• President Obama signed executive orders today reversing much of the Bush administration's anti-labor policies and announced that Vice President Joe Biden would head a middle class task force that will rely on leadership from economist Jared Bernstein. In addition, Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill has introduced a bill that would put a cap on the extravagant salaries and bonuses that so irked the president yesterday, as long as those firms continue to receive federal bailout money. Finally, Sam Stein reports on the conference call held between conservative activists and recipients of federal bailout money last Fall to organize opposition to labor initiatives being pursued by Democrats.
• Today New Hampshire Senator Judd Gregg confirmed rumors late last night that the Obama administration is considering him for commerce secretary. Gregg, a Republican, could be replaced by a Democrat, giving them a 60-seat majority in the Senate (assuming Al Franken prevails in Minnesota).
• After several rounds of ballots and candidates dropping out, Michael Steele was elected RNC chairman, the first African-American to hold the position. Although, if the comments of Mitch McConnell are any indication, the GOP faces a substantial challenge to reinvent itself as a competitive national party; their best electoral chances currently consist of rooting for the Democrats' economic stimulus package to fail.
• Following a similar vote in the U.S. House two weeks ago, the Senate passed SCHIP expansion that won't find itself in danger of tasting former president Bush's veto pen. Additionally, President Obama has signaled that the the family planning aid that was stripped from the House stimulus bill this week will get dedicated treatment, potentially as early as next week.
• Someone ought to tell John McCain that he's no longer running for president and hence doesn't need to make gestures to the conservative base to gain their support. Either that or the Arizona Senator actually believes Rush Limbaugh has a "wide viewing audience" and that it was wrong for President Obama to criticize him. Or maybe it has something to do with the fact that Limbaugh is about as reviled a conservative figure as George Bush is.
• You know, there actually are conservative economists out there who have voiced reasonable criticism of the economic stimulus package making its way though Congress and are able to make arguments with which liberals can engage. So I'm a bit baffled that in addition to the usual supply-side wizardry extolled by House Republicans, their own stimulus bill relies on fuzzy math that Mitt Romney has decided to double down on.
• Samatha Power -- exiled from the Obama primary campaign for calling Hillary Clinton a "monster" -- has been brought back into the fold to serve as senior director for multilateral affairs at the National Security Council, a position that will involve working closely with the new secretary of state. I predict the D.C. gossip mongers will have a field day with this one and be oblivious to the fact that Power and Clinton are both, you know, professionals who can do their jobs without resorting to petty conflict.
• I have no idea why Arlen Specter thinks that three judges nominated by former president Bush ought to be renominated by President Obama. Did he sleep through the election?

--Mori Dinauer

President Obama’s unveiling today of his administration’s Task Force on Middle Class Working Families is the most unambiguous statement yet from the president of his support for unions. Surrounded by union leaders from both the AFL-CIO and Change To Win (which generated the idea for the task force some months ago) and by Vice-President Biden, who will chair the task force, Obama delivered comments were even more emphatic than his official actions.

“I don’t see organized labor as part of the problem,” the president said. “To me, it’s part of the solution.”

Lest anyone miss the point, he added, “You cannot have a strong middle class without a strong labor union.”

But for a few stray remarks from Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, that’s the strongest endorsement of the case for unions that an American president has ever made.

The task force, whose executive director will be Biden’s economic adviser, Jared Bernstein (formerly of the Economic Policy Institute and the most liberal of the new administration’s major economists), will be comprised of the Secretaries of Labor, Education, Commerce and Health and Human Services, as well the directors of the Economic Council (Larry Summers), the Domestic Policy Council (Melody Barnes), the OMB (Peter Orszag) and the Council of Economic Advisers (Christinea Romer). Its first full meeting will come late next month in Philadelphia, on the topic of green jobs. The task force’s goals, according to its website, include “restoring labor standards, including workplace safety,” “helping to protect middle-class and working-family incomes” and “protecting retirement security.”

In conjunction with announcing the task force, Obama also issued three executive orders on labor issues: one requiring federal contractors to offer jobs to their current workers when receiving new contracts; the second preventing payment to federal contractors for any funds they spend opposing their workers’ attempts to organize; and the third repealing a Bush administration order requiring federal contractors to post notices telling workers how they can withhold dues payments from the union representing them if they don’t like the union’s politics.

The first order comports closely to some municipal “worker retention” ordinances that various living-wage advocacy groups have persuaded city and county governments to adopt over the past decade. In weeks to come, labor leaders expect Obama to sign more labor-backed executive orders, including one to require project labor agreements between contractors and construction unions on federally-funded infrastructure projects.

Probably the most significant part of today’s proceedings is Obama’s observation that a strong labor movement is essential to building a strong middle class. It’s certainly a historically grounded assertion: The only time in American history that median household income increased at the identical level that productivity increased was the period from 1947 to 1973, when both rates increased by 104 percent. Not coincidentally, this was the only time in American history when union labor constituted more than a quarter of the work force. Over the past decade, with the unionized percentage of the private-sector workforce reduced to single digits, productivity increases have enriched only the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans, according to the work of economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez.

But it’s not just the historical accuracy of Obama’s remarks that is notable, however much they represent a departure from the practice of his predecessor. What’s really notable here is that Obama is publicly, as president, laying the basis for his case for the Employee Free Choice Act, though his public push for the bill is still to come. A number of union leaders have recently told me that they expect the bill to begin to move through congress this spring, and they sound relatively optimistic that they can get to the magic number of 60 in the Senate. With his comments today, Obama certainly has given them a basis for their optimism.

--Harold Meyerson

In some ways, the race for RNC chair was terribly predictable. Sharing a breath of fresh air outside the TAP office with atypical liberal Tim Fernholz, I predicted that if Obama won, the monochromatic GOP would be desperate to field an RNC chair with a black face, and so they would pick Michael Steele. While Ken Blackwell struck all the right positions, the party had already been burned by a doctrinaire conservative who wasn't very smart. But I would never have predicted that in a six round contest, the fight would come down to Steele and Katon Dawson, a former member of an all-white country club who experienced his political awakening during a fight against school busing.

Steele is smart. From the beginning of the race, he plucked exactly the right strings. In an interview with the Washington Times, he decried "country Club conservatives," a move made more meaningful by Dawson's entrance into the race. From Sarah Palin, such complaints rang false; despite her populist tone Palin wanted to be a part of the country club set as much as anyone. But from Steele, it sounded genuine.

But Steele, like Blackwell, struck his own Faustian bargain with the racist impulses of the GOP. He alleged that Barack Obama "played the race card beautifully" during the election, adding that the GOP shouldn't go easy on Obama "just because the President of the United States happens to be a black man." Both of these views put him at odds with the majority of black folks in the country, who are solidly behind the president and who won't countenance outreach based on the idea that Obama had it easier because he's black. The subtle implication was that the party could change its face, even if it didn't change its tone.

When former RNC candidate Chip Saltsman sent around a CD to RNC donors containing Paul Shanklin's song "Barack, the Magic Negro," Blackwell took that Faustian bargain to the bank, alleging that everyone was being too sensitive. Steele fumed in silence, expressing his frustration only to bloggers from the Center for American Progress. "It reinforces a negative stereotype of the party," Steele said. "We have a opportunity to step in the breach and clear that up and make sure that people appreciate and know that look, this is not representative of the party as a whole, this is not a direction that we want to go in or a system that we believe." 

But Steele, loyally obeying the 11th Commandment, ("Thou shall not speak ill of a fellow Republican"), didn't step into the breach, he stayed silent. In doing so he showed an unwillingness to curb the GOP's most harmful impulses, even when he knows they're hurting the party. As RNC chair, he'll have to find someway to rescind the implicit agreement he made at the beginning of the race to be the mouthpiece for traditional Republican views on race. Filtering conservative racial narratives through a black face won't temper the rage of those affected, and they won't do much to change the makeup of the party, no matter who's in charge.

Reaching out to minorities from the party of Rush Limbaugh won't be easy, even if the GOP weren't in the midst of an identity crisis. And Steele will have to contend with the fact that man he has to spend the next four years tearing down is the same one he owes his new job to.

- A. Serwer

A source in the Senate passes on the following info: Part of the hypothetical deal to make Republican Senator Judd Gregg Commerce Secretary is the appointment, by New Hampshire's Democratic Governor John Lynch, of a moderate Republican to his seat for the last two years. The potential choice? Former Republican governor (and head of Republicans for Lynch during the Democrat's 2006 campaign) Walter Peterson. Peterson, who is 86 years old, would serve as a caretaker until the regularly scheduled 2010 election. Not quite the same as having 60 votes in the Senate for the Dems, and I don't know much about Peterson, but I get the sense that he would fall into the older tradition of Yankee Republicans who don't mind crossing party lines.

-- Tim Fernholz

When taking questions from the crowd he was asked if money from whatever congressional stimulus bill is signed into law would be assured for communities of color. Rangel emphasized that the House bill includes “billions for community organizations to go out and educate their people on energy efficiency.” But another questioner noted that government grants tend to disproportionally go to mainstream environmental organizations rather than smaller EJ groups.

Rangel responded by rambling off in a separate direction, discussing the upcoming Census. He similarly dodged a question about whether the green workforce development funds will benefit minority communities that need jobs most, instead riffing on the need to re-educate public school teachers.

His response to a question on how immigrant workers would figure into the new green workforce, posed by Antonio Diaz of People Organizing to Demand Environmental & Economic Rights (PODER), did eek an honest answer out of Rangel: “I wonder too.”

“It seems to me that our religious organizations need to organize,” around this issue and answer the question of “what role do they see themselves playing in society besides giving people hope and to pray? … Where is the voice of church synagogues and mosques on this moral question?”

This was, needless to say, a disappointing answer. But to be fair, it’s a question few people have the answer to. Unfair, however, to cast responsibility off on the faith community, especially when few are represented at this conference.

--Brentin Mock

(Photo courtesy Kamau Ware)

Booker T. Washington is one of those historical figures whose legacy has suffered somewhat because of the political inclinations of those who hold the responsibility of preserving it. Some of his thoughts about black advancement, namely that at the time, black folks should have accepted racist white hegemony, abdicating their rights while pursuing smaller, more economically based goals, might seem absurd in an age where we have come to take many of those rights for granted.

At the same time, as Kelefah Sanneh reminds us in his piece for The New Yorker this week (subscribers only at the moment), Washington's philosophy of economic self-sufficiency, personal responsibility and to a certain extent, disengagement from white society, provides the intellectual underpinning for some of the most radical black political groups, including Marcus Garvey's UNIA, (still the largest black organization ever created) and the Nation of Islam. As Sanneh points out, much of what we remember of Washington comes from W.E.B DuBois scathing critique of him as an accomodator of white racism, in part because DuBois was a better writer and he came into his own at a different time. It's probably also true that DuBois' dream of a black elite appeals more to the elite who are often the caretakers of history. But even DuBois came around eventually, Sanneh writes, admonishing a student never to forget that Washington "unlike you, bears the mark of the lash on his back."

It's easy to see Washington's goals as modest now, Sanneh points out, while at the time the idea of even vocational education for black folks was seen as quite radical by many, and was managed by Washington's careful skill as an orator and advocate. Southerners were scandalized by his dinner with President Theodore Roosevelt, by the president's decision to allow his wife and daughter to sit at a table with a black man. His radicalism was quiet, and carefully obscured by things like his willingness to make "darky" jokes.  Still, while it's impossible to put oneself in Washington's shoes, I can't help but wonder if he would have seen Barack Obama's campaign in its early stages as something frivolous and indulgent, an anathema to the kind of slow, sure progress he felt was inevitable as long as black folks played their position. Certainly, he wouldn't have been the only one. I suppose the lesson here is that while there's a time for casting down your bucket where you are, there's also a time for deciding that where you are just ain't good enough, no matter what people tell you.

-- A. Serwer

There's been back-and-forth reporting over the last week or so about Dennis Ross, who has hypothetically been chosen as the Special Envoy to Iran for the new administration; Laura Rozen rounds up the confusion here. In any case, let me express my hope that Ross is not appointed to this position. As Matt has noted, Ross has a ton of experience working on the Israel-Palestine peace process -- dating back to his work in the State Department under George H.W. Bush -- but none with Iran. Some of his writing on Iran has indicated support for an approach somewhat at odds with with the Obama administration might pursue. For instance, he suggests in this piece that an engagement based on the potential for increased sanctions, and not on the potential for future cooperation, is the best strategy for approaching the problem of Iran's nuclear program. I'm not sure that's the right approach to changing Iran's behavior.

Instead, let me suggest Flynt Leverett as the new administration's envoy to Iran. A former National Security Council staffer during the Bush administration who had worked at the State Department and the C.I.A, Leverett resigned in 2003 after a series of policy disagreements. So far as I know, he does not have a job in the current administration.

Leverett's views on Iran can be sussed out from this piece, which outlines the potential for a "grand bargain" with the state. But it's especially useful because it puts U.S. options in a forward-thinking strategic context, figuring out how to deal with the interests of both countries. It's all the more interesting given the news that some U.S. experts have been quietly and unofficially meeting with Iranian counterparts in Europe. Now, I don't know if Leverett has enough political juice to be named a special envoy, but he does seem to have a very clear idea about how to balance Iranian and U.S. interests and would represent a distinct change from the previous administration's approach, which is, I hope, what we're going for here.

UPDATE: Spencer talks about some of these issues, too.

-- Tim Fernholz

I hadn't seen the wealthy urban male proposing to "solve" the abortion debate by letting anti-choicers win (hey, women he knows will be able to get abortions, so sho cares, right?) routine in its pure form for a while, but Damon Linker is back to the plate:

How could Obama -- how could liberals, how could supporters of abortion rights -- both win and end the culture war, once and for all? By supporting the reversal or significant narrowing of Roe, allowing abortion policy to once again be set primarily by the states -- a development that would decisively divide and demoralize the conservative side of the culture war by robbing it of the identity politics that holds it together as a national movement.

• The idea that overturning Roe would "return the issue to the states" is transparently wrong, and the idea that having constant legislative battles about banning abortion at the state and federal level would somehow "end the culture war" is bizarre.
• Linker's claim that the pro-life movement was "conjured into being" by Roe is entirely false. Opposition to abortion legalization was very well-mobilized prior to 1973, which is why abortion was still illegal in most states with little immediate prospect for changing policy for the better. If the argument is that the movement expanded, this would seem to be the more trivial argument that winning creates more opposition. Linker's answer that it would therefore be better to lose seems...unconvincing.
• Linker's grasp on abortion law seems, at best, tenuous. Consider his claim that "in socially liberal Western Europe, where democratically elected legislatures readily place modest restrictions on abortion that would never be allowed to stand under current American constitutional law." My first question: what "modest" restriction of abortion (aside from husband notification laws) would not be permitted under current American constitutional law? (Linker shows no awareness that Casey even exists.) My second question: Does Linker realize that when you consider all factors -- most notably state funding -- abortion is probably more accessible to women in many Western Europeam countries than in the U.S.? I fear he does not, and indeed has never spent much time considering how abortion policy actually works on the ground.
• Another country Linker doesn't mention: Canada, where abortion is a federally protected right, abortion is both largely unregulated and state-funded, and yet policy has been stable and abortion is not a salient issue in national politics. And since it completely destroys his assertion that the "culture war" over abortion is solely the product of judicial intervention, I think you can understand why.

--Scott Lemieux

David Brooks has a very bad column on the stimulus legislation today. The best part is his decision to rely on statements made by Larry Summers last September, well before we had an understanding of the depth of the economic crisis. Perhaps if congress and the Bush administration had followed Summers' advice then, we wouldn't have the larger problems we have now. But we have gained a greater understanding of the depth of the crisis in the last five months, which is why Summers' advice has changed. But for Brooks' disingenuous purposes, five month-old quotes work just about right.

In any case: No, David, the legislation doesn't create permanent spending programs, it just boosts funding for existing programs in order to provide the most effective fiscal stimulus. No, David, it isn't too slow, as somewhere between 64 and 75 percent of the money will be spent in the next eighteen months, and no, David, the additional funding that will go out in fiscal 2011 and after isn't a waste, it is necessary because we will still be in a recession. And the administration does have plans to address both the financial and housing crises, it has also articulated its concerns about medium- and long-term fiscal responsibility, which apparently you have not bothered to learn about.

Maybe my favorite part of the column is this line:

As readers may know, the policy I am most passionate about is pre-K education. Yet I fervently hope that the Head Start expansion is dropped from this bill. A slapdash and shambolic expansion could discredit the whole idea.

Oh, sure. Expanding an incredibly well-understood, successful and broadly popular 43-year old program -- at a time when doing so would have important economic ramifications for the low-income people it serves and create jobs -- is a terrible idea.

-- Tim Fernholz

Not to open back up the great circumcision wars of 2007, but as someone who has written about experiments in using male circumcision as an HIV preventative, I feel obliged to recognize that the idea, it seems, has run amok. According to the UN's IRIN news service, Kenyan proponents of female genital mutilation are now claiming that the practice reduces women's likelihood of contracting the virus. Their rationale?

"When you are cut as a woman, you do not become promiscuous and it means you cannot get infected by HIV; even our men want circumcised girls who will not turn out to be prostitutes," said Grace Kemunto, a traditional circumciser.

I feel the need to make a bit of a mea culpa here. As encouraging as the studies were showing up to a 60 percent reduction in HIV infections among African men who had been circumcised as adults, I must now conclude that public health messaging must remain focused on safe sex and women's liberation. Transposing the experimental findings on men's circumcision and HIV onto women is especially dangerous, because FGM actually increases a woman's chance of contracting STIs -- not to mention the devastating effects the practice has on a woman's ability to experience sexual pleasure:

FGM/C increases a woman's risk of HIV primarily through the use of a single blade to cut several girls during traditional circumcision. There is also an increased risk of hemorrhage, leading to a greater likelihood of blood transfusions becoming necessary during circumcision, at childbirth, or as a result of vaginal tearing during sexual intercourse, with an even higher risk in areas where a safe blood supply cannot be guaranteed.

Horrifying.

--Dana Goldstein

David Cay Johnston has an interesting piece in the Columbia Journalism Review about the Obama press shop, and their over-reliance on "off the record" conversations. In my experience, albeit at a small opinion magazine, it was relatively easy during the campaign to have instant message chats and email exchanges with Obama spokespeople, but then almost impossible to arrange on-the-record phone interviews. It is very difficult for a reporter to do his or her job if the assumption on the part of the flack is that all conversations will be off-the-record, and that interview questions must be submitted in advance. Indeed, the element of surprise is crucial to a successful interview. It's not necessarily that the source should be caught off guard or be tricked into saying something he or she will regret. Rather, the idea is to avoid rehearsed, meaningless answers to fair questions.

The Obama administration absolutely ought to be held to a higher standard than the Bushies were when it comes to openness with the press.

--Dana Goldstein

Yesterday I had a post questioning whether Judge Pohl retained the authority to refuse President Obama's executive order to shut down the military commissions, given the text of the Military Commissions Act and the fact that the commissions are not independent Article III courts. Hina Shamfi, an attorney with the ACLU, which is coordinating with the counsel representing Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri, points me to section 949b of the MCA:

No person may attempt to coerce or, by any unauthorized means, influence—"the action of a military commission under this chapter, or any member thereof, in reaching the findings or sentence in any case [or] the action of any convening, approving, or reviewing authority with respect to his judicial acts...

"No person" probably also means the president himself. But that doesn't mean the ACLU is happy about Judge Pohl's decision, yesterday Anthony Romero put out a press release condemning it:

Judge Pohl's decision to unabashedly move forward in the al-Nashiri military commission case shows how officials held over from the Bush administration are exploiting ambiguities in President Obama's executive order as a strategy to undercut the president's unequivocal promise to shut down Guantánamo and end the military commissions. Judge Pohl's decision to move forward despite a clear statement from the president also raises questions about Secretary of Defense Gates – is he the 'new Gates' or is he the same old Gates under a new president? Secretary Gates has the power to stop the military commissions and ought to follow his new boss' directives.

As Dafna Linzer points out, al-Nashiri is among the detainees we know have been waterboarded.

Today, economists forecast that the Gross Domestic Product would drop at an annual rate of 3.8 percent in the final quarter of 2008 (it takes them a bit to figure this out). It's the largest one-quarter drop since 1982. A full 2 percent of that came from the decline in auto manufacturing. Consumer sales and investment also fell. Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors Christina Romer has this to say:

The large decline confirms the evidence from other indicators, such as payroll employment and the unemployment rate, that the U.S. economy continues to contract severely. Aggressive, well-designed fiscal stimulus is critical to reversing this severe decline and putting the economy on the road to recovery and improved long-run growth.

Or we could have a fringe libertarian tell us to do nothing and see how far that takes us.

-- Tim Fernholz

This post has been updated.

Via Dan Gilgoff comes the not-very-surprising news that President Obama will speak at the National Prayer Breakfast next week. Not surprising because every president since Eisenhower has been a speaker, and the event is a must-attend for political movers and shakers.

While it seems bland enough on the surface (apart from the always questionable mingling of religion and state affairs), the National Prayer Breakfast is actually the brainchild of Washington's most powerful network of fundamentalist Christians, according to Jeff Sharlet, author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. Last year, I sat down with Sharlet to discuss his book. In light of the current political climate, particularly The Family's political activism against labor unions and the New Deal, if you haven't read Sharlet's book, you should, or at least take a look at our Q and A.

