8 x 8

Posted on April 4, 2008 by admin

Can insufficient water intake make you sick? Dan Negoianu and Stanley Goldfarb, writing in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (that’s the study of kidney diseases, folks) say we’ll never know:

Only large and expensive randomized trials could settle these questions definitively. Given that water cannot be patented, such trials seem unlikely.

How droll. But I’m sure someone is working on this.

Actually, the point of N&G’s piece was to knock down — once again — the myth that we should all drink eight 8-ounce glasses of water a day (the “8×8″ myth). Their conclusion: for normal, healthy people, there’s really no evidence one way or the other that doing this has any health benefits. It doesn’t clear your kidneys of toxins, it doesn’t improve organ function, it doesn’t help you lose weight, it doesn’t prevent headaches, and it doesn’t improve your skin tone. On the other hand, it doesn’t do any harm, either. If you’re thirsty, drink some water. If you aren’t, don’t bother.

Anyway, I’m sure they’re spitting into the wind here. The 8×8 myth gets debunked approximately once a year and no one ever listens. However, I’ll add two comments anyway. First, N&G say this about the origin of the 8×8 myth:

In his exceedingly thorough review of this subject, [Heinz] Valtin reached the following conclusion: Nobody really knows.

Not true! In fact, Valtin (here) found a pretty likely source for it, which I summarized like this a few years ago: “The whole eight-glasses-a-day thing came from some prehistoric government study based on God-knows-what that’s been handed down through the generations like the Dead Sea scrolls, and even at that everyone misunderstood it in the first place.” You may click the link for a more sober assessment.

Second, remember a few weeks ago I noted that a study about antidepressants got wide play in UK daily newspapers but not in the U.S.? Guess what? Same deal this time. N&G got a bit of pickup on TV stations, specialty sites, and a couple of wire services, but as near as I can tell not a single U.S. daily newspaper bothered with it. But in the UK, it got picked up by the Guardian, Independent, Telegraph, Mirror, and the Scotsman.

What’s the deal here? Are British newspapers just gaga for pop medical news, and American newspapers aren’t? It sure seems as though Americans are gaga for pop medical news, so why wouldn’t our newspapers be too? Very odd.

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More FISA Lies?

Posted on April 3, 2008 by admin

Last week, during a question-and-answer session following a speech he delivered in San Francisco, Attorney General Michael Mukasey revealed a startling and extremely newsworthy fact. As I wrote last Saturday, Mukasey claimed that, prior to 9/11, the Bush administration was aware of a telephone call being made by an Al Qaeda Terrorist from what he called a “safe house in Afghanistan” into the U.S., but failed to eavesdrop on that call. Some help is needed from readers here to generate the attention for this story that it requires.

In that speech, Mukasey blamed FISA’s warrant requirement for the failure to eavesdrop on that call — an assertion which is, for multiple reasons that I detailed in that post, completely false. He then tearfully claimed that FISA therefore caused the deaths of “three thousand people who went to work that day.” For obvious reasons, the Attorney General’s FISA falsehoods themselves are extremely newsworthy, but it is the story he told about the pre-9/11-planning call from Afghanistan itself that is truly new, and truly extraordinary.

Critically, the 9/11 Commission Report — intended to be a comprehensive account of all relevant pre-9/11 activities — makes no mention whatsoever of the episode Mukasey described. What has been long publicly reported in great detail are multiple calls that were made between a global communications hub in Yemen and the U.S. — calls which the NSA did intercept without warrants (because, contrary to Mukasey’s lie, FISA does not and never did require a warrant for eavesdropping on foreign targets) but which, for some unknown reason, the NSA failed to share with the FBI and other agencies. But the critical pre-9/11 episode Mukasey described last week is nowhere to be found in the 9/11 Report or anywhere else. It just does not exist.

Yesterday, I contacted Lee Hamilton, the 9/11 Commission Vice Chairman, to ask him whether the Commission was ever told about Mukasey’s alleged Afghan Terrorist 9/11-planning telephone calls and/or the Bush administration’s failure/inability to eavesdrop on such calls. Hamilton refused to comment, first claiming that he was in meetings all day yesterday and had no time to talk to me. When asked if he would comment today or whenever he had time, he said he was not going to comment on this ever, since he had not read Mukasey’s speech. Calls to 9/11 Executive Director Philip Zelikow seeking comment were not returned and 9/11 Commission Chairman Tom Kean could not yet be reached.

