Month: March 2014

What’s the matter with Kansas? Right now it’s catastrophic austerity.

by digby

When right wing ideologue Sam Brownback became governor of Kansas the first thing he did was enact tax cuts and an austerity budget. He wanted to unleash the “job creators.” How’s that working out for them? Read this report and weep:

As other states consider large tax cuts, they should heed these key lessons from Kansas:

Deep income tax cuts caused large revenue losses. Kansas’ tax cuts this year are costing the state about 8 percent of the revenue it uses to fund schools, health care, and other public services, a hit comparable to a mid-sized recession. State data show that the revenue loss will rise to 16 percent in five years if the tax cuts are not reversed.

The large revenue losses extended and deepened the recession’s damage to schools and other state services. Most states are restoring funding for schools after years of significant cuts, but in Kansas the cuts continue. Governor Sam Brownback recently proposed another reduction in per-pupil general school aid for next year, which would leave funding 17 percent below pre-recession levels. Funding for other services — colleges and universities, libraries, and local health departments, among others — also is way down, and declining.

The tax cuts delivered lopsided benefits to the wealthy. Kansas’ tax cuts didn’t benefit everyone. Most of the benefits went to high-income households. Kansas even raised taxes for low-income families to offset a portion of the revenue loss; otherwise the cuts to schools and other services would have been greater still.

Kansas’ tax cuts haven’t boosted its economy. Since the tax cuts took effect at the beginning of 2013, Kansas has added jobs at a pace modestly slower than the country as a whole. The earnings and incomes of Kansans have performed slightly worse than the U.S. as a whole as well. (An exception is farmers, whose incomes improved as the state recovered from a drought.) And so far there’s no evidence that Kansas is enjoying exceptional business growth: the number of registered business grew more slowly last year than in 2012, and the state’s share of all U.S. business establishments fell over the first three quarters of last year, the latest data available.

There’s little evidence to suggest that Kansas’ tax cuts will improve its economy in the future. No one knows for certain how Kansas’ economy will perform in the years ahead, but it isn’t likely to stand out from other states. The latest official state revenue forecast, from November 2013, projects Kansas personal income will grow more slowly than total national personal income in 2014 and 2015.

Not that there hasn’t been ample evidence already that austerity and tax cuts are a lethal, counterproductive combination in an economic slump. Common sense should have told anyone that. But by 2012, there was hardly anyone left who was willing to experiment any more with people’s lives. Four long years of recession had left the austerians with nothing more than empty bloviation. But not Kansas. They just kept cutting.

Well, not entirely. There were some people who had to pay up:

I guess that lowest 20% weren’t creating enough jobs.

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We need more diversity in diversity

by digby

This report from the Alliance for Justice is eye-opening. Apparently, virtually the entire judiciary is made up of former prosecutors and corporate lawyers. gosh, I wonder why we see rampant corporatism and authoritarianism in our judicial system?

Nan Aron wrote this piece for TPM explaining why it’s important to have professional diversity on the courts:

Diversity of professional backgrounds matters for the same reasons as racial or gender diversity. Like all human beings, judges are the product of their background and experiences, including their professional lives before taking the bench. When a judge decides whether a claim is “plausible,” or whether a witness is “credible,” or whether police officers, when they stopped and searched a pedestrian, acted “reasonably,” her determination is necessarily colored by the nature of her work as a lawyer up to that point. And when an individual who has faced workplace discrimination, contaminated drinking water, or civil rights violations by police enters a courtroom, her faith that she will get a fair hearing is enhanced by a judiciary that includes judges who once represented people like her.

As Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) put it at a forum Alliance for Justice sponsored on the issue in February, “It matters that someone has represented people other than corporate clients, that they’ve had real experience with people who can’t afford lawyers, that they’ve had real experience trying to fight for the public interest …. It matters where you come from.”

