Month: September 2008

¡Viva Zapatero!

by dday

So you may know about this by now. John McCain granted an interview to the Spanish newspaper El Pais, which is interesting in itself since he’s basically shut out the American press, to the point that reporters staged a rally to get McCain out from the front of the campaign plane (which is completely pathetic).

So he gives this interview, and he’s asked about some Latin American hot spots, like Venezuela, Bolivia, and Cuba. And then the reporter turns back to Spain, and… well, look:

Then the interviewer switches gears and asks about (Prime Minister Jose Luis) Zapatero, the Spanish Prime Minister. And McCain replies — very loose translation — that he’ll establish close relations with our friends and stand up to those who want to do us harm. The interviewer has a double take and seems to think McCain might be confused. So she asks it again. But McCain sticks to the same evasive answer.

You can hear the exchange here.

At first I thought this could have been because of a faulty phone line, but no, the reporter was in the room with McCain in Miami. Clearly he has no idea who Zapatero is. He thinks this it’s someone allied with Mexico (the Zapatistas?), and he reverts back to a boilerplate answer about only meeting with leaders who respect democracy. He may not have understood that she said “Europe” in her thick Spanish accent.

But regardless, it sounds really bad. No wonder he’s being hid from the press. They must be deathly afraid of him making a mistake like this.

Now the damage control artist Randy Scheunemann has stepped away from his lobbying gigs long enough to offer an explanation, and it’s worse than the initial assumption that McCain was just confused:

Zapatero is a center-left politician, but McCain has suggested that as president he would seek to repair relations that have been badly frayed in Europe during Bush’s tenure. In an early-April interview with a reporter from Spanish newspaper El Pais, McCain said, “This is the moment to leave behind discrepancies with Spain.”

He added: “I would like for [President Zapatero] to visit the United States. I am very interested not only in normalizing relations with Spain but in obtaining good and productive relations with the goal of addressing many issues and challenges that we have to confront together.” […]

McCain foreign policy adviser Randy Sheunemann (sic) said McCain’s answer was intentional.

“The questioner asked several times about Senator McCain’s willingness to meet Zapatero (and id’d him in the question so there is no doubt Senator McCain knew exactly to whom the question referred). Senator McCain refused to commit to a White House meeting with President Zapatero in this interview,” he said in an e-mail […]

Asked to explain McCain’s apparent shift in tone and position since April, Scheunemann gave almost no ground.

“In this week’s interview, Senator McCain did not rule in or rule out a White House meeting with President Zapatero, a NATO ally,” he said in an e-mail. “If elected, he will meet with a wide range of allies in a wide variety of venues but is not going to spell out scheduling and meeting location specifics in advance. He also is not going to make reckless promises to meet America’s adversaries. It’s called keeping your options open, unlike Senator Obama, who has publicly committed to meeting some of the world’s worst dictators unconditionally in his first year in office.”

(That’s Prime Minister Zapatero, genius)

The female interviewer basically backs this up, believing that McCain “ducked the question” because the Bush Administration doesn’t have good relations with Zapatero.

I’m not sure I agree; there was no reason for McCain to go on about Latin America if he knew he was talking about Spain. But if this is true, wow. I knew the neocons were belligerent, but this explanation makes them sound suicidal. Spain is a NATO ally. We would be obligated to go to war on their behalf if they were attacked. McCain wants to refuse to meet with their leaders?

This is part of a pattern of the McCain campaign trying to cover up a bad moment with an even worse explanation. But it’s also worth noting that the neocons are far more invested in McCain than they ever were in Bush, if that’s possible. He’s a very willing parrot for all of their petty grudges and magical thinking. And they’re scheming to indoctrinate the other half of the ticket.

Comments by the governor of Alaska in her first television interview, in which she said Nato may have to go to war with Russia and took a tough line on Iran’s nuclear programme, were the result of two weeks of briefings by neoconservatives.

Sources in the McCain camp, the Republican Party and Washington think tanks say Mrs Palin was identified as a potential future leader of the neoconservative cause in June 2007. That was when the annual summer cruise organised by the right-of-centre Weekly Standard magazine docked in Juneau, the Alaskan state capital, and the pundits on board took tea with Governor Palin.

