Senate Confronts The Aftermath Of The Larry Craig
Scandal...

post from DownWithTyranny! on 08 January 2009 01:00:00 PM. © DownWithTyranny!

... with a new "How To" video for male evacuation etiquette. Too late for poor Larry Craig, who announced today he's not going to try to overturn his convictions of soliciting sex in a public toilet after all (too busy writing a book and setting up a consulting business), but perhaps in time to save the senatorial careers of Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and John Barrasso (R-WY). The House needs a copy urgently.

video details and more

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Madoff Had Signed Checks To Employees In Desk At
Time Of Arrest

post from TPMMuckraker on 08 January 2009 12:56:00 PM. © TPMMuckraker

The Wall Street Journal is reporting on its homepage that, according to prosecutors, Bernard Madoff had $173 million in signed checks made out to his friends and employees in his office desk at the time of his arrest.

News reports immediately after Madoff's arrest revealed that, after confessing the alleged fraud to his sons, he asked them for time to distribute bonuses to his firm's employees.

From the Journal at the time:

Mr. Madoff told them he planned to surrender to authorities, but first, he wanted to pay certain employees portions of the $200 million to $300 million dollars that was left.

And earlier this week, the Associated Press reported:

Prosecutors on Monday said disgraced financier Bernard Madoff violated bail conditions by mailing about $1 million worth of jewelry and other assets to relatives and should be jailed without bail.

Investigators have been working to figure out what Madoff did with the billions he's alleged to have stolen.

Yesterday, the Journal reported that shortly before his arrest, Madoff received $250 million from Carl Shapiro, an early friend and backer, in what was believed to be an effort to stave off his firm's collapse.

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The Daily Rant ©

post from My Left Wing - Front Page on 08 January 2009 12:50:58 PM. © My Left Wing - Front Page

I guess I missed all the excitement yesterday of the server hack at Soapblox. Evidently, that's what it was, according to the "press release" on their front page; somebody hacked their servers. (It did finally induce me to sign up for Facebook.) They're back, and Paul sounds really pissed.

Assholes. The hackers, I mean. Criminal assholes, at that. Guess the phishing scams weren't paying well enough.

My attitude with car/house alarms is this: I can't expect to foil the real experts, should any not working for governments or multinationals decide to target me. The best I can hope for is to discourage the dedicated amateur. With the 'net, the problem is: the "dedicated amateur" is next week's "real expert". Fortunately, it seems the ISP's servers caught it and minimized the damage. We hope.

I frankly don't care if it was a) some teenager trying to make a "name", b) an unhappy previous soapblox user with some tech savvy, or c) a criminal enterprise hoping to get a "back door" to some stealable assets. I hope that they catch the assholes who did this, that they are in some country with which we have extradition treaties (not bloody likely, I know), and that their asses rot in jail for a good long time.

Without Internet access.

Read The Full Article:
http://www.myleftwing.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=24053

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The Daily Rant

post from My Left Wing - Front Page on 08 January 2009 12:50:58 PM. © My Left Wing - Front Page

Assholes. The hackers, I mean. Criminal assholes, at that. Guess the phishing scams weren't paying well enough.

Without Internet access.

Read The Full Article:
http://www.myleftwing.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=24053

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Ill. House Panel Recommends Blagojevich
Impeachment

post from TalkLeft on 08 January 2009 12:50:00 PM. © TalkLeft

A panel of the Illinois House has released its report recommending that Ill. Gov. Rod Blagojevich be impeached. The full report is here.

The report finds "the totality of the evidence" provides cause to impeach the governor.

The panel may vote on whether to approve the report today. If it approves, the full House could vote tomorrow, and then pass it to the Illinois Senate.

The list of exhibits attached to the report, beginning at page 68, is lengthy. Many look quite interesting. They are available here.

Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TalkleftThePoliticsOfCrime/~3/agCRhcyA-HQ/0252

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Obama's Economic Push: The Good, the Bad & the
Ugly

post from Open Left - Front Page on 08 January 2009 12:49:43 PM. © Open Left - Front Page

Note: Per Chris's introduction, I'm thrilled to be starting full-time here at OpenLeft. As you may[...]

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http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/OpenLeft-FrontPage/~3/506427840/showDiary.do

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Perle Washes His Hands Of Iraq: I Was Not An
‘Architect Of That War,’ Neocons Had No Influence

post from Think Progress on 08 January 2009 12:48:00 PM. © Think Progress

Over the past few weeks, many Bush administration officials have begun rewriting history in an effort to burnish President Bush’s legacy. Following suit, neoconservative war hawk Richard Perle has taken the opportunity to polish his own record during the Bush years — mainly on Iraq.

