Grayson Strikes Again
by digby
Apparently, this was making the rounds on the trading floor today. From CNBC:
viewers, search on youtube for inspector general. The title piece, “is anyone minding the store store at the federal reserve.” Elizabeth Warren is the inspector — excuse me, Elizabeth Coleman is the inspector general — and this cross-examination by representative Alan Grayson is just all over the floor. I’ll say no more. Check it out if you get a minute. thank you very much.
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Lenin Test
by digby
Michael Lind at Salon alerts us to the fact that tomorrow is cut social security day. Again:
On Tuesday, May 12, the trustees who oversee Social Security and Medicare will issue their annual report. I don’t know what will be in the report. But I do know what the response will be. Conservatives, libertarians and center-right Democrats will take whatever the report says as evidence that there is an “entitlement crisis,” which should require us not only to address spiraling healthcare costs (a genuine issue, affecting the private sector as well as Medicare and Medicaid) but also the alleged “crisis” of Social Security (an imaginary problem).
The coalition of libertarian zealots, Jeffersonian conservatives, center-right Democrats and bankers and brokers who would like to earn fees or commissions from the diversion of Social Security payroll taxes into IRAs recycles the same arguments against Social Security, rain or shine, boom or bust. They’ve been doing it for more than a quarter-century, ever since a couple of libertarians wrote up a guide for small-government conservatives on how to spread doubts about a popular, solvent and effective entitlement. These tried-and-true arguments will be dusted off and dragged through the media once again, after the latest Social Security Trustees’ report is published.
He goes on to list the various predictable bogus arguments, which you should review just so you know what coming. But he also informs us about a piece of the history of this of which I was unaware, and it’s fascinating:
In 1983, in the Cato Journal published by the libertarian Cato Institute, Stuart Butler, a transplanted British Thatcherite, and Peter Germanis published their manifesto “Achieving a ‘Leninist’ Strategy.” Small-government conservatives, they argued, should learn from Lenin, who sought to shape history rather than wait patiently for the inevitable evolution of socialism: “Unlike many other socialists at the time, Lenin recognized that fundamental change is contingent both upon a movement’s ability to create a focused political coalition and upon its success in isolating and weakening its opponents.”
Our two Leninist libertarians went on to argue: “First, we must recognize that there is a firm coalition behind the present Social Security system, and that this coalition has been very effective in winning political concessions for many years. Before Social Security can be reformed [destroyed], we must begin to divide this coalition and cast doubt on the picture of reality it presents to the general public.” Because the “political power of the elderly will only increase in the future,” Butler and Germanis argued that any plan to phase out Social Security should assure the elderly and near-elderly that they would get their benefits: “By accepting this principle, we may succeed in neutralizing the most powerful element of the coalition that opposes structural reform.”While pursuing a divide-and-rule policy to “neutralize” the elderly and other supporters of Social Security, the authors of the Leninist strategy called for libertarians to build up a counter-alliance consisting of institutions that could profit from the privatization of Social Security: “That coalition should consist of not only those who will reap benefit from the IRA-based private system … but also the banks, insurance companies, and other institutions that will gain from providing such plans to the public [emphasis added].” They continue: “The business community, and financial institutions in particular, would be an obvious element in this constituency. Not only does business have a great deal to gain from a reform effort designed to stimulate private savings, but it also has the power to be politically influential and to be instrumental in mounting a public education campaign.”In true cunning Leninist fashion, the opponents of Social Security would disguise their revolutionary goal by pretending to be interested only in modest, piecemeal reforms: “The first element consists of a campaign to achieve small legislative changes that embellish the private IRA system, making it in practice a small-scale Social Security system that can supplement the federal system.” Only when all of the pieces were in place — when the concerns of the elderly had been “neutralized” by reassuring words, when banks and other businesses seeking to cash in on Social Security privatization were part of the libertarian alliance, and when business-funded campaigns of “education” [that is, propaganda] had convinced most Americans that Social Security was untrustworthy, would the Leninist right reveal its true colors: “If these objectives are achieved, we will meet the next financial crisis in Social Security with a private alternative ready in the wings — an alternative with which the public is familiar and comfortable, and one that has the backing of a powerful political force.”
