Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Red Flags

by digby

In the Plame hearings this morning Chris Van Hollen asked Victoria Toensing the question I have been waiting for somebody to ask these hypocritical Scooter Girls for a long time:

Van Hollen: Do you think White House officials have any obigation at all — put aside the techinical legal obligation — as stewards of our national security — when they find out that someone works for the Central Intelligence Agency, do you think they have any obligation to the citizens of this country to find out before telling the press about it, whether that disclosure would compromise sensitive information? As citizens ofthis country, wouldn’t you want that to be the standard?

Toensing: I think the press secretary should always tell what’s accurate so…

Van Hollen: I’m sorry?

Toensing: A press secretary should always tell what’s accurate, I have no problem with that.

Van Hollen: But before somebody goes around saying this person’s works for the CIA, in a kind of cavalier manner, and an obviously intentional manner, to try and spread this information, you said, don’t you think they have an obligation to the citizens of this country to make some determination —this was, we’re talking about the Iraq war, the decision to go to war, whether or not Saddam was trying to get nuclear weapons material.

Before they disclose the identity of somebody who works in the nucelar non-proliferation area of the CIA, don’t you think they have some obligation to demonstrate the good judgment to find out if that would disclose sensitive information?

Toensing: Uhm..well..could be, but I don’t particularly think that, uh, a red flag would go off because those of us who work in government all the time know people who work at the CIA…

I hope every covert or classified employee of the CIA takes notice. The Republicans don’t feel there’s any need for red flags to naturally go up even in the highest reaches of the White House when it’s proposed that somebody leak the name of a CIA employee who works on WMD. After all, people in government are apparently babbling to anyone who’ll listen about this stuff all the time. Good to know. I’d watch my back.

And I hope Americans will remember this when they hear the inevitable GOP caterwauling and rending of garments about leaking of classified information and national security the next time somebody leaks to the newspapers. People in government talk about people in the CIA (and I presume all other government departments) all the time so no red flags go up when they are talking to reporters about potentially sensitive information. Why should it? It didn’t even occur to the White House to double check to make sure that they weren’t giving away classified info when they used CIA agents as weapons against their political enemies.

This is the principle thing I think was lost in all this. Let’s suppose that everything the Scooter girls have been saying is true and that nobody was trying to out a CIA operative and that she wasn’t legally covert and that it was just politics as usual. Even if all that were true, which it isn’t, they would still be culpable for having the exceedingly poor judgement to casually bandy about the name of a CIA employee without checking to see what she might be working on and whether it was a good idea to publicize her name.

There is simply no excuse for outing this CIA agent, whether it was legal or not. This was the Bush Administration, the people who are allegedly fanatical about national security and who are so secretive that we can’t even know who works for the Vice President’s office. Yet, they apparently just cavalierly dropped this woman’s name to several reporters and Victoria Toensing wants us to believe that this is perfectly reasonable. I realize she’s playing with a bad hand, but this little performance was a stretch even for her. (You could practically see the gears of her brain seizing up while she played for time with that non-sequiter about the press secretary.)

This hearing was designed to show that the White House leaked classified information and nobody paid a price for doing that despite the fact that many others in government have paid significantly. It’s impossible to defend what they did, even if it was just an honest oversight. This is the White House and the CIA and weapons of mass destruction we are talking about. But as we’ve learned these past six years, there really is no limit to how much the Bush administration can screw things up and there is no limit to the dishonesty and hypocrisy of Republicans in defending it.

Toensing’s testimony was extremely difficult to listen to. She is an arrogant gorgon and lies as easily as she breathes. Waxman even said at the end that he knows her testimony was inaccurate and that he was going to leave the record open to correct all of her misstatements.

I love you Henry.

