Dilan Ratigan is on MSNBC right now, puzzling over the recent developments in North Korea, where Bill Clinton has arrived to negotiate the release of the two journalists who have been trapped there. They’re trying to get to the motivation of the North Koreans; to decide what reason they have to talk to Bill Clinton about this issue where they will not speak with the State Department or any other branch of the current administration.
Former President Bill Clinton in North Korea to try to free U.S. journalists.
Allow me to point out the painfully obvious: Hillary Clinton declared that the North Korean government was acting like a spoiled child. In response, the North Korean government called her a “funny girl.” Now, the NKs have decided to bypass the Secretary of State to the United States of America for…. her husband.
Seriously? Is it really that diffiicult to ferret out the motivation? I would have thought it obvious..
Having said that, Bill Clinton is absolutely right to go. Sexist international slam-fests aside, if the North Koreans are willing to speak with him and get those poor women released from prison, it’s all worth it. To the North Koreans, this is a way to treat the Sec. State like a bitch; to the United States, this is an opportunity to save two lives simply by rolling through some pointlessly sexist and insulting game-playing. At the end of the day, North Korea is less two prisoners and Hillary Clinton is still… the Secretary of State to the United States of America.
TweetHuffPo is reporting that AP sources say the Senate Finance Committee is planning on dropping the public option from the Senate bill. Of course, the Senate and House bills need to be reconciled before making it to the president. Even if the reporting is accurate, its not quite the end.
But the Senate generally gets its way, so this is a major obstacle.
TweetI’ve been blogging for at least five years, now. I’ve been doing so right along with a lot of my other Lefty buddies, commenting on and applauding a lot of the same news sources, such as Rachel Maddow, Ed Schultz and what has become the entire MSNBC lineup. And right along with Bill Mahar, too. I thought I understood what they were saying when we all complained about George Bush, but in recent months, I’ve begun to doubt that.
In recent months, since the Obama Administration took the White House, Progressive talking heads have been consistently pushing on a number of issues. Gays in the military, Guantanamo, the stimulus package and many others. And the common refrain has been some variation of, “with the stroke of a pen, President Obama could end all this…”
Perhaps I’ve lost my mind, but I could have sworn that one of the things we didn’t like about George Bush was… his use of executive orders and signing statements to bypass the will of the Congress? Did I totally misread that? Because now that we have our man in the White House, we want him to employ precisely the same tactics that I recall people decrying as circumventing the U.S. Constitution. And beyond that apparent contradiction, there are a number of problems with executive overrides of this type which are also worth mentioning.
The first should be obvious: if we can turn over all of Bush’s executive hanky-panky this easily, so too can the next president “correct” the Obama Administration. I may be confused about what we Lefties were talking about a few years ago, but I remember my U.S. History and Government class, and this is definitely not what the Founders had in mind. We are not meant to be a cult of personality like Saddam’s Iraq or Kim’s North Korea. Our laws are not meant to be subject to the whims of the most powerful ape in the room. We may like things fast in our modern world, but some things are better left up to the stodgy, old, slow and yes, painfully prejudiced and ignorant Congress.
Secondly, if the president does not get the work done through Congress, Congress can always pass a law that circumnavigates his circumnavigation. Potentially, they can do so in a way that overrides the veto. Remember how Congress’ slowness was a bad thing? Well, with a stroke of a pen, you’ll be counting on it.
Third, in some cases, it’s really not that simple anyway. The president is sitting on a prison in Guantanamo filled with people who have been wrongly imprisoned. People whose basic human rights have been violated, which is a crime which our Constitution is particularly well-suited to prosecute… harshly. In fact, history buffs will know that the entire point of the Constitution is precisely that.
The president cannot simply wave his pen and declare “Do-over!” He cannot free Gitmo detainees without complications. And he certainly cannot do that by, once again, short-circuiting the legal process. The only legally justifiable means of releasing the Guantanamo detainees is by putting them on trial, but since most of the evidence against even those guilty of actual crimes against the United States was obtained via torture and is therefore not admissible, that means both the guilty and the innocent would be set completely free.
The CIA is another sticky wicket. The good and bad news about stable democracies is that the institutions of government – from the Department of Agriculture to the military to the CIA – maintain contiguous operation beyond presidential terms. The Department of the Interior does not suddenly loose all it’s staff and get repopulated every time a new president takes the oath, though it came close in the Bush Administration. It is this contiguous institutionalization of government that provides the democratic stability we enjoy as Americans, not the voting part. There is even an argument to be made that this bureaucratic stability is what eventually ground the Bush Administration down in the end: whistleblowers throughout the government leaked the documents and instigated the investigations that mired the Bushies down for the past three or four years.
But in the case of the CIA, that also means there are bodies buried deep in the vaults of that secret agency that no president has probably ever known about. And even if presidents do, we the public don’t. Again, untangling this web, especially where torture has been used, is not as simple as people seem to think it is. And as we’ve learned from the Bush Administration, the leadership can only push agencies just so far before they earn the ire of career bureaucrats who will outlast them. I’m quite certain that, as a Constitutional law professor, President Barack Obama is quite well aware of the problem torture presents. I’m quite certain that he’s interested in removing the stain of torture from our government – not out of ideological zeal, but out of fidelity to the Constitution he spent his life studying. But this, like much of the damage done by the Bush Administration, is going to take time to put right.