Her case as John McCain’s running mate was later advanced vociferously by William Kristol, the magazine’s editor, who is widely seen as one of the founding fathers of American neoconservative thought – including the robust approach to foreign policy which spurred American intervention in Iraq.

In 1988, Mr Kristol became a leading adviser of another inexperienced Republican vice presidential pick, Dan Quayle, tutoring him in foreign affairs. Last week he praised Mrs Palin as “a spectre of a young, attractive, unapologetic conservatism” that “is haunting the liberal elites”.

Now many believe that the “neocons”, whose standard bearer in government, Vice President Dick Cheney, lost out in Washington power struggles to the more moderate defence secretary Robert Gates and secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, last year are seeking to mould Mrs Palin to renew their influence.

They go after everyone. Some of them work out, some of them don’t. In the end, they stay in charge. This “twilight of the neocons” idea was vastly overrated.

…UPDATE: Scheunemann is now intimating that Spain is one of America’s adversaries. If you think that Scheunemann is telling the truth and McCain really snubbed the Spanish Prime Minister, it’s insane. If you think he’s lying, then he’s willing to create an international incident just to avoid admitting a mistake.

Both are prime neocon qualities.

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Breaking News. Sun Rises In East.

by digby

Let me just say up front that I like Chris Cilizza. Of all the MSM bloggers, he’s probably the one who walks the line between the two forms most successfully. I read his stuff with interest.

But every once in a while he writes something that is so beltway bubblicious that I have to laugh out loud. Today he lets fly with a doozy:

Drudge-ology 101: McCain, Obama and Media Bias

Yesterday was a typical recent day on the Drudge Report — the single most influential source for how the presidential campaign is covered in the country.

In the banner headline spot for most of the day was a picture of entertainer Barbra Streisand touting a Beverly Hills fundraiser for Barack Obama — not exactly the sort of headline that the Illinois senator wants as chum for the cable channels 49 days before the election.

Two other stories never merited attention from Drudge: a claim by a senior aide to John McCain that the Arizona senator had invented the BlackBerry and a statement by McCain surrogate Carly Fiorina that neither McCain nor Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin would be equipped to serve as CEO of a major U.S. company.

(A quick note to preempt the inevitable argument that Drudge’s influence is overblown. Tomorrow morning, take a minute to look at the stories Drudge is highlighting. Then, later in the day, watch a few cable channels to see what stories they are talking about. It will open your eyes.)

The emphasis on Obama’s Hollywood ties and the omission of two negative McCain items is consistent with a broader trend over the past month (or so) that has seen the Arizona senator receive far better treatment from Drudge than he had during the primary season when, as several other acute political observers noted at the time, a number of tough stories for McCain regularly appeared on Drudge.

The increase in positive McCain stories featured on Drudge has coincided with more skeptical coverage of Obama’s candidacy. In recent weeks, Drudge has featured in his center well spot: A picture of Obama shooting at a far off basketball hoop with a subtitle asking “Will he get his groove back?”; an image of Obama sweating on stage at the Democratic National Convention during the Illinois senator’s acceptance speech; and heavy coverage of the “lipstick on a pig” comments.

What explains the change in tone? It’s easy to lapse into the tired old logic that Drudge is nothing more than a conservative mouthpiece returning to his roots as election day nears.

But, those who follow the news choices that Drudge makes on a day in and day out basis — Democrats and Republicans alike — argue that the shift in focus by Drudge is in keeping with a long time strain of his site: a healthy disdain for the mainstream media and their perceived biases.

“The Drudge Report penalizes mainstream media bias more effectively than any other venue,” said one Drudge-ologist who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “The more flags Drudge throws, the more site traffic he seems to get.”

These Drudge-ologists (of which The Fix considers himself one) note that the coverage turned in earnest after McCain named Palin as his running mate.

I honestly don’t even know what to write about this. So I’ll just show a picture taken by a freeper a while back:

The highlight of the FReep was seeing our friends Matt Drudge, Ann Coulter and Peggy Noonan come walking up the sidewalk together towards us from the direction of Dupont Circle.

