Gerry Mulligan at Newport 1958

Art Farmer on trumpet...

Changes at the Journal

This aint good. Looks like the wall between the news room and the editorial pages of the WSJ may be crumbling a bit.

I think that the news pages of the Journal are among the few remaining distinct and quality voices in the print industry. The editorial pages are filled with some of the most egregious deceitful dreck that you can find outside of Little Green Footballs, The Corner, or Pajamas Media.

Sheesh.

Why don't we just cut to the chase and rename the NYSE "Goldman Annex"?

Another Goldman man joins NYSE

NYSE Group has tapped Goldman Sachs trading executive Duncan Niederauer as its president and co-chief operating officer, setting up the possibility that he may become the second executive in recent years from the bank to run the Big Board, reports the Wall Street Journal. The announcement, late on Monday, raises questions about how long current Big Board CEO John Thain, who also hails from Goldman Sachs, will remain in power. Mr Thain has announced two big mergers at the NYSE and is busy overhauling the 214-year-old exchange but has also said he may only stay in the job a total of five years. He started three years ago, in 2004.

They have the largest trading operation on the floor (Spear Leeds), they own 30% of ARCA, which merged with the NYSE last year. (In a ridiculous conflict of interest, they advised both ARCA and NYX on that deal). They posted almost $10b in net income last year, the vast majority of it attributable to their proprietary trading desk. While most of that trading does not take place in the equity markets, the derivatives, swaps and interest rate instruments that make Goldman their money are based upon information that ultimately emanates from those markets. If people don't think that Goldman has an informational advantage due to their position, they're nuts. The pretense of independence of the management and the board of the NYSE makes the Grasso era look good.

One trader puts it this way: "in the interests of the individual investor, first we ought to put everyone at Goldman in jail. Then we'll figure out what they were doing".

Supporting the Troops....

From that great multi-colored fishwrap, USA Today, comes this:

Money Graphs:

Rushed by President Bush's decision to reinforce Baghdad with thousands more U.S. troops, two Army combat brigades are skipping their usual session at the Army's premier training range in California and instead are making final preparations at their home bases.

Some in Congress and others outside the Army are beginning to question the switch, which is not widely known. They wonder whether it means the Army is cutting corners in preparing soldiers for combat, since they are forgoing training in a desert setting that was designed specially to prepare them for the challenges of Iraq.

He's sending them into a hopeless situation, and not even preparing them fully for the task. Better buy another magnetic ribbon for the back of the pickup.

This is how it's done...

World class smackdown of Condi by Olbermann....

She has failed at everything that she has ever undertaken. Yet she continues to move into more and more prominent and sensitive roles, which can only be attributable to her blind loyalty to the boy king. Middling scholar, poorly regarded provost of Stanford, National Security Advisor on 9/11, key architect of the Iraq debacle, Secretary of State.

Murtha

The Bush/Rove/Cheney machine has shown time and again its disdain for public opinion, the Constitution and history of the republic, but there is one thing that they cannot work around, one person who they simply do not have the power to discredit, one force that they cannot roll over, simply due to the fact that he has two cards that this administration cannot trump: moral authority and nothing to lose.

John Murtha is 74 years old. He has two purple hearts and a bronze star. He has no political ambitions beyond his current service in Congress. He is the Pentagon's man. No matter how hard Cheney, Brit Hume and the Fox News attempt to smear him, he is supported at the highest level of the military as a long standing friend. He spends his afternoons at Walter Reed.

Today in the Journal, in a breathless article that attempts to point to a growing rift in the Democratic ranks with regards to their use of the power of the purse, the best that they can do to highlight opposition to Murtha is to quote Rahm Emmanuel. Emmanuel is the Democratic caucus chairman, a political operative and poll watcher. He exists only to gauge the elusive public sentiment and by definition, to split the middle on questions of national importance. He can say what he wants, but he lacks everything that Murtha already has.

Murtha's plan is simple: Bush doesn't get the money without providing some accountability towards properly training the troops, and without some restrictions on the madness of extending current combat tours. Britt Hume can call him senile until the cows come home, and Michelle Malkin can call him a traitor, but they cannot stop the train, because it's left the station: 58% of the public supports this simple plan. That number will grow.

When the final reviews of the Boy King's reign are written, John Murtha will have a prominent role.

That would make this.....

If the Sy Hersh article is true, and planning is underway for a coordinated bombing attack of Iran, then this statement, by the President, from January 29th:

"Some are trying to take my words and say what he is really trying to do is go invade Iran. Nobody is talking about that," he said.

would be a lie, right?

Sy Hersh and The Changing Landscape

Another terrific piece by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker, it really bookends last year's piece on the maneuvers already going on inside of Iran.

A few things come together here. First, the complexity of the playing field that we've decided to enter. That in itself is unremarkable, beyond the fact that this administration's gross incompetence is really central to the hash that we've made of the region. As Josh Marshall points out, that incompetence is not a by-product of the disaster, it's actually central to the entire strange and tragic journey.

The corruption and ineptitude aren't unfortunate add-ons to the effort. They're at the heart of it. It's a stain like original sin. And the same goes for the democratizing element of the mission. Even among critics of the war, it's often accepted as granted that a key aim of this effort was democratization -- only that it was botched, like so much else, or that the aim of democracy, in a crunch, plays second fiddle to other priorities. Not true. The key architects of the policy don't believe in democracy or the rule of law. The whole invasion was based on contrary principles. And the aim can't be achieved because those anti-democratic principles are written into the DNA of the occupation, even as secondary figures have and continue to labor to build democracy in the country.

