To the wife of Italian Prime Minister Giovanni Gronchi…

To Pope John XXIII…

Maybe he just liked to sneak a peek at their shoes?

(h/t: Gaucho Politico & Lawyers, Guns & Money)

Bernie Madoff being pinned to the wall by a huge, farting bull…which is supposed to represent Wall Street.

All from the mind of Chinese artist Chen Wenling.

I mean, come on…that is AWESOME!

A question…if you had to create a sculpture that summed up what happened last year…what would it look like and why?

(Photo: BBC)

“Sometimes you have to make the tough decisions. If you think this has to be done, you have my blessing. But someday you guys are going to need to tell me how we ended up with a system like this. I know this is not the time to test them and put them through failure, but we’re not doing something right if we’re stuck with these miserable choices.”
- George W. Bush on September 16, 2008

That’s from an upcoming 19,000 word piece in The New Yorker entitled, “A Reporter at Large — Eight Days: The battle to save the American financial system piece.” It will be a must read for anybody interested in seeing how things went so horrible, terribly wrong, but as the Bush quote hints at…deregulation is why we were stuck with miserable choices.

If this raises your conservative/libertarian hackles, well, tough. It’s time to accept the fact that markets are not self regulating and never can be due to the very nature of capitalism itself.

Why do I bring this up? Well, this fall Obama is set to propose much tougher regulations on banking and the marketplace. So I want everybody to remember why we find ourselves in the economic situation we’re in and why we need to never let it happen again.

Until then…

The latest Carnival of Divided Government – Labor Day Edition has been posted at my home blog. The carnival is an irregularly scheduled compilation of links to new and traditional media commentary on the topic of divided government. I’ll highlight one link here.

This excerpt is from a 1959 letter written by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and referenced in a recent New York Times Op-Ed by Max Blumenthal – “Ike’s Other Warning“.

Eisenhower wrote the letter in reply to one Robert J. Biggs, a WWII veteran. Biggs was dissatisfied with the level of discourse in Washington D.C. and thought the President was not projecting sufficient strength and certitude. He goes on to say that Americans need “more of the attitude of a commanding officer who knows the goal and the mission and states, without evasion, the way it is to be done.” Ike took the time to write a long, thoughtful and honest letter to Mr. Biggs:

“As you know, for four years our government has been a divided government, with the Administration confronted by a Congress controlled by the opposition–and the two working, if not in opposition, at least at cross purposes much of the time. An example is the sparring that seems to go on constantly over our defense situation–and specifically over our missile position. It is difficult indeed to maintain a reasoned and accurately informed understanding of our defense situation on the part of our citizenry when many prominent officials, possessing no standing or expertness except as they themselves claim it, attempt to further their own ideas or interests by resort to statements more distinguished by stridency than by accuracy.”

As an exercise to the reader, I suggest rereading the above paragraph substituting “health care reform” for “missile position” and “defense situation”.

Ike continues the letter, explaining in more detail the burden and responsibility that our messy, democratic government puts on the citizenry:

“Even if this division in the government did not exist, I doubt that citizens like yourself could ever, under our democratic system, be provided with the universal degree of certainty, the confidence in their understanding of our problems, and the clear guidance from higher authority that you believe needed. Such unity is not only logical but indeed indispensable in a successful military organization, but in a democracy debate is the breath of life. This is to me what Lincoln meant by government “of the people, by the people, and for the people. … But while this responsibility is a taxing one to a free people it is their great strength as well–from millions of individual free minds come new ideas, new adjustments to emerging problems, and tremendous vigor, vitality and progress.”

The legion of bloggers and pundits complaining about the tone of the health care debate, and the difficulty of passing a health care reform bill because the masses seems insufficiently appreciative, would benefit from reading Ike’s letter.

