Month: May 2009

QOTD

by digby

I assume the right will insult the new Supreme Court nominee’s gender and ethnicity in a thousand different ways. But Glenn Beck, always in the vanguard, goes after her with an unexpectedly creative one:

“Does the nominee still have Diabetes? Could the Messiah heal her, or does she just not want to ask?”

This could be a very important avenue to explore during the confirmation hearings. Does anyone have Jeff Sessions’ email?

Update: The Republicans are evidently hungover this morning and accidentally sent out their talking points to the media.

Here are the talking points:

o President Obama’s nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court is an important decision that will have an impact on the United States long after his administration.

o Republicans are committed to a fair confirmation process and will reserve judgment until more is known about Judge Sotomayor’s legal views, judicial record and qualifications.

o Until we have a full view of the facts and comprehensive understanding of Judge Sotomayor’s record, Republicans will avoid partisanship and knee-jerk judgments – which is in stark contrast to how the Democrats responded to the Judge Roberts and Alito nominations.

o To be clear, Republicans do not view this nomination without concern. Judge Sotomayor has received praise and high ratings from liberal special interest groups. Judge Sotomayor has also said that policy is made on the U.S. Court of Appeals.

o Republicans believe that the confirmation process is the most responsible way to learn more about her views on a number of important issues.

o The confirmation process will help Republicans, and all Americans, understand more about judge Sotomayor’s thoughts on the importance of the Supreme Court’s fidelity to the Constitution and the rule of law.

o Republicans are the minority party, but our belief that judges should interpret rather than make law is shared by a majority of Americans.

o Republicans look forward to learning more about Judge Sotomayor’s legal views and to determining whether her views reflect the values of mainstream America.

President Obama on Judicial Nominees

o Liberal ideology, not legal qualification, is likely to guide the president’s choice of judicial nominees.

o Obama has said his criterion for nominating judges would be their “heart” and “empathy.”

o Obama said he believes Supreme Court justices should understand the Court’s role “to protect people who may be vulnerable in the political process.”

o Obama has declared: “We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old-and that’s the criterion by which I’ll be selecting my judges.”

Additional Talking Points

o Justice Souter’s retirement could move the Court to the left and provide a critical fifth vote for:

o Further eroding the rights of the unborn and property owners;

o Imposing a federal constitutional right to same-sex marriage;

o Stripping “under God” out of the Pledge of Allegiance and completely secularizing the public square;

o Abolishing the death penalty;

o Judicial micromanagement of the government’s war powers.

UPDATE: These points were represented in RNC Chairman Michael Steele’s statement on the nomination:

“Republicans look forward to learning more about federal appeals court judge Sonia Sotomayor’s thoughts on the importance of the Supreme Court’s fidelity to the Constitution and the rule of law,” he said. “Supreme Court vacancies are rare, which makes Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination a perfect opportunity for America to have a thoughtful discussion about the role of the Supreme Court in our daily lives. Republicans will reserve judgment on Sonia Sotomayor until there has been a thorough and thoughtful examination of her legal views.”

Chuck Shumer just reassured the MSNBC audience that “Obama, to his credit, didn’t nominate a far-out liberal,” so that should help. Gawd knows everybody hates liberals.

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Sotomayor

by dday

I caught the tail end of the announcement, which you probably know by now.

President Obama announced on Tuesday that he will nominate the federal appeals judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court, choosing a daughter of Puerto Rican parents raised in Bronx public housing projects to become the nation’s first Hispanic justice.

Judge Sotomayor, who stood next to the president during the announcement, was described by Mr. Obama as “an inspiring woman who I am confident will make a great justice.”

The president said he had made his decision after “deep reflection and careful deliberation,” and he made it clear that the judge’s inspiring personal story was crucial in his decision. Mr. Obama praised his choice as someone possessing “a rigorous intellect, a mastery of the law.”

But those essential qualities are not enough, the president said. Quoting Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Mr. Obama said, “The life of the law has not been logic, it has been experience.” It is vitally important that a justice know “how the world works, and how ordinary people live,” the president said.

