Month: March 2009

Tossing GWOT

by digby

Me Likee:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the Obama administration has stopped using “war on terror,” breaking with the Bush administration’s terminology in describing the conflict with al Qaeda and militant Islam. “The administration has stopped using the phrase, and I think that speaks for itself,” Mrs. Clinton told reporters as she traveled here for a United Nations-led conference on Afghanistan. The phrase has been criticized as having inflammatory connotations in the Muslim world. Some Democratic officials believe it is better to describe more specifically whom the U.S. is fighting, such as al Qaeda or the Taliban.

It’s a good first step. But it would be even more meaningful if the Department of Defense would get with the program and stop issuing these:

This is actually a pretty important step and one that should be formalized. The GWOT was a “war” that justified all the outrageous unitary executive moves legalized by John Yoo under his “commander in chief in wartime is a functional dictator” argument. By declaring that war officially over, it would put another nail in the coffin of those unconstitutional rulings.

Remember, they initially gave that medal out to military which participated in the domestic “Airport Security Operation” after 9/11. Let’s just say they had a somewhat “expansive” view of the GWOT from the very beginning since they created a military medal for a US military operation on American soil. And it’s creepy. They should get rid of it.

.

Pre-Emptive Strike

by dday

In New York today, the Republicans are dispensing with the election and going right to the overturning of the election results:

Republican Jim Tedisco may be running for the House in a district where Republicans outnumber Democratic voters by some 70,000, but with the polls closing in a matter of hours, Tedisco’s campaign is prepping for a loss.

An electoral loss, anyway.

The Dutchess County Clerk’s Office has confirmed to FDL that Tedisco’s people have filed an ex parte motion in order, the effect of which would be to investigate and overturn today’s election results, should the outcome not be to Republicans’ liking.

FDL is trying to obtain a copy of the motion and will post when available.

This filing come on the heels of a report that Tedisco’s own polling has him losing to Democrat Scott Murphy by a narrow margin.

Why not? It’s working for Norm Coleman. In fact, given that success I’d be surprised if Republicans acknowledge losing an election ever again.

By the way, I want to address somnething else about this race. There are definitely national implications to Tedisco losing this seat, in a Republican-leaning area, to a virtual unknown in the district, especially because the race has turned in many ways on Murphy’s support for President Obama’s stimulus package. And on taking joy in watching Republicans flail about and continue their losing streak I take a back seat to no one. However, I never asked readers to support Scott Murphy financially, only wrote about the race a few times, and whenever I did I included the caveat that Murphy has planned to join the Blue Dogs. And I completely agree with Chris Bowers that we cannot keep supporting Democrats just because of the D next to their name, especially after they announce their intentions to undermine our values.

We–participants in blog and email list small donor fundraising efforts–have to completely stop raising money for Blue Dogs. We should not give a single cent to any current member of the Blue Dog coalition. We should not give any money at all to any candidate who refuses to rule out joining the Blue Dogs once in Congress. If we hope to improve Democratic behavior in Congress, this break has to be as public and as thorough as possible.

In politics, money speaks a lot louder than either voting or public criticism. We can criticize Blue Dog behavior all we want, but as long as we keep funneling their members millions of dollars every two years in small, online donations, then we will actually be ratifying, not criticizing their behavior. We will be supporting their efforts to push the party to the right, not working to push the party to the left. We will be sending a clear signal of support for their votes, not working to hold them accountable for those votes […]

If we keep sending the Blue Dogs millions of dollars in small, online donations every year, then there is no incentive for Blue Dogs to ever change their behavior, or for Democratic candidates to not seek out membership in the Blue Dog coalition. Currently, being a member, or prospective member, of the Blue Dog coalition provides you access to a network of Hill staff, corproate lobbyists and their PACs, large donor fundraisers, and press releases back home to talk about how you aren’t like those other, dirty liberal Democrats. If we want to change Democratic behavior in Congress, we have stop adding even more incentives for Democrats to become Blue Dogs. Instead, we must offer strong disincentives for them to become Blue Dogs, such as a significantly reduced access to online, small donor fundraising.

Unfortunately, in Scott Murphy’s case, small online donors raised over $300,000 for him even after Murphy had stated he was applying to join the Blue Dogs. That has to stop. Before we raise money for other congressional candidates in 2009-2010, we have to extract promises from those candidates that they won’t join either the Blue Dogs (for House candidates) or Evan Bayh’s groups (for Senate candidates).

