Thanks, Josh for flagging the Rolling Stone article on the facts about McCain, Who would think the GOP would come up with a nominee less honest and fit for the Presidency than George W. Bush or Richard Nixon?

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Sarah Palin's ridiculous performance in the debate only underscores our need to know if John McCain can survive four years in the White House. Not that I think he's more qualified than she is, it's just that if Palin will be President -- and not Mc Cain -- we should know it now.

Actually, I suspect that psychologically she's in better shape (none of her colleagues say she's off her rocker). But intellectually I think McCain may be better suited for high office.

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From WaPo:

Sen. John McCain and his Republican allies are readying a newly aggressive assault on Sen. Barack Obama's character...."We're going to get a little tougher," a senior Republican operative said, indicating that a fresh batch of television ads is coming. "We've got to question this guy's associations. Very soon."

First, these ads are going to be chockablock with distortions, innuendo, and lies -- as John McCain knows, because the people he brought in to smear Sen. Obama include the same people who smeared McCain in 2000. So the real news is the announcement of a coming attempt to deceive the American people, drag down public discourse, and dampen turn-out. That's what the WaPo should report.

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When I heard about the flap regarding Governor Palin's inability to cite a Supreme Court case, I paused to reflect on how many case names I could come up with. After a period of some duration, which on television would have looked like an eternity, I came up with Brown v. Board of Education. So I don't put much in that flap. Its currency is yet another flag to the inanity of our campaign discourse, liberal edition.

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At first, Jewish rightwingers tried to portray Barack Obama as anti-Israel. That fizzled after he delivered a speech to AIPAC, picked Joe Biden for Vice President, and when the anti-Obama machine could find no evidence whatsoever that he was unfriendly, in any way, to Israel.

Of course, the Republican Jewish operatives never believed Obama was hostile to Israel. What they were -- and are -- counting on is that Jews won't vote for Obama because he is African-American. They are having some success with that approach. The race issue is all they have but it's something.

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Dear Café Clatch--

Thank you so much for joining me. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, you can be on my truth commission, if I can be on yours.

I wanted to leave you with the final thought, borrowed from Hannah Arendt, about why this business of getting the truth, and preserving it, is so important particularly in the darkest times. Before quoting her, let me also make the obligatory point that nothing the Bush Administration has done is remotely equivalent to the Nazi period. That said though, I think her point resonates in less horrific times too. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, she argues that one of the goals of police states is to establish "holes of oblivion into which all deeds, good and evil, would disappear." It is our duty, according to Arendt, to preserve history by descending into those holes, rescuing those individual deeds and recounting them to ourselves and our children. As she put it:

Under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that 'it could happen' in most places but it did not happen everywhere. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can be reasonably asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.

Okay, let's hear from all those media commentators and politicians who screamed about the stock market plunge on Monday in response to Congress' rejection of the bailout. With the market closing lower today than it did on Monday should we assume that the bailout didn't work?

Should we be screaming about the hundreds of billions of dollars lost in retirement accounts and pensions? Or was that just something they talked about when they were pushing for a Wall Street bailout?

The list of the overwhelming challenges President Bush is leaving for the next president was long enough before he added, with the acquiescence of the U.S. Senate, providing India with nuclear material and knowhow. There are so many ways this is a dangerous policy that it is hard to know where to start. The "winner" is the fact that Pakistan's military responded by deciding that it must keep up with India, and hence will seek to expand its nuclear program, one way or another. This is a truly alarming development, in a world in which alarms abound, because Pakistan is by far the country in which terrorists are the most likely to get their hands on nuclear arms, either by capturing them, having them slipped to them by cooperative elements in the military or intelligence services, or by overthrowing the failing government.

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Astonishing. Women are more than half the population. Yet the vice-presidential debate, which featured a woman running for the VP, and moderated by a respected female journalist, barely even mentioned any of the issues that concern female voters.

Amazingly, it was Sarah Palin who uttered the words "women's rights" as part of her robotic explanation as to why the world doesn't like the United States. Sen. Joseph Biden, who authored the Violence Against Women Act, hardly took the time to stress the significance of what he had achieved.

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On Friday, I watched as the two presidential candidates squared off for their first debate. As an Iraq veteran and as the Executive Director of the nation's first and largest group for veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I have a vested interest in the future direction of our foreign policy.

But in a debate that bounced from fiscal responsibility to off-shoring drilling and nuclear energy, one thing was notably absent: any real discussion of the overall readiness of our military or veterans' issues. And this was supposed to be the debate on national security? Over and over again, we heard about Wall Street and Main Street. Well what about Range Road? Even Senator Biden and Governor Palin, who will both have sons deployed by Election Day, failed to address these issues in last night's debate.

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In the debate, Sarah Palin promised that she would never "allow another Holocaust. John Mc Cain has repeatedly said he would not permit "a second Holocaust."

What offensive bull! There is not going to be another Holocaust for a host of reasons including the fact that Israel has 200 nuclear weapons and the 4th strongest army in the world. . (There would have been no first Holocaust if the Jews of Europe had the bomb). Jews are no longer helpless flowers who can be annihilated by some tinpot dictator with a big mouth. That was the whole point of creating Israel. And it is Israel's most significant success. No one can destroy Israel without themselves being destroyed. Using the term Holocaust implies that Jews are still helpless victims who can be led like sheep to the slaughter. We aren't.

