April Fools’!

So, I was going to do a post on the Republican budget plan as presented in the WSJ by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) until I read a Crooks and Liars post, a Steve Benin post, and a blog entry by Krugman.  I think that linking these entries will mostly suffice. 

I will add that the Republicans (aside from being disconnected from reality and/or betraying Beavis and Butthead-like understandings of that economic reality) seem once again to be banking on the massive ignorance of the American populace.  While I understand that the Republicans do well amongst the “I don’t understand that chart but abortion’s bad” crowd, the level of dangerous stupidity contained in the Republican budget alternative (i.e., spending freeze in the middle of the worst recession in a quarter century) is staggering. 

The Republican budget is basically a rehash of the exact same policies contained in the DeMint amendment–permanently cutting the capital gains tax to 15%, eliminating the estate tax, lowering the corporate tax rate from 35% to 25%, and lowering the top bracket income tax from 35% to 25%.  Again, cutting the capital gains tax was disastrous for 99% of Americans, as the chart below shows.  (Click link if chart size too small)

SOCOM during the Bush years

It was interesting coming across this story today on Raw Story about Sy Hersh’s mention of an “executive assassination ring” at a forum on Constitutional issues.  It is pretty well known that most of the covert operations carried out by the CIA during the Cold War are now being handled by SOCOM.  Hersh has maintained sources amongst the top brass at the Pentagon, and he has had some exclusive stories during the global war on terror.

I’m currently reading Dana Priest’s The Mission:  Waging War and Keeping Peace with America’s Military, which is to an extent a reflection on the issue of SOCOM’s increasing role in foreign affairs.  It’s an OK read, profiling some of the service chiefs and it has an interesting section on Obama’s new DNI, Adm. Dennis Blair, and his involvement in Indonesia in the 1990’s.

It will be interesting to see what will be leaked about Bush’s use of SOCOM during the global war on terror.  There have been plenty of reports of Operation Mongoose-like sabotage operations in Iran.

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UPDATE:

I read a great post by Emptywheel today regarding JSOC’s activities under the former Vice President.  It places the latest covert activities in Iran within the context of Cheney’s experiences during Iran-Contra, and shows that the neocons are essentially trying to elude oversight by moving covert action to JSOC.

Horton on torture and law

As usual, Scott Horton at Harper’s Magazine has written a great post detailing where the US stands on the torture issue.

He was also recently on the Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC.

(il)Legal (en)Treaties

I’ve been following the torture debate pretty closely the last few months years, and Glenn Greenwald’s blog has  consistently been a good place to go for information and insight.  His latest post asks the question everyone has been waiting for Obama to answer:  Does the US stand by its treaty obligations?

He points out a recent story by Michael Isikoff in Newsweek which details an internal DOJ inquiry during the Bush years whose findings were consistent with what the left has been charging since the Bybee memo was declassified:  that political appointees in the Justice Dept. were put in place to give legal clearance for actions that were transparently illegal.

Bathtub Blues

From what I’ve seen in the mainstream media, there is virtually no attention being paid to the brobdingnagian tax cut (DeMint amendment) being supported by all but five Senate Republicans.  Here is what it includes, briefly:

o Permanently repeal the alternative minimum tax once and for all;
o Permanently keep the capital gains and dividends taxes at 15 percent;
o Permanently kill the Estate Tax for estates under $5 million, and cut the tax rate to 15 percent for those above;
o Permanently extend the $1,000-per-child tax credit;
o Permanently repeal the marriage tax penalty;
o Permanently simplify itemized deductions to include only home mortgage interest and charitable contributions.
o Lower top marginal income rates from 35 percent to 25 percent.
o Simplify the tax code to include only two other brackets, 15 and 10 percent.
o Lower corporate tax rate as well, from 35 percent to 25 percent.

Reducing the top income tax bracket from 35% to 25% would be a massive blow to tax receipts, which have the same impact as massive spending, which makes Republican attempts to brand the stimulus as “generational theft” completely disingenuous.  Add to that the fact that modern Republicans have a stated goal of “reduc[ing] [government] to the size where [they] can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub” and you can see, once again, their ideology at work.

Republicans since Reagan have argued that taxing at a lower rate actually brings in more revenue–that businesses and individuals, less constrained by taxation, are able to make so much more money that the government actually brings in more money with the lower rate than the higher rate.  See:  the Laffer curve.  The problem is that there has NEVER been any evidence to support this, even with near 30 years of practice by Republican administrations.

Most Americans don’t have any idea the history of the income tax brackets’ percentages or their economic effects.  During the post-war boom years, which lasted until 1973, there were high taxes and widely shared prosperity.  Since Reagan, the income tax rate has fallen off a cliff.  As our tax code has become more regressive, the classes become more polarized economically.  Below is a chart I filched from that socialist conspiracy, Wikipedia.

