Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the Senate minority leader, says tax cuts to spur job growth, like all tax cuts, should be “deficit neutral”. He went on, during an interview with MSNBC, to say that the Congress will “have to look at how to pay for” proposed reductions in the corporate tax rate. Throughout 2010, Republicans consistently argued that tax cuts don’t need to be paid for.

Neither Savannah Guthrie nor Chuck Todd, who were jointly interviewing McConnell, seemed to notice the importance of the remark; instead, they praised McConnell for never straying from the party line. In fact, he had just contradicted one of the fundamental party talking points of 2010, indeed of the last decade: that tax cuts “don’t need to be paid for”, because they are not, to their minds, “spending”.

If McConnell is held to his words, the Republicans in Congress will be forced to treat hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans as potentially wasteful spending. McConnell’s about-face on this point may be one of the early signs of how successful was Pres. Obama’s reframing of the legislative landscape in last night’s address.

There is one key issue at play in the logic of tax policy and budget calculation that might be driving McConnell to change his view of whether tax cuts need to be paid for: last night, Pres. Obama proposed following through on one of the key recommendations of the Deficit Commission, to lower the corporate tax rate while eliminating all loopholes that allow major corporations to get away without paying any taxes at all.

The proposal was popular with members of both parties, and part of a wider call by Obama to “simplify” the tax code. Speaker of the House John Boehner was visibly startled by the president’s commitment to work with Republicans on key proposals they have long struggled for with little success.

But some free-marketeers are wary of any change to the tax code that would eliminate loopholes that give an unwarranted advantage to their favored players. The contradiction in supporting free markets while defending unfair tax policy that picks winners and losers has long been a weak point for proponents of tax reform, but Pres. Obama clearly wants to challenge that problematic orthodoxy: eliminating all loopholes should help fix the deficit by not only paying for the corporate tax-rate reduction, but should increase revenues while promoting new investment and economic growth.

That model is anathema to some of the Republican party’s most important backers, and Mitch McConnell, as leader of the obstructionist minority in the Senate, is in many ways the chosen champion of those wealthy interests. The question is: will Sen. McConnell hold to his contention that tax cuts need to be paid for.

Less than one year after the historic passage of healthcare insurance reform, financial regulatory reform and the initial phase of EPA regulation of greenhouse gas emissions, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) is asking industry to provide a wish list of regulations they would like erased from federal law. Issa is the new chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Affairs, and has announced his intention to use the post to eliminate consumer protections and anti-fraud regulations.

Rep. Issa would not, of course, explain is view in that way; he has been careful to couch his rhetoric in the language of “stimulating growth” and “spurring innovation”, treating any and all government oversight (now part of his official responsibilities) as totalitarian, evil and a roadblock to progress and the free market. Critics say his language is outdated, and too intimately adherent to the philosophy of trickle-down economics, which holds that only the private sector can achieve legitimate progress in a democratic-capitalist republic.

The direct result of what Issa appears to be planning would be the elimination of crucial government regulatory powers that allow consumers to enjoy at least minimal protection against sweeping, systemic corporate fraud and abuse. Among the regulations Issa aims to target are provisions of the Affordable Care Act that do nothing more than require that insurers follow the law and provide insurance to their contributors.

Rep. Issa’s planned campaign of deregulation is more sweeping and more radical than previous similar attempts, and would strip most environmental protections, most public health regulations, most food safety provisions, and most anti-fraud regulations designed to prevent abuses by financial firms and insurers. What’s more, the radical ideology underlying the planned deregulation ignores the facts regarding the substantive value (to consumers and to industry alike) of effective regulation.

According to the watchdog group Public Citizen:

Corporations and their apologists routinely overstate the costs of public protections and ignore their benefits. To take one example, the Heritage Foundation attributes more than a third of all costs of regulation issued in 2010 to fuel economy standards. Yet Heritage fails to mention that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found those rules would confer benefits three times as great as the costs.

Indeed, even the Bush administration found that major regulations’ benefits far outweigh their costs, concluding that the total cost of major regulations issued from 1997-2007 was between $46 billion and $53 billion, while benefits were, at minimum, more than twice that: $122 billion to $656 billion (see here at page 10).

Mr. Issa has no clear plan to substitute any responsible regulatory provision for the programs he aims to eliminate, and has consistently opposed legislation that grants consumers the right to seek redress for grievance—a constitutionally guaranteed right (First Amendment). What, if anything, Rep. Issa believes this assault on consumer protection will achieve for the benefit of ordinary Americans remains a mystery.

He alleges such actions are needed to spur job creation, but has opposed proven models for public-private partnership and recovery-oriented job creation. Issa is not alone. The Republican House caucus now includes more members with a decided opposition to any form of government funding intended to create jobs or spur private investment. Despite demands that taxes be lowered to unsustainably low, budget-busting levels that would cripple the public and private sectors alike, this new band of radicals oppose programs where public spending is known to have a high ROI for private investment and opportunity.

While carping about the need to rein in government spending, Rep. Issa now plans to spend Committee resources on the dubious notion that killing consumer protections is related to “investigating” slow job creation during the ongoing economic recovery. Politico reports:

a partial list obtained by POLITICO includes ones sent Dec. 13 to Duke Energy, the Association of American Railroads, FMC Corp., Toyota and Bayer. Others receiving inquiries from Issa over the course of the month included the American Petroleum Institute, National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), the National Petrochemical & Refiners Association (NPRA) and entities representing health care and telecommunication providers.

The goal is to investigate the Obama administration’s promise through the 2009 economic stimulus bill and other measures to create jobs, which “has gone unfilled, I guess is the nicest way to put it,” Bardella said.

Issa apparently believes that failure to achieve record job creation totals (which would be needed to compensate for population growth, failed retirements, and high unemployment resulting from the 2007-2008 financial industry collapse) is grounds for a corruption probe, relating to a law that has actually performed well, in the toughest economic climate to hit the US in 8 decades. Rep. Issa appears to be stretching the legal definition of his committee chairmanship, from day one, with a misguided drive to smear the president and to undermine consumer protections in service of corporate interests.

His wish list request is as close to an overt admission as one could hope to see from a member of Congress that his intent is to do the bidding of private industry first, and to worry about the consequences for ordinary Americans sometime later on, if at all. Issa has defended his wish list request by suggesting it is intended only as a means of gathering information to discern whether some “patterns” of regulatory practice might be hindering job creation.

Again, it appears his intent is to have industry groups provide him with the vocabulary for blaming Pres. Obama for their own failure to innovate, to invest wisely, to manage their resources appropriately and to create jobs. It would be a good idea, if Mr. Issa is serious about job creation and economic recovery, for him to ask the same industry groups how many jobs they have outsourced to nations with lax labor laws, slave-labor conditions and/or widespread political corruption, and whether “patterns” of executive compensation and/or financial mismanagement have negatively impacted US domestic job creation.

In one of the least informed, most reckless votes of the 2010 midterm elections, a racist ideologue aiming to intimidate Oklahomans into voting for him and his party, pushed an unconstitutional response to a non-existent threat. The referendum aimed at preventing Islamic sharia law from supplanting the United States Constitution was a response to a non-existent threat, and it includes language that directly contradicts the Constitution of the United States.

Article VI of the Constitution reads:

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.

The Constitution is the ‘supreme Law of the Land’. It cannot be supplanted, and will not be. There has never been a single case in the history of the United States, despite the false propaganda peddled by the referendum’s backers, in which sharia law has been used as grounds for any judicial ruling. The entire history of this referendum is based on lies, smears and language that is very closely linked to the ideas spread by white-supremacist and hate groups.

In cases where individuals have chosen to refer to traditional Islamic principles as an explanation of their own behavior, or where prosecutors may have used such language to cross-examine witnesses, there are key issues of the Constitutional right to seek redress for grievances, to mount a defense, and to use any information that might pertain to that defense.

The Oklahoma referendum also aims to prevent any reference to “international law”. This language stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of the Constitution, the false assumption that only the original words of the framers are relevant and no other text or precedent is useful under Constitutional law.

In fact, the very opposite is true: judicial precedent has always included British Common Law, and especially to international treaties ratified by the United States Congress and signed by the president, which the Constitution deems are actually part of the ‘supreme Law of the Land’, i.e. part of the body of the Constitution itself.

Some have argued, though not with widespread support, that this particular matter could be clarified if we developed the habit of listing those ratified treaties as a kind of second tier of Constitutional Amendments. Amendments they are not, because they cannot be considered valid, if they contradict the Constitution itself. They do not amend it. But they do have the weight of Constitutional law in adding specificity that was not int he original document and enumerating powers that might not have previously been listed.

All judges in the United States are bound by law to uphold the Constitution of the United States, and this means international treaties, including those made with Native American tribes, which have the legal status of sovereign nations. Yet the Oklahoma referendum not only misinterprets this fact; it goes beyond in barring any Oklahoma judges from considerings elements of other “cultures”.

Experts believe this could be used to delegitimize, or attempt to delegitimize, treaties that have long governed relations with Native American tribes, many of whom live in and hold land in Oklahoma. Some have even seen sinister intent, alleging that such might be the real motive of the referendum, to give corporate and political interests the power to ignore precedent, “unsign” treaties, and strip Native Americans of their land and/or legal rights.

What is clear is that while there is no threat to the Constitution of the United States from any phantom sharia menace, the referendum itself is a very real assault on the principles of the Constitution and the democratic republic it founded. The people of Oklahoma appear to have been tricked, by shameless bigots, into acting out of fear and animus, against their own interests in protecting the Constitution that establishes the democratic republic they hope to protect.

There should be lawsuits both at the state and federal level, from community groups, citizen watchdogs, Native American tribes, and any conservatives who actually believe in the Constitutional order, to 1) investigate the backers of the referendum, to determine their intention and whether any laws were violated in collusion aimed at manipulating the election outcome; 2) overturn the referendum, on the grounds that it violates the Constitution of the United States; 3) examine whether backers in public office violated their oath to uphold the Constitution; 4) prevent Oklahoma from being known as the state that aims to undermine the Constitution.

Republican House minority leader John Boehner, of Ohio, said last Sunday on Meet the Press that, whether or not tax cuts are paid for, Pres. Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans must not be allowed to expire. He refused, in increasingly heated and defensive language, to say whether or not tax cuts are paid for. His refusal was as good as an admission that there is no way to pay for the tax cuts and that his party does not, in fact, believe the trickle-down theory behind the Bush tax cuts will actually work.

Boehner went on to argue that the only way to “get the economy moving” is to make sure that nothing is done to alter the Bush tax cuts, though they were specifically planned and legislated to expire, because they were never conceived of as being sustainable in terms of federal budgetary needs. The revelation that Rep. Boehner has no plan for reining in federal spending, except to extend Bush tax cuts for the wealthy and cut social programs that are helping American families in need weather the economic storm and provide healthcare to their children.

The most rapidly expanding area of federal spending is consistently the military, yet no prominent Republican arguing for reduced spending argues that Defense spending should be cut. Since George W. Bush took office in the year 2001, the Pentagon’s annual budget has doubled, to half a trillion dollars, and that does not include the two wars, which are projected to cost over $3 trillion before they are through.

George W. Bush’s catastrophically failed tax-cut policy, in which he shed a $1.7 trillion budget surplus, has already cost the United States taxpayer over $3 trillion, and an extension of that policy is projected to cost nearly $3 trillion more over the next 10 years. The spending on Bush’s wars will cost at least $3 trillion. Yet Pres. Obama is being attacked as a “tax-and-spend” liberal. This lie is toxic to the American republic and if successful, could bankrupt the government, drive the economy into a prolonged state of depression economics, and cede global leadership to China.

The bulk of the so-called “increase” in the federal budget deficit from George Bush’s last year in office to Barack Obama’s first year comes from one thing alone, and it is not an increase in spending: Barack Obama decided the government should stop lying to the American people by keeping the accounting for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan off the federal budget. Until 2009, when Obama took office, the Bush administration had been appropriating funds for the wars as “supplemental spending bills”, so that the annual budget never reflected the massive spending.

It was a deliberate strategy, designed to reduce oversight and to frustrate the ability of the public to scrutinize and evaluate just how much the government was spending. The Republican Congress consistently supported this strategy, until it was replaced by a Democratic majority in 2007. John Boehner was part of that unprecedented spending binge, yet he continues, along with many other record-spending Republicans, to shout about the need to reduce spending.

It is Pres. Obama who is working to cut waste, fraud and abuse. It is Pres. Obama who has undertaken Reinventing Government 2.0, an effort to repeat the Clinton/Gore administration’s record success in reducing wasteful government spending from 1993 to 2001. It is Pres. Obama who revealed the extent of Bush’s profligate spending by forcing the war spending back onto the federal budget books.

It was the Republican Congress and George W. Bush that passed one after another budget designed to deepen deficits and weaken the dollar, a “trickle-down” strategy of “deficit spending” —meant to mimic Reagan’s policies, which by the way created 3 recessions in 8 years— mixed with a monetary policy designed to cover up serious weaknesses in the broader economy. Exports and consumer spending, including easy borrowing and home loans, could stay artificially high, while real wealth was being depleted.

Boehner claims $1.3 trillion worth of spending cuts, but doesn’t like to admit that there is no coherent plan for what to cut or why, or that the military budget is not targeted, the Republicans continue to exclude war spending from their budget proposals —to artificially make them appear lower than Obama’s budget projections— or that he plans to target schools, children’s health insurance, Medicare and Medicaid, unemployment, and infrastructure spending.

Boehner refused to discuss how he would in fact spend in ways that could be grossly detrimental to the nation: extending multi-billion-dollar subsidies for the oil industry, despite its proven inability to manage its own resources, protect the environment, or work in good faith with the government or with local communities.

Pres. Obama, on the other hand, has actually called for a cap on discretionary spending. Mr. Boehner says it’s not “a real cap”, because discretionary spending now includes certain elements of military funding that Pres. Bush kept “off book” —two hugely expensive wars— and measures designed to put the brakes on a major economic downturn, itself the direct result of the very policies Boehner is promoting.

The “not a real cap” claim is another assertion of the Republican position that nothing whatsoever should be done to address the economic crisis that began in 2007, when property and credit markets started to lose momentum. This do-nothing Republican approach is a sign of deep ignorance of the underlying problems facing the economy, and a betrayal of the public trust, consigning present and future generations to a degraded economic standing and a reduced level of real personal freedom.

