1 Boring Old Man

Op-Ed Contributors
Restore the Senate’s Treaty Power
By JOHN R. BOLTON and JOHN YOO
Published: January 4, 2009

blah, blah, blah…

People reporting this article all say the same thing - "you couldn’t make this stuff up!" These two self appointed A.E.I. pundits have both been advocates of a strong, almost omnipotent Executive Branch - particularly in the arena of Foreign Affairs. They’ve both been vocal antagonists of Congress. Yoo acted like an asshole in his Congressional Hearing [outdone only by Mr. Arrogance, David Addington]. Bolton got to the U.N. Ambassadorship by skirting Senate confirmation because everyone hated him [he's hard to love]. And now they’re stumping for the Senate to have more power?

I mean I’m not dumb. I get what they’re saying. They don’t want Obama "making nice" with the rest of the world. They want us to continue to pretend that we’re Caesar and the U.S. is the Roman Empire and to continue pounding our chests and rattling our sabers like George Bush and Dick Cheney did. Maybe we could throw in a little Torture to let people know that we’re tough as nails. They each skipped the military themselves - too busy being vocal pugilists to actually fight themselves.

The Little Bomblet for Turdblossom in the New Rules
By: emptywheel
Tuesday January 6, 2009

Kagro has been tracking the passage of the new House rules package over at his new digs. As he described earlier, John Conyers stuck something in the new rules that will allow the House Judiciary Committee to continue its lawsuit against Harriet Miers and Bolten to get their testimony in the US Attorney scandal.

One nice goody buried in the new House Rules package: the House will authorize the Judiciary Committee to continue its lawsuit seeking to enforce its subpoenas and contempt of Congress citations against Bush White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and former White House counsel Harriet Miers.
Technically, Miers and Bolten were in contempt of the 110th Congress. But with its adjournment, the 110th Congress no longer exists, so there’s nothing to be in contempt of, nor any plaintiff in the lawsuit. The courts had indicated that this might give them cause to moot the whole case and drop it. But the Rules package specifically authorizes the Judiciary Committee in the new 111th Congress to continue the suit. And we had earlier word that the 111th was considering reissuing those subpoenas.

And, as Kagro now points out (now that the rules have passed), there’s a little bomblet in there specific to Rove.

There’s one more juicy nugget in the rules package that just passed. Regarding the Judiciary Committe’s power to continue its suit against Miers and Bolten.

From Majority Leader Steny Hoyer’s fact sheet (PDF):

In addition, it authorizes the Judiciary Committee and General Counsel to add as a party to the lawsuit any individual subpoenaed by the Committee in the 110th Congress who failed to comply.

Who else was subpoenaed by the Judiciary Committee in the 110th Congress and failed to comply? Karl Rove and Michael Mukasey.

Nice going, Chairman Conyers and Speaker Pelosi.

In other words, Rove - and Michael Mukasey, who refused to turn over documents particularly relating to the Siegelman prosecution - is about to get added to HJC’s lawsuit forcing him to testify before House Judicial Committee in the 111th Congress.

Solving the Rootsgap
by: Matt Stoller
Tue Jan 06, 2009

(I wanted more people to see this, and not just because I am running errands today and won’t be able to blog until later. Best wishes to Matt, who for three years has been the best writing partner I could ask for. If our efforts to create a progressive governing majority are to succeed, we need people organizing on the inside, too. Also, Open Left isn’t going anywhere, and over the next couple of days, we will have a series of announcements on our new content. Stay tuned

- promoted by Chris Bowers)

Well, I suppose I had to make the announcement at some point, so here goes.  I won’t be blogging at OpenLeft for some time.  I’ve taken a job inside the House of Representatives (more on that when I’ve cleared what I can say) to see how the place works and to help create the space for more progressive policies…

On the day before his arrest, he told his sons that he only had 200 or 300 million dollars left and he wanted to disperse it to employees and certain favored accounts before he was going to turn himself in. His sons short circuited his plans by turning him in themselves the next day. Now, several weeks after his arrest, he’s mailing a million dollars worth of bling to his sons and vacationing friends - defying a court order that froze his assets. That mailing had cufflinks, expensive watches, and contained a pair of mittens. It was a stupid thing to do, mailing these things. It must have been important to him, like his plan to give bonuses to certain people at the end. His sons turned him in [again]. And then there’s that face - downturned eyes, something between a smirk and a smile that’s neither defiant nor ashamed, almost  detached.

