Feeding the Shark

I'm sure you've read lots of commentary on David Leonhardt's interview with the president, so let me just say this: After the last eight years, it is really refreshing to have a president who can speak confidently about, say, the information asymmetry between patients and doctors.

Snark aside, one substantive point I want to make. Leonhardt and Obama talk about what I think is the biggest question in financial regulatory reform -- whether we just need stronger regulators, or whether we also need smaller financial institutions. Here's Obama:

Even with the best regulators, if you start having so much differentiation of functions and products within a single company, a single institution, a conglomerate, essentially, things could potentially slip through the cracks. And people just don't know what they're getting into. I mean, I guarantee you that the average A.I.G. insurance policyholder had no idea that this stuff was going on. And in that sense I think you can make an argument that there may be a breaking point in which functions are so different that you don't want a single company doing everything.

We do need to fix our regulatory structure to prevent future AIGs. There should be universal political consensus on that point, because AIG's "oversight" was pure farce: a bank regulator with no insurance expertise regulated the world's largest insurance company.

Obama continues after the jump:

The Obama administration is getting very good at the Thursday-afternoon "document dump." They did this with the high-level 2010 budget proposal in February. Now it looks like we'll get a more detailed version of the budget on Thursday -- and possibly the results of the administration's 60-day cybersecurity review, too.

I guess it's a smart political move, because you control the Friday news cycle and then it's the weekend; you give your opponents very little time to process the documents and respond.

But it's a real pain for us journalists with end-of-the-week deadlines...

This didn't get much attention, but Chuck Todd's question at Obama's presser the other night -- basically, whether the U.S. military would secure Pakistan's nuclear weapons if the Taliban took over -- didn't make much sense at all.

How would that work? Would we send in a SEAL team to camp out by the nukes until a friendlier government takes over? Or land a C-130 and fly Pakistan's estimated 75-to-100 nuclear weapons out of a newly-hostile country? What active steps can the military take to secure a nuclear arsenal?

There were a few good questions at the presser; Jake Tapper and Michael Scherer asked smart, pointed questions on torture and state secrets, respectively. But Todd swung and missed. Again.

I've never understood the fascination with the "ticking time bomb" scenario. It's about as likely as running into Osama bin Laden at the Georgetown Safeway. Think about the variables that have to fall into place: you have to know that there's an imminent attack, that the man you have in custody has information about the attack, that his information will stop the attack. It just doesn't happen, at least not outside of network television.

That said, if such a scenario did occur, I know that many people would support using torture. Alone CIA officer faced with that situation might decide, on his own, to torture a suspect for information. But that should never be the official policy of the United States government -- that torture is abhorrent and evil, except for a few circumstances.

Why? There are the obvious reasons: Torture is immoral and illegal. The 24 fetishists always forget that Jack Bauer is breaking the law -- and he knows it. He doesn't stop to ask OLC for a legal opinion excusing his actions (who would play John Yoo, I wonder?). He just does it, even though he knows it's illegal; he makes an individual choice. And invariably there are consequences.

You also start down a slippery slope if you approve torture in certain circumstances. The OLC memos certainly didn't permit killing prisoners, but 100 detainees have died in our custody and more than two dozen of those have been ruled homicides. Torture taps into some of the basest elements of human nature. If you approve torture, no matter how carefully circumscribed it might be, you will lose control; atrocities will occur far beyond what you intended.

The only way to avoid that is to ban torture -- all forms of it, in all circumstances.

There's a lot of talk about whether we are overreacting to the swine flu outbreak. Listen, there are definitely some hysterics out there, many of whom work in journalism (I'm going to lose it if I hear one more question about whether Obama has swine flu).

A little hysteria isn't necessarily a bad thing, though. The disease is spreading -- slowly, but it's spreading -- and public health officials say the goal is mitigation, not containment. That means people need to take certain precautions: hand-washing, staying home from work if they feel sick, etc. You know the drill by now.

But that's just it: you know the drill. This was an unknown disease circulating in rural Mexican villages a few weeks ago, and now a majority of the world's population probably knows what it is and how to protect themselves. That wouldn't have happened without a massive government (and media) outreach campaign.

