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This blog is written by a couple of pissed-off patriots who share a fierce dedication to the Constitution - the only words ever put to paper worth dying for. We exist to remind y'all that America was founded on four boxes:
The Soapbox
The Ballot Box
The Jury Box
The Ammo Box
They should be used in that order. This is our soapbox.
Contact me at:
bluegirl_dot_redstate
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gmail_dot_com
Your humble bloghostess is proud to be the recipient of not one, but two much-coveted Golden Monkeyfist awards!True Golden Monkeyfist - 2007
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Best New SoapBlox - 2008
You knew it was coming. You knew that John Yoo and David Addington and all the others who provided the legal cover for the unitary executive theory of presidential power to become practice would have a come-to-Jesus moment once Bush was gone.
Like past presidents, Mr. Obama will likely be tempted to avoid the requirement that treaties must be approved by two-thirds of the Senate. The usual methods around this constitutional constraint are executive agreements or a majority vote in the House and Senate to pass a treaty as a simple law (known as a Congressional-executive agreement).
Executive agreements have an acknowledged but limited place in our foreign affairs. Congressional-executive agreements are far more troubling. They have evoked scathing attacks by constitutional experts and have been strongly resisted in the Senate, at least so far.
The framers of the Constitution designed the treaty process with a bias against "entangling alliances," as Thomas Jefferson described them in his first inaugural address. They designated the Senate as the body responsible to protect the interests of the states from being bargained away by the president in deals with foreign nations. The framers required a supermajority to ensure that treaties would reflect a broad consensus and careful, mature decision-making.
America needs to maintain its sovereignty and autonomy, not to subordinate its policies, foreign or domestic, to international control. On a broad variety of issues - many of which sound more like domestic rather than foreign policy - the re-emergence of the benignly labeled "global governance" movement is well under way in the Obama transition.
Candidate Obama promised to "re-engage" and "work constructively within" the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Will the new president pass a new Kyoto climate accord through Congress by sidestepping the constitutional requirement to persuade two-thirds of the Senate?
Draconian restrictions on energy use would follow. A majority of the Congress would be much easier for Mr. Obama to get than a supermajority of the Senate. A scholar at the Brookings Institution has already proposed that a new president overcome objections to this environmentalists' holy grail by evading the Treaty Clause.
President George W. Bush resisted many efforts at global governance. But his administration still sometimes fell into the temptation to flout the constitutional requirement of a two-thirds majority in the Senate.
In 2002, the administration considered submitting the Treaty of Moscow, a nuclear arms reduction agreement, for majority approval of Congress. Vice President-elect Joe Biden, who was then the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, privately made clear that he would vigorously oppose such an attempt to evade the Senate's constitutional prerogatives. The administration agreed to submit the agreement as a treaty, and the Moscow agreement cleared the Senate.
We hope the new vice president will not reverse his commitment to the Senate's constitutional authority. But an administration determined to tie one hand behind America's back might use Congressional-executive agreements to push the nation all too easily into quixotic and impractical global governance regimes.
Brass. Balls.
These people are un.fucking.believable.
They are already denouncing the overreaches that they made possible.
It's a miracle they can walk at all. They must have balls the size of watermelons.
I don't know what to say. Other than I totally didn't see that comin'! Leon Panetta??? Heading the CIA?
Wow.
I don't know anything other than what is in the story at the link, but I would suspect that this pick signals that the intel services will be undergoing a shake up unlike anything we have seen since the CIA replaced the OSS in 1946.
I say that because Panetta is a manager extraordinaire...with absolutely no expertise or experience in intelligence matters.
But Bob Gates has enough experience for five people, and if I were a betting woman, my money would be on the square that says we are going to see the intel services move under the DoD umbrella in the next 18 months.