And it’s an election year! Imagine what the Republicans would actually do were they to regain control of Congress and have two years before facing another election. The reward-the-rapacious brand of economic sabotage during the Bush-Delay-Abramoff years would be slight by comparison to what is now being proposed. The media have a responsibility to tell the truth about liars like John Boehner: his policies have been tried and have failed; he proposes nothing whatsoever that would deal with the problems he helped to create, and he is lying about the president and the ongoing economic recovery.

Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona, a Republican who supports the draconian anti-immigrant law, today lied on CBS’ political show ‘Face the Nation’ when he said the federal policy on immigration law is to deliberately “not thoroughly enforce the law”. He also lied about the capability of the “papers please” law to combat organized crime and a rash of kidnapping in Arizona. Responsible citizens must remember: SB1070′s absolute ban on safe interaction with government or community turns hundreds of thousands of people into targets for a drug mafia protection racket.

Kyl went on to explain that the children of undocumented immigrants should be denied their explicit constitutional right, which is that by being born on American soil they are American citizens. This proposal is as radical and disturbing as the proposition that police should be able to ignore the 4th Amendment and the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause, because it would, by virtue of allowing the government to be more selective about who is a citizen, directly impact the civil rights of every American citizen.

Yet again, a major proponent of this draconian legislation failed to provide even one hint of what should be done to address the real problem at hand, which is how to bring those here into the legal system and derive the appropriate revenues from their contribution to the broader economy. At bottom, because the Arizona law makes no pretense whatsoever to find a way to honor the contributions of people who work honestly to provide legitimate services to those who pay them.

That fact puts Kyl’s position and that of every prominent supporter of SB1070 at odds with their claim that the law is not discriminatory. The 14th Amendment explicitly forbids this type of law, stating that “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

It is, of course, impossible for Arizona’s authorities to not “abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States” without denying “to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” What’s more, SB1070 contains provisions that permit detention without judicial oversight and even extradition without due process to neighboring jurisdictions where federal immigration enforcement is harsher.

Yet “nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty or property, without due process of law”. ANY PERSON. SB1070 is an explicit and unashamed assault on the Constitution of the United States. There can be no doubt about that. This is why the most aggressive provisions were struck down by a federal judge—the law is very much in fact an erosion of fundamental principles of American Constitutional law, and a threat to the freedoms of every American citizen.

Jon Kyl clearly went on television today with the purpose of using the rhetoric that emerges from this debate, as seen through the lens of partisan spin, to tell lies about the Obama administration in order to promote the Republican party’s interests in the fall election. Sen. Kyl should rethink his shameless manipulation of this issue and consider the human dignity and Constitutional value of the millions of Americans whose rights he would throw out for partisan gain.

The overhaul of financial regulations that passed Congress yesterday and was signed into law today by Pres. Obama is the most sweeping and significant reform to financial services regulation since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The passage was a major victory for Pres. Obama, who had set significant financial regulatory reform as a top priority since before the 2008 credit crisis hit. It is also shaping up to be a key plank in the Democratic campaign this fall, as Republicans systematically opposed and sought to block the measure, aligning themselves with major banks and financial interests.

Some of the most important provisions of this major reform package include:

• banning predatory home loans to low-income consumers;
• requiring lenders to cover up to 10% of any loss on a loan, even if they securitize part of it;
• restoring the “wall” between commercial and investment banking and insurance, to prevent conflicts of interest;
• requiring banks to hold a higher percentage of overall assets as cash in reserve;
• the launch of a consumer financial protection agency;
• wider range of options to “unwind” failed financial firms through bankruptcy, to avoid taxpayer-funded bailouts…

Derivatives, hedge funds and credit rating agencies will also be more tightly regulated. The freedom of firms to choose which credit rating agency will rate a given product or service will be limited, due to the conflict inherent in selecting the most favorable pattern of analysis among several options. The legislation also strengthens restrictions on credit card companies, which were already imposed in a consumer protection bill last year.

Any one of these provisions would constitute a major reform to the financial regulatory regime which governs how complex financial transactions and major banking institutions are organized. Taken together, they are just part of the most important piece of financial services legislation in nearly 80 years. Rep. Barney Frank, head of the House financial services committee said it was the most important piece of legislation he was ever involved in passing.

Pres. Obama has said the legislation will ensure that taxpayers are never again forced to foot the bill for bailing out failing financial firms. He also said the notion that some banks are “too big to fail”, the fear of the collapse of firms like Lehman Brothers or AIG, will no longer enter into federal financial regulatory policy. Obama’s response to the so-called Great Recession, and his legislative program generally, has been highly successful, despite public anxiety over the languishing US job market.

As Newsweek has noted:

With Wall Street reform added to health care, President Obama is now two-for-two on his major domestic initiatives. If you include big bills expanding college loans and cracking down on credit-card companies (further strengthened in the new Dodd-Frank financial legislation), he’s four-for-four. Throw in the Recovery Act, which included more public investment than even Franklin Roosevelt managed in his first year, and a half dozen other meaty bills and you’ve got a legislative record that’s already historic. Oh, and Obama (with Ben Bernanke) prevented another Great Depression, then got almost all the bailout money back.

The legislation is certainly a defense of the average consumer or household against the reach of abusive financial practices. But Obama must still struggle to make the case that all the good in the economic landscape has been his work and all the bad is the residue of 8 years of Bush policy. He wasted no time taking the message to the people, reminding Americans that this bill is designed to prevent a slide back into the bad old days of “failed policies of the past”.

He has also begun to speak more strongly in support of the Democratic case for this November’s elections, accusing the Republicans of “filibustering our recovery”, for opposing the extension of unemployment benefits to the many American families in need. Analysts have argued the Republican intransigence on unemployment is a political calculation: on the one hand, they hope to deepen the day-to-day impact of a slow job market on families and communities, so they blame the current leadership, and on the other, they seek to expand an ideological assault on government programs to make the populist case.

It will be hard for Republicans to avoid the accusation that by opposing this financial reform legislation —only three Republican senators voted for passage, all three New England moderates: Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine and Scott Brown of Massachusetts—, with its consumer-protection and anti-fraud provisions. Financial markets will adjust, and while analysts are mixed in their response to specific provisions, there is hope added transparency will strengthen financial services markets over time and help stabilize the recovery.

A group of Republican senators today suddenly took a shift to the extremist right when they launched one after another attack on the legendary Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, widely considered to be one of the wisest and most responsible justices ever to sit on the Supreme Court. They attacked him as a quintessential “activist judge”, mainly to paint Elena Kagan, who clerked for him, as somehow opposed to “American values”.

The smear campaign is astonishing for its personal bent, and shocking in its near total disregard for history or for the level of prestige Marshall’s name enjoys throughout the American legal universe. He is one of the great minds of American jurisprudence, almost a late-come founding father in terms of his stature in shaping and defining Constitutional law, yet for what appear to be electoral reasons, a group of Republican senators chose to tear at his legacy in order to make political hay with the confirmation process.

The bizarre assault on one of the nation’s major public service heroes appeared to many to be a leftover of some tragic bygone era when their party routinely associated minorities with degenerate behavior, and has outraged not only legal scholars, the majority in both houses in Congress and the general public. A closer look at Marshall’s record raises even more questions as to what could possibly be motivating the Republican senators’ shocking, and obviously concerted, strategy.

Thurgood Marshall was not only the first African American Supreme Court justice. He was also one of the most accomplished civil rights lawyers in US history. He fought and won some of the most important cases in Supreme Court history, including Brown v. Board of Education. The argument that his approach to the law is somehow “not in the mainstream” clearly suggests echoes of the pro-segregationist ideology, which held that any attempt to update unconstitutional laws should be treated as radical.

Are several Republican members of the Senate judiciary committee using the Kagan confirmation hearings to wax nostalgic for the era when segregation was the law of the land? Is this a repeat of Trent Lott’s effusive praise of Strom Thurmond’s pro-segregation 1948 presidential campaign? (Lott infamously remarked that we would have been spared all the problems we face as a nation had Thurmond won and implemented those policies.)

In fairness, an honest observer would want to say it is improbable that the reason for this unwarranted assault on one of the most prestigious and accomplished legal minds in American history is not a perverse longing for a time when the nation’s laws utterly failed to live up to the standards set forth by the Constitution and denied millions of people fundamental rights. But, in all honesty, there is no good reason for this smear campaign against Justice Marshall.

Smearing Justice Marshall in no way affects Solicitor General Kagan’s qualifications to serve on the Supreme Court; it just reminds everyone of Kagan’s achievements. Smearing Justice Marshall in no way makes the case that “liberal” judges are bad for America or “out of the mainstream”; it just makes clear how far outside the mainstream the questioners themselves are, to not be showing adequate depth of knowledge regarding the salient accomplishments of Thurgood Marshall for the betterment of the nation and its legal infrastructure.

It also seems to indicate a very lazy kind of thinking about what the nation’s laws are for and how the legal system works. Thurgood Marshall was not “an activist judge”, but rather an actual civil rights lawyer fighting to overturn several centuries of cruel and dehumanizing treatment of minorities by extreme racists and by elected officials who lacked the courage and moral fiber to use the Constitution to build the “more perfect union” the founders hoped for.

To define someone who actually had to lead a struggle against oppression, hatred and even cold-blooded murder that went unpunished by corrupt authorities, as “not in the mainstream”, because one seeks to define such a project as his as being against the long-term interests of the nation, is morally and intellectually inexplicable. As political strategy, it is incomprehensible. And as a line of questioning for Supreme Court confirmation hearings, it is a shameful waste of time and an abdication of Constitutional responsibility.

The Senate judiciary committee should be comprised of elected officials who are willing and able to explore the remote minutia of legal process and legal theory, not a list of bullet-points listing ways to use innuendo to smear one of the nation’s great legal heroes. What we have learned is that several members of the United States Senate’s judiciary committee do not understand the historic weight of Justice Marshall’s achievements or how they have made this nation more congruent with the ideals expressed in its founding documents: in other words, how his achievements have made us all more free.

Whether Elena Kagan is qualified for the Supreme Court may be of less concern than what we are learning about the attitudes of several of those senators who have used their opportunity to explore her record to attack the legendary Justice Thurgood Marshall. They apparently do not fully understand the weight of their place in shaping the nation’s future, nor do they grasp the ways in which the Supreme Court is precisely designed to do just that.

NBC’s chief Pentagon corresondent Jim Miklaszewski told MSNBC this morning that in his opinion military trials are “more reliable” in terms of the outcomes they produce. The comment was perhaps an unwelcome introduction of Constitutional questions into the debate over whether to try accused 9/11 terrorist conspirators in a civilian criminal court or before a military tribunal.

The reason for Miklaszewski’s comment is unclear, as his role was simply to report on the possibility of Attorney General Holder being “open to the idea” of using a military setting to try terror suspects held at Guantánamo Bay. One of the major criticisms leveled at the military commissions process set up by Pres. George W. Bush was that it gave the air of unfair trial and could spur revenge attacks on military personnel.

Several elements of the military commissions were declared unconstitutional, and more than one lawyer involved, including one judge, have said they believe the process was deliberately set up to circumvent Constitutional constraints on executive power and predetermine guilt. Miklaszewski’s comment this morning on MSNBC again raises the concern that some proponents of military tribunals expect a rigged verdict.

Military justice in the United States has a long a storied history. With a number of concerning exceptions, it is largely a history of deliberately subjecting the forum of military justice to the civilian rule of law set forth in the Constitutional order. In this sense, it is a proud aspect of military justice professionals, lawyers and judges alike, that all military trials adhere to the same strict standards of due process as mandated by the United States Constitution.

Failure to live up to those standards is not so much a way of “getting terror convictions” —the more unfair the process, the more likely appeals to federal law will succeed, putting convictions at risk— as it is an assault on the due process rights of American military personnel. Military courts martial are considered to be more severe than civilian courts mainly because they have unique jurisdiction over military personnel who are required to follow a chain of command.

That requirement means they are responsible to more specific mandates than civilians who are responsible to follow written law. While courts martial may not require military personnel to follow any order that flagrantly violates federal law, criminal punishments can be meted out for infractions that involve ignoring orders or violating military rules or the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Because military courts martial can punish military personnel for violations under this expanded legal code, and because the hierarchy of military authority is integral to some questions that are at issue in such cases, military justice is considered to be “more severe”, but in fact, military personnel are supposed to enjoy 100% of their Constitutional due process rights, even when facing military courts martial.

Establishing the precedent —unlikely to hold up in federal court, and already rejected by the Supreme Court— that military justice can ignore key due process protections does more to harm military personnel who must face trial through that system than it does to harm any accused terrorist. US military personnel deserve the same Constitutional protections all other defendants would receive under the US Constitution.

There is no legal foundation for the use of military courts to conduct any kind of criminal proceeding that would not provide all the protections of civilian criminal court. There are essentially two circumstances in which there would be solid legal foundation for using military tribunals to try accused terrorists: 1) to adjudicate the legality of holding a prisoner of war during the conflict in question; 2) to prosecute war crimes, under international war crimes law.

Application of international war crimes law is, according to the United States Constitution, application of the “supreme law of the land”, because all treaties signed and ratified are, essentially, part of the body of Constitutional law. This means that even then, Constitutional due process requirements would still apply. The US Constitution does not provide any means by which the US Congress could legislate ad-hoc military courts, specific to a unique circumstance or accusation, which would not meet Constitutional requirements.

As such, there are serious concerns about the motivations of those who profess open preference for military tribunals over civilian criminal courts for the prosecution of accused terrorists. Some observers have noted that there is a clear overlap between the most vehement proponents of military tribunals and individuals who seek to prevent the release of information about extralegal detentions and intelligence-gathering methods.

This overlap has raised concerns among civil rights groups and human rights watchdogs that there is in the pressure for military tribunals a politically driven campaign to fundamentally alter the application of US Constitutional law in order to allow for the concealing of evidence that could incriminate members of the previous administration, or which could see their actions lead to the failure to convict dangerous terrorists.

One solution would be to stage a thorough, independent criminal investigation of the very methods in question, both to establish whether Constitutional law was violated, or even flagrantly ignored, and to establish further grounds on which the tainted evidence might be admissable in any court of law, military or civilian, following Constitutional standards.

