Category: Politics

Who Says that Irony is Dead

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Yes, it’s ironic that one of the leading opponents of Marijuana decriminalization in New York State was was busted for possession, but true irony would involve him being beaten up by said cop”

Republican New York State Assemblyman Steve Katz (AD-99) was arrested Thursday morning for possession of marijuana after he was pulled over for speeding to Albany for a legislative session. The New York State Trooper who pulled over Katz smelled marijuana in the conservative Assemblyman’s car. Katz then surrendered a bag of weed to the Trooper.

 Katz, who has strong Tea Party backing in the lower Hudson Valley, has opposed legalizing medical marijuana treatments for New Yorkers with conditions such as cancer and glaucoma while in the Assembly. The outspoken conservative with was first elected to the Assembly in 2010. He sits on the alcoholism and drug abuse committee, as well as its committees on higher education, mental health and economic development.

I do love the headline to this story though, “Katznip“.

When is Being in a Car Accident Not the Worst Thing to Happen to You All Day?

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When you are returning from a field trip to CPAC (the Conservative Political Action Conference), where you have meet attendees who argue that the slaves should never have been emancipated.

I was involved in an accident with a toy Tour bus carrying students from the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, who were returning from this field trip.

Light posting for a while.

Posted via mobile.

Speaking of Back Loaded Bribery………

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Did you hear the one about the SEC chair who got a choice gig on the GE Board of Directors for protecting the banksters?

Well, now you have:

Mary L. Schapiro is starting to get a taste of opportunities in the private sector after stepping down as chairwoman of the Securities and Exchange Commission in December.

General Electric announced on Monday that it had nominated Ms. Schapiro to serve as one of its directors. She will stand for election at the company’s annual meeting on April 24.

The G.E. board position will certainly pay her more than she made in government service. G.E. paid its directors about $250,000 in 2011; at the S.E.C., her annual salary was around $165,000. Presumably, there will be other board positions and job offers, although Ms. Schapiro has not hinted at her future career aspirations.

“Future career aspirations?”

I believe that her “future career aspirations” are spelled “Ka-Ching!“

If we could hook a generator to the revolving door that she is using, we could power the world.

Unfortunately, this is a feature, not a bug of live in the nation’s capitol.

So Not Surprised

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Joe Lieberman has taken a job with the Koch suckers at the American Enterprise Institute.

Digby nails the analysis:

This is a common project of the Right these days. They know that no one likes their ideas. Scarred by the experience in Iraq, few want to do it again in Iran. Few want to eliminate Social Security, give tax breaks to rich, loosen gun laws, or do any of the other things on the Right’s agenda.

So one of the Right’s strategies is to go trolling for morally deficient, easily corrupted neoliberal “Democrats” to assist their efforts at creating a “bipartisan consensus” to override popular will and common sense in the service of the conservative agenda.

I don’t know how much he’s being paid for this, but my guess is that it will be a lot more than he made as a Senator, because that’s how back loaded bribery works.

No promises, but if you toe the line, you know that you get a payoff when you retire.

This Explains a Lot About Bob Woodward

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The author of a biography on John Belushi compared his understanding of the life, and death, to Bob Woodward’s account, the book Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi, and finds the Washington Post scribe’s account to be bizarrely inaccurate.

Tanner Colby is not suggesting that Woodward fabricating anything, but rather that he is completely incompetent when it comes to putting the facts he has in an accurate context:

A little more than a week ago, during an interview with Politico, Bob Woodward came forward to claim he’d been threatened in an email by a “senior White House official” for daring to reveal certain details about the negotiations over the budget sequester. The White House responded by releasing the email exchange Woodward was referring to, which turned out to be nothing more than a cordial exchange between the reporter and Obama’s economic adviser, Gene Sperling, who was clearly implying nothing more than that Woodward would “regret” taking a position that would soon be shown to be false.

