As a matter of fact, America’s current health care system wastes considerably more than a trillion dollars every year. We know that because countries such as France, Germany, Japan, and Finland, with comparable standards of living to ours, spend roughly half what the United States spends annually on health care per citizen, while covering everyone and achieving better results. So if the total cost of American health care over the coming decade reaches $40 trillion, as economists expect, then we will be “wasting” approximately $20 trillion, or $2 trillion a year.
The New York Observer via True Blue Liberal

7.2.2009 U.S. Nuns Facing Vatican Scrutiny

“They think of us as an ecclesiastical work force,” said Sister Sandra M. Schneiders, professor emerita of New Testament and spirituality at the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, in California. “Whereas we are religious, we’re living the life of total dedication to Christ, and out of that flows a profound concern for the good of all humanity. So our vision of our lives, and their vision of us as a work force, are just not on the same planet.”
NYT

7.1.2009 Rules of the Wronged

In which Maureen coins the word "telenovela"

4. When your husband turns into a Harlequin romance, babbling to The A.P. — yes, even The A.P. thought it was T.M.I. — about a magical encounter on an open-air dance floor in Uruguay, “a soul that touches yours in a way that no one’s ever has,” and the “left brain and right brain” compartmentalization of “the world of ideas that impact this country and state” and “the pursuit of happiness, whatever that is,” just beat it. NYT via Anne Atherton

Also: If you’re Baptist, you shouldn’t be dancing period.
You know why Baptists don’t have sex standing up? They might be accused of dancing.
Anne Atherton, quoting hackworth1

And, as if that weren't enough: "God is My Doorman: Mark Sanford for Non-Christians"
Huffington Post | Chris Kelly via Anne Atherton

You could see this coming a mile off: having initiated the worst foreign policy decision in recent times, Cheney doesn't want the occupation to end any time soon. More to the point, he is gearing up to blame Obama if the withdrawal leads to bloodshed or chaos. I predicted this years back and it's quite remarkable to see it come to pass. Every now and again, you lapse into thinking that these people have some lingering trace of shame or accountability or decency. And then Cheney cracks open his mouth and you realize that a man capable of inflicting torture on countless prisoners is capable of pretty much anything.
The Daily Dish

Scalia breaks ranks, slams Bush Fed on bank regulation
McClatchy

... In the end, it seems to me that the Supreme Court’s decision in Ricci is an outright rejection of the lower courts’ analysis of the case, including by Judge Sotomayor. But on the other hand, the Court recognizes that the issue was unsettled. The fact that the Court’s four more liberal members would affirm the Second Circuit shows that Judge Sotomayor’s views were far from outlandish and put her in line with Judge Souter, who she will replace.
ScotusBlog.com:Tom Goldstein

For seven months, The New York Times managed to keep out of the news the fact that one of its reporters, David Rohde, had been kidnapped by the Taliban.
...
Joseph M. Reagle, an adjunct professor of communications at New York University who studies Wikipedia, said he was not sure whether its role in suppressing news about Mr. Rohde would prompt an outcry among longtime editors, because in the Rohde case, lives were at stake.

“Wikipedia has, over time, instituted gradually more control because of some embarrassing incidents, particularly involving potentially libelous material, and some people get histrionic about it, proclaiming the death of Wikipedia,” he said. “But the idea of a pure openness, a pure democracy, is a naïve one.”
NYT:RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

Billmon: After all, what Norm (Coleman) is threatening to do -- if he can't get his way in state court -- is to demand that the US Supremes go storming through the equal protection door they opened just a crack, and then promptly tried to close again, in Bush v. Gore.

But if we're really going to start vigorously applying the 14th Amendment to how votes are cast and counted in this country, then a whole bunch of GOP-friendly election realities are going to be open to constitutional challenge. How, for example, is it "equal" for poor and urban precincts to have 1/5th the number of voting machines per capita as wealthy surburban ones? Is it "equal" for election officials to routinely deny elderly, undereducated or inexperienced voters the assistance they need to understand complex, confusing and/or poorly constructed ballots? Is it "equal" for prosecutors to aggressively pursue registration fraud cases against ACORN, while generally ignoring those against GOP-leaning groups?

Can you say "disparate impact"? How about "protected class"?