The words empathy and sympathy are often confused. empathy is the human capacity to feel the inner experience of another person. sympathy implies a feeling of harmony with another. I have no sympathy for Bernard Madoff. I doubt many do. But I can have snatches of what it might have felt like to be Bernard Madoff. That his fraud was a conscious gambit on his part is unquestioned - he knew what he was doing, and he had to know how it would end. You can sort of see it in this picture plastered all over the Internet [far left] - a deep sadness. But it’s not there in the other oft-printed head shot [near left].

The mental mechanism called denial is sort of complicated. It involves dealing with something by keeping it out of your mind. What’s complicated is that it doesn’t exactly work. The deteriorating alcoholic knows what’s happening some of the time [when they can't keep from not seeing it]. The pedophile is aware [no matter how elaborate the internal ruse] that what he’s doing is not okay. It comes and goes like in these two pictures. We don’t know how long Madoff has lived with his version of denial, but we do know that it has been a very long time. These end-game acts [the bonuses, the mailed presents] seem to me to be some kind of desperate attempt to feel positively about himself, and the only way he knows how to do that is to give people money or valuable things.

His sons want no part of him - that’s obvious. I expect there are reasons deeper than his financial duplicity that explain their consistent "No" response - turning him in to the S.E.C., refusing to bail him out of jail, reporting his mailing of these expensive trinkets. No matter how consciously he’s pondered how the end might feel, it’s something he couldn’t really know until he got there. Anyone who knew what he was doing is distancing themselves from him like a hot potato. People who suspected are feeling like they were part of this and are also showing him the back of their heads. Anyone who knew him but didn’t know of his schemes is in shock and hardly a resource to him. Unless his wife Ruth was a willing confidante all along, she’s no pleasure to be locked up with no matter how grand their apartment.

Cheney: Bush’s actions legal if not impeached

Cheney referenced Abraham Lincoln as an example of another president who "suspended the writ of habeus corpus" during a war, prompting this exchange:

SCHIEFFER:But nobody thinks that was legal.
CHENEY: Well, no. It certainly was in the sense he wasn’t impeached. And it was a wartime measure that he took that I think history says today, yeah, that was probably a good thing to do.

The vice president spent much of the interview defending eight years of the Bush administration’s policies, including its surveillance and interrogation programs. When Schieffer asked if the Bush administration had gone "too far" in its surveillance program, Cheney said no.

CHENEY: I don’t believe we violated anybody’s civil liberties.

Cheney also urged President-elect Barack Obama to continue the Bush administration’s interrogation policies…

CHENEY: I would hope [Obama] would avoid doing what others have done in the past, which is letting the campaign rhetoric guide his judgment in this absolutely crucial area… We were very careful, we did everything by the book, and in fact we produced very significant results

He then claims that Lincoln’s suspension of the writ of habeus corpus must have been legal because Lincoln wasn’t impeached. What a piece of Cheney-think. Lincoln wasn’t impeached because he saved our Union, and he didn’t make a habit of slithering through the cracks. Cheney would do well to think that a major reason his boss, George Bush, wasn’t impeached is because we’d have him [Cheney] as President!

Next we have, "I don’t believe we violated anybody’s civil liberties." I presume he’s referring to surveillance, because it’s hard to imagine that even Cheney would argue that Torture isn’t violating Civil Liberties [my guess is that he doesn't consider P.O.W.'s to be fellow human beings]. But what he seems to be saying is that surveillance doesn’t hurt anybody. Privacy, itself, is the Liberty in question. What he means is that since we didn’t go shoot the people, they weren’t hurt. That’s not for him to decide. By definition, their Liberties were violated.

