400 richest Americans’ incomes doubled under Bush

400 richest Americans’ incomes doubled under Bush

The drop from 2001’s tax rate of 22.9 percent was due largely to ex-President George W. Bush’s push to cut tax rates on most capital gains to 15 percent in 2003.

Capital gains made up 63 percent of the richest 400 Americans’ adjusted gross income in 2006, or a combined $66.1 billion, according to the data. In all, the 400 wealthiest Americans reported a combined $105.3 billion of adjusted gross income in 2006, the most recent year for which the IRS has data.

The Wonk Room has noted how “the conservative approach of putting big corporations and the very wealthy ahead of the middle class has failed to create prosperity that can be shared by all Americans.”

Stimulus plan would give states $200 billion

Stimulus plan would give states $200 billion
States and local governments would be the big winners in an $825 billion economic stimulus program set for a House vote Wednesday.

More than $200 billion would go to states, enough to offset $100 billion in projected budget shortfalls they now face in the next two years, plus fund big spending increases. The money could spare states from politically painful program cuts, tax increases or both. Two-thirds of the federal money is aimed directly at states' biggest spending items: education, health care and roads.


California would get $22 billion over two years, estimates the Federal Funds Information for States (FFIS), a state-financed research group. Texas and New York would get $16 billion each. The smallest take: $578 million for Wyoming, which has a surplus and is considering a property tax cut.

"This will let us balance our budgets in a way that avoids making draconian cuts," says North Carolina House Speaker Joe Hackney, a Democrat and president of the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL).
FIND MORE STORIES IN: California | New York | Wyoming | Nancy Pelosi | National Conference of State Legislatures | National League of Cities | Jonathan Williams | Legislative Exchange Council | Federal Funds Information for States

His state, which would get $5.5 billion over two years, faces a $2 billion shortfall through June 30.

Nationally, states confront $32 billion in projected budget shortfalls this year and $64 billion in 2010, according to a December estimate by NCSL. NCSL spokeswoman Michelle Blackston says states still will watch their budgets tightly. "This will supplement, not supplant, state spending," she says.

President Obama supports a large stimulus plan, including aid to state and local governments, and is scheduled to meet today with Republican congressional leaders.

The federal government gave states $20 billion in 2003 to help them overcome budget problems. The current plan, supported by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats, would dwarf that amount. Included in the aid state and local governments would get over two years:

• $198 billion for all states, FFIS estimates. This money would include about $80 billion for education, $50 billion for infrastructure and $30 billion left to the discretion of governors.

• An extra $45 billion for health care in high unemployment states, the final amount depending on future jobless rates.

• $160 billion for cities, the National League of Cities says. Included: $10 billion for mass transit.

CNN's Henry misrepresented CBO cost estimate of economic stimulus bill

CNN's Henry misrepresented CBO cost estimate of economic stimulus bill
Summary: On CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight, Ed Henry asserted that the Congressional Budget Office's cost estimate of the economic stimulus bill "basically says that 52 percent of the money will be spent out over the next 18 months, that some 64, 65 percent of the bill will be paid out over the first two years." However, Henry's calculations are based on outlays only, excluding the plan's tax cut provisions. Including both outlays and tax cuts, the CBO estimated that about 64 percent of the recovery bill would be paid out within 19 months, and about 86 percent by the end of fiscal year 2011.

Republicans Continue Recovery Obstruction

Republicans Continue Recovery Obstruction
Since the Republican Conference of the U.S. House of Representatives is largely made up of individuals who believe their party lost the 2008 elections because they did not run far enough to the right, it is not surprising that their leaders are now attempting to block efforts to clean up the mess their far right philosophy created. There appears to be no factoid or morsel of misinformation they are unwilling to utilize to make the case to do nothing other than provide still more tax cuts to their business friends.

The recent editorial by the senior Republican on the House Appropriations Committee, the so-called "King of Pork" from California's Inland Empire, is a good case in point. Rep. Jerry Lewis's argument is that spending in other people's districts doesn't create jobs, but he attempts to make it appear that he has factual support for that argument by making assertions that are flatly untrue.

His first argument is that estimates of job creation under the package do not calculate the impact of government borrowing as well as the impact of the spending. That is simply not the case. Projections by economist Christine Romer--now head of President Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisors--as well as those of other macroeconomic forecasters include the overall impact of the proposal measuring the effect on credit markets, prices, consumer demand, and job creation.

Rep. Lewis apparently unwittingly puts his finger precisely on the problem that the U.S. economy now faces. The government is being forced into the role of borrower of last resort because the economic mismanagement of recent years has left so much of our private sector in such tatters that the rest of the private sector will not extend the credit necessary for the economy to function. It is regrettable that we are where we now find ourselves, but we should have thought of that a few years ago.

Lewis also makes totally false arguments about the cost of job creation. He claims that if the package creates only 3 million jobs, the cost per job of an $825 billion package would be $275,000. The Romer analysis, however, indicates that by the fourth quarter of 2010 the smaller package first put forward by the White House would have created 3.6 million jobs. That analysis also shows that in addition to the jobs created in 2010 the package would create substantial additional numbers of jobs in 2009, 2011, and 2012, making the annual cost per job a small fraction of the figure used by Lewis.

While Romer and Jared Bernstein--now Vice President Joe Biden's chief economic advisor--used very conservatives estimates of job creation, another estimate by Mark Zandi, the Chief Economist at Moody's Economy.Com, projects that a somewhat smaller package than the one now under consideration by Congress would produce nearly than 15 million additional man years of employment between now and the end of 2012. That works out to about $50,000 per man year of work. It should also be noted that the plan will produce a substantial number of additional jobs beyond 2012.

