Why, then, shouldn’t we have an official inquiry into abuses during the Bush years?
One answer you hear is that pursuing the truth would be divisive, that it would exacerbate partisanship. But if partisanship is so terrible, shouldn’t there be some penalty for the Bush administration’s politicization of every aspect of government?
Alternatively, we’re told that we don’t have to dwell on past abuses, because we won’t repeat them. But no important figure in the Bush administration, or among that administration’s political allies, has expressed remorse for breaking the law. What makes anyone think that they or their political heirs won’t do it all over again, given the chance?
In fact, we’ve already seen this movie. During the Reagan years, the Iran-contra conspirators violated the Constitution in the name of national security. But the first President Bush pardoned the major malefactors, and when the White House finally changed hands the political and media establishment gave Bill Clinton the same advice it’s giving Mr. Obama: let sleeping scandals lie. Sure enough, the second Bush administration picked up right where the Iran-contra conspirators left off — which isn’t too surprising when you bear in mind that Mr. Bush actually hired some of those conspirators.
Yes, we have seen this movie before. It's a zombie movie.
And the undead who were trained in the Bush administration will be more determined than ever to prove they were right. Now is the time to drive a stake through conservatism, not help them reanimate it.
When my fellow Californian Joan Walsh threw out Carolyn Maloney's name as a possible successor to Hillary Clinton I had, coincidentally, just finished Maloney's book and I wrote a post saying I thought she would be an excellent choice for senator. Her book was a bit of a tonic to me (at least to the extent that it ruefully validated my impressions during the previous year that women were not nearly as far along as I'd thought they were.) After I wrote the post, I asked if she could spare a few minutes to answer a couple of questions about that and other things and much to my delight, she agreed.
Q: I was a bit surprised by certain sexist attitudes across the media and even in the political establishment that were revealed during the election campaign ---- and it seemed to me that I wasn't the only one. Do you sense there is a new awareness about sexism among women in politics?
Carolyn Maloney: 2008 will go down in history as the year we finally came face to face with the level of stereotyping, sexism and misogyny that still persists in American society. While it was awe-inspiring to see Hillary Clinton as a major party candidate, the number of attacks on her because she was a woman was simply astonishing. It came from every direction – from the hecklers at rallies who held up signssaying "Iron My Shirt" to the netroots who created a website "Make Me A Sandwich and Get Out of the Race."
The election season was a study in contrasts. Hillary's historic run for the White House generated great enthusiasm and inspiration, especially among young women. Still, there are enormous hurdles apparent in the extraordinary sexist attitudes and remarks. I thought to myself "Someone ought to write a book" and then I realized, someone already has – My book is called Rumors of Our Progress Have Been Greatly Exaggerated: Why Women's Lives Aren't Getting Any Easier--And How We Can Make Real Progress For Ourselves and Our Daughters In it I debunk the myths about how far women have come and discuss the many areas in which we have a long way to go: in workplace opportunities, family-friendly work policies, pensions and tax policy, violence against women, trafficking, reproductive rights and representation in government, among other things.
To me, the most startling display of sexism came from the media stars who chose to attack Hillary, not for her policies or campaign strategy, but solely on the basis of her gender. Her supporters were called castratos in the eunuch chorus; she was compared to "everyone's first wife standing outside a probate court"; one commentator said she was scary, castrating and that he involuntarily crossed his legs when she came into the room; another said that when she spoke, men heard "Take out the garbage"; yet another queried whether Americans will want to watch a woman growing older before their eyes on a daily basis. You can go here to see some of these attacks for yourself. It's so over the top that you almost have to see it to believe it. If that's what they thought about someone as accomplished, intelligent and gracious as Hillary Clinton, what must they be thinking of us?
Many women, including me, were surprised and disappointed by the attitudes of these commentators. On the other hand, as Hillary Clinton herself has said, she received more votes than any woman in history and put 18 million cracks in the glass ceiling. Her success opens the door for other women to follow her. I hope some of those women who were startled by Hillary's rejection will seize the opportunity to run for office. We need more good women in public service.
Q: With the obvious necessity for a big stimulus to deal with the economic crisis, there's a lot of talk about creating green jobs and infrastructure projects. But as Linda Hirshman pointed out in a recent op-ed piece, these jobs will go almost exclusively to men. Are there any initiatives contemplated to ensure that stimulus job creation will be aimed at jobs that affect women as well?
CM: I think the economic stimulus plan will wind up providing a great deal of help to women. First, many women are working in industries that were formerly the province of men and hopefully more women will try to compete for jobs created by the stimulus package. Second, women are disproportionately represented in city and state jobs and would benefit from the portions of the stimulus plan that will provide aid to local government. Third, the plan will likely include help for vulnerable populations – likely including assistance for unemployment assistance, the earned income tax credit, food stamps, child care, among other things. Finally, there is always an indirect benefit when an unemployed member of a family gets a job, even if that person is a man. When one member of a family is unemployed, the entire family suffers.
On Sunday January 11th, the Obama camp released a video addressing this precise issue. In it Chair-designate for the Council of Economic Advisers, Christina Romer, explains the many ways in which women would benefit from the stimulus package. She explains: "The balance of the program, the fact that it does have the investments in education and health care, it does have the state fiscal relief, it does have themiddle class tax cuts. All those pieces are creating jobs in some of the sectors like health care, education and retail trade, where women are a disproportionately large fraction."
For my part, I definitely want to make sure that women are included in this package. In fact, I am working with my colleagues to try to ensure that the bill will include a diversity requirement, although there is no guarantee that this will make it into the final bill. In any event, I believe that moving forward with long-delayed, ready-to-go infrastructure projects would have long-term impacts from which our entire community will benefit.
Q: Your book makes clear that participation by women electoral politics is essential in order to challenge assumptions and correct many existing imbalances. (In fact, I would argue that it requires not just women, but feminists like yourself) .) Why do you think there are so few women in politics in proportion to their numbers in the population? I find it difficult to wrap my mind around.
CM: In my experience, it is women who fight for women, children and families. Look at the impassioned dissent written by Ruth Bader Ginsberg in the Lily Ledbetter case. Although women are 51% of the population, we have only 17% of the seats in Congress.
In my book, Rumors of Our Progress Have Been Greatly Exaggerated, I talk about the 30% solution – sociologists say that once the percentage of women members of a legislature reaches 30%, women's issues begin to be addressed. Twenty four countries have reached this critical mass. The United States isn't anywhere near it. The 111th Congress which has just convened includes 75 women in the House and 17 women in the Senate, or 17% of Congress. That's a record high – in the 110th Congress, women constituted 16% of the members. At the current rate of 1% every 2 years, it will be 2034 before the United States reaches the magic 30% number. Small wonder, then, that Congress hasn't passed any new bills to improve family/work balance since the Family and Medical Leave Act back in 1993. It's a lot easier to diagnose the problem than to answer the question of why more women do not enter the political world. I hope that Hillary's historic run will prompt other women to step forward and run.
Q: I keep hearing "Blue Dogs this and Blue Dogs that" in the press, but I wonder how you think the Progressive Caucus will work in the House with its larger membership and a clear mandate for change? Is there any hope of a similar level of organization and public relations as what we see with these other groups?
CM: There are many caucuses and many coalitions that work on particular issues. The Blue Dogs are one and the Progressive Caucus is another, but there are many others and some of them are extremely effective and share progressive ideals – I personally have done a lot of work with the Congressional Caucus on Women's Issues. We have worked together to pass a wide range of bills. In fact, two of the first bills we voted on in the House in the 111th Congress that just began are bills the Women's Caucus supported -- the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and the Paycheck Fairness Act, both of which make it more difficult to discriminate against women in pay.
Q: In terms of the new economic initiatives, what do you think are the chances of passing the credit card bill of rights and the cram down legislation? Those seem to be to be obvious political (and substantive) winners to me and yet the press reports indicate they are not necessarily going to make it. What's the problem?
CM: As the Author of the Credit Cardholder's Bill of Rights, I will continue to push for its passage and I believe we will be successful. We have made great headway to date with winning overwhelming passage in the House of Representatives last year and with the Federal Reserve announcing that they will bar many of these unfair and deceptive practices starting next year. As for the cram down legislation, which would allow bankruptcy judges rework the mortgages of distressed homeowners, I believe there is growing momentum to get it done. Just this week there was a major breakthrough with Citigroup announcing announcing that they will now support the legislation with certain changes..
Q: The Democratic Party has made much of its outreach to social conservatives in recent cycles. Inclusive rhetoric about faith aside, do you believe that one party can accommodate those who sincerely believe abortion and gay marriage are crimes with those who believe they are fundamental matters of civil rights and civil liberties? If you do, what kind of compromises do you believe are possible to make that happen?
CM: The Democratic Party has always been a broad umbrella. We do not always agree, and that's probably a good thing. It allows us to form a broader coalition and work effectively together. The Democratic Party has been clear on its support for abortion rights and gay marriage. If people have different opinions on those issues but still choose to vote Democratic, it's because the Democratic Party stands for much more – they may be Democrats because of economic issues, or the party's tradition of providing a social safety net, or they may prefer our record of competence in running the government.
The Democratic Party will always support reproductive rights, civil rights and gay rights. Nonetheless, social conservatives who believe in helping the poor, expanding health care and preserving Social Security and Medicare are right to vote as Democrats even if they do not join us on every issue.
Q: Finally, you've been endorsed by major women's groups in New York to fill Hillary Clinton's senate seat and after reading your book, it seemed to me that you would be an excellent choice. If that doesn't happen, can we expect to see you run for higher office in the future?
CM: I am honored by their support, and yours. I have been endorsed by, among others, the National Organization for Women Political Action Committee, National Foundation for Women Legislators, Inc., Business and Professional Women's BPW/PAC, Feminist Majority Political Action Committee and the National Women's Political Caucus. As for the future, one never knows what opportunities may come.
I sincerely appreciate Congresswoman Maloney taking the time to answer these questions during this busy and eventful time and hope that she will continue to interact with the netroots on these issues. I think we need more of this perspective.
There is a lot of chatter in the New York press that Kennedy should be chosen because of her close relationship to Obama (with the implication that he bears some animosity toward New Yorkers who supported their Senator for president in the primaries.) I think that's utter nonsense. Clinton is about to become one of Obama's most important cabinet members and, say what you will about him, he has proven time and again that he doesn't bear grudges (sometimes to a fault, in my view.) And in any case, with what they've been through in Illinois, I don't think they are touching this senate appointment with a ten foot pole.
Carolyn Maloney would be a huge asset in the Senate, an unabashed progressive feminist with a ton of experience navigating the treacherous shoals of the beltway. New Yorkers would be well represented and so would women throughout the country. She's earned it.
Here's hoping that David Paterson is looking as closely at Carolyn as he is at Caroline.
Bruce Wilson has written an incredible expose of the man the Religious Injdustrial Complex is asking us to accept as a decent and moral voice of healing, (despite a few mild differences between us on icky issues nobody wants to talk about anyway.) It turns out that his activities in Africa are a trifle less impressive than advertised once you look into them. In fact, they're downright horrifying.
But then I'm always a little bit horrified at people who say things like this:
During his Anaheim speech, Warren revealed that he'd received a message from God to seek more influence, power and fame. God, Warren narrated, led him to Psalm 72, "Solomon's prayer for more influence... in Psalm 72 [Solomon] says 'God, I want you to make me more influential. God, I want you to give me more power. I want you to bless my life more. God, I want you to spread the fame of my name through other countries.'"
"It sounded pretty selfish," mused Warren but, as he explained to the crowd, God had led him on a path towards solving the five biggest global problems.
Beyond 'spiritual poverty', egocentric leadership is the next most oppressive 'global giant', according to Rick Warren, and thus a higher priority than HIV/AIDS, poverty, and other material afflictions. "The world is full of little Saddams," he observed, "they're in every country, they're in every church, they're in every business, they're in every homeowner's association. They're everywhere. You give a guy a little power and it goes to his head."
Wow. Talk about some serious lack of self-awareness...
But it shouldn't be surprising that he's saying such internally inconsistent things and supporting authoritarian dictators and killers, considering that he seems to admire such people and their propaganda to the point of instructing his followers in their methods.
This is the new voice of evangelical moderation, America's pastor:
"What is the vision for the next 25 years ? I'll tell you what it is.
It is the global expansion of the kingdom of God.
It is the total mobilization of his church.
And the third part is the goal of a radical devotion of every believer.
Now, I choose that word 'radical' intentionally, because only radicals change the world.