She isn’t Pam Karlan or a darling of the left. She was nominated for her first judgeship by Bush 41, in fact. But in many ways, this is the sharpest pick Obama could have made. The Village tried to Swiftboat Sotomayor a few weeks ago, and Obama ignored it. Jeffrey Rosen basically called her a dumb broad, and picked up anonymous whispers to do it. This whisper campaign spread like wildfire. And a couple weeks ago, the entire Village got very interested in a New Haven firefighter’s case, likely to be reversed, where Sotomayor participated in an opinion striking down a promotions test showed no advancement for African-Americans. Chris Matthews put a figurative hardhat on and imagined himself an Irish tough getting passed over for a job, and we had a weeklong debate about affirmative action in the most empty way possible. Obama dismissed it.

We’re going to hear a lot from the right about these two quotes:

Judge Sotomayor has said her ethnicity and gender are important factors in serving on the bench, a point that could generate debate. “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life,” she said in a 2002 lecture.

She also once said at a conference that a “court of appeals is where policy is made,” a statement that has drawn criticism from conservatives who saw it as a sign of judicial activism. Judge Sotomayor seemed to understand at the time that she was making a controversial statement, adding that, “I know this is on tape, and I should never say that, because we don’t make law.”

It doesn’t appear from her case law that she has a ultra-liberal record, but on the thin reed of these two quotes, expect a whole mess of shrieking. Obama couldn’t care less.

He made his own decision based on his own best belief of who would make the best Justice. He didn’t curry favor with anyone, and certainly not the right or the DC establishment. In fact, he really stuck it to the latter. Good for him.

…Sotomayor appears to be an open book when it comes to executive power, sitting on an appeals court that simply didn’t hear very many cases of that type. Given that Obama has gone a bit too far, for my taste, when it concerns executive power, and the Supreme Court will certainly hear many of such cases, and the Court is closely divided on these issues, this will make a tremendous impact and in a perfect world it would become a big part of the debate. (Which it won’t, but…)

…Christy Hardin Smith has more. This Ricci case (the affirmative action case in New Haven) is going to be the MOST IMPORTANT JUDICIAL OPINION EVAH before we’re done.

…as Greenwald says here, that Jeffrey Rosen New Republic story has fast become the talking point from the right to “prove” that Sotomayor is somehow intellectually incapable. Much obliged!

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They’re Coming To Get You

by digby

Run for your lives:

“My insurance wasn’t good enough,” said Lord McWilliams, 20, who has a deadly liver disease.

His brother, David Williams, wanted money “to speed up the process,” McWilliams said. “Medicaid only goes so far.”

He dismissed as “crazy” federal accusations that Williams was a Jew-hater who wanted to wage jihad.

McWilliams said the FBI informant who lured his brother and three other hapless petty criminals into a plot to blow up synagogues and shoot down a plane promised enough money to take care of his transplant.

“[My brother] told me, ‘Don’t worry, when you go to the doctor, tell them you got money,'” McWilliams said.

McWilliams, who has already had his spleen removed, said his brother told him he would have $20,000 for the operation.

Their mother, Elizabeth McWilliams, said her older son had told her he would be able to give her a wad of cash Thursday, which was the day after the terrorist plot was to have been carried out.

“He was a loving, sweet kid. He took his brother’s illness worse than me,” she said.

Lord McWilliams said the informant, who often drove his brother to the hospital to visit, even promised to take him to Universal Studios when he was well again.

“He said I didn’t have to pay for nothing,” McWilliams said.

Federal prosecutors say Williams, 28; James Cromitie, 44; Laguerre Payen, 27, and Onta Williams, 32, all of upstate Newburgh, were militant Muslims caught on tape railing against Jews and plotting to blow up Jewish temples.

Federal prosecutors say Williams, 28; James Cromitie, 44; Laguerre Payen, 27, and Onta Williams, 32, all of upstate Newburgh, were militant Muslims caught on tape railing against Jews and plotting to blow up Jewish temples.

