AZspot

Can anyone deny that the most trenchant and effective criticism of President Obama today comes not from the right but from the left? Rachel Maddow’s grilling of administration economic officials. Keith Olbermann’s hectoring Democratic leaders on the public option. Glenn Greenwald’s criticisms of Elena Kagan. Ezra Klein and Jonathan Cohn’s keepin’-them-honest perspectives on health care. The civil libertarian left on detainees and Gitmo. The Huffington Post on derivatives. I want to find Republicans to take seriously, but it is hard. Not because they don’t exist — serious Republicans — but because, as [Julian] Sanchez and others seem to recognize, they are marginalized, even self-marginalizing, and the base itself seems to have developed a notion that bromides are equivalent to policy-thinking, and that therapy is a substitute for thinking. Marc Ambinder (via savingpaper) ☀

WikiLeaks editors, including Assagne, have spent substantial time of late in Iceland because there is a pending bill in that country’s Parliament that would provide meaningful whistle blower protection for what they do, far greater than exists anywhere else. Why is Iceland a leading candidate to do that? Because, last year, that nation suffered full-scale economic collapse. It was then revealed that numerous nefarious causes (corrupt loans, off-shore transactions, concealed warning signs) were hidden completely from the public and even from policy-makers, preventing detection and avoidance. Worse, most of Iceland’s institutions — from its media to its legislative and regulatory bodies — completely failed to penetrate this wall of secrecy, allowing this corruption to fester until it brought about full-scale financial ruin. As a result, Iceland has become very receptive to the fact that the type of investigative exposure provided by WikiLeaks is a vital national good, and there is real political will to provide it with substantial protections. If that doesn’t sound familiar to Americans, it should. At exactly the time when U.S. government secrecy is at an all-time high, the institutions ostensibly responsible for investigation, oversight and exposure have failed. The American media are largely co-opted, and their few remaining vestiges of real investigative journalism are crippled by financial constraints. The U.S. Congress is almost entirely impotent at providing meaningful oversight and is, in any event, controlled by the factions that maintain virtually complete secrecy. Glenn Greenwald ☀

The person who many believe is the leading candidate to replace Stevens — Obama’s Solicitor General Elena Kagan — has a record that is almost as bad as Sunstein’s when it comes to executive power abuses, civil liberties, and “War on Terror” radicalism. Unlike the Sotomayor-for-Souter substitution, which essentially maintained the Court’s balance, replacing Stevens with the likes of Cass Sunstein or Elena Kagan would move the Court dramatically to the Right, especially in the areas of executive power and civil liberties, where a fragile 5-4 majority has provided at least some minimal safeguards over the last decade. Whatever else one might want to say about Cass Sunstein — or, for that matter, Elena Kagan — it is simply false to claim that they would fit within the so-called “liberal” wing of the Court on matters of executive power and civil liberties. The replacement of John Paul Stevens could have a very radical impact on the Supreme Court, and it’s certainly not too early to begin combating pernicious myths about the leading candidates. Glenn Greenwald ☀

Meanwhile, the bill recently introduced by Joe Lieberman and John McCain — the so-called “Enemy Belligerent Interrogation, Detention and Prosecution Act” — now has 9 co-sponsors, including the newly elected Scott Brown. It’s probably the single most extremist, tyrannical and dangerous bill introduced in the Senate in the last several decades, far beyond the horrific, habeas-abolishing Military Commissions Act. It literally empowers the President to imprison anyone he wants in his sole discretion by simply decreeing them a Terrorist suspect — including American citizens arrested on U.S. soil. The bill requires that all such individuals be placed in military custody, and explicitly says that they “may be detained without criminal charges and without trial for the duration of hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners,” which everyone expects to last decades, at least. It’s basically a bill designed to formally authorize what the Bush administration did to American citizen Jose Padilla — arrest him on U.S. soil and imprison him for years in military custody with no charges. Glenn Greenwald ☀

