Category: White House

Yes, Not Like Iraq at All………

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This just in, we have a news report that, the rebels were behind the gas attack in Ghouta.

Full disclosure, I know nothing of the news organization, MintPress News, though I am familiar with the work of one of the authors, Dale Gavlak, she’s done stuff for public radio, the AP, and Salon.

The assertion is that the Jabhat al-Nusra, received the weapons with the aid of Prince Bandar, the head of intelligence for the Saudi Arabia.

The connection between the House of Saud and Jabhat al-Nusra is well known, so it is not out of the realm of possibility that this could have happen.

Needless to say, I don’t think that this will delay the attack on Syria at all, because Obama is too concerned about his dick swinging over his “red line” comments, and so wants to maintain his “credibility.”

My guess is that it was Syrian government forces who did this, but I’ve yet to see anything that would justify us dropping missiles on them at this point.

The 4 page declassified report from the White House, which has basically no useful information in it at all, is after the break.

What a Bunch of Misogynistic Assholes

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In the Washington Post, Neil Irwin looks at the Federal Reserve Chairman selection process, and discovers that the Obama administration is full of a bunch of sexist assholes:

Why don’t they like Janet Yellen?

  • She actually has an opinion, “Yellen has a perfectly solid relationship with Bernanke, as best as I can tell, but she’s more of her own thinker within the institution.“
    • Because a Fed Chair should not have their own opinions?  (The Fed Chair is supposed to be independent).  I call this the “Uppity Woman” objection.
  • She has never been a part of the Obama “team”, as in “They are big on the team player concept, people diving in together to sort through the hard and messy challenges they face……… In the early months of the Obama administration, the same could be said of the group that included Geithner, Summers, Gene Sperling and others who are now influential voices advising the president on the decision.“
    • Notice, not a woman in the group.  Romer and Bair were marginalized too.
  •  She is too cautious and well prepared, “A second, and related, reason that Yellen’s leadership style isn’t a great mesh with the Obamaites is also one of her strengths. She is always meticulously prepared, a careful and systematic thinker who chooses her words carefully. In a Fed policy committee meeting or a gathering of international central bankers, she typically scripts herself in advance and reads those prepared comments. ……… She is methodical, not manic.“
    • Let me get this straight, they WANT a shoot from the hip, shoot from the hip loose cannon at Fed Chair?   This is the last thing you want from a Federal Reserve Chairman, or for that matter any central banker in any nation.  They are asking for something that would not pass muster for a central banker for Zimbabwe!
  • And then there is concerns about policing bubbles, “Third, the president very clearly frets about the risk of financial bubbles and wants a Fed chief who will be attuned to staving them off.”
    • Because Yellen was the first, and the most strident, Fed Governor to warn about the housing bubble.  

It’s no wonder that Anita Dunn told Ron Suskind that the Obama administration, “Actually fit all of the classic legal requirements for a genuinely hostile workplace to women.”(She later denied it, but Suskind had the tape)

And all this is about making Larry Summers the Fed Chair.

Larry Summers, who is pretty much the epitome of, “Does not work well with others,” is the guy that Barack wants to head a consensus driven organization.

Larry Summers is bad policy, and its bad politics, and that is ignoring Summers’ record of cashing in on Wall Street, which makes him suspect as a regulator.

Why Janet Yellen will not Become the Federal Reserve Chairman

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Because she has ovaries:

The favored parlor game of the political-economic complex right now is guessing who will replace Ben Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve. The clear front-runner is Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Janet Yellen. But she’s by no means a sure thing.

One important reason she’s not — and I don’t know another way to say this — is sexism, as evidenced by the whispering campaign that’s emerged against her.

The message isn’t always delivered in a whisper, of course. In May, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas President Richard Fisher suggested on CNBC that if Yellen is chosen, the pick will have been “driven by gender.” That’s more of a shouting campaign.

Fisher hastened to add that Yellen is “extremely capable.” But, he said, “there are other capable people.” Capable people, I guess, who are male, and thus whose picks wouldn’t be driven by gender.

