A handful of Republican governors are considering turning down some money from the federal stimulus package, a move opponents say puts conservative ideology ahead of the needs of constituents struggling with record foreclosures and soaring unemployment.
Though none has outright rejected the money available for education, health care and infrastructure, the governors of Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alaska, South Carolina and Idaho have all questioned whether the $787 billion bill signed into law this week will even help the economy.
“My concern is there’s going to be commitments attached to it that are a mile long,” said Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who considered rejecting some of the money but decided Wednesday to accept it. “We need the freedom to pick and choose. And we need the freedom to say ‘No thanks.'”
[…]
In fact, governors who reject some of the stimulus aid may find themselves overridden by their own legislatures because of language Clyburn included in the bill that allows lawmakers to accept the federal money even if their governors object.
He inserted the provision based on the early and vocal opposition to the stimulus plan by South Carolina’s Republican governor, Mark Sanford. But it also means governors like Sanford and Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal — a GOP up-and-comer often mentioned as a potential 2012 presidential candidate — can burnish their conservative credentials, knowing all the while that their legislatures can accept the money anyway.
I guess these people are placing their political bets on the economy not being sobad that they get blamed, but still bad enough that they can blame Obama. It’s quite tight rope they’re walking.
If the Democrats were as ruthless and reckless with other people’s lives as the Republicans are, they wouldn’t have put that clause in the legislation and would have let the Republicans pay the price for this nonsense. You know if the shoe were on the other foot, the GOP kamikazees would have forced the Dems to bear the brunt of such a decision. But then, that’s the reason why the country is in this catastrophic mess in the first place isn’t it? The Republicans just don’t give a damn about the people they are supposed to be representing.
I have to say that I’m really thrilled that the Republicans have found a fresh new face of congressional leadership in the person of Eric Cantor. He’s got the wingnut shining: a perfect blend of whining sanctimony and sociopathic malevolence combined with a winsome, youthful appearance. Rick Warren meets Joe McCarthy meets a long lost Jonas brother. He could end up surpassing Newtie in the pantheon of Republican kamikazees.
And like all Republicans, he’s up to his ears in hypocrisy and corruption. Here’s Julia at FDL:
The whole government bailout thing just… bothers him.
Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) holds up House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s statement while speaking to the media after the vote failed on the bailout on Capitol Hill on Sept. 29, 2008. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)House Republican Whip Eric Cantor, a rising star in the Republican party, has been a prominent voice demanding accountability in how the government doles out hundreds of billions for bank bailouts.
“I think most American taxpayers now are sort of scratching their head,” Cantor told CNN in December, “wondering when all this bailout stuff is going to end. And probably thinking, ‘You know, when is my bailout coming?'”
Rep. Cantor is not one of those confused taxpayers
This Thursday, Cantor cast a high-profile vote opposing release of another $350 billion in bailout funds. Unpublicized until now was a recent development: The Treasury Department used $267 million of taxpayer funds to buy preferred stock in a private banking company that employs Cantor’s wife.
The bailout for New York Private Bank and Trust (NYPBT) came earlier this month as part of a Treasury Department program to boost “healthy banks” with extra capital. NYPBT is the holding company for Emigrant Bank, a savings bank with 35 branches in and around New York City. Diana Cantor runs the Virginia branch of Emigrant’s wealth-management division, called Virginia Private Bank & Trust, which targets an ultra-rich clientele.
You know what’s interesting about Virginia Private Bank and Trust? It’s a brand new initiative for NYPBT, which appears to consist largely of Ms. Cantor
Diana Cantor runs the Virginia branch of Emigrant’s wealth-management division, called Virginia Private Bank & Trust, which targets an ultra-rich clientele.
…
The Virginia Private Bank & Trust, a satellite opened this spring, is still getting off the ground. On Thursday, when ProPublica visited its small Richmond office in an office park not far from the Cantors’ home, a sheet of white paper taped to the door served as its sign. One of the two employees there said the office had yet to serve a client since it opened last spring. She referred further queries to the bank’s main office.
In an April interview with Private Wealth magazine, NYPBT executives said that Virginia was the first of several regional locations planned for the bank’s division concentrating on wealthy investors. The New York branch opened in 2005, concentrating on New York City area clients wanting to invest more than $50 million.