Everything great done in this world is done by passionate people.
Moderate people get moderately nothing done. And moderation will never slay the global giants. . ."
[ minute 48:45 ]
"In 1939, in a stadium much like this, in Munich Germany, they packed it out with young men and women in brown shirts, for a fanatical man standing behind a podium named Adolf Hitler, the personification of evil.
And in that stadium, those in brown shirts formed with their bodies a sign that said, in the whole stadium, "Hitler, we are yours."
And they nearly took the world.
Lenin once said, "give me 100 committed, totally committed men and I'll change the world." And, he nearly did.
A few years ago, they took the sayings of Chairman Mao, in China, put them in a little red book, and a group of young people committed them to memory and put it in their minds and they took that nation, the largest nation in the world by storm because they committed to memory the sayings of the Chairman Mao.
When I hear those kinds of stories, I think 'what would happen if American Christians, if world Christians, if just the Christians in this stadium, followers of Christ, would say 'Jesus, we are yours' ?
What kind of spiritual awakening would we have ? "
[ minute 51:50 ]
"Jesus said, 'I want you to do this publicly.' So what I want you to do is take the card, and in just a minute, and if you say 'Rick, I am willing to serve God's purposes in my generation.'
I want you to open up to the sign that says 'Whatever it takes.'
Whatever it takes.
And I want you to just say, 'This is my commitment, before God and in front of everybody else. I'm in.' "
And I would invite you to just stand quietly and hold up 'Whatever it takes'. . .
I'm looking at a stadium full of people who are saying 'whatever it takes'.
Whatever it takes, God. Time, talent, energy, money, effort, vision... God, whatever it takes.
Whatever it takes, that's what I'm going to do.
And I believe that today we are making history. We're making history that's going to start a movement that will bring a new Reformation in the church of God and a new spiritual awakening in our world. And, our world needs it.
And today, as you say 'whatever it takes,' you're saying publicly, "I'm in, God. I'm in...
...I'm in.' "
I'm not in. In fact, I'm definitely out. I don't want to be anywhere near this creep and I don't think politicians should be anywhere near him either.
As Wilson points out in the piece, he doesn't point to the methods of great spiritual leaders like Ghandi or Martin Luther King. He doesn't even point to the positive ideals of political or revolutionary leaders like the founding fathers. He stands before a roaring crowd of 30,000 followers in a huge sports stadium and points to the 20th century's worst genocidal madmen as inspiration! And from his work in Africa, it appears he practices what he preaches.
EJ Dionne was at the meeting of less conservative writers yesterday (less conservative by contrast to the George Will dinner the night before, anyway) and he came away with a little character study that is quite interesting. First, he discusses the fact that Barack is non-ideological, which I think is quite clear. But he says it in an interesting way that's worth examining:
There are at least three keys to understanding Obama's approach to (and avoidance of) ideology. There is, first, his simple joy in testing himself against those who disagree with him. Someone who knows the president-elect well says that he likes talking with philosophical adversaries more than with allies.
This part of him was once the detached writer and professor who could view even his own life from a distance and with a degree of abstraction. Seen with perspective, after all, the ideological differences in the United States are rather small. We have no major socialist party, and when it comes down to it, even conservatives are reluctant to dismantle our limited social insurance and welfare programs.
But Obama's anti-ideological turn is also a functional one for a progressive, at least for now. Since Ronald Reagan, ideology has been the terrain of the right. Many of the programs that conservatives have pushed have been based more on faith in their worldview than on empirical tests. How else could conservatives claim that cutting taxes would actually increase government revenue, or that trickle-down economic approaches were working when the evidence of middle-class incomes said otherwise?
I would guess that it will remain the terrain of the right because there is no ideology on the left, at least among politicians. At this point I'm not sure there is such a thing as liberal ideology at all.
The fact that Dionne says this is temporary puzzles me. How exactly does one change the fact that Republican ideology is the default position in American politics unless it's challenged? Is it not just as likely that in the event that Obama is successful, the public will believe that conservatism is "what works" since nobody tells them differently? And will they not be inclined to vote for someone who offers a more pure version of what they believe is "what works" once their memories of the loathed Bush fade away?
I suppose this all depends upon whether or not you think that politics is a matter of smart people getting together and agreeing on how the world should be run or whether you think it's a system designed to organize society and government by testing and challenging varying ideologies and worldviews against competing interests and values. The first is a very nice, clean way of doing things and the second is somewhat messy and difficult. But the truth is that I've never seen the first kind of politics work. (Indeed, Obama would be wise to put down his Lincoln histories for a few minutes and pick up a copy of The Best and the Brightest.)
Even the most pragmatic of presidents, Franklin Roosevelt, had no illusions about the forces arrayed against his programs (and against him personally) and he wasn't afraid to lay it out for the American people:
For twelve years this Nation was afflicted with hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing Government. The Nation looked to Government but the Government looked away. Nine mocking years with the golden calf and three long years of the scourge! Nine crazy years at the ticker and three long years in the breadlines! Nine mad years of mirage and three long years of despair! Powerful influences strive today to restore that kind of government with its doctrine that that Government is best which is most indifferent.
For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. We will keep our sleeves rolled up.
We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace--business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.
They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.
Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me--and I welcome their hatred.
I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.
Under pressure from the right, he pulled back a lot of New Deal programs the next year and it caused unemployment go back up, so rhetoric isn't everything. But he had no illusions about how political power is won and used for the greater good and he didn't give the Republicans tools to gain political power by pretending they were anything but the opponents they were. His lasting legacy, however pragmatically it was envisioned and implemented, was that people trusted the Democrats for generations and the New Deal programs were woven into the fabric of America. Liberalism, not conservatism, was the default ideology because Roosevelt made his arguments in stark and clear ideological terms.
It has been my experience and reading of history generally that politics is rarely a gentlemanly debate about the public good but is rather a struggle between competing interests. And ideology is usually what binds these interests together through common values and worldviews. In our system those interests have historically formed coalitions within the two political parties which fight it out before the public. I'm sorry that's unpleasant, but it's usually the best humans can do short of killing each other.
But perhaps change is upon us and for the first time in history we will have a functional one party government of earnest like-minded public servants dedicated to the betterment of the people. (We have had a functional one party government of like-minded public servants dedicated to the continuation of the ruling class and the status quo many times, so that much is certainly possible.) But everybody calmly sitting down together and agreeing on "what works" would be a first.
Unfortunately, it would appear that Obama is going to go to China --- or rather, he's going to "reform entitlements," which is the Democratic equivalent. Dionne reports that they've adopted Stephanopoulos' characterization of a Grand Bargain (which just shows that the beltway echo chamber is in full effect.) Obama told the Washington Post today that he's doing this in order to prove to somebody (who I'm not sure) that he is "serious."
President-elect Barack Obama will convene a "fiscal responsibility summit" in February designed to bring together a variety of voices on solving the long term problems with the economy and with a special focus on entitlements, he said during an interview with Washington Post reporters and editors this afternoon.
"We need to send a signal that we are serious," said Obama of the summit.
Those invited to attend will include Senate Budget Chairman Kent Conrad (N.D.), ranking minority member Judd Gregg (N.H.), the conservative Democratic Blue Dog coalition and a host of outside groups with ideas on the matter, said the president-elect.
Obama's comments came in a wide-ranging, hour-long interview that came just five days before he will be inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States and become the first African American to hold that title.
Obama said that he has made clear to his advisers that some of the difficult choices--particularly in regards to entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare - should be made on his watch. "We've kicked this can down the road and now we are at the end of the road," he said.
Normally another Democratic run bipartisan commission on social security reform wouldn't alarm me so much as annoy me. After all, Clinton was forced by the incoherent "centrist" Bob Kerrey into appointing a social security commission and Bush promised to appoint one after the failure of his attempt to privatize the system. But this time could be different. The scope and complexity of the economic crisis could lead to politicians rushing forward with some bad plans just to appear to be doing something.
I believe that everything about this is a huge mistake. It validates incorrect right wing economic assumptions, incorporates their toxic rhetoric about "entitlements," focuses on the wrong problems and continues the illusion that social security is in peril when it isn't. The mantra of shared sacrifice sounds awfully noble, but it isn't very reassuring to talk about the government going broke at the moment, particularly when the cause of our problems isn't the blood-sucking parasites who depend on government insurance when they can't work, but rather the handiwork of the vastly wealthy who insist on operating without restraint and refuse to contribute their fair share. I would have thought that a bipartisan commission on financial system reform might have at least been on the agenda before social security.
Obama is empowering the Republicans and the Blue Dogs with this fiscal responsibility rhetoric and perhaps he believes they will reward him by acting in good faith. And maybe they will.Or perhaps he thinks he can jiu-jitsu the debate in some very clever way to actually bolster social security and enact universal health care. But it's a big risk. I believe that all this talk about "entitlements" and fiscal responsibility will make it much tougher to sell universal health care and easier to dismantle some of the safety net at a time when many people have just lost a large piece of their retirements, their jobs and their homes. It's very hard for me to understand why they think it's a good time to do this.
I know it's probably right that we give him a chance before we completely go postal about this, but I also know that if this were a Republican saying these things I'd certainly be doing everything in my power to oppose it. But then that's the beauty of the Nixon goes to China gambit, isn't it? It neatly shuts down the most fervent opposition. That's why it's so frightening. He might just get it done.
For the last several weeks, and I'm sure until George Bush steps aside next week as well as in tonight's "farewell address," officials of the outgoing Administration are wearing themselves out selling an image of him as a wise, judicious, successful President with bold vision and unflappable will. 65-70% of the country think this is insane, nor do they believe it, and going on television to proudly announce that the death of 4,500 soldiers was well worth the foreign policy catastrophe created in Iraq, for example, isn't helping. The question of how history will judge these individuals can at this point only be altered by whether or not they are prosecuted for the crimes they willingly committed.
I'm wondering if they even need to bother with all this. The Bush regime will have a legacy, and not just the expansion of executive power or the model for future Presidents on how to break the law repeatedly, treat Congress with nothing but scorn, and get away with it. No, there's an even more tangible legacy than that, which will play out every day for the next couple decades at 1 First Street NE in Washington:
The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that evidence obtained from an unlawful arrest based on careless record keeping by the police may be used against a criminal defendant.
The 5-to-4 decision revealed competing conceptions of the exclusionary rule, which requires the suppression of some evidence obtained through police misconduct, and suggested that the court’s commitment to the rule was fragile.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the majority, said that the exclusion of evidence should be a last resort and that judges should use a sliding scale in deciding whether particular misconduct by the police warranted suppressing the evidence they had found.
“To trigger the exclusionary rule,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “police conduct must be sufficiently deliberate that exclusion can meaningfully deter it, and sufficiently culpable that such deterrence is worth the price paid by the justice system.”
That price, the chief justice wrote, “is, of course, letting guilty and possibly dangerous defendants go free.”
The case itself is noteworthy. Bernie Herring had an adversarial history with a cop in his Alabama town. His truck was impounded and he went to the sheriff's office to pick it up. The cop ran a check for outstanding warrants and found what he thought to be one, he arrested Herring. The officers detained Herring, and found a gun and traces of methamphetamines on him. Minutes later, the officers discovered that the arrest warrant was faulty. Nevertheless, he was tried for drug possession and sentenced to 27 months(!).
And the Supreme Court now has ruled that the evidence, gained through what amounts to a warrantless search, is admissable.
The decision in the case, Herring v. United States, No. 07-513, may have broad consequences, said Craig M. Bradley, a law professor at Indiana University.
“It may well be,” Professor Bradley said, “that courts will take this as a green light to ignore police negligence all over the place.”
Chief Justice Roberts, who was joined by Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr., said the exclusionary rule was unlikely to deter isolated careless record keeping and should be reserved for “deliberate, reckless or grossly negligent conduct, or in some circumstances recurring systemic negligence.”
Of course, these 5 will decide what ought to be considered negligent conduct for the near future. And that line will get moved, and moved, and moved. Scott Lemieux has a lot more.
We'll be dealing with reactionaries on the Supreme Court for a long time, two of them placed there by this President. Civil liberties, women's rights, consumer protection, and a host of other issues will be at stake. Among the next up is the Voting Rights Act.
The Supreme Court agreed yesterday to examine whether a central component of landmark civil rights legislation enacted to protect minority voters is still needed in a nation that has elected an African American president.
The court will decide the constitutionality of a provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that seeks to protect minority voting rights by requiring a broad set of states and jurisdictions where discrimination was once routine to receive federal approval before altering any of their voting procedures.
