Flannel Shirt

Bad jacketing and bust outs

Just a few days ago we had three scandals that the pundits said was going to make Obama look like Nixon. If you haven't been following closely, they were: Benghazi, the Yemeni leak (AP subpoenas) and the IRS. Everything seems to have dissipated. Let's review.  

The Republicans have been beating the drum over Benghazi, seeing it as a way to damage both Obama and HIllary Clinton, a potential Presidential candidate in 2016. The first thing was whether Obama said "terrorist" or "an act of terror". Now, I was an English major in college many years ago, and really, this is parsing to the nth degree. And it didn't make a difference anyway. Next, there was the "coverup" of whether or not it was a terrorist cell that did the act. This was amplified by the "leaked memos" reported by ABC, except that they weren't the leaked memos at all but written interpretations of the memos produced by some anonymous Republican staffer, as CNN and others discovered. It turns out that the real memos weren't all that damaging to the Administration, basically documenting a turf war between the State Department and the CIA, with various disputes on what they thought happened versus what they knew. The White House was pretty much out of the loop. 

Republicans rely on the short memory span of the American public, since there were thirteen embassy attacks during the Bush years. Well, what did the Republicans do when faced with all the embassy attacks of the Bush years? They CUT the budget for embassy security. You'd think that they'd be embarrassed by that. But, no, they aren't.

When the Associated Press ran a story blowing the cover of the infiltration of a Yemeni terrorist cell, Republicans in Congress decried the leak and demanded a complete investigation. The Justice Department subpoenaed the phone records of numerous reporters at AP to find out the source of the leak and Republicans decried that the Department of Justice would threaten the freedom of the press. You don't like that? Well, since 1979 and Smith v. Maryland  cops can look at LUDs (local usage details, phone records) without a subpoena. Between the laws passed immediately following 9/11 and the FISA bill of 2008 there's not a whole lot of your communications the government can't look at. Some of the Republicans in Congress thought this might be a great way to nail the Attorney General, Eric Holder. Unfortunately for them, Holder had been privy to the information about the Yemeni cell and was himself one of the many government employees being investigated so he recused himself and appointed the Assistant AG to lead the investigation. It was the Assistant AG who subpoenaed the phone records. 

Since Republicans have been behind just about every law which gives the government the right to stick its nose into everyone's business (by all means go back and look at the roll calls of the last fifteen years of homeland security laws) it seems a little hypocritical that they'd make a ruckus over this. 

Well, what about the IRS thing? In that one IRS employees were a little too scrupulous in examining Tea Party groups trying to get tax-exempt status. When it broke Obama launched an investigation. The acting head of the IRS (and another official) resigned/were fired. Here's the problem: when the IRS was investigating those Tea Party groups Douglas H. Shulman was the IRS Commissioner. He was a Bush appointee. 

+++ 

So what do we have?

Here's two terms you need to learn:

The first term is bad-jacketing. That means making someone, in this case Obama, look bad by putting things around him that look bad. You can tell a President is being bad-jacketed when something that he has no control over is pinned on him. Obama's IRS. Obama's Department of Justice. Obama's State Department. This is a list of terrorist attacks that occurred during the Bush years:

January 22, 2002. Calcutta, India. Gunmen associated with Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami attack the U.S. Consulate. Five people are killed.June 14, 2002. Karachi, Pakistan. Suicide bomber connected with al Qaeda attacks the U.S. Consulate, killing 12 and injuring 51.

October 12, 2002. Denpasar, Indonesia. U.S. diplomatic offices bombed as part of a string of "Bali Bombings." No fatalities.

February 28, 2003. Islamabad, Pakistan. Several gunmen fire upon the U.S. Embassy. Two people are killed.

May 12, 2003. Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Armed al Qaeda terrorists storm the diplomatic compound, killing 36 people including nine Americans. The assailants committed suicide by detonating a truck bomb.

July 30, 2004. Tashkent, Uzbekistan. A suicide bomber from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan attacks the U.S. Embassy, killing two people.

December 6, 2004. Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Al Qaeda terrorists storm the U.S. Consulate and occupy the perimeter wall. Nine people are killed.

March 2, 2006. Karachi, Pakistan again. Suicide bomber attacks the U.S. Consulate killing four people, including U.S. diplomat David Foy who was directly targeted by the attackers. (I wonder if Lindsey Graham or Fox News would even recognize the name "David Foy." This is the third Karachi terrorist attack in four years on what's considered American soil.)

September 12, 2006. Damascus, Syria. Four armed gunmen shouting "Allahu akbar" storm the U.S. Embassy using grenades, automatic weapons, a car bomb and a truck bomb. Four people are killed, 13 are wounded.

January 12, 2007. Athens, Greece. Members of a Greek terrorist group called the Revolutionary Struggle fire a rocket-propelled grenade at the U.S. Embassy. No fatalities.

