• The GOP's latest effort at giving itself a face-lift is a new initiative, the National Council for a New America, headed up by such folks as John McCain, Jeb Bush, Haley Barbour and Bobby Jindal. Eric Cantor denies this is a "rebranding" effort although it does seem like the policy problems the initiative will be tackling conspicuously lack a focus on social issues. Presumably to tie their criticism of the president to this rebranding effort, House Republicans also released an 86 second video that suggests Obama's policies are making us less safe and ends with a shot of the smoldering Pentagon after the 9/11 attacks.
• In light of Barack Obama's roundabout admission last night that the Bush administration used torture and broke the law, and the evidence that Bush signed executive orders authorizing detainee abuse, you might think that support for a real investigation could be built. If it comes to that, though, Condoleeza Rice has her former boss' back, telling Stanford students that "the United States was told, we were told, nothing that violates our obligations under the Convention Against Torture. And so by definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Convention Against Torture."
• Time Magazine's list of the 100 most influential people is bound to provoke some head-scratching over some of the inclusions (an Ann Coulter-penned ode to Sarah Palin on the "Heroes and Icons" list?) -- but that's the point. Lists like this are utterly meaningless because "influence" becomes diluted when there's so much competition and since the finalists aren't even ranked, there's no way to determine whether, say, Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel, both in the "Leaders and Revolutionaries" category, are more or less influential than one another.
• Moe Tkacik at TPM has a good report on how the urge to put teachers' pensions into the high-flying bull markets of the go-go late-90s has resulted in those assets becoming toxic waste in the aftermath of the economic crash. Furthermore, this practice made possible the pay-to-play scandals slowly coming to light, most prominently in the case of New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson.
• Remainders: Michael Steele keeps embarrassing himself; Ambinder thinks the GOP needs to grow up (no argument here); Kilgore looks at the vote breakdown for the budget resolution and sees fairly strong party unity in the Democratic caucus; and Gingrich is down with a new Contract with America.

--Mori Dinauer

Marc Ambinder Chris Good points to this Pew Study showing that weekly Church-goers are more likely to approve of torture. Fifty-four percent of weekly churchgoers believe that torture is sometimes or often justified, which honestly isn't that much higher than the number of Americans overall, which is 49% to 47% who say it can rarely or never be justified. White evangelical protestants are the most likely, at 62%, to believe that torture is often or sometimes justified.

I feel like I should be making some smart remark about how Jesus was tortured, but I'm really too horrified. Of course, that won't stop me from pointing out the obvious: there is a large number of people committed to preventing consenting adults from having sex or getting married because of their sexual orientation who nevertheless think it's okay to beat or waterboard people and shove them in tiny boxes.

-- A. Serwer

General Motors just announced it was laying of 21,000 more workers, as a means of assuring the Treasury Department that the company is worthy of more bailout money. A Treasury official was quoted as saying approvingly that the goal is a "slimmed down" GM.

What? Having GM or Chrysler cut tens of thousands of jobs in order to be eligible for a government bailout reminds me of "saving" Vietnam by bombing it to smithereens. Aren't we giving these companies billions of taxpayer dollars to save jobs? If not, we're just transferring money from taxpayers to GM and Chrysler bondholders and shareholders.

I agree with those who say the United States needs an auto industry. But there's no point spending tens of billions of taxpayer dollars for an auto industry that's a tiny fragment of what it was before. We could achieve that objective by doing nothing.

Besides, as I've said before, the "American auto industry" shouldn't be defined as auto companies with U.S. headquarters. The true "American auto industry" is Americans who make automobiles. At the rate the Big Three are shrinking (even as they’re bailed out), foreign automakers with American plants may soon employ more Americans than the Big Three do. The Big Three have gone global anyway. A Pontiac G8 shipped by GM from Australia contains far less American labor than a BMW X5 assembled in the United States. GM's European subsidiaries include Opel and Saab. Ford also has operations around the world. It even owns Volvo.

The purpose of any auto bailout ought to be to help American autoworkers keep their jobs, regardless of whether they work for GM or Toyota or anyone else. Or if they lose their jobs, to help them get new ones that pay almost as well. Yet we’re doing exactly the opposite: We're paying GM and Chrysler billions of taxpayer dollars to keep them afloat while they cut tens of thousands of American jobs and slash wages. There's no good reason why taxpayers should foot any of this bill unless the Big Three agree to keep their workers employed while they try to turn themselves around.

--Robert Reich

When Republican elected officials say something nutty and inclined to cause panic -- say, Sen. Richard Burr's encouragement of bank runs -- you have his staff insisting that it's fine, and you have other important Republican organs defending his statements.

When a Democratic elected official says something nutty and inclined to cause panic -- say, Vice President Joe Biden telling people to avoid public transportation -- you have his staff walking it back and prominent Democratic leaders gently, or not so gently, correcting him as well.

A small thing, but this is the kind of stuff that gives a party the image of being responsible and pragmatic versus being perceived as reckless and ideological.

-- Tim Fernholz

How can citizenry be engaged across different platforms? Today, the Prospect considers public media 2.0 and asks experts about its future.

Yochai Benkler is the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard, and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Jessica Clark and Pat Aufderhaide have written the best current analysis of how we can pursue the core values underlying support for public media in the new, networked environment. Critical to their insight is the understanding that those values are best pursued through platforms that allow the individuals and groups who make up "the public" to engage in constructing their own political and cultural sphere.

Given that public media's objective is to facilitate the capabilities and practices of the population at large, what is the role of public media organizations (and their funding)? What is their institutional context? Professionalism still has its place in media, but public-media organizations need to focus on fostering and enabling the creation of distributed platforms for public self re-creation.

Public media's challenge will be to overcome the more controlling aspects of the 20th-century culture of professional media creation, both within the media and among funders and policy-makers. Leaders should not swamp media organizations' ability to transition from publishers of high-quality, “good for you” goods to orchestrators of political participation across engaged platforms. The transition is far from trivial, because professional judgment and technical ability historically went hand in hand with authority, as well as the responsibility to give the public what is good for it in forms that it could absorb. The passive view of the public was every bit as much a part of the mass-media culture as the focus on production values and professionalism. And it is that set of biases that need to be overcome. It will require public media to hire and promote people experienced with platforms for networked public engagement, rather than imagine that the same skills that went into superb traditional public-media creation will alone be sufficient to build a participatory platform. It will require funders to seek out organizations whose practices suggest a real understanding that the role of professional as enabler, curator, and interlocutor of participatory public media is fundamentally less authoritative and more discursive than that of the public mass media producer.

If these challenges are met, there is every reason to think that, unlike for commercial media, the new environment is more of an opportunity than a threat for public media.

Related: Jessica Clark and Patricia Aufderheide offer their vision for building a new national network, and a group of media experts discuss the challenges faced by public media 2.0.

--Yochai Benkler

Yesterday, at the Bank of America shareholders meeting, various pension funds and other dissident shareholders, led by labor unions and in particular SEIU, attempted to force Chairman and CEO Ken Lewis out of both his positions. (SEIU's pension funds own shares in B of A.) Lewis managed to hang on to his role as CEO, but 50.3 percent of shareholders voted to replace him as chairman of the company. Sez the Financial Times:

[T]he loss of the chairman title does not bode well for Mr Lewis. Last year, two former high-flying banking executives – Kennedy Thompson of Wachovia and Kerry Killinger of Washington Mutual – were stripped of their chairman titles and, shortly after, removed as chief executives as their institutions sagged under the weight of bad real estate loans.

SEIU objected to Lewis' reign for a variety of reasons: on a purely economic standpoint, Lewis has overseen a huge crash in the company's value; the company's high fee structure targets low- and moderate-income consumers of credit cards and mortgage loans; and the Bank has lobbied against the Employee Free Choice Act and other legislation while receiving government bail-out funds. There's also the -- surprisingly controversial -- idea that the board of directors should be independent from the management it oversees.

Between this, and the the United Autoworkers' large role on the boards of "new" Chrysler, Ford, and GM, it's starting to look like there is something of a trend in unions giving workers a stronger voice on the boards of major corporations.

-- Tim Fernholz

The thing is, it’s hard to do so precisely because of the way the media is going into its utterly predictable full-on freak-out mode, replete with absurd sub-angles. Watching the CNN feed on one of those horrible little captive-audience elevator monitors the other day, I saw the headline, “Swine Flu and Twitter.” All this makes swine flu seem like a weirdly inflated pseudo-event on par with Obama’s first 100 days. David Rothkopf wrote about this other day on his Foreign Policy blog:

Swine flu! World Health Organization at alert level 4! Markets rocked by sell-offs! Howie Mandel was right! Never shake hands! Bathe in Purell! See if you can borrow a face mask from Michael Jackson! Or hold your breath whenever you are near a ham sandwich! Armies of pigs in uniform marching on Washington! Orwell was right: the animals have turned on us, become more dangerous than us! Four legs bad, two legs good! Head for the hills!

Once again, the media is reacting to a potential threat with its usual calm, responsibly recognizing that sensational coverage of diseases can have far worse consequences than the diseases themselves. Or not.

Remember SARS? Fewer people died of SARS than choked to death in the United States on small objects that year. But estimates of global economic losses exceeded $40 billion. Back then, I wrote an article called "The Buzz Bites Back" for the Washington Post about this phenomenon dubbing it an "infodemic." And it was clear at the time that the progress of the information revolution was amplifying the impact of these information epidemics and accelerating their spread. Yet, still hysteria reigns again.

I bet I could get a really good deal on a beachfront suite right now.

--Michelle Goldberg

The most active demographic in the 2008 election was black women, according to a report released by the Pew Center. The electorate was the most diverse in American history, with minorities representing an unprecedented number of voters, and the participation gap between black and white voters was ground down to less than a percentage point. Black women had the highest voter turnout rate of any group.

Perhaps most surprising is that the surge in black voter turnout was especially pronounced in the South:

From 2004 to 2008, the greatest increases were in Southern states with large black eligible voter populations: Mississippi (where the voter turnout rate was up 8 percentage points), Georgia (7.5 points), North Carolina (6.1 points) and Louisiana (6.0 points). It also increased in the District of Columbia (6.9 points)

How can citizenry be engaged across different platforms? Today, the Prospect considers public media 2.0 and asks experts about its future.

Ellen Goodman is a law professor at Rutgers University. She specializes in information technology, media, and intellectual property.

How do we nurture public media 2.0? Federal support for noncommercial public media needs to be better tailored to the capabilities and needs of digital networks.

Federal funding for public media needs to be unbundled from the aging broadcast infrastructure. The Public Broadcasting Act earmarks federal appropriations for broadcast stations -- about 70 percent -- to an extent that is out of proportion with the reduced importance of broadcasting in our communications environment and the increased importance of broadband and mobile.

Federal support also takes the form of spectrum allocations to full power noncommercial broadcast stations. There ought to be consolidation among noncommercial broadcast stations, especially in television, with some television stations sharing multicast digital channels. Economic pressures alone will effectuate some of this consolidation, but a policy piece is also necessary. There should be incentives for noncommercial stations to return licenses to the FCC; the value of these licenses ought to be returned to public media through grants and new investments.

Finally, federal support takes the form of copyright exemptions and licenses. These are designed for broadcasting, and not for broadband distribution, and need to be updated for the digital environment.

Related: Jessica Clark and Patricia Aufderheide offer their vision for building a new national network, and a group of media experts discuss the challenges faced by public media 2.0.

--Ellen Goodman

The good folks of Iowa who went door-to-door for John Edwards' presidential campaign in December 2007.

The Daily News has done a read-through of Elizabeth Edwards' new memoir, Resilience, ahead of its May 12 publication date. The write-up is pretty depressing:

Campaign cad John Edwards' cheating ways made his wife, Elizabeth, sick to her stomach - literally.

After the former presidential hopeful confessed his betrayal, Elizabeth Edwards writes in her new book, "I cried and screamed, I went to the bathroom and threw up."

Edwards goes on to call Rielle Hunter, the amateur videographer and '80s-era party girl with whom her husband had an affair, "pathetic." She says she told John not to run for president when he first revealed the affair to her, in 2006, but notes that he initially hid from her the full extent of his contact with Hunter, saying they had only slept together once. But Elizabeth says she continues to work on forgiving John, writing:

I lie in bed, circles under my eyes, my sparse hair sticking in too many directions, and he looks at me as if I am the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. It matters.

It must be very difficult to have the entire world knowing the sordid details of your personal life. I'm sure it's very, very tempting to tell your side of the story. But still, one wonders why exactly Elizabeth felt the need to write about all this, when she has called health-care reform the cause of what remains of her life. It's not like the Edwards family needs the money. And calling Hunter, who by all accounts is a somewhat disturbed individual, "pathetic" in print is not exactly taking the high road. Sad.

--Dana Goldstein

Magazines are folding; newspapers are substantially cutting their staffs; and television news networks are increasingly competing with Web sources for an audience. In short, commercial media is experiencing a bit of a crisis. But what does this mean for public media? Can public media seize this moment as an opportunity to reinvent itself? Jessica Clark and Patricia Aufderheide consider the steps necessary to develop a public-media network capable of building publics, and a group of experts define public media for the future. Public-media policy recommendations will also be posted here on TAPPED throughout the day.

Meanwhile, Matthew Yglesias ponders the question, "If conservatives love torture so much, why don't they marry it?"

And Nathan Schneider wonders if attempts to reclaim Christianity for humanism are mere wishful thinking.

As always, subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they are published. Also, follow us on Twitter for highlights from our blog.

--The Editors

Last night, Andre Showell, a reporter from BET, asked President Obama this question:

As the entire nation tries to climb out of this deep recession, in communities of color, the circumstances are far worse. The black unemployment rate, as you know, is in the double digits. And in New York City, for example, the black unemployment rate for men is near 50 percent.

My question to you tonight is given this unique and desperate circumstance, what specific policies can you point to that will target these communities and what's the timetable for us to see tangible results?

Obama turned to his stock answer on questions like these, which is that his policies help everyone. His response was predictable: Even before he was a candidate, Obama's approach to race was to cast problems that affect the black community in particular or discrete ways as American problems. It's a shrewd way of neutralizing the kind of racial resentment that has been ginned up in the past to oppose a more robust social safety net.

I don't mean to single out Showell, but I don't know what is gained from asking these kinds of questions. At best the question is so vague and general as to solicit a vague and general answer, at worst it looks like the reporter is getting on a pedestal and reminding Obama that he's black. Framed in this manner, the question is unlikely to get a substantive policy answer for the reason I described above. It would be more effective to ask questions about specific policies that would affect the black community -- criminal-justice reform, better regulation of predatory lending and credit cards, or the mortgage cram-down bill that seems destined for defeat because of anemic support from the administration. Asking specific questions about any one of these policies would have yielded a more substantive answer about what the administration is doing to help communities of color than the one we got last night.  

-- A. Serwer

AEI's relatively new leader, Arthur Brooks, has a weird op-ed in the Journal today that basically tries to gin up an economic culture war in the classic conservative manner: uniting the wealthy with people who think they share the interests of the wealthy. Brooks is sort of a weird character -- check out this profile by TNR's Marin Cogan -- who mixes his cultural and economic analysis into a very strange brew called "ethical populism," which is different from unethical populism in that it allows the rich to continue paying lower taxes. A perfect example:

Take public attitudes toward the estate tax, which only a few (who leave estates in the millions of dollars) will ever pay, but which two-thirds of Americans believe is "not fair at all," according to a 2009 Harris poll. Millions of ordinary citizens believe it is unfair for the government to be predatory -- even if the prey are wealthy.

Later on, of course, he trashes advocates of fairness, and never bothers to explain why taxing millions of dollars in windfall income is "predatory." The whole piece is silly in the typical Wall Street Journal way, you know, conflating high deficits with socialism, citing weird projects that got federal money, and suggesting anyone who thinks the incoherent tea party protests were, well, incoherent, opposes the free market. He also refers to "social democrats" as though there was some kind of social democratic movement hard at work in America's government, but the three most prominent social democrats I can recall off the top of my head (Harold Meyerson, John Judis and Bernie Sanders) aren't really trying to tear down capitalism; they're mostly concerned with income inequality and union density.

Watching Republicans harp on the socialism canard has been pretty funny; after all, it's not true and it's not working for them as a political strategy -- maybe Brooks didn't get Saul Anuzis' memo. That's probably because, as Brooks observes, "We need to offer specific, market-based reform solutions." Of course, none of those solutions find their way into his article, so I await future dispatches from this ethical populist explaining the market-based solutions to the market-based failures that brought down our economy. Reminds me a little of this oft-cited and NSFW Onion article.

-- Tim Fernholz

Yesterday Obama reiterated his commitment to a narrower use of the state secrets privilege--a commitment he's already broken in three separate instances. He said he believed the state secrets doctrine should be "modified" and, without acknowledging his own abuse of the privilege, suggested that the administration had only invoked it because they were overwhelmed by having to hit the ground running on the cases in question. He ended by saying:

But searching for ways to redact, to carve out certain cases, to see what can be done so that a judge in chambers can review information without it being in open court, you know, there should be some additional tools so that it's not such a blunt instrument.

And we're interested in pursuing that. I know that Eric Holder and Greg Craig, my White House counsel, and others are working on that as we speak.

How can citizenry be engaged across different platforms? Today, the Prospect considers public media 2.0 and asks experts about its future.

Josh Silver is the executive editor and cofounder of Free Press, an organization that advocates for diverse and independent media ownership, strong public media, and universal access to communications.

The decline of U.S. commercial journalism, combined with new technology and digital innovations, presents an unprecedented opportunity for public media to be reinvented as go-to sources for journalism, education, arts, culture, and local programming.

We’ve all seen the headlines. Newspapers are rapidly losing print circulation and advertising dollars while laying off employees en masse (there were more than 20,000 layoffs since the beginning of 2008). Television networks air cheap reality programs instead of substantive investigative reporting. Commercial radio is dominated by screaming pundits, and, like television, is nearly devoid of substantive or local reporting.

Leadership on public media is needed now – both in local communities and in Washington. Our biggest obstacle isn’t money or technology; it’s imagining the alternatives and harnessing the political will to make them a reality.

Three major reforms that would reinvigorate public media after the jump.

Related: Jessica Clark and Patricia Aufderheide offer their vision for building a new national network, and a group of media experts discuss the challenges faced by public media 2.0.

--Josh Silver

So how do we do it? The creation of a public-media trust could be funded through a number of means, ranging from a simple congressional appropriation, to a tax on commercial broadcasters, to a spectrum-use fee for companies profiting from the public airwaves.

Funding is vital both for enabling public media to produce more high-quality content and for protecting public broadcasters from undue political pressures inherent to the annual congressional appropriations process. It would also help alleviate the negative influences associated with corporate underwriting of public media: namely, a reluctance to challenge the status quo or offend the sponsors.

Diversity and Expansion: Public media are overrun with what historian Eric Barnouw referred to as “splendidly safe” programming. While Antiques Road Show and Lawrence Welk specials appeal to a certain audience, public media’s current range of programming has little mass appeal to new communities, especially racial and ethnic minorities.

While media technology has advanced dramatically since the advent of public broadcasting, much of America remains unaware of the expansive variety of public media. Public media include a range of outlets and formats – including community radio and public access TV, muckraking magazines and independent producers – whose mission is to serve the public, not to earn a profit. Offering an alternative to mainstream media, this noncommercial sector aims to educate and engage audiences.

Harness the Digital Revolution: Public media require a 21st-century infrastructure to prosper in the digital age. This means building a national broadband backbone that would connect public media outlets with libraries, schools, public access channels, community organizations, and one another.

We must invest in creating tools that will make public media more dynamic and participatory, and we must put the vast libraries of public-media content online and into the hands of the public. We need to develop new platforms – from iPhone apps to open-source multimedia players – for all public media entities to use on their Web sites. We must get more hardware and software to stations to enable and embolden new media, innovative journalism, and creative production on all levels.

The budget passed last night, and it passed without a number of the president's smart revenue-increasing proposals, including lowering the tax-deduction rate for the wealthy and cutting unnecessary agricultural subsidies. Congress also declined to extend the "Making Work Pay" tax credit, which was set to be funded by the proceeds of cap-and-trade. (Of course, some or all of those provisions could find their way back into legislation as details of the resolution are filled in during the coming months.) Reading this Los Angeles Times article, though, you'd think that the president's main budget goal was taxing the rich. But the reporter doesn't make the connection that if you want to cut deficits, you have to increase revenues.

It boggles the mind that conventional wisdom sees cutting spending as anti-deficit but cutting subsidies as "redistribution"; allowing wealthy people to only deduct 28 percent of a charitable contribution or a mortgage bill rather than 35 percent is a "Robin Hood" move, not an attempt to bring some sanity back to our fiscal policy. John McCain predictably complained about "generational theft" again -- and as a representative of the next generation, let me note that he can take his concern-trolling elsewhere -- but he he missed his chance to show that his opposition to agricultural subsidies or his prior concerns about income inequality were anything but campaign showboating.

Similarly, last night Chris Matthews was on Jay Leno's show, telling him that "the fact that we’re going to borrow $13 trillion. I mean, by the time he leaves office, the national debt will be the same as the total American economy today. That’s a little scary. We’re printing money." That's not a serious analysis at all! (Admittedly, I'm not sure what I was expecting from Chris Matthews). If you're worried about the national debt, you need to explain what programs you'll cut (remember how successful that project was for Republicans when they controlled the government) or what taxes you'll raise. Obama isn't "printing money" because ain't-that-just-fun-for-everybody, he's doing it to address a number of serious problems. And if Congress decides that wealthy people need more tax loopholes or that agribusiness ought to receive a ton of money for no good reason, well, we need to assign blame appropriately.

-- Tim Fernholz

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has announced the end of British combat operations in Iraq:

''Today marks the closing chapter of the combat mission in Iraq,'' Brown said. ''The flag of 20 Armoured Brigade will be lowered as British combat patrols in Basra come to an end and our armed forces prepare to draw down.''

It was an ill-conceived contribution to an ill-conceived war, and I suspect that the British will continue to pay, in a variety of ways, for a very long time.

--Robert Farley

The answers Obama gave to two torture questions last night were very good. He explained why the United States doesn't torture, that while torture can be successful tactically as an overall strategy, it's counterproductive because of the way it affects our relationships abroad and our ability to win hearts and minds across the Middle East. But, to borrow a phrase, he didn't answer the "central question" which I think Jay Bookman gets to here:

Publicly, Obama claims America has changed course. On his first day in office, he signed an executive order halting “enhanced interrogations.” But that did not restore the rule of law; it weakened it further. If one executive order can ban torture, as Obama claims, then another such order can restore it, simple as that.

