The Guilty Don't Feel Guilty; They Learn Not To

Freddie and Fannie Edition.

From the AP today and August 5, 2008.

E-mails and other internal documents released by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee show that former Fannie Mae CEO Daniel Mudd and former Freddie Mac CEO Richard Syron disregarded recommendations that they stay away from riskier types of loans.

Fannie and Freddie own or guarantee around half the $11.5 trillion in U.S. outstanding home loan debt. The two companies are the engines behind a complex process of buying, bundling and selling mortgages as investments.

They traditionally backed the safest loans, 30-year fixed rate mortgages that required a down payment of at least 20 percent. But in recent years, they lowered their standards, matching a decline fueled by Wall Street banks that backed the now-defunct subprime lending industry.

The documents show that Freddie Mac's former Chief Risk Officer David Andrukis sounded warnings as far back as 2004 about the risks posed by loans in which borrowers didn't provide proof of their incomes or detail their assets, according to e-mails released by the committee. In an interview with investigators, Mr. Andrukis recalled telling Mr. Syron in mid-2004 that the company was buying bad loans that "would likely pose an enormous financial and reputational risk to the company and the country." Moreover, Mr. Syron received a memo stating that the firm's underwriting standards were becoming shoddier and that the company was becoming exposed to losses. In a 2004 meeting with Mr. Andrukis, however, Mr. Syron refused to consider possibilities for reducing Freddie Mac's risks. Mr. Syron told Mr. Andrukis that he "couldn't afford to say no to anyone." Mr. Syron ended up firing Mr. Andrukis for, in his words, "a variety of [unspecified] reasons . . . not primarily for his having a view on credit."

According to Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., chairman of the committee,
such "irresponsible decisions are now costing the taxpayers billions of dollars."

The two companies were seized in September by government regulators after stock prices fell by more than %60, destroying more than $80 billion of shareholder value. Two months later, Freddie Mac asked for an injection of $13.8 billion in government aid after posting a massive quarterly loss. Fannie Mae has yet to request any government aid but has warned it may need to do so soon.

For his part, Mr. Syron collected more than $38 million in compensation from 2003 through 2008.

The documents presented by the House committee included an internal Fannie Mae presentation from June 2005 that showed the company at a "strategic crossroads," at which it could either delve into riskier loans or focus on more secure ones.

"We couldn't afford to make the bet that the changes were not going to be permanent," Mr. Mudd said.

Lawmakers, in questioning that lasted more than four hours, were clearly frustrated by what they called a lack of willingness among Syron and Mudd, plus former Fannie Mae CEO Franklin Raines and former Freddie Mac CEO Leland Brendsel, to share any of the blame for the companies' fortunes.

"All four of you seem to be in complete denial that Freddie and Fannie are in any way responsible for this," said Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif. "Your whole excuse for going to risky and unreasonable loans that are defaulting at an incredibly high rate is that everyone is doing it."

The ability of the companies to capitalize on the perception they were implicitly backed by the government allowed them to borrow at relatively low rates and use those funds to buy mortgages as investments. The companies also collected fees in exchange for guaranteeing that borrowers would repay other home loans.

By the end of 2007, the firms held mortgages worth more than $1.4 trillion combined, and guaranteed payments on loans worth $3.5 trillion more.

Both firms had sophisticated systems to hedge against risks. But they remained exposed to one unlikely, but potentially catastrophic possibility: a wide-scale decline in national home prices.

The only real protection against such a downfall was purchasing only the safest loans.

Executives of both companies maintained that one of the reasons the firms held so many bad loans was that Congress leaned on them for years to buy mortgages from low-income borrowers to encourage affordable housing while shareholders constantly attacked the executives for missing profitable opportunities by being too cautious.

Others, however, dismiss that explanation. "Sure, it's hard to deal with the pressures of Congress and shareholders and regulators," said a former high-ranking Freddie Mac executive. "But that's why executives get paid so much. It's not acceptable to blame those pressures for making bad choices."

Mr. Syron and Mr. Mudd eventually yielded to those pressures, effectively wagering that if things got too bad, the government would bail them out.

The thinking was that if something really bad happened to the housing market, then the government would need Freddie and Fannie more than ever, and would have to rescue them," Mr. Andrukonis said. "Everybody understood that at some level the company was putting taxpayers at risk."

