Nobody Could Have Predicted...

The Washington Post has a massive investigative piece today that takes a look at the military/intelligence/contractor clusterfuck that was spawned post 9/11:

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

The article is definately worth a read, but I thought two reactions were pretty dead on:

Atrios:

Oh Well

It occurs to me that some crazy hippies thought that a massive overreaction to 9/11, including pointless wars and massive expansion of the security state, might not be such a good idea. Well, nobody could have predicted. Bygones.

Matt Yglesias:

Dana Priest continues to do the kind of reporting that 90% of "reporters" only think they do.

"We Waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed"

Speaking of the Geneva Conventions, when the former President of the United States feels comfortable spouting off about violating them, something is clearly wrong:

Former President George W. Bush answers questions during his visit with the Economic Club of Grand Rapids on Wednesday. GRAND RAPIDS -- Former President George W. Bush was by turns affable, relaxed -- and deadly serious in his local appearance Wednesday.

"Yeah, we water-boarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed," Bush said of the terrorist who master-minded the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington. He said that event shaped his presidency and convinced him the nation was in a war against terror.

"I'd do it again to save lives."

Someone should probably checking into this, although that would mean looking backwards, which can't be done because Obama said it could lead to the break up of the United States or something.

Remember That Guy Who Was Incompetent and Universally Hated? Yeah, Let's Get Him!

Fresh, bold thinking from the Heritage Foundation:

The U.S. government response should be bold and decisive. It must mobilize U.S. civilian and military capabilities for short-term rescue and relief and long-term recovery and reform. President Obama should tap high-level, bipartisan leadership. Clearly former President Clinton, who was already named as the U.N. envoy on Haiti, is a logical choice. President Obama should also reach out to a senior Republican figure, perhaps former President George W. Bush, to lead the bipartisan effort for the Republicans.

There are probably dumber ideas out there, but so far I haven't seen any that top this.

The Lost Decade

What a crappy 10 years:

The U.S. economy has expanded at a healthy clip for most of the last 70 years, but by a wide range of measures, it stagnated in the first decade of the new millennium. Job growth was essentially zero, as modest job creation from 2003 to 2007 wasn't enough to make up for two recessions in the decade. Rises in the nation's economic output, as measured by gross domestic product, was weak. And household net worth, when adjusted for inflation, fell as stock prices stagnated, home prices declined in the second half of the decade and consumer debt skyrocketed.

Heckuva job, Ben!

Well, Henry Kissinger did win a nobel peace prize...

Time magazine on Wednesday named Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke as its 2009 Person of the Year, calling him "the most powerful nerd on the planet."

Bernanke will be featured on the cover of the magazine that hits stores Friday.

He beat out Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, President Obama, Apple CEO Steve Jobs and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi among other finalists.

Time said Bernanke was the reason the U.S. financial crisis wasn't worse.

"The story of the year was a weak economy that could have been much, much weaker. Thank the man who runs the Federal Reserve, our mild-mannered economic overlord," the article said.

"He didn't just reshape U.S. monetary policy; he led an effort to save the world economy."

Yep, that's just what he did. Dean Baker:

The Senate finance committee overwhelmingly voted to approve Ben Bernanke for another four-year term as Federal Reserve board chairman. This is a remarkable event since it is hard to imagine how Bernanke could have performed any worse during his last four-year term. By Bernanke's own assessment, his policies brought the US economy to the brink of another Great Depression. This sort of performance in any other job would get you fired in a second. But for the most important economic policymaker in the country it gets you high praise and another term.

There is no room for ambiguity in this story. Bernanke was at the Fed since the fall of 2002. (He had a brief stint in 2005 as chair of President Bush's council of economic advisors.) At a point when at least some economists recognised the housing bubble and began to warn of the damage that would result from its collapse, Bernanke insisted that everything was fine and that nothing should be done to rein in the bubble.

This is worth repeating. If Bernanke knew what he was doing, he should have been able to see as early as 2002 that there was a housing bubble and that its collapse would throw the economy into a recession. It was also entirely predictable that the collapse could lead to a financial crisis of the type we saw, since housing was always a highly leveraged asset, even before the flood of subprime, Alt-A and other nonsense loans that propelled the bubble to ever greater heights. Of course as the bubble expanded, and the financial sector became ever more highly leveraged, the risks to the economy increased enormously.

