Month: April 2009

What Krugman Said

by tristero

From one of his greatest columns:

Isn’t revisiting the abuses of the last eight years, no matter how bad they were, a luxury we can’t afford?

No, it isn’t, because America is more than a collection of policies. We are, or at least we used to be, a nation of moral ideals. In the past, our government has sometimes done an imperfect job of upholding those ideals. But never before have our leaders so utterly betrayed everything our nation stands for…

…what we really should do for the sake of the country is have investigations both of torture and of the march to war. These investigations should, where appropriate, be followed by prosecutions — not out of vindictiveness, but because this is a nation of laws.

We need to do this for the sake of our future. For this isn’t about looking backward, it’s about looking forward — because it’s about reclaiming America’s soul.

This has been another edition of What Krugman Said.

Hundred Days Navel Gazing

by digby

Political scholar Thomas Mann gave an interesting speech looking at the first hundred days. His assessment of Obama as a somewhat enigmatic leader who is adeptly learning how to use the levers of partisan power without appearing to be ideological seems correct to me.

Perhaps the most startling thing is that Mann openly acknowledges that the two parties are not divided by silly Washington conventions that can be cured by somebody putting them all in a room together and telling them to knock it off. He attributes the partisan divide, accurately in my opinion, as serious, substantial differences of ideology and philosophy between the parties:

It is undeniable that the parties in Congress remain deeply polarized. As I shall argue shortly, this polarization is not simply an affectation of petty politicians in Washington; it reflects an ideological chasm between Democratic and Republican voters across the country. Obama’s overtures to the opposition party have been unsuccessful to date because Republicans reject the central components of his agenda, including his economic recovery program. In less polarized times, the seriousness of the crisis and decisive nature of the Democratic electoral victory would have produced a significant number of Republican votes for the fiscal stimulus. But not a single Republican in the House and only three in the Senate voted for the stimulus; most have since gone on record supporting a repeal of the stimulus, a freeze on federal spending, and a massive, permanent, across-the-board tax cut – a combination of Herbert Hoover and Arthur Laffer – because that is what they believe. How can Obama split the difference with the Republican opposition without vitiating a stimulus he believes is the minimum required to avoid a serious risk of deflation and depression?

(And here I thought all this arguing was just bad manners …)

He points out that there are issues that don’t cut as easily along partisan lines and that Obama may find some Republican allies down the road on issues like Afghanistan. That’s certainly possible, but it seems to me that it will just be the usual handful of centrists and mavericks. The party as a whole would turn into pacifist before they back anything Obama wants to do. It’s clear they will not rethink their tactics or temper their extremist ideology until they have lost a few more elections.

Mann concludes with this:

Obama is likely to stick with his philosophy of inclusiveness even as he manipulates the partisan levers that are a critical resource at the beginning of his presidency. His ambitious progressive agenda is tempered with an instinctive pragmatism. As presidential scholar Fred Greenstein has noted, Obama elevates workability and political feasibility over abstract doctrine in his leadership style. At times this will require playing partisan hard ball but even then with an even temperament that laments its necessity to get some big things done. If the smattering of green sprouts in this spring’s economy accurately forecasts a bottoming out of the severe downturn later this year and a gradual recovery, Obama has a good chance of harvesting some important legislative victories in the fall, minimizing the 2010 midterm loss of seats by his party in the House (and possibly gaining the one seat needed in the Senate after Al Franken of Minnesota is seated to make fifty-nine, allowing the Democrats to reach the magic sixty), putting himself and the Democrats in Congress in position to pursue their agenda over six or eight years, and making significant strides toward bolstering their majority status in the country.

That sounds promising. But I actually think we’d all better be praying to the deities of our choice that the economy picks up pretty robustly and the financial system gets its act together fairly soon. If this crisis gets worse or drags on too long, anything could happen.

Last Chance

by dday

I’m headed out to Sacramento for the California Democratic Party convention, so just a final mention – I have a petition to tell the CDP to support the resolution to impeach Torture Judge Jay Bybee of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. There are musings about independent commissions and special prosecutors in Washington – the establishmentarians in the Senate and the more cautious types in the White House are trying to resist the pressure, but this is bigger than them now.

