The Israeli media is a-buzz with sarcastic talk of a "three state solution," Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. Ehud Olmert, Israel's Prime Minister, who has taken his time in giving Palestinian President Abu Mazen the support and signals that he needs to have any chance of solidifying power, is now, all of a sudden, proclaiming that a newly constituted Palestinian government--minus Hamas--will get whatever it needs from Israel. The US will now release funds. Talk about too little too late.

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With the public relations campaign being waged against Judge Walton and Patrick Fitzgerald, we believe this is an important response to the Republican Presidential Candidates who have forgotten what it means to commit perjury and obstruct justice.

13 June 2007

The Honorable Mel Martinez
General Chairman
The Republican National Committee
310 First Street, SE
Washington, D.C. 20003

As former intelligence officers -- most of us have served the United States in undercover positions -- we are saddened and appalled by the recent public comments of former Senator Fred Thompson, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and former Governor Mitt Romney -- one a potential candidate and the other two declared candidates for the Republican nomination for president -- with respect to the perjury and obstruction of justice conviction of Vice President Cheney's Chief of Staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

These men misrepresent the case against Mr. Libby and call into question the integrity of a respected Federal Judge and U.S. attorney. Their positions with respect to the just and fair punishment meted out to Mr. Libby raise serious questions about their commitment to the rule of law free of partisan bias.

We are particularly concerned by the recent speech by Fred Thompson, who declared:

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Earlier this week, Governor Deval Patrick (D-MA) introduced legislation that would criminalize mortgage fraud in Massachusetts.  The bill would also ban foreclosure "rescue scams," slow down the state's foreclosure process, and constrict the use of adjustable rate subprime loans.  Governor Patrick's effort follows up several other bills introduced this session to address predatory lending and the subprime meltdown.

Of course, in a bill like this, the details matter -- but this is one of the more aggressive approaches out there and worth taking a look at.

Oregon this week joined New Hampshire in this legislative session in allowing state employees to organize a union whenever a majority sign cards asking for a union- a majority signup provision that's part of the federal Employee Free Choice Act that the Senate will be voting on next week.

But here's the thing-- states like Oregon & New Hampshire have the power to protect the labor rights of employees who work directly for them, but the second they hire a contractor to perform any public service, federal law prevents them from screening out companies that repeatedly violate their workers labor rights. This is one reason so many state legislatures have passed resolutions demanding tougher labor enforcement by the feds, including passage of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), but it's a criminal situation that repeat labor law violators have mandatory federal access to public funds.

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With today’s release of the inflation report for May, we can have a look at what’s going on with real (i.e., inflation-adjusted) hourly and weekly earnings for most workers. It ain’t pretty.

As shown in the Figure (after the break), hourly and weekly wages for the 80% of the workforce holding non-managerial jobs are trending down pretty sharply this year. Thanks to a few months of very mild inflation readings last fall, wages grew steeply, but only for two months. Most recently, inflation has been outpacing wage growth on a monthly basis, though given the very strong real growth in the fall, wages remain above their levels of one year ago.

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Liberal bloggers are complaining that Scooter came in and trashed the place. But what these fever-swamp denizens fail to understand is that it's Scooter's place.

-- Hey, that was easy! Can I have a twice-a-week spot on the op-ed pages of the Washington Post now?

Can any modern, professionally staffed, high tech intelligence service plying its trade for a Western democracy ever insulate itself from the biases of its sponsoring government? The answer is probably no.

CIA analysts told Senate investigators that they didn't cave to administration pressure in assessing that Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program. They may not have caved, but they sure bent a lot. The heat on analysts and their managers was enormous, especially from the Vice President's cheerleaders at State, the National Security Council and the Pentagon. As we have reported, this was not because the administration needed the intelligence to craft policy, but it was critical for selling it.

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There is, no doubt, a whole lot of celebrating going on. For those more afraid of negotiations than of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, or any of that violent crew, a collapsing Palestinian Authority with Gaza in absolute chaos with Mahmoud Abbas weakened almost to irrelevancy is a dream come true.