But Fisher’s comments aren’t the sort that matter in this process. They’re too crude. The significant doubts about Yellen are transmitted with more subtlety, and for months they’ve been coursing through the cloistered, close fraternity that will drive the selection of Bernanke’s successor.

If you look at the dynamics of the Obama administration and finance, at least under the auspices of (the now thankfully in private life) Timothy Geithner was contempt against those who lacked a Y chromosome.

Notwithstanding the presence of Valerie Jarrett, the Obama administration has many of the aspects of an old boy’s club, and even if you ignore the “boys” part, it is a club, and Larry Summers is most assuredly a part of that club, and Janet Yellen isn’t.

Barack Obama Reveals that he is Black

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Barack Obama has spent pretty much all of his time on the national stage trying to avoid the accusation that he is the stereotypical “Angry Black Man“, and so, with the brief exception (which he walked away from as quickly as he could) of a comment on the arrest of Henry Louis Gates.

This is why Obama saying that 35 years ago that he would be Trayvon Martin was such a big deal:

Barack Obama used an unexpected speech at the White House to personally address the debates over race relations that have convulsed America since George Zimmerman was acquitted over the shooting of the unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin.

In remarks immediately interpreted as the most expansive comments on race since he became president, Obama said the US was still not “a post-racial society”.

“You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is: Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago,” he said.

But once again, it appears that Obama immediately followed this up by pandering to bigots racial profilers by floating the name of New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, who has aggressively profiled blacks, Hispanics, and Muslims:

Earlier this week, President Barack Obama endorsed New York City police commissioner, and stop-and-frisk cheerleader, Ray Kelly as an adequate replacement for Janet Napolitano as head of the Department of Homeland Security. Under Kelly, the New York Police Department’s policy on randomly stopping people in the streets and then questioning and patting them down for weapons and drugs, imposed a stiff burden on black and Latino residents. According to the ACLU in New York, between 2002 and 2011, black and Latino New Yorkers made up close to 90 percent of those stopped by police — 88 percent of whom had no weapons or drugs on them when it happened. Kelly has staunchly defended the policy regardless of the racial profiling it codifies and its fruitless conclusions.

But Obama told Univision on Wednesday that “Kelly has obviously done an extraordinary job in New York,” and that the police commissioner is “one of the best there is” — an “outstanding leader in New York.”

“Mr. Kelly might be very happy where he is,” said Obama. “But if he’s not I’d want to know about it. ‘Cause, you know, obviously he’d be very well qualified for the job.”

This endorsement seems tone deaf given the current conversations nationwide around national security. Kelly’s “extraordinary” work in New York City has led to the city council passing the Community Safety Act, which scales back the police’s ability to racially profile considerably. Kelly’s stop-and-frisk policy is being challenged in federal court by the Center for Constitutional Rights right now. Obama’s own Justice Department may be sending in a federal monitor to ensure that NYPD stops racial profiling. The following, questioning and apprehension of targeted black males is at the crux of the current debate around George Zimmerman’s killing Trayvon Martin.

Also, you have to read the New York Times OP/Ed by Ta-Nehisi Coates:

It was candidate Obama who in 2008 pledged to “ban racial profiling” on a federal level and work to have it prohibited on the state level. It was candidate Obama who told black people that if they voted they would get a new kind of politics. And it was State Senator Obama who understood that profiling was the antithesis of such politics. Those of us raising our boys in the wake of Trayvon, or beneath the eye of the Demographics Unit, cannot fathom how the president could forget this.

Of course, the best argument against allowing Ray Kelly anywhere near law enforcement are the words of Ray Kelly, who, writing in (where else) The Wall Street Journal, where he engages in transparent lying to defend his career:

Since 2002, the New York Police Department has taken tens of thousands of weapons off the street through proactive policing strategies. The effect this has had on the murder rate is staggering. In the 11 years before Mayor Michael Bloomberg took office, there were 13,212 murders in New York City. During the 11 years of his administration, there have been 5,849. That’s 7,383 lives saved—and if history is a guide, they are largely the lives of young men of color.