Diana Cantor comes to the job with many years of financial experience. She was hired in early 2008 after a long tenure running the Virginia College Savings Plan. Rep. Cantor’s personal financial disclosure shows that she received a “consultant fee” from NYPBT in 2007 as well
Mrs Cantor claims she knew nothing about the bailout of her wealthy benefactors. But it’s pretty hard to believe that her wealthy benefactors didn’t know their neophyte employee wasn’t married to a rising star in the Republican party.
I would hate to see Cantor be ousted from his assignment as General of the Imperial Republican Congressional kamikazees. His whining is so unctuous and insincere that I think even hard core Republicans are hard pressed to keep their lunches down once he gets on a roll. (I’m sure you recall his breathless press conference after the failure of the first TARP vote, screeching that the Republicans couldn’t vote for it because Nancy Pelosi’s comments during the debate hurt their feelings.) But this could be trouble for him. Even wingnuts don’t like crooked bankers these days.
Just to update everyone on the meltdown out here in California – last night the Republicans in the State Senate engineered a putsch, deposing their leader in the dead of night because he was insufficiently unconcerned about the welfare of the state.
Around 11 p.m., a group of GOP senators, unhappy with the higher taxes that Senate leader Dave Cogdill of Modesto agreed to as part of a deal with the governor and Democrats, voted to replace him in a private caucus meeting in Cogdill’s office. Shortly before midnight, it was still unclear who would replace him.
Cogdill’s ouster could be a major setback to budget negotiations. Cogdill was a lead negotiator on the budget package and had committed to voting for it. If he were removed from his leadership post, a new Senate minority leader would likely try to renegotiate the deal, which lawmakers spent three months forging.
Zed Hollingsworth (I’m calling him Zed because, like the recently excavated mammoth at the La Brea Tar Pits of the same name, he’s a prehistoric elephant) is indeed trying to reopen budget talks and take taxes off the table, and if there’s not a breakthrough in a couple days, he may succeed. Darrell Steinberg, the Democratic leader, is vowing to hold out, but he doesn’t have much left to offer the holdouts, as they remain 1 vote short in the Senate.
Meanwhile, 20,000 state employees are getting pink slips, and continued delay will make the state ineligible for federal transportation dollars because they can’t provide matching funds, costing the state billions. The Republican obstructionists have cost the state untold amounts in shutdown/start-up costs, higher rates of borrowing due to the uncertainty, etc.
Given all this, I have to wholeheartedly agree with Robert Cruickshank’s take on how this all does nothing but highlight the need for fundamental reform and a return to democracy in California. He did an admirable job going over the history and the menu of options, but I want to make the more emotional argument for a return to majority rule. Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns and Money did the best and most concise job of explaining why, despite the essential truth of the Republican Zombie Death Cult, it’s the process-based enabling that is the original sin.
Although Krugman is of course right to blame a “fanatical, irrational minority” for the current crisis in California, it can’t be emphasized enough that what really matters is the incredibly stupid institutional rules that empower this minority: namely, the idiotic super-majority for tax increases and an initiative system that both created that supermajority requirement and provides incentives to vote for every tax cut while mandating certain kinds of spending because the issues are isolated. Fortunately, the federal level (while it has too many veto points) is not quite at this level yet, and at least the stupid filibuster rule doesn’t apply to budgets.
It’s very easy to get people excited and motivated about a PERSON. Not so much about a process. And yet, as we all know, without the process, the villains in this melodrama would be sidelined, a fact which actually serves both parties.
We on the left often obsess over whether the electorate can figure out who to blame in these crises. This 2/3 requirement for budgets and tax increases in California is a powerful enabler for that confusion. Because the elected representatives of the majority party are not allowed to impose their will on how the state is to be run, they cannot be held to account. Because the elected representatives of the minority party are in the minority party, they cannot be held to account. Therefore we have a political cycle that mirrors the economic cycle resulting from the inevitable bad policies. The powerful stay powerful, the voiceless stay voiceless, people lose faith in the process, leading to more entrenched power and more voiceless, and so on.
Greg Lucas at California’s Capitol makes the moral case for a majority-vote budget along these lines, that it is the only way for true accountability in the system.
If the huckstering of the President’s Day Weekend demonstrated anything at all, it’s that the majority party should be able to pass the budget it considers best for California.