The Republican party is jubilant about the victory of state Senator Scott Brown, in the race to take over the United States Senate seat held for nearly half a century by the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA). And they should be jubilant. Kennedy was in many ways the de facto leader of the Democratic party for much of that time, and his untiring defense of liberal principles of social justice and economic fairness were a thorn in the side of Republicans throughout. But the odd thing is that suddenly, the Republicans are arguing that where goes Massachusetts, so goes the nation. Are they kidding?

For perhaps the first time since the 1950s, the Republican party is actually arguing that Massachusetts is the indicator state for a nationwide trend. Usually, Republicans don’t like trends that start in Massachusetts (though some of them have caught the “tea party” bug some 236 years after the fact). But the party of Lincoln and Reagan and Bush and Abramoff is hoping that somehow Mr. Brown’s trip to Washington will so fundamentally alter the electoral math across the nation that the failures of the last decade will be forgotten and they might actually have a chance at taking back the Congress.

But Massachusetts remains in many ways the most Democratic state in the nation. Both houses of the state legislature are dominated by Democrats, the governor is a Democrat, the other US senator is a Democrat, and every Massachusetts member of the House of Representatives is a Democrat. Mitt Romney, when he was governor of Massachusetts won favor mainly because he passed universal healthcare in the state, and Senator-elect Brown himself is a Republican who vows to oppose Obama, but yet is pro-choice and favors expanded rights for same-sex couples and gay civil rights protections.

Of course, on foreign policy, liberals quip that he sounds a lot like Dick Cheney, and he is avowedly pro-death-penalty, a position that deeply offends many in Massachusetts, where the movement for the abolition of slavery, the women’s suffrage and civil rights movements and the push for gay marriage rights, set an historical background for the view that capital punishment is simply state-sanctioned murder. Mr. Brown’s own political future in Massachusetts will be very uncertain if he does not represent the views and priorities of his constituents.

Many of his supporters in this month’s special election were relatively liberal, if non-ideological, independents who sought to “send a message” to Pres. Obama and the Democrats: they want someone who will fight and who will see their initiatives through to conclusion. Paradoxically, the Massachusetts win for the Republicans is in some ways indicative of a mood that demands more determined progressive leadership from the Democrats, but the Republican party would like to spin the win in a more obvious way: it’s a sign that their message —whatever that is— is getting through and they can be the party of “change”.

It’s important to add whatever that is to any comment on the Republican message at present, because the actually professed message of the moment is not only logically incoherent, but holding them to an actual policy program is a little like nailing Jello to a wall. On the one hand, they are angry about job losses and want to defend working people; on the other hand, they are angry that Pres. Obama is not fond of Bush’s tax giveaways and catering to wealthy corporate interests. They are outraged by Treasury Sec. Tim Geithner’s perceived closeness to Wall Street, but they rail against Pres. Obama’s efforts to regulate Wall Street’s most abusive practices.

Where does Mr. Brown fit into this discourse? Well, he fits perfectly into the slippery, logically incoherent part of the rhetorical proposition: he’s a liberal Republican from a Democratic state who swears to oppose Obama, but has been elected by a constituency that wants to see Obama succeed. He sometimes agrees with the party line, but would not pass the right-wing ideological “purity test” that is expected to be proposed at the Republican National Convention.

He will have to behave like the populist he has claimed to be, but that will likely require him to work closely with the Democrats in Congress and the White House, as they are the one’s actually pushing a re-regulation of financial markets and healthcare reform —which Brown opposes— designed to answer populist uproar and shore up the economy in a way that benefits the little guy. Brown will have to be something other than a foaming-at-the-mouth obstructionist if he is to be relevant, but he has promised to be the obstructionist, with a ‘whatever the cost’ posture.

There is a line of thinking that suggests Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV), the majority leader, could have an “easier” job now, since he will not be expected to reach a 60-vote “filibuster-proof” super-majority, so the very logic of the absolutely uniform Republican voting bloc is itself undermined. And it may be so. With only 59 votes for the majority, and most Democrats already considering two or three of those presumed caucus members to not really be part of the team, the Republicans will have to produce ideas that will make them relevant to the legislative process, not just obstruct the 60-vote juggernaut in defense against the phantom menace of socialism.

RNC Chair Michael Steele, controversial at turns among both friend and foe, when asked by Sean Hannity if the Republicans would take back the House of Representatives this year, said “not this year”. Hannity, apparently hoping for a different answer, interrupted the RNC Chair, asking “You don’t think so?” Then Steele made the now famous remark that “We still have some vacancies that need to get filled, but then the question we need to ask ourselves is: If we do that, are we ready.”

This is the question the Republican party needs to answer in 2010. But, as observed above, it will not be by way of universal obstructionism that the party demonstrates its leadership qualities; the party will have to do the unthinkable, and work with the Democratic majority and the White House, to produce better policy. While the victory of Scott Brown is significant in many ways, Republicans should not take it as a sign of things to come: Democrats are angry at the campaign of obstruction and will be increasingly active throughout 2010, pushing the message that Republicans failed when they had power and while out of power, do nothing but undermine reform.

In a vile new low, former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani has said he expects bringing the accused 9/11 mastermind to justice will directly cause new terror attacks on New York. Mr. Giuliani is now seeking to use the memory of 9/11 and the very real and lasting trauma felt by so many people, to sow fear and provoke a partisan backlash against Pres. Obama, whose Justice Dept. is actually seeking a conviction after 8 years of inaction. For Giuliani to use the tragic memory of that day as a political bludgeon is bad enough, but to come so close to openly calling for and thinking aloud another attack is a new low in callous Machiavellian politicking.

It is unclear if Giuliani had any motive other than to slander Pres. Obama and incite a visceral fear response from the public, but Giuliani has made a post-political life and fortune for himself, talking up terrorism and defaming American security and intelligence personnel for much of the last 8 years. And while being the only mayor in America whose city was hit twice by terrorists in his watch, he has sought to profit from his “expertise” on counter-terrorism and security matters.

His own flirtation with a presidential bid was cut short to a large extent because he referred to the 9/11 attacks as part of his credentials so often it had come to be taken as a pattern of poor taste rhetorical manipulation of the event and of the human grief associated with it. This latest smear on the Obama administration, coming in the form of Mr. Giuliani’s nearly calling for a terrorist act to bolster his argument, is, however, his most egregious and unsympathetic attack on the human dignity of the American people and of the victims of that horrible day.

The progressive organizing group MoveOn.org has announced huge success in collecting funds to mount primary challenges to any Democratic senator who acts to block an up-or-down vote on healthcare reform. In just one week, their Health Reform Accountability Pledge campaign collected $3,578,117 in pledges.

The organization’s statement about the fundraising success reads:

That’s how much progressives pledged this week to fund primary challenges against any Democratic senator who blocks an up-or-down vote on health care reform with a public option.

It’s a huge sum, and the clearest signal yet that any Democrat who helps Republicans filibuster health care reform will face an enormous backlash from the grassroots.

The news clearly marks a shift in the dynamics of the healthcare reform risk-calculation for conservative Democrats who have been operating on the assumption they will see their electoral chances dashed if they vote to pass the bill. On the one hand, there’s concern voters won’t comprehend the complex nuance of health reform, and that ideologically driven rhetoric will sink the chances of anyone who doesn’t fit the arch-conservative “small government” narrative winning reelection.

But on the other hand, any moderate has to win by blending strong turnout among the party faithful with a convincing argument that draws indepedents in large numbers. Te last two elections (2006 and 2008) have shown not just a shift toward Democratic ideology as toward a more active and engaged continuing effort on issues. The Democrats convinced independents in those two full election cycles that their candidates were better equipped to deliver that kind of sustained and fruitful engagement with the issues that affect their degree of personal freedom and wellbeing.

The Republicans hope they can scare voters into believing Democrats are now engaged in a sinister “left-wing conspiracy” to rob them of freedom and prosperity. But they are planning to do this by pushing even more vehemently for the very policies that over the last 8 years plunged the nation into near depression, bankrupted record number of millions of American families and made the average American less free and less hopeful of a restored prosperity.

Joe Lieberman is throwing in with that lot, and the progressive groups that now seek to hold him accountable for his radical departure from the common-sense Democratic values he campaigned on are aware that his reliance on the logic of Republican laissez-faire ideologues and obstructionists to justify a position he cannot explain in rational terms is his Achilles’ heel.

The $3.5 million comes in the form of pledges, which will have to be produced if the time comes to stage that challenge, against Sen. Lieberman or any other Democrat who moves to block a floor vote in the Senate. But it’s a major change of momentum in favor of the pro-public-option position and the clearest sign to date that Pres. Obama’s coalition of young and independent progressives remains a force that can challenge even the most seasoned veterans.

The radical fringe of the Republican party today gathered to hear Michelle Bachmann call for open rebellion against the government. Signs were held up in front of the US Capitol showing a Nazi mass grave and calling it “healthcare”. Other signs showed the president as an evil villain and calling for “hunting season” against moderate Republicans. The rally, which Rep. Bachmann called a “press conference”, is now being called the most visible admission the party is being taken over by a message of hate.

The extremist fringe now apparently has the support of the minority leader. When Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) held up what he called the US Constitution, the reponse fromthe crowd was to boo, and he then proceeded to quote from the Preamble to the Declaration of Indepedence. His lack of attention to detail remains the only possible explanation for his insistence that his party is not actively promoting hate. He claimed none of the placards were “offensive”, implying he condones the use of the Holocaust to lie about healthcare and promote the “hunting” of moderates. Boehner himself has previously suggested “rebellion” was an appropriate way to oppose healthcare reform.

The rally has now been called “an orgy of racism, anti-semitism, bigotry and hate”. Boehner’s refusal to denounce the open racism, violent threats and radical manifestaions of hate us a low point in the Republican party’s long-running flirtation with the radical hate-based fringe, and is another case of Boehner’s apparent willingness to condone the language of incitement to violence —he previously urged supporters who had begun carrying loaded firearms at political events to rebel against the government— to promote a smear campaign against the president.

Markos Moulitzas observed today that “Any party that would use pictures of dead Jewish children [in Nazi concentration camps] and compare it to affordable health care has lost its moral and ethical bearings”. Not one major national figure has com forward to denounce Rep. Bachmann for staging yesterday’s hate parade or Rep. Boehner for endorsing its radical message.

Attempts to defend or explain the increasing radicalization of the party have amounted to denial and obfuscation, making claims about moral equivalency or suggesting that such extreme, threatening and even seditious language is acceptable if use against a fictional “socialist” threat. Meanwhile, Mr. Boehner has released a faux health reform plan, which would leave 52 million Americans uninsured —or roughly 17%—, whereas the Demicratic plan would cover all but 4%. Boehner’s health bill would also reduce the federal by only $60 billion, compared to the Democrats’ more effective reduction of over $100 billion.

The Boehner plan would also legitimize the right of insurers to discriminate against patients on the grounds of “pre-existing conditions”, which in some cases could include having had a C-section or having been raped. The hapless nature of Republican positions on health insurance reform might be part of what is driving their now apparently coordinated effort to spread fear and lies and propagate an atmosphere of hate against Pres. Obama.

UPDATE, 9 November 2009, 22:38 EST: It has come to our attention that Elie Wiesel, the cultural icon, Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate, found in the shameful use of imagery of Holocaust victims to smear Democratic healthcare reform proposals a latent threat of right-wing extremist anti-Semitism. His foundation posted the following on Twitter on Friday:

Elie Wiesel on the GOP Tea Party’s anti-Semitism and Holocaust comparisons: “This kind of political hatred is indecent and disgusting”

There has been no formal apology from Rep. Bachmann, Rep. Boehner, or any leader of the Republican party who was in attendance. Rep. Steve Israel (D-NY) decried the use of the images of Holocaust victims as a rhetorical tool at Bachmann’s rally, and demanded an apology:

I can’t believe that Congresswoman Bachmann would stand where she stood, and see those images, and not have the common decency to say, ‘I disagree with the use of those images.’ I think that she owes the memory of those who perished in the Holocaust an apology. She owes us all an apology. And I’m waiting. We’re all waiting.

The vitriol and propaganda on display at Bachmann’s rally, the reckless use of hate-filled rhetoric and smears, by the least thoughtful, least productive, least conscientious elements on the fringe right of the Republican party, is evidence of the same callous indifference to human suffering that allows them to condone the use of Holocaust imagery to smear Obama, the same callous indifference to human suffering that motivates them to gloss over the senseless deaths of 45,000 innocent people every year in the US, attributable to a flawed and corrupt system of insurance.

John McCain, the Arizona Republican who ran against Barack Obama in last year’s presidential election, today introduced in the Senate the “Internet Freedom Act”, in a brazen bid to make the internet far less free for the average web surfer. The bill would bar the FCC from enacting regulations that would prevent internet service providers from interfering with users’ preferred content choices, penalizing small content producers and slowing the internet down broadly in order to collect fees for higher-speed services, which the providers would select.

The concept of net neutrality is not new; in fact, McCain introduced his bill on the same day as the FCC actually moved forward on a plan to establish net neutrality in the United States. McCain argues that net neutrality regulations will hamper “innovation” in the internet services marketplace and therefore slow job creation. But a vast and very impassioned movement, both among businesses and users, has fought long and hard for net neutrality regulations, because without them, the free press in the United States may literally disappear.

Major ISPs have sought to persuade policy-makers that they should be able to technically manage and interfere with specific travel routes for specific data online, privileging services that pay them for access to a wider audience and marginalizing anyone who does not. McCain is making the specific pitch the ISPs have used repeatedly in their arguments that they should be allowed to seize control of the Internet —which they did not build— in order to better control users’ browsing habits.

McCain’s proposed legislation, while posing as a defense of “internet freedom” may actually be a legal assault on the First Amendment, which mandates that:

Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble [...]

That specific prohibition on Congressional interference in the “press” is being turned on its head by Sen. McCain. He alleges the ISPs are entitled to total “freedom” to control and manipulate the information that others create and which paying customers are seeking to access. McCain confuses the paper-mill for the writer or editor who actually takes the risk of speaking truth to power or expressing an untested view.

McCain’s bill would be a very deliberate attempt by Congress to abridge the freedom of the American citizenry to speak freely in the public square, to produce or to access the press they personally seek and/or to “assemble” in online communities, should those communities not pay the fees ISPs would demand for better quality connectivity.

