I can't help marveling at the fact that the "Tea Party" health care protesters at the capitol today recited the pledge of allegiance "to drive the liberals crazy," completely oblivious to the fact that the pledge of allegiance was written by Christian Socialist, Francis Bellamy.

Most of the people shocked by today's news that President Obama has been named the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize apparently missed (or didn't fully digest) the news of the major deal the administration just struck with Iran (shipping off their raw uranium to be enriched in Russia under IAEA supervision into medical grade uranium, which is unsuitable for use in weapons manufacturing).

If this deal works out (and there's no reason to think it won't at this point), we'll have achieved the real potential for an island of stability in the region, with Iran no longer posing a major threat to Israel or other Western interests in the region, and with Iran retaining its right to use nuclear technologies (such as nuclear power) for peaceful civilian purposes.

There's been scarcely any coverage at all in the American press about just how important the deal that the administration made with Iran is.

So why the Nobel Peace Prize now?

Because people who make promising peace deals under difficult, politically charged circumstances are exactly the kind of people the Nobel Peace Prize was designed to honor, so I really don't understand what all the skepticism is about.

Oh, yeah. Right, Almost no Americans have even heard about this deal and what it means, because the press has shown barely any interest in discussing it. That probably has something to do with it.

Rod Dreher of Belief.net offers further analysis of a budding new Wiki project to rewrite the Holy Bible to eliminate what some young conservatives apparently now view as liberal bias in the scriptures (via Harpers; also blogged on MetaFilter).

To hear modern-day right-wingers tell it, any talk at all of equal access to health care or public welfare is wholly inconsistent with America's historical legacy of rugged individualism, and the use of tax revenue to fund social programs amounts to a form of government sponsored theft or a program of wealth redistribution befitting only a Communist state.

But back in 1952, under the Truman administration, Superman took a much different view, as shown in this public service ad from the time period:

"Superman Says: Hop on the Welfare Bandwagon"

It probably wouldn't hurt to get Superman's voice back into the debate. So why not print this vintage ad out for yourself, reproduce it in the form of a handbill, and distribute copies at town hall meetings and other public events on health care reform? Or maybe just give a copy to any Mr. Stanton's you might encounter in daily life.

Then ask them this: If we didn't equate tax subsidized social programs and welfare with Communism in the 1950s, early in The Cold War, at a time in history when anti-Communist sentiment in America was at its apex, why do we so readily equate the two now?

This cartoon provides a stunning illustration of America's dramatic political drift to the right over the last few decades. We've moved much farther to the right than where we were even during the era of anti-Communist hysteria and McCarthyism!

Wall Street Journal affiliated online financial news site MarketWatch today reports stunning new revelations about how contributions from the credit card industry may have swayed the votes of the 70 legislators who voted against the The Credit Cardholders Bill of Rights Act.

Noting that the legislative measure enjoyed nearly "universal support," MarketWatch puts on its thinking cap and wonders why so many senators nevertheless opted not to vote for the bill. Well, luckily somebody did a study, as MarketWatch reports:

"A look at campaign finance data by MAPLight.org found that banks and their lobbying groups pumped $271,029 into Congressional campaigns just two weeks before the April 30 vote. And in some cases, the cash coincidently appears to have found sympathetic elected representatives."

So who turns up on the list of wascally-wabbits in congress that MarketWatch specifically names as having received industry funds only to go on to vote "No" on the act?

1. Addison Wilson (R)
2. John Boehner (R)

So which of these morally bankrupt lawmakers' who allowed the industry machinery to sway their votes does MarketWatch deem deserving of the shame of having their photo carried prominently next to its explosive investigative report, and on which of these Will-of-the-People-defying scoundrels in congress does the Rupert Murdoch owned property see fit to turn its merciless analytical gaze most harshly?

Well, naturally, Democratic legislator Barney Frank, who voted "Yes" on the act, because he, too, accepted some industry funds, and it only stands to reason that if those funds weren't able to buy his vote this time around, they must have represented a down-payment on some even more excoriable vote to be delivered up to Frank's credit card industry puppet masters down the road.

So let's all just remember who the real enemy is here, people.

