Later On

DougJ has an excellent post at Balloon Juice:

E. J. Dionne has the same kind of delusions about the Catholic Church that David Frum has about the Republican party:

The church needs to cast aside the lawyers, the PR specialists and its own worst instincts, which are human instincts. Benedict could go down as one of the greatest popes in history if he were willing to risk all in the name of institutional self-examination, painful but liberating public honesty, and true contrition.

And then comes something even harder: Especially during Lent, the church teaches that forgiveness requires Catholics to have “a firm purpose of amendment.” The church will have to show not only that it has learned from this scandal, but also that it’s truly willing to transform itself.

Of course, this will never happen. The Catholic Church is a right-wing organization, as Andrew Sullivan has pointed out, as is the Republican party, of course. And that’s just how right-wing organizations operate. They don’t backtrack or apologize. In many ways, that’s a strength. But it certainly means they’re never going to come clean about anything.

Mary Ann Sorrentino (how’s that for a Catholic name!) says more or less the same thing—that there will be no major resignations or apologies. I like this in her article:

A quarter-century ago—at a time when about 10 priests in Rhode Island had already been accused of sexually abusing children—the Roman Catholic Diocese of Providence tried to stop my then-14-year-old daughter from making her confirmation because of her mother’s work with Planned Parenthood. When that conversation took place in our pastor’s office (and was taped by me), I was also told not to come to the rail, since I’d been excommunicated for that work.

My reply?

“Let me understand this, Father. Because of my work with women at Planned Parenthood, you don’t want me to come to the rail and take communion from the hands of a man who sexually abuses children? Is that what you’re telling me, Father?”

Steve Benen at Political Animal on a particularly contemptible Republican Senator—a very competitive category:

Republican Sen. John Ensign’s (Nev.) humiliating sex scandal doesn’t get a lot of media attention, but it’s becoming a very big deal, including an ongoing FBI investigation that produced subpoenas for the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

But as far as the disgraced, hypocritical, right-wing senator is concerned, he’s gotten a bad rap. In fact, Ensign believes he’s been the victim of "gotcha" journalism.

The Nevada Republican made the charge as he was being asked whether he’s been subpoenaed in a grand jury probe into the aftermath of his affair. Instead of answering that question, he descended into an extended rebuke of the press — including POLITICO — for the way it has covered the scandal surrounding him.

"Seeking of the truth should be not only part of the Justice Department and part of our judicial system, but also should be … a goal of reporters today," Ensign said. "Unfortunately, too much of our press is … (1) biased or (2) just about ‘gotcha.’" [...]

Ensign has insisted that he complied with the law and with Senate ethics rules, and he suggested Wednesday that the press is out to get him.

"Whether it’s Republican or Democrat, it’s about nailing somebody," Ensign said.

And if there’s one senator who knows all about nailing somebody, it’s John Ensign.

Look, for the senator to claim to be a victim is ridiculous. If anything, the media has gone unbelievably easy on this guy. Despite recent revelations and subpoenas, the Washington Post, for example, hasn’t run an article about Ensign’s scandal in months. News outlets that couldn’t get enough of Eric Massa (and John Edwards, and Eliot Spitzer) haven’t even mentioned Ensign’s sordid affair.

If you’re just joining us, Ensign’s humiliation came to public attention last June, when we learned the conservative, "family-values" senator carried on a lengthy extra-marital relationship with one of his aides, who happened to be married to another one of his aides. Ensign’s parents tried to pay off the mistress’ family.

The scandal grew far worse in October, when we learned that the Republican senator pushed his political and corporate allies to give lobbying contracts to his mistress’s husband. When Douglas and Cynthia Hampton left Ensign’s employ — because, you know, the senator was sleeping with Cynthia — Ensign allegedly took steps to help them make up the lost income, leaning on corporate associates to hire Douglas as a lobbyist. Emails surfaced this month that bolstered the allegations.

The controversy features the immediate affair, plus alleged ethics violations, hush money, and official corruption. An ongoing FBI investigation appears to be heating up, and by some accounts,expanding.

And yet, no media frenzy. No reporters staked out in front of Ensign’s home. No op-eds speculating about the need for Ensign to resign in disgrace.

"Gotcha" journalism? Please. If Ensign were a Democrat, he would have been forced from office months ago.

Paul Krugman in his blog:

I’m trying to wrap my mind around the details of financial reform, and in particular the difference between the Frank bill, already passed by the House, and the Dodd bill. And I keep coming back to an odd analogy, involving ancient history.

You see, somewhere, long ago, I read about the difference between the military methods of the Romans and those of the Hellenistic regimes set up after the conquests of Alexander the Great. Hellenistic armies, it was explained, were collections of specialists: heavy infantry with 16-foot pikes, archers, cavalry, and so on. Roman armies, by contrast, consisted of generalists: guys with shields, short swords, and javelins.

Used optimally, the Hellenistic armies had the advantage: longer reach if their heavy infantry confronted guys with shorter spears, longer range if their archers confronted guys with javelins, and so on. But making sure that everything went right required a first-rate commander; you could mess up badly if your phalanx found itself on uneven ground, etc..

