Stupendous?
by digby
Or delusional?
"what digby sez..."
One Down
by digby
Monica Goodling’s BFF and prayer partner was a bad girl:
An independent federal investigation has determined that former U.S. Attorney Rachel Paulose retaliated against the No. 2 person in her Minneapolis office after he filed a complaint that she had mishandled classified materials.
The announcement by the Office of Special Counsel in Washington on Wednesday appeared to be a full vindication of John Marti, the first assistant U.S. attorney, who resigned his management position in 2007, along with two other top lawyers in the Minneapolis office.
Marti, who continues to work as an assistant U.S. attorney, reached a financial settlement with the Justice Department. Any negative references will be removed from his personnel records. He had filed a complaint under the Whistleblowers Protection Act.
The finding, by acting Special Counsel William Reukauf, caps two years of near-constant turmoil in the local U.S. attorney’s office over Paulose’s policies and management style. The contention pitted many of the office’s career attorneys and staff against Paulose, a political appointee of President Bush.
When the U.S. Senate approved her appointment in December 2006, Paulose, then 33, was the youngest U.S. attorney in the country and the first woman to hold the post in Minnesota. She resigned in November 2007 and was reassigned to a non-supervisory position in the Department of Legal Policy within the Justice Department in Washington, D.C.
Former U.S. Attorney Tom Heffelfinger said that complaints like Marti’s are rare and that the very strong public statement from the special counsel was also unusual. “The press release is not good news for Rachel Paulose because it is very critical of her conduct as U.S. attorney,” he said.
Remember this crazy shit?
Sorry
by digby
Blogger is bloggered, please excuse us. If you want to comment on dday’s post, post on the one right below this one. We’ll delete the repeats as soon as blogger is fixed.
Annals Of Privatization
by dday
Conservative dogma states that private enterprise and contractors accomplish basic services more efficiently and professionally than nasty ol’ big government. This happens through crackerjack tactics like holding workers like slaves in windowless warehouses.
Najlaa International Catering Services, a subcontractor to KBR, an engineering, construction and services company, hired the men, who’re from India, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. On Tuesday, they staged a march outside their compound to protest their living conditions.
“It’s really dirty,” a Sri Lankan man told McClatchy, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he still wants to work for Najlaa. “For all of us, there are about 12 toilets and about 10 bathrooms. The food — it’s three half-liter (one pint) bottles of water a day. Bread, cheese and jam for breakfast. Lunch is a small piece of meat, potato and rice. Dinner is rice and dal, but it’s not dal,” he said, referring to the Indian lentil dish.
After McClatchy began asking questions about the men on Tuesday, the Kuwaiti contractor announced that it would return them to their home countries and pay them back salaries. Najlaa officials contended that they’ve cared for the men’s basic needs while the company has tried to find them jobs in Iraq.
Now sure, you could say that slavery is just the price we pay for efficiency and the best in service and quality. And you would be right. Because without keeping costs down by enslaving workers, contractors wouldn’t be able to provide ice with human remains in it to the troops so quickly and crisply.
The lawsuit also accuses KBR of shipping ice in mortuary trucks that “still had traces of body fluids and putrefied remains in them when they were loaded with ice. This ice was served to U.S. forces.”
Eller also accuses KBR of failing to maintain a medical incinerator at Joint Base Balad, which has been confirmed by two surgeons in interviews with Military Times about the Balad burn pit. Instead, according to the lawsuit and the physicians, medical waste, such as needles, amputated body parts and bloody bandages were burned in the open-air pit.
“Wild dogs in the area raided the burn pit and carried off human remains,” the lawsuit states. “The wild dogs could be seen roaming the base with body parts in their mouths, to the great distress of the U.S. forces.”
I suppose you could provide bodily-fluid free ice to US forces, if you wanted to increase the size of government to outrageous degrees. Or you could believe in the shining glory that is private enterprise and the free market.
Here endeth the lesson.
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Hippie Punch Of The Day
by digby
Howie Klein reports that the village is suddenly getting very, very nervous that crazy, freaked out weirdos might get important committee assignments:
[Y]esterday’s CongressDaily featured a long post on the ins and outs of finding the right successor for Rangel. Do you recall any of the Inside the Beltway types viewing a Republican appointee to any job thru the lenses of how that person might be accepted by working families or by organized labor? Or did I miss the issue where CongressDaily suggested that Elaine Chao might be the world’s absolute worst Labor Secretary because she loathes working people and doesn’t recognize their aspirations as legitimate or worthy of her attention?