They were arrested last Wednesday while planting what they thought were plastic explosives outside two Riverdale synagogues.

They also had a Stinger missile – phony, supplied by the FBI – with which they allegedly planned to shoot down a military plane. Family and friends say the four were down-on-their luck ex-cons who apparently thought they would be paid by the FBI informant.

In dozens of interviews around Newburgh, no one can remember hearing any of the four talk of Jews or jihad. They had converted to Islam in prison, but they drank beer, ate pork and rarely prayed, family members said.

Obviously, we don’t know the whole story, but this sure sounds like so many other so-called terrorists plots that turned out to be a bunch of losers coerced into some stupid plan and then arrested with a bunch of phony fanfare. And the transplant angle is just mind-boggling. As Susie Madrak says:

I hardly know what to say. What’s worse: A healthcare system where someone is so desperate, he’d blow up buildings to pay for his brother’s treatment, or homeland security that thinks nothing of setting people up so they can claim they caught some “terrorists”?

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Lifting Up

by digby

I wrote last week about the plea for Obama to end the practice of sending the wreath to the Confederate War memorial on Memorial Day and I assumed that he would send it rather than ignite a culture war skirmish. (My thesis was that ending the practice this would have to be a Nixon goes to China thing — a white southern Republican would have to do it.)

Obama did send the wreath as predicted, but didn’t just leave it there:

Last week, a group of university professors petitioned the White House to end a longstanding practice of sending a wreath to a monument to Confederate soldiers on the cemetery grounds. Mr. Obama continued that tradition but started another, the White House said, by sending a second wreath across the Potomac River to the historically black neighborhood in Washington where the African-American Civil War Memorial commemorates more than 200,000 blacks who fought for the North in the Civil War.

Some of us would like the Lost Cause mythology to be retired altogether, but this is a creative and non-confrontational way to get at the underlying issues that make so much of that mythology toxic. It gives black Civil War veterans equal footing with the confederate soldiers — which puts out the racists among the Southern Heritage types (who like to pretend it isn’t about race) and doesn’t bother the non-racist southerners at all. It’s vintage Obama at his best. Very clever.

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Media Know-Nothings

by dday

It happened the Friday before Memorial Day and went almost unnoticed, but this small bit at the end of Hardball fairly well sums up the Village approach to government.

CILLIZZA: Here’s the problem. She, she holds a press conference, she brings the leadership with her to show that everyone is behind her.

MATTHEWS: Yeah, but Steny was acting like her defender, he’s her biggest rival…

CILLIZZA: I agree. She talks for, they talk for twenty-five minutes about essentially nothing. Everyone knows she has a plane to catch…

MATTHEWS: It’s called policy, by the way, Chris. (LAUGHTER) Something only a political reporter would say.

CILLIZZA: That gets me. Well-played.

SIMON: Stuff we don’t care about…

MATTHEWS: All this stuff, health care, cap and trade, all this stuff.

Political reporters are often derided as being sportswriters. But sportswriters actually bother to watch the game. Cillizza’s comment is akin to saying that the Lakers and the Nuggets for four quarters did “essentially nothing” to run out the clock on the postgame press conference so reporters couldn’t ask Kobe about his relationship with Phil Jackson. I’ve never seen a group of journalists so openly dismissive about a subject they ostensibly exist to cover.

Because every report of this press conference focuses on the attempted extension of the Pelosi-CIA dust-up, you cannot actually find a record of what the House leadership talked about in those first 25 minutes. I assume it tracks closely to this statement about legislation passed in the last week and since the beginning of the new Congress. Here’s an excerpt:

SIGNED INTO LAW THIS WEEK

CREDIT CARDHOLDERS’ BILL OF RIGHTS, to provide tough new protections for consumers by banning unfair rate increases, abusive fees, and penalties—such as retroactive rate hikes on existing balances and double-cycle billing — giving consumers clear information, and strengthening enforcement.

