Category: Congress

Dems Try for Seppuku Once Again

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So the Democrats on the “Super Committee” are trying to gut Medicare once again, while showing how serious they are by exceeding their mandate for deficit reductions:

Democrats are proposing to slash huge budget deficits by up to $3 trillion, aiming high to repair the country’s fiscal mess even as Republicans show early signs of resisting the proposals.

The broad package of measures calls for long-term spending cuts, including to the government-run Medicare health program for the elderly that threatens to explode the national debt. The other half of the package would come from tax increases, four congressional aides told Reuters on Wednesday.

Republicans rejected the Democratic initiative.

“Asking for a $1.5 trillion tax hike in the middle of a jobs crisis is not a serious proposal,” said a House of Representatives Republican leadership aide.

There is a deep ideological divide between the two parties over taxes — likely a key issue in the congressional and presidential elections in November 2012.

The Democratic plan was presented on Tuesday behind closed doors to a special congressional panel tasked with finding ways of cutting the budget deficit by at least $1.2 trillion over 10 years, the sources said.

It was a rare leak from the so-called “super committee,” whose secretive deliberations have sparked intense speculation about how much progress the 12 Republican and Democratic members have made since they first began meeting on September 8. They face a November 23 deadline to report to Congress.

The aides spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the negotiations.

The Democratic plan proposes cutting the deficit by $2.5 trillion to $3 trillion and calls for between $200 billion and $300 billion in new stimulus spending to boost an ailing U.S. economy. It would be paid for with lower interest payments from reducing deficits.

It also seeks around $400 billion in Medicare savings, with half coming in benefit cuts and the other half in cuts to healthcare providers. Details of that proposal were scant but tackling the popular Medicare program is always politically risky for politicians in Washington, especially Democrats.

The Democratic proposal also identifies $100 billion in cuts to the Medicaid healthcare program for the poor, according to a lobbyist in contact with the committee.

Seriously, it’s both bad policy and bad politics, and it echos Obama’s strategy of attempting to show that they are even more crazy serious about the deficit, which the rest of the country really does not give a crap about.

It Appears that Batsh%$ Insane is Bad for Business

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Because it looks like the big corporate fat cat donors are not supporting the Republicans as one would expect:

Last month, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee just about doubled the haul of their counterparts, the National Republican Congressional Committee. The DCCC pulled in $6.64 million, while the NRCC brought in just $3.8 million. While the NRCC has more cash on hand (around $12.2 million to the DCCC’s around $9.5 million) and slightly less debt, over the course of the year the DCCC is outraising the team with the big House majority.

The year-long totals show the DCCC raising nearly $48 million to the NRCC’s just over $44 million.

I think that the Republican Party Presidential Primary clown show has convinced business executives that Republicans are simply not a good investment, because while one can price risk, you can’t price uncertainty, and insane motherf%$#er teabaggers are the very definition of uncertainty.

Least Surprising News of the Day

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According to Senator Sanders, a recent GAO report has uncovered pervasive conflicts of interests at the Federal Reserve.

The language is steeped in the gentility of the Senate, but I think that the short version is, “Stop the looting and start prosecuting”.

Sanders’ full press release after the break.

GAO Finds Serious Conflicts at the Fed

October 19, 2011

WASHINGTON, Oct. 19 – A new audit of the Federal Reserve released today detailed widespread conflicts of interest involving directors of its regional banks.

“The most powerful entity in the United States is riddled with conflicts of interest,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said after reviewing the Government Accountability Office report. The study required by a Sanders Amendment to last year’s Wall Street reform law examined Fed practices never before subjected to such independent, expert scrutiny.

The GAO detailed instance after instance of top executives of corporations and financial institutions using their influence as Federal Reserve directors to financially benefit their firms, and, in at least one instance, themselves.  “Clearly it is unacceptable for so few people to wield so much unchecked power,” Sanders said. “Not only do they run the banks, they run the institutions that regulate the banks.”