So far this year, murders are down 29% from the 50-year low achieved in 2012, and we’ve seen the fewest shootings in two decades.

He knows that these numbers are reflected nationwide in any number of cities with all sorts of different sorts of police tactics.

He knows these numbers, and the reason that he lies about this is because the only way that he can defend his contemptible policies is to misrepresent his numbers, and what they mean.

Bush Obama Nominee for Commerce Secretary Approved

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Sorry about the headline, but Penny Pritzker who was just approved by the Senate as Secretary of Commerce, with only Bernie Sanders voting no:

Senators pick their battles, and by Tuesday, members in both parties had decided not to have one with President Obama over his nomination of Penny Pritzker, the billionaire hotel heiress, to be commerce secretary. In a 97-to-1 vote, they confirmed her to join the cabinet.

The lone dissenter was Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the socialist independent who caucuses with Senate Democrats.

When Mr. Obama announced in May his choice of Ms. Pritzker, 54, to join his second-term economic team as head of the eclectic Commerce Department — its responsibilities vary widely and include federal business programs and weather forecasting — rumblings from the right and left suggested trouble.

Yes, virulently anti union, a bought/looted a bank, dove into subprime mortgages, and left the taxpayers holding the bag, and keeps her fortune in overseas tax havens. (Background here.)

But the is a friend of Obama, and was his his first big buck donor, so she gets to be commerce secretary.

I guess that it’s the new motto of the Obama administration cabinet, “Not quite as lame as Alberto Gonzalez.”

Hope & Change ……… Not!!! Environment Edition………

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The White House is slow walking major environmental regulations:

The White House has blocked several Department of Energy regulations that would require appliances, lighting and buildings to use less energy and create less global-warming pollution, as part of a broader slowdown of new antipollution rules issued by the Obama administration.

The administration has spent as long as two years reviewing some of the energy efficiency rules proposed by the Energy Department, bypassing a 1993 executive order that in most instances requires the White House to act on proposed regulations within 90 days. Regulatory review times at the White House Office of Management and Budget are now the longest in 20 years, having spiked sharply since 2011.

………

The proposed rules would require that refrigerators, light bulbs and electrical equipment use less energy, much as the Obama administration in its first term required automakers to commit to make cars more energy efficient.

With a sweeping climate bill having died in the Senate in Mr. Obama’s first term, his only options for major action on the issue in the second term appear to involve executive action. In one of the signature moments of his 2013 State of the Union address, he vowed that if Congress failed to act on energy and climate change, he would use his executive powers to do so.

What it comes down to is that Barack Obama does not believe in regulation. That’s why he had Cass Sunstein as the head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.

The slowdown stems from a combination of factors, including high-level vacancies and election-year politics. Analysts and former administration officials said the White House, sensitive to Republican charges that it was threatening the economy by pushing out dozens of so-called job-killing regulations, reined in the process last year, leaving many major rules awaiting action for months beyond legal deadlines.

Some administration officials are also concerned that regulations have the potential to do more harm than good. “If we make refrigerators lousy, that’s a big problem,” Cass R. Sunstein wrote in “Simpler: The Future of Government,” a book published this year about his time running the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, a small unit of the budget office responsible for reviewing regulations.

………

Lisa Heinzerling, a professor of law at Georgetown University and a former top Environmental Protection Agency official who tangled with Mr. Sunstein over a number of environmental regulations in Mr. Obama’s first term, said in a recent article that such demands for detailed analysis become “a regulatory game of Whac-A-Mole: every time the agency meets one demand for a piece of information about the costs or benefits of a rule, it finds itself met with a new and different demand.”

She said the decision of how quickly to move now rested with Mr. Obama. “The cabinet does not need a presidential directive telling the agencies to do their work,” she said, “rather, it needs presidential support for the work they are trying to do.”

I think that Ms. Heinzerling is missing the point: If Obama wanted regulations to progress with alacrity, they would be.

Regulations are stalled because that is what he wants. 

