Month: March 2009

Finding A Scapegoat

by dday

Good to see that the Treasury Department is so concerned about the AIG bonus babies that they are throwing Chris Dodd to the wolves to deflect criticism.

The administration official said the Treasury Department did its own legal analysis and concluded that those contracts could not be broken. The official noted that even a provision recently pushed through Congress by Senator Christopher J. Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, had an exemption for such bonus agreements already in place.

That’s just not true, as both Jane and Glenn Greenwald explain pretty definitively. Under a Dodd-written amendment, the Senate version of the stimulus bill included executive compensation limits for all recipients of TARP money, only to have the amendment stripped of retroactivity and applied strictly toward future payouts, after negotiations with none other than Tim Geithner and Larry Summers:

The administration is concerned the rules will prompt a wave of banks to return the government’s money and forgo future assistance, undermining the aid program’s effectiveness. Both Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers, who heads the National Economic Council, had called Sen. Dodd and asked him to reconsider, these people said.

This wasn’t a small behind-the-scenes fight, it was a major contention in the stimulus debate, subject of several articles. Obama’s economic team didn’t want limits on executive compensation, and Dodd did. The Administration won, and now in the midst of this furor they’re trying to rewrite history by putting Dodd and themselves in opposite roles.

Dodd is a threatened incumbent who the right wing has been slandering for months, and now some anonymous official in the Obama Administration has taken the heat off themselves by allowing a firestorm based on a myth. Chris Bowers writes:

Now, some elements inside the administration have reached the point where they are placing blame for something Geithner and Summers did–block legislation that would have stripped the bonuses–on the person who wrote the legislation that would have stripped the bonuses. And that person just happens to be the most vulnerable Democratic Senators in 2010.

Glad to see that some senior administration officials value Geithner and Summers more than either Democratic Senate seats, or even more than honesty. There is a serious problem inside the Obama administration on this matter, and dismissals are needed to solve it.

In a related development, Republicans tied Democrats in the congressional generic ballot in one poll today, and took the lead in the other. I guess the new “Geithner uber alles” strategy isn’t working out to well for Democrats.

I think it’s premature to hype those poll numbers, especially when other ones taken at the same time show an opposite dynamic, but unquestionably, there is a rot at the heart of the economic team. This is the first incident that Obama has truly owned, regardless of the deflections. Republicans don’t completely have their act together on this – they’re too conflicted, having argued for free market fundamentalism for so long that the knee-jerk response is to argue for more. Even their ideas for clawing back the bonuses are crude copies of what the President has already decided. But anyone can plainly sniff out the villains here, and in addition to hyping the bogus Dodd assertion, the GOP is going after Geithner.

Reps. Steven LaTourette (R-OH) and Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI) introduced a resolution of inquiry today that would force Geithner to reveal the full extent of his department’s communications with AIG.

The resolution would affect not just talks over bonuses but about the very structure of the Federal Reserve’s investment in the company — which appears to have included built-in limitations on the government’s influence over management.

This is the real deal, folks: resolutions of inquiry (ROIs) are a crucial procedural tool for the minority party to seek information from the executive branch. Democrats did this during the Valerie Plame/Spygate scandal and the debate over the Bush administration’s extraordinary rendition. The Congressional Research Service found in a November study that ROIs oftentimes succeed in prying out information even if they fail on the House floor.

No rational Democrat can disagree that we need to know about those communications. Geithner’s connections with AIG go all the way back to the initial bailout decision, and are tied to the tens of billions in payments to counterparties, which is the far more damaging element of this – essentially a double-dip for banks who already received government money. While the bonus scandal raises the right-wing phony populist ire, the drumbeat for more investigations into Geithner’s contacts with AIG and what he knows about the counterparties and maybe about why the Federal Reserve is injecting billions into foreign central banks and why more than half of the AIG bailout money is leaking over the border and a whole host of other issues which involve Geithner but also the previous Administration. And the very clear potential exists to drown the entire Administration agenda into a day-by-day recitation of whether the President still has faith in his economic advisers, etc.

