The Sideshow
Archive for March 2009
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The SideshowArchive for March 2009Main |
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Monday, 09 March 2009Didn't want to have to blog today
Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman says it looks like the Obama administration is Behind the Curve, and that he was not reassured by Obama's latest interview in the NYT, in which he offered little and "went on to dismiss calls for decisive action as coming from 'blogs' (actually, they're coming from many other places, including at least one president of a Federal Reserve bank), and suggested that critics want to 'nationalize all the banks' (something nobody is proposing)." I believe we predicted earlier that the administration, after saying they were interested in any good ideas that Paul Krugman or anyone else had, would simply fail to recognize that Paul Krugman's ideas are a damn sight better than their own. We did not predict that the administration would then sink to the Rovian straw man defense - but then, I guess form follows function, or something like that.
I remember watching Jeremy Paxman hammer Michael Howard 14 times with the same question over something that was comparatively trivial, and thinking, "Why doesn't this happen when he's lying about his destructive policies?" Similarly, everyone is going a bit nuts over Jacqui Smith not filling out some forms on her house properly, when in fact her policies are a much bigger scandal. Johann Hari says, "Crime is going to rise - unless we get liberal," and he's right, because that's what conservative policies do, and we can expect more robberies and muggings as a result. But Smith has been instituting policies that make things worse instead of better. "The debate should be about your house, not Smith's house." And we should start using the solutions we used to know worked.
Damn, I was going to link it last night before Atrios got to it, but I faded out too soon. Still, too good to miss, DougJ on the bizarre sense of irreplaceability that our elites seem to have - like there aren't millions of people who would be happy to take their roles - and probably do a much better job of it, too. (Also: John Cole has an appropriate suggestion for what to do with Senator Shelby, and also discusses how the liberal media isn't liberal.)
Julia informs me that the guy who doesn't like Obama's birth certificate is now tying him to 9/11 and is forming a PAC - and, because Julia is up on all the real creeps, she also tells me that Rick Santelli thinks Jon Stewart has a gay crush on him, presumably because he spent a long segment of his show laughing at him and at CNBC and then did it again on Letterman. [Full segment Part 1 and Part 2.]
I can't even understand how this happened. (via)
Watchmen as a Saturday morning cartoon. (Also: urban camouflage, a video that explains what a capacitor is and how to make one (you may want to learn this for when we have to re-start civilization), emergency hammer graffiti, unnatural rhythm.)
Watching the clock"Ex-UN prosecutor: Bush may be next up for International Criminal Court: An ex-UN prosecutor has said that following the issuance of an arrest warrant for the president of Sudan, former US President George W. Bush could -- and should -- be next on the International Criminal Court's list. The former prosecutor's assessment was echoed in some respect by United Nations General Assembly chief Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann of Nicaragua, who said America's military occupation of Iraq has caused over a million deaths and should be probed by the United Nations."
Mary asks and answers: "When is a layoff not news? When it is done in small enough increments that no press release is needed."
I dunno, people's willingness to believe in Reagan's philosophy may be dead, but his effect on us is still all too much alive.
Frank Rich wants to get back to Our Town after watching the gluttons feast, and notes, having seen Jon Stewart's take-down of the CNBC geniuses, "What should really terrify the White House is that Cramer last month gave a big thumbs-up to Timothy Geithner's bank-rescue plan."
This Week In Tyranny, lots of people are talking about torture, but: "Last week Dianne Feinestein announced the creation of a panel to investigate torture by the CIA, but the intent is not to punish. A news source I do not recognize also claimed that CIA director Leon Panetta claimed in a memo that no one at the agency would be punished. Once again there is very little on the record but the signs are ominous."
Is There Anything Wrong With Saying Yes?
Kim Stanley Robinson wants to end the real multigenerational Ponzi scheme. (via)
Feel like reading something depressing that someone put in my comments?
Slow motionThere's no puzzle about why Bush had these policies - fear of prosecution is a significant deterrent to raising your voice against oppression even if there's no danger you can ever actually be convicted. If you can keep someone incarcerated without trial for years, it doesn't really matter if any jury would ever have found them guilty. And it's no surprise that a conservative Supreme Court would happily support the position that the issue is "moot" when the administration suddenly drops the charges just before they reach the court, so there's no downside for the administration, which gets to throw people in jail for years for no reason at all. It's the very antithesis of what "a free country" means, and it appears that the current administration has no problem with it. And it shouldn't be necessary to say it's an outrage.
Bernard Chazelle found a nice quote: "I find it baffling that the banks' boards of directors have not resigned yet. In fact, the Treasury Secretary has all but promised Citi's boss, Vikram Pandit, that he would hold on to his job even if the board goes. The big banks have persuaded everyone around them that they need to operate under current management in order for the country to have an economic recovery. That to me is completely at odds with the historical record from crises elsewhere." (Also, John Caruso reminds us: "if you plan on committing war crimes, the last thing you want is an international court that's dedicated to prosecuting them.")
Much as I hate to link to the Cabbage, apparently no less than four members of the Obama administration sat him down to reassure him that they are non-ideological pragmatists who are going to reduce spending on "all the stuff that Democrats love" [.. ] "He is extremely committed to entitlement reform and is plotting politically feasible ways to reduce Social Security as well as health spending. The White House folks didn't say this, but I got the impression they'd be willing to raise taxes on the bottom 95 percent of earners as part of an overall package." Why is he extremely committed to reducing Social Security? Is this just something they say when they are talking to cabbages, or do they really mean to do this destructive, evil thing?
