When your words, actions, habits, location, etc. — when the sum total of social data which makes you you – is given to the control (and whims) of others (or simply taken from your control as a matter of course), you are no longer in any substantive sense free.

Welcome to the future, where everything about you is saved. A future where your actions are recorded, your movements are tracked, and your conversations are no longer ephemeral. A future brought to you not by some 1984-like dystopia, but by the natural tendencies of computers to produce data.

Data is the pollution of the information age. It’s a natural by-product of every computer-mediated interaction. It stays around forever, unless it’s disposed of. It is valuable when reused, but it must be done carefully. Otherwise, its after-effects are toxic.

And just as 100 years ago people ignored pollution in our rush to build the Industrial Age, today we’re ignoring data in our rush to build the Information Age.

[snip]

…Being constantly scrutinised undermines our social norms; furthermore, it’s creepy. Privacy isn’t just about having something to hide; it’s a basic right that has enormous value to democracy, liberty, and our humanity. Source (alternate link)

It’s a price most dear. It’s slavery by default in a digital dimension. It’s a creeping cancer on the concepts of personal space and individuality. It’s a super-highway to (to coin a term) slaveillance.

As it seems obligatory to comment on the presidential address last night, ye old scribe’s take is that it represented a powerful and overdue step toward restoring the bully pulpit, as opposed to the whiting out of the first word’s crucial final letter as evinced throughout the previous administration.

There are so many additional areas to delve into, one can but hope the initiative for shining light into the shadows does not fade.

As the old saying goes: Once the camel’s nose is in the tent, the rest of the camel is not far behind.

Still and all, hopeful noises.

The Senate Judiciary Committee plans to move forward with a commission to investigate torture during the Bush administration. Committee Chairman Pat Leahy, D-Vt., told Salon Tuesday that his panel would soon announce a hearing to study various commission plans. His staff said the announcement could come as early as Wednesday.

[snip]

Spearheading Senate efforts to establish a torture commission is Rhode Island Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse. As a member of both the Judiciary Committee and the Intelligence Committee, Whitehouse is privy to information about interrogations he can’t yet share. Still, regarding a potential torture commission, he told Salon, “I am convinced it is going to happen.” In fact, his fervor on the issue was palpable. When asked if there is a lot the public still does not know about these issues during the Bush administration, his eyes grew large and he nodded slowly. “Stay on this,” he said. “This is going to be big.”

[snip]

…”When push comes to shove, we are the legislative branch of government. We have oversight responsibilities. And we don’t need the executive branch’s approval to look into these things just as a constitutional matter.”

Plans to establish the commission still remain in their infancy, as senators and staff look at previous panels, such as the 9-11 Commission, and investigations following Watergate. Whitehouse, a former U.S. attorney, noted that a torture commission might need the power to immunize witnesses on a case-by-case basis. The prospect of future prosecutions, he said, are beside the point. Most important was putting a spotlight on abuses committed by the Bush administration.

[snip]

Last week, retired Maj. Gen. Tony Taguba, known for conducting an honest investigation of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib […] joined a group of former high-level diplomats and law enforcement officials who also announced their support for a torture commission late last week, along with 18 rights groups. Source

Almost surely not an isolated instance of last days mayhem inflicted on the body politic.

The woebegone Bush administration to institutionally abused elders: “Get stuffed.”

Yet one more example of the reams of deliberate actions meant to neuter the courts system and deny basic access to justice to all, of the mean-spirited, misbegotten emphasis on the less in powerless, as pursued over the past eight years.

How many more parallel or echo Binyam Mohamed?

A Guantánamo detainee at the center of a long standoff between the United States and Britain was freed and returned to Britain on Monday after almost seven years in American custody.

The detainee, Binyam Mohamed, was captured in Pakistan in April 2002. American officials said he had been part of a conspiracy to detonate a dirty bomb on American soil, but all charges against him were eventually dismissed. He has said he was held for 18 months in Morocco, where he says he was tortured, then was moved to Afghanistan and then to the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Source

More:

Dressed in casual clothes, Mohamed, 30, landed in a small plane at RAF Northolt airbase in northwest London and was escorted across the runway by officials.

He was then detained by police officers under anti-terror laws and questioned for nearly five hours before being freed and told he would face no further action.