A rather trivial scandal, but the incident did manage to raise important questions about Woodward’s behavior. Was he cynically trumping up the administration’s “threat,” or does he just not know how to read an email? Pretty soon, those questions tipped over into the standard Beltway discussion that transpires anytime Woodward does anything. How accurate is his reporting? Does he deserve his legendary status?

I believe I can offer some interesting answers to those questions. Thirty-one years ago, on March 5, 1982, Saturday Night Live and Animal House star John Belushi died of a drug overdose at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles—which, bear with me a moment, has more to do with the current coverage of the budget sequester than you might initially think.

………

Twenty years later, in 2004, Judy Belushi hired me, then an aspiring comedy writer, to help her with a new biography of John, this one titled Belushi: A Biography. As her coauthor, I handled most of the legwork, including all of the interviews and most of the research. What started as a fun project turned out to be a rather fascinating and unique experiment. Over the course of a year, page by page, source by source, I re-reported and rewrote one of Bob Woodward’s books. As far as I know, it’s the only time that’s ever been done.

………

Wired is an infuriating piece of work. There’s a reason Woodward’s critics consistently come off as hysterical ninnies: He doesn’t make Jonah Lehrer–level mistakes. There’s never a smoking gun like an outright falsehood or a brazen ethical breach. And yet, in the final product, a lot of what Woodward writes comes off as being not quite right—some of it to the point where it can feel quite wrong. There’s no question that he frequently ferrets out information that other reporters don’t. But getting the scoop is only part of the equation. Once you have the facts, you have to present those facts in context and in proportion to other facts in order to accurately reflect reality. It’s here that Woodward fails.

………

Woodward also makes peculiar decisions about what facts he uses as evidence. His detractors like to say that he’s little more than a stenographer—and they’re right. In Wired, he takes what he is told and simply puts it down in chronological order with no sense of proportionality, nuance, or understanding.

………

Of all the people I interviewed, SNL writer and current Sen. Al Franken, referencing his late comedy partner Tom Davis, offered the most apt description of Woodward’s one-sided approach to the drug use in Belushi’s story: “Tom Davis said the best thing about Wired,” Franken told me. “He said it’s as if someone wrote a book about your college years and called it Puked. And all it was about was who puked, when they puked, what they ate before they puked and what they puked up. No one read Dostoevsky, no one studied math, no one fell in love, and nothing happened but people puking.”

Here is the money quote:

Whenever people ask me about John Belushi and the subject of Wired comes up, I say it’s like someone wrote a biography of Michael Jordan in which all the stats and scores are correct, but you come away with the impression that Michael Jordan wasn’t very good at playing basketball.

It’s not that Woodward is a manipulator with a partisan agenda. He doesn’t alter key evidence in order to serve a particular thesis. Inconsequential details about rehearsing movie dialogue are rendered just as ham-handedly as critical facts about Belushi’s cocaine addiction. Woodward has an unmatched skill for digging up information, but he doesn’t know what to do with that information once he finds it.

My thesis about Woodward, and I’ve thought this for a while is that he’s kind of a big Hoover* for information, but he needs someone who can connect the dots to create actual meaning.

As I have followed Woodward’s solo career, I have increasingly given more credit to Bernstein.

*The vacuum cleaner, not the former FBI director.

This is Fascinating

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An analysis by Robert Parry suggests that both Watergate and Iran Contra were about covering up collusion to subvert US foreign policy for electoral advantage, something that the less sophisticated amongst us might call treason:

………

A favorite saying of Official Washington is that “the cover-up is worse than the crime.” But that presupposes you accurately understand what the crime was. And, in the case of the two major U.S. government scandals of the last third of the Twentieth Century – Watergate and Iran-Contra – that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Indeed, newly disclosed documents have put old evidence into a sharply different light and suggest that history has substantially miswritten the two scandals by failing to understand that they actually were sequels to earlier scandals that were far worse. Watergate and Iran-Contra were, in part at least, extensions of the original crimes, which involved dirty dealings to secure the immense power of the presidency.

