Liberal Media Elite

It’s such a relief to see the serious discussion about what Bush, Cheney et al. have done to the soul of this country by authorizing torture. The discussion is painful, it is necessary, and having the strength to engage in it is something America can be truly proud of.

As a coda on a discussion at the bar last night, the accomplishments, to date, of our 44th President:

Signed into law:

Lilly Ledbetter Equal Pay Act.

SCHIP

An 800bn Stimulus Bill

The FY 2009 Budget

Omnibus Public Lands Act (I’m a big fan of this one, protecting over 2 million acres of public land, and over 1,000 miles of rivers, and other waterways. Awesome!)

Executive Orders:

Opening Presidential Records.

Banning Torture

Closing Gitmo

Lifting the ban on stem cell research.

Presidential Memoranda, other actions.

Overturning the Mexico City Policy.

Fast-tracking fuel-economy standards to the 2011 model year.

I could go on. The complete list is found at Whitehouse.gov.

More progressive goodness has come from this man’s first 72 days in office than the previous 8 years. And he hasn’t been in the job for a full 3 months. I think all the hand wringing, consternation, doubt and concern are, at this point a little premature.

Let me be clear, I do have concerns. The Geithner-Summers duo have me concerned. They seem to be of the mindset that dragged our economy into this mess, and don’t quite appear to have any good ideas to get us out. Granted, the mess is so completely intractable, I don’t think anyone has all of the answers, but I’d at least like to see a Krugman or a Stiglitz at the table on this one.

I also fail to see how contracts with AIG are somehow infallible, yet contracts with UAW and other unions need to be revisited, revised, and reduced every time corporate America feels their profits being pinched. That seems to be a double-standard the Administration has embraced.

So far he’s accomplished a lot. The big fights are yet to come, and they will certainly take all of us keeping on him and Congress to get the job done right.

“I, unfortunately, have been to too many disasters as president.”

–George Bush, June 17th, 2008. Referring to the levee break in Gulfport, IL.

Yes, Mr. Prezzz has been to too many disasters. Pity he hasn’t done anything to diminish the impact of them. Having learned nothing, apparently, from Katrina…having opted to defer doing anything whatsoever about our crumbling infrastructure…the Prezzz has, in the time since Katrina not yet proposed a single increase in funding for levee improvements.  Of course, he couldn’t do a thing about the rains that have led to the flooding throughout the Midwest. He could and should have done something about improving the infrastructure in place to mitigate the damage and even diminish the likelihood of these floods. The levees in Gulport, one of the 37 levee sites in the US considered at risk, broke today flooding millions of acres of cropland, destroying businesses, and ruining homes. In each of his previous budgets, the Prezzz has refused to allocate additional funds for critically needed improvements. Why? ‘Cause he can’t do that and continue his ridiculous tax cuts and corporate subsidies without blowing up his budget even further. Infrastructure ages and it takes more than maintenance money to fix it. If the next President chooses to address this issue (or the Dems in Congress…who I have little to no faith in given their track record of the last two years) he will have to raise revenue or hack the life out of spending elsewhere. And the Republicans will scream “tax and spend, tax and spend” like Rainman screaming about burning the baby.

I’ll take tax and spend any day over slash and spend. I’ll take a higher tax rate any day over more disasters that have more severe consequences than they need to have.

Yeah, Mr. Prezzz. You’ve been to way too many disasters as President. And you’ve done nothing but diminish our ability to address them.

I really hope that this is not the video that they will play in 50 years or so when they talk about the big crash of 2008 in Economics 101:

Bush was joking about “interesting times” in his speech to the Economic Club of New York on March 14, while down the street Bear Stearns was drawing its last breaths, sending out worldwide financial shock waves. Some people were comparing him to Hoover today, who promised that prosperity was around the corner right as things turned pitch black during the Great Depression. But Hoover at least tried to change things for the better after he saw that laissez-faire the Invisible Hand didn’t quite cut it. Too little, too late, I know, but still.

