Author: digby

Outsourcing The Problem

by digby

Well, that was easy:

Obama preserves renditions as counter-terrorism tool

The role of the CIA’s controversial prisoner-transfer program may expand, intelligence experts say.

By Greg Miller

February 1, 2009

Reporting from Washington — The CIA’s secret prisons are being shuttered. Harsh interrogation techniques are off-limits. And Guantanamo Bay will eventually go back to being a wind-swept naval base on the southeastern corner of Cuba.

But even while dismantling these programs, President Obama left intact an equally controversial counter-terrorism tool.

Under executive orders issued by Obama recently, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States.

Current and former U.S. intelligence officials said that the rendition program might be poised to play an expanded role going forward because it was the main remaining mechanism — aside from Predator missile strikes — for taking suspected terrorists off the street.

The rendition program became a source of embarrassment for the CIA, and a target of international scorn, as details emerged in recent years of botched captures, mistaken identities and allegations that prisoners were turned over to countries where they were tortured.

The European Parliament condemned renditions as “an illegal instrument used by the United States.” Prisoners swept up in the program have sued the CIA as well as a Boeing Co. subsidiary accused of working with the agency on dozens of rendition flights.

But the Obama administration appears to have determined that the rendition program was one component of the Bush administration’s war on terrorism that it could not afford to discard.

The decision underscores the fact that the battle with Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups is far from over and that even if the United States is shutting down the prisons, it is not done taking prisoners.

“Obviously you need to preserve some tools — you still have to go after the bad guys,” said an Obama administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity when discussing the legal reasoning. “The legal advisors working on this looked at rendition. It is controversial in some circles and kicked up a big storm in Europe. But if done within certain parameters, it is an acceptable practice.”

Well now we know why Obama used the same odd rhetoric as the Bush administration did: “The United States does not torture.” he just left off the rest of the sentence — “we contract it out to people who really know how to take the gloves off.”

So, it would appear that the whole argument is kabuki. The CIA, I’m sure, is happy to “supervise” such things rather than have to get their own hands dirty. Their little hissy fit over Panetta and the rest may even have been a ruse to give the new administration cover to keep (perhaps expand?) the rendition program. That is, after all, a fine bipartisan program first approved during the Clinton years.

So, it would appear that we will not see the end of torture under this administration after all. And I’m also sure that news of renditions and orders from the White House will leak in great detail in order to damage Obama’s moral authority (even more than this news already does.) But the quivering villagers are undoubtedly relieved that the new president understands the value of torture. They can rest well tonight, unafraid that the terrorists are coming to kill them personally in their beds. Depends sales will take a big hit.

Just as a reminder, here’s Jane Mayer’s seminal article in the New Yorker called “Outsourcing Torture.” Here’s an excerpt:

Arar, a thirty-four-year-old graduate of McGill University whose family emigrated to Canada when he was a teen-ager, was arrested on September 26, 2002, at John F. Kennedy Airport. He was changing planes; he had been on vacation with his family in Tunisia, and was returning to Canada. Arar was detained because his name had been placed on the United States Watch List of terrorist suspects. He was held for the next thirteen days, as American officials questioned him about possible links to another suspected terrorist. Arar said that he barely knew the suspect, although he had worked with the man’s brother. Arar, who was not formally charged, was placed in handcuffs and leg irons by plainclothes officials and transferred to an executive jet. The plane flew to Washington, continued to Portland, Maine, stopped in Rome, Italy, then landed in Amman, Jordan.

During the flight, Arar said, he heard the pilots and crew identify themselves in radio communications as members of “the Special Removal Unit.” The Americans, he learned, planned to take him next to Syria. Having been told by his parents about the barbaric practices of the police in Syria, Arar begged crew members not to send him there, arguing that he would surely be tortured. His captors did not respond to his request; instead, they invited him to watch a spy thriller that was aired on board.

Ten hours after landing in Jordan, Arar said, he was driven to Syria, where interrogators, after a day of threats, “just began beating on me.” They whipped his hands repeatedly with two-inch-thick electrical cables, and kept him in a windowless underground cell that he likened to a grave. “Not even animals could withstand it,” he said. Although he initially tried to assert his innocence, he eventually confessed to anything his tormentors wanted him to say. “You just give up,” he said. “You become like an animal.”

A year later, in October, 2003, Arar was released without charges, after the Canadian government took up his cause. Imad Moustapha, the Syrian Ambassador in Washington, announced that his country had found no links between Arar and terrorism. Arar, it turned out, had been sent to Syria on orders from the U.S. government, under a secretive program known as “extraordinary rendition.” This program had been devised as a means of extraditing terrorism suspects from one foreign state to another for interrogation and prosecution. Critics contend that the unstated purpose of such renditions is to subject the suspects to aggressive methods of persuasion that are illegal in America—including torture.

Changing this was the change I voted for. If nothing else, it was this.

Update: Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings says that the article is mistaken and that the orders Obama signed actually prohibit rendition under existing law and speculates that this is more nonsense from the intelligence community (which would certainly be in keeping with their behavior since Obama was elected. ) I certainly hope that correct. Perhaps someone will ask the administration about it directly to clear it up once andfor all.

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Blogging The Origin

by tristero

I’m in Oswego, NY for rehearsals leading up to the premiere of my new evening-long piece, The Origin which will take place on February 6 and 7 at 7:30 PM at Waterman Theatre, Tyler Hall on the SUNY Oswego campus. I’ll be blogging about the experience all week and try to post some pictures and audio files (oddly, the last time I tried, it was all but impossible to post audio files to Blogger, so I may have to post links). If you’re in the area, please come and say hello! I’ll be there for both performances and there should be Q&A’s after each.

