Where I Left Conservatives

I want my conservatism with at least a side of compassion. As a red state native, I know the answer to that. Liberal activism isn’t compassion. It’s fake. It’s a tool to gain power and reelection. I know that explanation, but to these untrained eyes it looked like you’re hammering a guy who saw a problem and had an idea. You cannot be anti-people-with-ideas, even if you disagree with those ideas, and wonder why a nation doesn’t rally behind you. I want a conservatism that believes in personal rights, but isn’t overwhelmed by the ‘my big gun and my big drink and my big country’ crowd. Conservatives have gotten really good at firing those people up while everyone else snuck out to find a quieter gathering.

Unfortunately, our corporate media has convinced themselves that whatever the Republicans present must be a rational position, because they’re one of our two major political parties, after all. Never mind that much of what they say is unhinged, the media acts as though it’s not. This distorts all kinds of things, from the popularity of single-payer health care to addressing global warming.

In the end, we won the battle to change gun laws because there was majority support across Australia for banning certain weapons. And today, there is a wide consensus that our 1996 reforms not only reduced the gun-related homicide rate, but also the suicide rate. The Australian Institute of Criminology found that gun-related murders and suicides fell sharply after 1996. The American Journal of Law and Economics found that our gun buyback scheme cut firearm suicides by 74 percent. In the 18 years before the 1996 reforms, Australia suffered 13 gun massacres — each with more than four victims — causing a total of 102 deaths. There has not been a single massacre in that category since 1996.

Massachusetts eighth-graders outperformed most countries on a highly regarded international math and science exam, according to results being released Tuesday, offering fresh evidence that the state’s educational system rivals academically powerful ­nations around the globe.

In the science part of the test, only Singapore outscored Massachusetts eighth-graders. In math, Massachusetts trailed only South Korea, Singapore, Chinese Taipei, Hong Kong, and Japan; 63 countries took the test.

Thank you, teachers!

As governor, Romney showed Massachusetts that—pragmatic to the core—he was willing to say whatever was needed to advance his political career. Facing an emboldened Democratic majority in the legislature after his 2004 election debacle, Romney began to turn his attention away from Beacon Hill and toward Washington, DC. In the process, the former self-described “progressive” shifted his views on gay rights, abortion, and stem cell research to appeal to a more conservative audience.

In 2005 Romney vetoed a bill that would have expanded embryonic stem cell research even though his wife, Ann, who suffers from multiple sclerosis, had recently said she hoped that same research could help cure MS. The legislature ultimately overrode the veto. Romney would later veto an emergency contraception bill as well, only to see that one overridden, too. The growing sense that Romney viewed Massachusetts as merely a steppingstone did not go over well. By November 2005, a Suffolk University/7 News poll found that his favorability rating—47 percent a year earlier—had plummeted to 33 percent, while his unfavorability rating had rocketed up to 49 percent.

Everybody on BMG knows this stuff, of course. The article is addressed to the rest of the country, many of whom seem to be unaware of Mitt’s true nature.

Schwartz brings it home to the present campaign:

Just as it’s difficult to recall another governor who shifted his views so much to appeal to a bloc of voters, it’s difficult to recall a presidential candidate who has relied so much on falsehoods and out-of-context quotes.

The first sign of trouble came in an ad Romney’s campaign ran last fall, quoting Obama saying, “If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.” In reality, the clip came from the 2008 election, and Obama was actually referring to something said by a John McCain aide. A small controversy over the ad erupted, after which Fehrnstrom, Romney’s top adviser, affirmed to the press that the outright distortion was part of a calculated strategy.

It’s hard to believe that the country could be so gullible as to elect a man like Mitt, but I thought the same thing about Nixon.

Though Ryan had already decided to distance himself from the floundering Romney campaign, he now feels totally uninhibited. Reportedly, he has been marching around his campaign bus, saying things like, “If Stench calls, take a message” and “Tell Stench I’m having finger sandwiches with Peggy Noonan and will text him later.”

. . .

Dan Senor, one of Romney’s closest advisers, has kept a tight grip on Ryan, traveling with him everywhere and making sure he hews to the directions of the Romney “brain trust” in Boston. (A brain trust, rumor has it, that refers to Ryan as “Gilligan.”)

Do they actually want to win? Maybe they dislike each other so much that they don’t care if they do.

Since 9/11, Americans have chosen to stake our domestic tranquility on our ability – under our commander-in-chief – to rule the world by force of arms rather than to lead, as we had in the past, by the force of our example or our arguments. And we appear to have decided in the process that it is necessary to destroy our civil liberties in order to save them and that abandoning the checks and balances of our Constitution will make us more secure. Meanwhile, our military-industrial complex and its flourishing antiterrorist sidekick have been working hard to invent a credible existential challenge to match that of the Cold War. This has produced constantly escalating spending on military and antiterrorist projects, but it has not overcome the reality that Americans now face no threat from abroad comparable to Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, or the USSR. The only real menace to our freedoms is our own willingness to supplant the rule of law with ever more elements of a garrison state.

The so-called “global war on terror” or “militant Islam,” as so many now openly describe it, has become an endless run in a military squirrel cage that is generating no light but a lot of future anti-American terrorism. It turns out that all that is required to be hated is to do hateful things. Ironically, as we “search abroad for monsters to destroy,” we are creating them – transforming our foreign detractors into terrorists, multiplying their numbers, intensifying their militancy, and fortifying their hatred of us. The sons and brothers of those we have slain know where we are. They do not forget. No quarter is given in wars of religion. We are generating the very menace that entered our imaginations on 9/11.

There’s a lot more:

We need to rethink our commitments in light of our current interests as they are affected by a world order we no longer direct. We cannot afford to reject or defer adjusting these commitments out of fear that doing so might undermine our credibility. Over the course of the past decade and more, we have amply demonstrated our capacity for willful obstinacy. No one now doubts that we are prepared to persevere in failing policies for as long as it takes them to fail. But, neither our allies nor our adversaries have been much impressed by our willingness to continue mindlessly to do things that neither serve our interests nor have any prospect of doing so. Reliable stupidity is still stupidity. Few admire it.

There’s realistic (not Realpolitik) discussion of the outlook in the Pacific, Africa, and other regions. Definitely worth the read.

