"Trusting Our President" With "Britney" Broder

The Dean Of Beltway “Journalism” pontificated as follows from here (h/t to Thers at Eschaton for posting about this first here – the subject is Attorney General Eric Holder's decision to name a special counsel to examine allegations of torture against those suspected of terrorism by Bushco)…

Looming beyond the publicized cases of these relatively low-level operatives is the fundamental accountability question: What about those who approved of their actions? If accountability is the standard, then it should apply to the policymakers and not just to the underlings. Ultimately, do we want to see Cheney, who backed these actions and still does, standing in the dock?

(And before I forget, I should note that the post title is an “homage” of sorts to the response provided by non-philosopher Britney Spears, who once told Michael Moore in “Fahrenheit 9/11” that we should “trust the president in every decision that he makes and we should just support that,” here, since I believe that mentality has driven everything Broder has written on this subject in particular.)

In response to what Broder wrote today, I give you the words of Robert H. Jackson, chief US prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials (from 1945-1946, with the defendants pictured above – the plural was used by Jackson because of the multiple Nazi defendants of course, but I think the context fits Bushco also)…

At the very outset, let us dispose of the contention that to put these men to trial is to do them an injustice, entitling them to some special consideration. These defendants may be hard pressed but they are not ill used…

…

The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated.

…

The common sense of mankind demands that law shall not stop with the punishment of petty crimes by little people. It must also reach men who possess themselves of great power and make deliberate and concerted use of it to set in motion evils which leave no home in the world untouched.

Thank God we have such a legal standard to fall back on, one which Broder (a young man when these glorious words were uttered) and the other Beltway punditry, to say nothing of our politicians, would do well to reconsider.

And in response to Broder, we have this from Adam Serwer at Tapped (h/t Atrios)…

There is, naturally, no concern for the rule of law here (by Broder), a complete indifference to those who died in CIA custody, or the fact that the IG report itself states that torture was used on people "without justification."

I've already said I don't think those interrogators who stayed within the OLC's guidelines should be prosecuted -- I hold the policymakers ultimately responsible for the implementation of torture as policy. But for Broder, it doesn't matter that what the Bush administration did was illegal -- the powerful deserve immunity, because in holding them accountable, the "cost to the country would simply be too great." What, I wonder, will be the cost for becoming a society in which torture, torture, is not a crime but simply a policy preference?

Broder isn't so much saying that the powerful deserve to ignore the law so much as he is saying that the statute of limitations is up once they leave office. He cops without reservation or qualification to the idea that Cheney did something illegal -- he just doesn't think it should matter. This idea is completely antithetical to Thomas Paine's ideal that "in free countries the law ought to be king." If this is to be the new standard, if the executive branch is to be king, then we should enshrine it in the law -- because right now our laws say otherwise.

Indeed…also, the New York Times gets this (here today, responding to the inevitable outrage from you-know-who)…

In Mr. Cheney’s view, it is not just those who followed orders and stuck to the interrogation rules set down by President George Bush’s Justice Department who should be sheltered from accountability. He said he also had no problem with those who disobeyed their orders and exceeded the guidelines.

It’s easy to understand Mr. Cheney’s aversion to the investigation that Attorney General Eric Holder ordered last week. On Fox, Mr. Cheney said it was hard to imagine it stopping with the interrogators. He’s right.

The government owes Americans a full investigation into the orders to approve torture, abuse and illegal, secret detention, as well as the twisted legal briefs that justified those policies. Congress and the White House also need to look into illegal wiretapping and the practice of sending prisoners to other countries to be tortured.

There it is – the rationale for an investigation leading to filing of charges and prosecution in a court of law.

So the answer to the question, Broder, at long last, is YES. I DO want to see Cheney, who backed these actions and still does, standing in the dock.

Part of me understands full well why Broder continues to benefit from his “perch” amidst the beltway establishment, he being one of the keepers of the sacred “conventional wisdom.” But part of me wonders just how fouled, how polluted our media discourse, including on matters of politics, has become that someone like Broder can concoct this insult to common sense and still be taken seriously.

So with that in mind, let’s review some past Broder lowlights, shall we?

Here, he claimed he was getting “killed” with negative Email for a column about the marriage of the Clintons (the only episode where I can ever recall Broder spoke out against someone in power, and of course it had to be over a matter of such little consequence; Broder, let’s not forget, once claimed here that President Clinton “trashed the place”…as in Washington…”and it’s not his place,” a quote which revealed volumes about Broder’s sense of entitlement).

Here, he considered the matter of the outing of Valerie Plame to be “overblown” and claimed that Karl Rove was owed an apology for being cast as the leader of a “supposed plot to silence the opposition.”

Here, Broder wrote that “(concerning) the Iraq Study Group report being issued (in 2006), for the 10 commission members this was an exhilarating experience, a demonstration of genuine bipartisanship that they hope will serve as an example to the broader political world,” when in fact, as BriVt notes, “the Iraq Study Group didn't solve a goddamn thing.”

Oh, and lest we forget, “bipartisanship” trumps all in "Broder land," as noted here.

Here is one of the many “Bush Bounce” columns from Broder in hope of improving approval numbers for Dubya that, in the end, never materialized (of course, that was known well in advance by most life forms on this planet except Broder).

Broder blamed both Democrats AND Republicans equally here for the SCHIP fight about two years ago (call me crazy, but the Dems were the ones trying to wrench funding from the suddenly-frugal Repugs, which they were eventually able to do…of course, by then the “Party of No” had blown the budget “out of the water” from 2000-2006).

Here, Broder concocts a column about Hillary Clinton which, for my money, is nothing but an exercise in chauvinism (of course, it’s disguised as a commentary on “the state of the Clintons’ marriage – funny, but I haven’t read too many columns from Broder about the state of the Obamas’s marriage, or even the Bushs’s).

Here, Broder defends former Bushco HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt as “the man I got to know and admire in his years as governor of Utah and a leader in the National Governors Association,” even though Utah’s Division of Child and Family Services during Leavitt's tenure as governor was described as “reprehensible” (from 1993 to 1996, ten children who were under DCFS care died).

Here, Broder offered a crackpot history lesson on the 2000 presidential campaign, telling us that Al Gore’s convention speech was, "a request to step inside a seminar room, listen closely and take notes," adding, "Never has a candidate provided more detailed information on his autobiography and the program initiatives he plans. One more paragraph and he would have been onto the budget of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. ... [M]y, how he went on about what he wants to do as president. ... For all his Washington experience, Gore does not seem to have grasped Bush's point that a chief executive is smart to focus on a few key reforms, rather than dissipating his leadership on a crammed agenda."

And concerning Dubya at his “coronation,” Jamison Foser of Media Matters made the following observation…

Reading Broder's reaction to Bush's speech, you wouldn't have known whether Bush made mention of a single policy, proposal, or issue in his speech. You would, however, have learned that "Bush is seen by the public as a stronger leader -- and, by almost any measure, a man more likely to help cure the poisonous partisanship of the capital city."

