Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Smackdown

by digby

In case you missed it, you can see Jon Stewart turn Jim Cramer into mincemeat over at Crooks and Liars. It’s already legendary.

I’m still waiting for someone to confront him about this. Someone with a badge.

Update: This is rich. Here’s Cramer’s defense on his pay-to-read blog:

When I come to work each day, whether as a commentator for TheStreet.com or a host of Mad Money With Jim Cramer, I have only one thought in mind: helping people with their money.

I fight to help viewers and readers make and preserve capital. I fight for their 401Ks, for their 529s and their IRAs. I fight for their annuities and for their life insurance policies. I fight for their profits, trading and investing. And in this horrible market, I fight to keep their losses to a minimum by having some good dividend-yielding stocks from different sectors, some bonds, some gold and some cash.

The lines are drawn pretty clearly: If you can help people make money to be able to retire, enjoy life, pay for college, pay down debt, etc., you are a “good guy,” so to speak. If you take the other side of the trade, you are, well, let’s say, a less favored fellow. And if you gun for the gigantic investor class that is out there that includes 90 million people in one form or another, whether it be 401Ks or individual stocks or pension plans, then you are on my enemies list.

Now some would say, including Rush Limbaugh, I am on someone else’s enemies list: that of the White House. Limbaugh says there are only a handful of us on it, and if I am on it for defending all of the shareholders out there, then I am in good company. Limbaugh — whom I do not know personally, but having been in radio myself, know professionally as a genius of the medium — says, “They’re going to shut Cramer up pretty soon, too, but he’ll go down with a fight.”

Limbaugh’s dead right. I am a fight-not-flight guy, so I was on my hackles when I heard White Press Secretary Robert Gibbs’ answer to a question about my pointed criticism of the president on multiple venues, including the Today Show.

“I’m not entirely sure what he’s pointing to to make some of the statements,” Gibbs said about my point that President Obama’s budget may be one of the great wealth destroyers of all time. “And you can go back and look at any number of statements he’s made in the past about the economy and wonder where some of the backup for those are, too.”

Huh? Backup? Look at the incredible decline in the stock market, in all indices, since the inauguration of the president, with the drop accelerating when the budget plan came to light because of the massive fear and indecision the document sowed: Raising taxes on the eve of what could be a second Great Depression, destroying the profits in healthcare companies (one of the few areas still robust in the economy), tinkering with the mortgage deduction at a time when U.S. house price depreciation is behind much of the world’s morass and certainly the devastation affecting our banks, and pushing an aggressive cap and trade program that could raise the price of energy for millions of people.

The market’s the effect; much of what the president is fighting for is the cause. The market’s signal can’t be ignored. It’s too palpable, too predictive to be ignored, despite the prattle that the market’s predicted far more recessions than we have.

Gibbs went on to say, “If you turn on a certain program, it’s geared to a very small audience. No offense to my good friends or friend at CNBC, but the president has to look out for the broader economy and the broader population.”

How much I wish it were true right now that stocks played less of a role in peoples’ lives. But stocks, along with housing, are our principal forms of wealth in this country. Only the people who have lifetime tenure, insured solid pensions and rent homes but own no stocks personally are unaffected. Sure that’s a lot of people, but believe me, they aspire to have homes and portfolios. If we only want to help those who have no wealth to destroy, we are not helping the majority of Americans; we are not helping the broader population.

You can argue, of course, that Obama inherited one of the worst hands in the world. I had been a relentless critic of the Bush administration’s “stewardship” of the economy, calling repeatedly for changes to avert the disaster that I saw coming, although perhaps Gibbs hasn’t seen my CNBC meltdown. Seemed pretty prescient to me.

I, like everyone else, have made less authoritative and wrong statements in the past, but that rant still stands as something that I am sure everyone in the Bush administrations’ Treasury and Fed listened to. My calls to sell 20% of your stocks in September at Dow 11,000 and then all of your stock if you need the money for the next five years at Dow 10,000 in October, might have eluded Gibbs, too.

But Obama has undeniably made things worse by creating an atmosphere of fear and panic rather than an atmosphere of calm and hope. He’s done it by pushing a huge amount of change at a very perilous moment, by seeking to demonize the entire banking system and by raising taxes for those making more than $250,000 at the exact time when we need them to spend and build new businesses, and by revoking deductions for funds to charity and that help eliminate the excess supply of homes.

We had a banking crisis coming into this regime, but now every area is in crisis. Each day is worse than the previous one for this miserable economy and while Obama’s champions cite the stimulus plan, it’s really just a hodgepodge of old Democratic pork and will not create nearly as many manufacturing or service jobs as we hoped. China’s stimulus plan is the model; ours is the parody.

