I guess you gotta have a scapegoat, and true to form, just as in the military prosecutions regarding Abu Ghraib, the goal is to find the lowest possible level person possible to assign blame.
The pertinent quote is from an anonymous Senate staffer
“If you look at the documents, you get very close to a direct order (not to destroy the tapes) without it being, ‘Jose, you’re not going to do this,'” the official said.
Sounds to me like everyone knew what was going on. Higher ups wanted plausible deniability, so they gave “strong advice” without giving an “order”, so they could have it both ways.
Hoekstra said Rodriguez must testify to the committee to determine on whose authority the tapes were destroyed, and he said the panel will consult with the Justice Department on whether granting Rodriguez immunity would undermine its own investigation.
“If there appears to be any criminal activity taking place, the last thing we would want to do is get in the way of a successful prosecution,” Hoekstra said.
Translation: let’s bury this until after the election.
The risks of default by MBIA and Ambac have gone through the roof, and Ambac is in danger of losing it’s AAA rating, which could hasten a collapse by making capital harder to raise.
As to the significance? Atrios nails it when he says:
Ambac and MBIA are the two Jenga pieces which will pull the whole sh#@pile down. They insure all of the sh#@pile, allowing everyone to pretend that all of the risky stuff they own isn’t risky at all. But that insurance is most likely a complete fantasy as it seems Ambac and MBIA don’t have the cash to pay out claims. I should’ve gotten into the bond insurance business. Lower their ratings, you destroy their businesses. More than that, you wipe out the insurance fantasy, forcing everyone who insured with them to admit they have all this risky stuff on the books. Recognizing, of course, that in this context “risky” is just a euphemism for “sh#@ty.”
The GAOhas the details on Iraqi reconstruction spending, but the nickel tour is that Bush and His Evil Minions™ lied when they said that, “By July 2007, the administration said, Iraq had spent some 24 percent of $10 billion set aside for reconstruction that year”, as was stated in documents given by Crocker and Petraeus to Congress.
But in its report on Tuesday, the accountability office said official Iraqi Finance Ministry records showed that Iraq had spent only 4.4 percent of the reconstruction budget by August 2007. It also said that the rate of spending had substantially slowed from the previous year.
The reason for the difference, said Joseph A. Christoff, the G.A.O.’s director of international affairs and trade, was that few official Iraqi figures for 2007 were available when General Petraeus and Mr. Crocker went to Congress.
So the administration, with the help of the Finance Ministry in Baghdad, appears to have relied on a combination of indicators, including real expenditures, ministries’ suggestions of projects they intended to carry out, and contracts that were still under negotiation, Mr. Christoff said. But actual spending does not seem to have lived up to those estimates for spending on reconstruction, a budget item sometimes called capital or investment expenditures, he added.
“So it looked like an improvement, but it wasn’t an improvement,” he said.
Meaning that there was no data, and that they did not look for ways to get that data, because they were under orders to sell Bush’s endless war™.
This was not bad data, this was Crocker and Petraeus telling the Iraqis the numbers they wanted, and then getting those numbers.
BTW, the 2007 number on Iraqi spending is LESS than the 2006 number. It’s getting worse, not better.
Local housing crashes have all taken at around 5 years to recover, and the markets were far less inflated. Additionally, the underlying economic situation is very grim, and the home buyers were less leveraged, meaning that foreclosures will be higher this time.
The answer is actually far more depressing than the my friend Harold Feld, esq. would like to think: The Canadians believe in public policy, and the United States does not.
This is why someone like Michael Powell could make a statement that basically said that corporate profit was a public good, and not get tarred and feathered.
The Nation has a very interesting article, Citigroup: Too Big to Fail?, which goes a long way towards seeing how the deregulatory attitudes of the past 31 years (yes, it started with Carter) have led to our current mess.
Citibank is the poster child for this problem, though the bank has a very long history of being on the wrong side of collapses (they were deep in Mexico and Asia when both needed bailouts).
