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Yglesias: Release the Memos
As Kevin Drum says if the best argument against releasing the last still-classified Bush-era torture memos is that doing so might embarrass people, countries, and institutions that were involved in war crimes, then that’s not really much of a reason at all. That’s embarrassing, shameful stuff. That’s why you need to release the memos.Sully: Realist Capitalism
- Hilzoy adds:
Newsweek:"As reported by NEWSWEEK, the White House last month had accepted a recommendation from Attorney General Eric Holder to declassify and publicly release three 2005 memos that graphically describe harsh interrogation techniques approved for the CIA to use against Al Qaeda suspects. But after the story, U.S. intelligence officials, led by senior national-security aide John Brennan, mounted an intense campaign to get the decision reversed, according to a senior administration official familiar with the debate. "Holy hell has broken loose over this," said the official, who asked not to be identified because of political sensitivities.
Brennan is a former senior CIA official who was once considered by Obama for agency director but withdrew his name late last year after public criticism that he was too close to past officials involved in Bush administration decisions. Brennan, who now oversees intelligence issues at the National Security Council, argued that release of the memos could embarrass foreign intelligence services who cooperated with the CIA, either by participating in overseas "extraordinary renditions" of high-level detainees or housing them in overseas "black site" prisons.""
Fear of embarrassing countries who cooperated with us cannot possibly be the reason for not releasing the memos. The solution is too simple: just redact their names and any identifying details. Are we supposed to believe that this has not occurred to Panetta or Holder? Or that there is some identifying detail that is so thoroughly intertwined with the legal arguments that it cannot possibly be edited out?
Give me a break.
President Obama: let us see what our public servants defended as lawful, and the arguments they used. If necessary, don't name the countries who, to their shame, decided to assist us. But don't insult our intelligence by pretending that you and your administration have never heard of White-Out.
Francis Fukuyama opines:
All of this does not amount to a failure of capitalism, but to a failure of American public policy. It is inevitable, however, that the credibility of things that Americans hold near and dear—i.e., liberal democracy and a market economy—will suffer greatly as a result of the crisis. People from Latvia to Korea to Mexico are suffering from a global recession that started in the United States. It started in large measure because of the faith that Americans placed in the ability of free markets to regulate themselves, a key aspect both of Reaganism and of the so-called “Anglo-Saxon” model of capitalism. Alan Greenspan admitted last fall that he was astonished that the self-interest of the financial community did not prevent it from making huge mistakes. Now that the public sector is cleaning up behind them, we need to move from astonishment to a different model of capitalism if we are to fix our own economy, and regain a shred of credibility on the world stage.
- However, Chris in Paris finds Banksters furious at G20 calls for regulation
My heart really goes out to the poor chaps. They've done so well and helped the world until it hurt. How dare anyone asks for accountability! Shameful! Disgraceful! Can't they all mind their own business and let banksters work in peace? Who do they think they are? Shareholders that aren't joined at the hip with management? Sure the G20 punks own them and have kept them afloat with a lifestyle above the rest including juicy bonuses but besides that, who do they think they are? Outrageous!Bankers are furious about the possible collapse of a system that inflated their basic pay: thousands of City jobs pay between £80,000 and £110,000 a year, with another £30,000 to £50,000 from bonuses, whilst senior management enjoyed multi-million pound bonuses.Right, so bankers are paid just like any other person on the street. That's a good one. So now they're trying their hand at comedy. If they wondered why they are hated so much, they can stop the search.
"Salaries in the banking and corporate finance world are not outrageous. The big reward is in the bonus," said Larry Schechter, a director at Schechter & Co, a boutique investment bank in Mayfair. "I am not a proponent of arbitrary compensation restrictions. I believe that bonuses - the rewards - should be commensurate with the level of success. You cannot have the whip without the carrot, and vice versa."
The G20 wants to restrict compensation that rewards short term risk-taking. Investment bankers banks received bonuses for taking big bets in the markets that may have led to longer term losses.
Many bought complex derivative contracts that proved to be worthless and now count among the toxic assets sitting on banks' balance sheets. They lent millions to companies that cannot repay their loans and must lay off thousands of staff.- FRANK RICH
But this romantic view of the auto industry is a sentimental illusion. Some of Wall Street’s exact failings also capsized G.M.: the hard sell of alluring but junky products, crony capitalism, reckless gambling, unregulated accounting sleights of hand. Only if we accept the full extent to which the bubble virus spread beyond that New York City town can we grasp the radical treatment President Obama must administer to restore the nation to health.The parallels between G.M. and the likes of Citigroup are uncanny. Much as bloated financial institutions gorged on mortgage-backed derivatives even when the underlying fundamentals made no rational sense, so G.M. doubled down on sure-to-be obsolete S.U.V.’s and trucks to serve a market transitorily enthralled by them. Much as the housing boom’s collapse left the get-rich-quick holders of AAA-rated mortgage derivatives with worthless paper, so the oil price spike left consumers trapped with self-indulgent, wealth-depleting gas guzzlers. In both instances, the customers were not entirely innocent.
