Month: April 2014

Talking about torture is not as bad as torture

by digby

I guess she feels she has to do this — the CIA is probably blaming her for it — but it still reeks. The only way we’d know anything about this hideous torture program is from leaks. And she must know that if there was no public awareness, it would probably still be going on.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has opened an investigation into how McClatchy obtained the classified conclusions of a report into the CIA’s use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics, the panel’s chairwoman said Friday.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said she was also referring the case to the Justice Department for investigation.

“If someone distributed any part of this classified report, they broke the law and should be prosecuted,” Feinstein said in a prepared statement. “The committee is investigating this unauthorized disclosure and I intend to refer the matter to the Department of Justice.”

Feinstein issued her statement a day after McClatchy reported on the 20 major conclusions of the committee’s four-year, $40 million investigation into the top-secret detention and interrogation program that the CIA operated under the Bush administration.

“We are disappointed that Sen. Feinstein plans to seek a Justice Department investigation of our journalism,” said James Asher, McClatchy’s Washington bureau chief. “We believe that Americans need to know what the CIA might have done to detainees and who is responsible for any questionable practices, which is why we have vigorously covered this story.”

I think Feinstein is sincere in her horror over torture. But this episode proves just how vital a free press is to keeping the government on the straight and narrow. The congress knew a lot about this before we did but even they didn’t know the whole scope. It was the press that alerted us to the fact that they were torturing people. Feinstein being all holier than thou about leaks isn’t going to help her in her fight to release the report. It just reinforces the idea that the problem is the press not what the press is revealing about what our government is doing in our name.

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Kansas FTW!

by digby

I guess we’ve finally figured out what’s the matter with Kansas. They’re spending most of their time indulging online onanistic activity:

It should be noted that Blue states collectively consume 13% more pornography than Red States. But these heartlanders leave all the rest of us in the dust. Congratulations to Kansas! You beat all the rest of us. No pun intended …

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My heart bleeds for the NSA. So misunderstood.

by digby

This has been making the rounds today:

The U.S. National Security Agency knew for at least two years about a flaw in the way that many websites send sensitive information, now dubbed the Heartbleed bug, and regularly used it to gather critical intelligence, two people familiar with the matter said.

The NSA’s decision to keep the bug secret in pursuit of national security interests threatens to renew the rancorous debate over the role of the government’s top computer experts.

Oh come now. What could be wrong with allowing the worst security breach in history to continue for two years for its own convenience? They’re trying to protect us. Oh wait …

I shouldn’t be so flippant about this. If this story is true it should be the last straw. This is a perfect example of the intelligence agencies’ belief that their “mission” is so all-important that they can use any means necessary. The culture of these bureaucracies inevitably leads to this sort of thing.

Recall this from Dan Drezner’s field trip to the NSA:

…they’ve been so walled off from the American body politic that they have no idea when they’re saying things that sound tone-deaf. Like expats returning from a long overseas tour, NSA staffers don’t quite comprehend how much perceptions of the agency have changed. The NSA stresses in its mission statement and corporate culture that it “protects privacy rights.” Indeed, there were faded banners proclaiming that goal in our briefing room.

I think it’s not just how they sound. It’s what they do as well..

The NSA spokesperson has now denied they knew about it. But one can certainly understand why people might be skeptical. It’s not as if their grand commitment to privacy rights has prevented them from exploiting security vulnerabilities in the past:

Like any government agency, the NSA hires outside companies to help it do the work it’s supposed to do. But an analysis of the intelligence community’s black budget reveals that unlike most of its peers, the agency’s top hackers are also funneling money to firms of dubious origin in exchange for computer malware that’s used to spy on foreign governments.

This year alone, the NSA secretly spent more than $25 million to procure “‘software vulnerabilities’ from private malware vendors,” according to a wide-ranging report on the NSA’s offensive work by the Post’s Barton Gellman and Ellen Nakashima.

Companies such as Microsoft already tell the government about gaps in their product security before issuing software updates, reportedly to give the NSA a chance to exploit those bugs first. But the NSA is also reaching into the Web’s shadier crevices to procure bugs the big software vendors don’t even know about — vulnerabilities that are known as “zero-days.”

This is a culture that sees its mission a paramount. The consider themselves as some kind of cyber-ninjas who need to use every means possible to complete it. It’s very easy to imagine they might just let a little useful security hold slide for a while.

Who knows? But it’s certainly worth noting that at this point it’s fairly easy top believe they could do this. Their reputation precedes them.

Oh, and this should make you feel better:

The White House said Friday that when the government uncovers a Heartbleed-like bug, “it is in the national interest” to notify developers — “unless there is a clear national security or law enforcement need.”

