You know, between the crooks, the politicians and the payoffs, this issue shouldn't be a third rail anymore. Democrats need to decide which we can afford: Shoveling trillions of dollars into the military-industrial-congressional complex (and the pockets of defense donors), or rebuilding this country's economic and social infrastructure. David Sirota:

In 2000, the Pentagon admitted it has lost -- yes, lost -- $2.3 trillion. In 2003, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that a subsequent Department of Defense study said it was only $1 trillion. To put such numbers in perspective, contemplate what those sums could finance. $1 trillion, for instance, could pay the total cost of universal healthcare for the long haul. $2.3 trillion would cover universal healthcare plus the bank bailout plus the stimulus package.

Obviously -- obviously! -- these points are no cause for alarm and certainly no cause for defense spending reductions, right? All they must prove is that the archconservative Cato Institute, William Randolph Hearst's newspaper chain, National Journal employees and Pentagon officials are secretly America-hating liberals. And -- obviously! -- so are two of the most aggressive neoconservative hawks ever to hold government office, Sen. John McCain and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. After all, they’re the ones who issued those scathing statements about wasteful defense spending in the pop quiz above. That means they’re actually terrorist-appeasing lefties, right?

Really, how could anyone other than traitorous communists see the data and then consider backing the mildest Pentagon spending cuts? I mean, come on -- in a country whose paranoid conservative movement now makes a dead-serious ideology out of Stephen Colbert wisecracks, how dare any red-blooded American even think of pondering basic budgetary facts?

Of course here's a typical conservative reaction:

Lost in all the typical liberal hyperventilating over increased defense spending during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is just how low current defense spending compared to the last 45 years.

Oh, well then! Quit yer griping!

8:09 EST: Dodd, presiding over the Senate, said the motion passed, smattering of applause. Motion is agreed to. Clerk is now reporting the bill and amendment.

And that's it for the night. Debate will begin after Thanksgiving, plus amendments, then moving on to the final cloture motion and a final vote.

8:04 EST: Cloture passes 60-39. Debate will start after Thanksgiving.

7:57 EST: Voting continuing.

7:56 EST: Clerk reading cloture motion.

The question is: Is it the sense of the Senate that debate on the motion to proceed shall be brought to a close. Clerk is calling the roll.

Voting now.

7:55 EST: Vote starting 5 minutes early.

7:54 EST: Absence of a quorum noted by Reid, and the roll is being called. Vote coming soon!

7:44 EST: The American people want us to start over. All it would take is just one on the other side of the aisle to not end the debate, but change the debate.

And he's yielded.

Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) is up.

My friend, the minority leader, has had since Wednesday to read the bill. Obviously he hasn't done so.

We debate the right to live free of disease and death by giving health care for all. The road has started many times, never been completed. Merged bills have never been done before. We couldn't have got here without the help of many Senators.

As a matter of principle, that I respect, the senior Senator from Arkansas insisted we have time to read the bill. All Senators have now had ample time. That is why we are voting tonight.

I invite Republicans to join the right side of history. Around dining room tables, families are agonizing over what to sacrifice next to afford health care. Employers are wondering whether they can afford to provide health care. Americans need reform.

Debate is constant, but the only place where silence is evened considered is the Senate. Now, finally, we have the opportunity to bring this great deliberation to this body. That and nothing more is what this vote does.

A yes vote says this issue is important and the Senate should at least talk about it.

Some Republicans would like Americans to think voting to debate the bill is voting to pass the bill. Tonight's vote is only the beginning of debate. It's clear Republicans have no problem talking about health care on TV, at town hall meetings, on the radio, yet now that we have the legislation to debate, to amend, to build on, will they refuse to debate?

If we refuse to let the Senate do its job, what are we doing here? What do we fear? And who's voice to you speak for? In who's interest do you vote?

Certainly debating reform can't be more difficult than American deciding to pay their mortgage or medical bills. It can't be more upsetting than having an insurance company take away your coverage when you need it the most.