Here's something I don't get. McClatchy and others are reporting that the latest federal budget deficit projections show the 2010 annual budget deficit expected to come in at 1.58 trillion. A staggering sum, to be sure, but still down from 1.84 trillion projected previously in the year, as McClatchy notes in its own negatively slanted report.

Sounds like good news, right?

Well, no, of course not. That might lead the public to the mistaken conclusion that it's possible for economic conditions to actually improve with a liberal Democrat at the helm, prompting MSNBC to report the news under the not in anyway misleading headline: "White House Projects Bigger Deficits, Debt"

[Update: Made some corrections due to confusing language in the initial reports on this story.]

With all the furor surrounding the recent health care reform town hall meetings, with protesters seemingly intent on subverting any chance at real dialogue or discussion, I'm left wondering something.

Where are the Free Speech Zones these same political interests supported so enthusiastically under the Bush administration now? During the run-up to the Iraq War and throughout the previous administration's tenure, the current crop of home-grown right-wing jihadists insisted that Free Speech Zones were necessary to ensure public order.

Isn't it abundantly clear by now that ensuring public order is the farthest thing from these astro-turf activists' minds? So by their own reasoning, shouldn't we be consigning the protesters to Free Speech Zones?

Consider this my modest proposal for how to address the problem of what should be a civil dialog increasingly drowned out by an exceedingly vocal few.

In his latest blistering salvo against DOJ's legal brief filings, Glenn Greenwald makes a number of very potent and alarming charges against the Obama DOJ that unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) don't stand up well under closer scrutiny.

As a former constitutional attorney and occasional contributing writer for libertarian think-tank, the Cato Institute, you might expect Greenwald to really know his stuff when it comes to matters of constitutional law.

But it's hard to see how one can interpret some of Greenwald's more strident recent attacks on the administration's legal positions as not being either ill-informed or deliberately misleading.

Alleging that the Obama administration is continuing the Bush policy of "expanding" states secret powers and even claiming new powers for itself, Greenwald writes (emphasis mine):

"...beyond even the outrageously broad 'state secrets' privilege invented by the Bush administration and now embraced fully by the Obama administration, the Obama DOJ has now invented a brand new claim of government immunity..."

In similarly breathless tones, he writes at another point that, with its latest legal filing, the Obama administration has created "a brand new 'sovereign immunity' claim of breathtaking scope -- never before advanced even by the Bush administration."

Let's unpack and inspect each of these alarming claims in turn:

Claim 1: The Bush Administration Dramatically Expanded the Scope of State Secrets Powers and the New DOJ Is Carrying these Expanded Powers Forward

The first part of this claim isn't a claim about the Obama administration at all, but nevertheless, it provides a crucial underpinning of Greenwald's broader greivances.

Only, as Gertrude Stein once famously remarked, "There's no there there."

We who criticized the Bush administration may be correct in saying Bush grossly abused his state secrets powers, but granting that fact, it's not at all clear that Bush actually expanded the scope of these powers.

Greenwald frequently asserts that, through previous legal precedent, state secrets powers allowed the executive to block specific pieces of evidence from the courts, but that the executive before Bush never had the power to dismiss whole cases or to prevent non-privileged evidence from undergoing judicial review.

But there are two previous legal precedents that, when taken together, show that both in principle and in practice, the executive already held this power long before Bush.

The first of these precedents is the one that originally established "state secrets" powers in the US, the Supreme Court decision in the case of US v. Reynolds. This decision explicitly granted the executive branch the authority to invoke state secrets privileges in its own discretion, without the privileged evidence being subject to any form of judicial review or further legal challenge.

In other words, the decision gave the executive branch and only the executive branch the power to say what is or isn't a privileged state secret.

Like it or not, this precedent alone effectively gives the executive branch the power to dismiss any civil lawsuit it can reasonably claim touches on national security issues. All the government has to do to shut down any such trial from this point forward is to declare whatever evidence is entered into consideration off limits under state secrets powers.

Technically, such a case could still be brought before the courts, but since the government has the authority to declare any evidence even potentially entered into consideration as privileged, it can ultimately force the case to be thrown out of the courts on the basis that it has no legal standing.

