I was listening to NPR this morning, and they were talking about the position of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops regarding healthcare reform and abortion.

Any time that anyone talks about their position, this morning, it was a law professor, the consensus is that the position of the Bishops is coming from somewhere in the Twilight Zone: There is simply no basis in realities of law, precedent, legislation, or the manner in which regulation is derived from statute to suggest the Senate language will allow for federal funding of abortion.

This raises an obvious question: Why does the professional staff of the Conference hold a position at such extreme odds with every lawyer, and almost every other Catholic organization out there, most recently the Catholic Health Association and 59,000 nuns?

The only answer that I can come up with is that the professional staff working in their offices have been captured by partisan Republican operatives.

Either there are Republican operatives working and generating legal and legislative opinions, or the staff has been browbeaten by the loud right wing lay activists, most notably Bill Donohue and his Catholic League, and so the staff is taking its talking points from Republican operatives.

In either case, it is clear that the staff is NOT providing competent or good faith advice.

Perhaps a look at the senior lay staff at the organization, and their backgrounds might be warranted by some news gathering organization. (I sent an earlier version of my theory to Josh Marshall, if you know of any other investigative organizations, please forward this to them.)

Note that I am not suggesting that the Bishops themselves are operating as partisan political operatives, simply that their staff may be operating as such.

Cross posted from 40 Years in the Desert.

In the aftermath of the Massachusetts debacle, a lot of people are wondering what the hell happened.

The talking heads inside the Beltway are sure that it's because Obama is too Librul™, of course, but I think that Josh Marshall talked about the core problem in August of 2004.

He was talking about the Bush-Kerry campaign, and he characterized it as follows:

Let's call it the Republicans' Bitch-Slap theory of electoral politics.

It goes something like this.

.........

Consider for a moment what the big game is here. This is a battle between two candidates to demonstrate toughness on national security. Toughness is a unitary quality, really -- a personal,characterological quality rather than one rooted in policy or divisible in any real way. So both sides are trying to prove to undecided voters either that they're tougher than the other guy or at least tough enough for the job.

.........

One way -- perhaps the best way -- to demonstrate someone's lack of toughness or strength is to attack them and show they are either unwilling or unable to defend themselves -- thus the rough slang I used above. And that I think is a big part of what is happening here. Someone who can't or won't defend themselves certainly isn't someone you can depend upon to defend you.

.........

Hitting someone and not having them hit back hurts the morale of that person's supporters, buoys the confidence of your own backers (particularly if many tend toward an authoritarian mindset) and tends to make the person who's receiving the hits into an object of contempt (even if also possibly also one of sympathy) in the eyes of the uncommitted.

.........

Only now, it isn't the Republicans bitch slapping anyone. It's the Democrats who bitch slap themselves.

Or as Zaid Jilani's southern ConservaDem friend says:

And can I say this? F*ck the Democrats. They couldn't get shit done with 60 seats, why the hell would I care if they have 59? F%$# them seriously we deserve to lose Congress this year. And don't bitch and whine about it either how much has changed since we took over in 2006?Ain 't s%$# as far as I can tell. We capitulated to Bush, then capitulated to Republicans and now are just capitulating to ourselves.

F%$# it dude, I mean Republicans get whatever the fuck they want with 50 seats and we can't do fuck all we deserve to lose

("%$#" mine, "*" original)

Fundamentally, when we look at what is going on in DC, it looks like no one in the Senate or the White House is even trying to make substantive change. (Pelosi, at least, creates the appearance that she is trying to do something)

What's more, among the DC Dems, there has been near constant bitch slapping of the Party Base, whether it's the capitulation on the public option, the labor union insurance surtax, or the constant drum beat of how "the left" hates the Democratic Party because they want to primaryDINOs ( Democrat In Name Only) who have safe seats.

The central campaign platform of the Republican Party is that government can't do anything.  The Democratic Party seems to try very hard to prove them right.

Cross posted from 40 Years in the Desert.

During the Russian-Georgian war in 2008, Bush and His Evil Minions™ considered military strikes against Russia:

As Russian tanks rumbled into Georgia in 2008, a post-Cold War turning point was at hand.