Kennedy once said let us not be afraid of debate or discussion, let us encourage it.

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In one of my past incarnations, I used to be a medical fraud investigator. My job was to catch medical providers and clinic operators who were ripping off insurance companies -- mostly by billing for unnecessary and expensive treatments for fabricated car accident injuries.

The vast majority of the cases I investigated were in the state of New Jersey, where insurance laws meant to protect consumers actually make it a magnet for insurance fraud. There were scam artists from states as far away as Massachusetts who commuted to clinics in NJ after being shut down, it was that easy - and that lucrative.

The scam was usually run in poor urban areas. Personal injury lawyers hired people to drive vans around town, and if there was a fender bender, the driver would scoop up the "victims," take them to the lawyer to sign a contract, and then drive them to the crooked chiropractic clinic.

When you'd look at the patient files (as a representative of the insurance company, I had the right to see the patient files), you'd see rubber-stamping. Every patient had the exact same diagnosis, every patient got the exact same treatment - i.e., just about anything the chiro could bill. Some of them had their secretaries do the "treatments."

I remember one of the crooked chiros (he had a chain, they hardly ever had just one office) had all the people who worked for him snowed. One of his former employees described him to me as "a saint" who really didn't care about money - "I worked for him for five years, and he didn't make enough to give me a raise," she told me.

"Would you be surprised if I told you your doctor was stopped carrying three million dollars in cash to the Cayman Islands?" I told her. "Because he was." (These crooks invariably cultivated flirtations and even relationships with the women who worked for them to keep them from looking too closely.)

You should have seen the look on her face.

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It could have been "The Clash of the Titans," but Howard Dean was, as usual, a class act when he appeared this morning on This Week with Newt Gingrich to talk about health-care reform. If President Obama had put him in charge of selling the health reform effort, we probably wouldn't be having all these problems right now:

DEAN:I think putting $60 billion a year into the health insurance industry is insane. I really do.

And so you want a public option. Look, we've -- what the president wants to do is very straightforward. Sixty -- or roughly sixty -- fifty or sixty million Americans have what Newt has called socialized medicine or government-run health care. They're over -- over 65. They're Medicare. That's what Medicare is.

Now, what Obama is essentially saying is, "Let's give the choice of getting into a system like that or staying with what they have to the American people."

So if you're voting against having a public option, what you're voting against is something that 72 percent of Americans in two polls want, which is the choice. Most of them aren't going to sign up for the public option, but they think they should have the choice.

Why shouldn't they have the choice? Why should the health insurance companies have that choice?

STEPHANOPOULOS: What's the answer to that question?

GINGRICH: Well, first of all, the government option we're talking about -- let's look at where government runs the health system entirely. The Indian Health Service is a disaster. Medicaid is so corrupt and run so badly -- we just published a book at the Center for Health Transformation called "Stop Paying the Crooks," because our estimate is that government fraud between Medicare and Medicaid is between $70 billion and $120 billion a year.

Hey Newt, do you suppose - bear with me a minute here - do you think the Indian Health Service problems just might come from the deep and crippling cuts inflicted on them by people like you and your buddies? Nah, never mind.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Veterans care works pretty well.

GINGRICH: Veterans care is the one system that actually works reasonably well. But the others do not. I mean, Medicare is basically a private system with a government funding.

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I wrote a short piece last week in which I tried to remind Congress that we need to have hearings on the financial meltdown for obvious reasons:

Just a reminder.

I know we've asked for a Truth Commission on torture over and over again, but what about the financial catastrophe the world just experienced? When will hearings be held to uncover the facts that led us and the world to financial ruin? I know we have many basic facts of what happened, but when will an actual hearing take place? If nothing is officially uncovered then how can we stop another one from taking place?

Bill Scher of CFAF heard a little birdy and it sounds quite promising on that front now:

Word is circulating in Washington that members for the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission will be named this week.

