Later On

Absolutely fascinating book review by Kelefa Sanneh in the New Yorker:

Glenn Beck excels at expressing adventurous thoughts in memorable language, but he outdid himself when, one morning last summer, he offered a diagnosis of President Obama. He said, “This President, I think, has exposed himself as a guy, over and over and over again, who has a deep-seated hatred for white people, or the white culture. I don’t know what it is.” (The context was one of the summer’s most entertaining reality shows—the one starring the black Harvard professor and the white police officer who arrested him.) In September, Beck sat for an interview with Katie Couric, and she asked him a deceptively simple question, which had been posed by a Twitter user named adrianinflorida: “what did u mean white culture?” Whatever adventurous thoughts this query inspired, Beck did not seem eager to share them. “Um, I, I don’t know,” he said. Finally, after two minutes of temporizing, he arrived at a nonresponsive response that was both honest and sensible: “What is the white culture? I don’t know how to answer that that’s not a trap, you know what I mean?”

Often, the most appropriate answer to that question is a joke, or a series of jokes. In 2008, a canny young white Canadian named Christian Lander started a blog called “Stuff White People Like,” which soon became a best-selling book bearing the same title; it listed a hundred and fifty of white people’s favorite things, from recycling to the Red Sox. (This magazine made the list, too, at No. 114.) Lander’s tone is faux-anthropological but wide-eyed: “Bike shops are almost entirely staffed and patronized by white people!”; “After learning that a white person is pregnant, it is a good idea to provide a list of recipes for placenta.” His “white people” are wealthy, urban, youngish, and thoroughly blue—they “hate” Republicans, and although Obama hadn’t yet won the Democratic nomination, he placed eighth on the list. (Coffee was No. 1.)

Which means that Lander isn’t really talking about white people, or, at any rate, not most of them. In fact, he sometimes defines “white people” in opposition to “the wrong kind of white people,” because his true target is a small subset of white people, a white cultural élite. Most white people don’t “hate” Republicans—they have voted Republican in every Presidential election since 1968. A few months ago, a different and more demographically precise portrait of white culture arrived, bearing a fulsome blurb (“Revelatory!”) from Lander himself. The author is a black journalist named Rich Benjamin, and his book, “Searching for Whitopia” (Hyperion; $24.99), chronicles the years he spent in overwhelmingly white enclaves across America, from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, to Forsyth County, Georgia. The people he meets tend to be politically conservative, and although they talk readily about the urban blight they left behind, they talk much less readily about race. Many in Idaho seem to agree with Helen Chenoweth-Hage, the late congresswoman, who responded to a question about the region’s lack of diversity by means of an ingenious euphemism. “The warm-climate community just hasn’t found the colder climate that attractive,” she said. Benjamin hears many disavowals of racism, and he has to drive an hour north of Coeur d’Alene, to a tiny Christian Identity church, in a town called Sandpoint, just to find someone willing to say, “I’m glad I’m white.” Even that statement, delivered from the pulpit, is swiftly followed by a disclaimer: “The Indian, the Mexican, and the black can be proud of what they are, too.”

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And runs it for their profit. Donny Shaw at the Open Congress blog:

“The banks — hard to believe in a time when we’re facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created — are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place.”

That’s Sen. Dick Durbin [D, IL] speaking earlier this year on the political influence of the finance industry.

In a few weeks, the banks’ “ownership” of Congress will really be put to the test. The Senate is going to take up comprehensive financial regulatory reform legislation in May — this is the main bill the banks have been using their political capital on to fight, and the Senate is where they are hoping they can make the bill friendlier to their ways of business.

Earlier this week, Paul Blumenthal of the Sunlight Foundation ran down the top 20 senators who receiving the most financial industry money over the entire length of their careers. Here I’m taking a look at the top senators receiving the most finance industry during the current election cycle only. This is where the industry is focusing their influence right now. The similarities and the differences are both interesting, and I’ll explain a little of that below. First, here are the 20 senators who, so far, have received the most finance/insurance/real estate money during the 2010 cycle (data from CRP):

1. Sen. Charles Schumer [D, NY] — $2,987,139
2. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand [D, NY] — $1,424,750
3. Sen. Harry Reid [D, NV] — $1,264,067
4. Sen. Christopher Dodd [D, CT] — $1,210,688
5. Sen. Scott Brown [R, MA] — $971,364
6. Sen. Richard Shelby [R, AL] — $896,738
7. Sen. Michael Bennet [D, CO] — $816,996
8. Sen. Blanche Lincoln [D, AR] — $767,000
9. Sen. Arlen Specter [D, PA] — $650,875
10. Sen. Ron Wyden [D, OR] — $509,401
11. Sen. Robert Bennett [R, UT] — $493,225
12. Sen. Johnny Isakson [R, GA] — $483,300
13. Sen. Evan Bayh [D, IN] — $463,967
14. Sen. David Vitter [R, LA] — $461,591
15. Sen. Richard Burr [R, NC] — $457,249
16. Sen. John Thune [R, SD] — $452,950
17. Sen. Jim DeMint [R, SC] — $404,276
18. Sen. Byron Dorgan [D, ND] — $383,050
19. Sen. Charles Grassley [R, IA] — $381,819
20. Sen. Michael Crapo [R, ID] — $371,671

Here are some quick observations comparing the above list of top recipients of finance money in 2010 with Blumenthal’s list of top all-time recipients.