The central debate dominating discussions of a possible investigation into torture by the Bush administration seems to have shifted sharply in the past few days: from whether such an investigation should take place, to now what form it will have when it comes […]

Thursday morning, Sen. Claire McCaskill told MSNBC that she was “sure there will be some form of investigation in Congress.” She said she could not make the same value judgments about the other two forms of investigation.

Meanwhile, one of the few legislative vehicles actually geared toward starting the torture investigation process already has bipartisan support. Legislation backed by House Judiciary chairman John Conyers to establish “a national commission on presidential war powers and civil liberties” has one rather notable co-sponsor: Republican Rep. Walter Jones, a vocal GOP critic of the Bush administration. Jones’ office did not return requests for comment but Conyers’ office confirmed the North Carolinian remains a co-sponsor of the legislation.

I believe this is a direct result of the grassroots activism of the past week or so, and we must press on all fronts, and the impeachment of Bybee, who sits on the 9th Circuit in San Francisco, is particularly acute here in this state. Currently I have 4,435 signatures – please sign by midnight tonight and I will present yours and everyone else’s name at the Resolutions Committee tomorrow at 3pm. If we get this resolution passed, we will have a powerful tool to force California members of Congress to initiate hearings in the House Judiciary Committee to impeach Bybee. I think it’s absolutely possible that we make this happen over the weekend – but the leadership of the CDP needs to know that there’s a large and powerful constituency behind this effort.

Please sign the petition if you haven’t already. And California’s Courage Campaign has their own petition, with around 8,500 signatures at last count. 13,000 people arguing for impeachment is a powerful number – let’s go for more. I’ll let you know how it goes.

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Rivers Coming Togetherby digbyRon Suskind on Maddow yesterday:

And what‘s fascinating here, if you run the timeline side by side, you see, really, for the first time from that report that the key thing being sent down in terms of the request by the policymakers, by the White House, is find a link between Saddam and al Qaeda so that we essentially can link Saddam to the 9/11 attacks and then march into Iraq with the anger of 9/11 behind us. That was the goal and that was being passed down as the directive.It‘s, you know, it‘s often called the requirement inside the CIA for both agents with their sources and interrogators with their captives. “Here‘s what we‘re interested in, here‘s what we, the duly elected leaders, want to hear about. Tell us what you can find.”What‘s fascinating, in the Senate report, is finally clear confirmation that that specific thing was driving many of the activities, and mind you, the frustration inside of the White House that was actually driving action. The quote, in fact, inside of the Senate report from a major said that as frustration built inside of the White House, that there was no link that was established—because the CIA told the White House from the very start there is no Saddam/al Qaeda link. We checked it out. We did every which way. Sorry.The White House simply wouldn‘t take no for an answer and it went with another method. Torture was the method. “Get me a confession, I don‘t care how you do it.” And that bled all the way through the government, both on the CIA side and the Army side. It‘s extraordinary.Mind you, Rachel, this is important. This is not about an impetus to foil an upcoming potential al Qaeda attacks. The impetus here is largely political diplomatic. The White House had a political diplomatic problem. It wanted it solved in the run-up to the war.And mind you, and I think the data will show this—after the invasion, when it becomes clear in the summer, just a few months after in 2003, that there are no WMD in Iraq. That‘s the summer of Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame—my goodness, there are no WMD. Now, the White House is being hit with a charge that they took us to war under false pretenses. That‘s when the frustration is acute.My question, the question for investigators now: Is how many of these interrogations were driven specifically by a desire to come up with the Saddam/al Qaeda link? It‘s essentially rivers coming together.

All day I’ve been seeing torture apologists all over TV frantically trying to block this particular line of inquiry. They know that it’s potentially the most explosive revelation of all. If the White House ordered torture to try to get the prisoners to falsely confess to links between al Qaeda and Iraq … well all bets are off. I have to say that even in all my cynicism about the Cheney gang, this didn’t occur to me, but now it seems obvious. They used torture techniques that were specifically designed to get false confessions after all. Is it really reasonable to believe they did that by accident? Update: Marcy Wheeler did a slightly rough transcript of Liz Cheney’s interview with Norah O’Donnell today. Liz seems a little nervous. I wonder why?

