The pressure is growing on the Justice Department to produce supposedly "deleted" e-mails that could reveal whether government lawyers during the Bush administration were instructed to devise legal justifications for torture.
Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) likes to tout his experience as a former military lawyer. Graham apparently thinks this makes him sound more convincing when he goes around advocating military trials for all suspected terrorists, as he's been doing lately. Graham's now trying to get that idea signed into law in a bill he's introduced in the Senate. A similar provision is likely headed to a vote today in the House of Representatives.
Memory fades quickly in politics; less than a year ago Bush was president, and already the man is halfway forgotten.
Many, though, remember that Bush became distinctly unpopular during his second term. Liberals will explain this as a product of Bush's stance on Iraq, civil liberties, the environment everything. Conservatives will point to his "betrayal of the cause" - the deficits and his moderate stance on immigration.
The average person might, if asked, talk about Bush's poor handling of the Iraq War and the economy's weak performance during his term.
These explanations all ring true enough. But there is a giant element which they do not account for. Nobody talks anymore about this thing - this event. It is only when one reads Bush's wikipedia article, that one goes - "Ah! I remember that. He really failed on that."
Among the many striking aspects of the Justice Department's recently-released ethics report on the creation of the "torture memos" are the repeated indications that John Yoo, the memos' principal author, was in frequent direct contact with the White House and under intense pressure to quickly approve abusive interrogation techniques that policymakers had already chosen to implement but knew might amount to torture.
Well it looks like it's mid afternoon in Health Care Reform land. You remember Health Care Reform don't you? That thing that some of the talking heads were carrying on was a dead thing? Yeah well about that, not so much. People might not completely agree on details, but the one thing that pretty much everyone who's not a politician or a CEO Can agree on is that we are sick and tired of having to go through our days living in terror of getting sick. The system is broken and we want something done about it. NOW!
In reporting on the long-delayed release of the Justice Department's ethics report on the work of Bush administration lawyers who approved the torture of detainees, The New York Times on Saturday wrote that it "brings to a close a pivotal chapter in the debate over the legal limits of the Bush administration's fight against terrorism and whether its treatment of Qaeda prisoners amounted to torture."
About 6 months ago, I started warning about the potential for a really bad electoral cycle for the Democrats in the 2010 midterms. I feared that by not taking the big banks on more aggressively, not doing more to create jobs in a really bad economic period for job creation, and letting the health care bill drag on and get too compromised in terms of taking on the insurance industry, that Democrats would be badly hurting ourselves with both our base voter turnout and with swing working class voters getting hammered in this economy. A lot of the Democratic establishment said folks like me were over-hyping, that while it wouldn't be an easy year, there were all kinds of reasons to think it wouldn't be so bad. To my great chagrin, my predictions were proved right with a vengeance in the first three big elections of this cycle in NJ, VA, and MA: base vote turnout was terrible, and working class swing voters turned dramatically against us. Now, the conventional wisdom has turned and just about everybody in the Democratic party is in full scale doomsday mode.
That's why I was so heartened to see David Plouffe's well reasoned analysis piece in the Washington Post on Sunday, laying out a strategy on how the Democrats can survive 2010 without getting slaughtered. Because what is needed now in the Democratic party is that kind of calm, steady thinking. As worried as I have been now for these last 6 months, I am equally convinced that if we do the right things politically and policy-wise (the two are in sync), we can surprise people in the 2010 elections and do a lot better than the pundits and the panickers think.
The reason I believe this is that I have been involved in several elections where good things happened against all the predictions of the conventional wisdom. Let me take you back to some elections in the past where Democrats came back when things looked really dark for them:
On the eighth anniversary of 9/11, a professor of mine made a comment that caused a lot of soul-searching for me. He remarked, quite casually, that the United States is in decline.
Those words angered me. Nobody likes to hear their country characterized in that manner. But ever since then I've been considering that casual statement.
I think it accurately describes the state of our nation.
We are a nation in decline.
We are in decline for a variety of reasons, some more controllable and some less so. Economic weakness has something to do with it, as does the popularity of anti-Americanism (thank you, George Bush). Misadventures in the Middle East and the rise of China also play a participating role.
But enough about why we are in decline. What can be done to stop it?
