Pruning Shears

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post (UPDATED BELOW)

Special Prairie Weather hat trick edition!

In an email, PW tipped me to this article by Jack Balkin that goes over the issues and challenges president-elect Obama will face.  Three excerpts to comment on:

Obama will begin his first term with overwhelming public support - if not outright adulation - and a Congress controlled by members of his own party….Giving up power is harder than it sounds. Obama’s attorney general will have to craft new limits and new methods of accountability. This, in turn, may invite intense scrutiny of what happened in the immediate past. Both Congress and the public may demand to know about secret orders and opinions authorising torture, domestic spying or other forms of illegal activity. Obama and his advisers will have to decide whether political prudence and national security require them to conceal the previous administration’s dirty little secrets….The Bush years demonstrated that congressional oversight of intelligence gathering was rarely effective, and with judicial review significantly constricted in the new surveillance act, the civil liberties of Americans will depend heavily on how the Obama administration implements the vast new powers it has been given.

1. Substantial public support and party control of Congress didn’t work out too well for the current president so I hope the next one doesn’t take it as the last one did - carte blanche for pretty much anyone in the executive to do anything.  2. Obama has a very collegial style and seems to strongly prefer avoiding confrontations (though he did so in both the primary and general election campaigns).  If he is serious about reforming Justice from all the abuses in the last eight years it will almost certainly require a massive political bloodletting.  That seems to go against how he likes to do things.  How that shakes out will give us an early indication of how he prioritizes the various considerations before him.  3. I hadn’t seen Balkin’s last point put so starkly before but we have become frighteningly dependent on the good will of the executive branch, and not checks and balances from competing interests, in restraining presidential overreach.  That is, um, a problem.

PW has also posted an interview with James Galbraith where he describes what he calls the predator state, where “in finance, what happened was that the business of mortgage finance and securitization got taken over by shady operators, by card sharks, by institutions that were making enormous sums of money on fees, issuing loans that they, themselves, understood were extremely unlikely to be serviced over the entire lifetime. So the whole system, which should be protected by regulation was corrupted by deregulation. A few people got very rich. And a stinking mess was left for us to clean up now and in the next administration.”  It turns out that “stinking mess” is also roughly the most detailed report we’ll be getting on it.  Everything is fine kiddo, go back to sleep.  And think about this as you lay in bed:

“It’s just like after September 11. Back then no one wanted to be seen as not patriotic, and now no one wants to be seen as not doing all they can to save the financial system,” said Lee A. Sheppard, a tax attorney who is a contributing editor at the trade publication Tax Analysts. “We’re left now with congressional Democrats that have spines like overcooked spaghetti. So who is going to stop the Treasury secretary from doing whatever he wants?”

PW also nicely extended an (unfortunately) much-used metaphor:  “Having to wait 70 days for any visible action could really put us in the ditch, axle broken.”  Heh to the indeedy.

I’ve been following the Siegelman fiasco in Alabama for a while now but this week it jumped the shark.  I flatly refuse to believe any levels of incompetence, hackery and corruption can account for the circus that’s been playing out down there.  I finally figured out it’s all an enormous and elaborate prank.  Any day now the principals will hold a press conference where they all explode with laughter at how us credulous boobs were completely taken in and how we’re totally punked.  What a bunch of rubes we are for falling for it!  Right?  RIGHT?!

Our detention policies have unfortunately not jumped the shark.  “War crimes” is such a fraught term.  I don’t think even those of us who believe they have happened are emotionally or psychologically prepared for what that would imply for us; for what it would say about us for having promoted, supported or allowed this as a country, or how we would react to see even a former leader, even a historically unpopular one, being the one sitting there with the earpiece and staring grimly and defiantly ahead.

UPDATE: The Sideshow nails it:

The thing about Republicon plans is that they are never designed to actually deliver for the people, but rather to destroy what services already exist and divert funds that could be used to improve them.

If you think about John McCain’s health care plan, the Social Security privatization plan, school funding initiatives, “modernizing” financial services legislation, the Pentagon’s increasing use of mercenaries, and on and on there are some common features:  Shifting of (at least somewhat) transparent public services to opaque private entities, the use of inadequately funded vouchers to fund obviously unworkable policies and the neglect or removal of government oversight on the clearly incorrect proposition that these private entities and systems are self-regulating.  The goal is not to better existing services but covertly kill the ones inconvenient to their worldview.  The emphatic rejection of the GOP at the polls in the last two elections should have ended that outlook as a credible political position, but until it stops being put forward I’m glad we have the likes of Avedon Carol to call it out.

UNPACKING JANE: Mayer quotes a former CIA officer on page 174:

“Drowning is a baseline fear.  So is falling.  People dream about it.  It’s human nature.  Suffocation is a very scary thing.  When you’re waterboarded, you’re inverted, so it exacerbates the fear.  It’s not painful, but it scares the shit out of you.”  (He was waterboarded himself in a training course.)  While he had no sympathy for the detainees, the officer was deeply concerned about the impact that these methods had on his colleagues who inflicted them…a friend of his who had helped to waterboard Khalid Sheikh Mohammed “has horrible nightmares.”  He went on, “When you cross over that line of darkness, it’s hard to come back.  You lose your soul.  You can do your best to justify it, but it’s well outside the norm.  You can’t go to that dark place without it changing you.”  He said of his friend, “He’s a really good guy.  It really haunts him.  You are inflicting something really evil and horrible on somebody.”

I’ll admit my first reaction to that was, poor baby, maybe if you wouldn’t torture people you’d sleep better.  But the fact is, the impact on the people who do it matters.  That the administration has been so willing to inflict harm on its own citizens (even in the name of some idealized, unobtainable “greater good”) makes the people in it seem literally like sociopaths - people without a conscience who care exclusively about providing for their own comfort.  Or like communist revolutionaries who in the name of establishing a perfect system for humanity would gladly sacrifice any number of actual humans.