The carjack victim
by digby
If you haven’t had a chance to read the story of the Boston Bombers’ hijack victim, you can read it here. This CNN interview with the reporter who got the story captures the highlights:
Just wow. I seriously doubt I could keep my wits about me as this fellow did. Bravo to him.
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The Georgetown book review and lady’s circle jerk society is meeting this week-end
by digby
This week-end is going to put the most insufferable side of Washington on display for their “Nerd Prom” in which they get all dressed up and admit for one day that they aren’t Very Serious People but rather overpaid celebrities just like the movie stars they hire to come in and sit with them. In some ways it’s the most honest day of the year in our nation’s capital.
I’m going to guess it’s no coincidence that this morning’s Politico featured this nauseating little navel gaze:
A year after signing a book contract to chronicle the incestuous ecology of insider Washington, New York Times writer Mark Leibovich was schmoozing his way through a going-away party for Joe Lockhart atop the Glover Park Group headquarters. He stumbled upon an incredible gift.
Outgoing Pentagon flack Geoff Morrell was musing about his future now that his boss, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, was retired. Just then, Robert Barnett – Washington’s super-lawyer and a chief target of Leibovich’s upcoming book – popped over to brag about Morrell, his client: “He’s drowning in offers.”
Two months later, Morrell, with Barnett’s help, landed a very lucrative gig with BP America. This news was featured exclusively atop POLITICO’S “Playbook” – Mike Allen’s morning newsletter.
Talk about incestuous: A top Obama official cashes in with a top corporation with the help of a top Washington fixer and gets top-shelf treatment from one of Washington’s top journalists (who also happens to be the co-byline on this piece.)
And they’re all personal friends, to boot.
This scene is virtually certain to make the final cut of Leibovich’s upcoming book, titled “This Town,” scheduled to be published in July.The book’s subtitle, for reasons we cannot fathom, will soon be changed from “The Way It Works in Suck Up City” to “Two Parties and a Funeral — Plus, Plenty of Valet Parking! — in America’s Gilded Capital.”
Yes, you read that right. The co-byline on this piece is also featured as one of the “suckup-ees” and doesn’t seem to find any of it in the least bit embarrassing. But then, this is Politico and he’s Mike Allen so I suppose one needn’t say anything more. It speaks for itself:
*Barnett might [care]. The Democratic super-lawyer is portrayed as a quintessential operator who self-promotes and seems to have clients on every side: Democrats and Republicans, managers and employees, corporations and individuals. This is hardly shocking to Washington insiders – because most have had him on retainer. We are not sure he will much care, given that he jokingly boasts in speeches that he was once called “the doorman to Washington’s revolving door.”
Barnett once represented us for a brief period. Come to think of it, he represents almost everybody we know.
*Haddad may regret it, too. Leibovich asked a lot of questions about how the former TV producer courts the powerful. He focused on Haddad’s relentless promotion and fundraising for CURE (Citizens United for Research in Epilepsy), founded by Susan Axelrod, the wife of David Axelrod. Leibovich portrays this as a blatant effort to curry favor – a bald execution of the theory that you build connections to the powerful by finding out what interests the people around them.
David Axelrod is distressed by the expected portrayal and told us: “Tammy has been a great friend to Susan and me, and I think very sincere about it. She has never asked me for anything in return.”
Haddad did not give Leibovich a formal interview but the two recently had a clear-the-air lunch at The Jefferson hotel. Leibovich seemed suspicious of Haddad’s presence on Air Force One when Jon Meacham of Newsweek, then one of her clients, had an interview with President Obama. But Haddad has told friends it’s perfectly normal to accompany clients to interviews she has helped arrange. She declined to comment.
For what it’s worth, Haddad is a friend who has thrown parties for us. Come to think of it, she has thrown parties for virtually every other person and cause we know.
*We won’t love the book, either. It is clear that POLITICO and Playbook are portrayed as enablers of the culture Leibovich lampoons. (See: this column). He will write about how often Barnett appears in our publication, as both a source and subject, and how often POLITICO is setting the narrative on stories he argues are superficial or trivial. Mike is the subject of at least a chapter – drawn largely from the New York Times Magazine profile that helped win the “This Town” book contract — that paints him as suspiciously popular with people in power, oddly private and the middleman in many news transactions in town.
