Later On

John Cole:

By now, you all have heard that the Republicans, in one of their first acts back from the midterm elections, have decided to scuttle START. Yes, that is crazy, obscene, and will undercut our foreign policy with Russia while making the world less safe, but to me, the craziest thing I’ve seen about the whole affair came in this NY Times write-up:

President Obama’s hopes of ratifying a new arms control treaty with Russia by the end of the year appeared to come undone on Tuesday as the chief Senate Republican negotiator moved to block a vote on the pact, one of the White House’s top foreign policy goals, in the lame-duck session of Congress.

The announcement by the senator, Jon Kyl of Arizona, the Republican point man on the issue, blindsided and angered the White House, which vowed to keep pressing for approval of the so-called New Start treaty. But the White House strategy had hinged entirely on winning over Mr. Kyl, and Democrats, who began scrambling for a backup plan, said they considered the chances of success slim.

Really? This blind-sided them? Sweet mother of everything holy.

Just what the hell have the members of this administration been paying attention to for the last two years? The Republicans are going to do EVERY single thing they can to ruin your administration. If they sense there is the slightest chance for you to do anything positive or constructive, they will block it. Did you not see them demanding that Robert Byrd be wheeled to the floor of the Senate at midnight on Christmas to vote for HCR? Did they not learn from Chuck Grassley saying that sure, if everything I want in HCR is in there, I will still vote against it. Did they not learn anything from all their dealings with the snow princesses in Maine? Have they not learned anything from the antics of mean old man McCain in regards to DADT? Lindsey Graham on cap and trade and immigration? They are actively working to keep the economy in the shitter until 2012, for chrissakes.

With all due respect, what the hell are you idiots in the White House smoking? You incompetent boobs. THE REPUBLICANS WILL NOT WORK WITH YOU IN GOOD FAITH ON ANYTHING. Get it through your god damned heads. And they will screw you dim bulbs on tax cuts next, and then you all will throw up your hands and tell us no one could have predicted. The Republicans aren’t the only one living in their own reality, as this White House clearly has constructed a new reality in which Republicans act in good faith. It’s about as real as Narnia.

Fly With Dignity is a site that collects TSA horror stories and is putting up a petition to abandon the naked-photo scanners. Take a look.

I previously linked to this excellent post by Steve Benen on how Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) is determined to sabotage the START treaty. Benen comments further on the likely effects:

The optimism hadn’t been expressed publicly, but the White House really did think it finally had a deal in place for Senate ratification of the new arms control treaty with Russia, New START.

Republicans had made Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) their point man on the issue — it’s not clear why, since Kyl has no background or working knowledge of the issue — and he made specific objections to the Obama administration clear. Officials, in response, gave Kyl what we asked for. The deal, they thought, was done.

Over many months of negotiations, the administration committed to spending $80 billion to do that over the next 10 years, and on Friday offered to chip in $4.1 billion more over the next five years. As a gesture of commitment, the White House had made sure extra money for modernization was included in the stopgap spending resolution now keeping the government operating, even though almost no other program received an increase in money.

All told, White House officials counted 29 meetings, phone calls, briefings or letters involving Mr. Kyl or his staff. They said they thought they had given him everything he wanted, and were optimistic about completing a deal this week, only to learn about his decision on Tuesday from reporters.

Kyl wouldn’t even give the White House the courtesy of a phone call to let them know he was betraying them and the nation’s national security needs. Worse, the dimwitted Kyl, with the future of American foreign policy in his hands, couldn’t even give a coherent rationale for why he’d made the decision — his office would only say "there doesn’t appear to be enough time" in the lame-duck session.

This is what happens when serious officials try to negotiate in good faith with Republicans — they refuse to take "yes" for an answer, they don’t have intellectual capacity to explain why, and the entire country has to suffer the consequences.

The bulk of the Republican foreign policy apparatus enthusiastically supports this treaty, as does the entirety of America’s military, diplomatic, and intelligence leadership. Matt Cooper noted late yesterday:

Indeed, Republicans will need to explain why they want to sit on a treaty that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has described this way: "I believe — and the rest of the military leadership in this country believes — that this treaty is essential to our future security. I believe it enhances and ensures that security. And I hope the Senate will ratify it quickly." [...]

There are risks for Republicans who follow Kyl and find themselves on the opposite side of the military and diplomatic community on ratification of the treaty.

