By min | March 31, 2008, 2:09 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link

Mukasey, are you sure that's the argument you want to make?

Mukasey:

Officials "shouldn't need a warrant when somebody with a phone in Iraq picks up a phone and calls somebody in the United States because that's the call that we may really want to know about. And before 9/11, that's the call that we didn't know about. We knew that there has been a call from someplace that was known to be a safe house in Afghanistan and we knew that it came to the United States. We didn't know precisely where it went."

At that point in his answer, Mr. Mukasey grimaced, swallowed hard, and seemed to tear up as he reflected on the weaknesses in America's anti-terrorism strategy prior to the 2001 attacks. "We got three thousand. . . . We've got three thousand people who went to work that day and didn't come home to show for that," he said, struggling to maintain his composure.

Glenn Greenwald responds:

These are multiple falsehoods here, and independently, this whole claim makes no sense. There is also a pretty startling new revelation here about the Bush administration's pre-9/11 failure that requires a good amount of attention.

Even under the "old" FISA, no warrants are required where the targeted person is outside the U.S. (Afghanistan) and calls into the U.S. Thus, if it's really true, as Mukasey now claims, that the Bush administration knew about a Terrorist in an Afghan safe house making Terrorist-planning calls into the U.S., then they could have -- and should have -- eavesdropped on that call and didn't need a warrant to do so. So why didn't they? Mukasey's new claim that FISA's warrant requirements prevented discovery of the 9/11 attacks and caused the deaths of 3,000 Americans is disgusting and reckless, because it's all based on the lie that FISA required a warrant for targeting the "Afghan safe house." It just didn't. Nor does the House FISA bill require individual warrants when targeting a non-U.S. person outside the U.S.

Independently, even if there had been a warrant requirement for that call -- and there unquestionably was not -- why didn't the Bush administration obtain a FISA warrant to listen in on 9/11-planning calls from this "safe house"? Independently, why didn't the administration invoke FISA's 72-hour emergency warrantless window to listen in on those calls? If what Muskasey said this week is true -- and that's a big "if" -- his revelation about this Afghan call that the administration knew about but didn't intercept really amounts to one of the most potent indictments yet about the Bush administration's failure to detect the plot in action. Contrary to his false claims, FISA -- for multiple reasons -- did not prevent eavesdropping on that call.

Michael Mukasey can cry all he wants about the 9/11 attacks. But neither he nor the rest of the Bush administration are the proprietors of those attacks. There were millions of New Yorkers in Manhattan on 9/11 other than Michael Mukasey, who lived and worked there for a long time. Neither Mike Mukasey nor his tearful pleas for unchecked government surveillance power and the erosion of the rule of law are representative of them.

To the contrary, the substantial majority of New Yorkers -- and huge majorities of Manhattanites -- vehemently reject the Bush/Cheney agenda of dismantling our constitutional framework and basic safeguards in the name of these sorts of fear-mongering and manipulative appeals. Unlike Mukasey and other Bush followers, most New Yorkers have ceased quivering in fear long ago -- if they ever did -- and have had their resolve to defend our basic constitutional liberties strengthened, not obliterated, as a result of the 9/11 attack and the subsequent, self-serving exploitation of it by Mukasey's White House bosses. And under no circumstances do Mukasey's tears provide license for this tidal wave of lies in defense of presidential lawlessness, from our nation's highest "law enforcement officer."

By fnord12 | March 31, 2008, 9:49 AM | Liberal Outrage | Link

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To his credit??!??

Quoted on Digby:

His most famous pander came in 2000, when, after earlier denouncing the Confederate flag as a "symbol of racism," he embraced it as "a symbol of heritage." To his credit, Mr. McCain later acknowledged, "I feared that if I answered honestly I could not win the South Carolina primary, so I chose to compromise my principles."

Our media is sooooo broken. Go read that Digy post.

