The Obfuscation Report

Orly Taitz... apparently not only is she a Shitty Lawyer.... she's a Shitty Dentist.

2009-08-05T11:43:00.000-04:00

CASE# / DATE NAME / CASE TYPE

718165 DEFENDANT ORLY TAITZ
09/30/1993 MALPRACTICE – DENTAL

S41640 RESPONDENT ORLY TAITZ
02/27/1998 SMALL CLAIMS APPEAL

00CC11017 DEFENDANT ORLY TAITZ
09/14/2000 MALPRACTICE – DENTAL

03CC04813 DEFENDANT ORLY TAITZ
03/25/2003 MALPRACTICE-MEDICAL

03CC12382 DEFENDANT ORLY TAITZ
10/10/2003 BREACH OF CONTRACT/WARRANTY

03CC12364 DEFENDANT ORLY TAITZ
10/09/2003 MALPRACTICE – DENTAL

04CC05196 DEFENDANT ORLY TAITZ
04/23/2004 BREACH OF CONTRACT/WARRANTY

04CC06308 DEFENDANT ORLY TAITZ
05/28/2004 CONTRACT – SPEC PERFORMANCE

AP14265 APPELLANT ORLY TAITZ
12/16/2004 MISC COMPLAINTS – OTHER

05CC12538 DEFENDANT ORLY TAITZ D.D.S 11/23/2005 MALPRACTICE-MEDICAL

06CC12669 DEFENDANT ORLY TAITZ D.D.S. 12/06/2006 MEDICAL MALPRACTICE

Orly Taitz... soon to be disbarred... we hope.

2009-08-05T11:40:00.001-04:00

Disbarment of Orly Taitz Sought by California Bar

Even though any questions about President Obama's eligibility to serve as President were put to rest last June with the release of certified proof of his birth in Honolulu, Hawaii on August 4, 1961, which proof has been accepted and validated by the Governor of Hawaii, the United States Congress, former Vice President cheney, over twenty United States District Courts and the United States Supreme Court on at least five separate occasions, some extremists have refused to let the matter die. Just recently, an April Fool's Hoax alleging that the President claimed Indonesian citizenship in his college days, began circulating around the internet.

FINALLY there seems to be a chance that the madness will soon end. The Chief Trial Counsel of the State Bar of the State of California has filed a complaint against Orly Taitz, one of the more outspoken of the conspiracy obsessed, a woman who was unable to gain entry to an Accredited Law School and whose career seems to consist mainly of frivolous attacks on anyone within range. With luck, and with the wisdom that the Courts have unanimously shown when dealing with this ludicrous issue, Ms. Taitz will soon no longer be a practicing attorney. We can only hope it comes soon.

A PDF link to the entire complaint can be found on this site:

http://www.obamaconspiracy.org/2009/04/complaint-against-orly...

Below, I reprint only the Preface to the Complaint. For details, consult the full complaint (it is approximately 30 pages long).

Complaint to the State Bar of California

IN RE: ORLY TAITZ
STATE BAR NO. 223433

Office of the Chief Trial Counsel/Intake
The State Bar of California
1149 South Hill Street
Los Angeles, California 90015-2299

Preface

A California attorney has decided that President Obama is ineligible to be president, and has taken on the mission of removing him from office -- by force, if necessary. On at least two occasions, she has openly called for armed rebellion by the military, to arrest and imprison the elected President.

Her name is Orly Taitz. Using the power of the Internet, including blogs, online radio and television shows, and YouTube, she has become the national leader of a fringe movement. She has literally thousands of followers who think she is waging a lonely battle to uphold the Constitution, in the face of a conspiracy to place a usurper in the White House. Because her cause is so important, she has ignored the laws of the United States, established court procedures, and specifically, the California Rules of Professional Conduct. Specific violations are alleged below.

She has filed three lawsuits in California (two of which have been dismissed), and unsuccessfully attempted to file a fourth in federal court in Washington, D.C. Having been unable to achieve her goal by legal action, she has begun encouraging her followers nationwide to organize themselves as wholly unlawful "Citizens Grand Juries," and making "presentations" to lead them in indicting President Obama on criminal "charges". Already, a group of citizens in Georgia issued an "indictment" of the President, and "served" it on government officials, threatening violence if their "indictment" was ignored. Another such "indictment" is coming in early May, under her direction. In addition:

1. She has accused the following federal officials of treason and called for their indictments:

a) All the justices of the Supreme Court,
b) All the members of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate,
c) Attorney General Eric Holder, Solicitor General Elena Kagan, and other federal officers,
d) and, of course, President Obama himself.

2. She has personally confronted two Supreme Court justices, when they made public appearances. On both occasions, she improperly tried to engage them in improper ex parte discussion of her case before the Court.

3. At her confrontation with Chief Justice Roberts, she gave two suitcases full of documents to his security detail, later claiming that she had "filed" a Motion for Reconsideration in one case, and a new lawsuit -- though she paid no filing fee, failed to file with the clerk's office, and showed no proof of service on opposing counsel. When her documents were not placed on the Supreme Court docket, she accused Justice Roberts of further treason and demanded his resignation.

4. She has openly encouraged and advised these unlawful "Citizens Grand Juries". In Georgia on March 28, she "presented the case" before a "Citizens Grand Jury" of 25 people, who then issued an indictment of President Obama on charges of fraud. The "indictment" was then "served" on the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, and on the Georgia Attorney General, on Georgia's Speaker of the House, and on Georgia's President of the Senate.

http://www.riseupforamerica.com/index.html

She apparently also plans to "do the presentation," as if a prosecutor, at the "Illinois Citizen's Federal Grand Jury" on May 2. http://americangrandjury.org/grand-jury-updates-from-georgia-... She believes she's some sort of "National Prosecutor" at these "Fake Grand Juries," and more will surely follow.

5. She has recruited dozens of active and retired military for her crusade, including retired Major General Carroll D. Childers. She published (and thus, endorsed) his statement about President Obama that:

"He is an interloper, a usurper, a fake, a scam artist, a Chicago crook, a recipient of bribes and gratuitous income for which he paid no tax, a socialist (perhaps only a communist or Marxist), and a grave danger to the future of America ... [Congress and the Supreme Court] are all complicit and should all be severely punished for having failed in their sworn oath to protect and defend the constitution ... [instead of swearing him into office, Justice] Roberts ... should have immediately had Obama arrested and deported.

"Other than this, my key short-term complaint is that he has not had a heart attack in office."

http://defendourfreedoms.us/2009/02/24/major-general-commandi...

6. On April 4, she attended a "Machine Gun Shoot" in Kentucky, where she actively recruited plaintiffs for her various actions and was at least partially successful. According to her own accounting, she signed up at least 20 new "plaintiffs for my legal actions," presented "a case for fraud" against President Obama in a public appearance with the man who convened the Georgia "Citizens Grand Jury," and collected "at least 300 signed indictments". However, upon information and belief, she is not licensed to practice law in the State of Kentucky.

7. She repeatedly instructs her followers to write, call, and otherwise harrass the U.S. Supreme Court, federal courts, U.S. Attorneys, and other governmental officials, demanding that they investigate the President, arrest, and imprison him. On March 14, she wrote:

[I have been] criss crossing this country talking to Justices of the Supreme court, Representatives, Senators, FBI agents, Attorney Generals, US attorneys, telling all of them, what is wrong with you? Did some evil magician put a spell on the men in this country and they stopped being men? Why are you afraid to speak up, to stand up for you constitution? Why are you afraid to tell this arrogant jerk from Africa and Indonesia - You need to go home, you cannot be a president and commander in chief because you are not a Natural born Citizen. To be a Natural born Citizen you have to have both parents as citizens. Your father was never a US citizen and you don't qualify and you also spit us in the face by refusing to unseal your vital records. There is no proof that you are even a citizen. For all we know, you need to go back to Kenya and wait for your green card, and that after we try you for all the crimes perpetrated upon American citizens.

http://defendourfreedoms.us/2009/03/14/i-did-it.aspx

By openly advocating armed revolt, accusing virtually the entire federal government of treason, and using poisonous invective against President Obama, she is making it significantly more likely that someone will attempt to assassinate the President of the United States. I recognize that, however distasteful, many of her actions are likely protected by the First Amendment. However, in her capacity as a California attorney, she has violated numerous Rules of Professional Conduct, as detailed below.

Blue Dog "Democrats" Shitting Where They Eat.

2009-07-30T09:43:00.001-04:00

Conservative Democrats Most Vulnerable If Health Reform Fails

by Sahil Kapur at HuffPO

The failures of Democrats to overhaul health care under Clinton and Harry Truman both led to dramatic Republican gains in the following elections, with Democrats losing their control of Congress both times.

"A lot of the conservative Democrats who voted against [Clinton's health care] bill got swept out in 1994," Lux said. Republicans gained 54 additional seats in the House of Representatives and eight in the Senate that year -- mostly in conservative states and swing districts -- regaining control of Congress for the first time in half a century.

The influential conservative Democrats who are combating their own party's efforts to overhaul health care could ironically wind up being among the biggest losers if the effort to pass comprehensive legislation founders too badly.

Health care reform is so central to the Democratic agenda that its collapse could gravely damage the party's stature in 2010.

The self-styled fiscal conservatives who call themselves Blue Dogs in the House fear the effects of being labeled as liberals in their predominantly right-leaning districts. But history suggests that they should be more afraid of fueling a Republican electoral resurgence.

"If [President] Obama's popularity and the Democratic party's approval rating goes downhill, that will hurt the Blue Dogs and those in conservative districts more than anybody else," Mike Lux, a progressive political strategist, told the Huffington Post.

In previous elections, the prospects of conservative Democrats in both the House and Senate have been strongly linked to the overall popularity of their party.

In 2006 and 2008, the fiscally conservative Blue Dogs, gained 15 seats -- mostly in conservative districts -- while capitalizing on high Democratic popularity across the nation. During the same period, 11 of the 14 Democratic gains in the Senate were in conservative or toss-up states. By contrast, in the 2002 and 2004 elections, when Republicans added to their majorities in both chambers, their pickups were mostly in conservative and swing states.

There's also a precedent for health care being a make-or-break issue for Democrats.

"The reason we lost so badly in '94," said Lux, who was an adviser to Bill Clinton at the time, "was that working class voters of medium and low incomes -- who turned out in big numbers in 1992 -- were incredibly discouraged by us not delivering on health care."

Meanwhile, Michael Tomasky writes in the Guardian that most of the Blue Dogs shouldn't be so fearful, period.

"To hear them talk sometimes, you'd think if they depart one iota from a basically conservative agenda, the voters will toss them out," he writes.

But Tomasky's elaborate analysis of the 2008 election results suggests that very few of them are really in danger of being voted out of office for being too liberal.

"Yes, some Democrats have to be very careful and not be seen as casting a liberal vote. But they're a comparatively small number," he concludes. "A very clear majority of these people have won by large enough margins that it sure seems to me they could survive one controversial vote if they [put] some backbone into it."

The Arrest of Professor Gates... We still have a long way to go.

2009-07-24T08:48:00.000-04:00

July 24, 2009

Professor’s Arrest Tests Beliefs on Racial Progress

By SUSAN SAULNY and ROBBIE BROWN

CHICAGO — Ralph Medley, a retired professor of philosophy and English who is black, remembers the day he was arrested on his own property, a rental building here in Hyde Park where he was doing some repair work for tenants.

A concerned neighbor had called the police to report a suspicious character. And that was not the first time Mr. Medley said he had been wrongly apprehended. A call Mr. Medley placed to 911 several years ago about a burglary resulted with the police showing up to frisk him.

“But I’m the one who called you!” he said he remembers pleading with the officers.

Like countless other blacks around the country, Mr. Medley was revisiting his encounters with the police as a national discussion about race and law enforcement unfolded after the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard’s prominent scholar of African-American history. Professor Gates was arrested for disorderly conduct July 16 at his home in Cambridge, Mass., as the police investigated a report of a possible break-in there. The charge was later dropped, and the Cambridge Police Department said the incident was “regrettable and unfortunate.”

In interviews here and in Atlanta, in Web postings and on television talk shows, blacks and others said that what happened to Professor Gates was a common, if unacknowledged, reality for many people of color. They also said that beyond race, the ego of the police officer probably played a role.

But more deeply, many said that the incident was a disappointing reminder that for all the racial progress the country seemed to have made with the election of President Obama, little had changed in the everyday lives of most people in terms of race relations.

“No matter how much education you have as a person of color, you still can’t escape institutional racism,” said Keith E. Horton, a sports and entertainment lawyer in Chicago who is black. “That’s what the issue is to me.”

To be sure, people have found fault with how Professor Gates responded to the arresting officer, Sgt. James Crowley, who said he was simply fulfilling his duty in investigating the report of a burglary in progress.

The police and Professor Gates offered differing accounts of what happened after officers arrived. The police said Professor Gates initially refused to show identification and repeatedly shouted at officers. Professor Gates said that he had shown photo identification to Sergeant Crowley but that the sergeant had not appeared to believe that he lived there. He also said he had brought up race during the confrontation but was not disorderly.

Many comments posted online suggested that Professor Gates, 58, had made a tricky situation worse by not easily cooperating. Even some blacks acknowledged that he did not help himself by refusing to show deference to a police officer.

“It is unwise for anyone of any race to raise their voice to a law enforcement officer,” said Al Vivian, a diversity consultant in Atlanta who is black. “But the result at the end of the day is this was a man who violated no law, was in his own house, who is the top academic star at the top academic school in the nation, and he was still taken away and arrested.”

At a news conference on Wednesday night, President Obama said he thought the Cambridge police had “acted stupidly” in the arrest of Professor Gates.

“I think it’s worse than stupid,” said Mr. Medley, 65, the retired Chicago professor. “I think it was mean-spirited and ill-intended.”

In interviews, blacks and whites of various ages and experiences with law enforcement showed a tendency to give a benefit of the doubt to Professor Gates over the police.

“It seems to me that Dr. Gates was simply arrested for being upset, and he was arrested for being upset because he’s a black man,” said Wayne Martin, 25, an official at the Atlanta Housing Authority, who is also black.

The way Mr. Martin described himself, he could be the very definition of a “post-racial” American. “I have children I’m trying to raise not to see race,” he said. “I’m beyond the whole black-white thing. It doesn’t matter to me.”

Yet Mr. Martin could not think of any other way than racism to explain what had happened to Professor Gates. He is fascinated by the story. On Wednesday, he changed his Facebook status to: “Wayne Martin is wondering when it became illegal to be angry at a law enforcement official.”

Mr. Martin said that he was heartened to see Mr. Obama — who said he was a friend of Professor Gates — address the issue, and that while he agreed with Mr. Obama’s interpretation of the incident, he thought the word “stupidly” had been poorly chosen.

“That choice of the word was something that I don’t agree with,” Mr. Martin said. “To use such a common offensive term, it almost lowers him down to the level of the folks he’s wagging his finger at.”

Sabine Charles, 37, a white cardiologist who lives in Hyde Park, is married to a black man and said that she could not count how many times people had interrupted the two over the years to ask her, quietly, “Is this man bothering you?”

“I say, ‘Guess what? He’s not! We’re actually on a romantic date, can’t you tell?’ ” she said. “Even here in this diverse area I’ve heard people say, ‘Look at those black guys coming toward us.’ I say, ‘Yes, but they’re wearing lacrosse shorts and Calvin Klein jeans. They’re probably the kids of the professor down the street.’ ”

“You have to be able to discern differences between people,” she said, criticizing the practice of racial profiling. “It’s very frustrating.”

Mr. Vivian, the diversity trainer in Atlanta, said that what happened to Professor Gates was “age old” in America, but that what was different this time was that it happened in a so-called post-racial America.

Mr. Vivian, 47, said that he had been unfairly stopped by the police in the past, but that he lived by “an unwritten code” for dealing with these incidents. And Dr. Gates certainly did not obey the code, he said.

Quiet politeness is Rule No. 1 in surviving an incident of racial profiling, he said. So is the frequent use of the word “sir.”

“People used to say, ‘Look, there’s a Colin Powell. There’s an Oprah Winfrey.’ Now they say, ‘There’s a black president.’ I say, I’m happy to see the exceptions. There’s always an exception. But I’m interested in how society treats the average person.”

That there is a well-known code of behavior familiar to most minorities who are stopped by the police, Mr. Vivian said, is testament enough of a problem.

“It clearly says that we have a lot of work to do,” he said.

Susan Saulny reported from Chicago, and Robbie Brown from Atlanta.

Sweet Deal.... Bailed out banks and auto companies use our money to buy Congress. Double bonus for them.

2009-07-23T10:45:00.000-04:00

July 22nd, 2009 5:45 pm
Autos, banks spend $20M lobbying

By Silla Brush / Hill

Auto companies and eight of the country's biggest banks that received tens of billions of dollars in federal bailout money spent more than $20 million on lobbying Washington lawmakers in the first half of this year.

General Motors, Chrysler and GMAC, the finance arm of GM, cut back significantly on lobbying expenses in the period, spending about one-third less in total than they had in the first half of 2008.

But the eight banks, the earliest recipients of billions of dollars from the federal government, continued to rely heavily on their Washington lobbying arms, spending more than $12.4 million in the first half of 2009. That is slightly more than they spent during the same period a year ago, according to a review of congressional records.

The heavy lobbying comes as President Obama and congressional lawmakers work to overhaul the financial system and the auto industry undergoes a dramatic restructuring that has already witnessed GM and Chrysler pass through historic bankruptcy proceedings.

As lawmakers turn their attention to enacting major changes to the regulatory system, the financial industry is at a crossroads. Some smaller and regional banks continue to show considerable signs of weakness while several big Wall Street banks announce multibillion-dollar profits.

Those big banks traditionally are among the most active Washington lobbying interests in the financial industry, and the recession has done little to dent their spending. Major banking interests maintain it's important to have a seat at the table as lawmakers chart such large changes. Since last fall, companies receiving government funds have argued that none of the taxpayer money they were receiving was being spent on lobbying.

Still, lawmakers have pushed back hard on companies that continued to lobby, with some targeting the banking industry for scuttling legislative efforts while relying on government help. Democratic leaders blamed the industry when a major bankruptcy bill failed to pass the Senate earlier this year.

The bill would have empowered bankruptcy judges to rewrite the terms of primary home mortgages. Industry groups were stridently opposed to the effort, which they dubbed "cramdown."

Some of the biggest banks are also among the more than 30 that have already moved to repay funds from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the formal name for the bailout package Congress passed last October. More than $70 billion has been repaid to the federal government.

Six of the eight banks spent more to try to sway lawmakers in the first half of 2009 than over the same period in 2008, before the worst of the financial crisis took hold. The eight banks include: Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase & Co, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, State Street and Bank of New York Mellon.

JPMorgan was the top spender, at $1.76 million in the second quarter and $3.07 million in first half of the year. That is roughly 20 percent more than the bank spent on lobbying in the first half of 2008.

Citigroup, which has yet to repay any of the $50 billion in bailout money it has received, was the second highest, at $1.67 million in the quarter and $2.92 million in the first half. A spokesman for Citigroup declined to comment.

Only Bank of America and Goldman Sachs spent less on lobbying during the first six months of 2009 compared to the first half of 2008.

GM spent $5.56 million on lobbying in the first half of 2009, compared with $7.08 million in the same period in 2008. GM also has dropped a dozen lobbying contracts.

"GM's spending is proportional to its activity," said Greg Martin, GM's spokesman. "At any given time, GM is engaged with policymakers on a variety of complex policy issues with significant economic and competitive consequences to individual automotive companies."

Chrysler has continued its outside lobbying contracts after establishing itself as a legally new company during the bankruptcy proceeding. Chrysler spent $1.42 million in the first half of the year, compared with $2.78 million a year ago. GMAC spent $660,000 this year, compared with $1.15 million a year ago.

American International Group, the insurance firm crippled by trades in financial derivatives that received roughly $180 billion in bailout commitments, closed its Washington lobbying shop earlier this year. AIG continues to spend money on counsel to answer requests for information from the federal government, but the firm said it does not lobby on federal legislation.

My New Congressional Hero....

2009-07-22T11:14:00.001-04:00

The Utter Stupidity of the "Birther Movement"... Even if their claims are true, Obama would still be a Natural Born Citizen.

2009-07-22T09:34:00.003-04:00

The Birther Movement are the fringe right wing morons who believe that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States. They believe that there is a vast conspiracy that is covering up the fact that he was born in Kenya. President Obama, and the State of Hawaii, and the Kapi'olani Medical Center in Hawaii, all claim that President Obama was born in Hawaii.

The Hilarious part about the birther movement, is that even if what they say is true, President Obama is still a Natural Born Citizen.

According to the Wingbats, Obama was born in Kenya, to a U.S. Citizen Mother and a Kenyan Father.

Under the laws of the United States at the time of Barack Obama's Birth, a person born outside the United States, to a U.S. Citizen Mother and an alien father, acquires Citizenship AT BIRTH. The only exception to this is if his mother did not live in the U.S. for at least 10 years prior to his birth. Which has never been claimed by the wingbats.

The only saving grace for the wingbats is if they claim that a "natural born" citizen means that you must have been born on U.S. Soil. Ironically this would mean John McCain wouldn't have been eligible either. However, there is NO CASE LAW to support this definition of "Natural Born Citizen" and in fact the U.S. Constitution states the opposite.

However, for both John McCain and Barack Obama, U.S. Law is very clear on this matter... "the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution provides an additional source of constitutional doctrine stating that birth "in the United States" and subjection to U.S. jurisdiction at the time of birth, entitles one to citizenship:

“

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

”

It's about damn time, Mr. President.

2009-07-21T11:24:00.000-04:00

Obama Demands: The Bill I Sign Must Include Public Option
By Brian Beutler - July 20, 2009, 10:16AM

While we're talking health care reform: In his weekly radio address on Saturday, President Obama did what he's refused to do all along--he said the public option isn't an option at all.

[A]ny plan I sign must include an insurance exchange: a one-stop shopping marketplace where you can compare the benefits, cost and track records of a variety of plans - including a public option to increase competition and keep insurance companies honest - and choose what's best for your family.

That's a first. In the recent past, the White House has only demanded that health care reform expand and improve coverage while lowering costs. But Blue Dogs and conservative Senate Democrats have been raising noises about the public option, while citing concerns that the reform proposals on the table won't cut costs. And with the debate reaching its crescendo, Obama's letting them know they can't have it both ways.

He has a point--introducing a robust public option would be an extremely effective way to retard the growth in health care spending. And those who are both demanding a bill that bends the spending curve downward, but also opposing any measures that would accomplish that goal, are being pretty nakedly inconsistent.

Health Care Reform is Doomed. The Reason? Congress has been BOUGHT.

2009-07-21T10:38:00.000-04:00

Industry Cash Flowed To Drafters of Reform
Key Senator Baucus Is a Leading Recipient

By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 21, 2009

As liberal protesters marched outside, Sen. Max Baucus sat down inside a San Francisco mansion for a dinner of chicken cordon bleu and a discussion of landmark health-care legislation under consideration by his Senate Finance Committee.

At the table on May 26 were about 20 donors willing to fork over $10,000 or more to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, including executives of major insurance companies, hospitals and other health-care firms.

"Most people there had an agenda; they wanted the ear of a senator, and they got it," said Aaron Roland, a San Francisco health-care activist who paid half price to attend the gathering. "Money gets you in the door. The only thing the other side can do is march around and protest outside."

As his committee has taken center stage in the battle over health-care reform, Chairman Baucus (D-Mont.) has emerged as a leading recipient of Senate campaign contributions from the hospitals, insurers and other medical interest groups hoping to shape the legislation to their advantage. Health-related companies and their employees gave Baucus's political committees nearly $1.5 million in 2007 and 2008, when he began holding hearings and making preparations for this year's reform debate.

Top health executives and lobbyists have continued to flock to the senator's often extravagant fundraising events in recent months. During a Senate break in late June, for example, Baucus held his 10th annual fly-fishing and golfing weekend in Big Sky, Mont., for a minimum donation of $2,500. Later this month comes "Camp Baucus," a "trip for the whole family" that adds horseback riding and hiking to the list of activities.

To avoid any appearance of favoritism, his aides say, Baucus quietly began refusing contributions from health-care political action committees after June 1. But the policy does not apply to lobbyists or corporate executives, who continued to make donations, disclosure records show.

Baucus declined requests to comment for this article. Spokesman Tyler Matsdorf said the senator "is only driven by one thing: what is right for Montana and the country. And he will continue his open process of working together with the president, his colleagues in Congress, and groups and individuals from across the nation to get this legislation passed."

Baucus's fundraising prowess underscores the enduring political strength of the health-care lobby, which led all other sectors in donations to federal candidates during the last election cycle and has shifted its giving to Democrats as the party has tightened its control of Congress.

The sector gave nearly $170 million to federal lawmakers in 2007 and 2008, with 54 percent going to Democrats, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks money in politics. The shift in parties was even more pronounced during the first three months of this year, when Democrats collected 60 percent of the $5.4 million donated by health-care companies and their employees, the data show.

Many of these contributions have been focused on Baucus, Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) and other senators in the moderate camps of their respective parties, whose votes could prove crucial in a final health-care reform deal, as well as the leaders of five key committees leading the debate. Grassley, the Finance Committee's ranking Republican, received more than $2 million from the health and insurance sectors since 2003. House Ways and Means Chairman Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.) took in $1.6 million from the health sector and its employees over the past two years; ranking Republican Dave Camp (Mich.) received nearly $1 million.

But Baucus, a senator from a sparsely populated and conservative Western state who is serving his sixth term, stands out for the rising tide of health-care contributions to his campaign committee, Friends of Max Baucus, and his political-action committee, Glacier PAC. Baucus collected $3 million from the health and insurance sectors from 2003 to 2008, about 20 percent of the total, data show. Less than 10 percent of the money came from Montana.

Top out-of-state corporate contributors included Schering-Plough, New York Life Insurance, Amgen, and Blue Cross and Blue Shield; individual executives such as Richard T. Clark, chief executive and president of drugmaker Merck, have also made regular donations. Most of these companies, particularly major insurers, strongly oppose a public insurance option, which is favored by President Obama and top House Democrats but has not received support from Baucus's committee.

Baucus is a longtime centrist in the Democratic caucus, and his committee chairmanship has made him a key broker in the health-reform debate. Many former Baucus staff members, including two chiefs of staff, lobby on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry and other health-care players and have been closely involved in negotiations on the legislation.

John Jonas, a Patton Boggs health-care lobbyist who has attended a Baucus fly-fishing event and other fundraisers, said the Montana senator is "key to getting anything done" when it comes to health-care legislation.

"This is not an overwhelmingly liberal Congress, and it's certainly not a liberal Senate," said Jonas, whose clients include Bristol-Myers Squibb, Pfizer and Northwestern Mutual. "I think Max is uniquely situated to try to accomplish that, because he's more of a centrist and moderate Democrat than others are."

But Jerry Flanagan, a health-care analyst with Consumer Watchdog, a California-based advocacy group, said the tide of campaign contributions amounts to "a huge down payment" by companies that expect favorable policies in return. "That is the cold reality of big-money politics," he said.

Baucus won easy reelection in the fall, but he has continued to hold fundraisers since then. In addition to the fly-fishing event, he held his "Eighth Annual Ski and Snowmobile Weekend" in Big Sky in February and celebrated the start of his sixth term with a $10,000-a-table dinner at the Washington Court Hotel later that month. Aides say another fundraiser scheduled for July 7 at Bistro Bis in Capitol Hill was scrapped.

Baucus's office declined to provide attendance and donation details about his fundraising events, and federal records laws do not require such disclosures. Starting in June, aides say, Baucus adopted an internal office policy to refuse contributions from health-care PACs and to continue doing so until after Congress passes reform legislation.

But new Federal Election Commission documents filed last week show that individual lobbyists and others with health-care connections continued to make contributions to Baucus committees throughout June. Examples from Baucus's Glacier PAC include $5,000 from the Independent Insurance Agents and Brokers of America and $2,500 from lobbyists with U.S. Strategies, which represents numerous health-care firms. Overall, half of the $110,000 in donations to the PAC from April to June came from health-care firms and lobbyists, including Schering-Plough, Medtronic and New York Life.

Craig Holman, government affairs lobbyist for the Public Citizen advocacy group, said the continued fundraising by Baucus during the health-care debate is "very troubling."

"He's doing all this fundraising right in the middle of this effort to mark up a bill," Holman said. "When you put these events close to matters concerning these lobbyists, clearly it's a signal. You are expected to show up with a check."

Baucus and his aides strongly dispute any assertion that campaign contributions have an impact on the senator's policy views and proposals. Aides say he has frequently backed policies opposed by health-care companies, including support for greater availability of generic drugs, allowing drug imports from Canada and cutting payments to the Medicare Advantage plan.

During an interview earlier this year with the Missoulian newspaper, Baucus said that "no one gets special treatment." He added: "Your word is your bond back there."

Research editor Alice Crites contributed to this report.

Republicans Don't Want the Government To Do Anything About Health Care. Here's Why We Need Reform NOW!

2009-07-21T09:06:00.002-04:00

Congress is behaving as if the Health Care System isn't in tatters.

by Mitchell Bard at HuffPO

When it comes to health care reform, I feel like the house is on fire, but nobody in Washington (except maybe President Obama) seems to see it. Or worse, they see it, and they don't care.