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Senator McCain says he'll lead us out of this crisis by freezing federal spending on everything but "defense" and entitlements. He will (and this now seems just a corollary) end earmarks as we know them: no new spending on schools and colleges, health insurance, hospitals and claims processing, bridges (to somewhere), bullet-trains, dikes, and green power--in short, on none of Senator Obama's promised investments in next generation infrastructure and intellectual capital.

On the surface, this seems a responsible, if unfortunate, plan. Jim Lehrer's relentless, smug debate question--"What are you prepared to give up?"--implicitly pointed to McCain's answer. But the question was simple-minded. And McCain's response shows that he understands how we got here about as well as he understands how Iraqis get to democracy.

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The good news is that Sarah Palin lost the debate to Joe Biden. The bad news is that she didn't self-destruct in the way she had in the Katie Couric interviews. It was observed by many of the post-debate analysts that she basically repeated the same talking points regardless of the question at hand -- but of course if we got rid of every politician who did that we wouldn't be able to muster up enough folks to fill the House and Senate.

What I wished I had done to make the debate more entertaining--although I'm not really drinking these days--is to have played a drinking game during last night's debate, in which everyone would have to take a drink whenever one of the candidates said a key word like "Main Street" or "Wall Street" or "middle class."

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As my friends know, I can't stand Charles Krauthammer. First, he's a neocon who has about as much regard for American interests as Nick Sarkozy (i.e, he likes America. He just doesn't identify with it). Second, (stop me if I told this before) he bellowed at the rabbi in synagogue on Yom Kippur 2001 for expressing the hope that Jews and Arabs could coexist peacefully. I mean, he started screaming from his seat in the middle of services. Unforgettable.

But today I give him credit for the best analysis of why Barack Obama should be President: "Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. famously said of Franklin Roosevelt that he had a 'second-class intellect, but a first-class temperament..'" Barack Obama, is better than that. "He's got both a first-class intellect and a first-class temperament. That will likely be enough to make him president."

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Sitting in London watching the collapse of Wall Street, the global financial markets and the U.S. presidential race is a useful lesson. It helps to physically be across the ocean to feel how incredible the U.S. power is to the rest of the world. The waves on one side of the Atlantic rippling are felt here on the other side. Lead stories in the news are dated Washington or Wall Street with 10 Downing Street as second, even at a time of great uncertainty in the political system here in Britain. Still, some interesting lessons for progressives in the U.S.

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If Congress passes the bailout it will be demonstrating an extraordinary belief in the power of redemption. In the past, I have noted the fact that Secretary Paulson's failure to recognize the housing bubble, and the economic and financial havoc that would be created by its inevitable collapse, contributed to the disaster we now face.

It turns out that Secretary Paulson played an even more direct rule in bringing down our financial system. The NYT has a superbly timed piece reporting on how a 2004 change in an SEC rule allowed Bear Stearns, Lehman, and the other major investment banks to leverage themselves to unprecedented levels. Among the highlights of the story is the fact that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson was one of the main people pushing for this change in SEC rules.

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I always liked Joe Biden but, I'll admit it, I worried about how he would do in the debate with Palin.

It was a difficult situation. It was imperative that he give the Republicans no openings at all to portray him as condescending, arrogant, sexist or a bloviator.

He gave them none.

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I don't think we'll know whether the dog has yet to bark for a while yet. Let's give the new president time to take office and muster up the mettle, to use Hitch's word, to excavate the Bush skeletons. If they've all been ground to bits already, a la the interrogation tapes we already know were destroyed, then prosecutors, have at the perpetrators.

And if incriminating, horrifying photos and videos do come to light sometime during a future administration? Then the biggest question won't be whether Bush has shielded his wrongdoers by granting them pardons--though that will sting. It will be whether Congress and all of us summon the will to make sure that routinized torture never happens on our government's watch again. Jane, it's true that the Abu Ghraib photographs were a game changer. But did we get definitive, binding-for-the-future legislation out of them?

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Your thoughts?

If the choice is between a lousy bailout bill and economic Armageddon, I'd vote for the lousy bailout bill.

But make no mistake: This is a lousy bill. It doesn't do the most important thing -- help distressed homeowners avoid foreclosure (that role is given to the Treasury Department, which is the equivalent of putting it into the permanent circular file). It doesn't make Wall Street more transparent (there's almost no word in it about improved transparency and
capital requirements, or avoiding conflicts of interest and market
manipulation). It doesn't control the most egregious aspects of executive
salaries (the bill contains a contorted detour for controlling certain
golden parachutes when the government has made direct equity purchases of
financial companies rather than taken their bad paper through an auction).
It does have provisions designed to protect taxpayers should the bad
securities continue to be bad, but the responsibility for acting on this
is left up to the next President. And the Senate version has lots of
additional stuff -- some good (extending deposit insurance), some
unnecessary (extending certain tax credits), but most of which should
never have been added.

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The essential point that Christopher and Jane have been making is correct: the public needs to be patiently brought along on this issue. That's not a small point. It drives the process. So those who care about the torture issue serve their cause best by pushing to fully expose the facts. What, exactly, was done. Who gave the directions for it to be done. What did those high up in the Administration know, and what did they do when they learned. I expect the ultimate evidence will be extremely damning, as suggested by the statement that John Bellinger gave to Senator Levin last week, and I am certain that the most damning things are still being suppressed on bogus claims of national security.

Figures in the CIA who supported destruction of the torture tapes were largely driven by the same concern: when the public sees this, we won't look good. So it is imperative that the public see all this evidence and form its own views.

