The dismissal of New Mexico U.S. Attorney David C. Iglesias in December 2006 followed extensive communication among lawyers and political aides in the White House who hashed over complaints about his work on public corruption cases against Democrats, according to newly released e-mails and transcripts of closed-door House testimony by former Bush counsel Harriet Miers and political chief Karl Rove.
A campaign to oust Iglesias intensified after state party officials and GOP members of the congressional delegation apparently concluded he was not pursuing the cases against Democrats in a way that would help then-Rep. Heather Wilson in a tight reelection race, according to interviews and Bush White House e-mails released Tuesday by congressional investigators. The documents place the genesis of Iglesias’s dismissal earlier than previously known.
DougJ has been a Balloon Juice writer since 2009.
Toilet paper rationing
If loving winger craziness is wrong, I don’t want to be right (from Specter’s town hall):
I know that years down the road, I don’t want my children coming to me and asking me, ‘Mom, why didn’t you do anything? Why do we have to wait in line for, I don’t know, toilet paper or anything?’ I don’t want to have to tell them I didn’t do anything. As a normal citizen, the most I feel like I can do is come to this town hall meeting.
Spanking rights, toilet paper shortages…oh, never mind.
Even the liberal New Republic
John noted the Marty Peretz/Betsy McCaughey connection. Betsy McCaughey’s dishonest smear piece, titled “No Exit” on Hillarycare, published in The New Republic while Sully was editor, was perhaps the lowest moment in the magazine’s history, and that’s saying a great deal. The wiki on Betsy McCaughey is pretty thorough: here’s a summary of her smear of the Clinton health care reform bill and here she is lying about provisions of the stimulus.
Just to give you some notion of how awful McCaughey’s “No Exit” was, here’s James Fallows, calling it a “A Triumph of Misinformation”. Franklin Foer apologized for the piece when he assumed creative control of the magazine in 2006. It’s also fair to say that Sully’s smarmy defense of the piece is one of lowest moments in the history of his blog.
And now McCaughey’s back telling lies about Obama’s health care plan and the Atlantic has assumed the New Republic’s old role of attacking health care reform from a faux high-brow perspective.
Plus ça change.
The quiet triumph of sanity
So it seems that we aren’t going to have a second Great Depression after all. What saved us? The answer, basically, is Big Government.
[……]Probably the most important aspect of the government’s role in this crisis isn’t what it has done, but what it hasn’t done: unlike the private sector, the federal government hasn’t slashed spending as its income has fallen. (State and local governments are a different story.) Tax receipts are way down, but Social Security checks are still going out; Medicare is still covering hospital bills; federal employees, from judges to park rangers to soldiers, are still being paid.
All of this has helped support the economy in its time of need, in a way that didn’t happen back in 1930, when federal spending was a much smaller percentage of G.D.P. And yes, this means that budget deficits — which are a bad thing in normal times — are actually a good thing right now.
He goes on to credit the bailout and the stimulus as also helping to avert catastrophe.
Now, let’s be clear, no one did anything particularly brilliant here. The stimulus and the decision not to cut federal spending are straight out of the mainstream Keynesian playbook. (Let’s leave the bailout out of this because all kinds of arguments can be made about how it was implemented and whether or not it would have been necessary at all if Paulson had acted sooner.)
And yet, throughout the Republican party and in most quarters of the media, these decisions are regarded as controversial. Krugman recalls Boehner’s idiotic quote “it’s time for government to tighten their belts and show the American people that we ‘get’ it.”
The attack on economic common sense was two pronged, just as the attacks on health care reform are. With health care, it begins with the crazies talking about euthanizing your grand-parents and then shifts to Chuck Lane wanking about end-of-life counseling. With economics, it begins with Boehner’s bone-headed belt-tightening (if not some even fringier stuff supply-side or Austrian economics) and ends with more high-brow Fama/Mankiw whackadoodle.
And the fact that sane, mainstream economic decisions actually worked won’t help Obama politically as much as they should. There’s no way he can land on aircraft carrier and declare “Mission Accomplished” on the economy. And, no matter what happens with the economy, we’re going to hear a lot of TEH STIMULUS DIDN’t STIMULATE.
This isn’t isolated, of course. Bush I was excoriated for his sane, mainstream tax increases and probably lost the election as a result.
We’re in a place where sanity prevails in practical terms and craziness prevails in political terms.
Update. Per the comments, I do think that Obama will get credit (possibly too much) if and when the economy returns to pre-2008 levels of unemployment, etc. But in the meantime, I don’t think he’ll get much credit for taking what could have been a catastrophe and turning it into merely a bad recession.
I’m not a teabagger but….
Chuck Lane’s piece on the end-of-life counseling provisions in the House health care bill is such pitch perfect contrarian, on-the-other-hand wankery that it ought to be put in a time capsule. Lane, you may recall, is the TNR editor who oversaw the Stephen Glass fiasco; he’s now a member of the Washington Post editorial board.
