QOTD2,Paul Krugman:
Whatever the specifics, however, falling wages are a symptom of a sick economy. And they’re a symptom that can make the economy even sicker.
First things first: anecdotes about falling wages are proliferating, but how broad is the phenomenon? The answer is, very.
Bob Minzesheimer, USA TODAY. Pete Seeger's 90th birthday will be a selfless celebration
NEW YORK — Three months after Bruce Springsteen persuaded Pete Seeger to sing This Land Is Your Land with him at President Obama's inaugural concert, they'll be back together on stage Sunday — on Seeger's 90th birthday.A sold-out benefit concert at Madison Square Garden will celebrate Seeger, the folk singer/songwriter who was banished from commercial TV for 17 years.
Seeger says a party for 15,000 isn't his idea of a birthday celebration, even with more than 40 musicians, including Dave Matthews, Eddie Vedder and Arlo Guthrie, whose dad, Woody, taught Seeger how to jump freight trains 60 years ago.
But he agreed to it because it will benefit his Hudson River environmental group. Or, as Seeger puts it, "wooden boats don't last forever."
The boat is a 106-foot sloop, the Clearwater, a floating symbol for the group of the same name that Seeger started in 1966 when the Hudson was an open sewer.
It's healthier now, repopulated by eagles, shad and osprey. But, Seeger says, "a lot remains to be done," including "thousands of dollars of repairs to the boat."
Seeger, who says "small is beautiful," plans to remind the crowd: "It's not always the big things that make a difference, but all the small things done by people who don't get attention."
As the subject of three new books and an updated biography, Seeger says, "I've had too much publicity," even as he talks by phone to a reporter.
He says he's encouraged by Obama's willingness to experiment and "to remind us he can't do it all. We have to help."
He recalls how another president, Herbert Hoover, told Rudy Vallee: "If you can sing a song that makes people forget the Depression, I'll give you a medal."
Says Seeger: "Too many singers have been trying to get that medal."
He's the only star in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to discuss past membership in the Communist Party. His 1955 conviction was overturned on appeal in 1961, but Seeger's blacklisting lasted from 1950 to 1967. Even then, CBS censored his anti-Vietnam War allegory, Waist Deep in the Big Muddy.
The man who wrote If I Had a Hammer and Turn, Turn, Turn and helped popularize We Shall Overcome plans to sing one solo Sunday — he won't say which one — and join some choruses.
Asked about being called "a saint" by Bob Dylan, he laughs. "What a terrible thing to call someone. I've made a lot of foolish mistakes over the years."
Joe Sudbay: Now that the 100 day obsession is past, one theme for the pundits this week is that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are getting along and she's doing a very good job as Secretary of State. Apparently, that's just something they can't wrap their heads around. It wasn't supposed to be that way, they though. But, it is. Brilliant choice. Most excellent Secretary of State. (Actually, the only surprise is that Bill Clinton has been virtually invisible.)
ROGER COHEN The Mellow Doctrine
Did the White House threaten Chrysler creditors?WASHINGTON — Amazing what happens when you cast aside the testosterone.
I know bristling Dick Cheney believes America’s enemies now perceive “a weak president,” as do sundry Republican senators, but the truth is that foes of the United States have been disarmed by Barack Obama’s no-drama diplomacy.
Call it the mellow doctrine. Neither idealistic nor classic realpolitik, it involves finding strength through unconventional means: acknowledgment of the limits of American power; frankness about U.S. failings; careful listening; fear reduction; adroit deployment of the wide appeal of brand Barack Hussein Obama; and jujitsu engagement.
Already the mellow doctrine has brought some remarkable shifts, even if more time is needed to see its results.
The Castro brothers in Cuba are squabbling over the meaning of Obama’s overtures. Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez has gone gooey-eyed over the Yanqui president. Turkey relented on a major NATO dispute, persuaded of the importance of Obama’s conciliatory message to Muslims.
From Damascus to Tehran, new debate rages over possible rapprochement with Washington. In Israel, I understand Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is about to drag his Likud party kicking and screaming to acceptance of the idea of a two-state solution because he knows the cost of an early confrontation with Obama.
Not bad for 105 days.
The fact is the United States spent most of the eight years before last January making things easy for its enemies. It was in the ammunition-supply business.
Nothing comforted U.S. foes as much as Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, axis-of-evil moral certitude and the schoolyard politics of punishment.