With a superman like David Broder leading the fight for less substance and fewer details, nobody should have been surprised by Thursday night's Democratic debate, in which moderator Brian Williams asked candidates about haircuts and horse-race polls, and repeatedly dumbed down the debate with questions instructing the candidates to raise their hands in response, or to "say a name or to pass." No details, please -- our titans of journalism might nod off. Just raise your hand and move on.

Here, Broder called Harry Reid “the Democrats’ (Alberto) Gonzales” (there’s plenty of ammunition to go after Reid out there in the “reality-based community,” but that’s a rather laughable insult to hurl at the Senate Majority Leader).

And finally, Broder alleged here that Nancy Pelosi didn’t want to do anything substantive on the deficit because she wanted to score political points by protecting Social Security and Medicare, remembering how Dubya lost on trying to privatize Social Security (which was the result of people not trusting him more than anything else – took awhile for that to happen on something, but it finally did).

So in conclusion, it should be emphasized that Broder’s opposition today to the Holder investigation is totally in keeping his desire to “comfort the comfortable,” to twist the phrase of Finley Peter Dunne intended to describe the journalistic profession. However, the stakes in the Holder investigation are much higher than those of a typical bout of Broder voyeurism into the lives of the powerful over which he so abjectly fawns.

Once again, I give you the words of Nuremberg prosecutor Robert H. Jackson…

We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well. We must summon such detachment and intellectual integrity that this trial will commend itself to posterity as fulfilling humanity's aspirations to do justice.

And what a pity that our hopelessly compromised corporate media, personified by Broder, so utterly fails Jackson’s test of “detachment and intellectual integrity.”

Wednesday Stuff

Note to the pathetic Max Baucus, Kent Conrad (still laughing over the Dem-sponsored commercials on health care reform in his state, I'm sure) and every one of these corporatist losers - this is what a member of your party is supposed to sound like on this issue.

And by the way, Mr. President, you'd better have ample doses of the same "piss and vinegar" Richard Trumka has here when you give your speech next week, or else you'll continue to slide in the polls (with right-wing demagogues like Brooks and Krauthammer telling you, as always, that the way to "save yourself" is keep kissing off the people who elected you to begin with).

Am I more than a little fed up with having to continue posting on this? You're damn right.

As I and others have said many times already, the Bushies were never shy about kicking and screaming for what they wanted at every turn, which was nothing but destructive to this country. If you don't respond in kind for what is good for the country instead, then be prepared to serve only one term.

(And by the way, for Philly-area folk, there will be a demonstration for the public option tomorrow at noon in front of the offices of Independence Blue Cross at 1900 Market Street in Philadelphia)...



Update 1 9/3/09: Daily Kos diarist politicjock tells us the following here...

...during the heated August health care debate MSNBC outperformed CNN by 61 percent and FNC by 4 percent in the key 18-34 demographic in prime time. Let me restate this, the cable news channel which has been the most vocal in support of the public option (Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Ed Shultz) and, to a certain extent, single payer, was also the #1 news network among younger viewers during the month of August when all the kooks were supposedly coming out of the woods against health care reform.

This is still more proof that the Republican Party has relegated itself to minority party status for a generation – unless, of course, the Democrats cave and refuse to stand up for what they're supposed to believe in, which, sadly, is always a distinct possibility.

Update 2 9/3/09: And here is a sane, compassionate point of view on this from today's Bucks County Courier Times (shocking, I know).

...and 48 seconds is about all I can take of this idiot (and he LOST MORE SPONSORS today, huh? Terrific - if anyone else wants to bail, click here...God, does he even have any left?)...



...and congratulations to new corporate media news anchor Diane Sawyer of ABC News, taking over for Charlie Gibson who will no doubt contemplate the intricacies of capital gains taxation now on his spare time (as a reminder, I should note that Gibson asked about that twice during a McCain/Obama debate last year - and by the way, Diane, "Mickey" doesn't approve of drinking on the job)...



Update 9/3/09: I should have noted above that this was the reason why I took a shot at Sawyer (h/t to Atrios for jogging my memory).

...and either some or all of this video was shot in Philadelphia, by the way.

Will Obama-Rama Avert A Swine Flu Onslaught?

(And I also posted here.)

This story tells us the following…

WASHINGTON — Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Wednesday that people should expect "a big influx" of swine flu cases this fall and prepare as best they can.

"The best thing we all can do are the very simple things, the washing of the hands, the coughing into the sleeve," Napolitano said in a nationally broadcast interview. " ... We're in all likelihood going to have them (new infections) before the vaccine is available."

As I read that, I recalled what happened after Napolitano predicted that the militia crowd would try to recruit veterans (somehow I don’t think “Joe Scar” on MSNBC will be laughing if the swine flu turns out to be as bad as Napolitano predicts...to refresh our memories, he did so before the life form known as James von Brunn murdered a security guard at the Holocaust museum).

Basically, if Napolitano says it, then I think there’s a better-than-even-money chance that it will occur (despite what Michael Fumento once said here).

And the Washington Post tells us the following today…

After months of preparation and umpteen billions of dollars, the federal government came out Tuesday with its swine flu response. It is red and furry and giggles in a high-pitched voice.

"Come on! Wash your hands with Elmo! Wash, wash, wash!" the Muppet from Sesame Street sings in a public service announcement released Tuesday by the Obama administration. "Sneeze into your arm with Elmo," the character adds. "Ah-choo!"

Word of this new federal initiative was released at 8:51 Tuesday morning, in an e-mail straight from the White House press office announcing the partnership with Sesame Workshop aimed at "stressing healthy habits to prevent H1N1 flu." The administration is hoping Elmo's good hygiene will go, uh, viral.

And I was all set to pile on the WaPo’s Dana Milbank, until he shockingly provided some appropriate context…

This reliance on Muppets rather than medicine is not the fault of the Obama administration, which has done about the best it could with limited tools. It's the result of years of failure to build adequate vaccine-manufacturing capacity in the United States. Too little work on new vaccine technologies means producers of flu shots still rely on the ancient method of making inoculations with chicken eggs. And the anemic public health system will almost surely buckle this fall as flu sufferers flood emergency rooms.

If there's any good news, it's that the government may be jolted into building an adequate vaccine and public health infrastructure before a more severe pandemic comes along with the potential to kill millions of Americans instead of mere thousands. In the meantime, the best the feds can do is try to slow the spread of the germs until the vaccines arrive -- and that's why it's time to meet the Muppets.

I know it gets to be a tired refrain going over how our present difficult or awful circumstances can inevitably be traced back to the occasionally murderous incompetence of our prior ruling cabal, but it is an exercise individuals such as your humble narrator must perform if we are to ever avert such calamities again.

You see, the Repugs have consistently opposed pandemic preparedness, with both Susan Collins of Maine (here) and “Diaper Dave” Vitter of Louisiana (here) trying to remove it from the stimulus bill (Collins was successful, unfortunately).

