Buzz
by digby
Just a reminder to root for at the Oscars tonight: progressive activists and filmmakers Julie Bergman Sender and her partner, husband Stuart Sender, are nominated for Best Documentary feature: The Garden.
I’m also rooting for Mickey Rourke purely on the basis of his speech at the Independent Spirit Awards yesterday. You just don’t see that kind of thing in Hollywood very often. (Or politics, for that matter.)
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Revisiting The Proxy Witch
by digby
It’s interesting to watch the coverage of the imminent arrest of a suspect in the Chandra Levy murder after all these years. It’s especially interesting to see the media conveniently forget to mention that they conducted a shrieking witchhunt against Gary Condit and ran him out of town, tarring him as not just an adulterer (fair enough) but as a murderer as well.
He was a dastardly white haired Democrat who’d had an affair with a younger woman, behavior that until Bill Clinton got a couple of hummers, was completely tolerated in the village as a perk of the job. They were Very Upset that Clinton “got away” with something they had determined was now out of bounds and so when Condit’s girlfriend disappeared and they realized what they had in him, he became the proxy witch, ripe for burning.
And a Village witch hunt it was. Frank Rich wrote snarky columns about it. Locals were upset about the neighborhood being tainted:
REP. GARY CONDIT is my neighbor. He lives around the corner, but I never knew that until reporters, photographers, TV cameramen and their bulky trucks started to clog up the intersection a block away from my home.
We haven’t had so many crowds around here since Adams-Morgan Day, a neighborhood festival that takes place every summer when the streets are blocked off and local vendors sell their wares — fried plantains, jerk chicken, barbecue, spicy sausages and fried dough. You want multicultural, come on to my house.
Adams Morgan — ask any of us — is the hippest neighborhood in Washington, with lively clubs, bars, shops and cafes. Not many politicians choose to live here because it’s a little earthy for the folks back home. But it’s not hard to understand why a cool family-man congressman from Modesto, Calif., would find it a fun place to be. It’s a neighborhood with lots of swinging singletons.
Many families live here, too, and the local moms recently organized a playground behind the apartment house where Gary Condit lives. We’ve had our share of crime, from purse snatchings and burglaries to rape and even murder, but in general we think we live in a safe community, for an urban neighborhood. We resent it when our streets are the focus of a search for a missing person.
But if we’re angry about the invasion of reporters and photographers, we’re as interested as everybody else in the answer to the question the reporters ask: “What happened to Chandra Levy?” We take the story personally; it’s our very own story out of “Law and Order” and we already have the set and we can imagine costumes. But we haven’t a clue to how it ends…
Bill Clinton dulled our senses, and Gary Condit has sharpened them. This sordid episode reminds us how treacherous the road of deception, how exorbitant the cost of concealment, how terrible the burden borne by constituents, staff workers and loved ones, beginning with the first lie. The poet got it right: “Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.”
(These villagers are so deep …)
They used the same lame explanations as they had in the Lewinsky matter (“it’s not about the sex, it’s about the lies”) but because this one featured an actual crime, they soon went into a frenzy of unwarranted speculation and truly hideous character assassination, pretty much calling the man a murderer on television night after night. It was as if every reporter in DC morphed into the vicious and somewhat distrubed Nancy Grace.
Here’s just one random exchange I found on Mr Google. It’s fairly representative of the kind of thing that was being said night after night (and as it happens featured Grace herself:)
KING: Every host wants to say this: This just in! CNN has learned that Gary Condit has agreed to help the FBI create a profile of Chandra Levy. Apparently, within next few days he will sit down with FBI profilers. Good sign, Mark?
GERAGOS: Of course it is. And that just shows that he is cooperating. He’s given three interviews. Now he’s going to go to the FBI. He’s going to cooperate with a profiler, although we were talking at break, you know, profilers are generally pretty much the end of the line. If you hit psychics you know you have hit rock bottom.
KING: But he has agreed to sit with them. Impress you?