Top five racist Republican dog-whistles

But one of his “gaffes” has a decidedly darker undertone, when an unnamed aide was reported by the Telegraph to have commented that Romney would be a better President than Obama because only he understood the “shared Anglo-Saxon heritage” that Britain and America have.

This sort of statement is known in politics as a “dog whistle”. To most people, it looks innocuous, if a bit weird, but to its target audience – in this case, racists – it reads as a perfectly clear statement that Romney is better than Obama because he is white. It’s noticeable, for example, that Romney did not bring up the fact that Ed Miliband, the son of Polish Jewish migrants, also does not share an Anglo-Saxon heritage.

Let me emphasize that this is not some Democratic Party “hack” (and that word is yet another dog-whistle); the writer is expressing views held by people in Britain. They were not favorably impressed with Mr. Romney.

The writer gives some context to the GOP’s use of clandestine signals to racists. I think his attribution for the Georgia flag is misplaced, though. In 1956, Georgia was solidly Dixiecratic.

A Self-Made Man Looks At How He Made It

I am financially successful now; I pay a lot of taxes. I don’t mind because I know how taxes helped me to get to the fortunate position I am in today. I hope the taxes I pay will help some military wife give birth, a mother who needs help feed her child, help another child learn and fall in love with the written word, and help still another get through college. Likewise, I am in a socially advantageous position now, where I can help promote the work of others here and in other places. I do it because I can, because I think I should and because I remember those who helped me. It honors them and it sets the example for those I help to help those who follow them.

Perhaps Senator Brown should read it.

Former Selectman and past Republican Town Committee Chairman Angel Connell can no longer vote in Westford after the Board of Registrars unanimously voted Tuesday to remove him from the voter registration.

Connell was re-elected to the Republican Town Committee in the March 6 primary as a write-in candidate.

Connell bought a home in Cumberland, R.I., in 2006; however, his address listed in the voter registration was 25 Keyes Road.

Connell said during the hearing he had no documentation to prove he lived in Westford.

The evidence the board weighed in its decision included the facts that Connell owns a home in R.I., he has a Rhode Island driver’s license, his vehicles are registered in Rhode Island, he spends most of his evenings and nights in Rhode Island and he filed nonresident tax returns in Massachusetts.

It also says the Board “agonized” over the decision.

A former candidate for Marlborough City Council was arraigned today on voter fraud charges for allegedly handing in an absentee ballot application at City Hall for a man who had died earlier in the year, Middlesex County prosecutors said today.

Mark Evangelous, 51, 0f Marlborough faces charges of forgery, uttering, and violating absentee voting laws, District Attorney Gerard T. Leone Jr.’s office said.

It doesn’t say so in the Globe article (I wonder why), but Evangelous is a prominent Republican in the town. Oddly, he doesn’t seem to have videotaped himself committing voter fraud. Also not known is whether he’s on the Marlborough Republican Town Committee.

James O’Keefe Voter Fraud Sting Video Could Draw Legal Backlash, Experts Say

Conservative filmmaker James O’Keefe targets the alleged threat of voter fraud in his latest offering, a 10-minute video that features attempts by his cohort to demonstrate how easy it is to vote as a deceased person in this week’s New Hampshire primary.

The undercover video by his group, Project Veritas, shows O’Keefe and his associate Spencer Meads visiting various polling stations around the Granite State, inquiring about getting ballots and giving the names of recently deceased voters. Because New Hampshire doesn’t require voters to show identification, the poll workers appear prepared to oblige their requests.

In their efforts however, some experts say they have violated election laws at both the federal and state level that explicitly prohibit such attempts to acquire ballots for voters other than themselves. Legal scholars recently told Talking Points Memo that their actions could lead to some repercussions.

James O’Keefe violates election law to prove liberals violate election law

O’Keefe has pretty clearly violated the law and TPM reports that a federal prosecutor is reviewing his video. But at least he finally proved that voter fraud is a very real threat, and one that could lead to upward of a couple of phony ballots being cast in a statewide primary election, depending on how many registered voters died quite recently. As we all know, once you prove that something is hypothetically possible, it is a factual certainty that ACORN has done it.

And now O’Keefe might finally get that felony conviction that he avoided last time. Fingers crossed.

Another account, written before O’Keefe outed himself.

Can this guy finally get the justice he deserves?

The reason 2012 feels so empty now is that voters on both sides of the aisle are not just tired of this state of affairs, they are disgusted by it. They want a chance to choose their own leaders and they want full control over policy, not just a partial say. There are a few challenges to this state of affairs within the electoral process – as much as I disagree with Paul about many things, I do think his campaign is a real outlet for these complaints – but everyone knows that in the end, once the primaries are finished, we’re going to be left with one 1%-approved stooge taking on another.

Most likely, it’ll be Mitt Romney versus Barack Obama, meaning the voters’ choices in the midst of a massive global economic crisis brought on in large part by corruption in the financial services industry will be a private equity parasite who has been a lifelong champion of the Gordon Gekko Greed-is-Good ethos (Romney), versus a paper progressive who in 2008 took, by himself, more money from Wall Street than any two previous presidential candidates, and in the four years since has showered Wall Street with bailouts while failing to push even one successful corruption prosecution (Obama).

There are obvious, even significant differences between Obama and someone like Mitt Romney, particularly on social issues, but no matter how Obama markets himself this time around, a choice between these two will not in any way represent a choice between “change” and the status quo. This is a choice between two different versions of the status quo, and everyone knows it.

Why is this the inevitable outcome? Taibbi has that covered, too:

But the ugly reality, as Dylan Ratigan continually points out, is that the candidate who raises the most money wins an astonishing 94% of the time in America.

That damning statistic just confirms what everyone who spends any time on the campaign trail knows, which is that the presidential race is not at all about ideas, but entirely about raising money.

The auctioned election process is designed to reduce the field to two candidates who will each receive hundreds of millions of dollars apiece from the same pool of donors. Just take a look at the lists of top donors for Obama and McCain from the last election in 2008.

. . .[Lists of donors removed; they're heavy with embedded links, and are summarized in the following paragraph] . . .

Obama’s list included all the major banks and bailout recipients, plus a smattering of high-dollar defense lawyers from firms like WilmerHale and Skadden Arps who make their money representing those same banks. McCain’s list included exactly the same banks and a similar list of law firms, the minor difference being that it was Gibson Dunn instead of WilmerHale, etc.

