By The Short And Curlies
by digby
Over the course of the Sonia Sotomayor confirmation hearings, Senator Lindsey Graham underwent a baffling, Jekyll-and-Hyde-like transformation. His own words may reveal why.
Rush issued the fatwa and Huck did what he had to do.
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Apple Of His Daddy’s Eye
by digby
Following in his father’s turncoat, egomaniacal style, Oklahoma congressman Dan Boren laid down the gauntlet:
“Barack Obama is very unpopular,” said Boren, who represents Oklahoma’s 2nd Congressional District. “He got 34 percent of the vote statewide, and less in our district. If he were to run for re-election today, I bet it would be even worse.” Boren points out that he does support some of Obama’s initiatives, like the economic stimulus package. He has voted for Obama-supported bills 81 percent of the time, according to a recent Congressional Quarterly study. But despite this, he said the president is too liberal. “It would be a lot nicer if we had someone who was in the middle,” he said. “Bill Clinton won our district. A lot of people don’t remember that, but he, in 1996, carried this district. I think if you have someone who governs from the middle, who’s pragmatic, who works with both parties. President Obama talks a lot about bipartisanship. If you look at some of the legislation, he may have one or two Republicans.”
I’ve written about Boren’s father David’s intractable know-nothingness during the Clinton administration before, which you can see here if you missed it. Suffice to say that the idea that Clinton was a much more bipartisan figure is largely due to the fact that Democratic jackasses like David Boren held a gun to his head for no reason other than that they could.
More importantly, I think it’s quite obvious why the white man from Arkansas might win in Boren’s Oklahoma district while the exotic mixed race guy from Illinois by way of Hawaii might not. Luckily for the Democrats there are fewer districts in the land like Boren’s than there used to be.
Luckily for the country, Dan Boren is not a US Senator like his father where he could really do some damage, and if he ever tries to run I certainly hope progressives all rise up and try to stop him. He’d make Ben Nelson look like Teddy Kennedy by comparison. With 60 Democrats — hell with 51 — there’s no need for someone like him in the Senate. Might as well keep the Inhofe/Coburn sideshow for entertainment purposes.
h/t to bb
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Daft
by digby
The latest round of “What Was Cheney Up To” has this from TPM:
Since the news broke (sub. req.) at the start of the week that CIA director Leon Panetta had pulled the plug on a secret program to assassinate or capture al Qaeda leaders, we’ve been raising questions about one key aspect of the story. In particular, what was it about the program that was so shocking that Dick Cheney reportedly ordered it kept secret from Congress, Panetta quashed it as soon as he heard about it, and Congressional Democrats risked being painted as soft on terror by shrieking about being kept in the dark? We may have gotten a good piece of the answer here: The Washington Post reports today on how the program had been revived and then put on hold several times since 2001. But it also says, referring to the “presidential finding” with which President Bush authorized the program in 2001:
The finding imposed no geographical limitations on the agency’s actions, and intelligence officials have said that they were not obliged to notify Congress of each operation envisaged under the directive.
“No geographical limitations” presumably means that operations could potentially be carried out in countries, friendly or unfriendly, that are far from any war zone — including even the US itself.
The Wapo also reports that the thing was just about to be operational before the plug was pulled last month. The plot thickens.
The LA Times says that the “CIA Was A Long Way From Jason Bourne” but when I read that description of a secret hit squad with no limits, I was reminded of something else, which I wrote a year ago:
Dahlia Lithwick has a great column in this week’s Newsweek about the biggest influence on the thinking of members of the Bush administration in regards to its “interrogation” policies: Jack Bauer.
I’ve written a ton about this shocking phenomenon over the years, but even I didn’t know that John Yoo actually cited the show in his book:
“What if, as the Fox television program ’24’ recently portrayed, a high-level terrorist leader is caught who knows the location of a nuclear weapon?”
… And we know for sure he knows and he knows we know he knows and we know he knows we know he knows and he STILL won’t give it up even if we give him ice cream? Then what, huh? Will you be willing to waterboard him then, you lily livered terrorist symps?