GRACE: Yes, I’m very impressed. I’ll be even more impressed when he sits down for that polygraph, a real polygraph. Word I heard today regarding the door-to-door attempt by police. It seemed to be the press was suggesting something nefarious, something evil, that certain people in the apartment building where Levy lived have not responded to police. That is not that unusual. Larry, I have done many, many door-to-door canvassing the neighborhoods, knock, knock, knock. People that think they don’t know anything don’t call back, and they don’t realize they could be withholding evidence.
DEPAULO: I know people who live in the building who have called the police and have not gotten a return call!
KING: Are you impressed though that he’s going to meeting with profilers?
DEPAULO: I think it is too little too late, quite frankly.
KING: You do?
DEPAULO: Yeah.
KING: You are not even willing to give…
GERAGOS: She won’t even give — she wouldn’t even give him that much. I mean the fact that the guy is going in there again, he is going to meet with the FBI, he’s going to give them a profile.
(CROSSTALK)
KING: (UNINTELLIGIBLE) Michael, for him, he’s going to sit down with profilers.
ZELDIN: We have all agreed that the moral thing for him to do is to fully cooperate. If this is a step toward full cooperation then we all should be applauding him. And there is nothing short of that. And good for him.
KING: Does that impress you, Cynthia?
ALKSNE: I’ll believe it when I see it. GERAGOS: Spoken like a true ex-federal prosecutor.
ALKSNE: Let’s make sure really happens before we get, you know, hand out too many roses. This is a guy when the cops were going to try to do one of the interviews to him, first of all, it wasn’t a good time. and the cops left.
One time they said, well he wasn’t in Congress, they didn’t know where he was. And one time he was too busy, and now it turned out he’d had a, you know, worked out and had a three-hour lunch. So I will believe it when I see it.
DEPAULO: And also it’s been four days now since they’ve been talking about the fourth interview. And this is — and put yourself in the position of the Levy family. Every time there is a promise that he is going to talk again. Then there is two more weeks…
GERAGOS: He’s talked three times. He’s just agreed that he’s just agreed that he’s going to go help the FBI do a profile. Give the guy a break. And the same time you are apologizing for the people who don’t want to get involved, who are sitting in the apartment building, and the landlord has to send out a little flier that says please help.
DEPAULO: Mark, we can’t all live by the morals of a defense attorney.
GERAGOS: Except the morals of the defense attorney is not why we are here. We are here because generally we are either law enforcement people or people who are in the criminal justice system. He wants priests, he can he get five priests to come here and talk about it.
DEPAULO: If Chandra was your lover, best — good friend and constituent…
GERAGOS: Would I call the police and tell them she was missing? Yes, just like Gary Condit did? Yes. Would I get interviewed three times just like Gary Condit did? Yes. Would I throw away a watch case that somebody else may have given me? Probably not. I mean, I won’t go there.
But, at the same time, when you are under that kind of scrutiny, when you’ve got this kind of attention and media focus, you freeze. It is not the first time somebody has frozen
KING: Going to get another break and we’ll come right back with our panel.
Lisa DePaulo is supposed to be a reporter.
It was a sickening display. I never cared about Condit personally (he was a Blue Dog jerk as a politician and took too long to accept that he had been caught with his pants down.) But I figured that if his constituents didn’t want an “adulterer” in office they had a right to elect someone else and until the police actually arrested him, he was entitled to a presumption of innocence. But watching the press destroy the man on the basis of their “gut feeling” that he wasn’t behaving according to their lofty standards was disgusting — and yet another example of how their immaturity and shallowness rips away at the fabric of our constitutional system. It shouldn’t take one of the loathed defense attorneys to point out that someone is innocent until proven guilty. In that exchange you had both the press and the Barbizon School of former prosecutors heaping such derision on Condit that if he had ever been charged he couldn’t have gotten a fair trial. It was a terrible case of professional malpractice in both the fields of journalism and the law.
If you want to read the anatomy screaming village witchhunt in all its glory, read The Daily Howler archives for the summer of 2001. Somerby covered this event at the time with his usual thoroughness, pointing out not just the prosecutorial attitude, but detailing the lazy, sloppy reporting in which they often engaged as they pontificated about immorality and murder.
