Later On

This is a heartening development. Mike Lillis of the Washington Independent:

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner appeared on Capitol Hill this morning, testifying for the first time before the congressional oversight panel created to monitor the Wall Street rescue plan. He didn’t have an easy time of things, getting grilled from the panel’s liberals and conservatives alike over things like rising foreclosures and the shift in government bank holdings from preferred stock, which pays interest, to common stock, which doesn’t.

Yet not much news emerged from the sometimes testy discussion. Geithner reiterated the administration’s hope to create a regulator to oversee non-bank institutions like investment firms, much like the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation currently regulates traditional banks. He also denied the charge that the automakers have been forced to make greater concessions than the finance sector in return for federal help, pointing out that both Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae have seen shifts in management.

Of note, Geithner — himself a creature of Wall Street — conceded that there aren’t nearly enough consumer protections in the credit card, mortgage and other financial products markets, adding that in coming weeks, the administration plans to  propose a series of consumer-friendly reforms on all fronts.

“We had systematic failures in consumer protection,” he said. “It’s going to require very substantial changes to fix that.”

Pressed by Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard University law professor who heads the oversight panel, Geithner also reiterated the administration’s support for legislation empowering struggling homeowners to file bankruptcy to prevent foreclosure — an avenue that’s currently prohibited.

The House earlier this year passed legislation allowing bankruptcy judges to reduce — or cramdown — the principal balance and interest rates of mortgage loans to help prevent foreclosures, which are on the rise. But the bill has stalled in the Senate in the face of opposition from most banks.

President Obama has said the cramdown bill is a vital element …

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Kevin Sack in the NY Times:

When Danna Walker left the second-floor conference room and returned tearily to her desk — where someone had already deposited a packing box for her belongings — her first thought was not of the 14 years she had worked for DHL or the loss of her $37,000-a-year salary.

It was of Jake. In three months, once her benefits ran out, how in the world would she provide health insurance for Jake, her mountainous, red-headed 21-year-old son, who had learned three years earlier that he had metastatic testicular cancer?

Since the day she was laid off in October, Ms. Walker and her husband, Russ, co-owner of a struggling feed store here on the outskirts of Houston, have mounted a largely fruitless quest to find affordable coverage for Jake’s pre-existing condition. Their odyssey has become all too familiar to millions of newly uninsured Americans who suddenly find themselves one diagnosis away from medical and financial devastation.

The Walkers, both 46, are among nine million people who have lost employer-sponsored insurance since December 2007, according to projections by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Some have qualified for government insurance, and others have bought individual policies. But an estimated four million have joined the ranks of the uninsured, heightening the urgency in Washington to close the coverage gaps in American health care.

Like many others, the Walkers live on a knife’s edge of risk. Without insurance to cover her high blood pressure or his diabetes, they defer doctors’ visits when possible and obtain their prescriptions — nine between the two of them — for $4 apiece at Wal-Mart.

But their primary concern has been finding insurance for Jake, who, after four operations, two stem cell transplants and round after grueling round of chemotherapy, has been cancer-free for a year.

He continues to face …

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Well, Hicks recommended shuttering only the Army, Navy, and Air Force Academies, not the Coast Guard Academy. (Not sure why he omitted that one.)

Here’s Hicks’s original article, and here’s the response.

Also, the comments to Hicks’s article are quite interesting.

Very interesting column by Tom Ricks:

After I spoke at Princeton the other night, I was surprised by the stream of young men who came up to told me that they are joining the Marines or Army after graduation.

On reflection, I shouldn’t have been, because lately I’ve been noticing this phenomenon of graduates of elite universities going into the military. This isn’t a tidal wave, or even a fad, but I think a steady self-selection.

Lately I have spoken with three men, by coincidence all 24 years old, who have good entry-level jobs in Washington foreign policy and journalism circles, who are planning to chuck all that and become Marine officers in the coming year. I also know Matt Pottinger, once reputed to be among the best Wall Street Journal reporters in Beijing and a fluent Mandarin speaker, who signed up and went to Marine Officer Candidates School. He is now serving in southern Afghanistan.

What is going on here? I think two things, one negative, the other historical.

The negative trend is …

Continue reading. And also read his column on how to read a newspaper. He provides an example of excellent reporting.