“He’s now been released full stop, that’s the end of it,” a Metropolitan Police spokesman told AFP. Source

And a statement which cuts to the quick (emphasis added).

Binyam Mohamed, 30, walked unaided from the chartered jet that landed at RAF Northolt shortly after 1pm after being held at the controversial US military base in Cuba for four years.

[snip]

“I am not asking for vengeance; only that the truth should be made known, so that nobody in the future should have to endure what I have endured.” Source

Shorter version: Hurriedly building on a flawed foundation cannot but tempestuously compromise or topple any structure constructed thereon.

Update Feb. 21 8:30 p.m.: A highly related and important read from yet one more who was right in the thick of it:

Darrel Vandeveld is an attorney and former military officer, who, in civilian life is a prosecuting attorney in Erie, PA. In the military, he attained the rank of Lt. Col. in the Army Reserve, serving, among other places, in Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan and Africa, as well as serving as a senior prosecutor for the military commissions prosecuting Guantanamo detainees. Last year, he became the seventh attorney to resign as a prosecutor from the military commissions.…

[snip]

…When I arrived in May 2007, the Commissions and their predecessor tribunals, had been underway for almost six years. I fully expected that in that lengthy period of time, the evidence against the detainees would have been collected and systematized, that prosecution packages or files would have long since been assembled, and that informed, prudential decisions would have already been made about which detainees had committed war crimes, and which detainees had not.

Instead, what I found was precisely the opposite: despite the best efforts of the Chief Prosecutor at the time, Air Force Colonel Morris Davis, and his deputy, who I will not identify in order to respect his personal privacy, the prosecution enterprise was a shambles, in a state of disorganization that had me reeling in disbelief. It became clear to me within weeks after I reported for duty that the various military services had not assigned officers with the experience, skills, and motivation necessary to conduct the vital mission of prosecuting the war criminals with the sense of urgency and diligence the task required. As I’ve explained elsewhere – and my assertions have been confirmed by “senior Bush administration officials” familiar with the Commissions – the evidence and, more importantly, the missing evidence, had neither been assembled nor sought after with any diligence after prosecutors and investigators had discovered the evidence to be missing. The prosecution office, after detaining supposed enemy combatants for as long as six years, seemed to have accomplished little more than to install a security door in order to separate the prosecution offices from where the convening authority’s offices had then been located.…

[snip]

…seven or eight years to bring the detainees to trial is a travesty; holding for those who should have been released long ago (the plight of the Uighurs is particularly repellant) is unbelievable. Source

Scratching the scab: Festering in the party’s collective memory for seventy years, the G.O.P. blows the dust off the long buried (and properly so) arguments and discredited fantasy tales of their last stint (properly deserved) in the wilderness.

Social insecurity is a political problem, not a political platform.

One of the most diverting aspects of the debate over President Obama’s stimulus plan has been the concerted conservative attack on the New Deal.

One might have thought that voters of that day had pretty much settled the question of whether the New Deal worked by enthusiastically reelecting FDR, and not once but three times. But since right-wing revisionism is really an arrow aimed at the current stimulus plan, the effort to discredit the New Deal is worth examining. Source

For the record, working to return the scales to nominal calibration.

After a three-year global study, the International Commission of Jurists said many states used the public’s fear of terrorism to introduce measures.

These included detention without trial, illegal disappearance and torture.

It also said that the UK and the US have “actively undermined” international law by their actions.

It concluded that many measures introduced to fight terrorism were illegal and counter-productive.

It called for justice systems to be strengthened and warned that temporary measures should not become permanent.

The Geneva-based International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) is a non-governmental organisation which promotes the observance of the rule of law and the legal protection of human rights.

The panel of eminent lawyers and judges concluded that the framework of international law that existed before the 9/11 attacks on the US was robust and effective.

But now, it said, it was being actively undermined by many states and liberal democracies like the US and the UK.

[snip]

The panel reviewed counter-terrorism measures in over 40 countries, and heard from government officials, victims of terror attacks, and from people detained on suspicion of terrorism.

It found that many states have used the fear of terrorism to introduce measures which are illegal such as torture, detention without trial, and enforced disappearance.