Presidents Richard Nixon, George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan photographed together in the Oval Office in 1991. (Cropped from a White House photo that also included Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.)

In the case of Watergate – the foiled Republican break-in at the Democratic National Committee in June 1972 and Richard Nixon’s botched cover-up leading to his resignation in August 1974 – the evidence is now clear that Nixon created the Watergate burglars out of his panic that the Democrats might possess a file on his sabotage of Vietnam peace talks in 1968.

………

Similarly, Official Washington and many mainstream historians have tended to dismiss Ronald Reagan’s Iran-Contra scandal as another case of some overzealous subordinates intuiting what the President wanted and getting everybody into trouble.

………

So, while congressional and federal investigators looked only at how the specific 1985-86 arms sales to Iran got started, there was no timely attention paid to evidence that the Reagan administration had quietly approved Israeli arms sales to Iran in 1981 and that those contacts went back to the days before Election 1980 when the hostage crisis destroyed Carter’s reelection hopes and ensured Reagan’s victory.

The 52 hostages were not released until Reagan was sworn in on Jan. 20, 1981.

Over the years, about two dozen sources – including Iranian officials, Israeli insiders, European intelligence operatives, Republican activists and even Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat – have provided information about alleged contacts with Iran by the Reagan campaign.

And, there were indications early in the Reagan presidency that something peculiar was afoot. On July 18, 1981, an Israeli-chartered plane crashed or was shot down after straying over the Soviet Union on a return flight from delivering U.S.-manufactured weapons to Iran.

In a PBS interview nearly a decade later, Nicholas Veliotes, Reagan’s assistant secretary of state for the Middle East, said he looked into the incident by talking to top administration officials. “It was clear to me after my conversations with people on high that indeed we had agreed that the Israelis could transship to Iran some American-origin military equipment,” Veliotes said.

In checking out the Israeli flight, Veliotes came to believe that the Reagan camp’s dealings with Iran dated back to before the 1980 election. “It seems to have started in earnest in the period probably prior to the election of 1980, as the Israelis had identified who would become the new players in the national security area in the Reagan administration,” Veliotes said. “And I understand some contacts were made at that time.”

When I re-interviewed Veliotes on Aug. 8, 2012, he said he couldn’t recall who the “people on high” were who had described the informal clearance of the Israeli shipments but he indicated that “the new players” were the young neoconservatives who were working on the Reagan campaign, many of whom later joined the administration as senior political appointees.

I really don’t think that “treason” is too strong a term here.

The assertion here is that the Watergate break-in was about trying to find files implicating Nixon in deliberately extending the war for electoral advantage, and the arms deliveries to Iran were payback for holding the Tehran embassy hostages from being released until after the elections.

It does provide some context to the “Third Rate Burglary” the brought Nixon down.

There were files on his interference, and he could not find them because a Johnson aide had taken them with him, and he was desperate to ensure that they would not be used against him in the 1972 elections.

Considering the 30,000 American deaths, and the million+ dead Vietnamese, Nixon and his merry band of rat-f%$#ers (their term) had to have been in a panic about this.

Your Daily Grillo

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The 5 Star Party will ask the Italian President to form the next Italian government:

Beppe Grillo’s anti-establishment 5-Star Movement said on Sunday it wanted to lead Italy’s next government following last month’s inconclusive election and reiterated that it would not agree to an alliance with any other party.

The movement’s newly elected parliamentary leaders told reporters it would make this position clear to President Giorgio Napolitano when he begins consultations later this month on the formation of a government.

“Our proposal will be a 5-Star government,” the movement’s Senate leader Vito Crimi said after a meeting of its lawmakers in a Rome hotel.

It is unlikely that the other parties would accept a government led by the 5-Star Movement. This is partly because of policy differences and partly because although it was the most voted single party at the election, 5-Star has fewer seats in parliament than the center-left and center-right coalitions.