Torture is not a "policy difference." It is a crime. If no one at all is held to account, in the future, it will be a policy difference. The United States position on torture will be subject to the whims of which administration is in power. The next administration to torture will be able to argue that torture is a policy difference and will point to this administration's failure to prosecute anyone for it as proof. The next time we torture, those pointing to the prosecutions of men for waterboarding will have to face torture supporters who will point to the lack of action by this administration for support.

Meanwhile, it's disappointing, but not surprising that some in the press have accepted the right's framing of the torture question. Last night Mark Knoller, apparently a fan of 24, asked this question: 

[I]f part of the United States were under imminent threat, could you envision yourself ever authorizing the use of those enhanced interrogation techniques?

This is a leading question, designed to get a specific answer. If Obama simply says no, he's too weak to defend the country. If he says yes, he's admitted he is willing to break the law and conceded that torture will cure cancer and male pattern baldness. The question assumes that torture will yield the information needed, and it plainly disregards the law. It is a pro-torture question, and it's really unfortunate that we've gotten to the point where some people in the press are encouraging the executive to break the law rather than holding him to account when he does.

-- A. Serwer

• The president's budget passed in the House today, garnering zero Republican votes and 17 Democratic defections. It is expected to pass in the Senate though it will be interesting to see how the much-vaunted Democratic "filibuster-proof" majority holds together. One piece of (tentative) good news: the conference committee version of the budget stripped the Mike Johanns amendment that would have prevented the reconciliation process from being used on climate change legislation.
• The GOP, other than Olympia Snowe, is really having a hard time coming to grips with their loss of Arlen Specter. Judd Gregg, for example, thinks Specter's voluntary switch has something to do with upsetting "checks and balances." But James Inhofe sees a silver lining, arguing that Specter's decision is "visable evidence" that Democratic overreach is laying the groundwork for a GOP comeback in 2010. I tried repeatedly to understand Inhofe's logic but I decided that life's too short to care.
• I'm just speculating here, but perhaps Michael Steele's casting of Specter as Benedict Arnold and himself as George Washington clarifies the RNC's proposed resolution that would strip Mikey of his allowance. See also, Steele's First Hundred Days.
• Sens. Jay Rockefeller and Sherrod Brown have drafted a letter to Sens. Baucus and Kennedy making the case for including a public option in health care reform. Sixteen Democratic Senators have cosigned.
• Quote of the Day, David Frum edition: "For years, many in the conservative world have wished for an ideologically purer GOP. Their wish has been granted. Happy?"
• Remainders: Leahy wants to chat with Bybee; a collapsing economy hasn't prevented the bank lobby from twisting Congress' arm with minimal effort; Charles Grassley has concerns about a USDA nominee he knows nothing about; and the people of MN-06 who didn't vote for a wingnut to represent them at least deserve someone with a semblance of historical literacy.

--Mori Dinauer

I think what Ezra Klein and Kevin Drum are missing about Deputy Health Minister Yakov Litzman's remarks arguing that "swine flu" is offensive to people who keep Kosher and that it should be called "Mexican flu" instead is that Litzman obviously has enormous potential as a right-wing blogger. Just to make sure though, he should threaten to drag some public health official out of their office and beat them to death.

-- A. Serwer

For me, the most fascinating segment of Obama's New York Times Magazine interview with David Leonhardt was the one on how the recession is impacting gender roles. Leonhardt begins with the premise -- a false one -- that the recession is primarily impacting men, especially on a sort of psychic level. He likens the situation to that of Obama's grandfather, who is portrayed in Dreams From My Father as feeling less-than -- in terms of masculinity -- because he earned less than his wife, a bank manager.

LEONHARDT: I think there are a lot of men out there today, working at G.M. and Chrysler and other places, who feel the same kind of dejection that your grandfather did. What do you think the future of work looks like for men?

THE PRESIDENT: I think it’s an interesting question, because as I said, you know, you go in to factories all across the Midwest and you talk to the men who work there — they’ve got extraordinary skill and extraordinary pride in what they make. And I think that for them, the loss of manufacturing is a loss of a way of life and not just a loss of income.

The thing is, this is not a male economic crisis. There is no nationwide pandemic of women out-earning men. Indeed, the opposite is true; women continue to earn just 78 cents on the male dollar, even for the same work, with the same educational background, and the same number of years on the job. Women still make up slightly less than half the workforce (49 percent). And while it is true that four of five jobs lost in this economic crisis -- so far -- were held by men, that speaks mostly to the inequalities borne of occupational gender segregation. Men are losing more jobs because they had more of the good, unionized jobs in construction and manufacturing to begin with.

In other words, just because men are losing-out, it doesn't mean women are winning. A recession is no time for a battle of the sexes. Rather, it's a time to remember that as more and more families lose the salary of male breadwinners, we must make sure that the jobs held by women pay better and have better benefits. Obama goes on in the interview to discuss the importance of attracting men to professions like nursing and teaching. The same logic should be applied to women getting into "green jobs" in sectors such as transportation and construction.

--Dana Goldstein

Like Ambinder, I'll be at tonight's White House news conference, and also like Ambinder, odds are I won't be called on for a question. But I will be on the Twitters throughout the event, so tune in (tweet in?) for live commentary and also the high likelihood I'll bungle the job, since it will be my first time using this mode of communication I despise. (If the WH press team lets me bring my laptop into the East Room -- unlikely! -- I'll live blog as well.)

I'll also have some questions ready to go in case the powers that be in the White House decide that they're just not hitting the coveted small liberal magazine demographic as hard as they would like. What would you be interested in hearing Obama asked this evening?

-- Tim Fernholz

What will newly minted Democrat Arlen Specter do for a climate bill's chances? The consensus thus far: Not much. Having a filibuster-proof 60 votes in the Senate would be generally cool for Democrats, but energy specifically isn't a partisan issue. As Sen. Barbara Boxer said about the Specter effect, "I don't think climate change is a matter of party. It is really more a matter of region."

More important is winning over the Democrats' Blue Dog Coalition, many of whom are from coal regions and remain unconvinced on the climate bill. Getting a vote from a Dem like Rep. Mike Doyle, of Pennsylvania, will be tough -- he didn't sound like he believed the U.S. could reach the renewable energy standard called for in hearings last week.

A fellow Pennsylvanian, Specter has no outstanding voting record on climate, or more specifically cap and trade. He co-sponsored the weak "Low Carbon Economy Act" cap-and-trade attempt with Sen. Jeff Bingaman in 2007. And, while he believes that moving a climate bill is "something we ought to do our best to get done," he was one of the votes that derailed cap-and-trade's chances of passing through a budget reconciliation process -- along with 26 Democrats.

But can Specter's mind be changed? He seems at least open to the prospects of renewable energy. Last April, Specter co-sponsored and voted for the Ensign-Cantwell amendment in the housing reform bill for renewable tax credits. He also supported the American Recovery and Recovery and Reinvestment stimulus act that in part expanded renewable energy investment incentives. Plus, it's worth keeping in mind that Pennsylvania is the U.S. headquarters for Gamesa, one of the world's largest wind turbine manufacturers and a promising alternative energy company with regard to jobs.

So Specter at least gets it. But rather than focusing on him for delivering a cap-and-trade saving vote, we should pay attention to Mike Ross, the Arkansas Representative who's down with the Democratic Blue Dog Coalition. He's one of 11 Democrats from the House energy and commerce committee who has yet to be convinced to pass the bill. Meanwhile, he holds good sway over Blue-Dog Arkansas Sens. Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor. Pryor even told reporters earlier this month, "I guarantee you if Mike Ross is OK with it, it goes a long way with me."

The Blue Dogs are just the kind of Dems with whom Specter can probably play nice. Securing their votes would go perhaps a long way to securing Specter's.

-- Brentin Mock

David Weigel, who in high school was voted Most Likely To Win The Internet, catches Byron York making a shocking discovery: black people like Barack Obama.

On his 100th day in office, Barack Obama enjoys high job approval ratings, no matter what poll you consult. But if a new survey by the New York Times is accurate, the president and some of his policies are significantly less popular with white Americans than with black Americans, and his sky-high ratings among African-Americans make some of his positions appear a bit more popular overall than they actually are.

I'm not sure how it makes sense that this means Obama's positions are "more popular overall than they actually are," unless you're arguing that black people don't actually count.

This is another example of a really bizarre genre of conservative writing, which I call "If Only Those People Weren't Here." It reminds me somewhat of the absence of black people in most non-dystopian science fiction, except the subtextual desire in York's column is far more deliberate: If black people weren't able to vote, Republicans would win more elections. And Ann Coulter, at the very least, has had the chutzpah to say directly what she's really thinking: "If we took away women's right to vote, we'd never have to worry about another Democrat president."

Part of the point of York's column is to provoke the common conservative response that black support for Obama is "racist." The problem is that while Obama's support among black folks is high, it's only really a bit higher than that of Al Gore, John Kerry, and Bill Clinton, all of whom earned close to 9 out of 10 black votes in their respective elections. Weigel writes that "black voters strongly support the Democratic Party, and have since the 1960s, for a number of complicated reasons." Maybe black support for Obama has more to do with things like Republicans arguing that black votes don't really count than it does with Obama being black. Note that Al Sharpton and Carol Mosely-Braun have never sat behind the desk at the Oval Office.

It's telling that rather than conclude the GOP should do something about its deficit with women and minority voters, the typical conservative response is to simply fantasize about a world in which we might not actually exist. I don't mean to spook anyone (well, maybe Pat Buchanan) but we're not exactly going anywhere. Deal with it.

-- A. Serwer

Everyone seems to be very concerned that the outbreak of swine flu means they'll have to stop eating bacon and other delicious pig products. While health officials have assured the public that you can't contract this flu from your breakfast sausage, meat consumption just might be at the heart of the possible pandemic. Residents of the area where swine flu originated, the state of Veracruz, Mexico, say that a local Smithfield confined-hog operation is to blame, with its poop lagoons and untreated waste polluting the area.

As far back as late March, roughly one-sixth of the residents in the Gulf Coast state of Veracruz began complaining of respiratory infections that they say can be traced to a farm that lies upwind 8.5 kilometres to the north, in the town of Xaltepec.

But Jose Luis Martinez, a 34-year-old resident of La Gloria, said he knew the minute he learned about the outbreak on the news and heard a description of the symptoms: fever, coughing, joint aches, severe headache and, in some cases, vomiting and diarrhea.

"When we saw it on the television, we said to ourselves, 'This is what we had,'" he said Monday. "It all came from here.… The symptoms they are suffering are the same that we had here."

Smithfield says it hasn't found swine flu in its eight industrial farms in the area, but that claim has yet to be independently verified. And it's worth noting that the last this "H1N1" virus popped up, in 1998, it was found in a North Carolina industrial pig farm. (I'm from Iowa, which isn't as hog-heavy as North Carolina, but I've certainly smelled a poop lagoon. Pig products are no longer part of my diet.)

So no, you don't have to give up your bacon because of the immediate swine flu threat. But if you want to actually diminish the risk of getting this or other potential animal-waste-borne illnesses, giving up factory-farmed meat might be a good idea.

--Ann Friedman

David Leonhardt interviews the president, and it's all quite interesting. But I know you want to read about banks and, if possible, Larry Summers and Tim Geithner, so let me flag this selection for your attention:

THE PRESIDENT: Not entirely. But, I mean, the fact is that Larry Summers right now is very comfortable making arguments, often quite passionately, that Bob Reich used to be making when he was in the Clinton White House. Now Larry might not like me saying that —

Larry Summers is the new Bob Reich —

THE PRESIDENT: — that he’s become a soft touch. But, no, I think that one of the things that we all agree to is that the touchstone for economic policy is, does it allow the average American to find good employment and see their incomes rise; that we can’t just look at things in the aggregate, we do want to grow the pie, but we want to make sure that prosperity is spread across the spectrum of regions and occupations and genders and races; and that economic policy should focus on growing the pie, but it also has to make sure that everybody has got opportunity in that system.

I also think that there’s very little disagreement that there are lessons to be learned from this crisis in terms of the importance of regulation in the financial markets. And I think that this notion that there is somehow resistance to that — to those lessons within my economic team — just isn’t borne out by the discussions that I have every day.

If anything, the only thing I notice, I think, that I do think is something of a carry-over from Bob Rubin — I see it in Larry, I see it in Tim — is a great appreciation of complexity.

And a willingness to admit what you don’t know, in many cases.

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, exactly. And so what that means is that, as we’re making economic policy, I think there is a certain humility about the consequences of the actions we take, intended and unintended, that may make some outside observers impatient. I mean, you’ll recall Geithner was just getting hammered for months. But he, I think, is very secure in saying we need to get these things right, and if we act too abruptly, we can end up doing more harm than good. Those are qualities that I think have been useful.

A few things here. Though Summers has moved a good deal further left than his critics would give him credit for, it is also very clear that whatever the situation was in 1993, today he and Reich are still making very different arguments. (Luckily, Jared Bernstein is also in the mix). I do think that Obama's equation of a Reich-style world view with being a "soft touch" is silly, and in keeping with a discredited economic ideology that certainly, and unfortunately, still exists in Democratic politics.

Another point: there is certainly disagreement about the lessons of this crisis with respect to regulation, with many experts suggesting that increased regulation alone is not enough to address the problems of the financial sector; rather, the big banks need to be broken up into smaller institutions. While the president does touch on that at one point, suggesting (predictably) a balance between smarter regulations for investment banks but perhaps a prohibition on some of the truly exotic financial institutions that came up in the last few years (his example is AIG's financial products division), I wonder if he really has been confronted with the bolder ideas about anti-trust action in the financial sector.

Finally, there is the continual concern about the complexity and unintended results of a more aggressive response to the financial crisis. This is a persuasive argument that I often hear when I talk to experts on these issues, but given the amount of criticism coming at the president's plan I wish he -- or anyone from his administration -- would go into more detail about the potential successes and problems that would come from both their plan and some kind of national receivership option.

-- Tim Fernholz

Hey, momentous occasion, guys -- it's hump day! And it's also Barack Obama's hundredth day as president. So, how important is this landmark event? Important as any other day, says Mark Schmitt, who punctures the hundred-days myth.

And since we're already at it, Tim Fernholz offers a retrospective of Obama's domestic policy, and Ilan Goldenberg looks at the president's work abroad.

Meanwhile, Sarah Posner recaps some of the religious drama surrounding Kathleen Sebelius' confirmation as Health and Human Services Secretary.

As always, subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they are published. Also, follow us on Twitter for highlights from our blog.

--The Editors

In my column yesterday, I discussed how Israeli bellicosity toward Iran actually amplifies Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's insane Holocaust-denial, and suggested that the Israeli government and its supporters tone down their rhetoric. A thoughtful reader, Mark Welsh, sends in the following idea on another way to combat Ahmadinejad's historic revisionism -- through taking him up on his suggestion to re-"investigate" the Holocaust:

I ... would like to point out one very important aspect of this whole Ahmadinejad/Holocaust denial controversy. The West's refusal to take up the Iranian president's challenge, call his bluff, and agree to an investigation plays right into the hands of people like him and all other anti-Semites/revisionists.

Simply saying, as does George Stephanopoulos, or rather, inferring that the Holocaust has been studied/documented so very thoroughly so as to preclude any questions or debates on its historical veracity is, in my opinion, a serious mistake. It feeds the conspiracy theorists and their 'Protocols of Zion' mentality. The revisionists continually point out that truth should fear no inquiry. If anything, that is probably one of the only fair statements they make. They try to point out inconsistencies in witness testimony and technical and engineering issues regarding the actual exterminations, which no respected source ... ever tries to refute. The silence of contempt, regularly employed in this respect, is doing nothing to curtail the growth of the revisionist movement. And putting its protagonists in jail is even worse. Nothing is more guaranteed to foster the growth of further revisionism than the Holocaust Denial Laws. They are insane and counterproductive.

The fact that no respected source is open to the idea of debate or further investigation of this great historical tragedy is, to me, as serious blunder as is the unscientific and hysterical reaction to such an idea. Fact will always triumph over fiction and if the facts of the Holocaust must be reinforced with additional confirmation, that process should be allowed to continue. That and only that will silence and discredit the revisionists.

--Dana Goldstein

I just can't figure it out. Incidentally, here's a cartoon the conservative group Americans for Limited Government published responding to Arlen Specter's defection...comparing him to Judas Iscariot.

I've lived in Washington for 20 years, and I have to admit there are two people whose joint appearance on a dais I never contemplated: the Family Research Council's Tony Perkins, and current D.C. Council member (and former disgraced D.C. mayor) Marion "bitch set me up" Barry.

In a delicious coda, later in the day Perkins lauded the Supreme Court decision that upheld Federal Communications Commission "decency" rules, which permit the agency to fine broadcasters for even "fleeting expletives" on broadcast television.

But there was the decency duo, at the rally at Freedom Plaza yesterday in the District, protesting the D.C. Council's impending vote to legally recognize same-sex marriages from other states. Barry is the only councilman opposed to the same-sex marriage measure.

Bishop Harry Jackson, whose anti-gay crusades I wrote about two years ago on TAP, had predicted that 1,000 supporters would show up for the launch of his "Armageddon" battle for marriage. He had to have been disappointed by the crowd of about 100 people. But that seemed less important to Perkins than the presence of black and Latino clergy, as he called pastors "the last line of defense in America."

Barry lauded the pastors, too, saying that while we need "moral politicians" like himself (yes, he said that without a trace of irony), we also need moral pastors to defend against gay marriage.

For Jackson, the anti-gay-marriage battle is an epic one between the forces of light and darkness. "We have to turn back the tide of darkness," he shouted to his tiny crowd. "It's not about hating anybody, it's about loving Jesus. ... America is on the verge of the greatest prosperity she's ever known as she returns to Christ."

--Sarah Posner

So it seems "opposite marriage" opponent and Miss California Carrie Prejean has joined up with the National Organization for Marriage folks to launch a new anti-gay marriage ad. Or maybe it's an anti-criticizing people for opposing gay marriage ad; it seems that the NOMsters are now more concerned about their feelings than the agenda they push. In any case, Ben Smith has the press release (emphasis mine):

What happens when a young California beauty pageant contestant is asked "do you support same-sex marriage?" She is attacked viciously for having the courage to speak up for her truth and her values. But Carrie's courage inspired a whole nation and a whole generation of young people because she chose to risk the Miss USA crown rather than be silent about her deepest moral values. "No Offense" calls gay marriage advocates to account for their unwillingness to debate the real issue: gay marriage has consequences.

Are these folks suggesting that Prejean might have a personal truth that is unrelated to other, perhaps equally valid truths, or some kind of larger perfect truth? Seems to me that if you want to push a religiously-inspired public agenda that brooks no dissent, it's harder to do if you concede the contingency of moral values. How ever would we organize such a society? (Paging John Rawls!)

On a less philosophical point, it's worth noting that folks have been debating the consequences of gay marriage for a long time now. The chief consequence of gay marriage, of course, is that gay people can get married and share in the various rights society grants to heterosexual marriages. Judging by this page, NOM's concern is that the consequence is that "people like you and me who believe children need moms and dads will be treated like bigots and racists.” The whole thing has a 'doth protest/project too much' feeling to it. But as gay marriage becomes a reality in more and more places across the country, it becomes clear that most people aren't feeling too threatened by the whole prospect, whatever their beliefs about child-rearing.

-- Tim Fernholz

I find Thomas Friedman's arguments against prosecution for Bush administration officials who broke the law underwhelming, as I do his retroactive defense of his support for a war in Iraq on the grounds that it has kept al-Qaeda occupied and that's why we haven't had another attack. The logical conclusion of this argument is that we should thank the Bush administration and their supporters in the press (like, ahem, Tom Friedman) for manipulating the country into war under false pretenses because of its alleged peripheral effects. I wonder how many other wars the American people will be lied into for their own good. 

The president’s decision to expose but not prosecute those responsible for this policy is surely unsatisfying; some of this abuse involved sheer brutality that had nothing to do with clear and present dangers. Then why justify the Obama compromise? Two reasons: the first is that because justice taken to its logical end here would likely require bringing George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and other senior officials to trial, which would rip our country apart; and the other is that Al Qaeda truly was a unique enemy, and the post-9/11 era a deeply confounding war in a variety of ways.

America will never find a shortage of unique enemies: The British Empire was not the Confederacy, the Nazis were not the Soviets, and the North Vietnamese were not al-Qaeda. Every potential conflict brings the prospect of a "unique" enemy for America to fight, for us to abandon the rule of law every time we face one simply means our society isn't governed by the rule of law at all. The same goes for the notion that crimes shouldn't be prosecuted if committed by high-level officials simply because it would "rip the country apart." If we're going to make high-level government officials immune from prosecution from any crimes they might commit in pursuit of their duties we should simply pass a law saying so. Otherwise the notion that we live in a country governed by laws rather than the arbitrary and convenient excercise of authority is mere pretense.

-- A. Serwer

Ehhh, not so great. The GDP shrank at a 6.1 percent annualized rate, about on par with last quarter's 6.3 percent annualized drop (some economists were predicting a 4.7 percent plunge). While it's too early to say whether this reflects the president's economic policies (it will probably take until next fall to assess the efficacy of the stimulus and other counter-cyclical measures) the fact that the GDP's plunge has been consistently outstripping expectations should raise concerns that they are not large enough.

There is good news, though. Consumer spending has gone up 2.2 percent, credit markets have stabilized (thanks in good part to the efforts of Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke), and Tuesday's housing price measures leveled off instead of falling. But overall, the news should temper anyone getting too exuberant about the hundred-day hoopla.

-- Tim Fernholz

Jay Bybee speaks, and contrary to what his friends told The Washington Post, he doesn't feel bad at all:

“The central question for lawyers was a narrow one; locate, under the statutory definition, the thin line between harsh treatment of a high-ranking Al Qaeda terrorist that is not torture and harsh treatment that is. I believed at the time, and continue to believe today, that the conclusions were legally correct.”

The Root's Dayo Olopade has a not-to-be-missed update on the White House's Office of Urban Affairs, which is off to a rocky start. Bureaucratically, the Obama administration has given the office -- led by inexperienced Bronx politician Adolfo Carrion -- a mandate that touches upon the work and budgets of a dozen separate federal agencies. But hinting at the office's lack of influence, its employees report not to Obama's policy team but to Valerie Jarrett, whose focus is on inter-governmental affairs and public outreach.