Here are some statistics, via the nonpartisan/bipartisan National Coalition on Health Care (NCHC), to demonstrate just how dire the current health care situation is:

46 million Americans under the age of 65 (which represents 18 percent of the population) had no health insurance in 2007. And given the spike in the unemployment rate and downturn in the economy since then, that figure has to be even higher now.
2.4 trillion was spent on health care in 2008, representing 17 percent of the U.S.'s gross domestic product. That's more than four times what we spend on defense.
Costs are trending in the wrong direction. Projections have costs reaching3.1 trillion in 2012 and4.3 trillion by 2016, if the same health care system remains in place.
The NCHC has compiled projections on the negative impact of spiraling health care costs on the economy, state and federal budgets and employers, large and small, and the effects are stifling. Health care costs are a major threat to our future.
We are also very inefficient. We spend more money per person on health care than nations that provide universal coverage to their citizens. The NCHC, citing the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, points out that health care spending was only 10.9 percent of the gross domestic product in Switzerland, 10.7 percent in Germany, 9.7 percent in Canada and 9.5 percent in France, all countries that provide single-payer health care.
And what about the small businesses Republicans are always pretending to defend? They are getting killed by health insurance payments. Employer-based premiums rose 5 percent in 2008. In 2007, rates for small employers went up 5.5 percent and companies with less than 24 employees saw an even bigger increase, 6.8 percent. The Republicans call any health care reform measure from the Democrats a job-killer, but nothing is killing the ability of small businesses to hire Americans more than the rising cost of health insurance.
Not that Republicans care about American workers, but I thought Democrats were supposed to be looking out for them. They are getting hammered, too, according to the NCHC. In 2008, employees had to pay a whopping 12 percent more in health insurance premiums than they did in 2007, so that the average worker is now paying $1,600 more a year for premiums than he/she did in 1999. In fact, since 1999, premiums for employment-based health insurance have increased 120 percent. (NCHC notes that during that same period, wages grew only 29 percent.) That means that health insurance costs are increasing four times faster for American workers than their wages are, on average.
Republicans love to talk about how bad health care will be if the government gets involved, and President Obama has taken great pains to assure Americans that, under his plan, if they like the coverage they have, they can keep it. But the evidence points to the fact that care in the United States isn't as good as it could or should be, and is not the best in the world. The NCHC notes that we are not in the top three in infant death mortality rate; ours is 7 percent, while the leaders are at 2.7 percent. The U.S. rate of mortality from treatable conditions is a third lower than the world's leader. A drop more than half of adult Americans get the care recommended for them, and less than half of those suffering from diabetes and less than a third with coronary heart disease receive proper care. There are also growing problems with medical errors and infections in hospitals.

It's not in question that there needs to be a complete overhaul of the health care system. The only question should be, how much can we change it? But if you listen to the debate in Congress right now, it sounds like a race to see who can do the least. And you would certainly never get the idea that the status quo is as broken and dangerous as it actually is.

The last time I wrote about health care, last month, my central concern was that Republicans were intentionally stoking fears of "socialized medicine" to kill a public option, all in defense of the insurance companies at the expense of the American people. A month later, my concern seems almost quaint by comparison.

A Washington Post-ABC News poll released over the weekend showed that support for President Obama's handling of health care dipped below 50 percent for the first time. (It should be noted that more respondents still supported him than not, 49 percent to 44 percent, and Republicans continue not to be thought well of on health care, with only 34 percent trusting the GOP on the issue.)

While I wish President Obama's rating was higher, I can't say I am surprised. Yes, part of the blame goes to Congressional Republicans who are on an all-out blitz to kill health care reform, and their motives for doing so -- the protection of the big corporations who control the industry, including the health insurers and drug companies -- are in no way involved with helping the American people.

But if the Republicans were the only problem, I wouldn't be too concerned. Reforming the country's broken health care system is such an obvious need, I am sure that the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate would be able to shepherd through meaningful legislation, if that's what they wanted to do.

The problem, as I see it, is that none of the bills working their way through the House and Senate committees now really address making fundamental changes to the broken-down health care system I described above. Instead, the proposed pieces of legislation would seek to find ways to pay for more Americans to be covered under the old, broken, insurer-dominated status quo.

I thought Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius did a pretty good job battling David Gregory on Meet the Press yesterday. She made a good case that no consensus bill has emerged yet, so it's unfair to claim that any eventual legislation would include the failings that any of the proposals currently contained. And she did an excellent job pointing out that we have a long way to go, from the current broken system to one that eventually achieves the president's three goals of improving quality, lowering costs and expanding coverage.

But the one fact that Sebelius could not get around, and one that Gregory pressed her on repeatedly, is that the current pieces of health care legislation in Congress, according to the Congressional Budget Office, will not significantly lower costs.

I wasn't surprised by this problem, since as the debate has unfolded, it seems as though the policies that might actually reduce costs by addressing the domination of profit-motivated health insurers are the ones that have been the most contentious, especially the introduction of a government-run public health insurance option to compete with the private insurers. As I pointed out last month, there is an inherent contradiction to right-wing criticisms of the public option. They say that such a policy would create poor care for Americans while wiping out private insurers. The problem, of course, is that if the care would be so bad, why would people choose it at the expense of their current private insurers? And, if the private insurers would be ruined because the public option would create less-expensive, superior care, why wouldn't we want to adopt a system that raises quality and lowers costs? The Republican argument is completely disingenuous.

And yet, there are plenty of Democratic senators who have come out against a public option or failed to openly support it.

The Republicans are seizing on the obstacles President Obama is facing with health care reform, sensing an opportunity to dent his popularity. A banner headline on the Huffington Post today trumpets that Republicans from Michael Steele to William Kristol are predicting, as Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina did over the weekend, that health care will be "Obama's Waterloo." Hell, things are looking so good to the Republicans that Kenneth the Page impersonator/governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal, has reappeared to chime in that he has "seen enough."

But blaming the Republicans for risking the health and economy of the American people to kneel in supplication at the altar of their big-business patrons is like blaming the scorpion of the famous proverb for stinging the frog. It's in their nature. Few of the GOP's policy positions actually benefit the majority of Americans, and even fewer are adopted for that purpose.

No, the blame gets spread across the entirety of Capitol Hill for the current state of health care reform, since not even all of the Democrats seem to realize the enormity of the problem. Rather than pushing for systematic change, they are dancing around the edges, trying to find ways to cover uninsured individuals without changing the way in which Americans receive (and pay for) health care.

I sincerely believe that President Obama sees the need for a massive overhaul of the health care system to lower costs, cover most Americans, and provide quality care. It's time for the Democrats in Congress to become as committed to these principals as the president seems to be. In light of the attacks by Republicans, which paint the president is some kind of take-over-crazed socialist trying to turn the U.S. into some amalgam of the Soviet Union, Sweden and hell, it seems like Democrats from pink and red states are running scared, afraid of being painted as too liberal in their next elections. And I'm sure that these same moderate Democrats are also feeding from the same insurance-company-supplied troughs as their Republican brothers and sisters.

Frankly, I'm less concerned about the "why" than the "how," as in, How do we move forward from here? So far, the concerns in Congress have led to tepid legislation that, if you believe the CBO, may cover more people, but won't address the underlying problems in the system. A government option should, if done correctly, help lower costs by forcing the private insurers to be more competitive in pricing and service. But even if a public option can find its way into a final bill, will it be strong enough to accomplish what it is designed to do?

In the end, we need a massive overhaul of the health care system that decreases costs, increases quality and covers most Americans. And it seems that right now, President Obama is one of the few players in Washington who seems to realize this fact. I was glad to read today that he is going to take a more aggressive approach to the health care debate, because I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that health care is shaping up to be the biggest leadership challenge of his presidency thus far.

The way things are going now, we are either going to get no health care reform (if the Republicans win) or watered-down health care legislation that acts as a bandage, helping some people but ignoring the larger problem creating the pain. Neither of those options are acceptable if we want to prevent a looming health care disaster that will not only risk our well-being, but also our economy, both individually and nationally.

We need fundamental change to the health care system, and President Obama has to find a way to convince his fellow Democrats on the hill that it's in their best interest politically to get on board. Because if the Democrats can come up with a solution that truly provides quality health care to more Americans for less money, their constituents will reward them in the voting booths. And if no health care legislation emerges, or if the bill that is produced is easily assaulted for threatening to balloon the deficit without addressing rising costs, voters will hold the Democratic lawmakers accountable.

The fire is burning, and it's time for real action to extinguish the flames. President Obama needs some help to do it. Let's hope he can convince enough of his colleagues in Congress to join him.

Regulatory Reform for the Banking Industry? Not Until We Get A Handle on Lobbyists and Campaign Contributions.

2009-07-17T11:53:00.001-04:00

What Do You Get When You Combine Huge Bailouts Without Any Regulatory Reform? Crooks Who Steal Again.

2009-07-17T11:50:00.001-04:00

July 17, 2009

Op-Ed Columnist

The Joy of Sachs

By PAUL KRUGMAN

The American economy remains in dire straits, with one worker in six unemployed or underemployed. Yet Goldman Sachs just reported record quarterly profits — and it’s preparing to hand out huge bonuses, comparable to what it was paying before the crisis. What does this contrast tell us?

First, it tells us that Goldman is very good at what it does. Unfortunately, what it does is bad for America.

Second, it shows that Wall Street’s bad habits — above all, the system of compensation that helped cause the financial crisis — have not gone away.

Third, it shows that by rescuing the financial system without reforming it, Washington has done nothing to protect us from a new crisis, and, in fact, has made another crisis more likely.

Let’s start by talking about how Goldman makes money.

Over the past generation — ever since the banking deregulation of the Reagan years — the U.S. economy has been “financialized.” The business of moving money around, of slicing, dicing and repackaging financial claims, has soared in importance compared with the actual production of useful stuff. The sector officially labeled “securities, commodity contracts and investments” has grown especially fast, from only 0.3 percent of G.D.P. in the late 1970s to 1.7 percent of G.D.P. in 2007.

Such growth would be fine if financialization really delivered on its promises — if financial firms made money by directing capital to its most productive uses, by developing innovative ways to spread and reduce risk. But can anyone, at this point, make those claims with a straight face? Financial firms, we now know, directed vast quantities of capital into the construction of unsellable houses and empty shopping malls. They increased risk rather than reducing it, and concentrated risk rather than spreading it. In effect, the industry was selling dangerous patent medicine to gullible consumers.

Goldman’s role in the financialization of America was similar to that of other players, except for one thing: Goldman didn’t believe its own hype. Other banks invested heavily in the same toxic waste they were selling to the public at large. Goldman, famously, made a lot of money selling securities backed by subprime mortgages — then made a lot more money by selling mortgage-backed securities short, just before their value crashed. All of this was perfectly legal, but the net effect was that Goldman made profits by playing the rest of us for suckers.

And Wall Streeters have every incentive to keep playing that kind of game.

The huge bonuses Goldman will soon hand out show that financial-industry highfliers are still operating under a system of heads they win, tails other people lose. If you’re a banker, and you generate big short-term profits, you get lavishly rewarded — and you don’t have to give the money back if and when those profits turn out to have been a mirage. You have every reason, then, to steer investors into taking risks they don’t understand.

And the events of the past year have skewed those incentives even more, by putting taxpayers as well as investors on the hook if things go wrong.

I won’t try to parse the competing claims about how much direct benefit Goldman received from recent financial bailouts, especially the government’s assumption of A.I.G.’s liabilities. What’s clear is that Wall Street in general, Goldman very much included, benefited hugely from the government’s provision of a financial backstop — an assurance that it will rescue major financial players whenever things go wrong.

You can argue that such rescues are necessary if we’re to avoid a replay of the Great Depression. In fact, I agree. But the result is that the financial system’s liabilities are now backed by an implicit government guarantee.

Now the last time there was a comparable expansion of the financial safety net, the creation of federal deposit insurance in the 1930s, it was accompanied by much tighter regulation, to ensure that banks didn’t abuse their privileges. This time, new regulations are still in the drawing-board stage — and the finance lobby is already fighting against even the most basic protections for consumers.

If these lobbying efforts succeed, we’ll have set the stage for an even bigger financial disaster a few years down the road. The next crisis could look something like the savings-and-loan mess of the 1980s, in which deregulated banks gambled with, or in some cases stole, taxpayers’ money — except that it would involve the financial industry as a whole.

The bottom line is that Goldman’s blowout quarter is good news for Goldman and the people who work there. It’s good news for financial superstars in general, whose paychecks are rapidly climbing back to precrisis levels. But it’s bad news for almost everyone else.

Grass Roots? I don't think that means what you think it means.

2009-07-17T11:39:00.001-04:00

Exclusive: Conservative group offers to sell endorsement for $2M
By: Mike Allen
July 17, 2009 05:07 AM EST

The American Conservative Union asked FedEx for a check for $2 million to $3 million in return for the group’s endorsement in a bitter legislative dispute, then flipped and sided with UPS after FedEx refused to pay.

For the $2 million plus, ACU offered a range of services that included: “Producing op-eds and articles written by ACU’s Chairman David Keene and/or other members of the ACU’s board of directors. (Note that Mr. Keene writes a weekly column that appears in The Hill.)”

The conservative group’s remarkable demand — black-and-white proof of the longtime Washington practice known as “pay for play” — was contained in a private letter to FedEx , which was provided to POLITICO.

The letter exposes the practice by some political interest groups of taking stands not for reasons of pure principle, as their members and supporters might assume, but also in part because a sponsor is paying big money.

In the three-page letter asking for money on June 30, the conservative group backed FedEx. After FedEx says it rejected the offer, Keene signed onto a two-page July 15 letter backing UPS. Keene did not return a message left on his cell phone.

Maury Lane, FedEx’s director of corporate communications, said: “Clearly, the ACU shopped their beliefs and UPS bought.”

ACU's executive vice president, Dennis Whitfield, said that neither the group nor David Keene, the chairman, took any money from UPS. Whitfield said the group has never received a response to its original proposal to FedEx. He said Keene endorsed the second letter as an individual, even though the letter bore the logo of ACU.

"Our position hasn't changed," said Whitfield, who was a deputy secretary of labor in the Reagan administration. "It won't change. I am fundamentally, philosophically opposed to doing what the Obama administration wants to do [to FedEx], and so is our organization."

FedEx and UPS, fierce competitors in the package delivery business, are at war over a provision under consideration in Congress that would expand union power at FedEx.

FedEx currently has one U.S. union contract for its entire express business. Under a change passed by the House and awaiting action in the Senate, FedEx — like UPS — would have to negotiate union contracts for individual locations, which FedEx claims would make it much more difficult to promise worldwide regularity for deliveries.

The American Conservative Union, which calls itself “the nation's oldest and largest grass-roots conservative lobbying organization,” took UPS’s side on Wednesday as part of a conservative consortium that accused FedEx of “misleading the public and legislators.” ACU's logo is at the top of the letter, along with those of six other conservative groups.

Just two weeks earlier, ACU had offered its endorsement to FedEx, saying in a letter to the company: “We stand with FedEx in opposition to this legislation.”

But there was a catch — an expensive one. ACU asked FedEx to pay as much as $3.4 million for e-mail and other services for “an aggressive grass-roots campaign to stop the legislation in the Senate.”

“For the activist contact portion of the plan, we will contact over 150,000 people per state multiple times at a cost of $1.39 per name or $2,147,550 to implement the entire program,” the letter says. “If we incorporate the targeted, senator-personalized radio effort into the plan, you can figure an additional $125,000 on average, per state” for an estimated 10 states. The total would be $3,397,550.”

The letter shows one reason why activists get so much junk mail, both on paper and electronically: Some groups that send it charge handsomely for the service.

Under the grass-roots program ACU proposed, “Each person will be contacted a total of seven times totaling nearly 11 million contacts total in the 10 targeted states.” “Within 72 hours of an agreement on the whole plan, we can have the data sets delivered and the first round of e-mail ready for delivery,” the offer states. “Within seven days, the mail can be in the USPS system and the phone call delivered.”

Lane, the FedEx official, said the offer was refused. "The proposal didn’t fit with our strategy of taking a straightforward approach to discussing the issue,” he said.

After the rebuff, American Conservative Union changed sides. ACU Chairman David A. Keene was one of eight conservative leaders who signed a letter to FedEx Chairman Frederick W. Smith, a champion of capitalism who in the past has been a favorite of conservatives.

The letter accuses FedEx of “falsely and disingenuously” labeling the rules change a “bailout” for UPS, since FedEx would become subject to the same arduous union structure.

The letter is also signed by Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, who is also on ACU’s board. FedEx is pushing its case with a website called www.BrownBailout.com.

The letter signed by the conservative leaders concludes: “To paraphrase the words of Ronald Reagan, ‘Mr. Smith, tear down this website.’”

Among the services ACU had offered to provide for the $2 million-plus price tag:

—Acquiring data of known conservatives in the targeted states (to be determined by FedEx), matching that data to an e-mail database and then incorporating those e-mail addresses with the current ACU e-mail database to create one targeted database of all potential activists.

—Sending a piece of targeted direct mail to these potential activists to ensure that they are well-educated prior to their contact with their senators.

—E-mailing the identified voter activists, in five rounds, in order to educate them on the issue(s) and to urge them to call their senators based on key dates. The ACU would include the phone number of their personal senators directly in the correspondence.

—Conducting targeted phone call campaign that will contact all voter activists to urge them to make a personal call to their senators. Each state would have a specialized message just for that state.

—Encouraging activists who live within 30 miles of a senator’s district office to consider making a personal visit to register their concerns at the office. ACU has proved that we can turn out well-informed, quality voters who present a good image to represent our concerns.

—As the vote for the legislation nears, distributing ACTION ALERT e-mails, and after the vote has taken place, distributing MegaVote e-mails to ACU’s members letting them know how their senators vote.

C Street? I guess the C stands for "Cheaters"... this place looks more like a Republican Swingers Club than a "Christian" group.

2009-07-17T10:46:00.003-04:00

Chip Pickering's Wife Claims He Had An Affair

JACKSON, Miss. — The estranged wife of former U.S. Rep. Chip Pickering claims in a lawsuit that the Mississippi Republican had an affair that ruined their marriage and derailed his political career.

Leisha Pickering said in the lawsuit filed this week that her husband and the woman dated in college, reconnected and began having an affair while he was in Congress and living in a building where several Christian lawmakers reside on C Street near the U.S. Capitol. Chip Pickering is the third Republican with ties to the building at 133 C Street SE to find his personal life making headlines in recent weeks, after Nevada U.S. Sen. John Ensign and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford.

Leisha Pickering is seeking unspecified damages in the alienation of affection lawsuit she filed this week against Elizabeth Creekmore Byrd of Jackson. The Pickerings filed for divorce in June 2008, but it is not complete.

Chip Pickering, 45, was elected to Congress in 1996, retired in January and is now a lobbyist in Washington for Cellular South, the company Creekmore Byrd's family owns. The lawsuit does not say when the affair started.

He said in a statement Thursday that his marriage is irreparably damaged.

"I still believe it is in the best interest of our five boys if our differences are resolved privately and before the appropriate court and not in the media," Pickering said.

He cast himself as a defender of decency, particularly on television and the Internet, and was among House members urging then-President George W. Bush to declare 2008 "the National Year of the Bible."

Another lawmaker who lived at the C Street house, Ensign, a member of the Christian ministry Promise Keepers, stepped down from the Senate Republican leadership in June after admitting he had an affair for much of last year with a woman on his campaign staff.

Just days after the story broke, South Carolina Republican Gov. Mark Sanford admitted an affair with a woman in Argentina. He apparently never lived in the house, but has said he turned to "C Street" for counsel and solace while having the affair.

The building, registered in tax records as a religious and commercial building, is affiliated with a Christian group that sponsors the annual National Prayer Breakfast attended by the president, members of Congress and other dignitaries. Both Democratic and Republican members of Congress live there.

Leisha Pickering's lawsuit also says that when Republican Trent Lott resigned from the U.S. Senate in December 2007, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour offered the seat to Chip Pickering, who declined. Barbour spokesman Laura Hipp said Thursday that the governor only offered the Senate seat to U.S. Rep. Roger Wicker, who accepted it.

The lawsuit contends that Creekmore Byrd gave Pickering an ultimatum, saying their relationship could not continue if he became a senator because he would have to stay married.

"Ultimately, Creekmore Byrd gave Pickering the option to remain a public servant or become a private citizen and continue relations with her," the lawsuit says.

The voice mail box at Creekmore Byrd's home was full Thursday and messages left for her divorce attorney were not immediately returned.

The 45-year-old is a member of Mississippi's wealthy Creekmore family, founders of the Cellular South phone company.

She and several relatives and Cellular South executives donated to Pickering while he was in Congress, and he had kind words for the company at a 2007 subcommittee hearing where invited speakers included Cellular South president Victor Meena.

He announced in August 2007 that he wouldn't seek another term. After leaving office in January, he joined the lobbying firm Capitol Resources LLC, in which one of Barbour's nephews is a partner. The firm, which counts Cellular South among its clients, lists Pickering as a member of its Washington and Mississippi teams.

In the House, Pickering specialized in telecommunications issues, including one dear to Cellular South: making sure Congress took into account the interests of cellular companies serving rural areas.

Creekmore Byrd and her husband, Dr. Douglas Byrd, were married in 1990 but stopped living together in June 2006. They were granted a divorce in 2007 on the grounds of irreconcilable differences.

____

Associated Press writer Sharon Theimer in Washington contributed to this report.

Republican Health Care Plan? Do Nothing.

2009-07-16T09:35:00.001-04:00

GOP pushing hidden health care tax on all Americans, not reform.

by Rep. George Miller (Democrat California)

Republicans and right wing commentators who oppose health care reform hope to turn our effort at lowering costs and expanding access into a debate about whether or not to tax small businesses. In opposing our reform they would instead continue the hidden health care tax on all Americans that exceeds the surcharge on the highest income taxpayers that is included in the House bill.

Before you adopt their rhetoric, remember that nearly half of the cost of the House Democrats' health plan would be paid by tight cost controls and forcing down the expense of the health care system. That's a top priority. And as for who will pay higher taxes and who won't under our plan, here are the cold facts.

Only the highest earning 1.2 percent of American households will pay a surcharge for health care reform. That leaves 98.8 percent of American households who will not pay any surcharge at all.

As for small businesses, according to the non-partisan Joint Committee on Taxation, only 4.1 percent of all small business owners will be affected by the health care surcharge. The remaining 95.9 percent of small business owners will be completely unaffected by the surcharge.

Under our bill, a family making up to $350,000 in adjusted gross income (AGI) will not owe any surcharge at all, as President Obama has promised. A family making $500,000 in AGI will contribute $1,500 to help reduce costs and provide access to affordable health care for all Americans -- 0.3 percent of their annual income. And a family making $1 million in AGI will contribute $9,000, or 0.9 percent of their annual income.

Who are the highest earning 1.2 percent of all households? They are the same households who over the past 20 years have seen a massive shift in wealth in their favor and who over the last 8 years received the lion's share of President Bush's tax cuts.

Between 2001 and 2010, the richest one percent of taxpayers alone will have received approximately $700 billion from the Bush tax cuts, according to Citizens for Tax Justice. Those tax cuts for the wealthy one percent have been the biggest contributor to the record deficits wrung up during the Bush Administration -- deficits that were passed along to President Obama in January.

The Washington Post put it another way. They pointed out that over the past 20 years, the highest earning Americans have seen their tax burden go down and their share of national wealth rise. The share of adjusted gross income claimed by the highest earning Americans doubled, from 11 percent to 22 percent.

Meanwhile, average American working families have seen their wages stagnate, their health care costs spiral out of control, and their share of national wealth reduced.

Many Republicans and right wing commentators would do nothing to reform health care and would instead leave in place the hidden $1,800 a year tax on all Americans in the form of rapidly rising health insurance premiums caused by uncontrolled health care spending and the shared cost of covering the uninsured.

Congress faces a clear choice. Our plan cuts more than $500 billion in health care spending and asks the richest 1.2 percent of all households to make a modest contribution of their income toward the remaining cost of our health care reform effort to reduce costs and strengthen our economy. The main Republican plan -- Just Do Nothing -- maintains the hidden tax on every business, large and small, and every American suffering under today's broken health care system.

George Miller (D-CA) is chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee and one of the three principal authors of the "America's Affordable Health Choices Act" introduced this week.

Senator Jon Kyl (Republican-Arizona) continues Republican Strategy of Winning Over Latino Voters by attacking Sotomayor for being Hispanic.

2009-07-14T17:45:00.001-04:00

Sen. Jon Kyl gave a lengthy speech (R-Ariz.) during his question and answer session with Sonia Sotomayor that was undoubtedly the type of red-meat inquiry for which conservatives pined.

The Arizona Republican accused the Obama Court nominee of "embracing" the different jurisprudence that women and Hispanics could bring to the court, of championing the idea of judges having personal interpretation of law, and of "relativism run amok."

In what was far more a lecture than a back-and-forth (Kyl went on for nearly ten minutes before allowing Sotomayor to answer) the senator did not reference a single case decided during the judge's career. Rather, he honed in on the infamous "wise Latina" remarks delivered on several occasions during her public speeches.

"You seem to be celebrating [the superiority of being a minority judge]," Kyl said at one point. "You understand it will make a difference," he added at another point. "And not only are you not saying anything negative about that. But you are embracing [it]."

Finally, after waiting her turn, a somewhat exasperated Sotomayor chimed in, noting that there was little of substance in Kyl's critique.

"I have a record for 17 years, decision after decision," she replied. "It is very clear that I don't base my judgments on my personal experiences or my feelings or my biases. All of my decisions show my respect for the rule of law."

Chief Justice John Roberts: Activist Judge. Calls himself an "umpire" yet if he is, he only calls strikes and never balls.

2009-07-14T12:16:00.004-04:00

Sheldon Whitehouse: Roberts Court Already Activist

by Sam Stein at HuffPo

For the most part, Monday's hearing for Judge Sonia Sotomayor avoided political debate. But when it came time for Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) to begin his opening statement, he didn't shy away from discussing what was on everyone's mind.

The two selections by a Republican president have resulted in a more conservative Supreme Court, Whitehouse noted.

As long as Whitehouse has broached the subject, perhaps it is time to take a look at the old canard of activist judges only being liberals.

Whitehouse explained:

The "umpire" analogy is belied by Chief Justice Roberts, though he cast himself as an "umpire" during his confirmation hearings. Jeffrey Toobin, a well-respected legal commentator, has recently reported that "[i]n every major case since he became the nation's seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff." Some umpire. And is it a coincidence that this pattern, to continue Toobin's quote, "has served the interests, and reflected the values of the contemporary Republican party"? Some coincidence.

For all the talk of "modesty" and "restraint," the right wing Justices of the Court have a striking record of ignoring precedent, overturning congressional statutes, limiting constitutional protections, and discovering new constitutional rights: the infamous Ledbetter decision, for instance; the Louisville and Seattle integration cases; the first limitation on Roe v. Wade that outright disregards the woman's health and safety; and the DC Heller decision, discovering a constitutional right to own guns that the Court had not previously noticed in 220 years. Some "balls and strikes." Over and over, news reporting discusses "fundamental changes in the law" wrought by the Roberts Court's right wing flank. The Roberts Court has not kept the promises of modesty or humility made when President Bush nominated Justices Roberts and Alito.

So, Judge Sotomayor, I'd like to avoid codewords, and look for a simple pledge from you during these hearings: that you will respect the role of Congress as representatives of the American people.

Whitehouse wasn't the only senator on the committee to use Roberts as a benchmark by which to evaluate Sotomayor. And while he may have been blunter than his fellow members, he certainly wasn't the only one to address the political subtext of the Supreme Court confirmation candidly. As a Democratic operative pointed out, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) also left subtlety at the door in his opening statement.

"The Hispanic element of this hearing is important, but I do not want it to be lost," Graham said. "This is mostly about liberal and conservative politics more than anything else."

C Street? Christian Mafia? Biblical Capitalism? Sanford and Ensign scandals shed light on Republican "Christians"

2009-07-14T09:03:00.000-04:00

Republicans Continue to send out racists to attack Sonia Sotomayor. This must be a part of the Republican plan to win over Latino Voters.

2009-07-10T09:34:00.003-04:00

Sessions Uses Sotomayor as a pawn in his lifelong crusade against civil rights.

Ian Millhiser at HuffPo

In 1986, an ambitious young United States Attorney named Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III was denied a seat on the federal bench because of his own deep-seated hostility to the very notion of civil rights. As a federal prosecutor, Sessions conducted a tenuous criminal investigation into voting rights advocates that registered African-Americans to vote -- an investigation that culminated in an unsuccessful prosecution against a former aide to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He once quipped that he "used to think [the KKK] were OK" until he found out some of them were "pot smokers;" and he routinely referred to an African-American attorney who worked for him as "boy" -- even once warning that attorney to "be careful what you say to white folks" after Sessions overheard him chastising a white secretary.

Moreover, Sessions remains unrepentant for these incidents, although he did reluctantly concede at his confirmation hearing that it "probably was wrong" when he attacked the NAACP as an "un-American" and "Communist-inspired" organizations that "forced civil rights down the throats of people." Watch:

Twenty-three years later, Sessions is the highest ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee; and he is the architect of a right-wing campaign which claims that Sotomayor's past service on the board of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund (PRLDEF) makes her unsuitable for the bench. Last week, Sessions claimed that this mainstream civil rights organization took "extreme" positions in litigation. This week, Sessions clarified this remark in an interview with Fox News, explaining that he is concerned that PRLDEF "brought several race discrimination lawsuits for minorities."

Sessions' assault on Sotomayor and PRLDEF has largely been met with skepticism -- New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, for example, commented that "[o]nly in Washington could someone's many years of volunteer service to a highly regarded nonprofit organization that has done so much good for so many be twisted into a negative" -- and its puzzling that conservatives permitted Sessions to be the public face of their opposition to the first Latina nominated to the Supreme Court. Sessions' anti-PRLDEF campaign is not only baseless; it is reminiscent of his decades-old comments about the NAACP that kept him off the federal bench years ago.

Indeed, given Sessions' long history of baseless assaults on civil rights and civil rights organizations, one has to wonder whether conservatives chose him as their leading voice on Sotomayor because they fundamentally agree with his lifelong stance on race. Once thing is clear, however, America has changed a lot since 1986, but Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III remains exactly the same.

Glenn Beck: Wishing For Americans To Die. How Do You Spell Treason?

2009-07-02T17:02:00.001-04:00

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Activist Judges Roberts, Alito, Scalia, Thomas and Kennedy Create New Right For White Men. The Activist Court Created New Law.

