Wish I'd said this.....

John Yoo, Still A War Criminal

Not only do these war criminals and shoddy lawyers refuse to take accountability for their crimes, they tell clear untruths about how the capture of bin Laden was achieved and distort history.
So let us be very clear. The war criminal Dick Cheney presided over the worst lapse in national security since Pearl Harbor, resulting in the deaths of more than 3,000 people. This rank incompetent failed to get bin Laden at Tora Bora, and then dragged the US on false pretenses into a war in Iraq, empowering Iran's dictatorship, and killing another 5,000 more Americans on a wild goose chase. He presided over the deaths of more than 8,000 Americans, and tens of thousands of Iraqis during his criminally incompetent years in office.
On the other hand, the man who abolished torture as soon as he took office, Barack Obama, captured and killed Osama bin Laden, and captured a massive trove of intelligence, more than two years later. No Americans died in the operation.
What on earth are we debating? How have these delusional maniacs managed to even get us onto this turf? Because they have to. Because when the full truth of these past years are fully in focus, they will be revealed as some of the greatest criminals ever to have wielded power in America.

Unclear on the concept

John Ashcroft to advise Blackwater on ethics

John Ashcroft has been hired to work as an independent ethics advisor for Xe Services, the military contractor that used to be Blackwater Worldwide, the company announced Wednesday.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0511/54283.html#ixzz1LWFr2IRg

The mind boggles.....

Big Oil

Big Oil and your money

Americans spent 28 percent more for gasoline during the first three months of 2011 than the same period in 2010. Meanwhile, the big five oil companies—BP, Chevron, Conoco Phillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell—made 38 percent more profit. The companies then used a major portion of these additional profits to enrich their board of directors, senior managers, and shareholders by purchasing shares of their stock.

Torture - the slippery slope

Andrew Sullivan discusses the changes in torture justification with the death of Bin Laden.  Seems that the general view in GOP circles is that the end justifies the means no matter what.  Once again, fear rules the day.

"Torture Creep"

Remember the days when Republicans only defended torture in the case of a ticking time bomb? Funny how now the debate on the right has moved - so quickly and without any evidence - to defending torture as a permanent policy to find small nuggets of information that could help in developing leads in anti-terrorism work. Those of us who warned of such slippery slopes are vindicated. And that the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden should immediately prompt unfounded Republican celebrations of torture reveals how morally degraded the discourse has become after the despicable policies of Bush and Cheney.

American Exceptionalism

Andrew Sullivan puts American torture in context.

America is exceptional not because it banished evil, not because Americans are somehow more moral than anyone else, not because its founding somehow changed human nature—but because it recognized the indelibility of human nature and our permanent capacity for evil. It set up a rule of law to guard against such evil. It pitted branches of government against each other and enshrined a free press so that evil could be flushed out and countered even when perpetrated by good men. The belief that when America tortures, the act is somehow not torture, or that when Americans torture, they are somehow immune from its moral and spiritual cancer, is not an American belief. It is as great a distortion of American exceptionalism as jihadism is of Islam. To believe that because the American government is better than Saddam and the Taliban and al-Qaeda, Americans are somehow immune to the same temptations of power that all flesh is heir to, is itself a deep and dangerous temptation. The power to torture is a case in point. Because torture can coerce truth, break a human being’s dignity, treat him as an expendable means rather than as a fragile end, it has a terrible power to corrupt. Torture is the ultimate expression of the absolute power of one individual over another; it destroys the souls of those who torture just as surely as it eviscerates the dignity of those who are its victims. And because torture is so awful, it also often requires a defensive embrace of it, a pride in it, an exaggeration of its successes.

Got Perspective?

Random thought;

You have to wonder what the right wing wingnuts would be saying if left leaning folks had pitched a fit about that war-mongering, torture supporting President Bush addressing our young impressionable school children.

Think they would have been calling them America hating traitors?  Me too.  I think the shoe fits...

Got Health Care?

I found the opinion below posted on the Internet, on a music related forum no less. It is one of the most cogent discussions of the health care issues facing our country that I have seen. It's simple and direct, and speaks to folks in a way that does not use fear, nor drowns us in policy wonk speak. It's the discussion we should be having in this country.  Unfortunately we aren't.....

