Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Cover Up For God And Country

by digby

Can someone tell me what kind of arrogance would lead someone to write a letter like this, and more importantly, why anyone would pay attention to it?

We respectfully urge you to exercise your authority to reverse Attorney General Holder’s August 24 decision to re-open the criminal investigation of CIA interrogations that took place following the attacks of September 11.

Uh, at least three of the people who signed this are implicated in the crime. How absurd it is that they are strutting around like some sort of heroes, when in fact they are publicly urging the president to engage in a cover-up from which they stand to benefit.

And as Emptywheel adroitly points out:

They’re not asking Obama to pardon those CIA officers under investigation, which would be a proper request of the President; they’re asking Obama to spike an investigation the Attorney General has deemed necessary. They are, in short, asking for legal process to be set aside for, ultimately, a political decision. And they’re making that request by appealing to an investigation conducted under a prior Attorney General–Alberto Gonzales–still (as far as we know) under investigation for politicizing DOJ.

The post-September 11 interrogations for which the Attorney General is opening an inquiry were investigated four years ago by career prosecutors.

They’re further making that request by appealing to a US Attorney–Paul McNulty–also involved in that politicization.

Career prosecutors under the supervision of the US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia determined that one prosecution (of a CIA contractor) was warranted.

So they pile up political interference on top of political interference. Now, these former DCIs repeat the term “career prosecutor” four times. And it may well be the case that–unlike some other cases under Alberto Gonzales–there was no interference here. But they ignore one of the precipitating causes for the investigation being reopened: The Office of Public Responsibility’s finding that there was serious misconduct involved with the referrals in these cases (the DCIs say there were fewer than 20).

Read on ...

Today, good little soldiers all over the village and the media are popping up all over the place to tell us how incredibly serious these people are and how important it is that they be listened to.

We’ve completely institutionalized elite criminal activity in the country to the point where we not only fail to prosecute it, we don’t even recognize it.

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Rational Economic Decisions

by digby

The LA Times reports that “strategic defaults” comprise a fair number of mortgage defaults these days. These are people with good credit scores who are keeping up with their mortgage payments who nonetheless walk away from their mortgages. The reasons are:

* Strategic defaults are heavily concentrated in negative-equity markets where home values zoomed during the boom and have cratered since 2006. In California last year, the number of strategic defaults was 68 times higher than it was in 2005. In Florida it was 46 times higher. In most other parts of the country, defaults were about nine times higher in 2008 than in 2005.

* People who default strategically and lose their houses appear to understand the consequences of what they’re doing. Piyush Tantia, an Oliver Wyman partner and a principal researcher on the study, said strategic defaulters “are clearly sophisticated,” based on the patterns of selective payments observable in their credit files. For example, they tend not to default on home equity lines of credit until after they bail out on their main mortgages, sometimes to draw down more cash on the equity line.

Strategic defaulters may know that their credit scores will be severely depressed by their mortgage abandonment, Tantia said, but they appear to look at it as a business decision: “Well, I’m $200,000 in the hole on my house, and yes, I’ll damage my credit,” he said of defaulters. But they see it as the most practical solution under the circumstances.

I don’t want to hear one conservative complaining about this. We are told incessantly that people should make such economic decisions. Indeed, much of modern economics has insisted that it’s rational decisions like this that make free markets efficient.

Is it moral to default on their financial obligations unless they have no choice? I’m sure that people wouldn’t have thought so once. But that hasn’t been the ethos of the past few decades, by a long shot. And in a world where there are banks being bailed out by the trillions and CEOs are paid salaries and bonuses in the millions despite their epic failures, it’s hard for me to see why the average “savvy” homeowner should be looked at askance for essentially doing the same thing. It’s the natural result of a culture that averts its eyes when the leaders of its financial sector game the system for their own profit. Everybody becomes a hustler.

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Regional Power

by digby

From Steve Benen:

This was predicted more than ten years ago by conservative Christopher Caldwell. Nobody listened.

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What Moved Him

by digby

A towering neo-conservative intellectual died yesterday — William’s Dad. He lived to a ripe old age having had a long and prosperous life. He was a very important man in American politics, having been among those who provided the intellectual purpose and fundamental principles of modern conservatism.