I honestly don’t know if this is some Straussian ruse to try to pull one over on the rubes or if these people actually believe the things they see on television. Scalia cited Bauer too. They held a seminar at the Heritage Foundation with the shows actors and producers featuring Chertoff and Limbaugh in which Chertoff said:
SECRETARY CHERTOFF: …In reflecting a little bit about the popularity of the show “24” — and it is popular, and there are a number of senior political and military officials around the country who are fans, and I won’t identify them, because they may not want me to do that (laughter) I was trying to analyze why it’s caught such public attention. Obviously, it’s a very well-made and very well-acted show, and very exciting. And the premise of a 24-hour period is a novel and, I think, very intriguing premise. But I thought that there was one element of the shows that at least I found very thought-provoking, and I suspect, from talking to people, others do as well.
Typically, in the course of the show, although in a very condensed time period, the actors and the characters are presented with very difficult choices — choices about whether to take drastic and even violent action against a threat, and weighing that against the consequence of not taking the action and the destruction that might otherwise ensue.
In simple terms, whether it’s the president in the show or Jack Bauer or the other characters, they’re always trying to make the best choice with a series of bad options, where there is no clear magic bullet to solve the problem, and you have to weigh the costs and benefits of a series of unpalatable alternatives. And I think people are attracted to that because, frankly, it reflects real life. That is what we do every day. That is what we do in the government, that’s what we do in private life when we evaluate risks. We recognize that there isn’t necessarily a magic bullet that’s going to solve the problem easily and without a cost, and that sometimes acting on very imperfect information and running the risk of making a serious mistake, we still have to make a decision because not to make a decision is the worst of all outcomes.
And so I think when people watch the show, it provokes a lot of thinking about what would you do if you were faced with this set of unpalatable alternatives, and what do you do when you make a choice and it turns out to be a mistake because there was something you didn’t know. I think that, the lesson there, I think is an important one we need to take to heart. It’s very easy in hindsight to go back after a decision and inspect it and examine why the decision should have been taken in the other direction. But when you are in the middle of the event, as the characters in “24” are, with very imperfect information and with very little time to make a decision, and with the consequences very high on a wrong decision, you have to be willing to make a decision recognizing that there is a risk of mistake.
Here’s Rush at the same seminar:
RUSH: I asked Mary Matalin, by the way, on this trip to Afghanistan, we were watching this, and I asked her — she worked for Vice President Cheney at the time — I said, “Do we have anything like this?”
SURNOW: (Laughter.)
RUSH: She said, “Not that I know of.” What about the possibility of government officials — back to the scholars — government officials watching this program (we know they do) can they get ideas, creative ideas on dealing with these problems from this show, or are they strictly fans, do you think?
[…]
Speaking just as an American citizen, you mentioned the operation in Canada. This is why the show has an impact on people. We have a political party trying to shut down the program that enabled that operation in Canada to be a success. It’s being called “domestic spying,” when it’s not. These guys put the same kind of conflict in the program. Jack Bauer, who never fails, always is the target of the government, somebody, being put in jail. It’s amazing how close it is.
Rush was actually asking the right question. I laughed at him at the time,thinking he was an embarrassing torture fanboy. But it turns out that the military really was getting ideas from the show:
According to British lawyer and writer Philippe Sands, Jack Bauer—played by Kiefer Sutherland—was an inspiration at early “brainstorming meetings” of military officials at Guantanamo in September of 2002. Diane Beaver, the staff judge advocate general who gave legal approval to 18 controversial new interrogation techniques including water-boarding, sexual humiliation, and terrorizing prisoners with dogs, told Sands that Bauer “gave people lots of ideas.”
This probably worries me as much as anything I’ve heard about the antics of the Bush administration. These people are so fundamentally unserious that they found inspiration in a television show when the stakes were about as high as they could possibly be. It’s horrifying to think these powerful people were this daft. But they were.
It seems it was actually worse than I thought.
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Scoring The Plan
by digby
Max Baucus says Obama is part of the problem not the solution:
Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said on Thursday that President Obama had hindered his efforts to reach a bipartisan compromise on sweeping health care legislation by opposing a tax on some employer-provided health insurance benefits.
“Basically, the president is not helping us,” Mr. Baucus told reporters outside his office. “He does not want the exclusion. That’s making it difficult.”
Baucus is a jackass, but it’s also possible that this is an authorized negotiating ploy to get recalcitrant conservative Dems on board. It’s hard to sort these things out from afar in the middle of a negotiation. But you do have to wonder when the head of the CBO also specifically said today that unless they repeal the exclusion (and some other things) the plans currently on the table won’t contain costs:
Elmendorf: Bending the cost curve is difficult. As we said in our letter to you, there is a widespread consensus, and you quoted some of this, that a significant share of health spending is not contributing to health. But rooting out that spending without taking away spending that is beneficial to health is not straightforward.