MILITARY PROCUREMENT REFORM, to crack down on Pentagon waste and cost overruns, which GAO says amount to $296 billion just for the 96 largest weapons systems, by dramatically beefing up oversight of weapons acquisition, promoting greater use of competition, and curbing conflicts of interest.

HELPING FAMILIES SAVE THEIR HOMES ACT, building on the President’s housing initiative, to provide significant incentives to lenders, servicers, and homeowners to work together to modify loans and to avoid foreclosures, which cost families their homes every 13 seconds in America.

FIGHTING MORTGAGE AND CORPORATE FRAUD & CREATING COMMISSION ON CAUSES OF CRISIS, to provide tools for prosecuting the mortgage scams and corporate frauds that contributed to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression; and to create an outside commission to examine its causes.

The housing bill had the guts ripped from it with the loss of cram-down, and the credit card bill mirrors closely rules already put in place by the Federal Reserve; this legislation will just accelerate their effective start date. But it would be nice for Americans to actually know what their Congress manages to pass, instead of having those statements of passage ridiculed as “essentially nothing” by the reporters employed, presumably, to inform the public. In fact, reporters could even detail the legislation and separate the facts from the spin, separate from dart-at-a-board predictions of political consequences or positioning. It’s a novel idea, I know.

I’d like to pinpoint the moment at which reporters stopped covering policy and began to cover “politics,” which they defined as mini-controversies and gossip and what each side of the political divide says about the other (news flash: they’re critical!). I have a sense the consequences haven’t been all that stellar.

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Heroes

by digby

Throughout the WOT and the invasion of Iraq, there have been military heroes, some of whom showed great physical bravery in the face of terrible danger. But, in my mind, some of the greatest military heroes since 9/11 have been those who showed great moral bravery in standing up for what was right in the confusing legal and moral morass that’s characterized this period. Many of the JAG lawyers like Lt. Commander Charles Swift and lowly grunts like Joseph Darby who blew the whistle on Abu Ghraib went up against powerful forces within the government to do what they thought was right. And there have been quite a few of them.

Indeed, if there hadn’t been such people it’s hard to imagine that things wouldn’t be far worse today. So, these military heroes deserve a thanks today, right along with those who’ve laid down their lives on behalf of their country.

Today’s NY Times features one such person, a Captain in Afghanistan named Kirk Black. He isn’t a bleeding heart, childish DFH who supposedly doesn’t understand how the world works. In civilian life he’s a member of the Baltimore Police SWAT team. But he doesn’t believe in knowingly holding innocent people in prison:

Capt. Kirk Black, who trains the Afghan police in this impoverished province, developed a practiced skepticism about claims of innocence during a decade as a Baltimore police officer.

But last January, when relatives of an Afghan imprisoned at the Bagram military detention center begged him to look into the case, he agreed to listen. Eventually he became convinced that the detention was a case of mistaken identity and put the family in touch with a lawyer.

Soon, Captain Black was facing a potential legal battle of his own. One of his senior commanders ordered him not to discuss the case, and the military sent an officer to investigate him. He retained military defense counsel.

The Bagram prison — where about 600 people, mostly Afghans, are being held indefinitely and without charges — is a delicate issue for the Obama administration at a time when it is struggling to come up with a plan for detainees in the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, which it intends to close.

The administration has argued that military detainees in Afghanistan may not challenge their detentions in American courts. A federal judge ruled last month that some Bagram detainees captured outside Afghanistan had the constitutional right of habeas corpus, citing a Supreme Court ruling. But the new administration has appealed.

Captain Black’s involvement in the Bagram detainee’s case began in January, while the American officer was attending a meeting of village elders and leaders. He was approached by relatives of an Afghan named Gul Khan, who they said had been snatched by American troops in September and imprisoned at Bagram Air Field, north of Kabul. The military apparently believed Mr. Khan was a Taliban leader named Qari Idris. But local Afghan officials told Captain Black it was a case of mistaken identity. Captain Black, believing that he was fulfilling a policy of the American counterinsurgency by trying to hear out locals with grievances, applied his police training to the evidence he heard.

