Or, $10 billion a month just won't stretch very far these days.

Sewage backup in Baghdad is creating a lake that can be seen on Google Earth:

AFP: Baghdad is drowning in sewage, thirsty for water and largely powerless, an Iraqi official said in a grim assessment of services in the capital five years after the US-led invasion.

One of three sewage treatment plants is out of commission, one is working at stuttering capacity while a pipe blockage in the third means sewage is forming a foul lake so large it can be seen "as a big black spot on Google Earth," said Tahseen Sheikhly, civilian spokesman for the Baghdad security plan.

Sheikhly told a news conference in the capital that water pipes, where they exist, are so old that it is not possible to pump water at a sufficient rate to meet demands -- leaving many neighbourhoods parched.

A sharp deficit of 3,000 megawatts of electricity adds to the woes of residents, who are forced to rely on neighbourhood generators to light up their lives and heat their homes.

Okay, since the NYT decided to hire Bill Kristol over me, I'll have to restrict my punditication to this space.

You may have noticed that I've had basically squat to say about the presidential campaign. I did point out that of the three Dem contenders, Edwards has the best health care plan, and Obama has the worst, but who cares, really? It's not as if an Edwards presidency -- which seems unlikely at this point anyway -- will result in the legislation he has posted on his web site becoming reality. In the best case, a Democratic president and a somewhat more Democratic congress in 2009 will result in some marginal changes around the edges. Big Pharma and Big Insurance aren't going to get rolled no matter who is elected.

Apologies for not posting yesterday. I wasn't feeling well (which is permitted of bloggers, you know) but more than that, I was just so knocked out by the idiotic state of political discourse in this country that words seemed inadequate. They still do but I'm typing anyway.

The Emperor of Mespotamia is about to go on TV and tell us about his new, strong and resolute plan to win the long-promised Glorious Victory. While there has been concern among the courtiers in both the Pentagon and the corporate media over such problems as the state of military readiness and whether the current policy is Making Us Safer™, they are all pleased to note that the level of violence in Iraq has been dramatically reduced. It is fortunate that when American helicopters and fighter jets fire missiles into residential neighborhoods and kill dozens of people, it is not an example of violence, otherwise that statement might be untrue. Come to think of it, it isn't necessarily true anyway, but it is virtually true by virtue of incessant repetition.

Sen. McCain says, "Al Qaeda is in Iraq. It’s called ‘Al Qaeda in Iraq.’ My friends, if we left, they wouldn’t be establishing a base. They’d be taking a country, and I’m not going to allow that to happen." He's running largely on the strength of his claimed foreign policy expertise. He says -- and he reiterated yesterday -- that if the United States withdraws from Iraq, al Qaeda will take over the country.

The pundits and so-called "reporters" who work for the corporate media, including, as in the link above, the New York Times, aren't going to tell you that this is completely nuts. They treat this analysis as credible and therefore, undoubtedly, many people will believe it.

I'm sure you don't need me to tell you that it is extremely crappy. Unfortunately, if you depend on resources such as the Washington Post, you do need me to tell you that.

For years, President Bush and his advisers expressed frustration that the White House received little credit for the nation's strong economic performance because of public discontent about the Iraq war. Today, the president is getting little credit for improved security in Iraq, as the public increasingly focuses on a struggling U.S. economy.

It has often been said that the family is the most violent institution in society. That probably is not true -- the prison system probably wins that competition -- but there is no doubt that the most likely assailant of a woman or child is a family member. Statistics on this point are not very reliable -- family violence happens in private, usually in secret, and usually does not come to the attention of the authorities. Advocacy groups have been known to exaggerate, but This fact sheet seems to offer a level-headed overview.

One can frame this problem in terms of gender role norms. Women are certainly capable of assaulting their spouses and children, but men are more likely to do so. (I'm steering clear of quantification here because it's not reliable.) We now understand that the phenomenon commonly called battering is not really about anger; it's a pattern of coercive control. Batterers are extremely possessive, jealous, and need to monopolize power in their intimate relationships. It's no surprise that they typically victimize children in their households as well as their spouses or partners.

George W. Bush is now in the midst of trying to ensure his legacy. His speech this Friday at the Conservative Political Action Committee made clear that he sees the future direction of the Republican party as continuing what he regards as his signature policies: demanding lower taxes appointing conservative judges, increasing spending on defense, and fighting the war on terror, which, for Bush, means continuing the war in Iraq and the military occupation of Iraq indefinitely. Put another way, Bush's speech put down a marker that if John McCain or any other Republican wants to be elected in 2008, Bush expects it will be by a continuation of his basic policies-- a third term of the George W. Bush Administration. It is worth noting that on almost all of the issues just mentioned, John McCain appears to be following Bush.