Now, the stock market crash has taken the wind out of those particular sails for the moment, but
all they really need to do right now is push the idea that the deficit is the single biggest threat to mankind and that only by cutting “entitlements” can we possibly survive as a country. The “alternatives” will undoubtedly be ready and waiting. After all, the country has just added a trillion or so to that very deficit to keep wall street and the banks solvent. It’s a sweet deal all around.
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Smelling Salt Alert
by digby
Are we really going to have a hissy fit about Wanda Sykes making crude jokes about the fatuous gasbag now? Really? It’s inappropriate now for someone to joke about Limbaugh being the 20th highjacker? The guy who called the majority leader “Mullah Daschle?” Who called Obama, “Osama” about 7,320 times? Even Keith Olbermann is wagging his finger over this — the guy who names Limbaugh the worst person in the world virtually every night.
According to Keith, the problem isn’t so much what she said, it’s that she said it at the White House Correspondents dinner which is an inappropriate venue. These are very sensitive, important people, you know, and it’s rude to be rude in front of them. It embarrasses the poor souls to have someone make crude jokes about the crudest, most despicable man in politics. Why that should be, I do not know.
But Pat Buchanan gets to the heart of it: it was mean to the Republican Party. Attacking Limbaugh was attacking Republicans everywhere according to him. He wasn’t even there but he is the head of the GOP and And no matter what swill he puts out on his radio show to millions of people every single day, that just isn’t done.
They should just get rid of these stupid events. Every year the press corps demonstrates what idiots they are. They get huffy when the joke’s aimed at them, they think it’s hilarious when it is crudely personal and aimed directly at the first lady, they laugh uproariously when the president jokes about not finding weapons of mass destruction but get the vapors when somebody takes aim at Rush Limbaugh. Really, it’s just too ridiculous.
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De-basing Torture
by digby
The argument against torture is slipping away from us. In fact, I’m getting the sinking feeling that it’s over. What was once taboo is now publicly acknowledged as completely acceptable by many people. Indeed, disapproval of torture is now being characterized as a strictly partisan issue, like welfare reform or taxes.
Here’s a representative exchange from Chris Matthews today in a discussion of whether or not it’s a political problem for Nancy Pelosi to be seen as knowing about torture:
Chris Cillizza: There was a poll a week or two ago, an independent poll, a media poll that asked people whether what had gone on a Gitmo was torture and by a large majority people said yes. The next question was did they think that those techniques would be necessary in certain circumstances and a slimmer, but still more people said yes than no so you have this weird disconnect. People do think it is torture, but they feel like if it yeilds results that it’s the right thing to do, so this is tough especially as it relates to the Democratic Party base which clearly believes that this is something that is wrong, wrong, wrong.
Matthews: (to Harold Ford) … You seem to be suggesting you can’t be both tough as nails and at the same time looks as if you worry about human rights violations. Is that a problem or not?
Harold Ford: No I … Eric Holder said this best when referring to the Ted Stevens case in the aftermath when they said they wouldn’t move forward when they said the United States would not move forward. He said the most important thing in the justice department is not winning, it is justice.
So, in this sense, I think having the conversation about what happened at Guantanamo Bay, and I’m not as outraged as some about it, because I think some of those techniques were enhanced and might have risen to a level of torture, you have to remember when this was occurring, this was 2002 and 2003. The country was in a different place and a different space and if you were to say to me as an American, put aside my partisanship, that we have an opportunity to gain information that would prevent the destruction of an American city to prevent killings in an American city, and we have to use certain techniques, I’m one of those Americans who would have voted acertain way Chris in that polling that said it might have been torture, but I’m not as outraged.
Matthews: wait, wait. You are veering into Cheney country here.
Ford: no, no, no
Matthews: … the destruction of an American city? What evidence did you ever have that the enemy had a nuclear weapon that could blow up an American city? That’s Cheney talk. That’s what he uses to justify torture. We have no evidence that any enemy of ours had a nuclear weapon.
Ford: No, no. I said if thousands of people in America … we can play the game of associating me with one person or another. I’m just saying ..
Matthews: No but you said blow up an American city. What are you talking about?
Ford: In 2002, 2003, remember where America was. You remember our mindset. If the American people were told that there were those that might have been held at Guantanamo Bay that might have had information, after our country was attacked on 9/11, I’m certain that people would have wanted them to take those, take certain steps. I’m not arguing at all that there was evidence that that would have happened, yet Cheney has said that he hopes that all the data is released and then maybe we’ll have an opportunity to see that.