As HuffPo’s Jason Linkins told us in the Collins post, House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey justified the pandemic preparedness funding as follows…

Pandemic influenza poses a major threat to the nation's public health, security, and economy. CBO has estimated that an influenza pandemic might cause a decline in U.S. gross domestic product of between 1 and 4.25 percent depending on the severity of the pandemic. Providing additional funding to prepare for and respond to a pandemic will ameliorate the morbidity and mortality associated with worst case scenarios of an influenza pandemic thereby reducing the potential economic burden. Another program funded in this recovery package is BARDA, which supports advanced development and procurement of medical countermeasures, such as vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics for chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear agents, as well as other emerging infectious diseases. According to a recent independent economic analysis of BARDA, in order to develop countermeasures for all biodefense requirements identified in HHS's Public Health Emergency Countermeasures Enterprise Implementation Plan, significant increased investment in advanced development is required. BARDA also provides for the expansion of the domestic manufacturing infrastructure to support new vaccines and other countermeasures, where an expansion of domestic manufacturing is desired to provide sufficient quantities of products in a timely manner.

Now, let’s “set the ‘wayback,’ Sherman” (shameless “boomer” reference, I know) to 2006 (from here)…

On May 3, 2006, the George W. Bush White House "unveiled a foreboding report on the nation's lack of preparedness for a bird flu pandemic, warning that such an outbreak could kill up to 2 million people and deal a warlike blow to the country's economic and social fabric. It urged state and local governments to make preparations beyond the federal efforts," James Gerstenzang reported for the Chicago Tribune May 4, 2006.

…

Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-Massachusetts), "the senior Democrat on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, issued a report of his own that chastised the [Bush] administration for what it said was a failure to prepare the country for a flu pandemic," Gerstenzang wrote. "Speaking on the Senate floor, Kennedy said the administration suffered from 'competence-deficit disorder.'

"'The United States is at the back of the line in ordering essential flu medicines, and we're at the bottom of the international league in having a coordinated national strategy'," Kennedy said.

The Sourcewatch article also tells us the following (in the matter of how we ended up “at the bottom of the international league”)…

In his Tuesday, November 1, 2005, speech delivered at the National Institutes of Health, Bush asked Congress "for $7.1 billion in emergency funding to prepare the United States for a possible pandemic of avian influenza," Reuters' Maggie Fox and Caren Bohan reported. "The total includes requests of $1.2 billion to make 20 million more doses of the current vaccine against H5N1 avian influenza, $2.8 billion to accelerate new flu-vaccine technology and $1 billion to stockpile more antiviral drugs."

Bush said that "we must have emergency plans in place in all 50 states, in every local community. We must ensure that all levels of government are ready to act to contain an outbreak." Although several groups "praised Bush for making a start," they "said the requests were nowhere near enough," Fox and Bohan wrote.

"The president also said the United States must approve liability protection for the makers of lifesaving vaccines. He said the number of American vaccine manufacturers has plummeted because the industry has been hit with a flood of lawsuits," Lauran Neergaard reported for the Associated Press.

Uh, no (another shining journalistic moment for the AP, people) – this tells us the following (from October 2004, the genesis of this particular “zombie lie” - let's all crunch up our "tin foil hats")…

Almost half of the nation's flu vaccine will not be delivered this year. Chiron, a major manufacturer of flu vaccine, will not be distributing any influenza vaccine this flu season. Chiron was to make 46-48 million doses vaccine for the United States. Chiron is a British company. Recently British health officials stopped Chiron from distributing and making the vaccine when inspectors found unsanitary conditions in the labs. Some lots of the vaccine were recalled and destroyed.

Why is our vaccine made in the UK and not the US?

The major pharmaceutical companies in the US provided almost 90% of the nation’s flu vaccine at one time. They did this despite a very low profit margin for the product. Basically, they were doing us a favor.

In the late 80's a man from North Carolina who had received the vaccine got the flu. The strain he caught was one of the strains in that years Vaccine made by a US company. What did he do? He sued and he won. He was awarded almost $5 million! After that case was appealed and lost, most US pharmaceutical companies stopped making the vaccine. The liability out weighed the profit margin. Since UK and Canadian laws prohibit such frivolous law suits UK and Canadian companies began selling the vaccine in the US.

By the way...the lawyer that represented the man in the flu shot lawsuit was a young ambulance chaser by the name of John Edwards.

(God, and they didn't even find a way to make a joke about his hair? What kind of propaganda is this, anyway?)

Now, for the reality-based perspective…

Chiron, the corporation mentioned in this piece as an example of a "British company" that has taken over the manufacture of flu vaccine from American companies supposedly driven out of business by liability lawsuits, is not a British company. It is an American company headquartered in Emeryville, California, which last year purchased British vaccine maker Powderject and a flu vaccine plant in Liverpool, England.

American manufacturers did not produce flu vaccine until liability lawsuits made it impossible for them to continue doing so. Most American pharmaceutical companies got out of the flu vaccine market because a variety of factors (not related to lawsuits) make it an unattractive line of business:

Flu viruses mutate easily, so new flu vaccine formulas have to be made up every year.

Because a different flu vaccine is used each season, unsold doses cannot be saved and end up being destroyed (along with any potential profits).

The production of flu vaccine (and the requirement of meeting Food and Drug Administration standards) is a labor-intensive process. Flu vaccine is made by injecting virus into fertilized chicken eggs — each egg must be hand-inspected and hand-injected and produces only 4 or 5 doses of vaccine.

Because flu vaccine is a commodity (i.e., the same product can be made by many different companies) and much of the available supply is bought up in large orders by the government, the market price of vaccine — and the profit to be made from selling it — has been quite low. (The global market for vaccine is about $6 billion a year, while the global market for drugs is about $340 billion a year. Which of these two markets a pharmaceutical company should concentrate on is a no-brainer.)

Sometime within the next several years, the flu vaccine industry will switch to growing vaccine in cell cultures rather than eggs, a much easier and cheaper process. No new entrant to the flu vaccine market is going to spend several years and millions of dollars investing in a process that will soon become obsolete.

And years before he “got the goods” on Blackwater/Xe, journalist Jeremy Scahill reported the following here for The Nation in 2005 (basically, we lucked out that we didn’t have a “Katrina”-like pandemic scenario because of another Dubya flunky appointed to a job for which he was not qualified in any way in 2003)…

…the man responsible for coordinating the federal response to a flu pandemic or bioterror attack could well (have been) the next Michael Brown. Meet Stewart Simonson. He's the official charged by Bush with "the protection of the civilian population from acts of bioterrorism and other public health emergencies"--a well-connected, ideological, ambitious Republican with zero public health management or medical expertise, whose previous job was as a corporate lawyer for Amtrak. When Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin Powell, recently speculated, "If something comes along that is truly serious...like a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence," many of those professionally concerned with such scenarios couldn't help thinking of Simonson. They recalled his own unsettling words at a recent Homeland Security subcommittee hearing on government response to a chemical or biological attack: "We're learning as we go."

