Month: January 2009

Torture Shock

by digby

Apparently, a lot of people find this to be really hilarious:

There’s no doubt the guy was non-compliant. And there’s no doubt he was drunk. But there’s also no doubt that he wasn’t presenting any danger to the officer or that the officer had many other options besides knocking the man off of a moving lawnmower with 50,000 volts. But hey, there’s nothing funnier that seeing a drunk man screaming in agony and fouling his trousers because he’s just been shot full of electricity, so it’s all good. I laughed so hard I cried.

Actually I just cried.

It’s fairly common, by the way, to lose control of one’s bodily functions when tasered as this fellow did:

A former Southern Virginia University and Brigham Young University adjunct professor of political philosophy and jurisprudence, Dr. Lowery entered the Utah Third District courtroom alone on November 22, 2004, to make oral argument before Judge Anthony Quinn. Two Salt Lake County Deputy Sheriffs sat at the back of the courtroom, one on each side of the door. Other deputies were in the foyer of the courtroom. No members of the public were present.

Dr. Lowery suffered from major depression, bipolar disorder, paranoia disorder, delusional disorder, and psychotic disorder. Judge Quinn granted one of Dr. Lowery’s motions made under the Americans with Disabilities Act, Title II, which allowed for reasonable modifications of court rules, policies, or practices in order to accommodate Dr. Lowery’s multiple mental disabilities.

Near the end of his oral argument, the traumatic content of the argument moved Dr. Lowery into moderate mania, and he characterized a previous crabbed ruling by Quinn as “bullshit.”

Impatient for the speech to end, Judge Quinn took that as an opportunity to order the bailiffs to take the professor into custody and cool him off.­

The plaintiff’s state of agitation was caused by his mental disabilities. The deputy sheriffs’ approach only caused the situation to escalate. As five or more Salt Lake County deputy sheriffs/bailiffs seized Lowery from behind, he shouted, “I am cooled off; I deserve to be heard­­— I deserve to be heard­­, your Honor, and you are violating my access to due process at this very moment. I am not violent and—“

Judge Quinn interrupted him with ordering the bailiffs to take Dr. Lowery to a holding cell. A split second later—unclear whether following the judge’s orders or acting on his own accord, a bailiff sent 50,000 volts of incapacitating electricity into the lower back of the unsuspecting professor. As the courtroom video shows, nothing in Dr. Lowery’s behavior suggests that the bailiffs had any reasonable motive to believe they or the judge were in physical danger.

Yet the taser gun fired more than once.

The repeated electric shocks blew Dr. Lowery over the podium, and he landed face down on the floor, with two bailiffs on his back. The electric blasts caused Dr. Lowery’s bowels to empty twice. He screamed, “Help me!” while he complied with a bailiff’s order to stay on his belly, neither capable nor willing to offer resistance. Then, suddenly, he went unconscious.

Remembering they were still on camera, the bailiffs shouted at Dr. Lowery to not resist again (though his resistance was only instinctive) and threatened him with more electrocution. When they realized that he could no longer hear them, they dragged the man across the floor, put him in a chair, and massaged his heart. One bailiff called for paramedics.

[…]

Since no one but the victim and the abusers were in the courtroom, this crime remained unknown to the public until recently.

(read on if you can stomach it.)

A mentally ill man, causing trouble in a courtroom. C’mon. They had to do something, right?

Here’s the Youtube of the event.

The government tortures innocent citizens into unconsciousness, on camera, in United States courtrooms. They use them on prisoners and on motorists and on political protesters and on mentally ill people. Why on earth would any of us think they wouldn’t torture terrorist suspects?

Somebody is going to have to explain to me why it’s ok to do what they did to that man in the court room but this is wrong, because I don’t see it:

In fact, the wires on the man above weren’t actually attached to anything. Those men in those videos were actually electrified.

America’s torture problem is much bigger than Gitmo or the CIA or the waterboarding of Khalid Sheik Mohamed. The government is torturing people every day and killing some of them. Then videos of the torture wind up on Youtube where sadistic freaks get their jollies watching them. It’s sick.

Update: If you are interested in the good, western, democratic societies’ long history with electric torture, read this instructive essay.I’ll be writing more about it in the future.

Update: the video of the man on the lawnmower was evidently staged. That’s entertainment.