If the bill McCain is proposing passes the Congress and becomes law, it would be the end of the Internet as we know it, because it would remove any effective obstacle to major connectivity providers using their networks to select among users’ content choices, leading to a kind of profit-based censorship of online content. Content creators, the journalists, media outlets and network and website designers of today, would find themselves severely restricted in their ability to employ the Internet’s resources freely.

Between 200,000 and 250,000 people are estimated to have gathered in Washington, DC, to demand action to ensure equal rights for homosexual Americans and other groups. The march was organized to demand full equal rights for same-sex couples and hate-crimes protection for homosexual victims. The rally came just after passage of historic hate-crimes legislation and a pledge from the president to end the military’s controversial “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

On Thursday, the House of Representatives passed historic hate crimes legislation, expanding hate crimes qualifications to cases where a victim was targeted due to gender or sexual orientation. As the New York Times reported:

The House voted Thursday to expand the definition of violent federal hate crimes to those committed because of a victim’s sexual orientation, a step that would extend new protection to lesbian, gay and transgender people.

Democrats hailed the vote of 281 to 146, which brought the measure to the brink of becoming law, as the culmination of a long push to curb violent expressions of bias like the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay Wyoming college student.

Republican House leader John Boehner (R-OH) decried the legislation as “radical social policy” and suggested it was wrong to criminalize what murderers or assailants “may have been thinking”. Boehner and other Republicans have long opposed such legislation, alleging it unfairly extends sentences for violent criminals whose crimes are already covered under other laws, despite supporting more aggressive prosecution of minors, extended sentences and additional funding for private prison firms.

The contrast between those pro-prison positions and the same officials’ opposition to hate crimes protections for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (LGBT), victims, has led many to allege the opposition is either a cynical calculation or a demonstration of entrenched bias against homosexual Americans. Some have gone as far as to accuse opponents of the bill of openly condoning and “giving comfort” to those who would commit such hate crimes.

Ultimately, 131 Republicans voted to oppose the broader Pentagon spending bill —essentially voting to cut off funding for the US military— in order to oppose the expansion of hate-crimes protection to those victimized by hate based on sexual orientation. The vote is one of the most radical in recent years, demonstrating entrenched Republican opposition to any extension of full and equal rights to gay Americans.

But the tide is turning toward expanding basic civil rights and hate-crimes protection to Americans of a minority sexual orientation. As the host of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, Bill Maher, said last week, “Everyone deserves equal rights. That’s why they’re called ‘equal’ and ‘rights.’” Maher even suggested the conservative rage over the issue could be helpful in passing other major reforms, like healthcare, as the conservative movement splits over its opposition to an array of policy changes.

The mood among LGBT activists, homosexual Americans and their supporters —some of whom rallied with signs reading “Straight against hate”— is that the time is now for major reform to guarantee equal rights for all Americans. The Chicago Tribune reports some in attendance said the campaign was “our war”, the civil rights struggle of this century:

“It’s like the [1960s] Freedom Rides [for racial equality],” said Bella Mia, 20, a Columbia College student who said she marched to support her gay friends. “I think gay rights are the great civil rights cause of the here and now.”

Rick Garcia, public policy director with LGBT advocacy group Equality Illinois, said he’s been to every national gay rights march since the first in 1979, and felt this year’s had the clearest goal: to demand equal rights.

The Tribune has also compiled a list of crazy fabrications and historic injustices, related to the issue of incomplete civil rights for gays and lesbians. The premature death of Alan Turing, the British mathematician who helped crack Nazi encryption techniques during World War II, can be attributed to his being brutalized by the state as a result of his sexual orientation.

Organizers of the march were young. TIME magazine reports the average age was under 30. Their interest in spurring a mass protest on the Mall in Washington, DC, was apparently ignited by efforts across the nation to deny equal rights to the LGBT community, including, for example, California’s Prop 8, which established that California cannot legally marry same-sex couples.

According to TIME:

“What Prop 8 did for my generation,” [Wayne] Ting told me the night before the march, at Restaurant Nora, “is that unlike past generations before, we had never been through something like where progress didn’t seem inevitable. Suddenly, some right that was given was taken back. I think that had a huge effect on my generation — to say, wait a minute, you mean, if I voted for and maybe wrote a check to the Democratic Party, that’s not enough?”

The case contesting the constitutionality of Prop 8 was brought by lawyers David Boies and Ted Olsen, who faced each other in the Bush v. Gore 2000 election contest regarding Florida’s electoral votes. The two found common ground in their belief that the government does not have the Constitutional authority to strip certain citizens of rights enjoyed by others.

Something seems very wrong with Max Baucus. The Democratic senator whose party placed him in the chairmanship of the Senate finance committee, charged by Pres. Obama with crafting legislation that could achieve the president’s stated goals, while bringing centrist Republicans on board, has become one of the chief proponents of the very arguments entrenched corporate-interest Republicans are making to try to kill the Democratic reforms.

Baucus’ own staff say they cannot reveal whether he voted his conscience or whether he made a political, electorally motivated vote, when he voted against including any form of the so-called “public option” in his committee’s health reform bill. He had claimed that the months of slow-going and excruciating silence on the issue of what would come out of the finance committee’s deliberations, was owing to the fact that he was engaged in such a struggle to achieve consensus on the public option.

But at his first opportunity, Baucus cast not one but two votes against the public option, on a single afternoon. His staff say he believed there was “no way to get the votes” for the public option to pass his committee. Of course, if everyone votes against it for that reason, there will never be enough votes. It appears, in fact, that after all the posturing and all the protesting about what a hard labor it was to sell the public option, it was Baucus himself who opposed it.

There is something not right about this because:

1. It is integral to the framework for reform put forth not only by the president, but by the leadership of his own party, and by all four of the other committees that passed bills for open debate;
2. a majority of the public actually believe it’s “important” or necessary to include a public option that will compete with private, for-profit insurers;
3. Baucus’ language in talking about the public option’s weaknesses very closely mirrors the language used by Republican opponents and by the health insurers’ lobbying efforts, language that is based on a number of patently false assumptions;
4. Baucus has consistently said he would vote his conscience, and not be driven to go against his party or the public good simply for the sake of appearances (before the electorate);
5. Baucus has clearly been given too much influence over the course of the national debate, for a member of the majority party who doesn’t even fully believe in the reforms he’s supposed to be championing;
6. it seems the Montana senator has been living in a Washington echo-chamber, dominated by hardline pro-business voices, ignoring the outcry from across the landscape of his party’s supporters, in Montana and elsewhere…

Nationwide, 73% of the public say the option to purchase a low-cost no-cutoff public insurance policy should be part of health reform. Voters in Ohio support public option 57% to 35%, according to recent Quinnipiac poll, this despite House minority leader John Boehner (R-OH) claiming he’s never met or spoken to anyone not in government or the media who thinks the public option’s a good idea.

The Boehner claim closely mirrors the dubious claim by Max Baucus that citizens of his own state neither would benefit from nor would support the type of public option being proposed. In both cases, there appears to be a knee-jerk willingness to accept the critique of well-financed interest groups who seek to maximize profit by killing reform, and a near total aversion to the idea that explaining in plain language what the public option is might help create consensus.

Reports emerging from Washington say the health insurance industry has lobbied Congress to impose possible jail sentences for individuals who fail to purchase health insurance coverage. Sources cited by Howard Fineman, as reported on MSNBC, last week, indicate the senator that introduced this idea into debate was none other than Sen. Max Baucus.

This raises the question as to whether proffering such a shockingly irresponsible and inhumane idea as to jail the working poor and/or paycheck-to-paycheck middle class for nothing more than being both poor and barred access to medical care might be part of a deliberate effort to sink the reforms altogether or further erode the president’s political capital. A key question has to be: how much money is Max Baucus taking from private insurers?

Each of the ‘Gang of Six’ senators, as well as Rep. Charles Boustany (R-LA) and Rep. Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin (D-SD), all of whom oppose even including a public option for affordable health insurance, voted last year to extend the federal flood insurance corporation, a universal, government-backed insurance system that protects insurance firms and property, not people.

Astonishingly, the logic behind the federal flood insurance system is that private insurers claim they cannot take the risk of something as “unpredictable” as flooding, so the government assumes 100% of the risk, while the insurers simply administer sales and take the profits. It’s been called a ”mandatory, socialized, government-run property insurance” and amounts to a $1 billion giveaway to private insurance firms.

What possible reason could there be for backing that government-insurance program and opposing the public option for low-cost healthcare, other than favoring what’s good for insurers’ bottom line? The question is increasingly relevant, as momentum seems to be gaining to find a way to compromise on the public option in a way that allows the principles of large-scale non-profit competition to be part of the ultimate national reforms.

Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) proposes the finance committee’s bill should provide for states to be empowered to create their own state-level public option for individuals living at 133% – 200% of the federal poverty level, if they have no option for affordable private insurance through their employer. As reported by The Hill:

[Cantwell] scored a significant win Thursday when her proposal to direct federal dollars to optional state-based public plans was attached to the bill with the support of Baucus, Conrad and all of the panel’s Democrats except Sen. Blanche Lincoln, who is up for reelection in the conservative state of Arkansas.

Meanwhile, Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) has been feeling out his fellow Democrats on a kind of all-in-one compromise. Under Carper’s plan, states would decide to use federal money to found a private co-op, set up state-based or regional public plans or allow people to buy into the state employees’ healthcare plan.

And finally, there’s Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe (Maine). Obama and Senate Democratic leaders ardently want Snowe to join their cause and be probably the lone Republican on their side. Snowe opposes a national public option but has floated a proposal that would “trigger” a public option in states where insurance companies are not adequately serving the market.

The three proposals suggest the Democrats will ultimately be able to put forward a comprehensive health reform bill that will win at least 60 votes in the Senate, a figure that would allow them to put the bill on Pres. Obama’s desk by year’s end. Senate leadership have said debate will open on 12 October 2009, and may come to a vote as soon as a week later.

Rep. Charles Boustany lied repeatedly in his official Republican response to Pres. Obama. The first major lie was his reiteration of the false claim that Obama is proposing a “government takeover” of healthcare that would “replace” healthcare American families already have. Not only has that never been proposed; Obama had just explained that the public option, if passed, would only apply to the uninsured.

Boustany did express his own personal understanding of the need to reduce costs. He also expressed some conciliatory sentiment, saying the Republican party is thankful that Pres. Obama is making that cause a priority. He did, however, suggest that the entire current raft of proposed reforms —each of which has gone further than any previous comprehensive reform proposal— should be scrapped.

Rep. Boustany built his rebuttal around that initial lie, telling viewers falsely that Obama plans a “government-run” healthcare system and that his plan could significantly drive up costs of healthcare. The remarks shifted Boustany’s message into a twilight zone parallel to but entirely disconnected from fact. He reiterated multiple false claims, each of which had been vehemently denounced by the president just moments before.

Boustany did offer four points, where he argued Republicans and Democrats already agree: 1) All should have coverage, regardless of pre-existing conditions; 2) People should be able to pool resources and negotiate lower costs; 3) Find a way to extend care to those who cannot access medical treatment; and 4) Prioritize preventative wellness care. He did not express any concrete ideas on how to achieve any of these points; nor did Boustany evaluate pending proposals on any of these points.

In fact, all five pending bills do directly address all four of those points. By that standard, one might expect Rep. Boustany to give more praise to the shared points of reform that are already on the table. His refusal to do so might be motivated by partisan interest or by an ideological bias, but his speech routinely ignored important areas where his professed goals are in fact addressed.

He praised Obama for speaking of medical malpractice reform and ordering HHS Secretary Sebelius to explore demonstration programs for ways to privilege quality of patient care and reduce the need for “defensive medicine”, which he acknowledged might be contributing to the rapidly accelerating costs of healthcare. He did not offer any input as to whether Republicans had been talking with Pres. Obama about those plans.

Rep. Boustany also said Republicans believe allowing insurers to sell plans “across state lines” will help bring costs down, but lied when he suggested existing proposals would not favor such a move, saying “Obama disagrees”. Boustany’s response was confused and vague, full of false claims, and largely unproductive in terms of real conciliatory gestures.

He appears to have chosen to yield to his party’s urging to be forceful about alleging that the president refuses to listen to new ideas. Despite this repeated claim, and the histrionics of Republicans waving plans they say have been excluded from debate, Democratic committees have added 160 Republican amendments to the proposals under consideration, so far.

In a brief discussion with one of the Congressman’s aides, we learned that Rep. Boustany believes the language of H.R. 3200 would allow for “a third party that is all knowing” to dictate to individuals that they must have one type of care and not another, and that the Congressman also believes that H.R. 3200 would ban individual insurance within 5 years.

In our own research, we have found no provision of the legislation that would dictate to any individual what sort of health insurance they should buy, and no provision that would ban individual health insurance policies. It appears Rep. Boustany’s aide is referring to language that would require health insurers to meet certain guidelines in some policies (either existing or new) that are more favorable to consumers.

There is no provision that would bar them from continuing to offer the insurance policies people currently have. What’s more: Pres. Obama has just assured the public that he would not support any measure that would not allow those happy with the coverage they now have to keep it. Rep. Boustany’s office assured us that in fact the Congressman did watch the entire speech, so he knows he was making claims that had just been refuted.

• Some reporting contribute by J.E. Robertson

Today’s Cafe Sentido includes a lengthy write-up on the potential ills of Wall Street plans to bundle re-sold life-insurance policies into a new breed of financial product derivative, but the New York Times is also reporting on a range of new financial exotics that are tempting the deans of Wall Street’s major investment banks to again rig up a system of dubious investment choices, in the hopes of bringing in major fees and new revenues.

Not only are major investment banks reportedly looking into ways they can securitize “life settlements”, resold life insurance policies purchased for a fraction of their full value —an unwise gamble where the investor is better served when fewer people pour money into the system and the original policy holder dies sooner rather than later—, but they are taking failed mortgage-backed securities and repackaging them as re-securitized real estate mortgage investment conduits (re-REMICs).

The REMIC re-securitization process allows banks to essentially re-use the failed mortgage-linked securities as a way to recapture some of the money hemorrhaged in last summer’s implosion of the credit markets. Morgan Stanley is reported to have already identified $30 billion in re-REMIC investments this year. The scale of the suddenly-generated new exotic pool warrants a new look at regulating all mortgage-linked activities.