George W. Bush's national security team considered launching air strikes to halt the invasion. ............

............

Thus we learn that "several senior White House staffers" urged "at least some consideration of limited military options," such as bombing the mountain tunnel that served as Russia's main supply line.

What part of the phrase, "Russia has around 10,000 nuclear warheads in its arsenal," didn't these guys get?

Great googly moogly!

Cross posted from 40 Years in the Desert.

Ezra Klein nails it with one picture.

You see, the American public, given a few months, and a subject that holds their interest, even tangentially, and they begin to tease truth from fiction, and as a group, come to understand what is going on.

It's the Delphi Method writ large.

We saw it during Bill Clinton's impeachment, when the public came to realize over a period of months that this was not the end of the world, it was some guy lying about cheating on his wife, and the Republicans attempting a coup as a result.

So, here we are, 8 months into the Obama administration, and a year into the financial crisis, and the American public gets it: No one is the least bit interested in doing anything to help them.

They are bailing out banks and automakers, and CEOs are still getting obscene pay packages, and the, as taxpayers are paying for it.

You see, this is not a problem that can be solved with an Obama speech, because there is nothing to explain here. That great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity,* Goldman Sachs, has captured treasury, insurance has captured healthcare, and real-estate has captured....well...Everything.

The Obama administration, and much of the Democratic Party has been captured by the Finance, Insurance, and Real-Estate (FIRE) sectors, and so is attempting to support the phony products of this sector, as opposed to produce something useful.

The Republican party has been captured by FIRE too, but this doesn't matter, because they are remarkably honest about this, and their platform is not to protect the little guy, but rather to hate those defined as "the other", so they are neither hypocrites, nor are they likely to lose much support.

That being said, much as in 1994, when people looked at the Democrats in Congress, and said, "If they are both going to f$#@ me over with NAFTA, I might as well vote for someone who hates f*gg*ts and n*gg*rs too," Obama and the Dems are in real trouble.

As Harry S Truman said, "Given the choice between a Republican and someone who acts like a Republican, people will vote for the real Republican all the time.

Absent actions that involve most of the senior staffs of Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Citi, Bank of America (Especially Ken Lewis), and the ratings agencies (S&P, Moody's, etc) frog marched out of their places of work in handcuffs, this is the reality we have, not the reality we'd like to have.

*Alas, I cannot claim credit for this bon mot, it was coined by the great Matt Taibbi, in his article on the massive criminal conspiracy investment firm, The Great American Bubble Machine.


Cross posted from 40 Years in the Desert.

This is normally not a phrase I use, even with the most annoying members of my family, but I think that for Dick Cheney, it is very clear that his complaints about George W. Bush remove any doubt about the fact, and furthermore it places his comments about the repudiation of his Manichean, and quite frankly delusional, view of the world by the voters in the proper context.

We need to call him a bitch, because to call him anything else grants him a credibility and gravitas that he simply does not deserve.*

The man, who has an uninterrupted record of failure in his life, recommending that Ford dump Rockefeller as VP, moving to contractors in the military, invading Iraq, etc., is now saying that George W. Bush was not hard line enough for him:

"In the second term, he felt Bush was moving away from him," said a participant in the recent gathering, describing Cheney's reply. "He said Bush was shackled by the public reaction and the criticism he took. Bush was more malleable to that. The implication was that Bush had gone soft on him, or rather Bush had hardened against Cheney's advice. He'd showed an independence that Cheney didn't see coming. It was clear that Cheney's doctrine was cast-iron strength at all times -- never apologize, never explain -- and Bush moved toward the conciliatory."

Truth be told, I really think that this is really all about two words, "Scooter Libby," and Cheney is upset, because he believes that without a full pardon, Libby may some day roll over on his flabby, lily-white ass.

He knows that Omertà means less in politics than it does in the Mafia, which means that it means nothing at all, and it terrifies him.

*Yes, I understand that the social dynamics of the situation, where in order to diminish a man you essentially call him a woman, and in order to diminish a woman, you essentially call her a man,† but you go to war with Dick Cheney with the societal norms you have---not the societal norms you might want or wish to have at a later time.
†See Clinton, Hillary and Pelosi, Nancy.