I think that Italian politics is going to get even more bizarrely surreal, which, considering Silvio Berlusconi’s multiple elections as Prime Minister, I did not think was possible.

BTW, here is a video of Beppe Grillo’s comedy routine from 1998.

Its a bit evocative of Carlin, though I think that there is a lot of Italian culture context that I am missing.

H/t Naked Capitalism for the vid.

Increasingly, Conservative Journalism Appears to be an Oxymoron

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This is Not Star Trek. In Startrek, the Evil Spock has a goatee. In our world the evil James O’Keefe is clean shaven, and the good one, chief cat-herder for the Massachusetts Pirate Party, has a goatee.

So, the great triumph of the conservative gonzo journalism machine, the destruction has resulted in James O’Keefe paying a 6 figure settlement to one of the people he deceived:

James O’Keefe—the blonde bombshell who set the conservative world of hidden-camera YouTube movies ablaze—has just agreed to a $100,000 settlement to calm down the unjustly fired (and weirdly litigious about it) ACORN employee Juan Carlos Vera. According to a copy of the deal, obtained late last night by your wonkettes and viewable after the jump, O’Keefe has also agreed to ink an 11-word non-apology apology, that sources close to reality are calling “insincere” and “suuuuuuuch bullsh%$.”

 According to the final 5-page agreement, signed by O’Keefe and his legal counsel Mike Madigan this past Tuesday, the boy detective now publicly “regrets any pain suffered by Mr. Vera or his family.” O’Keefe and his counsel have also consented to fork over the $100,000 within 30 business days of the settlement agreement’s being signed.

(%$ mine)

Of course, this news comes out on the same week that we had a spate of other revelations about the right wing media machine:

The best piece of journalism I’ve read in the last couple of weeks — and certainly the most perversely fascinating — came from Chris Faraone in the slickly rejiggered Boston Phoenix. It was the story of Nadia Naffe, a woman who signed up into James O’Keefe’s ratfking empire only to find herself the eventual target of said ratfking. Faraone’s piece is long, but you should read it all, as the kidz say, not just because Faraone is a terrific storyteller, which he is, but also because his story dropped just as the insular universe of rightwing faux-journalism seems to be imploding to all points of the compass.

(Faraone’s story on Naffe appears to be a chunk of an upcoming book. His earlier effort, 99 Nights With The 99 Percent, a collection of his insider reporting on the Occupy movement, is also required reading. I know, I know. You were told there wouldn’t be homework.)

First, there was the embarrassing revelation that a host of rightwing bloggers — and one from the port side, Jerome Armstrong — were on the fiddle with the Malaysian government to the tune of almost 400 large. (One of them, Ben Domenech, was a recidivist embarrassment, having previously lost a sweet gig with the endlessly credulous Washington Post because he was a proven thief of other people’s work.) Then, last night, it was revealed that Tucker Carlson’s vanity project, The Daily Caller, appears to have been caught trying to sucker its audience regarding the tale of New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez’s patronizing of prostitutes. (TDC is standing by its reporting for the moment, although its explanation is rather heavy with the squid ink.) This is hardly the way you want to celebrate Holy Week commemorating The Passion Of Andrew Breitbart. On the other hand, maybe it is…

Being a polemicist is not necessarily antithetical to telling the truth, but it does appear to be so for the right wing media.

As to why, my guess is that this has a lot to do with the fact that their customers are not their readers as much as they are the people who bankroll them.  The Scaifes and the Kochs of the world have no concern with the truth.

Hugo Chavez is Dead

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Certainly, he was never a friend of the United States, and this was exacerbated by the US tacit (and likely covert explicit) support of 2002 coup attempt against him.

As to how he was as the chief executive (and pretty much everything else) in Venezuela, I would not give him high marks, unless I were grading on the curve.

If I were grading on the curve though, he would get high marks against the previous ruling elites in Venezuela.