The Supreme Court has upheld the requirement in the past, saying the intrusion on state sovereignty is warranted to protect voting rights and eliminate discrimination against minorities. But challengers say it ignores the reality of modern America and "consigns broad swaths of the nation to apparently perpetual federal receivership based on 40-year-old evidence."
This comes conveniently before the 2010 Census and the next round of reapportionment and redistricting in the states.
That right-wing bloc on the Court is relatively young, incidentally. Weep not for George W. Bush. He's got a legacy. Not content just to screw us for eight years, the pain will be felt for decades.
Nobody could have anticipated that Israel couldn't bomb its way to peace with Palestine.
Israel hoped that the war in Gaza would not only cripple Hamas, but eventually strengthen its secular rival, the Palestinian Authority, and even allow it to claw its way back into Gaza.
But with each day, the authority, its leader, Mahmoud Abbas, and its leading party, Fatah, seem increasingly beleaguered and marginalized, even in the Palestinian cities of the West Bank, which they control. Protesters accuse Mr. Abbas of not doing enough to stop the carnage in Gaza — indeed, his own police officers have used clubs and tear gas against those same protesters.
The more bombs in Gaza, the more Hamas’s support seems to be growing at the expense of the Palestinian Authority, already considered corrupt and distant from average Palestinians.
“The Palestinian Authority is one of the main losers in this war,” said Ghassan Khatib, an independent Palestinian analyst in the West Bank city of Ramallah. “How can it make gains in a war in which it is one of the casualties?”
This is a pretty familiar outcome - what rises from the ashes of an attack like this is typically not more moderate or agreeable to the offensive power. Fatah was already disliked and now they are seen to be cooperating, either directly or indirectly, with the bombing of civilians.
I bring this up because Tom Friedman can't bother to read his own paper or talk to any regional expert, and would rather just tell the Palestinians to suck on this.
Israel’s counterstrategy was to use its Air Force to pummel Hezbollah and, while not directly targeting the Lebanese civilians with whom Hezbollah was intertwined, to inflict substantial property damage and collateral casualties on Lebanon at large. It was not pretty, but it was logical. Israel basically said that when dealing with a nonstate actor, Hezbollah, nested among civilians, the only long-term source of deterrence was to exact enough pain on the civilians — the families and employers of the militants — to restrain Hezbollah in the future. […] In Gaza, I still can’t tell if Israel is trying to eradicate Hamas or trying to “educate” Hamas, by inflicting a heavy death toll on Hamas militants and heavy pain on the Gaza population. If it is out to destroy Hamas, casualties will be horrific and the aftermath could be Somalia-like chaos. If it is out to educate Hamas, Israel may have achieved its aims.
Yes, it is quite educational to murder women and children, and it almost always leads to a more learned and chastened militant group. Just read any history book. I guess the theory of "education" doesn't extend to Friedman, who can't seem to learn that collective punishment induces radicalism and rage.
Very. Serious. Monster.
UPDATE: Jonathan Schwarz writes in to mention his look at Friedman's reaction to being "educated" on 9/11.
President-elect Barack Obama's hopes of scoring significant bipartisan support for his stimulus package are fading, as the debate over the nearly $800-billion plan morphs into a classic Washington impasse: two rival parties in irreconcilable conflict.
Obama had hoped to induce Republicans to back his plan by putting forward a series of business tax cuts. But GOP support is peeling off as the party crafts alternative ideas that rely even more heavily on tax reductions.
Obama's stimulus package is on track to pass before the Presidents Day recess in mid-February. But it is increasingly doubtful that he will pick up the 80 Senate votes he had hoped to win in the first major legislative test of his presidency. Instead, the bill is likely to pass on the strength of the Democrats' majority.
Republicans probably made the calculation that falling in line behind the President would not help them down the road if the plan ultimately failed. Keeping their distance would allow them to blame the Democrats for that failure. Not to mention the fact that their ideology of "tax cuts in a boom, tax cuts in a bust, tax cuts whenever" prevents them from accepting the mere concept of a fiscal stimulus. The plans they're drafting are all across-the-board tax cuts.
In addition, these efforts to woo Republicans ultimately alienated Democrats, and thus far Obama has been willing to accommodate members of his own party and dial back things like the tax cuts for businesses. The stimulus has grown in size, and the percentage devoted to tax cuts has dipped. Obama has moved in the Democrats' direction by about $75 billion dollars.
I hope Obama's people learn something from this, and I trust they have. Republicans are committed to opposing a popular plan (extremely popular - 80-85% support job creation on various initiatives like energy and infrastructure) for nakedly ideological reasons. At this point, their support is going to be meager at best. Ultimately, this could be a very good lesson. Obama extended the hand of friendship and it was rebuffed. He can now take the high road and move the bill even further in the direction of job creation. After all, he tried. And he can take that message right to the people.
Still, Obama is taking no chances. On Friday he will visit a wind turbine manufacturing plant in Bedford Heights, Ohio, to make the case for his plan.
If the lesson from this is that bipartisanship is nothing more than a nice theory, that will be very valuable in the future.
The other day I wondered why there was so much being written and discussed among the villagers about how Obama should (and mostly shouldn't) deal with the torture regime, when I didn't see it as being a top agenda item among the public. I guessed that the intelligence community was probably heavily lobbying, but beyond that the whole discussion seemed bizarrely outsized considering how disdainful the establishment is toward civil libertarians. Why are they working so feverishly to ensure that the new administration let bygones be bygones on this?
Greenwald hits the nail on the head: the members of the political establishment are all complicit. It hadn't occurred to me that they were frantic to ensure that torture is removed from the realm of taboo because they all advocated breaking it. I should have realized that if these people had publicly indulged themselves in violent expressions of primitive bloodlust, one can only imagine what they must have been saying to each other in private. They have to excuse the torture and insist that it was necessary because they've all told each other for years that was so. Theydon't want to play the blame game because they are all guilty.
Oh Goody. More bipartisan establishment institutions join with Pete Peterson to give the Republicans and the Blue Dogs excuses to ensure that the government can't do what's necessary to stave off a depression:
To modernize an outdated Congressional budget process in light of the daunting economic challenges facing the nation, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, The Pew Charitable Trusts and the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) today announced a landmark partnership to build bipartisan consensus for a core set of reforms. The Peterson-Pew Commission on Budget Reform will convene the nation’s preeminent experts to make recommendations for how best to strengthen the budget process used by federal lawmakers. CRFB will manage and staff the commission under the leadership of its prestigious board of directors.
“The need for this effort could not be more urgent,” said David M. Walker, president and CEO of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. “The budget process lacks transparency and our federal budget path itself is unsustainable. The Peterson Foundation was established to address the nation’s growing fiscal challenges, and this commission will be central to achieving this goal.”
“The federal budgeting process lays the foundation and should establish the rules of the game for all policy decisions,” said Rebecca W. Rimel, president and CEO of The Pew Charitable Trusts. “Pew is proud to partner with a prominent group of budget experts from both sides of the aisle to address these critical reforms.”
The commission will meet over the next two years to address a number of shortcomings in current budget rules, concepts and processes. Among these shortcomings:
· Congress routinely fails to pass a budget.
· The existing process tends to ignore long-term obligations.
· Most of the budget is on automatic pilot and lacks adequate oversight.
· Accounting standards are outdated and inconsistent—including those used to track the costs of the current economic stabilization policies.
· Congress routinely uses gimmicks to circumvent the rules and enforcement mechanisms that are in place
Well hell. There's nothing wrong with that. The budgeting process is a mess. Of course, the real reason why it's necessary to do this isn't efficiency or modernization:
Significant emphasis on budget reform over the next few years is imperative given the current economic conditions, the tremendous amount of borrowing taking place to help stabilize the economy, and the large and growing promises for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits.
Conflating the current economic crisis with the overall health care crisis and the non-existent social security crisis is a recipe for confusion, obstruction and failure.
And if you think that this is about anything but destroying social security, think again. Peterson has been hustling the village for decades. This article is from 1997:
A Crusader in Clover Pete Peterson, Enemy of Social Security, Counts Journalists as Friends
By John L. Hess
Where does the man find the time to earn all that money? You can’t turn on the tube but there’s Peter G. Peterson, telling some awestruck talking head that Social Security and Medicare are gobbling up our kiddies’ porridge. Or he’s writing it on your favorite op-ed page, or in magazines, or relaying the message through a thousand media converts. Or he’s presiding over the Council on Foreign Relations or the Concord Coalition, or gracing the society page in a dinner jacket, at all the really important social functions, sometimes as host. Or you can find him more informally at Sunday brunch in the Hamptons, with such useful tablemates as Diane Sawyer, Mort Zuckerman, Leslie Stahl, Peter Jennings, Barbara Walters and so on.
Vanity Fair (8/93) called on the great crusader at his spectacular beachside retreat in 1993 for an admiring profile. It said the interview was interrupted by telephone calls arranging the appointment of Leslie Gelb (ex-New York Times) as president of the Council on Foreign Relations, and of James Hoge (ex-New York Daily News) as editor of the organization’s journal. Peterson made another call inviting former Sen. Warren Rudman (R.-N.H.) to join the board of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a health-policy appendage of the great health supply company Johnson & Johnson (of which Peterson’s third wife is a director).
Peterson told Vanity Fair he was writing about health policy at that very moment, for his second book, Facing Up: How to Rescue the American Economy From Crushing Debt and Restore the American Dream. That would be the chapter that said: “The issue isn’t whether these new [universal health] benefits would be nice to have. They would. The issue is whether we can afford it. We can’t.”
That’s our boy. His remark lends piquancy to his wife’s explanation that her husband needed his $2.5 million, $1,500-an-hour helicopter to safeguard his health.
The question is not whether this kind of health care is nice. It is. The question is whether he can afford it. He can.
While he is reticent about his income, Vanity Fair put his take-home in 1992 at $7 million, not an excessive sum for an investment banker of his rank. His partner Stephen Schwartzman, who is regarded in the financial press as the sparkplug of their firm, the Blackstone Group, said that year that investors in its venture fund should expect returns of 25 to 30 percent during the 1990s—again, not unreasonable, since the Dow Jones average rose more than 26 percent last year.
Such rates of return are, again, piquant, because Peterson has described the indexation of Social Security, which lately has raised benefits by roughly 3 percent a year, as “one of the greatest fiscal tragedies of American history.” Piquant? Wait. Peterson was at President Nixon’s side as his economic adviser and secretary of commerce when that “tragedy” was enacted in 1972. (Conservatives thought making the cost-of-living adjustment automatic would deter Congress from voting more generous benefits.)
Peterson denounces the “mad, drunken bash” of the Reagan years. That would be the time when the top income-tax rate was cut from 70 percent to 28 percent, military spending went sky-high, and trillions were made (and lost) on savings and loans and takeovers financed by junk bonds. He was himself, of course, making out like a bandit, hustling for his share of the action, and contributing his bit to Republican campaign funds. He also led a chorus of corporate executives who keened about the exploding federal deficit. His contribution was a key series of articles in the New York Review of Books in 1982 (12/2/82, 12/16/82) that prepared the intellectual climate for the 1983 Social Security “rescue,” which raised payroll taxes and lowered benefits.
The series purported to prove with mathematical certainty that the entitlements of the elderly were snatching food from babies and driving the nation toward bankruptcy. George Will called it “the most important journalism of 1982.” (Washington Post, 12/19/82). Its charts persuaded such liberals as Tom Wicker and Anthony Lewis. Leslie Stahl of ABC said Peterson “really began to educate me.” (She has since repaid the favor with appearances by her mentor on 60 Minutes.)
All the journalists he met seemed impressed by his expertise, and by his generosity in offering to surrender his own entitlements. It does not seem to have occurred to any of his interviewers that a rise of 1 percentage point in his income tax rate would cost him perhaps twice as much as his Social Security and Medicare benefits combined. Nor have any observed how policies he has supported have transferred the tax burden from the wealthy to the wage earner. Indeed, in Facing Up, Peterson remarks with pleased surprise that nobody had clamored for a cut in the Social Security payroll tax to match cuts in benefits.
If opinion-makers consider Peterson an expert on finance, experts on finance tend to consider him more of an opinion-maker. Ken Auletta’s book Greed and Glory, about the near collapse of Lehman Brothers in the 1980’s, describes Peterson as, in the eyes of his partners, an arrogant bungler dying to make killings in leveraged buyouts, an obsessed reactionary, a name-dropping snob, and, all told, so much a pill that his partners paid him $18 million to get rid of him.