More Banking Committee members — In this election cycle, 45% of the top 20 recipients of finance industry donations to senators are members of the Banking Committee, which is where the shape of the financial reform legislation is really determined. The all-time average of top 20 recipients being on the Banking Committee is 30%.

More Republicans — 50% of the top 20 recipients of finance money are Republicans. The lifetime average of Republicans in the top 20 is 40%. Business interests typically give more money to the party that is in power, so this increase in financial money for Republicans is surprising. You can see here that, overall, the Democrats are getting significantly more money than Republicans across the board, so the even split in top finance recipients really is an outlier.

Scott Brown — The typical story of Scott Brown’s election to the Senate in MA is that he was put there to kill health care reform. But all the money he’s getting from the finance industry indicates that they may be hoping he will also be the 41st Republican vote to kill financial regulatory reform, or at least parts of it. If you look at his OpenSecrets profile, all of his top campaign contributors are financial companies.

Blanche Lincoln — She isn’t anywhere on the top 20 all-time list. According to my count, she’s 47th all-time amongst current senators. So why is Sen. Lincoln suddenly the 8th biggest recipient of finance money in the Senate? As I’ve been reporting, Lincoln is taking over over the derivatives reform portion of the financial reform bill. Lincoln heads the Senate Agriculture Committee, which has partial jurisdiction over the derivatives market because of its historical roots in the trade of agricultural futures. Recent statements indicate that she plans to go pretty easy and give the industry the exemptions to clearing and reporting requirements that they are lobbying for. By the way, there are a total of 5 Agriculture Committee members on the top 20 for 2010 list.

I wonder why they would fight oversight—surely we can simply trust them to do the right thing. /snark  Climate Progress:

The oil and natural gas lobby is working hard to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from establishing safeguards to protect the public from chemicals used to produce shale gas through “hydraulic fracturing,” also called “fracking” or “fracing.”  CAP’s Sarah Collins and Tom Kenworthy have the story in this repost.

Oil and gas companies use fracking in combination with horizontal well drilling; the process involves injecting a mixture of water, sand, and chemicals at high pressure into rock formations thousands of feet below the surface to fracture the rock and allow oil and gas previously trapped inside the rock to escape. Recent advances in drilling techniques combined with fracking have dramatically expanded the supply of technically recoverable shale gas. But studies show that the chemicals may pollute nearby sources of water.

BP, ConocoPhillips, and Shell Oil Co.’s latest lobbying efforts propose adding “Sense of the Senate Language” to upcoming energy and climate legislation from Sens. John Kerry (D-MA), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) that would exempt fracking from federal oversight. Lee Fuller, executive director of Energy in Depth, a consortium of U.S. oil and natural gas producers, wrote in a recent letter to the senators, “we hope that you can find space in your draft legislation to make your commitment to natural gas explicitly clear…to remind your colleagues once again of the critical role that technologies such as hydraulic fracturing can and must play in meeting the goals for our future.”

The proposal would be on top of a similar fracking loophole already on the books. The practice is currently protected from oversight under the Safe Drinking Water Act due to an exemption in the Energy Policy Act of 2005. The loophole was added into the bill after a 2004 EPA studyfound the process posed “little or no threat” to drinking water. Natural gas companies have often cited this study as evidence that the practice is “safe,” but the study was cursory and called “scientifically unsound” by Weston Wilson, an EPA scientist with more than three decades of experience with the agency. The Oil and Gas Accountability Project also reported that, “EPA removed information from earlier drafts that suggested unregulated fracturing poses a threat to human health, and that the Agency did not include information that suggests fracturing fluids may pose a threat to drinking water long after drilling operations are completed.”

An aide for Sen. Kerry has indicated that the three senators have not included the oil companies’ proposal in their draft bill. Sen. Graham also said that there is not yet language to continue to protect fracking included in the bill, but said, “we need to use the fracturing process to get gas. But it needs to be transparent, and we understand the environmental impact of it.”

The Safe Drinking Water Act loophole isn’t the only exemption natural gas producers enjoy. They are also free from reporting the specific toxic chemicals used for fracking, even though many other industries must report their toxic emissions under the 1986 Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act.

The Right-to-Know Network, a project of OMB Watch, notes: “Studies have identified a long list of toxics that may be included in these fracking fluids, and numerous cases of drinking water contamination have been documented.” A study by Environmental Working Group “found that at least 65 chemicals used by the natural gas industry in Colorado—many of them used in hydraulic fracturing—were listed or regulated as hazardous substances under six federal statues including the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and Superfund.” And the OGAP report found that, “The EPA states that many chemicals in hydraulic fracturing fluids are linked to human health effects. These effects include cancer; liver, kidney, brain, respiratory and skin disorders; birth defects; and other health problems.”

The natural gas industry’s most common defense to these claims is …

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Andrew Sullivan:

The AP’s story on Joseph Ratzinger’s direct involvement in delaying for six years the defrocking of a priest who had confessed to tying up and raping minors ends any doubt that the future Pope is as implicated in the sex abuse crisis as much as any other official in the church.