It is truly a shame that, when compared to the political elites who seemed primarily concerned with who got the loot, he was arguably a better leader.

Yes, This is to be Expected from a Story “Broken” by the Daily Caller

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It turns out that the escort who claimed that Senator Bob Menendez paid her for sex now says that she was paid to lie:

An escort who appeared on a video claiming that Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) paid her for sex has told Dominican authorities that she was instead paid to make up the claims and has never met or seen the senator, according to court documents and two people briefed on her claim.

The woman said a local lawyer had approached her and a fellow escort and asked them to help frame Menendez and a top donor, Salomon Melgen, according to affidavits obtained by The Washington Post.

That lawyer has in turn identified a second Dominican lawyer who he said gave the woman a script and paid her to read the claims aloud. The first lawyer said he found out only later that the remarks would be videotaped and used against Menendez, the affidavits say.

The claims of two women that they had had sex with Menendez seemed to confirm a tipster’s allegations that Menendez had patronized prostitutes while vacationing in the Dominican Republic. The tipster, who last spring began e-mailing allegations to a government watchdog group and the FBI, said he had evidence that Menendez had relations with underage prostitutes and participated in sex parties arranged by Melgen, his friend and political backer.

FBI agents conducting interviews in the Dominican Republic have found no evidence to back up the tipster’s allegations, according to two people briefed on their work.

Here’s the kicker:

The videotaped claims of two women, made with their faces obscured, were posted on the conservative Web site the Daily Caller. The site reported that “the two women said they met Menendez around Easter at Casa de Campo, an expensive 7,000-acre resort in the Dominican Republic. . . . They claimed Menendez agreed to pay them $500 for sex acts, but in the end they each received only $100.”

Daily Caller Editor Tucker Carlson did not reply to phone calls and e-mails requesting comment.

What a surprise.

He did not call back.

Kind of like when John Fund hid in the bathroom when police came in to talk to him a domestic violence beef.

Carlson is yet another product of the Republican nepotism machine, like Bill Kristol and Liz Cheney, and the results ain’t pretty.

We Have A New Best Definition for Chutzpah

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For those of you who are not aware of the classic definition, “That quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan,”

Well, Mark “Hiking the Appalachian Trail” Sanford has come up with a new and improved definition:

But Mark wanted more than just his ex-wife’s disavowal of interest. When he first ran for Congress in 1994, he installed Jenny as his campaign manager. He did this for reasons of economy—“You’re free,” he told her at the time—but she proved a natural at the job. She blossomed into a shrewd political strategist, running Mark’s subsequent campaigns and becoming his top adviser. Will Folks, a former Sanford press secretary, says, “There’s absolutely no way he would have ever won the congressional seat or been governor without her.”

According to Jenny, she had already told Mark she would be taking a pass on the race the day before, at the funeral of a mutual friend. So when Mark came to visit her, he arrived with a proposal. “Since you’re not running, I want to know if you’ll run my campaign,” he said. “We could put the team back together.”

Jenny told him, in so many words, that wasn’t going to happen. Mark made one last appeal.

“I could pay you this time,” he said.

Un-dirtyword-believable.

You leave her, you publicly humiliate her, and you want her to run her campaign?

If I were Mark Sanford’s parents, I’d worry.

H/t Talking Points Memo.

In Your Face, Wayne LaPierre

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There was a primary to replace Jesse Jackson Jr. in the Illinois 2nd Congressional district, and it ended up a referendum on gun laws, and the pro-gun control candidate won it in a walk:

Riding a wave of “super PAC” spending that helped catapult her to the front of a crowded Democratic field, Robin Kelly, whose campaign called for tougher national gun laws, clinched her party’s nomination Tuesday in a special primary election for the House seat vacated by Representative Jesse L. Jackson Jr.