Blue Dogs derive their strength from their numbers, and their ability as a caucus to block progressive legislation. I support particular individuals in the Blue Dogs on particular stances from time to time – Patrick Murphy in Pennsylvania comes to mind. But I can’t support any individual who joins that group, which has been composed for the sole purpose of blocking progressive legislation. If we keep giving them money time after time we are being played for suckers.

Update: from digby

One way to do this is to support Blue America candidates. We learned the hard way some time back to get commitments on this and we don’t endorse Blue Dogs or those who are open to being Blue Dogs.

Like dday, I have nothing against Murphy and I’ll be happy if he wins, but the Blue Dogs have their own financing system and they can pay their own freight. I ask for financial support only for those congressional candidates whose values and positions on the issues are truly progressive. Somebody’s got to do that or there will never be anything but Blue Dogs in congress.

.

Stop It

by digby

Rick Sanchez just asked Wolf Blitzer if the fact that Europe loves Obama will hurt him at home. (Blitzer said he didn’t think so.)

But I have to wonder: aside from a handful of neocon nutballs and the far right fringe of the Republican party, do villagers actually believe the rest of the country hates Europe? Really? If that’s the case, perhaps the better question is “who don’t Americans hate?” If Europe really is considered an enemy to the extent that Europeans liking our president is a liability, then I’m hard pressed to think of any country we could consider a friend.

CNN shouldn’t be feeding this idiocy and I have to wonder where it came from. Did somebody tweet Sanchez with the question?

.

Izzies

by digby

Tonight is the night that Glennzilla and Amy Goodman will receive the first “Izzy” awards, for independent journalism from the The Park Center for Independent Media :

The Izzy Award is named after legendary maverick journalist I. F. Stone, who launched I. F. Stone Weekly in 1953 and exposed government deception, McCarthyism, and racial bigotry. Presented annually for “special achievement in independent media,” the Izzy Award will go to an independent outlet, journalist, or producer for contributions to our culture, politics, or journalism created outside traditional corporate structures.

Jeff Cohen of FAIR, who also runs the Park center, wrote this about I. F. Stone a few months back:

Before there was an Internet, Izzy Stone was doing the work we associate with today’s best bloggers. Like them, he was obsessed with citing original documents and texts. But before search engines, Izzy had to consume ten newspapers per day — and physically visit government archives and press offices, and personally pore over thousands of words in the Congressional Record. That’s how he repeatedly scooped the gullible, faux-objective MSM of his day in exposing government deceit, like that propelling the Vietnam War. Izzy was the ultimate un-embedded reporter. His journalism was motivated by a simple maxim that resonates loudly in our era of Cheneys and Rumsfelds and WMD hoaxes: “All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out.”

Month after month from 1953 to 1969 I.F. Stone’s Weekly (biweekly through 1971) exposed deceptions as fast as governments could spin them. His timely and timeless dispatches are gathered in an exceptional paperback, The Best of I.F. Stone….]Born of immigrant parents, Izzy was an American patriot who worshipped the Bill of Rights: “You may think I am a red Jew son-of-a-bitch, but I’m keeping Thomas Jefferson alive.” And he worshipped our country’s tradition of press freedom: “There are few countries in which you can spit in the eye of the government and get away with it. It’s not possible in Moscow.” But Izzy was never naïve about American traditions that threatened freedom, and he had a 5,000-page FBI spy file to prove it. Today’s muckraking bloggers are often belittled for working from their homes, far removed from the corridors of power. Izzy worked out of his home. If he were alive, he’d be applauding the Josh Marshalls and other independents, urging: Keep your distance from power.

I made no claim to inside stuff. . . I tried to dig the truth out of hearings, official transcripts and government documents, and to be as accurate as possible. . . I felt like a guerilla warrior, swooping down in surprise attack on a stuffy bureaucracy where it least expected independent inquiry. The reporter assigned to specific beats like the State Department or the Pentagon for a wire service or a big daily newspaper soon finds himself a captive. State and Pentagon have large press relations forces whose job it is to herd the press and shape the news. There are many ways to punish a reporter who gets out of line. . . But a reporter covering the whole capitol on his own – particularly if he is his own employer – is immune from these pressures.

I can’t think of anyone who better personifies the Izzy Stone tradition than Glenn Greenwald. Congratulations to him and to Amy Goodman for the well deserved recognition.

Coming For The Social Security Checks, Again

by dday

How interesting that the Washington Post, in the midst of this Great Recession, decides that the biggest fallout of the loss of millions of jobs is not the health and welfare of those unemployed themselves, but the concurrent depletion of the Social Security Trust Fund, with a not-so-subtle inference that benefits need to be cut.

The U.S. recession is wreaking havoc on yet another front: the Social Security trust fund.