The only thing worse than someone completely indifferent to human rights abuses when committed by their own government is someone whose concern for such matters is dictated by the religion or other demographic attributes of those whose basic rights are being denied. That’s the same mentality that leads our media to treat American journalists held by Evil Foreign Governments for a few weeks under dubious circumstances as screeching headline-making news, while ignoring almost completely those foreign (Muslim) journalists held by the U.S. Government for years without charges. How many Americans know and are outraged about Iran’s detention of Roxana Saberi, all while being completely ignorant of the numerous Muslim journalists held for years by the U.S., including a Reuters photojournalist, Ibrahim Jassam Mohammed, finally released last week after being held by the U.S. military for 17 months with no charges and even after an Iraqi court ordered him released? It’s the same mentality that allows the U.S. Government, with a straight face, to issue reports condemning as “torture” the very techniques we used, to protest indefinite detention, extra-judicial killings and lawless eavesdropping when engaged in by other countries, and to demand that other countries prosecute their war criminals and torturers in the name of “the rule of law” (while our own are feted on TV shows and given regular newspaper columns to glorify the torture and other war crimes they implemented). Glenn Greenwald ☀

Ron Paul was denied the ability to speak at the Republican convention in St. Paul, and held his own convention across town. Glenn Greenwald and I were there. While we disagree with the libertarians about more things than we probably agree on, it’s an honest disagreement about the role of government. The GOP establishment, on the other hand, struck a bargain for power with corporate America that is totally at odds with everything the libertarians stand for. I’ve often thought they have more points of honest intersection with progressives on the war, civil liberties, accountability and transparency than with the GOP and the “For Sale” sign they’ve affixed to the taxpayer trough. Ron Paul has been tireless in taking his message to college campuses, and he has tremendous support among younger people who identify themselves as fiscal conservatives but are uncomfortable with the fundies and their gay-bashing. But as the libertarian message is gaining traction, it is being hijacked by the Neocons — and Sarah “bridge to nowhere” Palin leads the parade. Jane Hamsher ☀

The power of myth and propaganda is well-documented. Still, even with that in mind, how could any conservative look at the messages sent from the Post Op-Ed page just in the last few days alone — Palin is awesome!; Europe needs a tea party movement! Confront Iran! Liberals are patronizing losers! — and still go on chattering about The Liberal Media, of which, in their minds (and in the mind of that paper’s “media critic”), the Post is a charter member? And it’s far from unusual for the Post to deliver an almost uniformly right-wing (particularly neoconservative) message; in fact, it happens quite frequently. “Liberal media” has basically come to mean: “anyone who doesn’t sound like Rush Limbaugh,” but even using that definition, the Post Op-Ed page comes very close and often, as today, meets it. That’s not news, but the persistence of the Liberal Media myth — not just among the Right but among media figures themselves — is quite remarkable. Not even the complaint by George Bush’s own Press Secretary that the media was “too deferential” to the Bush administration undermined it at all; if that didn’t, what could? Glenn Greenwald ☀

Nobody suggests that there’s anything wrong with hiring Gruber to perform modeling analyses and paying him to do so. That’s all perfectly appropriate; I’m all in favor of the Government’s retaining genuine experts (as Gruber is) for analysis. Nor has anyone claimed that Gruber changed his views because of these payments. The issue is the non-disclosure, and — most serious of all — the misleading attempts by the White House and others to depict him as being “objective” and independent rather than disclosing that he was being paid a significant amount of money by the very party whose interests his advocacy was advancing (which happens to be one of the misleading schemes Sunstein explicitly advocated in his 2008 paper). Glenn Greenwald ☀

…if Obama’s approach — reflective of the Republican “realists” to whom he seems to listen most — slays the pervasive, preening “liberal hawk” fantasy that we invade and bomb other countries in order to help them, that will at least be an important value. With some extremely rare historical exceptions, governments start and wage wars in order to benefit themselves, not to “help” the people in the countries which are being invaded and bombed. We’ve proven so many times as to place it beyond dispute that we’re more than willing to support and empower foreign leaders who do our bidding regardless of how they treat their own citizens. That didn’t change when we had a swaggering, cowboy-hat-wearing, evangelical moralizer in the Oval Office, and it’s not going to change just because he’s been replaced by a charming, nice, eloquent, East-Coast-educated Democrat. Glenn Greenwald ☀

But the U.S. media’s willingness to mindlessly apply the term “terrorist” in exactly the subjective, self-serving way the U.S. Government dictates — starkly contrasted with their refusal to use the far more objective term ”torture” on the ground that the term is in dispute (i.e., disputed by the U.S. Government torturers) — illustrates the establishment media’s principal function:  to serve American political power and justify whatever our government does.  That’s a major reason — perhaps the primary one — why the U.S. Government has been able to get away with everything it’s done over the last decade.  Those unseen victims of torture, rendition, indefinite detention and other government crimes are all just “terrorists,” so who cares?  In reporting on these convictions, CNN immediately and helpfully proclaims Nasr to be a “suspected terrorist” in a way that guts any meaningful definition of that term and — in many minds — justifies whatever was done to him, no matter how illegal. It’s worth asking this question:  which sounds more like actual “terrorism”:  (a) kidnapping people literally off the street and shipping them thousands of miles away to be tortured with no legal process, or (b) what Nasr is “suspected” of having done? Glenn Greenwald ☀

