The golden age of comedy

We should be grateful our era has provided so much rich material.

Stephen Colbert To FEC: I Don't Want To Be The 'Chump' Without Unlimited Corporate Cash

Stephen wants a piece of the action that could be coming his way thanks to the Citizens United decision.

In the house of R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming

Without doubt this is the most insightful post about the Royal Wedding that I've seen. That hat deserves special attention. An apt description:

. . . a thing which was little more than a protoplasmic mass, from the body of which tentacles of every length and thickness flailed forth, from the head of which, constantly altering shape from an amorphous bulge to a simulacrum of a man's head, a single malevolent eye appeared.

. . . which also happens to describe a certain ancient unspeakable cosmic horror. Coincidence? I think not.

Remembering Chris Hondros

For me this was the iconic photo of the Iraq debacle. It just said it all.

He was a superior, fearless, possibly reckless photographer. He also had the eye.

Here was a photographer who could attend to the details of composition and lighting, while conveying volumes with elegant simplicity, sometimes under fire and always under circumstances few can comprehend.

Excellent remembrance and photo montage from, of all newspapers, the WSJ.

Late update: the one piece of good news conveyed in the New York Times article about Samar Hassan, the poor unfortunate photographed above, is that the U.S. brass - all the way up to the Joint Chiefs - considered the photo to be a problem. Would like to think there were some sleepless nights in northern Virginia.

Later update: here is the Guardian's retrospective.

Later update: fixed the links.

Justice delayed

The DOJ OPR were prevented from referring this piece of work to the Bar for disciplinary action - she received immunity in return for her testimony before the House Judiciary Committee. Fortunately, the Virginia State Bar have taken matters into their own hands. It's a start.

Meanwhile, John Yoo is back in the media, yet again, complaining that Obama killed Osama because Obama didn't have the cajones to torture someone whose name rhymes with his own.

And, Yoo's former go-to girl is doing quite nicely, thank you very much, sitting pretty in her appellate practice in a top-end Washington law firm.

No comment necessary

Yes, a tad infantile. Sorry about that - but even Juan Cole posted it, so that makes it okay - speaking of whom, his "informed comment" on the topic is worth reading.

Late update: agree with Juan that the next step for Obama is to get us out of Iraq:

Now that Obama has eliminated the monster Usama Bin Laden and vindicated the capability of the United States to visit retribution on its dire enemies, he can do one other great good for this country abroad. He can get us out of Iraq altogether. The US military presence there is the fruit of a poisonous tree. It will always provoke Iraqi Muslim activists, whether Sunni or Shiite or secular nationalist. And it angers the whole Arab world.

Speak of the Devil

Apropos of the previous post, the man who would advise the president he can slaughter a village is appalled Obama might force disclosure of political donations, except, perhaps . . .

. . . there's no word from Yoo on whether the President has the executive power to torture executives to force them to disclose their political donations.

"Sure"-ly not!

Late update: a TPM commenter feels compelled to make the obvious point:

It goes almost without saying that Yoo is lying. The small businesswoman, acting as an individual, can give as much money as she wants without disclosing it. Only when she signs a check to a political organization on an account belonging to the business does this rule come into play.

Poli-Sci 101

So the Gitmo Papers are out - and while they caused barely a ripple in the news cycle - what with the Royal Wedding coming up and all - it's interesting to reflect that everything some of us learned in American History, high school civics classes, Poli-Sci classes in university and Con Law in law school went right out the window at the first opportunity:

Innocent men were picked up on the basis of scant or nonexistent evidence and subjected to lengthy detention and often to abuse and torture. Some people were released who later acted against the United States. Inmates who committed suicide were regarded only as a public relations problem. There are seriously dangerous prisoners at Guantánamo who cannot be released but may never get a real trial because the evidence is so tainted.

While Mr. Obama did stop the torture and perhaps (we think? we hope?) the renditions, he didn't put an end for once and for all to the enduring blight - the existence of Guantanamo - on everything we were supposed to stand for.

Worse, he let the bastards who definitely knew better - the lawyers - get away with it. And . . . not only did they get away with it, they flourished.

Not to put to fine a point on it, here is the previous administration's chief lawyer's vision of executive power. Here is why this vision as articulated is really just another misdirection not to be taken remotely seriously, assuming of course anyone has cared enough to pay attention.

So - off to the liquour store I go.

Obama finally kicks it in gear

Krugman's assessment - good to see the Bush tax cuts expire. Love the use of the Stockman quote.

Couldn't agree more with Marshall:

President Obama's core angle in this speech seems to be to focus on the fact that country got deficits under control in late 90s under Clinton and then went off the deep-end again with the Bush binge. Hard to beat the truth.

