Right Wing Nut House

In many ways, I agree and sympathize with Howell Rains who bemoans the loss of journalistic integrity in this Washington Post op-ed. What is truly unfortunate - and a little bizarre - is that Rains only sees a lowering of standards at Fox News.

Is he trying to be funny? Or just very selective in his outrage?

A couple of hard truths along with a little history. Until around the turn of the 20th century, newspapers were wholly owned subsidiaries of political parties. Sure, there were independent voices here and there, crying in the wilderness to, as Rains put it, “afflict the comfortable.”

But the dominant media template of the day was partisan hackery. You had Republican newspapers and Democratic newspapers vying for readership in big cities while the hinterlands weren’t as lucky; people had to settle for usually one editorial voice that dominated a township, or county.

There was no attempt to “balance” opinion and plenty of effort put into spinning the news to make one side look good and the other side appear to be the spawn of Satan. This was the age of the front page editorial screaming bloody murder about something the opposition had done, or failed to do. It was the golden age of political cartoonists who skewered their targets with the nastiest of captions while drawing opposition figures in the most vile, and unflattering ways imaginable.

Ironically, the New York Times - a paper Rains was, at one time, executive editor - sought to change all of that. Always something of an independent voice from its founding in 1856, the Times strove over the years to stay above the fray of day to day politics and concentrate on delivering a reasonably factual product relatively free of bias. When the Ochs family purchased the Times at the end of the 19th century, an even greater emphasis on reporting the news in a style that highlighted the old “who, what, when, where and how” notion of factual storytelling came into vogue. The Times didn’t invent this kind of reporting, but editorially, they mastered it.

They also perfected the crafting of the “why” of a story, usually by separating the carefully wrought opinion of the reporter from the facts reported in the original story. Below the fold analysis of why a story was important contributed to the notion that the Times was responsibly separating journalistic opinion from the raw facts of a story.

Is this what Mr. Raines is talking about here?

Why haven’t America’s old-school news organizations blown the whistle on Roger Ailes, chief of Fox News, for using the network to conduct a propaganda campaign against the Obama administration — a campaign without precedent in our modern political history?

Through clever use of the Fox News Channel and its cadre of raucous commentators, Ailes has overturned standards of fairness and objectivity that have guided American print and broadcast journalists since World War II. Yet, many members of my profession seem to stand by in silence as Ailes tears up the rulebook that served this country well as we covered the major stories of the past three generations, from the civil rights revolution to Watergate to the Wall Street scandals. This is not a liberal-versus-conservative issue. It is a matter of Fox turning reality on its head with, among other tactics, its endless repetition of its uber-lie: “The American people do not want health-care reform.”

That “rulebook” was trashed nearly 40 years ago. It was ripped to shreds by the Times, the Washington Post, and most other major newspapers in America when Mr. Rains’ precious “standards” of “fairness and objectivity” were tossed aside in order to compete with Walter Cronkite, Huntley-Brinkley, and whoever was the flavor of the month anchor at ABC whose de-objectification of the news was already an art form.

As the viewership and influence of the Big Three TV news shows grew to an astonishing level, newspapers began to die in unprecedented numbers. Afternoon and evening mainstays like the Chicago Daily News, the Washington Star, and the Cleveland Press disappeared altogether while hundreds of other PM publications merged with their more successful morning competition. And the reason most often cited was the arrival on American airwaves of a new brand of journalism - one where images, rather than copy ruled the broadcast. And these images, manipulated by experts to wring drama and pathos out of a story in order to keep America glued to the channel, made a mockery of Rains’ “standards.”

In order to compete with network news, newspapers abandoned straight, factual news reporting and went into the business of using news as a way to convey opinion, infusing “drama” into stories. A young black kid did not kill the old white lady for her purse because he’s a criminal. Racism killed the old lady as surely as if George Wallace had pulled the trigger.

An exaggeration, but nevertheless, the entire concept of “objectivity” had been turned on its head in order to both sell newspapers and satisfy the “new journalism” that was making a mark in publications like Rolling Stone and Village Voice. The young, strongly opinionated writers for those publications and others were the vanguard of new kind of “journalist” who saw newspaper reporting as more than just a means to inform the public about what was going on in their part of the world, but viewed their mission as “reforming” the staid, old institutions of the media in order to promote a decidedly liberal point of view.

Rains has got to know that the New York Times does not report news the same way it did in the 1950’s, doesn’t he?

Whatever its shortcomings, journalism under those standards aspired to produce an honest account of social, economic and political events. It bore witness to a world of dynamic change, as opposed to the world of Foxian reality, whose actors are brought on camera to illustrate a preconceived universe as rigid as that of medieval morality. Now, it is precisely our long-held norms that cripple our ability to confront Fox’s journalism of perpetual assault. I’m confident that many old-schoolers are too principled to appear on the network, choosing silence over being used; when Fox does trot out a house liberal as a punching bag, the result is a parody of reasoned news formats.

My great fear, however, is that some journalists of my generation who once prided themselves on blowing whistles and afflicting the comfortable have also been intimidated by Fox’s financial power and expanding audience, as well as Ailes’s proven willingness to dismantle the reputation of anyone who crosses him. (Remember his ridiculing of one early anchor, Paula Zahn, as being inferior to a “dead raccoon” in ratings potential when she dared defect to CNN?) It’s as if we have surrendered the sword of verifiable reportage and bought the idea that only “elites” are interested in information free of partisan poppycock.

Mr. Rains and the Times surrendered that sword many years ago. It was the network news that accepted the capitulation of newspapers to the notion that objectivity and fairness in news reporting was part of the ancien regime and that in order to stay alive, print media would have to ape some of the worst attributes of bias found in the manipulation of images on TV in order to make them “interesting” or “dramatic.”

Where was Rains during coverage of the Katrina disaster? Where was his outrage at the lack of objectivity and fairness when CNN, MSNBC, and even Fox News reported rumors as being true, routinely added political commentary to their remotes, and shamelessly vied with each other to see which outlet could outdo the other in vitriol directed at the government?

Guess that sort of slipped his mind.

In their heyday, 80 million Americans tuned into one of the three network news broadcasts. Their power was incredible. It was they who set the nation’s agenda, deciding as they did which stories merited attention and which could be left on the cutting room floor. A half hour program just didn’t allow for in depth exploration of issues, nuance, or much explanation. And a dry recounting of the facts of a story would have viewers changing channels to something more interesting. Hence, storytelling via images was born - and in order to keep eyeballs glued to their product, news producers would indulge themselves by trying to create controversy, or take words out of context (easy enough to do with so little context given anyway). While copy may have been vetted for obvious bias, images, by definition, were different. Images were show biz and everyone from news executives down to segment producers didn’t want the viewers walking out at the end of the first act.

Rains and his old timers in the newspaper business followed right along, aping their electronic relatives by choosing angles for news stories that highlighted the dramatic impact a story would have on the reader; the goal being, to move the reader emotionally. At times subtle, at times blatant, the reporting of “news” was no longer a craft, but an art form.

Is Fox News any more at fault than CNN, or MSNBC? In the case of the latter, we have the senior vice president of NBC News Phil Griffin making no bones about the ideological nature of their programming:

“The network has evolved a lot in the past few years. We went from doing a little bit of everything to doing lots of politics under Keith from 2003-05. We first began to get traction after the Iraq war started, after ‘Mission Accomplished.’ Then, more and more, politics led the way. When we did well with it in the 2006 elections, we made a decision to become ‘the place for politics,’ as the late Tim Russert dubbed us - and all of a sudden began to take off a little.”

Griffin says that both Olbermann and fellow MSNBC stalwart Chris Mathews “both had a strong point of view about the war — but our strategy then was simply to hire smart people, allow them to have a point of view, and to be authentic. At the same time, we moved even further toward politics and away from trying to be ‘all things to all people.’”

Is Fox any worse than MSNBC? Nitpickers might discover a hair’s width of difference between the two, with CNN and their emotive journalism brand of weepy, touchy-feely storytelling not too far behind.

I agree with Mr. Rains that Fox is a travesty of journalism going by the standards of the 1950’s. But not including CNN and MSNBC, as well as his former employer and hundreds of newspapers, magazines, and the over the air TV networks in his diatribe is ludicrous. Journalism has changed. And Rains is kidding himself if he believes he and his “old timers” are immune from criticism for propagating those changes and foisting their own biases and politics on the rest of us.

It is difficult to be on the outside looking in when it comes to the exercise of power. For 8 years, it caused hysterical derangement on a very large slice of the left who tried to promote the idea that George Bush was a fascist, or a theocrat intent on establishing an authoritarian “regime” - the word most often used even by “respectable” liberals. America does not have “regimes” - not now, not then, not ever. But you can’t tell that to liberals who, for 8 long, tiresome years, bored us to death with their paranoid fantasies about George Bush. The draft, the Haliburton nonsense, the “lies” about WMD, the “lapdog press,” the “stolen” elections - all this and more, told and retold on the web, and even sometimes in respectable publications (not to mention the halls of Congress); paranoid delusions that only grew wilder and more sensationally idiotic as time went on.

