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Month: April 2009

Individualist Dittoheads

by digby

Funny:

Speaking of kings, Rush also had some unkind words for Larry. On his program last night, King said last night: “[Y]ou can be individuals as much as you like. … Somebody has got to think for the masses.” This set Rush off, demanding to know at what point in American history has anyone ever thought of the masses. Rush said FDR might count as an example, but look at how people lived under him. Rush expanded on this later on, saying that the “masses” are “you faceless dorks who can’t fend for themselves,” and “elitists” like King who demand that the masses be considered. (This from a guy whose fans proudly call themselves “dittoheads.”)

Slick

by digby

Following on of dday’s post yesterday about Colin Powell’s interview with Maddow, C&L now has up the transcript of the exchange on torture. It’s worth looking at in print, to parse his actual words:

RACHEL: On the issue of intelligence—tainted evidence and those things—were you ever present at meetings at which the interrogation of prisoners, like Abu Zubaida, other prisoners in those early days, where the interrogation was directed? Where specific interrogation techniques were approved. It has been reported on a couple of different sources that there were Principals Meetings, which you would have typically been there, where interrogations were almost play-by-play discussed.

POWELL: They were not play-by-play discussed but there were conversations at a senior level as to what could be done with respect to interrogation. I cannot go further because I don’t have knowledge of all the meetings that took place or what was discussed at each of those meetings and I think it’s going to have to be the written record of those meetings that will determine whether anything improper took place.

But it was always the case that, at least from the State Department’s standpoint, we should be consistent with the requirements of the Geneva Convention. And that’s why this was such a controversial, controversial issue. But you’ll have to go, and in due course I think we all will go, to the written record of what memos were signed. I’m not sure what memos were signed or not signed. I didn’t have access to all of that information.

MADDOW: If there was a meeting, though, at which senior officials were saying, were discussing and giving the approval for sleep deprivation, stress positions, water boarding, were those officials committing crimes when they were giving that authorization?

POWELL: You’re asking me a legal question. I mean I don’t know that any of these items would be considered criminal. And I will wait for whatever investigations that the government or the Congress intends to pursue with this.

MADDOW: There have been two Bush administration officials now who have said explicitly that what we did at Guantanamo was torture. One of them was the State Department general counsel for Guantanamo litigation, a man named Vijay—excuse me—Padmanabhan.

POWELL: I don’t know him.

MADDOW: Also Susan Crawford, who heads up the military tribunals at Guantanamo. Both have said it was torture. Do you think that they are wrong? Do you feel like you have enough information to know if people were waterboarded? Is that torture?

POWELL: I will let those who are making the legal determination of that make that judgment. Susan Crawford has made a statement and she is in a position of authority to make such a statement, has access to all of the information. The lawyer you mentioned who is working in, I guess, the legal advisor’s office in the State Department, but I don’t believe I know him, has made statements recently. What’s the basis for his statements and what meetings he was in and whether he was in Guantanamo, I just don’t know.

MADDOW: I guess have to ask that—just a broader question about whether or not you have regrets, not about what the Bush administration did broadly in the years that you were Secretary of State, but the decisions that you participated in about interrogation, about torture, about the other things.

POWELL: We had no meetings on torture. It’s constantly said that the meetings—I had an issue with this—we had meetings on what torture to administer. What I recall, the meetings I was in—I was not in all of the meetings and I was not an author of many of the memos that have been written (and some have come out, some have not come out). The only meetings I recall were where we talked about what is it we can do with respect to trying to get information from individuals who were in our custody. And I will just have to wait until the full written record is available and has been examined.

MADDOW: I don’t mean to press you on this to the point of discomfort but there is an extent to which there is a legal discussion around this where everybody feels a little constrained by the legal terms and whether or not they are a legal professional. There is also the policy implications that you’ve been so eloquent about, in terms of what the implications are of these policies for the U.S. abroad in a continuing way. And you’ve been very optimistic in thinking that America still has a reservoir of good will around the world that we can call on regardless of these difficulties that we’ve had around these issues.