Here’s something he wrote in 1993, to give you and idea about what animated him and, therefore, the movement which carried forth his ideas:

For me, then, “neo-conservatism” was an experience of moral, intellectual, and spiritual liberation. I no longer had to pretend to believe–what in my heart I could no longer believe–that liberals were wrong because they subscribe to this or that erroneous opinion on this or that topic. No–liberals were wrong, liberals are wrong, because they are liberals. What is wrong with liberalism is liberalism–a metaphysics and a mythology that is woefully blind to human and political reality. Becoming a neo-conservative, then, was the high point of my cold war.

It is a cold war that, for the last twenty-five years, has engaged my attention and energy, and continues to do so. There is no “after the Cold War” for me. So far from having ended, my cold war has increased in intensity, as sector after sector of American life has been ruthlessly corrupted by the liberal ethos. It is an ethos that aims simultaneously at political and social collectivism on the one hand, and moral anarchy on the other. It cannot win, but it can make us all losers. We have, I do believe, reached a critical turning point in the history of the American democracy. Now that the other “Cold War” is over, the real cold war has begun. We are far less prepared for this cold war, far more vulnerable to our enemy, than was the case with our victorious war against a global communist threat. We are, I sometimes feel, starting from ground zero, and it is a conflict I shall be passing on to my children and grandchildren. But it is a far more interesting cold war–intellectually interesting, spiritually interesting–than the war we have so recently won, and I rather envy those young enough for the opportunities they will have to participate in it.

I guess it’s serendipitous that could be synthesized so well into the well worn grooves of primitive racism and tribal hatred isn’t it? Let no one say that Rush Limbaugh and his ilk are anti-intellectual. All they have to do is point to Irving Kristol as their mentor.

He had a major impact on American life of the past thirty years. Brad Delong points out this quote to illustrate just one small corner of his influence:

“Among the core social scientists around The Public Interest there were no economists…. This explains my own rather cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit and other monetary or fiscal problems. The task, as I saw it, was to create a new majority, which evidently would mean a conservative majority, which came to mean, in turn, a Republican majority – so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government…”

Same as it ever was.

And he’s greatly admired for all those things:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney was a longtime admirer and former President George W. Bush, whose administration was heavily populated by neoconservatives, awarded Kristol a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2002, praising him as “a wide-ranging thinker whose writings have helped transform America’s political landscape.”

On Friday night, Bush called Kristol “an intellectual pioneer who advanced the conservative movement.”

Yes, he did.

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Cheap Credentials

by digby

So, the fatuous gasbags have been all over the sexy tidbits in GQ about Taylor Branch’s new book about Bill Clinton, which contains the earth shattering revelation that Bill and Hillary Clinton don’t actually hate each other. It’s shocking stuff, for sure.

But I found this more interesting myself:

The Bill Clinton in this book is very different than the version we came to know in the press. You describe a guy who was steadfast and idealistic, very different from the wishy-washy, flip-flopping caricature who let Dick Morris tell him what to do.

It was almost like a credential for old liberals to look down on Clinton, because if you looked down on Clinton, you could say, “He’s betrayed liberalism,” but you didn’t have to uphold anything yourself. All you had to do was talk about what a shit he was or what a sellout he was and you could get this cheap credential.

Meanwhile, you’re seeing this guy whose face is red with allergies, he’s so tired that his eyes are rolling back in his head.… He’s the last fighting baby boomer.

Well, yeah. For example, I admire Obama greatly, but if you compare Clinton and Obama on the National Rifle Association, Obama said, “It’s not worth it.” Right from the get-go. “You can’t win.” And Clinton was going after the NRA and assault weapons and cop-killer bullets the whole time. And he paid for it, and maybe it was a mistake, because it certainly hurt him in the 1994 congressional elections. But he did stick to his guns, as it were. He took risks. On Haiti—restoring Aristide. I would hear him say it: “This is going to hurt my presidency.” Or, “I could go down the tubes for this.”

In all the Kennedy and Johnson tapes you’ve listened to, do you hear the same resolve?

In some ways, Kennedy was just the opposite. People would idealize him, but then on the tapes, you hear him trying to kill Castro and all this other stuff. It’s disillusioning. And Johnson does the Civil Rights bill, but then he does the Vietnam War—and you hear them saying essentially, “We know this is not going to work, but we’re going to do it anyway.” Then Nixon promises to end the war, and four years later the war is still going. Then you have Watergate. So it was kind of like we had this post–World War II optimism about politics that was yanked out of our generation by hard experience. In some ways, Hillary and I were more typical of our generation than Bill. We were bruised and disillusioned with politics. We had more in common with each other politically than either of us had with Bill. He seemed to be on automatic pilot: “I’m going to run for office!” At the time, I didn’t connect that to idealism. I connected it to ambition. The notion that it came from a sense of idealism didn’t rear up for me until I was able to watch him in the White House, seeing why he would do things.

