Month: June 2009

Anything Happen While I Was Away?

by dday

I was out this morning until now, anything up?

Anything at all?

After going AWOL for seven days, Gov. Mark Sanford admitted Wednesday that he had secretly flown to Argentina to visit a woman with whom he was having an affair. Wiping away tears, he apologized to his wife and four sons and said he will resign as head of the Republican Governors Association.

“I’ve been unfaithful to my wife,” he said in a bombshell news conference in which the 49-year-old governor ruminated aloud with remarkable frankness on God’s law, moral absolutes and following one’s heart. He said he spent the last five days “crying in Argentina.”

Sanford, who in recent months had been mentioned as a possible presidential candidate in 2012, ignored questions about whether he would step down as governor.

At least one state lawmaker called for his resignation. As a congressman, Sanford voted in favor of three of four articles of impeachment against President Bill Clinton, citing the need for “moral legitimacy.”

Oh, that. Anything else? Slow news day.

OK, a few things. First, powerful men thinking they’re invulnerable? Go figure. These things are actually not widespread; despite the anecdotal evidence, a small percentage of politicians have affairs on their spouses. But to the extent that they are, they are internal matters between these people and their families. Nobody really knows what goes on in someone else’s marriage, and I really don’t care about my representatives’ faithfulness. In fact, none of us should. But where this breaks down is when these sanctimonious “family values” types want to police personal behavior of their constituents when they cannot keep it in their pants themselves.

That’s the usual disclaimer. But this Sanford case is much, much different. He left his state, in fact he left the country, for seven days without telling anybody. Setting aside the fact that going to Argentina to “say goodbye” for seven days doesn’t make any kind of sense, and if he got away with this I’m sure there would be additional hikes on the Appalachian trail, so to speak, in the future, leaving the country with no proper explanation is a severe dereliction of duty. He apparently lied to his own staff, lied to the Lieutenant Governor, and left his state in the lurch, despite the unpredictability of events (aren’t we in hurricane season?). That’s probably a firing offense. If I was a South Carolinian, it would be to me, regardless of party.

The larger story is the complete ineptitude of this crop of Republicans to capitalize on what could actually be a treacherous road for Barack Obama in 2012. Sanford has an affair. John Ensign has an affair. Bobby Jindal does an impression of Kenneth the Page from 30 Rock in his coming-out party. Newt Gingrich calls Sonia Sotomayor a racist. And on and on and on. If the economy fails to improve, and if health care fails to pass, Obama is actually vulnerable. That is, if there was a second political party in this country.

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Beck’s Dream House

by digby

There’s something really disconcerting about the fact that this stuff is getting huge ratings:

I get the angry, white male blowhard stuff. That’s been around forever. But Beck brings a sort of decadent, emotional, infantilism to this thing that I don’t think I’ve actually seen before. Maybe off-off Broadway — or an avant garde puppet performance art installation in North Beach I saw once back in the 80s.

It’s not the same old thing, I’ll give him that.

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It Ain’t Over

by digby

With all that’s going on domestically and around the world it’s hard to keep up right now. And I’ve certainly not been keeping up properly with what the supreme court’s been up to. So when I read this by Scott Lemieux, I had one of those awful realizations that no matter how much we may able to politically pull ourselves out of the conservative era, the Roberts Court is going to pull us right back in. The culture war will continue to be fought in the Supreme Court and I will predict that within a very few years we liberals will be decrying the unelected judicial activists on the court while the conservatives will discover the majesty of the judicial system and the wisdom of our forbears in assuring that the Justices have the last word.

Are we really sure that the American system is the best we can do? Really?

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Doh

by digby

The New York Times published a paean to Max Baucus as the great advocate and negotiator on health care reform today. It talks about how he likes to bring evryone to the table and work with both sides and seek bipartisan compromise, blah,blah,blah. And then it slips this in two thirds of the way through:

He conceded that it was a mistake to rule out a fully government-run health system, or a “single-payer plan,” not because he supports it but because doing so alienated a large, vocal constituency and left Mr. Obama’s proposal of a public health plan to compete with private insurers as the most liberal position.

And then it just picks right up and talks about what a terrific legislator he is:

In more than a year of preparation, Mr. Baucus largely developed a new model for writing complex legislation, bringing in an array of interest groups, lobbyists and other experts to lay out issues and options for senators and aides.

In fairness, Baucus wasn’t alone in taking single payer off the table. The presidential candidates all did that and without running on it or at least having it as an option there was very little chance it would be taken seriously as the liberal starting point anyway. It’s quite clear that the Democratic establishment decided a long time ago that we could not be completely rational about health care in this country, many of them because they are slaves to the insurance industry (Baucus among them) and many others because they fear anything that will rile up the Republicans.