Sure there’s going to be some mortgage relief, but the way to approach that problem is to eliminate the overhang, which a $15,000 tax credit for existing home sales could have dented if not consumed. I have offered a comprehensive plan of 4% refinanced mortgages for all by the government, not just those many considered deadbeats, to eliminate moral hazard. I have come up with a novel plan to cut the principal and spare the banks regulatory problems by offering them a certificate of equity, making them whole over time when the house appreciates in value, which will happen if demand is stoked and supply is shrunk.

I have offered a comprehensive bank plan to solve a systemic problem — could all bankers really be malefactors of wealth Mr. President, or given the endemic nature can’t we just presume that it’s an epidemic and finger-pointing is a worthless endeavor until things get better? Like after Pearl Harbor — let’s win the war and then investigate, and even try and convict the bad actors, instead of demonizing everyone who works at a bank right now, when we need them to right themselves without too much taxpayer help.

Which leads me to the true irony of not being political: I don’t like talking politics. It is personal, but some things are a matter of public record, including my substantial six figure donations to the Democratic Party before I was no longer allowed to contribute by contractual agreement. I regard two Democratic governors as my friends, and helped back one of them in a major financial way and spoke and campaigned directly for the other.

I also made it clear in a New York magazine article that I favored Obama over McCain because I thought Obama to be a middle-of-the-road Democrat, exactly the kind I have supported all my adult life, although I will admit to being far more left-wing during my teenage years and early 20s.

To be totally out of the closet, I actually embrace every part of Obama’s agenda, right down to the increase on personal taxes and the mortgage deduction. I am a fierce environmentalist who has donated multiple acres to the state of New Jersey to keep forever wild. I believe in cap and trade. I favor playing hardball with drug companies that hold up the U.S. government with me-too products.

But these are issues that we have no time for now, on the verge of a second Great Depression. This is an agenda that must be held back for better times. It is an agenda that at this moment is radical vs. what is called for. I am proud to have voted for the Obama who I thought understood the need to get us on the right path, and create jobs and wealth before taxing it and making moves that hurt job creation — certainly ones that will outweigh the meager number of jobs he’s creating.

Most important, I believe his agenda is crushing nest eggs around the nation in loud ways, like the decline in the averages, and in soft but dangerous ways, like in the annuities that can’t be paid and the insurance benefits that will be challenging to deliver on.

So I will fight the fight against that agenda. I will stand up for what I believe and for what I have always believed: Every person has a right to be rich in this country and I want to help them get there. And when they get there, if times are good, we can have them give back or pay higher taxes. Until they get there, I don’t want them shackled or scared or paralyzed. That’s what I see now.

If that makes me an enemy of the White House, then call me a general of an army that Obama may not even know exists — tens of millions of people who live in fear of having no money saved when they need it and who get poorer by the day.

Yes, he’s all about the little guy.

“I really have no use for theoreticians of the market. They make you no money. We are in a casino-like market and I want to game the casino. The absurdity of a Jeremy Siegel from Wharton coming out with some statement about valuation and how he thinks it’s wrong is just poppycock. Valuation is what it is. If you could sell only thousands of dollars worth of stock at these prices, then I would be wrong. But you can sell trillions of dollars worth. So what does it matter if an academic says the prices are wrong. They are the prices. That is the hand you are dealt, so figure it out or get lost.” (Cramer Rewrites ‘How an Old Dow Learned New Tricks’,” TheStreet.com, March 18, 2000.)

Meanwhile, here’s the view from Dr Doom. He seems to think the problem runs a little bit deeper than Obama’s attitude and that fixing things requires something more than to stop “demonizing” bankers.

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Long Term Leadership

by digby

Here’s a blast from the past:

October 15, 1992
Get Angry, Bush
By RUSH H. LIMBAUGH

Rush H. Limbaugh, a syndicated radio and television talk show host, is author of “The Way Things Ought to Be.”

The most important thing President Bush must reveal in tonight’s Presidential debate is anger. Make no mistake — his Democratic opponent richly deserves it.

In addition to being disingenuous, Bill Clinton is Robo-Candidate, a walking, talking public policy manual. Friends, you could see his programming at work Sunday night. Step 1: Pause 2.6 seconds while the requisite issue is installed in the brain. Step 2: Grimace to provide the illusion that human thought is occurring. (Bite lip if emotion is necessary.) Step 3: Play back Sincere Policy Answer 5b. This is a candidate, folks, whose most effective weapon is to stupefy voters.