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Very briefly indeed - because, damn it all, I actually am going to attend a VP debate-watching party - I think that Jane may indeed be right about evidence yet to come, but that she also may be missing or understating the importance of what old Sherlock identified as the case of the dog that did NOT bark, and thus by indirection clinched the matter. I have to say that the single most shocking thing to me, not about the torture but the cover-up, was the calm admission that Langley had destroyed so many interrogation tapes. Whence came the permission for THAT? Who was present when it happened? Everybody understands that the deliberate destruction of pre-trial evidence is either prima facie evidence in itself or at least a very strong suggestion of guilt if not by suggestio falsi then at the very least suppressio veri, if that's the distinction I am looking for. In other words, only banana republics burn or shred state papers when lawsuits are impending.

As always,

Christopher

I agree that at the bottom of it all, the stumbling block to accountability is the complicity of the American public - AT THE MOMENT. But call me naïve, because I think that public opinion could shift if the next administration released certain explosive documents. The case of Abu Ghraib has hammered home the cliché about a picture being worth a hundred words. Humbling though it is for a writer, nothing written has matched the impact of those photographs. The international revulsion they stirred forced President Bush to publicly denounce them, and for the first time, call for some kind of investigation and punishment. As Eric Umansky and others have noted, it was only when President Bush acknowledged that a scandal had taken place, that the mainstream media - including network television news shows -- reacted as if something was wrong.

The CIA clearly understood the potential power of incriminating pictures, which is why they destroyed them. I am told that if the CIA's videotapes of Muslim detainees being waterboarded were seen by the public, the international political reaction would have been, as one former CIA office put it, "unmanageable." It was bad enough watching Hitch sputtering away. So- this brings me to the question of other photographic evidence. What's still in the federal cupboard?

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Even the cheerleaders on CNBC are going to start having to use the "R" word. Yesterday, automakers announced their worst results since the depths of the 1993 recession. Not even Toyota was spared. This morning the Labor Department announced that last week's new jobless claims soared to 497,000, the most since the weeks after 9/11. And finally the crucial ISM manufacturing index slipped 4% (as against the expected 2%) for the month of September.

We need to be really clear. We have two problems--a credit crisis and a cyclical recession. The two are connected, but solving the credit crisis will not stop the recession. It will just keep it from turning into a depression.

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I've read all the sober explanations of why we must hold our noses and support the bailout. I've watched Barack Obama intone the same on the Senate floor. Sorry, but it all fits into a neoliberal paradigm whose adherents haven't noticed that it's over. Watching the Senate's pompous porkers play populist with the package was like watching Hapsburgs greet their subjects in July, 1914.

True, we're all tethered into the dance: We love our cars -- couldn't imagine reconfiguring our lives to save energy, enhance walking, reduce obesity, end road rage. Yet the car culture is only a sample of what an increasingly manic, drugged, violent, and stupid America of sovereign consumers has been choreographed into "choosing."

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Not everyone recognizes that we have a universal health care plan in this country-- approved and in operation in the city of San Francisco. Since it went into effect this year, it has been enrolling residents at a rate of 600 per week with the goal of covering everyone in the city up to 500% of the poverty line (about $100,000 per year for a family of four) by early 2009.

The good news is that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday upheld the law after a challenge by the business lobby that it violated federal ERISA benefits law, because employers not providing health care for their employees are required to pay $1.17 to $1.76 per hour to the city in order to cover their employees' costs under the city-provided health care plan. In Golden Gate Rest. Ass'n v. San Francisco upheld these employer responsibility provisions as in compliance with federal law.

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My friend, John Cullinane, is one of the most successful Irish business people in American history. Forty years ago, he began a successful computer software business that soon dominated the field. He is also a great philanthropist who made a singular contribution to peace in Northern Ireland and is seeking to do the same in Israel-Palestine.

The following is a letter he has sent out to his friends on Barack Obama's behalf. I think it is worth sharing with yours (especially if they are of Irish descent).

MJ,
If I were asked to summarize the candidates' relative strengths in a few words, they would be that John McCain has considerable experience but very poor judgment, and that Barack Obama has limited experience but very good judgment, and good judgment wins over experience, every time.

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It's just one more reason that John McCain cannot be President. He has contempt for the democratic process.

By refusing to acknowledge Obama, Mc Cain sends a clear message that he hates his opponent for having the temerity to run against him.

Politicians usually go to some length to avoid the suggestion of personal contempt or hate for their opponents. Why? Because this is a democracy. The "my honorable opponent" phrase is intended to show respect, not necessarily for the opponent, but for the system. And for the voters, the people of the United States.

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Today's the big vote. The nation's political leadership has carried out a full court press for this bailout. They have frequently ignored the facts and commonsense (since when do we make policy based on stock market swings?) and repeatedly tossed out the specter of the Great Depression to push their case.

It's clear that the overwhelming majority of the public thinks that this Wall Street bailout stinks, but Wall Street has immense political power and it is likely that it will get its way.

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The Senate will vote tonight; the House is scheduled to vote tomorrow morning. Will the deal fly? Probably. Wall Street's gyrations since Monday have scared the hell out of a number of holdouts, notwithstanding all the negative emails and phone calls they continue to receive from constituents.

An important distinction here. While more Americans are coming around to "supporting" the bailout bill, the vast majority still hate the idea of bailing out Wall Street. They're for the bailout bill now only because they fear that a failure to pass it will have worse consequences -- drying up credit at a time when Main Street is struggling. But make no mistake: America is mad as hell. They resent what they perceive as extortion by the Masters of the Universe.