Needless to say, urbanists are disappointed, not least because economic-stimulus funding has largely bypassed city governments. (An exception is in education, where the federal government is providing direct assistance to school districts.) Indeed, the practice of funneling money for cities through state capitals has, historically, stymied progressive urban policy. In New York last year, for example, it was Albany lawmakers that put the kibosh on Mayor Bloomberg's congestion-pricing plan, which was popular in New York City. Today, New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority continues to face a $621 million deficit, yet the state legislature continues to do a lot of nothing about it. That's why mayors and urban transit czars are asking President Obama and Congress to directly fund their priorities. So far, though, this hasn't been a focus -- $40 billion in direct aid to cities was stripped during congressional negotiations over the recovery package.

--Dana Goldstein

• Specter Roundup: The other poll that made the switch more likely; the full list (since 1890) of Senate switches; committee chairs won't be decided until the next Congress; Specter's forgotten NYROB article; his stance on EFCA isn't changing; and Rep. Joe Sestak (D-PA) leaves the door open for a primary challenge.
• The congressional budget conference committee has reached an agreement on Barack Obama's $3.5 trillion budget that retains the reconciliation option for health care and doesn't interfere with Social Security. A floor vote is scheduled for tomorrow, symbolically coordinating it with Obama's hundredth day in office.
• A New York Times/CBS News poll confirms much of the same information as yesterday's Washington Post/ABC News poll, with Obama receiving a 68 percent approval rating, broad support for his agenda, and only 20 percent of respondents carrying the flag for the GOP.
  
• A vote for HHS Secretary-designate Kathleen Sebelius is expected today, although that hasn't deterred the Family Research Council, which manages to connect the dots between the swine flu pandemic and "rushing" the nominee through Congress.
• Deep Thought: It wasn't too long ago that the conservative counter-establishment used to be respected and feared.
• Remainders: "Gingrich is a pseudo-intellectual con man"; Democrats push for rate caps on the usurious credit card industry; Rick Santorum is apparently a very stupid (or mendacious) man; Sanchez gets up in DeMint's grill about the GOP's "tent of freedom"; and Bachmann gets to show off her policy chops.
  

--Mori Dinauer

I don't know whether Bank of America shareholders will oust Ken Lewis from his chairmanship this week. I don't know if Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will eventually do it, either. What really worries me is I don't know who would actually be responsible for doing the deed, or by what criteria.

When it comes to keeping top corporate executives in line, we usually entrust the job to shareholders -- or, as a practical matter, boards of directors that are supposed to represent shareholders' interests. When it comes to keeping top public servants in line we generally trust voters -- or, as a practical matter, the elected officials who represent them. But when, as now, the public has committed large amounts of its money to particular companies in the private sector, we're in a quandary.

The $45 billion we've sent to the Bank of America should give the public some say over whether Mr. Lewis remains in his job because he is now accountable to us as well as to his shareholders. But to which group should he be more accountable?

Find out, after the jump.

--Robert Reich

Is Mr. Lewis' main job still to make money for his shareholders, or does he now have a higher public responsibility to lend more money to Main Street? Was that public responsibility also paramount last fall when Federal Reserve Chief Ben Bernanke and former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson told Mr. Lewis to proceed with the Merrill-Lynch merger -- and when, according to Mr. Lewis's sworn testimony, he believed they didn't want him to disclose Merrill-Lynch's financial losses to Bank of America shareholders or anyone else?

It's not even clear who represents us as members of the public. Next month, AIG holds its annual shareholders meeting. Are you attending?

Maybe you should. The $170 billion we've committed to AIG so far amounts to nearly 80% of its shares. Some private shareholders are pushing for a vote to oust an AIG board member and to further restrict executive pay. But these dissident shareholders represent only a slice of the 20% of AIG's private owners.

AIG has three public trustees, each of whom is being paid $100,000 a year. Should they vote with the dissidents? There's no way to know, because the public trustees have no charter or mission statement to guide them, and they don't seem to report to anyone, either.

The question of public representation keeps growing. Now that our loans to Citigroup have been turned into common stock, you and I and other members of the public are poised to become Citigroup's biggest shareholder, holding about 36% of its voting shares. But who represents us, and how should they vote?

The Obama administration apparently wants to do more of these debt-for-equity swaps. They're a means to get more capital to the banks without returning to Congress to ask for more money -- which Congress would be very reluctant to provide. But the swaps also expose the public to more risk. At least loans have to be repaid.

Share prices, as we've seen, sometimes go down. Yet without a means for representing the public's interest in the governance system of these banks, we can only rely on the Treasury Secretary to keep a watchful eye over the ongoing decisions of every bank. That's unrealistic.

Even if our public interests were being represented, it's not clear exactly what they are beyond getting repaid or possibly making a bit of a profit. Presumably taxpayer dollars are being committed because of some larger public purpose. Yet companies are designed to make profits, not to fulfill public responsibilities.

Suppose the government, representing the public, instructs the Wall Street banks it now controls to lend more money to Main Street. But top bank executives believe they can better raise share prices by using the money for new investments, bigger dividends, or to lure and retain "talent?" The executives have a duty to do what the government tells them to do, but they have an even larger fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to raise share prices.

Suppose the government instructs AIG to clean up its balance sheet, but AIG's executives think they can make more money by inventing new off-balance-sheet derivatives? The executives' primary job is to make money for their shareholders. The fact that the public now owns 80% of AIG doesn't change that.

Suppose we tell General Motors Corp. -- about to become partly ours -- to shift its fleet to more fuel-efficient cars. Yet its executives know that as long as gas prices are low, Americans remain infatuated with highly profitable SUVs and pickup trucks? GM executives would have a perfect right, if not a duty, to disregard what we as citizens tell them to do in favor of what shareholders want them to do.

Democratic capitalism entails two systems by which people with significant power are held accountable. One is capitalism, by which companies and their executives are accountable to the market. The other is democracy, by which public agencies and their leaders are accountable to voters. Americans may disagree about how much we want of one or the other, but most people understand we need both systems of accountability. When we confuse the two, we run the danger that people with great power may escape accountability altogether.

That's the problem right now. Bank of America's Ken Lewis is fully accountable to no one. AIG's public trustees have no charter or public mission to guide them. GM is trying to satisfy the Treasury and its shareholders simultaneously, and is doing neither very well. Even as the public takes larger ownership stakes in big Wall Street banks, the public has no systematic means of expressing its growing interest, whatever it is.

Perhaps government had no business meddling in the private sector to begin with. AIG, the big banks and the auto companies should have been forced to work out their problems with their creditors, or else be put into temporary receivership until their profitable units or nonperforming loans could be sold off. Perhaps any company that's judged too big to fail is too big, period. Antitrust laws should have been used to break these giants up before they got so big.

These arguments may be relevant to the recent past and possibly to the future, but they're beside the point right now. The immediate challenge is to sort out public from private responsibilities and to create clearer lines of accountability.

At the least, when government takes an ownership stake in a company, the pubic should be represented on that companies' board of directors in direct proportion to the size of its stake. Those public directors should be appointed by the president. In exercising their oversight function, they should seek guidance from the president and his top economic officials. And their votes on critical issues before the board -- such as whether to fire Ken Lewis -- should be made public.

TTR offers a smorgasbord of policy delights today, touching on Social Security solvency, a green economy, equal pay and the impact of cap-and-trade legislation. Get in there...

• Social Security is fine. Now that the House and Senate have come together on a budget deal, some observers have been questioning whether a deal was made to do health-care reform this year and Social Security reform in the near future. But we've got time to figure out the problem -- Social Security will be solvent for years to come. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities reports, first, that we still have a surplus of Social Security funding:
  
  
  
  Some important dates to remember: The cost of Social Security is projected to exceed its total income in 2027, when it will have to start drawing on trust-fund assets to pay full benefits. Those assets, if nothing is done, will sustain the program through 2041, when benefits would have to be cut about 25 percent to sustain the program into the future. The lesson? Social Security will require legislative attention to ensure long-term solvency and efficacy, but it doesn't need to happen immediately, especially given the much larger unsustainable problem of American health-care costs. Responsible public policy requires that the Social Security reform happen in the next few Congresses, but anyone prophesying the death of Social Security is engaged in irresponsible fear-mongering. -- TF

• Is the economy greener on the other side? [PDF] A report released by the Economic Policy Institute spells out the long-term economic benefits of public "green" investments. Most notable is its pronouncement that a "green" investment is one of the most stimulative forms of government spending, providing a 1.6:1 return-to-investment ratio. This is greater than generic infrastructure investment (1.59), temporary tax cuts (1.03), and corporate tax cuts (0.3). A significant percentage of these returns would come in the form of new, higher-paying jobs. EPI estimates that a $100 billion investment would yield a 1.1 million net job increase over a two-year period. Now for the less-than-rosy projection: Men would be disproportionately advantaged by this spending, accounting for 75 percent of the total employment gains. This is the inevitable result of an EPI statistical model that targets "green" spending toward male-dominated industries such as construction and transportation. Perhaps the key to enlarging and popularizing the still-nascent green industry is to make job opportunities accessible to both genders. -- JL
• How about real pay equality? President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act on Jan. 29, his first act as president. But as the Center For American Progress points out, there is much more to be done on the issue of equal pay -- specifically, making the Paycheck Fairness Act law by maneuvering it past recalcitrant Senate Republicans. The Paycheck Fairness Act "would close and eventually end the pay gap altogether" by strengthening the 1963 Equal Pay Act. The legislation explicitly prohibits "retaliation against employees who actively seek knowledge regarding the pay rates of their coworkers" and opens up employers to "civil action for compensatory and punitive damages" on the basis of gender disparity. -- JB

• A measurable impact. [PDF] The potential results of a piece of legislation can seldom be precisely quantified, but the World Resources Institute offers a prediction of the impact of the Waxman-Markey bill on U.S. greenhouse gas emissions through its cap-and-trade program and indirectly through other requirements. The caps alone would cut emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, but that number could potentially increase to 38 percent when other mandates in the bill and additional sources of reductions are considered. The accompanying graph illustrates a potentially dramatic drop in emissions by 2050, compared to the increases predicted if the status quo persists. The institute warns, however, that these figures are based on a variety of assumptions and "should not be taken as statements of fact." The House Energy and Commerce Committee held hearings on the draft bill last week, but it has yet to be formally introduced. -- MK

-- TAP Staff

Previous Round-Ups:
4/21/09
4/14/09

Today a three-judge panel on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated the Mohamed v. Jeppesen Dataplan case, rejecting the Obama administration's use of the state-secrets doctrine to have it dismissed. The five plaintiffs claim to have been subject to extraordinary rendition to countries where they were tortured either in the custody of American or local authorities, and are suing Boeing subsidiary Jeppesen for having assisted in their rendition. The most publicly noted of the plaintiffs is Binyam Mohamed, who was alleged to have been participating in the dirty-bomb plot with Jose Padilla. Mohamed claims he was subject to torture in various countries where he had been transferred, including Morocco, where he claims interrogators sliced his genitals with a scalpel.

The panel sided with the plaintiffs because the state-secrets privilege “simply cannot stretch to encompass cases brought by third-party plaintiffs against alleged government contractors for the contractors’ alleged involvement in tortious intelligence activities." The ruling also said that "acceding to the government’s request would require us to ignore well-established principles of civil procedure." The case has been remanded back to district court where the government will have to make a case for why specific evidence should be kept secret during discovery.

The reason why this case is significant is that it appears to restrict the use of the state-secrets privilege to dismiss entire cases only if the plaintiff has a secret agreement with the government to withhold information, which obviously isn't the case here. Now the administration can appeal this decision, but if this ruling holds, what it essentially means is the end of the use of the states-secrets privilege to dismiss entire cases unless there is a prior agreement between the plaintiff and the government to keep that information secret. In other words, if Jeppesen were suing the government, the case could be dismissed. But otherwise, the use of the state-secrets privilege is restricted to withholding specific pieces of evidence, as it was originally intended. The administration won't be able to dismiss entire cases except within a certain narrow criteria. 

"[The Totten bar option*} would seem to be off the table except in a very limited set of circumstances," said Ken Gude, a human-rights expert at the Center for American Progress. "It's great news."

*Corrected. Totten bar refers to a previous court case cited to argue for the case's dismissal, the court rejected the government's argument.

-- A. Serwer

Via the Armchair Generalist, it appears that India has successfully eliminated its chemical weapon stockpiles. India has become the third nation to eliminate its known stockpile of chemical weapons, the organization that monitors adherence to the Chemical Weapons Convention announced last week.

Broadly, there are three arguments as to why states are willing to give up their chemical weapons. The first is that such weapons have little battlefield utility; the second is that there is a moral taboo against their use; and the third is that the legal requirements of arms-control agreements have forced states to eliminate their programs. These arguments are not mutually exclusive: Chemical weapons have little utility in battle because of the legal and moral consequences of their use, and international agreements have been created in response to a moral consensus. In any case, the elimination of India's stockpile is a strong positive step for international arms-control efforts.

--Robert Farley

Alongside President Bush, Arlen Specter was a consistent Republican supporter of comprehensive immigration reform. Given the Obama administration's recent murmuring about prioritizing the issue -- a commitment some have doubted -- the loss of bipartisan support could represent a setback for immigrants' rights.

After the June 2007 defeat of the McCain-Kennedy immigration compromise, Specter wrote a Washington Post op-ed outlining a third approach he believed would gain more GOP support: giving green cards to the nation's 12 million undocumented immigrants, but withholding citizenship and the right to vote. That, of course, would prevent an influx to Democratic Party voting rolls.

Now that he's a Democrat, will Specter continue to promote this idea, or will he be on board with a path toward full citizenship? And are there any Republicans or moderate Democrats out there who would've used Specter's Republican support as cover to support immigration reform themselves? One guy to watch is McCain, who flip-flopped on his own immigration bill during the campaign season, and in 2010 will face re-election in Arizona, a state with a nativist right-wing base. The other prominent Republican immigration moderate is South Carolina's Sen. Lindsay Graham, who has recently criticized Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano for not requesting more money from Congress for border security.

On the Democratic side, a number of senators from swing and Rust Belt states voted against comprehensive immigration reform in 2007, including Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Jim Webb of Virginia, Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, and Jon Tester and Max Baucus of Montana. Of course, the electorate has moved left over the past two years -- but the simultaneous deepening of the economic crisis could raise some voters' hackles about job competition from immigrants.

--Dana Goldstein

One more interesting take on yesterday's Geithner profile comes from Ryan Avent of now-defunct Portfolio, who looks at the story's opening anecdote about guaranteeing bank debt in the early days of the crisis:

[T]his would not only have been a very smart and prescient move, but it might also have laid the groundwork for a much tougher bank policy? Guaranteeing all the bank debt was, of course, one of the key ingredients of the Swedish bank rescue so beloved by fans of nationalization. [Yves] Smith just assumes Geithner is looking to help his Wall Street buddies, but he might just as easily have been reading directly from the Swedes' playbook.

Moreover, this move would have entirely changed the calculus in September. It would have made the government much more reluctant to let Lehman fail, which I believe we can agree would have been a good thing. Had they nonetheless decided that Lehman should be allowed to go down, in the knowledge that the government would have to make the debtholders whole, then we would have avoided most of the negative effects of the actual Lehman collapse. No money market fund would break the buck. No freeze in commercial paper markets would have resulted. And no emergency rush to TARP would have followed. Correspondingly, no intense fear of bank failures or nationalizations would have cast its shadow over all subsequent decisions.

This should be getting more attention, and it should also be causing Geithner-haters to rethink what they think they know about the man -- about his timidity, subservience, and allegiances. But it's already clear that it won't.

Ryan's analysis makes a lot of sense. One problem with armchair quarterbacking the response to the financial crisis is forgetting the context of each policy decision; at that time, early decisive action might have led to very different results. My take on the Times piece is here.

On a related note, James Surowiecki has another useful analysis of Geithner critics:

But from a policy perspective, the Administration has not been tentative at all: in fact, it’s been unwavering in its insistence that, given current market and economic conditions, the risks and costs of nationalization outweigh the benefits. And its alternative strategy may be wrong, but that doesn't mean it’s ill-considered, or halfhearted.

Thoughts?

-- Tim Fernholz

When it comes to the lives of women around the globe, do local traditions ever trump human rights? Michelle Goldberg examines the issue of female circumcision and the cultural tensions that surround it.

Meanwhile, Dana Goldstein considers the challenges of dealing with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

And Paul Waldman studies how the other half thinks.

As always, subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they are published. Also, follow us on Twitter for highlights from our blog.

--The Editors

Jon Cohn has some cautionary words about the effects of Arlen Specter switching parties:

But the headline currently on the Post home page--"Democrats Get Filibuster-Proof Majority"--is bit-misleading.

Yes, the Dems will have sixty votes in the Senate. But Colorado [sic] Senator Ben Nelson isn't a reliable Democratic vote and, to a lesser extent, neither are moderate Dems like Indiana's Evan Bayh.

This is a fair point. Still, there's one big difference between Specter and the existing centrist Dems: Bayh and Nelson represent very conservative states, and since the Democrats (thankfully) tend to avoid suicidal primary challenges in usually red states, they have a lot of room to cross the Democratic leadership. Specter, on the other hand, not only is the senator of a blue-and-getting-bluer state, but is going to have to win a Democratic primary with an extensive history of capitulation to Republican reactionaries (going back to his behavior during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings). It's hard to see him doing anything to obstruct important parts of Obama's agenda in that context. He might put on some of his trademark hand-wringing, but my guess is that he'll be a reliable vote.

--Scott Lemieux

Chris Cilizza is reporting that Arlen Specter is switching to the Democratic Party. Can he vote for EFCA now? (No, he won't, according to his statement.)

Winners:

President Barack Obama (Happy 100 days!)

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (Happy 60 votes!)

Senator Arlen Specter (Happy chance at re-election!)

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (no more bloody primary between up-and-coming Pennsylvania representatives -- maybe)

Losers:

The Republican Party (cue the shrinking-tent story)

Chair of the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee John Cornyn (Must be regretting this decision)

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Who's he again?)

Hell of a scoop, Fix. (Apparently, Mike Crowley was there first!)

Update: Here's Specter's statement. An excerpt.

Since my election in 1980, as part of the Reagan Big Tent, the Republican Party has moved far to the right. Last year, more than 200,000 Republicans in Pennsylvania changed their registration to become Democrats. I now find my political philosophy more in line with Democrats than Republicans.

When I supported the stimulus package, I knew that it would not be popular with the Republican Party. But, I saw the stimulus as necessary to lessen the risk of a far more serious recession than we are now experiencing.

Since then, I have traveled the State, talked to Republican leaders and office-holders and my supporters and I have carefully examined public opinion. It has become clear to me that the stimulus vote caused a schism which makes our differences irreconcilable. On this state of the record, I am unwilling to have my twenty-nine year Senate record judged by the Pennsylvania Republican primary electorate. I have not represented the Republican Party. I have represented the people of Pennsylvania.

I have decided to run for re-election in 2010 in the Democratic primary.

-- Tim Fernholz

This morning's post about Judd Gregg's weird analysis of the student lending program attracted a lender lobbyist into the comments -- Kevin Bruns of America's Student Loan Providers. Exciting stuff! Here's what Kevin had to say:

Talk about "fast and loose" on student loans.

Right out of the starting gate the author grossly misstates the already loosey-goosey OMB/CBO cost savings projections: The president’s plan to eliminate federal guaranteed loans "will save hundreds of billions of dollars."

Maybe in your children's childrens lifetimes. The OMB projection comes no where close to that stratospheric sum. Nor does CBO.

Touche, salesman, I was off by an order of magnitude -- that's what I get for blogging early in the morning. Some real facts? The most recent CBO report makes clear that taxpayers spent at least $1.3 billion subsidizing your industry last year, far more than the cost of administering the direct lending program. Here's a report [PDF] from the New America foundation that goes into detail about why the FFEL program costs so much. And, in the president's budget [PDF], the OMB estimated the savings from eliminating the program would be $4 billion a year. This somewhat older report [PDF] from the Center for American progress estimates savings at $6.5 billion a year. Maybe you think that's chump change, but it seems like a healthy chunk of taxpayer money to me.

Finally, Tim, “bribery”? I looked at the PBS segment you linked to and I found no such thing. More important, do you seriously think 5,000 schools in this country, some of the nation’s finest, can somehow be bought like that. That’s too cynical for words.

New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo refers to these schemes as "kickbacks" -- essentially, student lenders paid cash to schools to get students referred to their programs. It seems to me that anytime you are making illegal payments to someone in exchange for a service, that's a bribe. And yes, I do think schools in this country can be bought like that. More than 63 schools were bought like that, including Columbia University, Georgetown University (my Alma mater), Wake Forest University, University of Kansas, Central Michigan University, St. John's University, University of Washington, University of Oregon, University of Texas El Paso, Rutgers University, Georgia Tech, Florida State University, Florida Atlantic University, the University of Central Florida, and the University of Pittsburgh. Here's Cuomo on what his investigations in student lender corruption unearthed:

The investigation uncovered among other things, illegal steering to preferred lenders by specific schools, revenue sharing agreements between schools and lenders, university financial aid call centers staffed by lender employees, gifts and trips from lenders to a school’s financial aid directors, and even stock in lender companies directly given to financial aid officers.

Sounds pretty corrupt to me. Back to our friend the lobbyist...

Finally, taxpayers are not spending money on the lender-based program. The government has made few if any subsidy payments to lenders in nine years—you can look it up, as Casey Stengel used to say. In fact, the program makes money for the government.

You say tomato, I say subsidy. You are right that the Bush administration stopped guaranteeing your industry a 9.5 percent interest rate of return after The New York Times broke the news about that additional $1 billion per year slush fund. That doesn't change the fact that your industry is still being paid billions of dollars for services the government can provide more cheaply. That's my case, Kevin. Where are you getting your numbers from?

-- Tim Fernholz

Grading Obama's first 100 days is all the rage with the kiddies, and Russ Feingold has gotten into the act, issuing a report card on Obama's efforts to "restore the rule of law." Feingold's grades are mostly positive especially when it comes to general issues of transparency, but when it gets to government secrecy on national security issues -- specifically the administration's abuse of the state-secrets privilege to block judicial scrutiny of things like torture and warrantless surveillance, Feingold gives Obama a "D."

If you ask the Brennan Center, Feingold's being generous. While also largely positive, when it came to the state-secrets privilege, they gave the president a big fat "F."