Through this all, Bernanke just looked the other way. The whole time he insisted that everything was just fine.

To be clear, there was plenty that the Fed could have done to deflate the bubble before it grew to such dangerous proportions. First and foremost the Fed could have used its extensive research capabilities to carefully document the evidence for a housing bubble and the risks that its collapse would pose to the economy.

It then should have used the enormous megaphone of the Fed chairman and the platform of the institution to publicise this research widely. The Fed could have ensured that every loan officer who issued a mortgage, as well as all the banks officers who set policy, clearly heard the warnings of a bubble in the housing market, backed up by reams of irrefutable research. The same warnings would have reached the ears of every potential homebuyer in the country. It's hard to believe that such warnings would have had no impact on the bubble, but it's near criminal that the Fed never tried this route.

The second tool that the Fed could have pursued was to crack down on the fraudulent loans that were being issued in massive numbers at the peak of the bubble. It is absurd to claim that the Fed didn't know about the abuses in the mortgage market. I was getting emails from all over the country telling me about loan officers filling in phony income and asset numbers so that borrowers would qualify for mortgages. If the Bernanke and his Fed colleagues did not know about these widespread abuses, it is because they deliberately avoided knowing.

Finally, the Fed could have had a policy of interest rate hikes explicitly targeted to burst the bubble. Specifically, it could have announced that it will raise rates by half a percentage point at every meeting, until house prices begin to fall and it will keep rates high until house prices approach their pre-bubble level.

This is what a responsible Fed policy would have looked like. But Ben Bernanke did not pursue a responsible Fed policy. He insisted that everything was just fine until he had to run to Congress last September, saying that if it didn't immediately give $700bn to the banks through the Tarp programme then the economy would collapse.

How on earth can you do worse in your job as Fed chair than bring the economy to the brink of a total collapse? If this is success, what does failure look like?

It's also good that he doesn't think 10% unemployment is a concern either. Man of the year!

Understanding the Bailout

Due to both the complexities of the finance involved, a lack of transparency at the Treasury and unbelievably bad reporting, it's been difficult to understand both the bailout of the major US banks.

Want to understand what's going on? This article by Chris Hayes and Nomi Prins explains things as well as I've seen anywere, and comes with this fairly scary graph:


Read the whole thing, you won't be dissapointed.

Can't Get Enough of the Bush Family?

So fucking absurd:

NEW YORK – NBC's "Today" show has hired someone with White House experience as a new correspondent — former first daughter Jenna Hager.

The daughter of former President George W. Bush will contribute stories about once a month on issues like education to television's top-rated morning news show, said Jim Bell, its executive producer.

Hager, a 27-year-old teacher in Baltimore, said she has always wanted to be a teacher and a writer, and has already authored two books. But she was intrigued by the idea of getting into television when Bell contacted her.

Glenn Greenwald rightfully takes the opportunity to sound off:

They should convene a panel for the next Meet the Press with Jenna Bush Hager, Luke Russert, Liz Cheney, Megan McCain and Jonah Goldberg, and they should have Chris Wallace moderate it. They can all bash affirmative action and talk about how vitally important it is that the U.S. remain a Great Meritocracy because it's really unfair for anything other than merit to determine position and employment. They can interview Lisa Murkowski, Evan Bayh, Jeb Bush, Bob Casey, Mark Pryor, Jay Rockefeller, Dan Lipinksi, and Harold Ford, Jr. about personal responsibility and the virtues of self-sufficiency. Bill Kristol, Tucker Carlson and John Podhoretz can provide moving commentary on how America is so special because all that matters is merit, not who you know or where you come from. There's a virtually endless list of politically well-placed guests equally qualified to talk on such matters.

. . .