They didn't understand, they didn't want to understand, they brooked no criticism, and had no time for nuance. They swallowed the idiocy of Bill Kristol's vision, which at this point has been proven to be as simple-minded and flawed a plan as anyone could imagine.

Why do we think that this same group will be able to extricate us from this? Dick Cheney, Elliot Abrams, and Prince Bandar?? You couldn't even find a bookie that would take that bet...

Da Blues

Going to see BB King tomorrow, so you get John Lee tonight....

Hillary and the past.....

I hesitate to jump to the defense of the Clintons, other than to say that Bill Clinton, to me, represents the kind of intellect and personality that defines modern political leadership. Hillary, I've heard, shares many of the same traits that make her husband such a compelling individual: incredibly smart and polished, extremely well spoken, engaging at both a personal and professional level.

Do not underestimate the well placed desire for revenge that many who lived through the right's assault on the Clinton presidency still feel towards the perpetrators and abettors of that coordinated attack on the Clintons. The irony is too rich. Those who were happy to tear down the Presidency in the late 1990s on false charges and thinly veiled innuendo now bristle at the criticism of the same office, where tragic hubris and monumental incompetence destroy the reputation of our country in the eyes of the world.

Joe Conason calls out the New York Times for their mealy-mouthed story on the right wing smear machine that lies in wait for another Clinton candidacy. Aside from being dead wrong on the supposed change in heart that Dick Scaife and his minions have had, they paper over their own culpability in the sad story of Whitewater. It cost this country $70 million and eight years time to find out that the story was about nothing. The New York Times never shied away from regurgitating each and every pernicious rumor, much to their discredit.

Digby also mentions this meme in a post on Chris Matthews, who seems to think that there may be something undiscovered yet in the Clinton's closet:

Every single allegation was aired in the press either through leaks or salacious official "reports." An entire batalion of rightwing operatives also spent eight years making up dirt, including allegations of murder and drug running. They went all the way back to the Clintons' college days, looked into financial transactions from the 70's and interviewed virtually every person the Clintons had ever met. Libraries could be filled with the books and magazine articles written about their personal history along with vast numbers of psychological profiles and speculation about everything from Bill being a manchurian candidate to their sex lives. There were no limits and no stone was left unturned.

What in God's name does Chris think they could possibly find after all that?

Will the press go after Clinton for being a "calculating" bitch? (I think that word's been used more in the past month than ever before in history.) Of course. Will they attack her mercilessly and dredge up every old trope that was used against her back in the day? Undoubtedly. But it is almost impossible to believe they could come up with any real dirt on her because there has never been a more thoroughly vetted candidate in history. Not that the swift-boaters won't just make stuff up like they always do, but it should not be believable to anyone in the mainstream media and it should be greeted with so much skepticism as to be laughable on its face.

Hillary has a huge hill to climb. Only 75% of the eligible voters in this country would vote for a woman. I have not seen what percentage would vote for a black man. These are the real hurdles to the Democratic front-runners. We'll have to see what artificial hurdles the right wing smear machine throw up.

Calling out Fox

Robert Greenwald continues his evisceration of Fox News with this piece on their coordinated attacks on Barack Obama.

Tom Tomorrow

I don't know, is this too shrill?

the only thing to fear....

Do you remember all of the statistics on terror incidents the DOJ brought forward in the years after 9/11? Turns out that they were all made up. Now there's a shocker.

Departed

I saw The Departed this past weekend. Thought is stunk. Scorsese has become a bore. 7 of the 9 male leads get shot dead, there's a shock. Familiar score, familiar surroundings. It ain't no Mystic River.

His next movie is a documentary on the Stone's Bigger Bang tour. That's perfect.

I don't think so....

In an editorial in the Journal today, Paul Vigna tries to make the case that YouTube does not have the upper hand as the entire broadcast industry gets obliterated in much of the same way that the music industry did. His point, quite predictable, is that content is and will always be king. He says:

So anybody who thinks videos of cats flushing toilets is going to also flush away the networks, the scores of programs they show and millions of viewers they attract, is missing the point. Advertisers need a platform like TV, and they'll spend real money to keep it around in one form or another.

I'm not sure that is the point. That assumes that content will always be created by the studios, and will always seek the broader distribution channel that broadcast television affords it. That seems debatable to me. HBO proved that they could independently produce content and distribute it profitably outside the traditional advertising supported network model, I'm sure that there are folks working right now on a football league, a sitcom and a live music performance that will be created exclusively for YouTube and broadcast exclusively down that channel.

More importantly, I'm not sure that there is a real place on the broadcast networks for content like the clip below. Five minutes of Mitt Romney passionately staking out his position as the pro-choice candidate in 2002. Romney is indignant that his pro-choice credentials are even brought into question by his opponent, which will be tough to explain should his absurd presidential candidacy get off of the ground.

Betcha they don't sound like this....

I remember listening to the Police on the King Biscuit Flower Hour in 1978 or 1979. I've never been able to stomach a Sting song, though. This is from 1979 at Hatfield Polytechnic.

Supporting the Troops

Michael Kinsley, who edited The New Republic in a better time, deftly summarizes the upside down argument being thrown at the Democratic party by so many on the right.

