Sunday Photo, Earth Day Edition

Is it Earth Day today? I'm still not sure. The Sierra Club's website says it is. The Earth Day site doesn't say jack. The big announcement there is for a rally in DC this Sunday.

I guess we'll call this Earth Day. So here's a special edition of the Sunday Photo, on Thursday, which may or may not be Earth Day.

This is a picture of the Olallie State Park, near North Bend in the state of Washington. It's yet another example of what makes our planet a special place:
Image credit: Cujo359

If you want to read something Earth Day themed, check out George's article.

Click on the image to enlarge. Have a good Earth Day, whenever it turns out to be.

Freedom's Just Another Word ...

Caption: Click on Janis for a musical accompaniment.

Eli seems troubled by this revelation about Glenn Beck by After Downing Street's David Swanson:

I don't think Glenn Beck has much between his ears. I don't think he has a coherent principled view of anything, and I expect he would throw his own grandmother under a bus for a buck. His opposition to war is driven by the most disgusting priorities, lacks logic or coherence, and manages to co-exist with a certain strain of fascism for dummies. He thinks he can put the military in charge of Congress AND defund the military. Yet it may just be that his is the best antiwar voice on network or cable television. The bar is that low.

Is the Best Antiwar Voice on TV Glenn Beck?

I assume, without bothering to check, that Beck really did say these things, and sounded like he meant them. I'm not shocked that he would, at least not completely. The reason - both that I'm not shocked and that I didn't bother to check the video - is that Beck, among television commentators, is uniquely gifted with this pair of traits:

• He's crazy


• He has nothing to lose

At least, he has nothing to lose when it comes to sponsors. Among all the people gracing us with their presence on the screen, Beck has the fewest worries about honking someone else off. He's free to say whatever he wants, as long as a substantial portion of his television audience will believe him, which I suspect is seldom a problem.

Most commentators, working for most networks, like this one, have to worry about what the defense contractors that either own the network or advertise on it will think of such behavior. Beck can operate without these restraints. They might or might not be crazy, or otherwise unaware of what's going on in the world around them, but those talking heads know where their bread is buttered. Beck's is buttered in an entirely different place.

So on those occasions when Beck happens to feel like saying something that's true, he's quite likely to say it. Every once in a while, perhaps despite himself, Glenn Beck is going to be right about something. And it really is perfectly obvious, even to people like me who have worked in the business, that the defense establishment is far too large, and used far too often, for our good as a country. You almost have to want to not see that to be unaware.

There's really nothing more to it than that.

Kris Kristofferson said it best.

Man Bites Man

Caption: New Zealand native Been with two of his adopted children.

Image credit: Colin Smith/Nelson Mail

While reading Naked Capitalism yesterday, this old quote of Mark Twain's came to mind:

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.

Mark Twain Quotations

I encountered this quote about Been, the dog from New Zealand who survived being left for dead, amongst all the stories of malfeasance by Goldman Sachs, and the governments that are trying to recover from what Goldman Sachs and others have done to the world's economy:

A dog who survived being shot in the head three times has fully recovered, and now spends much of his time playing doting dad to a litter of kittens.

When Been was found, he was 10 kilograms [more than 20 pounds] underweight, but now the mongrel weighs a healthy 27kg [60 lbs.] and enjoys tending to four kittens who are being bottle-fed after being rejected by their mother.

After the three-week-old kittens are fed, Been licks them clean. If they are not locked up at night, he picks them up and puts them in his basket.

Gentle Been Pays It Forward

Dogs are social creatures who have, through millenia of selective breeding, partly lost their instinct to fear and hunt other species. They are among the most generous creatures on the planet. You could say that animals like Been are generous to other creatures because their social instinct is to bond with and protect each other. That is probably true, but the fact remains that it's a rare dog who makes himself important by destroying the lives of others. In that regard, dogs are way ahead of these humans:

A lawsuit filed against investment bank Goldman Sachs by a shareholder alleges that the company spent more money on corporate bonuses than it earned in 2008.