Jane Hamsher on MSNBC discussing the spending bill. (But, hey, I'm happy to spend some bucks on helping gang-members get rid of their tribal tattoos so they can go out and get jobs instead.)
Learn about London from comics!
Push harderJosh Marshall on Consequences:
As I noted last night, there is a growing body of evidence that February's Stimulus Bill was too small and an increasing likelihood that a second Stimulus Bill will be needed -- perhaps sooner than we imagine.(Via Memeorandum - with more from Buck Naked Politics, Balloon Juice, and Talk Left) - where I also learned that John Yoo has provided a "defense" of his egregious memos.)But aside from the math and economics, there's a point of media criticism that needs to be made. While the bill was being debated, the news media -- and particularly television -- focused almost entirely on the question of whether it was too big. The possibility that it was too small -- which now seems likely -- was seldom raised. As Krugman argues, it's a mini-version of the press failure in the lead up to the Iraq War, with depressingly familiar dynamics.
I think the administration deserves a small amount of the blame for this for not starting the debate with a much more aggressive and expansive bill, kicking off the game with the goalposts more advantageously placed, as it were. But fundamentally it goes back to that issue of DC and the national political media remaining wired for the GOP.
Instant defaults - Now that every con artist in the mortgage business has a government-backed guarantee behind them, they're selling fraudulent mortgages up the wazoo to naive buyers who never manage to make more than one payment (if that many). Guess what happens next.
Jerome Doolittle thinks Matt Steinglass could be right when he suggests that Obama just out-gamed everyone on healthcare: "Anyway, Obama is now saying mandates are going to be a part of the health care solution proposed in the upcoming budget bill. Apparently he now thinks he has the political strength to do the whole reform at once, universal care, mandates, and all. Maybe he's wrong, but he hasn't been wrong yet." (Also: Backsliding, and the horror of socialized medicine.)
Save Justice - How Karl Rove used the justice system to prevent the emergence of successful Democratic legislators - by persecuting individuals rather than investigating crimes. Maybe a thousand of them. And the agents and judges who did it are still in place to keep doing it. (Part 2 and Part 3.) (And here's emptywheel, Open left, and Scott Horton on the verdict in the Siegelman appeal (via Memeorandum, which has even more links to responses).
Media mediaJamison Foser: "When is a tax cut for 98 percent of taxpayers portrayed as a tax increase? When some of the small handful of people whose taxes will go up happen to control the nation's news media. Last week, President Obama unveiled a budget outline that extends the Bush tax cuts for all but the top two percent of taxpayers and makes permanent a tax credit of up to $800 for low- and middle-income workers that was included in the recent stimulus package, among other tax cuts."
You know all that buzz about how Limbaugh's ratings have nearly doubled since January? Well, Eric Boehlert points out that there's no evidence for it, since there are no publicly available figures on Limbaugh's actual ratings.
Robert Parry, "War Crimes and Double Standards: New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof - like many of his American colleagues - is applauding the International Criminal Court's arrest order against Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir for his role in the Darfur conflict that has claimed tens of thousands of lives." But, "While Kristof writes movingly about atrocities that can be blamed on Third World despots like Bashir, he won't hold U.S. officials to the same standards. Most notably, Kristof doesn't call for prosecuting former President George W. Bush for war crimes, despite hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have died as a result of Bush's illegal invasion of their country. Many Iraqi children also don't have hands - or legs or homes or parents."
Paul Street, "Why Did Newsweek Say 'We are All Socialists Now?'" It's a funny thing, government always intervenes in some way to shape the economics of a country, but it's only Bad Old Socialism when there's talk of intervening to help the people who aren't rich. (via)
In other news that won't get much coverage, Larisa Alexandrovna reminds us just how dirty the Siegelman verdict is, with little details like: "Okay, now let's also recall something very important to both this case and that of Paul Minor. In Alabama, the former Attorney General who sealed the ballots during the 2002 election, not allowing Siegelman to get his rightful recount, was William Pryor. Within several months of his sealing the ballots, he was appointed on a recess appointment to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals (the same court that just ruled on this case). Although Pryor was not part of the 3 judge panel reviewing this case, his recess appointment into a position of such authority raises questions about other judges. It should also be noted that Pryor was a former client of Karl Rove."
Reading the entrailsFAIR Study: Media Blackout on Single-Payer Healthcare Proponents of popular policy shut out of debate: "Single-payer--a model in which healthcare delivery would remain largely private, but would be paid for by a single federal health insurance fund (much like Medicare provides for seniors, and comparable to Canada's current system)--polls well with the public, who preferred it two-to-one over a privatized system in a recent survey (New York Times/CBS, 1/11-15/09). But a media consumer in the week leading up to the summit was more likely to read about single-payer from the hostile perspective of conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer than see an op-ed by a single-payer advocate in a major U.S. newspaper." It's the 1990s all over again, on just about everything - the Republicans set the news agenda, single-payer is kept out of the healthcare discourse, and we're being told that Obama's presidency is already failed because he hasn't solved all of the problems the conservatives created over the last 30 years.
Bob Herbert: "In the midst of the craziness, conservatives are busy trying to blame this epic economic catastrophe - a conflagration of their own making - on the new president. Forget Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush and George Herbert Hoover Bush and the Heritage Foundation and the Club for Growth and Phil Gramm and Newt Gingrich and all the rest. The right-wingers would have you believe this is Obama's downturn."