The banks argue these new products are a way of liberating credit value, making more money more readily available to a wider cross-section of the public. In a sense, the banks are saying this new round of exotics is their own self-started recovery process. They will not lend readily like before, unless they can make money from these type of bundled derivatives.

That might be reading between the lines, but even top investment analysts are expressing bewilderment at the apparent compulsion to return to risky derivatives at a time when most of the American banking system is still hobbled by massive losses, frozen credit and failing mortgages.

The Times reports that Wall Street’s interest in life insurance derivatives might just be strictly mathematical: there are $26 trillion in extant life insurance policies in the United States at present, and finding a way to derive new revenues from that market could be a massive windfall for the firms that manage the securities. According to the Times, “even if a small fraction of policy holders do sell them, some in the industry predict the market could reach $500 billion.”

The aim, then, would be “to help Wall Street offset the loss of revenue from the collapse of the United States residential mortgage securities market, to $169 billion so far this year from a peak of $941 billion in 2005″. The aftermath of the collapse of the mortgage securities market, however, raised the question as to whether that market was ever anything more than fictional wealth: gambles with projected outcomes based on other gambles with fictional assumptions built into them.

Now, Wall Street is facing a range of choices that might seem improbable to the casual observer. For policy-makers, regulators and the general public, it seems the question was long ago settled that Wall Street had to, along with the general public, enter a “new age of responsibility”, as urged by Pres. Obama in his inaugural address, and deal in factual figures, hard commodities, and fundamentally “non-exotic” investment strategies.

But Wall Street’s business model takes in a much wider range of possibilities, including the need to explore what might seem like questionable investment strategies, especially where huge amounts of money are involved. Making money from money is the Wall Street business, so top banks would rather have a rigorous rating system evaluating the virtues of new derivatives than have to simply rule them out altogether.

One of the areas that has some people questioning the logic of this strategy, aside from the problems of actual long-term investment value, is the ethical shadow hanging over the entire life settlement industry. Many analysts already say the standard rates are a thinly veiled rip-off of vulnerable people, depriving their heirs of wealth they should be entitled to receive and giving the policy-holder in some cases less cash than they actually paid into their policy.

There are also widespread allegations of systematic fraud, in which state-level insurance regulators say life settlement companies routinely badger the ill and the elderly into buying life-insurance policies in order to then buy them on the cheap and collect later. The practice has led to life settlement brokerages being referred to as “stranger-owned life insurance” companies, dealing in clients’ weakness and mortality.

Calculating risk for such derivatives is notoriously difficult. The formulation of the derivative security itself may have a lot to do with how much risk is inherent in the investment. But ferreting out the details of how the bundled policies are securitized is also notoriously difficult. So that part of calculating risk, barring a trend toward total transparency —it’s worth noting that the value of derivatives depends in part on a lack of transparency—, may be impossible to actually do.

In the 1980s, life settlement companies saw a surge in business as investment in bought-out life insurance policies targeted people diagnosed with HIV/AIDS. The gamble was that people with AIDS would live on average less than two years. But new medical treatments and improved understanding of the retro-virus-induced immunodeficiency that sped patients toward death, extended life expectancy for AIDS patients. Many investors lost money, or earned far less than expected.

Last year, analysis of human life expectancy in the United States found that the average person was again living longer, meaning that the life settlement industry had still more problems related to calculating risk. Securitization is what Wall Street does, so securitizing a financial market with a potentially huge amount of wealth to bet on makes sense, in a way.

But applying the logic of securitization to mortgage-backed derivatives was a fatally flawed gamble, and many now see life settlements as the same kind of problem. The logic of securitization is, to some extent, safety in numbers: the risky bets are bundled, possibly added to other types of investments that are more secure, so the windfall potential is balanced against a significant reduction in risk, the bet being that no all the policies can fail to pay in one go.

A Dealogic chart evaluating mortgage-backed securities’ overall value in the US, from 1995 through 2009, shows that by August of this year, the US market for mortgage-backed securities had dropped to not only less than 20% of its peak value (2005), but was nearing 1996 levels. Has the “boom and bust” cycle erased nearly a trillion dollars’ worth of value, or was the entire boom period a fictionalization of value?

Wall Street is still wading in proverbially croc-infested waters, working to find ways to emerge clean of the injuries inflicted by the credit collapse and hoping to return to the high levels of persistent fee-based securitization of traditionally unsecuritized financial products. The re-REMIC process is itself an extremely risky step, seen as necessary by some who refuse to allow the entire pool of mortgage-backed securities to evaporate, seen by others as a step deeper into the dangerous waters of financial exotics.

There is concern among some analysts that a lack of effective credit rating standards and inattention from underinformed regulators could mean that re-REMIC instruments and life-settlement derivatives could actually come together in still more exotic derivatives, leading to a brief period of boom investment and a near guarantee of another collapse.

In an interview with the McAlester News-Capital newspaper, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) —the senior senator from his state— strung together one lie after another, in an apparent effort to slander Pres. Obama and derail healthcare reform. There are no softer words for Inhofe’s incessant lies and fabrications. He has apparently pledged his time and energy to the hard labor of being an inveterate and unapologetic professional slanderer.

Not satisfied with the false claim that Obama secretly wants to “socialize America”, the read-nothing senator —he recently said he doesn’t need to read or even know what’s in legislation to vote on it— claimed “Everything that made this country great has been disavowed by this president”. However imaginative Sen. Inhofe may be, there is not one single example of Pres. Obama disavowing or speaking against the great achievements, or principles, of American democracy.

Inhofe might be talking about the president’s opposition to the use of torture, or his attempts to prevent the destruction of American capitalism by rampant industrial-scale bank fraud, or efforts to expand educational opportunity. Surely Sen. Inhofe is not arguing that torture, systematized bank fraud and unfair obstacles to quality education are what “made this country great”.

Or maybe he’s concerned that efforts to improve the health of American citizens, reduce their suffering or prolong their lives are contrary to the American ideal that proudly forces people into grave suffering and premature death, because somehow that’s better for the bottom line. Is that the greatness that Inhofe is so passionately defending with so few ideas and so few words referring to any verifiable truth?

He falsely accused Obama of being “the most anti-military president in the history of America”. This is a lie not only because it is dishonest interpretation. It is a lie, because Obama received, as senator, the highest rating national veterans groups can give an elected official for work on behalf of veterans’ rights and welfare. And as president, he has continued to fight to expand healthcare for injured or psychologically affected veterans of the US military, at all levels.

It is also a lie, because his budget actually expanded funding for the military, provided for a regularized process for budgeting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, trimmed waste and sought to expand pay and benefits to servicemen and women in combat zones, as well as to their families back home.

Inhofe did admit, however, that his focus is not so much on the wellbeing of the members of the US armed forces, but rather on the pocket-books of specific arms manufacturers, when he added: “I’m talking national defense; I’m talking future combat systems; I’m talking ground systems”. Inhofe equates “national defense” to specific, failed “combat systems”, and that is indicative of his attitude toward public service, it would seem.

He would like to benefit the big players that back him, and the needs of individual citizens, their rights, freedoms and quality of life, can take a backseat to arbitrary, unproven ideological assumptions. How does he know “global warming” is a socialist conspiracy to destroy democracy? He just believes it. He knows it because he wants to know it, and he won’t do the reading to find out if his ideas are those of shameless hacks or of thinking souls.

Pres. Obama’s choices on funding for “future combat systems” has been in line with the requests of military commanders to trim waste and focus on systems that will help protect American lives and improve actual combat capability — a notable change of course from prior administrations that had prioritized heavy spending on unproven systems, which did nothing to improve military performance or capability, wasted years, if not decades of planning and research, but consistently lined the pockets of specific defense contractors.

Amazingly, Inhofe persists in claiming that all the money spent on bank bailouts was just a scheme to steal taxpayer money and use it for socialist schemes to sabotage democracy, saying “That money is gone for good”, and calling it “the most egregious vote in the history of the U.S. Senate.”

The senator seems completely unafraid to wade into the most ludicrous conspiratorial ranting, based on nothing but his own will to believe the false claims he is making. In fact, it has just been reported that taxpayers have made a $4 billion profit to date on bailout money paid to 8 major national banks. As MarketWatch reported on Monday:

U.S. taxpayers have seen a profit of about $4 billion, or the equivalent of about 15% annually, now that eight of the biggest banks have fully repaid their obligations to the government as a result of the financial bailout, the New York Times reported Monday, citing its own analysis.

The analysis is partial, but while there is still a substantial amount of bailout funding outstanding, the Financial Times of London has reported that the Federal Reserve has already turned a $14 billion profit on loans to banks and commercial lending institutions. Inhofe’s claims are baseless lies, with no foundation other than his lust to destroy the Democratic party and serve the interests that back his campaigns and keep him in a seat he openly refuses to use for what it’s intended to be: a way to craft responsible legislation to serve the people.

On one issue after another, James Inhofe has chosen to use his seat in the United States Senate to spread vile lies or to whitewash misdeeds he is not ethically serious enough to oppose. On the now well-established evidence of pervasive, programmed, persistent abuse [PDF] and violent mistreatment of prisoners, he says simply, fantastically: “There has never been a case of torture there. The people there are treated better than in the federal prisons”.

Revealing his motivations in the baldest language possible, Inhofe said, in language that appears ever more desperate: “If we can hold on for another 16 months, I think we’ll be able to change Congress enough to stop these socialist programs from going through”. There are no plans to socialize America, and healthcare reform proposals contain zero plans to give government control over medical decisions. Inhofe is lying.

He is lying in order to give false information to the people of Oklahoma and to ensure that the democratic process in the United States is frustrated and corrupted by lies and by interests other than the public good. The kind of vile slander that has become standard operating procedure for Sen. James Inhofe is nothing less than a disgrace to the greatness of American democracy and an insult to the people of Oklahoma.

He has slapped them on one cheek promising to vote against legislation that could save lives, without so much as reading it, then slapped them on the other by becoming a mouthpiece for an unscrupulous rumor-mill whose sole aim is to sow confusion, hatred and political inefficacy.

At some point, one would think, the people of Oklahoma will simply demand a more conscientious, more relevant, more thoughtful and genuine public servant, someone who puts democracy and the public good ahead of his own bizarre fantasies and his lust to destroy political opponents. Those of us who value our democracy and believe that public servants are there to work for us can only hope they do.

“I think Governor Palin knew exactly what she was doing”, says Republican strategist Ed Gillespie about Palin’s lie that the Obama administration plans to institute “death panels” to euthanize the elderly, infirm or “no longer productive”. Gillespie told ABC’s ‘This Week’ that he views it as disappointing whenever anyone “from either party” makes misleading, false or manipulated statements.

Gillespie also said he felt it was “evocative” for Democratic leaders to decry healthcare opponents for mounting a “disinformation” campaign or for calling those spreading falsehoods about healthcare “un-American”. The question of Palin’s “savvy” was the focus of the discussion, even as Gillespie admitted the “death panel” claim was totally false.

The exchange was perhaps most interesting not for Gillespie’s admitting Palin lied or for his admitting she did so with full knowledge that her statements were false and would inflame violent emotional reactions among the public, but that he was not willing to say her distortions were out of bounds. The hedging on whether or not Palin had crossed a line with her most recent inflammatory fabrications suggests a willingness by experienced, high-visibility Republican party strategists to either countenance or promote the use of such distortions.

Gillespie clearly said such distortions are disappointing. And he admitted that her claim was entirely false. But he then aided her effort at distortion by making the false claim that there are in fact “panels” that will cut costs and ration care and “legitimate concern” about what the effect of those “panels” would be. Gillespie’s appearance on ‘This Week’, it turns out, is meant to both distance the GOP broadly from Palin’s radical language and to support her claims and capitalize on the public confusion they may have generated.

This strategy, it must be noted, discredits the Republican party and its entire public relations process. The “loyal opposition” seems to be a role the party is unwilling or unable to play. Nearly any distortion, no matter how wild-eyed or riotous, is condoned and adopted, so long as it paints the president and the Democratic Congress in a bad light.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, whom Pres. Obama praised as a genuinely conscientious Republican working to find a bipartisan solution for healthcare reform, this week responded by proudly telling a Republican audience that if Obama hadn’t included him in negotiations, a bill would have passed both houses of Congress the week of 22 June, and likely been signed by now.

Grassley then responded to questions from the public by accepting out-of-hand gross distortions of the scale of uninsurance in the United States. Working from the 2007 Census Bureau estimate of 46 million uninsured, accepting the false claim that 12 million of those  are in fact “illegal immigrants” with “no right to healthcare”, he then also agreed with the claim that most of the remaining uninsured “don’t want insurance”.

The result was a claim that only 8 million people are in fact in need of coverage. The problem with Grassley’s rubber-stamp agreement with this outlandish reasoning was that he appeared not to know whether or not it was true. He also appeared not to understand that, even if it were true, failure to find a way to extend quality affordable coverage to the young and fit and to undocumented immigrants would mean costs would remain inflated due to vast amounts of unpredictable uncompensated care.

CNN’s truth seeker program found that the Census figures were among the more conservative estimates, with one family public policy organization finding that as many as 90 million people went without health insurance for all or part of 2007. The Census Bureau has no direct evidentiary confirmation of whether or not undocumented immigrants are among the uninsured, because that population does not fit within the Census process.

The Center for American Progress reported in May that an updated study of the rates of uninsurance found that fully 6 million more people were uninsured in early 2009 as compared to 2007: 52 million people, a jump of 13% in 2 years. The 46 million figure is a gross underestimate, convenient to public officials, because it will make it appear that whatever reform is enacted gets closer to solving the problem than it does.

The fact that there is no solid evidence that the 2007 Census estimate of 46 million includes undocumented immigrants means that less presumptive estimates would add the 13 to 15 million undocumented immigrants to the ranks of the uninsured. That means somewhere between 65 million and 67 million people are in need of a more affordable, more comprehensive form of insurance than is currently available to them.

Grassley’s “uh, yes, uh, yes, that’s right” response to the radically distorted picture of uninsurance, which resulted in the false claim that only 8 million people need to be covered, demonstrated this same tendency: the willingness to accept nearly any distortion, so long as it makes the president or the Democratic party look over-ambitious, confused, irresponsible, dangerous or profligate with public spending.