Shareholder Ken Brown's lawsuit is one of two suits filed against the company this week over its controversial decision to hand out billions of dollars in bonuses even after it was accused of playing a central role in the financial collapse of 2008 and receiving $10 billion in direct aid from the US government.

Lawsuit: Goldman Sachs Bonuses Bigger Than Its Earnings

Don't forget that TARP is just the tip of the financial iceberg. U.S. taxpayers are still on the hook for trillions of dollars in financial guarantees that were designed to keep banks and large financial firms like GS from failing.

Not only did these people ransack their own company, they ruined our economy, and then screwed up Europe's. If I understand this story correctly, they screwed their own customers, too. The White House seems to have no interest in punishing this behavior, perhaps because they've hired GS executives as economic advisers. The Securities and Exchange Commission's too little, too late response has been played up by the press, who spent much of the last decade largely ignoring this malfeasance. Both houses of Congress seem equally uninterested in preventing future repeats of the 2008 disaster that these people caused. The Other Guys are even less interested in regulating this out-of-control industry. Neither party is willing to part with the kind of money these people can pour into their campaigns.

I'm sure these people are all pleased with themselves. GS and its competitors are awash in cash they didn't earn. The White House and the Congress are clearly happy to let this state of affairs continue, since being the ones that the financial lobby panders to allows them to convince themselves that they are in charge. At the risk of bursting a bubble that would dwarf our housing prices, I have news for them.

There's a dog in New Zealand who's worth more than all of them put together.

Sunday Photo(s)

It's been several weeks now since the cherry trees bloomed here. A couple of weeks later, these trees were blooming. I don't know what they are, but they're all over the place here. These were at a mini-mall on 4th Ave. SW:
Image credit: All images by Cujo359

These were at the Weyerhauser Center:


These are along 330th SW near 1st:


As were these:


They're all within a couple of miles of each other, and there are lots more I didn't take a picture of.

Click on the images to enlarge. Have a good Sunday.

UPDATE: Corrected the location of the third image.

Rep. Andre Carson: Another Symptom of Democratic Cluelessness

Rep. Andre Carson (IN-07) wrote this in a political spam e-mail the other day:

Do you have high cholesterol?
Do you have diabetes?
Do you have high blood pressure?

Congratulations dear friend, this historic healthcare legislation will guarantee that you will not be denied coverage due to your pre-existing condition! I am happy to say that this law will also expand coverage to over 32 million Americans; nearly 95% of our population!

Casting my vote to pass health care reform is just one of the many items we’ve been tackling in Washington to help Hoosiers and American alike. But I couldn’t be in Congress without your support.

To which I replied:

"this historic healthcare legislation will guarantee that you will not be denied coverage due to your pre-existing condition!"

This is patently absurd. The Congress and President deliberately made sure that there was no means of enforcing this provision in the HC"R" bill. For all the good it will do, they could have been legislating an end to rainy days.

They still don't get it. Given what Steve Benen was willing to write on the Democrats' behalf yesterday, I continue to doubt they will anytime soon:

It seemed like a good strategy at the time. With Robert Wexler (D) giving up his U.S. House seat in South Florida, a special election would offer conservatives a chance to create a "referendum" on the Obama presidency. After all, the election, held yesterday, would be the first since the Affordable Care Act was signed into law, and Republicans could ride the wave of voter anger to an upset.

Indeed, the Republican candidate, Ed Lynch, ran on a strictly anti-Obama platform, vowing to repeal the new health care law and railing against the recovery efforts that rescued the economy. Lynch sought to position himself as the "next Scott Brown."

So, how'd that referendum turn out? The backlash against Democrats and the president propelled Lynch to a 26-point defeat.

'Referendum' Falls Far Short In Special Election

What Benen fails to mention, of course, is that the FL-19 district is rated by Cook Report as being a D+15 district, meaning that Democratic candidates do 15 percent better in this district than average. Wexler, the incumbent, has never won by a percentage of less than 66. The candidates also had a considerable disparity in fundraising:

Lynch is running against Democrat Ted Deutch, who represents Palm Beach County in the state Senate and is heavily favored to retain the seat left vacant by the retirement of Democrat Robert Wexler. Through March 24, Deutch had spent nearly $1.2 million, more than 14 times as much as Lynch's $83,000.