-- A. Serwer

Talk about paranoia -- right-wing talk radio hosts and anti-abortion-rights groups are promoting the idea that President Obama declared a state of emergency regarding swine flu in order to push through pro-choice Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius' nomination as health and human services secretary. (You know, it's not like 152 people have died, or anything.) Concerned Women of America's Wendy Wright told Dave Weigel, "If there’s even a hint that [Department of Homeland Security] is manipulating the health situation to push a political appointee through, well, it almost defies imagination that they’d be willing to that.” In an email to supporters, the Family Research Council's Tony Perkins wrote, "What do sick pigs have to do with widespread, taxpayer-funded abortion? More than you might think."

As I reported last week, Sebelius' confirmation has been delayed as her home state Republican legislature has forced her to deal with a series of abortion-related bills. Her latest pro-choice veto inspired a Republican backer of her nomination, Sen. Sam Brownback, to hint that he may change his mind and vote "no" on her appointment. The Senate is scheduled to debate Sebelius' nomination and take a vote today. Hopefully GOP senators will remember that actual, full-fledged, independent human beings -- not embryos -- are facing a public-health crisis. This is no time for job vacancies at HHS and the CDC.

--Dana Goldstein

What Richard Cohen lacks in logic, he makes up in ignorance and emotionalism.

The idea that we don't torture because it's wrong, not because it would make us safer not to torture, is an entirely acceptable argument. But that's not Cohen's argument. His argument is that not torturing people makes us less safe, but also less like the Nazis, a regime that like the Soviet Union, was known for its "safety." Cohen doesn't actually engage the arguments for why torture makes us less safe -- that it exposes Americans abroad to the same treatment, that it incites people to take up arms against the United States, that it makes our allies less likely to cooperate with us because their governments might hold them legally accountable, or that torture froze out some of the nation's most experienced counterterrorism experts and interrogators, men such as Ali Soufan, because they wouldn't participate in illegal interrogation. He also doesn't acknowledge the 2004 CIA Inspector General's report that found there was no evidence that torture foiled any "specific imminent attacks."

Cohen doesn't address any of these arguments, because he's plainly unconcerned with the larger strategic effects of using torture; he's concerned with exacting "good Old Testament-style vengeance."

The horror of Sept. 11 resides in me like a dormant pathogen. It took a long time before I could pass a New York fire station -- the memorials still fresh -- without tearing up. I vowed vengeance that day -- yes, good Old Testament-style vengeance -- and that ember glows within me still. I know that nothing Obama did this month about torture made America safer.

The logic of this argument goes like this: I'm angry about 9/11, therefore torturing people will make us safer. These two things are in no way logically connected, although I suppose this argument makes sense to a number of people and I suspect that the people who ordered the program feel much the same way. This not an informed argument about the effectiveness of torture in gaining intelligence, it's just Cohen being angry and wanting to exact retribution against "those people." The guilt or innocence of any detainee caught up in America's torture program is of no consequence.

Cohen has made decisions in this state of mind before. Last year, in a piece for Slate about why he supported the Iraq War, he recalled thinking, "I wanted to go to 'them,' whoever 'they' were, grab them by the neck, and get them before they could get us. One of 'them' was Saddam Hussein." Indeed, considering that the connection between al-Qaeda and Iraq was established by evidence obtained through torture, that worked out well for us didn't it? Maybe then, other than our moral obligations under domestic and international law, we should be more concerned with the overall strategic effect of using torture than our own individual impulses toward exacting vengeance against the nearest scary Arab. Cohen seems to have a problem distinguishing between what makes America safer and what makes him feel relief. This is torture as therapy.

A final point: Cohen says in releasing the memos Obama "has made things a bit easier for terrorists who now know what will not happen to them if they get caught." Aside from the fact that the methods used were already in the public domain, the world should already know that the United States does not torture. In the United States, torture is illegal. Somehow, the idea that the president can simply ignore laws he doesn't like is one that's become so broadly acceptable that pundits writing about torture don't even care to mention it. That's the most frightening part of this whole thing.

Ross Douthat, the kind of guy who eats moral relativists for breakfast, breakfast I tell you, spends 750 words describing the torture debate without taking a position, since he can't do that in less than 3000 words and a series of blog posts. He does however, believe that it "makes adaptive sense for women to have a certain amount of difficulty having orgasms," because then they won't be such wanton harlots. If only torture was as clear-cut a moral wrong as women choosing to have sex for pleasure.

-- A. Serwer

One recent victory for the president was getting his student loan reform effort -- which will save hundreds of billions of dollars by shutting down unnecessary subsidies to, you guessed it, bankers -- included in the congressional budget reconciliation process, thus preventing an opportunity for Republicans to filibuster it.

But that doesn't prevent them from saying any old thing they like, so here is Sen. Judd Gregg at The Wall Street Journal:

The Democrats, he says, pulled the same public-private switcheroo before with student loans for college. Back in the late 1990s, "there was a huge debate in the committee . . . between myself and [Senator Ted] Kennedy over a private plan versus a public plan." In the end, they compromised -- the government would offer loans directly to students, but that program would have to compete with private-sector lenders. "And the agreement was very formal, and the record shows this very clearly. We agreed to level the playing field, put both plans on the playing field at an equal status and see who won. Well, private plans won. Big time."

Given the choice, most borrowers went to the private sector for their loans.

Hm. That's not quite accurate. As New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo discovered a few years back, one of the reasons that private student lenders were succeeding was the practice of bribing financial aid officers to push private sector loans on students, who tend to rely on the programs endorsed by their college. Where did all that kickback money come from? Why, your pocket, taxpayer.

While Gregg may live in a free market fantasy where impartial borrowers are choosing between different plans, out in the real world it's a much more complicated game, where student lenders' ability to give kickbacks to college officials and put on slick marketing campaigns increases their market share. I just don't understand why we should spend so much tax money on those things when we could just be getting the loans themselves for much cheaper. It's ok, though, since Gregg is a big deficit hawk, I'm sure if he tells us we need to give hundreds of billions of dollars to bankers for them to bribe people, he must be right.

Update: Bring it, Lender Lobby.

-- Tim Fernholz

• Barack Obama is using the outbreak of swine flu to argue, rightly, for increased federal funding for basic scientific research, while some GOP "moderates" are trying to whitewash their decision to strip funding for swine flu prevention from the February economic stimulus package. Meanwhile, I genuinely wonder if Rick Perry is aware that his principled stand against accepting the jackboot of the state stimulus funds sorta contradicts his request for federal help in dealing with pandemics.
• I'm beginning to sense that the GOP base described in this weekend Politico piece is truly incapable of grasping that anywhere from two-thirds to three-quarters of Americans like the president, like his policies, like the direction he's taking the country, and loathe the GOP congressional rump. They also don't understand that they're merely a vocal plurality in a Republican party that only 1-in-5 Americans identify themselves with. And they also don't seem to get that their ideological spokespeople aren't mounting a very credible or widely-shared criticism of the president's "first hundred days."
• I'm quite shocked by the levels of moral depravity the American Right has sunk to to defend the Bush administration and its use of torture for intelligence gathering. Even more sickening is Erick Erickson's apparent belief that the Obama administration cynically released the torture memos now in order to be ready to blame the Bush administration when the next terrorist attack comes, which they're all but welcoming with open arms. I'll leave it up to the reader to decide whether the right wing's open embrace of war crimes is a bug or a feature of the political movement that brought us George Bush.
• Speaking of torture, Carl Levin is calling for an independent prosecutor (though not in those words) to investigate the authorization of torture by the Bush administration, which I'm amazed we're actually debating about when it's so abundantly clear that torture was used and that it didn't make us any safer.
• Seems there's some fuzziness going on with the exact date U.S. forces are leaving Iraq. According to The New York Times, American and Iraqi officials are negotiating an exception to the SOFA stipulation that all combat forces leave by June 30 in order to focus on renewed violence in Mosul.
• Weekend Remainders: Lizza profiles Orszag; Silver looks at the libertarian wing of the GOP (again); Obama knew the moment John McCain had lost to him; John Sununu is apparently a very stupid man; and Fox News sets the bar high for asking leading polling questions.

--Mori Dinauer

Breathless 100-days coverage sucks and I hate it, though not enough to prevent me from writing two forthcoming analysis pieces pegged to the topic. Nonetheless, the media's love of arbitrarily pleasing numbers doesn't make for a very substantive discussion of anything. Is there a connection between the stimulus debate's arbitrary "lop off a solid $100 billion" strategy and the "one hundred days" meme? Discuss.

Venting aside, the National Security Network has done something interesting for the occasion, namely, putting together a list of 100 Obama administration foreign policy accomplishments. It's worth looking at. Here are a few under-appreciated items worth noting:

10. At a recent Pakistan donor’s conference in Tokyo, the U.S. secured aid commitments of roughly $5bn “to bolster the country's economy and help it fight terror and Islamic radicalism.”

54. President Obama’s proposed defense budget offers the largest increase for veterans funding in 30 years.

99. In a move reminiscent of Henry Kissinger’s successful effort to bring the U.S. the 1994 World Cup, President Obama delivered a message to FIFA imploring soccer’s governing body to grant the U.S. the right to host the Cup again in 2018 or 2022.

Even though it's still pretty amazing how much has actually been accomplished since January 20, the fact that a lot of these accomplishments still have a long way to go before completion -- a "proposed defense budget" is not a defense budget yet -- sort of undermines the whole analytical frame. Still, kudos to NSN for coming up with something more concrete than Politico, which provides this sort of discussion: "The politics of personality drove the first 100 days, but there were issues, too."

-- Tim Fernholz

Jim Manzi asks why torture is wrong:

Or more precisely, why is the belief that the torture of captured combatants is wrong compatible with anything other than some form of pacifism? I mean this an actual question, not as a passive-aggressive assertion.

It can’t just be that it involves inflicting horrible pain and suffering. The moment before an enemy combatant surrenders, it is legal (under the current rules of war which govern U.S. military operations as I understand them), to shoot this person in head, launch burning petroleum jelly onto him that is carefully designed to stick to his skin and clothing, or deviously hide explosives that will maim him (but intentionally not kill him) when he steps on a landmine, in order to slow the advance of the group that must then carry him, and also to make it easier to subsequently kill both him and the person who assists him.

As the child of divorced parents who rarely argued -- or at least did a really good job of shielding me from their disagreements -- I read with interest this Boston Globe report on a study that found long-term negative consequences for children exposed to verbal fighting between their parents:

...15-year-olds exposed to their parents' verbal battles, or involved in family arguments, were more likely to be functioning poorly at age 30 than other people in the study who did not live in increasingly fight-filled homes.

The children exposed to family fighting were two to three times more likely to be unemployed, suffer from major depression, or abuse alcohol or other drugs by age 30. They also were more likely to struggle in personal relationships, but that was evident to a somewhat lesser degree.

The study puts in perspective this Washington Post op-ed by Mark Regnerus, who argues in favor of immediate post-college marriage between 23-year-old women and men in their later 20s. (This matches up the genders' biological clocks, he says, urging women to reproduce during their "most fertile years" instead of focusing on careers. That's men's work!) Living as a married couple is more economically viable, Regnerus writes -- which is true, as long as you take as given that government ought not to provide social services such as health care or child care. Those services would make it easier, of course, for people to be effective individuals and parents, regardless of whether or not they've found a romantic partner who makes their life easier, not more difficult.

But instead of social services, conservatives perennially offer up "marriage promotion." The problem is that traditional marriage is no more an obvious "good thing" for individuals and society than is living in a yellow house instead of a white one, or driving a Honda instead of a Toyota. As the new research on verbal abuse and children makes clear, what is important is healthy, supportive environments. Since we know fights about money are a leading cause of divorce, it makes perfect sense for people in their 20s to delay marriage until they are economically secure, which often entails focusing first on higher education and career success.

Incidentally, I'd add that Regnerus' portrait of college-educated 20-somethings is pretty alien to me. "Many women report feeling peer pressure to avoid giving serious thought to marriage until they're at least in their late 20s," he writes, claiming that young adults today prefer "sexual variety" to stability. I'm in my mid-20s, and while it's true that only a few of my friends have imminent plans to walk down the aisle, the vast majority of them are either in long-term committed relationships or looking for one. We are a generation raised during the height of the AIDS crisis, and ours is an age of serial monogamy and practice-marriages.

Even those who declare themselves ambivalent about the institution of monogamous marriage, like TAP contributors Courtney Martin and Jessica Valenti, are, in fact, aping marriage or even living it. While Web sites like this one might promote the idea that today's young people are "clubbing" and "sexting" up a storm, many of us are living much more conventionally than we even like to admit to ourselves.

--Dana Goldstein

Last week, Kai Wright questioned whether environmental justice was "enough" for black Americans, or should their green concerns be more rooted in jobs and economic sustainability:

When policymakers systematically clump bus depots and waste treatment plants in black neighborhoods, driving up childhood asthma rates, it's a civil rights concern. When slumlords refuse to strip lead paint, they're preying upon poor families. Black people have been trained, in recent decades, to get these connections.

But that largely defensive, health-based environmentalism is no longer enough—if it ever was.

The "green jobs" appeal may be a new thing for some progressive organizations, but it's nothing new to many environmental-justice collectives around the country. From Oakland to Sacramento, Chicago to Detroit, New York City to Newark, Atlanta to Memphis, New Orleans to Houston -- EJ organizations in these cities have long gone beyond pointing out disproportionate impacts of pollution on disadvantaged communities. With many EJ activists questioning the government's commitment to fix these problems, they've been proactive about addressing brownfield remediation, air/soil/water monitoring and waste mitigation themselves, and they've done so by employing as many people from the affected communities as possible.

Right now, the focus should really be on why green-jobs advocates like Van Jones have been emphasizing jobs for the poor less since entering the White House.

-- Brentin Mock

Keeping tabs on my beloved New England Patriots during the NFL Draft this weekend, I saw that they picked Brandon Tate, a wide receiver from North Carolina. All good and well, except that Tate apparently failed a marijuana test at the NFL combine. Asked about the situation by sports reporters, he had this to say:

Q: There was a report that you tested positive for marijuana at the combine. Is that true?

BT: I know I had made a mistake, and now that's behind me. I'm just moving forward, getting ready to go to the NFL and play for the Patriots.

Q: Was that something that came up during this draft process—that teams wanted you to explain that?

BT: Like I said, all of that is behind me. Whatever happened with that, it already happened, so I'm moving forward.

In Tate's case, that is presumably the right thing to say, as he is a young man in his 20s who has apparently used a widely popular illegal drug, not a government charged with the systematic illegal torture of its enemies. Plenty of jokes have been made about the looking-forward excuse, but this little item really puts in perspective when and where that outlook is appropriate.

-- Tim Fernholz

Before Inauguration Day, Barack Obama said he wanted to hit the ground running. Instead, he hit the ground sprinting and hasn't stopped.

Consider: A $787 billion stimulus package. A 10-year budget including universal health insurance and a cap-and-trade system to combat global warming. Subsidies to help distressed homeowners stay in their homes. Public-private partnerships to clean up the big banks. A bailout of the auto companies. New regulations to clean up Wall Street. A G-20 meeting to harmonize global economic policies. A proposal to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. A thaw in relations with Cuba and Venezuela. Overtures to Iran. A start to immigration reform. Even a dramatic rescue from pirates.

And this is just the first 100 days. He also has done this without breaking a sweat. Obama is the serene center of the cyclone -- exuding calm when most Americans are petrified about paying the monthly bills, offering assurance when everyone in the world is worried about loose nukes falling into the wrong hands.

All this activity has made the right angry and the left uneasy. But a whopping 65 percent of Americans think highly of him. And no president since John F. Kennedy has received such an enthusiastic welcome around the globe. By almost any measure, his presidency so far has been a triumph. (I give him only a C-plus on his economic policies so far, but that's mainly because of a provisional F on the bank bailout.)

Yet Obama's success has rested on several delicate balancing acts. Whether he continues to succeed will depend on how well he shifts his balance in the months ahead.

The choices Obama must make after the jump.

-- Robert Reich

Short-term or long-term economics?

The stimulus and bank bailouts have required the government to pump almost $1.5 trillion into the economy and the Federal Reserve Board to dramatically expand the money supply. This makes sense in the short term. With almost one out of six Americans either unemployed or underemployed, government has to be the spender of last resort. But as the economy recovers, Obama will have to rein in government deficits. If he does this too early, he risks prolonging the deep recession. Yet if he waits too long, he risks wild inflation.

Progressive vision or conservative governing?

Obama's 10-year budget presents the most ambitious and progressive vision of any president since FDR. But when it comes to governing, Obama has been cautious and incremental. His stimulus was smaller than even conservative economist Martin Feldstein recommended. He has been unwilling to take over the banks. He won't push Congress on the Employee Free Choice Act. His mortgage relief program is modest. He doesn't want to prosecute CIA torturers. Yet if he wants to be a transformative president, he's got to move boldly. Universal health insurance will be his first big test.

Dominance of domestic or foreign policy?

So far Obama has focused on the home front, as he should -- given the economy's plunge. But he's confronting a major foreign-policy challenge in Pakistan. And other challenges are emerging in Iran, North Korea, Russia, China and stateless regions of the world. So the big question here is whether foreign policy will come to define his presidency, notwithstanding his domestic ambitions. Presidents don't have much control over this. FDR's first two terms were defined by the Great Depression; his last was dominated by World War II. Lyndon Johnson wanted to create the Great Society but got bogged down in Vietnam. George W. Bush didn't know that his administration would be defined by Iraq.

Policy emerging from contending arguments or strong "czars"?

At first it looked as if Obama was hiring a "team of rivals" who would battle out hard policy problems. This management style allows a president to hear and consider contrary points of view, but it can also be chaotic. Yet Obama seems to be opting for strong White House "czars" instead, such as Lawrence Summers on the economy, Carol Browner on the environment and Rahm Emanuel on politics. This approach saves presidential time and focuses responsibility, but it can suppress contrary views. And it's often those contrary views that presidents need to hear to avoid major errors.

Working with Republicans or taking them on?

By temperament and inclination, Obama prefers to reach across the aisle and court Republican support. Yet, so far, this tactic has been notably unsuccessful. Republicans have moved almost in lockstep against him. They're already gearing up for the 2010 midterms, staging anti-tax rallies and laying the foundation for a major assault on his presidency. They fantasize about repeating the coup Newt Gingrich pulled off in November 1994. At some point before then, Obama will have to take off the gloves.

Playing nice with Wall Street or getting rough with it?

Almost $600 billion has been poured into big Wall Street banks with nothing to show for it. They're still not lending to Main Street, still paying their top executives princely sums, and still issuing dividends and looking for acquisition targets. Yet apart from a few rhetorical blasts at a few Wall Street executives, Obama has so far shown remarkable solicitude to the banks because he thinks he needs their cooperation to get credit moving again. At some point, though, he'll have to get tough.

So far Obama has found a workable balance in all these domains. But all require increasingly fancy footwork, and some rebalancing will be needed. The central question for the next 100 days is how deftly he finds new footing.

No matter how moderate the candidates may seem, controversy always seems to surround judicial appointments. Now that Obama has started to name his nominees, Doug Kendall and Simon Lazarus consider the never-ending war over the courts.

Meanwhile, Ben Adler takes a trip out to the exurbs and learns a few things about suburban sprawl.

And Courtney Martin looks for ways to achieve justice in a system that doesn't always guarantee it.

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--The Editors

The People's Liberation Army Navy carried out its 60th anniversary fleet review last week, with the United States Navy, the Russian Navy, and others in attendance. The review showcased growing Chinese naval power and served as a platform for speculation about China's plans for building aircraft carriers.

While the Chinese navy currently has numerous destroyers and submarines, its only aircraft carrier is an aging former Russian hulk purportedly called Shi Lang. Although this ship is unlikely ever to serve in a combat capacity, it could be used as a training platform for a larger carrier fleet. The problem is that there is no solid indication as of yet when such a fleet will appear. Articles about Chinese aircraft-carrier construction invariably contain sentences like "may be planning," and "up to six," neither of which tell us very much about China's actual shipbuilding plans. Aircraft carriers are an extremely expensive and time-intensive investment, and it takes quite a while to learn how to operate one.

There are some good reasons to think that China may be pursuing carriers, including a deal with Russia for the purchase of carrier-borne aircraft and the aforementioned refurbishment of Shi Lang. What we don't have, however, is any solid evidence that construction has begun or even that the Chinese have made a clear cut and irreversible commitment to push forward with carrier aviation. Absent that, I remain pretty happy with my assertion that the United States Navy will not face a serious peer competitor for a generation or longer. When you consider that Chinese naval growth has already produced balancing behavior on the part of U.S. Pacific allies, I'm really not convinced that alarm is in order.

--Robert Farley

Wow, a monster profile in the Times digs deep into Tim Geithner's career, or rather, his career since becoming president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank in 2003. The article doesn't reveal anything new, but it does draw together a narrative asserting that Geithner is too close to the banks. Yves Smith reads the piece and goes to town on Geithner:

This story now makes official what only those who kept tabs on these matters knew, that Geithner is captured by the industry. It will now be much easier for Obama to cut Geithner loose should that prove necessary. But with Summers still in the mix, I'm dubious that even an outster of Geithner would produce much of a change in policy direction.

That is, actually, why I think this story doesn't matter so much. Smith spends a lot of his her post drumming up the common theory that the leaks about Geithner are part of a media strategy to give the administration a fall guy to take the blame if the response to the financial crisis really falls flat, but even that is less important than the structural problems with the policy debate. Ryan Avent's comment on my recent Simon Johnson piece helpfully summarizes my views as well: "I just don't think it's correct to extend that argument to say that the Obama administration is primarily constrained by the will of the financial oligarchy."

One disappointment with the new piece is that it fails to shed light on what is currently going on in the Treasury; the reporting is excellent during Geithner's tenure as Fed chair during last summer's bailouts, but it doesn't really touch on the current debates. We don't learn about the formation of the public-private investment plan or the stress tests or the relationship between Geithner and Congress. The one interesting nugget concerns the financial institution take-over authorities, recently set aside by Barney Frank, and thus is almost a moot point. And indeed, because the piece never actually tackles the policy implications of Geithner's supposed capture by bankers by presenting non-captured alternatives, readers never learn what that means in practical terms. (One exception is where FDIC Chair Sheila Bair comes into the picture and forces Geithner to take a harder line on fees for banks whose debt is insured; of course, the fact that she won that argument sort of undermines the whole capture theory.)