--Sarah Posner

Always a special thrill for me to be able to write about New Hampshire politics. Seems that word on the Hill is that Republican Senator Judd Gregg is under consideration to become the new administration's Secretary of Commerce. Appointing Gregg to the post would, not coincidentally, give the Democrats a magically filibuster-proof 60 seats in the Senate, as NH Governor John Lynch would appoint a fellow Democrat to the seat. (It would also put an end to the subtle but increasingly bitter fight between NH Representatives Paul Hodes and Carol Shea-Porter over who would challenge Gregg for the seat in 2010).

Gregg, a relatively moderate Republican, and has already been working well with the new administration from his senate perch; from their point of view, they see a very credible face to offer the business community from a department that's unlikely to make many waves beyond pushing technoratic policy changes. It's also, god forbid, a bipartisan appointment to a position that has been very difficult to fill.

Why would Gregg take the position? Well, he's 61, and has been building a respectable political career in New Hampshire since the eighties as a Representative, Governor and now Senator. But in 2010 he's likely to face the most difficult race of his career as NH's Democratic-leaning trend continues and any number of reputable challengers could face him with strong backing from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Given that Gregg has never been a strong campaigner and that the GOP won't regain a Senate majority -- and thus give Gregg a shot at the Budget Committee Chairmanship -- before 2012 at the earliest, it may be that the prospect of raising a few million dollars and stumping the state in exchange for another six years in the minority doesn't appeal to the patrician Yankee.

On the other hand, a nice bipartisan capstone to his career would be a few years spent as Secretary of Commerce to a popular Democratic president. Will this come to fruition? No idea, and no doubt Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is begging Gregg to stay in his current post. It's unclear, though, what kind of inducements -- appreciation? -- McConnell could offer to Gregg, already a ranking member who has never expressed much interest in a leadership role. But if the administration convinces Gregg to come aboard, it would be a hell of a coup for the Democrats.

-- Tim Fernholz

• Yesterday, House Republicans -- along with 11 Democrats -- unanimously voted against the economic stimulus package despite President Obama's multiple outreach efforts. Yes, I know, shocking. Some  reactions: Greg Sargent asks the question I was thinking about, namely when will Obama start using the bully pulpit against the Republicans? Nate Silver describes The Republican Death Spiral. House Minority Whip Eric Cantor takes to the pages of Politico to plead "[a]t a moment when the country needs our help, it would be a great mistake for the House GOP to turn inward and simply become the party of 'no.'" Court jester Mark Halperin blames Obama for failing to concede to Republicans on every issue in the name of "bipartisanship." Think Progress documents that no matter who's in charge in Washington, cable news always deems it necessary to have twice as many Republicans on TV as Democrats. And de facto GOP leader Rush Limbaugh comes up with his own stimulus plan (seriously) and suggests he and the president can work together to pass it.
• Then there's the Senate. Jim DeMint seems convinced that Senate Republicans will be able to replicate what their House counterparts accomplished, and describes the current stimulus bill as a "mugging." Meanwhile, Democrats are busy trying to win the support of Republican moderates with a series of advertisements targeted at their home state constituents.
• Barack Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law today but the far more ambitious Paycheck Fairness Act could face a more precipitous challenge in Congress.
• Fair and Balanced: Politico publishes a companion piece to yesterday's ode to the "do-nothing" movement, looking at the more organized (if underplayed) effort to increase the size of the economic stimulus legislation.
• The Illinois State Senate voted unanimously to remove Gov. Rod Blagojevich from office, the first impeachment of a sitting governor in the state's history. Earlier Blagojevich had made an emotional plea for the legislative body to spare him.
• Tomorrow the RNC chooses a new chairman, and it looks like Chip Saltsman's enlightened opinion of Latinos is about as likely to win him that chair as his equally enlightened sense of humor about black folks.
• I'm telling you -- Karl Rove represents the decade's comedic zeitgeist. In his Wall St. Journal column, the jubilant former political strategist argues that the large number of people working in the White House -- compared to his time -- could politicize policy discussions and effect the quality of White House policy.
  
• Change you can believe in: Mike Griffin 86ed from NASA, replaced by interim director Christopher Scolese.
• One nice thing about having a president who reads newspapers every morning is that there's a good chance he'll get pissed off by what he reads in them from time to time. Like, say, learning about the mind-boggling huge bonuses Wall St. managers continue to receive even as they beg for money from the federal government: "[w]hen I saw an article today indicating that Wall Street bankers had given themselves $20 billion worth of bonuses -- the same amount of bonuses as they gave themselves in 2004 -- at a time when most of these institutions were teetering on collapse and they are asking for taxpayers to help sustain them, and when taxpayers find themselves in the difficult position that if they don't provide help that the entire system could come down on top of our heads -- that is the height of irresponsibility. It is shameful."

--Mori Dinauer

A major discussion of climate change and gender raised some interesting ideas around labor organizing here at the “Advancing Climate Justice” conference. The talk was led by Aimee Thorne-Thompsen of Pro-Choice Education Project, Shana Griffin of New Orleans’ Women’s Health and Justice Initiative, Rachel Harris of Women’s Environment & Development Organization and Dana Paredes of Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice.

The health of these workers is in a sense double-taxed, once by the fumes they inhale while working, and then again when climate disasters such as hurricanes and flooding occur due to global warming spurred by the greenhouse gases emitted from these industries.

Paredes’ group started the Participatory Research and Organizing Leadership Initiative for Safety and Health (POLISH) to advocate for better working conditions for Asian and Latina women, as well as to call for reform of the manufacturing processes of the producers.

Perhaps these industries and the women who work in them should get a close examination from the implementers of Obama’s American Reinvestment and Recovery Plan job stimulus experiment?

--Brentin Mock

A military commissions judge has refused the Obama administration's request for a 120-day continuance in the case of Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri, saying that the government's argument was "unpersuasive."

The government, Pohl wrote, sought a delay because if cases went ahead, the administration's review could "render moot any proceedings conducted during the review"; "necessitate re-litigation of issues"; or "produce legal consequences affecting options available to the Administration after completion of the review."

"The Commission is unaware of how conducting an arraignment would preclude any option by the administration," said Pohl in a written opinion, which was obtained by The Post. "Congress passed the military commissions act, which remains in effect. The Commission is bound by the law as it currently exists, not as it may change in the future."

Well, the law as it currently exists holds that the Secretary of Defense, "or by any officer or official of the
United States designated by the Secretary for that purpose," is the convening authority for the commissions. So it's not clear that the judge has the authority to refuse Section 7 of Obama's executive order, which states that:

The Secretary of Defense shall immediately take steps sufficient to ensure that during the pendency of the Review described in section 4 of this order, no charges are sworn, or referred to a military commission under the Military Commissions Act of 2006 and the Rules for Military Commissions, and that all proceedings of such military commissions to which charges have been referred but in which no judgment has been rendered, and all proceedings pending in the United States Court of Military Commission Review, are halted.

So the judge can refuse the request, but the law appears to state that if the SecDef says the process is halted, it's halted. “It’s not like a regular Article III court, it’s in the executive branch, it’s controlled by the president,” according to the Center for American Progress' Ken Gude. “The judges aren’t independent.” Which is why so many people objected to this process in the first place.

Still, the Brennan Center's Emily Berman isn't so sure that Judge Pohl doesn't have the authority to do what he's doing. She says it's strange that the Obama administration would direct prosecutors to "file the request with the judge if it wasn’t up to him to decide."  But she adds that "even if he has discretion on whether or not to suspend the proceedings, the [administration] has other ways of stopping them," namely by temporarily dropping the charges. But doing so doesn't mean Nashiri will be released, since he's still defined as an enemy combatant pending the administration's review of the Gitmo cases and the institution of a new approach to trying detainees, which means he can be held as long as the AUMF is in effect. 

-- A. Serwer

The “Advancing Climate Justice” conference at Fordham University in New York City (organized by the NY-based environmental justice group WE ACT) today and tomorrow, is billed as an attempt to raise awareness about the need to protect vulnerable communities from the consequences of climate change. Within that rubric, they’ve wasted little time exposing their advocacy for a carbon tax bill.

Dr. James Hansen, leading siren on the dangers of global warming, didn’t make the opening session due to sickness, and he undoubtedly was invited in some part due to his aggressive advocacy for a carbon tax regime as opposed to a cap-and-trade regime.

Cecil Corbin-Mark, of WE ACT, filled right in, asserting that the carbon tax is the preferable option for poor and minority communities. He argues that under cap-and-trade, the biggest polluters will have the most leeway to continue polluting in neighborhoods that have already suffered the worst health impacts from existing pollution. He also expressed a fundamental distrust with a market-based approach to dealing with carbon emissions, a distrust shared among most of the EJ activists here judging by the applause.

He also expressed that EJ activists and the communities they represent felt left out of the discussions that led to the existing cap-and-trade programs, specifically the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which includes ten northeastern states. Lisa Jackson, the new EPA head and a respected colleague of many of the people here, is a RGGI board member and will be addressing the conference tomorrow.

It will be interesting to see how Jackson frames her support and involvement in the RGGI cap-and-trade program (support she reiterated during her confirmation hearings) before an audience that opposes it.

According to Corbin-Mark, carbon tax legislation “allows transparency … where all Americans knows who’s collecting the taxes, and how they are spent,” with a greater possibility that the tax revenue will go toward renewable energy projects, green jobs and economic relief for the poor. Now that the cap and trade legislation seems to be moving ahead, Corbin-Mark said EJ activists are positioning themselves to ensure the dividends go toward the same purposes.

--Brentin Mock

Michelle Obama was the keynote speaker this morning at the White House reception honoring Lilly Ledbetter and the Fair Pay Act, which was signed into law today by the president. The event was a natural fit for the first lady, who, after making some supposedly controversial remarks on the campaign trail last February, has largely limited her public statements to a few issues of special concern to women and military families. According to the New York Times' Rachel Swarns, who prepared the White House press pool report of the reception, Mrs. Obama, "wearing a purple suit, white pearls and purple pumps," made the following comments:

This legislation is an important step forward, particularly at a time when so many families are facing economic insecurity and instability. It's also one cornerstone of a broader commitment to address the needs of working women who are looking to us, to not only ensure that they're treated fairly, but also to ensure that there are policies in place that help women and men balance their work and family obligations without putting their jobs or their economic security at risk.

It's great to see Michelle speaking about policy again, after all the retrograde, pre-inauguration obsession over her clothes and where the girls would attend school. But just for memory's sake, I thought I'd post one of my favorite Michelle Obama speeches, which she made in Iowa in August 2007. She seems so free in this speech, looking sleek and strong all in black with her hair pulled back. And while she's completely comfortable here portraying herself as Barack Obama's wife -- and sharing her pain at having their life disrupted by the campaign -- she's also passionately anti-war. I miss this Michelle:

--Dana Goldstein

Word on the street is that President Obama is set to tap Joshua DuBois, who led religious outreach for his presidential campaign, to head his Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, the effort that Obama has promised will represent a reform of Bush's White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.

The Rev. Welton Gaddy, president of the Interfaith Alliance, a church-state separation advocacy group that has been a consistent and vociferous critic of faith-based initiatives, issued a statement expressing cautious optimism that, based on his consultations with transition team members, including DuBois, Obama's version of the program would honor constitutional requirements:

In every conversation with senior officials on the transition team I have conveyed my preference for the faith based office to be eliminated and a community based office established to help the weakest, poorest, and neediest people in our nation. However, now that a decision has been made to establish and staff another faith based office, the question remains whether or not a change in the name of the office as organized by the Bush Administration will reflect substantive change in the policies of the Obama Administration that advocates for religious liberty find acceptable.

Meanwhile, in related news, American United for the Separation of Church and State is calling for the Senate to strip $100 million in funding for the "Compassion Capital Fund" from the stimulus package passed yesterday in the House. The program has been a key component of the Bush faith-based initiative.

--Sarah Posner

I'm feeling a little under the weather today so I won't be blogging much (except to start trouble with Adam) but if you're really missing my opinions, I would urge you to check out this Guardian column I wrote on the brief GOP love affair with the Congressional Budget Office and its phantom report:

There was one problem with Henry's comment: there wasn't any report at all. Any journalist who called up the CBO or checked its website quickly found that out. Nonetheless, the "report" was cited on TV no less than 81 times since the story was first reported by the Associated Press. Republican leadership in Congress, with house minority leader John Boehner at the forefront, claimed the report proved "government spending isn't going to get our economy back on track."

...But since conservatives are taking the CBO's reports so seriously now, they should spend time reading another missive from the office: CBO Director Doug Elmendorf's testimony in front of the House Budget Committee. In it, he projects that "economic output will remain significantly below its potential for several more years, so policies that provide stimulus for an extended period of time may be appropriate. Indeed, a fiscal stimulus that ends before the economy has started to regain its footing runs the risk of exacerbating economic weakness when the stimulus ends."

Read the whole thing!

-- Tim Fernholz

John Yoo's ignorance of the law has long been a source of fascination for me. I remember him being on the Newshour in 2004 and complaining about Supreme Court Justices who didn't always rule the way he wanted them to. Yoo said, "If you're just switching back and forth all the time, if you're in the middle all the time, are you really being a judge?" In other words, the Justices should be deciding cases on ideology, rather than the law. I remember thinking at the time, "this guy is a law professor at Berkeley?"

Today, Yoo takes to the Wall Street Journal to offer his strange cocktail of deception and ignorance in support of the lawlessness he enabled:

Relying on the civilian justice system not only robs us of the most effective intelligence tool to avert future attacks, it provides an opportunity for our enemies to obtain intelligence on us. If terrorists are now to be treated as ordinary criminals, their defense lawyers will insist that the government produce in open court all U.S. intelligence on their client along with the methods used by the CIA and NSA to get it. A defendant's constitutional right to demand the government's files often forces prosecutors to offer plea bargains to spies rather than risk disclosure of intelligence secrets.

"It’s not such a summary that it’s unchallengable," says Ken Gude, an associate director of international rights and responsibilities at the Center for American Progress. "It can be cumbersome and difficult, it’s not an easy thing to do, but you can’t have a system where you don’t allow the defendant to challenge the evidence used against them." Well you can, that's the system Yoo wants. It just won't be, by any standard, a fair and just system.

Moreover, Yoo's hostility to plea bargaining is bizarre. The point of a plea bargain, Goode adds, is to secure a conviction in exchange for information. John Walker Lindh was plea bargained. He's still locked up. Granted, Yoo believes that crushing a baby's testicles is a more appropriate way of extracting information, and that anything less is "requiring...that CIA interrogators be polite," which is how he describes Obama's executive order on interrogations. (It certainly does not do that.) Yoo is on equally shaky ground legally and empirically when it comes to torture, and the faulty legal reasoning that led to the Bush administration's lawlessness is never more clear than when Yoo pretends that certain laws exist when they don't, or makes up new laws where there are none.

-- A. Serwer

My colleague Adam largely misses it in this post about the stimulus bill vote. The bill as passed is the one Obama wanted. He won. The only part "stripped out" was the medicaid contraception provision, and while that's not good public policy, it's also likely to be implemented in the near future. The "bad" tax cuts in the bill were the only other sop to conservatives, and they make up a relatively small share of the overall legislation and have some stimulative effect. That's why it's funny when Adam writes, "The dude is almost as popular as chocolate chip cookies, how much more political capital does he need before he actually gets what he says he wants?"

In fact, the administration got everything it says it wanted; indeed, much more than they were predicting in the past months (remember when the stimulus was forecast at $500 billion? And then $750 billion? Now it's at $855 and counting). Even though some observers on the left think the infrastructure investment portion could be larger, it's not clear that it could be: the administration seems to have maxed out the government's ability to invest quickly, so much so that their estimates on how fast they can spend exceed those of the Congressional Budet Office. As well, Republicans are right, to a point, when they say they didn't have a hand in negotiating the bill in the House -- that's why Obama had to step in to to give them the one concession he did. And it's certainly not the administration's fault that more Republicans than Democrats are on TV. The blame for that foolishness falls squarely in the media's wheelhouse.

Don't forget that the upcoming Senate and conference votes are important, too, and that Obama's outreach to the GOP may pay dividends then. Note as well that the bill could improve in both of those settings. I was disappointed that no House Republicans voted for the bill, but they've made a stark political choice: to be obstructionist when the American people want action, even in the face of serious outreach from the new preisdent. It's a decision they may come to regret, but the Democrats can only score political points on it if the outreach was serious. It also gives the new administration tactical flexibility to refute GOP proposals in the future without looking churlish.

Ultimately, though, Obama meant what he said about a new approach to politics in Washington. The way the Bush administration approached the legislative process -- ignore all dissent -- was something progressives didn't like, and neither did the American people at large. Returning to that approach may make those of us on the left feel good, but it won't impress the public. Many, including me, have been demanding that the Democrats pass the bill they want and campaign on it, ignoring the the objections of the opposition. Strangely, Obama has done just that, all while maintaining his reputation as a pragamatic leader who will listen to all sides. That's the point.

-- Tim Fernholz

In 1968, when the United States first began to survey the racial and ethnic makeup of its public schools, 80 percent of students were white. Today, 44 percent of public school kids are minorities. Yet school desegregation reached its peak over 20 years ago. In 1988, one-third of black students attended schools that were at least 90 percent black. Today, thanks to the work of the conservative judiciary in overturning desegregation orders, 40 percent of black students attend such a school. Black and Latino children are more segregated in 2009 than they were at the time of Martin Luther King Jr.'s death.

Those are just some of the disturbing statistics from a new report on school desegregation written by Gary Orfield of UCLA's Civil Rights Project. The paper makes clear that increased housing segregation in inner-ring suburbs is responsible for the school re-segregation trend. Many people assume that efforts to desegregate public schools are doomed to fail in a nation so deeply stratified by race and class. School reform, they argue, should be about either alleviating poverty broadly, or should focus on improving instruction in low-performing, minority majority schools. Those goals are important. But those who overlook segregation ignore research showing that low-income and minority students who attend integrated schools perform better academically and in the job market than their similar peers who attend segregated schools. In addition, surveys show that students of all races who have attended integrated public schools report higher rates of tolerance and routinely describe the experience as formative and positive.

With an unprecedented amount of federal money being funneled to local school districts and states by President Obama's stimulus package, now is a good time to ask what can be done on the ground to desegregate schools -- and I'm not talking about 1970s-style busing. The creation of high-quality urban magnet programs would be a good start. With those in place, urban and suburban districts can forge partnerships in which suburban schools accept a certain number of high-risk urban students in exchange for spaces for suburban kids in competitive urban magnet programs. Such a program has worked well in Hartford, Conn., and is now oversubscribed. NCLB should also be updated in order to incentivize urban-suburban school transfers by moving extra federal dollars along with high-risk kids.

Granted, many districts will use these federal dollars just to prevent layoffs and fix crumbling buildings. But if just a few localities chose to launch some high-profile experiments in desegregation, it would alert Washington to another way of thinking about education reform.

Hat tip: The Bay State Banner.

--Dana Goldstein

If you loved "Barack the Magic Negro," you are really going to be gaga for potential RNC chairman Chip Saltsman's less well-known track, "The Star Spanglish Banner," which he also included on the infamous CD he sent to RNC members. And in case you like some anti-Semitism along with your nativism, keep your eyes peeled for the Star of David American flag. The video, of course, was produced by YouTube independent right wingers, not by Saltsman or the RNC. But you reap what you sow.

Hat tip: NDN.

--Dana Goldstein

Excerpt from the White House statement:

"...[I]n signing this bill today, I intend to send a clear message: That making our economy work means making sure it works for everyone. That there are no second class citizens in our workplaces, and that it’s not just unfair and illegal – but bad for business – to pay someone less because of their gender, age, race, ethnicity, religion or disability. And that justice isn’t about some abstract legal theory, or footnote in a casebook – it’s about how our laws affect the daily realities of people’s lives: their ability to make a living and care for their families and achieve their goals."

So a feminist victory, even as reproductive health advocates remain disappointed -- and angry -- about the stripping of family planning funding from the stimulus package.

Update: Just to clarify, the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act is the less aggressive of two pay equity bills that have been considered by Congress. The Ledbetter legislation restores the Equal Pay Act of 1963 to the strength it had prior to the Supreme Court's 2007 decision to deny back pay to Ledbetter. The Paycheck Fairness Act would go further, expanding damages available to victims of pay discrimination and providing funding for further study of the problem. For more on the uncertain future of the Paycheck Fairness Act, read Elana Schor at TPM.

--Dana Goldstein

Harold Pollack is right about the disastrous effects of mothers using crack that were distinct from the original hype surrounding "crack babies." But I want to point out the original takeaway that we were all supposed to get from the "crack baby epidemic." The goal was to find a modern scientific justification for racism. As Charles Krauthammer wrote in 1989, crack had created "a generation of physically damaged cocaine babies whose biological inferiority is stamped at birth," indeed, a "bio-underclass." It was no longer racism to suggest that black people were inferior, it was science. Again. The press loved this explanation. According to Mariah Blake's 2004 Columbia Journalism Review article (via), between 1984 and 1987 the press ran over a thousand stories on "crack babies." Everyone bought it, not just white people.  I remember being a kid and having both adults and other kids explain to me that the bad kids in school were bad because they were "crack babies." The best part about the whole narrative from the point of view of those pushing it was that racism wasn't merely justified by science, it was black people's own fault for making themselves inferior by doing drugs.