A Plethora Of Possibilities

by digby

From County Fair:

The first 100 days of the Obama administration are coming to a close, and there has certainly been no shortage of unhinged and outrageous media moments.

From Rush Limbaugh saying that “we are being told to bend over and grab the ankles … because his father is black,” to Glenn Beck imitating President Obama pouring gasoline on an “average American,” conservatives in the media have wasted no time in stoking a culture of paranoia with extreme, vitriolic, and often irresponsible rhetoric.
Now it’s your turn to weigh in. Check out this video of the most outrageous media moments from the first 100 days, and then vote for which you think is the worst:

More possibilities here.

There’s a lot to choose from, but I think for sheer crazy, Beck’s pretty much owned the first quarter. But wow. It’s like watching a dying, rabid animal.

Big Media Ezra

by digby

Congratulations to Ezra Klein, who announced today that he’ll be moving his blog to the Washington Post:

The news is true: On May 18th, I’ll be moving about two blocks east and two blocks south to the Washington Post‘s massive building. I will have part of a desk rather than much of an office. I will not have natural light. This blog, too, will change its home, moving to the “columnists and blogs” area of the Post‘s Business section. It will have a gray and white color scheme rather than a red one. It will have a .com address rather than a .org. For all that, the site won’t change much. As now, the core subject area will be domestic and economic policy issues. That means the financial crisis, health care policy, cap and trade, the budget, the congressional process, and all those other fine topics that let me deploy the charts and graphs I so adore. It will still have posts on, say, Clarissa’s little brother, and why people applaud at the opera, and what the tea parties means. That is to say, it will still have opinions and conclusions and reporting and emotion and concerns.

Ezra was the first fellow blogger I ever met personally. Being a fellow Los Angeleno, he had invited me to pitch a project to the LA Weekly with him and some others and we subsequently became pals. At the time he was a handsome, young whippersnapper (still is one, actually) at UCLA and blogging at Pandagon. As we all have seen, he’s since become a power-journalist in the young liberal DC establishment, bringing blogging and its somewhat irregular sensibilities along with him. It was only a matter of time before he moved into MSM blogging. And with this new hire, along with that of former TPM alum, Greg Sargent, the Post is showing they aren’t willing to go the way of the dinosaurs quite just yet. That’s good news for everyone.
Ezra is smart, dedicated and full of energy. He’s also an extremely sweet guy who has always been very kind and generous to me and this blog over the years. I couldn’t be happier for him.

Haggling With Taxpayer-Owned Companies

by dday

This is a maddening enough situation when you isolate it, but keep in mind that the government has kept these same banks afloat with hundreds of billions of dollars in capital.

The Obama administration has entered a tense showdown with several of the nation’s largest banks that appears likely to determine whether Chrysler survives.

Last week the Treasury Department, which runs President Obama’s automobile task force, presented banks holding $6.9 billion in Chrysler’s secured debt with a plan under which they would get about 15 cents on the dollar, or about $1 billion.

That is roughly the trading level of Chrysler debt in recent days, a reflection of Mr. Obama’s declaration that the firm is not viable on its own, and must put together a partnership with Fiat or go out of business […]

On Monday the banks, led by JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup, rejected the administration’s plan outright, with some of the debtholders arguing that they would rather break up Chrysler and sell its assets — notably its Jeep brand — because they believed that they would receive more money selling the assets than they were being offered by the administration.

The lenders offered 65 cents on the dollar and a 40% stake in Chrysler, and the government has now counter-offered with 22 cents and a 5% stake in the reorganized company. The union is sitting on the sidelines at this point.