You really can go on and on with this -- which is precisely why Scalia and company tried so very hard to make their power grab a "good for one use only" ticket. But now Norm is putting their handwork at risk. And who knows? By the time his case reaches the US Supremes, maybe there will be a few new faces on the bench, liberal faces, faces that wouldn't mind at all taking Scalia's legal legerdemain and shoving it right back up his runty ass.
Daily Kos

The old Economist line about the ultimate European — he combines British efficiency, French moral courage, Italian fighting spirit, and a German sense of humor, in short, he is a Belgian — is, no doubt unfair. But funny.
Via SlyRich

... Yes, the worst terrorist attack in our history was perpetrated by a foreign conspiracy. But the second worst, the Oklahoma City bombing, was perpetrated by an all-American lunatic. Politicians and media organizations wind up such people at their, and our, peril.
NYT

When former Vice President Cheney said recently that what happened at Abu Ghraib was the work of "a few sadistic prison guards" acting on their own, he bore false witness.
...
I have suggested that the Attorney General appoint independent experts -- such as a few retired federal judges -- to review all the materials related to detainee abuses and make recommendations about whether and, if so, how officials should be held accountable.

This is not a question that should get tied up in politics -- it is a legal matter and it's about assuring a thorough and sober assessment of this chapter in our history so that we can regain what we have lost, including our credibility to object to the use of abusive tactics on our own troops and to human rights violations in other countries.

Only once we face the facts can we restore America's image as a country that not only espouses ideals of human rights, but lives by them. That is how we win back hearts and minds and rally the people of the world to the great causes that face mankind.
video here

In a 5-4 decision yesterday, the Supreme Court ruled "that elected judges must step aside from cases when large campaign contributions from interested parties create the appearance of bias." The decision, "the first to say the Constitution's due process clause has a role to play in policing the role of money in judicial elections," found that excessive campaign contributions can pose "an unconstitutional threat to a fair trial."
...
In a dissent joined by conservative justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito, Chief Justice John Roberts argued that this decision would encourage "groundless" charges that other "judges are biased." "The end result will do far more to erode public confidence in judicial impartiality than an isolated failure to recuse in a particular case," Roberts argued .
...
it appears that Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor agrees with Souter that judges cannot be for sale." In a 1996 speech, Sotomayor argued that "[w]e would never condone private gifts to judges about to decide a case implicating the gift-givers' interests," yet "our system of election financing permits extensive private, including corporate, financing of candidates' campaigns, raising again and again the question what the difference is between contributions and bribes."
Think Progress

Members of Congress are seriously considering proposals to rein in the growth of health spending by taking tens of billions of dollars of Medicare money away from doctors and hospitals in high-cost areas and using it to help cover the uninsured or treat patients in lower-cost regions.
...
Mr. Orszag says health spending could be reduced by as much as 30 percent, or $700 billion a year, without compromising the quality of care, if more doctors and hospitals practiced like those in low-cost areas. The supply of hospitals, medical specialists and high-tech equipment “appears to generate its own demand,” Mr. Orszag has said.
ROBERT PEAR:NYT

... A shocker: The Constitution, which we love for the limits it places on government power, not only constrains government, it empowers it. Limited government is not no government.
...
American conservatism has always had the problem of being misnamed. It is, at root, the political twin to classical European liberalism, a freedoms-based belief in limiting the power of government to intrude on the liberties of the people. It is the opposite of European conservatism (which Winston Churchill referred to as reverence for king and church); it is rather the heir to John Locke and James Madison, and a belief that the people should be the masters of their government, not the reverse (a concept largely turned on its head by the George W. Bush presidency).
LAT via Anne Atherton

The increase in public debt was, however, dwarfed by the rise in private debt, made possible by financial deregulation. The change in America’s financial rules was Reagan’s biggest legacy. And it’s the gift that keeps on taking.
NYT

... But a yearlong investigation by Self—including more than 50 interviews and records leaked from one of the world’s largest generic-drug companies, Ranbaxy Laboratories—raises questions about whether some new generics are as safe or effective as the brand names. Although Dr. Kesselheim’s review looked at all of the available data, many of those studies were completed before the recent flood of generics hit the market and many generic-drug factories moved overseas. In FDA applications for new generic drugs, nearly 90 percent of the factories providing active ingredients are located overseas, where the agency’s inspection rate dropped 57 percent between 2001 and 2008.
aol health via Anne Atherton