Sadly, this kind of diversity has been valued even less than diversity of race,gender or sexual orientation. President Obama hasn’t been any worse than any other president on this score. But he certainly hasn’t been any better:

I actually think this definition of diversity would be helpful in some other fields as well. Certainly politics and journalism would be enriched by having a more people with substantial life experience other than ivy league educations and social climbing. But it is an absolute necessity in the judiciary. These prosecutors and corporate lawyers have a singular worldview that transcends their party affiliation. And let’s just say that the interests of the average middle class Joe or a member of the working poor are pretty abstract compared to the interests of the police apparatus or the moneyed elites.

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Republicans are banking on Obamacare hate for 2014. That might not work so well…

by David Atkins

Greg Sargent makes a great catch:

Here’s a really interesting example of how the GOP Obamacare repeal stance is running into complications even in a deep red state like West Virginia. It also shows how Dems can seek to turn the Obamacare war of anecdotes to their advantage by dramatizing the local impact of repeal — though it still remains to be seen whether this strategy will be enough to offset the law’s (and Obama’s) deep unpopularity in regions such as this one.

A battle has erupted in West Virginia over an ad that Dems are running against state senator Evan Jenkins, the Republican candidate who is seeking to unseat Dem Rep. Nick Rahall, in a nationally watched “toss up” race.

The Dem-allied House Majority PAC is airing an emotional spot that hits Jenkins over Obamacare repeal by featuring a coal miner who fears losing his black lung benefits if the Republican is elected to Congress. The charge is that, if Obamacare is repealed, miners could lose expanded black lung protections that the late Senator Robert Byrd inserted into the Affordable Care Act. The ad says Jenkins ”vowed to repeal black lung benefits…”

The Jenkins campaign has objected to the ad, arguing that while he would repeal Obamacare, he remains firmly opposed to any cuts in black lung benefits, and stressing that he would replace the law. FactCheck.org has sided with Jenkins, arguing that repealing the law isn’t quite the equivalent of repealing the benefits. But FactCheck.org does concede that the repeal of Obamacare would mean that “some miners and surviving spouses would be denied benefits and some would find it harder to obtain benefits.” And FactCheck.org also notes that the replacements Jenkins has suggested for the law don’t deal with black lung benefits.
Meanwhile, the president of the United Mine Workers tells the Charleston Gazette that repealing Obamacare “would have the practical effect” of “cutting off black lung benefits for most, if not many, of those applying for them.” The Gazette also notes that Jenkins “has not explained what he would do to protect those benefits if the ACA were repealed.”

Republicans are going to be in a bind over issues like this all across the country if Democrats get out there, stand behind the ACA and explain its local impacts. With over 6 million people signed up for the ACA already, it’s going to be very difficult for Republicans to effectively tell voters that those people shouldn’t get healthcare.

The bigger danger for Democrats, I think, remains the zombie lie about the ACA stealing money from Medicare that worked so effectively for them in 2010. But given the number of votes they’ve all taken for the Ryan budget that explicitly slashes Medicare and Social Security, even that will be problematic for them.

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Sure, they may think the entire world is about to declare war on America but don’t call them paranoid

by digby

Reading this piece by the usually mild-mannered John Feehery felt as if I had accidentally fallen asleep at my computer and was having a scary Bizarroworld nightmare:

It’s a dangerous world out there.

Vladimir Putin is on the march in Eastern Europe. Syria is a complete mess. North Korea’s butcher has systematically liquated potential rivals as he threatens our allies in South Korea and Japan with nuclear annihilation.

The Chinese are expanding their power and reach, building up their armed forces and intimidating their neighbors. Afghanistan is about to be overrun by the Taliban as we get ready to depart, and the Iranians are building up their nuclear capabilities and are moving to dominate Iraq.

In Venezuela, Nicaragua and Argentina, political instability could lead to opportunities for mischief by our global rivals, with the most likely suspects being the Russians and the Chinese.

In the face of this more dangerous world, President Obama offers weakness. He admits that America won’t back our allies in Ukraine with any hope of military assistance, can’t get Congress to back him in Syria, and doesn’t do anything to counter the little dictator in Pyongyang.