It is unfortunate that government cannot turn on the spigots of job creation more rapidly, and that the damage already done to households and businesses cannot be repaired more quickly. Those were facts that Rep. Lewis and his House Republican colleagues should have weighed more thoughtfully when they blocked a smaller stimulus package in September. Had it been passed and implemented then, money would now be flowing and the precipitous drops in monthly employment that we are now enduring might have been significantly softened.

What seems to be the real message being put forward by House Republicans is that government should hand out additional tax cuts to businesses and then sit on the sidelines. It is time for the loyal opposition to recognize their responsibility for the mess in which we now find ourselves and begin to find ways to be part of the solution rather than prolonging the agony in which millions of jobless Americans and at-risk families are now suffering.

Republicans Acting in Bad Faith on Economy

Bad Faith Economics

As the debate over President Obama’s economic stimulus plan gets under way, one thing is certain: many of the plan’s opponents aren’t arguing in good faith. Conservatives really, really don’t want to see a second New Deal, and they certainly don’t want to see government activism vindicated. So they are reaching for any stick they can find with which to beat proposals for increased government spending.

Some of these arguments are obvious cheap shots. John Boehner, the House minority leader, has already made headlines with one such shot: looking at an $825 billion plan to rebuild infrastructure, sustain essential services and more, he derided a minor provision that would expand Medicaid family-planning services — and called it a plan to “spend hundreds of millions of dollars on contraceptives.”

But the obvious cheap shots don’t pose as much danger to the Obama administration’s efforts to get a plan through as arguments and assertions that are equally fraudulent but can seem superficially plausible to those who don’t know their way around economic concepts and numbers. So as a public service, let me try to debunk some of the major antistimulus arguments that have already surfaced. Any time you hear someone reciting one of these arguments, write him or her off as a dishonest flack.

First, there’s the bogus talking point that the Obama plan will cost $275,000 per job created. Why is it bogus? Because it involves taking the cost of a plan that will extend over several years, creating millions of jobs each year, and dividing it by the jobs created in just one of those years.

It’s as if an opponent of the school lunch program were to take an estimate of the cost of that program over the next five years, then divide it by the number of lunches provided in just one of those years, and assert that the program was hugely wasteful, because it cost $13 per lunch. (The actual cost of a free school lunch, by the way, is $2.57.)

The true cost per job of the Obama plan will probably be closer to $100,000 than $275,000 — and the net cost will be as little as $60,000 once you take into account the fact that a stronger economy means higher tax receipts.

Next, write off anyone who asserts that it’s always better to cut taxes than to increase government spending because taxpayers, not bureaucrats, are the best judges of how to spend their money.

Here’s how to think about this argument: it implies that we should shut down the air traffic control system. After all, that system is paid for with fees on air tickets — and surely it would be better to let the flying public keep its money rather than hand it over to government bureaucrats. If that would mean lots of midair collisions, hey, stuff happens.

10 Absurd Conservative Myths About Obama's Recovery Plan

10 Absurd Conservative Myths About Obama's Recovery Plan
1. The proposed recovery package is too big.

False. Most progressive economists agree (and Paul Krugman is downright emphatic) that it's going to take a minimum of a trillion dollars of well-placed investment to pull our economy out of this ditch. This is no time for half-measures, blue-ribbon committees, pilot projects, or trial balloons: this is a life-or-death crisis that requires immediate and massive intervention.

CAF Senior Fellow Bernie Horn puts it this way: "The American economy is huge and it’s at a standstill. It’s like a motionless 100-car freight train -- or one going backwards slowly. A small locomotive simply can’t pull it forward. We need an engine large enough to work, one that can create millions of jobs. If anything, a $775 billion 2-year plan may be too small rather than too big."

Dean Baker of the Economic Policy Institute echoed this same thing on MSNBC's "Countdown" last Tuesday night. It's got to be big. And it's got to be now. Anything too small -- or too late -- and the American economy will be at serious risk of stagnating the same way Japan's did in the 1990s.
2. If we can't afford (insert pet project here), we certainly can't afford this.

Yes, we can. What we really can't afford is a huge recession that undercuts the tax base. That's a vicious cycle that will make it increasingly harder to dig out the longer this goes on. The Congressional Budget Office projects that the current slowdown will cost the federal government $166 billion in lost tax revenues in 2009 -- a number that could easily get even larger in coming years if we fall into a real depression. If we get on that trendline, we could lose a trillion dollars in government revenues by the end of Obama's first term. We need to invest what we have while we still have it if we hope to have a strong economy going forward.

This argument is based on the limited view that wealth is mainly generated by loaning or borrowing at interest -- a common enough assumption among financial people over the past 30 years. A more progressive view is that real wealth is generated by labor, combined with access to resources required for production. Putting people to work creates wealth. So does ensuring that our current failing energy regime is replaced as rapidly as possible with one that's infinitely renewable and that we will finally be in full control of. And so do other kinds of infrastructure investments, which form the footing on which a new round of businesses can rise and thrive.

Businesses have always invested their capital to create more capital. The best parts of Obama's proposal involve getting the government to do the same thing. Conservatives are resisting this because don't believe that there's such a thing as the common wealth -- which is how they've rationalized their plundering of our common assets. We need to make it absolutely clear that we do believe in the common wealth -- and that their assaults on everything that allows America to generate national wealth are going stop, right here and right now.