Roman armies, by contrast, were relatively robust to mediocre leadership, since the soldiers could function relatively well in many circumstances. And in the end, since mediocre leaders are the norm, the Roman way prevailed.

So what does this have to do with financial reform? The pre-1980 system was, I’d argue, pretty robust. Bank regulators didn’t have to be all that smart, because the rules were simple — and besides, the large franchise value of banks, the fact that they faced limited competition and were almost guaranteed to be profitable, made bank executives unwilling to take big risks of killing the goose that laid golden eggs.

By contrast, the regulatory proposals now on the table are fairly Greek — they rely on regulators identifying systemic risk and the actions to combat it. The Frank (House) bill is more Roman than the Dodd (Senate) bill, in that it sets some firm, nondiscretionary limits on leverage and other stuff; there’s an awful lot of leaving things up to the judgment of the Fed and others in the Dodd proposal.

That doesn’t make financial reform useless. But it is a worry, since you can’t count on always having smart, well-intentioned people doing the regulating. Mike Konczal has a nice chart showing who would have been on the Financial Stability Oversight Council in 2005: John Snow, John Dugan, Alan Greenspan …

I’m all for passing reform. But I’m not that optimistic that it will work, even if it passes.

Typical except that, so far as I know, he has not had an extra-marital affair as yet. Amanda Terkel at ThinkProgress:

Some of the most inflammatory rhetoric in recent days surrounding the health care debate has come from Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), who excused the racist, homophobic slurs at the recent Capitol Hill Tea Party by saying that they were a justifiable response to Democrats’ “totalitarian tactics.” He has also said Democratic congressmen from California are “part of this totalitarian regime in Washington” whose “votes are for sale.” McClatchy reports that he is now comparing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to infamous international dictators:

Nunes said Pelosi and her lieutenant, Rep. George Miller, D-Concord, want to cut off Valley irrigation water because “they are radical environmental crazies,” and he explicitly likened the House leaders’ water policies to those of the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and the current Zimbabwe dictator Robert Mugabe.

Saddam’s forces killed between 30,000 and 60,000 of the so-called Marsh Arabs in the early 1990s, following an uprising encouraged by the first Bush administration after the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War. Saddam’s campaign included destroying marshlands. Mugabe’s corrupt security forces practice torture and “politically motivated, arbitrary and unlawful killings,” according to the State Department’s annual human rights report. Some activists allege Mugabe’s repressive tactics include cutting off water supplies to dissident cities.

Nunes also took a shot at aides who work on Capitol Hill, calling them “‘staff thugs,’ who watch over lawmakers during votes.” Nunes’ comments are similar to those of House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), who urged bankers to lobby against financial reform and not be deterred by the “little punk staffers” who work in Congress.

The GOP grows steadily crazier. Zaid Jilani at ThinkProgress:

Since Congress’s health care debate, lawmakers have received countless death threats, had their buildings vandalized, have had white powder mailed to their offices, and have had to get police protection. One tea party blogger has even warned that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) life is in danger and that there may be a “thousand little Waco’s.”

Yesterday, former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-GA) spoke alongside Gov. Sonny Perdue (R-GA) at a press conference in Atlanta organized to air Republican opposition to the health care bill that just passed. At one point, Gingrich was asked about the death threats and vandalism lawmakers who supported the bill have been receiving. After stressing that “there is no place for this viciousness” and condemning the various threats and violent acts, Gingrich went on to explain that the Democratic leadership “has to take some moral responsibility” for encouraging death threats and terrorism because of the way they conducted the health care debate:

GINGRICH: Just as there was no place for the kind of viciousness against Bush and Cheney, there’s no place for viciousness against Democrats. I would condemn any kind of activity that involves that kind of personal threat. But look, I think there’s something very disingenuous about the Democratic leaders who attacked the tea party movement, who refused to hold town hall meetings, who refused to go back home, who kept the Congress locked up in Washington, and are now shocked that people are angry. I think the Democratic leadership has to take some moral responsibility for having behaved with such arrogance, in such a hostile way, that the American people are deeply upset. So let’s be honest with this. This is a game that they’re playing. People should not engage in personal threats. I’m happy to condemn any effort to engage in personal threats. But I think the Democratic leadership has to take some real responsibility for having run a machine that used corrupt tactics, that bought votes, that bullied people, and as a result has enraged much of the American people. And I think it’d be nice for President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, and Majority Leader Reid to take some responsibility over what their actions have done to this country.

Listen to it:

Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time that Gingrich has accused his political opponents of provoking terrorism. After the tragic Virginia Tech shootings, he called on the “liberal elite” to “take responsibility” for creating a world where such tragedies were possible. And on the eve of the 2006 elections, Gingrich appeared on Fox News and said that the the Democrats’ “whole approach is to blame [America] for what, in fact, [terrorists] do. I think it tells you how deep the sickness is in the left wing of the Democratic Party.” It appears now that Gingrich is blaming America in an attempt to rationalize right-wing terrorism.

Gingrich’s state reminds me strongly of men who have been caught beating their wives and then go into long involved explanations of how she forced him to do it—he didn’t want to beat her, but she made him, she gave him no choice, etc.