Did anyone ever question whether one of Congress’ biggest corporate shills on environmental issues, Dirty Dick Pombo, would be unqualified to be Chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee because he was unanimously loathed by every single environmental group in the country? And what about that issue of CongressDaily– or any other daily– that pointed out that maybe Joe Barton (R-TX) shouldn’t be chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce because the $1,315,660 in legalized reported bribes he’s taken from Big Oil over the years is far more than any other member of the House, more even than notorious Big Oil puppets like Don Young (R-AK- $964,763), Steve Pearce (R-NM- $804,815), Tom Delay (R-TX- $688,840), and Pete Sessions (R-TX- $582,264), and that all the green energy groups feel that Barton is an integral part of the energy problem in our country and decidedly not part of the solution? No, I must have missed it too.
But yesterday CongressDaily was dismissing Democrats on the Ways and Means Committee in line to follow Rangel– should he decide to… spend more time with his family or need to spend more time in the court system– because they are– Heaven Forbid!– too liberal. Or too intellectual. Or not in the pocket of Bug Business lobbyists. And That Will Not Due in Companytown, DC.
Next in seniority to Rangel is Ways and Means Health Subcommittee Chairman Fortney (Pete) Stark, D-Calif., who is given virtually no chance. “The conventional wisdom is he would have a tough time getting elected chairman,” said a Democrat close to leadership. From suggesting Republicans were sending troops to Iraq to die “for the president’s amusement” to referring to a former GOP lawmaker as a “little fruitcake,” Stark is prone to gaffes, sources said. “The guy behind [Rangel] is just not tenable. Republicans would have a field day,” an industry lobbyist said, while noting the business community would “go nuclear. It would just be open warfare.” A more viable pick might be Ways and Means Trade Subcommittee Chairman Sander Levin, D-Mich., who is next in seniority, although sources cautioned the cerebral Levin may be too deliberate for the high-profile job. Levin also appears to relish his duties at the helm of the trade panel. He is also seen as very much in tune with the labor movement, although industry sources said Levin was someone they could work with, as opposed to Stark. Also, the Democratic Caucus still largely respects the seniority system, the Democratic strategist said. “If you make the decision that Stark is too out there, then I don’t see how you go over Sandy,” he said. “He’s been a loyal member, and nobody would doubt he’s got the intellectual and legislative expertise for the job.”
Next is Income Security and Family Support Subcommittee Chairman Jim McDermott, D-Wash., who is seen as a bit more of a pragmatist than Stark but still in the too-liberal category. He also is a highly partisan figure, and sources said there was generally little reason to reach down the seniority list to tap McDermott.
It’s good to know the “business community” still has its veto power in the congress. I was worried they’d lose their clout with all the change going on. But maybe, just to be safe, the Democrats should just give the job to a Republican so there’s no misunderstanding.
Here’s an example of the kind of choice the political establishment approves of with no problem. He was chairman of the Senate Energy Committee at the time he said this:
INHOFE: Now look, God’s still up there. We still have these natural changes, and this is what’s going on right now. New science comes out. I had a news conference yesterday, Brian, and the reason I did is because we were going to go over to Nairobi, take a bunch of scientists to get the true science over there, only to find out that the registration had dropped off. Almost no media was over there. So we had the same news conference yesterday right here in Washington, D.C.
We had all these scientists and all of them came to the conclusion, yes, part of the globe is warming. Let’s keep in mind, now, the southern hemisphere has never been warming and changing in the last 25 years. The last time I checked that’s part of the globe.
But if the northern hemisphere is warming up, it’s not due to manmade gases. And that’s what these people all come to the conclusion. And yet the other side, the far left, the George Soros, the Hollywood elitists, the far left environmentalists on the committee that I chair — all of them want us to believe the science is settled and it’s not.
By the way, there’s all kinds of new things. Gretchen, you’ll enjoy this. Get your violin out and get ready. They came out with a great discovery just a few weeks ago. And this came from the geophysical research letters and you know what they said? Hold on now! They said the warming is due to the sun. Isn’t that remarkable?
