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John went on MSNBC yesterday afternoon to talk health-care reform. He was paired with John Stirewalt, the Washington Examiner's political editor, who was not only at a disadvantage in the neckwear department but had the misfortune of having to defend the sorry record of the Party of No.

Amato most of all issued a challenge of sorts to the House of Representatives to stand up for itself in the face of the Senate's mishandling of the legislation:

Amato: To say that it's dead is way premature, because they still have to go to conference. And the House has to make a choice: Are they actually a legislative body? Do they have a say in this process? Or is Congress just Joe Lieberman? So really, right now, it's still premature. Liberals are still fighting, progressives are still fighting.

It will be worth seeing whether the House rises to this challenge.

Very interesting - if Congress actually intends to pass this. (Or if the banks let them!) The repeal also removed protections that kept banking and insurance interests separate, which accelerated the Wall St. meltdown:

Dec. 28 (Bloomberg) -- A one-page proposal gaining traction in Congress could turn back the clock on Wall Street 10 years, forcing the breakup of banks, including Citigroup Inc.

Lawmakers in both parties, seeking to prevent future financial crises while soothing public anger over bailouts and bonuses, are turning to an approach that’s both simple and transformative: re-imposing sections of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act that separated commercial and investment banking.

Those walls came down with passage of the Gramm-Leach- Bliley Act of 1999. A proposal to reconstruct them, made by U.S. Senators John McCain and Maria Cantwell on Dec. 16, would prevent deposit-taking banks from underwriting securities, engaging in proprietary trading, selling insurance or owning retail brokerages. The bill could also force the unwinding of deals consummated during the financial crisis, including Bank of America Corp.’s acquisition of Merrill Lynch & Co.

“The impact on Wall Street would be severe,” Wayne Abernathy, an executive vice president at the American Bankers Association, said in a telephone interview.

[...] Splitting banking functions needed for the smooth operation of the economy from riskier securities and trading activities was proposed earlier this year by the Group of Thirty, a nonprofit organization made up of former government officials and bankers, including Paul Volcker, a former Fed chairman and head of the president’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board.

The group said the crisis spread like a contagion from firm to firm, putting both commercial banks and securities companies at risk. To prevent a domino effect, systemically important financial institutions shouldn’t be allowed to engage in proprietary trading that involved “particularly high risks” or “serious conflicts of interest,” the group said.

While that would not bar banks from underwriting securities, as some U.S. lawmakers want, it might force them to shutter or sell trading divisions. The financial system has “failed the test of the marketplace,” Volcker said in January. He added that “it’s been proven that they’re unmanageable, the existing conglomerates.”

.

Illinois Republican Andy Martin is about as slimy as they come. He gleefully accepts credit for starting a nasty smear campaign against President Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign, and continues to ramp up the hate as he runs for a seat in the U.S. Senate:

Andy Martin, a noted conservative dirty trickster, put out a spot on local radio in which he pushes a "solid rumor" that fellow Senatorial aspirant, Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), "is a homosexual."

"I helped expose many of Barack Obama's lies in 2008," the ad goes. "Today, I am fighting for the facts about Mark Kirk. Illinois Republican leader Jack Roeser says there is a 'solid rumor that Kirk is a homosexual.' Roeser suggests that Kirk is part of a Republican Party homosexual club. Lake County Illinois Republican leader Ray True says Kirk has surrounded himself with homosexuals."

The seedy spot seems to take a page out the Karl Rove playbook -- in which allegations of homosexuality are pushed by innuendo and 'simple demands for the truth.' In a statement to a local Illinois station, the Kirk camp vehemently condemned and denied its content.

In a stunning move, the Illinois Republican Party has denounced Martin and his tactics. Maybe Republicans is learning?