The President brought this upon himself through his hirings. But if he wants to find a way out, he could stop the practice of his team blaming others and start living up to his own rhetoric.

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What Are The Odds?

by digby

… that the GOP would pull this?

A state court could rule any day now on Norm Coleman’s challenge to Al Franken’s 225-vote lead in Minnesota, but the race may be far from over no matter what the judges say.

Top Republicans are encouraging Coleman to be as litigious as possible and take his fight all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court if he loses this round, believing that an elongated court fight is worth it if they can continue to deny Democrats the 59th Senate seat that Franken would represent.

And in pushing a possible Supreme Court conclusion, Republicans are raising case history that makes Democrats shudder: Bush v. Gore.

Since the same lawyers who argued for Bush are representing Coleman, it seems like a no-brainer to me. Everyone thinks that this is mostly a delaying tactic to keep the Dems from their 59th seat, and maybe it is. But the fact that Republicans are willing to bring up Bush vs Gore shows once again that they have absolutely no shame.

“The Supreme Court in 2000 said in Bush v. Gore that there is an equal protection element of making sure there is a uniform standard by which votes are counted or not counted, and I think that’s a very serious concern in this instance,” said Texas Sen. John Cornyn, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “I’m not making any predictions, but I wouldn’t be surprised” if it ended up in federal court.

[…]

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Friday first blessed the idea of encouraging Coleman to take his fight into federal appeals court and potentially all the way up to the Supreme Court. On Monday, several top Republicans continued pushing the federal courts angle, which could delay the Minnesota Senate race for several more months.

“The state court is not the final word on that, because the question in federal court is whether the guarantee of equal protection under laws in the U.S. Constitution has been violated by an inconsistent policy with regard to counting ballots,” said Judiciary Committee member Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.). Sessions said he “absolutely” would encourage Coleman to take his fight to federal court if he loses.

“From what I can tell, there are legal issues well worth taking up in the [Supreme] Court,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). “I think the whole Bush v. Gore — using the same standards to count votes is a big issue.”

Of course the court also said “our consideration is limited to the present circumstances, for the problem of equal protection in election processes generally presents many complexities,” not that it makes any difference to hypocritical Republicans. There are just as many hard core partisan wingnuts on the court today as there were then, so the only thing stopping them is their own consciences, which I doubt extends to electoral fairness. Rigging the vote is in their DNA.

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Goldilocks Journalism

by digby

When I saw this on Shuster yesterday, I knew it was going to be the big new GOP talking point:

SHUSTER: But it‘s good for them? I mean, Rush Limbaugh, it appears his ratings are up. Glenn Beck‘s ratings are through the roof. Glenn Beck was suggesting that the Obama administration is heading toward concentration camps, with those FEMA camps, and he accuses the Obama administration of embracing totalitarianism. Watch this. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)GLENN BECK, FOX NEWS ANCHOR: We are a country that is headed toward socialism, totalitarianism, beyond your wildest imagination. I wanted to debunk these FEMA camps. I‘m tired of hearing about them. You know about them. I‘m tired of hearing about them. I wanted to debunk them. We‘ve now for several days done research on them. I can‘t debunk them. (END VIDEO CLIP)SHUSTER: I mean, it‘s crazy, isn‘t it? BLAKEMAN: It is. It‘s crazy as Jon Stewart is crazy or Bill Maher is crazy on the left. KOFINIS: No, no. BLAKEMAN: These guys—you have a massive deception because you want to take people away from your horrid policy. Jon Stewart started attacking Rush Limbaugh. Jon Stewart is a comedian, and so is Rush Limbaugh. He‘s an entertainer.

Chris Kofinis pushed back, but it was clear that this was going to be the new right wing line and he didn’t quite know what to do with it. It works.
Naturally, little Tuckie Carlson is among those leading the charge:

Tucker Carlson, who lambasted Stewart during an appearance on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” on Sunday, agreed in a chat on washingtonpost.com yesterday that the Daily Show host is a “player in the national conversation” but argued that Stewart’s stature means that he should “be held to the same standards everyone else at his level (including Jim Cramer) lives by.”