Instead, Obama’s new budget cuts the Army to a size not seen since before the Second World War. According to USA Today, he proposed cuts to military assistance to Ukraine by more than 25 percent. He even proposed to cut military pay.

Where Ronald Reagan offered peace through strength, Barack Obama offers to dismantle the Pentagon piece by piece.

About the only thing the Obama has done right is to keep much of his predecessor’s spy capabilities in place.

Runferyerlives!

That’s John Feehrey saying that. This guy:

He’s one of the normal ones. And he’s just written the most paranoid screed I’ve seen since Michael Ledeen was whipping up the neocons to bomb Paris back in 2003.

But self-awareness isn’t his strong suit, apparently. He certainly doesn’t seem to see anything ironic about writing that hysterical tale of global dystopian horror and then saying this about Rand Paul’s complaints about the NSA:

Paul is practicing the politics of paranoia, aimed directly at the American government. It’s a form of populist libertarianism that posits that the biggest threat to our liberty comes not from foreign powers but from our own government.

That kind of paranoia is not grounded in reality, but it unquestionably has a following in this country. Edward Snowden, for example, enjoyed a warm welcome at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, despite being the houseguest of Putin.

So, those who think the government shouldn’t be spying on its own people are paranoid. But the guy who says that the entire world is on the verge of imploding into an epic conflagration unless we start being “strong” is a realist. Hookay …

This little disagreement does illustrate one thing — the uphill battle old Rand is going to have with the GOP faithful. I don’t believe for a minute that there are more than a handful of young libertarians out there who agree with Paul and think Feehery is full of it. In fact, it appears to me that whomever gets the GOP nomination in 2016 is going to have to be a hardcore hawk. That’s where the sweet spot in the Republican Party has always been and nothing has changed that.

It’s vaguely interesting that Paul is making an early bid for the nomination using the network built up by his daddy, but it won’t work. What would be interesting is if the Democratic nominee decided that instead of chasing a bunch of non-existent swing voters who will never vote for a Democrat, he or she would try to persuade the young Rand Paul followers who care about a sane foreign policy and civil liberties to join with their brethren on the left side of the dial instead of the war-mongering authoritarians of the right.

Yeah, I know. Fat chance that a Democratic presidential nominee would actually try such a strategy — or that the young libertarians would take them up on it. But it makes as much sense as a bunch of isolationist, civil libertarians voting for the party of war, spying and fetus worship. But then, I guess I just don’t understand libertarians …

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The 2014 Paul Ryan “I’m definitely not a racist, how could you even think that” right wing gasbag tour

by digby

Joan Walsh weighs in on the Paul “I don’t have a racist bone in my body” Ryan sitting there like a potted plant when a famous right wing gasbag defends him by going on about “race hustlers” flap:

“She does not believe that I have these views,” he told O’Reilly. “She knows me well, and she knows that I don’t have a racist bone in my body.”

O’Reilly wasn’t satisfied: “Then why did she imply you did?”

“Well, you’ll have to ask Barbara that,” Ryan averred. The host jumped in again:

“Are you mad at her? I would be…”

“No, I’m not mad at her. I’m a big boy. I understand that if you challenge the status quo sometimes you’ll be misinterpreted…”

And that’s when O’Reilly got to the point of his segment: trashing Lee and other black leaders as “race hustlers.”

It’s intentional. With all due respect to you, because I think you’re a good man, they don’t want a conversation, they don’t want to solve the problem. These race hustlers make a big living, and they get voted into office, by portraying their constituents as victims. And it’s all your fault, and it’s my fault, it’s the rich people’s fault, and it’s the Republicans’ fault — it’s everybody’s fault except what’s going on.

And what’s going on, as you know, is the dissolution of the family, and you don’t have proper supervision of children, and they grow up with no skills, and they can’t read and speak, and they have tattoos on their neck, and they can’t compete in the marketplace, and that’s what’s going on!