The Illinois Republican Party disavows the statements made today by Mr. Andrew Martin in his statewide radio advertisements. His statements today are consistent with his history of bizarre behavior and often times hate-filled speech which has no place in the Illinois Republican Party. Mr. Martin will no longer be recognized as a legitimate Republican Candidate by the Illinois Republican Party. Read on...

Connecting the Dots: The Way We Live Now

Mugsy's Rap Sheet: Predictions for 2010

The Grey Matter: The Sunshine Boys and Their Hot Air Festival

Enduring America: An Open Letter to Charles Krauthammer

Presenting the 2009 Stinque Awards.

"We are living in a post-literate world, and I am a post-literate girl..."

Open Thread below...

I don't know about you, but with half the world on vacation, it just feels like a Saturday night. If you're in a snuggling mood, you can never ever go wrong with Julie London.

What are you listening to? We love sharing here at the Music Club...

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(With each new minute the news got worse)

Five years ago this weekend, the worst earthquake and Tsunami in recorded history devastated a wide area around the Indian Ocean. The initial quake was felt as far away as South Africa - with a magnitude of between 9.1 and 9.3 the initial reports were sketchy. At first the death toll was thought to be in the hundreds and then the thousands. In the end it will probably never be known how many died - the latest estimate, some five years later puts it at over 300,000 people with untold billions of dollars in damage.

Even as reports were coming in and the news was becoming more grim by the minute, there were those who thought it wasn't all that bad. That tourism would come back to the region and everything would be back to normal in "three days".

Here is a group of news broadcasts between December 26 and 27th from the BBC World Service and Thai Radio, giving some hint at what was unfolding before a horrified world during the first 25 hours.

I don't know what to say. The United States not only permits this, we subsidize it - at great personal cost to our country. After all, why were we an Al Qaeda target in the first place?

Yes, we'll tie ourselves in knots to keep a taxpayer dollar from getting anywhere near an abortion, yet we continue to fund the slow starvation of the Palestinians.

Very sad:

One year after Israel launched its three-week offensive in Gaza that killed more than 1,300 Palestinians and damaged or destroyed over 50,000 homes in a campaign aimed at stopping Hamas rocket fire, the survivors are still living in rubble. And it is not for want of money that thousands of residents of the coastal enclave remain homeless this winter: Moved by the plight of Gaza's 1.5 million Palestinians who were already reeling from a two-and-a-half year economic siege imposed by Israel with help from Egypt and the U.S. even before Israel's air and ground assault had begun, international donors earlier this year pledged over $4.5 billion to repair war damages. But that aid has failed to reach Gaza, according to Palestinians and relief agencies who accuse Israel of imposing Kafkaesque rules that bar entry to vital reconstruction materials and items as bizarre as glass, most schoolbooks, honey and family-sized tubs of margarine.

Says Chris Gunness, spokesman for the United Nations' Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), "Because the Israelis are not allowing in any reconstruction material, that $4.5 billion is just a paper figure." With over 80% of Gazans now surviving on humanitarian handouts from UNRWA, Gunness adds, "Palestinians are becoming more desperate and more extreme."

Relief officials estimate that Gaza needs 40,000 tons of cement and 25,000 tons of iron to start repairing the homes, hospitals, schools and shops destroyed during Israel's offensive. But so far, according to GISHA, an Israeli legal rights group, the Israelis have allowed only 19 trucks carrying construction material into Gaza since the war ended last January. "You could say that Israel has bombed Gaza back into the mud age," says UNRWA's Gunness, "because that's what they're building their houses out of now — mud."

Without parts to replace machinery damaged in the war, 97% of Gaza's factories have shut down, raising unemployment to over 43%. With scarce sources of income, many Gazans would probably starve if not for food handouts from the U.N. and other agencies. Over 40,000 Gazans have no electricity, 10,000 have no running water in their homes, and because Israel bans entry of the spare parts needed to run its sewage treatment plant, every day 87 million liters of sewage is dumped into the Mediterranean (which washes up on Israel's beaches, too.)

