Tool

Lindsey Graham is a tool.



That is all.

Actually, that's not quite all. Graham didn't know whether he would be allowed to clap for the university system while not being construed as clapping for the public option. So he half-stepped it.

And he's once again seated next to John McCain. When are those two going to move to Vermont or Massachusetts and make it official?

Through Judiciary

Sonia Sotomayor has been confirmed by the Senate Judiciary committee with a vote of 13-6. Only Lindsey Graham joined all the Democrats in supporting her confirmation. With four Republicans on the record as supporting her on the floor of the Senate, her confirmation is assured. She will become the first Latina on the Supreme Court.

The near-united front against a qualified Hispanic really isn't going to help the GOP in the years ahead.

Boy, If Only Life Worked Like This

Josh Marshall gets this right, it was an Alvy Singer bringing out Marshall McLuhan at the cinema moment:

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.), seeking to discredit Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s judicial philosophy, cited her 2001 “wise Latina” speech, and contrasted the view that ethnicity and sex influence judging with that of Judge Miriam Cedarbaum, who “believes that judges must transcend their personal sympathies and prejudices.”

“So I would just say to you, I believe in Judge Cedarbaum’s formulation,” Sessions told Sotomayor.

“My friend Judge Cedarbaum is here,” Sotomayor riposted, to Sessions’ apparent surprise. “We are good friends, and I believe that we both approach judging in the same way, which is looking at the facts of each individual case and applying the law to those facts.”

Cedarbaum agreed.

“I don’t believe for a minute that there are any differences in our approach to judging, and her personal predilections have no effect on her approach to judging,” she told Washington Wire. “We’d both like to see more women on the courts,” she added.

Sessions was clearly flustered by this, causing his lobster bib to flap full into his face and almost tip over his ten-gallon hat.

Perhaps the best part of this is that Judge Cedarbarum and Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III were nominated by Ronald Reagan for the federal bench in the same year, 1986, but Sessions didn't make it as far as Cedarbaum, because of "a controversy surrounding comments he made involving the Ku Klux Klan and the NAACP."

This won't stop the silliness, but it was an amusing moment to distract us from, for example, Lindsey Graham comparing the "wise Latina" comment to sectarian violence and repression in Iraq.

"I don't know what we're getting out of it."

I kind of buried it in a separate post, but the deal in Russia for the world's top two superpowers to reduce their stockpiles is a pretty big deal. This would eliminate up to 28% of all nuclear weapons on the planet. And the President followed on that success with an agreement at the G8 summit to reduce all nuclear arsenals toward a goal of eliminating them; strengthening the Non-proliferation Treaty; and cleaning up loose nukes and preventing them from falling into the hands of extremists. The President will also host a Global Nuclear Security Summit in March 2010, and has taken more legitimate steps to rid the world of nuclear weapons than any President in decades.

And in response, Lindsey Graham says:

Republicans are already demanding that Obama press Russia into allowing a missile defense system in Eastern Europe in return for the U.S. agreeing to reduce its nuclear arsenal to between 1,500 and 1,675 warheads.

“I don’t want the Russians to get something and we get nothing. I don’t know what we’re getting out of this,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), an influential member of the Armed Services Committee.

“I think the administration is going to make a mistake if they don’t recognize the missile-defense components of this debate have to be addressed.”

How about the ability to live without the threat of being vaporized?

This is really the problem with a philosophy of selfishness. The idea of eradicating nuclear weapons isn't good enough. We need a payoff as well.

So much for politics ending at the water's edge...

The Great Huckleberry Hope

Chris Cillizza thinks he's found the answer to Republican prayers just by flipping on his teevee on Sunday morning:

Dispirited Republicans looking for national leaders amid a wash of scandals that have dominated national news over the last fortnight got a bit of good news on Sunday with an inspired performance on "Meet the Press" by South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham (R).

Graham, who spent the 2008 election cycle as Sen. John McCain's loyal sidekick, appeared alongside former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, the GOP frontrunner in advance of 2012, and managed to stand out.

Why? Because unlike other Republicans who seem to be so fixated on scoring political points on President Obama, Graham was willing to point out where his own party had strayed while also making a reasonable argument for GOP ideals.

Asked about Gov. Mark Sanford's extramarital affair, Graham, who is close to the governor, said that he was "disappointed" in his friend's behavior and praised Obama as "one of the better role models in the entire country for the idea of being a good parent, a good father."

Of the two major legislative victories for Democrats so far this Congress -- the economic stimulus bill and the climate change measure -- Graham offered a criticism that acknowledged the mistakes his own party had made while subtly hanging the politics as usual label on Obama and Democrats.

"The stimulus package was Karl Rove politics; pick a few Republicans off, call it bipartisan," said Graham. "The climate change bill was Tom DeLay banging heads and twisting arms to get one vote more than you needed. So there's really been no change in Washington."

Even on the most divisive of issues -- the impeachment of former President Bill Clinton -- Graham managed to deflect the partisan bows and arrows slung at him, pointing out that he was the only Republican to vote against the article involving Clinton lying about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky and adding "part of life, is failing."

This is pretty unbelievable. Somehow, calling Obama a dissembler and a thug is tempered by saying that he appears to not be sleeping around. And it's notable for Graham to point out that he voted against one article of impeachment, despite being a HOUSE MANAGER for the impeachment trial and perhaps as visible as any politician in that entire episode. Graham has been questioning the patriotism and the judgment of any Democrat in his path for well over a decade. And using the words "Karl Rove politics" or "Tom DeLay politics" hardly changes the fact that Graham's record was more conservative than DeLay when he was in the House. Graham's words about "bipartisanship" are nonsense and never match his actions.

Here's the laughable wrap-up:

Does one solid performance on a Sunday show mean that Graham is the new "it" guy for the GOP? No. But the notoriously private Graham seemed to signal on Sunday that he is ready to take more of a leadership role.

I think Graham shows up on teevee more on Sunday morning than the CBS Eye and the NBC peacock combined. "Notoriously private?" The man showed up in the background of so many John McCain rallies last year you'd think he was either McCain's running mate or his personal nurse. He's not exactly some sparkling, new figure on the political scene. But sometimes, he makes soft cooing sounds before voting in a hard-right fashion, and so the traditional media swoons.

Oh, and by the way, there's a pretty good reason that Graham has never sought higher office.

The Dark Side

I thought this was a known known, but WaPo treats it like a scoop - Dick Cheney sat in on CIA briefings about torture in 2005.

Former vice president Richard B. Cheney personally oversaw at least four briefings with senior members of Congress about the controversial interrogation program, part of a secretive and forceful defense he mounted throughout 2005 in an effort to maintain support for the harsh techniques used on detainees.

The Cheney-led briefings came at some of the most critical moments for the program, as congressional oversight committees were threatening to investigate or even terminate the techniques, according to lawmakers, congressional officials, and current and former intelligence officials [...]