Gaza has fallen to Hamas. Abu Mazen's Fatah is on the run. Unless a United Nations force (like UNIFIL) steps in, a sliver of territory with a population of 1.4 million, a short drive from Tel Aviv will become a dagger aimed at Israel's heart and perhaps even an Al Qaeda staging ground. A humanitarian crisis of horrific proportions is a certainty.

Who's fault is it?

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The FTC has just published a study detailing how well (or, as the case may be, poorly) consumers understand mortgage contracts. The results are astonishing: over half of consumers surveyed could not even identify for what amount the loan was for, and nearly 80% could not explain why the interest rate and APR of the loan might be different. So I ask again: are disclosures enough? One industry observer raised a very interesting point in response to the study's findings...

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I think there's a lot to Jerome Armstrong's analysis about the potential limits to Obama's movement building, but what strikes me about Obama -- and I am keenly undecided still between him and Edwards -- is that Obama is working to engage a lot of folks in movement building who are not the "low hanging" fruit of available activists, including the netroots. That seems to be part of his church outreach but other outreach as well.

I read his biography a few weeks ago, particularly his chapter on his experience as a community organizer, and it's clear that he (a) does have a deep ear for the complexities of what motivates and doesn't motivate people to be active in politics and (b) tends to listen first and act later. Whether he translates that into a campaign that roars forward later is an open question, but I wouldn't underestimate him.

A couple of data points:

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Rather than "Actor-Candidate", some reporters are actually beginning to notice that Fred Thompson's day job for many of the last thirty years was as a corporate lobbyist, often on behalf of global corporations at the expense of American workers.  See this Washington Post story starting to highlight the big bucks lobbying by lobbyist-candidate Thompson.

Today we'll let our sources do the talking. We brought four of them together at a forum last month at the University of the District of Columbia.

The collective knowledge was deep—the participants were former CIA analysts Mel Goodman and Larry Johnson; W. Patrick Lang, who ran the Middle East section for the Defense Intelligence Agency; and retired Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who was Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff.

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The Clinton/Obama/Edwards race hasn't begun in a real sense. All are principally doing preparations now. John's big challenge is to raise enough money to stay in the top tier but if he does, this three-way race begins in earnest after Labor Day, and probably more seriously after Thanksgiving. It is true that the long time between today and then must be used wisely by each campaign, but the pay-off cannot be seen until late this year.

Mitt Romney is showing that money talks and big money screams. He's in the top tier through February 5, for sure, no matter what he says or does. He's a smart person and his early spending to drive up his poll numbers is a good idea for him.

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Gaza seems to be descending towards a civil war, Lebanon lurched closer to conflict with the killing today of MP Walid Eido and ongoing clashes at the Nahr El-Bared camp, and the Iraqi civil war, already long underway, took another desperate turn with the re-bombing of the Shia mosque at Samarra.

Each of these situations has its own complex circumstances and particular set of actors, causes, and dynamics. They cannot be neatly filed under one common rubric -- say extremists vs. moderates, or Iran vs. the US. Yet it is possible, perhaps, to discern at least one unifying theme: each of these conflicts is, in part, the pushback against the neocon transformationalist agenda for the Middle East. I am not suggesting that the US is solely responsible for the woeful state of the region, but the contribution of a mistaken and rigid ideological dogma applied to the region has been dramatic and devastating.

On Iraq, the case hardly needs to be made -- it is self-evident. On Lebanon, the isolation of and regime-change rhetoric towards Syria exacerbated an already tense situation, and has clearly failed to "correct Syrian misbehavior." In Gaza, the Bush administration policy of "no meaningful peace process under our watch," combined with support for Israeli unilateralism and, most recently, the destabilizing of the PA government, are all crucial to understanding the current Fatah-Hamas debacle.

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An article in yesterday's Roll Call appears to resolve the central mystery behind Obey's earmarks antics: why in the world must poor Obey himself review each and every one of this year's 36,284 earmark requests, which in turn forces him to wait to include earmarks in spending bills until they are in conference -- after it's too late to remove any earmarks by amendment?