Although the international community occasionally protests Gaza's ongoing tragedy, so far no real pressure has been applied on Israel to loosen its stranglehold. One senior official in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing government recently confided to a U.N. colleague that Israel's goal for Gaza was: "No development, no prosperity, no humanitarian crisis." The U.N. official interpreted that to mean that Israel would provide Gaza with an intravenous drip of relief to keep its 1.5 million inhabitants alive, but just barely, in hopes that the people would overthrow the Hamas government they voted into power in the last Palestinian elections. But that hasn't happened yet, nor is it likely to; Hamas smuggles arms, money and supplies into Gaza through tunnels from Egypt, and, increasingly, joining the militants has become the only source of a monthly wage for young males. In the meantime, said John Ging, UNRWA's chief officer in Gaza, the Israeli siege is "facilitating the destruction of a civilized society." Before the siege Palestinians in Gaza prided themselves on the excellence of their schools and industriousness of their workforce, many of whom, in more peaceful times, found jobs across the fence in Israel.

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In typical fashion, Bill Kristol is upset that the attempted air plane bomber is 'lawyered up'. I guess he thinks law enforcement would have a better case against him if they just hurried up and tortured the guy. That'll help get him convicted Bill! Idiot.

WALLACE: Well, obviously, we were just plain lucky that this guy's device, explosive device, didn't work.

But, Bill Kristol, what does the Christmas Day terror attack tell you about the continued efforts of our enemies to try to strike the U.S. homeland?

KRISTOL: Well, they are our enemies, and we have to understand that it's a war. And what most worries me -- what most worries me about the reaction to the attack is we're still treating it as a law enforcement matter. The FBI is investigating. He's been arrested. He's been read his rights. In the Washington Post late yesterday afternoon, after the news was already coming out about the Yemen connections and stuff, a law enforcement authority was quoted as saying authorities are operating on the theory that he acted alone.

We so desperately want not to believe that we have to deal with this as a global threat from Al Qaida and that we need to act against the key nexuses of Al Qaida, such as in Yemen, that we hope these guys are just acting alone. But he wasn't acting alone.

[...]

WALLACE: You know, it's interesting, Juan, because it does come out today -- we find out that he had a visa because he was a student in London. I guess the visa had lapsed.

He applied for a new visa in May because he said he was going to take a course. Somebody there checked out and said, "You know what? That course that you're talking about doesn't exist. It's a bogus course." They didn't give him a new visa. And somehow one wonders if that should have been in his file.

WILLIAMS: Well, I think it was in his file. It's how we know it. But I think that the big issue...

WALLACE: Well, I think they know it from the British authorities now.

WILLIAMS: Right, but I think that one of the -- the big issue here is that he went on this list in November, the same time that his father went to the U.S. embassy in Nigeria.

So the question is then at some point should he have been advanced to at least the no-screening list, which is about 14,000 people. And you know what? We don't know. It looks like they're going to ramp up a lot of this now. Sort of the horse is out of the barn, or however you say that phrase, to try to go after people at this level.

But to me, it doesn't seem fair to start, you know, all these political recriminations. Jennifer says the White House is very aware that that kind of criticism is coming. But it seems to me at this point it's a bunch of finger-pointing and a bunch of politics in Washington.

The real thing is we have hardened America as a target. And despite that, what we're seeing is an increase in these so-called -- and here I disagree with Bill Kristol -- lone wolves, people who are...

INGRAHAM: We don't know yet.

WILLIAMS: ... as a result of...

WALLACE: We don't know -- we don't know that.

WILLIAMS: No, I think we do know that.

WALLACE: How do we know that?

INGRAHAM: No, we don't.

WILLIAMS: I think what we know is...

WALLACE: We don't know if he was in Yemen or not. Where did he get...

WILLIAMS: No.

WALLACE: ... the PETN?

WILLIAMS: Clearly -- look.

WALLACE: We don't know any of that.

