Later On

The GOP does not want the Senate even to talk about financial regulations. The GOP are a cancer on the body politic. Steve Benen:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) signaled his intention to move forward as early as next week on financial regulatory reform legislation. "We have talked about this enough. We have negotiated this enough," Reid said.

To prevent the bill from moving forward towards a vote, all 41 Senate Republicans would have to unanimously agree to filibuster the motion to proceed. (In other words, the GOP would refuse to allow the debate to even get underway.) As of yesterday afternoon, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) did not yet have commitments from all 41 members of his caucus.

Today, that changed.

Every member of the Senate Republican Caucus has signed a letter, delivered to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, expressing opposition to the Democrats’ financial regulatory reform bill, which they all claim will lead to more Wall Street bailouts.

"We are united in our opposition to the partisan legislation reported by the Senate Banking Committee," the letter reads. "As currently constructed, this bill allows for endless taxpayer bailouts of Wall Street and establishes new and unlimited regulatory powers that will stifle small businesses and community banks."

The Republican caucus was not specific about the path ahead. Indeed, the GOP’s letter did not even specifically vow to block the motion to proceed, but rather, simply articulated the caucus’ collective "opposition." It stands to reason, though, that the point of the letter is that Republicans are prepared to block the vote and the debate on bringing some safeguards to the industry that caused the economic disaster.

It’s worth remembering that Senate Democrats, by and large, didn’t really expect it to come to this. Given Wall Street’s scandalous recklessness, and the public’s disgust for irresponsible misconduct in the financial industry, Dems thought it would be politically suicidal for Republicans to reject reform efforts.

As of this afternoon, it appears Republicans are prepared to link arms and take their chances, fighting to protect Wall Street from accountability.

He sure gets stuff wrong a lot, doesn’t he? Brad Johnson at ThinkProgress:

Last Friday, Rush Limbaugh demanded to know why a coal miner union didn’t protect the 29 miners who were killed in one of Massey CEO Don Blankenship’s mines. After ThinkProgress reported that there was no union at the mine, Limbaugh claimed yesterday that it was a “fact” that “there were union workers there.” Limbaugh cited an October 2009 story by the Charleston Gazette’s Ken Ward Jr. that the “National Labor Relations Board has affirmed a decision that Massey Energy must rehire 85 coal miners who alleged they were illegally discriminated against because of their union affiliation.” Limbaugh concluded that “the left” who “are trying to blame the Massey disaster on its union busting” were wrong:

So there were union workers there, and so the United Mine Workers should have been overseeing their safety. United Mine Workers of America. There were union workers at that mine, and the left is trying to say, “You can’t say that, Limbaugh! Why it’s a nonunion shop. That SOB CEO got rid of all the unions!” No, no. He agreed to bring back 85 of them. You people, it’s been 21 years. At some point you are going to learn: If you go up against me on a challenge of fact, you are going to be wrong. It’s just that simple.

Watch it:

On this “challenge of fact,” Limbaugh is wrong once again. The 85 union coal miners were actually at a different Massey subsidiary at a different mine in a different county than the one where the disaster occurred. The coal miners that Limbaugh references were located at Mammoth Coal’s Mammoth (formerly Cannelton) mine in Kannawha County, WV, while the tragedy occurred in Performance Coal’s Upper Big Branch-South mine in Raleigh County, WV.

In fact, Blankenship successfully fought three different attempts by the United Mine Workers of America to unionize Upper Big Branch in the 1990s. After the last union drive failed, Blankenship cut bonuses in half and increased hours by fifty percent.

Amanda Terkel has an interesting post at ThinkProgress, though I must point out an error: Ms. Terkel refers to “President Clinton.” However, Clinton is NOT president. The president is Barack Obama. I thought pretty much everyone, including political reporters, knew that. I imagine she’s referring to former-President Clinton, or (as he should now be known) Governor Clinton (governors, like judges, senators, ambassadors, and field-rank military do retain the title as a courtesy) or Mr. Clinton.

“President”, when referring to the president of the US, is not retained as a courtesy title. At any time, there is at most one US president: the person currently holding the office.

Feel free to check with the White House Office of Protocol.

I hope this error will not recur.