Since rehearsals begin in less than two hours and I have much to do before then, I”ll make this post short and leave you with a link to an NPR interview with Keith Thompson about the young Charles Darwin. It’s quite good, but in an inexcusable nod to religious correctness, Leann Hanson says:

Today, scientists continue to uncover the mechanisms of [Darwin’s] insight and theologians continue to question it.

The implied parallelism is sheer nonsense. True, scientists do continue to uncover the mechanisms of evolution, informed and influenced by Darwin’s theory of natural selection. However, only some theologians continue to question it and most of those are from extreme right American evangelical churches or radical islamists. The rest of the worldwide theological community, Christian and otherwise, has either little to say about Darwin’s theories – they’re not relevant to their beliefs – or sees no conflict whatsoever between their religion and science. To frame it the way Hanson does is to manufacture a worldwide controversy that doesn’t exist as well as elevate the status of a small, well-financed group of rightwing operatives to that of spokesmen for Christianity. Hopefully, somewhere in the series that NPR is planning this month they will deal with the social issues swirling around the teaching of evolution in this country in a responsible fashion.

Villagers Let Their Freak Flag Fly

by dday

This is a reversal:

President Barack Obama, who pledged during his campaign to shift U.S. troops and resources from Iraq to Afghanistan, has done little since taking office to suggest he will significantly widen the grinding war against a resurgent Taliban.

On the contrary, Obama appears likely to streamline the U.S. focus with an eye to the worsening economy and the cautionary example of the Iraq war that sapped political support for President George W. Bush.

“There’s not simply a military solution to that problem,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said last week, adding that Obama believes “that only through long-term and sustainable development can we ever hope to turn around what’s going on there.”

Less than two weeks into the new administration, Obama has not said much in public about what his top military adviser says is the largest challenge facing the armed forces. The president did say Afghanistan and Pakistan are the central front in the struggle against terrorism, a clue to the likely shift toward a targeted counterterrorism strategy.

After Obama’s first visit to the Pentagon as president, a senior defense official said the commander in chief surveyed top uniformed officers about the strain of fighting two wars and warned that the economic crisis will limit U.S. responses. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because Obama’s meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff was private.

I think the reporter is playing mind-reader a little bit. What’s happening right now is a strategy review. Wisely, President Obama is actually looking at the situation and taking input from everyone, even detractors. Publicly, those who will be closest to making the decision are offering a very balanced view, full of warnings and caveats. Bob Gates’ Senate testimony this week was quite honest.

Gates, a cautious advocate of bolstering U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday that he worries that “Afghans [will] come to see us as the problem, not the solution, and then we are lost.” He warned that increased levels of U.S. troop deaths in 2009 were “likely.”

In December, Gen. David McKiernan, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, stated that he needs an increase of nearly 30,000 troops “for the next few years” — in other words, a sustained troop increase, not a brief surge in U.S. forces as occurred in Iraq in 2007. In the last few days Obama administration officials have begun telling reporters off the record not to presume that the president has made a decision on the size or duration of any prospective troop increase.

Gates said Tuesday that he backs McKiernan’s request — but signaled that the troop spigot would not remain open. “I would be very skeptical about additional force levels beyond what Gen. McKiernan asked for,” Gates told the Senate panel. A former senior CIA official during the Russian invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, Gates recalled that “the Soviets couldn’t win that war with 120,000 troops and a ruthless approach” to Afghan civilians, since they adopted “the wrong strategy.” […] “Above all,” he said, “there must be an Afghan face on this war.” More important to Gates than increasing U.S. troop levels, he said, was increasing the numbers of Afghan security forces, and he said the government of Hamid Karzai supports a U.S.-backed effort to increase the Afghan National Army to 130,000 troops from its current 80,000, though he said he was unsure “even that number will be large enough.” At several points in the hearing, Gates worried that the U.S. was losing support from the Afghan people, saying that the U.S. has “lost the strategic communications war” to the Afghan insurgency about U.S.-caused civilian casualties. Proposing a policy of “first apologiz[ing]” when U.S. troops kill civilians in error, Gates said, “We have to get the balance right with the Afghan people or we will lose this war.”

Gates was adamant that there’s no military solution in Afghanistan, and that the goals should be minimal, narrowed to denying Al Qaeda a safe haven. “If we set as the goal [creating] a Central Asian Valhalla, we will lose,” he said. Similarly, this week Adm. Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said to the Washington Post “I don’t have enough troops in the United States military to make the difference that needs to be made” in Afghanistan.

Some of this may come from the large protests against the President’s first forward action in the region, an airstrike in the Waziristan area that killed civilians. This may have shown that aerial strikes will only inflame the population and possibly turn Pakistan toward religious parties. While the theory behind additional troops is that less airstrikes would be necessary, it would increase the foreign occupier footprint at a time when the population is less supportive of them. The fact that NATO help appears unlikely is being factored into their thinking as well, as is the relative weakness and corruption of the Karzai government. While top officials press Karzai for more, there is a lot of thought to throwing Karzai over, or at least not offering him any support, in the next Presidential election, which has now been postponed until August due to the rising violence. So it looks like no big decisions have been made.