We, however, are dealing with the same president who sat out Katrina, playing the guitar at a fundraiser.

No dam this time.

Wow. That was a boring State of the Union.

The lies aren’t even shocking anymore. The double speak is just trite instead of insulting. The world truly will end with a whimper. I’m just glad I don’t live in Iran. And I thought for a second he was going to declare war on Colombia or something. He shouldn’t just mention countries like that. It scares us all.

At 9:08 on CNN’s live feed on the interwebs. Prez just said, “This is for Michele Bachmann.” And he passed something to some other elected officials to hand back to her. She didn’t get an aisle seat? Oh, sad! And she probably spent all day at Forever 21 and High Tech Nails. Worst. Prom. Ever.

UPDATE: At 9:11, child screams, “Mr. President, you know my sister, Sarah Tucker!” POTUS responds, “Yes I do. How she doin’?” THIS IS FASCINATING.

UPDATE: 9:25: I like this Gov. Sebelius. She’s like Helen Mirren. I would like her to be my mom, except that would mean I’d have to live in Kansas, and, you know, mmmmeh.

Some really bad economic news just came out that has been lost in the Iowa-New Hampshire shuffle. Of course, it makes sense that we invest so damn much power in those two little states when it comes to choosing the next President. Money starts to flow to the winners of those states and away from the losers. Perfectly reasonable, especially when you consider that Iowa and New Hampshire represent less than 1% of the population of the country…but that’s a separate rant so I’ll leave it at that.

The jobless rate went up this year. Both Hourly and Weekly earnings dropped impressively. The latter two in particular are worrisome. Hourly earnings growth dropped from 4.3% last year to 3.7% this year. Weekly earnings growth, which account for hours worked per week and are thus a better indicator of what’s happening to the income streams of the 80% of Americans that are blue collar or non-manager types, dropped from 4.6% to 3.4%. The worrisome part is not that they dropped (well…that’s worrisome but it ain’t the big mcgilla). The worrisome part is that inflation ran at 4%. When nominal inflation runs higher than nominal earnings growth it means that the vast majority of working Americans lost money this year in the form of earnings growth being outpaced by inflation. That is very, very bad economic news. When taken with a credit crunch, a devaluation of the housing stock, and our deplorable negative savings rate, you have the kind of stew that usually signals recession.

Indeed, it’s so bad that the news has even pierced the hermetic seal around the Boy Who Would Be King. The Prezzz is now saying that he’s considering a stimulus package. Which would be good news coming from just about anyone but him. Why? Dig the following from the New York Times…

Mr. Bush has repeatedly said economic fundamentals are strong, a theme he is likely to echo Monday in Chicago when he delivers a speech on the economy. But with polls showing that the economy has eclipsed Iraq as the leading concern among voters, and with Democrats warning of a “Bush recession,” it has become increasingly apparent that inside the White House, there is a growing feeling that he cannot leave the economy to its own devices in his final year as president.

Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One on the way back from Crawford, Tex., on Tuesday, Mr. Bush’s counselor, Ed Gillespie, said one of the president’s top priorities this year would be making his tax cuts permanent.

Yup. The snake oil cure-all of tax cuts has come back from the apparently dead. And those tax cuts will do nothing to alleviate the pressure on the middle and lower class…also known as laborers…also known as the people who are losing out and will be the ones most hammered by the recent economic trends. Those tax cuts are aimed at the wealthy. The wealthy are not income constrained. They haven’t had earning growth trumped by inflation and they have wealth to offset those income losses even if they were to incur them. While tax cuts may be a valid part of an economic stimulus package (but not useful if that’s all there is) they will only have a positive impact if they are aimed at the people who need the relief…the blue-collar working class. The Bush tax cuts being made permanent will offer exactly nothing in the way of such relief.