And — though it boggles the mind — the strategy appears to be working. How else can you explain, in this era of virulent distrust of government, that the candidate ahead in the polls is the one most infatuated with making government bigger and more intrusive and more expensive? Obviously, no one is thinking about what the man actually says.

As Ross “I’m All Ears” Perot provided comic relief, George Bush went about giving a rock solid performance in St. Louis. You won’t find this assessment anywhere else, friends, but the fact is: Mr. Bush told the truth. What he said was correct. He spoke with assurance and he was composed. These observations are unassailable — go back and watch the tape.

The key to these debates, however, is television ability, pure and simple. President Bush needs to cut through the noise so that his strong message will connect with the public. To do this, he must marshal his passion, his energy, his conviction, his confidence. And he must do so in such a way that it forces Governor Clinton off his formulated answers, allowing the public to take a true measure of the man.

The starting point must be the economy. Granted, this is a tough economy, but the President should not be defensive about his optimistic message, which is absolutely correct. I am weary, as he should be, of his opponents sneeringly characterizing him as “out of touch” because he dares to portray the American economy as the strongest in the world.

It is.

Inflation has been whipped, inventories are lean, interest rates have been wrestled to 20-year lows. Housing starts, retail and car sales have been posting gains. Although politically tempting, Mr. Bush must not, as Mr. Clinton has, pander to the electorate’s current masochistic desire for tales of economic pain, misery and woe. The President’s upbeat reckoning is, in fact, an honest one.

When Bill Clinton says we are in the worst economic period in 50 years, the President has a right to be angry. The worst economic period in the last 50 years was under Jimmy Carter, which led to the 1981-82 recession, a recession more punishing than the current one.

Indeed, let Mr. Bush press Mr. Clinton to do the math on his “Putting Government First” economic plan, which will devastate American business. And when the Governor says, “We don’t need any more trickle-down economics,” the President must pointedly ask why the Democratic Party always runs against prosperity.

When Mr. Clinton links the President with McCarthyism, Mr. Bush can again be furious. The double standard here amazes me. Conservatives in every area of life — Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas, for example — have been crucified for past statements and activities, real or imagined. Yet examine the record and judgment of a liberal Democrat (say, a vaguely explained trip to Moscow when Moscow was literally enemy territory) and you are denounced for using sleaze and dirty tricks.

This, to quote a great leader, must not stand.

Lest anyone think that was just the blowhard mouthing off on the pages of National Review, it was actually in the New York Times. The establishment has been validating him and his tired, shopworn schtick for a long, long time. I don’t know why it’s even controversial that he would be considered the leader of the GOP at this point. Everything he says now is what he said then and every day in between. He is the Republican Party and has been for a very, very long time.

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The Phelps Effect

by digby

So the Vice President has declared that there will be no money spent on swimming pools in the stimulus. (Sigh. Again with the braindead validation of wingnut propaganda … oy vey.)

I wondered aloud why swimming pools were being targeted since they were infrastructure projects, community building and good for kids and Mr Digby speculated that “it’s the Phelps effect — they probably think swimming pools are a gateway drug.”

It makes as much sense as anything else.

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Revisiting The Codpiece

by digby

Chris Matthews is making quite a bit of the fact that Ari Fleischer suggested again yesterday that Saddam was involved in 9/11. (Fleischer clarified today that he didn’t really mean that, but it’s nonsense. He simply blurted out the same conflation the Bushies always did.)You can see the video at the link.

Matthews is very proud of “confronting” Fleischer today and strutting around like he’s a brave truth teller. (And it’s correct that he wasn’t a huge invasion booster at the time, at least compared to some others.) Still it’s hardly true that he was a big war critic either or that he challenged the administration’s obvious propaganda at the timje..

For instance he hauled out this example of Bush’s misleading rhetoric on the connection between Iraq and 9/11, from his Mission Accomplished speech on the aircraft carrier:

The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September the 11, 2001 — and still goes on. That terrible morning, 19 evil men — the shock troops of a hateful ideology — gave America and the civilized world a glimpse of their ambitions. They imagined, in the words of one terrorist, that September the 11th would be the “beginning of the end of America.” By seeking to turn our cities into killing fields, terrorists and their allies believed that they could destroy this nation’s resolve, and force our retreat from the world. They have failed.

Matthews is correct that this was a ridiculous conflation designed to give the impression that Saddam was involved in 9/11 and that the US was exacting retribution. At the time 71% believed it to be true. He asks Bush defender Frank Gaffney to admit that these kinds of statements were misleading and Gaffney dances around on the head of a pin as usual. David Corn declares that the Bush administration did this constantly.