5.25.09 Bush's Shocking Biblical Prophecy Emerges: God Wants to "Erase" Mid-East Enemies "Before a New Age Begins"

... There can be little doubt now that President Bush's reason for launching the war in Iraq was, for him, fundamentally religious. He was driven by his belief that the attack on Saddam's Iraq was the fulfilment of a Biblical prophesy in which he had been chosen to serve as the instrument of the Lord.
AlterNet via Anne Atherton

5.22.2009 Jack Goldsmith: The Cheney Fallacy

...The main difference between the Obama and Bush administrations concerns not the substance of terrorism policy, but rather its packaging. The Bush administration shot itself in the foot time and time again, to the detriment of the legitimacy and efficacy of its policies, by indifference to process and presentation. The Obama administration, by contrast, is intensely focused on these issues.
...
If this analysis is right, then the former vice president is wrong to say that the new president is dismantling the Bush approach to terrorism. President Obama has not changed much of substance from the late Bush practices, and the changes he has made, including changes in presentation, are designed to fortify the bulk of the Bush program for the long-run. Viewed this way, President Obama is in the process of strengthening the presidency to fight terrorism.
The New Republic via Norman

5.22.2009 More on The Dick Cheney, via Norman: (Here)

5.18.2009 GQ Articles, Pics, and More on men.style.com I cannot believe this. Oh, yes I can., Anne Atherton

5.3.2009 Interrogation Debate Sharply Divided Bush White House MARK MAZZETTI and SCOTT SHANE: NYT

4.25.2009 Bernie Sanders: Socialist Successes

Representative Spencer Bachus is one of the only people I know from Alabama. I bet I'm the only socialist he knows. I'm certainly the only one the congressman from Birmingham could name after darkly claiming that there are 17 socialists lurking in the House of Representatives.
...
And what we learned impressed us. Finland is a country which provides high-quality health care to all of its people with virtually no out-of-pocket expense; where parents and their young children receive free excellent childcare and/or parental leave benefits which dwarf what our nation provides; where college and graduate education is free to students and where children in the public school system often record the highest results in international tests. In Finland, where 80 percent of workers belong to unions, all employees enjoy at least 30 days paid vacation and the gap between the rich and poor is far more equitable than in the United States.
...
Despite all the rhetoric about "family values," workers in the United States now work the longest hours of any people in a major country. Our health care system is disintegrating. At last count, 47 million Americans had no health insurance while we spend twice as much per capita on health care as any other nation.
...
Whether we live in Burlington, Vt. or Birmingham, Ala., we should be prepared to study and learn from the successes of social-democratic countries. Name-calling and scare tactics just won't do.
HuffPo via Anne Atherton

Five years after the Abu Ghraib revelations, we must acknowledge that our government methodically authorized torture and lied about it. But we also must contemplate the possibility that it did so not just out of a sincere, if criminally misguided, desire to “protect” us but also to promote an unnecessary and catastrophic war. Instead of saving us from “another 9/11,” torture was a tool in the campaign to falsify and exploit 9/11 so that fearful Americans would be bamboozled into a mission that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda. The lying about Iraq remains the original sin from which flows much of the Bush White House’s illegality.

Levin suggests — and I agree — that as additional fact-finding plays out, it’s time for the Justice Department to enlist a panel of two or three apolitical outsiders, perhaps retired federal judges, “to review the mass of material” we already have. The fundamental truth is there, as it long has been. The panel can recommend a legal path that will insure accountability for this wholesale betrayal of American values.

President Obama can talk all he wants about not looking back, but this grotesque past is bigger than even he is. It won’t vanish into a memory hole any more than Andersonville, World War II internment camps or My Lai. The White House, Congress and politicians of both parties should get out of the way. We don’t need another commission. We don’t need any Capitol Hill witch hunts. What we must have are fair trials that at long last uphold and reclaim our nation’s commitment to the rule of law.
NYT OpEd

The Central American wars were only one ugly facet of the Reagan administration's world impact, but they were hardly an exception to the overall trend. Whatever Professor Diggins and the others believe was in Ronald Reagan's heart and mind, during his years in office, the United States stood for "freedom, peace, [and] disarmament" only in the administration's rhetoric. The reality - the spectrum of actual policies behind that image - was tragically different. The Reagan legacy must be remembered as it really was - so that its crimes will not be repeated.
John Lamperti:Truthout.org via Anne Atherton

