CAF made note of the fact that CNN outsourced its news gathering function to propagandists this week-end and is asking people to take some action:
There is a growing consensus among economists that:
The investments we need for America’s long-term prosperity require federal deficit spending, but the deficits are manageable.
Social Security is fiscally sound for decades to come.
The answer to soaring health costs includes universal health care, not slashing Medicare.
Yet if you turned on CNN during the weekend of Jan. 10-11, you were told the opposite. That our budget is a “fiscal cancer, with catastrophic consequences.” That “large … social spending” can bring about an “economic downturn.” That Social Security will reach a crisis point in “10 years.” That Medicare is based on “unfunded promises.” And that those views were unequivocal objective truth, not opinion or ideology.For CNN to do that was wrong. (See why below.) It’s time to tell CNN to give equal time to public investment strategies that will put our economy back on a sound footing.
This nonsense is taken as an article of faith among the villagers and it’s really dangerous. It wasn’t just the six hours they devoted to Peterson’s docudrama. All week-end, media gasbags were blithely passing it on like it was common knowledge as well:
Blitzer: But if he wants to deal with the deficit, the national debt, he’s got to deal with those entitlements, social security, medicare, medicaid.
Borger: This is the opportunity. This is the opportunity, because everybody understands right now that won’t have the money. So this is what you call a teachable moment here right now for Barack Obama. The American public can’t keep these entitlements at these levels.
It would be nice if, just once, somebody actually countered this stale drivel with the facts.
There’s a lot of talk about torture these days. Among the political elites the parameter of the debate has narrowed between Obama deciding to continue the torture or abandoning it, despite the fact that Obama vociferously denounced it during the campaign. But such is the way that goalposts are moved in Washington. But the goalposts are moving across our culture as well. Here are two stories about the torture of teen-agers by police, one of whom died.
In the first case, you can see perfectly how the government now views the use of electrical shock as a benign tool to force compliance:
Salt Lake City police used a stun gun on a 14-year-old boy after they say he refused to leave the Gateway Mall and resisted arrest on Saturday night. Around 8 p.m. Saturday, police said a group of kids was trying to pick a fight with a second group. Gateway security officers asked the group to leave the mall, but they refused and at least one boy actively fought with officers, police said. “He said his group was waiting for someone, and they were not leaving until they did so — despite what police and security officers were telling them to do,” said Salt Lake City Police Department Det. Dennis McGowan. The boy cursed at officers and clenched his fists, taking “an aggressive stance,” McGowan said. McGowan said the boy refused to turn around to be arrested and pushed back at officers. “He wouldn’t go on the ground, and officers were unable to gain control,” McGowan said. “Apparently they were falling on top of each other, so as a last resort, the officer pulled out his Taser.” McGowan said officers told the boy “over and over” to stop resisting and “had no choice but to deploy the Taser.” “It was for this person’s safety as well as the officer’s safety,” he said. “It’s much safer for them to do that versus someone getting beaten, or both parties getting beaten badly.” McGowan said the officers tried to work with the boy, and police were justified in elevating the force for the boy’s own protection. “A Taser only lasts for a few seconds,” McGowan said. “Once the shock is over, it’s as if nothing happened. The person totally recovers. We use minimum force when necessary — that’s what we try to do on every single call.”
“It only last for a few seconds” and then “it’s as if nothing happened.” (Of course, the pain is akin to major organ failure, but it’s such a short jolt of agony that it’s hardly worth even thinking about.) It leaves no marks. There is really no reason it shouldn’t be used by anyone at any time.
Tasers were supposed to replace deadly force. This officer doesn’t even try to claim that here. He says right out that it’s a harmless tool to force compliance when someone refuses to cooperate with police. Officers needn’t even be required to physically restrain children anymore since this is such a harmless weapon. Not that we didn’t know that, but it’s kind of sickeningly refreshing to see it in black and white.
After Justin Gregory saw a Taser used on his friend, he thought the incident would be good for a laugh.
“I thought Derrick was getting Tased and we’d laugh about it tomorrow,” Gregory said.
He never expected Derrick Jones to die.
But Jones did die, after becoming unresponsive when the Taser was deployed by a Martinsville police officer seeking to subdue the 17-year-old.
