Brainiac Conspiracy

Question of The Day

If they can do it, why can't we?

Beijing has an ambitious rail development programme aimed at increasing the national network from the current 86,000 kilometres to 120,000 kilometres, making it the most extensive rail system outside the United States.

China unveiled its first high-speed line at the time of the Beijing Olympics in 2008 -- a service linking the capital with the port city of Tianjin.

In September, officials said they planned to build 42 high-speed lines by 2012 in a massive system overhaul as part of efforts to spur economic growth amid the global downturn.

The network uses technology developed in co-operation with foreign firms such as Siemens, Bombardier and Alstom.

Because it would add to the deficit so unless the CBO says it won't, we can't afford it and besides, those companies probably offer employer-based health-insurance coverage that pays for abortion which means we can't do anything about it until some Blue Dog Senator from the Plain or Presidents Snowe and McCain give their assent on a Sunday talk show. And still we continue to shrink.

---Vitelius

Randian Moral Virtue in Theory & Practice

We're only talking about the creation of wealth, after all:

"Monsanto (MON) is my top investment idea for 2010," says Sy Harding, an advisor well-known for his seasonal timing strategies.

In his Street Smart Report, he observes, "Monsanto is the world's leading provider of biotech-advanced seeds and agricultural products for growers; seeds for corn, soybeans, cotton, fruit, and vegetables, which are produced by its genomics division."

Harding continues, "Monsanto experiences high grower demand for such seeds, which are genetically engineered to provide increased crop yields, increased quality, insect and disease resistance, and drought tolerance.

"The company recently introduced two new products, SmartStax for corn, and Round-up Ready-2-Yield soybeans, which are potential drivers for significant growth going forward.

"The company said it expects to plant 8 to 10 million acres of Roundup Ready-2-Yield soybeans in 2010, along with a more than 4 million acre launch of SmartStax seed corn, both significantly higher than earlier projections for the new products.

"The company has also introduced two versions of a lower cost genetic corn seed, VT Double Pro and VT Triple Pro.

"The goal of those products is to let growers test the advantages of farming with genetically engineered seeds without having to move all the way to the higher-priced SmartStax seeds.

Wouldn't you love to see these bastards get put out of business? I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it to happen, but theoretically, there could be a way:

Confidential contracts detailing Monsanto Co.'s business practices reveal how the world's biggest seed developer is squeezing competitors, controlling smaller seed companies and protecting its dominance over the multibillion-dollar market for genetically altered crops, an Associated Press investigation has found.

With Monsanto's patented genes being inserted into roughly 95 percent of all soybeans and 80 percent of all corn grown in the U.S., the company also is using its wide reach to control the ability of new biotech firms to get wide distribution for their products, according to a review of several Monsanto licensing agreements and dozens of interviews with seed industry participants, agriculture and legal experts.

Declining competition in the seed business could lead to price hikes that ripple out to every family's dinner table. That's because the corn flakes you had for breakfast, soda you drank at lunch and beef stew you ate for dinner likely were produced from crops grown with Monsanto's patented genes.

Monsanto's methods are spelled out in a series of confidential commercial licensing agreements obtained by the AP. The contracts, as long as 30 pages, include basic terms for the selling of engineered crops resistant to Monsanto's Roundup herbicide, along with shorter supplementary agreements that address new Monsanto traits or other contract amendments.

The company has used the agreements to spread its technology---giving some 200 smaller companies the right to insert Monsanto's genes in their separate strains of corn and soybean plants. But, the AP found, access to Monsanto's genes comes at a cost, and with plenty of strings attached.

For example, one contract provision bans independent companies from breeding plants that contain both Monsanto's genes and the genes of any of its competitors, unless Monsanto gives prior written permission---giving Monsanto the ability to effectively lock out competitors from inserting their patented traits into the vast share of U.S. crops that already contain Monsanto's genes.

Monsanto's business strategies and licensing agreements are being investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice and at least two state attorneys general, who are trying to determine if the practices violate U.S. antitrust laws.

A civilization that allows a select group of its members to make huge profits out of contaminating its food supply and draining its natural resources---not to mention encouraging others to get in on the gravy train by investing in these practices---is not long for survival. Like, what was the CEO of the Easter Island Timber LLC thinking when one of his employees cut down the last tree standing? What did he tell the shareholders then?

---Vitelius

Your Liberal Media, v2.1 PBS Death Spiral

Words fail:

The George W. Bush Institute -- the "action-oriented think tank" that is part of Bush's Presidential Center -- will co-produce a public television show hosted by its executive director, Ambassador James Glassman, in a rare convergence of public broadcasting and a partisan research organization.

"Ideas in Action" will premiere in February and will be co-produced by Andrew Walworth, who produces PBS's "Think Tank." Glassman, the former Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy under President Bush and one-time moderator of CNN's "Capital Gang Sunday," will lead a discussion on public policy issues in front of a live audience at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. He will remain executive director of the Institute.

The show will be distributed by Executive Program Services (EPS) to public television stations nationwide, including many PBS affiliates. Beginning in January, EPS will also begin distributing repeats of "Think Tank," currently distributed by PBS.

PBS must die. Not for the reasons the wingnuts have wished for since the 1970s, but if they air a single minute of this retrograde shit, it is time at last to pull the plug on federal funding for the CPB for the greater good of the commonweal.

---Vitelius

You Can't Be Too Young or Too Thin

And you can't be too ignorant or too dishonest to get a job at the Fox Business Channel:

Stossel even has his eye on first lady Michelle Obama and her South Lawn garden. "I'd like to know how much fertilizer and pesticide she uses per green bean versus the big factory farms to see who's more organic," says Stossel, who adds with sarcasm: "I'm sure she does it all by herself."

Wrong again, Sherlock:

The total cost of seeds, mulch and so forth is $200, said Sam Kass, an assistant White House chef, who prepared healthful meals for the Obama family in Chicago and is an advocate of local food. Mr. Kass will oversee the garden.

The plots will be in raised beds fertilized with White House compost, crab meal from the Chesapeake Bay, lime and green sand. Ladybugs and praying mantises will help control harmful bugs.

None of this, of course, will stop a tool like Stossel from simply making shit up if it fits his storyline. Not that he's ever done anything like this before on the same identical subject.

---Vitelius

Good Thing We Didn't Need That Public Option

When we can expect the private sector to handle our health-insurance needs in a more careful and cost-conscious manner:

Ed Hanway, CEO of Cigna, one of the nation's largest health insurance companies, will step down at the end of this year, in just over a week. When he does, he'll get $73,200,000 as compensation for a job well done.

What makes Hanway worth $73.2 million? Well, for one example, he's presided as Cigna denied a liver transplant to 17-year-old Nataline Sarkisyan, causing her death and widespread outrage.

---Vitelius

The Most Awesome of All Possible Worlds

Remember how the TARP program was supposed to save the financial system so we could all keep borrowing money and buying stuff so we could make our mortgage payments and stay in our homes and hold onto our jobs and keep the economy afloat?

Yeah, me neither.

Well, TARP was a supply-side solution, after all. So this should surprise nobody in particular:

In this comeback year for investors, David Tepper may have scored one of the biggest paydays of all.

Mr. Tepper's hedge-fund firm has racked up about $7 billion of profit so far this year---with Mr. Tepper on track to earn more than $2.5 billion for himself, according to people familiar with the matter. That is among the largest one-year takes in recent years.

Behind the wins: a bet worth billions of dollars that America would avoid a repeat of the Great Depression.

Through February and March, Mr. Tepper scooped up beaten-down bank shares as many investors were running for the exits. Day after day, Mr. Tepper bought Bank of America Corp. shares, then trading below $3, and Citigroup Inc. preferred shares, when that stock was under $1. One of his investors insisted more carnage loomed. Friends who shared his bullish beliefs were wary of aping his moves amid speculation that the government was about to nationalize the big banks.

"I felt like I was alone," Mr. Tepper recalls. On some days, he says, "no one was even bidding."

The bets paid off. A resurgent market has helped Mr. Tepper's firm, Appaloosa Management, gain about 120% after the firm's fees, through early December. Thanks to those gains, Mr. Tepper, who specializes in the stocks and bonds of troubled companies, manages about $12 billion, a sum that makes Appaloosa one of the largest hedge funds in the world.