For tens of millions of Americans, one illness, and one denial of coverage equals economic disaster. And guess what? For every one of those disasters the entire economy suffers. A house goes into foreclosure, bringing every house on that street down in value. High ticket items like cars, appliances, computers, aren’t even a consideration for these families, which means less of those items are sold, which equates into job losses for the companies that produce such things. And that medical care required to deal with that catastrophic illness? That goes unpaid due to a bankruptcy, which means you and I pay for it anyway in underlying costs. It's why a Tylenol costs $50 at the hospital.

For any American that finds the idea of a public option for health care to be distasteful, consider this: You already pay for every person who is currently not insured (1 in every 6) or is under-insured (an indeterminate number). You already pay for every person who is bankrupted by health system as it exists now. You already pay for every person (and that includes illegal aliens) that can’t pay their health care bill.

Without the public option, health care reform amounts to a huge bonanza of new customers for the current crop of for-profit insurers. Notice the “for-profit” part of that sentence. It is in the interest of your health insurer to prevent you from getting the health care you need because that's how they profit over and above the actuary tables that were once the basic premise of insurance. Why would we want to reward the companies that have bankrupted so many Americans by denying them the health care they paid for?

The arguments against a public option are without merit. Show me one good argument that has been presented against the public option. Death panels? A total lie. Why make something up out of whole cloth if you have a good argument?

How about abortion coverage? A lie. Everyone knows that a bill covering abortion wouldn't pass, so it's not going to be in there. Besides isn’t that a women's health issue? Shouldn’t that be between the doctor and the woman? I mean how can it be argued, on the one hand, that a public option will interfere with the relationship between a patient and a doctor, while on the other hand it's argued that the government should disallow payment on a procedure recommended by a woman’s doctor? If you want NO interference between that doctor/patient relationship, then technically there should be NO exclusions other than purely elective surgery. But remember, not all abortions are elective, and we shouldn't allow any insurance company, private or otherwise, to determine whether a particular abortion is elective thank you very much.

Paying for illegal aliens? We already pay for them!

Government takeover of your health? No. Even a single payer option, which is what medicare is, doesn’t take over a patient’s health. At most a public option offers a government run health INSURANCE program. In other words, it’s just another option.

But then the naysayers argue that the public option will put the private insurers out of business, because somehow everyone will want to jump ship from their insurance company to enter into the public option.

Why would people want to do that? I mean, if the insurance you have is so great, then why on earth would you want to jump into a government run insurance program which is supposed to be so bad for you/us? This defies logic. Is the argument against a public option because it’s bad? Or is it because it will be better than what we currently have and thus destroy our already existing quasi-capitalistic health care system? Please pick one.

It’s too expensive? Too expensive for whom? I don’t know about you, but I pay $14,500 a year in insurance premiums, and two years ago I was denied coverage on a "pre-existing" condition--a condition that cost me $15,000 for a one hour procedure, despite religiously paying my premiums. In this particular case, I was able to deal with the unexpected cost. But what if it cost me $150,000 or more? At some point, a denial breaks me. And I currently PAY a substantial monthly amount for insurance! What exactly am I being insured against?

Too expensive for America? We can’t possibly sustain our current system, so we’re going to just tweak it, leaving our premiums in the hands of companies who’s only interest is their own profits? How much are our premiums going to go up when the government tells insurance companies that they can no longer exclude preexisting conditions? You don’t think your premiums are going to increase substantially absent any real independent not-for-profit competition? Come on.

Breaking the state restrictions currently on health insurers, and allowing them to supply coverage on a national scale? Personally, I don’t think this is such a horrible thing, so long as there is a public option too. Otherwise we risk crushing competition even more by creating large monopolies that will do everything to prop up just enough competition to prevent antitrust lawsuits. Give us a public option, and allow the private insurers to operate nationally. That would make an even playing field, right? Let’s see who wins.