March 18, 2008. Sana'a, Yemen. Members of the al-Qaeda-linked Islamic Jihad of Yemen fire a mortar at the U.S. Embassy. The shot misses the embassy, but hits nearby school killing two.

July 9, 2008. Istanbul, Turkey. Four armed terrorists attack the U.S. Consulate. Six people are killed.

September 17, 2008. Sana'a, Yemen. Terrorists dressed as military officials attack the U.S. Embassy with an arsenal of weapons including RPGs and detonate two car bombs. Sixteen people are killed, including an American student and her husband (they had been married for three weeks when the attack occurred). This is the second attack on this embassy in seven months.

If you hold Obama responsible for Benghazi, do you hold Bush responsible? You might hold Congressional Republicans responsible for Benghazi for cutting the security budget for embassies. 

Likewise, if you don't like the government listening in on your phone calls, you might not want to vote for people (read: Republicans) who keep voting for laws to allow the government to listen in on your phone calls.

Finally, please note that the guy who is being grilled in Congress, Steven Miller, had not been appointed the temporary head of IRS until after the 2012 election. While the IRS was looking at those Tea Party groups, it was a Bush appointee who headed the agency.

The second term is bust out. I first heard of this term when VP GHW Bush oversaw the deregulation of the Savings and Loans. The term itself is a term of organized crime. The best way to rob a bank is to own one. That, essentially, was the S&L crisis. It wasn't surprising that many of the bigger bust outs were done by people connected to intelligence circles. You know, where Bush #41 worked prior to becoming VP. Bust outs work in the federal government too. If you put people who want to destroy a federal agency in positions of power you can go far in destroying it. The Postal Service has been going through a decades-long stretch of bad management who wanted to destroy the Post Office. The Congressional law that requires the USPS to pay for health insurance 75 years in advance, that is, to pay for health insurance for employees who haven't yet been born, was the coup de grace. But appointing someone whose term runs into the next President's term works too. Douglas Shulman was appointed in 2008 and lasted until the 2012 election.

So which scandal do you hate Obama over? The embassy attack? The Department of Justice investigating the top secret leak? Or let's blame Obama for what happened under Bush's appointee at the IRS. Your choice.

 

When economics bend to politics and personal pride

Here.

Am I (and others on my side of the issue) that much smarter than everyone else? No. The key to understanding this is that the anti-Keynesian position is, in essence, political. It’s driven by hostility to active government policy and, in many cases, hostility to any intellectual approach that might make room for government policy. Too many influential people just don’t want to believe that we’re facing the kind of economic crisis we are actually facing.

And so you have the spectacle of famous economists retreading 80-year-old fallacies, or misunderstanding basic concepts like Ricardian equivalence; of powerful officials instantly canonizing research papers that turn out to be garbage in, garbage out; and so on down the line.

There you go

There it is. 

And here.

COMMENT:  A Texas Tea Party leader has spilled the beans, explic­itly artic­u­lat­ingthe clas­si­cal fas­cism of the Tea Party.

With the excep­tion of the name, there is noth­ing new about these folks.

 “Texas Tea Party Leader Pro­motes Fas­cist Party as ‘Pro-Constitution, Pro-America’” by David Edwards; The Raw Story; 3/19/2013.

EXCERPT: A tea party leader in Texas is defend­ing his pro­mo­tion of the Amer­i­can Fas­cist Party as some­thing he thought was “pro-Constitution, pro-America.”

James Ives, who was listed as the pres­i­dent of the Greater Fort Bend County Tea Party in 2011, con­firmed to The Texas Tri­bune on Mon­day that he had made a pro­mo­tional video for the Amer­i­can Fas­cist Party and advo­cated tea party prin­ci­ples on a Fas­cist Party mes­sage board.

In the video, a man who looks like Ives sits in front of a Fas­cist Party logo wear­ing a uni­form with yel­low shoul­der patches. Another photo shows a uni­formed man sit­ting in front of a fas­cist cross. The blog that inspired Nor­we­gian mass shooter Anders Behring Breivik describes fas­cist solar crosses as “sym­bolic rep­re­sen­ta­tions buried deep in the regions of the brain where the pri­mal responses to stim­uli are rage, awe, and fear.” . . . 

. . . “From my point of view, it was all pro-Constitution, pro-America,” Ives explained to the Tri­bune. “I never did any­thing… There really weren’t enough peo­ple involved to be a gath­er­ing, let alone a rally. It was basi­cally a scat­ter­ing of peo­ple across the con­ti­nent just complaining.”

The tea party leader claimed that he his par­tic­i­pa­tion in the Fas­cist Party was part of an effort to write a novel about what he thought was a cabal. But instead of writ­ing that novel, Ives wrote on the mes­sage board about how build­ing the Fas­cist Party in Amer­ica was “our spirit, our calling.”

“It will be our great­est chal­lenge, and our sweet­est vic­tory, to finally sur­pass this dark men­ace, this numb­ing threat from the shad­ows, and replace it with the pure sun­beam that is our Fas­cist Faith, our Fas­cist Truth,” Ives wrote.