H/T – Septimus at The Whig Blog

More at Divided We Stand United We Fall

” I think the interrogations were in violation of the Geneva Convention against torture that we ratified under President Reagan. I think that these interrogations, once publicized, helped al Qaeda recruit. I got that from an al Qaeda operative in a prison camp in Iraq who told me that. I think that the ability of us to work with our allies was harmed. And so — and I believe that information according to the FBI and others could have been gained through other methods.”
- John McCain on Face The Nation today

Yes folks, torture became a recruitment tool. And it’s apparently yet another reason we got bogged down in Iraq. Again, from McCain…

“Senator Lindsey Graham and I were in Camp Bucca, where there’s the 20,000-prisoner camp. We met with a former high- ranking member of al Qaeda. I said, how did you succeed so well in Iraq after the initial invasions? He said two things. One, the chaos that existed after the initial invasion, there was no order of any kind. Two, he said Abu Ghraib pictures allowed me and helped me to recruit thousands of young men to our cause. Now that’s al Qaeda.”

Does this surprise anybody?

The question now…will we learn?

Everybody’s abuzz about the new Wash Post story today that starts off with the idea that Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM) was turned into some type of “terrorist professor” because he was waterboarded.

And away we go…

The debate over the effectiveness of subjecting detainees to psychological and physical pressure is in some ways irresolvable, because it is impossible to know whether less coercive methods would have achieved the same result. But for defenders of waterboarding, the evidence is clear: Mohammed cooperated, and to an extraordinary extent, only when his spirit was broken in the month after his capture March 1, 2003, as the inspector general’s report and other documents released this week indicate.

Over a few weeks, he was subjected to an escalating series of coercive methods, culminating in 7 1/2 days of sleep deprivation, while diapered and shackled, and 183 instances of waterboarding. After the month-long torment, he was never waterboarded again.

“What do you think changed KSM’s mind?” one former senior intelligence official said this week after being asked about the effect of waterboarding. “Of course it began with that.”

Yes, of course it began with that. Why? BECAUSE IT BEGAN WITH THAT.

Also, KSM didn’t start giving these terrorism lectures until a full 2 YEARS LATER. The waterboarding lasted one month. Think maybe building rapport and trust with him over the next couple years did more than making him feel like he was drowning?

Not only that, during this early period KSM gave us a bunch of false information…

Mohammed, in statements to the International Committee of the Red Cross, said some of the information he provided was untrue.

“During the harshest period of my interrogation I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear in order to make the ill-treatment stop. I later told interrogators that their methods were stupid and counterproductive. I’m sure that the false information I was forced to invent in order to make the ill-treatment stop wasted a lot of their time,” he said.

When will people begin to understand that there is an inherent paradox in the idea of torture: you don’t know what you don’t know. So somebody can make up ANYTHING to get you stop torturing them and you’ll waste your time.

Of course the vast majority of interrogators will tell you this time and time and time again, but the opposition finds a few people who were able to beat some actionable intelligence out of somebody and that makes it alright for us to do

And that gets me to the real point of this post. Torture works? Again, no. Because it completely undermines the values that we’re fighting to defend. America is not a TV show. Fighting terrorism doesn’t work like that. And if you don’t understand that having policies that allow us to kidnap and torture anybody we want makes us look like the big bullies they accuse of being, makes it easier for more people to hate us and therefore makes us less safe, well, please think on this some more.

Seriously, really dig into the cause and effect of what we’re doing. Because “blowback” is real, and I fear that if we don’t stop what we’re doing we’re in for yet another round of it.

Still, to hear Republicans talk…reconciliation is this scary new thing that’s never been used.

Well, surprisingly, the folks over at Fox News put the lie to that…

Let’s repeat that Judd Gregg quote against for posterity…

Reconciliation is a rule of the senate that has been used before for purposes exactly like this on numerous occasions. Is there something wrong with majority rules? I don’t think so. The point, of course, is this…if you have 51 votes for your position you win.

51 wins. From one of the more moderate Republicans in the Senate. And he’s right. Majority rules in everything, especially elections. Why not here? Why do we have to get to 60 votes in order to pass anything without giving the other side the option to block it indefinitely with procedural stall tactics?

Long story short, Republicans set themselves up for this during Bush and if Dems decide to go the reconciliation route, well, tough.

MSNBC has put together a documentary of John, Bobby and Teddy and it’s set to air soon.

Here’s a preview of some of the interviews they got…

As I said, love them or hate them, if you’re a history geek like me you’ll be tuning in.

Our first head of the Department of Homeland Security has written a tell all and it’s more of the same we’ve heard from insiders about the former administration. They politicized nearly everything and made the wrong decision and nearly every turn.

