Link blag

George Will: The Obama administration's economic lawlessness.

NM: Flunking school for welfare.

Cato: Torture sucks. Don't do it.

NYT: Training the future police state.

TNR takes a peek at what health reform will look like.

NYT: How life began with RNA.

A creative solution for Social Security solvency.

Eyes on Holder

TNR's Jeffrey Rosen:

Barack Obama is trying to split the difference on torture. He wants to move forward–no messy dwelling on the Bush-Cheney era–except that he’ll look backward if forced. There will be no independent commission to hold top-ranking officials politically accountable. But, if Attorney General Eric Holder wants to prosecute the Bush lawyers who defended the legality of waterboarding–John Yoo, Jay Bybee, and Steven Bradbury–well, the president won’t stand in the way.

TMV nods:

What does Obama gain by this approach? For starters, he has delegated the hard choice to his subordinate–and has left himself room to maneuver once more if the political winds shift further.

As a bonus, it's pretty darn close to the right thing to do. I would prefer Obama be more optimistic about an independent truth commission to give us a full report, but enacting that would be up to Congress, and the Democratic leadership is against this because they are implicated. (Speaker Pelosi, for instance, knew all about the techniques before they were used in 2002.)

So in terms of what the executive branch can do on its own, that's the Justice Department's turf. And decisions like this aren't supposed to be politically motivated, so it's entirely appropriate that Obama delegate the decision to the AG and his staff. This is certainly a step up from the Bush administration's shenanigans during the Plame affair et. al.

However, Obama did promise no prosecutions for CIA interrogators, which was disappointing. It's within his power to promise pardons for anyone who's convicted for following the bogus legal advice, certainly, but ignorantia legis neminem excusat—nor is 'I was just following orders' a valid defense. We prosecuted the Nazis, remember?

That said, I can see how Obama's promise may have been helpful to keep the dolchtoss right from going absolutely berserk—but more importantly to placate the agency itself, which was somewhat pissed over the release of the shaming memos. Fmr. CIA director Michael Hayeden and others argued that revealing the techniques has made us less safe, of course, but this remains a bogus claim because Obama banned their usage on day one.  In reality, Bush officials and partisans on the right objected to the memo release because of the shame and more definitive accountability it has wrung.

Somewhat tangentially, I'm reminded of how UNRR absurdly said of the release that "Terrorist Rights Supporters Win Minor Victory", which would be laughable if the situation weren't so grave. He likes to scoff about the "bad ideas" of justice, "legalism", and moans there of "crippling legal restrictions"—I don't, because torture is indisputably illegal and will remain that way; if you wish to advocate torture interrogations it's clear that the only cogent position is that they be done extralegally and kept ultra secret.  But talking about such a thing is rather pointless, because we'd definitionally know nothing about whether it's happening or not.

Specter of doom (for the GOP)

I'll have more thoughts on this later. For now, his statement:

Since my election in 1980, as part of the Reagan Big Tent, the Republican Party has moved far to the right. Last year, more than 200,000 Republicans in Pennsylvania changed their registration to become Democrats. I now find my political philosophy more in line with Democrats than Republicans.

Quoth TNR:

Specter is one of the better-known senators in America. If you follow politics even casually, you've seen or heard him on the news before. So it's going to register with you that a major Republican senator has decided his party has become too extreme for him. And if you're a Republican, you might wonder if it's become too extreme for you, as well.

Let there be no further doubt, Democrats are now the big tent party. In a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll, only 21 percent of Americans identified as Republican. Even allowing for how much of an undercount that could be, it's still startlingly low.

Yet you'll read many conservative blogs reacting to the news with "we didn't move to the right, Specter became more liberal."  Heads, meet sand.

In my opinion Specter is one of the greatest public servants in the US Senate; one who actually votes against his party often enough when they're wrong. I don't agree with him on everything, but I'm pretty sure the U.S. would be a better place if we had a few more Arlen Specters in office.

Update: NYT has a timeline of Specter's career.

TPM analyzes why Specter had to switch.

Nate Silver looks at the consequences.

Bush against torture

Official proclamation by President Bush in June 2003:

Torture anywhere is an affront to human dignity everywhere. We are committed to building a world where human rights are respected and protected by the rule of law.

Freedom from torture is an inalienable human right. The Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment, ratified by the United States and more than 130 other countries since 1984, forbids governments from deliberately inflicting severe physical or mental pain or suffering on those within their custody or control. Yet torture continues to be practiced around the world by rogue regimes whose cruel methods match their determination to crush the human spirit. Beating, burning, rape, and electric shock are some of the grisly tools such regimes use to terrorize their own citizens. These despicable crimes cannot be tolerated by a world committed to justice....

