Of course, NPR and especially PBS have also been obtuse on the whole health finance reform issue, as far as I can see. PBS in particular has been heavily funded for years by insurance companies, which may help explain their odd reluctance to push hard on the issue on McNeil-Lehrer, etc., though individual good programs have made it through.

And of course, if the President had not done what every other candidate city's country did, and not showed up, theClever would have known, from his profound insight, that "His ego and arrogance at refusing to campaign for Chicago insulted the IOC, and Chicago paid the price," right?

Meanwhile, it's useful to have it made so obvious that Limbaugh hates America.

In Washingtonese Republican: "cooperate, v.i.": Signifies an intent to deploy every conceivable, and some inconceivable obstacle to providing information.

In Washingtonese Republican: "N. N. will..." commonly used phrase: The lawyers of N.N. will ensure that the named individual makes no statements on the record, refuses to release any information, while also appearing regularly on Fox News to decry the witch-hunt against their client.

In Washingtonese Republican: "official inquiry," n.: Questions coming from Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and similar sources. No action on the part of socialists born in Kenya, or on the part of extremist conspirators against the American people (s.v.: Democrat Party) could ever constitute an 'official inquiry.'

Once translated, Senator Ensign's statement is perfectly clear to the lay reader from outside Washington!

In contrast, while shares for conventional shorting are always available for loan, large holders might well refuse to 'loan' their stocks to the shorters in the quantities needed for large-scale market manipulation.

A second safeguard used to be the uptick rule -- as I understand it, roughly that a short sale cannot be initiated except at a moment when a stock's price has, at least momentarily, trended upwards. This protects against death-spiral shorting: if no one is willing to buy a stock, the price will never tick up, and shorting will be limited.

With the ability to naked short without upticks, almost any firm could be driven to zero. This is no defense of Bear, Lehmann, or the other finance stocks that crashed or nearly crashed: I think Baker's point about the role of (conventional) shorting of their stock is relevant.

Again, as everywhere else: markets work when they are structured, transparent, and set up to avoid manipulation. Markets are not 'natural', but human-created phenomena that depend on human regulation of one kind or another.

The Naderites and purists are always with us, but in politics, it's quite important to recognize the limited usefulness of what they say. Has the Obama administration's every decision be what I would want? No, of course not. Politics remains politics. Perhaps Obama compromised too early on some issues, and perhaps he's found executive privilege and secrecy rather tempting himself, now that he's president. But there is a vast world of difference between Obama's actions and everything Bush or McCain would be doing, and we need to keep that in sight -- even while criticizing mis-steps and lack of mettle.

Criticize away, but I simply don't want to hear the "Obama's just a Republican-light": it's not true, and it's certainly not useful.

I'd be happy to see them duobated again and again, myself!

Petards away, lads...wait for them to offer themselves for hoisting. Smart politics!

Once again, the Obama team has offered the right wing a juicy opportunity to paint themselves into a yet narrower and yet more unpleasant corner -- an opportunity some on the reactionary right will be unable to resist, even if the party machinery and the Senators are reluctant to go there.

One often sees situations where polarization allows extremists and dead-enders on both sides of a conflict to play a disproportionate role and to seize the political oxygen from moderates and pragmatists. Obama's political genius -- no doubt enabled by the frustration of the last 25 years for Democrats -- has been to mobilize right-wing polarization in a way that reinforces moderate and pragmatic support for him without his having to cede much ground to left-wing outliers. He's in an apparent win-win confrontation with the Republican base -- they get to be the 'true' Republicans in the public's eyes, and he gets the support of independents as well as Democrats. But in our system, that gives him all the marbles at the end of the game.

It will be interesting to see if the Democrats can build on this strategy into the 2010 elections -- if it works, the Republican position may well weaken even further.

But there's a deeper level at which I think Josh Marshall et al are right: Wall Street and its political clients love to trumpet the virtues of 'free markets', or the unrestricted play of capitalism, etc. etc. -- while ignoring the elementary insight behind all political economy, which is that 'free markets' (or any other kind) depend on larger interaction frameworks provided by law and by states. There's no alternative.

(This, as a sidebar, is why the same people who love to praise 'totally free markets' today also love to praise the 'rule of law' and a certain kind of Whiggish state in history).

But particularly in hedge fund world, it became far too easy to drink the Kool-Aid, far to easy to believe that they really were brave free marketeers, not people playing arbitrage agaisnt a large state-backed regulatory system, as they were. Now they confront the ugly (for them, not for me!) reality that state power, being the precondition for their kind of game, also retains the power to change the rules and remake the game, and there's not much they can do about it, except seek to influence the state even more than they already do.

From celebrating their cleverness in circumventing the rules two years ago, hedge fundies are now whining that we the people are changing the rules and that's not fair!!

At this level, then, Josh is entirely right -- not that playing chicken with President Obama is not a good business plan, but that playing chicken with the state is not a good business plan.

Warrick and Finn do avoid the gross amorality of Shane's article in the NYT, and do cite sources who point out the illegality, immorality, and likely ineffectiveness of torture as an intelligence-gathering technique in either the short or the long run, to their credit. But they still fall into the trap of reporting as if there were any serious controversy about these issues. They thus miss the torturers' strategy of sowing confusion by their self-serving claims about how well torture worked: the reporters thus become inadvertent agents of defending torture even though they themselves may well abhor it.