Health care companies like big pharma and insurance companies give large amounts of money to Senators in small states (both Republican and Democratic). Do you know why they do that? Because a Senator in a small state wields just as much voting power as one from a large one. Because these Senators are in less populous states, raising campaign money is far more difficult for them than say a Senator in New York or California. This means the “Blue Dog” Democrats who operate in small rural states are bought and paid for, and that’s why it's difficult for the Dems to come up with 60 votes. Not because it’s good for you, me, and your neighbor as Americans. But because it keeps those Senators in office.

These insurance and pharma companies also give large sums of money to Senators in charge of certain committees, like the Senate Finance Committee for instance (where the current Senate version of the health care bill sits). That's because committees are where potential bills go to die, and paying off Committee chairs only helps the cause. The term “blood money” comes to mind here, and I mean that literally and on a grand scale.

So please stop believing the lies and the false arguments. Start thinking beyond the rhetoric, and understand that a government run health insurance option has already been popular for decades now. It's called Medicare. Understand that there are many examples of systems that work far better than ours and which involve government. Nothing being proposed is new or untested elsewhere in the industrialized and capitalistic world.

The only way to push health insurers into competing is by providing some actual competition. And the only way to do that is to have a public option. If a public option turns into a single payer government run health insurance system ten to twenty years from now, then clearly, the public option proved to be the better one, and we can all continue to strive for the American Dream, whatever that is.

Tell me, why would anyone be afraid of that?

Our current state of political affairs

A love note from writer Charles Pierce to Mr. Cheney and the current Republican party. What's sad is that his P..S includes some gazing into the future, and unfortunately I believe he has the gifts of a seer;

To every camel's back, there is a final straw. Sooner or later, we've taken all we can stand and we can't stands no more, and we pass over the Popeye Line. For me, it came sometime last weekend when I heard Richard Cheney, the pre-eminent moral and physical coward of the era, explain once again the Mulligan theory of national defense by which every president gets one free mass casualty attack that doesn't count toward "keeping us safe." (Note to Dick: by this standard, every two-term president kept us safer than you guys did. You were the worst at it. Scoreboard!) And I realized that, by all the standards of objectivity I was taught in journalism school--the most basic of which was that, if you saw a man walking down the street with a bird on his head, you could report it without finding someone else to tell you that, no, what you actually saw was a bird walking down the street with a guy on his ass--there is no longer any reason to take the Republican party seriously. It has become a festival for fruitcakes. The political movement that powered its ascension has become publicly demented. Sam Tanenhaus can plug his book all he wants, but the fact remains that it was American conservatism that spent three decades throwing open the doors to the monkeyhouse--starting with the Goldwater campaign in 1964, moving along through the Reagan campaigns of 1976 and 1980, the NCPAC campaigns of that same era, the marriage of convenience with theocratic crackpottery, the Buchanan campaign against the first President Bush, the various exercises in lunacy aimed at Bill Clinton, the half-mad banality of Newt Gingrich, and the cult of personality that sprang up around the second President Bush. It's a little late for delicate conservative intellectuals to ponder how it was that all that monkey poo ended up on the walls.

The serious people don't lead in that party any more, and the leaders of it -- Hello, Michael Steele -- are not serious people. It is a major political party run now as an elaborate radio talk-show and completely in thrall to the maniacs who run actual radio talk-shows. Goddammit, the Spartacists are more intellectually honest and the Hemp Party folks are a helluva lot more fun. Why do serious political journalists take this careering clown car seriously, ignoring the evidence plainly in front of their own eyes? Why does a Democratic president, and an overwhelmingly Democratic congress, both elected at least in part because the country had determined that the Republicans had gone completely mad, care what these people think about anything? Why does a party led by people who think the president is going to hypnotize schoolchildren with his magic Kenyan-Socialist spinning eyeballs scare the living protoplasm out of putative tough guys like Rahm Emanuel?

The perfect should not be the enemy of the good? Maybe not, but the good has many actual enemies. Evil is the enemy of the good. Greed is the enemy of the good. Ignorance is the enemy of the good. Cowardice is the enemy of the good. How's about, just once, somebody worries about those enemies of the good, all of which are amply in evidence in the campaign to make sure we never reform the criminally negligent and morally indefensible way we deliver healthcare in this country?

