Daniel Larison on the state of the Republican Party and why (read the whole thing):
One the reasons why the GOP has so little credibility left is that its members and its spokesmen spent the better part of the fall concocting exaggerated, if not absolutely ridiculous, narratives that put all of the blame for the crash solely on the other party, which had not been in power during most of the period in question. One might be able to understand, if not condone, this on account of the timing right before a general election, but the infuriating thing is that they actually came to believe that these tall tales were correct and they have continued to repeat them as if they were true. Unanimous House GOP opposition to the stimulus bill seemed unwise to me at the time because it suggested that the party had learned nothing from its electoral repudiations, and more than this it suggested that the party was unwilling to take responsibility for decisions that its leaders had endorsed over many years…In short, the leadership took the wrong side on the obviously winning issue of resistance to the bailout and then took the right, but politically toxic side in the stimulus debate, all the while believing that it had behaved both responsibly and cleverly. If there is to be any credible Republican opposition to centralization, it is not going to come from the current House and Senate leadership. The leadership must be replaced. It will be as clear a break with the Bush-accommodating ways of the past as the GOP can manage at the moment, and it could bring to the fore a new set of leaders in the minority to craft an agenda, or for that matter simply an alternative budget proposal, that will not be immediately laughed out of the room.
Iraqi PM to Obama: If you release those unreleased photos from Abu Ghraib, my electorate will go up in blue flame and demand that the US get out yesterday.
…from Think Progress. Give it a look for a summary of why it’s major bad news, if you didn’t know that already…unless you think you’re Jack Bauer or something.
As Jesse Ventura said on The View:
“If waterboarding is OK, why don’t we let our police do it to suspects so they can learn what they know?” he asked. “If waterboarding is OK, why didn’t we waterboard [Timothy] McVeigh and Nichols, the Oklahoma City bombers, to find out if there were more people involved? … We only seem to waterboard Muslims… Have we waterboarded anyone else? Name me someone else who has been waterboarded.”
And no, I don’t care if half the Democratic leadership knew something about the bad stuff pulled off by Bush; they should have had the guts to stand up at the time and say - NO - but they apparently didn’t. Them being gutless wonders is not a reason to excuse anyone else from prosecution. The more in the dock or politically dealt with and squished on this, no problem.
My focus is on justice, the law, and good government. Torture and other arbitrary government crap has caused an awful pile of hurt to most all of us in some form from the past; just ask a Japanese-American whose family was in internment camps during WW2, or blacks who had to deal with government-backed racism in the South (or North, and I’m talking the Bull Connor sort of thing), or those of us out there who have family who were destroyed in the Holocaust or disappeared in the Gulags behind the Iron Curtain.
Daniel Larison, the thinking man’s conservative pundit:
So, ironically, some of the defenders of the torture regime are making the best argument for the prosecution of past administration officials by their own invocations of past government illegalities. They are unwittingly reminding us that crimes unpunished today can easily become tomorrow’s conventionally accepted “correct” decisions. Every usurpation or instance of lawbreaking that is not challenged and reversed creates a precedent for the next round of usurpation and lawbreaking, and the fact that there is a non-trivial number of people in America who think that the illegal acts of Lincoln, FDR, Truman or others should have some mitigating effect on how we treat illegal acts under a more recent administration is one of the best reasons why crimes committed during the last administration must be investigated and lawbreakers must be prosecuted. Had many past administrations been scrutinized and their crimes investigated and punished, it is less likely that we would have to cope with an executive branch that acts as if it is above the law and which seems to be able to to break the law with impunity. If we fail to hold past administration officials accountable, we not only make a joke out of the rule of law, but we ensure that no legal or institutional constraints will prevent a future administration from committing similar wrongdoing in a time of crisis.
Another note on torture issues. This post seems to put it all together that the prime people who got good, reliable information in World War 2 were people who followed the same gold standard we followed before George W Bush changed things around; that torture is only good for causing people to suffer and say whatever you tell them to say. To get them to lie, to get them to scream (and doesn’t it sound lovely?) while you get off thinking you’re Jack freaking Bauer.