Poor Tuckie. He’s never quite been the same. He calls Stewart a “Partisan Demagogue,” which is just funny.
That piece above was written by Chris Cilizza who I am guessing heard some of this from Republicans, although it’s perfectly possible that he put it together himself from all the chatter. But it doesn’t really matter. The Republicans are obviously trying to convince the MSM that Limbaugh and Stewart are two sides of the same coin. It’s standard working the refs stuff and it may just work for the village media since they don’t understand what Stewart is doing in the first place.
But Stewart isn’t actually a partisan and I do worry that he’s going to take the bait and start worrying about being perceived as such. I expect that he’s too smart for that, but I hope he’s aware of it and guards against it having a subconscious effect. The wingnuts are good at this stuff, and the media will help them because while they don’t understand Stewart’s (and Colbert’s) kind of satire, they do love to see the politics in perfectly symmetrical partisan terms. He said/she said makes for easy coverage so they have more time twitter each other about what they had for lunch.
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Father Of The Year

by digby

This story is trivial and somewhat painful, as a woman, to watch, so I’ve been avoiding it. Laura Ingraham has been known for some time to have some rather serious issues and behaves very badly at times. She’s a right wing talk show host. What else is new?

But I can’t let this go without comment:

Today, in his “Twitterview” with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) shied away from condemning Ingraham’s gratuitous attacks on his daughter. Stephanopoulos asked McCain, “What do you think of Meghan’s feud with Coulter and Ingraham?” McCain first said, “I’m proud of my daughter and she has a right to her opinions.” When asked if he agrees with his daughter, McCain did not say, simply stating, “like any family we agree on some things and disagree on others.”

What kind of a man is this that he can’t even defend his daughter against personal insults from the likes of Laura Ingraham? He doesn’t even have a political motivation, as low and cynical as that might be. He won’t be running for president again. He’s never been a favorite of the right wing and has no reason to curry favor with them now and everything we know about him would suggest that he thinks right wingers like Coulter are political poison. They sure aren’t friends of his.

I think he believes that Megan deserves to be spoken to like that because he probably speaks to her that way himself. Although she’s quite lovely, she’s not physically a perfect Barbie like her mother or Sarah Palin — or Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham —which is what he thinks is important in a woman. So, he can’t bring himself to defend her. She asked for it.

Whenever I find myself getting down about something the Obama administration is doing all I have to do is picture that man in my head and I immediately bring myself back from the brink. Imagine.

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Give Me Your Tired

by digby

…your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. As long as they aren’t gay.

If you missed Greenwald’s post yesterday about gays not having the basic human right to live in the same country as their partners and spouses, be sure to check it out. This is yet another little known, legal hurdle for gays and lesbians that exists purely to appease bigots.

Glenn makes the case eloquently:

[B]eing forced to choose between one’s country and one’s most central relationship — being, in essence, barred from living in one’s own country — is a grave injustice. Even under the best of circumstances, there are burdens and limitations imposed. But the point is that huge numbers of Americans in that situation — probably most — are not lucky. Quite the contrary: they are unable to live in their spouse’s country for any number of reasons, and are thus forced to live apart from the person who is most important to them, while others are forced into very risky or otherwise untenable predicaments (living in the U.S. illegally, entering sham marriages, making huge sacrifices of career, livelihood and family to live abroad) in order to be with the person they love. It’s an inhumane and discriminatory legal framework that is purely punitive, has no conceivable value or justification, and imposes profound hardship on people who have done absolutely nothing to deserve it.

Again, as always, I can’t understand why anyone thinks this is necessary. There’s nothing coercive about it, nobody is inflicting foreign “gayness” on unsuspecting heterosexuals. They just want to live their lives, work, pay taxes, shop at Target, all the usual, banal stuff that everyone else does. This kind of pointless bigotry just confuses me.