The commission is supposed to resemble the 1930s Pecora commission that dug into the culprits behind the Great Depression and laid the groundwork for major bank reform. But that will only be true if the commission is run by aggressive seekers of truth, independent of the financial industry, willing to use their subpoena power, knowledgeable enough to have warned us of impeding crisis in the first place despite market cheerleading from the political and media establishments.
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Speculation from Reuters last week on who might be named was not terribly encouraging, though most of the names floated clearly were coming from conservative circles, as Republican leaders will pick four of the 10 members.

Cut...OK, here's where we come in. Updated: No members of Congress can be on the commission, but
I think an Alan Grayson or Henry Waxman type would be good choices for the commission. . We do need a panel of brilliant minds that has real progressive representation, but what we also need are people that have an appreciation for the "dramatic." That is, they should know how to ask questions with their allotted time in such a way that it will be highly informative and entertaining at the same time. These are the moments that can really educate Americans, but the commission needs members that understand how to use their valuable time---not to pontificate---but to educate and uncover. And it needs to be riveting while getting to the truth of this mess.

Please ask Speaker Pelosi and Harry Reid to make sure they put together a great panel. Nancy was almost scheduled to do a live chat on C&L last week, but because of my family issues, we are rescheduling. However, I think if we let her know how strongly we feel about the new Pecora Commission and ensuring that progressives are solidly represented, she'll come through.

Here's her contact info.

Harry Reid is another story. Here's Reid's office info, so please let him know too.

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Click the above image to go to the straw poll page. I don't know about you, buy I don't think the Democratic party should be handing the keys to the kingdom over to Arlen Specter when he's started off by shooting down important health care and union legislation. We'll see where he goes from here. And it also dictates to the people who and where some one gets a golden parachute into the party as well.
I've joined up with several other bloggers and the PCCC to hear what you have to say about this issue.

The poll, which will remain open for five days, asks whether a "Draft Sestak" movement should be created to take on Specter. The possibility of a Sestak run has been lighting up left-leaning blogs and provoking debate among Pennsylvania Democrats ever since Specter changed his party affiliation last week.

For his part, Sestak appears to be inching closer toward jumping into the race, and on Tuesday said on Fox News Radio that Specter’s switch was at least part of the reason. “I think that even before Arlen got in I hadn’t made a final decision yet, and I haven’t,” Sestak said. “But I got to tell you that I’m a little bit more concerned now than I was then.”
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Adam Green, a co-founder of the five-month-old organization, said that his group’s goal was to “call the question on a primary in general and whether Sestak’s the candidate in particular.”

“Our hope is that this will have an impact on the political environment in which Joe Sestak makes his decision and in which the larger political world makes their evaluation,” Green said. “If it turns out that it’s 50-50, that would be very informative. If it’s 90-10 in favor of Sestak, that would be very informative too.”

You can also get to the poll by clicking here.

Digby says:

I back this effort. At this point, we don't know how the netroots feel about Sestak or Arlen and it seems like something we should find out. My personal opinion is that the end run the Party made in getting Specter to sign on was undemocratic and antithetical to the bottom-up democracy Obama ran on.

The party does not get to promise people that they will not be primaried, period. The do not choose our leaders for us. If we had wanted that we would have kept the smoke filled rooms. It is insulting that they would promise such a thing to a Republican apostate (even if it's just a wink and nod that Obama will campaign for him in the primary) particularly one who promptly goes on TV and declares that he is not a loyal Democrat and never will be.

Rachel Maddow from last week, in a clip that explains exactly why I don't get the whole sex/texting trend among the young people today.

On a related topic, The Village Voice has a lovely collection of MP3's of Bill O'Reilly reading icky sex passages from his 1989 crime novel. As the former mayor of Detroit would "say," LOL!

Open thread below....

ONE THIRD of all the weapons procured for the Afghan security forces are missing and can be presumed sold onto the black market. Worth roughly $40 million at wholesale cost (and weighing in excess of 200 tons) to the Pentagon, would anyone like to guess at the black market value? The report has been compiled by congressional auditors, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO).