The death penalty is going away

Maryland voted it away yesterday. It's about time.

Maryland lawmakers approved a measure abolishing the death penalty on Friday and sent the bill to Gov. Martin O'Malley, who has long supported banning capital punishment.

The House of Delegates voted 82-56 for legislation already approved by the Senate. Eighty Democrats and two Republicans voted for the bill, which needed 71 to pass. Eighteen Democrats joined 38 Republicans to vote against it.

The vote represented a major win for the Democratic governor, who has pushed for the death penalty's repeal for five years. He is also widely believed to be weighing a presidential bid in 2016.

"We have a moral responsibility to stop doing the things that are wasteful and do not work and that I would argue run contrary to the deeper principles that unite us as Marylanders," O'Malley said, flanked by a group of death penalty opponents, including NAACP President Benjamin Jealous.

Under the bill, life without the possibility of parole would be the most severe sentence in the state.

Supporters of repeal argued that the death penalty is costly, racially biased, a poor deterrent of crime and sometimes wrongfully applied. The possibility of executing the innocent prompted many lawmakers to support the repeal measure.

"I can live with putting to death criminals who committed what are truly grievous and wicked acts against our children, our police, our mothers and our daughters," Delegate Luiz Simmons, D-Montgomery, said on the House floor, "but what I am opposed to and what I can no longer live with is using the death penalty to accidently put to death an innocent man or woman."

Opponents insisted that capital punishment was a necessary tool in punishing those who commit the most egregious crimes.

"This bill is wrong-spirited," said Delegate Michael McDermott, an Eastern Shore Republican. "It's a shame that we will not allow future generations to have the option of putting the absolute worst of the worst to death."

Kirk Bloodsworth, the first person in the United States freed because of DNA evidence after being convicted in a death penalty case, watched the vote from the House gallery. He pumped his arms toward the ceiling when he saw the vote count.

"You can't punish the guilty by walking over an innocent -- ever," an elated Bloodsworth said.

Bloodsworth was twice wrongly convicted of a 9-year-old girl's murder, and he spent two years on death row following his first trial. A second trial brought another conviction, although he received a life sentence instead of capital punishment. He was cleared in 1993.

Maryland has five men on death row. The measure would not apply to them retroactively, but the legislation makes clear that the governor can commute their sentences to life in prison without the possibility of parole. O'Malley said he would evaluate those cases individually.

Maryland has executed only five inmates since 1976. There were three executions in the 1990s and two under O'Malley's Republican predecessor, Robert Ehrlich.

In contrast, neighboring Virginia has executed 110 inmates since the U.S. Supreme Court restored capital punishment in 1976, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. However, Virginia's death row population has dwindled to eight from a peak of 57 in 1995, in part because fewer death sentences are being handed down in the state amid an increased acceptance of life without parole as a reasonable alternative.

"We see Maryland as the bellwether for the direction the rest of the country is headed in," said Diann Rust-Tierney executive director of the National Coalition To Abolish The Death Penalty. "There was an effort, early on, to try to address some of the problems with the death penalty, especially the possibility of executing an innocent man. Maryland has gone the full gamut trying to fix it and realized it can't be fixed."

The state's last execution took place in 2005, during Republican Gov. Robert Ehrlich's administration. He resumed executions after a moratorium had been in place pending a 2003 University of Maryland study, which found significant racial and geographic disparity in how the death penalty was carried out.

Capital punishment was put on hold in Maryland after a December 2006 ruling by Maryland's highest court that the state's lethal injection protocols weren't properly approved by a legislative committee. The committee, whose co-chairs oppose capital punishment, has yet to sign off on protocols.

O'Malley, a Catholic, expressed support for repeal legislation in 2007, but it stalled in a Senate committee.

Maryland has a large Catholic population, and the church opposes the death penalty.

In 2009, lawmakers tightened the law to reduce the chances of an innocent person being sent to death row by restricting capital punishment to murder cases with biological evidence such as DNA, videotaped evidence of a murder or a videotaped confession.

The center said death sentences have declined by 75 percent and executions by 60 percent nationally since the 1990s.

O'Malley's signing of the measure would make Maryland the 18th state to ban the death penalty. Connecticut did so last year. Illinois, New Jersey, New Mexico and New York also have abolished it in recent years.

Out here in Oregon we've got the opposite problem.

A power struggle between a death-row inmate who wants to be executed and a governor who refuses to let it happen reached Oregon state’s highest court Thursday as lawyers sparred over the governor’s power.

The lawyer for a man convicted of two murders argued that Gov. John Kitzhaber lacks authority to delay Gary Haugen’s execution without the inmate’s consent.

Kitzhaber, a death penalty opponent, regretted letting two other inmates be put to death and said he won’t allow it to happen again. He blocked Haugen’s execution in 2011, two weeks before Haugen was scheduled to die by lethal injection, delaying the sentence until the governor leaves office.