Mr. Mudd has asserted that the companies were merely victims of circumstance. A company spokesman added that, "there is little to nothing that Freddie Mac could have done to prevent the losses."

Documents and interviews of company employees show, however, that the executives were specifically and repeatedly advised from 2004 onward to increase their capital cushions and to scale back on mortgage purchases.

In November 2007, after Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson, Jr. and Federal Reserve chairman Ben S. Bernanke privately urged both companies to raise more money, Fannie Mae raised $14.4 billion from shareholders. Freddie Mac's Syron was more resistant. The company ended up raising $6 billion in preferred stock in 2007 while Mr. Syron combatively dismissed suggestions he would raise more simply because officials told him to. "This company will bow to no one," Mr. Syron told a room of investors and analysts in March of this year.

In 2007, as home prices were falling and defaults rising in some areas, Fannie Mae finally shrunk its mortgage portfolio, albeit slightly. Mr. Syron's Freddie Mac, however, increased its portfolio by $17 billion. That same year the companies posted combined losses of $5.2 billion. Analysts say they may lose an additional $24 billion or more this year.

Documents also highlight Freddie and Fannie's extraordinarily aggressive and expense lobbying campaign to thwart off repeated attempts to impose tighter restrictions on the companies. According to the AP, internal Freddie Mac budget records reflect $11.7 million paid to 52 outside lobbyists and consultants in 2006 alone. Former Fannie Mae CEO Raines defended his company's lobbying, saying that "Fannie Mae, like any other corporation owned by shareholders, came to Congress and expressed its views."


Jerks, Congress, Economy Meltdown

Deficit Hawks Have Got It All Wrong

Krugman on why increasing the federal budget deficit is not a valid reason for opposing massive government spending to prevent economy from falling further (paraphrased).

People who think that fiscal expansion (i.e., government spending) today is bad for future generations have it exactly wrong. The fact is that fiscal austerity will worsen the economy now and in the future.

Deficit worries are based on the notion that government spending "crowds out" private investment -- that the government, by issuing lots of debt, drives up interest rates, which makes businesses unwilling to spend on new plant and equipment, and that this in turn reduces the economy's long-run rate of growth. This reasoning is sound, under normal circumstances. Current long and short term interest rates are already at historic lows, yet private investment continues to plummet. Moreover, two cases (US in 1937 and Japan in 1996-1997) demonstrate that reducing government spending during times of depressed economy lead to steep falls in private investment. In both cases the government pulled back in the face of a liquidity trap, a situation in which the monetary autority had cut interest rates as far as it could, yet the economy was still operating below capacity. We are in the same kind of trap today, which is why deficit worries are misplaced. Right now we have a short fall in private spending and government spending must be used to take up the slack, particularly by investing in infrastructure items that will make the nation richer in the long run.

Economy

Mukasey's Refusal To Investigate Torture War Crimes

Using Law To Justify Torture, Daphne Eviatar via Washington Independent:

For months now, Atty. Gen. Michael Mukasey has refused to investigate whether Bush administration officials committed war crimes by authorizing the torture of suspected terrorists. His reasoning? Any actions were authorized by the administration’s lawyers, and so cannot constitute a crime. As he wrote to Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), one of 56 House Democrats who last month called on Mukasey to appoint a special counsel: “It would be both unwise and unjust to expose to possible criminal penalties those who relied in good faith on ... prior Justice Department opinions.”
*****
But do the administration’s legal memos put the matter to rest? Does soliciting a set of self-serving opinions actually shield senior government officials from prosecution?

Probably not, according to many constitutional scholars and lawyers. Indeed, the Justice Dept. itself would never accept, on face value, any suspected criminal’s defense that he had been relying on advice of counsel. Rather, legal experts say, that advice must have been a reasonable interpretation of the law, based on a thorough knowledge of the facts, and provided before the suspect acted. So when it comes to policymakers authorizing torture, the administration’s defense appears to fail on all grounds.

Torture

We Were Warned

Look No Further Than The Driveway, America. Via NYT:

Over the last 25 years, opportunities to head off the current crisis were ignored, missed or deliberately blocked, according to analysts, politicians and veterans of the oil and automobile industries. What’s more, for all the surprise at just how high oil prices have climbed, and fears for the future, this is one crisis we were warned about. Ever since the oil shortages of the 1970s, one report after another has cautioned against America’s oil addiction.
*****
Nearly 70 percent of the 21 million barrels of oil the United States consumes every day goes for transportation, with the bulk of that burned by individual drivers, according to the National Commission on Energy Policy, a bipartisan research group that advises Congress.