4.22.2009 Mark Benjamin: Torture planning began in 2001, Senate report reveals

"While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not being successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq," Army psychiatrist Maj. Paul Burney is quoted in the Senate report as saying about Guantánamo. "The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish this link ... there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results."
Salon

... Take. for instance, the torment of Al Qaeda suspect Abu Zubaydah, the guinea pig for the C.I.A.’s most abusive interrogation techniques, who was critically injured in a gunfight and captured on March 28, 2002. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel authorized harrowing tactics for interrogating Zubaydah in the infamous “Bybee Torture Memo” of August 1, 2002, which Obama released publicly last week. So, presumably, whatever happened to Zubaydah after August is indemnified by the Obama invisibility cloak. But what about what happened to Zubaydah in the four months before?
...
By June 2002—again, months before the Department of Justice gave the legal green light for interrogations—an F.B.I. special agent on the scene of the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah refused to participate in what he called “borderline torture,” according to a D.O.J. investigation cited in the Levin report. Soon after, F.B.I. Director Robert Mueller commanded his personnel to stay away from the C.I.A.’s coercive interrogations.

What did the F.B.I. see in the spring of 2002? And exactly who was involved? How high up was this activity authorized? Is it off-limits for criminal investigation?
New Yorker

President Obama’s unwillingness to see his first term dominated by the crimes of the Bush administration is comprehensible.

Yet there is a limit. The latest case of the human moral vacuum created and encouraged during the Bush years is so outrageous, perverse, sadistic and nihilistic that it demands attention, for all that it tells us about the rest that has happened. I speak of the ordered, authorized and conscientiously supervised waterboarding of two prisoners 266 times.

The men who authorized, ordered and performed such acts should be hanged. It is as simple as that.
Truthdig via Anne Atherton (One Nation does not endorse hanging)

The New Nattering Nabobs of Negativism Are Gunning For Obama's Judicial Nominees: A Republican Strategy That We Must All Hope Fails
Findlaw.com via Anne Atherton

4.19.2009 Frank Rich: The Bigots’ Last Hurrah

Iowa and Vermont were the tipping point because they struck down the right’s two major arguments against marriage equality. The unanimous ruling of the seven-member Iowa Supreme Court proved that the issue is not merely a bicoastal fad. The decision, written by Mark Cady, a Republican appointee, was particularly articulate in explaining that a state’s legalization of same-sex marriage has no effect on marriage as practiced by religions. “The only difference,” the judge wrote, is that “civil marriage will now take on a new meaning that reflects a more complete understanding of equal protection of the law.”
...
As marital equality haltingly but inexorably spreads state by state for gay Americans in the years to come, Utah will hardly be in the lead to follow Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa and Vermont. But the fact that it too is taking its first steps down that road is extraordinary. It is justice, not a storm, that is gathering. Only those who have spread the poisons of bigotry and fear have any reason to be afraid.
NYT via Norman (my bold)

These memos are not an honest attempt to set the legal limits on interrogations, which was the authors’ statutory obligation. They were written to provide legal immunity for acts that are clearly illegal, immoral and a violation of this country’s most basic values.
...
Until Americans and their leaders fully understand the rules the Bush administration concocted to justify such abuses — and who set the rules and who approved them — there is no hope of fixing a profoundly broken system of justice and ensuring that that these acts are never repeated.
...
After eight years without transparency or accountability, Mr. Obama promised the American people both. His decision to release these memos was another sign of his commitment to transparency. We are waiting to see an equal commitment to accountability.
NYT Editorial via Norman

Looked at from a distance, the Bush administration wanted to do two things at once: to declare to the world that freedom is on the march, and human rights are coming to the world with American help, while simultaneously declaring to captives that the US has no interest in the law, human rights, accountability, transparency or humanity. They wanted to give hope to all the oppressed of the planet, while surgically banishing all hope from the prisoners they captured and tortured. And the only way they could pull this off is by the total secrecy they constructed and defended. So we had a public government respectful of the rule of law, and a secret government whose main goal was persuading terror suspects that there was no rule of law at all. It is hard to convey just how dangerous this was and is.
...
The question of prosecution remains. It's a painful decision. My view is that those who pay the legal price should be, first and foremost, those who authorized this at the highest levels. My view is also that it is a travesty that the Abu Ghraib reservists were prosecuted, and yet far, far more culpable people are claiming it would be too divisive to prosecute them. My view is that no one is above the law, and that when a society based on law prosecutes the powerless and excuses the powerful, it is corroding its own soul.