WILLIAMS: I think what we know at this point -- all that we know is that this guy had not spent any large amount of time with Al Qaida. He may have visited Yemen at...

INGRAHAM: We don't know that.

WILLIAMS: ... one point. That's about it. And he may have been given the PETN and a small amount...

INGRAHAM: Well...

KRISTOL: That's enough time to possibly...

WILLIAMS: OK.

KRISTOL: ... kill -- this is the problem. This is precisely the problem. This guy has been lawyered up. We don't know anything. One reason we don't know anything -- he's not being treated like an enemy combatant. He's not being interrogated. We're not finding out everything we could know about Awlaki.

This is an ongoing attack -- enemy attempt to attack the United States, and we're treating it as a one-off law enforcement case.

Transcript via Lexis Nexis.

Last Sunday Republican Jim DeMint appeared on Fox News and used the alleged Christmas Bomber issue to attack President Obama and the TSA because the agency's screeners might *gasp* unionize.

As it turns out, DeMint was really trying to deflect attention away from the fact that he voted against TSA funding earlier this year and has put a hold on Obama's nominee to head the department - hampering the agency's ability to put leadership in place:

As Republicans seek to put the blame for the widespread perception of ineptness at the Transportation Security Administration on the Obama administration, Democrats are arguing that Republican legislators bear part of the blame and that they're politically vulnerable on the subject.

Perhaps the largest impediment to change at the agency: South Carolina Republican Sen. Jim DeMint has a hold on the appointment of a TSA chief, over his concern that the new administration could allow security screeners to unionize.

DeMint spokesman Wesley Denton responds: Democrats have only themselves to blame for not having a confirmed TSA administrator. President Obama waited 243 days in office before making a nomination and Harry Reid has been too busy trading earmarks for votes on health care to schedule debate on the nominee. This is an important debate because many Americans don't want someone running the TSA who stands ready to give union bosses the power to veto or delay future security measures at our airports. Read on...

Senator DeMint is playing political games with funding and an important appointment to an agency tasked with keeping American travelers safe. You can find his contact information here if you would like to ask him to remove his hold on the TSA appointment so the agency can get down to business.

This really isn't new, although the Pentagon would like to pretend it is. There has always been sexual harassment and rape of male recruits, who are usually targeted during basic training for being "weak" or effeminate. (I have a friend who's a VA counselor, which is how I know about it. Like me, you probably didn't know that VA hospitals offer support services for male rape survivors.)

I bring it up to show this isn't a problem caused by allowing women to serve in combat zones. More to the point, the military culture seems to condone violent sexual impulses by refusing to actively pursue the perpetuators:

A Pentagon-appointed task force, in a report released this month, pointedly criticized the military’s efforts to prevent sexual abuse, citing the “unique stresses” of deployments in places like Camp Taji. “Some military personnel indicated that predators may believe they will not be held accountable for their misconduct during deployment because commanders’ focus on the mission overshadows other concerns,” the report said.

That, among other reasons, is why sexual assault and harassment go unreported far more often than not. “You’re in the middle of a war zone,” Captain White said, reflecting a fear many military women describe of being seen, somehow, as harming the mission.

“So it’s kind of like that one little thing is nothing compared with ‘There is an I.E.D. that went off in this convoy today and three people were injured,’ ” she said, referring to an improvised explosive device.

By the Pentagon’s own estimate, as few as 10 percent of sexual assaults are reported, far lower than the percentage reported in the civilian world. Specialist Erica A. Beck, a mechanic and gunner who served in Diyala Province in Iraq this summer, recalled a sexual proposition she called “inappropriate” during her first tour in the country in 2006-7. “Not necessarily being vulgar, but he, you know, was asking for favors,” she said.

She did not report it, she said, because she feared that her commanders would have reacted harshly — toward her.

“It was harassment,” she said. “And because it was a warrant officer, I didn’t say anything. I was just a private.”