Why do we call this country an ally? Look at this:

Source: Haaretz (Israel), April 20, 2009

Worried about "increasing international willingness to negotiate with Tehran over its nuclear program," the Israeli government is ramping up its anti-Iranian messaging. Israel has committed 8 million NIS, or around U.S.$2 million, for the campaign. "To appeal to people who are less concerned with Iran’s nuclear aspirations and more fearful of its human rights abuses," Israel will work with the "international gay community" to highlight Iran’s repression of LGBT people. "The campaign will also reach out to Jewish groups who want to bring more attention to [Iranian president Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial and some members of the Iranian regime’s anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist views," reports Haaretz. The Israeli campaign will also include "increased briefings for foreign journalists on the Iranian nuclear program and greater use of the Internet and sites such as YouTube." A "senior political source in Jerusalem" said the campaign will "lay the groundwork" for "possible diplomatic failure" with Iran. "Despite talk of a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities," the campaign advocates "harsh economic sanctions."

This sounds quite interesting:

The Queue
by Vladimir Sorokin

A review by Elaine Blair

A few years ago during a family visit in St. Petersburg, my grandmother, who has never been outside Soviet borders, asked me if Russians now had, in their stores, everything that you could buy in the United States. I thought, for some reason, of shampoo and the eight or ten different kinds of it for sale at the Western-style supermarket in my grandmother’s unassuming neighborhood. And I thought of the department stores and boutiques on Nevsky Prospect, where, if you wanted to spend more money on your shampoo, you had a choice of another eight or ten different European and American luxury brands. Then I thought of the dozens, possibly hundreds, of different brands of shampoos to be found in an American city, each with its own complicated semiotics signaling that the shampoo was high-tech or discount or handmade on a commune. How to explain the minute, absorbing consumer choices that made fools of us every day? "You have as much of everything as anyone could want," I told her. "But for some reason we have…even more."

At this point it’s only a difference of degree between the obscene bounty of America’s consumer republic and the slightly more modest bounty (for those who can afford it) of free-market Russia. But for many decades of the past century the universe of Soviet consumption was the flip side of the American one: many people had enough money to buy the things they coveted, but such items only rarely appeared in stores. These peculiar conditions of Second World consumerism are the background of The Queue, the first novel — originally published in 1985 in Russian, in Paris — by Vladimir Sorokin, one of Russia’s funniest, smartest and most confounding living writers. Sorokin, born in 1955, has become an elder statesman of Russian postmodernism, with a career spanning Soviet stagnation, perestroika and the transformation of Russia into a free-market and increasingly autocratic state.

The Queue, which is being published for the first time in the United States, is set in an enormous line that forms one summer afternoon in the 1980s in Moscow, a line that about 2,000 people eventually join, over the course of two days, in order to have a chance to buy — something. It’s never entirely clear what they’re so eager to buy. In one of the novel’s running jokes, Sorokin keeps hinting at different kinds of items. At first the goods seem to be shoes from Yugoslavia (or possibly Czechoslovakia or Sweden), then jeans from the United States, then suede jackets from Turkey. Certainly they are imports: the Soviet versions of all these things could be bought in a store without much queuing, but their shoddiness was a familiar, insulting and inescapable fact of Soviet life. David Remnick recalls in Lenin’s Tomb, his book about the fall of the Soviet Union, an exhibit he attended in 1989 at Moscow’s Exhibition of Economic Achievements. Mounted in the frank spirit of glasnost, it was called "The Exhibit of Poor-Quality Goods" and featured "ruptured shoes, rusted samovars, chipped stew pots, unraveled shuttlecocks, crushed cans of fish, and, the show-stopper, a bottle of mineral water with a tiny dead mouse floating inside." One could blame perverse incentives, mismanaged supply chains and bureaucratic corruption for this state of squalor; but two customers in Sorokin’s queue hit upon a more straightforward explanation while comparing American and Soviet economies: "They have to work their asses off over there, but here if you come drunk to work it’s no big deal."

The Queue is written entirely in dialogue, composed of bits of conversations that take place among the people waiting in line. The most pressing subject for the queuers is …

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Little surprise, but it’s happening:

In the first major disclosure of corruption in the $750-billion financial bailout program, federal investigators said Monday they have opened 20 criminal probes into possible securities fraud, tax violations, insider trading and other crimes.

The cases represent only the first wave of investigations, and the total fraud could ultimately reach into the tens of billions of dollars, according to Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general overseeing the bailout program.

The disclosures reinforce fears that the hastily designed and rapidly changing bailout program run by the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve is going to carry a heavy price of fraud against taxpayers — even as questions grow about its ability to stabilize the nation’s financial system.

Barofsky said the complex nature of the bailout program makes it "inherently vulnerable to fraud, waste and abuse, including significant issues relating to conflicts of interest facing fund managers, collusion between participants, and vulnerabilities to money laundering."