This is the sentence in the article that explains it all:

Obey, under new House rules, must sign off on every earmark.

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There is a wonderful story told by Tom Segev in his authoritative new history of the Six Day War where Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol (and Labor Party leader) is trying to stave off a challenge by Moshe Dayan who is part of a break-away party led by former Labor Party chief and Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion by figuring out a place at the cabinet table for Dayan. There is pressure to make Dayan Defense Minister, a post that until then (and this is days before the 6 Day War), Eshkol held for himself. "And so the ministers flexed their political creativity, tossing out more and more ideas and suggestions and solutions to a problem that now seemed even more urgent than the war itself: what to do with Dayan," Segev writes.

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Researching and writing our book, The Italian Letter, we made a little mistake. We assumed that President Bush’s top national security aides would know how to read intelligence. Especially those who’ve been around a while, like that very bright woman who toiled in the National Security Council under two administrations, and who took a break in between by serving as provost of Stanford University. She now runs the State Department.

Yet the case of Condoleezza Rice illustrates how assumptions make for bad journalism.

She got big play in our book because she was: one of Bush’s top advisers, a member of the President’s war sales team, the White House Iraq Group; and was one of the most forceful voices in insisting Iraq had been seeking uranium from Africa.

But in his generally uncritical book, At the Center of the Storm, George Tenet indicates that Rice simply didn’t know what she was talking about-- she didn’t know how to read intelligence, and perhaps didn’t read it at all.

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See Eric Boehlert here for an important dissection of the media's successful efforts to prove they are in fact leading an assault against reason.

There are times when dealing with the vital obscurities of telecommunications can verge on the metaphysical. This is one of those times when an issue, as important as it may be, seems more relevant to a philosophy class than to a discussion of regulation.

Here is the question: Can a single activity by a cable company be both good for consumers and bad for consumers at the same time? Answer: Do you have to ask?

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Eleven and a half minutes of Drinking Liberally coverage not nearly enough for you? Fear not! We've got the full, unedited versions of all 9 interviews we conducted, plus 2 short speeches. Induuuuuuuulge!

[Ed. note: Apologies for the poor lighting, video quality had to be compromised to shrink the files down small enough for youtube... plus it was nighttime.]

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Thanks to Maggie Mahar for posting about Sunday's NYT piece on John Edwards. She correctly summarizes my work, while nailing Matt Bai for embracing the Third Way's claim about the middle class: If we don't count the middle class people who aren't doing well, then the remaining middle class people are doing pretty well. Go, Maggie!

Now that she has me rev'd up, how about a second point in that same NYT paragraph?

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To this hour, the Bush administration contends that the decision to invade Iraq was based on the "best available intelligence" at the time. The lesson learned is that without checks and balances—and subpoenas— policymakers can get away with almost anything.

The blame-the-intelligence argument is itself a fraud. A careful reading of the intelligence, and sometimes a casual glance, would have told anyone who really wanted to understand what was going on with Iraq's WMD program that U.S. intelligence didn't know.

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Professor Warren’s recent post and Dan Geldon’s follow up on student loans reminded me of a conversation I had recently about education debt. The conversation centered around why post-secondary education costs are not a tax write-off like, for example, business expenses? While there are some tax provisions designed to help curb the cost of education, such as the Hope Credit, costs associated with education are largely not defrayed, in stark contrast to the wide scope of business write-offs.

In light of the growing importance of secondary education to the service economy, it is puzzling to me that the tax code fails to create educational incentives in the same way it does for business. A tax break for educational expenses would benefit those who chose to pursue higher education. In light of all the claims about the need to educate Americans, why aren’t we doing more to make education affordable?

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“Can John Edwards turn the plight of the poor into a campaign issue?” Matt Bai asked in yesterday’s NYT Magazine.