What a totally awesome development. So is this:

The New Goldman Sachs World Headquarters---a 43-story office tower next to the World Trade Center site---is being built with the help of millions of dollars from taxpayers, Bloomberg news service reports.

The company that has been the focus of populist anger since the TARP bailout last year took advantage of programs the government set up to revitalize lower Manhattan after the 9/11 attacks. Setting up shop next to the WTC qualified Goldman Sachs for $49 million in "job-grant funds, tax exemptions and energy discounts," Bloomberg's Christine Harper reported.

Additionally, because then-Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson raised concerns about security at the site, the city and state threw gave the construction project an additional $66 million in benefits. And the investment bank was also allowed to sell tax-free some $1.6 billion of Liberty Bonds---bonds created to fund the effort to rebuild lower Manhattan. That allowed Goldman Sachs to avoid taking out a commercial loan for that amount of money, saving it an additional $175 million over 30 years, according to the Bloomberg report.

The New York Daily News reported earlier this month that the city of New York forgave Goldman Sachs about $161 million in lease payments the company would have had to make on the land where the new 43-story office tower sits. Under the agreement between the city and the company, Goldman doesn't have to pay the lease if Ground Zero remains empty.

Meanwhile, out in the hinterlands, where the banks are leveraged with overvalued loans that people can't afford to pay back:

Troubled home loans continued to mount in the nation's banks in the third quarter as even once-solid borrowers increasingly fell behind on their mortgage payments.

For the first quarter ever, the number of homes in foreclosure with mortgages serviced by U.S. national banks and savings and loans topped the 1-million mark, according to figures released Monday by the Office of Thrift Supervision and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

The percentage of prime borrowers whose loans were 60 or more days past due doubled from the July-to-September period a year earlier. And more than half of all homeowners whose payments had been lowered through modification plans defaulted again.

The report, which covers about 34 million loans, or about 65% of all U.S. mortgages, underscores the obstacles to strengthening the nation's rickety housing market. Stubborn unemployment is making it tough for millions of homeowners to pay their debts. In addition, many people whose monthly installments have been lowered still are unable to keep up with their payments.

Of the mortgages serviced by national banks and thrifts, only 87.2% were current and performing. It was the sixth straight quarter that the quality of those home loan portfolios had slipped.

Enter the government, Lender of Last Resort®, to ride to the rescue:

Treasury Department officials said last week that the number of homeowners who had received permanent reductions in their mortgage payments as part of an administration foreclosure prevention program was low. Data released today showed how low---just 31,382 of 759,058 mortgage modifications under the program have been made permanent as of the end of November.

Bank of America led mortgage servicers with 158,562 trial modifications, but only 98 of those have been made permanent. And another major servicer, CitiMortgage Inc., has converted just 271 of its 103,478 trial modifications into permanent ones. GMAC Mortgage Inc. had the most permanent modifications, 7,111 out of a total of 28,275.

Sometimes I think the current debate over healthcare reform has become a kind of convenient sideshow to distract everyone from what has been our government's single-most glaring collective failure of leadership for the past 12 months. TARP has worked wonders for the Goldman Boys, and for guys like David Tepper, and for virtually nobody else in America. The number of monthly foreclosures is still brutal, the number of monthly jobless claims is still brutal, the state of the economy is still brutal, and this recession ain't over by a longshot, no matter what Larry Summers says. When jobs are scarce, voters are pissed, and incumbents from either party are vulnerable. And when more Democrats are incumbents than Republicans, it's the Dems who get to feel the greater wrath of the electorate some 11 months hence. And the healthcare bill, be it a worthy compromise or a corporate sell-out, will be all but forgotten next fall if jobs are still scarce and voters still pissed.

On the topic du jour, someone should remind our elected officials that healthcare costs are a leading cause of home foreclosures and personal bankruptcies in this country, and because of that, it might have been a nice gesture if someone had thought to write some provisions in the Senate healthcare reform bill to, oh, maybe provide some temporary vouchers, or tax credits, or rebates to help cover short-term healthcare costs for people who've lost---and are still losing---their jobs and/or their homes in this recession. Too bad nobody seems to have thought about that. Maybe the next Democratic administration will get around to it, sometime in 2025.

Update: Looks like at least one Senator has thought about it, or something very much like it. Let's hope somebody else on The Hill listens to him.

---Vitelius

Why We Blundered Into Iraqistan (and Everywhere Else Too, For That Matter)

These are the people we entrusted with our security for seven long years after September 11:

The weeks before Christmas brought no hint of terror. But by the afternoon of December 21, 2003, police stood guard in heavy assault gear on the streets of Manhattan. Fighter jets patrolled the skies. When a gift box was left on Fifth Avenue, it was labeled a suspicious package and 5,000 people in the Metropolitan Museum of Art were herded into the cold.

It was Code Orange. Americans first heard of it at a Sunday press conference in Washington, D.C. Weekend assignment editors sent their crews up Nebraska Avenue to the new Homeland Security offices, where DHS secretary Tom Ridge announced the terror alert. “There’s continued discussion,” he told reporters, “these are from credible sources—about near-term attacks that could either rival or exceed what we experienced on September 11.” The New York Times reported that intelligence sources warned “about some unspecified but spectacular attack.”

The financial markets trembled. By Tuesday the panic had ratcheted up as the Associated Press reported threats to “power plants, dams and even oil facilities in Alaska.” The feds forced the cancellation of dozens of French, British and Mexican commercial “flights of interest” and pushed foreign governments to put armed air marshals on certain flights. Air France flight 68 was canceled, as was Air France flight 70. By Christmas the headline in the Los Angeles Times was "Six Flights Canceled as Signs of Terror Plot Point to L.A." Journalists speculated over the basis for these terror alerts. “Credible sources,” Ridge said. “Intelligence chatter,” said CNN.

But there were no real intercepts, no new informants, no increase in chatter. And the suspicious package turned out to contain a stuffed snowman. This was, instead, the beginning of a bizarre scam. Behind that terror alert, and a string of contracts and intrigue that continues to this date, there is one unlikely character.

The man’s name is Dennis Montgomery, a self-proclaimed scientist who said he could predict terrorist attacks. Operating with a small software development company, he apparently convinced the Bush White House, the CIA, the Air Force and other agencies that Al Jazeera—the Qatari-owned TV network—was unwittingly transmitting target data to Al Qaeda sleepers.

And yes, it was all bullshit. Read the whole thing, because it tells you what happens when you turn over the control of government to a bunch of myopic and racist ideologues who know that they have a monopoly on the truth about everything---and if they don't, i.e., if the exigencies of "real" reality conflict with their own preconceptions, they will concoct a "new reality" on the fly (borrowing from Ron Suskind) to confirm the truthiness and righteousness of their rank and shallow prejudices. How many fluffer essays in our mainstream media got written about Tom Ridge back then? Anybody got a link?

But wait! Obama Epic Fail!

---Vitelius

Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics Also Too

A more richly deserved award could not have been conceived:

Of all the falsehoods and distortions in the political discourse this year, one stood out from the rest.

"Death panels."

The claim set political debate afire when it was made in August, raising issues from the role of government in health care to the bounds of acceptable political discussion. In a nod to the way technology has transformed politics, the statement wasn't made in an interview or a television ad. Sarah Palin posted it on her Facebook page.

Her assertion — that the government would set up boards to determine whether seniors and the disabled were worthy of care — spread through newscasts, talk shows, blogs and town hall meetings. Opponents of health care legislation said it revealed the real goals of the Democratic proposals. Advocates for health reform said it showed the depths to which their opponents would sink. Still others scratched their heads and said, "Death panels? Really?"

The editors of PolitiFact.com, the fact-checking Web site of the St. Petersburg Times, have chosen it as our inaugural "Lie of the Year."

Meanwhile, UR librul media sez 2 U 2day:

In a late night posting on her Twitter feed, Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin continued to blast climate change believers Friday, calling the talks in Copenhagen, Denmark a representation of man's "arrogance," for believing people have an impact on nature.

"Arrogant&Naive2say man overpwers nature," Palin tweeted.