All you had to do, from Moscow to Caracas, was point a finger toward the White House and domestic woes paled. All you had to do, in the recruitment schools of Waziristan and Ramadi, was show video footage of Americans humiliating Muslims. Even among allies, nobody much wanted to help the former administration.
I like this definition from Obama of the impact of the mellow doctrine on countries with divergent interests from the United States:
“What it does mean, though, is, at the margins, they are more likely to want to cooperate than not cooperate. It means that where there is resistance to a particular set of policies that we’re pursuing, that resistance may turn out just to be based on old preconceptions or ideological dogmas that, when they’re cleared away, it turns out that we can actually solve a problem.”
I met last month with Abdullah Gul, the Turkish president, after he’d seen Obama in Strasbourg. When I asked him if the perception under former President Bush had been that the United States was at war with Islam, Gul said: “Unfortunately, yes, that was the perception.”
By contrast, Gul told me, with Obama, “His views and ours seem almost the same: We have to value dialogue and follow engagement.”
When Gul and Obama confronted each other at the NATO summit over the nomination of Denmark’s Anders Rasmussen as the alliance’s secretary general, the odds of an accord seemed remote given Turkey’s objections to Rasmussen’s free-speech defense of the Mohammed cartoons. Arab states had called on Ankara to resist.
But agreement was reached after Obama guaranteed Gul that Rasmussen, a former Danish prime minister, would “act very carefully and have an intense dialogue with the Islamic world.” Gul smiled: “We wanted Obama to be successful on his first trip to Europe. Failure would have overshadowed things.”
There you have it: cooperation at the margins.
Deprived of an easy enemy, several countries are trying to calibrate how to become America’s friend, or at least normalize relations. They are uneasy about being left in the cold.
On a recent visit to Damascus, Martin Indyk, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, was intrigued to find Walid Muallem, the Syrian foreign minister, asking him with concern whether there was “some sort of understanding” between the United States and Iran.
There isn’t yet, but Syria, like many Arab states, is already worried about losing out to any American-Iranian détente.
Conversely, Iran worries that it might lose its Syrian ally (and conduit to Hezbollah and Hamas) as a result of Obama’s Middle East peace effort. The fact is Syria’s interests in Iraq after a U.S. withdrawal will diverge from Iran’s: Syria’s priority is an Iraq in the Arab sphere.
Such strategic concerns, along with economic difficulties, explain the intense Iranian debate about the United States, and how to respond to Obama’s overtures, in the run-up to June presidential election.
In Cuba, meanwhile, Fidel Castro is talking about “definite failure” for Obama and lambasting him for preserving a “blockade” (it’s in fact an outmoded partial trade embargo), while his brother Raúl says Cuba’s ready and eager to discuss everything.
A Kansan-Kenyan cat is loose among the waddling Cuban pigeons.
The likes of aging Fidel will try to resist the mellow doctrine. But it will succeed if America’s foes understand that normal relations with Washington do not imply the loss of distinctive cultures and politics or the imposition of U.S. values, but rather the “mutual respect” which Obama has promised Iran.
Is there a reason why anyone should even care if they did? If anything, assuming the White House did it shows that Obama does know how to play hardball. Somehow it's difficult to see Americans being upset with the White House taking a hard line against the big money folks during a serious discussion that could greatly impact the rest of the country. It's long been a concern that Obama is too nice so I only hope that this hard approach continues as the former Wall Street giants come begging for more cash. DealBook in the NY Times:digby: Socialist RepublicanRecent comments by a lawyer representing Chrysler’s dissident debtholders alleging that Steven Rattner, the White House’s auto task force chief, “directly threatened” to wreck the reputation of the investment firm Perella Weinberg Partners if it continued to oppose the Obama administration’s reorganization plan have been picking up steam in the blogosphere.
After President Obama announced Thursday that Chrysler would file for bankruptcy, Perella Weinberg said it would support the government’s settlement with the carmaker’s secured lenders.
Robert Gates said this to Fareed Zakaria today:Christy Hardin Smith. SCOTUS: Practically SpeakingPeople must see government delivering services.Shocking, I know.
Of course, he was talking about Afghanistan, but I can't see any reason why that wouldn't be true of any country, do you?