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Well the thing is, as Rosa Luxemburg wrote to Lenin in 1918, all regimes have the temptation to take what they will always call "emergency measures", and then let these short-term hysterias harden into permanent laws, and then into routine practices.

I noticed this when I was a part of the ACLU suit against warrantless wiretapping. Probably very few people would NOT have demanded to know, on 12 September 2001, who was calling whom on US territory, from US territory, to US territory and so forth. A government that didn't also demand to know might have been impeachable for other reasons, and would certainly have been kicked to death by public opinion as it then stood. But then the urgent and the contingent become bureaucratic everyday reality, and it turns out that Congress and the courts didn't - ahem - actually know about any of or most of that.

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This evening at 7:30 p.m., the United States Senate is scheduled to vote on its own version of the economic rescue plan that the House voted down on Monday.

The new version comprises virtually all the provisions of the House plan, but with the following key add-ons:

• FDIC: an increase in the ceiling on bank deposits insured by the FDIC from $100,000 to $250,000

• The Extenders: an extension of tax breaks - known as the "extenders" - for renewable energy, research and development, the state sales and college tuition deductions, and numerous other provisions

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The Federal Reserve Board chairman described the credit squeeze as being "as severe as any supply-induced constraint ever, other than from policy actions." That statement should help to prompt Congress into quick passage of the bank bailout bill, except this quote is from February of 1991, and the chairman at the time was Alan Greenspan.

The economy is in a recession and banks always tighten up on credit in a recession. When the economy's growth prospects are in question, it puts the health of any particular business into question. Therefore, banks will be far more hesitant to make loans during a period of economic weakness. There were literally hundreds of news stories about the credit squeeze in the 1990-1991 recession.

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Christopher is right to remember Jackson's very powerful words. Let's recall them exactly:

If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them. And we are not prepared to lay down the rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us. We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well.

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I love them. And I'll take care of them. And they know that I'll take care of them."

The other day, I posted a refutation of this claim of McCain's about veterans during the Sept. 27 debate.

A friend came up with more. I haven't vetted (sorry) this compilation of McCain's votes on troops and veterans, but at a glance, and then again at a second and third glance, it looks pretty impressive, putting the lie to yet another blusterbash from the Crooked Talk Express. See the website of Veterans for Common Sense for all the links.

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Agreed, Christopher, that Biden and Palin aren't made of the stuff of Cheney, and that Obama and McCain wouldn't welcome a vice presidency like his anyway. Still, I think there's a bit more to play out in Jane's question, at least on the Republican side. Last week, when Palin got into a spat with the press over covering the handshake pleasantries before her sit downs with foreign dignitaries, I made the Sarah-to-Dick connection. Albeit for different reasons, they share a penchant for secrecy and obfuscation. Palin's has a different basis at the moment--she's turning tail, whereas Cheney barks and bites. At the moment it seems laughable to imagine her as the Cheney in "The Dark Side" and "The Angler." She's all puppet and no puppet master--that's her problem. But as governor, she had a governing style that sounds like Cheney lite, prizing loyalty and discretion above other attributes.

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I took a deep breath before writing here last night that a second House bailout bill will deserve to die like the first, even if it gets emergency medical assistance from a United States Senate that is scheduled to rush through a package this evening. (Yes, there's still time to call your Senators, whose phone numbers are at the end of this post). I was expecting some in TPM's "shadow audience" to call me a populist demagogue.

Shadow audience? Beyond those who post comments are many who don't, and some among them are bankers, politicians, and others who never would. But I'm hearing from several of them directly, and their comments are surprising.

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As it happens, pace Scott and Christopher, I stopped to get an egg sandwich at the deli next to my office and who should walk by but Donald Rumsfeld. This marks the third time I've seen Rumsfeld jaunting down Connecticut Avenue in the mornings, a goon in wraparound shades three steps behind him, death's-head grimace (his version of a smile?) chiseled onto his face. Is a citizen's arrest for war crimes a non-concept? I'd cite Jane's book in my indictment.

Christopher's point about the need for universally-applicable rules of global behavior is as unassailable as it is politically unachievable. (At least insofar as I understood it: Christopher, were you advocating such a need or merely urging the rest of us to take up the argument?) Imagine if Barack Obama said, "We ought to follow Justice Jackson's exhortation against creating one international system for us and another for the rest of the world." The avalanche of demagoguery would be overwhelming. Everyone remember the hyperventilation over John Kerry's (predictably misquoted) "global test"? In keeping with Cheney's elevation of the expansion of executive power to a first principle, the right -- by which I mean not simply the conservative movement but the leadership and the membership of the national Republican Party -- holds any challenge to American hegemony to be a first-order national security threat. Several in the Bush administration -- including, remember, Jack Goldsmith, despite his current use as a liberal hero -- believe international law to be little more than "lawfare," a method of unconventional attack on American interests.

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What I had meant to add in my last post was the famous remark made by Justice Robert Jackson - our man at Nuremburg - to the effect (even if these were not the ipsissima verba) - that the United States sets no standard in these matters by which it is not itself prepared to be judged.