The other one was not.

h/t to deS

Common Ground

by digby

This contraceptive thing is turning into the first hissy fit of the New Year and back in pre-post-partisan times, I’m sure we’d be seeing condom denouncements in speeches on the senate floor within days. But now that we’ve declared the culture war over and reached common ground with the social conservatives on the issue of “reducing unwanted pregnancies,” I’m sure we can count on our new conservative allies to step up now and defend government spending for contraceptives.

But they’d better hurry. Some of their friends don’t seem to have gotten the memo:

Pelosi’s Decision Bigoted, Racist, Elitist and Anti-Child says Christian Defense Coalition
WASHINGTON, January 26 /Christian Newswire/ —

Christian Defense Coalition calls Speaker Pelosi’s decision to add contraceptives to the economic stimulus package bigoted, racist, elitist and anti-child.

It is unthinkable that the Speaker of House would try to stimulate the economy by seeking to reduce the number of children.

Our political leaders should do all within their power to protect, support and encourage America’s children, not crush and destroy them.

This policy would lay the foundation for racism and eugenics because it would seek to reduce the number of children to the nation’s poorest economic groups, which tend to be persons of color and other minorities.

It is now becoming clear that the Democratic leadership intends to use the economic crisis to push forward a radical anti-family social agenda.

The Christian Defense Coalition will do all within its power to see that hundreds of millions of dollars are not used for contraceptives.

Speaker Pelosi’s actions are even more troubling and hypocritical when one realizes she herself has five children. Perhaps she thinks they have more value because they are white European children.

Rev. Patrick J. Mahoney, Director of the Christian Defense Coalition, states, “I was stunned to learn that on a national news program Speaker Pelosi defended a move to make contraceptives a part of the economic stimulus package. This is one of the most bigoted and anti-child policies I have ever seen embraced by a public official.

“It is hard to believe that this kind of legislation is coming out of America. One would expect it more from China or other oppressive governments.

“Speaker Pelosi shows a clear lack of compassion and understanding of social justice by laying the groundwork for racist and eugenic social policies. Clearly the focus of the distribution of these contraceptives would center on minority communities which tend to be poorer and more economically challenged.

“This situation is even more troubling when one realizes that Speaker Pelosi has five children herself. Does she believe that children born to white parents deserve the right to live more than other children?

“I would challenge the Speaker to put those millions of dollars to foster job creation and help Americans keep their homes rather than crushing families and children.

“The Christian Defense Coalition will do all within its power to see this money is not used for contraceptives and that the new Democratic leadership does not use the economic crisis to push through a radical, anti-family social agenda.”

This must be making the rounds. Chris Matthews parroted the “China one child policy” line on his show earlier.

For those who are disappointed that this truce in the culture wars was so short-lived, fear not. I’m sure it will be back on the minute the Democrats capitulate and agree to ensure that no federal money be spent to help women prevent pregnancies, which I fully expect they will do. That is how right wing hissy fits work and I see no reason to believe anything’s changed on that count.

Update: As Atrios says … as predictable as the rising sun.

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“Boy, If Only Life Were Like This”

by digby

The media are going to be the death of this country. It was bad enough when they were too dumb to know (or care) that the Bush administration was marching us off to war for no good reason. But at least that made a certain evil, emotional sense. People have often gone to war because they got all excited over snappy uniforms and killing people.

Watching them deal with something complicated like our economic crisis is enough to make your head explode.

Here’s just one short segment on MSNBC today, which is pretty representative of the complete incoherence among the media villagers — and, I fear, our financial and political elites as well. Norah O’Donnell and Richard Wolf of Newsweek are talking about the stimulus package. (O’Donnell, you’ll notice, is dutifully regurgitating Chuck Todd’s puerile insights from this morning):

Richard Wolf: … the question is, can he peel some away, that’s what they’re trying to do.”

Norah O’Donnell: … and still not leave too much anger behind in case he needs them on future stuff.

We know the Republicans want to oppose this, they say it’s too big, not enough tax cuts. But I want to read what Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times today saying “many of the plan’s opponents aren’t arguing in good faith, Conservatives really, really don’t want to see a second new deal and they certainly don’t want to see government activism vindicated. So they are reaching for any stick they can find with which to bneat proposals for increased government spending.”

How much of that is true? This really is a massive spending bill.

Wolf: Yes it is and Republicans are not entirely against spending. I mean, if it gets the economy out of a recession, they’re all for it.

No they aren’t. They want the recession to painlessly fix itself, which would keep their philosophy relevant. They cannot wrap their minds around the fact that all their ideas have failed and that they have absolutely nothing to offer in this time of crisis. So they are resorting to magical thinking, as usual.