That was Bill O’Reilly, a man famous for being surprised that eating a meal at Sylvia’s in Harlem didn’t require him to flash gang signs or witness the birth of an out-of-wedlock child in he next booth:

“It was like going into an Italian restaurant in an all-white suburb in the sense of people were sitting there, and they were ordering and having fun,” he said. “And there wasn’t any kind of craziness at all.”

Joan Walsh adds:

So let’s get this straight: Ryan effectively uses Lee as a human shield against charges of racism, insisting “she knows I don’t have these views” and “she knows me well” and “she knows I don’t have a racist bone in my body.” But when O’Reilly trashed Lee as a “race hustler,” Ryan can’t be bothered to say a word on her behalf. Instead of smiling and nodding, imagine if Ryan had shown a little spine: “Look, Bill, Barbara and I disagree on these issues, but she is not a ‘race hustler,’ she’s a strong public servant looking out for her constituents.”

It’s more and more obvious that Paul Ryan’s “I am not a racist” tour is actually an elaborate dogwhistle to the base. There’s no real reason to go on Bill O’Reilly’s show to talk about this if what he wants is to convince non-racists and racial minorities that he isn’t hostile to them. The only reason to go on O’Reilly’s show is to whine about being called a racist … and then let O’Reilly spew his toxic bile about “race hustlers” while he sits there looking like Eddie Haskell.

Paul Ryan is making a play for the hardcore conservatives and he’s doing it in the guise of “helping” the poor and the downtrodden. It’s not an original ploy, but we haven’t seen it in a while. The question is, why? I don’t honestly know the answer, but it is a common strategy for those planning a run for the White House to work hard to secure their base before launching a national campaign. Or perhaps he just needs to brush the last of the Romney dust off his reputation. Whatever it is, he’s certainly a traditionalist: Republicans have been “race hustlers” ever since the Southern Strategy was hatched. It’s worked quite well for them. What’s laughable about all this is the idea that his “root causes of poverty” rap is something new that’s shaking up the status quo. There couldn’t be a more stale and predictable pile of wingnut nonsense.

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Now we won’t even have a death panel. Random bureaucrats are just going to kill you.

by digby

According to Michele Bachman anyway:

“[The birth control mandate] is government enforced coercion on religious belief. And it varies at caprice and whim. That’s one thing under the rule of law that has been a pillar of American exceptionalism, the fact that under the rule of law there is certainty for the American people.

If you looked at the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, you knew with certainty when you woke up tomorrow morning that your religious liberties were intact. Now, apparently today, the gentlemen was in the chamber and heard that, according to at least one Supreme Court justice, in her opinion, they aren’t so much certain anymore.

It is not at only the election of the court, but at the election of the unnamed bureaucrat that decides, today we will have these killer drugs that we mandate. Tomorrow, what drugs will they take off the list? Will I not get life-saving drugs that I need to get?”

“We don’t know! That means that the president and his administration wins their religious liberty, and the right to force their religious views down the throats of the American people… It’s unlike anything we have ever seen before in the history of the United States of America.

The American people better wake up quick because we are living in a country we no longer recognize.”

I don’t know how many people out there believe this but I suspect the undercurrent of irrational fear is fairly widespread among conservatives. There are some ideological reasons for this but I think it really comes down to temperament and psychology. That paranoid, delusional rant doesn’t come from a difference of opinion. It’s primal.

When you see crazy rhetoric like this it’s always good to consult Chris Mooney’s book “The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science- and Reality“. In this interview about the book he explains the psychological differences among all the various political persuasions:

Q: If you were designing a brain science-based campaign against a Republican candidate, what might some of its rhetoric or strategies be? Similarly, how might a Republican campaign against a Democratic opponent, again based on science?

Chris Mooney: One part of this is easy. The conservative fares best if he or she appeals to fear. All the research shows that at times of great stress or threat, conservatives are at an advantage politically—after 9/11, for instance.

This sensitivity to threat is probably why. At times of fear and threat, people don’t have any time or interest for the wonky, nuanced policies that liberals like to propose. They’re focused on something much, much more immediate and visceral. And they like strong and decisive leaders.