Hahahaha! It’s just so droll. Here they are being “lampooned” for being so terribly, terribly insiderey and important! And they are! (After all, it would be far worse not to mentioned at all, don’t you know.)
Honestly, I’d rather watch the Real Silicone Housewives of Anywhere than read that book about these fatuous, self-important social climbers. They are the least interesting wealthy celebrities in the world.
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Mark Zuckerberg moves his empire to Galt’s Gulch
by digby
Lest you think that some drunk GOP strategist put the wrong candidate in that ad, think again:
Mark Zuckerberg’s new political group, which bills itself as a bipartisan entity dedicated to passing immigration reform, has spent considerable resources on ads advocating a host of anti-environmental causes — including drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and constructing the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.
The umbrella group, co-founded by Facebook’s Zuckerberg, NationBuilder’s Joe Green, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, Dropbox’s Drew Houston, and others in the tech industry, is called FWD.US…
FWD.US is bankrolling two subsidiary organizations to purchase TV ads to advance the overarching agenda — one run by veteran Republican political operatives and one led by Democratic strategists. The GOP-lead group, called Americans For A Conservative Direction, has created an ad in support of Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) which praises him for supporting construction of the Keystone XL pipeline and expanded drilling elsewhere. The ad, which does not mention immigration policy, also attacks Obamacare, “wasteful stimulus spending,” and “seedy Chicago-style politics.” Politico reports the group plans a seven-figure buy with this and other ads.
The other group, called Council for American Job Growth and purportedly intended to appeal to liberals, lauds Sen. Mark Begich (D-AK) for “working to open ANWR to drilling.” The ad also does not mention immigration reform but does highlight Begich’s support of a balanced budget amendment.
I’m sure I don’t have to point out what’s wrong with that picture do I?
Ok, I will anyway: Both the conservative and “liberal” ads are … uhm, conservative.
The article does stress that Zuckerberg’s group is in favor of comprehensive immigration reform which, I guess, is why liberals are supposed to be enthusiastic. I guess we’re supposed to overlook the fact that it’s also a Republican priority to try to get some Latino votes.
In other words, Mark Zuckerberg is a Republican as are, apparently, all his tech pals who are putting their cash to work for conservative causes. Just like all the other greedhead billionaire assholes.
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Sequester game over?
by digby
I think it’s great that Ezra is writing that “the Democrats” have bungled the deficit reduction gambit. It’s certainly true and I’m hopeful that the rest of the establishment will wake up to what’s happened here as well. But it’s been true since before the sequestration ever took place.
He declared the game over because of today’s FAA vote:
In effect, what Democrats said Friday was that in any case where the political pain caused by sequestration becomes unbearable, they will agree to cancel that particular piece of the bill while leaving the rest of the law untouched. The result is that sequestration is no longer particularly politically threatening, but it’s even more unbalanced: Cuts to programs used by the politically powerful will be addressed, but cuts to programs that affects the politically powerless will persist. It’s worth saying this clearly: The pain of sequestration will be concentrated on those who lack political power.
Those he’s referring to are also known as “Democratic Party constituents” which should mean that they have at least some political power. But alas, we’ve known for some time that neither party really gives a damn about them since they were more than willing to use them as chips in their high stakes game of deficit reduction?
Democrats had other choices, of course. As Politico’s Glenn Thrush pointed out on MSNBC Friday, President Obama could’ve vetoed the FAA bill while standing at a Head Start that’s about to throw needy children out of the program. He could’ve vetoed it from the home of an jobless worker who just saw her benefits cut. Democrats could simply have insisted that the powerful can’t get out of sequestration unless the powerless can, too. But they didn’t — and they show no signs that they’ll start.
But that’s game, then. Absent the willingness to accept the pain of sequestration and use it to overturn the whole policy, Democrats have no leverage to end it.
Lol.