The CIA made no mention of his role in documents delivered to Capitol Hill last month that listed every lawmaker who had been briefed on "enhanced interrogation techniques" since 2002. For meetings that were overseen by Cheney, the agency told the intelligence committees that information about who oversaw those briefings was "not available."

Several members of Congress who took part in the Cheney meetings declined to comment on them, citing secrecy concerns. But there was little doubt that he was leading the charge on the issue.

"His office was ground zero. It was his office you dealt with at the end of the day," recalled Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who jousted with Cheney over the system of interrogations.

As Greg Sargent notes, you can just go ahead and throw those CIA documents right in the garbage. Enough errors have been found in them that I could write up something more plausibly just by going through old blog posts.

Remember what was going on around 2005. Republicans on the Hill were revolting after allegations of torture started reaching the mainstream. Lindsey Graham and John Warner and John McCain wanted to ban the practice. Democrats were calling for a full-scale investigation. These sessions, as I read them, were basically designed to keep the Republican caucus on board with the policy. They were in charge of Congress at the time, and they could shut down any probes into the torture regime. You can see that at work in the one briefing described at length:

One of the most critical Cheney-led briefings came in late October 2005, when the vice president and Porter J. Goss, then director of the CIA, read Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) into the program on the interrogation methods, according to congressional and intelligence sources.

One knowledgeable official described the meeting as contentious. Cheney and Goss, with other CIA officials present, tried to persuade the former Vietnam POW to back off an anti-torture amendment that had already won the support of 90 senators.

The McCain amendment would have ended practices such as waterboarding by forbidding "cruel, degrading and inhumane" treatment of detainees. The CIA had not used waterboarding since 2003, but the White House sought to maintain the ability to employ it.

In the meetings with lawmakers, Cheney was adamant that the enhanced interrogations were needed to preserve national security, according to two participants. He advocated briefing more lawmakers about the program, against the wishes of National Security Council officials who sought to inform only the top members of the intelligence committees.

Lawmakers at times challenged Cheney and CIA officials about the legality of the program and pressed for specific results that would show whether the techniques worked. In response, the CIA briefers said that half of the agency's knowledge about al-Qaeda's plans and structure had been obtained through the interrogations.

In case you needed more evidence that the CIA lies to Congress. Just the fact that they hid Cheney's involvement in these briefings is an example of that.

Marcy Wheeler reports on a couple other interesting parts of the story:

First, the WaPo reports that Jello Jay pushed for an investigation, but Pat Roberts quashed it. I guess that explains why Roberts is so quiet now. But in case anyone wanted any more affirmation that Democrats opposed torture and Republicans sustained it, there's yet one more data point.

And then yet another Gitmo trip for Addington, this time with some Senators in tow. Was this an all-Republican affair as well? The question is particularly relevant, since Lindsey Graham has helpfully reminded us that all these Republican-only briefings are proof of criminal intent. Or was it just Graham, McCain and the few other anti-torture Republicans, off on a field trip to be coerced by Cheney's right hand man?

If anyone needed yet more proof that torture was Cheney's baby, his active lobbying of Congress--hidden as "CIA briefings"--ought to do the trick.

Hopefully the Post will develop this angle in future articles. For now, we know that Dick Cheney was the torture lobbyist, he worked with the CIA to shut down any investigation, and the CIA lies to Congress.

Still All About Iraq

Among the many inanities from Huckleberry Graham yesterday was his claim that "one of the reasons these techniques have survived for about 500 years is apparently they work." You know what has survived for longer than that? Syphillis. Should we incubate that for use on prisoners?

But I'll agree with Huckleberry to an extent. Torture does work in its primary function: to extract false confessions. That's why Dark Sith Cheney was so keen on using torture prior to the run-up to war in Iraq.

*Two U.S. intelligence officers confirm that Vice President Cheney’s office suggested waterboarding an Iraqi prisoner, a former intelligence official for Saddam Hussein, who was suspected to have knowledge of a Saddam-al Qaeda connection.

*The former chief of the Iraq Survey Group, Charles Duelfer, in charge of interrogations, tells The Daily Beast that he considered the request reprehensible.

*Much of the information in the report of the 9/11 Commission was provided through more than 30 sessions of torture of detainees.

Lawrence Wilkerson essentially confirmed this today.

Likewise, what I have learned is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002--well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion--its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa'ida.

So furious was this effort that on one particular detainee, even when the interrogation team had reported to Cheney's office that their detainee "was compliant" (meaning the team recommended no more torture), the VP's office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods. The detainee had not revealed any al-Qa'ida-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, "revealed" such contacts. Of course later we learned that al-Libi revealed these contacts only to get the torture to stop.

There in fact were no such contacts. (Incidentally, al-Libi just "committed suicide" in Libya. Interestingly, several U.S. lawyers working with tortured detainees were attempting to get the Libyan government to allow them to interview al-Libi....)

Pity that al-Libi just up and committed suicide like that, ay?

Over and over again, we have seen Iraq as the white whale to the Bush Administration, as their sole focus through much of the first term appeared to be laying down the basis for invasion and occupation. Everything flows from this original sin. And we can now say with a good degree of surety that the torture programs rose from a desire to link Iraq with 9/11 and Al Qaeda. if you want to know why Dick Cheney has been on the teevee more than American Idol lately, throwing up roadblocks and confusion and assorted nonsense, it's because he doesn't want this fact, which apparently came from his office, revealed.

That Incredible Hearing

That torture hearing yesterday with former FBI agent Ali Soufan and Bush State Department official Philip Zelikow and others was truly amazing. Here are just a few of the things we learned:

• During questioning, Russ Feingold stated that he has seen the classified documents "proving" torture worked of which Fourthbranch Cheney often speaks, and nothing he saw "indicates that the torture techniques authorized by the last administration were necessary, or that they were the best way to get information out of detainees."

• Ali Soufan, who sat behind a curtain, making for a hearing that looked like the Monty Python sketch about the talk show featuring a tree and a Chesterfield, testified that the torture techniques were slow and unreliable, that lawful techniques were able to pry key information from Abu Zubaydah within an hour, and that waterboarding wasn't approved until after it was used, according to the timeline put forward by the CIA about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Jose Padilla. Either the CIA is lying about the intelligence information they got from KSM and Padilla, or they broke the law and then retroactively sought clearance for it.

• Soufan also called false information in some of the Bradbury torture memos supposedly proving the value of torture.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who’s presiding over the hearing, read aloud a key passage in the May 30th, 2005 torture memo that credited “enhanced techniques” with getting Abu Zubaydah to reveal “detailed information regarding Al Qaeda’s organizational structure, key operatives, and modus operandi.”

The passage Whitehouse read also said the techniques had gotten the suspect to identify Khalid Shaikh Mohammed as the September 11th mastermind.

Whitehouse then asked Soufan if, based on what he witnessed, he knew that statement “not to be true.”