Some of the world’s top international law experts served on the ICJ panel…. Source

Link to the full report (.pdf file) is included at the source link.

It’s ba-a-a-ack.

Governing elites in Washington and Wall Street have devised a fiendishly clever “grand bargain” they want President Obama to embrace in the name of “fiscal responsibility.” The government, they argue, having spent billions on bailing out the banks, can recover its costs by looting the Social Security system. They are also targeting Medicare and Medicaid. The pitch sounds preposterous to millions of ordinary working people anxious about their economic security and worried about their retirement years. But an impressive armada is lined up to push the idea….

These players are promoting a tricky way to whack Social Security benefits, but to do it behind closed doors so the public cannot see what’s happening or figure out which politicians to blame.…

[snip]

The Social Security fight could become a defining test for “new politics” in the Obama era. Will Americans at large step up and make themselves heard, not to attack Obama but to protect his presidency from the political forces aligned with Wall Street interests? This fight can be won if people everywhere raise a mighty din–hands off our Social Security money!–and do it now, before the deal gains momentum. Popular outrage can overwhelm the insiders and put members of Congress on notice: a vote to gut Social Security will kill your career. By organizing and agitating, people blocked Bush’s attempt to privatize Social Security. Imagine if he had succeeded–their retirement money would have disappeared in the collapsing stock market.

[snip]

…Social Security is not broke–not even close. It can sustain its obligations for roughly forty years, according to the Congressional Budget Office, even if nothing is changed. Even reports by the system’s conservative trustees say it has no problem until 2041 (that report is signed by former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, the guy who bailed out the bankers). During the coming decade, however, the system will need to start drawing on its reserve surpluses to pay for benefits as boomers retire in greater numbers.

[snip]

Follow the bouncing ball: Washington first cuts taxes on the well-to-do, then offsets the revenue loss by raising taxes on the working class and tells folks it is saving their money for future retirement. But Washington spends the money on other stuff, so when workers need it for their retirement, they are told, Sorry, we can’t afford it.

[snip]

The assault sounds outrageous and bound to fail, but the conservative interests may have Obama in a neat trap. Their fog of scary propaganda makes it easier to distort the president’s position and blame him for any fiscal disorders driven by the current financial collapse. He will be urged to “do the right thing” for the country and make the hard choices, regardless of petty political grievances (words and phrases he has used himself). Obama’s fate may depend on informing the public–now, not later–so that people are inoculated against these artful lies. Source

---

Update Feb. 17 3:15 p.m.: Like home-made chicken soup, it certainly couldn’t hurt.

The anonymity of the crowd: A quaint concept.

If it is not invasive and not an unauthorized taking and use for profit of proprietary information (your face, fercorn’s sake), then there is no valid reason to hide the damn cameras, is there?

Watch an advertisement on a video screen in a mall, health club or grocery store and there’s a slim - but growing - chance the ad is watching you too.

Small cameras can now be embedded in the screen or hidden around it, tracking who looks at the screen and for how long. The makers of the tracking systems say the software can determine the viewer’s gender, approximate age range and, in some cases, ethnicity - and can change the ads accordingly.

That could mean razor ads for men, cosmetics ads for women and video-game ads for teens. Source

Not to mention that claims that the data is “not stored” doesn’t preclude that the data can and may be stored, tracked and/or sold.

So not so much as one single House Republican was moved to (pace McCain) put country first over ideology in today’s vote.

This was not loyal opposition, this was secession.

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Update 8:45 p.m.: In the Senate vote, abandonment of duty in abject deference to cowardice.

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Update Feb. 14 3:30 a.m.: The near-instantaneous logical inconsistency and outright hypocrisy are palpable.

Hints of a thin silver lining to an otherwise very, very dark cloud.

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Always an author worth the time, Chalmers Johnson hits one out of the park in this must-read in full essay looking at the Pentagon’s unholy trinity of cost-benefit-utility (and identifying some of its all too frequent and all too common structural and inertial irrationality).

The constant conundrum: That congressional Republicans (and, granted, some Democrats, but the difference in proportionality is gargantuan) will stumble over one another in the mad rush to vote for (or increase) funds to blow things up, but wear a hole in the carpet shuffling their feet in one spot or evince political nausea or throw tantrums when it comes to supporting (or increasing) funds to build things up.