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Respect Is Earned

by dday

The scribblers from the White House Press Corps have dropped their teacups and opened windows for air after the vicious, uncouth attack on their dear friend Dick Cheney by Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. Rick Klein, chief towel-washer at ABC’s The Note (they still print that?), exclaimed “Wow—we’re talking about the former vice president here.” NBC’s First Read (Facebook to The Note’s MySpace) tut-tutted about the return of “petty political squabbling.” And Chip Reid, bravely bold Chip Reid, after choking back tears and bolstered by the support of his fellow Villagers, stood up to that horrible bully and gave him a piece of his mind (hopefully he has some left):

Reid: Can I ask you, when you referred to the former Vice President, that was a really hard-hitting, kind of sarcastic response you had. This is a former Vice President of the United States. Is that the attitude—is that the sanctioned tone toward the former Vice President of the United States from this White House now?

The Village is rising in solidarity to defend and protect that most fragile of egos, Dick Cheney. Because they have respect for the institutions and the office, you see.

Slightly less remarked-upon than the honor of St. Dick is yet another verdict on the torture that he directed and authorized while sitting in that office. I know in the Village you can earn respect without being respectable, but this fake outrage over a one-line insult when prisoners around the world were beaten, strapped naked to cots, suffocated by water, dragged around by collars and confined into a small box, to just name a few techniques, at the behest of THE SAME GUY THE PRESS IS DEFENDING, is a little tough to take.

With the help of the American trauma surgeon, Abu Zubaydah’s captors nursed him back to health. He was moved at least twice, first, reportedly, to Thailand; then, he believes, to Afghanistan, probably Bagram. In a safe house in Thailand the interrogation began:

I woke up, naked, strapped to a bed, in a very white room. The room measured approximately [13 feet by 13 feet]. The room had three solid walls, with the fourth wall consisting of metal bars separating it from a larger room. I am not sure how long I remained in the bed. After some time, I think it was several days, but can’t remember exactly, I was transferred to a chair where I was kept, shackled by [the] hands and feet for what I think was the next 2 to 3 weeks. During this time I developed blisters on the underside of my legs due to the constant sitting. I was only allowed to get up from the chair to go [to] the toilet, which consisted of a bucket. Water for cleaning myself was provided in a plastic bottle.

I was given no solid food during the first two or three weeks, while sitting on the chair. I was only given Ensure [a nutrient supplement] and water to drink. At first the Ensure made me vomit, but this became less with time.

The cell and room were air-conditioned and were very cold. Very loud, shouting type music was constantly playing. It kept repeating about every fifteen minutes twenty-four hours a day. Sometimes the music stopped and was replaced by a loud hissing or crackling noise.

The guards were American, but wore masks to conceal their faces. My interrogators did not wear masks.

During this first two to three week period I was questioned for about one to two hours each day. American interrogators would come to the room and speak to me through the bars of the cell. During the questioning the music was switched off, but was then put back on again afterwards. I could not sleep at all for the first two to three weeks. If I started to fall asleep one of the guards would come and spray water in my face […]

Two black wooden boxes were brought into the room outside my cell. One was tall, slightly higher than me and narrow. Measuring perhaps in area [3 1/2 by 2 1/2 feet by 6 1/2 feet high]. The other was shorter, perhaps only [3 1/2 feet] in height. I was taken out of my cell and one of the interrogators wrapped a towel around my neck, they then used it to swing me around and smash me repeatedly against the hard walls of the room. I was also repeatedly slapped in the face….

I was then put into the tall black box for what I think was about one and a half to two hours. The box was totally black on the inside as well as the outside…. They put a cloth or cover over the outside of the box to cut out the light and restrict my air supply. It was difficult to breathe. When I was let out of the box I saw that one of the walls of the room had been covered with plywood sheeting. From now on it was against this wall that I was then smashed with the towel around my neck. I think that the plywood was put there to provide some absorption of the impact of my body. The interrogators realized that smashing me against the hard wall would probably quickly result in physical injury.