An economy as big as ours is a wildly complex thing. There are a great many tools that policy makers can deploy to address economic woes. There is not, and never has been, one single thing that addresses all economic problems. There are scenarios in which tax cuts aimed at the wealthy are a viable tool. This is not one of them. None of the various economic problems that have arisen in the Bush era has been solved by his tax cuts (the early Reagan era tax cuts were different…investment, for numerous reasons, was way, way down…tax cuts on the investor class were a reasonable and ultimately effective component of a stimulus package for that set of problems). As always, the Republicans provide the Wrong Damn Answer to a very real economic problem. They can’t help themselves, really. There used to be Republicans who actually understood fiscal policy. Now they are left only with ideologues who, Chicken-Little-like, do nothing but flail about crying “tax cuts for the wealthy, tax cuts for the wealthy”.

Yesterday the EPA ruled that California could not have a waiver that would have allowed the state to significantly cut tailpipe emissions by 2016. After the love-in of the announcement of the new energy bill, which has fairly tame fuel consumption reductions, the administration went back to its old self and turned the effort to cut air pollution into a typical hate fest.

It did this because of lobbying by the automakers, who have tried, unsuccessfully, to have courts overturn the California policy. Stephen L. Johnson, the head of the EPA, made the decision to deny California its waiver despite the assessment of his own staff that:

1.) There was no legal basis for doing so.
2.) That if California is denied the waiver and sues the EPA it will “almost certainly win”.

You best believe that California is gonna sue. The state has long been the nation’s innovator when it comes to air pollution reduction. California, under the Clean Air Act, is allowed to develop more stringent standards than the national standards, so long as it gets a waiver from the EPA. It has never before been denied a waiver. 18 other states, representing 45% of the US auto market, have adopted or pledged to implement the California standard. Safe bet they’ll be joining California in the suit.

So…why? Why would the EPA, specifically why would Bush toady Stephen Johnson, override the recommendations of his staff, of external scientists and legal experts and issue a decision that the EPA will have to reverse?

‘Cause he can, y’all. ‘Cause that overturning will take place on someone else’s watch. ‘Cause Bush and Cheney get to point to yet another victory for business interests. It’ll make ‘em way more valuable on the lecture circuit down the road.

While the news media go batshit crazy over the Mitchell report which says that a bunch of baseball players took steroids (no shit) but identifies particular players as guilty based on media reports that they didn’t corroborate (usually, we call that libel) there’s a nasty little coverup going on over at the SBA.

Seems they have the interesting policy that when one of their lenders is involved in fraudulent SBA loans they elevate said lenders to “preferred lender” status. Interesting policy.

More interesting is that the SBA then ignored, revised, and outright lied about the investigation from its own Office of the Inspector General (OIG). Meaning, they tried very hard to lie about what had happened and cover it the hell up.

Hmm…Bush administration lies and coverups. Sounds vaguely familiar.

The amount of money Saddam Hussein supposedly requested in order for him to step down and go into exile before the war even started: $1 billion.

Total cost of war in Iraq to date: $455 billion.

Being able to say “screw you” to your allies and to force other countries into compliance by blackmailing them while indulging in absolute self-delusion: Priceless.

The two dudes with the worst jobs in America are Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. They’ve just gotten through getting grilled by the Senate and now they’re being ripped in the press and the blogosphere. Interesting. They work for the Prezzz. They were given a task with a set of parameters and they’ve set forth to achieve that task (stabilize) within those parameters (whatever it takes).

One thing worth pointing out with both of these gentlemen is that they’d been critical of the war and/or its execution and tactics since the initial blast into Iraq.

The most revealing part of the testimony to my mind was the inability or utter resistance put up by both men to answer the question “Tell me how this ends?” There is no defined mission beyond the short term one of stabilize the country (not the democracy, you’ll note). This isn’t surprising as there has never been a clearly defined mission. There were no answers to the long term questions…what’s the strategy to put the whole country back together and bring our forces home? None. Zip. Again, not surprising. The closest we ever had to such a strategy was “kick their asses”. Again, not a surprise, then, that there were no answers forthcoming from the two sacrificial lambs, nor will the Prezzz offer any in his speech tonight.

