Later On

Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal:

The great second wave of church scandals appears this week to be settling down. In the Vatican they’re likely thinking "the worst is over" and "we’ve weathered the storm." Is that good? Not to this Catholic. The more relaxed the institution, the less likely it will reform.

Let’s look at the first wave. Eight years ago, on April 19, 2002, I wrote in these pages of the American church scandal, calling it calamitous, a threat to the standing and reputation of the entire church. Sexual abuse by priests "was the heart of the scandal, but at the same time only the start of the scandal": the rest was what might be called the racketeering dimension. Lawsuits had been brought charging that the church as an institution acted to cover up criminal behavior by misleading, lying and withholding facts. The most celebrated cases in 2002 were in Boston, where a judge had forced the release of 11,000 pages of church documents showing the abusive actions of priests and detailing then-Archbishop Bernard F. Law’s attempts to hide the crimes. The Boston scandal generated hundreds of lawsuits, cost hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements and judgments, and included famous and blood-chilling cases—the repeat sexual abuser Father John Geoghan, who molested scores of boys and girls and was repeatedly transferred, was assigned to a parish in Waltham where he became too familiar with children in a public pool; Cardinal Law claimed he was probably "proselytizing."

In the piece I criticized Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, then archbishop of Washington, who had suggested to the Washington Post that the scandal was media-driven, that journalists are having "a heyday." Then came the it-wasn’t-so-bad defense: The bishop of Joliet, Ill., Joseph Imesch, said that while priests who sexually abuse children should lose their jobs, priests who sexually abuse adolescents and teenagers have a "quirk" and can be treated and continue as priests.

Really, he called it a quirk.

Does any of this, the finger-pointing and blame-gaming, sound familiar? Isn’t it what we’ve been hearing the past few weeks?

At the end of the piece I called on the pope, John Paul II, to begin to show the seriousness of the church’s efforts to admit, heal and repair by taking the miter from Cardinal Law’s head and the ring from his finger and retiring him: "Send a message to those in the church who need to hear it, that covering up, going along, and paying off victims is over. That careerism is over, and Christianity is back."

The piece didn’t go over well in the American church, or the Vatican. One interesting response came from Cardinal Law himself, whom I ran into a year later in Rome. "We don’t need friends of the church turning on the church at such a difficult time," he said. "We need loyalty when the church is going through a tough time."

I’d suggested in the piece that the rarefied lives cardinals led had contributed to an inability to understand the struggles of others and the pain of those abused, and soon Cardinal Law and I were talking about his mansion outside Boston. He asked me how it would look if he’d refused to live there. I told him it would look good, but more to the point, the church was going to lose the cardinal’s mansion to trial lawyers, and it should sell it first and put the money in schools.

Soon enough the mansion was gone, sold to pay the plaintiffs. Cardinal Law’s successor, Archbishop Sean O’Malley, lives in an apartment in Boston’s South End.

John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter once called Cardinal Law "the poster boy" of the American scandal. He has also became the poster boy for the church’s problems in handling the scandal. And that has to do with its old-boy network, with the continued dominance of those who grew up in the old way.

In December 2002, Cardinal Law left Boston just hours before state troopers arrived with subpoenas seeking his grand jury testimony in what the state’s attorney general, Thomas Reilly, called a massive coverup of child abuse. The cardinal made his way to Rome, where he resigned, and where he stayed with Archbishop James Harvey, a close friend and, as head of the pontifical household, the most powerful American in the Vatican. Within a year Archbishop Harvey, too, was implicated in the scandal: The Dallas Morning News reported the Vatican had promoted a priest through its diplomatic corps even though it had received persistent, high-level warnings that he had sexually abused a young girl. The warnings had gone to Archbishop Harvey.

Cardinal Law received one of the best sinecures in Rome, as head of the Basilica of Saint Maria Maggiore and a member of the Vatican office tasked with appointing new bishops and correcting misconduct.

These stories are common in the church. Cardinal Angelo Sodano, a former Vatican secretary of state and now dean of the College of Cardinals, was a primary protector of the now disgraced Father Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legion of Christ, described by a heroic uncoverer of the scandals, Jason Berry, in the National Catholic Reporter, as "a morphine addict who sexually abused at least twenty . . . seminarians."

I know this from having seen it: Many—not all, but many—of the men who staff the highest levels of the Vatican have been part of the very scandal they are now charged with repairing. They are defensive and they are angry, and they will not turn the church around on their own.