Dick Cheney attended the principals’ meeting where these techniques were approved. And given the timeline of events, and Abu Zubaydah’s testimony, we can divine that he was a guinea pig, an experiment, a test subject for torture.

“I was told during this period that I was one of the first to receive these interrogation techniques, so no rules applied. It felt like they were experimenting and trying out techniques to be used later on other people.”

This article makes clear, then, that about two and a half months after he first woke up in US custody–so probably shortly after mid-June 2002–the US was experimenting on Abu Zubaydah, testing out various forms of torture to see which worked best and left the fewest marks.

Understand what this means: the torturers were conducting their experiments on Abu Zubaydah before John Yoo wrote up an OLC memo authorizing torture (hell–Yoo may have excluded those methods they had decided were ineffective and that my be why they told Abu Zubaydah there were no rules). The torturers were conducting their experiments with the intimate involvement of those back at the White House getting briefed and approving of each technique. And the torturers were being videotaped doing so.

You can put aside, for only this moment, the fact that Cheney helped to break the global economy and has no explanation for it. Or Katrina or Iraq or Valerie Plame or the energy task force or the allegations of an executive assassination ring that reported only to him. This is a man who presided over the experimentation of human beings.

That is who the Village has decided is worthy of respect.

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Granny Bashers Are Fibbers

by digby

It’s long been obvious that the right wing’s economic arguments are bogus since no matter what the issue, the answer is always tax cuts. Similarly, the fiscal scolds’ varied arguments about “entitlements” always ends up with scare stories that the system is going broke and the kids are going to be left with nothing — no matter what the evidence says.

Dean Baker demonstrates:

The granny bashers have treated us to three very dramatic examples of this “different facts, same policy” approach in the last 15 years. The first example is slightly technical. It has to do with the claim that the consumer price index (CPI) overstates inflation. The CPI is our yardstick for measuring how much better off people are getting through time. If wages grow 4.0 percent and the CPI tells us that inflation is 3.0 percent, then real wages have grown by 1.0 percent. However, if the true rate of inflation is just 2.0 percent because the CPI overstates inflation by 1.0 percentage point a year, then real wages have grown by 2.0 percent (4.0 percent wage growth, minus 2.0 percent inflation). Fifteen years ago, many economists and pundits (including much of the granny basher lobby) embraced the claim that the CPI overstated the true rate of inflation by at least 1.0 percent a year. If this claim was true, then it undermined the core of the granny bashers’ story. It would mean that our children and grandchildren would be far richer than we ever imagined possible and that many older workers and elderly grew up in poverty. If annual wage growth was 2.0 percent rather than 1.0 percent, then in 40 years, wages will be more than 220 percent of the current level, instead of just 50 percent higher. The granny bashers embraced the claim of the overstated CPI in order to justify cutting Social Security (retiree benefits are indexed to the CPI), but they never followed through the logic of this claim for their generational equity story. This would be comparable to Al Gore maintaining a drive to reduce greenhouse gas emissions even after new evidence showed that the planet was actually cooling. Honest people don’t ignore such evidence. The exact same issue arises with the speed up in productivity growth in the mid-90s. The granny basher crusade against Social Security and Medicare dates from the mid-80s when productivity growth was just 1.5 percent a year. Productivity growth determines the rate at which society can, on average, get richer. In the mid-90s, the rate of annual productivity growth increased by a full percentage point – in effect bringing about the more rapid gains in real income that would have been implied by an overstated CPI. However, none of the granny bashers noted how the productivity growth speedup had enormously improved the prospects of future generations. They just maintained their insistence on cutting Social Security and Medicare. Finally, the recent collapse of the housing bubble and the resulting stock market plunge have reduced the wealth of older workers and retirees by close to $15 trillion. This is a transfer to the young, since they will be able to buy the housing stock and the corporate capital stock for a far lower price than they would have expected to pay just two years ago. Remarkably, the granny basher crew has somehow failed to notice this enormous transfer of wealth from the old to the young. They just continue their crusade to cut Social Security and Medicare as though nothing has happened. It should be evident that the granny bashers don’t care at all about generational equity. They care about dismantling Social Security and Medicare, the country’s most important social programs. It is important that the public recognize the granny bashers’ real agenda so that they can give them the respect they deserve.