New verdict in the Siegelman case: "Bad news for former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman. The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals today upheld his conviction on all but two counts in a 68 page opinion." Also: False Positives Abound in Drug Field Tests: "While testing the specificity of the KN Reagent test kits with 42 non-marijuana substances, I observed that 70% of these tests rendered a false positive," said Dr. Omar Bagasra, director of the Center for Biotechnology, who conducted the experiments. And it looks like Bernie Maddoff got a deal from prosecutors.
The LiberalOasis Radio Show: Health Care Summit Edition: "Underneath the comity displayed at the White House health care summit, fault lines between progressives and insurance lobbyists were clear, especially on the issue of whether we provide the choice of a public health insurance plan to compete against private plans. That's what health care blogger Richard "R.J." Eskow (Huffington Post and Sentinel Effect) told listeners of The LiberalOasis Radio Show, heard on WHMP in Western MA Saturdays at 10 AM ET." You can get various podcast formats at the link. And I think that every single person who discusses this issue should make a big point of always speaking of this in terms of how it's the insurance companies versus the rest of us.
Hold on tightIn The Village Voice, James Lieber asks, "What Cooked the World's Economy?" and answers, "It wasn't your overdue mortgage."
In fact, what we are living through is the worst financial scandal in history. It dwarfs 1929, Ponzi's scheme, Teapot Dome, the South Sea Bubble, tulip bulbs, you name it. Bernie Madoff? He's peanuts.Only we don't seem to have anything like that at the moment. What we have are a bunch of people who are so focused on protecting the banksters that they are pouring our money into them instead of doing our business. I'm not the first person to say that these deals should be treated as crimes and their perpetrators treated like racketeers. In fact, the article quotes someone who helped pull things back together after the savings and loan scandal of the 1980s as saying much the same.Credit derivatives - those securities that few have ever seen - are one reason why this crisis is so different from 1929.
[...]
This was not caused by imprudent mortgage lending, though that was a piece of the puzzle. Yes, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were put on steroids during the '90s, and some people got into mortgages who shouldn't have. But the vast majority of homeowners paid their mortgages. Only about 5 to 10 percent of these loans failed - not enough to cause systemic financial failure. (The dollar amount of defaulted mortgages in the U.S. is about $1.2 trillion, which seems like a princely sum, but it's not nearly enough to drag down the entire civilized world.)
[...]
Credit derivatives are breaking and will continue to break the world's financial system and cause an unending crisis of liquidity and gummed-up credit. Warren Buffett branded derivatives the "financial weapons of mass destruction." Felix Rohatyn, the investment banker who organized the bailout of New York a generation ago, called them "financial hydrogen bombs."
[...]
The heart of darkness was the AIG Financial Products (AIGFP) office in London, where a large proportion of the derivatives were written. AIG had placed this unit outside American borders, which meant that it would not have to abide by American insurance reserve requirements. In other words, the derivatives clerks in London could sell as many products as they could write - even if it would bankrupt the company.
[...]
So what do we do now? In 2000, the 106th Congress as its final effort passed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA), and, disgracefully, President Clinton signed it. It opened up the bucket-shop loophole that capsized the world's economic system. With the stroke of a presidential pen, a century of valuable protection was lost.
[...]
Will Obama re-criminalize these financial weapons by pushing for repeal of the CFMA? This should be a no-brainer for Obama, who, before becoming a community organizer in Chicago, worked on Wall Street, studied derivatives, and by now undoubtedly knows their destructive power.
[...]
Paulson has taken flack for spending little to bring mortgages in line with falling home values. Sheila Bair, the FDIC chief who often scrapped with Paulson, said this would cost a measly $25 billion and that without it, 10 million Americans could lose their homes over the next five years. Paulson thought it would take three times as much and balked. Congress is bristling because the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (EESA) could provide mortgage relief - and some derivatives won't detonate if homeowners don't default. Obama's nominee for Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, could back such relief at his hearings.
[...]
The other key appointment is Attorney General. A century ago, when powerful trusts distorted the market system, we had AGs who relentlessly tracked and busted them.
The environment from the top of the chain - derivatives gang leaders - to the bottom of the chain - subprime, no-doc loan officers - became "criminogenic," Black says. The only real response? Aggressive prosecution of "elites" at all stages in this twisted mess. Black says sentences should not be the light, six-month slaps that white-collar criminals usually get, or the Madoff-style penthouse arrest.If they keep messing around like this, we really are looking at total global collapse within just a few years. (Thanks to CMike for alerting me to this long but very readable - and scary - article.)As staggering as the Madoff meltdown was, it had a refreshing side - the funds were frozen. In the bailout, on the other hand, the government often seems to be completing the scam by quietly passing the proceeds to counterparties.
Catching upWow, even The Wall Street Journal is calling for transparency about what the money we gave AIG is being used for, suspecting that it's going to European banks. But Quiddity has a further suspicion: "Here's my thought: The money is going to the European banks. But to a significant degree, the money the European banks were playing with was from the oil-rich Middle East. If that can be proved, can you imagine the furor over giving money to AIG which flows through to European banks in order to make whole a bunch of wealthy Arab potentates." (And a link on the same page tells me I missed it the other day when Joe Klein finally admitted that: "We are at the end of a 30-year period of radical conservatism, a period so right-wing that many of those now considered "liberals"--like, say, Barack Obama--would be seen as moderate pantywaists in the great sweep of modern political history. The past 30 years have been such a violent departure from the norm, such a profound destruction of the basic functions of government, that a major rectification is called for now--in rebalancing the system of taxation toward progressivity, in rebuilding the infrastructure of the country, not just physically, but also socially and intellectually.")