“Yes, sir,” Soufan replied.

• During cross-examination, Lindsey Graham cited the debunked ABC News report claiming that Abu Zubaydah was only waterboarded once, a claim that even ABC News has distanced themselves from. He also called the law "a nicety we could not afford."

• Zelikow, who offered an alternative viewpoint to the Bush Administration on torture in a memo the White House tried to destroy, said that his memo has been found, and will soon be declassified.

And there was more, like the browbeating Graham gave a law professor. I believe Sheldon Whitehouse, who put this hearing together, is building a fact pattern. He wants these things public, so that the drumbeat for real investigations and real accountability will grow. And we have to help him in that regard.

Terrorizing The Rule Of Law

The GOP geniuses think they've found an issue they can run with. This has slowly built over the past several weeks, but now they've done a full rollout. It starts with the movie trailer, a preview of coming attractions.



Then they followed through with the main event, a bill literally called “The Keep Terrorists Out Of America Act,” which would prohibit the transfer of any "Terrorist" from Guantanamo Bay into a prison facility in the United States, without approval from the state's Governor and legislature, and some other legislative hoop-jumping.

Taken to its extreme, Republicans would call for the immediate closure of all prisons ("criminals... in your community!"), and the dispatching of all 2.3 million prisoners to some offsite floating barge, Australia, or that island of plastic in the Pacific. To suggest that a maximum-security prison could not possibly hold a Dangerous Terrorist is an insult to the men and woman of the federal corrections system, who already hold convicted terrorists in custody who received justice through a court of law, and basically acknowledges that those facilities are completely insecure, and should be feared by local residents. I'm sure the RNC and the Republican members of the House will pick up the costs of moving every single prisoner over to that plastic island. Because think of the children.

When pressed on the point that Americans held 425,000 German POWs at the height of WWII, bill sponsor Pete Hoekstra, who is crazy, incidentally, casually remarked that the threat of Al Qaeda surpasses the Nazis.



A substantial chunk of the Republican Party believes that people who live in caves represent a greater threat to the American way of life than the Third Reich. Just so you know.

However, I'm convinced that this is a bit of misdirection and Overton Window-lifting. Of course the idea that Scary Terrorists would endanger local communities while in prison is absurd and should be rejected. But that's not really the ultimate plan. John McCain and Lindsey Graham posted on the conservative blackboard, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, with the more "sensible" view - that we must hold suspects indefinitely without trial for as long as we please, in violation of habeas corpus statutes, until they are tried in sham courts without Constitutional criminal justice protections.

• Second, military commissions remain the appropriate trial venue for these individuals. We would strenuously oppose any effort to try enemy combatants in our civilian courts. By an overwhelming bipartisan vote in 2006, Congress passed the Military Commissions Act, which set forth procedures for trying enemy combatants for war crimes.

Our domestic criminal laws -- including their treatment of classified information -- are ill-suited for the complex national security issues inherent in the trial of enemy combatants. We have great faith in our military justice system -- appropriately modified for war crimes trials -- and we believe that military judges and lawyers render fair and impartial justice not only for our troops, but for enemy combatants as well.

• Third, preventive detention will continue to have a place in the war on terror . Under the law of war, the idea that an enemy combatant has to be tried or released is a false choice. Rather, it is well-established that combatants can be held off the battlefield as long as they present a military threat.

While there is little doubt that we initially cast the net too broadly in determining who merited enemy combatant status, the Department of Defense estimates nearly one in 10 detainees released from Guantanamo have returned to the battlefield, including Said Ali al-Shihri (al Qaeda in Yemen's second-in-command), and Abdullah Gulam Rasoul, who reportedly now serves as the Taliban's operational commander in southern Afghanistan. We cannot let this continue.

A significant group of detainees still in custody at Guantanamo may be too dangerous to release, but they are not suitable for war crimes trials. In these cases, a system needs to be devised in which a designated national security court, with a uniform set of standards and procedures administered by a civilian judge, hears the petitions for habeas corpus authorized by the Supreme Court, and an annual interagency review is conducted to determine whether the detainee remains a security threat to the United States.

"Preventive detention" is a nice turn of phrase. "I think you may steal a candy bar later. Better put you in jail for a few months until everything blows over."

And unbelievably, this "fallback" position, which I always considered the reason to close Guantanamo in the first place, has gained traction inside the White House.

The Obama administration is moving toward reviving the military commission system for prosecuting Guantánamo detainees, which was a target of critics during the Bush administration, including Mr. Obama himself.

Officials said the first public moves could come as soon as next week, perhaps in filings to military judges at the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, outlining an administration plan to amend the Bush administration’s system to provide more legal protections for terrorism suspects.

Continuing the military commissions in any form would probably prompt sharp criticism from human rights groups as well as some of Mr. Obama’s political allies because the troubled system became an emblem of the effort to use Guantánamo to avoid the American legal system [...]

In a news conference this week, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. emphasized that if the administration did use military commissions, the rules must give detainees “a maximum amount of due process.”

But, speaking of detainees whom American officials have accused of involvement in major terrorist plots, Mr. Holder added, “It may be difficult for some of those high-value detainees to be tried in a normal federal court.”

These military commissions represent a total obviation of the rule of law, an attempt to gather convictions they could not otherwise get. And what's left unsaid is the always shaky phraseology of the Obama plan, where some Gitmo detainees would be tried, some released, and this vague "third category," where the legal black hole of Guantanamo apparently remains.

It does no service, particularly in relating to our allies, to just insource Guantanamo with the same methods. People weren't angry about the site or the symbol, but the policies. But because the Republicans are being so transparently ridiculous with their "Eek! Prisoners going to prison, they'll kill us all!!!" pose, there may be a tendency to back up the White House's viewpoint. Not until they make perfectly clear that they intend to either try Gitmo prisoners in American courts, or release them. Any other options are unacceptable.

Crystal Pepsi

I won't identify the source, but I heard about a meeting between Arnold Schwarzenegger and a Democratic pol where he exclaimed that he figured out politics, and "it's all marketing." Looks like the rest of the GOP agrees with him.

Coming soon to a battleground state near you: a new effort to revive the image of the Republican Party and to counter President Obama's characterization of Republicans as "the party of 'no.'"

CNN has learned that the new initiative, called the National Council for a New America, will be announced Thursday.

It will involve an outreach by an interesting mix of GOP officials, ranging from 2008 Republican presidential nominee John McCain to Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor and the younger brother of the man many Republicans blame for the party's battered brand: former President George W. Bush.

Now there's an idea! The failed Presidential candidate and the brother of the guy who destroyed the GOP brand teaming up to remake the party! Does someone want to tell Republicans that "remake" means something new?

But that's not all! They're also bringing on stage the people who have created the failed GOP brand this year.

