Check It Out for Monday, June 1st
Dean Baker at Truthout about investigating the collapse or the killer we already know.
"Congress may establish a commission to investigate the causes of the economic crisis. This may be a useful exercise in publicly shaming those who are responsible for an enormous amount of unnecessary suffering. That would be a good thing.
"These people should be held accountable. Those in the financial sector who broke the law should go to jail, or at the least, lose their ill-gotten fortunes. The public officials whose incompetence and/or corruption allowed for this disaster should lose their jobs and never again be given a position of public trust.
"These could be positive outcomes from an investigative commission. However, such a commission could have a negative role. It could be part of an ongoing effort to rewrite history and cover up for those who were responsible for this disaster.
"The basic point is straightforward. This crisis was simple and easy to see for any competent economist. We had an $8 trillion housing bubble. This bubble was driving the economy ever since the recession in 2001.
"There was nothing on either the demand or supply side that could explain this huge run-up in house prices. Incomes had grown well in the late 90s, but were actually stagnant in the current decade. Population growth and new household formation had slowed markedly from the pace decades earlier when the baby boomers were forming their own households for the first time.
"So, it would be great if Congress outs the boys and girls at the Fed, the Treasury, the SEC, and the other regulatory institutions which allowed this bubble to grow on their watch as well as the Wall Streeters who profited off the nation's pain. But if this is an effort to cover up responsibility, then let's just save the money and wait until we get honest representatives in Congress to establish such a commission."
William Fisher at Public Record highlights the Obama administration apparently channeling Bush on claiming state secrets.
"The lawsuit was brought in San Francisco by two American lawyers who claim their telephone calls were illegally intercepted by the National Security Agency (NSA) under the Bush administration. The lawyers represent the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, a charity that the Treasury Department claims was linked to terrorism.
"Jon Eisenberg, the attorney for the two American lawyers, told Judge Walker at the time that the purpose of the lawsuit was to “obtain an adjudication of the legality of President George W. Bush’s warrantless electronic surveillance program and, more broadly, the Bush administration’s expansive theories of presidential power.”
"Bush claimed that his war powers gave him the authority to eavesdrop on Americans’ electronic communications without warrants.
"Eisenberg told us, 'The DOJ attorneys repeat all the same arguments that Judge Walker has already rejected. They're treating Judge Walker as if he were irrelevant.'
"Al-Haramain lawyer Eisenberg told us, 'I anticipated that the Obama Department of Justice would take a more reasonable approach to moving forward with litigating this case in a manner that doesn’t jeopardize national security, which I think can be easily done.'
“ 'They’re taking as hard a line as the Bush administration did on state secrets,' he said. 'If anything, they’re being more aggressive about it.'
“ 'In three years of litigating this case,' Eisenberg added, I'd come to expect this sort of thing from the Bush Department of Justice, but I'm astounded to see the new Obama DOJ continuing down the same path. So far, at least, we're not seeing any ‘change we can believe in’ regarding presidential abuse of the state secrets privilege.' "
Jill Filipovic at The Guardian writes about the horror and intimidation of abortion providers that has resulted in the murder of 10 providers by anti-women's reproductive rights terrorists and yesterday's fatal shooting of Dr. George Tiller
"They had him and his staff wearing bullet-proof vests to work every day. Tiller drove an armoured car and protected his home with a state-of-the-art security system. And, to better enable stalking and harassment, they posted his daily comings and goings – including the fact that he attended services every Sunday at Reformation Lutheran Church, the place where he was ultimately shot and killed.
"All because he was a licensed physician who performed legal medical procedures.
"Not surprisingly, his killer is strongly suspected to be affiliated with the "pro-life" movement. If that's the case, it makes Tiller the 10th person in the United States to be murdered by anti-choice terrorists.
"And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Since 1977, there have been at least 17 attempted murders, 383 death threats, 153 incidents of assault or battery and three kidnappings committed against abortion providers in North America. Tiller himself survived an assassination attempt in 1993.
"When you convince your followers that abortion providers are the equivalent of SS officers slaughtering innocents by the millions, tell them that "it's all-out WAR" against pro-choicers and then provide the home addresses and personal information of the "monster" "late-term baby-killer" abortion providers you're supposedly at war against, you can't act surprised when those followers conclude that it's morally justified to use the information to kill doctors.
"These are not fringe groups. Conservative television personality Bill O'Reilly called Tiller's clinic a "death mill", referred to Tiller as a "baby killer" who was "executing babies about to be born" and said Tiller was doing "Nazi stuff" for which he "had blood on his hands".
"Self-identified pro-lifers have celebrated Tiller's murder, leaving hundreds of comments on rightwing blogs (and a good number at progressive and pro-choice blogs, just for good measure).
"These are not "bad apples". They are symptomatic of (and sometimes the spokespeople for) a larger a movement that is disturbed and dangerous.
"While individuals who self-identify as pro-life may be well-meaning and against violence, mainstream pro-life groups and the people who run them do not care about life, before or afterbirth. And while today anti-choice groups are half-heartedly condemning Tiller's murder, they continue to use the same outlandish and inflammatory rhetoric that inspired and enabled it.
Glenn Greenwald at Salon on the Obama administration's recent secrecy outrage.
"The White House is actively supporting a new bill jointly sponsored by Sens. Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman -- called The Detainee Photographic Records Protection Act of 2009 -- that literally has no purpose other than to allow the government to suppress any "photograph taken between September 11, 2001 and January 22, 2009 relating to the treatment of individuals engaged, captured, or detained after September 11, 2001, by the Armed Forces of the United States in operations outside of the United States." As long as the Defense Secretary certifies -- with no review possible -- that disclosure would "endanger" American citizens or our troops, then the photographs can be suppressed even if FOIA requires disclosure. The certification lasts 3 years and can be renewed indefinitely. The Senate passed the bill as an amendment last week.
"Just imagine if any other country did this. Imagine if a foreign government were accused of systematically torturing and otherwise brutally abusing detainees in its custody for years, and there was ample photographic evidence proving the extent and brutality of the abuse. Further imagine that the country's judiciary -- applying decades-old transparency laws -- ruled that the government was legally required to make that evidence public. But in response, that country's President demanded that those transparency laws be retroactively changed for no reason other than to explicitly empower him to keep the photographic evidence suppressed, and a compliant Congress then immediately passed a new law empowering the President to suppress that evidence. What kind of a country passes a law that has no purpose other than to empower its leader to suppress evidence of the torture it inflicted on people? Read the language of the bill; it doesn't even hide the fact that its only objective is to empower the President to conceal evidence of war crimes.
"That this exact scenario is now happening in the U.S. is all the more remarkable given that the President who is demanding these new suppression powers is the same one who repeatedly vowed "to make his administration the most open and transparent in history." After noting the tentative steps Obama has taken to increase transparency, the generally pro-Obama Washington Post Editorial Page today observed: "what makes the administration's support for the photographic records act so regrettable" is that "Mr. Obama runs the risk of taking two steps back in his quest for more open government."
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