The numbers show remarkable consistency, as Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Citigroup all gave roughly twice or just over twice as much to Obama as they did to McCain, almost perfectly matching the overall donations profile for both candidates: overall, Obama raised just over twice as much ($730 million) as McCain did ($333 million).

The system is not broken; it’s working fine – for the 1%. After all, they own it. I don’t see much point in investing any energy in this year’s race.

Perhaps the most widely watched hearing is the one that took place in September 2009. A video of part of that hearing can still be found on YouTube, under the title “Elizabeth Warren Makes Timmy Geithner Squirm.” It opens with Warren asking the question that was on the minds of many taxpayers: “A.I.G. has received about $70 billion in TARP money, about $100 billion in loans from the Fed. Do you know where the money went?” What followed during the rest of the hearing was the spectacle of the Treasury secretary tripping over his words, his eyes darting around the room as Warren, calm and prosecutorial, kept hammering him with questions. At another hearing, in December 2009, Geithner appeared to be barely able to contain his annoyance, at one point almost shouting at her. Warren’s questioning “was masterful,” says Neil Barofsky, who ran the TARP oversight for Treasury. “She eviscerated him.” But Warren would pay a price for those hearings.

“Geithner hated her,” says a former administration official. Part of it was seen as personal because she had scorched him in public. But the whole thrust of her work on the oversight panel—getting the facts out to the public—was at odds with Geithner’s perceived conviction, shared by the Wall Street establishment, that the details of the banks’ TARP rescue should be hidden from public scrutiny whenever possible in order to give the banks time to recover, an assessment that a Treasury spokesperson disputes, insisting that “Secretary Geithner initiated unprecedented disclosure requirements for financial institutions.”

It’s also why we should make her our Senator. Let’s do it.

The Senate’s PROTECT IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House are supposed to address copyright infringement and counterfeiting. In reality, they are so technically impractical that they do little to address these problems. They would, however, undermine participatory democracy and human rights, which is why these bills have garnered near-universal condemnation from both human rights groups and technologists.

. . .

Both the PROTECT IP Act and SOPA would create a national firewall by censoring the domain names of websites accused of hosting infringing copyrighted materials. This legislation would enable law enforcement to take down the entire tumblr.com domain due to something posted on a single blog. Yes, an entire, largely innocent online community could be punished for the actions of a tiny minority.

If you think this scenario is unlikely, consider what happened to Mooo.com earlier this year. Back in February, the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security seized 10 domains during a child-porn crackdown called “Operation Protect Our Children.” Along with this group of offenders, 84,000 more entirely innocent sites were tagged with the following accusatory splash page: “Advertisement, distribution, transportation, receipt, and possession of child pornography constitute federal crimes that carry penalties for first time offenders of up to 30 years in federal prison, a $250,000 fine, forfeiture and restitution.” Their only crime was guilt by association: They were all using the Mooo.com domain.

SOPA would go even further, creating a system of private regulation to shut down websites that are accused of not doing enough to prevent infringement. Keep in mind that these shutdowns would happen before a site owner could defend himself in court—SOPA could punish sites without even establishing whether they are guilty of the charges brought against them.

I can’t shrug off this flight from reality and responsibility as somebody else’s problem. I belonged to this movement; I helped to make the mess.

I’ve had conversations that felt like what he describes in the beginning of his essay, where I tried to tell a Republican just why the GW Bush administration was a bad thing, and was patronized as being deranged.

In another essay, that he links to in that one, he talks about when he became aware that something was going wrong with his Party:

I moved to Washington, D.C., in 1996. And there I began to notice something disturbing. While the congressional victory of 1994 had ceased to produce much in the way of important conservative legislation, it sure was producing a lot of wealth for individual conservatives. They were moving from the staff offices of Congress to lobbying firms and professional associations. Washington (to quote something I’d write later) began to feel like a giant Tupperware party, where people you had thought of as friends suddenly seemed always to be trying to sell you something. Acquaintances of mine began accepting all-expense-paid trips to the South Pacific from Jack Abramoff.

The Party of the Rich, not even pretending these days. The Democrats are still pretending, but not very convincingly. Is the Republican Party all used up? Isn’t it time for something new that is not Democratic Party, Inc., (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Wall Street)?

The government’s patronage of the bank was never clearer than in recent weeks, when B of A quietly decided to move trillions of dollars (trillions, not billions) in risky Merrill Lynch derivatives contracts off Merrill’s books and onto the books of the parent/retail arm, Bank of America.

This decision was done at the behest of counterparties to those transactions, who wanted those contracts placed under the aegis of Bank of America, whose deposits are insured by the FDIC. The move was made, according to reports, so that Bank of America could avoid posting $3.3 billion in collateral to satisfy the company’s creditors. In other words, Bank of America just got You the Taxpayer to co-sign as much as $53 trillion worth of dicey derivative contracts.

The FDIC wasn’t pleased by the move, but the Fed apparently encouraged it. Bloomberg, citing people with “direct knowledge” of the deals, reported that,

The Fed has signaled that it favors moving the derivatives to give relief to the bank holding company, while the FDIC, which would have to pay off depositors in the event of a bank failure, is objecting, said the people. The bank doesn’t believe regulatory approval is needed, said people with knowledge of its position.

So the primary regulator of the banking industry is encouraging a functionally insolvent megabank to respond to a credit downgrade by pushing its most explosively risky holdings onto the laps of the taxpayer. This is lunacy…. Remember that story about the Chinese man who had a world-record 33-pound tumor removed from his face? This would be like treating that patient by removing the tumor and surgically attaching it to the face of a new patient, in this case the U.S. taxpayer.

Too big to fail. Our megacorporate citizens go first-class all the way. The rest of us are second-class citizens at best.

Under a deal the SEC worked out with the National Archives and Records Administration, all of the agency’s records – “including case files relating to preliminary investigations” – are supposed to be maintained for at least 25 years. But the SEC, using history-altering practices that for once actually deserve the overused and usually hysterical term “Orwellian,” devised an elaborate and possibly illegal system under which staffers were directed to dispose of the documents from any preliminary inquiry that did not receive approval from senior staff to become a full-blown, formal investigation. Amazingly, the wholesale destruction of the cases – known as MUIs, or “Matters Under Inquiry” – was not something done on the sly, in secret. The enforcement division of the SEC even spelled out the procedure in writing, on the commission’s internal website. “After you have closed a MUI that has not become an investigation,” the site advised staffers, “you should dispose of any documents obtained in connection with the MUI.”