Just to underscore a very important, related point: all of the above-listed people are examples of America's Great Meritocracy, having achieved what they have solely on the basis of their talent, skill and hard work -- The American Way. By contrast, Sonia Sotomayor -- who grew up in a Puerto Rican family in Bronx housing projects; whose father had a third-grade education, did not speak English and died when she was 9; whose mother worked as a telephone operator and a nurse; and who then became valedictorian of her high school, summa cum laude at Princeton, a graduate of Yale Law School, and ultimately a Supreme Court Justice -- is someone who had a whole litany of unfair advantages handed to her and is the poster child for un-American, merit-less advancement.

I just want to make sure that's clear.

Movement on Torture Investigations

Glenn Greenwald:

Attorney General Eric Holder today confirmed what has been suspected for many weeks: he has ordered what he calls "a preliminary review into whether federal laws were violated in connection with the interrogation of specific detainees at overseas locations." Holder's decision does not amount to the appointment of a Special Prosecutor, since a preliminary review is used, as he emphasized, "to gather information to determine whether there is sufficient predication to warrant a full investigation of a matter." More important, the scope of the "review" is limited at the outset to those who failed to "act in good faith and within the scope of legal guidance" -- meaning only those interrogators and other officials who exceeded the torture limits which John Yoo and Jay Bybee approved. Those who, with good faith, tortured within the limits of the OLC memos will "be protected from legal jeopardy" (the full Holder statement is here).

In theory, Holder's announcement does not foreclose the possibility that DOJ lawyers who authored the torture memos and/or those in the White House who authorized torture will, at some point, be investigated. Strictly speaking, Holder's announced "review" concerns only those in the intelligence community who conducted interrogations. And by extending immunity only to those who both (a) acted "within the scope of the [OLC] legal guidelines" and (b) "acted in good faith," it's theoretically possible that there is some class of persons who could fall outside the scope of immunity even though they technically complied with the OLC memos: i.e. high-level White House officials and/or DOJ lawyers who had reason to believe that the conduct authorized by the memos was illegal, meaning those who wrote or requested those memos with the deliberate intent to obtain cover for what they knew was criminal behavior. In other words, there are those who complied with the memos, but in bad faith, and are thus are outside the bounds of immunity Holder today defined and ineligible for this immunity. But that's just theory.

This seems good if it's a first step towards something more. While Greenwald is rightfully sceptical on what this means in the long run, there's always the hope that the outrage generated by these revelations (as well as by the report released yesterday) will lead to prosecutions of the real villains who wrote these memos.

No clue where this leads, but it seems like any movement on the issue is better than none.

So Dick Cheney Wasn't Telling the Truth?

I for one am shocked:

For months, former Vice President Dick Cheney has said that two documents prepared by the CIA, one from 2004 and the other from 2005, would refute critics of the Bush administration’s torture program. He told Fox’s Sean Hannity in April:

“I haven’t talked about it, but I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw, that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country,” Cheney said. “I’ve now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was.”

Those documents were obtained today by The Washington Independent and are available here. Strikingly, they provide little evidence for Cheney’s claims that the “enhanced interrogation” program run by the CIA provided valuable information. In fact, throughout both documents, many passages — though several are incomplete and circumstantial, actually suggest the opposite of Cheney’s contention: that non-abusive techniques actually helped elicit some of the most important information the documents cite in defending the value of the CIA’s interrogations.

And surprisingly enough, after repeating Cheney's claims as a valid counterpoint during the torture "debate", the media seems less inclined to pick up on the "Dick Cheney: Fucking liar about fucking everything" angle of the story:

While Cheney’s original assertions that the docs would prove torture worked garnered reams of stand-alone print and TV coverage, the fact that the docs themselves don’t actually prove Cheney’s claims was either not covered at all, buried deep in stories, or described in highly hedged language.

To its credit, The New York Times stated this conclusion very clearly, saying that the docs, which were released yesterday, “do not refer to any specific interrogation methods and do not assess their effectiveness.” But this came in the 13th paragraph in an article not directly focused on Cheney’s claims.

The Washington Post buried its description of the documents and didn’t even take a stand on whether they backed up Cheney. The Associated Press ran one story featuring Cheney’s repetition of his claim yesterday, with no mention at all of the documents. Another AP story said it was “not clear” whether the docs show torture worked — in its 21st paragraph.