Now obviously the United States is not guilty on the main charge at Nuremburg, on which all other "war crimes" verdicts ultimately depended, of the crime of conspiring to wage a war of aggression in the first place. (At least, I am not among those who think it is guilty in this way.) And I myself prefer an administration that overthrows dictatorships to one which, a la Kissinger, imposes them where democracies once used to be. However, the Jackson standard appears to me to be one that we ought to have cited and gnawed over by now. After all, with most important treaties and conventions and declarations concerning human rights, the United States is not only a signatory itself but is the power that most strongly urges that others become signatories as well.
Night thoughts for a dark time....

Readers of TPM Cafe may recall my posts on HRes 362, the resolution that would have imposed a full blockade on Iran. Although the bill's authors claimed it was not a "war resolution," my take was that a blockade is an act of war, no matter what the sponsors said.

I expected the resolution to pass because AIPAC made it the centerpiece of its lobbying efforts for 2008. At its huge Washington confab, it tasked its membership with getting co-sponsors for the bill with the goal of speedy passage. But look what happened.

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That's easy. You ask them how failure to pass the bailout will give us a Great Depression.

The odds are that your favorite DC intellectual type has uttered some dire warning like that. After all, they all heard some authority like President Bush or a highly respected news reporter make such a claim. All right-thinking people know that we just have to give $700 billion to the Wall Street crew or the economy will collapse.

While all right-thinking people might know we need the bailout, just about all right-thinking people don't have a clue as to what they are talking about.

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Some supporters of the bailout package that failed on Monday still think that it sank only because a tidal wave of short-sighted, right-wing populist rage topped the levee and swamped the House. Their Exhibit A is Thaddeus McCotter (R-Mich.), who warned, "In the Bolshevik Revolution, the slogan was 'Peace, land, and bread.' Today, you are being asked to choose between bread and freedom. I suggest the people on Main Street have said they prefer their freedom, and I am with them."

Such demagoguery is containable, bailout proponents say: A slightly-more "populist" package will pass the House soon, perhaps with a push from the Senate. And if the economy still worsens, the same angry citizens who scared those representatives who weren't "with them" as fully as Rep. McCotter into voting Nay will turn against them soon enough for having opposed the bailout.

A small problem: A lot of House "Bolsheviks" and liberals opposed it, too.

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Hank Paulson has worked his whole life in a business culture and as he rose to the top of Goldman Sachs, when he said "jump", his minions said "how high?". His first mistake in the rescue package was putting out a three page "deal memo" that reflected the command and control culture from whence he came. And then he ran into a thing called democracy.

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Christopher is correct on universal jurisdiction. Moreover, we're beyond the point of speculation on this--one case is already underway. In Milan, a trial is now pending in which 26 American intelligence officers, diplomats and one military attaché are charged with kidnapping and assault in connection with the extraordinary renditions program. They are being tried in absentia and the U.S. refused to extradict them. Christopher notes Judge Garzon, and I have interviewed another investigating magistrate who advised me that the process of collecting information to proceed with a case against Bush Administration officials is underway, though there has been no decision to actually bring charges and it was not conceivable that such a decision would occur before the Bush team leaves Washington. As he put it "those currently serving the U.S. government have the protection of political considerations; but with respect to the officials of a former regime--they are fair game." That was in a country which supports the U.S. efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan and has sent its troops to fight in both, by the way. So whatever happens in the United States, it is likely that there will be some sort of enforcement overseas, and that people like David Addington and John Yoo will have to be extremely careful about any trans-Atlantic vacation plans.

To start with the easy question: the next V-P will not be of Cheney's mettle or metal in any sense, and nor will their bosses - except in the depressingly likely case of mental or physical capacity - need or want or encourage them to be. Joe Biden still cherishes his reputation as the great commuter, and as for the thriller from Wasilla....

The fetish of "bipartisanship" furthermore ensures that Obama won't want to seem vengeful and McCain will want to "move on". I also, to repeat my earlier misgivings about the state of public opinion, have a tendency to doubt whether any jury would be inclined to convict any American who might claim that he was stretching the rules to go after Al Qaeda or to defuse a "ticking bomb". This in turn might inhibit potential prosecutors.

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A few weeks ago, we showed you what the next generation of TPM's community tools would look like. We're excited to say we're almost ready to launch the new service. But before we unveil it to the world, we would like some of our Cafe regulars to help us test the tools and give us their feedback and bug reports so we can release the best product we can on October 8.

We will need you to commit at least two hours over this coming weekend to the test, and report back to us your first impressions, along with any bugs you run into.

If you would like to be a part of this beta, send us an email at tpmbeta@gmail.com and we'll set you up with a test account. Thanks for helping us in this transition!

No possibility that any Bush Administration official will be held to account?! No, Jane, that's not my view at all. So let me be a bit more clear. I believe that the accountability process will not go quickly. It will take its time. The facts will have to be developed carefully. Then, when the heat is gone from present political feelings, some cold assessments can be reached. Everything I have seen up to this point makes pretty clear that there was a formal policy, adopted at the top of the administration, to abuse prisoners. This policy also included some practices which are well understood as torture (waterboarding, hyperthermia, sleep deprivation over two days, long-time standing, the administration of psychotropic drugs), and indeed have long been called torture by the United States when used by other governments. This can't be allowed to pass without action, because that would open the door for use of these techniques with impunity for posterity--not just by the United States, but by the Sadaam Husseins and Kim Il-Jongs of future generations. If we look at the enforcement actions in Argentina, Chile and Peru, for instance, it took a decade or longer. By that point, the crimes were thoroughly exposed and documented, and no one viewed the prosecutions as destabilizing, or even as politically motivated. Time addressed the "political retaliation" argument.