The answer, Bai suggested, is probably not. He began by observing that 21st century poverty just isn’t as grim as it’s cracked up to be:

“If you've recently flipped to Lou Dobbs on CNN or opened the pages of a liberal political journal like The American Prospect, you might have the impression that America in the Bush years has slipped into a kind of Dickensian darkness,” Bai wrote, “a period of unbridled greed and economic deprivation on a scale not seen in this country since the Great Depression. . . this has some basis in truth, but only some. To compare Bush's America with Herbert Hoover's -- or Lyndon Johnson's, for that matter -- is to engage in not very helpful hyperbole.”

“It's true that the official poverty rate, while fluctuating quite a bit, is pretty much unchanged from where it was 40 years ago,” Bai acknowledged, “but it's also true that what we call poverty has changed strikingly. When Johnson stepped onto that front porch in Inez, there were still rural poor who had no electricity, no running water, no primary-school education. Now most rural towns have access to satellite TV, and even the worst of the housing projects built in the 1960s -- though thoroughly horrid places to live -- come with solid roofs and indoor plumbing.”

And hey, if they have satellite TV and indoor plumbing, just how bad can things be?

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If you look closely at the recent confrontation between the U.S. forces in Iraq and the Mahdi Army—you see the elements of a whole new approach to the Iraqi crisis, one based on sociological analysis rather than political fantasies. The Mahdi Army was providing satisfactory security for an important Shia segment of Baghdad, Sadr City. However, the U.S. maintained that to show to Sunni politicians and their followers among the insurrectionists that its law and order enforcement is even handed, the U.S. must take control of Sadr City. Initially the Mahdi Army made way, but then it relented. The result? Bombing in this part of town increased and so did revenge killing. Indeed, it now seems that this clash will endanger the very political balance the U.S. sought to promote, as Shias are withdrawing from the coalition government.

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For all the blather about the end of The Sopranos, its cunning subliminal propaganda has been overlooked so far!

There are no fewer than two scenes involving murderous vehicles. In the first, A. J. and his girlfriend are about to do "it" when the vehicle goes up in smoke--its catalytic converter has ignited a pile of leaves. In the other, Phil Leotardo's vehicle, stuck in gear, creeps forward and-- well, let's just say it's not a pretty sight (or sound).

In each case, the lethal vehicle is an SUV.

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Thanks to Todd for his eulogy for Richard Rorty, one of the towering intellectual figures of our age, someone who defined the phrase 'public intellectual', and who never gave up on the ideals of the democratic left, in an era when that is all too easy.

As a philosophy grad student in the 1980s I struggled with finding philosophical writings that were applicable to today's dilemmas, beyond logical positivism. (reader...alas, I dropped out). Rorty always exemplified how to bring the academy into the real world.

I only saw him once, though he published often in Dissent magazine, where Todd and I both are on the editorial board. But, his appearance at a Labor-Scholar teach in at Columbia University soon after John Sweeney took over the AFL-CIO, after ending the legacy of Lane Kirkland and returning organized labor to work in alliance with scholars and students, was memorable. Rorty was a featured speaker at standing-room only opening session in Low Library.

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The Bush White House was never really preoccupied with the question of whether or not Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. It wasn’t until “late 2002,” virtually on the eve of the U.S. invasion, that the administration ordered the CIA to shift priority on WMD intelligence collection to Iraq from North Korea and Iran, according to an internal CIA report.

The administration’s belated concern appears to have been driven by two contemporary events. The White House at the time was narrowly focused on rallying public support for war by invoking the specter of mushroom clouds, and any supportive “intelligence” would be useful. That would also serve as backup ammunition to discredit inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, reintroduced into Iraq after a four-year hiatus, if they were to conclude there was nothing there.

The decision to invade had been made months earlier. There would be no show-stoppers. No matter that the belated emphasis on discovering Iraq’s alleged banned weapons produced nothing, or that the IAEA also came up with blanks.