See what I mean? Continuing…

"If I was in charge, he wouldn't be in that position," says Dr. Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University. "We don't have the best and brightest in the key positions, and this leaves us in a very, very precarious situation." So how is it that Simonson ended up in a position that could impact the lives and health of millions? Simonson's qualifications can be summed up in two words: Tommy Thompson. Simonson was a protégé of the former Health and Human Services secretary and longtime Republican governor of Wisconsin. Thompson hired him out of the University of Wisconsin Law School in 1995 and put him on the political fast track, eventually naming him as his legal counsel. Thompson then used his influence as chair of Amtrak's board to place Simonson as the rail service's corporate counsel. When Bush named Thompson as HHS secretary, Simonson again went with him, and he has been rising through the ranks of the Administration and the Republican Party ever since. "He's a political hack, a sycophant," says Ed Garvey, a prominent Wisconsin attorney and the state's former deputy attorney general. "People just laughed when he was appointed to Amtrak, but when the word came out that he was in charge of bioterrorism, it turned to alarm. When you realize that people's lives are at stake, it's frightening. It's just one of those moments when you say, Oh, my God."

So basically, we can thank a power greater than ourselves for the fact that this country never was attacked through bioterrorism (aside from the anthrax attacks) over the past eight years (Bill Maher and others can make as much fun of religion as they want, but that works for me).

And it also has a good bit to do with the reason why, in lieu of an immediately available vaccine (which is no doubt being rushed to production with all speed at this moment), we have to rely on the counsel of a furry red puppet to protect us instead.

Tuesday Stuff

Last night Rachel Maddow interviewed Bernie Sanders on health care reform of course, with a setup that basically showed that the "party of No" has no intention now or ever to act on this urgent matter (with this as still more proof).

And by the way, PA Sen. Bob Casey is scheduled to appear at a town hall (here we go again) tomorrow at 11:15 am; the location is the Keystone Room, 200 Prospect Street, East Stroudsburg, PA (if you can get there as early as possible - say, 9 AM? - to try and crowd out those teabaggin' wingnuts, that would be terrific)...

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

...and I really wasn't going to waste time with Deadeye Dick here, but I loved the commercial parody...

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

..."Worst Persons" (Glenn Beck gets his nightly citation - hmm, forgot about this, though...and if any more sponsors want to bail on him or Fix Noise, click here; this life form named Lynn ("Uh, Oh!") Jenkins (R - Crazyland, otherwise known as Kansas) tells a working mother who supports "an affordable option" on health care to "be a grownup" and go get coverage...the Repug Party standing up for (on?) the workers of the world once more, my fellow prisoners - and why is it that I get the feeling that Jenkins is the progeny of Martha Raye, Denture Lady?; but the firm DDB Brazil takes it for concocting a public service ad showing countless planes approaching New York, including the now-gone World Trade Center towers, presumably in the name of "respecting the planet"...kudos to the World Wildlife Fund for realizing how despicable this creation is and rejecting it - DDB Brazil quite obviously no longer deserves to be in business)...

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

...and I love this tune, but don't "Photoshop" any more Beatles' album covers, OK?

Some Clarity From Kerry On The Carbon Conundrum

(And I also posted here.)

Sen. John Kerry at The Hill posted this yesterday on the urgency of enacting legislation to control man-made carbon emissions (and please allow me to observe that I can’t think of a word to describe how pathetic it is that I posted on this topic not quite four years ago here, and I believe events require that I continue to post about it)…

The truth is that the threat we face is not an abstract concern for the future. It is already upon us and its effects are being felt worldwide, right now. Scientists project that the Arctic will be ice-free in the summer of 2013. Not in 2050, but four years from now.

Make no mistake: catastrophic climate change represents a threat to human security, global stability, and -- yes -- even to American national security.

Climate change injects a major new source of chaos, tension, and human insecurity into an already volatile world. It threatens to bring more famine and drought, worse pandemics, more natural disasters, more resource scarcity, and human displacement on a staggering scale. We risk fanning the flames of failed-statism, and offering glaring opportunities to the worst actors in our international system. In an interconnected world, that endangers all of us.

…

Anyone who doubts the threat should talk to the 11 retired American admirals and generals who warned in 2007 that "Climate change can act as a threat multiplier for instability in some of the most volatile regions of the world, and it presents significant national-security challenges for the United States."

You can even ask the security planners in the Bush Administration, whose final national-defense strategy document recognized climate change among key trends that will shape U.S. defense policy in the coming years.

Or ask the National Intelligence Council -- the U.S. intelligence community's think-tank -- has concluded "global climate change will have wide-ranging implications for U.S. national-security interests over the next 20 years."

Former CENTCOM Commander Anthony Zinni, no radical tree-hugger, put it simply: "We will pay for this one way or another. We will pay to reduce greenhouse gas emissions today, and we'll have to take an economic hit of some kind. Or, we will pay the price later in military terms. And that will involve human lives. There will be a human toll."

Kerry then goes on to describe with disturbing clarity how the climate crisis could impact southeast Asia, perhaps the most volatile region in the world.

And actually, the security threat posed by climate change has been known in this country for some time, as noted in this story, which also tells us the following…

Nearly six years ago, two scenario planners prepared a report for the Department of Defense titled "An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security." The report (download - PDF), by Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall of the Global Business Network, a San Francisco-based think tank, explored how an acceleration of climate change "could potentially de-stabilize the geo-political environment, leading to skirmishes, battles, and even war." It examined climate-induced constraints such as "food shortages due to decreases in net global agricultural production; decreased availability and quality of fresh water in key regions due to shifted precipitation patterns, causing more frequent floods and droughts; and disrupted access to energy supplies due to extensive sea ice and storminess."

And even though we know what the response was from our prior ruling cabal, I must reiterate it with this 2007 story, which tells us that…

George Bush was castigated by European diplomats and found himself isolated yesterday after a special conference on climate change ended without any progress.

European ministers, diplomats and officials attending the Washington conference were scathing, particularly in private, over Mr Bush's failure once again to commit to binding action on climate change.

Although the US and Britain have been at odds over the environment since the early days of the Bush administration, the gap has never been as wide as yesterday.

Britain and almost all other European countries, including Germany and France, want mandatory targets for reducing greenhouse emissions. Mr Bush, while talking yesterday about a "new approach" and "a historic undertaking", remains totally opposed.

The conference, attended by more than 20 countries, including China, India, Britain, France and Germany, broke up with the US isolated, according to non-Americans attending. One of those present said even China and India, two of the biggest polluters, accepted that the voluntary approach proposed by the US was untenable and favoured binding measures, even though they disagreed with the Europeans over how this would be achieved.

I don’t completely trust China and India on this issue either, but as far as I’m concerned, that’s no excuse for our inaction.

So where are we at the moment concerning climate change legislation?

Well, Marshall Saunders of the Citizens Climate Lobby tells us the following today in the Philadelphia Inquirer in support of a carbon tax (I haven’t quite made up my mind about this guy, but I have a feeling he’s “on the beam” here - the fact that the Inky published him automatically makes me suspicious)…

The more I look at Congress' legislation to address climate change with a cap-and-trade program, the more it looks like a Rube Goldberg device - one of those amusing contraptions that employ all manner of moving parts in a complicated, convoluted process that performs a simple task.

The task we're talking about - reducing carbon emissions by making fossil fuels more expensive - is pretty straightforward. And yet to accomplish it, Congress has come up with a 1,400-page bill that makes War and Peace read like a short story.