John Boehner and Republican Values

Boehner’s Alternate Reality: Gitmo Detainees Get ‘More Comforts Than A Lot Of Americans Get’
Earlier today, President Obama signed an executive order directing the closure of the U.S. military prison at Gitmo. Asked during a news conference for his reaction to the order, House Minority Leader John Boehner made it clear that he wasn’t even sure why anyone would want to close the prison in the first place. After all, he explained, the detainees there get “more comforts than a lot of Americans get”:

QUESTION: A lot of members of Congress on both sides of the aisle say that Guantanamo Bay has just given the United States a black eye on the world stage. Isn’t that part of the problem, too? […]

BOEHNER: I don’t know that there’s a terrorist treated better anywhere in the world than what has happened at Guantanamo. It is — we have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build a facility that has more comforts than a lot of Americans get.

Boehner has not been paying attention. Just last week, Susan Crawford, the top Bush administration official in charge of deciding whether to prosecute Gitmo detainees, revealed that she had concluded that Mohammed al-Qahtani was tortured by the U.S. military and consequently could not be prosecuted. As the Washington Post reported:

“For 160 days his only contact was with the interrogators,” said Crawford, who personally reviewed Qahtani’s interrogation records and other military documents. … Qahtani “was forced to wear a woman’s bra and had a thong placed on his head during the course of his interrogation” and “was told that his mother and sister were whores.” With a leash tied to his chains, he was led around the room “and forced to perform a series of dog tricks,” the report shows.

The Post also reported that al-Qahtani’s treatment was so extreme he had to be hospitalized twice and at one point his heart rate dropped to 35 beats per minute. In 2007, an FBI report found that detainees “were chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor for 18 hours or more, urinating and defecating on themselves.” Similarly, in 2004, the Red Cross reported “cruel, inhumane and degrading” treatment which was approaching “torture.”

Afghanistan - Where's the Strategy

Obama's Strategic Wasteland

In December 2008, Joe Klein of Time magazine called the war in Afghanistan an "aimless absurdity." Our new president is onboard with committing 30,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan, despite the fact that the Pentagon isn't certain what to tell the additional troops to do there or even what kind of troops it wants to send. According to the Washington Post, "the incoming administration does not anticipate that the Iraq-like 'surge' of forces will significantly change the direction of a conflict that has steadily deteriorated over the past seven years."

One senior U.S. military commander told the Post "We have no strategic plan. We never had one." He was referring to the Bush administration's Afghanistan program, but he might as well have been talking about Iraq and Iran and every other tentacle of Bush era foreign policy. The senior commander also said that Obama's first order of business will be to "explain to the American people what the mission is" in Afghanistan. Obama will be hard pressed to explain what the mission is if he doesn't have a strategy. * more at link

A Surprise for the Right Obama's Election Has Caused a Patriotic Spirit to Sweep America

A Surprise for the Right Obama's Election Has Caused a Patriotic Spirit to Sweep America by Robert Creamer

It just doesn't square with the right wing narrative. They painted Barack Obama as an unpatriotic, "terrorist sympathizing" candidate whose values are foreign to the American way of life. How could it be that his ascendance to the presidency should be the occasion for the new patriotic spirit sweeping America?

Yesterday on the mall in Washington hundreds of thousands belted out "This Land is Your Land" led by 90-year-old labor activist and folk singer Pete Seeger who was blacklisted in the 50s. The eyes of white middle aged working guys moistened as they listened to a black children's choir sing "America the Beautiful". And throughout the crowd -- even among the aging 60s activists who had struggled against the Vietnam War -- there was a genuine, deep admiration for the men and women who risk it all every day in our armed forces.

And it's not just in Washington. As unlikely as it might seem to the right, the election of Barack Hussein Obama has caused an intense feeling of patriotism to well up across the country. I think there are four reasons why:

First and foremost, Obama and his call to service -- to commitment -- has touched our most fundamental self interest -- our desire for meaning. Obama understands that to have a real sense of significance, you have to have a commitment to something outside of yourself. You have to be willing to sacrifice. The right wing's belief that if every one simply pursues their own individual interest the "invisible hand" will assure that the public interest is served doesn't work in practice -- a lesson delivered graphically by the 2008 crash of Wall Street. But more important, it doesn't address our overwhelming need to live lives that mean something.

Eight years ago, my wife, Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, decided that -- as painful as it was -- she should attend the swearing in of George W. Bush. I accompanied her and sat with the other Congressional spouses. Most of the spouses that year were Republicans women who were decked out in diamonds and furs. Bush's speech was pretty unremarkable, with few applause lines - at least until he called for tax cuts. With that the fur bedecked spouse section leapt to its feet and gave the new president a standing ovation. How far we had come from "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country."

The last eight years have demonstrated that true patriotism isn't about xenophobia. It isn't about "where's mine". It isn't about Bush's call on everyone to "go shop" after September 11. Patriotism is about commitment to other people - and willingness to sacrifice for the common good. And that's why President Elect Obama chose to commemorate Martin Luther King Day- his last day before taking the oath - by calling on Americans to participate in a day of service.

Second, Obama -- his campaign and his transition - have been unequivocal in their willingness to hold up and unapologetically celebrate the principles that lie at the heart of traditional progressive American values: unity not division; hope and optimism not fear and cynicism; tolerance not prejudice; that it's the right thing to help your neighbor not just yourself; that we're all in this together -- not all in this alone.

They have refused to allow the right wing to claim the symbols of America for their nationalistic, exclusionary vision of "patriotism". Instead Obama has reattached those symbols to the traditional progressive values that have always defined what is best in America. In his new book, The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, political strategist and author Mike Lux documents that tradition and challenges us all to be part of creating its next chapter.