My friend Steve Benen actually worked in the West Wing during the Clinton Administration, with Leon Panetta and he makes a couple of cogent observations:
Obama needed someone capable who had nothing to do with the last eight years, and Panetta fit the bill. At a minimum, he had the highest of security clearances during his tenure as White House chief of staff, and no doubt spent a lot of time in intelligence briefings and in the situation room, and he was a member of the 9/11 Commission, so it's not as if Panetta is going to the CIA with no background.
What's more, while hiring from outside the agency seems a little odd, former CIA Director John Deutch told the New York Times that "two of the agency's most successful directors, John McCone and George H.W. Bush, had little or no intelligence experience when they took over at C.I.A."
UPDATE II - 5:15 est
I decided to google "panetta" and "torture" - here is the screen shot of the second page. (The first page was all stuff from today.) Panetta is very, very good on that issue. His appointment makes perfect sense in that context. Here is an op-ed he wrote last spring:
Harry Reid tells Coleman to suck it up and concede Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid issued a statement to TPM Election Central calling on Norm Coleman to concede defeat in the Minnesota Senate race. He also had the bad manners to reminded Coleman of his own calls for Franken to concede and not waste taxpayer time and money when the close vote tally triggered an automatic recount by state law.
MN Supreme Court rejects key Coleman challenge About an hour ago the Minnesota Supreme Court denied an emergency motion from the Coleman campaign to keep the State Canvassing Board from certifying the vote in the statewide Senate recount, clearing the war for the canvassing board to certify Franken the winner this afternoon.
This sort of thing happens every day, and everyone who works in health care knows it A nurse from Peoria, Illinois is suing her former employer, claiming that she was fired because her husband sought treatment for his terminal cancer using the group policy her job provided. Lawsuits charging such discrimination will probably become more common in the next year, experts predict, because of changes to the Americans with Disability Act that went into effect Jan. 1. The law bars discrimination against the disabled and, in some circumstances, against their associates.
French thwart pirates A French vessel turned back heavily armed pirates twice yesterday in the Gulf of Aden as they tried to board cargo ships bound for port. They took into custody 19 pirates and confiscated several weapons, including 11 assault rifles, two rockets and two rocket launchers.
Actually, it would be news if there weren't blatant falsehoods in Coulter's latest work of fiction Media Matters waded through her bilious screed so you don't have to and delivered unto the hateful harridan a 6,000 word bitch slapping that details her deliberate lies and purposefully inflammatory rhetoric. Every time she tops herself I get closer to thinking that she is a parody - a liberal doing performance art to make conservatives look ridiculous.
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Our blog platform had server issues all morning, and now that it is back up, I have to be gone for a while. Back this evening. Hopefully someone will feed the content beast between now and the newswrap tonight. This is obviously no longer a partnership enterprise, and Warren probably won't be returning, he just has too much on his plate right now, and I simply can't do that kind of content all by myself. On the other hand, there are plenty of opportunities for anyone who wants to try their hand at blogging...
Kaine to head DNC President-elect Barack Obama has selected Virginia Governor Tim Kaine to lead the DNC. It was first reported that Kaine was not interested in the position, but reconsidered after the President-elect personally asked him to think about it. Kaines unfailing support early in the campaign is credited with turning the Old Dominion State blue.
McConnell: GOP may support economic stimulus plan Sen. Mitch McConnell, appearing on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" this morning that Republicans will decide their legislative strategy based on how Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) runs the process. If Reid and his aides allow Republican input, McConnell indicated that a stimulus plan could receive as many as 80 votes in the chamber. It sounds to me like he is saying he will play nice so long as Reid kisses his ring and pretends the republicans are on control - and if Reid kisses his ass, they are.
Four qualify for RNC ballot South Carolina GOP chief Katon Dawson, Former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, Michigan Republican Party chairman Saul Anuzis and current chairman Mike Duncan have all garnered sufficient support to have their names on the ballot for RNC chair. Former Maryland Lt. Governor Michael Steel and .Chip "Magic Negro" Saltsman also want the job, but haven't mustered enough support yet to make it onto the ballot, and time is running out.