There’s been a tag on this journal for a while - sep_reality - and almost all of the tag instances are for situations where people were living in fantasyland, where they could make their own rules and create their own world where you are little people and they are the Big Bad Boss. Where they could trick themselves and others into believing that they knew their butt from a hole in the ground, and were running the show with endless ease. The best trick, of course, was getting you to not understand what they were doing, and think it was awesomely awesome.
Somehow, through mindless showings of 24, or Kyriakou’s ‘torture made them sing’ stuff, now proven to be false, people got the very wrong idea that brave torturers got the goods on the bad guys and made ‘em fess up, saving us all. And then the secret memos from the insiders started coming out of the Department of Justice and other areas, basically saying that people using the gold standard of persuasion got everything out of the Al Qaeda dudes, and then People With Orders came in and tortured the terrorists many dozens of times in a month’s time, demanding more information. Information they didn’t have.
My guess is that as more things come out, the specific questions they wanted answered will come out. And my strong bet is that the entire point of that torture was to get a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam, something they could then present as a ‘Saddam did this, let’s get him’ excuse to invade Iraq.
I don’t know this, and I certainly have no love lost for Al Qaeda or Saddam. But I don’t like it when people lie to me to get me to support them in something they wanna do because I’d never support it otherwise. As an American, I would hope that we’re better than that.
And frankly, the people who gainsay ooh-go-torture forget the long history of this country towards the protection of the rights of the individual. Watch this clip from A MAN FROM ALL SEASONS, about the need for the law, and you see, perhaps, that once you allow the law to fall, you may be the next one up when you end up on the wrong side of people who have more power than you do. Manzanar can be rebuilt for new tenants anytime, and with less reason.
…which is the Organization of American States’ irregular meeting of the leadership of the OAS states (34) countries). Interesting news coming out of it, of course. Discussions between Obama and the US delegation on the one side, and some people Bush would never deal with on the other…discussions with the Cubans and Venezuelans and so on are very non-Bush.
Do I think that the Cuban embargo has worked? Not really. It hasn’t worked in 50 years of trying to bring-down-Castro, obviously. It’s certainly helped out the Big Sugar producers in the US, some of whom are repulsive jerks, and about the only things you can say for it is that it has made Cuba the expensive problem child for either the Soviets or other lefty dictators with money who want to back him up.
I have no stars in my eyes about brutal dictatorships, and can’t stand the Cuban government and / or Chavez’s efforts to become El Jefe Por Vida in Venezuela, but I will note that what got them there was a great deal of idiocy and looking-the-other-way-while-the-rich-got-r
The key word there is *stupid*, allied with *cheap and greedy*. As I’ve also noted before, most of the consumer protection things that I’ve sen in my time have rotated around that sort of root, where people cut corners and exposed the public to risks because they wanted to make a cheap, fast buck, and didn’t care about the problems they created for the public at large. Goes for food safety, pollution, you name it.
You’d think some folks would learn…
I also found it interesting that the only ‘anglo’ in the bunch is now the PM of Canada; and if the Governor-General of Canada was there to represent the nation, there would be a shutout (she’s a Haitian refugee who came to Canada as an 11 year-old.
The problem is that if Obama’s people are looking at a vast mess, what about the Republicans who allowed it to get out of hand in a big way? Well, frankly, they don’t have a clue as to what to do, because they really didn’t have a clue about the whole affair in the first place. Or they knowingly let their buds in for a slice of the pie without a care in the world for the long-term results. And if Obama manages to pull this one off, they’re politically screwed; a grateful public won’t listen to them any quicker than they listened to Herbert Hoover after he left office, and for the same reasons. So their only strategy is to take out their “money” wrenches (the monkey wrenches they used to get money out of lobbyists and contributors) and wooden shoes (sabots in French) and throw them into the works of what Obama’s doing, in the hope that they can gum things up enough to blame him for everything.