CNN’s story featured paragraph after paragraph of Cheney’s claims and only noted in the second to last graf that it was “unclear” whether the docs proved him right.

Precious few news orgs ran stand alone stories on this. ABC News did one. The Washington Independent did another.

This is all particularly absurd when you think of the shitstorm that Joe Biden caused by harshly critizing Cheney earlier this year. It's nice to know that an angry and dismissive tone (what Biden was accused of) is "not becoming of the Vice President", but constantly lying about everything is.

John Yoo v. Brilliant, Tasteless Pranksters

I've long wondered why John Yoo is teaching at UC Berkeley. Barring prison, it at least seems like he shouldn't be teaching. But if he can get a job teaching, how and why did he end up at Berkeley?

This video sheds some unsurprising but hilarious light on how it's going. And since I was on campus myself just yesterday, it seems particularly timely:

My favorite part is that the class applauds.


EDIT: This Glenn Greenwald piece about a letter by UC Law Dean William Orrick helps explain Berkeley's willingness to hire Yoo: the school's desire to defend and cement academic free speech transcends just about everything else.

EDIT II: Whoops, J.N. already posted this.

Torturing to Justify War

Huge revelations from Colin Powell's former chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson:

Likewise, what I have learned is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002--well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion--its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa'ida.

So furious was this effort that on one particular detainee, even when the interrogation team had reported to Cheney's office that their detainee "was compliant" (meaning the team recommended no more torture), the VP's office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods. The detainee had not revealed any al-Qa'ida-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, "revealed" such contacts. Of course later we learned that al-Libi revealed these contacts only to get the torture to stop.

There in fact were no such contacts. (Incidentally, al-Libi just "committed suicide" in Libya. Interestingly, several U.S. lawyers working with tortured detainees were attempting to get the Libyan government to allow them to interview al-Libi....)

So from a former Bush Administration official, we know that Dick Cheney authorized torture in order to fabricate a link between Iraq and Al Qaida, a link which was then used to advocate a war that led to the the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and four thousand US soldiers.

If that doesn't lead to some sort of criminal investigation, we should probably just give up and abandon this "rule of law" thing altogether.

Law & Order: War on Terror Unit

In response to a BAGnewsNotes post about Leibovitz's hilarious portrait of the Bush Administration major players (entitled "Cabinet Room," reproduced above), Wilson Paul Dizard IV dramatically opines:

In the War on Terror, the enemy combatants and American citizens are represented by two separate, yet equally important groups: the spooks, who torture the combatants held in secret without charges; and their bosses, whom the American people never elected in the first place. These are their heavily redacted stories.

At the Highest Levels

Prosecute them:

WASHINGTON — A newly declassified narrative of the Bush administration's advice to the CIA on harsh interrogations shows that the small group of Justice Department lawyers who wrote memos authorizing harsh interrogation techniques were operating not on their own but with direction from top administration officials, including then-Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.

At the same time, the narrative suggests that then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and then-Secretary of State Colin Powell were largely left out of the decision-making process.

The narrative, posted Wednesday on the Senate Intelligence Committee's Web site and released by its former chairman, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., came as Attorney General Eric Holder told reporters that he'd "follow the evidence wherever it takes us" in deciding whether to prosecute any Bush administration officials who authorized harsh techniques that are widely considered torture.

I don't know, enforcing the law could end up being a pretty partisan affair.

Count me out.

Infuriating Progress

Yesterday, the Obama Administration announced that it will no longer designate the detainees at Guantanamo Bay as illegal enemy combatants.

Those three words are, as I have noted a number of times before, the very heart of the Bush Administration's legal framework behind the detention of prisoners from the "War on Terror" in relative secrecy and without trial. The Obama Administration's decision to redefine the Guantanamo prisoners' legal status is therefore an acknowledgment of the problems inherent to that particular classification, and is something of a reassurance after last month's decision to maintain the use of the legal category for the detainees at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan. Presumably, at least some of the Guantanamo prisoners will now receive the full rights entitled to them under the traditional justice system of the United States – something that terrified the Bush Administration for completely inexplicable reasons.