The Republicans, now divided, are trying to put the Reagan coalition together again. Bush's advice is: do it my way. Use my Presidency and its commitments-- low taxes, a conservative judiciary, and national security in an age of terrorism as the party's mantra going forward. To know what the Republicans stand for, look at what I stand for.

I'm not a clinician, I'm here as a project evaluator with the intention of getting sense of the what the field of mental health care for traumatized children is like these days -- at least for those community based agencies and academic experts who are fortunate enough to have support from SAMHSA as part of the National Child Traumatic Stress Network.

There's plenty of good news here -- then I'll give you the bad news.

Good news bulletin #1: I have heard scarcely a word about psych meds. The only way pills have come up is as a peripheral note that somebody who is part of a case scenario had been prescribed something. The NCTSN is not about drugging kids.

Bulletin #2: The DSM-IV is equally conspicuous by its absence. There is absolutely no interest in classifying kids' problems as diseases, tossing around disease categories, or using diagnostic labels to guide treatment.

There has been a great deal of debate, and consternation, in Congress recently concerning the Bush Administration's intention to enter into a a bilateral Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with Iraq by the end of July. The Administration has indicated that it does not plan to obtain any congressional authorization or Senate approval for such an agreement. Many legislators believe this would be unconstitutional. So, for example, Senator Clinton has introduced S.2426, which would express the "sense of Congress that any bilateral agreement between the United States and Iraq involving `commitments or risks affecting the nation as a whole', including a status of forces agreement (SOFA), that is not a treaty approved by two-thirds of the Senate under Article II of the Constitution or authorized by legislation does not have the force of law," and that would prohibit the use of funds to carry out such an SOFA that is not such a Senate-approved treaty.

A week before Army Gen. David Petraeus updates Congress on the war in Iraq, two new studies have found that soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are suffering from especially high rates of post-combat psychological problems, exacerbated by an unusually high rate of repeat deployments.

Veterans for America’s (VFA) Wounded Warrior Outreach Program is concerned with the staggeringly high levels of mental health problems and neurological injuries experienced by today’s troops, and the lack of resources and rehabilitative programs available for our wounded.

Okay, let's imagine you're a U.S. Army psychiatrist.

Oh, so they attack your base with mortars every night? How does that make you feel?

Mmhmm, difficulty sleeping, I see.

Whenever you go out they what? Try to kill you with bombs, machine guns, and rocket propelled grenades? So do you think people are out to get you?

And how does that make you feel?

Anxious, afraid? Ah hah. Angry?

Well you know that's irrational, President Bush isn't shooting at you. And what else is bothering you?

You don't like shooting people. Well, we all have a job to do, it isn't always pleasant . . .

The frog boiling thing turns out to be a myth. As the temperature rises, the frog feels it and pretty quickly tries to escape. But apparently it's possible to slowly raise the temperature on the Murkan People and it takes them a long time to recognize that they are getting poached.

They're going to figure it out pretty soon. Jean Dixon is never accountable for her predictions but I will be. We'll check back this time next year and see how I did.

What is the DSM-IV diagnosis for this?

WASHINGTON — President Bush, saying that "normalcy is returning back to Iraq," argued Thursday that last year's U.S. troop "surge" has improved Iraq's security to the point where political and economic progress are blossoming as well.

Bush coupled his description of the situation in Iraq, meant to lay the groundwork for next month's report to Congress by U.S. military and diplomatic chiefs, with a forceful slap at war critics.

"Some ... seem unwilling to acknowledge that progress is taking place," Bush said in a speech at the U.S. Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio. He accused war opponents of constantly shifting their critique, adding: "No matter what shortcomings these critics diagnose, their prescription is always the same — retreat."

In touting progress in Iraq, however, the president appeared to gloss over developments that most would characterize as a far cry from "normalcy," even by Iraqi standards.