Not that I’m expecting anyone to go back and reevaluate their behavior. That simply isn’t done. But it’s there for anyone who wants to know why nobody trusts the media or why people have such a terrible time understanding even the most fundamental tenets of our legal system. They had him convicted of murder. And he wasn’t guilty.
This is how Guantanamo happens and the public shrugs its collective shoulders, unsurprised and cynical. They have to accept that the important people just *know* who’s guilty and who isn’t and that the system is actually just a show for the folks. That’s how we treat it.
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Smart
by digby
Richard Shelby left the Democratic party in 1994 finally signaling the final success of the Southern Strategy and the long overdue gathering of all conservatives under the same banner. It was a good day for Democrats. We may be a lot of bad things, but at least we don’t have to claim this nasty, braindead piece of work:
Another local resident asked Shelby if there was any truth to a rumor that appeared during the presidential campaign concerning Obama’s U.S. citizenship, or lack thereof.
“Well his father was Kenyan and they said he was born in Hawaii, but I haven’t seen any birth certificate,” Shelby said. “You have to be born in America to be president.”
According to the Associated Press, state officials in Hawaii checked health department records during the campaign and determined there was no doubt Obama was born in Hawaii.
That’s a US Senator we’re talking about, not some wingnut talk radio “entertainer.” But then, Shelby’s been making no sense for a long time and his economic incoherence is more obvious by the day. (He’s no better on national security.)
Between Jindahl, Barbour and Shelby, the Southern Republicans have hit the trifecta. If you live in one of their states and are counting on getting through this economic crisis with even the shirts on your backs, you probably need to think about relocating.
h/t to bb
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Actual Responsibility
by dday
I’m going to get hammered over the head for this, but what the hell, here goes.
President Obama’s budget has been leaked to major news organizations in time for the Sunday papers, and it seeks to close a yawning deficit over the long term through entirely unobjectionable means like ending unnecessary wars and ensuring that everyone pays their fair share for using the public commons. Also, importantly, he doesn’t try to close the budget gap entirely, and he’s offering an honest appraisal of the numbers instead of the stupid budget tricks that have defined the past decade.
Obama proposes to dramatically reduce those numbers by the end of his first term, cutting the deficit he inherited in half, said administration officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because the budget has yet to be released. His budget plan would keep the deficit hovering near $1 trillion in 2010 and 2011, but shows it dropping to $533 billion in 2013 — still high in dollar terms, but a more manageable 3 percent of the overall economy.
To get there, Obama proposes to cut spending and raise taxes. The savings would come primarily from “winding down the war” in Iraq, a senior administration official said. The budget assumes that the nation will continue to spend money on “overseas military contingency operations” throughout Obama’s presidency, the official said, but that number is significantly lower than the nearly $190 billion the nation budgeted for Iraq and Afghanistan last year.
Obama also seeks to increase tax collections, primarily by making good on his promise to eliminate the temporary tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003 for wealthy taxpayers, whom Obama defined during the campaign as those earning more than $250,000 a year. Those tax breaks would be permitted to expire on schedule for the 2011 tax year, when the top tax rate would rise from 35 percent to more than 39 percent.
Obama also proposes to maintain the tax on estates worth more than $3.5 million, instead of letting it expire next year. And he proposes “a fairly aggressive effort on tax enforcement” that would target tax havens and corporate loopholes, among other provisions, the official said.
Overall, tax collections under the plan would rise from about 16 percent of the economy this year to 19 percent in 2013, while federal spending would drop from about 26 percent of the economy, another post-war high, to 22 percent.
The other big elements of this would be to eliminate the hedge fund loophole, which would tax a hedge fund manager’s income as income instead of capital gains, and to institute a cap-and-trade plan for carbon emissions, which would provide revenue to the federal government by selling carbon credits at auction. And while floating a deficit equal to about 3% of GDP in 2013, which would be remarkable given the investments being made, we would have a more efficient health care system that costs less and covers more people in return.