Liberals fare best at a different time—when they can excite widespread emotions of empathy in the public, such as happened after Hurricane Katrina. So that is the emotion that a liberal candidate wants to evoke.

Q: Where do greens, libertarians, independents, and other outliers from the two-party system fit into all this? Are their brains different, too, or just their politics?

Chris Mooney: Everybody’s brain is a little different. It’s important to emphasize that not every liberal is a psychological liberal, nor is every conservative a psychological conservative. The psychological traits that separate left and right describe average tendencies, but there will be many people who are above or below the average, on both sides of the aisle.

Greens have a broadly liberal psychology. As for independents, I spend a section of the book on them. They’re tricky.

There are both disengaged independents, who simply aren’t following politics closely enough to take a side, and then there are well-informed moderates or centrists. These are two very different groups. The disengaged independents may be psychologically quite liberal or conservative, but not attuned enough to see how their values and psychologies match up with the current parties. By contrast, the well-informed moderates or centrists might have a blend of typically conservative and typically liberal traits, and it feels natural to them to split the difference.

And then there are libertarians—theoretically, those who are economically conservative but socially liberal. They are a smaller group, but the research shows that at least for economic conservatives, they, too, tend to be less open to new experiences, and more conscientious.

The batty Bachman contingent isn’t a huge faction but it’s large enough to be highly influential in the Republican Party and nowadays includes some very wealthy benefactors like the Koch brothers. As long as the latter are able to dominate politics with their money, this group is going to have outsized influence on all of us. (And that makes me feel like “the American people better wake up quick because we are living in a country we no longer recognize”…)

Mooney’s book makes one thing very clear and it’s something that liberals need to absorb and understand: conservative psychology isn’t going away and it isn’t going to be overwhelmed and subsumed by demographics or anything else. It’s a fundamental characteristic of human nature and will always be with us to some degree. The battle will never be “won”. I know that’s depressing, but unlike conservatives, liberals are supposed to be able to deal with reality.

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It happens every (other) spring

by digby

… when a conservative middle aged guy’s fancy turns to shooting something up in a campaign video. Here’s the first of the season:

We’re down here to have a little fun today and talk about two serious subjects: the Second Amendment and see how much damage we can do to this copy of Obamacare,” Will Brooke, a congressional candidate running in the GOP primary for Alabama’s 6th district says in a new video posted Wednesday to YouTube.

I guess that’s the 2014 GOP message in a nut-shell. Or rather in a spent-shell.

This imagery is a staple of right wing electioneering. Why, even conservative Democrats employ it from time to time:

Now I’m sure that these politicians consider all this gun play just metaphorical good fun. After all, they aren’t threatening to kill people. (Well, only in the most abstract sense — by denying them health care and burning up the planet.) But the fact is that people who use guns to make a political point are being threatening whether they know it or not.

Our democracy depends upon having a debate amongst a variety  of citizens who feel passionately about many different issues. And humans tend to get a bit overwrought at times about things they care about. When you introduce guns into it — regardless of how much “fun” you’re having with it — you introduce a subliminal threat. I feel quite confident that those conservative, middle aged, white guys using those guns know quite well that they’re doing more than just announcing their hostility to health care reform or cap and trade legislation. They’re illustrating hostility to the people who support those things. And they’re using guns to do it.

I don’t care how much the gun people insist that carrying their firearms to political events or using them to illustrate their opposition to particular legislation is all in good fun. It isn’t. It’s a form of intimidation. And for all their paeans to freedom and liberty, it’s fundamentally antithetical to our constitutional system to use threats, however indirect, to influence democratic debate. In fact, it’s the opposite of freedom.

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The Heartland Institute thinks climate change will be awesome. Real scientists disagree.

by David Atkins

The Heartland Institute, one of the conservative movement’s most obnoxious propaganda machines, thinks that climate change will be wonderful. No, really:

Whereas the reports of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warn of a dangerous human effect on climate, NIPCC concludes the human effect is likely to be small relative to natural variability, and whatever small warming is likely to occur will produce benefits as well as costs.