. . .

In at least one case, according to [whistleblowing SEC attorney Darcy] Flynn, investigators at the SEC found their desire to bring a case against an influential bank thwarted by senior officials in the enforcement division – whose director turned around and accepted a lucrative job from the very same bank they had been prevented from investigating. In another case, the agency farmed out its inquiry to a private law firm – one hired by the company under investigation. The outside firm, unsurprisingly, concluded that no further investigation of its client was necessary. To complete the bureaucratic laundering process, Flynn says, the SEC dropped the case and destroyed the files.

This is the agency that’s supposed to keep Wall Street honest. No wonder it isn’t working.

The SEC’s inspector general is investigating the destroyed MUIs and plans to issue a report. NARA is also seeking answers. “We’ve asked the SEC to look into the matter and we’re awaiting their response,” says Laurence Brewer, a records officer for NARA. For its part, the SEC is trying to explain away the illegality of its actions through a semantic trick. John Nester, the agency’s spokesman, acknowledges that “documents related to MUIs” have been destroyed. “I don’t have any reason to believe that it hasn’t always been the policy,” he says. But Nester suggests that such documents do not “meet the federal definition of a record,” and therefore don’t have to be preserved under federal law.

Last year my federal tax bill — the income tax I paid, as well as payroll taxes paid by me and on my behalf — was $6,938,744. That sounds like a lot of money. But what I paid was only 17.4 percent of my taxable income — and that’s actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office. Their tax burdens ranged from 33 percent to 41 percent and averaged 36 percent.

If you make money with money, as some of my super-rich friends do, your percentage may be a bit lower than mine. But if you earn money from a job, your percentage will surely exceed mine — most likely by a lot.

. . .

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, tax rates for the rich were far higher, and my percentage rate was in the middle of the pack. According to a theory I sometimes hear, I should have thrown a fit and refused to invest because of the elevated tax rates on capital gains and dividends.

I didn’t refuse, nor did others. I have worked with investors for 60 years and I have yet to see anyone — not even when capital gains rates were 39.9 percent in 1976-77 — shy away from a sensible investment because of the tax rate on the potential gain. People invest to make money, and potential taxes have never scared them off. And to those who argue that higher rates hurt job creation, I would note that a net of nearly 40 million jobs were added between 1980 and 2000. You know what’s happened since then: lower tax rates and far lower job creation.

So, why does our government – and specifically, why do members of the Democratic Party, who are supposed to be looking out for the working man – continue to reduce the amount that the incredibly rich pay in taxes, while settling the yoke of funding the government ever more firmly on the shoulders of the middle class? Why is that, Democrats? Why do you keep doing that, and so long as you do, why should anyone give any credence to your claims of caring about the Common Man?

Talk is cheap. Until politicians – and especially the Democrats - make real efforts to change the tax structure to shift some of its burden onto those who can manifestly afford to bear it, all their noise is bullshit. At the very least, defend Social Security and Medicare. Failure to do that is surrendering to the enemy in the ongoing class war.

It appears to be true that the President wanted tax revenues to be part of this deal.  But it is absolutely false that he did not want these brutal budget cuts and was simply forced — either by his own strategic “blunders” or the “weakness” of his office — into accepting them.  The evidence is overwhelming that Obama has long wanted exactly what he got: these severe domestic budget cuts and even ones well beyond these, including Social Security and Medicare, which he is likely to get with the Super-Committee created by this bill (as Robert Reich described the bill:  ”No tax increases on rich yet almost certain cuts in Med[icare] and Social Security . . . . Ds can no longer campaign on R’s desire to Medicare and Soc Security, now that O has agreed it”).

Greenwald references Matt Taibbi, who is also convinced that Obama is playing a different game from the one we’d like him to play:

We probably need to start wondering why this keeps happening. Also, this: if the Democrats suck so bad at political combat, then how come they continue to be rewarded with such massive quantities of campaign contributions? When the final tally comes in for the 2012 presidential race, who among us wouldn’t bet that Barack Obama is going to beat his Republican opponent in the fundraising column very handily? At the very least, he won’t be out-funded, I can almost guarantee that.

And what does that mean? Who spends hundreds of millions of dollars for what looks, on the outside, like rank incompetence?

It strains the imagination to think that the country’s smartest businessmen keep paying top dollar for such lousy performance. Is it possible that by “surrendering” at the 11th hour and signing off on a deal that presages deep cuts in spending for the middle class, but avoids tax increases for the rich, Obama is doing exactly what was expected of him?

It reminds me of when people went on and on about how incompetent the Bush Administration was because of the Iraq debacle, the destruction of New Orleans, and all the rest, when it was clear that the things that they did badly at were things they did not care about. The things they did care about got done. They took control of Iraq’s oil away from Saddam and turned it over to Western oil companies. They effectively locked the SCOTUS into a corporatist-leaning body for the foreseeable future. They saved the banksters from the consequences of their hubris.

Now there’s Obama, the supposed moderate Democrat, and his supposed liberal Democratic Party. This is the repository for all the hope for change? Dream on.

Jessen’s notes, prepared for an Air Force survival training course that he later “reverse engineered” when he helped design the Bush administration’s torture program, however, go into far greater detail than the Armed Services Committee’s report in explaining how prisoners would be broken down physically and psychologically by their captors

. . .

Jessen’s notes were provided to Truthout by retired Air Force Capt. Michael Kearns, a “master” SERE instructor and decorated veteran who has previously held high-ranking positions within the Air Force Headquarters Staff and Department of Defense

“Every single Marine I know goes to Iraq to help,” she said. “While I was there that is what I thought. That is why I volunteered. I thought I was going to help the Iraqis. I know better now. We did the dirty work. We were used by the government. The military knows that young, single men are dangerous. We breed it in Marines. We push the testosterone. We don’t want them to be educated. They are deprived of a lot and rewarded with very little. It keeps us at ground level. We cannot question anyone. We do what we are told.

. . .

