Month: December 2014

Race and class — race IS class

by digby

Nah, there’s no race problem in America. It’s all in your head:

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Oh Modo

by digby

Don’t worry, she later explained that they are friends so it’s all good. Why she thinks that excuses her behavior is beyond me:

[T]he leaked documents show that when Dowd emailed Pascal on March 3 for the column — which would run online the next night and in print on March 5 — Dowd told Pascal “i would make sure you look great and we’d check it all and do it properly.”

Before Pascal actually interviewed with Dowd for the column, she talked to Weinraub.

“I said the rap that you jus like to make womens films is unfair amnd sexist,” Weinraub said in an email to Pascal on March 4. “You made all these “women’s movies ===league of their own, 28 days,,,the nora Ephron films…zero dark…. but you also do spifderman… denzel….Jonah hill…..bad teacher etc etc.”

Pascal responded, “IM NOT TALKING TO HER IF SHE IS GONNA SLAM ME. PLEASE FIND OUT.”

Weinraub assured her, “you cant tell single person that I’m seeing the column before its printed…its not done…no p.r. people or Lynton or anyone should know.”

After the column was published later that night, Pascal emailed Dowd, saying “I THOUGHT THE STORY WAS GREAT I HOPE YOUR HAPPY “

Dowd responded: “I hope you’re happy! Thanks for helping. Let’s do another.” Pascal replied, “Your my favorite person so yes” and Dowd finished the conversation with “you’re mine! you’re amazing”

Dowd denies that she showed the column to anyone ahead of time. Uh huh.

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What the torture regime revealed about our government

by digby

Can you see what’s wrong with this picture?

“The fact that the intelligence case for detaining an individual is later shown to be less powerful than originally thought does not, in itself, render the original reasonably well-founded decision to detain ‘wrongful,’ ” the C.I.A. response says. An intelligence official who spoke of the classified program on the condition of anonymity added that “the vast majority of those detained in C.I.A.’s program were committed terrorists,” but “in the few instances where we determined that the detainee in custody did not meet the standards for detention, C.I.A.’s general practice was to release that person and compensate him with cash.”

There was no cash in Mr. Bashmilah’s case. Originally from Aden, Yemen, he had a small import-export business in Indonesia in 2003, when he traveled to Jordan with his wife to meet his mother and give her the money for heart surgery. But in Amman, he was arrested by the Jordanian authorities, who were suspicious about the new passport he held and his admission that he had once traveled to Afghanistan.

The Jordanians hung him upside down and beat him in three weeks of imprisonment before turning him over in the middle of the night to C.I.A. officers. There followed 19 months of solitary confinement in two secret prisons in Afghanistan, which he told Salon in 2007 was worse than physical torture.

“Whenever I saw a fly in my cell, I was filled with joy,” he said. “Although I would wish for it to slip from under the door so it would not be imprisoned itself.”

Then he was returned to Yemen and held there, reportedly at the Americans’ request. After nine more months, he was convicted of forgery based on an allegedly fake travel document that was not presented in court and sentenced to time served, according to an Amnesty International report.

Ms. Satterthwaite was not able to answer Mr. Bashmilah’s question about an apology or reparation. No apology was forthcoming from the C.I.A., which declined to comment on specific cases. A lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of Mr. Bashmilah and others flown to prisons on C.I.A. aircraft against an agency contractor, Jeppesen Dataplan Inc., was dismissed on the grounds that it might expose state secrets. Whether the Senate report’s release will change such legal calculations is uncertain.

I cannot imagine anything more horrible than what happened to that man. Put yourself in his shoes. He was a regular guy with no ties to terrorism. And the only thing anyone did to determine if he was one was torture him. That is medieval behavior little better than throwing suspected witches in the pond to see if they drown. It illustrates the reasons why civilized people developed a system of justice designed to at least attempt to determine guilt and innocence based upon reason. It doesn’t work very well, but it’s a damned sight better than this.

These torturers have not only shown themselves to be primitive barbarians, they have shown themselves to be dangerous to society at large. In fact, I would suggest that being as infiltrated into our government as they are, they are as dangerous as the terrorist threat itself. These are people who will use a crisis as an excuse to let their sadistic imaginations run wild.

Now let’s let our imaginations run a little bit wild, shall we? Let’s say we have another terrorist attack, a big one. Or maybe it’s just a massive natural disaster, one that results in major chaos with many lives lost and our infrastructure destroyed. (Think Katrina, only bigger.) Do you feel comfortable with people like this running things? People whose first instinct was to start torturing people with no care about whether they were innocent or guilty?