The trio looked like the new Mod Squad: Matt wore his trademark fedora and dark sunglasses to go with his tux, Ann was stunning in her beautiful black dress…

(You’ll note that a freeper version of The Mod Squad includes two blond women and no black man…)

I had always thought that the John Harris line “Drudge rules our world” at least took into consideration that Drudge himself was a right wing tool and the reporters factored that into his information (or thought they did.) But apparently, they have actually been laboring under the illusion that Drudge is a reliable, non-partisan purveyor of straight information. Wow. That truly does stun me.

This may be the single most illuminating post ever written by a mainstream reporter. That he writes it so guilelessly and without even the slightest disclaimer tells you everything you need to know about American journalism.

By golly, Drudge seems to have a political agenda! Someone alert the media. Apparently, they didn’t know.

Update: Jamison Foser weighs in at County Fair

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So Goes The Nation

by digby

The first vote I ever cast was for Jerry Brown for Governor of California way back in the day. It’s one vote I’ve never regretted. He’s a bold and forward thinking liberal:

Opposition to a California ballot measure to ban same-sex marriage is mounting following Attorney General Jerry Brown’s move to change the language on the initiative, according to a Field Poll released today.

The poll found that just 38 percent of likely voters support the measure, while 55 percent intend to vote no. That compares with 42 percent in support and 51 percent opposed in July.

Brown amended the Proposition 8 summary language after the state Supreme Court’s decision on May 15 to overturn California’s previous ban on same-sex marriage.

The pollsters found the amended language played a role in that growing opposition, especially among the 30 percent of likely voters interviewed who had never heard of Prop. 8.

Those voters were much more likely to oppose the measure when read Brown’s wording (58 percent against it and 30 percent for it) than those in the same category who were read the old version of Prop. 8 (42 percent against and 37 percent for it), according to the Field Poll.

The Brown language reads, in part: “Eliminates the right of same-sex couples to marry.” The original version read, in part: “Limit on marriage.”

Brown’s revision makes it clear that voters are taking away someone’s rights and that made the difference, said Field Poll Director Mark DiCamillo.

This is really good news. (So’s this: yesterday, Brad Pitt gave 100k to the cause.)

These numbers come from the Field Poll, which is considered the most reliable of all California polls. But I’m told that others show this initiative far closer, so there’s no reason to relax.

But think about this. California has a population of 38 million people and is somewhere in the top ten largest economies in the world. And if this initiative passes, along with Massachusetts, we will have completed a process that guarantees the right for gay people to marry. It’s a huge step forward in human rights and one that I predict will be looked back on in the not so distant future as shocking, not because it was done, but because of its necessity. Of course gay people should have the right to marry. Why ever not?

(Meanwhile, some people are suing the state over the fact that marriage licenses in California no longer use the words “bride and groom” which, like, totally ruins their super-awesome wedding they’ve been planning, like, forever!)

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Hacks Say Enough To St. John. And That’s The Way McCain Likes It.

by tristero

We learn today that the scales have fallen from the fishy eyes of more and more of America’s Greatest Pundits in re: St. John McCain:

All admired John McCain, all held him in the highest regard, and all of have been disgusted as McCain has descended into a Republican hack.

The technical term for that sentence is “a huge crock of shit.” Today, Somerby tells the shocking truth:

There never was a saint named McCain; that was the press corps’ imagination.

The context is McCain’s Confederate flag-flapping. Turns out he was for it before it was against it. Or maybe he was against it while he was pretending he was actually for it.

Or maybe he just didn’t give much of a damn which side he was on just as long as it got votes. Which, we can say with definite assurance, McCain was for. As Someby howls:

This was Saint McCain playing the game! Later, when it no longer mattered, the great saint boo-hoo-hooed and blubbered about how much he despised that flag. It was almost like being a POW!

By the way, yes, the utterly truthless McCain really compared praising the Confederate flag to being a prisoner of war; it’s in Somerby’s post:

In his memoir “Worth the Fighting For,” McCain describes the sickening sensation of renouncing his views about the Confederate flag to curry favor with South Carolina voters in 2000—”reading it as if I were making a hostage statement.”

