The Republicans Still Run The Village

...as proven once again today by Politico's John Feehery writing the future autopsy of Nancy Pelosi's political career.

With Pelosi, the press assumes she is both a hypocrite and a liar. Her various explanations of what she knew of waterboarding and when she knew it have been unconvincing at best. Her news conference was a complete disaster, and her credibility is in tatters.

Should Pelosi continue to mishandle this current crisis, and should she continue to make wild statements about the veracity of the CIA, don’t be surprised if somebody in the House says enough is enough. The conditions are ripe for a coup.

Of course, Feehery actually IS a former Republican staffer. Gotta love that Liberal Media, choosing to ask aloud how long Nancy Pelosi has left while Dick Cheney continues to have all the credibility in the world and gets away with torture and lying us into a war.

But the only thing that matters is NANCY IS A LIAR.

[UPDATE] Nice to see Greg Sargent catch FOX News in the admission of the truth.

Obama's CAFE Now Open

One of the good things coming out of this financial mess and the automakers being in dire trouble are the fact that Obama has the automakers and the energy companies by the short and curlies on fuel economy standards (CAFE). Politico is reporting Obama will announce major new CAFE standards tomorrow.

President Barack Obama will announce on Tuesday plans for a new national fuel economy, or CAFE, standard for automobiles in an effort to give more certainty to car companies as they struggle for survival, industry sources told POLITICO on Monday.

The administration will bill the tailpipe-emissions announcement as historic, because it avoids a patchwork of standards and harmonizes so many stakeholders, including automakers, state governments, the Department of Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency.

In secret conversations, the Obama administration has lined up support from many state governments and a huge array of domestic and foreign automakers, including GM, Ford, Chrysler, BMW and many more.

Top officials are flying into Washington from around the world for the White House announcement.

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, is expected to attend, the sources said.

Even Ahnold is going to be there. We'll see how tough these standards are.

[UPDATE] Via Atrios, some numbahs.

Under the new standard, the national fleet mileage rule for cars would be roughly 42 miles a gallon in 2016. Light trucks would have to meet a fleet average of slightly more than 26.2 miles a gallon by 2016.

42 MPG by 2016 is a massive improvement, the auto industry knows it can't say a damn thing about it, and Congress isn't about to pick this fight...not even Michigan's congressional delegation.

SOX It To The Supremes

The Supreme Court is reviewing the constitutionality of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), the legislation put in place to regulate the accounting industry after Enron. Business groups and the accounting industry say the regulatory board set up to oversee accounting is itself unconstitutional.

The justices said they will consider a challenge to the Sarbanes-Oxley law from pro-business conservatives, who complained that the board established by the law to oversee the accounting industry violates the constitutionally mandated separation of powers.

The law had been upheld by a federal appeals court in Washington.

The opponents argue that the makeup of the accounting board violates the separation of powers doctrine because its members aren't appointed by the president and cannot be removed by him, and Congress cannot control its budget.

The chairman of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board and the other four directors are appointed by the Securities and Exchange Commission, an independent federal agency.

The accounting board is funded by fees on publicly traded companies according to their size. Congress created the board to replace the accounting industry's own regulators amid the business scandals, giving it subpoena power and the authority to discipline accountants.

Keep this challenge in mind the next time conservatives complain about activist judges trying to interfere with Congress. After all, to overturn this law would be an unusual step in enforcing the court's will upon the legislative process, yes?

And that only happens to stupid hippie laws that want to regulate things like accounting or the financial industry. Why, there's no evidence that these industries need any additional oversight...

Race And Subprime Lending

Baseline Scenario puts together a sobering post on the issue of race and subprime lending in America and arrives at the conclusion that racism still exists.

Like most forms of hardship in our society, the foreclosure crisis is disproportionately affecting minorities. The New York Times conducted a study of foreclosures in the New York area and found, among other things:

Defaults occur three times as often in mostly minority census tracts as in mostly white ones. Eighty-five percent of the worst-hit neighborhoods — where the default rate is at least double the regional average — have a majority of black and Latino homeowners.

Well, that might simply be a function of poverty: statistically speaking, minorities are more likely to be poor, and therefore more likely to become delinquent on their mortgages. But I don’t think it’s that simple.

It never is. Turns out that a lot of minority homeowners who could have qualified and gotten regular mortgages were given subprime loans anyway.

You can also give him a higher-rate mortgage than he could otherwise qualify for. According to the Times article:

Roughly 33 percent of the subprime mortgages given out in New York City in 2007, [Secretary of HUD Shaun] Donovan said, went to borrowers with credit scores that should have qualified them for conventional prevailing-rate loans.