Developing better public policy to deal with crime or poverty would therefore be useless, because inferiority was biologically ingrained, scientifically proven, a concrete fact. The perfect anti-government message.

-- A. Serwer

Ted Haggard's media blitz around tonight's premiere of Alexandra Pelosi's HBO documentary, "The Trials of Ted Haggard," seems directed at portraying himself as the tormented, not the tormentor. There's no doubt that Haggard's fundamentalist upbringing created his internal turmoil over his sexuality, and the accompanying fear and repression that dictated his life. But Haggard also visited that turmoil upon others.

There are new revelations that the man who exposed Haggard in 2006, Mike Jones, was not the only object of Haggard's pent-up desires. And a Colorado television station is reporting that Haggard's former church, New Life, once considered one of the most thriving and politically powerful megachurches in the country, paid hush money to a 20-something congregant, Grant Haas, who says he was the target of unwanted advances from Haggard. The church denies the money was intended to keep the young man quiet, and was merely benevolence for a struggling parishioner ($180,000 worth). But tape-recorded phone calls between Haas and Haggard show Haggard's relief over Haas's deletion of hundreds of text messages he sent about sex, pornography, and drugs, and apparently over Haas's decision to keep quiet.

Haggard exploited that unique trust that exists between clergy and flock; his sin is not just the politicization of the Christian right's anti-gay bigotry, but exploiting his perch as the nation's most influential evangelical to exercise his political power. But that exploitation and politicization is not the reason he was expelled from evangelical power. He was expelled because being gay is fundamentalists' most unforgivable sin.

Back in 2007, I wrote in these pages that Haggard's fall from grace was, for his fellow evangelicals sitting in judgment, evidence that the dreaded "homosexual agenda" was powerful enough to recruit even the most devout, not evidence that sexuality is biological. This enables them to maintain their position that homosexuality is a sin that must be overcome and "cured" without looking inward at the pain they visited on Haggard, and he, in turn, on countless others.

Today, Haggard is trying valiantly to maintain the charade that he is not gay. Meanwhile, his fellow evangelicals, some of whom claim just as strenuously that they're not anti-gay, refuse to take a serious look at their own agenda. The National Association of Evangelicals, which Haggard used to lead, still insists that homosexuality is a "sin that, if persisted in, brings grave consequences in this life and excludes one from the Kingdom of God." While Haggard's upbringing in this environment in no way excuses his predatory and deceptive behavior, it's really no wonder Haggard lived in fear for his life and his soul.

The "new" or "centrist" evangelicals claim they want a "broader agenda" beyond "divisive" "culture war" battles over abortion or gay marriage. What they don't seem to understand is that by dodging serious discussion about their core beliefs about homosexuality, they're complicit in perpetuating the divisiveness they claim to eschew.

--Sarah Posner

At first glance, it's hard for me to see what Obama gained from taking so much effort to reach out to Republicans. Not only did not a single House Republican vote for the stimulus, but Republicans were able to monopolize time on the networks with absolute nonsense about why saving the taxpayer money doesn't count if sex is involved. I'd believe that Republicans' irrational arguments against the stimulus made them look bad if their point of view wasn't the only one the American people were hearing. Meanwhile, useful provisions were stripped out of the stimulus for the purpose of pleasing the opposition, whose goal wasn't to produce an effective stimulus but to make the bill as useless as possible so they could run against it next time around.

The "but you don't understand, Obama just made himself look really good" arguments are getting kind of tired. The dude is almost as popular as chocolate chip cookies, how much more political capital does he need before he actually gets what he says he wants?

-- A. Serwer

Nice short read over at the NYT on the changing culture of the White House under Obama. He eats cheeseburgers! He roams the halls, ducking into offices unannounced! And Honest Tea is about to see a spike in sales; it's apparently POTUS' drink of choice.

But this is the real gem:

When Mr. Bush moved in, he exercised his presidential decorating prerogatives and asked his wife, Laura, to supervise the design of a new rug. Mr. Bush loved to regale visitors with the story of the rug, whose sunburst design, he liked to say, was intended to evoke a feeling of optimism.

The rug is still there, as are the presidential portraits Mr. Bush selected — one of Washington, one of Lincoln — and a collection of decorative green and white plates. During a meeting last week with retired military officials, before he signed an executive order shutting down the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, Mr. Obama surveyed his new environs with a critical eye.

“He looked around,” said one of his guests, retired Rear Adm. John D. Hutson, “and said, ‘I’ve got to do something about these plates. I’m not really a plates kind of guy.’ ”

--Phoebe Connelly

• The House will vote tonight on the $825 billion economic stimulus package whose vote for floor consideration already attracted significant "blue dog" defections. Meanwhile President Obama is continuing his outreach efforts, hosting a reception at the White House for Congressional leaders of both parties and courting CEOs to support the bill. Mike Castle (R-Del) bets that the bill will receive zero Republican support while Marc Ambinder makes the political case (not compelling, in my view) for Republicans to support the bill.
• After making the sensible point that blowhards like Rush Limbaugh have more freedom to be, shall we say, iconoclastic than elected officials, Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.) pathetically retracted his statement and went on to praise the "conservative conscience" that right-wing radio represents. "Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Newt Gingrich, and other conservative giants are the voices of the conservative movement’s conscience. Everyday, millions and millions of Americans -- myself included -- turn on their radios and televisions to listen to what they have to say, and we are inspired by their words and by their determination."
• In an encouraging piece of front-page reporting, The Washington Post actually takes a look at progressive opposition to the stimulus -- you know, arguing that it doesn't do enough -- and breaks with recent reporting that seems to focus solely on the concerns of conservative Republicans (not enough tax cuts!). Then there's Eamon Javers and Jim VandeHei's libertarian mash note in today's Politico that details the supposedly influential "Do-Nothing Crowd" who are opposed to the stimulus plan in its entirety. Who's in this exclusive group? Javers and VandeHei quote a couple libertarian sources (Cato, Americans for Limited Government) but mostly rely on an investment consultant named Andrew Schiff who provides this nice piece of social Darwinism: "Our standard of living needs to come down to the point where it can be supported by organic output. It’s brutal, but it’s called capitalism, and it works. The alternative is called socialism, and it doesn’t work." Matt Cooper has more on Schiff's politics here.
• The good: the ACLU presses the Obama administration to release Bush legal memos making the case for torture, surveillance, and indefinite detention. The bad: Eric Holder reportedly promised Kit Bond (R-MO) he wouldn't seek prosecutions for Bush administration officials who authorized torture in exchange for a timely confirmation as AG. (For the record, the White House denies Holder made this deal so someone's lying.)
• Gallup has put up the first in a four-part series on the "State of the States," looking at party affiliation and the results don't jibe too well with the conventional wisdom of a "center-right" nation. Only five states could be considered Republican or Republican-leaning in Gallup's analysis, with 35 going to Democrats and the remaining ten considered "competitive." Those five states make up 2 percent of the nation's population.
• The Senate Intelligence Committee voted to approve Dennis Blair for national intelligence director, clearing the way for a full Senate vote.
• Fearing the masses might revolt if they couldn't keep up with this season's American Idol, Barack Obama successfully lobbied the Senate to delay the digital television transition from February 17 to June 12. Unfortunately, the House didn't feel as magnanimous and shot down the proposal.
• Perhaps instead of Obama trying to reach out to Republicans through personal and intellectual appeals he should challenge them all to a series of two-on-two, winner-take-all basketball challenges. Only then will we know who truly has game.

--Mori Dinauer

Elana Schor reports, contrary to Eli Lake, that there were no special deals between Eric Holder and Kit Bond regarding prosecutions of Bush administration officials:

"Eric Holder has not made any commitments about who would or would not be prosecuted," the aide said via e-mail. "He explained his position to Senator Bond as he did in the public hearing and in his responses to written questions."

Maybe not most useful, but certainly the funniest. Tom Ricks does finance:

The latest round of massive corporate layoffs reminds of the financial crisis the Roman Empire suffered in 33 A.D.

The resemblance is more than striking.

-- Tim Fernholz

Eli Lake is also reporting that there is a "loophole" in the executive order closing the CIA's so-called black sites:

President Obama's executive order closing CIA "black sites" contains a little-noticed exception that allows the spy agency to continue to operate temporary detention facilities abroad.

The provision illustrates that the president's order to shutter foreign-based prisons, known as black sites, is not airtight and that the Central Intelligence Agency still has options if it wants to hold terrorist suspects for several days at a time.

Lake thus concludes that:

The exception is evidence that the new administration, while announcing an end to many elements of the Bush "war on terror," is leaving itself wiggle room to continue some of its predecessor's practices regarding terrorist suspects.

The executive order does indeed say that "The terms "detention facilities" and "detention facility in section 4(a) of this order do not refer to facilities used only to hold people on a short term, transitory basis." But calling this a loophole ignores the original point of the black sites, which was to hold suspected terrorists in "isolation and secrecy, perhaps for the duration of their lives," and so CIA officers would be able to use torture, or transfer detainees to countries where they would be tortured. But by nature, temporary detention facilities don't hold people indefinitely, and the executive order holds that "whenever such individuals are in the custody of, or under the effective control of an officer, employee or other agent of the United States Government or detained within a facility owned, operated or controlled by a department or agency of the United States" their treatment must be consistent with Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention and "not subject to violence to life and person" or "outrages upon personal dignity (including humiliating and degrading treatment)." Part (b) of Section 4 cited by Lake requires employees or any "other agent of the United States Government" to provide the Red Cross with "notification of, and timely access to" any individual detained.

So they can't, by definition, be "black sites" as they came to be known under the Bush administration. Lake notes:

The detentions would be temporary. Suspects either would be brought later to the United States for trial or sent to other countries where they are wanted and can face trial.

If they're detained temporarily, rather than indefinitely, under section 3(b) of the executive order they can't be tortured, and the detainees would be brought to trial here or elsewhere, how is this a continuation of Bush's policies?

I can't vouch for what the Obama administration will actually do...but there's little in the letter of the executive order that resembles Bush's policies on so-called black sites.

-- A. Serwer

Gershom Gorenberg writes a letter to the new U.S. envoy to the Middle East:

The president's choice of you as his diplomatic alter ego was a pleasant surprise: The agreement you brought in Northern Ireland, in a conflict that looked as bitter and irrational as our own, means that you come carrying evidence that it's possible to negotiate peace. Though you were part of the Clinton team, you aren't associated with the failure of the Camp David summit in 2000. The choice of a former Senate majority leader also shows that Mr. Obama wants someone with prestige and seniority -- and someone who can go to Capitol Hill to explain the need for aggressive, even impatient, peace-making. When AIPAC tries to line up votes for knee-jerk resolutions to undercut your work, this will matter.

Most of all, your arrival is a statement of conviction by the new administration that diplomacy can make a difference, that conflict is a choice rather than fate, that last year's mistakes are not inevitably the dress rehearsal for next year's madness.

Read the whole thing here.

--The Editors

The CIA's chief in Algeria has been accused of raping two local women after slipping drugs into their drinks, and filming sexual encounters with many others. ABC News has the story.

--Dana Goldstein

I've sparred with Damon Linker about the "culture wars" before, and I can't resist another chance at the conversation, since I think we were talking past each other a bit last time. Linker's latest entry on this front:

Now, I'm all for trying to undercut the political salience of culture-war issues. And I think symbolic gestures like these can be a very effective way to achieve this goal. But we need to be clear that keeping the religious right out of political power (by stealing the votes of its more moderate members) is not the same thing as ending the culture war. Indeed, the core of the religious right might very well respond to political impotence by becoming even more radical and more committed to its causes.

And mark my words: This unhappy outcome is guaranteed if President Obama signs anything resembling the Freedom of Choice Act that's been kicking around Congress for the past few years -- and which during his presidential campaign he famously (and for pro-lifers, notoriously) promised to sign. If he fulfills this promise, Obama will not only have failed to end the culture war. He will have ensured its survival for another generation.

I missed out on the high dudgeon culture wars of the nineties, so maybe I'm not quite clear on what he means, but my question for Linker is this is: What does the end of the culture war even entail?

We know that Linker thinks "that keeping the religious right out of political power" isn't an end. We can consider that in the Peter Beinart article Linker cites, Beinart describes the end of the culture war in comparison with the 1920s, when relevant cultural issues ("immigration, Darwinism, and the Ku Klux Klan") receded in the face of the challenges of the 1930s; he suggest a similar thing might happen now as some White Protestants view the economic crisis and our international position as more important than "guns and gays." But the "culture wars" of the 1920s obviously didn't end: immigration, creationism and civil rights issues are still very much alive and very much contested in the political debates of our day.

There are real public policy differences at the basis of these discussions: Should women be able to have an abortion, or not? Should LGBTQ people have the same rights as everyone else, or not? Do we teach evolution, creationism or both in schools? When we think of "cultural" decisions, we think that government shouldn't really be involved in those, but it's also obvious that government does affect those issues and that people on both sides will always be ready to use government to affect those issues.

Culture wars end, I think, when one side "wins," by way of having public opinion so strongly on its side that any objections are just outside of the national conversation -- i.e. prohibition or slavery. This is what people are talking about when they forecast the eventual triumph of gay marriage advocates. But while I do believe that gay marriage is on the right side of history, it will take time for that view to set in, and it is certainly unlikely to happen anytime soon with issues like abortion, affirmative action, and the general role of religion in the public square.

Obama won't end the "culture war" -- if by culture war we mean these conflicting impulses -- but what he is doing is making it more civilized and more broad-minded. Working with evangelicals to reduce unwanted pregnancies is a good idea, but Obama isn't going to compromise on choice. In that sense, I think Ross Douthat has the right idea.

Which is why I disagree with Linker that Obama potentially signing the Freedom of Choice Act and further radicalizing the religious right is an "unhappy outcome" that will continue the culture wars for another generation. Women should have the right to make their own choices about their bodies. Unlike some liberals, I think people who feel differently deserve a certain amount of respect. But they don't deserve to have a veto over other people's rights. If that makes the religious right angry, well, that's what happens in a liberal democracy.

So, Damon, how does one end the culture wars?

-- Tim Fernholz

It appears that the Bush administration's effort to diplomatically "lock in" a missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic has failed:

Russia has dropped plans to install missiles near Poland after the Obama administration signalled a change in US attitude to the region, a Moscow military official has reportedly said. The official suggested that Mr Obama's White House had made clear it would not prioritise executing the Bush administration's plan to install a missile defence shield in Poland and the Czech Republic.

An unnamed official in the Russian military's general staff said: "The implementation of these plans has been halted in connection with the fact that the new US administration is not rushing through plans to deploy" elements of its missile defence shield in eastern Europe, according to the Interfax news agency.

--Robert Farley

Eli Lake reports that Eric Holder has assured Republicans that the Obama administration won't seek prosecutions for Bush administration officials who facilitated torture, which was part of an agreement to ensure his timely confirmation as attorney general:

Sen. Christopher "Kit" Bond, a Republican from Missouri and the vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said in an interview with The Washington Times that he will support Eric H. Holder Jr.'s nomination for Attorney General because Mr. Holder assured him privately that Mr. Obama's Justice Department will not prosecute former Bush officials involved in the interrogations program.

Mr. Holder's promise apparently was key to moving his nomination forward. Today, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted 17-2 to favorably recommend Holder for the post. He is likely to be confirmed by the Senate soon.

-- A. Serwer

On a conference call with reporters this morning, Congressman George Miller, chair of the House Committee on Education and Labor, outlined how pre-school, K-12, and higher education will benefit from the economic recovery act the House is set to vote on today. Here are the highlights:

• $14 billion for school modernization and repair, including investments in instructional technology and greening
• $13 billion to economically disadvantaged school districts
• $13 billion to school districts for special education instruction
• $15.6 billion for Pell grants, increasing the average grant by $500
• $6 billion for higher ed infrastructure modernization
• $2.1 billion for Head Start, allowing an additional 124,000 children to participate and creating new jobs in the program
• $39 billion for states to funnel to local districts, colleges, and universities

Miller said it is "difficult to tell" how far this initiative will go in terms of caulking local school budgets. Over half of estimated state budget cuts are in education. American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, who was also on the conference call, said the situation on the ground is already dire. In New York, Mike Bloomberg is threatening to cut thousands of jobs in the schools if the city doesn't receive extra financial support from Washington and Albany. "That is equal to what happened in the fiscal crisis in the seventies," Weingarten said. "Thirty years it took us to build back. Overcrowding. The devastation of programs. Buildings were frayed. ...We know what will happen if we don't try to stabilize our schools."

The most notable thing about this education spending is that the majority of the money will be sent directly to local school districts, colleges, and universities, cutting out state government middlemen. That should clamp down on waste and ensure that the dollars are at work on the ground within 60 days. It is the same logic mass transit advocates use to argue for direct federal funding of urban transportation departments.

--Dana Goldstein

This week's day-late edition of Think Tank Round-Up examines Latino public opinion, state-level tax shelters, growing union membership and the transit component of economic stimulus legislation the House of Representatives will vote on today. Check it out:

• Slip-sliding away. Even when immigration reform boiled over in 2007 after Congress and the Bush administration failed to pass a comprehensive bill, only 38 percent of Latinos cared enough about the issue that summer to rank it “extremely important” in a Pew Hispanic Center poll. Now, a year and a half later, 7 percent fewer Latinos hold immigration reform in such high regard. Pew released this data in a recent report that examines immigrant and native-born Latinos’ opinions on policy priorities; their hopes for Obama and judgments of Bush; and their attention to and involvement in politics. When ranking policy priorities, immigration came in sixth out of seven, with the likes of the economy, education, and health care lording over the top of the list. The phenomenon of so few Latinos caring about immigration reform surprises -- more than half of adult Latinos are immigrants.-- CP
• Tax shelters aren't helping [PDF]. Michael Mazerov at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows that North Carolina legislators’ concerns about the negative impact of instituting “combined reporting” on the state’s already hobbled manufacturing sector are unwarranted. North Carolina is one of a few states that does not practice combined reporting: treating all of a large corporation’s subsidiaries as a single entity for state income tax purposes. Companies have historically used the state as a tax shelter, burdening taxpayers with the cost of litigation. This study reveals that 80 percent of the largest manufacturers operating in North Carolina also maintain facilities in states with combined reporting.-- MK
• Union rates rising. The Center for Economic and Policy Research reports that union rates rose in 2008, from 12.1 percent to 12.4, a gain of some 420,000 new members. This news comes in spite of the declining economy. Much of the increase came in the public sector, although private sector unionization went up one tenth of a percentage point last year. The report notes that despite small upticks this year and last, union membership has stagnated or sunk every year since a high of 20.1 percent of workers in 1983. Union membership strongly correlated with increases in income equality and productivity in the post-World War II economic boom, and with the Obama administration's commitment to making organizing easier at least through Labor Department policies and perhaps with the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, there is hope that membership may increase again in 2009.-- TF
• Shovel-ready projects. Transit for America has compiled a map of various transit agencies which, in the face of the current economic situation, are either cutting service or raising fares. The goal of the project is building grass-roots support behind amendments that would change the current economic stimulus legislation to have more focus on public transit investments, which are more energy-efficient than investments in highways and roads. Currently, the stimulus has been disappointing transit advocates who would like to see a more balanced funding program between different kinds of transportation infrastructure.-- TF

-- TAP Staff

Past Round-Ups:
1/13/09
1/6/09

We're outraged that Obama has refused to continue Bush's highly successful policy of antagonizing Iran, which completely halted their pursuit of nuclear weapons.

-- A. Serwer

A week or so ago on the Larry King show, George W. Bush, responding with characteristic eloquence to a question about whether he facilitated torture, said "Everything we did was -- you know, it had legal -- legal opinions behind it," adding "I got legal opinions that said whatever we're going to do is legal." Unfortunately, Bush's office has blocked attempts to scrutinize the legal reasoning behind said extralegal behavior.

But last week, Obama issued an executive order on transparency that puts the decision of whether the Bush OLC memos that provided the legal justification for torture, indefinite detention, and warrantless surveillance are protected by executive privilege in the hands of current Obama administration officials and the United States Archivist, and ultimately Obama himself, should the attorney general, the White House counsel, and the archivist not unanimously agree on whether a claim of executive privilege has merit. The ACLU is now testing Obama's commitment to transparency with a request to the Office of Legal Counsel that Bush memos regarding torture, surveillance, and indefinite detention be released, and ProPublica has a helpful chart of which memos remain secret.

-- A. Serwer

Food blogging is really Ezra's jam, but I thought I'd call your attention to the "Bacon Explosion," which seems like the perfect thing to make for Superbowl Festivities. But I don't want to talk about the recipe, I want to point out this great passage:

The Bacon Explosion posting has since been viewed about 390,000 times. It first found a following among barbecue fans, but quickly spread to sites run by outdoor enthusiasts, off-roaders and hunters. (Several proposed venison-sausage versions.) It also got mentions on the Web site of Air America, the liberal radio network, and National Review, the conservative magazine. Jonah Goldberg at NationalReview.com wrote, “There must be a reason one reader after another sends me this every couple hours.” Conservatives4palin.com linked, too.

So did regular people. A man from Wooster, Ohio, wrote that friends had served it at a bon voyage party before his 10-day trip to Israel, where he expected bacon to be in short supply. “It wasn’t planned as a send-off for me to Israel, but with all of the pork involved it sure seemed like it,” he wrote.