Even the Fed chair section of the piece is somewhat lacking. The authors note that Geithner failed to foresee the crisis, but he has already admitted as much. They criticize him for supporting one bank-friendly policy that wasn't adopted (government guarantees on all financial institution debt) and another that hasn't been adopted yet (lessening capital requirements at banks). The crisscrossing source agendas also undermine some of the critique -- at one point a right-leaning former Fed chair is attacking him for massive government spending and inflation worries, at another hedge funds are criticizing him for hiring a different hedge fund to manage Treasury securities, at a third point he is under fire for trying to get private capital to AIG in the early stages of that bailout rather than government money, an effort that obviously failed. My point is that this is a complex narrative that can't really be shoehorned to fit any one critique of Geithner, except that he is terrible at managing politics. (Sources tell me that a couple of Democratic operatives have been parachuted into Treasury to try to fix that. Good luck!)

Where does all that leave us? Well, it leaves us with some very dubious financial-crisis policies coming out of the administration but not a lot of easy or obvious alternatives to those policies. Geithner is clearly very close to the financial sector -- one clear argument coming from this piece is that we have got to radically restructure the way the Federal Reserve regulates banks -- but despite this piece I agree with Yves on one point: He's here for at least another six months, and if he leaves before a massive failure of one of his signature programs, things won't change much.

-- Tim Fernholz

The story of FBI interrogator Ali Soufan plays out like a movie. The son of an immigrant from Lebanon, Soufan, using traditional interrogation methods, gleaned from Abu Zubayda a plot to plant a dirty bomb in the United States and the alias of September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed. He turned the jihadis' greatest weapons against them, citing Qu'ranic verses from memory and using his knowledge of Islam to gain the trust of terrorist detainees, then using the trust he had gained to get information that saved American lives. When he discovered that the CIA was planning on torturing Zubayda, his reaction was that of a lawman: "I swear to God," he reportedly said to FBI assistant director for counterterrorism Pasquale D'Amuro, "I'm going to arrest these guys!"

Soufan's courage and respect for American values contrasts sharply with former CIA official Michael Scheuer, who insists that the only way to protect America is through torture and that anyone who believes otherwise is anti-American. This contradicts the CIA inspector general's own 2004 findings that there is no conclusive information that tortured yielded information that foiled "specific imminent attacks." Scheuer's belief in the power of torture is not empirical but ideological, just like that of James Mitchell, the former Air Force psychologist who helped design the torture program and who, despite having never interrogated a prisoner a day in his life, told Ali Soufan he had no idea what he was doing.

It's startling how much contempt those who would be America's protectors have for the society they ostensibly want to protect. The battle against terrorism is not one of mere survival. It is about the preservation of American society -- while it's doubtful that the terrorists will be able to wipe us out, they may succeed in changing America beyond recognition, from a champion of human rights to a nation of torturers where the government eavesdrops on its own citizens without warrants and holds people indefinitely without trial. Osama bin Laden isn't smiling at Obama's commitment to respect international laws governing detainee treatment. That much is obvious; since Obama's election, al-Qaeda has scrambled to develop an effective message against a popular new president who has disavowed the use of torture.

Every time we waterboard a suspect, or strip him naked, or slam him against a wall, we've lost a battle to al-Qaeda. Every time we do this, we create the possibility of another Jose Padilla, or another Abu Zubayda. But when we affirm the rule of law, when we meet the high standards we set for ourselves, we help create the kind of society that produces men like Ali Soufan.

-- A. Serwer

A federal judge is scheduled to review a challenge this morning to the indefinite detention of Mohamed Jawad, a terrorism suspect who was captured in Afghanistan on suspicion of throwing a grenade at an American convoy when he was 16 or 17, and has been held in detention ever since. The original prosecutor in Jawad's military commissions case, Lt. Col. Darrel J. Vandeveld, resigned because he felt the military commissions process didn't allow for exculpatory information that might have proved Jawad's innocence. Today, his lawyers will be arguing that he's being held indefinitely based on a confession obtained through torture. Jawad says he was subjected to Guantanamo Bay's "frequent flier program" which is a method of sleep deprivation implemented by moving the detainee from cell to cell. Jawad claims that in May 2004, he was was moved to a different cell 112 times over the course of 14 days. Last Wednesday, a judge dismissed the Obama administration's attempt to delay Jawad's ability to challenge his detention, essentially until the administration had developed a policy for dealing with detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

Beyond the ethical and moral problems with torture, the use of something like sleep deprivation to obtain evidence or intelligence makes that information completely unreliable -- because it makes the victim completely incoherent. That's why evidence gained that way is inadmissible in court. But say you made a legal exception for confessions obtained through torture -- do I even need to explain why giving the government a license to torture and the ability to use torture confessions in court would be a bad idea? 

-- A. Serwer

Jay Bybee has become a focus of civil-libertarian anger not just because of his role in drafting OLC memos that "legalized" torture but because he is a sitting federal judge. Today, Bybee began his public charm offensive in a piece for The Washington Post, which contains a number of quotes from friends and associates saying things like "On the primary memo, that legitimated and defined torture, he just felt it got away from him." Bybee should fire whoever is organizing his public outreach. The Post piece completely undercuts the idea that Bybee and the administration didn't know the methods they were using was torture, despite Bybee's own legal arguments. Rather than defending the notion that the methods Bybee approved were not torture, his friends are confirming that Bybee knew the methods were torture, and that's why he feels bad now. But there's no "feeling bad about breaking the law" exception to breaking the law. You're no less legally liable because you feel bad about what you did.

But this final passage is what is truly devastating:

Bybee's friends said he never sought the job at the Office of Legal Counsel. The reason he went back to Washington, Guynn said, was to interview with then-White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales for a slot that would be opening on the 9th Circuit when a judge retired. The opening was not yet there, however, so Gonzales asked, "Would you be willing to take a position at the OLC first?" Guynn said.

Being unable to answer for what followed is "very frustrating," said Guynn, who spoke to Bybee before agreeing to be interviewed.

So Bybee knew he was breaking the law in allowing the use of torture, but you have to understand, he only did it because he really wanted to be a federal judge. That's not exculpatory information, that's motive.

-- A. Serwer

• The big news is that the final budget resolution being hashed out in Congress will include an October 15 deadline for passing health care reform, after which budget reconciliation rules will be used. Ezra hears whispers that the same ultimatum will not be used for climate change regulation, however.
  
• It's obviously too early to be seriously examining next year's Senate races, but it's pretty striking that Arlen Specter is down 21 points against Pat Toomey in a new Rasmussen poll of Pennsylvania Republicans. But given this is Rasmussen, I'd like to see what other pollsters have to say.
• I was going to write something snarky about Newt Gingrich being the appointed "voice of opposition" appearing before a House hearing on climate change with Al Gore and Mark Warner, but compared to founts of wisdom like Reps. Michele Bachmann, John Shimkus and Joe Barton, Newt practically looks well-informed. Then there's Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), who prefers an attempted character assassination of Gore instead.
• The Minnesota state supreme court has settled on a schedule for Norm Coleman's appeal of Al Franken's court victory, the hearing set for June 1. Meanwhile, the DSCC is keeping the pressure on, putting out a "Coleman Obstruction Timeline" that explains why Minnesota still doesn't have a second Senator nearly seven months after Election Day.
• Remainders: Scott Murphy prevails in NY-20; Harry Reid thinks "Judge Bybee has a good professional reputation in Nevada;" Nate Silver games out splitting Texas into five separate states; Laura Rozen has a brief item on National Security Adviser James Jones' potential problems reorganizing the NSC; and Yglesias asks, "since when have conservatives opposed banana republics?"

--Mori Dinauer

The president has announced two appointments to the five-member National Labor Relations Board. He had previously announced that Wilma Liebman, formerly a regular member, would become the chair. Now, he is proposing to add
Craig Becker and Mark Pearce to the board. Becker is currently associate general counsel for both the SEIU and the AFL-CIO; Pearce is a longtime labor lawyer who co-founded his own firm to pursue union-side labor law (full bios of both after the jump). It's not the Employee Free Choice Act, but this is a nice gift to the unions all the same. Presuming, of course, the Senate confirms these nominees -- there's a reason that the five-member board currently only has two members...

-- Tim Fernholz

Craig Becker, Nominee for Board Member, National Labor Relations Board

Craig Becker currently serves as Associate General Counsel to both the Service Employees International Union and the American Federation of Labor & Congress of Industrial Organizations. He graduated summa cum laude from Yale College in 1978 and received his J.D. in 1981 from Yale Law School where he was an Editor of the Yale Law Journal. After law school he clerked for the Honorable Donald P. Lay, Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. For the past 27 years, he has practiced and taught labor law. He was a Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law between 1989 and 1994 and has also taught at the University of Chicago and Georgetown Law Schools. He has published numerous articles on labor and employment law in scholarly journals, including the Harvard Law Review and Chicago Law Review, and has argued labor and employment cases in virtually every federal court of appeals and before the United States Supreme Court.

Mark Pearce, Nominee for Board Member, National Labor Relations Board

Mark Gaston Pearce has been a labor lawyer for his entire career. He is one of the founding partners of the Buffalo, New York law firm of Creighton, Pearce, Johnsen & Giroux where he practices union side labor and employment law before state and federal courts and agencies including the N.Y.S. Public Employment Relations Board, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the U.S. Department of Labor, and the National Labor Relations Board. Pearce in 2008 was appointed by the NYS Governor to serve as a Board Member on the New York State Industrial Board of Appeals, an independent quasi-judicial agency responsible for review of certain rulings and compliance orders of the NYS Department of Labor in matters including wage and hour law. Pearce has taught several courses in the labor studies program at Cornell University’s School of Industrial Labor Relations Extension. He is a Fellow in the College of Labor and Employment Lawyers. Prior to 2002, Pearce practiced union side labor law and employment law at Lipsitz, Green, Fahringer, Roll, Salisbury & Cambria LLP. From 1979 to 1994, he was an attorney and District Trial Specialist for the NLRB in Buffalo, NY. Pearce received his J.D. from State University of New York, and his B.A. from Cornell University.

One of the complaints of civil liberties groups about the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships (OFBNP) advisory council is its lack of transparency. Yesterday, the Coalition Against Religious Discrimination (CARD) met with the Office's director, Joshua DuBois. Ron Millar, acting director of the Secular Coalition for America, was also present. According to Millar, CARD raised concerns regarding both faith-based hiring discrimination and transparency.

CARD was told the advisory council is created under and subject to the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), which requires that meetings of such committees be open to the public. This was the first I had heard about FACA mandates being applied to the OFBNP, so I followed up and discovered that committees formed under the act are required to adopt and file charters with the General Services Administration.

The OFBNP advisory council's recently filed charter lays out its mandate as follows: "To identify best practices and successful modes of delivering services; evaluate the need for improvements in the implementation and coordination of public policies relating to faith-based and other neighborhood organizations; and make recommendations for changes in policies, programs, and practices."

That's pretty broad -- broad enough, I suppose, to include topics such as reducing the need for abortion, promoting responsible fatherhood initiatives, fostering interfaith dialogue, or to add any other policy areas that the OFBNP decides to include.

The charter also requires that, in accordance with FACA, the Council "hold open meetings," unless the director determines that the meeting should be closed in accordance with provisions of the Freedom of Information Act, and that "interested persons may attend meetings, appear before the Council, or file comments with the Council." The council's subcommittees are also subject to the provisions of FACA -- which appears to mean that their meetings are open to the public as well.

The charter also states that the council's records "shall be available for public inspection and copying, subject to the Freedom of Information Act."

The OFBNP itself, though, appears not to be subject to FOIA. According to the White House, entities like the OFBNP that are within the Domestic Policy Council are exempt from FOIA.

--Sarah Posner

After a marathon week of panels and testimonies on the discussion draft of the 2009 American Clean Energy and Security Act, former Vice President Al Gore spoke this morning in hopes of summarizing all that was debated concerning the climate bill. Speaking before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Gore said the proposed legislation has "the moral significance equivalent to that of the civil rights legislation of the 1960's and the Marshall Plan of the late 1940's."

It seems people have lost all shyness about defining their representative issues as "the civil rights" of our generation. Gore's wording -- "moral significance equivalent to" -- seemed, though, a more genuine and accurate phrasing, compared to defining the issue as such. But, what Gore proceeded to describe, in explaining why the challenge of fighting global warming is no longer something for partisan trifling about, illustrated something much bigger than a staging for civil rights. Among the examples of evidence of climate change catastrophe, Gore cited:

"New research, which draws upon recently declassified data collected by U.S. nuclear submarines traveling under the Arctic ice cap for the last 50 years ... has told us that the entire Arctic ice cap may totally disappear in summer in as little as five years."

"A recent study in the journal Science has now confirmed that the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet is warming. Scientists have told us that if it were to collapse and slide into the sea, we would experience global sea level rise of another 20 feet worldwide."

"The American West and the Southeast have been experiencing prolonged severe drought and historic water shortages. A study ... from the Scripps Institute estimated that 60 percent of the changes in the West's water cycle are due to increased atmospheric man-made greenhouse gases."

"A number of new studies continue to show that climate change is increasing the intensity of hurricanes. Although we cannot attribute any particular storm to global warming, we can certainly look at the trend. Dr. Greg Holland from the National Center for Atmospheric Research says that we have experienced a 300 to 400 percent increase in category five storms in the past 10 years."

Such catastrophes, if left unchecked, will result in challenges much larger than presented in a civil rights context. And since the climate bill won't be moving with any speed on economic principles -- if rebuttal from Republicans on the committee are any indication -- then moral appeal may have to figure stronger in the bill's advocacy.

The toughest battle will be finding a moral soft spot in GOP legislators who still think global warming is from God tinkering with the thermostat, as Gore found out when he was stoned during the question period by the committee's Republicans.

Rep. Marsha Blackburn, from Gore's home state of Tennessee, made her comments personal: She lifted up an article from New York Times Magazine about Gore's partnership with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a venture capital firm that helps direct investments into green technology. Gore laughed it off, and stated he was "proud of it." Blackburn's insinuation that Gore was only promoting this bill so that he could personally profit from it seemed outright cross, given her and other Republicans' welcoming of plenty of testimony throughout the week from executives of oil and coal companies, who made it explicit that they were willing to sacrifice the country's environmental health so that they could preserve profits for themselves and their shareholders.

After shaking the Blackburn dirt off his shoulder, Gore summarized his position by appealing straight to Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman telling him, "I know in the committee process there will be lots of debates about this, but I urge you during that process to stay on this side of the line that preserves the effectiveness of this legislation."

In other words, keep its moral integrity intact.

-- Brentin Mock

Floyd Norris observes how credit-card companies lobbied themselves right into a tight, greedy little corner. Remember in 2005 when they convinced Congress to make it harder for borrowers to get credit-card debt discharged during bankruptcy? Take it away, Floyd.

The law encouraged banks to relax credit card lending standards. If consumers would have to pay even if they did go broke, then you don’t need to worry so much about whether they will go broke.

Now credit-card defaults are rising, and the banks have responded by jacking up interest rates and fees on anyone they don’t much trust. Higher rates make defaults more likely, of course, but if you get enough fees from holders that do pay, you can offset a lot of defaults.

... By giving the banks the law they wanted, the Congress made it likely the banks would lose more money. Those losses led the bankers to try to squeeze more dollars out of overextended customers, which led Congress to turn on the banks.

You could probably tell similar stories about the investment banks that lobbied the SEC to relax leverage limits so instead of making 12 to 1 bets, they were able to make 40 to 1 bets, which must have been nice at the time but becomes problematic once you start losing those bets, er, deleveraging. Which makes an important point about regulation: it doesn't just protect consumers from predatory companies; ideally, it also protects companies from letting their short-term interests completely undermine their long-term stability.

These firms are like a child who won't heed warnings that eating an entire chocolate cake is going to make her sick. Unfortunately, in this analogy, the child can afford to buy off its parents and purchase as much chocolate cake as she pleases. How do all of the people who got taken advantage of by credit-card companies and predatory lenders fit into this little metaphor? They're the guests at what is about to become a very messy birthday party.

-- Tim Fernholz

Cliff May, after writing a blog post in support of waterboarding suspected terrorists on the grounds that their religion won't allow them to cooperate, tries to argue that he's not pro-torture:

Every opponent I’ve debated on has taken this tactic — labeling me as “pro-torture,” refusing to grapple with definitions, and refusing to consider whether there may be methods of interrogation that are unpleasant but fall short of torture. 

This is especially important because we now know that Islamists believe their religion forbids them to cooperate with infidels — until they have reached the limit of their ability to endure the hardships the infidel is inflicting on them.* In other words: Imagine an al-Qaeda member who would like to give his interrogators information, who does not want continue fighting, who would prefer not to see more innocent people slaughtered. He would need his interrogators to press him hard so he can feel that he has met his religious obligations — only then could he cooperate.

Once again, the individual whom May draws his disgusting rationalization from, Abu Zubayda, gave up all of the useful information he had before he was tortured. Second, waterboarding has always been torture, it was torture when the Spanish used it during the Inquisition, it was torture when the Khmer Rouge used it, and it was torture when Yukio Asano used it. You can take all the pains you want to "emphasize" you oppose torture but if you're doing it while making argument for the use of tactics that have for centuries been identified as torture, you support torture. May can rationalize all he wants, but he is making an argument here that is both (A) objectively pro-torture and (B) just plain bigoted. As the experience with Zubayda shows, there's nothing mystical about Muslim resistance to traditional interrogation that justifies torturing them.

Meanwhile, May lacking a sense of irony, labels his position "pro-facts."

-- A. Serwer

The Sri Lankan government has forced the Tamil Tiger guerrilla organization onto a narrow spit, about 7 kilometers long. Unfortunately, the U.N. estimates that between 50,000 and 100,000 civilians are trapped in the area along with the Tigers. Continuing military operations by the Sri Lankan government and the Tigers are resulting, according to the UN, in about 70 civilian casualties per day. Things will get worse before they get better, as the Tigers have been conscripting and arming civilians as their military cause has grown more desperate.

The Sri Lankan government faces a conundrum. It can destroy the major military formations of the Tamil Tiger organization, which is no small feat. However, ending the influence of the organization is beyond the military capacity of the Sri Lankan state, because much of the Tiger's support comes from the Tamil diaspora. The Tigers also continue to have underground support in Tamil parts of Sri Lanka. Solving these last two problems depends on political reconciliation, and causing large civilian casualties while destroying the last organized Tiger resistance would set back reconciliation prospects.

Key, I think, to a successful resolution is post-conflict management on the part of international organizations and the international community. The success of any ceasefire, prior to the destruction of the military arm of the Tigers, is premised on the willingness of the parties to negotiate. There's not that much indication thus far that either are interested; the government is winning, and the Tigers don't want to negotiate from a position of weakness. Our best hope is that the international community can create sufficient incentive for the Columbo government to maintain a fair peace, while limiting the ability of the wider Tamil community to support another insurgency.

--Robert Farley

Kansas' Republican state Legislature certainly is crafty. During Gov. Kathleen Sebelius' long, still unresolved fight to be confirmed as Health and Human Services Secretary, she's been forced to deal with several abortion-related bills back home. You know, because in the midst of an economic crisis, the most crucial agenda item is constraining women's reproductive health choices!

In any case, Sebelius -- whose confirmation hearings have centered around abortion politics -- buckled last month, signing into law a bill requiring doctors to ask patients, 30 minutes before scheduled abortions, if they would like to see an ultrasound image of the fetus or hear its heartbeat. Yesterday, however, Sebelius found her spine, vetoing legislation that would have required doctors performing late-term abortions to submit, in writing, exactly what medical risks "justified" the procedure. Abortion is illegal in Kansas after the 22nd week of pregnancy, barring serious health threats to the pregnant woman. The bill also, classically, infantalized women and girls, allowing their husbands or parents to sue abortion providers if they suspected the pregnant woman's health wasn't really at risk.

Of course, what the veto reveals is the horror underlying seemingly innocent late-term abortion bans and limitations, like the Kansas law already in place. They intimidate doctors at a time when the nation is experiencing a severe shortage of abortion providers. They pressure women into carrying non-viable pregnancies to term; after all, if your own health isn't at risk, why wouldn't you want to give birth to a child destined to die within days or weeks of birth? And they trivialize women's emotional and mental health needs, implying that only a life-threatening physical ailment justifies the choice to end a pregnancy.

It took real political guts for Sebelius to veto this bill, and she is paying the price. Previously, her nomination had attracted the strong support of her home state Republican senator, Sam Brownback, a staunch anti-choicer who regularly likens abortion to slavery. But now Brownback is back-pedaling. Sebelius' veto "makes it harder and harder" for him to support her, Brownback said, adding that he would "keep thinking on through it over the weekend." Given that Sebelius is the last Cabinet appointee yet to be confirmed -- and that the delay is preventing President Obama from filling crucial positions at the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention -- here's hoping Brownback doesn't overthink the thing.

--Dana Goldstein

... his statement, issued on the traditional day to remember the massacres, avoids saying the word "genocide" at all costs but technically confirms his previous statements characterizing the massacres as such:

Just as the terrible events of 1915 remind us of the dark prospect of man’s inhumanity to man, reckoning with the past holds out the powerful promise of reconciliation. I have consistently stated my own view of what occurred in 1915, and my view of that history has not changed. My interest remains the achievement of a full, frank and just acknowledgment of the facts.

... The best way to advance that goal right now is for the Armenian and Turkish people to address the facts of the past as a part of their efforts to move forward. I strongly support efforts by the Turkish and Armenian people to work through this painful history in a way that is honest, open, and constructive. To that end, there has been courageous and important dialogue among Armenians and Turks, and within Turkey itself.

It's reminiscent of his refrain on torture: Acknowledge the facts, look forward, not back.

-- Tim Fernholz

The Global Climate Coalition, a fossil fuel lobby, in public:

“The role of greenhouse gases in climate change is not well understood,” the coalition said in a scientific “backgrounder” provided to lawmakers and journalists through the early 1990s, adding that “scientists differ” on the issue.

And in private:

“The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied,” the experts wrote in an internal report compiled for the coalition in 1995.

Perhaps the most amazing part is that this happened 15 years ago. Since then, the strength of the scientific consensus has only increased. But you still have folks like Michelle Bachman getting out there and making things up on the floor of the House of Representatives. Meanwhile, Jon Chait finds an appropriate observation from Upton Sinclair.

-- Tim Fernholz

Hollywood, it seems, is no longer captivated by the narrative of unions. But Rich Byrne still finds it worthwhile to consider the cultural effect of plays concerned with organized labor.

Meanwhile, Nick Danforth wonders how the U.S. should handle a resolution recognizing the Armenian genocide.

And Terence Samuel casts himself as the raconteur of Republican decline.