Sanders said he will work with leading economists to develop legislation to restructure the Fed and bar the banking industry from picking Fed directors. “This is exactly the kind of outrageous behavior by the big banks and Wall Street that is infuriating so many Americans,” Sanders said.

The corporate affiliations of Fed directors from such banking and industry giants as General Electric, JP Morgan Chase, and Lehman Brothers pose “reputational risks” to the Federal Reserve System, the report said. Giving the banking industry the power to both elect and serve as Fed directors creates “an appearance of a conflict of interest,” the report added.

The 108-page report found that at least 18 specific current and former Fed board members were affiliated with banks and companies that received emergency loans from the Federal Reserve during the financial crisis.

In the dry and understated language of auditors, the report noted that there are no restrictions in Fed rules on directors communicating concerns about their respective banks to the staff of the Federal Reserve. It also said many directors own stock or work directly for banks that are supervised and regulated by the Federal Reserve. The rules, which the Fed has kept secret, let directors tied to banks participate in decisions involving how much interest to charge financial institutions and how much credit to provide healthy banks and institutions in “hazardous” condition. Even when situations arise that run afoul of Fed’s conflict rules and waivers are granted, the GAO said the waivers are kept hidden from the public.

The report by the non-partisan research arm of Congress did not name but unambiguously described several individual cases involving Fed directors that created the appearance of a conflict of interest, including:

  • Stephen Friedman In 2008, the New York Fed approved an application from Goldman Sachs to become a bank holding company giving it access to cheap Fed loans. During the same period, Friedman, chairman of the New York Fed, sat on the Goldman Sachs board of directors and owned Goldman stock, something the Fed’s rules prohibited. He received a waiver in late 2008 that was not made public. After Friedman received the waiver, he continued to purchase stock in Goldman from November 2008 through January of 2009 unbeknownst to the Fed, according to the GAO.
  • Jeffrey Immelt The Federal Reserve Bank of New York consulted with General Electric on the creation of the Commercial Paper Funding Facility. The Fed later provided $16 billion in financing for GE under the emergency lending program while Immelt, GE’s CEO, served as a director on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
  • Jamie Dimon The CEO of JP Morgan Chase served on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York at the same time that his bank received emergency loans from the Fed and was used by the Fed as a clearing bank for the Fed’s emergency lending programs. In 2008, the Fed provided JP Morgan Chase with $29 billion in financing to acquire Bear Stearns.At the time, Dimon persuaded the Fed to provide JP Morgan Chase with an 18-month exemption from risk-based leverage and capital requirements. He also convinced the Fed to take risky mortgage-related assets off of Bear Stearns balance sheet before JP Morgan Chase acquired this troubled investment bank.

To read a more detailed analysis of the GAO report prepared for Sen. Sanders, click here.

To read the full GAO report, click here.

OK, Maybe She Has a Chance

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Elizabeth Warren’s Senate campaign raised $3.15 million in the 3rd quarter, more than double Wall Street darling Scott Brown’s haul of $1.55 million:

 Consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren is off to a quick start when it comes to raising money for her Senate campaign in Massachusetts, with a debut total — $3.15 million — that may even out-perform some of the Republican candidates for president.

Warren, who helped set up the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and is a favorite candidate among progressives, announced the impressive third-quarter haul in an email to her supporters Monday. She said that 96% of the contributions came in donations of $100 or less.

Note that, “Most of the money was raised since she formally joined the race for the Democratic nomination in mid-September.”

You gotta figure that she’s going to get a lot of sweat equity out of her supporters as well.

I think that the primary campaign is basically over, but I still think that Scott Brown, particularly with the enthusiastic backing of the banksters, and what will surely be tepid support from the Wall Street living Democratic establishment *cough* Obama *cough* will be a though nut to crack.

But I am no longer making a prediction about the outcome.