Charles Cooper for CBS News:

Watching the reports of threats and violence against Democrats pile up, House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) did what any self-respecting Republican politician in a similar situation might do: He changed the narrative.

On Thursday, Cantor claimed that someone had fired a bullet through the window of his Richmond, Va. campaign office. If true, that would mark a shocking escalation of the ugliness which has accompanied the battle over health care reform legislation. Cantor got what he hoped for as the first round of media stories bought the spin. But Talking Points Memo got a hold of this statement from the Richmond, Va. police and it’s worth a read:

"The Richmond Police Department is investigating an act of vandalism at the Reagan Building, 25 E. Main St., Richmond, Virginia. A first floor window was struck by a bullet at approximately 1 a.m. on Tuesday, March 23. The building, which has several tenants including an office used by Congressman Eric Cantor, was unoccupied at the time A Richmond Police detective was assigned to the case. A preliminary investigation shows that a bullet was fired into the air and struck the window in a downward direction, landing on the floor about a foot from the window. The round struck with enough force to break the windowpane but did not penetrate the window blinds. (My emphasis.) There was no other damage to the room, which is used occasionally for meetings by the congressman."

So someone fired a bullet which followed a parabola-like trajectory and then landed "about a foot" away from the window. Serious stuff, but there’s a world of difference between the police statement and Cantor’s assertion. The investigation may ultimately find that the shooter had a political motivation, but the authorities haven’t made that claim. There’s no evidence suggesting that Cantor’s trying to pull an Ashley Todd but he is playing for sympathy.

The random acts of vandalism obviously don’t cast the conservative opponents of the health care form bill in a favorable light. Cantor and the GOP know that the next battle will be to sell the American public on competing narratives offered by Democrats and Republicans. That’s why he’s singling out the Democrats for using the reported threats as political props (he called them "political weapons")

I imagine that this must be one of the famous "no-bid" government contracts that KBR seems to land. Adam Weinstein at Mother Jones:

It was just a single contract for a single job on a single base in Iraq. The Department of Defense agreed to pay the megacontractor KBR $5 million a year to repair tactical vehicles, from Humvees to big rigs, at Joint Base Balad, a large airfield and supply center north of Baghdad. Yet according to a new Pentagon report [PDF], what the military got was as many as 144 civilian mechanics, each doing as little as 43 minutes of work a month, with virtually no oversight. The report, issued March 3 by the DOD’s inspector general, found that between late 2008 and mid-2009, KBR performed less than 7 percent of the work it was expected to do, but still got paid in full.

The $4.6 million blown on this particular contract is a relatively small loss considering that in 2009 alone, the government had a blanket deal worth $5 billion with KBR (formerly known as the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root). Just days before the Pentagon released the Balad report, KBR announced it had won a new $2.3 billion-plus, five-year Iraq contract. But the inspector general’s modest investigation offers new insight into just how little KBR delivers and how toothless the Pentagon is to prevent contractor waste. Moreover, the government’s own auditors predict that as the military draws down its forces in Iraq, KBR will keep most of its workforce intact, enabling it to collect $190 million or more in unnecessary expenses. Much of any "peace dividend" from the war’s gradual end—potentially hundreds of billions of dollars—could wind up in the hands of contractors.

On March 29, the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting—which Congress set up in early 2007 to investigate waste and corruption in the military private sector—will hold a hearing to examine whether contractors are doing their part to prepare for leaving Iraq. Some commissioners are raring for a showdown with KBR over its drawdown plan—or lack thereof. The commission’s co-chair, former Republican congressman Christopher H. Shays, said in a statement: "Considering that KBR was just awarded a task order—now under protest—that could bring them up to $2.3 billion in new [Iraq-related] revenues, it’s very important that we get a clear picture of the quality of planning and oversight during the Iraq drawdown."

The Balad report is likely to be a hot potato at the hearing. Commissioner Charles Tiefer tells Mother Jones the report is a "dynamite critique" of the firm’s practices. "The numbers translate into an astonishingly large pool of KBR employees standing around idle and having the government be charged," he says.

What the DOD investigators found in Balad was astounding. Army rules require that its civilian maintenance employees are actively working 85 to 90 percent of the time they are on the clock. Yet KBR’s own records showed that its workers were only engaged in labor an average of 6.6 percent of the time they were on duty. The DOD ran its own numbers, and its findings were even worse. In September 2008, for example, …

Continue reading. Good graphs at the link.

Marian Wang at ProPublica:

Ever since we began following the storyline of “Repo 105,” a sly balance-sheet maneuver performed by Lehman Brothers that helped it hide billions in dodgy assets, we noted that Lehman auditor Ernst & Young had some explaining to do. That explaining has begun.

Contrarian Pundit posted a letter that Ernst & Young sent out yesterday, defending itself: not to the media, but to its clients. Check out both pages of the letter (PDFs).

A few choice bits:

Lehman’s bankruptcy was the result of a series of unprecedented adverse events in the financial markets. The months leading up to Lehman’s bankruptcy were among the most turbulent periods in our economic history. Lehman’s bankruptcy was caused by a collapse in its liquidity, which was in turn caused by declining asset values and loss of market confidence in Lehman. It was not caused by accounting issues or disclosure issues.