If its awful the governor, should he or she be of a different political party, can slice-and-dice it through the miracle of the veto process.
Should the governor be of the same political party and warmly endorse the spending plan well he or she can be thrown out by voters.
And, if the non-partisan commission created by Proposition 11 last November to draw new legislative boundaries does its job it will be possible to throw out members of the party that passed the budget as well.
I don’t agree about the panacea of redistricting – the available data shows virtually no link between gerrymandering and political polarization – but on balance Lucas is right. It’s not a marketplace of ideas unless citizens can buy one idea or the other and make their decision based on the evidence. Democracies work when ideas are allowed to stand strong or wither on the strength of results. We do not have that here in California. This is also true on the national level. Senate leaders string their constituents along with the need for more Democrats to overcome a self-imposed hurdle of the filibuster.
The extreme version of this madness is here in the Golden State. The 2/3 rule is the prime mover for all the dysfunction we see. It was actually put into place in the 1930s to stop the New Deal from reaching these shores. It was modified in the 1960s and in 1978, Prop. 13 added a 2/3 barrier for tax increases to the budget. We’ve been feeling the effects ever since, as taxes are flattened and ratcheted down and the state is governed for the sake of people in gated commnunities and not the least of society. It creates an artificial conservative veto over policy. The expressed goal was to save homeowners money – the actual goal was to destroy government. California is the house that Grover Norquist built, and the results are predictable.
As to my point that this serves both parties? Greg Lucas:
Just to sweeten the majority-vote budget pot a little, there’s a fairly hefty number of folks who work both in and around the Capitol who assert that whichever team wins the power to run roughshod over the minority party will be so scared of exclusive blame for any badness in the budget being exclusively their fault that they won’t do anything real drastic.
This is what they are scared of CURRENTLY. There are lots of checks and balances in political systems. There is no need for an artificial veto. Democrats will remain timid to stick their necks out (they’re politicians), but at least they would have no excuses. And who knows, maybe they would realize they have a little bit of power and they would use it!
Arnold Schwarzenegger is irrelevant and a failure. State Democrats are spineless jellyfish. The death-cult Republican Party is a collection of flat-earthers bent on destruction. All well and good. Yet all of these discrete groups are enabled by a political system that does violent disservice to the people of the state and the concept of democracy. We must have a return to majority rule as soon as possible. For the sake of accountability.
I understand why the administration is doing this, but I’m not sure it’s a good idea:
With all the controversy surrounding the Bush administration’s firings of several U.S. attorneys, the question for the Obama administration became: What now?
And with all the muck that the hard-charging Chicago-based U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald has stirred not only in Chicago, but also in Washington, the question became: How now?
The Obama White House has effectively, and somewhat quietly, answered that question — for now: With Press Secretary Robert Gibbs explaining that the Justice Department has allowed all the chief federal prosecutors who have not already left in the changing of the presidential guard to remain at their posts, at least temporarily.
Of the 93 U.S. attorneys who served under the previous administration, Gibbs said aboard Air Force One en route to Phoenix with President Barack Obama, 51 remain.
The White House also says that, at the start of the administration, all 93 were allowed to serve temporarily. Thirty resigned before Obama’s inauguration on Jan. 20, and 12 more have left since then. And the 51 still serving are technically there on a temporary basis — Obama hasn’t decided that all will remain.
They understand that if they ask any of these prosecutors to resign, the right wing will immediately go into a full-on hypocritical fugue state and start keening about how Obama is “politicizing” the Justice department. It’s hissy fit 101. They have no shame. But unfortunately, if they subsequently find out that they have some burrowed, hardcore wingnuts in their midst (which wouldn’t be surprising, considering that Rove tended to have the honest ones fired) it will be nearly impossible to fire them individually because the hissy fit will be even more overwhelming.
This was always going to be a mess. The Bushies very successfully set this trap because the investigations petered out upon the resignations of Gonzales, Goodling and Sampson. (The Democrats seemed to think that was more than enough.) I don’t think the public ever understood that the firings of the US Attorneys for refusing to prosecute for political purposes necessarily put all of those who weren’t fired under suspicion. It’s not to say they were all guilty, of course, but how likely is it that the only US Attorneys appointed by Bush who were pressured to participate are the ones who refused and were fired for it?