They were drunk and the place was all torn up and the officers were justified in seeing the situation as potentially dangerous. But the kid wasn’t threatening them and he certainly didn’t deserve to die. Had the officers taken the time to assess the situation instead of shooting their handy “non-lethal” weapon first and asking questions later, he would be alive today. His “crime” was being a drunk teenager, not a capital offense, the last I heard. (Of course his “crime” was in being unresponsive to police — and that is a capital crime nowadays, or at least it’s blithely treated like one.)
Let’s put it this way — if they had killed him with their gun under the exact same circumstances, there would be no question that it was excessive force. Why should the fact that they used a different weapon make the outcome any different?
Imagine if we had a consumer product on the market that was causing untold numbers of deaths and which the authorities were insisting was completely harmless. Would everyone just accept this? Oh wait:
A handy new holster from Taser International Inc. holds not only your stun gun but a music player too.Taser’s latest foray into consumer products was introduced Monday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The holster costs $72.99 on the company’s Web site and includes a 1-gigabyte MP3 player.The company, which also sells its electronic weapons to law enforcement agencies and the military, has been stepping up its consumer product offerings with Tasers in new colors like “red-hot” and “fashion pink.”The latest Taser — in a leopard print and costing $379.99 — “provides a personal protection option for women who want fashion with a bite,” said Chief Executive Rick Smith.
As we watch the Madoff scandal unfold and deal with the consequences of unfettered greed it’s amazing to see the Randians cling to their romantic illusions. It must be so lonely —after all, even “Alyn” Greenspan had to admit the sad betrayal:
I found a flaw in the model that I perceived as the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works
I hate when that happens.
But he is an unusual case, perhaps because he’s so personally and directly responsible for the chaos we are facing. The rest of the the swooning schoolgirls of the Rand cult continue to believe:
Some years ago when I worked at the libertarian Cato Institute, we used to label any new hire who had not yet read “Atlas Shrugged” a “virgin.” Being conversant in Ayn Rand’s classic novel about the economic carnage caused by big government run amok was practically a job requirement. If only “Atlas” were required reading for every member of Congress and political appointee in the Obama administration. I’m confident that we’d get out of the current financial mess a lot faster. Many of us who know Rand’s work have noticed that with each passing week, and with each successive bailout plan and economic-stimulus scheme out of Washington, our current politicians are committing the very acts of economic lunacy that “Atlas Shrugged” parodied in 1957, when this 1,000-page novel was first published and became an instant hit. Rand, who had come to America from Soviet Russia with striking insights into totalitarianism and the destructiveness of socialism, was already a celebrity. The left, naturally, hated her. But as recently as 1991, a survey by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club found that readers rated “Atlas” as the second-most influential book in their lives, behind only the Bible. For the uninitiated, the moral of the story is simply this: Politicians invariably respond to crises — that in most cases they themselves created — by spawning new government programs, laws and regulations. These, in turn, generate more havoc and poverty, which inspires the politicians to create more programs . . . and the downward spiral repeats itself until the productive sectors of the economy collapse under the collective weight of taxes and other burdens imposed in the name of fairness, equality and do-goodism. In the book, these relentless wealth redistributionists and their programs are disparaged as “the looters and their laws.” Every new act of government futility and stupidity carries with it a benevolent-sounding title. These include the “Anti-Greed Act” to redistribute income (sounds like Charlie Rangel’s promises soak-the-rich tax bill) and the “Equalization of Opportunity Act” to prevent people from starting more than one business (to give other people a chance). My personal favorite, the “Anti Dog-Eat-Dog Act,” aims to restrict cut-throat competition between firms and thus slow the wave of business bankruptcies. Why didn’t Hank Paulson think of that?[…] The current economic strategy is right out of “Atlas Shrugged”: The more incompetent you are in business, the more handouts the politicians will bestow on you. That’s the justification for the $2 trillion of subsidies doled out already to keep afloat distressed insurance companies, banks, Wall Street investment houses, and auto companies — while standing next in line for their share of the booty are real-estate developers, the steel industry, chemical companies, airlines, ethanol producers, construction firms and even catfish farmers. With each successive bailout to “calm the markets,” another trillion of national wealth is subsequently lost. Yet, as “Atlas” grimly foretold, we now treat the incompetent who wreck their companies as victims, while those resourceful business owners who manage to make a profit are portrayed as recipients of illegitimate “windfalls.” When Rand was writing in the 1950s, one of the pillars of American industrial might was the railroads. In her novel the railroad owner, Dagny Taggart, an enterprising industrialist, has a FedEx-like vision for expansion and first-rate service by rail. But she is continuously badgered, cajoled, taxed, ruled and regulated — always in the public interest — into bankruptcy. Sound far-fetched? On the day I sat down to write this ode to “Atlas,” a Wall Street Journal headline blared: “Rail Shippers Ask Congress to Regulate Freight Prices.”