The conservatives have been doing this for decades. If it isn’t the deficit, it’s generational warfare or it’s fearmongering that “the cupboard will be bare,” as Reagan used to claim back in the 1960s. It’s always something with these people, with the prescription always the same — end the government guaranteed pension and health programs.I think we can also assume that one of the main purposes of the Little Friskies Fiscal Scold Tour is to make health care reform just too scary for the folks. They may not be able to end social security as we know it just yet — but they might just be able to help the special interests derail universal health care. No matter what the evidence, they’ll find something to justify their agenda.

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Sociopathic Scribes

by digby

I wrote a little bit about the Chandra Levy case apparently being resolved a while back, but I hadn’t heard about Chief Inquisitor and slavering witch hunter Lisa DePaulo’s thoroughly disgusting revisit of the case. Charles Pierce writes:

Those of us whose memories stretch beyond lunchtime will recall la DePaulo as the hard bitten scribe who spent the summer of 2001 all but accusing former congressman Gary Condit of having murdered Chandra Levy. She wrote an extended magazine treatment for Talk that, now that the actual murderer’s turned up, can be used as a textbook example of what happens when you combine sub-tabloid hyperventilation–“Chandra was waiting for her man.” Hubba-hubba!–with the professional standards of the nitwit on the next barstool. Get an account of a ballgame as wrong in a 25,000-circulation daily as she did the biggest story of that summer, and you’re sweeping out the print shop by dawn. Anyway. Here’s the lameass mea culpa.

Lameass is far too kind. Her self-serving little screed really should prevent her from ever practicing journalism again. This woman was convinced that Gary Condit killed Chandra Levy and she went on television day after day for months to make that case. She was wrong. And yet she justifies her witchunting by saying he acted suspiciously. I guess in the world of big time journalism that’s what passes for ethics.

And she does it with the trademark snotty, juvenile attitude she showed that whole summer as she smeared this man daily all over television:

I will never forget a moment during the Summer of Chandra in 2001 when I ended up on an elevator at CNN with Jeff Greenfield. He turned to me and said, “So, if a serial killer did this, will you apologize to Gary Condit?” To which I, being in the asshole-mood that I was, replied: “So, if Condit did this, will you apologize to all the serial killers?” I laughed. He did not.

Greenfield obviously had some respect for the truth and the law.

She goes on to accuse Condit of acting like OJ because upon being vindicated he complained about the insatiable sensationalism. She even puts the word vindicated in scare quotes. Still determined to smear him as a murderer who got away, even now that they have someone else who confessed to the crime, she cutely evades responsibility (as she and the rest of her ilk are wont to do) by attacking him for getting a lawyer and being a cad, as if those things are the equivalent of murder. (The fact that vicious media harpies like DePaulo were on TV every night insisting he was the only obvious suspect might possibly explain why his lawyer would tell him to be circumspect about what he said. There was a lynch mob after him, after all.)

The man stood accused of murder for the past eight long years and this is Lisa DePaulo’s “apology”:

But OK, let’s give Gary Condit his due. He wasn’t the murderer, after all. And worse: The poor bastard has gone from the perch of power to scooping Baskin-Robbins ice cream in Carefree, Arizona, and making ends meet with multimillion-dollar libel suits. (I remember when I first heard the Baskin-Robbins thing. Chandra’s favorite ice cream, I thought—smooth move, Gary.)

That’s it.

