Needlenose

This is the kind of nostalgia I can live without.  Via Politico today:

If President Barack Obama needed any more incentive to go all out for Democrats this fall, here it is: Republicans are planning a wave of committee investigations targeting the White House and Democratic allies if they win back the majority.

Everything from the microscopic — the New Black Panther party — to the massive –- think bailouts — is on the GOP to-do list, according to a half-dozen Republican aides interviewed by POLITICO. . . .

. . . And a handful of aggressive would-be committee chairmen — led by Reps. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Lamar Smith (R-Texas) — are quietly gearing up for a possible season of subpoenas not seen since the Clinton wars of the late 1990s.

Issa would like Obama’s cooperation, says Kurt Bardella, spokesman for the ranking Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. But it’s not essential.

“How acrimonious things get really depend on how willing the administration is in accepting our findings [and] responding to our questions,” adds Bardella, who refers to his boss as “questioner-in-chief.’

Yes, my friends, that’s right — if their obstruct-and-blame game plan borrowed from 1993-94 repeats its success in giving Republicans control of the House of Representatives, the GOP will do its damnedest to relive the whole eight years of Bill Clinton’s presidency.  (No word yet if Obama will cooperate in the re-enactment by having a tawdry Oval Office affair, although he’s been remarkably obliging toward the Republican strategy so far.)

Not that anyone should be surprised, of course.  The Republicans only have a few tricks in their bag, and endless, puffed-up accusations of Democratic scandals have always been one of them.  And with a nominally Democratic president still in place in the White House no matter what happens in the midterm elections, it’s not like the GOP could entertain thoughts of passing a serious policy agenda, even assuming they had one.

Still, think about the media’s belly-exposing submissiveness toward the right wing in dealing with manufactured controversies like ACORN and Park 51.  Now imagine how much more airtime will be devoted to these nonsensical claims once they’re backed by House subcommittees with subpoena power, and the TV bobbleheads can gravely intone that Serious Republican Congressmen wouldn’t make such accusations unless they had some merit.  Sobering, isn’t it?

And even if relentless scandal-mongering won’t boost the public’s opinion of Republicans very much, it will accomplish the party’s underlying strategic goal — distracting Americans from issues that really matter, and convincing them further that government can’t accomplish anything useful.  (The Democrats, truth be told, are only good at the second part of that.)

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

We’ve only got Soros (where is my monthly check btw, George?).  They’ve got the Koch Brothers, Satan’s little helper Rupert Murdoch, and another 184 billionaire-donors.  Not to mention all those corporations…

Judicial activism in liberal courts result in equal rights for Americans.  Reactionary judicial activism consists of increasing the rights of corporations over Americans, such as keeping individual campaign contributions in check while allowing unlimited corporate donations.  Or continuously letting Big Coal destroy mountains and fresh water streams and to hell with the locals.

*Update 8/6/10* Great analysis of 2 recent rulings in favor of gay marriage along with encouraging prognostication of how SCOTUS might rule.

For years it’s been trendy to argue that in pricing fuels it’s important to use  ’true (or full) cost accounting’  to adequately compute the total cost of fuels.  Alternative fuels, through this reasoning, don’t look nearly so bad in comparison on a cost basis once you add in environmental costs, cleanup costs and the like to the cost of fuel.  The usual public policy conclusion is invariably that the greenshades sharpen their pencils to compute externals, and the government then add those externals to the cost of the fossil fuels in the form of a tax.

So I’ve been reading about this true cost of accounting for nearly 3 decades and while there has been a lot of accounting done, gubbermint has sat on its ass and delivered nothing in the way of the tax.  In fact, under the Shrubya Reign of Error, they larded the fossil fuel industry with massive additional subsidies in a hellish ‘false cost accounting’ variant that could only have been concocted by a coterie of cthonic cretins on K Street.

The BP oil disaster, however, points to a novel approach for implementing at least a portion of applying ‘external’ costs – forget fossil fuel taxes that lily-livered  Congress will never pass – instead, make the fucking companies pay directly for their messes!