But that's not the only precedent that undermines Greenwald's assertions on state secrets: In 1992, a federal appeals court decision ruled that the courts can't even allow a trial to proceed if doing so might touch on evidence protected under state secrets powers.

The court ruled that a previous court's decision to dismiss a state secrets related case had to stand without the appeals court even taking any new evidence, whether it was declared privileged or not, into consideration--in fact, the court ruled that it couldn't even examine the new evidence, because the application of the state secrets privilege didn't permit it:

This time the plaintiffs file over 2,500 pages of unclassified documentary evidence supporting their claims that the contractors were negligent in their design and implementation of the weapons systems aboard the Stark. The appeals court finds that regardless of the amount of evidence entered, to allow the trial would be to potentially infringe on the US government's "state secrets" privilege (see March 9, 1953). "[N]o amount of effort could safeguard the privileged information," the court rules.

So previous precedent held that the executive could declare any particular piece of evidence it wanted off limits, and the 1992 federal appeals court decision ruled that even allowing a trial that might bump up against state secrets privileged evidence to proceed posed an unacceptable risk to national security.

Putting these two rulings together, the legal precedent for the government to throw out any case it likes under state secrets privileges was already established even before Clinton took office. In using states secret powers to block public scrutiny of his torture and wiretapping programs, Bush didn't actually claim new legal authority for himself, as Greenwald argues. He just grossly abused legal authority that he already had.

Claim 2: The Obama Administration Has Created "a Brand New 'Sovereign Immunity' Claim of Breathtaking Scope"

This part of Greenwald's argument is a little bewildering to see coming from someone with a legal background. 

The United States federal government, like every government in history, has always been understood to enjoy the protections of sovereign immunity--meaning, the federal government can't be sued unless it consents to being sued.

This isn't a new claim of "breathtaking scope": it's been the law of the land from the beginning of the US legal system, with exceptions only in a few narrow circumstances defined in statute under which the federal government has waived its sovereign immunity to a limited extent.

Though his motives are likely much purer, Greenwald writes about "sovereign immunity" as credulously as right-wing pundits wrote about "habeas corpus," acting as if it were some novel, controversial legal theory rather than a bedrock principle of the US legal system.   

* * * *

In offering these responses to Greenwald, it's not my intent to dismiss his arguments all together, just to set the record straight on a few of his more sensational and pointed recent criticisms. I have no doubt that Greenwald's commitment to government accountability and the defense of civil liberties are genuine and that his contributions in these areas are valuable.

I also have no doubt that his recent attacks on President Obama's DOJ are meant to shed light into dark places--places that could definitely stand to see more light.

But unfortunately, I think he's misinterpreting the administration's actions and motives in certain fundamental ways, looking for instantly-gratifying, short term outcomes for problems that require more carefully measured approaches to stand any chance of achieving substantive long-term change.

Sensationalizing every legal brief filing that comes along as if each one is the final nail in the coffin of democracy isn't helping to foster the kind of calm, level-headed approach to policy-making we need right now.

And among the many lessons the Bush years should have taught us, isn't one that the executive branch doesn't always have to claim new powers to make itself more powerful? If left unchallenged, it can usually achieve the same effect simply by abusing powers it already has.

There's a lot of very reasonable outrage these days about the role the financial sector has played in the recent downturn in the US economy. Whether the focus of ire has been executive compensation schemas that reward excessive short-term risk taking at the expense of long-term investor value, know widely-recognized abuses of accepted accounting practices to skirt regulatory requirements, or a certain culture of wanton greed, arrogance and opportunism that many people now identify with the financial services industry generally, the financial sector seems to be public enemy number one these days. And justifiably so.

So it only makes sense that government proposals aimed at bailing out troubled financial services institutions are met with hostility as well.

But lately, the outrage from some quarters has begun to focus on perceptions of a sluggish, ineffective or even fraudulent response to the crisis from President Obama's Treasury Secretary Geithner, and it's my view that these criticisms are in large part unfair and have deliberately been stoked by Wall Street interests to push back against what should under the present circumstances be overwhelming popular support for expanding Geithner's regulatory authority.

