David Pleasant

Add ice, stir, and make your own jokes.

By David Horsey at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

Politico reports the end of the Darth Vader era.

Joe Biden is laying plans to significantly shrink the role of the vice presidency in Barack Obama’s White House, according to an official familiar with his thinking.

It’s not just that Biden won’t sit in on Senate Democrats’ weekly caucus meetings – a privilege Republicans afforded outgoing Vice President Dick Cheney. He won’t have an office outside the House floor, as House Speaker Dennis Hastert gave Cheney early on.

Biden will not begin every day with his own intelligence briefing before sitting in on the president’s. He will not always be the last person Obama speaks to before making a decision.

He also will not, as a transition official calls it, operate a “shadow government” within an Obama administration.

[snip]

In short, Biden will be no Dick Cheney – who redefined the office of the vice presidency to gather unto himself unprecedented influence and reach. Instead, Biden will serve the role of trusted backup, but someone who won’t be mistaken for a co-president single-handedly crafting and promoting policy.

I thought we elected Barack Obama President of the United States, not General Ray Odierno, who seems to have his own plan for Iraq.

The top American commander in Iraq said Saturday that some soldiers would remain in a support role in cities beyond summer 2009, when a new security agreement calls for the removal of American combat troops from urban areas.

The commander, Gen. Ray Odierno, said American troops would remain at numerous security outposts in order to help support and train Iraqi forces. “We believe that’s part of our transition teams,” he told reporters in Balad while accompanying Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who arrived on an unannounced trip Saturday.

General Odierno declined to say how many American troops might remain in Iraqi cities past the summer and said the number still remained to be negotiated with the Iraqi government under the terms of the so-called status of forces agreement. “But what I would say is we’ll maintain our very close partnership with the Iraqi security forces throughout Iraq even after the summer.”

Instead of an op-ed to The New York Times, this should be an open letter to John McCain, every member of the McCain-Palin campaign (staff or volunteer), the Republican Party, and especially to Sarah Palin. They are, in every sense of the words, the unrepentant terrorists. Look it up.

December 6, 2008

Op-Ed Contributor

The Real Bill Ayers

By WILLIAM AYERS

Chicago

IN the recently concluded presidential race, I was unwillingly thrust upon the stage and asked to play a role in a profoundly dishonest drama. I refused, and here’s why.

Unable to challenge the content of Barack Obama’s campaign, his opponents invented a narrative about a young politician who emerged from nowhere, a man of charm, intelligence and skill, but with an exotic background and a strange name. The refrain was a question: “What do we really know about this man?”

Secondary characters in the narrative included an African-American preacher with a fiery style, a Palestinian scholar and an “unrepentant domestic terrorist.” Linking the candidate with these supposedly shadowy characters, and ferreting out every imagined secret tie and dark affiliation, became big news.

I was cast in the “unrepentant terrorist” role; I felt at times like the enemy projected onto a large screen in the “Two Minutes Hate” scene from George Orwell’s “1984,” when the faithful gathered in a frenzy of fear and loathing.

With the mainstream news media and the blogosphere caught in the pre-election excitement, I saw no viable path to a rational discussion. Rather than step clumsily into the sound-bite culture, I turned away whenever the microphones were thrust into my face. I sat it out.

Now that the election is over, I want to say as plainly as I can that the character invented to serve this drama wasn’t me, not even close. Here are the facts:

I never killed or injured anyone. I did join the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s, and later resisted the draft and was arrested in nonviolent demonstrations. I became a full-time antiwar organizer for Students for a Democratic Society. In 1970, I co-founded the Weather Underground, an organization that was created after an accidental explosion that claimed the lives of three of our comrades in Greenwich Village. The Weather Underground went on to take responsibility for placing several small bombs in empty offices — the ones at the Pentagon and the United States Capitol were the most notorious — as an illegal and unpopular war consumed the nation.

The Weather Underground crossed lines of legality, of propriety and perhaps even of common sense. Our effectiveness can be — and still is being — debated. We did carry out symbolic acts of extreme vandalism directed at monuments to war and racism, and the attacks on property, never on people, were meant to respect human life and convey outrage and determination to end the Vietnam war.

Read more….

The AEI wingnuts are out in force criticizing Obama’s economic stimulus plans.

Alan D. Viard, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, told Congress recently that public works spending should not be authorized out of “the illusory hope of job gains or economic stabilization.”

