The Strident Centrist Blog

There’s been a public pissing match of late between Princeton economist, NY Times columnist and early George W. Bush years liberal-voice-crying-in-the-wilderness Paul Krugman and Senator and Democratic Presidential candidate Barrack Obama. What it’s really all about is nothing less than the soul of the Democratic Party, and whether the early 21st century version of the Progressive Movement has a significant place within it.

Lambert, at Corrente, comes down strongly on the Krugman side, while in the process providing the historical background of the dispute. The only argument I have with him is that, in saying

All progressives—and most Democrats—agree on the opportunity and the stakes. That’s not the issue. The issue is: What kind of politics can turn the opportunity into permanent, progressive change? What kind of politics can drive economics?

he doesn’t emphasize how fundamental the conflict is. Here’s more from Lambert: (more…)

Glenn Greenwald of Salon has this to say about why Majority Leader Harry Reid put off consideration of the FISA bill until mid-January:

It’s one thing to watch Congressional Democrats fail to stand up to any of the Bush abuses. It’s another thing entirely to watch as they actively enable them. But they’ve now moved beyond even that to actually perceiving as their Enemy anyone — such as “Dodd and his allies” — who seeks to disrupt their Bush-enabling efforts and, worst of all, who infects their rituals with any dirty, outside riff-raff, such as actual citizens.

That is the worst crime there is, Dodd’s real sin here, the reason he has to be attacked. He allowed the riff-raff to derail Harry Reid and Jay Rockefeller’s plan for quick and quiet enactment of telecom immunity. As Digby caught Nancy Pelosi saying recently about Democrats who are dissatisfied with Congress: (more…)

That’s what Cambridge University chemist Sir David King is quoted as saying in this article on Wired.com:

Sir David King, a chemist at the University of Cambridge, says the world would be a greener place if only women didn’t find men in exotic cars so sexy. Taken at face value, it seems outlandish - and some would argue chauvinistic - but King raises a valid point, even if it is obscured by the “sports cars and the women who love men who drive them are bad” tenor of his argument.

King, the UK’s chief scientific advisor, told the Telegraph there’s only so much governments can do to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, and real progress will come only through cultural change. People, he said, must take a greater personal role in addressing the issue. He singled out women who find drivers of expensive sports cars “sexy” and said they should instead focus their affection on men in more eco-friendly autos

If you haven’t been following the FISA controversy very closely because of the distractions of living a more or less normal life, it’s likely that you’re a bit confused as to what the dispute is really all about. As Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse pointed out during his speech on the Senate floor this morning, confused is exactly what the Bush-Cheney administration wants you to be. Fortunately the good Senator, who is a former US Attorney, does an excellent job of clarifying things. Here are a few key paragraphs:

The Protect America Act, passed in the August stampede, contains no statutory limitation on this administration’s ability to spy on Americans traveling abroad whenever it wants, for whatever purpose. (more…)

From the International Herald Tribune:

On the surface, the accomplishment of the two-week UN climate conference that concluded this weekend in Bali seems meager: Thousands of delegates representing nearly 200 nations agreed to talk more, laying out a “road map” for negotiations that will in theory produce a climate treaty by 2009.

Even this baby step required sleepless, volatile negotiations that continued to the last hours of the conference, with the U.S. delegation refusing to go along, until its lead negotiator was literally booed and jeered.

“If for some reason you are not willing to lead, leave it to the rest of us,” Kevin Conrad, the negotiator from Papua New Guinea, told the U.S. delegation in the wee hours of Saturday morning. “Please, get out of the way.” Minutes later, the Americans agreed.

B. H. Liddell-Hart, the mid-20th century British military analyst and writer, was once lauding a regimental officer he’d met many years before (perhaps during the First World War if I recall correctly) with words to the effect “he was the most intelligent officer I ever met. Of course, he never made general.” Eating the best and brightest of its young has been a bad habit of professional military services as long as there have been such, and the United States Army is far from an exception of the rule. Retired Col. Douglas MacGregor is a case in point, as you’ll see in this brief biography in the Wikipedia.