That is so, like, weird, isn’t it? I mean, it’s like exactly the same thing,dude. Exactly! What are the odds???
But this is just totally awesome:
One memorable moment in “Atlas” occurs near the very end, when the economy has been rendered comatose by all the great economic minds in Washington. Finally, and out of desperation, the politicians come to the heroic businessman John Galt (who has resisted their assault on capitalism) and beg him to help them get the economy back on track. The discussion sounds much like what would happen today: Galt: “You want me to be Economic Dictator?” Mr. Thompson: “Yes!” “And you’ll obey any order I give?” “Implicitly!” “Then start by abolishing all income taxes.” “Oh no!” screamed Mr. Thompson, leaping to his feet. “We couldn’t do that . . . How would we pay government employees?” “Fire your government employees.” “Oh, no!” Abolishing the income tax. Now that really would be a genuine economic stimulus. But Mr. Obama and the Democrats in Washington want to do the opposite: to raise the income tax “for purposes of fairness” as Barack Obama puts it. David Kelley, the president of the Atlas Society, which is dedicated to promoting Rand’s ideas, explains that “the older the book gets, the more timely its message.” He tells me that there are plans to make “Atlas Shrugged” into a major motion picture — it is the only classic novel of recent decades that was never made into a movie. “We don’t need to make a movie out of the book,” Mr. Kelley jokes. “We are living it right now.”
Oh God, if only! That John Galt is such a hunk! I’ll bet Stephen Moore goes to bed every night dreaming of being thrown over than man’s shoulder and ravished on a big pile of money.
While most people aren’t a puerile and transparent as Stephen Moore about their passion for macho capitalists, the fundamentals of Randism have been inculcated in the minds of far too many Americans. They’ve been hearing for years that the only truly efficient and moral organizing principles are to be found in business and that government should either be run like one or not exist at all. They don’t know what that means exactly, but after thirty years of hearing it, it just seems right.
Here’s some writing I did for the Big Con on the subject of Randian psychology and it’s a good idea to stay abrest of it now. It’s nearly impossible to believe that important thinkers with influence among influential elites could actually still believe this puerile drivel, but they do.
And here’s the proof. At the bottom of that piece, it says this:
Mr. Moore is senior economics writer for The Wall Street Journal editorial page..
Today happens to be the seventh anniversary of the opening of the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, which Scott Horton calls a “concentration camp.” And on this day, Barack Obama’s advisers are leaking that they will move to close it down by executive order immediately.
Advisers to President-elect Barack Obama say one of his first duties in office will be to order the closing of the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay.
That executive order is expected during Obama’s first week on the job — and possibly on his first day, according to two transition team advisers. Both spoke Monday on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Obama’s order will direct his administration to figure out what to do with the estimated 250 al-Qaida and Taliban suspects and potential witnesses who are being held at Guantanamo.
My first thought is that this is very strange. Yesterday on “This Week,” Obama said that it would be “more difficult than a lot of people realize” to close Gitmo. Now there’s this leak that it will be closed immediately. Perhaps they will order the closure while working out the more knotty issues at the same time.
Federal judges in Washington have ordered the release of at least 23 prisoners, ruling there were no grounds to detain them. Three were sent home to Bosnia last month.
About 200 other habeas corpus challenges are working their way through the courts.
However, experts say, political and legal will is not enough to surmount the complex diplomatic and security issues that must be resolved before the prison is closed: where to send those facing prosecution, whether a new court should be created to try them and what to do with those against whom the U.S. has little evidence but deep suspicions.