To raise the cost of carbon-based energy and make clean energy technologies, such as wind and solar, more competitive, cap-and-trade creates a market in which thousands of companies are required to purchase permits to emit carbon dioxide. But wait - most of the permits will initially be given away rather than auctioned off. And there's also this messy contrivance called carbon offsets, which allows polluters to invest in projects that reduce carbon emissions. Good luck verifying the efficacy of those offsets.

This seems to verify what Mother Jones points out here about Waxman-Markey (the ACES bill, which passed the House by seven votes as noted here); the MJ post tells us the following…

The split (over the bill) encompasses more than predictable ideological divides. Debate over the relative merits of a carbon tax versus this bill's cap-and-trade model has mostly given way to concerns about whether the legislation, sponsored by representatives Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.), lines the pockets of polluters with little to show for it. The most it would cut carbon emissions by 2020 is 17 percent below 1990 levels, nowhere near the 25 to 40 percent reduction sought by scientists and international climate negotiators. The Sierra Club has withheld its endorsement in hopes of improving the bill before a final vote—it wants to prevent polluters from receiving tradable emissions permits for free, preserve the EPA’s authority to independently regulate carbon, and better fund energy efficiency and clean energy—but Fahn and other environmentalists are skeptical that lawmakers will listen. “From my perspective,” he says, “the prospects of strengthening it to where we’d want to support the ultimate version are growing slim.”

Many environmentalists blame Waxman-Markey’s flaws on the United States Climate Action Partnership (US-CAP), a coalition of industry and moderate environmental groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council that, during the last years of the Bush administration, quietly hammered out what has become the bill’s framework. Sierra Club board member M.K. Dorsey, a professor of global environmental policy at Dartmouth, calls the environmentalists in US-CAP “well-meaning liberals who do not pay enough attention to political economy.” He adds: “They got out-maneuvered, they got hoodwinked, because they were in over their head.”

As much as I respect the two principals behind the House bill, this seems to verify what I’ve read from other sources also (this recommends a carbon tax as does the Saunders column today, and even Exxon supported a carbon tax in Australia, as noted here, so there is a precedent - we also learn the following)…

Imposing a global carbon tax would ease pressure on the climate more cheaply than emissions trading, according to a study released last week by Danish professor Bjoern Lomborg.

A $0.50 tax for each ton of emissions may generate $1.51 in avoided climate damage, compared with costs as high as $68 per ton, resulting in 2 cents of avoided damage, under some emissions-mitigations models, the study said.

And that leads us back to the Senate bill sponsored by Kerry and Barbara Boxer of California, which, as noted here, will not be introduced until late September (with Dem senators from states dependent on coal manufacturing claiming here that they won’t support the legislation without job protection measures; I respect their fight, but I think they may lose on getting our trading partners onboard with this also).

I sincerely hope the Boxer-Kerry bill favors the carbon tax as opposed to the “cap ant trade” Waxman-Markey model. My suspicion is that the former would have a better shot at passage, since it’s a lot harder to demagogue on such a direct concept (though the “teabaggin’” demagoguery will come, of course).

I know a lot has transpired this year between the automaker assistance, the stimulus, the health care reform battle, and now this. But all of these are necessary components in the process of rebuilding an economy that has suffered from years of neglect.

And let’s hope and pray that I don’t somehow find myself in a position to post about our inaction on this four years from now. In that event, anything I or anyone else would say on it probably wouldn’t matter any more.

Monday Stuff

I would think that the answer to the question posed to Grassley by this courageous American is self-evident by now based on this (and click here for more)...



...and "The Pap Attack" takes on this subject once more here because it's necessary to do so...



..."Worst Persons" (there are people out there still allowing Betsy McCaughey to peddle her long-since-destroyed lies on health care, this time about people supposedly being forced to buy the "government plan"...hard to tell who's a dimmer bulb, her or Just Plain Folks Sarah Palin; Pat Boone - is he still alive? - tiptoes ever so closely to that racist razor's edge, and takes a shot at liberals also of course...funny and/or pathetic that Boone would do this seeing as how he made a fortune covering the music of African American artists; however, Michael Scheuer takes it again for claiming that Obama and the Dems want to see another 9/11, or words to that effect - this is as old as the Hitler stuff by now, and of course it's even more tasteless given the fact that another anniversary is coming up)...

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

...and I thought this was an appropriate vid given this rather interesting story.

Monday Mashup Part 2 (8/31/09)

(I ended my most recent post here on torture, so I guess I should follow up here also.)

In yesterday’s Philadelphia Inquirer, Mark Bowden pontificated as follows here…

I will predict right here that the investigation ordered last week by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. will not result in prosecuting CIA agents or any top officials of the Bush administration. If the investigation uncovers a clearly rogue interrogator guilty of some murderous outrage, that's one thing, but those who were working under close supervision from Washington, complying with their instructions, no matter how outrageous some believe them to be, will not be charged with crimes. Ordering the investigation will please those on the left who are more angry than most Americans about harsh interrogation methods, and they may shed further light on whether such tactics worked - early indications are that they did.

As far as “pleasing those on the left” is concerned in the matter of investigating torture, I should note that “close to two-thirds” of those surveyed here claimed that they wanted an investigation (this information is from February, which was the most recent data I could locate; given the leveling of other Obama polling numbers, though, I can easily envision that it’s closer to 50-50 by now).

However, even at 50-50, that’s an awfully big group of people “on the left,” wouldn’t you say?

And in response to “Deadeye Dick” Cheney’s claim that “coercive interrogation techniques” were successful, CNN’s Peter Bergen tells us the following (here – as his bio tells us, Bergen, CNN's national security analyst, is a fellow at the New America Foundation)…

Historians will likely judge the putative intelligence gains made by abusive interrogation techniques were easily outweighed by the damage they caused to the United States' moral standing.

That is certainly the view of Adm. Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, who wrote in April 2009, "These techniques hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefits they gave us and they are not essential to our national security." Quite.

And as Think Progress tells us here…

There have been no documents supporting Cheney’s claim that torture was essential to saving American lives. Even CIA memos from 2004 and 2005, which Cheney claimed would back him up, have been released and have no evidence linking torture to valuable intelligence. In fact, these memos show that “non-abusive techniques actually helped elicit some of the most important information.”

I guess observations such as this from Bowden will no doubt curry favor from sources that would be amenable to providing material for future books, so from a marketing perspective at least, columns such as this one could be judged as a success.

But from a standard of basic journalistic integrity, if this is the best Bowden can do with his every-other-month-or-so columns for this failing newspaper, than he shouldn't even bother at all.

At least Bowden is an accomplished author, but I know of no such claim that can be made for Kevin Ferris, another Inky editorialist, who waxed indignant here yesterday over Samir Shabazz, head of the Philadelphia chapter of the New Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, and Jerry Jackson, a party member, who were both "deployed" eight to 15 feet from the entrance of a polling place at 1221 Fairmount St. in "military style uniforms" last November 4th (and if you’re thinking this has already been rehashed by the Drudge/Malkin crowd, you win a free subscription to Clown Hall dot com)…

"Shabazz brandished a deadly weapon" - a nightstick, the complaint said. "Shabazz pointed the weapon at individuals, menacingly tapped it [in] his other hand, or menacingly tapped it elsewhere."