And indeed, Reuters quotes Attorney General Holder as saying some things you'd never have heard from a Bush Administration official:

"As we work toward developing a new policy to govern detainees, it is essential that we operate in a manner that strengthens our national security, is consistent with our values, and is governed by law."

Aside from the references to values and the rule of law (read: "not torturing people"), it's encouraging that Holder refers to the developing nature of the Administration's work on these issues, as it means that some of the poor decisions thus far may merely be temporary measures.

Nevertheless, the real question here does not concern Guantanamo Bay at all. That prison's fate is clearly sealed. The real question is about the United States detention facilities on foreign soil, where most current and future prisoners will be held and interrogated in the upcoming years. After all, Section 8(a) of Obama's executive order to close Guantanamo quite explicitly states that "Nothing in this order shall prejudice the authority of the Secretary of Defense to determine the disposition of any detainees not covered by this order." In other words: any reassessment of the Guantanamo Bay prisoners does not apply to the prisoners at the massively expanded Bagram facility in Afghanistan or any of the other US military prisons overseas. For now, we must assume that last month's reaffirmation of their illegal combatant status stands.

Even the ultimate treatment of the Guantanamo prisoners remains something of an open question, as the rumblings of many a human rights lawyer and activist can attest. With this new announcement, we almost have less of an answer than ever to the question of how future prisoners will be treated. And that is the very point I would like to stress: while just about any work to negate the illegal enemy combatant jurisprudence is good news in my book, I can't help but feel that the Administration's focus on Guantanamo is just a distraction, an effort to correct the most technically illegal portions of Bush approach to justice while maintaining their fundamental framework.

But my god, I hope I'm wrong. The stakes could hardly be higher on this.

And John Yoo Responds...

After our discussion in the comments, it seems worth mentioning John Yoo's response to the release of nine memos in which he explicitly denigrated the first and fourth amendments and arguably encouraged war crimes. In (of all places) the Orange County Register, Yoo gives an interview with the following choice tidbits:

Q. Were you surprised with the student reaction at Berkeley to you being there?

A. Berkeley is sort of a magnet for hippies, protesters and left-wing activists. So I'm not surprised that being one of the few recognizable conservatives on campus that I would generate a lot of heat and friction. It happened well before working in the Bush administration.

Step 1: Announce status as reactionary asshole who hates "hippies." Check. Whatever "hippies" are, now that the 1960s have been over for forty years, John Yoo hates them.

Q. You recently wrote an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal criticizing President Obama for closing Guantanamo Bay.

A. He's really restricting what the CIA can do in the war on terrorism. That's my opinion. Now that I'm not in the government, part of my role, because I have a certain amount of expertise, is to try to keep the government honest.

Honest. Huh. That was not the word that first came to mind, as I'm not sure how relevant honesty is here. More like evil. "Part of my role, because I have a certain amount of expertise, is to try and keep the government evil." But hey, it's his interview.

Q. What needs to be understood with governmental decisions?

A. There are tradeoffs inherent in every question. Someone can say, "I think it's more important that other countries have a more favorable opinion of us than any intelligence we gain from interrogation." That's a benefit and a cost. That's the cost … we will get less information about the enemy.

The enemy... does that include the 533 prisoners who were released from Guantanamo Bay? Or just the 241 still under guard? Or do you mean, all 779 illegally 100% legally held detainees? I'm so confused!

Q. Do you have a different perspective as a private citizen?

A. The thing I am really struck with is that when you are in the government, you have very little time to make very important decisions. You don't have the luxury to research every single thing and that's accelerated in war time. You really have decisions to make, which you could spend years on. Sometimes what we forget as private citizens, or scholars, or students or journalists for sure (he laughs), is that in hindsight, it's easier to say, "Here's what I would have done." But when you're in the government, at the time you make the decision, you don't have that kind of luxury.

WHICH IS EXACTLY WHY THE BILL OF RIGHTS EXISTS. That is exactly, 100%, why we have some lines that never get crossed, no matter what.