So, the administration is stuck either way. As I think with all these issues pertaining to the Justice Department and civil liberties, that the best policy is to pull the band-aid off and simply do the right thing. Trying to finesse this stuff rarely works out.
Unless, they know somehow that all the bad apples are those who’ve already resigned, it seems to me that with all the flurry of activity going on and the recent memories of the Bush administration abuses, that they would have been better off just asking for resignations across the board, keeping those who are career Justice Department types like Patrick Fitzgerald — and taking the heat from the wingnuts. It’s never going to get any easier and the stakes for the future are pretty high. The last thing they need are a bunch of political operatives in the Justice Department undermining everything they want to do.
Roland Burris is on TV giving a speech defending himself against allegations he lied about his role in being solicited and then trying to help raise money for Rod Blagojevich to help get the senate seat. And it’s basically identical to a series of speeches Blago himself gave when he was swirling around the bowl: How dare you give me any crap for lying about that fundraising stuff when, my god, I just helped pass the Stimulus Bill, SCHIP and the Lily Ledbetter bill.
A-Rod’s presser was less excruciating. Where do they get these guys in Illinois?
It was obvious from the moment anyone accepted an offer from Rod Blagojevich to be appointed that they had only a passing familiarity with ethics and standards. And now it appears the dam is going to burst. The Senate Ethics Committee is opening a probe into Burris’ possible perjury, and Illinois Rep. Phil Hare is calling for resignation:
“Senator Burris’ story has now evolved several times since he testified before the Illinois House Impeachment Committee in December. The only logical conclusion is that he is not being entirely straight with the people of Illinois.
“A cloud of corruption has hung over our state and its leaders for too long. The impeachment and removal of former Governor Blagojevich was a step in the right direction. But just as it looked like a new era in Illinois politics was possible, we suffer yet another setback. It is like a recurring nightmare.
“Given this latest revelation, I believe it is in the best interest of all Illinoisans that Senator Burris resigns. Our state and its citizens deserve the whole truth, not bits and pieces only when it is convenient.”
Citizens also deserve to have a full say in who is their representative in Washington. If Burris doesn’t survive and removes himself from the Senate, there ought to be a special election. The new Governor can ask the legislature to approve one. This only highlights how broken the appointment process is for vacancies. It’s not the exception, it’s the rule. And instead of trying stalling tactics to stop Burris from being seated, Harry Reid and Dick Durbin could have stood up for the greater principle. It certainly would put them in a better position now.
I wish I thought that we had learned these lessons for all time once we come out the other side of the current hellish situation. Sadly, I fear that we will have to learn lessons like this all over again a few years down the road, when the “caveat emptor” party get’s its groove back. Greed will never be repealed and that’s at the heart of this:
The Food and Drug Administration put patients’ lives at risk by halting enforcement of 30-year-old requirements that medical device makers meet federal laboratory standards prior to testing their products on humans, a watchdog group charges in a new report. The rules at issue cover studies on an array of devices, including life-saving products such as defibrillators, pacemakers, coronary stents and heart valves.The report by the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight is to be released Wednesday and says several agency officials left their jobs because they were so upset over the policy to forgo enforcement of requirements that the tests adhere to Good Laboratory Practices. “At present, if a manufacturer knowingly violates the GLP regulation and falsely asserts compliance with GLP, that manufacturer is safe — safe from discovery, safe from disciplinary action by the FDA, safe from prosecution,” the report says.It calls the agency’s decision to halt lab inspections on animal studies and other early research “stunning in its contempt for the protection of patients” and its failure to comply with federal regulations.The report offers the latest harsh critique of the FDA’s regulatory performance during the Bush administration. In 2007, a group of experts from industry, academia and the government warned that the agency was understaffed and overworked, raising “incalculable risks” to the public safety.
Greenwald does the usual thorough job demolishing the fatuous arguments set forth by extremist right wing lawyers David Rivkin and Lee Casey to ensure that no one who ordered torture is ever held legally liable. (Perhaps if the vice president had been receiving fellatio as he ordered it, there might be a case.) He writes:
Does anyone deny that we are exactly the country that Walsh described: one where “powerful people with powerful allies can commit serious crimes in high office — deliberately abusing the public trust without consequence”? And what rational person could think that’s a desirable state of affairs that ought not only be preserved — but fortified still further– as we move now to immunize Bush 43 officials for their far more serious and disgraceful crimes? As the Rivkin/Casey oeuvre demonstrates, we’ve created a zone of lawlessness around our highest political leaders and either refuse to acknowledge that we’ve done that or, worse, have decided that we don’t really mind.