The budget also puts in place the building blocks of what administration officials say will be a broad restructuring of the U.S. health system, an effort aimed at covering some of the 46 million Americans who lack insurance while controlling costs and improving quality. Many lawmakers said they had expected a health care overhaul to be pushed off while Obama deals with the economic crisis, but administration officials stressed they intend to forge ahead with comprehensive reform.
“The budget will kick off or facilitate a focus on getting health care done this year,” the senior official said, adding that the White House is planning a summit on health care. The event has been delayed by former senator Tom Daschle’s decision to withdraw from consideration as health secretary because of tax problems, a move that left Obama without key member of his health team.
Administration officials and outside experts say the most likely path to revamping the health system is to begin with Medicare, the federal program for retirees and people with disabilities, and Medicaid, which serves the poor. Together, the two programs cover about 100 million people at a cost of $561 billion in 2007. Making policy changes in those programs — such as rewarding physicians who computerize their medical records or paying doctors for results rather than procedures–could improve care while generating long-term savings, expert say. It also could prod private insurers to follow suit.
They are talking about reducing Medicare eligibility to age 55, and also getting rid of the grossly inefficient Medicare Advantage, which is essentially a $35 billion dollar payoff to private insurance companies.
I know people are worried about the fiscal responsibility summit. Words matter, and using the language of those who have been trying for 40 years and longer to gut the social safety net is problematic. However, I am more than willing to judge the Administration on what they do. This budget is a Democratic statement of priorities, which states pretty clearly that we need a more responsible and progressive tax system that makes sure corporations and the wealthy are paying their fair share. It strives for progress in health care and climate change and a winding down of commitments to foreign military adventures. And it ends blatant giveaways to industry.
There will be details that come out that I imagine I will not particularly like, and I’ll certainly fight any off the books chicanery designed to prop up elites as well as any assaults on the social safety net in this time of economic peril. But the budget is a major document. And this one is, so far, a very respectable manifestation of liberal principles.
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Protesting The Brownies
by digby
If you don’t read anything else this Sunday besides your Oscar ballot, read this interview with Darrell Vandeveld, the former Guantanamo prosecutor who resigned in protest, by The Talking Dog (the latest in his remarkable series of interviews with lawyers involved in the legal morass of the Bush administration’s War on Terror.)
Mr Vandeveld is a man of integrity, not just in his unwillingness to go along with these miscarriages of justice and human decency, but in his unusual honesty in revealing his own motivations and evolution of thought. It’s fascinating stuff.
Seven prosecutors have resigned from the military commissions process in protest. These aren’t bleeding heat liberal hippies — they’re prosecutors. And from this man’s account, these prosecutions are so tainted by disorganization alone that it’s nearly impossible to imagine that justice can be done.
It appears that there is no aspect of the Bush administration that wasn’t run by a malevolent and/or incompetent “Brownie” to some extent or another. At this point, it’s hard to ignore the possibility that this was the plan all along.
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Saturday Night At The Movies
Pay you back with interest
By Dennis Hartley
Owen and Watts: Lawyers, guns and money.
Get this. In the Bizarro World of Tom Tykwer’s new conspiracy thriller, The International, people don’t rob banks…. banks rob people. That’s crazy! And if you think that’s weird, check this out: at one point in the film, one of the characters puts forth the proposition that true power belongs to he who controls the debt. Are you swallowing this malarkey? Oh, and it gets even better. The filmmakers even go so far as to suggest that some Third World military coups are seeded by powerful financial groups and directed from shadowy corporate boardrooms. What a fantasy! I suppose the next thing you’re gonna tell me is that these same “evil bankers” will devise some nefarious bailout plan that enables them to sustain their self-indulgent standards of high living while the world’s economy collapses-and all at the expense of hard-working taxpayers. Yeah, right.
The (fictional) international bank in question is under relentless investigation by a stalwart Interpol agent (the ever-glum Clive Owen), who is following a trail of shady arms deals all over Europe and the Near East that appear to be linked to the organization. Whenever anyone gets close to exposing the truth about the bank’s Machiavellian schemes and criminal enterprises, they die under Mysterious Circumstances (alas, it is the karma for all whistle-blowers portrayed by lower-billed actors in a conspiracy thriller). The chase leads to New York, where (for reasons I was not 100% clear on) Owen is teamed up with a Manhattan-based assistant D.A. (Naomi Watts). Complexity ensues, with tastefully-attired Eurotrash assassins lurking behind every silver-tongued bank exec.