In addition to Sen. McCain and Gov. Bush, GOP sources familiar with the plans tell CNN others involved in the new group's "National Panel Of Experts" will include:

*Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, a former national GOP chairman
*Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal
*Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney

It will report to GOP congressional leaders, and among those signing the announcement that will be made public Thursday are:

*House GOP Leader John Boehner
*House GOP Whip Eric Cantor
*House GOP Conference Chairman Mike Pence
*Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell
*The No. 2 Senate Republican, Jon Kyl
*And the Senate GOP Conference Chairman, Lamar Alexander

It's kind of amusing that Michael Steele, who's, ahem, the leader of the Republican National Committee, doesn't factor into this rebranding effort. Maybe because they've seen his Poochie the radical dog approach to attracting "the kids" to the party.

"You (Brzezinski) wear your hat one way you like to wear it, you know, kind of cocked to the left, you know, 'cause that's cool out West," Steele said. "In the Midwest, you guys (Scarborough) like to wear it a little bit to the right. In the South, you guys (Buchanan) wear the brim straight ahead. Now the Northeast, I wear my hat backwards, you know, 'cause that's how we roll in the Northeast."

I guess they tried to get Sarah Palin aboard as well, but couldn't reach her. When SARAH PALIN is reticent to join you, I mean...

I know that Republicans are never going to believe this, but maybe when they listen on the town hall meetings that will supposedly follow this effort, they can understand that nobody likes them anymore.

Republicans are widely viewed by the public as less competent than Democrats to handle issue ranging from health care to education and energy, according to internal polling presented to top GOP officials in Congress.

The same survey found President Barack Obama holds the support of a significant minority of self-described conservative, independent voters [...]

Democrats were favored by a margin of 61 percent to 29 percent on education; 59 percent to 30 percent on health care and 59 percent to 31 percent on energy. Congress is expected to consider major legislation later this year in all three areas.

Democats were also viewed with more confidence in handling taxes, long a Republican strong suit. The only issue among nine in the survey where the two parties were rated as even was in the war on terror.

Republicans can keep claiming that they "strayed away from their core values" and need to go even more base-crazy in order to win, but the facts don't bear that out.

(Lindsey) Graham scoffed at the notion that the party was suffering because it was not conservative enough.

“Do you really believe that we lost 18-to-34-year-olds by 19 percent, or we lost Hispanic voters, because we are not conservative enough?” he said. “No. This is a ridiculous line of thought. The truth is we lost young people because our Republican brand is tainted.”

And what the party appears to be saying is, let's taint some more!

The Dangerous Politics Of Cap And Trade

I mentioned earlier that I am less hopeful on getting meaningful carbon pricing legislation through Congress this year than getting health care reform. The main reason is that too many Americans experience the broken health care system directly for politicians to evade public anger over it. Climate change is simply more abstract, making it a tougher sell. And you can very easily turn the idea of capping emissions and selling carbon credits at auction to polluters into "an energy tax." This is from a letter from GOPers on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee to their colleagues, and the rhetorical gambit is clear.

The President's 2010 Budget proposal contains a risky, ill defined new energy tax that has the potential to continue the economic recession for many years to come. We are writing this letter to alert you to this situation and ask that you join us in a budget resolution amendment to strike and such provision.

Specifically, the President's 2010 Budget proposal asks to collect $646 billion dollars in new "Climate Revenues" from the American people. The government will collect these new revenues through a cap and trade scheme in which " allowances" are sold to the highest bidder. The government won't tax consumers directly, but it will impose new costs on energy producers and users who will in turn pass those higher costs on to consumers, which will result in higher electricity bills, gasoline prices, grocery bills, and anything else made from conventional energy sources. In short, consumers will feel as if they are paying a new tax on energy.

The stated price tag for this new energy tax is $646 billion, yet recent news reports indicate that administration officials are privately admitting their program will actually generate between "two and three times" this amount of revenue, or between $1.3 trillion and $1.9 trillion. However, these numbers represent only the cost from 2012 through 2019. The budget summary describes the energy tax extending at least through 2050. At the 2012 through 2019 average annual rate, families and workers would face through 2050 between $6.3 trillion and $9.3 trillion in higher energy taxes.

Left unsaid is that the government would funnel most if not all of that tax to those same consumers in the form of the "Making Work Pay" tax credit. Really this is an effort to keep the oil industry in business - and the industry obviously believes it can work, as they divest from renewable energy and into biofuels, the production of which emits just as much carbon.

There are good signs as well - Lindsay Graham and John McCain have signed on to climate change legislation, but of course they would like nothing more than to eliminate the auction for carbon credits and give away polluting rights for free. That was the structure of the McCain-Lieberman (later Lieberman-Warner) cap and trade bill from last session. The hint toward using budget reconciliation clearly got McCain and Graham out of their chairs on this one. But a bad climate bill that ditches auctioning off pollution rights wouldn't be anything to cheer about. It would reward big business, plain and simple.



As Brad Plumer notes:

You see what happens if the permits are auctioned off and the revenue is divided among Americans equally. The overall impact is actually progressive, and lower-income households come out ahead—the extra amount they pay for dirty energy is more than offset by the rebate. But if the permits are given out to companies for free, it's only wealthier Americans who benefit—they're the ones running the companies making windfall profits, after all—while everyone else gets squeezed.

Given the option of another tax break for the wealthy or movement on other issues like investing in renewables and a hard standard for electricity generation... let's say it's a toss-up.

Chipping Away

It may be weird to have a member of the Republican leadership say out loud that their goal as a party, in a time of crisis, is to lower Democratic approval ratings, but come on, we all knew this, right? Their public statements are carefully crafted to nitpick elements of spending bills that sound more outrageous that they actually are. When those examples of "wasteful spending" aren't in the bill, they make them up. And then they offer amendments on them anyway.

Interestingly enough, all three of Kyl's amendments deal with U.S. policy towards Palestine at a time when signs are pointing to a possible unity government by Fatah and Hamas. The most eyebrow-raising of the three, however, is a bid to prevent any government money from being used to resettle Palestinian refugees from Gaza to America.

As the Mondoweiss blog explains, an Internet rumor making the rounds on the right has accused President Obama of signing an order to resettle hundreds of thousands of Hamas sympathizers in the U.S. ... without a grain of truth to it.

Heck, the entire conception of starting a firestorm around earmarks is self-evidently ridiculous. The elimination of earmarks doesn't reduce spending by one penny - all an earmark does is direct appropriations to a specific project. Without them, money would be appropriated by an executive branch bureaucrat. And Republicans know that.

“I voted to take all earmarks out, but I will come back in the new process and put that back in,” Graham insisted, saying that the convention center is important to stimulate the local economy. “I think I should have the ability as a United States senator to direct money back to my state as long as it’s transparent and it makes sense.”

So of course the entire GOP game plan is to embarrass Democrats. Unfortunately, so far it has succeeded only in embarrassing themselves. But those are only the short-term ramifications. Over the long term, all they are doing is chipping away at the notion that government can perform its core function, demonizing the activities of the Congress, evoking mistrust in elected officials, and poisoning the whole notion of federal spending. That's their REAL project.