The facts are as clear as they are damning. From the documents, the priest fits exactly the model of arrested development I sketched out here. He seems to have been pressured by a bossy mother to become a priest, and was interested only in hanging out with children around the ages of 11 to 13 (the age of the boys he raped). He had no genuine impulse to ordination, but the church was so desperate for priests he was acceptable.

When confronted with the charges, the priest pleaded no contest to tying up and raping two pre-teen boys in 1978 in the rectory of Our Lady of the Rosary Church in Union City. There were, apparently, several more victims. There was no dispute as to his guilt. The priest, Stephen Kiesle, personally requested to be defrocked. His legacy is horrifying:

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In today’s NY Times:

The Republican Party is not simply the “just-say-no” party. It’s also a shameless advocate of the free lunch. Ronald Reagan famously told us he could jack up defense spending, cut taxes and balance the federal budget all at the same time.

George W. Bush put two big wars on a credit card. And now we have the perennially clownish Newt Gingrich, in an embarrassing rant against President Obama, assuring the deluded G.O.P. faithful that, yes, the party can indeed bring down the federal deficit while cutting taxes.

The Great Recession and the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan have not been savage enough to reintroduce the G.O.P. to reality.

One of the reasons so many conservative Republican absurdities became actual U.S. policy was the intellectual veneer slapped upon them by right-wing think tanks and commentators. The grossest nonsense was made to seem plausible to a lot of people — people who wanted to believe in a free lunch. When Mr. Reagan told the country that “government is the problem,” the intellectual handmaidens of the corporate and financial elite were right there to explain in exhaustive detail why that was so.

The result, in addition to the terrible consequences of Iraq and Afghanistan and the damage to America’s standing in the world, was the tremendous (and tremendously debilitating) transfer of wealth from working people in the U.S. to the folks already in the upper echelons of wealth and income. The elite made out like bandits — often literally.

The liberal or progressive community was slow to counter the remarkable effectiveness of this intellectual offensive from the right. But during the 1990s and into the early-2000s, that began to change. And one of the progressive organizations that has done a really good job (but has never been particularly well known) is about to celebrate its 10th anniversary.

Demos, headquartered in New York City, grew out of a series of meetings of scholars, activists, journalists and elected officials who were concerned about the ever-increasing influence of the right on public policy. “The thinking was that there should be more moderate, liberal and left-of-center voices,” said Miles Rapoport, the group’s president. The group was formed in 2000, a year that would later see the disputed election that gave the presidency to Mr. Bush.

It didn’t take long for Demos to begin issuing loud warnings about the danger that ever-increasing debt was posing to American households, while pointedly disputing the argument that over-the-top credit card debt was primarily the result of excessive consumer spending.

Working people from the middle class down were in serious trouble, and Demos, along with many other voices (the bankruptcy expert and middle-class advocate Elizabeth Warren comes quickly to mind) was sounding the alarm long before the Great Recession hit like a Category 5 hurricane.

In a 2003 report called “Borrowing to Make Ends Meet,” Demos spotlighted the increasing gap between the incomes and the day-to-day living costs of many low- and middle-income families. That report was updated steadily in subsequent years, and in 2007 Demos was reporting: “Many households have tried to cope with this financial imbalance by relying on credit cards to cover basic expenses that earnings do not meet. Homeowners, ominously, have then relied on cashed-out home equity — $1.2 trillion over the last six years — largely to pay down those debts and to cover other costs of living.”

The Bush crowd during this period had taken us into Iraq and was fashioning its own fantasy of free-lunch economics…

Continue reading. And take a look at Demos.org.

Steve Benen rounds up some guesses:

We talked yesterday about an odd phenomenon. As Afghan President Hamid Karzai becomes increasingly erratic — he reportedly began threatening to hook up with the Taliban this week — and causes consternation within the White House, leading right-wing voices are taking Karzai’s side.

Here’s Liz Cheney, speaking this week to the Southern Republican Leadership Conference:

"Afghan President Karzai, whose support we need if we are going to succeed in Afghanistan, is being treated to an especially dangerous and juvenile display from this White House. They dress him down publicly almost daily and refuse to even say that he is an ally. There is a saying in the Arab world: ‘It is more dangerous to be America’s friend than to be her enemy.’ In the age of Obama, that is proving true."

Putting aside the fact that Afghanistan is not, in fact, Arab — try to keep up, Liz, you used to cover the Middle East at the State Department — the fact that Cheney is siding with Karzai instead of the U.S. leadership strikes me as peculiar. That she and others are publicly backing Karzai, even while he’s appearing less sympathetic and less reliable to the West, makes it that much more confounding.

I reached out to a few foreign policy types yesterday, hoping to get a better sense of why the far-right would do this, especially now. I received some interesting responses and a range of possibilities.

* Knee-jerk partisanship: The Obama administration and much of the West is looking at the Afghan leadership with increasing suspicion. For Cheney, Palin, and their cohorts, if U.S. leaders don’t trust a foreign government, there’s a reflexive, child-like temptation to take the opposite position.

* The Bush/Cheney legacy: No matter what Karzai does, no matter how corrupt he seems, no matter how little legitimacy his government is perceived to have, Bush/Cheney installed him. For the far-right, that necessarily means he’s worth defending.