Apparently, it never occurred to America’s crack – or most cracked – political reporters that McCain was then what he is now, a shameless, ignorant, lying, conniving filthy-rich political opportunist.

Now the rubes – sorry, I meant, hacks – have all turned against him. Ooooh, that’ll show Senator Forked Tongue! But of course it won’t. In fact, McCain deliberately alienated them because he thinks it will be a political plus. Having discredited the national mainstream media – admittedly, a trivial easy task – then McCain can, and does assert that anything they print about his lies, Palin’s lies, and the conjoined relationship they both have with the Unseen One – George “Codpiece” Bush – anything they print that is derogatory towards McCain is ipso facto too grossly biased to take seriously. Therefore, McCain is counting on the defection of the clowns. It makes it all that easier for him to whine and shore up enthusiasm for his lunatic, far-right base. Which is what this, and Palin, is all about.

Will it work? Oh, you bet it will, and has. A man so ignorant and befuddled he doesn’t know that who the prime minister of Spain is, who may not even be sure that Spain is in Europe, has remained even in the polls with one of the most knowledgeable and focused pair of Democratic candidates in modern history. Factor in America’s racism; Fox News and its orcs; an energized, Palinized base; and some old fashioned subversion of voting rights and McCain can all but snort that Napalm In The Morning that means Victory.

The American media has been played for suckers for a very long time, but they are now starting to wake up. I don’t care. Why? Because they shouldn’t wake up. They should go out and get jobs they’re good at, if such exist.

Because you can bet your bippy that if Obama gets elected, as he must, this Newly Awakened Press Corps will prove just how independent they are by investigating Obama on trivialities that will make the non-existent Whitewater scandal look as substantial as Republicans’ Watergate, Iran/Contra, and attorney general scandals (to name but three from their ample portfolio). And you can bet that selfsame bippy that if McCain gets elected (God forbid), they will crawl on hands and knees to beg forgiveness for their mean treatment of President McCain. Hey! Show him some respect! Don’t you know a long time ago, he was actually a brave man?

Who Could Imagine…

by tristero

… that they would freak out, somewhere in Russia? Chuck Hagel could, and did in February, 2008, seven months before the Russian invasion of South Ossetia and Georgia.

There is no evidence anyone was listening. Now, why does the date August 6, 2001 float into mind? And why do I keep on hearing an unpleasant, snotty voice drawling, “Okay, you covered your ass, now?”

Constitution Day and Cheneyism

by dday

Yesterday was Constitution Day, a commemoration of a document that reportedly once governed the United States of America. At one time, the rules contained therein actually bound politicians and citizens to an agreed set of laws which everybody would follow or suffer consequences.

That was a quaint time.

These days, we know from experience that indomitable will and a talent at evading opponents is sufficient to nullify that Constitution. This week, the Washington Post printed two excerpts from Angler, a new book by Barton Gellman about the Cheney Vice Presidency. Longtime readers probably already know that Fourthbranch has hijacked the government and used it to his own ends, but reading these excerpts (and I’m sure, the book) reveals one head-scratching moment after another. Here’s an example:

The command center of “the president’s program,” as Addington usually called it, was not in the White House. Its controlling documents, which gave strategic direction to the nation’s largest spy agency, lived in a vault across an alley from the West Wing [7] — in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, on the east side of the second floor, where the vice president headquartered his staff.

The vault was in EEOB 268, Addington’s office. Cheney’s lawyer held the documents, physical and electronic, because he was the one who wrote them. New forms of domestic espionage were created and developed over time in presidential authorizations that Addington typed on a Tempest-shielded computer across from his desk [8].

It is unlikely that the history of U.S. intelligence includes another operation conceived and supervised by the office of the vice president. White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. had “no idea,” he said, that the presidential orders were held in a vice presidential safe. An authoritative source said the staff secretariat, which kept a comprehensive inventory of presidential papers, classified and unclassified, possessed no record of these.