But then we come to his sickest thoughts. "I would hope [Obama] would avoid doing what others have done in the past, which is letting the campaign rhetoric guide his judgment in this absolutely crucial area." He’s big on this campaign rhetoric thing - often discounting others by saying, "Oh that’s just campaign rhetoric." But here, he reveals his true colors. Early in 2008, former Senator Lincoln Chaffee, a Republican "good guy" published Against the Tide:

Cheney swore off ‘moderate’ campaign promises a month after 2000 election
April 1, 2008

In his new book, former Rhode Island Republican senator Lincoln Chafee reveals that even before President Bush was sworn into office after the 2000 elections, Cheney had rejected the “moderate course” laid out in their campaign:

The former Senator describes a December 2000 meeting of Republican moderates with Vice President-elect Cheney. Chafee listened as Cheney swore off the moderate course he and Bush had just finished championing in their campaign.
Hearing Cheney say “the campaign was over and that our actions in office would not be dictated by what had to be said in the campaign,” Chafee writes, was “the most demoralizing moment of my seven-year tenure in the Senate.”

In his book, Chafee angrily adds about the incident,

Mr. Cheney tore our best campaign promises to shreds and the moderates acquiesced instead of pelting him with outrage.

• "We were very careful" to make sure we wouldn’t be held responsible for what we did.
• "we did everything by the book" meaning we found a lawyer [John Yoo] who would rationalize what we were doing and put the DoJ stamp of approval on it.
• "we produced very significant results" There are grave doubts whether either domestic surveillance or torture got us any intelligence at all. But there have been significant results - the world’s disdain and our own shame.

The Anti-Stimulus Crowd: The Fear of Success
by: Dean Baker, t·r·u·t·h·o·u·t | Perspective

At least some Republicans are starting to muster an anti-stimulus drive, claiming that President-elect Obama’s package will not help the economy. Their drive is centered on what they claim is a careful rereading of the history of the New Deal. According to their account, President Roosevelt’s policies actually lengthened the Great Depression. In their story, we would have been better off if we just left the market to adjust by itself. New Deal programs that directly employed people, or in other ways supported living standards, created an uncertain investment climate. They claim that this uncertainty slowed the process of market adjustment that was necessary for returning to high levels of employment.

The Wagner Act, which created the legal framework for the union organizing drives of the era, stands out as being especially pernicious in their story. The Fair Labor Standards Act, which created the 40-hour workweek and established the first national minimum wage, also gets singled out for criticism. In this new reading of history, what most people consider the great successes of the New Deal simply worsened the Great Depression. In reality, any careful reading showed that the New Deal policies substantially ameliorated the effects of the Great Depression for tens of millions of people. The major economic failing of the New Deal was that President Roosevelt was not prepared to push the policies as far as necessary to fully lift the economy out of the Great Depression.

Roosevelt was too worried about the whining of the anti-stimulus crowd that he confronted. He remained concerned about balancing the budget when the proper goal of fiscal policy should have been large deficits to stimulate the economy. Roosevelt’s policies substantially reduced the unemployment rate from the 25 percent peak when he first took office, but they did not get the unemployment rate back into single digits. It took the enormous public spending associated with World War II to fully lift the economy out of the depression. The lesson that economists take away from this experience is that we should be prepared to run very large deficits in order to give the economy a sufficient boost to generate self-sustaining growth.

However, from the standpoint of Republicans, the more ominous lesson of the New Deal policies is that it left the Democrats firmly in power for more than 20 years. The Republicans did not regain the White House until 1952, 20 years after President Roosevelt was first elected. Imagine how terrifying the prospect of 20 years of Democratic presidencies must be for the current generation of Republican leaders. This would mean that they would not retake the White House until 2028, just 20 years before the Social Security trust fund is first projected to face a shortfall…

In short, we should realize that the main concern of some of those opposed to stimulus may not be that it will fail, but rather that it will succeed. Most of us don’t have the same set of concerns.

In Krugman’s model, the Republicans are thinking about what to do for the country, but they’re just wrong. In Baker’s way of thinking, they’re thinking about the long term viability of their Party. I find myself thinking that both Krugman and Baker are giving the Republicans too much credit. I don’t think they think that much about what they’re doing. At least, not in that way.

