PostPartisan

There's been a lot of misguided criticism of President Obama's trip to Asia. You're upset that he bowed to the emperor of Japan? Get over it. Obama was being respectful -- which was in keeping with the tone of his trip. His overall message seemed to be that the United States values its relations with Asian nations and intends to be a presence in the region -- but a polite one, willing to listen as well as lecture. That's as it should be.

The president did make one remark, though, that made me wince. Speaking with NBC News, he rightly noted China's "unprecedented" economic progress since 1979, and then said: "One of the things I'm confident about is that when you start seeing economic freedom like that then political freedom starts, starts gearing up." This has been the operating assumption of U.S. presidents for many years, and it's time for a bit more skepticism. Since abandoning the Cultural Revolution and choosing a more pragmatic, quasi-capitalist path, China has seen more people move out of poverty than at any other time or place in history. Personal freedoms have expanded immeasurably: most Chinese today can marry whom they please, travel if they want and express just about any opinion among friends and family. Of course one personal freedom -- to have more than one child -- still does not exist.

Something truly momentous happened in the United States Senate last night, and almost all of the accounts today involve carping. Typical is the Politico headline: “How health care reform could fall apart.”

Okay, it’s entirely true that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s success in putting together 60 votes to let debate on a health-care bill go forward is only a first step. A final bill is a long way from passage, and of course many things could go wrong. My colleague Ezra Klein is right to quip that this was a case of “60 votes to go find 60 votes.”

But can we pause to note that a comprehensive health-reform bill has never been this close to passage?

The House has passed a bill. Yet most of the post-game analysis of the House’s action two weeks ago focused not on the bill but on the fight over abortion that immediately preceded its victory.

Now, the Senate takes the next step, and all we hear about are problems, obstacles and dangers.

Many families are struggling in today’s economy, and this has hurt their food budgets. This week an Agriculture Department study showed that 16.4 million U.S. households containing 49.1 million people experienced “food insecurity” in 2008, up from 12.2 million households containing 36.2 million people in 2007. Fortunately, Congress has already addressed some of the problem with a significant food-stamp boost in the stimulus package adopted in February.

But is “hunger” widespread in America these days? That is the misleading impression created by press coverage of the USDA study. Headlines in the New York Times print edition (“49 Million Americans report a lack of food”), USA Today (“1 in 6 went hungry in America in 2008”), and The Washington Post (“America’s economic pain brings hunger pangs”) made it sound as if famine stalks the land. The stories were salted with terms such as "alarming" and "dramatic."

When you crack into the data, however, they don’t support this dire portrayal. The USDA report is based on a survey of 44,000 households. They were asked if, and how, a lack of funds affected their eating habits. The first question was whether the respondent had ever “worried” about running out of food in the previous 12 months -- not actually run out of food, just worried about it. A “yes” answer counts as “food insecurity.” Adults are asked if they ever lost weight due to a lack of food money -- but not how much weight, or what they weighed before. In theory, a 300-pound man who lost a pound could count as "food insecure." Similarly, the questionnaire asks whether parents “cut” their kids’ portions at any point in the last year -- without specifying what the portions were before and after. [Clarification, 2:30 p.m.: Three or more "yes" answers here and your household is "food insecure."]

My normally mild-mannered colleague Ruth Marcus has gone rogue about my recent column on Eric Holder’s decision to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed and other Sept. 11 conspirators in Manhattan. She makes a number of sincere but flimsy arguments that deserve a response.

But let me start by expressing concerns about Marcus’s disturbingly inconsistent commitment to equality before the law. In her post, Marcus refers to Mohammed as the “Sept. 11 mastermind.” Shouldn’t that be “alleged Sept. 11 mastermind?” It is Holder’s intention, after all, to give him the full range of constitutional protections -- just like any American citizen facing trial. Why is Marcus so insensitive to his rights? She goes on to assure us that Mohammed will not gain a platform for his Islamist views because an “experienced federal judge” can shut him up in court. But why should this defendant be denied the right to speak fully in his own defense? Should the Marcus gag rule apply to all defendants in federal court fighting for their lives? Further, Marcus asserts that even if Mohammed is let off by a jury of his peers -- well, preferably a jury of non-terrorist American citizens -- he will be “preventively detained” for the rest of his life anyway. Does she want to predetermine the outcome of all federal trials?