Of course a certain number of Republicans are so solidly safe that they can get along one way or the other. But the bulk of members of congress need to be able to say to constituents and donors alike that they’ve done something. And absent earmarks, that would require members of the minority to forge some kind of compromises with members of the majority on the big issues of the day. Which is precisely what almost no Republicans seem inclined to do at the moment.
Of course, all the crash is also hitting the lobbyists and the buddies, who are being beaten to death. The collapse of the Dow has beaten the crap out of many companies, especially those who where most dependent on a share of the financial services pie (like GE and GM and AIG, sucked dry and down by the debt-handling end of the business). Also, the more you were dependent on wild consumer shoppies for bigger ticket items, and on lots of cheap and easy credit to keep your business going, the more you are well and totally screwed. Once the spigot dies on those two taps, your business is irredeemable hash.
I’m not worried about a bunch of wanna-be John Galts out there who proclaim that you can’t regulate or tax me, and if you do I’ll pick up my toys and go home. Go right ahead and try, since you idiots were the ones who got us in this mess with your bonuses-all-around, your bigger-size-of-the-company-means-my-manh
It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in economics to know that you can’t have CEOs whose companies have received billions in bailout funds going to court and threatening to sue employees to keep the public from knowing which executives pocketed millions in bonuses — and you can’t have them pretending that no bailout money was used to pay said bonuses.
You can’t have insolvent banks pretending that the problem is one of liquidity, and then using taxpayer money to protect their balance sheets instead of lending money to credit-worthy businesses and consumers.
And, ultimately, you can’t allow the same people who were part of the problem to be part of the solution. There is absolutely no way on earth that the same flawed thinking that got us into this mess will ever get us out of it. We need to clean house, taking the steering wheel away from the executives and the compliant boards that steered us over the economic cliff. They didn’t get it then; they still don’t get it now (see handing out bonuses, hosting spa retreats, redecorating, and throwing lavish parties while America teeters on the verge of economic collapse).
- Senator Schumer is saying that if a state government doesn’t want any of the stimulus money, they shouldn’t be forced to take it; however, you can’t pick what parts you will or won’t take. Sounds good to me. And Governor Sanford of South Carolina says that he’ll pray for you if you’re down and out, but horrors, can’t take that stimulus money. I want to see him do that and see what happens to his party in the next election with those people he prayed for.
- Robert Reich on deficit cutting and stimulus and the recession. Short version: #3 is the real worry.
- British bankers don’t like all this no-bonuses talk and demand more goodies. The reason is simple; the world they live in has purple paisley skies and endless bonuses for just showing up at the office.
- McCain: your new helicopter costs too much. Obama: I didn’t order it, your buddy Bush did, I’m happy with what I’ve got, and I’ve told the people involved to suss this all out and figure out if we really need this.
- New idea: an infrastructure bank.
- As the Philadelphia papers were tanking, their run-them-into-the-ground CEO was getting massive pay raises.
Even though Tierney in January 2008 demanded a 10% cost concession from workers, his own pay was bumped up 3% in May 2008 to $618,000. Then came the big boost around Christmas.The Inquirer and Daily News join a growing list of newspapers forced into bankruptcy after sharp declines in advertising destroyed their ability to service big debts taken on when they changed hands…It also raises the prospect of big losses by the lenders that provided the balance of more than $400 million in debt financing. The list of largest unsecured creditors was topped by Royal Bank of Scotland, which is owed $22 million. As of Jan. 31, the company said it still owed $395 million to lenders.
I’d forgotten about this: The American Service Members Protection Act of 2002, courtesy of Messrs Bush and Helms. It authorizes the US President to use any and all means to yank US citizens and soldiers out of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, including invading the Netherlands on a rescue mission. It also prohibits any office in the US from assisting the ICC or extraditing people out of the US to the ICC, or letting ICC investigators into the US. If another country wants American military aid, they have to sign a waiver that says that they will not accept an extradition request for Americans to the ICC (doesn’t apply to NATO, Israel, Egypt, Taiwan). Good question as to what the future holds on this.