Instead, we get this. One thing we learned this week--Stephanopoulos is Greek for "Stockholm Syndrome". Jesus wept.

P.S. Oh, hell. They've even started selling their alibis already. Watch this unfold. The D's will sign off on some nutless POS and then have to run in 2010 on their support for a massive giveaway to the insurance companies, a group of institutions whom everyone I know hates. The elite press then will ponder earnestly whthe administration couldn't work with "serious conservative voices" on a "bipartisan" plan, as though any of the former even exist. The Beckite "Socialism! Fascism! Soup!" crazoids will go zipping down the memory hole.

Got Special Prosecutors?

The New York Times, in an editorial today sums up my feelings;

The government owes Americans a full investigation into the orders to approve torture, abuse and illegal, secret detention, as well as the twisted legal briefs that justified those policies. Congress and the White House also need to look into illegal wiretapping and the practice of sending prisoners to other countries to be tortured.

Got College?

18 years ago my wife and I brought a cute little baby girl home from the hospital, both of us clearly befuddled as to why these competent nurses would let two foolish kids leave with this baby, without any type of directions or manual....

Today, my wife and I dropped off a beautiful 18 year old woman at college after helping her move into her dorm room. This confident young thing has great plans to become an elementary school teacher, and is looking forward to her first foray into living on her own (still with our checkbook however).

The intervening 18 years seem to be a bit of a blur now, but on the whole as I look back on it, it was an experience I would not ever trade. Each phase had it's unique challenges and rewards, and those memories will be among my most treasured.

To all who have survived this journey, I commend you. Cheers to that journey, and to the new ones commencing.

Got Wingnuts?

How to properly deal with wingnuts? Clearly acknowledge them for what they are.......crazy.

Got Minority?

Funny....

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Reform Madness - White Minority
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Healthcare Protests

Got Loans?

The behavior of our entitled elite never ceases to amaze me.

Jon Carroll, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle has an interesting take on the behavior of our bankers now that the U.S. taxpayer has bailed them out;

last week the New York Times had a story about how banks, having been given emergency bridge loans to tide them over after the unholy mess they made of the entire financial system with their greed-driven mortgage loans, are now reluctant to lend that money back to struggling small businesses.

Loans are not being made. Why? Let Paul Merski, chief economist for the Independent Community Bankers of America, a trade organization, tell you why. "There's not a lot of profit motive in a $35,000 loan stretched over six years."

Profit motive? Profit motive? The American taxpayers came in and saved your sorry asses, rewarding your bad behavior because every other option was even less good, and now certain struggling American taxpayers are asking for five-figure loans, and you guys are whining about profit motive?

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/carroll/#ixzz0OT0B88Qw

Time to fight back?

Democrats never seem to learn that Republican leopards don't change their spots. Especially ones who have screwed up the last 8 years so badly that they feel cornered.

Liars lie and fear mongers lay on the fear. It's what they know and what they do. Partisanship is not in their vocabulary.

It's about time the Democrats figure this out and respond accordingly with accountability and outrage.

Paul Krugman has more.

Got WebMD?

So, doctors must hate the Internet.

After tearing up my Achilles tendon, I naturally started to Google my brains out trying to get info on my injury and the proposed treatments. I was also looking for other folks who were blogging about this issue and documenting recovery times and the like.

Not surprising there was a lot of info out there, but it took some time to sort through it to find common themes and issues, as well as to sort through current studies along with older info.

To my surprise, there is a fair amount of controversy over the treatment of Achilles injuries, some doctors saying that non-surgical treatment is just as good and significantly less invasive than surgical treatments. Some very current studies also seem to support this.

Of course, armed with all this wonderful info, I attempted to have a conversation with my orthopedic surgeon about this. Have you ever seen folks get that tight little smile when you bring up an uncomfortable subject? Suffice it to say, he was not too keen on listening to my brilliant medical opinions based on a day of surfing the net. Now I don't necessarily blame him, and he was very professional about it, even strongly recommending that I get a second opinion to address my concerns, which I did.