Once the health care fight is over, the next big fight is the battle over financial regulation. As challenging and frustrating as healthcare has been, at least reformers have been in the game in terms of a decent bill. The odds have never been even, but a decent bill, in my view, is a possible ending. With the financial regulation fight, the odds are much tougher because the Wall Street lobby is so powerful, and the forces on the other side are still relatively weak, and the Obama proposals overall are a weaker starting place than in health care. As important as it is, though, the financial regulations fight is only a pre-cursor to the massive economic policy debates that we will be engaging in for the next four years. These fights are symbolized by a phrase that the President and his economic advisors repeat too often, a phrase that is both politically tone deaf and potentially indicative of a much deeper problem in their thinking. It's the phrase, "jobs are a lagging indicator" of our recovery. I worry less that they say it, though, and more that they might actually believe it.
That "jobs are a lagging indicator" thing is a phrase that conservative economists (which is most of them) like to use because in their neo-classical economic models about recessions and financial crises, first the bankers regain confidence and their economic health, then they start loaning to businesses again, then businesses get healthy - and finally at the end of the happy cycle - they start hiring workers again. Of course, as the brilliant Paul Krugman piece on the economics profession in the NYT magazine pointed out, many of the same economists said both a real estate bubble and a financial panic were actually impossible because they didn't correspond to their free-market-cures-all-problems-and-provides-perfect-equilibrium models.
If the basic ideas behind the jobs being a lagging indicator phrase sound vaguely familiar, it's because they are essentially another version of the trickle-down economics we have been hearing for years from the two Presidents Bush and President Reagan: give those rich people and corporate CEOs more money, and it will eventually trickle down to the rest. There are a great many problems with this theory, but they can be summed up rather simply with the fact: pretty much nothing ever trickles down. In all the years of the Reagan and Bush presidencies, 20 years in all, the income of middle class workers stagnated (or worse), while the income of the rich skyrocketed.
So now we see one article after another on the economy reporting some version of the news that banks have recovered, businesses are starting to do better, but workers are getting left behind. You can grab any article on the economy at random written over the last couple of months, and find the same kind of quote, such as this one from a WP article from September 1st: "The emerging economic recovery suffers from a great contradiction: Even as factories seem to be cranking out more stuff, the job market remains terrible."
Now I am not suggesting that Obama's economic philosophy is the same as the right-wing Republican trickle-down philosophy of Reagan and the Bush kin. There are lots of things to like about what he has done and proposed so far. The stimulus was classically liberal Keynesian, with hundreds of billions in job-creating public capital investments, and it is clearly helping prop up the economy right now. Even the tax cuts that were included in the stimulus bill were considerably more progressively structured than any tax cuts ever passed or proposed by Republican Presidents. Obama's budget proposal was also very progressive: the most money for poor people of any federal budget in history, even LBJ's War on Poverty budgets, for example. He has generally argued strongly for a more progressive tax system than we have seen in the Bush or Reagan years. Although we don't know what we will get in the end, his initial health care and energy proposals included solid policy ideas with lots of good progressive notions in them. And he clearly does believe in a stronger regulatory hand than Republican Presidents whose lack of support for even basic regulation is so much of the reason we are in the economic mess we are in today.
In spite of all this though, I do have a couple of deep worries about Obama's economics, and neither of them are small things, they go to the very core of whether the "lagging indicator" ever catches up to the happy days the Wall Street bankers are experiencing right now. One worry is about the President and his economic team's core belief system, and the other is his tactical mindset.
On the economic belief side, I worry that he doesn't fundamentally get that the neo-classical theories that have dominated the economics profession over the last couple of decades are just flat out wrong, and that our economy, despite the recent uptick in some statistics because of the stimulus and the trillions of dollars the Fed injected into the system over the last year, is on some level truly broken. Neo-classical economics assures that once we stabilize the banking system, more credit will go to businesses to invest, and they will all eventually start hiring people. The problem is that this economy is still fundamentally weakened, that the cracks and bruises it suffered in its sudden fall last year made it vulnerable to other problems that will sap its strength. If the neo-classical economists are wrong again- just like they were about the housing bubble, just like they were about deregulating finance and the financial crisis in general- and the economy stays soft, will the jobs ever start getting ginned up again, especially after all that stimulus money runs out in the middle of 2011? (What a delightful time for the economy to turn south for an incumbent President gearing up for his re-election campaign.)
The other thing I worry about with President Obama is on the tactical level. I give him huge credit (in fact of all the things I like about him, what I like best is this) for his willingness to swing for the fences, to try to do big things, transformational things: health care reform, climate change, financial reform, immigration reform. His ambition and desire for big change is his best quality. But when it comes to how you get things passed, his instinct seems to be to follow Rahm Emanuel's more conservative lead and stay carefully within the cautious conventional wisdom lines: rather than being as gutsy on his tactics as he was on his big change agenda, he seems to be pulling back. In order to break through the power of DC special interests, I think Obama is going to have to take them on directly, pick fights with them, and beat them decisively. Because not only is the economic system broken, the political system is broken as well. He needs to think big about programs that create jobs directly, and think bigger than he's done so far about taking on Wall Street.