The report said …

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From the Daily Muck:

In civil charges filed Monday, the SEC accused a Pennsylvania money manager of running a Ponzi scheme and using investor dollars to fund his lavish lifestyle. The SEC charged Tony Young, an investment advisor and polo player, with stealing $20 million from investors to buy a boat and home in Florida, several cars, and polo horses. The scam became a Ponzi scheme, the SEC says, when Young began paying off debts with funds provided by new investors. A federal judge approved a restraining order Friday and froze the assets of Young’s investment fund. (Wall Street Journal)

Excellent column in the NY Times by Paul Kane. It begins:

Robert Gates, the secretary of defense, has proposed a budget overhaul that will go a long way toward improving our national security, but more can be done to meet his long-term goal: creating the right military for the 21st century.

Not since Henry Stimson’s tenure from 1940 to ’45 has a defense secretary been faced to the same degree with simultaneously fighting a war and carrying out far-reaching reforms. Yet there are three major changes Mr. Gates should add to his agenda, and they deserve President Obama’s support.

First, the Air Force should be eliminated, and its personnel and equipment integrated into the Army, Navy and Marine Corps. Second, the archaic “up or out” military promotion system should be scrapped in favor of a plan that treats service members as real assets. Third, the United States needs a national service program for all young men and women, without any deferments, to increase the quality and size of the pool from which troops are drawn…

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Good sign of progress in this NY Times story.

UPDATE: Jeff Stein has a follow-up column to the column in which he broke the story.

TPMmuckraker has a very good timeline of the Harman doings. The NY Times has a story on the situation. And from the Center for American Progress:

Yesterday, CQ’s Jeff Stein reported that in 2005 Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) was “overheard on an NSA wiretap telling a suspected Israeli agent that she would lobby the Justice Department [to] reduce espionage-related charges against two officials of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee.” In exchange, Harman asked for help lobbying Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to “appoint her chair of the Intelligence Committee after the 2006 elections, which the Democrats were heavily favored to win.” Stein also reported that contrary to previous reports that an FBI probe into Harman had been dropped due to “lack of evidence,” it was actually then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales who intervened on Harman’s behalf in mid-2005 to stop the FBI’s investigation because he needed her help selling the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretap program. According to Stein, Gonzales told then-CIA Director Porter Goss that Harman had helped persuade the New York Times to hold a story on the wiretapping program before the 2004 elections. In an initial statement to The Plum Line’s Greg Sargent yesterday, New York Times executive editor Bill Keller said “Ms. Harman did not influence my decision. I don’t recall that she even spoke to me.” But in a second statement yesterday, Keller acknowledged that “Harman called Philip Taubman, then the Washington bureau chief of The Times, in October or November of 2004″ and “urged that The Times not publish the article.” Harman’s office released a statement yesterday as well, arguing “the CQ Politics story simply recycles three year-old discredited reporting of largely unsourced material.” Harman said that she “never contacted the Justice Department” about the prosecution. Harman’s statement did not address whether she had “contacted anyone at the White House.”

From the Center for American Progress:

Last week, President Obama released four Bush-era Office of Legal Counsel memos that had authorized torture. "In dozens of pages of dispassionate legal prose, the methods approved by the Bush administration for extracting information from senior operatives of Al Qaeda are spelled out in careful detail — like keeping detainees awake for up to 11 straight days, placing them in a dark, cramped box or putting insects into the box to exploit their fears," The New York Times writes. The earliest memo, from 2002, was signed by Jay Bybee, then an Assistant Attorney General and now a federal judge on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Bybee’s memo provided "a legal authorization for a laundry list of proposed C.I.A. interrogation techniques," including waterboarding. The techniques Bybee approved are illegal by U.S. statute and an international treaty to which the U.S. is a signatory. Bybee attempted to give legal cover to illegal acts, and thus broke the ethical, professional, and legal standards that govern lawyers. For this, Judge Jay Bybee should be impeached. The Progress Report has launched a campaign to persuade the House Judiciary Committee to initiate impeachment hearings against Bybee. Already, more than 3,000 of you have taken action. Join our effort to convince the committee to launch hearings.