Again, the way I think experts would put it – the money is out there, but it is not going to walk in the government’s door by itself. And devising the legislative strategies and the regulatory changes that would generate these changes is not straight forward. But the directions that have widespread support among health analysts include changing the preferential tax treatment of health insurance. We have a subsidy for larger health insurance policies in our tax code, and that like other subsidies encourages more of that activity. Reducing that subsidy would reduce that. And on the other side, changing the way that Medicare pays providers in an effort to encourage a focus on cost effectiveness in health care and not encourage, as a fee for service system tends to, for the delivery of additional services because bills for that will be paid.
So it appears that this might be shaping up as the most viable ticket to getting a good CBO score. Maybe.
I realize there are policy and political differences among experts on this subject. But as an average American worker, I can testify to the fact that the Cadillac coverage my employers always gave to the executives were outrageous. They not only got huge salaries, bonuses and platinum parachutes, they also got the kind of coverage that gave them no deductibles, unlimited massage therapy, full prescription drug coverage and 100% dental, the kinds of things that weren’t even remotely available to the rank and file. It was like a little present, an afterthought, and considering how much money they were already handing out to these masters of the universe, a drop in the compensation bucket.
I am not in a position to make a judgment on whether or not the policy is correct in terms of overall financing, but in terms of whether or not it’s right to tax these high benefit plans that overwhelmingly benefit pampered executives, I don’t think there’s any question. There is absolutely no reason that they should get the exclusion.
Everything is in motion, so who knows how this will all come out in the wash. It’s worth noting, however, that if the CBO says that lifting the exclusion will allow them to better score the plans, then maybe that’s a good hint about what they should do, even if the wonks disagree about whether or not it will work. Nobody really knows what will contain costs, (or at least those things aren’t on the table at the moment) so they might as well take the CBO hints about what it’s going to take to score the thing successfully. The cost control measures can be tweaked at a later date. It’s better to get as good a plan in terms of benefits, coverage and national regulatory structure as they can on the books right now.
Update: For those who are going to be quizzing lawmakers on the CBO scoring, Ezra Klein has some good advice: if they say that the Democrats’ health reform plans don’t contain enough cost savings, then they should be pressed on what they would do differently. Klein has some good suggestions for specifics.
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Goldman’s Record Taxpayer-Subsidized Profits
by dday
Following up on Digby’s last piece, Matt Taibbi’s excellent reported piece on Goldman Sachs is now online, and he’s created a kind of sequel with this piece about Goldman’s big profits, mostly the result of handout after handout from the Feds:
Last year, when Hank Paulson told us all that the planet would explode if we didn’t fork over a gazillion dollars to Wall Street immediately, the entire rationale not only for TARP but for the whole galaxy of lesser-known state crutches and safety nets quietly ushered in later on was that Wall Street, once rescued, would pump money back into the economy, create jobs, and initiate a widespread recovery. This, we were told, was the reason we needed to pilfer massive amounts of middle-class tax revenue and hand it over to the same guys who had just blown up the financial world. We’d save their asses, they’d save ours. That was the deal.
It turned out not to happen that way. We constructed this massive bailout infrastructure, and instead of pumping that free money back into the economy, the banks instead simply hoarded it and ate it on the spot, converting it into bonuses. So what does this Goldman profit number mean? This is the final evidence that the bailouts were a political decision to use the power of the state to redirect society’s resources upward, on a grand scale. It was a selective rescue of a small group of chortling jerks who must be laughing all the way to the Hamptons every weekend about how they fleeced all of us at the very moment the game should have been up for all of them.
Goldman’s profits only count as “profit” if you consider a pass-through federal subsidy to AIG, quick and easy loans and multiple bailout programs made available to them by the FDIC and the Fed after converting themselves into a bank holding company, the forced collapse of much of its competition and fees from stock issuance from other banks having to repay TARP to be something based on hard work and ingenuity and not political connections and corporate welfare.