But my view is also that the president has acted wisely in this. As president in wartime, he knows how wounding it would be to engage in this kind of activity right now. But he has also ensured that a process of transparency continue. A full accounting of all of this - by people from both parties with real power to investigate and report (a 9/11 style commission, in other words) would be a natural next step. There is still much we don't know. It should take its time to get everything right. Justice can be slow as long as it is guaranteed. ...
The Daily Dish (mybold)

Criticisms directed at Obama and Holder for advocating immunity for CIA officials who relied in "good faith" on DOJ memos (a mere subset of the government criminals) is absolutely warranted. But, it is not Obama's sole responsibility -- or even his decision -- to prosecute. As a strictly legal matter, that is a decision for the Attorney General, independently, to make; it is Eric Holder who has the obligation to enforce the law, independent of anything Obama wants or says and regardless of what public opinion demands.
...
Regardless of the reasons, it is clear that Obama will not single-handedly eliminate the immunity from the rule of law which the political class and other elites have arrogated unto themselves. If anything, as his comments yesterday reflect, he is likely to affirm and defend that immunity (and, obviously, he personally benefits from its ongoing vitality). Demanding that political leaders be subjected to the rule of law -- and finding ways to force the appointment of a Special Prosecutor -- is what citizens ought to be doing. Either we care about the rule of law or we don't -- and if we do, we'll find the ways to demand its application to the politically powerful criminals who broke multiple laws over the last eight years. Obama's release of those torture memos yesterday makes that choice unambiguously clear and enables the right to choice to be made.
Salon

4.15.2009 Kos: Where we get our information

... While newspapers were the most common source of information, they accounted for just 123 out of 628 total original information sources, or just shy of 20 percent. And a huge chunk of that, up to half, came from links in the Abbreviated Pundit Roundup, which is specifically designed to track what some of the nation's top pundits are yammering about. In the unlikely and tragic event that every single newspaper went out of business today, we'd have little problem replacing them as a source of information. Even most of the pundits we're following would stick around somewhere or other. It's not as if Paul Krugman's fate is intertwined in any way with the NY Times'.
dailykos.com

Yesterday, Ken Johnson at the New Bedford Eagle-Tribune in Massachusetts, noticed something fishy going on with the letters to the editor his paper was receiving:
...
It turns out, these letters came from the Dewey Square Group, a Boston-based political marketing and consulting firm, who has been hired by America's Health Insurance Plans, the insurance industry lobby, to fight against President Obama's plan to stop subsidizing private insurers through Medicare Advantage.
...
So, the question should be asked: Does the insurance industry, as represented by America's Health Insurance Plans, endorse using unsuspecting Americans in a fake grassroots campaign to combat a government giveaway that is in danger of being repealed? Are these the kind of tactics we can expect when the insurance industry tries to manufacture "grassroots" opposition to health care reform later this year?

The silence on the part of AHIP says all you and I need to know.
JasonRosenbaum:Oxdown Gazette

What I find unpleasant but nonetheless poetic justice is that the 30% who were all for illegal warrantless wiretapping and internet surveillance sweeps when Muslims and envoronmentalist hippies were the prime targets might be feeling a whole lot different now that they themselves may well be the subject of such spying. Spying that the Obama administration has strongly defended by claiming a clause in the wingnuts' beloved Patriot Act allows the government protection by "sovereign immunity" from lawsuits. If you hit the irony with a hammer (and sickle) it would ring.