The excerpts cover the time period in March 2004 when a significant portion of the upper leadership of the Justice Department threatened to resign en masse over the illegal spying program, which of course the Democrats were bullied into giving blanket amnesty for earlier this year (a law which the ACLU is continuing to fight, because they’re the ACLU). But this violation of the Fourth Amendment is certainly not the end of Cheney’s assault on the Constitution. Scott Horton asked 6 questions of Gellman today about his book, and the revelations are amazing. Cheney may have burned VP hopeful Frank Keating by releasing damaging information HE GOT DURING THE SELECTION PROCESS to Newsweek. That’s just the kind of guy this is. You can see the parallels to other events. Then there’s this very important point:

A lot of critics call Cheney and Addington contemptuous of the Constitution. I think that’s completely wrong–a cartoon that misses something important, because it fails to take them seriously. The vice president has an unyielding conviction, to which he has devoted substantial thought, about what the Constitution means. He occupies an extreme position in the usual separation-of-powers debate, sometimes beginning with widely accepted tenets but carrying them beyond the bounds of accepted scholarship. In his own frame of reference, the Constitution not only permits but compels him to help Bush break free of restraints on his prerogatives as commander in chief and leader of the unitary executive branch. But where Cheney does show contempt is for public opinion, the capacity of the citizenry at large to make rational decisions.

Go back and look at what he says about “opinion polls.” Invariably his message is that a politician who pays them heed is failing to do his job. As Cheney sees it, public opinion is fickle, ill-informed, self-contradictory, emotional–nothing like his own conversation with himself and trusted aides. He speaks disdainfully of critics as “elites,” but his own view of democracy is at the far elite extreme. Voters are entitled to choose a president every four years, he said at the National Press Club, but then they need to let him do his job. The transaction is like hiring a surgeon; pick a good one, and don’t try to tell him where to place the knife. This “trustee” model of democracy is associated with Edmund Burke, the Old Whig philosopher in 18th century England. It is not the model that took root here when the Founders designed a plan of government that derived its authority from the people. If you take Cheney’s view, aggressive efforts at secrecy, for our own good, to prevent us from making the wrong choices or interfering with government’s important work, are a rational response.

That is crucial. If you simply don’t care about what anyone thinks of you, there is no barrier. You can state without compunction that “To the extent that the Constitution and laws are read narrowly, as Jefferson wished, the Chief Executive will on occasion feel duty bound to assert monarchical notions of the prerogative that will permit him to exceed the law,” because you feel you know better and you must organize your belief of the Constitution around that belief in yourself. You can lie to Congressional leaders boldly, asserting that Iraq has suitcase nukes, because you believe that Saddam is a threat and you organize the intelligence around that belief.

Gellman may think that Fourthbranch has given the Constitution a lot of thought, but I don’t. I think he’s given his own ego a lot of thought, and he’s warped the Constitution to fit around it. And he’s secure that this interpretation won’t be challenged because he has enough will to steamroll right through anyone who would raise an objection. We’re seeing this again right now from the woman who would be Vice President with respect to the “Troopergate” investigation in Alaska. The McCain campaign has sent a lawyer (one of a whole passel) to shut down the investigation and pressure the state Republicans who allowed it in the first place. Subpoenas have been issued for aides and Todd Palin, but the Governor’s hand-picked Attorney General has told investigators that they won’t testify. And Sarah Palin herself has refused to testify.

This is not about this particular politician. What is significant here is that Cheneyism is LEARNED behavior. Want to avoid a subpoena? Don’t show up. Want to break the law? Just plow ahead and do it, and fight like hell to ignore the consequences, saying things like “I can do whatever I want until the courts tell me I can’t.”

The question becomes how you end Cheneyism before this cancer grows. Russ Feingold has some ideas.

Our next president will face a difficult challenge. He must repair the wreckage the current administration has left, which means renouncing some of the powers the current President tried to amass as he turned a blind eye to the rule of law and separation of powers. No president will want to limit his own power. But if we are to be the nation our founders envisioned when they gathered in Philadelphia more than two centuries ago, we must work together — across party lines and at all levels of government — to protect and defend our Constitution and restore the rule of law.