During the McCain Campaign, I was appalled by what the man said. I’ve always liked McCain, but during the Campaign, his negativity and irresponsibility shocked me. It had me asking, "Who is this person I thought I knew?" Since the Campaign, he has seemed tp me like his old self.  And that’s how the Republican Party has worked since Nixon days. - C.R.E.E.P., Donald Segretti, Lee Atwater, Karl Rove, Steve Schmidt, Ken Starr, Dick Cheney, etc. They’ve had a formula - unrelenting contemptuous attack on anything the Democrats say or do. They destroyed Carter and wounded Clinton. There’s no reason to think they won’t try to do the same thing with Obama. This Republican Mythology about the New deal is just another Talking Point, nothing more. It’s all over Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and coming out of the mouths of the usual Republican suspects - always suffused with contempt and sarcasm. It’s what they do. I don’t think it has anything to do with the issues - it’s just how they finally got some power. "Lets everyone say the same thing over and over and maybe it will stick." How easily we forget:

Feds: Jail Madoff For Violating Bail 4:29 PM ET: Federal prosecutors are asking a judge to throw alleged $50 billion Ponzi-schemer Bernie Madoff — currently out on bail — in jail for mailing $1 million worth of assets to third parties. According to assistant U.S. attorney Marc Litt, testifying in Manhattan federal court today, Madoff and his wife Ruth mailed five items, including "very valuable jewelry," Bloomberg reported, to others, violating the terms of his asset freeze.

The act violated Madoff’s bail — he is under house arrest in his apartment — Litt said, so Madoff should be sent to the slammer. Madoff’s defense lawyer, Ira Sorkin, disputed that his client has violated the terms of his bail. The government has recovered three of the items, Litt said.

How Much Does Madoff Still Have?

The Securities and Exchange Commission was given a list of disgraced businessman Bernard L. Madoff’s personal assets last week, as government regulators try to size up the remaining wealth of the alleged Ponzi scheme operator. Madoff handed over an accounting of all of his investments, loans, lines of credit, business interests, brokerage accounts and other holdings, including possible offshore accounts. According to federal court documents, his assets total an estimated $200 million to $300 million, but federal regulators are refusing to make the list public.

While that debate rages, the Post Investigations blog decided to round up what is known about Madoff’s holdings from public records and published accounts:

• A Palm Beach, Fla., mansion located at 410 N. Lake Way. Price tag: $9.4 million
• A pricey New York penthouse on the Upper East Side, located at 133 E. 64th St., No. 12A.Price tag: $7 million.
• A 55-1/2-foot wooden fishing boat, purchased in 1977 for $462,000
• Country club memberships in Palm Beach, Fla., and Amagansett, N.Y.
• An East Hamptons, N.Y., getaway, located at 216 Old Montauk Highway on Long Island. Price tag: $3 million.
• Madoff’s 17th floor New York office,Price tag: $3 million to $5 million.
• From vintage watches from George Somlo, Tiffany & Co. wedding bands and Savile Row suits, Madoff apparently spared no expense when it came to personal accoutrements.
• He also owns a gray outfitted Brazilian-built Embraer Regional Jet 145, which costs roughly $29 million, along with stock in BLM Air Charter.
• A small villa overlooking Cap d’Antibes on the French Riviera; a Mayfair office in London; and a yacht on the Mediterranean. His office at 12 Berkeley Street in London is "modest," according to the Evening Standard, but still pricey. And Madoff had stored millions in capital in the British subsidiary.

Fighting Off Depression
By PAUL KRUGMAN

“If we don’t act swiftly and boldly,” declared President-elect Barack Obama in his latest weekly address, “we could see a much deeper economic downturn that could lead to double-digit unemployment.” If you ask me, he was understating the case.

The fact is that recent economic numbers have been terrifying, not just in the United States but around the world. Manufacturing, in particular, is plunging everywhere. Banks aren’t lending; businesses and consumers aren’t spending. Let’s not mince words: This looks an awful lot like the beginning of a second Great Depression.

So will we “act swiftly and boldly” enough to stop that from happening? We’ll soon find out.