Ultimately, because of the specific nature of my Achilles injury (it had detached from the heel bone), I selected surgery, and used this specific doctor because of his skill set in this area. Interestingly enough, he has been much more forthcoming and informational since my initial pushback on his treatment suggestions, and I feel that I'm getting the reasons behind things rather than just "orders from the doctor".

The bottom line is, you are the customer in this scenario and you should be as informed as possible when making decisions about your health and treatment. Doctors may or may not be appreciative of this, but ultimately it's your call. Use the internet. Talk to friends. Get a second opinion. Knowledge is power.

Got Crutches?

Well, maybe I will be blogging a bit more now.

In an attempt to be somewhat athletic, during a scary electrical incident, I ruptured my Achilles tendon. It required surgery to repair and now I am looking at a month of time on crutches (no weight bearing on the injured leg), plus another month or so of being confined to a walking boot and a lot of physical therapy.

Oh, and I can't drive....for 2 months. Sigh......

Got Blog?

It sure is hard to blog. I have a whole new appreciation for folks who dive into this and keep the ball rolling. There is a definite knack to doing this well and keeping it fresh and interesting.

For the last few months I've just been using this space as a way to get quick links to other blogs that I find useful or interesting. You can see the list on the right side of the blog under "Cool Places". Check them out, it's a nice mix of liberal discussion, gossip, and local foodie stuff.

Ch..Ch..Ch..Changes

America spoke. In very large numbers.

A choice at the ballot box. Not by court order, not with the national guard, but by simple choice. America changed a bit today, and will continue to change tomorrow. Some will come along with joy, other will continue to drag their feet.

I don't go much for all the fancy rhetoric, the soaring imagery. My needs are simple;

Competent governance by responsible adults.
Transparancy
Respect for the Constitution

Let's see if we can make that work for awhile. Then we can go from there.

Remember To VOTE

Make a Difference

Bring about CHANGE

REMEMBER TO VOTE THIS NOVEMBER 4TH






.

OK. Lets try again......

So the 700 billion dollar bailout deal is dead. Republican lawmakers got their feelings hurt when big bad Nancy said mean things about them. (Plus, they are scared to death that they will get there butts voted out of office). So what do we do now?

Here's a pretty good idea from FireDogLake;

1) Buy up mortgages at a discount and give people new fixed rate mortgages. The government shares in further house appreciation (only fair since it bailed the homeowner out). This stabilizes mortgage prices and helps people and banks both. It is essentially identical to what FDR did with the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC), and we know how to do it. Initial price tag? Probably around 20 billion.

2) Use the FDIC (the folks who take over failed banks) to take over failed mutual and money market funds, make sure the investors get as much money back as possible, liquidate the funds in an orderly fashion (or keep them operating if necessary) and if they are kept alive, kick the people who screwed them up to the curb and change how they do business.

3) Declare a national emergency, with judicial review (unlike Paulson's seizure of ultimate power) and use the authority to review all purchases of banks, to institute oil rationing if necessary (or simpler procedures like "every street now has a 55 mile an hour speed limit, if it is normally higher). Also allows release of oil from the reserve, if necessary.

4) Expand the safety net such as food stamps, employment insurance, welfare and so on. We know this is going to get worse no matter what we do, so why aren't we taking care of ordinary people?

Read the rest here.

Pay me to go away......

Seems the new WaMu CEO made out like a ban....uh, typical golden parachuted CEO. Matt also makes the great point that the real way to control CEO compensation is to tax it accordingly.

From Matther Yglesias;

My understanding is that even for the super-elite it normally takes a couple of months to wrack up tens of millions of dollars. But Alan Fishman gets the job done with super speed:

But the seizure and the deal with JPMorgan came as a shock to Washington Mutual’s board, which was kept completely in the dark: the company’s new chief executive, Alan H. Fishman, was in midair, flying from New York to Seattle at the time the deal was finally brokered, according to people briefed on the situation. Mr. Fishman, who has been on the job for less than three weeks, is eligible for $11.6 million in cash severance and will get to keep his $7.5 million signing bonus, according to an analysis by James F. Reda and Associates.

One friend suggests “Obama should suspend his campaign to go punch this guy in the kidney.” Indeed.