Nor can you convince many conservatives today that entire segments of their overall critique of President Obama are hysterically exaggerated fantasies, nonsensical assumptions and “truths” that bear no resemblance to the facts. The left today has their own delusions; about conservatives, Republicans, and the motives of both. But it is conservatives who, by pushing these ridiculous fallacies about the president, are swallowing the barrel and pulling the trigger on their chances to rally the country behind them and take back the government.

I have been virtually told that I don’t hate Barack Obama enough; that if I don’t parrot these birdbrained “facts” about the president, I am actually a supporter of his or, at best, a simpleminded dupe who just can’t see what kind of evil man he is.

Worse, by highlighting these imbecilic talking points, or going after cotton candy conservatives and others on the right who are shooting conservatism in the foot with their derangement, I am a traitor. Better to lie and march to the beat of the same drum in order to defeat the forces of darkness who besmirch our republic with their loathsome plans.

Sorry. I don’t do lockstep. Nor am I enamored with illogical, unreasonable, and patently false arguments about Obama that serve only to prove that there are many on the right who have lost themselves in overhyped agitation - a delirium tremens that no amount of Chivas can help.

What really flips my gibbet is that this guy Obama is such an easy target for rational, penetrating criticism. He’s a clown sitting above a dunk tank just waiting for an accurate missile to send him to a well deserved soaking. Instead, so many on the right are missing so wildly they end up smacking themselves in the nose with their own throws.

There is an objective reality in which most Americans live. It’s a place where people are human, not cartoon cut-outs of evil. It’s a place where there is a connection between actions and rhetoric. And it is a place where facts are facts, not exaggerated, paranoid flakes of fancy seen through a broken mirror of ideology and fear.

Here then are 8 popular myths and exaggerations about Barack Obama that are routinely pushed by the right. Having been a comment moderator for three conservative sites, I know them by heart and can attest that at the very least, a large number of conservatives believe this nonsense.

1. Obama is sympathetic to Moooooslims and favors them at the expense of America

This has variations from Obama is a closet Muslim, to Obama wants to establish Sharia law, to Obama is actually a terrorist. One or all of these jumbo baloney sandwiches passes for wisdom among many on the right, including a prominent blogger who is worried that the 2 million Muslims in America are sneaking up on the rest of the 299 million of us and wish to make us all into dhimmis.

2. Obama is a socialist/Marxist.

I put this one to rest right before the election here.

Obama is a liberal. He’s a far left, garden variety, 100%, fully inspected La-La Land lefty. Are his policies “socialist?” Sure. I guess. Some of his policies ape programs initiated by socialist governments. National health insurance for one.

But the same could be said for Social Security, Medicare, and a host of Great Society programs still with us today. The social democracies of Europe that so enamor the left are not “socialist” countries - not by a long shot. The means of production are still in the hands of private citizens, even though those governments - and soon, our own - make it difficult for private enterprise to succeed. It makes no sense to call what Obama is doing “socialist” if you wish to adhere to the strictest definition of the word. And if you’re not going to stick with how a word is defined and make up your own definition, why bother with the English language at all?

It is quite simply an exaggeration to say that the president is a socialist.

3. Obama hates America.

Glad that so many of my friends on the right have been given the gift of insight into someone’s heart.

In truth, the president loves America as most liberals love it; in an abstract, intellectualized manner. It would perhaps be more accurate to say the president loves what America could be, rather than what she is now. I happen to believe you can love both Americas but many on the right are steadfast in their belief that America can do no wrong, while probably the same number on the left believe she can do no right. It is a different kind of love, but a love nonetheless, and to posit that the president of the United States hates his own country is, on its face, absurd.

4. Obama wasn’t born here/not a natural born citizen/is hiding the origins of his birth/is the spawn of the devil/is the antichrist.

Debunked too many times, in too many places to waste any time here except to say that about 30% of conservatives have “questions” about Obama’s origins.

A winning issue for 2010.

5. Obama is deliberately trying to destroy America.

This is a favorite of Rush Limbaugh. The “reasoning” goes, Obama wants to destroy America so that everybody becomes dependent on the federal government for their very lives. This will create a permanent Democratic majority because everyone knows that people who are dependent on government vote for Democrats.

I can’t argue against the notion that the president’s policies have the potential to harm America greatly. I have argued such in the past. If that happened, I am sure the president would be as disappointed as the rest of us. No doubt, he would blame it on Bush.

But there is no politician who would ever deliberately destroy the country that just elected him. Where’s the advantage? I daresay that voters would give a good goddamn about dependency and throw the majority party who ruined their lives out into the street.

This is so absurd on its face and yet so prevalent a notion on the right, is it any wonder I question the sanity of conservatives sometimes?

And then there’s a related myth…

6. Obama is deliberately preventing a recovery.

This is a variation on #5 but the “reasoning” is a little different. Obama needs a “crisis” to pass his agenda.

He’s had a crisis, his agenda lies in tatters, and he is proven so incompetent he can’t even take advantage of the worst economic crisis in 80 years to push through a Congress his party owns lock, stock, and barrel anything except an $800 billion stim bill he didn’t write and had little to do with passing.

7. Obama wants to kill your grandma.

We have Sarah Palin to thank for this one. It is the one myth in the health care debate that refuses all applications of reason and logic, and is persistently advanced despite all evidence to the contrary.

The slippery slope argument is even bogus. It is impossible to connect the dots from A to Z, as I explained here. But Saracudda says it’s true so it must be.

8. Obama goes around the world “apologizing” for America’s sins

If you’re not grown up, or well read enough, or have been asleep for the last 50 years, you know that there are several things that America should be apologizing for. But here, we have a gross exaggeration of what the president was doing by highlighting our shortcomings (I don’t believe the words “apology” or “We’re sorry” ever crossed his lips.)

The president acknowledged errors - at least, errors from his perspective - that America committed not only during the Bush administration, but prior to that as well. He also acknowledged them because his audience perceived our actions to be in error - whether we think them right or wrong.

But almost in the same breath, Obama castigated his audiences from London to Cairo for their reflexive, knee jerk anti-Americanism. Tony Blair and John Howard actually said it much better than he did. But our professorial president used a common rhetorician’s gimmick of forcing the audience to listen to him by agreeing with their perceptions about America and then hammering them for their own shortcomings.

It was an effective technique and certainly won him a lot of friends overseas among the common folk. But it is inaccurate to say that he “apologized” for our past. In fact, he frequently went out of his way to say that he had no apologies for our ideals or principles. It appears to me that many on the right heard what they wanted to hear and closed their mind to the rest. Hence, this myth - as widespread as it is - doesn’t stand up to the facts.

The unhinged nature of some of the criticism directed at the president reflects badly on the entire right. When you consider that Obama is a duck in a shooting gallery that a pie eyed prostitute could hit with her eyes closed, it is a mystery why so many seek to misrepresent and exaggerate what this president has done and what he stands for.

Keep your eye on the target and allow logic and reason to guide your criticisms. Leave behind the paranoia, the fear mongering, and the hysteria. That’s the losers argument. Let objective reality animate your commentary and people will actually start to listen rather than turn you off quicker than a Tim Robbins movie.

Greg Sargent touting President Obama’s speech in Philly as he tries to “close the sale” on health care reform:

One striking thing about the speech Obama just gave at the big health care rally in Pennsylvania is how many times he stressed that if reform passes, voters will begin enjoying the benefits this year.

Though he didn’t say it directly, it’s an obvious effort to put some spine in wavering Congressional Dems by urging them to understand that they’ll have something to run on this year if they vote for reform. Here’s the key part:

Within the first year of signing health care reform, thousands of uninsured Americans with preexisting conditions would suddenly be able to purchase health insurance for the very first time in their lives.

This year, insurance companies will be banned forever from denying coverage to children with preexisting conditions.

This year, they will be banned from dropping your coverage when you get sick. And they will no longer able to arbitrarily and massively hike your premiums. Those practices will end.

If this reform becomes law, all the new insurance plans will be required to offer free preventive care to customers starting this year. Free checkups so we can catch preventable diseases.

Starting this year, there will be no more lifetime restricive annual limits on the amount of care you can receive from your insurance companies…

It would change fast: Insurance companies would finally be held accountable to the American people

Before examining the reality, let’s look at the rhetoric. Is it true that those with pre-existing conditions will be able to purchase health insurance “for the very first time in their lives?” Only if the condition existed for their entire lives or came upon them in adolescence before they had the ability to buy insurance. In fact, most pre-existing conditions occur after someone enters adulthood which means the idea that they never had the opportunity to purchase insurance is a crock.

And how about that “free” preventive care? And you wonder why we’re running a $1.4 trillion deficit? Of course, there is nothing “free” about nationalizing insurance or ordering insurance companies to offer a specific coverage. The bottom line is that those who don’t use the health care system will be paying for those who do. I predict this crazy idea hitting the auto insurance industry soon, where those with multiple drunk driving convictions demand the same rate of insurance and coverage as a teetotaler.

It would be more accurate to say that the preventive care coverage is mandated as part of the insurance plan that companies must offer. It is hardly “free” since we’re all paying for it. In short, the customer is paying for preventive care whether he wants to or not. We get a lot of this already from state insurance boards who demand insurance companies cover many procedures the overwhelming majority of policy holders will never use.

But what is the reality of all those goodies we are going to get the first year of Obamacare? An interesting development occurs when sick people pay exactly the same amount for insurance as healthy people; “insurance” is no longer insurance and becomes a government entitlement whose management and cost is farmed out to private industry.