Haugen’s lawyer, Harrison Latto, said the Oregon state constitution allows the death penalty and that trumps the moral views of the governor.

The governor argued that his clemency power is absolute, and nobody — certainly not an inmate on death row — can prevent him from doing what he believes to be in the state’s best interest.

“The decision to grant clemency is something that’s entrusted in the governor and the governor alone,” Kitzhaber’s lawyer, Solicitor General Anna Joyce, argued. “No other branch of government is entitled to question the reasons or the motive.”

Kitzhaber has urged a statewide vote on abolishing the death penalty, and the Legislature could put it on the ballot in 2014.

Americans and their elected representatives have expressed mixed feelings about the death penalty. Lawmakers abolished capital punishment in New Mexico, New Jersey and Connecticut, but Californians turned down a chance to follow suit at the ballot box last year.

In 2000, then-Gov. George Ryan of Illinois issued a moratorium on the death penalty after numerous condemned inmates were exonerated. The Legislature abolished capital punishment more than a decade later.

Oregon’s justices will likely rule on Haugen’s case by the end of the year. They won’t decide the legality of the death penalty itself, which has been extensively debated, but rather will consider the sparsely explored question of how much power the governor has to reduce, delay or eliminate criminal sentences.

Haugen was sentenced to death along with an accomplice in 2007 for the jailhouse murder of a fellow inmate, who was found with stab wounds and a crushed skull in the prison band room. At the time, Haugen was serving a life sentence for fatally beating his former girlfriend’s mother in 1981.

After the state Supreme Court upheld his death sentence, Haugen announced in 2011 that he would voluntarily waive legal appeals that could have delayed his execution. He said the move was a protest against a criminal justice system he views as broken and inequitable.

Haugen was scheduled to be executed by lethal injection in December 2011, but Kitzhaber issued a reprieve two weeks before the sentence was to be carried out, citing his own moral opposition to capital punishment and problems he sees with Oregon’s death-penalty process.

Haugen challenged the reprieve last year, saying it was invalid because he refused to accept it. The trial court judge agreed.

At the Supreme Court, Haugen’s lawyer argued that his client must accept the reprieve for it to be valid. He also argued that it wasn’t actually a reprieve because it didn’t have an expiration date — it expires on whatever day Kitzhaber leaves office — but rather an illegal attempt by Kitzhaber to nullify a law he doesn’t like.

Joyce, Kitzhaber’s lawyer, reached back to the English monarchy, arguing that Kitzhaber’s clemency power stems from the king’s absolute authority to issue clemency. She said Haugen can’t reject a reprieve that has no conditions attached.

“Death penalty cases are different, and an individual doesn’t possess the power to force his government to execute him if that isn’t what his government wants to do,” Joyce argued.

She later added: “That would mean Mr. Haugen has ... powers that are equal or greater than those of the governor.”

For people who believe in magic

There's Paul Ryan.

Zipping across the land with a nice internet connection, so a good time to reflect a bit (looking down on clouds from above broadens the perspective a bit, I find).

So, I’m doing a radio interview last night, and moderately impressed with myself for being able to speak coherently about four different budgets: Ryan’s, Senate’s, POTUS (not out yet, but we can guess at the mix), and the CPC.  Then I got asked a question which threw me a bit: why are Paul Ryan and his budget taken so seriously?

It wasn’t a snarky question.  It’s just that I’d been discussing the absolute non-reality of his proposal—how the numbers don’t begin to add up, the unrealistic budget cuts, the plethora of magic asterisks in the absence of actual proposals (the most egregious of which is: I’ll cuts taxes by $6-7 trillion over the next decade and offset the revenue losses with…um…sorry, gotta run).  And the interviewer was like, “OK…but if you’re right, why is his budget front page news such that he’s driving the debate?”

Here’s what I think is going on.  First, institutional reasons.  His party holds the majority and he’s the chair of the House Budget Committee.  That in itself makes his budget newsworthy.  Also, as a former VP candidate, he’s a national figure.

But that’s not the main reason.

I asked a wise, intently non-partisan friend who thought, and he admitted he was being generous, that one reason might be that Ryan’s introduced an important theme into the discussion: if you want really low taxes, you’ve got to give up Medicare as we know it.

But while that may be in there somewhere, it’s awfully muddled.  It certainly wasn’t Ryan’s position in the election, where he and Mitt attacked the President for Medicare cuts.  And his voucher program doesn’t start for ten years.

In other words, I think my friend is being too generous.  I’ve argued that we actually need our politicians to articulate this point: if we want X, we’re going to have to pay for X.  To my ears, Paul Ryan actually fits squarely in the problematic camp on this point, telling folks they can painlessly have it all.  But in his version, it takes the form of trickle down: if we cut taxes on job creators, get rid of the safety net, and inject health care delivery with competition, then we can have it all for a fraction of what we’re paying now.