Insofar as the stimulus package is concerned, it should by now be self-evident who was casting pearls and who behaving like swine.

Yet another byzantine (and potentially deadly) Defense Department SNAFUed program. In short, they’re working with and researching some of the most human-lethal germs there are, yet have no complete records of what they have or where some it may be.

The U.S. Army has suspended research with deadly agents and toxins at the military’s top germ warfare lab….

The suspension, announced internally last week at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), was attributed to concerns about whether the facility had an accurate inventory of all the deadly “select agents” in its freezers and refrigerators. Select agents are the most dangerous and tightly regulated biological substances used in research, including anthrax, Yersinia pestis (plague) and the Ebola and Marburg viruses.

[snip]

…many WMD experts are worried that the $20 billion the federal government has spent on bio-defense research in the past seven years might actually have put the nation at even greater risk of a bioterrorism attack because the spending has spawned a proliferation of labs and scientists working with “select agents.”

John P. Skvorak, the commanding officer at USAMRIID, notified researchers in an internal memo that the lab was unable to meet Defense Department requirements that all biological select agents and toxins (BSAT) used in the facility be tracked and logged in a database.

Over the past four decades, as researchers have come and gone and programs have been started and completed, select agents no longer in use have accumulated in corners of the facility, according to one official. Much of it has become forgotten, she added. [The unspoken corollary being that there is virtually no way to document, track or identify what may have been removed from the facility proper. — voxd]

“I believe that the probability that there are additional vials of BSAT not captured in our database is high,” Skvorak wrote in the memo, which was first reported Monday by Science magazine.

He added: “We must take immediate steps to meet the Army and (Defense Department) definition of 100% accountability. Therefore, we will stand down until we have inventoried all freezers and refrigerators.” Source

It certainly gives one pause as to the monitoring, containment and security of not just physical specimens but also of research or experimental data.

It’s bad. Very bad.

The Obama administration’s argument, the very idea that an administration headed by someone versed in Constitutional law would unabashedly support broad-brush and unilateral denial of access to the judicial system, figuratively deploying the new broom to sweep the same dirt under the old rug, the continuance of one-sided use of classification as both a means and an end, the upheaval and degradation visited on those seeking to air their case — it all stinks to the heavens.

…”This is the first real test of the authenticity of Obama’s commitment to reverse the abuses of executive power over the last eight years.” Today, the Obama administration failed that test — resoundingly and disgracefully….

[snip]

That the Obama DOJ — when faced with its first real test to determine what it intends to do in these areas (as opposed to engaging in symbolic rituals and issuing pretty words) — explicitly adopts exactly the Bush position is about as inauspicious a start in these areas as one can imagine.

[snip]

What this is clearly about is shielding the U.S. Government and Bush officials from any accountability. Worse, by keeping Bush’s secrecy architecture in place, it ensures that any future President — Obama or any other — can continue to operate behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy, with no transparency or accountability even for blatantly criminal acts.

[snip]

They’re embracing a theory that literally places government officials beyond the rule of law. No minimally honest person who criticized the Bush administration for relying on this instrument can defend the Obama administration for doing so here. Source

More:

…State secrecy should exist to protect the nation’s military and diplomatic secrets, and those are the parameters which have governed its use since the time the Constitution was adopted. But state secrecy must not be invoked to keep materials secret because they would be politically embarrassing or harmful to individual politicians. And even more clearly, state secrecy must never be invoked to conceal evidence of a crime.

[snip]

…Using state secrecy claims to cloak criminal conduct without any acknowledgment of the misconduct that occurred is a bad, even criminal, idea. It can only bring the government itself into disrepute and will serve to undermine the nation’s security and respect for state secrets. Source

Preventing truth from being openly weighed in the public commons allows liars, sneaks, deceivers, charlatans and hordes of assaulters of liberty unchallenged access and voice.

Slacking off in stages from despotism and imperialistic hubris is not an option. A break, a cold turkey stoppage, a renunciation by deed, is the only honorable path.

A path decidedly not taken today.

---

Update Feb. 11, 1:30 p.m.: Good on Rep. Bill Delahunt (D-MA).