Doesn't the Times know that conservatives4palin are the only regular people? Unless that man from Wooster, Ohio who recently took a trip to Israel is Joe the Plumber -- perhaps the most regular of all people -- the newspaper is once again proving that it is the locus of the liberal media.

-- Tim Fernholz

Since the financial crisis and throughout the debate over the government response to the recession, John Maynard Keynes' name has been on everyone's lips, but the references have been more of a rhetorical short-hand for a simplistic version of his approach to an economic crisis than an actual citation of his broader economic theories (I'm guilty as charged). Now, though, John Judis has written a very smart piece that puts Keynes in perspective and outlines his ideas about the modern economy. In part, Judis concludes that we need to remember Keynes' lessons during "normal" economic times as well as during a recession. Obviously, it's not the same as tackling The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money -- which Tyler Cowen has been doing intermittently over at Marginal Revolution -- but read the whole thing for a better understanding of our current situation.

-- Tim Fernholz

After being sworn in as New York's junior senator yesterday, Kirstin Gillibrand laid out several policy objectives, one of which was making sure that the final economic stimulus bill includes funding for mass transit, such as high-speed and light-rail trains. Politico calls the move "upstatey," but actually, as I reported for the print magazine in November, New York's upstate Democrats have often scuttled smart transportation plans. So Gillibrand's stance is likely to earn her some new support in New York City and its environs.

Obama's original stimulus proposal was a disappointment to transit advocates, as its infrastructure focus was on roads and schools, not rail, cycle lanes, streetcars, or express bus service. And the plan did not authorize the federal government to grant transit funds directly to cities instead of to states, where "upstatey" politicians and bureaucrats often withhold money for the most pressing urban transportation projects that would benefit the most people.

So Gillibrand is sticking her neck out here on behalf of urban concerns. That's a good thing, because today, as Streetsblog reports, the full House will vote on an amendment to add $3 billion in transit funding to the economic recovery bill.

--Dana Goldstein

• Barack Obama's efforts to win votes for his economic stimulus package from Republicans might have been well-intentioned, but it ought to be crystal clear to the president after today's meeting with Hill Republicans that they are not -- particularly the House GOP -- interested in compromise. If I had the president's ear I would tell him the following: forget the House Republicans. All they want is to tie themselves to your popularity, and make you think they'll back your bill with more concessions to them. Democrats are getting nothing in return for this "compromise" so your time would better be spent trying to get 60 votes in the Senate, where it really matters. Also, House Republicans preview their own stimulus bill.
  
• While I'm having this imaginary one-on-one with the president, may I ask why, if you're going to make a big deal about the ethics of letting former lobbyists work in your administration, have you approved a waiver for one and announced that a second will be number-two at the Treasury? Was all that talk about transparency and openness just for show?
• The president gave his first television interview with Al Arabiya to start reaching out to the Muslim world and Adam points out the subtle taunt Obama gave to groups like al-Qaeda who offer the Muslim world nothing productive and only promise violence.
• Karl Rove has once again been subpoenaed by House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers in an attempt to get to the bottom of his role in the Bush administration's firings of U.S. Attorneys in 2006. "Change has come to Washington," Conyers said, "and I hope Karl Rove is ready for it. After two years of stonewalling, it's time for him to talk."
• Timothy Geithner was confirmed last night by a 60-34 vote, with Democratic Sens. Harkin, Byrd and Feingold voting no along with Independent Bernie Sanders.
• Apparently a book deal wasn't enough for Sarah Palin. The former VP candidate has launched a PAC looking to capitalize on the Alaska Governor's continuing popularity with the conservative rank-and-file. And speaking of yesterday's news, it appears John McCain's campaign media strategy was to rely upon a shoot the messenger approach that led to serious consideration of banning New York Times reporters from the campaign plane.
• Over at The Corner, Michael Novak calls Obama's lifting of the Global Gag Rule a "relapse into paganism," and Patrick Ruffini thinks hiring Rush Limbaugh as The New York Times' new conservative columnist would "shock the Upper East Side, not reinforce its worldview in subtle ways." In other news, Mike Tomasky predicts that "[i]n the coming weeks, you'll hear Republicans doing two things: Invoking Ronald Reagan, and arguing for more tax cuts." No argument here.
  
• I, for one, am relieved that Arlen Specter has now had enough time to consider Eric Holder worthy of being confirmed U.S. attorney general. In the future, the Senate Judiciary Committee ought to just preemptively set aside a two month window in order to give Specter enough time to weigh these important decisions before suddenly changing his mind.
  

--Mori Dinauer

I've been rolling Juan Williams' statement about Michelle Obama around like a wad of gum, trying to figure out why it bothers me so much. The first thing is that Juan is a genuinely nice guy, with whom I've had the pleasure of talking a few times. But the second, and the much bigger thing, is that I realized that I've never heard --and I don't think I ever will hear -- a rapper call Michelle Obama a bitch. But you don't have to call a woman a bitch to treat her like one.

I've tried for a long time to reconcile my love of Hip-hop music with its unapologetic misogyny, or even the fact that so many friends I've known since knee-high flick around the word like spent cigarettes no matter how many times we argue about it. The bitches/sisters explanation is patently unsatisfying, it's basically a reinvention of the old madonna/whore dichotomy. I can't really come up with an explanation, other than that there are ugly sides to most of the things we love. But Williams is one of the most vocal critics of Hip-hop; of what right-leaning black pundits refer to as "street-culture." I see little that's different in what Williams is saying about Michelle from what you might hear from Young Jeezy. This isn't an isolated statement about something someone said last year, it fits into an established narrative of who black women are. Rather than being the hyper-sexualized Jezebel popular in rap music, she's portrayed as the masculine ball-buster, the kind of women ignorant men write "why I don't date black women" essays about, trying to convince themselves that there's something rational about hating the kind of woman who gave birth to you. Williams' statement makes me angry not because it's about Michelle, but because it's so manifestly not about her, but about black women in general. And maybe with some kind of messed up, terrible rationalization I can divorce myself from what happens in Hip-hop because I know Jeezy isn't talking about my mama. But when people talk about Michelle like this, they're talking about this universe of brilliant, accomplished black women who never seem to get their due. They're talking about the women I know; my mother, my aunts, my cousins. And it makes me furious.

But of course we've been here before, and the last time a first lady got this kind of treatment her name was Hillary Clinton. We've changed the particulars to fit Michelle's cultural context, but ultimately nothing has really changed.

-- A. Serwer

Via David Axe, it appears that the Somali government has collapsed following the seizure of its capitol, Baidoa, by Islamist fighters. Ethiopian troops withdrew from Baidoa less than a day before its fall. The collapse of the Somali provisional government represents a foreign policy disaster for both Ethiopia and the United States; the United States supported Ethiopia's invasion in late 2006, in order to depose an Islamist government that the Bush administration believed was sympathetic to Al Qaeda. The proxy war quickly became a rallying point among conservative bloggers and commentators, who celebrated Ethiopia's brutal approach to counter-insurgency while decrying the limits imposed on the United States in Iraq. Caroline Glick denounced European skeptcism about the invasion as part of a wider pattern of anti-semitism and support for jihad:

But the EU's treatment of Ethiopia and the TFG [the secular Transitional Federal Government] indicates that Brussels' hostility towards the Jewish state is part of a much further-reaching policy. Europe's pro-jihad position toward the war in Somalia indicates that its support for jihad is over-arching rather than limited to specific battlegrounds. ...

--Robert Farley

Dean Baker's new book, Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of The Bubble Economy, explores the stock and housing bubbles at the heart of our current economic crisis. This week, TAP Online is hosting a two-part discussion of the book, featuring Dean Baker, Josh Bivens, Eileen Appelbaum, Danilo Pelletiere, and Ezra Klein.

Part one is up today. Dean kicks off the discussion:

Remarkably, even now, economists and policy analysts still seem determined to make housing and financial policy as though the bubble is not there. They talk about stabilizing housing prices without distinguishing between markets where the bubble is still deflating and those markets in which house prices are consistent with fundamentals.

It would be difficult to believe that our top economists can still be so incompetent, but among economic policy makers, blindly following the conventional wisdom seems to be a job requirement. Even if this policy leads to yet another disaster, those responsible are unlikely to face any serious consequences. The taxpayers, homeowners, and job losers are the ones who pay the price of the economists' mistakes.

Is there any way that economists can ever be held accountable for the quality of their policy advice? And, if they can't be held accountable, is there any reason that the public should ever take these experts seriously?

Read the rest here, and look for part two on Thursday.

--The Editors

Today is the official launch of The Progressive Realist, a "metablog" of foreign policy commentary from across the left side of the political spectrum, all in the service of exploring what a post-Bush foreign policy should look like. Robert Wright, who is heading up the project, articulated the progressive realist vision back in 2006:

Progressive realism begins with a cardinal doctrine of traditional realism: the purpose of American foreign policy is to serve American interests.

But these days serving American interests means abandoning another traditional belief of realists — that so long as foreign governments don’t endanger American interests on the geopolitical chess board, their domestic affairs don’t concern us. In an age when Americans are threatened by overseas bioweapons labs and outbreaks of flu, by Chinese pollution that enters lungs in Oregon, by imploding African states that could turn into terrorist havens, by authoritarian Arab governments that push young men toward radicalism, the classic realist indifference to the interiors of nations is untenable.

Although not everyone at the new site necessarily buys into Wright's conception, reading the whole piece is a good idea. Reading the Progressive Realist in the coming months is a good idea, too. I'll be contributing, as will some other TAPPED folks, plus a roster of other interesting writers.

-- Tim Fernholz

Among them, according to Juan Williams, is his wife, Michelle Obama:

WILLIAMS: Yeah. And let me just -- let me just tell you this: If you think about liabilities for President Obama that are close to him -- Joe Biden's up there -- but Michelle Obama's right there. Michelle Obama, you know --

O'REILLY: But it's not her fault in the sense that --

WILLIAMS: -- she's got this Stokely Carmichael-in-a-designer-dress thing going. If she starts talking, as Mary Katharine suggested, her instinct is to start with this "blame America," you know, "I'm the victim." If that stuff starts to come out --

I really think we're setting the threshold for being a black nationalist a bit low here in our post-racial utopia.

-- A. Serwer

One of the bludgeons torture apologists and supporters of indefinite detention without trial have been using to argue against Guantanamo's closure is the idea that a significant number of former detainees have "returned to the fight". They've been touting questionable statements from the Pentagon declaring that a certain number of detainees have returned to terrorism. The only problem is that, upon close scrutiny, those numbers turn out to be inflated and inaccurate. Spencer Ackerman reports that Defense Secretary Bob Gates gave a little more perspective today in his Senate hearing:

Gates doesn’t really make an overt pushback, but he subtly points out that Guantanamo isn’t something to be afraid of. The total recidivism numbers “until recently” from Guantanamo have been on the order of “four or five percent, but there’s been an uptick in recent months.” Worst of the worst, huh? So much for the bogus 61 detainees back in the fight number — which, by my back-of-the-envelope calculations based on about 750 detainees having gone through Guantanamo in total, would be about eight percent, or double Gates’ total.

Just to put that in perspective, the recidivism rate for the formerly incarcerated here in the United States is around 66 percent. 

-- A. Serwer

The first in what no doubt will be a series of attempts to put Obama's slap-in-the-face moments in perspective. I'm told being contrarian is good for your career.

Reports indicate that Barack Obama has asked congressional Democrats to remove a provision from the stimulus package that would fund contraceptive programs through medicaid. Nicholas Beaudrot explains that it isn't a funding change so much as a cosmetic delay in the program; states can still access those funds but the bureaucratic procedure is more difficult. Ann Friedman makes the stark case that this is a bad idea.

Indeed, in pure policy terms the move is a bad decision -- making it easier for states to access medicare funds, for family planning or anything else, will improve their budgetary situations and prevent them from cutting social services, public jobs or raising taxes. And of course providing family planning funds is smart public health policy. Reproductive health advocates are angry about this, and rightly so.

Nonetheless, Obama apparently put some heavy personal pressure on Rep. Henry Waxman, who chairs the committee with jurisdiction of Medicaid, to take the provision out. It's the first time he's really put the screws to a House Dem, so presumably the new administration sees some political benefit in the decision. Despite a general consensus that the stimulus package as a whole is good policy, even with its high price tag, Republicans are seeking any argument they can to oppose it. First they tried tax cuts, but Obama made 40 percent of the package tax cuts, some of which are actually beneficial; some of which are sops to business.

Now the opposition is trying to demagogue the contraception issue with people like House Minority Leader John Boehner going on TV and misrepresenting the goals of the policy. After pulling the provision, the Obama team has the opportunity to say, "Ok, we listened, and we changed it. Hope that's the only problem you had with the bill, because we're not changing anything else." Of course, this strategy is undercut if the White House or congressional Dems give in on anything else. My colleagues here at TAP are already predicting that other provisions will go -- probably a safe bet -- but I'm a dreamer. I may be the only one.

In any case, Republicans look increasingly petty if they argue over other provisions in the bill after staking their case on contraception. One of the reasons they had to do it, and why Obama is smart to call their bluff, is that it's the only argument they have -- the Republican stimulus counter-proposal was all tax cuts, including capital gains tax cuts, that don't make any economic sense during a recession. The more they fixate on individual provision in the bill, the more petty a good media strategy can make them look.

Of course, many Republicans will likely vote against this bill no matter what, leading some -- and I count myself in this camp -- to argue that Obama, and the Democrats, should really just put together the best bill he can, ram it through, and take credit for what he can get. But that's clearly not his strategy, and given the results of that strategy during Bush administration's middle-years, maybe that's a good thing. Now the question is how many Republicans can be brought over to make this gambit worthwhile. If Obama can show enough good faith to split the Republican caucus, he's won an important battle. This all may be an attempt to test the party discipline of the GOP's legislators. Matt worries that Obama isn't getting anything in return for these concessions, but it's way too early to know how rank-and-file GOPers will vote when the bill comes up, and if they're leaning towards supporting the bill, they're not going to say anything publicly and give their leaders time to put the screws in.

Another option: This is all a mutt-and-jeff plan, and House Dems will put the provision back in. Obama can go wide-eyed to the public, disappointed in Congress' dislike of bipartisanship, and then cheerfully sign the bill. It's also possible that the Medicaid family-planning provision will be re-inserted in the Senate version of the legislation, or come up in a stand-alone bill soon, so this policy isn't dead, merely delayed. It's also a lesson that we need to expect congressional Dems -- and progressives outside of government -- to keep steady and loud pressure on Obama to make good decisions.

The ultimate take-away here is that governing is a messy and oft-disappointing business.

-- Tim Fernholz

To follow-up on Ann's post about the support for contraception for poor women (and Obama's attempts to strip the provision from the bill), this is unfortunately instructive not only about how unserious Republican claims to be "pro-life" are (uh, shouldn't you be trying to reduce unplanned pregnancies then?) but is also bad news about Obama's political instincts. Not only would this be wrong on the merits, as Matt says, what's even worse is that the Dems seem to be getting absolutely nothing in return. Indeed, Obama should be moving in the other direction; since at this point it's obvious that there's essentially no chance that the Republicans will vote for the bill, and it will make no difference to any future election how many Republicans vote for it (voters will give Democrats the credit or blame irrespective of the final vote), the Dems might as well pass the best bill they can.

--Scott Lemieux

So when I heard some jerks in Staten Island went around with baseball bats on election night looking to beat up black folks, I didn't expect any of the perpetrators to look like this (via Ta-Nehisi):

This dude is really going to want to stay above the Mason-Dixon line if he wants to avoid an existential crisis.

-- A. Serwer

Tim already posted about this interview, but I just wanted to point out that this is what an effective taunt looks like:

Q How concerned are you and -- because people sense that you have a different political discourse. And I think, judging by (inaudible) and Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden and all these, you know -- a chorus --

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, I noticed this. They seem nervous.

Q They seem very nervous, exactly. Now, tell me why they should be more nervous?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think that when you look at the rhetoric that they've been using against me before I even took office --

Q I know, I know.

THE PRESIDENT: -- what that tells me is that their ideas are bankrupt. There's no actions that they've taken that say a child in the Muslim world is getting a better education because of them, or has better health care because of them.

In my inauguration speech, I spoke about: You will be judged on what you've built, not what you've destroyed. And what they've been doing is destroying things. And over time, I think the Muslim world has recognized that that path is leading no place, except more death and destruction.

It's so much more effective than "bring it on," because it has the virtue of being accurate. Al-Qaeda has no social service wing; they're bent on destruction. It's not that it's the only thing they're good at; it's that it's the only thing they do. And rather than antagonize them by puffing himself up, Obama slips the knife in quietly and twists it with the truth: you haven't made the lives of Muslims any better. An effective response to this statement, as opposed to "bring it on," isn't violence, because Obama has acknowledged al-Qaeda's capacity for violence. He's not questioning that. He's questioning their ability to do anything else. Everyone knows the loudest dude in the room is the one with something to prove.

-- A. Serwer

Q: When do conservatives not like policies that remove bureaucratic hurdles and save states millions of dollars?
A: When those policies have the potential to reduce the number of unplanned pregnancies.

House Minority Leader John Boehner is railing against a provision of the stimulus package that would increase Medicaid funding to states for family-planning services. Not only will this expand health care services and take some burden off states, it will eliminate the need for states to go to the federal government and obtain a waiver. Writes Amanda Terkel at ThinkProgress,

No one would be forcing states to pay for family planning services. States can now cover low-income women if they get a state waiver, but approval can take a long time. Despite these bureaucratic hassles, 27 states have already “obtained federal approval to extend Medicaid eligibility for family planning services to individuals who would otherwise not be eligible.” This bill would simply allow states to skip the administrative delays.

So instead of rejoicing about how this provision would remove red tape and save states $400 million over 10 years, conservatives are wailing about how Nancy "Grandmother of 6" Pelosi hates babies. James Pethokoukis at U.S. News:

This is wrong on so many levels, one of which is looking at children born to the "wrong people" as economic burdens rather gifts, the music makers, the dreamers of dreams. She sees them as a cost instead of blessed benefits.

Pethokoukis seems a little confused. See, this provision doesn't just fund contraception. It pays for services to promote maternal and infant health -- medical care once those "music-makers and dreamers of dreams" are born.

For more head-smackingly stupid commentary, we turn to Chris Matthews:

MATTHEWS: I don’t know. It sounds a little like China. […] I think everybody should have family planning and everybody believes in birth control as a right. I’m for — abortion is a right and all that. It’s all right. But why should the federal government have a policy of reducing the number of births?

Because broadening access to voluntary contraception is the same thing as forced abortions under the one-child policy? I, and roughly 98 percent of American women, see those things as quite distinct.

The most frustrating thing is that Obama wants to cave on this. A final decision on the provision is expected tomorrow.

UPDATE: Harold Pollack, writing over at Ezra's blog:

Family planning is no pork barrel item. By any reasonable public health measure, these services are more important and cost-effective than many other health expenditures nobody is fighting about.

--Ann Friedman

... in his first formal television interview, with Al Arabiya. Marc Lynch, king of public diplomacy, tells us

I do think that this is an extremely significant gambit which signals his commitment to real public diplomacy, his engagement with Middle East issues (repudiating all the pundits expecting him to neglect foreign policy), and his ability to speak in a genuinely new way to the Muslim world.

His remarks hit the sweet spot again and again. He repeatedly emphasized his intention of moving past the iron walls of the 'war on terror' and 'clash of civilizations' which so dominated the Bush era. "My job is to communicate to the Muslim world that the United States is not your enemy," Obama said, emphasizing as in his inaugural address that he is "ready to initiate a new partnership [with the Muslim world] based on mutual respect and mutual interest." And where so much of the Bush administration's 'public diplomacy' was about manipulating and lecturing, Obama begins -- as he should -- with listening: "what I told [Mitchell] is start by listening, because all too often the United States starts by dictating..so let's listen."

This is, as Marc says, a great step. But only a step: change means policy change, which I hope has been drilled into everyone by now, and taking Muslim world opinion seriously also means responding to those concerns responsibly. The transcipt of the interview is here.

-- Tim Fernholz

Despite rumors to the contrary, there was no Congressional Budget Office report on the economic stimulus legislation until yesterday, when the CBO released this -- pleased to see new CBO Director Doug Elmendorf continue Peter Orzag's blogging ways. Read the whole thing, but consider that the projections for direct spending -- the infrastructure investment part of the plan -- still indicate that outlays will come out about as slowly as the early computer run predicted, with a little less than half of that portion of the bill being spent by the end of fiscal 2010 (which is Oct. 1, don't forget). Why does CBO think the investment section of the bill will take time?

* The bill’s enactment would likely occur nearly half way through the fiscal year.
* Previous experience suggest that agencies have difficulty rapidly expanding existing programs while maintaining current services; the funding in H.R. 1 for some programs is substantially greater than the usual annual funding for those activities.
* Spending can be delayed by necessary lags for planning, soliciting bids, entering contracts, and conducting regulatory or environmental reviews.
* Agencies face additional challenges in spending funds for new programs quickly because of the time necessary to develop procedures and criteria, issue regulations, and review plans and proposals before money can be distributed.

Frequently in the past, in all types of federal programs, a noticeable lag has occurred between sharp increases in funding and resulting increases in outlays. Based on such experiences, CBO expects that federal agencies, states, and other recipients of funding would find it difficult to properly manage and oversee a rapid expansion of existing programs so as to spend added funds quickly as they expend their normal resources. The seasonal nature of some spending also affects the speed at which activities can be conducted; for example, major school repairs are generally scheduled during the summer to avoid disrupting classes.