In the 1930s, FDR figured out that the economic theories that he studied in college were no longer working, and needed to be directly challenged. He put money directly into jobs and income for the poor and working class people rather than doing bank bailouts and tax cuts for the wealthy. He took the fight to the big special interests, the "economic royalists", with pride and with gusto. And the American people supported him. Now is the time for President Obama to take FDR's example, and to fully embrace bottom-up policies rather than the trickle-down variety.
We find that the average income for the middle 20% of households will likely decline by $2,456 in 2009, and by an additional $601 in 2010, for a total decline of $4,813 from 2007 to 2010. This is a decline in income of 9.3% for the typical household over these three years. Given the decline in income over the weak business cycle from 2000 to 2007, this means that after reaching an all-time peak in 2000, by 2010 real incomes for the typical household will likely have declined by $5,729, or 10.8% - truly a lost decade.
And here's one of her charts that Meteor Blades reproduced:
I advice everyone to go read her presentation. This are really going to get ugly before they get better. But I want to take a somewhat different focus for this diary, extending an analysis I did a couple of weeks ago, "Forget The Recession--Bush Economy Sucked BEFORE Then". I want to compare the 7-year and 8-year records with a view toward arguing that things have been economically lousy throughout the Bush years, and the media have been doing a terrible job of informing the American public all along. More charts, and very little text need to tell the story on the flip.
This is a bit of the flip side of the earlier diary on fascism.
There was quite a flap this week over Tom Ridge's revelation that terror alerts had (gasp!) been politicized! Marc Ambinder made a fool of himself and Marcy Wheeler and Glenn Greenwald smacked him down.
In part, Glenn wrote:
Just as is still commonly said about opponents of the Iraq War (even though they were right, they were still wrong and unSerious because their motives were bad), Ambinder acknowledges that Bush critics were right that the terror alerts were being manipulated for political ends (he has no choice but to acknowledge that now that Ridge admits it), but still says journalists like himself were right to scorn such critics "because these folks based their assumption on gut hatred for President Bush, and not on any evaluation of the raw intelligence." As always: even when the dirty leftist hippies are proven right, they're still Shrill, unSerious Losers who every decent person and "journalist" scorns.
This is fine as far as it goes, but there's a number of larger points that need to be made here:
(1) What the Bush Administration did with these manipulations was itself terrorism. They terrorized the American people in order to manipulate the political process and coerce a political outcome favorable to themselves in a manner that was inherently destructive to civil peace and the democratic process.
(2) This was only the tip of the iceberg, however. The entire Bush response to 9/11 was a form of terrorism, from start to finish. They never let off terrorizing the American people, repeatedly scaring them out of their wits, and frightening them into doing things that they would never do if free from threats and coercion. 9/11 was a terrible screw-up on Bush & Cheney's part. It was nowhere near an existential threat to America. But because it was such a terrible screw up, Bush/Cheney had to vastly inflate al Qaeda's purported prowess. And so they went all in on terrorizing the American people. The vast majority of the Versailles press went there with them, and that press continues to defend Bush/Cheney to this day, precisely because they are complicit in terrorism against the American people, and the Republic.
Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission released its assessment of an American aerial attack in the western province of Farah on May 4, saying American forces demonstrated "a disproportionate use of force" that might have killed up to 97 civilians, most of them children.
That number is lower than the Afghan government's figure of 140 civilians killed but higher than the American military assessment of 20 to 30 civilian deaths in an attack it said singled out Taliban fighters.
In its statement on the American aerial attack in Farah, the human rights commission said that in addition to 11 adult male civilians who were killed, "available records suggest that 21 were women and 65 were children, 31 of whom were girls and 34 boys."
Abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay has worsened sharply since President Barack Obama took office as prison guards "get their kicks in" before the camp is closed, according to a lawyer who represents detainees.
IRF teams in effect operate at Guantánamo as an extrajudicial terror squad that has regularly brutalized prisoners outside of the interrogation room, gang beating them, forcing their heads into toilets, breaking bones, gouging their eyes, squeezing their testicles, urinating on a prisoner's head, banging their heads on concrete floors and hog-tying them -- sometimes leaving prisoners tied in excruciating positions for hours on end.
Despite President Barack Obama's publicized pledge to close the prison camp and end torture -- and analysis from human rights lawyers who call these forces' actions illegal -- IRFs remain very much active at Guantánamo.