Director Tykwer, best-known for his hyper-kinetic cult thriller Run Lola Run
That being said, I still found the film involving enough to hold my attention throughout. It’s far from a classic, but if you are a sucker for the genre (like yours truly), I think you’ll find it a worthwhile diversion. I enjoyed the Bondian travelogue device (it even has the mandatory stop in Istanbul-complete with the requisite foot chase through a crowded bazaar). Owen and Watts hold your attention (although I would have liked to have seen more screen chemistry between them, and would it kill Clive Owen to crack just a tiny little smile once in a while?) and there is an excellent supporting performance from the frequently underrated German character actor, Armin Mueller-Stahl.
The timing of the film’s release is interesting, in light of the current banking crisis and the plethora of financial scandals. From what I understand, screenwriter Eric Singer (no relation to the drummer from Kiss) based certain elements of the story on the real-life B.C.C.I. scandal. I predict that this will become the ubiquitous new trend in screen villains-the R. Allen Stanfords and Bernie Madoffs seem heaven-sent to replace Middle-Eastern terrorists as the Heavies du Jour for action thrillers. You can take that to the bank.
Previous posts with related themes:
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Whim Justice
by digby
Joan Walsh writes:
You might remember Bagram from Alex Gibney’s devastating “Taxi to the Dark Side,” which detailed the December 2002 torture and death — I would say murder — of a 22-year-old cab driver named Dilawar by U.S. soldiers there. Or maybe you remember Tim Golden’s riveting New York Times story in 2005, detailing the death of Dilawar and another detainee at Bagram.
After the Supreme Court ruled that Guantánamo detainees had the right to challenge their detention in U.S. courts, four Bagram prisoners tried to challenge their detention in U.S. District Court in Washington. The prisoners say the American military had detained and interrogated them without any charges and without letting them contact attorneys. According to AP, the suit was filed by relatives on their behalf; that was their only access to the legal system. The Bush administration defended against the suit by claiming all Bagram detainees have been deemed “enemy combatants” who had no right to U.S. courts. Today lawyers for the Obama administration decided to embrace the Bush defense.
I’m not sure what the legal or moral distinction between Guantanamo and Bagram might be, but the history of both hellholes is so bad that they not only shouldn’t they try to legally justify holding people there, they should destroy them completely.
I guess if you’re unlucky enough to live in a country the United States has invaded, you just have to take your chances and hope you don’t accidentally get caught up in the Kafkaesque prison nightmare we seem to favor. There’s no way out unless someone decides, out of the goodness of their hearts or perhaps on a whim, to let you go.
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Cutting Corners
by digby
Here’s an email I received yesterday from regular reader Sleon about E coli conservatism and its consequences:
I wanted to thank you for your piece on the issue of the FDA, medical device companies, the corruption surrounding them and the laws they got enacted to prevent victims of defective products from suing them. I am one of those people. I had a defective lead (the wire that that connects my defibrillator to the heart itself) installed and when it failed, the device shocked me repeatedly. The device manufacturers euphemistically refer to those shocks as “inappropriate” and the sensation “uncomfortable but fleeting”, but I and many other patients I have spoken with call them excruciating and terrifying. It had only been installed a few weeks before and so I had to undergo surgery again to have it replaced. It turns out the failed product was a new one, supposedly improved, that had recently been sanctioned by the FDA. After the second surgery, the electrophysiologist who performed the operation followed up with the manufacturer and was told by someone there that they had already been “looking into” reports of other failures. The stress on my body from the second surgery soon caused my heart to go into an abnormal rhythm, which triggered additional shocks (10 in five minutes because the device itself couldn’t actually correct that particular kind of arrhythmia) and the whole incident was nearly fatal.