Sen. Grassley clearly cast aside the offer of being cast as a responsible moderate leader that was extended to him by Pres. Obama, and he clearly threw in his lot with the haphazard, unscrupulous disinformation campaign that some factions tied to his party have adopted. Whether he did so because he is afraid for his electoral viability and literally knows not what position to take, or whether he did so because he is out to “break Obama” as Jim DeMint suggested, is unimportant: Grassley has firmly taken the obstructionist ground for himself.

Gillespie is willing to say Palin knew she was lying and maybe went too far, but viewed the distortion as politically savvy, to hurt Obama and undermine chances for meaningful reform. Grassley is willing to sign on to hapless, unwarranted manipulations of the facts of the nation’s health insurance crisis. GOP leaders continue to spread the false claims that Obama wants to “ration care”, mandate euthanasia, or balloon the deficit.

One has to ask: is this party interested in participating in the complicated work of public service? The Republican party has abandoned the work of governing so thoroughly, its national leaders now openly espouse the most unfounded conspiracy theories, slander the president on the floor of the Congress, on talk shows and at rallies, and have declared their collective aspiration to make sure nothing is achieved to aid the millions in need of reform.

August 2009 —one year after the beginning of the visible collapse of the American financial sector set off a global recession— has brought the news that the largest US banks are taking in record revenues from small-account overdraft fees. Applying fees between $25 and $39 per overdraft, the nation’s largest banks are now taking in more revenue from overdraft fees than from their primary banking operations. The reliance on such fees to drive profits also suggests major US banks may not be sustainable in their current form.

The Financial Times reports the projected record profits from overdraft fees to small account holders is $38.5 billion. FT also reports the median overdraft fee jumped from $25 to $26 during the last year, the first time that figure has increased during a recession for more than 40 years. For banks with assets in excess of $50 billion, the median overdraft fee was $33, a clear sign the nation’s largest banks are dependent on such fees to drive profits.

This news suggests the major US banks did not carry out their pledge to make their banking operations more consumer-friendly and/or more conducive to preserving and expanding individual wealth, in exchange for unprecedented amounts of public money used to prop them up during the worst banking crisis in 8 decades. The solvency of major banks has been a question of persistent speculation and significant mystery since February, when a number of large banks reacted to a program of theoretical “stress tests” by offering to give back federal dollars.

Experts have speculated since well before the summer of 2008, when the mortgage-backed securities crisis threatened to undermine the entire US financial system, that major banks had used the freewheeling logic of financial exotics and mortgage-backed split-then-bundled derivatives to claim to hold more cash in reserve than they actually do. Such a situation would, in any case, run afoul of federal banking regulations, but could also leave banks insolvent.

The atmosphere of panic that overtook the financial world and the Congress last fall is seen by some as evidence that long-term solvency was precisely the problem: that there might be no viable way to carry major banks through the worst of the fallout from the collapse of mortgage-backed securities. It would be one thing to protect them from specific “toxic assets”, quite another to find all the money they claim to hold but do not.

It was clear by spring 2009 that the nation’s biggest banks were increasingly uncomfortable with the “stress tests” the Treasury Department had ordered. The banks claimed the process gave the government too much control over their businesses, but independent observers noted the stress tests did not actually mean control, only observation: the problem wasn’t in what the government was doing, but in what it was finding.

We don’t actually know all the details of what was uncovered in that process of sifting through the complicated accounting operations the banks use to justify their claims about preservation and generation of assets. But it is very far from conspiracy theory to make the logical assumption that there are specific qualities of those accounting operations the banks did not want the federal government to observe.

Economists and regulators have been puzzled by the unusually entrenched unwillingness of banks to resume lending, even after receiving the largest bailouts in the history of American government assistance to private business, and with relatively few strings attached (financial regulatory reform has not yet even been taken up by Congress or the White House in any official legislative process). A neat explanation that solves all these mysteries: too little cash in reserve.

In the US, banking institutions with deposits and notes totaling in excess of $43.9 million must hold 10% of the total value in reserve cash. In other words, the bank must have liquidity of 10% on its total account holdings. This varies, depending on attendant regulations for various types of institutions and various forms of transactions related to that liquidity question.

What does not vary, however, is the fact that by using the wrong means of measuring cash in reserve, a bank can get into trouble claiming liquidity it cannot actually resort to if needed. That fact has led to economists speculating that during the mortgage-backed derivatives binge, fractional reserve banking morphed into a precarious and untenable system of claiming as cash reserves assets which were partly or entirely fictional or speculative.

In plain English: the banks may have lied about whether they were 10% liquid or not, setting them up for a fall far more perilous than what the bailouts have covered so far. The result would be that the banks would have to hoard that cash in order to meet their reserve requirements, the only logical way of explaining why lending, potentially the most lucrative part of their business, has not resumed at projected rates.

According to a Raw Story report from July:

Before the committee — which assembled Tuesday to hear the testimony of Neil Barofsky the Special Inspector General for TARP, along with Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke — [Rep. Dennis] Kucinich [D-OH] wondered aloud if “banks are parking a historic amount of taxpayers’ money in the Federal Reserve while the businesses and consumers across America are starved for credit,” and whether the Federal Reserve is paying banks to avoid making loans.

“Is the Fed paying banks NOT to loan money?” a Kucinich media advisory pondered.

Kucinich cited a Bloomberg report that found that in May 2009, major US banks were holding “excess reserves” with the Fed at a daily average rate of $877.1 billion, up from $2 billion one year earlier. Clearly, in May 2008, the banks were lending all they could, or close to it, and lending had slowed while banks received massive infusions of taxpayer money… but an increase of 43,855%, in one year?!

No, the banks did not take in that much in profits, and no, they did not suddenly become so wealthy as to count all that cash as excess reserves. Somewhere in between, there is the truth: somehow, the difference between the proper required cash in reserve from one year earlier and the proper required cash in reserve for May 2009 is a story that can be told within the range of unlent money referred to as “excess reserves” for the two weeks ending 20 May 2009.

• Some reporting also contributed by J.E. Robertson

It is a mystery to many people why certain political fringe elements are so violently enraged by the idea of extending healthcare coverage to all Americans. Some individuals have made racist and degrading remarks about Pres. Obama and his administration; some suggest that there is “evil” behind efforts to expand healthcare coverage to those who don’t have it; some say things like “then there’s the illegals, they shouldn’t even be here!” shouting in anger.

Some Republican lawmakers have openly asserted that people who don’t have coverage are probably guilty of something that means they “don’t deserve any”, in part because these ideologues base all such claims on the idea that “decent” people pay for things through private business (though 47% of the nation is covered through government-run plans).

Democracy —”government of the people, by the people and for the people”— is inclusive of all people, even allowing for differences of ideology and agenda. So the question we need to start asking is: do these opponents of comprehensive healthcare reform legislation hate democracy? Is that why the idea of expanding coverage to people they do not imagine are in any way like themselves provokes such apocalyptic ire and vitriol?

Or: is there something more subtle taking place? Maybe it’s the disinformation campaign, which is centered around putting into people’s minds ideas that are genuinely odious and contrary to the principles of open democracy. Maybe it’s the people behind that disinformation campaign who are opposed to open democracy, opposed to the rights of the people, not only to decide what their government does but to take control of their own destiny.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer have called the mob-scenes orchestrated to disrupt explanatory town hall meetings and public debates about healthcare reform “unamerican”, prompting conservatives to define democracy as “rooted in dissent and protest”, something they not only advocated against just a few years ago, but openly sought to detain people for, going as far as to argue before the Supreme Court that opponents of the president could be held without charge as “enemy combatants”, based on nothing other than the president’s own determinations.

In another healthcare town hall meeting, the president was subjected to an angry woman screaming at him: “No socialized medicine! And keep your hands off my Medicare!” She wants socialized medicine for herself, subsidized by everyone else and taken for granted as a natural fact of life, but she wants to deny everyone else in the country the same privilege. Is she confused? Or is she easily given to hatred of her fellow human beings?

There is mass confusion at work, clearly. There are probably only a few people who have actually read the legislation that is being treated with such hostility by these groups opposed to reform. The confusion is made evident by the fact that some of the people expressing hatred of the president or the Congress and portraying proposed healthcare reforms as the “death” of American democracy or the betrayal of “Constitutional values”, would actually be helped significantly in a direct and personal way by the reforms.

Are people really so blinded by partisan rancor, blind-faith ideological bias or by fear and dislike of their fellow citizens that they are unable to see that the reforms as currently proposed would actually work to their own benefit? Apparently, yes. When such a specific contradiction arises, it is necessary to ask: do these people hate democracy as such? are they incapable of participating in an open debate on actual issues that will affect real people?

Democracy is inclusive of differing views, differing interests, differing minorities. Even the most uninformed, irresponsible, incapable-of-reasoning radical fringe groups have a voice in American democracy, because freedom of speech is paramount to all other civic values. What is instrumental in this perversion of free speech enacted by radicals pushing to kill healthcare reform, however, is that they are spreading overt lies, defaming public figures, in some cases threatening public figures, and falsely claiming that reform is an attempt to erase American democracy from history.

To claim that legislation designed to give more choice to more people, to curb the power of interested healthcare profiteers or to prevent innocents from being sent to their deaths by for-profit firms that deny them the right to treatment, is somehow designed to “destroy the Constitution” or to institute a “Soviet-style” totalitarian regime, is to lie with the specific purpose of spreading hate and confusion.

That some or most of these people are honestly reacting to information they have heard which is flawed or totally fabricated, that they may be confused by a disinformation campaign, is not an excuse for their hate-filled rhetoric or their spreading of lies. They can read the entire House bill at OpenCongress.org; they can find out for themselves that there is no “death panel”, that there is no mandate to buy a government plan, that there is no fine for staying with their own insurer.

That they would rather express hate and spread lies than research the truth for themselves is testament to their own deeply flawed character and their own lack of devotion to the democratic, Constitutional process of government. That a bill that makes no mention of undocumented immigrants is being used to spread fear and hate of “illegal aliens” is a sign of how deeply some people want to spread fear and hate of illegal aliens.

It is 100% absolutely incumbent upon every citizen to take an interest in their democracy deep enough to do their own research. Reading the Club for Growth’s abstract, theoretical position on healthcare reform, or treating bullet points from the Republican National Committee as if they were the equivalent of reading the bill, is to surrender one’s power as a citizen and sign over one’s civic consciousness to the interests of those groups. It is not to do research; it is not to take a stand.

Companies that hope to impede the extension of care to more people or impede the improvement of care, even as costs come down, have no credibility in negotiating the fine points of reform, because they are rejecting the principle that caring for people’s health is about those people’s health, first and foremost. Doctors, patients and the government all share this particular interest, and groups diametrically opposed to that principle are more a problem than a solution. This is undisputed among those who view patient health as top priority.

While some insurers have signed up to a pledge to cease callous, unethical practices like denial of coverage for “pre-existing conditions” (one economist recently reminded readers that “mortality” is a pre-existing condition we all share), there is now growing stratification among industry groups on the issue of whether patient care should be prioritized over billing and profits. There continues to be a strong push among so-called “conservative” political factions that seek to protect business interests and their right to claim massive profits, even when their product fails the consumer, or openly violates contractual terms.

This faction is the principle responsible source for attacks on any semblance of increased regulation or government-backed insurance plan as “socialism”. While there are no proposals for socialized medicine or “government-run healthcare” (where “bureaucrats make choices about care”), opponents of responsible reform that will save lives and make needed adjustments oriented toward long-term healthcare industry sustainability in the US are actively seeking to organize rallies and “tea parties” to decry Democratic plans as a “socialist takeover” of the American healthcare system.

This fear-mongering has one objective: to stop any serious reform from being implemented. Some in the industry, who understand that adjustments that will shape a more sustainable insurance system are beneficial to all parties, and a necessary step, understand that without covering everyone, the problem of skyrocketing costs will not go away. Others, who seek to maintain a level of profit that is, in fact, mathematically unsustainable, hope they can beat the economic system at its own game, outwit the math of periodic down-cycles and achieve profits even when no one can fund them any longer.

The split between pro-reform and anti-reform is not one between anti-business and pro-business, but rather one between rational pragmatist and irrational mystic. The anti-reform position is that without adjusting anything, this catastrophically broken system will “correct itself” without any major economic fallout, and stop bankrupting the US economy, from individual to corporate to government level. It is an irrational and mystical assumption, based solely on the desire to see things that way, and contrary to all evidence and to anything like “fiscal responsibility”.

That mystical approach, which claims to be pro-business, and which claims that business interests are inherently virtuous, is the same flawed logic that claimed Enron could grow forever and the housing bubble could continue to be funded at an accelerating rate, even though the world itself was running out of money even to sustain existing values. It is worse than naïve; it is reckless and will lead to great economic and personal hardship for millions of people, if not tens of millions, if this anti-reform position wins out over responsible, pragmatic reform.

The fact is: reform is necessary or the system will cease to function, and the US economy may be forced into a prolonged and deepening recession due to mass bankruptcy, layoffs related to rapidly escalating benefit costs and extreme stresses on government plans like Medicare and Medicaid and the healthcare providers that depend on them to pay for care. Voices that decry reform as unnecessary, overly aggressive, “liberal” or “socialist”, have their heads in the sand and are asking everyone involved to gamble away their future on the word of the most interested, least cooperative players in the process.

Responsible opposition to specific provisions should, as Pres. Obama has time and again suggested, include substantive, viable alternatives that would do better at imposing competition where it has failed, reducing costs, increasing quality of care and curing the sick than what is being opposed. Absent such an alternative, it is hard to consider as credible any outright opposition to reforms currently under consideration.

Pres. Obama’s call for a “public option”, where individuals can buy low-cost non-profit blanket insurance coverage that will not deny treatment, in order to find insurance the private sector will not offer and in order to force the private sector to compete with those standards, is key to these discussions. It’s a lead-by-example concept of market dynamics, and has widespread support among economists who do not see it as a Trojan horse for government management of care.

One alternative that has been floated is health insurance cooperatives: ordinary people and institutions could band together in a non-profit cooperative aimed at achieving those specific goals in terms of coverage, care and competition. Such an option could entirely stand in for the public option, or could serve as added competition, to lessen the degree to which the government becomes de facto owner of the nation’s largest insurance policy-manager. So far no substantive opposition to this idea has been put forward, except by individuals who speculate that such a system would be “inefficient” compared to for-profit plans.