April 13, 2010: Dem Favored In First Election Since Health Care Vote

The Democrats should have won here. They may take a bit of comfort in the fact that it wasn't a nail-biter, but that's about the only good news for the Democratic Party I see coming out of this.

The bad news is that the Democrats will continue to view the health care "reform" bill as some sort of plus for them, and there are plenty of folks willing to abet them in that delusion.

Quote Of The Day

Caption: A demonstration by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in New York City in 1914. It's hard to believe, but sometime in the future, we may look back on this as the good old days.

Image credit: Library Of Congress/Wikimedia

At his blog, Robert Reich wrote an economic forecast yesterday that certainly bears reading. In contrast to previous efforts, I think he largely gets this one right, which is discouraging:

The likelihood, therefore, is that as the economy struggles to recover and today’s jobless begin to find work, the median wage will continue to fall—as it did between 2001 and 2007, during the last so-called recovery.

More Americans will be working, but for pay they consider inadequate. The approaching recovery will be tepid because so many people will lack the money needed to buy all the goods and services the economy can produce.

Americans will once again be employed, but they will also be back on the downward escalator of declining pay they rode before the Great Recession.

The Future Of American Jobs

This is our near future. What lies beyond will depend on whether Americans finally get off their asses and learn what's going on in their world and their own government, instead of just shouting like frightened idiots.

At the moment, I'm not optimistic that the long term looks any better.

One Less Fantasy

In the increasingly desparate race to figure out if there's any reason left for progressives to support Barack Obama, one of the few ideas that occur to most people is that he will undoubtedly nominate several Supreme Court justices. Surely, Obama would nominate progressives to replace the progressives who will soon retire. For a long time, I've wondered just what it was they thought they were seeing that I wasn't in this regard. Today, Glenn Greenwald wrote something that should puncture this last fantasy:

The prospect that [Supreme Court Justice John Paul] Stevens will be replaced by Elena Kagan has led to the growing perception that Barack Obama will actually take a Supreme Court dominated by Justices Scalia (Reagan), Thomas (Bush 41), Roberts (Bush 43), Alito (Bush 43) and Kennedy (Reagan) and move it further to the Right. Joe Lieberman went on Fox News this weekend to celebrate the prospect that "President Obama may nominate someone in fact who makes the Court slightly less liberal," while The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus predicted: "The court that convenes on the first Monday in October is apt to be more conservative than the one we have now." Last Friday, I made the same argument: that replacing Stevens with Kagan risks moving the Court to the Right, perhaps substantially to the Right (by "the Right," I mean: closer to the Bush/Cheney vision of Government and the Thomas/Scalia approach to executive power and law).

The case against Elena Kagan

Sonia Sotomayor has generally voted with the conservatives. She will continue to do so, at least on anything having to do with workers' rights and other issues where corporations are involved. She was happy to ignore decades of precedent to vote with the Bushies in the Citizens United case. (see UPDATE) I'm pretty sure she hasn't missed any opportunity to screw the little guy since she took office.

Kagan has been Obama's Solicitor General. That's the person at the Department of Justice who is responsible for representing the government's case in lawsuits, etc., before the courts. In that capacity, Kagan has been responsible for supporting the lawless behavior of the Obama Administration regarding wiretaps, indefinite detention, and excusing torture.

Why anyone who thought an Adminstration that would do something like this would ever nominate a progressive, or even someone who takes the Constitution seriously to the Supreme Court is beyond me. These guys have been about excusing the transgressions of the affluent and powerful from the moment they assumed office. They weren't going to nominate any Justices who would fail to support such behavior.

Is there anything left? Are Obama supporters, the ones who aren't on his payroll at least, tired of being played yet? Anyone? Bueller?

UPDATE: Oops. As Boukman70 pointed out in comments, Sotomayor voted with the minority in the Citizens United case. Don't know how I got that wrong, but I did. Thanks for the correction.

Dawn Johnsen: No Longer A Football

Caption: Dawn Johnsen. If there's anything good to say about the Obama Administration's treatment of her nomination, it's that Charlie Brown never got a chance to kick her.