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Last night I made this recipe by Peggy Filippone, and it was delicious:

Chicken Stroganoff

Prep Time: 15 minutes
Cook Time: 30 minutes

• 2 Tablespoons all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon ground sage
• 1 teaspoon dried thyme, crushed
• Kosher salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
• 4 boneless, skinless chicken thighs, cut into 1-1/2-inch chunks
• 2 Tablespoons olive oil
• 1 Tablespoon butter
• 1/2 cup minced [sliced] sweet onions
• 2 cloves garlic, pressed
• 8 ounces white mushrooms, sliced
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt
• 1/2 cup white wine
• 1 cup chicken broth
• 1/2 cup heavy cream
• 1/2 cup sour cream
• [1 Tablespoon Dijon mustard]
• 1 Tablespoon chopped chives for garnish

In a large bowl, combine flour, sage, thyme, salt, and pepper. Add chicken thigh pieces and toss to coat.

Heat a large, heavy, deep-sided skillet over medium heat. When hot, add olive oil and swirl to coat the bottom of the pan. Add chicken thigh pieces in a single layer and cook until lightly browned. Place browned chicken in a bowl and set aside.

In the same pan, melt butter in the pan drippings. Add minced sweet onions, garlic, and mushrooms. Toss to coat, then sprinkle with 1 teaspoon kosher salt to help mushrooms release their liquid. Sauté over low heat until vegetables are lightly browned.

Deglaze pan with white wine and stir, scraping bits from the bottom. Cook about 2 minutes to boil off the alcohol. Add chicken broth and simmer about 5 minutes. Return chicken to the skillet and add heavy cream. Simmer another 10 minutes or until sauce is thickened.

Remove from heat and stir in sour cream. Serve chicken stroganoff over buttered and parsleyed noodles or rice pilaf and garnish with chives.

Yield: 4 to 6 servings

I used chicken breasts instead of thighs, and 1 cup of sour cream instead of 1/2 cup sour cream and 1/2 cup heavy cream. I thought both changes were good and I’ll stick with them.

It was really tasty, and I’ll use fresh tarragon (added with the chicken broth) and leave out the sage. Also, I believe 1 Tbs of Dijon mustard is needed for a true Stroganoff flavor and slicing the onions rather than mincing them is also traditional. But very tasty and quite easy.

UPDATE: The Eldest called with a couple of good suggestions:

1. Use Coleman’s English Mustard instead of Dijon. Coleman’s is a powdered mustard, so put that in with the flour so that the mustard and flour sticks to the chicken, which you then sauté.
2. Try adding a teaspoon or so of tomato paste when you sauté the onion and mushrooms. She says it doesn’t add a tomato taste, but does give some depth.

The Valobra shave stick is very nice indeed: a modest fragrance, but a superb lather. I believe that the soap is triple milled, and in any event is a favorite. With the Sabini ebony-handled brush, I got a perfect lather, and the Gillette President provided an excellent shave with the Asco Super Stainless blade it carried. And Alt Innsbruck provided a fine finish.

No tea or coffee today: it’s hot. I’m drinking iced water with some pomegranate juice and a dash of lemon bitters.

Very interesting article in New Scientist, which points out that quantum physics was established and worked out before we knew about black holes and about fractals. Use of those might reconcile quantum physics with common sense. The article, by Mark Buchanan, begins:

QUANTUM theory just seems too weird to believe. Particles can be in more than one place at a time. They don’t exist until you measure them. Spookier still, they can even stay in touch when they are separated by great distances.

Einstein thought this was all a bit much, believing it to be evidence of major problems with the theory, as many critics still suspect today. Quantum enthusiasts point to the theory’s extraordinary success in explaining the behaviour of atoms, electrons and other quantum systems. They insist we have to accept the theory as it is, however strange it may seem.

But what if there were a way to reconcile these two opposing views, by showing how quantum theory might emerge from a deeper level of non-weird physics?

If you listen to physicist Tim Palmer, it begins to sound plausible. What has been missing, he argues, are some key ideas from an area of science that most quantum physicists have ignored: the science of fractals, those intricate patterns found in everything from fractured surfaces to oceanic flows (see What is a fractal?).

Take the mathematics of fractals into account, says Palmer, and the long-standing puzzles of quantum theory may be much easier to understand. They might even dissolve away.

It is an argument that is drawing attention from physicists around the world. "His approach is very interesting and refreshingly different," says physicist Robert Spekkens of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. "He’s not just trying to reinterpret the usual quantum formalism, but actually to derive it from something deeper."

That Palmer is making this argument may seem a little odd, given that he is a climate scientist working at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting in Reading, UK. It makes more sense when you learn that Palmer studied general relativity at the University of Oxford, working under the same PhD adviser as Stephen Hawking.