Throughout this there have been great, strident voices contextualizing the situation in Afghanistan and warning against a deeper commitment. Barnett Rubin, Juan Cole, Steve Clemons and Scott Ritter are just a few. What’s been notable in the past couple days is, while the Administration undergoes this strategy review, the chattering class is going nuts. Newsweek decided that eleven days and a noncommital stance was enough to call this “Obama’s Vietnam,” as if he ordered the invasion in 2001 and neglected the war for seven years. They’ve somehow justified this by distancing from dirty hippies who analogize every war to Vietnam, and then… analogizing the war to Vietnam:

“Vietnam analogies can be tiresome,” they write. “To critics, especially those on the left, all American interventions after Vietnam have been potential “quagmires.” But sometimes clichés come true, and, especially lately, it seems that the war in Afghanistan is shaping up in all-too-familiar ways.”

And you should have seen Bob Woodward on ABC this morning, yipping away with “What is the strategy?” and “Why aren’t we leaving yet,” sounding like a latter-day Country Joe McDonald. And there have been other big-picture pieces in the print media.

I agree that troops shouldn’t be committed in the absence of goals or strategy, and it’s good that the establishment is starting to question the slow roll in Afghanistan. Forgive me, however, for questioning their motives. Although Obama is engaging in a deliberative process, it is characterized as a rush to war. They are making up for their own past while they analogize to the distant past. Obama stumbling into his own Vietnam “fits” for them. It’s the perfect narrative and they’re going to sell it.

I think it’s very unsettling. The public is very split on Afghanistan and could be persuaded on either side. While I’m personally against escalation, I’m willing to deal with the outcomes of my decision. I don’t think the Village is. They’re interested in putting their imprint on the story no matter what happens. So if Afghanistan falls into chaos with an escalation, then Obama is stuck in a quagmire. If it falls into chaos without an escalation, then Obama make a strategic mistake and the blood is on his hands. Even if it succeeds, the voices will be raised about when we can leave. And throughout it all, there will be talk about how the commitment overseas will constrain Obama at home and ruin all of his plans to restore and transform the economy. They are not arguing in good faith, and while I’m glad to have a real public debate about Afghanistan, I think it’s worth thinking about why the Village has put on their tie-dye and gone wild in the streets.

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Tortured Comedy

by digby

Our political elites are just wonderful people. They fight over what to do about the little people by day and get together at off-the-record black tie dinners at night and joke about torture.

At last night’s black-tie dinner at Washington’s Alfalfa Club, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) couldn’t resist cracking a joke about torture. Politico’s Mike Allen reports:

More from Senator Lieberman: ‘We had hoped Vice President Cheney would be here tonight. I hope it’s not his back injury that’s keeping him away. Apparently, he hurt it moving some things out of his office. Personally, I had no idea that waterboards were so heavy.

Last year, Lieberman, who has voted against banning waterboarding, “reluctantly acknowledged” that he doesn’t believe that waterboarding is torture. “It is not like putting burning coals on people’s bodies. The person is in no real danger. The impact is psychological,” he said.

This is the man who went to the Senate floor and gave a long sermon about how the president’s sexual indiscretion was destroying the moral fabric of the country.

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Saturday Night At The Movies

Dust Bowl XLIII

By Dennis Hartley

I’ve sure been hearing the “D” word an awful lot lately. They say that in times of severe economic downturn, people crave pure escapism at the movies. I say, screw that. I wanna revel in economic downturn, ‘cos there’s something else “they” say as well: Misery loves company. So, with that in mind, and in the spirit of a little cinematic aversion therapy, here’s my Top 10 Great Depression Movies. Study them well, because there’s yet one more thing that “they say”: Those who do not understand history are doomed to repeat it.

Berlin Alexanderplatz– When you think of the Great Depression in terms of film and literature, it tends to vibe America-centric in the mind’s eye. In reality, the economic downturn between the great wars was a global phenomenon (not unlike our current situation); things were literally “tough all over”. You could say that Germany had a jumpstart on the depression (economically speaking, everything below the waist was kaput by the mid 1920s). In October of 1929 (interesting historical timing), Alfred Doblin’s epic novel Berlin Alexanderplatz: The Story Of Franz Biberkopf was published, then adapted into a film in 1931 directed by Phil Jutzi. It wasn’t until nearly 50 years later that the ultimate film version would appear as Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 15 hour opus. It’s nearly impossible to encapsulate this spiritually exhausting viewing experience in just a few lines; I’ll just say that it is (by turns) the most outrageous, shocking, transcendent, boring, awe-inspiring, maddening and soul-scorching film I’ve ever hated myself for loving so much.

Bonnie and Clyde– The gangster movie meets the art film in this 1967 groundbreaker from director Arthur Penn. There is much more to this influential masterpiece than just the oft-mentioned operatic crescendo of violent death in the closing frames; particularly of note was the ingenious way that its attractive antiheroes were posited to directly appeal to the rebellious counterculture zeitgeist of the time, even though the film was ostensibly a “nostalgia piece”. Our better instincts may tell us that the real Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were nowhere near as charismatic (or physically beautiful) as Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty, but we don’t really care, do we? (Is it getting warm in here? Woof!)

Bound for Glory-There’s only one man to whom Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen must bow before-and that’s Woody Guthrie. You can almost taste the dust in director Hal Ashby’s leisurely, episodic 1976 biopic about the life of America’s premier protest songwriter/social activist. David Carradine gives one of his finest performances, and does a very credible job with his own singing and playing. Haskell Wexler’s outstanding cinematography earned him a well-deserved Oscar. The film may feel a bit overlong and slow in spots if you aren’t particularly fascinated by Guthrie’s story; but I think it is just as much about the Depression itself, and perhaps more than any other film on my list, it succeeds as a “total immersion” by transporting the viewer back to the era.