There should be risks, but they don’t really exist. Let me put this plainly: They. Don’t. Care. They disregard the pleas of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and listen to the confused misjudgments of a buffoon from Arizona. They assume the public isn’t paying attention, so there won’t be political consequences. They expect this to hurt the foreign policy power of the United States, but they’re fine with that since there’s a Democratic president.

When it comes to Russia, inspection of the country’s long-range nuclear bases will remain suspended indefinitely; the country’s hard-liners will be emboldened; and Russia’s willingness to cooperate with U.S. on Iran or on Afghanistan will likely disappear.

But in the bigger picture, countries around the globe will see this as a reminder that negotiating with the United States is pointless, since the country is burdened with a Republican Party that puts partisan hatred above the country’s interests. It hurts American credibility in ways that are hard to even gauge.

Sleep well, Jon Kyl. Dream of the time when the United States had the respect and stature to lead the world.

The FBI continues to expand its role in domestic surveillance. Charlie Savage reports in the NY Times:

Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, traveled to Silicon Valley on Tuesday to meet with top executives of several technology firms about a proposal to make it easier to wiretap Internet users.

Mr. Mueller and the F.B.I.’s general counsel, Valerie Caproni, were scheduled to meet with senior managers of several major companies, including Google and Facebook, according to several people familiar with the discussions. How Mr. Mueller’s proposal was received was not clear.

“I can confirm that F.B.I. Director Robert Mueller is visiting Facebook during his trip to Silicon Valley,” said Andrew Noyes, Facebook’s public policy manager. Michael Kortan, an F.B.I. spokesman, acknowledged the meetings but did not elaborate.

Mr. Mueller wants to expand a 1994 law, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, to impose regulations on Internet companies.

The law requires phone and broadband network access providers like Verizon and Comcast to make sure they can immediately comply when presented with a court wiretapping order.

Law enforcement officials want the 1994 law to also cover Internet companies because people increasingly communicate online. An interagency task force of Obama administration officials is trying to develop legislation for the plan, and submit it to Congress early next year.

The Commerce Department and State Department have questioned whether it would inhibit innovation, as well as whether repressive regimes might harness the same capabilities to identify political dissidents, according to officials familiar with the discussions.

Under the proposal, firms would have to design systems to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages. Services based overseas would have to route communications through a server on United States soil where they could be wiretapped.

A Google official declined to comment. Mr. Noyes said it would be premature for Facebook to take a position.

Thanks to TYD for the link.

The NY Times editorial today:

The contrast could not be more distressing. [I would say "damning" rather than "distressing." – LG]

The British government has decided to pay former detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, tens of millions of dollars in compensation and conduct an independent investigation into its role in the mistreatment of prisoners.

The United States still operates the Guantánamo camp, with no end in sight. None of the truly dangerous terrorists there have been brought to justice, while many prisoners are still held who never should have been. The government not only refuses to come clean on this ignoble history, but it is covering up the Bush administration’s abuses by denying victims a day in court.

In July, Prime Minister David Cameron announced that there would be an independent investigation into Britain’s role in the mistreatment of detainees. On Tuesday, the government announced that it was compensating British citizens who were held at Guantánamo, six of whom filed a lawsuit accusing government agencies of complicity in their detention, torture and incarceration.

Three years ago, Canada apologized and paid compensation to Maher Arar, a Canadian torture victim, following an investigation into how the Royal Canadian Mounted Police mistakenly identified him as a terrorist. American authorities acted on that false information to arrest Mr. Arar and “render” him overseas. Even after the mistake was revealed, they continued to hold him.

The United States has neither compensated victims of illegal detention and abuse nor taken steps to hold the architects of the human rights abuses accountable. Indeed, some of the Obama administration’s biggest legal victories have come in shielding Bush-era officials by getting lawsuits brought by victims with credible claims of kidnapping and torture thrown out of court on specious secrecy grounds, without any testimony being heard.

Among the former detainees whom Britain has agreed to compensate is Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian-born former detainee with a British right of residency who said that he was tortured after American authorities sent him to Morocco. In September, a federal appeals court dismissed his case on unconvincing security grounds presented by Obama administration lawyers.

It will do no good for this nation’s tarnished human rights reputation that at the same time Britain took responsibility for its comparatively minor role in the ill treatment of terrorism suspects, former President George W. Bush was bragging in a new book that he had personally authorized the repeated use of a form of simulated drowning called waterboarding on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the accused mastermind of Sept. 11.