At least Andrew Mellon was honest back in the 1930s when he said, “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers – purge the rottenness from the system.” Republicans back in that day were willing to court economic devastation and possible revolution in the name of free market capitalism and they admitted it. The modern conservatives, on the other hand, are still in love with the crazy notion that the more taxes that are cut on the wealthy the more money the government will have to give back in tax cuts to the wealthy — and then we’ll all be rich. Why is anyone even giving them the time of day at this point?

But the media has been so brainwashed that they are nearly speaking in tongues. Here’s “wall street analyst” Erin Burnett just a few minutes later talking about the layoff announcements today:

Burnett: It is pretty concerning because when you look at that stimulus plan you could be looking at somewhere between 800 and 900 billion dollars spent and how quickly are you gonna get job announcements, job creation out of that bill. That is a big question right now on Wall Street.

O’Donnell: Yeah, and I know Democrats and President Obama’s team using that to make that argument that we’ve got to get this done quickly.

There is some good news out there about the housing market.

Burnett: Yes there was, and this is funny, I guess it’s the world we’re in right now Norah. This is going to sound horrible but it’s actually better news than expected. Home prices were down 15% from a year ago, but existing home sales overall were up, and what really sticks out here was inventory, how much of the stuff we’ve got to work through before we are to get back to a healthy market. We saw a big drop there, we have 9.3 months of inventory which means at the current selling rate it would take 9.3 months to actually work through everything but that is a big improvement from where we were just a month ago.

So there are a few signs of improvement, raising to some the question of how big and how quick this stimulus actually needs to be to stimulate. The economy’s trying to turn itself around.

It’s trying to turn itself around. We don’t need to do anything! Yea!

Burnett has shown in the past that she is particularly obtuse, so it isn’t surprising that she would carry the conservative water so openly.

Remember this?

I think people should be careful what they wish for on China. You know, if China were to revalue its currency or China is to start making, say, toys that don’t have lead in them or food that isn’t poisonous, their costs of production are going to go up, and that means prices at Wal-Mart here in the United States are going to go up, too. So I would say China is our greatest friend right now. They’re keeping prices low and they’re keeping prices for mortgages low, too.

She continued with this on MSNBC today:

Norah, the other big thing though, when you talk about Caterpillar. We just had the CEO of Caterpillar and he is very concerned about one thing in this bill which is that you’ve got to buy American. American steel, American iron. And that seems to a lot of people in this country like an unambiguously good thing. In his view, it would be “disastrous” and that that would be starting the 1930s. If we start to say “buy American” China, which is the other significant player here, will say the same thing, our exporters will get locked out and we really could end up with a great depression. And he used those words. So it’s interesting to see in this bill a lot more to be worked through and what the consequences will be.

O’Donnell: Just so I understand you, clarify that. The CEO of Caterpillar, which is, of course, a US based is saying don’t restrict it to only buy American?

Burnett: (nodding very matter-of-factly) Right. Exactly. He’s saying that it would be disastrous because that would mean that Caterpillar and other US companies that export to China and Europe, which are spending a lot of money to fix their economies, wouldn’t buy anything American. They would just start to buy Chinese or buy European and then you could end up exactly where you were in the 1930s which would be protectionist policies that cause everybody to get a whole lot poorer a whole lot more quickly.

O’Donnell: Very,very interesting. Thank you very much, Erin Burnett…

Burnett isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, but she isn’t dishonest. She says what conservative politicians think. It’s simple and stupid.

Now, I don’t have a strong opinion on the details of a “buy American” part of the package, but I will say that it should be a difficult sell for conservatives to be fighting anything that isn’t tax cuts and concrete and steel infrastructure, as they’re doing, while also demanding that taxpayers create jobs with that money in … a foreign country. They are determined that there be no money for things like teachers or the environment or medical expenses or, indeed, anything that doesn’t require heavy equipment. (Too bad for women, who tend not to work in construction. Maybe they can all become manicurists for media celebrities.)

Boehner’s cute soundbite about contraceptives is, of course, nonsense. The money he’s talking about is for medicaid, which is desperately needed at a time when people are losing their jobs — and, by the way, will help stimulate the economy by paying the doctors, pharmacies and hospitals for the (much increased) care they give, something that is a big problem at a time when states are going broke.

Norah O’Donnell later ripped Democrat Chris VanHollen a new one on that issue because he wasn’t prepared and he ended up pretty much endorsing the idea that spending should all be on infrastructure after she perfectly parroted all the conservative talking points and successfully framed all expenditures that aren’t tax cuts and bridges as pork.