The United States is committed to the world-wide elimination of torture and we are leading this fight by example. I call on all governments to join with the United States and the community of law-abiding nations in prohibiting, investigating, and prosecuting all acts of torture and in undertaking to prevent other cruel and unusual punishment. I call on all nations to speak out against torture in all its forms and to make ending torture an essential part of their diplomacy. I further urge governments to join America and others in supporting torture victims' treatment centers, contributing to the UN Fund for the Victims of Torture, and supporting the efforts of non-governmental organizations to end torture and assist its victims.

Accept that sleep deprivation for 11 days, waterboarding, and other parts of the cumulative program he approved are torture and you can hang the man by his own standards—which also happen to be those of a supermajority of Americans.

It's little wonder partisans from the right are stuck trying to argue Bush and Cheney didn't torture. And so 183 waterboards in 2 months becomes "something that should be considered a source of pride" by the unhinged right.

"Rant of the Year" parody

TNR's response to that Santelli clip



Nicely done

I know it's unfair

But I prefer to get commentary on economic policy speeches from people other than white guys in business suits, so here goes:

Post hoc ergo propter hoc

NYT:

Representative Virginia Foxx, Republican of North Carolina, said that former President George Bush’s signature tax cuts in 2001 had created years of growth but that the nation’s problems started when Democrats regained majorities in Congress in the 2006 elections.

Noam Sheiber fumes:

Really? So the Democrats came into office and a housing bubble retroactively inflated and began to pop? Mortgage-backed assets worth trillions less than their stated value just magically appeared on bank balance sheets and in hedge fund portfolios?

Just to clarify, did all this happen on election night 2006, or was it not until January of 2007, when Nancy Pelosi officially became Speaker?

10 things you didn't know about NY's new senator Kirsten Gillibrand

TNR:

1. She "comes from a politically sophisticated family," writes the Almanac of American Politics. "[H]er father was an attorney and lobbyist with ties to George Pataki; her grandmother was a prominent Democratic activist in Albany who brought Gillibrand along with her on the campaign trail." One summer in college, she interned for Alfonse D'Amato.

2. She bucked House leadership by voting against both versions of the TARP bailout bill in the fall.

3. A big gun supporter, she's been given a 100% approval rating by the NRA -- she's one of the extremely few Democrats on a federal level to win official NRA endorsement -- and, this fall, she voted in favor of a controversial bill to repeal District of Columbia laws prohibiting the possession of semiautomatics.

4. A couple more mavericky votes: She was the only New York Democrat to support the May 2007 war-funding bill; the others voted against it because it did not contain a troop-withdrawal timetable. She also voted for H.R. 6304, the FISA Amendments Act, which extended immunity to telecoms that spied on U.S. citizens at the behest of the Bush administration.

5. During this year's campaign, she described her voting record as "one of the most conservative in the state" of New York.

6. Her district, while not overwhelmingly Republican -- the Cook Political Report gives it a "partisan voting index" of R+3 -- voted for George W. Bush twice.

7. She's crazy for constituent outreach, and has held dozens of "office hours" at grocery stores in her district. During her re-election campaign, even local Republican officials expressed awe at her "visibility."

8. She's one of a few representatives to disclose her daily schedule online, so reporters and constituents can see who's got access to her. She also posts her earmark requests.

9. Hill wags have chattered about a rift between the rising-star Gillibrand -- who agitated hard for a coveted seat on Ways and Means -- and Nancy Pelosi, although the women have denied there's any tension.

10. She has a child under one year old: a son, Henry, delivered this past May -- just hours after Gillibrand sat through a marathon 13-hour Armed Services Committee hearing. Take that, Sarah Palin!

On the inaugural, new administration and future of libertarians in the GOP

A TNR and reason guy have a lucid discussion:

Caption this!

See Ambers' comments.

TNR has another funny one.

It's a goddamn SEATING CHART

Noam Scheiber and Marc Ambinder read into the press release. Yglesias yawns.

The Enforcer, Chief of Staff

The Daily Beast:

The selection of Emanuel signals that he apparently wants to operate with ideological moderation, speed and skull-cracking political toughness.

“Rahm Emanuel is a preternatural political force, a man of extraordinary intelligence, skill and toughness who has learned about politics and policy on the streets of Chicago and at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. A fascinating choice for Obama as White House Chief of Staff,” Thomas E. Mann, the W. Averell Harriman Chair and Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, told The Daily Beast Wednesday.