In general, high-rate mortgages account for a larger proportion of mortgages in minority communities, even after taking median income into account. According to sociologist Gregory Squires,

We see these loans heavily concentrated in poor neighborhoods and targeted to minority neighborhoods. There is some evidence that these neighborhoods were actually targeted — that lenders have gone after people whom they think are less sophisticated borrowers, including single women and the elderly. . . .

Credit rating and income would and does explain some of the patterns. But when you control for those, segregation is also a factor. . . . In those metro areas where segregation is highest, the share of loans that are subprime goes up.

If you are disproportionately steering minority borrowers into higher-rate mortgages, then of course they will suffer a higher rate of defaults and foreclosures than you would predict solely from their other characteristics (income, credit rating, etc.).

Remember, the argument from the "broke-ass minorities caused the subprime crisis" theory states that banks were forced to give minorities loans under Clinton's (It's always Bill Clinton's fault) Community Reinvestment Act, and the only loans these minorities could get were subprime loans at higher rates (which they couldn't pay). Banks were therefore forced to give risky loans to risky customers, and that's how these defaults wrecked the financial industry and eventually the entire economy.

But this of course shows that this theory is completely false. The banks were greedy and gave minorities in poorer neighborhoods subprime loans to rip them off. They should habve qualified for better prime loans. They were instead given worse loans and higher rates based on race and location, NOT income.

But here's the real mindblower from the Times article.

In retrospect, this seems like an area where better consumer education could have played a role. Back to the Times:

Upper-income black borrowers in the region are more likely to hold subprime mortgages than even blacks with lower incomes, who often benefit from homeownership classes and lending assistance offered by government and nonprofits.

Maybe the economic debacle we are all living through will lead to better personal finance education, both in school and for adults. That’s one silver lining to hope for, since an end to racism is almost certainly far off.

In other words, they didn't know they were getting ripped off. They didn't shop around...they just figured "Well, that's the rate you get when your me."

Buyer beware, of course. But the banks certainly got greedy across the board. They ripped off millions of Americans, bilking them for billilions. Now the bill is due, and we're all paying for corporate greed.

Remember this story next time somebody tells you it was the "broke-ass blacks and Mexicans" who ruined the economy.

When You're All Standing On The Same Quicksand...

It's common ground. Obama talked much about "common ground" in his speech at Notre Dame on Sunday, but the reality is there is no common ground in the argument.

Either you think abortion should be legal, or you don't. It really is that simple.

Pretending there's middle ground on it (it should be legal is some situations) is pointless. You can call yourself pro-choice or pro-life or whatever, but it boils down to a black and white decision.

Legislating it as a common ground decision is equally banal. It should be legal, period, or illegal, period.

Decide. Don't qualify it. Either it's legal or illegal. Choose one, America.

Actual Journalism

There's a reason McClatchy News is over in the links. You should be reading it, they actually tend to do things like "reporting" and "investigating" rather than "stengoraphy".

Then-Vice President Dick Cheney, defending the invasion of Iraq, asserted in 2004 that detainees interrogated at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp had revealed that Iraq had trained al Qaida operatives in chemical and biological warfare, an assertion that wasn't true.

Cheney's 2004 comments to the now-defunct Rocky Mountain News were largely overlooked at the time. However, they appear to substantiate recent reports that interrogators at Guantanamo and other prison camps were ordered to find evidence of alleged cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein — despite CIA reports that there were only sporadic, insignificant contacts between the militant Islamic group and the secular Iraqi dictatorship.

The head of the Criminal Investigation Task Force at Guantanamo from 2002-2005 confirmed to McClatchy that in late 2002 and early 2003, intelligence officials were tasked to find, among other things, Iraq-al Qaida ties, which were a central pillar of the Bush administration's case for its March 2003 invasion of Iraq.

"I'm aware of the fact that in late 2002, early 2003, that (the alleged al Qaida-Iraq link) was an interest on the intelligence side," said retired Army Lt. Col. Brittain Mallow, a former military criminal investigator. "That was something they were tasked to look at."

Which is the real thing that needs to be investigated. But the steno pool is more interested in spewing the GOP talking points on NANCY IS A LIAR rather than looking at the actual story here.

Big Pile Of Irony

Irony:

Maureen Dowd (fake journalist at real newspaper and one of the worst Village offenders) rips off Josh Marshall (blogger who does actual journalism), then Marshall in turn gets dumped on for being the hack by Winger bloggers who do zero journalism, all ironically noted by a non-journalistic blogger.