Money quote:

There is something backward here. Congressional opponents of the Iraq war are "supporting the troops" in the best possible way: by trying to bring them home to safety and their families. It is those — those few, apart from President Bush — who want to send even more troops to Iraq who should feel defensive about their support for the troops. Some of those troops are on their third tour of duty in Iraq, and few of them are pleased to be there. Maybe, as Bush and his advisers no doubt sincerely believe, the drip drip drip of young American blood is worth it. Maybe the critics underestimate the peril of pulling out. Maybe the "surge" will turn out to be a huge success and vindicate Bush's strategy. But please — let's not pretend that staying the course is a favor to the troops.

and again:

How can you make this point — which is surely a legitimate one in a democracy, whether you agree with it or not — if any form of words that might undermine the morale of American soldiers is not allowed because it fails to "support the troops"? Even Bush's defenders in Congress do not, presumably, support in advance any conceivable use of American military power. Many of them, for example, who were in Congress at the time, opposed President Clinton's initiatives in the Balkans. Maybe there were those who bit their tongues, in order to "support the troops." But many spoke out, and bitterly. As they should have: to keep quiet as American soldiers died in what these politicians saw as a misuse of American power and American blood would have been a strange way to show support.

That wasn't too hard, was it? Somebody tell the Democrats to stop apologizing for exercising a right that exists as the basis of our democracy.

Chauncey Gardiner

Funny if it weren't true:

Brig. Gen. Patrick Finnegan, the dean of West Point, decided that he needed to do something to end the horror of Americans torturing prisoners. So he gathered three of the top military and FBI interrogation experts and they headed for the airport.

Did they fly to Abu Ghraib? No. Guantanamo? No. One of those secret prisons where the CIA allegedly tortures terror suspects? Nope.

Finnegan and his experts flew to Hollywood to meet the producers of the TV show "24," so Finnegan could urge them to stop the actors who play American agents from pretending to torture the actors who play terrorists in the show.

Really. This actually happened.

Wait, there's more:

Last March, Rush Limbaugh hosted a dinner for "24's" executive producer, Joel Surnow, and invited Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife, Virginia, who works at the conservative Heritage Foundation. (Wouldn't it have been fun to be a fly on that wall?) Inspired by the dinner, Virginia Thomas organized a full-blown Heritage symposium with the wonderful title " '24' and America's Image in Fighting Terrorism: Fact, Fiction, or Does It Matter?" Michael Chertoff, the real-life homeland security secretary, showed up to praise the show, saying, "Frankly, it reflects real life."

After the symposium, Surnow and other "24" honchos went to the White House to dine with Karl Rove, Tony Snow, Lynne Cheney and Mary Cheney.

"People in the administration love the series," says Surnow, who described himself to Mayer as a "right-wing nut job."

State Of Denial

I have a copy of Bob Woodward's State of Denial on my coffee table at home, but I don't think that I can bring myself to open it. I watched him on Chris Matthew's this weekend, and he came across like a doddering old nitwit. Maybe I've become completely inured to the dinosaurs of the print media, but this comment just rubs me the wrong way:

One of the things that we forget as we’re caught in the heat of the current debate: this is a legal war. The Congress three to one in 2002 said, gave Bush the right to go to war. He decided to do it. So, you know what really amazes me is that Bush, and Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid don’t get together and say, “We’ve got to come up with a bipartisan strategy and consensus on this.” We’re all in to a certain extent in this war. And we owe it to the troops.

Leave aside the fact that the "evidence" that was presented to that Congress was by and large exaggerated and fabricated. Leave aside the fact that Congress typically gives the benefit of the doubt to the executive branch on matters of national security, and that a naive presumption of honesty on the part of the executive branch undoubtedly colored Congress' approach to the debate in 2002.

What you cannot leave aside is the fact that this administration has said, time and again, that they do not need Congress' approval, counsel, or advice in the prosecution of this war. Further, that any criticism of the administration's prosecution of the war, from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, to illegal warrantless wiretapping, to troop levels and body armor is in fact unpatriotic and tantamount to giving aid and comfort to the enemy, whomever that may be. Woodward's absurd response to this is to seek some sort of kumbaya moment, where Nancy Pelosi and George Bush hold hands and work together on a bright plan for defeating the brown terra.

Woodward, like David Broder and Richard Cohen are have become irrelevant. They pine for a time when they could dictate the conversation from their lofty perches at the Washington Post. They've been scooped by the great unwashed horde of bloggers that bring the power of community to the analysis of real time information. Further, the blogosphere is populated by political scientists, lawyers, economics professors and historians who bring something that Woodward and his ilk cannot bring to the conversation, namely expertise. At this point, the unfortunate truth is that columnists like Broder and Bernstein can only bring damage to our discourse.

Broder's contribution to the discussion came in his column this weekend:

Like President Bill Clinton after the Democrats lost control of Congress in 1994, Bush has gone through a period of wrenching adjustment to his reduced status. But just as Clinton did in the winter of 1995, Bush now shows signs of renewed energy and is regaining the initiative on several fronts.

More important, he is demonstrating political smarts that even his critics have to acknowledge.

Broder, too close to the Beltway to have any perspective at all, continues to apologize for the failed presidency of the boy king, and most importantly, cannot understand the true loathing that the majority of Americans have for this president, this administration, and the war that they have dragged us into.

At the close....long weekend

Heard this song at the Kmart the other day....

Responsible Journalism

Here's how the Inquirer reports Nutrisystem's latest quarter:

Shares in NutriSystem Inc. leaped in after-hours trading yesterday, after the weight-loss company released fourth-quarter earnings and announced a $200 million stock buyback.

During regular trading hours, the Horsham company's shares climbed $2.34, or 5.6 percent, to close at $43.88. They gained an additional $5.46 later, reaching $49.34 by 6 p.m.

The share-repurchase program follows a 30 percent decline in NutriSystem's stock price late last month, propelled by fears that the company's growth was slowing and that costs to sign up new customers were accelerating.