At least someone is owning up to the awful legacy of Mr. Bush’s illegal detention policies.

Obama’s legacy is irremediably stained by his contempt for the rule of law and his determination to protect malefactors. This is becoming increasingly clear to many observers. From Greenwald:

. . . Also from the Department of Glaring Contrasts, we have this:

New York Times, yesterday:

Britain to Compensate Former Guantánamo Detainees

Bidding to restore the reputations of MI5 and MI6 and to rebuild damaged intelligence links with the United States, the British government said on Tuesday that it had agreed to pay compensation running into millions of dollars to 15 former detainees at Guantánamo Bay and one man still held there who have accused Britain’s intelligence agencies of colluding in their torture in the American-run detention system. . . .

They have said in their lawsuits that agents of MI5 and MI6 worked closely with the C.I.A. and other American agencies involved in their interrogation, and must have known about the torture and mistreatment. They said they suffered so-called stress techniques like sleep deprivation; subjection to extremes of noise: heat and cold, beatings and death threats.

CBS News, January 6, 2007:

The [Canadian] prime minister apologized Friday to a Syrian-born Canadian [Maher Arar] and said he would be compensated $8.9 million for Ottawa’s role in his deportation by U.S. authorities to Damascus, where he was tortured and imprisoned for nearly a year. . . . Arar’s case was an example of rendition, a practice in which the U.S. government sends foreign terror suspects to third countries for interrogation.  He was exonerated in September after a two-year public inquiry led by Associate Chief Justice of Ontario Dennis O’Connor.

The Washington Post, today:

The [British] settlement represents the first time any Guantanamo Bay detainee, of 779 who have passed through or are still held at the military prison in Cuba, has received a financial settlement because of his incarceration. . . . The George W. Bush and Obama administrations, as well as the federal courts, have rejected the idea of compensation. . . .

A number of former Guantanamo detainees have tried to sue in the United States. The courts have dismissed every case on the grounds that the government agencies and officials named have immunity from such civil lawsuits. . . .

The Bush and Obama administrations have also invoked the “state secrets” privilege to end a number of lawsuits that charged that various government and private entities were complicit in torture.

“The Obama administration continues to shield Bush-era torturers from accountability in civil proceedings by blocking judicial review of their illegal behavior,” said Steven Watt, a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union. “To date, not a single victim of the Bush administration’s torture program has had his day in a U.S. court. The U.S. can no longer stand silently by as other nations reckon with their own agents’ complicity in the torture program” . . . .

But another former U.S. military officer praised the British action. “Without getting into whether they are good guys or bad guys, there is a global obligation that we don’t condone torture, and the U.S. has done everything to avoid its duty under domestic and international law to prevent and atone for torture,” said retired Air Force Col. Morris D. Davis, the former chief military prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay, who resigned in 2007 after alleging political interference in the military’s legal process.

It was clear from that start that, standing alone, Obama’s steadfast devotion to protecting and shielding all Bush crimes from any form of accountability — and his active blocking of all victims from obtaining compensation or any form of justice in a court of law — seriously mars his record, his legacy and his character.  That other nations are providing exactly the accountability that Obama has desperately sought to prevent makes that even more apparent.  The British are acting with less than pure motives here — they are particularly concerned that allowing these lawsuits to proceed will expose their intelligence agencies to judicial scrutiny — but the fact that their political and legal system (and Canada’s and Sweden’s and others’) does not permit a total whitewash of these crimes while ours eagerly does speaks volumes about comparative notions of justice and the rule of law — especially since, first and foremost, they are American crimes.  Leaders of the Free World.

A very pleasant lime-themed shave. QED’s Fresh Lime is intensely lime and provided an excellent lather with the Omega silvertip, a soft luxuriant brush. Three passes with the Feather Premium, a good splash of Geo. F. Trumper’s West Indian Extract of Limes aftershave, and I’m ready for the day.

Steve Benen gives a perfect example.

Robinson Crusoe got much from the wreck—canvas sails, ropes a-plenty, hatchets, an ax, a couple of guns with powder and shot a-plenty, and so on. But he lamented that he had no easy way to dig and transport dirt: no wheelbarrow, no bucket, no shovel, no pick.

He was able to make do with a crowbar for a pick, and he fashioned a shovel of sorts from ironwood at a great cost in labor, but still: once you break up and dig up the earth, how do you move it about? Moving it by hand is terribly tedious. He eventually fashioned a sort of hod, but The Wife pointed out that he had the canvas, and it would be easy to pile dirt on a piece of that and then drag or lift and carry it wherever. And I think the idea would have immediately occurred to Crusoe. So we catch Defoe nodding.

