Sunday Evening: any brand of nonsense ... Edition

Hamsher: Shorter Elizabeth Warren: Timothy Geithner, WTF?

I guess Elizabeth Warren can forget about that invite to the AIG Christmas party:

Elizabeth Warren, chief watchdog of America's $700bn (£472bn) bank bailout plan, will this week call for the removal of top executives from Citigroup, AIG and other institutions that have received government funds in a damning report that will question the administration's approach to saving the financial system from collapse.

Warren, a Harvard law professor and chair of the congressional oversight committee monitoring the government's Troubled Asset Relief Program (Tarp), is also set to call for shareholders in those institutions to be "wiped out". "It is crucial for these things to happen," she said. "Japan tried to avoid them and just offered subsidy with little or no consequences for management or equity investors, and this is why Japan suffered a lost decade." She declined to give more detail but confirmed that she would refer to insurance group AIG, which has received $173bn in bailout money, and banking giant Citigroup, which has had $45bn in funds and more than $316bn of loan guarantees.

Warren also believes there are "dangers inherent" in the approach taken by treasury secretary Tim Geithner, who she says has offered "open-ended subsidies" to some of the world's biggest financial institutions without adequately weighing potential pitfalls. "We want to ensure that the treasury gives the public an alternative approach," she said, adding that she was worried that banks would not recover while they were being fed subsidies. "When are they going to say, enough?" she said.

She said she did not want to be too hard on Geithner but that he must address the issues in the report. "The very notion that anyone would infuse money into a financially troubled entity without demanding changes in management is preposterous."

Well somebody had to play the Brooksley Born role in all of this. Though Larry Summers might have to break out the thesaurus, the word "shrill" has been a bit overworked.

• Glenn Greenwald

  UPDATE: Just to get a sense for how propagandistic, sycophantic and fact-free are the most extreme Obama worshippers in our "journalist" class, consider this recent article from The New Republic's Noam Scheiber in which he urged the White House to "free its economic oracle" -- Summers -- and defended and praised Summers on the ground that "his exposure to Wall Street over the years has been limited." As Jonathan Schwarz asks, citing the massive compensation on which Summers engorged himself by feeding at the Wall Street trough last year: "I wonder what would have constituted 'significant' exposure to Wall Street? Maybe if he'd worked for D.E. Shaw full time? (Amazingly, Summers was paid $5.2 million for a part-time position.)"

Think Progress: Axelrod hits back at Cheney: He has not been acting like a ‘statesman.’

Vice President Cheney has used his public appearances in recent months to launch fearmongering attacks against the Obama administration, in contrast to President Bush, who said Obama “deserves my silence.” Today on CNN’s State of the Union, Senior White House Adviser David Axelrod hit Cheney for not acting like a “statesman“:

AXELROD: [President Bush] has behaved like a statesman. And as I’ve said before, here and elsewhere, I just don’t think the memo got passed down to the vice president.

Watch it:

Axelrod also noted that Cheney’s insistence that he kept America safe flies in the face of reality. “I find it supremely ironic, on a day when we were meeting with NATO, to talk about the continued threat from al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where they’re still plotting against us eight years — or seven years later,” he said. “I think the question for Mr. Cheney is, how could that be? How could this have gone so long? Why are they still in business?”

• Steve Benen adds:
  

  I have to assume the White House welcomes these kinds of opportunities. The more Cheney takes cheap shots, the more Obama and his team get to respond. The result reinforces the notion that the political fight boils down to Obama's approach vs. the Bush/Cheney approach.

  It's also why Republican leaders would prefer to have Cheney stop talking so much.

Benen on A RELIGIOUS RIGHT CRACK-UP?....

In general, the most noticeable fissure among politically conservative evangelical Christians is generational. In this dynamic, older evangelicals see themselves as an appendage of the Republican Party, and consider abortion and gay rights as the only "moral" issues that matter. Younger evangelicals are less partisan, and consider poverty and global warming important, too.

But there's another fissure, which in the short term, may be even more consequential. It's between leaders of the religious movement vs. those more inclined to take John 18:36 to heart (Jesus said, "My kingdom is not of this world").

The split first emerged, on a conceptual level, about a decade ago, when Cal Thomas, a far-right columnist and founding member of the Moral Majority, write a book called "Blinded by Might," arguing that conservative evangelical Christians have been going about their efforts all wrong. Religious right activists, Thomas said, should focus less on political power and influence -- having a seat at the proverbial GOP table -- and more on religion and family.