“The easy part is putting the detainees on a plane and flying them away. The hard part, and the part that is so important to get right, is the policy decisions,” said Rear Adm. David Thomas, commander of the prison and interrogation network.
There is a little more of that “limits of the imagination” stuff at work here. Other countries in Europe have offered to take some detainees. Consider what Anthony Romero, ACLU Executive Director, has said on this:
While the next steps might be politically charged and require courage, they are not fundamentally complicated. Each detainee’s case must be reviewed by the new Justice Department. If there is evidence of criminal conduct – and one would hope that, after all these years, the government with its vast resources in the Defense Department, the Justice Department, the CIA and FBI would have collected untainted evidence against those detainees it claims are dangerous or guilty — detainees should be prosecuted in our traditional courts, which are the best in the world and fully capable of handling sensitive national security issues without compromising fundamental rights. If there is not, detainees should be repatriated to countries that don’t practice torture. Fundamental and transformative change is neither incremental nor tentative.
I actually have fairly close ties to someone in the Justice Department working on what to do with the remaining Guantanamo detainees. There seems to be a lot of work here for a simple solution. We have had the debates over our justice system over 200 years. Those debates continue to an extent, but we have endlessly tried to perfect it so that they offer fair trials based on evidence without compromising civil liberties. There is simply no need to invent anything new. To the extent that “evidence” against detainees has been tainted because it was extracted through torture, that probably should have been considered before the torturing. Evidence obtained by torture is inadmissable in every civilized court in the world, and it would simply be unconstitutional to create a system that allowed it, not to mention distasteful. Glenn Greenwald has much more.
So in response, as it were, there’s this leak that Gitmo will be closed immediately. The question, then, is will it be closed, or will it be “closed,” pending some indefinite resolution sometime in the indefinite future.
There was a fairly amazing article in yesterday’s Washington Post that I think hits on many of the features of this newfound effort Digby’s been chronicling, to worry about the deficit and entitlements precisely at the moment when a Democratic President enters office facing a huge crisis requiring major public spending. The basic thrust of the story by David Brown, a doctor and science reporter, is that health care spending will inevitably expand forever, and there’s nothing we can do to control costs, and pretty soon we’re going to face a crossroads between wanting to live longer and healthier lives and being able to afford it. This was not in the opinion section. I guess it was in the opinion section. (RSS reader, you have failed me!!!)
This difficult truth, which has emerged over the past half-century, is leading the United States and the rest of the industrialized world into a new era of humankind […]
Last year, 16 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product went for health care, about $7,600 per person. In terms of human effort, health care is the new food. By 2016, when it reaches 20 percent of GDP, it will be the new shelter. If it grows at its present rate through the first three-quarters of this century, it will consume 38 percent of GDP by 2075. It will then be the new food and shelter.
This isn’t a mistake. If it were, we might have a chance of stopping it. It’s success — the way things are supposed to be, and the way we want them to be.
“At the end of the day, when it comes to controlling health care costs, the enemy is us,” said Drew Altman, head of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. “Americans want the latest and best in health care technology, and we want it down the street, and we want it now.”
It sounds so simple, doesn’t it? Americans greedily want to be healthy, and they demand the latest and greatest, and the costs skyrocket.
Now, nowhere in this analysis is any explanation of the method of delivery of the US health care system, and how its inefficiency may just be, I don’t know, the source of the problem. I’m trying to remember when I barged into a doctor’s office and insisted on an artificial heart because the guy down the street just got one. No, what happens is that I pay thousands of dollars in premiums to a for-profit insurer, and when I try to use my coverage, I barter with some customer service rep for hours on end trying to get them to sign off, and she gets paid along with a whole staff to keep treatment costs down, and her salary and the salary of the marketing team at the insurance company and the PR guys and the pharmaceutical reps bringing in free lunches for the doctors and the CEO’s private jet all fall under that big number of “health care spending.”
Also, health care spending grew at its lowest rate in a decade last year, mainly because the economy started slowing down, people started using CHEAPER generic drugs (I thought Americans wanted the best and they wanted it now?), and because of lower rates of growth for administrative costs in – wait for it – Medicare, the public not-for-profit alternative health care delivery system.