U.N. calls for Gaza cease fire, U.S. shoots it down The Deputy U.S. Ambassador, Alejandro Wolff, blocked the U.N. security council from putting anything in writing tht would have come out of a late-night meeting of the council that took place shortly after the ground incursion began yesterday. Wolff claimed that the U.S. believes that there is no immediate prospect that Hamas militants will cease their rocket attacks against Israel. "We're not going to equate the actions of Israel, a member state of the United Nations, with the actions of the terrorist group Hamas; there is no equivalence there," Wolff said. "The Charter of this organization respects the right of every member state to exercise its self-defense. And Israel's self-defense is not negotiable." I would point out that Hamas is the legally elected government in Gaza - installed by an election that the United States pushed for, in spite of being warned that Hamas would win at the polls if elections were rushed.
Eight dead in Louisiana helicopter crash A PHI, Inc. helicopter with nine people on board went down about in a marshy area in Louisiana this afternoon. Eight people were dead at the scene and one was medevaced to a hospital. That person's condition is unknown. PHI is a private, independently owned helicopter services company that provides transportation to offshore oil and gas, onshore mining, and medical and technical services industries. This is the second PHI helicopter to crash and result in multiple fatalities in the less than a year. In June, three PHI crew members and a patient they were transporting died after their helicopter crashed in Texas.
Tamil Tigers claim to have killed 40 soldiers in an area where the army is trying to capture rebel strongholds. A Tiger statement said the soldiers had been killed in heavy fighting in an area believed to remain in rebel hands. Military officers denied that their troops had suffered heavy casualties.
Ban Ki-Moon commends Ghanaian vote The Secretary General of the United Nations congratulated the people and government of Ghana for the orderly outcome of the election, which saw a narrow victory for the opposition candidate, John Atta Mills, who says he wants to be "a president for all."
Peacekeepers bogged down in Somalia African Union peacekeepers have come under attack the last three days running at a strategically important traffic roundabout, and on Monday, the airport, which is the Ugandans' main military base, was also hit.
Dismissing the detox mythSense About Science, a charitable trust in the UK that is dedicated to promoting an evidence-based approach to scientific issues in the public domain, tested fifteen products ranging from face scrubs to bottled water that made claims on the labels that using the products had a detoxifying effect. And the results? On balance, the claims are "meaningless."
"We've had enough Bushes in there." Poppy Bush had a sit-sown with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday this morning. He would like to see Jeb be president some day, but followed that sentiment with the acceptance of reality that the country has had quite enough of him and his offspring, at least for now. I get the feeling that we are never going to be completely shed of these horrible, horrible people...
Franken inches closer to claiming victory in Minnesota The state canvassing board could declare Franken the winner as early as tomorrow. The next step will be certification by the Secretary of State. Coleman has indicated he will take the sore loser route and file lawsuits contesting the outcome.
I just got the following email about three minutes ago:
Statements of President Elect Barack Obama and Governor Bill Richardson
Inbox X
Reply to all
Forward
Jen Psaki
to dailyreporters
show details 12:51 PM (4 minutes ago)
Reply
STATEMENT OF PRESIDENT ELECT BARACK OBAMA
It is with deep regret that I accept Governor Bill Richardson's decision to withdraw his name for nomination as the next Secretary of Commerce.Governor Richardson is an outstanding public servant and would have brought to the job of Commerce Secretary and our economic team great insights accumulated through an extraordinary career in federal and state office. It is a measure of his willingness to put the nation first that he has removed himself as a candidate for the Cabinet in order to avoid any delay in filling this important economic post at this critical time. Although we must move quickly to fill the void left by Governor Richardson's decision, I look forward to his future service to our country and in my administration.