But what’s most amazing about all of this is how Goldman Sachs is taking all this federal largesse and plowing it back into the market at HIGHER rates of leverage than even during the crisis which amount burnt down the entire financial system:
As Felix Salmon notes, Goldman last year, after it converted to bank holding company status, announced that it was “taking steps to reduce leverage.” But what’s happened since then is that Goldman has actually been emboldened by all its state backing to borrow more and gamble more than ever. This is the equivalent of a regular casino gambler who hears that the house has doubled down on his credit line and decides to stay up at the tables all night, instead of going home and sobering up. Just look at Goldman’s VaR, or Value at Risk, which measures the amount of money the bank puts at risk on any given day: it’s soared since last year.
Taken altogether, what all of this means is that Goldman’s profit announcement is a giant “fuck you” to the rest of the country. It is a statement of supreme privilege, an announcement that it feels no shame in taking subsidies and funneling them directly into their pockets, and moreover feels no fear of any public response. It knows that it’s untouchable and it’s not going to change its behavior for anyone. And it doesn’t matter who knows it.
And meanwhile, out in the country, unemployment will top 10 percent soon, and lots of people will be wondering why those Wall Street profits haven’t trickled down.
Ian Welsh has a lot more.
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Go Grayson
by digby
Alan Grayson, Elliot Spitzer and Dylan Ratigan (who quit the horrific CNBC because he just couldn’t take it anymore) address Goldman Sachs and the Fed’s secret three trillion dollar bailout.
As long as this continues I don’t want to hear one word about deficits and fiscal responsibility. Not one.
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Whose Fault Will It Be?
by digby
Jack Balkin comments on Jeff Sessions’ special kind of identity politics:
The racial politics of Lee Atwater and his successors has by now long worn out its welcome. We see Senator Sessions engaging in Atwater version 6.0. Like many updates, the old software worked far better.
We should let Sessions rant and rave, but not be much worried about him anymore. We should coolly ignore the newest provocations, much as Judge Sotomayor did today. Sessions can appeal to his base all day long. But playing the politics of resentment to a smaller and smaller base is a loser’s strategy. Let him play it and lose.
I agree. But I have a question. If this economy stays bad and the country doesn’t recover smartly, people are going to get more unhappy and they are going to want to blame someone. Traditionally, the right has always scapegoated blacks or foreigners at times like these (thus deflecting any blame from the ruling class.) And there have been plenty of apolitical people who were willing to look in that direction. But if race is off the table, where will Americans turn if things don’t improve quickly?
Who’s going to be blamed this time?
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David Broder Sees Partisanship
by digby
The Dean observes the Sotomayor hearings and finds that the Democrats and the Republicans are arguing over Supreme Court nominations because they are partisans:
By making the best of their meager case against Sotomayor, the Republicans signaled to Obama that they are ready to fight harder if he names to the bench other liberals less armored by their personal histories. But the Democrats are clearly ready for that fight, fueled by their resentment of the two Bush appointees who have already moved the Supreme Court in a markedly more conservative direction. Chief Justice Roberts won 22 Democratic confirmation votes, not only with his obvious legal credentials but his bland assurances that he saw the job of a justice as akin to that of a baseball umpire — enforcing the rules, not rewriting the rulebook. One after another, Judiciary Committee Democrats told the Republicans: You fooled us once, but never again. Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, for one, pointed to the long list of significant decisions on which Roberts and Alito have led or joined a 5-4 majority, overruling precedent and narrowing individual rights. “I do not believe that Supreme Court justices are merely umpires calling balls and strikes,” Feinstein said. “I believe that they make the decisions of individuals who bring to the court their own experiences and philosophies” — the very thing that Republicans say they worry about in Sotomayor’s speeches. Strip away all the rhetoric, and what you have left is a certainty that partisanship and deeply felt battles will continue to rage every time there is a vacancy on the Supreme Court.
Broder failed to notice, naturally, that the silly Charlie Browns in the Democratic party are the ones who held hands and sang bipartisan kumbaaya while the Republicans now laugh in their faces when the shoe is on the other foot. Roberts and Alito turned out to be hard core ideologues, which anyone with a pulse should have known. But Broder seems reluctant to acknowledge that fact, instead casting the two parties as hypocritical partisans.
Luckily for the Dean, the “partisanship” on display this week is all a kabuki show with no substance. Sotomayor will be confirmed. And who knows what kind of justice she will be? It’s always a crap shoot. But the one thing we do know is that barring an untimely retirement, we will be living with a defacto 5-4 conservative liberal split for probably the next generation thanks to the Rhenquist Court installing their favorite son in 2000 and the press helping make the country believe he was actually competent long enough to get re-elected. The Democrats lost that battle some time back.