Americans need to think this through. This is a very revealing episode. Our government officials showed us that they are hysterical panic artists who cannot be trusted to keep their wits about them during a crisis. They proved they will revert to superstition and primitivism when they are afraid. They are openly admitting it this week with all the excuses about how we need to understand the “atmosphere of ear” they were living with in the aftermath of 9/11 and how the panic and hysteria of the moment led to all these “mistakes.”

These are supposed to be professionals, people whose jobs it is to stay calm when the public is frightened. They are supposed to have the cool heads and the experience and training to keep it together in these situations. They are not supposed to be running around in circles, unable to figure out the difference between the enemy and some random guy who had a new passport. They were supposed to already know what countless studies dating back decades (centuries!) have shown: that torture doesn’t work. They were supposed to be good at this.

How can any American feel secure now knowing that the most powerful military and intelligence services in the world are run by misfits like Michael Hayden? How can we feel safe now that we know the nuclear arsenal is secured by a bunch of cheating careerists?

What we know now is that we have entrusted the security of this country to a group of cruel, inept, bureaucratic whiners who wouldn’t know how to find water if they fell out off the side of an aircraft carrier.

I have never felt so unsafe — and I went through the nuclear fallout drills of the 1960s.

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A 21st-century lynching?
by Tom Sullivan

Questions surrounding the August hanging death of Lennon Lacy, 17, of Bladenboro, NC have been percolating since the summer. With fall election campaigns and higher-profile deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of police, the black teenager’s hanging death, quickly ruled a suicide, went largely unnoticed outside North Carolina. But Lacy’s family did not accept the official conclusion that the youth killed himself. Lacy was found hanging by a dog leash wearing someone else’s shoes. Two sizes too small:

Days after he was buried, Lennon’s grave was defiled – an act of vandalism that Lennon’s family believes supports their claim that he was killed in a racially-motivated homicide.

After calls from the North Carolina NAACP and Lacy’s family, the FBI has stepped in:

The FBI will investigate the case of Lennon Lacy, the black teenager found hanging in August from a swing set in North Carolina, whose parents have disputed the official ruling that he killed himself and asked whether his death amounted to a modern-day lynching.

It was confirmed on Friday that a federal agent has been assigned to investigate what happened to Lacy, 17, a budding high-school football prospect found hanging in the middle of a predominantly white trailer park in Bladenboro, North Carolina, on 29 August. The move follows a formal request from the Lacy family and from the North Carolina branch of the NAACP to the US attorney asking for the federal authorities to throw their weight behind the investigation.

Lacy’s mother, Claudia, wants answers. She tells the Guardian’s Ed Pilkington that her son was involved with an older white woman. Black men were lynched for less back in the day.

Moral Mondays organizer, NC NAACP President Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II, welcomed the FBI investigation:

We are glad to hear that the request made by the North Carolina NAACP and the family of Lennon Lacy for a federal investigation has been accepted. There must be a thorough investigation. There are too many questions and contradictions raised by our independent pathology report and stories in the community about the facts, quick conclusions, and how the death scene was not protected to leave this case unprobed and unevaluated.

I have never been to Bladenboro, NC, but have spent enough decades in the Carolinas to know about other out-of-the-way places such as this stretch of country road in South Carolina. The locals prominently display these cultural artifacts on poles right beside the road to let outsiders know just who is whom and what is what. My guess is the Lacy family wouldn’t feel too at home there.

Hey, who you ordering around?

by digby

I think this reaction is perfectly understandable:

It’s not really a royal reaction which would have been to ignore the comment like a robot. That was a commoner reaction — she rolled her eyes — and then went back to wrapping.

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Papa Dick goes home

by digby

Dick Cheney is going to be on Meet the Press this Sunday cheerleading for his torture program like it was the New Deal. Froomkin reminds us why he doing that:

Cheney’s love for “Meet the Press” is not a matter of conjecture. The 2007 trial of Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby, revealed all sort of embarrassing facts about a Washington press corps that is more into enabling its sources than digging away at the truth – and one of the most delicious morsels was the testimony by Cathie Martin, Cheney’s former communications director, that Cheney’s office saw going on “Meet the Press” as “our best format.”

Prosecutors even introduced as evidence a little chart she had made of the “pros” and “cons” of going on “Meet the Press.”

Under “pros”, she had written: “control message.”

“We control the message a little bit more,” she told the prosecutors. “It was good for us to be able to tell our story.”