Among other things, Obama’s pick of Rahm Israel Emanuel, whose father is of Israeli origin, gives the lie to an endless wild myths that political enemies have tirelessly spread during the campaign that he was supposed to be a closest America-hater and no doubt anti-Semite because of his Kenyan background and boyhood in Indonesia. Emanuel, nicknamed “Rahmbo” by his colleagues, is a quasi neo-con hawk on foreign policy, tough champion of the war on terror,and advocate of crackdowns on crime. Obama was accused of being a “socialist” and hater of big business, but Emanuel was managing director in the Chicago office of a major global investment bank, Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, where he made millions.

Rolling Stone back in 2005:

Friends and enemies agree that the key to Emanuel’s success is his legendary intensity. There’s the story about the time he sent a rotting fish to a pollster who had angered him. There’s the story about how his right middle finger was blown off by a Syrian tank when he was in the Israeli army.

And there’s the story of how, the night after Clinton was elected, Emanuel was so angry at the president’s enemies that he stood up at a celebratory dinner with colleagues from the campaign, grabbed a steak knife and began rattling off a list of betrayers, shouting "Dead! . . . Dead! . . . Dead!" and plunging the knife into the table after every name. "When he was done, the table looked like a lunar landscape," one campaign veteran recalls. "It was like something out of The Godfather. But that’s Rahm for you."

Of the three stories, only the second is a myth — Emanuel lost the finger to a meat slicer as a teenager and never served in the Israeli army. But it’s a measure of his considerable reputation as the enforcer in Clinton’s White House that so many people believe it to be true. You don’t earn the nickname "Rahmbo" being timid.

An NROite is less impressed:

Obama’s apparent selection of Rahm Emanuel for White House chief of staff is an extremely disconcerting (if not wholly surprising) first indication on the “which Obama will we get” question. It suggests both that he wants to be ruthless and partisan and that he does not have a clear sense of how the White House works.

Emanuel was by all accounts a very effective White House staffer in the Clinton administration, and he has certainly been an effective member of the House of Representatives. He is smart and tough. But he has been, in both positions, a vicious graceless partisan: narrow, hectic, unremittingly aggressive, vulgar, and impatient. Those who have worked for and with him come away impressed but not inspired, and generally not loyal.

The White House chief of staff is not a chief strategist or a chief advocate. He is a manager of people and of process. Above all else, he sets the tone internally, and shapes the president’s decision process and the feel of the upper tiers of the administration. Obama is especially in need of someone who will lead him to decisions, because he appears to be intensely averse to making difficult choices—which is the essence of what the president does. His inclination is to step back and conceptualize the choice out of existence, looking reasonable but doing nothing. To overcome this, he will need a chief of staff with a sense of the gravity of the choices the president faces, and one capable of moving the staff to decision, keeping big egos satisfied and calm, and resisting the pressure to be purely reactive to momentary distractions. None of this spells Rahm Emanuel. There is definitely a place for a Rahm Emanuel type of brilliant ruthless shark in a White House staff, but not in the Chief’s office. Not a good first sign.

TPM:

The number one quality in a chief of staff is a recognition that it's not about him -- a quality Rahm "Hamlet" Emanuel isn't exhibiting. He is expressing some serious reluctance about whether he'll accept the position of White House chief of staff: "I do know something about the White House and I have children now. I have a family." The tradeoff for Emanuel is that if he leaves the House of Representatives, he would be effectively giving up on his long-term goal of becoming Speaker.

UPDATE: Rahmbo accepts. Ambers ponders what it means, saying "his management style breeds loyalty," contra the NROite above.

The RNC isn't pleased, but then what realistic pick would have pleased them?

M.J. soothes the netroots.

Sullivan sees good cop, bad cop.

Michael Weiss: Change You Can Motherfucking Believe In.

TNR: Only choice, not just right choice

Megan quirks brow at superficially plausible-yet-contradictory narratives.

WSJ: Glass half-full analysis

More TNR: rounds up foreign reactions (big surprise: Palestinians aren't stoked)

Bill Bennett: Not an inexperienced idealogue

Culture11 thread:

rickm: All evidence suggests that an Obama administration will be a significant improvement from one of the worst Presidents ever.

Joe Carter: All evidence? You mean like putting Rahm Emanuel as the Chief of Staff? Even the Obama-fawning Andrew Sulivan says, “Whenever I’ve come across him, he has seemed like a massive, world class, meshuggena asshole.”

libarbarian: If the crew doesn’t think the XO is an asshole then he’s not doing his job.