What the Shrill One Said

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Yes, Paul Krugman is correct in noting that the US dollar is overvalued, and that the
Chinese Yuan is undervalued.

He only has 800 words, so what should also be noted is that the dollar is not just overvalued versus the Yuan, but versus the whole world, though he does note that the Chinese are deliberately pushing the value of the Yuan in addition.

Since the undervalued Yuan is, at its core, a tariff on Chinese imports, and a subsidy of their exports, it is clear that the sanctions bill in the Senate is justified.

That being said, there are also structural issues that overvalue the US dollar, to the advantage of Wall Street and the disadvantage of Main Street (Hence Robert Rubin’s* full throated support of a “strong dollar policy when he was SecTreas), and these need to be addressed as well.

*Why is this corrupt ratf%$# not under criminal investigation?

Not Enough Bullets…

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The SEC has ruled that Congressmen, their staffers, and executive branch members are free to commit insider trading with impunity:

When you buy and sell stocks based on secrets you learned at the office, it could be insider trading.

But when a United States Senator does it, it’s probably perfectly legal.

That’s because the SEC has largely determined that trading stocks based on advance knowledge of action in Congress is not insider trading.

If anything, it’s “outsider” trading — buying and selling shares based on knowledge of an outside force that’s about to hit a company’s share value.

Think of it like a trader who sees a satellite image of a hurricane bearing down on an oil rig — and shorts the oil company’s stock in expectation of the damage.

Except in the case of Capitol Hill, the members of Congress can be both the trader and the hurricane — buying and selling shares in expectation of the effect that their own action has on the company’s stock price.

Some critics say that’s probably going on a lot on Capitol Hill — although they don’t have any direct proof.

“It’s really quite outrageous,” said Craig Holman, the legislative representative for Public Citizen. “If you just take a look at the statistics, members of Congress are either geniuses when it comes to stock trading or they are in fact trading off of some of this insider information.”

A pair of recent academic studies found that House members beat the market in their personal stock trading by about 6 percent, and Senators beat the market by about 10 percent.

Just when you thought that Washington could not get any more corrupt.

Chutzpah

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The old definition was murdering your parents and asking for mercy because you are an orphan.

The new definition is House Majority Leader Eric Cantor whining about delays in disaster aid to his district:

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-7th, is pushing for information on the status of Gov. Bob McDonnell’s request for federal disaster assistance for Louisa County residents in the wake of an earthquake there last month.

On Friday, Cantor held a conference call with Federal Emergency Management Agency and Louisa County officials. A readout of the call provided by Cantor’s office indicates that he asked FEMA officials about the timeline and process for determining whether the agency would grant federal assistance.

Maybe, just maybe, it had something to do with your attempt to use FEMA as a political chip in the budget fight you pig felching hypocrite.

And The Knives Come Out for Elizabeth Warren

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You go, girl!

It appears that the powers that be in finance are trying to gin up a story about how there were irregularities on Elizabeth Warren’s TARP oversight panel because the details on compensation are not as granular as they would have liked.

It’s the usual suspects:

  • Politico, who has never seen a Republican talking point that they won’t echo.
  • The Boston Herald, which even if Rupert was forced to sell it, is still in his pocket.

In addition to being hostile to the idea that banks should be able to rip people off without consequences, she has also eloquently made the point that, “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own,” because the accumulation of wealth is an artifact of the support that the rest of society provides you: (see the vid as well)

In the video (at left), which was filmed at an event in Andover, Mass., Warren rebuts the GOP-touted notion that raising taxes on the wealthy amounts to “class warfare,” contending that “there is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody.”

Warren rejects the concept that it is possible for Americans to become wealthy in isolation.

“You built a factory out there? Good for you,” she says. “But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.”

She continues: “Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

It’s kind of an anti-Randroid philosophy that Democrats should be shouting from the heavens, but the only other political figure of any national stature who does is Bernie Sanders, and he ain’t a Dem.