Fair enough, though I have to wonder if the emphasis on shovel-ready projects will increase the speed of investment. The analysis does seem to also confirm the White House claim that 75 percent of the total bill will be spent in the eighteen months after it is passed, noting that "combining the spending and revenue effects of H.R. 1, CBO estimates that enacting the bill would increase federal budget deficits by $170 billion over the remaining months of fiscal year 2009, by $356 billion in 2010, by $174 billion in 2011, and by $816 billion over the 2009-2019 period." As this blog has noted before, having a chunk of the investment package hang over through fiscal 2011 is not a bad thing, since we can expect the recession to last well through that time.

-- Tim Fernholz

• President Obama cleared the way for enacting widespread EPA review of emissions standards for vehicles, issuing executive orders to fast-track applications from 14 states pushing for tougher standards for cars and trucks. This follows Obama's directive to freeze construction of new coal-burning plants, Henry Waxman's aggressive stewardship of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Hillary Clinton's selection of Todd Stern to be chief envoy on global climate change for the U.S. State Department.
• By my reckoning, the conservative argument for opposing the economic stimulus package now appears to take one of the following forms: they argue the stimulus wastefully spends money on contraceptives and park services. They believe the public is opposed to using federal money to meet state budget shortfalls. They believe a successful stimulus would help Democrats electorally both short- and long-term. They believe it is their duty to be as partisan as the Democrats were when they didn't agree to destroy Social Security in 2005. They are concerned about the findings of a CBO report that doesn't actually exist.
• William Kristol, esteemed public intellectual and carrier of the torch for neconservatism, will no longer be regaling us with his weekly phoned-in columns, the Times citing "mutual agreement" to end 54 weeks of endless banalities and factual errors. Scott Horton has more on the behind-the-scenes of this trivial matter that has inexplicably become news.
• Opposition to economic stimulus isn't the only area where the principled opposition has resorted to whining, demagoguery and deception in an effort to remain relevant to the political conversation. Indeed, this new "NIMBY defense" has the makings of an instant classic, especially the tendency to portray terrorists as devious and skilled enough to indoctrinate other inmates -- if only they could penetrate our borders! Back in the real world, CIA director-designate Leon Panetta's confirmation hearing has been pushed back, and Jane Mayer takes us "Behind the Executive Orders."
• Rod Blagojevich is, I must say, a real piece of work. After comparing his travails to those faced by Naval personnel at Pearl Harbor and blowing off his impeachment hearing, his own lawyer has taken himself off the case, leaving the Governor to defend himself on television by comparing his struggle for freedom with that of Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr.
• Sen. Russ Feingold has introduced a perfectly reasonable Constitutional amendment that would require a special election to fill any Senate vacancies which, in all likelihood, will not not even come to a floor vote. A Saturday Washington Post editorial puts the case in the context of the controversy surrounding several recent high-profile appointments, Dylan laments the glacial amendment system we must grapple with, and Nate Silver makes the case that now is actually a good opportunity to get the necessary 3 quarters of states on board to pass the thing.
• Looks like John McCain isn't poised to be Barack Obama's secret weapon in the Senate after all. Not only has the one-time presidential rival rightfully criticized Obama's approval of a waiver for William Lynn's lobbyist past, but he is also siding with his party on stimulus bill obstruction, claiming the legislation needs more tax cut voodoo.
• Weekend Remainders: Abu Ghraib, now under new management, India versus Richard Holbrooke, more on delaying Tom Daschle, the Sunday Times profiles Rahm Emanuel, and the "urgent" sub-cabinet positions that need filling.

--Mori Dinauer

This really can't be linked to enough.

-- A. Serwer

One bummer about getting most of your news consumption on the Web is missing out on those gem articles you notice paging your way through the physical newspaper. Such was the case last night, when I ran across a copy of the Sunday Post's Outlook section at a friend's house, and in particular this article by Joel Kotkin:

No longer a jumped-up Canberra or, worse, Sacramento, [Washington] seems about to emerge as Pyongyang on the Potomac, the undisputed center of national power and influence. As a new president takes over the White House, the United States' capacity for centralization has arguably never been greater. But it's neither Barack Obama's charm nor his intentions that are driving the centrifugal process that's concentrating authority in the capital city. It's the unprecedented collapse of rival centers of power.

This is most obvious in economic affairs, an area in which the nation's great regions have previously enjoyed significant autonomy. But already the dukes of Wall Street and Detroit have submitted their papers to Washington for vassalage. Soon many other industries, from high-tech to agriculture and energy, will become subject to a Kremlin full of special czars. Even the most haughty boyar may have to genuflect to official orthodoxy on everything from social equity to sanctioned science.

At the same time, the notion of decentralized political power -- the linchpin of federalism -- is unraveling. Today, once proudly independent -- even defiant -- states, counties and cities sit on the verge of insolvency. New York and California, two megastates, face record deficits. From California to the Carolinas, local potentates with no power to print their own money will be forced to kiss Washington's ring.

Americans may still possess what the 19th-century historian Frederick Jackson Turner described as "an antipathy to control," but lately, they seem willing to submit themselves to an unprecedented dose of it. A financial collapse driven by unrestrained private excess -- falling, ironically, on the supposedly anti-Washington Republicans' watch -- seems to have transformed federal government cooking into the new comfort food.

The prose is florid, as is the Pyongyang comparison, but the overarching point that circumstances have contrived to center national attention and power in D.C. is a provocative one. There are plenty of counter-examples, of course, and arguably much of the damage that resulted in the circumstances Kotkin describes emanated from federal policies put in place by previous administrations -- does anyone believe that, if proper steps had been taken to address the housing bubble, financial derivatives regulation, and income inequality, the current recession would be as bad as it is? But of course hindsight is perfect.

In any case, one of the great things about the United States is the cultural and political diversity of our cities and states, a diversity under inevitable decline due to encroaching modernity (see the slow death of the regional accent, for one) and its bureaucratic demands -- I won't traffic in the naive belief that everything would work better if we returned to old ideas about federalism or that a modern nation state with challenges as broad as those we face today could be effective without strong central authority. Kotkin's assertion that the changes he observes will be "bad for much of America" isn't right, either: The new administration is much more likely to take into account the common good than financial elites in New York City, and aid to states from the federal government will prevent major drops in quality of life in states facing economic crisis across the country. His suggestion that the "new science apparat" will be somehow as susceptible to lobbyist pull as the, um, lobbyist-run Bush administration is just laughable.

Culturally, though, it would be sad if Kotkin is right and D.C. joins London and Paris as cities that exemplify their country's ideal, since American life is so much more than simply its politics. On that front, though, the challenge for the Obama administration is in recognizing the greater-than-normal influence they have and being smart about working with local- and state-level actors to ensure that federal policies have the necessary flexibility to be effective. There was some of that in Obama's post-election meetings at the National Governor's Association in Philadelphia, and hopefully we'll see more.

In other Outlook reading, here's Joel Achenback dissenting from one of the central premises of Kotkin's piece, and an informative article about how engineering is as important as science.

-- Tim Fernholz

I've never bought the idea that opposition to abortion is solely about controlling women's bodies. I've just known too many people who were genuinely sincere in their religious beliefs that abortion is wrong. But I've seen little evidence that conservatives' hostility to contraception, to methods that prevent unwanted pregnancies and therefore abortions, from taking place, could be anything else. Steve Benen writes, via Elana Schor, that Republicans are opposed to money in the stimulus bill that would help state governments assist low-income women in getting contraception coverage:

What's being proposed is an expansion in the number of states that can use Medicaid money, with a federal match, to help low-income women prevent unwanted pregnancies. Of the 26 states that already have Medicaid waivers for family planning, eight are led by Republican governors (AL, FL, MS, SC, CA, LA, MN and RI -- a ninth, MO, had a GOP governor until this past November). If this policy is truly a taxpayer gift to "the abortion industry," as John Boehner and House Republicans claim, where are the GOP governors promising to end the program in their states?

Additionally, the process of obtaining a waiver for Medicaid family-planning coverage is extremely cumbersome. A letter written by Wisconsin health regulators in 2007 noted that some states have had to wait for as long as two years before their request was approved. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that eliminating the waiver requirement would save states $400 million over 10 years.

According to RedState, Bill Kristol is not a conservative, mostly because he had dinner with the enemy--I mean the president. Besides Sarah Palin and Joe The Plumber, is anyone?

-- A. Serwer

Kudos to 60 Minutes for putting together a good segment on West Bank settlements last night (via Peter Juul):

The extent to which there is consensus on the long term non-viability of the settlements is remarkable, as is the inability of the Israeli political system to do anything productive about the problem. Gershom Gorenberg, of course, has written extensively about this problem. Internal Israeli problems are exacerbated by the "support" of settlement advocates in the United States, who can freely argue for an increased presence in the West Bank while paying none of the costs. While on a Foundation for the Defense of Democracies junket last year, an American explained to me that the settlements could not be removed, and that the problem would be solved only "when one side or the other developed the necessary political will."

As a side note, I was mildly surprised last night to find that 60 Minutes is still considered "must see TV" by a swath of early twenty-something Americans. Who knew?

--Robert Farley

There's something horrifying about how complete the denial of due process is for Guantanamo detainees, especially when you consider press coverage that frames the debate as one over "terrorist rights" rather than due process. Glenn Greenwald says just about everything that needs to be said about this, part of the problem with Guantanamo is that we don't know who is actually guilty and who isn't absent an actual trial, something that is apparently of little concern to many of the reporters and editors covering the issue.

But just so we're clear, even convicted terrorists have the right not to be physically or mentally abused to the point of insanity. If we can't understand that due process is part of the fundamental human decency that separates us from them, then I don't really know what we're fighting for. It's certainly not a free and just society, because that doesn't exist without due process of law.

-- A. Serwer

Marc Ambinder has been having a good back-and-forth between Republican pollster Mike Murphy and labor pollster Guy Molyneux on the Employee Free Choice Act. The discussion is revealing of how structuring a poll can influence response, and how it's not really worthwhile to write about polls without seeing their actual questions and the cross-tabs. It also shows that the conservative message on the legislation is dependent on misdirection. Consider Murphy's comment here:

"I think Guy misses the big point here; the part of EFCA that really counts is the likely elimination of the secret ballot in most future union organizing elections. So, as a union member myself (WGA-West, AFTRA), I'll make this offer: If the AFL-CIO/Hart Research team re- tests the same ballot question they have released to the media, but adds the critical phrase "which would eliminate the secret ballot workers now utilize in most union organizing elections" to their question and then release the findings from this more accurate question to the media, I'll chip in $5,000 toward the cost of the conducting this more poll."

Oh, sure, except that the Employee Free Choice Act doesn't eliminate the secret ballot. It's categorically false. Marc notes as much here. Molyneux makes that point here. I would even recommend that folks check out the National Labor Relations Act, and particularly this provision, which is unmodified by EFCA:

(e) Secret ballot; limitation of elections (1) Upon the filing with the Board, by 30 per centum or more of the employees in a bargaining unit covered by an agreement between their employer and a labor organization made pursuant to section 158 (a)(3) of this title, of a petition alleging they desire that such authority be rescinded, the Board shall take a secret ballot of the employees in such unit and certify the results thereof to such labor organization and to the employer.

That means, of course, that if only 30 percent of workers feel intimidated by union organizers -- a feeling that is not in the organizers' interest, incidentally -- they can demand a secret ballot. No doubt their employer would help organize that petition. But to the main point: Both sides are tweaking polling language to their advantage, but the preferred labor language -- "[a]llows employees to have a union once a majority of employees in a workplace sign authorization cards indicating they want to form a union" -- has the advantage of being essentially true if a bit simplified. The clause Murphy could add to the question truthfully is, "which would eliminate the option for employers to coerce employees into secret ballot election weighted in the employer's favor after a majority of workers have already expressed their preferences for a union." But I imagine that wouldn't poll so well, either.

The fact is that there is no really "private" option for labor organizing: With the so-called secret ballot, an unfair election process begins with one side having nearly every structural advantage; voting is done under the supervision of management after weeks of intense one-on-one meetings, and it's naive to think that the company in question doesn't know how most of their employees are voting. On the other hand, under majority sign-up, union organizers have a good idea of how people vote but once the cards are delivered to the National Labor Relations Board, employers generally don't see them. Co-workers probably know which way their colleagues are leaning no matter which mechanism is used. Neither process is perfect, and I would err on the side of giving workers more choice, not less.

-- Tim Fernholz

Andrew Sullivan reads about a non-peer-reviewed study showing black test-takers closing the performance gap with whites on a test after Obama's nomination speech and again after the election and writes:

A small anecdote. I know a neighbor in my hood from walking my beagles. She teaches in a local school and is even more aware than the rest of us in this city how challenging it is to teach and rear a self-confident generation of minority kids. She's African-American and has long bemoaned the ubiquitous use of the n-word by young black teens. But she pointed out to me months ago that there was one man they never used the n-word to describe. It was Obama. If he can help lift eyes to a larger horizon for more generations of minority children, then surely liberals and conservatives and everyone in between can be glad.

Sullivan needs to get out more. "Nigga" is ubiquitous and not just among blacks. In New York City, teenagers of every persuasion use the word: Puerto Ricans, Italians, Arabs, Dominicans, everybody. Not even just for people. I've heard it used for everything from a dilapatated bike ("that nigga needs new brakes") to a mediocre Cabernet Sauvignon ("this nigga has aged past its vintage"). Black folks who use the word "nigga" sometimes use it to describe Obama, and not out of nastiness, hatred or shame. The word isn't going away because Obama is president, and it's long past time that pop psychology about its use relative to black American self-esteem be recognized as useless, since it's use among people of other ethnicities now has to be measured in NPM.

I understand that Sullivan made the above statement out of a desire for things to be better. But this is a manifestation of a particular strain of white guilt that seeks to decouple itself from the social responsibility Americans bear toward each other when the Americans in question are black. Obama's election changes some things, but it doesn't change the hard circumstances many black kids grow up in. For all the power Obama's presidency will have symbolically, the most important relationships young people have are those with the people who are physically present--or absent, in their lives. Having a white president hasn't eradicated cocaine use among whites, Obama's presidency will not solve the most difficult social circumstances that many black children find themselves in.

It may be unfair to refer to this as "white guilt" since white people aren't the only ones who manifest it. Take House Majority Whip James Clyburn, expressing a popular sentiment even among black pundits that "“every child has lost every excuse.” I don't know what that means except that the difficult social circumstances facing someone born in Berry Farms or East New York are meaningless. It's not "white guilt" because Clyburn is not white, but it's something similar, a desire to be free of obligation and perhaps embarrassment. But it's not helpful, in fact what both Clyburn and Sullivan's statement do is provide a rhetorical framework for distancing oneself from social responsibility after the fact, after the magic improvements among blacks engendered by Obama's presidency have dissipated. "If those people can't succeed after Obama," the argument goes, "then what can we do?" 

There's nothing particularly mysterious about the obstacles facing black folks or about why many of them persist despite a growing black middle class, Charles Blow listed many of them on Sunday. But it's his conclusion that's most important:

So black people have to keep their feet on the ground even as their heads are in the clouds. If we want to give these children a fighting chance, we must change the worlds they inhabit. That change requires both better policies and better parenting — a change in our houses as well as the White House.

Among the more frustrating obstacles to a better public policy is the idea that these problems can be solved with symbolic victories that don't require anyone thinking hard about them or getting their hands dirty. It's not just about "self-esteem," it's about the hard realities of poverty, education, housing, and criminal justice. It requires a great deal of work and thought, not a lot of self-congratulatory pap about how wonderful and race-blind the country is for electing a black man president.

-- A. Serwer

In a time like this, when tempers are riding high and many Americans are close to panic about their jobs and finances, you have a special responsibility to consider the accuracy of what you say and the consequences of inflammatory and erroneous statements. In the last few days, manifestly distorting my words and pulling them out of context, you have accused me of wanting to exclude white males from jobs generated by the stimulus package. Anyone who takes a moment to examine what I actually said and wrote knows this to be an absurd misrepresentation of my position (see this). My goal is and has always been to create as many opportunities for as wide a group as possible, and not exclude anyone from access. There is not and has never been any ambiguity about this. The hate mail I have received since your broadcast suggests that the mischievous consequences of your demagoguery are potentially dangerous, in addition to being destructive of rational and constructive political discourse. I urge you to take responsibility for your words. Words and ideas have real world consequences, and you have demonstrated a cavalier disregard for both.

--Robert Reich

America has embraced Lemon Socialism.

The federal government -- that is, you and I and every other taxpayer -- has taken ownership of giant home mortgagors Fannie and Freddie, which are by now basket cases. We've also put hundreds of millions into Wall Street banks, which are still flowing red ink and seem everyday to be in worse shape. We've bailed out the giant insurer AIG, which is failing. We've given GM and Chrysler the first installments of what are likely to turn into big bailouts. It's hard to find anyone who will place a big bet on the future of these two.

It gets worse. While Washington debates TARP II, the Federal Reserve Board continues to buy or guarantee or provide loans for a vast and growing pile of questionable financial and corporate assets, much of which are likely to be worth far less than the Fed has paid or guaranteed or accepted as collateral. We're talking big money here -- so far over $2.4 trillion. (The entire TARP -- parts I and II -- in combination with the proposed stimulus package come to just over $1.5 trillion.)

Taxpayers are on the hook for this Fed bailout money, too, of course. We have to pay the interest on the ever-growing debt used to make these payments or guarantees and loans. Yet while TARP II and the upcoming stimulus package are receiving a great deal of attention, this much larger public commitment by the Fed is not. That's partly because the media doesn't much understand it, but also because the Fed is doing it in secret, using provisions of its charter never before utilized, and avoiding discussion before the full Board of Governors for fear such meetings would be subject to the Freedom of Information Act.

Put it all together and at this rate, the government -- that is, taxpayers -- will own much of the housing, auto, and financial sectors of the economy, those sectors that are failing fastest.

Consider too that the government already finances much of the aerospace industry, which is still doing reasonably well but depends on a foreign policy that itself has been a dismal failure. And a large portion of the pharmaceutical industry and health care sector (through Medicare and Medicaid, the Medicare drug benefit, and support of basic research). These are in bad shape as well, and it seems likely the Obama administration will try to reorganize much of them.

What's left? Most of high-tech, entertainment, hospitality, retail, and commodities. So far, at least, we taxpayers are not propping them up. And when the economy turns up -- perhaps as soon as next year, most likely later -- these sectors have a good chance of rebounding.

But the others -- the ones the government is coming to own or manage -- are less likely to rebound as quickly, if ever. If anyone has a good argument for why the shareholders of these losers should not be cleaned out first, and their creditors and executives and directors second -- before taxpayers get stuck with the astonishingly large bill -- I would like to hear it.

It's called Lemon Socialism. Taxpayers support the lemons. Capitalism is reserved for the winners.

--Robert Reich

When Howard Dean campaigned for president in 2003, he had an "A" rating from the NRA and was considered a fiscal conservative who promised balanced budgets.

-- Tim Fernholz

Some feminists wondered last week why President Obama overturned the Global Gag Rule the day after the 36th anniversary of Roe, missing an opportunity for some powerful symbolism. But with a press release on the order sent out after business hours last Friday, at 7 p.m., Obama signaled his desire to avoid political football on reproductive rights -- but not to avoid the issue altogether.

“For too long, international family planning assistance has been used as a political wedge issue, the subject of a back and forth debate that has served only to divide us. I have no desire to continue this stale and fruitless debate.

“It is time that we end the politicization of this issue. In the coming weeks, my Administration will initiate a fresh conversation on family planning, working to find areas of common ground to best meet the needs of women and families at home and around the world.

“I have directed my staff to reach out to those on all sides of this issue to achieve the goal of reducing unintended pregnancies. They will also work to promote safe motherhood, reduce maternal and infant mortality rates and increase educational and economic opportunities for women and girls.

Our own Sarah Posner has done some great reporting on the various "common ground" domestic reproductive health bills floating around Washington. Obama could choose to throw his support behind any one of these, or propose an alternative. There is the Reducing the Need for Abortion and Supporting Parents Act, co-sponsored by Democratic Reps. Tim Ryan and Rosa DeLauro. This legislation funds ultrasound equipment, economic support for pregnant women, adoption services, and other programs meant to encourage women to carry pregnancies to term. It also requires clinics recieving federal funding to run women seeking an abortion through a script that focuses on the supposed physical and mental health risks of the procedure. But Ryan-DeLauro does promote comprehensive sex-ed and access to contraceptives, unlike the Senate's Pregnant Women First bill, sponsored by anti-choice Democrats Bob Casey and Ben Nelson. The Casey-Nelson legislation is unlikely to attract the support of a president who describes himself as pro-choice.

Another option, more acceptable to reproductive-rights advocates, is Prevention First, sponsored by Reps. Louise Slaughter and Diana DeGette in the House and Harry Reid in the Senate. Obama, as a senator, was one of the original co-sponsors of the bill, but we'll have to wait and see whether he will prioritize it as president. This legislation is wide-ranging, providing appropriations for comprehensive sex-ed and education about Plan B emergency contraception. It would end insurance company discrimination against women seeking contraception and require all hospitals receiving federal funds to stock Plan B and offer it to rape victims. Prevention First would also expand Medicaid's coverage of family planning services. The hospitals portion of the bill would likely be the most controversial, as Catholic interest groups are already organizing against it.