In a way, the Vatican lives outside time and space. The verities it speaks of and stands for are timeless and transcendent. For those who work there, bishops and cardinals, it can become its own reality. And when those inside fight for what they think is the life of the institution, they feel fully justified in fighting any way they please. They can do this because, as they rationalize it, they are not fighting only for themselves—it’s not selfish, their fight—but to protect the greatest institution in the history of the world.

But in the past few decades, they not only fought persons—"If you were loyal you’d be silent"—they fought information.

What they don’t fully understand right now—what they can’t fully wrap their heads around—is that the information won.

The information came in through the cracks, it came in waves, in newspaper front pages, in books, in news beamed to every satellite dish in Europe and America. The information could not be controlled or stopped. The information was that something very sick was going on in the heart of the church.

Once, leaders of the Vatican felt that silence would protect the church. But now anyone who cares about it must come to understand that only speaking, revealing, admitting and changing will save the church.

The old Vatican needs new blood…

Continue reading.

Steve Benen:

On "Meet the Press," host David Gregory asked Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to reflect a bit on the Tea Partiers, particularly in light of April 15 events this week. I found Geithner’s response kind of interesting.

"We’ve just been through eight years where people said — many people said, ‘Deficits don’t matter. We can pass huge tax cuts, pass huge new programs without paying for them.’ That debate has changed fundamentally.

"Now you don’t hear people say anymore, ‘Deficits don’t matter.’ You don’t hear people saying that we can pass enormous expansion of government without paying for it. That’s an important change. I think all Americans understand that our deficits are unsustainable. And I think that’ll be helpful as we move to try to make the hard choices to bring them down again."

I didn’t see the video of this, only the transcript, so it’s hard to say whether Geithner was actually being coy with his comments. But what I liked about his response was its subtle underpinnings.

The Treasury secretary’s remarks, which apparently came at the very end of the interview, effectively told the Tea Party crowd, "Oh, now you’re worried about fiscal responsibility. While Bush and the Republicans were taking fiscal irresponsibility to new depths with tax cuts and government expansion without paying for it, you kept on supporting them, but now you care."

The subtext is politically relevant — for folks who are literally taking to the streets to complain about budget shortfalls, the real rage should be directed at the Republican gang that turned surpluses into deficits, and added $5 trillion to the debt.

Marion Nestle in Food Politics:

In the latest issue of the American Journal of Public Health, Derek Yach and his colleagues at PepsiCo in Purchase, NY, say yes, it can, in answer to the question they pose in their article, “Can the food industry help tackle the growing global burden of undernutrition?”

If we are to successfully combat global undernutrition, efforts must be sustained by multiple stakeholders from various sectors. We believe that trust is built through industry’s demonstration of practical actions that improve health, and recognition of these actions by governments and nongovernmental organizations. Only through new and innovative public–private sector partnerships can we truly make a difference.

Three international public health leaders counter with no, it can’t, in an article entitled “The snack attack.“  They point to irreconcilable differences between the the goals of private industry and public health:

The problem lies with food, drink, and associated companies whose profits depend on products that damage public health and that also have damaging social, economic, and environmental impacts. These most of all include transnational companies, of which PepsiCo is one. To succeed, big business must sustain and increase annual turnover, profit, and share price…We suggest that public health professionals see papers such as those of Yach et al. as part of the marketing strategies of transnational food and drink companies…The privatization of public health does not work.

This argument reminds me of the editorial that David Ludwig and I wrote for JAMA late in 2008: “Can the food industry play a constructive role in the obesity epidemic?”  We concluded:

With respect to obesity, the food industry has acted at times constructively, at times outrageously. But inferences from any one action miss a fundamental point: in a market-driven economy, industry tends to act opportunistically in the interests of maximizing profit. Problems arise when society fails to perceive this situation accurately.

While visionary CEOs and enlightened food company cultures may exist, society cannot depend on them to address obesity voluntarily, any more than it can base national strategies to reduce highway fatalities and global warming solely on the goodwill of the automobile industry. Rather, appropriate checks and balances are needed to align the financial interests of the food industry with the goals of public health.

PepsiCo owns Pepsi Cola, of course, but also Gatorade, Frito-Lay snacks, and Aquafina water, among many other brands.  According to Advertising Age (June 22, 2009), PepsiCo earned $43 billion in worldwide sales in 2008. Its product-specific advertising expenditures in 2008, just for “measured media” (meaning run through advertising agencies) were, for example:

• $162 million for Gatorade
• $145 million for Pepsi Cola
• $27 million for Tostitos
• $14 million for Doritos
• $11 million for Fritos.