Third, the new patriotism results from relief. Americans are relieved that they once again can be proud of the way their government acts in the world. Obama has pledged unequivocally to end torture, secret prisons, the practice of capturing people on the streets of foreign nations to "rendition" them (or disappear them) to other countries. He has pledged to end the Neo-Con doctrines of unilateralism and pre-emptive war. In other words he has pledge to return America to its standing as a moral leader in the world -- a country that holds fast to the principles of human rights - a country that understands that if our children are to be prosperous and free, the children of every nation must have that opportunity as well. Americans are relieved that in our dealings with the world, we have returned to the progressive principles elaborated by John Kennedy in his inaugural address 48 years ago:

Now the trumpet summons us again -- not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are -- but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, "rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation" -- a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself.

Finally, the election of Obama makes us proud of ourselves. We are proud that we have elected the first African American president. We are proud that from the all-white "Norman Rockwell" communities of Iowa; to the roadside bar with "Rednecks for Obama" on the marquee; to the suburbs of Philadelphia -- our fellow Americans have been willing to put centuries of prejudice behind them. And we are proud that we have reaffirmed America's founding principle: that we are a society that truly believes that all human beings are created equal; that America truly is a society where every child, of whatever background, can aspire to be President of the United States -- or anything else he or she wants to be.

Tomorrow will be a day that Americans will remember for years to come. It will be a day when most Americans -- whatever their partisan bent -- will feel particularly good about our country. But it will also be a day when people around the globe look at America differently than they did the day before. And they too will be inspired that everyday Americans mobilized successfully to take our country back -- that America did not fail them. The world will celebrate that we chose to chart a future governed by the American principles that they have long admired -- not the arrogance and selfishness they had come to loath.

complete essay at link*

Military Authority Claims Bush Violated Geneva Convention

How the Susan Crawford interview changes everything we know about torture
When Vice President Dick Cheney told the Weekly Standard last week, "I think on the left wing of the Democratic Party there are some people who believe that we really tortured," he probably wasn't thinking about Susan J. Crawford, convening authority of the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay. Crawford, a retired judge who served as general counsel for the Army during the Reagan administration and as Pentagon inspector general, is hardly the kind of hippie moonbat Cheney would like to poke fun at. And that's why everything changed this morning when the Washington Post published a front-page interview by Bob Woodward, in which Crawford stated without equivocation that the treatment of alleged 20th Sept. 11 hijacker Mohammed al-Qahtani at Guantanamo Bay was "torture."

You're wondering how it is that Crawford's claim that the United States authorized torture (not "coercive interrogation" or "enhanced interrogation" or other "nontorturous forms of interrogation" or "abuse," but torture) changes anything. After all, the Senate armed services committee issued a report just last month pointing the finger of responsibility for the military interrogations at then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his general counsel Jim Haynes. The committee did not use the T-word, however. And Crawford is hardly the first high-ranking military official to use the word. Alberto J. Mora, former general counsel of the U.S. Navy, wrote in a letter to the Navy's inspector general: "The interrogation techniques approved by the Secretary [of Defense] should not have been authorized because some (but not all) of them, whether applied singly or in combination, could produce effects reaching the level of torture." The 84-page log of al-Qahtani's interrogation has long been a matter of public record, and there is now little dispute that the treatment it describes rose to the level of torture. As described in Torture Team, London-based clinical psychiatrist and trauma specialist Dr. Abigail Seltzer studied the log and concluded that al-Qahtani had been tortured.

It's also not an accident that Crawford is a military lawyer. From the very outset of the Bush torture regime, it was the military attorneys who warned him—if they were given a chance—that his program was illegal.

The Lies of Dick Cheney

The Lies of Dick Cheney by Andy Worthington
On December 11, the Senate Armed Services Committee issued a compelling report into the torture and abuse of prisoners in US custody (PDF), based on a detailed analysis of how Chinese torture techniques, which are used in US military schools to train personnel to resist interrogation if captured, were reverse engineered and applied to prisoners captured in the "War on Terror."
The techniques, taught as part of the SERE programs (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) include sleep deprivation, the prolonged use of stress positions, forced nudity, hooding, exposure to extreme temperatures, subjecting prisoners to loud music and flashing lights, "treating them like animals," and, in some cases, the ancient torture technique known as waterboarding, a form of controlled drowning that the torturers of the Spanish Inquisition called "tortura del agua."

The report rejected the conclusions of over a dozen investigations, conducted since the Abu Ghraib scandal in 2004, which identified problems concerning the treatment of prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo, but which were not authorized to gaze up the chain of command to blame senior officials for approving the use of torture by US forces, and for instigating abusive policies.

This enabled the administration to maintain, as it did with Abu Ghraib, that any abuse was the result of the rogue activities of "a few bad apples," but the Senate Committee report comprehensively demolished this defense. The authors wrote:

The abuse of detainees in US custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of "a few bad apples" acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees. Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority.

Those singled out for blame include President George W. Bush (for stripping prisoners of the protections of the Geneva Conventions in February 2002, which paved the way for all the abuse that followed), former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney's former legal counsel (and now chief of staff) David Addington, former Pentagon general counsel William J. Haynes II, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Richard Myers, former White House general counsel (and later US Attorney General) Alberto Gonzales, former White House deputy counsel Timothy Flanigan, former Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee, former Justice Department legal adviser John Yoo, former Guantánamo commanders Maj. Gen. Michael Dunlavey and Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, and Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the former commander of coalition forces in Iraq.