It’s unacceptable for Hamilton to refuse to comment on Mukasey’s claims. The whole purpose of the 9/11 Commission was to ensure that there was full-scale investigation and disclosure of all facts relevant to the 9/11 attacks, including the Government’s actions and inactions in preventing that attack from occurring.

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More Experience

Posted on April 1, 2008 by admin

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton told a labor group here Tuesday that she “raised a big yellow caution flag” against the North American Free Trade Agreement while she was first lady, even though others say she actually promoted the trade deal.
Pennsylvania Update

And Gerry McEntee, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, vouched for her opposition, telling the labor leaders that the day Nafta was approved, she called him and said, “We lost.”

She told him that “the votes were there for Nafta,” Mr. McEntee said, adding, “So anybody who tries to hang it around her neck is hanging it on the wrong neck.”

There was no applause at that line from the hundreds of labor leaders in the audience, members of the Pennsylvania A.F.L.-C.I.O. But when Mrs. Clinton spoke, they gave her standing ovations at several points during what was a red-meat speech for union workers, highly critical of President George Bush, Senator John McCain, the presumed Republican nominee, and Senator Barack Obama, her Democratic opponent. Mr. Obama is to speak to the same group on Wednesday.

Both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama have said they would renegotiate Nafta, which many argue has cost jobs, especially in Ohio and western Pennsylvania. Mrs. Clinton has made hay of a top Obama adviser’s telling Canada not to believe that Mr. Obama would really renegotiate the trade deal, while the Obama camp has said that Mrs. Clinton did not really object to Nafta while she was first lady.

Documents released last month of her schedule while she was first lady show that Mrs. Clinton helped her husband sell the Nafta, citing a speech at a confidential White House briefing on the subject in November 1993, days before Congress approved it at the strong urging of her husband.

“I appreciate Gerry talking about how I did speak out, and I did speak out and oppose Nafta,” she said after Mr. McEntee addressed the group. “The president made a different decision, but whether it’s President McEntee or David Gergen or the people who were in those meetings in the White House, they know that I raised a big yellow caution flag. I said, ‘I’m not sure this will work,’ and I have a plan to fix Nafta.”

She told reporters later that she questioned Nafta during her husband’s 1992 presidential campaign and opposed it in the White House with “many different audiences.” But, she said, “when you’re part of the administration, you support the president, and I did.”

She said she argued that the side agreements were not strong enough and there was “no understanding of what it would take” to retrain workers who were going to lose their jobs. She also said she thought health care was such a huge issue that it should take precedence, “but the president did make a different set of decisions,” she said. “That’s what presidents are for.”

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Almost Daily Corner Bashing

Posted on March 11, 2008 by admin

The task of cutting greenhouse gas emissions enough to avert a dangerous rise in global temperatures may be far more difficult than previous research suggested, say scientists who have just published studies indicating that it would require the world to cease carbon emissions altogether within a matter of decades.

Their findings, published in separate journals over the past few weeks, suggest that both industrialized and developing nations must wean themselves off fossil fuels by as early as mid-century in order to prevent warming that could change precipitation patterns and dry up sources of water worldwide.

Using advanced computer models to factor in deep-sea warming and other aspects of the carbon cycle that naturally creates and removes carbon dioxide (CO2), the scientists, from countries including the United States, Canada and Germany, are delivering a simple message: The world must bring carbon emissions down to near zero to keep temperatures from rising further.

“The question is, what if we don’t want the Earth to warm anymore?” asked Carnegie Institution senior scientist Ken Caldeira, co-author of a paper published last week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. “The answer implies a much more radical change to our energy system than people are thinking about.”

Although many nations have been pledging steps to curb emissions for nearly a decade, the world’s output of carbon from human activities totals about 10 billion tons a year and has been steadily rising.

For now, at least, a goal of zero emissions appears well beyond the reach of politicians here and abroad. U.S. leaders are just beginning to grapple with setting any mandatory limit on greenhouse gases. The Senate is poised to vote in June on legislation that would reduce U.S. emissions by 70 percent by 2050; the two Democratic senators running for president, Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) and Barack Obama (Ill.), back an 80 percent cut. The Republican presidential nominee, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), supports a 60 percent reduction by mid-century.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who is shepherding climate legislation through the Senate as chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, said the new findings “make it clear we must act now to address global warming.”

