Month: May 2011

Lovin’ a cold-blooded cowboy

by digby

Chris Matthews says that this Bin laden story marks the end of the silly season and America is back to being serious once again:

Matthews: It seems to me that this president is, and I mean this positively, cold-blooded. I think chief executives of this country who have all the fire power before them have to be willing to use it or they shouldn’t take the job. It’s very simple. If you not going to be willing to use out military power, if you’re not going to be willing to kill people when you have to, you shouldn’t take that job.

This president is not a wimp about using power. In fact, I dare say, he’s pretty cold blooded. In going after the pirates, he called for the contract he called for the hit. He did it again here.

Jonathan Martin (Politico): Chris, do you remember the speech he gave when he got the Nobel peace prize? That was very telling, I think …

Matthews: oh yes …

Ok, let’s just stop right there. The whole “only cold-blooded killers should be president” thing juxtaposed with the Nobel Peace Prize is enough to make you reach for the tequila. But it gets even loonier:

Martin: He said that he was a lover of peace but as a leader of a country he looks after America’s interest and there are times when you have to project American force and, yes, use the weapons of war to protect American lives and that’s what he’s done here. But this does I think provide a problem for Republicans on the issue of this narrative. It’s what you touch on Chris. The notion that he is somehow weak or unwilling to use force, he doesn’t like violence, he is sort of the faculty lounge guy who is unfamiliar with the US Military. Uhm, he has a ready response for that now, for the next year and a half: “you can ask Osama bin Laden about how soft I am. You’ll find him at the bottom of the Arabian Sea.”

Matthews: Yeah, I think he’s the man who shot Liberty Valance.

Right. There’s nothing silly in the least about Villagers getting all hot and bothered over a dreamboat presidential cowboy. Remember this one?

Mr. Bush, at a rare prime-time press conference, portrayed himself as the protector of the country…” [His] somber new “war is hell” act was much commented upon, without irony, in the post-mortems. Appearing on Hardball after the press conference, Newsweek’s Howard Fineman (one of the worst monsters of the business) gushed when asked if the Bush we’d just seen was really a “cowboy”: “If he’s a cowboy he’s the reluctant warrior, he’s Shane… because he has to, to protect his family.”

They can hardly contain their swoons when they think a president shows the characteristics of their adolescent fantasy heroes. They just yearn desperately for Real Man to take control.

If that conversation is any indication, I’d say the silly season is far from over.

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The Silent Protests

by digby

Allison Kilkenny has a full round-up of various actions and protests happening around the country showing opposition to budget cuts. I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me that it’s getting so little press, especially considering that we vanquished the boogeyman this week, but still. These are fellow Americans all over the country facing a very real threat to their own lives that nobody seems to think is particularly relevant:

Capitol Police arrested eighty-nine disability rights activists [1] on Monday following the group’s occupation of the Cannon House Office Building rotunda. The disability rights group ADAPT [2] staged the event to protest Representative Paul Ryan’s Medicaid cuts, which would force people with disabilities to live in nursing homes rather than in their own houses. Additionally, the House-passed budget resolution would turn Medicaid into block grants and reduce the program’s spending by more than $700 billion over ten years. Combined with other Medicaid cuts at the state level, the protesters said, the block grant plan could restrict funding so much that people with disabilities would not have enough public support to be able to live independently.[…]Nursing home residents in Illinois [3] also turned out to protest proposed Medicaid cuts. Governor Pat Quinn’s budget reduces Lee Manor’s funding by $500,000, a crushing blow that would cut staff and services at the nursing center.Quinn’s plans include cutting Medicaid by 6 percent, or $70 million in state funds, which would result in a federal match of an additional $70 million also being wiped out. Nearly 7,000 healthcare jobs would be lost, according to Pat Cornstock, executive director of Health Care Council of Illinois.

[…]New Jersey firefighters [4] took to the streets Monday to protest budget cuts and a recent reduction in official fire department staff size.

