Month: November 2008

First Scandal

by digby

This could be trouble:

In the first two weeks after the election, President-elect Barack Obama has broken with a tradition established over the last eight years through his controversial use of complete sentences, political observers say. Millions of Americans who watched Mr. Obama’s appearance on CBS’s “Sixty Minutes” last Sunday witnessed the president-elect’s unorthodox verbal tic, which had Mr. Obama employing grammatically correct sentences virtually every time he opened his mouth. But Mr. Obama’s decision to use complete sentences in his public pronouncements carries with it certain risks, since after the last eight years many Americans may find his odd speaking style jarring. According to presidential historian Davis Logsdon of the University of Minnesota, some Americans might find it “alienating” to have a president who speaks English as if it were his first language. “Every time Obama opens his mouth, his subjects and verbs are in agreement,” says Mr. Logsdon. “If he keeps it up, he is running the risk of sounding like an elitist.”

He does drop his “n’s” from time to time, so maybe they’ll let him get away with it.

Unlocking The Secrets

by digby

I’ve written a bit about this notion of a bipartisan, 9/11 style commission to investigate the abuses of the Bush administration and for a number of reasons I’ve been fairly pessimistic that anything like it would come to pass or that it would accomplish anything. But you never know …

Here’s a fascinating article by Charles Holman from this month’s Washington Monthly called “The Last Secrets Of The Bush Administration” which tackles all these issues and makes a good argument for establishing a “9/12” Commission. He lays out all the rational political reasons why the administration and the congress won’t do this, including a fascinating bit a history about the fallout from the Church Commission in the 1970s which I was unaware of:

[T]he unfortunate fact is that such investigations, while necessary, tend to be politically poisonous for the lawmakers who run them. Frank Church had presidential aspirations in 1975, but the investigation ate up so much of his time that it kept him from campaigning (he later groused that it might have cost him a shot at being Jimmy Carter’s vice president, too). The public and Congress, who had been furious about agency abuses of power in 1975, had mostly lost interest by the time the committee delivered its report a year later. Only one of its recommendations—the surveillance court—actually made it into law, and Church lost his Senate seat in the 1980 election following spurious accusations that his investigation had led to the assassination of a CIA station chief in Greece. The chairman of the concurrent investigative committee in the House, New York Democrat Otis Pike, saw his reputation similarly battered, and left office in 1979.

You know they will …

Holman is bullish on the idea of a commission if it’s structured correctly and for some very interesting reasons. It’s my long held view that it’s a grave mistake to allow these people to go unpunished, because it inevitably leads to further (and probably worse — they always are) abuses down the road. The zombies need to be vanquished once and for all. But as he points out in the article, just as important is the fact that the agreed upon national narrative of this period is written that says the Bush administration was clearly wrong to do what it did and that it was not an acceptable response to a threat. It’s not that this country doesn’t have a long history of such abuses, it does. But normalizing the idea that suspending habeas and committing kidnapping, torture and indefinite detention to “keep us safe” leads to the inevitable expansion of that idea into our domestic legal system, which is already bad enough. (I think tasers are a part of that acceptance of “antiseptic” government sanctioned coercion.) This is important across a wide range of issues (not the least of which is that America’s reputation in the world is just slightly above Pol Pot’s at the moment.)

Holman writes:

With their strong majorities, the Democrats in Congress can remedy many of the 9/11 Commission’s institutional failures from the get-go, giving the new commission enough time, money, and subpoena power to do its work. Appointing a respected bipartisan membership will be crucial, because of the simple fact that most of the people who know things we need to know are Republicans. Addington and Gonzales will probably never provide useful information about what they did, but their immediate subordinates might, if they are given the right forum in which to do so. Much of what we know now comes from the handful of them who have already come forward. James Comey, a former deputy attorney general, offered up to a Senate committee the story of the attempt by Gonzales and White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card to get Attorney General John Ashcroft to sign an extension of the NSA’s secret wiretapping program while Ashcroft was ill and drugged in a hospital room. Jack Goldsmith, the former OLC head, has published an illuminating memoir of his time in the administration that fills in a great deal of granular detail about how Cheney, Addington, and Gonzales pursued their agenda. Both Comey and Goldsmith are staunch conservatives who agreed with the Bush administration on many principles, but not with the unconstitutional methods by which it pursued them. Comey may have been willing to volunteer his story to a Democratic Senate committee, but a bipartisan commission could be instrumental in reaching more reluctant administration veterans. Some might talk out of a sense of duty, as Comey and Goldsmith appear to have done. Others might be persuaded to testify in order to clear their names and position themselves for future appointments. The crucial thing is to define the question as what happened, not whether it was right. Now is not the time to argue with Jack Goldsmith about what constitutes a legal interrogation technique. Now is the time to get him to help explain what those techniques were. The commission can sweeten the deal by offering future immunity to anyone willing to testify, making it clear that its goal is to fill in the history of the Bush years, not to send anyone to jail. Otherwise, says Jim Dempsey, the vice president for public policy at the Center for Democracy and Technology and a former House Judiciary Committee counsel, “all the people who know what you want to know come under the protection of the Fifth Amendment. They lawyer up, and the whole inquiry gets frozen.” (John Yoo did just that this summer, arriving with high-powered defense attorney Miguel Estrada at a House subcommittee hearing.) And as tempting as it is to believe otherwise, the odds of any major Bush administration figure serving time for what happened over the past eight years are pretty long under even the best of circumstances. Remember Goldsmith’s get-out-of-jail-free card: it would be difficult to convict anyone in a position of authority on charges related to interrogation or wiretapping, because those actions were legitimized with OLC memos. At most, a few CIA interrogators would go to prison, and the big fish would go free, á la Abu Ghraib; and this summer, Congress—the Democratic Congress—absolved the telecommunications companies that helped the NSA listen in on phone calls and e-mail exchanges. The U.S. attorney firings? Maybe a few tangentially related perjury convictions. Invading Iraq on false pretenses? Henry Kissinger did worse, and won the Nobel Peace Prize. And for all of the above, Bush could always borrow a page from his father, who less than a month before leaving the Oval Office preemptively pardoned half a dozen of his fellow Reagan administration officials— including the defense secretary—for their involvement in the Iran-Contra affair, sinking an independent prosecutor’s six-year investigation. Most importantly, a commission tasked with creating the be-all, end-all record of a tumultuous political era makes a powerful implicit offer to potential witnesses: the prospect of having some small influence on how they are viewed by history. This is why once-loyal administration officials talk to Bob Woodward and publish memoirs that polish their reputations at the expense of their former bosses’, and why the 9/11 Commission was ultimately able to wrestle testimony—albeit unsworn—out of two presidents and vice presidents on the subject of their own failures. It’s not crazy to think that one or two staffers from the Office of the Vice President, weighing the risk of coming off badly in another witness’s telling against the limited political rewards of loyalty to an administration whose marquee names will be out of power for quite some time, might volunteer their own accounts of the past eight years; they would be instrumental in helping to clear away the unknown unknowns and suggesting which questions to ask.

I think there’s almost no chance that the new Obama administration will pursue prosecutions and even less that the congress will do anything on its own. They can’t even find it in themselves to deny Joe Lieberman a chairmanship. What are the chances they’re going to prosecute Dick Cheney for war crimes? But there are those among Obama’s advisors and among members of congress who understand that this should not be swept under the rug and if they can come up with some sort of commission, it’s something.
Will it tell the “true story?” I doubt it. But it might just be the kind of cautionary tale that ensures that a new generation of Americans don’t grow up thinking that it’s normal for their government to torture and suspend portions of the the Bill of Rights at will. I think that’s the bare minimum we should expect from this new, allegedly liberal government.

Update: Dahlia Lithwick was terrific on Maddow tonight on this issue wondering why Obama doesn’t seem to be willing to expend political capital on these issues. She claims he’s getting two pieces of irreconcilable advice —- half of his advisors are saying he has to pursue this and the other half who say we can’t be playing the blame game and observes that there are reasonable legal questions about all this that aren’t being asked; the considerations all seem to be political. (I would just point out that from a crassly political standpoint, showing these defeated Republicans testifying about their crimes, turning on each other and generally making people’s stomach’s churn at the mere sight of them is an investment in their political future — a form of aversion therapy.)

Maddow asked a good question: If you allow it to stand without a full public airing does it “legalize” it for the future. I think so. Once the precedent is set they will use it again. And the public, like the proverbial frogs in the slowly heating water, don’t even realize they are losing not just their rights, but even the idea of their constitution.