And that's why Obama won't prosecute Bush and his friends for war crimes...
Because Obama and his friends are committing exactly the same crimes!
Students at Stanford stood still as they listened to former Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice speak. As the scholars pondered the words of the prominent woman who presented her case for waterboarding, many mused; "Is it Richard Nixon, or Condoleezza Rice? Which person thinks a President is above the law?" One might wonder. Those who viewed a video taped classroom conversation with Secretary Rice, today express astonishment as well. In her defense for actions she took to advocate for this extreme interrogation techniques Condoleezza Rice both blamed her former boss, George W. Bush and justified his decision.
"The president instructed us that nothing we would do would be outside of our obligations, legal obligations under the Convention Against Torture."
Earlier today, Alren Specter said that the Democratic Party is being taken over by extremists
But we find, I think regrettably, that the extremes of both parties are taking over.
A senator like Joe Lieberman can't win a primary in Connecticut. I had a 1 percent primary for 2004. And, to repeat, the word that I use is "bleak."
Yep, it's "bleak" that Joe Lieberman and Arlen Specter have to face difficult primary challenges from the extremes. Arlen Specter is excellent at repudiating extremes, which is why only four weeks ago he introduced flat tax legislation in the Senate:
Senator Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) today introduced legislation that would scrap the 17,000 pages of current IRS code in favor of a 20 percent flat tax for all individuals and businesses. The revenue-neutral legislation would allow tax-payers to file returns on a postcard that could be completed in 15 minutes.
"My flat tax legislation would make filing a tax return a manageable chore, not a seemingly endless nightmare, for most taxpayers," Senator Specter said. "This legislation will fundamentally revise the present tax code, with its myriad rates, deductions, and instructions."
He also ran this campaign ad with Rick Santorum back in 2004:
''I'm here to say it as plainly as I can: Arlen Specter is the right man for the United States Senate,'' Mr. Bush said at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in downtown Pittsburg speaking to a crowd of cheering Republicans who raised $400,000 for Mr. Specter's campaign.(...)
Mr. Specter, the president said, is ''a firm ally when it matters most.''
Mr. Specter in turn piled accolades on Mr. Bush.
It is worth noting that this, pro-Bush version of Arlen Specter actually supported the Employee Free Choice Act.
What happens to the Democrats if there's another major terrorist attack within the United States, during the administration of Barack Obama?
Cheney has already made Obama the fall guy for another 9/11, and Republicans will probably continue to reinforce the meme that Democrats have weakened national security by ending "enhanced interrogations," withdrawing "prematurely" from Iraq, and so on.
Tons of cocaine pour across our borders non-stop, and there's absolutely no way to prevent biological, chemical, or even nuclear weapons from following the same channels.
Democrats could make the argument that "enhanced interrogations" wouldn't interrupt the supply of cocaine, or prevent weapons of mass destruction from crossing the Mexican or Canadian borders, and every relatively intelligent person in the United States already knows this...
All 30% of us.
Meanwhile, the same 70% percent who thought Saddam had sponsored 9/11, just because Bush kept saying "Saddam....9/11....Saddam....9/11..." in disconnected sentences...
That 70% would never vote for another Democrat.
So how can Democrats avoid getting swept into the dust-bin of history by another major terrorist attack within the United States?
There's obviously a downside to making it crystal clear that our borders are too porous to defend, because the bad guys are also listening, and even if the relatively intelligent 30% of them already comprehend the porosity of our borders in detail, Republicans could still claim that anyone who discussed border-security had given terrorists a blue-print for terror.
Tax time is reason enough to reflect on our budgets, personal and national. How realistic are our expenditures? Do we spend more than we earn? Does our income allow for a few irrational indulgences? Do discretionary dollars exist? Might we consider our ample debt. Does this represent a temporary deficit, easily resolved, or an obligation that cannot be paid promptly. We may wish to rethink our reality. At home, families have taken scissors to credit cards. More than the minimum payment is made. The intention is to lessen liabilities and increase savings. In the month of April, after we pay Uncle Sam, most of us concluded, it is time to clean our own fiscal house. Next, we move to the nation's ledger.
Expenses The largest share of our moneys go to military operations. The terror tax has become a tremendous burden of American household and communities. Yet, few wish to rethink this "duty."
Not using the word "narcissism" (though she has before), digby is instead focusing on the issue of temperament in a recent brief post, "Finger On The Button", but the two are clearly related. She begins:
I think one of the things I find most reprehensible about the Republican Party and their Big Money backers is that they think it's ok to play Russian Roulette with the country (and the world) by nominating people to power who have completely inappropriate temperaments for it. George W. Bush, with his thin skinned, shallow understanding of the world, bottomless need for flattery, is a good case in point.