….While no specific disclosures around Repo 105 transactions were reflected in Lehman’s financial statement footnotes, the 2007 audited financial statements were presented in accordance with US GAAP, and clearly portrayed Lehman as a leveraged entity operating in a risky and volatile industry.

In other words, we at Ernst & Young didn’t point out that Lehman was doing things to hide its risks, but you should’ve known Lehman was in trouble anyway.

Felix Salmon points out that at least they’re no longer denying that they knew about Repo 105.

They simply cannot stop lying—indeed, they must not: if they told the truth about themselves, who would vote for them? Steve Benen:

Whenever Republicans or their allies get hysterical about federal officials trying accused terrorists in the U.S. justice system, the Obama administration has a compelling retort: we’re just doing what Bush/Cheney did.

Indeed, several weeks ago, administration officials began using a specific number: more than 300 suspected terrorists have already gone through the civilian court system — with nary a complaint from Republicans.

Incredulous, far-right lawmakers and personalities have concluded that the number must be the result of Obama administration deception. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the Judiciary Committee’s top Republican, called the number "unsubstantiated" and questioned its validity. Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) called the number "disingenuous." National Review called the figure "bogus." Dana Perino concluded, "The 300 number is as false as false gets."

Both sides can’t be right. Either Bush/Cheney did this or it didn’t. Either Obama’s detractors are right or wrong. Care to guess which side of the dispute is telling the truth?

An extensive new chart compiled by the Obama Justice Department, drawing on Bush administration records, shows hundreds of terror suspects have been convicted in civilian courts — directly contradicting claims by Bush/Cheney officials to the contrary. [...]

[I]n its most comprehensive pushback to date, the Justice Department has produced a detailed accounting of hundreds of such prosecutions in chart form. It was sent over by a source and can be viewed right here.

I’m trying to think of the last time the right came up with criticism of Obama related to national security that proved to be accurate. I can’t think of anything.

Between lies and errors of fact and judgment, this is a crowd that has an uninterrupted track of record of failure. Dems, in general, still seem hesitant about engaging on national security, even if that means hanging the White House out to dry, but the truth is, this is one of the Republicans’ weakest issues.

That the conventional wisdom suggests otherwise is a result of media laziness and Democratic reluctance.

Glenn Greenwald:

A media consensus has emerged that the retirement of Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, the 90-year-old Ford-appointee who became the leader of the Court’s so-called "liberal wing," is now imminent.  The New York Times‘ Peter Baker has an article today on Obama’s leading candidates to replace Stevens, in which one finds this strange passage:

The president’s base hopes he will name a full-throated champion to counter Justice Antonin Scalia, the most forceful conservative on the bench. . . . The candidates who would most excite the left include the constitutional scholars Harold Hongju Koh, Cass R. Sunstein and Pamela S. Karlan.

While that’s probably true of Koh and Karlan, it’s absolutely false with regard to Sunstein, who is currently Obama’s Chief of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.  From the beginning of the War on Terror, Cass Sunstein turned himself into the most reliable Democratic cheerleaders for Bush/Cheney radicalism and their assault on the Constitution and the rule of law. 

In 2002, at the height of controversy over Bush’s creation of military commissions without Congressional approval, Sunstein stepped forward to insist that "[u]nder existing law, President George W. Bush has the legal authority to use military commissions" and that "President Bush’s choice stands on firm legal ground." Sunstein scorned as "ludicrous" the argument from Law Professor George Fletcher that the Supreme Court would find Bush’s military commissions without any legal basis.  Four years later — in its Hamdan ruling — the Supreme Court, with Justice Stevens in the majority, held that Bush lacked the legal authority to create military commissions without approval from Congress, i.e., the Court (and Stevens) found Bush lacked exactly the "legal authority" which Sunstein vehemently insisted he possessed.  Had Sunstein been on the Court then instead of Stevens, that decision presumably would have come out the opposite way:  in favor of Bush’s sweeping claims of executive authority.

Worse still, in 2005, Sunstein became the hero of the Bush-following Right when, in the wake of revelations that the Bush administration was illegally eavesdropping on Americans, he quickly proclaimed that Bush was within his legal rights to spy without warrants in violation of FISA.  Sunstein defended Bush’s NSA program by embracing the two extremist arguments at the core of Bush/Cheney lawlessness:  that (1) the AUMF silently authorized warrantless eavesdropping in violation of FISA and, worse, (2)  the President may have a plausible claim that Article II "inherently" authorizes warrantless eavesdropping regardless of what a statute says.

In a March, 2006 Washington Post article, Sunstein solidified his credential as Leading Democratic-Law-Professor/Bush-Defender by mocking the notion that Bush had committed crimes while in office: …

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I’ve seen a couple of commenters on this blog making statements about the role of the new IRS agents. Amanda Terkel at ThinkProgress:

Now that health care reform is law, conservatives have come up with a new line of attack to scare the American public: The IRS will be tracking you down if you don’t purchase health insurance. Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX) fueled the scare in a March 18 press release, announcing the findings of a study by Republican Hill staff:

A new analysis by the Joint Economic Committee and the House Ways & Means Committee minority staff estimates up to 16,500 new IRS personnel will be needed to collect, examine and audit new tax information mandated on families and small businesses in the ‘reconciliation’ bill being taken up by the U.S. House of Representatives this weekend.