Budgets reflect national priorities. Ours are clear:

Via ThinkProgress.

Radley Balko:

A few weeks ago, I wrote about a SWAT raid on New Haven nightclub. The raid was for suspected underage drinking. In addition to the obvious overkill show of force, police also threatened and allegedly arrested a Quinnipiac University student for attempting to record the raid with their cell phones (the police say the student was arrested for assaulting officers and disrupting the raid). This was a big story in New Haven, and it prompted a statement from both the mayor and the chief of police affirming that it is perfectly legal to record on-duty cops in New Haven.

At about the same time, another man was arrested in New Haven for recording the cops. On September 25, Luis Luna was arrested for filming an arrest outside of a New Haven bar with his cell phone. Officially, Luna was charged with interfering with police, but the police report itself specifically says that Luna was arrested for “filming”, and makes no mention of him interfering with the arrest in any other way. (You can read the report here [PDF].)

The report also says that Luna’s arrest was ordered not by a rank-and-file cop, but by Assistant Chief Ariel Melendez, as in the assistant chief of the New Haven Police Department. According to the New Haven Independent, when Luna got his phone back, the arrest video had been deleted. His phone did, however, include the photo at right, which looks to be an image mistakenly captured while the cops were fiddling with Luna’s phone.

After nightclub incidents made headlines, New Haven Police Chief Frank Limon assured the local media that he told his officers, “Assume you’re being videotaped all the time when you’re out there.” And here’s what New Haven Mayor John DeStefano said on October 4 in response to the nightclub raid:

This is America. Anyone can film anytime they want, including you, me and the PD while on duty. It is not my understanding that this is why the QU student was arrested.

Perhaps not. But it is why Luis Luna was arrested. And on October 8, four days after DeStefano unequivocally affirmed the legality of recording on-duty cops, Luna appeared in court to answer the charge. Here’s what happened next:

“I approached the prosecutor and he said they would drop my charges and that I would have to pay a fine for creating a public disturbance,” Luna said. Luna said he thought to himself that he shouldn’t have to pay anything, that he hadn’t done anything wrong. But the prosecutor told him he probably wouldn’t qualify for a public defender, Luna said. He said when he asked where he might find a lawyer, he was referred to the yellow pages.

Without the time or money to fight the case, Luna decided to agree to the deal. He was charged with the lesser crime of creating a public disturbance.

When the judge asked if he was guilty, he said no, Luna recalled. “The judge explained I have to plead guilty,” he said. “At that moment when I said I’m guilty, I felt like I was going against myself.”

If, according to DeStefano, “[a]nyone can film anytime they want, including you, me and the PD while on duty,” why was Luna arrested, charged, and convicted for doing precisely that?

If the law in New Haven is as clear as DeStefano makes it out to be, not only should Luna have never been arrested, but in ordering the arrest, Assistant Chief Melendez clearly violated Luna’s civil rights—and he, of all people, should have known as much. New Haven State’s Attorney Michael Dearington (or whatever subordinate handled the case) also should have known that carrying out the prosecution of Luna was also a violation of Luna’s rights. Finally, the cop or cops who deleted the video on Luna’s phone destroyed evidence, of both the arrest Luna was filming and of the illegal arrest of Luis Luna himself.

So who will be punished? Will the cops who deleted the video face criminal charges, as any citizen who destroys evidence of unlawful activity likely would? Will they be charged for destroying Melendez’s property? Will Melendez be disciplined for ordering an arrest that was, very clearly, a violation of New Haven law and Luis Luna’s civil rights?

Here’s the thing: It’s all well and good for Mayor DeStefano to state that it is perfectly legal for citizens to record on-duty cops in New Haven. But if New Haven police are permitted to arrest and jail—and if prosecutors are permitted to charge and convict—citizens for doing precisely that, it pretty clearly isn’t legal, by any definition of the word.

It’s also about damned time that cops who delete citizen-shot video that may incriminate them or their colleagues get the same punishment a citizen would get for doing the same thing. They can’t play dumb with the “Gosh, if the videos aren’t there, you must have never taken them” excuse this time. The police report clearly states that Luna was arrested for “taking pictures” and “filming”. The bumbling cops then inadvertently provided photo evidence of their tampering with Luna’s phone. Luna should take the phone in to see if the videos can be recovered, and if it can be discerned when they were deleted.