So while Palmer has spent the last 20 years establishing a reputation as a leading mathematical climatologist, he has also continued to explore the mysteries of his first interest, quantum theory (see "Quantum ambitions").

"It has taken 20 years of thinking," says Palmer, "but I do think that most of the paradoxes of quantum theory may well have a simple and comprehensible resolution."

Arguments over quantum theory have raged since the 1920s, starting with a series of famous exchanges between Einstein and the Danish physicist Niels Bohr.

Bohr and his supporters believed that …

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Just received and acted upon:

If you saw the front page of the New York Times today, you saw them pick up an important story that Marcy Wheeler broke on FDL on Saturday — Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in one month.

She reported how the interrogators went far outside of anything they were legally allowed to do, even under the expansive laws written by the Bush Administration.

Marcy’s work shows just how important it is that Attorney General Eric Holder appoint an independent special prosecutor to investigate the torture of detainees.

You can sign the petition here:
http://action.firedoglake.com/page/s/Prosecutor

The ACLU will be delivering the signatures to Secretary Holder later this week.  The deadline for signatures is 9am ET, Thursday, April 23.

Thanks for taking the time to stand up for the rule of law.

Jane Hamsher
firedoglake.com

From a story in the NY Times by Scott Shane:

The Obama administration, eager to avoid the political distraction of full-scale investigations of Bush administration programs, has offered a two-part message: waterboarding is illegal torture, but there will be no investigation of who ordered the torture or carried it out.

That is incredible. They admit that a crime has been committed, they acknowledge that our law and treaty obligates us to investigate and prosecute the crime, but they just don’t want to do it because it would be a lot of trouble.

This, of course, applies only to well-connected criminals.

I’m so disgusted that I’m going to stop blogging before I come over all cranky again.

Dishes all done, chicken almost done. Extremely hot here today. I’m drinking a glass of water with some pomegranate juice in it, along with ice and a dash of lemon bitters. Very refreshing.

Glenn Greenwald has a new post on how much the beltway media elite are against any prosecution for past crimes (Bush Administration only, but I imagine they would agree that Jane Harman should also not have to answer charges). This, despite the fact that most people WANT justice served.

He also points out that this is a decision that Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel don’t get to make. It’s up to the Attorney General. Their comments are just a way of putting pressure on Eric Holder.

I just don’t understand this.

Joanne Mariner has this column in FindLaw:

The Obama administration’s release last week of four Bush-era memos on the abusive interrogations of detainees in U.S. custody has raised a host of questions. The memos, written by Justice Department attorneys, purport to authorize CIA interrogators to use a range of coercive techniques against detained terrorism suspects, even techniques that constitute torture under U.S. and international law.
The first and perhaps most compelling question is whether U.S. officials should be prosecuted for carrying out acts of torture, authorizing the use of torture, or ordering that torture be used. The administration was quick to suggest that it would not initiate such prosecutions, a move criticized by human rights groups and others.

The Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents a number of detainees at Guantanamo, emphasized the deterrent effect of prosecutions. By prosecuting these abusive techniques as crimes, the government would ensure that they would not be used in the future. Conversely, "[f]or there to be no consequences not only calls our system of justice into question, it leaves the gate open for this to happen again."

Another important question raised by the memos is what happened to the information that was obtained using torture. Was it used only preventively—to provide leads about possible future plots? Or was this tainted—and likely quite unreliable—information used in legal proceedings that affected people’s rights?

Court and Other Legal Proceedings

The rules on admissibility of evidence vary dramatically from forum to forum. While the U.S. federal courts bar evidence obtained under torture or other coercion, not all legal proceedings have such strict protections.

Of greatest concern are proceedings in which the evidence is kept secret. Secret evidence is often synonymous with tainted evidence, since without the safeguards imposed by the adversarial system, it is easier for the government to throw in whatever evidentiary garbage it wants.

It is no secret that the administrative decisions regarding the continued confinement of individual detainees at Guantanamo were, in many cases, based on unreliable evidence obtained via torture. For example, statements coerced from Mohammed al-Qahtani, a detainee whose prolonged physical and psychological abuse is documented in a government interrogation log, were used in the administrative proceedings of at least 30 other prisoners.

We also know that the U.S. government provided information obtained from Abu Zubayda, the detainee whose planned abuse by the CIA was described in one of the recently-released memos, to the Canadian government for use in at least two deportation cases. (To their credit, the Canadian courts barred the information from being admitted as evidence.)

Terrorist Blacklists

In addition, this abusively-obtained information was almost certainly used in the blacklisting of individuals and groups allegedly linked to terrorism…

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