Linda Greenhouse, former NYTimes legal correspondent now teaching at Yale Law, talked SCOTUS the other day. This rings a number of bells for me:Benen: 'CODE' AND THE COURT....I foresee a bit of a struggle inside the Democratic coalition as to how persuasive a liberal a recommendation they want. Many think, “We need our Scalia” — which is to say a staunch ideological justice, but for the progressive side — but others think that’s not necessarily the only or most effective way to broker discussion on a conservative Supreme Court. Instead you need someone who will work towards the middle.
It's a mistake to go for ideology only. Because while Scalia has been a staunch and mouthy conservative on the bench, he is far from persuasive with the other justices.
Before Clarence Thomas joined the Court, Scalia was often a lone dissenter. Since the Federalist Society project to cram the courts full of conservative soldiers, Scalia's had more support. But not due so much to his bench skills as much as an ideological brotherhood.
The real persuasive force these days on SCOTUS is Chief Justice Roberts, whose ideology is firm, but whose social skills are persuasive enough for the real prize. What prize, you ask?
Justice Anthony Kennedy, the swing vote.
What Obama needs is to find a sharp legal mind, an incisive analyst and logician. But also with some practical experience to bring to an academia and federal judiciary-laden table.
Someone who is a persuasive writer who can not only detail the law but also grab the imagination as to why that view is correct. Plus, in the current political and media frenzy climate, he must find a decent, unblemished perfect person.
But President Obama also needs to find someone whose personality will instantly click with Justice Kennedy's need for ego-boo in order to make a real impact.
Someone young enough to stay on the Court for a long time to come. Someone wily enough to see the chinks in the armor of the ideologically driven arguments on the other side -- and call them out, subtly, in memo exchanges (which, after initial arguments luncheons, is the real way that work is done at the Court) based on the law and the facts. And a justice who is skilled at selecting clerks who can be equally persuasive among her/his peers, but do so in a way that is subtle and not ham-handed.
They aren't just justices, they are human.
To be effective, a new justice must comprehend the full range of the human dynamic from the outset. Because they'll be working in it for a lifetime appointment. Interpersonal alienation is not an option for success.
Someone who can thread the needle between the GOP's tactical maneuvering in the Senate, the weakness of Democratic leadership in thwarting filibusters, the our-biblical-interpretation-or-hell-driven absolutism of the religious right, and the anger of the Federalist Society in not getting one more justice before the end of the Bush years.
In short, we need a miracle. Any takers?
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) appeared on ABC News' "This Week" yesterday to discuss the looming Supreme Court vacancy. George Stephanopoulos showed a video of President Obama describing his ideal justice as a person of intelligence, excellence, integrity, and empathy. "I will seek someone who understands that justice isn't about some abstract legal theory or a footnote in a casebook," the president said. "It is also about how our laws affect the daily realities of people's lives."atrios: Still Might Not Happen,But...Stephanopoulos asked Hatch what he thought of Obama's comments. The Utah Republican wasn't happy.
"Well, it's a matter of great concern. If he's saying that he wants to pick people who will take sides -- he's also said that a judge has to be a person of empathy. What does that mean? Usually that's a code word for an activist judge.
"But he also said that he's going to select judges on the basis of their personal politics, their personal feelings, their personal preferences. Now, you know, those are all code words for an activist judge, who is going to, you know, be partisan on the bench."
There are a few key angles to this. First, Hatch is already laying the groundwork for Republican obstructionism, suggesting the president's own search criteria for a justice will necessarily make the nominee some kind of "activist."
Second, if we really want to talk about "activist" judges, Hatch may want to take a closer look at the current Roberts court.
And third, Obama hasn't used "code" in describing the qualities he's looking for in a justice. This is using code.
At a press conference two days after his re-election, President Bush was asked about what sort of Supreme Court justice he might nominate if and when the ailing Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist retires. Mr. Bush repeated the pledge he made in the presidential debates: "I would pick people who would be strict constructionists."
Nevertheless, Hatch is supposed to be one of the more amenable and cooperative Republicans left on the Senate Judiciary Committee. His comments yesterday were hardly reassuring.
More to the point, Steve, the phrase "activist judge" is itself code. Hatch has got his head pretty far up his ass if he doesn't understand the irony of what he said. (Of course, he may understand perfectly well the game he's playing.)