“War is disgusting and horrific,” she said. “It never leaves the people who were involved in it. The damage is far greater than the lists of casualties or cost in dollars. It permeates lifestyles. It infects cultures and people and worldviews. The war is never over for us. The fighting stops. The troops get called back. But the war goes on for those damaged by war.”

This is why you should not rationalize going to war. It is not a rational act. It is not a human act. It is abomination, and those who promote it should be treated accordingly.

Treasury staffers began conversations with congressional aides by saying the administration supported cramdown and would then “follow up with a whole bunch of reasons” why it wasn’t a good idea, said an aide to a senior Democratic senator.

Homeowners, Treasury staffers argued, would take advantage of bankruptcy to get help they didn’t need. Treasury also stressed the effects of cramdown on the nation’s biggest banks, which were still fragile. The banks’ books could take a beating if too many consumers lured into bankruptcy by cramdown also had their home equity loans and credit card debt written down.

“Lured into bankruptcy?” Seriously? What a load of crap.

Where is the Great Progressive Hope?

The Supreme Court is “the only judicial body in the country that is not governed by a set of judicial ethical rules,” Gillers said.

A spokesman for the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, which oversees the financial disclosures, could not be reached Friday night to comment on what actions could be taken. In most cases, judges simply amend their forms when an error is discovered.

Who says we don’t have an aristocracy?

Under the current law, however, Vermont would have to wait until 2017 to get the waiver that would allow the state to set up its own system.

“It doesn’t make sense to have it be 2017 because by then the federal law has gone into effect,” Welch said. “You are setting up the exchanges and what you end up doing is having states that want to innovate — in our case single-payer — have to unwind what we put in place.”

Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Scott Brown (R-Mass.) have introduced legislation to move the opt-out date up to 2014 — an amendment that both Welch and, it appears, House Democratic leaders support.

There goes that darned Scott Brown, acting all populist again!

President Obama is continuing the process of reinflating the Pentagon that began in late 1998-fully three years before the 9/11 attacks. The rise in national defense spending since 1998 is as large as the Kennedy-Johnson surge (43 percent) and the Reagan increases (57 percent) put together. The Department of Defense has been given about $7.2 trillion since 1998, which is when the post-cold war decline in defense spending ended. Current spending is above the peak years of the Vietnam War era and the Reagan years, and the Pentagon plans to remain there at this point. The radical increase in military spending now, compared to the cold war and World War II, is justified by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, even if today’s wars are taken out of the picture, there has still been a 54 percent increase since 1998.

This is happening while we already spend 7 times as much on the military as the next-biggest war economy (China), and almost as much as the entire rest of the world combined. What are we in the Home of the Brave afraid of, that we need to expend so much of our resources on war? Or are we just hell-bent on becoming the Arsenal of Plutocracy?

Really, what is being accomplished with all of this?

Updated:

We’ve been dealing with the same threats for decades. But we used to be a lot calmer about it, less self-defeating

We continue enacting the wrong policies, wasting our security resources and manpower. We have implemented many important changes since Lockerbie, it’s true (actually, many of the new protocols are post-9/11), but much of our approach remains incoherent. Cargo and packages go uninspected while passengers are groped and harassed over umbrellas and harmless hobby knives. Uniformed pilots are forced to remove their belts and endure embarrassing pat-downs.

President Obama struck a tentative deal with congressional Republicans yesterday to extend all of the Bush-era tax cuts in exchange for an extension of unemployment benefits, a move the president said would avoid a damaging stalemate but which infuriated liberal Democrats and left unclear whether the plan could be passed by Congress.

I’m sure a real struggle was required to hammer out this compromise. BIFF! BAM! POW! And the Republican negotiators emerged battered and bloody after a hard-fought battle in which they barely eked out a technical decision, while having to give huge concessions.

Let’s hear it for Battlin’ Barack Obama!

Hip! Hip! Meh.

Not long after Obama spoke, Democrats ignited a partisan row in the House with legislation that would prevent taxes from rising on lower- and middle-income wage earners but allow them to go up for people at higher incomes.

Given Republican objections, that measure has no chance of passing the Senate. But Democrats there insisted on voting on it Friday as a way to dramatize their support for the measure and, officials said, register unhappiness with Obama.

The president has already signaled he will accede to Republican demands for extending tax cuts at all income levels, making votes on the Democratic-backed bill purely symbolic.

Heckova compromise, Mr. President!

Editor’s note: I hope that kirth will forgive me for hijacking this post.  I was considering writing the following up separately, but it fits right in here.  I was struck by comments made by Obama’s press guy Robert Gibbs the other day regarding the federal employee pay freeze.  They reveal, it seems to me, how profoundly the Obama administration doesn’t understand how negotiation and compromise is supposed to work. Check this out:

Q    My question is, why does the President — he did this with off-shore oil drilling, too.  Why does the President go out and set — and make these proposals at a podium instead of behind closed doors with your political adversaries in a negotiating position where you might be able to get something in return?  What is the President getting in return by making this [the federal employee pay freeze] gesture?

     MR. GIBBS:  I think $2 billion in savings next year and $28 billion over five.

     Q    And he does not think that Democrats should try to actually extract some concessions from Republicans when he makes moves that anger the left?  Because he has angered the left.

     MR. GIBBS:  Jonathan, I think on a daily basis we anger many people.  That comes with the job of governing.  The President makes a series of decisions that he thinks are in the best interest of the country and I think, as he said today, not focused on the next election, but focused on the next generation. That’s why the President made the decision that he made with the deadline that we had — not as a bargaining chip or a bargaining tool, but because it was the right thing to do.

-David

Obviously, those who screamed bloody murder over Bush/Cheney Terrorism policies but now justify or at least acquiesce to the same policies when implemented by Obama have serious issues with partisan loyalties trumping honest advocacy.  But it’s when the Obama administration reverses itself — such as with the torture photos — that one’s intellectual honesty is most conclusively tested:  one’s beliefs and principles can’t shift with Obama’s reversals if they’re to be meaningful or credible.  The same issue applies here:  shouldn’t anyone who defended Holder’s original decision on the ground that it was compelled by the Constitution, the rule of law and our values now vocally denounce Obama for his profound violations of those same doctrines?

So is it principles that are important, or is it supporting the Democratic President?  

I am not making any of this up.

Boudreau is not amused.