That’s very different that telling the electorate straight up that if we want what we say we want—social insurance, a strong safety net, productive public goods including education—we’re going to need to raise more revenues to pay for it.

So what is the answer?  I think it’s twofold.

First, his views, positions, and rhetoric mesh very neatly with those of influential people, and those people have helped convince the media that Ryan is saying important things.  One group of those people are, of course, the fix-the-debt-shrink-the-government-fell-the-pain coalition.  Neither the numbers (the actual fiscal record or trajectory) nor the economics support their views, but they’ve been extremely effective in driving the debate.

The other group—and yes, there’s tons of overlap—are those who benefit most from tax reductions on the wealthy, and remember, many of these folks are professional investors.  When they invest in Congress, they expect a big bang for their big bucks.

All pretty depressing so far, I know.  But the second part of the answer is hopeful, and comes from the hoary old adage that you really can’t fool all the people all the time.

This may well be premature, but I believe Ryan’s popularity—his rep as someone who mustn’t be ignored—is fading and that this most recent budget will play a significant role in his decline.

My first clue was an interview he did with Larry Kudlow this week, and Larry’s on his side, especially on the supply-side stuff.  But the tone of the interview was revealing, I thought.  Kudlow expressed skepticism and disbelief that Ryan would be able to repeal Obamacare and thus didn’t think the budget stood up to even cursory scrutiny.  And Ryan basically agreed!  He spoke of his budget as symbolic and visionary, or some such stuff—I don’t remember the word salad.  But he kind of just said he’s holding up a picture of one way of looking at things, a way that he and his caucus think makes sense.

But I think they’re increasingly isolated in this regard—certainly, the election outcome suggests that to be the case—and eventually, this will move the media away from him, especially as the fiscal numbers continue to move down to more normal levels.  I could easily be wrong, of course, but I think that at the end of the day—and it’s getting toward dusk—enough people will no longer want to look at that picture he’s holding up, and as far as I can tell, he doesn’t have any other ones to show us.

Here's some more.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow joined Bill Maher on Real Time Friday night to discuss the two conflicting budgets released by Republicans and Democrats earlier this week.

Maddow and Maher both took issue with Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) “laughable” budget proposal, saying he’s offering the same measures he and Mitt Romney introduced last year during their failed 2012 presidential run.

“The Ryan budget says that the big problems in America are that rich people do not have enough money…and poor people have too much access to affordable health care,” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow said. “We need to invest in things that are going to make us more competitive in the long run.”

Flim Flam Man still on the job

It's still "trickle down" but now we're near the endgame. But he lifts weights.

I took Paul Ryan’s measure two and a half years ago. All the Very Serious People were very angry with me — Ryan was the Serious, Honest Conservative, the guy centrists demonstrated their centrism by praising. But he was an obvious phony. His “plan” was all smoke (I couldn’t even find any mirrors), with all the alleged deficit reduction coming from closing tax loopholes he refused to specify plus projected reductions in discretionary spending that he also refused to specify. Meanwhile, he was pursuing radical redistribution away from the needy to the wealthy.

Nothing has changed, except that the plan has gotten even crueler.

So while I may do some analysis later today, the only really interesting question is how the VSPs will react. Have they had enough of the Flimflam Man? Or does hype spring eternal?

Looks like rain

More than a fool. He's a tool.

Back in 2005, after Bob Woodward revealed who "Deep Throat" was (supposedly), I wrote the following essay on him. Last week Woodward was back in the news, pretending that he was being threatened by a member of the Obama Administration who told him he would regret acting like a fool. But Woodward is more than a fool. He's a tool.

Here is that essay, in full:

Spy vs. Spy vs. Spy vs. Deep Throat

Mystery solved...not!

The problem with the world of secrecy (that is, the spy world) is that all is never what it is supposed to be, that all is never all, that you can never be quite sure what someone's motive might be. What is leaked may or may not be truth. Backgrounds of individuals help you to categorize a person and identify what "camp" he or she may be in. When an intelligence scandal breaks, though, there is more to an individual than just the few sentences in a news story. In fact, you can't ever trust the news source reporting the story to give you all of the story.

Political researcher Dave Emory has suggested another dimension to the difficulties of analyzing the movements of intelligence players. It was his theory of "agents, assets and assholes." That is, there are some people out there who are agents. That is, they work for an intelligence agency and draw a check. Then there is a murkier category, the asset. During the Cold War, for example, any American who went behind the Iron Curtain (with the peculiar exception of Lee Harvey Oswald) would be debriefed when he or she returned to the U.S. An oil executive (like, say, George H. W. Bush early in his career) who was negotiating a contract with the government of Yugoslavia would undoubtedly be called in upon his return to the U.S. to tell an agent what he saw. Students who went abroad, like Bill Clinton or Gloria Steinem (who in a 1967 news story actually admitted her CIA connections), would be important sources of intelligence about dissident student groups overseas, especially during the Vietnam War. Then there are the assholes, who may not have any connection to any intelligence agency but travel the same roads. And these categories overlap. An asshole may become as asset, an asset an agent. Sometimes an individual on assignment may be officially discharged from an intelligence unit but still working for it, albeit under cover of private employment.