As always, subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they are published. Also, follow us on Twitter for highlights from our blog.

--The Editors

Michael Goldfarb thinks that if you support gay marriage or choice, but not torture, you're a hypocrite:

As to the morality of the methods used, I don't see anything immoral about smacking around a terrorist or making him sit in the cold or dunking him in the water, but you can argue it either way. Still, I wonder why the same people squealing about the alleged moral indignity to which these monsters were subjected are the same people who want the government to keep morality out of their bedrooms and doctors' offices. Why should the government be forbidden from making a moral judgment about gay marriage or abortion but compelled to make a moral judgment about the treatment of terrorists plotting to murder Americans citizens?

So he's arguing that it doesn't make sense for people who support gay rights and women's rights to support...human rights? I believe Goldfarb may have discovered a new species of non-sequitur somewhere at the intersection of dadaism and thuggishness. It's like this: people have rights, government has authority. Learn the difference.

Bonus Goldfarb:

To call this torture, particularly when done to an individual like KSM, diminishes the very real torture employed by the regimes that U.S. troops have toppled and the rogue states like North Korea and Iran that continue to violate basic human rights.

This is the most honest presentation of the right's view of torture yet: the definition of torture isn't based on whether or not interrogation techniques meet the definition of torture under the law, but on the arbitrarily defined personal qualities of the tortured. That's why when North Korea treats its prisoners to “prolonged periods of exposure to the elements”; “confinement for up to several weeks in small ‘punishment cells’ in which prisoners were unable to stand upright or lie down”; “being forced to kneel or sit immobilized for long periods”; and “being forced to stand up and sit down to the point of collapse,” it's torture, but when we do similar things it's not. Spencer Ackerman is right, these guys deserve a thank-you note from Kim Jong Il: the most powerful surrogates for torturers around the world are now Americans like Dick Cheney.

Hardly a day goes by that I don't think to myself, how could McCain possibly have lost the election with people like this guy working for him?

-- A. Serwer

*This post was edited from its original version because I had to take it down after a blogjam, and there were related developments.

Dawn Johnsen, President Obama's nominee to head the Office of Legal Counsel, has been a target of the religious right largely because she previously was the legal director for the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL). They've called on Republicans to filibuster her nomination because, as Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List, said in a statement yesterday, she's a "radical pro-abortion nominee" with a "disturbing view of pregnancy, motherhood, and even the Constitution." Dannenfelser threatened, "This key personnel decision will determine whether pro-life senators are serious about acting to protect women and the unborn."

Now, via Greg Sargent, it looks like conserva-Dem Sen. Ben Nelson is poised to vote against Johnsen too.

Johnsen is a hero to opponents of the Bush administration torture policies, because of her early and strong denunciations of them. Torture is not an issue for the religious right -- the culture of life, you know, has its limits -- but there are a lot of other religious activists against torture who have been agitating for an investigatory commission, and, in some cases, criminal investigations and potentially prosecutions.

But some of those anti-torture activists are also anti-abortion. They have not publicly weighed in on the Johnsen nomination, but it certainly would be interesting to hear whether it's more important to them that Johnsen opposes torture -- an issue that now directly and urgently relates to the OLC director's duties -- or supports abortion rights, a position she incidentally shares with the president.

Politicians of both parties love to claim they listen to religious voices. But in this case, will the very loud voices on abortion drown out others on the torture issue?

--Sarah Posner

Marcy Wheeler takes apart Cliff May from National Review, but I can't help but notice the coda to May's argument:

Remember that Abu Zubaydah said: “Brothers who are captured and interrogated are permitted by Allah to provide information when they believe they have reached the limit of their ability to withhold it in the face of psychological and physical hardships.”

Any interrogator worth his salt would understand this means it is his job to bring his subject to the point at which cooperation is no longer betrayal but permitted according to his religious beliefs. Can that be achieved short of torture? Sure. Can it be achieved without coercive interrogation techniques? No, not with subjects who have the beliefs described above.

Aside from May's problems with arithmetic, the assertion that torture is the only way to get valuable information from terrorist suspects is broadly disputed by intelligence experts, including the director of National Intelligence. But I can't help notice that like Marc Thiessen, May is arguing that torture is necessary due to the religious beliefs of the subject being interrogated. The above two assertions are false on their face, Abu Zubayda gave up all his useful information before being tortured, so it's useless to quote his assertion that radicals will only talk if brought to a state of spiritual epiphany through torture.

It's also thinly veiled bigotry posited as an anthropological insight. Is this the conservative position now? We have to torture them because they're Muslims? I assumed Thiessen's argument was too embarrassing to be repeated, but I underestimated the tendency some people have toward using things like race and religion as a basis for dehumanizing treatment.

Hillary Clinton’s amazing congressional testimony yesterday made that incredibly clear. New Jersey Rep. Chris Smith asked her whether the Obama administration is seeking to “weaken or overturn pro-life laws and policies in African and Latin American countries,” and whether the United States considers abortion as a component of reproductive rights and health. Smith knows the influence the United States can wield on this issue, since he’s often used his office to bolster anti-abortion forces worldwide. In 2004, for example, when Uruguay moved to liberalize its abortion law, Smith faxed a letter, signed by five other Republican congressmen, to every member of Uruguay’s Senate urging them to defeat the bill and not “legalize the violent murder of unborn children.” It lost by four votes. Anyway, Clinton’s answer to him was thrillingly unequivocal:

When I think about the suffering that I have seen, of women around the world. I’ve been in hospitals in Brazil, where half the women were enthusiastically and joyfully greeting new babies, and the other half were fighting for their lives against botched abortions. I’ve been in African countries where 12 and 13-year-old girls are bearing children. I have been in Asian countries where the denial of family planning consigns women to lives of oppression and hardship.

So we have a very fundamental disagreement. And it is my strongly held view that you are entitled to advocate, and everyone who agrees with you should be free to do so, and so are we. We happen to think that family planning is an important part of women’s health, and reproductive health includes access to abortion, that I believe should be safe, legal and rare.

--Michelle Goldberg

Critical legislation to limit foreclosures has been stalled in the Senate for a while, as regular readers know. A bill that would allow primary home loans to be modified by a judge during bankruptcy is being opposed by the usual coalition of mortgage bankers, Republicans (all of them) and a sprinkiling of moderate Democrats. (Strangely enough, primary home loans are one of the few loans that a judge can't already modify). The mortgage bankers make two arguments against the new law, known as cramdown: One is that the modifications judges will make are going to force them to take a big loss. However, that's not really true -- compared to foreclosure, loan modification will save money.

The other argument from the mortgage bankers is that the change will force them to raise interest rates 2 percent or more to cover potential losses; essentially, as is often the case with financial regulation, they are trying to blackmail legislators with the idea that any changes to mortgage law will result in less available credit. But a report out from Credit Suisse's Structured Assets Research division, of all places, disputes that idea and concludes that "we are not very convinced that the current bankruptcy reform alone will drag the mortgage and housing markets down further." More specifically:

A new study by Adam Levitin from Georgetown University didn’t find empirical evidence that the proposed mortgage cram down will have meaningful impact on mortgage interest rates (based on looking at pricing of mortgages that currently permit cram down, such as second homes and comparing them to pricing on owner-occupied homes (which don’t allow cram downs today) ... rule changes in the middle of the game are nothing new. Did rates drop dramatically after the 2005 bankruptcy law for credit card and auto borrowers (both of whom faced increasing restrictions on bankruptcy filing)? If tightening the bankruptcy law for borrowers in 2005, failed to lower rates for affected borrowers, it’s hard to imagine that rates will necessarily rise based on the proposed bill. Further, filing a Chapter 13 bankruptcy is a fairly onerous procedure and many borrowers may choose foreclosure rather than bankruptcy. Assuming most borrowers who file can’t pay their mortgage anyway, the losses lenders would suffer would not seem to be any higher under the bankruptcy proposal and may in fact be lower as shown in our test.

The report also points out that compromise provisions in the legislation would limit cramdown to existing mortgages issued before the bill became law, suggesting that the mortgage market won't change completely; new compromises being floated (for instance, that loans could only be modified in court if a borrower failed to qualify for the Obama administration's voluntary loan modification plan) will limit its affects even further. But even in that format, this is a hugely important measure for stopping foreclosures, both through bankruptcy and more important, as a stick to encourage mortgage originators and investors to modify their loans voluntarily. Arguments that this cure is worse than the disease rely more on fear than fact.

-- Tim Fernholz

In response to a FOIA lawsuit filed by the ACLU in 2004, the Department of Defense has agreed to release photographs that contain images of detainee abuse at the hands of American personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan by May 28. The Bush administration had previously argued against the release of the photos on the basis that they would "incite violence" against "U.S. troops, Coalition forces and civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan." The DoD had previously applied for a FOIA exemption on these grounds and was denied.  It's a twisted argument: Evidence of the government's bad behavior should be kept secret because it might endanger American lives, as though the problem were the obligation toward transparency rather than the abuse itself. The potential for international backlash may sound like a good argument against torturing people in our custody, but in the minds of torture apologists, this isn't an argument for not torturing detainees, but rather evidence that such lawbreaking should be kept secret. 

The photos will probably affect the contours of the current public debate over torture, where civil libertarians argue that torture violates both American law and American values, torture apologists argue that torture is freaking sweet because it saves lives, just like on 24, and the press speculates about political gamesmanship. It's one thing to hear about torture in the abstract, it's another entirely to see visual evidence of such abuse. The Abu Ghraib photos shocked even the Weekly Standard into calling for legal accountability.

Of course, I'm not holding my breath for that this time around.

-- A. Serwer

• It may be true that Eric Cantor is trying out a new media strategy to help boost his party's fortunes, but back in the real world Republicans are blocking Kathleen Sebelius' nomination for HHS, gearing up to take down Dawn Johnsen, and promising to do everything in their power to grind the nation's business to a halt if Democrats dare ask for a majority vote on health-care reform. Ah, democracy.
  
• Dan Balz reports that Barack Obama made it clear from the beginning that he did not want a special commission investigating the Bush administration's use of torture, lest it consume the rest of his agenda; Scott Horton reports that the Justice Department is displeased that the president has inserted himself into their business by signaling immunity for CIA officers who believed they were acting lawfully; and Greg Sargent thinks Dick Cheney wants to shift the conversation about torture to a referendum on the Bush administration keeping the country safe from terror.
• I think it's safe to say that Rep. Joe Barton's (R-TX) belief that his sub-elementary school knowledge of science "stumped" Nobel Prize-winning Energy Secretary Stephen Chu qualifies for one of the most ridiculous things uttered by the minority party in the last 24 hours. But then again, consider that Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) thinks the Senate Armed Services Committee Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody is untrustworthy because it's a "partisan document" (it's not) and Newt Gingrich wants to make July 4th "American Freedom Day" to celebrate last week's tea parties.
• It's been a while since we've seen the "angry left" meme of the Bush years in circulation, but Byron York manages to resurrect it for his Washington Examiner column by citing the single example of Janeane Garofalo making some incoherent remarks on the Keith Olbermann show. York then talks to a friend of his who surmises that liberals are really just afraid that their moment of victory is precarious, because they know it's only a matter of time before the public wakes up to their radical plans for the country. I know conservatives are fond of recycling old arguments, but this is just pathetic.
• Remainders: Americans are surprisingly optimistic given the circumstances; Lieberman has issues if he can't figure out whether he's for or against waterboarding; Bill O'Reilly is apparently a very stupid man; and inexplicably, Matt Drudge still rules their world.

--Mori Dinauer

Prior to choosing Joe Biden for veep, credit-card reform was mentioned fairly often as a part of Barack Obama's agenda during the campaign. After Biden was chosen, there was some reasonable speculation that Biden's relationship with the credit-card companies--many credit-card companies are located in Delaware, because of weak usury laws--might derail credit-card reform. Biden was also a supporter of the bankruptcy bill that was a huge boon to credit-card companies as it made it harder for consumers to file for bankruptcy under chapter 7. Obama hasn't mentioned the idea too much since, but it looks like he's still going forward with it and is meeting with heads of the credit-card industry today, in advance of a push for reform which is good news as long as he sticks to his platform.

Other than on TAPPED of course, there's been little discussion of how much the credit-card system resembles predatory lending.  When you think of their methods (sneaking in hidden rate raises and penalty fees, applying interest to past rather than future debt, raising interest rates based on behavior with other credit accounts), credit-card companies do, as Robert points out, resemble predatory lenders. Their goal is to find really creative ways to quickly and arbitrarily increase the debt owed. I'm not saying that the White House should be figuring out a catchy way to describe credit-card practices as exploitative, because that might be counterproductive if the banks are already willing to go along with the changes the administration is proposing. But the fact is that these practices are exploitative, and in the past, failing to fully explain that has led to conservatives painting regulatory efforts that aid consumers as coddling the irresponsible. 

I'm sorry, could you try to stay awake while I'm blogging?

-- A. Serwer

Jessica Valenti writes on Laura Kipnis' Against Love: A Polemic for our new print feature on the book that changed a writer's view of politics. (If you haven't been looking for them, be sure to go back and read Michael Tomasky on Milan Kundera, and E.J. Dionne on William E. Leuchtenburg.)

Valenti says Kipnis' takedown of monogamous relationships "made me think of feminism as the adultery of social norms. What do you mean you want to keep your own last name when you get married? Or refuse to buy that wrinkle cream? Or play baseball instead of softball? I liken feminism to cheating on the deeply ingrained gender standards that our society clings to as tightly as it holds on to the idea of love."

When a co-worker insisted I read Kipnis years ago, I was similarly taken with the book. Kipnis took my sexual politics and gave them a good shake.

Rejecting the norm of coupledom isn't a get-out-of-jail-free card for adultery. Rather, it's a call to remember that the reason why some people (even feminists!) choose monogamy is because they are trying to craft a relationship with another person. The point of the boundaries is the other person you're defining them with, not the rules themselves.

Being concerned with policing the boundaries means that you're concerned about the boundaries, not the people involved in these relationships. This hypocrisy is writ large in the culture wars. Take your pick of the right-wing cliches -- you're against gay marriage, but on your third wife; you refuse the notion of reproductive rights, but you're on the pill.

And that's Kipnis' point -- focusing on adultery obscures the real battles. As she told an interviewer:

The question is what other social and political forms these current ideas about love prop up. How we love isn't unconnected to larger questions, for example how much social and political freedom we get or demand, or whether a society of compliant worker bees is what we really want to be.

What Against Love did for me was encourage me to remember that the integrity with which we conduct personal relationships is just as important as how we define the boundaries of them.

--Phoebe Connelly

The next front in the banking wars will be over credit cards. Some of the nation's biggest bankers -- including representatives of Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, and other recipients of billions of taxpayer dollars -- are meeting today with the president to ask him to back off of his move to reform credit-card lending practices.

What's happening to credit-card lending is a smaller replay of what happened to mortgage lending. For years, banks used every gimmick possible to get the public to use their cards -- regardless of the credit worthiness of the customer. They lured borrowers with low "teaser" rates. They told borrowers they could get by simply by paying minimum balances.

And now that tens of millions of Americans are poorer than they used to be, the credit-card bubble is bursting. Credit-card delinquencies are soaring. At Bank of America, the largest U.S. lender by assets, 7.8 percent of credit-card accounts were delinquent in February by more than 30 days, up from 5.9 percent last August. Yesterday, Bank of America reported a $1.8 billion first-quarter loss in its credit-card services unit.

As delinquencies mount and profits shrink, card lenders are raising fees and interest rates, including rates on existing balances. They're also charging higher fees when customers exceed their credit limits, and shortening the duration of the teaser rates. When a customer makes a payment in excess of what's owed, card companies now routinely apply the excess to balances with the lowest rates rather than those carrying the highest rates. And banks disclose very little of relevance: For example, most customers have no idea how long it will take them to pay off their balances if they make minimum repayments, or what interest they're actually paying on their balances.

As more and more Americans find themselves in the credit-card squeeze, they're complaining loudly. But the bankers have their own loud lobbyists on Capitol Hill, whose voices haven't been muzzled despite the giant bank bailout. Last month, the Senate Banking Committee reported a bill that bans rate increases for existing balances, among other things. But the vote was close -- 12 in favor, 11 opposed -- and its future in the Senate is uncertain. A House bill advanced yesterday, sponsored by Rep. Carolyn Maloney, a Democrat from New York, has only a 50-50 chance of succeeding. Meanwhile, the Fed is working on a set of watered-down reforms scheduled to go into effect a year from July, but that's way too far off to avoid the pending battle.

Enter Obama. The Treasury holds lots of cards given how dependent the big banks are on its solicitude. Meanwhile, the public has grown weary and suspicious of the bank bailouts. Knowing how unpopular the bailouts have become, the administration is considering how to get additional capital to the banks without going back to Congress for the money. One big idea is to convert taxpayer-provided bank loans into bank equity -- even though the swap puts taxpayers at greater risk (after all, loans have to be repaid, but equity can continue to fall).

That's why getting tough on the banks' credit-card lending practices has such appeal for the administration, politically. It puts the White House on the side of the people rather than Wall Street, on an issue that the public is becoming more and more upset about. And the administration's push could be enough to get reform legislation through Congress.

The bankers will tell Obama today that any new constraints on credit-card lending will cause the banks to reduce the amount of credit-card lending they do, which will hurt the economy. But it's a weak argument because it presupposes that any lending is good for the economy -- even lending to people who don't know what they're getting into and can't repay the loans. It's the same argument banks used two years ago, when prescient observers warned that constraints had to be placed on mortgage-lending practices. What may hurt the economy in the short term, we now know, may save it from even larger pitfalls to come.

--Robert Reich

I ain't even gonna say nuffin.

-- A. Serwer

What happens when states lose their leaders to Cabinet positions? TAP editors take a look at states like Arizona and Kansas, whose governors have left them for the greener pastures of the Obama administration.

Meanwhile, Gershom Gorenberg considers Israel's commemorative holidays, looking at how they construct national narratives and what they mean for the peace process.

And Jessica Valenti makes the case (for and) against love.

As always, subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they are published. Also, follow us on Twitter for highlights from our blog.

--The Editors

Roger Cohen makes a stunning argument in today's New York Times:

So I’m wary of the clamor for retribution. Congress failed. The press failed. The judiciary failed. With almost 3,000 dead, America’s checks and balances got skewed, from the Capitol to Wall Street. Scrutiny gave way to acquiescence. Words were spun in feckless patterns.

Those checks and balances are recovering now. I don’t think this recovery would be served by prosecutions, either of C.I.A. operatives or those who gave them legal advice. Such legal action, if initiated, would split the intelligence services and the military in paralyzing ways at a time when two wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, are still being fought. The country would be lacerated.

Cohen's argument simply reflects the consensus among certain journalistic and political elites that the powerful simply shouldn't be held accountable when they make mistakes, because, after all, we all make mistakes. This compassionate attitude naturally doesn't extend beyond this small group. America has the highest incarceration rate in the world, fully 1 percent of the population. I'm sure there are millions of people currently incarcerated who would like it if Cohen's policy of absolution for crimes was extended to them.

More important, this entire philosophy has it backward. Accountability is the burden of the powerful in a democracy. Those who are responsible for upholding our laws shouldn't get a pass when they break them, precisely because they have that responsibility. Power without accountability is, by definition, tyranny.

-- A. Serwer

Later this afternoon, President Obama will be meeting with Congressional Leadership from both parties. Minority Whip Eric Cantor, who sets the tone for the GOP message in the House -- really, for all congressional Republicans; what is Mitch McConnell up to these days, anyway? -- has reportedly sent a letter ahead to the president "painting him as the good guy and Speaker Nancy Pelosi as the meanie: 'Democratic leaders in Congress have so far ignored your call for a new era of bipartisanship in Washington – however the next 100 days can be different.'"

It's an interesting shift. During most of the stimulus debate, up until the president dropped his budget, this was the Republican line of the day -- align with the popular president, and use attacks on the less-popular Congressional Democrats as an excuse to vote no on the government's agenda. After the stimulus, the Republicans adjusted and started going after the president more directly, in part because members didn't think they were seeing an return on their previous strategy and partially in response to the ambition of the Obama budget. But after a quiet Easter recess (Congress returned to work this week) it seems that the GOP could be shifting back again. Despite their harsh criticism, the president remains popular, and most of his real problems have come from Senate Democrats. Looking ahead to 2010, they may have given up on casting Obama as a political enemy -- who wants to take on the champ? -- in favor of scapegoating the congressional Dems to make their argument for a return to power.

One letter makes it too early to say for sure, but this could be a sign that Republicans are adjusting their media strategy, continuing their effort to gain traction in a political environment that hasn't rewarded their efforts so far. Even the special election in upstate New York has now tilted in the Democrats' direction, leaving them without even a symbolic victory. Safe to say, though, that with the widely over-hyped 100 days marker coming up next Wednesday, actors on all sides wil be doing a post-mortem on the first chunk of the year to figure out how to tackle the next set of debates.

-- Tim Fernholz

Nearly 80 percent of Palestinians desire an independent state alongside Israel. Shocking, I know. But then comes this statistical hip-check: Three-fourths of Israelis feel exactly the same way. This according to a poll just released by OneVoice, an organization dedicated to "amplifying the voices of Israeli and Palestinian moderates." It further reports that the top issue of concern for those Israelis polled was "security," which is truly significant, as it indicates that most Israelis now implicitly attach their safety to a two-state solution. If accurate -- an early April poll by the Israel Policy Forum places the pro-two-state'ers at a more modest 56 percent -- this is a seismic shift in public opinion. Only two months ago, in the wake of the widely popular Gaza operation, a slight majority of Israeli adults were wary of an autonomous Palestinian neighbor.

Israelis can be a volatile electorate. Yet rarely do massive swings in public opinion produce transformational elections of the kind we just experienced here in the U.S. The ascension of a Netanyahu-led conservative coalition in Israel, in spite of public weariness for the occupation, reaffirms this notion. Parliamentary politics and coalition building may be the primary culprits, granting disproportionate power to minority, often right-wing parties, who then assume the role of kingmaker mercenaries. They support (crown) whoever gives them the goods (policy promises or government positions). But this is nothing new. What, perhaps, we failed to realize, was the extent to which these lesser parties' power would be amplified under the "threat" of a renewed and reconfigured peace process. The Israeli public wants it. The new U.S. administration desperately wants it. And yet we are left with the reactionary odd-couple of Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman stewarding Israel's diplomatic efforts.