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Only after both chambers of Congress had already voted on the health care reform bills which will cut the deficit, AP on Saturday belatedly looked back at the deeply flawed and unfunded Medicare prescription drug program Republicans jammed through Congress in 2003. 24 hours later, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell appeared on ABC's This Week to add his to the chorus of Republican voices protesting that was then and this is now.

As Reagan Treasury official Bruce Bartlett told the AP, "As far as I am concerned, any Republican who voted for the Medicare drug benefit has no right to criticize anything the Democrats have done in terms of adding to the national debt." In response, Orrin Hatch, who promised a "holy war" to block Democratic success on health care, explained Republican behavior during the Bush years, "it was standard practice not to pay for things." And Olympia Snowe (R-ME), the GOP Senator courted in vain by President Obama, suggested the tale of the 2003 Medicare Rx benefit should be swept under the rug, "dredging up history is not the way to move forward."

But it was Mitch McConnell, who along with his lieutenants Jon Kyl (R-AZ) and Lamar Alexander (R-TN) backed President Bush's Medicare giveaway to the pharmaceutical industry, who turned to misdirection to explain it all away to ABC's Jake Tapper:

TAPPER: Senator, you voted for that Medicare prescription drug benefit, which some say will cost $1 trillion over 10 years and was not offset by revenue or spending cuts.

MCCONNELL: Well, the first thing, you should notice that it came in 30 percent underbudget because of the competitive mechanisms that are involving in extending a prescription drug benefit to seniors. The Democrats criticized it at the time because it was not generous enough. And look, they have gone far beyond any deficit spending discretions -- indiscretions that Republicans might have had. In their first year alone, they ran the deficit up more than the last four years of the Bush administration combined.

As an act of political fraud, McConnell's statement was impressive, if only because of the off-the-charts ratio of deceptions delivered per word spoken. For starters, while this year's projected $1.4 trillion deficit dwarfs the figures from Bush's tenure, McConnell conveniently omitted mentioning that the budget Barack Obama inherited was already $1.2 trillion in the red when he took office in January. But more cynical still is McConnell's whitewashing of the scandal regarding the original estimate of the cost of Medicare drug plan, a forecast the Bush White House withheld from Congress in order to secure its passage.

Here's a look back at the fuzzy math and the dirty politics Mitch McConnell and friends don't want to talk about.

Continue reading »

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Has this man ever found a war he didn't love or a country he didn't mind saber rattling against? From Fox News Sunday, Holy Joe thinks we need to be acting 'preemptively' in Yemen, whatever that means. And of course he agrees with wingnut Pete Hoekstra that we shouldn't close Gitmo.

WALLACE: We’ve got about a minute left and I want to ask you both a quick question about Yemen.

This is not the first time that we have seen possible ties between Yemen and terrorism. We’ve got the U.S. with Obama attacking -- air strikes in Yemen. On the other hand, the Obama administration sent six Guantanamo detainees back to Yemen.

Your thoughts about Yemen and what the U.S. role should be, attitude should be, towards that country?

HOEKSTRA: Yemen is a hot spot. We need to do everything we can to work with that government. We have about 90 Yemenis left in Gitmo. They should stay there. They should not go back to Yemen. If they go back to Yemen, we will very soon find them back on the battlefield going after Americans and other western interests.

WALLACE: And, Senator Lieberman, final 30 seconds?

LIEBERMAN: Well, I agree with Pete on this. I know the president made a promise that he’d close Guantanamo because of what it represented in world opinion.

But today it’s a first-class facility. It’s way above what’s required by the Geneva Convention or our Constitution. It would be a mistake to send these 90 people back to Yemen, because based on the past of what’s happened when we’ve released people from Guantanamo, a certain number of them have gone back into the fight against us.

Yemen now becomes one of the centers of that fight. I was in Yemen in August. And we have a growing presence there, and we have to, of Special Operations, Green Berets, intelligence. We’re working well with the government of President Saleh there.