That’s all true, except for one thing: the Democrats, particularly the White House, has never been prepared to play the sequestration game effectively. Remember: the idea was that the Republicans would come to the table when the defense cuts bit while the Democrats would be willing to do the same when the children got kicked out of Head Start. But that was always ridiculous. Both parties protect defense cuts, while only progressive Democrats give a second thought to programs for average people. It was never an equal bet.
In fact, the White House has ostentatiously led the way from the beginning by criticizing the “balanced approach” of Simpson-Bowles on the basis of their proposed defense cuts and proposing a Grand Bargain budget that reversed most of the sequestration cuts to those programs. I don’t think it takes a tactical genius to see that while the Republicans may not want defense cuts, the Democrats don’t want them either, which means that the only logical outcome of this stand-off was that while the Democrats would protest the cuts to programs for the poor, the Republicans would actually propose to reverse specific sequestration cuts to the programs that both parties value — like defense, the FAA etc. (And hey, they may even find they value stuff like meat inspection or the CDC too. Winning!)
Unless the Dems were prepared to hold out and let those defense cuts take place, those programs were always going to be sacrificed. And we knew the White House, at least, wasn’t prepared for that. They signaled it loud and clear.
Ezra concludes:
It is worth noting how different the Democrats’ approach to sequestration has been to the GOP’s approach to, well, everything. Over the past five years, Republicans have repeatedly accepted short-term political pain for long-term policy gain. That’s the governing political principle behind their threats to shut down the government, breach the debt ceiling, and, for that matter, accept sequestration. Today, Democrats showed they’re not willing to accept even a bit of short-term pain for long-term policy gain. They played a game of chicken with the Republicans, and they lost. Badly.
Well, yeah. But they do look like grown-ups and that’s what’s going to save them, right?
Meanwhile, as Ezra says, the White House should probably accept the Inhofe-Toomey bill so they can choose how some of these cuts are distributed. I know they don’t want to take responsibility for that, but they aren’t running again and should take this bullet for the Democrats who are. It’s only fair. They’re the one’s who have been pushing this cockamamie strategy the hardest.
Update: Also too, what Charles Pierce says:
Pure political analysis — this whole thing is going to come down, not to “who’s the grown-up in the room?” but to, “Government doesn’t work. See?” At which point, the Republicans win.
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I gotcher libertarian paradise for ya rightchea
by digby
You’ll enjoy watching a libertarian dance on the head of a pin, make absolutely no sense and blame “redundancy” in the regulatory state and “central planning” for the disaster in Texas:
You see, there were too many rules and too much government planning. So we need fewer rules and less planning and then it wouldn’t happen. Or something.
But once you sort through all the clumsy obfuscation you see that these are really the operative phrases for this fellow:
“… you want to let people go out into the marketplace and take risks … you can’t have a utopian society … do you believe that nobody can ever be put into any danger?”
Shit happens. That’s all he’s really got.
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QOTD: President Obama
by digby
At the Planned Parenthood conference:
“The fact is, after decades of progress, there’s still those who want to turn back the clock to policies more suited to the 1950s than the 21st Century. And they’ve been involved in an orchestrated and historic effort to roll back basic rights when it comes to women’s health.”
This is apparently the first time a sitting president has spoken in person to Planned Parenthood. Good for him.
Unfortunately, there was also this:
Obama says he fought for his health care law to ensure individuals have the right to make their own medical choices. He’s asking medical providers and abortion rights supporters to “get the word out” about the law’s benefits.
I would hope that everyone in that audience, at least, would understand why that comment is more than a little bit bizarre.
Oh well. It’s still good that he appeared and that he condemned the neanderthal activities in the states. Hopefully, all national Democratic leaders will stop puling their punches on this as well. It never made any sense from a moral perspective and it’s incomprehensible from a political perspective.
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So the US “doesn’t torture”, is that right?
by digby
Even DiFi is becoming concerned and she’s never been an outspoken opponent of torture*:
The Senate’s influential Intelligence Committee chairman urged the White House to renew its efforts to release cleared captives at the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo on Thursday, as the prison spokesman said the hunger striking population had reached 94.