Barbara Burke in the new JAMA reviews Bipolar Children: Cutting Edge Controversy, Insights, and Research, Edited by Sharna Olfman. Unfortunately, it's subscription only, but I'll give you a fair-use quote:

IN EUROPE AND ACROSS THE GLOBE, MANIC DEPRESSION IS rarely diagnosed in the pediatric population. In the United States, on the other hand, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP) suggests that it may exist in up to 13% of children.1 Prescriptions of sedating drugs (anticonvulsants, -agonists, and atypical antipsychotics) have increased up to 3-fold in the last decade.2 Both of these anomalous trends, poorly substantiated by quality research, have occurred during a time of dramatic economic change in the health care industry. Meanwhile, US children appear to be getting less mentally healthy, not more, with diagnoses of “mood disorders” and “pediatric bipolar” (PBD) topping the list. This is clearly crazy, but where does the madness lie? In the children, the prescribers, or society as a whole?

Gary Schwitzer in PLoS Medicine:

• The daily delivery of news stories about new treatments, tests, products, and procedures may have a profound—and perhaps harmful—impact on health care consumers.
• A US Web site project, HealthNewsReview.org (http://HealthNewsReview.org/), modeled after similar efforts in Australia and Canada, evaluates and grades health news coverage, notifying journalists of their grades.
• After almost two years and 500 stories, the project has found that journalists usually fail to discuss costs, the quality of the evidence, the existence of alternative options, and the absolute magnitude of potential benefits and harms.

I essentially agree with Mr. G that Provigil doesn't really increase intelligence, it's actually a lot like the amphetamines that students take during exam week -- it creates a temporary state of hyperarousal which allows for intense concentration. But what if there was a treatment that could be given to children which would, in fact, cause them to have permanently enhanced mental capabilities?

Notice I didn't say, "make them more intelligent," because we already know that there isn't a single quality that's synonymous with intelligence. There are various capacities that don't necessarily go together. I would guess that John Coltrane had a reasonably high IQ but I really don't care. And Daniel Goleman's book Emotional Intelligence was very helpful to me in explicating the very different realms of intellectual and social competence.

This morning we heard from representatives of the Children's Defense Fund, who discussed the Fund's report and campaign called Cradle to Prison Pipeline. Using what a take to be the method called Life Table Analysis (although they didn't actually say so), CDF has figured out that a Black boy born today has a 1 out of 3 chance of going to prison during his lifetime, and a Hispanic boy a 1 out of 6 chance, compared to 1 out of 17 for a white boy. Ratios for girls are similarly disproportionate, although the absolute chances are lower.

The CDF points out that 1 out of 6 children in the U.S. are living in poverty, and that the numbers living in poverty, and the poverty rate has increased during the reign of the current Christian moral values administration -- most dramatically among the very poor. Poverty is of course associated with all sorts of problems for children -- failure in school being the most pervasive. The CDF goes on to talk about all the other ills that afflict poor children, and disproportionately afflict poor and minority children, but I want to get to the bottom line.

Please say a prayer today for those courageous men and women who put their lives on the line for us every day: our military around the world, especially those in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yesterday was Veterans Day, but today is the observed day.

Veterans Day was first observed on November 11, as it was the day World War I ended in 1918, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

Remember especially those vets who've returned home from Iraq and Afghanistan who've had a difficult time readjusting to life back home. Many have had their lives shattered forever because of war. May God bless them.

but I do believe in Senator Dodd.*

However, the spectacle of a Democratic Senator filibustering against the Democratic leadership and most of the Democratic membership in order to preserve the constitution and the rule of law in the United States is disconcerting, to say the least. The lesson here should be obvious -- our biggest problem is not Christian dominionism or neocon fantasies of world domination, it is corporate power.

Continuing the discussion from the previous post...

God bless our economy, but this very quick presentation by Chris Jordan (on Business Interactive) will make you wonder just how long we can sustain this kind of nonsense:

People in the US uses 60 thousand plastic bags every five seconds.

But they do try to predict health care costs ten years out. You may have seen a news brief about the new prediction that health care spending will be 19.5% of GDP by 2017. Health Affairs has made this open access, so go for it if you are turned on by wonkery.

Now, there are a lot of assumptions that go into any such prediction, and it's pretty obvious that unless the McCain campaign succeeds in its increasingly transparent plan to make voters believe that Barack Obama is a secret muslim extremist who has been planted by al Qaeda to turn the country over to Islamofascist infiltrators and give Tomahawk cruise missiles to Hamas,* some of those assumptions will be overturned somehow some way, and they probably won't all work out anyway. But, for what it's worth, the broad outlines of what these perpetrators of deep wonkery expect assuming that nothing major changes are as follows.