As it stands, the only person to suffer any consequences in Luna’s case is Luna, the one party who, according to the mayor and chief of police, didn’t do anything wrong.

The attitude shown by this Republican should shock the conscience, but I’m beginning to believe that organ is absent in modern Republicans. Steve Benen:

It’s perfectly reasonable for Andy Harris, like all Americans, to want health care coverage. He’s a husband and father of five, and I’m sure he worries about his family losing their health insurance, just like everyone else.

The difference, in this case, is that Andy Harris is a newly-elected far-right congressman from Maryland. Yesterday, at an orientation session, he and his colleagues were told that their health coverage would take effect on Feb. 1, and Harris, an anesthesiologist who railed against the Affordable Care Act to get elected, suggested that’s not soon enough.

He wants his government-subsidized health care — and he wants it now.

"He stood up and asked the two ladies who were answering questions why it had to take so long, what he would do without 28 days of health care," said a congressional staffer who saw the exchange. [...]

"Harris then asked if he could purchase insurance from the government to cover the gap," added the aide, who was struck by the similarity to Harris’s request and the public option he denounced as a gateway to socialized medicine.

Harris, a Maryland state senator who works at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and several hospitals on the Eastern Shore, also told the audience, "This is the only employer I’ve ever worked for where you don’t get coverage the first day you are employed," his spokeswoman Anna Nix told POLITICO.

Harris spent months condemning the idea of Americans being entitled to taxpayer-subsidized health care coverage. Now that the election’s over, Harris suddenly feels entitled to taxpayer-subsidized health care coverage — and wants it immediately. (For the record, Harris and his family will probably rely on COBRA to stay insured until his coverage kicks in. COBRA, of course, is another government program that the right opposed.)

That Harris apparently sought a public option for him and his family just makes the whole story that much more hilarious.

Just to clarify, I don’t actually blame the far-right congressman-elect. He wants coverage for him and his family, and doesn’t want to have to worry about a 28-day gap in which he, his wife, and his kids would have no protections if they get sick.

I do, however, blame the far-right congressman-elect for failing to realize that millions of American families want the same peace of mind he’s seeking.

Harris wants to know "what he would do without 28 days of health care"? I don’t know, Andy, what have tens of millions of Americans, including millions of children, done without access to quality health care for years? Why are you entitled to government-subsidized health care, but they’re not? What will those families do after you repeal the Affordable Care Act? Wait for tort reform to magically cover everyone?

What an embarrassment.

This is the sort of person for whom "contempt" was invented.

Steve Benen:

It’s never been easier for Americans to keep up on current events and public affairs, but the persistent propensity for large swaths of the electorate to believe demonstrable falsehoods remains astounding.

I’m well aware of the structural problems that generated Republican gains in the midterms — high unemployment means huge losses for the incumbent majority. But I’m also inclined to believe that our stunted discourse contributes to an environment in which facts are swiftly rejected.

Much, if not most, of the country believes President Obama raised taxes. And that he signed TARP into law. And that TARP money isn’t being repaid. And that the economy contracted in 2010. And that the stimulus was wasteful and counter-productive. And that this current Congress did less than most. And that the Affordable Care Act constitutes "socialized medicine" and a "government takeover." And let’s not even get started on the president’s birthplace.

In a historical sense, it’s not at all unusual for propagandists and provocateurs to spread lies, but we live in an era in which it’s almost effortless for ignorance to spread like a cancer — leading more people to believe more nonsense, faster and easier.

Andrew Sullivan had an item on this last week that bears repeating.

It seems to me that the last year or so in America’s political culture has represented the triumph of untruth. And the untruth was propagated by a deliberate, simple and systemic campaign to kill Obama’s presidency in its crib. Emergency measures in a near-unprecedented economic collapse – the bank bailout, the auto-bailout, the stimulus – were described by the right as ideological moves of choice, when they were, in fact, pragmatic moves of necessity. The increasingly effective isolation of Iran’s regime – and destruction of its legitimacy from within – was portrayed as a function of Obama’s weakness, rather than his strength. The health insurance reform — almost identical to Romney’s, to the right of the Clintons in 1993, costed to reduce the deficit, without a public option, and with millions more customers for the insurance and drug companies — was turned into a socialist government take-over.

