So-called Democrats

The millionaires won again yesterday. Who were the so-called Democrats who joined the Republican filibuster of Obama's jobs bill?

One of them was, of course, Joe Lieberman, who hasn't been a Democrat for...ever.

I hope Barack Obama and Harry Reid regret their failure to send him packing to the Republican caucus when they had the chance in January 2009 - to repay his betrayal with the back of their hand.

The others were Ben Nelson, always reliable voting for a Republican filibuster, and Mark Pryor. I refuse to put a D next to their names.

Meta-question: Why did I have to visit a third site before finding who the turncoats were? Don't journalists find the question who an important question any more?

News of the microcosm

News of the World displays almost every feature of the business environment that robber barons, plutocrats, and teabaggers want:

• Disposable employees pitted against each other
• Almost all power and reward at the top
• No accountability at the top for anything but money
• Management by fear
• The right to be completely arbitrary, chiseling, and ruthless
• Relationships dominated by force
• Money the only value

This is what they want for all of us. No unions, no labor law, double standards for the rich, in short a return to Dickens.

Waziri leaks

In all the hue and cry over Wikileaks, I haven't seen much to get too bent out of shape over. Most of it was, duh, obvious. A lot of it had already been reported.

While governments need to be able to keep their conversations confidential, even some that are merely embarrassingly frank, the main damage has been the need to blush a little.

Still, imagine this: You're a foreign service officer talking with your opposite number in another country's diplomatic corps. You know how certain you would be that he will keep your confidences, small and large! C'mon, no one is that naive.

Instead of laughing off the embarrassment, governments have pursued Julian Assange, arrested him, and locked him up on unrelated charges that look trumped up (h/t Digby). These governments have certainly responded with much greater focus than they would have had he been, say, Brett Favre or Kobe Bryant.

The biggest take-away from the whole affair so far has been how thoroughly inculcated the media is in the culture of secrecy that they are supposed to expose to light. Sure, they've reported on the leaks, but I'm starting to wonder how thoroughly.

When I heard that the Pentagon was directing its service people and contractors that they were not allowed to read classified documents even after they were published on the Internet, I thought they were typically, bureaucratically overreaching. Just like the world's most command-oriented bureaucracy to pretend that the genie right there in the room was still safely in the bottle. Even a genie not nearly as revealing as Barbara Eden.

Then, today, the New York Times carried the story of the U.S. CIA station chief in Islamabad had fled Pakistan after his name got out into the open in local media. What is his name? The Times pointedly wouldn't say:

The legal complaint that named the station chief, who was working undercover and whose name is classified, was filed on Monday over attacks that killed at least two Pakistanis. The complaint sought police help in keeping the station chief in the country until a lawsuit could be filed.
The agent’s name had already been revealed in a news conference last month by Mirza Shahzad Akbar, the lawyer who filed the complaint this week, and the name had been reported in local media.

The rest of the world can know, but Americans can't! The big media is in on the suppression of information.

Of course, Google is still up, so it's easy to find out. No, not the character actor by the same name.

I'm showing fear here, too, by not simply typing the name. I don't want to be charged with espionage for "revealing" something that's widely known the world just because there's a Top Secret stamp marking a piece of paper locked in a vault that I've never seen. Think about what that fear means to an open society, without which democracy is a sham.

The name I'm omitting is probably itself a cover identity. Really, would the CIA send someone to Pakistan for covert action under his own name? Of course not. Yet the Times and I won't simply type the name, and it's itself a fiction. Am I still allowed to name Winston Smith?

Funny, I don't recall the American big media being so solicitous of the classification status of non-official cover identity when the exposed agent was Valerie Plame.

The question: How long before the U.S., like China, decides it needs to block sites that expose its own citizens to this slightly uncomfortable sort of truth?

Update (1/7/2011): Related comment on Salon.

Victory in class warfare

There was a class war. The rich won.


Felix Salmon says:

If you were structuring a tax code from scratch, it would look nothing like this. But the problem is that tax hikes seem to be politically impossible no matter which party is in power. And since any revamp of the tax code would involve tax hikes somewhere, I fear we’re fiscally doomed.

Digby says:

If I were you, I would print out this post by Felix Salmon and pull it out whenever you confront some bozo who's railing about the deficit and insisting that we have to put old ladies on a cat food diet to fix the problem.