Energy

Truth is Out on Torture

Milt Bearden, former career CIA, via The Washington Independent:

Throughout this ugly drama, U.S. leaders have assured the public that the extreme interrogation measures used on detainees have thwarted acts of terrorist and saved thousands of American lives. The trouble with such claims is that professionals who know something of interrogation or intelligence don’t believe them. This is not just because the old hands overwhelmingly believe that torture doesn’t work -- it doesn’t -- but also because they know that torture creates more terrorists and fosters more acts of terror than it could possibly neutralize.

The administration’s claims of having “saved thousands of Americans” can be dismissed out of hand because credible evidence has never been offered -- not even an authoritative leak of any major terrorist operation interdicted based on information gathered from these interrogations in the past seven years. All the public gets is repeated references to Jose Padilla, the Lakawanna Six, the Liberty Seven and the Library Tower operation in Los Angeles. If those slapstick episodes are the true character of the threat, then maybe we’ll be okay after all.

Torture

Heckuva Job

Via NYT:

After the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush committed the nation to a “war on terrorism” and made the destruction of Mr. bin Laden’s network the top priority of his presidency. But it is increasingly clear that the Bush administration will leave office with Al Qaeda having successfully relocated its base from Afghanistan to Pakistan’s tribal areas, where it has rebuilt much of its ability to attack from the region and broadcast its messages to militants across the world.

Al Qaeda

Lawyers Concocted Torture Schemes

via McClathcy:

WASHINGTON — The framework under which detainees were imprisoned for years without charges at Guantanamo and in many cases abused in Afghanistan wasn't the product of American military policy or the fault of a few rogue soldiers.

It was largely the work of five White House, Pentagon and Justice Department lawyers who, following the orders of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, reinterpreted or tossed out the U.S. and international laws that govern the treatment of prisoners in wartime, according to former U.S. defense and Bush administration officials.

Torture, Guantanamo

The McClellan [Over]Reaction

So many layers get uncovered with this story. Particularly striking, is the unsurprising reaction of the media to the claims that they were lapdogs in the lead up to the war. Most folks, I believe, figured the barn door was shut on this topic, but journalists, newsreaders and other hacks, just like the current administration and stand-up comedians, do not like to be criticized, no matter how cogent the knock. A standard response coming out the last few days is similar to the Hillary Clinton justification to vote for the Iraq War Resolution. It goes something like this:

How could we have known that the what the President and other administration officials said about the threat posed by Iraq was flawed and/or patently false? How could we have known that what we all figured would be a nice, short, tidy little war, with great patriotic visuals for the folks back home (for that is what the administration promised us), would turn into a sectarian bloodbath and 5 year plus counter-insurgency quagmire? We asked all the hard questions and the President, and even Colin Powell, gave their word that this unprovoked war was necessary. Heck, it was even desperately urgent to save us from a nuclear strike that would make 9/11 look like a walk in the park. How could we have known?!

As Salon's Glenn Greenwald points out, in reviewing McClellan's book, Tim Rutten, the LA Times media "critic," joins the choir of voices defending those journalists who couldn't be bothered with doing their jobs, i.e. acting as independent inquirers as opposed to White House stenographers. According to media "critic" Tim Rutten:

The news media, no less than the nation, endured a wrenching trauma on 9/11 and no less than any other institution in society felt the moral obligation to demonstrate solidarity with a country under deadly threat. In that situation, not giving the administration the benefit of the doubt, when it presented "facts" it said were based on the best and most sensitive intelligence available from the CIA and other spy agencies, would have been mindlessly adversarial. Moreover, since the media lacked the ability to do original reporting on the ground in Iraq, what basis would there have been for contradicting the administration's assessment of Saddam Hussein's aims?

Greenwald highlights the absurdity of these comments.

There's that standard media excuse: it was impossible for journalists to do anything except spout what the government was telling them. . . . Apparently now, in the U.S., when our Government wants to start a war by attacking another country that hasn't attacked us, it's the duty of the media to presume that they're telling the truth about everything, and it would be extremely irresponsible -- "mindlessly adversarial" -- for them to do otherwise. I just can't even add anything to that.