Cass Sunstein was head of the OIRA, QED.

I Guess the Obama Administration Picked the Wrong Week to Stop Sniffing Glue

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In the middle of a rather busy past few days for news, the Obama administration has quietly dropped restricting women’s access to birth control:

The Obama administration has decided to stop trying to block over-the-counter availability of the best-known morning-after contraceptive pill for all women and girls, a move fraught with political repercussions for President Obama.

The government’s decision means that any woman or girl will soon be able to walk into a drugstore and buy the pill, Plan B One-Step, without a prescription.

The Justice Department had been fighting to prevent that outcome, but said late Monday afternoon that it would accept its losses in recent court rulings and begin putting into effect a judge’s order to have the Food and Drug Administration certify the drug for nonprescription use. In a letter to Judge Edward R. Korman of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, the administration said it would comply with his demands.

The Justice Department appears to have concluded that it might lose its case with the appeals court and would have to decide whether to appeal to the Supreme Court. That would drastically elevate the debate over the politically delicate issue for Mr. Obama.

Women’s reproductive rights groups, who had sued the government to clear the way for broader distribution of the drug, cautiously hailed the decision as a significant moment in the battle over reproductive rights but said they remained skeptical until they saw details about how the change will be put into practice.

They should worry about how it is put in practice.  Barack Obama has a long history of tepid (at best) support for reproductive rights, and his comment that he supported the blatantly political and craven restriction, because, “as the father of two daughters, the government should apply some common sense,” shows that he does not get women as independent people in control of their bodies.

Thankfully though, he does realize that further appeals will be a political loser, so he’s throwing in the towel.

Speaking of Fails………

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How about that funny looking guy with the big ears?

You know, the one who ran against John McCain in 2008?

Well, there are reports that that he will nominate Bush Administration apparatchik James Comey as the next FBI director:

President Obama plans to nominate James B. Comey, a former senior Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration, to replace Robert S. Mueller III as FBI director, according to two people with knowledge of the selection process.

 Comey, 52, was at the center of some of the most bruising debates over counterterrorism during the Bush administration and established a reputation as a fierce defender of the law and the integrity of the Justice Department regardless of the political pressures of the moment.

 The expected nomination of Comey, a Republican, was seen in some quarters as a bipartisan move by a president besieged by Republicans in Congress. But Chuck Hagel’s prior service as a Republican senator from Nebraska did not spare him from a bruising nomination battle for secretary of defense.

(emphasis mine)

Yes, more of the PPUS (Post Partisan Unity Schtick).  It does not work, and neither does starting the negotiation process with capitulation does a disservice to the basic morals on that Obama purports to believe it.

Notwithstanding the fact that he opposed one the most egregious excesses of the Cheney Bush administration, he is a bad guy, who has next to no interest in supporting civil rights, as the ACLU has observed:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: 212-549-2666, media@aclu.org

WASHINGTON – Below is a statement from Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, on President Obama’s reported plan to nominate James B. Comey as the next director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

“While the ACLU does not take official positions on nominations to appointed office, there are many questions regarding Comey’s record that deserve careful scrutiny from the Senate Judiciary Committee. As the second-highest ranked Justice Department official under John Ashcroft, Comey approved some of the worst abuses committed by the Bush administration. Specifically, the publicly available evidence indicates Comey signed off on enhanced interrogation techniques that constitute torture, including waterboarding. He also oversaw the indefinite detention without charge or trial of an American citizen picked up in the United States and then held for years in a military brig. Although Comey, despite tremendous pressure from the Bush White House, deserves credit for courageously stopping the reauthorization of a secret National Security Agency program, he reportedly approved programs that struck at the very core of who we all are as Americans.

“It’s critical that the Senate ensures that the men and women of the FBI know that they have a leader who will demand adherence to the rule of law and will hold those accountable who do not, wherever he or she may find them.”

Seeing the Obama administration’s consistently dismissive attitude towards civil rights (Worst Constitutional Law Professor Ever), they may see his role in the some of the worst excesses of the Bush administration, including torture, as a plus.