Conservative operative put off by right-wing hate radio. And if you're looking for a job, FedEx Office (formerly FedEx Kinko's) is offering to print your résumé on high quality paper for freeTuesday.
Sarah Palin fails to pander to the right when picking a state Supreme Court justice. Ron Beasley reckons she's not so dumb and can see which way the wind is blowing.
Housing crisis: "So let me see if I've got this straight: Israel is planning to demolish dozens of illegal houses because the people in question had no right whatsoever to build there. Now, I'm getting the unmistakable sense that there's some sort of subtle irony at work here, but I just can't seem to put my finger on it. What a puzzle."
Andrew Malcom won Atrios' coveted Wanker of the Day* award for thinking America's homeless are "rich" because they have cell phones. Note to wingers: Cell phones always catch on fast in poor neighborhoods because people don't have access to landlines. I guess that goes double for homeless people. (Over here, cell phones probably caught on faster in the more downmarket neighborhoods, since you can get a cheap pay-as-you-go phone, pay for it only when you use it, and never have to pay to receive calls.)
Creepy Brazilian Archbishop to excommunicate people who saved child's life: "He said the excommunication would not apply to the child because of her age, but would affect all those who ensured the abortion was carried out. However, doctors at the hospital said they had to take account of the welfare of the girl, and that she was so small that her uterus did not have the ability to contain one child let alone two. While the action of the Church in opposing an abortion for a young rape victim is not unprecedented, it has attracted criticism from women's rights groups in Brazil."
I haven't seen Achy in a long, long time, but her latest novel is out and she's doing her book tour, so I thought I'd send my congratulations.
Goshwow! Nanotube radio!
Time flies when I'm watching videosA couple of fatuous men who have completely ignored the deliberate miseducation of young people in reproductive health (at the expense of our tax dollars), and the ardent denial of access to good information and contraception to as many people as possible, discuss what women need to do, and Digby says: "Maybe Chris Matthews and Will Saletan think that lecturing women about murder and responsibility will make a big difference, but it won't. All women except the youngest or the mentally disabled understand very well the ramifications of unwanted pregnancy and if there's is one woman who fully understands the consequences of unprotected sex, it's the woman whose period is late. To have a bunch of men piously lecturing them that pregnancy is something they need to take seriously is pretty absurd."
Counter-propaganda is still necessary to assure the American public that the health insurance industry is lying about healthcare, and encourage people to act now to get our voices heard in the debate. (BTW, fans of Mike Lux might want to check out his interview last week on Second Life, archived at blogtalkradio.) (Oh, and don't miss Melissa Etheridge and Joss Stone's little tribute to Janis Joplin.)
Can it really be that the Obama administration doesn't know it has a toxic waste dump on its hands? Maybe we should start simple and explain that a mortgage on a house, once it has been foreclosed, has no income value and is in fact an expense until the moment that house is resold - and if it is overvalued, it will be a lot harder to sell.
Dave Ettlin was looking at his personal archives of his old newspaper, and found one helluva non-prescient headline from the 150th anniversary issue of The Baltimore Sun.
I'm watching the Prime Minister's address to Congress, and clearly even he knows that something has to be done to restore faith in the system or else the whole crap game falls apart, but I distrust his epiphany about the failures of "modernizing" - and his hammering on the pursuit of "terrorists" and "terrorism" rather than those things that really threaten our security does not inspire me. (And I think it's sweet that they arranged the honorary knighthood for Ted Kennedy, but you can't be an American citizen, let alone a federal legislator, and be a servant of the Queen.)
You can't do thatPruning Shears: "The Obama administration has adopted the positions of the Bush administration in many of its early decisions, but the declassification of the OLC memos is a welcome break. They provide enough evidence of potential lawbreaking to initiate a criminal investigation. That is the process we have always used, and it should be sufficient now. Let the Justice Department start looking into it and let the chips fall where they may. There is no need for Congress to be involved. Given its history and (in this case) its members there is no reason to hope it would produce any kind of satisfactory result."
"Not Gonna Work [...] And why is it not going to work? Very simply: the goals of universal coverage and containing health care costs cannot be achieved without a single-payer system, and these people will not want a single payer."
Our Bush-Built Banking Industry: Vultures, Vampires and Very Dead Zombies: "Or not much of a surprise at all in a country that worships money and honors thieves and con artists as long as they're successful. Hell, we'd sigh longingly at pond scum if it was rich. How are they doing it? The old-fashioned way: picking the bones of the corpse they killed."
Conservafail: "I don't believe these people are in any meaningful sense reachable. It's just possible that Obama will persuade them to try something different but more likely that change will only come after disaster on the national scale. Remember that nothing has dented the conservative coalition in the Senate: not losing a war, not the collapse of the economy, not the dismal failure of response to Katrina. They are convinced that their personal power trumps reality, and their social circle supports them in this belief. I do not think the people in charge of Treasury and the Federal Reserve are so very different. But change is coming."
Quote: "Yup. This bailout is socialism, all right. National Socialism."
You know who - and keep listening to find out what else they played on that rooftop. (Oh, and we mustn't forget Thisbe!)
Odds and endsThe best financial and political reporting on television came, of course, from Jon Stewart, who eviscerated Rick Santelli's pseudo-populism and CNBC's "advice" beautifully last night.