Today President Bush vetoed an intelligence authorization bill which would have required the CIA to abide by the Army Field Manual. The Army Field Manual outlaws waterboarding and a variety of other coercive techniques that the Administration euphemistically calls "enhanced interrogation techniques." The White House announced previously that it had waterboarded people before and might do so again in the future. Bush's veto is, in effect, an attempt to retain the option to violate the Geneva Conventions, the Federal Anti-Torture statute, and the McCain Amendment. He would only retain this option, however, because his lawyers have made unreasonable interpretations of U.S. law to conclude that the most egregious of these techniques-- including waterboarding-- are lawful, instead of what they actually are: violations of federal law and breaches of Geneva.

Few Americans remember the Great Depression. For my grandparents, it was an essential formative experience, but for people of my parents' age, it's a childhood memory, with little impact on their understanding of the world. Since World War II, Americans grew accustomed to a steadily rising material standard of living and eventually came to take it for granted that the average person would always be wealthier than people of a decade before. However their own dreams had fallen short, people invested not merely optimism, but faith, in the greater well-being and achievements of their children.

Yes, another political post. Tomorrow is the Super Tuesday to end all Super Tuesdays, so I don't feel too bad about it. For a political junkie, this has been the most fascinating 6 weeks I've ever seen. Results wildly out of line with the polls, huge lead changes, the death of "momentum" as a meaningful gauge of a candidate's chances, debates more wonkish than I've ever seen, and two candidates I'm super enthusiastic about...

And that's just on the Democratic side. With the Republicans we've got Giuliani's 50 million dollar delegate, Huckabee's shock win in Iowa and all-too-predictable collapse, Romney remembering too late that he had a far better case as a smart business guy than he ever did as the cultural warrior, and the resurgence of McCain (which I'm not enthusiastic about in a strategic sense, but which does make me feel smart for predicting that he would win the nomination way back in November when he looked DOA).

Anyways, I got an e-mail today from a friend in California leaning toward Hillary asking me to make the case for Obama. I ended up with a fairly lengthy response and figured it wouldn't hurt to post it here. Yesterday I made the emotional case. This is the strategic one:

This week history was made with Obama winning the Democratic party's nomination!

I love this video of Chris Rock's views on the 2008 Election: Chris Rock's 2008 Election Analysis

Hilary's speech was very interesting. Click here

. . . you decide.

Which one of these people is more fucking nuts? This woman?

Authorities are considering charges in the bizarre case of a woman who sat on her boyfriend's toilet for two years -- so long that her body was stuck to the seat by the time the boyfriend finally called police. Ness County Sheriff Bryan Whipple said it appeared the 35-year-old Ness City woman's skin had grown around the seat. She initially refused emergency medical services but was finally convinced by responders and her boyfriend that she needed to be checked out at a hospital.

"She was not glued. She was not tied. She was just physically stuck by her body," Whipple said. "It is hard to imagine. ... I still have a hard time imagining it myself." He told investigators he brought his girlfriend food and water, and asked her every day to come out of the bathroom. "And her reply would be, `Maybe tomorrow,'" Whipple said. "According to him, she did not want to leave the bathroom."

Or this man?

One of the respondents to my previous post points out, altogether correctly, that George W. Bush isn't truly "unaccountable." It's possible, after all, that Congress could impeach him or that it would simply vote to cut off all funds for even one more day in Iraq. Putting to one side the fact that the latter action would be irresponsible in the extreme, any genuine analysis of the notion of the American "constitutional dictatorship" must include attention to the vital role that political parties play in our political system.

Imagine, for example,

that Ross Perot had been elected and then embarked on Bush's policy in Iraq. One wonders if he would have been successful, precisely because there would have been no institutionalized party backing the Texas maverick. Even if he could have initiated some activities using his constitutional commander-in-chief powers, one could well expect that members of both parties would have been eager to engage in oversight and, should he turn out to be so dangerously adventurist as George W. Bush has been, he might well have been impeached. Who, after all, would have had any interest in saving him? Indeed, the impeachment would dramatically demonstrate to Americans the dangers of deviating from the sacred two-party system and succumbing to the blandishments of an "independent."

In his foreword to National Geographic Countries of the World: Iraq (NG Countries of the World), Shakir Mustafa gives credit to the land which gave us the first system of writing, code of law, and even the first cookbook. In contrast, author Charlie Samuels aptly terms Iraq a country "living on the edge," pointing to the long succession of empires--the Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Persian, and British--which have flowed over this land, destroying and creating new cultures--with new forms of writing, new laws, and, indeed, new foods--for millennia.

As Laura notes below, in his most recent signing statement the President has reserved the authority to disregard several "provisions" of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008.