"Earth saw clmate chnge4 ions;will cont 2 c chnges.R duty2responsbly devlop resorces4humankind/not pollute&destroy;but cant alter naturl chng," the former Republican vice presidential nominee wrote.

Do we really need any more evidence to establish conclusively that our mainstream political discourse is irrevocably degraded and debased?

---Vitelius

Do You Or Don't You?

There sure has ben a lot of finger-pointing among Progressives on the Interwebs this week, primarily over the questions of whether or not the Senate healthcare reform bill is worth torpedoing and whether Rahm Emmanuel is a backstabbing traitor and whether Howard Dean should shut the fuck up and whether Joe Lieberman should burn in hell for all eternity. Which then has led to the follow-up question as to whether or not we on the Left have fundamentally misread Obama the politician and the policy-maker from the get-go.

In that vein, Doug J at Balloon Juice reasonably asks:

Did you all think you were voting for a transformational change agent when you voted for Obama last November? I didn’t. I thought I was voting for a pragmatist, who would (hopefully) bring about positive, gradual change in some areas--—bring in a sane economic policy, do something about health care (he’s been more ambitious than I thought he would be on this), end the excesses of Bush foreign policy (even as he continues some Bush policies I don’t agree with).

Is that more or less what you thought?

Did I think Obama was a transformational change agent? I think the real question is, how could anyone not? We are, after all, talking about a liberal. And a Democrat. And a black guy. Named Hussein, for Chrissakes, winning an election in post-Reagan America.

Americans, historically, have tended to be somewhat conservative in their choice of political leaders. By that I mean "incremental," preferring to elect political leaders who won't upset any apple carts and who will make only gradual, not wholesale, changes to the policies enacted by their immediate predecessors---more or less what Doug J says he expected from Obama. Every 20 to 30 years, however, the electorate will choose a candidate who promises, either by philosophy or temperament, to make a clear break from the immediate past and bring a new philosophy of governance to Washington. While the demographic and political trends that gradually tip the scales in favor of that particular candidate may be many years in the making, the candidate's ascension to the pinnacle of power simply cannot be seen as anything other than the beginning of a political sea change, both in terms of philosophy and policy. It was certainly that way the last time it happened, in 1980. It can be argued that it happened in 1960, and it certainly was the case in 1932, and in 1904, and in 1884, and in 1860, and in 1828. Take a look at the intervals between those numbers, and a chronological pattern begins to emerge, doesn't it?

Flash forward to 2008, when a young man who was a relative unknown only four years earlier astonishes the world by winning the Presidency. His liberal political views, and his insistence on treating the electorate as adults, are as sharp a contrast to his predecessor's as any that we have ever seen in our lifetimes. He campaigns on a platform which includes a pledge for universal health care for all Americans, and dares to touch the Third Rail of post-Proposition 13 politics by (a) proclaiming unabashedly that the Reaganomic models of low taxes and deregulation that have governed economic policy for more than a generation are fundamentally flawed and must be replaced, and furthermore, by (b) calling for a tax increase on the wealthy.

So, to recap: He's black, in a nation that has never elected a black President and which has been defined in many ways by three centuries of institutional racism in its history. He's a liberal running in an era that has been dominated and defined by conservative politics and politicians for over 20 years. He even has an odd and exotic background, and an Arabic name, in a nation that is currently engaged in two wars against various Islamic movements and which has grown increasingly resentful of immigrants in poor economic times.

And yet he won anyway. By nine million votes. The biggest margin of victory in a Presidential race since . . . our last transformational election, in 1980.

So yeah, I did envision Obama as a transformational agent of change, not a moderate incrementalist, and I don't see how anyone would think that such a perception was in any way flawed or misguided. To me, his ascension to power was just as dramatic, and just as unlikely in the face of conventional wisdom, as those of an elderly B-movie actor or a paraplegic governor. To be fair, Obama has faced challenges, and in particular a rabid and insane opposition party, that have been unprecedented in American history---at least, since the Civil War. But I really don't think that an attempt to re-cast him now as some conciliatory moderate gently pulling the nation back towards the political center, rather than as a liberal crusader tugging it sharply to the left, rings particularly true, either as contemporary narrative or as part of an evolving historical saga. That may be Obama's political fate, but if it is, I do believe it will be largely of his own making (acknowledging his pragmatic temperament), and an historic opportunity to radically change the course of America's political discourse will have been squandered in the name of a chimerical post-partisanship. That's what's frustrated me the most over the healthcare debate---not so much the actual knee-jerk willingness to compromise with vain little men like Nelson and Lieberman, who will be mere footnotes in the history books a century from now, but the failure to see these workaday compromises and concessions in the greater historical perspective, and how they will dictate, and ultimately short-change, the political future of the Republic, 20 to 30 years hence. That is, unless we are simply not to be allowed the privilege of Roosevelt/LBJ-style Social Democratic government anymore, and we are destined henceforth to be forever governed by a revolving cartel of corporatists who can only be truly distinguished between each other by their positions on guns, Jesus, unborn babies and homo marriage. If that's the case, then our elections, and our citizens, no longer have the power to influence the course of our shared history, and we'll have officially entered the Decline of the American Empire.

Update: Writing at HuffPo today, Jane Hamsher nails it:

With unemployment at 10%, the idea that you can pass a bill whose only merit is that "liberals hate it" just because the media will eat it up and print your talking points in the process is so cynical and short-sighted it's hard to comprehend anyone would pursue it. It reflects a total insensitivity to the rage that is brewing on the popular front, which is manifest in every single poll out there.

Yet time and again, we're told "Obama retains his popularity with liberals" and that "screeching liberal bloggers" aren't having an impact. Nobody seems to notice that the "screeching liberal bloggers" are reflecting the very same sentiments of the vast majority of the country, whether the very small segment of the population who self-identify as "extremely liberal" holds the President responsible or no.

---Vitelius

They Forgot to Mention Hillarycare, Too

Thought healthcare reform was the topic du jour? Afghanistan? The Copenhagen conference? Silly liberal, wrong again.

Because somewhere, somehow, in some way, it's always Bad News for Democrats™.

---Vitelius

But At Least I Know I'm Free

Lee Greenwood, bitches!

The 35-year-old federal law regulating tap water is so out of date that the water Americans drink can pose what scientists say are serious health risks — and still be legal.

Only 91 contaminants are regulated by the Safe Drinking Water Act, yet more than 60,000 chemicals are used within the United States, according to Environmental Protection Agency estimates. Government and independent scientists have scrutinized thousands of those chemicals in recent decades, and identified hundreds associated with a risk of cancer and other diseases at small concentrations in drinking water, according to an analysis of government records by The New York Times.

But not one chemical has been added to the list of those regulated by the Safe Drinking Water Act since 2000.

Other recent studies have found that even some chemicals regulated by that law pose risks at much smaller concentrations than previously known. However, many of the act’s standards for those chemicals have not been updated since the 1980s, and some remain essentially unchanged since the law was passed in 1974.

All told, more than 62 million Americans have been exposed since 2004 to drinking water that did not meet at least one commonly used government health guideline intended to help protect people from cancer or serious disease, according to an analysis by The Times of more than 19 million drinking-water test results from the District of Columbia and the 45 states that made data available.

Groundwater reclamation, sewage treatment, outdated water mains . . . Just in Los Angeles alone, there must be at least a couple of hundred water-related projects like these waiting to get underway but languishing for lack of funds. It would be, like, totally awesome if somebody in Washington thought about, you know, throwing some money our way---call it a "stimulus" package if you like---so we could hire people and put them to work digging trenches and laying pipe and all the other unglamorous but necessary jobs you need to fill to keep a modern city's infrastructure from deteriorating over time. Why it is so difficult to get programs like this through Congress, I have no idea. Maybe we're better off larding out federal subsidies to health-insurance companies through mandated coverage instead of helping public utilities produce healthy drinking water so people don't get sick in the first place, or something like that. That would be the Randian ideal, now, wouldn't it.

---Vitelius

Your Tax Dollars at Work

Because stuff like single-payer healthcare and new federal jobs programs would be, like, way too expensive:

The federal government quietly agreed to forgo billions of dollars in potential tax payments from Citigroup as part of the deal announced this week to wean the company from the massive taxpayer bailout that helped it survive the financial crisis.

