Later On

Matt Corley at ThinkProgress:

Some members of the Obama administration have suggested that they might use the budget reconciliation process to pass their health care and energy proposals, which would require only 51 votes in the Senate, instead of the usual 60. Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) doesn’t like this idea, claiming that it is the equivalent of “running over the minority, putting them in cement and throwing them in the Chicago River.” But The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn notes that Gregg wasn’t so opposed to pushing changes through budget reconciliation in 2005 when Republicans were in power:

Republican leaders indicated Tuesday that they plan to press the issue of drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as part of a so-called budget reconciliation process, which cannot be subject to a Democratic filibuster–a tactic that has blocked the refuge’s development in the past. …

Budget Committee Chairman Judd Gregg, R-N.H. said it was reasonable to assume ANWR, as the refuge is commonly called, would be part of the budget measure.

“The president asked for it, and we’re trying to do what the president asked for,” Gregg said Tuesday after meeting privately with Republicans on his panel.

Matt Yglesias writes that “Gregg is being a hypocrite and deserves to be called on it; media outlets who quote him complaining without noting that he’s a hypocrite are being irresponsible.”

Update: Bush’s 2001 tax cut passed the Senate with 58 votes and his 2003 tax cut passed with 51 votes.

Mike Lillis of the Washington Independent lets us know:

On day four of AIG bonus-gate, the message from Capitol Hill has emerged as clear as it is unanimous: The $165 million paid this week to executives of bailed-out American International Group is “appalling,” “outrageous” and “a breach of public trust.”

Yet as pitchfork populism continues to fuel the congressional castigation, a vital element of the debate has gone largely ignored: Congress, going back to September, has had numerous opportunities to limit executive pay for bailed-out banks, only to ignore or abandon those efforts in the face of opposition from the finance industry, the White House or both.

The result has been that hundreds of billions of dollars in bailout funds have left Washington with virtually no conditions on how the money would be spent. The banks have taken advantage of that freedom, collectively paying out billions in bonuses, retention salaries and other perks to the same employees who helped run the companies into the ground.

Julian E. Zelizer, congressional expert at Princeton University, said the failure of policymakers to limit executive pay for bailed out banks was no accident. “Neither Congress nor the president wanted to look as if they were ‘taking over’ financial institutions,” Zelizer wrote in an email, “nor did they want to anger business.”

The result, he added, was “predictable:” a bailout strategy with plenty of leeway for the companies receiving the money.

Indeed, allowing most bonus payments to continue was a central element of both the Bush and Obama administrations’ bailout strategies. When Henry Paulson, Treasury secretary under the Bush White House, first unveiled the Troubled Asset Relief Program in September, the public wailed about the absence of conditions on the money. Congress intervened to add some limits on executive pay — provisions that Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) labeled “anything but mild.” But liberal critics of those compensation limits, including a number of congressional Democrats, pointed out loopholes allowing the companies to pay their executives virtually any sum they wanted. Most provisions, for example, apply only to companies receiving more than $300 million in TARP funds.

“Under this bill,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said at the time, “the CEOs and the Wall Street insiders will still, with a little bit of imagination, continue to make out like bandits.”

In January, the House passed legislation placing tighter restrictions on TARP spending, including tougher limits on executive pay. Senate Democrats, pressed by administration officials, never took up the bill.

A month later, after Congress released the second $350 billion in TARP funding, President Barack Obama tightened the restrictions on executive pay, but not without including a telling caveat: The rules wouldn’t be so strict that they would scare away the employees of recipient companies.

Continue reading.

Obama shows some actual support and consideration for the troops. A press release today from the Pentagon:

The Department of Defense announced today a comprehensive plan to eliminate the current use of Stop Loss, while retaining the authority for future use under extraordinary circumstances. This is an important step along the path in adapting the Army into an expeditionary force.

The Army Reserve and Army National Guard will mobilize units without employing Stop Loss beginning in August and September 2009, respectively. The Regular (active duty) Army will deploy its first unit without Stop Loss by January 2010.

For soldiers Stop Lossed during fiscal 2009, the department will provide a monthly payment of $500. Until the department is able to eliminate Stop Loss altogether, this payment will serve as an interim measure to help mitigate its effects.

“Stop Loss disrupts the plans of those who have served their intended obligation. As such, it is employed only when necessary to ensure minimal staffing in deploying units, when needed to ensure safe and effective unit performance,” said Bill Carr, deputy under secretary of defense for military personnel policy. “It is more easily rationalized in the early stages of conflict when events are most dynamic; but tempo changes in this war have frustrated our efforts to end it altogether.”