Nutrisystem is run by the same crew that brought us VerticalNet, and tangentially Internet Capital Group and of course the granddaddy of them all, Safeguard Scientifics. Aside from the fact that those three companies were composed entirely of vapor, one might be cautious about the idea of this company, Nutrisystem, where the CEO, Michael Hagen, has disposed of over $10m in stock since 2005.

My beef, though, isn't with the company. Crappy companies will always be around, and they will always be looted by their CEOs. My beef is with the Inquirer. A responsible article would have mentioned that an enormous percentage (over 9 million shares, or almost a quarter) of Nutrisystem's stock has been sold short, by professional traders who are convinced that the stock is destined to fall. And a responsible article would mention that when a company announces that they are going to use their cash in order to repurchase their shares in the open market, the shorts are often forced to cover their positions. When a short seller covers his position, he needs to purchase the shares, thus creating a short term price surge. That, rather than newfound enthusiasm for the stock could be an explanation for the upward price movement.

But, you wouldn't have known that from reading the Inquirer. However, you would have been able to pick up this little nugget at the end of the article...

Hagan is among the investors in Philadelphia Media Holdings L.L.C., which owns The Inquirer, the Philadelphia Daily News and Philly.com. Brian Tierney, chief executive of Philadelphia Media Holdings and publisher of the newspapers, is on NutriSystem's board.

Just Click It

Jon Stewart just nails the whole Iran issue

WSJ: Editorials Written With Crayons...

One of the prerequisites of my job is that I read the Journal each day. In my opinion it is one of the few great newspapers left in the country. My own newspaper, the Inquirer, on the other hand, is in the midst of a painful slide into irrelevance hastened recently by Brian Tierney's acquisition of the paper.

Unfortunately, it is impossible to ignore the editorial page of the Journal, which exists like a lunatic Uncle Elmo, stored away in the attic of an otherwise reasonable household. Ranting and raving, throwing feces around the attic, generally fouling up the place, etc.

So, if the Journal feels the need to recap the House debate on the anti-surge resolution as "one of the most shameful moments in the institutions history", and accuses John Murtha of a plan to "slow bleed the troops" (what exactly would we call the present situation?), so be it. However, the sophomoric attempt to capture the voice of "the troops" goes a bit too far. Because for every Spc. Tyler Johnson, quoted here:

"People are dying here. You know what I'm saying . . . You may [say] 'oh we support the troops.' So you're not supporting what they do. What they's (sic) here to sweat for, what we bleed for and we die for."

There are other voices that say things completely different

Got Some Splainin to do...

A few bloggers have noted that the absurd contortions that Rudy, McCain and now Mitt are going thorough in order to prove that they are of a like mind with the fundies and the troglodytes that would like to drag our society back into the dark ages. What will be interesting to watch is how the "keepers of the conservative" flame, like Pat Buchanan and Buckley and Will react to these candidates.

It certainly calls into question the tired accusation that liberals will flip and flop and adopt any position in order to get elected, and conservatives are the only party that "sticks to their principles". Perhaps more subtly, it will prove once and for all that dog whistles aside, the elected leaders of the Republican party are only paying lip service to the fundies, and that they have no intention of following through on most of their coded promises. Bush had all three branches of government for 6 years, after all, and Roe is the law of the land, and our Constitution remains unstained by a discriminatory amendment against gay marriage.

Buckley was on Chris Matthews last night, and basically called Romney a scheming opportunist. What does that make Rudy, who was married to his second cousin for 12 years?

Our long national nightmare..

It's getting to be downright uncomfortable listening to Little Lord Fauntleroy conduct a presser these days. Today, he carried on, petulant as ever, speaking down to the American people armed with his fourth grade vocabulary, while the Washington press corps snickered along with his "humor". When I see him these days, he looks like nothing as much as a senior in high school who's already packed it in, and can't wait for the last day of school.

This statement, on Iran, from the AP wrap up of today's press report is instructive:

But, the president added, he does not know whether the weapons were "ordered from the top echelons of government. But, my point is, what's worse, them ordering it and it happening, or them not ordering it and it happening?"

This is entirely consistent with Bush's simplistic approach to Iraq. He doesn't seem to understand that the critical issue is whether the Iranian government itself is responsible for arming Shiite terrorists that are adding to the chaos in Iraq. Just as he is fighting a "war" against an enemy that he cannot name, he intends to hold responsible a country whether that country's government is at all involved in the offense. Wars are fought against countries, not against illegal drugs, or political tactics. He can repeat "war on terra" over and over again, but if he cannot tell us who we're fighting, he's in a situation that cannot accurately be described as a war. Policing? Nation building? Peacekeeping in the middle of a Civil War based on ancient tribal entities? Sure.

Make no mistake about it, today's presser was aimed squarely at Congress, who is debating the surge. The Boy King makes it clear when he says: "They have every right to express their opposition and it is a nonbinding resolution," a tortured mosh up of two thoughts that belies his underlying belief that although the voters spoke in November, and although the Congress may speak now, their words are meaningless. Withdrawl at the behest of Congress, or the voters, however measured, equals defeat to Bush. Remember the Vanity Fair profile, so long ago:

Even if he loses, his friends say, he doesn't lose. He'll just change the score, or change the rules, or make his opponent play until he can beat him. "If you were playing basketball and you were playing to 11 and he was down, you went to 15," says Hannah, now a Dallas insurance executive. "If he wasn't winning, he would quit. He would just walk off.... It's what we called Bush Effort: If I don't like the game, I take my ball and go home.

And just like the senior sees the end of the school year, Bush sees the end of his term as an opportunity to take his ball and go home.

UPDATE: Here's a taste of the press conference

Snowstorm in Philly

KT Tunstall from Austin City Limits last September. That'll warm you up.