[UPDATE] Iggy does him homework and comes up with the GOP walking right into the jet engine intake.

Who Wants To Tax Dodge Like A Millionaire?

Arthur Laffer and Steven Moore argue loudly that the worst thing a state can do is tax rich people, because they can afford to simply move to states with lower or no taxes.

With states facing nearly $100 billion in combined budget deficits this year, we're seeing more governors than ever proposing the Barack Obama solution to balancing the budget: Soak the rich. Lawmakers in California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York and Oregon want to raise income tax rates on the top 1% or 2% or 5% of their citizens. New Illinois Gov. Patrick Quinn wants a 50% increase in the income tax rate on the wealthy because this is the "fair" way to close his state's gaping deficit.

Mr. Quinn and other tax-raising governors have been emboldened by recent studies by left-wing groups like the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities that suggest that "tax increases, particularly tax increases on higher-income families, may be the best available option." A recent letter to New York Gov. David Paterson signed by 100 economists advises the Empire State to "raise tax rates for high income families right away."

Here's the problem for states that want to pry more money out of the wallets of rich people. It never works because people, investment capital and businesses are mobile: They can leave tax-unfriendly states and move to tax-friendly states.

And the evidence that we discovered in our new study for the American Legislative Exchange Council, "Rich States, Poor States," published in March, shows that Americans are more sensitive to high taxes than ever before. The tax differential between low-tax and high-tax states is widening, meaning that a relocation from high-tax California or Ohio, to no-income tax Texas or Tennessee, is all the more financially profitable both in terms of lower tax bills and more job opportunities.

California's problem isn't that it's home to 1/7th of America's population, it's that it has high taxes. Here's my favorite little bit of the article however.

Those who disapprove of tax competition complain that lower state taxes only create a zero-sum competition where states "race to the bottom" and cut services to the poor as taxes fall to zero. They say that tax cutting inevitably means lower quality schools and police protection as lower tax rates mean starvation of public services.

They're wrong, and New Hampshire is our favorite illustration. The Live Free or Die State has no income or sales tax, yet it has high-quality schools and excellent public services. Students in New Hampshire public schools achieve the fourth-highest test scores in the nation -- even though the state spends about $1,000 a year less per resident on state and local government than the average state and, incredibly, $5,000 less per person than New York. And on the other side of the ledger, California in 2007 had the highest-paid classroom teachers in the nation, and yet the Golden State had the second-lowest test scores.

The Granite State's test scores are great because there's no income tax or sales tax! What these knuckleheads forget is New Hampshire has to pay for schools somehow, and it has arguably the most regressive tax structure in the country, with property taxes, cigarette taxes, meal taxes, car rental taxes, hotel taxes, timber cutting taxes...the list goes on. The poorest residents in the state provide a lion's share of the tax revenue in the state, while the wealthiest in New Hampshire contribute only a few percentage points.

And these two jerks basically want that regressive tax structure to become the norm across the country.

You want to know what the real problem is? States like NH with high property taxes are going to find themselves in deep trouble with falling home prices. They're going to need to cut services and spending on things like schools and police too, just like the states with other types of taxes.

If I was a millionaire, I'd want to live in New Hampshire too, and I could afford to move.

StupidiNews!

• An assistant school principal in New York became the fourth U.S. H1N1 swine flu fatality.
• The first target in Obama's new antitrust efforts may be tech giant Google.
• Florida's Republican Party isn't happy with the idea of Charlie Crist, Senator.
• The National League of Cities is asking for $5 billion from Treasury to fund a new municipal loan insurer.
• A court-ordered audit of portable electronic breathlyzers has found plenty of buggy code.

Last Call

Looks like Nancy Pelosi's best ally to get a full investigation underway? Guess. Who else would stick their foot in it when the Republicans are feeling cocky? RNC head Michael Steele, that's who.

During a Sunday broadcast, RNC Chairman Michael Steele, in the midst of attacking Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) for accusing the Central Intelligence Agency of lying, offered his support for an investigation of the Bush administration’s torture program.

Speaking on MSNBC’s Meet the Press, Steele asserted that Pelosi had “stepped in it big time” when she said the CIA had misled Congress in its briefings on torture techniques approved by the Bush administration.

“I think you have heard a lot of Republicans call for that,” he said. “If this is a door that the Democrats and their leaderships, they have the House and Senate and the presidency, and if they want to expose all this, then let’s put it all on the table and take a closer look at it.”