2009-06-29T17:41:00.001-04:00

Roberts Court Rules: White Men Were Discriminated Against
Submitted by christine on Mon, 06/29/2009 - 3:34pm.

Analysis

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Christine Bowman

The U.S. Supreme Court's conservatives -- Justices Roberts, Scalia, Thomas and Alito, joined by swing-voter Kennedy -- have almost certainly added fuel to the white-supremacist, right-wing, entitled-male fires Monday by overturning an earlier ruling by Judge Sonya Sotomayor and others on the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. That means the Roberts Court is standing now with the forces that have always said, since enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, that white men are just not getting a fair deal.

Legal nuances aside, the Ricci v. DeStefano job discrimination case had been widely seen as pitting white firefighters against their black and Hispanic colleagues, all of whom were competing for promotions. Why? The city of New Haven, CT had hired an outside firm to test firefighters to determine who would be promoted. Then the city decided to ignore the test results which yielded an unexpectedly skewed pool of applicants that eliminated all black applicants from consideration for promotion. For the record, New Haven's population is 60% black.

The majority Supreme Court opinion said the city erred and should proceed with promotions based on the test. The court offered not just its majority opinion, written by Kennedy, but two other concurring ones written by Scalia and Alito. Justice Ginsberg was joined in her dissent by Souter, Stevens and Breyer.

The Associated Press interpretation is that "The ruling could alter employment practices nationwide, potentially limiting the circumstances in which employers can be held liable for decisions when there is no evidence of intentional discrimination against minorities."

Soon after the ruling, The American Prospect admitted some skepticism regarding Justice Alito's concurring opinion and the majority's stance in general:

Alito is arguing that the decision to throw out the tests was not based on a good faith concern about disparate impact but about avoiding the political consequence of a backlash among black voters.

Of course, it also needs to be said that there's no way Italian Americans could be considered anything like a "politically important" ethnic constituency in the Northeast.

The number of concurring opinions here--Scalia filed one as well--rebuking the dissent of the court's four liberals is interesting. The court's conservatives are protesting, one might say, a little too much.

In addition to re-igniting long-simmering resentment over issues of employment discrimination and perceived reverse discrimination, today's ruling gives political conservatives something new to use in arguing against confirmation of President Obama's Supreme Court nominee, a Latina woman, Sotomayor. Newt Gingrich and The American Spectator were among those immediately crowing that Sotomayor had been overruled and thus was a tarnished candidate for the high court. This despite the fact that Sotomayor did not author the lower court opinion that was reversed today. As Senator Patrick Leahy explained, "Judge Sotomayor and the lower court panel did what judges are supposed to do, they followed precedent."

Prior to today's ruling, People for the American Way anticipated the right's disparagement of Sotomayor as well:

Opponents of Judge Sotomayor have gone to great lengths to use the ruling of her panel in Ricci v. DeStefano against her ...

Sotomayor and her panel colleagues were bound by longstanding precedent and federal law. They applied the law without regard to their personal views and unanimously affirmed the district court ruling. To do anything but would have been judicial activism.

... Sotomayor is anything but an outlier. She and the seven other federal judges who decided Ricci and Oakley at the district and circuit levels were unanimous in determining that precedent and federal law required the rejection of the suits.

In a teleconference Monday sponsored by People for the American Way, three experts answered questions about the ruling: Marge Baker, executive vice president for People For the American Way; Dustin McDaniel, Attorney General of the state of Arkansas, who had filed an amicus brief in support of the city of New Haven; and Mary Frances Berry, University of Pennsylvania professor and former chairwoman of the U. S. Commission on Civil Rights during the Clinton Administration.

According to Baker, "What happened today is the court changed the law." She called the ruling "problematic" for government entities that have tried to follow Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and "troubling" overall. She described the Roberts Court as "systematically undoing key civil rights protections."

McDaniel, too, noted the court's "troublesome evolution in the interpretation of Title VII" and clear shift from "what the settled law has been for decades. I am troubled by that and disappointed in the ruling," he said. "We have seen today a ruling from the Supreme Court that changes the game dramatically. ... They have changed existing law."

The Arkansas attorney general also expressed fear that the court's shift on discrimination might lead to "resegregating our schools" and "further the racial divide."

Berry described the majority opinion as "text without context" that ignores decades of discrimination in hiring of firefighters in New Haven and elsewhere. She said the court has "undermined" efforts to correct the problem and characterized the Roberts Court point-blank as "conservative right-wing activists."

Berry also criticized the justices for not remanding the case back to a lower court to decide based on their new standard for "disparate impact." Noting Ginsberg's Footnote 10,* Berry argued that if the lower court used the wrong standard, the proper thing is to send it back -- let them use the new standard. Instead, the Supreme Court "wanted to overturn it," she concluded. Baker agreed that "they didn't want a lower court to look at it again."

McDaniel worrried that "there's a real cloud" now for lawyers such as himself who represent government clients. "We don't know what the boundaries are for our clients."

In a statement for People for the American Way, Baker concluded:

The Court today set a new standard for how states and cities across the country can operate—and in the process exposed conservative cries for ‘judicial restraint’ as utterly hypocritical. It seems conservative legal activists are perfectly happy to have judges rewrite the law as long as they get the result they want. In Ricci, the far right wing of the Court defied Congress’s well thought out design for encouraging diversity and preventing discrimination in favor of its own preferred policy. If the ruling has any upside, it’s that we’ll no longer have to listen to the Right’s cries of ‘judicial activism’ with a straight face.

With Roberts and associates now taking off till October, and Souter heading for the retirement hills for good, it promises to be a long, hot summer in the city, indeed. There's nothing like encouraging the racists in their self-perception as victims, then getting the hell out of Dodge, or D.C., as the case may be.

^{*10 "The lower courts focused on respondents’ “intent” rather than on whether respondents in fact had good cause to act. See 554 F. Supp. 2d 142, 157 (Conn. 2006). Ordinarily, a remand for fresh consideration would be in order. But the Court has seen fit to preclude further proceedings. I therefore explain why, if final adjudication by this Court is indeed appropriate, New Haven should be the prevailing party."}

Private Health Care Much More "Efficient"... Yet Can't Compete with Public Health Care? Surely You Must Be Joking.

2009-06-24T14:23:00.003-04:00

When Private Insurers Claim They Can't Compete Against Public Health Care, They Just Make Themselves Look Silly

by Robert Creamer at HuffPO

You've got to give the private insurance companies credit for chutzpa. The argument that they have been making to Congress -- with straight faces -- that they "can't compete" against a public health insurance plan is preposterous. That's because it is internally inconsistent.

If it were true, then private health insurance firms must be inherently unable to provide health insurance as efficiently as the public sector. And if that were true, why would our nation allow itself to be held hostage by private insurance companies that unnecessarily siphon billions of dollars of wasted health care dollars from our collective pockets?

Every time the private insurance companies -- or their Republican apologists in Congress -- make the argument that "private insurance companies can't compete", they might as well dress up in clown suits and put on big red noses: they just look silly.

President Obama pointed out the absurdity of the argument in his news conference yesterday:

Just conceptually, the notion that all these insurance companies who say they're giving consumers the best possible deal, if they can't compete against a public plan as one option, with consumers making the decision what's the best deal, that defies logic.

The insurance executives are the first to tell us all about how much more efficient the private sector is at doing anything than the "government." Do they mean to tell us that the "best and the brightest" from private industry can't compete with a "bunch of government bureaucrats"?

There is, of course, considerable evidence that private insurance companies are generally more inefficient than public insurance plans. For instance, only 3% of every Medicare dollar goes to administrative costs, while from 13% to 17% -- and sometimes more -- goes to administering and marketing private plans.

Or there's the fact that "MedicareAdvantage" plans -- where private insurers are paid by Medicare to provide insurance for Medicare beneficiaries -- have required about a 20% subsidy above the cost of providing insurance through the regular Medicare system.

But the image of the poor little private insurance companies arrayed against the public colossus is ridiculous. One Republican went so far yesterday as to argue that the way a private insurance company would compete against a public plan was the way a rabbit competes with an alligator. The private insurance companies are not cuddly cute little bunnies. Many of them are giant multi-billion dollar companies that have massive provider networks, longstanding client bases and pay their CEOs tens of millions of dollars.

The real problem for private insurance companies is not that they can't compete with a public plan. It is that they can't compete and continue to do business they way they want to do business. And that, of course, is the point of a public option -- to change the behavior of the players in the health care market to assure that everyone has access to quality health care, and to stop the skyrocketing increase in health care costs.

The whole idea of insurance is to spread risk. Everyone pays into a common insurance pool, so when anyone gets sick they can count on getting the health care they need even if it costs far more than they could afford individually.

But left to their own devices, private insurance companies have an ever-present incentive to minimize their own risk of paying out for health care to their policyholders. That's why they try to select only customers who are well and get rid of those who are sick. That's why it's in their interest to spend millions on armies of people whose only job is to deny claims -- a task that has no value in the broader scheme of the health care system, but makes perfect sense from the standpoint of a private insurance company. That's why they don't want to take people with pre-existing conditions -- because they are more likely to get sick.

And, private insurers are not in business to provide health care coverage for every American, or to slow the growth of health care costs. They are in business to maximize return for their investors and the pay of their top management. So when left to their own devices, private insurers generate huge profits and pay their CEO's tens of millions of dollars.

The entry of a public insurance option into the health insurance marketplace would change the rules of the game. If consumers had a public option, who in their right mind would sign up with a company that would discontinue your policy if you got cancer or had a heart attack? Who would join a plan where they had to pay for bloated executive salaries -- or had to regularly do battle with an insurance bureaucrat in order to get a claim paid? Why do seniors like Medicare? They don't have to contend with these kinds of problems. They have secure, reliable health insurance.

So to compete, private insurance companies would be forced to change the way they do business. They would have to end all of those practices that American consumers have grown to hate, cut administrative costs -- maybe even cut CEO pay. Of course since the CEO of Cigna makes $26 million -- 65 times the salary of the President of the United States -- he could afford several million dollars in belt-tightening.

They could compete - but they would have to change the way they compete. That's what they are fighting tooth and nail to avoid - and that's also the whole point of health care reform: to change the incentives that determine how the players in the health insurance market do business day to day.

Of course there is another reason why all the concern about the competitiveness of private insurers is so absurd. The point of health insurance reform is not to benefit the private insurance companies. It is to provide everyone access to quality, affordable health care -- and to control exploding health care costs.

It's up to every one who cares about health care -- and the future of our economy -- to make sure Members of Congress remember what is really at stake in the health care debate. And it's not the health of the private health insurance industry.

Robert Creamer is a longtime political organizer and strategis,t and author of the recent book: Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, available on Amazon.com.

The Roadblock To Public Health Care? Democrats: Max Baucus, Ben Nelson, Kent Conrad, Mary Landrieu, Dianne Feinstein, Jeff Bingaman, Blanche Lincoln

2009-06-24T14:20:00.002-04:00

Democratic Opponents of Public Health Care Option Called Out In Ad.

by Jason Linkins at HuffPo

So, the public option! The GOP hates it, based on some weird read of free-market philosophy that says even though it will be a terrible and inferior product, it will nevertheless be too beloved by consumers for alternatives to thrive. The media thinks it's some oddball idea, which they constantly confuse with the socialized style medicine in Britain and Canada, when they are bothering to discuss the merits of health care at all. But the general public? Well, they love the idea of a public health care option. So, lucky for them the Democratic representatives they elected in large numbers to considerable Congressional majorities are... well, filled with people who have been bought off by insurance companies.

In the Senate -- where filibuster-proof supermajorities have become necessary to do anything, anymore -- Max Baucus, Ben Nelson, Kent Conrad, Mary Landrieu, Dianne Feinstein, Jeff Bingaman, and Blanche Lincoln have thrown up roadblocks to the possibility of a public option. Why? Because of something they call "centrism!" Paul Krugman made note of this in a column on Monday:

The real risk is that health care reform will be undermined by "centrist" Democratic senators who either prevent the passage of a bill or insist on watering down key elements of reform. I use scare quotes around "centrist," by the way, because if the center means the position held by most Americans, the self-proclaimed centrists are in fact way out in right field.

But what Baucus, Conrad, Landrieu, Feinstein, Bingaman, and Lincoln have found out there in right field are millions and millions of dollars from insurance companies which they can use to get re-elected! And when they run for re-election, they can all talk about the pressing need for more health care, which is just adorable!

So, what are the vast majorities of people who support a public option to do, arrayed against an indifferent media and cash-soaked coterie of compromised lawmakers? Well, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee will be running a new ad, calling out these wayward Senators, and are offering the public the chance to get all interactive and whatnot, by offering public option supporters a chance to have their name in the advertisement.

Well, it can't hurt! (If it does hurt, sadly, many of you don't have health care coverage.) The ad, sans names, runs as below:

PREVIOUSLY, on the HUFFINGTON POST:
Public Strongly Supports Public Health Care Option
NYT Poll Indicates Even Republicans Back Public Option

Idiot America: You Should Read This Book

2009-06-23T09:42:00.000-04:00

Amazon.com Review
Book Description
The Culture Wars Are Over and the Idiots Have Won.

A veteran journalist's acidically funny, righteously angry lament about the glorification of ignorance in the United States.

In the midst of a career-long quest to separate the smart from the pap, Charles Pierce had a defining moment at the Creation Museum in Kentucky, where he observed a dinosaur. Wearing a saddle... But worse than this was when the proprietor exclaimed to a cheering crowd, “We are taking the dinosaurs back from the evolutionists!” He knew then and there it was time to try and salvage the Land of the Enlightened, buried somewhere in this new Home of the Uninformed.

With his razor-sharp wit and erudite reasoning, Pierce delivers a gut-wrenching, side-splitting lament about the glorification of ignorance in the United States, and how a country founded on intellectual curiosity has somehow deteriorated into a nation of simpletons more apt to vote for an American Idol contestant than a presidential candidate.

With Idiot America, Pierce's thunderous denunciation is also a secret call to action, as he hopes that somehow, being intelligent will stop being a stigma, and that pinheads will once again be pitied, not celebrated.

A Q&A with Charles P. Pierce

Question: What inspired, or should I say drove, you to write Idiot America?
Charles P. Pierce: The germ of the idea came as I watched the extended coverage of the death of Terri Schiavo. I wondered how so many people could ally themselves with so much foolishness despite the fact that it was doing them no perceptible good, politically or otherwise. And it looked like the national media simply could not help itself but be swept along. This started me thinking and, when I read a clip in the New York Times about the Creation Museum, I pitched an idea to Mark Warren, my editor at Esquire, that said simply, “Dinosaurs with saddles.” What we determined the theme of the eventual piece—and of the book—would be was “The Consequences Of Believing Nonsense.”

Question: You visited the Creation Museum while writing Idiot America. Describe your experience there. What was your first thought when you saw a dinosaur with a saddle on its back?
Charles P. Pierce: My first thought was that it was hilarious. My second thought was that I was the only person in the place who thought it was, which made me both angry and a little melancholy. Outside of the fact that its “science” is a god-awful parodic stew of paleontology, geology, and epistemology, all of them wholly detached from the actual intellectual method of each of them. The most disappointing thing is that the completed museum is so dreadfully grim and earnest and boring. It even makes dragon myths servant to its fringe biblical interpretations. Who wants to live in a world where dragons are boring?

Question: Is there a specific turning point where, as a country, we moved away from prizing experience to trusting the gut over intellect?
Charles P. Pierce: I don't know if there's one point that you can point to and say, “This is when it happened.” The conflict between intellectual expertise and reflexive emotion—often characterized as “good old common sense,” when it is neither common nor sense—has been endemic to American culture and politics since the beginning. I do think that my profession, journalism, went off the tracks when it accepted as axiomatic the notion that “Perception is reality.” No. Perception is perception and reality is reality, and if the former doesn't conform to the latter, then it’s the journalist's job to hammer and hammer the reality until the perception conforms to it. That's how “intelligent design” gets treated as “science” simply because a lot of people believe in it.

Question: You delve into Ignatius Donnelly’s life story. In 1880, he published the book Atlantis: The Antediluvian World in an attempt to prove that the lost city existed. Yet, you characterize Donnelly as a lovable crank, and don’t take issue with him as you do with modern eccentrics, like Rush Limbaugh. What’s the difference between a harmless crank and a crank in Idiot America?
Charles P. Pierce: Cranks are noble because cranks are independent. Cranks do not care if their ideas succeed—they'd like them to do so—but cranks stand apart. Their value comes when, occasionally, their lonely dissents from the commonplace affect the culture, at which point either the culture moves to adopt them and their ideas come to influence the culture. The American crank is not someone with 600 radio stations spewing bilious canards to an audience of “dittoheads.” The concept of a “dittohead” is anathema to the American crank. He is a freethinker addressing an audience of them, whether that audience is made up of one person or a thousand. A charlatan is a crank who sells out.

Question: What is the most dangerous aspect of Idiot America?
Charles P. Pierce: The most dangerous aspect of Idiot America is that it encourages us to abandon our birthright to be informed citizens of a self-governing republic. America cannot function on automatic pilot, and, too often, we don't notice that it has been until the damage has already been done.

Question: Is there a voice or leader of Idiot America?
Charles P. Pierce: The leaders of Idiot America are those people who abandoned their obligations to the above. There are lots of people making an awful lot of money selling their ideas and their wares to Idiot America. Idiot America is an act of collective will, a product of lassitude and sloth.

Question: What is the difference between stupidity and glorifying ignorance?
Charles P. Pierce: Stupidity is as stupidity does, to quote a uniquely stupid movie. It has been with us always and always will be. But we moved into an era in which stupidity was celebrated if it managed to sell itself well, if it succeeded, if it made people money. That is “glorifying ignorance.” We moved into an era in which the reflexive instincts of the Gut were celebrated at the expense of reasoned, informed opinion. To this day, we have a political party—the Republicans—who, because it embraced a “movement of Conservatism” that celebrated anti-intellectualism is now incapable of conducting itself in any other way. That has profound political and cultural consequences, and the truly foul part about it was that so many people engaged in it knowing full well they were peddling poison.

Question: While writing Idiot America, what story or incident made you the most incensed?
Charles P. Pierce: Without question, it was talking to the people at Woodside Hospice, who shared with me what it was like to be inside the whirlwind stirred up by people who used the prolonged death of Terri Schiavo as a political and social volleyball to advance their own unpopular and reckless agenda. There are people—Sean Hannity comes to mind—who, if there is a just god in heaven, should be locked in a room for 20 minutes with Annie Santa Maria, the indomitable woman who works with the patients at the hospice. Only one of them would come out, and it wouldn't be him.

Question: With the election of President Obama, is Idiot America coming to an end? Or, will there always be a place for idiocy in America?
Charles P. Pierce: Look at the political opposition to President Obama. “Socialist!” “Fascist!” “Coming to get your guns.” Hysteria from the hucksters of Idiot America is still at high-tide. People are killing other people and specifically attributing their action to imaginary oppression stoked by radio talk-show stars and television pundits. That Glenn Beck has achieved the prominence he has makes me wonder if there is a just god in heaven.

Question: Are there any positive signs that we are moving away from Idiot America? If you could create a twelve step program to America back on track, what would be your first suggestion?
Charles P. Pierce: Remember that perception is not reality, that opinion, no matter how widely held, is not fact. An old and wise friend of mine said that the only question that any American citizen is required to answer is “Do you govern or are you governed?” It has to be answered in the former, and that answer has to be continuous. We have to get back to that.

President Obama's Health Care Reform? I Don't Think That Means What You Think It Means.

2009-06-16T13:33:00.001-04:00

Dave Lindorff: Obama, Like Clinton Before Him, is Blowing the Chance for Real Health Care Reform

Submitted by BuzzFlash on Tue, 06/16/2009 - 9:15am.

Dave Lindorff

If you want to fix the disaster that is called the American healthcare system, the first thing to do is to clearly point out what its major failings are, and there are two of these.

The first is cost. America is the most expensive or one of the most expensive places in the world to get sick or injured. The corollary of that is that it is one of the best places to make a killing if you are in the medical business, whether as a doctor, a hospital company, a pharmaceutical firm, or a nursing home owner.

The second is access. One in six Americans -- a total of 50 million people at latest count -- have no way to pay for that care. Too young for Medicare, too "well off" for Medicaid, but too poor to buy private health insurance or too sick to be admitted into a plan, or employed by a company that doesn't provide health benefits, these people get no medical care until they get so sick that they are brought into a hospital emergency room where they get treated (often too late) at public expense, or at the hospital's expense, with the cost shifted onto taxpayers or onto insured patients' premiums.

Any reform of this atrocious "system" must address these two major failings or it is no reform at all.

And that's where all the various versions of Obamacare fall flat.

Simply put, you cannot solve either of these problems by leaving the payment system for medical care in the hands of the private insurance industry, since the whole paradigm of insurance is to make money by keeping high-risk people out of the insured pool, and by keeping reimbursements and coverage for premium payers as low as possible.

Having a so-called "public option" plan working in competition with private insurance plans will not solve this problem. Either the public option will become like the private options -- trimming benefits and rejecting some applicants -- or it will become a dumping ground for all the high-cost, high-risk people that the private sector insurance industry doesn't want. At that point, the public plan will become a huge cost burden on the taxpayer, who will begin demanding that it cut back in the benefits it provides, taking us right back to where we started.

The fact that the Obama Administration and the Democratic Congress are both raising the issue of the high cost of health care "reform," and are talking about ways to raise revenues to pay for it tells us all we need to know about the alleged "reform" schemes they are contemplating. They are doomed and, even if implemented, will not work.

Real reform of the American health care system would not cost money. It would save money.

There is a level of dishonesty in what passes for the debate over health care "reform" in both Congress and the media that is stunning in its brazenness and/or venality.

Of course, real reform would cost more in government spending. But that is because real reform would remove the cost of medical care from both employers and from workers (who over the last 20 years have been shouldering an increasing share of their own medical care). And that shift would mean more profits for U.S. companies, which would free up more money for wages, and it would mean less money deducted from paychecks, meaning higher incomes for workers.

If President Obama had any political courage at all, he'd simply get on TV and say this: I will create a plan that will cover everyone, lift the burden of paying for healthcare from individuals and employers, and have the government pay for it all. You the taxpayer will pay for this plan with higher taxes, but you will no longer have any significant medical bills, you will no longer have health insurance premiums deducted from your paycheck, your employer will no longer be paying for employee medical coverage, and you will never have to worry about losing health benefits again, even if you are laid off. (Incidentally, eliminating employer-funded health insurance would go a long way towards allowing workers to fight to have unions, and to strike for contracts, by ending the threat that they would lose their benefits.)

Of course, to do that the president would have to be talking about what is variously known as national health care or a single-payer plan, in which the government is the insurer of health care for all.

This option isn't even being discussed in this so-called debate. As I've written earlier, even though there is an excellent single-payer system in place that has been running for a third of a century just to the north in Canada -- a system where patients have absolute freedom to choose their doctor, get instant access to a hospital and to expert specialist care in emergencies, and have a healthier society by every statistical measure -- all at a fraction of the staggering cost of healthcare in the U.S., not one Canadian expert working in that system has been invited down to discuss its workings with the White House or with members of Congress.

There has been a lot of negative propaganda spread about Canada's single-payer system, by right-wing, business-funded "no-think" tanks, and by medical industry lobbies from the American Medical Association to the pharmaceutical industry, but no government committee or agency has bothered, or dared, to bring in Canadian experts to respond to and debunk that propaganda. The corporate liars talk about waiting lists and lack of access to CAT-scan or MRI machines. But all we really need to know about the Canadian, and other similar single-payer systems, is that nowhere that they have been instituted have they been later terminated, even when, as in Canada, right-wing governments have been elected to power. The public, whether in Canada, or France, or England, or Taiwan or elsewhere, loves their public health insurance system, whatever flaws or problems with underfunding those systems may have at certain times. Trying to eliminate such systems would be political suicide for a conservative government, as even arch-free-marketer British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who never met a government activity that she didn't want to privatize, learned.

Right now, with half of all Americans reportedly fearing that they could lose their jobs, and with one in five Americans reportedly either unemployed, or involuntarily working part-time, we have a situation where a majority of Americans either have no health insurance, have lost their health insurance, or are in danger of losing their employer-funded health insurance. It is a unique moment when a bold president and Congress could act to end private health insurance and establish a public single-payer insurance plan to insure and provide access to affordable medical care to all Americans.

Instead of this, we are being offered half measures or no measures at all by leaders who are shamelessly in hock to the health care industry or who are afraid of its power.

In 1993, the Clintons had a similar opportunity to grab the health care industry by the neck, strangle it, and produce a single-payer alternative. They blew that chance by trying to keep the health care greed-heads happy. Now, almost a generation later, we have another shot at it, and Obama and his Democratic Congress are doing the same thing again. There is a strong likelihood that they will fail, like the Clintons before them. If they succeed in coming up with some kind of hybrid public-private Frankenstein of a system that includes a public insurance option, it will simply delay the inevitable disaster, as medical costs, already 20 percent of GDP -- the highest share of any economy in the world -- continue to soar, and as the cost of the public plan, which will inevitably become a dumping ground for high-cost patients, becomes politically untenable. In the end, we will have even more expensive and inaccessible healthcare than we have today.

It doesn't have to be this way, but only if Americans rip their eyes away from their crisp new digital-image TV screens and start demanding real health care reform will we get honest reform. A good place to begin would be to start writing and phoning your local media outlets to ask why they are not reporting on single-payer, and in particular on the single-payer bill sponsored by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), which is being silently blocked and killed by his colleagues in the Democratic congressional leadership and by the White House. A good place to begin would also be to start calling your elected representatives to demand that they support Rep. Conyers' single-payer bill.

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His is author of the critically acclaimed book "Marketplace Medicine: The Rise of the For-Profit Hospital Companies" (Bantam Books, 1992). His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006). His work can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Other Republican Racist of the Week: Sherri "I'm Sorry I Mailed It To The Non-Racists" Goforth.

2009-06-16T12:56:00.001-04:00

Sherri Goforth, an executive assistant for Tennessee State Rep. Diane Black (R-Gallatin), sent this picture out to other legislative staffers:

The email was headlined "Historical Keepsake Photo."

One staffer who received the email publicized it online:

I talked to my local rep, Mark Maddox about it, and described the picture to him at a recent fund raising event. I think he was as appalled as I was. I was going to post it last week but there was a death in my family and I had to think about it.

Because it made me mad.

But, you know, people need to know that this stuff is going on. I would be just as angry if a democratic staffer had sent it.

Dammit, Tennessee, haven't we moved past this kind of crap. I'm serious.

Goforth admitted to sending the email, but she apologized only for sending it to the wrong people.

"I went on the wrong email and I inadvertently hit the wrong button," Goforth said. "I'm very sick about it, and it's one of those things I can't change or take back."

Republicans Show Their True Colors: Rusty "Douchebag" Depass is the GOP Racist of the Week.

2009-06-16T12:53:00.002-04:00

South Carolina GOP activist and former chairman of the state elections commission Rusty DePass has apologized for saying a gorilla that escaped from a zoo was an "ancestor" of Michelle Obama.

The controversy started when FITSNews, a local politics Website, obtained a screengrab of DePass's comment on Facebook.

After an aide to state Attorney General Henry McMaster detailed the escape of the gorilla from Columbia's Riverbanks Zoo, DePass responded with a comment: "I'm sure it's just one of Michelle's ancestors - probably harmless."

DePass later admitted to WIS News that he was referring to Michelle Obama and said, "I am as sorry as I can be if I offended anyone. The comment was clearly in jest."

DePass, who was a county co-chair for Rudy Giuliani's 2008 campaign, supported the push to impeach President Bill Clinton in the late 90s, writing in an op-ed for The State, "Do Republicans have higher moral standards than Democrats?"

Obama Administration Promised To Defend Gay Rights. I don't think that means what you think it means.

2009-06-16T12:51:00.000-04:00

June 16, 2009

Editorial

A Bad Call on Gay Rights

The Obama administration, which came to office promising to protect gay rights but so far has not done much, actually struck a blow for the other side last week. It submitted a disturbing brief in support of the Defense of Marriage Act, which is the law that protects the right of states to not recognize same-sex marriages and denies same-sex married couples federal benefits. The administration needs a new direction on gay rights.

A gay couple married under California law is challenging the act in federal court. In its brief, the Justice Department argues that the couple lack legal standing to do so. It goes on to contend that even if they have standing, the case should be dismissed on the merits.

The brief insists it is reasonable for states to favor heterosexual marriages because they are the “traditional and universally recognized form of marriage.” In arguing that other states do not have to recognize same-sex marriages under the Constitution’s “full faith and credit” clause, the Justice Department cites decades-old cases ruling that states do not have to recognize marriages between cousins or an uncle and a niece.

These are comparisons that understandably rankle many gay people. In a letter to President Obama on Monday, Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights organization, said, “I cannot overstate the pain that we feel as human beings and as families when we read an argument, presented in federal court, implying that our own marriages have no more constitutional standing than incestuous ones.”

The brief also maintains that the Defense of Marriage Act represents a “cautious policy of federal neutrality” — an odd assertion since the law clearly discriminates against gay couples. Under the act, same-sex married couples who pay their taxes are ineligible for the sort of federal benefits — such as Social Security survivors’ payments and joint tax returns — that heterosexual married couples receive.

In the presidential campaign, President Obama declared that he would work to overturn the Defense of Marriage Act. Now, the administration appears to be defending it out of a sense of obligation to support a validly enacted Congressional law. There is a strong presumption that the Justice Department will defend federal laws, but it is not an inviolable rule.

If the administration does feel compelled to defend the act, it should do so in a less hurtful way. It could have crafted its legal arguments in general terms, as a simple description of where it believes the law now stands. There was no need to resort to specious arguments and inflammatory language to impugn same-sex marriage as an institution.