Whatever else is true, Fox has taken on a political role that is very rare, at least in modern times, for a large American news organization.  Its news coverage is not merely biased or opinionated; there’d be nothing unusual about that.  Instead, it is a major participant — the leading participant — in organizing, promoting and fueling protests, including street protests, against the government.  Fox has undertaken a role typically played by media outlets in, say, Venezuela or various unstable, under-developed countries — sponsoring rather than reporting on protests against the government — and it is difficult to recall any recent example that is similar. Fox has every right to do that, but the pretense that it is a news orgainzation is ludicrous — transparently so — and there isn’t anything remotely wrong with the Obama White House saying so.  Even those with high tolerance levels for blatant double standards should have a very hard time watching Bush officials of all people — along with their media-star allies — whine about criticisms of Fox coming from the White House, when the prior eight years were marked by an administration that attempted to dominate and control media coverage more than any in modern history, along with a media that seemed perfectly content, even happy, to be controlled. Glenn Greenwald ☀

It’s hard to overstate how aberrational — one might say “rogue” — the U.S. is when it comes to war.  No other country sits around debating, as a routine and permanent feature of its political discussions, whether this country or that one should bombed next, or for how many more years conquered targets should be occupied.  And none use war as a casual and continuous tool for advancing foreign policy interests, at least nowhere close to the way we do (the demand that Iran not possess nuclear weapons is clearly part of an overall, stated strategy of ensuring that other countries remain incapable of deterring us from attacking them whenever we want to).  Committing to a withdrawal from Iraq appears to be acceptable, but only as long as have our escalations and new wars lined up to replace it (and that’s to say nothing of the virtually invisible wars we’re fighting).  For the U.S., war is the opposite of a “last resort”:  it’s the more or less permanent state of affairs, and few people who matter want it to be any different. The factions that exert the most dominant influence on our foreign policy have only one principle:  a state of permanent warfare is necessary (the public and private military industry embraces that view because wars are what bestow them with purpose, power and profits, and the Foreign Policy Community does so because — as Gelb says — it bestows “political and professional credibility”). Glenn Greenwald ☀

…the Fox-News/Glenn-Beck/Rush-Limbaugh leadership trains its protesting followers to focus the vast bulk of their resentment and anxieties on largely powerless and downtrodden factions, while ignoring, and even revering, the outright pillaging by virtually omnipotent corporate interests that own and control their Government (and, not coincidentally, Fox News).  It’s hard to imagine a more perfectly illustrative example of all of that than the hysterical furor over ACORN. ACORN has received a grand total of $53 million in federal funds over the last 15 years — an average of $3.1 million per year.  Meanwhile, not millions, not billions, but trillions of dollars of public funds have been, in the last year alone, transferred to or otherwise used for the benefit of Wall Street.  Billions of dollars in American taxpayer money vanished into thin air, eaten by private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, led by Halliburton subsidiary KBR.  All of those corporate interests employ armies of lobbyists and bottomless donor activities that ensure they dominate our legislative and regulatory processes, and to be extra certain, the revolving door between industry and government is more prolific than ever, with key corporate officials constantly ending up occupying the government positions with the most influence over those industries. Glenn Greenwald ☀

Journalists, like everyone else, are entitled to have private conversations, and privacy can facilitate more candid discussions. But when hundreds of highly influential opinion-makers gather to talk about politics, that is a matter of public interest. If participants in that discussion agree to keep the discussions confidential, they should abide by that. But the rest of the world isn’t bound to honor that secrecy. That’s what journalism and leaks are about: disclosing and publishing other people’s secrets that are a matter of public interest. That’s what journalists do all the time, or at least should do: inform the public what powerful people are saying and doing in “private.” Unless you’re Tim Russert, you don’t need “permission” or “authorization” to publish what you learn. Beyond that, the very idea that someone has the right to attack and insult someone who isn’t present in front of hundreds of people — and then demand that the entire world, including the target of the attacks, honor that discussion as secret and private, that the target has no right to publicize it or respond — is ludicrous beyond words. Glenn Greenwald ☀