I Hate What You Just Said

The Dick in Question (click on thumbnail for a larger Dick)

FOR FAR TOO LONG, Congress has almost completely ignored its responsibility to hold the executive branch accountable for its actions.  In particular, Dick Cheney appears to have worked outside the law nearly since the day of his inauguration as V.P., and he has gotten away with every bit of it.  (See Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s Articles of Impeachment against The Dick by clicking here).

Perhaps a strong showing on election day will embolden Congressional Democrats.  A small, but not insignificant peice of good news appeared today:

Democrats from the Senate Intelligence and Judiciary committees last week sent a letter to the White House demanding that it preserve all records produced by the Bush administration. The letter, obtained by the Associated Press, expressed particular concern that the office of Vice President Cheney would not comply with the law.

The letter, sent by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, Sen. John D. Rockefeller of West Virginia and Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, asks White House counsel Fred Fielding to detail steps being taken to preserve White House documents and hand them over to the National Archives and Records Administration.

I urge all IHWYJS readers to write to your representatives in Congress  - let them know that no Dick is above the law.  Hold that Dick accountable.  Also, feel free to use the word “Dick” gratuitously when you write.

Dick.

Paul Krugman with a statement on “The Monster Years.”

Daniel Gross with a nice retort to those who would blame our sub-prime mortgage meltdown on loans made to minority homeowners.

The Troopergate investigation will continue. The Alaska Supreme Court said “thanks but no thanks” to the injunction.

In today’s Boston Globe, foreign affairs columnist H.D.S. Greenway provides a brief retrospective on the calamitous reign of Bush the Younger.  Greenway mentions a number of Bush’s greatest hits, including “mission accomplished,” the botched job in Afghanistan, torture, and the current financial crisis.  But the money shot is Greenway’s comparison between the shame of Bill Clinton and the shame of W:

IT IS HARD to believe how far this republic has fallen since President George W. Bush took office. Eight years ago, the United States had a budget surplus, peace and prosperity reigned, and America was universally respected. True, Bill Clinton had besmirched the office of the presidency by his self-indulgence. In his memoir, he would put down his dalliance with a White House intern to the worst of all possible motives. He did it because he could. But that pales in comparison to what Bush has done to the country.

…

When all the various reasons for a preemptive war against Iraq are examined - the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, spreading democracy, helping Israel, etc., etc. - it all boiled down to the worst of all possible reasons: Bush invaded Iraq because he could  [Italics added].

I’ll say it again: draft George W. Bush.

Today’s New York Times has some interesting information about Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary who we will trust with 700 billion of our taxpayer dollars to rescue our troubled financial system.

Paulson is perhaps the worst person in the world to place in this role. After all, he was directly involved in getting us here:

[D]ecisions made at a brief meeting on April 28, 2004, explain why the problems could spin out of control. The agency’s failure to follow through on those decisions also explains why Washington regulators did not see what was coming.On [April 28, 2004], the five members of the Securities and Exchange Commission met in a basement hearing room to consider an urgent plea by the big investment banks.

They wanted an exemption for their brokerage units from an old regulation that limited the amount of debt they could take on. The exemption would unshackle billions of dollars held in reserve as a cushion against losses on their investments. Those funds could then flow up to the parent company, enabling it to invest in the fast-growing but opaque world of mortgage-backed securities; credit derivatives, a form of insurance for bond holders; and other exotic instruments.

The five investment banks led the charge, including Goldman Sachs, which was headed by Henry M. Paulson Jr. Two years later, he left to become Treasury secretary.

The rest is history:

[With the passage of the plan] the five big independent investment firms were unleashed. In loosening the capital rules, which are supposed to provide a buffer in turbulent times, the agency also decided to rely on the firms’ own computer models for determining the riskiness of investments, essentially outsourcing the job of monitoring risk to the banks themselves.

Over the following months and years, each of the firms would take advantage of the looser rules. At Bear Stearns, the leverage ratio — a measurement of how much the firm was borrowing compared to its total assets — rose sharply, to 33 to 1. In other words, for every dollar in equity, it had $33 of debt. The ratios at the other firms also rose significantly.