 

Partial History of U.S. Federal Income Tax Rates Since 1913
Applicable Year	Income brackets	First bracket	Top bracket	Source
1913-1915	-	1%	7%	Census
1916	-	2%	15%	Census
1917	-	2%	67%	Census
1918	-	6%	73%	Census
1919-1920	-	4%	73%	Census
1921	-	4%	73%	Census
1922	-	4%	56%	Census
1923	-	3%	56%	Census
1924	-	1.5%	46%	Census
1925-1928	-	1.5%	25%	Census
1929	-	0.375%	24%	Census
1930-1931	-	1.125%	25%	Census
1932-1933	-	4%	63%	Census
1934-1935	-	4%	63%	Census
1936-1939	-	4%	79%	Census
1940	-	4.4%	81.1%	Census
1941	-	10%	81%	Census
1942-1943	-	19%	88%	Census
1944-1945	-	23%	94%	Census
1946-1947	-	19%	86.45%	Census
1948-1949	-	16.6%	82.13%	Census
1950	-	17.4%	84.36%	Census
1951	-	20.4%	91%	Census
1952-1953	-	22.2%	92%	Census
1954-1963	-	20%	91%	Census
1964	-	16%	77%	Census
1965-1967	-	14%	70%	Census
1968	-	14%	75.25%	Census
1969	-	14%	77%	Census
1970	-	14%	71.75%	Census
1971-1981	15 brackets	14%	70%	IRS
1982-1986	12 brackets	12%	50%	IRS
1987	5 brackets	11%	33%	IRS
1988-1990	3 brackets	15%	28%	IRS
1991-1992	3 brackets	15%	31%	IRS
1993-2000	5 brackets	15%	39.6%	IRS
2001	5 brackets	15%	39.1%	IRS
2002	6 brackets	10%	38.6%	IRS
2003-2008	6 brackets	10%	35%	IRS

Not to mention permanently reducing the capital gains tax to 15%.  Most middle class conservative Americans ask themselves why should the government tax their capital gains, which are mostly in 401(k) plans used for retirement.  What is not realized is that most of the income of the super-rich is through capital gains.  What does this mean?  It means that, in effect, someone who realizes $500 million in capital gains in 2010, under the DeMint Amendment would pay a lower tax rate than the couple who makes $100K.  If anything, the capital gains tax needs to be progressively stratified, not flat and lowered.

And what are the costs of these tax cuts?  In Paul Krugman’s latest opinion piece, he writes:

“In the Senate, Republicans inveighed against “pork” — although the wasteful spending they claimed to have identified (much of it was fully justified) was a trivial share of the bill’s total. And they decried the bill’s cost — even as 36 out of 41 Republican senators voted to replace the Obama plan with $3 trillion, that’s right, $3 trillion in tax cuts over 10 years.”

So, with a 2009 deficit of $1 trillion, the Republicans are castigating Obama for wanting to spend $800B to stimulate the bleakest economy in 70 years, while simultaneously trying to burden the government by $3T over the next decade.  And the CBO is predicting a paltry surplus of 0.3T over the next decade.  Those tax cuts would put us well into the red.  All of which begs the question:  Who won the elections?

Sometimes you just gotta laugh

at how poorly formed are neoconservative arguments.   I feel bad for them.  It must be difficult to transparently lobby for arms companies and the Likud party and make no sense.  It’s like being a Kirby salesman, except on a larger scale.

Fortunately, we have the blogosphere to dispel easily disprovable errors of fact and judgment.

Military Commissions dealt another blow

On Wednesday the Washington Post published a crucial story in the unfolding drama of Guantanamo Bay and detainees in the War on Terror.  Judge Susan J. Crawford refused to prosecute Mohammed al-Qahtani or refer his case to another court because of the extensive torture he was put through at the hands of the US military at Guantanamo Bay.

Emptywheel at Firedoglake has a great post with video from Keith Olberman’s Countdown with an interview with Cmdr. Jonathan Swift, who represented Salim Hamdan in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the case whose review by the Supreme Court declared the Bush administration’s military commisions unconstitutional in their then present form.

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A useful tool via NYT:

http://projects.nytimes.com/guantanamo

8 years/$10 trillion deficit

Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes have an analysis of the deficit surge during the Bush years at Harper’s.

“… had Clinton-era policies been kept in place the past eight years, the CBO estimates, the overall national debt actually would have significantly decreased.”

The requisites of neoconservatism

I couldn’t help but notice Frank Gaffney’s appearance on Chris Matthews’ show on MSNBC. It’s not worth getting bent out of shape over what neoconservatives will say on television, but Gaffney’s performance in this interview is especially ludicrous. In US political debate, it’s easy to blur lines and distort facts, but Gaffney takes things a step further with brazen prevarications. It is a hallmark of neoconservatism since its “Team B” days in the 70’s to repudiate actual experts and deny the most obvious facts. It is actually a travesty that Gaffney or any of his comrades are even allowed to appear on television or in print, given thirty plus years of intelligence failures. Matthews does a decent job of rebutting some of what Gaffney states, but most of his rebuttal is emotive. It was good he had David Corn with him on the interview. Corn and Michael Isikoff are authors of one of the better books that analyze the pre-Iraq war intelligence deceptions of the Bush administration, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War, and Corn has the chance to briefly go into mis-use of the “aluminum tubes” intelligence in the run-up to the war. (I am always amazed at the ridiculous format of political shows in the US, which makes thoughtful dialogue next to impossible due to the constraints of fitting a 4-minute segment in between commercials.)