First, let’s look at the Glass-Steagall act of 1933. It was a New Deal law, which was enacted in response to abuses preceding the Great Depression, where bankers were pushing depositors to invest in dubious stocks that they were also being paid by the company to sell.
Bill Clinton delivered his “New Democrat” party, accompanied by lots of happy talk about magic words like “synergy” and how “modernization” would create a more stable (and profitable) financial system. It did the latter, for sure, but not the former.
Actually, the combination of insurance, investment banking and old-line commercial banks multiplied the conflicts of interest within banks, despite so-called “firewalls” supposed to keep these activities separate. Much like Enron, placing some deals in off-balance sheet entities did not insulate Citigroup from the losses in its swollen subprime housing lending. The bank has so far written off something like $15 billion and more to come.
The problem is, of course, that Citi is so large that the consequences of its failure would be disastrous to the markets. It would make the collapse of LTCM, which reaqired a Fed orchestrated (Alan “Bubbles” Greenspan) bailout look like the failure of the corner 7-11.
Over the past few years it has appeared that the every single rollback of Depression Era regulations has been a mistake.
I think that it’s increasingly evident that this was intended to avoid congressional and criminal scrutiny.
I think that it’s also very likely that some tapes were missed, and they will find their way into investigators hands, where there may be criminal issues.
I understand that the torturers were being “good Germans”, but that is no defense.
I further understand that there will be no small number of people who will demagogue this issue for political gain, making any prosecution near-impossible.
This is why I support the US signing onto the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague.
Our politics, and judiciary, have been so poisoned that we are unable to pursue justice in such cases.
FWIW, prosecuting torture is not about our victims, though doubtless some were innocents tortured by mistake, but about who we are.
No major GOP candidate has set foot in the state for two onths, and some Republicans are bracing for a possible surprise first-place showing by long-shot Texas Rep. Ron Paul, the only Republican to broadcast TV ads in Nevada.
My guess as to why no Republican has campaigned in Nevada? It requires too much outreach to non-Cuban Hispanics.
Hopefully, the US policy following his death will be a dropping of sanctions, and an agreement on policies to keep the Cuban émigré community out. They are more poisonous than Achmed Chalabi.
Machiavelli got it right when he said (Discourses, Book 2, Chapter 31):
“It ought to be considered, therefore, how vain are the faith and promises of those who find themselves deprived of their country. For, as to their faith, it has to be borne in mind that anytime they can return to their country by other means than yours, they will leave you and look to the other, notwithstanding whatever promises they had made you. As to their vain hopes and promises, such is the extreme desire in them to return home, that they naturally believe many things that are false and add many others by art, so that between those they believe and those they say they believe, they fill you with hope, so that relying on them you will incur expenses in vain, or you undertake an enterprise in which you ruin yourself….. A Prince, therefore, ought to go slowly in undertaking an enterprise upon the representations of an exile, for most of the times he will be left either with shame or very grave injury.
In a country of 300 million, the wacko wing Cuban émigré community has damaged US diplomacy and credibility significantly. If they given ties to Cuba through property restoration, they will create an unstable despotic state that will be a US security risk.
To quote Tallyrand on the Bourbons, “They have learned nothing and they have forgotten nothing. “
Not only are these clearly government records which require retention, but these tapes have been used in investigations going back to Iran-Contra.
They knew that this could be used as evidence, and they knew that it had been used as evidence, and they deliberately decided to destroy this evidence.
This also means that the Ultra-Orthodox Shas party, with 12 members, is all that prevents a new round of elections, that Olmert would almost certainly lose, and Shas has said that it would leave the government if any compromise is made over Jerusalem.
You’ve gotta love Israeli politics.
BTW, this sort of crap is why proportional representation sucks wet farts from dead pigeons.
For Poland, “The worst scenario is a situation in which Poland would agree to the shield, will incur the political costs and then the base is not built, because of a change of government in the United States”.
They are afraid of being left holding the bag.
