"Nobody's Perfect" is Not What You Want Atop Your CV
Perhaps like many of you, I am experiencing considerable emotional distress over some of the Obama administration's undertakings. I am on-board and even happy with the great majority of the actions of our new remarkably lucid and charismatic President and continue to be agog over his progress already in redeeming both the stature of the office of the President of the USA and our nation's standing in the eyes of much of the rest of the world. Isn't it truly remarkable that a person this savvy - to put it mildly - could actually achieve sufficient popularity to overcome the nasty, mean-spirited male-adolescent-bully schtick embodied by folks like Ann Coulter? It does not bother me in the slightest to have him acknowledge that America has at times acted arrogantly, especially since that behavior was more or less the sine qua non of the prior "spike" administration. And, of course, that acknowledgement was in the context of also noting that Europe has harbored anti-Americanism that is also not helpful when we need to work together.
Closing Guantanamo, ending torture and at least some categories of human rights violations (by your United States of America!), being open to direct conversation with Iran, and an aggressive budget emphasizing many admirable programs including health care, education, and energy independence, are just some of the remarkable measures this President has already gestated.
And today Obama released four key long-awaited barely-redacted memos from the Bush Office of Legal Council that are part of the basis of claims that torture had been found to be a perfectly acceptable form of sadism. This is one of his bigger moves to reclaim the high ground when it comes to so-called "transparency" and adherence to law. Kudos to BHO for this courageous step, rumored to have forced him to defy anxious intelligence community sorts who despair of having any of their laundry aired. Glenn Greenwald at Salon has been an admirable bull terrier on this topic, and gives Obama high marks for this move, as he promised he would, though not for his vow not to prosecute:
In a just-released statement, Barack Obama announced that -- in response to an ACLU FOIA lawsuit -- he has ordered four key Bush-era torture memos released, and the Associated Press, citing anonymous Obama sources, is reporting that "there is very little redaction, or blacking out, of detail in the memos." Marc Ambinder reports that only the names of the CIA agents involved will be redacted; everything else will be disclosed. Simultaneously, and certainly with the intent to placate angry intelligence officials, Attorney General Eric Holder has "informed CIA officials [though not necessarily Bush officials] who used waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics on terror suspects that they will not be prosecuted," and Obama announced the same thing in his statement.
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So it is not as if I am eager to complain when there is so much that Obama has already done well and handled adroitly. It could easily be argued in fact that he's done more good for the country in less than 100 days than bush did in eight years (of course much of that "good" was actually powering down bush's destructive actions).
But a case could be made that it is a major weakness of liberals, progressives, or whatever label one has the courage to wear in this era of merciless nastiness from the Hitlerian right that we are not capable of duplicating their tinfoil-hat ditto-head regimented lemming-like behavior. As if we believed in free will and democracy and individual freedom or something, rather than taking cues and dictation from drug-addled unstable egomaniacal radio talk-show hosts!
Let us not forget that their Chosen Guy, (infallible, according to them, though not even open to being questioned by or argued with by actual citizens!) was into sadistically branding fraternity-house pledges and couldn't be bothered to actually fulfill the fat jet-flying opportunity poppy bought for him. They signed up for whatever he wanted and vigorously brandished the "unpatriotic" smear whenever a brave soul actually made anything like defiant noises. For them (well back then - just listen to them now!), any questioning of a President's actions, never mind disagreement, was unpatriotic if not traitorous. Asking questions, never mind actual dissent while w was in office was just plain heinous.
I trust I am in good company here in being unwilling, now that we have a President who might actually listen to the citizenry and ponder if his actions are out of step with the populace, to simply adopt that same robotic stance. I have seen something like "Dissent is the truest form of patriotism" on a bumper sticker, attributed to someone like Thos. J. The sentiment rings smack-on for me. (I also understand one of those programmed tea-bag drones was seen yesterday with a somewhat similar sign: "Descent is the truest form of patriotism"!). I'm not talking lying smear campaigns a la that drug-addled radio host, not to mention most of the republican apparatchik, or hoping the President will fail, the sort of stuff the desperate screechers on the right are orchestrating these days. This would be thoughtful disagreement, without the caterwauling and dishonesty that has become the hallmark and definition of most of those who lost out so dramatically the last time the American people voted.