Hard Candy

Counting Crows from 2004. Adam sounds pretty awful here, as opposed to when I saw him this summer. Still think this is one of the best bands around today, but I realize that I may be in a small group on that thought.

How banks make money, part 3,616

We had a discussion in the office today concerning brokers pushing this investment on our day traders.

Broker: Do you have a mortgage?
Customer: No.
B: You should consider tapping into that equity for this. The yield is targeted at 9-10%.
C: I don't think that I need any more exposure to the market. In order to get that yield, these guys gotta buy stock, right?
B: The market doesn't go down over the long term.

And on and on. So how does a closed end fund achieve such high yields? It must be very sophisticated, right? Covered calls, leverage, derivatives, right?

Actually, it's all in the press release:

The primary investment objective of the Fund is high current dividend income, with a secondary focus on long-term growth of capital. The Fund seeks to achieve these goals by employing a research-driven approach to identifying companies globally with the potential for dividend increases and capital appreciation.

Good old 'dividend recapture'. The fund buys companies just before they pay a dividend and sells them right after. The dividend gets passed on as yield, and the capital gains/losses, well, you'll have to live with them. As Richie Rich, our resident fund analyst said, "You could put a whole room of MBAs together and they couldn't come up with a stupider idea".

Underwritten and schlepped by Wachovia, Citi and Edwards. $4.4 B raised at 7%. That's a cool $308m in gross underwriting fees. How'd Goldman miss that one?

Chicken/Egg

The WSJ has a predictable editorial today, accusing the administration's critics of whistling past the graveyard of Iran's nefarious intentions. They lead with this:

U.S. military officials finally laid out detailed evidence on Sunday that Iranian-supplied weapons are killing American soldiers in Iraq. The issue now is the lesson the Bush Administration and the American political establishment draw about dealing with Iran.

Our guess is that a large part of Washington will pretend the evidence doesn't exist, or suggest the intelligence isn't proven, or claim that it's all the Bush Administration's fault for "bullying" Iran. This was the impulse behind the Baker-Hamilton Commission's recommendation late last year that the U.S. "engage" Tehran to help us find some honorable diplomatic or political solution in Iraq.

What strikes me about this is the underlying assumption that the fact that Iranian supplied weapons are surfacing in the conflict is somehow not tied intimately to the chaos that we've unleashed in the region. In this powerful Washington Post editorial, William E. Odom, former Reagan NSA director, runs down the reality of the situation in Iraq as it stands right now. He points out the fallacy of treating the destabilizing effects of Iranian elements as somehow independent of our own actions and more interestingly, our stated goals. He debunks a list of assumptions about the our involvement, in particular:

2.We must continue the war to prevent Iran's influence from growing in Iraq. This is another absurd notion. One of the president's initial war aims, the creation of a democracy in Iraq, ensured increased Iranian influence, both in Iraq and the region. Electoral democracy, predictably, would put Shiite groups in power -- groups supported by Iran since Saddam Hussein repressed them in 1991. Why are so many members of Congress swallowing the claim that prolonging the war is now supposed to prevent precisely what starting the war inexorably and predictably caused? Fear that Congress will confront this contradiction helps explain the administration and neocon drumbeat we now hear for expanding the war to Iran.

McCain and the Fundies

John McCain is just becoming a 3D Cartoon. Between this and Rudy's announcement last week that he'd only appoint strict constructionists to the bench, the two Republican front runners are already flailing around attempting to prove their Neanderthal bona-fides:

on February 23, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) will be the keynote speaker for the most prominent creationism advocacy group in the country. The Discovery Institute, a religious right think-tank, is well-known for its strong opposition to evolutionary biology and its advocacy for “intelligent design.” The institute’s main financial backer, savings and loan heir Howard Ahmanson, spent 20 years on the board of the Chalcedon Foundation, “a theocratic outfit that advocates the replacement of American civil law with biblical law.”

Rudy thinks that he can cover up the train wreck of his private life by speaking in code to the fundamentalists. McCain's strategy is to prove as often as possible that everything he stood for as he waved out the back of the Straight Talk Express in 2000 was hogwash and he's actually the heir apparent to the pre dementia Reagan. To his great discredit, he proved he'd do anything that this administration asked him to do in defense of their ham fisted prosecution of the War on Terra, and now we'll be subject to his pathetic pandering to the "base" from now until 2008.

And John Kerry was a flip-flopper.

Manufacturing the case for war

Most of the headlines should concern this Newsweek Article that basically lays out the case that we've already decided to go to war with Iran, and are simply in the process of putting the facts in place to fit that decision. To me, the most amazing thing is that this is put forward so nonchalantly, as if this weren't the height of insanity. By the way, Sy Hersh called the whole thing in The New Yorker last April. At the time I read that, I remember being very skeptical....oh well.

Therefore, just to go on the record, I'll add my blog to the ones that attempt to point out that the administration may not be following the most prudent strategy here. For instance, before we place into our collective minds the "fact" that Iran is responsible for 25% of the US casualties in the fourth quarter of last year, we should probably delve a bit into that assertion. The indispensable Juan Cole does here, and it aint pretty.

The attempt to blame these US deaths on Iran is in my view a black psy-ops operation. The claim is framed as though this was a matter of direct Iranian government transfer to the deadliest guerrillas. In fact, the most fractious Shiites are the ones who hate Iran the most. If 25 percent of US troops are being killed and wounded by explosively formed projectiles, then someone should look into who is giving those EFPs to Sunni Arab guerrillas. It isn't Iran.

So, which of the following statements will be embraced by the collective psyche?

Iran is responsible for arming the militants that are killing our soldiers.