The department intends to provide Stop Loss Special Pay to eligible service members until the point of separation or retirement, to include that time spent on active duty in recovery following redeployment. Stop Loss Special Pay will begin on the date of implementation, and will take effect for those impacted on or after Oct. 1, 2008.

Continue reading.

Interesting post by Matt Yglesias:

Thinking about the fine whine Ben Nelson, Even Bayh, and others are currently enjoying over the dastardly idea of returning the marginal tax rate on the richest two percent of the population to where it was back when Bill Clinton was destroying the economy, I’m growing concerned that the Obama administration may have made a mistake by putting forward such a reasonable budget proposal.

I can see why they did it. The key administration players—Larry Summers, Peter Orszag, Tim Geithner, Jason Furman, etc.—are nothing if not reasonable, moderate people. But the key legislative players aren’t reasonable, moderate people they’re “reasonable” “Senate moderates.” A “Senate moderate” is someone who takes his party’s proposals, objects to them, waters them down a bit, and then congratulates himself on a job well done. Which is great if his party’s proposals are unduly immoderate. But it’s big-time trouble if his party puts a reasonable, moderate agenda on the table.

After all, you don’t maintain the painstakingly achieved Nelson/Bayh “Senate moderate” brand by clapping politely. You need to bitch and moan and be quoted in inside-baseball only media outlets that none of your constituents pay attention to, and hold conferences and have meetings at the White House where people hold your hands. You need to be praised by the opposition party, and extract your pound of flesh from the proposal. Then when it looks like it might go down to defeat, you can vote for the somewhat-watered-down version and be the hero who saved the day and nobody will mention that you saved the day from yourself.

But you really do need to do that stuff. You can’t just say “well, this is a reasonable proposal so I’ll back it.” Then your moderate license gets taken away.

But I think that means that proposals need to deliberately overshoot the mark. Say Obama had proposed a top marginal tax rate of 43 percent. Well Evan Bayh couldn’t stand for that! He might propose some reasonable alternative like letting the Bush tax cuts expire so that post-recession rates will be back where they were in the 1990s. How reasonable! How moderate! How judicious!

From ThinkProgress’s Ryan Powers:

This morning on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN) officially announced the creation of his new Blue-Dog style coalition of approximately 15 “moderate” Democratic senators. As Roll Call explained last week, members of the group “acknowledge that they are seeking to restrain the influence of party liberals.” During his announcement, host Joe Scarborough asked Bayh who is in the new coalition. Bayh said that while a press release on the group’s creation included the names of 12 senators, there are “three or four” who don’t want to be identified:

SCARBOROUGH: This is great! Can you tell us who’s in it?

BAYH: Well there are about 12 of us on the press release and then there are three or four who we are putting in the witness protection program, who attend our meetings but don’t want to be publicly identified yet.

Watch it:

Explaining the likely rational for senators not wanting to be publicly associated with Bayh’s new group, Matt Yglesias writes, “After all, Barack Obama is popular! And his agenda is popular! So if you choose to oppose it, you might face political problems. So better to keep the sabotage secret.”

For whatever reason (probably to protect Phil Gramm, the architect of the economy’s failure), the GOP is pushing a myth about the cause of the subprime crisis. Mike Lillis of the Washington Independent debunks that myth:

Amid the ongoing debate over mortgage lending reform, a top federal regulator took a seat before Congress last week and debunked the myth — popular among conservatives — that a law encouraging loans to low-income communities has been largely responsible for the nation’s housing crisis.

“I can state very definitively,” Sandra Braunstein, director of the Federal Reserve’s consumer and community affairs division, said during a House Financial Institutions subcommittee hearing Wednesday, “that from the research we have done, the Community Reinvestment Act is not one of the causes of the current crisis.”

The statement may have come as a surprise to some of the panel Republicans, who have made a habit of fingering the CRA as a leading cause of the financial downturn. Enacted under the Carter administration, the law has been a lightning rod for conservative criticism for years, but the scorn really took off when the housing market collapsed last year. Critics claim that the CRA forced lenders to make bad loans to low-income borrowers who ultimately couldn’t pay them back.

Braunstein’s testimony, supported by a Fed analysis and echoed by other finance regulators in recent months, could add force to a recent Democratic push to expand the CRA to cover non-bank financial institutions, including mortgage companies, securities firms, credit unions and insurance companies. The bill aims to boost not only lending, but also investments and other services in minority and low-income neighborhoods.