More pertinent than the electoral politics, however, is the question of whether this governing coalition has the strength to last, particularly in light of its objections to the now favored two-state solution. As TAP's Israeli correspondent Gershom Gorenberg recently pointed out, Netanyahu's amateurish display of parliamentary bargaining left him with a number of incompetent ministers and an extremely vulnerable Knesset majority. Combine that with this recent polling information, Foreign Minister Lieberman's proclivity for pissing off, well, just about everyone, and Obama's subtle indications that he will up the pressure on the Israeli government, and you have a recipe for a coalition nose-dive. Or perhaps a "damn the torpedoes!" approach in the mold of a Dick Cheney.

The X-factor in the coalition's survival may be Obama -- particularly his popularity among secular Israelis. Certainly, during the campaign he was painted as pro-Palestinian -- I even found myself on the receiving end of many an anti-Obama diatribe while in Jerusalem last summer. However, one of the implicit goals of Obama's diplomatic strategy around the world is to induce cooperation by circumventing government officials and speaking directly to people, who presumably hold some degree of power to influence their leaders. If Obama can establish a base level of trust among the majority of Israelis now willing to accept two states, and in the process reveal the Netanyahu government as the true obstructionist roadblock, we may start to see the coalition crumble under the weight of its own poor configuration.

The House Financial Services Committee is holding a hearing on predatory-lending reform right now, but what they aren't working on is more interesting. Chairman Barney Frank told The Wall Street Journal that he won't be moving quickly on legislation that would allow the administration to take insolvent major financial institutions -- like, say AIG or Citi -- into recievership to fire managers, unwind toxic assets, and ultimately break them up. Whatever powers that are eventually granted to the executive will come as part of a larger regulatory-reform bill later in the year.

The change is a blow to Obama administration officials who have pushed aggressively for these powers, and leaves government officials without new tools to take over teetering companies during the next few months. It could also frustrate efforts by the Obama administration to convince foreign leaders that the U.S. plans to move swiftly to overhaul financial market rules.

I've made this point before, but this decision should make it clear that the main obstacle to more agressive action in the financial sector is Congress, through an aversion to appropriating the up-front costs of that action and trepidation toward authorizing a broad government intervention in the market. While many critics direct their concerns about a complacent response to the financial crisis at the Obama administration, more time needs to be spent building a viable coalition in Congress to support the kinds of tools and resources needed to take decisive action.

On the other hand, it is clear that the administration is concerned about the risks, and possible unintended consequences, of a recievership process. While time is of the essence in creating an effective recovery, these issues are complex, and due consideration needs to take place in structuring a response; we all recall how well the rushed TARP bill came out. Maybe Frank has a point about taking time on the project, and lord knows the Senate will take forever on its version anyways.

-- Tim Fernholz

You have to get up early in the morning to beat the dishonesty of Rep. Pete Hoekstra's op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today:

George Tenet, who served as CIA director under Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, believes the enhanced interrogations program saved lives. He told CBS's "60 Minutes" in April 2007: "I know this program alone is worth more than the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency put together have been able to tell us."

Last week, Mr. Blair made a similar statement in an internal memo to his staff when he wrote that "[h]igh value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qa'ida organization that was attacking this country."

The right has degenerated from simply arguing that torture works and is legal to arguing that it's so effective that it trumps all other forms of intelligence gathering. Call it the "all you need is torture" platform.

Hoekstra also eliminates the context of Blair's remarks in order to misrepresent them -- Blair concluded that "the bottom line is these techniques have hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security," which is a substantially different takeaway from the idea that torture was more valuable than the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA put together.

Hoekstra argues that "it was not necessary to release details of the enhanced interrogation techniques, because members of Congress from both parties have been fully aware of them since the program began in 2002." He adds that "it appeared that Mr. Obama understood it would be unfair to prosecute U.S. government employees for carrying out a policy that had been fully vetted and approved by the executive branch and Congress." So Hoekstra believes the government is entitled to break the law in secret as long as it does so by committee.

Hoekstra never acknowledges that the "enhanced interrogations" constituted torture, because then he'd have to argue that government officials are above the law. But that's essentially what he's arguing anyway.

-- A. Serwer

Ali Soufan, a former FBI agent, sets the record straight (again) on Abu Zubayda. Some of the claims about the intelligence he offered were false, but all the useful information we got out of him was disclosed before he was tortured.

We've talked about the ways torture makes us less safe--it undermines our moral standing in the world, it gives our enemies a cause to rally others to, it puts the treatment of captured American soldiers in danger, and it makes our allies less likely to cooperate with us. It's also unreliable. But Soufan identifies another effect of the Bush administration's torture regime: the result of the CIA torturing prisoners was that some of our most experienced counterterrorism experts were shut out:

One of the worst consequences of the use of these harsh techniques was that it reintroduced the so-called Chinese wall between the C.I.A. and F.B.I., similar to the communications obstacles that prevented us from working together to stop the 9/11 attacks. Because the bureau would not employ these problematic techniques, our agents who knew the most about the terrorists could have no part in the investigation. An F.B.I. colleague of mine who knew more about Khalid Shaikh Mohammed than anyone in the government was not allowed to speak to him.

Soufan also writes that there were instances of torture "backfiring" which he says are "still classified."

First of all, I think it almost goes without saying that there's something comforting about the fact that the FBI recognized that these interrogations were illegal and refused to participate in them. I think that has a great deal to do with the fact that the FBI is a law enforcement organization as opposed to an intelligence gathering one, there impetus is very different. It's also worth pointing out that while a number of former Bush administration officials claimed torture "worked" and intelligence gleaned from such methods saved American lives, FBI director Robert Mueller III* has said this wasn't the case.

But here's my question. As a result of the previous administration's torture program, some of the country's best interrogators and counterterrorism experts were frozen out of the intelligence gathering process. How does that make us any safer?

*He's still the FBI director. My bad ya'll. 

-- A. Serwer

• According to ABC News, Patrick Leahy has signaled that if he can't get the votes for a bipartisan truth commission to investigate the illegalities of the Bush administration, he'll go about the inquiry using the normal hearing process. President Obama has indicated that he's only interested in an investigation if it's done in a bipartisan fashion, but I think there might be a bit of an unconscious good-cop, bad-cop routine going on here. After all, Obama could have avoided all of this by stonewalling the release of the torture memos, but he did release them, and surely he knew what the result would be. I'd wager Obama wants to stay above the fray with his "look forward," post-partisan rhetoric while tacitly letting congressional Dems do the dirty work.
• The DNC has settled on a political strategy of making Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and Newt Gingrich the public face of the GOP, and really, why wouldn't they? All three are ubiquitous figures on the talking-heads circuit, all three are polarizing figures loathed by the public, and each helps the GOP look more ridiculous by the day. The only thing I'm not sure about is whether the DNC thinks this strategy will win them more votes (unlikely) or give them a fundraising boom (very likely).
• Speaking of rallying the base, Jonathan Martin wonders why conservative outrage over every single thing Barack Obama has done since taking office hasn't translated into wider public discontent with the administration. Martin offers some possible explanations that each seem plausible enough but misses the bigger picture: Americans aren't outraged with Obama because he hasn't done anything outrageous. The vast majority of the public sees Obama for what he is: the banality of good (for the most part) presidential leadership.
• Seems Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid met last night to discuss creating a congressional panel charged with investigating the causes of Wall Street's meltdown last Fall, similar to the Pecora Commission established to investigate the market crash of 1929. One hopes such a panel would reach Simon Johnson's conclusions about the financier oligarchy, but let's not be too optimistic about the same legislative body that helped establish that oligarchy in the first place.
• Steve Benen is right to point out that this statement from Charles Schumer about using the budget reconciliation process to pass health-care reform isn't just an off-the-cuff remark -- it's an ultimatum to Senate Republicans.
• Remainders: Hillary Clinton smacks down Mike Pence's absurd criticism that U.S. leaders can't ever meet with our enemies; John Yoo is a moral monster; Mike Tomasky dissects a viral right-wing lie; a Bushie practically hopes for another terrorist attack on U.S. soil to validate his degenerate views on releasing the torture memos; and Bill Kristol wins a quarter-million dollar prize for "outstanding achievements in a wide range of activities affecting the development of public policy from national and international perspectives." Seriously.

--Mori Dinauer

The administration is coming up to that magical 100-day mark, at which point measures are taken of how a new president is doing. As a university professor, I'm accustomed to giving grades. So here's my report card on Obamanomics so far:

The 10-year budget gets an A. It's an extraordinary vision of what America can and should become, including universal health insurance and environmental protections against climate change. And the budget takes a little bit more from the rich and gives a little bit more back to the poor and lower middle class, which seems appropriate given that the income gap is wider than it's been since the 1920s. I'd give the budget an A+, except for its far-too-rosy economic projections.

The stimulus package gets a B. Good as far as it goes but it doesn't go nearly far enough. $787 billion over two years sounds like a lot of stimulus. But the economy is operating at about a trillion and a half dollars below its capacity this year alone. And considering that the states are cutting services and increasing taxes to the tune of $350 billion over this year and next, the stimulus is even smaller.

The last grade is for the bank bailouts. I give them an F. I'm a big fan of this administration, but I've got to be honest. The bailouts are failing. So far American taxpayers have shoveled out almost $600 billion. Yet the banks are lending less money than they did five months ago. Bank executives are still taking home princely sums; their toxic assets and non-performing loans are growing; and the banks are still cooking their books. And now the Treasury is talking about converting taxpayer dollars into bank equity, which exposes taxpayers to even greater losses.

So that's the report card. An A on the budget, B on the stimulus, and F on the bailout. On the whole (given how I weigh grades) that gives Obamanomics a C-plus. Not bad given the magnitude of the problems Obama inherited. But by the same token, not nearly good enough.

--Robert Reich

Thomas Frank certainly thinks so, and righteously calls out those who contributed to the problem. We've covered the anti-worker Democrats before, but Frank's criticisms of supposedly liberal lobbying groups are newer and entirely spot on; one of the depressing phenomena of having a more-or-less liberal government is that we are also rewarded with a more-or-less liberal lobbying corps cheerfully selling out their principles for money. Frank also puts forward the most likely scenario for the next year, wistfully hoping that it is a clever move and not the reaction to political impasse:

EFCA's supporters may simply drop their bill's most controversial provisions, get some compromise measure passed, and spend the next 20 years reminding corporate America of the days when it was touchingly committed to "workers' rights" and a "democratic workplace."

On the other hand, I've mentioned in the past that the climate for card check might look much better in 2010 than it does now. Why? Well, even if Republicans can gain ground in the House, it's very hard to believe that they'll gain even close to enough seats (79!) to take away a majority, and as even NRSC Chairman John Cornyn admits, the chances of the Democrats gaining a net one Senate seat for a filibuster-proof majority are pretty high. Wishy-washy Democrats afraid of supporting labor are always a concern, but at least institutional excuses would be hard to come by, forcing them to take a clear position. By that time, as well, we can hope that the administration would be more willing to expend political capital on the legislation.

For now, negotiations proceed apace, as this interview with SEIU leader Andy Stern reveals. Stern is unwilling to wait until 2011 -- frankly, he's right to be impatient -- and foresees some kind of compromise, likely on accelerated elections and stiffer penalties, passing Congress. That interview also produces a hilariously damning quote from SEIU Secretary-Treasurer Anna Burger, who was asked if Sen. Arlen Specter, the Republican and former EFCA supporter, might flip his support back to the bill: "Oh sure. This is Arlen Specter we're talking about."

-- Tim Fernholz

I want to return for a moment to Adam's point on the use of torture to ferret out a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda. What fascinates me is the irrelevance of the line of inquiry; despite the fact that no evidence of a link was ever found, we still invaded Iraq. Jonathan Landay:

A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration.

"There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used," the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity.

"The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there."

This has a couple of interesting implications. The first is that the information that they were trying to get doesn't appear to have been that critical at all. Nothing that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed could have said under torture, apparently, would have dissuaded the United States from invading Iraq, or Cheney and Rumsfeld from believing in the link. Thus, the suspects were being tortured for information that would not have affected either US policy or the beliefs of senior US officials in the slightest. The CIA might as well have been asking Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to solve Fermat's Last Theorem, for all the relevance that the information had. The second implication is that Cheney and Rumsfeld didn't believe that the torture was working. If anyone were aware of an operational link between Iraq and al-Qaeda, it would have been Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, but the fact that he failed to confess to any such link under prolonged torture didn't convince senior Bush administration officials that no link existed. Cheney and Rumsfeld chose to believe that the torture itself had failed to produce the relevant information, rather than that the relevant information didn't exist.

In other words, Cheney and Rumsfeld insisted on torturing people in order to get information that didn't matter, then implicitly rejected the idea that torture works when it produced the wrong answer. I'm all out of outrage; what's left is just grim fascination.

--Robert Farley

U.S. District Court Judge Ellen Huvelle rejected the Obama administration's efforts to dismiss or delay Mohammed Jawad's attempts to challenge his detention until the military commission against him was concluded. President Obama ordered a halt to all military commissions during his first few days in office, which means that Jawad's attempt to challenge his detention would have been delayed indefinitely until the administration settled on a policy for dealing with detainees at Guantanamo Bay. 

There are some wonderful precedents for turning public space into gardens. In 2005, Growing Power, in Chicago, partnered with the city to transform 20,000 sq feet of beds in Grant Park that previously contained annuals into a decorative vegetable garden. (I wrote about Erika Allen, who heads the Chicago branch of Growing Power, and the rise of urban agriculture for In These Times.)

Here's a photo of the Chicago gardens:

Gardening advocates are rightly pleased. As Rose Hayden-Smith, a historian and food systems educator at the University of California, told the Washington Post: "I kept having to pinch myself in this meeting, We're not the kind of people who have been invited to Washington, D.C., before. We're the guerrilla gardeners, the pollinator people, the seed savers. It wasn't our usual cast of characters. People were grinning from ear to ear."

--Phoebe Connelly

David Ignatius has a column today on how the administration's decision to release the torture memos has affected CIA field agents. I don't have Ignatius' sources in the intelligence community, but parts of his article just don't seem to pass the smell test. For instance:

...Put yourself in the shoes of the people who were asked to interrogate al-Qaeda prisoners in 2002. One former officer told me he declined the job, not because he thought the program was wrong but because he knew it would blow up. "We all knew the political wind would change eventually," he recalled. Other officers who didn't make that cynical but correct calculation are now "broken and bewildered," says the former operative.

CIA officers do illegal stuff for a living, more or less, so they do count on an implicit bargain with the political process to prevent their work protecting national security today from making them criminals tomorrow. But that doesn't excuse them from basic moral considerations; it seems to me that it's possible to create a distinction between a lot of typical law-breaking they may engage in during the course of collecting foreign intelligence and torturing someone for information. The impression I've gotten in my discussions with intelligence sources is that our efforts are not a lot of James Bond stuff at all, but rather the slow-grind cultivation of sources, etc., so it would be interesting as well to learn how much of the overall CIA field operation turns on capturing and interrogating people. Incidentally, Ignatius' assertion that the decision not to torture someone is "cynical" was truly amazing. Another note:

One veteran counterterrorism operative says that agents in the field are already being more careful about using the legal findings that authorize covert action. An example is the so-called "risk of capture" interview that takes place in the first hour after a terrorism suspect is grabbed. This used to be the key window of opportunity, in which the subject was questioned aggressively and his cellphone contacts and "pocket litter" were exploited quickly.

Now, field officers are more careful. They want guidance from headquarters. They need legal advice. I'm told that in the case of an al-Qaeda suspect seized in Iraq several weeks ago, the CIA didn't even try to interrogate him. The agency handed him over to the U.S. military.

I'm sorry, I don't understand why the revelation of now-forbidden torture techniques would prevent an agent from interrogating a suspect or going through cellphone contacts, unless "questioned aggressively" is a euphemism for torture. Also, and I'd be interested to learn more from Ignatius or anyone else who knows these procedures -- do CIA agents frequently grab suspects without talking to their superiors first? If they do so in a war zone where they frequently collaborate with the armed forces, is turning a captured suspect over to the military such a bad thing?

I take Ignatius' point that CIA agents might feel demoralized by the decision to release the memos, but I'm not convinced that they should be; the article raises more questions than it answers. His comparison to the 1995 efforts to end agency contacts with politically-sensitive sources like Guatemalan death squads seems to have nothing to do with the task at hand; the administration isn't saying what sources an operative can have; they're giving them guidance on what they cannot do with people they've captured. At the end of the day, the lack of evidence that torture was effective at all, and my suspicion that a majority of CIA agents spend the bulk of their time doing things other than torture, makes me confident the administration made the correct decision.

-- Tim Fernholz

After reading Lithwick, Savage, and Liptak, it was impossible to avoid the conclusion that the Supreme Court will uphold a principal's appalling decision to strip-search a 13-year old student because of extraordinarily flimsy evidence that she might possess ... ibuprofen. I decided to look at the transcript of the oral arguments to try to find a ray of hope that these fine reporters missed. But, alas, I came up empty: it was about as depressing as an oral argument that could involve Stephen Breyer asserting that "And in my experience, too, people did sometimes stick things in my underwear" could be. (Fortunately, this line of argument was not pursued.) Some additional random thoughts:

• What's most striking is the extent to which the justices sympathetic to the principal's arbitrary strip search relied on hypotheticals that were completely irrelevant to this case.   (Perhaps one could imagine a case involving much more reliable evidence of a much more serious breach of school rules in which a strip search was arguably reasonable, but so what?) As Radley Balko notes, there's a good reason for the use of hypothetical scare stories rather than actual data: "Can anyone think of a single incident in the last 30 years in which several children have died after ingesting drugs distributed by one of their classmates on school grounds? Before we let school principles [double sic -- I mean, I don't think the word "principle" should even be used in the same sentence as this guy] go rummaging through the panties of underage girls, shouldn’t we be at least be able to cite a few examples?"  
• The early exchanges with Scalia and Ginsburg in which they noted that the school's position would logically permit body cavity searches was devastating.   (And makes the fact that they're overwhelmingly likely to be in dissent all the more disgraceful.)
  
• Another key pillar of the attempt to defend the indefensible is the invocation of the precious budgetary resources of schools. A majority of the Supreme Court seems to think that the best way of protecting budgets is to give school officials a blank check to violate the privacy and dignity of their students no matter how trivial the suspected offense. I think the best way to protect school budgets is for school boards to find officials who won't egregiously violate the rights of their students over trivial offenses.
  
• To follow up on this, it should also be noted that there's a significant overlap betwee the justices unwilling to countenance any fiscal remedy for violations of rights by school officials and justices who believe that we don't really need the exclusionary rule because juries will be willing routinely issue civil awards that will come out of the budgets of police departments. Sure. And why don't we also stipulate that cities can pay for these judgments with the proceeds from unicorn farms!  
  
• Obviously, choosing a Supreme Court justice involves a complex set of criteria. But I would suggest that one non-negotiable factor for President Obama should be that any nominee be able to distinguish between wearing gym shorts and being strip-searched. This would at least make him or her an improvement over President Clinton's second appointment.

There's been a lot of talk about "fascism" lately, what with "fascist" becoming the GOP's word of choice to describe the president. In the midst of heated political rhetoric, sometimes things can get a bit confusing. So I've written a brief, helpful guide for understanding what is and isn't fascism. 

The following things are fascism:

• Universal health care coverage
  

• A 39% top tax rate 

• Boosting funding for voluntary national service programs
  
  

The following things are not fascism:

• Idenfinite detention without trial 

• Torture 

• “Disappearing” suspected criminals 

• Warrantless surveillance of American citizens
  
  

— A. Serwer

This has been dealt with before, but it's worth pointing out again that our use of torture techniques was gleaned from the SERE program, which simulates torture in order to train American soldiers in how to resist its use. Part of Jay Bybee's legal reasoning for the use of torture was in fact that American soldiers had been subjected to these methods in a limited setting.

It should be self-evident that the non-simulated use of simulated torture is torture. It wasn't, because after all, U.S. officials were trying to use torture, but torture is illegal, so they had to figure out some rather creative ways to explain why the non-simulated use of torture isn't torture. But the report also reiterates that the program was developed in part to resist torture techniques used by Chinese communists during the Korean War. More important, these techniques were meant to force false confessions, not to glean reliable intelligence from the victims.

Why would we want false confessions? Or at least, why would we be unconcerned with the reliability of such confessions? With the disclosure that the Bush administration was pressuring intelligence services to establish a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq, I think we have our answer.

-- A. Serwer

Simon Johnson has become a voice for those who believe that not enough is being done to repair our financial architecture. Tim Fernholz talks to the economist and learns that his revolutionary approach has nothing to do with populism.

Meanwhile, Ann Friedman reflects on America's largest raid on undocumented workers and wonders why we rarely hear stories of small towns suffering in the absence of immigrants.

And Sarah Posner considers whose "religious conscience" matters when it comes to gay marriage.

As always, subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they are published. Also, follow us on Twitter for highlights from our blog.

--The Editors

In an earlier post I noted that SERE psychologist Bruce Jessen circulated a memo on "exploitative" techniques in April of 2002, months before Jay Bybee's August 2002 memo declaring such techniques "legal." Jane Mayer reports that FBI agents may have been present for an interrogation where torture was used prior to the Bybee memo--which prompted FBI Director Robert Mueller to tell his agents to "stay away." 

By June 2002—again, months before the Department of Justice gave the legal green light for interrogations—an F.B.I. special agent on the scene of the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah refused to participate in what he called “borderline torture,” according to a D.O.J. investigation cited in the Levin report. Soon after, F.B.I. Director Robert Mueller commanded his personnel to stay away from the C.I.A.’s coercive interrogations.

We know that the OLC was working backward from the conclusion that torture was legal in order to justify its use in the future. Mayer's reporting suggests the policy that they may have been retroactively declared torture legal after it was already being used. Theoretically, interrogators who used such methods before the OLC gave its blessing wouldn't be entitled to the blanket immunity Eric Holder offered last week. Holder specifically said in his statement that "it would be unfair to prosecute dedicated men and women working to protect America for conduct that was sanctioned in advance by the Justice Department."

But what if it wasn't sanctioned in advance? What if it was already happening?

-- A. Serwer

Yesterday, Rep. John Shadegg became the sixth prominent Republican official to challenge Rush Limbaugh's control over the party.

Shadegg disagrees with radio commentator Rush Limbaugh, who has said he hopes Obama and his liberal policies fail.

"I sincerely hope he creates the strongest recovery possible," Shadegg said. "It is petty to worry about who gets the credit when people are losing their jobs and their homes."

As for Limbaugh, Shadegg said, "I think he is an entertainment personality who is an interesting factor in American politics. I agree with much of what he says on some issues, but not on other issues."