--Dana Goldstein

By now, everyone's probably heard that the Bush administration failed in their basic bureaucratic duties to keep organized and detailed casefiles on the detainees at Guantanamo Bay. The response, both from former Bush administration officials and folks on the right, is that this both proves that Guantanamo Bay should stay open and that the prisoners can't be released. It's another example of one of the bizarre idiosyncratic arguments of the Bush administration, that their failures prove the success of their approach:

Several former Bush administration officials agreed that the files are incomplete and that no single government entity was charged with pulling together all the facts and the range of options for each prisoner. They said that the CIA and other intelligence agencies were reluctant to share information, and that the Bush administration's focus on detention and interrogation made preparation of viable prosecutions a far lower priority.

But other former officials took issue with the criticism and suggested that the new team has begun to appreciate the complexity and dangers of the issue and is looking for excuses.

After promising quick solutions, one former senior official said, the Obama administration is now "backpedaling and trying to buy time" by blaming its predecessor. Unless political appointees decide to overrule the recommendations of the career bureaucrats handling the issue under both administrations, he predicted, the new review will reach the same conclusion as the last: that most of the detainees can be neither released nor easily tried in this country.

"All but about 60 who have been approved for release," assuming countries can be found to accept them, "are either high-level al-Qaeda people responsible for 9/11 or bombings, or were high-level Taliban or al-Qaeda facilitators or money people," said the former official who, like others, insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to reporters about such matters. He acknowledged that he relied on Pentagon assurances that the files were comprehensive and in order rather than reading them himself.

This response is less than convincing, because Hilzoy was looking through this declaration from the prosecutor on the Mohammed Jawad case, which he resigned from on the basis that the government had no case against Jawad. This is one of the reasons why:

It is important to understand that the "case files" compiled at OMC-P or developed by CITF are nothing like the investigation and case files assembled by civilian police agencies and prosecution offices, which typically follow a standardized format, include initial reports of investigation, subsequent reports compiled by investigators, and the like.

UPDATE: In case this wasn't clear, the idea that the Bush administration's failure to keep comprehensive case files on GTMO detainees proves that they should all be held indefinitely without trial is absurd. Aside from the moral implications of arguing that bureaucratic errors justify indefinite detention, the Constitution doesn't have exceptions for government officials who don't like doing paperwork.

-- A. Serwer

I'm looking forward to the detailed explanation behind this:

This is William Kristol’s last column.

Needless to say, that's the most interesting part.

-- A. Serwer

• Kirsten Gillibrand has been appointed to Hillary Clinton's vacated Senate seat and the decision is flawed both from the perspective of advancing progressive causes and electoral strategy. Ultimately, though, Gillibrand is likely to be a mixed bag on policy; as Ben Smith notes, some progressive groups are already lining up behind her, while others are not (seriously, a perfect score from the NRA?).
• President Obama reversed the Global Gag Rule preventing American foreign aid from going to overseas health organizations that provide abortions and Congress passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair-Pay Act.
• Yesterday brought confirmation of more Obama Cabinet picks, including Susan Rice for U.N. ambassador, Ray LaHood for transportation secretary, Lisa Jackson to head the EPA, Shaun Donovan for secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Nancy Sutley to head the Council on Environmental Quality, and Mary Schapiro to head the Securities and Exchange Commission. Still being held up by GOP obstruction are Eric Holder, Hilda Solis and Timothy Geithner, while Tom Daschle is with his cancer-stricken brother and the delay behind Ron Kirk's confirmation is unknown.
• If John McCain really is destined to be the guy in the Senate who brings moderate Republicans into the fold for passing progressive legislation with a filibuster-proof majority, then I'm ecstatic. But does The Washington Post really need to resurrect the old 'Maverick' storyline as a narrative for this front-page piece? I know I use the term in jest here, but the Post seems to have truly bought into it as McCain's defining feature.
• In addition to the wingnuttery chronicled by Adam here, we also learn that Dick Morris' derangement actually indicates that everything will be alright, Frank Luntz is shocked that Americans are not only willing to pay for infrastructure, but are willing to pay higher taxes for it (including 3 out of 4 Republicans!), the NRCC believes the economy is "robust and job creation is strong" because "Republican tax cuts are creating jobs and continuing to strengthen the economy," and Marc Thiessen declares Obama to be "the most dangerous man ever to occupy the Oval Office."
• Another day, another Republican retiring being urged to retire his Senate seat.
• Speaking of retired Republican pols, Marc Ambinder reports considerable buzz behind former Idaho governor and Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne running for president in 2012. Was Bob Dole unavailable?

--Mori Dinauer

To be sure, there will be change and disagreement on the 4th Circuit, but I pray that coming appointments to our court will not cause the doors of communication and compromise to slam shut. A polarized 4th Circuit would bring no discernible public benefit. At the end of the day, it's not lines of battle; it's not us and them. Americans are in this together, and that includes the courts.

Matt observes conservative carping about the stimulus package's size and speed, and recalls the Democratic proposal from September, which was blocked by congressional Republicans...

As I recall, at the time the objections were that the plan was (a) too big, and (b) too slow. Now, months later, the situation has gotten worse. And that necessitates a bigger stimulus. And because it’s bigger, it winds up having a slower payout time. And payout time aside, we’re necessarily talking about “later” since now we’re talking about passing something in February 2009 rather than September 2008. Now conservatives say we’re talking too big and too slow. But this could have been smaller and faster had they not been singing that same tune back in September.

-- Tim Fernholz

After writing this morning's post on the subject, I've been calling around the Hill to figure out what's going on with the Congressional Budget Office report. Republicans say it proves infrastructure investment won't help the economy in the short term. What's become clear is, first and most important, there was no CBO "report," a definition that office takes seriously.

I've obtained the document that reporters were looking at and learned that it is a preliminary calculation of the spending schedule for one portion of the stimulus bill; it was performed for committee staffers before January 15. Since that time, the entire bill has changed a good deal and an actual CBO report outlining all of its costs will be forthcoming in the next week or so. The other thing to realize is that CBO cost estimates are based on historical projection of how departments spend money. Officials are confident that the executive branch can increase its rate of spending on shovel-ready projects given the urgency of the situation, so those historical projections apply less during an economic crisis like the one we currently face.

Also, in my earlier post I referenced reports that Peter Orzag, former CBO director, current Office of Management and Budget director, has promised a different analysis. Indeed, following a meeting today between the president, his staff, and congressional leadership, Orzag released a letter sent to Sen. Kent Conrad, chair of the budget committee:

The Congressional Budget Office recently released an analysis of a component of the economic recovery proposal; that analysis, however, did not assess the overall package. Our analysis indicates that at least 75 percent of the overall package (including its tax component and the other spending provisions that were not analyzed by the Congressional Budget Office) will be spent over the next year and a half (the rest of fiscal year 2009 and fiscal year 2010).

We are committed to maintaining at least a 75 percent spend-out rate for the package as a whole as the legislation moves through the Senate and House and into conference.

One somewhat worrying note about this response: The CBO report suggested that a little more than half of the infrastructure component would not be spent before 2010. Which makes it a little less than a quarter of the entire bill. Perhaps this CBO report isn't entirely wrong.

The assumptions it makes about spending schedules are conservative, though, given the situation. And critics of the stimulus should probably acknowledge that this recession will continue through 2010. Thus, continued infrastructure spending through that year will be an important part of the recovery process. There is a compromise to be had between getting money into the economy and ensuring that it is spent on wise investments. Though there is plenty that can be done in the next two years, money shouldn't be spent immediately on frivolous projects if a year down the line, when economists are still projecting minimum 8 percent unemployment (higher than now), there are solid investments to be made.

-- Tim Fernholz

Josh Keating, commenting on a roquefort cheese trade dispute:

The last thing Obama wants right now is to get into a trade war with France over a last-minute decision by his predecessor, particularly when he's looking for French cooperation on far more pressing issues. But even the farmers seem to realize that the "cheese wars" are not particularly high on Obama's list right now. "The boy must have a lot of priorities," acknowledged the head of one agricultural union. Umm ... yeah. I would say so. And you probably shouldn't be calling him "boy" either.

Indeed.

--Robert Farley

Clearly, the executive orders mandating the closing of Guantanamo and the banning of torture have yet to affect the widespread derangement among torture apologists that forces them to look for guidance from a television show when assessing problems of national security. The Wall Street Journal today makes this spurious claim about yesterday's executive order:

The unfine print of Mr. Obama's order is that he's allowed room for what might be called a Jack Bauer exception. It creates a committee to study whether the Field Manual techniques are too limiting "when employed by departments or agencies outside the military." The Attorney General, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Director of National Intelligence-designate Dennis Blair will report back and offer "additional or different guidance for other departments or agencies."

There's no exception. The section the article is referring to is how best to adjust the guidelines set out in the Army Field manual for non-military government agencies like the CIA, and the order quite clearly says that this isn't meant to shirk the "obligations of the United States to ensure the humane treatment of individuals in its custody or control."

I've said it before, but quite frankly it's moments like these that really expose the immorality of torture advocates. Lacking both an empirical or moral justification for torture, they look to the legitimacy of the state for reassurance. Now they don't have it. And it's driving them crazy.

The banking crisis is worsening as the economy continues to sink. It's not just that bank balance sheets are still  stuffed with "toxic" assets probably worth far less than what they're listed for -- subprime loans mixed up with all sorts of other things. It's because more and more individuals and businesses that had been credit-worthy six months ago can't make their payments. As a result, bank shares are plummeting. So what should the new administration do?

Set up an aggregator or "bad bank" to buy up assets the banks want to unload -- along with the conditions I set out a few days ago designed to prevent remaining shareholders, creditors, executives, traders, and directors from profiting off taxpayers.

One way to determine how much the government should pay is through the mechanism Hank Paulson told Congress he'd use back in late September, which he never followed through on -- a reverse auction. It might work like this: The Treasury offers $10 million to any bank that wants to offload. Banks will compete with each other to get that $10 million by offering securities they consider to be worth at least that much if and when they could ever be sold on the open market. They also provide the "auctioner" with whatever information they have -- both about why their bids are credible and why the auctioner should be skeptical about the valuations of other bidders. Once the auctioner accepts one of the bids for $10 million, the auctioner then increases the offer to $25 million, and takes in a new set of bids for securities that the banks think are worth that amount. Banks that lost the first bid would add a new bunch of securities to their first-round entries, and try to make their case. And so on.

At the end, the government (you and I) own lots of securities at firesale prices that have been competed downward. They're put into the Bad Bank for safe keeping until they're eventually resold on the open market -- hopefully at a price that's at least as much as they cost. And the banks have cleared up their balance sheets, which enables them both to borrow and to make new loans.

Sounds simple, but it's not. For one thing, the prices the banks get on the securities they unload might be so low relative to their face value that the banks are effectively insolvent (this may be why Paulson gave up on the idea). For another, it depends on sufficient competition among banks to get the prices down, and some big banks are big enough to stifle competition. For another, it requires a Treasury staff (auctioners) sufficiently smart and large to effectively evaluate the information they receive. For another, in order to really clear bank balance sheets of junk, it may require far more than the $350 billion left under TARP.

Still, it may be the only alternative -- outside a large-scale reorganization under bankruptcy. (The problem with the current bankruptcy laws as applied to banks is that changes in the law that went into effect four years ago don't give banks enough time and resources to reorganize. Under the former law, Lehman might have been saved.)

--Robert Reich

Smuggling operations have resumed in the tunnels along the Gaza-Egypt border:

The tunnels linking Gaza and Egypt are back in business, despite the hundreds of tons of bombs and missiles that Israeli troops rained down on them. The air reeked from spills of newly smuggled fuel being poured into plastic barrels as winches powered by noisy generators hauled more goods out of the wood-lined openings in the ground.

At other shafts, workers were still raising only dirt as their colleagues labored underground to dig out cave-ins caused by the Israeli bombardment. Egyptian border guards manned watchtowers barely 100 yards away. Their fast recovery underlines the difficulty of stopping the smuggling and reinforces Israel's fears that Gaza's Hamas rulers will use the tunnel network to bring in weapons to rearm after the offensive.

The elimination of this trade was a key objective of Operation Cast Lead:

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said Thursday that Israel is willing to reopen hostilities if the bombings weren't enough to stop the smuggling.

''If we need to do additional military operations to stop smuggling, it will be done,'' she told Israel Radio. ''Israel reserves the right to act against smuggling, period.'' Ending the smuggling -- along with stopping Hamas rocket fire on southern Israel -- was a key Israeli objective for its offensive, which killed 1,285 Palestinians, most of them civilians, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights counted.

The Israeli military offensive was sold to the world on several different premises. The operation was supposed to destroy Hamas human infrastructure, convince the people of Gaza to overthrow the government, and destroy smuggling along the border. It's fair to say that none of those objectives have been met; Hamas fighters famously melted away in the face of the IDF, the people of Gaza show no apparent interest in kicking Hamas to the curb (although it's early), and smuggling resumed as soon as the bombs stopped falling. Indeed, the IDF wasn't even able to stop the rocket fire, until Hamas declared its own ceasefire. The offensive has, rather, demonstrated that the Israeli political system produces dangerous, erratic, and strategically suspect policy. Noah Shachtman suggests that this was perhaps the point:

Israel's war against Hamas was launched, in large part, to send a message to its adversaries: Be afraid. Any attacks on the Jewish state will be met with overwhelming, even brutal, force. Traditionally off-limits sites, like Mosques and hospitals, won't serve as hiding places. Enemy leaders will be hunted down and killed -- even if they're surrounded by their children and wives.

Israeli leaders believe they've accomplished that task. "The Arab view is now that Israel is a crazed animal, locked in a cage, fuming to get out all the time," a senior Foreign Ministry official tells Danger Room, approvingly. "Now, it's the responsibility of the Arab leadership to keep the animal in the cage, by not provoking it."

--Robert Farley

The Lilly Ledbetter Act passes the Senate easily, with all of the Republican senators who are women voting in favor of the bill. Obviously they don't share their colleagues' view of gender discrimination as a trivial matter that should be dealt with within a 180-day statute of limitations.

Between Obama's executive orders closing Guantanamo and prohibiting torture, the repeal of the global gag rule and the Senate's passage of the Fair Pay Act, it's been a pretty good first few days for liberals hasn't it? Maybe Obama's been reading Rick Perlstein. Now about that stimulus...

-- A. Serwer

Marc Ambinder and Jeffrey Goldberg wonder aloud (ablog?):

Jeffrey Goldberg just wandered into my office and observed that, at first blush, President Barack Obama's reckoning of the last month's worth of Middle East history would be the exact same reckoning that George W. Bush would have had. In other words -- there's nothing that Obama said today that George W. Bush wouldn't also say.

Is this true? Significant?

False! Insignificant! Remember how Bush looked at the last month of Middle East history and reckoned he should appoint the wretchedly even-handed George Mitchell as his Middle East envoy over the objections of the AIPAC crowd, just like Obama did. God, it's like there hasn't even been an election.

-- Tim Fernholz

Though I don't have much to add to my colleagues on the issue of Kirsten Gillibrand, I will note one interesting thing about Caroline Kennedy's exit. Weeks ago, a savvy source suggested I look into this portion of the big Times interview with Kennedy.

CK:... so I don't have large staff —

DH: Do you have any?

CK: In my house, is that what you're asking me?

DH: Yeah. I think it gets to the whole, is there a Nannygate issue down the road.

CK: (Laughs) I think we're heading down to the — I have somebody who helps me in my house, and I have an assistant who helps me with you, know, kind of all the correspondence, I mean, I'm on the board of the Legal Defense Fund, the Commission on Presidential Debates, I have staff that I work with down at the Department of Education, at the Kennedy Library, so in that way, I'm managing, you know, staff in different places, and so that's really how I do that. They don't work directly for me, but they're people that I work with in all these different capabilities. So in that way it's kind of a decentralized operation.

My source thought there was something to the exchange because of Kennedy's roundabout answer to the question; I didn't want to speculate about the issue without the reporting to back it up. And then...

There was incredulity in Democratic circles Thursday afternoon after the governor’s camp engaged in a ferocious public back-and-forth with Ms. Kennedy’s side, reaching out to numerous news organizations early Thursday afternoon to disparage her qualifications; one person close to the governor said that her candidacy had been derailed by problems involving taxes and a household employee, but declined to provide details.

That account was at odds with Ms. Kennedy’s own description of her reasons for withdrawing. While not denying that issues had arisen, aides to Ms. Kennedy downplayed their significance, saying they had been aired out in discussions between the Paterson and Kennedy camps over the last two weeks and were not considered by either side to be disqualifying.

Not knowing the details, I generally don't think those kinds of issues should be disqualifying of public office, especially considering the myriad reasons why Kennedy shouldn't be tapped for the seat. Maybe now it looks like the situation has gone from the frying pan into the fire, considering Gillibrand's record, but ultimately her record may have been more determined by her right-leaning congressional district than her personal beliefs. We could see a shifting in priorities as she becomes representative of a larger and more liberal constituency. That said, if Kennedy partisans choose to take advantage of this development and argue that their candidate was the only viable progressive chocie, I'd disagree: there are many progressive New Yorkers that Paterson could have picked to fill the seat. The blame, and the responsibility, lies with the governor.

-- Tim Fernholz

I think I'm going to have to be stronger than Dana and say that Paterson has made a very poor selection to fill New York's vacant Senate seat. Kirsten Gillibrand's Republican dynastic background doesn't bother me in itself, but being a Blue Dog really should disqualify you from consideration for statewide office. To add to Dana's analysis, Wayne Barret further details her conservative "credentials":

Gillibrand has described her own voting record as "one of the most conservative in the state." She opposes any path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, supports renewing the Bush tax cuts for individuals earning up to $1 million annually, and voted for the Bush-backed FISA bill that permits wiretapping of international calls. She was one of four Democratic freshmen in the country, and the only Democrat in the New York delegation, to vote for the Bush administration's bill to extend funding for the Iraq war shortly after she entered congress in 2007. While she now contends that she's always opposed the war and has voted for bills to end it, one upstate paper reported when she first ran for the seat: "She said she supports the war in Iraq." In addition to her vote to extend funding, she also missed a key vote to override a Bush veto of a Democratic bill with Iraq timetables.

Ugh. And in terms of the argument that you have to be this conservative to win the district -- which makes sense on its own terms -- I think it makes the pick even worse. If you're going to pick a sitting member of the House, it should presumably be from a safe seat. Now we have a senator without progressive credentials and have handed the GOP a good pickup opportunity in the House. I don't see how this can be defended.

--Scott Lemieux

House Republicans are excited by a Congressional Budget Office report that suggests stimulus spending would move too slowly to affect the economy; it hasn't been released to the public yet so far as I can see, but we can deduce a few observations from the reporting around it.

Keep in mind the report doesn't seem to analyze the legislation as proposed, but rather a general package of infrastructure spending; proponents of the bill argue their legislation will allow them to spend faster than the CBO's analysis indicates. The report also doesn't take into account the non-infrastructure investment items (like aid to states, unemployment insurance, and tax cuts) that make up the bulk of the bill. Many of these policy tools go into work in the short term and will have strong immediate effects. But the objection from the right, that only about half the infrastructure-investment money will be spent by 2010, is only an objection if you assume the recession will be over by 2010 -- which it will not be. Even optimistic assessments suggest that the recession will continue in some form, whether alleviated by stimulus or not, past 2010 and likely through 2012. In fact, the logic of the Great Depression suggests that it is important spending not be cut off too soon during a recession: After initial New Deal programs had pushed the economy back to its feet, Roosevelt cut spending and saw a recession in 1937. As we get more reaction from economists or a look a the report, you'll hear about it.

Incidentally, this is a good time for you to read Ezra's print piece on the CBO and its former director, now Office of Mangement and Budget Director, Peter Orzag. The article looks at how the CBO frames the debate over legislation like the stimulus with its analysis of costs, and will give you an idea of just how convenient it is for House conservatives to see this report.

As a final note, Noam Scheiber reports that administration officials are reassuring members that 75 percent of the entire stimulus bill will hit the ground during the next 18 months, suggesting that the explanation satisfied the skittish Sen. Kent Conrad, who as chair of the upper chamber's budget committee, expressed concerns about the report. That sounds about right to me.

-- Tim Fernholz

Today, one day after the 36th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, President Obama will overturn the Global Gag Rule, which under the Bush administration prohibited American foreign aid from supporting health care organizations that provided abortion or referred women to abortion providers.

And in related news, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has dismissed Mark Dybul, head of the office in charge of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. Dybul oversaw PEPFAR's abstinence-only programs. For more on his record, check out RH Reality Check.

Next up, brave progress on domestic reproductive rights, such as cutting off funding streams for abstinence-only education? I'll believe that when I see it.

--Dana Goldstein

New York Gov. David Paterson is reportedly all set to appoint upstate two-term Congresswoman Kirsten Gillibrand to Hillary Clinton's vacant Senate seat. My first thought was that Paterson made a bold choice in favor of youth, smarts, and policy chops over connectedness (Andrew Cuomo) or interest group support (Carolyn Maloney). But if you delve deeper into Gillibrand's record, you'll find there are some red flags in terms of civil rights issues.