For some reason, insurance companies have an aversion to going bankrupt. Don’t ask me why. They must be old fashioned or something to believe that they aren’t in business to get Democrats re-elected but rather to make a little money for their shareholders. Since that won’t be possible even in the first year under Obamacare, look for insurance companies to be screaming for rate increases in everybody’s premiums which will cause enough heart attacks in customers that Obama will be forced to activate the Death Panels 3 years early just to handle drain on health care resources.

This entire debate has taken a topsy-turvy turn. I’ve got history on my side when I say what Matt Welch says here:

The Senate promised more than $300 billion in such cuts. Furthermore, the CBO scores bills in 10-year windows. So the Senate delayed more than 99 percent of the reform package’s spending until 2014, thus allowing the decade of 2010–2019 to clock in under the magic $1 trillion number. Add to all that chicanery the fact that every major health care entitlement expansion in U.S. history has vastly exceeded initial cost projections, and you have ample reasons for why Americans believed, by a margin of more than 3 to 1, that health care reform would exacerbate rather than improve the deficit.

It should be up to the proponents of health care reform to prove that their schemes will not meet the fate of past entitlements - every single one of them - that exceeded spending projections by laughable margins.

And when I say laughable, I mean real loony toons, cross-eyed Mary, monkey wanking, impossibly incorrect margins:

Congress has a long history of dramatically underestimating Medicare costs. “At its start, in 1966, Medicare cost $3 billion,” wrote Steven Hayward and Erik Peterson in a 1993 Reason article. “The House Ways and Means Committee estimated that Medicare would cost only about $12 billion by 1990 (a figure that included an allowance for inflation). This was supposedly a ‘conservative’ estimate. But in 1990 Medicare actually cost $107 billion.”

Why, I say to reform advocates with as much sincerity and passion as I can muster, should things be different this time? What evidence do you have that history won’t repeat itself and we will be embarking on an insane fiscal course that will lead to the actual ruin of the United States? The burden of proof, as I said is on you. History has taken the measure of other entitlements and shown projections of costs to be ludicrous and silly.

With Democrats poised to prevent their labor allies from paying a tax for their gold plated health care plans, their extraordinary nebulous disingenuousness on “waste and fraud” savings to be found in Medicare, and the non-existent “doc fix” that is supposed to save $500 billion over 10 years - how in God’s name can you stand in front of the American people and make a case that this reform bill won’t add to an already out of sight deficit?

You can’t, which means you are either deluding yourselves or Obama and the Democrats are lying outright.

Welch thinks its the latter:

Obama’s dishonesty, by contrast, seems to spring from a different place. As a man who has spent most of his career wowing people with his words and very little of it converting those words into deeds, he has an activist’s gap between rhetoric and reality and a radio broadcaster’s promiscuous carelessness with cutting rhetorical corners. Sure, it’s not technically true that the administration’s day-one lobbying reforms served “to get rid of the influence of…special interests,” as he claimed in a January radio address (to the contrary: federal lobbying in 2009 set an all-time record), but it’s easy to imagine that the president feels his combination of tighter employment restrictions for ex-lobbyists and stricter disclosure requirements for current ones is, in the context of the Manichean fight between “the people” and “special interests,” good enough for government work. The perfect shouldn’t be the enemy of the good, and the critics who complain are just opportunistic literalists grasping for any club to beat back the march of progress. No need to give them an inch.

But there’s a less charitable explanation too. During the president’s nonstop gabfests before, during, and after the State of the Union speech, he kept repeating the fiction that the medical industry’s “special interests” were significantly to blame for scotching his health care legislation. In fact, the administration and Congress negotiated with those interests every step of the way, receiving crucial buy-in and millions in campaign contributions. Pro-reform lobbyists outspent anti-reform lobbyists on advertising by a factor of 5 to 1. There’s a three-letter word for blaming the defeat of his bill on health care lobbyists, and it rhymes with pie.

In his speech yesterday, Obama picked a familiar target; insurance companies who he thinks the government should hold accountable to their customers:

President Obama struck a populist tone, setting up the health insurance industry as his main target.

“We can’t have a system that works better for the insurance companies than it does for the American people,” he said.

Citing big rate increases for buyers of individual insurance policies in some states — 40 percent, 60 percent, even 100 percent — Mr. Obama sought to focus attention on provisions in the legislation that he said would protect consumers from the worst excesses of insurers, give people more choice among insurance policies, insure most people who do not have coverage, and put downward pressure on health care costs.

Boiling down his proposal to a few sentences, Mr. Obama asked, “How many people would like a proposal that holds insurance companies more accountable? How many people would like to give Americans the same insurance choices that members of Congress get? And how many would like a proposal that brings down costs for everyone?

Obama missed his calling. He should have been an insurance company Customer Service Rep.

Holding insurance companies more accountable might make people feel better when Obama sticks it to them but how does it improve the situation if it drives them out of the business of insuring all but the wealthy in 5 years? Also, the idea that Joe Blow will get the same health care coverage as a Member of Congress is snicker-worthy. If that were true, Members of Congress would be opting in, not passing laws to exclude themselves from the plan. And only a real Pollyanna - or the village idiot - believes that this reform package will “bring costs down for everyone.”

I would like to give Democrats the benefit of the doubt and say that they are actually kidding themselves about what reform will actually do when the rubber meets the road and the plan is being enacted. But I can’t. They know there are horrendous, unsolvable problems, with this bill. They know their cost cutting provisions are bullsh*t. They know it will substantially increase the deficit. They know it will mean less health care for most of us. They know it will mean less innovation in the pharma, bio tech, and other industries. They know it won’t put any downward pressure on the costs of health care. And they know that this massive thrust to control an unbelievable 1/6 of the economy - never before seen in peacetime - is beyond a riverboat gamble that it will work and enters the realm of a wing and a prayer.

They can’t actually believe what they are saying about it, can they? Of course not.

There are times that I want to take some of my fellow conservatives by the scruff of their neck and shake some sense into them. Or at least kick their behinds until some semblance of reason penetrates their thick skulls.

The blow up over the 7 Department of Justice lawyers who represented terrorists at Gitmo and elsewhere is mostly idiotic - especially the name given to them; the Al-Qaeda 7. I say mostly idiotic because AG Holder might have avoided any controversy at all if he had simply responded to a simple request from a senator and released the names of the detainee advocates and listed what actions they took in that capacity.

But Holder, who has continually stiffed Senator Charles Grassley over requests for information on the IG scandals and the New Black Panther party mystery, really screwed the pooch here. Any neophyte political hack could have told him that trying to hide their identities by refusing a reasonable request for information from a senator would lead to the kind of hysteria on the right that Holder was covering for “terrorist sympathizers” in his department.

As it turns out, the activities of the 7 DoJ lawyers on behalf of their clients (with perhaps one exception) didn’t even rise to the level of eye-brow cocking. And despite the fact that it is now clear that none of the 7 are a national security threat, the exaggeration and hyperbole about the “terrorist sympathizers” continues.

It would be one thing if any of these lawyers while in private practice acted as Lynn Stewart, the convicted terrorist lawyer who assisted her client, the “Blind Sheikh” Omar Abdel-Rahman, in smuggling messages out of prison that could have incited violence in Egypt. This lefty, loony toons nutjob actually sided with the terrorists.

But the DoJ lawyers who have come under hostile fire from the right don’t come anywhere near that standard. A couple of examples:

An extensive review of court documents and media reports by Fox News suggests many of the seven lawyers in question played only minor or short-lived roles in advocating for detainees. However, it’s unclear what roles, if any, they have played in detainee-related matters since joining the Justice Department.

Before joining the Justice Department, Jonathan Cedarbaum, now an official with the Office of Legal Counsel, was part of a “firm-wide effort” to represent six Bosnian-Algerian detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, according to the web site of the firm WilmerHale.

That effort brought the case Boumediene v. Bush to the Supreme Court, which reaffirmed the right of detainees to challenge their detention.

But, according to a review by Fox News, Cedarbaum’s name appears only once in court records of detainee-related cases. Specifically, he’s named as part of the WilmerHale legal team in a 2007 filing with the Supreme Court, and he was joined in that filing by Eric Columbus, a former WilmerHale attorney who is now senior counsel in the Office of the Deputy Attorney General.

Alongside Cedarbaum in the Office of Legal Counsel now is Karl Thompson, who while working for the firm O’Melveny & Myers became one of seven attorneys to represent Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen who was captured in Afghanistan in 2002 and transferred to Guantanamo Bay.

But, according to court documents, Thompson was only part of Khadr’s defense team for seven months, from October 2008 to May 2009.

These are not wild-eyed lefties who were looking to betray the United States. Call them naive perhaps, but they worked for solid, respected law firms and the minimal actions they performed on the behalf of their detainee clients hardly justifies the wild eyed righty hysteria that is surrounding these revelations. The exaggerated claims - that the 7 lawyers worked for “al-Qaeda terrorists” is, on its face, a crock:

More than five years before that, Joseph Guerra, now Principal Deputy Associate Attorney General at the Justice Department, was one of five lawyers from the firm Sidley Austin to help three civil liberties groups, including the self-described “conservative” Rutherford Institute, file a detainee-related brief with the Supreme Court.