These figures, staggering as they may be, do not include the amounts Pepsi spends on lobbying, supporting the American Beverage Association’s efforts to fight soda taxes, funding medical research at Yale, or marketing to children and adults in India and other developing countries, as previously discussed on this site.

Is corporate “social responsibility” really responsible?  Or is it just marketing?  And what should be the checks and balances?  You decide.

Added April 17: This comes from a former employee of PepsiCo who asks that I post this anonymously:

I think you probably know that the “marketing dollars,” the share (ads/direct marketing), of companies like Pepsico are only a fraction of what are their actual marketing/promotions budgets.  Many years ago, PepsiCo made a conscious effort to redefine/shift budgets to what is called promotional spending from traditional marketing spending.  In doing so though, they keep the control and allocation of the funds in the hands of the marketing teams.

For Pepsi I know that the $145 million you mention is probably only 25% of what Pepsi “internally” considers consumer marketing spending.  For example, direct to retails “incentive” bonus funds are given for moving volume — those funds are almost entirely funneled into the retails increasing consumer marketing to their direct customers.  There are even examples where they can hide 10’s of millions of dollars at a time by linking event sponsorships (stadiums, etc.) to retailer agreements, thus moving those dollars to long-term “capital expenditures.”  I would guess that for Pepsi alone that that $145 million could be as much as a billion a year for direct and indirect consumer marketing spending.

It is not just obscene how much gets spent to increase volume… since, for companies like PepsiCo, Coke, etc., volume is the only way they generate higher profit to their shareholders.  As you say, to expect a corporation to do things for the good of the consumer just shows a misunderstanding of their primary function when they are a for-profit entity.

Repeat after me: "Businesses have just one goal: increase profits."

Recently the Catholic church has tried a counterattack (they tend to counterattack rather than trying to address the problem) by saying that many more children in the US are abused by public school teachers than by Catholic clergy. Well, of course: there are many more public school teachers than there are Catholic clergy. But take a look at this post by mistermix at Balloon Juice. From the post:

[In the video], he’s saying that priests molest an average of 220 kids/year, but teachers molest around 29,000, so it’s unfair that the media has singled out the church.

I take his point that we never read about teachers abusing students. So, it’s probably discriminatory of me to mention that the rate of abuse, based on recent census and church statistics, is 5 rapes per thousand priests, versus 4 rapes per thousand teachers.

If you want to read something more sane about the Catholic Church, Peggy Noonan has a good column on the subject, believe it or not.

The fact that the guy in the video makes such a biased claim (ignoring the RATE of abuse in favor of raw number) is prima facie evidence of bad faith. And, one must say, we see a great deal of that from the church with regard to this scandal: the overwhelming response has been denial, defensiveness, and a determination that all criticism is inspired by (you choose): Satan, the Jews, atheists, people who hate the church, and so on.

I had a bit of a struggle recently with my router and my Roku HDxr. I thought I’d explain what I learned, both for you and for my own later reference.

UPDATE: As pointed out in the comments, I am here confusing 802.11 and 801.11 — and I am still confused and don’t understand wireless. Do NOT use this as a guide. You’re better off doing your own research.

WiFi devices nowadays follow one of three IEEE protocols: 801.11b, 801.11g, or 801.11n. From Wikipedia:

The 802.11 family includes over-the-air modulation techniques that use the same basic protocol. The most popular are those defined by the 802.11b and 802.11g protocols, which are amendments to the original standard. 802.11-1997 was the first wireless networking standard, but 802.11b was the first widely accepted one, followed by 802.11g and 802.11n. Security was originally purposefully weak due to export requirements of some governments and was later enhanced via the 802.11i amendment after governmental and legislative changes. 802.11n is a new multi-streaming modulation technique.

At the link is a table that shows how the bitrates have increased: 801.11n is faster than 801.11g, and 801.11g is faster than 801.11b.

My router is a TRENDnet TEW-633GR, and it can use any of the three protocols: n, g, or b. Generally speaking, it uses the fastest protocol a device supports.

The Roku comes in three models, only one of which (HDxr) uses the n protocol—the other two are limited to the g protocol.