Now it’s true that Matthews challenged Ford, but as per usual he misses the point. He thinks the problem with Ford’s point is that he used the ticking time bomb scenario when what he actually said was that the country’s “mindset” determined the limits (or lack thereof) to what it could do. And ironically, Matthews off point challenge actually forced Ford to lower the stakes even more and admit that he thinks torture is justified pretty much any time people felt threatened.
Some of this probably Ford’s reflexive, phony identification with “the middle” which he perceives on this topic as being pro-torture on the basis of the poll Cilizza cited. And sadly, that poll is reflective of the fact that people are starting to feel that it’s not just ok to publicly support torture, but that opposing it is nothing more than dopey DFH politics.
Ford seems to think that Cheney’s call to release all the CIA info will prove that his nervous nsellie-ism will be validated. I’m not so sure. But, it doesn’t matter. If everyone but the “Democratic Base” has so lost all sense of decency that they think torture is a-ok, then I’m sure they won’t mind if it turns out that the torture didn’t work. They have bought into Cheney’s “one percent solution” which holds that even if there’s only a one percent chance that an America could be harmed the government must prevent it by any means necessary. It might not turn out to be real, and it could result in a terrible catastrophic blowback down the road, but nobody ever said we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. And today, we have the head of the Democratic Leadership Council endorsing the logic behind it.
One hopes this will make a difference, but I doubt it. Since polls are showing that half the country thinks torture is justified, mealy mouthed politicians everywhere will be rushing to join them. There’s nothing they hate more than being categorized with the DFHs.
We are in big trouble when torture becomes just another political football. It’s the kind of thing that turns powerful empires into pariah nations. Why anyone thinks it’s good for America for the world to perceive us as violent, pants wetting, panic artists who could start WWIII at the least sign of threat is beyond me. I certainly don’t feel safer.
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With Them On The Votes That Matter
by digby
And now a word from Joe Sestak:
I am honored that so many of you took the time to vote in the recent grassroots Straw Poll. Let me tell you, I and many others were paying attention. If I decide to run it will be in large measure because of the grassroots energy of so many people like you. Until I and my family make that decision, please accept my thanks and my best wishes as you continue be active participants in our people-powered democracy. Thank you so very much!
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Good Americans
by digby
Krugman writes about the new health industry lobby initiative today and says much of what I was going to say about it. The first bell that started ringing in my head was the odd idea that these health care trade associations and business interests were “offering” to cut costs over the next ten years simply because they are good Americans, as one administration official characterized it. And not only are they doing it out of patriotic duty, when asked how their promises were going to be enforced, the administration said the media would do it. The fact that the medical industry is making this commitment publicly to the president of the United States somehow means they have to live up to their promise, which is so odd I don’t know quite what to say.
Having said that, I have to believe that the administration truly wants to reform health care. Its failure would be a serious blight on the administration’s legacy and hobble Obama in reelection so it’s impossible to believe they actually believe the industry is operating out of altruism and that the media is an adequate enforcement mechanism. So, this has to be some kind of kabuki, political strategy. The question is to what end?
Although the official line is that the industry just spontaneously approached the administration with this fully formed plan, the fact is that it greatly resembles what the insurance lobby has been pushing for some time. Michael Hilzik of the LA Times wrote about this last March:
The genius of modern marketing is pouring old material into new packaging. Over the years this has given us yogurt in tubes, prechopped salad greens in cellophane bags and, most recently, the health insurance industry’s new image as a friend of reform.
In December, the industry’s trade group, AHIP (for America’s Health Insurance Plans) revealed that it had experienced an epiphany and decided for the first time to support the principle of universal healthcare — insuring everyone in America, regardless of health condition. It described its change of heart as the product of three years of sedulous soul-searching by AHIP’s board of directors, who claimed to have “traveled the country and engaged in conversations about healthcare reform with people from all walks of life.”
As a connoisseur of health insurance lobbying practices, however, I withheld judgment until I could scan the fine print. What I found by reading AHIP’s 16-page policy brochure was that its position hadn’t changed at all. Its version of “reform” comprises the same wish list that the industry has been pushing for decades.
Briefly, the industry wants the government to assume the cost of treating the sickest, and therefore most expensive, Americans. It wants the government to clamp down hard on doctors’ and hospitals’ fees. And it wants permission to offer stripped-down, low-benefit policies freed from pesky state regulations limiting their premiums.