What Is This Single Payer You Speak Of?

by digby

Corrente hosted a live blog event on single payer health care with Katie Robbins from Healthcare-NOW, which I missed in real time, unfortunately. But the dialog is interesting to read after the fact anyway. Check it out.

Feminine Mystique

From Taylor Marsh:

Republican women decked out in mink coats. Not exactly a 21st century image. But it sure says it all about the GOP. Their problem in a nutshell, or maybe should I say in a calendar. Announcing the conservative women “Pretty in Mink” calendar. The Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute hammers home that Republicans are a 20th century party, complete with smart, even beautiful women, but whose ideas simply don’t match the times. Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin preening in fur coats. Now that’s classic conservatism. Attempting to save a dying industry through featuring a dying political brand, both in need of rescue. But at least the girls look great.

h/t to reader Bill who adds, “they’d better watch their backs or Sarah Palin might accidentally shoot them.”

Crisis Management

by digby

There’s a lot of chatter in the blogosphere about Obama not picking enough progressives for his cabinet, some of which I’ve participated in backstage, although I haven’t written a lot about it on this blog. I tend to see this in a couple of ways. First, as I said, I think Obama was pretty clear during the campaign that he was not an ideologue but rather a pragmatic technocrat. You’ll all recall this quote:

“What I’m saying is I think the average baby-boomers have moved beyond the arguments of the 60’s but our politicians haven’t. We’re still having the same argument… It’s all around culture wars and it’s all … even when you discuss war the frame of reference is all Vietnam. Well that’s not my frame of reference. My frame of reference is “what works.” Even when I first opposed the war in Iraq, my first line was I don’t oppose all wars, specifically to make clear that this is not an anti-military, you know, 70’s love-in kind of approach.”

“I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people, he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was ‘we want clarity we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.'”

There’s no need at this point to relitigate whether or not he was professing admiration for Reagan’s policies, so please resist the temptation. It is irrelevant to my point. What is clear from his comments is that he sees himself as a pragmatist (“my frame of reference is ‘what works'”) who isn’t driven by political ideology.

And if it were normal times, we might expect him to fulfill the Village’s “center-right” domestic dreams based upon where the center of political gravity has been these last few years. But these are not normal times and conservative economics are completely inoperative in a severe economic crisis. So, he’s likely to be more liberal in that area than any of us ever dreamed he’d be, as will all of his neo liberal economic advisors. There is just no other choice available than massive government intervention, which is a fundamentally liberal concept. The only question is if they will be competent at carrying out liberal economic policies,or if they will persist in the current program of badly structured bailouts of badly run companies. Let’s hope it’s the former, because the latter is just more of what Bernanke calls “finger in the dike” economics and they ain’t working.

On foreign policy Obama campaigned on getting out of Iraq, escalating in Afghanistan and setting the world’s mind at ease that the United States is no longer a rogue superpower, and I have no reason to believe that’s not going to be the way it goes. I would worry a lot about the military — they tend to give youthful Democrats a hard time — but as with the economy, the military is falling apart too, so they may have limited choices there as well. We’ll see.

The world is in crisis on all fronts and it was conservative philosophy and policies that brought us here. They have nothing to offer but more crisis, so by default liberalism is on the rise. What lucky duckies we all are.

However, (and it’s a big however) I find this very disturbing. I have been sort of jokingly calling this bipartisan fetish among the establishment a “one party state” but this isn’t funny:

A senior Obama campaign official shared with The Washington Note that in July 2008, the McCain and Obama camps began to work secretly behind the scenes to assemble large rosters of potential personnel for the administration that only one of the candidates would lead. Lists comprised of Democrats and Republicans were assembled, sorted into areas of policy expertise, so that the roster could be called on after the election by either the Obama or McCain transition teams. This kind of out-of-sight coordination is rare between battling presidential camps and provides some indication that both Obama and McCain intended to draw expertise into their governments from both sides of the aisle — or at least they wanted to appear interested in doing so if the information leaked out about the list development process. Fascinating tidbit on cooperation behind battle lines.