It found that, in the four years up to June 2008, the US military failed to keep complete records on some 222,000 weapons entering the country.

The report will be discussed in the US House of Representatives on Thursday.

It states that weapons supplied by the US to the Afghan military "are at serious risk of theft or loss".

The report says:

• US military officials failed to keep proper records on about 87,000 rifles, pistols, mortars and other weapons sent to Afghanistan between December 2004 and June 2008 - about a third of all the weapons sent
• There was a similar lack of management of a further 135,000 light weapons donated to Afghan forces via the US military by 21 countries
• The military failed even to record the serial numbers of some 46,000 weapons, making it impossible to confirm receipt of weapons or identify any which had fallen into the hands of militants
• The serial numbers of 41,000 weapons were recorded, but US military officials still had no idea where they were

"Lapses in accountability occurred throughout the supply chain," concludes the report, which is due to be discussed on Thursday at a panel hearing of a House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee.

In response, the Pentagon agreed that it needed more people to help train the Afghanistan government to track the weapons, the AP news agency reported.

Which is to say the Pentagon didn't figure that much out after the first time this happened.

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Who could have predicted that the Federal Reserve would abuse its authority by giving away over $2 trillion in "emergency loans" and then refuse to disclose the recipients of those loans when faced with a FOIA request by Bloomberg?

Bloomberg:

The Federal Reserve refused a request by Bloomberg News to disclose the recipients of more than $2 trillion of emergency loans from U.S. taxpayers and the assets the central bank is accepting as collateral.

Bloomberg filed suit Nov. 7 under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act requesting details about the terms of 11 Fed lending programs, most created during the deepest financial crisis since the Great Depression.

The Fed responded Dec. 8, saying it’s allowed to withhold internal memos as well as information about trade secrets and commercial information. The institution confirmed that a records search found 231 pages of documents pertaining to some of the requests.

“If they told us what they held, we would know the potential losses that the government may take and that’s what they don’t want us to know,” said Carlos Mendez, a senior managing director at New York-based ICP Capital LLC, which oversees $22 billion in assets.

Hmmm... I wonder why they would want to hide from the public who is getting all that money? It's sometimes hard to wrap your head around that huge sum of money, but when all is said and done, that is our money. We deserve to know who's getting it.

Raffaello Follieri, perhaps most famous for being Anne Hathaway's ex-boyfriend, has been sentenced to four and a half years in prison this Friday after being pleading guilty to one count of conspiring to commit wire fraud, eight counts of wire fraud and five counts of money laundering.

Raffaello Follieri, 30, pleaded guilty in September to fraudulently obtaining US$2.4 million by leading investors to believe he had Vatican connections that enabled him to buy the Roman Catholic Church's unwanted US properties at a discount.

..."I have dishonored my family name and embarrassed the church I love," Follieri told Judge John Koeltl in US District Court in Manhattan in a statement in Italian that was translated into English.

"I will never be able to wash away the stain. I hope that someday those hurt by my actions will forgive me," Follieri said before the judge handed down the sentence.

He'll be deported after serving his sentence.

Follieri had good connections to both McCain and Rick Davis, for whom he had promised to "deliver Catholic votes", and was the host of John McCain's 70th birthday party, celebrated onboard the yacht of another dodgy character - a Russian oligarch who pretty much owns the tiny state of Montenegro.

In mid-September The Nation's website published a photo of McCain celebrating his seventieth birthday in Montenegro in August 2006 at a yacht party hosted by convicted Italian felon Raffaello Follieri and his movie-star girlfriend Anne Hathaway. On the same day one of the largest mega-yachts in the world, the Queen K, was moored in the same bay of Kotor. This was where the real party was. The owner of the Queen K was known as "Putin's oligarch": Oleg Deripaska, controlling shareholder of the Russian aluminum giant RusAl, currently listed as the ninth-richest man in the world, with a rap sheet as abundant as his wealth. By mid-2005 Deripaska had already virtually taken control of Montenegro's economy by snapping up its aluminum plant, KAP--which accounts for up to 40 percent of the country's GDP and some 80 percent of its export earnings--in a nontransparent privatization tender strongly criticized by NGO watchdogs, Montenegrin politicians and journalists. The Nation has learned that Deripaska told one of his closest associates that he bought the plant "because Putin encouraged him to do it." The reason: "the Kremlin wanted an area of influence in the Mediterranean."