As for universal coverage, which is the goal of many reformers (if not yet the Obama administration), the industry will accept a government mandate to take on all customers, as long as all Americans are required by law to buy coverage.
Parsing the insurance industry’s stance on healthcare reform will be of paramount importance this year. President Obama’s healthcare forum on Thursday demonstrated that the administration and Congress are girding for a big push to remake a tattered employer-based system that has left more than 45 million people without coverage.
[…]
The insurance industry understands that at this moment, with the political establishment thinking reform, it pays to make nice. In a speech not long ago, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who has sponsored a bill that would unlink health coverage from employment but leave a role for insurance companies, warned the industry against trying to scuttle reform as it did under Clinton. “I told them, if you do what you did then, you may hold off reform for a bit, but you will hasten the day when there’s a government-run healthcare system,” Wyden said. The warning may have inspired AHIP Chief Executive Karen Ignagni to tell the Obama summit: “You have our commitment to play, to contribute and to help pass healthcare reform this year.” (On the coy and noncommittal scale, this statement rates a 10.0.)
Ignagni can afford to be gracious because no specific reform plan is yet on the table. But veterans of the last reform battle warn that the moment concrete proposals appear, the insurance industry will deploy in force to kill anything that threatens its profitability and freedom of movement, such as an expansion of public insurance programs or tighter federal regulations. No one should take the summit’s atmosphere of good fellowship as a harbinger of what lies ahead. “Everybody’s very ‘Kumbaya’ right now,” observes Jonathan Oberlander, a healthcare reform expert at the University of North Carolina.
The insurers think government intervention is fine if it applies to customers they don’t want. The way they put it in their reform plan is that we need a system that “spreads costs for high-risk individuals across a broader base” — the base consisting of all taxpayers, that is.
The industry says that it’s going to streamline their processes and do such things as “cost bundling” and build in new efficiencies industry wide that will result in savings, which is all to the good. The waste that goes into administrative costs is nearly criminal. But Hilzik points out something that should be obvious to all of us:
AHIP’s commitment to an improved healthcare system is skin-deep. It endorses the quest for lower costs, more efficiency, and the fair and impartial resolution of claims disputes. Achieving these ends always has been within the industry’s power, but it never seems to make any progress toward them.
For example, AHIP says it believes that “administrative processes should be streamlined across the healthcare system.” But at its member firms, the administrative complexity only proliferates. I know doctors who now have to split their working hours 50-50 between seeing patients and dickering with insurance companies over claims and preauthorizations — a vast increase over the time they spent on administrative chores a few years ago.
The industry talks a good game about marching for reform side by side with all healthcare stakeholders — patients, drug manufacturers, doctors and hospitals. Ignagni says her members will “come to the table with real proposals and solutions” rather than “the old-fashioned playbook of ads and 30,000-feet campaigns.”
Veterans of earlier healthcare battles justly wonder if the industry is merely trying to get in front of the parade, the better to lead it into a dead end.
The administration says this group hasn’t asked for anything in return, but it’s pretty clear that the thing they fear the most is the public option:
America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) President and CEO Karen Ignagni told Schumer that AHIP “appreciate[s] how thoughtful you are working to reconcile all these different views” but insisted that private insurers would be unable to fairly compete with a Medicare-like public plan that did not have the capital reserves of private insurers or the ability to build networks of providers:
There are a significant amount of Capital requirements that we need to meet, Medicare would have failed the capital test right now and so that is a very significant dollar figure that would have to be imbued into this plan and I know you’ve thought about that. The third issue is the payment issue…it would take a very long time, for government to develop the infrastructure to negotiate with physicians. Government doesn’t have networks, can’t put together networks, the Disease Management program failed in traditional Medicare and we all know why—because there’s no predictability with respect to who’s coming through the doors to the physicians’ offices, etc.
But here, Ignagni’s sense of fair competition is itself unfair. Ignagni does not want a new public health insurance plan to have any inherent advantages, but she’s insisting that private insurers preserve their advantage to create provider networks and enter or exit markets as they wish, etc. As Schumer pointed out, “it’s sort of as if you’re saying well the public advantages we should get rid of, but the private advantages we should keep. Let them compete.” (Listen here).