Posted by: Tom on May 4, 2009 at 8:15 AMI have despised Orrin Hatch since his Judiciary Committee refused even to hold hearings for 43 Clinton nominees. Hatch and the Republicans are going to oppose, and probably filibuster, any nominee who is not a member of the Federalist Society,
I hope someone in the DNC or the DSCC is pulling together video clips of Republicans bleating, "Up or down! Up or down!" and of them saying how "unconstitutional" a filibuster of a judicial nominee is.
And I hope that as soon as the opposition begins, the Obama surrogates will be given talking points so that they challenge the members of the corporate-controlled media, asking them why they don't ask Republicans why it's okay to filibuster nominees from a Democratic president but it's a Constitutional crisis to challenge the nominees of a Republican president.
Posted by: SteveT on May 4, 2009 at 8:31 AM
The New York Times Co. said last night that it is notifying federal authorities of its plans to shut down the Boston Globe, raising the possibility that New England's most storied newspaper could cease to exist within weeks.
After down-to-the-wire negotiations did not produce millions of dollars in union concessions, the Times Co. said that it will file today a required 60-day notice of the planned shutdown under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification law.
Sully: Why To Pass Cap And Trade During A Heat Wave
Brad Plumer reads through a new study showing that views on climate change correlate with local weather. The study finds that:
"For each three degrees that local temperature rises above normal, Americans become one percentage point more likely to agree that there is 'solid evidence' that the earth is getting warmer."Plumer speculates:
Maybe this explains why national surveys that ask people whether they believe in global warming tend to fluctuate fairly significantly, even over a few short months' time.
Bonus finding: This local-weather effect is strongest on people who aren't particularly partisan, and it's pretty much non-existent for people who identify strongly with one party or the other. Committed Republicans tuning into Rush aren't likely to believe in man-made climate change no matter how sweaty it gets, while ardent Democrats won't stop listening to Al Gore just because there's a cold snap the day he's testifying before Congress. But for many people, however irrational, this stuff appears to have a fair-sized impact.
Sully: Taming The Prince, Ctd.
A reader writes:
One small point that I think is worth noting, and that I think can be used against some of the conservative defenders of both unlimited executive power and torture, is the following. Isn't it the case that, say, Locke's understanding of prerogative is such that by definition we cannot restrict its use ahead of time, but that after the fact there will be a judgment of sorts, a post-hoc reckoning with what happened?
I fully admit that in Locke -- and, I would argue, The Federalist and Lincoln -- there's a fairly robust notion that action sometimes will need to be taken with great dispatch, or where the law is silent, or even, at times, against the law. Because such situations will not be regular or normal, they necessarily fall within the realm of prudence and prerogative. They are exceptions to the rule and thus, in a way, extra-legal. Locke writes that such actions can be undertaken for "the common good;" Lincoln believes they can be undertaken to defend the Constitution itself (violating some facet of the Constitution to preserve the continued use of the document itself).
But all these theories include the idea that because such actions cannot really be limited beforehand, they can be judged, and punished, afterwards (thus Locke's famous "appeal to the heavens"). And isn't that what we are doing now?
Philip Gourevitch (New Yorker): Interrogating Torture
On November 14, 2003, at Abu Ghraib prison, on the outskirts of Baghdad, six hooded Iraqi prisoners accused by their American jailers of trying to start a riot were brought to the Military Intelligence cellblock and handed over to Corporal Charles A. Graner, Jr., the military-police officer in charge of the night shift. Graner noted in the M.P. logbook that he had instructions from a lieutenant colonel to strip the newcomers, and to subject them to a routine of rough calisthenics designed to disorient, exhaust, terrify, and humiliate them, and to cause them pain. This was standard practice on the M.I. block, and Graner set to work. When one of the prisoners resisted, Graner later told Army investigators, “I bashed him against the wall.” Running hooded prisoners into walls was also standard practice at Abu Ghraib, but this prisoner fell to the floor, and blood ran out from under his hood, and a medic was summoned. In the logbook, Graner wrote that the prisoner required eight stitches on his chin. He helped sew the stitches himself, and he had one of his soldiers photograph the bloodstained scene.