The Grapes of Wrath– I’m stymied for any hitherto unspoken superlatives to ladle onto John Ford’s masterful film or John Steinbeck’s classic source novel, so I won’t pretend to have any. Suffice it to say, this probably comes closest to nabbing the title as THE quintessential film about the heartbreak and struggle of America’s “salt of the earth” during the Great Depression. Perhaps we can take (real or imagined) comfort in the possibility that no matter how bad things get over the next few months (years?), Henry Fonda’s unforgettable embodiment of Tom Joad will “be there…all around, in the dark.”

Inserts– This 1976 sleeper from director John Byrum has been dismissed as pretentious dreck by some; it remains a cult item for others. If I told you that Richard Dreyfuss, Veronica Cartwright, Bob Hoskins and Jessica Harper once all co-starred in an “X” rated film, would you believe me? Dreyfuss plays a has-been Hollywood directing prodigy known as “Wonder Boy”, whose career has peaked early; he now lives in his bathrobe, drinking heavily and casting junkies and wannabe-starlets in pornos that he shoots in his crumbling mansion. Bob Hoskins is memorable as the sleazy “producer”, who is also looking for investors for his scheme-an idea to open a chain of hamburger joints (his nickname is “Big Mac”). The story takes place in 30s Hollywood, and as a wallow in the squalid side of show biz, it would make a great double bill with The Day of the Locust.

King of the Hill– Steven Soderbergh’s exquisitely photographed film (somewhat reminiscent of Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon) is a bittersweet rendering of A.E. Hotchner’s Depression-era tale about young Aaron (Jesse Bradford) who lives with his parents and kid brother in a decrepit hotel. After his sickly mother (Lisa Eichhorn) is sent away for convalescence, his kid brother is packed off to stay with relatives, and his father (Jeroen Krabbe) hits the road as a travelling salesman, leaving Aaron to fend for himself. The Grand Hotel-style framing device (offering glimpses of the mini-dramas unfolding in each room, here suffused through a child’s innocent perceptions) gives you an effective microcosm of the day-to-day struggles of those who live through such times. The film is full of wonderful little moments of keen insight into the human condition. The great ensemble includes Karen Allen, Adrian Brody, Elizabeth McGovern and Spaulding Gray.

Pennies from Heaven (Original BBC version)-I’ve always preferred the original 1978 British television version of this production to the Americanized theatrical version that was released several years afterwards. Written by Dennis Potter (The Singing Detective), it is rife with the usual Potter obsessions: sexual frustration, marital infidelity, religious guilt, shattered dreams and quiet desperation…broken up by the occasional, completely incongruous song and dance number (I really would not want to be in his head, ever). Bob Hoskins is outstanding as a married traveling sheet music salesman in Depression-era England whose life takes some, erm, interesting Potter-esque turns once he becomes smitten by a young rural schoolteacher (Cheryl Campbell) who lives with her widowed father and two extremely creepy brothers. Probably best described as a film noir musical?

Sullivan’s Travels-A unique and amazingly deft mash-up of romantic screwball comedy, Hollywood satire, road movie and hard-hitting social drama that probably would not have worked so beautifully had not the great Preston Sturges been at the helm. Joel McCrea is pitch-perfect as a director of goofy populist comedies who yearns to make a “meaningful” film. Racked with guilt about the comfortable bubble that his Hollywood success has afforded him and determined to learn firsthand how the other half lives, he decides to hit the road with no money in his pocket and “embed” himself as a railroad tramp (much to the chagrin of his handlers). He is joined along the way by an aspiring actress (Veronica Lake, in one of her best comic performances). His voluntary crash-course in “social realism” turns into much more than he had originally bargained for. Lake and McCrea have wonderful chemistry. Years later, the Coen Brothers smugly co-opted the title of the fictional “film within the film” here: O Brother, Where Art Thou?

They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? – “Yowsa, yowsa, yowsa!” This richly decadent allegory about the human condition has to be one of the grimmest and most cynical films ever made. Director Sydney Pollack assembled a crack ensemble for this depiction of a Depression-era dance marathon from Hell: Jane Fonda, Gig Young (who snagged a Best Supporting Actor Oscar), Susannah York, Bruce Dern and Red Buttons are all outstanding; Pollack even coaxed the wooden Michael Sarrazin (the Hayden Christensen of his day) into showing some real emotion. Adapted from Horace McCoy’s novel.

Thieves Like Us-This loose remake of Nicholas Ray’s 1949 film noir classic They Live By Night is the late Robert Altman’s most underrated film, IMHO. It is often compared to Bonnie and Clyde, but stylistically speaking, the two films could not be farther apart. Altman’s tale of bank-robbing lovers on the lam (Keith Carradine and Shelley Duvall) is far less flashy and stylized, but ultimately more affecting thanks to a consistently naturalistic, elegiac tone throughout. Carradine and Duvall really breathe life into their doomed couple; every moment of intimacy between them (not just sexual) feels warm, touching, and genuine-which gives the film some real heart. Altman adapted the screenplay (with co-writers Joan Tewkesbury and Calder Willingham) from the same source novel (by Edward Anderson) that inspired Ray’s earlier film. Ripe for rediscovery.