It’s great to see Matthews go back in time and show footage of members of the administration in real time misleading the public. But he and his guests politely and self-servingly left out one tiny little part of the story. Here’s what Matthews and his esteemed commenters had to say about that speech in real time:

MATTHEWS: Let’s go to this sub–what happened to this week, which was to me was astounding as a student of politics, like all of us. Lights, camera, action. This week the president landed the best photo op in a very long time. Other great visuals: Ronald Reagan at the D-Day cemetery in Normandy, Bill Clinton on horseback in Wyoming. Nothing compared to this, I’ve got to say.

Katty, for visual, the president of the United States arriving in an F-18, looking like he flew it in himself. The GIs, the women on–onboard that ship loved this guy.

Ms. KAY: He looked great. Look, I’m not a Bush man. I mean, he doesn’t do it for me personally, especially not when he’s in a suit, but he arrived there…

MATTHEWS: No one would call you a Bush man, by the way.

Ms. KAY: …he arrived there in his flight suit, in a jumpsuit. He should wear that all the time. Why doesn’t he do all his campaign speeches in that jumpsuit? He just looks so great.

MATTHEWS: I want him to wa–I want to see him debate somebody like John Kerry or Lieberman or somebody wearing that jumpsuit.

Mr. DOBBS: Well, it was just–I can’t think of any, any stunt by the White House–and I’ll call it a stunt–that has come close. I mean, this is not only a home run; the ball is still flying out beyond the park.

MATTHEWS: Well, you know what, it was like throwing that strike in Yankee Stadium a while back after 9/11. It’s not a stunt if it works and it’s real. And I felt the faces of those guys–I thought most of our guys were looking up like they were looking at Bob Hope and John Wayne combined on that ship.

Mr. GIGOT: The reason it works is because of–the reason it works is because Bush looks authentic and he felt that he–you could feel the connection with the troops. He looked like he was sincere. People trust him. That’s what he has going for him.

MATTHEWS: Fareed, you’re watching that from–say you were over in the Middle East watching the president of the United States on this humongous aircraft carrier. It looks like it could take down Syria just one boat, right, and the president of the United States is pointing a finger and saying, `You people with the weapons of mass destruction, you people backing terrorism, look out. We’re coming.’ Do you think that picture mattered over there?

Mr. ZAKARIA: Oh yeah. Look, this is a part of the war where we have not–we’ve allowed a lot of states to do some very nasty stuff, traffic with nasty people and nasty material, and I think it’s time to tell them, you know what, `You’re going to be help accountable for this.’

MATTHEWS: Well, it was a powerful statement and picture as well.

As much as I love watching Ari Fleischer squirm, it’s very hard to take Chris Matthews, of all people, seriously as his interrogator on this subject. Of course the Bushies consciously and knowingly conflating 9/11 with Iraq. But so did the media, including Matthews himself. I don’t doubt that he was privately skeptical of the war and he even let it show a teensy bit from time to time. But for the most part on television as he vigorously and repeatedly fluffed Bush for his manly manliness for years, he too conflated 9/11 and Saddam and reinforced the nonsense the white house and its cronies were dishing out. Hell, even Fareed Zakaria was caught up in that skeevy homoerotic frenzy at the time.

The press and the gasbags both refuse to accept responsibility for their roles in that war. I suppose it’s good new for our “team” temporarily that Matthews is on our side, but somehow I’m not comforted. The country desperately needs a real press and a punditocrisy with some credibility. Indeed, I’m still convinced that if we had one liberalism would be far better off. Having clowns attacking conservative losers they used to worship doesn’t fill me with pride.

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Village Markers Laid

by dday

I am a little late to this party, but Howard Fineman’s barbaric yawp on behalf of the political establishment is a truly amazing document. It should be put in a time capsule so that future generations can understand why American politics became so corroded in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. What Fineman appears to be saying is that the public, who elected Barack Obama with the belief that he would fulfill his agenda, supports him in that effort; but that the “establishment,” who is unelected and self-appointed, is very unhappy about all this agenda-fulfilling going on, and that might sink the President. He cites a bunch of data points that I think he picked off of random Twitter feeds from the Gang of 500 to prove his point, but then he admits that they are all contradictory:

“The stimulus was too small. The omnibus was too big. He’s doing too much in the budget. He’s doing too little for housing. He won’t nationalize the banks. He’s doing too much “social engineering” on health care and energy and education. He’s not explaining enough. He’s doing too much explaining while “outsourcing” the details to Congress (who write the laws). And his Treasury Secretary was lampooned on Saturday Night Live.

