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Via sully, this is astonishing and very very cool! Take what solace you can.



Aravosis CNBC discovers its loves Obama Anybody else think CNBC got orders to start making nice after Jon Stewart beat the crap out of them?


Countdown: GOP turns to Cheney to rewrite history March 16: MSNBC's Richard Wolffe talks about former Vice President Dick Cheney's attempt to undermine support for the Obama administration while rewriting the history of the Bush administration. Wolffe asks precisely the questions that the rest of the media refuses to ask about this travesty.

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Gimme a break - New York Times concern trolling with Editorial On Signing Statements

As a candidate, Barack Obama offered withering criticism of President Bush’s signing statements — declarations that he would not enforce parts of the bills he signed. So it was encouraging when President Obama invalidated the Bush signing statements last week and explained when he would issue statements of his own.

If Mr. Obama lives up to the principles he outlined last week, he could roll back the excessive powers that Mr. Bush claimed for his presidency, but the new president quickly issued a signing statement of his own that made us wonder just how clean a break he intended to make.

Presidents have long issued signing statements, but Mr. Bush used them with unprecedented frequency and brazenness. When he signed a torture ban in 2005, he made a groundless assertion that he could override Congress and the courts on a major part. In 2006, the American Bar Association called on presidents not to issue statements that claimed the right not to enforce the law.

In principle, a president should veto a bill if he believes part of it is unconstitutional. But Mr. Obama’s memo raised a legitimate concern: that Congress these days often passes omnibus bills. If a big bill has only a few problematic parts, a president has to choose between vetoing the whole bill, or agreeing to enforce provisions he believes to be unconstitutional.

Mr. Obama said he would try to work with Congress to address constitutional concerns in advance. Once a bill passes, he said, he would object only over “interpretations of the Constitution that are well founded.”

These are good policies, but the real test will be in how they are applied. ... ... ...
...

Outrage at AIG March 16: AIG, after taking billions in federal bailout money, plans to give out millions in bonuses to the same employees who ran the company into the ground. Obama says he would pursue every "legal avenue" to block them. After all the bailouts they've got, how can this happen? Rachel Maddow is joined by Rep. Barney Frank, D-MA.

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hilzoy: AIG: The Commentary

Something about the AIG story is bringing out strange reactions. Chuck Grassley:

"In a comment aired this afternoon on WMT, an Iowa radio station, Grassley (R-Iowa) said: "The first thing that would make me feel a little bit better towards them if they'd follow the Japanese model and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say I'm sorry, and then either do one of two things -- resign, or go commit suicide." (...)

Nobody else has suggested hara kiri for AIG executives, and Grassley's spokeswoman tried to make clear the senator didn't really mean it."

Meanwhile, Paul Kedrosky has a post called "The Case For Waterboarding AIG Execs". (No, he's not serious either.)

Mel Martinez has one of the dumbest comments on the whole affair:

""What executives have done is troubling, but it's equally troubling to have government telling shareholders how much they can pay the executives," said Sen. Mel Martinez (R-FL)."

Um, Senator Martinez: who exactly do you think owns 79.9% of AIG's shares? Or do you just object to the government talking to itself?

All very peculiar.

Sully: Frum vs Fox

The Glenn Beck insanity strikes a chord:

The audience for Beck’s Friday night special were each given copies of two books. One of them was Cleon Skousen’s Five Thousand Year Leap. Skousen, who died in 2006, is one of the legendary cranks of the conservative world, a John Bircher, a grand fantasist of theories about secret conspiracies between capitalists and communists to impose a one-world government under the control of David Rockefeller.

There’s always been a market for this junk of course. Once that market was reached via mimeographed newsletters. Now it’s being tapped by Fox News.

Andrew Sullivan has been a powerful advocate for exposing the torture regime and prosecuting those responsible. With the new Red Cross allegations, he is re-energized. Some links, all worth a look:

• The Point Of Torture Is Always Torture
• The Torture Doctors
• The Cowardice Of The MSM
• How Bush And Cheney Tortured I: Pfahlbinden
• How Bush And Cheney Tortured II: Verschaerfte Vernehmung
• Compare And Contrast

From the Red Cross's summary of Bush-Cheney torture techniques:

Contents
Introduction
1. Main Elements of the CIA Detention Program
1.1 Arrest and Transfer
1.2 Continuous Solitary Confinement and Incommunicado Detention
1.3 Other Methods of Ill-treatment
1.3.1 Suffocation by water
1.3.2 Prolonged Stress Standing
1.3.3 Beatings by use of a collar
1.3.4 Beating and kicking
1.3.5 Confinement in a box
1.3.6 Prolonged nudity
1.3.7 Sleep deprivation and use of loud music
1.3.8 Exposure to cold temperature/cold water
1.3.9 Prolonged use of handcuffs and shackles
1.3.10 Threats
1.3.11 Forced shaving
1.3.12 Deprivation/restricted provision of solid food
1.4 Further elements of the detention regime...

The Gestapo's list of torture techniques that fit into their "enhanced interrogation program" - a torture regime designed to avoid too-obvious or incriminating physical scars:

Bush and Cheney were, in fact, more brutal in their "enhanced interrogation" than the Gestapo was. And note that I am not engaging in the slightest hyperbole here. I'm not saying that the US is Nazi Germany in any way. I am saying that the torture program used by Bush and Cheney follows exactly the specific methods used by the Gestapo. This is not in any historical dispute, although the irony of using the exact same phrase for the exact same methods is one reason the Bushies dropped the term.

We also have a very specific legal precedent. When the US captured officials who had done to prisoners exactly what the last president did, the US prosecuted them, found them guilty and executed them. The price Cheney pays is a fawning interview on CNN.

That's who we are. That's what we've become.

Sully: Too Bad To Fire?

Conor Clarke looks at why AIG says it needs to provide bonuses to retain workers:

...the complicated contracts that resulted in huge losses in AIG are being used as a reason why the the people who wrote the contracts can't be fired. (They understand the belly of the beast!) I don't really know if this should be convincing. But I do find it interesting that this argument takes almost the same form as the claim that certain institutions are "too big to fail." Size isn't a question of merit, and neither is complexity. But both size and complexity are now being used as a defense of the status quo.

Josh Marshall notes:

Contracts don't easily withstand credible allegations of illegal behavior. And the executives in question need to have their attention focused on the calculus of levels of cooperation and legal vulnerability rather than compensation packages.