In the latest issue of The National Interest, Perle devotes 4,600 words — not to congratulate President Bush for invading Iraq — but to wipe his, and the whole neoconservative movement’s, hands clean of the whole affair. In the essay, he categorically denies that both he — and neoconservative ideology in general — had any influence on the Bush administration in its decision to go to war:

I have been widely but wrongly depicted as deeply involved in the making of administration policy, especially with respect to Iraq. Facts notwithstanding, there are some fifty thousand entries on Google in which I am described as an “architect,” and often as “the architect,” of the Iraq War. I certainly supported and argued publicly for the decision to remove Saddam, as I do in what follows. But had I been the architect of that war, our policy would have been very different. […]
But about the many mistakes made in Iraq, one thing is certain: they had nothing to do with ideology. They did not draw inspiration from or reflect neoconservative ideas and they were not the product of philosophical or ideological influences outside the government.

Perle is right. He strongly advocated publicly for the invasion of Iraq, especially after 9/11, even making claims that Saddam Hussein had links to Osama bin Laden (an assertion he later claimed he never said). But in fact, Perle had direct access to top administration officials during the run up to the war. Former CIA director George Tenet recalled that shortly after 9/11, Perle told him that “Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday, they bear responsibility.”

Moreover, the neoconservative influence on the Bush administration, particularly regarding Iraq, has been well documented. For Perle to claim otherwise is beyond absurd.

Seeing that Perle cannot deny he supported the invasion, he then offers two separate justifications for both outcomes of the WMD argument. First, he says the belief that Saddam had WMD was “widely accepted” at the time of the invasion. But, noting that no WMD were found, Perle then says the “salient issue” was not that Saddam had WMD but that he “could produce them” someday. Nevertheless, Perle concludes, “no one should take seriously the facile conclusion that invading Iraq was mistaken because we now know Saddam did not possess stockpiles of WMD.”

Except this statement is a direct contradiction of what Perle wrote earlier this year in an article for The American Interest. Then, he claimed if we knew Saddam had no WMD in March 2003, the U.S. shouldn’t have invaded:

If Saddam had provided solid, confirmable evidence of the destruction of the stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction he was believed to possess, we would not have invaded.

Indeed, no matter how many incoherent, contradictory and misleading essays Perle concocts trying to absolve himself from the Iraq debacle, like his fellow Iraq war architects, it’s clear he has no leg to stand on.

Read The Full Article:
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/01/08/perle-iraq-architect/

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Obama announces the end of 'an era of profound
irresponsibility'

post from Crooks and Liars on 08 January 2009 12:45:52 PM. © Crooks and Liars

Obama Speech 1-08-09
icon Download | Play icon Download | Play

President-elect Barack Obama laid out his case for an economic-stimulus package this morning, warning that the current recession could "linger for years" unless Congress acts to pump historic sums of federal cash into the economy. He added that the current economic crisis is ?unlike any we have seen in our lifetime.?

We start 2009 in the midst of a crisis unlike any we have seen in our lifetime - a crisis that has only deepened over the last few weeks. Nearly two million jobs have now been lost, and on Friday we are likely to learn that we lost more jobs last year than at any time since World War II. Just in the past year, another 2.8 million Americans who want and need full-time work have had to settle for part-time jobs. Manufacturing has hit a twenty-eight year low. Many businesses cannot borrow or make payroll. Many families cannot pay their bills or their mortgage. Many workers are watching their life savings disappear. And many, many Americans are both anxious and uncertain of what the future will hold.
I don't believe it's too late to change course, but it will be if we don't take dramatic action as soon as possible. If nothing is done, this recession could linger for years. The unemployment rate could reach double digits. Our economy could fall $1 trillion short of its full capacity, which translates into more than $12,000 in lost income for a family of four. We could lose a generation of potential and promise, as more young Americans are forced to forgo dreams of college or the chance to train for the jobs of the future. And our nation could lose the competitive edge that has served as a foundation for our strength and standing in the world.