Now here’s where it gets interesting. For security, The router allows the user to specify WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) or WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access). In either case, you enter a key in the router (by using your browser to go to the router via its IP address, which for this router is 192.168.10.1 (you enter that in the address bar of your browser as though it were a URL, and you get to tinker with your router settings). The TRENDnet menu has five main headings: Basic, Advanced, Tools, Status, and Help. Under Basic, if you click Wireless, you can (at the bottom) select the type of security you want: WEP, WPA-Personal, or WPA-Enterprise. If you select WEP, you see this explanation:

WEP is the wireless encryption standard. To use it you must enter the same key(s) into the router and the wireless stations. For 64 bit keys you must enter 10 hex digits into each key box. For 128 bit keys you must enter 26 hex digits into each key box. A hex digit is either a number from 0 to 9 or a letter from A to F. For the most secure use of WEP set the authentication type to “Shared Key” when WEP is enabled.

You may also enter any text string into a WEP key box, in which case it will be converted into a hexadecimal key using the ASCII values of the characters. A maximum of 5 text characters can be entered for 64 bit keys, and a maximum of 13 characters for 128 bit keys.

If you choose the WEP security option this device will ONLY operate in Legacy Wireless mode (802.11B/G). This means you will NOT get 11N performance due to the fact that WEP is not supported by 11N specification.

So, obviously, since I have a n-compatible Roku and since The Wife has an n-compatible netbook and an n-compatible laptop, we want to use WPA-Personal as the security. This allows the n-compatible devices to connect a n-protocol speeds, while devices that are limited to 801.11g can still connect, only at not such a high bandwidth.

This was all very confusing to me, but now things are working. So far.

Directly from Dan Colman’s Open Culture:

Maybe you have noticed. (Or maybe you haven’t.) Almost every YouTube video featured on Open Culture can be accessed through our YouTube Channel. You’ll find about 225 videos overall, and they run the gamut. Intelligent lectures, artistic videos, comic bits, scientific explorations, historical footage – they’re all here. And, if you subscribe to our YouTube channel, you’ll get notified when we add new videos down the road. Now, let me give you fifteen of my personal favorites, and if you have your own YouTube faves, please send them our way. We’d love to share the great ones with our readers.

• Richard Dawkins on the Awe of Life & Science
• Picasso’s Guernica Animated in 3D
• The Only Existing Video of Anne Frank
• Robert Sapolsky on the Uniqueness of Humans
• Stand by Me Travels Around the World
• Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams
• Malcolm X at Oxford University
• Steve Jobs Speaks to Stanford Graduates
• Women in Art
• Mark Twain Filmed by Thomas Edison in 1909
• The Bayeux Tapestry Animated
• My Stroke of Insight
• Hubble Deep Field: The Most Important Image Ever Taken
• The Monty Python Philosophy Football Match
• Ira Glass on the Art of Storytelling

More on Sen. Vitter’s assault on public health. Why doesn’t he go back to prostitutes? Joaquin Sapien in ProPublica:

When Sen. David Vitter persuaded the EPA to agree to yet another review of its long-delayed assessment of the health risks of formaldehyde, he was praised by companies that use or manufacture a chemical found in everything from plywood to carpet.

As long as the studies continue, the EPA will still list formaldehyde as a "probable" rather than a "known" carcinogen, even though three major scientific reviews now link it to leukemia and have strengthened its ties to other forms of cancer. The chemical industry is fighting to avoid that designation, because it could lead to tighter regulations and require costly pollution controls.

"Delay means money. The longer they can delay labeling something a known carcinogen, the more money they can make," said James Huff, associate director for chemical carcinogenesis at the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences in the Department of Health and Human Services.

The EPA’s chemical risk assessments are crucial to protecting the public’s health because they are the government’s most comprehensive analysis of the dangers the chemicals present and are used as the scientific foundation for state and federal regulations. But it usually takes years or even decades to get an assessment done, or to revise one that is outdated. Often the industry spends millions on lobbying and on scientific studies that counter the government’s conclusions.

The EPA has been trying since 1998 to update the formaldehyde assessment, which was first written in 1989. But the agency’s efforts have repeatedly been stalled by the industry and Congress.

This time, the resistance came from Vitter, a Republican senator from Louisiana, where, ironically, thousands of Hurricane Katrina victims say they suffered respiratory problems after being housed in government trailers contaminated with formaldehyde. Last year Vitter blocked the nomination of a key EPA official until the agency agreed to ask the National Academy of Sciences to weigh in on the assessment. Vitter’s spokesman, Joel DiGrado, told the media that "because of the FEMA trailer debacle, we need to get absolutely reliable information to the public about formaldehyde risk as soon as possible."