The administration says that Obama still “likes” the public plan. But it’s pretty clear that it’s on the table. I’ll leave it to the wonks to explain why that is terrible or acceptable, but it’s certainly reasonable to assume that the industry is not coming forward with a plan in partnership without geting something in return. They know very well that if a public plan is enacted in competition that it will at the very least break their monopoly and force them to actually do what they promised to do today. I assume the administration knows all this and is planning some complicated strategy to outmaeuver these people. At minimum, they may be able to forestall any more “Harry and Louise” ads from the industry, which would be helpful. The emphasis on cost savings (even to the extent that this initiative is being sold as an answer to the burgeoning deficit!) has an upside and a downside. The upside is that the industry may be able to influence their Republican allies to not fully exploit the debt issue as the reason to block health care reform. The downside is that the emphasis on cost savings focuses the issue on money, which I have grave doubts will accrue to the reformers’ favor. It’s obviously part of the equation and has to be addresses and so maybe this is the best way to do it. But I’m skeptical.
It certainly doesn’t help to have allies like Donna Shalala on MSNBC this morning saying:
In the 90s we had the money, but we didn’t have consensus. Now we have consensus but we don’t have the money.
And they have to be very, very careful that the Republicans (and the media) don’t exploit the “cost savings” by successfully characterizing it as “rationing.” (The industry letter proposing this new plan says things like “reducing over-use and under-use of health care by aligning quality and efficiency incentives,” which is very easily demagogued.) I hope the Dems are prepared for it.
I don’t mean to sound totally cynical. This is the most difficult issue out there by far. It’s hugely complicated with dozens of moving parts and a political system that is at best dysfunctional. But it seems to me that progressive activists have a job to do in this and that is to exert pressure on the politicians to keep their eye on the ball. The industry will do everything it can to insure that reform translates into their profits being protected. That’s their job. Ours is to insure that reform translates into universal, comprehensive health care for all Americans. (To that end, Move On is pushing the public plan and has been quoted saying it’s the most important issue they will deal with this year.) So, when dealing with these big business interests, skepticism must be our watchword. As much as the administration wants to spin these lobbyists as being good Americans who just want to help, I think it’s fairly clear that they work out of self-interest first. They would be fired if they didn’t.
Like Krugman, I think this is a good sign that everyone is very serious about pursuing reform. That Obama is putting his personal prestige on the line for it is meaningful. But all we can do is look at each piece of the puzzle with a clear eye and put it in its proper place on the board. And then hope it all comes together.
dday has more on this below.
Update: More links on this topic:
http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2009/05/11/indudstry-cost-letter/
http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/ezraklein_archive?month=05&year=2009&base_name=is_the_health_care_industry_on
http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2009/05/11/health-care-industry-steps-up-maybe/
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Define “Over-Use”, Please
by dday
In what is being pitched as a major announcement, health industry groups are vowing to slow the growth of health care costs over the next decade, to accommodate President Obama’s reform strategy.
Reporting from Washington — Leading health industry groups have agreed to slow the explosive growth of healthcare spending, according to administration officials and others knowledgeable about the agreement.
Hospitals, drug makers and doctors, among others, wrote a letter to President Obama outlining their plan, which estimates $2 trillion in savings over the next decade.
The letter lacks much detail but suggests savings could come from simplified billing, restructuring the way hospitals are paid and using more information technology, among other steps.
Obama plans to promote the letter at a White House event today.
Although the agreement does not outline any industry commitments to accept specific reductions in revenue, it does signal continued engagement by powerful healthcare interests in the Obama administration’s effort to overhaul the nation’s troubled healthcare system […]
Signatories include the American Medical Assn.; the American Hospital Assn.; the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America; the Advanced Medical Technology Assn., which represents device makers; America’s Health Insurance Plans, which represents insurers; and the Service Employees International Union, which shepherded the agreement.
Specifically, they want to reduce the annual spending growth rate by 1.5 percent, which translates into $2 trillion in the next decade. Like the article says, the letter is thin on specifics, preferring to instead talk about “encouraging coordinated care” and “addressing cost drivers” and “reducing over-use and under-use of health care.” Some of the reforms, like prevention and dealing with obesity and health IT, are familiar.