But when our President and his designees swing at balls that bounce halfway to the plate, they need to be called on it. Loudly and promptly.
I've got three bones to pick, the first ever-so-briefly, but not with any intent to diminish its' importance to me.
I find it absolutely appalling that we continue to use or even expand our use of unmanned airborne drones for surveillance and more-particularly missile launches in violation of Pakistan's airspace. I believe this greatly undermines our need to demonstrate a change of course involving good intentions and reliance on measures that minimize civilian risk and respect national boundaries. There have to be better ways than drones and mega-payoffs to corrupt Pakistan politicians to gain improved cooperation by Pakistan in thwarting terrorism. Of course it could help if we reversed that absurd nucular (sic) pact gwb desperately cobbled together with India.
We also need as a nation of humanists to take a vow to refrain from any further use of depleted uranium, cluster bombs, and land mines. We have an obligation to actually join the enlightened of our species on so many fronts, and with a President who seems to give off signs of actually having skills in empathy and nuance, the time seems ripe.
My original concept for this post had little of the above in it. Consequently, in the interests of "brevity," I am abbreviating what were originally the most important two of three topics. I will be trusting you to pursue links and follow through.
First off, these Obama uses of claims of "state secrets" and the new one of "National Sovereignty" to thwart judicial investigation of law-breaking and general criminality by our government. It is absolutely implausible to me that there is some even faintly-possible downside to BHO adhering to his repeatedly-stated principles that would justify him basically pimping for gwb. I find this truly sickening. I can understand that there is a genuinely paranoid intelligence establishment that has the same disaffection for "change" that any enshrined bureaucracy does, with the added fillip that the "company" for one has been committing criminal acts "on our behalf" since well before this latest outrage of completely free-wheeling data-mining. I suspect Obama does not dare get badly conflicted this early on with these careerist government-paid criminals who think they have a life-long get-out-of-jail-free card.
I had a number of posts tagged for links, but I think Greenwald's here includes several of them, so I will leave it at that, trusting you to follow up:
I wasn't able to post today, but TalkingPointsMemo has done an excellent job in advancing the story of the Obama DOJ's inexcusable embrace of some of the most radical Bush/Cheney secrecy doctrines. First, here is the top headline at TPM right now:
The first TPM post then says this:
Working the Dark Side
Why is Obama following Bush's lead on state secrets?
That post, in turn, links to this excellent and comprehensive article on the controversy by TPM's Zachary Roth, which reports this:
Is the Obama administration mimicking its predecessor on issues of secrecy and the war on terror? . . .
Coming on the heels of the two other recent cases in which the new administration has asserted the state secrets privilege, the motion sparked outrage among civil libertarians and many progressive commentators. Salon's Glenn Greenwald wrote that the move "demonstrates that the Obama DOJ plans to invoke the exact radical doctrines of executive secrecy which Bush used." MSNBC's Keith Olbermann called it "deja vu all over again". An online petition -- "Tell Obama: Stop blocking court review of illegal wiretapping" -- soon appeared.
Not having Greenwald's training in constitutional law (and perhaps lacking Olbermann's all-conquering self-confidence), we wanted to get a sense from a few independent experts as to how to assess the administration's position on the case. Does it represent a continuation of the Bushies' obsession with putting secrecy and executive power above basic constitutional rights? Is it a sweeping power grab by the executive branch, that sets set a broad and dangerous precedent for future cases by asserting that the government has the right to get lawsuits dismissed merely by claiming that state secrets are at stake, without giving judges any discretion whatsoever?
In a word, yes.
That's rather definitive (my legal analysis of the Obama position was set forth here, on Monday). The TPM article then quotes numerous experts lambasting the Obama administration, including -- most amazingly -- Ken Gude, a national security law expert of the Center for American Progress (CAP). That's John Podesta's CAP, one of the most pro-Obama organizations in the country (Podesta was Obama's transition chief).