Cross posted from 40 Years in the Desert.

Normally, I'm not a big fan of protest theatrics, to my mind, Code Pink frequently does more harm than good to the cause, but I have to approve of ACT-UP's chaining themselves to the Capitol Rotunda today.

What's going on here is that during the campaign, Barack Obama promised to lift the ban on funding needle exchange programs, which:

• Do not encourage drug use.
• Reduce AIDS transmission.
• Reduce the cost to society.
• Provide an entry point with addicts for counseling.

The problem is that the White House submitted a budget to Congress still contained the ban on federal funding for needle exchange programs.

So this wasn't even a matter of his not fighting for the program, it's a matter of him submitting language reauthorizing a program that he explicitly campaigned against in his budget.

A president's budget is purely advisory. Congress can, and does, amend it, or ignore it, as they see fit, but he is unwilling to even leave out a bit of language authorizing a program he claims to oppose.

I'm with John Aravosis's take on this

1. The candidate promised to lift the ban.
2. The White House Web site reaffirmed the president's commitment to lifting the ban.
3. The White House Web site no longer reaffirms his commitment to lifting the ban.
4. The president now refuses to lift the ban.
5. The president actually affirmatively makes things worse by administratively supporting [and] defending the ban.
6. The spokesman reiterates the president's support for lifting the ban, some day, once Congress gets around to it.

There is a pattern to all this, whether it's his sucking up to homophobic screeds "reformed homosexual" Donnie McKlurkin, using legal arguments equating gay marriage with pedophilia and incest, refusing to take administrative actions to even modestly impede the anti-gay witch hunt in the military, and now affirmatively submitting anti-gay legislation to Congress.

Either there is some real homophobia here, or there has been a political calculus made that appealing to homophobia is a political win, because the opposition wants gay people dead.

At best, it's no different than the prosecutors in and around Baltimore who will routinely demand more severe sentences in plea bargains for black defendants, because they know that they have a better chance to convict a black man, even in front of a black jury.

I believe that this action has been taken because it can be seen as a gay issue, not in spite of it.

This is dog-whistle gay bashing, and it is quite deliberate.

Cross posted from 40 Years in the Desert.

Eric Boehlert agrees with William Kristol when he says that Todd Purdum's piece must be wrong when he says that Hit's simply not possible that multiple individuals would have concluded that she had Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

First, my background: I lived in Alaska from 1963 to 1969, I was 7 when I left, and my father worked at various levels in the state and local government, being the head of planning for Governor Bill Egan, and head of the State Charter Commission.

He maintains the friendships that he made there, and as such, he is in touch with many people who are very much a part of the political scene there, particularly on the Democratic Party side.

The other thing to realize is just how tiny the political scene is there. Everyone knows, and meets, everyone else on an almost daily basis when the legislature is in session, so if one person made a comment, like "I was looking through the DSM IV, and 'Narcissistic Personality Disorder' matched Palin to a 'T," it could rapidly become a talking point.

This makes this story likely, but the email that I got forwarded to me by my dad pretty much makes it a almost certainly true.

I would note that my dad quoted this individual to me in October saying essentially the same thing.

----- Forwarded Message ----
From: -------
To: Mr Ron Saroff <-------->
Sent: Thursday, July 2, 2009 8:31:38 AM
Subject: FW: Politico.com:

Further amusement --this time amongst the R's. Lots of bad substantive stuff to say about Palin, but frankly I think the sexism is disgusting from both parties and elsewhere.

Check out this page:

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0609/24392.html

I was one of the people who told TP [Todd Purdum] Sarah had a narcissistic personality disorder! And he told me I wasn't the first to say it.

Thank you,
THE POLITICO
Politico.com

Cross posted from 40 Years in the Desert.

One of the odd bit of news right now is that South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford has gone missing.

He ditched his security detail, he's turned off his cell phones, and no one can find him.

The interesting quote in the above story is from his wife:

Neither his wife, nor the state's lieutenant governor, nor police officials know where he is, South Carolina newspapers reported.

But Jenny Sanford told the Associated Press she wasn't worried.

"He was writing something and wanted some space to get away from the kids," she said while vacationing with the couple's four sons.