When Cheney was vice president, his chief M.O. was to spread false information and savage his critics, while avoiding any sustained inquisition. He often did that through intermediaries.

But when he needed to take things into his own hands, “Meet the Press” was “best” because, while there might be a tough prepared question or two, then-host Tim Russert could be counted on to follow up obsequiously or not at all, without in any way knocking the veep off his talking points.

Froomkin has some advice for Chuck Todd which he should heed but probably won’t and offers up some possible questions. I especially like this one:

Q. Did you watch any of the videos of detainees being interrogated at the black sites ? What was that like for you?

I’m sure he wouldn’t answer truthfully (has he ever?) but I’d love to see the look of sadistic pleasure suffuse his face at the memory on national TV.

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“Most of these Gomers didn’t know shit”

by digby

Here’s a question I haven’t seen asked before? It comes from an old CIA hand talking with The Intercept’s Ken Silverstein:

“It doesn’t matter what tactics you use, you’re not going to get information if people don’t know anything and most of these Gomers didn’t know shit,” he said. “Who in the leadership was stupid enough to think they would? Why would these guys have detailed knowledge about plans and targeting? Even if they were hard-core jihadis who took part in operations, that doesn’t mean they would have knowledge of upcoming attacks.”

And, as we know, many of these guys were “sold” to the US troops for a bounty by local rivals, were low level grunts at best or were completely innocent. Some were children, some were very old men.

Remember this?

The BBC’s Gordon Corera, in Guantanamo Bay, says the US’s interviews with the three children – aged between 13 and 15 – reveal they may have been coerced into fighting in Afghanistan.

General Geoffrey Miller who leads operations at the camp is seeking to have the children released in recognition of their age and co-operation, our correspondent says.

“These juvenile enemy combatants were impressed, were kidnapped into terrorism. They have given us some very valuable intelligence. We are very close to making a recommendation on their transfer back to their home countries,” General Miller said.

Big of him. I shudder to think what was done to elicit this “valuable intelligence.”

And then there’s this famous case:

Omar Ahmed Khadr is a Canadian Islamic Jihadist who was one of the youngest captives and the last Western citizen to be held by the United States at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. Captured at the age of 15 years and 10 months on July 27, 2002 by American forces in the village of Ayub Kheyl, Afghanistan, he was detained, interrogated and sent to Guantanamo Bay detention camps, in Cuba. He was convicted of killing a U.S. medic by throwing a hand grenade and planting mines to target U.S. convoys […]

The unconscious Khadr was airlifted to receive medical attention at Bagram. After he regained consciousness approximately a week later, interrogations began. He remained stretcher-bound for several weeks. Col. Marjorie Mosier operated on his eyes after his arrival, though fellow detainee Rhuhel Ahmed later said that Khadr had been denied other forms of surgery to save his eyesight as punishment for not giving interrogators the answers they sought. His requests for darkened sunglasses to protect his failing eyesight were denied for “state security” reasons.
that his confession was gained after it was revealed that Americans had discovered a videotape of Khadr and others making IED’s.

Khadr arrived at Guantanamo Bay on October 29 or 30, 2002, suspected of being an enemy combatant. He was recorded as standing 170 cm (5′ 7″) and weighing 70 kilos (155 lbs), and recalled the guards said, “Welcome to Israel”. Despite being under 18, he was treated as an adult prisoner from the beginning at Guantanamo. Officials considered him an “intelligence treasure trove,” as his father was suspected of al-Qaeda activities, and the youth had personally met Osama bin Laden. They thought he might be able to offer answers about the al-Qaeda hierarchy, although Omar Khadr was 10 years old when he met bin Laden. 

On January 21, 2003, American military interrogators received a new standard operating procedure, and were told that they had to “radically create new methods and methodologies … needed to complete this mission in defense of our nation”.

In February 2003, Canadian Foreign Affairs intelligence officer Jim Gould and an official from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) were allowed to interrogate Khadr. For three weeks prior to the Canadian visit, the US guards deprived Khadr of sleep, moving him to a new cell every three hours for 21 days in order to “make him more amenable and willing to talk”.

Khadr eventually pled guilty and got 8 years — on top of the time he spent being tortured and waiting for a “trial.”