Now to return to the question with which we began: How does Peterson find the time to make all that money? It would seem to be the new-fashioned way of tapping the gusher of wealth flowing from the economy. Peterson took his severance pay to Schwartzman and formed the Blackstone Group, which played the arbitrage game, bought up failing companies, shopped the savings-and-loan auctions, and made money.
A towboat operated by one of their subsidiaries and piloted by a man who had flunked his licensing exam seven out of eight times hit a railroad bridge and caused 47 deaths. Another Blackstone company drilled a hole in the Chicago River and caused that city’s costliest disaster since the Great Fire. A major partner resigned last October under the cloud of an ugly scandal alleging fraud.
These things happen. Peterson is a busy man. Journalists may be forgiven for not connecting him with these misfortunes, or even knowing about them. What is not forgivable is their swallowing his ideological book, line and sinker.
Now CNN is simply turning over their airwaves to him for hours at a time, with no competing views or any independent investigation.
Read up on Blackstone Group and its activity in the more exotic realms of finance and ask yourself if Peterson might just be working on behalf of some interests other than the average Joe taxpayer. He has been on this phony crusade for decades, adjusting his tactics with each change in circumstances, but always with one goal in mind. He wants to destroy the American safety net, period. As he nears the end of his life he is putting billions into the project and like the disaster capitalist he is, he sees the current crisis as the best opportunity to make his move.
David Walker is a decent person and I'm sure the people at the PEW Trust are decent people too. But they are either being willfully blind or they are too genuinely myopic to see they are being used.
The Justice Department's Inspector General report on politicization under the Bush regime was so overwhelming that they had to cut it into sections. Yesterday's release of the section concerning the Civil Rights Division once again invites us to witness the glory that is Bradley Schlozman:
In sum, we concluded, based on the results of our investigation, that Schlozman improperly considered political and ideological affiliations in the recruitment and hiring of career attorneys in the Civil Rights Division, and in doing so, he violated Department policy and federal civil service laws, and committed misconduct.
We found evidence that Schlozman told others in the Department about his success in hiring conservatives. In addition, in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Schlozman admitted making such boasts. Numerous e-mails from Schlozman described above also demonstrate that he sought conservative candidates and rejected liberal ones. Further, Schlozman admitted to Special Litigation Section Chief Cutlar in March 2007, after allegations of partisan hiring surfaced in the media: “I probably made some mistakes. . . . I probably considered politics when I shouldn’t have.” Moreover, a statistical overview of the political and ideological affiliations of attorneys hired in the Division during his tenure showed that Schlozman hired far more Republican or conservative attorneys than Democrats or liberals. At the same time, political and ideological affiliations did not appear to have been a factor when attorneys were hired without Schlozman’s involvement [...]
We concluded that Schlozman inappropriately considered political and ideological affiliations when he forced three career attorneys to transfer from the Appellate Section.
As noted above, Schlozman frequently criticized the attorney staff in the Appellate ection and talked of his plan, when he “came into power,” to move certain attorneys from the section to make room for “real Americans.” Based on our interviews and our review of numerous e-mails, we found that Schlozman used the term “real Americans” to refer to individuals with conservative political views. Appellate Section Chief Flynn also told us that Schlozman named Appellate Section Attorneys A, B, and C as among several in the section whom he considered to be “disloyal,” “not one of us,” “against us,” “not on the team,” or “treacherous” and whom he wanted to move out of the section [...]
We concluded that Schlozman inappropriately used political and ideological affiliations in managing the assignment of cases to attorneys in the sections of the Division he oversaw. According to Section Chiefs Flynn, Cutlar, and Palmer, Schlozman placed limitations on the assignment of cases to attorneys whom Schlozman described as “libs” or “pinkos,” and he requested that “important” cases be handled by conservative attorneys he had hired. In addition, Schlozman expressly inquired about the politics of Cutlar’s nominees for performance awards.
On June 5, 2007, Schlozman testified under oath before the Senate Judiciary Committee in connection with its investigation into the use of political considerations in the hiring and firing of career attorneys at the Department of Justice. At the time of his testimony, Schlozman was Associate Counsel to the Director of EOUSA.
On September 6, 2007, after resigning from the Department, Schlozman responded by letter to supplemental questions for the record posed to him in writing by several Senators as a follow-up to his Senate Judiciary testimony.
We believe that Schlozman made false statements to the Senate Judiciary Committee, both in his sworn testimony and in his written responses to the supplemental questions for the record. In this section, we describe Schlozman’s statements and the evidence that we believe demonstrates their falsity.
That's the bill of particulars, and I believe the words "preponderance of evidence" apply.
And yet, Schlozman will only see the inside of a courtroom in his continued capacity as a lawyer, despite an investigation clearly detailing numerous crimes.
Because the US Attorney in DC, after reviewing this report (which is dated July 2, 2008, and obviously held back until right before Bush leaves town), declined to prosecute.
We referred the findings from our investigation to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia in March 2008. We completed this written report of investigation in July 2008.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office informed us on January 9, 2009, of its decision to decline prosecution of Schlozman. The Interim U.S. Attorney, Jeffrey Taylor, was recused from the matter and the decision.
So, after taking ten months to decide whether or not to prosecute (ten months which happened to include an election in which one of those named in the report--Hans Von Spakovsky--served on FEC), they now release the report. Nice.
There you have the latest from the culture of accountability.
If I follow this, a Bush appointee committed crimes by hiring ideological soulmates. The Inspector General reported the crimes to Bush's Justice Department, and they held the report. The Bush appointee at the US Attorneys office in DC recused himself, and let his staffers reject the findings. And those ideologues hired through criminal practices will REMAIN in the Justice Department, protected by civil service laws, well into the future.
There's more here, including a peek into the classiness of these folks.
Slapping down "a bunch of . . . attorneys really did get the blood pumping and was even enjoyable once in a while," Schlozman wrote three years later when he left to become the U.S. attorney in Kansas City, Mo.
Schlozman surrounded himself with like-minded officials at the Department of Justice. When he was due to meet in 2004 with John Tanner, then chief of the voting section, he asked how Tanner liked his coffee.
"Mary Frances Berry style -- black and bitter," Tanner replied by e-mail, referring to the African American woman who chaired the U.S. Civil Rights Commission from 1993 to 2004. Schlozman circulated the e-mail. "Y'all will appreciate Tanner's response," he wrote.
Did the fun ever stop?
So this is the inevitable result of an attitude of "looking forward" and making sure abuses "never happen again" instead of prosecuting clear crimes. There were civil service laws violated as well as, you know, lying to Congress. Republicans love to talk about deterrence in the criminal justice system unless they're the defendant. Likewise, the establishment Villagers love to punish the wicked with their knowing glances and poison pens and scorn, unless, you know, one of their own is in trouble.
I really wish that the current U.S. attorney's office appointed by this administration had prosecuted. I think that the only way you stop such blatant criminal violations by people who know better, people who are sworn to uphold the law, (unint.) that they know they'll go to jail for breaking the law. That's what should have been done. And just because they broke the law in the Bush administration and the Bush administration did not, or deemed not to prosecute, I think that raises real questions. Prosecution should be done no matter who breaks the law. I think about one of the people who testified that same investigation and said that, uh, "we swear an oath to President George Bush." I said, "no, you swear an oath to uphold the Constitution. That constitution is the constitution you're sworn to uphold and I'm sworn to uphold and it's the constitution that reflects all Americans." [...]
And when somebody deliberately, purposely sets out to subvert the constitution of the United States, and then lies about it, lies about it, Mr. President, I find that a heinous crime. We will see some kid who steals a car, they'll be prosecuted as they probably should. But when you have a key member of the DoJ lie about it under oath, who subverts the consitution of the United States, all the more reason to prosecute that person.
I always find it astonishing that so many people, including America's Pastor Rick Warren, say they could never vote for an atheist, but they can vote for people like this:
On January 7, second-term Republican Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia and two friends prayed over a door. It was not just any door, but the entranceway beneath the Capitol that President-elect Barack Obama will pass through as he walks onto the inaugural stage to take the oath of office. “I hope and pray that as God stirs the heart of our new president that President Obama will listen and will heed God’s direction,” Broun proclaimed.
And then they anointed the door with oil.
In case you are wondering who is praying for our new president and anointing the door through which he'll walk:
While the Capitol prayer partners appeared earnest in the prayers for the president elect’s success, they have each distinguished themselves from their Christian right comrades by leveling some of the most paranoid imprecations Obama has faced since he arrived in the Senate. On November 10, 2008, a week after Obama’s election victory, Broun took umbrage at the President-elect’s call for a national civilian security force, a proposal also backed by George W. Bush. According to Broun, who acknowledged the possibility that he might be “crazy,” Obama had revealed himself as a radical Marxist Nazi socialist comparable to Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.
"It may sound a bit crazy and off base,” Broun told an AP reporter, “but the thing is, he’s the one who proposed this national security force. I’m just trying to bring attention to the fact that we may—may not, I hope not—but we may have a problem with that type of philosophy of radical socialism or Marxism. That’s exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it’s exactly what the Soviet Union did. When he’s proposing to have a national security force that’s answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military, he’s showing me signs of being Marxist.”
After seeming to back away from his comments when he was heavily criticized, Broun announced that he was “not taking back anything [he] said.” “I firmly believe that we must not fall victim to the ‘it can't happen here’ mentality,” he declared in a press release. “I adhere to the adage ‘eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.’”
The son of a Democratic state senator from the liberal college town of Athens, Georgia, Broun attributes his conservative transformation to the wonder working power of Jesus. Broun’s born-again moment arrived in 1986, during the height of the Reagan Revolution, while he toiled as a doctor in rural Georgia, struggling to keep afloat during the first year of his marriage. He had suffered through several “broken marriages and episodes of broken relationships and financial problems,” Broun recalled during a November 2007 speech on the House floor. While watching an NFL game, Broun became entranced by a “gentleman with this big type hair wig on” holding a “John 3:16” sign. “As I sat there in my office that fall trying to figure out life, I picked up the Bible and read John 3:16,” Broun said. He suddenly transformed into a true believer, a cadre of the Christian right.
(The wigged “gentleman” was Rollen Stewart, an evangelical fanatic and fixture at sports events who is currently serving three consecutive sentences in jail on kidnapping charges as well as several minor sentences for stink bomb attacks).
There's a lot of jockeying about what to do with the unspent portion of the TARP bailout and even more jockeying about how much to spent on a new stimulus package. But nobody's talking about the huge sums of money the Federal Reserve has been loaning to banks and other entities around the world since the financial crisis hit.
Yesterday, Blue America congressman Alan Grayson actually asked Vice Chairman of the Fed Donald Kohn where the money is going. And you won't believe the answer he got:
Apparently, it wouldn't be prudent for the American taxpayers to know where these trillions are going. The man simply refused to answer.
For a primer on what this is all about, go here. This is actually a big deal and the stakes are huge:
The bottom line is that Bernanke has made a gamble with something approaching 2 trillion. If the gamble wins, taxpayers owe nothing. If the gamble loses, taxpayers are committed to borrow a sum equal to any losses and start making interest payments on it.
The sum we're talking about is more than the amount that the CBO cited last week as the impending federal deficit -- and which caused a group faint among the villagers. But nobody's talking about this except a progressive freshman congressman from Florida.
There are more hearings scheduled and Chariman Frank's ears certainly seemed to perk when the vice chairman declined to say where the money was going and couldn't give a good reason why so I expect this isn't the last we'll hear of it.
Just how much are we on the hook here? And for whom?
I'm baffled as to why the Washington Post put this on the front page, and why most other papers referred to it as if Bob Woodward had a Watergate-esque scoop.
The top Bush administration official in charge of deciding whether to bring Guantanamo Bay detainees to trial has concluded that the U.S. military tortured a Saudi national who allegedly planned to participate in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, interrogating him with techniques that included sustained isolation, sleep deprivation, nudity and prolonged exposure to cold, leaving him in a "life-threatening condition."
"We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani," said Susan J. Crawford, in her first interview since being named convening authority of military commissions by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in February 2007. "His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that's why I did not refer the case" for prosecution.
Crawford, a retired judge who served as general counsel for the Army during the Reagan administration and as Pentagon inspector general when Dick Cheney was secretary of defense, is the first senior Bush administration official responsible for reviewing practices at Guantanamo to publicly state that a detainee was tortured.
As for the supposed scoop that Crawford is the first Bush Administration official to admit to torture, um, how about Dick Cheney? CIA Director Michael Hayden? George W. Bush?