I’m certainly not arguing against infrastructure, far from it. But stimulus is more than just roads and bridges. Government spending to get money into the hands of the states and local governments as well as individuals is vitally necessary along with immediate support for people who are out of work and losing their homes. If the Republicans succeed in chipping away at this with a constant barrage of nitpicking, lies and misinformation, the stimulus will end up being “tax relief” and a few new roads and despite conservative magical thinking, this thing isn’t going to right itself.

As I watch this stimulus debate unfold I can’t help but be reminded of this famous scene in Annie Hall:

MAN: It’s the influence of television. Now, now Marshall McLuhan deals with it in terms of it being a, a high– high intensity, you understand? A hot medium–

WOODY ALLEN: What I wouldn’t give for a large sock with horse manure in it.

MAN: — as opposed to the truth which he [sees as the] media or–

WOODY ALLEN: What can you do when you get stuck on a movie line with a guy like this behind you?

MAN: Now, Marshall McLuhan–

WOODY ALLEN: You don’t know anything about Marshall McLuhan’s work–

MAN: Really? Really? I happen to teach a class at Columbia called TV, Media and Culture, so I think that my insights into Mr. McLuhan, well, have a great deal of validity.

WOODY ALLEN: Oh, do you?

MAN: Yeah.

WOODY ALLEN: Oh, that’s funny, because I happen to have Mr. McLuhan right here. Come over here for a second?

MAN: Oh–

WOODY ALLEN: Tell him.

MARSHALL McLUHAN: — I heard, I heard what you were saying. You, you know nothing of my work. How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing.

WOODY ALLEN: Boy, if life were only like this.

No kidding.

I so wish we could clone Paul Krugman and Dean Baker and have them on every television show to refute the avalanche of economic bullshit that’s coming down on our heads from every direction. We certainly can’t count on the news media to clear anything up.

Update: Chris Matthews just said that this federal contraceptive money sounds like China’s policy to limit the number of children and has no place in an economic package.

Just shoot me now.

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The Gitmo Court

by digby

We are fortunate to have a president who is not going to continue the torture and indefinite imprisonment of detainees in the GWOT. But Bush’s cruel legacy will live on in hundreds of decisions coming down from the Roberts court. Jeralyn at Talk Left reports on today’s sad rulings:

>

The Supreme Court issued opinions and orders today. Among them:

• Ruled that a man wrongly convicted and sent to prison for 24 years cannot sue the former Los Angeles district attorney and his chief deputy for violating his civil rights. The court said unanimously that decisions of supervising prosecutors, like the actions of prosecutors at trial, are shielded from civil lawsuits.

• Ruled that police officers have leeway to frisk a passenger in a car stopped for a traffic violation even if nothing indicates the passenger has committed a crime or is about to do so

At the link Jeralyn makes note of several others they have agreed to hear along these lines. This will be going on for some time and will probably take many decades to undo again if they are to be undone at all. The conservative assault on civil liberties is going to continue for a long while. Everyone had better ge used to the idea that if they find themselves on the receiving end of a law enforcement officer they’d better hope he or she doesn’t make a mistake or take a dislike to them. Conservatives believe your rights end at the moment the authorities decide to question you. (Unless you are a gun owner, of course.)

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Hortonization

by dday

Karl Rove issued a prediction last week that sounded a bit more like a warning:

The “campaign architect,” as he is commonly called, built a case against President Barack Obama’s order to close Guantanamo, an overseas CIA detention center where terrorists and other “enemy combatants” are held. Obama’s order could enable terrorists to be tried in U.S. courts, to be given undeserved rights afforded American citizens and could cause damaging long-term effects, Rove said.

“One year from now, Gitmo won’t be closed,” Rove said. “If it is, there will be an uproar in the U.S. about where to put these people.”

Interrogation tactics used by the CIA during Bush’s term in office were not torturous, Rove said, but he did not deny that the CIA strongly pressed terrorists for vital information.

“You bet we squeeze them for information,” Rove said. “If we hadn’t, those same terrorists could have executed their plans to kill, and [people] would be asking why Bush didn’t protect American soldiers’ lives.”

That’s going to be the strategy going forward. If Obama closes Guantanamo, terrorists will be shopping next to you at the Pic ‘n’ Save. Before long, there will be a TV ad with a revolving door at the gates of a prison, and a closeup on a bearded Muslim face while the voice-over intones “America can’t afford that risk.”

Actually, I didn’t have to wait for the ad.