Crooks And Liars About Sums It Up

The Joe The Plumber Victory Tour continued today on Capitol Hill, where he did a "live hearing" on failed Internet channel Pajamas TV and said this:

The money that they’re talking about spending is just absolutely incredible. You can’t get your mind around it. We used to think a million dollars was just the most incredible thing. Then it went to billions and now we’re talking trillions. And trillions is such a large number we just can’t wrap our mind around it, at least I can’t.

I know, inflation blows my mind too. Let me try and help out. US GDP every year is $13 trillion dollars. This is a two-year bill for $789 billion. So it's less than 1/26th of total GDP. See, Mr. the Plumber, one dude in ACORN doesn't get the whole "trillion," it's spread out over 300 million people, which I know is just the most incredible thing.

When they're not zonked out about all the crazy, crazy numbers, they're straight-up lying:

Is there really $30 million in the new stimulus package devoted to saving the salt marsh mouse in Nancy Pelosi’s district?

That’s what some conservatives are now charging, and the claim seems to be gaining some traction with elected GOP officials and conservative media outlets, who are using it to argue that the bill is stuffed with Dem pork.

But there isn’t any such money in the bill. And Pelosi’s office is saying that the claim is a “total fabrication.”

Not that you needed to hear this, but there is no salt marsh mouse in San Francisco.

Meanwhile the Repbulicans' big idea is to get Politico to write a story about "attack ads" when they're spending $35,000 on spots in 29 districts. Not exactly saturation coverage. Speaking of fiscal responsibility and sticking to conviction:

BLITZER: Doesn’t South Carolina need some help?

GRAHAM: Yes. But there’s only one taxpayer. This is not money we found under a tree in Washington. The money we’re sending back to the states came out of the same wallet that the money going to the states came from. So, yes, South Carolina needs help. I’m all for infrastructure spending. But it’s got to be shovel ready. […]

I’m not for $75 billion slush fund for states that can be spent on anything they want to spend it on including budget problems because we’ve got our own budget problems and you’re rewarding states who have done very little to trim up their own budget.

However, when Blitzer asked him whether South Carolina should “take the money, Graham replied: “I think that, yes, from my point of view, I — you don’t want to be crazy here. I mean, if there’s going to be money on the table that will help my state, but I’ve got a job to do up here, and that is to try to help people and not damn the next generation.”

If Democrats were vindictive, the formula would be pretty simple: if you don't vote for the recovery, your district doesn't get any of it. Some Republicans get this, and I'm sure if the Democrats played hardball a lot more would, too.

U.S. Rep. Anh "Joseph" Cao, R-New Orleans, said Wednesday he is likely to vote for the economic stimulus bill when it comes to a vote, probably today or Friday, even if he is the only Republican member of the House to do so.

"I'm voting along what my conscience dictates and the needs of the 2nd Congressional District dictate, even if I were to be the only member of the GOP to vote for the stimulus package," he said.

"Even though it is going to be a humongous bill, even though we will be in debt for years, I believe that more likely than not, I will vote for it because the 2nd Congressional District needs a stimulus package."

A liberal is a conservative who has angry constituents.

We Can't Have The Attorney General Following Laws

As you may know, John Cornyn has led a revolt that would delay the confirmation of Eric Holder in the Senate Judiciary Committee for at least a week, citing the fact that he might actually prosecute people who have committed crimes, which is simply off-limits to Beltway thinking (at least for people of import, he can prosecute all the poor people he wants for shoplifting, but at war crimes Cornyn draws the line):

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, convened the panel Wednesday and asked for an immediate vote to send Holder's nomination to the Senate. Republicans called for a one-week delay, permitted by committee rules.

Holder told the Judiciary Committee last week that waterboarding is "torture" and therefore illegal. Susan J. Crawford, the top Bush administration official overseeing the trials of detainees, told the Washington Post that at least one individual held at the prison center at Guantanamo Bay was "tortured."

The question Republicans want answered before Holder is confirmed: Will you prosecute those who took part in that torture?

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said that he would block committee proceedings, scheduled to resume at 2:30 pm on Wednesday, if he did not receive answer from Holder. "I'm not going to allow things to proceed," he said. He added that it was "physically impossible" for Holder to get the answers to him by then, thus assuring a conflict would ensue [...]

"Part of my concern, frankly, relates to some of his statements at the hearing in regard to torture and what his intentions are with regard to intelligence personnel who were operating in good faith based upon their understanding of what the law was," said Cornyn.

Well, at least he didn't bring 9/11 into it in a blatant attempt to scaremonger... I'm sorry, what was that next paragraph?

"There were provisions providing immunity to intelligence officials based up on good faith and what they understood the law to be," said Cornyn. "I want to know if he's going to enforce congressional intent not to second guess those things in a way that could jeopardize those officials but also could cause our intelligence officials to be risk averse -- the very kind of risk aversion...that the 9/11 commission talked about when they talked about what set us up for 9/11."

Ah, Republicans. Proudly using victims of terror as a human shield for going on eight years.

I don't need to recapitulate the arguments made by Tom Ricks, Paul Krugman, Keith Olbermann, the UN special rapporteur on torture, and others. We need a reckoning for torture because if we don't, the successors to this legacy will do far worse in the name of national security; we need to "look back" because it's the basis for jurisprudence and we can't prejudge who or who not to prosecute absent all the facts; we cannot listen to the Beltway insiders who want to protect their friends by saying that ignoring clear crimes is very "appropriate"; etc. I would simply say that Holder would be breaking the law if he DIDN'T prosecute.

1. Each State Party shall take effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture in any territory under its jurisdiction.

2. No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.

3. An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture. . . .

That's from the Convention Against Torture, and it's pretty unequivocal. We are legally obligated to prosecute acts of torture, and "promising not to" is as much a crime, under this statute, as the torture itself. As to the argument that top Democrats are complicit in these actions and a Democratic Administration and the whole thing would have a look of a show trial if they were forced to admit that they were aware of but didn't object to these abuses, that's what an independent prosecutor would be for. And by the way, one of those top Democrats assumed to have been read in to the torture policy is open to prosecution, kind of blowing that theory out of the water.

The glib and cynical establishment press, desperate to protect their friends and defend THEIR OWN moral complicity in these crimes, may think this is a legitimate stand to take, but it only reveals their own moral hollowness.

To the standard Washington reporter, nothing is more contemptible than those who want to hold political leaders accountable -- and that fact is as potent a reflection of how diseased our political culture is, since journalists, in theory, ought to be those leading the crusade for such accountability, not leading the lynch mob against citizens who are demanding it. Yet since the zombie-like march behind the Leader during the run-up to the attack on Iraq, there hasn't been a more complete, virtually lockstep consensus among our media class than their vehement opposition to investigating the crimes of our political leaders.