“There is a growing problem of more and more detainees on a hunger strike,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., wrote President Barack Obama’s national security advisor. She specifically asked the White House to review the files of 86 detainees already cleared for transfer by the U.S. intelligence agencies “and let me know if there are suitable places to continue to hold or resettle these detainees either in their home countries or third countries.” The White House has blamed restrictions imposed upon transfer by Congress as well as political instability in Yemen for its inability to send any captives away.
Obama, in addition, had placed an indefinite hold on release of Yemeni detainees to their homeland after the failed 2009 Christmas Eve bombing attempt of a U.S.-bound airliner by Umar Farouq Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian man who was influenced by Yemen’s Al-Qaida of the Arabian Peninsula offshoot. Feinstein supported the freeze at that time, calling Yemen “too unstable.”
“Although AQAP still has a strong presence in Yemen, I believe it would be prudent to re-visit the decision to halt transfers to Yemen,” she wrote NSA Director Thomas Donilon. Since the freeze, Yemen has a new post-Arab Spring president and Feinstein said the White House should reassess whether, “with appropriate assistance,” Yemen could securely hold detainees in its capital, Sana’a.
She cited a recent meeting with the International Red Cross who described detainee desperation at Guantánamo as “unprecedented.”
Feinstein released the letter on the same day the military said all 94 hunger strikers among the 166 captives at Guantánamo are under lockdown in solitary cells or at the prison hospital.
Whenever I hear anyone say “the United States doesn’t torture” I am reminded of this famous essay by former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky which was published in the middle of the torture debate in 2005:
Why would democratically elected leaders of the United States ever want to legalize what a succession of Russian monarchs strove to abolish? Why run the risk of unleashing a fury that even Stalin had problems controlling? Why would anyone try to “improve intelligence-gathering capability” by destroying what was left of it? Frustration? Ineptitude? Ignorance? Or, has their friendship with a certain former KGB lieutenant colonel, V. Putin, rubbed off on the American leaders? I have no answer to these questions, but I do know that if Vice President Cheney is right and that some “cruel, inhumane or degrading” (CID) treatment of captives is a necessary tool for winning the war on terrorism, then the war is lost already.
Even talking about the possibility of using CID treatment sends wrong signals and encourages base instincts in those who should be consistently delivered from temptation by their superiors. As someone who has been on the receiving end of the “treatment” under discussion, let me tell you that trying to make a distinction between torture and CID techniques is ridiculous. Long gone are the days when a torturer needed the nasty-looking tools displayed in the Tower of London. A simple prison bed is deadly if you remove the mattress and force a prisoner to sleep on the iron frame night after night after night. Or how about the “Chekist’s handshake” so widely practiced under Stalin — a firm squeeze of the victim’s palm with a simple pencil inserted between his fingers? Very convenient, very simple. And how would you define leaving 2,000 inmates of a labor camp without dental service for months on end? Is it CID not to treat an excruciatingly painful toothache, or is it torture?
Now it appears that sleep deprivation is “only” CID and used on Guantanamo Bay captives. Well, congratulations, comrades! It was exactly this method that the NKVD used to produce those spectacular confessions in Stalin’s “show trials” of the 1930s. The henchmen called it “conveyer,” when a prisoner was interrogated nonstop for a week or 10 days without a wink of sleep. At the end, the victim would sign any confession without even understanding what he had signed.
I know from my own experience that interrogation is an intensely personal confrontation, a duel of wills. It is not about revealing some secrets or making confessions, it is about self-respect and human dignity. If I break, I will not be able to look into a mirror. But if I don’t, my interrogator will suffer equally. Just try to control your emotions in the heat of that battle. This is precisely why torture occurs even when it is explicitly forbidden. Now, who is going to guarantee that even the most exact definition of CID is observed under such circumstances?
But if we cannot guarantee this, then how can you force your officers and your young people in the CIA to commit acts that will scar them forever? For scarred they will be, take my word for it.