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Last week, I gave some of the reasons why I thought that the bailout was a lesser evil solution, but I want to emphasize that the "bailout" bill, especially if it can be tightened in the next few days to get more Dem votes, is a far cheaper alternative to the status quo.

Just look at the headline on the front of TPM itself: Fed Pumps Further $630 Billion Into Financial System, which details the massive emergency loans that the Fed has authorized for the financial system. This comes on top of the deal Citigroup got for buying Wachovia, where the federal government agreed to absorb ALL losses on bad loans above $42 billion in Wachovia's portfolio, similar to the deal JPMorgan Chase got for buying Bear Sterns. The risk and obligations assumed are unknown and could balloon astronomically for taxpyers.

Compared to these bailouts that already happening on a massive scale, here's the advantage of the explicit "bailout" legislation:

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Jane, no one could ever accuse you of skirting the big questions. I'm a different story. I'll leave your second question to others and take up your first:

...Vice President Cheney, from whose office most of these policies appear to have sprung, will be seen by history as not just the most powerful vice president in America, but, also the most successful?

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The failure of the $700 billion financial bailout package in the House yesterday (228-205) set off immediate tremors in Washington, New York, and throughout the U.S., followed by aftershocks in capital markets around the world. Never in its history has the Dow suffered a worse single-day point drop. Credit markets have ground to a complete halt. Over one trillion dollars of national wealth was lost. by the time the markets closed on Monday. Retirement plans and nest eggs are shrinking. Americans seeking mortgages, student and car loans, or bank credit are being turned away regardless of their ability to repay. If we didn't have a crisis before, we have one now. What are the next steps to take?

Yes, congressional negotiators deserved tremendous credit for their tireless efforts to reach a compromise on an economic rescue package this past weekend. But, following the bill's defeat yesterday, the rescue plan now faces a major uphill struggle in the court of public opinion and, therefore, in Congress as it prepares to reconsider the package and vote on Thursday. Vast improvements in both the legislation and the sales pitch both can and must be made.

Here is a five-point rescue plan to save the rescue plan:

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Divided government and bipartisan gridlock has prevented serious revamping of the financial markets for decades-- and, as fingerpointing over the failed bailout bill now shows, has eliminated any sense of accountability, whether for which party leadership acted or failed to act to rein in financial excesses and who needed to act to solve the crisis. One toxic problem was the Democratic leadership's fear of owning a solution and seeking "bipartisan" support, even though this alienated their own party members.

I'm reading Michael Heller's Gridlock Economy, which is primarily about how a multiplicity of property rights from ownership of land to patents undermines economic growth and innovation, but he has a similar point on politics (written even before the recent meltdown). Financial markets loved Dems taking back Congress in 2006, mostly because it promised gridlock on regulation:

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OK- so Christopher Hitchens, Spencer Ackerman, Emily Bazelon and Scott Horton - four of the most astute and fearless critics of the abuses of power in America, basically believe it is far-fetched to expect that those in the Bush Administration who ordered the United States government to institute a regime of torture, will be held criminally liable. In secret dungeons, U.S.-held prisoners were waterboarded, stripped naked, kept chained and near frozen, bombarded with unbearable sounds, deprived of daylight, kept isolated from human contact for months, fed barely enough to live on, beaten, confined in dog cages, and deliberately mistreated in other carefully-regulated ways under a policy set in place by the highest-ranking officials of our country. An unknown number died. A larger unknown number simply disappeared. We know that the Red Cross -- an independent non-partisan organization - warned the President and other top officials that at least fourteen of the individuals currently held in Guantanamo -- people who the Red Cross was able to interview -- were tortured. Not maybe. Definitely. The Red Cross also warned the President that he and others in his administration were in danger of being held liable for war crimes.

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There is an innocent moment in Animal Farm that leads to the fable's most chilling one. Adorable new puppies are born; Napoleon Pig gathers up the litter and takes them into his quarters. Then, a year later, they emerge: fierce, snarling dogs, utterly loyal to their spiritual father, ready (even eager) to be unleashed on any opponent.

Here, in this shocking little clip, is a settler-pup turning into a beast before our eyes. One can only imagine the dinner table conversation this benighted youth has been exposed to, and not exposed to, over the past ten years. Arthur Koestler, Orwell's friend, once warned about Jewish "claustrophilia." This boy is a very hard case. One can also imagine the officer he will turn into when he is conscripted in the coming years.

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The rightwing neocon New York Sun has published its last edition. From now on, Gotham hysterics, worried that Israel will cede the West Bank or that America won't go to war with Iran or that a guy with a Muslim sounding name will become President, will only have the New York Post to weep over with their morning coffee.

Yes, there are other rightwing papers. But not even the Wall Street Journal is a fullblown neocon paper whose motto could be, "But is it good for the Likud party?."

Anyway, I told my oldest son that the Sun had folded and he said, "good. Did you see their guidelines for interns." I hadn't. But here they are.

The Old Testmanent Lord works in mysterious ways.

PS I feel bad when any newspaper folds. But the Sun was not a newspaper. It was Sean Hannity on paper. My sympathy goes to the people who lost their jobs.

In spite of its best efforts, the Bush administration failed to push through a $700 billion give away to Wall Street. President Bush conjured up scary images of the Great Depression on national television. He even partially backed away from his initial demand for a complete blank check for Henry Paulson. But the public refused to send their tax dollars to Wall Street banks run by incompetent bankers, and they insisted that their representatives in Congress listen to their wishes.