Gary Condit was no angel. He committed adultery and didn’t rush to tell anyone about it when she went missing. So, Lisa DePaulo and her pals worked themselves up into a frenzy and determined that he was her killer. And they destroyed him. TYo this day, DePaulo, self-appointed protector of adult women everywhere who choose to have affairs with married men, feels perfectly justified in doing it:

Now with the imminent arrest of Ingmar Guandique, Chandra Levy is being remembered once more. The other night on Fox News, Geraldo Rivera had the good sense (or shamelessness) to ask the same question to Bob Levy, Chandra’s still-distraught father that Jeff Greenfield had once asked me: Did he think Gary Condit deserved an apology? Bob stumbled through his answer—“A lot of things were going on at that time. There were certain actions that were suspicious and devious.”—You had to see his expression to know what he was really feeling: He screwed my daughter. In every sense. And at the end of the day, we still can’t forgive him for that.

What is she, a priest? What possible standing does this person have to be issuing forgiveness to anyone? Her presumptuousness literally knows no bounds.
The man is gulty of having an affair, which destroyed his life, and which had nothing whatsoever to do with the disappearance and murder of Chandra Levy. Gary Condit didn’t even break any laws. But DePaulo still insists that he is some sort of sociopath — and excuses her own disgusting behavior by comparing his “crime” to homicide saying he deserved the twisted obsession in which she and her cohorts drowned themselves that horrid summer. (But then that particular illness had been prevalent in Washington for some years at that point, hadn’t it?)I submit that she is the one with the problem, a big one. And it’s a problem that renders her incapable of being a reliable journalist. If she cannot see that wrongly accusing someone of being a murderer requires a serious reevaluation of where she went wrong and a sincere apology for doing it, then she can’t be trusted. She obviously has no ethical compass.

This horrible little screed is the most vivid example of everything that’s wrong with American journalism I’ve seen in quite some time — the adolescent shallowness, the shrill sanctimony, the arrogance with which they wield their power, the sheer immorality of wrongly accusing someone of a heinous crime and feeling absolutely no remorse.

(And aren’t lack of remorse and empathy two of the defining characteristics of the sociopath? I’m just asking …)

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Felonious Derivatives

by digby

These AIG bonuses certainly are causing a furor and for good reason. It is just such a clear demonstration of the indefatigable chutzpah of these Big Money Boyz. But the AIG story is very, very bad on many levels. For those of you who may not be as conversant with the dark arts of the world of derivatives , this article by James Lieber in the Village Voice may help explain it:

The basic story line so far is that we are all to blame, including homeowners who bit off more than they could chew, lenders who wrote absurd adjustable-rate mortgages, and greedy investment bankers. Credit derivatives also figure heavily in the plot. Apologists say that these became so complicated that even Wall Street couldn’t understand them and that they created “an unacceptable level of risk.” Then these blowhards tell us that the bailout will pump hundreds of billions of dollars into the credit arteries and save the patient, which is the world’s financial system. It will take time—maybe a year or so—but if everyone hangs in there, we’ll be all right. No structural damage has been done, and all’s well that ends well. Sorry, but that’s drivel. In fact, what we are living through is the worst financial scandal in history. It dwarfs 1929, Ponzi’s scheme, Teapot Dome, the South Sea Bubble, tulip bulbs, you name it. Bernie Madoff? He’s peanuts. Credit derivatives—those securities that few have ever seen—are one reason why this crisis is so different from 1929. read on …

The article was published at the end of January and some things have happened since then, most astonishingly today’s other bailout news:

Statement of SEIU Secretary-Treasurer Anna Burger on Secretary Geithner’s latest TALF proposal

Washington, DC –Treasury Secretary Geithner’s plan to invite private equity and hedge fund investors to a fire sale of bank assets is a return to the very same policies and practices that triggered the financial crisis in the first place.

Secretary Geithner’s proposal for the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF) would enable private equity firms and hedge funds to buy up higher quality loan securitizations, including auto, consumer, student and small business loans. The Federal government would provide low-cost financing for up to 95% of the purchase price, with private firms putting down as little as 5% and the securitizations as collateral. The hope is then to expand this proposal to include toxic mortgage-backed securities.

Each of these programs could cost taxpayers up to $1 trillion. If the private firms make a profit from the deal, they keep all of it. If they end up losing money, they are only on the hook for the nickel or two of equity they put in. The taxpayers would then assume the rest of the losses. Even worse, subsidizing the purchase up to 19-to-1 will drive up the price of the assets, which would be yet another gift to the same banks that caused this crisis while at the same time putting taxpayers at a much greater risk of bearing huge losses.