By fnord12 | March 31, 2008, 9:30 AM | Liberal Outrage | Link

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Slip-throughs

Check out these interviews by Charlie Rose and Peter Jennings, where "off message" Iraqis somehow wound up being interviewed. What's amazing is how shocked Rose and Jennings seemed to be that they somehow wound up interviewing these people.

By fnord12 | March 26, 2008, 1:44 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link

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Predictable

Atrios:

Social Security trustees report comes out today. Get prepared for usual round of IT'S GOING BANKRUPT AND WE'LL HAVE TO CUT THEIR BENEFITS UNLESS WE CUT THEIR BENEFITS.

...and here it is. Quick glance says no substantial change from last year's projections. On to dig through and see what's up with the assumptions...

CNN:

Social Security looms for next president

The Social Security trustees issued their annual report Tuesday, and it showed how soon the system will run into trouble.

The problem is well-known: Funded by taxes on workers' wages, the Social Security system currently takes in more funds than it has promised to pay out to retirees. And the federal government has been borrowing those surplus funds over the years. But that surplus is shrinking, and eventually the system won't be able to pay out all of the promised benefits.

The trustees estimate that by 2017, the funds going in to Social Security will be less than the benefits promised.

This is the same half-baked information we've been hearing for a while. The truth, as they obscurely refer to further down in the article, is that if we do absolutely nothing, the SS office will stop being able to make 100% of payouts in 2041 (it will at that point be able to pay out at 80%). The obvious and simple solution to this is to raise the income cap at which SS taxes are paid (currently you don't pay for SS taxes over about $100,000 of your salary, assuming you make that much). This should be done (and i'd like to see a push to actually expand SS benefits) but there is certainly no crisis.

If we want to worry about potentially unsolvent government programs, we can look at Medicare, but the real issue here is that there is a strong push to make people think that their Social Security benefits won't be there for them when they retire. Once people are convinced that SS is in trouble, they can push to privatize the benefit, which means putting it in the hands of the people who recently invested all of their money in worthless mortgages.

By fnord12 | March 26, 2008, 1:26 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link

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I know a solution to this problem

Link:

A federal appeals court Tuesday struck down a state law requiring airlines to give food, water, clean toilets and fresh air to passengers stuck in delayed planes, saying the measure was well-intentioned but stepped on federal authority.

Should take about 2 hours of our federal government's time to take the language of NY's law and turn it into a federal law, and i can't imagine it'd be a terribly unpopular law to pass.

You do have to admire the balls of the airline industry in challenging a law that requires them to provide food, water, toilets, and air to people trapped on their planes.

By fnord12 | March 25, 2008, 6:25 PM | Liberal Outrage | Comments (1)| Link

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Master of analogies

Dick Cheney, whose intial response to the fact that the public is at this point heavily against the Iraqi invasion was "So?", has now clarified:

Just like, 30 years ago, everyone was against President Ford's decision to pardon Nixon's criminal behavior, but now they are apparently in favor of it, 30 years from now everyone will approve of the Bush's decisions in Iraq.

Thirty years later, nearly everybody would say it is exactly the right thing to do, that if he'd paid attention at the time to the polls he never would have done that. But he demonstrated, I think, great courage and great foresight, and the country was better off for what Jerry Ford did that day. And 30 years later, everybody recognized it.

And I have the same strong conviction the issues we're dealing with today -- the global war on terror, the war in Afghanistan and Iraq -- that all of the tough calls the president has had to make, that 30 years from now it will be clear that he made the right decisions, and that the effort we mounted was the right one, and that if we had listened to the polls, we would have gotten it wrong.

By fnord12 | March 25, 2008, 12:03 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link

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UPDATED: As our economy collapses, put the guy who let it happen in charge.

Can you imagine that Hillary Clinton is proposing putting Alan Greenspan in charge of fixing our mortgage crisis? I'm all for forcing the man into doing community service for the rest of his life, but how about picking up litter on the sides of the highways instead of running an agency where his incompetence can once again screw us over.

This may be pushing it a bit too much (i tend to be attracted to the most apocalyptic doomsayers), but we're going to be in big trouble for the next few years, and if the best our presidential candidates have in mind is handing the keys back to the people who got us here, things will be bad.