I understand why the knives are out.  The Objectivist view of the divine right of wealth is an unspoken common wisdom among much of the political class, and real populism, as opposed to the teabagger rent-a-crowds,  is a threat to that.

Worst      Speaker      Ever

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I mean, of course John Boehner.

It’s not because he’s an evil ratf%$#, I think that Newt has him beat on that particular qualification, but rather because he is completely unable to manage his caucus:

House Republicans tried a fresh strategy Wednesday night: Go it alone on a spending bill.

The result was an embarrassing setback.

Wednesday night’s rank-and-file rebuke of GOP leadership — with 48 Republicans bolting on a temporary spending bill — underscored the fact that the House Republican majority is still struggling to find unity on major spending bills. It also showed they still need Democratic votes to help them govern.

The pressure from an angry Speaker John Boehner didn’t work — he even threatened to strip committee assignments. Four dozen Republicans —mostly conservatives — wanted more cuts, and they just said no, creating an uncomfortable scene on the House floor as the funding bill failed on a 195-230 vote. Democrats showed a rare moment of unity in overwhelmingly opposing the continuing resolution, which would keep the government funded through Nov. 18.

Now, to prevent a government shutdown, Republicans will have to rewrite the bill and figure out how to get the votes.

Which means that he’s going to have to drop the offsetting cuts for the disaster relief, and come up with a bill to appeal to the Democrats, at least about 25 or so of them anyway.

The inmates are running the asylum, when Boehner should be the adult in charge.

Have you ever though how f%$#ing terrifying it is to think of a situation where a chain smoking tanaholic sot with the brains of a turnip like him has to be the adult in the room?

And he is 3rd in line to be the President.

Well, Pull Down My Pants, and Paint My Butt Blue!

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The latest poll has Elizabeth Warren up two points over Scott Brown in the Massachusetts Senate race, which, while within the margin or error, is still a 17 point swing in her favor:

Elizabeth Warren has had an incredibly successful launch to her Senate campaign and actually leads Scott Brown now by a 46-44 margin, erasing what was a 15 point deficit the last time we polled the state in early June.

Warren’s gone from 38% name recognition to 62% over the last three months and she’s made a good first impression on pretty much everyone who’s developed an opinion about her during that period of time. What was a 21/17 favorability rating in June is now 40/22- in other words she’s increased the voters with a positive opinion of her by 19% while her negatives have risen only 5%.

I would note that the general rule of thumb is that undecideds break 2:1 to the challenger, so this is a pretty ugly picture for the distinguished gentleman from Massachusetts.

There are some important caveats here as well though.  Warren just announced, and so is likely experienced a bounce, and this is just one poll.

What’s more, Brown’s approval numbers are falling as well. (see chart pr0n)

My guess is that Massachusetts voters are beginning to understand that he is much more of a cog in the Republican party machine than he said while he was campaigning in the special election.

And the Republicans War on Organized Labor Continues

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The House just passed a bill which would castrate the National Labor Relations Board:

The House voted on Thursday to approve a Republican-backed bill that would prohibit the National Labor Relations Board from trying to block Boeing from operating a new $750 million aircraft assembly line in South Carolina. The largely party-line vote was 238 to 186.

Republicans denounced the labor board’s case against Boeing, asserting that the board was overreaching its authority and should not be dictating where companies can locate their operations. But many Democrats and union leaders condemned the legislation, arguing that it undercut an independent federal agency and favored Boeing, a potent lobbying force and prominent political donor.

Under the bill, an unusual effort to curb a federal agency’s actions in a pending case, the labor board would be barred from seeking to have an employer shut, transfer or relocate employment or operations “under any circumstances.”

The bill, called the “Protecting Jobs from Government Interference Act,” is expected to face a battle in the Democratic-controlled Senate. In the House vote, the partisan divide was clear: only eight Democrats voted for the bill and only seven Republicans voted against.