The complaint continued, "Shabazz and Jackson made statements containing racial threats and racial insults at both black and white individuals" and "made menacing and intimidating gestures, statements and movements directed at individuals who were present to aid voters."

"That would be intimidating to anybody," says Linda A. Kerns, an attorney who was representing the GOP city committee that day. The police were called and they escorted Shabazz from the polling place. Jackson, a credentialed Democratic poll watcher, was allowed to remain - and credentialed again for last spring's primary.

The Panthers and their national chairman, Malik Zulu Shabazz, were also named in the complaint.

…
As none of the defendants had responded to the complaint, the case could have been won by default. But (the Obama Justice Department) dismissed the case against the Panthers, their chairman, and Jackson in May. Samir Shabazz was banned from "displaying a weapon within 100 feet of any open polling location on any election day in the City of Philadelphia."

That slap on the wrist leaves too many questions unanswered.

Well, maybe Justice decided not to prosecute because they felt that the goal of keeping the thug Samir Shabazz from the polling place had already been achieved, and they felt there wasn’t enough of a case against anyone else named in the complaint and decided not to waste time and taxpayer dollars in the effort (to say nothing of giving these characters more publicity than they deserved).

But of course, that doesn’t placate the easily offended conservative sensibilities of Ferris and his brethren.

Oh, and by the way, Inky, one of the reasons why I’m bothering to post about this at all is because I left a comment on this story to this effect that was not abusive in any way, but you declined to publish it all the same.

I hope you don’t make this mistake too many more times. The last thing an operation in your precarious financial straits can afford to do is turn away readership.

Update 9/1/09: This should make Ferris happy (hat tips to Atrios and The Opinionator at the New York Times), though, as Mary Frances Berry said, the Civil Rights Commission "totally lack credibility in the civil rights community."

And venturing over to The Old Gray Lady today, Katharine Q. Seelye brings us the following (from here)…

SPARTANBURG, S.C. — Senator Jim DeMint, the South Carolina Republican who predicted that President Obama’s effort to overhaul the health care system would become his “Waterloo,” is doing his best to make that happen.

Taking questions from a friendly crowd of 500 people here the other day, Mr. DeMint did little to correct their misimpressions about health care legislation but rather reinforced their worst fears.

When one man said the major House bill would give the government electronic access to bank accounts, Mr. DeMint told him the bill was never about health care. “This is about more government control,” he declared. “If it was about health care, we could get it done in a couple of weeks.”

As Atrios would say, “THE STUPID….IT BURNS US!!!!”

That being said, I should point out that Seelye actually does plug in some context towards the end of the story to balance the wingnuttery a bit, such as the fact that “South Carolina, much of which is poor and rural, faces some particular challenges. Its unemployment rate of 11.8 percent exceeds the national rate of 9.4 percent. And 16.2 percent of the population has no insurance, more than the national average of 15.3 percent.”

However, would it have killed Seelye to also point out the following (from here)?...

The 1,017-page bill passed by the House Ways and Means Committee does call for electronic fund transfers—but from insurers to doctors and other providers. There is zero provision to include patients in any such system.

(And by the way, in the matter of our elected leaders acting like adults, this Guest Opinion that recently appeared in the Bucks County Courier Times tells us that Patrick Murphy has included a bill in the health care legislation to close a loophole involving Medicare and Medicaid fraud…as always, read the comments from “my2cents” and ignore just about all of the others – my God, what hideous trolls!)

And finally, getting back to DeMint, we learn the following from Seelye…

…(South Carolina) voters seem more interested in whether Mr. DeMint might run for president.

“I wouldn’t get out of my driveway without my wife shooting me in the back,” he said in Greenville. “You’ve got to find somebody who’s smart enough to be a great president but dumb enough to want to be president. Right now, I think I’m still too smart to be president.”

I wouldn’t bet on that.

Saturday Stuff

Well said, Mr. President...



...and I think this is appropriate, and I hope you do also.

Thursday Stuff

(By the way, no posting tomorrow, so talk amongst yourselves.)

So WATB Glenn Beck has now lost 46 sponsors, huh? Well, at least he can count on "Skank of America," as Bill Maher calls them, I guess, even if it's apparently a local "buy".

And if anybody else wants to join in the fun, click here...



...and sorry, I don't know how else to say it, but John McCain is an utterly incorrigible liar ("no amendments of significance," huh?), as Lawrence O'Donnell amply demonstrates when talking with K.O...

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

...and this goes on for about a minute too long, but otherwise it's pretty cool...



...and to commemorate the centennial of premier jazz tenor saxophonist Lester Young, here's his quintet performing "Pennies from Heaven" in 1950 with Con Bill Harris (tbn), Hank Jones (piano), Ray Brown (bs), and Buddy Rich (btr).

Thursday Mashup (8/27/09)

Not enough to expound on at length, but here it is again anyway (and I also posted here)…

This Moonie Times story tells us the following...

President Obama's choice for the U.S. Labor Department's top law enforcement job created a first-of-its-kind program in New York that deputized unions and advocacy groups to visit private businesses and report wage violations to the government, an initiative that has raised concerns holding up her nomination.

M. Patricia Smith told senators vetting her appointment to be the Labor Department's solicitor that her "wage watch" pilot program in New York was created over the last year to "engage groups to help us with education" and not to let the private groups conduct labor investigations.

But internal memos obtained by Republican aides on the Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee show Ms. Smith's state labor agency in New York actually referred to the union and group participants as "enforcers," The Washington Times has learned.

Oooh, “enforcers,” huh? Sounds real scary, kids!

Until you read this…

On Nov. 28, (New York State Regulator Lorelei) Boylan (who worked for Smith) wrote a message to coworkers, which was copied to Ms. Smith, on the subject of training groups in the wage watch program. It said, "The one day session will not turn the enforcers into labor law experts but will assist them in identifying labor law violations and make the referrals of greater value."

The Times story tells us that Boylan “has been nominated by Mr. Obama as administrator of the Wage and Hour Division at the U.S. Labor Department.”

And by the way, leading the charge against Smith is Senate Repug Mike Enzi, who apparently was able to find time from obstructing health care reform (here) to concoct this straw man (woman?) against Smith.

Update 8/31/09: If this isn't "game, set and match" on Enzi, I don't know what is.

There are a lot of reasons why I’m glad that the Labor Department will once more act on behalf of workers in this country under the Obama Administration, but one of them (which of course is utterly ignored here by the Times) is that wage theft was a huge problem while The Dragon Lady (pictured) ran labor under Dubya (noted here).

The Think Progress post also noted that Elaine Chao’s DOL investigated only 1 in 10 fictitious labor violations, a sorry record that I’m sure will be topped by current DOL Secretary Hilda Solis.

Update 9/2/09: The New York Times tells us the following from here...

Low-wage workers are routinely denied proper overtime pay and are often paid less than the minimum wage, according to a new study based on a survey of workers in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.