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Tacit Approval To Let The Decider Decide On Iran

by poputonian

Around blogland there has been some backslapping and high-fiving by establishment Democrats who are proud of the House’s Iraq spending legislation. Apparently, these high-fivers believe the Cheney-Bush administration is trustworthy, that they will voluntarily handcuff themselves by virtue of their consummate sensibilities on matters of war and peace. Others don’t quite see it that way. Here’s John Nichols writing in The Nation:

… the decision by Pelosi and her allies to rewrite their Iraq legislation to exclude the statement regarding the need for congressional approval of any military assault on the neighboring country of Iran sends the worst possible signal to the White House.
…
It is not too much to suggest that Pelosi’s disastrous misstep could haunt her and the Congress for years to come.

Here’s how the Speaker messed up:

The Democratic proposal for a timeline to withdraw troops from Iraq included a provision that would have required President Bush to seek congressional approval before using military force in Iran. It was an entirely appropriate piece of the Iraq proposal, as the past experiences of U.S. involvement in southeast Asia and Latin America has well illustrated that when wars bleed across borders it becomes significantly more difficult to end them. Thus, fears about the prospect that Bush might attack Iran are legitimately related to the debate about how and when to end the occupation of Iraq.

Unfortunately, Pelosi is so desperate to advance her flawed spending legislation that she is willing to bargain with any Democrat about any part of the proposal.

Under pressure from some conservative members of her caucus, and from lobbyists associated with neoconservative groupings that want war with Iran and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s (AIPAC), Pelosi agreed on Monday to strip the Iran provision from the spending bill that has become the House leadership’s primary vehicle for challenging the administration’s policies in the region.

One of the chief advocates for eliminating the Iran provision, Nevada Democrat Shelley Berkley, said she wanted it out of the legislation because she wants to maintain the threat of U.S. military action as a tool in seeking to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. “It would take away perhaps the most important negotiating tool that the U.S. has when it comes to Iran,” explained Berkley.

The problem with Berkley’s “reasoning” — if it can be called that — is this: Nothing in the provision that had been included in the spending bill would have prevented Bush from threatening Iran. Nothing in the provision would have prevented war with Iran. It merely reminded the president that, before launching such an attack, he would need to obey the Constitutional requirement that he seek a declaration of war.

I think Nichols has it right. There is greater likelihood the war-makers will interpret the change in language as tacit agreement that it is the Decider who decides:

By first including the provision and then removing it, Pelosi and her aides have given Bush more of an opening to claim that he does not require Congressional approval.

Again and again, the Bush administration has seized any and every opening to claim powers that were never accorded the executive branch by the Constitution or the Congress. Remember that this administration has sought to justify a massive, unregulated domestic spying program by claiming authority under narrow legislation that was passed permitting the president to respond to the September 11, 2OO1, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Never mind that no mention of such spying was included in the 2OO1 legislation; the fact that it was not explicitly barred gave the administration all the room it required to claim the power to disregard the Constitution and the rule of law.

By stripping the Iran provision from the legislation that is now under consideration by Congress, Pelosi has handed Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney — no believer he is [in] the separation of powers — exactly what they want. They can and will say that, when the question of whether Congress should require the administration to seek Congressional approval for an attack on Iran, Pelosi chose not to pursue the matter.

Anyone who thinks that Bush and Cheney will fail to exploit this profound misstep by Pelosi has not been paying attention for the past six years. The speaker has erred, dramatically and dangerously.

Dennis Kucinich apparently agrees with this; he made these remarks on the House floor yesterday:

This week the House Appropriations committee removed language from the Iraq war funding bill requiring the Administration, under Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11 of the Constitution, to seek permission before it launched an attack against Iran.
…
This House cannot avoid its Constitutionally authorized responsibility to restrain the abuse of Executive power.
…
The Administration has been preparing for an aggressive war against Iran. There is no solid, direct evidence that Iran has the intention of attacking the United States or its allies.

Kucinich then added this very important sentiment, hopefully edging us closer to an impeachment reality:

Since war with Iran is an option of this Administration and since such war is patently illegal, then impeachment may well be the only remedy which remains to stop a war of aggression against Iran.