In 1971, while in Lefortovo prison in Moscow (the central KGB interrogation jail), I went on a hunger strike demanding a defense lawyer of my choice (the KGB wanted its trusted lawyer to be assigned instead). The moment was most inconvenient for my captors because my case was due in court, and they had no time to spare. So, to break me down, they started force-feeding me in a very unusual manner — through my nostrils. About a dozen guards led me from my cell to the medical unit. There they straitjacketed me, tied me to a bed, and sat on my legs so that I would not jerk. The others held my shoulders and my head while a doctor was pushing the feeding tube into my nostril.
The feeding pipe was thick, thicker than my nostril, and would not go in. Blood came gushing out of my nose and tears down my cheeks, but they kept pushing until the cartilages cracked. I guess I would have screamed if I could, but I could not with the pipe in my throat. I could breathe neither in nor out at first; I wheezed like a drowning man — my lungs felt ready to burst. The doctor also seemed ready to burst into tears, but she kept shoving the pipe farther and farther down. Only when it reached my stomach could I resume breathing, carefully. Then she poured some slop through a funnel into the pipe that would choke me if it came back up. They held me down for another half-hour so that the liquid was absorbed by my stomach and could not be vomited back, and then began to pull the pipe out bit by bit. . . . Grrrr. There had just been time for everything to start healing during the night when they came back in the morning and did it all over again, for 10 days, when the guards could stand it no longer. As it happened, it was a Sunday and no bosses were around.
They surrounded the doctor: “Hey, listen, let him drink it straight from the bowl, let him sip it. It’ll be quicker for you, too, you silly old fool.” The doctor was in tears: “Do you think I want to go to jail because of you lot? No, I can’t do that. . . . ” And so they stood over my body, cursing each other, with bloody bubbles coming out of my nose. On the 12th day, the authorities surrendered; they had run out of time. I had gotten my lawyer, but neither the doctor nor those guards could ever look me in the eye again.
And he made a most important observation that also stuck with me:
Today, when the White House lawyers seem preoccupied with contriving a way to stem the flow of possible lawsuits from former detainees, I strongly recommend that they think about another flood of suits, from the men and women in your armed services or the CIA agents who have been or will be engaged in CID practices. Our rich experience in Russia has shown that many will become alcoholics or drug addicts, violent criminals or, at the very least, despotic and abusive fathers and mothers.
For me, that essay said everything that needed to be said about torture. (If you haven’t read the whole thing, I urge you to read it today.) It was published in the Washington Post and every political elite in the country no doubt read it.
And yet … here we are 8 years later still force-feeding prisoners in Guantanamo.
This is what a force-feeding apparatus at Guantanamo looks like:
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The camp’s medical staff were authorized to strap captives into the restraint chair, for their force-feeding, and a period long enough afterwards to prevent the captives defeating their force-feeding by inducing vomiting.
Note the plastic bag protecting the seat cushion. Guantanamo captives report they were routinely immobilized so long they could no longer control their bladder and bowels and soiled themselves. |
They can also be strapped to a gurney with five point restraints.
This is a terrible, terrible policy and they have to figure out a way to stop it. It may be that Obama cannot close Guantanamo or ship some of these prisoners back to their countries (although there’s some question about why the administration is not taking advantage of some loosening in that repatriation policy) but there is no reason that these men who have been improperly imprisoned should be treated with anything but kindness and dignity while they are still in custody. Obviously, that will not make up for their wrongful incarceration, but we should at least try to make them as comfortable as possible.
They should fire the commandant and hire the head of Hilton to go down there and turn the camp into a resort. Look at it this way: if the US ever gets its soul back and closes the damned place, we can sell it to a big hotel chain for profit. Isn’t that the American way?
*according to Emptywheel, that’s wrong. She’s actually been pretty good on torture. I stand corrected.
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John Galt: terminally selfish, or terminally stupid?
by David Atkins
Paul Krugman takes a good look at the abject failure of the Austerians at an academic and a public policy level, and asks if the problem is simply delusion, or a more sinister corruption of elite policymakers.