Now, it would be simply gauche to point out that the current health care delivery system sucks up all kinds of money for insurance industry profits and admin costs, and that the high cost of premiums force 47 million people to go without health care and use emergency rooms as their personal physician, jacking up costs prohibitively. That couldn’t possibly explain all that growth in spending.
Except consider the current series of health care bills before Congress, and recognize that the plan which would cover the most uninsured and the plan which save the most money are THE SAME PLAN. Matt Yglesias has the charts to prove it, from this Commonwealth Fund report. As Yglesias notes, because that DFH Pete Stark wrote the bill that combines reducing the most uninsured with saving the most money, it’s deeply unserious and outside the boundaries of conventional Beltway debate.
Stark’s is the best again. And yet there’s no chance whatsoever that we’ll actually do this because his plan, though the most practical, is also the most left-wing. Far too left-wing for the United States of America
Some folks, of course, will oppose the Stark plan because they’re right-wingers who don’t want to expand health care coverage. And some folks, will want to focus their energies on other, worse, plans because those plans have a better chance of passing. But what’s incredibly frustrating is that a lot of people who claim to want to change public policy to expand health care coverage and better control health care costs will nonetheless fail to embrace Stark’s plan or anything similar for no real reason other than ideological posturing. It just can’t be the case, as a matter of centrist dogma, that the best solution is actually the most left-wing solution. It’s a far more ideological stance than anything you’ll ever hear from Pete Stark or from me. But the people hewing to it will insist on being called pragmatists.
Pragmatists like David Brown, who says that we’re all going to have to live with the costs of better medical care and drugs, and if it costs too much to save someone’s life, well we just have to grapple with that Malthusian Spectre. It can’t possibly be that bringing America’s health care costs in line with every other industrialized nation on the planet would both help to fix the deficit and entitlement concerns AND deliver better quality and more affordable health care to every American.
That just cannot be. If it’s such a good idea, why wouldn’t we have thought of it by now?
This all reflects a very ideological problem, where the case for liberal government has either not been made or drowned out by the right for the past 40 years, and so the Very Serious People in Washington view that case as a pollyanna scenario. And in the exchange, we all suffer.
I wrote a post over the week-end that caused some angst around the blogosphere among some who believe that I’m dead wrong about the horror film IOUSA. I mostly discussed the political implications, which I believe are deadly for both the Democrats and the nation, and that is natrually a matter of opinion and subject to debate in good faith. However, there are extremely important economic reasons to dispute the premise and the facts presented in this film and thankfully Dean Baker and David Resnick have done so, point by point.(pdf) I urge anyone who is inclined to buy into the premise of the film, which is very persuasive and well produced, to read that report. I predict we are going to be fighting this one out with the entire village and it may just be the most important fight we wage.
The fundamental purpose of the shock doctrine is to use crisis to push through unpopular and unjust “solutions” that favor the wealthy. We are seeing this battle take shape on several fronts. The right is working feverishly to discredit the New Deal at the same time that outside groups of so-called elder statesmen are lining up to screech about the deficit and entitlements. All of this obscures the real source of the current problem and obstructs the president’s ability to do what’s necessary to solve it.
If Obama were to succeed in fixing the economy, re-regulating the financial system, enacting health care and a modern environmental and energy policy, the right would be discredited for a couple of generations — and the wealthy would lose many of their unfair advantages under a fair and equitable system. They not only do not want to take that chance, they also see this crisis as an opportunity to bury liberal economics and end the government programs that ensure a stable and prosperous society with a vast middle class. The stakes are huge for both sides.
Campaign For America’s Future is going to be keeping and eye on this issue as well, which is good. The CNN program over the week-end and the reference by Stephanopoulos about a “grand bargain” are all signs that conversations among elites are starting to head in this direction. Bloggers may or may not have any influence, but it certainly helps if beltway institutions engage the issue.