Graner clearly felt that he had nothing to hide. When his company commander, Captain Christopher Brinson, and one of Brinson’s deputies, Master Sergeant Brian Lipinski, stopped by, Graner said, he made the other prisoners crawl to their cells while Brinson and Lipinski watched. Graner also said that, in addition to medics and his superior officers, lawyers from the Judge Advocate General’s Corps frequently visited the cellblock and saw the abuse that went on there. Graner interpreted their presence to be “implied consent that this was all O.K.,” he said. In fact, two days later, Brinson, who in civilian life is a top aide to Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Alabama, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, issued a Developmental Counselling Form to Graner. Such a form is normally used for reprimands, but what Brinson wrote sounded more like a commendation: “CPL Graner, you are doing a fine job. . . . You have received many accolades. . . . Continue to perform at this level and it will help us succeed at our overall mission.”
That story comes to mind as Americans are seized by belated outrage over the Bush Administration’s policy of practicing torture against prisoners in the war on terror. It was exactly five years ago that some of the photographs that Charles Graner and his comrades took at Abu Ghraib were aired on CBS’s “Sixty Minutes” and published in this magazine. At that time, the Administration claimed that Graner was the mastermind of the abuse represented in the photographs, and that they showed nothing more than the depravity of a group of rogue soldiers who had fallen under his sway. Yet it became almost immediately apparent—and has been confirmed repeatedly in the years since, most recently with President Obama’s decision to release four Bush Administration memorandums seeking to establish a legal justification for the use of torture—that the Abu Ghraib photographs showed not individuals run amok but American policy in action. (From those memos, we now know that Bush Administration lawyers had a technical term for what Charles Graner called bashing a man against a wall. The term is “walling.”)
The natural first reaction on seeing the photographs of American soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners in Saddam Hussein’s old dungeons was to ask: Why are we doing such things to them? With time, however, Americans have come increasingly to understand that it is equally appropriate to ask: Why are we doing such things to ourselves? Why dismantle the laws that have made our country worth fighting and dying for against states that torture? Former Vice-President Dick Cheney has said that we must torture because it is effective. That is, at best, a false argument: a crime is not absolved just because it works. (After all, terrorism can be effective.) President Obama, in his press conference last week, cut through the noise to the essence of the issue. Torture, he said, “corrodes the character of a country.”
America is now embroiled in a debate about how, or whether, to hold the true masterminds—the former President, the former Vice-President, the former Defense Secretary, and their top lawyers—to account for their criminal policies. Here, we are on uncharted ground. As a rule, the war-crimes prosecutions of the past century were conducted by a group of states, acting collectively, against the (usually defeated) leaders of another state. When states hold their own leaders to account, it tends to happen not after an election but after a revolution, when the very premise of the ancien régime is treated as criminal. Furthermore, prosecution and punishment are not necessarily the best means to eradicate the rot from a political system, because in adjudicating systemic crimes political compromise is inevitable. It is practically impossible, and politically intolerable, to contemplate holding to account every corrupted officer in the chains of command that ran between the White House and the guardhouse at Abu Ghraib or at Bagram Airbase. A full and public reckoning of the historical record might be less cathartic but would ultimately be more valuable than a few sensational trials.
In any event, President Obama, who has taken a courageous lead in bringing the issue of torture to light, and in insisting on recriminalizing it, appears to have no interest in taking any of the policymakers to court—though he has not precluded doing so. Still, to date the only Americans who have been prosecuted and sentenced to imprisonment for the criminal policies that emanated from the highest levels are ten low-ranking servicemen and women—those who took and appeared in the Abu Ghraib photographs, and embarrassed the nation by showing us what we were doing there. Charles Graner is the only one remaining in prison, serving ten years. His superior officers enjoy their freedom, and C.I.A. interrogators, who spent years committing far worse acts against prisoners than Graner did even in the darkest days at Abu Ghraib, have been assured immunity.
But, if full justice remains impossible, surely some injustices can be corrected. Whenever crimes of state are adjudicated—at Nuremberg or The Hague, Phnom Penh or Kigali—the principle of command responsibility, whereby the leaders who give the orders are held to a higher standard of accountability than the foot soldiers who follow, pertains. There can be no restoration of the national honor if we continue to scapegoat those who took the fall for an Administration—and for us all. ♦
Benen: IS RICE SMARTER THAN A 4TH GRADER?....
Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice ran into a little trouble in April during a discussion with students at Stanford University, during which she denied waterboarding is torture and were necessarily legal because the president authorized the abusive techniques.
Yesterday, Rice was pressed on the same issue by another student, though this one was quite a bit younger.
...Misha Lerner, a student from Bethesda, asked: What did Rice think about the things President Obama's administration was saying about the methods the Bush administration had used to get information from detainees? [...]