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And then there is this economic catastrophe the bush greediocracy dumped on our doorstep. Obama's decision to place what appear to be at the very least ethically-challenged conflicted wall street sycophants in key financial positions also seems to echo the prior occupant's lazy habits. These guys may actually have IQs over 100, but their actions to date in terms of both their decisions as to how to deal with crisis and how to juggle their critical role in communicating with the public leave that seriously in doubt. You're in a seriously bad way when even Frank Rich can get you in repeated choke-holds:
“I am pronouncing the depression over!” declared CNBC’s irrepressible Jim Cramer on April 2. The next day the unemployment rate, already at the highest level in 25 years, jumped yet again, but Cramer wasn’t thinking about the 663,000 jobs that disappeared in March. He was thinking about the market. Mad money. Fast money. Big money. The Dow, after all, has rallied in the weeks since Timothy Geithner announced his bank bailout 2.0. Par-tay! On Wednesday, Cramer rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange, in celebration of the 1,000th broadcast of his nightly stock-tip jamboree.
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We discovered, for instance, that Lawrence Summers, the president’s chief economic adviser, made $5.2 million in 2008 from a hedge fund, D. E. Shaw, for a one-day-a-week job. He also earned $2.7 million in speaking fees from the likes of Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. Those institutions are not merely the beneficiaries of taxpayers’ bailouts since the crash. They also benefited during the boom from government favors: the Wall Street deregulation that both Summers and Robert Rubin, his mentor and predecessor as Treasury secretary, championed in the Clinton administration. This dynamic duo’s innovative gift to their country was banks “too big to fail.”
Some spoilsports raise the conflict-of-interest question about Summers: Can he be a fair broker of the bailout when he so recently received lavish compensation from some of its present and, no doubt, future players? This question can be answered only when every transaction in the new “public-private investment plan” to buy the banks’ toxic assets is made transparent. We need verification that this deal is not, as the economist Joseph Stiglitz has warned, a Rube Goldberg contraption contrived to facilitate “huge transfers of wealth to the financial markets” from taxpayers.
But perhaps I’ve become numb to the perennial and bipartisan revolving-door incestuousness of Washington and Wall Street. I was less shocked by the White House’s disclosure of Summers’s recent paydays than by a bit of reporting that appeared deep down in the Times follow-up article on that initial news. The reporter Louise Story wrote that Summers had done consulting work for another hedge fund, Taconic Capital Advisors, from 2004 to 2006, while still president of Harvard.
That the highly paid leader of arguably America’s most esteemed educational institution (disclosure: I went there) would simultaneously freelance as a hedge-fund guy might stand as a symbol for the values of our time. At the start of his stormy and short-lived presidency, Summers picked a fight with Cornel West for allegedly neglecting his professorial duties by taking on such extracurricular tasks as cutting a spoken-word CD. Yet Summers saw no conflict with moonlighting in the money racket while running the entire university. The students didn’t even get a CD for his efforts — and Harvard’s deflated endowment, now in a daunting liquidity crisis, didn’t exactly benefit either.
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Closing Guantanamo, ending torture and at least some categories of human rights violations (by your United States of America!), being open to direct conversation with Iran, and an aggressive budget emphasizing many admirable programs including health care, education, and energy independence, are just some of the remarkable measures this President has already gestated.
And today Obama released four key long-awaited barely-redacted memos from the Bush Office of Legal Council that are part of the basis of claims that torture had been found to be a perfectly acceptable form of sadism. This is one of his bigger moves to reclaim the high ground when it comes to so-called "transparency" and adherence to law. Kudos to BHO for this courageous step, rumored to have forced him to defy anxious intelligence community sorts who despair of having any of their laundry aired. Glenn Greenwald at Salon has been an admirable bull terrier on this topic, and gives Obama high marks for this move, as he promised he would, though not for his vow not to prosecute:
In a just-released statement, Barack Obama announced that -- in response to an ACLU FOIA lawsuit -- he has ordered four key Bush-era torture memos released, and the Associated Press, citing anonymous Obama sources, is reporting that "there is very little redaction, or blacking out, of detail in the memos." Marc Ambinder reports that only the names of the CIA agents involved will be redacted; everything else will be disclosed. Simultaneously, and certainly with the intent to placate angry intelligence officials, Attorney General Eric Holder has "informed CIA officials [though not necessarily Bush officials] who used waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics on terror suspects that they will not be prosecuted," and Obama announced the same thing in his statement.
-clip-
So it is not as if I am eager to complain when there is so much that Obama has already done well and handled adroitly. It could easily be argued in fact that he's done more good for the country in less than 100 days than bush did in eight years (of course much of that "good" was actually powering down bush's destructive actions).