Heck, even Lindsay frickin' Graham understands that no Attorney General could vow to rule out prosecution in a blanket fashion absent knowing what has been committed. He still thinks that "criminalizing policy differences" would be bad for the country, which is absurd, but he at least has enough sense to know that ruling out prosecution of a crime is not really an option for the nation's chief law enforcement officer.

All told, the Republicans don't have the votes to stop Holder, so this is a delay tactic at best. Why? Emptywheel has been working on her theory for a while now, and it's starting to make sense:

Two and a half weeks ago, bmaz predicted that the Bush Administration would appeal Judge Vaughn Walker's ruling requiring the Bush Administration to turn over a document that likely proves they violated FISA by wiretapping American citizens. Sure enough, on Friday and Monday, they did so [...]

Between that appeal and Arlen "Scottish Haggis" Specter's highly unusual one-week hold on Eric Holder's nomination yesterday, it sure does look like my theory--that Republicans are trying to delay the time when a Democrat takes over DOJ and starts reviewing Bush Administration actions and considering prosecutions.

In particular, I believe, they are delaying Holder's nomination to shorten the time between the day Holder takes over and the day the statute of limitations on violations of FISA Bush committed on March 11, 2004 start to expire--that is, March 11, 2009, just seven weeks away.

It would certainly be interesting if this was not about torture at all, but the violations of FISA. Especially given the revelation from Russell Tice that the US Government has been monitoring every single communication made by an American for years.

OLBERMANN: Let's start with the review. We heard the remarks from Mr. Bush in 2005, that only Americans who would have been eavesdropped on without a warrant were those who were talking to terrorists overseas. Based on what you know, what you have seen firsthand and what you have encountered in your experience, how much of that statement was true?

TICE: Well, I don't know what our former president knew or didn't know. I'm sort of down in the weeds. But the National Security Agency had access to all Americans' communications, faxes, phone calls, and their computer communications. And that doesn't -- it didn't matter whether you were in Kansas, you know, in the middle of the country, and you never made a communication -- foreign communications at all. They monitored all communications.

OLBERMANN: To what degree is that likely to mean actual eavesdropping and actual inspection? In other words, if not actually read or monitored by the NSA, everything was collected by the NSA, recorded, archived? Do you have any idea to what degree the information was ever looked at, per se?

TICE: Well, it's actually, even for the NSA, it's impossible to literally collect all communications. Americans tend to be a chatty group. We have the best computers at the agency, but certainly not that good.

But what was done was a sort of an ability to look at the meta data, the signaling data for communications, and ferret that information to determine what communications would ultimately be collected. Basically, filtering out sort of like sweeping everything with that meta data, and then cutting down ultimately what you are going to look at and what is going to be collected, and in the long run have an analyst look at, you know, needles in a haystack for what might be of interest.

We have never fully known the extent of this lawlessness, and any delay in Holder's confirmation will keep Americans in the dark that much longer, if he chooses to exercise his prosecutorial discretion at all. If he does not, we may have to rely on lawmakers like Sheldon Whitehouse to offer the reckoning that this nation so desperately needs.

Our new President has said, "America needs to look forward." I agree.

Our new Attorney-General designate has said, we should not criminalize policy differences. I agree.

And I hope we can all agree that summoning young sacrificial lambs to prosecute, as we did after the Abu Ghraib disaster, would be reprehensible.

But consider the pervasive, deliberate, and systematic damage the Bush Administration did to America, to her finest traditions and institutions, to her reputation and integrity.

Read the whole thing.

Great Except The Gray Areas

Obama is following through on his promises. He is closing the Guantanamo prison and restricting the interrogation tactics used by the CIA. Before we get to the details, on the top line this is great news.

President Barack Obama is ready to issue orders on Thursday to close Guantanamo prison and overhaul the treatment of terrorism suspects, in a swift move to restore a U.S. image hurt by charges of torture.

A draft executive order obtained by Reuters on Wednesday sets a one-year deadline to close the controversial U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where foreign terrorism suspects have been detained for years without trial.

Obama, who was sworn in as president on Tuesday, is expected to issue the order on Guantanamo on Thursday. He will also ban abusive interrogations and order a review of detention policies for captured militants, said congressional aides and a White House official [...]

"It's exactly the kind of bold action that is necessary," said Elisa Massimino, executive director of the Human Rights First advocacy group. "Both the speed and the content will send a clear message to our own people and the rest of the world that what he said ... he meant." [...]

Another presidential order would ban CIA use of "enhanced" interrogation methods by making all U.S. agencies abide by the Army Field Manual, which bans techniques such as waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning the CIA says was used on three terrorism suspects.

Outgoing CIA chief Michael Hayden has defended the harsh techniques and called the Army manual too restrictive but says the agency would abide by limitations. The CIA declined comment on the reports.

Obama is also expected to order a review of all U.S. detention policies.

Obama is really setting a bad precedent of keeping campaign promises and abiding by the rule of law. It's like the oath of office reboot, setting the horrible precedent of acknowledging mistakes and seeking to rectify them. Who does this guy think he is?

Aides sent around the draft order on Guantanamo today, and I think my favorite part is "the individuals currently detained at Guantánamo have the constitutional privilege of
the writ of habeas corpus." 1300 years of Western law restored in one sentence.

The rest of the details look fairly good. They'll essentially either try or release detainees, although there's this gray area of "other disposition" which needs to be clarified. With people like Marty Lederman now telling the President what they can and cannot do, I'm hopeful that this won't turn into a loophole. But it won't be for lack of trying by those who want to demagogue the issue.

GRAHAM: I do believe we can close Gitmo, but what to do with them? Repatriate some back to other countries makes sense, if you can do it safely. Some of them will be tried for war crimes. And a third group will be held indefinitely because the sensitive nature of the evidence may not subject them to the normal criminal process, but if you let them go, we’ll be letting go someone who wants to go back to the fight. … So we’ve got three lanes we’ve got to deal with: Repatriation, trials, and indefinite detention.

Indefinite detention is inconsistent with the Constitution and international law, as well as the stated rights granted under habeas corpus. And it cannot be allowed as a "third way" here. I think that civil liberties groups understand this and will be vigilant in ensuring that detainees be only tried or released. I can warm to the idea that this process will take up to a year (especially given the state of the evidence, which is haphazard at best according to prosecutors), but there have to be bright lines. Here's Anthony Romero, putting it much more diplomatically than I would.

"This is the first ray of sunlight in what has been eight long years of darkness, of trampling on America's treasured values of justice and due process. The order is remarkable in its timing and its clear intent to close down Guantánamo and unequivocally halt the Bush administration's shameful military commissions. While the order leaves some question as to how some detainees will be released or prosecuted, we trust that's not President Obama's intent and hope that any ambiguity is due to the fact that this order was done on day one in record time. We are confident that President Obama understands that indefinite detention without trial must end once and for all and that detainees should be either prosecuted in a federal court or, if there is no evidence against them, released or transferred to countries where they will not be tortured. Our centuries-old justice system is well-equipped to handle these cases, and it's a great relief to finally have a president who is committed to upholding American values and the rule of law. Although we have a long road ahead to get to an America we can be proud of again, change has begun."