The best approach of all would have been to make clear, even as it defends the law in court, that it is fighting for gay rights. It should work to repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the law that bans gay men and lesbians in the military from being open about their sexuality. It should push hard for a federal law banning employment discrimination. It should also work to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act in Congress.

The administration has had its hands full with the financial crisis, health care, Guantánamo Bay and other pressing matters. In times like these, issues like repealing the marriage act can seem like a distraction — or a political liability. But busy calendars and political expediency are no excuse for making one group of Americans wait any longer for equal rights.

Obama's Transparency? I don't think that means what you think it means.

2009-06-16T12:49:00.001-04:00

Obama blocks access to White House visitor list

Taking Bush's position, administration denies msnbc.com request for logs

By Bill Dedman

Investigative reporter

msnbc.com

updated 12:46 p.m. ET, Tues., June 16, 2009

The Obama administration is fighting to block access to names of visitors to the White House, taking up the Bush administration argument that a president doesn't have to reveal who comes calling to influence policy decisions.

Despite President Barack Obama's pledge to introduce a new era of transparency to Washington, and despite two rulings by a federal judge that the records are public, the Secret Service has denied msnbc.com's request for the names of all White House visitors from Jan. 20 to the present. It also denied a narrower request by the nonpartisan watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which sought logs of visits by executives of coal companies.

CREW says it will file a lawsuit Tuesday against the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Secret Service. (Updated: Here's a copy of CREW's complaint.)

"We are deeply disappointed," said CREW attorney Anne L. Weismann, "that the Obama administration is following the same anti-transparency policy as the Bush administration when it comes to White House visitor records. Refusing to let the public know who visits the White House is not the action of a pro-transparency, pro-accountability administration."

Groups that advocate open government have argued that it's vital to know the names of White House visitors, who may have an outsized influence on policy matters. The visitor logs have been released in only a few isolated cases, most notably records of visits by lobbyist Jack Abramoff to the Bush White House, and in the "filegate" investigation of the Clinton White House.

The Obama administration is arguing that the White House visitor logs are presidential records — not Secret Service agency records, which would be subject to the Freedom of Information Act. The administration ought to be able to hold secret meetings in the White House, "such as an elected official interviewing for an administration position or an ambassador coming for a discussion on issues that would affect international negotiations," said Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt.

These same arguments, made by the Bush administration, were rejected twice by a federal judge. The visitor logs are created by the Secret Service and maintained by the Secret Service, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth ruled in 2007 and again this January. CREW had requested records of visits to the Bush White House, as well as the residence of Vice President Dick Cheney, by leaders of Religious Right organizations.

The Bush administration appealed Lamberth's decision, and the Obama administration has continued to press that appeal.

"It is the government's position," the Secret Service wrote last week to msnbc.com in denying access to the visitor logs, "that the vast majority, if not all, of the records ... are not agency records subject to the FOIA. Rather, these records are records governed by the Presidential Records Act" and "remain under the exclusive legal custody and control of the White Office and the Office of the Vice President. After the resolution of this litigation, we will respond further to your request if necessary."

The visitor records are kept in two databases:

Worker and Visitor Entry System (WAVES). This Secret Service database includes information submitted to the Secret Service about individuals who have a planned visit to the White House. This information includes the name of the pass holder submitting the request, the date of the request, the time and location of the planned visit and the nature of the visit or the person to be visited. This information may be updated with the actual date and time of entry and exit. Msnbc.com also requested lists submitted to the Secret Service of groups or delegations of visitors with planned visits to the White House.

Access Control Records System (ACES). This Secret Service database includes information generated when a pass holder, worker or visitor swipes a permanent or temporary pass over an electronic reader at entrances or exits. This information includes the name of the visitor, the badge number, the post or location, and the date and time of entry or exit.

No private information requested
Msnbc.com excluded from its request any private information on the White House visitors. It asked that the Secret Service delete from the logs any dates of birth, Social Security numbers, and home addresses (other than city and state).

In addition, msnbc.com asked the Secret Service to exclude information on security precautions and the results of background checks on prospective visitors.

The Bush White House had taken several steps to close off access to the visitor logs, steps repeatedly rejected by the federal judge.

In May 2006, the Bush White House signed a memorandum of understanding with the Secret Service, declaring that the logs are agency records, under White House control.

In October 2006, CREW sought records of visits by nine religious leaders: James Dobson, Gary L. Bauer, Wendy Wright, Louis P. Sheldon, Andrea Lafferty, Paul Weyrich, Tony Perkins, Donald Wildmon and Jerry Falwell.

The Bush position was rejected in December 2007 by Judge Lamberth, a former federal prosecutor who was appointed to the bench by President Ronald Reagan. Lamberth gave the White House 20 days to hand over the public records. But CREW did not get the visitor logs.

In September 2008, Homeland Security said that it did not plan to release the visitor logs, claiming that the visitor logs were protected by the presidential communication privilege in the law.

Judge Lamberth ruled again, denying that claim on Jan. 9. The judge wrote that a simple list of visitors is not a communication at all, because it includes no details on the topics discussed during a meeting, and therefore is not protected by a presidential communication privilege.

The Bush administration appealed on Jan. 14, a week before the end of President Bush's term of office.

In late January and again in May, the Obama administration had opportunities to change course, when it filed papers in the appeals court, but stuck with the Bush position.

In February, the White House spokesman, LaBolt, told msnbc.com that the policy was under review. "We are reviewing our policy on access to visitor logs and related litigation involving the previous administration to determine how we can ensure that policymaking in this administration happens in an open and transparent way, and that we take appropriate measures to ensure that we are operating in a secure environment."

But last week, in denial letters to msnbc.com and CREW, the Secret Service continued to cite the Bush position.

Asked Monday whether the White House plans to continue to oppose release of the records, White House spokesman LaBot said the policy is still under review. He also cited a list of "the unprecedented steps the administration has taken to promote openness and transparency." These include instructing all agencies to adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure in Freedom of Information Act decisions, and overturning the practice of allowing other executives, aside from the president, to assert executive privilege to block access to an administration's records.

Unpersuaded was the attorney for the watchdog group CREW, which was formed in 2003 during the Bush administration to increase open government.

"It's great that President Obama made this commitment to transparency," attorney Weismann said. "But now you need to make good on it."

Right Wingers Continue To Pretend Their Rhetoric and Histrionics About Socialism Don't Contribute to Right Wing Extremism.

2009-06-11T11:44:00.001-04:00

When a Department of Homeland Security report on right-wing extremism was released earlier this year, the conservative media responded with outrage and mockery. In light of Wednesday's attack at the Washington D.C. Holocaust Museum, Fox News' anchor Shep Smith pointed out that "they warned us for a reason." Media Matters has looked back at how those warnings were ignored.

"There are no Timothy McVeighs out there right now," declared James Dobson on Fox News in April. "They're making a big deal out of something that hasn't happened and may not happen."

Fox News contributor Andrea Tantaros dismissed the report's findings as a "made up threat."

Joe Scarborough reacted with both anger and indignation, expressing shock that the report was "targeting veterans returning from war" while also laughing hysterically when it was brought up: "This is a funny story this is a laughably -- they're nuts, Janet Napolitano has gone nuts -- this is funny."

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Fox News Double Whammy: Shep Smith Decries "Crazies" then Glenn "Never Went to College" Beck Incites those same Crazies.

2009-06-11T11:20:00.004-04:00

Glenn Beck Spins the Holocaust Museum Shooting

Joseph A. Palermo

This afternoon Glenn Beck and two of his guests argued that Adolph Hitler and the Nazi Party were "leftwing"; that "political correctness" led the committed white supramacist, James Von Brunn, to shoot a security guard at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC; and that ultimately President Barack Obama is the one responsible for the violence because his "bailouts" and "Socialistic" policies are engendering widespread anger. Beck denounced those who claim he is "churning the pot" because, he says, "the pot is already boiling."

Seeing this spectacle with subtitles at the gym today led me to wonder if there are any laws on the books against using the public airwaves to incite violence. Because that is clearly what Beck is doing. I only caught about ten minutes of the show (about all I can stand) and it was a white reactionary tour de force -- incendiary, stupid, and racist.

In Beck's world President Obama brings "identity politics" and "political correctness" to the White House, and it's the "Left" that is "racist" because unlike conservatives, who judge people only on their individual merits and character (the three white men sitting at Beck's table nodding in agreement), all liberals see is people of different races and classes and genders, which "divides" America. And Obama's "socialistic" policies are leading people of dubious sanity to become unglued, and therefore the outbreak of right-wing violence is Obama's fault. Talk about spin! Only through a conscious and disingenuous effort could anyone link the shooting today at the Holocaust Museum to President Obama.

Beck and his guests at the opening of his show today all agreed that the Nazis were not rightwing but a bunch of leftwingers (like Obama and Nancy Pelosi). That is pretty weird when you think about how that tidbit of agitprop must disappoint a lot of white supremacists. All those white guys who hail Hitler and the Nazis because they were so good at kicking the crap out of Socialists, labor unionists, Communists and Soviets, women who didn't know their place, and even "degenerate" Dadaists and surrealists, and don't forget the Jews. What self-respecting Neo-Nazi or Ku Klux Klansman (or good ol' boy at the Council of Conservative Citizens) wants to hear that Hitler was like Michael Moore and Al Franken? But it doesn't matter because Beck is not appealing to his viewers' brains but to their guts. And all those "isms" sound the same to 'em anyhow.

And since this James Von Brunn guy targeted a museum where the murder of millions of Jews is memorialized Beck took the opportunity to run a short audio clip of an interview he had with Benjamin Netanyahu three years ago. He then segued into a riff on how our currently tough economic times will lead some people to scapegoat Jews and that means that Israel should bomb Iran right away. Somewhere behind Beck's talking points there is real thinking going on. No one should dismiss Beck as a hack or "entertainer." He is a propagandist.

It's also clear that Beck and his fans just can't get over the fact that a black man is now their president.

The television and radio producers behind Beck's shows are bright, highly educated Republican strategists at FOX News who are expert at calculating each talking point for the host to pull on the jingoistic heartstrings of his viewers. And it works. Beck's writers are creative people because they've found numerous ingenious ways to denounce Obama because he's black but in ways that don't sound racist.

Beck's good at what he does. I'm sure his viewers get fired up during every show. He's also dangerous. He talks up a grand conspiracy of liberals and "Socialists" who are destroying everything that makes America great and constantly uses alarmist rhetoric as if the whole country is falling apart around us. He does so by emoting on command and with practiced histrionics. I urge you go to Netflix and put on your queue "The Goebbels Experiment."

When the doctors start acting like businessmen, who do the people turn to for doctors?

2009-06-11T08:51:00.002-04:00

American Medical Association Trying To Torpedo Health Care Reform Again

Sam Stein at HuffPo

Just days before President Barack Obama is set to address the American Medical Association to pitch its members on his vision for health care reform, the 250,000-member physician group announced it would oppose a major component of that effort.

On Wednesday night, the New York Times reported that AMA was "letting Congress know" that it would resist a public plan for health insurance coverage.

Politically, the revelation could be a potentially significant blow to progressive health care reform advocates, who contend that a public option is the best way to reduce costs and increase insurance coverage. AMA has the institutional resources and the prestige to impact debates in the halls of Congress.

Historically and philosophically, however, AMA's opposition is hardly newsworthy. Despite a lofty reputation and purported commitment to universal coverage, AMA has fought almost every major effort at health care reform of the past 70 years. The group's reputation on this matter is so notorious that historians pinpoint it with creating the ominous sounding phrase "socialized medicine" in the early decades of the 1900s.

"The AMA used it to mean any kind of proposal that involved an increased role for the government in the health care system," Jonathan Oberlander, a professor of health policy at the University of North Carolina, told NPR in a 2007 interview. "They also used it to mean things in the private system that they didn't like. So, at one point, HMOs were a form of socialized medicine."

Indeed, the role played by AMA throughout health care reform battles past has often been primarily as the defender of the status quo. In 1935, fears of an AMA backlash helped persuade Franklin Roosevelt's advisers to drop a health care article from the Social Security package -- fearful that the opposition would sink the legislation altogether.

Concerned about government restriction on and oversight over surgical activities -- not to mention the loss of physician income -- the group deployed the "socialized medicine" argument to undermine Harry Truman's effort at a national health care system years later.

In 1961, AMA organized a campaign to block Medicare. Titled "Operation Coffeecup," the effort insisted that the government-sponsored system would lead to a varying form of totalitarianism. For a spokesman, the group turned to Ronald Reagan, who lent his famous actor's voice to a 10-minute plus recording.

"One of the traditional methods of imposing state-ism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine," said the then-future president. "It is very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project. Most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can't afford it."

During the most recent effort at reform -- the Clinton administration's go at it in the early '90s -- AMA found itself, once again, the spoiler. The group, worried about cost-control measures, poured $3 million into defeating Hillary Clinton's proposal. Perhaps as significantly, it lent its name (and the prestige of its members) to the political opposition. In 1995, AMA endorsed then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich's Medicare Preservation Act. It was interpreted, at the time, as a patently political ploy - an effort to align with the party that held the keys to legislative power.

The same cannot be said of the American Medical Association's decision to oppose a public plan in the current health care reform quarrel, in which the Obama White House holds the vast majority of political power. Indeed, up until Wednesday, AMA, like most other private players, had kept its powder dry.

So why speak up now? The group cited impossible-to-avoid policy disagreements.

"The A.M.A. does not believe that creating a public health insurance option for non-disabled individuals under age 65 is the best way to expand health insurance coverage and lower costs," read an organizational statement to the Senate Finance Committee. "The introduction of a new public plan threatens to restrict patient choice by driving out private insurers, which currently provide coverage for nearly 70 percent of Americans."

Without private insurers in the market, the statement added, "the corresponding surge in public plan participation would likely lead to an explosion of costs that would need to be absorbed by taxpayers."

On this front as well, AMA's critics have room to scoff. Indeed, in mid-February, the Commonwealth Fund put out a report on the most cost-effective ways to revamp the health care industry. The public plan, it concluded, "plays a central role in harnessing markets for positive change" by lowering premiums for many Americans by, potentially, $1,000 a year. In addition, the Commonwealth Fund added, a public plan would help decrease the number of uninsured in the country from "an estimated 48 million in 2009 (16 percent of the U.S. population) to 4 million by 2012."

It's time for Universal Heath Insurance.

2009-06-11T08:49:00.001-04:00

The Health Insurance Mafia deserves a good Screwing.

Bob Cesca at Huffpo

Not so long ago, I lost my health insurance.

The coverage was provided through my small business, that is until the carrier (rhymes with Screw Costs) decided to triple the monthly premium completely at random, leaving me with a common ultimatum: either cancel the plan or spend myself out of business. So I canceled the plan.

Good timing, considering that while riding my bike last year I was hit by a car and, upon being hurled to the street, I fractured my T10 vertebra. (My auto insurance covered my medical expenses free and clear, and I'm gratefully back to riding 80 or so miles a week.)

Coupled with my wife's back surgery from the middle 1990s, though, there are currently two fairly serious preexisting conditions on our family medical records, and so now whenever I shop for health insurance, I'm either turned down or quoted a premium that amounts to a request for voluntary financial rape. There are an array of other craptastical tricks and awfulness dished out by the insurers, but those are the most common walls I run into.

My only other option is to abandon my career and take a job that provides health insurance. As happy as that might make some comment trolls, I'm not in a position to do that either. But even if I did, there aren't any guarantees that the insurer wouldn't deny coverage that I paid for, along with a mélange of various other screwings the health insurance industry routinely gets away with.

This story isn't unusual, unfortunately, though I doubt other stories too often involve ricocheting off of a moving vehicle onto hard pavement with nothing but a helmet and garish road cycling regalia to break the fall.

So needless to say, I'm anxiously anticipating the public health insurance option -- as long as it's not crapped up with triggers or trap doors.

Actually, "anticipating" doesn't suffice to define my mood right now. I need it. My family needs it. Because the private health insurance companies have essentially told me that either they want all of my money, or nothing. And if I were to acquiesce to their thievery, I could once again count on premiums randomly being jacked up and, as so many Americans have experienced, coverage being outright denied, all for the sake of profit margins, stock quotes and obscene executive salaries.

A government healthcare plan, on the other hand, would be specifically tailored for stories like mine, and it's my only real chance of having health insurance anytime soon.

In addition to putting the "insurance" back into "health insurance," the public plan would force the private insurers to figure out how to compete -- or face bankruptcy. How excellent would that be for a change? The health insurance companies under financial pressure brought on by a competitive entity that we own.

Honestly, I hope they choke on it. I can think of no other American industry that more closely resembles a criminal shakedown of the public than the health insurers.

Even calling it "insurance" is a sick joke. Insurance implies a guarantee, and no matter what we pay, there are never any guarantees. I propose replacing the word "insurance" with the word "maybe?" -- including the question mark -- as in "health maybe?" Maybe they'll pay when we get sick. Maybe they won't randomly hike our monthly premium by 30 percent. Maybe they'll cover our preexisting conditions without gouging us -- that is if they agree to cover us at all. Maybe they won't let our family members die after refusing coverage.

The entire business model of the health insurance industry is based around a basic truth: people have a natural will to live, and in many cases we'll go broke paying someone to prevent death. The cost of healthcare is so expensive -- in some cases conspiratorial by design -- that we need these other companies to step in and help us pay for it. That's the whole scam. Pay or die.

Consequently, the basic animalistic fear of pain and death coerces us to keep paying whatever we have to pay, and allows the health insurance companies total latitude to get away with their criminal enterprise. (It's a similar fear that keeps us hooked on a cocktail of prescription drugs even though the freakish excretory side effects are often worse than the ailments themselves.)

The public option is an escape hatch. A light in the tunnel. It's actual insurance and not some sort of twisted form of legalized Mafioso extortion.

The Republicans along with the several cowardly Democrats who oppose the public option, in addition to mostly being bought off by the dons who run the industry, are actually preventing competition when they otherwise claim to embrace it. They're preventing you from having a fair choice in this thing.

Competition is what capitalism is all about, yes? The spirit of competition mandates that the marketplace -- you and I -- have the flexibility to move towards the path of least resistance, thus competition is generated, prices are controlled, service improves and the companies that can't compete are killed off. If we don't like one form of crap on a stick, we can stop buying it in lieu of better, cheaper crap on a stick. Choice drives competition and competition drives the economy, right?

As it stands now, there are no choices so there's no real competition.

If we opt to bail on our insurance company because we think they're being unfair or generally screwing us, there are no guarantees the next place will be better or cheaper, or that they'll even have us. And what if we developed an injury or illness on the previous policy? So our tendency is to stay put or, like me, roll the dice.

We're very literally trapped and we have no leverage. We're effed coming and going. We're in a compromised, boxed-in, no win situation and the health insurance companies, along with the politicians they're buying off, know it. So they're exploiting our captivity (and our basic will to live) for profit and political gain.

Tell me again how this is an industry that needs to be defended and protected. Tell me how this isn't organized crime.

Ultimately, the public healthcare option has the potential to end the systematic screwing. It'll force la cosa nostra to compete -- to become more efficient and less criminally coercive. If they can't or if they refuse, then too goddamn bad. Or maybe they'll actually do the right thing and become better than the public option and everyone will want to buy in.

Yeah, that last thing won't happen. After all, there are obscene CEO paychecks to support.

* Ron Williams - Aetna - Total Compensation: $24,300,112.
* H. Edward Hanway - CIGNA - Total Compensation: $12,236,740.
* Angela Braly - WellPoint - Total Compensation: $9,844,212.
* Dale Wolf - Coventry Health Care - Total Compensation: $9,047,469.
* Michael Neidorff - Centene - Total Compensation: $8,774,483.
* James Carlson - AMERIGROUP - Total Compensation: $5,292,546.
* Michael McCallister - Humana - Total Compensation: $4,764,309.
* Jay Gellert - Health Net - Total Compensation: $4,425,355.
* Richard Barasch - Universal American - Total Compensation: $3,503,702.
* Stephen Hemsley - UnitedHealth Group - Total Compensation: $3,241,042.

These people are, of course, compensated based upon the potential profits they're able to generate for their respective shareholders. And those profits are generated both by charging ever-increasing premiums and by refusing to pay out. Put another way: screwing you. And, by the way, while they're screwing you they're locked into the recession-proof tobacco industry -- investing $4.5 billion dollars in a product that's been proven to kill you.

Seriously. Good people.

The health insurance companies and their guardians in Congress can't be allowed to win this one. The Obama administration is giving you and me -- our government, accountable to us -- a chance to compete with the health insurance crime families. We have to draw the line here. There can be no capitulation or compromise on public health insurance. More than any other issue on the table right now, this is about our lives and, in a very serious way, our human dignity. And at no other time in recent history have we had a similar such opportunity for victory in a system that is transparently designed to otherwise screw us.

Bob Cesca's Awesome Blog! Go!

Bill O'Reilly: Inciting the Death of George Tiller. Judgment Day Comes For You Too Billy.

2009-06-01T16:06:00.001-04:00

When his show airs tomorrow, Bill O'Reilly will most certainly decry the death of Kansas doctor George Tiller, who was killed Sunday while attending church services with his wife. Tiller, O'Reilly will say, was a man who was guilty of barbaric acts, but a civilized society does not resort to lawless murder, even against its worst members. And O'Reilly, we can assume, will genuinely mean this.

But there's no other person who bears as much responsibility for the characterization of Tiller as a savage on the loose, killing babies willy-nilly thanks to the collusion of would-be sophisticated cultural elites, a bought-and-paid-for governor and scofflaw secular journalists. Tiller's name first appeared on "The Factor" on Feb. 25, 2005. Since then, O'Reilly and his guest hosts have brought up the doctor on 28 more episodes, including as recently as April 27 of this year. Almost invariably, Tiller is described as "Tiller the Baby Killer."

American Taliban Strikes.... Christians Who Murder Those Who Disagree With Them? Terrorists.

2009-06-01T15:01:00.001-04:00

Christian Fundamentalist Terrorism.

by Shannyn Moore at Huffpo

It's shocking to write. But it's time to start calling it what it is.

When Jim D. Adkisson walked into the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church with 76 rounds and a shot-gun, he killed 2 people and was charged with murder. His motive was "he hated the liberal movement" and was upset with "liberals in general as well as gays." He should have been charged with terrorism.

Sunday George Tiller, a Wichita doctor, was killed INSIDE the lobby of his Wichita church. Reformation Lutheran Church became a crime scene; fundamentalist terrorism.

The right wing media hacks make targets of the left. The fundamentalist reverends blather their intolerance of other Americans. Their marriages are in jeopardy if the GLBT community can walk down an aisle. Their children are going to be molested if you have to rent to a same sex couple. Fear...fear...fear the queer.

Bill O'Reilly's hit piece on Dr. Tiller is a training tape for Christian Fundamentalist Terrorists. Never did he ask the woman interviewed how she, as a 13 year old, got pregnant, who was the father, or where her parents were when she underwent an abortion at Dr. Tiller's clinic. I'm sure O'Reilly's drivel will insist on personal accountability for the murderer. I'm sure he won't be in line for any "accountability" for calling the doctor "Tiller the baby-killer" or his clinic a "death mill."

Are anti-choice groups celebrating today? An abortion doctor is dead so women won't have unwanted pregnancies!

The "war on terror" needs to include domestic religious, fundamentalist terrorists.
Who is next?

Right Wing Hate Mongers Continue To Fan The Flames and thier unhinged supporters act... With Murder.

2009-06-01T14:58:00.001-04:00

The Murder of Dr. Tiller: A Foreshadowing
by Christina Page

For those who would like to think today's murder in church of Dr. George Tiller, an abortion provider, is an isolated incident, here's the horrifying news: You are wrong. The pattern is clear and frightening.

In March 1993, three months into the administration of our first pro-choice president, Bill Clinton, abortion provider Dr. David Gunn was murdered in Pensacola, Florida. That was the beginning of what would become a five-fold increase in violence against abortion providers throughout the Clinton years.

Today's assassination of Dr. George Tiller comes 5 months into the term of our second pro-choice president. For anyone who would like to believe that this is a statistical anomaly, a coincidence that doesn't portend anything, again, you are wrong.

During the entire Bush administration, from 2000-2008 there were no murders.

During the Clinton era, between 1994-2000 there were 6 abortion providers and clinic staff murdered, and 17 attempted murders of abortion providers. There were 12 bombings or arsons during the Clinton years.

During the Bush administration, not only were there no murders, there were no attempted murders. There was one clinic bombing during the Bush years.

One can only conclude that like terrorist sleeper cells, these extremists have now been set in motion. Indeed the evidence is already there. The chatter, the threats, the hate-filled rhetoric are abundant.

In the last year of the Bush administration there were 396 harassing calls to abortion clinics. In just the first four months of the Obama administration that number has jumped to 1401.

And so the execution of Tiller, 67, is not only tragic but ominous. He was born into an era when being an abortion provider meant saving women's lives. And the cold-blooded murder in church and in front of his wife of this stalwart defender of women rights and beloved physician, comes as a message for others, as well as tragic deja vu.

Battered women are at greatest danger of being killed by their abusers when they are most strong -- that is, when they muster the courage to leave. The same phenomenon may be true in the abusive political abortion debate. The pro-choice movement, specifically our abortion providers, are in the greatest danger of violence when we take power. When the anti-abortion movement loses power, their most extreme elements appear to move to the fore and take control. The murder of Dr. Tiller suggests that violence against abortion providers may be far more linked to the power, or lack thereof, anti-abortion groups have politically than to laws designed to increase penalties against such acts.

History has another disturbing lesson for us. The escalation of anti-abortion rhetoric plays a direct role in instigating violence. When anti-abortion groups ratchet up the rhetoric, they know exactly what they're doing and the results it will have. Even if they maintain deniability, as Operation Rescue recently did saying, in effect, we wanted Tiller gone, but didn't want him murdered, they have inflamed the rhetoric. And suddenly people Like Dr. Tiller's murderer become inspired.

Eleanor Bader, co-author of Targets of Hatred: Anti-Abortion Terrorism, in an article in March for RHRealityCheck.org about clinics bracing for an uptick in violence after the election of Obama wrote, "immediately after Obama's election, Douglas Johnson, Legislative Director of the National Right to Life Committee, called him a "hardcore pro-abortion president." The American Life League dubbed him "one of the most radical pro-abortion politicians ever," and Father Frank Pavone of Priests for Life warned that Obama will "force Americans to pay for the killing of innocents." Americans United for Life, the Family Research Council and Operation Save America quickly joined the chorus."

Bader interviewed clinic staff -- many seeing a direct relationship between the pro-choice victory in November and increased aggression against them and their patients. Claire Keyes, of Allegheny Reproductive Health in Pittsburgh, explained:

Right after the election we saw a small upsurge in anti-abortion activity. But since the inauguration, things have gotten measurably worse. There's been an increase in picketing by students from Franciscan University in Ohio. On Saturdays there are 60-plus protesters and there's been an increase in screaming and aggression. We don't have a parking lot so people park on the street. The antis have surrounded cars, trapping the women inside, and in several cases the antis jumped into vehicles and touched or grabbed at them. The police were called but so far they don't seem to be responding appropriately.

Bader also quotes Elizabeth Barnes, Executive Director of the Philadelphia Women's Center, who explained, "When the pendulum swung in the direction of protecting women's rights, we expected something. The way the antis are reacting has changed, they're taking more liberties, pressing the boundaries of legal, civil protest."

Many in the pro-choice movement believed that the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) law, passed in 1994 in response to Gunn's murder, was responsible for reigning in violence against abortion providers. Clearly that is not the case. Based on statistics on violence against abortion providers compiled by the National Abortion Federation, even after the passage of FACE in 1994, there was still considerable violence and threats against clinic personnel, including six murders. As appears clear, the pro-choice movement has looked through rose-colored glasses, assuming or hoping that legalities can restrain terrorists.

In fact, it didn't abate after FACE, as we've seen. It was not until a comforting anti-abortion president did they calm down and stop the murder, bombing and harassment spree.

As a result of Bush's policies, recent reportings from clinics suggest that we may be seeing a surge in abortions. That has failed to inspire introspection from anti-abortion groups. That Clinton presided over the most dramatic decline in abortion rates in the recorded history of our country left them unmoved. That Obama has assigned his senior-most staff to the task of finding ways to reduce the need for abortion has not protected clinics nor providers nor Obama. Holder and his Justice Department should take note of the chatter and move aggressively against this form of domestic terrorism. The hate-filled rhetoric against Obama from the anti-abortion movement is at unprecedented levels, even for this reflexively inflammatory group. They refer to him as the "Most Pro-Abortion President Ever" ignoring the fact that he is the first to extend an olive branch in hopes that together we can make abortion more rare.

Anti-abortion groups will put out carefully worded press statements condemning the murder of Dr. Tiller, as became routine for them during the Clinton years. But unless the rhetoric they choose from now on becomes careful too -- they may be the enablers of murder and terror.

Laugher Of The Week: College Dropouts Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh Claim Sonia Sotomayor is "Unqualified and a racist."

2009-05-29T12:57:00.003-04:00

Sotomayor graduated with an A.B., summa cum laude (meaning in the top 1% of the class), from Princeton in 1976, and received her J.D. from Yale Law School in 1979, where she was an editor at the Yale Law Journal. (Law Review generally means that the student was in the top of the class.)

Glenn Beck graduated from High School. He took a single class at Yale University under special program that admitted non-traditional students (affirmative action anyone?) and dropped out.

Rush Limbaugh graduated from Cape Central High School, in 1969. His father and mother wanted him to attend college, so he enrolled at Southeast Missouri State University. He dropped out after two semesters and one summer; according to his mother, "he flunked everything", even a modern ballroom dancing class.

Only in America could these two uneducated morons be given a platform to criticize the intellectual ability of Sonia Sotomayor.

Dick Cheney Continues To Lie.

2009-05-22T13:39:00.001-04:00

Cheney's Speech Contained Omissions, Misstatements
By Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel, McClatchy Newspapers Jonathan S. Landay And Warren P. Strobel, Mcclatchy Newspapers – Thu May 21, 7:10 pm ET

WASHINGTON — Former Vice President Dick Cheney's defense Thursday of the Bush administration's policies for interrogating suspected terrorists contained omissions, exaggerations and misstatements.