For his part, NBC White House correspondent David Gregory is willing to level criticism at anyone besides himself and other reporters. According to Gregory, the fault that the American people heard only one side of the story, that of the Bush/Neo-Con marchers onto war, was the fault of, well, the American people. After all, according to Gregory, its not the press's responsibility to question the President when he lies the country into war.

I think the questions were asked. I think we pushed. I think we prodded. I think we challenged the president. I think not only those of us in the White House press corps did that, but others in the rest of the landscape of the media did that.

If there wasn't a debate in this country, then maybe the American people should think about, why not? Where was Congress? Where was the House? Where was the Senate? Where was public opinion about the war? What did the former president believe about the pre-war intelligence? He agreed that—in fact, Bill Clinton agreed that Saddam had WMD.

The right questions were asked. I think there‘s a lot of critics—and I guess we can count Scott McClellan as one—who thinks that, if we did not debate the president, debate the policy in our role as journalists, if we did not stand up and say, this is bogus, and you‘re a liar, and why are you doing this, that we didn‘t do our job. And I respectfully disagree. It‘s not our role.

As Greenwald and others have noted, some reporters were doing more than reprinting the administration's dire warnings and fear mongering talking points. Take for example the McClatchy organization, whose excellent reporting before the war demonstrated the hollowness and outright falseness of the administrations justifications for war. I guess Rutten of the LA Times must find it hard to understand how they could have gotten the story right. I guess they were just acting "mindlessly adversarial."


Media

Romney: I'm Always Open To Hypocrisy and Duplicity If It Gets Me Elected

AP via USA Today:

BOSTON (AP) — A decorated Iraq war veteran, convicted as a boy for a pellet gun shooting, seemed like an ideal candidate for a pardon from then-Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney.

But Romney, now a U.S. Republican presidential candidate, said no — twice — despite the recommendation of the state's Board of Pardons.

At age 13, Anthony Circosta was convicted of assault for shooting another boy in the arm with a BB gun, a shot that did not break the skin. Circosta worked his way through college, joined the Army National Guard and led a platoon of 20 soldiers in Iraq's deadly Sunni triangle.

In 2005, as he was serving in Iraq, he sought a pardon to fulfill his dream of becoming a police officer.

"I've done everything I can to give back to my state and my community and my country, and to get brushed aside is very frustrating," said Circosta, 29.

In his presidential bid, Romney often proudly points out that he was the first governor in modern Massachusetts history to deny every request for a pardon or commutation during his four years in office. He says he refused pardons because he did not want to overturn a jury.

But critics argue that the blanket policy is an abdication of a key power given governors and the president — the ability to recognize how someone convicted of a past crime has turned their life around.

During the four years Romney was in office, 100 requests for commutations and 172 requests for pardons were filed in the state. All were denied.

"Governor Romney's view is that it would take a compelling set of circumstances to set aside the punishment and guilt resulting from a criminal trial," said Romney aide Eric Fehrnstrom, who added he was not familiar with Circosta's case. "The power to pardon should only be used in extraordinary circumstances."

While he refused all requests for pardons as governor, Romney has said that could change if he is elected president.

Asked in last week's debate if he would consider pardoning Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who was convicted of lying and obstructing the CIA leak investigation, Romney said: "It's worth looking at that. I will study it very closely if I'm lucky enough to be president. And I'd keep that option open."

REPUG 2008

Sadly, People Still Need Reminding That Torture Is Wrong, And Unhelpful

via WashPost op-ed:

As has happened with every other nation that has tried to engage in a little bit of torture -- only for the toughest cases, only when nothing else works -- the abuse spread like wildfire, and every captured prisoner became the key to defusing a potential ticking time bomb. Our soldiers in Iraq confront real "ticking time bomb" situations every day, in the form of improvised explosive devices, and any degree of "flexibility" about torture at the top drops down the chain of command like a stone -- the rare exception fast becoming the rule.

To understand the impact this has had on the ground, look at the military's mental health assessment report released earlier this month. The study shows a disturbing level of tolerance for abuse of prisoners in some situations. This underscores what we know as military professionals: Complex situational ethics cannot be applied during the stress of combat. The rules must be firm and absolute; if torture is broached as a possibility, it will become a reality.

This has had disastrous consequences. Revelations of abuse feed what the Army's new counterinsurgency manual, which was drafted under the command of Gen. David Petraeus, calls the "recuperative power" of the terrorist enemy.