[…]Thousands of people are expected to rally in downtown Raleigh today in order to protest the proposed cuts [6] in the House budget proposal…Republicans have proposed spending $900 million [9] less in public education and health care than what Governor Beverly Perdue (D) offered in her spending proposal to the legislature in February. These cuts are piled atop 15,000 education job cuts that have already occurred over the past two years, according to NCAE.North Carolina’s budget also sets aside $230 million for corporate income tax breaks and private sector job creation.[…]Thousands more are expected to descend upon Pennsylvania’s State Capitol today to protest Governor Tom Corbett’s budget proposal [10], which calls for over a billion dollars in cuts to education and axing 1,500 state jobs.

Read on … There’s much more.

Now I suppose you can chalk that up to a bunch of useless hippies waving their peace signs around if you want to, but it looks like similar protests are happening all over the country over these issues. And the people who are protesting aren’t doing it out of some abstract ideological commitment to the safety net — they are citizens who are going to be personally affected by these cuts. Real human beings, with real lives.

We can blame the blackout on bin Laden, but let’s face it: nobody in the mainstream media was covering this systematically anyway. These guys need to start calling themselves terrorists or Tea Partiers. It’s the only way anyone will notice.

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Taxing Issues

by digby

If you have a few minutes, listen to this excellent debate between Sam Sedar and Brietbart editor John Nolte about tax policy. It’s a good one.

Also read this excellent post by Dday about corporate tax rates:

While conservatives focus on the nominal corporate tax rate of 35%, that’s almost a meaningless number compared to the effective tax rate, AKA what corporations actually pay to the government. And that tax rate is among the lowest in the industrialized world. But I suppose we need yet another article about this. So David Kocieniewski writes it again, with the excellent topic heading “But Nobody Pays That”:

By taking advantage of myriad breaks and loopholes that other countries generally do not offer, United States corporations pay only slightly more on average than their counterparts in other industrial countries. And some American corporations use aggressive strategies to pay less — often far less — than their competitors abroad and at home. A Government Accountability Office study released in 2008 found that 55 percent of United States companies paid no federal income taxes during at least one year in a seven-year period it studied. The paradox of the United States tax code — high rates with a bounty of subsidies, shelters and special breaks — has made American multinationals “world leaders in tax avoidance,” according to Edward D. Kleinbard, a professor at the University of Southern California who was head of the Congressional joint committee on taxes. This has profound implications for businesses, the economy and the federal budget.

I would argue that, when 55% of US companies pay no federal income tax during at least one year out of seven, more than “some” American companies pay less than their competitors abroad. I’d go with “most.” The best way to judge the efficiency of the corporate tax code is to look at results, and in the US, corporate tax topped out at 1.3% of GDP last year. Most industrialized countries collect DOUBLE that, around 2.5% of GDP. The corporate tax rate is a useless parameter in the face of these numbers.

Obviously, this whole notion that American corporations are the most highly taxed in the world is a lie. And when it comes to this topic in the context of deficit reduction, politicians are incoherent: they say insist that eliminating “loopholes” will raise revenue to close the deficit while simultaneously saying that we must lower corporate tax rates because our corporations can’t compete . But unless corporations are hiring high school kids as accountants these days, they aren’t going to be fooled into believing that they are paying less just because their rates have been lowered, and presumably “compete” out of sheer determination. And it’s very difficult to believe that the corporate lackeys in the US Congress are serious about cutting the kind of loopholes that will result in corporations paying more. I’m fairly sure that the “loopholes” that raise revenue (if there are any) will mostly be the kind that falls on average people, not the Big Money Boyz.

American corporations and individuals do not pay higher taxes than any other industrialized country in the world. They just do not believe they should have to pay any taxes at all.

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Growing Up With “24”

by digby

MSNBC just did a story on something that I had wondered about as well — why were so many big celebrations after the announcement of bin Laden’s death particularly raucous among college students around the country? They showed footage of various campuses and interviewed a couple of the students who explained that they were in the 6th grade when it happened and were just thrilled that it was finally over and that justice was finally done. It was truly a huge, patriotic moment for them.