Republicans have repeatedly criticized the board’s acting general counsel for filing a complaint against Boeing last April, accusing the company of building an assembly plant in North Charleston, S.C., as a form of retaliation against unionized employees in Washington State who have engaged in five strikes since 1977, including a 58-day-walkout in 2008.

The National Labor Relations Act prohibits companies from taking any actions, whether firing employees or relocating a factory, against workers for exercising federally protected rights that include forming a union or going on strike.

“F%$# the law, we’re for rich pigs,” so say the Republicans.

The management at Boeing Publicly Stated that they were establishing a factory in South Carolina in retaliation for earlier (legal) strikes.  If there is no sanction allowed for blatant and admitted law breaking, it will get worse.

Then again, the Republicans don’t think that rich people should be prosecuted for breaking the law.

Elizabeth Warren Announces Run for Massachusetts Senate

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Elizabeth Warren has officially declared her run for the Senate.

I understand why she feels the need to run, but I am pessimistic.

First, whatever you say about Republican Scott Brown, he is a very good campaigner, second, the Dems are rooting for her to lose almost as much as the Republicans are, because they can then argue that people don’t want real consumer protections.

And if she wins, she ends up in the Senate, where she would enter a seniority driven and hidebound old boys club that would do their level best to keep her away from any meaningful voice on finance.

I wish her luck, but it’s a lose-lose for her us.

Well, at least she’s better than Brown, who’s a smarmy right wing ratf%$#.

Her campaign web page is here.

Thanks Barack

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So, the Dems just lost the special election to replace Anthony Weiner, losing the Congressional district to the ‘Phants for the first time im almost 90 years. (!)

While the Democrat, David Weprin, by all accounts ran a horrible campaign, we also need to understand that that the Republicans aggressively tried to make this campaign national rather than local, and it does not bode well for keeping the White House, or the Senate, or retaking the House in 2012.

I understand that no will save it publicly, but this is not good news for Barack Obama or the Democratic party.

Unfortunately, particularly inside Obama administration’s reality distortion field, they are telling themselves that it’s not about them, and so will not learn from this.

I’ve Had it With These Motherf%$#ing Republicans on This Motherf%$#ing Plane!M

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Alligator 0, Snake 0, Let’s call it a tie.

The latest regulation that the Republicans are objecting to and trying to repeal, is one that literally forbids snakes on a plane.

I’m not kidding here. They are literally trying to roll back regulations on the transportation of snakes on airplanes:

Democrats and Republicans all agree that the nation needs to move on a jobs agenda. And Republicans have a new plan: unleash the reins of snake commerce.

GOP members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee today called attention to a proposed regulation that would restrict the transportation and importation of nine types of snakes, including the Burmese Python.

In a new report entitled “Broken Government: How the Administrative State has Broken President Obama’s Promise of Regulatory Reform,” GOP members cited the proposed snake ban as one of seven examples of red tape choking off job growth in an already ailing economy.

One witness invited to testify, snake breeder David Barke, told lawmakers that the rules “threatens as many as a million law-abiding American citizens and their families with the penalty of a felony conviction for pursuing their livelihoods, for pursuing their hobby, or for simply moving with their pet to new state.”

Politico reports that Florida officials, led by Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL), are pushing for the new rules because the Everglades are under attack by 100,000 gigantic Burmese pythons who have been accidentally introduced by negligent pet owners. The outside invaders have been on a rampage, devouring native birds and other creatures. One python grew so big that it managed to devour a six-foot alligator before exploding. No really. This actually happened. There’s a photo.

No, this is not The Onion, and I wish that I didn’t live in a world where I cannot tell the difference between reality and satire.

Have I Mentioned that I Love Barney Frank?*

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He’s calling for a major restructuring of the Federal Reserve:

U.S. Representative Barney Frank, the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, is renewing a push to remove Federal Reserve regional presidents from voting on central bank interest-rate decisions.