Specific policy proposals in addition to letting Duhbya's tax cuts expire above $250,000 of income:

• Once unemployment is below 7%, make the income tax more progressive with a 50% marginal tax rate on incomes over $1 million, to be lowered to 40% when the deficit (not including any surplus from Social Security) is lowered below 2% of GDP (currently, it's about 10% of GDP).
• Make the payroll taxes less regressive immediately by removing the income cap on taxes subject to FICA, Medicare, etc.
• Reinstitute the Paris Hilton tax at 50%, closing the loopholes that have allowed the lazy children of extreme wealth to escape taxes on their parents' estates, but raise the estate size floor to $4 million and index it for inflation.

But of course, President Obama has no taste for a fight. We needed FDR, not Mr. Rogers.

Enraging truth

Could we please finally try liberalism? Goddammit!

Doesn't look like it...

Evidence of political perversion

Bank lobbyists don't automatically have a vote in Congress, yet the expectation of media - rational to be sure - is a contest between those lobbyists and the overwhelming majority party. The New York Times headline over a Reuters story:

Dems Vow Fight With Banks on Consumer Agency

Democrats need to man up and tell the bank lobbyists to shut up and go away. It's all they have to do.

How can this not be a walkover? How can it even be controversial to protect consumers and taxpayers from the rape and pillage of financial abuses?

Blame Barney Frank

The GOP and their laissez-faire economists really need some way to blame Barney Frank for this:

"I doubt this approach would play well with regulators, investors, rating agencies, etc," [John P. McMurray, chief risk officer of Countrywide Financial] wrote. "To some, this approach might seem like we've simply ceded our risk standards and balance sheet to whoever has the most liberal guidelines."

Fortunately for them, they don't care about facts.

(h/t Atrios)

Consider the source

Oddly, this item, which is full of evidence of ignoramuses, probably represents progress. After all, there's this:

The panel includes the word “evolution” in state science standards for the first time

So, even if the willful idiots from the Christian fundies won 4-3, at least kids will learn the ideas of evolution (hopefully well beyond the groundbreaking but now dated work of Darwin), and those ideas have the power to convince the open-minded.

The nightmare scenario

John McCain, the Republicans' great white-haired hope, is the last man standing. He picks Mike Huckabee to balance the ticket and reunite the bullies and the fundies. The wealthies decide that this is going to work for them.

We Democrats nominate Hillary, but the fight with Obama is too bitter to heal quickly. Hillary picks another bloodless centrist technocrat, say, Bill Richardson to balance the ticket, appeal to the Hispanic vote, and keep it in the Clintonista house.

Duhbya lies low. The swiftboaters find a picture of Hillary walking past a protester holding a sign that says, "Hanoi Hilton is too good for baby-killers," or whatever the Rovians want to Photoshop into it. The MSM says that they have to cover it since Drudge did and the story is in play. And anyway she should have ripped that sign up on the spot.

Sean Hannity wets himself with excitement. Chris Matthews slurs, "See, I told you she was an unfeeling bitch." Rush Limbaugh feels so good that he actually kicks the pills - except for Viagra, Cialis, and every other ED remedy he can shop for. Ann Coulter writes a book called Liberal Torturers, in which she lays all torture in the history of the West and most of the East at the feet of blood-sucking liberals. Inquisition? Liberal Jews in Spain. Jeanne D'Arc? The French, for chrissake. Salem witch trials? Massachusetts!! She appears on the cover as a dominatrix clad in studded black leather.

We need all this circus because the economy is totally in the shitter. The vacillating Dems in Congress fight Duhbya's $150 billion self-stimulus plan to leave no billionaire behind. Then they cave. The Republican media operation successfully blames the Dems for their one-month delay, despite the obvious fact that the stimulus where they applied it couldn't possibly have helped in the vital short run. For that, the money needed to go to people who would spend it, instead of just making their ill-advised investments whole and rewarding bad choices.

McCain wins, and nothing changes.

Nothing, that is, until the cancer comes back on his left cheek or until 2012, when he's 76 and too old to run for reelection.

Make way for President Huckabee!

I didn't say this had a happy ending.

Update: Found that picture!

Another craven capitulation

As I told the office of one of the good guys, John Kerry, "The Congress needs new leadership."

Scooter scoots

Scooter Libby helped out Valerie Plame to aid a craven political smear in a way that damaged American national security. She did after all work on WMDs. For this "service", Scooter got:

• his sentence commuted
• a legal defense trust - Hey, did he pay his fine out of it? Who gets to keep the balance?

Scooter's web site says, "We are confident that at the end of this process, Scooter Libby will be fully exonerated." Oops, I guess not! They've apparently taken down the donate page.

I still think Duhbya will pardon this shitheel. Republicans take care of their accessories.