From US News:

Among the headlines promoted by publisher Thomas Dunne Books: Ridge was never invited to sit in on National Security Council meetings; was “blindsided” by the FBI in morning Oval Office meetings because the agency withheld critical information from him; found his urgings to block Michael Brown from being named head of the emergency agency blamed for the Hurricane Katrina disaster ignored;

Never invited to sit in on National Security Council meetings? The director of the government agency that was created in the aftermath of 9/11?

WTF??????????

So yes, that’s a bombshell, but the one in the title seems to be even more craven…

and was pushed to raise the security alert on the eve of President Bush’s re-election, something he saw as politically motivated and worth resigning over.

Yes, 3 years after the worst terrorist attack in our country’s history, Bush and company were scaring people into voting for him. I think that tells you all you need to know about the guy and his crew.

My question…we finally going to get some mea culpas from the right or will Tom Ridge simply be smeared like Paul O’Neill, Richard Clarke and Scott McClellan?

I’m not holding my breath.

Many of us are already regard the Bush administration as a bad, distant memory, but today we’re reminded of just how morally bankrupt they were.

From Wash Post:

The dismissal of U.S. Attorney David C. Iglesias of New Mexico in December 2006 followed extensive communication among lawyers and political aides in the White House who hashed over complaints about his work on public corruption cases against Democrats, according to newly released e-mails and transcripts of closed-door House testimony by former Bush counsel Harriet Miers and political chief Karl Rove.

A campaign to oust Iglesias intensified after state GOP officials and Republican members of the congressional delegation apparently concluded that he was not pursuing the cases against Democrats in a way that could help then-Rep. Heather A. Wilson (R) in a tight reelection race in New Mexico, according to interviews and Bush White House e-mails released Tuesday by congressional investigators. The documents place the genesis of Iglesias’s dismissal earlier than previously known. [...]

The House panel focused most of its attention on Iglesias, a rising star in New Mexico who came to displease his political patrons. Miers told investigators that Rove called her in September 2006, “agitated” about the slow pace of public corruption cases against Democrats and weak efforts to pursue voter-fraud cases in the state. In the call, Miers said, Rove described Iglesias as a “serious problem” and said he wanted “something done” about it. Miers testified that she called then-Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty to pass along the concerns.

Yes, Rove didn’t say “I want Iglesias fired!”, but this is much more than nudge nudge wink wink. Miers admits that Rove said he wanted something done. That was September 2006. Two months later in November, Iglesias’ name was placed on a list for dismissal. In December he was fired.

Rove’s response? As if you even have to read it….

In a statement Tuesday, Rove asserted that he “never sought to influence the conduct of any prosecution” and did not decide which prosecutors were fired. He also accused Democrats of making “false accusations and partisan innuendoes.”

The only problem here with Rove’s hacky answers is the fact that Harriet Miers is now the one supplying the accusations and innuendoes. To me this is game, set, match.

Moving on…

Doug points this one out, and if true, well, no wonder France took a pass on backing us in Iraq.

French journalist Jean-Claude Maurice recounts the tale in his book release in March, Si Vous le Répétez, Je Démentirai (If You Repeat it, I Will Deny).

From Secular Humanism:

President George W. Bush told French President Jacques Chirac in early 2003 that Iraq must be invaded to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible’s satanic agents of the Apocalypse.

Honest. This isn’t a joke. The president of the United States, in a top-secret phone call to a major European ally, asked for French troops to join American soldiers in attacking Iraq as a mission from God.

Now out of office, Chirac recounts that the American leader appealed to their “common faith” (Christianity) and told him: “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East…. The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled…. This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.”

This bizarre episode occurred while the White House was assembling its “coalition of the willing” to unleash the Iraq invasion. Chirac says he was boggled by Bush’s call and “wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs.”

Again, if true, I think it speaks for itself.

And given Bush’s insistence on saying he was chosen by God, etc., we have every reason to believe that something like this is not only plausible, but also highly likely.

Ugh.

In this first part, note around the 4:15 mark how the era of easy money was at its worst during the period from 2002 to 2006.