There is some news value in Crawford's remarks, on a couple of fronts. She admits that a combination of techniques that were authorized, administered in succession and over a long period of time, can have the same effect as torture. And the fact that she held back military lawyers from prosecuting him because of the torture used underscores what some are calling the difficulty with closing Guantanamo and dealing with the detainees.
The Qahtani case underscores the challenges facing the incoming Obama administration as it seeks to close the controversial detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, including the dilemmas posed by individuals considered too dangerous to release but whose legal status is uncertain. FBI "clean teams," which gather evidence without using information gained during controversial interrogations, have established that Qahtani intended to join the 2001 hijackers. Mohamed Atta, the plot's leader, who died steering American Airlines Flight 11 into the World Trade Center, went to the Orlando airport to meet Qahtani on Aug. 4, 2001, but the young Saudi was denied entry by a suspicious immigration inspector.
"There's no doubt in my mind he would've been on one of those planes had he gained access to the country in August 2001," Crawford said of Qahtani, who remains detained at Guantanamo. "He's a muscle hijacker. . . . He's a very dangerous man. What do you do with him now if you don't charge him and try him? I would be hesitant to say, 'Let him go.' "
These decisions have to made for a relatively small group of individuals, maybe a dozen. And really, the answer is that the government should have thought of this before deciding to torture. As it is, they're going to have to do some investigative work and find the evidence of Al-Qahtani and other suspects' involvement rather than relying on unreliable confessions gained through torture. If you can find that, and it should be fairly available, you charge them. If not, you are going to have to release them. This is popularly known as "the legal system." US courts have dealt with hundreds of terrorism trials and have methods for dealing with classified information. The sham military commissions need to stop. They're not even effective in dealing with the suspects they were DESIGNED to adjudicate, as this case shows.
He motorcaded to a house in Maryland this evening, and if the press pool report is accurate, he is breaking bread with William Kristol and David Brooks. (If Brooks and Kristol seem to be unusually briefed about Obama's thinking, you'll know why.)
CBS News's Dan Raviv tells the pool that the house, on Grafton Street in Chevy Chase, belongs to George Will. (Unless he's moved.)
That's nice. But lest you think he's not being fair and balanced:
Tomorrow, I hear Obama has another private meeting with non-Republican opinion columnists.
Ellen Moran, the incoming White House communications director, set these meetings up.
Again -- establishment opinion matters to the Obama communications team.
You don't say.
If HotAir is right, he may be breaking bread with the Big Kahuna too:
Coincidentally, I got an e-mail from a reader shortly after noon noting that Limbaugh had a surprise guest host today who spent the beginning of the show dropping hints that Rush had been called away to urgent business in D.C. and that it might have to do with something he said yesterday about giving Obama advice. I ignored it — but now they’re dropping hints on the EIB homepage, too.
I'm sure Rush will lead the whole crew in a rousing rendition of "Barack, The Magic Negro" over brandy and cigars.
This week, a number of bloggers have formed a coalition called Get Afghanistan Right, dedicated to breaking out of the narrow boundaries of the Afghanistan debate and open the discussion about what it means to escalate in a part of the world that has historically proven to be a graveyard of empires. I have seen a shift both in online and offline media over the last several weeks, with writers more willing to challenge assumptions about this war in its eighth year and what can be done outside of military escalation that meets with our national security and foreign policy goals. I've written a lot about Afghanistan, and I think my concerns with a de facto escalation rests on a number of big myths that have proven false:
1) It's not a "good war". Thomas Ricks speaks for me when he says that he finds the notion of a "good war" to be offensive. All wars are painful and cost both lives and treasure. By casting Afghanistan as unimpeachable and just, we hide the consequences, which are becoming greater as the years pass - more coalition forces died there than in Iraq last year. I'm perfectly willing to have a debate about Afghanistan, but not under the terms that it's a "good war," which is tautological.
2) There is something to "win." This has been ill-defined throughout all of Bush's wars, but particularly in Afghanistan. Andrew Bacevich has a brilliant little treatise based on this premise. Once you talk about "winning," you have to define victory, and given our Western biases, we assume that to mean a democratic state able to defend its borders and become an ally in freedom. That is ahistorical to the Afghanistan experience.
Afghanistan is a much bigger country—nearly the size of Texas—and has a larger population that's just as fractious. Moreover, unlike Iraq, Afghanistan possesses almost none of the prerequisites of modernity; its literacy rate, for example, is 28 percent, barely a third of Iraq's. In terms of effectiveness and legitimacy, the government in Kabul lags well behind Baghdad—not exactly a lofty standard. Apart from opium (last year's crop totaled about 8,000 metric tons), Afghans produce almost nothing the world wants [...]
U.S. officials tend to assume that power in Afghanistan ought to be exercised from Kabul. Yet the real influence in Afghanistan has traditionally rested with tribal leaders and warlords. Offered the right incentives, warlords can accomplish U.S. objectives more effectively and cheaply than Western combat battalions. The basis of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan should therefore become decentralization and outsourcing, offering cash and other emoluments to local leaders who will collaborate with us in keeping terrorists out of their territory.
Those who favor escalation have an obligation to define the end state of the mission, as well as how additional troops can accomplish that better than local forces and diplomatic measures.
3) The Afghanistan war is about Afghanistan. Actually, it's about a comprehensive strategy for the entire region. Pushing Taliban remnants and extremists out of Afghanistan and into Pakistan could destabilize a nuclear power. And that doesn't disarm the ostensible goal of US policy, to deny a safe haven for terrorist planning and activity. That requires local law enforcement globally, as well as a strategy of winning hearts and minds that is disabled by violence and chaos far away from Kabul:
More than a thousand Afghans signed up on Thursday to say they wanted to go and fight Israel in the Gaza Strip, many of them blaming the United States which has some 30,000 troops in Afghanistan, for supporting the Jewish state.
Accusations by Taliban militants and some Muslim clerics that Israel and its main ally, the United States, aim to destroy Islam have a strong impact on public opinion in Afghanistan, where Washington plans to almost double its troop numbers this year.
Scores of young men crowded into the library of Kabul's Milad ul-Nabi mosque, lined with banners reading "Death to Israel" and "Death to America," to sign up to fight Israel.
There is a regional strategy that can blunt the influence of extremism globally and increase our national security without a major troop surge. Bringing me to my next point...
4) Surges always work. The cause and effect between the troop surge in Iraq and the modest security gains there, which has been misread as a direct action, colors the potential for throwing troops at the problem in Afghanistan. But the situations are very different. Increasing the footprint of occupation on a country wary of outsiders is perilous. And the Taliban, growing in strength in the country, are not seen as outsiders imposing their views on the locals but locals speaking the language of rebellion and fighting for freedom. Peter Beaumont has more. The top US commander in Afghanistan has said that an Iraq-style surge cannot work.
5) We have to "do something." This is the common lazy style of thinking in Washington, which thinks that actions only have good consequences, and therefore any action must be supported over none at all. Today we saw a tacit admission of this in the Washington Post:
President-elect Barack Obama intends to sign off on Pentagon plans to send up to 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, but the incoming administration does not anticipate that the Iraq-like "surge" of forces will significantly change the direction of a conflict that has steadily deteriorated over the past seven years.
Instead, Obama's national security team expects that the new deployments, which will nearly double the current U.S. force of 32,000 (alongside an equal number of non-U.S. NATO troops), will help buy enough time for the new administration to reappraise the entire Afghanistan war effort and develop a comprehensive new strategy for what Obama has called the "central front on terror."
With conditions on the ground worsening by nearly every yardstick last year -- including record levels of extremist attacks and U.S. casualties, and the expansion of the conflict across Pakistan and into India -- Obama's campaign pledge to "finish the job" in Afghanistan with more troops, money and diplomacy has encountered the daunting reality of a job that has barely begun.
I imagine that the Obama team has seen the assessments and they are dire. The Bush Administration muddled through with no overarching strategy and wasted valuable time. But how do you tell a soldier that you're deploying him to buy time while you can come up with a way out? How does that meet the interests of the military, or our national security?
It's in some ways encouraging that the Obama team does not expect a "surge" to automatically succeed. And they have talked about building a developmental and diplomatic counterpart to the military action, so I am confident that the mission will also be concerned with reconstruction and improving regional ties (the admission by Gen. Petraeus that the US and Iran share interests in Afghanistan is a very good new way to think about this conflict). But just airlifting in troops, without a settled strategy or even how to best deploy them seems unwise.
Afghanistan in 2009 does not lend itself to an obvious solution, and there are arguments for more troops that have a certain logic to them. But these lines of debate should be open, instead of arguments against escalation marginalized as the "unserious" alternative in Afghanistan. Hopefully this effort will go a long way in bringing those viewpoints more into the mainstream.
"Proper Privy Council Inquiry Into The Origins And Conduct Of The Iraq War."
by digby
This is interesting. Apparently it wasn't just Cheney who strong armed members of his government into creating a basis for an illegal war:
Fresh questions over the legality of the Iraq war were raised today after the government admitted it could not substantiate its claim that Lord Goldsmith had changed his mind over the legal basis for the invasion before a highly controversial meeting with two of Tony Blair's closest allies.
The admission has revived allegations that the former attorney general was pressured to revise his opinion that an invasion could be illegal without an explicit UN resolution.
Opposition MPs have renewed calls for a full Iraq inquiry in light of the new information.
The revelation comes ahead of a ruling on whether the government should publish minutes of two prewar cabinet meetings at which Goldsmith's advice was discussed.
Two weeks before the invasion, in March 2003, Goldsmith gave Blair a detailed legal opinion that doubted its legality.
Six days later, on 13 March, Goldsmith met Lord Falconer, then a junior minister, and Sally (now Lady) Morgan from Blair's office.
On 17 March, he published a single-page parliamentary answer, asserting that the war would be legal on the basis of existing UN resolutions.
In 2006 Richard Thomas, the information commissioner, ordered the government to disclose details of the process by which Goldsmith had come to his revised conclusion.
However, rather than requiring the publication of actual documents, Thomas allowed the government to publish a narrative account and include material that was not based on documentary evidence.
The Cabinet Office then issued a "disclosure statement" which claimed Goldsmith had informed his legal secretary of his new opinion before he met Morgan and Falconer.
But in response to a new freedom of information request, it has admitted it has "no information" to support this sequence of events.
The Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman, Ed Davey, told the Guardian: "This latest revelation shows there is no evidence to back up government claims that Lord Goldsmith was not leant on by Blair's inner circle before deciding the war would be legal.
"We may never know the full truth but, as the official version slowly unravels, the credibility of Goldsmith's changed legal position is further called into question. A full inquiry is our only hope that we can force the full truth out."
The Tory shadow foreign secretary, William Hague, said: "It is surprising that the Cabinet Office is unable to supply further information on this matter.
"This adds yet further weight to the case for a proper privy council inquiry into the origins and conduct of the Iraq war."
Last November, Lord Bingham, a former senior law lord, said Goldsmith's view was "flawed" and called the invasion "a serious violation of international law and of the rule of law".
[...]
It emerged during the tribunal hearing in November that the minutes could prove there was insufficient cabinet discussion of the legality of the war.
The attorney general missed the first cabinet meeting, on the day that he reached his new conclusion, but attended the second, at which the cabinet was presented with his single-page view.
Most ministers were not shown Goldsmith's original advice or told that he had expressed doubts on the issue.
The former minister Clare Short has claimed that she was prevented from asking Goldsmith why he had taken so long to provide an opinion and whether he had any doubts.
Why Blair threw in so hard with Cheney on this, I'll never understand. It's true that the foreign policy elite in both countries were in agreement and that any attempt to stop the steamroller would have been seen as a rupture of the special relationship. But Blair seemed to sincerely buy into the whole thing with the fervor of the most committed neocon. It's not that I would have expected him to be French or anything, but his enthusiasm for the project was disconcerting.
It appears the Brits aren't unwilling to play the blame game and it will be very, very interesting if they manage to find out just what it was the Blair people told Goldsmith to make him change his mind on something so significant as the legality of an invasion. Maybe someday we'll do something like that here in the US.
As I watch the gasbags "analyze" the Clinton confirmation hearings, it seems clear to me that the village will not rest until they force Bill Clinton to close down the Clinton Global Initiative and remove himself from his own foundation. By allowing foreigners to support these projects, Clinton is obviously committing treason.