At one point, McCain reportedly began referring to Hispanics as "you people":
"He was angry," one source said. "He was over the top. In some cases, he rolled his eyes a lot. There were portions of the meeting where he was just staring at the ceiling, and he wasn't even listening to us. We came out of the meeting really upset."
McCain's message was obvious, the source continued: After bucking his party on immigration, he had no sympathy for Hispanics who are dissatisfied with President Obama's pace on the issue. "He threw out [the words] 'You people - you people made your choice. You made your choice during the election,' " the source said. "It was almost as if [he was saying] 'You're cut off!' We felt very uncomfortable when we walked away from the meeting because of that.
Some "outreach" huh? But that's how it's done amongst the narcissistic set. "You may kiss my ring.... No, on second thought, you're not worthy!"
So many times when we get together you have to put up with me complaining about something...and there are lots of other times when it's me warning about events that are looming in our future.
Even though they're conversations we need to have, they're often not very emotionally satisfying.
Today we depart from that pattern, in a very good way.
It's "follow-up day"; and the conversation takes us to three "happy places": two "problem" stories that have recent positive progress to report-and, just because I care about you, Gentle Reader, an exclusive preview of the George W. Bush autobiography, obtained with considerable effort from an unnamed and particularly well-placed source.
There's a lot to cover, so let's jump right in and tell you what you need to know.
I supported Wesley Clark and Dennis Kucinich in the Democratic primaries, and for bloggers driven by ideology and idiots on Daily Kos intoxicated by TV charisma, this pairing was more or less incomprehensible, but for anyone looking around for an honest candidate, it was obvious. Kucinich and Clark were the only honest Democrats in the race.
Did it really matter?
Suppose there's a candidate (like Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton) who bullshits almost constantly (like Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton), but promises low taxes, world peace, free medicine, cheap gas, new frontiers in renewable energy, tolerance for gays, more jobs, better jobs, better schools, a huge defense establishment, and ... did I mention low taxes?
Doesn't it make sense to vote for a candidate who promises you a package of wonders for cheap, in the hope that the laws of physics and economics and even the axioms of mathematics will undergo a miraculous transmogrification immediately after election day, and our elected Messiah will transform five loaves and two fishes into a feast for everybody?
No.
It makes about as much sense to elect Obama or Clinton or Bush or McCain or that other Clinton or Reagan or that other Bush as it makes to award the Nobel Prize in Physics to a candidate who promises to simplify the laws of physics into one easy-to-remember formula that any idiot can understand, on the basis of mathematics that everybody knows is bullshit.
The Presidency of the United States really is a job for a rocket scientist, meaning somebody outstandingly more intelligent than you and me, and if we can't find anybody more intelligent than you, at least we have to try, and the obviousness of this maxim for almost everybody is convincingly demonstrated by the fact that we haven't elected a President without an Ivy-League diploma since 1984.
So almost everybody more or less accepts the fact that we live in a monstrously complicated world, and nobody but a genius can sort out all the conflicting advice that constantly rains down on every President, and somehow maintain the equilibrium of our monstrously complicated nation. But genius expresses itself in an infinite number of categories, and because we are weak, foolish creatures, we keep electing geniuses in the category of bullshit.
It gets worse.
As recently as 1996, we could still find a genius-bullshitter who was also appealing enough on TV to get himself elected, but no such individual appeared in 2000, and the era of Siamese Presidents was inaugurated by the mutant-hybrid Howdy-Doody-and-the-Devil frontman-puppetmaster combination of George W. Bush and Karl Rove, now replaced in the Oval Office by David Axelrod and Barack Obama.
These new twinsies have already managed to dump trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars into black holes only thinly disguised as stimuli and bailouts, with no end in sight, and nothing like an honest explanation of any of it even expected by anybody except a few out-and-out drool-buckets at the very bottom of the category of idiots who elected the current monstrosity-hybrid of a bullshit genius.
I also like voting for geniuses, as long as they're honest, and only a few months before the beginning of the Democratic primary season, I still had two to choose from, although the Rhodes Scholar Wesley Clark fit a lot more obviously into that high-falutin' category than the indomitable little ex-mayor of Cleveland, Ohio, but Dennis Kucinich is so honest, and his honesty keeps so much bullshit from getting in his way, that now his incredible clairvoyance about the many boondoggle-bailouts looks infinitely more like genius than the bullshit-twin-geniuses we foolishly installed in the Presidency, along with all their fumbling, bumbling Ivy-League assistants.