Here’s the post:

Fifteen years ago, a deranged anti-government extremist named Timothy McVeigh set off a truck bomb below the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including 19 children under the age of six. In a speech delivered at the Center for American Progress Action Fund today, President Clinton drew eerily parallels between that incident and the current atmosphere of right-wing, anti-government hatred.

He specifically pointed to the influence of right-wing media in the 90s, saying that those hate radio hosts “understood clearly that emotion was more powerful than reason most of the time, and it happened that they got much bigger listenership, and more advertisers, and more commercial success, if they kept people in the white heat.” People like Timothy McVeigh were “highly vulnerable to the suggestions and implications of the most militant rhetoric of the time.” Both media and politicians therefore need to be responsible in their rhetoric since it falls on the “serious and the delirious alike”:

We can’t let the debate veer so far into hatred that we lose focus of our common humanity. It’s really important. We can’t ever fudge the fact that there’s a basic line dividing criticism from violence or its advocacy, and that the closer you get to the line and the more responsibility you have, you have to think about the echo chamber in which your words resonate. [...]

But what we learned from Oklahoma City is not that we should gag each other or we should reduce our passion for the positions that we hold, but the words we use really do matter because there are — there’s this vast echo chamber, and they go across space, and they fall on the serious and the delirious alike. They fall on the connected and the unhinged alike. And I am not trying to muzzle anybody, but one of the things that the conservatives have always brought to the table in America is that no law can replace personal responsibility. And the more power you have, and the more influence you have, the more responsibility you have.

In 1995, McVeigh’s targets were federal employees. In the past year, there has also been a suicide attack of an IRS building in Texas, a shooting of officers at the Pentagon, and threats of violence against Census workers. Clinton stressed that there’s a difference between criticizing a policy and demonizing a whole class of government workers, and the latter should be unacceptable after the Oklahoma City bombing:

Oklahoma City proved that beyond the law, there is no freedom, and there is a difference between criticizing a policy or a politician, and demonizing the government that guarantees our freedoms and the public servants who implement them. And the more prominence you have in politics or media or some other pillar of public life, the more you have to keep that in mind. I acknowledged that in my political career, I had more on than one occasion, in the face of a government policy I disagreed with or a practice that I thought was insensitive, referred in a disparaging way generally to “federal bureaucrats,” as if all of them were arrogant or insensitive or unresponsive, and I have never done it again. You could not read the stories of the lives of the people who perished in Oklahoma City and not respond in that way.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) is one elected official who consistently demonizes federal employees. In an interview with the New York Times, Clinton took direct aim at her, saying “They are not gangsters. They were elected. They are not doing anything they were not elected to do.” Clinton said people involved with “hatriot” groups like the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters may take the wrong lessons from irresponsible rhetoric. “Ninety-nine percent of them will never do anything they shouldn’t do, but there are people who advocate violence and anticipate violence,” he warned.

Clinton also said he welcomed the Tea Parties, but pointed out that they really don’t bear any relation to the actual Boston Tea Party. “It was about no taxation without representation,” he said. “It was not about representation by people you didn’t vote for and didn’t agree with, but can vote out in the next election.” He also warned them that their anger may backfire, since “when you get mad, sometimes you end up producing the exact reverse result of what you say you are for.” Watch some highlights of Clinton’s speech:

Indeed, Mark Potok, intelligence project director at the Southern Poverty Law Center says that the climate today “feels a lot like the run-up to Oklahoma City.” Stephen Jones, who defended McVeigh, also said that he agrees the right-wing movement is gaining strength, although there aren’t now the “galvanizing events” — like in Waco and Ruby Ridge — that inspired the violence 15 years ago.

Steve Benen again:

When Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) made the laughable argument that the Wall Street reform legislation would "institutionalize" bailouts, there was one key upside: he was lying well in advance of Paul Krugman’s next deadline.

The NYT columnist doesn’t disappoint, labeling the Republican’s nonsensical rhetoric "shameless."

…Mr. McConnell is pretending to stand up for taxpayers against Wall Street while in fact doing just the opposite. In recent weeks, he and other Republican leaders have held meetings with Wall Street executives and lobbyists, in which the G.O.P. and the financial industry have sought to coordinate their political strategy.