Former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld once wondered aloud whether we were creating more terrorists than we were killing. In counterinsurgency doctrine, that is precisely the right question. Victory in this kind of war comes when the enemy loses legitimacy in the society from which it seeks recruits and thus loses its "recuperative power."

The torture methods that Tenet defends have nurtured the recuperative power of the enemy. This war will be won or lost not on the battlefield but in the minds of potential supporters who have not yet thrown in their lot with the enemy. If we forfeit our values by signaling that they are negotiable in situations of grave or imminent danger, we drive those undecideds into the arms of the enemy. This way lies defeat, and we are well down the road to it.

Torture

Broder: Man of the People?!

Glenn Greenwald via Salon:

The disconnect between, on the one hand, what Beltway media stars think about and care about, and the lives of most Americans on the other, is so vast that it is difficult to describe. One could argue that the complete disconnect between our Beltway power centers and the lives of most Americans is the single greatest deficiency in our political culture. Yet the preening, insulated pundits of the royal court think the opposite.

They think that they are the real representatives of The People, and that their King, David Broder, is the Real Voice of the People. Mike Gravel apparently "chuckled" in Tom Edsall's face after Edsall bestowed Broder with that title, thinking that he had "made an absurdist joke."

But most national journalists would almost certainly walk away exactly the way Edsall did -- deeply confused and disoriented over the fact that someone did not perceive David Broder as the Man of the People. They live in a different universe and -- especially for the ones who have been there for so long, as well as for the ones who are most desperate to rise within it -- they cannot and do not recognize that any other exists.

More:

In sum, Broder has propped up one of the most unpopular and corrupt presidencies in history, all after he spent years waxing hysteric over a deeply popular President and a sex scandal that Americans by and large thought was petty and inconsequential. Time and again, David Broder is on the wrong side of every critical political issue. His judgment proves again and again to be worthless and misguided. And his opinions could not be any more detached from the "ordinary Americans" he thinks he represents.

Press

Authoritarianism On Parade

Via NYT editorial:

Suddenly, Mr. Bush is in a hurry. He has submitted a bill that would enact enormous, and enormously dangerous, changes to the 1978 law on eavesdropping. It would undermine the fundamental constitutional principle — over which there can be no negotiation or compromise — that the government must seek an individual warrant before spying on an American or someone living here legally.

To heighten the false urgency, the Bush administration will present this issue, as it has before, as a choice between catching terrorists before they act or blinding the intelligence agencies. But the administration has never offered evidence that the 1978 law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, hampered intelligence gathering after the 9/11 attacks. Mr. Bush simply said the law did not apply to him.
* * *
This is a dishonest measure, dishonestly presented, and Congress should reject it. Before making any new laws, Congress has to get to the truth about Mr. Bush’s spying program. (When asked at a Senate hearing yesterday if Mr. Bush still claims to have the power to ignore FISA when he thinks it is necessary, Mr. McConnell refused to answer.)

With clear answers — rather than fearmongering and stonewalling — there can finally be a real debate about amending FISA. It’s not clear whether that can happen under this president. Mr. Bush long ago lost all credibility in the area where this law lies: at the fulcrum of the balance between national security and civil liberties.

Spying, Civil Liberties,

The Wolf Has Got To Go

Ignatius via WashPost.com:

Wolfowitz has failed at the World Bank not because his underlings were out to get him (though many probably were) but because he treated the organization itself as an enemy. He saw its professional staff as an impediment to achieving his goals, rather than as a potential ally. Instead of heeding advice to work with the prickly international staff and win them over, he installed a palace guard of Americans who, like him, exuded the cocky "we know best" confidence of the Bush administration.

Wolfowitz, NeoCons

McCaffery on Iraq, "The population is in despair."

Gen. McCaffrey on the not-so-bright future for Iraq. Via WaPo:

[His] bottom line is that the U.S. military is in "strategic peril" -- a sharp contrast to his previous views. In 2005, he concluded in a similar report that "momentum is now clearly with the Iraqi government and coalition security forces." In a 2006 assessment, he wrote: "It was very encouraging for me to see the progress achieved in the past year."

The retired general, who on his latest visit also interviewed a U.S. intelligence official and some Iraqi officers, is especially critical of the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. It is "despised" by the Sunnis, he writes, is seen as "untrustworthy and incompetent" by the Kurds, and now enjoys "little credibility among the Shia populations from which it emerged."