How did you contain that for eight years, listening to people say the opposite about him?

I couldn’t communicate with people, because I felt like I was in a different galaxy. I just dropped out. I didn’t see a way of fighting it that didn’t endanger the project. I couldn’t challenge my friend [Washington Post critic] Jon Yardley, who would sit around and bitch and moan about Clinton: “He’s no good, he doesn’t care about anything, he doesn’t believe in anything.” I couldn’t say, “Jon, I know that’s not true.” I couldn’t start that conversation, because the only way I could combat it would be to say, “I’ve been around Clinton a lot, and my experience is totally different.” And then some story would come out that he had these tapes, and they would get subpoenaed. So I just basically had to be quiet and not talk to people.

I would be shocked if the village is able to process this at all. The image of Bill Clinton that was promulgated by the right wing and the mainstream media in the 90s was internalized by all sides in the political establishment. If it had been up to them he would have been convicted in the Senate and sent out of town on a rail. (It really was the people who saved him.)

It’s always been interesting to me why they hated him so, since even though he was from Arkansas (not that there’s anything wrong with that) he was also a product of all the right schools and had all the proper credentials and best connections. The class argument doesn’t really work perfectly with him. There was always something else at play.

This perhaps gives a hint of what was at the bottom of it. It’s just possible that they smelled a little earnest idealism, which is the most revolting stench imaginable to the cynical elites and those of both parties who make their living feeding on Democratic failure. It’s not surprising that they would project their own decadent, self-serving ambition on to him and then try to destroy him over it.

I’ll have to read the book, of course, and this may just be a tantalizing and ultimately irrelevant piece of revisionist history to whet our appetites. I’m hooked, that’s for sure.

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Coinkydink

by dday

Ryan Grim has been all over the story of Big Pharma’s deal with the White House and Max Baucus, and despite the denials from everyone, Grim notes that the language in Baucus’ draft matches the terms of the deal.

In August, the Huffington Post published a memo that outlined exactly what each side was going to do for the other. And Big Pharma was getting a lot more than they were giving up.

Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America senior vice president Ken Johnson said that the outline “is simply not accurate.” White House spokesman Reid Cherlin concurred: “This memo isn’t accurate and does not reflect the agreement with the drug companies.”

But now that the bill is out, let’s fact check those denials.

1) The memo said that PhRMA would “[a]gree to increase of Medicaid rebate from 15.1 – 23.1%”.
The finance bill, on page 56, increases the Medicaid rebates for patented drugs from 15.1 to 23.1 percent.
Check.

2) The memo said that the parties had agreed “to get FOBs done.” FOBs refer to follow-on biologic drugs – vaccines and other drugs made from living cells that are the fastest growing field of pharmaceutical research.

PhRMA wants extended patent protections from generic biologic drug makers. A finance committee aide said that the Baucus bill doesn’t address biologics, leaving that to the Senate health committee’s bill. The health committee bill gives drug makers 12 years of market exclusivity — five more than the White House proposed — and allows a 12-year extension with a minor tweak to the drug. The protection is worth billions to drug makers and is entirely unnecessary to encourage research, according to the Federal Trade Commission, which recommended zero years of market exclusivity.

“Already biologics take up at least 30% of Medicare part B spending and this proposal has been rolled into the overall health care reform bill, which is meant create cost savings, which it will not do,” Jane Andrews, a medical student at the Johns Hopkins University and a member of Universities Allied for Essential Medicines, wrote in an e-mail to HuffPost. “It’s simply a giveaway to BIO/PhRMA from Congress supported by the American Association of Universities.”

Check (more or less.)

There are more, just go read. Baucus actually doubled the fee on the industry, from $1.2 billion a year to $2.3 billion, but the rest pretty much matches up. No importation of drugs from Canada, no negotiating with drugmakers for cheaper prices on prescription drugs, no shift of drugs into Medicare Part D.