The one senior official who was not mentioned -- presumably because of the talent for remaining behind the scenes that once earned him the secret service nickname "Backseat" -- was Dick Cheney. However, just four days later, as if to make up for his omission from the report, Cheney was interviewed by ABC News, and took the opportunity to present a detailed defense of the administration's national security policies, throwing down a very public gauntlet to critics of torture, Guantánamo, illegal wiretapping and the invasion of Iraq, and raising fears that he was only doing so because a Presidential pardon is just around the corner.

Cheney's most significant remark was his first admission in public that he was involved in approving the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-confessed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks (who, it should be noted, claimed responsibility for the attacks before he was captured by US forces). However, the entire interview is worth looking at, as Cheney's version of the truth does not stand up to scrutiny, and features ten lies that should not be allowed to pass without further comment and analysis.

1) On the supposed legality of unauthorized wiretapping

Asked what he thought about suggestions from Barack Obama's transition team that the Bush administration's homeland security policy "has basically been torture and illegal wiretapping, and that they want to undo the central tenets of your anti-terrorist policy," Cheney replied, "They're wrong. On the question of terrorist surveillance, this was always a policy to intercept communications between terrorists, or known terrorists, or so-called 'dirty numbers,' and folks inside the United States, to capture those international communications. It's worked. It's been successful. It's now embodied in the FISA statute that we passed last year, and that Barack Obama voted for, which I think was a good decision on his part. It's a very, very important capability. It is legal. It was legal from the very beginning. It is constitutional, and to claim that it isn't I think is just wrong."

THE LIE: Although the Bush administration secured Congressional approval for the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) in the week after the 9/11 attacks (the founding document of the "War on Terror," which granted the President seemingly open-ended powers "to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001"), the approval for the warrantless surveillance of communications to and from the United States that followed on September 25 was neither "legal" nor "constitutional."

In a series on Dick Cheney in the Washington Post last summer, Barton Gellman and Jo Becker explained how, on the day of the 9/11 attacks, Cheney and David Addington swiftly assembled a team that included Timothy Flanigan and John Yoo to begin "contemplating the founding question of the legal revolution to come: What extraordinary powers will the President need for his response?" Gellman and Becker described how Flanigan, with advice from Yoo, drafted the AUMF, and Yoo explained that "they used the broadest possible language because 'this war was so different, you can't predict what might come up'."

In fact, as the authors point out, they "knew very well what would come next: the interception -- without a warrant -- of communications to and from the United States." Although warrantless communications intercepts had been forbidden by federal law since 1978, the administration claimed that they were "justified, in secret, as 'incident to' the authority Congress had just granted" the President, in a memorandum that Yoo finalized on 25 September. Far from being "legal" and "constitutional," therefore, the secret memorandum was the first brazen attempt by the key policy-makers (in the Office of the Vice President and the Pentagon) to use the AUMF as cover for an unprecedented expansion of presidential power that was intended to cut Congress, the judiciary, and all other government departments out of the loop.

2) On the definition of torture

Moving on to the allegations of torture, Cheney said, "On the question of so-called 'torture,' we don't do torture, we never have. It's not something that this administration subscribes to. Again, we proceeded very cautiously; we checked, we had the Justice Department issue the requisite opinions in order to know where the bright lines were that you could not cross. The professionals involved in that program were very, very cautious, very careful, wouldn't do anything without making certain it was authorized and that it was legal. And any suggestion to the contrary is just wrong."

THE LIE: The claim, "we don't do torture," which President Bush has also peddled on numerous occasions, is an outright lie. The definition of torture, as laid down in the UN Convention Against Torture, to which the US is a signatory, is "any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person." However, in the summer of 2002 (obviously with Cheney's knowledge), John Yoo, with input from Addington, Gonzales and Flanigan, drafted another secret memorandum, issued on August 1 (PDF), which has become known as the "Torture Memo." This extraordinary document -- one of the most legally manipulative in the whole of the "War on Terror" -- drew creatively on historical rulings about torture in countries including Northern Ireland and Bosnia, and attempted to claim that, for the pain inflicted to count as torture, it "must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death."

Last summer, Yoo confirmed that Addington was responsible for another of the memo's radical claims -- that, as Commander in Chief, the President could authorize torture if he felt that it was necessary -- and also confirmed that a second opinion was signed off on August 1, 2002, which, unlike the first (leaked after the Abu Ghraib scandal in 2004) has never been made public. An unnamed source cited by Gellman and Becker explained that this second memo contained a long list of techniques approved for use by the CIA, which included waterboarding, but apparently drew the line at threatening to bury a prisoner alive.

As a result, all Cheney's talk of "careful" and "cautious" legal advice is nothing more than a failed attempt to justify redefining torture. Outside of the White House and the Pentagon, it has always been abundantly clear that the SERE techniques (let alone the more extreme methods approved for use by the CIA) are torture, pure and simple, and the Senate Committee's recent report quotes extensively from a number of bodies -- the Air Force, the Defense Department's Criminal Investigative Task Force, the Army's International and Operational Law Division, the Navy and the Marine Corps -- who were opposed to their implementation for this very reason. Others, who took their complaints to the highest levels, were Alberto J. Mora, the head of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, and the FBI.

3) On intelligence obtained through torture

Following his defense of the interrogation techniques authorized by the administration, Cheney continued: "Did it produce the desired results? I think it did. I think, for example, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was the number three man in al-Qaeda, the man who planned the attacks of 9/11, provided us with a wealth of information. There was a period of time there, three or four years ago, when about half of everything we knew about al-Qaeda came from that one source."

