In the asking the right questions department . . .
Ezra Klein: BAUCUS ON CAP AND TRADE: "COSTS OF INACTION WOULD BE FAR GREATER."
The Senate Finance Committee is holding hearings on cap and trade today. And Baucus starts it off with a nice point. "Action would not be without cost," he admits. "But the costs of inaction would be far greater."
That's really the key insight. No one advocates a cap and trade program or a carbon tax because it seems like fun. No politician pushes these proposals because they're a surefire ticket to reelection. It's simply that if we don't do something, the consequences could prove disastrous. There are, of course, some opponents of action who simply deny the reality of global warming altogether. Asking for their cooperation is like asking a Christian Scientist to help reform the health care system. But then are those who admit the reality of global warming but spend their time talking up the downsides of all the policies that would actually reduce carbon emissions. Of all the positions on the table, that one's actually the most dishonest and nakedly opportunistic.
Baucus's full remarks follow the jump.
Voltaire wrote: “Men argue, nature acts.”
While people argued over global warming, nature acted. Now, at long last, people appear nearly ready to act in response.
Last year, the Senate had a good discussion of legislation to respond to climate change. As part of that effort, the Committee heard from witnesses about the tax and trade aspects of a cap-and-trade program. But ultimately, the Senate did not act on legislation last year.
This year, we will once again take up climate change legislation. President Obama has given a high priority to addressing the problem. It is time for us as a nation to show leadership and responsibility. It is our moral imperative to address climate change. It is time for us to act.
Action would not be without cost. But the costs of inaction would be far greater.
Many have analyzed the effects that a cap-and-trade program would have on our economy and our ability to compete in the world. Each study has generated its own set of questions and uncertainties. But we need to move ahead with the best information that we have.
Today, we have asked our witnesses to share their analyses of the effects of a cap-and-trade program on the economy. And we have also asked for their thoughts on the best way to design the system to provide certainty, where we can. We need certainty in terms of establishing and containing costs. And we need certainty in terms of meeting our greenhouse gas reduction goals.
We will ask: How can we reduce the effect of potentially increased energy costs on our economy?
How can we reduce the effect on energy consumers?
How should an auction be structured?
How should allowances be allocated? Should they be auctioned, given away for free, or some combination of the two? What is the proper balance between free allowances and auction revenues?
Are free allowances an effective tool to assist industries facing particularly high costs? Are they effective to assist industries who are trade sensitive?
If we provide free allowances, who should receive them? Based on what criteria?
These are all questions that I hope our witnesses can help us to answer.
And so, while people argued, nature acted. Now, Congress can act in response. Let us find out what we can, so that we may act wisely.
Benen: NATIONAL DAY OF PRAYER....
As "holidays" go, the official National Day of Prayer is difficult to understand. For the faithful, every day is a day of prayer. For a secular government that separates church from state, the idea of a state-sanctioned day in which the public is encouraged to pray is rather odd.In the early 1950s, when lawmakers were adding "under God" to the Pledge and changing all American money to include the phrase "In God We Trust," Congress created an official annual Prayer Day for the nation. Congress, under pressure from the religious right, changed the law in 1988 to set the National Day of Prayer as the first Thursday in May, which brings us to today.
The good news is, President Obama is choosing to honor the official National Day of Prayer in a very different way than his predecessor.
The National Day of Prayer White House event is history -- for now.
The White House has announced that President Obama will sign a proclamation on the National Day of Prayer, to be held on Thursday, but will not hold any sort of event. This marks a return to the practice of presidents before George W. Bush, who hosted religious leaders for a ceremony in honor of the day.
Conservative Christian leaders who popularized the event are regarding it at a snub, calling it a "boycott." ... During the Bush administration, the first Thursday in May -- the National Day of Prayer, as mandated by Congress -- included a ceremony in the White House East Room with prominent evangelicals. It was headed by Shirley Dobson, wife of Focus on the Family founder James Dobson.
There's no White House ceremony this year.
Good. If Americans want to pray today, they will. If not, that's fine, too. There's no need for the White House to host a special event, organized by evangelical activists, promoting an exclusive and unnecessary "holiday" encouraging worship.