A few of us have noted that the ecnomic boys club seems to have a problem with women. (They aren’t good team players, dontcha know.) But if history is any guide, it’s just possible that the new Secretary of Labor, Hilda Solis, will use her position to school them:
When Franklin Delano Roosevelt, A.B. 1904, LL.D. ’29, asked Frances Perkins to be his secretary of labor in 1932, she drove a hard bargain: she would accept only if he would support her social-justice agenda. Perkins wanted federal relief and large-scale public-works programs to help victims of the Depression, along with federal minimum-wage and maximum-hours laws, a ban on child labor, and unemployment and old-age insurance. These were ambitious goals for the time, but Roosevelt agreed. “I suppose you are going to nag me about this forever,” he said. Perkins interpreted that response as an invitation. “He wanted his conscience kept for him by somebody,” she later said—and she was unusually well-qualified for the job.
Perkins was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, and attended Mount Holyoke, majoring in chemistry and physics. (After years of touring factories and poring over technical reports, she reflected once that science courses “temper the human spirit, harden and refine it, make it a tool with which one may tackle any kind of material.”) But it was a course in political economy that changed her life: sent into local mills to report on the lives of their workers, she realized that people could fall into poverty due to harsh circumstances, and not simply, as her conservative parents generally believed, because they were lazy or drank. After graduation, she defied her father and became a social reformer. She moved to Chicago, to help Jane Addams minister to immigrants in Hull House, and then to Philadelphia, where her social-work duties included hanging out at the docks, rescuing newly arriving immigrant women before they could be lured into prostitution. She next studied sociology and economics at Columbia and began working for the Consumers’ League, an influential reform group. On March 25, 1911, as she was having tea at a friend’s Greenwich Village townhouse, the butler mentioned a fire nearby. Perkins followed the sirens to the Triangle Shirtwaist factory inferno that killed 146 people, mostly immigrant women garment workers. That disaster “was a torch that lighted up the whole industrial scene,” she said later. As the Consumer League’s factory-safety expert, she worked closely with the two committees set up to develop new standards to prevent future workplace fires. In 1918, Al Smith, who had been vice chair of one committee, was elected governor of New York and named Perkins to a powerful state labor board. When FDR succeeded Smith in 1929, he named her industrial commissioner—head of the entire state labor department. Perkins was a strong advocate for working men and women, but had a light touch. Even “in her crusading days she never called names,” a prominent journalist observed, “marching to her goals with a gay, disarming amiability that won over many an opponent.” When the stock market crashed and unemployment climbed beyond 20 percent, Perkins became the driving force behind the governor’s Committee on Stabilization, which called for public-works programs because “The public conscience is not comfortable when good men anxious to work are unable to find employment.” And when, thanks in good measure to his state’s bold response to the Depression, FDR was elected president, he invited Perkins to join his cabinet. Women who had lobbied for the appointment begged her to become the first female cabinet member, but she hesitated, mainly because her husband, economist Paul Wilson, suffered from mental illness. Finally, with Roosevelt’s promise in hand, she agreed. Her role in the famous first 100 days has been underappreciated. She was the administration’s strongest advocate for a federal relief program to help people who were, literally, on the brink of starvation. Roosevelt charged her with finding a plan, and she brought him what became the Federal Emergency Relief Act, the first federal welfare program. But her greatest achievement was persuading Roosevelt to support large-scale public works. He was skeptical, but Perkins and several progressive senators convinced him such a program was necessary to provide work for the jobless and stimulate the economy. Before the Hundred Days ended, Roosevelt pushed a $3.3-billion program through Congress—as part of the National Industrial Recovery Act—that would evolve into larger efforts, notably the Works Progress Administration. Perkins also chaired the Committee on Economic Security, which developed the Social Security Act that became law in 1935, and helped secure passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act, in 1938, which set the first federal minimum wage and banned products made by child labor from interstate commerce—her final major achievement. She faced more than a few setbacks as well: the war shifted attention from labor issues, and congressional conservatives, judging her too soft on Communists in the labor movement, tried to impeach her. But Roosevelt stood by her. She was one of only two cabinet members who served throughout his presidency. In 1944, as that service was drawing to a close, a profile in Collier’s declared it “a major Washington mystery” that Perkins had “managed to hang onto her job….” Yet it also acknowledged that, 12 years after extracting FDR’s promise to support her social agenda, she had checked off every item. Despite her recent marginalization, it concluded: “what the country has been operating under…is not so much the Roosevelt New Deal as it is the Perkins New Deal.”