“When most people think of health care reform they think of more doctors exams, not more IRS exams,” says U.S. Congressman Kevin Brady, the top House Republican on the Joint Economic Committee.“Isn’t the federal government already intruding enough into our lives? We need thousands of new doctors and nurses in America, not thousands more IRS agents.”

This news quickly spread to conservative media outlets, which hyperbolized the claim with statements like: the “IRS will now oversee health control and determine whether you are compliant,” and the IRS will now be responsible “for finding and punishing those who don’t” have “acceptable” health insurance. An article on the Daily Caller published an article headlined “IRS looking to hire thousands of tax agents to enforce health care laws” accompanied by a picture of armed soldiers.

Yesterday during a House Ways and Means Committee hearing, IRS Commissioner Daniel Shulman made clear that all these claims are nothing but misinformation. He said that, essentially, Brady’s analysis was premature because the IRS is still figuring out the resources it will need “to implement the tax provisions” in the health care legislation. He also completely refuted the notion that IRS agents would be going after people to see if they have acceptable health care:

REP. RON KIND (D-WI): And IRS agents are not going to go out and auditing taxpayers to verify if they have obtained acceptable health insurance, will they?

SHULMAN: No. … [I]t’s probably worth me being very clear because I think there have been some misconceptions out there. The way we envision this working is that HHS, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the exchanges will be working with the insurance companies to determine what is acceptable coverage.

All that will happen with the IRS is similar to a current 1099 where a bank sends IRS a statement that says “here’s the interest” someone owes, and they send it to the taxpayer. We expect to get a simple form — that we won’t look behind — that says this person has acceptable health coverage. There are not going to be any discussions about health coverage with an IRS employee.

Shulman added that the role of the IRS is going to be “the tax portions of this, not the health portions of this,” including helping educate individuals and businesses learn about the tax incentives they qualify for. Watch it:

Transcript: …

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Matt Duss at ThinkProgress:

In an interview published today in the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot, Moshe Ya’alon — Israel’s Vice Prime Minister, Minister of Strategic Affairs, and a close adviser of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu — reveals that the lame efforts to resume the negotiations with the Palestinians are just “maneuvers” by the Netanyahu administration. Ya’alon’s comments explain that the gestures made by Netanyahu — from the qualified endorsement of the two-state solution to the decision to partially and temporarily freeze construction in the settlements — are all strategically intended to allow for greater settlement expansion in the future.

“And I say so out of knowledge,” Ya’alon told Yediot. “Nobody in the forum of seven [senior cabinet ministers] thinks that we can reach an agreement with the Palestinians.” Yediot Ahronot reports (print version, translated from Hebrew):

Q: So why all these games of make-believe negotiations? It’s possible to announce that we will not reach an agreement, and that is all.

YA’ALON: Because in the political establishment there are pressures. Peace Now from within and other elements from without. So you have to maneuver. But what I’m saying now has to be given over to the Americans, and I hope that they will understand.

Some of what we have to do is maneuver with the American administration and the European establishment, which are also nourished by Israeli elements, which create the illusion that an agreement can be reached.

Ya’alon disclosed that Netanyahu has made clear that he intends to increase settlement activity as soon as the freeze expires. “The prime minister reiterates all the time,” Ya’alon said, “and also brought a decision to the security cabinet that says clearly, that immediately after the freeze, we will continue to build in Judea and Samaria as we did before.”

Q: Will we evacuate settlements in the end?

YA’ALON: I do not accept that. What has happened to us in recent years obligates us to stop with everything connected to withdrawal.

The Netanyahu administration’s refusal to offer any compromise on settlement expansion in Jerusalem so angered President Obama that the president “walked out of his meeting” with the Prime Minister. The Netanyahu camp is huddling for discussions today, reportedly considering how to respond to Obama’s demands. It remains to be seen whether they will offer genuine accommodation or just more “maneuvers.”

I think we should now discontinue aid to Israel. They are so not our ally.

Yesterday Talking Points Memo was down with what seems to have been a denial-of-service attack. Back up today, so I can offer this open letter to conservatives from Russell King:

Dear Conservative Americans,

The years have not been kind to you. I grew up in a profoundly Republican home, so I can remember when you wore a very different face than the one we see now.  You’ve lost me and you’ve lost most of America.  Because I believe having responsible choices is important to democracy, I’d like to give you some advice and an invitation.

First, the invitation:  Come back to us.

Now the advice.  You’re going to have to come up with a platform that isn’t built on a foundation of cowardice: fear of people with colors, religions, cultures and sex lives that differ from your own; fear of reform in banking, health care, energy; fantasy fears of America being transformed into an Islamic nation, into social/commun/fasc-ism, into a disarmed populace put in internment camps; and more.  But you have work to do even before you take on that task.

Your party — the GOP — and the conservative end of the American political spectrum have become irresponsible and irrational.  Worse, it’s tolerating, promoting and celebrating prejudice and hatred.  Let me provide some examples — by no means an exhaustive list — of where the Right as gotten itself stuck in a swamp of hypocrisy, hyperbole, historical inaccuracy and hatred.