If you read the VV article and then this in the same sitting you will come to understand that we may be dealing with something far more nefarious than greedy executives insisting that taxpayers pay their bonuses. As Ian Welsh points out:

There is no reason to do this. If the government is providing 95% of the money, the government might as well provide 100% of the money and just take the profit as well as the risk. Under Geithner’s plan, the government accepts all the risk and none of the profits and puts up almost all of the money? This is ideology run rampant at the cost of common sense. What conceivable reason would Geithner have to pitch something like this? Could it be because he doesn’t believe government should make a profit, or that private investors should take losses? Or, worse than that. . .

Lieber calls it a criminal conspiracy and throws down the gauntlet at Eric Holder’s feet. From the administration’s actions, it appears that we are a long way from them seeing it in those terms. But maybe we need to start thinking about it that way. It tends to clarify things quite a bit.

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The List Is Coming, The List Is Coming!

by dday

The buzzing of excitement at the concept of Barack Obama awakening the sleeping giant of “the list” to help him pass his budget seems like a Washington-centric read of things. First of all, Barack Obama isn’t doing anything. Organizing for America has a separate organization, and they are making their determinations separately. Second, this isn’t the “first” deployment of the blessed list – there were stimulus meetings last month. Third, the idea that off-cycle organizing is novel and interesting is an example of why Washington consultants shouldn’t be trusted to run anybody’s campaign. Let’s look at what the ask is here:

The campaign, which will be run under the aegis of the Democratic National Committee, will rely heavily on the 13 million-strong e-mail list put together during the campaign and now under the control of Organizing for America (OFA), a group overseen by the DNC. Aides familiar with the plan said it is an unprecedented attempt to transfer the grass-roots energy built during the presidential campaign into an effort to sway Congress […]

(David) Plouffe, who passed up a formal role in the White House but remains a conduit to the army of Obama volunteers, sent an e-mail to the OFA mailing list over the weekend signaling the ramping up of the campaign for the president’s budget. “In the next few weeks we’ll be asking you to do some of the same things we asked of you during the campaign — talking directly to people in your communities about the President’s ideas for long-term prosperity,” he wrote.

That push begins today with an e-mail asking volunteers to go door to door Saturday to urge their neighbors to sign a pledge in support of Obama’s budget plan.

Hey idiots, THAT’S WHAT YOU DO in an off-election year, or at least it’s what you should do. Keeping in touch with neighbors and having what amounts to precinct captains in every corner of America is standard political organizing, and it’s shameful that it has taken until now to get around to it. A pre-cursor to increasing political engagement nationwide is building up trusted networks in communities, so that individuals know where to go to get information and steps for action. This is not transformational, it’s righting a grave wrong. Furthermore, the OFA/DNC effort is being asinine by re-starting this process over again and not retaining the on-the-ground organizers that were already implementing the 50-state strategy under Howard Dean. In addition, there are already email and Web-based campaigns that are very sharp, applying pressure on Democrats and Republicans alike – a good example is the Color of Change action to flood South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford with phone calls today for rejecting stimulus money (this enhances a DNC on-air effort to call out Sanford).

The lack of off-cycle organizing that is targeted on principles and explanations for policy is WHY there are so many wayward corporate Democrats talking about defying the President on his mostly progressive budget. The Party has long lost touch with the people who support it at the ballot. And the other side of this is that people who are energized by being instruments of change in the election are not necessarily going to hop to answer the call on whatever issue some folks in Washington decide is the most important. Here in California, I can tell you there is about four times as much energy and organizing going into marriage equality than there is on national priorities. And that focus is different depending on the regional area.

That OFA is deploying its list should not be a cause for joy; it should be a cause for embarrassment. And frankly, I don’t quite trust the same people that neglected this kind of activity for 50 years to be the ones to jumpstart it.

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