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The Bush Legacy Lives On

by digby

We are going to be dealing with the conservative assault on civil liberties — particularly the fourth Amendment — long after he’s faded into obscurity:

Supreme Court Steps Closer to Repeal of Evidence Ruling

In 1983, a young lawyer in the Reagan White House was hard at work on what he called in a memorandum “the campaign to amend or abolish the exclusionary rule” — the principle that evidence obtained by police misconduct cannot be used against a defendant.

The Reagan administration’s attacks on the exclusionary rule — a barrage of speeches, opinion articles, litigation and proposed legislation — never gained much traction. But now that young lawyer, John G. Roberts Jr., is chief justice of the United States.

This month, Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority in Herring v. United States, a 5-to-4 decision, took a big step toward the goal he had discussed a quarter-century before. Taking aim at one of the towering legacies of the Warren Court, its landmark 1961 decision applying the exclusionary rule to the states, the chief justice’s majority opinion established for the first time that unlawful police conduct should not require the suppression of evidence if all that was involved was isolated carelessness. That was a significant step in itself. More important yet, it suggested that the exclusionary rule itself might be at risk.

The Herring decision “jumped a firewall,” said Kent Scheidegger, the general counsel of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a victims’ rights group. “I think Herring may be setting the stage for the Holy Grail,” he wrote on the group’s blog, referring to the overruling of Mapp v. Ohio, the 1961 Warren Court decision.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. joined the Herring decision and has been a reliable vote for narrowing the protections afforded criminal defendants since he joined the court in 2006. In applying for a job in the Reagan Justice Department in 1985, he wrote that his interest in the law had been “motivated in large part by disagreement with Warren Court decisions, particularly in the areas of criminal procedure,” religious freedom and voting rights.

Justice Alito replaced Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who was considered a moderate in criminal procedure cases.

“With Alito’s replacement of O’Connor,” said Craig M. Bradley, a law professor at Indiana University, “suddenly now they have four votes for sure and possibly five for the elimination of the exclusionary rule.”

According to Justice Scalia, the police are much more professional that they used to be, so we don’t need these sorts of onerous rules to inhibit them from searching anyone thy choose for any reason. We can just take them at their word. (After all, if you’re innocent, you have nothing to worry about ,right?)

The fight never ends.

h/t to bb
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“We’re Smarter Than That”

by digby

I’ve had a number of Claire McCaskill’s constituents write to me today to complain about my comment yesterday that I don’t care for her because she’s something of a Blue Dog. I’m told that she is better than the Republican she replaced, which is certainly true, and I acknowledge the realities of Missouri politics which probably require a more conservative Democrat than I personally prefer.

But this is why I’m not crazy about her. She has a Liebermanesque tendency to validate GOP rhetoric (and consequently, GOP policy) and I don’t think that ever works out for Democrats:

I think that there have been some mistakes made. From my perspective there have been mistakes made on the stimulus bill. There has been such a starvation diet for some of these programs that the appropriators got a little over anxious in the House. They probably did some things they shouldn’t have… We do need to look at the safety net side of the stimulus bill that can get into the economy quickly. But we can’t right every wrong in terms of programs we support in the stimulus bill. And the other thing is, whether it is the National Endowment of the Arts or some of the STD funding or contraceptive funding, all we did was just tee up ammunition for the other side to tear this thing down. And I would like to think we are smarter than that. I’m hopeful on the Senate side we will be smarter than that. We will pull some of this stuff out that is not stimulative and we will have safety net in there that will get into the economy quickly, because that is what these tax breaks do, and the unemployment insurance benefits and the food stamps. People need them and they’ll spend it, and it will go into the economy quickly. But I think we have to remain very focused on how we are creating jobs in this thing. And I am hoping we will find that middle ground.

The problem with her statement is that it validates the idea that “stimulus” has this very narrow meaning that Republicans want it to have. And that is very, very bad. This bill is not called “the stimulus bill.” It’s called the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act” and that’s because we have a much, much bigger problem on our hands than a little recession that needs a quick “jolt.” By accepting the republican definition of what the bill is supposed to do, they have backed themselves into a corner and turned the kind of worthy spending she characterizes as “over anxious” into frivolous, unnecessary spending, that will never be authorized.

And the notion that if only the Democrats had left out contraception and the NEA that the Republicans wouldn’t have found something else is naive at best. Orrin Hatch was complaining about money for higher education yesterday. They can find a way to call any government spending pork or entitlements. Once you start worrying about what they will find to complain about you are paralyzed.
If Obama has cast McCaskill to be the centrist Democrat to kiss the moderate Republicans’ rings and bring them over, she could have done it without using their talking points. It’s a bad habit of Democrats and I’m very sorry to see them continuing the tradition.
It’s very unlikely that any of these programs will ever be put back into legislation after this (particularly with the PayGo fetish back) and that’s just shameful. Indeed, I would look for a swift “bipartisan” call to pull in our belts, enact entitlment reform and practice “fiscal responsibility” the minute the watered down, probably far less effective, plan is passed. (As I wrote earlier, I think the administration probably believes that they will get the most “jolt” by the psychological impact of passing the tax cuts and infrastructure spending. We’d all better hope that happens, and quickly.)

