What Were the Spitzers Thinking?

Many are remarking about Eliot Spitzer's extraordinarily brief and uninformative press conference yesterday, after it became known wiretaps had exposed him as a customer of an international prostitution ring. The presser amounted to little more than a 45-second photo-op, a chance for the New York governor to hold hands with his wife in public and announce his vacation plans.

Wouldn't you like to know what they were really thinking during that excruciating stage show? Well, now it can be told. The U.S. Justice Department, relying on super-secret spying technologies which the White House assures us do not require a judicial warrant, has now publicly released a transcript of the couple's thoughts as they left yesterday's press conference:

Truly, men are from Mars.

New York's Next Governor

Because of this it looks like David Paterson will be the next governor of New York. In a matter of days, if not hours.

Now, if only David Vitter had an equal capacity for shame, maybe the rest of the pols would wise up. No chance of that, is there?

Your Mid-Term John McCain Exam

Voters, open your laptops. This week the New Yorker has a multiple choice interactive quiz, "Senator Hothead," by Paul Slansky. We'll be grading it on this scale:

CORRECT ANSWERS

15-13 - A - You're a credit to democracy!
12-10 - B - Good effort, but you might have studied harder.
9-7 - C - Unless you mend your ways, you're likely to become a Republican.
6-4 - D - What? You get your news from Fox TV?
3-0 - F - Are you by any chance using John McCain's brain?

Your Next Homework Assignment:

Bush Endorses Torture

Saturday, George W. Bush made history, of sort. He joined the ranks of Torquemada and a select few other political leaders in mankind's history by explicitly endorsing torture as a governing national policy for the Spanish Inquisition C.I.A.

It's his "legacy," says the New York Times. It's "the very talisman of his unchecked rule and his arrogant indifference to the rule of law," says Scott Horton.

No doubt most of the Sunday talking heads will offer Oh-So-Serious chatter about why waterboarding is not torture; or, even if it is, why it's okay as long as we are the torturers. Save yourself the time. Here's a send-up of the Beltway insanity that passes for Serious commentary these days, courtesy of The Onion:

Our Obsequious Press

Glenn Greenwald has the proof.

Reconsidering the Democratic Campaign

Hillary Clinton has totally pissed off half the Democrats in American by seemingly campaigning for John McCain. Meanwhile, Barack Obama's chief foreign policy advisor resigned today after calling Mrs. Clinton a "monster." And another of his advisors says neither Hillary nor Obama is "ready to have that 3 am phone call." Do you happen to have another resignation form handy?

Says a Kos contributor, "The only one happy" about all of this "is John McCain." What we say is, it's time to reconsider this idea from a month ago:

He foresaw global warming. He "took the initiative" on the Internet. And he knew exactly how Iraq would turn out. Who's to say that Al Gore hasn't known all along that the Democratic race would descend into some weird state of gridlock--and that only he, the Goracle, could rescue the party from civil war?

As a Pennsylvania blogger points out, that's what "super-delegates" are for.

In Iraq 'Indefinitely'

WaPo's Karen DeYoung today covers the important and revealing constitutional crisis brewing between the White House and Congress over incipient "security" treaties being discussed by the U.S. and Nouri al-Maliki's Iraq. The treaties, so the White House contends, are needed because the mandate for having foreign troops in Iraq will expire at year's end.

The article appears in the 'Reality Section' of the Post, which is to say deep in the interior between pages A-14 and A-19, where the truth usually is buried.

The Bush administration yesterday advanced a new argument for why it does not require congressional approval to strike a long-term security agreement with Iraq, stating that Congress had already endorsed such an initiative through its 2002 resolution authorizing the use of force against Saddam Hussein.

The 2002 measure, along with the congressional resolution passed one week after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks authorizing military action "to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States," permits indefinite combat operations in Iraq, according to a statement by the State Department's Bureau of Legislative Affairs.

The statement came in response to lawmakers' demands that the administration submit to Congress for approval any agreement with Iraq. U.S. officials are traveling to Baghdad this week with drafts of two documents -- a status-of-forces agreement and a separate "strategic framework" -- that they expect to sign with the Iraqi government by the end of July. It is to go into effect when the current U.N. mandate expires Dec. 31.

The Bush administration says Congress shouldn't worry. Mr. Bush really isn't "trying to lock in a U.S. military presence in Iraq before the next president takes office." He just wants "combat operations" to continue 'indefinitely.'

Florida Education Evolves

The New York Times, March 6:

Has Florida come to its senses over the teaching of evolution? Sound science appears to be winning the latest round, but the struggle isn’t over.
* * *
Some anti-evolutionists are now pushing Florida’s Legislature to step in and allow the teaching of alternative explanations of biological origins. The alternatives that they have in mind would almost certainly not be deemed “scientific” and would have no legitimate place in science classes.

If the standards are strictly followed, Florida may finally be on the way toward improving the quality of its science curriculum and the subpar performance of its students in national assessments.

Baseball on Steroids

You can get all the primary news you want here, or just about anywhere else on the pipes. We're spending the day contemplating Abraham Socher's captivating Commentary Magazine article titled "No Game For Old Men," courtesy of Al Yellon's dad over at Bleed Cubbie Blue.

Did You Pick the Wrong Week?

Did you pick the wrong week to pay off that mortgage?

Gaza Q and A

Question:

[S]ays an official with the Department of Defense. “We sat there in the Pentagon and said, ‘Who the fuck recommended this?’”

Answer: Why, George W. Bush did it.