It’s just a mish-mash of various complaints of Obama from across the ideological spectrum, not from any named source or based on any reporting or significant of any one constituency. But Fineman has read the entrails and decided that “the establishment” is unhappy. And guess what, he’s just a trusty observer, your man in the Beltway, not one of those elites himself:

Other than all that, in the eyes of the big shots, he is doing fine. The American people remain on his side, but he has to be careful that the gathering judgment of the Bigs doesn’t trickle down to the rest of us.

Did you know that Fineman’s just a ham-and-egger Newsweek reporter, the guy who likes his meat red and his arugula off his plate?

Jamison Foser takes these complaints one by one so I don’t have to. It’s really a bizarre mix, with establishmentarian Fineman, for example, accusing Obama of not wanting to prosecute “the malefactors of the last 15 years” – when his magazine Newsweek employs Stuart Taylor and recently ran a cover story entitled “What Would Dick Do” encouraging the President to “see things Dick Cheney’s way.” Then there’s the familiar “he’s doing too much” argument, which says more about Fineman’s attention span than his conception of the size of the federal bureaucracy and their capacity to implement multiple policies because the President isn’t the only guy working for the government.

What I think is interesting is that all the Beltway types who welcomed George Bush and his gang into the family when he was trading off his 48% mandate and passing humongous tax cuts early in his term have all these doubts and troubles with Barack Obama trying to make good on his campaign promises. But more than that is this mindset that the “establishment” chatterers are the real constituency in this country, and the people on the outside, the chattel, the hoi polloi, the dumb rubes in flyover country, they’re nobody off of which to base a winning electoral coalition. The Village still thinks that the role of the President is to please the Villagers, but public opinion isn’t bearing that out. Congress’ approval has jumped since they passed a stimulus package and health care for kids and equal pay for women. People trust government to fix the economy and not big business – part of the “establishment” in Fineman’s scenario.

I’m not saying that all of these bits and bytes in Fineman’s bill of particulars are without merit. But people are very scared right now at what they are seeing in their own lives, and they are desperate for leadership to see them through it. They are fairly uninterested in the opinion of “the establishment” and are clearly willing to give Obama more than the two seconds Fineman and his Twitter pals are.

It’s not the criticisms themselves that get me – it’s the sense of entitlement, that these unelected pundits still think they hold veto power over the government, that they see their role not as reporters, not even as adversaries, but as a constituency.

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“The Repellent Extremist Sarah Palin”

by tristero

In my previous post, I mentioned in passing “the repellent extremist Sarah Palin.” And commenter willyjsimmons objected:

“repellent extremist Sarah Palin”

You were doing well until that…

“extremist” now?

Whatevs tristero!!!!

How quickly we forget. How easily we cut the worst characters in American political discourse some slack, if they are rightwingers and are capable of smiling for tv cameras.

All right, I’ll admit that thinking Sarah Palin repellent is a matter of taste, like thinking it’s repellent to eat a sewer rat fried in rancid peanut oil. On the other hand, it is a matter of hard fact that Palin is a political extremist and christianist far to the right of most Americans, not to mention most sane people. Or have we forgotten her plugging of Bircher literature and members (go here) or her video address to a convention for a political party that advocates the secession of Alaska from the United States (Palin’s husband was a full-fledged member)? Have we forgotten the infamous encounter between Palin and a witch doctor? And that these are just a few examples of her ultra-far-right and fanatical views and associations?

That is the problem with putting irresponsible extremists like Palin, or for that matter, Bush, on a national ticket. Or having a governor of California who once professed his admiration for Adolf Hitler.* It becomes too, too… shrill to call them extremists, or to express frankly your disgust. And it makes it that much easier to portray someone like John McCain as right-of-center moderate instead of the arch-conservative he truly is. Holy Overton window, Batman!

While willyjsimmons’ comments inspired this post, it is not about him (or her). For all I know, s/he is new to politics. Many folks who were just young kinds on 9/11 are now eligible to vote. So let’s not give willyjsimmons a hard time. Seriously, s/he’s not the problem. After all, even on the “liberal NPR,” it’s simply impossible properly to describe the political philosophies of Sarah Palin, James Inhofe, and many others for what they are: radical rightwing extremism that openly flirts with fascist tropes,.

Instead, I suggest we see willyjsimmons’ comments as one small consequence of a terribly distorted national discourse, a discourse in which the Republican political party has aligned itself with some of the most fanatical rightwing elements in American life, a discourse in which we are not permitted to discuss the “ideas” these extremists hold in a frank fashion within the mainstream media, a discourse in which these very same extremists have free rein to accuse even their most moderate oppoents of advocating socialism and “palling around with terrorists.”