The brief urged the justices to hear the case of Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen who was held as an “enemy combatant” before the Bush Administration decided in 2006 to prosecute him in a civilian court.

Does assisting civil liberties groups in the US make one an “al-Qaeda sympathizer?” The government couldn’t prove that Padilla was al-Qaeda, dropped charges against him for plotting to build a dirty bomb, and ended up with a shaky conviction of Padilla aiding terrorists that many who have followed the case closely believe could very well be overturned on appeal.

Many might believe that taking the axiom “everyone in America deserves a defense” to such an extreme to be wrong and immoral. But Padilla is an American citizen and if Jeffrey Dahmer deserved a decent defense under our rules, then certainly Padilla did as well. The other attorneys performed similar tasks for their clients - most of them acting in a more direct fashion in that they filed briefs directly on behalf of the detainees.

The principle at stake was not sympathy with al-Qaeda but the Constitution’s guarantees for those held in American custody. The fact that those rights were so ill-defined during the previous 8 years is the fault of Congress, who could have resolved the detainee rights issue, but chose instead to let the courts handle the matter. We might have had a system that gave the detainees certain rights like habeus corpus, the right to an attorney, and a limited ability to view evidence against the defendant, while fashioning the tribunals in such a way as to allow for some leeway given detainees, if Congress had done its job. Instead, the detainees have been in legal limbo for the most part, relying on the pro-bono efforts of civil liberties attorneys.

Not surprisingly, some of those same attorneys are now working at DoJ. To question their loyalty, or commitment to the law, is absurd. But what we can and should question, is their ability to perform their jobs in an unbiased manner.

Holder still won’t tell us if any of these lawyers are working on detainee cases, and if so, in what capacity. We have the right to demand the strictest adherence to ethical standards when it comes to prosecuting those in our custody who are bona fide terrorists and could do harm to the US or our friends. So why the secrecy?

In a recent letter to Grassley, Assistant Attorney General Ron Weich said nine Justice Department lawyers in total previously represented terror suspects, contributed to court briefs in detainee-related cases or otherwise helped advocate for detainees.

Weich acknowledged in the letter that Principal Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal previously represented a Guantanamo Bay detainee and that National Security Division Attorney Jennifer Daskal previously worked for Human Rights Watch, which advocates on behalf of detainees.

Weich declined to identify the other lawyers, but he insisted that no political appointee at the Justice Department “would permit or has permitted any prior affiliation to interfere with the vital task of protecting national security, and any suggestion to the contrary is absolutely false.”

He also said that any suggestions of a “conflict of interest” are “an apparent misapprehension” of legal standards, adding that all political appointees have taken pledges to meet ethical standards.

Asked whether any of the seven previously unidentified lawyers now work on detainee-related issues, Miller declined to comment.

It appears that, at least on one case, a DoJ lawyer sought advice from career prosecutors about conflict of interest:

As for the two lawyers who were named by Weich in his recent letter to Grassley, Daskal has “generally worked on policy issues related to detainees” while at the Justice Department, said Weich, adding that her detainee-related work “has been fully consistent with advice she received from career Department officials regarding her [ethical and legal] obligations.”

Weich said Katyal “has not worked on any Guantanamo detainee matters, but has participated in litigation involving detainees who continue to be detained” elsewhere.

It is asking an awful lot of even a good lawyer to set aside previous advocacy for a client and dispassionately carry out their duties at DoJ. In a well run department, one would think that even the appearance of ethical problems would be cause to reassign an attorney. Holder is either clueless, or arrogant in his dismissal of criticism. Judging by his actions in connection with requests for information from Senator Grassley, I’ll choose the latter.

It’s ridiculous to claim that the “al-Qaeda 7″ are a security risk. And the right does the cause no good by going off half cocked and calling DoJ “The Department of Jihad.” All conservatives are doing by employing these McCarthyite tactics is obscuring and taking attention away from the real issue at stake; whether attorneys who advocated for detainee rights have any business working on their cases at DoJ.

That, and Holder’s intransigence with Congress, arrogantly secretive manner in this and other cases, as well as the AG’s ultra-wrong call on the KSM trial are the real issues.

The rest is a crock.

UPDATE

At least one conservative has got their head on straight:

Finally, it is appropriate to criticize lawyers who defend terrorists and terrorist suspects. Contrary to what Walter Dellinger would like us to believe, these lawyers have no professional obligation to represent terrorists and terrorist suspects. They did so by choice and this choice, like all others, is fair game for criticism.

However, it is entirely inappropriate to suggest that these lawyers share the values of terrorists or to dub the seven DOJ lawyers “The al Qaeda Seven.” Unfortunately, this is what a video released by the organization Keep America Safe does.

I would rather give up my law license than represent Osama bin Laden’s driver, for example. And I take a very dim view of the decision by Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal to undertake that representation.

However, I would not deserve to have a law license if my personal views on this matter caused me to launch vicious, unfounded attacks on lawyers who exercise their right to represent despicable clients.

The best article I’ve read to date on how we have become a bailout nation and why was published about 2 weeks ago in Rolling Stone. It was by the estimable Matt Taibbi and is entitled “Wall Street’s Bailout Hustle.”

I dare you to read it and not be grinding your teeth by the end of it.

Recognizing a certain class bias inherent in Taibbi’s explanations of what the Wall Street banks have wrought doesn’t diminish the impact of this horror story in the slightest. The bottom line, as Taibbi explains is that nothing has changed since September 2008. The same practices that got us into trouble then, have been resurrected and, if anything, are being used with even more gusto by the Wall Street Raiders who are now working hand and fist with the government to rob the taxpayers:

That’s why the biggest gift the bankers got in the bailout was not fiscal but psychological. “The most valuable part of the bailout,” says Rep. Sherman, “was the implicit guarantee that they’re Too Big to Fail.” Instead of liquidating and prosecuting the insolvent institutions that took us all down with them in a giant Ponzi scheme, we have showered them with money and guarantees and all sorts of other enabling gestures. And what should really freak everyone out is the fact that Wall Street immediately started skimming off its own rescue money. If the bailouts validated anew the crooked psychology of the bubble, the recent profit and bonus numbers show that the same psychology is back, thriving, and looking for new disasters to create. “It’s evidence,” says Rep. Kanjorski, “that they still don’t get it.”

More to the point, the fact that we haven’t done much of anything to change the rules and behavior of Wall Street shows that we still don’t get it. Instituting a bailout policy that stressed recapitalizing bad banks was like the addict coming back to the con man to get his lost money back. Ask yourself how well that ever works out. And then get ready for the reload.

Taibbi - sometimes to the detriment of his narrative - uses various plays by con-artists (a society of criminals unique in their vocabulary and history) and compares them to what J.P. Morgan and other Wall Street outfits did to get the trillions in Fed money that have made them so profitable today.

In essence:

A year and a half after they were minutes away from bankruptcy, how are these assholes not only back on their feet again, but hauling in bonuses at the same rate they were during the bubble?

The answer to that question is basically twofold: They raped the taxpayer, and they raped their clients.

Beyond that, either the big banks haven’t learned a thing, or more likely, know a good thing when they see it:

The bottom line is that banks like Goldman have learned absolutely nothing from the global economic meltdown. In fact, they’re back conniving and playing speculative long shots in force — only this time with the full financial support of the U.S. government. In the process, they’re rapidly re-creating the conditions for another crash, with the same actors once again playing the same crazy games of financial chicken with the same toxic assets as before.

That’s why this bonus business isn’t merely a matter of getting upset about whether or not Lloyd Blankfein buys himself one tropical island or two on his next birthday. The reality is that the post-bailout era in which Goldman thrived has turned out to be a chaotic frenzy of high-stakes con-artistry, with taxpayers and clients bilked out of billions using a dizzying array of old-school hustles that, but for their ponderous complexity, would have fit well in slick grifter movies like The Sting and Matchstick Men.

Why we have been sanguine in the face of what Taibbi describes as these “old school hustles” is the result of the extraordinarily arcane nature of the cons being visited on the Fed and Congress by the banks.

To appreciate how all of these (sometimes brilliant) schemes work is to understand the difference between earning money and taking scores, and to realize that the profits these banks are posting don’t so much represent national growth and recovery, but something closer to the losses one would report after a theft or a car crash. Many Americans instinctively understand this to be true — but, much like when your wife does it with your 300-pound plumber in the kids’ playroom, knowing it and actually watching the whole scene from start to finish are two very different things.

Taibbi lists 7 of these con games that the gamblers at J.P. Morgan and other big banks have been running at our expense. Here is a too brief description of a few of them:

* “The Swoop and Squat.” How counterparties - including a French bank - played both sides in the AIG meltdown and forced it into bankruptcy. The big banks had been using AIG to “insure” the toxic mortgage backed securities, for which AIG received a substantial cut, but was unprepared when hundreds of billions in bad paper drowned it.

The “swoop and squat” is the well known insurance scam where your car is boxed in by 2 or 3 other cars and a deliberate “accident” ensues so that the scammers can collect:

This may sound far-fetched, but the financial crisis of 2008 was very much caused by a perverse series of legal incentives that often made failed investments worth more than thriving ones. Our economy was like a town where everyone has juicy insurance policies on their neighbors’ cars and houses. In such a town, the driving will be suspiciously bad, and there will be a lot of fires.