“It won’t be easy, given the makeup of the Senate, but the science is compelling,” she said. “It is hard for me to see how my colleagues can duck this issue and live with themselves.”

James L. Connaughton, who chairs the White House Council on Environmental Quality, offered a more guarded reaction, saying the idea that “ultimately you need to get to net-zero emissions” is “something we’ve heard before.” When it comes to tackling such a daunting environmental and technological problem, he added: “We’ve done this kind of thing before. We will do it again. It will just take a sufficient amount of time.”

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Health Care Agonizing

Posted on March 6, 2008 by admin

First, Obama aside, mandates matter because, sometimes, folks have to be protected from their worst instincts. That’s why we force everyone to pay into fire departments through taxes. Otherwise, some folks would opt out under the theory that they don’t do much cooking, and we don’t want their houses to burn down.

Second, single payer, which so many folks love, is a mandate by a different name. That name is taxes. Some people will feel they can’t, or shouldn’t, pay that level of taxes, and they will be angry, just as some will feel they can’t afford insurance, or shouldn’t have to buy it, and they will be angry. Now, maybe single payer is a better way to structure the mandate. But it’s a mandate nevertheless.

But there’s a clear difference between providing a universal public service (fire department / single-payer) financed through progressive taxation, and between setting up a bunch of private for-profit firefighting firms and then forcing everyone to buy their services (health care mandate / weird quasi-libertarian dystopia). We’re obviously not going to run a government policy in any are without “mandating” that some people do some stuff, but that’s hardly the same as saying that mandating that people buy specific kinds of products from for-profit firms is a close substitute for public provision of goods.

This is why, to me, it’s unfortunate that the discussion initially kicked off by John Edwards’ health care proposal has tended to focus so heavily on the mandate issue and touch so lightly on the idea of introducing a public sector health care alternative to compete with private plans. That’s a very good idea in my view, but obviously there are a lot of important details to be worked out. What’s more, unlike making people buy health insurance, this is an idea insurance companies will really hate — propose a substantial reform and I’m sure the insurers will tack a mandate on. But it’s an idea I’d like to see the next president really fight for. What I don’t want to see happen is the president come in having promised so loudly to pass “a health care bill” that he or she then feels absolutely compelled to agree to whatever the 41st most conservative senator will agree to even if that means a bad bill.

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Cliche vs. Plagiarism

Posted on March 3, 2008 by admin

One of the great moments among many in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver is when we find the young Albert Brooks manning the phones in the campaign office of the man we know (and he does not) to be a double-dyed phony. On behalf of the empty and grinning Sen. Palantine, he is complaining to a manufacturer of lapel buttons. “We asked for buttons that said, ‘We Are the People.’ These say, ‘We Are the People.’… Oh, you don’t think there’s a difference? Well, we will not pay for the buttons. We will throw the buttons away.” Part of the joke here is that the joke itself is also at the expense of Brooks’ character and his “candidate”—there really and truly isn’t much, if any, difference. Fan of Jerry Brown as I had been, I still winced when he ran on his lame “We the People” slogan against Clinton as late as 1992.

Of course, in 1992, Clinton borrowed from an old slogan of John F. Kennedy’s: “Change Is the Law of Life.” Now, why did he annex that questionable truism, and why in that year? First of all, because he wanted to plagiarize the entire Kennedy effect for himself, and second, because he was the challenger and not the incumbent. When you are the incumbent, it is harder (but not impossible) to demand “change.” Sen. Hillary Clinton, who wants to run as the “change” candidate—because, well, because you can’t so easily run as a status quo candidate—also wants to run as a stability-and-experience candidate. Hence the repeated alterations (or “changes”) in her half-baked slogans. By the time the plagiarism row had been started by her very ill-advised advisers, she had run through: “Big Challenges, Real Solutions”; “Working for Change, Working for You”; “Ready for Change, Ready To Lead”; and “Solutions for America.” Sen. Obama, meanwhile, had picked the slightly less banal and more cryptic mantra “Change We Can Believe In,” which I call cryptic only because at least it makes one ask what it can conceivably be intended to mean.