Meanwhile, people who need help preventing unwanted pregnancies during this steep downturn are just going to be out of luck and I can’t think of a more vital need. It’s disgusting, particularly when you consider this, which doesn’t surprise me, but makes me want to puke nonetheless:

Apparently, the target group most in need of some good old fashioned sex ed can be found among the male members of the Democratic Party and among the talking heads in the media. A number of Congressmen attending a House Caucus meeting on the economic package earlier this week reportedly could not stop snickering when the words “stimulus” and “family planning” were used in the same sentence, and continued to tee-hee their way through a presentation by female colleagues until asked to stop. “They acted like they were in junior high,” reported a participant in the meeting. “It made me realize that not only did they not understand this issue, but that they are uncomfortable even talking about it.” Rather than chastising their male colleagues further, the women members and staffers involved in the meeting took this as a serious learning experience. It should be a lesson for all of us. “These issues are second nature to the majority of women in Congress,” said one Congressional staffer speaking off the record, “so when we talk to women members or their staffers about the connection between family planning and women’s economic security, they don’t need an explanation. They just get it.” “Many of the men, however, do not,” the staffer continued, “It is clear we need to educate them. If they don’t understand the issues, they won’t be able to defend them effectively.”

I’m sorry, there is no excuse for this bullshit. These are adults and they are Democrats, who are voted into office by a huge majority of women, (although sometimes I have to wonder why we bother.) Fine, so family planning is funny stuff to the Beavis and Buttheads in the Democratic caucus. I just feel compelled to note once again that there is now DNA testing and strong laws about child support, so if you play you pay fellas. It’s no joke. (For a great anatomy of the “contraception” hissy, read this post. It lays it all out in chronological form.)
And while it makes me very angry on the merits, the biggest problem with all this isn’t the poor women who will have to deal with unwanted pregnancy, it’s that the Democrats have clearly and unambiguously signaled that they are still deer in the headlights when a hissy fit hits.The Republicans are very relieved, I’m sure. They know just how to hit that sweet spot and they’ll keep doing it over and over again until the whole country believes that the Democrats caused the crisis and want to solve it by surrendering to terrorists and forcing people to have abortions. At the very least they will continue to think that it’s logical to solve this crisis by cutting taxes for the wealthy and cutting government spending.
Instead of treating this as a teachable moment, with Democrats showing the American people how conservative economics have caused their problems, some of them are out there reinforcing all the tired old conservative bromides and forcing self-destructive compromises just so they can pretend that this program has bipartisan support — which it clearly doesn’t. It’s depressing.
Bending over backwards to please Republicans on policy has never worked for Democrats in the past and I’m frankly a little bit gobsmacked that some of them think it will work now, of all times. But hey, their motto is, ” if it’s broke, don’t fix it” so here we are.

Update: As always, give ‘m an inch, and they’ll stage a filibuster.

So, assuming that the Democrats would always have some Blue Dog DLC types in the senate like Ben Nelson, who are defacto Republicans, how many senators do they need to have to have a working majority that will fulfill a clear mandate as they got last November? 70?

Orrin Hatch chuckled evilly yesterday, and said “I don’t agree with that,” when it was mentioned that Obama didn’t need Republicans to pass legislation and he was probably right. The way they aregoing, they’ll have a bunch of Democrats helping them filibuster.

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Judgment Day

by digby

Here’s a post written by a (much younger) woman with an 87 year old husband who seems to be implying that she’s having an affair:

I have several friends who have died of cancer over the years. Two of them gave their husbands permission to have sexual relations with someone else when they became unable to meet their husband’s needs. They asked only that they not be told about it and that their husbands be discreet. Both husbands did have affairs, which did not last but which made it easier for them to care for their wives. I also had a woman friend whose husband had cancer. She tried to ask him about making the same arrangement, but he couldn’t deal with it. She had sex with someone else anyway, she was very discreet, and said it was the only way she managed to get through the terrible years of watching her husband die. Is this moral?. Is it more moral if you have a spouse’s permission? Is it worse for a woman to have sex with someone else when her husband is dying?

Nobody else knows what goes on in someone else’s marriage. And until you have watched someone you love die, particularly over a long period of time, you can’t know the pressures and stresses. My feeling is that I am not in a position to judge. Perhaps if one is a better caretaker for having an outlet for stress that is a good thing. Perhaps it only adds guilt to the suffering. I do think that in our society, people still judge women more harshly than men in these circumstances. What do you think?

I agree with these sage observations. No one can know what goes on in another person’s marriage and one should not judge lest ye be judged. I would say this is particularly true when one is a person of some notoriety and social influence. People might be tempted to call you a hypocrite and speculate publicly about your marriage if you are the type of person who would judge others.

Oh, did I forget to tell you who wrote that?

Sally Quinn.

Yes, that Sally Quinn. That link leads to a video of Sally Quinn talking with Charlie Rose about her famous article about the permanent Washington Establishment’s horror at Bill and Hillary Clinton’s sullying of their town, which I’ve never seen before today. If you don’t understand my “Village” metaphor, this will explain it to you. (Note Bob Woodward nodding and grinning like a trained monkey in the audience.)

There is much to chew on in it, but perhaps the most telling thing is this:

Charlie: What do you most want to know?

Quinn: … I want to know about the Clintons’ marriage. To me this is the most fascinating marriage I’ve ever seen. I don’t understand it, I don’t know anyone who understands it. I will be surprised if Carl Bernstein gets to it. I can’t wait to read his book. I will be surprised if anyone gets to it. I just find it riveting.

She goes on to explain that she doesn’t think Hillary could possibly be religious because when she saw the pain her husband caused her daughter she should have withdrawn from him.