It’s sooo typical that it was some uppity woman who insisted that the government should help a bunch of losers. It sapped the gumption right out of the old people, children and unemployed to get out there and solve their own problems. No wonder the fine centrists and conservatives loathed her.
It is highly unlikely that Solis will have the kind of power and influence that Perkins had in Roosevelt’s cabinet. But it would be very helpful if someone with her sense of social justice and commitment to progressivism did.
Update: As it happens, the NY Times editorial board also talks about Perkins today.
“I’ll be honest with you. I don’t think journalists should be anywhere allowed war. I mean, you guys report where our troops are at. You report what’s happening day to day. You make a big deal out of it. I-I think it’s asinine. You know, I liked back in World War I and World War II when you’d go to the theater and you’d see your troops on, you know, the screen and everyone would be real excited and happy for’em. Now everyone’s got an opinion and wants to downer–and down soldiers. You know, American soldiers or Israeli soldiers. I think media should be abolished from, uh, you know, reporting. You know, war is hell. And if you’re gonna sit there and say, ‘Well look at this atrocity,’ well you don’t know the whole story behind it half the time, so I think the media should have no business in it.”
Yes, that’s the newest war correspondent from Pajamas Media, Joe the Plumber reporting from Israel. Can a FoxNews gig be far behind?
For the latest on Adam Green and his new Progressive Change Campaign Committee, read this diary at Daily Kos. This is exciting stuff and well worth getting involved with. Read the post for information on how to stay in touch with the campaign.
I’ve written before about the influence of uber-villagers like Stuart Taylor and how his noxious views on torture are likely to affect policy. And now we see the results of his handiwork. Yesterday, the Washington Postvomited up an egregiously one-sided pro-torture article in its news pages (effectively rebutted by Robert Parry, here.) Today, Taylor himself has a cover story on this week’s Newsweek called“What Would Dick Do?, expanding on his earlier views that the president simply must be at least a little bit of a torturer (or perhaps a torturer only part of the time) in order to keep the babies safe. And he’s joined by smarmy, super insider Evan Thomas in his assessment.
They are clearly appealing to every consensus seeking Democrat’s propensity to always seek some way to appease Republicans, no matter what the issue:
ONCE IN OFFICE, PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA MAY SEE THINGS CHENEY’S WAYOBAMA NOT LIKELY TO REVERSE BUSH AND CHENEY’S EFFORTS, BUT WILL TRY TO FIND A MIDDLE ROAD ON NATIONAL SECURITY POLICY
President-elect Barack Obama was elected partly to reverse Vice President Dick Cheney’s efforts to seize power for the White House in the war on terror, but it may not be so simple, and Obama may soon find some virtue in Cheney’s way of thinking. In the January 19 Newsweek cover, “What Would Dick Do?” (on newsstands Monday, January 12), Contributing Editor Stuart Taylor Jr. and Editor-At-Large Evan Thomas argue that reversing Cheney’s efforts in the war on terror and national security may leave the country in a weakened position.
In the view of many intelligence professionals, the get-tough measures encouraged or permitted by George W. Bush’s administration-including “waterboarding” self-proclaimed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed-kept America safe. Cheney himself has been underscoring the point in a round of farewell interviews. “If I had advice to give it would be, before you start to implement your campaign rhetoric, you need to sit down and find out precisely what it is we did and how we did it, because it is going to be vital to keeping the nation safe and secure in the years ahead,” he told CBS Radio.
Obama, who has been receiving intelligence briefings for weeks, is unlikely to wildly overcorrect for the Bush administration’s abuses. A very senior incoming official, who refused to be quoted discussing internal policy debates, indicated that the new administration will try to find a middle road that will protect civil liberties without leaving the nation defenseless. But Obama’s team has some strong critics of the old order, including his choice for director of the CIA, Leon Panetta, who has spoken out strongly against coercive interrogation methods. Obama’s administration would do well to listen to Jack Goldsmith, formerly a Bush Justice Department official. Goldsmith worries about the pendulum swinging too far, as it often does in American democracy. “The presidency has already been diminished in ways that would be hard to reverse” and may be losing its capability to fight terrorism, he says. Goldsmith argues that Americans should now be “less worried about an out-of-control presidency than an enfeebled one.”