To paraphrase the old joke about the asylum's call waiting service: "If you're paranoid, stay online - we know where to find you."
Newshoggers.com

One customer, for example, identifies himself as a Ph.D. student in aerospace engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He or she (there is no name on the order) is interested in purchasing a 200-page dissertation. The student writes that the dissertation must be "well-researched" and includes format requirements and a general outline. Attached to the order is a one-page description of Ph.D. requirements taken directly from MIT's Web site. The student also suggests areas of emphasis like "static and dynamic stability of aircraft controls."
The Chronicle of Highter Education via Sly Rich

Emblematic of the assault is the effort to pass an international ban on religious defamation supported by United Nations General Assembly President Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann. Brockmann is a suspended Roman Catholic priest who served as Nicaragua's foreign minister in the 1980s under the Sandinista regime, the socialist government that had a penchant for crushing civil liberties before it was tossed out of power in 1990. Since then, Brockmann has literally embraced such free-speech-loving figures as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whom he wrapped in a bear hug at the U.N. last year.
WaPo

4.5.2009 It Really Is All Greenspan's Fault

... Here's Taylor's take. Short interest rates fell in 2001 in response to the dot-com bust. But--and here's the important moment--beginning in 2002, the Taylor rule indicated that Greenspan ought to have tightened. Indeed, from 2002 to 2005, rates ought to have climbed to a touch over 5% and then stayed there through 2006.

But the Fed kept to a loose monetary stance, and rates kept falling during the period 2002 through 2004. Rates didn't start back up until middle of 2004 and didn't reach 5% until 2006. You can check this out in Figure 1, below.
Forbes

Gabriel Byrne’s brooding psychoanalyst on “In Treatment” might envy Barack Obama’s calming psychoanalysis in Europe. He may not have come away with all he wanted substantively. His hand was too weak going in, and there was too much hostility toward America, thanks to W.’s blunders and Cheney’s bullying. But he showed a psychological finesse that has been missing from American leadership for a long time.
NYT via Norman

... The parallels between G.M. and the likes of Citigroup are uncanny. Much as bloated financial institutions gorged on mortgage-backed derivatives even when the underlying fundamentals made no rational sense, so G.M. doubled down on sure-to-be obsolete S.U.V.’s and trucks to serve a market transitorily enthralled by them. Much as the housing boom’s collapse left the get-rich-quick holders of AAA-rated mortgage derivatives with worthless paper, so the oil price spike left consumers trapped with self-indulgent, wealth-depleting gas guzzlers. In both instances, the customers were not entirely innocent.
NYT via Norman

"The fight to protect the accuracy and independence of the 2010 census has just begun," said Rep. Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, the top Republican on a House subcommittee overseeing the census. "President Obama has made clear that he intends to employ the political manipulation of census data for partisan gain."
...
A congressional aide familiar with Census matters said Groves has "bulletproof scientific credentials" and is "really highly regarded by his peers as a low-key, determined guy who's been really focused on reducing error in survey research for his whole career."
Mark Blumenthal:Pollster.com

... It's not just that the overwhelming majority of scientists are now convinced that evolution is inscribed in the fossil record and in the lineaments of molecular biology. It is more that evolutionists will say in advance which evidence, if found, would refute them and force them to reconsider. ("Rabbit fossils in the pre-Cambrian layer" was, I seem to remember, the response of Prof. J.B.S. Haldane.) Try asking an "intelligent design" advocate to stipulate upfront what would constitute refutation of his world view and you will easily see the difference between the scientific method and the pseudoscientific one.
Newsweek.com

Spain’s national newspapers, El País and Público reported that the Spanish national security court has opened a criminal probe focusing on Bush Administration lawyers who pioneered the descent into torture at the prison in Guantánamo. The criminal complaint can be examined here. Público identifies the targets as University of California law professor John Yoo, former Department of Defense general counsel William J. Haynes II (now a lawyer working for Chevron), former vice presidential chief-of-staff David Addington, former attorney general and White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, former Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, now a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and former Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith.
...
The Spanish criminal court now may seek the arrest of any of the targets if they travel to Spain or any of the 24 nations that participate in the European extraditions convention (it would have to follow a more formal extradition process in other countries beyond the 24). The Bush lawyers will therefore run a serious risk of being apprehended if they travel outside of the United States.
Harper's via Anne Brown

On page 8, it refers to the Executive order of November 13, 2001 "Su equivalente en el Derecho Español sería el Real Decreto" = "Its equivalent in the law would be the Spanish Royal Decree"

3.26.2009 Garrison Keillor: The real American dream

Salon Thanks Norman, we needed that

The number on that little sticker, not only is the price look number, it also tells how the product is grown or created. This has made news recently with the release of the new rules for “organic” labeling.