For example, the various oil companies could start with a supervised safety review of the other offshore wells currently in production as well as the 27,000 abandoned wells just in the Gulf of Mexico whose capping were most likely never supervised and which may be decaying as I type.  How about forcing the coal companies to put out the millions of tons of coal burning in thousands of coal seam fires around the world that are spewing noxious chemicals and carbon dioxide with zero benefit to anybody?  Or nuclear power plants paying for permanent storage of the 64,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel that will stay radioactive for up to 250,000 years?

We don’t need technology breakthroughs in alternative energy.  We need to eliminate the unbelievable corporate welfare the industry currently enjoys in subsidies, we need to force the companies to clean up the messes they have already created and to have plans to prevent and correct future messes, and we need to invest in conservation and modern grid infrastructure to properly use the power we do produce.

But first we need to break the link between the conservatives and the fossil fuel companies, otherwise we’ll keep circling the drain, faster with each turn of the spiral.

*Update 7/15/10* Could Congress actually be taking action to investigate those 27,000 abandoned Gulf Wells?  Or is this just more ‘look concerned’ bullshit?

This morning, Josh Marshall spent some time navel-gazing about the Supreme Court decision announced yesterday that questioned the conviction of Enron fraudster Jeffrey Skilling — and, more broadly, challenged the “intangible right to honest services” on which the Skilling verdict was partly based:

To put it very generally, the “honest services” theory allowed a much broader theory of criminal activity than those used in cases of bribery itself. Basically, if I’m working for the people of Kentucky and I’m in effect in the pay of a private interest, I’m depriving the people of the state of “honest services” even if the prosecutor cannot prove, narrowly speaking, that I took a bribe. In short, it makes it much easier for prosecutors to make their case.

The Court unanimously decided to scale back “honest services” and the conservative wing (Scalia, Thomas and Kennedy but not Alito) wanted to get rid of it altogether.

If you’ve followed TPMMuckraker over the last five years, I’d venture to say that the majority, probably the great majority of the public corruption cases we’ve covered relied in whole or in part on “honest services. So if it’s been dramatically curtailed that could undermine a lot of convictions.

I have to assume that those dissenting opinions, in particular, weren’t motivated by jurisprudence (Scalia? Thomas?! Obviously not…) or even ideology so much as an instinct for self-preservation. Strict constitutionalists or not, you gotta think that for the guys who overturned the popular vote in Bush v. Gore — and have since followed that up by determining that the 1st Amendment right to free speech should be weighted by how much money you have in Citizens United, among other atrocities — the last thing in the world they’d want would be an established legal right of the public to “honest services.”

A legal “right” like that could get certain Supreme Court justices in trouble if folks started taking it seriously.

Greg Sargent at The Plum Line has a couple of posts today about the boost of rhetorical adrenaline Democrats have gotten from the reflexive apology Rep. Joe Barton (R – Big Oil’s Pocket) issued to BP CEO Tony Hayward yesterday.  Saying that “Dems are determined not to let the Joe Barton story recede into the background, now that he’s retracted his apology,” Sargent notes:

The DNC has rapidly put together a new ad starring Barton that calls on Republicans to “stop apologizing to big oil” and says that if the GOP takes over the House, Barton will be in charge of the probe into the spill as chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee.

In a follow-up post, Sargent quotes Rep. Chris Van Hollen, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), promising this won’t be the end:

“Joe Barton said publicly where the majority of Republicans stand on energy — protecting the big oil companies,” Van Hollen argued, pointing to the fact that the Republican Study Committee, which has over 100 members, has called the BP escrow fund a “shakedown.” … ”This goes way beyond Joe Barton. It’s part of a larger pattern where Republicans in Congress are on the side of big corporate interests.”

…”We’re going to be making the point again and again that Joe Barton’s comments on big oil [show] Republicans in the House stand on the side of big corporate interests against consumers and taxpayers.“

In fact, Roll Call reports that the DNC has begun fundraising to support the new ad, and David Dayen notes in today’s Roundup that individual Democratic candidates are starting to blast their GOP opponents for remarks similar to Barton’s.