If Marx was a great historian but a lousy economist, Caldwell sucks at both

The execrable Caldwell: so pathetic, if well read:

The high point in The Gallery of Antiquities, Balzac’s great novel of debt, comes when gendarmes are arresting the young Count d’Esgrignons for a forgery committed to cover his borrowing. The loyal notary Chesnel, attached to the d’Esgrignons family by generations of service, has already spent his own modest fortune to get the young count out of such scrapes, but he is at the end of his resources. “If I don’t manage to smother this story,” he tells the count matter-of-factly, “you’ll have to kill yourself before the indictment is read out.” The count realises in a flash that people have lent him money not because they have more than they know what to do with, or because he’s a nice guy, or because his privileges are the natural order of things. They have lent him money because they have made certain assumptions about his honour – misplaced assumptions, as it turns out.

The great irony of Caldwell's literary allusion is that - while evidently trying to impress with his grasp of eternal truths about debt and honour (or something like that) - he succeeds only in impressing us with his utter cluelessness about any economic history that might be considered actually relevant to the dire situation facing us now. More telling, perhaps, is the fact that he has looked to an unrepentant reactionary and royalist (Balzac) for inspiration.

Sadly, Caldwell's brand of simple-mindedness is holding policy-making sway in Washington and London. Will Hutton, in today's Observer, is distraught, and rightly so:

In Washington, a resurgent Republican party took the American government to within two hours of being closed down for lack of politically authorised funds as it battled for swingeing cuts in federal spending. Across the Atlantic, an army of hedge funds and investment banks forced a lame-duck Portuguese government to turn to the IMF and European Union for a multibillion euro bail out. In Britain, George Osborne championed the breathtaking speed of his budget reduction plan by saying he would not play Russian roulette with British economic sovereignty. Everywhere are the echoes of the language Keynes tried to dispel at Bretton Woods.

Keynes: he always looms large in times like these. As Hutton observes, it is the spectre of Keynes who should be haunting us now, not some count in a Balzac novel.

At this critical juncture, it is worth remembering that today's red-faced crusaders for fiscal austerity were yesterday's sudden converts to Keynes (albeit without bothering trying to grasp what Keynes had actually intended) when Bush busily squandered U.S. budget surpluses on tax cuts and wars. These are many of the same people who are now (conveniently) rounding on America's supposedly bloated entitlements programs as the main deficit culprits. Keeping this kind of a scorecard is helpful when trying to decide who should be taken seriously when the chips are down, and who should not be.

This is not to say, of course, that long-term fiscal imbalances need not be redressed. Of course they do. The question is when, and how. William Keegan explains:

. . . having worked at a central bank myself, I am aware of that institutional desire to act "pre-emptively", in the words of a former head of the US Federal Reserve (not Alan Greenspan); that it is important to take the punchbowl away once the party gets going.

But the party has not got going in the UK.

The same might be said of the U.S. The current mess is a classic Keynes moment. Now is when we should be dusting off the manual, not talking about Balzac. Keegan points out:

Every day we read of the consequences of excessive austerity in countries such as Greece, Ireland and Portugal.

These would be the consequences that Keynes was trying to avoid. The fact that we seem to need to repeat past mistakes, including in the U.S. and the UK, is somewhat depressing.

Hutton concludes:

Economists and business leaders should not let the chancellor get away with Tea party-style statements about Britain risking bankruptcy and having no choices but to suffer. Keynes dedicated his life to challenge that thinking and for some years kept it at bay. The bad news is that it may only be disasters, like the one Keynes lived through, that will make people change their minds. The good news is that there are a lot of a very good and iconoclastic economists – many here – from many countries who want to take up the fight again. It's a race against conventional thinking – and time.

It's nice to see the police do their job . . .

. . . even if it happens after Murdoch already got what he wanted. Still, beggars can't be choosy. I had feared this one might go down the memory hole.

Late update: The FT weighs in - this scandal has legs: it may be the kind that causes governments to fall and applications for media domination (all part of the Murdoch plan to ensure the "plurality and independence of news provision") to be rejected faster than a police chief's dinner.

The big fish just need to be reeled in.

Later update: It's today's headline in the Observer. Hard to believe James Murdoch would be quite so stupid as to brag about "putting this problem in a box." Funny, I was reading about how Madoff only was able to carry on for so long only by compartmentalising, too. In any case, the chorus is growing louder: the Murdochs are not to be trusted with power.

Ben Bernanke . . .

. . . hot or not?

It figures

From judicial train-wrecks to literal car-wrecks. Next thing we'll hear he's on the lam, holed up in some fleabag Arizona motel.

There he goes again

Oh, shut up already, Mr. Smarty-Pants!