Yeah, it’s fascinating — and horrifying. These two people allegedly ran on entirely different visions of where to take the country and were backed by millions of people who thought they were making a serious decision between the two. And yet according to this account months ago (before the current meltdown) they were secretly coordinating to assemble a common roster of people to run the government no matter who won the election. What the hell did we bother having a campaign for? If this is true it validates every political crank out there, including Ralph Nader, who says there’s literally not a dime’s worth of difference between the two parties.

I hope someone pursues this further. As sanguine as I am about Obama’s hand being forced by the economic crisis to govern further from the left than we might have expected, this would be a very bad sign if proven to be factual. It’s fundamentally dishonest, untransparent partisan collusion that means the presidential campaign was far more of a kabuki entertainment than even the worst cynics imagined. It’s one thing to pledge bipartisanship and cooperation. It’s quite another to secretly create a bipartisan government with your opponent in a presidential campaign. It’s an anti-trust violation in more ways than one. I sincerely hope it’s not true.

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Warrantless Pillow Talk

by digby

Well, well, well. What a shocker:

A former communications intercept operator says U.S. intelligence snooped on the private lives of two of America’s most important allies in fighting al Qaeda: British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Iraq’s first interim president, Ghazi al-Yawer. David Murfee Faulk told ABCNews.com he saw and read a file on Blair’s “private life” and heard “pillow talk” phone calls of al-Yawer when he worked as an Army Arab linguist assigned to a secret NSA facility at Fort Gordon, Georgia between 2003 and 2007. Last month, Faulk and another former military intercept operator assigned to the NSA facility triggered calls for an investigation when they revealed U.S. intelligence intercepted the private phone calls of American journalists, aid workers and soldiers stationed in Iraq. Faulk says his top secret clearance at Ft. Gordon gave him access to an intelligence data base, called “Anchory,” where he says he saw the file on then-British prime minister Tony Blair in 2006. Faulk declined to provide details other than to say it contained information of a personal nature.

But, if they hadn’t done anything wrong they didn’t have anything to worry about, right?

And the government would never do such things to political enemies or anything like that. Why, that wouldn’t be right at all.

First Draft Of History

by digby

Read this story in the New Yorker called The Anatomy of a Meltdown. Be sure you’re sitting down.

This too.

What a mess.

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Taser Tort
by digbyThis report from the Las Vegas Sun about their police department’s experience with tasers is fascinating. (Too bad the Brits didn’t read it before deciding to arm their entire police force with these torture devices.) One of the most interesting thing about it is that nearly all the information police receive is from the Taser company itself.

Several cops got on their knees on a rubber gym mat. Kneeling in a line, they linked arms, interlaced hands, and looked up. All they knew of what comes next is this: It’s going to smart.This was called the “daisy chain.” It was part of the Metro Police Taser training program, the alternative to hitting a single individual with thousands of volts from the weapon. It was the option officer Lisa Peterson chose, a decision she regrets. The officers were at a training seminar in November 2003 to learn how to use the newest weapon on their belts, a device the manufacturer claimed would incapacitate a person but not do permanent harm. You can’t really comprehend the Taser, students were told, until you’re Tasered. So an instructor attached alligator clips to each end of the daisy chain. Two officers became electrical bookends, strung at the shoulder by wires feeding back into a Taser gun. Pull the trigger and the daisy chain shudders, seizes and pitches forward, the pile of police officers becoming a portrait of Taser’s selling point: neuromuscular incapacitation. In the middle of the chain, hands locked at her sides, Peterson had only her face to absorb the impact. She fell hard on her neck and fast into the rabbit hole – traumatic internal disc disruption, steroid injections, surgical reconstruction, temporomandibular derangement, persistent dizziness, cognitive defects, numbness, vertigo. Officer Peterson sued Taser International Inc. So did two other Metro cops who were seriously injured after being shocked with Tasers during other training sessions in 2003. In their lawsuits they say Taser failed to adequately warn the police department of the potential for injury and minimized the risks of being shocked, which officers had been assured was not only safe but advisable.[…]Metro’s initial approach to Taser instruction can be summed up like this: Almost everything the police knew about Tasers, and taught officers about Tasers, they learned from Taser.[…]Today, Taser warns that the device can cause burns. Moreover, the company acknowledges these burns can become infected. It warns that people who are shocked by Tasers can suffer bone fractures, hernias, ruptures and dislocations. Today, Taser suggests students be Tasered while lying facedown on the floor, eliminating falling hazards and stray Taser probes to the eye.