Amy Davidson at the New Yorker wrote this after the Wikileaks revelations:

Here are some of the reasons we’ve held people at Guantánamo, according to files obtained by WikiLeaks and, then, by several news organizations: 

A sharecropper because he was familiar with mountain passes; 

an Afghan “because of his general knowledge of activities in the areas of Khost and Kabul based as a result of his frequent travels through the region as a taxi driver”; 

an Uzbek because he could talk about his country’s intelligence service, and a Bahraini about his country’s royal family (both of those nations are American allies); 

an eighty-nine year old man, who was suffering from dementia, to explain documents that he said were his son’s; 

an imam, to speculate on what worshippers at his mosque were up to; a cameraman for Al Jazeera, to detail its operations; 

a British man, who had been a captive of the Taliban, because “he was expected to have knowledge of Taliban treatment of prisoners and interrogation tactics”; 

Taliban conscripts, so they could explain Taliban conscription techniques; 

a fourteen-year-old named Naqib Ullah, described in his file as a “kidnap victim,” who might know about the Taliban men who kidnapped him. (Ullah spent a year in the prison.)

Our reasons, in short, do not always really involve a belief that a prisoner is dangerous to us or has committed some crime; sometimes (and this is more debased) we mostly think we might find him useful.

I don’t know the degree to which these people were tortured but you can bet that no matter what happened to them, it wasn’t pretty.

In fact, the transport ritual alone was a form of torture. (This is from Jane Mayer’s “The Dark Side”)

“A former member of a C.I.A. transport team has described the ‘takeout’ of prisoners as a carefully choreographed twenty-minute routine, during which a suspect was hog-tied, stripped naked, photographed, hooded, sedated with anal suppositories, placed in diapers, and transported by plane to a secret location. A person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry, referring to cavity searches and the frequent use of suppositories during the takeout of detainees, likened the treatment to ‘sodomy.’ He said, ‘It was used to absolutely strip the detainee of any dignity. It breaks down someone’s sense of impenetrability. The interrogation became a process not just of getting information but of utterly subordinating the detainee through humiliation.’ The former C.I.A. officer confirmed that the agency frequently photographed the prisoners naked, ‘because it’s demoralizing.”

Even these idiots in charge of the CIA and the White House couldn’t have believed that all these prisoners had valuable information. They did this stuff because they could. To punish. With torture.

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The unknown unknowns and the need for metrics

by digby

I’m going through the torture report as best I can although it’s tough going because of the redactions. I’m hoping that someone is going to reproduce it in a more readable form. In any case, it keeps reminding me of stuff I’ve written from the past about all this. We already knew so much of it. But the report doesn’t really tell the whole story in the same way that press accounts told it at the time. And that’s because the Senate Committee was only tasked at looking at what the CIA did not at what the White House which ordered it did.

I keep seeing dunderheads like Chris Matthews (who apparently never reads a newspaper) repeatedly scratch their heads wondering why torturers would keep going when they weren’t getting any good information. This piece from 2009 sheds some light on that question:

Sunday, March 29, 2009

Dick Cheney is going to hell. But we knew that. And so are Bush and Rice and all the rest who insisted on torturing Abu Zubaida, a brain damaged man who was so desperate that he made up fantastical terrorist plots just to make the torture stop. They not only committed a war crime, they made us all less safe by sending investigators all over the world on wild goose chases.


This story was always pooh-poohed by administration officials, who insisted that the information this man with serious memory problems gave under torture was vital in stopping many terrorist attacks. But they lied. The Washington Post provides some new details in this story in today’s paper:

When CIA officials subjected their first high-value captive, Abu Zubaida, to waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods, they were convinced that they had in their custody an al-Qaeda leader who knew details of operations yet to be unleashed, and they were facing increasing pressure from the White House to get those secrets out of him. 

The methods succeeded in breaking him, and the stories he told of al-Qaeda terrorism plots sent CIA officers around the globe chasing leads. 

In the end, though, not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida’s tortured confessions, according to former senior government officials who closely followed the interrogations. Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly evaporated, while most of the useful information from Abu Zubaida — chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates — was obtained before waterboarding was introduced, they said. 

Moreover, within weeks of his capture, U.S. officials had gained evidence that made clear they had misjudged Abu Zubaida. President George W. Bush had publicly described him as “al-Qaeda’s chief of operations,” and other top officials called him a “trusted associate” of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and a major figure in the planning of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. None of that was accurate, the new evidence showed. 

Abu Zubaida was not even an official member of al-Qaeda, according to a portrait of the man that emerges from court documents and interviews with current and former intelligence, law enforcement and military sources. Rather, he was a “fixer” for radical Muslim ideologues, and he ended up working directly with al-Qaeda only after Sept. 11 — and that was because the United States stood ready to invade Afghanistan.

As weeks passed after the capture without significant new confessions, the Bush White House and some at the CIA became convinced that tougher measures had to be tried. 