I'm confident that the ACLU will keep pushing for justice. And while they're at it, they ought to trust but verify on torture. The most recent report before today's news that Obama would bring the CIA under the Army Field Manual included a "loophole" that would allow torture in extreme cases.

However, Obama's changes may not be absolute. His advisers are considering adding a classified loophole to the rules that could allow the CIA to use some interrogation methods not specifically authorized by the Pentagon, the officials said. They said the intent is not to use that as an opening for possible use of waterboarding, an interrogation technique that simulates drowning.

That's completely unacceptable and would be counter-productive. In addition, even if the entire government is brought under the Army Field Manual, we're STILL not done. As bmaz notes, even techniques allowable under the AFM can be combined in a fashion to effectively torture.

This is where Susan Crawford's stark admission comes into play. As Crawford admits, most all of the techniques used on al-Qahtani were actually permissible, but the layering of techniques compounded them into unmistakable torture.

Crawford, 61, said the combination of the interrogation techniques, their duration and the impact on Qahtani's health led to her conclusion. "The techniques they used were all authorized, but the manner in which they applied them was overly aggressive and too persistent. . . . You think of torture, you think of some horrendous physical act done to an individual. This was not any one particular act; this was just a combination of things that had a medical impact on him, that hurt his health. It was abusive and uncalled for. And coercive. Clearly coercive. It was that medical impact that pushed me over the edge" to call it torture, she said.

Crawford has exposed to bright sunlight the lie that is Barack Obama's, and other politicians', simple minded reliance on the Army Field Manual as cover for their torture reform credentials. Interrogators can stay completely within the Army manual and still be engaging in clear, unequivocal torture under national and international norms, laws and conventions.

It could be that this is the "loophole" sought by Obama advisers, to allow the combination of certain techniques. Appendix M of the Army Field Manual may allow this latitude. That would need to be excised so that there is no ambiguity about the complete end to the torture regime.

Overall, we have an excellent set of proposals here, but the gray areas need to be filled in with the ideals of justice. President Obama said that the rule of law "will be a touchstone of my Administration". He has every opportunity to prove it.

...more hints that extra-legal interrogation processes may be allowed. Don't defend it, don't mend it, just end it, Mr. President. Most Americans support you banning torture.

Wise Counsel

Meet the new big thinker on Afghanistan for the Obama Administration - Lindsay frickin' Graham:

Freshly returned from a tour of war zones and global hotspots, Vice President-elect Joe Biden told President-elect Barack Obama on Wednesday that "things are going to get tougher" in Afghanistan.

GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, Biden's partner in the five-day, bipartisan fact-finding mission to Kuwait, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq, predicted that "casualties are likely to increase" in Afghanistan as the number of U.S. troops there goes up this year [...] "It is a fair criticism to say, Mr. President, that we have taken our eye off the ball in Afghanistan and we need to re-engage," Graham, R-S.C., said. "And that re-engagement is going to come at a heavy price." [...]

Obama said little to reporters, other than thanking the two senators and announcing that he plans to enlist Graham as "one of our counselors" on foreign policy.

"The recommendations that you're going to be delivering to me are going to be of enormous help in making sure that we do what is my No. 1 task as president-elect and as president, and that is to keep the American people safe and to make sure that when we deploy our military, that we do so with a clear sense of mission and with strong support from the American people," Obama said.

I really may throw up. This is the same Lindsay Graham who during the campaign called Obama a defeatist and said that he has "supported retreat and would have accepted our defeat... They have worked too hard and sacrificed too much for a patronizing pat on the back... He should not be their commander-in-chief." Now he's the elder statesman counselor for whom politics ends at the water's edge.

The truth is that you can hardly blame Graham. There is a vacuum created by the lack of progressive voices in Obama's White House on foreign policy and Huckleberry is stepping right into it. Lots of the antiwar Democrats who supported Obama during the campaign have found themselves sidelined and unable to get jobs with the new Administration. The Hillary Clintons and Robert Gateses of the world are presumably uncomfortable with any DFHs, and so the ones who were right on Iraq, the ones who risked their careers by signing on with a longshot Senator from Illinois, are absent in the debate. And you see that in this unquestioning march to escalate in Afghanistan, even without knowing the purpose of the mission or the desired end-state in the country.

John McCain's Rosencrantz Lindsay Graham is a closer counsel to Barack Obama than those who got it right. Such is the world of Beltway accountability.

That said, if we wants a Senate counsel, particularly on Afghanistan, those sources are out there. Like Russ Feingold, who has called for a comprehensive regional strategy rather than sacrificing more troops by throwing them at the problem.



Or, you know, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) takes another bite at the Afghanistan apple. He says he doesn’t want to compare anything to Vietnam, but he’s worried Afghanistan is too close a parallel: “The night often rules, with insurgencies. The complications are profound in Pakistan and Afghanistan … That is the center of the war on–” he stops himself before he says “war on terror” and replaces it with “global insurgency.” There are “inherent contradictions” in the “structure we have been trying to impose in Afghanistan” politically. (He recommends two books that I also like: Rory Stewart’s “The Places In Between,” which I read in Afghanistan,” and Dexter Filkins’ “The Forever War.”) What to do about tribalism? “We’re on the wrong track, and unless we rethink this very, very capably, we could … wind up pursuing a policy that is frankly unpursuable, unachievable.” The original goal was “to go in there and take out Al Qaeda … it was not to impose a form of government, no matter how much we believe in it and support it, but that is the mission, at least as it is being presented today.” [...]

Kerry urges that there be more than just the strategy reviews and raises the question of targeting Al Qaeda. “There has been a considerable blowback … in terms of the collateral damage” in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas” by U.S. attacks on terrorists. “I think we’re making some enemies,” he warns.

Even inside Washington, there are other perspectives preferable to the desiccated groupthink epitomized by a war cheerleader like Huckleberry Graham. And once you get outside the Beltway, Barack, hoo boy, what counsel you could receive.

Gentle Rosencrantz

So Barack Obama and John McCain are meeting at this hour. And McCain's food taster is with him:

Advisers to the former candidates have said they don't expect Obama to consider McCain for an administration job.

The two will be joined by Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a McCain confidant, and Rep. Rahm Emanuel, an Illinois Democrat Obama has chosen as his White House chief of staff.

You know, the Senate's in session today. But Lindsay just has to play hooky with his bestest buddy. The election's over, guys, the hanging out on the campaign trail can now end.

This is getting to be a Smithers and Mr. Burns relationship.