In early December on the LJ side, I did a ‘rate the Presidents’ competition to see what my readers thought of the US Presidents. The raw results and comments are still there - and these are the results, sorted by Mean (statistical results under the cut; the spreadsheet itself is here).
Sets: One (Washington -> Harrison), Two (Tyler->McKinley), Three (TRoosevelt->Carter); Four (Reagan->GW Bush)
What I found interesting was the high SD for the more controversial picks - e.g, President A was good in this area, horrible in that area. Some were problematic; how do you rate a President who served for very little time and died in office? The breakdown seemed to be: (sorted by Median)
1-3 (horrible), 4 (bad), 5 (mediocre), 6 (nice try), 7 (pretty decent), 8 (darn good), 9 (walks on water).
Article about Michael Isikoff of Newsweek’s latest investigative direction: that the internal DOJ oversight office delivered a report to the Attorney General under Bush that said, essentially, that the DOJ’s legal papers from John Yoo and others that backed up torture with a film of legal justification were BS that were way off the line of legal research and were basically worthless; the AG sent it back with a ‘how dare you’ response and tried to deep-six it.
Along with the requests on jobs, I’m being queried about my thoughts on the stimulus; my position is that all parties are involved in varieties of Jedi Mind Trick. The most angrifying (sic) ones are the Republicans, frankly, and I thought I’d seen stupid mixed with power-hungry mendacity before, but this just takes the cake, It’s hard to watch the news without wanting to throw something at some Senator who comes up with yet another variant on the let-them-eat-cake Lucky-Ducky stuff and describes all of the recession’s problems are really Obama’s fault and the only thing that will save us are tax cuts and handouts to the right people.
Dude. A $400 tax cut will not help you much or for long if you do not have a job. Or an income for next year’s bills. Stopping your mortage payments from going up is good, but will not help if you do not have a job to pay those lowered mortgage bills.
And I dunno about your state, but mine is hurting. And the cuts in the stimulus for state bailout funds are just criminal; if you were a state worker in California and the Governor either lays you off of hands over State IOU ‘checks’ that are worthless at the bank, how are you going to pay your bills?
And boy, do I ever want to kill off the damn filibuster for good and all time. The real problem with the stimulus stuff is that it violates the Budget Act, and *that* requires a 60-vote margin to get through the Senate. Besides that, I’m pretty sure that an actual and successful filibuster to stop the stimulus would raise hell in Wall Street and the financial markets; political leaders in the states would be devastated, and the financial sorts would want to strangle the GOP.
The real problem is that only the GOP has been out there with the TV cameras and whatnot explaining the situation - and Obama’s efforts to go out there are raise hell and the public awareness is the best thing he can do. I understand there are some Christmas Tree things on this turkey. Fine, yank them. Don’t take the whole ’shovel-ready’ nonsense for granted, because I know how long it takes for government project to get going from my own office and other government types who are buddies and I talk to about this stuff.
But replacing state stimulus stuff with odd tax cuts is crazed. That will not make up for jobs lost.
“If the mood and the speeches at the winter meeting are any guide, Republicans are seeking refuge from electoral defeat in an alternate reality, one where the public still loves them — or would if they could only improve their sales pitch. And where going along with President Obama’s agenda just isn’t in the cards.” If any further evidence is needed, consider this little gem: On the afternoon the 168 national committee members were electing Michael Steele their new chairman, fully 10 days into the Obama administration, the “national leadership” page on the RNC’s Web site still depicted George W. Bush and Dick Cheney as president and vice president.
Along with that, there’s always the Bush-Cheney Alumni Association. I not you kid.