Frank, of Massachusetts, will submit a new version of legislation to cut the voting rights of five rotating regional representatives from the 12-member Federal Open Markets Committee, he said today. The revision of Frank’s May proposal calls for replacing them with four presidential appointees, according to a position paper released by his office.

Eliminating regional presidents, who are selected by board members of their banks and approved by Fed governors, will make interest-rate votes more democratic, Frank said in the paper. The 7-3 vote at the last FOMC meeting in August underlined the need to replace the presidents, who have become a “significant constraint on national economic policy making,” he said.

Regional presidents “are neither elected nor appointed by officials who are themselves elected,” Frank wrote in the paper. “They are part of a self-perpetuating group of private citizens who select each other and who are treated as equals in setting federal monetary policy with officials appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate.”

He’s right, of course. The regional Feds are not governmental organizations, they are quite literally owned by the regional banks they nominally regulate, and these people are therefore the employees of the regional banks.

Anything that to any degree takes any governmental (or in this quasi-governmental) agency out from under the thumb of the banksters is a good thing.™

*In a 110% purely heterosexual kind of way, of course, as the General would say.

Well, Here’s Some Good News

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‘Phant John Mica, chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, has decided that it’s too politically costly to shut down the FAA over his desire for union busting:

Unions were breathing a sigh of relief Friday morning after House Republicans punted a contentious anti-union issue preventing funding for the Federal Aviation Administration to the end of December, providing back pay to agency workers and giving opponents more time to organize and fight GOP-backed anti-labor provisions.

Rep. John Mica (R-FL), who chairs the the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, introduced a clean short-term extension of the FAA through December providing back pay to workers who were furloughed for nearly two weeks during a partial shutdown of the agency earlier this month. House GOP leaders plan to vote on the bill next week.

The extension, which cuts the agency’s overall budget by 5 percent, will be the 22nd for the agency since 2007, the last time Congress passed a full authorization bill. In the intervening years, Congress has failed to pass the measure over a dispute about modernizing the nation’s air traffic control system, but this year, the real sticking point for Democrats, was a GOP demand to change recently instituted federal labor regulation that made it easier for unions to organize at airline companies.

My guess is that some of his constituents at his town meetings gave him an earful over his union busting resulting in the layoffs of thousands of workers.

The next stage for the Dems should be to figure out why he folded, and rinse, lather, and repeat, but they won’t.

And the Daily Show Writers Rejoice

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Yes, the wife of wrestling magnate Jim McMahon, Linda, following a failed campaign in which she dumped millions of her husbands dollars on a epically failed campaign for the Senate in 2010, has decided to run again for the Connecticut Senate seat:

Linda E. McMahon, the wrestling mogul who spent $50 million of her own money in an aggressive but failed Senate run in Connecticut last year, will announce in the coming week that she will try again, according to two Republicans who are close to her.

Ms. McMahon, the two Republicans said, will seek the party nomination next year for the seat being vacated by Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats and who announced that he would not run for re-election. They requested anonymity to avoid being seen as upstaging Ms. McMahon’s announcement.

Her candidacy has the potential to alter the calculations of other candidates and potential candidates, if only because she has demonstrated an ability to finance a statewide campaign with little difficulty.

In last year’s Senate race, Ms. McMahon built a formidable political organization in just months and then led a hard-charging campaign that transformed a political newcomer into a highly visible figure in the state.

In the end, however, Ms. McMahon, the former chief executive of World Wrestling Entertainment, lost to Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, in one of the most closely watched Senate races in the country.

This time, Ms. McMahon plans to raise money from private donors instead of relying strictly on her own money, according to one Republican close to her. She decided to take this approach partly because of criticism last year that she was using her wealth to buy herself a seat in the Senate, the Republican said.

And because she understands the concept of throwing good money after bad, so she is looking for some useful idiots.

Still the comedic possibilities are endless.