Soon after taking office Obama will face some difficult choices, such as what to do about the detention of suspected terrorists such as Ali al-Marri, a Qatari graduate student who had legally entered the United States and settled in Peoria, Ill., with his wife and five children. He was seized in 2001 as a suspected terrorist-the long-feared Qaeda sleeper agent, sent to the United States to conduct a suicide attack when given the signal by his terrorist controllers. Al-Marri was charged with credit-card fraud and lying to the Feds, but the charges were dropped when he was put in military detention. His case has become a cause célèbre among civil libertarians, who argue that the government can’t just lock you up indefinitely on suspicion of terrorism. Obama must decide: Will he enrage many of his supporters by adopting Bush’s claim of sweeping power to grab legal residents-and perhaps even citizens-and jail them forever? Or will he let a possibly very dangerous man go, and thereby concede that any Qaeda terrorist who can get into the United States legally is free to roam the country unless (and until) he commits a crime? Both options would be political nightmares.
Dealing with the issue of torture will also be complicated. Waterboarding is a brutal interrogation method, but by some (disputed) accounts, it was CIA waterboarding that got Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to talk. It is a liberal shibboleth that torture doesn’t work-that suspects will say anything, including lies, to stop the pain. But the reality is perhaps less clear. Last summer, the U.S. Senate (with Obama absent) voted to require the CIA to use no interrogation methods other than those permitted in the Army Field Manual. These are extremely restrictive: strictly speaking, the interrogator cannot ever threaten bodily harm or even put a prisoner on cold rations until he talks. Bush vetoed this measure, not unwisely. As president, Obama may want to preserve some flexibility. Obama may want to urge Congress to outlaw “humiliating and degrading” treatment of prisoners. But he might also want to carve out an exception for extreme cases, outlining coercive methods, like sleep deprivation, that could be used on specified detainees. To provide political accountability, the president should be required to sign any such orders, share them with the congressional intelligence committees and publicly disclose their number.
They’ve just successfully moved the goalposts. We are now engaged in a battle to persuade Obama that he must unequivocally and publicly disavow what those two jaded, decadent sadists just suggested was necessary lest he risk Americans being killed. Good luck to us on that. Considering Obama’s propensity for consensus, I would guess that he will find some way to appease them. (Maybe he’ll vow to make sure that the torturers don’t enjoy it, as a sop to the liberal freaks.)
But I would suggest that Obama contemplate one little thing before he decides to try to find “middle ground” on torture. It is a trap. If he continues to torture in any way or even tacitly agrees to allow it in certain circumstances, the intelligence community will make sure it is leaked. They want protection from both parties and there is no better way to do it than to implicate Obama. And the result of that will be to destroy his foreign policy.
If the man who represents the second chance this country’s been given around the world to repudiate the horrors of the Bush years is revealed to have perpetuated the same horrors, his credibility and foreign policy will be in shambles. And there are many people buried in the intelligence and military establishments who would be happy to make sure that happens.
Obama said today on Stephanopoulos that he doesn’t want to look backwards but that Eric Holder could conceivably find something that must be prosecuted. (Good luck with those hearings, dude.) And he said that closing Guanatanamo was a difficult matter that would probably have to be dealt with by creating some new hybrid justice system. Of course, the Bush administration did that too with the military commissions, and they haven’t exactly worked out too well. But hey, the people languishing in Gitmo for years can wait a few more for the next shiny new justice system to be proven useless too. No hurry there.
As Greenwald discusses today, Obama is doing what all Democrats in my adult lifetime have always done — he is working as hard as he can to prove that he isn’t captive to his left. (You would think that the fact that the left is the law and order faction on this issue would at least make some of them scratch their heads.) And he seems to be doing a good job of it — even Pat Buchanan is effusive in his praise of Obama for making sure that everyone knows he isn’t “Reverend Wright’s man.”
But I’m not sure that’s what’s required right now. The nation is confused and scared about their economic security. They are embarrassed and angry at what the Republicans did. In fact, it seems that I heard somebody recently talking about how they desperately wanted … change. I guess that’s a word that’s open to interpretation, but it seems to me that it’s at least possible that they meant they wanted Obama to change the policies of the Bush administration.