STATEMENT OF GOVERNOR BILL RICHARDSON
For nearly three decades, I have been honored to serve my state and our nation in Congress, at the U.N., as Secretary of Energy and as governor. So when the President-elect asked me to serve as Secretary of Commerce, I felt a duty to answer the call.I felt that duty particularly because America is facing such extraordinary economic challenges. The Department of Commerce must play an important role in solving them by helping to grow the new jobs and businesses America so badly needs.
It is also because of that sense of urgency about the work of the Commerce Department that I have asked the President-elect not to move forward with my nomination at this time.I do so with great sorrow. But a pending investigation of a company that has done business with New Mexico state government promises to extend for several weeks or, perhaps, even months.
Let me say unequivocally that I and my Administration have acted properly in all matters and that this investigation will bear out that fact. But I have concluded that the ongoing investigation also would have forced an untenable delay in the confirmation process.Given the gravity of the economic situation the nation is facing, I could not in good conscience ask the President-elect and his Administration to delay for one day the important work that needs to be done.
So, for now, I will remain in the job I love, Governor of New Mexico, and will continue to work every day, with Lieutenant Governor Diane Denish, to make a positive difference in the lives of New Mexicans. I believe she will be a terrific governor in the future.I appreciate the confidence President-elect Obama has shown in me, and value our friendship and working partnership. I told him that I am eager to serve in the future in any way he deems useful. And like all Americans, I pray for his success and the success of our beloved country.
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More as details become available.
I hope Richardson is in the clear and stepping aside to avoid the appearance of impropriety. Given the climate right now, and the fact that so many specious allegations have been leveled against Democratic politicians that failed to bear out (Don Siegelman, Katherine Shields) I will be refraining from making any judgments until we have something resembling facts to base them on.
Like Blagojewich and William Jefferson if Richardson is dirty he should be prosecuted, convicted and punished. He is presumed innocent until proven guilty but, I appreciate that he is voluntarily stepping down.
I have two questions.
Isn't that the state where the Abu Gonzales justice department fired the AG for not being a sufficiently loyal Bushie and refusing to engage in politcally motivated investigations and prosecutions?
When will there be an investigation into the no-bid contracts and procurement irregularites that occured during the Bush/Cheney adminstration?
Posted by: Winkandanod on January 4, 2009 at 2:38 PM
The answer to the question is "Yes." And that is exactly why I am not getting too up in arms about this.
It looks to me like they are going to try to stop Obama by accusing every single person he has named of being a politician and doing what politicians do.
I guess it is going to be our job to point out the hyperbole and call it what it is. And demand accountability when it turns out that there is some "there" there.
UPDATE: 3:30 p.m. est
Heh and indeedy. I would love to watch the confirmation hearings on CSPAN if either ofthese two were to be tapped as Obama's pick to replace Richardson...
Our historical legacy ought to trump $.69 Pringles Historic preservationists are battling Wal-Mart to keep a 'super center' from being built a literal stones throw from the battlefield where Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant first met one another in battle. Wal-Mart points to other development in the area, and community leaders want the half mil a year in sales tax that they project will be generate by the store. Now remember, if the day ends in 'y' there is a battle raging somewhere in Virginia between historic preservationists and developers.
Blackwell gets a boost Former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell's chances of becoming the next head of the RNC gets bolstered today when two dozen prominent republicans, including economic conservative like Pat Toomey and Steve Forbes as well as social conservatives like Phyllis Schlafly and Tim LaHaye, make public a letter supporting his candidacy for the chairmanship. Given his pioneering work in voter suppression, and the fact that suppressing Democratic votes is the best shot the GOP has of recovering in the next quarter century, the choice of Blackwell is the practical one.
Let me fix that for you, Dick "Iraq intel was fixed. Not wrong. Fixed. The latter implies a mistaken interpretation by analysts. The former means that you warmongering criminals knew before the little idiot took the throne that you were going to go to war with Iraq. We know it, you know we know it, and if there is any justice in this world Dick Cheney will end up in the dock at The Hague before that diseased heart of his beats the last time.