Of course, he’s a Real American rather than a dirty hippie so he represents the beliefs of people who matter. (And needless to say, the business community felt no need to “go nuclear.”)
I don’t think I’d be as angry about this double standard if “Democratic strategists” wouldn’t publicly (and anonymously) support it. But they need to maintain their credibility, I guess, and the simplest way to do that, as dday says, is to punch a hippie.
Update: Stoller has more.
They Work Hard For The Money
by dday
So after driving to Capitol Hill this time, the heads of the Big 3 auto companies are due for their ritual stoning in front of Congress today, as they continue to prostate themselves and beg for funding to keep them alive. This time, they came prepared with plans for viability, and the promises are wide and deep. The three top executives will lower their salary to $1. They’ll cut product lines and consolidate operations. They’ll work on comprehensive health care reform, fair trade and even producing more fuel efficient cars, though many like Robert Reich are skeptical about that last offer, especially considering that gas has fallen back to under $2 a gallon and demand for bigger vehicles and SUVs may be creeping back up. I’ve read that getting the real junkers off the road and replacing them with even moderately efficient cars saves a lot more gas than getting everyone in an economical car into a Prius, so incentives for trading in those cars on the low end would actually be the best policy, and Ford has suggested that as well.
Even the UAW is offering concessions in return for the loans, which flies in the face of conservative propaganda about fat-cat unions destroying the industry (which makes sense, because, you know, without the industry, there is no union):
The United Auto Workers said Wednesday it is willing to change its contracts with U.S. automakers and accept delayed payments of billions of dollars to a union-run health care trust to do its part to help the struggling companies secure $34 billion in government loans.
United Auto Workers President Ron Gettelfinger said the union will suspend the jobs bank, in which laid-off workers are paid up to 95 percent of their salaries while not working, but he did not give specifics or a timetable of when the program will end.
“We’re going to sit down and work out the mechanics,” Gettelfinger said at a news conference after meeting with local union officials. “We’re a little unclear on some of the issues.”
In truth, the union contracts are not a problem, it’s the fact that a country without high wages and benefits and free healthcare is competing with a bunch of countries that have all that, and hopefully we’ll see people finally understand that fact. And by the way, this is on top of UAW restructuring from 2007 that lowered the wage structure under even nonunion auto plants in the South and transfered responsibility for the pension plan to the union as well. So this is not the first time the UAW has lent a hand.
GM and Chrysler are even considering a pre-arranged bankruptcy in exchange for bailout money, to reorganize the entire sector.
My point is that the auto companies are bending over backwards for an accommodation with Congress, all for a mere fraction of what Emperor Paulson has spent on the TARP program without hardly any oversight at all. And yet the votes still aren’t there, at the moment.
One day after the auto companies sent survival plans to Capitol Hill in an urgent plea for bailout billions from the fund, Sen. Harry Reid told The Associated Press in an interview, “I just don’t think we have the votes to do that now.”
I don’t think the automakers are saints or anything. They’re still spending a fortune on lobbying and campaign contributions. And Ford wants Congress to block California’s plan to regulate tailpipe emissions, saying that there ought to be one national standard (and it should be California’s – 16 states have signaled they would adopt it, and it is completely in government’s interest and mandate to reduce greenhouse gas emissions). But this really shows how completely in bed Congress is with the financial industry. The CEO of Citigroup didn’t have to agree to take $1 in salary. The head of Goldman Sachs didn’t have to drive to Washington. Nobody on Wall Street had to agree to major reregulation as a precondition for a bailout.
An auto industry bailout is unpopular, but so was the financial bailout. But that didn’t stop lawmakers from taking seriously the threats of depression if the banks didn’t get practically no-strings-attached money. Automakers are also playing up fears of serious economic collapse but lawmakers seem less concerned.
I think one difference here is that Congress actually understands how auto companies make money, while they can’t fathom the financial industry’s complex arrangements, and tend to just trust the “very serious people” that the banks need hundreds of billions to survive. Also, if Detroit contributes to campaigns, Wall Street bankrolls them. And there’s the skillful PR campaign from the right that the carmakers’ struggles are all the fault of the unions, when that doesn’t come into play with the financial industry.
It’s still pretty shameful that an industry that pushes paper back and forth and pretends to create wealth can ask for and receive hundreds of billions of dollars by snapping their fingers, while companies representing working people that make things for a living have to grovel and beg. A deindustrialized America is an America that will not function as a first-rate power in the future.