Kucinich made other important remarks yesterday, which I’ve partially transcribed:

Congress is on the threshold of a momentous decision. If Congress continues to fund the war, the President will have enough money not only to carry the war to the end of his term, but he will also have money that could be used to attack Iran. This is something that I know has united everyone here. I have long been in contact with people from all over the region — ambassadors, people at the level of national leaders, their cabinets and secretaries, people at the UN — and it’s across the board, that people of the world agree that an attack on Iran has the potential to precipitate not just a catastrophe but a cataclysm.

Today, I had the opportunity to speak with a friend of mine who is a high ranking official with the Israeli government and this is what he told me, he said, “We really don’t have an interest in attacking Iran.” But I told him that you have to understand that your supporters here in this country are sending cues to members of Congress and to people in the administration which indicate that you favor such an attack.

In his comments, Kucinich follows the above remarks with a thumbnail sketch of administration maneuverings with regard to Iran. He goes back to the Hersh articles and forward to the Administration’s claims about the IEDs. He then talks of the grave danger that results from removing the important and constraining language, as noted above, from the Iraq spending bill. In response, Kucinich is trying to force an opening up of the language in the provision, to restore its teeth and to eliminate the ambiguity that might result from its removal.

Kudos to Kucinich, both for the nudge toward impeachment, but also for his dedication and desire to put the brakes on the Administration’s latitude to make war with Iran.

http://www.kucinich.us/

Save Some Time Henry

by digby

I don’t know if looseheadprop and Marcy Wheeler and CHS have the time, but if they do, Henry Waxman should hire them as consultants on the Plame hearings. There is no substitute for their deep understanding of the evidence or the law on this case.

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Desperately Trying To Be Right

by digby

Matt Yglesias points us to an article by Michael Hirsch in the Washington Monthly which at least partially makes the point that the new 9/11 boogeyman did not, in fact, require that we completely overhaul our foreign policy. Indeed, it would seem that many of the old ideas would have worked quite well if bush had had the wherewithall to actually use them. It’s an interesting read.

Yglesias makes this further point:

This is not to deny that pre-Bush US foreign policy entailed, over the decades, some very serious pragmatic and moral flaws. I think it used to be the case, however, that the main elements of US strategy were basically sound, and presidents sometimes made bad decisions. Bush has turned things on their head and adopted a fundamentally flawed strategy from which he occassionally deviates by doing non-catastrophic things. In particular, it’s as if Bush ransacked post-WWII history looking for the areas where American policy has been at its worst — Indochina and Central America — and decided to apply the animating spirit of those errors across the board.

This is because the people who have been advising Bush since 9/11 are the same people (or their intellectual heirs) who were the drivers behind those earlier bad decisions. Their defining characteristic, in fact, is that they have always been wrong about everything and they never, ever learn anything from their experience.

It is also the case that their animating principle in the first few years of the administration was to do the exact opposite of Clinton in all things. It was a simple, easy to remember formula (for simple, forgetful people) that unfortunately led them to reject long-standing, bipartisan foreign policy along with everything else. When you combined the neocon and harcore hawk track records with a mandate to reject anything that Bill Clinton might have endorsed, you ended up with the hacktacular mishmash of sophomoric chest thumping, mindless military actions and conscious rejection all mutual understanding with our allies. It was an amazing thing to watch and I’m not sure we have enough distance from it yet to even begin to understand the full dimension of the errors that ensued.

Also, you really can’t discuss these people and their repeated bad decisons without mentioning the running battles with the CIA over the years. The Dick and Don Team B show, in particular, had overestimated the Soviet threat so many times in the past that the fact that anyone listened to a word they said is a testament to the sheer will of their personalities. When you come right down to it, this all goes back to the credibility issue we have discussed ad nauseum. It’s true that making the wrong call about Iraq does not destroy one’s credibility in one go and I certainly hope that most of the liberals who made that call will not develop an entire worldview based on vindicating that one wrong decision.