The fact is: much of the vitriol involved in the current healthcare debate revolves around the problem of profit: by definition, a policy that must fund not only health treatments but also profit expectations will incur more costs and be more expensive than a policy that does not have to fund profit expectations. This is the major salient fact that for-profit interests have long sought to bury in confusing language about the “inefficiencies” commercial interests perceive to be inherent in all government spending. But in many cases, public spending is more efficient at achieving the desired outcome than private business.

What’s more, private healthcare costs have been rising faster than government-paid benefits (9.9% per year, as compared with 8.8% per year) over the last 30 years. It’s a massive difference over time, and the resulting cost-divide is the single biggest factor driving the decline of the American healthcare sector (in terms of average quality of care per resident of the US). If this trend continues, private insurance in the US will become totally inviable, and the “public option” will look like an absurdist offer to placate pro-market thinkers, as nationalized healthcare or some form of zero-profit insurance will become the norm, by urgent necessity.

In the current climate, there is no single plan available that would embody the specific competitive virtues sought for a “public option”: bringing down costs, scaling back profit-taking, and forcing more wide-ranging coverage, both for health conditions and for methods of treatment. Anyone who wants the American system of healthcare —a complex hybrid of public and private interests— to survive knows reform must happen this time, and it cannot be watered-down.

Those who seek to obstruct reform solely in service of their own short-term profit-taking are short-sighted and working under a problematic delusion. They will not be bigger than the collapse; they will not survive the fallout from a total unraveling of over-priced under-treating private-sector insurance; they are not defending “the best system in the world” against a sinister attack by would-be socialists: they are disinterested in real patient outcomes, offer no real solutions, and would have us all do nothing, while they fiddle and Rome burns.

Senators Hatch (R-UT) and Cornyn (R-TX) have positioned themselves in the camp of “purified” Republican ideology, with a vaguely explained no-vote against Sonia Sotomayor. Sen. Hatch, who has never, in his 33 years in the Senate, voted against a Supreme Court nominee did not explain what specifically he found so objectionable in Sotomayor’s extensive judicial record, but kept close to code-words that might tip conservatives as to his ideological stance. Cornyn also appeared to critics to be “posturing” as he voted no against a nominee whose credentials he acknowledged.

While Sen. Lindsey Graham was passionate in his defense of a collegial Senate, and of his belief that “elections have consequences”, his statesmanlike tack on voting Sotomayor’s confirmation through to the full Senate did not persuade other Republicans to follow suit. Fully three Republican members of the judiciary committee voted “no by proxy”, not even bothering to show up for the vote. It was a startling reminder of how flippant some ideologically motivated members have been about judging Judge Sotomayor throughout this process, preferring to hew close to their own pre-conceived rhetorical points, and ignoring the judge’s actual work as a judge.

The LA Times called Graham’s support for Sotomayor’s confirmation, and his lecture about the ethics of being a senator, “a profile in statesmanship, if not courage“. Graham even went as far as to say support for Sotomayor was instrumental in his defense of a healthy, independent judiciary and the Constitutional system: “What I’m trying to do with my vote is to recognize that [during the Bush administration] we came perilously close to damaging an institution, the judiciary, that has held this country together in difficult times”.

Bill White, a Democratic party candidate for US Senate, from Texas, criticized Cornyn, a Republican, saying:

Senator John Cornyn acknowledged that Sonia Sotomayor has an excellent background, the right temperament, and a record of mainstream decisions. Her life has been an inspiration. Texas’ Senator should do what is right for our state and our mainstream values. Senator Cornyn’s “no” vote on Sotomayor represents political posturing for one wing of one party, politics as usual. As our next Senator, I will do what’s right for Texas.

It is clear that much of what has characterized the hearings regarding the nomination, and the qualifications, of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to sit on the nation’s highest court has been about partisan posturing. Facts have been ignored and she has been maligned by critics who seem at times more opposed to the idea that they be seen to vote for someone whose remarks are too complex to explain in sound-bite form than to her actual judicial temperament or record.

The radical partisanism, which actually ignores the facts in evidence and uses only rhetoric and innuendo to justify votes for or against the better interests of the nation’s future, or the fulfilling of Constitutional duties (advise and consent), has come to dominate the political strategy of the Republican party. The obsessive assaults on Judge Sotomayor’s character, defaming as racist a woman who succeeded against circumstance and overcame racism to achieve judicial excellence, are indicative of the unscrupulous manipulations that now stand in for service.

The Kansas City Star reports:

Hatch, who backed Sotomayor’s 1998 bid for a federal appellate judgeship and voted to confirm two of President Bill Clinton’s Supreme Court nominees, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, said Friday that he’d oppose Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court.

Hatch said he made decision “reluctantly and with a heavy heart,” but that he had serious questions about her judicial philosophy.

In fact, close examination of her record suggests she may be a more moderate jurist, in terms of the ideological alignment of her rulings (there is generally considered to be little evidence of ideology, and her rulings have often riled progressives who say she is too conservative), than either of the Clinton nominees Hatch supported. And, of course, Hatch himself supported her elevation to the Court of Appeals and only now says he finds her “too much at odds with the principles about the judiciary in which I deeply believe”.

In a candid and troubling moment, Hatch said “I wish President Obama had chosen a Hispanic nominee that all senators could support”, even going as far as to say “I believe it would have done a great deal for our great country.” Odd, because his opposition to her judicial philosophy is in part rooted in concerns about the role of ethnicity in judging, something she has been wrongly accused of defending. It turns out, Hatch accepts the logic that she should be a judge because she is Hispanic, but is not convinced by her stellar judicial record.

As the Daily News has it, “Sen. Lindsay Graham puts principle above party on Sotomayor“. Graham demonstrated his own allegiance to the rule of law and the democratic process, by acknowledging that, though he may differ from Judge Sotomayor philosophically, and he might like a justice with far more conservative viewpoints, her record as a judge is undeniably worthy, and deserving of his support.

Graham said in his remarks on the vote “I do not want to set a standard here that people who are aspiring to be a judge will never have a thought, never take on an unpopular cause.” He explained that while Judge Sotomayor was “left of center”, she was “certainly within the mainstream”. He added that “I would not have chosen her, but I understand why President Obama did.”

Graham sought to remind his colleagues that the US Senate should not be a place where partisan bickering gets in the way of honest public service. He said he takes his advise and consent responsibility seriously, and does not believe that this Constitutional role entitles the Senate to raw obstructionism, when a nominee is so eminently qualified. He reiterated the much-repeated observation that Sonia Sotomayor has more experience than any nominee to the Court in 100 years.

A group of former Israeli soldiers is questioning the methods used in the Gaza offensive carried out by the IDF on orders from then outgoing prime minister Ehud Olmert. The group interviewed veterans of the Gaza offensive and has reported that serious abuses occurred and need to be further investigated and prosecuted. One soldier reportedly described a “moral Twilight Zone” in which any Palestinian could be viewed as a threat.

The Miami Herald is reporting:

Israeli combat soldiers have acknowledged that they forced Palestinian civilians to serve as human shields, needlessly killed unarmed Gazans and improperly used white phosphorus shells to burn down buildings as part of Israel’s three-week military offensive in the Gaza Strip last winter.

Soldiers spoke to the group Breaking the Silence, an organization founded by Israeli army reservists in 2004, with the aim of revealing the truth about operations that might run afoul of IDF official policy or Israeli or international law. Breaking the Silence decries “Cases of abuse towards Palestinians, looting, and destruction of property” as not legitimate military or security activities and demands ”accountability regarding Israel’s military actions in the Occupied territories perpetrated by us and in our name”.

Ha’aretz is reporting that a Golani brigade soldier testified that his superiors had said Palestinians were used as human shields in Gaza. The Breaking the Silence testimony says the strategy was called the “neighbor procedure”. It was also suggested Palestinians were routinely sent into homes in advance of the IDF in order to check if anyone was there. The Israeli newspaper reports that the same soldier gave a similar account to one of its reporters.

The Israeli Defense Force flatly denies the allegations, and says the human rights organization is relying on untested and unverified verbal accounts alone. An official statement from the IDF reads:

… the IDF regrets the fact that a human rights organization would again present to the country and the world a report containing anonymous, generalized testimony without checking the details or their reliability, and without giving the IDF, as a matter of minimal fairness, the opportunity to check the matters and respond to them before publication…

Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and UN agencies have also alleged the destructive force used by the IDF against densely populated areas of the Gaza Strip was disproportionate and unjustified. There is an ongoing UN investigation into allegations of war crimes, including strikes that killed UN staff and targeted a school run by the UN.

On the newly reported testimony of IDF soldiers who served in Gaza, Reuters reports:

“Better hit an innocent than hesitate to target an enemy,” is a typical description by one unidentified soldier of his understanding of instructions repeated at pre-invasion briefings and during the 22-day operation, from December 27 to January 18.

“If you’re not sure, kill. Fire power was insane. We went in and the booms were just mad,” says another. “The minute we got to our starting line, we simply began to fire at suspect places.”

That soldier reportedly said the logic of urban warfare is that everyone is a threat and there are “no innocents”. A Palestinian group alleges 1,417 people were killed by the Israeli offensive, including 926 civilians. The IDF refutes these claims, saying 1,166 were killed, with only 295 of those deaths involving civilians. Israel also reports that 10 IDF soldiers were killed, along with 3 Israeli civilians.

The IDF strategy for Gaza saw the razing of entire streets in order to prevent dark corners of large structures being used as staging points for sniper-fire, ambushes and heavy artillery. The report on soldiers’ testimony says white phosphorous was indiscriminately used to target homes and streets, supporting allegations made by numerous rights groups and doctors that treated patients with the resulting burns.

Bulldozers and other heavy machinery, including explosives, were reportedly used to demolish entire sections of Gaza City, moves justified as militarily necessary, but which destroyed property on a massive scale, and had little apparent foundation in the laws of war. The group Breaking the Silence says “the existence of a moral society clearly requires a profound, honest discussion, of which the voice of soldiers on the ground is an inseparable part”.

The IDF denies that the laws of war were violated in any systematic way and says it is carrying out its own investigations. There have been calls from within Israel for an independent probe, but the government says the IDF has been thorough and has not found evidence of serious wrongdoing. International human rights groups remain skeptical and say there is substantial evidence of a wide range of abuses.

According to the BBC, the soldiers’ testimony suggests the “Rules of engagement were either unclear or encouraged soldiers to do their utmost to protect their own lives whether or not Palestinian civilians were harmed.” There were also reports of vandalism and of “Soldiers firing at water tanks because they were bored, at a time of severe water shortages for Gazans”.

Lt. Col. Avital Leibovich, spokeswoman for the IDF, has said the new report is based on hearsay and that “The IDF expects every soldier to turn to the appropriate authorities with any allegation”. She specified: “This is even more important where the harm is to non-combatants. The IDF has uncompromising ethical values which continue to guide us in every mission.”

Sarah Palin says she wants to save Alaska the injustice of watching its governor galavant around the country visiting fellow governors in a “politics as usual” lame-duck end to a first term. The “lame duck” problem arises, of course, only because she has chosen not to seek re-election. And a woman who professes to be presidential material is now stepping down after just two and a half years as governor of a state with population 686,293. 

The fact is: Sarah Palin is using her folksy style and unprincipled rhetoric to paint what is essentially a failure as a kind of “maverick” maneuver that one could never expect from those sinister enough to engage is “politics as usual”. But the pejorative “politics as usual” cannot exactly be made to fit the situation of public officials who serve the term they were elected to serve, and in fact, she rather conveniently ignores its intense relevance to the kind of spin game she is already playing with this resignation.

The Washington Post gives what might be a more appropriate description of her resignation: 

Palin offered few clues about her ambitions but said she arrived at her decision in part to protect her family, which has faced withering criticism and occasional mockery, and to escape ethics probes that have drained her family’s finances and hampered her ability to govern. She said leaving office is in the best interest of the state and will allow her to more effectively advocate for issues of importance to her, including energy independence and national security.

There is room, even for hardened political critics or for liberals who detest her methods and her politics, to see a note of human frailty in this story, and to feel the sadness that might come with a life of public service so affected by the spotlight and by the hounding of investigations, that it leads an ambitious person to step down from a job it would probably be in her own best interests to keep. There is room for this, but it is not necessary to make that sympathetic view the final word on Sarah Palin’s sudden resignation. 

She may have done it to save her family additional hardship. She may have done it because ongoing ethics probes were uncovering problems that would have her tied up in legal battles indefinitely. She may have done it because she wants to run for president, though this seems an improbable way to go about demonstrating leadership potential or the ability to juggle a dizzying array of responsibilities. She may have done it because she was tired. There may be personal reasons, still secret, and which need never be known. 

But Sarah Palin’s immediate spin-machine approach, claiming to be doing this out of some extreme, even fundamentalist devotion to fiscal discipline —”I cannot stand here as your governor and allow the millions of dollars and all that time go to waste just so I can hold the title of governor“— has made this resignation a political stunt of the first order.

She wants the stunt effect (spin the whole issue so that what is becomes what it is not and in the process win attention for yourself), but also the authenticity points (she’s doing it out of a rarefied devotion to the public good), without realizing they contradict each other. And that’s exactly the problem with Sarah Palin’s bursting on the national scene last year: she wanted to be both something she is and everything she is not, and she wanted for no one to notice the contradictions. 

Maybe she is saving herself from the public eye, or maybe she’s saving her pursuit of the presidency from the stresses of government. Maybe she is saving Alaska from her sort of governance. But it is so patently absurd to say she is saving Alaska from behavior she finds reprehensible, by removing herself from the picture, that it defies all logic: if she had any self control, she could simply perform as governor in the way she sees fit.

Michael Jackson was ‘the king of pop’, an informal title he acquired through the relentless echo chamber of American celebrity. He won this title by topping the charts from a young age, by having the “it” quality, by innovative body motions that changed dance, like the “moonwalk”, by way of record music sales, by way of conquering the video medium, by staging a massive global drive to fund food aid to Africa, by being odd enough to garner endless headlines, or because none of us really understand what it takes to rise to the top of the popular culture that elevated him and defamed him, or what it’s like to be there. So he was “king”, the way any royalty lives a life incomprehensible —for its opulence, its complications, its stresses— to the rest of society.