Yet some myths don’t die easy. And Republicans — backed by the finance industry and encouraged by conservative pundits — appear as willing as ever to blame the CRA for the collapse of the housing market. Indeed, Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) reiterated that argument at last week’s mortgage reform hearing, claiming that the CRA “helped put the federal government’s seal of approval, not so much on helping raise the economic opportunities of the borrower, but instead bringing down the lending standards of the lender.”

“I know the intent was noble,” Hensarling added, “but the effect has been devastating.”

Yet Braunstein’s testimony told a different tale. She cited a Federal Reserve Board analysis which found that, in 2006, CRA-covered banks operating in CRA-targeted neighborhoods accounted for just six percent of the risky, high-cost loans largely responsible for the housing crisis. Mortgage loans are considered high-cost when interest rates are at least three percentage points higher than those of conventional mortgages.

“So I can tell you,” Braunstein said, “if that’s where you’re going, that CRA was not the cause of this loan crisis.”

The debate arrives as …

Continue reading. Someday the GOP will abandon lying as their primary tactic. Maybe.

Jonathan Cohn knows a LOT about healthcare (see his book Sick). Here’s his report on how our national healthcare policy is being developed:

In early January, most of Barack Obama’s senior staff assembled with the president-elect for a meeting inside a windowless, eighth-floor office at the transition headquarters in Washington. It was a pivotal moment in Obama’s transformation from candidate to commander-in-chief. Obama’s advisers had taken all of his campaign pledges, factored in his promise to reduce the deficit, and put together a provisional blueprint for governing. For the first time, Obama would get a sense of how his proposals fit together in the real world.

Obama sat in the middle of a rectangular table with the budget projections in front of him. He said he was mostly happy with what his advisers had produced. Investments in energy and education, plus real progress on reducing the deficit—it was all in there, Obama noted. But then the president-elect turned to his one major concern: a key item that was not, in his opinion, sufficiently funded. "Here’s my guidance to you," one participant recalls Obama saying to the group. "Protect health care."

It wasn’t the first time that health care had seemed to get short shrift from Obama’s advisers. Nor would it be the last. Indeed, there were moments during the transition and the early weeks of the administration when it appeared that the push for comprehensive health care reform might collapse before it had even begun. During this time, a debate raged inside the administration, with some senior officials arguing that the new president should wade into health care gingerly—or even postpone it altogether—because it would cost too much, distract from other priorities, and carry huge political risks.

Ultimately, however, these arguments failed to carry the day, and health care reform, against what occasionally seemed like long odds, managed to find a sizeable place in Obama’s budget. The story of how that happened—as conveyed in interviews with more than a dozen administration insiders representing a wide variety of viewpoints—provides a window onto the political and personal dynamics that dominate the new White House. It also offers insights, some of them surprising, into the management style of the president himself.

The divide among Obama’s counselors was never over whether to pursue health care reform or even what it should look like in the end. Pretty much every top official serving in the administration believed that health care reform was a worthwhile project—and that the goal should be to give everybody insurance while making steady progress on reducing the cost of medical care. What divided Obama’s team was the question of how to pursue reform—in particular, how quickly.

That tension stretched back to the campaign, when Obama’s political strategists advised him to soft-pedal the topic. One of them was David Axelrod. Although personally acquainted with the flaws in our health care system because of his disabled daughter, he also understood public opinion: The middle-class voters whose support politicians covet were worried about the cost of insurance, but their enthusiasm for universal coverage seemed shallow. Obama, though, always insisted on keeping health care prominent in the election. "He said, ‘I want to do health care as president,’" one senior adviser paraphrased, "’and I can’t do health care if I don’t talk about it during the campaign.’"

The commitment was not just rhetorical. Behind the scenes, …

Continue reading.

Mark Danner is the guy who broke the story (in the NY Review of Books and in the NY Times, which published an excerpt of the article in the Review) of the ICRC report on US torture.

I’ve seen some good movies recently. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is an intense movie and has (IMHO) excellent acting. And what a cast: Albert Finney, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, Marisa Tomei. The director is Sidney Lumet.

Also, I watched again, with great enjoyment, Melvin Goes to Dinner. Quite a nice little movie.

I finished The Fortunate Fall, a very interesting sci-fi novel with, alas, a protagonist who was (for me) totally unsympathetic.

I’ve put a hold on the new Laura Lippman mystery, Life Sentences, which has gotten excellent reviews.

Glenn Greenwald and Jane Hamsher set the record straight. Greenwald:

There is a major push underway — engineered by Obama’s Treasury officials, enabled by a mindless media, and amplified by the right-wing press — to blame Chris Dodd for the AIG bonus payments.  That would be perfectly fine if it were true.  But it’s completely false, and the scheme to heap the blame on him for the AIG bonus payments is based on demonstrable falsehoods.