The government lacks dominance in every province, he added. One result is that "no Iraqi government official, coalition soldier, diplomat, reporter, foreign NGO [nongovernmental organization], nor contractor can walk the streets of Baghdad, nor Mosul, nor Kirkuk, nor Basra, nor Tikrit, nor Najaf, nor Ramadi, without heavily armed protection."
* * *
So, he concluded, it is still possible to develop a stable Iraq. But, he added, "We have very little time left." The dilemma facing the U.S. government, he said, is that U.S. forces probably will have to be reduced substantially within three years, but the insurgency will go on for many years more.

Iraq

The Broken Country

Veteran military correspondent Joe Galloway, via Military.com:

No doubt the contractors who are bloated like ticks on the billions they've sucked out of the public trough will write the checks to build George W. Bush a really fine presidential library on the campus of Southern Methodist University.

All of it will be a lie, just like the lies his administration told to beat the war drums five years ago.

How will the curators portray the broken military, the broken Constitution, the broken laws, the forever broken troops who came home missing limbs or eyes or pieces of their brains, the broken promises to cherish and care for the families of those who were killed and those very wounded veterans?

How will they portray the corruption, both real and spiritual, that this man and his accomplices have visited upon a nation and a people who once could be proud of their place in this world?

How and why did so many Americans, including so many in Congress and in the media, sit idly by while so much that was precious to us was bent and twisted and broken by men who had the power and the money to do the right things but chose to do the wrong things?

Iraq

George W. Bush is What Reagan Would Have Been Given The Opportunity

Or so says Prof. Krugman (via NYT):

Why is there such a strong family resemblance between the Reagan years and recent events? Mr. Reagan’s administration, like Mr. Bush’s, was run by movement conservatives — people who built their careers by serving the alliance of wealthy individuals, corporate interests and the religious right that took shape in the 1960s and 1970s. And both cronyism and abuse of power are part of the movement conservative package.

In part this is because people whose ideology says that government is always the problem, never the solution, see no point in governing well. So they use political power to reward their friends, rather than find people who will actually do their jobs.

If expertise is irrelevant, who gets the jobs? No problem: the interlocking, lavishly financed institutions of movement conservatism, which range from K Street to Fox News, create a vast class of apparatchiks who can be counted on to be “loyal Bushies.”

The movement’s apparatchik culture, in turn, explains much of its contempt for the rule of law. Someone who has risen through the ranks of a movement that prizes political loyalty above all isn’t likely to balk at, say, using bogus claims of voter fraud to disenfranchise Democrats, or suppressing potentially damaging investigations of Republicans. As Franklin Foer of The New Republic has pointed out, in College Republican elections, dirty tricks and double crosses are considered acceptable, even praiseworthy.

Bush, Reagan, Presidency

Our Warm(er) World

Scientists Gather to Finalize Climate Report via NYT:

``We basically have three choices - mitigation, adaptation, and suffering,” said John Holdren, the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and an energy and climate expert at Harvard University. ``We’re going to do some of each. The question is what the mix is going to be. The more mitigation we do, the less adaptation will be required and the less suffering there will be.”

Global Warming

Wealth, askew

Herbert via NYT:

There are 93 million production and nonsupervisory workers (exclusive of farmworkers) in the U.S. Their combined real annual earnings from 2000 to 2006 rose by $15.4 billion, which is less than half of the combined bonuses awarded by the five Wall Street firms for just one year.

Wealth, Income,

“It takes Executive Branch authority beyond anything we’ve ever known.”

Again.

Bush signing statement undoes intended protections against spying on Americans through the mail, via Carpetbagger and the NY Daily News.

President Bush has quietly claimed sweeping new powers to open Americans’ mail without a judge’s warrant, the Daily News has learned.

The President asserted his new authority when he signed a postal reform bill into law on Dec. 20. Bush then issued a “signing statement” that declared his right to open people’s mail under emergency conditions.

That claim is contrary to existing law and contradicted the bill he had just signed, say experts who have reviewed it.

Bush’s move came during the winter congressional recess and a year after his secret domestic electronic eavesdropping program was first revealed. It caught Capitol Hill by surprise.

Bush, Spying, Law

Why I Am A Democratic

Pithy but strong quote from Digby:

I am a liberal because it is the political philosophy of freedom and equality. And I am a progressive because it is the political path to a better future. And I am a Democrat because it is the political party that believes in freedom, equality and progress.

Politics