In his address to the American Enterprise Institute , a conservative policy organization in Washington , Cheney said that the techniques the Bush administration approved, including waterboarding — simulated drowning that's considered a form of torture — forced nakedness and sleep deprivation, were "legal" and produced information that "prevented the violent death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people."

He quoted the Director of National Intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair , as saying that the information gave U.S. officials a "deeper understanding of the al Qaida organization that was attacking this country."

In a statement April 21 , however, Blair said the information "was valuable in some instances" but that "there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means. The bottom line is that these techniques hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security."

A top-secret 2004 CIA inspector general's investigation found no conclusive proof that information gained from aggressive interrogations helped thwart any "specific imminent attacks," according to one of four top-secret Bush-era memos that the Justice Department released last month.

FBI Director Mueller Robert Muller told Vanity Fair magazine in December that he didn't think that the techniques disrupted any attacks.

— Cheney said that President Barack Obama's decision to release the four top-secret Bush administration memos on the interrogation techniques was "flatly contrary" to U.S. national security, and would help al Qaida train terrorists in how to resist U.S. interrogations.

However, Blair, who oversees all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, said in his statement that he recommended the release of the memos, "strongly supported" Obama's decision to prohibit using the controversial methods and that "we do not need these techniques to keep America safe."

— Cheney said that the Bush administration "moved decisively against the terrorists in their hideouts and their sanctuaries, and committed to using every asset to take down their networks."

The former vice president didn't point out that Osama bin Laden and his chief lieutenant, Ayman al Zawahri , remain at large nearly eight years after 9-11 and that the Bush administration began diverting U.S. forces, intelligence assets, time and money to planning an invasion of Iraq before it finished the war in Afghanistan against al Qaida and the Taliban .

There are now 49,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan fighting to contain the bloodiest surge in Taliban violence since the 2001 U.S.-led intervention, and Islamic extremists also have launched their most concerted attack yet on neighboring, nuclear-armed Pakistan .

— Cheney denied that there was any connection between the Bush administration's interrogation policies and the abuse of detainee at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, which he blamed on "a few sadistic guards . . . in violation of American law, military regulations and simple decency."

However, a bipartisan Senate Armed Services Committee report in December traced the abuses at Abu Ghraib to the approval of the techniques by senior Bush administration officials, including former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld .

"The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of 'a few bad apples' acting on their own," said the report issued by Sens. Carl Levin , D- Mich. , and John McCain , R- Ariz. "The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality and authorized their use against detainees."

— Cheney said that "only detainees of the highest intelligence value" were subjected to the harsh interrogation techniques, and he cited Khalid Sheikh Mohammad , the alleged mastermind of the 9-11 attacks.

He didn't mention Abu Zubaydah, the first senior al Qaida operative to be captured after 9-11. Former FBI special agent Ali Soufan told a Senate subcommittee last week that his interrogation of Zubaydah using traditional methods elicited crucial information, including Mohammed's alleged role in 9-11.

The decision to use the harsh interrogation methods "was one of the worst and most harmful decisions made in our efforts against al Qaida ," Soufan said. Former State Department official Philip Zelikow , who in 2005 was then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's point man in an internal fight to overhaul the Bush administration's detention policies, joined Soufan in his criticism.

— Cheney said that "the key to any strategy is accurate intelligence," but the Bush administration ignored warnings from experts in the CIA , the Defense Intelligence Agency , the State Department , the Department of Energy and other agencies, and used false or exaggerated intelligence supplied by Iraqi exile groups and others to help make its case for the 2003 invasion.

Cheney made no mention of al Qaida operative Ali Mohamed al Fakheri , who's known as Ibn Sheikh al Libi , whom the Bush administration secretly turned over to Egypt for interrogation in January 2002 . While allegedly being tortured by Egyptian authorities, Libi provided false information about Iraq's links with al Qaida , which the Bush administration used despite doubts expressed by the DIA.

A state-run Libyan newspaper said Libi committed suicide recently in a Libyan jail.

— Cheney accused Obama of "the selective release" of documents on Bush administration detainee policies, charging that Obama withheld records that Cheney claimed prove that information gained from the harsh interrogation methods prevented terrorist attacks.

"I've formally asked that (the information) be declassified so the American people can see the intelligence we obtained," Cheney said. "Last week, that request was formally rejected."

However, the decision to withhold the documents was announced by the CIA , which said that it was obliged to do so by a 2003 executive order issued by former President George W. Bush prohibiting the release of materials that are the subject of lawsuits.

— Cheney said that only "ruthless enemies of this country" were detained by U.S. operatives overseas and taken to secret U.S. prisons.

A 2008 McClatchy investigation, however, found that the vast majority of Guantanamo detainees captured in 2001 and 2002 in Afghanistan and Pakistan were innocent citizens or low-level fighters of little intelligence value who were turned over to American officials for money or because of personal or political rivalries.

In addition, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Oct. 5, 2005 , that the Bush administration had admitted to her that it had mistakenly abducted a German citizen, Khaled Masri , from Macedonia in January 2004 .

Masri reportedly was flown to a secret prison in Afghanistan , where he allegedly was abused while being interrogated. He was released in May 2004 and dumped on a remote road in Albania .

In January 2007 , the German government issued arrest warrants for 13 alleged CIA operatives on charges of kidnapping Masri.

— Cheney slammed Obama's decision to close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp and criticized his effort to persuade other countries to accept some of the detainees.

The effort to shut down the facility, however, began during Bush's second term, promoted by Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates .

"One of the things that would help a lot is, in the discussions that we have with the states of which they (detainees) are nationals, if we could get some of those countries to take them back," Rice said in a Dec. 12, 2007 , interview with the British Broadcasting Corp. "So we need help in closing Guantanamo ."

— Cheney said that, in assessing the security environment after 9-11, the Bush team had to take into account "dictators like Saddam Hussein with known ties to Mideast terrorists."

Cheney didn't explicitly repeat the contention he made repeatedly in office: that Saddam cooperated with al Qaida , a linkage that U.S. intelligence officials and numerous official inquiries have rebutted repeatedly.

The late Iraqi dictator's association with terrorists vacillated and was mostly aimed at quashing opponents and critics at home and abroad.

The last State Department report on international terrorism to be released before 9-11 said that Saddam's regime "has not attempted an anti-Western terrorist attack since its failed plot to assassinate former President ( George H.W.) Bush in 1993 in Kuwait ."

A Pentagon study released last year, based on a review of 600,000 Iraqi documents captured after the U.S.-led invasion, concluded that while Saddam supported militant Palestinian groups — the late terrorist Abu Nidal found refuge in Baghdad , at least until Saddam had him killed — the Iraqi security services had no "direct operational link" with al Qaida .

Joke of the Week: Liberty University

2009-05-22T13:15:00.003-04:00

From the 2008 Republican Party Platform:

Courts must have the option of imposing the death penalty in capital murder cases and other instances of heinous crime, while federal review of those sentences should be streamlined to focus on claims of innocence and to prevent delaying tactics by defense attorneys.

From the 10 Commandments:

Thou Shalt Not Kill

______________________________________________________

Liberty University Revokes Democratic Party Club's recognition on Moral Grounds.

By Ray Reed

Published: May 21, 2009

Liberty University has revoked its recognition of the campus Democratic Party club, saying “we are unable to lend support to a club whose parent organization stands against the moral principles held by” the university.

“It kind of happened out of nowhere,” said Brian Diaz, president of LU’s student Democratic Party organization, which LU formally recognized in October.

Diaz said he was notified of the school’s decision May 15 in an e-mail from Mark Hine, vice president of student affairs.

According to the e-mail, the club must stop using the university’s name, holding meetings on campus, or advertising events. Violators could incur one or more reprimands under the school’s Liberty Way conduct code, and anyone who accumulates 30 reprimands is subject to expulsion.

Hine said late Thursday that the university could not sanction an official club that supported Democratic candidates.

“We are in no way attempting to stifle free speech.”

Hine said the university had recently completed a policy that would govern clubs and organizations on campus.

“We looked at each club and organization to determine where it stood and unfortunately this one kind of got in the sights of policy, if you will,” he said.

Hine’s e-mail mentioned that he had expressed a concern to Diaz about the national Democratic Party’s platform during a meeting earlier in the semester.

Last fall, Diaz said, Hine had complimented the club for being a faith-based organization working within the Democratic Party.

Jan Dervish, secretary of the club, and Maria Childress, its staff adviser, said they met with Hine after the revocation and asked for a further explanation.

“He said it wasn’t us. It was the national Democratic Party,” which the campus club’s constitution supports, Dervish said. The campus club also opposes abortion and supports the traditional view of marriage, Dervish said.

“His bottom line was, ‘You can’t be a Democrat and be a Christian and be a university representative,’” Childress said.

Hine denied saying that.

Part of Hine’s e-mail said, “The Democratic Party platform is contrary to the mission of Liberty University and to Christian doctrine (supports abortion, federal funding of abortion, advocates repeal of the federal Defense of Marriage Act, promotes the “LGBT” agenda, hate crimes, which include sexual orientation and gender identity, socialism, etc.)” LGBT refers to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.

Mark Lawrence, chairman of the citywide Lynchburg Democratic Party, called The News & Advance Thursday after he learned about the revocation.

“My issue with this is the statement that the Democratic Party platform is contrary to the mission of Liberty University and to Christian doctrine,” Lawrence said. “They are essentially saying, ‘you cannot be a Christian and a Democrat.’”

Lawrence said he doesn’t personally support every plank in the party’s platform, and many Democrats also have their own differences with the document, which is assembled every four years for the national convention.

Hine’s e-mail said, “The candidates this club supports uphold the platform and implement it. The candidates supported are directly contrary to the mission of Liberty University.”

The goals of the Democratic Party and LU “run in opposite directions,” the e-mail said.

LU has had a College Republicans club for several years.

Claire Ayendi, who was chairman of the Republican club last year and graduated this spring, said she didn’t regard the university’s disbanding of the Democratic group as a political act.

“I think it’s more like a moral issue,” Ayendi said. “Letting a club like that exist goes against what the school is founded on,” she said.

Democratic Party club adviser Childress, an administrative assistant in the university’s honors program, said she sees her role as supporting students, especially their academic status.

“I love and support the university,” said Childress, who earned a bachelor’s degree in elementary education from LU in 2004. “But my support is to the students as well. My number one goal is protecting them,” she said.

Dervish said he asked Hine whether LU would let him work off campus in Democratic Party activities. Dervish said Hine told him and Childress that students’ activities outside the school were not affected by the university’s decision to revoke the club’s recognition.

In a written statement sent to The News & Advance Thursday night, Hine said, “Among other things, Liberty University stands for the sanctity of human life. The loss of human life through abortion is a great tragedy and we cannot remain silent when the political policies or politicians themselves promote the destruction of innocent human life.

“While those who are members of the LU Democratic Club are well intentioned and honorable, the platform and policies of the national Democratic Party and the candidates supported by that party, and thus the student organization itself, are inconsistent with the mission of the University.”

________________________________________________________

Right Winger Frank Lutz and Republicans Develop Language Used to Kill Health Care Reform. Don't Let Them Frame The Debate.

2009-05-08T12:05:00.004-04:00

Words Designed To Kill Health Care Reform

Sen. Jeff Merkley (D.-Oregon)

Over and over again, I hear from Oregonians that we need real health care reform that provides every American with access to quality, affordable care. That is why Congress and President Obama are so focused on this issue.

Of course there are folks in the insurance and hospital industries, from the medical profession, and both political parties who will have different ideas about how to achieve our goal. But I was shocked when I read a memo from Republican strategist Dr. Frank Luntz laying out plans to dismantle any effort to give all Americans access to quality health care. Dr. Luntz, the man who developed language designed to promote preemptive war in Iraq and distract from the severity of global warming, is at it again -- this time with a messaging strategy designed to sink our historic opportunity for health care reform.

Let's be clear: this is not a strategy to push certain ideas about health reform. It is a strategy intended solely to kill reform efforts altogether. In his own words, Dr. Luntz has stated, "You're not going to get what you want, but you can kill what they're trying to do."

Not surprisingly, since the American public is strongly in favor of fixing the broken health care system, the Luntz strategy is predicated on deception.

In his memo, Dr. Luntz lays out multiple ways that opponents of health care reform can trick and manipulate the American public. One strategy that stood out to me is to call efforts to reform our broken health care system a "bailout for the insurance industry." This is ridiculous. This statement is developed to serve the same interests who stopped at nothing to derail health care reform in the 90's, who blocked health care coverage for low-income children, and whose top Medicare priority for 15 years has been transferring money from seniors and taxpayers to the insurance industry.

When support for a prescription drug benefit in Medicare became too powerful to ignore, President Bush and his allies created the convoluted system we now have. Rather than simply add a prescription drug benefit to the tried, true, and popular Medicare program as Democrats wanted, they devised a giveaway for insurance companies. For years Dr. Luntz's clients have virtually abdicated health care policy making to the insurance industry; the last thing it needs is a bailout.

Today though, even the insurance industry is engaged in constructive negotiations about how to repair the health care system. Unfortunately for the vast majority of Americans who support reform, however, Dr. Luntz's new game plan to stop change is being embraced by leaders in the Republican Party. In a briefing where Dr. Luntz presented his strategy to Republican House members, Rep. Mike Pence from Indiana, the chairman of the House Republican Conference, made it official by saying, "Frank is back."

So expect a massive misinformation campaign coming to a health care debate near you. Opponents using Dr. Luntz's doublespeak will argue for a "balanced, common sense approach" to health care but what they really want is to keep the system the way it is. They'll say that a public plan will not be "patient centered," but their real goal is to block accessible health care for every American. They'll say reform will deny Americans "choice" even when every American will be allowed to keep their health insurance and their doctor. They'll claim that the "quality of care will go down," while callously ignoring the fact that millions of Americans have no health care at all and millions more are denied the medications and procedures they need.

What we are seeing, yet again, is that while Dr. Luntz and his clients may have excellent polling data, they are utterly clueless about what the American people want.

But, I have to give Dr. Luntz credit on one front: he points out that Republicans need to appear to be on the "right side of reform" or they lose the health care argument. The problem is that you can't fake support for reform. You're either for improving the quality and affordability of health care or you're against it. You're either for expanding coverage to every American or you're against it. At the end of the day, no matter what talking points they use, each member of Congress is going to have to vote for or against improving our broken health care system.

With small businesses and families being buried by rising costs, with 47 million uninsured, millions more underinsured and American companies losing ground against their global competitors, it is evident to anyone that our health care system is broken. There are Republicans and Democrats, insurance executives and patient advocates, physicians and hospital representatives all working to meet one of America's most pressing challenges. We certainly do not all agree on what a reformed health system should look like or how to get there, but there are people on all sides who are negotiating in good faith. The country deserves that debate on the merits, not poll-tested attack lines intended to prolong the broken system we have today.

If You Watch Fox News.... You're An Idiot.

2009-05-08T12:02:00.000-04:00

Michelle Bachman: Galactically Stupid

2009-04-29T13:31:00.001-04:00

Coward of the Week: Sean Hannity. Offers to be Waterboarded for Charity... Then Pretends He Didn't. You're a Fucking Coward Hannity.

2009-04-29T13:13:00.000-04:00

NEW YORK — The debate over torture is getting personal for two of cable TV's prime-time hosts. After Fox News Channel's Sean Hannity made a seemingly impromptu offer last week to undergo waterboarding as a benefit for charity, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann leapt at it. He offered $1,000 to the families of U.S. troops for every second Hannity withstood the technique.

Olbermann repeated the offer on Monday's show and said in an interview Tuesday that he's heard no response. He said he'll continue to pursue it.

"I don't think he has the courage to even respond to this _ let alone do it," Olbermann said.

Fox News Channel representatives did not respond to requests for comment.

The two men are on opposite poles of a debate that has preoccupied the worlds of talk TV and radio. Hannity says waterboarding is a fair and necessary interrogation technique for suspected terrorists; Olbermann calls it torture, says it's ineffective and should not be done by Americans.

Charles Grodin was challenging Hannity on the issue on Fox last week, and asked whether he would consent to be waterboarded.

"Sure," Hannity said. "I'll do it for charity ... I'll do it for the troops' families."

It wasn't exactly clear how serious the conversation was, since Grodin joked, "Are you busy on Sunday?" and Hannity laughed.

"I'll let you do it," Hannity said.

"I wouldn't do it," Grodin said. "I'll hand you a towel when you come out of the shower."

Olbermann's offer was quick. Besides the $1,000 per second, Olbermann said he'd double it if Hannity acknowledges he feared for his life and admits that waterboarding is torture.

"The idea of putting somebody in a position they have volunteered for, for charity, to respond to their own unsupportable claims, is in many ways priceless," Olbermann said.

Olbermann, who hasn't missed any chance to criticize his ideological enemies at Fox, concedes TV competition plays a part in his offer. But he said it was sincere, because he believes Hannity has had a damaging role in the debate.

"If you expose people to reality, even with someone who is denying reality, that can have a powerful and important impact," he said.

Losing My Religion: Those Who Claim "No Religion" Are The Only Demographic Group That Grew In All 50 States in the Last 18 Years.

2009-04-28T09:50:00.001-04:00

April 27, 2009
More Atheists Shout It From the Rooftops

By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

CHARLESTON, S.C. — Two months after the local atheist organization here put up a billboard saying “Don’t Believe in God? You Are Not Alone,” the group’s 13 board members met in Laura and Alex Kasman’s living room to grapple with the fallout.

The problem was not that the group, the Secular Humanists of the Lowcountry, had attracted an outpouring of hostility. It was the opposite. An overflow audience of more than 100 had showed up for their most recent public symposium, and the board members discussed whether it was time to find a larger place.

And now parents were coming out of the woodwork asking for family-oriented programs where they could meet like-minded nonbelievers.

“Is everyone in favor of sponsoring a picnic for humanists with families?” asked the board president, Jonathan Lamb, a 27-year-old meteorologist, eliciting a chorus of “ayes.”

More than ever, America’s atheists are linking up and speaking out — even here in South Carolina, home to Bob Jones University, blue laws and a legislature that last year unanimously approved a Christian license plate embossed with a cross, a stained glass window and the words “I Believe” (a move blocked by a judge and now headed for trial).

They are connecting on the Internet, holding meet-ups in bars, advertising on billboards and buses, volunteering at food pantries and picking up roadside trash, earning atheist groups recognition on adopt-a-highway signs.

They liken their strategy to that of the gay-rights movement, which lifted off when closeted members of a scorned minority decided to go public.

“It’s not about carrying banners or protesting,” said Herb Silverman, a math professor at the College of Charleston who founded the Secular Humanists of the Lowcountry, which has about 150 members on the coast of the Carolinas. “The most important thing is coming out of the closet.”

Polls show that the ranks of atheists are growing. The American Religious Identification Survey, a major study released last month, found that those who claimed “no religion” were the only demographic group that grew in all 50 states in the last 18 years.

Nationally, the “nones” in the population nearly doubled, to 15 percent in 2008 from 8 percent in 1990. In South Carolina, they more than tripled, to 10 percent from 3 percent. Not all the “nones” are necessarily committed atheists or agnostics, but they make up a pool of potential supporters.

Local and national atheist organizations have flourished in recent years, fed by outrage over the Bush administration’s embrace of the religious right. A spate of best-selling books on atheism also popularized the notion that nonbelief is not just an argument but a cause, like environmentalism or muscular dystrophy.

Ten national organizations that variously identify themselves as atheists, humanists, freethinkers and others who go without God have recently united to form the Secular Coalition for America, of which Mr. Silverman is president. These groups, once rivals, are now pooling resources to lobby in Washington for separation of church and state.

A wave of donations, some in the millions of dollars, has enabled the hiring of more paid professional organizers, said Fred Edwords, a longtime atheist leader who just started his own umbrella group, the United Coalition of Reason, which plans to spawn 20 local groups around the country in the next year.

Despite changing attitudes, polls continue to show that atheists are ranked lower than any other minority or religious group when Americans are asked whether they would vote for or approve of their child marrying a member of that group.

Over lunch with some new atheist joiners at a downtown Charleston restaurant serving shrimp and grits, one young mother said that her husband was afraid to allow her to go public as an atheist because employers would refuse to hire him.

But another member, Beverly Long, a retired school administrator who now teaches education at the Citadel, said that when she first moved to Charleston from Toronto in 2001, “the first question people asked me was, What church do you belong to?” Ms. Long attended Wednesday dinners at a Methodist church, for the social interaction, but never felt at home. Since her youth, she had doubted the existence of God but did not discuss her views with others.

Ms. Long found the secular humanists through a newspaper advertisement and attended a meeting. Now, she is ready to go public, she said, especially after doing some genealogical research recently. “I had ancestors who fought in the American Revolution so I could speak my mind,” she said.

Until recent years, the Secular Humanists of the Lowcountry were local pariahs. Mr. Silverman — whose specialty license plate, one of many offered by the state, says “In Reason We Trust” — was invited to give the invocation at the Charleston City Council once, but half the council members walked out. The local chapter of Habitat for Humanity would not let the Secular Humanists volunteer to build houses wearing T-shirts that said “Non Prophet Organization,” he said.

When their billboard went up in January, with their Web site address displayed prominently, they expected hate mail.

“But most of the e-mails were grateful,” said Laura Kasman, an assistant professor of microbiology and immunology at the Medical University of South Carolina.

The board members meeting in the Kasmans’ living room were an unlikely mix that included a gift store owner, a builder, a grandmother, a retired nursing professor, a retired Navy officer, an administrator at a primate sanctuary and a church musician. They are also diverse in their attitudes toward religion.

Loretta Haskell, the church musician, said: “I did struggle at one point as to whether or not I should be making music in churches, given my position on things. But at the same time I like using my music to move people, to give them comfort. And what I’ve found is, I am not one of the humanists who feels that religion is a bad thing.”

The group has had mixed reactions to President Obama, who acknowledged nonbelievers in his inauguration speech. “I sent him a thank-you note,” Ms. Kasman said. But Sharon Fratepietro, who is married to Mr. Silverman, said, “It seemed like one long religious ceremony, with a moment of lip service.”

Part of what is giving the movement momentum is the proliferation of groups on college campuses. The Secular Student Alliance now has 146 chapters, up from 42 in 2003.

At the University of South Carolina, in Columbia, 19 students showed up for a recent evening meeting of the “Pastafarians,” named for the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster — a popular spoof on religion dreamed up by an opponent of intelligent design, the idea that living organisms are so complex that the best explanation is that a higher intelligence designed them.

Andrew Cederdahl, the group’s co-founder, asked for volunteers for the local food bank and for a coming debate with a nearby Christian college. Then Mr. Cederdahl opened the floor to members to tell their “coming out stories.”

Andrew Morency, who attended a Christian high school, said that when he got to college and studied evolutionary biology he decided that “creationists lie.”

Josh Streetman, who once attended the very Christian college that the Pastafarians were about to debate, said he knew the Bible too well to be sure that Scripture is true. Like Mr. Streetman, many of the other students at the meeting were highly literate in the Bible and religious history.

In keeping with the new generation of atheist evangelists, the Pastafarian leaders say that their goal is not confrontation, or even winning converts, but changing the public’s stereotype of atheists. A favorite Pastafarian activity is to gather at a busy crossroads on campus with a sign offering “Free Hugs” from “Your Friendly Neighborhood Atheist.”

Swine Flu Pandemic? GOP Mocked Democrats Who Wanted To Spend Money on Pandemic Prepardness.

2009-04-27T15:03:00.001-04:00

The Bush Administration Developed an Interrogation Program From the Techniques Used On American POW's To Get False Confessions. WTF?

2009-04-23T12:24:00.002-04:00

Healthcare for All? Fascism. Torture: Noble and Democratic. Fox News and Wingnuts Tie Themselves Into Preztles of Illogic.

2009-04-23T12:12:00.003-04:00

The Tortured Logic of the Torture Superfans

by Bob Cesca @HuffPo

On average, the same number of Americans who were killed on September 11 will die from cancer over the next two days. 40,000 people this month. More than half a million throughout the course of the year.

Your chances of being killed at the hands of a terrorist, on the other hand, are comparatively remote. Some estimates show the odds at one in 9.3 million.

Why, then, are Republicans -- from the very serious moderates to the buggy-eyed Glenn Beck spasmodics -- embracing the broadly condemned and immoral act of government sponsored torture, while, often in the same talk radio segment, predicting the end of the world due to government plans guaranteeing that Americans will be able to afford healthcare? Somehow, irrational fear wins the day once again over a very rational desire to be treated for an illness without, you know, going broke.

Without explanation or logic, and following months of screeching about tea parties and tyranny and big government, the usual suspects on the right appear to be demanding that the government retain the power to do anything -- anything! -- in order to protect us from a terrorist attack. This, naturally, includes torture, but from what I'm hearing, there's no limit to what they'd allow. Whatever it takes, right? As FOX & Friends' Brian Kilmeade remarked on Monday: "It feels good" that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in a single month. And here I thought only shiny jingly objects made Kilmeade feel good.

But it's not just Bush administration officials they're defending here. Extrapolating what the torture superfans are suggesting, they appear to believe that in light of the threat of terrorism, any administration should be able to torture, including the current president. In other words: they're simultaneously accusing President Obama of being an oppressive and tyrannical "fascist," while also insisting that he should exercise the power to do whatever he wants in order to prevent another terrorist attack. Put yet another way: unchecked government power is awful, unless Sean Hannity is scared. Then it's excellent. Put a third way: WTF?

Meanwhile, your very real fear of bankruptcy, homelessness and illness is not "my problem." You liberal pinhead you.

As closely as I've been following the wingnut right lately, their ability to contradict themselves never ceases to confound. Stir into the mix a resurgence of irrational fear harkening back to 9/11 and the incongruities multiply faster than Newt Gingrich's wives.

For example, Rush Limbaugh this week both underscored the so-called efficacy of the Bush administration's torture policy, while also downplaying it by slapping himself in the face (ostensible with the same flappy arm gesticulations he used to mock a guy's Parkison's symptoms). He's wheeled out this argument before, most memorably after the Abu Ghraib photographs went public. Downplay the severity. Torture? Feh. It's nothing! Smack-smack. Splash-splash.

But if it's nothing more than slapstick and some splashy water antics then how effective can it really be, Rush? How could something so innocuous (as described by Limbaugh and others) be even the slightest bit effective -- not to mention a crucial weapon in America's anti-terrorist arsenal? It can't be both. Either the torture methods described in the Bush Office of Legal Counsel memos were harsh enough to create adequate anguish so as to elicit actionable intelligence (as is falsely claimed by Bush Republicans) or the techniques were nothing more than comfy chairs and soft cushions.

The reality is that the Bush torture methods were both horrifying and ineffective. The procedures we've read about in the OLC memos were clearly forms of torture as have been previously defined by America's own standards (you might recognize waterboarding from such famous torturers as the Khmer Rouge, Imperial Japan and North Korea), and by most accounts they're absolutely ineffective at acquiring decent information. And in fact, as McClatchy reported on Tuesday, the Bush administration used these torture techniques to gather intentionally false information about a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda.

With regards to defining The Waterboard as a particularly brutal form of torture, it's well worn territory to mention how we executed Japanese war criminals for waterboarding American prisoners. However, it takes on a different and stomach-churning dimension when we read a firsthand description of how the Japanese did it:

They laid me out on a stretcher and strapped me on. The stretcher was then stood on end with my head almost touching the floor and my feet in the air. . . . They then began pouring water over my face and at times it was almost impossible for me to breathe without sucking in water.

Compare that with the Bush OLC memo dated May 10, 2005:

In this technique, the detainee is lying on a gurney that inclined at an angle of 10 to 15 degrees to the horizontal, with the detainee on his back and his head toward the lower end of the gurney. A cloth is placed over the detainee's face, and cold water is poured on the cloth from a height of approximated 6 to 18 inches. The wet cloth creates a barrier through which it is difficult - or in some cases not possible - to breathe.

If you thought the second method was worse than the Japanese version, you're not alone. The cloth gag creates a sensation of being smothered -- on top of the drowning sensation itself. (It's also worth noting that American soldiers were court-martialed in for waterboarding Filipino prisoners. That was 1898.)

In terms of efficacy, one of the most successful detainee interrogations didn't involve torture of any kind. The detainee was named Saddam Hussein and the American interrogator was a Lebanese-American named George Piro. Piro was able to extract volumes of information about Iraq, WMD, terrorism and Hussein's regime through a process whereby Piro "manipulated Saddam, creating a relationship based on dependency, trust and emotion. Piro alternated between acts of kindness and provocation."

But even in the face of this sort of success, the Bush regime, driven by a desire for power and enabled by the irrational, ginned-up fear of a mostly supportive electorate, orchestrated one of the darkest chapters in American history.

And I'm still baffled how anyone in their right mind can possibly defend these torture policies in the face of overwhelming evidence condemning it. I mean, it's torture! Yet the right continues to chug from their bottomless mug of contradictions -- even Senator McCain, who endured unspeakable atrocities at the hands of the North Vietnamese, has fallen into this trap. Last year, in the heat of a presidential campaign, the senator voted in favor of allowing the CIA to continue to use the same techniques described in the OLC memos. Only now has he condemned the CIA's use of torture.

As I wrote in my book, if we can't protect ourselves with our morals intact, we don't deserve to be protected in the first place. I suspect that by allowing this gaping hole in our national morality, the Bush administration has successfully created more threats than it claims to have thwarted. And hearing the irrationally fear-driven arguments from unapologetic cowards like Hannity and Limbaugh understandably leads us all to think that certain Republicans will gladly acquiesce to anything -- any trespass against our values or even basic logic -- in the name of protecting you from that one in 9.3 million chance.

And no, the Dumb & Dumber "so you're saying there's a chance" defense won't work.