While the editorialists are busy denouncing members of Congress for surrendering to the vulgar masses, it's a good time to quickly check the score card. The United States is in a recession and facing the worst financial crisis in almost 80 years because the folks currently in charge were out to lunch.

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In my mind, Jane is asking the most important question--the accountability question. I also have had a run-in with a senior CIA official who described to me in some detail being briefed on the new policies. "I decided that afternoon that I was taking an early retirement," he told me. He went on to note that "it seems quite a few people took early retirement after getting that briefing." He also told me his thinking was simple: "It's not that this was bad policy. It was a crime. Black and white." It's clear that these moves were very controversial within the intelligence service. Although the pushback in the military is now very well documented, the pushback at CIA remains anecdotal. It will come in time, I think.

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Spencer, you are right about fantasy baseball. My own sense is that for an official like Addington or Yoo to come anywhere close to indictment, someone in the inner circle would have to flip, with the documents to prove it. Maybe what was divulged would change the dicey politics of a prosecution. (Because the upside for an Obama administration looks small compared to the softie downside for Democrats that Jane and Christopher sketch.) But in the more likely event that none of this happens, my question is how much energy the next president should spend on a difficult and inevitably recrimination-filled investigation. It would be cast as partisan and vengeful, and I don't see how any taking of the high road could really change that. There's the consideration Jane raises about whether such accountability is just given the circumstances, which I think of as the shadow cast by the show 24 (another great Jane topic!)

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Unsurprisingly for someone who's written such an excellent book, Jane asks an excellent series of questions. About two years ago, I had lunch with a former CIA official who tried to stop the torture. This person encountered a variety of opinion inside what used to be called the Directorate of Operations about whether it was indeed immoral or illegal to subject detainees to the "enhanced interrogation" regimen that Jane explores. But there was complete unanimity that CIA would end up holding the bag, marched before indignant legislators, smeared in the press, left at the mercy of grand juries -- all while the Bush administration officials who ordered and authorized the torture return to, say, their tenured positions at Boalt Hall.

Some of that reflects the odd culture of self-pity often seen at the CIA. But it also reflects a cardinal rule of policymakers: when the policy goes off the rails, blame the intelligence people. Not for nothing is Jose Rodriguez, former chief of the agency's clandestine service, the only U.S. official currently at risk of facing charges, not Yoo nor Addington nor Gonzales nor Cheney nor Bush.

So, yeah, there should be prosecutions -- or, rather, there should be the opposite sort of prosecutions that occurred after Abu Ghraib. Start with, say Addington and Yoo.

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Well, if we are allowed to mention the "unmentionable" then there are some other bad reasons why this subject has not come up during the present round of electoral antics. One is extremely depressing: a large number of people secretly approve of "harsh" methods but do not want - or expect - to be told about them. (Nor, necessarily, do they want to have to justify them: there's an upside if you like!)

Knowledge of this fact I think inhibits the Democrats from making a big noise about the problem. It has a "knock-on" effect in the intelligence "community" as well: American opinion demands safety and will most certainly demand accountability if that safety is once again violated. Thus some field agents must see themselves in the unenviable position of being asked for decisive results and then potentially having to hire a slew of lawyers in case they turn out to have crossed a line. There's a "stab in the back" mentality in the making, and that is never good for democracy.

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Welcome to all who are part of this discussion - please let it rip.

I wanted to start by bringing up the unmentionable question in the current presidential campaign, where both candidates are avowedly against the Bush Administration's embrace of torture and lesser cruelties in the "war-on-terror." While both McCain and Obama have spoken out against torture, neither has spelled out what he plans to do about holding Bush Administration officials accountable who may have committed or authorized crimes. Understandably, this is a toxic subject, reeking of political payback. But I have personally interviewed CIA officers who have said they refused to partake in the "enhanced interrogation" program because they feared that eventually it would lead to criminal charges. They had seen this happen before, and wanted nothing to do with it, even if it meant in some instances, leaving the CIA. The threat of prosecution clearly acted as a deterrent. My question is what happens if there is no accountability for America's first program of state-authorized torture? Does it send a green light to torture again when the next attack takes place? Is it an invitation to other forms of lawlessness by the U.S. Government? But, if top officials of the Bush Administration who were acting in what they believed to be the best interests of the country's security, are now prosecuted, is that just? Will the public support it? Particularly if Obama is elected, wont this become exhibit A that the Democrats are soft on terrorism, and members of the "Blame-America-First" Club?

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This week, Jane Mayer joins us for a book club discussion on her latest, The Dark Side: The Inside Story Of How The War On Terror Turned Into A War On American Ideals.

The book lays out in careful detail a chilling narrative-- how the Bush administration made the transition from the September 11th World Trade Center attacks to The War on Terror, to a systematic, institutionalized use of torture. This week, in the Bush-twillight, we turn our gaze to the future. What will the incumbent president do with an executive office that has left the constitution a smoldering wreck? In short, what will post-bush accountability look like? What will the consequences be?

Discussing along with Jane: Christopher Hitchens, journalist and literary critic, Scott Horton, Harpers Contributor and New York Attorney specializing in human rights law and the law of armed conflict, Emily Bazelon, senior editor at Slate, Spencer Ackerman, journalist and blogger and Marty Lederman, visting professor of Law at the Georgetown University Law Center, and blogger.

Jane's first post up shortly. Join us!