The positive development here, as Krugman writes, is that health insurers and the medical industry want to be part of a solution instead of committing themselves to blocking one. They believe that reform will happen with them or without them, and so they’d rather be around to influence the outcome. Another plus: in addition to agreeing to work with the Administration on reform, they appear to have accepted the basic economic arguments about how to bend the cost curve in health care.
How are costs to be contained? There are few details, but the industry has clearly been reading Peter Orszag, the budget director.
In his previous job, as the director of the Congressional Budget Office, Mr. Orszag argued that America spends far too much on some types of health care with little or no medical benefit, even as it spends too little on other types of care, like prevention and treatment of chronic conditions. Putting these together, he concluded that “substantial opportunities exist to reduce costs without harming health over all.”
Sure enough, the health industry letter talks of “reducing over-use and under-use of health care by aligning quality and efficiency incentives.” It also picks up a related favorite Orszag theme, calling for “adherence to evidence-based best practices and therapies.” All in all, it’s just what the doctor, er, budget director ordered.
However, I think there’s also reason to be skeptical. By committing themselves to lowering costs, these industry leaders are essentially committing themselves to lower profits, which is illogical unless they see that as a best-case scenario. AHIP and some of these other groups have every incentive to guard their profits while rejecting reforms that would cut into them too heavily. For instance, cost control could be a bargain in exchange for killing the public option. The lack of detail in the letter should not go unmentioned, either, and the Administration must make mandatory some changes to reduce costs rather than relying on these former enemies of reform to voluntarily reduce. Because “reducing over-use” of health care can mean a lot of things – denying care, for example, which health insurers are really good at. The White House had better put all this in writing and ensure that the effort is sustained.
I agree that there’s an absolute benefit to this, strictly in the sense of optics. Stakeholders are working toward reform rather than pushing against it. The conservative bullshit artists led by the discredited fraud artists Rick Scott, who are trying to demonize the Obama plan, have no friends this time around. But let’s verify these changes instead of accepting the industry offer at face value. And on the politics, emphasizing cost controls at the expense of choice and access to treatment in health care is not exactly a people-friendly message.
See also this potentially bigger breakthrough in financing for the health care plan, because these assumed cost controls still don’t get the reform out the door, dedicated revenue sources do. Industry-wide savings will not help the White House pay for a health care plan, because they won’t be factored into the final cost structure of the bill. More wonkery on this here.
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The Village In A Nutshell
by dday
Bob Schieffer does us all a great service in his commentary on Face The Nation yesterday by defining the Village’s version of a meritocracy – where people elevate in the DC community, not on the strength of their talent or brilliance, but whether or not they go to the right cocktail parties:
I had no problem with the Justice’s legal work. But as one who has lived 40 years in Washington, I’ll be honest: I didn’t care for his attitude.
He made it no secret that he hated the city, once describing his work as the best job in the world in the worst city in the world.
Another time he called life here “akin to an intellectual lobotomy.”
Really? Our nation’s capital? One of the most beautiful cities in the world?
Call me corny, but I have to confess, I’ve run into some pretty smart people here over the years, but then again I tried to get to know the city and its inhabitants. Who wouldn’t if you were going to live in a place? Justice Souter, obviously.
I’ve never known anyone who ever saw him outside the court. But now he’s leaving. I take it he won’t miss Washington – but my guess is Washington will hardly miss him.
Apparently we’re supposed to care that David Souter preferred hiking in New Hampshire to schmoozing with Bob Schieffer. It’s certainly colored the coverage of him. I remember multi-page spreads when Sandra Day O’Connor and William Rehnquist left the Court. Here, Souter gets the “if you didn’t like us then we didn’t like you” send-off.
In a certain sense, I relate this to the rapidly accepted conventional wisdom around Sonia Sotomayor as a dumb tokenist candidate for the Court, and the pervasive sexism that implies. To me, Jeffrey Rosen’s conflation of diversity with mediocrity just jibes with the Village’s conflation of chumminess with aptitude. Or even the conflation of pragmatism with wisdom. What matters to them are the relationships people make with them. Once you become a member in good standing you can do no wrong. And until you become one you can do no right.
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Expensive Luxuries
by digby
It’s much in vogue these days to rend one’s garments about government spending but for some reason nobody seems to have a problem with this:
Since 1994, DADT has resulted in the discharge of more than 13,000 military personnel across the services, including approximately 800 with skills deemed “mission critical,” such as pilots, combat engineers, and linguists. According to a 2005 report from the Government Accountability Office, “the cost of discharging and replacing service members fired because of their sexual orientation during the policy’s first 10 years totaled at least $190.5 million — roughly $20,000 per discharged service member.