But here's the real kicker, which is getting particular play around the internets:

Q. Is there anything you would have done differently?

A. These memos I wrote were not for public consumption. They lack a certain polish, I think – would have been better to explain government policy rather than try to give unvarnished, straight-talk legal advice. I certainly would have done that differently, but I don't think I would have made the basic decisions differently.

Translation: "I would have been just as disrespectful of civil rights, but would have either shredded the memos after they were read or lied more openly to the public about their meaning."

In conclusion: fuck you, John Yoo. Fuck. You.

Obama's First Failing Grade

I'd been hoping that I would not have the opportunity to use the below picture in a post. But the symbolism is sadly appropriate.

(Brennan Linsley / Associated Press)


Echoing perhaps the single most egregious legal position taken by the Bush Administration, the Obama justice department has now openly classified the detainees at the Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan as "unlawful enemy combatants." As previously discussed here, the purpose of this legal category is to keep secret the reasons for and reviews of their captivity and to deny any legal means to secure release.

Though the Obama administration's commitment to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay came as a surprising ray of hope for many of us who care about human rights, this new statement raises concerns that Guantanamo won't so much be closed as moved. As the New York Times article on the statement points out, the arguments of the two primary Supreme Court decisions on Guantanamo rest on the fact that the base is technically on United States soil. With that limitation removed, the overall mission of the prison can continue outside of SCOTUS's jurisdiction.

It isn't clear yet whether this indicates a full-fledged endorsement of the Bush legal framework or merely a temporary acceptance that will be addressed in time. But either way, it's worth remembering that Bagram has an arguably worse record than Abu Ghraib when it comes to prisoner abuses – there just weren't any publicly released pictures from Bagram.

Here's an Al Jazeera report, which both puts a human face on the situation and captures a US Officer's explicit statements on the legal status of the detainees and on the fact that Bagram contains prisoners from outside of Afghanistan:





Secrecy surrounding imprisonment is always worrisome, as public knowledge and legal recourse are the only means other than open revolt to keep abuse in check. Given how easy such abuse can be, how almost accidental or unintended, how impossible to investigate, an endorsement of institutionalized secrecy and questionable morality is playing with fire. For an administration that not only promised a change in detainee policy but would like to think of itself as pragmatic and rational, this is a scary step indeed.

Combine it with Hillary Clinton's remarks on China/Tibet relations, and you've got one truly awful week for human rights.

"Shamefully Disrespectful"

Matt Yglesias:

K-Lo:

Wow. Well, my inaugural good feelings were definitely spoiled a bit by the “Na Na Hey Hey … Goodbye” outburst on the Mall just now. How shamefully disrespectful. Keith Olbermann even thought so!

Wow. Well, my inaugural good feelings were definitely spoiled a bit by the realization that George W. Bush was heading off to live out his life in a lavish home as a multi-millionaire retiree rather than going to stand trial in the Hague. But hopefully Americans can put our differences aside and work together for a better future or something.

I'm with Ezra Klein:

His actions led to deaths of hundreds of thousands, the displacement of millions, and the impoverishment of more than we're likely to know. He will never go to jail. He will never be tried in Court. He will never be poor or hungry or homeless or drafted. And this country, sadly, has done away with the stocks. But he can be shamed.

And he should be. Forever. The self-delusion of his administration is startling. Last week, Chris Beam crashed the celebratory barbecue of the outgoing Bushies. It was hugs and kisses and high-fives all around. It was like watching Lehman's executives reminisce about the good times. Josh Bolten took the stage and emotionally toasted his colleagues. "If ever there was a group to leave government with their heads held high, this is it," he said. Yech. They can tell each other what they want. But they should have to hear from the country they harmed. Bush's awful, unpleasant, disrespectful post-presidency should serve as a warning to executives who would follow his path. Shaming him is not just appropriate. It's important.

Just to clear things up...

Things that are "Shamefully Disrespectful":
-Starting a war based on lies

Things that aren't "Shamefully Disrespectful":
-Being disrespectful to someone who started a war based on lies

I loved the heckling, and hearing it echo over the steps of the capital was genuinely cathartic. And I mean that in a good way, not in a Hillary Clinton "I'm going to ignore the will of the voters" way.