For conventionally grown fruit, the PLU code on the sticker consists of four numbers. Organically grown fruit have a five-numeral PLU beginning with the number 9. Genetically engineered fruit has a five-numeral PLU beginning with the number 8.
MissouriFamilies.org Via Anne Brown

3.26.2009 Chris Hedges: America Is in Need of a Moral Bailout

...Sadism is as much a part of popular culture as it is of corporate culture. It dominates pornography, runs like an electric current through reality television and trash-talk programs and is at the core of the compliant, corporate collective. Corporatism is about crushing the capacity for moral choice. And it has its logical fruition in Abu Ghraib, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and our lack of compassion for the homeless, our poor, the mentally ill, the unemployed and the sick.

“The political and economic forces fuelling such crimes against humanity—whether they are unlawful wars, systemic torture, practiced indifference to chronic starvation and disease or genocidal acts—are always mediated by educational forces,” Giroux said. “Resistance to such acts cannot take place without a degree of knowledge and self-reflection. We have to name these acts and transform moral outrage into concrete attempts to prevent such human violations from taking place in the first place.”

The single most important quality needed to resist evil is moral autonomy. Moral autonomy, as Immanuel Kant wrote, is possible only through reflection, self-determination and the courage not to cooperate.
Truthdig.com via Anne Brown

... The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron — a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers.
...
n the biggest joke of all, Cassano's wheeling and dealing was regulated by the Office of Thrift Supervision, an agency that would prove to be defiantly uninterested in keeping watch over his operations. How a behemoth like AIG came to be regulated by the little-known and relatively small OTS is yet another triumph of the deregulatory instinct. Under another law passed in 1999, certain kinds of holding companies could choose the OTS as their regulator, provided they owned one or more thrifts (better known as savings-and-loans). Because the OTS was viewed as more compliant than the Fed or the Securities and Exchange Commission, companies rushed to reclassify themselves as thrifts. In 1999, AIG purchased a thrift in Delaware and managed to get approval for OTS regulation of its entire operation.

Making matters even more hilarious, AIGFP — a London-based subsidiary of an American insurance company — ought to have been regulated by one of Europe's more stringent regulators, like Britain's Financial Services Authority. But the OTS managed to convince the Europeans that it had the muscle to regulate these giant companies. By 2007, the EU had conferred legitimacy to OTS supervision of three mammoth firms — GE, AIG and Ameriprise.

That same year, as the subprime crisis was exploding, the Government Accountability Office criticized the OTS, noting a "disparity between the size of the agency and the diverse firms it oversees." Among other things, the GAO report noted that the entire OTS had only one insurance specialist on staff — and this despite the fact that it was the primary regulator for the world's largest insurer! Matt Taibbi:Rolling Stone via Norman

3.16.2009 Now I get it: How AIG Destroyed the World

AIG was in the business of issuing credit default swaps, which are essentially insurance policies that protect lenders from defaults by borrowers.
...
While we all talk about AIG as some sort of monolithic entity, the reality is that it is unlikely that any of the people who received these bonuses bear any personal culpability for AIG's bad decisions. Decisions about high-level business strategy at big companies like AIG are made by a very small group of people. The fateful decision to go heavy into the credit default swap market was most likely made by no more than a few people, and from what I understand, they are no longer with the company. Everyone else, even within the financial products division, either worked on other stuff or acted at the direction of their bosses. Their jobs weren't to formulate investment strategy for the company, but to execute transactions. And at companies like this, it is true that a good portion of your yearly salary is expected to come in the form of a lump sum payment (called a "bonus"), regardless of the companiy's performance.
Anonymous Liberal

Attorney General Eric Holder signaled a change on medical marijuana policy Wednesday, saying federal agents will target marijuana distributors only when they violate both federal and state law.
Time:DEVLIN BARRETT

The Business Roundtable, which represents the largest U.S. corporations, released a study showing that for every $100 spent in the United States on healthcare, a group of five leading economic competitors -- Canada, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom and France -- spend about 63 cents.
Donna Smith:Reuters via Anne Brown

When it comes to disability pensions, you ought to include congressmen, especially these remarkable Republicans who, in the midst of a serious banking crisis, are recycling Herbert Hoover and decrying socialism and paying homage to a fat sweaty guy living alone with his cat in a five-mansion compound in West Palm Beach. At the moment, he seems to be steering the Republican Party like it's his personal power boat and Mitch McConnell is the girl in the bikini on water skis.
Salon