* Note to those ready to excuse Schwarzenegger for his Hitler admiration. Why yes, I was young once, too. I admired Stalin, for instance, because he came from being a little man with almost no formal education, up to power. And I admire him for being such a good public speaker and his way of getting to the people and so on. But I didn’t admire him for what he did with it.

And no, of course, I never admired Stalin; I simply parodied what Schwarzenegger said in order to point out just exactly how far to the right his comment was. It is simply mind-blowing that he holds such high political office in a country which sacrificed so much to defeat a man he once admired.

Peeling The Onion

by digby

I’ve been musing a lot lately about the unnerving sense that we are once again swimming underwater, trying to understand what people are saying but only being able to hear a muffled, garbled sound. Some of it is just the sheer complexity of the problems we face and some of it is the overwhelming amount of information and opinion that’s very difficult to sort through. One of the side effects of these periods is that you never know quite what to focus on and you find yourself with a sort of political ADD –rushing about from one subject to another, trying to figure out connections to things that appear unrelated but often turn out to be part of something bigger than you thought.

In the case of the Obama administration’s approach to the torture regime, unfortunately things are becoming clearer — and I’m kind of sorry it is:

In the Bush era, those of us who followed his administration’s torture, detention and interrogation policies often felt like unwilling participants in a perverse game of hide-and-seek. Whenever one of us stumbled on a startling new document, a horrific new practice, a dismal new prison environment, or yet another individual implicated in torture policy, the feeling of revelation would soon be superseded by a sneaking suspicion that we were once again looking in the wrong direction, that the Bush administration was playing a Machiavellian game of distraction with us.

OK, call it paranoia — a state of mind well suited to the Age of Cheney — but when Abu Ghraib finally came to light, it turned out that our real focus should have been on the administration’s program of “extraordinary rendition” and the secret CIA flights to the countries that were serving as proxy torturers for the United States. And when one case of torture by proxy, that of Maher Arar, achieved some prominence, we began looking at proxy torturers for the United States, when we should have been looking at legalized policies of torture by the U.S.

Several years ago, the British human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith placed that jewel in the Bush administration’s offshore crown of injustice, Guantánamo, in the category of distraction as well — distraction, that is, from the far grimmer and more important American detention facility at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.

….What ever happened to the U.S. prison at Bagram?

The reason I said this was an unfortunate moment of clarity is because the Obama administration is not being forthcoming about about Bagram, which is a terrible thing because Bagram makes Guantanamo look like summer camp:

It turns out that we can say very little with precision or confidence about that prison facility or even the exact number of prisoners there. News sources had often reported approximately 500 to 600 prisoners in custody at Bagram, but an accurate count is not available. A federal judge recently asked for “the number of detainees held at Bagram Air Base; the number of Bagram detainees who were captured outside Afghanistan; and the number of Bagram detainees who are Afghan citizens,” but the information the Obama administration offered the court in response remains classified and redacted from the public record.

We don’t even know the exact size of the prison or much about the conditions there, although they have been described as more Spartan and far cruder than Guantánamo’s in its worst days. Representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross have visited the prison, but it remains unclear whether they were able to inspect all of it. A confidential Red Cross report from 2008 supposedly highlighted overcrowding, the use of extreme isolation as a punishment technique, and various violations of the Geneva Convention.

We do know that a planned expansion of the facility is under way and will — if President Obama chooses to continue the Bush project there — enable up to 1,100 prisoners to be held (a step that will grimly complement the “surge” in American troops now under way in Afghanistan). There are no figures available on how long most of Bagram’s prisoners have been held — although some, it seems, have been imprisoned without charges or recourse for years — or how legal processes are being applied there, if at all. Last spring, the International Herald Tribune reported that Afghans from Bagram were sometimes tried in Afghan criminal proceedings where little evidence and no witnesses were presented.

To students of Guantánamo, this sounds uncomfortably familiar. And there’s more that’s eerily reminiscent of Gitmo’s bleak history. According to the New York Times, even four years after Bagram was established, wire cages were being used as cells, with buckets for toilets — as was also true of the original conditions at Camp X-Ray, the first holding facility at Guantánamo. Similarly, as with Guantánamo, the U.S. has no status-of-forces agreement with Afghanistan, and so the base and prison can be closed or turned over to the Afghans only on U.S. say-so. Above all, while some Bagram detainees have lawyers, most do not.

While I was wondering about the state of our black hole of incarceration in Afghanistan, the Obama administration issued its first terse statement on the subject. When it came to granting four Bagram detainees habeas rights (that is, the right to challenge their detention in U.S. courts), the administration simply stated that it “adheres to [the Justice Department’s] previously articulated position”: Habeas would not be granted.