There’s no denying that this deal has been made, and the consequences are also clear. Right now, Democrats are worried about the coverage subsidies in the bill, believing they don’t make health care affordable enough. One reason for the constraint is that these deals artificially limit the amount of money that can be wrung from inside the system. Because it’s an article of faith that you cannot say the word “taxes” in Washington, as a result poor people who can’t afford health insurance may pay the price for deals with Big Pharma, a kind of tax on the lower classes.

I hope avoiding the Harry and Louise ads were worth it. Fortunately, no groups on the right managed to make any headway attacking the overall plan.

I’m sorry, “death panels”? Never heard of it.

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Keep An Eye On This

by dday

As much of the content of the traditional media rankles many of us, the editorial decisions should as well. Dozens of potentially game-changing stories go unreported while the Umbrage Brigade on cable talk about what Joe Wilson said about Jimmy Carter or whether Michelle Obama is overstepping her boundaries by talking about health care (I caught that one today). Meanwhile, the biggest financial crisis in 70 years just happened, and even people who consider themselves well-informed don’t understand the entire story. The Congress enacted the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (some are calling it the new Pecora Commission, given its similarity to the Depression-era commission of that name led by chief investigator Ferdinand Pecora), headed by former California Treasurer and gubernatorial candidate Phil Angelides, and they held their first public session yesterday. The meeting was introductory in nature, but Tim Fernholz came away with a few thoughts.

• Given the membership [PDF], I worried that the committee would be beset with partisan bickering and/or clashing ideologies, like the Congressional Oversight Panel. The COP, appointed by Congress to provide oversight of the bank rescues, is regularly undermined by dissents from Representative Jeb Hensarling, whose deeply conservative economic views preclude almost any reasonable discussion about regulation and finance. But though some tensions showed, I though the conservative New Pecora commissioners seemed open-minded; former Bush administration economic official Keith Hennessey and McCain economic adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin made productive comments, though Peter Wallison, a more doctrinaire conservative than either of the other two, seemed to have his mind made up about the financial crisis, essentially blaming Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac right from the outset. He may be the poison pill on this committee.

• Most surprising was Vice-Chairman Bill Thomas, a former Republican Congressman and Committee Chair. Thomas seemed to agree broadly with Chairman Phil Angelides goals of non-partisan fact-finding, and went out of his way to compliment the views of every member of the commission. He even singled out Commissioner Brooksley Born, who strongly advocated regulating derivatives during the Clinton administration, telling her that the crisis would have been much more manageable had her advice been acted on. Later, asked by a reporter if the issue of regulating markets would divide the committee, Thomas stepped forward to say that he thought regulatory reform was inevitable and that making it work correctly was critical. Though it is easy for him to say that now, Thomas’ early impressions are much less doctrinaire than had been anticipated.

• One concern: There is no liberal economist on the committee, while there are three conservative economic thinkers in Hennessey, Holtz-Eakin and Wallison. The Democratic appointees have regulatory, legal, political and private business experience, but no specific economic expertise.

• Early in the week, the New Pecora Commission announced the appointment of Thomas Greene as its Executive Director. Greene, a lawyer, has done complex investigatory work both in Washington, D.C. and in California, coordinating anti-trust and securities investigations in a variety of venues. The appointment is critical; recall that the Pecora Commission was named after it’s executive director, Ferdinand Pecora, not the members of congress who constituted the actual committee. And more talent is coming: As Greene hung around after the hearing, several different people, including several lawyers, approached him about working for the commission.

The FCIC will hold hearings and issue regular reports between now and December 2010. This needs to be watched. We all have a sense that the banksters turned Wall Street into their private gambling hall and took huge risks, secure in the knowledge that they could get the government to bail them out if things went awry. Currently there have been no prosecutions of the major players in the scandal, no accountability to any degree, and a year later, Wall Street appears to be going back to their same old ways, entirely at our expense. Michael Hirsh believes that this commission offers one last chance to make the record public, and use it as a lever to change the system. He’s not optimistic, however. The ideological shadings of the commission and Angelides’ wariness of using the subpoena power he’s been given worry him (I actually think Angelides can be a lot tougher than Hirsh or anyone gives him credit for). But he offers a glimmer of hope.