* A campaign theme needs cultivating: The GOP wants to characterize President Obama as being antagonistic towards U.S. allies, despite, ironically enough, Bush/Cheney having been antagonistic towards U.S. allies. This is, not incidentally, related to policy towards Israel.

* Sending a signal of U.S. division: The White House is taking active steps to hold the Afghan government more accountable on combating corruption, establishing legitimacy, improving inefficiencies in the Afghan system, etc. If Cheney and her ilk can send a signal that U.S. officials are divided, and that Afghan accountability isn’t necessarily a priority, the far-right can undermine the Obama administration’s credibility. This would adversely affect U.S. interests, but for Cheney & Co., that’s an acceptable price for sabotaging the president.

It’s hard to say with certainty which of these possibilities is right. They might all be. But it’s a development that’s worth keeping an eye on. If tensions are straining the ties between U.S. leaders and the Karzai government, the far-right is siding with Karzai.

I suppose, then, that today’s right-wing voices will urge President Obama to apologize? Oh wait, they’re down on that, too….

Amanda Terkel at ThinkProgress:

Several lawmakers, including civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), said that Tea Party activists at the March 20 rally on Capitol Hill hurled racial and/or homophobic slurs at them. Instead of condemning this behavior, many conservatives have said that they don’t believe these incidents really occurred. However, yesterday, Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) told the Washington Post’s Dave Weigel that he had no doubt that Lewis was telling the truth about the hateful language at the Tea Party rally:

“A couple of weeks before the alleged incident occurred, I was walking across the bridge in Selma, Ala., with John Lewis,” said Pence. “I take at face value what John Lewis said. If John Lewis said he heard it, I believe he’s a man of integrity. And I would denounce those kinds of statements in the strongest possible terms.”

After the rally, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) called the incidents “reprehensible,” but added, “let’s not let a few isolated incidents get in the way of the fact that millions of Americans are scared to death, and millions of Americans want no part of this growing size of government.”

I doubt that Pence has convinced the Right, many of whom simply disbelieve anything that a Democrat says.

Tom Ricks again:

I ask because as I understand it, after more than a year in the White House, Michelle Obama still doesn’t have a full-time aide for military family issues, despite having her concern for the military family part of the Obama presidential campaign.

There is a White House aide named Matt Flavin who handles both, but mainly the veterans’ portfolio, and a bunch of other people with a finger in the pie, but no one dedicated to the issue. This is one reason we are seeing screw-ups like promising tuition aide for military spouses and then trying to shut down the program when it proved unexpectedly popular.

A big part of the problem has been the disarray in the Pentagon’s personnel office. This might have been resolved lately, with retired Marine Maj. Gen. Clifford Stanley finally being sworn in, but it is amazing that it went on for so long.

When Michelle Obama does engage, she seems to hang with generals’ wives at officers’ clubs, which indicates a certain tone deafness. Maybe that’s how they do things at Princeton, but those are not the people with whom she needs to connect. Have lunch with the wives of the enlisted — and make sure there is day care provided. This is another indication to me that she needs full-time help on this. It is time to get beyond lip service, and monitor implementation of policies and executions of budgets. The bureaucracy will spend all that money on itself unless pushed.

Here’s an interesting question: How many soldiers’ wives committed suicide last year?

Tom Ricks asks a good question:

That’s the very good question Cori Dauber asks. A soldier gets kidnapped in Afghanistan and it is all over the news. A reporter gets taken and suddenly it isn’t covered because of the possible harm to the victim. It is a nasty little double standard that editors need to think through together. Unfortunately, that isn’t their strong suit. They will only act if and when faced with legislation or litigation, or are deeply embarrassed by an incident.

Not so much to avoid a fight (though he does seem to avoid confrontations) as because Obama himself is rather conservative. Greenwald:

Justice John Paul Stevens, who was appointed to the Supreme Court by Gerald Ford in 1975 and then became the leader of its "liberal" wing, told the White House today that he was retiring in the Summer.  I had been planning to write a comprehensive post documenting the reasons why one of the clear front-runners to replace Stevens — current Solicitor General and former Harvard Law School Dean Elena Kagan — would be such a harmful choice (similar to the post I wrote along the same lines about Cass Sunstein’s record).  I’m not quite finished with all of my Kagan research yet, but in light of Stevens’ announcement today, I do want to make one key point about this.

When President Obama chose Sonia Sotomayor to replace David Souter, that had very little effect on the ideological balance of the Court, because Sotomayor was highly likely to vote the way Souter did in most cases.  By stark contrast, replacing Stevens with Kagan (or, far less likely, with Sunstein) would shift the Court substantially to the Right on a litany of key issues (at least as much as the shift accomplished by George Bush’s selection of the right-wing ideologue Sam Alito to replace the more moderate Sandra Day O’Connor).  Just click on the links in the last paragraph here, detailing some of Kagan’s "centrist" (i.e., highly conservative) positions on executive power, civil liberties and Terrorism for a sense of how far to the Right she would be as compared to Stevens.

Over the past decade, the Court has issued numerous 5-4 decisions which placed at least some minimal constraints on executive power.  Stevens was not merely in the majority in those cases, but was the intellectual leader justifying those limits.  And he often went further in demanding due process and accountability for the Executive than even the "liberal" wing in general was willing to go — as exemplified by his joining Justice Scalia’s dissent in Hamdi, where the two unlikely allies both argued that the President could never detain U.S. citizens as "enemy combatants," but instead must charge them with a crime (e.g., treason) and obtain a conviction in order to imprison them.