THE LIE: With exquisite timing, Cheney's bombastic pronouncements about the torture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) and its supposed value coincided with the publication, in Vanity Fair, of an article by David Rose, in which a number of senior officials from both the FBI and the CIA directly refuted Cheney's claims. The article, which is worth reading in its entirety, focused primarily on the torture of Abu Zubaydah, Binyam Mohamed and Jose Padilla (which I have discussed at length before), but there were also key insights into the torture of KSM. Although President Bush claimed that KSM had provided "many details of other plots to kill innocent Americans," a former senior CIA official, who read all the interrogation reports from KSM's torture in secret CIA custody, explained that "90 percent of it was total fucking bullshit," and a former Pentagon analyst added, "KSM produced no actionable intelligence. He was trying to tell us how stupid we were."

In addition, Cheney's claims about KSM were directly contradicted by Jack Cloonan, a senior FBI operative whose torture-free interrogation of al-Qaeda operatives in the years before 9/11 provides an object lesson in how the administration should have operated afterwards. Disputing the unspecified claims that, as Cheney put it, the interrogation of KSM had produced "a wealth of information," Cloonan said, "The proponents of torture say, 'Look at the body of information that has been obtained by these methods.' But if KSM and Abu Zubaydah did give up stuff, we would have heard the details." Rose added that a former CIA officer asked, "Why can't they say what the good stuff from Abu Zubaydah or KSM is? It's not as if this is sensitive material from a secret, vulnerable source. You're not blowing your source but validating your program. They say they can't do this, even though five or six years have passed, because it's a 'continuing operation.' But has it really taken so long to check it all out?"

However, what was probably the most damning opinion was offered by FBI director Robert Mueller:

I ask Mueller: So far as he is aware, have any attacks on America been disrupted thanks to intelligence obtained through what the administration still calls "enhanced techniques"?

"I'm really reluctant to answer that," Mueller says. He pauses, looks at an aide, and then says quietly, declining to elaborate: "I don't believe that has been the case."

Is Pragmatism Overrated?

Is Pragmatism Overrated? By erin.evans

Last month, Obama campaign strategist Steve Hildebrand went so far as to publish a chiding message [8] to progressives who dared object to the president-elect’s Cabinet choices. “This is not a time for the left wing of our party to draw conclusions about the Cabinet and White House appointments that President-elect Obama is making,” Hildebrand lectured, in full-throated Fox News indignation. He offered no indication of when, exactly, would be a more appropriate time for progressives to become involved in the political process.
Never mind that the largest problems facing the nation and the president-elect today could have been avoided [9] if progressives had not been similarly dismissed as unreasonable kooks during both the Clinton and Bush administrations. Progressive ideas about financial-industry deregulation, unrestrained “free trade,” climate change and, of course, Iraq were once considered rash but have all been proven correct.

Media Again Flacks for Bush's Crimes

Washington Post Again Flacks for Bush's Crimes

The latest example is the Post’s front-page article on Jan. 10 which offers a one-sided defense of torture in the guise of discussing how President-elect Barack Obama is under pressure over his expressed goal of prohibiting abusive interrogation of detainees in the “war on terror.”

The Post article presents those interrogation policies as an undisputed success, even quoting Vice President Dick Cheney as something of an unbiased expert in declaring that the harsh tactics “have been absolutely essential to maintaining our capacity to interfere with and defeat all further attacks against the United States.”

Throughout the article, Obama’s opposition to torture is portrayed as simply campaign rhetoric meant to appease the left-wing Democratic base and some human rights activists. Meanwhile the pro-torture position is described as realistic, hard-headed and patriotic.

“If Obama goes ahead with his plan to scrap the special CIA [interrogation] program, he could expose himself to criticism that he did not do all he could to prevent another terrorist attack,” the Post article states. It then cites a “white paper” from Bush’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence about the supposed successes of the interrogation tactics, including the simulated drowning of waterboarding.

The DNI’s “white paper” credited the waterboarding of an al-Qaeda operative known as Abu Zubaydah for forcing out the first information about Khalid Sheik Mohammed’s role in the 9/11 attacks and intelligence that helped capture another high-ranking operative, Ramzi Binalshibh.

Though the Post story appeared in the news columns – not in its reliably neoconservative editorial section – the article read more like a pro-torture opinion piece masquerading as news. The Post included no counter-arguments against the alleged value of waterboarding and other tactics which have been widely condemned around the world as torture.

If the Post had any interest in balance, it might have included at least some references to experts who have disputed the value of extracting information through torture.

For example, Lt. Gen. John Kimmons, head of Army intelligence, stated in 2006 that “No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tells us that.”

FBI Protests

Or the Post might have mentioned the opposition to torture from trained FBI interrogators who left the Guantanamo Bay prison in disgust over the illegality and ineffectiveness of the brutal interrogation tactics that had supplanted their own approach which they felt had been working.

A Justice Department’s Inspector General’s report, released May 20, 2008, addressed precisely the Abu Zubaydah case, noting that in spring 2002, FBI agents objected to the “borderline torture” of a badly wounded Zubaydah and passed on those concerns to FBI superiors in Washington.

Disgusted by the tactics, FBI Counterterrorism Assistant Director Pasquale D'Amuro pulled the FBI agents out and complained to FBI Director Robert Mueller. D’Amuro said the harsh techniques were less effective in gleaning reliable information, complicated later prosecutions, violated moral standards, and “helped al-Qaeda in spreading negative views of the United States.”