So does Marty Lederman:

1. A Well-Founded View of Presidential Power. To advance the first commitment, the next President should initiate a process to ensure that the new Administration withdraws and repudiates the reasoning of memoranda and opinions that overstate the President’s constitutional powers and that minimize those of Congress and the courts. We have not conducted a comprehensive review of OLC opinions, nor could we as many are classified or otherwise inaccessible. Thus, we cannot offer an exhaustive list of the opinions that should be withdrawn. We do believe, however, that the list should include the Torture Memos, the DOJ Whitepaper on the Terrorist Surveillance Program, and the September 25, 2001 opinion on war powers.

The next President should also affirmatively adopt a view of presidential power that recognizes the roles and authorities of all three co-equal branches and that takes account of settled judicial precedent. We believe that a model the next President should seriously consider adopting is “The Constitutional Separation of Powers between the President and Congress.”[18] Setting forth the principles that will govern the determination of questions of presidential power will provide a constraint against the sort of result-oriented advice-giving that proved so problematic in instances such as the Torture Memo.

2. Openness and Accountability. To advance the commitment to openness and accountability, we offer several recommendations. OLC should review its procedures for releasing opinions and publicly release guidelines that will govern publication decisions. The goal of the review should be to make sure that OLC’s memoranda and opinions are made available to the public to the maximum extent possible consistent with the legitimate confidentiality interests of the Executive Branch.

Congress, the Courts, and the public are unable to check against abuses of executive power if they do not know about them. In this regard, the experience of the past eight years is instructive. It was only years later and due to leaked information that we learned of highly consequential opinions advising that the Executive Branch was not bound to comply with statutory limits on its power, including opinions relating to the treatment of detainees, the President’s domestic surveillance program, and the use of secret prisons overseas for detention and interrogation […]

The next President should also commit to review the Executive Branch’s practice in asserting privileges, including executive privilege. The presidential communications privilege is, according to the Supreme Court, a legitimate constitutional privilege rooted in the separation of powers. Nevertheless, this privilege is not absolut e and judicial precedent as well as long Executive Branch and congressional practice recognize that the President’s constitutional interest must be balanced against Congress’s legitimate interests in conducting investigations and oversight. The next President should commit that, when disputes over privilege arise, the executive will seek to resolve them through good faith negotiation and meaningful accommodation. This negotiation and accommodation process must include recognition by the Executive Branch of the legitimate claims to information that the Congress does have in its legislative, oversight and investigatory functions. In a recent and highly relevant case, Judge Bates authored a helpful discussion of Congress’ legitimate interests in information, which in our judgment is largely correct.

3. Structural Safeguards against Abuse of Power. To advance the third commitment to enhance structural safeguards, we suggest that the President instruct the Attorney General to pay particular attention to the procedures of OLC. Together with a number of our former colleagues, we have written a set of guidelines that OLC should foll ow in order to best effectuate its role… Public confidence in the impartial administration of justice must be restored. It is not sufficient that the President and Attorney General themselves be satisfied that they have addressed the problem. Their efforts must be considered credible on bipartisan and interbranch bases.

The Constitution has not become an issue in this election, as much a cause of the failure of the media to cover it as of the candidates to express it. Barack Obama made a strong statement a week or so ago on habeas corpus, but it went into the ether. Joe Biden made noise by appearing to put criminal prosecutions of those who violated the law on the table (he later recanted), but it didn’t gather much interest. There are rumblings about a Congressionally-empowered commission in an Obama Administration to study abuses of the rule of law and maybe prosecute down the road. But you’re not hearing a lot about it.

I do believe that ending Chenyism in our time is the greatest challenge for the next President. Unless we restore the fundamentals of American government it won’t much matter what we do on an economic or foreign policy or environmental level. I would like you to pledge to be a Constitution Voter. The pressure will be immense to bind up the nation’s wounds and heal the partisan divide, and then we’ll have another disciple of Cheneyism 4, 8, 12, or 16 years down the road. We cannot cede the Constitution because it doesn’t hit people in the gut. Democracy is at risk, everyone. That cannot be in dispute. Cheneyism must be rejected. Fully.