I realized that the “War on Terror” has been going on for half their lives, so it seems like forever to them. And it reminded me just how much the zeitgest of the moment is “reality” when you are young. The GWOT and the militarization of America is just the way the world is to young people today. Which is probably why they also believe in this:

A new study by the American Red Cross obtained exclusively by The Daily Beast found that a surprising majority—almost 60 percent—of American teenagers thought things like water-boarding or sleep deprivation are sometimes acceptable. More than half also approved of killing captured enemies in cases where the enemy had killed Americans. When asked about the reverse, 41 percent thought it was permissible for American troops to be tortured overseas. In all cases, young people showed themselves to be significantly more in favor of torture than older adults. Torture has been around as long as there have been wars, but media coverage of enhanced interrogation techniques has risen the visibility of torture since the attacks of September 11. Could the generation who came of age since the towers fell have a different notion of what’s acceptable in a time of war? “Over the past 10 years, they’ve been exposed to many new conflicts,” says Isabelle Daoust, who heads ARC’s humanitarian law unit. “But they haven’t been exposed to the rules.”The reasons may be even more nuanced than that—a combination of social and political factors new to the national conversation since the Bush administration claimed that today’s enemy was different from the ones we’ve fought in the past. Intelligence attained through controversial interrogation techniques, Bush’s lawyers at the Department of Justice argued, may be the only way to save American lives. A 2006 dossier detailing the U.S. government strategy to combat terrorism described the difficulty of pursuing new enemies who constantly “evolve and modify their ways of doing business.” As a result, the document suggested, the military would have to evolve its understanding and treatment of the enemy. Legal scholars see societal influences that may be responsible for de-stigmatizing torture, including increasingly graphic media. “I think it suggests the national conscious is becoming more and more corroded and more accustomed to the violation of fundamental principles of human rights and international law,” says Lawrence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard, who blames programs like 24 that trivialize serious issues. (Tribe, along with nearly 300 legal colleagues, sent President Obama a letter last month decrying the prison conditions of Bradley Manning, the army private accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks.)

It’s a new world. Just as it was when I was growing up in the 1960s under the influence of the peace movement and the changing social norms of that time. It took me quite a few years to realize that everyone (except my parents) didn’t see things the way that I did. I just thought that my worldview was the world. At that age it’s all you know. It will be interesting to see how they evolve over the next few years.

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Birth of the Deathers

by digby

So I see that Fox and the talk radio wingnuts are already on the latest conspiracy theory:

Evidently, it’s an article of faith that the administration might have faked the death of bin Laden, ostensibly for electoral purposes. Drudge is heralding a tip that the WH is releasing the “death photos” supposedly to set the rumors to rest. As usual, it’s impossible to know if Drudge is reporting a rumor or starting one …

Wouldn’t you think they’d wonder why the President would do this 18 months before the election? It’s hard to see the advantage there. Of course, everyone knows they don’t know nothin’ ’bout winning campaigns so maybe they just got excited and went with it before they thought about the timing. But I really don’t think anyone’s dumb enough not to have thought of the fact that if they didn’t actually kill him, he might turn up. (Boy would their faces be red then!) The government has a history of lying and there’s every reason to be skeptical, but there are some conspiracy theories that just don’t make a lot of sense and this is one of them.

I suppose it’s inevitable that conspiracy theories would arise from this. Indeed, I would expect it coming from the Muslim extremist world, in which there’s good reasonfor “the legend” to survive. But then I suppose the Muslim extremist world and the American right wing could share the same purpose. It wouldn’t be the first time.