The reality on the ground in Iraq makes the notion that Iran is responsible for arming the militants that are killing our soldiers extremely problematic, and probably false.

Friday Afternoon Stevie.....1974

E-L-J

Charles Pierce, as always, brings out a very interesting and important point surrounding the 2008 election.

To me, the single biggest problem with the 2008 presidential election may well be an intractable one . There is no issue more critical to the country than crushing into the dust the theories of Executive power under which the current Avignon Presidency has operated. Everything else -- domestic wiretapping, the war -- flows from an a constitutionally absurd and utterly authoritarian concept of the presidency, one that was fueled by the atrocities of 9-11, and enabled by a dormant Legislature, a fitfully conscious Judiciary, and a national press the thoroughgoing corruption of which is being played out daily in the Prettyman courthouse down in DC. (Dear Tim: Congratulations. Now you're a hack under oath.) Of course, the problem is that no candidate wants to campaign for president based on the platform of appearing to make the presidency weaker. More to the point, no candidate could get elected on the platform of appearing to make the presidency weaker. The only remedies are second-hand ones: elect congressional candidates pledged to uphold the responsibilities of their co-equal branch of government and/or elect a president dedicated to appointing judges who didn't clerk in the House Of Wax. 'Ees a puzzlement. I don't even know how you'd frame a campaign around the issue, but there simply isn't anything more important at stake. Which, among other things, is why neither Rudy Giuliani nor John McCain should be elected. I certainly want the guy who outed Patrick Dorismond's juvie record in order to protect a couple of trigger-happy NYPD cops with his clammy mitts on the entire federal law-enforcement apparatus. I would also like to find a lemon zester with which to shave.

The way in which the power among the branches of government ebbs and flows is a very instructive prism through which our American history can be read. For every surge in power that the executive branch has manage, there has been a swing in the pendulum that brought the system back into equilibrium. Hamilton had Jefferson, Jackson had Calhoun, Lincoln had the Radical Reconstructionists, FDR faced the Court, and Nixon was was forced to resign. Now, as the imperial presidency of the Boy King slides further into the abyss, watching how the executive, judicial and legislative branches emerge from the rubble will be intriguing.

Pierce raises an interesting question, though: Could a candidate get elected on the platform of restoring the balance of legislative and executive power?

End of the Sell Side

The "sell side" of Wall Street continues to become less and less relevant. Prevailing trends call into question whether is value in any of their services. Eventually, the sell side will disappear.

Sell side research, while it barely survived the IPO debacle of 99-00, when it was clearly revealed to be nothing more than a shill for investment banking business, will continue towards obsolescence for two reasons. First, because the "information" that is included in those reports has become ubiquitous, available to anyone with a browser, and secondly, because there really is no way to justify the economic model that keeps the analyst on the sell side. The analyst belongs on the buy side, along side of the portfolio manager, keeping the value of the research at it's highest point, closely held and captive to the buy side firm. As soon as research is disseminated, it loses it's value. The only reason why the buy side does not pay for the research analysts today is because the sell side continues to foolishly foot the bill. That is a broken model.

Direct market access trading, dark liquidity pools, and the rise of alternative trading systems like Liquidnet and Lava Trading have made the notion of sending order flow to smaller sell side trading desks as quaint as a buggy ride in Lancaster. There will come a day when buy side trading desk employees will be fired for sending order flow anywhere but into an automated black box, and it won't be too far out in the future.

So, why does the sell side even exist? Their product set includes four things, research, liquidity and trading, M&A advice, and IPOs. My firm has worked towards finding a disruptive model to break the traditional book-building process of IPO issuance, but even we haven't gone far enough. At the end of the day, the exchanges will handle the issuance of new issues (perhaps through an auction, something with which they are intimately familiar) and lawyers and consultants will provide M&A advice. Hedge Funds and buy-out funds will line up to provide the balance sheet to finance the transactions.

Goldman just raised a $19B private equity fund. What side of the street are they on again?

Coolest thing about the Internets

I've got a brother in law that is an unrepentant Dead Head. He vaguely (but fondly) remembers shows that he went to during his Penn State days. How cool is it that now, almost 30 years later, you can visit a website and download those shows, burn them to a CD and have them in your collection?

I think that this is the first show I ever saw, at the Spectrum, my sophomore year in high school, with George Corrigan. I remember Terrapin into Playin in the Band, and US Blues as an encore. I think.

Guns of Brixton: 1980

If only Jack Bauer were here...

I've never seen 24, but I get the drift. The show has become an allegory to the right, who see the single-minded tough guy machismo that they once saw in this President personified in Jack Bauer. Further, they love the fact that the bad guys can be threatened and tortured into giving up the goods, and that through the force of will, all of these nettlesome terrorists can be beaten into submission. The Wall Street Journal picks up the theme here.

Money quote:

Well, here’s the hard, cold truth: When Islamic terrorists stop being a threat to America’s survival, viewers will lose interest in “24,” because it will have lost its relevancy. Until such time, I will continue to watch “24”—because, believe it or not, the idea that there are Jack Bauers out there in real life risking their lives to save ours does mean something to me.

It all seems consistent with the mindset that Bush brought to the table 6 years ago, and the parochial perspective that the right so happily embraced after 9/11. This is a former governor, the son of a former president, from one of the dynastic families in this country, a former CEO of a petroleum company that proudly points out that aside from Mexico, he has never traveled abroad. Think about the profound lack of intellectual curiosity, the obtuseness of that for a moment. Then consider the fact that he "doesn't do nuance" by his own admission. Then try to get your head around the reality in Iraq today, the US tied down in a roaring tribal conflict, attempting to bring order to a conflagration where ancient scores are being settled and the terms "allies" and "enemies" are fluid. The homebound President Who Doesn't Do Nuance has dragged us into perhaps the most inherently complicated and troublesome foreign policy situation that this country has ever faced.