If you have a real story, you don't have to make up phony stories. That's pretty straightforward.

I've heard lots of phony stories. Much of the country's political and economic leadership has been running around raising the prospect of the Great Depression and a breakdown in the banking system (I actually had taken the latter seriously). These stories are absolutely not true.

There is no plausible scenario under which the no bailout scenario gives us a Great Depression. There is a more plausible scenario (but highly unlikely) that the bailout will give us a Great Depression. There is no way that the failure to do a bailout will lead to more than a very brief failure of the financial system. We will not lose our modern system of payments.

At this point I cannot identify a single good reason to do the bailout.

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Strategy is the selection of direction and the means for getting there. Tactics comprises the ways one executes on strategic choices. Isn't that a workable definition of the two oft-confused topics?

In general, it is good to be flexible about tactics but resolute about strategy.

For example, seeking to regulate, or not to regulate, this or that, is a tactic. it is a way to execute on a strategy. Being opposed to earmarks is also a tactical decision. Seeking to to lower the economy's general cost of capital in order to promote investment so as to drive productivity gains that generate higher income per capita -- that is a statement of a strategic goal and a strategic means, pursuant to which large extra spending on earmarks may be ill-advised, although also exiguous relative to the whole budget. That sort of strategic goal should be pursued adamantly and will take a long time to achieve.

For what it's worth.

I don't think this is a useful topic for the upcoming Palin-Biden debate.

The Imperial three-page bill that the Bush Administration gave Congress 10 days ago, giving it unreviewable power over $700 billion, has not morphed into a 106-page compromise bill. And oh is it ever a complex piece of compromise.
The bill establishes a Troubled Asset Relief Program or TARP.
A quick review of the bill shows that:

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There is a question journalists ought to be asking members of Congress, in good part because of a new study (pdf) by two economists that say they generally do not, that they encourage bad banking practices and they mostly just transfer wealth from people to bankers.

The study, a work in progress known as a working paper, is by two economists at the International Monetary Fund who studied 42 banking crisis in Britain, Japan and the rest of the world over the last 37 years.

The study, the IMF notes, is not official policy. OK. But the findings of economists Luc Laeven and Fabian Valencia should give us all pause about out government moving with all deliberate speed to borrow $700 billion.

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Bill Clinton is something else. Just read what he said on MTP this morning. And this by a Nehesi Coates.

I think he'll be voting for McCain-Palin -- we'll never know, will we? The whole idea of Barack Obama seems to offend him. (Like McCain, he can't look at Barack, metaphorically in Bill's case. It's very odd.)

But I don't think that, at this point, his disdain for Obama has anything to do with Hillary. She is out there for Obama and, unlike Bill, is not using the Jewish holidays as an excuse not to campaign this week. (Yes, Bill told Larry King he won't campaign on Rosh Ha Shana!).

No, it's not about Hillary. Not now. The reason he prefers McCain is because with McCain in the White House, he remains the most important Democrat, the last Democratic President. If Obama wins, he becomes Jimmy Carter, just another ex-President.

The thought drives him crazy. And that is why he wants Mc Cain to win. It is that simple.

I have been awoken from my dogmatic slumber (credit goes to the spouse). Let's suppose that the worst happens and the financial system freezes up and none of us can use our credit cards or ATMs. This is truly an awful situation that we should absolutely try to prevent.

However, if we get here, the world does not stop. The Fed and Treasury will have to step in and take over the banks. There would be no alternative.

This is exactly what many economists argue should happen anyhow (I'd put myself in that boat, with some qualifications). So the outcome of the worst case scenario is a really frightening day in which the whole world financial system is shaken to its core, followed by a government takeover of the banks. Eventually the government straightens out the books and sells them off again. But the real threat here is not to the economy, it is to the banks.

For a week now I have been urging fellow journalists to be skeptical of the assertion that we have a huge crisis and, secondly, that the bailout proposed by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson (the former CEO of Goldman Sachs) is the ONLY solution.

Journalists should be insisting that officials make the case that there is a crisis, do not just accept that there is one because they say so. And then reporters should ask hard questions about who benefits from the bailout, whether there are alternative solutions that would be less costly or more effective.
Journalists, and specially Washington journalists, are generally behaving like lapdogs and generally only asking detail questions around the central premise. This should concern us all. This is the same kind of behavior that we saw during the run up to the War in Iraq, when there was no shortage of critical facts and skeptical sources, but only the usual stalwarts in journalism reported skeptically.

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In theory the one-state solution is not a bad idea. In theory, Israelis and Palestinians should be able to coexist happily in one state. In theory, Jews shouldn't need a state of their own. In theory, Palestinians could live among the settlers who despise them.

In fact, it's a terrible idea (although, at some point, in a hundred years or whenever the two peoples can truly coexist, it may not be).

I just got back from Jerusalem, Ramallah, and Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv is one of my favorite places in the world. It epitomizes the success of the Zionist movement. Tel Aviv is the embodiment of Theodor Herzl's dream: a modern, tolerant, secular Jewish city.

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Colonel Ken Allard is no whiner. He's military tough, a firm believer in personal responsibility. But he has been so badly treated by Bank of America that he decided to go public, here and here. Along the way, he picked up stories from other folks about their treatment at the hands of B of A.

I like the colonel. He has the sort of "I'll fix it myself" view of injustice that makes me root for him. But as I read his story, I wondered: how many people will be cheated, scammed, tricked, ignored and generally infuriated before someone says it is time to put some basic supervision in place?

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