The pressure from upper levels of the government was “tremendous,” driven in part by the routine of daily meetings in which policymakers would press for updates, one official remembered. 

“They couldn’t stand the idea that there wasn’t anything new,” the official said. “They’d say, ‘You aren’t working hard enough.’ There was both a disbelief in what he was saying and also a desire for retribution — a feeling that ‘He’s going to talk, and if he doesn’t talk, we’ll do whatever.’ “ 

The application of techniques such as waterboarding — a form of simulated drowning that U.S. officials had previously deemed a crime — prompted a sudden torrent of names and facts. Abu Zubaida began unspooling the details of various al-Qaeda plots, including plans to unleash weapons of mass destruction

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard that the Bush administration was obsessed with getting a volume of information, caring little about the quality or reliability of it. neither is it the first time that we’ve heard that this pressure came from the highest reaches of the administration itself. Back in 2005, I posted this:

Last week I wrote a post featuring Lt. Col Stephen Jordan and his testimony that the White House had been “impressed” with the “flow of information” coming out of Abu Ghraib. Today, Spencer Ackerman, pinch hitting for Josh Marshall at Talking Points, references this USA Today article about the same fellow, connecting many of the same dots and more.

There seems to be a great deal of emphasis placed on the numbers game. From the USA Today article:

Sergeant First Class Roger Brokaw, told the paper. “How many raids did you do last week? How many prisoners were arrested? How many interrogations were conducted? How many [intelligence] reports were written? It was incredibly frustrating.”

From the Christian Science Monitor article I referenced in my earlier post:

Specialist Monath and others say they were frustrated by intense pressure from Colonel Pappas and his superiors – Lt. Gen Ricardo Sanchez and his intelligence officer, Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast – to churn out a high quantity of intelligence reports, regardless of the quality. “It was all about numbers. We needed to send out more intelligence documents whether they were finished or not just to get the numbers up,” he said. Pappas was seen as demanding – waking up officers in the middle of the night to get information – but unfocused, ordering analysts to send out rough, uncorroborated interrogation notes. “We were scandalized,” Monath said. “We all fought very hard to counter that pressure” including holding up reports in editing until the information could be vetted.

General Ripper, as well, seems to have been mighty impressed with the quantity of intelligence he got from prisoners in Guantanamo after he “took the gloves off.” From January’s issue of Vanity Fair:

According to General Miller, Gitmo’s importance is growing with amazing rapidity: “Last month we gained six times as much intelligence as we did in January 2003. I’m talking about high-value intelligence here, distributed round the world.”

Daily success or failure in guerilla wars is notoriously difficult to assess. Unlike a war for territory you cannot say that you took a certain hill or town. Political types are always looking for some measurement, some sign that they are succeeding (or failing.)

Billmon noted this back in October in an interesting post on Rumsfeld’s angst at being unable to assess success or failure in the WOT:

Above all, Rumsfeld cries out for “metrics” that can be used to measure progress in such a war:

“Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror,” he wrote. “Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?”

Billmon makes the obvious comparison between Rummy and a other recent war criminal sec-def, Robert McNamara, concluding:

The same mindset also spawned McNamara’s preferred metric: the infamous “body count.” In that earlier, more naive, era, it hadn’t yet occurred to management theorists that numeric targets can quickly become bureaucratic substitutes for real objectives, such as winning wars. So McNamara (and the military) had to learn it the hard way, as industrious field officers dispatched soldiers to count graves in Vietnamese civilian cemetaries in order to hit their weekly numbers.

I’m not sure what the equivalent might be today, although Rumsfeld’s memo points in a possible direction when it suggests the creation of a private foundation that could fund “moderate” madrassas (Islamic schools) to counteract the radical ones. Perhaps someday we’ll have a “moderate student count,” in which hard-pressed CIA officers dispatch agents to count child laborers in Pakistani sweat shops in order to hit their weekly numbers.

It looks to me as if they found a simpler metric than that. Like the mediocre, hack bureaucrats they are, they decided that they would gauge success or failure — certainly they would report to the White House success or failure — based upon the sheer numbers of raids, arrests, interrogations, reports, confessions and breakdowns achieved, regardless of whether any of it resulted in good intel or enhanced security anywhere.

This was the only metric they could conceive of and in order to get those numbers up they had to detain large numbers of innocent people and torture them for false information to fill the endless reports of success on the ground in Afghanistan, Gitmo and Iraq. They could hoist up a huge pile of paper in a meeting with their president and say, “look at how much intelligence we’re getting. We’re really getting somewhere.”