BobCesca.com

Laugher of the Week: Texas Freedom? This is the State that wants to secede because of TOO MUCH GOVERNMENT?

2009-04-21T09:56:00.003-04:00

Texan Formally Charged for Using "Bad Word" in front of Teenager.
by Jonathan Turley

Texas authorities continue their criminal crackdown on potty mouths. The latest criminal is Joseph Loflin, 48, who was charged with using the word “shit” in front of a 13-year-old girl in Texas City, Texas. Loflin used the word to describe cat droppings left in his garden.

A former police officer, Loflin confronted his neighbors about their cats going on his lawn and used the descriptive term in front of his daughter.

He was upset because his dogs are attracted to the droppings and then lick him and carry them into the house. When he threatened to call the animal welfare people, they threatened to call the speech police for his use of profanity.

Debbie Rainey explained “He kept repeating the word in front of my child” and objected to his use of the word in front of his teenager.

He is the third person charged under the law, which comes with a $170 fine. He has demanded a jury trial.

These laws are highly questionable from a constitutional standpoint on grounds ranging from free speech to vagueness. The right to swear at police was upheld recently in South Dakota.. Conversely, swearing in court remains a grounds for discipline.

It is unclear why the Rainey’s did not ask their teenager to step away from the conversations. There is no question that Loflin was being rude and boorish. But, the use of criminal law to police speech is not how to instill good manners or force people to say “Holy Cat Feces.”

Tea Parties: Sore Losers

2009-04-17T16:45:00.001-04:00

I Love Secession In the Springtime! Rick Perry's New One-Man Show from Texas

by Rachel Farris at HuffPo

Stephen Colbert must be having a hard time coming up with material these days. It's difficult to create political satire when the GOP's reality has become more like an HBO one-man comedy show, live and uncut. Texas Governor Rick Perry, the new Sarah Palin of the South, rallied with teabaggers in the city of Austin yesterday, reinforcing his secession message from last week that the "federal government has become oppressive in its size, its intrusion into the lives of our citizens, and its interference with the affairs of our state." He forgot to add, "You're welcome, America."

All of this hypocrisy had this tax-paying Texan thinking of the Colin Powell Pottery Barn caveat: You break it, you buy it. The Republican party has been an elephant in the china shop for the last eight years, yet suddenly their base is turning up their noses at the mess. They're trying to distance themselves from their dismal leadership, clinging only to talking show hosts and those with a moral code low enough to pander to their deluded notions that somehow, this isn't their fault. Enter Rick Perry, stage left.

When Dubya was in office (you know, the guy that got us into this mess?), if you dared to ask what the color orange represented on the color-coded "The Terrorists Are Coming" scale, you were considered an anti-American Bin Laden sympathizer. Now suddenly the new fight song of Texas is "Secede!" and our Governor is calling these empirically-frustrated teabaggers "patriots."

But the nationwide tea parties yesterday came across more like self-satisfactory pity parties, a group of sulking sore-losers who are too consumed with their own ideology to look up from their Bibles to notice that their administration allowed all of this to happen. They want to complain about deficit spending? Our last Democratic president left office with a surplus that Bush whittled away to pay for two wars and color-coded threat assessment charts. Government intrusion? It was your guy who signed the Patriot Act into law.

So, spare me. Teabag away, but spare me the "life's not fair" grumblings while you wave flags to the sounds of Toby Keith and watch your party die a slow, strange death, like stunned deer losing a fight with a Suburban. I don't remember Rick Perry asking me how I felt about spending $300 million tax dollars a day while occupying Iraq for the last six years. And if anyone had asked, they wouldn't have listened to the answer. They were too busy calling us unpatriotic.

Texas Wants to Secede... "They're Tired Of Paying Taxes to The Federal Government!" Time for a Reality Check.

2009-04-17T16:02:00.002-04:00

Per Capita Each Person In Texas Paid $5,564 dollars to the Federal Government in 2003.

And the Federal Government Spent $6,372 per person in the State of Texas.

For those of you that can't do math (Texans) it means that you got more money FROM the federal government than you gave TO the federal government.

The numbers are similar in 2004.... $5,684 Per Capita from Texas to the Feds and $6,327 from the Federal Government to Texas.

Again 2005.... $6,437 from Texans to the Federal Government... and $6,514 from the Federal Government to Texas.

And the trend continued in 2006, 2007, 2008.

What does all this mean? Texas is a Welfare State. An Idiocracy. If you leave, the rest of us will have more money. Those of you complaining about paying taxes are complete morons.

So go, Texas... Don't Let the Door Hit You In The Ass On The Way Out.

Hugs and Kisses,

The Punisher

Texas Wants To Secede... I say Good Fucking Riddance.

2009-04-17T15:57:00.001-04:00

What's Left Of Texas

by James Moore

"If I owned Texas and hell, I'd rent out Texas and live in hell." - U.S. Gen. Phillip Sheridan, 1866

When they held their constitutional convention in a cotton gin on the edge of the Texas Hill Country, they seemed a merry band of pranksters. The Republic of Texas Militia, which became a movement in the state during the mid '90s, had decided the state was not a part of the union. The fuzzy-haired leader of the organization, Rick McLaren, had studied the state's constitution and was convinced that the legislature had not ever taken the appropriate votes to rejoin the United States after the Civil War.

McLaren was an intelligent man and was capable of endlessly debating law. There was no charisma to his leadership of the group but his fire kept inspiring fringe characters to join the ROT organization. When the separatist group got a permit to march on the state capitol, McLaren stood on the steps and declared the independence of Texas.

"We don't have to put up with Washington," he said to about 50 followers and a few reporters. "We aren't part of the United States. We haven't been since the beginning of the Civil War. Why should we pay taxes? Look at what Washington is doing with our money and how they are meddling in our lives and we don't even belong."

Although the language is a little different the message and the rhetoric coming from the current governor of Texas is essentially the same as delivered by a man who led his tiny militia to the mountains of West Texas and bought a run-down trailer to establish a Republic of Texas Embassy. McLaren was willing to begin diplomatic relations between the ROT's new government and the U.S. Whenever I went to interview McLaren and keep track of his legal tricks and size up his politics, we sat on a rock outside his embassy. On the ridgeline above and in the trees I saw men patrolling with high-powered rifles and I kept reminding myself to make no sudden moves toward the leader of the ROT.

Nothing good was going to transpire. McLaren became more fervent. He declared the government in Austin defunct because it was established under state charter and Texas was a republic, in his analysis, and not a state. His embassy was the new location of the Texas Federal government. Eventually, he made even more absurdist statements that began to threaten other residents in the Davis Mountain Ranch and the Department of Public Safety was dispatched to reduce McLaren to custody. He did, however, have guns, and a week-long standoff ensued, which ended with a shootout that took the life of one of McLaren's "soldiers." As DPS officers closed in on his embassy, I heard McLaren calling out on the short wave radio, "Nations of the world, mayday, mayday, mayday; this is the Republic of Texas calling for all due military assistance to protect our sovereignty." He lived his fantasy to the end but his inglorious accomplishment turned out to be a life sentence in a federal prison.

McLaren's misadventure began with the same hysteria that Texas Governor Rick Perry has been stirring. Perry blatantly suggested during the Fox News National Tea-Bagging Festival that Texans are about ready to leave the union because they are sick of Washington. In one cartoonish moment, the Republican standard bearer in this state insulted our entire democracy and every man or woman from Texas who has served under the Stars and Stripes. What is it they fought and died for governor? Was it so you could leave the union when people who had different politics than you were in the majority? I think we had that horror already in our history and, if you read when you were growing up out in Paint Rock, you would know that it was called the Civil War.

If a governor of a Democratic state had suggested such a thing during the administration of the previous president then you and every Republican in the land would have been demanding he or she be tried for treason. Suddenly, you fancy yourself a folk hero leading a band of revolutionaries. Turn around for a minute, pull back the hair from your forehead, and take a good look at who's following you. They are the 2009 version of Rick McLaren's wingnuts.

When Perry finally tempered his remarks there was a naked political motive. The state is in line for $17 billion from the Stimulus Bill. God knows that after six years of B**h and going on nine of Perry that the money is sorely needed for a state increasingly in disrepair. Eliot Shapleigh, a state senator from El Paso, compiles a report each legislative session called "Texas on the Brink." Skimming it will provide more than enough data to show just how functional the Republican leadership of this state has been since 1994. Here are a few embarrassing tidbits about Texas that Rick Perry doesn't want the rest of the nation to know so he can start planning his little fantasy of national politics.

1) 49th in teacher pay
2) 1st in the percentage of people over 25 without a high school diploma
3) 41st in high school graduation rate
4) 46th in SAT scores
5) 1st in percentage of uninsured children
6) 1st in percentage of population uninsured
7) 1st in percentage of non-elderly uninsured
8) 3rd in percentage of people living below the poverty level
9) 49th in average Women Infant and Children benefit payments
10) 1st in teenage birth rate
11) 50th in average credit scores for loan applicants
12) 1st in air pollution emissions
13) 1st in volume of volatile organic compounds released into the air
14) 1st in amount of toxic chemicals released into water
15) 1st in amount of recognized cancer-causing carcinogens released into air
16) 1st in amount of carbon dioxide emissions
17) 50th in homeowners' insurance affordability
18) 50th in percentage of voting age population that votes
19) 1st in annual number of executions

Shapleigh's little book of horrors comes fully footnoted to avoid being attacked by partisans. His staff gathers data from the Census Bureau and Texas government agencies. One assumes they then go out and get deeply, profoundly intoxicated to deal with their sense of hopelessness. In many categories, we are no longer ahead of poor Mississippi. This, then, America, is what Texans have acquired after 15 years of Republican guidance from B**h and Rick Perry. You want some of this? Didn't you just get a big overdose?

There is little doubt that Perry is serious about seceding from the union. My guess is he's grown tired of fighting it out for last place with Mississippi.

Idiocracy: Rich Right Wing Radio and News Personalities Convice Poor Working Class Whites That Obama's Policies Will Hurt Them.

2009-04-16T13:57:00.000-04:00

Reporting from the Tea Bagger Hate-Fest in Sacramento

Joseph A. Palermo @ HuffPo

The hatred was palpable today on the State Capitol's steps. Hatred for taxes, hatred for government, hatred for state workers, hatred for teachers, hatred for Democrats, and hatred for all of the straw men that leap from the imaginations of talk radio jocks. But the most hated figure of all at today's "Tea Bag" anti-tax rally in Sacramento was President Barack Obama. One of the first placards I saw as I entered the Capitol grounds read: "Wake Up! Fresh Prince of Belair is Destroying Us -- Stop Drinking the Red Koolaid." A state police officer told me that he thought the crowd was "a couple thousand."

It was a sea of American flags of all shapes and sizes and many "Don't Tread On Me" yellow flags as well. The crowd was predictably very white, very Republican, and on the older side. I didn't see one African American (except for one of the musical performers on the stage who denounced Obama), and I didn't see any Latinos. George W. Bush could have been the focus of some of this rage because theoretically their hatred could just as well be aimed at him. But since he is a "good" Christian, white Republican Bush remained unscathed. I didn't see one sign that would indicate that it was anything other than a Republican hate rally.

Several placards called Obama the "Teleprompter in Chief" probably because Glenn Beck denounced the president for using one. The crowd chanted in unison: "No More Bail Outs! No More Stimulus! No More Taxes!" I was given an ice-cold coke from a vender who was handing them out for free and I strolled around for a good hour taking in the scene. There was one Jumbotron television or otherwise I couldn't see the stage because of the number of people packed into the Capitol grounds. It was a sizeable rally. Bigger than many of the anti-Iraq War protests I attended there. Obama's name or face was featured with sickles and hammers so much that his likeness became synonymous with something deeply un-American.

An elderly woman on a scooter -- I didn't ask her if Medicare paid for it -- had a sign affixed to her chair: "If I wanted Socialism, I'd Move to Europe." Many of the participants in today's Tea Bagging protest seemed to be as old as John McCain but there were a smattering of families with little kids and some tweens who were waving American flags.

Speakers from the local right-wing talk radio establishment led the crowd in chants: "Vote Them Out! Vote Them Out!" There were plenty of signs depicting Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid as criminals, or the Three Stooges, or terrorists. One local talk radio speaker denounced Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano daring her to come and arrest this crowd. The straw man being that President Obama and the Democrats have somewhere denounced their tax revolt as being "un-American." In the land of Fox News and right-wing talk radio truth and falsehood blend together in an ideological muck that denounces Obama and the Democrats as "socialists," "fascists," "communists," and "terrorists" all at the same time. Speakers at the rally attacked labor unions and "card check" (a reference to the Employee Free Choice Act), which was ironic because most of the people in the crowd were clearly working class.

The Right has a monopoly on Sacramento's AM radio dial (1380 and 1530 where Rush Limbaugh started his career). So it was easy for them to pump up the volume and get people out. There's no progressive or even liberal information flowing on the public's AM airwaves in this region of California but somehow the Right always gets to play the "oppressed" victim. Ironically, after denouncing the "Liberal Media" and anyone else who suggested the Tea Bagging phenomenon was a product of cheerleading from Fox News and right-wing talk radio, a local AM jock confirmed to the crowd just that: "A lot of this is because of talk radio and Fox helped us defend ourselves!" This statement brought a huge cheer from the crowd. The right-wing talker also complimented channels 1380 and 1530 for bringing in people "from Rancho Cordova, Placerville, and El Dorado Hills." And he said the liberals want to impose the "fairness doctrine" that would undermine the good work of right-wing radio and urged people to go to "Talkback.com" to find out how they can save talk radio from the Democrats.

With the U.S. military base at Mather Field close by the veteran contingent loomed large. They were older vets though, mostly Vietnam, I only saw a few I thought were the age of the average Iraq or Afghanistan vet. There was a contingent of Republican state legislators and their staffers milling about who stood out because they were the only ones wearing suits and ties. Most of the people there were crusty-looking, grizzled biker types with American flag T-shirts and jeans, men with gray beards and baseball caps, women with big sunglasses and cheap jewelry. None of those people looked to me like they earn anywhere near $250,000 a year (like the AM jocks or Republican legislators do).

And therein lies the beauty of the whole Tea Bag "movement." Affluent people like Michelle Malkin and Grover Norquist and the army of radio "personalities" convince working people, most of who have a relative or are themselves on Medicare or Social Security, to denounce taxes on affluent people. Many of the people at the rally were from the eastern foothill communities that are pretty impoverished and would benefit from Obama's health care, economic, and education policies. The foreclosure rate alone east of Sacramento would lead one to think that far more people in this region could use some government help.

We will see if the Tea Bag phenomenon can be sustained or if it is just a one-time Republican gimmick. But remember, in 1994, Newt Gingrich took the House of Representatives with a similarly cornball gimmicky set of "principles" that channeled the same kind of blind right-wing hatred and anger. The lesson from today I think is that Congressional Democrats and the Obama Administration should work together to make the public AM radio airwaves more competitive so more diverse voices are heard. As long as the Republicans and the Right hold on to their monopoly on AM radio they'll be able to stage these kind of hate-fests easily and more often. I'd take the Tea Baggers seriously and move to use the FCC to open up the public airwaves and also use the Anti-Trust Division of the Justice Department to break up Rupert Murdoch's media empire along with the other media corporations that have become as dysfunctional to our democracy as the "too big to fail" financial corporations.

George W. Bush's entire eight years was nothing but a neo-liberal experiment in skewing government and every other public good toward serving the interests of profiteers and the rich. That was apparently fine with these rightwingers as long as the government money was flowing upwards into the hands of the rich and corporations. But as soon as a Democratic administration is elected to power everything's different now. The sky was the limit during the Bush spending binge on war and giveaways to Wall Street and lavish contracts for shoddy or nonexistent "government" services and corporate welfare and so on and on. But now with Democrats trying to put a little spare change in the pockets of the other 95 percent of the population who gained nothing from the Bush years all of a sudden the sky is falling! The Tea Baggers I encountered were very polite and well-mannered, even passive. They need cajoling to act out. They need their anger stoked. They need straw men to knock down and people to hate -- people like state workers and teachers and Democrats. I couldn't help but think that the whole damn thing is just one big constructed product of the propaganda from right-wing talk radio and their ideological soulmates at Fox News.

The Corporate Republic Plays On.... This Time With "Tea Parties"

2009-04-13T18:00:00.002-04:00

Spontaneous Uprising? Corporate Lobbyists Helping To Orchestrate Radical Anti-Obama Tea Party Protests

Yesterday, Think Progress reported on Republican lawmakers planning to speak at anti-Obama “tea party” protests taking place nationwide on April 15. Last night, Eric Odom of the DontGo website — one of the organizers of the protests — wrote a blog post stressing that these protests are displays of “regular American[s] in protest of government spending and extreme taxation,” rather than something affiliated with a political party or special interest agenda.

Today on Fox News — which has actively been promoting the protests — Glenn Beck pushed the tea party talking points, similarly claiming that the protests aren’t “coordinated” and are fully organized by “regular” people. Watch it:

Despite these attempts to make the “movement” appear organic, the principle organizers of the local events are actually the lobbyist-run think tanks Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Works. The two groups are heavily staffed and well funded, and are providing all the logistical and public relations work necessary for planning coast-to-coast protests:

– Freedom Works staffers coordinate conference calls among protesters, contacting conservative activists to give them “sign ideas, sample press releases, and a map of events around the country.”

– Freedom Works staffers apparently moved to “take over” the planning of local events in Florida.

– Freedom Works provides how-to guides for delivering a “clear message” to the public and media.

– Freedom Works has several domain addresses — some of them made to look like they were set up by amateurs — to promote the protests.

– Americans for Prosperity is writing press releases and planning the events in New Jersey, Arizona, New Hampshire, Missouri, Kansas, and several other states.

This type of corporate ‘astroturfing‘ is nothing new to either organization. While working to promote Social Security privatization, Freedom Works was caught planting one of its operatives as a “single mom” to ask questions to President Bush in a town hall on the subject. Last year, the Wall Street Journal exposed Freedom Works for similarly building “amateur-looking” websites to promote the lobbying interests of Dick Armey, the former Republican Majority Leader who now leads Freedom Works and is a lobbyist for the firm DLA Piper.

Americans for Prosperity is run by Tim Phillips, who was Ralph Reed’s former partner in the lobbying firm Century Strategies. The group is funded by Koch family foundations — a family whose wealth is derived from the oil industry. Indeed Americans for Prosperity has coordinated pro-drilling ‘grassroots‘ events around the country.

UpdateThis afternoon, former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich, leader of the corporate-funded American Solutions for Winning the Futures (ASWF), blasted an e-mail to his supporters with a reminder to attend the protests, along with a "Toolkit" of talking points. Gingrich's ASWF is funded by polluters and helped orchestrate the "Drill Here, Drill Now" campaign last summer. ASWF has been an official "partner" in the tea party effort since at least March.

Tea Parties: More Proof that Right Wingers are Fucking Idiots.

2009-04-13T17:56:00.002-04:00

The Corporate Lobbyist Behind the Tea Parties

by Jane Hamsher at Firedoglake

Anyone who has watched Fox News of late has seen them talking about the April 15 "tea party" demonstrations, which they take pains to characterize as a spontaneous grassroots uprising against government spending that they are simply "covering."

Neil Cavuto said:

We are are going to be in the middle of these protests because at Fox, we do not pick and choose these rallies and protests. We were there for the Million Man March, even though, as I pointed out, it turned out to be well shy of a million men.

The Million Man March happened in 1995. Fox News didn't go on the air until 1996.

Why all the effort to distance themselves from the teabaggers? It's obvious they are integrally involved -- Fox has given them millions in free publicity, despite the fact that there's no evidence of "ratings gold" here. Four of their biggest stars will be appearing at the rallies, Fox Nation will be hosting a "virtual tea party," Glenn Beck is holding a $500 a plate fundraiser for them and Fox has been officially promoting the entire affair as the FNC Tax Day Tea Parties:

Maybe they're afraid that if people knew that those behind the demonstrations were the very same lobbyists and influence peddlers the teabaggers claim to decry, the whole thing would be revealed to be what it is -- a hollow excercise in extremist right-wing hypocrisy.

A report by Lee Fang at Think Progress documents the involvement of corporate lobbyists FreedomWorks in organizing the teabaggers. FreedomWorks is run by ladies' man (and registered lobbyist) Dick Armey, and if they're not "organizing" the Tea parties, it's news to him. From a letter he wrote on March 10:

FreedomWorks has been organizing many of these "tea parties" and we are listing the details on our website IamWithRick.com
If you visit the website, you can rsvp for an event near you, and you can download guidelines to organizing a tea party in your home town if there isn't one being planned already.

On the Freedomworks website, it says: "If you are not able to organize or attend a Taxpayer Tea Party, you can still help the cause by donating or buying a t-shirt.

The "donation" for the Tea Parties page goes to -- you guessed it -- the FreedomWorks Foundation. The "thank you" letter is signed by Matt Kibbe, President & CEO, who cut his teeth working for Lee Atwater. He was behind the attempt to get Ralph Nader put on the ballot in Oregon in 2004, prompting a complaint to the FEC of illegal collusion with the GOP.

FreedomWorks was launched a GOP version of MoveOn. "We believe that hard work beats daddy's money," said Dick Armey at the time. Armey seems to be a bit irony challenged -- Steve Forbes is on the FreedomWorks board. As Krugman notes, their money comes from the Koch, Scaife, Bradley, Olin and other reliable funders of right wing infrastructure including Exxon Mobil.

This fact that none of this would be possible without the open checkbooks of right wing billionaires and the lobbyists who love them is beyond the grasp of Glenn Reynolds:

These aren't the usual semiprofessional protesters who attend antiwar and pro-union marches. These are people with real jobs; most have never attended a protest march before. They represent a kind of energy that our politics hasn't seen lately, and an influx of new activists.

In 2004, a woman who identified herself as a "single mother" in Iowa, Sandra Jacques, appeared at a George Bush town hall and gushed about his plan to privatize Social Security. She left out the part about being an employee of Freedomworks, who were lobbying on the issue at the time.

Before any media covering these events accept the idea that this is just a grass roots outpouring of populist sentiment, they ought to take a look behind the curtain -- where Dick Armey is laughing and counting his cash.

Jane Hamsher blogs at firedoglake.com

An Important Message From "Teabag Central"

2009-04-10T14:49:00.001-04:00

Right Wingers Continue "Tea Bagging" Parties. Oh this is just gold.

2009-04-10T14:36:00.001-04:00

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

It's About Time: Obama to Push Immigration Reform Bill.

2009-04-09T12:08:00.001-04:00

April 9, 2009
Obama to Push Immigration Bill as One Priority

By JULIA PRESTON

While acknowledging that the recession makes the political battle more difficult, President Obama plans to begin addressing the country’s immigration system this year, including looking for a path for illegal immigrants to become legal, a senior administration official said on Wednesday.

Mr. Obama will frame the new effort — likely to rouse passions on all sides of the highly divisive issue — as “policy reform that controls immigration and makes it an orderly system,” said the official, Cecilia Muñoz, deputy assistant to the president and director of intergovernmental affairs in the White House.

Mr. Obama plans to speak publicly about the issue in May, administration officials said, and over the summer he will convene working groups, including lawmakers from both parties and a range of immigration groups, to begin discussing possible legislation for as early as this fall.

Some White House officials said that immigration would not take precedence over the health care and energy proposals that Mr. Obama has identified as priorities. But the timetable is consistent with pledges Mr. Obama made to Hispanic groups in last year’s campaign.

He said then that comprehensive immigration legislation, including a plan to make legal status possible for an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants, would be a priority in his first year in office. Latino voters turned out strongly for Mr. Obama in the election.

“He intends to start the debate this year,” Ms. Muñoz said.

But with the economy seriously ailing, advocates on different sides of the debate said that immigration could become a polarizing issue for Mr. Obama in a year when he has many other major battles to fight.

Opponents, mainly Republicans, say they will seek to mobilize popular outrage against any effort to legalize unauthorized immigrant workers while so many Americans are out of jobs.

Democratic legislative aides said that opening a full-fledged debate this year on immigration, particularly with health care as a looming priority, could weigh down the president’s domestic agenda.

Debate is still under way among administration officials about the precise timing and strategy. For example, it is unclear who will take up the Obama initiative in Congress.

No serious legislative talks on the issue are expected until after some of Mr. Obama’s other priorities have been debated, Congressional aides said.

Just last month, Mr. Obama openly recognized that immigration is a potential minefield.

"I know this is an emotional issue; I know it’s a controversial issue,” he told an audience at a town meeting on March 18 in Costa Mesa, Calif. “I know that the people get real riled up politically about this."

But, he said, immigrants who are long-time residents but lack legal status “have to have some mechanism over time to get out of the shadows.”

The White House is calculating that public support for fixing the immigration system, which is widely acknowledged to be broken, will outweigh opposition from voters who argue that immigrants take jobs from Americans. A groundswell among voters opposed to legal status for illegal immigrants led to the defeat in 2007 of a bipartisan immigration bill that was strongly supported by President George W. Bush.

Administration officials said that Mr. Obama’s plan would not add new workers to the American work force, but that it would recognize millions of illegal immigrants who have already been working here. Despite the deep recession, there is no evidence of any wholesale exodus of illegal immigrant workers, independent studies of census data show.

Opponents of legalization legislation were incredulous at the idea that Mr. Obama would take on immigration when economic pain for Americans is so widespread.

“It just doesn’t seem rational that any political leader would say, let’s give millions of foreign workers permanent access to U.S. jobs when we have millions of Americans looking for jobs,” said Roy Beck, executive director of NumbersUSA, a group that favors reduced immigration. Mr. Beck predicted that Mr. Obama would face “an explosion” if he proceeded this year.

“It’s going to be, ‘You’re letting them keep that job, when I could have that job,’ ” he said.

In broad outlines, officials said, the Obama administration favors legislation that would bring illegal immigrants into the legal system by recognizing that they violated the law, and imposing fines and other penalties to fit the offense. The legislation would seek to prevent future illegal immigration by strengthening border enforcement and cracking down on employers who hire illegal immigrants, while creating a national system for verifying the legal immigration status of new workers.

But administration officials emphasized that many details remained to be debated.

Opponents of a legalization effort said that if the Obama administration maintained the enforcement pressure initiated by Mr. Bush, the recession would force many illegal immigrants to return home. Dan Stein, the president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, said it would be “politically disastrous” for Mr. Obama to begin an immigration initiative at this time.

Anticipating opposition, Mr. Obama has sought to shift some of the political burden to advocates for immigrants, by encouraging them to build support among voters for when his proposal goes to Congress.

That is why Representative Luis V. Gutierrez, a Democrat from Mr. Obama’s hometown, Chicago, has been on the road most weekends since last December, traveling far outside his district to meetings in Hispanic churches, hoping to generate something like a civil rights movement in favor of broad immigration legislation.

Mr. Gutierrez was in Philadelphia on Saturday at the Iglesia Internacional, a big Hispanic evangelical church in a former warehouse, the 17th meeting in a tour that has included cities as far flung as Providence, R.I.; Atlanta; Miami; and San Francisco. Greeted with cheers and amens by a full house of about 350 people, Mr. Gutierrez, shifting fluidly between Spanish and English, called for immigration policies to preserve family unity, the strategic theme of his campaign.

At each meeting, speakers from the community, mainly citizens, tell stories of loved ones who were deported or of delays and setbacks in the immigration system. Illegal immigrants have not been invited to speak.

Mr. Gutierrez’s meetings have all been held in churches, both evangelical and Roman Catholic, with clergy members from various denominations, including in several places Muslim imams. At one meeting in Chicago, Cardinal Francis George, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, officiated.

One speaker on Saturday, Jill Flores, said that her husband, Felix, an immigrant from Mexico who crossed the border illegally, had applied for legal status five years ago but had not been able to gain it even though she is an American citizen, as are their two children. Now, Ms. Flores said, she fears that her husband will have to leave for Mexico and will not be permitted to return for many years.

In an interview, Mr. Gutierrez rejected the idea that the timing is bad for an immigration debate. “There is never a wrong time for us,” he said. “Families are being divided and destroyed, and they need help now.”

Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting.

Why Do Sean Hannity and Michelle Bachman Hate America?

2009-04-08T12:26:00.001-04:00

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

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Baracknophobia - Obey

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Meet The New Boss... Same as the Old Boss. Obama Continues Bush Legacy of Government Secrecy.

2009-04-06T10:16:00.004-04:00

Following Bush Lead, Obama Moves To Block Challenge To Wiretapping Program

by John Byrne at RawStory

Wants case against NSA dismissed

President Barack Obama invoked "state secrets" to prevent a court from reviewing the legality of the National Security Agency's warantless wiretapping program, moving late Friday to have a lawsuit that challenged the program dismissed.

The move -- which holds that information surrounding the massive eavesdropping program should be kept from the public because of its sensitivity -- follows an earlier decision in March to block handover of documents relating to the Bush Administration's decision to spy on a charity. The arguments also mirror the Bush Administration's efforts to dismiss an earlier suit against AT&T.

The decision Friday involves a lawsuit filed by the civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is suing the NSA for the wiretapping program. The agency monitored the telephone calls and emails of thousands of people within the United States without a court's approval in an effort to thwart terrorist attacks.

In attempting to block a San Fransisco court from reviewing documents relating to the NSA program, the Obama Administration is also protecting other individuals named as defendants in the suit: Vice President Dick Cheney, former Cheney chief of staff David Addington and former Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

It also stands firmly behind the telecommunications giant AT&T. AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein revealed that the company allowed the agency to install network monitoring hardware to spy on American citizens.

The Director of National Intelligence, the Justice Department says, "has set forth a more than reasonable basis to conclude that harm to national security would result from the disclosure of whether the NSA has worked with any telecommunications carrier." AT&T is specifically mentioned. Public reports have fingered AT&T, Verizon, MCI and Sprint as participating in the government's eavesdropping efforts.

Acting Assistant Attorney General Michael Hertz penned the brief on behalf of the Obama Justice Department.