With unemployment rising, the payroll tax revenue that finances Social Security benefits for nearly 51 million retirees and other recipients is falling, according to a report from the Congressional Budget Office. As a result, the trust fund’s annual surplus is forecast to all but vanish next year — nearly a decade ahead of schedule — and deprive the government of billions of dollars it had been counting on to help balance the nation’s books.

While the new numbers will not affect payments to current Social Security recipients, experts say, the disappearing surplus could have considerable implications for the government’s already grim financial situation.

Considerable!

Since the WaPo doesn’t make it clear, Dean Baker can explain what they’re talking about. Payroll tax revenue may be coming into balance with current payouts from the system during this recessionary period, but the article conveniently sidesteps the $2.5 trillion dollar surplus the system has generated over the years.

While those seeking to cut Social Security benefits are highlighting these new projections, in reality they have very little significance for the program. Under the law, Social Security benefits are paid out of its trust fund. This trust fund has accumulated a surplus of almost $2.5 trillion. The lower projected surpluses for the next few years will have some impact (if the projections prove correct) on the date at which the fund is projected to be depleted, but the projected depletion date will almost certainly be beyond 2040, even after CBO adjusts its numbers for the downturn.

Remarkably, this piece alludes to plans to cut benefits without ever noting that older workers and retirees have just lost close to $15 trillion in wealth due to the collapse of the housing bubble and the plunge in the stock market Presumably this would be an important factor in any debate over reducing benefits.

The issue here is not the successful administration of Social Security, but the historic maladministration of the economy and the rest of the budget by the “deficits don’t matter” crowd. Of course, to them deficits only matter with respect to Social Security, not the magic doesn’t-cost-any-money military budget.

By the way, I don’t know why this wasn’t heavily pushed all that much by the White House, but as part of the federal stimulus, beneficiaries of Social Security will receive a one-time $250 payment, beginning in May. This puts money into the hands of those who need it, for the most part, and goes a little way to strengthening the social safety net and helping out those who are collateral damage to this economic storm. We need more of it, not the Village nonsense about how benefits have to be cut based on misleading fiscal projections.

.

Major Leagues

by tristero

From Seymour Hersh’s latest New Yorker article:

The Obama transition team also helped persuade Israel to end the bombing of Gaza and to withdraw its ground troops before the Inauguration. According to the former senior intelligence official, who has access to sensitive information, “Cheney began getting messages from the Israelis about pressure from Obama” when he was President-elect. Cheney, who worked closely with the Israeli leadership in the lead-up to the Gaza war, portrayed Obama to the Israelis as a “pro-Palestinian,” who would not support their efforts (and, in private, disparaged Obama, referring to him at one point as someone who would “never make it in the major leagues”)

This from Cheney, a bozo so, so…bozo-ish, it truly defies belief:

In his book It Doesn’t Take a Hero, retired U.S. Army Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf describes the evolution of the plans he and his staff made following Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait… Following one White House meeting at which he’d asked for more time and more troops, Stormin’ Norman reports, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell called to warn the Desert Storm commander that he was being loudly compared, by a top administration official, to George McClellan. “My God,” the official supposedly complained. “He’s got all the force he needs. Why won’t he just attack?” Schwarzkopf notes that the unnamed official who’d made the comment “was a civilian who knew next to nothing about military affairs, but he’d been watching the Civil War documentary on public television and was now an expert.”

And then, twenty pages later, Schwarzkopf casually drops the information that he got an inspirational gift from Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney right before the air war finally got under way. Cheney was presenting a gift to a military man, and he chose something with an appropriate theme: “(A) complete set of videotapes of Ken Burns’s PBS series, The Civil War.”

But that wasn’t the only gift that Dick Cheney had for Norman Schwarzkopf. Having figured out that the general was being too cautious with his fourth combat command in three decades of soldiering, Cheney got his staff busy and began presenting Schwarzkopf with his own ideas about how to fight the Iraqis: What if we parachute the 82nd Airborne into the far western part of Iraq, hundreds of miles from Kuwait and totally cut off from any kind of support, and seize a couple of missile sites, then line up along the highway and drive for Baghdad? Schwarzkopf charitably describes the plan as being “as bad as it could possibly be… But despite our criticism, the western excursion wouldn’t die: three times in that week alone Powell called with new variations from Cheney’s staff. The most bizarre involved capturing a town in western Iraq and offering it to Saddam in exchange for Kuwait.”

Remember the clowns in the Bush administration, people. They really were that bad.

No. They were worse.