At least 38 House Democrats have now come out publicly in favor of at least a short-term extension of current income tax rates for couples earning more than $250,000 and individuals over the $200,000 threshhold…

Tax the rich? Nah. It’s an election year! These people have a will of tapioca.

ONE of the world’s largest oil companies has broken its pledge to stop funding groups that promote scepticism about man-made climate change.

ExxonMobil gave almost £stg 1 million ($1.75m) last year [2009] to organisations that campaigned against controls on greenhouse gas emissions.

. . .

The energy giant had indicated it was pulling back from funding sceptics. In its 2007 corporate citizenship report, it stated: “In 2008, we will discontinue contributions to several public policy groups whose position on climate change could divert attention from the important discussion on how the world will secure energy required for economic growth in an environmentally responsible manner.”

Exxon also gave reassurances last year that it had no funding links with the sceptics’ biggest annual conference, the International Conference on Climate Change. But a list published by Exxon this month of its “2009 worldwide contributions and investments” revealed it had given four co-sponsors of the New York event $US275,000. It also gave $US1m to 20 other sceptic groups.

ExxonMobil is the world’s third-largest corporation (based on revenues), and second-most profitable.

In a press release, the National Tea Party Federation says it ordered the Tea Party Express to kick Williams out and say so “prominently” on their Website. They did not.

Williams’ response: who’s the National Tea Party Federation anyway?

“There are internal political dramas amongst the various self-anointed tea party ‘leaders’ and some of the minor players on the fringes see the Tea Party Express and Mark Williams as tickets to a booking on Face the Nation,” he said.

…Even a flawed marriage was likely to be a stable one. Over time, the spouses would grow into their responsibilities.

That is what “families form adults” means. Many teenagers and young adults formed families before they reached maturity and then came to maturity precisely by shouldering family responsibilities. Immature choices and what were once euphemistically called “accidents” were a fact of life, but the unity of sex, marriage, and procreation, combined with the pressure not to divorce, turned childish errors into adult vocations.

. . .

The new paradigm prizes responsible childbearing and child-rearing far above the traditional linkage of sex, marriage, and procreation. Instead of emphasizing abstinence until marriage, it enjoins: Don’t form a family until after you have finished your education and are equipped for responsibility. In other words, adults form families. Family life marks the end of the transition to adulthood, not the beginning.

. . .

In 2008, when news emerged that the 17-year-old daughter of the Republican vice presidential nominee was pregnant, traditionalists were reassured rather than outraged, because Bristol Palin followed the time-honored rules by announcing she would marry the father. They were kids, to be sure, but they would form a family and grow up together, as so many before them had done. Blue America, by contrast, was censorious. Bristol had committed the unforgivable sin of starting a family too young. If red and blue America seemed to be talking past one another about family values, it’s because they were.

We used to hustle over the border for health care we received in Canada. And I think now, isn’t that ironic? “

Tsongas defended the vote as a stopgap measure until lawmakers on Capitol Hill can agree to a suitable alternative that balances personal freedoms with the need to protect the United States from attacks at home and abroad. President Barack Obama signed the extension into law on Saturday.

“This is a temporary one-year extension, and I do have serious concerns with it, but we don’t yet have a substitute to correct them,” Tsongas told The Sun when questioned about her vote. “We saw with the Christmas Day bomber that we still have real problems collecting intelligence and sharing it, and we need a broad solution.”

The House voted 315-97 last Thursday to extend three key provisions of the Patriot Act related to wiretapping and surveillance that were set to expire on Sunday. The vote, coming on the heels of unanimous consent without a roll call in the Senate, extends the powers granted to the federal government until Feb. 28, 2011.

Tsongas joined 127 Democrats, including the party leadership, in backing the extension, but was one of only three members of the Massachusetts delegation to support the measure. U.S. Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Boston, probably the most conservative of the delegation, and Rep. William Delahunt, D-Quincy, also voted to support the extension.

The PATRIOT Act is a steaming pile of crap. It should have been repealed the first month that the Democrats gained a majority. That they have not done so, but have gone on to extend it, is an indicator of how little they value our rights.

But Hall, 56, will keep his $31,000-a-year job as the civil attorney in nearby Fremont County, according to Prosecutor Joette Lookabaugh, a Republican who hired Hall in January.

. . .

In a news release, Lookabaugh suggested Hall was singled out because of his notoriety.

“I understand that political figures are held to a higher standard,” she said. “What is disturbing is the fact that often people who have devoted their lives to public service are not given the same benefits, or are treated more harshly, than the public at large. There seems to be a certain amount of political glee in striking down the well-known for any real or perceived foible.”

Some of the details of Hall’s “foible”:

Idaho Falls police reported that witnesses said Hall disposed of used condoms on the lawn of the woman’s house. Nineteen condoms were turned over to police, collected on 10 different dates, according to a police report. Both Hall and his lawyer acknowledged the condoms belonged to him, according to a police report.

Also, between March and August, Hall repeatedly followed the woman to restaurants, the movies and her home, and he ignored her repeated requests that he leave her alone, according to police and court records.

The victim testified Friday that Hall once followed her to a Walmart and took her car keys and would not return them until she agreed to “hear him out” concerning her marriage, the Idaho Falls Post Register reported.

. . .

Harding has been a judge for 18 years in 6th Judicial District and was assigned the case in the 7th District because of Hall’s many connections in the region’s legal community. Said Harding: “I’ve never seen (a stalking case) this extensive where it lasted so long and (was) such an invasion of privacy.”

Both county prosecutors are Republicans. One of them is not an idiot.

BIRTHERS TURN ON O’REILLY

Fox News prime-time host Bill O’Reilly is the latest media target of the “birther” movement, after O’Reilly commented on Tuesday that he thinks the “birther” lawsuits are “crazy.”

The off-the-cuff comment didn’t go by unnoticed by Taitz’s followers, and now they are planning a protest outside Fox news headquarters in New York on Veterans’ Day.

On her Web site, Taitz wrote, “Keep in mind, what OReilly did, is more dangerous, more harmful then what some idiots like Rachel Maddow or Keith [Olbermann] did, since people believe O’Reilly to be fair and balanced.”

Taitz told the news blog Conservative Monster that O’Reilly is “not a legitimate journalist” because he had not contacted her about the story he planned to air. Taitz “stated that if Fox gave her a 30-minute show for her to display her evidence, Obama would have to resign from office within 48 hours,” the Web site reported.