I really wish that people who have an entire (worthy) blog post bubbling up inside them would create a Kos diary or something that I can link to instead of having to link to my own comment threads (which Haloscan has always claimed would only be kept for six months since I have a free account, although this doesn't appear to be quite true). I find it especially annoying when the posts come from a name I don't recognize, as if they've just been wandering around looking for any blog they've never heard of on the subject to attach their comment to. Be that as it may, you might want to check out this comment and the one that follows it on the healthcare battle. Aside from some interesting informational content, there's also the matter of action: "Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT), who ruled single-payer off the table before he even started considering healthcare reform, is now pressuring the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to favorably judge his health plan as financially sound--even though it isn't." Baucus needs to hear from a lot of people telling him to put single-payer back on the table. (PS. If you actually have a blog, providing a brief explanation and the link is really much more tasteful than copying the whole post to the comment thread.)
I am pleased to see that, despite threats to throw in the towel, our friend Skimble still has a thing or two to say about what's going on, the latest being a post on Buying the bailout: "While Obama is being blamed by mindless commenters and cable talking heads for the recent market turmoil and the halving of everyone's 401(k) accounts, it might be useful to take a look a bit further back to see where the blame really lies."
Advise and consent is still a good rule, and I have always, always hated the idea of having policy "czars" from the first moment I heard it.
Kyle Moore says that Kathy of Liberty Street and Comments from Feft Field has hit the rocky shores and needs some help. Pitch in if you can.
I thought the trailer for Watchmen looked pretty good, but this clip just seems all wrong.
Things to readSirota: "The term "too big to fail" is a euphemism for any institution that is so important to the entire nation's most basic well being, that society cannot let that institution fail. This is why one of the foundational principles of civilized society has always been nationalization - i.e. government control - of the institutions that are "too big to fail": institutions like the military, whose failure would mean a basic loss of national security; law enforcement, whose failure would mean a basic loss of civil order; and infrastructure construction, whose failure would mean the crumbling of commerce. The government, as the most powerful representative of society as a whole, runs these institutions/services because they are too important to be allowed to fail." (Also: Robert Borosage on Obama's Next Gauntlet: Reviving the Middle Class.)
So, the argument is supposed to be that the Swedish model can't work for America because Sweden only had five problem banks, whereas the US has "thousands". So how many banks are we talking about in America? Not thousands. Hmm...(via)
If I hadn't heard of Gordon Brown before, I might actually believe that he has seen the light and really means it when he talks about a global New Deal. On the other hand, I see he still hasn't gotten rid of Jacqui Smith, which any decent human would have done a long time ago.
Just imagine how much money we could save if we got rid of all this wasteful spending.
In which Mr NTodd Goes To Washington (Again), and Patrick Leahy tells him about meeting Heath Ledger.
So I'm reading this post and Ken McLeod's place, and I learn this: "Mutation was illustrated by a picture of Boris Johnson, 'British mutant'. The London Mayor's shock of yellow hair is the result of a mutation which has had a selective advantage in Northwest Europe. Light skin colour maps almost exactly to areas where Vitamin D deficiency, due to lack of sunlight, is a problem. (Point-sticking slide: graph showing significant difference in Vitamin D levels in the blood of European-Americans and African-Americans.) Blue-eyed blondes are a further twist in this tale: Northwest Europe, because of the Gulf Stream, is the only region where grain crops can be grown that far north. Grain crops are not only lacking in Vitamin D - eating their food products actually removes Vitamin D from the blood. This confers an advantage on skin types even more light-sensitive and melanin-deficient than the European norm. Natural blondes, sadly enough, are just people who can live on oats in the rain." Be that as it may, I still miss Saltines.
Show and tellCraig Murray wants your help: "On Tuesday 10 March the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights will discuss whether or not to hear my evidence on the UK government's policy of using intelligence from torture. They discussed whether to hear my evidence on 3 March but failed to reach a conclusion. The government is lobbying hard for my exclusion. I need everybody to send an email to jchr@parliament.uk to urge that I should be allowed to give evidence. Just a one-liner would be fine. If you are able to add some comment on the import of my evidence, or indicate that you have heard me speak or read my work, that may help. Please copy your email to craigjmurray@tiscali.co.uk."
I think Harold Meyerson is getting a little tired of hearing the cut-throat capitalists who want government to assume all their risk "socialists", and he's not particularly impressed by the idea that merely making a few changes to preserve capitalism (save it from itself) are "socialism".
I see Evan Bayh made Wanker of the Day for putting an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal full of conservative talking points to oppose letting Bush's tax cuts for the rich expire. He actually had the nerve to say: "Spending should be held in check before taxes are raised, even on the wealthy. Most people are willing to do their duty by paying taxes, but they want to know that their money is going toward important priorities and won't be wasted." Which translates as, "Rich people think they should be able to avoid paying taxes so that only people who work for a living have to pay them, and only rich people will get the benefit of them." Up yours, Evan, I can't even believe you are related to your father..
H - E - double hockey sticks" - Fred Clark notes that the religious right's Christianity seems to have less to do with loving God and following the teachings of Christ than it does to do with fearing Hell - but not fearing it enough to notice what your soul is supposed to be sent there for.
Good on Marcy Kaptur for correcting Republicans' pronunciation on the House floor.
QrazyQat forced me to link to this video, but it's actually pretty damned good.
Stuff to check outEzra Klein and Jonathan Cohn both discuss the fact that former HMO fraudster Richard Scott is launching an attack on healthcare reform with the usual lies about the Canadian and British systems, among other things. (For the record: I don't have to wait an ungodly long time for appointments or treatment. More importantly, I know I will get the treatment, and that no health insurance company is going to tell my doctor to let me die or go blind or whatever because I'm not covered. If I call my doctor's office wanting an appointment because I'm ill now, I almost always get to see him that day, and if it's not an emergency, I will see him within a day or two at most in almost all cases. And I never have to think about the cost.)