Question: So, what happened next?

Answer:

Long story short: the US government decides to bolster Fatah by sending them a bunch of arms. Word of these shipments leaks to a Jordanian newspaper. All hell breaks loose, Hamas and Fatah start a civil war. Hamas wins the war and proceeds to use the American-supplied arms it confiscated from Hamas Fatah against Israel.

Question: How could such a thing happen?

Answer:

“You know,” says [Khalid Jaberi, a commander with Fatah’s al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades], “since the takeover, we’ve been trying to enter the brains of Bush and Rice, to figure out their mentality. We can only conclude that having Hamas in control serves their overall strategy, because their policy was so crazy otherwise.

The 20 Percent Solution

Following on this from yesterday, Robert Reich has published a second post, "Are We Heading For Another Great Depression (Part Two)." He thinks "the chances of a Depression are no higher (and not much lower) than twenty percent."

"Why not higher?" he asks. Mostly, he suggests, because the people in charge are smarter than they used to be.

[O]ur monetary authorities know how and when to pump more money into the economy; our Congress and White House know how and when to stimulate with fiscal policy; and the US economy is more integrated with the rest of the world... .

Poppycock. We may well avoid a depression, even a Great one, but it won't be because authorities are smarter than they used to be. As George Orwell famously observed in a 1945 essay, "Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it."

Another Great Depression?

Professor Robert Reich, the former Secretary of Labor, runs a blog called, appropriately enough, "Robert Reich's Blog." There, yesterday he asked the question "Are We Heading for Another Great Depression?"

Prof. Reich gives two answers. One of them is brief and maddeningly unexplained: "Probably not," he says.

The other answer is an extensive quote from Marriner S. Eccles' memoir, "Beckoning Frontiers and Personal Recollections." Eccles was FED Chairman -- in effect, a professional forebear of Ben Bernanke -- for more than a decade during the Roosevelt administration.

As Prof. Reich notes with admirable candor, there are "eerie similarities" between the causes of the Great Depression identified by Eccles and the credit crisis we see unfolding today. The trigger for both was the increasing trend of maldistribution of wealth that preceded a credit crunch. Think the Bush tax cuts, for example:

[A] giant suction pump had by 1929-30 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently produced wealth. This served them as capital accumulations. But by taking purchasing power out of the hands of mass consumers, the savers denied to themselves the kind of effective demand for their products that would justify a reinvestment of their capital accumulations in new plants. In consequence, as in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran out, the game stopped.
* * *
The time came when there were no more poker chips to be loaned on credit. Debtors thereupon were forced to curtail their consumption in an effort to create a margin that could be applied to the reduction of outstanding debts. This naturally reduced the demand for goods of all kinds and brought on what seemed to be overproduction, but was in reality underconsumption when judged in terms of the real world instead of the money world. This, in turn, brought about a fall in prices and employment.

Unemployment further decreased the consumption of goods, which further increased unemployment, thus closing the circle in a continuing decline of prices. Earnings began to disappear, requiring economies of all kinds in the wages, salaries, and time of those employed. And thus again the vicious circle of deflation was closed until one third of the entire working population was unemployed, with our national income reduced by fifty per cent, and with the aggregate debt burden greater than ever before, not in dollars, but measured by current values and income that represented the ability to pay.

To judge from the comments section, Reich's readers are not happy with his glib "probably not" answer. But what's a former cabinet officer to do?

He couldn't very well say "Hmmm. Sure looks like it to me." Just as with Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, the moment an informed observer -- say, an economist like Robert Reich -- predicts, "The Great Depression Is Coming, The Great Depression is Coming," it has "profound implications" on the future itself.

Bernanke knows this, too. That's assuredly why, as the Cunning Realist points out today, he has been so spectacularly wrong in so many of his public predictions about the future of the economy.

Or, as The Big Picture boldly puts it, "If the Fed were to come clean about the present circumstances, it would cause a market panic." The observers, don'cha know, are lying just to protect us.

Keep that in mind every time you read or hear what they have to say.

Jim Paul: 'Champion of Travel'

Intrepid investigative journalist Michael Stewart reports in today's Pensacola News Journal that disgraced school superintendent Jim Paul has been racking up more out-of-state conference trips -- and expenses -- than any other school chief in Northwest Florida. In fact, "Paul spent more money on travel than the five other superintendents combined."

Since January of last year, Escambia County School Superintendent Jim Paul has spent 66 days away from work attending 17 professional conferences — an average of one trip every three weeks.
* * *
[A]n examination of Paul's travel records last year compared to members of the Escambia School Board and five other Florida school superintendents shows he is the champion of travel.

Paul's defense seems to be that Pensacola is such a backwater burg, who wouldn't want to escape it for a little lobbying action elsewhere? He told the News Journal, "We live in Pensacola on the edge of Alabama. Nobody comes here."

Tell that to the tourist bureau.

This latest bamboozle is about as convincing as the excuses Jim Paul put on offer after being arrested on drunk driving charges. Especially when you notice that so many of the cities he 'conferenced' at -- Boston, Las Vegas, Tampa, and New Orleans, among others -- happen to be within easy driving distance of gambling casinos.

On the other hand, maybe he just needs a lot of parking lot naps.

An E.B. White Moment

The late E.B. White, long-time editor of The New Yorker, used to have fun in the margins with bad newspaper headlines and other gaffes. We feel sure this one about Timothy Goeglein's resignation, following his exposure as a serial plagiarist, would have been titled "Words of One Syllable Dept."

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