Note the “There Goes The Neighborhood” caption. And the doofus offering Alcatraz, a MUSEUM, as an alternative.

Of course, terrorists are already housed in federal prisons on US soil. But the above piece doesn’t really mention prisons all that much. It asks residents if they want scaaary Mooslims living next to them.

We have, then, the outliines of a political strategy for the next election. President Obama and the librul Congress want terrorists to work in your office while tough daddy Republicans want to keep you safe. Never mind that it’s the height of weakness to think that maximum security prisons aren’t sufficient, or that our security can only be bought with a loss of liberty.

Another part of this narrative is that nasty libruls want to spend taxpayer money on condoms for your kids while heartland Murcan Republicans are the paragons of virtue and values.

You’ll note that the lie quotient since Republicans have lost power has, if anything, been raised. But these kinds of appeals to emotion, to safety and protection and xenophobia, have a resonance in the lizard brain. I wouldn’t discount them, nor would I combat them solely with an appeal to reason. There has to be an emotional counterpart, perhaps from pointing out how being terrified by the prospect of prisoners in a nearby prison is a triumph of terrorism, and the ultimate weakness.

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Favors

by digby

Every morning, my favorite thing to read is Chuck Todd’s First Read. It makes me laugh, it makes me cry, it makes me wonder what it must be like to live in a world filled with unicorns and rainbows and stand up guys who love God, Mom and apple pie:

Looking For Bipartisanship Down The Road: Why does bipartisanship support for the stimulus matter? Let’s get one thing straight: Obama’s stimulus plan is going to pass Congress, and the vote won’t be that close. But this isn’t the goal this week — or next. For Team Obama, it’s about winning over Republicans. And for some on the left, this doesn’t compute. After all, some might ask, “Who cares? The election just happened and voters overwhelmingly chose Democrats to run the government, both in the White House and in Congress.” But what Obama needs is a Republican Party that isn’t consistently confrontational, because he’s going to be asking for some trickier bills, including more money for the financial industry, potentially support for nationalizing some parts of the banking industry, and a bunch of money to shore up the housing crisis. So while Obama doesn’t need GOP support for stimulus, he wants the opposition to be against him in a way that he can win them over for more favors and — most importantly — prevent potential filibusters.

Right. Because it’s in their best political interest to give Obama “favors.”

They will cooperate if they get what they want and they won’t if they don’t. If Obama comes to them and says “we capitulated on your demands on the stumulus package a year ago, so now you need to fulfill your end of the bargain” they’ll say “what bargain?” And that isn’t something that just applies to Republicans. It’s the way politics works. The idea that the Republicans will eschew a filibuster on, say, health care, because Obama gave them some extra tax cuts in the stimulus package is just absurd.

But then, Chuck Todd is just the political director for NBC News, so he can’t be expected to know that.

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They Wish They Knew How To Quit Him

by dday

A quick return to prominence for the Republican Party would require some vision, some new ideas, or even old ideas bottled in a new package. I’m almost certain that the wrong way to go about this is through a loving tribute to the most hated President in history on the House floor:

George W. Bush is gone from office…but he is not forgotten, at least not by Reps. Trent Franks (R-AZ), Mike Pence (R-IN), and Steve King (R-IA). On Thursday, the three men spent almost 40 minutes delivering their final love letters to Bush. Some highlights:

• FRANKS: “President Bush often had to walk like a knowing lion — like a knowing lion, Mr. Speaker, through the chattering of hyenas. … [I]f those critics do not devour themselves in the meantime, Mr. Speaker, they may face the bared teeth of an enemy that will make us all wish the lion still walked among us.”

• PENCE: “I truly believe that this nation owes a debt of gratitude to George W. Bush.”

• KING: “I’m here to say thank you to President Bush for the things that he has done when he’s had his steady hand on the till of leadership, and especially with our national defense.”

At one point, Franks began to tear up when talking about how Bush made the country “brighter” and “more hopeful” for his children.

Republicans still love George W. Bush because George W. Bush was a through-and-through Republican. There have been times over the last several years when conservatives have tried to throw Bush over, but there’s no denying that he embodied the full spectrum of conservative policies, proving them all to be a hideous failure. And the same arguments that Bush so eloquently made throughout his Presidency are the arguments that conservatives are making as they try to derail the stimulus package.

Next, write off anyone who asserts that it’s always better to cut taxes than to increase government spending because taxpayers, not bureaucrats, are the best judges of how to spend their money.