This could very well be the stupidest person on the face of the earth. Perhaps we should shoot him.*

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I am referring, of course, to former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller, who’s latest brainstorm is that Obama should appoint Kenneth Starr as a special prosecutor to investigate the latest ginned up faux scandals against the Obama administration:

Republicans are howling for President Obama to name a special prosecutor to investigate the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of Tea Party groups. The president should call their bluff.

 The president should announce that he has told the Justice Department to appoint an independent investigator with bulldog instincts and bipartisan credibility. The list of candidates could start with Kenneth Starr, who chased down the scandals, real and imagined, of the Clinton presidency. It might include Patrick Fitzgerald, who was special counsel in the Valerie Plame affair, winning the conviction of Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, and who has successfully prosecuted two corrupt governors of Illinois, one from each party.

This is batsh%$ insane.

It’s also ahistorical. Ken Starr did not pursue any real scandals, that was done by his predecessor, Robert Fiske, who uncovered significant corruption in Arkansas. Starr had no interest beyone his witch hunt.

Ken Starr???? This is beyond the wildest dreams of the writers for The Onion.

I cannot believe that anyone can be this obtuse.

Neither can the people reading his post.  The comments are nearly universally disparaging.

The stupid, it burns us.

*What, you’ve never seen Ruthless People? Great movie.

This is a Feature, Not a Bug

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At Salon, David Dayen observes that it, “Turns out much-hyped settlement still allows banks to steal homes,’ even after the much hyped mortgage settlement.

This is not an oversight.  The Obama administration has aggressively allowed banks to cheat customers an investors since day one.

Basically, they see this as a way of making sure that the banks appear solvent.

See my writings on HAMP. Here is one quote:

Warren asked Geithner repeatedly about HAMP. After several evasions, Geithner said about the banks, “We estimate that they can handle ten million foreclosures, over time… this program will help foam the runway for them.”

By “them”, he means the banks.

By foaming the runway, he means that it allows them to delay writing down bad loans, and continue to extract payments and fees by cheating the public.

The suggestion that this is anything but deliberate policy is simply naive.

So, Now That We Have a Week of “Scandals”………

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The Obama administration has come out in favor of a media shield law that they had previously tried to delay and kill:

Under fire over the Justice Department’s use of a broad subpoena to obtain calling records of Associated Press reporters in connection with a leak investigation, the Obama administration sought on Wednesday to revive legislation that would provide greater protections to reporters in keeping their sources and communications confidential.

President Obama’s Senate liaison, Ed Pagano, on Wednesday morning called the office of Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, and asked him to reintroduce a version of a bill that he had pushed in 2009 called the Free Flow of Information Act, a White House official said.

The bill would create a federal media shield law, akin to ones most states already have, giving journalists some protections from penalties for refusing to identify confidential sources in federal law enforcement proceedings, and generally enabling journalists to ask a federal judge to quash subpoenas for their phone records.

………

The top Democrat on the committee, Representative John Conyers of Michigan, noted that he had sponsored a version of the Free Flow of Information Act that passed the House twice when it was under Democratic control. He said he would reintroduce his version, too, and he said he hoped that Republicans — who until recently had called for more aggressive investigations of leaks — would support it.

The version the Obama administration is seeking to revive, however, is the one that was chiefly sponsored by Mr. Schumer, which was negotiated between the newspaper industry and the White House. It was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee in a bipartisan 15-to-4 vote in December 2009. But while it was awaiting a floor vote in 2010, a furor over leaking arose after WikiLeaks began publishing archives of secret government documents, and the bill never received a vote.

In a statement confirming that he would reintroduce the legislation, Mr. Schumer referred to the controversy over the subpoena of A.P. calling records, saying: “This kind of law would balance national security needs against the public’s right to the free flow of information. At minimum, our bill would have ensured a fairer, more deliberate process in this case.”

So, they are supporting the fake bill that they and Chuck Schumer drew up a while ago in an attempt to kill Conyer’s real reform.

Same sh%$, different day.