MacGregor has an important article in Mother Jones about what the surge has and has not accomplished, a piece apparently informed by extensive input from officers on the ground in Iraq. Let’s just say that the administration’s unequivocally positive spin is just that: spin.

We don’t know much about developments within Iraq. Military officers who have recently served in Iraq tell me they don’t truly understand Iraq’s complexity or the duplicitous nature of the Iraqis they work with. In my conservations with them, they raise troubling questions that don’t lend themselves to sound-bite answers on talk radio or the evening news. Is the Great Awakening inside the Sunni Arab community the road to Iraq’s stability, or is it just a pause for Sunni rearmament and reorganization? Is it a means to secure American military bases inside an emerging Sunni client state generously supplied with cash from Saudi Arabia, a kind of cordon sanitaire along the fault line that separates the Sunni Arab world from Shiite Iran and its beachhead in southern Iraq? Does this development mean America wins when our former Sunni Arab enemies regain power in central Iraq? Or—here’s the most disturbing question—will the presumed successes of today be catalysts for yet bloodier civil war inside Iraq or, worse, larger regional war? (more…)

John Dean points out that there are ten investigations of one sort or another that are underway into the Torture Tape Destruction. One of them is a suit the ACLU filed against the CIA in June, 2004, after being stiffed in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for documents regarding the treatment of prisoners. In September of that year, the judge in the case, one Alvin K. Hellerstein of the Southern District of New York, ordered the government to “produce or identify” all responsive documents within thirty days. Let’s pick up with Dean:

Now, in the action before Judge Hellerstein, he ACLU has moved to hold the CIA in contempt of court, based on the Judge’s September 15, 2004 ruling. It is difficult to see why the CIA is, in fact, not in contempt, given the nature of the FOIA request and the judge’s order. (more…)

Ex-CIA agent Larry Johnson must have spewed the coffee out of his nose the other day when he read this Dana Perino exchange with a reporter:

QUESTION: . . . On these CIA videotapes, did either the President or Vice President or Condoleezza Rice, when she was National Security Advisor, or Steve Hadley, see them before they were destroyed?

Perino offered this artful phrasing:

PERINO: I spoke to the President, and so I will have to defer on the others. But I spoke to the President this morning about this. He has no recollection of being made aware of the tapes or their destruction before yesterday. He was briefed by General Hayden yesterday morning.

Here’s Larry recalling how interested high level officials were in an incident he was involved in during the Reagan administration:

I know from my time at the CIA how presidents and national security staffs react to intelligence on high priority matters. They are ravenous and they are constantly pushing for more info. I remember, for example, being tasked on an urgent basis to review and analyze Spanish language documents the CIA obtained from a Nicaraguan military defector that described the mutual concern of Soviet and Sandinista officials about U.S. supplied shoulder fired surface to air missiles that were downing helicopters in Nicaragua and Afghanistan. At the time, the war in Nicaragua was one of the top five policy priorities of the White House. And the White House was eager to know what the defector had to say.

So please answer these questions. In the summer of 2002 was terrorism and the threat of terrorism at least one of the top three policy priorities for the Bush Administration? Was the White House interested in any details about the capture or interrogation of Abu Zubaydah?

All Larry really wants to know is how good the popcorn was.

From a piece by Joby Warrick and Dan Eggen today’s Washington Post:

In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA’s overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.

. . .

Individual lawmakers’ recollections of the early briefings varied dramatically, but officials present during the meetings described the reaction as mostly quiet acquiescence, if not outright support. “Among those being briefed, there was a pretty full understanding of what the CIA was doing,” said Goss, who chaired the House intelligence committee from 1997 to 2004 and then served as CIA director from 2004 to 2006. “And the reaction in the room was not just approval, but encouragement.”

Marcy Wheeler has more, as does Josh Marshall. First this, from Marshall: (more…)

We need a new Speaker of the House, one who doesn’t carry around the Bushian baggage of picking and choosing which parts of the Constitution to protect and defend and which to ignore. Sheldon Whitehouse, the freshman Senator from Rhode Island and former US Attorney, made a speech today on the floor of the Senate that should be read by every American who cares about Constitutional government. Here’s but one example of the lawlessness in the White House cited by Senator Whitehouse that threatens the future of our democracy: (more…)