It is no surprise that Gillibrand identifies as a Blue Dog and voted against the Wall Street bailout; those positions, while hardly courageous, are to be expected from a Democrat who narrowly won a district that voted 54 percent for Bush in 2004. But Gillibrand's careful centrism goes beyond mere signals of economic populism. She opposed former Gov. Eliot Spitzer's plan to offer driver's licenses to undocumented immigrants, and supports proposed federal legislation that would require proof of citizenship to obtain a license. On gay rights, Gillibrand scores 80 percent according to the Human Rights Campaign, the lowest score of any New York Democrat. Politicker New York sums her record up, and it's nothing to be proud of:

According to the Human Rights Campaign, she voted against the repealing of “Don’ Ask, Don’t Tell” legislation, opposed legislation that would grant equal tax treatment for employer-provided health coverage for domestic partners, opposed legislation to grant same-sex partners of U.S. citizens and permanent residents the same immigration benefits of married couples and opposed legislation to permit state Medicaid programs to cover low-income, HIV-positive Americans before they develop AIDS.

In this light, Maloney, who isn't known for her legislative rigor, suddenly looks far more attractive. The New York City congresswoman is hardly the most prominent member of the House, but she has staked out a few issues that matter to her, among them LGBT rights and women's issues. Maloney is the sponsor, for example, of legislation that would extend family-medical leave rights to gay couples.

Thoughts on the developing situation in New York?

--Dana Goldstein

• Making good on campaign pledges, President Obama signed executive orders today to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility within a year, shut down the system of international prisons utilized by the Bush-era CIA to indefinitely detain terror suspects without legal recourse, and banned the use of torture by U.S. personnel, restricting interrogation techniques to those prescribed by the Army Field Manual. As Adam and Greg Sargent note, however, there's enough legal vagueness in the orders to start the process up again but I find it difficult to believe that the likes of Marty Lederman would sign off on a reversal, much less the administration itself -- after all, Bush never claimed to be involved in anything illegal whereas the Obama administration has already implied they were.
• The principled Republican opposition has responded to closing Gitmo, and my favorite is this c. 2002 bit of fear mongering from House Minority Whip Eric Cantor: "Actively moving terrorists inside our borders weakens our security, raises far more questions than it answers and is the wrong track for our nation. Most families neither want nor need hundreds of terrorists seeking to kill Americans in their communities."
• The new administration's desire for accountability and openness is laudable, but to argue that Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn -- former lobbyist for defense contractor Raytheon -- ought to be exempted from an hours-old executive order banning lobbyists from serving in the administration is a very crass move. If getting an exemption is as simple as being "uniquely qualified," then I fear you'll start hearing a lot of these "indispensable man" arguments down the road.
• Timothy Geithner was approved by the Senate Finance Committee and former Symantec CEO John W. Thompson is reportedly being floated for commerce secretary.
• Despite reports that the Obama administration might put the kibosh on a lame-duck Bush executive order expanding offshore oil drilling, and Al Gore heading to the Hill once again to testify, House Republicans are focusing their energies on delaying the confirmation of both EPA head-designate Lisa Jackson and CEQ head-designate Nancy Sutley. However, the real target could be Carol Browner, who as Energy Czar would act in an position that needn't be confirmed by the Senate.
• Caroline Kennedy withdrew herself from the running to fill Hillary Clinton's Senate seat, although there seems to have been some confusion over whether the withdrawal was for real. Meanwhile New York Gov. David Paterson can't seem to make up his mind on a replacement, even though it's scheduled to be announced tomorrow.
• Freshly minted Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has gotten to work at Foggy Bottom, naming George Mitchell Special Envoy for Middle East Peace and Richard Holbrooke Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.
• Barack Obama took the oath of office for a second time last night, an act described by a White House attorney as "an abundance of caution." See also "The Wikipedia War Over Obama's Inauguration."
• I can only assume that since Norm Coleman has found a new job he'll immediately drop all those lawsuits against Al Franken, right?
• Dear Dick Cheney: Regarding your disappointment that your former boss did not get around to pardoning your pal Scooter, please review the lyrics of this song. Thanks.

--Mori Dinauer

I am on assignment today for a print feature, so haven't had the chance I would have liked to blog about the 36th anniversary of Roe. But here is Obama's statement, pointedly sent to reporters late enough in the day so that coverage would not compete with news about Obama's national security orders.

On the 36th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, we are reminded that this decision not only protects women’s health and reproductive freedom, but stands for a broader principle: that government should not intrude on our most private family matters. I remain committed to protecting a woman’s right to choose.

While this is a sensitive and often divisive issue, no matter what our views, we are united in our determination to prevent unintended pregnancies, reduce the need for abortion, and support women and families in the choices they make. To accomplish these goals, we must work to find common ground to expand access to affordable contraception, accurate health information, and preventative services.

On this anniversary, we must also recommit ourselves more broadly to ensuring that our daughters have the same rights and opportunities as our sons: the chance to attain a world-class education; to have fulfilling careers in any industry; to be treated fairly and paid equally for their work; and to have no limits on their dreams. That is what I want for women everywhere.

I expect that by next week, Obama will have overturned several of Bush's anti-choice executive orders, including the Global Gag Rule.

--Dana Goldstein

John McQuaid makes a marvelously concise point about the different ways in which the last two presidents relate to the media. As John summarized it even more concisely in his Twitter feed, "Obama and Bush each see the establishment media agenda in conflict with his own. To Bush it's ideologically hostile; to Obama, trivial."

Like Bush, Obama appears to view the media agenda in fundamental conflict with his own. But now, the perceived difference isn’t ideological. It’s programmatic. Obama (correctly, I think) sees the press representing two things that are clear obstacles to his ambitious plans: official Washington and a trivia-obsessed media culture.

First, the official Washington view: There’s a certain, Broderesque way of doing things. Be centrist, bipartisan - especially if you’re a Democratic president. Listen to the conservative talking heads who dominate Sunday talk shows, who will advise you to be … conservative. This world, shaped by the rise of conservative media since the Reagan era, remains several steps behind where the country is, or is ready to be, on politics and policy.

Second, the media culture: The cable maw must be fed with transient panics. Feeding frenzies and micro-scandals dominate. They fuel the chat shows, opinion columns and blogs. These faux crises and dramas, which usually pass with little consequence, can knock a presidential agenda off-stride or even destroy it.

But treating it as trivial, rather than hostile, is the appropriate reaction. And as the media changes and scrambles to respond to the new environment, Obama can find ways to work around both the High Broderism and the culture of transient panics.

-- Mark Schmitt

Spencer Ackerman reports that when asked during a Senate hearing whether waterboarding is torture, only days after Attorney General designate Eric Holder answered in the affirmative, Director of National Intelligence designate Dennis Blair refused to answer:

Blair just refused to answer a very easy question, asked by Sen. Levin: Is waterboarding torture? "I would say that there wil be no waterboarding on my watch, there will be no torture on my watch."

C'mon, a stunned Levin said. Blair: "I'm very much aware there were dedicated officers in the intelligence service who thought they were carrying out activities thought were authorized at the highest levels... I don't intend to reopen those cases of those officers who acted within their duties. I'm hesitant..." He doesn't want to call his intelligence officials torturers, but, you know, still. Waterboarding is is clearly torture.

I'm not sure what to say about this, I just think it should be noted.

-- A. Serwer

As someone who could very much do without Kennedy worship in general and JFK worship in particular, I suppose that I'm happy, on balance, that Caroline Kennedy has removed herself from consideration to be New York's next senator. Unlike many people, though, I never cared enough to even blog about it, roughly for the reasons suggested by Dana. First, what matters most about a senator is their votes, and Kennedy's presumably would have been fine. Second, I'm not really convinced that which particular wealthy, especially well-connected person is appointed is some sort of major issue of merit or justice. (Nepotism always seems a bigger deal where women are concerned; somehow, I don't remember all the outrage over the fact that Andrew Cuomo may not have gotten his current position strictly on merit.) And, finally, however unjustified I think JFK's reputation is, the brutal truth is that his legacy is a real political resource.

None of this is to say that I actually wanted Paterson to pick Kennedy; I would prefer a legislator with more experience and (especially) a clearer record of progressive politics, like Carolyn Maloney or Jerrold Nadler. But Kennedy probably would have been just fine.

--Scott Lemieux

Obama is unlikely to overhaul Bush's intelligence policies.

-- A. Serwer

On Inauguration Day, Ace of Spades blogger DrewM gave this title to a post on the new White House website:

You Stay Classy President Obamanation....New White House Website Trashes President Bush

DrewM's partner Ace, just a few hours earlier, commenting on Michelle Obama's dress:

She looks like she just got raped by the cast of Joseph and the Amazing Monocolor Dreamcoat.

Certainly, Obama could learn a few things about class from the guys making gang-rape jokes about the first lady.

-- A. Serwer

According to this ABC/Washington Post poll flagged by Glenn Greenwald. The American people oppose torture in all circumstances by a 58-40% margin, 52-38% want the United States to "find another way to deal" with terrorists than holding them at Guantanamo, 53-42% would rather put them on trial here or at home than keep them in Guantanamo, and by a small (50-47%) margin Americans want Obama to investigate human rights abuses under the Bush administration. By a larger margin, (52-42%) Americans would have opposed Bush pardons for those "who carried out his administration's policy on the treatment of terrorism suspects."

All of which, as Greenwald points out, puts the lie to the idea that Americans, rather than a beltway coalition of Very Serious People, believe the United States should pursue a policy of outright disregard for human rights. Jim Geraghty seems to think that Republicans have an issue here where they can win some points, but I think he underestimates the degree to which the torture debate was skewed by President Bush arguing in favor of torture. The bully pulpit of the president will now be mobilized in the other direction, something which, taking into account the relative communication skills of the current and former officeholders, is sure to affect public opinion.

Though I try to avoid cable news as much as possible, it's impossible at the gym, and so last night I was treated to three networks at once hyper-analyzing a joke VP Biden made at the swearing-in of White House senior staff yesterday -- it was a crack about John Roberts flubbing the presidential oath on Tuesday (I thought it was funny). Obama didn't laugh, though the rest of the room did. This signaled dreaded CONFLICT to the maniacs who populate cable news (see Jack Shafer here) and suddenly the joke became an issue. Now Marc Ambinder offers this:

The somewhat awkward episode yesterday at the White House staff swearing-in ceremony may be a harbinger of the Obama-Biden relationship for the remainder of this Administration. For all his respective strengths he brings to the office, Biden is a very different person from Obama. Biden is folksy, gregarious, undisciplined, an attention seeker and always the life of the party. Obama is sober, serious, and disciplined. At some point, the two styles will clash in a more significant fashion than yesterday.

To put it another way, Obama respects Biden for his years of experience, relationships with world leaders, and working class roots, but I don't think the two will become personally close. I doubt you will see the Obamas and Bidens vacation together or socialize.

Hmmm. On the latter point, I'd note that most reports indicate Michelle Obama and Jill Biden struck up a close relationship on the campaign trail. But did anyone care if Dick Cheney and GWB hung out together outside of work?

Marc's initial analysis of the Pres-VP relationship is solid right up to the point where he predicts that "the two styles will clash in a more significant fashion than yesterday." Putting aside the news judgment of the cable networks, I can't come up with a scenario where the two men's personality differences have any real affect on government; frankly, their opposites-attract scenario brings the best of both worlds to the executive branch, since Biden is just the man you want buttering up reluctant legislators while Obama brings the serious. The other thing to keep in mind is that Obama isn't exactly a stick in the mud -- look at the cracks he made to pool reporters called to attend his second "abundance of caution" swearing-in last night:

"We decided it was so much fun..." Obama joked while sitting on a couch. ... [the president is sworn in] ..."All right." Obama said. "The bad news for the pool is there's 12 more balls."

-- Tim Fernholz

Former Maryland Governor Bob Erlich steps proudly onto the swirling Cheeto-dust dunes of wingnuttia:

Toward the end of his speech, Obama referred to "the price and the promise of citizenship" -- as though it were a patriotic duty to ante up more of your hard-earned dollars. His infamous exchange with "Joe the Plumber" was no accident; our new president was serious when he said he planned to share the wealth of producers and wage earners. That the top 1 percent of taxpayers shoulder 40 percent of the federal income tax burden appears to no longer be pertinent, or patriotic, enough.

What Obama was referring to when he said "the price and promise of citizenship":

For as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies. It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break, the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours. It is the firefighter's courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent's willingness to nurture a child, that finally decides our fate.

Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends — hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism — these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility — a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.

This is the price and the promise of citizenship.

Obama was talking about individual people making the choice to sacrifice for others, not government forcing them to do so. But whatever, when firefighters save people, it's socialism. And Obama's just going to let those crazy redcoated freaks run wild, saving anyone they want!

-- A. Serwer

Elana Schor reports on the GOP's framing of the Lilly Ledbetter bill:

Senate Republicans will hold a press conference tomorrow, Thursday, January 22, at 11:30 a.m., in [location redacted] to discuss the Democrats' trial lawyer bailout bill ...

Nice to see that the Republican Party is keeping that big tent open. The bill would extend the statute of limitations on employment discrimination claims past the six months that the Supreme Court said was sufficient last year. In other words, it would prevent employers from getting away with discriminating against employees on the basis of race, sex, religion, or national origin as long as they're able to hide it for six months.

-- A. Serwer

The impeccable T.A. Frank has a new piece on the Employee Free Choice Act that does two interesting things. First, it describes in detail the problems faced by workers who try to organize, problems that most people are simply not familiar with. One of the main reasons that legislation to support union members is so controversial is a lack of information about what a union organizing campaign actually entails.

Second, and even more interesting, Frank identifies a possible way to win on EFCA without card check. Sacrilege, you say? Perhaps. But Frank does point out that the key way to improve union organizing is to make it less cost-effective for the company in question to engage in shady anti-organizing activities. Right now, it is very easy to do all kinds of illegal things to prevent a union: firings, hazing, forced meetings, favoritism, etc. Card-check seeks to get around that by closing the window of time a company has to pull these kind of shenanigans -- as soon as 50 percent plus one workers sign on to the union, poof, there's a union (no worries, secret balloteers, it only takes 30 percent of workers to force an election).

Currently, when 50 percent plus one workers sign cards, the company can choose to recognize the union or demand an election. Though some companies have either the public-relation smarts or corporate-responsibility ideals to simply accept the union, many will demand an election, and it's during the long election process that most of the problematic actions occur. Frank's insight is that if we increase the financial and other penalties on all those things -- currently, the sanctions are near nonexistent -- then a company would have a much bigger incentive to simply accept the union as soon as the cards are signed, whether or not it is legally required. And thus, card check without card check.

Frank apparently found some labor folks who think this might be a workable compromise, since the bill is much more likely to pass if conservatives can't demagogue the secret ballot issue. I'm mildly skeptical, since business interests are going to want to fight anything that would make union organizing easier, but public opinion would be more likely to fall on the labor side. Whether or not labor would accept this kind of compromise remains to be seen. The other part of this discussion is that the new administration can do a lot to help enforce the currently existing mild penalties through the National Labor Review Board and the Department of Labor -- the Bush administration did little, if any, regulatory enforcement -- and there is already funding in the stimulus bill to increase enforcement of worker protection.

-- Tim Fernholz

Jeez, here they go again. Karen Tumulty's tick-tock really captures the madness of Caroline Kennedy's decision to take herself out of contention for Hillary Clinton's Senate seat:

7 p.m. or thereabouts: The New York Post reports she has told Governor David Paterson that she is withdrawing her name from consideration for the Senate seat being vacated by Hillary Clinton. It says she is citing "personal reasons."

...

8:40 p.m.: We hear that Kennedy's advisers have just finished a very chaotic conference call. One source says even Josh Isay, her top strategist (at this point, obviously, we are using that word very loosely), is claiming not to know anything about any decision of hers to drop out.

8:59 p.m.: Swampland commenter rmrd tells us: Olbermann just said Kennedy did not bow out

...

2:07 a.m.: This statement by Caroline Kennedy arrives by email:

"I informed Governor Paterson today that for personal reasons I am
withdrawing my name from consideration for the United States Senate."

At first, it seemed that the decision to pull out was simply a way for her to avoid the embarassment of not getting picked for the seat. But if that had been the strategy, wouldn't her camp have stuck with it, instead of spiraling out of control? The other option suggestsed -- that Paterson leaked Kennedy's demural without her knowledge to force her out -- is a crazy bit of political jujitsu that certainly appears to be effective. On the other hand, though the Plank is taking credit, the real reason might be that Kennedy is a regular TAPPED reader. David Paterson, if you, too, are a regular TAPPED reader, heed the call of democracy and appoint a caretaker senator prior to a special election.

-- Tim Fernholz

The New York Times reports that President Obama is expected to sign executive orders mandating that Guantanamo Bay prison be closed within 100 days, secret prisons set up abroad be closed, and restricting the CIA to interrogation methods used by the military. There may be some anxiety about these two paragraphs:

But the orders would leave unresolved complex questions surrounding the closing of the Guantánamo prison, including whether, where and how many of the detainees are to be prosecuted. They could also allow Mr. Obama to reinstate the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation operations in the future, by presidential order, as some have argued would be appropriate if Osama bin Laden or another top-level leader of Al Qaeda were captured.

The new White House counsel, Gregory B. Craig, briefed lawmakers about some elements of the orders on Wednesday evening. A Congressional official who attended the session said Mr. Craig acknowledged concerns from intelligence officials that new restrictions on C.I.A. methods might be unwise and indicated that the White House might be open to allowing the use of methods other the 19 techniques allowed for the military.

We know torture produces unreliable intelligence, and we know that it has tarnished our international reputation and been used as a recruiting tool for Al Qaeda. Therefore, if we capture the highest-profile terrorist in the world, we should certainly prove our critics right by torturing him rather than giving him a fair trial. I suppose what's odd about that kind of thinking is that positing an extreme hypothetical to justify torture is a dead giveaway that we know it's wrong. If we were to actually capture bin Laden and then subsequently torture him, it would be a disaster for our reputation as a country and an important symbolic victory for al-Qaeda.

Obviously I haven't seen the draft of the order that the Times has, but torture is illegal and we are bound by treaty not to practice it. So while yes, it's technically possible that Obama could do it again, it would be just as illegal as when Bush did it, and I doubt there's any way the folks appointed to the OLC would approve it.

The second paragraph refers to the CIA being restricted to the techniques outlined in the Army Field Manual. My understanding is that intelligence types are concerned that the restrictions would prevent them from using techniques that are not in the manual, but are also not torture. I don't have the sources or the experience to determine the degree to which that's a legitimate concern or a beard for torture techniques. 

All in all, I would say it's something of a SLAP in the FACE that Obama waited until he was actually president to ban torture and order Guantanamo closed.

-- A. Serwer

• On his first full day as President, Barack Obama initiated a salary freeze for administration staff making over $100,000, ordered a two-year ban on lobbyists working in the administration in the same area they had previously lobbied in, made several calls to Mideast leaders, met with top military leaders to discuss a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, and halted all trials at Guantanamo Bay. The president also acted yesterday to halt and review all regulations issued by the Bush administration during its final days.
• Given that David Iglesias is now a prosecutor at Gitmo, I have the same question as Kate Klonick: "If President Obama is drafting an executive order to close Guantanamo Bay, and he has already filed a motion to halt military commission trials, does that make fired U.S. Attorney David Iglesias’ new gig as a Gitmo prosecutor irrelevant?"
• Timothy Geithner was questioned on Capitol Hill today over the vaguely controversial matter of failing to pay back taxes, Ken Salazar was confirmed for Interior Secretary, Eric Holder's confirmation was delayed by Arlen Specter at the committee level and John Cornyn's futile quest to delay the confirmation of Hillary Clinton induced an annoyed John McCain to get all mavericky on the Senate floor, ultimately prompting a 94-2 confirmation vote.
• Day One remainders: Marc Ambinder reports that Barack Obama might yet be able to keep his Blackberry, pending the introduction of presidential-level encryption, Brian Beutler asks us to keep an eye on whitehouse.gov's executive orders page (curiously, still blank), and Thomas Ricks asks what Obama intends to do about the Bush administration's covert programs.
• Senator Kennedy has been discharged from the hospital after suffering a seizure during yesterday's post-inauguration luncheon.
• Envelopes containing unidentified white powder show up at the offices of The Wall St. Journal.
• Jim DeMint goes all Red Dawn, telling the WSJ that "[w]e have to have a remnant of the Republican Party who are recognizable as freedom fighters. What I'm looking to do as a conservative leader in the Senate is to identify those Republicans, and even some Democrats, and put together a consensus of people who can help stop this slide toward socialism."
• The DNC unanimously elected Tim Kaine as their next chairman, whose plans for the future include a rhetorical embrace of Howard Dean's 50-state strategy while keeping an eye on top-level races, particularly the re-election of Barack Obama in 2012.

--Mori Dinauer

An upcoming Heritage Foundation event:

Is the Bolshevik Design Dead?

Speaker: Viktor Suvorov
Former Soviet Intelligence Officer and Author of
The Chief Culprit: Stalin’s Grand Design To Start World War II

Host: Lee Edwards,
 Ph.D. Distinguished Fellow in Conservative Thought,
The Heritage Foundation and
Chairman, The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation

I get the impression the answer they propose is "no."