Part One


A vitally important segment in this second part is Greenspan’s testimony around the 2:30 mark. He admits that he and his deregulation focused colleagues got it wrong and it nearly collapsed the world’s financial system.

Part Two


There’s another part to this series and I’ll post that when it becomes available.

Also, from the sound of the script, it appears as if they’re putting more pressure on Republicans to pass this than Dems…

As Louise and her “husband” — actually Harry Johnson — sat around the kitchen table, they pounded the message that Americans should not abandon health reform this time. “Looks like we may finally get health care reform,” Harry says. “It’s about time,” Louise responds. She complains about the cost of health insurance: “We need good coverage people can afford, coverage they can get –” Harry, finishing her sentence, says, “– even if they have a pre-existing condition.” Louise wraps up the conversation by urging a “little more cooperation and a little less politics, and we can get the job done this time.”

One additional thing that’s different this time around is the fact that the original Harry and Louise ads ran for nearly a year and encompassed a bunch of different spots. These new one seem to be only running for a couple weeks at most.

So is this what happens when you bring interest groups to the table early and often?

(h/t: National Journal)

After I read Matt Taibbi’s piece about Goldman Sachs gaming the oil/gas marketplace and wrote my own response, I started to think about the massive $24.3 billion budget deficit in California, and I wondered, “How could they get that far in the hole?”

Sure, the global economy has tanked the past couple years and revenues aren’t coming in like they were, but how can the gap be so vast? Because we’re not talking a couple billion dollars. This took some doing and I had a really hard time believing this was due to simple revenue shortfalls or excess expenditures on infrastructure, health care, welfare and schools.

Read more at True/Slant.

Happy Independence Day everybody. Hope you and yours have a fun and safe 4th.

And, as always, thank you so much for reading and joining the conversations here.

During this weekend’s D-Day remembrance ceremony, President Obama urged us not to forget those who fought for our freedom and what they managed to achieve.

Many estimate we are losing as many as 1,200 WW II veterans every day in America alone. But there’s no reason we have to lose their stories. For those of us with parents or grandparents who fought in WWII, it’s up to us to not let that war and its sacrifices drift into distant memory and mythology.

I’ve lived my life surrounded by stories of WW II, whether it’s personal stories about my grandfathers who both served in the Air Force, a college professor’s tale of escaping the Nazi invasion of Austria and then Poland or even just the biographies of the political leaders who’ve served in office during my lifetime: George H. W. Bush, Bob Dole, Jimmy Carter. Even though I was born 30 years and a few months after D Day, WW II never seemed all that long ago.

But now it is long ago. Soon there will be WW II remembrances with only a handful of veterans, or none at all. Soon, the only breathing link between our world and the world of the 1930s and 1940s will be through those of us who’ve heard the stories first-hand, who knew the very real people who served both at home and abroad.

We may call them the Greatest Generation or the WW II generation, but many of us just called them Mom or Dad or Grandma or Granddad. We know they were just human, no more or less flawed than we are, no more or less brave. And that’s what makes what they achieved all the more extraordinary. All the more worth remembering.

In memory of Henry Casey Carl. 1925 – 2009.

There are few images as iconic as this, and none that serve as both a realistic and symbolic portrayal of the war China has waged against freedom and free thinkers.

And while this one was snapped on June 5, 1989, I felt the need to share it today. Because as Americans we should remember Tinananmen and feel thankful that we live in a country where something like this could never happen.

One British journalist remembers…

The massive student protest of 1989 was seen by the world – as was its brutal suppression by the People’s Liberation Army, sent into Beijing by nervous and angry Communist Party bosses.

From just before midnight on June 3, I spent five hours on the streets among those unarmed people being shot by their own army.

Although the political drama took place in Tiananmen Square, we roamed for miles that night and saw killings in the suburbs and back streets.

Scores of trucks thundered down Chang An Avenue towards Tiananmen Square, each with soldiers firing down every side street.

Bewildered citizens were killed as they wandered outside to investigate the noise. Others died as bullets ripped through the thin walls of their traditional hutong houses.

Students who confronted the army were faced with thousands of soldiers firing volley after volley.

It was a hellish scene – at the city’s Children’s Hospital, I saw the floor awash with blood.

I have to admit, this all happened well before I started paying attention to politics, but what do you remember about those fateful days in 1989?