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Junk Morals
by digby
No high-quality study done to date can document that having an abortion causes psychological distress, or a “post-abortion syndrome,” and efforts to show it does occur appear to be politically motivated, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.
A team at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore reviewed 21 studies involving more than 150,000 women and found the high-quality studies showed no significant differences in long-term mental health between women who choose to abort a pregnancy and others.
“The best research does not support the existence of a ‘post-abortion syndrome’ similar to post-traumatic stress disorder,” Dr. Robert Blum, who led the study published in the journal Contraception, said in a statement.
“Based on the best available evidence, emotional harm should not be a factor in abortion policy. If the goal is to help women, program and policy decisions should not distort science to advance political agendas,” added Vignetta Charles, a researcher and doctoral student at Johns Hopkins who worked on the study.
An estimated 1.29 million American women get elective abortions each year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. An estimated 25 million women globally have legal abortions every year.
And they’re all dizzy broads who have no idea what they’re doing.
Aside from the annoyance of having to argue with mendacious zealots, there has been a real world effect of this junk science:
“The U.S. Supreme Court, while noting that ‘we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon,’ cited adverse mental health outcomes for women as part of the rationale for limiting late term abortions,” Blum’s team wrote.
The anti-choice movement believes that abortion is morally wrong. But they also believe it is moral to lie, cheat and sometimes kill to stop it. I’m sure they would say that the latter is the lesser of evils — they are only doing it to stop the killing of innocent children. But you have have to wonder where on the moral matrix they really fit when they are willing to create a mental illness where none exists and attempt to pin it on millions of women who made the choice to have an abortion. There is premeditated evil in that.
Update: Apparently, millions of Christian believers who don’t agree that contraception and abortion are morally wrong are also waging a war on Christmas.
On Not Using Corporate-Created Buzzwords, Part II
by dday
Wow, when I wrote this brief yesterday about the dangers of clean coal, I honestly had no idea that an entire campaign was being readied by Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection, the Sierra Club, The League of Conservation Voters, the NRDC and several other enviro groups, in a coalition they call The Reality Campaign. Their first TV ad is sharp and to the point.
There are some solid quotes in their press release:
“The reality is that there’s not a single home or business in America today powered by clean coal,” said Brian Hardwick of the Alliance for Climate Protection. “If coal really wants to be part of America’s energy future, the industry can start by making a real commitment to eliminating their pollution that is a leading cause of global warming.”
Hardwick continued: “It is high time for the coal industry to come clean and admit to the American people that today clean coal is not a reality. No matter how much they say it in their advertising, coal can’t truly be clean until the plants can capture global warming pollution. With so much at stake, we can’t afford to hang our hats on an illusion.”
While the single-issue enviro groups haven’t been entirely effective, on coal they have started to get it, with the Sierra Club’s legal team winning a major recent ruling at the EPA making it virtually impossible for them to approve new coal-fired power plants. This ad campaign goes after the court of public opinion, and pushes back on the pervasive use of “clean coal.” The coal industry sponsored every single debate on CNN this election season. We can no longer allow these poisonous, PR-friendly phrases to be injected into the discourse without serious pushback.
You can sign up to help The Reality Campaign at their website.
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Throwing Bullets
by digby
Your daily taser death:
A man has died in police custody today after being shocked by police Tasers, city officials said.
Officers responded to Highland and Jefferson avenues in Peaselburg neighborhood about 11 a.m. to a report of a man with a gun, Covington police Lt. Col. Spike Jones said. The initial report over police radio was that a man had put a gun into his pocket.
When confronted by at least three officers, the man refused to follow their orders, Jones said. The man became combative and started throwing things at the officers, he said. One of the things thrown was a box of bullets, Jones said.
Officers then fired Tasers at the man during the struggle to arrest him, he said.
“The officers then became very fearful for their safety,” Covington Fraternal Order of Police president Chris Gangwish said. “They deployed Tasers to try to gain control of the individual. Fortunately, the officers had the necessary means to subdue the subject although (the Tasers) were not completely effective in and of themselves.”
The man pulled the electrical probes out of his body to stop the shock, Gangwish said.
At some point during the struggle, the suspect began having “physical difficulties,” Jones said. An ambulance was called transported the man to St. Elizabeth Medical Center in Covington. Jones said medics were unable to revive the man after he stopped breathing.