Yes, but onesimplydoesn’t hold people of good breeding liable for such unpleasantness. They suffer more than enough just by being socially embarrased by these inconvenient questions. Any punishment beyond that is completely disproportionate.On the other hand, we just know that certain other people can’t even be allowed a proper trial before we lock them up and throw away the key. Jane Mayer reports:
A number of national-security lawyers in both parties favor the creation of some new form of preventive detention. They do not believe that it is the President’s prerogative to lock “enemy combatants” up indefinitely, yet they fear that neither the criminal courts nor the military system is suited for the handling of transnational terrorists, whom they do not consider to be ordinary criminals or conventional soldiers. Instead, they suggest that Obama should work with Congress to write new laws, possibly creating a “national-security court,” which could order certain suspects to be held without a trial.
One proponent of this idea is Neal Katyal, whom Obama recently named to the powerful post of Principal Deputy Solicitor General, in the Justice Department. Katyal is best known for his victory as the lead counsel in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006). In his first appearance before the Supreme Court, he persuaded a majority of the Justices to declare that the Guantánamo military-commission system was illegal, arguing that Congress had not authorized the commissions. Katyal’s new job is to represent the government before the Supreme Court. Given the sensitivity of this role, Katyal declined to comment for this story. But in October he posted an article on a Web site affiliated with Georgetown Law, in which he argued, “What is needed is a serious plan to prosecute everyone we can in regular courts, and a separate system to deal with the very small handful of cases in which patently dangerous people cannot be tried.”
All I can say is, thank goodness we have such big hearted and trustworthy people deciding which people are just too dangerous to be allowed their human rights or somebody might get the idea that the rule of law doesn’t mean anything more than the paper its written on.
Read the whole thing. This is looking more and more like “don’t ask don’t try” — except this is actually much worse than the don’t ask don’t tell policy. These people are being imprisoned indefinitely, which is the ultimate Kafkaesque nightmare.
I just don’t get this. Is it really their feeling that these particular people are so much more dangerous than the many thousands of muslim extremists who are out there plotting as we speak? Are they so dangerous that it’s worth it to give those same crazies a rallying cry, further compromise what little moral authority the US has left and tie our foreign policy up in knots?
Unless we’ve been teaching these people to make nuclear weapons down in Gitmo, the idea that they are too dangerous to take a chance on a trial is absurd. In fact, it’s so absurd that one can’t help but suspect that they don’t want to try these people because to do so would expose some of the horrors that have been perpetrated by the US government — which leads us right back to where we started.
While worrying about Montana’s receding glaciers, Schweitzer, who is 50, should also worry about the fact that when he was 20 he was told to be worried, very worried, about global cooling. Science magazine (Dec. 10, 1976) warned of “extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation.” Science Digest (February 1973) reported that “the world’s climatologists are agreed” that we must “prepare for the next ice age.” The Christian Science Monitor (”Warning: Earth’s Climate is Changing Faster Than Even Experts Expect,” Aug. 27, 1974) reported that glaciers “have begun to advance,” “growing seasons in England and Scandinavia are getting shorter” and “the North Atlantic is cooling down about as fast as an ocean can cool.” Newsweek agreed (”The Cooling World,” April 28, 1975) that meteorologists “are almost unanimous” that catastrophic famines might result from the global cooling that the New York Times (Sept. 14, 1975) said “may mark the return to another ice age.” The Times (May 21, 1975) also said “a major cooling of the climate is widely considered inevitable” now that it is “well established” that the Northern Hemisphere’s climate “has been getting cooler since about 1950.”