Yglesias disagrees with Megan. I think he's right.

Politico: ex-Reagan and Clinton chiefs of staff praise the pick. Sounds good to me.

Obama's primetime infomercial

"American Stories, American Solutions"



A+ for production values. Basically a recap of the DNC, which was a great convention but got forgotten in the wake of Palinmania.

This may remind some people what Obama's candidacy is about.

NYT gives some context.

TNR says money well spent.

AP checks the spin against facts.

Eve Fairbanks has a more sentimental take:

The performance was scripted, so I won't extrapolate too broadly on Obama's actual character from it, but the person he presented himself as tonight was a listener, a gatherer of stories, a reporter, somebody who's interested in the pure, gritty texture of his interlocutors' lives, and not merely in the way their lives happen to illustrate his abstract positions. At one juncture, he gave a shout-out to a woman he'd met in Iowa whose son had recently deployed. The reminiscence didn't even entirely have a point. Its goal was to telegraph that he was listening, even to the random people on the trail who -- unlike, say, Joe the Plumber -- were never destined to become symbols.

Obama never mentioned McCain. But McCain was present, his signature stubborn bullheadedness brought out in the contrast. I hadn't thought about it much before, but McCain really doesn't relish this kind of from-the-trail detail, doesn't relish talking about people he's met, at all. His fundamental pitch is that he's capable of forcing the moral right -- which he's uniquely able to perceive on account of his unusual experiences early in life -- on a morally-benighted world that either doesn't know what right is, like the simple child at Passover, or doesn't desire it (the venal members of his own party, the countries that "don't like us very much," etc).

Obama's opposing pitch, tonight, was that he's a kind of flypaper, absorbing the world and its ideas to arrive, later, at a more aggregate understanding of how to proceed. Actually, in spite of all the celebrity crap and the speech in Berlin and the 100,000+ crowds and the will.i.am hymn and all that "messianism" we've been chewing over for 18 months -- much of which truly rubbed me the wrong way -- his final argument was totally and persuasively humble. It recalled the "Team of Rivals" leadership style. And it ceded no ground to McCain's critique that such a political style, one that depends on listening to others, is weak or naive. The supremely serene Obama was neither on defense nor on offense tonight.

The whole thing came to a head at the very end:

Everybody here's got a story. Everybody here's got a story of a grandparent or great grandparent who worked in a coal mine ... I'm reminded every single day that I'm not a perfect man. I will not be a perfect president ... But I will listen to you when we disagree ... and most importantly, I will open the doors of government and ask you to be involved in your own democracy again.

Delivered over a montage of black and white photos that subtly recalled the imagery of the civil rights era, this part just killed. "I will listen to you when we disagree": Who, after the last eight years, doesn't pine for some of that.

Breakin' up

Palin goes rogue! I sorta predicted this.

Real socialism

Don't miss this hilarious interview with Socialist Party USA's candidate for the presidency.

Stay Classy VIII

Via TNR, in Missouri:

NIXA, Mo. — A Republican official in a southern Missouri county says a flyer showing a picture of Barack Obama and the phrase, "In Ahla We Trust" has been removed from party headquarters.

The flyer that was available at the Christian County Republican office Thursday asserts that Obama is a Muslim, a false claim that has followed the Democratic senator during his presidential campaign. Obama is a Christian.
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In addition to the mispelled "In Ahla We Trust," the fake $100 bill is printed with the words "socialist," "food stamps," and communist symbols.

Head fake in Pennsylvania

TNR reader Rick Rosenthal has a theory:

Both Nate and Noam have tried to make sense of John McCain's odd-seeming decision to turn Pennsylvania into the battleground state. Here, smart reader Rick Rosenthal offers his (decidedly optimistic) theory of what's really going on:

Apparently McCain drew less than 500 people to a rally in suburban PA two days ago. Then he went to Western PA and flubbed the attack lines against John Murtha's comments so that the sound bite was completely incoherent. On Monday he drew crowds of about 2000, then 15 people at an airport rally (yes, that is correct--no zeros), and then his third rally of the day was described as "sparsely attended." (Maybe they should try raffling off a car next time.) In Florida today, McCain is going to a factory in the morning, unable to draw a crowd even in a Republican area of the state. McCain is demanding that he campaign with Palin again, so he can draw a crowd, so they are back together today, wasting valuable candidate time and resources.