This court is as right wing as we’ve ever known and it’s not going to get markedly better even if Sotomayor turns out to be William O Douglas in a dress. And everybody knows it. Because of that, we need more unabashedly liberal partisanship from the legislative branch, not less, just to ensure that our vaunted system of checks and balances isn’t completely trumped by a five man wrecking crew on the Supreme Court.
Broder needs to re-evaluate his premises from an institutional standpoint and realize that because we have a far right, corporate whore Supreme Court, we either need a truly liberal president or a liberal majority legislature to balance things out. When one branch is packed with ideological zealots with lifetime tenure, partisanship is necessary in order to have bipartisan governance.
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The Blue Dogs Go To Work
by dday
Mike Ross, apparently the point person for the Blue Dogs on health care, says he has the votes to defeat the bill in the Blue Dog-heavy Energy and Commerce committee, if he doesn’t get certain changes.
A leader of the conservative “Blue Dog” Democrats told CNN Wednesday he and other group members may vote to block House Democrats’ health care bill from passing a key committee if they don’t get some of the changes they want.
“We remain opposed to the current bill, and we continue to meet several times a day to decide how we’re going to proceed and what amendments we will be offering as Blue Dogs on the committees,” said Rep. Mike Ross, D-Arkansas.
Ross said the bill unveiled Tuesday by House Democratic leaders did not address concerns he and other conservative Democrats outlined in a letter late last week to Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
The conservative Democrats don’t believe the legislation contains sufficient reforms to control costs in the health care system and believe additional savings can be found. Their letter to leaders raised concerns about new mandates on small businesses. Blue Dogs also say the bill fails to fix the inequities in the current system for health care costs for rural doctors and hospitals.
Of course, this is inconsistent. You cannot control costs in the health care system while demanding higher payments to rural doctors and hospitals. I wonder if anyone has pointed that out. The same with the mandates on small businesses. House Democratic leaders actually exempted small businesses from the employer mandate with a higher amount of payroll than what was initially in their discussion draft – up to $250,000. But the Blue Dogs want larger small businesses to be exempted as well. That means less money in the system, because businesses would pay 8% of payroll for each employee if they don’t provide health care. So the Blue Dogs want both cost controls, less cost controls, and more targeted health spending. It’s not supposed to make any sense.
In addition, freshman Jared Polis is trying to derail the surtax on the wealthy used as a mechanism in the House bill to pay for it.
And Rep. Jared Polis (Colo.), meanwhile, was circulating a draft letter among freshman Democrats to Pelosi opposing the $544 billion income tax surcharge on the wealthy, arguing it would hit many small businesses and manufacturers.
“Especially in a recession, we need to make sure not to kill the goose that will lay the golden eggs of our recovery,” Polis wrote. “By concentrating the cost of health care reform in one area, and in one that will negatively affect small businesses, we are concerned that this will discourage entrepreneurial activity and job growth.”
That objection was gaining steam Wednesday among freshmen and others from wealthy suburban districts, as business groups stepped up their attacks.
Actually, what the surtax does is add extra brackets, which should have been done long ago and should actually go further.
The lack of an instinct for self-preservation strikes me. If health care doesn’t pass, the primary part of the President’s agenda, the 2010 midterms could get ugly. And the first people to pay the price would be Blue Dogs in conservative districts and freshmen, the same people grousing at the provisions of the bill. Some of that is legislative sausage as they look to get paid off – but the cost of not having a bill for these members of Congress is great. Henry Waxman puts it best:
Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) said he will meet with Ross, along with others, and plans to amend the bill again tomorrow himself.
But he urged them to work to pass the bill instead of tearing it down.
“Can a bunch of Members bring a bill down? Yeah. Then what? … Democrats have a lot at stake in this legislation, the president has made this his No. 1 priority,” he said. “We’re going to have to come together.”
…Here’s Ben Nelson also being an idiot and attributing the idiocy to his constituents.
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Two Minutes Of Hate
by digby
Media Matters has been gathering a two minutes of wingnut hate compilation every day and they are doozies.
This one’s from Monday:
Here’s Tuesday and here’s today.
Wow. Especially note Beck in the last one. He’s going to have a stroke right on the air. These people are very, very angry.
And then there’s this:
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