In the 1970s, “a major cooling of the planet” was “widely considered inevitable” because it was “well established” that the Northern Hemisphere’s climate “has been getting cooler since about 1950″ (New York Times, May 21, 1975). Although some disputed that the “cooling trend” could result in “a return to another ice age” (the Times, Sept. 14, 1975), others anticipated “a full-blown 10,000-year ice age” involving “extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation” (Science News, March 1, 1975, and Science magazine, Dec. 10, 1976, respectively). The “continued rapid cooling of the Earth” (Global Ecology, 1971) meant that “a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery” (International Wildlife, July 1975). “The world’s climatologists are agreed” that we must “prepare for the next ice age” (Science Digest, February 1973). Because of “ominous signs” that “the Earth’s climate seems to be cooling down,” meteorologists were “almost unanimous” that “the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century,” perhaps triggering catastrophic famines (Newsweek cover story, “The Cooling World,” April 28, 1975). Armadillos were fleeing south from Nebraska, heat-seeking snails were retreating from Central European forests, the North Atlantic was “cooling down about as fast as an ocean can cool,” glaciers had “begun to advance” and “growing seasons in England and Scandinavia are getting shorter” (Christian Science Monitor, Aug. 27, 1974).
He shuffled around the quotes a bit, but they are basically the same ones. Which are, of course, wrong. And it’s amusing how they’re wrong, because Will values the fact that Newsweek and other pop-science publications wrote mass-market articles about global cooling over, you know, science, and the breadth of scientific opinion at the time. In other words, Will believes that anything in a Villager text reflects the collected wisdom of the entire world. The Village community presumes to speak for the scientific community.
But that’s not all that Will was wrong about. He skimmed data about Arctic sea ice off a 45 day-old blog post from Jim Inhofe’s climate denialist shop, which was quickly slapped down by, well, a scientist. And he wrote “[A]ccording to the World Meteorological Organization, there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade,” which is practically the opposite of the truth.
The pace of global warming is likely to be much faster than recent predictions, because industrial greenhouse gas emissions have increased more quickly than expected and higher temperatures are triggering self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms in global ecosystems, scientists said Saturday.
“We are basically looking now at a future climate that’s beyond anything we’ve considered seriously in climate model simulations,” Christopher Field, founding director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University, said at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Field, a member of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said emissions from burning fossil fuels since 2000 have largely outpaced the estimates used in the U.N. panel’s 2007 reports. The higher emissions are largely the result of the increased burning of coal in developing countries, he said.
Unexpectedly large amounts of carbon dioxide are being released into the atmosphere as the result of “feedback loops” that are speeding up natural processes. Prominent among these, evidence indicates, is a cycle in which higher temperatures are beginning to melt the arctic permafrost, which could release hundreds of billions of tons of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, said several scientists on a panel at the meeting.
True, that was the result of a scientific study and not what old Newsweeks were printing to sell copies through counter-intuition 30 years ago. But you know, it’s a perspective.
Predictably yet somewhat hilariously, Will and his editor Fred Hiatt are ducking accountability on this tripe.
Mum’s the word for George Will and the Washington Post when it comes to explaining how misinformation on global warming got into Will’s most recent column.
Yesterday morning we called Will to ask him about the misrepresentations in his Sunday column. We also called Fred Hiatt, the editor of the paper’s editorial page, to ask about the editing process that the Post’s editorial page employs. Neither chose to answer our questions […]
Will’s assistant told us that Will might get back to us later in the day to talk about the column. And Hiatt said he was too busy to talk about it just then, but that he’d try to respond to emailed questions. So we emailed him yesterday’s post, with several questions about the editing process, then followed up with another email late yesterday afternoon.
But still nothing from either of them, over twenty-four hours after the first contact was made. Nor has the online version of Will’s column been updated, even to reflect the fact that the ACRC has utterly disavowed the claim Will attributes to it.
I get the impression that opinion columns in Big Media papers aren’t rigorously fact-checked, with the excuse being that they are, well, “opinion.” In practice, this becomes a license for Villagers to use the credibility they’ve assumed for themselves to lie. And if they make a mistake that actually filters through the roadblocks and reaches their editors, they face no consequence. In fact, they frequently fail upward. So they reprint the same nonsense the next week or the next month or the next year. And they are feted at cocktail parties through the next millennium.
Somebody convene a blogger ethics panel.
..Jonathan Schwarz has this awesome story about Will from Noam Chomsky. The persistent lying and lack of accountability may sound familiar to you.