If specific interrogation techniques were being approved by people at the political level in the Cabinet, it doesn’t—the legal niceties of it almost become less important.

POWELL: I don’t know where these things were being approved at a political level.

MADDOW: If there was a Principals Meeting at the White House to discuss interrogation techniques?

POWELL: It does not mean it was approved, anything was approved, at a meeting.

MADDOW: OK.

POWELL: It depends on did the meeting end up in a conclusion or was it just a briefing that then went to others to make a final decision on and to document. And so it is a legal issue and I think we have to be very careful and I have to be very careful because I don’t want to be seen as implicating anybody or accusing anybody because I don’t have the complete record on this. And that complete record I think in due course will come out.

Now Powell is saying that he can’t make a judgment about this because he wasn’t in all of the meetings. Of course, he could talk about the meeting in which he did participate, but he won’t. And then he retreats into excuses about legality and says he doesn’t want to implicate anyone else. Very, very slick. But he does say one thing that’s worth noting. He says the White house principals groups didn’t make the final decisions, which indicates that the decisions went all the way to the president. After all, Junior was the only “White House principal” who wasn’t in those meetings.

And like everyone from Cheney to Bush to Obama when he insists on using that awkward locution “America doesn’t torture” no matter what the question, he insults our intelligence with comments like this:

We had no meetings on torture. It’s constantly said that the meetings—I had an issue with this—we had meetings on what torture to administer. What I recall, the meetings I was in—I was not in all of the meetings and I was not an author of many of the memos that have been written (and some have come out, some have not come out). The only meetings I recall were where we talked about what is it we can do with respect to trying to get information from individuals who were in our custody.

It’s infuriating. They had no meetings on torture, only on “what is is we can do with respect to trying to get information from individuals who were in our custody.” Which was a discussion of techniques that any sentient being considers torture! And, in fact, it has been reported in more than one account that they actually had CIA people acting out the torture techniques for the White House principals.

As for Powell’s insistence that a complete record will come out in due course — why would that be? There are no official inquiries, no investigations, no hearings, no nothing. As a result, the “complete record” will undoubtedly be competing narratives of events and it will never be adequately settled. Nobody will be held responsible and our society will never have a “ruling” on the definition of torture and whether or not we prohibit it. And that’s pretty disturbing since torture was considered a taboo for many years prior to this recent decent into barbarity.

Colin Powell can pretend that he isn’t responsible because he didn’t make the “final” decision all he wants. But if he sat in meetings when they were discussing what any decent human being would describe as torture, and went along with it, then he’s as guilty as the rest. But then Powell has quite a history of involvement with barbaric acts, doesn’t he?

America’s Worst People

by dday

I mentioned that Congress passed a budget yesterday. In the Senate, the vote played out almost exclusively among party lines, with only two Senators – Evan Bayh and Ben Nelson – crossing the aisle. They are the two most conservative Democrats in the 111th Congress, by voting record (I would throw out Bayh’s record when he was musing running for President in the 2005-2006 Congress). And they didn’t only vote against the budget – they voted definitively FOR a motion to recommit, which essentially would have substituted this budget for a Republican version.

Enter Mike Johanns, the freshman Republican senator from Nebraska whose amendment preventing the Senate from passing climate change legislation through the reconciliation process passed on Tuesday.

He also authored a different measure–not an amendment, but a “motion to recommitt”–which would have scrapped the budget that passed and replaced it with a much more conservative version. Most significantly, it would have indexed non-defense, non-veterans discretionary spending to the expected rate of inflation. It failed 43-55–for all intents and purposes a mirror image of the vote on the final budget resolution. Which is to say that Bayh and Nelson voted for the “Johanns Budget”.

So how did these two Republicans, who voted affirmatively for a Republican budget, justify their votes? They said it costs too much.