But a case could be made that it is a major weakness of liberals, progressives, or whatever label one has the courage to wear in this era of merciless nastiness from the Hitlerian right that we are not capable of duplicating their tinfoil-hat ditto-head regimented lemming-like behavior. As if we believed in free will and democracy and individual freedom or something, rather than taking cues and dictation from drug-addled unstable egomaniacal radio talk-show hosts!
Let us not forget that their Chosen Guy, (infallible, according to them, though not even open to being questioned by or argued with by actual citizens!) was into sadistically branding fraternity-house pledges and couldn't be bothered to actually fulfill the fat jet-flying opportunity poppy bought for him. They signed up for whatever he wanted and vigorously brandished the "unpatriotic" smear whenever a brave soul actually made anything like defiant noises. For them (well back then - just listen to them now!), any questioning of a President's actions, never mind disagreement, was unpatriotic if not traitorous. Asking questions, never mind actual dissent while w was in office was just plain heinous.
I trust I am in good company here in being unwilling, now that we have a President who might actually listen to the citizenry and ponder if his actions are out of step with the populace, to simply adopt that same robotic stance. I have seen something like "Dissent is the truest form of patriotism" on a bumper sticker, attributed to someone like Thos. J. The sentiment rings smack-on for me. (I also understand one of those programmed tea-bag drones was seen yesterday with a somewhat similar sign: "Descent is the truest form of patriotism"!). I'm not talking lying smear campaigns a la that drug-addled radio host, not to mention most of the republican apparatchik, or hoping the President will fail, the sort of stuff the desperate screechers on the right are orchestrating these days. This would be thoughtful disagreement, without the caterwauling and dishonesty that has become the hallmark and definition of most of those who lost out so dramatically the last time the American people voted.
But when our President and his designees swing at balls that bounce halfway to the plate, they need to be called on it. Loudly and promptly.
I've got three bones to pick, the first ever-so-briefly, but not with any intent to diminish its' importance to me.
I find it absolutely appalling that we continue to use or even expand our use of unmanned airborne drones for surveillance and more-particularly missile launches in violation of Pakistan's airspace. I believe this greatly undermines our need to demonstrate a change of course involving good intentions and reliance on measures that minimize civilian risk and respect national boundaries. There have to be better ways than drones and mega-payoffs to corrupt Pakistan politicians to gain improved cooperation by Pakistan in thwarting terrorism. Of course it could help if we reversed that absurd nucular (sic) pact gwb desperately cobbled together with India.
We also need as a nation of humanists to take a vow to refrain from any further use of depleted uranium, cluster bombs, and land mines. We have an obligation to actually join the enlightened of our species on so many fronts, and with a President who seems to give off signs of actually having skills in empathy and nuance, the time seems ripe.
My original concept for this post had little of the above in it. Consequently, in the interests of "brevity," I am abbreviating what were originally the most important two of three topics. I will be trusting you to pursue links and follow through.
First off, these Obama uses of claims of "state secrets" and the new one of "National Sovereignty" to thwart judicial investigation of law-breaking and general criminality by our government. It is absolutely implausible to me that there is some even faintly-possible downside to BHO adhering to his repeatedly-stated principles that would justify him basically pimping for gwb. I find this truly sickening. I can understand that there is a genuinely paranoid intelligence establishment that has the same disaffection for "change" that any enshrined bureaucracy does, with the added fillip that the "company" for one has been committing criminal acts "on our behalf" since well before this latest outrage of completely free-wheeling data-mining. I suspect Obama does not dare get badly conflicted this early on with these careerist government-paid criminals who think they have a life-long get-out-of-jail-free card.
I had a number of posts tagged for links, but I think Greenwald's here includes several of them, so I will leave it at that, trusting you to follow up:
I wasn't able to post today, but TalkingPointsMemo has done an excellent job in advancing the story of the Obama DOJ's inexcusable embrace of some of the most radical Bush/Cheney secrecy doctrines. First, here is the top headline at TPM right now:
The first TPM post then says this:
Working the Dark Side
Why is Obama following Bush's lead on state secrets?
That post, in turn, links to this excellent and comprehensive article on the controversy by TPM's Zachary Roth, which reports this:
Is the Obama administration mimicking its predecessor on issues of secrecy and the war on terror? . . .