Image credit: Indiana University

This is another depressing topic that I've avoided the last few days, but thankfully, bmaz is on the case. Discussing the anonymously-sourced bleatings in the DC press about how President Obama didn't have the stomach for a fight on Dawn Johnsen's nomination to head the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), he wrote:

This is a bunch of bunk. I have previously written extensively on why there were at least 60 votes for Johnson’s confirmation for the entire second half of last year after Al Franken was sworn in, and why there still were 60 votes for her confirmation this year upon Obama’s renomination, even after the Scott Brown victory in Massachusetts. If you have any question, please click through and refer to those articles; for now though, I want to revisit the false light being painted on Ben Nelson and Arlen Specter on the nomination’s failure.

Obama Killed The Johnsen Nomination, Not Ben Nelson Nor The GOP

As with so much we read these days from this source, bmaz is correct. This is just the story that the Senate "leadership" and the Administration want to tell us, but don't have the honesty to just say on the record. In short, it's a lie, and the DC press is happy to let people with power lie anonymously.

Why is this a lie? Maybe the most telling reason is this under-reported story:

Today, both The New York Times and The Washington Post confirm that the Obama White House has now expressly authorized the CIA to kill [American citizen Anwar] al-Alwaki no matter where he is found, no matter his distance from a battlefield. I wrote at length about the extreme dangers and lawlessness of allowing the Executive Branch the power to murder U.S. citizens far away from a battlefield (i.e., while they're sleeping, at home, with their children, etc.) and with no due process of any kind.

Confirmed: Obama authorizes assassination of U.S. citizen

You read that right - the Obama Administration is now claiming that it has the right to kill an American citizen if the national intelligence establishment is willing to say that he's a terrorist. As we saw in the last Administration, it's pretty clear that this is not a process that will be free of political consideration, or error.

This isn't a case of trying to arrest someone at all costs, or of killing someone in order to prevent an imminent attack or to defend someone's life - it's a policy that was coldly discussed for months. No trial, nor even a warrant is required. The implications of this are staggering. I can't imagine Dawn Johnsen, or any other principled professional lawyer, going along with this.

To that, let's add this quote from Glenn Greenwald on the subject, which I copied from bmaz's article:

virtually everything that Dawn Johnsen said about executive power, secrecy, the rule of law and accountability for past crimes made her an excellent fit for what Candidate Obama said he would do, but an awful fit for what President Obama has done. To see how true that is, one can see the post I wrote last January detailing and praising her past writings, but all one really has to do is to read the last paragraph of her March, 2008 Slate article — entitled “Restoring Our Nation’s Honor” — in which she outlines what the next President must do in the wake of Bush lawlessness:

The question how we restore our nation’s honor takes on new urgency and promise as we approach the end of this administration. We must resist Bush administration efforts to hide evidence of its wrongdoing through demands for retroactive immunity, assertions of state privilege, and implausible claims that openness will empower terrorists. . . .

Here is a partial answer to my own question of how should we behave, directed especially to the next president and members of his or her administration but also to all of use who will be relieved by the change: We must avoid any temptation simply to move on. We must instead be honest with ourselves and the world as we condemn our nation’s past transgressions and reject Bush’s corruption of our American ideals. Our constitutional democracy cannot survive with a government shrouded in secrecy, nor can our nation’s honor be restored without full disclosure.

What Johnsen insists must not be done reads like a manual of what Barack Obama ended up doing and continues to do — from supporting retroactive immunity to terminate FISA litigations to endless assertions of “state secrecy” in order to block courts from adjudicating Bush crimes to suppressing torture photos on the ground that “[openness] will empower terrorists” to the overarching Obama dictate that we “simply move on.” Could she have described any more perfectly what Obama would end up doing when she wrote, in March, 2008, what the next President “must not do”?