Mueller conveyed the FBI’s concerns to Bush’s White House but was rebuffed because it turned out that the abusive tactics had been selected by the so-called Principals Committee of Vice President Cheney and other senior aides and cleared by the President.

About That War On Terror

About That War On Terror
Q The administration has been boasting about the success of the President's war on terror, yet data compiled by the RAND Corporation show that the global rate of terrorism, as measured by the number of people killed per year, increased by almost fivefold during the Bush presidency. And according to the government's own terrorism statistics, 2007 was the worst year ever, with over 22,000 people killed worldwide. Does the President consider that record a success?

MR. STANZEL: The President considers it very much a success yada yada yada bs bs bs........Trade Center, the Pentagon............. field in Pennsylvania.

Q But shouldn't the anti-terrorism efforts reduce terrorism rather than increase it?

MR. STANZEL: Well, I guess you should ask the question, have terrorists...bs sbs bs bs yada yada

Were Troops Poisoned? Vets Demand KBR Come Clean on Toxins in Iraq

Were Troops Poisoned? Vets Demand KBR Come Clean on Toxins in Iraq
James Gentry served his country honorably as a battalion commander in Iraq. Now, he is dying of a rare form of lung cancer. And he's not the only one. A troubling number of troops in Gentry's Indiana National Guard unit have bloody noses, tumors and rashes. And tragically, one soldier has already died.

New reports suggest these injuries may be the result of exposure to toxins at a KBR-run power plant in Southern Iraq. In 2003, James and his men were responsible for guarding that plant, and protecting KBR's employees. The soldiers were stationed there for months before being informed that the site was contaminated with a chemical known as hexavalent chromium.

Hexavalent chromium is a deadly carcinogen. It's the same toxin that Erin Brockovich became famous for campaigning against. James believes that it was the inhalation of this chemical that caused his cancer, and the other rare illnesses among the Guardsmen who served at the plant.

But this is not just some sad story about accidental chemical exposure. This is a question of responsibility. CBS News has uncovered evidence that KBR may have known about the contamination at the power plant months before it took any action to inform the troops stationed there.

If the CBS story is proven true, checks need to be written, contracts should be cancelled, and heads must roll. James signed up to serve his country, and he was told to protect KBR contractors. He did his job. But it doesn't seem like KBR did theirs. If the company neglected to take quick and decisive action, it must be held responsible for the months of avoidable toxic exposure that may be taking the lives of American servicemembers.

From burn pits to power plants, we are hearing more and more about troops who have been exposed to toxins while serving our country overseas. Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana has announced that he will reintroduce legislation to create a medical registry for military personnel exposed to toxins. That's a vital first step towards discovering the full extent of toxic exposure in Iraq and Afghanistan, and is critical to preventing a replay of the Agent Orange situation after Vietnam.

We need real answers from KBR.

Despicable Act

The Bush Administration's Most Despicable Act
"This is not the America I know," President George W. Bush said after the first, horrifying pictures of U.S. troops torturing prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq surfaced in April 2004. The President was not telling the truth. "This" was the America he had authorized on Feb. 7, 2002, when he signed a memorandum stating that the Third Geneva Convention — the one regarding the treatment of enemy prisoners taken in wartime — did not apply to members of al-Qaeda or the Taliban. That signature led directly to the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay. It was his single most callous and despicable act. It stands at the heart of the national embarrassment that was his presidency.

The details of the torture that Bush authorized have been dribbling out over the years in books like Jane Mayer's excellent The Dark Side. But the most definitive official account was released by the Senate Armed Services Committee just before Christmas. Much of the committee's report remains secret, but a 19-page executive summary was published, and it is infuriating. The story begins with an obscure military training program called Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape (SERE), in which various forms of torture are simulated to prepare U.S. special-ops personnel for the sorts of treatment they might receive if they're taken prisoner. Incredibly, the Bush Administration decided to have SERE trainers instruct its interrogation teams on how to torture prisoners. (Read "Shell-Shocked at Abu Ghraib?")

Karl Rove lies about Democrats and Housing

Karl Rove’s Factually Challenged Housing Revisionism

1. “Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were among the principal culprits of the housing crisis” Wrong. Fannie and Freddie were cogs in the giant mortgage machine, but they had nothing to do with the abdication of lending standards from 2002-07. That was a function of the Lend-to-Securitize business model of the sub-prime mortgage originators. THAT was the primary cause of the housing boom and bust, along with Ultra-low rates and a lack of Fed regulation of these sub-prime lenders.

2. “Fannie and Freddie were too large and overleveraged” True. This had been pointed out by many people, before Bush and afterwards, that Fannie was a problem. Chief amongst the Fannie critics was Fed Governor William Poole. He deserves credit for his many early warnings about Fannie Mae and the GSEs. He was ignored by Alan Greenspan. Also ignored was Fed Governor Edward Gramlich, whose early warnings about subprime and predatory lending and were both timely and prescient.

3. Democrats controlled the Congressional Debate on GSEs: Rove somehow fails to note the GOP controlled Congress from 1994-2006, including the first 6 years of the Bush Presidency. If the President wanted to rein in the GSEs, he needed only make it a major priority, and not a footnote in the 2001 budget.