(emphasis mine)

She sounds to me like someone who is studiously avoiding trying to find the answer to this.

The real issue here is not Mark Sandford's personal life. It's the concern that self-hating individuals, and the closet does imply self-loathing, do not make good decisions on the public policy.

Here is a question, how many straight Republicans who practice marital fidelity does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A: Either one can do it themselves.

Update:
The governor has been located.

He has been hiking along the Appalachian Trail....Yeah, sure, I believe that.

A commenter on the 2nd link nails it:

brads77 Jun 23, 2009 7:28:12 AM
The only reason this guy would have hiked the Appalachian Trail is because he wanted to visit the Home of Deliverance--thinking that the movie was a love story.

Brads77 owes me a screen wipe.

Cross posted from 40 Years in the Desert.

Great googly moogly, their latest brief in court is even more absurd than their DOMA brief.

Hell, it's more absurd than the Twinkie Defense, it's the Jon Stewart Defense:

A federal judge yesterday sharply questioned an assertion by the Obama administration that former Vice President Richard B. Cheney's statements to a special prosecutor about the Valerie Plame case must be kept secret, partly so they do not become fodder for Cheney's political enemies or late-night commentary on "The Daily Show."

...

....He told the judge that if Cheney's remarks were published, then a future vice president asked to provide candid information during a criminal probe might refuse to do so out of concern "that it's going to get on 'The Daily Show' " or somehow be used as a political weapon.

Gee, I wish that I could tell police investigating a crime to go pound sand because somehow it might be embarrassing.

Making this even more absurd is that this argument was first put forward by Bush's now disgraced acting head of the Office of Legal Counsel Stephen Bradbury. (See also here and here)

Cross posted from 40 Years in the Desert.

Some times you notice something, and think, "I'm gonna have to post about it later," and by the time you do, the story has changed.

This is particularly true in corruption cases, where things move rather quickly.

Case in point, the corrupt, self dealing Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Stephen Friedman, who, "bought shares in Goldman Sachs in December, profiting to the tune of $1.7 million."

Ordinarily not a problem, since the Federal Reserve does not regulate investment banks, but for a little fact, that in September, the Federal Reserve allowed Goldman Sachs to become a bank holding company, and hence was regulated by the Federal Reserve, and most particularly was regulated by, you guessed it, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

But of course, as Yves Smith so eloquently notes, "A Conflict of Interest is Not a Conflict of Interest If It Involves Goldman," or as he said to the Wall Street Journal:

Last week, following questions from The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Friedman, 71 years old, disclosed he would step down from the New York Fed at year end. In an interview, he said he made the decision because the waiver letting him own Goldman stock and be a Goldman director expires at the end of the year. He added: "I see no conflict whatsoever in owning shares."

Except of course, as Ms. Smith notes, he bought shares in a company that he was regulating, and he did so before the waiver was approved.

This is insider trading, pure and simple.

Of course, today we see have justice, Wall Street style, as Mr Friedman has resigned, effectively immediately, from the NY Fed.

That's it. He gets to walk way and keep his money, there will almost certainly be no criminal investigation.

This is business as usual, and, yet again, all roads on corruption lead back to Goldman Sachs, the BCCI of Wall Street.

Taking these racketeers down them down must be a government priority.

Cross posted from 40 Years in the Desert.

We are getting reports now of what Timothy "Eddie Haskell" Geithner's stress test has determined, and it's clearly not reality.

Bank	Needs Capitalization	Amount
Bank of America	Yes	$34 B
Wells Fargo	Yes	$15B
Citigroup	Yes	$5B
Morgan Stanley	Yes	$1-2B
Goldman	No
MetLife	No
JP Morgan Chase	No
Bank of NY Mellon	No
American Express	No
Capital One	No
BB&T	No

This is a damn joke.

You have one "oh my God" number, for Bank of America, and it's about 50% of their market cap, but Citi, which is clearly in much worse shape is somehow better capitalized by a factor of 6.

This is simply not true, even after BoA's disastrous acquisition of Merrill Lynch and Countrywide.