Warrick's and Finn's start OK, describing the immediate abuse that Khalid Sheik Mohammad received upon capture, rather than the application of traditional interrogation techniques. It seems that the CIA barely considered traditional interrogation, but turned immediately to brutalization and threats (thus compromising from the outset the value of the information they sought from Mohammad).

The article then detours away from reality. The reporters begin by reporting the torturers' assertion that congressional Democratic legislative leaders briefed on torture techniques did not object. This is false: several did, including Jane Harman, but in secret as the terms of the briefings required; additionally, such claims are disingenuously misleading, since these briefings were under tight security rules that prohibited the Democrats from talking about, much less objecting to what they learned about. The reporters treat CIA leakers' evidence as of equal value as reality, which under the circumstances shows a lack of critical facility on the reporters' part: the sources they quote here had every reason to lie and distort, no?

They also cite "former high-ranking officials" at the CIA (Hi, Porter!) claiming that all sorts of juicy information was obtained by torturing Muhammad. Here again, the value of such assertions is extremely dubious, as close analysis elsewhere has shown over and over.

Indeed, when the reporters turn from CIA insider's spin and consider the actual evidence that 'torture worked', they quickly reveal it to have been a pretty thin brew. Although the article repeats the assertion that post-9/11 urgency and a fear of imminent attack facilitated the turn to torture -- (something that is plausible enough, but not a justification) -- when they report the actual results, they show that the claims for success are either temporally impossible, or not about immediate prevention at all. For example, they pass on a CIA claim that several torture victims were "pivotal sources because of their ability and willingness to provide their analysis and speculation about the capabilities, methodologies and mindsets of terrorists." No ticking bomb in sight, I'm afraid: for this kind of work, torture would actually lessen the value of anything these men said, for obvious reasons.

In short, they write an article that is critical and balanced about the torturers' claims...but don't see that their very desire to be 'balanced' supports the torturers' agenda. It's a difficult situation as a reporter, I'm sure, and they do a much more credible job than Shane's 'analysis' in the NYT, I'd say.

You phrase it this way, and fair enough, I'll take a shot: ""Where is the line between acceptable interrogation practices and unacceptable torture?"

Being old-fashioned, let's start with a dictionary, the OED, who tell us that torture is "The infliction of severe bodily pain, as punishment or a means of persuasion." (For a documented historical analysis of why torture was thought, in medieval and early modern Europe, to elicit truth, you might consider looking at Lisa Silverman's book Tortured subjects : pain, truth, and the body in early modern France, which has its flaws, but goes into the literature on the subject.)

So, acceptable interrogation practices are those that do not involve the 'infliction of severe bodily pain.' In fact, I'd go further and say that interrogation in general should involve no infliction of pain (thus removing the red herring of deciding whether pain is 'severe' or not). Interrogation can involve persuasion, the presentation of facts and evidence (including shocking evidence), and in cases of great seriousness, it can involve lying or false information given to the subject. Interrogation in the cases we're talking about here always meant imprisonment, as well. There's no need to play down that interrogation is not a pleasant experience for the person interrogated, nor that it may involve attempts to affect the subject's psychological state (including making the subject fearful, angry, or intimidated). But interrogation does not and should not involve the infliction of pain, including psychological pain.

The reason, as I said above, is that once pain is involved, the subject has overwhelming incentives to say whatever the interrogator wants...or whatever the subject thinks the interrogator wants to hear. And under such circumstances, the subject's answers become utterly unreliable, since they will likely contain truths and untruths mixed indiscriminately -- an outcome that is worse for an investigation than either truth, or untruth, or even evasions.

Pain, or the immediate threat of pain, renders the subject's statements into nonsense. This is why interrogation, no matter how intense, cannot and should not involve inflicting pain at all. Is that clear enough for you?

We've heard a number of very experienced interrogators, and a major agency (the FBI) stand behind this view that interrogation does not need, and should avoid, the infliction of pain. The FBI has no strong institutional incentive to speak up, here, as far as I can see. Of course, everybody like to be the 'hero' of the moment, but that's hardly relevant. In contrast, when people who did inflict pain--that is, the torturers-- (like Hayden, the other day), they have every incentive to distort the truth of what they report, and even NPR is reporting that Hayden's statements appear to be baldly contradicted by the available evidence.

The current Carl Hulse article (as of 10:44 PM EDT) is considerably changed, and I would say considerably better. The article no longer characterizes reconciliation as 'arcane' or 'obscure', but simply describes it as a tactic that can be used to circumvent filibusters. This is accurate and doesn't load the issue, as the previous characterization did. Moreover, the article now mentions that reconciliation has been used to pass major policies in the past by the Repbulicans, and gives Senator McConnell's statement that using reconciliation would heighten partisan tension as a Senatorial statement, not as a description of fact.

Again, I have no idea whether passing health care reform under reconciliation rules is the best tactic, or whether it's necessary, or even a good idea, politically. But I'm very pleased that a New York Times article now reports on this issue, rather than recycling cliches. That's a real improvement, and Hulse and the NYT editors deserve credit for the improvements.