Cue the WingNet chorus A housing development in Florida that was a Hollywood-celebrity-bankrolled habitat for Humanity project is having the same problems with mold and mildew and shoddy construction that is ubiquitous to a lot of houses built in the last fifteen years or so. I know a little bit about this. In the mid-nineties I went to a community college and took the classes to get a general contractors license. My original intent was to simply pull my own permits to build a house. But as fate would have it, my husband founded and ran a home improvement company for five years after the Air Force, declining to follow his dad into the defense contractor business. I know something about home construction and I didn't learn it on HGTV. I learned it wielding a sawzall and swinging a 20 oz. hammer (16 oz. for interior window trim and finish work. I called that my tack-hammer.) Let me tell you what the real problem is here - weak building codes. It isn't soft lefties who can't read a tape that are responsible (although that makes me cringe, too). If so, stories about such problems wouldn't be ubiquitous throughout the land, and they most certainly are. Here is the one that Kansas City readers will be familiar with, and I am sure you all have a local builder who built crap and got away with it. Hint: That ain't the fault of Democrats who want to regulate and protect homeowners from spending their money on dwellings and products that are crap. There is outrage in this story, but they need to peel another layer or two off this onion if they are going to pitch this fit.
I'm sometimes asked why I obviously hate Wall Street with such a passion and why I blame the parasites who sit in fancy paneled offices along that fabled byway and dictate to the rest of us how much we'll make, how much the necessities of life are going to cost us and how many things we are going to have to do without this year. All of this in order that they can maintain themselves in the manner to which they've become accustomed (or would like to) without ever having to lift a manicured finger, rumple a lock of that $500 haircut or break an honest sweat. It's a question that that I had never been able to answer answer simply or even directly since it was based on "gut feeling" more than anything else.
Amongst my small on line circle of working class laypeople, there has pretty much always been a consensus that "stock markets", at least as they're being operated and/or controlled by the fat butted CEOs in the paneled offices, are nothing more than humongous Ponzi schemes that sooner or later are going to break down and fall apart of their own weight, but I was never able to actually articulate the exact reasons that I subscribed to this particular theory.
Then two things happened. I found an article by Pamela Martens (site linked above) that helped put the whole thing into a discernible perspective for me and then... Bernie Madoff, arrogant and surly right to the end... had his own pyramid come crashing down on his ass, exposing the operation for everybody in the world to see.
Openly borrowing a page from Ms. Martens' book here's the Wiki definition of a Ponzi Scheme:
"A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that involves promising or paying abnormally high returns ('profits') to investors out of the money paid in by subsequent investors, rather than from net revenues generated by any real business. It is named after Charles Ponzi...One reason that the scheme initially works so well is that early investors - those who actually got paid the large returns - quite commonly reinvest (keep) their money in the scheme (it does, after all, pay out much better than any alternative investment). Thus those running the scheme do not actually have to pay out very much (net) - they simply have to send statements to investors that show how much the investors have earned by keeping the money in what looks like a great place to get a high return. They also try to minimize withdrawals by offering new plans to investors, often where money is frozen for a longer period of time...The catch is that at some point one of three things will happen:
(1) the promoters will vanish, taking all the investment money (less payouts) with them;
(2) the scheme will collapse of its own weight, as investment slows and the promoters start having problems paying out the promised returns (and when they start having problems, the word spreads and more people start asking for their money, similar to a bank run);
(3) the scheme is exposed, because when legal authorities begin examining accounting records of the so-called enterprise they find that many of the 'assets' that should exist do not."