Whenever I see some little diaper wearing toady like David Vitter get all filled with righteous indignation about conflict of interest and setting precedents I just have to laugh. George W. Bush's entire family was a walking conflict of interest for eight years --- his father even accepting money directly from the Saudi Arabian government for his own personal use. It was assumed that Poppy was clean because well .... he was one of them, if you know what I mean.
The village doesn't like Clinton doing this work because it makes their obsessive loathing look petty and shallow, which it is. They insist that there must be something nefarious about it, because they are still convinced that Bill Clinton came to town and trashed the place and they cannot rest until everyone in the world agrees with them. Which it never will.
This is how ridiculous this is: Bill and Hillary Clinton are pretty much accused by these jackasses of selling out their country --- to help people around the world deal with AIDS and climate change, no less. It makes no sense at all unless you are a spoiled elite who actually believes that helping AIDS victims and working on climate change is somehow in conflict with America's policies, which I'm sure they do.
Never let it be said that the establishment doesn't require accountability of politicians. They certainly do --- it's just that the only people they ever require it of are named Clinton. Imagine if they spent even a tiny portion of the energy they expend endlessly harassing those two for non-existent crimes on prosecuting war criminals or denouncing torture instead ...
*Here's just the first page of nearly a thousand projects which must be destroyed in order that the elites be allowed to continue to indulge their never ending quest to portray Bill and Hillary Clinton as crooks.
Looks like the Obama team either acquiesced to Democratic lawmakers or allowed themselves to look like the serious bipartisan centrists while orchestrating the whole thing:
Bowing to widespread Democratic skepticism, President-elect Barack Obama will drop his bid to include a business tax break he once touted in the economic stimulus bill now taking shape on Capitol Hill, aides said last night.
Obama suggested the $3,000-per-job credit last week as one of five individual and business tax incentives aimed at winning Republican support. He proposed $300 billion in tax relief in a bill that could reach $775 billion, and he resurrected the jobs-credit proposal from the campaign trail as one of his main provisions [...]
"We've always said we're open to other ideas. This was never set in stone," said a senior Obama adviser of the decision.
Whether it was all kabuki or not, the perception that this President listens to the other major actors and arrives at a compromise without anger or territorial concerns is probably the kind of tone they wanted to strike. In addition, they are signaling a responsiveness to pressure from within the Democratic caucus that is a good portent for progressives, who must keep pushing. Sirota has a good post on the best strategies moving forward.
While I totally agree that now is simply not the time to seriously discuss deficits or entitlement "reform" when a crisis is afoot, it's important to recognize that there are progressive solutions to that hurdle, when we get to it. Bob Herbert discusses this today.
Well, there’s a good idea floating around that takes its cue from the legendary Willie Sutton. Why not go where the money is?
The economist Dean Baker is a strong advocate of a financial transactions tax. This would impose a small fee — ranging up to, say, 0.25 percent — on the sale or transfer of stocks, bonds and other financial assets, including the seemingly endless variety of exotic financial instruments that have been in the news so much lately.
According to Mr. Baker, the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, the fees would raise a ton of money, perhaps $100 billion or more annually — money that the government sorely needs.
But there’s another intriguing element to the proposal. While the fees would be a trivial expense for what the general public tends to think of as ordinary traders — people investing in stocks, bonds or other assets for some reasonable period of time — they would amount to a much heavier lift for speculators, the folks who bring a manic quality to the markets, who treat it like a casino.
“It raises money in a way that comes primarily at the expense of speculation,” said Mr. Baker. “The fees would be a considerable expense for someone who is buying futures, or a stock, or any asset at 2 o’clock and then selling it at 3. The more you trade, the more you pay.
“For the typical person holding stock, who is planning to hold it for a long period of time, paying the quarter of one percent on a trade is just not that big a deal.”
Making the people most responsible for this mess pay for it? The devil you say!
Rather than cede the argument, progressives must engage at all levels. You want to talk about the deficit? Here's a remedy. You want to talk about entitlements? Cost controls through universal health care. Obviously, there's a balance to this, and prioritizing the problem is important. But let's not forget that there are plenty of ways to deal with these challenges beyond the usual right-wing off-the-shelf solutions.
***********
Looping back to some of the other important discussions we've been having in the last couple days about the new Administration and civil liberties, I'm actually on a panel tonight discussing those issues with the Pasadena chapter of the ACLU. For those of you in Southern California, the location is:
NEIGHBORHOOD UNIVERSALIST CHURCH 301 North Orange Grove Blvd. Pasadena, CA 91103 7:30pm
I've long worried about the gradual open acceptance of torture and have written a lot about the expanding police apparatus and what that means to our civil liberties. ("If you build it, they will use it.")
In a post questioning the usefulness of creating yest another alternate legal system to deal with the Guantanamo prisoners, Hilzoy puts her finger exactly on why it is a very dangerous idea, and cites what I consider to be a chilling example of how it's likely to be abused:
One of the ways in which we protect ourselves from torture is by making it clear that evidence gained through torture is inadmissible in court. Creating an alternative legal system in which such evidence was admissible would create horrible incentives for law enforcement. This is particularly true since many terrorism statutes are broadly written. Consider this case:
"For the past three years, a 24-year-old construction worker named Edgar Morales has been in jail, awaiting trial on murder and terrorism charges that could send him to prison for life. Mr. Morales, however, does not belong to Al Qaeda or Hamas.
Instead, prosecutors say, he is a member of the St. James Boys, a group of recreational soccer players who formed a street gang that terrorized the Mexican and Mexican-American population of the west Bronx for several years and killed a 10-year-old girl in 2002. (...)
The Bronx district attorney, Robert T. Johnson, says the law is an apt tool in his effort to prosecute violent street gangs.
"The obvious need of this statute is to protect society against acts of political terror," Mr. Johnson said in a statement. "However, the terror perpetrated by gangs, which all too often occurs on the streets of New York, also fits squarely within the scope of this statute.""
This case concerns a state statute, but the relevant part of it -- defining terrorism as acts that violate the law and are intended to "intimidate or coerce a civilian population" -- is also found in federal law. This means that a lot could count as terrorism in the hands of a creative prosecutor, and if, in all such cases, an alternate legal system was available in which evidence gained through torture was admissible, that would have huge implications.
Of course Obama would say that the new justice system could only be used in the "right" kind of terrorist trials. And he would probably make sure that they were. But down the road, suppose we have a crime wave or there becomes some kind of extreme dissent on an issue or someone like David Koresh gets the attention of the authorities and you have these "terrorist" laws on the books and a special justice system all ready to deal with them? After what we've seen (and the clear lesson that there will never be any ramifications for such behavior) why would anyone think that the government wouldn't use them? They already are. ("Terrorism" is a very elastic term and one that is wide open for abuse in a nation where sadistic sheriffs are so celebrated that they are given their own reality TV shows.)
We have a civilian legal system and a military legal system under our constitution, both of which have been developed over centuries and tested from a myriad different directions. And as sophisticated as they are, they are still imperfect and often produce unjust results. It's impossible to develop yet another legal system from scratch that will even function much less have any credibility. We've seen that with the military commissions that are nothing more than staged Kangaroo courts where even the judges don't have a fundamental understanding of how the thing works. It's just not possible.
This report released by the Center for Constitutional Rights includes the newest and most comprehensive numbers and lists of detainee status by nationality. The three simple steps are: 1) send those can go home home, 2) secure safe haven for those who cannot, and 3) charge those who can be charged and try them in ordinary federal criminal court.
It has been often repeated that closing Guantánamo will be a challenge. The reality is that the restoration of the rule of law to that offshore prison—and this country—should be significantly less complicated than the dismantling of the law has been. The time to close Guantánamo is long overdue—and it can be done in three months.
The new administration must repatriate those who can be released safely, secure safe haven in the United States and other countries for those who cannot be repatriated safely, and prosecute in federal criminal courts those who should be prosecuted. Only 250 of 779 men remain in the prison camp. Most can be returned to their home countries through vigorous diplomacy. A smaller number need to be offered protection in the United States or third countries, many of whom have already begun to come forward to offer help to the new administration. There is no justification for continued detention without trial or the creation of special courts; such proposals would continue the human rights disaster rather than end it.
For more information on CCR's 100 Days campaign to restore, protect and expand the constitution, click here.
And in the spirit of being supportive when it's warranted, the ACLU has a nice action going to show your appreciation to President-elect Obama for pledging yesterday to issue an executive order to close Guantanamo on his first day. You can sign the letter, here.
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 WAY
OBAMA 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.
In case you were wondering what the spoiled, wealthy celebrity villagers believe Obama should do to pay for his agenda, here it is on CNN this morning:
Gloria Borger: Out of crisis comes opportunity. And they're thinking, as long as we're not paying so much attention to the deficit this year, next year, why not go for it all? Why not do what we want to do on healthcare and energy? Got it done with the understanding that two or three years down the road we're going to have to start paying for this.
Blitzer: But if he wants to deal with the deficit, the national debt, he's got to deal with htose 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.
That's completely incoherent, of course. Universal health care is the very definition of an "entitlement" and will be vociferously opposed on the very grounds that Borger cites: "we don't have the money." (And if the "grand bargain" is that these programs have to be paid for on the backs of old people, I have a feeling it's going to run into some resistance from a large political constituency as well. )
This is why talk of "entitlement reform" at a time of great economic peril is a dangerous thing. The Republicans and wealthy villagers get all excited again at the prospect that they might finally be able to destroy social security and this provides them with a great new excuse to push for it. And in doing that, they scare the hell out of people who are more dependent on those "entitlements" than ever. They make no sense and nobody should ever listen to them.
It's not that deficits don't matter, mind you. But they don't matter more than anything else and they certainly don't matter right now. And by putting "entitlements" on the menu it becomes nearly impossible for Obama to pass health care and makes cuts in social security and medicare the price that must be paid for the Republican sponsored financial meltdown. How convenient.
Social security was passed during the great depression when the country finally understood that the elderly simply had to have a guaranteed pension. It's incredibly ironic that in a time which many believe may be the worst economic crisis since then, it's becoming common wisdom among the elites that the only answer is to ensure that they don't.
You should have seen the smug, satisfied look on Borger's face.
BTW: If people seriously want to know how to pay for what neds to be done in this country, they should read this.
I doubt that the rich media celebrities who decide the parameters of our political agenda will ever agree (after all, it means that they will have to kick in) but it's certainly doable.
Yesterday the Obama transition team delivered an official estimate of the effects of their recovery package, as it stands now, focusing particularly on job creation. Obama spoke about it in his weekly address.
I asked my nominee for Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, Dr. Christina Romer, and the Vice President-Elect’s Chief Economic Adviser, Dr. Jared Bernstein, to conduct a rigorous analysis of this plan and come up with projections of how many jobs it will create – and what kind of jobs they will be. Today, I am releasing a report of their findings so that the American people can see exactly what this plan will mean for their families, their communities, and our economy.
The report confirms that our plan will likely save or create three to four million jobs. 90 percent of these jobs will be created in the private sector – the remaining 10 percent are mainly public sector jobs we save, like the teachers, police officers, firefighters and others who provide vital services in our communities.
The jobs we create will be in businesses large and small across a wide range of industries. And they’ll be the kind of jobs that don’t just put people to work in the short term, but position our economy to lead the world in the long-term.
(The insistence that the jobs be in the private sector doesn't make much sense to me. Who cares where the paycheck is coming from? This is an example of how Obama still accepts too many of the arguments of prevailing conservative economic ideology, which I'll return to in a moment.)
What's quite remarkable about the analysis is that it's honest. It very specifically states that tax cuts will not be nearly as effective in creating jobs as direct government investment. It includes state government relief as a necessary component of saving and creating jobs (state relief provides the biggest job-creation number). It admits that there's a wide margin of error in terms of numbers of jobs across specific sectors, particularly because of the unusual nature of this recession. And the numbers it eventually uses are basically correct, says Paul Krugman.
Kudos, by the way, to the administration-in-waiting for providing this — it will be a joy to argue policy with an administration that provides comprehensible, honest reports, not case studies in how to lie with statistics.
That said, the report is written in such a way as to make it hard to figure out exactly what’s in the plan. This also makes it hard to evaluate the reasonableness of the assumed multipliers. But here’s the thing: the estimates appear to be very close to what I’ve been getting.
The report does make is hard to determine what's in the plan, but that's because they're assuming a sort of mythical, as-yet-unwritten plan that has elements of what we've heard through news reports. Seeing that Krugman has been a critic of the proposal for being not sufficient for what is needed, however, we do see a pattern emerging: the Obama team is diligent, scrupulous, technocratic and aware of the challenge - they just aren't willing to do what's necessary.