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Duh

by digby

Despite an intense effort to distance himself from the way his party has done business in Washington, Senator John McCain is seen by voters as far less likely to bring change to Washington than Senator Barack Obama. He is widely viewed as a “typical Republican” who would continue or expand President Bush’s policies, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

Stop the presses. The American people aren’t completely brain dead every minute of the day.

More on the latest NYT poll at the link. Both bounces have disappeared and it’s back to where it was in August: a statistical tie with Obama slightly ahead. The only difference seems to be that white women have all (except for certain snooty Baronesses) come over to Obama and the Republican base is all fired up over Palin.

Oh, and half the country thinks we “won” the Iraq war.

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What’s Inside The Kit

by digby

The whole rape kit thing has had me a little bit confused. Palin is a wingnut, for sure, but that also usually includes being a Law ‘n Order freak who wants the cops to have as much money as possible for anything they want. What was it about this particular thing that so upset her?

DKos diarist Hekebolos may have the answer: the rape kits contained emergency contraception. Palin’s spokeswoman’s comments were very carefully constructed:

Palin spokeswoman Maria Comella said in an e-mail that the governor “does not believe, nor has she ever believed, that rape victims should have to pay for an evidence-gathering test.”

“Gov. Palin’s position could not be more clear,” she said. “To suggest otherwise is a deliberate misrepresentation of her commitment to supporting victims and bringing violent criminals to justice.”

You don’t have to be a legal scholar to parse that statement. She’s already said she believes that abortion should be illegal except to save the life of the woman. That’s outside the mainstream in itself. Being against even emergency contraception in the case of rape, clearly takes her to the outer fringe of social conservatism. If she ever submits herself to questioning by someone who isn’t a potted plant, he or she should ask her about this in very specific terms.

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Crooks In Ties

by tristero

Towards the beginning of Dean Starkman’s terrific, eye-opening article on the business press reporting, and often missing, the story of insanity in the loan industry, he springs a pop quiz on his fellow business reporters:

Since it’s just us business reporters here—just us chickens—let me illustrate what I mean with a quiz. Match the allegation with the institution. Answers are at the end of the piece.

Allegation

1. Handed out copies of the movie Boiler Room as a training tape

2. Partnered to sell its “PayOption Arms” with a brokerage owned by a five-time felon, whose convictions included gun-related charges

3. Forbade loan officers to check borrower income on certain loans

4. Ran an “art department” in its Tampa office, where documents were altered.

5. Settled allegations of institutionalized marketing deception that covered two million customers

6. Developed “FastQual,” a program designed to approve borrowers in twelve seconds

7. Incentivized brokers and loan officers through “yield spread premiums” and other compensation schemes to put borrowers into more expensive loans

8. Tapped two kegs of beer at weekly staff meetings

Institution

A. Citigroup

B. Countrywide

C. Ameriquest

D. IndyMac

E. Merit Financial

F. New Century

G. All of the above

This is not a take-home exam. If you don’t get more than two of seven, I think we have work to do.

Read the article to learn the answers. Starkman points out that conservative commentators, including the odious David Brooks, tend to blame the lending crisis on the lowered ethical standards of the investors. Yes, says Starkman, that’s certainly part of it, but then he tells some stories that are simply beyond belief:

From 2004, Countrywide led the market in rolling out new “products” that were basically bureaucratic ways of approving a loan to anybody. The complaint said Countrywide threatened to fire underwriters for (my emphasis) “attempting to verify a borrower’s ability to pay.”

As the bank said in ads aimed at brokers:

More ways to say yes! Qualify more of your borrowers with Expanded Criteria programs from Countrywide®, American’s Wholesale Lender®. Countrywide offers some of the most flexible documentation guidelines in the industry.

Remember, this was not some fringe player. It was the firm that around 2004 was the nation’s largest home-mortgage originator. The market leader.

The complaint has plenty of examples of people blown out of homes they already owned by Countrywide products. A sixty-four-year-old widow with payments of $300 a month on a thirty-year, fixed-rate loan is put in a “3/27 interest-only loan with a fixed rate for only the first three years of the loan.” Never mind what it is; she couldn’t afford the $800 payments before the rate adjusted, Illinois says.