And yet, police use these things indiscriminately.

And nobody seems to think there’s anything wrong with the police inflicting horrible pain on people on the thinnest of pretexts. As long as there’s no permanent damage, there’s no harm in it. Heck, even if there is permanent damage, it’s the victim’s fault for failing to be properly cooperative — or agreeing to do it as part of their job.

You can see why waterboarding is now considered perfectly acceptable. The authorities only use it when they believe they need to (and ok, sometimes just because they’re in a bad mood) and it doesn’t leave any permanent damage either. No harm no foul. What’s the problem?

H/T to pastordan and barb

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Beating Torture

by digby

Wasn’t Michael Isikoff supposed to be a crack “investigative” reporter? Why then is he nearly plagiarizing the work of Salon writer Mark Benjamin?

Isikoff today:

Despite the hopes of many human-rights advocates, the new Obama Justice Department is not likely to launch major new criminal probes of harsh interrogations and other alleged abuses by the Bush administration. But one idea that has currency among some top Obama advisers is setting up a 9/11-style commission that would investigate counterterrorism policies and make public as many details as possible. “At a minimum, the American people have to be able to see and judge what happened,” said one senior adviser, who asked not to be identified talking about policy matters. The commission would be empowered to order the U.S. intelligence agencies to open their files for review and question senior officials who approved “waterboarding” and other controversial practices. Obama aides are wary of taking any steps that would smack of political retribution. That’s one reason they are reluctant to see high-profile investigations by the Democratic-controlled Congress or to greenlight a broad Justice inquiry (absent specific new evidence of wrongdoing). “If there was any effort to have war-crimes prosecutions of the Bush administration, you’d instantly destroy whatever hopes you have of bipartisanship,” said Robert Litt, a former Justice criminal division chief during the Clinton administration. A new commission, on the other hand, could emulate the bipartisan tone set by Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton in investigating the 9/11 attacks. The 9/11 panel was created by Congress. An alternative model, floated by human-rights lawyer Scott Horton, would be a presidential commission similar to the one appointed by Gerald Ford in 1975 and headed by Nelson Rockefeller that investigated cold-war abuses by the CIA.

Benjamin, November 13th:

With growing talk in Washington that President Bush may be considering an unprecedented “blanket pardon” for people involved in his administration’s brutal interrogation policies, advisors to Barack Obama are pressing ahead with plans for a nonpartisan commission to investigate alleged abuses under Bush.The Obama plan, first revealed by Salon in August, would emphasize fact-finding investigation over prosecution. It is gaining currency in Washington as Obama advisors begin to coordinate with Democrats in Congress on the proposal. The plan would not rule out future prosecutions, but would delay a decision on that matter until all essential facts can be unearthed. Between the time necessary for the investigative process and the daunting array of policy problems Obama will face upon taking office, any decision on prosecutions probably would not come until a second Obama presidential term, should there be one.The proposed commission — similar in thrust to a Democratic investigation proposal first uncovered by Salon in July — would examine a broad scope of activities, including detention, torture and extraordinary rendition, the practice of snatching suspected terrorists off the street and whisking them off to a third country for abusive interrogations. The commission might also pry into the claims by the White House — widely rejected by experienced interrogators — that abusive interrogations are an effective and necessary intelligence tool.A common view among those involved with the talks is that any early effort to prosecute Bush administration officials would likely devolve quickly into ugly and fruitless partisan warfare. Second is that even if Obama decided he had the appetite for it, prosecutions in this arena are problematic at best: A series of memos from the Bush Justice Department approved the harsh tactics, and Congress changed the War Crimes Act in 2006, making prosecutions of individuals involved in interrogations more difficult.

Blogger ethics panel anyone?

As for the substance, I wrote about it back when Benjamin first broke the story. I still don’t know what it means. The presumed appointment of Holder gives me a little bit more optimism that they won’t just let this drop. His statements are so strong and unequivocal on the subject that it makes me think a commission might actually happen.

Naturally, I would prefer prosecutions but they’ve pretty much ruled that out — so this would be better than nothing. And frankly, I’ll still be surprised if there is any official effort to expose the scope of the torture regime — the intelligence community will do everything in their power to prevent it and their power is considerable. But still, it’s good news alone that there are people from the new team who are leaking this stuff. It means there are advocates for accountability from within.