But please, spare us the encomiums to the brilliant tactician who took single payer off the table and dealt himself a weakened hand. Clearly, we’ll be lucky at this point if we don’t end with a system that forces us to pay more and receive less. They’re that good.

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Ooookay

by digby

Gov. Mark Sanford arrived in the Hartsville-Jackson International Airport this morning, having wrapped up a seven-day visit to Buenos Aires, Argentina, he said. Sanford said he had not been hiking along the Appalachian Trail, as his staff said in a Tuesday statement to the media.

Sanford’s whereabouts had been unknown since Thursday, and the mystery surrounding his absence fueled speculation about where he had been and who’s in charge in his absence. His emergence Wednesday ended the mystery.

Sanford, in an exclusive interview with The State Media Company, said he decided at the last minute to go to the South American country to recharge after a difficult legislative session in which he battled with lawmakers over how to spend federal stimulus money.

Buenos Aires? I’m thinking tummy tuck.

Update: Cilizza writes this:

The fact that he disappeared for six days made for an interesting — and somewhat odd — story. The fact that — whether willfully or accidentally — Sanford’s staff misled the public about his whereabouts is a major problem for a candidate considered almost certain to run for president in 2012.

Why in the world would anyone think that’s true? His staff lied, probably, to protect their boss. Bad. They may even have to quit over it or be fired. But isn’t the real problem here that this presidential hopeful is something of a weirdo?

I personally have nothing against weirdos. I consider myself to be one. But people with serious, governmental responsibilities can’t be this level of weird. The fact that his staff lied is actually not that big of a problem by comparison. I can’t imagine why anyone would think that’s the salient point about all this.

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The Club Part II

by digby

Following up on my post last week about the shall we say, friendliness between the business and national security elites, here’s a story from 2006 for the wtf files:

President George W. Bush has bestowed on his intelligence czar, John Negroponte, broad authority, in the name of national security, to excuse publicly traded companies from their usual accounting and securities-disclosure obligations. Notice of the development came in a brief entry in the Federal Register, dated May 5, 2006, that was opaque to the untrained eye.

Unbeknownst to almost all of Washington and the financial world, Bush and every other President since Jimmy Carter have had the authority to exempt companies working on certain top-secret defense projects from portions of the 1934 Securities Exchange Act. Administration officials told BusinessWeek that they believe this is the first time a President has ever delegated the authority to someone outside the Oval Office. It couldn’t be immediately determined whether any company has received a waiver under this provision.

The timing of Bush’s move is intriguing. On the same day the President signed the memo, Porter Goss resigned as director of the Central Intelligence Agency amid criticism of ineffectiveness and poor morale at the agency. Only six days later, on May 11, USA Today reported that the National Security Agency had obtained millions of calling records of ordinary citizens provided by three major U.S. phone companies. Negroponte oversees both the CIA and NSA in his role as the administration’s top intelligence official.

[…]

Securities-law experts said they were unfamiliar with the May 5 memo and the underlying Presidential authority at issue. John C. Coffee, a securities-law professor at Columbia University, speculated that defense contractors might want to use such an exemption to mask secret assignments for the Pentagon or CIA. “What you might hide is investments: You’ve spent umpteen million dollars that comes out of your working capital to build a plant in Iraq,” which the government wants to keep secret. “That’s the kind of scenario that would be plausible,” Coffee said.

William McLucas, the Securities & Exchange Commission’s former enforcement chief, suggested that the ability to conceal financial information in the name of national security could lead some companies “to play fast and loose with their numbers.” McLucas, a partner at the law firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr in Washington, added: “It could be that you have a bunch of books and records out there that no one knows about.”

The memo Bush signed on May 5, which was published seven days later in the Federal Register, had the unrevealing title “Assignment of Function Relating to Granting of Authority for Issuance of Certain Directives: Memorandum for the Director of National Intelligence.” In the document, Bush addressed Negroponte, saying: “I hereby assign to you the function of the President under section 13(b)(3)(A) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended.”

A trip to the statute books showed that the amended version of the 1934 act states that “with respect to matters concerning the national security of the United States,” the President or the head of an Executive Branch agency may exempt companies from certain critical legal obligations. These obligations include keeping accurate “books, records, and accounts” and maintaining “a system of internal accounting controls sufficient” to ensure the propriety of financial transactions and the preparation of financial statements in compliance with “generally accepted accounting principles.”

??????

Anybody???

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Examining The Runes

by digby

Greenwald has a great post up today about NPRs continued refusal to use the word torture. Calling it Orwellian is actually kind. He quotes the NPR ombudsman and then comments:

This passage is the second time Shepard described waterboarding with the pleasant-sounding, clinical, minimizing phrase: “poured water down a detainee’s mouth and nostrils for 40 seconds.” Note the other nice-sounding descriptions for what the U.S. did (“forced to stand for hours along side a wall”; that almost sounds peaceful, like a yoga pose: “along side a wall”).