Here’s how to think about this argument: it implies that we should shut down the air traffic control system. After all, that system is paid for with fees on air tickets — and surely it would be better to let the flying public keep its money rather than hand it over to government bureaucrats. If that would mean lots of midair collisions, hey, stuff happens […]

These are only some of the fundamentally fraudulent antistimulus arguments out there. Basically, conservatives are throwing any objection they can think of against the Obama plan, hoping that something will stick.

But here’s the thing: Most Americans aren’t listening. The most encouraging thing I’ve heard lately is Mr. Obama’s reported response to Republican objections to a spending-oriented economic plan: “I won.” Indeed he did — and he should disregard the huffing and puffing of those who lost.

As should we all – especially the paeans to their Dear Leader.

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Old Wars

by digby

Representative Clyburn says he remembers 1994, so there will be no comprehensive health care reform. (The headline says “in 2009,” but the body of the article says that he’s for some kind of incremental reform:

While noting he does not know exactly when President Obama want to
move forward with a universal healthcare measure, Clyburn said, “If
you take what we’ve done with [the State Children’s Health Insurance
Program bill] and then you follow with [more spending] on community
health centers, you would have gone a long way to building a
foundation upon which to build a universal access healthcare program.

“I would much rather see it done that way, incrementally, than to go
out and just bite something you can’t chew. We’ve been down that road.
I still remember 1994.”

And I remember 2002 when Democrats insisted on fighting the last war and helped the Republicans destroy the country with a misbegotten second round in Iraq. In fact, they are always fighting the last war instead of learning the proper lessons from them.

This isn’t 1994. The country is very possibly going into a fucking depression. The Republicans are on the decline not the ascent. Democrats were just given the task of saving the country. The health care crisis, which was already awful, is getting worse with every lay-off and every job lost — and the state governments are going broke and can’t take up the slack. How many uninsured to we have to have before they realize that this crisis can’t just be kicked down the road until they get over their trauma of 1994? 75 million? 100?

If these people do not recognize that they have to really do something at a time like this, it’s possible that a wingnut on a white horse might just come riding in with some very unpleasant ideas.

Update: Dday reminded me that Clyburn has been saying this for quite some time, which is a relief. It appears he is only speaking for himself.

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Misplacing The Metrics
by digby
The Talking Dog has complied the most impressive set of interviews with lawyers and others about the torture regime on the internet. He’s as well versed in the evidence and testimony of those involved in the issue as anyone. What he says here is absolutely right.

I cannot emphasize that strongly enough: we MUST hold The President’s feet to the fire with respect to what he has made one of the signal aims of his Administration, to wit, the closure of Guantanamo Bay and related illegal facilities. So, although it comes as no surprise to anyone that, as WaPo reports, the Government’s files re the allegations against Guantanamo detainees are in disarray (hat tip to Candace), we simply cannot stand by and allow one of the possible permutations raised in the article, that the Obama Administration may attempt to blame its precedessor for delays in doing what it said it would, i.e. closing Guantanamo, and its companion and (far) more important promise, restoring the rule of law. Let me make this easy, based on my extrapolating from Candace’s representations and from the dozens more I am familiar with from the interviews conducted on this blog: there’s simply no there there. The reason that the Government’s “evidence” is “in disarray” is because if it were well-organized, it would be obvious to all that it is, as the courageous Col. Stephen Abraham called it, “garbage”. Nothing more than a bunch of guilt-by-association accusations, often derived from torture, or from other sources that the Government itself believes unreliable. Look people: why should we believe the Bush Administration ON ANYTHING? Of the decisions that have gone that far, in actual “on the merits” hearings, detainees are winning 90% of them, even in courts that have demonstrated their predisposition to be hostile to the detainees at every turn heretofore. Now why might that be? Might it be because there is no there there… that the Bush Administration held men not because they were or are dangerous, but because it would be embarrassing to release them? The President has directed a stay of prosecutions for 120 days, and ordered a shut-down within a year. Both of those are way, way too long periods, given what everyone knows (i.e., there is simply no reason to believe anything the Bush Administration did is reliable, so why should this be different). But, notwithstanding my unwavering support for my college classmate The President, we cannot allow any slippage on this: it’s too important. To quote The President himself, we cannot compromise our principles in the interests of expedience. The Bush Administration has, indeed, left a mess. But the default has got to be that if, after more than seven years, we cannot quickly ascertain a legal basis to hold someone… we probably don’t have one. We must all be mature enough to know that there is a difference you can sail the Queen Mary through between someone being a terrorist because they are an actual terrorist and someone being a terrorist because the Bush Administration said they were. There is evidence, or there isn’t. It doesn’t matter how bad the acts of the accused are: what matters is whether we have reliable evidence of their guilt. Nothing short thereof, whether it be KSM or anyone else, will be acceptable.