“We are extremely thankful that none of our officers were injured,” Gangwish said. “Unfortunately following the arrest, the individual died.”
It’s a good thing they didn’t have to use lethal force.
Read the whole article for a rundown of other taser incidents in the area.
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41% Solution
by digby
Todd Beaton catches the latest so-called evidence for center-rightism —Chambliss’ win:
On AC360 earlier David Gergen declared:
I think this actually puts a lot more pressure on Barack Obama to govern much more from the center and not from the left. He is going to need Republicans now, he is going to need a bipartisan approach…
Right, a 41 vote minority should by all means have Barack Obama shaking in his boots. I wonder if Gergen said something similar about Republicans on Nov. 4th, perhaps something like…
I think the fact that Barack Obama won 53% of the vote tonight and that Democrats will have won at least 7 more seats in the Senate and 20 more seats in the House puts a lot more pressure on Republicans to govern much more from the center and not from the right.
Oh, he didn’t? Ya don’t say…
In fact, Gergen said something quite interesting about all this after Bush’s (much closer) victory in 2004:
“From beginning to end, this election was about George W Bush, and he can claim that an apparently insurmountable lead in the popular vote vindicated his policies, his persistence, his personal qualities and his political strategy,” wrote Todd S Purdum in the New York Times.
In the Washington Post, John Harris wrote: “George W Bush’s presidency – its governance and its politics – was organised from the outset with an unwavering eye on keeping the conservative base of the Republican Party intact, energised and loyal.”
And exit polls showed that morality and values were the issues motivating President Bush’s core conservative supporters.
“This was not about a difference of policies but a difference over values,” said David Gergen on CNN.
And he said that disagreement on social issues such as gay marriage might lead to division in the country and a sense of alienation for John Kerry’s supporters.
For Democrats, “there will be a sense of isolation from the majority. A feeling of ‘is this the country that we thought it was’?” Mr Gergen said.
Right. But Saxby Chambliss keeping the Democrats from having a 60 seat majority means that the Republicans must be accommodated.
Todd puts it very well:
Gergen’s refusal to put the burden on the Republicans to be cooperative and “centrist” rather than the Democrats is really a symptom of the persistent beltway “center right nation” conventional wisdom, which always puts the burden on Democrats to be the centrist ones since the Republican Party, so goes the logic, is where the people already are.
This is why people like me are chafing at all the bipartisan chatter, which does nothing to change that perception. Indeed, it feeds into it.
And until that default rightist mentality is changed, nothing changes over the long term. Sure, the country will hire Democrats to come in and clean up conservative messes from time to time, but they won’t ever realize that the party that is identified as the center-left is actually the majority unless someone claims it. The result will be that when the smoke has cleared the country will reflexively want to go back to “normal” by electing Republicans, the true representatives of our naturally center-right country.
I don’t expect national politicians to take on labels that have been made toxic by their enemies. But I think it is very shortsighted to continually reinforce these destructive themes and use their own base as a convenient foil. All they do is plant the seeds of their own obsolescence once the country has forgotten what they didn’t like about their last rightwing president.
Progressivism needs progressive rhetoric to match policy if it wants to be around long enough to make a real impact. If Democrats make things better without making it clear that their ideology (I know that’s a bad word) is superior, the country will simply continue to treat politics like entertainment and vote for whoever puts on the best show and makes them feel good about themselves at a particular time, irrespective of their policies. It would be foolish to think the Republicans will never again be able to compete in that arena. They have shown themselves to be very adept at that kind of politics.
Now, if their ideas could be so discredited that nobody wants to ever be associated with them again it wouldn’t matter if they ran the reanimated Elvis, nobody would want to vote for them. But that’s not going to happen if progressives believe that it doesn’t matter if our politicians distance themselves from progressivism simply because it’s easier than challenging the myth that the country is center-right.
This is a two party country. You can say you aren’t “ideological” and that you are a pragmatist, as Obama does, but polarity is the norm. This isn’t just semantics — it matters in a very prosaic, practical way if the country identifies itself with the party that has staked out the conservative side of the line. You can see from the two different responses to presidential victories by Gergen how that plays itself out politically.
There’s a reason why armies wear identifiable uniforms and it’s so their own fellows will recognize them.