Can I just re-emphasize how ridiculous this is? For all practical purposes, we own the banks that are haggling with us. And this isn’t the only area in which the banks are using our money to show leverage over our government. Among the millions of dollars in political lobbying, the banksters are stopping progress on consumer bills:

The banks have made it difficult for Congressional Democrats and the White House to give stretched homeowners a stronger hand in negotiating lower monthly payments on mortgages and to prevent credit card companies from imposing higher fees and interest rates.

Having won some early skirmishes by teaming with Republican allies, the banks now appear to have the upper hand and may wind up killing — or at least substantially diluting — both pro-consumer measures.

I don’t think they’ll stop the credit card bill – the President has personally stepped in on that one and I expect a decent bill to pass, the way it did yesterday – but cram-down does look dead, with key Democrats jumping ship. James Kwak correctly sources my anger.

The banks leading the charge over Chrysler: JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup. The banks opposed to cram-downs: Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo. The banks blocking credit card protections: American Express, Bank of America, Capital One Financial, Citigroup, Discover Financial Services, and JPMorgan Chase. All or almost all are bailout beneficiaries. But don’t blame them: they’re just doing what they can to maximize their profits at the expense of the taxpayer, which is perfectly legal (and even ethical, depending on your conception of shareholder rights). Instead, you should be wondering why they are in a position to be maximizing profits at the taxpayer’s expense.

If you’re Tim Geithner or Barack Obama, you’re probably thinking that now would be a nice time to have a controlling interest in these banks so they would stop blocking your efforts to help the rest of the economy. But the government has consistently bent over backward to avoid gaining control over the banks. It began with Henry Paulson (Bush administration) taking non-convertible, non-voting preferred shares last October; it continued with the Citigroup and Bank of America bailouts in November and January (during the transition period), in which the banks got underpriced asset insurance in exchange for more non-voting shares; and it peaked in the third Citigroup bailout in February, when the Obama administration insisted on forcing other investors to convert preferred shares into common, precisely to avoid getting a majority stake.

If the government had simply accepted the ordinary consequences of its actions – majority ownership – it would at least not have to plead for favors from Citigroup and Bank of America, who desperately needed help on any terms the government chose to dictate. Arguably JPMorgan and Wells are in a different situation, since the government was never in a position to buy a majority stake, and they are claiming they only took TARP money as an act of patriotic solidarity. But leaving aside TARP capital, the government has gone to extraordinary lengths to protect the financial system – guarantees on money market funds, increased guarantees on deposits, guarantees on bank debt, massive programs to lend against or purchase securities, not to mention the AIG bailout conduit – without which none of these banks would be in a position to make a profit. Yet it has left the banks in a position to capture the entire surplus from its actions, without getting the kind of concessions that would come in handy now.

When government takes its own tools away from itself, this is the consequence – a society governed by oligarchs.

… Chrysler’s likely to go bankrupt over this, although this could just be a way for the Administration to try and show a little leverage. Thank you o wise banksters for salvaging your profits at the expense of millions of workers.

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Naked Taser

by digby

Apparently, being naked is cause for electrocution these days. (Warning NSFW — and not safe for people who get upset at seeing people being screaming in pain.)

Naked Wizard Tased By Reality from Tracy Anderson on Vimeo.

The police were patient and tried to get this person to put his clothes back on. But after five minutes of talking they shot him full of electricity to get him to comply. What would they have done in this situation before tasers? Put a bullet in him?

Oh, and I really love the gleeful commentary of the person who posted this video on Huffington Post:

The officer grabs the gown and tosses to the Naked Wizard, but he casts it away again. Then the cops put on their rubber gloves, and things get ugly. Herewith, the best Tasering video since “Don’t Tase me bro!”

The people in the crowd don’t seem to be having so much fun watching this guy get tasered. Maybe hearing the screams of pain up close and personal isn’t quite as enjoyable as it is on TV.
The Great American Torture Continuum: as long as it doesn’t cause pain and suffering equal to organ failure or death, it’s all good.

h/t to to everyone who sent this in.