If you’re going to regain your stature as a party of rational, responsible people, you’ll have to start by draining this swamp:

Read the rest of this entry »

In this connection, let me again recommend this wonderful book: Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, with Recipes. Melinda Moyer in Slate:

Thirty years ago, America declared war against fat. The inaugural edition of Dietary Guidelines for Americans, published in 1980 and subsequently updated every five years, advised people to steer clear of "too much fat, saturated fat, and cholesterol," because of purported ties between fat intake and heart disease. The message has remained essentially the same ever since, with current guidelines recommending that Americans consume less than 10 percent of their daily calories from saturated fat.

But heart disease continues to devastate the country, and, as you may have noticed, we certainly haven’t gotten any thinner. Ultimately, that’s because fat should never have been our enemy. The big question is whether the 2010 Dietary Guidelines, due out at the end of the year, will finally announce retreat.

The foundation for the "fat is bad" mantra comes from the following logic: Since saturated fat is known to increase blood levels of "bad" LDL cholesterol, and people with high LDL cholesterol are more likely to develop heart disease, saturated fat must increase heart disease risk. If A equals B and B equals C, then A must equal C.

Well, no. With this extrapolation, scientists and policymakers made a grave miscalculation: They assumed that all LDL cholesterol is the same and that all of it is bad. A spate of recent research is now overturning this fallacy and raising major questions about the wisdom of avoiding fat, especially considering that the food Americans have been replacing fat with—processed carbohydrates—could be far worse for heart health.

Last year, Ronald Krauss, director of atherosclerosis research at the Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute, teamed up with researchers in Sweden to tease out some of the more nuanced characteristics of LDL cholesterol and its role in heart health. The term "LDL cholesterol" refers to the cholesterol housed in low-density lipoprotein particles, and these particles come in a range of sizes. Krauss and his colleagues analyzed the LDL particles they found in blood samples taken a dozen years earlier from 4,600 Swedish men and women and discovered that concentrations of the small- and medium-sized LDL particles best predicted whether the subjects later developed heart disease. Larger LDL particles, they noted in their study, which was published in Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology, were essentially neutral with regard to the subjects’ heart health.
This finding is particularly interesting in light of what Krauss had uncovered years earlier: Men who switch from a low-saturated-fat diet to one high in saturated fat experience an increase in total blood LDL cholesterol, as expected. But the change is mostly the result of a spike in the concentration of large LDL particles, not small. In other words, saturated fat consumption typically boosts the number of particles that Krauss has shown to be harmless.

Blood tests for LDL cholesterol might not even be a dependable indicator of your risk of heart disease. Take, for instance, the infamous Women’s Health Initiative hormone trials. Though women on hormone replacement therapy experienced overall drops in LDL cholesterol, they did not suffer fewer heart attacks. The finding initially baffled trial investigators, but further analysis revealed that the women’s LDL particle concentrations had remained exactly the same. Recently, researchers including James Otvos, a biochemist at North Carolina State University, have reported that cholesterol tests—the kind most doctors administer—accurately predict heart disease risk only about 70 percent of the time, because they ignore particle size. (Otvos’ company, LipoScience, plans to start selling particle-based cholesterol tests to doctors’ offices later this year.)

LDL particles are not the only factor in fat’s exoneration. Large population-based studies are, too. A 2006 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, based on data collected from 82,802 women, found that the subjects who consumed the highest percentage of their daily calories from fat (including saturated fat) did not experience …

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Jodi Cantor in the NY Times:

Ask Elizabeth Warren, scourge of Wall Street bankers, how they treat consumers, and she will shake her head with indignation. She will talk about morality, about fairness, about what she calls their “let them eat cake” attitude toward taxpayers. If she is riled enough, she might even spit out the Warren version of an expletive.

“Dang gummit, somebody has got to stand up on behalf of middle-class families!” she exclaimed in a recent interview in her office here.

Among all the dramatis personae of post-financial crisis Washington, there is no one remotely like Ms. Warren, 60, who has divided the town between those who admire her and those who roll their eyes at her.

She is an Oklahoma native, a janitor’s daughter, a bankruptcy expert at Harvard Law School and a former Sunday School teacher who cites John Wesley — the co-founder of Methodism and a public health crusader — as an inspiration. She brims with cheer, yet she is she is such a fearsome interrogator that Bruce Mann, her husband, describes her as a grandmother who can make grown men cry. Back at Harvard, Ms. Warren’s teaching style is “Socratic with a machine gun,” as one former student put it. In Washington, she grills bankers and Treasury officials just as relentlessly.

Ms. Warren has two roles here: officially, as head of Congressional oversight for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, and unofficially, as chief conceiver of and booster for a new consumer financial protection agency. Fusing those projects and her academic work, she has become the most prominent consumer advocate in years.

In a blitz of television appearances, she offers a story of how 30 years of deregulation has rewarded the financial industry but led to abusive practices and collapses that have hurt ordinary Americans — the same taxpayers who are paying for bank bailouts.

Ms. Warren’s climactic hour begins now: three years after she hatched the idea for the agency, the White House has backed it, the House of Representatives has approved it and it is a top Democratic priority in the Senate.