So much for not judging others’ marriages.

Quinn has always couched her judgments carefully under the rubrik of “journalism,” which most people would call gossip in this case. But it’s quite clear that she is not reporting, she is one of the queen bees, leading the charge. Even within that short interview, she contradicts herself several times, saying that nobody cared about the sex, it was all about the lying. But then she says that the problem was that Lewinsky was so much younger, whereas if he’d had an affair with a 50 year old, nobody would have cared.

It’s fascinating stuff. But I think that what’s most fascinating is that these people were so overwrought about Clinton’s misbehavior, going on the record with forceful opprobrium and condemning this soiling of the office of the presidency with spittled fury. This was hugely important to them.

And yet today, we have evidence that his successor ordered torture. Indeed, we know that the CIA came to the White House and acted out the torture techniques for extremely high level members of the Bush administration for their approval and the president has admitted that he approved those metings. But instead of condemning these people for “trashing the place and it’s not their place” the entire political establishment has circled the wagons to insist that we move on .

It’s the shallow obsession with trivial personal behavior as the only proper gauge of character that makes the political establishment a village rather than a court. Their slavish devotion to power is predicated on the notion that they will decide who is allowed to wield it on the basis of faux provincial, puritan values and that they be acknowledged by the powerful as such. Values which aren’t, as Quinn was astonished to find, shared by the rest of the country. They operate as exclusive arbiters of this allegedly character definining personal behavior and use that as a proxy for accountability, which works out very nicely for the powers that be.

That’s why it’s so fascinating to see Quinn’s odd little missive in that Washington Post blog. It certainly appears as if she is having some sort of personal issue which she fears may be revealed. Perhaps it’s just a “friend” of hers, as she unconvincingly asserts. But in a political culture in which accountability is based solely on personal faux pas and in which you elevate sexual gossip to the level of treason, you have to expect that it might just get you too one day if you stray outside the accepted boundries. Every once in a while the village has to punish one of its own just to show its still got its teeth.

I’d be careful if I were Sally Quinn. They haven’t had a good witchhunt in years and they are overdue.

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Scenes From The Class Struggle In Capitol Hill

by dday

If you’re on Twitter, I strongly recommend you find a right-wing mouth-breather Congressman to follow on the site and read them carefully. You’ll get the talking points hours or even days before they show up on the teevee. For example, my favorite right-wing Twitterbug, Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), has offered his sage thoughts on this Tom Daschle tax story.

Daescle(sp?)/Geitner/Rangel all avoided/cheated on taxes!Daescle latest!They don’t mind raising taxes because they don’t pay them.

He got two of the three names wrong, including Daschle, who was Senate Majority Leader when Hoekstra chaired the Intelligence Committee (!) and therefore was in all the Gang of Eight meetings with him.

But let’s get off spelling for a second. The soundbite is that Democrats don’t mind raising taxes because they don’t pay them. Har giggle snort glorf!! So let’s pre-but this statement in case it’s used by George Will or David Brooks tomorrow morning.

Because, sigh, if only failure to pay taxes or disclose income had anything to do with party and not class. And this happens through both illegal and legal means.

The average tax rate paid by the richest 400 Americans fell by a third to 17.2 percent through the first six years of the Bush administration and their average income doubled to $263.3 million, new IRS data show.

The 17.2 percent tax rate in 2006 was the lowest since the IRS began tracking the 400 largest taxpayers in 1992, although the richest 400 Americans paid more tax on an inflation-adjusted basis than any year since 2000.

The drop from 2001’s tax rate of 22.9 percent was due largely to ex-President George W. Bush’s push to cut tax rates on most capital gains to 15 percent in 2003.

And as long as we’re talking about tax dodgers, let’s bring in the biggest group of them bar none, corporations.

The news that more than 60 percent of U.S. corporations failed to pay any federal taxes from 1996 through 2000 when corporate profits were soaring and that corporate tax receipts had fallen to just 7.4 percent of overall federal tax revenue in 2003 – the lowest since 1983 and the second-lowest rate since 1934 – is an outrage. But it should come as no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to national tax policy over the past few years. The General Accounting Office (GAO) report also found that an astonishing 94 percent of corporations reported tax liability of less than 5 percent of their total income during the same time period. Corporate tax dodging has gone on for far too long. But the policies of the Bush administration have exacerbated the problem by furthering the culture of tax avoidance by big corporations and creating a pervasive unfairness in our tax code.

We have a problem in this country with people not paying their taxes. And irrespective of anything else, those people are by and large rich and connected. They influence politicians in Washington to write breaks and favors into the tax code. They pass special gifts back and forth to one another. They claim that their corporate headquarters can fit into a mailbox in the Cayman Islands.

The tax code is multi-layered and complex. These tax problems happen at confirmation hearings every four years as a result. Because it’s easy to evade taxes, by either legitimate oversight or outright theft, and for the wealthy that likelihood is multiplied. Don’t take my word for it – take the leader of the Republican Party from 2000 to 2008:

WALLACE: How does [McCain] overcome all of that and…

BUSH: Because there’s two big issues. One is, who’s going to keep your taxes low? Most Americans feel overtaxed and I promise you the Democrat [sic] party is going to field a candidate who says I’m going to raise your tax.

If they’re going to say, oh, we’re only going to tax the rich people, but most people in America understand that the rich people hire good accountants and figure out how not to necessarily pay all the taxes and the middle class gets stuck.