Vitter’s ties to the formaldehyde industry are well known. According to Talking Points Memo, his election campaign received about $20,500 last year from companies that produce large amounts of formaldehyde waste in Louisiana. But ProPublica found that Vitter actually took in nearly twice that amount if contributions from other companies, trade groups and lobbyists with interests in formaldehyde regulation are included. Among those contributors is Charles Grizzle, a top-paid lobbyist for the Formaldehyde Council, an industry trade group that had long sought a National Academy review of the chemical.

Congress stalled the formaldehyde risk assessment once before. In 2004, Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., persuaded(PDF) the EPA to delay it, even though preliminary findings from a National Cancer Institute study had already linked formaldehyde to leukemia. Inhofe insisted that the EPA wait for a more "robust set of findings" from the institute.

Koch Industries, a large chemical manufacturer and one of Inhofe’s biggest campaign contributors, gave Inhofe $6,000 that year. That same year Koch bought two pulp mills from Georgia-Pacific, a major formaldehyde producer and one of the world’s largest plywood manufacturers. The next year Koch bought all of Georgia-Pacific.

The "more robust" findings that Inhofe asked for weren’t released until five years later – in May 2009 – and they reinforced the 2004 findings. Of the nearly 25,000 workers the National Cancer Institute had tracked for 30 years, those exposed to higher amounts of formaldehyde had a 37 percent greater risk of death from blood and lymphatic cancers and a 78 percent greater risk of leukemia than those exposed to lower amounts.

The Formaldehyde Council immediately released a statement disputing those findings and calling for a full review by the National Academy of Sciences. Such an evaluation could take as long as four years, according to an EPA spokesperson.

But this time it wasn’t Inhofe who stepped in on the industry’s behalf, but Vitter, who like Inhofe sits on the Environment and Public Works Committee.

On the day the study came out, Grizzle, the Formaldehyde Council lobbyist, donated $2,400 to Vitter’s re-election campaign, the maximum an individual can give to a federal candidate in a single election cycle…

Continue reading.

Here’s a timeline in the story:

Timeline: Formaldehyde’s Convoluted Review

1989
The first health assessment of formaldehyde is written by the EPA.

1998
The EPA begins updating the assessment.

2004
Despite preliminary findings from a National Cancer Institute study linking formaldehyde to leukemia, Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., persuades the EPA to delay a planned revision of the formaldehyde health assessment.

May 2009
The National Cancer Institute releases new results in its ongoing health study, showing that workers exposed to a higher amount of formaldehyde had a 78 percent greater risk of leukemia than those exposed to lower amounts.

June 29, 2009
Sen. David Vitter, R-La., urges the EPA to let the National Academy of Sciences review the formaldehyde assessment, a process that usually requires more time and money than the EPA’s own external peer review panel.

September 2009
The International Agency for Research on Cancer and the National Toxicology Program, a U.S. organization, both conclude that formaldehyde exposure is linked to leukemia.

Sept. 23, 2009
Vitter says he will delay the nomination of a senior EPA official until the EPA agrees to send the formaldehyde assessment to the National Academy. The EPA says the chemical doesn’t need more review.

Dec. 23, 2009
The EPA agrees to Vitter’s demand, and Vitter releases his hold on the EPA nominee. The EPA says it asked the National Academy to move quickly, so the review could be done in about the same amount of time it would have taken for an internal review.

Sebastian Rotella in ProPublica:

During the years he dueled terrorists overseas as a top operative for the CIA, Charles S. Faddis came to see the world through the eyes of the enemy.

Working in Iraq, South Asia and other hotspots, he cased streetscapes like a terrorist, identifying potential targets, probing for vulnerabilities. When he returned home he found himself looking through the same instinctive lens, whether riding Amtrak or attending a U.S. Marine Corps graduation.

What he saw — despite a vast campaign to fortify the United States after the Sept. 11 attacks — scared him. In fact, he says it scared him so much that he has written a new book, Willful Neglect: The Dangerous Illusion of Homeland Security.

"Amazingly…as you tour this nation and examine the prime targets that beg to be defended from terrorist attack, what you find, eight years later, is that virtually nothing meaningful has been done," Faddis writes. "True, large new bureaucracies have been created and shiny, new office buildings constructed, but in terms of concrete measures which will stand in the way of determined, evil men, there is very, very little."