ActBlue — Elizabeth Warren Draft Fund

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Well, it looks likes Elizabeth Warren has a fundraising issue in her naisant bid for Senator from Massachusetts, specifically that Scott “Wall Street’s Bitch” Brown is raising money hand over fist from the Banksters, because the idea of someone who would prevent them from cheating the average consumer scares the sh%$ out of them:

Elizabeth Warren’s combative history with Wall Street could create a fundraising dilemma for her burgeoning Senate campaign.

Her ardent grassroots following on the left — forged during stints as TARP watchdog and as mastermind of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — would likely make her a formidable Senate candidate in Massachusetts.

But her reputation as sheriff to Wall Street could also be a liability against Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.), a popular Republican who has been stockpiling campaign cash in anticipation of a tight 2012 race.

If Warren runs, she will have to decide whether to court high-rolling donors in the financial services community — an awkward choice both personally and politically, given her carefully crafted image as antagonist to big finance.

“I think it’s pretty clear she’s going to run the classic, grassroots campaign here in Massachusetts,” said Mary Anne Marsh, a longtime Democratic operative in the state. “That means she’s going to rely on folks here to give low-dollar donations here a number of times.”

But without the support of heavy-hitting donors in Massachusetts, many of whom work at hedge funds and other financial firms, Warren might find it difficult to keep up with Brown’s fundraising juggernaut.

I tend to think that her bigger problem is that she has to fairly explicitly criticize Obama, but the (IIRC) she needs a modicum of support from the party establishment to net enough votes in the party caucus to even get on the primary ballot.

I tend to think that Warren will do more good outside of the Senate than inside the Senate, if just because being a woman with no seniority in what is a pretty misogynist institution is not a high impact position.

In any case, you can donate here, or via Matthew Saroff’s Act Blue Page

H/t Sarah Burris at Crooks and Liars

McCain Lobbied to Arm Qaddafi

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So says the gift that keeps on giving, the Wikileaks cables.

Julian Assange should be up for a Nobel:

For all the braying by the Senate’s top three hawks about how the U.S. wasn’t doing enough to oust Libyan dictator Col. Muammar Qaddafi from power, one might be surprised to learn that exactly two years ago, Sens. John McCain (R-AZ), Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) were in Tripoli meeting with the erratic leader and giving him assurances that relations between the nations were on the mend.

According to a leaked August 2009 U.S. diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks recounting the Senators’ junket, the neoconservative Connecticut Senator captured the dynamic of aligning with a brutal dictator:

Lieberman called Libya an important ally in the war on terrorism, noting that common enemies sometimes make better friends.

Qaddafi’s history as a top enemy of the U.S. stretched back decades, but his change of heart came quickly after the U.S. invaded Iraq under the pretense of Saddam Hussein’s development of weapons of mass destruction. Hawks seized on Libya’s détente with the West as a sign that Bush’s tough actions in Iraq were having a ripple effect, though patently not, as Iraq War boosters had predicted, with regard to democratic reforms. “We never would have guessed ten years ago that we would be sitting in Tripoli, being welcomed by a son of Muammar al-Qaddafi,” said Lieberman, according to the leaked cable.

The three Senate hawks discussed in detail the Qaddafi regime’s security needs with Libyas National Security Adviser, Qaddafi’s son Muatassim. According to the cable:

5.(C) Senator McCain assured Muatassim that the United States wanted to provide Libya with the equipment it needs for its [a Libyan security program]. He stated that he understood Libya’s requests regarding the rehabilitation of its eight C130s [a transport plane] and pledged to see what he could do to move things forward in Congress. He encouraged Muatassim to keep in mind the long-term perspective of bilateral security engagement and to remember that small obstacles will emerge from time to time that can be overcome.

And these are the wankers that are considered to be serious about foreign policy and national security by the very serious people in Washington, DC.

And no one will ever challenge them on this.

We are so doomed.