When AIG was drowning, the banks hurried its collapse along:

So Goldman and other banks began demanding that AIG provide them with cash collateral. In the 15 months leading up to the collapse of AIG, Goldman received $5.9 billion in collateral. Société Générale, a bank holding lots of mortgage-backed crap originally underwritten by Goldman, received $5.5 billion. These collateral demands squeezing AIG from two sides were the “Swoop and Squat” that ultimately crashed the firm.

Of course, Goldman demanded the government reimburse them for the full “value” of the $5.9 billion in collateral they ripped from AIG. If the insurance giant had gone through bankruptcy, Goldman would have received virtually nothing. Just one way that Goldman gamed the government and the Fed in gorging itself to bursting.

* “The Dollar Store.” In grifter parlance, this refers to something like what we saw in the movie “The Sting” where a lot of con artists set up a fake front to fool the mark. Goldman and Morgan Stanley applied for, and received in record time, a charter that redefined the kind of bank they were just 5 days after the AIG bailout:

By law, a five-day waiting period was required for such a conversion — but the two banks got them overnight, with final approval actually coming only five days after the AIG bailout.

Why did they need those federal bank charters? This question is the key to understanding the entire bailout era — because this Dollar Store scam was the big one. Institutions that were, in reality, high-risk gambling houses were allowed to masquerade as conservative commercial banks. As a result of this new designation, they were given access to a virtually endless tap of “free money” by unsuspecting taxpayers. The $10 billion that Goldman received under the better-known TARP bailout was chump change in comparison to the smorgasbord of direct and indirect aid it qualified for as a commercial bank.

Before reading this next bit from Taibbi on what the banks did with that new charter, I suggest you remove all sharp objects from within reach plus anything that might be used as a missile to hurl through your monitor:

When Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley got their federal bank charters, they joined Bank of America, Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase and the other banking titans who could go to the Fed and borrow massive amounts of money at interest rates that, thanks to the aggressive rate-cutting policies of Fed chief Ben Bernanke during the crisis, soon sank to zero percent. The ability to go to the Fed and borrow big at next to no interest was what saved Goldman, Morgan Stanley and other banks from death in the fall of 2008.

[...]

In fact, the Fed became not just a source of emergency borrowing that enabled Goldman and Morgan Stanley to stave off disaster — it became a source of long-term guaranteed income. Borrowing at zero percent interest, banks like Goldman now had virtually infinite ways to make money. In one of the most common maneuvers, they simply took the money they borrowed from the government at zero percent and lent it back to the government by buying Treasury bills that paid interest of three or four percent. It was basically a license to print money — no different than attaching an ATM to the side of the Federal Reserve.

That’s right. They borrowed interest free money from the government and lent it back to us - with interest. This is one con game used by Taibbi that has a direct application to what occurred in the real world.

* The Rumanian Box. This is an age old scam invented by a guy named Lustig where the con man shows the mark a magical machine where you put a blank piece of paper in one end, turn a crank and out pops a $20 on the other end. Here’s how the banks used this concept and bilked the Fed:

The brilliant Lustig sold this Rumanian Box over and over again for vast sums — but he’s been outdone by the modern barons of Wall Street, who managed to get themselves a real Rumanian Box.

How they accomplished this is a story that by itself highlights the challenge of placing this era in any kind of historical context of known financial crime. What the banks did was something that was never — and never could have been — thought of before. They took so much money from the government, and then did so little with it, that the state was forced to start printing new cash to throw at them. Even the great Lustig in his wildest, horniest dreams could never have dreamed up this one.

The big banks threatened to freeze lending even more unless the Feds came up with more goodies. The government didn’t disappoint:

The ploy worked. In March of last year, the Fed sharply expanded a radical new program called quantitative easing, which effectively operated as a real-live Rumanian Box. The government put stacks of paper in one side, and out came $1.2 trillion “real” dollars.

The government used some of that freshly printed money to prop itself up by purchasing Treasury bonds — a desperation move, since Washington’s demand for cash was so great post-Clusterfuck ‘08 that even the Chinese couldn’t buy U.S. debt fast enough to keep America afloat. But the Fed used most of the new cash to buy mortgage-backed securities in an effort to spur home lending — instantly creating a massive market for major banks.

And what did the banks do with the proceeds? Among other things, they bought Treasury bonds, essentially lending the money back to the government, at interest. The money that came out of the magic Rumanian Box went from the government back to the government, with Wall Street stepping into the circle just long enough to get paid. And once quantitative easing ends, as it is scheduled to do in March, the flow of money for home loans will once again grind to a halt. The Mortgage Bankers Association expects the number of new residential mortgages to plunge by 40 percent this year.

The last con game Tabai uses to highlight what Wall Street has been up to is called “The Reload.” This refers to a mark who comes back for seconds.

It’s important to remember that the housing bubble itself was a classic confidence game — the Ponzi scheme. The Ponzi scheme is any scam in which old investors must be continually paid off with money from new investors to keep up what appear to be high rates of investment return. Residential housing was never as valuable as it seemed during the bubble; the soaring home values were instead a reflection of a continual upward rush of new investors in mortgage-backed securities, a rush that finally collapsed in 2008.

But by the end of 2009, the unimaginable was happening: The bubble was re-inflating. A bailout policy that was designed to help us get out from under the bursting of the largest asset bubble in history inadvertently produced exactly the opposite result, as all that government-fueled capital suddenly began flowing into the most dangerous and destructive investments all over again. Wall Street was going for the reload.

Why? Why haven’t we woken up to this outright robbery? Well for one thing, the financial services industry gives generously to both parties, thus allowing them virtual free reign to snooker the taxpayer. But even Obama’s new regulations - being watered down even further as I write this - will be inadequate. And the reason has to do with morals, not regulation:

Con artists have a word for the inability of their victims to accept that they’ve been scammed. They call it the “True Believer Syndrome.” That’s sort of where we are, in a state of nagging disbelief about the real problem on Wall Street. It isn’t so much that we have inadequate rules or incompetent regulators, although both of these things are certainly true. The real problem is that it doesn’t matter what regulations are in place if the people running the economy are rip-off artists. The system assumes a certain minimum level of ethical behavior and civic instinct over and above what is spelled out by the regulations. If those ethics are absent — well, this thing isn’t going to work, no matter what we do. Sure, mugging old ladies is against the law, but it’s also easy. To prevent it, we depend, for the most part, not on cops but on people making the conscious decision not to do it.

My concern about Democrats and liberals bashing bankers has always been that they fail to adequately differentiate between the robber barons on Wall Street, and the friendly, smiling face of a loan officer we have dealt with at our neighborhood suburban bank. Those are the guys who suffer because of the indiscriminate class card played by the left. They have as much in common with the crooks at Goldman Sachs as my pet cat Aramas has with a saber tooth lion.

But I think the key here has been misplaced conservative support for these rogues who we see as the ultimate success stories in the free market. The problem, as Taibbi points out and as we should have realized long ago, is that these guys operate on another level of the playing field altogether. They can’t be effectively regulated by the government because they are so powerful both politically and as economic entities that drive the macro economy, that they, in effect, hold most of the cards. They are partners with the government. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the government is partners with them. There is no competition except among the extremely small group of bankers to which they sometimes conspire with to realize their enormous profits.

Maybe tar and feathers isn’t such a bad idea after all.

Was the Austin terrorist John Stack a right wing loon?

Sure - because as we all know, liberals love to pay taxes and never get mad at the IRS.

Don’t believe me? Here’s Paul Begala wanting to make April 15 “Patriot’s Day:”

Happy Patriots’ Day. April 15 is the one day a year when our country asks something of us — or at least the vast majority of us.

[...]

This country has showered me with the blessings of liberty. So what do I owe my country in return? Paying my fair share of taxes, it seems, is the least I can do. Thanks to President Obama and the Democratic Congress, 95 percent of Americans will get a tax cut this year. No one — not even the wealthiest 1 percent — will have to pay higher income taxes until 2011.

But no one kisses the ass of our IRS overlords with more nauseating obeisance than Matt Stoller:

I just paid my taxes, and I have to say, I always take pride when I do so. I don’t like having less money to spend, of course, and the complexity of the process is really upsetting. But I am proud to pay for democracy, and I feel when I do send money to the DC Treasurer and the US Treasury that that is what I am doing. The right-wing likes to pretend as if taxes are a burden instead of the price of democracy. And I suppose, if you hate democracy, as the right-wing does, then taxes are the price for paying for something you really don’t want. Personally, I find banking fees, high cable and internet charges, health care costs, and credit card hidden charges much more abrasive than taxes, because with those I’m just being ripped off to pay for someone’s summer home.

To which I responded:

When liberals like Stoller make noises of satisfaction like an infant who has just soiled their diaper just because they obeyed the law one wonders what lefties like our Matt do when they come to a complete stop at a stop sign. The celebrations must go on far into the night.

Obviously, liberals love it when they are racked and stretched by the IRS - even for honest, piddly-sh*t transgressions. They get off on a government agency that can make your life miserable - and, as Mr. Stack suggests - unlivable once caught up in the maw of IRS enforcement procedures. The trauma and torture wears one down, as forcefully and unrelentingly as tectonic plates grinding against each other.