As Alliance for Justice President Nan Aron put it today:  Stevens was a "master tactician" who "emerged as one of the Court’s most vocal and eloquent spokespersons for individual liberties, separation of powers, and equal access to justice."  Given Stevens’ status as the leader of the Liberal wing, The Nation‘s Ari Melber said today:  "With Justice Stevens retiring, it will take a nominee like Harold Koh just to maintain the Court’s status quo."

The danger that we won’t have such a status-quo-maintaining selection is three-fold:  (1) Kagan, from her time at Harvard, is renowned for accommodating and incorporating conservative views, the kind of "post-ideological" attribute Obama finds so attractive; (2) for both political and substantive reasons, the Obama White House tends to avoid (with a few exceptions) any appointees to vital posts who are viewed as "liberal" or friendly to the Left; the temptation to avoid that kind of nominee heading into the 2010 midterm elections will be substantial (indeed, The New York Times‘ Peter Baker wrote last month of the candidates he said would be favored by the Left:  "insiders doubt Mr. Obama would pick any of them now"); and (3) Kagan has already proven herself to be a steadfast Obama loyalist with her work as his Solicitor General, and the desire to have on the Court someone who has demonstrated fealty to Obama’s broad claims of executive authority is likely to be great. 

As but one example, see here as National Review‘s Ed Whelan, a former official in the Bush/Cheney OLC and a far-right legal ideologue, lavishly praises Kagan’s record on "national-security and executive power" issues while discussing her possible nomination to the Court.  Such admiration for Kagan’s record among the Right is far from unusual; as the NYT‘s Eric Lichtblau put it last year: …

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I’ve always liked Laurie Anderson. Here’s an interview with More Intelligent Life:

Laurie Anderson, a New York-based performance artist, has carved a unique niche for herself over the past three decades. Her multimedia stage shows often address big topics, such as war and nationality in “Homeland” (2008), space and time in “The End of the Moon” (2005), and feature dazzling video images, beautiful synthesised sonorities, her lullaby voice and trademark electronic violin. Her new show, “Delusion”, is a beguiling montage of largely personal stories—about her mother (who died last year), rat terrier Lolabelle, her hopes and dreams. The show premièred at the Vancouver Culture Olympiad in February, and is Anderson’s most poetic work to date.

Petite and spiky-haired at 63, Anderson is in meditative mood. Having shot to unexpected international fame in the early 1980s on the back of a hit single, “O Superman”, Anderson has followed her own lights and claims to have no interest in pop culture, despite being married to a giant of the genre, Lou Reed. They share a home in Manhattan, though rarely work together. This summer marks an exception, as they are co-curating a new arts festival called Vivid, which will take place in Sydney from May 27th to June 21st. Later in the year she will also be mounting an art show in Brazil. Anderson seems most comfortable when she is working. She often has half a dozen projects going at any given time.

More Intelligent Life caught up with her in Paris where, at the Cité de la musique, she performed the European première of “Delusion”. The show visits London’s Barbican Theatre on April 14th for four nights and the Brooklyn Academy of Music in the autumn.

More Intelligent Life: How did you feel your performance of “Delusion” at Cité de la musique went?

Laurie Anderson: I don’t know it very well yet. I’m still just there on stage alone with it and my little console. But I learnt a lot from the first Paris performance. There were some errors: why was one pedal saying “19” instead of “30”? It’s a compact piece. I’ve worked on it a long time and there were a few jams when you saw it. It was something in my computer programme: I ran out of voices. There are a certain number of voices available and I’m always looking at a lot of things at the same time.

MIL: Is “Delusion” a work in progress?

LA: I guess all my things are works in progress. I certainly hope to know “Delusion” really well by the time it gets to the Barbican. And there’ll also have been some editing by then. Then there’s a break and it’ll be on in New York in the fall, so that’ll give me another chance to forget it all over again. So, what I know for sure is that I’ll have to keep learning this thing. I need to know it under my hands, as it were, more than I do, so I don’t have to think about it too much, so I don’t have to go “7-11-14-73-72-4” in my head—that’s just for me to learn it. If I don’t remember it automatically, I start to feel clumsy.

MIL: In “Delusion”, you tell a magical story about giving birth to your own dog, Lolabelle. Here in Paris, you told the story in French. Do you feel comfortable in French?

LA: Not really. I was reading that story. The day after, I have to say, I spent all morning in a studio recording some things because there’s going be a French version, at this year’s Paris Festival d’automne, of a show I did in 1979, a precursor of a big thing I did in the early 1980s, called “United States”. There was one small story in the 1979 show I originally did in French, and it really wasn’t so well-recorded, so I re-recorded it for a little record of that show that’s now going to come out in the fall. The people who are doing it are actually an interesting group, made up of architects and others, and they’ve decided, Let’s just put out records that we like, so they do.

MIL: You’ve another wonderful story in “Delusion” about, or a criticism of, a quarrel over ownership of the moon. Are those details factual? …

Continue reading.

Culture as ritual. Well worth reading.