In the war on drugs, drug cartels are winning the war against Mexico, and it is not something the US can safely ignore. Of course, they wouldn't have this kind of power if the United States didn't make selling drugs such a profitable enterprise. We could, after all, be growing this stuff in our own backyards and cutting their profit motive down to nothing.
"Anatomy of a Netroots Failure" - Eli Sanders suggests that though liberal bloggers certainly helped Darcy Burner's campaign, there was enough of a downside that for all our support, she still lost.
"I can't help but wonder if there is anything that will stop the administration from trying to sell us the same bad idea over and over again: "Indeed. Every plan we've heard from Treasury amounts to the same thing - an attempt to socialize the losses while privatizing the gains. We're going to buy up all the bad assets at premium prices; no, we're going to offer the banks guarantees against losses; no, we're going to let private investors buy the stuff, but offer them de facto guarantees against losses in the form of non-recourse loans."
The viper at our breastScott Horton on George W. Bush's Disposable Constitution:
Yesterday the Obama Administration released a series of nine previously secret legal opinions crafted by the Office of Legal Counsel to enhance the presidential powers of George W. Bush. Perhaps the most astonishing of these memos was one crafted by University of California at Berkeley law professor John Yoo. He concluded that in wartime, the President was freed from the constraints of the Bill of Rights with respect to anything he chose to label as a counterterrorism operations inside the United States.Which raises another point I've tried in the past to discuss, which is that it is perfectly possible to be living in a dictatorship and not experience it as such as long as you are either uninvolved in politics or are a genuine supporter of the regime. It's even possible that you could openly oppose the regime but be deemed sufficiently harmless that no one bothers to harass you, or maybe you are just visible enough that they can't openly act against you without overexposing their hand. But in a free country, you don't prevent pacifists from getting on airplanes because you're trying to prevent terrorists from flying, and you don't refuse entry into the country to journalists from friendly nations. Neither do you incarcerate people for lengthy periods without trial, let alone torture them. Saddam was a dictator, but many Iraqis went about their daily business without encountering any trouble with him and his government. Millions of Soviet citizens did the same under the USSR, but that wasn't a free country, either. Pretending that nothing is wrong because you don't personally know any of the people who are being abused this way does not provide evidence that the country you live in is, in fact, free.[...]
John Yoo's Constitution is unlike any other I have ever seen. It seems to consist of one clause: appointing the President as commander-in-chief. The rest of the Constitution was apparently printed in disappearing ink.
[...]
We may not have realized it at the time, but in the period from late 2001-January 19, 2009, this country was a dictatorship. The constitutional rights we learned about in high school civics were suspended. That was thanks to secret memos crafted deep inside the Justice Department that effectively trashed the Constitution. What we know now is likely the least of it.
One of the central facts that we, collectively, have not yet come to terms with is how extremist and radical were the people running the country for the last eight years. That condition, by itself, made it virtually inevitable that the resulting damage would be severe and fundamental, even irreversible in some sense. It's just not possible to have a rotting, bloated, deeply corrupt and completely insular political ruling class -- operating behind impenetrable walls of secrecy -- and avoid the devastation that is now becoming so manifest. It's just a matter of basic cause and effect.Glenn also points out that:The most vital point is that all of the documents released yesterday by the Obama DOJ comprise nothing less than a regime of secret laws under which we were governed. Nothing was redacted when those documents yesterday were released because they don't contain any national security secrets. They're nothing more than legal decrees, written by lawyers. They're just laws that were implemented with no acts of Congress, unilaterally by the Executive branch. Yet even the very laws that governed us were kept secret for eight years.There were no national security secrets. The secret they wanted to conceal was that they were just making up reason for breaking the law.Dan Froomkin and Jack Balkin also discuss the material, and the "reasoning" that all this was necessary and legitimate "in time of war" - but, again, no one mentions the other big hole in what appears to be everyone's excuse for this illegal madness, which is that people got a bit carried away in the days after September 11th of 2001. See, this doesn't work too well with the revelation that the NSA program of illegal spying on Americans was initiated months earlier. It wasn't power they took in the heat of the moment after being shaken by a terrorist attack, nor was it something they did because it was "necessary" in time of war, but something they had started doing almost immediately upon taking office. It makes their entire argument moot; there was no "wartime" to "justify" the violations they were committing in March, not September, of 2001.
They weren't doing it to protect the country. They were doing it simply because they wanted to, as a way to consolidate their power and show everyone what tough guys they were. It was government by terrorism.
Little things"War Is Over (If You Want It)" - Eric Alterman notes that Obama may be stuck with handing the right-wingers a victory in Iraq if he isn't careful, because they've all along been claiming that Bush has been successful in Iraq, and if things go sour, well, it will be all Obama's fault. The fact that Bush's policies guaranteed failure in Iraq is not something that is going to be talked about where it counts.
"AIG Bailed Out Again, but Endless Fire-Drills Don't Put Out Fires: Pumping more money into the financial giant reflects rampant cluelessness and a misplaced belief that inaction is worse than action." You know, I really don't see how anything can be saved as long as everybody knows that the same people who created the mess are still in charge. Nobody trusts them, and no one wants to do business with them. I believe Atrios is making a similar point.