Here’s Amanda Marcotte who suggests that Mr. Stack was indeed a left winger but that he was trying to goose right wing nuts into picking up on his IRS jihad:

Stack’s beef with the IRS seems to have developed from personal problems stemming from possible tax evasion on his part. But it appears to have turned into a full-blown ideological stance, and again, it’s clear that he hopes others who share his ideological stance—and believe me, there are a lot of crazy right wing nuts in the area who do, and I have no doubt Stack was aware of this—will act on his wishes. This is what I mean by a mish-mash. Most of his ranting seems very left wing, but if you’re living in central Texas and you do something like this, you’re sending a signal to right wing nuts, and you know it.

“Most of his ranting seems very left wing…” but ignore that, pay it no mind. It disturbs the narrative that this fellow was a tea party type.

What was that “left wing rant?”

And while they appear to make it look like it’s all about anti-government and anti-IRS, they fail to mention his anti-Catholicism, anti-Bushism, anti-capitalism and pro-communism.

I guess it doesn’t fit the preferred narrative

No, it doesn’t. But when has that ever stopped anyone on the left from jumping to conclusions? Recall that suicide of the federal worker in Kentucky that the left flayed conservatives over before it was discovered he took his own life and wasn’t murdered by “anti-government extremists.” Or Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan’s “PTSD transference” where he heard so many bad things about Iraq coming from his patients that he snapped. I wrote here about both right and left jumping to conclusions about Hasan but in the case of the Austin terrorist, there is a clear, and laughably ignorant attempt by many on the left to tie Mr. Stack to tea partyers.

Why can’t a nutcase just be a nutcase? Why does he have to be “motivated” by political views at all? I’m not a mental health professional, but I’ve read enough to know that trying to glean intent from a diseased mind is a ludicrous sport for amateurs. The reason someone commits suicide in the first place is that the natural, healthy, normally functioning mind breaks and the primal urge of self preservation is either short circuited or is prevented from working properly. This does not happen in minds that are in love with logic or reason.

The left is ascribing a rational thought process to an irrational man. If it weren’t so stupidly obvious that there’s is a political attack rather than a serious attempt to reach a conclusion based on observation, investigation, and a familiarity with how mental disease can lead to suicide, we might excuse liberals for simply being dumb. But tis the season for idiotic political bloviating so we’re stuck with nonsense like this:

Joseph Stack was angry at the Internal Revenue Service, and he took his rage out on it by slamming his single-engine plane into the Echelon Building in Austin, Texas. We now know this thanks to the rather clear (as rants go) suicide note Stack left behind. There’s no information yet on whether he was involved in any anti-government groups or whether he was a lone wolf. But after reading his 34-paragraph screed, I am struck by how his alienation is similar to that we’re hearing from the extreme elements of the Tea Party movement.

I was not struck by that at all. What struck me was this guy’s lack of a clear ideology - something that some of the less reason challenged liberals recognized and, to their credit, are writing about.

Or this:

5. He was mad at the IRS, and left what CNN reports was a suicide note on a local website, detailing his trials with the agency. In fact, a lot of his rhetoric could have been taken directly from a handwritten sign at a tea party rally.

The question of whether this guy was a terrorist is a no brainer; of course he was. Maybe the FBI and Homeland Security refuse to call incidents like this “terrorism” because of the increased paperwork involved in reporting it that way. Otherwise, the only explanation that makes sense is they don’t want to make a big deal out of the incident.

But in this case, we have a terrorist without portfolio. His motivation, given the building housed a regional IRS office, seemed to have been revenge more than anything. His ranting about wanting to inspire people is just that - the mouthings of a madman who wanted to give his death a twisted kind of meaning. It’s not logical or rational. It is delusional.

Maybe some day both sides will realize that the only people they are fooling with their politicization of the insane are themselves.

First, let’s dispense with the notion that Obama has not cut taxes for a very large majority of Americans. In fact, the administration went a step further and “refunded” monies to people who don’t pay any taxes in the first place - a giveaway little noticed at the time.

But most critics are focusing on the payroll tax cut that grants an individual an extra $400 a year in take home, and a married couple filing jointly $800. This is a tax cut - period. Of course, at the end of the year when you do your taxes, your calculated tax includes that extra cash so your refund may be slightly smaller. It’s not like you didn’t earn the money and don’t owe taxes on it. The government just decided to allow you to keep a little more of what you earned each pay period by reducing the amount they withheld from your check in payroll taxes.

Some administration opponents are trying to make the case that because this does nothing to decrease the average American’s tax bill that it is not a tax cut. Technically, they may have a case. But if you ask the average taxpayer if taking home more cash every week is a tax cut, they would almost certainly say yes.

It was a good plan, although fairly modest in its workings. It didn’t help the economy much at all and the reason most Americans think their taxes haven’t been cut is probably due to the fact that the average taxpayer’s take home pay was increased by only around $13 a week.

Also, concentrating solely on the reduction in withholding is disingenuous. There were other tax cuts in the stim bill (they didn’t work either) as well as extensions or enhancements of Bush era tax cuts that the president - being disingenuous himself - is claiming as his own.

Here are a few:

First time home buyer credit: Enacted under Bush, enhanced up to $8000 credit for buying a new home.

Reduction or elimination of sales tax and use taxes paid on qualified new car purchases. (Expired 1/1/10).

American Opportunity Tax Credit on college scholarships. Changed the name from the “HOPE scholarship credit” and enhanced and relaxed rules for broader participation.

Expanded and enhanced energy tax credits already in place.

Then there are “tax cuts” that primarily targeted Americans who don’t pay any taxes at all. Including these measures allows the president to say he has “cut” taxes for 95% of Americans:

Child Tax Credit. The Stim bill enhanced the child tax credit by making a larger portion of the credit refundable for 2009 and 2010. Even if you paid no income tax, you can still receive the money.

The Stim bill increased the Earned Income Tax Credit. This is another refundable credit that allows taxpayers that pay no income tax to get thousands of dollars “refunded” to them.

There were also a couple of items in the stim bill that either extended Bush era cuts for small business or enhanced existing programs.

What we can glean from this thumbnail summary is that both sides are right, and both sides are being disingenuous in picking and choosing what constitutes a tax cut and what doesn’t. The facts, however, are clear; taxes were cut for a large majority of Americans while the president is taking credit for some tax cuts not of his own design.

I think it very revealing of the philosophy of both sides in this argument as it relates to taxes in general and how the government funds itself.

Whose money is it anyway? It appears to me that on the left, there is the feeling that whatever you earn belongs to the government and it is up to government to decide how much of your money you can keep. Admittedly, this is put rather crudely but I think it an accurate reflection of what liberals believe, at least subconsciously. It is philosophically satisfying for many liberals to reduce what the government withholds from your paycheck because it signifies the government’s power to determine how much of your own property you are entitled to - even if the amount is paltry as it is in the stim bill.

Conservatives, on the other hand, believe that your earnings are your property and that the citizen consents to have the government take that portion it needs to operate efficiently. Ideally, we give our consent by electing representatives whose philosophy reflects that basic, underlying creed of personal liberty and the sanctity of private property. If taxes become too high, we elect people who promise to ease the burden. That also, is a form of consent.

I never hear the word “consent” from the left when it comes to a citizen parting with their property for taxes. Is it an important distinction? I believe it is indeed and that this fundamental outlook on taxes highlights a huge divide between right and left.

So perhaps all the hub-bub on the right about Obama not cutting taxes for the vast majority of Americans has more to do with a basic disagreement over whose money we’re talking about to begin with. Liberal governments appear to take an entirely different view of property than conservatives ones. This manifests itself in support for expanded eminent domain powers by the left, and a more limited definition of “private” property.

But if we’re going to criticize the president, let’s do it for his disingenuousness in claiming credit for tax provisions he had absolutely nothing to do with creating.

It should be clear to all of us by now that the single driving factor in this economic downturn was the meltdown in home values. All the talk about how the big banks screwed us over is relevant only as it relates to the massive devaluation of our largest personal asset; our homes. If home values had stayed relatively stable, or come down at a reasonable rate, the bank crisis may have been manageable. It may have been seen as a bad couple of quarters rather than the catastrophe it became.

But that didn’t happen so here we are. And where we are may very well precipitate another huge devaluation of homes which would then lead to another round of bailouts and takeovers. This is because according to most experts, there is still slack in home values that has yet to be taken in; that our homes are still overvalued despite dropping 30-35-40%.

This has created a situation that is evidently not unprecedented except in scale; people with “underwater” mortgages - where they owe more than their house is worth - simply mailing the keys to their domicile to the bank and walking away from their mortgage obligations. Many simply stop payments and dare the bank to foreclose and evict them. Others find cheaper quarters by either renting, or taking advantage of cheaper mortgages.

There were a few of these walkaways during the housing bust of the early 1990’s. But today, nearly 5 million mortgages - about 10% of all residential mortgages in the country - are underwater (defined as a mortgage where the value of the house is 75% or less than the principle). And while no one is keeping track, one outfit has estimated that a half million people took the walkaway route last year.

Financial advisors are at the point of actually urging their clients to walkaway. Sure, their credit rating will take a hit. Better that than pouring money down a black hole where you will never realize any return on your investment.

There are a couple of ethical questions associated with walkaways that need to be addressed; one is personal, the other is an apparent double standard in the application of society’s disapproval.