Aside from the obvious political bias, which Glenn explores at length, there is another dimension to the problem even if such bias doesn’t exist. It isn’t that I need the writers’ opinion on the facts. But I do need the facts to be clear. I wrote about this in an earlier post:

[T]here’s a reason why Billmon called it Pravda on the Hudson: we have to spend way too much time these days deciphering the news pages as if they are a bunch of ancient druid runes. I spend hours here and at other blogs trying to read between the lines and figure out what these reporters “really mean” because the conventions of modern journalism are so arcane that you have to be some sort of insider or psychic to know what the hell is actually going on.

I know it’s heresy to say that one of the reasons that newspapers are failing is because of the journalism they practice, but think it’s should at least be considered. The conventions of mainstream reporting have become so complicated that even a fairly sophisticated reader can’t really grasp what’s going on half the time.

All that ombudsman’s “show not tell” concept does is confuse the NPR listeners. Torture is well defined under the statutes and by plain old common sense. To refuse to use the word tells the listeners that what they are hearing is strange and makes them mistrust their own instincts. It obscures, it doesn’t reveal, which is the real point of journalism — at least I thought it was.

Reading Glenn’s piece you’d think the purpose of journalism was to make things so complicated that average people have no idea what’s going on. If that’s the case, they are very successful at what they do.

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Poll Pot

by digby

There is a lot of irrationality in our society, and it’s actually getting worse it seems to me. but one of the most irrational is the war on drugs, specifically the war on marijuana. I don’t think I need to go into the reasons why it’s stupid. Anyone who isn’t completely brainwashed can see that it is a huge waste of money and resources — and everyone knows it. here in California it’s now quasi-legal and there are many medical clinics where people can buy high quality pot if they have a prescription. In LA they are everywhere. In fact, they just opened up a clinic on Venice Beach called “Dr Kush.” Seriously.

But it’s all arbitrary and random, with certain neighborhoods and cities being tough while others are lax and the whole thing just creates a lack of respect for the law and reason. It’s stupid beyond belief.

So, three cheers to Barney Frank for offering up a little common sense on this issue:

A controversial law in Massachusetts could go national if Congressman Barney Frank gets his way.

Frank has filed a bill that would eliminate federal penalties for personal possession of less than 100 grams of marijuana.

It would also make the penalty for using marijuana in public just $100.

“I think John Stuart Mill had it right in the 1850s,” said Congressman Frank, “when he argued that individuals should have the right to do what they want in private, so long as they don’t hurt anyone else. It’s a matter of personal liberty. Moreover, our courts are already stressed and our prisons are over-crowded. We don’t need to spend our scarce resources prosecuting people who are doing no harm to others.”

It won’t pass, of course, because it’s one of those issues that gives every politician a chance to preen and prance about as a social conservative and pretend that they are a member of the Moral Majority standing up for family values. They love to bond with their wingnut brethren and nothing brings them all together like a good hippie punching. But,as with so much of the right wing agenda, it makes no rational sense. I suppose that’s at least partially the point.

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CyberCrat

by digby

Yesterday, when I wrote about Representative Tom Davis’ blithe “good luck” to the 62 year old woman who couldn’t get health insurance, I didn’t realize that he was an Obama administration favorite:

Tom Davis, a moderate Republican from Virginia, has emerged as a leading candidate for the Obama Administration’s newly created position of cybersecurity czar. Sources familiar with the White House’s deliberations on the subject say Obama officials feel a Washington power player would make a better candidate than a tech guru. “They want someone who understands technology issues, but more importantly, knows how to get things done in Washington,” says a cybersecurity expert who has been consulted by the White House. “There are very few people who have that combination of skills, and Davis is at the top of that short list.”

Perhaps he is a talented technology geek who knows how to “get things done.” But there must be at least one person in the country who qualifies for that job who also doesn’t think like a French aristocrat circa 1790. Maybe they could put up an ad on Craigslist or something.

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The Aristocrats

by dday

I don’t think you can find a more perfect summation of the traditional media inside Washington than this – Dana Milbank and Chris Cillizza dressed like fops in bowties and smoking jackets – or more likely, dressed like their own mental projection of themselves – smugly discoursing, with CHAMBER MUSIC in the background, about Beltway gossip. You would think they’d go ahead and use the British accents too.

Amazingly, this isn’t a product of two You Tubers engaging in a parody of the Village mindset, but a video produced by two of the top political reporters at the Washington Post. Two respected figures inside the Beltway, who get all kinds of face time on major media.

I think at this point, we can stop asking “If only the media would cover such-and-such story in THIS way…” For that to be successful, we would have to get such a story covered by someone like these two. That’s just not going to happen.

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