You may not have heard of the astroturf “NIPCC.” It’s the Heartland Institute’s group of flacks who put out press releases meant to muddy the waters and confuse people in contrast the the real IPCC.

When I mocked them on Twitter by suggesting that they be exiled to the soon-to-be-drowned-by-rising-sea-levels island nation of Kiribati, the Heartland Communications Director Jim Lakely tweeted back at me:

@DavidOAtkins So, what's the ideal climate? Has it ever changed? Before man? Can we now lock it in? Y'all seem to believe so. It's fantasy.— Jim Lakely (@jlakely) March 26, 2014

The idea that neither the world’s species nor our civilization can, in fact, adapt and evolve fast enough to deal with rapid catastrophic greenhouse effects did not occur to him. Nor, apparently, that he probably shouldn’t be displaying that level of sheer ignorance to a hostile party with a megaphone.

Meanwhile, here is what the real scientists are saying about the effects of climate change just as of a few days ago:

Global warming will disrupt food supplies, slow world economic growth and may already be causing irreversible damage to nature, according to a U.N. report due this week that will put pressure on governments to act.

A 29-page draft by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will also outline many ways to adapt to rising temperatures, more heatwaves, floods and rising seas.

“The scientific reasoning for reducing emissions and adapting to climate change is becoming far more compelling,” Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the IPCC, told Reuters in Beijing.

Scientists and more than 100 governments will meet in Japan from March 25-29 to edit and approve the report. It will guide policies in the run-up to a U.N. summit in Paris in 2015 meant to decide a deal to curb rising greenhouse gas emissions.

The 29-page draft projects risks such as food and water shortages and extinctions of animals and plants. Crop yields would range from unchanged to a fall of up to 2 percent a decade, compared to a world without warming, it says.

And some natural systems may face risks of “abrupt or drastic changes” that could mean irreversible shifts, such as a runaway melt of Greenland or a drying of the Amazon rainforest.

It said there were “early warning signs that both coral reef and Arctic systems are already experiencing irreversible regime shifts”. Corals are at risk in warmer seas and the Arctic region is thawing fast.

Climate change will hit growth. Warming of 2.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels could mean “global aggregate economic losses between 0.2 and 2.0 percent of income”, it says.

I will never for the life of me understand people who condemn their children, the future of the human race and the condition of all life on our planet to misery, collapse and extinction just to make an extra dolar or two in the moment.

These people do understand that they’re going to die, right? And that they can’t take it with them? They do understand that if there is no afterlife, a few extra temporal pleasures today won’t matter against the judgment of history? And that in the unlikely event that there is an afterlife for which our actions in this realm will be weighed and measured, that the judgment will likely go very poorly for them? They do understand that even if the overwhelming consensus of the world’s climate scientists is somehow wrong about climate change, that curbing fossil fuels and moving to clean energy will create a better world regardless?

It boggles the mind. I can put myself into the mentality of a conservative on many issues as a matter of justification for pettiness, prejudice and selfishness. But on climate change the leaps of moral reasoning to put myself into a conservative’s shoes are simply too great. I do not understand how they come to their moral judgments, or how they can rest at night with an easy conscience.

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If you’re going to steal, steal big

by digby

There’s just no margin in it unless you are stealing millions:

Charlotte Mayor Patrick Cannon has been arrested and indicted on corruption charges, including theft and bribery concerning programs receiving federal funds, honest services wire fraud and extortion under color of official right. For selling his office — before becoming mayor, Cannon had been mayor pro tem and a City Council member — received a total of $68,000 in cash, plus airline tickets, a hotel room, and use of a luxury apartment.

The three charges, which came after a 3 1/2-year undercover sting operation in which FBI agents posed as real-estate developers and allegedly bribed Cannon to use his office to do them favors, carry a combined maximum of 50 years in prison. Assuming Cannon is guilty on all counts, he still won’t do anything like 50, but he’ll do quite a number of years. And it won’t be in Alcatraz, but it won’t be in Club Fed, either. He also could be fined up to $1.5 million, which, for him, is years’ and years’ worth of income.