Nelson defended his vote in a prepared statement:

“The administration inherited a lot of red ink in this budget, along with our ailing economy. But this budget still has trillion dollar-plus deficits in the next two years, and adds unsustainably to the debt. These are tough times, and the federal government needs to take a lesson from American families and cut down on the things we can do without.

I respect the Administration offering an honest budget…but it just costs too much.”

Similarly, Bayh issued a statement saying he opposed the budget in an attempt to be the voice of “fiscal responsibility“:

“[U]nder this budget, our national debt skyrockets from $11.1 trillion today to an estimated $17 trillion in 2014. As a percentage of our gross domestic product, it reaches a precarious 66.5 percent. The deficit remains larger than our projected economic growth, an unsustainable state of affairs. This budget will increase our borrowing from and dependence upon foreign nations. I cannot support such results. We can do better, and for the sake of our nation and our children’s future, we must.”

These same two Senators, the ones whining and crying about fiscal responsibility, voted last night to shield millionaires from taxes on their estates, costing the government $250 billion dollars.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate has voted to cut taxes on multimillion-dollar estates as it gets ready to pass a budget backed by President Barack Obama.

By a 51-48 vote, the Senate embraced a nonbinding but symbolically important amendment by Arkansas Democrat Blanche Lincoln and Arizona Republican Jon Kyl to exempt estates up to $10 million from the estate tax. Estates larger than that would be taxed at a 35 percent rate.

Tim Fernholz has more on this nonsense, including the good news that this will likely never make law. But let’s just soak in this for a minute. The two ConservaDems who voted against the budget on the grounds of fiscal responsibility voted to give a handout to families with estates over $7 million dollars. Tremayne at Open Left has a chart showing just exactly who this tax policy would affect.

Hard to see it, but those with annual incomes in the millions are represented by the vertical red line on the left and those making less than a million (i.e., almost everyone) are the horizontal red line on the bottom. Lincoln and Kyl are concerned about the people on the vertical red line.

So are Bayh and Nelson, America’s worst people.

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Again?

by digby

Uhm, am I the only one getting a little bit alarmed by these daily stories of random gun rampages all over the country?

I realize we cannot even discuss this situation in terms of the weapons these people use or risk having the gun rights community get upset, but is there anything that can be done about this? The body count is really starting to add up.

Authorities are at the scene of a building in Binghamton, New York, where there are “multiple” shooting victims and hostages are being held, a county spokesman said.

Broome County Director of Emergency Services Brett Chellis said there is an “active” shooting situation at the American Civic Association, and that several law enforcement agencies are at the scene.

Chellis did not provide numbers of victims or hostages, and had no further details.

Pressconnects.com, a local media Web site, said at least four people were shot and about 20 people had been taken hostage.

Binghamton is about 75 miles south of Syracuse, New York.

According to the United Way of Broome County Web site, the civic association assists immigrants and refugees with immigration and personal counseling, resettlement, citizenship, family reunification.

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Problem Solved, The Banksters Get To Lie Again!

by dday

Yesterday, the Financial Accounting Standards Board approved a change to mark-to-market accounting that will allow banks to pretend they’re still solvent, which apparently will end the crisis in their minds.

A once-obscure accounting rule that infuriated banks, who blamed it for worsening the financial crisis, was changed Thursday to give banks more discretion in reporting the value of mortgage securities.

The change seems likely to allow banks to report higher profits by assuming that the securities are worth more than anyone is now willing to pay for them. But critics objected that the change could further damage the credibility of financial institutions by enabling them to avoid recognizing losses from bad loans they have made.

Critics also said that since the rules were changed under heavy political pressure, the move compromised the independence of the organization that did it, the Financial Accounting Standards Board.

During the financial crisis, the market prices of many securities, particularly those backed by subprime home mortgages, have plunged to fractions of their original prices. That has forced banks to report hundreds of billions of dollars in losses over the last year, because some of those securities must be reported at market value each three months, with the bank showing a profit or loss based on the change.