This visceral, who’s-on-your-side framing should be familiar to anyone aware of populist Democratic messaging over the years, and it’s a far sight more potent than the emotionally-drained “party of results” versus “party of no” approach that DNC chairman Tim Kaine was threatening promising a couple of months ago.  (A hint, guys: If unemployment is still hovering between 9.5% and 10% come November, don’t expect that “party of results” stuff to have much resonance.)

But however refreshing it is to hear Democrats forthrightly characterizing Republicans as what they are, it’s equally sobering to think of what it took to reach this point — an epic ecological catastrophe, extended so long that the president’s poll numbers began to be dragged downward, pushing his party to find a potential angle of counterattack.  Before that, it was all about mealy-mouthed “bipartisanship,” pragmatism, and attempts at partnering with politicians and interest groups diametrically opposed to the needs and wants of ordinary Americans.

So, unless Democrats are willing to revisit a more effective economic stimulus program, a public option for health insurance, and a host of other issues, it’s hard to see this rhetorical shift as anything but a conversion of convenience, scheduled to expire just after this fall’s elections.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

Finally!!  A US President calls for an end to the ludicrous tax breaks that keep fossil fuel prices artificially low!  But you have to really push this, Mr. President, you have a golden window of opportunity here.  If you wimp-out now, it will be years if not decades before another President can address this.

The Huffington Post , among other sources, reported a couple of days ago that

“Fair Game,” the film about former CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson and the Bush administration’s leaks about her identity, is set to premiere May 20 at the Cannes Film Festival.

Naomi Watts and Sean Penn play Plame Wilson and her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson. Doug Liman, the producer behind the Bourne franchise, directed “Fair Game.”

Based on Plame’s 2007 memoirs “Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House,” “Fair Game” is the only U.S. film in the running for the Palme d’Or, the festival’s top prize.

The film’s trailer hasn’t made it online, but the clip below was posted to the festival’s web site.

The clip (posted above), though, raises questions about just how faithful the adaptation was.  As summarized by Greg Mitchell for the Nation:

It finds the couple–Naomi Watts and Sean Penn–in a playground with their kids running about, as Penn angrily confronts his wife over what he has just learned: that she may have written something that got him “sent” to Africa on that famous uranium fact-seeking mission related to Iraq WMD.

In the scene, she denies that she did that as he claims that if this gets out his career is ruined, and asks her to speak out. She suggests that maybe he did not think of his family first when he wrote that New York Times op-ed that drew so much attention…

Curiously, I don’t remember any of those moments being recounted in either Valerie or Joseph Wilson’s memoirs (on page 139 of her book, Valerie writes, “at no time did Joe or I ever consider that my cover and work at the CIA  would be compromised by the submission of the op-ed“) — but they do happen to be exactly in line with common, if false, Republican talking points during the controversy:

1. Valerie Plame Wilson sent her husband on the trip to Niger.
2. His wife’s role is an embarrassing fact that undermines Joseph Wilson’s credibility.
3. Joseph Wilson more or less invited the outing of his wife by publicly criticizing the Bush administration.

As many people, including Joseph Wilson, noted repeatedly during the past few years, these assumptions are absolute nonsense.  Why on earth would Valerie Plame Wilson think it would help her husband’s business to send him on an unpaid trip (except for reimbursing his expenses) to beautiful, scenic the bleak desert of Niger?  And how was Joe Wilson’s consulting business somehow dependent on a trip that he didn’t talk about until it was revealed in news reports a year and a half later?

Similiarly, as Plame herself notes in passing in her book (see the quote above), the idea that a career CIA officer working on vital nuclear-security issues would be exposed by her own government for the meager purpose of political retaliation was utterly unthinkable to most people… except, unfortunately, the cutthroat, politics-is-everything sociopaths who populated the highest levels of the Bush-Cheney White House (and their unquestioning acolytes).

Or, I guess, the amoral denizens of Hollywood studios, who are more interested in emotionally-driven conflict than accuracy.  As Fair Game’s director, Doug Liman (known previously for The Bourne Identity), said in an interview, the focus of the Plame movie was “story and character, and not… politics.” And I can see why people in “the industry”  might prefer a story about a CIA spy who secretly tries to help her husband’s career, but is inadvertently exposed by his media self-promotion, to the less combative, politically correct truth.