“Upon speaking to multiple village elders, family members, the police chief and the subgovernor, I am convinced that the individual in question is not the person that the government claims,” he wrote in January to Clive Stafford Smith, a human rights lawyer he had met three years earlier during a posting to Guantánamo. “I am a police officer in the United States, and there is a mass of evidence that this individual does not need to be held.”

[…]

Captain Black, 36, who grew up in the Detroit suburbs and attended college in Michigan, joined the Baltimore police force in 1999. He eventually became a member of its SWAT team.

In 2006 he was deployed to Guantánamo as an Army National Guard officer. “When I got there, I’ll admit I basically believed everyone there was a terrorist and we had every right to be holding them,” he said. “But as I learned more about the system, I learned that quite a few of them were just swept up in the initial invasion.” He also said he and some fellow officers grew to fear that harmless or innocent detainees were locked away alongside hard-core jihadists and were vulnerable to conversion.

Late last year, Captain Black was sent to Ghazni Province. He and his fellow officers said they soon ran into limits on how much they could accomplish. The biggest frustration: provincial government and police officials so steeped in corruption that they seemed to knock the Americans back every time they tried to take a step forward.

Hearing out Mr. Khan’s family, which had the support of police and other village leaders, struck Captain Black as a way to build trust and show that the military would look into complaints of wrongful incarceration.

[…]

In March, Captain Black said, he was ordered by a commander several rungs above him to “toe the party line” and not discuss Mr. Khan’s guilt or innocence. He was also ordered not to allow two journalists who visited his base to accompany him on routine trips to Waghez.

A few days later, as part of an official military investigation, a more senior officer unexpectedly arrived at Captain Black’s base to question him about conversations with Mr. Khan’s family and with this reporter. The investigating officer also sought a sworn statement from this reporter, who declined.

A military spokesman in Kabul did not respond to questions about why the decision was made to investigate the captain — or whether he would be punished. American military officials in Afghanistan and Washington also declined to comment about evidence against Mr. Khan. One official would say only that all Bagram prisoners were classified as “an imminent danger to the lives of U.S. service members.”

Citing his orders, Captain Black declined to comment about specifics of Mr. Khan’s case. But in an interview before those orders were issued, he said he was mindful of the danger of incarcerating someone who might be innocent. “Lock a guy down for 22 hours a day,” he said, “and you are creating a criminal.”

U.S. service members are in far more danger from the continuing lack of accountability by their own government than they are of anything else. A global superpower cannot hope to prevail in a place like Afghanistan with tough talk and military prowess even if they are willing to take the gloves completely off as the Soviets did. The U.S. should have learned that lesson in Vietnam.

Many thanks to Captain Black for speaking out.

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More Please

by digby

Think Progress has the transcript of Dick Durbin pwning Newtie this week-end. If only more Democrats were so well prepared:

DURBIN: I’d just say that I’m afraid Mr. Gingrich is suffering from a little political amnesia here. He’s forgotten that in year 2007, he criticized the National Intelligence estimate in regard to the capability of Iran to develop nuclear weapons and said that — if I remember the quote correctly, I’m looking down here — that what they did damaged our national security and misled the American people. Mr. Gingrich, would you like to make an apology to our intelligence agency for what you said in 2007? GINGRICH: I said that particular report was intellectually dishonest. It was a public, non-classified report, and we were debating it. I said it was intellectually dishonest. I never said the CIA lied to the Congress, which would be illegal. It would be a felony. DURBIN: Well, what would you say about Republican congressman Hoekstra, who did in fact say that the intelligence community had lied and misled the American people when it came to the killing of an individual in Peru. Should he apologize? GINGRICH: Chairman Hoekstra, as he was at the time, was engaged in a specific incident. The Inspector General of the CIA actually did the right job. The investigating board of the CIA did the right job. There was a specific case. They reported that it was wrong, and the CIA actually insisted on telling Congress the truth. And if you check with Chairman Hoekstra, he’ll tell you he agrees with me on this particular issue.