Basically, the GOP has been VERY white for a while and are getting less so. But not enough to really make a difference.

From FiveThirtyEight…first the GOP’s demos…

88 percent of George W. Bush’s voters in 2004, and 91 percent of them in 2000, were white. And nearly 98 percent of Ronald Reagan’s voters in 1980 were white as were 96 percent of Gerald Ford’s in 1976. The GOP is, in fact, slightly less white than it once was, as they do relatively better among Hispanics and Asians than among blacks (if still not particularly well), and Hispanics and Asians are starting to make up a larger fraction of the nonwhite (and overall) voting pool.

Now the Dems…

Consider this remarkable statistic. In 1980, 32 percent of the electorate consisted of white Democrats (or at least white Carter voters) — likewise, in 2008, 32 percent of the electorate consisted of white Obama voters. But whereas, in 1980, just 9 percent of the electorate were nonwhite Carter voters, 21 percent of the electorate were nonwhite Obama voters last year. Thus, Carter went down to a landslide defeat, whereas Obama defeated John McCain by a healthy margin.

The trend is there and the GOP isn’t doing anything to address it. Well, Bush tried to reach out to Hispanics, and he definitely had some success, but McCain’s campaign virtually ignored these voters when he flipflopped on immigration and that sunk him.

So, like any good product, the GOP needs to change with the times or face irrelevancy. But they’re in a tough situation since they’ve built so much of their power around the ideas of social conservatism and national security. Because any of the ideas that more and more people seem to favor are issues that would alienate the GOP’s base. And this is why many think that they’re doomed to become a regional party unless they can have a reformation…and quick.

We all knew this had to happen sooner or later, and it looks like the White House wants to put this issue to bed once and for all.

From Wash Post:

Government officials familiar with the CIA’s early interrogations say the most powerful evidence of apparent excesses is contained in the “top secret” May 7, 2004, inspector general report, based on more than 100 interviews, a review of the videotapes and 38,000 pages of documents.

The full report remains closely held, although White House officials have told political allies that they intend to declassify it for public release when the debate quiets over last month’s release of the Justice Department’s interrogation memos…

Although some useful information was produced, the report concluded that “it is difficult to determine conclusively whether interrogations have provided information critical to interdicting specific imminent attacks,” according to the Justice Department’s declassified summary of it.

And let’s note the date when this was finished: May 7, 2004.

That means that Bush and company had a report in their hands that was THE most extensive look at their torture program and they completely ignored it.

Why?

Because admitting it at that time would have meant certain defeat for Bush in the 2004 election. And admitting it after the election would have completely discredited the administration.

So then, to all of you who continue to think that the Bush continued to sanction the torture techniques because it made this country safer, please, wake up already.

He was known for his dedication to supply-side economics and ushering in an entirely new era for the GOP.

Here’s more from TIME:

It is hard now to imagine the intramural fights that rent the Republicans in the late 1970s and early 1980s over tax policy. Following the economic troubles of the mid and late 1970s, a group of outspoken Republicans championed an array of tax cuts to stimulate the economy as the Carter era ended and the Reagan era approached. (See TIME’s photos: Ronald Reagan Remembered)

More than anyone else it was Kemp, starting in the late 1970s as a congressman from Buffalo, who led the crusade for a series of specific proposals to cut income tax rates that formed the basis of measures that were both adopted by candidate Reagan in the 1980 race and then enacted during the Regan presidency that followed. Kemp’s tax rate cutting crusade culminated in a massive reform of the tax code in 1986 that members of both parties supported.

Tax cuts aside, what most people in my generation know Kemp for is his run as Bob Dole’s VP in 1996 since that’s when we were first allowed to vote…

In 1996, another longtime rival, Kansas Senator Robert Dole, tapped Kemp to be his running mate in his quest for the White House against incumbent President Bill Clinton. Dole was hoping to unify his divided party by choosing the supply sider to round out the ticket. “Get me the quarterback,” Dole told his campaign manager, Scott Reed, in a move that surprised many in the party. The former Buffalo Bills quarterback was never an easy political partner. During the Dole campaign, Kemp sometimes performed as if he was at the top of the ticket.

Rest in peace Mr. Kemp.