Depends on what the definition of “clear” is I guess.

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It’s not that Republicans don’t think Obamacare can work. They don’t like what it does.

by David Atkins

Greg Sargent makes an excellent point today regarding the GOP reaction to Sebelius’ resignation: they are finally, even though only implicitly as yet, acknowledging that their main opposition to the ACA is not that it won’t work, but that it can’t and shouldn’t be made to work:

Here’s Mitch McConnell: “Sebelius may be gone, but the problems with this law and the impact it’s having on our constituents aren’t. Obamacare has to go too.” As always, with McConnell, the law’s beneficiaries simply don’t exist.
Last fall, as the law got underway and as the website then crashed, the Republican position was essentially that the law was fatally flawed (nobody wanted it, supposedly) and thus would inevitably fail to fulfill its own goals. Now that the law has hit enrollment targets, and evidence comes in that it is for now on track, the Republican position is that the law is a failure even if it is more or less doing what it was designed to do — cover a lot more people. Indeed, one way to describe the GOP position is that Republicans think the law is an inherent failure precisely because it is doing what it was designed to do.

The Republican position — that the law can’t work by definition – is essentially an admission that Republicans simply don’t support doing what Obamacare sets out to do: Expand coverage to the number of people the law hopes to cover, through a combination of increased government oversight over the health system and — yep — spending money. The GOP focus on only those being negatively impacted by the law, and the aggressive hyping of cancellations into “millions” of full blown “horror stories” – combined with the steadfast refusal to acknowledge the very existence of the law’s beneficiaries — is, at bottom, just another way to fudge the actual GOP position: Flat out opposition to doing what it takes to expand health care to lots and lots of people.

Sometimes Republicans are candid about this position, such as when Paul Ryan forthrightly admitted that once Obamacare is repealed, its popular provisions should not be restored because it would be too expensive. Others, however, recognize the political problem here, and continue to say they support Obamacare’s general goals while declining to detail how a replacement would accomplish them. The problem for Republicans is that they want to persuade folks that they, too, support these general goals — hence the perpetual promise of vague alternatives — but this posture is fundamentally incompatible with the idea that Obamacare cannot work by definition, because there’s no alternative way to accomplish those goals at the law’s scale.

The ACA is going to get more and more tricky for Republicans as time goes along. The key for Democrats will be to not let the Republicans off the hook for their virulent opposition. As much as the GOP saw gains from exploiting lies about the ACA in 2010, Democrats should be able to punish the GOP for opposing many of the law’s commonsense provisions for the next two decades.

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Strange bedfellows


by digby

Offered without comment:

Not sure what’s less likely: this RedSox fan braving foreign land of Yankee Stadium tonite or going w/Henry Kissinger pic.twitter.com/GYHsYdDH08
— Samantha Power (@AmbassadorPower) April 11, 2014

by digby

This week has seen a celebration of the passage civil rights act accompanied by lots of interesting commentary about whether or not Lyndon Johnson was truly a leader who made a difference as the common myth holds or whether he was really just another powerless figurehead who stood by and took credit for legislative accomplishment over which he had little influence, as much of the the current thinking about the presidency holds.

Bill Moyers was in the room:

Bill recalls Johnson facing down a Congress controlled by Southern Democrats who were “die-hard racists—all of them, including some of his old mentors, white supremacists who threatened to bring the government, if not the country, to its knees before they would see blacks eat at the same restaurants, go to the same schools, drink from the same fountains, and live in the same neighborhoods as whites.” 

Despite those convictions and other challenges, such as an unpopular war and growing unrest at home, Johnson was able to pass an impressive number of initiatives on his “Great Society” agenda, more than any president since. As The New York Times noted in an article about this week’s summit, Johnson’s presidency “represented the high-water mark for American presidents pushing through sweeping legislation — not just the Civil Rights Act, but the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, the Fair Housing Act and major measures on immigration, education, gun control and clean air and water.”

I certainly agree that this couldn’t have been accomplished without legislative leadership. I would even argue that it probably couldn’t have been accomplished without the background horror of a martyred president. But there is simply no doubt that Johnson had unusual legislative skills for a president, along with many relationships and a keen knowledge of human character and the nature of power. It’s hard for me to believe that being a Southern politician with his talent and experience wasn’t a decisive factor.

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“Awesome in its evilness”

by digby

This otherwise celebratory Paul Krugman column about Obamacare contains one very depressing factoid:

At the state level, however, Republican governors and legislators are still in a position to block the act’s expansion of Medicaid, denying health care to millions of vulnerable Americans. And they have seized that opportunity with gusto: Most Republican-controlled states, totaling half the nation, have rejected Medicaid expansion. And it shows. The number of uninsured Americans is dropping much faster in states accepting Medicaid expansion than in states rejecting it.