Happy Holidays, Part I: "Merry Christmas"

Happy Holidays, everyone! Just wanted to share the glorious new webcomic Red Phone by Marc Leahy, premised on the growing relationship between George W. Bush and Barack Obama:

The Colbert Transition

From photography analysis blog BAGnewsNotes comes this hilarious note about Stephen Colbert's relationship with the office of the presidency:

That was then.




This is now.

The end of satire? No, probably not. But things are going to be a little different.

More fun with your money

[Sec. Henry Paulson, pictured shortly after bailout bill passage]

No one could have seen this coming. Giving 700 billion dollars with no strings to the Bush administration was such a good idea:

The financial world was fixated on Capitol Hill as Congress battled over the Bush administration's request for a $700 billion bailout of the banking industry. In the midst of this late-September drama, the Treasury Department issued a five-sentence notice that attracted almost no public attention.

But corporate tax lawyers quickly realized the enormous implications of the document: Administration officials had just given American banks a windfall of as much as $140 billion.

The sweeping change to two decades of tax policy escaped the notice of lawmakers for several days, as they remained consumed with the controversial bailout bill. When they found out, some legislators were furious. Some congressional staff members have privately concluded that the notice was illegal. But they have worried that saying so publicly could unravel several recent bank mergers made possible by the change and send the economy into an even deeper tailspin.

"Did the Treasury Department have the authority to do this? I think almost every tax expert would agree that the answer is no," said George K. Yin, the former chief of staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation, the nonpartisan congressional authority on taxes. "They basically repealed a 22-year-old law that Congress passed as a backdoor way of providing aid to banks."

And then there's this:

The nation may be diving headlong into recession, but that's not stopping financial firms from a cherished year-end tradition: the awarding of bonuses.

The number of bankers who will share the bonus pool has also decreased because of layoffs, the report found.

The top executives will likely get paid "primarily in paper," meaning stocks and stock options, according to Alan Johnson of Johnson and Associates. Pay will be down, he said, but there will still be "thousands of people who make millions of dollars."

In the report, he said, however, that "thanks in part to the financial bailouts and mergers we've seen recently, the decline in incentive payments won't be as drastic as first thought."

Awesome. Well at least we've got that transparency we were promised:

[Neel Kashkari, the former(by several weeks) Goldman Sachs Executive in charge of giving away your money]

To see Neel Kashkari field questions from a crowded room, one might think he's still being paid by Goldman Sachs rather than American taxpayers.

The interim assistant secretary of the Treasury for financial stabilization yesterday had a tone of impatience during a question-and-answer session, leaving some attendees feeling cheated.

. . .

When it came time for questions, the former Goldman Sachs executive told the eager audience that he had time for just "two or three."

In response to the first question, about the government's latest lifeline for beleaguered insurance company American International Group, Kashkari gave a clipped response before quickly moving on.

"This morning's action at AIG was a one-off event" that was necessary for the financial stability of the markets, he said. "He didn't say anything that I couldn't have learned from going to the Web site," griped one mortgage entrepreneur. Treasury spokeswoman Jennifer Zuccarelli said it's not unusual for public officials to answer a few questions before moving on. Kashkari's impatient tone comes amid a growing desire for openness about how government agencies, including the Treasury, are handling billions of taxpayer dollars being used to prop up Wall Street.

Yesterday's news that the Treasury and Federal Reserve increased the size of American International Group's rescue to around $150 billion from $123 billion intensified concern that Uncle Sam isn't spending wisely.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg News sued the Federal Reserve for information under the US Freedom of Information Act, claiming the Fed refuses to identify the recipients of almost $2 trillion of emergency loans as well as the troubled assets the bank is accepting as collateral.

The more news that comes out about this thing, the worse it seems. It's important to remember that the those who strongly advocated passing this bailout weren't innocent bystanders caught up in a whirlwind, they knew what they were doing.

They were giving 700 billion dollars to the Bush Administration's Treasury Secretary without any meaningful strings attached. And it's not like you needed news stories like these to know that it probably wasn't going to end well.