Faddis backs that startling claim with his credentials as a counter-terror warrior. He retired in 2008 after 20 years at the CIA, serving as a station chief in the Middle East and leading a Washington-based program to prevent terrorists from obtaining weapons of mass destruction. He is also the author of last year’s Beyond Repair, a tough critique of the CIA’s internal troubles.

For his new book, Faddis spent months on reconnaissance missions to likely terror targets in U.S.: dams, rail lines, military bases, biological research labs and nuclear, chemical and liquid natural gas plants. He roamed along fences, visited authorized areas and otherwise tested security measures. Although his covert experience helped, he obeyed self-imposed ground rules and tried to maintain the perspective of an ordinary visitor.

"I didn’t want people saying it’s not fair because you were a senior [anti-terror operative] in the CIA," the solemn, silver-bearded Faddis explained during an interview at a burger joint near the Beltway. "I was just Joe Blow. I didn’t do clandestine stuff. If somebody turned me around, I left."

His findings are a catalog of danger and negligence. He says he encountered systemically weak, outmoded defenses and poorly trained personnel more apt at discouraging burglars than stopping suicide terror teams.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security …

Continue reading.

Marian Wang at ProPublica:

As you may have heard,Goldman Sachs is being sued for fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission for allegedly misleading investors about a deal that Goldman helped structure and sell. In the civil suit, the SEC specifically faulted Goldman for failing to disclose that a hedge fund was helping create the investment while betting big the deal would fail.

According to the SEC, Goldman Sachs knew about the hedge fund’s bets, knew it played a significant role in choosing the assets in the portfolio, and yet did not tell investors about it. (Goldman Sachs has called the SEC’s accusations "completely unfounded in law and fact." And in another more detailed statement, it said it "did not structure a portfolio that was designed to lose money.")

As we reported at ProPublica last week, many other major investment banks were doing a similar thing.

Investment banks including JPMorgan Chase, Merrill Lynch (now part of Bank of America), Citigroup, Deutsche Bank and UBS also created CDOs that a hedge fund named Magnetar was both helping create and betting would fail. Those investment banks marketed and sold the CDOs to investors without disclosing Magnetar’s role or the hedge fund’s interests.

Here is a list of the banks that were involved in Magnetar deals, along with links to many of the prospectuses on the deals, which skip over Magnetar’s role. In all, investment banks created at least 30 CDOs with Magnetar, worth roughly $40 billion overall. Goldman’s 25 Abacus CDOs — one of which is the basis of the SEC’s lawsuit — amounted to$10.9 billion.

Our reporter Jake Bernstein explained the investment banks’ disclosure failures on Chicago Public Radio’s This American Life:

The role of Magnetar, both as equity investor and in their bets against the very CDOs they helped create were not disclosed in any way to investors in the written documents about the deals. Not the marketing materials, not the prospectuses, not in the hundreds of pages that an investor could get to see information about the deal was it disclosed that it was in fact Magnetar who’d helped create the deal, and who’d bet against.

That is, of course, along the lines of what the SEC is suing Goldman Sachs for now. The SEC’s suit also says CDOs like the ones Goldman built "contributed to the recent financial crisis by magnifying losses associated with the downturn in the United States housing market."

Notably, the SEC did not …

Continue reading.

Greenwald:

The more I think and read about the Obama DOJ’s prosecution of NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, the more I think this might actually be one of the worst steps the Obama administration has taken yet, if not the single worst step — and that’s obviously saying a lot.  During the Bush years, in the wake of the NSA scandal, I used to write post after post about how warped and dangerous it was that the Bush DOJ was protecting the people who criminally spied on Americans (Bush, Cheney Michael Hayden) while simultaneously threatening to prosecute the whistle-blowers who exposed misconduct.  But the Bush DOJ never actually followed through on those menacing threats; no NSA whistle-blowers were indicted during Bush’s term (though several were threatened).  It took the election of Barack Obama for that to happen, as his handpicked Assistant Attorney General publicly boasted yesterday of the indictment against Drake.

Aside from the indefensible fact that only crimes committed by high-level Bush officials — but nobody else — enjoy the benefits of Obama’s “Look Forward, Not Backward” decree, think about the interests being served by this prosecution.  Most discussions yesterday suggested that Drake’s leaks to The Baltimore Sun‘s Sibohan Gorman were about waste and mismanagement in the “Trailblazer” project rather than controversial NSA spying activities, but that’s not entirely accurate.