Also note this joint statement from the Treasury Department, Federal Reserve, FDIC, and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which, to my untutored eye, appears to say that they are going to go with their cockamamie scheme to claim that capital is increased by swapping preferred for common stock.

It's an accounting trick, and what's more, it's one where the taxpayer has just taken a second haircut.

They are making great theater by pretending to talk tough and giving a month for the banks that need to to present a plan to raise capital, and 6 months to have this plan in action, but it's all a lie, since the plan may very well be, "suck on this, taxpaying rubes".

I disagree with former IMF chief economist Simon Johnson's analysis, which is that they are selectively leaking to create confusion in order to keep people from looking at whether the test was too hard on the banks.

I think that his analysis is incomplete. The "stress test" begins and ends with public relations. It's a sham, and it has always been a sham, intended to show that the government was serious about reigning in the big banks, without actually engaging in the necessary actions, like seizure of insolvent institutions that would actually be required for it to work.

Cross posted from 40 Years in the Desert.

I've been following this for some time, and now we have a credible explanation from Laura Rosen as to why a further investigation might have been quashed by Alberto Gonzales, that you did not break the law until Dick Cheney and His Evil Minions^™ told you to break the law:

3. Did Goss no longer have authority to certify the FISA Warrant when the call in question happened? The Time 2006 magazine piece on Harman coming on the radar in the Aipac case says that the tapped conversaation in question in which the possible alleged-by-some quid pro quo occurred was in "mid 2005." A former intelligence official familiar with the matter told me that Goss had certified a FISA warrant to target Harman based on that intercepted communication, but didn't know exactly what time it had occurred.

But a former intelligence community source tells me that DCI Goss no longer legally had the authority to certify FISA warrants at all beginning January 1, 2005 when the law creating the Office of the Director of National Intelligence went into effect. So if Goss did try to certify a FISA warrant to target Harman in 2005, sources tell me that would be unkosher at best, and legally suspect. That authority was no longer in the Director of Central Intelligence's hands and had gone to the Director of National Intelligence.

(Emphasis original)

The idea that the Bush White House was paranoid about various players pursuing their own agendas is not hard to believe, since both paranoia and ignoring the law was SOP for them, and they would naturally assume that everyone else would do the same.

On a note regarding the coverage of the coverage, it gets more interesting.

BTD at Talk Left notices that Jeff Stein who broke the Harman wiretap story for CQ, threw a hissy fit over suggestions that he was spoon fed self-serving leaks from Porter Goss's staffers when he was in Congress and the CIA, aka the "Gosslings".

Of note is that he complains about Ron Kampeas at JTA, and Laura Rosen at Foreign Policy magazine, but studiously ignores Zachary Roth at TPMMuckraker, who actually lists the most prominent "Gosslings":

• Patrick Murray
  
• Jay Jakub
  
• Michael Kostiw
  
• Merrell Moorhead

Who are a veritable rogues gallery of weirdness, as Roth makes clear when he notes that, "It says something about this crew that perhaps the best-regarded of them [Michael Kostiw] had his career derailed for shoplifting pork products."

Stein does not deny that they are his sources in his rant, and given his studious avoidance of the article that names the "Gosslings" even while not outing them, it certainly reasonable to conclude that one of his major sources, and more likely most of his major sources for his initial story, are these "Gosslings".

That being said, the problem with what appears to be ass covering and political vendettas is that there appears to be no way that they can all lose.

As Atrios notes when he rightly excoriates Harman for her new found discovery of the potential for abuse of surveillance, there are no good guys here:

The absurdity is obvious. Dirty f@#$ing hippies like me were horrified at the illegal warrantless wiretapping program and general expansion of the surveillance state in part because of the potential for political abuse (frankly, given the rubber stamp FISA court and rubber stamp Congress what other point would there be?). Jane Harman and her pal Joe Klein heaped scorn on dirty f@#$ing hippies for such crazy views. Harman gets caught up in what appears to be a perfectly legal wiretap not aimed directly at her, though the release of the details of it might be evidence of the kind of political abuse possible in any surveillance program. Suddenly Harman is a staunch defender the right of People Like Jane Harman to not be wiretapped.

(@#$ mine)

Cross posted from 40 Years in the Desert.