Pushing The Argot Of The Left

by digby

David Sirota has written an intriguing post about the potential “ghettoization” of politics and policy in the Obama administration:

“This is the violin model: Hold power with the left hand, and play the music with your right,” David J. Rothkopf, a former Clinton official who wrote a history of the National Security Council, said on Friday, as news of Mrs. Clinton’s and Mr. Geithner’s appointments leaked.

This quote, from the New York Times story asserting that Barack Obama will govern from the center-right, highlights a very important dynamic in politics: the tendency of politicians to use the argot of progressivism in their public presentations (to “hold power”) – all while wielding conservative policy (“playing the music with your right”).

There’s nothing surprising about this – the reason endangered politicians of both parties start airing populist progressive themes around election time is because they know those themes are popular among rank-and-file voters – they know, in other words, that this is a decidedly center-left country, and when they have to answer to that country come election day, they go left. But once these politicians get into office and are far away from all of us, the unwashed masses, the pressures of money and media – ie. the Establishment – unleashes incredible pressure for them to actually write the details of policy in a way that preserves the conservative status quo.

[…]

The potential ghettoization in the Obama administration – and I stress again, it’s only the potential – is one where the policy sculptors are center-right Establishmentarians, and where the policy marketers (ie. the political team) is comprised of people who know how to package and sell policies in the language of progressivism, and sell those policies to progressive activists, a progressive-dominated Democratic congressional caucus and a center-left public at large.

I’m actually hopeful that he will not choose center-right policies (or at least not be able to choose them out of necessity)but I’m actually quite happy if they decide to consciously sell anything using the argot of progressivism, particularly movement progressivism, outside of the stump. One of the biggest challenges for the left is disrupting the soothing comfort people feel when they hear conservative bromides that have been so thoroughly internalized they don’t even recognize them as political anymore. If you want progressives to have a long run you have to create a language of progressivism that becomes a default, mainstream way of thinking. Conservatives have been massively successful at that with things like “government isn’t the solution, it’s the problem” and “it’s your money.” People hear that and it just sounds … true. Changing the rhetoric is as important to a movement as changing government policies.

So, if Obama is going to continue using the more progressive and populist argot that Sirota correctly observes politicians often use at election time, then I think it’s good news for the long term prospects of the progressive movement.

As for the policies, we’ll have to wait and see. I suspect that on the economy, it’s going to have to be a hell of a lot more progressive than anybody dreamed it would be even three months ago. There are no conservative solutions to economic meltdown except just letting it happen — and I don’t think anyone expects Obama to do that.

Even Ben Stein agrees with that much. From John Amato:

Neil Cavuto and Ben Stein got into a screaming match over the state of the economy after the bailout Saturday morning on Fox’s Cavuto for Business. I’ve never seen them go at it like that before. It started immediately when Cavuto opened up the segment by saying we’ve spent 2 trillion dollars so far to fix the problem, which is patently false, and Stein called him out on it. (rough transcript.)

Stein: The $2 trillion dollar number you cited at the beginning is a completely made up number, I don’t know where you got it from.

Cavuto: What do you think it is?

Stein: Closer to $300 billion…

Cavuto: Oh, no, no, no, Ben I gotta stop you there…

Stein: Could I answer your question?

Cavuto: When you are supporting one institution after the other …

Stein: You are doing the classic post hoc ergo prop drop fallacy. You may as well say because there was a World Series, the market dropped 4000 points. The Federal government has to stabilize this economy.

Cavuto: No it doesn’t, Ben. No, no, and by the way…

Stein: The Federal government is the only one that can stabilize this economy.

Cavuto: It is a slippery slope Ben…

Stein: Then otherwise we fall into a great depression. Maybe not a problem for you, but a problem for everybody else.

Cavuto: Oh, stop the nonsense.

Stein: It isn’t nonsense.

Cavuto: Where do you draw the nonsensical line.

Stein: We go in for as much Federal stimulus as it takes keep us out of a great depression. That is basic common sense … We need to bail out the auto companies, we need to have a massive stimulus package. This economy is about to fall off a cliff. We need major stimulus.

That is so disorienting I think I need to go have a drink.

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