So when, then, will we leave Iraq? Certainly not during the Bush presidency. The Dems, despite their bluster, conceded the timeline through next June, during which the big change will be that the additional 30,000 troops who went over as part of the surge will come home. Leaving us exactly where we were in 2006.

The answer to that question?…When the Democrats find their collective spine and the Republicans find their collective conscience. In other words, no time soon.

I took this picture on September 2, 2007. It’s a store front on Via Cavour in Rome which led me directly to the centre of the old empire, the Forum Romanum.

Hey, it was 7am on a Sunday. In Rome. There was meaning in everything.

This evening the Bubble Boy will announce his bold vision to move forward in Iraq which consists entirely of restoring troop levels to November 2006 levels by July of 2008. Remember when we all that the levels in November 2006 were too high and we voted the Republicans into the minority? Yeah. By the time the 2008 election rolls around we just might have decreased the number of US personnel in Iraq to the same number that were in Iraq at the last election.

This, apparently, is progress.

A new national intelligence estimate has concluded that the Bush strategy of escalation has accomplished nothing. Zero. Zip. Nada.

Things have gotten so bad that John Warner (R-VA) and Gen. Peter Pace, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs have called for us to get out of Iraq. Warner…hmm…Warner has been a subtle critic of the war for awhile now. So, you know, whatever…give him props if you must while ignoring that he has supported the President on every single war related vote up to the present moment. So…nice of you to voice your concerns, how’s about doing something about it? Pace…well, that’s interesting. The General’s argument is that the army simply cannot keep doing this. That it is stretched to the breaking point. That its ability to protect the country is being compromised. Fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight ‘em here? Remember that. Hell, I just heard it in a conversation earlier this week. The General would appear to be saying that we ain’t accomplishing shit over there and we’re straining our resources so badly that we couldn’t fight ‘em over here if we had to.

Neat, huh? So…escalation (the “Surge” as it is more commonly known) was a failure, right?

Depends on what you wanted it to accomplish. In terms of the Prezzz’s dirty little war, in terms of our security, yes…an abject failure. But that’s not what the Prezzz ever set out to accomplish. Ever. What he wanted to do was look good (presumably to his base) and put off the decision for another year. Remember, he’d just gotten his ass handed to him in the 2006 elections when he dreamed up the Surge. Why another year? Because starting in about a month, gloriously coinciding with the timeline on which we’ll hear from Petraeus how fucked up things are, he’ll be able to change his tune to “it wouldn’t be right to make a decision with such grave consequences given a new President will be coming in”.

You heard it here first. My money is on Friday, September 21st.

Maybe we should start an office pool. Like March Madness but with people dying.

The Washington Post has an excellent article this morning on the lies of Alberto Gonzales. Of course, being the Post, the writers had no choice but to look at the lies of Fredo and come up with a totally implausible alternate theory… gotta fend off those accusations of liberal media bias, don’t you know?

Whether Gonzales has deliberately told untruths or is merely hampered by his memory has been the subject of intense debate among members of Congress, legal scholars and others who have watched him over the years. Some regard his verbal difficulties as a strategic ploy on behalf of a president to whom he owes his career; others see a public official overwhelmed by the magnitude of his responsibilities.

The article then goes on to reveal a distinct lack of truthfulness dating back a decade to Bush’s time as the Governor of Texas. It’s not like the alternative, he’s forgetful, is helpful, really. He was “forgetful” way back in the 90’s while serving under Bush in Texas (a vulgar but fun, in a sophomoric way, phrase to write). Meaning, he has always been addled and that should call into question his capability to do his job, any job, in a Presidential administration.

Stupid, however, ain’t legally actionable. And that, campers, is the golden chiclet for Fredo. “I’m just really dumb” don’t make you look so hot but it keeps you out of jail and keeps the Prezzz from being the new Nixon.

Bet it works, too.