Jesse Eisinger and Jake Bernstein in ProPublica:

In late 2005, the booming U.S. housing market seemed to be slowing. The Federal Reserve had begun raising interest rates. Subprime mortgage company shares were falling. Investors began to balk at buying complex mortgage securities. The housing bubble, which had propelled a historic growth in home prices, seemed poised to deflate. And if it had, the great financial crisis of 2008, which produced the Great Recession of 2008-09, might have come sooner and been less severe.

At just that moment, a few savvy financial engineers at a suburban Chicago hedge fund helped revive the Wall Street money machine, spawning billions of dollars of securities ultimately backed by home mortgages.

When the crash came, nearly all of these securities became worthless, a loss of an estimated $40 billion paid by investors, the investment banks who helped bring them into the world, and, eventually, American taxpayers.

Yet the hedge fund, named Magnetar for the super-magnetic field created by the last moments of a dying star, earned outsized returns in the year the financial crisis began.

How Magnetar pulled this off is one of the untold stories of the meltdown. Only a small group of Wall Street insiders was privy to what became known as the Magnetar Trade. Nearly all of those approached by ProPublica declined to talk on the record, fearing their careers would be hurt if they spoke publicly. But interviews with participants, e-mails, thousands of pages of documents and details about the securities that until now have not been publicly disclosed shed light on an arcane, secretive corner of Wall Street.

According to bankers and others involved, the Magnetar Trade worked this way: The hedge fund bought the riskiest portion of a kind of securities known as collateralized debt obligations — CDOs. If housing prices kept rising, this would provide a solid return for many years. But that’s not what hedge funds are after. They want outsized gains, the sooner the better, and Magnetar set itself up for a huge win: It placed bets that portions of its own deals would fail.

Along the way, it did something to enhance the chances of that happening, according to several people with direct knowledge of the deals. They say Magnetar pressed to include riskier assets in their CDOs that would make the investments more vulnerable to failure. The hedge fund acknowledges it bet against its own deals but says the majority of its short positions, as they are known on Wall Street, involved similar CDOs that it did not own. Magnetar says it never selected the assets that went into its CDOs.

Magnetar says …

Continue reading.

David Sirota in Salon:

When choosing between frugality and security, history shows that America almost always selects the latter. To paraphrase President Kennedy, we’ll pay any price and bear any burden to protect ourselves.

No doubt this was why the economic case against the Iraq invasion failed. To many, the war debate seemed to pose a binary question: debt or mushroom clouds? And when it’s a scuffle between money arguments and security arguments (even dishonest security arguments), security wins every time.

Call this the Pay-Any-Price Principle — an axiom that has impacted all of America’s wars, and now, most poignantly, its War on Drugs. When faced with criticism of budget-busting prosecution and incarceration costs, law enforcement agencies and private prison interests have successfully depicted their cause as a willingness to pay any price to jail dealers of hard narcotics.

Of course, data undermine that storyline. In 2008, the FBI reported that 82 percent of drug arrests were for possession — not sales or manufacturing — and almost half of those arrests were for marijuana, not hard drugs.

Fortunately, these numbers are seeping into the public consciousness. Gallup’s latest survey shows record support for marijuana legalization, as more Americans see the Drug War for what it really is: an ideological and profit-making crusade by the Arrest-and-Incarceration Complex against a substance that is, according to most physicians, less toxic than alcohol.

Considering both the public opinion shift and the facts about marijuana, this should be the moment that drug policy reformers drop their budget attacks and flip the security argument on their opponents — specifically, by pointing out how safety is actually compromised by the status quo.

The good news is that some activists are making this very case.

Last week, students at 80 colleges asked their schools to reduce penalties for marijuana possession so that they are no greater than penalties for alcohol possession. It’s a request with safety in mind: According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, alcohol use by college kids contributes to roughly 1,700 deaths, 600,000 injuries and 97,000 sexual assaults every year. By contrast, “The use of marijuana itself has not been found to contribute to any deaths, there has never been a single fatal marijuana overdose in history (and) all objective research on marijuana has also concluded that it does not contribute to injuries, assaults, sexual abuse, or violent or aggressive behavior,” as the group Safer Alternative For Enjoyable Recreation notes.

“It’s time we stop driving students to drink and let them make the rational, safer choice to use marijuana,” said one student.

Now the bad news: Not every reformer is on message…

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Interesting post at Climate Progress:

A strong cap on carbon would significantly cut the flow of petrodollars to Iran’s hostile regime, a ThinkProgress analysis shows.

The economic and political strength of Iran’s dictatorship is a threat to the national security of the United States and the world, and its nuclear ambitions threaten to destabilize the Middle East. Yesterday, diplomats from “six world powers have met for the first time to discuss imposing new sanctions on Iran for its failure to suspend work on its controversial nuclear program,” but negotiators have not yet figured how to achieve President Barack Obama’s goal of being “consistent and steady in applying international pressure.”

Iran, “which holds the world’s second-biggest oil and gas reserves and supplies about 4.5 percent of the world’s oil production,” uses its oil power “as a strategic asset.” One mechanism to control the flow of petrodollars to Iran — whose oil production is worth $120 billion a year at current prices — is for the United States to control its appetite for oil. ThinkProgress has found that a carbon cap that reduces global warming pollution by 80 percent by 2050 would mean Iran would lose approximately $1.8 trillion worth of oil revenues over the next forty years — over $100 million a day [as the figure shows].