After all, reasoned the new government lawyers (like their predecessors), Bagram is in an indisputable war zone and different legal considerations should apply. But here’s the catch neither the Bush administration, nor evidently the Obama administration, has cared to consider: It’s quite possible that these four individuals, like others at Bagram, were not captured on an Afghan battlefield (as the prisoners claim), but elsewhere on what Bush officials liked to think of as the “global battlefield” of the war on terror, and then conveniently transported to Bagram to be held indefinitely.

Here we go again. A lot of the torture regime has finally unraveled, but Bagram brings us to the fundamental question: is this really a war at all? And if it is, who is the enemy and under what rules are we fighting it? That question has not been addressed and I don’t see any sign that it’s going to be.

This prison in Afghanistan seems to be more legitimate because it exists on a real “battlefield,” right? Except we aren’t fighting the Afghans. We are fighting the Taliban, which is a religious/political sect, not the government itself, which we installed and support. This prison, however, belongs to the US and the government we are fighting on behalf of has no say in how its run. And even if we grant that we are fighting a legitimate war on behalf of the Afghan people, then Bagram must adhere to the Geneva conventions, which by all accounts, it most certainly has not.

But this other issue of prisoners captured elsewhere in the “global” battlefield is going to remain a huge problem until the Obama administration decides once and for all to treat those people as international criminals rather than “combatants. Bush and his people had good reasons for wanting to call the fight against islamic terrorism a war — their entire philosophy of the unitary executive resided in the powers granted to the commander in chief in wartime. They needed a war. Obama does not. If they are going to continue to kidnap and capture suspects off the streets of countries which the US has no extradition agreements, which everyone seems to think is a-ok, they are going to have to bring them to the United States and try them or turn them over to the Hague to be tried there. Taking them to a prison on a battlefield so they can be called combatants is no more legitimate than Guantanamo or any of the other illegal actions the Bush administration took in fighting the War On Terror.

The United States cannot just keep revising the notion of the rule of law and the rules of war as they go along. It’s been shown that every time they do it they wind up with an unworkable, unjust system that makes the US less safe and less respected. And this is not surprising. The legal systems of western civilization have evolved over avery long time and have been tested for centuries. And they are still barely legitimate. This obviously isn’t something you can just throw together on the fly to paper over cruelty, injustice and error.

Hopefully, the Obama administration is working to clean this up, but their unwillingness to open up about Bagram isn’t a good sign and neither are a number of other positions they’ve taken in these early days. It appears that they are trying to find some compromise between those who believe that we need to adhere to constitutional principles and international law and those who want to torture and lock these people up indefinitely on mere suspicion. But injustice isn’t really negotiable. Every time they validate these Bush era rulings, they take on the immoral taint as well — as will we all. America will not get another chance to set this right.

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Crackup In Pakistan

by dday

The Vice President gave a speech to NATO this week, basically urging the membership to get involved in Afghanistan. I don’t think it will be very successful. Though he may be right that there is a shared national security interest to deny a regional safe haven for extremists. The problem, of course, is that there already is one, in Pakistan and in the FATA areas. Pakistan is currently in the throes of a political crisis, that would cause instability and allow extremist forces to operate more freely. The fear is not that the Taliban takes over Pakistan, but that the political wrangling between Asif Ali Zardari and Nawaz Sharif will leave the leadership completely up for grabs. Here’s some background.

A conflict developed between Nawaz Sharif and PPP leader Asaf Ali Zardari over the deposed chief justice Iftikhar Chaudhury. Dictator Musharraf had dismissed Chaudhury in spring of 2007 for opposing some of his policies. Pakistan’s massive legal establishment began holding rallies and demanding that the chief justice be reinstated, which he was in summer 2007. Musharraf was under pressure from Washington to become a civilian president. But he found out that fall that the supreme court would not allow this transition because the constitution requires that a military man have been out of the service for 2 years before becoming president. So Musharraf just dismissed the whole supreme court, including the recently reinstated Chaudhury, and appointed a new court, which sycophantically recognized him as president.

When he was allowed to come back to Pakistan from exile in Saudi Arabia, Nawaz Sharif, who had been overthrown as prime minister in 1999 by Musharraf, began demanding that Iftikhar Chaudhury and the old, dismissed, supreme court be reinstated.

After the PPP won the parliamentary elections, its leader, Zardari, declined to reinstate Chaudhury. Zardari was afraid that the chief justice might reinstate the corruption charges against him, which had been amnestied by Musharraf […]

But just last week, the supreme court dismissed Shahbaz Sharif as chief minister of Punjab, and barred him and Nawaz Sharif from running for office. Some suspect the court of acting at President Zardari’s behest.