Jane Hamsher has written the definitive post narrating and indisputably documenting what actually took place.   The attempt to blame Dodd is based on a patently false claim that was first fed to The New York Times on Saturday by an "administration official" granted anonymity by Times reporters Edmund Andrew and Peter Baker (in violation, as usual, of the NYT anonymity policy, since all the official was doing was disseminating pro-administration spin). The accusation against Dodd is that there is nothing the Obama administration can do about the AIG bonus payments because Dodd inserted a clause into the stimulus bill which exempted executive compensation agreements entered into before February, 2009 from the compensation limits imposed on firms receiving bailout funds.  Thus, this accusation asserts, it was Dodd’s amendment which explicitly allowed firms like AIG to make bonus payments that were promised before the stimulus bill was enacted.

That is simply not what happened.  What actually happened is the opposite.  It was Dodd who did everything possible — including writing and advocating for an amendment — which would have applied the limitations on executive compensation to all bailout-receiving firms, including AIG, and applied it to all future bonus payments without regard to when those payments were promised.  But it was Tim Geithner and  Larry Summers who openly criticized Dodd’s proposal at the time and insisted that those limitations should apply only to future compensation contracts, not ones that already existed.  The exemption for already existing compensation agreements — the exact provision that is now protecting the AIG bonus payments — was inserted at the White House’s insistence and over Dodd’s objections.  But now that a political scandal has erupted over these payments, the White House is trying to deflect blame from itself and heap it all on Chris Dodd by claiming that it was Dodd who was responsible for that exemption.

Jane’s post documents this sequence of events without any possibility for doubt…

Continue reading.

Death of a species now underway. Mark R writes at the Ethicurean:

Recently I was snared — or hooked, snagged, or netted (pick your favorite fishing pun) — by a book that shows  humanity’s enormous capacity to affect ocean life. We can nearly wipe out an entire species in just a few decades thanks to new technologies and taste trends.

Take the Chilean sea bass, Dissostichus eleginoides, a.k.a. the Patagonian toothfish. Until the 1990s, it was more or less unknown to most of the world. By 2002, stocks had been depleted so much that the National Environmental Trust launched a preservation campaign called “Take a Pass on Chilean Sea Bass” and the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch eventually added it to its “avoid” list.

This is part of the story told in “Hooked: Pirates, Poaching, and the Perfect Fish” by G. Bruce Knecht. A historic chase of a fishing vessel by Australian authorities across thousands of miles of the Southern Ocean provides narrative drive for the history of the Chilean sea bass and how modern fishing operates. Knecht intersperses suspenseful chapters about the chase with background from the fish’s “discovery” in Chile and its introduction to wholesalers and restaurateurs in the U.S., weaving an engrossing tale that only lets up after the ship is captured and some of the officers and crew go on trial in Australia.

Before 1977, the fish was hardly known outside of the South American coast, and wasn’t even called the “Chilean sea bass.” Back then, fishermen called it bacalao de profudid (cod of the deep), and it was generally disliked in Chile because of its oily flesh. Lee Lantz, an American fish wholesaler working in Chile, and Eduardo Neef, his Chilean business associate, were the first to see the commercial potential of the fish. Having years of experience with fish buyers, Lantz knew that it needed a better name, and after much deliberation, he chose “Chilean sea bass” because its white flesh and triangular tail resembled other sea bass.

Initially, the fish was used as part of the mixture in frozen fish sticks, but eventually it was embraced by top chefs for its succulent, moist flesh and mild flavor. In 1990, it made its first appearance in a white tablecloth restaurant, at the Four Seasons Restaurant in NYC, where it was called “Corvina bass” (even though both words refer to other species of fish).  By the late 1990s, Chilean sea bass was the foundation of the signature dishes of many restaurants, including Rick Moonen’s Oceana in New York City. Increasing demand, of course, drove more fishermen to seek the fish, first decimating the fisheries off the coast of Chile and then angling for the Southern Ocean. In 2002, the National Environmental Trust launched its “Take a Pass on Chilean Sea Bass” campaign. Hundreds of chefs from around the U.S. joined the campaign, pledging to remove the fish from their menus until the population had recovered. As National Geographic News reported, chefs have a major influence on demand for the fish in the U.S.: restaurants account almost three-quarters of the sales of the fish.