And let me assure you, Wall Street isn’t lobbying to prevent future bank bailouts. If anything, it’s trying to ensure that there will be more bailouts. By depriving regulators of the tools they need to seize failing financial firms, financial lobbyists increase the chances that when the next crisis strikes, taxpayers will end up paying a ransom to stockholders and executives as the price of avoiding collapse.

Even more important, however, the financial industry wants to avoid serious regulation; it wants to be left free to engage in the same behavior that created this crisis. It’s worth remembering that between the 1930s and the 1980s, there weren’t any really big financial bailouts, because strong regulation kept most banks out of trouble. It was only with Reagan-era deregulation that big bank disasters re-emerged. In fact, relative to the size of the economy, the taxpayer costs of the savings and loan disaster, which unfolded in the Reagan years, were much higher than anything likely to happen under President Obama.

Even for Senate Republicans, this is an ugly scam — McConnell rushes off to New York for a private, behind-closed-doors meeting with hedge fund managers and other Wall Street elites, and he returns to the Hill to kill the legislation that would bring some accountability to the same industry whose recklessness nearly destroyed the global financial system.

CNBC’s John Harwood explained this week that McConnell’s anti-reform argument is "a little silly when you look at the text of the bill."

And with that in mind, the White House is encouraging people to look at the text of the bill.

As Krugman concluded, "So don’t be fooled. When Mitch McConnell denounces big bank bailouts, what he’s really trying to do is give the bankers everything they want."

Mitch McConnell, minority leader in the Senate, demonstrates yet again that he has no interest in governance or the good of the country. His interests seem restricted to fundraising (for the GOP and for himself) and in partisan politics. Steve Benen:

Finding a credible figure who agrees with Senate Republican talking points on Wall Street reform is proving to be very difficult. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is not only lying, he’s doing so in such a way as to make it obvious.

Consider FDIC Chair Sheila Bair’s comments to American Banker yesterday:

Would this bill perpetuate bailouts?

BAIR: The status quo is bailouts. That’s what we have now. If you don’t do anything, you are going to keep having bailouts. Bankruptcy doesn’t work — we saw that with Lehman Brothers.

But does this bill stop them from happening?

BAIR: It makes them impossible and it should. We worked really hard to squeeze bailout language out of this bill. The construct is you can’t bail out an individual institution — you just can’t do it.

In a true liquidity crisis, the FDIC and the Fed can provide systemwide support in terms of liquidity support — lending and debt guarantees — but even then, a default would trigger resolution or bankruptcy.

Asked specifically if reform will end the "too big to fail" phenomenon, Bair told the truth: "I think it will go a long way."

And who’s Sheila Bair? She’s not exactly a liberal activist — she’s a Bush/Cheney appointee to the FDIC, a former assistant Treasury secretary in the Bush administration, and a former aide to Bob Dole.

I know the political world likes to put on airs, and pretend that it’s impolite to expose a high-ranking official as a dishonest hack. But this week, no one wants to defend Mitch McConnell’s abject nonsense.

Andrew Sullivan:

A disturbing report on NPR finds little evidence within the Catholic church over the years to prevent "treated" child-rapists from returning to work with kids. But what struck me was a psychiatrist’s analysis of what’s really going on:

One of the biggest challenges in treating priests, Lothstein says, is that they don’t have the same kind of sexual experiences — or history of talking about such experiences — that an ordinary adult may have. "Many of the priests tend to be psychosexually immature," he says. "They’ve never taken a course in healthy sexuality."

He says some of them have gone into minor seminary at age 14 and developed "a sense of self without having appropriate lines of dating, meeting other people, experimenting with touch, kissing, ordinary sexuality."

If celibacy is a mature choice, it can be a wonderful act of self-giving. But when mandatory for all, it prevents many healthy men from entering the priesthood, offers a cover for those terrified of their own sexuality and thereby creates a priesthood dominated by the emotionally immature. The hierarchy cannot grapple with these obvious facts of life and human nature. Because it would require re-thinking the dogma in their bunker. And thinking is not allowed in Benedict’s church – at least thinking not done by the Pope.

That seems a major oversight. David Goldstein for McClatchy:

For several years, Afghan police recruits under the tutelage of private U.S. government contractors couldn’t understand why their marksmanship never improved.

The answer became clear earlier this year. Italian contractors also helping to train Afghan volunteers showed them that the sights on their AK-47s and M-16s had never been adjusted.