The Internal Revenue Service on Friday issued an exception to long-standing tax rules for the benefit of Citigroup and a few other companies partially owned by the government. As a result, Citigroup will be allowed to retain billions of dollars worth of tax breaks that otherwise would decline in value when the government sells its stake to private investors.

While the Obama administration has said taxpayers are likely to profit from the sale of the Citigroup shares, accounting experts said the lost tax revenue could easily outstrip those profits.

And thus is the great global money-laundering operation financial order preserved. Meyerson:

The stocks bubble of the late 1990s was succeeded by a bubble in housing; these were the engines of our economic growth. America's production of goods no longer received the level of investment that had made it the engine of our economic growth from the mid-19th century through the 1970s. The change began at the outset of the Reagan years, when the percentage of corporate profits retained for new investment dropped sharply. A report from the International Labor Organization published last week shows where the money went: to shareholder dividends, disproportionately benefiting the wealthy. In the prosperity years of 1946 to 1979, dividends constituted 23 percent of profits. From 1980 to 2008, they constituted 46 percent.

Meanwhile:

About $2 trillion in credit derivatives in 1989 jumped to $8 trillion in 1994 and skyrocketed to $100 trillion in 2002. Last year, the Bank for International Settlements, a consortium of the world's central banks based in Basel (the Fed chair, Ben Bernanke, sits on its board), reported the gross value of these commitments at $596 trillion. Some are due, and some will mature soon. Typically, they involve contracts of five years or less.

Credit derivatives are breaking and will continue to break the world's financial system and cause an unending crisis of liquidity and gummed-up credit. Warren Buffett branded derivatives the "financial weapons of mass destruction." Felix Rohatyn, the investment banker who organized the bailout of New York a generation ago, called them "financial hydrogen bombs."

Both are right. At almost $600 trillion, over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives dwarf the value of publicly traded equities on world exchanges, which totaled $62.5 trillion in the fall of 2007 and fell to $36.6 trillion a year later.

Ben Bernanke: Man of The Year. Couldn't have happened to a better guy. Too bad the rest of us will be paying for the next 30 years, with our jobs, our homes, our savings and our credit ratings, to prop up the rotten financial system he's worked so hard to preserve.

---Vitelius

Blowing Off The Base

Sometimes, you really have to wonder who these people are working for:

Rahm Emanuel visited Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in his Capitol office on Sunday evening and personally urged him to cut a deal with recalcitrant Sen. Joe Lieberman, two Democratic sources familiar with the situation told the Huffington Post.

Emanuel, President Obama's chief of staff, has long been identified as leading a faction of White House advisers who have been pushing the Senate simply to pass any health care bill, no matter how weak.

His direct message to Reid (D-Nev.), according to a source close to the negotiations: "Get it done. Just get it done."

Of course, "get it done" could also mean "Fuck the filibuster, you're taking the bill to budget reconciliation and you're stripping Joe of his seniority faster than Tiger can strip a cocktail waitress," but we'd be living in a world where our elected officials actually do what the voters sent them to Washington to do.

Wise Steve Benen points out the folly inherent to this approach:

But what's to stop Lieberman from making new demands if the White House and Senate leaders give him what he wants now? It's not like he's negotiating in good faith, and it's not like Lieberman's word has value. The White House wants Reid to cut the deal, assuming that it would end the standoff. But what if Lieberman discovers new concerns and takes the bill hostage all over again?

Exactly. When you reward narcissistic assholism, you cannot reasonably expect anything else in the future from a narcissistic asshole but greater and more frequent episodes of narcissist-asshole behavior. You might as well buy a carton of Kools for your favorite smoker on the promise that he'll quit smoking tomorrow.

You also might as well give you most ardent supporters a hearty one-finger salute while asking them to come back next year for more abuse:

A new national poll finds that fully one third of Democratic voters say that they’re "less likely" to vote in 2010 if Congress doesn’t pass a public option, underscoring the possibility that dropping the provision seriously risks dampening the Dem base’s enthusiasm.

When will the Democratic Party ever learn how to actually fucking govern?

---Vitelius

Democracy as a Blunt Instrument

This looks promising:

Supporters of an initiative that would legalize marijuana in California say they have collected enough signatures to ensure that it will be on the November 2010 ballot.

The petition drive, which was run by a professional signature-gathering firm, collected more than 680,000 signatures, 57% more than the 433,971 valid signatures needed to put it on the ballot, said Richard Lee, the measure's main proponent.

"It was so easy to get them," Lee said. "People were so eager to sign."

The initiative would also allow cities and counties to adopt their own laws to allow marijuana to be grown and sold, and the localities could impose taxes on any aspect of marijuana production and sales. It would make it legal for adults over 21 years old to possess up to an ounce of marijuana and to grow it in a 25-square-foot area for personal use.

Of course, legalization initiatives have been floated in our state before, and they have all failed up to now, but I think this one's got a real shot of passage this time. Now that cities such as West Hollywood have provided a workable model for the safe and sane distribution of pharmaceutical grass, it makes it that much harder for opponents to claim that greater legalization will ensnare unwitting schoolchildren, create a nation of future heroin addicts, and further rend asunder the existing social order. Also, the state's such a fiscal basket case now that any---and I mean any---ballot initiative that promises to raise revenues without imposing additional taxes on the populace at large is bound to be welcome by a fair chunk of the electorate. There's also the matter of prison overpopulation---and the insane amount of money we spend to incarcerate people these days---which everyone agrees has gotten completely out of control, and any law that's likely to keep nonviolent offenders who would otherwise end up in jail to remain free will find a receptive audience in California these days. Finally, I think the voting demographic, and the mood of the voters overall, has changed dramatically in the forty-some years since the War on Drugs® was first formulated. Marijuana simply doesn't scare many people anymore, if it ever really did. That doesn't mean that this initiative will pass for sure next year, but I'd lay odds of at least 50-50 on it right now. And that makes for a helluva good chance for passage right there. We'll find out soon enough.

---Vitelius

Winning Women Voters, One Bitch-Slap at a Time

Republicans really do the darnedest things sometimes.

The widely played video clip of U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer reprimanding a general for calling her "ma'am" is the gift that keeps on giving for the two Republicans hoping to challenge her next year.

Republicans Carly Fiorina and Chuck DeVore are trying to capitalize on the exchange by making it a key ingredient of their fundraising efforts and attempts to recruit grassroots support. Both campaigns say the video revs up a GOP base that already has long-standing animosity toward Boxer, among the most liberal members of the Senate.

Whether it will have currency beyond next June's Republican primary, when the winner will have to appeal to a much larger and more diverse audience, is an open question.

During a hearing last June, Boxer interrupted Brig. Gen. Michael Walsh of the Army Corps of Engineers in mid-sentence: "Do me a favor?" she said. "Could you say 'senator' instead of 'ma'am?' It's just a thing. I worked so hard to get that title, so I'd appreciate it. Yes, thank you."

Boxer said the general was not offended by her remarks, but many in the GOP clearly were, including the two Republican challengers.

Horseshit. These people aren’t offended. They’re simply trying to portray Barbara Boxer as an arrogant bitch who hates men doesn’t understand her place disrespects our military. That’s how these people roll.

Still, I think this is a political master stroke by the GOP, and can't encourage them enough to keep it coming.

Barbara O'Connor, professor of communications at Sacramento State University, said the use of Boxer's comments from the hearing will no doubt fire up the GOP base during the primary campaign but probably will not hurt the third-term senator in the general election. Jobs, health care and other bread-and-butter issues are expected to take precedence.

"It's not the kind of thing that plays well in California," O'Connor said, referring to the type of criticism Fiorina and DeVore are leveling at the Boxer video. "I think the economy is the sole issue that people are thinking about."

Registered Republicans represent less than a third of California's electorate. Women, who vote in greater numbers than men in California, may well see Boxer's statement as a demand for equal treatment.

"I think many California women resonate to the request to acknowledge their accomplishments," O'Connor said. "How you address someone is often a window to how much credibility you feel they have."

Like I said, keep the hits coming, guys. You're the best friend a Democratic Party in disarray can have.