---

Also, highly related (emphasis added):

…”You, as commander in chief, are being denied access to material that would help prove that crimes have been committed by US personnel. This decision is being made by the very people who you command.”

It is understood US defence officials might have censored the evidence to protect the president from criminal liability or political embarrassment. Source

As the entirety of the secreted evidence rests wholly on the previous administration, ye old scribe is doing a bit of head-scratching on that last bit, and hypothesizing that holdovers from or careerists under that woebegone group may be engaging in some classic CYA methodology.

---

Follow-up Feb. 11, 6 p.m.: Trust must be earned, not dictated. There is no rational (much less attributable) rationalization for this monumental miscarriage. It must be set right. The massive rent in the fabric of the American constitutional system must be mended and defended. To do otherwise without a clear, concise, and directly accountable explanation and laying out of all the principles and arguments involved is unconscionably incorrect and demonstrably dangerous — a retrograde revolution from within, and a pointed spitting in the eye of and slapping a gag on every person who has so much as heard the words “liberty and justice for all.”

---

Update Feb. 12 8:15 a.m.: Working towards a necessity?

House and Senate committees yesterday introduced bills that would sharply curtail the government’s use of the “state secrets” privilege, a policy used by President Bush to argue that a lawsuit involving allegations of torture should be dismissed - and a position that the Obama administration has now adopted.

[snip]

“The administration’s decision this week to adopt its predecessor’s argument that the state secret privilege requires the outright dismissal of a case challenging rendition to torture was a step in the wrong direction and a reminder that legislation is required to ensure meaningful review of the state secret privilege,” said Representative Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat who is one of the House bill’s cosponsors.

Nadler said protecting sensitive information “is an important responsibility for any administration and requires that courts protect legitimate state secrets while preventing the premature and sweeping dismissal of entire cases.”

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, said the Senate version of the bill “will help guide the courts to balance the government’s interests in secrecy with accountability and the rights of citizens to seek judicial redress” in cases of wrongdoing. The bill, he said, “does not restrict the government’s ability to assert the privilege in appropriate cases. In light of the pending cases where this privilege has been invoked, involving issues including torture, rendition and warrantless wiretapping, we can ill afford to delay consideration of this important legislation.” Source

More:

A President who seeks to aggrandize his own power through wildly expansive claims of executive authority ought to be vigorously criticized. But the ultimate responsibility to put a stop to that lies with the Congress (and the courts). More than anything else, it was the failure of the Congress to rein in the abuses of the Bush presidency (when they weren’t actively endorsing those abuses) that was the ultimate enabling force of the extremism and destruction of the last eight years. Source

Inheriting a long-running debacle, a change of tack — actually using the prevailing winds rather than gallumphing headlong into them?

Richard Holbrooke, Barack Obama’s new envoy for Afghanistan, General James Jones, the new White House national security adviser, and General David Petraeus, the new commander of the Afghan campaign, all stressed that the US president’s policy on the Taliban and al-Qaida would be governed by “attainable goals” matched by “adequate resources”.

[snip]

“Obama’s objectives will be much more moderate,” said a senior European policy-maker involved in discussions with the Obama team. A senior Nato official said Washington’s emphasis on Afghanistan was shifting to “being much more realistic”, adding: “It doesn’t need to be a democracy, just secure.”

“The new policy will be not just winning hearts and minds, but winning hearts, minds, and stomachs,” said another senior diplomat working in Kabul. “It’s realistic. Realism is good.”

[snip]

Holbrooke signalled a sharp change of tack on Afghanistan, saying: “We’ve inherited a situation of grand rhetoric and inadequate resources, both military and civilian. We need to understand what our goal is in Afghanistan.” Source

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Added Feb. 9, 7:15 p.m.: Thoughtful summary, via Vanity Fair (all emphasis in original).

What about Obama versus Bush on handling this war? Does Obama have any advantages over Bush?

Well the advantage Obama has is his intellect. He’s going to ask somebody, “O.K., what are we going to accomplish here?” I don’t think that was asked when we went in 26 days after 9/11. I think we went in because we were angry and we had to do something. I don’t know that we had a plan. I think Obama will look at this and ask–unlike the Bush administration–”What are we trying to get out of this? Somebody tell me.”

If you had to counsel Obama, what would you say the goal should be?