Marcus, of course, is not alone. Yesterday, President Obama declared in an interview that Americans won’t find Holder’s decision about Mohammed “offensive at all when he’s convicted and when the death penalty is applied to him.” Is it customary for a president to announce the outcome of a federal prosecution before it reaches court? And didn’t he just taint the entire national jury pool by declaring the defendants guilty on television? In his Senate testimony yesterday, Eric Holder declared that “failure is not an option” in the New York prosecution. But that isn’t the way federal prosecutions work, is it? Failure is always an option.

Who promoted Peress? That was the question posed by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the indefatigable red-hunter of the 1950s, regarding an obscure army dentist named Irving Peress who was promoted from captain to major despite having refused to answer questions regarding his loyalty. That right-wing rallying cry ought to be revived, only this time to pose a much more serious question: Who the hell promoted Nidal Malik Hasan?

The case of the Army psychiatrist charged with the murder of 13 persons at Fort Hood raises many questions -- about terrorism, of course, and whether the massacre could have been prevented. But it also makes me wonder how Hasan went from captain, which he was in April, to major, which is what he was the day he allegedly went on his homicidal rampage. The question is pertinent because while he was a mere captain and stationed at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, he was evaluated as supremely incompetent.

The evaluation, obtained by National Public Radio, shows that Hasan’s superiors had serious concerns about him. He was accused of having a “poor record of attendance,” of inappropriately discussing religion his patients, of being “consistently late,” of not being available even for emergencies, of permitting a “homicidal patient” to escape the emergency room and of simply not showing up for a night shift.

NPR went to private psychiatrists and asked them if they would hire someone with such a record. They all said no -- they’re not crazy, after all. That being the case, this raises the question of how and why Hasan went from captain to major. Was it because of an excess of caution regarding political correctness? Was it because no one cared enough or paid enough attention to stop it? Was it because Hasan filled a slot -- and the poor patients be damned? Whatever the case, Hasan moved up a grade. The Senate is now investigating what went wrong at Fort Hood. It ought to start with a simple question:

Who promoted Hasan?

By Jo-Ann Armao

Larry Bill Elliott died in Virginia’s electric chair Tuesday night and, among other things, his last meal wasn’t revealed. Officials at the Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt withheld the details at Elliott’s request. The decision -- like that a week earlier not to disclose the last meal of executed Washington sniper John Allen Muhammad -- irked me.

Why should these men get privacy? Muhammad was responsible for a reign of terror that is still felt in the Washington area. Elliott, in a twisted bid to win the love of a former stripper, killed a young couple that was involved in a bitter custody dispute with the woman. Who cares what they think? Don’t public tax dollars pay for this food?

Mostly, though, I have always been fascinated by what those condemned to die choose to eat as their last meal. And I am not alone. A former editor who worked the late shift on the Post’s national desk would regularly send out messages to members of "The Last Supper Club" detailing the food selections of those on death row. Serial killer Ted Bundy was served steak, eggs, hash browns and coffee. Arsenic murderess Velma Barfield was content with a bag of Cheez Doodles and a Coke. Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh dined on ice cream.

What happened?

I haven't always agreed with Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, but I've long respected him for taking principled stances even when that meant parting ways with his party's orthodoxy.

Graham recently triggered the ire of South Carolina conservatives by joining Democrats in support of cap-and-trade legislation. He has been criticized by the right for working with those across the aisle on immigration reform that could pave the way for millions of illegal immigrants to live legally in the United States. And Graham was a member of the Senate's "Gang of 14" that put an end to the routine use of filibusters to block George W. Bush's judicial nominations. Although the pact meant most Bush nominees would ascend to the bench, Graham and the other GOP gang members were pilloried by some on the right who would have loved to continue the nominations showdown as a way to rally the conservative base. Graham was also the only Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee to vote "yes" on the Supreme Court nomination of Sonia Sotomayor and one of only nine Republicans to vote for her on the Senate floor. He clearly had differences with this nominee but cast a yes vote based on her qualifications and in what I thought was an appropriate display of deference to the president in these matters.