Bankers bitterly complained that the current market prices were the result of distressed sales and that they should be allowed to ignore those prices and value the securities instead at their value in a normal market. At first FASB, pronounced FAS-bee, resisted making changes, but that changed within a few days of a Congressional hearing at which legislators from both parties demanded the board act.

Shorter banking industry: We should be able to price worthless crap at whatever dollar amount we want! We want a goddamn pony!

What will happen is that the banks will put this into their accounting statements and puff up their earnings reports for the first quarter, then making jazz hands at the market and singing “Let’s put on another show, kids!” It won’t work this time, as James Kwak explains.

Investors and regulators are not idiots. They know what the accounting rules are. If banks claim they were forced to mark their assets down to “fire-sale” prices, investors can look at the facts themselves and apply any upward corrections they want. Now that banks will be able to mark their assets up to prices based solely on their own models, investors will make the downward corrections they want. It’s a little like what happened when companies were forced to account for stock option compensation as expenses; nothing happened to stock prices, because anyone who wanted to could already read the footnotes and do the calculations himself.

However, the situation is not symmetrical, and the change is bad for two reasons. First, fair market value (”mark to market”) has the benefit of being a clear rule that everyone has to conform to. So from the investor’s perspective, you have one fact to go on. The new rule makes asset prices dependent on banks’ internal judgment, and each bank may apply different criteria. So from the investor’s perspective, now you have zero facts to go on. It’s as if auto companies were allowed to replace EPA fuel efficiency estimates with their own estimates using their own tests. We all know the EPA estimates are not realistic, but we can find out exactly how they were obtained and make whatever adjustments we want. If each auto company can use its own criteria, then we have no information at all.

Second, this takes away the bank’s incentive to disclose information. Under the old rule, if a bank had to show market prices but thought they were unfairly low, it would have to show some evidence in order to convince investors of its position. Under the new rule, a bank can simply report the results of its internal models and has no incentive to provide any more information.

So what we get is less information and more uncertainty. That was all reason number one.

Read the whole thing. Didn’t bad accounting standards get us INTO this mess, in some ways (I’m referring to Enron and the various scandals of 2001-2002)?

The banksters want to live in an alternate reality, and will be tempted to raise less capital because of the magic numbers on their books, leaving them even more vulnerable than before. You know it’s a problem when the SEC Commissioners under Bill Clinton AND George Bush denounce it.

The vote drew condemnation from an organization called the Investors Working Group, and the two former S.E.C. chairman who lead it — William H. Donaldson, appointed by the second President Bush, and Arthur Levitt Jr., who served in the Clinton administration.

“In order to create high-quality accounting standards, it is critical that the process be independent and free from political pressure,” the group said in a statement. “This will ensure that such standards are neutral and faithfully represent economic reality. To the extent that these new FASB proposals reduce the free flow of transparent and reliable financial information, they undermine investor interests and weaken their ability to make sound investment decisions.”

This is absurd. And Kevin G. Hall notes that this is EXACTLY what happened during the S&L crisis.

“Why should all assets be treated as if they’re really for sale?” asked Bert Ely, a banking expert who gained wide recognition during the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s.

During the S&L crisis, government regulators initially eased federal accounting rules for troubled S&Ls, which hid their negative worth and allowed them to make even worse decisions that led to their collapse and an expensive federal rescue.

Could it happen again?

“That concern does come up with this situation,” Ely said. “At what point in time do we move from improved accounting to manipulation?”

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Priorities, Or, The Progressive Caucus Needs A Publicist

by dday

The House passed a budget tonight, one that largely contours to Barack Obama’s outline, on a vote of 233-196, with all Republicans opposed. The President responded favorably, saying that “Tonight, the House of Representatives took another step toward rebuilding our struggling economy.” But that was but one of a host of budgets that were voted upon today.