On the other hand, this sort of thing really does add fuel to the conspiracy fire and you have to wonder what the hell they are thinking:

It was a fitting end for the America’s most wanted man. As President Barack Obama’s Deputy National Security Adviser John Brennan told it, a cowardly Osama bin Laden used his own wife as a human shield in his final moments. Except that apparently wasn’t what happened at all. Hours later, other administration officials were clarifying Brennan’s account. Turns out the woman that was killed on the compound wasn’t bin Laden’s wife. Bin Laden may have not even been using a human shield. And he might not have even been holding a gun.

You can’t help but recall the Jessica Lynch nonsense when you hear something like this. Or Pat Tillman. There seems to be a reflexive desire to portray such events as scenes from a cowboy movie and I suppose that after all the talk about “Osama the coward” hiding behind a woman’s skirts yesterday, I suppose they got their mileage out of it. But considering the inevitability of the conspiracy theories, it’s really foolish not to resist the impulse to embellish. The heroes and villains are clear enough.

As for whether or not they needed to create this myth in order to justify killing an unarmed man — well, that’s just nonsense. Just watch Stewart and Colbert last night for a taste of how even the self-identified liberals see this. I don’t think there’s any political downside, and in fact it probably makes them look more macho in the eyes of the people. Besides, the question of whether the president could order an assassination was settled some time ago. They assert the right to keep prisoners in jail forever and kill American citizens, and nobody cares, so why in the world would there be any domestic blowback for ordering the death of the world’s most wanted man?

I think it was mythologizing for the sake of mythologizing, even if it was subconscious. And it’s foolish. Certainly, John Brennan should be expected to get these details right when he comes before the press. But let’s not get stupid. The fact that they embellished doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

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Solitary Man

by digby

Now this makes me want to celebrate:

Ryan’s opponents want to portray the home-district confrontations as the first stirring of a liberal tea party II, while the congressman’s staff and supporters are casting the 41-year-old conservative as a solitary budget warrior willing to make the hard decisions to save the country from fiscal ruin. And he is looking increasingly solitary. Last week, House Speaker John Boehner said he was “not wedded” to the Ryan budget that his caucus passed with near unanimity. On Sunday, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) described the Ryan budget that she voted for as an “aspirational document.” “What I’m saying with that vote is that we have to make decision, we’re not saying every single decision in that bill — that aspirational document — will be the final result. What we are saying is that we have a conviction,” Bachmann said on “Fox News Sunday.”

This is Politico, so of course they go on to portray Ryan as the cool leader facing enemy fire and making far more friends than enemies, which is awfully nice of them. But the polls aren’t on his side and he ain’t popular. When you’re too extreme for Bachman, I think you might want to evaluate how much support you can possibly have.

BTW: Stop Paul Ryan

Burial At Sea

by digby

I assumed that the reason they buried bin Laden at sea was because Muslim tradition requires that they carry out the funeral within 24 hours. Later it was reported they didn’t want to leave a grave site as a memorial. But it turns out that historically this has always been a thorny issue and it’s something the US had dealt with before in the GWOT:

The sea burial of Bin Laden’s body—probably in a heavy metal casket with holes drilled in the top and bottom—is a twist on a longstanding practice. Governments hate to see a nemesis’ burial place become a focal point for resistance. After the Nuremburg trials, the Allied authorities cremated the remains of Hermann Göring—who committed suicide prior to his scheduled hanging—and his nine executed compatriots. Their ashes were spread in the Conwentzbach River, a minor tributary that flows into the Isar, so that their graves wouldn’t become a place of worship for Nazi sympathizers. While the U.S. government might have preferred to cremate Bin Laden’s remains prior to disposal, Muslim tradition forbids cremation because it’s inconsistent with the resurrection of the body. (The Vatican placed the same prohibition on Catholics between 1886 and 1963.) Osama Bin Laden should consider himself lucky compared to Adolf Hitler, whose death was made public 66 years to the day before Bin Laden’s. (Hitler actually committed suicide the day before the announcement.)