The administration wanted to “send a message” by creating a myth that they were omnipotent gods who were capturing all the “bad guys,” giving them drugs and forced enemas and putting them in a concentration camp. But it was, like most Mayberry Machiavelli marketing, not reality. There is very little “evidence” and a whole lot of hype. They did use a flurry of useless paperwork as their “metric” in the early years, but it was all derived from torture, threats and lies.The politics of this were never going to be easy for the president. The right is prepared to call him a terrorist sympathizer no matter what he does, short of keeping Guantanamo open indefinitely and going back on his promise to end torture. He might as well rip off the band-aid on this stuff. It isn’t going to get any easier — and there are actual human beings’ lives hanging in the balance. It would appear that people like Geoffrey Miller, Barbara Fast, Dick Cheney, Stephen Cambone, Paul Wolfowitz and others are all going to sail into history unpunished for their records on torture. They are walking around free. The least we can do is give their former prisoners a trial as soon as possible or let them go.
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Misinformation Brigade

by dday

The Sunday talk shows were filled with conservatives (it really is a new era on Sunday mornings, isn’t it?) trashing the Obama recovery plan and demanding more concessions in exchange for their votes, despite the fact that they have almost no leverage in the Congress. This is mostly a head game, using Obama’s supposed commitment to bipartisanship to force the types of unwise policies Americans roundly rejected at the polls into the final bill.

“Right now, given the concerns that we have over the size of this package and all of the spending in this package, we don’t think it’s going to work,” the House Minority Leader John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “And so if it’s the plan that I see today, put me down in the no column.”

While the plan can potentially pass the Democrat-dominated House without Republican support, it will continue to face opposition when it comes before the Senate, said Senator John McCain of Arizona, speaking on “Fox News Sunday.” At least two Republicans will need to approve the bill for a filibuster-proof majority vote of 60.

Senator McCain, who lost the presidential election to Mr. Obama in November, said that he planned to vote no unless the bill were changed.

“We need to make tax cuts permanent, and we need to make a commitment that there’ll be no new taxes,” Mr. McCain said. “We need to cut payroll taxes. We need to cut business taxes.”

After all, McCain did win the election, so you’d have to concede these points.

Republicans already have $275 billion in tax cuts in this bill, pre-negotiated into the mix by the Obama Administration, and it’s not enough. They don’t want to be associated with anything passed succesfully by Democrats because they fundamentally don’t want Obama to succeed. Further, the media is swallowing whole these Republican criticisms, based on conjecture and misreading and sometimes total fantasy. That’s not only true of Obama’s dinner partners.

Charles Krauthammer: “Look, this is one of the worst bills in galactic history. … FDR left behind the Hoover dam and Eisenhower left behind the interstate highway system. We will leave behind, after spending $1 trillion, a dog run in East Potomac Park.” [Fox News, 1/24/09]

David Brooks: “It is an unholy marriage that manages to combine the worst of each approach — rushed short-term planning with expensive long-term fiscal impact.” [New York Times, 1/23/09]

Bill Kristol: “The stimulus has so much bad stuff in it. … They let the House Democrats get out of control in sort of writing a pork-laden bill. Politically, I think the Republicans have more room too argue for changes and ultimately vote against it.” [Fox News Sunday, 1/25/09]

Worse is that the chattering classes have decided to become armchair economists, misinterpreting data along the way. Fortunately the Shrill One was on hand on ABC to set things straight, but he’s not given space in every cable news discussion and “analysis” article.

DONALDSON: The new head of the president’s council of economic advisers, a few years ago, studied recessions, including our big depression, and wrote a paper saying that she couldn’t find that stimulus programs had really worked in any major sense, now, but I think it’s right…

KRUGMAN: That’s not quite right, actually.

DONALDSON: Am I close enough for government work?

[laughs]

KRUGMAN: No, actually. What she found was monetary policy works better than fiscal policy. Problem is we don’t have any monetary policy because interest rates are already at zero. So it’s actually a paper which is very relevant to experience since the Great Depression but not where we are right now.