So Not a Surprise

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CNN’s Jake Tapper has discovered that the emails leaked to the press on Benghazi were altered to make the State Department (Hillary Clinton) look worse:

CNN has obtained an e-mail sent by a top aide to President Barack Obama about White House reaction to the deadly attack last September 11 on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, that apparently differs from how sources characterized it to two different media organizations.

 The actual e-mail from then-Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes appears to show that whomever leaked it did so in a way that made it appear that the White House was primarily concerned with the State Department’s desire to remove references and warnings about specific terrorist groups so as to not bring criticism to the department.

 ………

 Whoever provided those accounts seemingly invented the notion that Rhodes wanted the concerns of the State Department specifically addressed. While Nuland, particularly, had expressed a desire to remove mentions of specific terrorist groups and CIA warnings about the increasingly dangerous assignment, Rhodes put no emphasis at all in his e-mail on the State Department’s concerns.

 The context of the e-mail chain is important.

 Different officials from different agencies were going through iterations of talking points for Congress.

As the inestimable Marcy Wheeler notes, this has David Petreaus’ finger prints all over it:

It has taken three days for the bleating press corps in DC to wade through the roll-out of Benghazi talking point emails and realize that the tension behind the emails — as has been clear from just days after the attack — is that Benghazi was really a CIA, not a State, Mission, and therefore CIA bears responsibility for many of the security lapses. So State, in making changes to the emails, was making sure it didn’t get all the blame for CIA’s failures.

 ………

 They might have also said, “since February, people tied to CIA’s mission have twice been harassed by militia members, suggesting our OpSec was so bad they knew we were in Benghazi.”

 ………
They might also have said that the “trusted” militia, February 17 Brigade, trained by David Petraeus’ CIA, whose career legacy is based on false claims of successfully training locals, appears to have allowed the attack to happen (and, critically, delayed CIA guards from heading to the State mission to help).

 Note that Congressman Frank Wolf is just now showing some interest in why CIA’s vetting of the militia central to the mission’s defense was so bad. Maybe if CIA had included that detail in their self-serving initial talking points, Congress would have turned to this issue more quickly, particularly since we’re currently training more potentially suspect militias in Syria.

 In other words, the story CIA — which had f%$#ed up in big ways — wanted to tell was that it had warned State and State had done nothing in response (which, perhaps unsurprisingly, is precisely the story Darrell Issa and Jason Chaffetz are trying to tell). The truthful story would have been (in part) that CIA had botched the militia scene in Benghazi, and that had gotten the Ambassador killed.

 ………

 David Petraeus, who tried and failed to get his preferred spin of the attack in Benghazi accepted by the Obama Administration, who subsequently got fired, purportedly for f%$#ing and possibly sharing classified information with his mistress, went to Dick Cheney’s propagandist to try to get his preferred spin adopted after the fact.

This is a classic example of why we should not give too much power and influence to our intelligence agencies: When they are the master, rather than the servant, their primary mission is covering up their own f%$#-ups, not providing good intelligence.

Jeebus

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The Obama administration has revealed what policies it wants changed under the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement.

What do the Obama administration oppose?

They oppose things like:

  • Requiring that meat packing plants have separate spaces for halal and non halal slaughter.
  • Restrictions on pork and alcohol importation for religious reasons.
  • Better capital requirements for banks.
  • High taxes on cigarettes and alcohol to discourage their use.
  • Personal data privacy protections.
  • Regulatory actions to control pharmaceutical costs.
  • Objecting to a fee (all of $21) to file a copyright complaint.
  • Public ownership of energy resources.
  • Patent policies which prohibit evergreening (renewing patents ad infinitum).
  • Comprehensive food labels.
  • Buy local military procurement. (which the US has)
  • A publicly owned post office.
  • Requiring that cheese be made from milk.

Seriously, this is a neoliberal (free market mousketeer) wet dream.

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.

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.