Case in point; a New York developer walked away from paying the loan on 11,000 apartments in Manhattan:

The rules are different, though, for the walkaway of all walkaways.

That title is reserved for what happened to one of New York’s trophy properties, the 56-building Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village complex. Spanning 80 acres on Manhattan’s east side, it’s the largest single-owned residential area in the city. Its red brick buildings, built by Metropolitan Life in the 1940s for World War II veterans, are still a haven for the city’s middle class.

Commercial real-estate firm Tishman and its partner, investment firm BlackRock, paid $5.4 billion to buy the property from MetLife in late 2006 — right at the market’s peak. They hoped to make money by converting rent-regulated apartments into luxury condos and raising rents.

Then the housing crash hit. The value now: $1.8 billion.

And you thought you overpaid for your house.

“They made assumptions that things would grow to the moon, and things certainly did not,” said Len Blum, a managing partner at investment bank Westwood Capital.

Tishman said last week that it was turning the property back over to creditors to avoid filing for bankruptcy protection. In recent weeks, Tishman failed to restructure $4.4 billion in debt, and couldn’t find another buyer, according to a statement from the company.

Will Tishman come in for less disapprobation than a homeowner who walks away from a mortgage where he is paying 40% more than the house is worth? It’s a certainty that banks are treating Tishman differently than the ordinary homeowner:

Walking away isn’t risk-free. A foreclosure stays on a consumer’s credit record for seven years and can send a credit score (based on a scale of 300 to 850) plunging by as much as 160 points, according to Fair Isaac Corp., which provides tools for analyzing credit records. A lower credit score means auto and other loans are likely to come with much higher interest rates, and credit card issuers may charge more interest or refuse to issue a card.

In addition, many states give lenders varying degrees of scope to seize bank deposits, cars or other assets of people who default on mortgages.

Even so, in neighborhoods with high concentrations of foreclosures, “it’s going to be really difficult to prevent a cascade effect” as one strategic default emboldens others to take that drastic step, says Paola Sapienza, a professor of finance at Northwestern University. A study by researchers at Northwestern and the University of Chicago found that as many as one in four defaults may be strategic.

The double standard is easy to understand, less easy to justify. The fact is, a bank is less apt to severely penalize someone who owes them billions as opposed to someone who is into them for a few hundred thousand. The “sin” may be similar, but repentance is more complicated. It’s as if a rich man and a poor man both stole a loaf of bread; the poor man was forced to knee walk up a rocky mountain and say the rosary while the rich man got away with saying one our father, one hail mary, and a glory be (old line catholics will recognize that penance immediately).

Ideally, the same sin should engender the same penance or punishment regardless of wealth or social station. But in this case, we hold people and corporations to different standards of behavior and hence, different attitudes toward walkaways.

But it is the personal ethics of abandoning a promise to repay monies loaned in good faith by a lending institution based on your past history of good credit and timely repayment that is of most relevance for us. What happens when so many walk away from their obligations not because they can’t pay but because paying what they owe is a bad personal financial decision?

We can all sympathize with the walkaway and wonder if we’d do the same in their situation. But from an ethical standpoint, this is really rotten. By walking away, these homeowners are making it more difficult for the rest of us to get a homeloan or refinance our existing home. This is an inherently selfish act in that the walkaway fails to take into account the effect on the community and society.

And then there’s the prospect if there are enough walkaways, a tipping point will be reached and all that bad paper that is still on the balance books of major banks will cause another meltdown necessitating still more bailouts and takeovers when home values go into another death spiral.

What happens if five million Americans decide to stop overpaying their mortgages and mail the keys back to the bank? There would be a sharp decline in housing values. There would be another downward leg to the financial crisis, with a big hit to the capital of banks and other institutions holding large mortgage portfolios.

I think the housing decline would be a healthy thing, as this market is still overvalued. I don’t believe we would see a deflationary spiral, a widespread collapse of debt values, and a descent into a full-fledged Great Depression II. This was the great fear when the bubble first started popping in late 2006.

But since late 2008, the Bernanke Doctrine has showed that the modern Fed has the tools to keep this from happening. Administration officials can say whatever they want, but Too-Big-To-Fail is still reality.

What of the decline in individual purchasing power, the so-called adverse wealth effect, that would come with lower housing values? It would be muted because making mortgage payments on an overvalued house diminishes purchasing power just as badly.

But the net effect of the Great Walkaway would still be a strong downdraft in the overall economy.

I don’t for a moment believe that 5 million people will strategically default on their mortgages. But who can guess where the tipping point might be? Who can be sure that 1 million or 2 million such defaults wouldn’t crash the economy again?

All because people selfishly took stock of their personal financial situation and decided it was OK to saddle the rest of us with what is, after all, their problem. I say they have no ethical right to do it and that Congress should make it easier for banks to collect from these voluntary deadbeats.

Not surprisingly, Congress will treat these people as victims and no doubt either bail them out (one estimate is it would take about $750 billion to pay off the difference between what underwater borrowers owe and what their houses are worth), or make some accommodation with credit reporting services to give these strategic deadbeats a pass. Encouraging irresponsibility has been the hallmark of the Obama administration housing policies so why should we expect anything to be different here?

For the vast majority of us who have suffered a big hit on the value of our homes but continue to remain faithful to our obligations, this whole walkaway phenomenon is a slap in the face. We are being played for suckers. And it’s depressing to think that rewards will accrue to those ethically challenged scofflaws who don’t play by the rules but come out smelling like roses anyway.

Since I abhor easy answers, pat responses, and conventional wisdom, I will take a stab at examining this question from the flawed, but earnest perspective of a layman who respects the work of legitimate scientists and who still believes the possibility that global warming could be a big problem for mankind. (Note: What can be done about it is an entirely different question.)

I will not seek to summarize the shocking revelations of the past few months that have resulted in legitimate questions being raised about some of the cornerstones of the IPCC 2007 report that forms the basis of government actions to mitigate climate change. For that, I will point you to Climate Audit or Climate Depot. There you will find links to the major stories that describe the fraud, the blunders, the failure to properly vet and follow IPCC’s own procedures that have debunked, or otherwise called into question major and minor aspects of climate change science.

But let’s put this in perspective. Some of these revelations are more serious than others. Those trumpeting the Himalayan glacier story that showed as bogus the idea of those ice sheets disappearing by 2035 thus “proving” that global warming is a crock, fail to note that the glaciers are still retreating at an accelerated rate, although the Indian government report is unsure if climate change is the major cause.

Is that as important a piece of evidence as the data sets on temperatures that were apparently falsified or misapplied? Those temps were calculated into how many climate change models, how many scientific papers? That study by Jones is in the 2007 IPCC report.

Compared to one study of one small part of the world that has been laughably shown to be a politically motivated use of science, I daresay that screwing with temperature data is huge. But is it a climate change killer?

Not hardly. The science of climate change has been conducted for decades by hundreds of reputable scientists taking accurate measurements of tree rings, ice cores, ocean temperatures, and other observable and measurable phenomena that have not been debunked, or shown to be in error. There may indeed be misinterpretations of the data; that is a hazard of science and always will be. Skeptics have come up with alternate interpretations for most of the evidence of climate change which, of course, is what science is all about. In a perfect world, the politics that have captured the climate change argument would be absent and it would be scientist vs. scientist - man a mano , with both sides wielding their best arguments, fighting it out in the major scientific journals.

Obviously, we live in a world that has given a Nobel Prize to Al Gore and the IPCC - a mistake that should be rectified soonest. So we can now no more remove politics from the science of climate change as we could remove your beating heart from your chest and expect you to be upright for very long.

Aside from the regular political machinations from those seeking to benefit financially from decisions made by governments, as well as governments and institutions like the UN that are seeking to aggrandize power unto themselves, there is the very human desire for many scientists to protect their professional reputations from being destroyed. Hence, the actions of Jones and Mann that, as the investigations unfold, are becoming less and less defensible.

Given that some of these revelations are more important than others as far as calling into question the entire AGW theory, how is it possible to judge the real damage to the theory’s credibility and thus, the efficacy of the remedies being pushed by the climate change advocates?

There is a second aspect of climate change that hasn’t been touched - yet - by the climategate revelations; the notion that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere are rising. Again, skeptics have posited different interpretations of the data, predicting different outcomes as a result of this measured increase. But the increase is confirmed (although models have been wildly inaccurate in predicting how much CO2 makes it to the troposphere where the greenhouse effect is most damaging).

So where is climate change science today? The edifice is leaning as a result of several bricks being pulled away from the structure, and there is a definite possibility it can collapse unless it is shored up. That “shoring up” must be done by scientists themselves. If someone or some scientists aren’t already doing so, a thorough review of the literature with special emphasis placed on examining papers that used the Jones temperature model - with attention paid to the impact on that 2007 IPCC report - should be undertaken immediately. That would seem to be a minimum requirement to begin the process of regaining credibility.

Beyond that, a re-evaluation of at least some of the skeptical literature in light of the revelations would seem to be in order. And finally, a greater effort must be made by all to resist the political pressures placed on scientists to accede to outcome based science. In other words, tell Al Gore to take his carbon footprint and stuff it.