McNamara quotes TS Eliot at the end of The Fog Of War:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time

Well, not everybody apparently. Thirty years after the hell of Vietnam, it’s the same shit, different fools. 

In the case of Zubayda there seems to be another element as well. They were desperate to keep up the fiction that Al Qaeda was the outsized foe they’d built them up to be. If they were merely a dangerous little gang of criminals rather than a deadly global army of super-villains, it would be hard to justify the spending of trillions on unnecessary wars and suspending inconvenient portions of the constitution. These Vietnam chickenhawks didn’t want to hear anything that would imply that they weren’t fighting the war of all wars.


They knew these were false confessions and fictional plots and cynically used them to keep up the sense of panic — even among themselves — that fueled their global ambitions and fed their damaged egos. Ultimately they failed in that, not because they actually did anything that kept the babies safe, but because the American people just don’t have the attention span to stay panicked about anything for very long. Once the spell broke, there was nothing left but the metrics.


digby 3/29/2009 11:00:00 AM

Protecting the most vulnerable among us


by digby

Dday has an important piece today about the CRomnibus  in which he illustrates just how much of the battle over the vote last night was actually a bit of misdirection. The disputed provisions in the bill (to roll back derivative regulations and campaign finance reform measures) were terrible, of course. But they were the tip of the iceberg:

But there’s so much more to the CRomnibus than just those two riders. Under the bill, trustees would be enabled to cut pension benefits to current retirees, reversing a 40-year bond with workers who earned their retirement packages. Voters in the District of Columbia who approved legalized marijuana will see their initiative vaporized, with local government prohibited from taxing or regulating the drug’s sale. Trucking companies can make roads less safe by giving their employees 82-hour work weeks without sufficient rest breaks. Pell grants for college students will be cut, with the money diverted to private student loan contractors who have actively harmed borrowers. Government financiers of overseas projects will be prevented from stopping funding for coal-fired power plants. Blue Cross and Blue Shield will be allowed to count “quality improvement” measures toward their mandatory health spending under Obamacare’s “medical loss ratio” provision, a windfall saving them millions of dollars.

I’m not done. The bill eliminates a bipartisan measure to end “backdoor” searches by the NSA of Americans’ private communications. It blocks the EPA from regulating certain water sources for farmers. It adds an exception to allow the U.S. to continue to fund Egypt’s military leadership. In a giveaway to potato growers, it reduces nutrition standards in school lunches and the Women, Infant and Children food aid program. It halts the listing of new endangered species. It stops the regulation of lead in hunting ammunition or fishing equipment. It limits contributions to the Green Climate Fund to compensate poor countries ravaged by climate change. I could go on. And even if the offending measures on derivatives and campaign finance were removed, all of that dreck would remain.

He goes on to make the important point that this is going to be the new normal. I think that’s right. The progressive Democrats will now be free to make losing stand after losing stand — which is a nice bit of theatre that excites people like me without having to disrupt business as usual — while the Democratic centrists and the Republicans make “deals” for the benefit of their benefactors and trade off cuts to various benefits and regulations like they were baseball cards.  If any consensus exists in the US Congress it’s that we need to protect the most vulnerable among us: rich people.

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QOTD: Bob Menendez

by digby

On the congress asserting its responsibility to approve the president’s War on Isis:

I think what we have done is lay down a marker as the parameters. The AUMF that we passed out of the committee gives the president the wherewithal to do everything he is doing right now, plus. But what it doesn’t do is give him or any future president a blank check. And I think that is an important check and balance. 

And any president who comes to them in the future will also get  “the wherewithal to do everything he is doing, plus.” They always do. 


I appreciate this fealty to the notion that we need check and balances on presidential power to wage war. It’s a very lovely concept. But while dotting your constitutional Is and crossing your constitutional Ts is important, it’s not the most important issue –the war itself is. I think we waste a whole lot of time worrying about the president usurping congressional power and not enough about what the congress and the president are actually doing.

I’d love to see more independence in the congress on this issue. Maybe putting an emphasis on their responsibility here will make them take it seriously over time.  But I’ve never seen it happen yet and I’m sorry to be so cynical but as long as our endless war on terrorism continues, I don’t think we will.  This is one of the purposes of the Long Wars like the Cold War and the GWOT.  The incentives in a nation that’s on a permanent war footing with an economy organized around “defense” are all skewed in one direction. We end up putting on a constitutional pageant rather than actual governance. The wars go on, one way or another.

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