The outcome of the contest, which had been unexpectedly cast into the center of the national gun debate, was welcome news for Michael R. Bloomberg, the mayor of New York and a staunch gun-control advocate. He poured more than $2.2 million into attacking Ms. Kelly’s chief opponent, Debbie Halvorson, this month.

Flooding Chicago airwaves, Mr. Bloomberg’s super PAC, Independence USA, ran a series of advertisements criticizing Ms. Halvorson for opposing certain gun control measures and endorsing Ms. Kelly as the alternative candidate.

………

In Illinois’s Second Congressional District, which includes parts of the South Side of Chicago and southern suburban counties, Mr. Bloomberg’s super PAC financed a wave of mailers and television advertisements that criticized Ms. Halvorson, a former House member, for having gotten an “A” rating from the National Rifle Association in earlier elections and for opposing bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazine clips.

………

Last week, the Illinois State Rifle Association responded to Mr. Bloomberg’s effort by sending out mailers asking its members in the district to vote for Ms. Halvorson on Tuesday. Ms. Halvorson said she had not asked for the endorsement.

She was considered a front-runner after Mr. Jackson resigned in November, just weeks after his re-election. He pleaded guilty last week to one count of fraud for spending campaign money on personal expenses and celebrity memorabilia.

………

In he victory speech, Ms. Kelly, a former state representative who has worked as a chief of staff for the Illinois state treasurer, told supporters they had sent “a message that tells the N.R.A. that their days of holding our country hostage are coming to an end.”

Your mouth to God’s ear, Ms. Kelly.

The Germans Used the Euro to Exported Inflation

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Paul Krugman looks at the German economy at the start of the Euro, and compares it to the Spanish economy now, and observes that the Germans painlessly devalued relative to Europe as the Euro created inflation in the periphery:

1. Thanks to the giant housing bubble, Spanish costs got much further out of line than Germany’s ever did, so the required adjustment is much bigger.

 2. Germany got to do its adjustment in the face of a relatively strong European economy; Spain is being asked to adjust in the face of a depressed Europe sliding back into recession.

 3. In part because of this difference in overall macro conditions, but also because Germany doesn’t have a housing boom and is actually engaging in a bit of austerity on its own, the burden of adjustment this time around is falling much more on deflation by the overvalued country.

 ………

 You can see just how much harsher Spain’s adjustment is, and how much less help it’s getting from rising wages in the rest of the eurozone. Basically, Germany is refusing to do for Spain what Spain did for Germany in the past.

 And the result of all that is incredibly high unemployment.

German banks fueled speculative bubbles in the periphery, which raised costs relative Germany, and so made Germany’s labor markets relatively cheap.

I’m beginning to think that ending the Euro is the only way to save the EU.

Quote of the Day

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Even though, as the headline shows, I have little Italian, and less Italian politics, I’m so chuffed that Beppe Grillo did well in yesterday’s Italian elections — even though he was neither a wizened, permanently tanned, and shamelessly unrehabilitated whoremonger nor a Goldman Sachs alumnus (sorry for the redundancy) — that I thought I’d do a wrap-up before conventional wisdom completely congeals. Alert readers will, of course, correct and amplify this post in comments!

—Lambert Strether of Corrente on the recent Italian elections.

(emphasis mine)

Of course, the whoremonger is Berulusconi, and the Goldman Sachs alum is Monti.

The election results were as follows:

Italy’s center-left coalition won the most votes in the parliamentary election, mustering 110,000 more votes than its traditional rival, final data from the Interior Ministry showed early Tuesday.

 The victory came thanks to inclusion of the SVP party, a regionalist movement that has long ruled the German-speaking South Tyrol region.

 Pier Luigi Bersani’s center-left coalition had 29.54% of the total vote while Silvio Berlusconi’s center-right coalition had 29.18% of the vote.

 Under Italy’s electoral law, the winner of the most votes wins 340 of the 630 seats in the lower house, while losers split the rest proportionally.