---Vitelius

Watch What We Say, Not What . . . Whatever

This is rich:

"I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street," Obama said Friday in excerpts of an interview with CBS television to be aired on Sunday.

Then why are there so fucking many of them running the goddamned Treasury Department?

I don't have any additional comments about Matt Taibbi's essay other than to say, it's definitely worth the read. While it thoroughly documents all the conflicts of interest and suspect allegiances on Obama's finance team, the real takeaway is found about midway through the article. It is as good a one-paragraph description of our political system as any other I have ever read. Ever.

The significance of all of these appointments isn't that the Wall Street types are now in a position to provide direct favors to their former employers. It's that, with one or two exceptions, they collectively offer a microcosm of what the Democratic Party has come to stand for in the 21st century. Virtually all of the Rubinites brought in to manage the economy under Obama share the same fundamental political philosophy carefully articulated for years by the Hamilton Project: Expand the safety net to protect the poor, but let Wall Street do whatever it wants. "Bob Rubin, these guys, they're classic limousine liberals," says David Sirota, a former Democratic strategist. "These are basically people who have made shitloads of money in the speculative economy, but they want to call themselves good Democrats because they're willing to give a little more to the poor. That's the model for this Democratic Party: Let the rich do their thing, but give a fraction more to everyone else."

---Vitelius

Weekend Wingnut Meltdown Alert

Suck. On. This, bitches!

An effort by Congress to cut off funding to the community organizing group ACORN was unconstitutional, a federal judge ruled Friday, handing the embattled group a legal victory.

U.S. District Judge Nina Gershon issued a preliminary injunction against the government, saying it is in the public's interest for the organization to continue receiving federal funding. Gershon found that ACORN had was "singled out by Congress for punishment" without "any judicial, or even administrative, process adjudicating guilt."

No doubt another liberal activist judge . . .

Gershon was nominated to the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York by President Bill Clinton on October 18, 1995, to a seat vacated by Leonard Wexler. Gershon was confirmed by the Senate on July 30, 1996, and received commission on August 1, 1996.

Damn straight! And hopefully, the Justice Department will let this ruling sink oh-so quietly into the same legal oblivion that the whole phony ACORN crisis richly deserves. Besides, Tiger's retiring!

---Vitelius

Peace Prize, My Ass

Nothing to look at here, folks:

Private security guards from Blackwater Worldwide participated in some of the C.I.A.’s most sensitive activities — clandestine raids with agency officers against people suspected of being insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan and the transporting of detainees, according to former company employees and intelligence officials.

The raids against suspects occurred on an almost nightly basis during the height of the Iraqi insurgency from 2004 to 2006, with Blackwater personnel playing central roles in what company insiders called “snatch and grab” operations, the former employees and current and former intelligence officers said.

Several former Blackwater guards said that their involvement in the operations became so routine that the lines supposedly dividing the Central Intelligence Agency, the military and Blackwater became blurred. Instead of simply providing security for C.I.A. officers, they say, Blackwater personnel at times became partners in missions to capture or kill militants in Iraq and Afghanistan, a practice that raises questions about the use of guns for hire on the battlefield.

Separately, former Blackwater employees said they helped provide security on some C.I.A. flights transporting detainees in the years after the 2001 terror attacks in the United States.

The secret missions illuminate a far deeper relationship between the spy agency and the private security company than government officials had acknowledged. Blackwater’s partnership with the C.I.A. has been enormously profitable for the North Carolina-based company, and became even closer after several top agency officials joined Blackwater.

“It became a very brotherly relationship,” said one former top C.I.A. officer. “There was a feeling that Blackwater eventually became an extension of the agency.”

Let's see now: what were those lines from somebody's speech the other day? Ah, yes.

America -- in fact, no nation -- can insist that others follow the rules of the road if we refuse to follow them ourselves. For when we don't, our actions appear arbitrary and undercut the legitimacy of future interventions, no matter how justified.

This latest news---and Obama's stubborn refusal to hold anyone in our government, past or present, culpable for it---essentially marks the legitimization of private-sector warlordism as an extension of America's national-security policy. Instead of recruiting ethnic Pashtuns to do our killing for us, as per the usual protocols, we chose to enlist corn-fed American boys who were accountable to no one but their company's officers shareholders, to do the deeds instead on a for-profit basis.

Apparently, though, it is far more important to this administration that we keep looking forward, not backward, for reasons that I cannot fathom. But by now, I am nearly at the point of accusing Obama of being an accessory, post-facto, to the commission of war crimes. He seems to be doing his level best to prevent us from even investigating them, let alone holding anyone in the prior administration accountable. Matt Taibbi's expose on the administration's tank-job for the big banks may garner more attention today, but I still see Obama's unwillingness to confront, let alone excise, the cancerous abuses of the past administration as his most egregious failings of policy, of politics, and---most crucially---of morality.

---Vitelius

Watch We We Say, Not What We Do

From Obama's Nobel speech in Oslo yesterday:

I believe that all nations -- strong and weak alike -- must adhere to standards that govern the use of force. I -- like any head of state -- reserve the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend my nation. Nevertheless, I am convinced that adhering to standards, international standards, strengthens those who do, and isolates and weakens those who don't.

The world rallied around America after the 9/11 attacks, and continues to support our efforts in Afghanistan, because of the horror of those senseless attacks and the recognized principle of self-defense. Likewise, the world recognized the need to confront Saddam Hussein when he invaded Kuwait -- a consensus that sent a clear message to all about the cost of aggression.

Furthermore, America -- in fact, no nation -- can insist that others follow the rules of the road if we refuse to follow them ourselves. For when we don't, our actions appear arbitrary and undercut the legitimacy of future interventions, no matter how justified.

And this becomes particularly important when the purpose of military action extends beyond self-defense or the defense of one nation against an aggressor.

Wise words, eloquently spoken. But when one frames Obama's argument within the context of 21st-Century American history, one can only see a golden opportunity to elevate America's standing even further in the international community that was pointlessly squandered---and perhaps, for self-serving reasons, intentionally avoided.

What a perfect opportunity this would have been for Obama to officially proclaim that America would never again wage preemptive wars of aggression under false and misleading pretenses; that America would once again respect and uphold the Geneva Conventions, and hold accountable those within our borders, and within our own government, who had ignored and violated them; that America would once again recognize the authority of the International Criminal Court to investigate and prosecute crimes against humanity; and to affirm that that the office of the Attorney General and the Secretaries of State and Defense would cooperate in full with the court in any future investigation of alleged war crimes committed by US personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But none of this, alas, was forthcoming. Perhaps that should come as no surprise, considering this:

The Obama administration has asked an appeals court to dismiss a lawsuit accusing former Bush administration attorney John Yoo of authorizing the torture of a terrorism suspect, saying federal law does not allow damage claims against lawyers who advise the president on national security issues.

Such lawsuits ask courts to second-guess presidential decisions and pose "the risk of deterring full and frank advice regarding the military's detention and treatment of those determined to be enemies during an armed conflict," Justice Department lawyers said Thursday in arguments to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.

Now don't get me wrong. I still think there is much to admire about Obama, and about what he has been able to accomplish not even a year into his presidency. John Cole's post from the other day (on a related subject) could just as easily been one of mine. But I really do believe that his decision to give the Bush administration a free pass on waterboarding, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and the rest of the criminal enterprise that was part and parcel of the war in Iraq was an extremely serious mistake in judgment, another needless concession to a spirit of Beltway bipartisanship that simply does not exist. Dick Cheney and Sean Hannity will accuse him of embarking on another International Apology Tour, not matter what he does or says, in front of any foreign audience. What's worse in my mind is the fact that the cancerous Cheney Doctrine of preemptive war, and the torture and abuse that naturally follow in its wake as a matter of policy implementation, have not been excised using the purgative of open trials in civilian courts but allowed to fester silently in remission in America's collective unconscious psyche, to be agitated and metastasized, perhaps, at some later date by a President Palin, or President Gingrich, or God knows who else. There are simply some crimes and misdemeanors that cannot in good conscience be papered over or covered up or the sake of expediency---and history, I think, will find Obama wanting in full for his decision to run interference for the war criminals in the previous administration. But I guess we will find out eventually. One would certainly hope that his having to follow in the footsteps of human-right crusaders such as Mandela and King on the Nobel stage might have persuaded him to reconsider his position, just a bit.