If only Jack Bauer were here...

Condescension

The argument that the right has put forward stating that the current debate in Washington over the surge is somehow injurious to our force's morale smacks to me of the most insidious elitism and condescension towards those troops. More than John Kerry's botched joke, the idea that the act of discussing and debating the best course of action in Iraq somehow undermines our support of our armed forces is more than a bit offensive. This is Peter Pace, yesterday:

A top Pentagon leader weighed in yesterday on the war debate and appeared to undercut the argument advanced by the White House and many GOP lawmakers that a congressional debate challenging the Bush plan would hurt troop morale.

"There's no doubt in my mind that the dialogue here in Washington strengthens our democracy. Period," Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified before the House Armed Services Committee. He added that potential enemies may take some comfort from the rancor but said they "don't have a clue how democracy works."

If you believe that open debate, reasonable discussion, and the effective interplay of three branches of government is inimical to the prosecution of the war, then what is the alternative? The latitude that any tyrant enjoys, I suppose. To assume that our troops are incapable of understanding that our government needs to constantly scrutinize the progress or lack thereof in this war is to infantalize them.

Keep in mind, this is not Carl Levin's quote above, it is Peter Pace's.

Lucinda on Austin City Limits

Jonah Goldberg=Ignatius J. Reilly

Jonah Goldberg, the corpulent windbag at the National Review's Corner is being pilloried for a bet he attempted to make 2 years ago with Juan Cole. He proposed this wager 2 years ago today:

"Let's make a bet. I predict that Iraq won't have a civil war, that it will have a viable constitution, and that a majority of Iraqis and Americans will, in two years time, agree that the war was worth it. I'll bet $1,000 (which I can hardly spare right now)."

Cole refused the bet, and Goldberg today has a post up in which he attempts to respond to various bloggers who are calling him out on his idiocy. His response is to prove to his detractors that the bet was not accepted by Cole, and goes so far as to quote Cole's scathing response to his proposal:

Update: Oh and since so many of these enraged emailers seem to believe whatever lefty bloggers tell them, for the record this was Juan Cole's response to my offer of a wager:

"I cannot tell you how this paragraph hit me in the gut. I was nearly immobilized by disgust and grief. This man really does see Iraqis as playthings. He is proposing a wager on the backs of Iraqis. Millions of Iraqis are going through winter with insufficient heating oil. They are jobless. The innocent 250,000 Fallujans are homeless. Imagine what $1000 means to them. And here we have an prominent American media star, a man who sets opinion on the Sunday afternoon talking heads shows, betting on them as though they are greyhounds in a race. They are not human beings to him, but political playthings on which to be wagered. "

That sounds like a rejection to me.

Understand that Goldberg is using this to make himself look exonerated by the affair.

A grown man named Scooter.

This is about as accurate an assessment of the Libby trial as you are likely to find. I've no doubt that Cheney and Rove outed a covert CIA agent in order to silence a critic of the administration. Their actions were both incredibly petty and completely in line with everything that we know about the two of them. That said, the trial is truly and indictment of the traditional media and the role that they've played as enablers of the Bush administration over the past 6 years.

Keep in mind Bush's words:

"If there's a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is," Bush told reporters at an impromptu news conference during a fund-raising stop in Chicago, Illinois. "If the person has violated law, that person will be taken care of.

He probably didn't know who it was at that time. But he found out and he didn't do a thing. Cheney wouldn't let him. All hat and no cattle.

Friendly Fire

Unbelievable 15 minute cockpit recordings from a friendly fire incident four years ago that killed a British soldier. Not much to add here, just heartbreaking.

Whew. Glad we got that all cleared up....

See you at the Dallas Joyathon...

Rudy's Chances

Glenn Greenwald has a thought provoking article up on Rudy's chances today. Count me down as skeptical. I think that the train wreck of his family life, his support for gay marriage, and his pro-choice history will far outweigh the 9/11 mystique that he created around himself. But more than that, I think that his association with Bernie Kerik and the questions surrounding his consulting company bring another element into the equation. New Yorkers don't trust Giuliani, and they've had a long history with him. Until 9/11 he was extremely unpopular there, and even today, he trails Hillary by a 20 point margin when placed head-to-head in a NY poll. Hillary's unfavorable rating is among the highest of any politician, by the way. It's really a question of judgment, and the folks that know him best seem to have significant questions about that judgment.

However, I've certainly underestimated the ability of candidates to spin their own weaknesses and project that same weakness upon their opponents. If Bush and Cheney can successfully portray John Kerry as the candidate who has problems with military service, I suppose Rudy could make us believe that he shares bible belt values and possesses a history of competent judgment.

Russ Feingold on Countdown

He really has staked out the high ground in this debate. Because he clearly disputed the notion of Bush's preemptive war, he now stands virtually alone as a voice of reason. Meanwhile, Digby beats down the loathsome Joe Klein who trumpeted the "consistency" of John McCain here.

It will be very interesting to see whether Feingold's political stature will continue to rise during the upcoming election cycle.

Monday Market Close

Pixies 2005

The Hillary Problem

While most of the criticisms of Hillary are based upon thinly veiled sexism and the Right's lingering obsessive hatred of all things Clintonian, there is one issue that I think represents a major stumbling block for her. She will not be able to triangulate away her support of the Iraq war, because her candidacy is presaged, to a large degree, on her expertise and experience as a Senator well versed in foreign policy. (The reality, it seems to me, is that her reign as the junior senator from New York has been marked by an incredibly undistinguished record).