Deripaska is himself involved in some political scandal right now - involving both a high level Labour Party cabinet minister, Lord Peter Mandelson who was one of Tony Blair's closest advisors and the current shadow chancellor, the Conservative Party's George Osborne. Both McCain and his campaign manager, Rick Davis have dubious ties to Deripaska too. Other McCain campaign advisers, lobbyists to a man, have their own shady connections.

John McCain keeps saying he's a reformer and a maverick with no time for the incestuous and often shady dealings of the K Street crowd - but his actions speak louder than his words.

Crossposted from Newshoggers

    Former CIA third in command and indicted Cunningham bribery scandal co-conspirator Kyle "Dusty" Foggo is threatening to out agents, secret programs and Bush administration skeletons in an attempt to ward of a possible jail sentence on 30 counts of fraud, conspiracy and money laundering.

Prosecutors say Foggo has threatened "to expose the cover of virtually every CIA employee with whom he interacted and to divulge to the world some of our country's most sensitive programs - even though this information has absolutely nothing to do with the charges he faces."

Prosecutors also allege his lawyers are seeking to introduce classified evidence to "portray Foggo as a hero engaged in actions necessary to protect the public from terrorist acts" to gain sympathy from jurors.

Foggo's efforts to disclose classified information are "a thinly disguised attempt to twist this straightforward case into a referendum on the global war on terror," wrote prosecutors Valerie Chu, Jason Forge and Phillip L.B. Halpern in a court motion filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Alexandria.

The government wants U.S. District Judge James Cacheris to hold a closed hearing on whether the information is admissible at trial and if it is relevant to Foggo's case.

Desperate much? It's amusing to see the Bush administration panic on this one - especially after all their own thinly disguised attempts to make every issue they could think of a "a referendum on the global war on terror". "Dusty" knows where the bodies are buried on everything from Negroponte's South American death squads to Iraq procurement corruption and if he starts singing who knows where it could end.

But what's truly revealing is the way Foggo only believes in national security up until the point where its his own neck on the line. How Republican of him.

So much for fighting for reform, eh? Sarah Palin built her political capital in Alaska by throwing in with none other than Ted Stevens

Palin's name is listed on 2003 incorporation papers of the "Ted Stevens Excellence in Public Service, Inc.," a 527 group that could raise unlimited funds from corporate donors. The group was designed to serve as a political boot camp for Republican women in the state. She served as one of three directors until June 2005, when her name was replaced on state filings.

Palin's relationship with Alaska's senior senator may be one of the more complicated aspects of her new position as Sen. John McCain's running mate; Stevens was indicted in July 2008 on seven counts of corruption.

Palin, an anti-corruption crusader in Alaska, had called on Stevens to be open about the issues behind the investigation. But she also held a joint news conference with him in July, before he was indicted, to make clear she had not abandoned him politically.

Stevens had been helpful to Palin during her run for governor, swooping in with a last moment endorsement. And the two filmed a campaign commercial together to highlight Stevens's endorsement of Palin during the 2006 race.

Shortly after Palin was announced as McCain's vice presidential pick, the ad was removed from her gubernatorial campaign web site. It remains available on YouTube.

And here's that ad, courtesy of TPM, who saved it for posterity.

VECO, the company that gave "gifts" to Stevens, has ties to Palin too according to Think Progress, contributing 10 percent of her total campaign fund when she ran for lieutenant governor in 2002.

Corruption you can believe in!