The Progressive Caucus advanced a plan to spend hundreds of billions more on domestic programs than Obama, while cutting back on his defense budget. It failed, 348-84.

Next came a proposal from the conservative Republican Study Conference that would have cut Obama’s domestic spending proposals, and reduced taxes. It was defeated, 322-111.

The Congressional Black Caucus proposed immediately repealing Bush-era tax cuts for wealthy taxpayers, while adding a new tax on couples making over $1 million. It called for greater spending on domestic programs,including education, transportation and job training. It fell, 318-113.

House Republicans presented a comprehensive alternative, including a provision to eliminate the current traditional Medicare program as an option for anyone currently under 55. Upon turning 65, their Medicare coverage would come only from plans operated by private insurance companies. Their costs would be paid at least in part with government funds.

Supporters said the change would prevent Medicare from going broke.

The Republican budget was rejected 293-137. More than three dozen members of the GOP rank and file voted against it, and several officials said the internal opposition stemmed in large measure from controversy surrounding the Medicare proposal.

Also, St. John McCain offered his budget, which included a total spending freeze, today in the Senate, and he got 38 Republican votes for it, including Arlen Specter, who voted for the stimulus package, which included, you know, spending.

But I want to highlight that Progressive Caucus budget, which got short shrift in both the media and the Congress. The budget accurately describes progressive values and suggests what could be possible if politicians were actually straight about the needs of the American people separate from the needs of lobbyists and greedheads on Wall Street:

CPC Budget cuts and revenue raisers highlights:

· Elimination of unneeded, unwanted, and unproven Cold War Era weapons systems ($60 billion/year);

· Elimination of waste, fraud, and abuse at DOD. ($8.7 billion/year);

· Redeployment of all U.S. troops and military contractors out of Iraq ($90 billion);

· Repeal of Bush tax breaks for the top 1% of taxpayers ($222 billion);

· Instituting “Make Wall Street Pay For Wall Street’s Bailout” tax of .25% on all stock transactions ($150 billion/year);

· Closing egregious corporate tax loopholes ($100 billion/year);and

· Cap on tax deductibility of excessive executive compensation ($20 billion/year).

CPC Budget investment highlights:

· Provides $991 billion for non-military discretionary spending in FY10, $469 billion above President Obama’s request, primarily to help rescue the faltering U.S. economy and those Americans hardest hit;

· Provides $479 billion as sufficient defense spending level;

· Provides a strong economic stimulus package of $300 billion that includes an extension of unemployment insurance, an increase in assistance for food stamps, transportation infrastructure, school construction, water and flood control projects;

· Provides $120 billion a year for health care for all Americans; and

· Provides $1.22 trillion to cut the poverty rate in half over the next decade.

That’s a real-live progressive budget – what’s more, it’s no less fiscally responsible than the President’s, with the $469 billion in spending more than canceled out by the $600 billion-plus in savings. And it got 84 votes. Sometimes it’s good to know where we stand.

It’s important for the Progressive Caucus to set this marker every year, to create a budget and argue out in the open. They just need a better publicist.

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Better Than Cupcakes

by digby

Vanity Fair is featuring a very entertaining couple of political articles this month. The first is by da man, James Wolcott, on the quaint, anachronistic stylings of the DC punditocrisy in the Obama era:

If it were possible to reach into the television screen and throttle the scrawny neck of the Washington establishment, shake it until the dice rattled and the stem came loose, would that be wrong? Would that be considered unsporting? It pains me, as a bringer of dharma and light, to feel driven to imaginary acts of symbolic violence, but even a man of peace can take only so much until frustration blazes to the upper floor. Watching ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, for instance, is like receiving an engraved invitation to apoplexy. When the panel that Stephanopoulos conducts after his “Newsmakers” interviews includes Sam Donaldson, George Will, and Cokie Roberts, longtime observers of Roman folly, it is like being swallowed by an hourglass; they saw away at the same old creaky strophes of received wisdom as if nothing short of divine revelation could awaken a new thought, eject the dust bunnies from their brains.