Doesn’t that seem like an awful lot of money just to appease a bunch of social conservatives?
Sadly, that paragraph was excerpted from a post at Think Progress about the first discharge of a “mission critical” gay soldier by the Obama administration.
If Homicide Is Wrong, I Don’t Wanna Be Right
by dday
Christiane Brown has released an extraordinary interview with Harry Reid where he tries to redfine the law as what makes people like Harry Reid most comfortable after the fact.
Reid: Listen, if you ask me my opinion.
Brown: Yeah.
Reid: What went on, waterboarding, torture, of course it was. I don’t want to be drowned. I think that as afraid of – as afraid of – as afraid as I am with water, frankly probably you could drown me and I would confess to a lot of things that weren’t true….
Brown: Isn’t it the responsibility of the United States to enforce criminal law if it appears that war crimes have occured?
Reid: No matter how I personally feel about torture, I think that we as you’ve indicated that we are a nation of law. And that’s why we have to get the facts and then have people render legal decisions which certainly don’t take very long, render opinion as to whether or not what was done was wrong, illegal, immoral, and you know all the other issues.
Brown: Well let me ask you, Senator Reid, you’ve seen the evidence come forward. We’ve heard Dick Cheney himself say he waterboarded and he’d waterboard again…. Isn’t that therefore an obvious and admitted crime right there in the face of the American people?
Reid: Something everyone has to weigh is this, we’re a nation of laws and no one can dispute that, but I think what we have to, the hurdle we have to get over is whether we want to go after people like Cheney. That’s a decision that has to be made….
Brown: Is it a decision of whether…Isn’t it our obligation if he’s violated the law … ?
Reid: There are a lot of decisions that are made that are right that may not be absolutely totally within the framework of law. For example with President Nixon . . . I mean . . . should he have been impeached or did President Ford do the right thing?….
Reid must have misspoke at the end there, unless he’s among the minority of him and Dick Cheney opposed to the impeachment of Richard Nixon. But basically he’s opposed to enforcing the law when it comes to people of a certain stature and power. And as Jonathan Turley notes, his idea that we would be “rushing to judgment” because we lack the critical evidence and must wait for a secret Intelligence Committee report headed by DiFi neglects the voluminous amount of material already in the public domain, including videotaped admissions of torture from the principals involved. And that would also include this:
A simple fact is being overlooked in the Bush-era torture scandal: the number of cases in which detainees have been tortured to death. Abuse did not only involve the high-profile cases of smashing detainees into plywood barriers (“walling”), confinement in coffin-like boxes with insects, sleep deprivation, cold, and waterboarding. To date approximately 100 detainees, including CIA-held detainees, have died during U.S. interrogations, and some are known to have been tortured to death.
A review of homicide cases, however, shows that few detainee deaths have been properly investigated. Many were not investigated at all. And no official investigation has looked into the connection between detainee deaths and the interrogation policies promulgated by the Bush administration.
Yet an important report by the Senate Armed Services Committee, declassified in April 2009, explains in clear terms how Bush-era interrogation techniques, including torture, once authorized for CIA high-value detainees, were promulgated to Guantánamo, Iraq, and Afghanistan, where (as reporter Jason Leopold recently noted at The Public Record) the policies have led to homicides.
The killings, at least some of them, have hardly been kept secret. As early as May-June 2003, The New York Times and Washington Post reported on deaths of detainees in Afghanistan. Two detainees at Bagram air base died after extensive beatings by U.S. troops in December 2002—a case reported by The New York Times and that was also the subject of the Oscar-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side. Another death involved a man beaten to death by a CIA contractor at a base in Asadabad, in eastern Afghanistan, in June 2003.
If Harry Reid, and every Serious Bipartisan Fetishist in the Village, wants to block accountability for “harsh interrogation techniques” or whatever other buzzword they want to use this week, then they also want to hold no one responsible for homicide. These were murders directly coming out of a program of interrogation approved and directed at the highest levels. But according to the Democratic Majority Leader of the Senate, it was the “right” decision.
And thus the law becomes irrelevant.
(h/t reader VM)
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