Of course, I understand that we need people to push issues. Just because a president with a D next to his name gets elected does not mean that the things we need done will get done. There has to be pressure on politicians if anything is to be accomplished, especially presidents; there needs to be a loyal opposition, a position for which the Republicans are ill-equipped these days. But we need to be cautious that, in pushing for small changes, we don’t arrive at unforeseen and lamentable large changes. Pressure is one thing, but irresponsibility is quite another.
Tweet“Everybody needs a little time away,”
I heard her say,
“from each other…”
So, Governor Mark Sanford has decided it would be best to go missing for a while and it seems clear that the Governor’s family and staff are not at all worried. Neither does this seem to be a new thing for the Governor: sneaking away from his security duty. I certainly hope the Governor is as safe as the impression we are left with.
But hoping is hardly enough for the people of South Carolina. I think it should go without saying to anyone over the age of sixteen that their whereabouts are important to those who depend on them; you hardly need to be a governor for this to be true.
So does this type of behavior come back to haunt Governor Sanford in 2011? I think it should have to. Presidents don’t really have the option to simply slip past their security details, of course. But if Americans are willing to give a second thought to a septuagenarian president out of concern for his health, I’d say it’s fair to wonder about the sense of responsibility of a chief executive of a state who skates on his responsibilities.
TweetTalkingPointsMemo.com’s Sunday roundup is a great one this week, but I wanted to flag out one specific side of the issue of the president’s response to Iran: ownership.
Beyond the politics of the last thirty years of Iranian/American relations, American involvement in foreign affairs tends to suck all the oxygen out of the room for all other parties. Once it becomes a reality that the United States has decided to get involved in an issue, even the least interested parties tends to suddenly shift their focus to us rather than to the issue at hand.
So, once we own the Iranian revolution, what do we do next? Especially since even the most reform-minded Iranians is completely disinterested in our involvement? Do we send troops? Do we impose sanctions that will inevitably hurt the people we supposedly support more than the leadership? Do we fire a bunch of missiles and act like nothing happened? Or how about another toothless UN resolution?
Apart from using this issue to call the Democratic president a coward to score parochial points, I’m not seeing much in the way of ideas on this issue from the Right.
TweetI’m no expert in Iranian politics, but Friday looks like it could be really interesting. There have been many rumblings over the last month that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s chances of getting reelected were getting slim and now it looks like he’s starting to get desperate.
Experts I have read have suggested that really no president of Iran since the Revolution has ever had much to worry about in elections, suggesting that perhaps Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s problems are a reflection of the ruling clergy’s opinion of him more so than the people’s. And though it would pain him to do it, I am sure, Ahmadinejad might consider taking a queue from the Republican Party’s recent history and recognize that denying economic problems won’t con anyone.
Meanwhile, there are some in the States who are suggesting that Barack Obama’s election to the White House may have something to do with this and the elections in Lebanon. Well certainly, it can’t hurt that we’ve deposed a shit-talking cowboy and elected an intellectual man of peace with an Arab name. It’s just one less talking point. But to suggest Obama’s presence has altered the geography of Lebanese politics – to say nothing of Iranian – is just narcissistic. No, the recent run-in with Israel doubtless had an impact in Lebanon and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust-denying, taunting non-diplomacy has clearly had it’s own.
TweetFollowing on from my previous post about the Student Loan Corporation email I got this morning, it looks like the plan President Obama is proposing is basically to eliminate a subsidy system for private loan corporations that the government has been running for the last fifty years. This WaPo op-ed does a great job of laying out the history.
In short, the government has been insuring low-interest student loans for all this time by basically guaranteeing profits for private banks like Citi Corp who give out those loans. Its a classic Frankenstein Washington program where those who insist on free market rules and those who insist on government assistance get together and insure that neither happens. The Obama plan eliminates the cost of maintaining this facade by letting the Department of Education provide the loans through Treasury.
How much will tax payers save because of this new plan, if adopted? Estimates put that number between $40 and $100 billion annually.
Citi’s email is, typically, effusive with unsupported “facts” about how this will negatively impact both the government’s bottom line and consumers. The claim that this new plan will increase the federal deficit “substantially” is unsubstantiated as yet: there’s no concrete plan that I can find on how the loans will be doled out. Logically, if we can afford multi-trillion dollar bailouts to banks like Citi, I’m sure we can handle a few student loans. The word “substantial” is subjective and relative. Meanwhile as a matter of bookkeeping, since student loans can last for decades without defaulting, they are a relatively stable investment. At the risk of recalling the Subprime problem, student loans can be handled as assets, not debts.