Coulter portrayed herself as victim of an NBC "setup"

After penning book blasting "the way liberals use victimhood," Coulter portrayed herself as victim of an NBC "setup"
Summary: Following reports that her January 6 appearance on NBC's Today had been canceled, Ann Coulter -- who reportedly told CBS News her new book is "about the rewards and praise you get for being a victim and the way liberals use victimhood" -- complained during appearances on Sean Hannity's radio and television programs that "the Today show thing was a hoax from the beginning" and "a setup to block me from other TV shows." The next day, CBS' Harry Smith told Coulter: "[T]he more I listen to your complaints, the more I kept thinking, well, you're the whiner. You're the one who's claiming victimhood here. That you're the victim of this great left-wing conspiracy."

CBS' Smith: Coulter "says that I am certifiably insane. Perhaps I am, for having her on the program this morning"

CBS' Smith: Coulter "says that I am certifiably insane. Perhaps I am, for having her on the program this morning"
On the January 6 broadcast of CBS' The Early Show, co-anchor Harry Smith teased an interview with author and syndicated columnist Ann Coulter by saying, "Ann Coulter is in the studio this morning. She has a brand new book. It's called Guilty: Liberal "Victims" and Their Assault on America, and in it, she says that I am certifiably insane. Perhaps I am, for having her on the program this morning. So we'll get to that in a little bit."

Smith joins other media figures who have expressed disapproval for Coulter's comments while giving her a platform to promote those comments, as Media Matters for America has documented. Indeed, NBC has repeatedly provided Coulter a platform to spew her inflammatory rhetoric even as NBC-affiliated hosts and anchors have expressed disapproval of her statements or criticized the media for promoting her. Coulter's latest book is rife with such inflammatory and offensive comments.

From the January 6 edition of CBS' The Early Show:

SMITH: Ann Coulter is in the studio this morning. She has a brand new book. It's called Guilty: Liberal "Victims" and Their Assault on America, and in it, she says that I am certifiably insane. Perhaps I am, for having her --

MAGGIE RODRIGUEZ (co-anchor): Really?

SMITH: -- on the program this morning. So we'll get to that in a little bit.

Bush's Interior Secretary Kempthorne spent $235,000 in taxpayer money to renovate his bathroom

Bush's Interior Secretary Kempthorne spent $235,000 in taxpayer money to renovate his bathroom
The Washington Post’s Al Kamen reports today that outgoing Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne recently spent about $235,000 in taxpayer funds to renovate the bathroom in his fifth-floor office. The renovations included “installing a new shower, a refrigerator and a freezer and buying monogrammed towels.” An internal investigation by the department’s inspector general, however, found no wrongdoing on Kempthorne’s part “because the GSA had approved the project“:

The General Services Administration approved and partially funded the project, an Interior Department official said. The GSA paid about half the cost to refurbish aging plumbing, which needed to be replaced within four years.

But department officials say much of the money was spent on lavish wood paneling and tile.

An Interior Department spokesperson did not return Kamen’s calls requesting comment.

Is NBC going to help Coulter sell this book?

Is NBC going to help Coulter sell this book?
Summary: NBC has repeatedly provided Ann Coulter a platform to spew her inflammatory rhetoric even as NBC-affiliated hosts and anchors have expressed disapproval of her statements or criticized the media for promoting her. Coulter's latest book, Guilty, is rife with such inflammatory comments, including saying that the Democratic primaries were a contest of "Who's the Biggest Pussy?"; calling children whose parents divorce "future strippers" in a chapter titled "Victim of a Crime? Thank a Single Mother"; and calling former White House press secretary Scott McClellan "retarded." Nevertheless, Coulter has announced that she is scheduled to appear on Today on January 6.

2008 Bush’s Last Year By The Numbers

2008 Bush’s Last Year By The Numbers
– Number Of U.S. Troops Killed in Iraq: 322.
– Number Of U.S. Troops Killed in Afghanistan: 151.
– Number Of Jobs Lost: 1.9 million.
– Number Of Banks Federal Government Now Owns Stock In: 206.
– Number Of Uninsured Americans: 47.5 million.

– Change In Housing Prices: declined 18 percent.
– Change In Health Insurance Premiums: increased 5 percent.
– Change In Number Of Delinquent Mortgages: increased 75 percent.
– Change In Use Of Food Stamps: increased 17 percent.
– Change In Dow Jones Industrial Average: declined 35 percent.
– Change In Bush Approval Rating: declined 9 percent to 29 percent.

Alberto Gonzales can't find a job

Alberto Gonzales can't find a job
The onetime Bush Attorney General admitted Tuesday that "skittish" lawfirms won't hire him after his departure under fire from the Justice Department surrounding his role in the political firings of nine US Attorneys.

Sounding dumbfounded, the 53-year-old former judge and corporate lawyer told the Wall Street Journal, "What is it that I did that is so fundamentally wrong, that deserves this kind of response to my service?"

He says he's delivered a few paid speeches, done mediation work and arbitration.

In the interview, he also said he's writing a book but hasn't yet found a publisher. He also sounded flummoxed by the amount of rancor leveled at his stewardship of the Justice Department, saying he wasn't the one to blame.

"For some reason, I am portrayed as the one who is evil in formulating policies that people disagree with," Gonzales said. "I consider myself a casualty, one of the many casualties of the war on terror."

Gonzales took flak for the apparent political firing of US Attorneys who didn't toe the Bush administration line. It later emerged that his lieutenants had chosen Republicans and spurned Democrats when hiring professional staff.

On paper, many of the decisions surrounding US Attorney firings, as well as hirings, had been made by subordinates, which lent weight to arguments that Gonzales wasn't providing ample leadership.

The first Hispanic attorney general also kindled critics ire by repeatedly telling Congress "I don't recall" when questioned about his role in the US Attorney firings.