One of Newt’s biggest problems as a politician is all the stupid things he’s said in his career. He makes Biden look like Abraham Lincoln by comparison. That’s why I hope he runs for president.

More from Christy on Newtie’s re-emergence from the slime…

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Feingold Tries To Stop Obama From Crossing The Rubicon

by dday

The only good news out of this Marc Ambinder post is that the White House reads a lot of Glenn Greenwald. That’s of course fine, but the main point here is that the White House will, at some point, endorse and implement a policy of indefinite detention. We don’t know how many people will be held under this policy, but basically the idea here is to allow the President to determine, at essentially his discretion, although there may be certain safeguards, that a prisoner cannot be either charged with a crime or released from prison, and must be kept in a holding cell “until the terrorists disappear”. This prisoner will have not been proven to have committed a crime, but will simply be thought likely to commit crimes against the United States in the future, based not on actual proof (otherwise they could be charged) but the supposition of a few in the executive branch.

There’s more here and here, and I don’t think I could add much. I’m just completely disgusted by the prospect of indefinite preventive detention.

At least we have some American lawmakers left who understand the magnitude of this decision.

My primary concern, however, relates to your reference to the possibility of indefinite detention without trial for certain detainees. While I appreciate your good faith desire to at least enact a statutory basis for such a regime, any system that permits the government to indefinitely detain individuals without charge or without a meaningful opportunity to have accusations against them adjudicated by an impartial arbiter violates basic American values and is likely unconstitutional. While I recognize that your administration inherited detainees who, because of torture, other forms of coercive interrogations, or other problems related to their detention or the evidence against them, pose considerable challenges to prosecution, holding them indefinitely without trial is inconsistent with the respect for the rule of law that the rest of your speech so eloquently invoked. Indeed, such detention is a hallmark of abusive systems that we have historically criticized around the world. It is hard to imagine that our country would regard as acceptable a system in another country where an individual other than a prisoner of war is held indefinitely without charge or trial.

You have discussed this possibility only in the context of the current detainees at Guantanamo Bay, yet we must be aware of the precedent that such a system would establish. While the handling of these detainees by the Bush Administration was particularly egregious, from a legal as well as human rights perspective, these are unlikely to be the last suspected terrorists captured by the United States. Once a system of indefinite detention without trial is established, the temptation to use it in the future would be powerful. And, while your administration may resist such a temptation, future administrations may not […]

I appreciate your efforts to reach out to Congress on this important issue. In that spirit, I intend to hold a hearing in the Constitution Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee in June and ask that you make a top official or officials from the Department of Justice available to testify. I recognize that your plans are not yet fully formed, but it is important to begin this
discussion immediately, before you reach a final decision. I will be sending formal invitations in the coming weeks and look forward to hearing the testimony of your administration.

Sadly, Feingold appears to be alone in this opinion. But one Senator can do a lot, especially with help from the outside. It’s absolutely crucial that we provide him all the muscle he needs to push the Administration back on this horrific decision.

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Fiscal Scolds Hoping For Catastrophe
by digby
Here’s the latest from the catfood lobby:

When the trustees of Social Security and Medicare recently reported on the economic outlook for these programs, the news coverage was universally glum. The recession had made everything worse. Social Security, Medicare face insolvency sooner, headlined The Wall Street Journal. Actually, these reports were good news. Better would have been Social Security, Medicare risk bankruptcy in 2010.It’s increasingly obvious that Congress and the president (regardless of which party is in power) will deal with the political stink bomb of an aging society only if forced. And the most plausible means of compulsion would be for Social Security and Medicare to go bankrupt: trust funds run dry; promised benefits exceed dedicated payroll taxes. The sooner this happens, the better.That the programs will ultimately go bankrupt is clear from the trustees’ reports. On pages 201 and 202 of the Medicare report, you will find the conclusive arithmetic: over the next 75 years, Social Security and Medicare will cost an estimated $103.2 trillion, while dedicated taxes and premiums will total only $57.4 trillion. The gap is $45.8 trillion. (All figures are expressed in “present value,” a fancy term for “today’s dollars.”)The Medicare actuaries then dryly note what would happen once the trust funds for Social Security and Medicare’s hospital insurance program are depleted: “No provision exists under current law to address the projected [Medicare] and [Social Security] financial imbalances. Once assets are exhausted, expenditures cannot be made except to the extent covered by ongoing tax receipts.” Translation: benefits would fall. Social Security checks would shrink; some Medicare bills wouldn’t be paid in full—and the shortfalls would progressively worsen. Retirees would scream. Hospitals might shut. No president or Congress would abide the outcry; even the threat of imminent bankruptcy would rouse them to action. But restoring the programs’ solvency would confront Congress and the White House with fundamental questions.

My God, the sky is falling. Right now the social security trust fund isn’t going to run out of the surplus we’ve all been paying into it since 1983 until 2037, which is a real shame. If only we could make it go bankrupt now and use all that money for tax cuts and wars.
Just a little reminder — here’s Ronald Reagan raising the same alarm over 45 years ago:

But we’re against those entrusted with this program when they practice deception regarding its fiscal shortcomings, when they charge that any criticism of the program means that we want to end payments to those people who depend on them for a livelihood. They’ve called it “insurance” to us in a hundred million pieces of literature. But then they appeared before the Supreme Court and they testified it was a welfare program. They only use the term “insurance” to sell it to the people. And they said Social Security dues are a tax for the general use of the government, and the government has used that tax. There is no fund, because Robert Byers, the actuarial head, appeared before a congressional committee and admitted that Social Security as of this moment is 298 billion dollars in the hole. But he said there should be no cause for worry because as long as they have the power to tax, they could always take away from the people whatever they needed to bail them out of trouble. And they’re doing just that.

A young man, 21 years of age, working at an average salary — his Social Security contribution would, in the open market, buy him an insurance policy that would guarantee 220 dollars a month at age 65. The government promises 127. He could live it up until he’s 31 and then take out a policy that would pay more than Social Security. Now are we so lacking in business sense that we can’t put this program on a sound basis, so that people who do require those payments will find they can get them when they’re due — that the cupboard isn’t bare?

These people have been saying the same thing for over half a century and they’ll keep saying it until the program is gone. I don’t know why anyone still listens to them.
If only these people cared as much about the future of the planet as they do about the projected SS revenues a century out, we might start to make some rational policies. They simply want to break the generational bond between the young and old and are always looking for a good moment of impending crisis (or “opportunity” like a rising stock market) to put an end to the program. Whatever works. As for Medicare — there’s no fixing it without health care. But they know that too — which is one of the reasons they will block reform.
These people are zealots. And anyone who engages them with any earnest intention to make a deal will be thwarted. They know exactly what they want and it isn’t “solvency.” It’s the opposite — as that column makes crystal clear.
h/t to RA

Capital Punishment For Trespassing

by digby

A man believed to have been trespassing at a Salem apartment complex died Saturday night after he was shot with a Taser as Salem police officers tried to arrest him. Gregory Rold, 37, died at Salem Hospital shortly before 9:30 p.m., Lt. Dave Okada of the Salem Police said today. Officers were called to an apartment in the 1200 block of Royvonne Avenue Southeast in Salem about 7:38 p.m. following a report of a man who was trespassing. They encountered Rold, who Okada said “violently” resisted arrest. That prompted officers to shoot him with a Taser and strike him with their batons. After he was handcuffed, officers realized Rold was unconscious. According to Okada, they immediately called for medical help and gave emergency aid to Rold. Rold was then taken to Salem Hospital where he died.

Tasers are only supposed to be used in cases where lethal force would otherwise be employed, so one assumes that back in the day they would have just shot this man in the head. So this is much better. Less mess.

h/t to dt
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