Somewhere, Dick Cheney just shot his TV/monitor, because that's the LAST THING Republicans really want.

On the other hand, wouldn't a weekly political match-up show between Michael Steele and Joe Biden be the greatest thing ever? At any given moment, at least half of Washington would be screaming "NO YOU IDIOT!" at their TVs.

Kind of like how at least half of America does that now screaming at Washington.

Mitch Dances The Dance Of Brotherly Love

Steve Benen points out that my senior Senator Mitch McConnell likes to do the Mamushka.

Remember when Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) believed filibustering a president's judicial nominee was just about the worst thing a senator could do? When McConnell was prepared to change the rules, execute the "nuclear option," and declare judicial filibusters unconstitutional?

Well, never mind that now.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said on Sunday that he would not rule out employing a filibuster to block Barack Obama's Supreme Court nominee despite having vehemently opposed the use of the parliamentary procedure over judicial appointments four years ago.

Appearing on Fox News Sunday, the Kentucky Republican said that, per the rules of the Senate, "all things are possible" when it came to the vote on Obama's choice for the Court. When reminded that he threatened to resort to the "nuclear option" when Democrats were threatening to filibuster George W. Bush's Court appointments, McConnell largely embraced his 180 degree turn in position.

"The Senate rejected my advice," he reminded host Chris Wallace. "And the Senate is a place that frequently operates on precedent. So I think the Senate deliberately decided not to take a position one way or the other."

It was just four years ago this week that McConnell had a very different perspective.

And of course, nobody around here will call him on it. Certainly no one in Washington will.

But that's Mitch for you. We had our chance to get rid of him last year. As thy sow, so shall thy reap.

In Which Zandar Answers Your Burning Questions

As the President wades through the abortion debate at Notre Dame this afternoon, Noel Sheppard at NewsBusters dissects this Josh Gerstein piece at Politico and comes up with this question:

So, is this an honest assessment by Gerstein of growing discontent amongst liberals towards the new President, or a warning to Obama to name a liberal replacement to Souter or risk losing the support of his base?

The answer simply enough is "Both."

When Obama plays the Odubya card, he simply reminds the netroots that in politics, you're either a useful idiot, or just an idiot. As I've said before, Obama's "three steps forward, three steps back" political philosophy means in the end, nothing actually changes.

Hold That Tiger

Some good news in the world today, the bloody quarter-century conflict between the government of Sri Lanka and the rebel Tamil Tigers has for now come to an end as the Tigers have surrendered.

The Tamil Tigers conceded defeat in Sri Lanka's 25-year civil war on Sunday, after launching waves of suicide attacks to repel a final assault by troops determined to annihilate them.

President Mahinda Rajapaksa had declared victory over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) the day before, even as combat raged in the island's northeast and the military said it was freeing the last of thousands of trapped civilians.

By midday Sunday, the military said troops had freed all the civilians being held by the LTTE inside an area that was less than a single square km (0.5 sq mile). A total of 72,000 had fled since Thursday, it said.

LTTE founder-leader Vellupillai Prabhakaran's fate remained a mystery, although military sources said a body believed to be his was recovered and its identity was being confirmed.

The LTTE, founded on a culture of suicide before surrender, had shown no sign of giving up. Suicide fighters blew themselves up on the frontline on Sunday morning, and more than 70 were killed trying to flee overnight, the military said.

But by afternoon the military said fighting had slowed, and the pro-rebel web site www.TamilNet.com released a statement from the LTTE's head of international relations saying: "This battle has reached its bitter end."

"We remain with one last choice -- to remove the last weak excuse of the enemy for killing our people. We have decided to silence our guns," Selvarajah Pathmanathan's statement said.

Now, as any American can tell you, comes the hard part of living in the peacetime. Obama and the US have a major opportunity to help Sri Lanka recover from this and to assure that war does not break out again in the country, but first there must be a reckoning of twenty five years of war crimes comitted by both sides.

Were that other countries were held to that standard.