"The grounds for this motion [to dismiss] are that the Court lacks subject matter jurisdiction with respect to plaintiffs' statutory claims against the United States because Congress has not waived sovereign immunity, and summary judgment for the Government on all of plaintiffs' remaining claims against all parties... is required because information necessary to litigate plantiffs' claims is property subject to and excluded from use in this case by the state secrets privilege and related statutory privileges," Hertz and other trial attorneys for the Justice Department wrote.

The Justice Department also holds that the lawsuit can't proceed because of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Congress expanded the wiretapping program in 2008 with passage of amendments to the Act, which gave telecom companies immunity for past and future participation in the program and expanded the legal use of warrantless wiretaps from 48 hours to seven days. The revised Act also allowed the government to destroy records of previous taps.

Obama voted for the revised Act while a senator last year.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation fired off a scathing press release Monday.

"President Obama promised the American people a new era of transparency, accountability, and respect for civil liberties," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston in the release. "But with the Obama Justice Department continuing the Bush administration's cover-up of the National Security Agency's dragnet surveillance of millions of Americans, and insisting that the much-publicized warrantless wiretapping program is still a 'secret' that cannot be reviewed by the courts, it feels like deja vu all over again."

The Obama Administration's full motion to dismiss can be read here (PDF).

Appearance of Impropriety

2009-04-04T10:37:00.003-04:00

Summers Received Hundreds of Thousands in Speaking Fees from Tarp Recipients.

Sam Stein at HuffPo

Barack Obama's chief economic adviser, Larry Summers, received hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees last year from firms that have direct financial interests before the government or are intimately involved in the White House's bank relief programs.

The White House released late Friday the personal financial disclosure forms of many high-ranking administration officials. The document provided for Summers, who serves as one of the president's closest confidants, underscores just how close some of these officials are to the industry over which they now have oversight.

Among the firms that paid Summers large amounts in speaking fees include J.P. Morgan Chase. That bank offered the former Harvard president and Treasury Secretary $67,500 for a February 1, 2008 engagement. It has received $25 billion in government bailout funds.

Citigroup, which has received $50 billion in taxpayer help, paid Summers $45,000 for a speech in March 2008 and another $54,000 for a speech that May.

Goldman Sachs, which has received $10 million in bailout funds, paid Summers $135,000 for a speech on April 16, 2008 and another $67,500 for a speech on June 18, 2008.

Summers also received about $5.2 million over the past year in salary from the major hedge fund D.E. Shaw.

The speech payments will undoubtedly raise questions as to the impartiality of the economic advice Summers is providing to the president. Already viewed as too favorably disposed to Wall Street interests, the lavish payments for speeches will provide further fodder for those who think the administration has been forgiving in their approach to the banking industry.

In a prepared statement, spokesman Ben LaBolt said that, "From the first days of the administration, we have bolstered accountability over banks and reformed the TARP process so that taxpayers can see how their money is being spent, the influence of lobbyists is curbed, executive compensation is reined in, and firms are required to show how they will preserve or expand lending using government funds. Dr. Summers has been at the forefront of this administration's work to shore up our nation's financial system and to put in place a regulatory framework that will strengthen the financial system and its oversight - all in an effort to help the families across America who have paid a very steep price for risky decisions made by Wall Street executives."

E.J. Dionne's Excellent Analysis of the Conflict Between Geithner/Obama and Krugman/Stiglitz

2009-04-04T10:27:00.000-04:00

Posted on Apr 2, 2009

The Nobelist vs. Obama and Geithner

By E.J. Dionne

The great mystery of the Obama administration’s economic agenda is whether its signature marriage of boldness and caution will prove to be a Goldilocks recipe that gets things just right, or a Rube Goldberg approach of unimaginable complexity and uncertain purpose.

Without question, President Obama’s tax and budget proposals are daring, and his unwavering commitment to passing health care reform this year is both honorable and gutsy.

But his plan to bail out the banks reveals a deference to the existing financial system, deep worry about further unsettling an already troubled market, and a devout hope that the economic situation is not as bad as some economists, notably Nobel Prize winners Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, fear.

As for the auto industry, Obama has stepped in aggressively to take effective control of General Motors by forcing out CEO Rick Wagoner. He told Chrysler it must merge with Fiat or die.

But all these moves are in a context of caution about the ultimate purpose of the government’s actions. Obama placed strict limits on how long the federal government’s funds will be available to prop up the companies, and made clear that his only goal was to rebuild them to compete in the marketplace.

Some administration officials feared that this dual-track approach might win it support from absolutely no one, since it gave the domestic industry less help than its supporters hoped for but involved far more intervention than most free-market advocates could stomach. The better-than-expected initial reviews suggested that in the short term, the administration’s tightrope act had worked.

Describing what Obama is up to leads quickly to sentences freighted with contradictions. He wants to regulate the market more tightly in order to save it. He thinks big government is required now if we are to return to a less-restricted economic system later. You might say that he is using collectivist means to capitalist ends.

“We can’t fall back on the stale debates and old divides,” Obama said at his Wednesday news conference in London with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Obama’s alternative is a novel blend of opposing ideas.

Nowhere are the challenges facing this method more dramatic than in the bank rescue. The debate over the plan is rooted in three disagreements.

The most important is over whether some of the major banks are solvent or insolvent. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner believes that the toxic assets in their portfolios are temporarily undervalued in a bad economy. This means they will be worth more when the economy improves, which in turn means that the banks aren’t really broke. Krugman, the New York Times columnist who has emerged as Geithner’s most prominent critic, thinks the banks are insolvent. He believes that the economy will improve more slowly than Geithner does and sees many of the toxic assets as “trash.”

Therefore, Krugman thinks a temporary government takeover of some of the banks is inevitable and will ultimately get the economy moving more quickly. Geithner thinks a takeover would be more difficult than its supporters allow and might slow economic recovery. He prefers the more cautious approach of having government and private investors buy up the toxic assets before considering more radical steps.

The other two disagreements follow from the first. Critics of the administration plan (notably Stiglitz) believe it involves government subsidies for private investors that are much too large and will leave taxpayers far too exposed. And there is a difference in sensibility: Geithner simply has more trust in the working of the financial system than does Krugman, who recently criticized the administration as being “in the grip of the market mystique” and as overrating “the prowess of the wizards” who perform the market’s “magic.”

Stiglitz is right to worry about the subsidies in the administration plan and Krugman has good reason to fear that the administration is too close to Wall Street’s view of reality. But the core question of whether the banks are insolvent is maddeningly difficult to resolve. If Geithner is correct, he will move us to recovery with less disruption. If he’s wrong, he will waste a lot of taxpayer money before eventually reaching the Krugman solution. My heart is with the Nobel critics, but my head hopes that Geithner is making the right bet.

That’s the Obama enigma: boldness wrapped in caution rooted in an ambivalent relationship to the status quo. This is why Obama will, by turns, challenge not only his entrenched adversaries but also his natural allies.

E.J. Dionne’s e-mail address is postchat(at)aol.com.

Tim Geithner's Cozy Relationship With Wall Street Prevented Him From Doing His Job at New York Federal Reserve. And Now He's Gonna Save Us? Bullshit

2009-04-04T10:24:00.003-04:00

As Crisis Loomed, Geithner Pressed But Fell Short
Before Timothy Geithner became Treasury chief, he regulated major U.S. banks. Now he says: "We're having a major financial crisis in part because of failures of supervision."

By Robert O'Harrow Jr. and Jeff Gerth
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 3, 2009; A01

In September 2005, Timothy Geithner made one of his most visible moves as a supervisor of the U.S. banking system. He summoned the nation's top financial firms and their regulators to streamline an antiquated system that threatened Wall Street's boom.

Billions of dollars worth of financial instruments known as credit derivatives were being traded daily, as banks and investors worldwide tried to protect against losses on increasingly complex and risky financial bets. But the buying and selling of these exotic instruments was stuck in a pencil-and-paper era. Geithner, then head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, pressed 14 major financial firms to build an electronic network that would cut backlogs and make the market easier to monitor.

Geithner's summit, held at the New York Fed's fortress-like headquarters near Wall Street, was a success. By fall 2006, the new system had all but eliminated the logjam, helping derivatives trade more efficiently. One financial industry newsletter honored Geithner as part of a "Dream Team" for his leadership of the effort.

Yet as Geithner and the New York Fed worked to solve narrow mechanical issues in the derivatives market, they missed clear signs of a catastrophe in the making. When the housing market collapsed, derivatives stoked the fires that ignited inside some of the biggest banking companies. The firms' failure to assess an array of risks they were taking has emerged as a key element in the multitrillion-dollar meltdown of the global financial system.

Although Geithner repeatedly raised concerns about the failure of banks to understand their risks, including those taken through derivatives, he and the Federal Reserve system did not act with enough force to blunt the troubles that ensued. That was largely because he and other regulators relied too much on assurances from senior banking executives that their firms were safe and sound, according to interviews and a review of documents by The Washington Post and the nonprofit journalism organization ProPublica.

A confidential review ordered by Geithner in 2006 found that banking companies could not properly assess their exposure to a severe economic downturn and were relying on the "intuition" of banking executives rather than hard quantitative analysis, according to interviews with Fed officials and a little-noticed audit by the Government Accountability Office. The Fed did not use key enforcement tools until later, after the credit crisis erupted, according to its records and interviews.

Geithner defended his tenure as New York Fed president in an interview last week. He said he had been "deeply concerned about risk in the system" and worked assiduously behind the scenes to cajole banking institutions to do more to identify weaknesses and protect the financial system. But he also took some responsibility for falling short.

"These efforts to improve risk management did change behavior, but they did not achieve enough traction," Geithner said. "We're having a major financial crisis in part because of failures of supervision."

Even as critics have questioned how he used existing power before the crisis, Geithner, as Treasury secretary, now leads the push for the biggest expansion of financial regulation since the Great Depression. His sweeping plan to overhaul the U.S. financial system would empower regulators to broadly analyze risk and would grant more authority to the Fed and its 12 reserve banks.

Geithner says he is applying lessons from his five years at the most important of the Fed's reserve banks. This week, he assumed an even more prominent platform, joining President Obama in London at a meeting with the Group of 20 industrialized nations to discuss global financial regulatory reform.

Looking back at his time at the New York Fed, Geithner said: "I wish I had worked to change the framework, rather than to work within that framework."

Geithner, 47, adopted the diplomatic approach to supervision that had long held sway at the New York Fed, a hybrid institution that is owned by the banks but implements monetary policy for the Federal Reserve. Like the other regional Feds, it also shares supervisory authority with the central bank. Six of its nine board members are chosen by the commercial banking companies it supervises. The board plays a role in the selection of the New York Fed president.

Although the Federal Reserve system, and the New York Fed in particular, was responsible for watching for systemwide risks, Geithner said that the Fed was limited by a lack of explicit authority over financial institutions outside the banking system. One key example was insurance giant American International Group, whose derivative transactions helped fuel the financial collapse last fall.

As part of Geithner's confirmation process for Treasury secretary, Democratic and Republican senators questioned why he and the New York Fed did not take a tougher approach with the troubled institutions it did regulate, such as Citigroup, then the largest under its supervision and the one hardest hit by the financial crisis.

Geithner, who maintained ties to senior bank executives and others in the financial world, had a particularly close relationship with former Treasury secretary Robert E. Rubin, a mentor then serving as a senior executive at Citigroup. In 2007 and 2008, Geithner held discussions with Citigroup officials dozens of times, more than with any other firm, according to interviews and documents, including Geithner's daily calendar.

Some lawmakers in both parties are asking whether bank regulators in general were too close to the institutions they oversaw. Geithner says meetings with executives from Citigroup and other firms were a routine part of his job. He said checks and balances built into the Federal Reserve system preserve the independence of Fed officials.

Gerald Corrigan, a managing director of Goldman Sachs who once held Geithner's job, said every New York Fed president faces the same challenge -- supervising the very banks they rely on for information.

"The effectiveness of the New York Fed clearly does depend on frequent and open dialogue between the Fed and the leaders of the major financial institutions," Corrigan said.

"Striking that balance is never easy," he said. "On the whole, Tim did a reasonably good job."

'Biggest Casino'

Geithner is trim, boyish-looking and thoughtful, parsing his ideas with academic care. Unlike some of his predecessors at the Fed, he did not bring a banker's résumé to the job. A protege of former secretary of state Henry Kissinger at his consulting firm, he joined the Treasury and rose through the ranks with support from two Clinton-era secretaries, Rubin and Lawrence H. Summers. Geithner eventually served as undersecretary for international affairs, where he oversaw the department's response to the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s.

When he arrived at the New York Fed in fall 2003, the derivatives market had begun to soar. One type of derivative known as a credit-default swap is a contract that operates much like insurance for complex financial transactions. They greatly enhanced Wall Street's ability to package mortgages into exotic securities that could be resold to investors. That, in turn, fueled the housing bubble by expanding the supply of money for home loans.

But by 2005 the paperwork for derivatives contracts was swamping the back offices of big financial firms. Stacks of documents sat unattended. The archaic system was not only bad for business, it impeded the market from properly pricing deals. "They didn't know what their positions were," Geithner said in the interview. "This was a huge collective-action problem."

Under Geithner's direction, the banks formally agreed after months of meetings in early 2006 to fix the problem together.

At the time, many bankers and regulators were convinced that credit derivatives had in just a few years strengthened the world's financial system. Alan Greenspan, then chairman of the Federal Reserve, set the rhetorical tone for the Fed's advocacy of such deals.

"The development of credit derivatives," Greenspan said in a May 2005 speech, "has contributed to the stability of the banking system by allowing banks, especially the largest, systemically important banks, to measure and manage their credit risks more effectively."

Geithner often cited the merits of credit derivatives as well, saying in a May 2006 speech at New York University that they "probably improve the overall efficiency and resiliency of financial markets."

By then, some financial institutions already were worried about the subprime mortgages underlying exotic securities. AIG's Financial Products unit, one of the largest issuers of credit-default swaps, stopped offering that insurance. Even so, few understood the magnitude of the looming disaster.

"What nobody knew was that credit derivatives had moved from a risk diversification and risk management vehicle to the world's biggest gambling casino," said H. Rodgin Cohen, a New York attorney for large financial companies such as J.P. Morgan Chase and Wachovia.

Although he later said he didn't see the larger danger, Geithner at the time expressed concern about whether the large banks he supervised fully understood their vulnerabilities. In the NYU speech, he said they would need to take a "cold, hard look" at the interlocking effects of such deals across the financial system.

That same year he initiated a Fed-wide review of how well the financial giants were able to measure their ability to survive the stresses of a market downturn. William Rutledge, the New York Fed's executive vice president for bank supervision, said the reviews turned up several weaknesses. They found that banking companies were pretty good at measuring the risks to specific parts of their businesses but had little understanding of the dangers to the institution as a whole. The firms also failed to account for the kind of worst-case scenarios that would later cripple several banking giants.

The New York Fed followed up the study of the stress tests by holding private discussions with bank managers. The Fed officials sought among other things to "encourage" firms to improve their "credit risk-management practices" and to engage in "careful reflection" of their assessment of the global economy's health, Rutledge said in a written response to questions. Cohen, the banking lawyer, said that Geithner privately "was pushing the system to reform." But because of limited resources, Geithner was reliant on the big banks for information about their activities, Cohen said.

GAO auditors who recently reviewed the confidential Fed study said the banks pushed back against the idea of expanding their stress tests. Executives "questioned the need for additional stress testing, particularly for worst-case scenarios that they thought were implausible," Orice Williams, the director of financial markets at the GAO, told the Senate subcommittee on securities, insurance and investments last month.

Williams said that regulators "did not take forceful action" to correct the risk-management deficiencies "until the crisis occurred."

Records and interviews show that Geithner and his colleagues did not employ some of the harsher tools at their disposal to bring the banks into line. From 2006 through the start of the credit crisis in the summer of 2007, they brought no formal enforcement actions against any large institution for substandard risk-management practices. The Fed also did not use its confidential process during that period to downgrade any large bank company's risk rating, according to two people familiar with the process, a step that could have triggered costly consequences for the firms.

A spokesman for the New York Fed said it does not comment on private supervisory actions.

The New York Fed led a broader review of the large banks' risk management in early 2007, just months before the credit crisis began. Unlike the 2006 study, the review, titled "Large Financial Institutions' Perspectives on Risk," gave an upbeat assessment of their ability to handle potential vulnerabilities. Relying on bank assurances that the quality of their loans and investments remained "strong," the Fed concluded that there were "no substantial issues of supervisory concern."

When Congress learned of the Fed reports during last month's hearing, some lawmakers questioned the close relationships between the regulators and banks. They suggested that the Fed's practice of keeping its findings confidential may have contributed to the crisis.

"There might have been earlier, prompter and more effective action to deal with some of these issues that are bedeviling us at the moment," said Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.). "In many respects you are captives of the information of the organization you're regulating."

Dates with Citi

The recent criticism of the New York Fed raises questions about its dual mandate to be both a supervisor and the government's eyes and ears on the nation's financial markets.

Like his predecessors, Geithner relied on extensive contact with senior banking officials to collect information and influence their practices. "He had a remarkable ability to gain information without giving up information or without giving up his independence," said Cohen, the banking lawyer.

Cohen, who was in the running earlier this year to be Geithner's deputy at the Treasury, is among hundreds of people listed in Geithner's 2007 and 2008 appointment calendars, which were made available by the New York Fed. Geithner's outside contacts include senior banking managers, Treasury officials, regulators from other nations and journalists. The appointments range from breakfasts and lunches with bankers to tennis with Alan Greenspan and "Dinner w/Dr. and Mrs. Kissinger, et. al."

No institution shows up as frequently as Citigroup, the biggest bank company under the New York Fed's supervision. Among the numerous senior Citigroup officials recorded were Geithner's mentor Rubin, chief executive Charles Prince and his successor, Vikram Pandit.

Citigroup officials declined to comment for this report.

The calendar entries offer few details on the meetings, but the New York Fed had no shortage of topics to discuss with the bank holding company about its far-flung operations and its increasing exposure to subprime mortgages.

In 2005, as regulators abroad investigated Citigroup for imprudent trading practices, the Fed banned it from making new acquisitions. The ban was lifted in April 2006 after Citigroup assured the New York Fed it had tightened its compliance. At the end of that year, without public explanation, the Fed also terminated a three-year-old public-enforcement agreement that required Citigroup to beef up its risk management and file regular reports with the Fed.

At the time, Citigroup was taking on more risk. It was reporting record profits while also doubling its exposure to the subprime market. In 2006 Citigroup originated nearly twice as many subprime mortgages as the year before. It also issued twice as many exotic securities known as collateralized debt obligations -- including many composed of subprime loans.

By fall 2007, Citigroup began to recognize huge losses from these and other bets. At the urging of Geithner and the Fed, Citigroup began raising more capital to fill the growing holes in its balance sheets and reassure the markets of its solvency.

Citigroup's level of capital exceeded regulatory minimums. But the Fed did not require the banking company to raise the level to that of its peers. At the end of 2007, the capital level also fell below Citigroup's internal target.

A few months later, banking analysts raised questions about Citigroup's capital reserves. During the company's annual conference in early May, Pandit was asked whether there was tension between the banks, the auditors and the regulators over that issue. Pandit said that Citigroup was in "perfect agreement" with regulators and auditors. When an analyst expressed skepticism, another Citigroup executive backed up Pandit, saying there was "kind of an unusual symmetry."

In June 2008, Geithner told the Economic Club of New York that the guidelines for bank capital needed to be reworked -- but not yet. "After we get through this crisis, and the process of stabilization and financial repair is complete, we will put in place more exacting expectations on capital, liquidity and risk management for the largest institutions," he said.

By the fall, the only place beleaguered Citigroup could find capital was the Treasury. The government initially injected $25 billion to keep the company afloat. That wasn't enough. A few weeks later it came up with another $20 billion in cash and guarantees that would cover nearly $250 billion in losses on its toxic assets. No banking firm has received a larger federal bailout.

Geithner was working on the second Citigroup rescue, when, on Nov. 21, word leaked that President-elect Barack Obama wanted to name him Treasury secretary. Geithner had two meetings that day with top Citigroup executives, according to his calendar. Then he quickly stepped aside from further involvement in the rescue of financial institutions.

Before his confirmation hearing Geithner paid courtesy calls in the Senate. He mostly got a warm reception. When he went to see Sen. Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat quizzed him about his supervision of Citigroup.

"I quoted to him from the U.S. code," Wyden said, "about the clear responsibilities of the New York Fed." Wyden wanted to know why the "alarm bells" about Citigroup hadn't prompted the Fed to "enforce existing laws."

A few days later Geithner appeared before the Senate Finance Committee. Wyden once again asked why Geithner missed the boat with Citigroup.

Geithner acknowledged that "supervision could have been more effective." Before he could continue, Wyden pressed him: "Should your supervision have been more effective?"

"Absolutely," Geithner said.

As the Fed prepares to take on even more responsibility in a new financial regulatory architecture, it also is engaged in what Fed vice chairman Donald Kohn describes as a "comprehensive 'lessons-learned' review" of the credit crisis. In an interview, Kohn, who is leading the review, declined to discuss the findings so far.

Roger T. Cole, the central bank's head of banking supervision, told Congress two weeks ago that one lesson among many is that regulators must no longer be lulled by good times or put off by industry arguments.

"When bankers are particularly confident, when the industry and others are especially vocal about the costs of regulatory burden and international competitiveness, and when supervisors cannot yet cite recognized losses or write-downs," Cole said, "we must have even firmer resolve to hold firms accountable for prudent risk management."

Wait... Isn't A Bailout a LAST RESORT? Why then must Firms Be "Persuaded" to Participate? This Whole Thing Stinks.

2009-04-04T09:42:00.001-04:00

Administration Seeks an Out On Bailout Rules for Firms
Officials Worry Constraints Set by Congress Deter Participation

By Amit R. Paley and David Cho
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, April 4, 2009; A01

The Obama administration is engineering its new bailout initiatives in a way that it believes will allow firms benefiting from the programs to avoid restrictions imposed by Congress, including limits on lavish executive pay, according to government officials.

Administration officials have concluded that this approach is vital for persuading firms to participate in programs funded by the $700 billion financial rescue package.

The administration believes it can sidestep the rules because, in many cases, it has decided not to provide federal aid directly to financial companies, the sources said. Instead, the government has set up special entities that act as middlemen, channeling the bailout funds to the firms and, via this two-step process, stripping away the requirement that the restrictions be imposed, according to officials.

Although some experts are questioning the legality of this strategy, the officials said it gives them latitude to determine whether firms should be subject to the congressional restrictions, which would require recipients to turn over ownership stakes to the government, as well as curb executive pay.

The administration has decided that the conditions should not apply in at least three of the five initiatives funded by the rescue package.

This strategy has so far attracted little scrutiny on Capitol Hill, and even some senior congressional aides dealing with the financial crisis said they were unaware of the administration's efforts. Just two weeks ago, Congress erupted in outrage over bonuses being paid at American International Group, with some lawmakers faulting the administration for failing to do more to safeguard taxpayers' interests.

Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said the congressional conditions should apply to any firm benefiting from bailout funds. He said he planned to review the administration's decisions and might seek to undo them. "We have to make certain that if they are using government money in any sort of way, there should be restrictions," he said.

A Treasury spokesman defended the approach. "These programs are designed to both comply with the law and ensure taxpayers' funds are used most effectively to bring about economic recovery," spokesman Andrew Williams said.

In one program, designed to restart small-business lending, President Obama's officials are planning to set up a middleman called a special-purpose vehicle -- a term made notorious during the Enron scandal -- or another type of entity to evade the congressional mandates, sources familiar with the matter said.

In another program, which seeks to restart consumer lending, a special entity was created largely for the separate purpose of getting around legal limits on the Federal Reserve, which is helping fund this initiative. The Fed does not ordinarily provide support for the markets that finance credit cards, auto loans and student loans but could channel the funds through a middleman.

At first, when the initiative was being developed last year, the Bush administration decided to apply executive-pay limits to firms participating in this program. But Obama officials reversed that decision days before it was unveiled on March 3 and lifted the curbs, according to sources who spoke on condition of anonymity because the discussions were private.

Obama's team is also planning to exempt financial firms that participate in a program designed to find private investors to buy the distressed assets on the books of banks. But Treasury officials are still examining the legal basis for doing so. Congress has exempted the Treasury from applying the restrictions in a fourth program, which aids lenders who modify mortgages for struggling homeowners.

Congress drafted the restrictions amid its highly contentious consideration of the $700 billion rescue legislation last fall. At the time, lawmakers were aiming to reform the lavish pay practices on Wall Street. Congress also wanted the government to gain the right to buy stock in companies so that taxpayers would benefit if the firms recovered.

The requirements were honored in an initial program injecting public money directly into banks. That effort was developed by the Bush administration and continued by Obama's team. The initiative is on track to account for the bulk of the money spent from the rescue package. All the major banks already submit to executive-compensation provisions and have surrendered ownership stakes as part of this program.

Yet as the Treasury has readied other programs, it has increasingly turned to creating the special entities. Legal experts said the Treasury's plan to bypass the restrictions may be unlawful.

"They are basically trying to launder the money to avoid complying with the plain language of the law," said David Zaring, a former Justice Department attorney who defended the government from lawsuits involving related legal issues. "They are trying to create a loophole to ignore Congress, and I think the courts will think that it's ridiculous."

The federal watchdog agency overseeing the bailout is looking into the matter, trying to determine whether the Treasury's actions are legal.

Of the two major restrictions imposed by Congress in the bailout legislation, the limit on executive pay has been the most politically explosive issue.

Obama himself has called for these limits. "We've got to make certain that taxpayer funds are not subsidizing excessive compensation packages on Wall Street," he said earlier this year.

But officials at the Treasury and the Fed said they worry harsh pay limits will undermine critical bailout programs by discouraging financial firms from participating. Although many of these companies could survive without government help, they might lack money to ramp up lending, which officials consider critical to turning the economy around.

In private meetings with officials in both the Bush and Obama administrations, firms' leaders have pushed back against pay limits.

A major test of whether the Treasury would apply the congressional restrictions was a $1 trillion program developed last fall to revive consumer lending. The initiative, known as the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility, or TALF, will be seeded with up to $100 billion from the financial rescue package, with the rest coming from the Fed.

The program set up a special entity providing low-cost loans to hedge funds and other private investors so they can buy securities that finance consumer debt from banks and other lenders. This would free these companies to make more loans.

When the Bush administration announced the program in November, officials directed the Fed to apply the pay limits to the lenders because they stood to benefit the most from the program. "There was a public hunger for executive-compensation restrictions, and we knew we couldn't be tone-deaf to the politics there," a former Bush administration official said.

In February, Obama administration officials at the White House and the Treasury began reviewing that decision. Treasury officials consulted with Department of Justice attorneys, who said they could legally avoid the pay restrictions, according to a government official. The requirements were removed just before the initiative was launched.

The concerns persisted as the administration crafted other initiatives. Some private investors said, for instance, that they would not help the government buy toxic assets from banks if the congressional restrictions were applied to them. And every major provider of small-business loans has said that it will not participate in the government's program if it has to surrender ownership stakes to the government or submit to executive-pay limits.

American Brain Dead Media Continues To Focus on the Trivial, while ignoring real issues.

2009-04-02T15:52:00.002-04:00

Beware Media Bearing Gift-gates

posted by Leslie Savan on 04/02/2009 @ 1:10pm

The real question about how Barack and Michelle Obama are being received on their Rolling-G-20-Summit/Euro-Tour '09 has nothing to do with how the Europeans treat them, but all about the American mainstream media itself: What infinitesimal nit will they find to pick about the new president's conduct abroad that can be blown up into a two- to three-day pseudo-international incident?

You know the sort of story I mean. We're not talking about serious systemic issues, such as the different perspective a country like Germany (with universal health care, generous unemployment benefits, and a highly unionized work force) might have on the need for a global stimulus when compared to the U.S., where the party Obama just turned out of office has proposed effectively privatizing Medicare. That would be too much like journalism, and way too MEGO.

We're looking here for a truly small-bore, utterly irrelevant, content-free distraction, like the ones the MSM entertained us with during March Meme Madness. Stories like Obama laughs too much, teleprompters too much, or simply does too much.

You know the media nitwit-pickers have struck when, at some point, they've made the exact opposite charge--that Obama's too serious, too off the cuff, or does too little, all well-worn themes from the campaign. On Tuesday, for example, a Fox News promo tried to scorch the president with the tagline "Rock star no more," suggesting he's lost his touch. Of course, that's the B-side of McCain's complaint last summer (megaphoned all over Fox) that Obama drew too big a crowd in Berlin, proving he was the "world's biggest celebrity"--and if the Eurotrash love him, how could straight-talkin' 'muricans ever accept him as president?

But let's face it: However unpopular American and British financiers may be in Europe, even Fox is having a hard time insisting that the populist firehose over there is aimed at Obama himself. The press spent two weeks in this country trying to hang Obama with the AIG bonuses, and his popularity went up.

A more likely candidate for MSM trumpetition is the line going around rightwing blogs, that the Obamas are narcissitic and stingy gifters. The English press made a big deal last month about how Prime Minister Gordon Brown gave Obama a pen mount made from the wood of a 19th century British anti-slaving warship when he visited Washington, and all he got in return was a lousy stack of American DVDs. So when it was learned that the president gave Queen Elizabeth II an iPod, the blogs went into overdrive--AmericanDigest.com dubbed the Obamas "the Clampetts," asking, "Were they born in a barn?"

Turns out the Queen requested the video iPod the president gave her, and he filled it with footage of her American visits and 40 showtunes; he also presented her with a rare songbook signed by Richard Rodgers, the Broadway composer who wrote one of the Queen's fave musicals, "Oklahoma!" But that won't stop the piss-ant dramas. When Gift-gate turned out to be just another murder of Vince Foster, some of the same folks started getting the vapors over Michelle patting the Queen's shoulders during their meet'n'greet. Nobody "touches" the Queen, for chrissakes, they mooned--at least, until Buckingham Palace put out word that there was no violation of protocol, and the Queen thought Michelle was expressing a very natural "affection," which she shares.