My difficulty in answering that question is that I have such a problem with the fact that we’re already in there. That is such a big mistake that once you have made it, everything else seems to fail. We are there, so obviously we want to avoid the humiliation that everybody else has suffered in getting out, and we want to leave behind something that will walk back the damage already done by the fact that we have engaged in this war.

[snip]

Right now, it seems the U.S.-backed government and the U.S.-led coalition are in the same predicament that most other occupiers have found themselves in, eventually, which is controlling the main towns but having no control over the countryside. Is that accurate?

That’s a fair assessment. I mean, we spent huge amounts of money to build the Kabul to Kandahar Road, but nobody can travel it safely. Nobody is controlling all of Afghanistan from the center. And while we may not have reached that tipping point, in the overworn term, of a generalized resistance like the ones that forced out the Soviets, the British, the Moguls, and Alexander the Great–we’re close to that. And the policies that we come up with in this new administration will either move us over the tipping point, or back away from it.

So let’s talk about Obama and his plan. He’s talking about doubling the U.S. troop force, from about 34,000 to something like 60,000. Is that correct, as you understand it?

Well, the numbers are interpreted with a lot of leeway. [He wants to add] three brigades, which can run from 20,000 to 30,000 troops. I think that’s a nice campaign position, but once you’re president you’re going to say, “Are the numbers important, or is the mission–the redefinition of the mission–more important?” My sense is that if you send more gunfighters, you get into more gunfights. And I don’t think that’s ever worked out for anybody. There’s precious little experience that would point to the fact that we can kill enough Pashtuns to where they’d say, “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

So far, the U.S. strategy has been to isolate the Taliban. Are you saying that’s not possible?

You know, you have to start with this question: What are the Taliban? You would be correct if you described the Taliban as a Pashtun movement. If you described all the people that you’re engaging in combat operations with as “Taliban,” you’re including a lot of criminal gangs, you’re describing a lot of kids being paid to carry guns, you’ve got a lot of local-interest Pashtuns, and you’ve got some of the fervent Muslim, faith-driven Taliban. I don’t know what the proportions are of each group. But the point is, we’re going to have to start-over and define who our adversary is and what our mission is. And then we have to ask, “What kind of deals can I possibly work out along the way if I’m not convinced that I can kill enough of these people to bring them to heel?”…

[snip]

…The problem we face in Afghanistan and Pakistan goes beyond Taliban and al-Qaeda. A big piece of Afghanistan and Pakistan are in total turmoil, if for no other reason than because we’re there.

[snip]

Do you think there’s a moderate Pashtun force that would be willing to say, “We’re not going to run our country in the way that the Taliban did”? Because it would be hard for the U.S. to turn things over to a Taliban-style government.

There may be some Taliban that are moderate. We call every pissed off Pashtun a Taliban, just like every pissed off Vietnamese was V.C. We’re going to have to consider providing enough security–not going out and doing kinetic operations–so that they can regenerate the traditional, tribal elder system and build their own security. We’re calling this “militias” now, [but we need indigenous forces that can say,] “O.K., this is our district. We’ve lived here for 20,000 years, and we’re going to pull ourselves together. All I want from you, America (or the Canadians, or the Dutch, or whatever, the Brits), is a little security. We’ll have our share, we’ll do our thing, and we’ll even accept some arms and money to police this area.” And it may be Taliban Pashtuns that were somehow associated with it that will do it, and then they put up their sign that says, in their own Pashto language, “Don’t mess with Texas.” Or, “Don’t come into this district if you want to behave badly.” And if that happens, maybe you can make some progress. But if we don’t look at that, then we end up with “kinetic operations” and sending more guns and fighters to the gunfights, and publishing more body counts. Source

(Consider this at present a rough draft – some noodling on the topic – subject to revision, expansion and alteration as time and energy permit.) Updated, expanded and links added Feb. 6 5:30 a.m., again at 11 p.m., Feb. 7 3:15 p.m., 11:30 p.m.

What are the congressional Republicans afraid of?

Under the previous administration was passed a bill which virtually no one read or fully understood (and that administration deliberately and purposely worked to keep it vague, toothless and unfocused), passed in a legislative Chicken Little rush, with no strings attached to speak of. The funds in that bill were often doled out hodge-podge or in reaction to whatever the headline of the day might have been, and to this day their use remains hazy and untrackable. Lack of transparency, lack of accountability, lack of even a plan more detailed than ’shovel it out’ are what transpired.