Tell Me That This Is Not a Bribe

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Jack Lew, Obama’s nominee for Treasury Secretary, appears to have a deal with his current employer, Citigroup, that looks an awful lot like a bribe:

Jack Lew is the nominee for Treasury secretary whose own bonus as an investment banker was bailed out by the Treasury Department when it rescued Citigroup Inc. (C) in 2008. He owes much to America’s taxpayers. He should also be grateful to Citigroup for agreeing to let him rejoin the government without suffering much for it financially.

An intriguing revelation from Lew’s Senate confirmation hearing last week was that he stood to be paid handsomely by Citigroup if he left the company for a top U.S. government job, under his 2006 employment agreement with the bank. The wording of the pay provisions made it seem, at least to me, as if Citigroup might have agreed to pay Lew some sort of a bounty to seek out, and be appointed to, such a position.

………

Lew’s employment agreement with Citigroup said his “guaranteed incentive and retention award” wouldn’t be paid if he quit his job, with limited exceptions. One was if he left Citigroup “as a result of your acceptance of a full-time high level position with the United States government or regulatory body.” This applied if he left “prior to the payment of any incentive and retention award for performance year 2008 or thereafter.” Such an award wasn’t guaranteed but would be consistent with the company’s practice, the document said.

A similar provision concerned his stock-based compensation. If Lew left in 2008 or afterward to accept a high-level U.S. government position, all of his outstanding equity awards, including restricted stock, would vest immediately, the document said. Alternatively, Citigroup had the option of paying Lew the cash equivalent of any shares he forfeited upon leaving. The terms didn’t mention other kinds of public-service work, such as a midlevel U.S. government job, a position in municipal or state government, or working at a nonprofit organization such as a university.

The payoff here is very clear: You go and work for the government, and you are our boy, bought and paid for.

First, the Cayman Islands accounts, and now this.

This guy is going to be an even bigger creature of the Wall Street banksters than than Geithner was.

This is deeply corrupt, in reality if not by law, but I think that the Obama administration sees this as a feature, not a bug.

When Charles F%$#ing Krauthammer is the Voice of Reason, You Have Jumped the Shark

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Jumping C. Megalodon*


This is one big shark that he jumped.
With Frikken Lasers!

The White House press corps(e) is mad as hell and they are not going to take it any more.

They have been stonewalled by the Obama administration for the last time?

What was it? The secret kill list? The use of the CIA and the NSA to spy on US citizens? The secret negotiations for the the Trans-Pacific Partnership?

Nope. The press is livid that they did not get a press availability when Obama played a round of golf with Tiger Woods:

The White House pushed back Tuesday against complaints from the press corps that the administration was too restrictive last weekend in denying reporters and photographers a glimpse of President Obama playing golf with Tiger Woods during his vacation in Florida.

 Press secretary Jay Carney said he sympathizes with the press corps’ bid for greater access, but he disputed suggestions that Obama has been more off-limits than his recent predecessors.

 Carney said Obama has held 35 news conferences in which reporters were permitted to ask questions, compared to 19 by George W. Bush to this point in his presidency. And Obama has granted 591 interviews, including 104 with television networks, Carney added.

 ………

 Later that afternoon, the White House confirmed that Woods was among Obama’s foursome after a reporter for Golf World Magazine and the Golf Channel had published the news on his Twitter feed hours earlier.

 After several reporters, including Fox News correspondent Ed Henry, president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, complained about the lack of access, Obama spoke with reporters aboard Air Force One on Monday evening on the way back to Washington. But that conversation was off the record.

Do you know how stupid this is?

It’s so stupid and over the top that lunatic and long distance psychotherapist Charles Krauthammer thinks that this is whiny inconsequential bullsh%$:

Charles Krauthammer is blasting the media for complaining about a lack of access to President Barack Obama over the weekend while he golfed with Tiger Woods, calling it “the biggest non-story” since the Kardashian weddings.

 “If the guy wants to play golf, the guy deserves a couple of days off. He wants privacy — big deal. This is the biggest non-story that the media have created since the Kardashian weddings,” Krauthammer said on Fox News on Monday. “I don’t understand what the story is and what the outrage is.”

Seriously, Charles Krauthammer is correct.