"And then there’s the British experience. Like America, Britain is still perceived as solvent by financial markets, giving it room to pursue a strategy of jobs first, deficits later. But the government of Prime Minister David Cameron chose instead to move to immediate, unforced austerity, in the belief that private spending would more than make up for the government’s pullback. As I like to put it, the Cameron plan was based on belief that the confidence fairy would make everything all right.

"But she hasn’t: British growth has stalled, and the government has marked up its deficit projections as a result.

"Which brings me back to what passes for budget debate in Washington these days.

"A serious fiscal plan for America would address the long-run drivers of spending, above all health care costs, and it would almost certainly include some kind of tax increase. But we’re not serious: any talk of using Medicare funds effectively is met with shrieks of “death panels,” and the official G.O.P. position — barely challenged by Democrats — appears to be that nobody should ever pay higher taxes. Instead, all the talk is about short-run spending cuts."

Perhaps Krugman should try a different tactic: perhaps he should advise in favour of the opposite of what he really thinks should be done. Maybe that's where he's going wrong.

A helpful flowchart

It may not help you understand what to do about Libya, but it will help you understand . . . Republicans.

Does not compute

If there is one thing I understand less than people who lie to get us into a war it's the wilful delusion of those who are determined to keep us out of one.

I've lost count of the number of lefty-types on my tee-vee who just don't seem to give a shit what would have happened to the people of Benghazi had we not intervened. Strike that - I might understand if they just admitted they didn't give a shit - but it's worse than that: they continue to insist the people of Benghazi would have been better off without us.

One guy on 'beeb recommended we should leave Libyans to get on with their demonstratin' and remonstratin' unencumbered by our no-fly zone. I can only assume this is so they might present easier targets for Gaddafi's goons.

Makes my head spin.

Hitting bottom

I've seen little point in blathering about Japan. Anything I might say would be redundant, reductive or derivative.

Until now.

Certain aspects of the wall-to-wall media hysteria did have me wondering if predictions of the impending nuclear apocalypse were over-hyped. Now that the crisis seems to be have been rationalised, with nuclear genie back in the bottle, a little hindsight clearly shows that the western media seems to have performed as expected: woefully. From a TPM reader and putative "student of Japan":

"Of course fear sells newspapers, but in unfortunate cases, the coverage is rooted in long-standing prejudices held by some Westerners against the non-West: for instance, a superiority complex that feels only the West and its media have real access to the truth, which led to a downplaying of Japanese media reports. In the worst cases, there has been simple racism, as some reporters when viewing how calm the Japanese are, seem to think the Japanese are mere robots who cannot grasp the immensity of the crisis or, as one colleague reports when a Spanish reporter interviewed her, think that the Japanese are genetically tuned to accept disaster. It is ironic that such reports assume such an attitude when, at the same time through their own inaccuracies, they show how much better the Japanese coverage is."

I would prefer to be wrong

But I fear I won't be. It's already looking perilously late to get our collective asses, whom the Guardian is correctly exhorting to action, in gear.

Rawnsley is more pointed about the west's predicament:

Some of these dilations are a legacy of the Iraq war. Eight years on from the invasion, the calamitous errors after the toppling of Saddam continue to poison the cause of liberal interventionism. The shadow of Iraq makes it harder to win the argument that both self-interest and our moral values demand a response when a dictator is brutalising his people on our doorstep. In fear of another Iraq, the west risks repeating a different, earlier mistake: the divided and impotent European response to the slaughter in the Balkans in the 1990s.

If it weren't for Iraq, we would have been in there by now.

The process is what was supposed to protect us. The abasement of our former leaders becomes our abasement, and others will suffer and die needlessly as a result.

The circle is complete.

The hits keep coming

Whatever one thinks of whatever political philosophy he seems to think he espouses, you can't deny the fact that Scalia is a mean-spirited prick. This provides meaningful insight on the quality of his writing.

Late update: From a commenter -

. . . having read many Scalia decisions, I am not as convinced of his supposed 'brilliance' as generally claimed. His opinions were clearly unprincipled, results driven, and often overturned even recent S.Ct precedent. He is one of the most hypocritical on the big bench; when he likes precedent, he waxes on about stability and precedent. When he wants to advance his political agenda - he bulldoze over decades of established precedent.

I remain completely unimpressed by his principles and his mind.

Not such an Inside Job?

Following up on an earlier post, after the Oscars comes the inevitable nitpickers. They have a point: the film is simplistic. Yes, lots of blame to go around. No, it wasn't just the bankers.

It's probably true that perfidy and greed distributed across a broad enough spectrum will have a dilutive effect on accountability with a net result that no one is guilty. Not sure we still shouldn't try to determine who was naughty and who was nice.