There’s more. Yum.

The other article is by Michael Wolf on the undisputed leader of the Republican Party:

The most elemental fact about the Limbaugh career might be that, outside of seriously corrupt dictatorships, nobody has made as much money from politics as Rush Limbaugh. Since this Top 40 D.J. and local talker in Sacramento went national, in 1988, as a right-wing voice, he has made hundreds of millions of dollars in salary, bonuses, participation in advertising revenue, and the sale of his show to the Sam Zell–controlled Jacor radio production company (Zell, a real-estate entrepreneur, now controls the Chicago Tribune), which was then sold to Clear Channel. His new contract, signed last summer, is worth a reported $400 million over eight years. There are, too, his newsletter, his paid Internet site with its voluminous traffic, his blockbuster best-sellers, his speaking fees, his half-dozen cars, including a Maybach 57S, his Gulfstream G550, and his Palm Beach estate with five houses.

Rush’s business plan seriously impacts on the future of the Republican Party.

Read both of these for the sheer enjoyment of the entertaining writing and keen observation.

Under The Rock

by digby

Dahlia Lithwick wonders why liberal bloggers haven’t been beating back the rightwing on the Harold Koh nomination and I can only admit to ignorance of the controversy. (I will say in my own defense that if I addressed every batshit insane right wing controversy I literally would do nothing else.)

This one is really absurd, however, and Lithwick is right that it deserves some attention:

[B]y my most recent tally, every one of the anti-Koh rants dutifully repeats a canard that first appeared in a hatchet piece in the New York Post by former Bush administration speechwriter Meghan Clyne. She asserts that Koh believes “Sharia law could apply to disputes in US courts.” The evidence for her claim? “A New York lawyer, Steven Stein, says that, in addressing the Yale Club of Greenwich in 2007, Koh claimed that ‘in an appropriate case, he didn’t see any reason why Sharia law would not be applied to govern a case in the United States.’ “

Needless to say, if the future lawyer for the State Department wanted to apply sharia law willy-nilly in American courtrooms, it would be a terrifying prospect. And so Daniel Pipes can title his post “Obama’s Harold Koh, Promoter of Shari’a?” … OMG, people! Dean Koh wants to see women executed in the middle of the town square for wearing the wrong color burkha.

Yes, it’s really that stupid.

Lithwick clears up these ridiculous claims and explains how it all got started, (it’s the usual Malkin-style wingnut nonsense) and brings up the similar case of Dawn Johnson, Obama’s choice for the OLC, and how she is being slandered by the right wing noise machine.

It’s outrageous. But I have to confess that I’m a little bit surprised that Lithwick thinks something new is happening with this and that the left is somehow unaware of this. The fact is that the right always targets certain appointees and liberal voices for character assassination. That this now starts on certain well-chosen blogs rather than only on the radio or through their direct mail networks or (back in the day) at their John Birch Society kaffe klatches is only a matter of form. This has been one of their methods for more than 40 years. They do it to keep the troops engaged and to to symbolically draw lines in the sand.

Johnson has ostensibly been chosen for her abortion views, but the real agenda is, of course, to punish her for her stand on torture. And the rightwing hit squad is aided in her case by the serious village people who believe she was a little bit too honest about torture and detention policies and worry that it sends a bad message to validate her position. Koh has been the chosen target for the 9/11 hysteria/anti-state department crowd, for comments he didn’t even make. (This tells you haw deeply they are having to dig.)

But from what I gather, both people will be confirmed and whatever damage their reputations have born is the price that anyone can pay if they take a big job in a Democratic administration. That’s how the right wing rolls.

If there were any chance that Johnson and Koh could actually be denied their places, I would guess that the liberal blogosphere would be intensely engaged. But from what I understand, the filibuster threat on Johnson is just hot air and that nobody takes the nutty Koh critics seriously. There is a certain amount of procedural kabuki that these targets have to undergo, but in the end they’ll be confirmed.