I find it virtually impossible to imagine Dawn Johnsen opining that the President has the legal authority to order American citizens assassinated with no due process or to detain people indefinitely with no charges. I find it hard to believe that the Dawn Johnsen who wrote in 2008 that “we must regain our ability to feel outrage whenever our government acts lawlessly and devises bogus constitutional arguments for outlandishly expansive presidential power” would stand by quietly and watch the Obama administration adopt the core Bush/Cheney approach to civil liberties and Terrorism. I find it impossible to envision her sanctioning the ongoing refusal of the DOJ to withdraw the January, 2006 Bush/Cheney White Paper that justified illegal surveillance with obscenely broad theories of executive power. I don’t know why her nomination was left to die, but I do know that her beliefs are quite antithetical to what this administration is doing.

The Death Of Dawn Johnsen's Nomination

It's at least theoretically possible that when the Obama Administration first announced Johnsen's candidacy for OLC they were genuinely interested in having her work there. It was pretty clear, though, even before Obama took office, that they were more interested in retaining many of the powers that the Bush Administration had claimed while in office. They have actively sought, on numerous occasions, to continue using those powers, or cover up for the Bush Administration's misuse of them.

It's hard to believe that Dawn Johnsen would have approved any of this, regardless of the justifications. Assassinating an American citizen is such an extraordinary step that even the Bush Administration didn't take it. Given that, it's hard to believe that the Obama Administration wanted her around. They're undoubtedly much more comfortable with the leftovers from the previous administration, who clearly had no problem with an all-powerful executive.

The only real question is why the Obama Administration chose to renominate Johnsen back in January. I think there are two possible explanations, which are not mutually exclusive. The first is that they kept her nomination in play so that Johnsen would not feel free to criticize Obama's policies. Doing that would have placed her in a very uncomfortable position.

The second possibility is that they kept her on as cover from progressives. Anyone who really looked at what's going on, of course, would have realized that the Johnsen nomination was at odds with the Administration's behavior, as I did. As bmaz realized, but I didn't, it was also clear that the Obama Administration had no intention of following through. In retrospect, as bmaz explains, they could have gotten the nomination through the Senate if they had wanted to:

There is no evidence whatsoever [Democratic Senator Ben] Nelson would have voted against allowing the nominee of Barack Obama, the sitting President of his own party, to have an up or down vote. None. How Nelson would have voted on the up or down floor vote is irrelevant as there were far more than the 51 votes for confirmation in an up or down vote. Ben Nelson was not the problem.

Arlen Specter was not the problem either. Specter’s office directly confirmed to me that he was, and has been, willing to allow cloture on the up or down floor vote for Johnsen, and likely willing to support her in said up or down vote, ever since his second face to face meeting with Johnsen on May 12, 2009 and Specter confirmed the same to Marcy Wheeler in late February. The failure of the Johnsen nomination cannot be laid at the feet of Arlen Specter.

Obama Killed The Johnsen Nomination, Not Ben Nelson Nor The GOP

Both Senators who have been named as the ones who tried to obstruct this nomination, were going to allow a vote, which means that they would not have obstructed Johnsen's nomination. As bmaz writes, this is in keeping with past tradition on this issue. There is no reason to assume that either Nelson or Specter, particularly the latter, who is facing a tough re-election fight complete with a legitimate primary challenge, would have obstructed this nomination if Obama had wanted it. Anyone who thinks that was asleep during the health care debacle.

Speaking of the health care "reform", given the largely slavish coverage of that issue by the so-called progressive organizations, it shouldn't be surprising that they've been largely silent on both this issue, and on the assassination of American citizens. They didn't bother to work out the implications of the health care bill, something that supposedly is a central issue. Why would we expect any courage now?

The Johnsen nomination is done. That much is certain. Why it was put forward in the first place is the only interesting question. The implications of that question are enormous, and disturbing.

Sunday Photo(s)

Sometimes during spring in the Pacific Northwest, it stops raining. On these occasions, young people emerge from their homes and spend the evening trying to make a cylindrical object make a spherical object someone's thrown at them go in a useful direction. It's baseball in the Northwest:
Image credit: Cujo359

This is one of the Federal Way Little League baseball fields that I was referring to in this post about Panther Lake. In winter and early spring, it's part of the flood control strategy. The rest of the spring and summer, they play ball there.
Image credit: Cujo359

Click on the photos to enlarge. Have a good Sunday.