What's remarkable is that people like Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) are going around repeatedly spouting talking points like "Gov. Palin took on Ted Stevens. If she can take him on, she can take on the Russians. Heh." And the question arises - are they really that dishonest or are they simply ignorant, digging themselves deeper and deeper into holes because of the worst-vetted candidate ever?

    In a remarkable development at the High Court in London, an email from a senior US State Dept. official has been revealed, apparently threatening to curb co-operation with Britain on international intelligence sharing if details on a detainees interrogation are revealed. Lawyers for Binyam Mohamed, held at Gitmo, have taken legal action in the UK to force the release of details which, they say, will prove Mohamed was ilegally abducted and tortured into a confession. Mohamed claims that his torture included having his penis cut with a razor blade by Moroccan proxies for the US.

In an email to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, which was sent on to the court, Stephen Mathias, a legal adviser to the US state department, said that the disclosure of information would cause "serious and lasting damage to the US-UK intelligence-sharing relationship and thus the national security of the UK, and the aggressive and unprecedented intervention in the apparently functioning adjudicatory processes of a longtime ally of the UK, in contravention of well-established principles of international comity."

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  Oil exports from the U.S. are currently running at 1.8 million barrels a day - exports that enrich Big Oil but don't do a thing to reduce prices at the pumps. Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), Chairman of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming is asking Bush to "keep our oil".

.....at the current export rate, by the time the first barrel of oil could be produced from increased offshore drilling, America would have already exported the equivalent of nearly 40 percent of the oil that is projected to lie beneath protected areas offshore.

And that's the Oil Shuffle, as brought to you by George Bush, John McCain and oil company campaign donations.

Gareth Porter today examines the deeply flawed relationship between Musharraf of Pakistan and the Bush administration - one that sacrificed US national security for the mere appearance of alliance.

The problem faced by the Bush administration when it came into office was that the Pakistani military, over which Musharraf presided, was the real terrorist nexus with the Taliban and al Qaeda. As Bruce Riedel, National Security Council (NSC) senior director for South Asia in the Bill Clinton administration, who stayed on the NSC staff under the Bush administration, observed in an interview with this writer last September, al Qaeda "was a creation of the jihadist culture of the Pakistani army".

If there was a state sponsor of al Qaeda, Riedel said, it was the Pakistani military, acting through its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Directorate.

... For the next few years, Musharraf played a complicated game. The CIA was allowed to operate in Pakistan's border provinces to pursue al Qaeda operatives, but only as long as they had ISI units accompanying them. That restricted their ability to gather intelligence in the northwest frontier. At the same time, ISI was allowing Taliban and al Qaeda leaders to operate freely in the tribal areas and even in Karachi.

The Bush administration also gave Musharraf and the military regime a free ride on the A. Q. Khan network's selling of nuclear technology to Libya and Iran, even though there was plenty of evidence that the generals had been fully aware of and supported Khan's activities.

Journalists Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins wrote in their book "The Nuclear Jihadist" that one retired general who had worked with Khan told them there was no question that Khan had acted with the full knowledge of the military leadership. "Of course the military knew," the general said. "They helped him."

But the Bush administration chose to help Musharraf cover up that inconvenient fact.

I hope all the Bush-cheerleaders who backed Musharraf simply because Bush called the ex-dictator a bulwark against terrorism are thoroughly ashamed of their support for such an amazingly dangerous lie. The motive for that cover up seems to have been providing an appearance of progress in the War on Terror rather than an actuality. Style over substance. But Musharraf's Pakistan gave nuclear know-how to Iran, North Korea and Libya as well as providing safe haven to myriad of Islamic extremist terrorist groups.

Still, I really don't expect the situation under Zardari, a man who is legendary for his corruption in a land of incredibly corrupt politicians, to improve any. Which mounts a serious challenge to the foreign policy plans of both the presidential candidates. Does either have the courage to call a spade a spade and to call Pakistan a major sponsor of terrorism?