After the Führer shot himself, his subordinates cremated his remains—although not effectively—and buried them in the garden of the Reich Chancellery. Days later, Soviet soldiers disinterred the body and moved it to a different gravesite outside of Berlin proper. Over the next quarter-century, Hitler’s remains were dug up and reburied several times. In 1970, Soviet premier Yuri Andropov ordered a KGB officer named Vladimir Gumenyuk to pick a secret final resting place for Hitler, so that his grave wouldn’t become a shrine to neo-Nazis. To this day, Gumenyuk refuses to reveal its location.

Not all U.S. enemies wind up in a watery grave after assassination or execution. Saddam Hussein was treated to traditional Islamic burial rites and interred in a compound he had built for himself near his birthplace. It’s not clear, however, whether the Bush administration or the Iraqi government chose Hussein’s final resting place. When detainees die at Guantanamo Bay, either through suicide or natural causes, the Pentagon repatriates the remains to their home countries, where the funerals often become scenes of anti-American protest.

There’s more at the link.

Short of indulging the macabre fantasies of the wingnuts who want to spit on his naked corpse, there was little hope that they would be able to keep the conspiracy theories from fermenting anyway, so doing it quickly this way was probably for the best. It’s not the sort of thing one normally thinks about but obviously it’s been a big political issue for conquering armies for some time. Who knew?

Update: Apparently I’ve now become a dupe and a lackey (again) for my Lord on High Obama because I wrote this. To be honest, I don’t really give a shit what they did with the body as long as it isn’t used as a urinal for right wingers who want to demonstrate what manly men they are. Whatever. If people think it should have been “properly buried” in a Muslim ceremony, that’s fine. I don’t believe in all that folderol anyway. I was simply unaware of the complications of such a decision and thought it was interesting.

Now I’ll go back to drooling over my Obama poster and dreaming of the day when we’ll be married just like Wills and Kate. You boys can make all the big decisions about how to handle all the dead bodies. Enjoy.

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So now we need to ask the real questions

by digby

I’m certainly enthusiastic about the possibility that this killing might result in a quick withdrawal from Afghanistan, but I’m fairly sure it’s a lot more complicated than that.

This widely circulated article by Steve Coll in the New Yorker gives us some evidence to that effect:

Looking at maps and satellite photos on the Web last night, I saw the wide expanse of the Academy not far from where the million-dollar, heavily secured mansion where bin Laden lived was constructed in 2005. The maps I looked at had sections of land nearby marked off as “restricted areas,” indicating that they were under military control. It stretches credulity to think that a mansion of that scale could have been built and occupied by bin Laden for six years without its coming to the attention of anyone in the Pakistani Army.

The initial circumstantial evidence suggests that the opposite is more likely—that bin Laden was effectively being housed under Pakistani state control. Pakistan will deny this, it seems safe to predict, and perhaps no convincing evidence will ever surface to prove the case. If I were a prosecutor at the United States Department of Justice, however, I would be tempted to call a grand jury. Who owned the land on which the house was constructed? How was the land acquired, and from whom? Who designed the house, which seems to have been purpose-built to secure bin Laden? Who was the general contractor? Who installed the security systems? Who worked there? Are there witnesses who will now testify as to who visited the house, how often, and for what purpose? These questions are not relevant only to the full realization of justice for the victims of September 11th. They are also relevant to the victims of terrorist attacks conducted or inspired by bin Laden while he lived in the house, and these include many Pakistanis, as well as Afghans, Indians, Jordanians, and Britons. They are rightly subjects of American criminal law.

Outside the Justice Department, other sections of the United States government will probably underplay any evidence of culpability by the Pakistani state or sections of the state, such as its intelligence service, I.S.I., in sheltering bin Laden. As ever, there are many other fish to fry in Islamabad and at the Army headquarters, in nearby Rawalpindi: an exit strategy from Afghanistan, which requires the greatest possible degree of coöperation from Pakistan that can be attained at a reasonable price; nuclear stability; and so on.