Update:

Link

So the Daily News asked, why Greenspan, that wasn't he off-base on the housing bubble, and here was her response:

"Not only that, but the Fed didn't act while he was there. But he has a calming influence still to this day on Wall Street -- don't ask me why because I never understand what he's saying -- but nevertheless people respond to that Delphic oracle approach."

Awesome. Do any of our presidential candidates understand economics?

By fnord12 | March 24, 2008, 3:07 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link

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It ain't me, babe

Tom Tomorrow's comic is related to this feature in Slate where "liberal" hawks explain their rational in supporting the Iraq invasion five years ago. Tim Noah's article is the best of those, since he actually admits he was wrong and correctly wonders why the people who got it so wrong five years ago are still the ones with prominent columns and frequent television appearances. The same should apply on economic news - all the economists who discounted the warnings about the housing bubble should no longer be the go-to experts for journalists writing articles on the economy, and yet the same people who didn't predict the bubble are the ones who are now being asked what the impact will be and how long the recession will last.

By fnord12 | March 24, 2008, 12:25 PM | Comics & Liberal Outrage | Link

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Chris Wallace chides fellow Fox anchors over Obama 'coverage'

I'm a little suspicious of the motives (Wallace is no angel, he's been agitating for Obama to come on his show for a long while now, and why would Fox's producers allow this sort of infighting to happen on the air?), but it's still good and interesting to see this message reach Fox viewers. And the other anchors sure don't look happy.

By fnord12 | March 21, 2008, 3:45 PM | Liberal Outrage | Comments (2)| Link

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Nice Job, Guys

Link:

In fact, Gov. David Paterson, in an extraordinary news conference on Tuesday, his first full day on the job after taking over from Spitzer, acknowledged he had had extramarital affairs with a number of women while he was a state senator. At night, legislators, young staffers, younger interns, lobbyists and reporters mix at two or three bars just blocks from the Capitol. And there are numerous receptions, campaign stops and caucuses where lawmakers, straight and gay alike, often have many opportunities for a hookup.

Up until just a few years ago, lawmakers would go "window shopping" for interns at the start of every legislative session. In a practice that went on for decades, the interns would be corraled in a Capitol newsstand so that legislators could pick their office help based on their looks, not their resumes.

The hanky-panky even has its own lexicon: There's the "Bear Mountain Compact," which says that what goes on north of the state park just outside New York City stays there. Lobbyists, staffers and reporters who seek to enhance their influence by bedding powerful lawmakers are known as "big game hunters." And the men who sleep with the women lawmakers are "boy toys."

That'll go a long way towards convincing the rest of the country that "those east coast libruls" aren't a bunch of sexual deviants.

By fnord12 | March 21, 2008, 9:31 AM | Liberal Outrage | Comments (3)| Link

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Things are looking ugly in Tibet

Link

By fnord12 | March 20, 2008, 5:14 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link

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Oh my god, we're a third world country

You've seen this video a million times, but it usually takes place in Bangladesh or Zambia or somewhere not America.

By fnord12 | March 19, 2008, 10:08 AM | Liberal Outrage | Link

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And guess which party is going to be left holding the bag?

Krugman:

What if this initiative fails? I'm sure that Mr. Bernanke and his colleagues are frantically considering other actions that they can take, but there's only so much the Fed - whose resources are limited, and whose mandate doesn't extend to rescuing the whole financial system - can do when faced with what looks increasingly like one of history's great financial crises.

The next steps will be up to the politicians.

I used to think that the major issues facing the next president would be how to get out of Iraq and what to do about health care. At this point, however, I suspect that the biggest problem for the next administration will be figuring out which parts of the financial system to bail out, how to pay the cleanup bills and how to explain what it's doing to an angry public.