The United States is by far the world’s biggest consumer of oil, accounting for 25 percent of world production. Our demand is more than the four next biggest consumers — China, Japan, India, and Russia — combined, despite having only 11% of their population. Unilateral action by the United States to reduce oil consumption has a profound effect on the world market, and is the first step towards global climate policy that builds a zero-carbon economy.

If the world moves away from oil dependence, Iran’s regime will …

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The EPA has published its responses to comments about the action it is taking in the face of global warming:

Response to Comments

EPA’s response to public comments received on the Proposed Findings and accompanying Technical Support Document may be found here:

• Volume 1: General Approach to the Science and Other Technical Issues (PDF) (146 pp, 13.9MB)
• Volume 2: Validity of Observed and Measured Data (PDF) (104 pp, 704K)
• Volume 3: Attribution of Observed Climate Change (PDF) (59 pp, 372K)
• Volume 4: Validity of Future Projections (PDF) (81 pp, 483K)
• Volume 5: Human Health and Air Quality (PDF) (95 pp, 704K)
• Volume 6: Agriculture and Forestry (PDF) (43 pp, 172K)
• Volume 7: Water Resources, Coastal Areas, Ecosystems and Wildlife (PDF) (65 pp, 311K)
• Volume 8: Other Sectors (PDF) (25 pp, 95K)
• Volume 9: Endangerment Finding (PDF) (37 pp, 137K)
• Volume 10: Cause or Contribute Finding (PDF) (18 pp, 76KB)
• Volume 11: Miscellaneous Legal, Procedural, and Other Comments (PDF) (40 pp, 167K)

The responses are clear and convincing (to my eye), but I’m sure that there will be some who will not be convinced and may indeed be incapable of being convinced.

Dawn Johnsen has withdrawn from consideration to head the Office of Legal Counsel, and I can’t help but believe that’s exactly what Obama wanted. He could have included in her the recess appointments, but did not—and to my mind (and apparently to Ms. Johnsen’s) that sent a message.

I think that Obama liked Ms. Johnsen’s positions on civil liberties and the rule of law—before he really started in on his work as President. As we’ve seen, Obama has then turned to embrace the Bush-Cheney ideas of civil liberties and how the rule of law must bow to the power of the President, and so he decided that she would not fit his new direction, toward more and more Executive authority to override the law.

Glenn Greenwald:

After waiting 14 months for a confirmation vote that never came, Dawn Johnsen withdrew today as President Obama’s nominee to head the Office of Legal Counsel.  As I documented at length when the nomination was first announced in January, 2009, Johnsen was an absolutely superb pick to head an office that plays as vital a role as any in determining the President’s record on civil liberties and adherence to the rule of law.  With 59 and then 60 Democratic votes in the Senate all year long (which included the support of GOP Sen. Richard Lugar, though the opposition of Dem. Sen. Ben Nelson and shifting positions from Arlen Specter), it’s difficult to understand why the White House — if it really wanted to — could not have had Johnsen confirmed (or why she at least wasn’t included in the spate of recently announced recess appointments).

I don’t know the real story behind what happened here — I had an email exchange with Johnsen this afternoon but she was only willing to provide me her official, pro forma, wholly uninformative statement — but here’s what I do know:  virtually everything that Dawn Johnsen said about executive power, secrecy, the rule of law and accountability for past crimes made her an excellent fit for what Candidate Obama said he would do, but an awful fit for what President Obama has done.  To see how true that is, one can see the post I wrote last January detailing and praising her past writings, but all one really has to do is to read the last paragraph of her March, 2008 Slate article — entitled "Restoring Our Nation’s Honor" — in which she outlines what the next President must do in the wake of Bush lawlessness:

The question how we restore our nation’s honor takes on new urgency and promise as we approach the end of this administration.We must resist Bush administration efforts to hide evidence of its wrongdoing through demands for retroactive immunity, assertions of state privilege, and implausible claims that openness will empower terrorists. . . .

Here is a partial answer to my own question of how should we behave, directed especially to the next president and members of his or her administration but also to all of use who will be relieved by the change: We must avoid any temptation simply to move on. We must instead be honest with ourselves and the world as we condemn our nation’s past transgressions and reject Bush’s corruption of our American ideals. Our constitutional democracy cannot survive with a government shrouded in secrecy, nor can our nation’s honor be restored without full disclosure.

What Johnsen insists must not be done reads like a manual of what Barack Obama ended up doing and continues to do — from supporting retroactive immunity to terminate FISA litigations to endless assertions of "state secrecy" in order to block courts from adjudicating Bush crimes to suppressing torture photos on the ground that "openness will empower terrorists" to the overarching Obama dictate that we "simply move on."  Could she have described any more perfectly what Obama would end up doing when she wrote, in March, 2008, what the next President "must not do"?