Clearly the bipartisan fetishists in the media, as well as those who are trying to re-learn Econ 101 overnight, are signaling that only the midpoint of the pre-compromised baseline bill and Republican “destroy all taxes” philosophy would be the most wise and just. Stephanopoulos today couldn’t get over the fact that Nancy Pelosi wouldn’t accept GOP ideas, with Pelosi insisting that those ideas have to actually make sense:

STEPHANOPOULOS: The president’s made it pretty clear that he wants this to be a real bipartisan effort, yet House Republicans have said they’ve been shut out of this process. There were no Republican votes in the Appropriations Committee, no Republican votes in the Ways and Means Committee. Is this the bipartisan effort President Obama has called for?

PELOSI: Well, because the Republicans don’t vote for it doesn’t mean they didn’t have an opportunity to. We — the Republicans asked for a couple of things, one, that related to process that you described, that there would be an open process where they could present their amendments. They didn’t vote for the final bill, but we voted for some of their amendments in the committees that had the markups the day before yesterday and this week.

Secondly, the — some of the ideas that they had put forth in earlier meetings, President-elect Obama at the time on January 5th had our first bipartisan meeting, House and Senate, Democrats and Republicans, and some ideas that were put on the table by the Republicans at that time were contained in the bills that we wrote.

And now, this morning, they had some more suggestions, which we will review and see if they create jobs, turn the economy around, and do so in a cost-effective way.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Some of their suggestions that they’ve put forward are permanently cutting the two lowest tax brackets from 15 percent to 10 percent and from 10 percent to 5 percent, also new help for small businesses. Can you include those in your package?

PELOSI: When — when we had the recovery package last year, we brought the tax credit all the way down, regarding using payroll tax as a — as a tax and therefore you get a credit. Against using that precedent, which was established with President Bush, we built upon that in this legislation, and we prefer that route.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And they’re saying that’s giving a check to people who don’t pay taxes rather than cutting taxes for people who do.

PELOSI: But they do pay taxes, payroll taxes. And President Bush agreed with that last year. And using that precedent, we have built upon that.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So you’re not going to take these new Republican ideas?

PELOSI: Well, we will take some. We will judge them by their ability to create jobs, to — to help turn the economy around, to stabilize the economy, and to see how much they cost. But we’re open to them, and we’ll review them, and it all has to be done right away because our bill has to come to the floor this week […]

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, then tell us what’s in the package, then. I know you don’t agree with — completely with the Congressional Budget Office, this estimate, assessment of what’s in the package.

PELOSI: Well, they’re going to reassess it.

STEPHANOPOULOS: They’re going to look at it. But what they’ve shown so far is that only about 40 percent of the discretionary spending, including the highway spending in the bill, is going to be spent right away in the next year-and-a-half.

PELOSI: First of all, the Congressional Budget Office only looked at 40 percent of the investments in the bill, by their own admission. They didn’t even take a complete look at the bill. We have a letter from the administration that says 75 percent of the — of the investments will be paid out in the first 18 months.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And you’re committed to that?

PELOSI: We’re committed to that […]

STEPHANOPOULOS: We also heard from Congressman Boehner coming out of the meeting today that, again, a lot of that spending doesn’t even meet the same test you just talked about right now […] Hundreds of millions of dollars to expand family-planning services, how is that stimulus?

PELOSI: Well, the family planning services reduce cost. They reduce cost. The states are in terrible fiscal budget crisis now, and part of it, what we do for children’s health, education, and some of those elements, are to help the states meet their financial needs.

One of those — one of the initiatives you mentioned, the contraception, is — will reduce cost to the state and to the federal government.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So no apologies for that?

PELOSI: No apologies. No. We have to deal with the consequences of the downturn in our economy.

Food stamps, unemployment insurance, some of the initiatives you just mentioned, what the economists have told us, from right to left, there is more bang for the buck, is the term they use, by investing in food stamps and in unemployment insurance than in any tax cuts.

Nonetheless, we are committed to the tax cuts because they do have a positive impact on the economy, even though not as big as the investments.

I can quibble with Pelosi on some of the details, but you can see what she’s up against here.

So far, Obama has treated the pre-compromised initial package as his final offer instead of a negotiating point. The same with Pelosi, and Congressional Dems even dailed some of the tax cuts back (though not enough – business tax breaks should still be sacrificed in exchange for more infrastructure improvements). Meanwhile, the media is enabling the right wing by running with any unsubstantiated press release to undermine the bill, and next week I’d expect this to run at a fever pitch. We don’t have a lot of history of being able to count on Democrats to hold the line, so their performance on this bill will be a key indicator on what to expect. Will the attitude be “I won” or “What can I get you?”

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