So this looks like an estimate from the Obama team itself saying — as best as I can figure it out — that the plan would close only around a third of the output gap over the next two years.
One more point: the estimate of what would happen to the economy in the absence of a stimulus plan seems kind of optimistic. The chart above has unemployment ex-stimulus peaking at 9 percent in the first quarter of 2010 and coming down through the year; the CBO estimates an average unemployment rate of 9 percent for 2010, so the Obama people are more optimistic than the CBO, and a lot more optimistic than I am.
Bottom line: even if I use the Romer-Bernstein estimates instead of my own — there really isn’t much difference — this plan looks too weak.
This is a far cry from the Bush era, where they would hide the evidence, lie about the statistics, and reach unreasonable conclusions. However, while the reliance on the facts makes the end result far easier to recognize, it does not make it any more palatable. This is a weak package.
There's a more generous reading of these numbers by Tim Fernholz, who thinks that the chart showing unemployment still well over 7%, even with the recovery plan, by the midterm elections is meant for a particular audience:
But even with this plan, you can see that unemployment will remain appreciably high through the 2010 election, which could be problematic for Democrats in congress even if it seems that the economy is moving in the right direction. The new administration's expectation is that every percentage point increase in GDP is equal to about 1 million jobs, and they project a 3.7 percent increase in GDP and 3.6 million new jobs by the end of 2010 [...]
But one thing I do expect is for Democratic members of congress to look at that graph above, consider their reelection prospects, and wonder if maybe they ought to make the bill just a bit bigger so that unemployment line will drop just a bit lower as voters head to the polls; nothing like seeing self-interest and good public policy go hand-in-hand.
That's very possible. And as Fernholz notes, the effects of limiting foreclosures and recapitalizing banks with the second half of a rejiggered bailout could also be positive for economic growth. So in a sense, we're viewing this recovery package in a vacuum.
But the central problem remains. Obama's team has a sense of the problem, knows what's needed for the solution - and is reluctant to do all that is necessary. At the end of Krugman's The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008, he basically says (can't find the quote right now) that the only thing holding back a real response to the crisis is ideology - the accumulated economic thought of the last several decades that is based on old paradigms and the belief that depressions can never happen again, that the tools have been put in place to eliminate the possibility of bank runs and extended pain. The events of the past year have shown that this isn't true, and depression economics must again be used to get us out of the wreck. And so, despite Obama's frequent calls for post-partisanship and his focus on "what works," the problem with his outlook, at this point, is really ideological. He prefers incrementalism and cautiousness over real solutions because he cannot comprehend using the instruments of depression economics at this time. I do think Obama has shown the capacity to listen and alter his thinking based on the facts. But until he bridges this ideological divide, when he can accept a real Keynesian solution, or nationalization of the banks, we are going to be struggling with insufficient, incremental responses.
I can't believe what I saw yesterday: CNN showed the Shock Doctrine documentary I.O.U.S.A. It is an amazing piece of propaganda, which, if it isn't designed to destroy any chance of enacting a necessary stimulus, will persuade more than a few Americans that the biggest problem we face at this moment is long term debt caused by entitlements --- and nothing short of massive spending cuts can save us. Here's the press release:
Wake up, America! We're on the brink of a financial meltdown. I.O.U.S.A. boldly examines the rapidly growing national debt and its consequences for the United States and its citizens. Burdened with an ever-expanding government and military, increased international competition, overextended entitlement programs, and debts to foreign countries that are becoming impossible to honor, America must mend its spendthrift ways or face an economic disaster of epic proportions.
Throughout history, the American government has found it nearly impossible to spend only what has been raised through taxes. Wielding candid interviews with both average American taxpayers and government officials, Sundance veteran Patrick Creadon (Wordplay) helps demystify the nation's financial practices and policies. The film follows former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker as he crisscrosses the country explaining America's unsustainable fiscal policies to its citizens.
With surgical precision, Creadon interweaves archival footage and economic data to paint a vivid and alarming profile of America's current economic situation. The ultimate power of I.O.U.S.A. is that the film moves beyond doomsday rhetoric to proffer potential financial scenarios and propose solutions about how we can recreate a fiscally sound nation for future generations.
Creadon uses candid interviews and his featured subjects include Warren Buffett, Alan Greenspan, Paul O'Neill, Robert Rubin, and Paul Volcker, along with the Peter G. Peterson Foundation's own David Walker and Bob Bixby of the Concord Coalition, a Foundation grantee.
Pointedly topical and consummately nonpartisan, I.O.U.S.A. drives home the message that the only time for America's financial future is now.
I suspect that people who read this blog know why that's deeply dishonest and why the timing for this crusade couldn't be worse. It's obvious to those who are following this story that what's required to avert a far worse recession and quite possibly a depression, is for the government to do the opposite of what these deficit obsessives say must be done. But I don't think everyone in the country has that understanding.
I say this is a shock doctrine documentary because it is nearly impossible for me to believe that it is a coincidence that the deficit hawks have put together this slick "non-partisan" documentary and well financed campaign to cut spending at the moment of what many people believe is America's greatest economic peril since the 1930s. They are, quite obviously, attempting to use the crisis to dismantle the social safety net and avoid doing the real work of reforming the financial system. Shock Doctrine 101.
And when I say slick and non-partisan, it really is. The show also featured a panel with none other than the smarmy village saint Bill Bradley and the Clinton era deficit maven Alice Rivlin. Of course, it also included hedge fund king and deficit fetishist Pete Peterson and his little dog ex-CBO GAO chief David Walker. (Walker seems to be halfway aware that he might not be on the right track, but he's committed to this project.) It couldn't be more in keeping with the post-partisan, non-ideological zeitgeist. Except it's ideological to the core.
One would think this message is so dissonant that no one could possibly find it persuasive. After all, they are worrying about some potential future catastrophic event while we are in middle of a current calamity. But it's actually very clever ---you can see by the press release that it sounds like they are talking about the current problem, even though their prescription is exactly the opposite of what is required . Indeed the diabolical effect of this project and its timing is that it's designed to make people believe that government spendingis the cause of the current economic crisis.
And it's smart. What they are prescribing makes more intuitive sense to many people than what is actually necessary to solve the problem. We are all coming to terms with the fact that we are going to have to stop spending beyond our means and pay down our debt in order to get our financial houses in order. Why shouldn't the government have to do the same thing, especially if it's facing an imminent "balloon payment" with all those retirees and sick people getting ready to explode the debt? We all know that the government has been spending like drunken sailors and it stands to reason that's why we find ourselves in this crisis, right?
The sainted Bill Breadley said it right out on the program:
People understand that if they run up debts in their own lives, it's no different than when the government runs up debts the same way.
Americans have been mentally trained over the past few decades to believe drivel like that--- the free market is always the preferred method to solve economic problems, that the government should be run like a business (or your household budget) and, most importantly, that government is the cause of problems, not the solution. This deficit obsession plays into all those beliefs and makes it very difficult to explain in the middle of the crisis that the government isn't a business or a household and needs to go further into debt in periods when everyone else is trying to escape it. And, needless to say, it also sounds like the tax 'n spend libruls are at it again.
I'm sure it hasn't escaped anyone's notice that the deficit scolds are coming out of the woodwork now that the Republicans brought us to the brink, slashing taxes for the wealthy, larding their own contributors with earmarks, solidifying the notion that military industrial complex spending is a sacred, untouchable icon, and fetishing and deregulating the market until they finally brought the whole system to its knees. They certainly didn't say much about the debt while it was adding up these last eight years.
They did the same thing during the 80s, which is why Cheney uttered "Reagan proved deficits don't matter. (What was left out was "for Republicans." Democrats are endlessly and relentlessly harassed about deficits --- as they clean up the big mess the deficit spending Republicans leave behind.)
They've reanimated the yellow peril, which is only fitting. Last time, we were told that Japan was taking over the country by buying up all of our real estate. This time it's the Chinese buying up all our bonds. (In 92, Perot put a little zesty mexican salsa in the recipe.) It's always something. The foreigners are going to kill us in our beds unless we cut social security and medicare. And if we even think of enacting any new "entitlements" (a conservative buzzword designed to make you think people are getting something they don't really deserve) it's pretty clear that the Asian hordes are going to destroy our way of life (if the muslims don't get to us first.)
One of the fundamental characteristics of shock doctrine economics is extreme complexity for which a simple, intuitive solution is proposed. It's hard to argue with and it's hard to resist. Here are famous people who really seem to understand what's going on and the solutions they propose just seem like common sense. Even Joe the plumber can see how right their view is. Unfortunately, they're completely wrong --- at least if you care about the country as a whole and the suffering of the millions of people who will have to endure their "solutions."
It's highly unlikely that they will fully have their way on this. We are in deep shit and there are a lot of very smart people who know the deficit is the least of our problems at the moment and that "entitlement reform" is one sure way to deepen the panic and make personal spending contract further than it needs to. (There's a lot of wealth among seniors and near seniors. I can't imagine that chit-chat about how social security is going broke is particularly good news to people who've just lost a good portion of their portfolios in the real estate plunge and the stock market crash.)
But these people are going to cause trouble, which comes as no surprise to me. I've been writing about this for years. It's one of the reasons why I believe in liberal rhetoric (and, yes, the dreaded "ideology.") If you don't bother to educate people counter to the myths and propaganda they hear from the right, they have nothing to hold onto except faith in the Democrats in the face of arguments that have been built layer by layer over many years. (And having faith in Democrats really take courage.) The fact that they refuse to do this doesn't automatically spell failure for democratic policies, but it makes it many times harder to succeed.
They don't even seem to intend to do tank the stimulus, just restrict it. What they are doing is setting the stage for entitlement cuts and a swift, premature pullback on government spending --- thus extending the crisis. And if the Democrats are cowed by these people (they always are --- they hate being called spendthrifts) there will be enough egomaniacs in the congress to hamstring the administration and force them to adopt these "common sense" methods of running the economy --- which is precisely how we got into this problem in the first place.
*In case you would like a more erudite argument against deficit hawkishness at a time like this, here's James Galbraith on the subject. (I wonder if he's still so sanguine about the Peterson Foundation now.)
Update:Here's a post I wrote some time back about the long term crusade to destroy social security. This part is relevant:
[Ronald Reagan said back in the 1960s]:
But we're against those entrusted with this program when they practice deception regarding its fiscal shortcomings, when they charge that any criticism of the program means that we want to end payments to those people who depend on them for a livelihood. They've called it "insurance" to us in a hundred million pieces of literature. But then they appeared before the Supreme Court and they testified it was a welfare program. They only use the term "insurance" to sell it to the people. And they said Social Security dues are a tax for the general use of the government, and the government has used that tax. There is no fund, because Robert Byers, the actuarial head, appeared before a congressional committee and admitted that Social Security as of this moment is 298 billion dollars in the hole. But he said there should be no cause for worry because as long as they have the power to tax, they could always take away from the people whatever they needed to bail them out of trouble. And they're doing just that.
A young man, 21 years of age, working at an average salary -- his Social Security contribution would, in the open market, buy him an insurance policy that would guarantee 220 dollars a month at age 65. The government promises 127. He could live it up until he's 31 and then take out a policy that would pay more than Social Security. Now are we so lacking in business sense that we can't put this program on a sound basis, so that people who do require those payments will find they can get them when they're due -- that the cupboard isn't bare?
That was forty years ago. Later, in the 1980's, Ronald Reagan's indiscreet budget director David Stockman admitted that the purpose of ginning up the social security crisis was "to permit the politicians to make it look like they are doing something for the beneficiary population when they are doing something to it, which they normally would not have the courage to undertake." And then with masterful chutzpah, considering his famous "Choice" speech from 1964 excerpted above, Ronnie then went on to use the so-called "looming" SS crisis to great effect --- he flogged the GOP contention that the program was insolvent (as they'd been doing for fifty years) and also raised the payroll taxes which they immediately raided to cover their budget deficit. And now, lo and behold, we are "in crisis" again. Imagine that. Brilliant.
I guess if you repeat a lie long enough, it might actually come true some day. But let's just say that those who say that social security is going broke and that "entitlements" must be reformed haven't been right for decades and they aren't likely to be right this time.
We have a real crisis on our hands, but this crap is a very clever sleight of hand --- the problem, as we all know, is free market ideology run amok. If they can misdirect the public to "reforming government" instead, they might be able to take the heat off enough to get back in the saddle before anyone notices.