And he made clear he understands how we got here:

This crisis did not happen solely by some accident of history or normal turn of the business cycle, and we won't get out of it by simply waiting for a better day to come, or relying on the worn-out dogmas of the past. We arrived at this point due to an era of profound irresponsibility that stretched from corporate boardrooms to the halls of power in Washington, DC. For years, too many Wall Street executives made imprudent and dangerous decisions, seeking profits with too little regard for risk, too little regulatory scrutiny, and too little accountability. Banks made loans without concern for whether borrowers could repay them, and some borrowers took advantage of cheap credit to take on debt they couldn't afford. Politicians spent taxpayer money without wisdom or discipline, and too often focused on scoring political points instead of the problems they were sent here to solve. The result has been a devastating loss of trust and confidence in our economy, our financial markets, and our government.

Expect Republicans to squawk at talk like this. But the fact is that conservative governance got us into this mess. Obama (and the rest of us) are betting that progressive governance will get us out.

Susie Madrak:

Obviously, this isn't how I would handle it.

I'd say to the American people, "Look, I'm done pretending that these evil Republican bastards and their greedy, short-sighted economic policies haven't put us in this deep economic ditch. They want tax cuts to please their base, but they're not getting them BECAUSE WE ALREADY KNOW THEY WON'T WORK.

"What will work is what I've proposed, and it's up to you, the people, to call your congress critters and senators to tell them pointblank: they either support our massive stimulus package, or you and your neighbors will be storming their homes and offices with pitchforks and torches. I don't know about you, but I'm sick and tired of treating the ravings of these mendacious excuses for human beings as reality, and you should be, too.

"We didn't do our job, any of us. If we had, we wouldn't be in this mess. In the name of bipartisanship, we actually treated their destructive ideas as if they had value. Boy, were we wrong! Well, no more Mr. Nice Guy. Time to tell these Republican maroons to get the hell out of the way, or they can go back to the free market to find out what they're really worth.

"Thank you, and may God bless the countless victims of this Republican greed."

Read The Full Article:
http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/obama-announces-end-era-profound-irr

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Specter and Grassley double team Holder

It looks like Arlen Specter is emerging as the point man for Republican efforts to take President-elect Obama "down a peg," by stymying the confirmation of Eric Holder as Attorney General.

Speaking from the Senate floor on Tuesday, Specter, who had previously said he had "not taken any position" on the nominee, blasted Holder, comparing him to Alberto Gonzales. In less than two months, Specter went from saying that Holder's role in the pardon of Marc Rich would be ''a factor to consider,'' to comparing him to the worst Attorney General in recent memory. Patrick Leahy responded to Specter's ridiculous assertion, saying:

Any effort to question his character is unfounded. Every Republican voted for Alberto Gonzales, and felt his character merited confirmation. Certainly Eric Holder greatly exceeds that test.

That's putting it mildly. Specter has the gall to compare Holder to the man whose resume includes: politicizing the Department of Justice; who claimed, under oath, to Arlen Specter, that there was no guarantee of habeus corpus in the Constitution; who was intimately involved in carrying out and covering up George Bush's warrantless, domestic wiretap program; and who helped craft the administration's torture policy, before finally, with the threat of impeachment hanging over his head, resigning in disgrace.

Specter went from having no position to full-blown, hyperbolic outrage in a matter of weeks. What happened? Is he worried about a GOP-financed primary opponent in 2010? Afraid his Republican pals will threaten is committee assignments again? Or is he just following orders from Karl Rove?

And while Specter may be the point man on this Republican-led smear, Chuck Grassley is doing his part, making good on his promise from last month, to tie Holder to the scandal-plagued Rod Blagojevich:

It signals that it’s not going to be a smooth confirmation ... we need to know what the relationship is with Governor Blagojevich. And I don’t say that in denigrating in any way except Governor Blagojevich’s recent troubles raises questions with anybody that’s had a relationship with him.

And by the way, It seems that consistency isn't a concern for Grassley, given that moments before he was insisting that Roland Burris should be immediately seated in the U.S. Senate.

The apparent plan here is to force Barack Obama to spend political capital on getting Eric Holder confirmed. And what's also apparent is that, as has been true for the past eight years, when Karl Rove says jump, Republicans ask, how high...or low.

Read The Full Article:
http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/1RaoXpIJvr8/681029

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Senate's Democratic majority clears path for
Roland Burris (Chicago Tribune)

Chicago Tribune:
Senate's Democratic majority clears path for Roland Burris — Pressure by President-elect Barack Obama leads to about-face — WASHINGTON — The U.S. Senate's Democratic majority opened the way Wednesday for Roland Burris to become Illinois' next senator, pressured by President-elect Barack Obama …