Meanwhile, retired Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis and the bank itself settled a civil lawsuit today with the New York attorney general’s office that had alleged securities fraud. Specifically, Lewis and the bank were accused of deceiving BoA stockholders about what crappy shape Merrill Lynch was in when the bank asked stockholders to approve a takeover of Merrill in December 2008. This transaction played a nontrivial role in blowing up the economy, although that demolition was well under way when the sale closed on Jan. 1, 2009.

Neither Lewis nor the bank is required by the settlement to admit any wrongdoing. The bank will have to pay $15 million. Lewis himself will have to pay $10 million, although that’s the equivalent of zero days’ worth of income for him because the bank will pay it for him. Given the bank’s net earnings of $4.2 billion in 2012 (the 2013 annual report is due out any day), those fines amount to about two days’ profits, give or take. That’ll certainly warn all the other banks not to screw their shareholders, I think.

Yes, it’s all about sending messages…

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You don’t get credit for seeking approval and then doing what you want anyway when it’s denied

by digby

The president’s speech today was very strange. And it points out just how badly our position Ryan Grim reports:

President Barack Obama defended the American invasion of Iraq Wednesday in a high-profile speech to address the Russian takeover of Crimea. Russian officials, Obama noted, have pointed to the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq as an example of “Western hypocrisy.”

Obama struggled, however, in his attempt to defend the legality of the invasion. The war was unsanctioned by the United Nations, and many experts assert it violated any standard reading of international law. But, argued Obama, at least the U.S. tried to make it legal. “America sought to work within the international system,” Obama said, referencing an attempt to gain U.N. approval for the invasion — an effort that later proved to be founded on flawed, misleading and cherry-picked intelligence. The man who delivered the presentation to the U.N., then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, has repeatedly called it a “blot” on his record.

I can’t imagine anyone on those planet who would buy the president’s rubbish on that topic. You don’t get extra credit for “seeking” UN approval and going ahead when it’s denied, fergawdsakes. If anything that makes it worse! It proved to anyone with eyes that it doesn’t matter what the UN thinks — if the US wants to invade a country it’s damned well going to do it. “Asking” the UN is a mere formality. I think most of the nations of the world got that “message” loud and clear.

Obama, in his speech, noted his own opposition to the war, but went on to defend its mission.

“We did not claim or annex Iraq’s territory. We did not grab its resources for our own gain,” Obama argued. In fact, the U.S. forced Iraq to privatize its oil industry, which had previously been under the control of the state, and further required that it accept foreign ownership of the industry. The effort to transfer the resources to the control of multinational, largely U.S.-based oil companies has been hampered in part by the decade of violence unleashed by the invasion.

Yes, we invaded a sovereign nation and killed many thousands of its people for their own good. Pay no attention to the litany of lies our government told to justify it.

I heard the speech this morning and nearly choked when I heard President Obama — the man whose rationale for running for president in the first place was based upon his superior judgement compared to anyone who voted for that misbegotten war — now standing before the international community and defending that travesty and drawing a fatuous moral distinction between what we did just a decade ago and what is happening in Russia today. I am embarrassed for him. And for the United States.

He went on to say that we left Iraq so we’re not bad guy imperialists (like you know who) which is one of America’s traditional claims to excuse our special brand of imperialism: we had good intentions and at least we didn’t turn them into an American colony. Bully for us. The people who lost their families in any of these wars are unlikely to be moved by the fact that we remove our soldiers from the territory once our wet work is done.

Grim concludes with this upbeat current report about the results of our glorious adventure:

The president’s paean to Iraqi democracy comes one day after the entire board of the country’s electoral commission resigned en masse, protesting political interference and, according to Reuters, “casting doubt on a nationwide vote scheduled for next month.” Critics have accused Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki of a systematic effort to remove opponents from the ballot.

Across Iraq, 68 people were killed the same day the commissioners stepped down.

That’s surely something to be proud of.

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