Then there are the rivalries within the intelligence community. One hears about turf wars between the CIA and the FBI. But what about the Army Security Agency, the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Secret Service, or any other number of intelligence units in the U.S.? What about private intelligence companies that may or may not connect with official government intelligence units? Private intelligence agencies with political agendas have been around at least since Henry Ford's love affair with the Nazis and his desire to crush unions in the 1920s and 30s, and these have multiplied over the years with the greater ability to store information on individuals. Now multiply this multiplicity by the number of countries around the world. And intelligence agencies love to put their own people into other intelligence agencies in order to know what other intelligence agencies are doing. There are spies who double on their own agencies.

Most of this is funded with your tax dollar, by the way.

So here is the story we are now told to believe: A senior figure in the FBI leaked information to Bob Woodward, a young ace reporter for the Washington Post, and this information brought down the Nixon White House, which was an evil cabal of corrupt political figures who were overstepping their bounds.

Already there are problems. John Dean, the White House lawyer who "turned" and spilled the beans on Nixon's shenanigans, says that Mark Felt could not have known about some of the things for which he was attributed leaking to Woodward.

So who is Woodward?

Well, lo these many years later he is an established journalist with many books to his credit. He has never written anything quite so "investigative" as what he wrote about Watergate, but most books seem to have a smattering of little behind-the-scene discoveries that helps push publicity and sales.

Bob Woodward's history should have been of interest to anyone who was trying to find out who Deep Throat was. Where did he work prior to his job at the Post? Who might he have known who could have given him this information? But the media has for the most part stayed away from Woodward's life before Watergate.

An exception was Deborah Davis, who wrote KATHARINE THE GREAT, an unauthorized biography of Katharine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post. To understand Woodward, one needs to understand the Washington Post. There is a history of intelligence surrounding the Post that routinely escapes notice from the rest of the media. Graham's husband Phillip, during WWII, had been involved with "cable interception, code-breaking, [and] enemy disinformation." Chalmers Roberts, Mrs. Graham's first national affairs editor, "had been a communications specialist in the Pentagon." Joseph Alsop, there at the Post when Katharine Graham took the reins, had a military history with General Claire Chennault's "Flying Tigers" in the Asian Theater during the war. He was an extreme anti-Communist with connections to the reactionary milieu that gave birth to the various incarnations of what would become the World Anti-Communist League, itself a connection of reactionary and outright fascist intelligence officers from around the globe.

There are many, many more connections between the Washington Post and the U.S. intelligence community, but let's focus on one: Ben Bradlee, editor of the Post at the time of Watergate, had worked with codes during WWII (intelligence), and then after the war worked in Europe for the anti-Communist propaganda agency, the U.S. Office of Information and Educational Exchange. He spent much energy in that capacity denouncing the Rosenbergs and justifying their executions in American propaganda distributed throughout Europe in newspapers, pamphlets, etc. Through FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) disclosures it was learned that Bradlee was ordered by "the head of the CIA in Paris" to go to New York and meet with the prosecutors of the Rosenberg case [Davis]. So Bradlee, who assigned Woodward to the Watergate break-in story, was no stranger to the world of intelligence, or of the uses of leaks to promote the agenda of a clandestine agency.

And the perception of the Washington Post as part of a "liberal" establishment is at best an incomplete picture, at worst the wrong picture altogether. Nothing is ever as simple as it seems.

In short, from the publisher down, people at the Washington Post had numerous connections to intelligence agencies, to government propaganda operations and similar ventures, either through former employment or through "networking." [Emory has derided the term "conspiracy theory" for the bias connected with it. Instead, he prefers the term "networking." After all, in the end it is all a business.]

So what was Woodward's past? After he had graduated from Yale (a prime recruiting ground for the intelligence services after WWII) he enlisted and became a communications officer in the Navy, handling "coded cables on a guided-missile ship," a duty under the auspices of the Office of Naval Intelligence. Transferring to duty at the Pentagon, "he became, he conceded to a TIME magazine reporter, a member of an ultra-secret intelligence unit that was involved in highly sensitive issues at the White House [Davis]." Upon discharge he went to work as a reporter for the Washington Post.

You didn't see that in the movie "All The President's Men," did you?

There's plenty more, and if you're the curious sort, you may want to try to find a copy of Davis' book. Katharine Graham certainly used all the forces she could muster to quash the publication and distribution of that book. But you may be able to search out a copy.

The bigger question than "Who is Deep Throat" is why our free press didn't seem particularly curious about the background of all those connected to Bob Woodward and the Post? If Deep Throat was such a great mystery and given to so much speculation over the last thirty years, how come no one noticed that Woodward had an intelligence history through the Office of Naval Intelligence? Why didn't anyone consider Bradlee's work as a government propagandist when speculating on the motives of whoever was leaking this information that would eventually sink the Nixon Administration and force an exit from the disastrous war in Vietnam?