The next president will be a Democrat, and he will spend the next 4-8 years cleaning up this mess that the Republicans have left him. He won't be able to initiate any major programs because all his time will be spent focusing on this financial disaster and the war in Iraq, and he will likely have to take some very unpopular actions like raising taxes and cutting benefit programs. This will ensure that in 4-8 years the Democrats will once again be very unpopular, just in time for a Republican to come in, claim credit for the recovery, and screw everything up again.

By fnord12 | March 17, 2008, 1:21 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link

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--The hell?

What's going on at MTV? They're airing these anti-police state commercials. Anyone know why? What is the context for this?

By fnord12 | March 17, 2008, 1:11 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link

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Modern capitalism: Privatize the profits, socialize the losses

Nouriel Roubini:

So the question is: if Bear Stearns screwed up big time - as it did - with huge leverage, reckless investments, lousy risk management and massive underestimation of liquidity risk why should the US taxpayer bail out this firm and its shareholders? First fully wipe out those shareholders, then fire all the senior management and have the government take over such a bankrupt institution before a penny of public money is wasted in bailing it out. Instead now the use of public money to bail out financial institutions is spreading from banking ones to non banking ones. The Fed should at least give a clear and public explanation of why such extremely exceptional - and almost never used - intervention was justified.

Unless public money is used on a very temporary basis to achieve an orderly wind-down or merger of Bear Stearns this is another case where profits are privatized and losses are socialized. By having thrown down the drain the decades old doctrine and rule that the Fed should not lend or bail out non-bank financial institutions the Fed has created an extremely dangerous precedent that seriously aggravates the moral hazard of its lender of last resort support role. If the Fed starts on the slippery slope of providing massive liquidity support to non-bank financial institutions that have recklessly managed their risks it enters into uncharted territory that radically changes its mandate and formal role. Breaking decades-old rules and practices is a radical action that seriously requires a clear public explanation and justification.

The finer distinctions are probably lost on me, but this doesn't seem too different than what we did in the 80s during the S&L Scandal (and we are still paying off the debt we created during that bailout). Seems the government is always there to bail out rich investors when their risky or stupid investments don't pan out.

By fnord12 | March 17, 2008, 9:05 AM | Liberal Outrage | Link

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Sinbad crosses the threshold

Only one man has the experience it takes to become commander-in-chief.

By fnord12 | March 12, 2008, 3:55 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link

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Bailout

Dean Baker:

The workings of the Fed and the financial markets can appear complicated, so let's simplify matters a bit to make it more clear what is going on here. Suppose that it was suddenly discovered that much of the wealth held by the country's leading financial institutions was in fact counterfeit. Instead of having hundreds of billions of dollars of real currency in their vaults, institutions like Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, and Bears Stearns actually had hundreds of billions of dollars of counterfeit currency. Suppose further that the public did not know exactly who held what in terms of counterfeit currency, only that all of them had a lot of it. (The point here is that these banks hold mortgage backed securities, many of which are only worth a fraction of their face value, and therefore can be viewed as the equivalent of counterfeit currency.)

In such circumstances, investors would be very reluctant to accept the credit of any of the major financial institutions. They couldn't know whether most of their assets were in fact counterfeit, and they were dealing with a bankrupt institution, or whether the counterfeit currency was only a limited share of the wealth, which would not jeopardize the institution's ability to meet its obligations.

This is in fact the credit squeeze that we've have recently witnessed. The spread between the interest rates on a wide variety of assets and the interest rate on safe assets (U.S. government debt) has soared. As a result, the Fed's effort to stimulate the economy, by lowering the federal funds rate, has been largely unsuccessful because other interest rates have remained high.

In response to this situation the Fed today announced that it would lend $200 billion to banks and other financial firms, accepting mortgage backed securities as collateral. This is effectively the same as saying that the Fed is going to lend money to banks and accept the counterfeit currency as collateral, treating it just as though it were real money.

The intended effect of this policy is to convince other investors that the counterfeit currency is in fact real currency, or at the very least that there is a really huge sucker out there (the Fed) which is prepared to treat the counterfeit currency as real currency.