Many fans, including Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, hope Ms. Warren will run it. But even if the agency is approved, it might be far weaker than what she envisioned, thanks to fierce opposition from the financial industry.

Critics argue that such an agency, which would regulate mortgages, credit cards and nearly all other loans to consumers, would tighten credit in an already tight market, stifle innovation and hurt small businesses.

They have another objection as well: to Ms. Warren herself. As one administration official acknowledged, the prospect of her running the new agency may be an impediment to its creation because of her crusading style, her seemingly visceral loathing of financial services companies and her expansive way of interpreting assignments.

“ ‘Loose cannon’ would be an appropriate term to apply in her case,” said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and a Warren supporter.

The defining event of Elizabeth Warren’s life may have taken place before she was born, when a business partner ran off with the money her father had scraped together to start a car dealership. She arrived a few years later, in 1949, another mouth for a strapped family to feed. But she used that mouth to talk her way into a debate scholarship at George Washington University at age 16.

She became a speech therapist, then a lawyer — she hung a shingle and did wills and real estate closings — then a part-time law instructor, and finally a leading scholar of bankruptcy. Her research helped change the stereotype of bankrupt people as feckless deadbeats: many, she showed, are middle-class workers upended by divorce or illness.

While Ms. Warren was building her career, her father became …

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Zaid Jilani at ThinkProgress:

While the right-wing tea party movement touts its rhetorical “aversion to big government,” a new Bloomberg national survey finds that many tea partiers are clamoring for more aggressive government action. The poll finds that large numbers of them want the federal government to act to create jobs and rein in Wall Street by restricting excessive executive bonuses:

At the same time, 70 percent of those who sympathize with the Tea Party, which organized protests this week against President Barack Obama’s health-care overhaul, want a federal government that fosters job creation.

They also look to the government to rein in Wall Street, with almost half saying the government should do something about executive bonuses. Supporters are also conflicted over whether private-enterprise elements should be introduced into government programs like Social Security and Medicare.

“The ideas that find nearly universal agreement among Tea Party supporters are rather vague,” says J. Ann Selzer, the pollster who created the survey. “You would think any idea that involves more government action would be anathema, and that is just not the case.”

The poll also finds widespread disagreement about what comprises a “socialist” program run by the government. Only 10 percent of tea party backers agreed that the Veterans Administration, the country’s “only true island of socialized medicine” where the government directly runs hospitals and services for veterans, is socialist. Meanwhile, 47 percent of responders thought that Social Security and Medicare, both of which are government programs, should stay public programs and not be privatized.

And no thanks to Sen. Ben Nelson, either. Steve Benen at Political Animal:

Under normal circumstances, a major overhaul of federal student loan programs would be a historic victory in its own right. The idea, decades in the making, was, after all, the centerpiece of President Obama’s education agenda, and appeared stalled in the Senate.

But two weeks ago, Democratic lawmakers agreed to include the student-loan overhaul in the health care reconciliation package. And with that, we’re getting two historic reform victories at the same time.

Ending one of the fiercest lobbying fights in Washington, Congress voted Thursday to force commercial banks out of the federal student loan market, cutting off billions of dollars in profits in a sweeping restructuring of financial-aid programs and redirecting most of the money to new education initiatives. [...]

Since the bank-based loan program began in 1965, commercial banks like Sallie Mae and Nelnet have received guaranteed federal subsidies to lend money to students, with the government assuming nearly all the risk. Democrats have long denounced the program, saying it fattened the bottom line for banks at the expense of students and taxpayers.

"Why are we paying people to lend the government’s money and then the government guarantees the loan and the government takes back the loan?" said Representative George Miller, Democrat of California and chairman of the Education and Labor Committee.

What a good question. I’m glad we won’t have to ask it anymore.

Republicans, of course, were outraged about passage of the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA), largely because bank lobbyists told them to be. The same GOP lawmakers who demand cost savings, improved efficiency, and streamlined government programs, nevertheless fought like hell to kill a common-sense idea that achieves those very goals.

They lost. The result is a new law that provides "a huge infusion of money to the Pell grant program and … new help to lower-income graduates in getting out from under crushing student debt." The savings to taxpayers are expected to total about $61 billion over 10 years.

Kevin Drum added, "This is, to coin a phrase, sort of a big effin deal. The student loan program has been a disgrace for a long time, essentially insuring a fat stream of profits to banks by allowing them to make risk-free loans thanks to guarantees from Uncle Sam. It was a pretty nice racket while it lasted."

Update: An alert reader reminds me that CNN recently polled on student-loan reform, and found that 64% expressed support for the Democratic proposal. Even a slight majority of Republicans favored the idea.

All students should remember: This reform came completely from Democrats. Not a single Republican supported it. Republicans are strangely uninterested in efficiency in government: the better the government works, the more they hate it because their position is that it cannot work, certainly not so well as a profit-focused business. As is often the case with Republican notions, believing their position requires ignoring reality.

From the Center for American Progress in an email:

This week, Rep. Brian Bilbray (R-CA) told KUSI in San Diego that one of the most offensive parts of the health care reform law is that it will move TriCARE, the health program covering service members and their families, out of the Defense Department and "to the department that handles welfare." He added that once members of the military find out, "all hell is going to break loose."