For now, let's agree that it was a lovely speech. But that's all it was.

---Vitelius

The Road to Victory in Afghanistan

When did Obama replace Stan McChrystal with Rube Goldberg? Did I miss something?

We are so. Hopelessly. Fucked.

---Vitelius

Don't Give the People What They Want

Because America is a center-right nation:

Americans want their government to create jobs through spending on public works, investments in alternative energy or skills training for the jobless.

They also want the deficit to come down. And most are ready to hand the bill to the wealthy.

A Bloomberg National Poll conducted Dec. 3-7 shows two- thirds of Americans favor taxing the rich to reduce the deficit.

Even though almost 9 of 10 respondents also say they believe the middle class will have to make financial sacrifices to achieve that goal, only a little more than one-fourth support an increase in taxes on the middle class. Fewer still back cuts in entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare or a new national consumption tax.

But what about Climategate? This is more bad news for Democrats.

---Vitelius

Opinions Differ As To Heat of Earth

This really is rich:

“Climategate” has muddied the good green message that was supposed to come out of the United Nations climate change talks here, forcing leaders to spend time justifying the science behind global warming when they want to focus on ending it.

Former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin stirred the pot Wednesday with a Washington Post op-ed calling on President Barack Obama to boycott the Copenhagen talks over climategate and the “agenda-driven science” it exposed.

Obama will surely ignore the call. And the Environmental Defense Fund’s Peter Goldmark told Politico Wednesday that climategate isn’t coming up in private meetings among nongovernmental organizations in Copenhagen and is not an issue for negotiators.

But again and again this week, U.N. officials and government leaders have felt the need to defend climate science in public -— something few of them would have thought necessary just a few weeks ago.

Got that? "Climategate" is a problem because an incompetent numbskull and serial liar says it is. Never mind that Palin never actually mentions in her essay what "agendas" those scientists are pursuing. And government officials continue to "feel the need" to defend their work because . . . well, why? Certainly not because of intrepid reporting such as this, which transforms every right-wing hallucination into a instantly valid talking point, to be debated and analyzed like any other on the nightly news and in the blogosphere: Opinions Differ as to Heat of Earth.

I wonder why none of the Politico scribes seem to want to bother trying to hunt down the criminal(s) who illegally hacked the e-mail server at the University of East Anglia. That's all that's really been proven by "Climategate"---that somebody, somewhere, was willing to commit felonious acts in an attempt to debunk the work of some university climatologists.

There was a time when this would have been considered worthy of what we used to call investigative reporting. Take Watergate, for instance. Nobody bothered to spend much time investigating the files that were rifled by the plumbers in the DNC offices. They weren't considered newsworthy, and in fact, they weren't. But this is not the way journalism works in Washington anymore. In fact, it operates in a diametrically opposite fashion now. The conspiracists who masterminded the hacking of sensitive e-mail documents aren't important. It's their victims who need to be investigated. Caught in this simple demagogue's trick, the victims can now can be portrayed as suspects in a vast liberal conspiracy, who must proclaim their innocence again and again to assuage the concerns of "reporters" such as Policito's.

Imagine if Larry O'Brien and George McGovern had to spend week after week in the summer of 1972 having to deny to members of the Washington press corps any wrongdoing, any hidden agendas or incriminating documents, that they were trying to conceal at the Watergate Hotel. At the time, such an idea would have been considered absurd. Not anymore, friends.

It really is amazing how these guys get played for suckers time and again by the Drudges and Limbaughs of the media world.

---Vitelius

Jittery Little Rabbits

Atrios posits a sensible question about global warming denialists:

Still, one thing I've never quite understood is to the extent that they actually believe or claim to believe that it's all some liberal conspiracy, just what is it do they think we have to gain from it? What's the point of our little conspiracy?

I think the answer can be roughly summed up this way:

With this regulation the Government can now say that each human is a polluter, tax us, and also regulate how many children we have.

Because they are afraid, very afraid, of being dominated, controlled, manipulated, enslaved. By the Soviets. And the secularists. And the fluoridators. And the hippies. And the coloreds. And the bra-burners. And the media. And the abortionists. And the Iranians. And the liberals. And Clinton’s dick. And the Muslims. And teh gays. And now, the eco-nazis. It is a fear-based world in which they live, and a fear-centered worldview which they espouse. It has been that way with these people for my entire life, and they obviously aren’t going to change their tune anytime soon. Why do they view the world this way? Some of them are clearly deranged, but personally, I just think that most of them are jittery little rabbits who are scared to death that the world has caught on to their bullshit, that their overweening sense of White Man's Entitlement isn't playing very well on the global stage anymore, and that the way to compensate for it is to act out in a fashion that's more bullying and bellicose then ever. They're not going quietly down the rabbit hole, obviously, but I suspect that the Bush Years represent their apogee, and that it's all downhill from here for them. Color me naive, but after being subjected to 50 years of collective paranoia, the majority of Americans, and the rest of the world, are ever-so-slowly leaving them behind to choke on their own bile. But I guess we shall find out in our own time.

---Vitelius

Maybe We Should Call It the Tom Lehrer Decade

Not expected, but promising news nonetheless:

President Barack Obama called for a major new burst of federal spending Tuesday, aiming to jolt the wobbly economy into a stronger recovery and reduce painfully persistent double-digit unemployment.

Despite Republican criticism concerning record federal deficits, Obama said the U.S. must continue to "spend our way out of this recession" as long as so many people are out of work. More than 7 million Americans have lost their jobs since the recession began two years ago, and the jobless rate stands at 10 percent, a statistic Obama called "staggering."

Congressional approval would be required for the new spending, the amount unspecified but sure to be at least tens of billions of dollars.

"We avoided the depression many feared," Obama said in a speech at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. But, he added, "Our work is far from done."

It was the third time in a week the president had presided over a high-profile event on jobs, responding to rising pleas in Congress that he spend more time discussing unemployment as midterm election season draws near.

Obama proposed new spending for highway and bridge construction, for small business tax cuts and for retrofitting millions of homes to make them more energy-efficient. He said he wanted to extend economic stimulus programs to keep unemployment insurance from expiring for millions of out-of-work Americans and to help laid-off workers keep their health insurance. He proposed an additional $250 apiece in stimulus spending for seniors and veterans and aid to state and local governments to discourage them from laying off teachers, police officers and firefighters.

I've got another suggestion to add, Mr. President:

More than 20 percent of the nation’s water treatment systems have violated key provisions of the Safe Drinking Water Act over the last five years, according to a New York Times analysis of federal data.

That law requires communities to deliver safe tap water to local residents. But since 2004, the water provided to more than 49 million people has contained illegal concentrations of chemicals like arsenic or radioactive substances like uranium, as well as dangerous bacteria often found in sewage.

Regulators were informed of each of those violations as they occurred. But regulatory records show that fewer than 6 percent of the water systems that broke the law were ever fined or punished by state or federal officials, including those at the Environmental Protection Agency, which has ultimate responsibility for enforcing standards.

Studies indicate that drinking water contaminants are linked to millions of instances of illness within the United States each year.

In some instances, drinking water violations were one-time events, and probably posed little risk. But for hundreds of other systems, illegal contamination persisted for years, records show.

When you really think about it, "illegal contamination" pretty much sums up the period 2001-2008 in our nation's political history, now, doesn't it? In an era where conservative talking points form the dominant paradigm in our formulation of policy, I guess it's the role of Democratic presidents, henceforth and forevermore, to spend the bulk of their administrations cleaning out mess at the Reaganite Augean stables that's the inevitable detritus of Republican rule. It was that way for Clinton, and it is increasingly looking that way for Obama as well. Oh well, I suppose it's what happens when you let a gang of spoiled and impetuous children run your government for eight years.

---Vitelius

What Ought We Call The 'Aughts?

Because we all need a decade we can call our own:

Shoulder pads and Reaganomics belong to the '80s. The O.J. Simpson trial and grunge rock helped define the '90s. So September 11 and cell phone texting will remind us of . . . what? The zeroes? Americans have had 10 whole years to figure out what to call the past decade, and yet most people are still at a loss when it comes to referring to it as anything other than "the current decade" or simply "the 21st century."