"Let me just say that President Bush was very clear that he wanted to do everything he could to protect the country. After September 11, we wanted to protect the country," she said. "But he was also very clear that we would do nothing, nothing, that was against the law or against our obligations internationally. So the president was only willing to authorize policies that were legal in order to protect the country."
She added: "I hope you understand that it was a very difficult time. We were all so terrified of another attack on the country. September 11 was the worst day of my life in government, watching 3,000 Americans die.... Even under those most difficult circumstances, the president was not prepared to do something illegal, and I hope people understand that we were trying to protect the country."
Misha Lerner, a Washington-area fourth-grader, apparently intended to ask a more pointed question about torture, but his mother said "they" asked the student to "soften" his question.
As for the substance of Rice's remarks, they're obviously pretty unpersuasive. It's basically a two-pronged argument: 1) we were all scared out of our minds at the time, so we took extraordinary measures; and 2) the extraordinary measures were all legal, so don't worry about it.
The first -- let's call it the "temporary insanity" defense -- might be more compelling were it not for the second. In fact, I'd actually like to hear more Bush administration officials make this argument explicitly, telling the country, "Look, there was a panic and we crossed lines we shouldn't have. Cooler heads should have prevailed, but didn't. For a short while, we lost our heads, but we eventually got back on track. It was a regrettable lapse of judgment that won't happen again."
That may or may not be persuasive, it may or may not free Bush administration of legal responsibility for wrongdoing. But it's a hell of a lot better than, "Torture wasn't torture, and crimes weren't illegal." Even a fourth-grader can see through that nonsense.
hilzoy: Motiveless Malignancy
The NYT has an interesting story on Bush administration fights over torture policy. (Though, as emptywheel says, it "seems to be at least partly the product of two entities--the Bellinger/Condi- and the Goss-reputation protection entities--that have been working overtime lately.") It claims that the CIA had stopped using the "enhanced interrogation techniques" by 2005:
"Still, Mr. Cheney and top C.I.A. officials fought to revive the program. Steven G. Bradbury, the head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel and author of the recently declassified 2005 memorandums authorizing harsh C.I.A interrogations, began drafting another memorandum in late 2006 to restore legal approval for harsh interrogation. Mr. Bradbury noted that Congress, despite the public controversy, had left it to the White House to set the limits.
Early drafts of the memorandum, circulated through the White House, the C.I.A. and the State Department, shocked some officials. Just months after the Supreme Court had declared that the Geneva Convention applied to Al Qaeda, the new Bradbury memorandum gave its blessing to almost every technique, except waterboarding, that the C.I.A. had used since 2002.
Forced as secretary of state to defend the C.I.A. program before angry European allies, Ms. Rice and her aides argued that it had outlived its usefulness.
In February 2007, Mr. Bellinger wrote to the Justice Department challenging Mr. Bradbury's position. He called Mr. Bradbury's memorandum a "work of advocacy" that gave a twisted interpretation of the Geneva Conventions and told colleagues he might resign."
This is one of the things I will never understand about Dick Cheney. It's wrong, but still in some way comprehensible, to use torture when you think you have some truly compelling reason to do so. And it's wrong, but comprehensible, for people in the administration to think that we had such a reason right after 9/11. But what kind of person would fight for the right to use these methods of torture after we had stopped using them?
Was there some burning need to have them available in theory, a need that warranted recommitting ourselves as a nation to the idea that they were lawful? Or was he just so committed to them that he felt that he could not back down, even in principle?
Coleridge once described Iago as "motiveless Malignancy". That is how I always think of Cheney. I think I have some sense of what moved Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, et al. With Cheney, all I ever see is darkness, combativeness for its own sake, obsessive secrecy, a cramped and constricted heart, and a tiny shriveled thing that must once have been a soul. It never adds up to a human being.
Thank God he's gone:
"When Mr. Obama was sworn in on Jan. 20, the C.I.A. still maintained a network of empty jails overseas, where interrogators were still authorized to use physical pressure. Within 48 hours, he banned the methods.
Finally, last month, the program that had been the source of so many vigorous fights in Washington's power corridors met a prosaic end.
Leon E. Panetta, the new C.I.A. chief, terminated the agency's contracts providing the security and maintenance for the prisons, emphasizing the economic benefits. Closing the C.I.A. prisons, Mr. Panetta said, would save taxpayers $4 million."
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