Maybe Watergate wasn't the greatest moment of American investigative journalism after all. Maybe it was just a part of the intelligence community showing Nixon who was boss. 

Jun 2, 2005 12:04:00 AM

An explanation for Rubio's blowhardism

The problem for Rubio isn't any plan that Obama has. It's that Obama has a plan, and in order to go anywhere with the Republican base you have to loudly hate all things Obama. 

This strategy has obvious flaws. First, if you informed on the subject Rubio just looks like a jerk. Secondly, the only reason the Republicans are moving from their base regarding immigration is because they're being demographed out of being a national party. Opposing Obama's plan on immigration makes them look like the haters they've been. 

As a likely 2016 presidential contender, Rubio is taking a huge risk backing immigration reform. The last time there was a debate on the issue, it sparked a backlash from grassroots conservatives so intimidating that even the biggest Republican champions of a bill had to masquerade as hardliners for several years. And that was when a Republican President was leading the charge.

Not wanting to be seen as a shill for a Democratic President’s signature achievement, Rubio’s strategy from the start has been to play up his differences with the White House as much as possible. This weekend’s outburst was only the latest incident: in interviews with the Wall Street Journal, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, and other conservative thought leaders, Rubio has positioned himself as the right-wing antidote to a far-left White House on immigration.

This touring indignation act isn’t just for Rubio’s own benefit. The Republicans he needs to win over to pass a bill will be a lot more comfortable if they think they’re somehow thumbing their nose at Obama by voting for it. We’ve seen this dynamic on other issues in recent weeks, most notably the debt ceiling, where conservative Republicans delivered a lot of macho partisan talkabout a bill that was objectively a huge cave to the White House. If a compromise bill ends up passing, expect to see a lot of statements from Republicans supporters about how they stopped some non-existent White House “amnesty” bill.

Newt Gingrich acknowledged the political environment in an appearance on ABC’s This Week on Sunday, saying an Obama-led bill could never pass the House, not because of its substance, but because of “the level of hostility towards the president and the way he goads the hostility” on the right.

Meanwhile on the policy side, nobody’s even sure what Rubio and the White House are arguing over exactly.

Rubio has signed on to a bipartisan plan in the Senate that’s premised on the same broad planks as the White House’s 2011 and 2012 plans, often using identical language to describe them: a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, a crackdown on employers who hire future undocumented workers, additional border security measures, and a fix to the legal immigration system to bring in future workers. And since White House officials say they’ll only release their bill if Congress can’t pass one themselves, Rubio’s group — which Obama hasshowered with praise — is still the lead player in negotiations.

Of course, the devil is in the details, and that’s where Rubio’s been picking fights. In the biggest standoff, Rubio has insisted that his bill’s pathway to citizenship only kick in after a number of border security measures go into effect, an idea the White House is not too fond of. Immigrant rights groups are concerned about the trigger as well, but so long as the metrics are easily quantified and met, it’s not likely to be a dealbreaker since both sides are already planning to include a bunch of security measures in any bill (the leaked WH plan hires a bunch of border patrol agents).

The differences are even less defined on the other items Rubio attacked the White House over on Saturday: failing to include a plan for future immigrant labor in its leaked draft and backing a “special pathway” to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. That’s because Rubio and his Senate buddies haven’t come up with plans for these issues either. On the worker front, everyone’s waiting to see if labor and business groups can work out a compromise on how to deal with future immigration and then move from there. As for a “special pathway” to citizenship, Obama has used the same rhetoric as Rubio, repeatedly saying that undocumented immigrants would have to “go to the back of the line” behind legal immigrants who have already applied for a green card or citizenship. It was in his State of the Union address just this month.

It’s possible Rubio and Obama will end up far apart on these issues and that there’s a crisis looming for reform. There are big questions about whether the Senate’s path to citizenship will leave millions of immigrants waiting decades for a green card, whether labor or business willaccept a deal on guest workers, or how the border “trigger” will work. But since nobody involved has released much beyond vague guidelines, most reformers are still reserving judgement as to Rubio’s motives.

“That’s what we’ll be finding out,” Ana Avendano, the AFL-CIO’s point person on immigration,told TPM last week. “Whether [Rubio] can lead his party to the future or just continue to talk like a politician.”

It’s worth noting that Rubio has already committed himself to the part of reform conservatives hate the most — a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants — so the political benefits of backing out at this point are pretty weak. If his opponents want to demagogue him on the issue in 2016 they’ll have all the ammo they need regardless of whether a bill passes. Mitt Romney took out Rick Perry by tying him to tuition breaks for young immigrants, never mind citizenship. And since Rubio is being held up by the GOP as its savior in large part because they think he can appeal to Latino voters, he has a lot more to gain if he can plausibly claim he was the dominant player in passing a bipartisan bill that’s popular with said Latino voters.