Pakistan’s military and intelligence service takes risks that others would not dare take because Pakistan’s generals believe that their nuclear deterrent keeps them safe from regime change of the sort under way in Libya, and because they have discovered over the years that the rest of the world sees them as too big to fail. Unfortunately, they probably are correct in their analysis; some countries, like some investment banks, do pose systemic risks so great that they are too big to fail, and Pakistan is currently the A.I.G. of nation-states.

I suppose if I ever believed that the US was in Afghanistan for the sole purpose of capturing or killing bin Laden then I might believe his death means we will pick up and leave. But I’m guessing that the real reason is the neighboring Too Bit To Fail nuclear state with a very powerful radical Islamic faction. The question is how and whether having troops in Afghanistan affects any of it.

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Habeas Corpus

by digby

I expect this from a neanderthal drunk in a bar today, but coming from a US Senator it’s enough to make you sick:

A leading Republican senator on Monday questioned the U.S. government’s decision to dispose of Osama bin Laden’s body within 24 hours.

Bin Laden, the former al Qaeda leader killed by U.S. forces on Sunday, was buried at sea within 24 hours of his death in accordance with Islamic law. Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.), a top Republican on the Armed Services Committee, is skeptical of the decision.

“To me, that didn’t make a lot of sense,” Graham said during an interview with conservative radio talk show host Laura Ingraham.

I think Graham’s motives are probably fairly prosaic. He’s up for re-election and is considered unreliable by the Tea Partiers. The wingnuts are in desperate need of a fresh conspiracy theory and this one has the potential to be a doozy.

The usual suspects are already on it:

Andrew Breitbart, a prominent right-wing commentator with close ties to the Republican Party and the Tea Party, is pushing the theory on his website Big Peace. On Breitbart’s website, J. Michael Walker, suggests Obama take a number of extraordinary steps so he can “make sure [Osama] is dead.” Pictures are apparently not enough. Walker asserts that he needs to be able to “walk right up to bin Laden’s corpse and view it.” More:

The free world, particularly the United States, has a right to make sure Osama bin Laden is really dead. Every American has a right to walk right up to bin Laden’s corpse and view it. We are entitled to know for a fact that the witch is dead. No shroud for dignity’s sake, please – bin Laden’s naked, bullet-riddled corpse should be put on display in lower Manhattan for all the world to see. The entire body should be digitally scanned, inside and out – and made available for everyone to take his or her own picture.

Walker ads that “For us Doubting Thomases out there – we need to see in order to believe.”

This is necessary because we’re so good and they’re so evil.

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90 Seconds For The People

by digby

And now for something completely different:

Congress returns to Washington, DC this week, and with it returns the debate over the FY2012 budget. Frustrated with the focus on downsizing government and seeing a void of budget proposals that reflect their vision for the country, progressive members of Congress crafted the subject of this week’s 90 Second Summary: The People’s Budget.

With new episodes each Monday, 90 Second Summaries provides simple, concise explanations of bills in front of Congress. This week’s episode focuses upon an alternative to both President Barack Obama’s and Congressman Paul Ryan’s budgets. However, as seems to be the case with any “adult conversation” these days, the Beltway press assumes that progressives will be seated at the kids table.

If nothing else, the People’s Budget represents something radically different from the “austerity” measures proposed by the President and Congressman Ryan. It shatters the conventional wisdom that the only option to fix the deficit is to mangle the social safety net. Yet its exclusion from the greater debate means many Americans will never hear what the proposal is.

While folks online are watching this summary, we will be personally delivering it to targeted offices on Capitol Hill. The People’s Budget was never intended to pass on its own, but rather to influence the debate. Our goal is to make a splash today and increase understanding of the People’s Budget.

Please help us spread word about this week’s episode: The People’s Budget.

It would be nice to think that Obama might use some of his “political capital” from the bin Laden killing to push through something like this, but it’s probably too much to hope for. But his hand is at least temporarily strengthened and it will be interesting to see what he does with it.

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