(Maybe in more ways than one)

Lobbyists In The Closet

I said earlier that McCain might have some more dirt in the corners of his campaign that avoided last week's spring cleaning. In addition to having Randy Scheunemann, the campaign's top foreign policy advisor, lobbying McCain's Senate staff for the Republic of Georgia while being paid to work on the campaign, there's the issue of Phil Gramm, McCain's top economic advisor, ALSO lobbying Congress on behalf of banking institution UBS in the middle of the housing crisis.

Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain’s national campaign general co-chair was being paid by a Swiss bank to lobby Congress about the U.S. mortgage crisis at the same time he was advising McCain about his economic policy, federal records show. [See sidebar.]

“Countdown with Keith Olbermann” reported Tuesday night that lobbying disclosure forms, filed by the giant Swiss bank UBS, list McCain’s campaign co-chair, former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm, as a lobbyist dealing specifically with legislation regarding the mortgage crisis as recently as Dec. 31, 2007.

Gramm joined the bank in 2002 and had registered as a lobbyist by 2004. UBS filed paperwork deregistering Gramm on April 18 of this year. Gramm continues to serve as a UBS vice chairman.

Gramm's execrable Senate record, which includes easing regulation on energy trading (which directly led to Enron), and undoing the Glass-Steagall Act (which almost directly led to the mortgage mess), ought to be enough to disqualify him from any advisory economic role. But his lobbying for the very companies seeking to stop homeowners facing foreclosure from rewriting their mortgages, which was SUCCESSFUL lobbying, by the way, is really just beyond the pale. The compromise bill worked out in the Senate is far more friendly to the terms set out by Gramm's bosses, and, significantly, John McCain.

We could add to this the fact that Joe Lieberman and Lindsay Graham are violating the ethics rules laid out by the McCain campaign, serving on the board of an organization running 527 attack ads against Barack Obama. But let that go for a second. Practically McCain's entire staff has major ties to lobbying organizations. The reformer image is virtually dead and buried.

Democrats Fight At The Iraq Hearings

As the Petraeus/Crocker hearings shift to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joe Biden is doing a great job, hammering the President's non-strategy on Iraq and the costs to prestige, operational capacity, the fight against terrorism, lives and treasure. Actually, several Democrats have had fine performances today, and I wanted to highlight some of them from the Armed Services Committee session.

• Bill Nelson (D-FL) gets at the heart of the "political reconciliation" question, hitting the familiar tactic that we've seen by the Administration of highlighting initial votes passing pieces of legislation without mentioning that they never get signed into law or implemented. Worse, laws like the de-Baathification statute are being used to target Sunnis and increase sectarian tensions.

"It is with a great deal of respect and deference to you," Nelson said, that he pressed the issue: the point of the surge was to create political reconciliation. "Has political reconciliation happened?"

Petraeus: "As the Ambassador laid out, there has been agreement among different political parties on a number of pieces of important reconciliation laws, if you will, that represent reconciliation... [laws on] de-Ba'athification, a provincial powers law, a pensions reform bill..."

But have the laws been implemented?

Petraeus: I believe the pensions law is in the process of being implemented. De-Ba'athification --"

Nelson wondered: To the extent of bringing about political reconciliation "that is the goal in the first place?"

Petraeus kicked it over to Crocker.

This is a common "kick-the-can" tactic to prove some sort of ephemeral success of the surge, and I'm glad Nelson called it out.

• Claire McCaskill (D-MO) bluntly stated that Sadr won the battle for Basra, which is obviously true despite Ryan Crocker's spinning. This was buttressed by today's events, as the religious leadership in the country lined up behind Sadr, which is a complete thumb in the eye of Maliki and his call for the Mahdi Army to be disbanded.

• Evan Byah (D-IN) - yes, Evan frickin' Bayh - did a nice job of discussing the intelligence community's assessment that our presence in Iraq is actually creating more terrorists than we are defeating there. And there was this great moment:

He also wins huge plaudits from me for mentioning, in response to something Ambassador Crocker said, that "I would only caution us not to take our marching orders from Osama bin Laden."

Exactly so. It's really lunatic of hawks to keep citing OBL's desire to fight us in Iraq as a reason for us to fight him in Iraq. He likes the fight in Iraq because it's favorable terrain for his cause and his propaganda and lets him pose as the defender of the Arab world against American domination. They're suggesting we act like bulls running at the toreador's cape.

• I mentioned Jack Reed's (D-RI) questioning before, but he pressed Ambassador Crocker on a central point - that Iran is supporting all kinds of groups in Iraq, not just those "special groups" but also our "friends" in Maliki's Army like the Badr Brigade and the Dawa Party.

• Jim Webb noted as a side comment that the Anbar Awakening began well before the surge. That's something that always gets lost.

• Even Huckleberry Graham missed a layup, asking Gen. Petraeus if we could get a brigade a month out of Iraq, expecting the answer no, and Petraeus replied "It clearly would depend on the conditions at that time... that might be doable." Whoops.

I don't expect that these key facets of the crumbling of the Bush Iraq strategy will get much notice - that Petraeus and Crocker have to answer these questions instead of the policymaker-in-chief ensures that he is shielded from the consequences of his actions. But it's important to note that many Democrats are fighting to get out the truth about Iraq, and to change the debate from whether or not "we're winning" and whether our continued presence in Iraq makes sense for our economic and national security.

Great, Where's Lindsay Graham Going To Buy His Rugs Now?

"Sorry folks, park's closed. Moose out front shoulda told ya."

On April 1, 2007, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) strolled through the open-air Shorja market in Baghdad in an effort to prove that Americans are “not getting the full picture” of what’s going on in Iraq. In a press conference after his Baghdad tour, McCain told a reporter that his visit to the market was proof that people could “walk freely” in parts of Baghdad.

What McCain failed to mention was that he was accompanied by “100 American soldiers, with three Blackhawk helicopters, and two Apache gunships overhead.” He also appeared to be wearing a bulletproof vest during his visit.

Since that trip, McCain has claimed that the situation in Iraq has improved even more. A few months ago, McCain claimed that “we’ve succeeded militarily” in Iraq. Things, of course, are going so well, that he wants to keep U.S. troops there for at least 100 years.

McCain is now back in Iraq for a “surprise visit with Iraqi and American diplomatic and military leaders.” He is joined by fellow Iraq war defenders Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC). But it’s unlikely they will be visiting the Shorja market again. Today, CNN reported that they tried to visit the Shorja market, but it was too unsafe and they were unable to go.

(via)

This is a major blow to the Iraqi rug industry.

I'm going to have a lot more about the "Responsible Plan" being offered by progressive candidates today. This is a major development, the first tangible one toward ending the war since the Democratic takeover of Congress in 2006. That ended up having no material effect, but this might. I also will have a lot from a panel I sat in on with Brian Katulis of the Center for American Progress, perhaps one of the most knowledgeable foreign policy experts we have on our side of the aisle. There's a moment we're coming to where progressives can finally get together and do something to end this catastrophic occupation.