Their claim that this is an anti-choice plan presupposes that those of us who go to college are really in control of where we get loans from. In reality, the student loan game is a rigged one, just like health care. The word “choice” is a double entendre: it sounds like the choice is yours, but the choice is really made by corporations and large institutions – colleges or hospitals, depending on the example.
Citi lists a number of advantages of student loans that it claims are the result of competition, such as default prevention services, education and web access. It is debatable whether web access is an advantage or an inevitability, but default protection and education will surely both continue under the new plan. The problem with this entire line of argument, though, is that if there’s no risk then there’s no real competition. The current system is not a free market system and so the entire argument breaks down right there.
TweetReaders of this website know I have made no secret of my support for President Barack Obama. That support remains unflagging to this point. But politicians have one set of agendas, and the people another, so there is a time for all of us to break with our supported politicians and pressure them to do things they don’t want to do. I say this not as an apologia, but because the media’s insistence on a purely dualistic world of supporters and detractors completely obscures the meaning of the term “loyal opposition.” Opposition to your president does not necessarily presuppose hateful invectives.
Such is the case with the torture investigations. Clearly, Obama is not in favour of going forward with them. And as a practical matter, I don’t necessarily blame him: he’s not just the president, he is also a president, which means he has the power to make or break precedent in the Oval Office and so does his next successor. The precedent set here might be that a sitting president can prosecute a former president for misdeeds in office. Presidents have generally been very reluctant to do this for a simple reason: regardless of the justness of a given prosecution, the precedent leaves itself open to politically-motivated abuse down the line. Just as many of us have argued in the cases of eavesdropping and other violations of civil rights under the Bush Administration, the justness of motivation does not always outweigh the potential for abuse in the future.
And mindful as I am of that dangerous precedent, there has to be some point at which the potential threat of abuse is outweighed by the clear danger presented by the violations of the former administration. In this case, we’re not dealing with illegal actions that lived in a bubble, cut off from effect the moment President Bush left office. What we have is, again, a dangerous precedent that says that when a president wants to do something, all he needs is a few pliable lawyers to write grade-school legal justifications and he’s off to the races. And not just “something.” We’re talking about torturing human beings. . . on top of wrongful incarceration and illegal wiretapping of U.S. citizens. Taken as a whole, the Bush Administration opened up a little slice of totalitarianism that must – must – be closed, nailed shut and boarded up forever.
And what’s more, I think that there is also a political reality right now that cannot be ignored and in this one case, should not be ignored. The same wave of realization and needful correction that brought Barack Obama to power also drives the need to redress this most awful of crimes against the American consciousness. He cannot turn that tide back without crushing himself in the process.
Between the American public’s obvious need for self-correction and the institutional need for justice, the need to break with the president and make him do something unprecedented is overwhelming. And for the first time, we see Barack Obama being overtaken by the wave rather than riding it. This is what it means to be president, sometimes. This is what it means to elect one, too. As troublesome as the situation is and as dangerous as the path before us may be, for the benefit of our president and our nation, we must continue to push him to investigate the torture policies instituted by the Bush Administration.
TweetOK, I’m not too interested in getting into a big discussion of Obama’s Special Olympics comment on Jay Leno the other night. But for the short time that this story will be out there, it’s worth putting in my two cents.
When Bill Clinton made his South Carolina gaff; when Geraldine Ferraro made her gaff on The Today Show; when locally, Bob Lonsberry has made his many comments on the radio, I’ve always said that it’s not about whether you find the comment offensive as the speaker, but whether the listener finds the comments offensive. The same is true for Barack Obama, and irrespective of how many people are saying “come on, let’s get over it,” clearly some people found it offensive.
The Obama people are making statements of contrition, which is more than I can say for any of the aforementioned politicos. But this isn’t one of those “have my people call your people” situations: he’s going to need to just come out and put this one to bed with a heart-felt apology.
I know his handlers will say that this will “feed the beast.” I say fine: feed the beast. And at the end of this very short story, let the record show that our president had the courage to be a decent person and simply apologize for a simple mistake.
TweetThis is kind of interesting: Eric Massa’s office just announced that he has appointed a member of his staff to be the point man for ensuring transparent spending of the stimulus package in the 26th (erm. That’s the 29th) district. I’m not entirely sure how much impact a junior representative can really have in how the money gets spent, but if he has people monitoring what does get spent in the district, that’s probably a helpful thing in terms of building trust in a district where trust of President Obama is likely relatively low.
“On Tuesday night, President Obama spoke extensively about accountability and transparency in government, and that is exactly why I have appointed Michael Heenan to serve as your District Recovery Director,” said Congressman Eric Massa. “The families of New York’s 29th District deserve transparency and accountability in their government, and by dedicating one of your Congressional staff members to work hand in hand with Governor Paterson’s office, we will achieve just that. Mr. Heenan has proven himself to me and he will prove himself to the families of Western New York.”
Now, the question is: will they be developing some method of reporting these stats online in some sort of database? It might seem redundant at first, but knowing the breakdown of monies spent in the district would be a boon to local reportage.
Tweet
Bad Behavior has blocked 760 access attempts in the last 7 days.