But there is no basis to Bilbray’s claim, which he has repeated to other outlets.

The Administration for Children and Families at the Department of Health and Human Services administers the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, aka "welfare," and nothing in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act says that TriCARE will be moved there.

"Those who depend on TriCARE should rest assured — TriCARE will not change under health insurance reform," HHS spokesman Nick Papas told The Progress Report.

TriCARE spokesman Austin Camacho has also said, "TriCARE is a DoD agency, and I’m quite sure it will stay that way."

Even Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), appearing on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal on Monday, insisted that the Affordable Care Act won’t affect military care.

"It is unfortunate that some continue to raise what is now even more clearly a false alarm that is apparently meant to frighten veterans and their families in order to prompt them to oppose the pending legislation," said Vietnam Veterans of America President John Rowan.

The American Legion, usually one of the most conservative veterans groups, has said military members "can rest assured that their TRICARE benefits are secure under the law signed by President Obama." 

Steve Benen at Political Animal:

The Washington Post ran a profile of Mike Vanderboegh, a 57-year-old former militiaman from Alabama, who disapproves of the new Affordable Care Act. Vanderboegh, who describes himself as a "Christian libertarian" and has been part of various clandestine militia groups, has been encouraging those who agree with him to throw bricks through the windows of Democratic offices nationwide.

It’s about what you’d expect from someone like this, and Vanderboegh is unapologetic about his extremism. In his interview with the Post, he makes multiple references to people who "are armed and are capable of making such resistance possible and perhaps even initiating a civil war."

Given the threat of domestic terrorism, all of this is disconcerting, to be sure. But Josh Marshall flags the punch-line from the profile:

Vanderboegh said he once worked as a warehouse manager but now lives on government disability checks. He said he receives $1,300 a month because of his congestive heart failure, diabetes and hypertension.

I see. So, Vanderboegh has a physical ailment, so instead of working, he’s turned to the government to supply him with a modest income. Whether Vanderboegh appreciates the irony of a radical libertarian, who demands that a small government leave people alone, getting taxpayer-financed checks from the government not to work, is unclear.

But reading this, I’m reminded of the recent scene in Ohio, in which Tea Party activists berated a man with Parkinson’s. A conservative told the ailing man, "You’re looking for a hand-out, you’re in the wrong end of town. Nothing for free over here, you have to work for everything you get." Another conservative, after mocking the man with wadded bills, shouted, "No more hand-outs!"

To be clear, I don’t doubt that Vanderboegh is entitled to government benefits. To my mind, there’s nothing at all wrong with federal programs that provide assistance to those who can’t work for medical reasons. I support such efforts enthusiastically.

But Vanderboegh and his compatriots seem to think my approach represents radical "big government," which necessarily needs to be curtailed to promote and defend "liberty." Indeed, for those right-wing activists in Ohio, government disability checks are, by definition, "hand-outs."

Joe Conason in Salon:

It is an annoying habit of politicians and activists on the right to loudly denounce almost anything they don’t like as "unconstitutional" — including progressive taxes, civil rights statutes, environmental protections, and now healthcare reform. So Republican lawyers and attorneys general around the country are preparing challenges to the healthcare reform bill on constitutional grounds, perhaps hoping that a Supreme Court majority will strike down the legislation with the same flagrant disdain for legal precedent and democratic order displayed in Bush v. Gore.

Along those lines, one of the favorite complaints against the healthcare reform bill is that the founding document doesn’t permit the federal government to order anyone to buy a product or service. That supposedly renders illegitimate the individual insurance mandate that is part of the bill.

As every fervent advocate of gun rights ought to know, however, that argument suffers from a glaring historical flaw. Only a few years after the nation’s Founding Fathers ratified the Constitution, Congress approved the Militia Act of 1792,  which was duly signed by George Washington, then the president and commander in chief.

Establishing state militias and a national standard for their operation, the Militia Act explicitly required every "free able-bodied white male citizen" between the ages of 18 and 45, with a few occupational exceptions, to "provide himself with a good musket or firelock, a sufficient bayonet and belt, two spare flints, and a knapsack, a pouch with a box therein to contain not less than twenty-four cartridges, suited to the bore of his musket or firelock, each cartridge to contain a proper quantity of powder and ball; or with a good rifle, knapsack, shot-pouch and powder horn, twenty balls suited to the bore of his rifle, and a quarter of a pound of powder.."

Within six months, every citizen enrolled and notified of his required militia service had to equip himself as specified above. There was spirited debate in Congress as to whether the state ought to subsidize the purchase of arms for men too poor to afford their own, so that everyone could serve his country. Subsidized or not, however, the founders saw no constitutional barrier to a law ordering every citizen to buy a gun and ammo.

Quotations and facsimiles of the Militia Act can be found on hundreds of right-wing blogs, of course, where it is often cited to demonstrate that the founders would have despised gun control. Few if any of these Second Amendment zealots seem to have realized yet how ironic it is for them to quote this venerable statute alongside their anguished protests against the constitutional validity of any federal mandate.

Or maybe Washington was a socialist, too.