We’ve had — we’ve been through this drill before. We’re only going to tax the rich and all you have to do is look at the history of that kind of language and see who gets stuck with the bill.

He said this over and over during the 2004 campaign. His team must have thought it was a mighty clever talking point. It was so much fun to see the President of the United States, with control over the IRS, helpfully explain that the rich evade taxes and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.

7/14/2004 THE PRESIDENT: …People need to be aware of this talk out of Washington, D.C. that says, oh, don’t worry, we’re just going to tax the rich. That’s not the way it works in the tax code. The big rich dodge taxes, anyway. It’s companies like this who end up paying more taxes.
8/3/2004 THE PRESIDENT: …He said, tax the rich. You’ve heard that before haven’t you? You know what that means. The rich dodge and you pay.
8/13/2004 THE PRESIDENT:…I’ll give you one other thought. Let me just leave you with one other thought about taxing the rich. You know how that works. A lot of the rich are able to get accountants, so they don’t — they’re able to dodge. You’ve seen it before. We’re going to tax the rich, and then they figure out how not to get taxed.
8/28/2004 THE PRESIDENT: …Every time they say, tax the rich, the rich dodge and you pay.
9/1/2004 THE PRESIDENT: …You know what it means, tax the rich. It means the rich dodge and you get stuck with the bill.
9/3/2004 THE PRESIDENT: Yeah, we’ve heard that before, haven’t we? First of all, you can’t raise enough money by taxing the rich to support all his programs. Secondly, the rich figure out a way to dodge it, and you get stuck with the bill.
9/7/2004 THE PRESIDENT:Yes. Oh, don’t worry, we’ll tax the rich. Well, that’s why the rich hire accountants and lawyers. They dodge, you pay…
10/11/2004 THE PRESIDENT: …Something else about taxing the rich — the rich hire lawyers and accountants for a reason, to dodge the tax bill and stick you with it.

This is the same guy who eliminated half of the IRS lawyers who audit the rich, and went after the middle class more often with audits and scrutiny.

Since 2000, authorities at the Internal Revenue Service have nearly tripled audits of tax returns filed by people making $25,000 to $100,000 as part of a broad change in audit strategy.

Audits of these middle-class taxpayers rose to nearly 436,000 last year, up from about 147,000 returns in 2000. For these 61 million individuals and married couples, who make up nearly half of all taxpayers, the odds of being audited rose from 1 in 377 to 1 in 140.

I’d be willing to bet that practically everyone of means in Capitol Hill has cheated on their taxes in one way or another. They’re the Masters of the Universe and they see it as their due. If Republicans have gotten religion and suddenly want to end the practice, sounds good to me. We’ll just put those auditors back to work and start poring over the returns of every corporation and every man and woman of wealth. We can even get rid of those loopholes and complexities that cause a lot of these problems. But don’t tell me that this is an issue of party in any way. This is a class issue.

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Truce In The Culture War

by digby

I keep hearing it. Perlstein weighs in:

Is Nixonland over? One pundit’s opinion:

Reaganism has had it in California…[the] handwriting [is] on the wall for right-wing populism everywhere. By right-wing populism I mean the backlash politics which emerged in reaction against Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. It made its appeal to ordinary people–those earning $45,000 to $65,000 annually, for whom I invented the term Middle America. The thrust of the appeal was distinctly egalitarian or anti-elitist. The implicat6ion has been that the patricians and intellectuals who planned the Great Society were leses attuned to the true needs of thecountry than hard-hats…. The Reagan approach was tested in many different votes on Tuesday…. The acceptability of liberal ideas [was] emphasized by the triumph of Proposition 13, providing for the use of gasoline taxes for public transit. Another test came int eh gubernatorial primary. On the Democratic side, the key figure was Edmund Brown Jr. He is the kind of limousine liberal right-wing populists love to put down. he comes from an illustrious family (his father is former Gov. Pat Brown), enjoyed an expensive education at Berkeley and Yale Law School, and has been identified with all kinds of liberal causes from peace in Vietnam to racial harmony…. On the Republican side teh winner was Houston Flournoy, a political scientist from Princeton who takes the progressive stance in politics. He swamped, by a 2 to 1 majority, Reagan’s hand-picked Lieutenant Gov. Ed Reinecke…. Thus the rout of Reaganism in this state announces what seems to be a national possibility, the possibilty of closing the parenthesis on the era of backlash politics which has been so strong in the coutnry since Ronald Reagan rode out of the TV movies back in 1966.

The pundit was the Washington Post ‘s Joseph Kraft, writing on…June 4, 1974. I adjusted the column’s actual income threshhold ($10,000-$15,000 annually) for inflation. Right-wing populism: good bye to all that!

Plus ça frigging change.

To those who are arguing that the culture wars are over (or almost over as soon as we agree to make abortion an issue for the states) with those who see things more clearly here’s a sense of where we actually are today:

That one really has it all. Race, gender, choice and … torture. (Is that going to be a new culture war issue, I wonder?)

I’m sorry, people who think this way aren’t agreeing to any truce. They are regrouping.

Update: Here’s that principled conservative Mitt Romney, who has already switched once on this issue, yesterday:

Republican Mitt Romney, a potential candidate for the White House in 2012, accused President Barack Obama on Friday of answering to the “most extreme wing of the abortion lobby.” Even if the administration “will say nothing on behalf of the child waiting to be born, we must take the side of life,” the former Massachusetts governor told House Republicans at a weekend retreat, according to his prepared remarks.

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