“If more money is spent on infrastructure, more workers will be employed in that sector,” Mr. Viard told the House Ways and Means Committee. “In the long run, however, an increase in infrastructure spending requires a reduction in public or private spending for other goods and services. As a result, fewer workers are employed in other sectors of the economy.”

Does anybody really take the AEI seriously these days? Should anybody take the AEI seriously as long as they continue to tout luminaries such as Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and John Yoo as part of their scholarly elite?

Michael Hirsh presents a rather convincing argument in a recent Newsweek piece.

OK, enough with the Obamamania already. I have a major bone to pick with our all-praised president-elect. Where, Mr. Obama, is Joseph Stiglitz? Most pundits have pretty much gone ga-ga over your economic team: The brilliant Larry Summers as head of your National Economic Council. The judicious Tim Geithner as Treasury secretary. The august Paul Volcker as chair of the newly formed Economic Recovery Advisory Board. But lost amid the cascades of ticker tape is the fact that, astonishingly, you didn’t hire the one expert who’s been right about the financial crisis all along—and whose Nobel Prize-winning ideas will probably be most central to fixing the global economy.

This is not speculation. A source close to Stiglitz told me Thursday that the Columbia University economist has been left out in the cold, even though he was expecting at least an offer. (Stiglitz, traveling in Brazil, could not be reached.) Especially since Stiglitz supported Obama long before most of the others named to his cabinet (at a time when Summers was a key advisor to Hillary Clinton). “Who knows why? Obama has been choosing center-right people,” said the source, an associate of Stiglitz’s who would speak only on condition of anonymity. She went on to say that Stiglitz’s long-time enmity with Summers—whose ideas, Obama said last week, “will be the foundation of all my economic policies”—may be a factor. “Larry’s had it in for Joe for decades,” she said.

No surprise there. Stiglitz, more than anyone on the Washington scene, was the biggest fly in the ointment of “free-market fundamentalism” pressed on the world in the ’90s by Summers, Geithner and their mentor, former Treasury secretary Robert Rubin—advice that has now contributed to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. It’s not just that Stiglitz’s Nobel-winning work, building on John Maynard Keynes’s insights, uncovered profound fallacies in the Reagan-era idea that markets, especially in finance, can always correct themselves (good call, Nobel committee). In his writings and speeches since serving as chairman of Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors and then chief economist of the World Bank, Stiglitz has been the leading voice opposed to the mindless liberalization of capital flows that brought us to where we are today.

If the sheer number of job cuts reported by the government yesterday for November  wasn’t enough shock and awe for you, then maybe Paul Krugman’s comments today will help get you past that threshold. Now that he’s had a chance to review the numbers, he says the economy “is falling off a cliff.”

The media is all atwitter today over the notion that Democratic leaders are ”ready to provide a short-term rescue plan for American automakers,” as The New York Times reports. The Washington Post leads with “White House, Democrats Near Short-Term Deal for Automakers.”

One could easily be led to believe that George Bush and the Democrats suddenly had a Kumbaya moment — that miraculously, after eight years of George Bush’s my-way-or-the-highway policies and what’s-in-it-for-me deals, that modus operandi did not apply to this “deal.” Well, that’s simply not the case.

Yes, Congress and the White House may be on the verge of a deal, but the White House and Wall Street are most likely the big winners rather than Detroit and Main Street.

It’s simple. As currently reported, Congress will give the Big Three $14 billion, but it must take it from the $25 billion energy-related “re-engineering” legislation previously passed. In exchange for the $14 billion, which is $20 billion less than the automakers say the need, Congress must agree to give Hank Paulson, the Treasury Secretary, the $350 billion remaining from the original $700 billion bailout bill.

Seeking to end a weeks-long stalemate between the Bush administration and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, senior Congressional aides said that the money would most likely come from $25 billion in federally subsidized loans intended for developing fuel-efficient cars.

By breaking that impasse, the lawmakers could also clear the way for the Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., to request the remaining $350 billion of the financial industry bailout fund knowing he will not get bogged down in a fight over aiding Detroit.

Voila! Hank Paulson is allowed to continue flooding Wall Street with hundreds of billions of dollars that are virtually untraceable; certainly with no accountability if history is any indicator. Yet, Democrats must reduce the approved energy-related legislation by 56 percent and attempt to reappropriate the lost funding in the 111th Congress.