The people who were flogging Iraq for the past decade or so had all been proven wrong many, many times before. I frankly couldn’t believe it when the Team B people were screaming that the sky was falling again, based on transparently flimsy evidence, and people were actually believing them. That is why there is an obvious danger in allowing people who are wrong over and over again to have privileged access to the informed discourse when big decisions are being made. In the heat of the moment people forget that these people are always wrong about everything.

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They Heart Huckelberry

by digby

This irks the hell out of me. Media Matters did another study highlighting how the Sunday news shows (other than This Week) continue to feature far more conservatives than liberals, even since the election when the Democrats took control of the congress. The Sunday shows are refusing to address the issue or are snide and dismissive in spite of the study’s data proving that they favor the GOP.

Here’s an example from the producer of Face the Nation:

Responding to Media Matters’ finding that Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham (SC) appeared on her show nine times in 2005 and 2006, Pratt said: “We love Graham. He’s a great guy.” But more notably, Pratt suggested that ideology and balance are irrelevant when it comes to hosting administration officials, many of whom appear on Face the Nation without being countered by someone from the opposite side of the political aisle: “It doesn’t matter whether Secretary [of State Condoleezza] Rice is a conservative or a liberal,” Pratt said. “She’s the secretary of state.” For viewers, the result of Pratt’s position is to be denied the informed views of a guest countering the administration’s message. Pratt’s comments suggest that she believes it is appropriate for the program she produces to consistently offer the government, but not those who may disagree with it, access to the airwaves, and to host more Republicans than Democrats overall.

David Brock writes at Kos and MYDD today:

Thousands have taken action on our site – www.sundayshowreport.com – agreeing to stand up to the imbalanced debate occurring every Sunday morning on the influential network political talk shows. That number is growing by the hour. The Sunday morning shows are not as eager to respond. Media Matters has yet to hear directly from the Sunday shows or the networks. Even the press is getting the cold shoulder, with some reports claiming “[r]epresentatives for Meet the Press and Face the Nation would not comment on the report’s findings” and others claiming the networks are dismissing Media Matters’ findings. Providing equitable access to progressive points of view is critical for the future of our national debate. That’s why we need your help today. You, and people like you, can make the networks hear the truth and get us one step closer to fair and equitable coverage on the Sunday shows. Please click here to view Media Matters for America’s new report and take action. Together, we can force these influential shows to respond and make the necessary changes we seek.

Do it. This is ridiculous.

Solutions

by digby

Uncle Alan had some interesting things to say today. I think I like this most of all:

He said it was critical to find ways to address growing income inequality in the United States.

Income inequality “is where the capitalist system is most vulnerable,” Greenspan said. “You can’t have the capitalist system if an increasing number of people think it is unjust.”

So true, so true. So, how does Uncle Alan propose to fix the problem?

The former Fed chief said that increasing the number of immigrants with sought-after skills would increase the labor supply of these workers in the United States and hold down the wage gains of all workers with these skills.

In that way, Greenspan said, the gap between skilled and unskilled workers would be lowered.

The key to making Americans happy with capitalism is to hold down all their wages, not just some of them. Is this a great country, or what?

Uncle Alan shared some other thoughts:

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said he expects the fallout from subprime-mortgage defaults to spread to other parts of the economy, especially if home prices decline.

“If prices go down, we will have problems — problems in the sense of spillover to other areas,” Greenspan said in remarks to the Futures Industry Association meeting in Boca Raton, Florida today. While he hasn’t seen such spreading yet, “I expect to.”

Subprime borrowers, or those with poor or limited credit histories, are increasingly defaulting after looser lending standards allowed them to take on more debt than they could afford. Last month, Greenspan told an audience in Toronto that “disarray” in the subprime mortgage market isn’t likely to create greater financial instability in the rest of the economy.

“It is not a small issue,” Greenspan said today. “If we could wave a wand and prices go up 10 percent, the subprime mortgage problem would disappear.”