Isn’t it amazing how consistent the Bush administration is? Their reverse Midas touch makes every decision exactly the opposite of the right and true one. It makes perfect sense for the Bush administration to hire one of the high priests of laissez-faire, deregulated capitalism as Treasury secretary — especially one whose ideas caused our nation’s largest investment banks to collapse in on themselves, creating a financial black hole that threatens to suck us all down a vortex of doom and despair.

This is a serious question: Can you think of a single idea, decision, plan, policy, or cabinet position coming out of this administration that wasn’t an unmitigated nook·u·lar clusterfuck?

Andrew Sullivan is on a roll - a serious anti-Palin roll. In “The Twelve Lies of Sarah Palin,” my favorite Obamacon succinctly makes the case that Palin’s pants are now a four-alarm fire:

So for the record, let it be known that the candidate for vice-president for the GOP is a compulsive, repetitive, demonstrable liar. If you follow the links, here is the proof. I repeat: proof:

- She has lied about the Bridge To Nowhere. She ran for office favoring it, wore a sweatshirt defending it, and only gave it up when the federal congress, Senator McCain in particular, went ballistic. She kept the money anyway and favors funding Don Young’s Way, at twice the cost of the original bridge.

- She has lied about her firing of the town librarian and police chief of Wasilla, Alaska.

- She has lied about pressure on Alaska’s public safety commissioner to fire her ex-brother-in-law.

- She has lied about her previous statements on climate change.

- She has lied about Alaska’s contribution to America’s oil and gas production.

- She has lied about when she asked her daughters for their permission for her to run for vice-president.

- She has lied about the actual progress in constructing a natural gas pipeline from Alaska.

- She has lied about Obama’s position on habeas corpus.

- She has lied about her alleged tolerance of homosexuality.

- She has lied about the use or non-use of a TelePrompter at the St Paul convention.

- She has lied about her alleged pay-cut as mayor of Wasilla.

- She has lied about what Alaska’s state scientists concluded about the health of the polar bear population in Alaska.

You cannot trust a word she says. On anything.

Nope. It appears that you cannot.

Republicans everywhere are shaking with outrage because some individual broke the law by hacking into Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email account.

Just savor the irony. A bunch of lawless, authoritarian, surveillance-craving zealots suddenly get angry when someone breaks federal laws and reads someone’s webmail.

These are the same people, as Glenn Greenwald helpfully reminds us, that

cheered on every last expansion of the Lawless Surveillance State of the last eight years — put their fists in the air with glee as the Federal Government seized the power to listen to innocent Americans’ telephone calls; read our emails; obtain our banking, credit card, and library records; and create vast data bases of every call we make and receive and every prescription we fill and every instance of travel and other vast categories of information that remain largely unknown — all without warrants or oversight of any kind and often in clear violation of the law.

The same political faction which today is prancing around in full-throated fits of melodramatic hysteria and Victim mode (their absolute favorite state of being) over the sanctity of Sarah Palin’s privacy are the same ones who scoffed with indifference as it was revealed during the Bush era that the FBI systematically abused its Patriot Act powers to gather and store private information on thousands of innocent Americans; that Homeland Security officials illegally infiltrated and monitored peaceful, law-abiding left-wing groups devoted to peace activism, civil liberties and other political agendas disliked by the state; and that the telephone calls of journalists and lawyers have been illegally and repeatedly monitored.

Read Glenn’s whole post. Really worth it.

Glenn Greenwald with an important coda to the NSA spy scandal.

This article is utterly unbelievable.

At least one GOP senator is interested in hunting down the truth:

The abuse of power investigation against Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republican vice presidential candidate, took a potentially ominous turn for her party today when state lawmakers voted to subpoena her husband.

Republican efforts to delay the probe until after the Nov. 4 election were thwarted when GOP state Sen. Charlie Huggins, who represents Palin’s hometown of Wasilla, sided with Democrats. “Let’s just get the facts on the table,” said Huggins, who appeared in camouflage pants to vote during a break from moose hunting.