It is cliché, not plagiarism, that is the problem with our stilted, room-temperature political discourse. It used to be that thinking people would say, with at least a shred of pride, that their own convictions would not shrink to fit on a label or on a bumper sticker. But now it seems that the more vapid and vacuous the logo, the more charm (or should that be “charisma”?) it exerts. Take “Yes We Can,” for example. It’s the sort of thing parents might chant encouragingly to a child slow on the potty-training uptake. As for “We Are the People We Have Been Waiting For” (in which case, one can only suppose that now that we have arrived, we can all go home), I didn’t think much of it when Rep. Dennis Kucinich used it at an anti-war rally in 2004 (“We Are the People We Are Waiting For” being his version) or when Thomas Friedman came across it at an MIT student event last December. He wrote, by the way, that just hearing it gave him—well, you guess what it gave him. Hope? That’s exactly right.

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Obama, Clinton, Iraq

Posted on February 27, 2008 by admin

Over the past year, Sen. Barack Obama has been a vocal supporter of the Feingold-Reid Iraq legislation that sets a strict timeline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. But when a version of that bill was introduced this past week without a final date for troop removal, the Illinois senator chose not to attach his name to the list of co-sponsors.

Yesterday, Sen. Russ Feingold succeeded for the first time in getting the Senate to begin debating his measure to begin withdrawing troops in 120 days (with exceptions for certain specified missions). Neither of the Democratic presidential candidates was in D.C. to vote in favor of cloture, which allowed the bill to ultimately come to the floor. But only one — Sen. Hillary Clinton — co-sponsored the legislation.

A change in Feingold’s bill — the removal of an end date for troop redeployment in an effort to win wider support — persuaded Obama to not co-sponsor the measure.

“Senator Obama has long said that he would only support Iraq legislation that has an end date for the removal of troops,” an Obama aide told the Huffington Post. As for whether the Senator would ultimately support the bill, the aide said, “it will depend on the final version.”

The potential divergence of Clinton and Obama on Feingold’s bill represents how, when looking at the nuance of legislation, the two candidates can have differences on Iraq policy. Throughout much of the campaign, Clinton has stressed that, despite Obama’s opposition to the launch of the war, the two basically share the same outlook on America’s presence in Iraq.

“He’s to be commended for having given the speech,” Clinton said in last night’s debate. “When he came to the Senate he and I have voted exactly the same. When we both had responsibility, when it wasn’t just a speech it was action where is the difference?”

In Feingold’s four previous troop-withdrawal bills, which have represented the most aggressive attempts to ensure pullouts from Iraq, Obama has missed one vote, voted in favor of three, and cosponsored one. Obama’s record, except for the missed vote, had been identical to that of Clinton.

“This is the best policy for our troops, and for pressing Iraq’s leaders to finally get serious about resolving their differences,” Obama said about the Feingold-Reid legislation introduced in September 2007, which included a firm exit date. “I have opposed this war from the beginning. I will continue to urge my colleagues to support legislation that sets a direction out of Iraq, and a deadline to complete our drawdown. I will continue to urge Americans to press their Senators and Representatives to come together to end this war.”

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Perceived Strength

Posted on February 15, 2008 by admin

What can one even say about this quote, included in Carl Hulse’s NYT article on the Democrats’ refusal yesterday to pass the Senate’s FISA bill before expiration of the Protect America Act:

“I think there is probably joy throughout the terrorist cells throughout the world that the United States Congress did not do its duty today,” said Representative Ted Poe, Republican of Texas.

This is the kind of pure, unadulterated idiocy — childish, cartoonish and creepy — that Democrats for years have been allowing to bully them into submission, govern our country, and dismantle our Constitution. Outside of Andy McCarthy, Mark Steyn and their roving band of paranoid right-wing bloggers who can’t sleep at night because they think (and hope) that there are dark, primitive “jihadi” super-villains hiding under their beds — along with the Very Serious pundit class which proves their Seriousness by placing blind faith in the fear-mongering pronouncements and demands of our military and intelligence officials for more unchecked power — nobody cares about adolescent Terrorist game-playing like this any longer. In the real world, it doesn’t work, and it hasn’t worked for some time.

Americans are worried and even angry about many things. Whether Osama bin Laden is throwing a party because AT&T and Verizon might have to defend themselves in court isn’t one of them. Outside of National Review, K Street, and the fear-paralyzed imagination of our shrinking faux-warrior class, there is no constituency in America demanding warrantless eavesdropping or amnesty for lawbreaking telecoms.