CHOMSKY: [A] few years ago George Will wrote a column in Newsweek called “Mideast Truth and Falsehood,” about how peace activists are lying about the Middle East, everything they say is a lie. And in the article, there was one statement that had a vague relation to fact: he said that Sadat had refused to deal with Israel until 1977. So I wrote them a letter, the kind of letter you write to Newsweek—you know, four lines—in which I said, “Will has one statement of fact, it’s false; Sadat made a peace offer in 1971, and Israel and the United States turned it down.” Well, a couple days later I got a call from a research editor who checks facts for the Newsweek “Letters” column. She said: “We’re kind of interested in your letter, where did you get those facts?” So I told her, “Well, they’re published in Newsweek, on February 8, 1971″—which is true, because it was a big proposal, it just happened to go down the memory hole in the United States because it was the wrong story. So she looked it up and called me back, and said, “Yeah, you’re right, we found it there; okay, we’ll run your letter.” An hour later she called again and said, “Gee, I’m sorry, but we can’t run the letter.” I said, “What’s the problem?” She said, “Well, the editor mentioned it to Will and he’s having a tantrum; they decided they can’t run it.” Well, okay.
Everybody’s speculating about whether this reported ill feeling between Cheney and Bush over Scooter’s non-pardon will result in some sort of permanent falling out. They seem to think that the danger is that one or the other will let fly in their memoirs.
But I don’t think that’s the real issue. Doesn’t it seem more likely that the danger lies between Cheney and Scooter? If Cheney was this frantic, one supposes that he may have been trying to fulfill a “promise” he made to the loyal soldier who took all the heat and destroyed his career for him. Now that Scooter has nothing to lose, he may very well decide that he needs to “set the record straight” with a juicy book deal, don’t you think?
President Obama campaigned on the need for more attention and troops in Afghanistan and now he’s announcing it. There was no big surprise here, except that the commitment is a bit smaller than the expected 30,000. But this is pending a strategy review which may further increase the numbers.
President Barack Obama signed an order boosting U.S. troop strength in Afghanistan by 17,000 combat and support personnel.
Obama said in a statement released by the White House that he approved a request for the additional soldiers and Marines made by Defense Secretary Robert Gates and military commanders.
“This increase is necessary to stabilize a deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, which has not received the strategic attention, direction and resources it urgently requires,” Obama said in the statement.
The full statement is here. My hope is that the strategic review narrows our goals enough, away from stabilizing democracy and toward preventing terrorist safe havens that can project force globally, that we can realistically assess the impact of this increased footprint on the Afghan population.
I hear a lot of people talking about how more troops are necessary because, until now, airstrikes have papered over the lack of boots on the ground and led to an uncomfortable increase in the civilian death toll, which is unsustainable. The first response to this is that 17,000 extra troops and personnel in a country the size of Texas isn’t likely to change that, especially when the airstrike targets are often in inaccessible areas. The second is to look back at recent history. We “surged” in Iraq with an increase in forces and airstrikes surged, mainly to protect the new influx of boots on the ground, which American policymakers see as more precious resources than Afghans or Iraqis. It is not consistent to suggest that more troops=less airstrikes. That never happens. Escalation is escalation.
Clearly, U.S. policy in Afghanistan has failed, as numerous reports point to security conditions that have gone from bad to worse. That is why we applaud the president’s decision to conduct a fundamental review of U.S. policy in Afghanistan. But it is also why we are concerned that the deployment of additional combat troops is being announced at the outset of the review process and not at its conclusion.
The risks are significant–particularly in light of the warnings of several analysts that the presence of foreign soldiers fighting a war in Afghanistan is probably the single most important driving force in the resurgence of the Taliban. Reducing our military footprint could, therefore, be one of the most effective measures that can be taken to weaken the armed opposition.
The first principle for someone who finds himself in a hole is to stop digging. The US policy ‘hole’ in Afghanistan is not of the new administration’s making. But it is important for the president to consider if adding new U.S. combat forces in Afghanistan, without a new and comprehensive plan for U.S. policy there, might be digging an even bigger hole.
This is a very dangerous deployment for a number of reasons, not the least of which is how war can erode popular support at home and constrain a President’s initiatives. The Vice President has said to expect greater casualties from Afghanistan in the coming year. What we should expect is an actual strategy before committing sons and daughters to an uneasy and perhaps unwinnable conflict.