The people for whom O’Reilly is fair and balanced are sure to be profoundly affected by the Birther protest.

Maybe I should have saved this for the Joke Review, but it’s all true!

Here is a list of those voting against the amendment:

Lamar Alexander (R-TN)

John Barrasso (R-WY)

Kit Bond (R-MO)

Sam Brownback (R-KS)

Jim Bunning (R-KY)

Richard Burr (R-NC)

Saxby Chambliss (R-GA)

Tom Coburn (R-OK)

Thad Cochran (R-MS)

Bob Corker (R-TN)

John Cornyn (R-TX)

Mike Crapo (R-ID)

Jim DeMint (R-SC)

John Ensign (R-NV)

Mike Enzi (R-WY)

Lindsey Graham (R-SC)

Judd Gregg (R-NH)

James Inhofe (R-OK)

Johnny Isakson (R-GA)

Mike Johanns (R-NE)

Jon Kyl (R-AZ)

John McCain (R-AZ)

Mitch McConnell (R-KY)

James Risch (R-ID)

Pat Roberts (R-KS)

Jeff Sessions (R-AL)

Richard Shelby (R-AL)

John Thune (R-SD)

David Vitter (R-LA)

Roger Wicker (R-MS)

One hopes that women and other fully-human persons in New Hampshire and other states represented by those Senators will remember this vote when they have the opportunity to exercise their own votes. As for me, I want to say that those Senators have brought a pile of shame on my gender, and I object strongly to their doing so.

As you’d expect, Jon Stewart had some things to say about it all.

*The KBR Halliburton claim for binding arbitration been rejected by an appeals court.

WASHINGTON – State and local tourism officials are being flooded by emails and calls from people across the country, saying they won’t vacation in South Carolina because they’re upset by GOP Rep. Joe Wilson’s outburst at President Barack Obama.

The third stage: being there

All through the Bush years, progressive right-wing watchers refused to call it “fascism” because, though we kept looking, we never saw clear signs of a deliberate, committed institutional partnership forming between America’s conservative elites and its emerging homegrown brownshirt horde. We caught tantalizing signs of brief flirtations — passing political alliances, money passing hands, far-right moonbat talking points flying out of the mouths of “mainstream” conservative leaders. But it was all circumstantial, and fairly transitory. The two sides kept a discreet distance from each other, at least in public. What went on behind closed doors, we could only guess. They certainly didn’t act like a married couple.

Now, the guessing game is over. We know beyond doubt that the Teabag movement was created out of whole cloth by astroturf groups like Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks and Tim Phillips’ Americans for Prosperity, with massive media help from FOX News. We see the Birther fracas — the kind of urban myth-making that should have never made it out of the pages of the National Enquirer — being openly ratified by Congressional Republicans. We’ve seen Armey’s own professionally-produced field manual that carefully instructs conservative goon squads in the fine art of disrupting the democratic governing process — and the film of public officials being terrorized and threatened to the point where some of them required armed escorts to leave the building. We’ve seen Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner applauding and promoting a video of the disruptions and looking forward to “a long, hot August for Democrats in Congress.”

This is the sign we were waiting for — the one that tells us that yes, kids: we are there now. America’s conservative elites have openly thrown in with the country’s legions of discontented far right thugs. They have explicitly deputized them and empowered them to act as their enforcement arm on America’s streets, sanctioning the physical harassment and intimidation of workers, liberals, and public officials who won’t do their political or economic bidding.

This is the catalyzing moment at which honest-to-Hitler fascism begins. It’s also our very last chance to stop it.

Which chance she disappointingly postpones discussing until her next column. Does it matter what we call it? The tactics being embraced by the opposition party are blatantly disruptive of Democracy. If the progression described in the column continues, our world is going to get massively worse.

What do we do about it?

A Montana farm sold mint to an American toothpaste company. One day the toothpaste company mysteriously ceased its orders.

Wal-Mart, the toothpaste company explained, had decided that by its calculations a cheaper toothpaste could be made by importing vats of mint oil from China. Wal-Mart, known for trying to reduce costs by 5% every year, said it wanted to buy the cheaper paste and would find somebody else to make it, if necessary. The farm took a serious financial hit.

Wal-Mart’s business practices are good business. That doesn’t mean that they are good for anyone else.

The agreement of the corporate CEOs to cease criticizing each other was motivated by the belief that such criticism was hurting the unrelated corporate interests of GE and News Corp

A Greenwald reader wrote:

The sad truth is that what Olbermann and O’Reilly were doing in this particular instance was one of the rare examples of good journalism on these types of shows. Olbermann was holding O’Reilly’s feet to the fire about his repeated falsehoods and embarrassing positions. In turn, O’Reilly was giving the public accurate and disturbing information about General Electric, including extensive technology dealings with Iran.

How about that Liberal Corporate media, huh? Doesn’t that give you all kinds of confidence that the boardroom keeps its hands off the editing and reporting of news?

“After this horrible, long, tortured history, I hope the government will succeed in getting him back home,” U.S. District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle told Justice Department lawyers during a court hearing Thursday. “Enough has been imposed on this young man to date.”

Meanwhile, the Obama Administration is considering a plan to create a military prison inside the US to house those still held at Guantanamo.

http://www.google.com/hostedne…

Providing long-term holding cells for a small but still undetermined number of detainees who will not face trial because intelligence and counterterror officials conclude they are too dangerous to risk being freed.

How is it possible that anyone is “too dangerous” to be tried? If they are that dangerous, it should be easy to convict them of something. If they can’t be convicted, they should be sent back where they came from.

via

I’m genuinely surprised that he was was surprised that it was that bad. I’m not saying that for effect. Muller really seemed to think it was like getting dunked by your friend in a pool or something. Just factually, everyone who knows anything about this says that it’s horrific and you pretty much instantly feel like you’re drowning and at the edge of death. And it’s a physiological response. So even if you’ve gone through it ten times and know rationally that you don’t die, it doesn’t matter. You’re instantly put back into the mental space of drowning and being at the edge of death.