The Chilean sea bass’s rapid descent from unknown to overfished is a result of its nature and our technology. The Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch fact sheet about the fish says that they are slow-growing and don’t breed until an advanced age. And according to “Hooked,” these fish spend most of their lives in a relatively small region, unlike, say, bluefin tuna, which swim thousands of miles each year. Once a fishing boat finds a good spot, it’s all over for that sea bass community.

Our technology is the other main factor in the fish’s near demise. In recent decades, …

Continue reading.

From CAP:

A group of eight centrist Senate Democrats "is quietly maneuvering to keep open the option of vetoing two of President Barack Obama’s most ambitious agenda items this year — climate change and health care reform." The group, which includes Sens. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) and Blanche Lincoln (D-AK), are seeking to kill efforts to pass climate and health care legislation through a budget reconciliation, which requires only 51 votes.

From the Center for American Progress:

Last December, President Bush refused to support an unprecedented U.N. declaration calling for a worldwide decriminalization of homosexuality. Sixty-six countries — including all 27 European Union members, Japan, Australia, and Mexico — signed the declaration "to ensure that sexual orientation or gender identity may under no circumstances be the basis for criminal penalties, in particular executions, arrests, or detention." The United States joined China, Russia, the Vatican, and members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference in opposition. At the time, human rights advocates slammed Bush  for "trying to come up with Christmas presents for the religious right." But in a sharp reversal from Bush, the Obama administration has "notified the declaration’s French sponsors that the [U.S.] wants to be added as a supporter." "In the words of the United States Supreme Court, the right to be free from criminalization on the basis of sexual orientation ‘has been accepted as an integral part of human freedom,’ " an official said yesterday. This marks the second time that President Obama has signaled his outright rejection of Bush-era attitudes toward gay rights. Last month, the United States supported a separate proposal to condemn "all forms of discrimination and all other human rights violations based on sexual orientation" at the U.N.’s Durban Review Conference on racism and xenophobia in Geneva.

The Marijuana Policy Project emails:

Ten years ago yesterday, the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine (IOM) released its landmark report that forever changed the public debate on medical marijuana.

In November 1996, California became the first state to pass a medical marijuana ballot initiative. The following month, the Clinton administration struck back, threatening doctors if they recommended medical marijuana to patients. But the American Medical Association and the American public responded with outrage and condemnation, throwing the Clinton administration off-balance. The next month, in January 1997, the White House drug czar’s office attempted to deflect attention by awarding $1 million in taxpayer money to the Institute of Medicine to conduct a two-year study of medical marijuana.

In 1997 and 1998, MPP brought dozens of patients to a series of IOM hearings to testify about their fear of being arrested. Indeed, many of the patients had already been arrested and/or incarcerated for using medical marijuana.

Then, on March 17, 1999, the Institute of Medicine finally released a report that was not at all what the drug czar’s office had hoped for. The report contradicted the claims of the drug czar and other federals officials on a number of fronts:

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Like wars among bootleggers during Prohibition, but the drug cartels have more money, more men, and better weapons. The Center for American Progress writes:

With the severe economic recession and continuing U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, the growing crisis of drug-related violence in Mexico has thus far received less public attention than it should. But Obama administration officials are clearly aware of the problem. On Feb. 25, 2009, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told a congressional committee that "Mexico right now has issues of violence that are a different degree and level than we’ve ever seen before." Turf wars between drug gangs and Mexican authorities led to the deaths of some 6,000 people last year, more than twice the previous record, according to Deputy Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Mark Koumans. In a written statement to the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security, Koumans said that the number of murders in Ciudad Juarez on the U.S.-Mexico border in January 2009 "was three times higher than in January 2008." In response to requests from the governors of Texas and Arizona, President Obama is reportedly considering deploying National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexico border. Yesterday, Air Force Gen. Gene Renuart, the head of Northern Command, told a Senate committee that an inter-agency government team could complete work on an integrated plan to address Mexico’s escalating drug war as early as this week.

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The shave today I might call the “book cover” shave: Above you see the very container of Castle Forbes Lavender that made the lather for the book cover and the very Gillete Aristocrat featured on the cover. The brush today, though, is the G.B. Kent BK4, not the BK8 (which I have since sold in favor the BK4). The lather was wonderful, as always: thick, fragrant, luxurious, and effective. The Aristocrat today carries an Asco blade (rather than the Feather shown on the cover), and that blade did an excellent job today. As I recall, the first use was iffy, but this time it was just fine. The Castle Forbes Lavender Balm was excellent and is highly recommended to the balm-oriented shavers.

I just learned that the blender of the Castle Forbes line of shaving products was given a copy of the Guide to Gourmet Shaving by his daughter, and he likes it. I’m delighted!