Now the Obama campaign is doing a major head fake in PA. They "accidentally" leaked an "internal" poll showing Obama up by only 2 percent in PA. I guarantee you that no such poll exists and that this was done both to motivate volunteers in the state (and maybe elsewhere) and prevent them from getting too complacent and also to sucker the McCain campaign into spending more time there. Ed Rendell has asked Obama to come back and campaign in the state-another major ruse. They know that McCain makes most of the decisions for his campaign and that they can goad him into spending more time in PA by pretending that it is close there. Let's see if Obama actually returns to PA before November 4th, but I sincerely doubt it. They are brilliant.

Conquering race

TNR profiles Axelrod's rise as Obama's message man.

"David just does a Vulcan mind meld with his candidates."

...

"There are very few people who happen to be white who are sensitive and willing to give their all and commit themselves to candidates of color," says Dennis Archer, the former mayor of Detroit and one of the many black mayoral candidates who relied on Axelrod's services. "Some come in with a pejorative sense and treat the candidate in a pejorative way, and you don't have the full, committed respect that David has displayed."

Worth reading in full.

More Powell

Photo: Reagan and his National Security Advisor in 1988

TNR: Powell Endorses Obama. In No Uncertain Terms.

Glenn Greenwald: Colin Powell condemns the ugliness of the Republican Party

From the endorsement today:

I'm also troubled by, not what Sen. McCain says, but what members of the party say, and it is permitted to be said such things as: "Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim." Well, the correct answer is: he is not a Muslim. He's a Christian. He's always been a Christian.

But the really right answer is: What if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer is: No, that's not America. Is there something wrong with some 7-year-old Muslim-American kid believing he or she can be President?

Yet I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion: he's a Muslim, and he might be associated with terrorists. This is not the way we should be doing it in America.

Powell went on to say that he "feels strongly" about that point, and cited a photo essay he saw regarding U.S. troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan which included a photograph of a mother in Arlington National Cemetary with her head on the tombstone of her 20-year-old son, who was awarded a Purple Heart and Bronze Star and was killed in Iraq, and the photograph showed the headstone adorned with the "crescent and star of the Islamic faith," and his name was Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, a Muslim-American (I believe this is the soldier to whom Powell was referring).

There has been much condemnation over the "Obama-is-a-Muslim" line of GOP attack, but almost all of it has been on the ground that the attack is factually false as applied to the Christian Obama, not on the ground that it is a reprehensible and dangerous line of attack even if it were factually true. Powell bears much of the responsibility, and always will, for the horrific U.S. attack on Iraq (one which, just by the way, resulted in the deaths of at least hundreds of thousands of innocent Muslims), but he deserves credit for using the platform he had this morning to go out of his way to make this vital point when doing so was not necessary (and perhaps not even helpful) in advancing the cause of his endorsement of Obama.

That being Muslim or Arab is a mark against someone's character is now so ingrained in our political culture that it is hardly noticed any longer. When John McCain, at that rally in Minnesota last week, sought to chide his supporter for asserting that Obama is an "Arab," McCain did so by pointing out that, in fact, Obama is a "decent family man" -- as though that proves that he's not "an Arab because "decent family man" is the opposite of "Arab":

Later, another supporter told McCain, "I don't trust Obama...He's an Arab."

McCain stood shaking his head as she spoke, then quickly took the microphone from her.

"No, ma'am," he said. "He's a decent, family man, a citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with." '

It's debatable whether McCain actually intended to express the point that way -- whether he intended to imply that the opposite of "Arab" is "decent family man" and "citizen" -- but regardless of McCain's intent, that was how the point was expressed, and it received little attention.

A major enabling factor in convincing the population to support unnecessary and brutal wars -- and to perceive the "need" for endless expansions of federal surveillance and other police powers -- is the demonization of large groups of people both inside and out of the country. The Right's ongoing, intense obsession with demonizing Muslims and Arabs is, for that reason, not only repulsive but also quite destructive. The core of the Republican Party has degenerated into the unrestrained id of its worst impulses, and it was good to see Powell specifically cite (and condemn) those elements as a principal reason why he is turning away from the party he has served for so long and supporting the Democratic nominee.

Colin Powell is my kind of Republican. He would be a much better presidential or vice presidential candidate than McCain and Palin. If the rest of the party were more like him, they'd have my vote. Alas, a Republican like Powell cannot run for a presidential-level office because of the pro-choice litmus issue that's killing the Republican party.

But it's very satisfying to see him come around to endorsing the man who has the potential to be the "Reagan of the Left", something Andrew noticed back in May of last year.

Quote of the day II

Already making the rounds:

"Palin didn't need Greek columns. People react to her because they believe she represents what the Greeks established." --Kathryn Jean Lopez

K-Lo outdoes herself... again.