We weren’t supposed to find ourselves in this situation. For many years most economists believed that preventing another Great Depression would be easy. In 2003, Robert Lucas of the University of Chicago, in his presidential address to the American Economic Association, declared that the “central problem of depression-prevention has been solved, for all practical purposes, and has in fact been solved for many decades.”

Milton Friedman, in particular, persuaded many economists that the Federal Reserve could have stopped the Depression in its tracks simply by providing banks with more liquidity, which would have prevented a sharp fall in the money supply. Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, famously apologized to Friedman on his institution’s behalf: “You’re right. We did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.”

It turns out, however, that preventing depressions isn’t that easy after all. Under Mr. Bernanke’s leadership, the Fed has been supplying liquidity like an engine crew trying to put out a five-alarm fire, and the money supply has been rising rapidly. Yet credit remains scarce, and the economy is still in free fall.

• the economy of the entire planet…
• a bronze statue in the Washington Mall…
• Shiller’s Question…
• the death of empathy…

Friedman’s claim that monetary policy could have prevented the Great Depression was an attempt to refute the analysis of John Maynard Keynes, who argued that monetary policy is ineffective under depression conditions and that fiscal policy — large-scale deficit spending by the government — is needed to fight mass unemployment. The failure of monetary policy in the current crisis shows that Keynes had it right the first time. And Keynesian thinking lies behind Mr. Obama’s plans to rescue the economy.

But these plans may turn out to be a hard sell.

News reports say that Democrats hope to pass an economic plan with broad bipartisan support. Good luck with that. In reality, the political posturing has already started, with Republican leaders setting up roadblocks to stimulus legislation while posing as the champions of careful Congressional deliberation — which is pretty rich considering their party’s behavior over the past eight years.

More broadly, after decades of declaring that government is the problem, not the solution, not to mention reviling both Keynesian economics and the New Deal, most Republicans aren’t going to accept the need for a big-spending, F.D.R.-type solution to the economic crisis. The biggest problem facing the Obama plan, however, is likely to be the demand of many politicians for proof that the benefits of the proposed public spending justify its costs — a burden of proof never imposed on proposals for tax cuts.

This is a problem with which Keynes was familiar: giving money away, he pointed out, tends to be met with fewer objections than plans for public investment “which, because they are not wholly wasteful, tend to be judged on strict ‘business’ principles.” What gets lost in such discussions is the key argument for economic stimulus — namely, that under current conditions, a surge in public spending would employ Americans who would otherwise be unemployed and money that would otherwise be sitting idle, and put both to work producing something useful.

All of this leaves me concerned about the prospects for the Obama plan. I’m sure that Congress will pass a stimulus plan, but I worry that the plan may be delayed and/or downsized. And Mr. Obama is right: We really do need swift, bold action.

Here’s my nightmare scenario: It takes Congress months to pass a stimulus plan, and the legislation that actually emerges is too cautious. As a result, the economy plunges for most of 2009, and when the plan finally starts to kick in, it’s only enough to slow the descent, not stop it. Meanwhile, deflation is setting in, while businesses and consumers start to base their spending plans on the expectation of a permanently depressed economy — well, you can see where this is going.

So this is our moment of truth. Will we in fact do what’s necessary to prevent Great Depression II.

So, on the December the 26th after my daughter headed back home from a good holiday visit, I took a nap. I drove my truck on Saturday the 27th - which was fine. On the 28th, I got in my truck and it was "missing" and an ominous light on the dashboard lit up, shaped like an engine. I turned it off. The next morning, a friend followed me as my truck limped and sputtered to Jasper Jeep where it still sits. Later that day, they called and said I might want to call my insurance company. Seems that a rat/mouse/squirrel/possum had moved in on Saturday night and built a nest.

Fortunately, I have full coverage for rodent attacks on my truck, because it was a $2000 nest that the rat/mouse/squirrel/possum had created on Saturday night. I’m now locally famous as the most recent such victim. Every time I tell this story, more people appear who have been similarly afflicted. The guy at Jasper Jeep says it happens a lot, particularly on cold nights. I told him that I preferred calling it a possum attack for aesthetic reasons, but they were adamant that it was either a rat or a "very industrious field mouse."