I must confess that when I see Hannity or the rest of these guys saying it’s no big deal and it’s not torture, I kind of figured they’re playing semantic games and essentially saying ‘I don’t care what we do to evil Muslim terrorist bad guys.’ Hang them from them toes, waterboard them, whatever, who cares? I don’t agree with that. It’s hideous. But I understand it. But here it turns out they’re just completely ignorant, just haven’t been paying attention. Just in the purest factual sense have no idea what they’re talking about.

An “official with access to the transcripts said someone seeking help for the employees of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a prominent pro-Israel lobbying group, was recorded asking Ms. Harman, a longtime supporter of its efforts, to intervene with the Justice Department,” the paper wrote. “She responded, the official recounted, by saying she would have more influence with a White House official she did not identify.

“In return, the caller promised her that a wealthy California donor — the media mogul Haim Saban — would threaten to withhold campaign contributions to Representative Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat who was expected to become House speaker after the 2006 election, if she did not select Ms. Harman for the intelligence post,” the paper added.

Intervening in an espionage investigation, while being promised a quid-pro-quo by a foreign lobby – isn’t that treason?

Obama’s promise about lobbyists was a regular part of his stump speech. He said it on the campaign trail again and again. He used it to sharply contrast himself with John McCain, who had former lobbyists on his campaign staff. Obama’s comments against lobbyists were some of the biggest applause lines of his rallies, especially as the economy was roiled in September and October 2008.

“Make no mistake: We need to end an era in Washington where accountability has been absent, oversight has been overlooked, your tax dollars have been turned over to wealthy CEOs and the well-connected corporations,” Obama said at an Oct. 1 campaign stop in Wisconsin. “You need leadership you can trust to work for you, not for the special interests who have had their thumb on the scale. And together, we will tell Washington, and their lobbyists, that their days of setting the agenda are over. They have not funded my campaign. You have. They will not run my White House. You’ll help me run my White House.”

We previously rated this promise a Compromise while we waited to see whether Lynn was confirmed and how the Obama White House handled its waiver process. Some have said that Lynn alone caused the promise to be broken, but we felt that a transparent, timely and objective waiver process might merit a ruling of Compromise. But the concerns about waivers and recusals outlined above have convinced us that this promise is not being kept in letter or in spirit, and a Compromise rating is no longer appropriate.

Obama was very clear with his promise. He said no lobbyists would “work on regulations or contracts directly and substantially related to their prior employer for two years.” No means none. Promise Broken.

I think it’s time to let Obama know that we are paying attention, and that we do expect him to do more than pay lip service to the promises he made during the campaign.

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child status 100…The e-mail message could not be delivered because the user’s mailfolder is full.

But in the late Nineties, a few years before Cassano took over AIGFP, all that changed. The Democrats, tired of getting slaughtered in the fundraising arena by Republicans, decided to throw off their old reliance on unions and interest groups and become more “business-friendly.” Wall Street responded by flooding Washington with money, buying allies in both parties. In the 10-year period beginning in 1998, financial companies spent $1.7 billion on federal campaign contributions and another $3.4 billion on lobbyists. They quickly got what they paid for. In 1999, Gramm co-sponsored a bill that repealed key aspects of the Glass-Steagall Act, smoothing the way for the creation of financial megafirms like Citigroup. The move did away with the built-in protections afforded by smaller banks. In the old days, a local banker knew the people whose loans were on his balance sheet: He wasn’t going to give a million-dollar mortgage to a homeless meth addict, since he would have to keep that loan on his books. But a giant merged bank might write that loan and then sell it off to some fool in China, and who cared?

Yes, if Taibbi is right, then so are the Republicans when they say there’s more than enough blame to go around.

Why doesn’t Congress step up and find out what’s going on? The Fed doesn’t think they have to tell the Congress anything:

None other than disgraced senator Ted Stevens was the poor sap who made the unpleasant discovery that if Congress didn’t like the Fed handing trillions of dollars to banks without any oversight, Congress could apparently go fuck itself – or so said the law.

The prognosis is grim:

The real question from here is whether the Obama administration is going to move to bring the financial system back to a place where sanity is restored and the general public can have a say in things or whether the new financial bureaucracy will remain obscure, secretive and hopelessly complex. It might not bode well that Geithner, Obama’s Treasury secretary, is one of the architects of the Paulson bailouts; as chief of the New York Fed, he helped orchestrate the Goldman-friendly AIG bailout and the secretive Maiden Lane facilities used to funnel funds to the dying company. Neither did it look good when Geithner – himself a protégé of notorious Goldman alum John Thain, the Merrill Lynch chief who paid out billions in bonuses after the state spent billions bailing out his firm – picked a former Goldman lobbyist named Mark Patterson to be his top aide.

In fact, most of Geithner’s early moves reek strongly of Paulsonism. He has continually talked about partnering with private investors to create a so-called “bad bank” that would systemically relieve private lenders of bad assets – the kind of massive, opaque, quasi-private bureaucratic nightmare that Paulson specialized in. Geithner even refloated a Paulson proposal to use TALF, one of the Fed’s new facilities, to essentially lend cheap money to hedge funds to invest in troubled banks while practically guaranteeing them enormous profits.

Read the whole article. It’s written in Taibbi’s usual uncompromising style. If he’s even mostly right on the facts, this is a bad situation that does not seem to be getting addressed.

It’s pretty good; the promises are quoted directly. For instance, WRT earmarks is this:

No. 235: Require more disclosure and a waiting period for earmarks

Through the “Transparency and Integrity in Earmarks Act, will shed light on all earmarks by disclosing the name of the legislator who asked for each earmark, along with a written justification, 72 hours before they can be approved by the full Senate.”

Notice that he did not promise to eliminate earmarks.

BELFAST, Maine – James G. Cummings, who police say was shot to death by his wife two months ago, allegedly had a cache of radioactive materials in his home suitable for building a “dirty bomb.”

More here:

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/…

The man, allegedly furious over the election of President Obama, purchased depleted uranium over the Internet from an American company.

…

“Amber (Cummings) indicated James was very upset with Barack Obama being elected President,” reported the Washington Regional Threat and Analysis Center (PDF link). “She indicated James had been in contact with ‘white supremacist group(s).’ Amber also indicated James mixed chemicals in the kitchen sink at their residence and had mentioned ‘dirty bombs.’”

Wasn’t our occupation of Iraq supposed to prevent this sort of thing?