-- Tim Fernholz

Alvaro Vargas Llosa has an article at TNR that is really quite misguided. Vargas Llosa urges Obama to resist his "socialistic intellectual formation" and not "throw money at the recession." His concern is that supply of money has increased as the Fed and other government agencies have tried to deal with the recession, because in the eight years prior to the Great Depression the money supply also increased. This, he suggests, means that there should be no stimulus legislation, presumably because there is no distinction between an increasing money supply and increasing the money supply in response to a fincancial crisis. Needless to say, he does not offer a policy alternative. Perhaps because most credible economists think a spending plan is a good idea. Wait, has he found two who disagree?

[Obama] has two advisers who could help hold his formation in check: Paul Volcker, whose tight-money policy at the Federal Reserve in the 1970s facilitated the prosperity of the Reagan years, and Christina Romer, whose 1994 paper "What Ends Recessions?" sought to prove that fiscal spending was not the cause of recovery after the eight recessions that took place between World War II and the early 1990s.

Ah, whoops. That paragraph actually mis-states Romer's argument -- Noam Scheiber explains why. And of course, both of those advisers have endorsed Obama's stimulus plan. Why, here's Romer herself telling you it's a good idea.

Then there's the old entitlement spending and deficit panic. One simply notes that Obama has a plan to deal with entitlement spending, and that's health care reform, since Medicare costs are the real long-term financial problem, while Social Security outlays are in relatively healthy fiscal shape. The deficit should worry us, but in the long term -- you don't worry about how much the water costs when your house is on fire. I'd note that economist Mark Zandi has analyzed the House's stimulus legislation and notes that the short-term costs of a deficit are not prominent:

The $825 billion, two-year fiscal stimulus plan proposed by House Democrats is large enough to provide a substantive near-term boost to the economy, but not so large as to result in measurably higher interest rates. Global investors remain avid buyers of U.S. Treasury bonds despite fully anticipating the costs to the Treasury of responding to the current financial and economic crisis.

Zandi too worries about the huge deficits of such a program in the long-term -- as does anyone concerned with fiscal responsiblity -- but also makes the case that immediate action is necessary despite these longer-term risks. And Obama has made clear that he expects to take action on long-term fiscal stability once the immediate crisis is past.

As to Llosa's argument that the New Deal delayed economic recovery, well, that's why God gave us Erich Rauchway.

Llosa doesn't just come right out and say it, but presumably he's interested in a strategy of letting the recession continue on this present path, toward double-digit unemployment by 2010. At the very least, it doesn't seem like a great economic policy, and it also seems awful cold-blooded.

-- Tim Fernholz

David Iglesias was one of the U.S. Attorneys who was fired by the Bush administration for not pursuing politically motivated voter fraud cases. He's got a new job now--he'll be prosecuting terror detainees from Guantanamo:

Igleisas explained that he had already begun the work, having travelled to the facility once, and expecting to go back.

"It's the most significant set of orders I've had in my 24 years of navy service," he added. "The level of detail that I'm looking into some of these terrorist groups, it just takes my breath away."

And he signaled what seemed to be a change in tone from the Bush years. "We want to make sure that those terrorists that did commit acts will be brought to justice -- and those that did not will be released."

The big question remains what happens to those detainees who may be guilty but have had the cases against them tainted by the use of torture. But there's something reassuring about the Obama administration hiring a former U.S. Attorney who was willing to lose his job rather than pursue politically motivated prosecutions.

Almost every economist will tell you the stimulus has to be massive to have any real impact. Even Marty Feldstein, who headed Ronald Reagan's Council of Economic Advisors, told Congress it had to be $800 billion. But a price tag like that scares Republicans and so-called "Blue-Dog" Democrats who worry about government debt.

So here's Obama's strategic choice. He can fight for the biggest stimulus possible -- twisting arms and counting noses to get a bare majority in the House and sixty votes in the Senate. That's how Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush got their huge tax cuts, and how Bill Clinton got his first budget through Congress.

Or Obama can go after the backing of a much larger majority than he needs -- including a majority of Blue-Dog Democrats and Republicans. Of course, to do this he'd have to settle for a smaller stimulus package -- one that may not be enough to immediately jump-start the economy.

Why would he ever choose the second strategy? Because his goal is not just to squeeze through the biggest stimulus package possible. It's to get a Congress that's mostly united behind whatever stimulus package emerges. This would help ensure that Republicans and Blue-Dog Democrats take some ownership of the package, and therefore responsibility for making it work.

And maybe if they feel ownership and responsibility, Obama can return to them later for more money and probably get their backing. Just as important, he might build bipartisan support for other things that have to be done in the next few months -- like keeping the U.S. auto industry afloat, reducing mortgage foreclosures, and devising new regulations of Wall Street. And he lays the foundation for a more united Congress capable of tackling a new health-care system and reform of Social Security and Medicare.

It's not the strategy his predecessors used to enact their economic plans. It's not hardball politics, it may not be the best move for the economy in the short run, and it's a gamble. But given the challenges our new president and our nation face, trading bigger stimulus for broad based support may be very smart politics and smarter economics in the long run.

--Robert Reich

Tim Geithner's confirmation hearings began today, with some focus on his tax-filing mistakes, but even more scrutiny on his role in the bailout, which, while it has stabilized the financial system somewhat, has also allowed a lot of banks to get a capital injection in exchange for little help to the overall economy. His replies to those questions have not been in-depth (I'm following along at Dealbook's live blog) but his answer to a question on the New Deal is enlightening:

12:25 p.m. | The New Deal: Talk turns to the Great Depression, and what the government did to help the United States pull out of it. Mr. Geithner says he generally supported the range of government programs and fiscal stimulus plans from that era, but suggests that there the government pulled back its economic support too early — he includes the Federal Reserve in this criticism. The strategy this time around should be “doing a lot soon, and saying with it,” he says.

Geithner is rejecting the notion peddled by some that the New Deal in fact exacerbated the Great Depression. That's nice to hear.

-- Tim Fernholz

The new "family values."

--Dana Goldstein

Obviously I don't agree with the statements made by Dutch MP Geert Wilders comparing Mein Kampf to the Koran, but there's something ridiculous about putting people on trial for saying ugly things about people. Rather than fostering cohesion, I think this kind of thing is liable to have a chilling effect where different people simply avoid dealing with one another. The best thing that could happen in the wake of statements like these is a conversation, not a trial. The only practical effect this will have is increasing support for the far-right nativist party Wilders belongs to.

-- A. Serwer

Israel's High Court of Justice overthrows the decision by a parliament committee that would have barred Arab political parties from participating in upcoming elections. Congratulations to Israel for demonstrating that their liberal institutions have the ability to check the discriminatory impulses of their legislative assembly -- though the proposal came from ultra-nationalists, the committee that originally banned participation in a 26 to 3 vote was made up of representatives from all of Israel's major political parties. No word yet on whether there is any evidence that the parties, which were accused of supporting terrorism, actually broke any law or supported any terrorists. Presumably it would be better if the Knesset left that question to the Israeli equivalent of the FBI?

-- Tim Fernholz

I'm going to have more to say about the mush-headed nonsense that passes for commentary on Barack Obama's relationship to hip-hop and his magical ability to cleanse young black folks of all things older black folks find embarrassing and conservative whites find offensive, but for the moment I want to put up this short documentary by filmmaker Byron Hurt called Barack and Curtis. The short explores two apparently discrete archetypes of black masculinity on Obama and rapper 50 Cent, but rather than endorsing a binary view that is only a tiptoe away from the old "good nigger/bad nigger" dichotomy, it gets at some of the shared qualities that make them compelling. Perhaps more important, Hurt identifies that problematic aspects of black masculinity are rooted in American masculinity, rather than being the result of some unique black cultural pathology:

The money quote here belongs to Jelani Cobb:

It’s almost a kind of underdog vitality that you see in both of them. Because neither of them, by any reasonable stretch, is supposed to be in the position that they’re in now...As stark a contrast as you find between Barack Obama and 50 Cent in terms of their personalities, in terms of what they present about black manhood and black masculinity, there is a commonality. These are black men who are playing in a game that was not designed for them. And they are playing in a way that has allowed them to be successful against great odds.

Most of the commentary on Obama and hip-hop ignores the uncomfortable reality that Obama has Jay-Z on his iPod, and that Jay-Z snatches Obama's greatness for a lyrical boast as cheerfully as Biggie once invoked Frank White. If there's one thing hip-hop and Obama have in common, it's an unapologetic embrace of American capitalism that nevertheless acknowledges the terrible fates of those who get chewed up in its wake. But key to both Obama and 50's appeal to youth is that they made it. They made it to heights they weren't supposed to reach. You don't need to be a fan of 50 Cent to acknowledge that.

The irony is that conservatives who clutch their pearls at such a sentiment nevertheless cling to the belief that the unrestricted market by itself solves all ethical and moral dilemmas. "It doesn't matter as long as you're making money" is not a maxim that is unique to hip-hop. There are few posts at The Corner lamenting Pete Coors "coarsening of the culture" through his beer commercials featuring scantily clad blondes tending to mountains exploding with bottles of alcoholic bathwater. 

But part of the appeal of hip-hop is it's insistence on telling the stories of those who have learned first hand the ugly side of American capitalism. It is a critical embrace of capitalism that celebrates both the American Dream and recognizes the dark shadow it casts, and Obama and the emcees who shout out his name have this in common. They are certainly more honest than those who cope with these contradictions by denying the humanity of those who find themselves at the bottom.

H/T Ta-Nehisi Coates

-- A. Serwer

After work last Friday, a few of us took a Prospect field trip to the local multiplex to see "Defiance," the new film about Jewish partisans hiding and fighting in the Byelorussian forests during the final years of World War II. The film is a deeply sentimentalized version of the true story of the Bielski brothers, Tuvia, Zus, Asael, and Aron. The sons of a farmer/smuggler with ties to the Red Army, the brothers had the military skill and craftiness to save 1,500 Jews, some of whom they snuck out of Jewish ghettos.

In this interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, the film's director, Edward Zwick, discusses some of the Zionist impulses behind the film -- the desire to transform the Jewish people from an intellectualized, urbanized class into a society complete with soldiers, manual laborers, and farmers. Indeed, the class tensions in the film provide some of the more interesting plot lines. The Bielskis are villagers who've learned to mingle with their Christian neighbors. Tuvia is a veteran of the Polish army. But many of the people the Bielskis save are teachers, students, and craftsmen from towns and cities. They are ill-prepared to live in the forest. The most interesting of these characters is the socialist pamphleteer Isaac Malbin, who, like a proper kibbutznik, is concerned with creating "community" in the forest. His ideas triumph for awhile, until a roughneck Jewish fighter begins to terrorize the group with demands that fighting men get larger portions of food. Tuvia shoots and kills him, restoring order and proving that communal living must be subjected to traditional authority. At the film's denouement, Isaac is killed in a failed attempt to fling a grenade at a Nazi tank. What a hapless intellectual! He is also the only major young male character in the film not to have a love interest -- despite the fact that he is played by the very handsome Mark Feuerstein, who looks especially fetching in spectacles.

The film's gender politics are also hopelessly regressive. The once-wealthy women whom Tuvia and Zus take up with are ridiculous set-piece characters. Zus' "forest wife," Bella, is especially grating. She seems to have taken special care to bring her lip gloss into hiding. "I think women should have guns," she tells Zus. "Why?" he replies. "Women have men to protect them!" Bella breathes, "Then I want protection," and puts Zus' hand on her breast. Wretched. Tuvia's future wife, Lilka, is an angelic nurse type who also shoots a dog. Hott.

All in all, I suppose I'd recommend "Defiance" because the historical episode it documents is such a fascinating one. But "Defiance" is simply not a great film -- its creators succumbed almost completely to the urge to prettify and sentimentalize this story. When uneducated Tuvia climbs atop a white horse to lecture the partisans with soaring rhetoric about peace and liberty, you know there has been a significant departure from reality. And one that is not to the benefit of telling this tale of an essentially ugly, senseless period of human history.

--Dana Goldstein

UPDATE: As commenters point out, my internets are bad. Here is the accurate link, continue feeling slapped. Weirdly, I somehow was sent to the Change.gov site from the new White House website. Apologies to Ambinder.

Matt catches Ambinder missing out on Bill Clinton's economic resume. Now it's my turn! Ambinder, checking out the new website, observes "No EFCA On White House Website" :

On the Whitehouse.gov site, the whole section is significantly truncated, dropping a number of issues from Employee Free Choice Act to fair trade.

See:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/agenda/economy/

It would have been easy to transfer whole sections over.

Except that looking today, you find...

Hmm. Looks like the URL is different now, so probably Ambers, way ahead as always, just caught an early version. But it seems that labor proponents have now avoided yet another slap in the face.

-- Tim Fernholz

Matthew Yglesias comments on Diane Feinstein's endorsement of Bush's pardon of two border patrol agents who shot an unarmed drug dealer in the back as he was walking away:

I don’t really understand what the relevance of these considerations are supposed to be. I take it that the federal maximum security prisons are filled with people who aren’t “low-level wrongdoer[s] who got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.” But still if you were to wade into such a prison and go on a killing spree, that wouldn’t be okay. It would be a big deal! Mass-murder! There’s no special rule where it’s okay to shoot at people as long as they’re “bad guys.”

-- A. Serwer

Among other good news yesterday was the appointment of Marty Lederman as assistant attorney general. Lederman will be joining Dawn Johnsen at the Office of Legal Counsel, which (ideally, but not in the Bush administration) functions as the "first line of defense" against executive overreach, because it advises the president on what he is legally allowed to do. Lederman, like Johnsen, has been a consistent critic of the Bush administration's torture policies. He's also a blogger to boot--no word on whether he plays basketball or plans to grow a fine mustache.

The Obama administration has also ordered military prosecutors to ask for a 120-day continuance on cases involving GTMO detainees. Peter Finn reports that the move "appears designed to provide the Obama administration time to refashion the prosecution system and potentially treat detainees as criminal defendants in federal court or to have them face war-crime charges in military courts-martial." The move is an important first step to closing the Guantanamo Bay prison. Still up in the air is how the Obama administration will handle cases in which the evidence against detainees is tainted by the use of torture.

-- A. Serwer

Even as official Washington came together to celebrate Martin Luther King Day and Barack Obama's inauguration, fault lines were deepening in an intra-Democratic Party policy debate that the incoming president hopes to avoid -- but may not be able to.

On Monday at Cardozo High School in the Columbia Heights neighborhood of D.C., the Rev. Al Sharpton and New York City schools Chancellor Joel Klein hosted a bipartisan group of civil rights leaders and educators focused on addressing the achievement gap, in part through advancing policies opposed by teachers' unions, including test score based performance pay and private school voucher programs. Other speakers included incoming secretary of education Arne Duncan; Sen. John McCain; outgoing education secretary Margaret Spellings; Newark mayor Cory Booker; New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg; former
speaker of the House Newt Gingrich; D.C. mayor Adrian Fenty; and controversial D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee.

In front of an audience of enthusiastic African American families and District community activists, speaker after speaker came to the podium and attacked the "status quo" in Democratic education policy. To the trained ear, these were thinly veiled fighting words addressed toward the leadership of urban teachers' unions. "As a Democrat, there are forces in our party that hold us back from doing the right thing for children," said Cory Booker, who has been targeted by Newark's teachers' union because of his support for a voucher program. "So I am no longer concerned with right or left. I just want to move forward."

But proving that fiery rhetoric about education reform might be more popular with parents than actual change in their children's classrooms, local schools leader Michelle Rhee -- the embodiment of this movement -- was tepidly received. When Rhee said, "There are a lot of people who benefit from our system being dysfunctional," a few voices raised in the crowd, booing. "That's not true!" a woman shouted. But Rhee continued, referring obliquely to her long-running contract dispute with the Washington Teachers' Union over merit pay and tenure. "People who keep their jobs. People who keep their contract."

--Dana Goldstein

• Barack Hussein Obama was sworn in today as the 44th president of the United States, despite John Roberts' inability to properly memorize the oath of office he administered. In his inaugural address, the president justly criticized the foreign policy of the past eight years and was the first president to refer to Muslims and nonbelievers at an inauguration. The new White House Web site came online shortly after noon, laying out the presidential agenda and introducing a blog (without comments, though).
• Ted Kennedy suffered a seizure during a congressional luncheon following the inauguration ceremony, but it appears the Massachusetts senator is awake and talking at Washington Hospital Center. Sen. Robert C. Byrd also experienced discomfort due to longstanding health problems during the luncheon.
• John Cornyn has decided to delay Hillary Clinton's confirmation by one day, even as the Senate unanimously voted to confirm Steven Chu, Arne Duncan, Janet Napolitano, Peter Orszag, Ken Salazar, Eric K. Shinseki and Tom Vilsack.
• It would appear Norm Coleman's new strategy to keep his Senate seat is do another recount that includes about 12,000 rejected absentee ballots.
• Nelson Mandela is a fan of the 44th president.
• It's not an Andrew Jackson-level shindig, but the Obamas are opening the White House to the (limited) public tomorrow.
• Two vocal critics of the Bush administration's legal transgressions, Marty Lederman and David Barron, are heading to the Office of Legal Council, and Guantanamo Bay judge Pat Parrish hints that Obama could make good on his promise to close the notorious detention facility this week by executive order.

--Mori Dinauer

I was supposed to watch the Inauguration from the blue-ticketed section, but like many other people, I found my entryway an impasse. At 11, my friend and I decided to head away from the Mall and find some place indoors to watch the proceedings. We ducked into the American Legion post at 3rd and D St. SE, figuring they would be able to point us to the nearest bar, but the woman near the door invited us to stay and watch with them. We poured ourselves some Dunkin Donuts coffee, grabbed a whiskey from the bar in the back, and settled in.

We'd landed at Post 8, the Kenneth H. Nash post. My friend remarked later that it was in many ways the perfect place to enjoy this moment--a communal, non-commercial space for people to gather. I did debate in high school and spent plenty of time in Legion posts giving speeches on various aspects of citizenship and the Constitution, so the room with its brick walls, tournament bulletin boards and scattered tables felt familiar, like home. We shared a table with a family in from Houston; the son kept his pink phone propped up on the table the entire ceremony snapping photos of the room, and occasionally repeating the president's name to himself.

There were lots of amazing moments -- I loved when the camera caught Obama turning around and winking to his daughter. Right after Obama was sworn in, a man at the bar behind me called out, "God bless the United States of America," and I could hear people give out sighs, as if they'd been holding their breath for ages. The bartender called out to see if anyone wanted champagne.

During Obama's speech, at the line,

This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed -- why men and women and children of every race and every faith can join in celebration across this magnificent mall, and why a man whose father less than sixty years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.

A woman behind me whispered, "That's right."

The woman who invited us in was Kathryn Young-McGriff. She is the mother of biracial daughters. She choked up a little bit while we were talking, and said, "All this talk about Martin Luther King Jr.'s [I Have a Dream] speech--I really do believe this is the beginning of his dream come true."

--Phoebe Connelly

Chief Originalist Justice John Roberts, not Barack Obama, flubbed the oath of office, after trying to do it from memory.

-- A. Serwer

From an atheist friend: "Thank God Obama included the non-believers."

From an evangelical friend, on Rick Warren apparently asking the Lord for forgiveness for his anti-gay bigotry: "I had to ask the Lord to forgive me laughing at Cheney in the wheelchair!"

--Sarah Posner

It just went live. And it features a blog! But no comment section.

--Dana Goldstein

Obama: "We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and nonbelievers."

--Dana Goldstein

Obama:

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake. And so to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more.

--Dana Goldstein

That is all.

-- A. Serwer

Greeted by extremely tepid applause, Rick Warren offered a prayer that included an English translation of the Shema, the most sacred prayer in Judaism:

Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one.

Warren went on to make a few statements that seemed almost apologetic for his own history of discrimination against LGBT people, women, and religious minorities. "When we fail to treat our fellow human beings and all the earth with the respect that they deserve, forgive us," he prayed, asking for "civility in our attitudes even when we differ."

Warren concluded by saying that he offered the prayer on behalf of "the one who changed my life," Jesus Christ.

--Dana Goldstein

I'm not sure what to make of the explicit reference (or perhaps rebuttal) to Malcolm X in Dianne Feinstein's speech, in which she noted " the supremacy of the ballot over the bullet." For once that's not a rhetorical device, I actually don't know what to say, except it's striking that DiFi is still arguing with Malcolm moments before Obama is to be sworn in.

-- A. Serwer

The president-elect is announced as "Barack H. Obama." Wonder how much discussion and debate went into that decision.

--Dana Goldstein

Nobody at the inauguration is wearing a hat. Not even Baby Biden, aka Hunter, aged 2.

Also, Jesse Jackson Jr. has positioned himself right outside the door through which all the notables are entering, ensuring maximum television exposure and guaranteed hugs and handshakes from the Obamas, despite his name being connected to the Blagojevich scandal.

--Dana Goldstein

There's a very interesting conversation going on between Hilzoy and Matt Cooper about the changing racial landscape over the past 20 years or so, and I'll have more to add later. I had the opportunity to attend the NAACP's inaugural reception downtown yesterday, where there was a panel on what yet remains to be done in terms of civil rights. Something that Children's Defense Fund President Marion Wright Edelman said during the panel struck me. Discussing where civil-rights organizations should focus their energy, she said that "the most dangerous place for a child in America to grow up is at that intersection between poverty and race." Allowing for everything that's happening today, I think tha