So, yes, the coverage has occasionally bordered on the sensational, and by all means we should criticize it. But all of the public health sources I've talked to say the wall-to-wall coverage is actually helping them do their jobs.

Well, that didn't take long. Yesterday I wrote about the Egyptian government's harsh reaction to the avian flu pandemic. They're taking a similarly draconian approach to stopping swine flu:

Egypt has begun a mass slaughter of all 300,000 pigs in the country in an effort to prevent swine flu spreading.

(Egypt is a Muslim country, but 10 percent of Egyptians are Coptic Christians, and they're allowed to eat pork -- though this is the subject of some controversy.)

Juan Cole has a reality check on the apocalyptic pronouncements of doom coming out of Pakistan:

As I have said before, although the rise of the Pakistani Taliban in the Pushtun areas and in some districts of Punjab is worrisome, the cosmic level of concern being expressed makes no sense to me. Some 55 percent of Pakistanis are Punjabi, and with the exception of some northern hardscrabble areas, I can't see any evidence that the vast majority of them has the slightest interest in Talibanism.

I'm not an expert on Pakistan, but Cole's assessment seems sensible. We tend to ascribe almost superhuman powers to the Pakistani Taliban when, as Cole points out, it's really just a few thousand guys with light weapons.

It's also not like Hizballah or Hamas -- legitimate political entities that provide social services and enjoy a modest amount of popular support. Most Pakistanis are not pro-Taliban; the group is responsible for violence and unrest and little else.

The reporters at today's swine flu hearing were a little puzzled by this remark from Sen. Tom Harkin:

Wouldn't a more accurate name be the "North American virus"? Since it originated in North America? Why don't we call it avian influenza?

But now it becomes clear: The Iowa Pork Producers Association has a press release about Harkin's comments; he's obviously concerned about the name, swine flu, hurting bacon sales.

There is a real economic impact from pandemics, so I don't mean to mock. I lived in Cairo during the bird flu scare and everyone was outraged because the government ordered them to kill their chickens. I remember driving past a giant pile of burning chickens near the main bus station downtown; my cab driver remarked that it was, quite literally, someone's livelihood going up in flames.

Busy day -- lots of swine flu reporting! -- and I won't have time to post much until tonight. But I did want to muse about something Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison said at a swine flu hearing this afternoon:

I'm just not following this... it seems like an early detection that's relatively would be, I would assume, pretty inexpensive to take someone's temperature before you get on an airplane... it just seems to me that taking a little more precaution about someone coming in... wouldn't there be something more prudent in between what you're saying... and stop it before it comes in?

It seems to me that there are two fundamental approaches to many of our public policy challenges. One is the "fortress" approach, which focuses on keeping things out -- immigrants, terrorists, microbes. The other is a more realistic approach; it starts from the premise that borders are permeable, and it tries to minimize the impact of a problem once it crosses the border.

Hutchison, it seems, wants the CDC to check every traveler returning from Mexico for symptoms of swine flu. That's unrealistic: I heard a report on the BBC this morning that said 100,000 people cross the border at El Paso every day. It's not good public policy in the 21st century.

And yet it's also startingly similar to the hard-line solutions for illegal immigration (build a bigger fence) and terrorism (tougher border security).

An interesting first effort from the New York Times' new columnist. And I don't see any factual errors, so he's off to a better start than Bill Kristol. That said, I don't know if I agree with his argument, that Dick Cheney should have run for president (and lost) in 2008:

As a candidate, Cheney would have doubtless been as disciplined and ideologically consistent as McCain was feckless. In debates with Barack Obama, he would have been as cuttingly effective as he was in his encounters with Joe Lieberman and John Edwards in 2000 and 2004 respectively. And when he went down to a landslide loss, the conservative movement might - might! - have been jolted into the kind of rethinking that's necessary if it hopes to regain power.

Sure, a Cheney defeat would have been a repudiation of Bush's policies -- though I'd say the 2008 results (a Democratic president and 28 new Democratic congressmen) were pretty damning anyway.

But who would do this "rethinking"? The Republican establishment doesn't have any strong moderate voices. That's why a drug-addicted talk radio host and a disgraced, twice-divorced former Speaker have emerged as its leaders. I don't think a less "moderate" candidate in 2008 would have sparked a renaissance in the party.