Shadegg is known as a staunch conservative. After rising in the leadership earlier in his career, he has been an also-ran in races for majority leader and minority whip in the last two congresses. This year he went so far as to announce and then retract retirement plans. And now he's called out Limbaugh! If you're not keeping track at home -- and why not? -- Chris Orr has been on the case, following five previous officials who have made similar comments about the King of Conservative Talk Radio (Kansas Rep. Todd Tiahrt, Georgia Rep. Phil Gingrey, South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, RNC Chairman Michael Steele, and NY House candidate Jim Tedisco) and been forced to apologize after an uproar in the conservative base.

After seeing this kabuki play repeated again and again in the last months, I've started to think that this is the natural process of a party trying to shed it's extreme elements. The first conservative to stand up to Limbaugh and come away unscathed will have the potential to attract people other than die-hard conservatives to the GOP banner -- and that's why Republicans keep popping up to go another round with Rush. In fact, it would probably take someone with solid conservative bona fides who has been frustrated by the inability to advance in recent years. Someone like Shadegg, in fact.

-- Tim Fernholz

There are a number of important revelations in the Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainee treatment, and Spencer Ackerman has the details on how torture migrated between the DoD and the CIA, while being approved by senior administration officials in the interim. But the basic conclusion of the report is this: higher ups in the Bush DoD sought information on exploitative interrogation techniques from the segment of the armed forces that trains soldiers to resist torture in December of 2001, months before they had captured any high-level detainees or claimed to have had trouble getting them to talk. They were planning to torture people from the beginning. The decision to go to the "dark side" wasn't a tactical one -- it was a moral one. We were going to get them for what they did to us. 

But there's another bombshell in the report that undermines the "good faith" argument that administration officials were just trying to protect the country. Mark Benjamin notes that Army psychiatrist Maj. Paul Burney is quoted in the report as saying, "While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not being successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq. ... The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish this link ... there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results." Despite repeated warnings that torture would produce unreliable results, the Bush administration kept torturing detainees in an effort to establish a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq that justified going to war.

In a country where the law was not sensitive to political considerations, there would be a great deal of people in danger of prosecution right now. The report suggests that an extraordinary amount of people in the administration were well aware of the legal barriers to using torture and chose to ignore them and freeze out those who warned this was the case. At this point, the network of people responsible for the use of torture may be so large that prosecution would be politically impossible. We actually live in a country where a substantial number of people believe that war crimes are justifiable to prevent terrorism. Maybe the report's findings about how incredibly counterproductive the use of such methods are in the long term -- and the knowledge that they played a part in getting us mired into a six-year long war in Iraq will change people's minds. But I don't know.

-- A. Serwer

In an earlier discussion of the defense budget, I mentioned that the Marine Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle had been exempted from the cuts. This was curious, because the EFV is over-budget and effectiveness-challenged. The motivating concept of the EFV is that the Marine Corps needs an armored vehicle that can move fast on land and in the water, all while carrying a gun and a squad of Marines. The idea is that the EFV can be deployed from an offshore amphibious assault ship, move across water at about 30mph, then move on land at about 45mph. The Marines believe that the EFV is key to being able to carry out amphibious invasions.

Via Armchair Generalist, it appears that Robert Gates is targeting the EFV, in spite of the fact that it wasn't mentioned in his budget memo:

I have also directed the QDR team to be realistic about the scenarios where direct U.S. military action would be needed – so we can better gauge our requirements. One of those that will be examined closely is the need for a new capability to get large numbers of troops from ship to shore – in other words, the capability provided by the Marine Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle. No doubt, it was a real strategic asset during the first Gulf War to have a flotilla of Marines waiting off Kuwait City – forcing Saddam’s army to keep one eye on the Saudi border, and one eye on the coast. But we have to take a hard look at where it would be necessary or sensible to launch another major amphibious action again. In the 21st century, how much amphibious capability do we need?

--Robert Farley

Israel's far-right foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman is a "repatriate," or immigrant from the former Soviet Union. The key base of support for Lieberman's political party, Israel Beitenu (Israel Is Our Home), comes from the repatriate community, which, facing discrimination from native-born Israelis, tends to be more open to the extreme anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian politics that Lieberman promotes. Remember: this is the guy who has suggested: 1) That Israel's Arab citizens sign loyalty oaths; 2) That Israel should bomb Egypt's Aswan Dam; and 3) That "minorities are the biggest problem in the world."

Now, as Haaretz reports, Lieberman has offered his first major interview since coming to office, not to an Israeli newspaper, but to the Russian daily Moskovskiy Komosolets. Lieberman was characteristically combative, saying of the Obama administration, "Believe me, America accepts all our decisions" -- despite major differences between the agenda of Lieberman and the U.S. president. Lieberman, for example, derides attempts to move toward a two-state solution. If there is a silver lining in the interview, it is that Lieberman dialed back some of his confrontational rhetoric toward Iran, saying he now believes Afghanistan and Pakistan are bigger threats to Israeli security. Does that mean he'd like to bomb them, too?

--Dana Goldstein

• Deep thought: Given that he's a serial liar, why does anyone care what Dick Cheney thinks about torture, national security and the new administration?
• Greg Sargent has more details on the NY Times angle of the Jane Harman warrantless wiretapping story, getting a written statement from a Times spokesperson that seems to directly contradict Bill Keller's denial from yesterday. Maybe the executive editor and the Washington bureau chief ought to compare notes and get their stories straight, no?
• Nate Silver interprets a new Gallup poll to indicate that the libertarian wing of the Republican party is currently winning the battle for the GOP's soul at the expense of social conservatives who just aren't getting the same mileage out of their pet issues as they once did. It's an interesting thought experiment, to consider whether libertarians could find greater success under the umbrella of a currently-in-the-crapper but enduring political brand, but the GOP's political coalition is less about one faction triumphing over another and more about those factions finding some sort of peaceful coexistence.
• In case you haven't been keeping score at home, Rep. Todd Tiahrt of Kansas has become the fifth Republican to say something mildly critical of Rush Limbaugh, only to "revise" his statement a few days/hours later. I tried to come up with a comparable relationship Limbaugh has to the GOP on the Left and drew a blank.
• Seems a member of the Ohio militia wants to organize a "peaceful demonstration" of "at least one million armed militia men marching on Washington." Even if such a thing could be organized, I'm pretty sure the Park Service -- to say nothing of the Capitol Police and the Secret Service -- wouldn't permit it. But I'm curious what, precisely, they would be demonstrating against. The best I could come up with was this totalitarian federal judge ruling that you can't bring concealed weapons into national parks.
• Remainders: Inhofe promises to filibuster a noncontroversial judicial nominee; Dave Weigel writes about the "civil war" between increasingly reasonable and non-crazy blogger Charles Johnson and the rest of the paranoid right-wing blogosphere; it's Bush v. Clinton on May 29th; and Yglesias asks a question I've been wondering, "Who is Meghan McCain?"

--Mori Dinauer

TTR is back yet again. This week we've got the latest reports on the public opinion surrounding environmental issues, the challenges of regulating the oil industry, the need for service industry unions and the potential for a strategic reset of the U.S. relationship with Cuba. Check it out:

• Public eco-attitudes. [PDF] Just in time for Earth Day, the American Enterprise Institute has compiled 59 pages of of poll data dating back to the 1970s that tracks public perception of the government's handling of environmental issues. Many surveys found high levels of concern for green issues and a general consensus that global warming is human-caused and needs to be addressed, yet the environment has still scarcely ranked higher than the single digits on voters' priority lists. Some discouraging results: many polls included in the conservative think tank's analysis found a plurality of the public approving of the way George W. Bush handled the environment for most of his presidency, and as recently as three months ago, only 30 percent of those queried thought dealing with global warming should be a top priority. -- MK
• No such thing as a free ... drill? Government agencies are perfectly willing to admit that oil and gas drilling is a source of air pollution and toxic wastewater, but they haven't been willing to enact stricter regulations. Oil and gas drilling has skyrocketed over the past 8 years, with nearly 120,000 new wells in operation -- almost half of the total number of wells created since 1980. Ninety-nine percent of these new drilling operations are in six Western states whose water supply is already threatened by drought and over-usage. The chemicals injected into the ground during drilling have been cited by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management as dangerous contaminants, yet oil and gas companies still enjoy obscene exemptions under federal law. The Environmental Working Group hopes that new Interior Secretary Salazar will act swiftly with congress to limit hazardous drilling and protect the pristine lands of the American West. -- JL
• Service-sector employees need the (union) love too. [PDF] Although unions are generally associated with the manufacturing sector, the de-industrialization of America has marginalized those jobs over the last few decades; today, the service sector makes up three-fourths of all U.S. jobs. But service unions are generally not as powerful as their manufacturing forebears were during labor's heyday, largely due to rigid labor laws and vehemently anti-union employers. This is unfortunate, as a new study by The Center for Economic and Policy Research shows, because service employees benefit greatly from unionization, making $2.00 an hour more than their non-union counterparts. In addition they are also 19 percent more likely to have employer-provided health insurance, 25 percent more likely to have an employer-provided pension. -- JB
• Hell freezing over? To coincide with last weekend's Summit of the Americas, Brookings produced a paper on U.S. policy towards Cuba, the only Latin American country not invited to the summit. Among many other necessary short- and long-term steps that the report suggests, the U.S. should unilaterally delimit tradeable medicines, the exchange of art, cinema, and music, the donation and sale of communications equipment; and the transfer of funds for human rights activities. Freeing up travel and remittance restrictions, which the administration did last week, made the top of the list. Brookings also anticipated what ALBA (the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas, a group of the region's most Left governments) insisted over the weekend in Port of Spain: "Do not object to Cuba's reinstatement to the Organization of American States if the General Assembly consents." Will we see thawing relations between the U.S. and Cuba? One can only hope we don't trip over our history trying to get there -- the key players' intentions are set for progress. The prospect of improved U.S.-Cuba relations becomes even more coveted when you consider, as the report reminds, that U.S. relations with Cuba are a bellwether for U.S. relations with the rest of the region. -- CP

-- TAP Staff

Previous Round-Ups::
4/14/09
4/7/09

Ezra has a post on the new plan to convert the preferred shares in banks bought with TARP funds into common equity; he gets the policy debate right but fudges a little on the politics. First, what it all means:

This entails some new risk for the taxpayer. The preferred shares acted much like a loan. So long as the bank was solvent, we were pretty sure to be repaid. Equity isn't like that. If the bank limps along, and we want to cash out our equity at some point, we may well lose money on the deal. The point of dispute between folks like [Paul] Krugman and folks like [Felix] Salmon is whether you think the preferred shares that the government previously held were more like loans or more like equity. If the market was indeed treating them as equity, then this won't increase capitalization much. If it was treating them as the equivalent of bonds, as Salmon suggests, then it well might. The answer, in theory, will come clear soon enough.

One thing to note in the above is "so long as the bank was solvent, we were pretty sure to be repaid." Critics of this move like Krugman and others are convinced the banks are insolvent, so it seems an equity stake just takes us closer to seizing the banks for a government-mandated restructuring. Salmon's take seems to put this move in the perspective of the administration's continuing efforts to help the banks limp to solvency while avoiding both the high up-front costs of recievership and the needed task of radically restructuring the financial industry.

Back to Ezra's post. He writes that "when the story of all this is written, the amount of effort the administration expended finding clever ways to avoid Congress will play a starring role." This is backward. In this case, the administration isn't finding a clever way to avoid Congress; Congress is trying to avoid the huge expenses that would come with either a) taking insolvent banks into receivership or b) adding additional funding to the TARP. It's not as though Congress has a better idea about what to do in response to the financial crisis and the administration is avoiding it; almost all congressional attention to TARP has been focused on putting greater oversight on funds already allocated and questioning the current plan's efficacy. Nor is this a case of the administration trying to avoid the oversight mechanisms Congress is pushing. Instead, the dynamic at play here is such that, when the story of all this is written, the amount of effort the administration expended finding clever ways to extend their limited rescue funding -- perhaps at the expense of a quicker recovery -- will play a starring role.

-- Tim Fernholz

Apparently, the ability of the War On (some classes of people who use some) Drugs to act as a solvent in which the Fourth Amendment vanishes has some limits.

Today, the Supreme Court ruled that a search of an automobile after the defendant was secured (in this case, for his arrest for driving with a suspended license) for evidence of an unrelated crime (in this case, the police found cocaine, but obviously didn't need to search his car for evidence that he had been driving without a valid license) was unjustified. The Court did not overrule New York v. Belton -- the case which has generally been read to permit the police very wide discretion to conduct searches of automobiles without probable cause -- but did argue that it should be read much more narrowly than it has been. Since in Belton the suspects were actually arrested on a drug charge, the case is quite easily distinguished. Today's case will at least prevent the police from using unrelated minor offenses to justify drug searches without probable cause. Under today's ruling, car searches without probable cause are valid only "if it is reasonable to believe that evidence of the offense of arrest might be found in the vehicle" or if the suspect might be able to access the car for weapons.

The other interesting thing about the case is the lineup of the Court's 5-4 decision. This won't come as a surprise to you if you have a better grasp of the issues than Ann Althouse or Stuart Taylor, but this case presents yet another example of the fact that Alito and Roberts aren't as bad as Scalia and Thomas -- they're worse. Both Scalia and Thomas showed their sporadic libertarian streak today, joining Stevens's opinion (with Scalia even writing a concurrence suggesting that, if anything, the Court's opinion didn't go far enough.) Alito, on the other hand, wrote a dissent arguing for a bright-line rule that would permit any search of an automobile incident to arrest (irrespective of whether or not there is any threat to an arresting officer's safety or of whether the search was relevant to the arresting offense.) He was joined by Roberts and (a little more surprisingly, although he's pretty conservative on most civil liberties issues) Kennedy. Breyer, always a wet on civil liberties issues, also argued that the search should be justified on stare decisis grounds.

The only thing I can say for Alito's dissent is that his claim that the majority's analysis of Belton is artificially narrow has some merit; I wouldn't have objected to overruling it explicitly. But given Alito's history of, ah, "minimalist" treatment of precedents, he's the last person in the world who can complain about it. And as Scalia says, even if one agrees that the Court's holding "does not provide the degree of certainty I think desirable in this field," Alito's alternative "opens the field to what...are plainly unconstitutional searches—which is the greater evil."

--Scott Lemieux

Former Vice President Dick Cheney, torture supporter, has called for the release of more memos "proving" that torture was effective. At least, on Fox News he did. Greg Sargent has the details:

The source, however, tells me that the CIA didn’t get any such request from Cheney. So barring the unlikely possibility that Cheney submitted his request to the Obama White House, it seems fair to assume for now that the only target of this request was the Fox News television audience.

It's a bluff. The administration should call it. But even if it isn't, it's important that the American people have all the details about what was done and why.

UPDATE: Looks like Cheney did make the request.

-- A. Serwer

Marc Ambinder reports:

At a photo-op just now with King Abdullah of the Hashemite Kingdon of Jordan, the President would not rule out a Congressionally-chartered Truth Commission to investigate torture. He also said that his AG -- that would be Eric Holder -- is studying the issue about prosecuting senior officials who deliberately or willfully broke the law when it came to interpreting existing laws about torture.

Of course, you can't prosecute them if the Muslims wanted it right?

-- A. Serwer

Gabriel Sherman's piece on investment bankers and their woes has been the cause of much comment, not the least of which because are these dudes out of touch or what? Not just with the public mood of the country about their occupation, but with the mechanics of the financial crisis. You've got to love this:

“There’s this perception that the people on the Street were making money for nothing,” says a mortgage-investment banker. “You have a political and media class who make the mortgage originators and bankers out to be the villains. But are they? They were doing what Congress wanted them to do. Is the guy who lied on his mortgage application the victim here? This whole narrative that the downtrodden were the victims and the money guys were the perpetrators really doesn’t stand up to rational challenge.”

As to guys who lied on their mortgage forms, my god, you didn't even have to lie to get a mortgage. The subbiest of sub-prime loans were no-income, no-asset loans, which are exactly what they sound like. Other borrowers were offered sub-prime loans even though they qualified for prime options. Not even to mention blatant mortgage fraud on the part of issuers. The due diligence performed by the mortgage brokers was embarrassing; the due diligence performed by the investment banks that bought the securitized loans was non-existent. This banker is basically saying that he didn't bother to check on the quality of the investments he was making tons of money buying and selling, but now that it's all blown up in his face, how dare those people try and get a loan!

The piece also shows the anger of bankers at the Obama administration specifically:

The anger masks a deeper suspicion that Obama fundamentally doesn’t respect their place at the table. “I think he doesn’t have an appreciation for how hard it is to build these companies, the blood, sweat, and tears that goes into them,” says a senior executive from a failed Wall Street firm. “It’s just that he has no passion for it. He speaks dispassionately about the whole situation, except when he’s beating up on the Wall Street fat cats.”

The argument that Obama has in fact done a great deal to help Wall Street—to the tune of trillions of dollars—doesn’t have much truck with these critics. “If you really take a look at what Obama is promising, it’s frightening,” says Nicholas Cacciola, a 44-year-old executive at a financial-services firm. “He’s punishing you for doing better. He doesn’t want to have any wealth creation—it’s wealth distribution. Why are you being punished for making a lot of money?” As a Republican corporate lawyer puts it: “It’s the politics of envy, and that’s very dangerous.”

It's pretty clear, not just from this article but also from the everyday public statements of major financial institutions, that bankers are not happy with the Obama administration's response to the financial crisis. Folks like to say that the administration is in Wall Street's pocket, but that's not what Wall Street thinks. The administration's philosophy really has been standing between populists and financiers, as the famous quote goes. It's not a great place to be, but hopefully comments like this will motivate the administration to act with less deference to established interests in fixing the credit problem. After all, it's clear that they're not going to be friends afterward. Presuming, of course, an afterwards.

-- Tim Fernholz

Yesterday, the White House officially nominated law professor Cass Sunstein to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Sunstein will be charged with overseeing everything from economic to environmental to health regulation, and he will also be tasked with monitoring government efficiency.

In our April issue, Robert Kuttner examines Sunstein's behavioral approach to policy and economics, wondering how the new regulatory czar's commitment to market incentives will manifest itself in his administrative style. Will "nudges" be enough to improve the government's regulatory framework?

An archive of Sunstein's writings for the Prospect can also be found here.

--The Editors

Former Bush speechwriter Mark Thiessen explains that these people, they are not like you and me.

Critics claim that enhanced techniques do not produce good intelligence because people will say anything to get the techniques to stop. But the memos note that, "as Abu Zubaydah himself explained with respect to enhanced techniques, 'brothers who are captured and interrogated are permitted by Allah to provide information when they believe they have reached the limit of their ability to withhold it in the face of psychological and physical hardship." In other words, the terrorists are called by their faith to resist as far as they can -- and once they have done so, they are free to tell everything they know. This is because of their belief that "Islam will ultimately dominate the world and that this victory is inevitable." The job of the interrogator is to safely help the terrorist do his duty to Allah, so he then feels liberated to speak freely.

So you see, we have to waterboard them. They want us to do it. The only language the Negro the Muslim understands is force. You see, where other human beings might just tell us anything under being tortured, the exotic Muslim requires torture for disclosure. Our legal obligations are nullified by the biological imperatives of "those people." First we had "torture works." Then we had "they deserve it." Now we have "they need us to do it." 

Zubayda, of course, gave up all the useful intelligence he ever would before he was tortured. Which sort of puts a crimp in this whole theory. 

The torture apologist thrives on secrets, on playing on your fear of the unknown. You don't know that waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) 183 times actually didn't prevent "a hole in the ground in Los Angeles." So Thiessen explains today that the redacted parts of the memos -- you know, the ones that were edited to protect the identity of CIA interrogators -- actually contain all the information that proves torture worked, which is why they were redacted.

The justifications for torture provided in the memos themselves are not a good faith evaluation of the torture program's effectiveness, since the writers of the memos are self-evidently trying to justify the use of torture. In other words, the memo writers have a reason to overplay the program's effectiveness, because they are conscious that what they are doing is illegal. There's only one way to know what happened, and that's through the release  of the rest of the torture works memos. So let's do it.

But let's take a step back a moment. The Right has focused the torture debate on KSM because they are banking on the idea that KSM is so terrible that no one could possibly sympathize with him. As long as the torture debate is centered around whether or not we should torture one particular, terribly evil person, the right remains the sentimental favorite. But let's take a moment to consider what Thiessen and others are arguing in the long term: that we must torture and that for our own security, we must keep it secret. We currently live in a country where the president can detain anyone indefinitely without trial on suspicion of terrorism. Torture apologists want to add to that authority the ability to torture people that they detain without trial, without anyone actually knowing about it.

In order to try someone you've tortured, you'd have to make coerced confessions admissible in court. But of course, the reason we don't do that is because there's no way to know if a coerced confession is real, or if it's the result of being waterboarded or stuffed in a small box. So anyone you've tortured, you have to keep locked up forever, because if you release them, you risk that these methods -- which torture apologists explain must remain secret -- will get out.

You see where this is going. There's absolutely no way to reconcile the use of torture with a functioning, democratic society.

-- A. Serwer

What's the problem with Gary Gensler? Sen. Bernie Sanders has placed a hold on Obama's pick to lead the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, suggesting that Gensler is not independent enough to "create a new culture in the financial marketplace." Elana Schor examines the controversy and finds that the political jockeying obscures a very real debate over how to regulate the sprawling derivatives market.

Meanwhile, Michelle Goldberg asks if the threat of homegrown extremism is real.

And Paul Waldman thinks conservative critics have gone absolutely cuckoo.

As always, subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they are published. Also, follow us on Twitter for highlights from our blog.

--The Editors

The Times has a good piece today about the unionization and de-unionization efforts taking place at KIPP charter schools in New York City. The article, by Jennifer Medina, contains the clearest explanation I've seen to date of why, exactly, the teachers at KIPP AMP in Brooklyn felt they needed union representation. As reported by the Times, the following management policies were the biggest issues:

• pay was docked after three sick or personal days
• teachers were not given advance notice of required staff meetings
• teachers were not allowed to ask questions during staff meetings
• teachers were required to submit daily lesson plans, but did not receive any feedback on them

The Public Employee Relations Board is expected to certify the KIPP AMP union this week. For background on the complicated tango between teachers' unions and charter schools, check out my feature on "The Education Wars" from our March print issue.

--Dana Goldstein

Another entry in the annals of Barack Obama-as-reflection-of-observer's-values, today's David Brooks column makes the case that Obama's economic speech