 “It’s too close to call,” said Angelino Alfano, the head of Mr. Berlusconi’s People of Freedom party, signaling he may demand a closer scrutiny of the vote tally.

 In fact, Italy’s two main coalitions of the past 20 years together claimed less than half of all eligible votes, and their combined total fell more than 10 million from the last national vote in 2008.

 Turnout was the lowest in Italian history at 75%, but the big surprise was Beppe Grillo’s Five-Star Movement, an anti-establishment party born only three years ago, which took 25.55% of the vote. Activists in his party said they had no interest in negotiating “little stitched-up backroom deals.”

 Outgoing Prime Minister Mario Monti’s centrist coalition won 10.56% of the vote as support for the two veteran politicians he chose to ally with collapsed. Gianfranco Fini, once Mr. Berlusconi’s virtual dauphin, won 0.465 of the vote while Pierferdinando Casini’s UDC party, which claims to be the heir of the Christian Democrat party that ruled Italy for decades, won 1.78%, final data showed.

I would disagree with the assessment on Monti’s lack of performance.

This vote, albeit one with low turnout by Italian standards, was about a rejection of austerity and German Hegemony in the EU.

Of course, it did not help that Monti was completely clueless about  how widely loathed the very serious people are loathed: (H/t Paul Krugman)

There was a symbolic moment in the Italian elections when I knew that the game was up for Mario Monti, the defeated prime minister. It was when in the middle of the campaign – in the midst of an anti-establishment insurgence – he took off to Davos to be with his friends from international finance and politics. I know his visit to the elite gathering in the Swiss mountains was not an issue in the campaign, but it signaled to me an almost comic lack of political realism.

(emphasis mine)

Yes, sipping champagne with the rich ratf%$#s who ruined the world economy, and then end up even richer, that’s a productive use of your time.

I’m with Simon Johnson on this:  We need to break the back of the privileged class that broke the world as a first step to fixing the world.

The so-called “Technocrats” like Monti are just water carriers for these folks, and as such, are a part of the problem, not a part of the solution.

Sorry, But I Think the Lede Was Buried Here

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Yes, the Senate finally got around to voting on, and approval, Hagel, but they bury the part about a Democratic Senator supporting a filibuster of John Brennan as Director of the CIA:

The chances for Mr. Brennan remained good, though his confirmation was not expected to be entirely smooth, as both Republicans and Democrats have raised objections over the agency’s use of drones to kill American citizens suspected of terrorism. Republicans also see the Brennan vote, like the fight over Mr. Hagel, as leverage to press other issues with the White House.

Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said on Tuesday that he favored a longer confirmation process to force the White House to disclose more about the drone program. “There’s an old saw that after somebody is confirmed, they don’t even owe you a holiday card,” he said. “This is the time for vigilant oversight.”

Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, has called for similar disclosures on drones and has threatened to use “every procedural option at my disposal” to hold back Mr. Brennan’s nomination.

That’s half way down the New York Times article.

Meanwhile, Tina Brown’s Daily Beast prominently features this on their web site:

If you’ve followed the drawn-out saga surrounding John Brennan’s nomination to be CIA director—with all the questions it has raised about drones and targeting of American citizens—you may have noticed something odd: one of the Senate’s longtime liberals, Ron Wyden of Oregon, has appeared to be very much on the same page as Rand Paul of Kentucky, arguably the most ardent Tea Partier on Capitol Hill.

It turns out this isn’t just a fleeting alliance. For some time now, Wyden and Paul—along with two other senators, Republican Mike Lee of Utah and Democrat Mark Udall of Colorado—have been working together to try to curb the broad authorities the Obama administration has asserted in the war on terror. The advent of this group, which calls itself the Checks and Balances Caucus, is certainly not the first time in political history that the libertarian right has allied with the civil-liberties-minded left. Yet at a moment when inter-party cooperation is almost nonexistent in Washington, any bipartisan alliance—especially one that includes some of DC’s most committed ideological opposites—is both unusual and noteworthy.