Now, I don't mean to say that the critics themselves are politically motivated or that their critiques are disingenuous (although even the best pundits, like the rest of us, are likely susceptible to the same basic ego-driven impulses that make the media generally such fertile grounds for gotcha journalism). No doubt, much of the criticism is well-intentioned and raises serious points that under different circumstances might be valid. In fact, some of the criticisms most definitely succeed in raising points that the administration should be pressed to take into account in its ongoing formulations and applications of policy in this area.

But far too much of the criticism ignores the central, intractable problem that confronts the administration in its in my view earnest efforts to resolve the financial crisis in a way that isn't virtually guaranteed to bring the US economy to long-tem ruin: The complex web of risk entanglements created by complex derivatives products like credit default swaps and synthetic collateralized debt obligations.

Here's a hard figure to consider: The global market for financial derivatives is valued at $530 trillion dollars, with the credit default swap market accounting for 10% (or roughly $5.3 trillion) of that market alone. Writing for Huffington Post, David Paul explains how AIG's collapse came about as a direct result of its approximately $450 billion in credit default swap obligations. Even now, financial analysts estimate AIG's total derivatives exposure to be somewhere around $1.6 trillion, and some of these contracts have terms spanning in the range of 50 to 100 years.

So why not just let the AIG take the hit, forget about "winding down" these contracts and just let them go belly-up?

Well, here's the catch. AIG, through its regulated insurance business, is among other things the nation's largest guarantor of bonds. AIG guarantees bonds through its regulated insurance business, which remained relatively healthy after its initial losses played out (as opposed to its unregulated financial products division, which sold the trillions of dollars worth of exotic derivatives contracts that got them into trouble).

But under the revised bankruptcy rules adopted under Bush II, thanks to intensive lobbying on the part of the "International Swaps and Derivatives Association," derivatives contracts get preferred repayment treatment during the receivership settlement process.

In other words, if AIG as a whole were just allowed to go completely belly-up as a natural consequence of its risky activities on the derivatives market, AIG would be legally required to pay out all its derivatives obligations before paying off any of its other obligations under the new bankruptcy rules. Its derivatives contract obligations couldn't even be dismissed through the receivership process like ordinary contracts. Effectively, that means only the derivatives contract counterparties would get paid, and everyone else that AIG might be obligated to pay would be left holding the bag, because AIG doesn't have even a fraction of what it would take to pay off its derivatives obligations on hand.

And that would be just the beginning of a much broader cascade effect, toppling other major financial institutions like dominos. Another immediate consequence would be that any state or municipal bonds for which AIG is the guarantor would have to be revalued, potentially becoming worthless. This would make it next to impossible for states and municipalities to borrow to raise capital for operating costs and infrastructure projects in the future, since potential investors aren't very likely to park their money in bonds that could turn worthless overnight. And institutional investors like deposit banks whose holdings include bonds guaranteed by AIG would suddenly find those assets turn to liabilities on their books, potentially pushing them into under-capitalized status, which in turn could trigger another round of credit default swap contracts on the bank's own bond issues.

This isn't just a worst-case-scenario I'm describing. This is a baseline scenario. In the current reality of our financial system, the total collapse of AIG and one or two other major institutions could bring down hundreds of other institutions, forcing far more substantial outlays of public funds than anyone inside or outside the administration has proposed to date--public expenditures required in part to meet the massive FDIC deposit insurance obligations created with the collapse of so many deposit banks all at once and in part to mount the massive Great Depression-scale public assistance programs we'll need to keep millions of destitute Americans from starving.

I'm not trying to offer these reminders as apologia on behalf of those in the financial services sector who got us into this mess. Nor do I for one minute accept the arguments of those defending large bonuses for those executives and investment traders who bear the brunt of the blame for creating our toxic economic landscape. And I personally find the arrogant, unrepentant and even defiant attitudes shared among many of the worst offenders on Wall Street to be a repugnant reminder of just how much greed can twist a person's loyalties and personal priorities.

But none of that changes the underlying reality that neither taxpayers nor the US government has enough bargaining clout at this stage in this financial crisis to unilaterally call the shots. Unfortunately, Wall Street does. And it's going to take a lot of morally unsatisfying negotiation, compromise, and patience in the short term before the balance of power shifts enough to even consider playing real hardball.