With a year left in the reign of the Avignon President, it’s a sensible concern.
And as Harry Truman once said, “Given the choice between a Republican and someone who acts like one, the people will vote for the real Republican every time.”
His talk to Reno Gazette editorial board exemplifies this.
Barack Obama and I are alike in some significant ways.
We are nearly the same age, he was born in 1961, and I was born in 1962, and we both missed the 1960s, we was in Hawaii and Jakarta during the decade, and I was in Fairbanks, Anchorage, and Juneau (though after August 1969, I was in Virginia for a time.
As such, we were in some very real ways separated from the cultural goings on of the 1960s by virtue of geographic separation.
We thus both became politically aware at the same time, though I might have done so earlier, as both my parents were politically involved, and I had a summer without cartoons while my mom watched the Watergate hearing.
For most of my generation, any political awareness came around the time of Jimmy Carter, who was, and is, truth be told, a depressingly sanctimonious downer.*
So there are a lot of people, and I am not one of them, who have some fondness for Reagan, if just because Carter was so depressing.
I remember him running a blatantly racist campaign, and opening up the White House for the personal profit of his friends.
He won by keeping the hostages in Iran until after the election.
In any case, he gave a talk to the Reno Gazette editorial board on Monday, and it was caught on tape for posterity.
In any case, he gave a talk with Here is a transcript of the relevant portion of his talk, (H/T Open Left)
I don’t want to present myself as some sort of singular figure. I think part of what’s different are the times. I do think that for example the 1980 was different. I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s
This, of course would be the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Medicare, the opening of social welfare programs to black and brown people, and to a large degree the elimination of childhood malnutrition in the United States?
Yep, that’s REALLY excessive.
and government had grown and grown but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating.
You like how the American people forced the US to withdraw from a wasteful, stupid and useless war?
You mean like how a corrupt and dictatorial President was forced from office because the American people would not tolerate a crook in the White House?
When people like Ronald Reagan refered to the excesses of the 1960s, they mean that they did not want people with your complexion to be able vote in the South, and that Lynching and church bombings were the God given right of the white man.
You think those were excesses?
Well, Ronald Reagan certainly made it explicit that he was running on behalf of people who that that they were.
No, Ronald Reagan didn’t appeal to people’s optimism, he appealed to their petty, small minded bigotry and selfishness. Jimmy Carter told people to tighten their energy belts and act for the good of the country; Ronald Reagan told them they could guzzle gas with impunity and do whatever the hell they wanted. He kicked off his 1980 campaign talking about “state’s rights” in Philadelphia, Mississippi — the site of the murder of three civil rights workers in 1964’s Freedom Summer. He thus put up a welcome sign for “Reagan Democrats,” peeling off white voters who were unhappy with the multi-ethnic coalition within the Democratic Party.
One of his first acts was to fire 11,000 air traffic controllers in 1981 — one of the most devastating union busting moves of the past century. And his vision of deregulation didn’t free the country up for entrepreneurship, it opened it up for the wholesale thievery of the savings & loan crisis. He popularized the notion that all government is bad government and in eight short years put in place the architecture for decades of GOP graft and corruption.
There’s enough hagiography of Reagan on the right, I don’t think Democrats really need to go there.
*I also consider him a war criminal, along with Zbigniew Brezinski, for quite literally buying a civil war in Afghanistan just to screw with the Soviets.
Russia has licensed the Thales Damocles targeting pods with Su-27 class fighters. It’s flown on Malaysia’s Su-30MKM, and the Russian air force will be adopting the pod, which was chosen after a competition with the Ural Optical and Mechanical Plant (UOMZ) Sapsan and Solux targeting pods.
This is fairly significant, for a number of reasons.
I believe that this is the first time that Russia has license produced a western weapons system of this sophistication, and it is the first time that the manufacturer has incorporated sophisticated western electronics into one of their aircraft.
This may make it much easier for operators of western equipment to integrate fleets of Russian aircraft in the future.