And You Shall Know My Name Is The Rumsfeld

Robert Draper is probably best known for the book Dead Certain, an authorized bio of Dubya's '99 campaign and first term. Draper's book left many unanswered questions about the most important 18 months of the Bush's first term, the period from September 11, 2001 to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

Today on GQ's web site, Draper gets around to finally dropping that bombshell on the run-up to our war in Iraq.

on the morning of Thursday, April 10, 2003, Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon prepared a top-secret briefing for George W. Bush. This document, known as the Worldwide Intelligence Update, was a daily digest of critical military intelligence so classified that it circulated among only a handful of Pentagon leaders and the president; Rumsfeld himself often delivered it, by hand, to the White House. The briefing’s cover sheet generally featured triumphant, color images from the previous days’ war efforts: On this particular morning, it showed the statue of Saddam Hussein being pulled down in Firdos Square, a grateful Iraqi child kissing an American soldier, and jubilant crowds thronging the streets of newly liberated Baghdad. And above these images, and just below the headline secretary of defense, was a quote that may have raised some eyebrows. It came from the Bible, from the book of Psalms: “Behold, the eye of the Lord is on those who fear Him…To deliver their soul from death.” This mixing of Crusades-like messaging with war imagery, which until now has not been revealed, had become routine. On March 31, a U.S. tank roared through the desert beneath a quote from Ephesians: “Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand.” On April 7, Saddam Hussein struck a dictatorial pose, under this passage from the First Epistle of Peter: “It is God’s will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish men.”

These cover sheets were the brainchild of Major General Glen Shaffer, a director for intelligence serving both the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the secretary of defense. In the days before the Iraq war, Shaffer’s staff had created humorous covers in an attempt to alleviate the stress of preparing for battle. Then, as the body counting began, Shaffer, a Christian, deemed the biblical passages more suitable. Several others in the Pentagon disagreed. At least one Muslim analyst in the building had been greatly offended; others privately worried that if these covers were leaked during a war conducted in an Islamic nation, the fallout—as one Pentagon staffer would later say—“would be as bad as Abu Ghraib.”

But the Pentagon’s top officials were apparently unconcerned about the effect such a disclosure might have on the conduct of the war or on Bush’s public standing. When colleagues complained to Shaffer that including a religious message with an intelligence briefing seemed inappropriate, Shaffer politely informed them that the practice would continue, because “my seniors”—JCS chairman Richard Myers, Rumsfeld, and the commander in chief himself—appreciated the cover pages.

But one government official was disturbed enough by these biblically seasoned sheets to hold on to copies, which I obtained recently while debriefing the past eight years with those who lived them inside the West Wing and the Pentagon. Over the past several months, the battle to define the Bush years has begun taking shape: As President Obama has rolled back his predecessor’s foreign and economic policies, Dick Cheney, Ari Fleischer, and former speechwriters Michael Gerson and Marc Thiessen have all taken to the airwaves or op-ed pages to cast the Bush years in a softer light. My conversations with more than a dozen Bush loyalists, including several former cabinet-level officials and senior military commanders, have revealed another element of this legacy-building moment: intense feelings of ill will toward Donald Rumsfeld. Though few of these individuals would speak for the record (knowing that their former boss, George W. Bush, would not approve of it), they believe that Rumsfeld’s actions epitomized the very traits—arrogance, stubbornness, obliviousness, ineptitude—that critics say drove the Bush presidency off the rails.

It gets worse from there, the article painting a picture of a President convinced by everyone around him (and flat-out manipulated by Rumsfeld and Cheney) that he was literally doing God's work by going into Iraq, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, and trying to liberate the country from the man who tried to kill Poppy Bush.

We most certainly need a full accounting of all the actions of these people. It's not going to magically go away. We're still in Iraq, and we're still in Afghanistan because we got into Iraq instead of finishing the job. These people are inhuman monsters, committing atrocities that must see the light of day if America is ever to be able to move on.

But that doesn't matter of course because Nancy Pelosi doesn't like the CIA.

Frank Rich has much more on this in his NY Times column today. Bush was cynically manipulated by Rummy and Cheney, period...but Dubya must he held accountable for his decisions.

You should be sickened. I know I am. I know that America's soul will never be at peace until this is fixed. Look at these cover sheets and tell me God wanted us to go into Iraq and kill hundreds of thousands for the egos of people in Washington. Go ahead.

Last Call

The question of what Bush, Cheney, Condi, Colin, Rummy, Ashcroft, and Gonzo knew about us torturing people is completely irrelevant to the Village, the Republican Party and apparently President Obama.

All that matters is that Nancy Pelosi has to burn for it because the Village decrees that saying the CIA mislead you is completely and totally worse than authorizing waterboarding dozens and dozens of times.

ITEISATDF: In The End, It Somehow Always The Democrat's Fault (tm). After all, in the battle between Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich, and Rush Limbaugh on one side and Nancy Pelosi on the other, it's Pelosi who has the credibility problem according to our Liberal Media.