Coming on the heels of the two other recent cases in which the new administration has asserted the state secrets privilege, the motion sparked outrage among civil libertarians and many progressive commentators. Salon's Glenn Greenwald wrote that the move "demonstrates that the Obama DOJ plans to invoke the exact radical doctrines of executive secrecy which Bush used." MSNBC's Keith Olbermann called it "deja vu all over again". An online petition -- "Tell Obama: Stop blocking court review of illegal wiretapping" -- soon appeared.
Not having Greenwald's training in constitutional law (and perhaps lacking Olbermann's all-conquering self-confidence), we wanted to get a sense from a few independent experts as to how to assess the administration's position on the case. Does it represent a continuation of the Bushies' obsession with putting secrecy and executive power above basic constitutional rights? Is it a sweeping power grab by the executive branch, that sets set a broad and dangerous precedent for future cases by asserting that the government has the right to get lawsuits dismissed merely by claiming that state secrets are at stake, without giving judges any discretion whatsoever?
In a word, yes.
That's rather definitive (my legal analysis of the Obama position was set forth here, on Monday). The TPM article then quotes numerous experts lambasting the Obama administration, including -- most amazingly -- Ken Gude, a national security law expert of the Center for American Progress (CAP). That's John Podesta's CAP, one of the most pro-Obama organizations in the country (Podesta was Obama's transition chief).
-clip-
And then there is this economic catastrophe the bush greediocracy dumped on our doorstep. Obama's decision to place what appear to be at the very least ethically-challenged conflicted wall street sycophants in key financial positions also seems to echo the prior occupant's lazy habits. These guys may actually have IQs over 100, but their actions to date in terms of both their decisions as to how to deal with crisis and how to juggle their critical role in communicating with the public leave that seriously in doubt. You're in a seriously bad way when even Frank Rich can get you in repeated choke-holds:
“I am pronouncing the depression over!” declared CNBC’s irrepressible Jim Cramer on April 2. The next day the unemployment rate, already at the highest level in 25 years, jumped yet again, but Cramer wasn’t thinking about the 663,000 jobs that disappeared in March. He was thinking about the market. Mad money. Fast money. Big money. The Dow, after all, has rallied in the weeks since Timothy Geithner announced his bank bailout 2.0. Par-tay! On Wednesday, Cramer rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange, in celebration of the 1,000th broadcast of his nightly stock-tip jamboree.
-clip-
We discovered, for instance, that Lawrence Summers, the president’s chief economic adviser, made $5.2 million in 2008 from a hedge fund, D. E. Shaw, for a one-day-a-week job. He also earned $2.7 million in speaking fees from the likes of Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. Those institutions are not merely the beneficiaries of taxpayers’ bailouts since the crash. They also benefited during the boom from government favors: the Wall Street deregulation that both Summers and Robert Rubin, his mentor and predecessor as Treasury secretary, championed in the Clinton administration. This dynamic duo’s innovative gift to their country was banks “too big to fail.”
Some spoilsports raise the conflict-of-interest question about Summers: Can he be a fair broker of the bailout when he so recently received lavish compensation from some of its present and, no doubt, future players? This question can be answered only when every transaction in the new “public-private investment plan” to buy the banks’ toxic assets is made transparent. We need verification that this deal is not, as the economist Joseph Stiglitz has warned, a Rube Goldberg contraption contrived to facilitate “huge transfers of wealth to the financial markets” from taxpayers.
But perhaps I’ve become numb to the perennial and bipartisan revolving-door incestuousness of Washington and Wall Street. I was less shocked by the White House’s disclosure of Summers’s recent paydays than by a bit of reporting that appeared deep down in the Times follow-up article on that initial news. The reporter Louise Story wrote that Summers had done consulting work for another hedge fund, Taconic Capital Advisors, from 2004 to 2006, while still president of Harvard.
That the highly paid leader of arguably America’s most esteemed educational institution (disclosure: I went there) would simultaneously freelance as a hedge-fund guy might stand as a symbol for the values of our time. At the start of his stormy and short-lived presidency, Summers picked a fight with Cornel West for allegedly neglecting his professorial duties by taking on such extracurricular tasks as cutting a spoken-word CD. Yet Summers saw no conflict with moonlighting in the money racket while running the entire university. The students didn’t even get a CD for his efforts — and Harvard’s deflated endowment, now in a daunting liquidity crisis, didn’t exactly benefit either.
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posted by Sir Gumbo at 11:38 PM
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