Let’s Do The Time Warp

by digby

Oh goody:

Tim Kaine, the Virginia governor and President Barack Obama’s hand-picked choice as the head of the Democratic National Committee, infuriated abortion-rights groups Monday by signing legislation that gives abortion foes an important symbolic win.

Kaine brushed off intense lobbying by abortion rights supporters in Richmond to sign a bill that allows Virginia motorists to advertise their anti-abortion views by sporting “Choose Life” specialty license plates.

[…]

Kaine defended the move by pointing out that Virginia has a “long-standing program” allowing customized license plates and said that if Planned Parenthood applied for a plate he would grant it.

“I sign this legislation today in keeping with the Commonwealth’s longtime practice of approving specialty plates with all manner of political and social messages,” Kaine said in a statement.

“Furthermore, if Planned Parenthood—an organization that is already a recipient of state budget funds—or another similar organization ever chooses to seek a specialty license plate in Virginia, I believe the Constitution would require the state to approve that plate to protect against any viewpoint discrimination.”

I wonder what the chance is that Plannet Parenthood could get a bill through the legislature that says “Choose Condoms.” Not much, I’d guess.

Kaine is being too clever by half and it’s really unfortunate. (He’s apparently going to ban stem-cell research in Virginia too.) There’s absolutely no good political reason for the head of the Democratic Party to advance the conservative movement’s social agenda right now. It seems strangely anachronistic in this new era and gives gro0und at a time when it’s completely unnecessary. In fact, it’s lame on all levels.

Theater Critics
by digby
Speaking of the latest kerfuffle over Seymour Hersh’s reporting on Cheney’s assassination squad, Emptywheel quotes ex-official John Hannah on CNN today explaining why it would be perfectly legal:

Hannah: There’s no question, in a theater of war, when we are at war–and there’s no doubt, we are still at war against Al Qaeda in Iraq, Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. and on that Pakistani border–that our troops have the authority to go out after and capture and kill the enemy, including the leadership of the enemy.

This fellow might quarrel with that seeing as how he’s just been convicted of murder for capturing and killing the enemy in Iraq:

An American army sergeant faces up to 35 years in prison after admitting his involvement in the summary executions of four bound and blindfolded Iraqi prisoners. US Sergeant First Class Joseph Mayo told a court martial in Vilseck, southern Germany, that he thought the shootings were in the best interests of his troops because he feared the prisoners would attack them if released. The 27-year-old and fellow soldiers killed the four men with pistol shots to the head before pushing their bodies into a Baghdad canal in spring 2007 after fatal attacks on their patrol. His lawyer claimed that American troops on the ground in Iraq received insufficient support but military prosecutors said Mayo had demonstrated a “total lack of moral courage”. Mayo, from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, told his court martial at the US Army’s Rose Barracks that he was guilty of murder and conspiracy to commit murder. Asked by the judge whether he thought he had the authority to shoot the prisoners, he replied: “I thought it was in the best interests of my soldiers.”

Turns out there are all kinds of laws that forbid such things even in the “theater of war.” And there are laws that forbid assassinations and torture too. Cheney and his minions just believed those laws didn’t apply to them.

Keeping It Quiet

by digby

Over the week-end, I wrote a bit about the latest torture revelations concerning Abu Zubayda and the fact that everything they got from him under “enhanced interrogations” turned out to be garbage. I mused that they didn’t really care what the torture revealed, merely that they got lots of “metrics” that could show they were making progress in the GWOT with their macho tactics. Reader Sleon pointed me in the direction of this post by Bmaz at Emptywheel which adds another intriguing bit of speculation along the same lines:

Such is the clincher as to why the torture tapes had to be destroyed. It wasn’t just that Bush/Cheney et. al wanted to keep evidence of their torture program secret, there was never any complete way to do that. But there was only one thing that could prove they tortured for nothing and got nothing – the tapes. Cheney and his coterie of fellow Torquemadas were fiends proud of their handiwork; if they had evidence that it worked, they would have kept it. They burn spies for fun, crow on television about their willingness to torture and what they have accomplished, do you really think for one second they wouldn’t retain proof if they had it? And let us not forget just who we are talking about here – it is the White House Principals group:

The so-called Principals who participated in the meetings also approved the use of “combined” interrogation techniques — using different techniques during interrogations, instead of using one method at a time — on terrorist suspects who proved difficult to break, sources said. Highly placed sources said a handful of top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects — whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding. The high-level discussions about these “enhanced interrogation techniques” were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed — down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic. The advisers were members of the National Security Council’s Principals Committee, a select group of senior officials who met frequently to advise President Bush on issues of national security policy. At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft. As the national security adviser, Rice chaired the meetings, which took place in the White House Situation Room and were typically attended by most of the principals or their deputies.

Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell, Tenet and Ashcroft. Means, motive and opportunity. Who could have imagined? This certainly explains why it was top White House lawyers including Gonzales, Addington, Bellinger and Miers, with “vigorous sentiment”, assisted the CIA in the decision and process to destroy the torture tapes of abu-Zubaydah and others.

(Every time I am reminded of that principles group watching “choreographed” torture before signing off on it, I am shocked and appalled all over again. )As to the question at hand, considering the fact that Cheney and Rummy spent their entire careers trying to correct what they considered the sins of the Nixon administration, Bmaz’s speculation makes sense. After all, they believed that Nixon’s catastrophic error was failing to destroy the … tapes.
.

Bad Timing

by digby

Well it looks like we may get a little inkling of what would have happened if the GOP’s social security privatization plans had been implemented:

Just months before the start of last year’s stock market collapse, the federal agency that insures the retirement funds of 44 million Americans departed from its conservative investment strategy and decided to put much of its $64 billion insurance fund into stocks.

Switching from a heavy reliance on bonds, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation decided to pour billions of dollars into speculative investments such as stocks in emerging foreign markets, real estate, and private equity funds.

The agency refused to say how much of the new investment strategy has been implemented or how the fund has fared during the downturn. The agency would only say that its fund was down 6.5 percent – and all of its stock-related investments were down 23 percent – as of last Sept. 30, the end of its fiscal year. But that was before most of the recent stock market decline and just before the investment switch was scheduled to begin in earnest.

No statistics on the fund’s subsequent performance were released.

Nonetheless, analysts expressed concern that large portions of the trust fund might have been lost at a time when many private pension plans are suffering major losses. The guarantee fund would be the only way to cover the plans if their companies go into bankruptcy.

“The truth is, this could be huge,” said Zvi Bodie, a Boston University finance professor who in 2002 advised the agency to rely almost entirely on bonds. “This has the potential to be another several hundred billion dollars. If the auto companies go under, they have huge unfunded liabilities” in pension plans that would be passed on to the agency.

[…]

Asked whether the strategy was a mistake, given the subsequent declines in stocks and real estate, Millard said, “Ask me in 20 years. The question is whether policymakers will have the fortitude to stick with it.”

But Bodie, the BU professor who advised the agency, questioned why a government entity that is supposed to be insuring pension funds should be investing in stocks and real estate at all. Bodie once likened the agency’s strategy to a company that insures against hurricane damage and then invests the premiums in beachfront property.

Millard could be right that his diversification of the fund will result in a good return over 20 years. For all of our sakes, let’s hope so. But putting pension fund money into the inflated real estate market in 2007 was just stupid and in retrospect entering the stock market at that point was a case of very bad timing at the very least. It will probably take years for the fund to recover what it lost in the crash. That is a very big “oops.”

There has been no doubt for years that the fund was going to come up short with guaranteed pension plans going belly up, even in the good times. (See: airlines.) But instead of changing the agency’s conservative investment strategy, they could have lobbied to change the law to allow them charge higher premiums to the companies they insure or find some other less risky way to boost their returns. Of course, in the Bush years, that was the kind of thing that could get you kicked out of the Big Boyz club.

But even the original Bush appointee was a prudent investor who didn’t just start gambling with the pension insurance. Then they hired a Brownie:

In the early years of the George W. Bush presidency, the agency took a conservative investment approach under director Bradley N. Belt, who favored putting only between 15 and 25 percent of the fund into stocks.

Belt said in an interview that he operated under “a more prudent risk management” style and said he “would have maintained the investment strategy we had in place.” Belt left in 2006 and Millard arrived in 2007.

Under Millard’s strategy, the pension agency was directed to invest 55 percent of its funds in stocks and real estate. That included 20 percent in US stocks, 19 percent in foreign stocks, 6 percent in what the agency’s records term “emerging market” stocks, 5 percent in private real estate and 5 percent in private equity firms.

The PBGC is all that stands between a lot of retired people and penury, after a lifetime of paying into a guaranteed pension plan. Is it even remotely reasonable that a major change in investment strategy of an insurance fund like this could be done without any oversight or input? And yet it did. As usual, the best and the brightest were all partying 24/7 and nobody wanted to call the cops.

This could be a huge problem before long. And one of the saddest, yet inevitable, consequences of the opaque trillion dollar financial system bailouts and million dollar bonus pools for greedy bankers will be that when average pensioners need bailing out there will be no political capital left to do it.

.