Just consider this May 18, 2006, article by Gorman, describing how and why the NSA opted for the “Trailblazer” proposal over the privacy-protecting “Thin Thread” program, in the process discarding key privacy protections designed to ensure that the NSA would not eavesdrop on the domestic calls of U.S. citizens (h/t ondelette).  In that article — which really should be read to get a sense for the whistle-blowing that is being punished by the DOJ — Gorman described at length how then-NSA head Michael Hayden rejected technologies that could “rapidly separate and encrypt U.S.-related communications to ensure privacy” and “that monitored potential abuse of the records.”  As she put it: “Once President Bush gave the go-ahead for the NSA to secretly gather and analyze domestic phone records — an authorization that carried no stipulations about identity protection — agency officials regarded the encryption as an unnecessary step and rejected it.”

Read the rest of this entry »

John Cole at Balloon Juice:

Yesterday, I errantly stated the following:

The message is clear- you torture people and then destroy the evidence, and you get off without so much as a sternly worded letter.

If you are a whistle blower outlining criminal behavior by the government, you get prosecuted.

I was running under the assumption that the leaks Drake was accused of making were the NYT/wiretapping stuff. It turns out it was this:

But the description applies to articles written by Siobhan Gorman, then a reporter for The Baltimore Sun, that examined in detail the failings of several major N.S.A. programs, costing billions of dollars, using computers to collect and sort electronic intelligence. The efforts were plagued with technical flaws and cost overruns.

Commenter Stuck says the following:

This is mismanagement, and has nothing to do with civil liberties as such. Second, as I stated in my first comment, GG, an experienced lawyer uses the term “Whistleblower” a legal term for people who follow whistle blower laws. This guy leaked classified info to a reporter just like Libby with Plame, and as far as we know, didn’t go to congress first and follow the law. That may sound like splitting hairs, but it would be another kettle of fish if Obama was prosecuting an actual Whistleblower, or punishing them in any way, as opposed to prosecuting a guy who broke his oath and the law, and was too stupid to cover his tracks.

That’s the defense? This is even worse- they are now throwing the full weight of the government into the prosecution of a man who… embarrassed them.

I simply don’t understand why people do not see the problem here. We are told we have to move forward, and we can not look backward, and we have to ignore the criminal and immoral behavior of those who served in roles in the last administration for the good of the country. We have to overlook illegal and secretive wiretapping, we have to overlook the institution of a torture regime, it would be wrong to go back and prosecute those leaders who engaged in all of these things, lied to Congress, and covered up their behavior.

On the other hand, some guy who embarrassed us? Fuck him- we’ll go after him with guns a blazing. No concerns about looking backward there. No need to move forward on this one. We’ll bring the whole weight of the government down on this guy.

Mind you- I have no problem prosecuting leakers. None. My problem is the disparate application of “justice.” The powerful and the elites consistently avoid any scrutiny or face any prosecution for their crimes and misdeeds, but those lower down the rung are vigorously prosecuted. Had there been a widespread effort to investigate and prosecute the crimes of the Bush administration, I would have said nothing about Drake. It is the inconsistent application of the law that infuriates me.

How many days in court or jail did the people who codified into policy what happened at Abu Ghraib spend? None? Yet Charles Graner is still rotting in jail? Few bad apples, dontcha know!

Banksters rob billions, military contractors rob billions, and on and on and on, and nothing is done. But the little guys get this:

A homeless man robbed a Louisiana bank and took a $100 bill. After feeling remorseful, he surrendered to police the next day. The judge sentenced him to 15 years in prison.

Roy Brown, 54, robbed the Capital One bank in Shreveport, Louisiana in December 2007. He approached the teller with one of his hands under his jacket and told her that it was a robbery.

I just don’t get how anyone can support the prosecution of Drake when no one else has been held accountable for their behavior during the Bush years.

I never heard of these before reading about them in this post at Food & Fire. If you make pulled pork reasonably often, these would be very handy.

Take a look at Shaving-Shack.com—looks like quite a complete vendor, with blog.

I believe I’ve found my shaving groove: superb shaves rolling off the blade day after day. Today’s shave began with an excellent lather from Vintage Blades’s own shaving soap, worked up with the Rooney 2. Then the slim handle Gillette with a still newish Gillette 7 O’Clock SharpEdge provided three smooth passes, with a splash of New York to finish.

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.