Every one of these moves could be criticized in many ways. What cannot be done honestly, in my view, is to create a narrative from all of them to describe Obama as an anti-American hyper-leftist, spending the US into oblivion. But since this seems to be the only shred of thinking left on the right (exacerbated by the justified flight of the educated classes from a party that is now openly contemptuous of learning), it became a familiar refrain — pummeled into our heads day and night by talk radio and Fox. If you think I’m exaggerating, try the following thought experiment.

If a black Republican president had come in, helped turn around the banking and auto industries (at a small profit!), insured millions through the private sector while cutting Medicare, overseen a sharp decline in illegal immigration, ramped up the war in Afghanistan, reinstituted pay-as-you go in the Congress, set up a debt commission to offer hard choices for future debt reduction, and seen private sector job growth outstrip the public sector’s in a slow but dogged recovery, somehow I don’t think that Republican would be regarded as a socialist.

This is the era of the Big Lie, in other words, and it translates into a lot of little lies — "death panels," "out-of-control" spending, "apologies for America" etc. — designed to concoct a false narrative so simple and so familiar it actually succeeded in getting into people’s minds in the midst of a brutal recession.

As we talked about a couple of weeks ago, this dynamic encourages more of what we’ve seen of late — when dishonesty is rewarded, we’ll hear more lies, not fewer.

The post-truth era can be disheartening.

Steve Benen:

Compare and contrast.

Mitch McConnell, Senate Republican leader, two weeks ago:

"[O]ur top political priority over the next two years should be to deny President Obama a second term in office."

Harry Reid, Senate Democratic leader, two hours ago:

"Despite the changes, our charge remains the same. Our number-one priority is still getting people back to work. And the most important change we can make is in working more productively as a unified body to help our economy regain its strength."

One of these two leaders has the right priorities. Can you tell which one?

Kevin Drum:

Ryan Avent wonders why the deficit has become such a big deal suddenly. Maybe it’s because the bond market is panicking? Nope. The bond market is quite calm at the moment. Then maybe it’s because the public is panicking? Apparently not, according to survey data anyway:

It actually looks as though the public doesn’t care about the deficit either, at least relative to the state of the general economy. So why is the deficit such a big issue right now, at least in Washington?

The short answer is that President Obama has given the press a nice news peg in the form of the impending release of a report from his deficit reduction commission. Another question, then, is why the president felt the need to appoint a deficit reduction commission. And the answer there is some combination of “the deficit actually needs to be addressed” and “the president felt there was a political weakness that needed defending”. Why the president felt a weakness on deficits is another, mysterious issue.

I don’t think this is quite right. Leaving aside whether it was a good or bad idea, the deficit commission was a response to deficit hysteria, not the cause of it. And I don’t think it was all that mysterious, either: it was basically a response to an excellent political game played by Republicans. Think about it: if you’re opposed not just to a single initiative from the opposing party, but to every initiative from the opposing party, what’s a handy umbrella for expressing that uniform opposition? Answer: deficit panic. After all, just about everything Democrats propose can be spun as a deficit buster. And it’s pretty easy to to gin up the Republican base with talk of eventual doomsday and devalued currency. The deficit is just a perfect issue for Republicans and they did a great job of getting the maximum mileage out of it.

So you have to give Republicans an attaboy for playing the game well. The question is why Team Obama felt like they had to respond. And here I suspect Ryan is basically right. Obama probably really does believe the long-term deficit needs to be addressed, and he’s pretty famous for listening to his inner technocrat even if it annoys his base and makes for poor politics. And he probably really did believe that the existence of the commission would take some of the air out of the Republican attack. This is a more mysterious, since there was never any chance of that happening. There’s no way that a nonbinding commission was ever going to have the slightest effect on what Republicans knew was a very effective line of attack against Democrats.

But it’s too late now. As Ryan says, it all might have made some sense if Obama could have spun “medium-term deficit reduction as a means to create the fiscal room for more stimulus.” But he never even tried to do that, and the moment when he could have pulled it off is long gone. Too bad. It would have been good politics and good policy.