Demosthenes says Wikileaks has released NATO's Master Narrative for Afghanistan: "I haven't read it yet, more when I do, but I can't decide whether the best part is that there is such a document, or that a file created by the Pentagon was so easily cracked. By the Wiki people, no less."
Why are a bunch of people who know absolutely nothing about how income taxes work and who spend all day commenting at Michelle Malkin's blog claiming they are high-earners who will refuse to earn another penny if Obama's tax plan goes through?
I can't believe I'm linking to this, but I am.
Baby you need schoolin'Jurassicpork flags Michael Collins' interview with Susan Lindauer, who says the US knew very, very well that an attack on the WTC was coming via airliners, and that it wasn't coming from Saddam or Qadaffi: "After the attack, it became clear that neither country could have been party to the conspiracy. Gadhaffi and bin Laden hated each other. Back in 1995, Libya was the first country in the world to warn Interpol about Osama, and urge an international warrant for his arrest. Saddam's government hated him, too. Baghdad considered Osama's extreme brand of Sunni fundamentalism to pose a serious destabilizing threat to Iraq 's moderate Sunni elite. Osama was a wrecking ball to Arab governments. They all despised him. In fact, we pushed Iraq so hard for intelligence in the months before 9/11 that afterwards Iraqi diplomats aggressively challenged our U.S. claims of ignorance. A couple of diplomats put it to me bluntly: 'Obviously you knew it was coming, because you kept telling us about it. So why didn't you stop it? Why didn't you do something before this, instead of blaming us now. You should be blaming yourselves.'" Although the corporate media in America has kept it quiet, the entire rest of the world knew that Libya was not responsible for Lockerbie - and the jihadis were inspired by the knowledge of who was, and that he was getting away with it because the American government under President George Herbert Walker Bush was letting him. Maybe the fact that the Republican leadership was dining with the bin Ladens and having their pictures taken with the Mujahdin had something to do with it.
At The Poor Man Institute, the GOP looks in vain for hipness and standard bearers when their choices turn out to be raving lefty union-supporters.
SeattleTammy finds more reasons to hate Monsanto. If I believed in the Devil, I'd believe he personally runs this company. (And I'm not just saying that because they ruined my Juicy Fruit gum.)
The Medium Lobster on Life During Self-Defense: "Yes, we may be tempted to mourn the civilian dead, but in killing those civilians, isn't Israel merely protecting itself against future terrorists who would otherwise go on to retaliate against Israel for the deaths of their children? And yes, we may be tempted to mourn the deaths of the children, but in killing those children, isn't Israel simply preemptively taking out future militants who would otherwise grow up to avenge the deaths of their parents? As much as we might all yearn for peace, history has shown that Palestinians understand only violence. Well, violence and Arabic, but Arabic is notoriously difficult to learn, while most of us can become fluent in violence in just under a semester."
Those fires in Australia are still burning, but there's a little more to the story than is being heard.
This looks like wishful thinking to me, since what I see is some of the more progressive blogs moving up, for the most part. (Hard to tell about some of them since if they were not on last month's list, it might mean no one had yet identified the blog as political, which would have kept them off this particular list. It's amazing how your own rating might drop if someone suddenly notices that Hullabaloo and Eschaton belong in the "political" category. Be that as it may, several liberal blogs moved up a notch or three.)
I could have seen it on a bet, I could have seen it on the netAs we moved from a manufacturing-based economy to a more white-collar economy, "labor unions" became just too blue-collar. Too tainted with the stigma of "lower-class."Spendthrift Republicans: "The Huffington Post reports that the congressional operations budget has been increased to $4.4 billion 'because Senate Republicans wanted to retain previous staff levels' - despite losing 20 percent of their seats last year and railing against government spending recently. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) discussed the issue at a press conference today: 'We had a situation - you should direct that question to Senator McConnell because we had trouble organizing this year. He wanted to maintain a lot of their staffing even though they had lost huge numbers. And the only way we could get it done is to do what we did.' Hey, it's your money. Via an extremely linky post at MTA.We didn't need no unions. We were all upper-class, white-collar workers! We thought we'd made it.
We thought We were Them.
Guess They showed Us.
Mick Arran asks, "Did the SCOTUS just Turn the Constitution Into a Popularity Contest?" (Also: How to improve The Washington Post. And: I briefly considered posting this strip myself, but couldn't be arsed.)
Remember our friend John Ziegler, who "proved" that Obama's supporters watch bad/biased media because they didn't know the proper right-ring spin points? Well, Max Blumenthal interviewed him at the conservative nut conference, and hilarity ensued.
Gary Farber alerts us that Skynet has a webpage (with a spooky voice) and also to Lego Star Trek: "The Cage". (I definitely recommend watching it as a slideshow and clicking the picture so the captions will come up automatically.) Also: RIP: The Fairness Doctrine.
Google is celebrating Dr. Seuss' birthday.
Long time comin'Sorry, I decided to take the day off. But Bad Democrats did not, so see if dialing the phone will help. (We really have to get rid of that whole bankruptcy bill they passed, dammit. I don't care if these people know what they're doing or they're just blind to it all, but we have to get rid of them before there are only five people left who own any land in North America.)
American "health insurers" would still hate this, but: "We hear a lot about how Americans' health care appetite for the latest technology and drugs makes us hard to compare to other nations, so let's look at a country that has the highest number of CT scans per capita and more MRIs per capita than we do, not to mention a higher percentage of their health care dollars spent on drugs. Yet for all of this, they've created a universal health care system that provides health outcomes that are the envy of the world - the highest life expectancy for about a third of what the U.S. spends." (Just for the record, I still like Nye Bevan's idea better. The trouble is that no matter what you do, some tory will come along to screw it up.)