I find it virtually impossible to imagine Dawn Johnsen opining that the President has the legal authority to order American citizens assassinated with no due process or to detain people indefinitely with no charges.  I find it hard to believe that the Dawn Johnsen who wrote in 2008 that "we must regain our ability to feel outrage whenever our government acts lawlessly and devises bogus constitutional arguments for outlandishly expansive presidential power" would stand by quietly and watch the Obama administration adopt the core Bush/Cheney approach to civil liberties and Terrorism.  I find it impossible to envision her sanctioning the ongoing refusal of the DOJ to withdraw the January, 2006 Bush/Cheney White Paper that justified illegal surveillance with obscenely broad theories of executive power.  I don’t know why her nomination was left to die, but I do know that her beliefs are quite antithetical to what this administration is doing.

UPDATE:  ABC News‘ Jake Tapper quotes an anonymous "Senate Democratic leadership source" regarding a Senate vote to confirm Johnsen:  "Bottom line is that it was going to be close.  If they wanted to, the White House could have pushed for a vote. But they didn’t want to ’cause they didn’t have the stomach for the debate."  Take that anonymous quote for what it’s worth, but what is clear is that they were very close to having the votes last year if they did not in fact have them(when the Senate had 60 Democrats plus Lugar’s support) and, in any event, could have included her among last month’s recess appointments.  Had there been real desire to secure her confirmation, it seems likely it would have happened; at the very least, a far greater effort would have been made.

UPDATE II:  Dave Weigel, now of The Washington Post, becomes the latest to observe the core similarity between the Obama and Bush/Cheney approaches to civil liberties, Terrorism and national security.  If you were Barack Obama and were pursuing the policies that he ended up pursuing, would you want Dawn Johnsen in charge of the office which determines the scope of your legal authority as President?

Michael Winship reporting in Salon:

The high cost of energy in America was paid in human lives this week, with the deaths of more than two dozen miners in a massive explosion at the Upper Big Branch coal mine in West Virginia. It’s the worst mine disaster in a quarter of a century.

Upper Big Branch is owned by Massey Energy Co., which operates 47 mines in central Appalachia. According to the Los Angeles Times, it employs nearly 6,000 and in 2009 reported revenues of $2.3 billion, with a net income of $104.4 million. At the center of this week’s catastrophe is Massey’s president and CEO Don Blankenship, a man so reviled nowadays he had to be escorted away by police when he and other company officials tried to address a group of distraught family and friends outside the Upper Big Branch mine in the early morning hours after the explosion. The crowd hurled invective — and a chair.

Blankenship hates unions (Upper Big Branch is a non-union mine), thinks global warming is a figment of our imaginations and that those who do believe in climate change are crazy; supports destructive, mountaintop-removal mining; serves on the board of the conservative, free market U.S. Chamber of Commerce and now, lucky us, shares his pearls of right-wing wisdom via Twitter. "America doesn’t need Green jobs," he tweeted pithily last month, "but Red, White, & Blue ones." David Roberts of the environmental magazine Grist described him as "the scariest polluter in the U.S. …The guy is evil and I don’t use that word lightly."

Just one example of Massey Energy’s earlier history of environmental malfeasance was described in a May 2003 issue of Forbes Magazine:

"In October 2000 the floor of a 72-acre wastewater reservoir built above an abandoned mine in Kentucky collapsed, sending black sludge through the mine and out into a tributary of the Big Sandy River. The sludge killed fish and plants for 36 miles downstream. Water supplies were shut down in several towns for a month. In total, 230 million gallons spilled out, 20 times the volume of the crude oil from the Exxon Valdez. Lawns nearby were covered in as much as 7 feet of muck…

"… The reservoir had shown signs of leaking right before the accident and Massey failed to report that fact to regulators as required, according to the U.S. Mine Safety & Health Administration. The cleanup has cost $58 million so far."

This week’s Upper Big Branch mine disaster is the latest in a string of environmental and safety-related calamities linked to Massey and Blankenship. In 2008, …

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Check out this interesting article by Liz Welch at Inc.:

Sell a really good, juicy burger on a fresh bun. Make perfect French fries. Don’t cut corners. That’s been the business plan since Jerry Murrell and his sons opened their first burger joint in 1986. When they began selling franchises in 2002, the family had just five stores in northern Virginia. Today, there are 570 stores across the U.S. and Canada, with 2009 sales of $483 million. Overseeing the opening of about four new restaurants a week, the Murrells are proof that flipping burgers doesn’t have to be a dead-end job.

There was this little hamburger place where I grew up in northern Michigan. Almost everyone in our town, except the uppity uppities, ate the burgers. Even though the owner had a cat, which he’d pet while cooking. People called them fur burgers, but they still ate them because they were good.

I studied economics at Michigan State. I had no money and needed a place to stay, so I ran a fraternity house’s kitchen. I got the cook a raise and let her do the ordering. We started making money, because she knew what she was doing.

My parents died my last year in college. I married, had three kids, divorced, then remarried. I moved to northern Virginia and was selling stocks and bonds. My two eldest sons, Matt and Jim, said they did not want to go to college. I supported them 100 percent.

Instead, we used their college tuition to open a burger joint. Ocean City had 50 places selling boardwalk fries, but only one place always has a 150-foot line — Thrashers. They serve nothing but fries, but they cook them right — high-quality potato, peanut oil. That impressed me. I thought a good hamburger-and-fry place could make it, so we started with a takeout shop in Arlington, Virginia.

Our lawyer said,

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Take a gander:

The patty contains a surprise. Details here.