I cannot f%$#ing believe that I f%$#ing just f%$#ing said f%$#ing that.

*The largest shark, and likely largest predator fish ever. It died out some 1.5 million years ago. The Genus is still in dispute, between either Carcharodon (Great White) or Carcharocles (broad toothed Mako). But in either case, you are jumping C. Megalodon, you have jumped the biggest shark ever.

Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss………

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It appears that we will get fooled again

Jack Lew, who has been nominated by Barack Obama as Timothy Geithner’s replacement as Secretary of the Treasury.

Well, if you think back to Geithner’s confirmation hearings, it turned out that he simply did not pay his Social Security taxes for a few years while working at the IMF.

Well Jack Lew does one better, he squirreled away funds in the Cayman Islands:

Jack Lew, President Barack Obama’s Treasury Secretary nominee, previously held up to $100,000 in investments in an offshore hedge fund located in the Cayman Islands, according to financial disclosure forms.

Lew’s financial disclosure forms, filed in 2009 and 2011, showed that Lew had invested between $50,000 and $100,000 in a fund called Citigroup Venture Capital International Growth Partnership (Employee) II, L.P. — the very type of fund President Obama has repeatedly criticized.

The fund is an international venture capital fund for employees of Citigroup. According to his official White House biography, Lew served as managing director and chief operating officer of Citi Global Wealth Management and then Citi Alternative Investments (CAI) from 2006 to 2008.

Yeah, he is so not going to be the guy who cleans up Wall Street

H/t AmericaBlog.

Obama agrees to release legal memos on Awlaki drone strike – latimes.com

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So, now that Michale Isikoff has released a leaked Department of Justice memo which summarized their legal opinion on drone strikes, it basically said that Obama can kill anyone he wants at any time, the White House has agreed top release the actual legal opinion to Congress:

President Obama, who has championed lethal drone strikes as a major part of U.S. counter-terrorism efforts, bowed to pressure Wednesday and agreed to allow the Senate and House intelligence committees to review classified legal memos used to justify a drone strike against a U.S. citizen in Yemen in 2011.

Senators had demanded for months to see the Justice Department opinions that provided the White House legal authority to order the targeted killing of Anwar Awlaki, a New Mexico native who became an Al Qaeda leader.

Complaints by several Democrats over not receiving the documents had cast a shadow on the Senate confirmation hearing Thursday of John Brennan, the White House counter-terrorism advisor tapped to be CIA director.

An administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss classified material, described the decision to release the classified Office of Legal Counsel material as “part of the president’s ongoing commitment to consult with Congress on national security matters.”

“I think this is an encouraging first step,” said Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who sits on the Intelligence Committee and was among those who had publicly complained about being denied access to the material. He said Americans must “understand the rules under which a president may make these consequential decisions.”

Wyden said Obama had “assured me that all of the documents concerning the legal opinions on the targeted killing of Americans will immediately be made available” to the intelligence committees.

By “made available” I’m sure that they mean that the Congressmen can look at it in a locked room, take no notes, and not discuss it with their staff.

That’s how they roll.

You Tell Them to Go Cheney Themselves

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Another Cave

Obama tries to split the baby again, offering a compromise on birth control:

The Obama administration proposed yet another compromise on Friday in an effort to address the concerns of religious organizations that object to its policy requiring health insurance plans to cover contraceptives for women at no charge.

 Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, said the proposal would guarantee free coverage of birth control “while respecting religious concerns.”

 Churches and religious organizations that object to providing birth control coverage on religious grounds would not have to pay for it.

 Under the proposal, female employees could get free birth control coverage through a separate plan that would be provided by a health insurer. The institution objecting to the coverage would not pay for the contraceptives. The costs would instead be paid by the insurance company, with the possibility of recouping the costs through lower health care expenses resulting in part from fewer births.

Obama does not get it.

The Catholic Church, and its Talibaptist allies, are want the right to enforce their religious beliefs on others.

This is all about a naked assertion of power, and the proper response is “F%$# You”, not fence mending.