Man, I know things are bad when James Baker attacks the Obama administration from the left. Krugman even uses an exclamation point. He also says: "Well, you could say that American bankers, empowered by a quarter-century of deregulatory zeal, led the world in finding sophisticated ways to enrich themselves by hiding risk and fooling investors."
Mick Arran is another person who is unsympathetic toward former big earners who suddenly find themselves having to take "survival jobs" because they can no longer skate along in the financial sector or other highly-rewarded non-productive "work".
Amazingly, Ruth found an article in The Washington Post noting that the experts we hear form are still the people who got it all wrong.
More on the media's embedded class warriors from dday at Hullabaloo.
Here's a good question: "Who's the bigger clown - Jindal or Ben Smith?"
Note to Yonmei: You don't have to use iTunes, you can listen to the Cohen concert the same way I did. (And I thought this video was just fine. In fact, I recommend it.)
You know why I have to disagree with the Rude One on this, don't you?
Lazy Sunday bloggingAtrios says: "This article does a good job of explaining what AIG and its enablers were up to."
The more I hear about him, the more I would really like to see Tom Geoghegan fill Rahm Emanuel's Congressional seat. Having Geoghegan in Congress at all looks like a good deal to me, but it would really be a serious upside to having Rahm working in the White House instead of against us in Congress. You can help.
Meanwhile, Rahm's brother Ezekiel is talking crap about single-payer and still trying to keep the insurance companies in the picture, leading to the obvious question, "So why does Obama cut the middleman out for student loans, but not for health care?"
This Week In Tyranny, Obama still seems unwilling to repudiate Bush's policies of torture, secrecy, and general law-breaking without accountability. This isn't quite what we had in mind, Mr. President.
Watch Sheldon Whitehouse talk about how investigations will uncover facts that will be painful to face.
Ruth and ProfWombat are not impressed by an article that weeps for people who make a lot more money than the rest of us but resent the idea that they will have to tighten their belts to save the economy: "Its thrust is, essentially, that they'll have a harder time getting rich under new tax burdens, that they were entitled to become rich by dint of hard work and productivity and, by implication, possessed of virtues that others who work hard for far less money don't exhibit." And Diane is annoyed when the WaPo frames the announcement that Obama has rescinded a nasty Bush rule allowing professionals to refuse to practice their profession where family planning is concerned as a blow to religious freedom. And she's right. The anti-choicer/forced pregnancy brigade doesn't spend much time associating with people who are genuinely pro-life and therefore choose professions that don't require them to work on behalf of the war machine, for example. If they don't want to dispense needed contraception or perform abortions, let them choose a different profession like the rest of us do when we are facing moral choices.
When James Lovelock first started talking about Gaia, scientists were skeptical, but things changed as the decades went by. Now Lovelock is saying it may be too late to save ourselves from Gaia's reaction to having us around, and many millions are likely to die.
Eric Alterman described Leonard Cohen's Beacon Theater concert as "one of the most wonderful shows of my life; the concert was like being in church but in some imaginary church, (or shul) that actually does what a church or a shul is supposed to do." So I've been listening to it. And here's the NYT profile on Cohen.
The hour is getting lateHow Obama's plan to give a bunch of cash for student loans will save the taxpayers money - by getting rid of the middle-man. (Also: "Is There Any Truth In What The Republicans And Their Media Mouthpieces Say About The Employee Free Choice Act?" Well, of course not.)
After 30 years of the rich waging class warfare on the rest of us - and winning -, the media is aghast that there's some fightback threatening: "One reason they're winning is that the news media do not use the loaded phrases "class warfare" and "redistribution of wealth" to describe things like the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, or the home mortgage deduction (which favors those who are wealthy enough to buy homes over those who are not) or countless other policies that benefit wealthier Americans at the expense of those who are less fortunate. Instead, the media pretend this is a one-sided war -- as though the wealthy are being unfairly assaulted by an army of bullying waitresses and janitors and farmers and teachers."
Faking it: "What we discovered is that Santelli's 'rant' was not at all spontaneous as his alleged fans claim, but rather it was a carefully-planned trigger for the anti-Obama campaign. In PR terms, his February 19th call for a 'Chicago Tea Party' was the launch event of a carefully organized and sophisticated PR campaign, one in which Santelli served as a frontman, using the CNBC airwaves for publicity, for the some of the craziest and sleaziest rightwing oligarch clans this country has ever produced. Namely, the Koch family, the multibilllionaire owners of the largest private corporation in America, and funders of scores of rightwing thinktanks and advocacy groups, from the Cato Institute and Reason Magazine to FreedomWorks. The scion of the Koch family, Fred Koch, was a co-founder of the notorious extremist-rightwing John Birch Society.'"
Lean Left: "Somebody at the Department of Labor just re-posted this original report from 1965. It is heart-wrenching in how closely its high-level observations (aside from particulars of detail that have changed in 40 years) remain true, and to what degree the 'savage and brutal effort' of so many parts of society to resist addressing its subject still continue. But it is astounding, and heart-lifting, in two ways also."
The most recent Best of the Left podcast was "Missing: Stable economic system, if found please contact owner."
Bruce Sterling vs. Web 2.0 (via).
So far everything I've heard about Leonard Cohen's recent show has been enthusiastic, so maybe you want to have a listen.
Avedon Carol at The Sideshow, March 2009
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