Source of deficit (from Drum’s post):

And James Fallows also explains the source of the US deficit, something that the GOP can’t seem to grasp:

Chuck Spinney, who spent his career as a budget analyst in the Pentagon — that’s him, on the cover of Time for his defense-reform work in the Reagan era — has an idea about the answer. The green in the chart below shows periods when America’s overall federal debt burden shrank; red, when it grew. Spinney, by the way, is no one’s idea of a standard liberal. He’s more a deficit hawk than anything else, meaning both that he’s hard-line against excess spending and that he’s pro-defense but cheap. He explains the chart he has prepared:

Obama inherited a federal deficit that was spinning out of control (mostly because of decreased tax take and increased expenditures for automatic stabilizers, e.g. unemployment insurance), and pressure is growing to cut Social Security (perhaps the most efficiently run program in government) while placing Defense (one of the most inefficiently run programs) off limits. These political pressures are not new and in fact have been building up for years. So, as a first cut into a complex issue, perhaps it is time for the angry masses to ask which political party put them into the fiscal straight jacket that is setting them up for this horrible choice?

A. Democrats?
B. Moderate Republicans?
C. Right Wing Republicans?

Hint:
Green => Reductions in the burden of Gr. Fed. Debt (as measured by the debt to GDP ratio)
Red => Increases in the burden of Gr. Fed. Debt

To be clear: the middle column is how much overall federal debt grew, or shrank, as a share of gross domestic product during each administration, and the right-hand chart is the average annual rate of growth or reduction during that administration. As Spinney said in a note to me, “The idea of this column is simply to show the average annual change for the period covered in the first column — so you can compare one term administrations to two term administrations in terms of their annual performance.  The first row of the second column says, for example, that the average debt burden ratio declined by 4.7% during each year of the Truman administration.”

When the economy is growing faster than the debt, that administration looks “green.” When it isn’t, red. The chart may give a slightly unfair boost to Harry Truman, whose administration coincided with the end of huge outlays and borrowing for World War II. Otherwise…

I think it is clear that TSA is getting worried about public resistance to their increasingly outrageous demands, and so—to ensure that the public is properly cowed and submissive and willing to accept whatever they dish out—they are going to make an example of the guy who refused to go through the nude-photo machine and also refused to be groped. It’s important to note that they are planning to prosecute him for leaving the security area (the reasons given by the TSA official are laughable), but of course it was the TSA that told him he HAD to leave the security area and in fact had the police escort him out. Robert Hawkins reports at SignOn San Diego:

The Transportation Security Administration has opened an investigation targeting John Tyner, the Oceanside man who left Lindbergh Field under duress on Saturday morning after refusing to undertake a full body scan.

Tyner recorded the half-hour long encounter on his cell phone and later posted it to his personal blog, along with an extensive account of the incident. The blog went viral, attracting hundreds of thousands of readers and thousands of comments.

Michael J. Aguilar, chief of the TSA office in San Diego, called a news conference at the airport Monday afternoon to announce the probe. He said the investigation could lead to prosecution and civil penalties of up to $11,000.

TSA agents had told Tyner on Saturday that he could be fined up to $10,000.

“That’s the old fine,” Aguilar said. “It has been increased.”

Tyner’s stand tapped into an undercurrent of resentment toward the TSA and how security checks are conducted at the nation’s airports. Those commenting about Tyner’s experience at SignOnSanDiego.com told their own stories of personal humiliations and invasive body searches.

TSA chief John Pistole was grilled about Tyner’s case Monday on CNN.

“The bottom line is, if somebody doesn’t go through proper security screening, they’re not going to go on the flight,” Pistole said.

Other news websites, from gri.pe to Yahoo! News to Drudge Report, have consumed Tyner’s tale and recirculated it to millions of readers. On Monday, Tyner spent the entire day fielding interviews from television, radio and news agencies.

Tyner, 31, was on his way to South Dakota on Saturday to go pheasant hunting. He was chosen for a full-body scan and opted out because he thought it was invasive. He was then informed that he would be subjected to a body search. He told the TSA agent, “"You touch my junk and I’m going to have you arrested.”

Tyner likened the proposed search procedure to a “sexual assault.”

When he tried to assert his rights, Tyner was told by a TSA supervisor on tape, “By buying your ticket you gave up a lot of rights.”

Aguilar says that Tyner was facing nothing more than the traditional pat-down that TSA has used for some time, and not a more aggressive body search in effect since late October.

In the end, security escorted Tyner out of the airport, after American Airlines refunded his ticket…

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Under Lyndon Johnson we briefly had this problem under control, but much damage has been done. Tony Pugh reports for McClatchy:

U.S. agriculture officials said Monday that the nation’s 15 federal nutrition programs helped keep hunger in check in 2009 even as the number of unemployed Americans soared.