Alan Greenspan saying that illegal immigration aids the US economy, because he's wrong about everything:

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said that illegal immigration makes a "significant" contribution to U.S. economic growth by providing a flexible workforce.

Greenspan, appearing before a Senate subcommittee today, said illegal immigrants provide a "safety valve" as demand for workers rises and falls.

On a more serious note, look at what he is saying when you tease out the meaning, he is saying that illegal immigration is good because it drives down wages.....That's what "flexible workforce" and "safety valve," mean.

Alan Greenspan has always been a big fan of cheap labor.

There is no doubt that illegal immigration adds to GDP. The question is whether it contributes to per capita GDP, or the slightly more nebulous and hard to measure concept of the well being of our society.

½ of Europe's population died during the heyday of the Black Death, and it is indisputable that the GDP of Europe was lower in the years following the Bubonic Plague outbreak than before.

What is also indisputable is that the standard of living of those remaining rose at the time, as can be seen through records of increased wages, and the frantic passage of (largely ineffective) laws intended to reign in wages and reduce worker mobility.

The end question is not what our immigration policy should be, but rather what should our society look like, and how to we create an immigration policy most consistent with our professed values that creates this society.

To my mind, this is best addressed by extremely aggressive laws targeting employers who deliberately or negligently hire illegals, and not by harsh measures taken against desperate economic refugees.

Cross posted from 40 Years in the Desert.

So, the latest New York Times OP/ED page conservative affirmative action case has his debut editorial for the paper, and what is his trenchant analysis?

It's that the Republicans should have nominated Richard Milhaus Cheney as their presidential nominee in 2008.

I guess that's because Cheney is such a photogenic and friendly dude, whether talking about his penis (top picture), or simply snarling at the American public (bottom).

Of course this is not really what the author believes. He wanted Cheney to run because he would have been beaten like a baby seal while showing how the right wing orthodoxy needs to be repackaged: It's simply link bait, as Froomkin notes.

He wants people to read him, so Douthat says something outrageous, and finishes with, "And when he went down to a landslide loss, the conservative movement might - might! - have been jolted into the kind of rethinking that's necessary if it hopes to regain power."

No. Simply put, he is being a tool to get buzz, and it increasingly appears that the Republican Neocons are simply some sort of truly subversive performance art group.

I miss William Safire, who while right wing, had a brain, and could actually string together words in an attractive way.

Between Tierney, Kristol, and now Douthat, it appears that the sure sign that you are really, really, stupid is getting a regular Times OP/ED slot.

Yes, I know, I am really describing him being an asshole, not stupid, but his argument boils down to, "We should have nominated Dick Cheney, and we would have lost much better."

That's Doug "The Stupidest Motherf^%$er on the Planet" Feith stupid, and the New York Times already has a surfeit of stupid among their regular columnists, with Maureen Dowd, who covers politics like she is a junior high schooler dissing a classmates choice in shoes.

Still it appears that but it appears that Andrew Rosenthal, the Editorial Page Editor, feels that they need some more stupid.

Cross posted from 40 Years in the Desert.

I "embraced and extended" this from a post on 40 Years in the Desert, where I note how well Rachel Maddow ties the torture issue together, and leaves a finger pointing to the very top.

She links torture to political needs, as opposed to security needs. ( below, 13:23)

So, we already have reports, the famous "Mayberry Machiavelli" quote, that there was really no policy apparatus in the Bush White House, just a political one.

We also know that they were waterboarding some suspects six times a day for at least a month, which only makes sense if you want to coerce a lie, as opposed to uncovering actionable information.

The need to torture was less a policy decision than one to justify and gain support for an invasion if Iraq, and this invasion was driven to a large degree by a political consideration that "finishing the job" there would secure reelection for George W. Bush.

So the alpha and omega of the decision to torture was really politics and electioneering.

And whose office did politics and electioneering go through?  Whose office was at the center of any discussion of political calculus?

Karl Christian Rove, that's who.

From a political standpoint, he has to realize that constantly bringing up Bush and Cheney hurts the Republican party that he professes to love, so why is he bring them back, if just to defend them?

The answer is that it's not about the Republican Party, it's about keeping Karl Christian Rove out of jail.