Just because both these shots at the Obamas' legitimacy went foul so quickly doesn't mean the desperate will give up, unfortunately. After all, after weeks on the case, conventional-wisdom dispensing machine Mark Halperin was on Monday's Morning Joe still kvetching about how something or other was an example of Obama "doing too much." These people are as incapable of embarrassment as Inspector Clouseau.

And while the "does too much" line might seem exhausted by now, it's hot stuff in the digital basement over at Politico, where they're keeping it on life support by transferring it laterally, to Michelle. In a weekend piece that asked in the homepage subhead, "is [Michelle] doing too much?" Nia-Malika Henderson brooded that "it isn't yet clear whether her self-described core messages--about military families, volunteerism, and helping working women balance work and family life--are truly breaking through. Some wonder if she's spreading herself too thin to emerge in the public mind as a leading voice on those topics."

Using the time-dishonored "some say" device to suggest throngs of critics, Henderson produced only one, Mindy Sabella, a marketing director, who griped about Michelle's "branding": "She's in the kitchen at the White House, she's building houses, she's digging in the garden. It's all very nice, but I thought to myself, `Why is she planting herbs?'"

I thought to myself, "Why is Ms. Sabella planting her bs?" Some contend, however, that it is Politico's Henderson who's doing the planting, i.e., getting an "expert" to provide quotes that fill Politico's buzz quota. (An internal memo advises writers to "reframe your reporting and analysis so people will say, 'POLITICO is reporting...' or 'The way POLITICO put it is...'") Wait, this just in: It was Henderson who got an "etiquette expert" from the Emily Post Institute to complain about Obama's iPod gift, too.

Anyway, these pseudostories--naked memes, you might call them--are more than just Republican talking points taken up by the media. What is fascinating about them is that their fakiness is so Emperor-wears-no-clothes-obvious. They're sprinkled around not so much to rile the masses up over a particular make-believe item, but to help keep the GOP base in a chronic, make-believe-ready state, one where they're unlikely to question any of the larger political lies. Like, that this is "the Obama recession."

But this time it's not working. Polls indicate that by huge margins people blame the banks and Bush for the collapsed economy, not Obama. Why do techniques that bedeviled the Clintons seem to slide off Obama so easily?

Well, for one thing, Obama won his election by the widest margin any new president has garnered since LBJ, and the country really wants a change.

Ultimately, though, it was the way the Clintonites governed, as a kind of Republican Lite, that opened them up to charges of hypocrisy and often split the Democratic coalition. The GOP may have lost the war to remove Bill from office, but they were definitely onto something about the Clintons, the way their immediate tactical advantage determined whatever they did--from cutting welfare to deregulating the banks. There were just enough flanges sticking up on Clintonism to catch the force of that populist firehose.

That's just not so clear about Obama. So, no matter what happens, for the foreseeable future we will have the corporate-media Clouseaus saying, "Do you have a leesance for that minkey?" And most of us won't be able to understand a word.

Local Law Enforcement Should Not Be Attempting To Enforce Immigration Laws.

2009-04-02T15:31:00.000-04:00

House Hearing Will Examine Illegal Profiling and Police Misconduct By Local Law Enforcement Acting As Federal Immigration Agents (4/1/2009)

U.S. Department Of Homeland Security Should Suspend Agreements With Local And State Law Enforcement, Says ACLU

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: (202) 675-2312; media@dcaclu.org

WASHINGTON – Two House Judiciary Committee Subcommittees will hold a joint hearing tomorrow to examine civil rights abuses committed by state and local police functioning as federal immigration agents. As part of the hearing entitled, “The Public Safety and Civil Rights Implications of State and Local Enforcement of Federal Immigration Laws,” the American Civil Liberties Union in written testimony will urge Congress to suspend all local immigration enforcement agreements that have resulted in illegal profiling of Latinos and unlawful detention and deportation of U.S. citizens and permanent residents.

“Too many sheriffs, after being deputized as immigration agents, have treated their new authority as a license to profile and discriminate,” said Joanne Lin, ACLU Legislative Counsel. “The ACLU has received complaints across the country of U.S. citizens of Latino appearance being illegally stopped, detained, arrested, and even deported by local law enforcement functioning as immigration agents. Immigration law, like tax law, is very complex and constantly evolving. Since immigration law is exclusively federal, immigration enforcement belongs in the hands of the federal government only, not in the hands of county sheriff’s deputies and police officers.”

Since 2002, the federal government has actively shifted enforcement of civil immigration law to localities. State, county and local law enforcement agencies enter into agreements under Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, in which the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) authorizes local law enforcement officers to perform immigration duties under the training and supervision of the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Unfortunately, the federal government has completely abandoned its responsibilities to monitor and provide meaningful oversight of the 287(g) program. Consequently, sheriffs and police officers who, for example, are not adequately trained or supervised by ICE often rely on race or ethnicity as reason to suspect that an individual is undocumented. Any person who looks or sounds “foreign” is more likely to be stopped by police and more likely to be arrested, rather than given a warning or let go, when stopped.

One such individual is Julio Mora, a U.S. citizen who was stopped and arrested by Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (“MCSO”) deputies in February. Despite being a U.S. citizen, Mr. Mora was arrested and detained for several hours without reasonable suspicion or probable cause until MCSO could confirm his citizenship. While in MCSO custody, Mr. Mora was humiliated by deputies who forced him to urinate with his hands cuffed and then mocked him for not being able to do so. Mr. Mora will be testifying at the hearing about his experiences at the hands of MCSO deputies.

The ACLU, along with Steptoe & Johnson LLP and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, has sued MCSO for illegal profiling of Latino motorists in Maricopa County. In February, a federal court ruled that the class action lawsuit against MCSO will proceed.

“Discriminatory practices and policies in local enforcement of immigration law have no place in this country and must be stopped,” said ACLU staff attorney Mónica Ramírez, who is co-counsel in the case and co-authored the ACLU’s written testimony. “We urge Congress to take steps to make it unnecessary to bring further litigation on behalf of Latinos who have been illegally profiled and harassed by local law enforcement for the purpose of enforcing the immigration laws.”

In February, the ACLU of North Carolina co-authored a report entitled, “The Policies and Politics of Local Immigration Enforcement Laws: 287(g) Program in North Carolina.” Katy Parker, Legal Director of the ACLU of North Carolina, added, “All across the state, Latinos live in fear of being detained as they go to work, worship or run any other routine errand. Local law enforcement agencies have clearly targeted Latinos with immigration checkpoints near certain trailer parks, churches and flea markets.” Deborah Weissman, law professor at the University of North Carolina, co-authored the report and will be testifying at tomorrow’s hearing.

The ACLU urges Congress to eliminate the 287(g) program and other DHS programs that permit state and local police to enforce immigration laws. The ACLU recommends the following initiatives:

DHS should suspend agreements between localities and ICE pending a comprehensive review of the 287(g) program;
Local law enforcement age should be required to collect data on all contacts with the public as a way to monitor racial profiling;
DHS should create a transparent and accessible complaint process for local immigration enforcement; and
Congress should pass the End Racial Profiling Act without exemptions for immigration enforcement.

For the ACLU testimony, go to:
www.aclu.org/immigrants/gen/39242leg20090401.html

For more information about the 287(g) report by the ACLU of North Carolina, go to:
www.law.unc.edu/documents/clinicalprograms/287gpolicyreview.pdf

For more details about the Ortega v. Arpaio case, go to:
www.aclu.org/immigrants/gen/35998lgl20080716.html#attach

“The men and women of Afghanistan are building a nation that is free, and proud, and fighting terror - and America is honored to be their friend.” - W

2009-03-31T12:28:00.002-04:00

March 31, 2009

Afghan leader accused of bid to 'legalise rape'

By Jerome Starkey in Kabul

UN and women MPs say Karzai bowed to Islamic fundamentalists before poll

Afghanistan's President, Hamid Karzai, has signed a law which "legalises" rape, women's groups and the United Nations warn. Critics claim the president helped rush the bill through parliament in a bid to appease Islamic fundamentalists ahead of elections in August.

In a massive blow for women's rights, the new Shia Family Law negates the need for sexual consent between married couples, tacitly approves child marriage and restricts a woman's right to leave the home, according to UN papers seen by The Independent.

"It is one of the worst bills passed by the parliament this century," fumed Shinkai Karokhail, a woman MP who campaigned against the legislation. "It is totally against women's rights. This law makes women more vulnerable."

The law regulates personal matters like marriage, divorce, inheritance and sexual relations among Afghanistan's minority Shia community. "It's about votes," Ms Karokhail added. "Karzai is in a hurry to appease the Shia because the elections are on the way."

The provisions are reminiscent of the hardline Taliban regime, which banned women from leaving their homes without a male relative. But in a sign of Afghanistan's faltering steps towards gender equality, politicians who opposed it have been threatened.

"There are moderate views among the Shia, but unfortunately our MPs, the people who draft the laws, rely on extremists," Ms Karokhail said.

The bill lay dormant for more than a year, but in February it was rushed through parliament as President Karzai sought allies in a constitutional row over the upcoming election. Senator Humeira Namati claimed it wasn't even read out in the Upper House, let alone debated, before it was passed to the Supreme Court. "They accused me of being an unbeliever," she said.

Details of the law emerged after Mr Karzai was endorsed by Afghanistan's Supreme Court to stay in power until elections scheduled in August. Some MPs claimed President Karzai was under pressure from Iran, which maintains a close relationship with Afghanistan's Shias. The most controversial parts of the law deal explicitly with sexual relations. Article 132 requires women to obey their husband's sexual demands and stipulates that a man can expect to have sex with his wife at least "once every four nights" when travelling, unless they are ill. The law also gives men preferential inheritance rights, easier access to divorce, and priority in court.

A report by the United Nations Development Fund for Women, Unifem, warned: "Article 132 legalises the rape of a wife by her husband".

Most of Afghanistan's Shias are ethnic Hazaras, descended from Genghis Khan's Mongol army which swept through the entire region around 700 years ago. They are Afghanistan's third largest ethnic group, and potential kingmakers, because their leaders will likely back a mainstream candidate.

Even the law's sponsors admit Mr Karzai rushed it through to win their votes. Ustad Mohammad Akbari, a prominent Shia political leader, said: "It's electioneering. Most of the Hazara people are unhappy with Mr Karzai."

A British Embassy spokesman said diplomats had raised concerns "at a senior level".

While President Obama Plays Tough With The Auto Industry... Tim Geithner and Larry Summers allow Wall Street to Develop Plans to Save Themselves.

2009-03-30T13:15:00.003-04:00

Obama's Banking Rescue: O for Opaque

Robert Kuttner at HuffPo

I fear that these columns have been too polite. They have directed criticisms at Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and national economic policy chief Larry Summers. Lord knows, they richly deserve the criticism. But let's not kid ourselves. The man they work for is named Barack Obama.

President Obama has promised to run an administration of unprecedented openness. And in some respects, such as the ground rules for spending stimulus funds, he has. But in the most important area of all, the financial rescue, the administration is making trillion dollar decisions relying on the Federal Reserve and a small Wall Street club of advisors, with no transparency or public accountability.

In normal policy-making, an administration comes before Congress to request a law; one or more Congressional committees hold hearings; a broad range of witnesses are called; and then the legislation is drafted, enacted, and funds are appropriated. Criteria for spending the public's money are explicitly legislated; and Congress gets to conduct oversight hearings after the fact to see whether the money has been well spent.

But compare that process with the bank rescue, a policy with all the transparency of J.P. Morgan. The current approach to the bailout began last October when a panicky Hank Paulson, then George W. Bush's Treasury Secretary, met with Congressional leaders and told them if they didn't cough up a blank check of $700 billion in a matter of days, the economy would collapse. It took Congress three weeks, but Paulson got his blank check. There were no hearings, no expert witnesses, and no serious discussion of alternative approaches. But at least Congress legislated the funds, and added as a condition the creation of both a Congressional Oversight panel and an independent inspector general.

However, Paulson's decisions on which firms to bail out, and on what terms, were entirely ad hoc. Treasury has not cooperated well with the oversight panel, as the panel's several reports attest.

Then in January, Obama succeeded Bush--and if anything the closed-door operation became even more secretive. In devising their horribly convoluted and risky approach to the next phase of the banking bailout, chief economic strategist Summers and Treasury Secretary Geithner did not consult closely with Congress. The new rescue package was not legislated. There were no hearings. Rather, they met extensively with key Wall Street banking barons, to design government guarantees so lucrative that speculative hedge funds and private equity companies would bid for toxic securities clogging bank balance sheets. They would make a financial killing, but maybe banks would be recapitalized and start lending again.

This is described as a "public-private partnership," but the new private investors put up just three percent of the money. The rest comes from the Federal Reserve, the FDIC, and what's left of Paulson's original pot, now down to less than $100 billion. But if nearly all the risk and all the money is coming from the Fed, who needs the middlemen?

The plan is also advertised as a system for "price discovery" in which free market auctions allow market forces to discern the "correct" market price of financial assets that nobody has wanted to buy or sell. But, obviously, nothing that is 97 percent government-financed and government-guaranteed is a free-market price. See economist Jeff Sachs on this.

In the days before the plan was finally announced last Monday, Geithner and Summers had several meetings with key private equity and hedge funds, so that there could be well-orchestrated announcements that private capital liked the government's plan and would come to the table. Summers and Geithner effectively gave away one of the most important imperatives for solving the financial crisis--making sure that these unsupervised and highly speculative parts of the system are belatedly regulated.

Recently, in response to tough questions from Senator Carl Levin, Gary Gensler, Obama's new chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, made several explicit commitments about more stringent regulation of hedge funds and private equity.

But Gensler is singing one song, while Geithner sings a very different tune. It's awfully hard to crack down on these people when you are fairly begging them to come to your new government-guaranteed casino.

Even more alarmingly, the administration is now using the Federal Reserve as an unlegislated, all-purpose slush fund. Because the Fed's operations are largely beyond the reach of Congressional appropriations or scrutiny, the Fed can do whatever it wishes with its money. The Geithner plan was negotiated behind closed doors, the main players being the Fed, the FDIC, the Treasury, and power-brokers on Wall Street.

What we have is something perilously close to a dictatorship of the Fed and the Treasury, acting in the interests of Wall Street. The contrasts with the first hundred days of the Roosevelt administration are striking. Like Roosevelt, Obama faces an economic emergency. Like Roosevelt, he faces an angry public, which has been bilked by excesses on Wall Street. And like Roosevelt, Obama has a supportive Democratic Congress that is willing to substantially defer to the White House on an emergency recovery plan.

But unlike Roosevelt, who used the public's indignation and Congress's support to constrain the barons of private finance, Obama's economic team is using government funds to put the most abusive players on Wall Street back in the saddle. And Geithner and Summers, working with the Fed, are assembling their plan with no public scrutiny.

In the course of a week, the administration's own rhetoric on the A.I.G. bonuses has shifted from "We were bound by contracts" to "This is an outrage" to "Never mind." Wall Street was out for favor for just days. Meanwhile, Geithner is out with a new proposal to give the Federal Reserve even more sweeping powers to be a "systemic risk regulator."

All of this invites a couple of hard questions.

First, was this the only way to proceed? I have addressed this in a previous column arguing that a superior approach would be a new Reconstruction Finance Corporation.

For details of a well articulated rationale for a new RFC, see the recent speech by Thomas Hoenig, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, whose jurisdiction covers eleven Midwestern states. (PDF)

Second, where is Congress? Basically, the key Democratic Committee chairman, whatever their private reservations, have been persuaded that they need to support their president and that the Geithner plan is worth a try. But at the very least, they should be asking harder questions and demanding more transparency. For instance, the Treasury needs to define tactics to game the bailout that will be be prohibited. Congress needs to know which Wall Street moguls the Treasury team met with, and exactly what they were promised. And the whole plan needs to be legislated, rather than made up on the fly by Summers, Geithner, and Bernanke.

At the very least, Congress should act now to cap the kind of windfall profits that hedge funds and private equity companies are likely to make with government bearing nearly all of the risk. There is a good precedent for this. During and after World War II, ending only in the early 1970s, there was a government agency called the Renegotiation Board. Defense Contractors had to agree to a contractual provision allowing a post-audit, after the contract was finished. If their profit exceed the stipulated amount, the government got a refund. By the same token, hedge fund and private equity bets made with government guarantees should have limits on their upside.

And before the Fed is turned into an even more potent all-purpose regulator, Congress should turn it into a true public institution--a reform project that has been deferred since Roosevelt's day.

At a recent conference of the New America Foundation, economist and Obama adviser Laura Tyson, an in exchange with me, defended the administration's approach on the premise that there was no way that Congress would legislate the one to two trillion dollars in public funds that will be needed to make this rescue work. So, in Tyson's view, there was no alternative other than having Treasury contrive its own plan, using the Fed as an all purpose source of unlegislated financing.

I think this is exactly backwards. The administration has, in fact, put $750 billion into its current budget for bank-bailout funds to be tapped later. And if the White House had proposed a more progressive approach to the whole financial rescue--taking failed banks into receivership, involving Congress in the program design, doing comprehensive government audits of bank balance sheets before rather than after the fact, and forcing bank shareholders and bondholders rather than taxpayers to take more of the hit--Congress might well have provided at least some of the funds, leaving the Fed to provide the rest.

Under the present arrangement, the Fed provides nearly all of the funds, an approach that carries no transparency and huge risks of its own. Until last September, the Fed bought and sold mainly Treasury bonds, the safest securities there are. And it did so for one purpose only--to conduct monetary policy. Now, the Fed is buying trillions of dollars of junk assets, and it will be under tremendous pressure to keep these on its own books, compromising its capacity to run the nation's monetary policy.

It's possible that the Geithner plan will "work" in the sense of re-starting the Wall Street bubble machine, this time with a limitless line of direct credit from the Federal Reserve. If that happens, it will defer an even more serious day of reckoning, as the cost of the Fed's immense credit creation comes due. But the greater likelihood is that the plan will merely enrich some speculators, but neither bring zombie banks back to life, nor get a normal banking and credit system operating again. And then the administration will need to come back to Congress, this time with less credibility, with the economy in even worse shape, having burned through more than a trillion dollars.

We were promised unprecedented openness. In the most momentous area of policy for getting the economy functioning again for ordinary Americans, we have instead unprecedented secrecy, designed by and for Wall Street. We expected better of Obama.

Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect and senior fellow at Demos. His recent book is "Obama's Challenge: America's Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency."

President Obama Takes Hard Line Position On Auto Industry Bailouts. Why isn't the Line as Hard on Wall Street? What's the Difference?

2009-03-30T13:03:00.002-04:00

Obama's Remarks On Auto Industry Restructuring
NPR.org, March 30, 2009 · President Obama is giving General Motors and Chrysler weeks to restructure or face bankruptcy. Read his prepared remarks. Source: The White House

One of the challenges we have confronted from the beginning of this administration is what to do about the state of our struggling auto industry. In recent months, my Auto Task Force has been reviewing requests by General Motors and Chrysler for additional government assistance as well as plans developed by each of these companies to restructure, modernize, and make themselves more competitive. Our evaluation is now complete. But before I lay out what needs to be done going forward, I want to say a few words about where we are, and what led us to this point.

It will come as a surprise to no one that some of the Americans who have suffered most during this recession have been those in the auto industry and those working for companies that support it. Over the past year, our auto industry has shed over 400,000 jobs, not only at the plants that produce cars but at the businesses that produce the parts that go into them, and the dealers that sell and repair them. More than one in ten Michigan residents is out of work — the most of any state. And towns and cities across the great Midwest have watched unemployment climb higher than it's been in decades.

The pain being felt in places that rely on our auto industry is not the fault of our workers, who labor tirelessly and desperately want to see their companies succeed. And it is not the fault of all the families and communities that supported manufacturing plants throughout the generations. Rather, it is a failure of leadership — from Washington to Detroit — that led our auto companies to this point.

Year after year, decade after decade, we have seen problems papered-over and tough choices kicked down the road, even as foreign competitors outpaced us. Well, we have reached the end of that road. And we, as a nation, cannot afford to shirk responsibility any longer. Now is the time to confront our problems head-on and do what's necessary to solve them.

We cannot, we must not, and we will not let our auto industry simply vanish. This industry is, like no other, an emblem of the American spirit; a once and future symbol of America's success. It is what helped build the middle class and sustained it throughout the 20th century. It is a source of deep pride for the generations of American workers whose hard work and imagination led to some of the finest cars the world has ever known. It is a pillar of our economy that has held up the dreams of millions of our people. But we also cannot continue to excuse poor decisions. And we cannot make the survival of our auto industry dependent on an unending flow of tax dollars. These companies — and this industry — must ultimately stand on their own, not as wards of the state.

That is why the federal government provided General Motors and Chrysler with emergency loans to prevent their sudden collapse at the end of last year — only on the condition that they would develop plans to restructure. In keeping with that agreement, each company has submitted a plan to restructure. But after careful analysis, we have determined that neither goes far enough to warrant the substantial new investments that these companies are requesting. And so today, I am announcing that my administration will offer GM and Chrysler a limited period of time to work with creditors, unions, and other stakeholders to fundamentally restructure in a way that would justify an investment of additional tax dollars; a period during which they must produce plans that would give the American people confidence in their long-term prospects for success.

What we are asking is difficult. It will require hard choices by companies. It will require unions and workers who have already made painful concessions to make even more. It will require creditors to recognize that they cannot hold out for the prospect of endless government bailouts. Only then can we ask American taxpayers who have already put up so much of their hard-earned money to once more invest in a revitalized auto industry. But I am confident that if we are each willing to do our part, then this restructuring, as painful as it will be in the short-term, will mark not an end, but a new beginning for a great American industry; an auto industry that is once more out-competing the world; a 21st century auto industry that is creating new jobs, unleashing new prosperity, and manufacturing the fuel-efficient cars and trucks that will carry us toward an energy independent future. I am absolutely committed to working with Congress and the auto companies to meet one goal: the United States of America will lead the world in building the next generation of clean cars.

No one can deny that our auto industry has made meaningful progress in recent years. Some of the cars made by American workers are now outperforming the best cars made abroad. In 2008, the North American Car of the Year was a GM. This year, Buick tied for first place as the most reliable car in the world. And our companies are investing in breakthrough technologies that hold the promise of new vehicles that will help America end its addiction to foreign oil.

But our auto industry is not moving in the right direction fast enough to succeed. So let me discuss what measures need to be taken by each of the auto companies requesting taxpayer assistance, starting with General Motors. While GM has made a good faith effort to restructure over the past several months, the plan they have put forward is, in its current form, not strong enough. However, after broad consultations with a range of industry experts and financial advisors, I'm confident that GM can rise again, provided that it undergoes a fundamental restructuring. As an initial step, GM is announcing today that Rick Wagoner is stepping aside as Chairman and CEO. This is not meant as a condemnation of Mr. Wagoner, who has devoted his life to this company; rather, it's a recognition that it will take a new vision and new direction to create the GM of the future.

In this context, my administration will offer General Motors adequate working capital over the next 60 days. During this time, my team will be working closely with GM to produce a better business plan. They must ask themselves: have they consolidated enough unprofitable brands? Have they cleaned up their balance sheets or are they still saddled with so much debt that they can't make future investments? And above all, have they created a credible model for how to not only survive, but succeed in this competitive global market? Let me be clear: the United States government has no interest or intention of running GM. What we are interested in is giving GM an opportunity to finally make those much-needed changes that will let them emerge from this crisis a stronger and more competitive company.

The situation at Chrysler is more challenging. It is with deep reluctance but also a clear-eyed recognition of the facts that we have determined, after a careful review, that Chrysler needs a partner to remain viable. Recently, Chrysler reached out and found what could be a potential partner — the international car company Fiat, where the current management team has executed an impressive turnaround. Fiat is prepared to transfer its cutting-edge technology to Chrysler and, after working closely with my team, has committed to building new fuel-efficient cars and engines here in America. We have also secured an agreement that will ensure that Chrysler repays taxpayers for any new investments that are made before Fiat is allowed to take a majority ownership stake in Chrysler.

Still, such a deal would require an additional investment of tax dollars, and there are a number of hurdles that must be overcome to make it work. I am committed to doing all I can to see if a deal can be struck in a way that upholds the interests of American taxpayers. That is why we will give Chrysler and Fiat 30 days to overcome these hurdles and reach a final agreement — and we will provide Chrysler with adequate capital to continue operating during that time. If they are able to come to a sound agreement that protects American taxpayers, we will consider lending up to $6 billion to help their plan succeed. But if they and their stakeholders are unable to reach such an agreement, and in the absence of any other viable partnership, we will not be able to justify investing additional tax dollar to keep Chrysler in business.

While Chrysler and GM are very different companies with very different paths forward, both need a fresh start to implement the restructuring plans they develop. That may mean using our bankruptcy code as a mechanism to help them restructure quickly and emerge stronger. Now, I know that when people even hear the word "bankruptcy" it can be a bit unsettling, so let me explain what I mean. What I am talking about is using our existing legal structure as a tool that, with the backing of the U.S. government, can make it easier for General Motors and Chrysler to quickly clear away old debts that are weighing them down so they can get back on their feet and onto a path to success; a tool that we can use, even as workers are staying on the job building cars that are being sold. What I am not talking about is a process where a company is broken up, sold off, and no longer exists. And what I am not talking about is having a company stuck in court for years, unable to get out.

It is my hope that the steps I am announcing today will go a long way toward answering many of the questions people may have about the future of GM and Chrysler. But just in case there are still nagging doubts, let me say it as plainly as I can — if you buy a car from Chrysler or General Motors, you will be able to get your car serviced and repaired, just like always. Your warrantee will be safe. In fact, it will be safer than it's ever been. Because starting today, the United States government will stand behind your warrantee.

But we must also recognize that the difficulties facing this industry are due in no small part to the weakness in our economy. Therefore, to support demand for auto sales during this period, I'm directing my team to take several steps. First, we will ensure that Recovery Act funds to purchase government cars go out as quickly as possible and work through the budget process to accelerate other federal fleet purchases as well. Second, we will accelerate our efforts through the Treasury Department's Consumer and Business Lending Initiative. And we are working intensively with the auto finance companies to increase the flow of credit to both consumers and dealers. Third, the IRS is today launching a campaign to alert consumers of a new tax benefit for auto purchases made between February 16th and the end of this year — if you buy a car anytime this year, you may be able to deduct the cost of any sales and excise taxes. This provision could save families hundreds of dollars and lead to as many as 100,000 new car sales.

Finally, several members of Congress have proposed an even more ambitious incentive program to increase car sales while modernizing our auto fleet. Such fleet modernization programs, which provide a generous credit to consumers who turn in old, less fuel efficient cars and purchase cleaner cars have been successful in boosting auto sales in a number of European countries. I want to work with Congress to identify parts of the Recovery Act that could be trimmed to fund such a program, and make it retroactive starting today.

Let there be no doubt, it will take an unprecedented effort on all our parts — from the halls of Congress to the boardroom, from the union hall to the factory floor — to see the auto industry through these difficult times. But I want every American to know that the path I am laying out today is our best chance to make sure the cars of the future are built where they've always been built — in Detroit and across the Midwest; to make America's auto industry in the 21st century what it was in the 20th century — unsurpassed around the world. This path has been chosen after consulting with other governments that are facing this crisis. We have worked closely with the Government of Canada on GM and Chrysler, as both companies have extensive operations there. The Canadian Government has indicated its support for our approach and will be announcing their specific commitments later today.

While the steps I am talking about will have an impact on all Americans, some of our fellow citizens will be affected more than any others. And so I'd like to speak directly to all those men and women who work in the auto industry or live in the countless communities that depend on it. Many of you have been going through tough times for longer than you'd care to remember. And I will not pretend the tough times are over. I cannot promise you there isn't more pain to come. But what I can promise you is this — I will fight for you. You are the reason I am here today. I got my start fighting for working families in the shadows of a shuttered steel plant and I wake up every single day asking myself what I can do to give you and working people all across this country a fair shot at the American dream.

When a community is struck by a natural disaster, the nation responds to put it back on its feet. While the storm that's hit our auto towns is not a tornado or a hurricane, the damage is clear, and we must respond. That is why today, I am designating a new Director of Recovery for Auto Communities and Workers to cut through red tape and ensure that the full resources of our federal government are leveraged to assist the workers, communities, and regions that rely on our auto industry. Edward Montgomery, a former Deputy Labor Secretary, has agreed to serve in this role. Together with Labor Secretary Solis and my Auto Task Force, Ed will help provide support to auto workers and their families, and open up opportunity in manufacturing communities. Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, and every other state that relies on the auto industry will have a strong advocate in Ed. He will direct a comprehensive effort that will help lift up the hardest hit areas by using the unprecedented levels of funding available in our Recovery Act and throughout our government to create new manufacturing jobs and new businesses where they are needed most — in your communities. And he will also lead an effort to identify new initiatives we may need to help support your communities going forward.

These efforts, as essential as they are, will not make everything better overnight. There are jobs that cannot be saved. There are plants that will not reopen. And there is little I can say that can subdue the anger or ease the frustration of all whose livelihoods hang in the balance because of failures that weren't theirs.

But there is something I want everyone to remember. Remember that it is precisely in times like these — in moments of trial, and moments of hardship — that Americans rediscover the ingenuity and resilience that makes us who we are. That made the auto industry what it once was. That sent those first mass-produced cars rolling off assembly lines. That built an arsenal of democracy that propelled America to victory in the Second World War. And that powered our economic prowess in the first American century.

Because I know that if we can tap into that same ingenuity and resilience right now; if we can carry one another through this difficult time and do what must be done; then we will look back and say that this was the moment when America's auto industry shed its old ways, marched into the future, and remade itself, once more, into an engine of opportunity and prosperity, not only in Detroit, and not only in our Midwest, but all across America.