It’s horrible that people have to put up with this, of course. But the modern conservative movement has a malignant, destructive impulse at its very core that will persist in doing this no matter what. It works for them. Right now, out of power, they don’t have the capacity to really affect the outcome but they do it anyway to keep their paranoid loathing simmering until they can once again get traction.

I wish I thought this could be changed in some way. But I don’t. This aspect of politics, particularly American politics, is always going to be with us in some form or another. It’s how (some) humans roll.

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Lugubrious Tales Of Woe

by dday

Zack Roth catches Chris Matthews mistaking Eric Holder’s dismissal of charges in the Ted Stevens case, due to prosecutorial misconduct, with the notion that Stevens was completely innocent and the charges should have never been filed.

It’s no surprise that Matthews has no idea how the criminal justice system works. And of course, the rest of the Village establishment has taken up for their pal Ted as well, deliberately misreading yesterday’s events and intoning gravely how this honorable man has been “besmirched.”

George Stephanopoulos of ABC News (via Twitter): “Whatever your politics, hard not to feel for Ted Stevens.”

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL): “This incredible man, he served his country well, he was a power player … he took care of Alaska.”

Sen. Robert Bennett (R-UT): “We’re delighted that it’s been demonstrated that Ted was telling us the truth all along. (Ed: Needless to say, nothing of the sort was demonstrated.) Obviously, we’re a little disappointed that this didn’t come out before the election….I think he can get his reputation back. I don’t know where he goes to get his legal fees back.”

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT): “Here’s a guy who gave 60 years of service to this country, and he was screwed [by federal prosecutors] … How does he get his reputation back?”

Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ): “That’s why we have the presumption of innocence … I never called for him to step down or resign or anything like that. I think those who did might regret it now.”

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK): “[I am] deeply disturbed that the government can ruin a man’s career and then say, ‘Never mind.'”

Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-HI): “I didn’t tell him this, but, you know, he’s really suffered … I don’t want to use the word ‘angry,’ but I’m just disappointed that prosecutors were involved in that type of misbehavior … Lawyers’ fees are not cheap. He’ll have to work the rest of his life.”

As Roth notes, the bulk of these quotes appeared in “responsible Beltway publications,” without being challenged or balanced with a statement of the plain fact that nothing in the dismissal of the suits admits Stevens’ innocence.

For the record I think Holder did the right thing. The prosecutors clearly committed misconduct and that shouldn’t go by without consequences. I also hope this is just the beginning of restoring the assault on the rule of law committed at the highest levels of the Justice Department, and Don Siegeleman’s phone should be getting a ring shortly.

But this is classic Village behavior. Their friend, the guy they see shopping at the Safeway all the time, gets off on a technicality, and the collective water works come out, and these encomiums, these tales of woe. Meanwhile thousands of people are railroaded all the time in the criminal justice system, a key piece of our failed prison policy. But of course the Village doesn’t KNOW those folks.

…and the Alaska GOP thinks we should rerun Stevens’ Senate election. Can’t wait to see that in Ruth Marcus’ column shortly.

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The Dream Will Never Die

by digby

Tweety could still make it happen:

On the subject of media, yesterday Chris Matthews was in Nathans for lunch. His guest was a political consultant from Los Angeles, who would have handled his campaign had he run for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania. He has publicly said he would stay in his job at MSNBC rather than become a candidate. I happened to stop in and sat with them for a while and tried to convince Chris to change his mind and run. The consultant said he has to decide in the next week. Chris had one reason for not running, and I did not think it is good enough. The consultant agreed. We tried, but I don’t think we convinced Chris to change his mind. I wish he would. Chris would be an interesting addition to the Senate. Can you imagine him and Al Franken there together, in the same club?

Yes we can. After all, the Senate already features the comedy stylings of James Inhofe and John Cornyn.

Update: Of course, that’s nothing to the comedy revue that’s being performed daily in the House.