3.11.2009 The rise & rise of Pakistan's Taliban The Times of India via Amarjit

3.11.2009 Gary Kamiya: John Yoo is sorry for nothing

As a government lawyer, Yoo was the equivalent of one of those doctors who did "research" for Hitler.
Salon via Norman

The Justice Department’s ethics office is in the final stages of a report that sharply criticizes Bush administration lawyers who wrote legal opinions justifying waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods, according to department and Congressional officials.
SCOTT SHANE:NYT

3.9.2009 Could an Ingredient in Ice Cream Prevent HIV Transmission?
Discovermagazine.com

3.9.2009 Obama Brings Experts Back to Endangered Species Policy
Discovermagazine.com

3.6.2009 Al-Marri detention case ended

The Supreme Court on Friday wiped out a lower court ruling that gave the President the authority to detain indefinitely as terrorism suspects individuals who are living legally in the United States. The order also approved transfer of Ali Saleh Kahlah Al-Marri from military custody to civilian custody for a trial on criminal charges in a regular federal court, presumably in Illinois. The order is available here.
Scotusblog.com

Preventing a judicial ruling on the power to imprison without charges
...
But there were numerous steps the Obama administration could have and should have taken to prevent a repeat of the Padilla travesty, including: (a) explicitly renouncing the Bush administration's view that the President possesses this radical power (the super-transparent Obama DOJ refuses to comment on its view in that regard even though Candidate Obama explicitly rejected a similar theory -- see Questions 5 and 10); and (b) urging the Supreme Court to resolve the question notwithstanding Al-Marri's indictment, as Al-Marri's lawyers requested, on the ground that it meets one of the judicially established exceptions to the "mootness" doctrine. The Obama administration did neither: instead, it explicitly refused to renounce this power while simultaneously ensuring that the Supreme Court would -- once again -- refrain from ruling on its constitutionality:
Salon

But it is when talking about Afghanistan, where the US is shifting its focus to, and where Kilcullen's ideas may find a fertile testing ground over the next couple of years, that Bacevich does us all the greatest favor by pointing out just how far afield Kilcullen's ideas are.

In 2008, Kilcullen left Baghdad and turned his attention to Afghanistan, surveying the situation there at the behest of then-Secretary Rice. More than seven years after U.S. forces first arrived, the news coming out of Kabul is almost uniformly bad. Kilcullen knows this but insists that the war “remains winnable.” In this case, winning will require the United States and its allies to commit themselves to an intensive effort, lasting “five to ten years at least,” aimed at “building a resilient Afghan state and civil society” capable of fending off the Taliban. The key to success, in his view, is to extend “an effective, legitimate government presence into Afghanistan’s 40,020 villages.” Such a presence, he concedes, is something that has never existed.

Stripped to its essentials, this is a call for Western-engineered nation building on a stupendous scale—in Kilcullen’s own words, “building an effective state structure, for the first time in modern Afghan history.” Yet even that will not suffice. Given the porous Afghan-Pakistani border, unless the United States and its partners also fix Pakistan, “a military victory in Afghanistan will simply shift the problem a few miles to the east.” With this is mind, Kilcullen calls for a “full-spectrum strategy” designed to “improve governance, security, and economic conditions” throughout the region. Although he illustrates this approach anecdotally, he offers no estimates of costs or who will pay them. Nor does Kilcullen explain why the results to be achieved in Afghanistan-Pakistan, even in the very best case, would produce an outcome any more definitive than the one he foresees in Iraq.

Newshoggers

3.3.2009 Anonymous Liberal: Yoo's "Argument" for Ignoring FISA

The description of the merits of Yoo's argument in the January 15, 2009 memo is comical in its understatement. The memo states:

[Yoo's conclusion] that FISA does not contain a clear statement that Congress intended the statute to apply to the President's exercise of his constitutional authority is problematic and questionable, given FISA's express references to the President's authority. The statements to this effect in earlier opinions of OLC were not supported by convincing reasoning.

Yeah, I'll say. The reality is that Yoo's argument was simply not a good faith legal argument. And there really should be some professional (if not legal) repercussions for it. Our government attorneys need to be held to a much higher standard of conduct.
anonymousliberal.com