Perhaps she was irresponsible, as David Brooks would have it, or mad as a hatter. But Countrywide itself admitted to regulators in 2007, the complaint says, that 60 percent of borrowers in subprime hybrid arms “would not have qualified at the fully indexed rate”—that is, when the rate went up, as it inevitably did…

I realize that borrowers who signed the notes can never be fully let off the hook; no one knows what went on in the room at each closing—although the reporting of the last several years certainly yielded plenty of examples of loans made to stroke victims, the retarded, the elderly, the illiterate, and people who don’t speak English. A fine piece in April of this year by The Indypendent, a New York alternative paper, for instance, describes how an eighty-six-year-old Brooklyn man diagnosed with dementia decided it was a good idea to refinance his 5.95 percent, thirty-year, fixed-rate loan with an option ARM, an instrument that BusinessWeek described as “the riskiest and most complicated home loan product ever created.”

But more broadly, it pays to remember that the borrower is the amateur in this equation, someone who might execute a mortgage twice in a lifetime. A lender will do it a hundred times before lunch.

And the article ends:

So, that’s what we know: the lending industry used marketing deception—including boiler-room tactics—on a mass scale against a class of financially vulnerable borrowers (which subprime borrowers are, by definition) and other middle-class financial amateurs already laboring with stagnating incomes and rising costs for health care, education, and, of course, housing.

Yet to be explored fully is the extent of Wall Street’s role, the size of the transfer of wealth between classes—from millions of civilians to thousands of professionals—that resulted, and the social and economic consequences of it all.

Read the whole thing. It’s worth it.

h/t, friend and reader DS.

Social Security, Anyone?

by dday

I don’t think the Obama campaign has made this clear enough:

As it happens, though, not that long ago we had a rare political moment in this country, a moment where the public sat up and took notice of economic policy — and spoke out and made its voice heard too. When George W. Bush made it to term #2, he decided to try to privatize social security to reward his supporters on Wall Street with a new source of capital, customers, and fees. (Those would be the same people whose firms are now cratering under the weight of the bad debt they recklessly took on while Republican regulators looked the other way). But as it turned out, we Americans were not about to let our elected representatives turn over our social security taxes to Wall Street financiers to gamble with if it meant losing the guaranteed income that has allowed millions upon millions of American seniors to live out their sunset years with at least a basic measure of dignity.

But while ordinary Americans spoke out, John McCain stood with Bush (hugged him awkwardly in public, even), against the American people. In fact, just six months ago, McCain again let slip his fondness for privatization.

I have been scratching my head why this has not been talked about more, especially since Obama has been having trouble winning votes among seniors. There may well be some good reason I’m missing why it hasn’t been a top argument thus far.

There is no good reason. I will note that Sherrod Brown, the populist Senator from Ohio, made this point today, and hopefully that’s a harbinger of things to come.

“Just imagine if Bush and McCain had had their way and privatized Social Security,” said Brown. “People would have seen their private social security accounts just disintegrate the last two days. And imagine what that would mean in rural America, urban America, suburban America and small town America?”

It’s one thing to say that McCain’s record shows him to be captive to special interests and lobbyists, or that he has considered himself to be the king of deregulation and as a Senator has sought to remove any and all burdens from corporate interests. And it’s important to correct the record on this, now that McCain is running away from it. But those are true statements but not visceral ones. Even the familiar line, borrowed from John Kerry’s 2004 campaign, that McCain “gave tax breaks to companies that ship jobs overseas,” while potentially effective, doesn’t have broad resonance for everyone.

The fact is that from 2001 to today, the stock market has gained, in the best analysis, 1%. And depending on the choice of stocks, an individual portfolio may have incurred significant losses in those years. And this is the system to which George Bush and John McCain want to turn over your retirement savings. Before Social Security it was commonplace to witnesses large numbers of elderly men and women in poverty, struggling to survive. This is the Republican vision of America.

It seems significant.

Update: Turns out the Obama campaign has at least one unreleased ad on this subject playing in Michigan.

Ben Smith at Politico says:

These unreleased spots raising alarms about bread-and-butter economic issues may say more about the real race than does the cable news buzz.

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