What’s amazing about this wave of rejection is that it appears to be motivated by pure spite. The federal government is prepared to pay for Medicaid expansion, so it would cost the states nothing, and would, in fact, provide an inflow of dollars. The health economist Jonathan Gruber, one of the principal architects of health reform — and normally a very mild-mannered guy — recently summed it up: The Medicaid-rejection states “are willing to sacrifice billions of dollars of injections into their economy in order to punish poor people. It really is just almost awesome in its evilness.” Indeed.

And while supposed Obamacare horror stories keep on turning out to be false, it’s already quite easy to find examples of people who died because their states refused to expand Medicaid. According to one recent study, the death toll from Medicaid rejection is likely to run between 7,000 and 17,000 Americans each year.

Luckily, Medicaid has been expanded in certain states and it’s making a difference. A big difference. I suspect there would be twice as many deaths without it. But since the medicaid expansion was the most traditionally progressive piece of the ACA it was always the most vulnerable piece of the reforms and the Supreme’s found a way to allow conservatives to have their pound of flesh. They got a nice big chunk:

It’s always at least a little bit interesting to put this map up by way of comparison.

Will we ever get past this division? It seem absurd that this divide could still be so obvious, at least as regards that Southern rump. It’s America. I don’t think it’s ever going to change.

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GOP loons want Boehner’s scalp – but their plan is doomed to fail

by digby

My latest Salon piece: the conservative Lucy and Ethel’s are at it again.

It’s that time of year again: Spring is in the air, a midterm is on the horizon, and a young radical’s fancy turns to revolution. Yes, it’s time for another right-wing plot to dethrone an extremely conservative speaker of the House.

National Journal reports that “in discreet dinners at the Capitol Hill Club and in winding, hypothetical-laced email chains” unhappy Tea Party Republicans are mad as hell and they’re not going to take it anymore. John Boehner, the man who has managed to successfully maneuver a Democratic Senate and a Democratic president into passing one austerity budget after another, is considered a squish for failing to bring down the state. This is not the first time. It was only a year ago that similar threats were whispered and nothing came of it. But this time they insist they’re serious. If they could just settle on a plan… Read on.

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Angus King provides a great example of why we need strong state and local Democratic organizations

by David Atkins

Many “good government” advocates like to fantasize about what America would be like if political parties were weaker, and there were more unaffiliated citizen legislators out there willing to cross the aisle more often. Regardless of whether that’s a good idea from a policy standpoint (it isn’t), it also doesn’t work that way from a practical standpoint.

What you get instead are unprincipled opportunists like Angus King:

Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), who caucuses with the Democrats, will decide after the midterm elections whether to switch sides and join the Republicans.

He is leaving open the possibility of aligning himself with the GOP if control of the upper chamber changes hands.

“I’ll make my decision at the time based on what I think is best for Maine,” King told The Hill Wednesday after voting with Republicans to block the Paycheck Fairness Act, a measure at the center for the 2014 Democratic campaign agenda.
King’s remarks are a clear indication that congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle will have to woo the 70-year-old senator in order to recruit him to their side.

That lobbying battle could be especially intense if King’s decision determines which party will control the chamber in the next Congress.

If Republicans pick up six seats this fall, they will be running the Senate in 2015. But a pickup of five would produce a 50-50 split and Democratic control, with Vice President Biden breaking the tie. King could tip the balance.

The former governor of Maine is an independent, but he has generally been a reliable Democratic vote for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.).

King said after the 2012 elections that being in the majority was important to him, when he announced his decision to caucus with Senate Democrats, giving them control of 55 seats.

“The outcome of last week’s election in some ways makes this decision relatively easy. In the situation where one party has a clear majority and effectiveness is an important criteria, affiliating with the majority makes the most sense,” King said at the time.

Angus King will likely caucus with whoever has the majority. If he’s the deciding vote on that front, he’ll caucus with whoever gives him the most goodies.

Unprincipled politicians like Angus King are unequivocally bad for America, no matter whether your politics are liberal, conservative or somewhere in between.

Functionally speaking, however, the state and local Democratic Party organizations in Maine should never have allowed Angus King to rise to such a position of prominence in the first place.

Hopefully his example will lead other sate and local parties to do more to nip candidates like this in the bud and challenge them wherever possible.

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I Never Thought There Was Anyone Sillier Than Colbert…

by tristero

…then I read about Ben Shapiro.

No. You’re kidding? He’s serious???!!? Now, that’s even funnier!