Besides, Valerie Plame Wilson herself is going to Cannes to promote the film, so I guess she and her husband have made their peace with whatever factual detours Liman & Co. may have taken in adapting their autobiographical accounts.  But maybe the need to accept personally insulting, false narratives just for the sake of getting their story told in some form is the depressing moral here… the Republicans make up a bogus version of events out of thin air, and it winds up being perpetuated because it serves the interests of certain moneyed factions (like Hollywood film backers) more than the actual truth does.

And everyone else has no choice but to accept it, and make the best of things.  And so it goes.

There’s a major profile in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine of veteran Washington, D.C. reporter Mike Allen of Politico:

Allen’s e-mail tipsheet, Playbook, has become the principal early-morning document for an elite set of political and news-media thrivers and strivers. Playbook is an insider’s hodgepodge of predawn news, talking-point previews, scooplets, birthday greetings to people you’ve never heard of, random sightings (“spotted”) around town and inside jokes. It is, in essence, Allen’s morning distillation of the Nation’s Business in the form of a summer-camp newsletter.

Like many in Washington, [White House communications director Dan] Pfeiffer describes Allen with some variation on “the most powerful” or “important” journalist in the capital. The two men exchange e-mail messages about six or eight times a day.

Now, I could weigh in on all the alternately snark-worthy and/or unsettling anecdotes in the NYT’s mammoth profile of Allen, but Jason Linkins of the Huffington Post has already done so in rather devastating fashion (noting that even leaving aside the celebration of Politico’s self-conscious and self-promoting shallowness, portions of the Times piece are “like reading a David Lynch screenplay.”)

Instead, I’m interested in the (perhaps even longer) untold story of how Allen arrived at this point in life.  After all, it was only six and a half years ago that he became a well-known journalist the old-fashioned way — co-writing a story for the Washington Post that was immediately hailed as “one of the most memorable pieces of White House journalism produced in the Bush era” and was substantially responsible for the conviction of a high-ranking government official on perjury and obstruction of justice charges.

Unless you’re a hardcore junkie regarding trivia of the Valerie Plame Wilson CIA leak case, however, you probably have a dim idea, at best, of what I’m talking about.  Perhaps these words will refresh your memory:

… a senior administration official said two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and revealed the identity and occupation of Wilson’s wife. That was shortly after Wilson revealed in July that the CIA had sent him to Niger last year to look into the uranium claim and that he had found no evidence to back up the charge….

“Clearly, it was meant purely and simply for revenge,” the senior official said of the alleged leak.

Granted, Mike Allen’s moment of celebrity for breaking this story faded in part because the proverbial other shoe never fell — the identity of the “senior administration official” was never revealed publicly, much less those of the leakers or the journalists involved.

But I suspect it’s not a coincidence that immediately after reading this article in September 2003, ex-Bushite press secretary Ari Fleischer sought high-priced legal help and refused to talk to FBI investigators without a promise of immunity.  Or that Fleischer would eventually admit speaking to the Post’s Walter Pincus on July 12, 2003, as part of a series of phone calls to (at least six?) Washington journalists he made with WH communications director Dan Bartlett from Air Force One during a flight back from Africa.

Pincus himself testified in Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s perjury trial that Fleischer had leaked to him about Plame in that conversation.  As it happens, on July 12, 2003, Pincus was working on an article for the Post untangling some of the lies the Bush administration had told about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, a piece on which he shared a byline with… Mike Allen.  (Not surprisingly, Pincus was also an unnamed source in the Post’s scandal-breaking story quoted above.)

I suppose that if you asked Allen about this now, he’d get a faraway look in his eyes and say, “Ah, but that was a long time ago.” If he remembered at all, that is, in the blur of his near-sleepless life collecting tidbits of gossip and false leads for Politico.

That the latter is what has made Mike Allen a truly powerful reporter in Washington says more about our politics than I care to imagine.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

Good thing Obama got the Health Care Reform passed when he did!  Unfortunately, today also marks another very disturbing development – the opening of the floodgates of unlimited corporate election funding.

Can you imagine what’s going to happen now when they resume debating climate change legislation?  Bush really fucked us with Alito and Roberts.