As the banks peddled their risky financial products in countries like Iceland when the American market was saturated, so Wagoner looked to South America and Russia to gobble up the deficient vehicles Americans increasingly rejected. G.M. further emulated Wall Street by creatively finessing its balance sheets, moving its health care liabilities for retirees off its books (into a trust) to cosmetically enhance its appearance of fiscal health. It’s no surprise that members of G.M.’s often-compliant board — also now slated for overhaul by the White House — served as well on boards at Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and SunTrust Banks (another recipient of a multibillion-dollar government bailout).
Perhaps the most illuminating Detroit/Wall Street parallel of all is GMAC, the G.M. financial affiliate whose phantom profits were used to help hedge the parent company’s losses when its share of the car market plummeted. GMAC was yet another outfit that placed risky bets on the housing bubble until it burst, taking G.M.’s bottom line down with it.
As if to confirm that much of our so-called legitimate financial world has been six degrees of separation from Bernie Madoff, GMAC’s chairman was none other than J. Ezra Merkin. In addition to presiding over losses of nearly $8 billion at GMAC, Merkin had a separate investment management business that threw away another $2 billion by feeding other people’s money (including the endowments at N.Y.U. and Yeshiva University) into Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.
Benen: HE FEARED THE 'OBAMA GUN BAN'....
The latest gun massacre occurred this morning in Pittsburgh. This one had a more political bent than most.A man opened fire on officers during a domestic disturbance call Saturday morning, killing three of them, a police official said. Friends said he recently had been upset about losing his job and that he feared the Obama administration was poised to ban guns. [...]
Friends identified the suspect as Richard Poplawski, 23, but police would not immediately confirm his name. The gunman was arrested after a four-hour standoff, police said. [...]
Edward Perkovic said Poplawski, his best friend, feared "the Obama gun ban that's on the way" and "didn't like our rights being infringed upon."
It wouldn't be fair to blame right-wing propaganda for Poplawski slaying these police officers. Plenty of people have heard the far-right talking points and only a small handful have been driven to violence. As John Cole noted this morning, "Sure, crazy people do crazy things. But that doesn't make it responsible to encourage them, which is what a lot of really foolish people are doing right now for purely political reasons."
Exactly. As David Neiwert, who documents these kinds of right-wing activities, recently reported, there was a lengthy segment on Fox News two weeks ago in which Glenn Beck and the NRA's Wayne LaPierre insisted that Americans' 2nd Amendment rights are "under attack" from the Obama administration. What's more, as Neiwert noted this morning, the conservative Pittsburgh Tribune-Review ran a story just three days ago about "speculation that President Obama might pull the trigger on tighter regulations for gun ownership." The article quoted a gun-store salesman raising the specter of a "confiscation of firearms" from the government.
Everyone would benefit if the right could just lower the temperature a bit.
- sgw sees A Total Lack of Self Awareness And Personal Responsibility on the right over this.
Now that the story about that scumbag Richard Poplawski in Pittsburgh killing 4 police officers and wounding others because, in the words of his closest friends, he feared that President Obama was going to take his guns, the reactions on the blogs have been interesting to say the least. You can go to several different conservative blogs and you won't find even the hint of responsibility. Instead with the officers' bodies not even cold yet they try to contend that the guy really wasn't concerned about Obama taking his guns but rather that he lost his job, damn what his friends said. Or you might find words to the effect that the REAL tragedy here is that the guy actually helped those dirty fucking hippie liberals in their eternal fight against the second amendment. In still other places what you will find people absolving themselves by declaring that the guy was just insane. Now this last point has actually been echoed even on some progressive and left leaning sites like Washington Monthly.
Well I am calling bullshit on all of that, especially the whole "he was crazy so its nobody's fault" meme. He may very well have been insane, but that doesn't excuse the fearmongering spouted from the wingnuts which helped to push his insanity to a violent and deadly outburst. I am as big a proponent of free speech as anybody but you can't just keep scaring people everyday and making it seem like President Obama is going to personally target them and take away their freedoms and then turn around and not bear a great responsibility when someone acts out this way. Its just the same as why you can't yell fire in a crowded theater. What it comes down to is that your speech is not and should not be protected when you use it in an irresponsible manner to put other people in danger. There can be no better example of that than this situation. Yeah Poplowski may well have been bat shit crazy without all of the 2nd amendment bloviating from the wingnuts but would he have gone out and shot police officers? Would he have went out and bought an AK47? Would he have lived his life in fear of the government personally oppressing him? I don't believe so at all.
Now I don't expect the assholes on the right to ever change their ways because even though they preach personal responsibility you rarely see them take any, however its about damned time that we on the left stop giving them free passes. When they incite violence they need to be called out for it and held accountable. When they fearmonger and it leads to a tragedy, they should be made to own it. When they preach armed rebellion and revolution and then a nutcase actually goes out and attempts some of the things they allude to then the connections have to be made. I can tell you right now that I personally am not looking forward to 4 to 8 more years of this shit. The only way to change the behavior of the right is to try to shame them. If people actually start pointing directly at them when this stuff happens instead of letting them off the hook then maybe, just maybe, they will calm all that fear mongering bullshit down. But every single time we give them a pass with that "its nobody's fault" bullshit we damn near insure that they will continue to preach conspiracy and violence and sooner or later tragedy will happen once again.- It is notable that the Times article Gunman Kills 3 Police Officers in Pittsburgh didn't say anything, anything at all, about why he did this. They, in fact, had this line: "But no one could explain why he did what he did on Saturday."