After a record one-year increase from 2007 to 2008, the number of U.S. households facing food shortages increased only slightly last year to roughly 17.4 million, according to a new report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture

The share of households with members who went hungry or cut their food intake because of money also held steady in 2009, albeit at the highest levels since the data were first collected in 1995.

That stabilization in the growth of "food insecurity" was the silver lining in the otherwise-bleak report, "Household Food Security in the United States, 2009."

The annual survey found that 85.3 percent of U.S. households had enough food for all their members in 2009, about the same share as in 2008.

But more than 50 million Americans — or 16.6 percent — had problems getting adequate nutrition last year. The rates varied widely across states depending on economic conditions.

Arkansas had the highest percentage of food-insecure households, at 17.7 percent. Texas was next, at 17.4 percent, followed by Mississippi, at 17.1 percent. North Dakota had the lowest rate, 6.7 percent, followed by New Hampshire, at nearly 9 percent, and Virginia, at 9.2 percent.

Of the 50 million food-insecure people, 32.5 million lacked money or resources for meals at some point last year, but few of them reported reduced food intake overall.

But the other 17.7 million food-insecure individuals reported multiple instances of inadequate nutrition and disrupted eating patterns because they couldn’t afford meals. These people with "very low food security" were up from 17.3 million in 2008. They account for about 6 percent of all Americans…

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Of course, the US government, controlled as it is by large corporations, is loath to bar bisphenol-A from the plastics that contain our food. Janet Raloff reports in Science News:

Bisphenol A does a real number on the genes responsible for successful reproduction in a 1-millimeter-long soil-dwelling roundworm. And that suggests that this chemical — a building block of certain plastics and of coatings on thermal receipt papers — might pose a similar reproductive risk to people. Indeed, geneticists are finding that this tiny critter can be a remarkably useful “lab rat” — predicting impacts in mammals, including us.

Roughly a third of the genes in this worm — Caenorhabditis elegans—closely resemble those in people, not only chemically but also functionally. And that’s why Patrick Allard and Monica Colaiácovo of Harvard Medical School, in Boston, chose to study reproductive impacts from various classes of pollutants in this animal.

Among them: BPA.

Rodent studies of this pollutant by others “have revealed multiple levels of reproductive impairments,” including problems with cell meiosis, the Harvard scientists note. This type of cell division segregates an organism’s pairs of chromosomes into new sets — ones that will exchange genetic segments before separating so that each can serve as the genetic blueprint in some egg or sperm. Moreover, a 2008 study in Mutation Research by European researchers showed that in the test tube, continuous exposure to BPA while a mouse’s egg was maturing induced meiotic abnormalities.

Prior to meiosis, a cell duplicates each strand of chromosomes within its DNA. The duplicates swap segments of genes and then separate. Studies have suggested that high urinary concentrations of BPA in people may be related to miscarriages and offspring bearing defective chromosome arrangements, Allard and Colaiácovo observe. Those could be caused by impaired chromosome separations or bum swaps of strand segments during meiosis.

The Boston pair now report severe sterility in worms getting heavy doses (1 millimolar BPA exposures); the animals laid only 18 percent as many eggs as unexposed roundworms. Heavily exposed mama worms had acquired about 2 parts per million BPA in their tissues. Some of these worms successfully produced eggs. But not young. In their eggs — and those laid by worms getting only half as much BPA — virtually every embryo died.

Details appear in a paper posted early online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,

Bad breaks
To probe what was going wrong, Colaiácovo’s team used a variety of antibodies to monitor how the copied strands of DNA separate in the process of egg formation. The strands should break cleanly and evenly. When a problem arises, and it often may, repair genes should step in and fix it. RAD-51 is one such gene that plays an integral role in finding and fixing meiotic errors — both in roundworms and in humans. It was elevated in BPA-exposed worms.

This gene’s elevated activity was but one symptom that in these BPA-exposed animals, meiosis had gone awry.

Specifically, “errors in segregation of the chromosomes occurred,” Colaiácovo says. Sometimes part of a copied strand of chromosome remained stuck to the partner from which it was to separate — a problem that can result in an egg ending up with the wrong number of genes.

The Harvard scientists uncovered signs that the problem traced not so much to the initial development of meiotic problems, but instead to the cells’ inability to repair the genetic havoc BPA had wreaked…

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The NY Times has a fascinating article on how animation is helping science explain molecular processes. Read the article and look at this example:

Does anyone have a link to a script that explains what we’re seeing in that animation?

Thanks to TYD for the link.