My friends at Americans United for Separation of Church and State noted that Obama is doing the right thing. The Rev. Barry W. Lynn said, "I am pleased that President Obama has made this decision. The president is required by federal law to declare a National Day of Prayer, but there is no requirement that a special event be held at the White House in observance of this event. During the Bush years, the Dobsons and other Religious Right leaders were given special access to the White House. That seems to have come to an end, and I'm glad."
So am I.
Post Script: One prominent religious right activist, Concerned Women for America's Wendy Wright, said, "President Obama may have problems believing in the Christian faith, he should at least honor the traditions and foundation of our country."
First, the president doesn't have a problem "believing in the Christian faith," and these ridiculous attacks only make the religious right appear more sleazy. Second, if we're going to honor "the traditions and foundation of our country," I'd remind the religious right that Thomas Jefferson and James Madison specifically opposed government-endorsed prayer days.
hilzoy does good. Dueling Videos
The Senate Republicans have put up an unusually boneheaded video about the idea of holding Guantanamo detainees in the US:
Something about 9/11 seems to have produced a kind of amnesia among some people on the right. It's as though they think that we have never before had to figure out such questions as: how can we hold dangerous people in detention safely? When someone has served his time and we think he might go on to do something bad, how might we monitor him to ensure that he doesn't? Suppose we have captured someone who might be guilty of a violent crime, but we do not have enough evidence to charge him: what should we do?
These are not problems that we confronted for the first time after 9/11. They have been with us from the founding of our country. We somehow managed to face down the world's most powerful empire, survive a brutal civil war, defeat Hitler, and live for about forty years with an immense arsenal of thermonuclear weapons pointed at our cities, and do all that without giving up on the rule of law. But let nineteen guys with boxcutters fly planes into our buildings and, apparently, we face a Brand New Existential Threat that causes our entire legal history to fly out of our collective heads.
To explain this point, and to prove that I too can make a movie with Carl Orff's 'O Fortuna' as the soundtrack, I present my own YouTube. (It's the first time I've ever made a movie. Be gentle.)
If we can't have dangerous people living among us, then we are going to have a whole lot of extra prisons sitting around empty.
Just saying.
- sgwhiteinfla adds:
Here is the deal, Congressional Democrats have an opportunity here and they are squandering it. What they need to do is stand up and say that they would welcome the opportunity to house some of the detainees in their state. Not only should they project an aura of confidence that American jails can hold foreign terrorists, but also that the move could help create more jobs in their state. They should also point out that those who wouldn’t be similarly enthusiastic about helping to maintain our national security are COWARDS. This NIMBY bullshit that the Republicans are embracing is exactly the chance Dems have been waiting for for years to be able to wrest the mantle of “tough on crime” and “strong on national security” from the GOP. I can’t for the life of me understand why they are scared to take Republican on with this issue. The detainees will be in supermax prisons. They don’t have any frikkin superpowers to be able to break out. And by not confronting the GOP on this and in some cases actually agreeing with them that it would be dangerous to house detainees on US soild they are not only legitimizing what is at its core a nonsensical viewpoint, they are also opening themselves up to charges of being weak on defense of the homeland.
Fuck it, if the Republicans are going to use the issue anyway its time to make them pay for being the bed wetting pussies that they really are. I keep waiting to hear “Send them to us, we know just how to handle them” from ANYBODY in the Democratic caucus but it seems like they are just going to allow Republicans to frame this issue and then turn around and use it as a platform to run against them next year. I can’t tell you how stupid that is and how much it frustrates the hell out of me. We have the WTC bombers in jail in Colorado for pete’s sake along with the Oklahoma City bombers. We have a long and storied history of locking up the most dangerous people in our society and in fact the world in our prisons here. Why in the fuck should Democrats now show so little faith in their consituents that they run away from an issue that they could clearly win on? Somebody needs to step up to the plate and in a frikkin hurry.
Colbert has a modest suggestion."It violates everything we believe in as a country," Land said, reflecting on the words in the Declaration of Independence: that "all men are created equal" and that "they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights."