Democrats, There's A Big Defeat In Your Future

Things are getting clearer.

Image credit: Mostlyrecords/Wikimedia

It's official. At least, it's as official as it gets. If nothing substantial changes between now and November, the Democrats will lose control of the House of Representatives. Here's what Nate Silver had to say the other day:

In my piece a couple of weeks ago, I wrote that there was only a 1 in 10 chance that Democrats would lose more than 55 seats in November. Having now looked at this issue in somewhat more detail, that clearly seems to be a lowball estimate. While there is other statistical and anecdotal evidence that one can point toward that is relatively more favorable to Democrats, and while there are other techniques, like a district-by-district analysis, that could be applied to this problem instead -- if you could get 9:1 odds (a 1-in-10 chance) on the Democrats losing more than 55 seats in the House, that would be a good bet.

And what if, for example, the Rasmussen case comes into being? Rasmussen has the Democrats losing the generic ballot by 9 points (and has had similar numbers for awhile). A 9-point loss in the House popular vote would translate into a projected 65-seat loss for Democrats. Or, if we adjust the Rasmussen poll to account for the fact that the Democrats' performance in the popular vote tends to lag the generic ballot, it works out to a 12.4-point loss in the popular vote, which implies a loss of 79 seats!

Generic Ballot Points Toward Possible 50+ Seat Loss for Democrats

As Nate goes on to emphasize, these are not the most likely scenarios, but anything more than a 40 seat loss will mean the House reverts to Republican control. That's very likely, given the news from Gallup today:

Americans' favorable rating of the Democratic Party dropped to 41% in a late March USA Today/Gallup poll, the lowest point in the 18-year history of this measure. Favorable impressions of the Republican Party are now at 42%, thus closing the gap between the two parties' images that has prevailed for the past four years.

Democratic Party Image Drops to Record Low

Just two weeks ago, Gallup rated the generic Congressional ballot as being a virtual tie. Like the Republicans before them, all the Democrats needed to do was to be in power for a while to show how ineptly they'd handle that responsibility.

I could go into a long explanation about how congressional races are inevitably conservative, as in things don't tend to change much, because people tend to like their own congressman, but not anyone else's. This makes no rational sense, of course, but we're talking about American voters here. It doesn't matter. There's enough apathy on the progressive side, and enough anger and hostility on the conservative side, that this will probably be an even more Republican turnout than usual in a mid-year election. Plus, as the Gallup poll indicates, Democrats are losing popularity among independent voters.
Image credit: Gallup Poll

For reasons I've explained already, this is going to be a bad year for Democrats.

If it hadn't been for the recent health care debacle, I might see a silver lining in all this, which is that many of the seats the Democrats will lose will be Blue Dogs and DLCers. That would make the numbers more favorable for progressives to influence House Democratic policy. Unfortunately, I don't think that's going to change things very much. What the House Progressive Caucus did by capitulating to the conservative Democrats during the health care bill campaign was tell its constituency to go screw itself. That's not going to go over well. In essence, they've sold out to the conservatives and the lobbyists. It's no more likely that they'll be inclined to work for progressive causes in the future than it is that the rank and file progressives will be inclined to forgive them for selling out so thoroughly. Sure, the limousine liberals will support them, but most liberals don't ride in limousines. Those who do will just have to content themselves with calling the rest of us stupid for not seeing the light. These days, that's about all they're good for.

So, the Democrats will lose the House, and they won't learn anything from it if nothing else changes. Of course, that also means that Nancy Pelosi will lose her job as the leader of House Democrats. That, too, could be seen as a good thing, but somehow I'm not thinking it will be. Steny Hoyer is the next in line, and the logical successor. I don't see any reason to prefer him over Pelosi. He's less progressive, and more blatantly partisan than Pelosi. Neither attribute strikes me as an improvement. The leadership of the House Progressive Caucus, as I've already mentioned, will not be a factor. They're too weak to matter, no matter how numerous they become.

It's not a pleasant future, but that's the one we're in for. I suppose the only question is what we can, or should, do about it.