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Last week, Federal Reserve Governor Frederic S. Mishkin testified before the House Financial Services Committee about the Fed’s proposed revisions to the Truth in Lending Act (TILA) regulations. These revisions seek to improve the effectiveness of credit card disclosures, particularly because, as Governor Mishkin noted, “the presence in the market of terms seemingly unfavorable to consumers appears to some to indicate that the market is not fully competitive.”

I have always found the discussion about the link between disclosures and choice to be a peculiar one. The theory that consumers, if adequately informed, will choose the product that provides the best protection and services for them has allowed various industries to argue that the ongoing presence of certain terms in consumer contracts (such as mandatory arbitration) suggest that consumers do not actually find such terms offensive or problematic. Consumer groups often respond by arguing that consumers don’t have enough information, thereby questioning the assumption that consumers are adequately informed. As Governor Mishkin points out, however, their ongoing presence might suggest something entirely different - that the “market” itself might need some work.

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How's your romance?
How is it going?
Waning or growing,
How's your romance?

-- Cole Porter, Gay Divorce, 1932

Do we need more Democrats in Congress? A veto-proof majority? That's one interpretation of their failure to end the war. We also hear that the ones who are there have no guts. Or they have been bought by corporate interests.

Let's burn down a few straw men.

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When I started reading Richard Rorty and listening to him lecture in the ‘80s, I was both refreshed and exasperated. I hadn’t read much philosophy since college, and he give me a swift shove out of my dogmatic slumbers.

To be awakened, though, did not mean converted. When he argued that we were against torture not because it violated a universal human right but simply because torture was not what our tribe did (those were the days), I was not convinced. In the mid-‘90s, when I was writing about political correctness and the Enlightenment, I was pleased to find evidence (worked up by Norman Geras) that Rorty was mistaken when he thought that Gentiles saved Jews during the Nazi years out of particularist motives (they are coreligionists, fellow members of soccer clubs, etc.), and not universalist ones (they are fellow human beings).

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Victory by victory, the Internet establishes itself as the people's medium, a forum for assembling a critical mass of opinion and a lethal weapon against rule by elites.

With apologies to Senator Kennedy, who has long been a heroic leader on many issues, including education and immigration in particular, I think it is all to the good that the so-called grand bargain on immigration has collapsed. The reason is that nothing this important ought to be done so much in relative secrecy. The President hasn't discussed the topic much, if at all, with the American people; the media havn't reported it in an ample and truthful way; and the various compromises of the bill were hardly clear to any but the bargainers.

For an issue as important as the future demographic make-up of the United States, openness is essential, and no law should be enacted without that openness.

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In this morning's New York Times, Gretchen Morgenson warns of a new wave of foreclosures based on the upcoming $1 trillion dollars in "exploding mortgages." For a solution, she quotes an article I wrote that will be out tomorrow in Democracy. I argue that a Consumer Product Safety Commission regulates the toaster market so that we don't buy exploding toasters, and that we need the same kind of safety regulations for exploding mortgages and other financial products.

Morgenson rightly notes that my idea will be laughed off the stage by the anti-regulation folks, who treat the "R" word as a hateful epithet. But we need to get past the days when "regulation" always means "bad." This anti-government bias is costing millions of families their financial security.

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Every so often we are offered a window into the thinking of some of the people who run this country. And those who provide the "intellectual" justifications for that thinking.

Josh links to Fouad Ajami's obscene comparison of the White House's (so-far) abandonment of Libby to leaving a soldier behind on the battlefield.

But you have to take a look at the letters various bigs (including James Carville) sent to the judge about this stellar American Scooter Libby. Note the heavy preponderance of neocons (including right-wing Soviet --now Israeli -- hero, Sharansky weighing in from Jerusalem).

Of course, the crazed John Bolton is there and Douglas Feith, who was the man in charge of creating the lies that cost us 3500 soldiers so far. The letters are worth a look. They may literally turn your stomach.

Nice antidote to Paris Hilton. I mean, yeah, those of us paying attention to that silly saga find her sickening too. But she's just annoying. Scooter and company have caused incalculable damage to America and to the world.