The study, the most comprehensive examination of wage-law violations in a decade, also found that 68 percent of the workers interviewed had experienced at least one pay-related violation in the previous work week.

A hat tip to Think Progress for that, by the way.

And while he awaits the decision on whether or not he will face charges stemming from the U.S. Attorneys scandal from Connecticut Prosecutor Nora Dannehy, Karl Rove managed to concoct this screed for the Murdoch Street Journal (the topic, once more, is health care reform)…

...according to a White House fact sheet titled "Paying for Health Care Reform," (Obama senior advisor David) Axelrod was misleading his readers. It notes the administration would cut $622 billion from Medicare and Medicaid, with a big chunk coming from Medicare Advantage, to pay for overhauling health care. Mr. Obama heralded these cuts as "common sense" in his June 13 radio address.

Medicare Advantage was enacted in 2003 to allow seniors to use Medicare funds to buy private insurance plans that fit their needs and their budgets. They get better care and better value for their money.

Medicare Advantage also has built-in incentives to encourage insurers to offer lower costs and better benefits. It's a program that puts patients in charge, not the government, which is why seniors like it and probably why the administration hates it.

As noted here…

Under the Medicare Advantage program, created by a Republican-led Congress in 2003, the government buys private insurance coverage for Medicare patients in lieu of paying for health services directly. Supporters say MA plans have the advantage of delivering additional care to Medicare patients, including dental and eye services not covered under the traditional program. Those additional benefits, combined with a heavy dose of marketing, have made the program enormously popular. This year, a record-high 10.5 million seniors — or 23 percent of all Medicare beneficiaries — are enrolled in MA plans, according to a June report from the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, or MedPAC, an independent panel that recommends Medicare reforms to Washington policymakers.

But the extra care doesn’t come cheap. Despite promises that private plans operating under MA could eventually save money, the cost to treat the average patient in the MA program is 14 percent higher than the cost to treat the average senior under traditional Medicare. A part of that additional cost, MedPAC noted, “consists of funds used for plan administration and profits and not direct health care services for beneficiaries.”

The argument that private plans are necessary to keep Medicare sustainable, Berenson said, “is belied by the fact that private plans always seem to require more money.”

“It’s hard to make the case,” Berenson added, “that these overpayments are justified.”

And as firedoglake notes here…

Humana, Inc. (HUM) reported its earnings Monday, and they really love that government money. HUM reports in two segments: government and commercial. The government segment is really profitable: profits up 62.5%, membership up 12%. The increase in profits was the result of the membership increase and the company’s decision last year to charge its Medicare Advantage customers premiums on top of the lovely government subsidy.

Can’t wait to see how you look in that orange jumpsuit, Karl.

This post from Slate’s John Dickerson reminds us of the “summer Obama reading list” thing once again. And I really don’t have much to add; I only wanted to point out that I thought it was cool that a president of the United States would include Lush Life by Richard Price on his reading list.

As Dickerson says, it’s "a story of race and class on New York’s Lower East Side."

And the Amazon description tells us the following…

Set in a post 9/11, post Giuliani, rapidly gentrifying Lower East Side, the story revolves around a mugging turned murder, and how it affects everyone invovled.

…

Price is widely regarded as a master of dialogue, and a master of capturing how people walk it and talk it in the real world. And he certainly does that here, conveying almost everything important via dialogue, which is often heavily spiced with street slang or on the job jargon (which some readers may find offputting). Moreover s a fan of procedurals, I was hooked from the get go by Price's ability to set up the situation, show it go down, and then maintain the separate threads. Indeed, for the first third of the book, I was completely engrossed.

…

Of course, Price is trying to do more than write a crime procedural, and (his) subplots all feed into the broader themes he's trying to explore. These are pretty fundamental at their core: what happens to us/how do we feel when we realize that our lives aren't what we had planned, or that we've somehow failed ourselves.

…

Is there meaning, is there redemption? Check out the last stanza of Billy Strayhorn's incredible lyrics to the Duke Ellington tune, Lush Life:

"Romance is mush/stifling those who strive/so I'll live a lush life in some small dive/And there I'll be/While I rot with the rest/of those whose lives are lonely too..."

Nice to see that at least one of our leaders has an interest in a story of how everyday people live and interact, warts and all.

A pretty “fly” book selection, Mr. President…

And transitioning from one musically themed note to another, I give you this (and no, I suspect hell will not be freezing over)…

LOS ANGELES (AFP) – You're never too old for something new, they say, and veteran rocker Bob Dylan is set to release his first Christmas album, he announced on his website Thursday.

At the ripe young age of 68, Dylan will release "Christmas in the Heart" on October 13, with profits going to charity group Feeding America.

I can just imagine the track selection list in my mind…

It Take A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Sleigh To Cry

Visions Of Ol’ Santa

Snow (Not Gospel) Plow

Love Minus Below Zero/No Limit

It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Frostbitten)

Tangled Up In Christmas Lights

Just Like Hermie The Elf’s Blues

Ballad Of A Fat, Jolly Man (But Not Quinn The Eskimo)

No word yet on whether or not Bob would be a “man of constant sorrow” for the occasion – hope not (ho, ho, ho).

Wednesday Ted Kennedy Stuff

Keith Olbermann recalls the life and career of Sen. Ted Kennedy, with Brian Williams...

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...this is a documentary by Katie Couric of CBS News, which is probably a bit much for one of these videos, but it contains a lot of archival stuff (nice touch by the Sox here)...


Watch CBS Videos Online

...and there are people who say that Joe Biden is long-winded, and in response I say, "yeah - what of it?" (h/t The Daily Kos - a brief clip of this appears in the Olbermann/Williams remembrance).

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Wednesday Mashup (8/26/09)

(And I also posted here).

Boy, it sounds like the New Jersey Republican “sistahs” are all in a snit over this story (a follow-up from an update to this post)…

Former U.S. Attorney Chris Christie kept gubernatorial politics out of his initial statement on the resignation of First Assistant U.S. Attorney Michele Brown, leaving the task to his running mate for lieutenant governor, Monmouth County Sheriff Kim Guadagno.

Brown resigned a week after her ongoing repayment of a $46,000 loan Christie gave her two years ago was first reported.

Cue the obligatory umbrage over the rough-and-tumble political stuff…

It was Guadagno who blamed Governor Corzine for impugning Brown and forcing her to end "an acclaimed career."

"It is despicable that Jon Corzine has stooped so low to try to win re-election that he's aimed the negative attacks of his hired guns on a dedicated public servant who made it her life's mission to serve the people of New Jersey as a corruption-fighter," she said.

And…

State Sen. Diane Allen (R-Edgewater Park, pictured), who was a finalist to be Christie's running mate, furthered Guadagno's message.

"Jon Corzine earned a reputation that he was willing to spend millions on negative attacks and play down and dirty in order to win. He has certainly lived up to that reputation with his most recent target - a career prosecutor who has made it her life's work to end New Jersey's culture of corruption," she said. "Apparently a nearly 20 year commitment serving the public doesn't matter to Jon Corzine if you are a means to his political end. It's shameful that a female prosecutor who has clearly proven her talent and ability to get the job done is no longer able to do the job she has done so well for nearly two decades."