Yet Graham voted on Tuesday to filibuster Judge David F. Hamilton, President Obama's nominee to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit. The filibuster vote failed 70 to 29, but if it had prevailed it would have denied Hamilton a vote on the Senate floor. Graham's opposition to Hamilton should have come as no surprise; the senator voted against Hamilton in committee. Graham said in a brief statement that he found the judge's "decision-making process to be so far removed from the mainstream that he should be denied promotion to the Court of Appeals."

Fair enough. I don't view Hamilton's record that way, and believe that Republicans have distorted Hamilton's record for political advantage. Graham obviously sees it differently. But filibuster?

Does professional football cause domestic violence? Not exactly, although Thanksgiving does (see below.) But it turns out that losses in professional football games -- specifically, when the home team suffers an unexpected upset, based on the pre-game point spread -- lead to an 8 percent spike in the number of police reports of spousal abuse within a short time of the game.

The more important the game -- against a main rival, or for a playoff spot -- the bigger the spike. And in especially frustrating games, those with a large number of sacks, turnovers and penalties, the effect of an unexpected upset on an increase in domestic violence was 15 percent. Unexpected wins, on the other hand, were not associated with a reduction in domestic violence reports. And, if you had any question, the increased violence was entirely male-on-female, according to the newly released National Bureau of Economics working paper by David Card and Gordon Dahl.

Don’t get too upset with football, though. The increased violence was comparable to that of a hot day (over 80 degrees) but far smaller than the spike associated with major holidays such as Thanksgiving (up 22 percent) or the Fourth of July (up 28 percent.)

File this one under quirky observation.

On Sunday, Post writer Keith Richburg filed an interesting story from Shanghai about racial prejudice in China on the eve of President Obama's arrival there. The story explored the negative view of blacks in the wake of a half-Chinese, half-black singer named Lou Jing winning "Go! Oriental Angel" -- that nation's answer to "American Idol." Folks used the internet to call her a "black Chimpanzee" among other things. "[T]he widely held view here," Richburg reported, "[is] that black people are inferior, that white people are wealthy and successful."

Then came the picture on the front page of Wednesday’s Post of Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao at an arrival ceremony Tuesday in Beijing. Looking at the soldier to the left of Hu, the one second to the right of Obama and the one at the end, I couldn't help but wonder what they were thinking. Surely, it wasn't this. Whatever it was, I bet there was more than a modicum of disbelief.

I’d like to propose Marcus’s General Theory of Punditry: the intellectual force of a column tends to be in inverse relationship to the amount of invective. Today’s example -- and, yes, I’m sure it would be easy to apply this to some of my own -- is my normally mild-mannered colleague, Michael Gerson.

Gerson denounces Attorney General Eric Holder as “the most destructive member of Barack Obama’s cabinet.” Holder’s original sin, according to Gerson, was having a special counsel review allegations of criminal misconduct growing out of the Bush administration’s torture policies.

But what really set Gerson off was last week’s move to try Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed in federal court. Any ensuing trial, Gerson says, will be conducted in “a circus atmosphere,” with “America subjected to the airing of intelligence sources and methods” and Mohammed awarded “the full O.J. Simpson treatment.”

Holder himself is depicted as an Atticus Finch wannabe, “disapassionately defending the rule of law against the howling mob,” when he is, in fact, another Ramsey Clark, the left-wing former attorney general. And then, the gut punch: Not only does Holder deny that America is at war with terrorists, “he seems determined to undermine those who do.” His approach, says Gerson, boils down to: “Let justice be done, though the heavens, and buildings, fall.”

Those are some serious -- I’d even go so far as to say scurrilous -- allegations, so they bear examining.