On the far right, this is being portrayed as a plan to force everyone over 65 to sign his or her own death warrant. That’s rubbish. Federal law already bars Medicare from paying for services “the purpose of which is to cause, or assist in causing,” suicide, euthanasia or mercy killing. Nothing in Section 1233 would change that.
Still, I was not reassured to read in an Aug. 1 Post article that “Democratic strategists” are “hesitant to give extra attention to the issue by refuting the inaccuracies, but they worry that it will further agitate already-skeptical seniors.”
If Section 1233 is innocuous, why would “strategists” want to tip-toe around the subject?
I can answer that one: it’s because we live in a country where batshit crazy people have a lot of influence. Next question.
The whole “I’m not a teabagger but reasonable people can dispute blah blah blah” shtick passed into the land of self-parody around the turn of the century.
Grand Unified Craziness
I’ve been a little disappointed by the lack of birtherist rhetoric from the teabaggers disrupting the townhall meetings, the Mike Castle incident notwithstanding. But I recently hit the jackpot on a local teabagger google group (no link — you have to join the group):
In case anyone has any doubts about what is coming, local, state, and federal governments have the authority to mandate vaccination once a particular health emergency is declared. The word is MANDATE, as in MANDATORY. They are under no obligation to grant exemptions and in case you are wondering, you will not likely be getting one. The only possible exemption is to get wout of town but, really, there will be no place to go as this will certainly be a federal issue. We are being hyped up right now to willingly accept their unproven swine flu vaccine which is ostensibly designed to PROTECT us against a so called flu strain which from all indications is less potent than any ordinary flu strain. Why then the need to vaccinate everyone against something like that? Why indeed? Why the need to pass legislation for trillions of dollars in new spending to solve a problem which barely exists and do it all within 2 weeks? Why pass a $787 billion so called “stimulus” plan without debate and with no one having read the bill? Why have an administration whose chief antagonist is a guy with no birth certificate and with no one willing to ask him for one? Imagine that. Hwe could end the entire controversy immediately and gain legitimacy and would be able to prove his detractors as fools, thus gaining hugely increased political power and further leverage to push his agenda simply by producing his birth certificate. Not a fake computer generated copy but a real one. All he has to do is open his sock drawer, reach in, pull out his birth certificate and present it to the world, thus making fools of his detractors. What could be easier?
[…..]Look at the following.
If you’re scoring at home, that’s birtherism, anti-vaccination craziness, and a link to an Alex Jones article, all in one post.
Here’s the kind of stuff that scares me (from the same group):
Yes, some will be hurt, some will be killed, but our resolve to fight for freedom will only grow stronger. Obama is a fascist and until the majority of the citizens of this country realize that is not an exaggeration or the first word that I could think of, this will continue. Once we all realize who he is and stand together we will defeat him and remove him from power.
Ethics waivers
Attention, Goldman haters, the Times has a big piece on Paulson’s interaction with his former company.
“I operated very consistently within the ethic guidelines I had as secretary of the Treasury,” Mr. Paulson responded, adding that he asked for an ethics waiver for his interactions with his old firm “when it became clear that we had some very significant issues with Goldman Sachs.”
Mr. Paulson did not say when he received a waiver, but copies of two waivers he received — from the White House counsel’s office and the Treasury Department — show they were issued on the afternoon of Sept. 17, 2008.
[….]During the week of the A.I.G. bailout alone, Mr. Paulson and Mr. Blankfein spoke two dozen times, the calendars show, far more frequently than Mr. Paulson did with other Wall Street executives.
On Sept. 17, the day Mr. Paulson secured his waivers, he and Mr. Blankfein spoke five times. Two of the calls occurred before Mr. Paulson’s waivers were granted.
All my friends in the finance world say two things about Paulson’s big decisions: (1) letting Lehman fail was catastrophically stupid and (2) the bail-out prevented a 1929-style meltdown. Former Lehman employees seem to believe that Paulson let Lehman fail in part because Goldman has always hated Lehman (their own hatred of Goldman likely colors their views, of course). Everyone believes that the bail-out benefitted Goldman immensely. In any case, whatever one thinks of the wisdom of Paulson’s moves, it’s a fact his two biggest decisions killed one of Goldman’s biggest rivals and used government money to enrich Goldman. One move was hands-off, the other was interventionist, but both benefitted Goldman.
I’m not a Goldman conspiracy theorist, but I can certainly see why a lot of people are.
Update. “Conspiracy theorist” may sound more derogatory than what I mean. (I don’t think of it as derogatory and describe myself as a “conspiracy theorist” about various things, including the Kennedy assassination and corporate ownership of media.) What I mean is that I’m not ready to go the full Taibbi when it comes to Goldman.