So how does this story play out? Well, insofar as the Fed is successful, the counterfeit currency retains its value for a while longer. This allows Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, Bears Stearns and the rest of the big boys more time to dump their counterfeit currency on suckers who haven't figured out how the game is played.

It is possible that they won't be able to find enough suckers, in which case these banks will end up defaulting on their loans and the Fed (i.e. the government ) has lost tens or hundreds of billions dollars paying good money for counterfeit currency. Alternatively, perhaps the big boys are successful and can offload enough of their counterfeit money to restore themselves to solvency before the music stops. Then the Fed is repaid, but the counterfeit money now sits in the hands of other, less informed, or less inside, investors.

Either way, this is a policy of dubious merit. Why wouldn't we want the banks to be forced to come clean and eat their losses? This is always the policy that the economists advocate when the parties in question are not the big New York banks. Does anyone remember the East Asian financial crisis when the media was full of condemnations of crony capitalism and the IMF insisted imposed stringent conditions on South Korea, Thailand, and Indonesia as a condition of getting bailed out? At that time, everyone insisted on transparency. Aren't there any economists who still have this perspective? If so, why aren't their views appearing anywhere in the news?

By fnord12 | March 12, 2008, 2:42 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link

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Holy crap!

Corruption:

After Philadelphia's housing director refused a demand by President Bush's housing secretary to transfer a piece of city property to a business friend, two top political appointees at the department exchanged e-mails discussing the pain they could cause the Philadelphia director.

"Would you like me to make his life less happy? If so, how?" Orlando J. Cabrera, then-assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, wrote about Philadelphia housing director Carl R. Greene.

"Take away all of his Federal dollars?" responded Kim Kendrick, an assistant secretary who oversaw accessible housing. She typed symbols for a smiley-face, ":-D," at the end of her January 2007 note.

Cabrera wrote back a few minutes later: "Let me look into that possibility."

The e-mails, obtained by The Washington Post, came to light as a result of a lawsuit provoked by HUD's decision last September to strip the Philadelphia Housing Authority of as much as $50 million in federal funds. In December, it declared the agency in violation of rules that underpin its ability to decide precisely how it will spend federal housing funds. Kendrick was the official who formally notified the authority that she had found it in violation.

But Eliot Spitzer slept with prostitutes! Naughty!

By fnord12 | March 12, 2008, 1:52 PM | Liberal Outrage | Comments (2)| Link

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Gaming the system

Ohio:

A staggering 16,000-plus Republicans in Cuyahoga County switched parties when they voted in last week's primary.

That includes 931 in Rocky River, 1,027 in Westlake and 1,142 in Strongsville. More than a third of the Republicans in Solon and Bay Village switched. Pepper Pike had the most dramatic change: just under half its Republicans became Democrats. And some of those who changed - it's difficult to say how many - could be in trouble with the law.

At least one member of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections wants to investigate some Republicans who may have crossed party lines only to influence which Democrat would face presumed Republican nominee John McCain in November . . . .

In a nutshell, here's how it's supposed to work: Ohio voters are allowed to switch party affiliations on the day of a primary election but only if they sign a pledge vowing to support their new party - and mean it.

In the days following the election, The Plain Dealer interviewed more than two dozen voters - most of them Republicans who crossed over to Democrats last week.

None - including five who acknowledged lying about supporting the Democrats - were challenged. And several said poll workers never asked them to sign a pledge but gave them a Democratic ticket . . . .

It started a few weeks ago when conservative radio powerhouse Rush Limbaugh suggested that his Republican following cross over during the primary to vote for Clinton. Clinton, Limbaugh argued, would be easier for McCain to beat in November than Obama.

...

In Cuyahoga County, dozens and dozens of Republicans scribbled addendums onto their pledges as new Democrats:

"For one day only."

"I don't believe in abortion."

A Plain Dealer review of thousands of records showed few of those who switched were challenged by poll workers.