Poor pitiful hate festival. 

Ass clowns on parade

This is why I've lost all patience with Republicans in Washington.

A copy of the White House’s draft immigration proposal, leaked as a warning shot to Congress to get its act together, was swiftly and fiercely rejected by a Republican central to the negotiations. Other key Republicans echoed him. The White House responded on Sunday.

In a statement Saturday after President Obama’s draft bill was leaked to USA Today, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) dubbed the proposal “half-baked and seriously flawed,” saying it would exacerbate the country’s immigration problems. He promised it would be “dead on arrival” in Congress.

“It’s a mistake for the White House to draft immigration legislation without seeking input from Republican members of Congress,” Rubio said. “President Obama’s leaked immigration proposal is disappointing to those of us working on a serious solution. The President’s bill repeats the failures of past legislation. It fails to follow through on previously broken promises to secure our borders, creates a special pathway that puts those who broke our immigration laws at an advantage over those who chose to do things the right way and come here legally, and does nothing to address guest workers or future flow, which serious immigration experts agree is critical to preventing future influxes of illegal immigrants.”

Appearing Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” White House chief of staff Denis McDonough made clear that the proposal was designed to force Congress to get its act together.

“He says it’s dead on arrival if it’s proposed?” McDonough said. “Well, let’s make sure that it doesn’t have to be proposed. Let’s make sure that that group up there, the gang of eight, makes good progress on these efforts, as much as they say they want to, and that’s exactly what we intend to do, to work with them.”

He declined to get into a back-and-forth or “political scrum” with Rubio.

According to USA Today, the leaked proposal creates a “Lawful Prospective Immigrant” visa that puts undocumented immigrants on a path to legal permanent residency within eight years if they pass a background check, pay a fine and back taxes, learn English and wait in line. It expands security funding and requires business owners to check the legal status of new employees. But it omits any provisions involving future flow of immigration.

For Obama, the draft legislation aims to strike a delicate balance in the extraordinarily complicated politics of immigration reform. It seeks to prove his active involvement in the debate while giving Congress enough room to negotiate the details on its own.

Rubio has his own delicate balance to strike when it comes to holding together the conservative coalition for reform. His statement served as a clear signal that if the White House gets ahead of Congress, the effort would collapse and Republicans would blame Obama.

“If actually proposed,” he said, “the President’s bill would be dead on arrival in Congress, leaving us with unsecured borders and a broken legal immigration system for years to come.”

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) agreed that if Obama proposes a bill, it will “of course” fail.

“By the way, he’s had no communication with Republicans on the issue, unlike the previous four presidents that I have dealt with,” McCain said on NBC’s “Meet The Press.” “Leaks don’t happen in Washington by accident. This raises the question that many of us continue to wonder about: does the president really want a result or does he want another cudgel to beat up Republicans so that he can get political advantage in the next election?”

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), who has supported the push for immigration reform, also appeared on “This Week” and said the White House’s move damages the prospects for achieving a solution. He argued the leaked proposal does not address key issues and signals that Obama wants a “partisan advantage” and not a “bipartisan solution.”

“There are groups in the House and the Senate working together to get this done,” Ryan said, “and when he does things like this, it makes it much more difficult to do that. And that’s why I think this particular move — very counterproductive.”

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), a key Democrat in immigration discussions, said he was not upset by the White House leak but said any resolution will have to be bipartisan.

“It’s obvious that if a Democrat — the president or anyone else — puts out what they want on their own, it’s going to be different than when you have a bipartisan agreement,” Schumer said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “But the only way we’re going to get something done is with a bipartisan agreement.”

Anyone who knows any history of Washington politics knows that all sides put forward their versions of legislation. Considering that the Republicans haven't yet gotten their stuff together to put forward their own version just shows that all this kerfluffle about Obama's plan is nothing but more posturing. And the majority of Americans are getting sick and tired of Republican posturing.

Then there's John McCain who still hasn't gotten over losing to Obama in 2008. He spent most of his time during the Hagel hearings trying to get the nominee to admit that invading Iraq was a good idea.

Speaking of Iraq, our 21 years of war against it hasn't left the country in very good shape. You'll remember that McCain said that the Iraqis would greet us as liberators. Heh heh. 

According to Iraqi Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, he reported, there is an estimated 4.5 million children who are now orphans, with a "shocking 70%" of them having lost their parents since the 2003 invasion. 

"From that total number, around 600,000 children are living on the streets, without either shelter or food to survive," Al-alak wrote. Those living in the few state-run orphanages "are currently lacking in their most essential needs."

The fact that McCain is still cheerleading for a war that was a lie that cost hundreds of thousands of lives and destroyed a country and put our country in tremendous debt (although the oil companies did okay) says about all you need to know about his clarity of thought and integrity. 

What I see are two more years of Republican obstructionism until and bunch of them are voted out.