"We’re paying somebody to teach these people to shoot these weapons, and nobody ever bothered to check their sights?" Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri said, after relating that story at a hearing Thursday.

To McCaskill, who chaired the hearing of the Senate Contracting Oversight panel, it illustrated why the U.S. has spent more than $6 billion on private contractors, but the police-training program remains rife with problems.

"It is an unbelievable, incompetent story of contracts," she said. "For eight years we have been supposed training the police in Afghanistan. We’ve flushed $6 billion."

Improving and expanding the 90,000-man Afghan National Police to maintain stability and protect the population is crucial to the Obama administration’s plan to begin reducing the American military presence in July 2011.

But the training contracts have been plagued by mismanagement. Investigations by the Government Accounting Office and the inspector generals from the Departments of State and Defense have sharply criticized both the contractors and the government oversight. They detailed a lack of supervision and controls over spending, among other failures.

"Just about everything that could go wrong here has gone wrong," Defense Department Inspector General Gordon Heddell told the subcommittee.

Moreover, the job of an Afghan police officer is exceedingly dangerous. The death rate has risen from about two dozen per month in recent years to about 125 each month, Heddell said.

The most pressing issue is that the program is now in contract limbo. Last month, the GAO blocked the Army from awarding a $1 billion police training contract to Xe Services, the company which used to be known as Blackwater and which has its own troubled government contracting history.

Agency auditors said that the Army unfairly excluded other potential bidders and agreed with a protest by DynCorp International Inc. DynCorp has had a $1.2 billion training contract from the State Department…

Continue reading.

This is nice to read. Trudy Lieberman for the Columbia Journalism Review:

A few days ago, I found myself a visitor in Lincoln, Nebraska, a city where I cut my teeth as a reporter. So with a bit of time on my hands, I decided to do some reporting there again, this time to see if the now-infamous Cornhusker Kickback was still on residents’ minds, and to get a read on Sen. Ben Nelson’s political future. I headed in the direction of Lincoln’s historic district, where the old Burlington railroad station has morphed into a banquet hall, and hipsters and seniors drink mochas in buildings that once housed saddlery shops. Plenty of people wanted to chat.

The Cornhusker Kickback still grates on Nebraskans. A refresher here: To secure Nelson’s crucial sixtieth vote to pass the health reform bill before Christmas, Senate majority leader Harry Reid bestowed a $100 million gift on Nebraskans and their Democratic senator, which would have helped the state cover its share of Medicaid costs for low-income Nebraskans.

No doubt that money would have helped the state treasury, but Nebraskans, despite their reputation for fiscal conservatism, would have none of it. The deal offended the sensibilities of the state’s residents, who apparently don’t care much for hand shakes in back rooms. The kickback made the state, which has one of the lowest mortgage default rates and where people still pay cash, look bad. Nelson has taken the heat ever since. Although Congress struck the provision from the final legislation, people were pessimistic about Nelson’s future.

“I see it as detrimental in getting him reelected,” Ed, a driver for UPS told me. “He singled out Nebraska and made people wonder what was going on under the table.” Thirty-one-year old Jeff Melichar, who was working at his family’s Phillips 66 station on P Street, put it this way: “We even had the governor of California knocking us.” Melichar, a Democrat, voted for Nelson, but he added: “This is not going to go away. Any Republican could stand on the corner and point Cornhusker Kickback and make him sound as shady as possible, and that’s it. I wish it wasn’t the case, but he damaged himself. The fact he voted ‘yes’ on the bill ended his political career in Nebraska.” …

Continue reading. I have never much cared for Ben Nelson, who seems uninterested in the principles of the Democratic Party (as I understand them, at any rate), but I am glad that he voted for healthcare reform. He did it for the wrong reasons, but he did vote "Yes."

From the Drug War Chronicle:

Gil Kerlikowske, head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP — the drug czar’s office), testified on Capitol Hill Wednesday that the Obama administration is seeking "a new direction in drug policy," but was challenged both by lawmakers and by a panel of academics and activists on the point during the same hearing. The action took place at a hearing of the House Domestic Policy Subcommittee in which the ONDCP drug budget and the forthcoming 2010 National Drug Strategy were the topics at hand.