Mississippi:

I suspect partisans on either side will draw different interpretations from it. But here's another interesting tidbit out of the Mississippi exit poll. The conventional wisdom and to a significant degree the reality in many other states has been that Barack Obama has picked up the lion's share of Republican crossover voters. Not in Mississippi. According to MSNBC's exit numbers, Republicans made up either 12% or 13% of the voters in tonight's primary. And they went for Hillary Clinton by a decisive 3 to 1 margin.

Big difference between Mississippi and Ohio, of course. In Mississippi it was an open primary. In Ohio, it was illegal. But either way you have to wonder if you're a viable contender for the general if your opposition is helping you along in the primaries.

By fnord12 | March 12, 2008, 10:56 AM | Liberal Outrage | Link

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Stump the Chump

McCain interview:

Q: "What about grants for sex education in the United States? Should they include instructions about using contraceptives? Or should it be Bush's policy, which is just abstinence?"

McCain: (Long pause) "Ahhh. I think I support the president's policy."

Q: "So no contraception, no counseling on contraception. Just abstinence. Do you think contraceptives help stop the spread of HIV?"

McCain: (Long pause) "You've stumped me."

By fnord12 | March 11, 2008, 10:02 AM | Liberal Outrage | Comments (2)| Link

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Not very reassuring.

Paul Krugman:

And here's the thing: I don' think it's just me, the actions [the Fed is considering in reaction to the financial market meltdown] sound trivial compared with the problem. He more or less admits that credit markets are worsening faster than the Fed can cut rates, so that money is effectively getting more expensive, not cheaper; the other measures he describes sound minor. Rearranging deck chairs -- that may be too strong, but it's pretty unreassuring.

So what should be done? I'm not sure (and I'm thinking about it, hard.) For now, I'd just say that this is really, really scary.

By fnord12 | March 10, 2008, 3:34 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link

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Are you really that acquiescent in the United States?

Glenn Greenwald:

CARLSON: Right. But I mean, since journalistic standards in Great Britain are so much dramatically lower than they are here, it's a little much being lectured on journalistic ethics by a reporter from the "Scotsman," but I wonder if you could just explain what you think the effect is on the relationship between the press and the powerful. People don't talk to you when you go out of your way to hurt them as you did in this piece.

Don't you think that hurts the rest of us in our effort to get to the truth from the principals in these campaigns?

...

Credit to Tucker Carlson for being so (unintentionally) candid about the lowly, subservient role of the American press with regard to "the relationship between the press and the powerful." A journalist should never do anything that "hurts" the powerful, otherwise the powerful won't give access to the press any longer. Presumably, the press should only do things that please the powerful so that the powerful keep talking to the press, so that the press in turn can keep pleasing the powerful, in an endless, symbiotic, mutually beneficial cycle. Rarely does someone who plays the role of a "journalist" on TV so candidly describe their real function.

For anyone who wants to dismiss Carlson as some buffoon who is unrepresentative of journalists generally, I would refer them to the testimony at the Lewis Libby trial of the mighty, revered Tim Russert, Washington Bureau Chief for NBC News:

When I talk to senior government officials on the phone, it's my own policy -- our conversations are confidential. If I want to use anything from that conversation, then I will ask permission.

Update: Tucker cancelled.

By fnord12 | March 10, 2008, 9:28 AM | Liberal Outrage | Comments (2)| Link

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NBC's Irish Conspiracy

Bob Somerby has been hinting at this for years, but this is the first time he's come out and said it. And, looking at the list of people, it sure seems like he has a point (scroll down to Klein's Gaffe).

By fnord12 | March 4, 2008, 3:51 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link

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Evil scientist brain drain

It seems the kids today don't want to build bombs anymore. It's a real shame.

By fnord12 | March 4, 2008, 3:47 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link

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Spreading Democracy in the Middle East

Vanity Fair has obtained confidential documents, since corroborated by sources in the U.S. and Palestine, which lay bare a covert initiative, approved by Bush and implemented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams, to provoke a Palestinian civil war.

Link (8 page article).

By fnord12 | March 3, 2008, 2:01 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link

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