Hillary is in a box. She cannot completely pull a John Edwards and say that she blew it. She needs to put the blame on the administration for bringing faulty evidence to the Senate, which she assumed was legit, and therefore we need to understand that she was duped into support of the war. The problem, of course, was that there was that there was no evidence. The case was a poorly argued construct, based upon remarkably flimsy evidence, that many commentators, and a few senators saw for what it was. Russ Feingold got it. Hillary did not. Many reporters and pundits got it. Hillary did not.

Hillary, the foreign policy expert, saw the evidence, analyzed it, and got it dead wrong. That's going to hang around her neck like a millstone. And it should.

Media Matters

The power of the internet is best observed through websites like Media Matters For America, (www.mediamatters.org) which provide an incredible service. Fact checking and parsing the information that gets passed along through the main stream media outlets yields a tremendous amount of outright lying. Unfortunately, their work can only stanch a bit of the bleeding that comes from outlets like Fox News.

Here's an example:

This from a guy with an 18% approval rating...

Digby has a disturbing, but probably unsurprising piece on the possibility that Cheney has attempted to codify a Constitutional interpretation of the powers of the OVP that pretty clearly wasn't in the version of the Constitution that I've ever read.

The undemocratic streak in the Republican Party continues apace. Each time they get power, they seek ways to weaken the nation's understanding of what is acceptable in our democracy and what our constitution provides. (And keep in mind that it is entirely self-serving --- they will turn all of that around without a moment's thought when it suits them to challenge the opposition.)

The idea that they would agree with granting Hillary or Barak Obama the same latitude is simply laughable.

The great Beck Hansen to send you off for the weekend....

sweet cameo by Borat at no extra charge....

Your Weekend Reading Assignment

Great Vanity Fair article on the administration's long-running obsession with Iran. This is as comprehensive an overview as you'll find on the tortured logic that underlies our policy right now. Two things jump out at me. First, the appointment of Admiral William Fallon to the top post at CentCom was indeed ponderous, unless you look at it through the prism of an impending action against Iraq. Secondly, Gary Sick's dreaming if he thinks that the Boy King, who proudly "doesn't do nuance" is attempting a double-bank shot that will solidify our Sunni allies against the Shia government in Iraq that we have created.

Read this article on who actually controls Sadr City to understand that Maliki is a prop, and that we've put our forces in an untenable situation.

This alone should send shivers down your spine:

"Half of them are JAM. They'll wave at us during the day and shoot at us during the night," said 1st Lt. Dan Quinn, a platoon leader in the Army's 1st Infantry Division, using the initials of the militia's Arabic name, Jaish al Mahdi. "People (in America) think it's bad, but that we control the city. That's not the way it is. They control it, and they let us drive around. It's hostile territory."

I get the feeling that some people do not understand that this administration is undeterred by the facts on the ground. As long as Bill Kristol or Fred Kagan are out there explaining to Fox News that if we only pushed harder we'd wrap this thing up in a flash, they have a receptive audience in the White House. The petulant Bush and the ghoulish Cheney are unfazed by the fact that we've lost in Iraq by any reasonable measure.

Lastly, anybody who lives near Philadelphia understands that if Curt Weldon is at all involved, this whole enterprise is beyond comprehension:

IRAC?

Yeah, I don't know about all of this

I don't see the Republican party eating their own, Baker or no Baker. I think a far more likely scenario is that Cheney takes a powder due to his deteriorating health. The idea of a Republican-lead impeachment doesn't square with the current fault lines that I see. Who would lead this fight? Hagel? Olympia Snowe? Not likely.

The Fitzgerald investigation did not indict Cheney because they did not have the goods. If Fitzgerald felt he had Cheney dead to rights, he would have pressed the case, 2006 election notwithstanding.

Outta Here

Scott Ritter on Iran. Now we need to pay attention again.

Who Said It?

But, please, let`s not operate on politics or rhetoric or fear. Let`s face the truth: Extremism is going to be the death of us.

Glenn Beck, of course.

1937 vs. 2007

Reading Bush's comments on Congress' power of the purse today took me back to teaching introductory civics to learning disabled seventh graders. His simplistic understanding of the way that the three branches of government work clearly points to a mind that views the process as a zero sum game. The seventh graders displayed more nuance.

GWB: I think they have the authority to defund, use their funding power...ho
WSJ: You do?
GWB: Oh yeah, they can say "We won't fund." That is the constitutional authority of Congress.

His "theory" of government, and the more insidious, but no less radical theory of the Unified Executive, promulgated by John Yoo, are based upon very black and white notions of the powers that are attributed to the branches of government as written in the Constitution and interpreted over the history of the country. One historical event, though, seems to mirror their approach, namely FDR's court packing scheme, which was a similar attempt to deal with an intransigent branch of government that was standing in the way of unfettered executive process. Leave aside the very different motivations that were behind FDR's bill and Bush's mad rush towards the unrestrained executive privilege in a time of War (that has no defined enemy, no particular end in sight, no real definition of victory). The similarities between the approaches is in the fact that just as Roosevelt did not need the Court Packing Bill to pass to achieve his ultimate goal, Bush does not particularly need his signing statements, his blatant disregard for FISA, or his administration's embrace of institutionalized torture as a method of interrogation to be blessed by Congress. As a matter of fact, he has already (hollowly) backed away from his insistence that he can ignore the law of the land in FISA.

All he needs is for the Congress to continue to flinch in the face of his outlandish effrontery. It worked for 6 years, but the power of lame-duckery, and the humiliation of his war, and the inexorable increase of the public's personal distaste for the man will wear him down in the end.