Part of the answer surely lies in the widespread desire to see economics as a morality play, to make it a tale of excess and its consequences. We lived beyond our means, the story goes, and now we’re paying the inevitable price. Economists can explain ad nauseam that this is wrong, that the reason we have mass unemployment isn’t that we spent too much in the past but that we’re spending too little now, and that this problem can and should be solved. No matter; many people have a visceral sense that we sinned and must seek redemption through suffering — and neither economic argument nor the observation that the people now suffering aren’t at all the same people who sinned during the bubble years makes much of a dent.
But it’s not just a matter of emotion versus logic. You can’t understand the influence of austerity doctrine without talking about class and inequality.
Thus, the average American is somewhat worried about budget deficits, which is no surprise given the constant barrage of deficit scare stories in the news media, but the wealthy, by a large majority, regard deficits as the most important problem we face. And how should the budget deficit be brought down? The wealthy favor cutting federal spending on health care and Social Security — that is, “entitlements” — while the public at large actually wants to see spending on those programs rise.
You get the idea: The austerity agenda looks a lot like a simple expression of upper-class preferences, wrapped in a facade of academic rigor. What the top 1 percent wants becomes what economic science says we must do.
Does a continuing depression actually serve the interests of the wealthy? That’s doubtful, since a booming economy is generally good for almost everyone. What is true, however, is that the years since we turned to austerity have been dismal for workers but not at all bad for the wealthy, who have benefited from surging profits and stock prices even as long-term unemployment festers. The 1 percent may not actually want a weak economy, but they’re doing well enough to indulge their prejudices.
It could be that the wealthy feel an innate sense of guilt at riding the economy into a ditch, and feel the need to project that guilt onto their lessers. Or it could just be that the wealthy are doing quite nicely the way things are and see no reason why they should give up any of their stolen wealth to boost aggregate demand.
Are the John Galts simply stupid about economics, or do they know better and lie through their teeth in order to maintain their position? That debate can rage on, for whatever it’s worth. But one thing’s for sure: honest policymakers who want to do right by the country would do well to stop listening to the wealthy, and start listening to the rest of the 90% of America. The John Galts of the world aren’t brilliant at anything beyond their own self-enrichment. A talent for extracting a great sum of money from predation on consumers and workers doesn’t translate to an understanding of macroeconomics, or anything else for that matter.
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No, consistency does not matter
by digby
… to Republicans. It’s simply foolish to hang your hats on the fact that they are hypocrites and will be revealed as such to the nation. They don’t care, and neither does at least half the country:
Americans For Prosperity, a conservative group funded by the Koch brothers, is echoing the GOP narrative that sequestration cuts are largely President Obama’s fault. Back in March, AFP struck a different tone on sequestration, claiming it would help the economy.
“By no means is the sequester perfect, but we must begin acting now to rein in this wasteful prosperity killer,” AFP President Tim Phillips wrote in USA Today. “Making these modest reductions to government overspending is an important first step.”
[…]
In the weeks leading up to the sequester, AFP repeatedly urged Republicans to let it take effect, contradicting much of the economic field’s warnings against it.
Here they are today:
Maybe this will all blow back on them. But in the next election, the president will not be on the ballot and there will not be a national campaign. The Koch Brothers will be saying whatever they want in millions of dollars of ads and nobody will know or care that they once said the opposite. Banking on the American people to be able to sort all this out and declare the adult in the room the winner is a very big bet.
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Denial hits 400ppm
by David Atkins
Here is what Republicans are saying:
Back on planet Earth, concentrations of CO2 just edged past 400 parts per million.
What does that mean? Well, the relationship between global temperature and CO2 has been well established. It doesn’t take effect immediately, but it’s inevitable. The last time we had sustained 400ppm CO2 in the atmosphere?
A 2009 article in Science reported that when CO2 concentrations were sustained at this level 15 million years ago, it was 5° to 10°F warmer and seas were 75 to 120 feet higher.
For the record, 10 degrees Fahrenheit warmer and 120 feet higher sea levels might spell the end of civilization as we know it.
And it’s not like we’re going to stop at 400ppm, either, at our current rate:
Conservatives don’t live in the same reality the rest of us do. But they’ll die in it all the same.
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