The Sharif brothers say that this court is anyway illegitimate and refuse to recognize its rulings, since it is the fruit of a poisoned tree, i.e. the arbitrary creature of a desperate military dictator 18 months ago.

The attorneys are also still angry over the failure of Zardari to reinstate Chaudhury and the others.

So on March 15, the Muslim League (which is more conservative landlord than religious fundamentalist, despite the name) is organizing a “long march” on parliament to protest the current supreme court and the recent decisions it issued against the Sharifs.

On the hustings, Nawaz Sharif said that the only thing that could save Pakistan now was a revolution, and announced that he had “raised the standard of rebellion.”

Today, the “long march” in Pakistan has begun.

Police in the Pakistani city of Karachi have used sticks to beat up protesters as lawyers and political activists began an anti-government protest march.

Organisers intend the four-day march from cities across Pakistan to culminate in a sit-in at the parliament in the capital, Islamabad, on Monday.

They want President Asif Ali Zardari to fulfil a pledge to reinstate all judges sacked under his predecessor.

The government says the march is aimed at destabilising the country.

Police say they have arrested more than 400 opposition activists in the past few days.

The authorities have also banned political gatherings across the country, saying they could trigger bloodshed.

Right now organizers are describing this as a peaceful march. And I believe them. But mass arrests and violence are not necessarily going to be met with calm. It’s just a very tense situation, and Zardari’s popularity is plummeting. Pervez Musharraf lost his job after fights with the same groups and attempts to crack down on the independent judiciary.

More in The New York Times. The government is saying that they’ve banned the protest march, but it continues. These are very nervous times in Pakistan. Banning the freedom to peaceably assemble is anti-democratic, and I don’t know how the lawyers can possibly achieve their goals without toppling the Zardari government. I fear chaos.

Pakistan is a young nation. These political struggles could easily break the country apart, with secession, a partition between areas, and perhaps a military coup to stop the factional fighting, with a return to dictatorship. And remember, this is a nuclear-armed state. It seems to me that Afghanistan is almost an afterthought compared to the dangers here.

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Republican Class Warfare

by tristero

A letter to the NY Times:

For too many years now, I have been diligently reading the modest amount of biographical information you publish about American service members killed in action in your listings under the headline “Names of the Dead.”

In addition to the heartbreaking youth of most of the dead soldiers, I am struck by the fact that half the time I have never even heard of the small towns they come from — and I am someone who loves geography, studies maps for pleasure and has driven across the country a dozen times.

Many of the soldiers dying in our current wars come from tiny rural towns and from very limited economic circumstances. I would guess that military deployment is the first time many of them have been out of the country.

I’ll go further than Mr. Hayden. I’ve been to some of these small towns in Wisconsin and Missouri and spoken to military-age kids, including some who served. In far too many cases, it’s likely their deployment is the first time they’ve left their state.

There’s a name for this: class warfare. Bush -exploiting the surge of patriotism after 9/11 – deliberately targeted the recruitment of those young Americans who were the least experienced and informed to fight his insane wars. And oh! the cunning of it! Of course, the children of the elite weren’t recruited, minimizing those ever-so-embarrassing moments when some celebrity’s child gets his head blown off. But Bush went further: since most of us don’t live in these tiny little hamlets, those of us who aren’t in the military are very unlikely to encounter anyone who lost a child to Bush’s madness. The wars were, and are, essentially painless to the vast majority of Americans.

Unless, of course, you have an active imagination and read about the casualties.

Needless to say, those small, obscure towns are the very same ones the repellent extremist Sarah Palin characterized as the “real America.” The enormous cynicism of modern Republicans still has the power to shock me, no matter how inured I think I am to it: real people, decent people – Americans, Iraqis, Afghanis, and others – have been callously slaughtered because of them.

Note: The letter concludes with a call for what seems to be a draft. For a variety of reasons, I don’t support a draft. However, there’s a general principle that I think we can all agree on: the elite scum that indiscriminately advocate American aggression should be compelled, daily, to face the consequences of their decisions. We could start on that by bringing the Bush-era war criminals – and Bush himself, of course – to justice. Occasionally, I waver and think, forget punishment, we just need a Truth and Reconciliation Committee. Then I”m reminded, as I was by this letter, of the malicious, sadistic, remorseless murderous intent of these thugs and I know they must, somehow, be brought to account.

Hello?

by digby

We are now so far into 57 dimensional chess that I’ve lost my place.
Why?

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