Several GOP leaders have, indeed, pointed out the risk of the GOP becoming a regional party, and my call on that is that there’s plenty of truth to that, in general. Surveys like this one from Gallup, showing a big drop from the GOP has some truth to it, but the real problem is that We’re Not Talking Sense here. The Republicans have been taking this big dive away from studied, responsible good government towards a reflexive system of government that values fears over hope, ive-got-mine-jack over the common good, and ignorance over inspiration.
A big factor in the whole situation is that the GOP gets a jump from all sorts of things, including people who are serious low-information sorts or vote out of fear of various things that they associate with the Democrats, such as the <insert racial or ethnic group> or <insert foreign power> will take over if you let the Democrats in concept. This has been stirred up so at length by far right talk radio that the GOP sorts don’t dare cross the on-air bozos, for fear of being marked as a Pariah Against The Cause.
But the cause is not responsible government, it’s manipulating the masses towards supporting corruption and opportunism of the worst sort:
When the G.O.P. talks, nobody should listen. Republicans have argued, with the collaboration of much of the media, that they could radically cut taxes while simultaneously balancing the federal budget, when, in fact, big income-tax cuts inevitably lead to big budget deficits. We listened to the G.O.P. and what do we have now? A trillion-dollar-plus deficit and an economy in shambles.
This is the party that preached fiscal discipline and then cut taxes in time of war. This is the party that still wants to put the torch to Social Security and Medicare. This is a party that, given a choice between Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan, would choose Ronald Reagan in a heartbeat.
Why is anyone still listening?
Thus the whole ‘I hope Obama fails’ rot, and so on. If Obama ‘fails’, we are in the deepest of crapola, and I don’t know how we get out of it. You would end up with something very akin to The Sheep Look Up where only the plutocrats have anything, and everything else is a godforsaken mess. I do not want to hand off that sort of world to Mere and her peers.
- There’s now a monument in Iraq to the shoe-throwing seen round the world.
- Paul Krugman is a fan of Charles Stross, which makes sense to me. I’ll just wait for Krubman’s first AH novel…
- How many ways can you force-stuff the Roman Empire into science-fiction? At least a dozen.
Interesting list of the people that Bush said ‘no clemency’ to as he left. Leonard Peltier and John Walker Lindh, I expected. The rest, including Duke Cunningham, not so much.
Gitmo: People reviewing the cases of prisoners are finding out that there’s really no solid files as such on anyone, and that a lot of material is suspect or worthless - and scattered, disorganized and fifth-hand. The realization is coming through that people were supposed to get confessions and information first and worry about anything else waaaaaaaay later, and that bunches of people in Gitmo and the other ‘black’ jails, like the taxi-drivers in Abu Ghraib, were just Joe Blows scooped up in a wide net and tortured at length for information they didn’t have.
25. The written statement allegedly containing Mohammed’s confession and thumbprint is in Farsi. Mohammed does not read, write, or speak Farsi. There are several factual assertions in the statement that are false, including Mohammed’s name, his father’s name, his grandfather’s name, his uncle’s name, his residence, his current residence, his age, and an assertion that he speaks English. The statement’s account of the grenade attack — the responsibility for which the statement ascribes solely to Mohammed — conflicts with the eyewitness accounts of the American victims. Yet, it was this statement that Respondents and their agents primarily relied on as a basis for Mohammed’s detention, and for the charges brought against him in the Guantanamo Military Commissions.\
That was written by one of the prosecutors, folks.
He was the lead prosecutor against a detainee, Mohammed Jawad, until he resigned last September. After spending over a year on the case, he became convinced that the government had no good case against Jawad, that Jawad had been badly mistreated and was suffering serious psychological harm, and that continuing to hold him was “something beyond a travesty.” (p. 1) That’s why he wrote the declaration in question, in support of Jawad’s habeas petition.
The upcoming inauguration: wonder if we (Susan and I and the other EPA staff in Chicago) are getting off that day? I am assuming that federal offices in the DC area will be shut down…
I’m just so looking forward to a grownup in the White House. I think most of us are.
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