People close to Jackson have said over the past 24 hours that he lived an amount of stress impossible for any human heart to endure — an indirect or not so indirect suggestion that his heart just “gave out” from a life too intense and too big for the light-framed soft-spirited pop idol to withstand. It is said he weighed as little as 100 lbs. in recent months, that he was receiving regular treatments for an unconfirmed illness, that he had suffered from heart problems, that he was engaged in intensive weight training to prepare for his revival concert tour, that he needed medication to maintain the energy necessary to do all of this, and maybe he overdosed or mixed meds in inadvisable ways.

We don’t know. But the speculation that he had perhaps gotten too close to or even abused children that stayed at his Neverland Ranch continues. There have been passionate and angry outbursts from people convinced that he somehow maneuvered or bought his way out of conviction on those charges. There have been outpourings of affection from long-time friends and acquaintances who say he never could have done any such thing and who cite his acquittal as proof he was innocent. He is at once a universal symbol of pop culture, its excesses and its rewards, its infamy and its contribution to culture generally, and a scapegoat on whom people from across society place their worst feelings, without actually having met him or having knowledge of his mysterious personal life.

The pop-culture epic that is the story of Michael Jackson is riveting in part because of the extreme air of mystery that surrounds him. For some, it is the mystery of his unique abilities and apparently natural charisma and talent. For others, it is the mystery of his intense shyness, his reclusive ways, his periodic obsessions (like the hyperbaric chamber or the veiling of his children, whom he wanted to protect from the trials of celebrity). And for others, it is the mystery of what could possess a grown man to continue to interact with children after all the ugly allegations and the suspicion and infamy that came with past interactions.

There is also, of course, the mystery of whether what is imagined about him is true at all. Did he do it? Did he suffer from deprivation of childhood? Was he violently beaten or abused as a child? Was there a trauma we don’t know about that forced him into seclusion? How did he so persistently maintain a life both isolated and in the spotlight, for decades? Why did he? Was his skin losing pigmentation and for that reason, did he bleach his skin in an effort to maintain a uniform complexion? Or was he “trying to be white”? We don’t know.

He was a child star, a talent, an innovator, a charitable man, a man of conscience, a mystery, possibly a criminal, though we don’t have proof, a stunning success and a startling failure. His biography runs the gamut of ordinary people’s dreams and nightmares, and in that way, somehow, he became like part of an extended family of emotional symbols that pop culture has become for the general public.

It is perhaps an exaggeration to say, as someone did yesterday, that his was a “once in history” talent, or that his loss is another in a long string of national traumas that will mark us all, as suggested by Larry King. But somehow, there was popular energy concentrated in the person of Michael Jackson, in his story and the life he lived, some of which he chose and some of which pursued him to his endless chagrin.

His passing has suddenly opened up a window into our collective awareness: we focused on him, discussed his personal attitudes and relationships, made guesses and judged him, freely and at will. Does that say something about us? About the kind of culture we have made and are making every day? Does it serve as a caution to us all to rethink what elements of our society we elevate or tear down, or the grounds on which we base our choices in that regard? It might.

Anything beyond that, if we are honest, is speculation. The last two days have seen journalists quipping about the pop icon like teenagers trying to get a grip on something beyond their capacity to imagine, and serious reporters bending over backwards rhetorically to blend the narrative of his status as a much beloved figure with the sad story of a man who may have engaged in morally unjustifiable abuses. Michael Jackson splits our language as he split our public consciousness, not because he is a good or a bad man nor because his fame was warranted or unwarranted, but because as a society we put so much of our energy into his story for so long.

This is not news, but it’s worth repeating: Sen. John Cornyn, of Texas, has in the past suggested that the Republican challenge to Minnesota’s seating Al Franken as its junior senator could last for “years”. Coleman has challenged every single court ruling so far, despite losing every one of them and losing more ground in the vote-count with each examination of new votes. The last court to rule found that there was no evidence of any legitimate votes still uncounted, and ordered that Franken be certified the winner and Coleman pay court costs.

His final appeal to the state courts is now before the Minnesota Supreme Court, which is expected to rule any day. The day before the new Senate was to be sworn in this January, Cornyn threatened that his party would filibuster if Franken were seated. At the time, there was no “valid certificate” declaring Franken the winner, though state election officials had finalized their count. The Republican governor, Tim Pawlenty, had refused to sign an election certificate until Coleman had exhausted his appeals.

In March, Cornyn threatened “World War III” would ensue if Franken were seated. It was then that he suggested the challenge process could take “years” to resolve. Cornyn heads the National Republican Senatorial Committee, charged with winning seats for members of his party, and the Republican party is fighting to hold onto its last significant Constitutional clout in the present Congress, an as-yet unsecured 41st seat.

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Observers from both sides appear to agree Franken is much more likely to emerge as Minnesota’s 2nd senator, but Cornyn clearly sees a party interest in delaying that eventuality. Coleman’s loss would further shift the Republican party to the right, which even some conservative members of the party believe will make winning elections still more difficult. Franken could also be of use to Obama in achieving important reforms that could establish his record as a transformative president in a time of crisis; this would make 2010 and 2012 difficult years for Republicans.

A blog at Rabble.ca suggests this could be the beginning of a “Franken decade”, in part because the Republican party is battered, in part because Franken’s politics line up to a large degree with the general trend in electoral and demographic shifts, toward a more activist and progressive Democratic agenda. Such speculation has the Republican party scared of getting “lost in the wilderness”, not only out of power, but not convinced about the emerging vocabulary of electoral politics in general.

There is also the fundraising issue: fewer senators means fewer high-profile fundraisers for the party. And Washington realpolitik might mean that big donors will be a little less ideological and a little more pragmatic about who they support as candidates for office. Franken’s win could help moderate Democrats across the country win fundraising where out-of-favor conservative Republicans are likely their opponents.

So it’s worth asking: is John Cornyn, for reasons of party priority, actively seeking to orchestrate a Republican blockade against Minnesota seating its Constitutionally prescribed second representative in the United States Senate? If so, how much of his party’s funds is he willing to devote to this struggle, which will likely put a bad face on the party and embolden progressive opponents of his party’s legislative goals? And will such opposition to Minnesotans’ Constitutional right to representation undermine future Republican candidates across the state?

By refusing to follow the court order mandating that election results be certified and Al Franken seated as the junior senator from Minnesota, Gov. Tim Pawlenty, a Republican, has allowed the contest brought by a member of his own party to deprive his state of its second vote in the United States Senate since early January. Though a case is pending in the courts, the fact remains, Pawlenty is using his office to block the certification of results that would seat a member of the opposing party.

While Pawlenty may have authority under the Minnesota state constitution to not sign the election certificate that would send Democratic candidate Al Franken to the US Senate, his refusal is a refusal to obey a court order to certify the election count, and it could haunt him in a number of ways.

Pawlenty is widely thought to be eyeing his party’s nomination to run for president in 2012, and many believe his party-first approach to this contested election is a sign he is privileging his own political future over the welfare of the people of his state. By his actions, Pawlenty appears to be demonstrating that he puts party politics ahead of public service, and is less interested in the right to democratic representation of the people he represents than he is in using his office to aid a member of his party, in direct opposition to the finding of an independent court.

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It will not be lost, on the people of Minnesota or on those who might oppose Pawlenty’s nomination, that his approach to this election contest was to defy a court order and use his office to assist a member of his party in stalling the seating of a democratically elected representative of the people of his state. His actions show clear contempt for his constituents, for the election process and for the federal government itself. What evidence does this behavior provide that there is anything about Pawlenty that would qualify him for national office?

Admittedly, the governor finds himself between a rock and a hard place: Norm Coleman is a ferocious competitor and abject hypocrite, who will not hesitate to turn on a member of his own party. (One could hardly find a better proof of hypocrisy than Coleman’s calling on Franken to withdraw, lest he be treated as an enemy of the people of his state, simply for trailing by a few hundred votes, with the count still incomplete, then dragging the contest on for 7 months when it turns out that a complete count leaves him trailing by a few hundred votes.)

Pawlenty also has to face a radicalized national party some of whose leaders have openly spoken about a “purge” or an ideological “purification” of the party. The national party’s radicalization has become so extreme that 5-term Pennsylvania senator Arlen Specter abandoned the party, with some anger about the electoral climate, charging the party had diverged from principles he could support and chastising “the Pennsylvania Republican primary electorate” for being unfit to judge his 3 decades of service.

Party luminaries like Colin Powell (retired general, fmr. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and fmr. Sec. of State) or John McCain (war hero, popular candidate for president in 2000 and 2008, and self-professed man of principle) are treated like “traitors” or not “real” Republicans, because they do not robotically fall in line with the dictates of party hardliners.

This is the party that Pawlenty is aiming to serve above the needs of his state or his nation. If Pawlenty had hoped to take the moderate conservative tack in seeking the presidency, he will have relinquished it, in part by obeying the all-or-nothing anti-democratic obsessions of a leadership already far out of step with the national electorate, and in part by offending the sensibilities of all conscientious voters who want a final count to be final.

But there is another potential way in which Pawlenty’s intransigence in service of his party might backfire: the long election contest only further legitimizes Franken, should he be seated. He will have undergone the most exhaustive examination of ballots in recent memory, and will have emerged victorious in every single level of the process, except Pawlenty’s and Coleman’s obviously biased view of reality.

This gives weight to the Franken victory, and may mean his swearing in will be cheered statewide as a long-overdue and much needed boon for the state, both in terms of publicity for the new senator and in terms of actually achieving, finally, 7 or 8 months after Election Day, the Constitutionally mandated standard of 2 elected senators.

The shameful episode of Coleman’s blocking the state’s democratically elected senator from being seated might also harden an already significant shift toward the Democratic party, as Franken has, generally, been sporting about the repeated contests and challenges, while Coleman has shown himself to be more ambitious than right and more focused on his own power than on the good of the people.

Does Tim Pawlenty really want to go to the wire for Norm Coleman? Does he want to bet his entire political future on this hijacking of the electoral process masquerading as concern for the voters? Does he want to leave his most meaningful mark on state-wide politics by aiding and abetting Coleman’s steadfast opposition to the will of the voters, the rule of law and the judgment of the courts?

In what promises to be one of the most controversial court rulings of the decade, the Supreme Court of the state of California found in favor of the supporters of Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage by Constitutional amendment in the state. Kenneth Starr argued the case in favor of Prop. 8. The Court allows the 18,000 couples already married in legal California marriages prior to Prop. 8 to retain their married status.

Gay rights groups and civil rights advocates say the ruling is even more untenable than the ban itself, as the result allows for some same-sex couples to acquire the legal status of marriage, while others will not be able to, an even clearer violation of the federal Constitution’s “equal protection clause”. The ruling may lead to a federal court challenge to the Constitutionality of using any voting process to strip any citizen of existing civil rights.

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One opponent of the ban said that Prop. 8 is a dangerous precedent, equivalent to proposing a ban on people over 50 having the right to vote or people of a specific ethnicity having the right to own property. There may be a renewed push for a referendum to repeal Prop. 8, as public opinion in California has shifted dramatically since the ban was instated, with people who did not vote saying they could not countenance the state stripping citizens of rights they already enjoy.

The ban has serious legal bearing on the personal lives of people in long-term same-sex relationships. Marriage allows people who have accumulated shared property or who are each other’s sole immediate family to provide for retention of that property in case of emergency and family-status hospital visits in case of illness or accident. Many people take these rights for granted, because the legal protections for the traditional family are so widely enjoyed, but those same laws can result in the barring of individuals from the most intimate emergency situations or life-planning options in their partner’s life.

Advocates of the Prop. 8 ban have long said they believe the definition of the word marriage is a matter of religious importance and that the state providing such status to people whose relationships fall outside the traditional religious definition of a married couple is a direct legal assault on their faith. Advocates of same-sex marriage rights say that faith is a private matter and marriage a matter of secular law, that using religion as a legal argument diminishes the special status of religious liberty in the Bill of Rights.

A former FBI interrogator today told the first Congressional hearing into “enhanced interrogation techniques” —an alleged regime of systematic torture— that waterboarding was slow, ineffective and unnecessary. He told the hearings, from behind a screen used to protect his identity, that after he had used non-abusive legal interrogation techniques to elicit useful information from Abu Zubaydah, CIA ‘contractors’ took over, waterboarded him, and the suspect “shut down” and refused to talk.

The hearing was held by the Senate judiciary subcommittee on administration and oversight. The agent, Ali Soufan, testified that “These techniques … are ineffective, slow and unreliable and as a result harmful to our efforts to defeat al Qaeda”. According to the Washington Post:

Soufan also interrogated prisoners at Guantanamo and was a key prosecution witness last year during the only two trials completed in the special tribunals at the U.S. Navy base in Cuba. His testimony helped convict Osama bin Laden’s driver, Salim Hamdan, and al Qaeda videographer Ali Hamza al Bahlul.

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An ABC News report involving a CIA agent, which claimed Abu Zubaydah had been “broken in 35 seconds” by waterboarding, one of the few pillars of the Cheney argument that torture was “effective”, has been debunked, since it was revealed that Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times, and the CIA agent who made the claim on ABC’s report recently recanted, saying he was “misinformed” and that he had never been at the site of the Zubaydah interrogation.

Numerous military and intelligence analysts have recently come forward to explain that the abusive techniques used were ineffective and/or counter-productive and a potential threat to US national security. Philip Zelikow, a former aide to then national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, said today that the so-called enhanced interrogations were “coolly calculated dehumanizing abuse” without precedent in American history.

Zelikow wrote a memo offering legal advice that the abusive techniques were likely not legal and that more effective alternatives were available for gaining effective intelligence through non-abusive interrogations. Zelikow has repeatedly said that he not only proposed an alternative legal argument to the Justice Department’s findings that extreme interrogation techniques were legal, but that he was ordered to destroy the memo which would clearly demonstrate that officials had been informed their actions were potentially illegal.

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) said today that Dick Cheney is “misleading the American people” in his quest to persuade policy makers, the public and potential prosecutors that torture is “effective” as an interrogation tool. The Washington Times reports that, on Sunday, Cheney “continued his verbal attack against President Obama, saying that the country is more vulnerable to a potential terrorist attack”.

Cheney’s constant protests that the use of abusive interrogation techniques is a valuable “asset” to American security have rested on some of the claims that were discredited today. He has been increasingly situated, or has situated himself, as the representative of the pro-torture policy position, even as he continues to assert that no acts of torture took place. Today, there were renewed calls for Cheney to give sworn testimony about his involvement in crafting interrogation policy or ordering enhanced interrogations.