Strangely, Gaffney cites the Duelfer Report (2004) to make his points that Iraq constituted a dire threat to the US–the very same Duelfer Report that stated unequivocally that Saddam had no active nuclear, biological or chemical weapons or weapons programs-the very same Duelfer Report which was the final conclusion of the Iraq Survey Group, the Bush-handpicked team that searched for almost a year for WMD’s in Iraq and found nothing. So, he uses the very report that undermines his argument to make his own. This is not a new strategy for neocons. Gaffney himself has been peddling this garbage since the Duelfer Report was declassified.

Gaffney seizes on the presence of a few old artillery shells dating to the 1980’s when the US was providing them to Saddam for his war with Iran in order to argue that Hussein in fact had weapons he was aiming to use on the US and Europe in 2002. He refers to them as “vast quantities of VX sitting in artillery shells”. The Duelfer Report did mention a few rusty artillery shells that were found in the desert with traces of mustard and VX gas, but the report was clear that there were no active programs or elements that could create new programs. It states: “While a small number of old, abandoned chemical munitions have been discovered, ISG [Iraq Survey Group] judges that Iraq unilaterally destroyed its undeclared chemical weapons stockpile in 1991. There are no credible indications that Baghdad resumed production of chemical munitions thereafter…”. Furthermore, “ISG did not discover chemical process or production units configured to produce key precursors or [chemical weapons] agents…ISG found no direct evidence that Iraq, after 1996, had plans for a new BW program or was conducting BW-specific work for military purposes…Depending on its scale, Iraq could have re-established an elementary BW program within a few weeks to a few months of a decision to do so, but ISG discovered no indications that the Regime was pursuing such a course.” (It’s worth noting that your local high school biology lab could begin such BW production in a couple weeks’ time.) In addition, it states “Iraq did not possess a nuclear device, nor had it tried to reconstitute a capability to produce nuclear weapons after 1991. ISG has uncovered no information to support allegations of Iraqi pursuit of uranium from abroad in the post-Operation Desert Storm era.”

Gaffney goes on to repeat Cheney’s false claim from his recent ABC interview that post-invasion the US discovered that Hussein had “feedstock” for biological weapons. This is not true. All chemical and biological weapons were destroyed by UNSCOM in the early 90’s and all nuclear related material was secured and under seal. He went on to say that attacks were “imminent had we seen the sanctions lifted”, which is another argument altogether–Iraq was put under sanctions following the first Gulf War, and, despite some calls for their abandonment, there was never any serious consideration of their abandonment in the US government. Finally, Gaffney says that “agent that was in those laboratories…was being prepared to be put into aerosol cans to kill people here and in Europe”. Gaffney was referring to a small segment of the Duelfer Report which states “Mun’im Mustafa Fatahi, a close friend of Dr. Al Azmirli, reportedly told Al Azmirli that a group of people was actively pursuing ricin for weaponization. As of March 2003, ricin was being developed into stable liquid to deliver as an aerosol in small rockets, cluster bombs, and smoke generators, according to Al Azmirli.” The Duelfer Report went on to state that this account was “based on single source reporting of unclear veracity.” Having seen the multitudinous efforts of groups like the Iraqi National Congress and its “defectors”, the hearsay of one “friend” of a scientist hardly warrants mention in an intelligence report, and was probably an attempt to put a positive spin on an otherwise bankrupt report or to give a toehold to neoconservative apologists.
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I have more to say.  I’ll finish this later.

A note on the mundane

So, I initially did not want to take these forays into the personal on my blog, but I find myself here during the holidays waxing sentimental.  Besides, what are blogs for if not murky, quasi-Freudian  drivel.

My fall semester’s over.  Now I can start reading again.  I usually don’t have to stop, but this semester’s classes were overly tedious.  I had been on pace to read 60+ books this year until this Fall semester.  Now, it’s looking like I’ll barely break 50.  Things will be better when I’m at the university; I might actually get to read something for class I won’t be embarrassed to add to my librarything.  For now, it’s doin’ time with the glue-eaters.

And the holidays are here.  I can’t remember having been so excited about the holidays since I was young.  It will be so nice to have almost a week off of work, seeing family, being with baby.  We even got a real tree this year…a fir, at that.  I haggled with the guy at the tree lot and got it for barely half the tagged price.  We decorated it tonight with some ornaments I pilfered from my parents’ garage.  My mother had already decorated her house and she still had five or six very large boxes of Christmas decorations and ornaments.  About a third of the ornaments we found to our liking and the rest were either religious, tacky, or … tacky.  Niena the black cat, always  adept at understanding when something important is going on, made herself a spot right underneath the tree on our makeshift treeskirt, looking up through the branches and lights at us decorating.

I made the mistake of buying my gifts early this year.  I usually wait until the day before Christmas (literally), but this year I had most of my shopping done before December.  Which would have been a good thing if I’d had some practice at keeping gifts secret.  It is absolute torture for me to keep a gift under wraps for the whole month of December, especially if it’s for baby.  So, here I sit now, watching her play Fable on her new Xbox 360, looking at the few gifts left strewn under the tree.