The White House delivered its interim report on the surge to Congress today saying that there had been satisfactory movement on 8 of 18 critical benchmarks while giving the other 10 either unsatisfactory or grading them as worse than when the surge began. The White House has said that in light of a report where satisfactory progress has been made on fewer than half of the critical benchmarks it identified back at the beginning of the year (when it said it needed to see satisfactory progress on all of the benchmarks) as justification to continue with the surge strategy.

Yesterday, high ranking intelligence experts testifying before Congress gave an even more grim assessment.

Meanwhile, in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee yesterday, senior intelligence officials said there has been no meaningful positive change in Iraq since January, when a starkly pessimistic National Intelligence Estimate warned that even if security improved, violent sectarian divisions threatened to destroy the government.

Thomas Fingar, the deputy director of national intelligence and chief of the National Intelligence Council, which wrote the January estimate, said that assessment did not change. (snip) Communal violence and scant common ground between Shias, Sunnis and Kurds continues to polarize politics,” Fingar said yesterday. Even the majority-Shiite bloc that Maliki heads, he said, “does not present a unified front” and has continued to deteriorate in recent months. Meanwhile, the provision of essential services seen as crucial in building support for the government, including electricity and oil production, remains below prewar levels, he said. Some have declined during the past six months.

(snip)

“It will be difficult and time-consuming to bridge the political gulf when violence levels are reduced, and they have not yet been reduced significantly,” he said, in what he called his “most optimistic projection.”

But wait! There’s more!

Retired Maj. Gen. John R. Landry, also a member of the intelligence council, said there have been some improvements in the Iraqi army, although much less so with the Iraqi police, who are charged with holding urban areas. But Iraqi security forces remain “ridden with a certain degree of sectarian infiltration” and lack the logistics and support capabilities that would allow them to take over from U.S. forces in most of the country, he said.

Asked by Rep. John M. Spratt Jr. (D-S.C.) whether the Iraqi forces were in a position to bring “some sort of successful closure” to the U.S. troop presence, Landry said that was “not likely.”

Iraqi military leadership and capability will require “years to develop, not months,” he said.

To you ordinary folks: solve the wordsearch puzzle and you will get Habeas Corpus back.

Yeah, right.

The Boy Who Would Be King saw his last hope at legacy making domestic legislation take a header with the demise of his immigration bill.

Set aside for a moment whether it was a good bill or a bad bill. In terms of big domestic legislation, in terms of a domestic anything of any sizeable nature, The Bubble Boy just saw his last shot at any kind of lasting domestic impact go to shit. Yeah, he did the Supreme Court up…but I’m talking about big-time legislation.

Not since Warren G. Harding has a President been so very ineffective at passing anything domestic he gave a damn about.

I’ll forgo my lobbying for Worst President Ever. It’s subjective. But…I’m feeling good about Least Effective President Ever.

…which are essentially the same pet peeve, in, y’know, different contexts.

1) Smoking doesn’t cause cancer, because I smoke and I don’t have cancer!

You’ve got an argument? Fine. Bring it on. This isn’t an argument, it’s a fucking rationalization. You’ve smoked a pack a day since you were thirteen, and you’re in perfect health? That doesn’t mean that there’s no link, it means that you were fucking *lucky*. It’s like saying “I got shot and didn’t die, therefore bullets don’t kill people.” What the hell kind of science is that? You can’t map a trend from a sample of *one*.

2) Global warming is a hoax, because it’s a cold day outside!

…and let’s also add the left-wing “How can people say global warming is a hoax? It’s such a hot day outside!” Yes, I’ve heard both.

Now, look. I’m a global warming skeptic. There’s an argument to be had here. This is not it. Climatology means mapping trends over periods of thousands of years; you’ve gone ahead and made an assertion based on a study of *twenty seconds*. In one location. All argument like this does is serve to make the rest of us look stupid.

(Insert snarky “You don’t need any help for that! Ha-ha!” here.)