In her Washington Post column today, Kathleen Parker reports on how this kind of thinking as grown considerably more common, to the point that many "principled Christians" are now "finished with politics." Parker highlights a recent argument between Tom Minnery, head of the political arm of Focus on the Family, and Steve Deace of WHO Radio in Iowa.

Deace's point was that established Christian activist groups too often settle for lesser evils in exchange for electing Republicans.... Compromise may be the grease of politics, but it has no place in Christian orthodoxy, according to Deace.

Put another way, Christians may have no place in the political fray of dealmaking. That doesn't mean one disengages from political life, but it might mean that the church shouldn't be a branch of the Republican Party. It might mean trading fame and fortune (green rooms and fundraisers) for humility and charity.

Deace's radio show may be beneath the radar of most Americans and even most Christians, but he is not alone in his thinking. I was alerted to the Deace-Minnery interview by E. Ray Moore -- founder of the South Carolina-based Exodus Mandate, an initiative to encourage Christian education and home schooling. Moore, who considers himself a member of the Christian right, thinks the movement is imploding.

"It's hard to admit defeat, but this one was self-inflicted," he wrote in an e-mail. "Yes, Dr. Dobson and the pro-family or Christian right political movement is a failure; it would have made me sad to say this in the past, but they have done it to themselves."

For Christians such as Moore -- and others better known, such as columnist Cal Thomas, a former vice president for the Moral Majority -- the heart of Christianity is in the home, not the halls of Congress or even the courts. And the route to a more moral America is through good works -- service, prayer and education -- not political lobbying.

It's worth noting that both sides of the fissure believe the culture war has effectively been lost, but they differ wildly on the diagnosis. For religious right leaders, the culture war flopped because they faced too many enemies (popular culture, changing norms, progressive interest groups) with too few allies (no Republican follow-through). For those like Deace and Thomas, the war never should have been fought in the first place, because it required principled Christians to effectively become political lobbyists.

Thomas told Parker, "If people who call themselves Christians want to see any influence in the culture, then they ought to start following the commands of Jesus and people will be so amazed that they will be attracted to Him. The problem isn't political. The problem is moral and spiritual.... You have the choice between a way that works and brings no credit or money or national attention. Or, a way that doesn't work that gets you lots of attention and has little influence on the culture."

The movement, in other words, has a decision to make.

• Aravosis: Lead religious right groups oppose stimulus spending to save economy

  It's not terribly clear when the anti-gay/anti-Jewish bigots at the American Family Association, and their buddies at the oh-so-virile Family Research Council, became experts on fiscal policy. But since they're putting out action alerts opposing the government's stimulus spending, maybe it's time the media asked them in their in favor of throwing America into another Great Depression? That is what the spending is meant to stop - us sinking into a Great Depression.
  
  So if the bigots at the American Family Association and the Family Research Council are so upset about the spending Obama has had to propose in order to save the economy, the media should be asking them some tough economic questions about whether they prefer America go into another Great Depression, and whether, in the end, they simply exist to do the Republicans' bidding rather than God's.
  
  Here is the Family Research Council's latest alert, obviously on behalf of the conservative Republican leaders in Congress:

  It seems almost daily that the federal government launches yet another massive spending initiative. While it may be lost upon Washington bureaucrats that money for these projects doesn't just materialize from thin air, we Americans who have families, mortgages, car payments, tuition, and other expenses know differently. The money that Congress and the President seem to wield so nonchalantly comes from our pockets, our dreams, and our families.
  
  Our friends at American Family Association are, along with other groups, helping to organize thousands of "TEA" (Taxed Enough Already) Parties across the country. I encourage you to visit the xxxxxx website and join the rallies happening in your area.
  
  In a country such as ours where government, as described by Abraham Lincoln, is "of the people, by the people, for the people," we the people need to stand together to remind our officials not to use our families' hard-earned dollars so recklessly.

• Sully: Debating Evolution
  

  Juli Berwald testified at the Texas evolution hearings:

  Maybe evolutionists and creationists can't find common ground because they really aren't even having the same argument. Scientists are fighting to preserve their ability to answer how unimpeded by why. Creationists are fighting to have answers to why, unthreatened by answers to how.

  David Harsanyi takes a Libertarian view on the debate:

  The most sensible solution, of course, would be to permit parents a choice so that they can send their kids to schools that cater to any brand of nonsense they desire—outside of three core subjects.

  The left never will allow any genuine choice in our school systems. So it seems highly disagreeable and political to trap kids in public schools and, at the same time, decide where schools fall on controversial issues.