No Reframe

by dday

Greg Sargent is right – the media has managed to find a “he said, she said” entryway into the torture debate by focusing on the irrelevant data point of whether or not torture works. It doesn’t – ask Bush’s FBI Director – but turning this into a debate humanizes the tactic, turning it into some option that’s open to reasonable disagreement instead of a universally rejected, illegal action. We don’t have a debate over whether stealing from rich investors through a Ponzi scheme “worked.” It’s illegal and that’s the end of the story. Here’s Sargent:

This is precisely what Cheney and other Bushies want the debate to be about: Whether torture has stopped terror attacks, as opposed to whether it’s moral, or detrimental to America’s global image, or a boon to Al Qaeda recruitment, or whether the architects of the policy broke the law and should be prosecuted.

The Bushies want this question — “did torture stave off terror attacks and save lives?” — hovering in the air. There’s plenty of evidence that torture hasn’t worked at all and has done more harm than good. Even some former Bush administration officials have conceded it hasn’t done anything to stop terror attacks.

But it’s easy for the Cheney camp to muddy the waters and turn this into a matter of debate by citing unspecified classified info that supposedly supports the claim that it has saved lives — info that we’ll never see. Having the debate focused this way also lays the groundwork for the Cheney camp to say “I told you so” in the event of another terror attack.

And not only do sadists like Bill O’Reilly enable this misdirected debate, but useful idiots like Andrea Mitchell.

The law never asks if what the lawbreakers have done “worked.” The law follows the law to its conclusion. A debate about the efficacy of torturing human beings debases everyone who participates in it. It mainstreams these vile actions. Eric Holder has this exactly right.

Attorney General Eric Holder said Wednesday that he would “follow the law” as he weighed potential prosecutions of Bush administration officials who authorized controversial harsh interrogation techniques […]

“We are going to follow the evidence, follow the law and take that where it leads. No one is above the law,” Holder said at an Earth Day event.

…I should add that the NYT also ran a powerful op-ed today from Ali Soufan, an FBI special agent who interrogated Abu Zubaydah before the CIA decided to take the gloves off, who avers that “there was no actionable intelligence gained from using enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah that wasn’t, or couldn’t have been, gained from regular tactics.” I still say it’s a false debate.

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Golden Shield

by digby

Following up on my post yesterday about the Bush administration being very well aware that the FBI and others in the administration objected to the use of torture and refused to allow their agents to participate, Bob Fertik emailed me to remind me of this:

April 24, 2008, 1:39PM Testifying before the House Judiciary Committee yesterday, FBI Director Robert Mueller made it as clear as he could what the FBI’s reaction to the CIA’s use of waterboarding and other forms of torture in 2002 had been: keep FBI agents out of trouble. But when House Democrats pressed as to why the FBI hadn’t investigated the abuses, Mueller said his hands were tied. The CIA and the Defense Department had the green light. “There has to be a legal basis for us to investigate, and generally that legal basis is given to us by the Department of Justice.” Thanks to John Yoo and others in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, the CIA had its “golden shield.” He also testified that in 2002, he’d “reached out” to the Pentagon and the Department of Justice “in terms of activity that we were concerned might not be appropriate — let me put it that way.” Mueller said he couldn’t testify as to what the reply was, since it might be classified. Given the fact that a group of senior administration officials had agreed on the use of the techniques, you can guess what the answer was. Here’s video:

Now that the OLC memos have been declassified maybe it’s time to ask Mueller about this again.

The point in bringing this up isn’t to say this stuff is news. It isn’t. But the torture apologists are behaving as if government experts were of one mind on this and that any patriot would have gone along. But the FBI disagreed and withdrew themselves from the program entirely because they believed it was illegal. This was something that people in the Justice Department knew, the Pentagon knew, the NSC knew and certainly the White House knew. And it meant nothing to them. Theyjust had some lackeys write a couple of secret memos and went right on torturing.

Giving Bush administration officials any credit for acting in good faith — or out of ignorance — is totally absurd in light of this. The FBI’s adherence to the rule of law in this situation (and the fact that the Bush administration let them do it without reprisals) proves that others could have done the same thing. It’s quite clear that Bush and Cheney knew they didn’t really have a leg to stand on.