There are some readily apparent differences however, that keep us from actually being able to call the markets outright Ponzi schemes in the purely technical sense even though those differences are imposed from outside of the schemes themselves in the form of protection of the Ponzi promoters by our very own US government. From her article: (Emphasis mine)
Looking at outcomes 1, 2, and 3 above, here's where we are today. The promoters have clearly not vanished as in outcome 1. In fact, they are behaving as if they know they have nothing to fear. As over $2 trillion of taxpayer money is rapidly infused through Federal Reserve loans and over $125 Billion in U.S. Treasury equity purchases to keep these firms from collapsing, the promoters are standing at the elbow of the President-Elect in press conferences (Citigroup promoter, Robert Rubin); they are served up as business gurus on the business channel CNBC (former AIG CEO and promoter, Maurice "Hank" Greenberg); they are put in charge of nationalized zombie firms like Fannie Mae (Herbert Allison, former President of Merrill Lynch); they are paying $26 million and $42 million, respectively, for new digs at 15 Central Park West in Manhattan, where their chauffeurs have their own waiting room (Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs; Sanford "Sandy" Weill, former CEO of Citigroup, who put his penthouse in the name of his wife's trust, perhaps smelling a few pesky questions ahead over the $1 billion he sucked out of Citigroup before the Fed had to implant a feeding tube).
This blatant arrogance... this open sense of entitlement based on nothing other than the fact that they were either born into old money or that they've been able to line their own pockets by reducing more people to poverty than anyone else in their little group is what infuriates me the most about these bastards.
We are definitely seeing all the signs of outcome 2: the scheme is collapsing under its own weight; there are panic runs around the globe wherever Wall Street has left its footprint.
For which the Madoff case provides ample basis for the comparison but again the government imposed differences prevent us from direct technical comparisons.
But outcome 3 is the most fascinating area of departure from the classic Ponzi scheme. Legal authorities have, indeed, examined the books of these firms, except for one area we'll discuss later. They found worthless assets along with debts hidden off the balance sheet instead of real depositor funds. Instead of arresting the perpetrators and shutting down the schemes, Federal authorities have developed their own new schemes and pumped over $2 trillion of taxpayer money into propping up the firms while leaving the schemers in place.
Equally astonishing, Congress has not held any meaningful investigations. This has left many Wall Street veterans wondering if the problem isn't that the firms are "too big to fail" but rather "too Ponzi-like to prosecute." Imagine the worldwide reaction to learning that all the claptrap coming from U.S. think-tanks and ivy-league academics over the last decade about efficient market theory and deregulation and trickle down was merely a ruse for a Ponzi scheme now being propped up by a U.S. Treasury Department bailout and loans from our central bank, the Federal Reserve.
The article goes on to describe how a Bloomberg reporter, Mark Pittman, was repeatedly stonewalled in his FOIA request for information from the FED and shows the price movements for some of the bigger firms involved as of the time the article was written (November, 2008), along with a description of Credit Default swaps and how they were used in a very Ponzi-like operation by the principals involved including the US government "regulators" and "watchdog agencies" who are themselves extremely complicit.
All in all, the article is definitely worth a look, even if you think you've read everything you need to about the subject or even if you've read this one before. Ask yourself if that feeling that someone's hand is in your hip pocket has gone away as more and more comes out about the scheme that makes Madoff look like little more than a two biut old west snake oil salesman.
Have you seen the latest smart-ass bumper sticker?
"I Farm, You Eat"
Leave aside the outrageous arrogance of the claim, the condescension toward everyone who does not farm, the fallacy that what most Kentucky farmers grow ends up in Kroger's produce department.
I come from a long line of small farmers, most of whom toiled long before the advent of federal subsidies and perverse incentives forcing farmers to fall hopelessly in debt and poison their own land to compete.
Corporate agri-business and their congressional and DoA lackeys have done a superb job of fucking over family farmers six ways from Sunday.
Those family farmers need legal, regulatory, scientific and marketing help to survive.*
Formal Petition to Attorney General-Designate Eric Holder to appoint a Special Prosecutor to investigate and prosecute any and all government officials who have participated in War Crimes.
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Best New SoapBlox - 2008