That money is gone, via management haphazard, for purposes often indeterminate and for use and implementation shrouded and inconsistent with purported policy. That money is one, yet the miasma of the economy deepens and spreads. That money is gone, but the need for economic stimulus remains demonstrable and on a Topsy-like growth curve.

Now comes along a bill, by design not piecemeal (the core of its construction in the works via research and debate literally since the day after the election), with budgeting calculated by use and spending to be audited. Now comes along a bill not just designed to bail out, but to work on patching the holes and provide the labor to do so.

This bill is, of course, neither perfect nor a panacea. Like any spending bill ever submitted for a vote in Congress in living memory, it contains items which may be questionable, insertions jammed in by the ego of individual congresspeople and narrowly-defined spending geared to specific interests or constituencies. If a perfect bill is a goal, one would have to dither and wait until some time well after the Sun has burnt itself out.

The bulk of congressional Republicans (their own party self-diagnosed as bereft of ideas) now prance and yelp that, because the bill they supported under the Bush administration, and which was so ham-handedly and spottily handled under the Bus administration, did not clean up the situation, therefore a new bill of specific, rather than generic, funding, to be handled under a new administration openly promising more mature, sober, professional and specific targeting, oversight and maintenance will likewise have minimal effect.

It’s like saying that because pissing (while keeping the eyes tight shut) towards one part of a burning building didn’t put out the fire, it is therefore useless and senseless to bring in the fire hoses. Trickle-down firefighting is a loser’s game and an arsonist’s dream. Put another way, assault the table with an axe and you lose the privilege of having a seat at the table.

What are the congressional Republicans saying to the new president? They are paraphrasing their hero and, in a nutshell, demanding “Mr. Obama, tear down this country.”

For any party, majority or minority, fear is a constrictive blindfold to the evidence of the vagaries of actual happenstance. Whether by inertia borne of association with the last administration and its widespread policy of power through fear, or by dint of fear of the necessity of directly dealing with territory unknown in modern times, the stench of fear is prevalent.

What are they afraid of involving the real world consequences of massive accelerated stimulus from the only entity with pockets deep enough to provide it?

They are afraid that it just might work.

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The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.
– – Hubert H. Humphrey

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Following up:

Let’s review some of the more silly arguments about the stimulus bill, starting with the notion that “only” 75 percent of the money can be spent in the next two years, and the rest is therefore “wasted.”

As any economist will tell you, the economy tends to be forward-looking and emotional. So if businesses and households can see immediate benefits from a program while knowing that a bit more stimulus is on the way, they are likely to feel more confident that the recovery will be sustained. That confidence, in turn, will make them more likely to take the risk of buying big-ticket items now and investing in stocks or future ventures.

Moreover, much of the money that can’t be spent right away is for capital improvements such as building and maintaining schools, roads, bridges and sewer systems, or replacing equipment — stuff we’d have to do eventually. So another way to think of this kind of spending is that we’ve simply moved it up to a time, to a point when doing it has important economic benefits and when the price will be less.

Equally specious is the oft-heard complaint that even some of the immediate spending is not stimulative.

“This is not a stimulus plan, it’s a spending plan,” Nebraska’s freshman senator, Mike Johanns (R), said Wednesday in a maiden floor speech full of budget-balancing orthodoxy that would have made Herbert Hoover proud. The stimulus bill, he declared, “won’t create the promised jobs. It won’t activate our economy.”

Johanns was too busy yesterday to explain this radical departure from standard theory and practice. Where does the senator think the $800 billion will go? Down a rabbit hole? Even if the entire sum were to be stolen by federal employees and spent entirely on fast cars, fancy homes, gambling junkets and fancy clothes, it would still be an $800 billion increase in the demand for goods and services — a pretty good working definition for economic stimulus. The only question is whether spending it on other things would create more long-term value, which it almost certainly would.

[snip]

Actually, what’s striking is that supposedly intelligent people are horrified at the thought that, during a deep recession, government might try to help the economy by buying up-to-date equipment for the people who protect us from epidemics and infectious diseases, by hiring people to repair environmental damage on federal lands and by contracting with private companies to make federal buildings more energy-efficient.