Uncle Alan failed to mention that he had been quite a big booster of those sub-prime mortgages when he was frantically trying to prop up the economy with toothpicks and chewing gum:

“Innovation has brought about a multitude of new products, such as subprime loans and niche credit programs for immigrants. . . . With these advances in technology, lenders have taken advantage of credit-scoring models and other techniques for efficiently extending credit to a broader spectrum of consumers. . . .

Where once more-marginal applicants would simply have been denied credit, lenders are now able to quite efficiently judge the risk posed by individual applicants and to price that risk appropriately. These improvements have led to rapid growth in subprime mortgage lending . . . fostering constructive innovation that is both responsive to market demand and beneficial to consumers.”

Why, you’d be a fool not to run right out and get one! Constructive innovation! Beneficial to customers!

K-Drum wrote about this a few days ago and catalogued Greenspan’s comments on the issue over the last few years. It’s ironic that he’s finally been reduced to literally talking about waving magic wands. For too many years his utterances were treated like fairy dust and it’s going to be a miracle if we don’t pay a very huge price for it.

And I hope all those Randian libertarian techies and engineers out there who thought Uncle Alan was some sort of wizard are as happy as he thinks they’ll be when income inequality is solved by reducing their wages. After all, in the long run, it’ll all even out. (Of course, as a very smart economist once pointed out, in the long run even Greenspan-loving libertarians will all be dead.)

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Boys Crying Wolf

by digby

As little children we were all told a lovely little parable about boys and wolves to illustrate the problem of losing your credibility. (Apparently Barbara Bush was too busy golfing to share that one with her oldest son.) Once you are a proven liar, you often find that people don’t believe you even when you tell the truth.

Similarly, when a government has made a fetish out of torture, which everyone knows is unreliable and forces false confessions, people tend to be just a tad skeptical when the government releases transcripts of a terrorist mastermind’s confessed plots replete with lurid details about beheadings and plans to assassinate the pope. (It’s especially difficult to swallow when they release the information in the middle of an exploding white house scandal, when they’ve had custody of this person for years.)

It may all be true. But because this government has insisted that “sending a message” of toughness will make suicide bombers turn tail and give up — and seems to truly believe that a false confession is a good as a real one, we have no way of knowing. This guy is by all accounts a very bad man, I don’t doubt it. But the details of his confessions are meaningless because of this administration’s short sighted and immoral policies.

Imagine how powerful these confessions could have been in a legitimate war crimes trial if the Bush administration had followed civilized practices and maintained a shred of moral authority and credibility. Too bad we’ll never know.

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What’s Wrong With This Picture?

by digby

CHETRY: Well, as the Sam Cooke song goes, “Don’t know much about history,” the same could be said about religion. In a nation where the majority of people say they believe in God, most of us don’t know the specifics, it seems, about religion.

According to the new book “Religious Literacy,” Americans are shockingly ignorant about the bible, or any other holy book, for that matter. Its author says that one out of 10 Americans thinks that Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife. So — that was only one out of 10 — all right.

So, did — we did our own test. We wanted to see if anyone knew who wrote the gospels.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Michael, maybe? Right?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I mean, I know then, but I just can’t name them all.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: OK. I can’t do it.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: All right.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: So that’s what I meant, like gospel writers… don’t know.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CHETRY: Delia Gallagher is CNN’s faith and values correspondent.

Now, I thought that one was pretty easy. For the record, tell us.

DELIA GALLAGHER, CNN FAITH AND VALUES CORRESPONDENT: I thought it was pretty easy, too.

For the record, they’re Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, but surprisingly it was the question that most people had difficulty with, Kiran.

CHETRY: All right. So what were some of the other findings, Delia, about — because the vast majority of people asked say they are religious, and many Christians don’t necessarily know the specifics of the bible.

GALLAGHER: Yes. Well, you know, a lot of people will say they believe, and they are Christian, and they are practicing, but when it comes to really knowing your bible or even knowing about other religions, we found that a lot of people don’t have a great breadth of knowledge about their history and their religious history.