On one level, it’s difficult to maintain any sustained optimism about the House’s defiance yesterday. They were acting far more out of resentment over the procedural treatment to which they were subjected by the White House and, more so, the Senate — having a bill dropped in their lap again just a couple of days before a deadline and told that they had to pass it, as is, and immediately — than out of any principled objection to warrantless eavesdropping or telecom amnesty.

And it’s painfully easy to envision more than enough “Blue Dogs” eventually joining their GOP colleagues to pass the Senate bill, thus handing the White House yet another complete victory, even if it comes a little later than it was demanded. In light of the endless series of events over the last twelve months, the hope that some sort of actual conviction will cause this obstructionism to be permanent is far too naive for any rational person to entertain seriously.

Still, basic human nature — if nothing else — dictates that having finally liberated themselves, however fleetingly, from the truly moronic rule of the Ted “Osama-is-Celebrating” Poes of the world, and having seen that — as McJoan put it — “the Democrats stood up to Bush, and the world didn’t end,” Democrats will crave more of the sweet taste of dignity and autonomy.

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More O’Hanlon

Posted on February 14, 2008 by admin

A central element of Barack Obama’s plan to change American foreign policy is his intention, upon becoming president, to meet with foreign leaders of extremist regimes — the type of rogue-state dictators that George W. Bush has generally shunned during his time as president.

Applied categorically, this would be a bad idea. Meeting with enemy heads of state is neither as original as Mr. Obama implies, nor as promising as he claims. As a specific option for dealing with difficult regimes, it has potential merit on a case-by-case basis, and should always be considered — but only after a careful assessment of what the United States believes it can get out of such meetings and dialogues.

The would-be Obama doctrine has understandable roots. Upon becoming president, George W. Bush ended American efforts to promote a peace process in the Middle East, and Israeli-Palestinian violence worsened. He turned a cold shoulder to Kim Jong Il and North Korea wound up with perhaps eight more nuclear bombs. His administration successfully worked out a modus vivendi with Iran at the Bonn conference on Afghanistan in 2001, but Mr. Bush’s subsequent “Axis of Evil” speech, pre-emption doctrine, and termination of contact with leadership in Tehran led to a deterioration in relations that has haunted us in Iraq and that worsened when President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took office in 2005.

However, just because Mr. Bush went too far in one direction does not mean these situations would be rectified by going to the other extreme. U.S. negotiations with difficult regimes may sometimes be catalyzed by presidential engagement, but they only tend to work when we are in a commanding negotiating position or when we are prepared to make trades with foreign leaders that serve their interests as well as ours. Implying otherwise risks being labeled as naïve in the fall elections, with Democrats sounding like they believe ruthless dictators would behave better if only we took the time to try to understand them.

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MSNBC Wheeling And Dealing

Posted on February 8, 2008 by admin

This is really something. The Hillary campaign has just gone to war with MSNBC, dispatching a top Hillary adviser to launch a lacerating attack on the network on a conference call with reporters moments ago.

On the call, top Hillary adviser Howard Wolfson suggested that there’s a “pattern” of reprehensible comments by MSNBC personalities, and said outright that the Hillary campaign could no longer “envision a scenario where we would debate on that network given the comments that were made and have been made.”

Wolfson made the comments in response to a question about a now-notorious comment by MSNBC’s David Shustser, in which he asked if Chelsea’s campaigning on her mom’s behalf meant she was being “pimped” by the Hillary campaign.

Though Shuster apologized this morning, the Hillary campaign has clearly decided to seize upon the opportunity to launch a major attack on the network. A few weeks ago Chris Matthews publicly apologized to Hillary after suggesting that her whole Senate career and presidential candidacy was made possible only because of Bill’s shenanigans in the White House.

Asked about Shuster’s “pimp” comment, Wolfson denounced the comment as “disgusting” and “beneath contempt,” adding: “It’s the kind of thing that should never be said on a national news network.”

Then Wolsfon added: “You have to question whether or not there is a pattern here on the part of the network.” He added: “Is this part of a pattern? I don’t know, but [it's] beneath contempt.”

Then, unbidden, he concluded: “I’ll say this. We’ve done a number of debates on that network…I at this point can’t envision a scenario where we would debate on that network given the comments that were made and have been made.”

That he would effectively rule out future debate appearances for the time being strongly suggests that the Hillary campaign discussed this in some detail beforehand and decided to launch this broadside against the network. It also suggests that the Hillary camp sees the potential for political gain in drawing media attention to negative and sexist comments made on MSNBC about her and her daughter.

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