Benen: GIVING OBSTRUCTIONISM A BAD NAME....
Tammy Duckworth, who lost both of her legs in combat while serving in Iraq, is the head of veterans affairs for the state of Illinois, and President Obama's nominee for assistant secretary of veterans affairs. Duckworth had a nominating hearing on Wednesday, a vote was scheduled for Thursday, and a swearing-in event for Friday.Burr vs. Duckworth April 3: GOP in Exile: Rachel Maddow explains why Sen. Richard Burr, R-NC, is delaying the nomination of veteran Tammy Duckworth from a top job in the Veterans Affairs department.All of that has been pushed off, however, because the top Republican on the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs wants to feel important.
Republican Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina is delaying the nomination vote and swearing-in of injured Iraq veteran Tammy Duckworth for a top post in the Veterans Affairs administration.
His actions angered some veterans groups Friday.
"Senator Burr has had plenty of time to ask questions of her," Jon Soltz, the chairman of VoteVets.org, an organization of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, said in a statement. "Senator Burr is only hurting American veterans with this nonsense. He should stop playing petty partisan games, stop needling the White House for the sheer fun of it and grow up."
Burr still has questions about Duckworth's nomination, his office said.
What kind of questions? Burr's office wouldn't say.
This is hardly isolated. As Ryan Powers explained this morning, "Conservatives in Congress and in the media are attempting to block or delay a growing number of critical nominees for what amount to ideological witch hunts and self-interested horse-trading. As the President attempts to deal with the significant legal and logistical questions surrounding two wars, closing Guantanamo Bay, and caring for our nation's veterans, the people Obama has picked to assist him with such issues are being forced to wait in the wings."
In some cases, these are positions that hardly need Senate confirmation in the first place. In all the cases, we're talking about qualified nominees, ready to fill important posts, and who already have more than enough votes secured to win confirmation.
Burr and a few too many of his Republican colleagues are blocking and delaying good people simply because they can. It's more than a little frustrating to watch.
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Benen: BOEHNER'S RATIONALIZATION...
A wide variety of Republicans, in the House and Senate, have been pushing this absurd claim that the administration's cap-and-trade proposal would impose, on average, a $3,128 energy burden on the typical American home. The figure comes from a bastardization of a study conducted by John Reilly, an M.I.T. scientist who supports the cap-and-trade plan.Reilly told Republican officials that their talking point isn't true, but as evidenced this week, they keep saying it anyway.
House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) explained in a press release why GOP lawmakers feel comfortable repeating a bogus statistic, even after it's been debunked.
How do Republicans arrive at the $3,100 dollar figure? It's pretty simple. We took MIT's own estimate of a key "cap-and-trade" bill from the 110th Congress (S. 309) cosponsored by then-Senator Obama that said S. 309 would generate $366 billion in revenues in 2015.... We took MIT's own number -- $366 billion -- and divided that by the number of U.S. households (we assumed 300 million people and an average household size of 2.56 people...which is 117 million households). Using this formula, you get roughly $3,000 per household. [...]
An MIT professor has questions about the $3,100 figure but his letter makes assumptions that are factually inaccurate. Moreover, he claims "government rebates to consumers" must be factored in. But we all know that Democrats have no intention of using a cap-and-trade system to deliver rebates to consumers; they want the tax revenue to fund more government spending. Key Democrats -- including Senators Reid & Conrad -- have even said they want to use cap-and-trade to fund their bureaucrat-controlled health care plan. In fact, nothing in the Democrats' budget would provide rebates or any relief to consumers.
Let's unpack this a bit. First, the method of finding a per-household average is itself misleading. Brad Plumer noted that the GOP's arithmetic "brushes off the fact that most carbon revenue would be rebated back to consumers, and that certain conservation measures could help reduce energy bills. But the actual MIT study implies that the welfare cost would be around $31 per person in 2015, rising to an average of $85 per person per year -- not including the benefits of cleaner air and a habitable planet."
Second, as Brian Beutler explained, "Reilly's objections were farther reaching than [Boehner indicated] and included not just the idea that increased costs will be somewhat offset by rebates, but that consumers will respond to higher energy prices by being more efficient and reducing consumption and that alternative fuels will become cheaper and so on. In other words, their methodology is flawed even if you grant them the assumption that the government will rebate $0 to consumers."
And third, Boehner insists that Democrats intend to use cap-and-trade revenue to "fund their bureaucrat-controlled health care plan." Not only is this an absurd description of the Democratic health care plan, but both Reid and Conrad have specifically rejected the idea of financing health care reform through a cap-and-trade system.
In other words, Boehner, trying to justify repeating an obvious lie, doesn't know what he's talking about. Again.
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