The hearing comes in the wake of various drug policy reforms enacted by the Obama administration, including a Justice Department policy memo directing US attorneys and the DEA to lay off medical marijuana in states where it is legal, the removal of the federal ban on needle exchange funding, and administration support for ending or reducing the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine offenders.

But it also comes in the wake of the announcement of the ONDCP 2011 drug budget, which at $15.5 billion is up more than $500 million from this year. While treatment and prevention programs got a 6.5% funding increase, supply reduction (law enforcement, interdiction, and eradication) continues to account for almost exactly the same percentage of the overall budget — 64%–as it did in the Bush administration. Only 36% is earmarked for demand reduction (prevention and treatment).

Citing health care costs from drug use and rising drug overdose death figures, the nation "needs to discard the idea that enforcement alone can eliminate our nation’s drug problem," Kerlikowske said. "Only through a comprehensive and balanced approach — combining tough, but fair, enforcement with robust prevention and treatment efforts — will we be successful in stemming both the demand for and supply of illegal drugs in our country."

So far, at least, when it comes to reconfiguring US drug control efforts, Kerlikowske and the Obama administration are talking the talk, but they’re not walking the walk. That was the contention of subcommittee chair Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) and several of the session’s panelists.

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Interesting review by Lorin Stein, editor of the Paris Review:

Alien Hearts

by Guy De Maupassant

A review by Lorin Stein

Sooner or later, in writing about Guy de Maupassant, one feels impelled to address a rumor. Classy writers refer to this rumor obliquely. Tolstoy, in a preface to Maupassant’s stories, mentions “something remarkable and incredible in regard to his relations with women.” Henry James, in a book review, rather more subtly calls him “master [of] his instrument . . . that of the senses.” Frank Harris, a memoirist who had no class whatsoever, claims to have got the straight dope from the master himself:

“I suppose I am a little out of the common sexually,” he resumed, “for I can make my instrument stand whenever I please.”

“Really?” I exclaimed, too astonished to think.

“Look at my trousers,” he remarked, laughing, and there on the road he showed me that he was telling the truth.

“What an extraordinary power,” I cried. “I thought I was abnormal in that way, for I always get excited in a moment, and I have heard men say that they needed some time to get ready for the act; but your power is far beyond anything I have ever seen or heard of.”

“That is the worst of it,” he remarked quietly. “If you get a reputation some of them practically offer themselves.”

In a career that spanned barely a decade — the 1880s and early 1890s — Maupassant produced some 300 stories, 200 articles, three travel books, a collection of poems, three plays, and six novels, and the bulk of this production was consumed with the pursuit of illicit sex. His specialty was the conte leste, a kind of bawdy comic story we have very little of in English after Chaucer (think Boccaccio or The Arabian Nights). Maupassant modernized this tradition, testing the boundaries of what was permissible even in the Paris tabloids, where many of his stories first appeared. He was the best-selling writer of his generation.

According to his mother, who doted on him, Maupassant had his first romance at the age of sixteen, “followed by a friendly affection which lasted a long time.” This pattern would repeat itself all his life. He had a succession of mistresses, society women known for their wit and beauty, and a long intermittent affair with a spa attendant (who bore him several children), plus hundreds or thousands of briefer liaisons. Friends said he took more pride in his sex life than in his books. He never married.

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From a collection of photos taken of Molly and McGee, the barn owl couple, and their babies:

I made a second batch of the Greek baked beans, using Mortgage Lifter Beans (very large white beans). I’m getting into the bean mood, and I was pleased to see this post by SquawkFox with three easy recipes for baked beans using a crockpot/slow cooker (or you can cook in the oven in a covered pot: 200ºF = crockpot "Low"; 300ºF = crockpot "High"). The three recipes:

Baked Beans

Boston Baked Beans

Vegetarian Baked Beans

The recipes suggest sautéed onion as an ingredient. My advice: sauté the onions for at least 15 minutes, stirring often, so the onions caramelize, which greatly increases the flavor.

A good lather from the Art of Shaving Lemon, thanks to the Simpson Persian Jar 2 Super. Then the Elite razor, with a newish Astra Keramik Platinum blade, performed a very nice three-pass shave, followed by a splash of TOBS Mr. Taylor’s aftershave.