What really irks so many Republicans, of course, is that all the stimulus money isn’t being used to cut individual and business taxes, their cure-all for economic ailments, even though all the credible evidence is that tax cuts are only about half as stimulative as direct government spending. [ed. note: see relevant chart here]

[snip]

Spending is stimulus, no matter what it’s for and who does it. The best spending is that which creates jobs and economic activity now, has big payoffs later and disappears from future budgets. Source

Look, no one bill – not the House bull, not the Senate bill, not any bill which is the final product of a conference committee – is going to be a cure-all, fix all instrument. But staunching the bleeding is an absolute primary requirement when laboring to stabilize the patient.

The Sisyphean schema, indeed.

I really don’t understand how bipartisanship is ever going to work when one of the parties is insane. Imagine trying to negotiate an agreement on dinner plans with your date, and you suggest Italian and she states her preference would be a meal of tire rims and anthrax. If you can figure out a way to split the difference there and find a meal you will both enjoy, you can probably figure out how bipartisanship is going to work the next few years. Source

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How bad? That bad, and still plummeting.

And what are among the items the economic troglodytes want to slash? How’s about programs well outside the lifestyle sphere of Wall Street honchos, but well within that of the newly jobless.

Latest Cuts To The Stim Package: Head Start, Child Nutrition, Food Stamps Public Transit Source

Per the above link, increases in defense spending? Yet more into the rathole which the Department of Defense has already prompted to confess totally and completely “lost” at the least $1 trillion (and who knows how much more since)? And that admission was before the massive additional budget totals and supplementary war funding showered on them by the previous administration. Such figures (which logically must be larger after the previous regime) would have been than enough to fund the largest stimulus plan under consideration, with a more than tidy sum left over. Or, alternatively, to more than wipe out a yearly deficit.

The urgency of now:

While economists remain divided on the role of government generally, an overwhelming number from both parties are saying that a government stimulus package — even a flawed one — is urgently needed to help prevent a steeper slide in the economy.

Many economists say the precise size and shape of the package developing in Congress matter less than the timing, and that any delay is damaging.

“Most of the things in the package, the big dollar amounts, are things that are pretty quick stimulus and need to be done,” said Alice Rivlin, who was former president Bill Clinton’s budget director and who criticized aspects of the proposed stimulus in congressional testimony two weeks ago. “Is it a perfect package? Of course not. But we’re past that. Let’s just do it.” Source

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That many, perhaps the bulk, of the jobs envisioned for funding involve construction, teaching, state and local projects, etc. (cough - union labor - cough), is that as well what those same head-in-the-sand Republicans fear?

It must be mentioned that we don’t know the circumstances of the reported confession (i.e., whether or not it was coerced). But what is reported is a picture of psychosis — of a bitter, superstitious, delusional, crazy as a bedbug, heinous, exceptionally criminal serial sociopath.

A woman suspected of recruiting more than 80 female suicide bombers has confessed to organising their rapes so she could later convince them that martyrdom was the only way to escape the shame. Source

For years now it has been torrentially raining cash, and too many shady, greedy, mercenary, malfeasant or just plain incompetent or compromised or clandestine people have had a near-infinite supply of buckets.

“Before we go pouring more money in, we really need to know what we’re trying to accomplish (in Afghanistan),” said Ginger Cruz, deputy special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction. “And at what point do you turn off the spigot so you’re not pouring money into a black hole?”

[snip]

Cruz, along with Stuart Bowen, the top U.S. official overseeing Iraq’s reconstruction, delivered a grim report to the Wartime Contracting Commission. Their assessment, along testimony from Thomas Gimble of the Defense Department inspector general’s office, laid out a history of poor planning, weak oversight and greed that soaked U.S. taxpayers and undermined American forces in Iraq.

[snip]

Congress created the bipartisan panel a year ago over the objections of the Bush White House, which complained the Justice Department might be forced to disclose sensitive information about investigations.

There are 154 open criminal investigations into allegations of bribery, conflicts of interest, defective products, bid rigging and theft in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait, said Gimble, the Pentagon’s principal deputy inspector general. Source