I asked the president-elect, "At the end of the day, are you really talking about over the course of your campaign some kind of grand bargain? That you have tax reform, healthcare reform, entitlement reform including Social Security and Medicare, where everybody in the country is going to have to sacrifice something, accept change for the greater good?"
"Yes," Obama said.
"And when will that get done?" I asked.
"Well, right now, I’m focused on a pretty heavy lift, which is making sure we get that reinvestment and recovery package in place. But what you described is exactly what we’re going to have to do. What we have to do is to take a look at our structural deficit, how are we paying for government? What are we getting for it? And how do we make the system more efficient?"
"And eventually sacrifice from everyone?" I asked.
"Everybody’s going to have give. Everybody’s going to have to have some skin the game," Obama said.
"Structural deficit" is the exact wording used in I.O.U.S.A.
FDR went with "we have nothing to fear but fear itself," but Obama is adopting "everybody's going to have to have to sacrifice." It's an unusual way to get people through a period of extreme economic insecurity, but maybe it will be character building. It's certainly better than insisting that the fundamentals are strong.
Out of power, Republicans appear to be retreating to familiar old ground. They're becoming deficit hawks again.
GOP lawmakers didn't seem to mind enjoying the fruits of government largesse for the past eight years while one of their own was in the White House. Now they're struggling to regain footing at a time of economic rout, a record $1.2 trillion budget deficit and an incoming Democratic president claiming a mandate for change.
It might not be the best time for running against more government spending. But that hasn't stopped Republicans from casting themselves as protectors of the public purse, striving for relevancy as Congress tackles President-elect Barack Obama's stimulus legislation.
"Congress cannot keep writing checks and simply pass IOUs to our children and grandchildren," says Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas. Asks House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio: "How much debt are we going to pile on future generations?"
[...]
Republicans "seem to be on a funny tightrope on which they're trying to enunciate a Republican position," said Fred Greenstein, a presidential scholar at Princeton University. "They're saying, `Yes it is a crisis', and `yes, a lot has to be done. But it shouldn't be too much. And it shouldn't be imprudent.' They seem to be stuck with platitudes and truisms."
That's why the "elder statesmen" like Peterson and the members of the Concord Coalition are trotted out after the Republicans have disgraced themselves and spent the country into oblivion. They represent "bipartisan" consensus that pressures the Dems to abandon any economic policies that stand to hurt the wealthy when the Republicans are weak. That's their job.
If you doubt what they are up to, ask yourself why they didn't say a word over the past eight years about the shennanigans on wall street or the deficit as it was being run up by the Republicans. I think their lack of credibility is pretty obvious.
“Which one of you punks knocked over my McCain sign?”
Clint Eastwood certainly knows his core audience. Just when you thought that he had ceded his screen persona as one of the iconic tough guys for the more respectable mantle of a sage lion who makes prestige films, Clint Classic is back with a vengeance in Gran Torino, armed with an M-1, a cherry 1970s muscle car and a handy catchphrase (“Get off my lawn!”). Oh, don’t panic- Clint the Sage Director is still at the helm, and Clint the Actor is smart enough to keep it real and “play his age”. This isn’t Dirty Harry with a walker; it’s more like The Visitor…with an attitude. There’s also a Socially Relevant Message, an Important Theme, and even Redemption (if you’re into that sort of thing).
Look in the dictionary under “cantankerous”, and you’ll likely see a picture of Walt Kowalski (hmm, wait a minute-a film starring a 1970s muscle car and a protagonist named Kowalski…now does that ring a bell with anyone else?) Kowalski (Eastwood) is a retired Michigan auto worker and Korean War vet who has recently buried his wife, and along with her, any remaining semblance of social grace or desire for human interaction he may have once possessed. When he is not busy spurning “sympathy visits” from his adult son (Brian Haley) and his family or his late wife’s priest (Christopher Carley) he seems perfectly content to skulk about his Highland Park house, quaffing many beers whilst scowling and grousing to himself about the Southeast Asians who keep moving into “his” neighborhood. He is particularly chagrined about the Hmong family next door; the terms that Kowalski uses to describe them are derogatory racist epithets, which I am loathe to repeat here. Suffice it to say that those words are said often…and with gusto.
He certainly doesn’t mince words when he reacts to his son and daughter-in-law’s not-so-subtle attempts to pump him for his thoughts on estate planning, nor when the tenacious young priest begins sniffing around for dibs on his soul; he ostensibly informs all the circling vultures that he would prefer they fuck off so he can return to puttering around the house, muttering to himself and fetishizing over his beloved ’72 Gran Torino.
Kowalski’s innate mistrust of his neighbors appears to be justified when he surprises a prowler in his garage late one evening, and it turns out to be Thao (Bee Vang) the teenage boy from the Hmong family next door. Initially unbeknownst to Kowalski, the otherwise respectful and straight-arrow Thao has been pressured by his n’er do well older cousin, a Hmong youth gang leader, into attempting to steal the Gran Torino as an initiation rite. After Kowalski inadvertently saves Thao from the gang’s retaliation by chasing them off his property with the able assistance of his trusty service rifle (insert catch phrase here) his porch is festooned daily by an unwanted barrage of gifts, food and flowers, which is the Hmong family’s way of informing him that they are forever indebted for his act of “kindness” (to Kowalski’s abject horror). In further keeping with cultural tradition, Thao is ordered by the family elders to make amends for the attempted theft by offering his services to Kowalski as a handyman/manual laborer for the summer. Thanks to some cultural bridging and good will on the part of Thao’s sister (Ahney Her), Kowalski slowly warms to the family and becomes a father figure/mentor to Thao, teaching him how to “stand his ground” while still retaining a sense of responsibility for his actions.
Yes, I know what you’re thinking- there is a bit of a “wax on, wax off” vibe that recalls The The Karate Kid, but first-time feature film scripter Nick Schenk (who adapted from a story he developed with Dave Johannson) delves a little deeper into the heart of darkness with his variation on the theme. Whereas the aforementioned film was largely about overcoming the fear of failure, Gran Torino deals with a veritable litany of primal fears, namely the fear of The Other, the fear of death, and the fear of losing one’s soul.
That being said, there is still a surprising amount of levity in Schenk’s screenplay, and it provides a marvelous canvas onto which Eastwood can stretch his underrated proclivity (as an actor) for deadpan comedy (I have said for many years that he and Jim Jarmusch could make beautiful music together if they could find the right project to collaborate on). One scene in particular that stands out in this regard involves a parting of wisdom positing that any logistical hurdle you may encounter in your journey can be defeated with a “…pair of Vise-Grips, a roll of duct tape and some WD-40” (which reminded me of Douglas Adams’ sage advice to “Never go anywhere without your towel.”)
The film’s only flaw (and this can be a major distraction for some) is the casting of non-professional actors in most of the Hmong roles. For secondary or background characters, this is not so much of an issue, but concerning two more prominent (and very crucial) roles, I did find myself cringing at some of the community-theater level line deliveries.
Eastwood’s direction is assured as always, but I think the main reason to see this film is for his work in front of the camera; I would consider this one of his career-best performances and certainly his most well fleshed-out characterization since Unforgiven . All I know is-I should be so lucky to be as convincing as a badass when I’m pushing 80.
According to Jon Kyl, and I would imagine a substantial portion of the right, you cannot become Attorney General unless you unequivocally support torturing human beings.
KYL: I think Eric Holder will have some problems. He has not been able to stand up to his bosses in the past, President Clinton when he wanted to do pardons that I think Holder must have realized were big mistakes but he facilitated. And he’s also made some very unfortunate statements about our interrogation of prisoners, terrorists, and other things that lead me to believe that he is not going to be supportive of the Patriot Act, the FISA law, and others. And if he can’t be supportive of those laws, then he shouldn’t be Attorney General.
Got that? If you cannot be trusted to violate federal and international law, you cannot be allowed to become the nation's top law enforcement official. This is the looking-glass view of the world on the right.
And it infects the discourse. I would argue the reason for Obama's stilted rhetoric and the general reticence, outside of John Conyers, to prosecute the war crimes of the torture regime is that nobody in the establishment ever really pushed back in a coordinated fashion on the mainstreaming of torture, that allows for this kind of a statement by Kyl, which would have been almost nonsensical a few years ago. The Village got infected with war fever, goosed by the right, and they are only now coming out of it. And so Obama awkwardly tiptoes around ending torture because there are non-trivial political consequences for doing so. That's a very sad commentary on this country, but it's true.
Once we started having a debate in this country about torture, we made it tacitly acceptable. That was the original sin.
As President-elect Barack Obama assures intelligence officials that his complaints are with the Bush administration, not them, there are growing hints from Democratic Senate allies that spy agency veterans will not be prosecuted for past harsh interrogation and detainee policies.
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein told The Associated Press in an interview this week that there is a clear distinction between those who made the policies and those who carried them out.
"They (the CIA) carry out orders and the orders come from the (National Security Council) and the White House, so there's not a lot of policy debate that goes on there," she said. "We're going to continue our looking into the situation and I think that is up to the administration and the director."
Feinstein declined to comment on whether her committee would take specific action to offer legal cover to those involved in harsh interrogations that some critics say amount to torture.
This is a straw man. The debate is not about the low level operatives involved in the interrogation regime. It's about those who devised and ordered it. Not that I blame the low level people for being concerned that they will left holding the bag. That's how it usually works. But that's not where the argument over torture is at the moment.
The clever thing about Feinstein deftly throwing of the hot potato back to the administration is that the congress should be where any serious investigation of the policy and those who ordered it takes place. What appears to be happening is that the administration will task someone with finding out if any "crimes" were committed, and they will likely find none because John Yoo decided what the law was. But that's just my cynical guess.
I'm beginning to wonder if there isn't more to all this than is obvious. I don't honestly think anyone wants to deal with the torture regime, and it doesn't seem to me that there is a huge public clamor for it. For most people, it's probably enough that the president has promised to end the policy. So, I'm a little bit surprised that it remains so prominent on the radar screen. Something doesn't scan.
Meanwhile, I have to ask why Obama is using this very careful language repeatedly:
"I was clear throughout this campaign and was clear throughout this transition that under my administration the United States does not torture. We will abide by the Geneva Conventions. We will uphold our highest ideals," he said. "We must adhere to our values as diligently as we protect our safety with no exceptions."
Why does he keep saying "the United States does not torture." Why does he use the exact phrase that Bush used, which was clearly calibrated to conform with the notion that "torture" was a matter of definition, which his administration defined as being something other than the practices they approved? It's a strange phrase, which sounds as though he's saying that the United States shouldn't torture, when he's actually saying that it hasn't tortured. And that's just not true.
I would chalk it up to mangled grammar and wouldn't mention it if it had only happened once, but he said it on 60 Minutes too:
I have said repeatedly that I intend to close Guantanamo, and I will follow through on that. I have said repeatedly that America doesn’t torture, and I’m going to make sure that we don’t torture. Those are part and parcel of an effort to regain America’s moral stature in the world.
It is awkward grammatically for him to say it that way and it stands out like a sore thumb. His use of the phrase yesterday --- "under my administration the United States does not torture" makes him sound like English is his second language.
I don't know what it means, maybe nothing. I have no reason to believe that Obama isn't completely sincere about ending the torture regime, so I assume this is more about pretending that it never happened than any desire to keep torturing. But he is a very precise speaker and it strikes me as noteworthy that he repeatedly uses this phrase. I find it hard to believe that it's accidental.
with a walker; it’s more like 
…with an attitude. There’s also a Socially Relevant Message, an Important Theme, and even Redemption (if you’re into that sort of thing).
with anyone else?) Kowalski (Eastwood) is a retired Michigan auto worker and Korean War vet who has recently buried his wife, and along with her, any remaining semblance of social grace or desire for human interaction he may have once possessed. When he is not busy spurning “sympathy visits” from his adult son (Brian Haley) and his family or his late wife’s priest (Christopher Carley) he seems perfectly content to skulk about his Highland Park house, quaffing many beers whilst scowling and grousing to himself about the Southeast Asians who keep moving into “his” neighborhood. He is particularly chagrined about the Hmong family next door; the terms that Kowalski uses to describe them are derogatory racist epithets, which I am loathe to repeat here. Suffice it to say that those words are said often…and with gusto.
, but first-time feature film scripter Nick Schenk (who adapted from a story he developed with Dave Johannson) delves a little deeper into the heart of darkness with his variation on the theme. Whereas the aforementioned film was largely about overcoming the fear of failure, Gran Torino deals with a veritable litany of primal fears, namely the fear of The Other, the fear of death, and the fear of losing one’s soul.