Well well, it seems that Diane Allen, after lo these many years, has finally realized that any path to national Repug electoral success lies in partisanship and demagoguery.

And that’s a shame, really, because she has cast generally moderate votes, though Blue Jersey noted a lip-flop here where Allen was in favor of leasing the NJ Turnpike before she was against it, and here, where Allen voted against a needle exchange program in her state (as of the post date, New Jersey was the only state in the country without a needle exchange program).

And in terms of national politics, Allen has been a “bridesmaid, but never a bride,” even though Repug strategist Bill Pascoe noted here that Allen was “knocking the snot” out of Doug Forrester in the Repug primary during the ’02 Senate race before Forrester ended up outspending Allen and winning the nomination to run against Dem Bob “The Torch” Torricelli, who of course bailed over some rather tawdry office-selling in favor of Frank Lautenberg, the eventual winner.

So we’ll see if the Jersey statehouse goes “red” in the fall (hope not), and if it does, don’t be surprised if Diane Allen emerges with a key role in a Christie administration as a reward for speaking out on behalf of her would-be boss (feigning offense while trying to mask a rather startling financial misjudgment by “Mr. Repug Law and Order”).

Returning to national politics, I give you the following here from Armstrong Williams (here)…

Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision late yesterday to launch a potential criminal investigation of how terror suspects were treated by the CIA during the George W. Bush administration couldn’t have come at a better time for the White House. As the president’s health reform initiative continues to take a shellacking throughout the country, followed by more bad news today of a swelling national deficit and debt, and seemingly no end in sight for the slow, plodding economic recovery, Barack Obama desperately needs a game-changer.

So what does he do? He turned to page one of the Democratic playbook: “When in trouble, blame Bush.” It’s the eternal M.O. of this administration. Can’t turn the economy around? Bush put us in this ditch. Deficit even larger than you expected? Don’t look at my spending habits, Bush was just as bad. Kids having trouble at school? It’s that damned No Child Left Behind!

As far as I’m concerned, Williams is afflicted with either willful arrogance, invincible stupidity or both for invoking No Child Left Behind, given his own shilling for this underfunded Bush mandate here (and on the matter of approval numbers for health care, this, as an FYI, is ancient history...and the numbers for Obama have slipped since this poll, but not by much).

However, I wanted to point out that, in the matter of the Holder interrogation investigation (with "harsh methods" such as waterboarding depicted above), it turns out that loyal Bushie Frances Townsend (here), while not endorsing the investigation, also would not lie corroborate the opinion of former veep “Deadeye Dick” Cheney that the unlawful interrogation techniques “worked.”

Welcome to the warm, fuzzy glow of the reality-based community, Fran.

Finally, this story tells us the following…

MEXICO CITY – Mexico now has one of the world's most liberal laws for drug users after eliminating jail time for small amounts of marijuana, cocaine and even heroin, LSD and methamphetamine.

"All right!" said a grinning Ivan Rojas, a rail-thin 20-year-old addict who endured police harassment during the decade he has spent sleeping in Mexico City's gritty streets and subway stations.

But stunned police on the U.S. side of the border say the law contradicts President Felipe Calderon's drug war, and some fear it could make Mexico a destination for drug-fueled spring breaks and tourism.

Tens of thousands of American college students flock to Cancun and Acapulco each year to party at beachside discos offering wet T-shirt contests and all-you-can-drink deals.

"Now they will go because they can get drugs," said San Diego Police Chief William Lansdowne. "For a country that has experienced thousands of deaths from warring drug cartels for many years, it defies logic why they would pass a law that will clearly encourage drug use."

…

"It provides an officially sanctioned market for the consumption of the world's most dangerous drugs," San Diego County Sheriff Bill Gore said. "For the people of San Diego the risk is direct and lethal. There are those who will drive to Mexico to use drugs and return to the U.S. under their influence."

Let me ask you what poses a more lethal threat to the people of this country – guns or drugs?

If your answer, like mine, is guns, then why on earth aren’t they regulated as least as much as drugs, particularly when, as noted here, Mexican president Felipe Calderon has called for an assault weapons ban?

As noted here…

The US bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) estimates that 90% of firearms seized in Mexico come from north of the border. Of the 2,400 weapons traced back to the US, 1,800 came from dealers in the four US border states, where more than 6,500 gun dealers operate.

The scale of the arms trade can be shocking. On 7 November last year, Jaime González Durán - known as El Hummer - a leading member of a Mexican drug cartel, was arrested in Reynosa. A day earlier, police raided a safe house belonging to El Hummer and made the largest weapons seizure in Mexican history.

Homeland security and the ATF say that the Mexican cartels bypass gun control laws in Mexico by paying US citizens to buy guns for them.

I don’t know about you, but if I’m going to get scared about an illegal element from “south of the border,” it’s much more likely to be a drug trafficker armed with an assault rifle than a college student who’s had one too many bong hits.

(By the way, the above pic shows federal versus local Mexican law enforcement combating each other, with the "feds" trying to locate and bust "local officers and politicians accused of collaborating with brutal drug cartels.")

Decriminalizing the consumption of drugs (as opposed to the trafficking of same) makes so much sense in this day and age that it’s almost too obvious to be pointed out. And while we engage in “values voter” shouting matches on the subject, kudos to Mexico for acting with the common sense that we apparently do not possess.

RIP Teddy

I always thought that, though Ted Kennedy gave this eulogy for his brother Bobby 41 years ago of course, a lot of it applied to him as well.

Tuesday Stuff

And now, the nominees for Best Right-Wing Media Shill Propagating Health Care Lies: Faux News humanoids Chris Wallace and Megyn Kelly, and the "Doughy Pantload" himself (once more, I got into this here today)...



(And by the way, here is a consequence of this idiocy - at least it was property and not people...update 8/26/09: OK, maybe I was a bit premature based on this - we'll see.)

...and talk about turning over some big-time rocks; that's what "Countdown" does here with United Health Group...

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

..."Worst Persons" (Glenn Beck goes after Van Jones, and the fact that Jones was associated with Color of Change, the group sponsoring the campaign to get Beck's advertisers to boycott the show - hmmm, up to 36 now, huh? Will the last one to leave please turn out the lights? - has nothing to do with it...sure; Gretchen Carlson talks about unconfirmed Obama Administration appointees including Army Secretary - and Republican - John McHugh, not noting of course that a "hold" has been place on McHugh's nomination by Pat Roberts and Sam Brownback of Kansas...the utterly idiotic reason why is noted here; but spokesman Matt Lavoie for Repug Congressman Wally Herger of California...yesterday's "Worst"...gets it for claiming that Herger was trying to make a joke out of a guy named Bert Stead, who proclaimed that he is a "right-wing terrorist"...I would say that the "joke" has already made its presence known, though there are at least three involved in this sorry episode - and I didn't know lefties were showing up anywhere with guns too - ???)...

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

...and once more, I'm giving "mellow" the night off.