Still, Angelides and his team may yet surprise us. It’s happened before. The history of “blue ribbon” commissions like this one is rich and storied in Washington; one of them, in 1942, was led by an obscure senator from Missouri who was also seen as a political hack at the time. His name was Harry Truman, and he turned his commission on defense malfeasance into a ticket into the White House and the history books […]

What we do need, however, is a parade of witnesses who will provide what’s been missing so far in this crisis—a prominent outlet for public outrage. In the last nine months, the Obama administration and the grandees in Congress have been designing solutions without much input from the outside, often using experts from Wall Street (especially “Government Sachs”). It’s pretty much been a closed system. Even Paul Volcker, considered perhaps the greatest Federal Reserve chairman in history (now that the Alan Greenspan era looks much worse retrospectively), has been all but ignored by the president he is advising. Volcker has been making a series of speeches around the country calling for sensible changes to the structure of Wall Street that the administration and Congress are not yet considering. He wants federally guaranteed bank deposits to be cordoned off from heavy risk-taking and proprietary trading. Volcker wants banks, in other words, to be barred from behaving like hedge funds. “Extensive participation in the impersonal, transaction-oriented capital market does not seem to me an intrinsic part of commercial banking,” Volcker told a corporate group Wednesday in Los Angeles. He should be invited to Washington to say the same thing.

I can remember a time when commissions like these, from the Pecora Commission to the Truman Commission to Watergate to Iran-Contra to even the 9-11 Commission, were major public news, followed intensely by the media. You’d think that a similarly designed commission tasked with uncovering the greatest loss of wealth in world history would generated more than a few words on the cable news crawl. But we have to make this important, too. The FCIC may fall into partisan bickering, or it may create some powerful narratives about the criminal enterprise on Wall Street. But none of it will matter if nobody pays any attention.

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Influencers

by digby

This is interesting, if somewhat predictable (and slightly depressing:)

In conjunction with The Atlantic Wire, National Journal asked its panel of Congressional and Political Insiders to rank, one-through-five, those columnists, bloggers, and television or radio commentators who most help to shape their own opinion or worldview. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman received more points than anyone else, with support from both Democrats and Republicans. But it was rare that any media commentator boasted a significant audience from both sides of the partisan divide.

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I’m glad to see that Democrats read Krugman and Dionne, but the others they voted for — Friedman, Brooks and Broder — tell the tale. They are who the Democratic villagers are most influenced by. And golly, in the case of Friedman and Brooks, so are the Republicans. Long live bipartisanship! (And what’s a Dean got to do to get some Republican love in that town?)

They also did a poll of political bloggers to see who they read. The result is a little bit different.

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Pop-ups

by digby

As many of you have noticed, there are some pop-up ads appearing on this site. They are for major advertisers and I guarantee that I’m not receiving any money for them. I don’t yet know where they are coming from, but I do know that you should not click on them. I’m doing my best to figure out the problem. If anyone has any bright ideas, please email me.

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Two Docs Sittin’ Around Talking

by digby

On her show this morning, Dr. Nancy Snyderman looked like she’d just been tasered when Howard Dean declared unequivocally that there would be a public plan in the final health care bill. She bet him a dinner that it wouldn’t happen.

Then she said this:

Snyderman: Everyone consistently says, “we’re going to give up on the public option. There may be triggers, there may be co-ops.” Why are you so sure that a public option will come to fruition?

Dean: Because it’s the only thing that works. I’m delighted that the trigger’s not in there because that was a total fraud. But nobody knows how co-ops will work. And they’re expensive. If controlling costs, which is part of the president’s agenda, is going to happen, you have to have a public option. If you want to get some people insured by 2010, which I think is essential for the future of the Democratic Party, you have to have a public option. It’s the only way to do it.

Snyderman: And the votes are there?

Dean: the votes are there. We count 51 votes in the Senate that will vote for a public option. Chris Dodd’s bill is a very good bill. The Waxman Miller Wrangel bill is a fine bill. I don’t agree with everything in them, but that’s real reform and this isn’t.

Snyderman: Well, listen if you really think that public option is going to happen, you’ve made me a happy person going into the week-end. I hope you’re right.

Dean’s argument is the right one: “there will be a public option because it’s the only thing that works.”

I seem to recall a certain youthful president who declared in an inaugural address delivered to delirious approbation just nine short months ago:

The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works, whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, health care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified.

He’s the one that put technical competence as the best measure of his success. And I have to say that the hope I’m clinging to at the moment is the hope that it’s one thing he truly believes in.

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