"The zeroes" isn't too bad, really. But I think this is really a no-brainer:

Matthews: What's the importance of the president's amazing display of leadership tonight?

[...]

Matthews: What do you make of the actual visual that people will see on TV and probably, as you know, as well as I, will remember a lot longer than words spoken tonight? And that's the president looking very much like a jet, you know, a high-flying jet star. A guy who is a jet pilot. Has been in the past when he was younger, obviously. What does that image mean to the American people, a guy who can actually get into a supersonic plane and actually fly in an unpressurized cabin like an actual jet pilot?

[...]

Matthews: Do you think this role, and I want to talk politically [...], the president deserves everything he's doing tonight in terms of his leadership. He won the war. He was an effective commander. Everybody recognizes that, I believe, except a few critics. Do you think he is defining the office of the presidency, at least for this time, as basically that of commander in chief? That [...] if you're going to run against him, you'd better be ready to take [that] away from him.

[...]

Matthews: Let me ask you, Bob Dornan, you were a congressman all those years. Here's a president who's really nonverbal. He's like Eisenhower. He looks great in a military uniform. He looks great in that cowboy costume he wears when he goes West. I remember him standing at that fence with Colin Powell. Was [that] the best picture in the 2000 campaign?

[...]

Matthews: Ann Coulter, you're the first to speak tonight on the buzz. The president's performance tonight, redolent of the best of Reagan -- what do you think?

Coulter: It's stunning. It's amazing. I think it's huge. I mean, he's landing on a boat at 150 miles per hour. It's tremendous. It's hard to imagine any Democrat being able to do that. And it doesn't matter if Democrats try to ridicule it. It's stunning, and it speaks for itself.

Matthews: Pat Caddell, the president's performance tonight on television, his arrival on ship?

Caddell: Well, first of all, Chris, the -- I think that -- you know, I was -- when I first heard about it, I was kind of annoyed. It sounded like the kind of PR stunt that Bill Clinton would pull. But and then I saw it. And you know, there's a real -- there's a real affection between him and the troops.

[...]

Matthews: The president there -- look at this guy! We're watching him. He looks like he flew the plane. He only flew it as a passenger, but he's flown---

Caddell: He looks like a fighter pilot.

Matthews: He looks for real. What is it about the commander in chief role, the hat that he does wear, that makes him -- I mean, he seems like -- he didn't fight in a war, but he looks like he does.

Caddell: Yes. It's a -- I don't know. You know, it's an internal thing. I don't know if you can put it into words. [...] You can see it with him and the troops, the ease with which he talks to them. I was amazed by that, frankly, because as I said, I was originally appalled, particularly when I heard he was going in an F-18. But -- on there -- but the -- but you know, that was --

Matthews: Look at this guy!

Caddell: -- was hard not to be moved by their reaction to him and his reaction to them and --

Matthews: You know, Ann --

Caddell: -- you know, they -- it's a quality. It's an innate quality. It's a real quality.

Matthews: I know. I think you're right.

• • •

Matthews: We're proud of our president. Americans love having a guy as president, a guy who has a little swagger, who's physical, who's not a complicated guy like [former President Bill] Clinton or even like [former Democratic presidential candidates Michael] Dukakis or [Walter] Mondale, all those guys, [George] McGovern. They want a guy who's president. Women like a guy who's president. Check it out. The women like this war. I think we like having a hero as our president. It's simple. We're not like the Brits. We don't want an indoor prime minister type, or the Danes or the Dutch or the Italians, or a [Russian Federation President Vladimir] Putin. Can you imagine Putin getting elected here? We want a guy as president.

The Mission Accomplished Decade: When the conservative True Believers finished the job they started in the '80s, and trashed what was left of our federal government, while our Drudgified, Fox-infused media watchdogs swallowed the bullshit and cheered them on, oblivious to overwhelming evidence of a stage-managed presidency whose sole significant contribution to the annals of history was the legitimization of war crimes as an official extension of US foreign policy.

Honorable Mentions:
1. The Heckuva Job Decade.
2. The Suck. On. This. Decade.
3. The Decade That Greeted Us as Liberators.
4. No One Could Have Possibly Predicted This Decade.

Any others?

---Vitelius

Speaking of Things That Produce Tons of CO2 . . .

You had to suspect that this story would hit the tripwires in the Nutosphere today. And as if on cue, it has. National Review:

Under the statutory language of the Clean Air Act, the regulation of mobile sources tripwires regulations for all stationary sources that emit more than 250 tons of a designated pollutant. For greenhouse gases, that’s pretty much everything larger than a Gore-sized mansion. These stationary sources would have to get a Prevention of Significant Deterioration permit for any significant modification, as would any new source. They would also have to get operating permits. The upshot is that millions of buildings would be subject to regulations. Small businesses will similarly be affected, as millions of businesses emit that amount of greenhouse gases. Fast-food franchises, apartment blocks, hospitals — you name it — will find themselves subject to EPA bureaucracy.

Hot Air:

By classifying CO2 and methane (among other so-called greenhouse gases, it can inject itself into just about every industry in the US. Energy production will be its primary target, but the EPA has also gone after coal mining on the basis of the Clean Water Act; it will certainly not be shy about using this new authority to kill coal mining altogether. It will also impact agriculture, especially dairies and cattle ranching, as well as transportation. The entire manufacturing sector will have to answer for its output.

Ace of Spades:

Government regulation of nearly every aspect of economic activity by administrative fiat . . . it's enough to make Stalin blush.

Free Republic:

With this regulation the Government can now say that each human is a polluter, tax us, and also regulate how many children we have.

That's pretty good. But today, there's no topping Red State for hyperbole:

The intention here is to use the EPA to impose by executive fiat what the Senate has sensibly refused to do by legislative action: use the Clean Air Act to shut down businesses that they don’t like. And, given that the dislike is based on religious grounds - and much, much, much worse; the people with the religious objections don’t see themselves as being religious - forget about trying to compromise. The ‘compromise’ is that the industrialists don’t go to jail, a monastery, or the gibbet.

Amazing. I mean, here's a guy who can't even count on 60 reliable votes in the Senate to pass a halfway-decent healthcare-reform bill, yet he's somehow poised to impose some kind of Stalinist control over every aspect of our lives, at once. I hope these dudes get paid well for their work. It's the least they deserve for a life devoted to chronicling the ceaseless drudgery of everyday life in Neverland.

---Vitelius

Maybe They'll Offer an Amendment BarringFederal Health-Care Funding to States ThatAllow Gays & Lesbians to Get Married, Too

We really are Beyond Stupid as a nation, that we continue to elect Serious People like this to high office:

The divisive issue of abortion emerged Monday as an obstacle to Senate passage of President Barack Obama's health care overhaul as a moderate Democrat proposed tough restrictions that liberals said they could not possibly accept.

The amendment by Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., would bar any private insurance company from offering plans to cover abortion if they receive federal subsidies. In practice the restriction would apply to most plans within a proposed new insurance marketplace, or exchange, since most people shopping in the exchange would be using federal subsidies to purchase coverage.

The amendment also would block a proposed new government insurance plan from covering abortions except in cases of rape, incest or danger to the life of the mother.

Joining Nelson in sponsoring the amendment was another anti-abortion Democrat, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, along with eight Republicans. The measure is unlikely to get the necessary 60 votes to pass, but Nelson has threatened to oppose the underlying health care legislation if it doesn't.

"As written, the Senate health care bill allows taxpayer dollars, directly and indirectly, to pay for insurance plans that cover abortion," Nelson said in a statement. "Most Nebraskans, and Americans, do not favor using public funds to cover abortion and as a result this bill shouldn't open the door to do so."

Is there any other country on the planet that spends as much time debating this non-issue as ours? And does anyone outside the Palinoid Right really frown on any federal funding of abortions---you know, for the poor and indigent, or for service members in our military, or for women who were raped by government contractors?

Meanwhile, 123 people in America will die today, and every day after that, so long as this healthcare debate drags on, so pompous asshats like Ben Nelson can argue until they turn blue in the face about the need to protect all those unborn babies from Obama’s death panels.

And those babies who’ve already been born? Fuck them.