Rand Simberg made the point of using the “precautionary principle” when figuring out what to do about climate change. Seeing emissions reduction as a kind of “insurance” against catastrophe is all well and good. But Simberg quotes Bjorn Lomberg who cautions against the cure being worse than the disease. And Tom Friedman’s 1% chance of catastrophe being reason enough for such draconian measures drew this response from Simberg:

But I buy insurance that has a price commensurate with the expected value (i.e., the cost of the disaster times the probability that it will occur). For instance, I’ll pay a few hundred bucks for a million-dollar policy against the small chance that I’ll kick off tomorrow. Presumably, Friedman assumes that the proposed palliatives of cap’n’tax or carbon taxes meet that criterion, but he doesn’t do the calculations for us, because he can’t. Warm mongers like him propose to spend trillions of dollars now to prevent an unknown amount of cost later, in defiance of the basic economic principle of discounting the value of future expenditures.

There is a variation on this fallacy, in fact. It goes: There is a crisis; something must be done! What we propose to do is something. Therefore, it must be done!

Put another way; should a man buy insurance for uterine cancer? Or a woman buy a policy for prostrate cancer? Broadly drawn examples but I hope the point is rammed home. There is the notion of buying insurance intelligently or not. As I’ve written before, I think that it is perfectly acceptable to take measures that would reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases. But it makes no sense given what we know about climate change at this point to literally bankrupt our economy, placing monumental restrictions on industrial activity while entire swaths of our energy sector are taken over by government. The threat has never justified such action and this is true even more now.

Develop alternatives to fossil fuels? Absolutely - and quickly. This is a national security issue as much as it is an environmental one. Try to make everyone aware of their “carbon footprint” so that we can each do our part to lessen emissions? Sure, just don’t stuff it down my throat with draconian regulations and liberty-destroying legislation.

Climategate and its ancillary revelations have not killed the AGW theory or permanently damaged climate science. But if climate change proponents refuse to do the things necessary to regain credibility, and allow for a full fledged, real debate on every aspect of the science, they will be guilty of pandering to politicians and global bureaucrats who could care less about legitimate science while seeking to use their flawed conclusions to gain power and wealth at our expense.

I’ve been wanting to write about this for two weeks but didn’t find the time to think it through until the last couple of days.

James Poulos at American Scene (formerly Political Editor at Culture 11), writes provocatively about taxes:

The forceful way in which the tea partiers are putting this conservative resistance at the center of our political debate today should remind us of what went wrong for Republicans during the two Bush presidencies. The Bush presidents, different in so many ways, both turned the GOP toward corporatism in a way that significantly limited their success as candidates and presidents. (Reagan had neither problem. This is the root of Reagan nostalgia.) The lesson is a simple one: first and foremost, the Republican party is supposed to deliver not economic nor cultural but political goods.

The tea partiers, in insisting that economic policy derives from and reflects political principles, and not the other way around, help make this clear. Take taxes. When taxes are too many and too high, the economy suffers. But, as this decade has brutally taught us, taxes do not necessarily enrich the state, but they always aggrandize it. The evil of taxes is not primarily economic but political. When a government learns how to use taxes to coerce, control, and manage the behavior of its citizens, a country is placed on a perilous road — not to serfdom, necessarily, but to tyranny, a tyranny that lords over even the rich and famous, even when they happen to profit from its favor. The GOP is supposed to keep this kind of tyranny at bay, and when it comes near, the GOP is supposed to ward it off.

It’s in this regard that, over the past ten years, the GOP has failed. The trouble with RINOs is that, in their liberalism, they are often either blind to the threat of tyranny or they do not really see it as a problem. This is not because they ‘fail to understand the nature’ of tyranny. Tyrannical regimes can rule over dynamic, exciting societies, over huge numbers of people full of promise and purpose. They can focus resources on big challenges and execute amazing feats of efficiency and publicity. Just ask the growing number of American commentators suffering from China envy.

How does government use the tax code to “to coerce, control, and manage the behavior of its citizens…?” Let me count the ways. The government has declared smoking to be a hazard to your health and taxes the beejeebees out of it to discourage you from taking it up and encouraging you to quit. Coming soon, a federal tax on sugary sodas, salty snacks, fast food - again, trying to control your eating habits to keep you trim, slim, and out of the doctor’s office where you will be a drain on the health care system like other obese people.

Of course, the code is replete with such examples of government encouraging or discouraging - i.e. trying to control - behavior and Poulos, in what I see as some very original thinking, makes a case that real conservatives should oppose such laboratory experiments:

Moreover, liberals of any party seeking primarily to foster or facilitate cultural change typically have little desire to focus their attention, much less their careers, on preventing the government from aggrandizing itself. A government that routinely manages economic behavior through its economic policy is well able to routinely manage social and personal behavior that way. In theory, there’s no reason why lots of Republicans can’t be ‘socially liberal but fiscally conservative.’ In practice, social liberals, of any party, have a vested interest in a government that rules not only by law but by economics.

In fact, tea partiers help everyone understand that ‘fiscal conservatism’ is a misleading phrase. A ‘fiscal conservative’ is for balanced budgets and well-calibrated taxes and against wasteful spending. A tyrannical government, if it has any brains, is for solvency and efficiency too. ‘Fiscal conservatism’ can license the aggrandizement and abuse of government power. It might be necessary to economic conservatism, but it isn’t sufficient. Alone, it isn’t conservatism at all, and under the right conditions, ‘fiscal conservatism’ can actually destroy its namesake.

By granting a homeowner the ability to write off interest paid on their home loan, isn’t the government encouraging a certain kind of economic behavior? Of course they are. And this is where I’m not sure Mr. Poulos’s thesis holds. The macro effect of lots of home buying is a net plus for society in that such a large chunk of the economy is related to the care and feeding of our domiciles. Buying a home helps create a demand for more homes - residences that need to be built, furnished, and maintained. Do the resulting economic benefits outweigh the clear desire of government to “control” our behavior? Or is this comparing apples and oranges - freedom and tyranny?

How about the old fashioned dependent deduction? When it was at $500 in the 1950’s, it could be argued that this sum, realized through savings on a parent’s income tax bill, was subsidizing the feeding, clothing, and education of children of that era because the amount paid for a significant portion of a child’s needs. Coming from a family of 10 kids, I can testify to its efficacy in encouraging child bearing.

I think Mr. Poulos is enough of a realist to see that some of these “targeted” tax schemes aren’t necessarily “tyrannical” in the sense that we trade liberty for security by embracing them. The net effect is that the community is served by writing exemptions and subsidies into the tax code that benefit almost everyone. If a desired end in promulgating this kind of behavior modification is a better community - and the examples above regarding home interest and child deductions would seem to fit that model - whatever danger there is that government is aggrandized is mitigated by the net gain for society.

The problem - and I think Mr. Poulos would agree - is that such beneficence comes from the central government, rather than local political authorities. In a more perfect world, this might matter more than it does. But I think it unrealistic to expect that the desired community improvements can be granted or realized by any political entity save the largest - that being the federal government. If that government aggrandizes power unto itself as a result of these incentivizing measures - and this is true given that the increased employment and business activity brings in additional tax revenue - it is the consequence of consensus within the community of the beneficial nature of these schemes and not a power grab by the feds.

But the president’s tax cut proposals for small business might be a different matter:

The proposal, similar to plans he pitched during the presidential campaign and last year in Washington, would give employers a $5,000 tax credit for every net new worker hired this year and reimburse businesses for the Social Security payroll taxes they pay when they increase payrolls faster than inflation.

[...]

Though all businesses will be eligible, the administration would keep the focus on small companies by limiting the total maximum credit to $500,000 per employer. The payroll tax credit would be based on Social Security payrolls, and wouldn’t apply to wage increases above the current taxable maximum of $106,800.

Start-up firms would be eligible for half the credit, which the White House calls the “Small Business Jobs and Wages Tax Cut.”

Here is an example of the federal government artificially creating a demand for new workers by, in effect, attempting to influence the business decisions of individual firms. It’s not coercion, but is it tyranny? Given the $30 billion price tag, I can guarantee the measures will not enjoy the same level of support in the community as the home interest tax write off. And the chances that the the benefits will be as widespread as the child deduction are very small.

In this case, according to Mr. Poulos’s provocative thesis, you could say that the federal government is indeed aggrandizing power and influence at the expense of the community. In hard economic times, this may be accepted by the majority but that doesn’t make the power grab any less “tyrannical.”

The idea that the way our tax code is written can lead to a kind of tyranny is connected to the kind of society in which we have made for ourselves. Alexis de Tocqueville was quite enamored of our national mania to tinker with everything in order to make it more serviceable or valuable. It is only natural that this idea would find its way to government - that we can tinker with society through the tax code’s incentive/disincentive structure in order to improve the life of the citizen by modifying his behavior, and punishing poor choices.

But almost every time we “target” tax cuts, or incentivize certain behaviors at the federal level, we pay a price by ceding personal liberty and responsibility to government. And government becomes richer, and more controlling because of it. Some conservatives, as Poulos points out, are not immune to proposing these tax schemes. But his point that “economic policy derives from and reflects political principles, and not the other way around” is well taken.

Generally speaking, the tax code should be used for the purpose of raising revenue and not trying to modify human behavior. If Republicans keep that in mind the next time voters grant them the power to govern, we’ll all be better off for it.