"There are some things you should never do to another human being, no matter how horrific the things they have done. If you do so, you demean yourself to their level," he said. "Civilized countries should err on the side of caution. It does cost us something to play by different rules than our enemies, but it would cost us far more if we played by their rules," Land concluded.
He was also clear that waterboarding is categorically torture. So the core religious body of the Christianist right has now taken a stand. Against. And torture is a war crime. And war crimes must be prosecuted.
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A.L. The OPR Report
Just to add to Hilzoy's typically insightful post on the forthcoming OPR report, I want to make two points.
First, people seem to be focusing too heavily on the report's (apparent) refusal to recommend criminal prosecution of the OLC lawyers who drafted the torture memos. But the real news here is that the report apparently recommends that at least a few of the lawyers be referred to state disciplinary authorities for reprimand or disbarment. That's a really big deal. Disbarment is major punishment for a lawyer. Not only does it constitute a major public shaming, but it also represents a loss of livelihood. As I've written here before, I take a very consequentialist outlook on this whole affair. The most important question in my mind is not what kind of punishment the various bad actors deserve, but what steps can be taken to minimize the chances of this ever happening again.
The OLC lawyers played an indispensable role in allowing these illegal torture and surveillance programs to be implemented. The White House and CIA would not have pressed forward with these initiatives (at least for a sustained period of time) without the blessing of the OLC. So the key to preventing this kind of illegality in the future is to up the stakes for future OLC attorneys, to make them understand that there are potentially significant consequences to intentionally distorting the law. Disbarment would serve that purpose fairly well. If future OLC lawyers know that they might be disgraced and lose their livelihood if they distort the law, they'll be far less likely to do so. And that's the key. As much as I think that some of these attorneys deserve to be prosecuted criminally, there's very little precedent for that kind of prosecution and such cases would be very, very hard to prove. Disbarment, however, is a realistically attainment penalty, and one that would serve as a significant deterrent to future illegality.
The second point I want to make is this: though I haven't seen the OPR report, I suspect it focuses on more than just the torture memos. As bad as those memos were, some of the OLC opinions on other issues, particularly warrantless surveillance and the applicability of FISA, were likely much worse. Based on the reports I've read, the arguments the OLC was relying on in those memos were just laughably bad; they completely disregarded well established case law and principles of constitutional and statutory construction. Of late, the debate over the culpability of OLC lawyers like Bybee and Yoo has focused almost exclusively on their roles in approving torture. But their enabling of other Bush administration programs may have been even more egregious.
C&L, Susie Madrak: Fed Says High-Risk Equity Firms Can't Take Over Banks
Oh, boo hoo! How dare the Fed stop him from having his way? More to the point, how dare they say "no" to a Wall St. player? (Which begs the rhetorical question: Don't these people ever learn?)
CAINSVILLE, Mo. — No one seems to want to own a business in this dusty, windswept corner of rural America, population 370, with its crumbling sidewalks and boarded-up storefronts.
Except, that is, for J. Christopher Flowers, a media-shy New York billionaire who last year bought the First National Bank of Cainesville, one of the United States’ smallest national banks.
Mr. Flowers, a private equity manager, has no particular love for rural Missouri; in fact, he has never set foot in Cainsville. Rather, he wants to use the national bank charter he picked up in this farm town to go on a nationwide buying spree.
With that charter in hand, Mr. Flowers plans to take over a handful of large struggling banks, casualties of the economic crisis. In some cases, he hopes, the federal government will help.
But Mr. Flowers, whose investments in banks overseas have made him one of the richest men in America, has run into a major obstacle in the United States: the Federal Reserve, and its very notion of what a bank should be.
The Fed does not mind if private equity firms have a minority interest in banks — the Obama administration even wants them to invest. But the Fed will not let them take control, a stance the firms are lobbying regulators mightily to change, especially given that stress test results to be released Thursday are expected to show a glaring need for capital in the banking system.
It’s not personal, Fed officials say. It’s just that as the nation recovers from one of the worst banking crises in history, the Federal Reserve wants to make sure that it does not set the stage for the next financial implosion by turning banks over to private equity firms, some of the riskiest players in the business world.
So while Mr. Flowers was able to buy the bank here with his own money, he cannot tap into the billions his firm, J. C. Flowers & Company, has raised.
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