I leave you with this thought that somebody in our government said to me in the Sana’a, the capital of Yemen. Iraq was yesterday’s war. Afghanistan is today’s war. If we don’t act preemptively, Yemen will be tomorrow’s war. That’s the danger we face.

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December 28, 2009 FOX and Friends

Dave N.: Well, that certainly didn't take long. And as usual, the chief turds -- in this case, the execrable Mike Gallagher -- have come floating to the surface of the punch bowl:

Gallagher: But guys, let's look at the inevitable, the 800-pound gorilla in the room. How about we scrutinize young Middle Eastern men to stop this.

What happens when El Al Airlines, the airline run and operated by the state of Israel, if a Palestinian tries to board that plane? Do you think he goes through an extra degree of security? Well, let's do that with Muslims, let's do that with anybody named Abdul or Mohammad or Ahmed, let's take them and put them in a room and make sure they don't have explosives sewn into their underwear.

...

Brian Kilmeade: Do you think we ought to profile any Muslim?

Gallagher: Yes! I think we ought to do what El Al does. Ask anybody who knows El Al what they do with Palestinians who attempt to board El Al. We should anybody who is a known Muslim and put them in a separate line. Call it the VIP line! Treat them with respect!

Christine Fair: That is so preposterous. One-third of the world's population is Muslim. Trying to treat every single Muslim as a terrorist is simply untenable, it's fearmongering.

Gallagher: Who are you afraid of offending Christine? Al Qaeda?

Memo to Gallagher: Nigeria is not in "the Middle East," and the suspect in this case was not "Middle Eastern" -- he was African.

If you want to profile every "known Muslim," you're going to have a hell of a time in countries like Indonesia and the Philippines, considering that their populations are a mix of the world's religions, and any Muslim who wanted to pose as a member of, say, a Christian church in order to fool authorities could do so with ease.

This just underscores how foolish the whole notion of racial profiling actually is, because when you embark on such policies, they actually make you more vulnerable, not less.

That's because terrorists are not that stupid. If you begin profiling for Middle Eastern men, they will find Indonesian or African or European operatives to perform the same task. If you begin profiling for Muslims, they will find ways to conceal their religious preferences.

We know two things about profiling, especially ethnic, religious, or racial profiling: 1) These policies expose the profilers to being gamed by terrorists; and 2) They are always a tremendous waste of resources and inevitably are counter-productive.

Sounds like your classic conservative solution: Hey, let's just make matters worse!

Andrew Sullivan has been covering the rapidly moving events in Iran for the past week. It is amazing stuff, but you won't see this kind of video on CNN or MSNBC, even though you might think that their cable news channels would be optimally designed for this kind of event. No, let's obsess over the failure of an amateur terrorist-wanna-bee instead.

There will be, no doubt, calls by some politicians that the United States ought to "do something." And in fact, the White House did release a statement condemning the violence by the Iranian government against its own people. If we're lucky, that's all that the US government will do at this time. It's foolish to suggest overt (or covert) support for the Iranian Green Revolution, as the regime in power will use that against them. Similarly, idiots on the right may call for military muscle to be flexed, which would be similarly harmful. The Iranian public is going to have to work this out for themselves, and I hope that they'll be successful in resolving this crisis. This is not a call for inaction, but as Prof Walt observes, it is time to think about a) what we do if the Green Movement succeeds, b) what we do if it fails, and c) how to keep hawks in the United States and Israel from making things worse.

I can't stop from observing a bit of irony here. Bush 43 invades Iraq to create a "keystone democracy" for the rest of the Middle East to emulate, and instead creates a government that leans more toward the practices of the current Iranian government. Now, with this revolution in Iran, there may be a fundamental shift of power to a more Western-friendly government than the one that the US government emplaced in Iraq. You couldn't have made up a story like this that anyone would have believed ten years ago.