An estimated 17,000 children in the United States might have died unnecessarily over nearly two decades because they didn’t have health insurance, according to a report from researchers at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center in Baltimore.

They found that kids who lacked health insurance were 60 percent more likely to die in the hospital than were kids who had insurance. After adjusting for such differences as race and gender, uninsured kids were still 37.8 percent more likely to die than kids with insurance coverage.

David C. Chang, co-director of the pediatric surgery outcomes research group at Hopkins and a study co-author, said he could not think of a medical treatment that has such a dramatic impact on health outcomes as health insurance seemingly does.

“This is actually something we as a society . . . can choose to do something about,” he said. “It’s literally with the stroke of somebody’s pen, this could be changed.”

Maybe the Ben Nelsons of this world should spend a bit of time talking to this guy, too:

In my 20 years of practice as a family physician, I have encountered dozens of cases where the main contributing factor to a person’s death was the lack of health insurance for most of their lives.

I recall one family that lost three members this way.

George was 21 when he died of complications of juvenile diabetes that he’d had since the age of 2. Whenever George worked for a while, he lost his Medicaid. This meant he could no longer afford to test his blood sugars, they would get out of control, he would get sick, have to stop working, he would spend down, then qualify for Medicaid again. This went on for the three years I knew him.

His older sister Tina also had juvenile diabetes from the age of 6. Her situation was the same — working, losing insurance, getting sicker, not working, getting Medicaid etc. Tina was pregnant at the time of George’s death. Her poorly controlled diabetes made her a very high risk for complications in pregnancy. The baby was born three months prematurely and died in the intensive care unit one month later. Tina’s health worsened after that and within one year she died in post-op after heart bypass surgery. She was 25.

Then there’s Russell — also a diabetic, also on and off insurance. He died at age 37 of diabetic kidney failure. He was uninsured for years.

Another case — Vivian — had warning signs for cancer for years. She finally qualified for insurance but died two weeks into the workup of a pulmonary embolus (a complication of pelvic cancers).

I am only one clinician, and yet I have witnessed dozens of cases of people who died of preventable illnesses — preventable illnesses that could have been treated had these patients possessed uninterrupted, seamless coverage for needed treatments over their lives.

But none of those people's lives are really worth saving, if your priorities are similar to Ben Nelson's, so long as there's a chance that any federal money should find its way into any private insurance company that provides any measure of coverage for abortion services for women. Because any insurance company that does offer coverage for abortion services might actually empower women by giving them greater reproductive freedom via a broader range of family-planning options. And because there's probably no better way to persuade private insurance companies to drop abortion coverage than to threaten to withhold all federal healthcare funding from them. And because the true objective of the anti-abortion movement is to simply make abortion unavailable and inaccessible to all women, anywhere and for any reason, in the United States. In many parts of the country, sadly, they've already largely succeeded in this.

That's what this decades-long battle over abortion is really all about---it's a war on the empowerment of women. Always has been, always will be, and don't ever, ever forget it.

---Vitelius

On the Road to Riches and Diamond Rings

Real Baggaz do real things.

Some conservatives are happy to embrace “teabagger,” or are at least willing to do so. They are “owning the insult,” which is to say, taking what is intended as a slur and wearing it proudly. There are many words and names in our vocabulary that started out as slurs and became something else. Several of these words and names are found in religion — “Christian,” for example. According to a Bible dictionary, this was “the name given by the Greeks or Romans, probably in reproach, to the followers of Jesus.” Soon enough, it “was universally accepted.” “Jesuit” had a defamatory beginning. Same with “Methodist,” “Unitarian,” “Quaker,” and “Shaker.” (You can sort of tell with those last two, can’t you?)

We have had this phenomenon in politics, too. “Tory” and “Whig” were putdowns when they originated, and so was “neoconservative.” (All things are new again, I guess.) “Yankee Doodle” was none too nice. That second word probably relates to the male organ. In the world of art, “Impressionist” was a putdown directed at those who painted rather gauzily or suggestively, rather than accurately. But no one today would consider Monet defamed if called an Impressionist.

What about a special case — the worst word in American English, as some of us see it, namely the N-word? When I was growing up, in Ann Arbor, Mich., there was a little debate: Should school officials try to prevent black students from using the N-word? I don’t believe the issue was ever settled. And this brings up the question of whether “teabagger” could be kind of a conservative N-word: to be used in the family, but radioactive outside the family.

You are now about to witness the strength of Tweet knowledge. Consider yourselves warned.

---Vitelius

The Napalm and The Olive Tree

Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the New Global Economy:

This is the 25th anniversary of the Bhopal gas disaster, an epic mess that started one night when a pesticide plant owned by the American chemical giant Union Carbide leaked a cloud of poisonous gas. Before the sun rose, almost 4,000 human beings capable of love and anguish sank to their knees and did not get up. Half a million more fell ill, many with severely damaged lungs and eyes.

An additional 15,000 people have since died from the aftereffects, and 10 to 30 people are said to die every month from exposure to the hundreds of tons of toxic waste left over in the former factory. But amazingly, the site still has not been cleaned up, because Dow Chemical, which since acquired Union Carbide, refuses to accept any responsibility.

• • •

In 2001, the maker of napalm married the bane of Bhopal: Dow Chemical bought Union Carbide for $11.6 billion and promptly distanced itself from the disaster. If Union Carbide was at fault, that was too bad; it had just ceased to exist. In 2002, Dow set aside $2.2 billion to cover potential liabilities arising from Union Carbide’s American asbestos production. By comparison, the total settlement for Bhopal was $470 million. The families of the dead got an average of $2,200; the wounded got $550; a Dow spokeswoman explained, that amount “is plenty good for an
Indian” . . .

Union Carbide and Dow were allowed to get away with it because of the international legal structures that protect multinationals from liability. Union Carbide sold its Indian subsidiary and pulled out of India. Warren Anderson, the Union Carbide chief executive at the time of the gas leak, lives in luxurious exile in the Hamptons, even though there’s an international arrest warrant out for him for culpable homicide. The Indian government has yet to pursue an extradition request. Imagine if an Indian chief executive had jumped bail for causing an industrial disaster that killed tens of thousands of Americans. What are the chances he’d be sunning himself in Goa?

The Indian government, fearful of scaring away foreign investors, has not pushed the issue with American authorities. Dow has used a kind of blackmail with the Indians; a 2006 letter from Andrew Liveris, the chief executive, to India’s ambassador to the United States asked for guarantees that Dow would not be held liable for the cleanup, and thanked him for his “efforts to ensure that we have the appropriate investment climate.”

The appropriate investment climate. It really is awesome, the language of our global Free Enterprise System. I wonder if guys like Tom Friedman ever ask any of their cab-driver friends about shit like this while marveling at the nascent power of the emerging Indian juggernaut.

---Vitelius

Obama in Afghanistan

I don't have much to add to much of the progressive commentary over Obama's war speech this week, other than to note that I found Sullivan's take to be, on the whole, persuasive, and Greenwald's observation of a President who can call the nation to arms without pandering to some of our most pathologically insane neoncon fantasies bears reading. For now, put me in the "I hope he's right" column, though if I had my druthers, I'd start pulling all of our troops out of Afghanistan tomorrow even though I know what kind of clusterf*ck would be unleashed and havoc wrought, etc. Color me skeptical of any Land War in Asia.

And I still believe that instead of relying on The Mess That is Pakistan to serve as a bulwark against violent Islamism in central Asia, we should be looking towards the one country in the region that would be much more viable partner against Sunni extremism in terms of theology, temperament and outlook, and one which only figures to gain in regional influence---greatly so---in the near future: it may be impolitic to say this, but a nuclear-armed Shia Iran could act as a powerful deterrent to a nuclear-armed Pakistan should that nation be overrun by Sunni extremists, among other scenarios. And in the final analysis, the social and cultural causes of violent Islamism can only be addressed, and its territorial aspirations contained, by the most powerful Islamic nations themselves, not by a hundred thousand foreigners from Kansas and California toting AR-15s and wearing bull's-eyes in camo. (Turning the neocon saw on its head, I've claimed all along that Real Men go to Tehran: Not to wage war but to negotiate power-sharing agreements.) But like I said, I hope Obama is right all the same.

---Vitelius