I do hope that Wyden has the guts to back up a filibuster by Paul, because the administration needs to be forced to be more open about these policies and their legal justifications.

This is a Good Thing

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Map courtesy of the Kaiser Family Foundation

Notwithstanding the statements of the Obama administration that it was essential that the states should run their own health insurance exchanges, it’s good news that the Federal Government will run 26 of 50 of the exchanges:

Friday was a very important day for health policy days. It was the last day for states to tell the federal government whether they wanted any part in running the Affordable Care Act health exchanges come 2014.

The federal government did not get many takers. Some of the most closely watched states, including Florida and New Jersey, decided to leave the entire task to the federal government. All told, the federal government will run 26 of the state health exchanges. It also will partner with seven states, where state and federal officials take joint responsibility for the marketplace. Seventeen states and the District of Columbia will take on the task themselves. Here’s what that looks like in map form, via the Kaiser Family Foundation.

………

The big question moving forward is: Does this split matter? Is it better or worse for the federal government to be running the majority of the state health exchanges?

In the health policy world, there are essentially two schools of thought on this. The first is that states opting out of the exchanges is horrible for the Obama administration. All along, Health and Human Services has urged states to move forward on their own. Now, HHS has the massive task of setting up 26 separate state exchanges.

………

That is the pessimist’s take on the federal government’s very big workload. But there’s also an optimist’s take, one that suggests that federal oversight of most Affordable Care Act marketplaces will ultimately strengthen the health overhaul.

Remember, House Democrats originally wanted one national health exchange, where everyone in all 50 states could purchase coverage. That idea was nixed in the Senate bill, which aimed to give states a larger role in setting up the Affordable Care Act.

In a way, all these states turning over their exchanges to the federal government brings Obamacare a little closer to the more liberal House bill, which had the federal government running one big marketplace. It allows the White House to have more control over setting up its signature legislative accomplishment. It also creates some economies of scale, as HHS can develop one template exchange that all 26 states it handles will use.

I’m not sure why the Obama administration was so big on the state run exchanges.

My guess was that they are worried about the inevitable teething problems, and wanted as many opportunities as possible to spread the blame around.

The state based insurance system has resulted in a lot of oligopolies in healthcare, and has allowed the insurance corporations to purchase legislators and regulators, so I see this as an unalloyed good.

It moves us away from the inevitable race to the bottom that will occur in state based systems.

It’s a Start

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In the primary to replace Jesse Jackson, Jr. in Congress, a leading candidate has been forced out largely because of her high ratings from the NRA:

Illinois State Sen. Toi Hutchinson dropped her bid to fill the Congressional seat of former Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. on Sunday after her moderate views on gun safety made her a target of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s political action committee, Independence USA.

In what will be the first election since the shooting in Newton, Connecticut, the $2 million ad buy criticized Hutchison and another candidate for receiving an “A” rating from the National Rifle Association (NRA). “In the race for Congress, the big issue? Fighting gun violence. Debbie Halvorson and Toi Hutchinson both earned an A from the NRA, they can’t be trusted,” the ad began before endorsing former state Rep. Robin Kelly who supports background checks and banning assault weapons.

Guns have become a central issue in the primary, as Kelly attacked her opponents’ views on gun safety and “pointed out that Hutchinson received a 92 percent rating from the NRA” and does not support a statewide concealed carry ban. She also urged all candidates to “sign on to a five-point pledge to reduce gun violence: banning assault weapons and high capacity magazines, closing the gun show loophole, supporting Illinois’ conceal carry ban, and refusing support from ‘organizations that oppose reasonable gun safety legislation.’”

A few years ago, it would have been unthinkable that a high rating from the NRA would be used against a candidate, but the recent behavior of the organization, in particular the batsh%$ insane pronouncements of their CEO, Wayne LaPierre, have, when juxtaposed with the Newtown shootings, made the organization increasingly toxic.

This is good.