Where’s the “deal” that The Washington Post so gloriously touts between the White House and Congress? There is no deal. Democrats give up $14 billion and George Bush gives up absolutely nothing. Instead, he gets everything he has demanded since he submitted his three-page piece of emergency legislation to bailout Wall Street back in September.

Who would be foolish enough not do a “deal” where they received $350 billion in that deal and consequently forced their opponents to, in essence, reduce a previously agreed to “deal” by $14 billion in order to save the largest sector of manufacturing in the country?

Whether you agree or disagree with the automakers getting a bailout, it’s hard to argue that Democrats didn’t cave in again to the bullying by the most unpopular president in history and to a Republican Party that has been virtually decimated. It’s disgraceful.

*****

I believe the automakers should receive assistance, but only because of the substantial consequences of not bailing out Detroit. Management of the Big Three has been atrocious for at least three decades, in my opinion, but if the Big Three collapse – even just one of them — the implications are dire.

This is what the Center for Automotive Research (CAR) reported in a recent study (PDF – see page four) on the potential contraction of the Big Three automakers.

We assume that domestic production by international automakers in the United States would be seriously affected by a major contraction of the Detroit Three automakers for at least a period of one year due to the high likelihood of many U.S. supplier company insolvencies. In fact, we assume in our 100 percent contraction scenario that not only does domestic production by the Detroit companies fall to zero in the first year, but that domestic production (in the U.S.) by the international producers also falls to zero. That is because we expect a major wave in supplier bankruptcies or a “supplier shock.” The collapse of a domestic market for suppliers coupled with the reality that few auto suppliers serve export markets would result in manufacturing utilization rates below 50 percent, forcing suppliers to restructure or liquidate. The scale of the contraction of the Detroit Three would overwhelm any attempt by the international producers to keep their existing suppliers in business or to find alternative suppliers, here or elsewhere. U.S. consumers would be forced to rely on only imported vehicles as a source of new vehicle purchases in the first year. [Emphasis added]

Of course that is the extreme case — failure of all three. But as CAR points out, something similar would happen if just two of the domestic automakers had a serious contraction, which is precisely the scenario presented here.

We assume essentially the same first year supplier crisis for all automakers in the United States. Production would fall about 50 percent in the first and second years for the international producers….

In all contraction scenarios, imported automotive supplies and parts prices are increased by 15 percent because of the probable disruption in the domestic supplier sector.

Late Update: I stated the amount of the bailout for the Big Three was $14 billion. Some media outlets are reporting $15 billion while others are reporting $14 billion. Who knows what the right amount is? We’ll find out soon enough, but I just wanted to note why there was a discrepancy in what I stated in my post and what is in certain press reports.

In his weekly address, President-elect Obama pledged a huge public works system — the largest since Eisenhower initiated the interstate highway system in the 1950’s. In addition to the public works system, Obama said he would modernize classrooms and libraries with computers, make broadband service more available, improve technology in health care (emphasis on hospitals and doctor’s offices), and make government buildings more energy efficient.

Transcript after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Supreme Court has decided to take on George Bush’s assertion that he can detain individuals indefinitely. This has the potential to be a landmark ruling.  I need to mull this over a bit and avoid knee-jerk comments.  That withstanding, at first glance, I want to say this smacks more of political maneuvering on the Court’s part, especially considering the timing, than it does with the execution of justice or the Rule of Law.

Via the NYT:

The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to decide the most fundamental question yet concerning executive power in the age of terror: Can the president order the indefinite military detention of people living in the United States?

The case concerns Ali al-Marri, the only person on the American mainland being held as an enemy combatant, at the Navy brig in Charleston, S.C. Mr. Marri, a citizen of Qatar, was legally in the United States when he was arrested in December 2001 in Peoria, Ill., where he was living with his family and studying computer science at Bradley University.

Eighteen months later, when Mr. Marri was on the verge of a trial on credit card fraud and other charges, President Bush declared him an enemy combatant, moving him from the custody of the Justice Department to military detention. The government says Mr. Marri is a Qaeda sleeper agent sent to the United States to commit mass murder and disrupt the banking system.

The case, which will probably be argued in the spring, will present the Obama administration with several difficult strategic choices. It can continue to defend the Bush administration’s expansive interpretation of executive power, advance a more modest one or short-circuit the case by moving it to the criminal justice system. [emphasis added]