So, for example, one of the things that I found was interesting in our little non-scientific survey, we should say, from some of those people that you saw there was that they did know about Islam’s holy book, the Koran. So, you know, you can see that some of this is seeping through in terms of what’s happening in today’s world, but they don’t necessarily know about Jewish and Christian scriptures in the bible.

CHETRY: All right. So why do we need to know this stuff?

GALLAGHER: Well, you know, it’s — religious history is history in general, so, of course, there is some value to knowing about history, and it’s about the history of the Jewish and the Christian people. And then, of course, you have cultural references from today that refer back to the bible and presidents and pop songs, and all kinds of different references that a lot of people are sort of familiar with, but they don’t really know where it all comes from.

CHETRY: Hey, does this sort of reopen the debate about whether we should be teaching religion in schools?

GALLAGHER: Well, this is part of the point that the author makes in his book. He blames the fact that were are religiously illiterate on the fact that in our schools we do not teach the bible either as history or as literature in any way.

The problem, of course, with that, as he points out, is that people are afraid to do this, because you will find yourself in court if you try to teach it, but not preach it. You know, there’s a fine line between those two. And in our public school system, that is something that the schools are really afraid to get into, and one of the reasons why kids today and adults aren’t getting any kind of bible history.

I agree that it’s a little bit odd that the vast majority of people in a country that prides itself as the most religious in the world can’t name the writers of the gospel, but really, whose fault is that? The last I heard, there were tens of thousands of churches in this country. Is it too much to ask that they be in charge of religious instruction? Isn’t that their specialty?

I know that many of the conservative mega-churches spend most of their time instructing their parishoners on Republican politics and holding Christian rock extravaganzas so they don’t have time for actual religious teaching. Understood. But maybe they could send their kids to the mainline and liberal churches once a month so they can get some actual Bible teachings. With all the pressure on public schools to find a way to teach biology that doesn’t offend the Christian Right, they just don’t have the resources to spend on special classes about Biblical references in pop songs and presidents ‘n stuff.

I’m sure there are many churches that would be happy to accomodate those who want their kids (or themselves) to learn about religion.

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It’s A Bitch

by digby

So, Senator Sununu Jr came out for Gonzales to be fired. Hmmm. Maybe he finally saw the moment to give Bush Jr some payback for his metaphorical assassination of Sununu’s father:

“G.W. played a key role in the ousting of John Sununu,” Ed Rollins says. “John was too high-profile to be Bush’s chief of staff. He saw himself almost as a deputy president. The reality was, John had to go — and G.W. knew it. Others in the Bush administration did not want to take on Sununu, even though they shared G.W.’s view. So G.W. became the messenger who told his father this had to happen. I’m sure G.W. volunteered to fire Sununu himself. There’s a hard-ass side to G.W. that he enjoys.” Because of the Sununu firing, George W. was often asked to do the more unpleasant duties his father wanted to avoid. “That’s how he got the nicknames the Hatchetman and the Enforcer,” says a Bush White House insider. “George W. was the one who carried out the trash.”

I’m so glad we don’t have an aristocracy and all the hideous family infighting they bring with them, aren’t you?

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Five Stages Of Spin

by digby

If you aren’t reading Mahablog (along with TPM, of course) on the US Attorney scandal, you should be. She has lot’s of great analysis and sources in many posts over the last few days.

I particularly like this one:

You’ve no doubt heard of the five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance). I’ve come to realize something like that goes on among righties whenever a new Republican scandal washes ashore. I propose that the five stages of reaction to a scandal are:

1. Ignoring
2. Belittling
3. Blaming the Media
4. Evoking Bill Clinton.
5. Boredom

That last stage allows the sufferer to return to stage 1 and ignore the issue. Also note that righties don’t necessarily go through these stages in order or even one stage at a time.

Haha. I think she leaves out one important stage — righteous indignation and evocations of unamerican, unpatriotic motives on the part of critics. Certainly, when we criticize the Justice Department for its political purge of Republicans with integrity, we are prove how much we hate the troops.

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