Even so it was still more than six months before the company issued a recall, though doctors like mine (who is one of the leading experts in these surgeries in all of new England) had refused to continue implanting them much earlier. I sought legal counsel afterwards and my attorney recommended joining a class-action suit that was in the works, rather than trying to go at them on my own. I took that advice even though at the time I was less interested in suing them for making a defective product than I was for their knowing it was defective, but still allowing it to be placed inside my body. These products are extremely expensive to develop and the company’s brass must have decided it was more profitable to continue to sell as many as possible before they were forced to recall them, in part because they had recently successfully lobbied for a new law they thought would protect them from lawsuits.
And as of today, that’s exactly what happened. The judge hearing the case threw it out citing the new law that said since the FDA had approved the device the manufacturer was protected from suits. Since then however, there have been numerous press reports that scientists and other whistleblowers within the agency are beginning to expose the corruption at the heart of the Bush FDA’s symbiotic relationship with the manufacturers – and in addition to outright graft and administrative incompetence, the certification process had been reduced to the manufacturer telling the FDA the product was safe and the FDA then certifying it was so. That, coupled with the fact that Congress has begun to consider clarifying the law in question to remove the protection loophole court decisions have provided the manufacturers, leads me to hope our rights will eventually be restored in this case. It is, of course, only the cost of punitive sanctions that will protect the public from the greed of under-regulated corporations like this.
Many people who received this and other defective parts and devices have been killed by them. I’m one of the lucky ones. All I had to do was suffer the torture of the “inappropriate” shocks; go through unnecessary additional surgeries; become so sick afterwards I nearly died; lose 20 pounds in 10 days as a result; miss a lot of work – it was months before I was back to my full, regular schedule; and suffer from repeated nightmares to this day of the device failing and shocking me again and again.
This is all part of what happens when the deregulation fetishists have their way. Add in that the political appointees entrusted with the agencies created to protect us from the unscrupulous have in fact worked to weaken and destroy the oversight we ought to have learned time and time again is necessary. The result is a world where the powerful control the legal process to the point where they can make profit trump public safety and morality. While we face many other pressing problems, I would hope we can find time to urge our representatives to support legislation that will restore sanity to the process and the necessary resources to protect us to the agencies charged with doing so.
Sincerely,
sleon
I’m convinced that one of the mistakes we’ve made over the years is not telling enough stories of real people who were affected by the conservative movement’s deregulation fervor. When they can keep it all abstract and clean it sounds great. It’s not so impressive when you see the human results of their “ideology.”
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Best Mommies For The Job
by digby
US News & World Report’s Washington Whispers page currently features a poll asking readers who they would prefer to run a daycare center for their kids: First Lady Michelle Obama, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, or Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.
Why didn’t they just ask which one you’d rather get a blow job from?
I suppose it does make the editors at the NY Post feel better to know that they aren’t the only ignorant cretins in the new business these days.
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Kamikazee Governors
by digby
I guess Jindahl and Barbour figure they’ve got four years for the economy to improve enough that their voters won’t remember that they put them out on the street during the recession:
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal announced Friday that he will decline stimulus money specifically targeted at expanding state unemployment insurance coverage, becoming the first state executive to officially refuse any part of the federal government’s payout to states.
In a statement, Jindal, who is slated to give the Republican response to President Barack Obama’s message to Congress on Tuesday, expressed concern that expanding unemployment insurance coverage would lead to increased unemployment insurance taxes later on.
“The federal money in this bill will run out in less than three years for this benefit and our businesses would then be stuck paying the bill,” Jindal said. “We must be careful and thoughtful as we examine all the strings attached to the funding in this package. We cannot grow government in an unsustainable way.”
Jindal is one of a small group of Republican governors, which includes South Carolina’s Mark Sanford and Mississippi’s Haley Barbour, who have said they might refuse some or all of the stimulus money targeted to their states.
In an interview Friday, Barbour said he, too, would likely decline funds for broadening access to unemployment insurance.
I’m actually surprised that they chose unemployment insurance to make their stand. This isn’t aimed at the poor, who they always give the shaft, but actual voting, tax-paying workers. Do they think these folks won’t notice? I sure hope the Democratic Party is planning to explain it to them.
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