Part of what you’re seeing as some of this unfolds is that the idea of CEO pay controls specifically tied to the bailout, though good, is also a bit of a joke. A lot of the folks responsible for this mess left their jobs months ago and are current sitting in their multi-million dollar homes, wearing extremely expensive clothing, and laughing at you, me, Obama, McCain and all the rest. Laughing their asses off. You just need to have additional tax brackets for folks up at the millionaire and multi-millionaire level to make sure that the public gets a bigger slice of the pie. If that decreases the incentives for the sort of wild financial shenanigans that brought the country to this point, well, so what?

Trust Us...part duex

Eric D. Hovde is chief executive of Washington-based Hovde Capital and Hovde Acquisitions. He has a nice assessment of the players to blame for our current financial mess.

Money Quote;

Looking for someone to blame for the shambles in U.S. financial markets? As someone who owns both an investment bank and commercial banks, and also runs a hedge fund, I have sat front and center and watched as this mess unfolded. And in my view, there's no need to look beyond Wall Street -- and the halls of power in Washington. The former has created the nightmare by chasing obscene profits, and the latter have allowed it to spread by not practicing the oversight that is the federal government's responsibility.

I find it hard to stomach the fact that investment banks that caused this financial crisis immediately ran to the government asking for assistance, which Bear Stearns received and Lehman Brothers, thankfully, did not. This is one of many eerie parallels that the current meltdown bears to the Great Depression, when Washington and the taxpayers had to step up and take unprecedented action to stabilize the financial markets and the economy. Unfortunately, the government today has already put enormous taxpayer resources at risk -- bailing out investment firm Bear Stearns, mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and insurer AIG, and proposing to buy risky assets from the banking system -- to stop the economy from plummeting into another depression. But these events only underscore the toxic relationship between Washington and Wall Street that has brought us to this point.

Read the rest here.

Third Time's the Charm?

A little background on our current financial mess, and how it dovetails into the earlier S&L and Enron collapses. "Deregulation" just another word for "Trust me". And we all know what "Trust me" means in politi-speak.

Who Gets Help......

OK. Let's make a deal. When this crisis is all said and done and all the bailouts have been created, defined, and put into action, let's circle back around and take a look see at how the taxpayer's money (which will be in the multiple billions of dollars) was used, and where it went.

Wanna bet the little middle class guy who lost his house, or his job, or his health care won't get squat? He'll be told to "pull himself up by his bootstraps" while the largest corporate welfare check in the history of the world gets written.

I'm just sayin......

The Blame Game

Matthew Yglesias sums this up pretty well I think. Regulation is only one piece of the puzzle. You can make all the rules and laws that you want, but the key peice is that you have to ENFORCE THEM.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the so-called Government-Sponsored Entities, really did have some serious problems that have contributed to the current financial crisis. They also really were, politically, generally closer to the Democratic Party. Thus it’s useful for Republicans to act, as John McCain did in his speech this morning, to focus on the tree GSE malfeasance rather than the forest of overall systemic failings. But it doesn’t really make sense. Consider the term “subprime mortgage” that you may have heard. Well, it turns out that what it means for a mortgage to be “subprime” is that it doesn’t meet Fannie or Freddie standards.

Beyond that, it’s impossible to say whether additional regulatory authority over the GSEs would have been necessary or sufficient to reduce the impact of this crisis because the existing regulators weren’t using their existing authority. Arguably, the authority they already had would have been sufficient had they used it. Indisputably, giving additional authority to people unwilling to use their existing authority wouldn’t have changed anything. And that set of regulators wasn’t the only set asleep at the switch — the Fed dragged its feet on the subprime issue despite Fed Governor Ed Gramlich’s warnings about problems here, and the SEC ignored the risks associated with the highly leveraged trades that were being made.

Problems existed with the regulatory oversight across the board. And of course part one crucial common thread here is that all of these agencies were headed up by conservative deregulators. The same people not enforcing environmental regulations and not enforcing civil rights law and not enforcing labor rights were also not doing their job at the financial regulatory agencies. Conservatives believe that the role of agency heads is to avoid using their regulatory authority in constructive ways.