So with what did Dick Cheney threaten Barack Obama?

So what do YOU think it was? Did Cheney threaten to set loose his contacts in the Middle East to attack this country if Barack Obama releases torture photos? Did he threaten assassination? Or was it all part of a quid pro quo between the outgoing and incoming administrations to turn over power on January 20th, but ONLY if Obama agreed to not do anything to expose Bush Administration officials to prosecution?

Or did Barack Obama simply crumple like a cheap car hitting a traffic cone in the face of the nonstop microphone being given to Dick Cheney by the media?

Cenk Uygur thinks it’s the latter:

This is an unbelievable moment. Dick Cheney’s PR offensive over the last month actually worked. Barack Obama just crumbled and will follow Cheney’s command to not release the new set of detainee abuse pictures.

By the way, if you hadn’t figured it out by now, that’s why you saw every Cheney in the world on television arguing that torture works and that releasing more information would gravely harm the troops. They weren’t worried about what was already released; they were worried about what was going to get released. They were trying to pre-empt the most damaging thing of all – the pictures that show the torture.

Just talk about torture doesn’t really do it for the American people. But when they see pictures, they get it. That’s why Bush had to apologize profusely and throw a few low-level soldiers under the bus when the Abu Ghraib pictures came out. You think there would have been anywhere near that level of controversy or accountability (such that it was) without the pictures?

How many Americans have heard of Bagram Air Base and how we tortured people to death there? A scant few. How many would have heard of it if there were pictures of detainees shackled from the ceiling in a Palestinian hanging or bleeding to death? Pictures are worth a billion words.

You know why? Television! If something isn’t on television, it didn’t happen. And television producers are obsessed with visuals (makes some sense since it’s a visual medium, but their obsession winds up dumbing down the news if there aren’t any pictures or video to go along with an important story).

[snip]

The news reports will tell you that Obama listened to his generals on this. Yes, who put Gen. David Petraeus and Gen. Ray Odierno in their current positions? Oh yes, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Very fair and balanced advice you would get from them. This isn’t about protecting the troops; it’s about protecting their own behinds. They might have been in the chain of command that allowed this abuse to happen. Expecting unbiased advice from them is ridiculous.

Now, it looks to the rest of the world that we are trying to hide something, that we have not turned over a new leaf, that it is the same old lies and duplicity – and that Obama is on it. This was colossally stupid.

And to add insult to injury, we have to reconcile ourselves to the fact that Dick Cheney still runs DC no matter how unpopular and despicable he is. He still has the Democrats eating out of his hand. Pathetic. Absolutely pathetic.

It’s really a question of pick your poison, isn’t it? The BEST of these three scenarios is that Obama was willing to let the Bush Administration get away with war crimes in order to prevent a Constitutional crisis in a kind of secret Inauguration Day agreement. The question is which is worse: the idea that Dick Cheney is still actually running this country and there is no way to get rid of him, or the possibility that we have elected yet another morally bankrupt hack?

(UPDATE: Robert Windrem reports at The Daily Beast that it was, in fact, Dick Cheney himself who suggested waterboarding Muhammed Khudayr al-Dulaymi, a former intelligence officer for Saddam Hussein, to try to gin up an Iraq/Al Qaeda connection:

n his new book, Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq, and in an interview with The Daily Beast, Duelfer says he heard from “some in Washington at very senior levels (not in the CIA),” who thought Khudayr’s interrogation had been “too gentle” and suggested another route, one that they believed has proven effective elsewhere. “They asked if enhanced measures, such as waterboarding, should be used,” Duelfer writes. “The executive authorities addressing those measures made clear that such techniques could legally be applied only to terrorism cases, and our debriefings were not as yet terrorism-related. The debriefings were just debriefings, even for this creature.”

Duelfer will not disclose who in Washington had proposed the use of waterboarding, saying only: “The language I can use is what has been cleared.” In fact, two senior U.S. intelligence officials at the time tell The Daily Beast that the suggestion to waterboard came from the Office of Vice President Cheney. Cheney, of course, has vehemently defended waterboarding and other harsh techniques, insisting they elicited valuable intelligence and saved lives. He has also asked that several memoranda be declassified to prove his case. (The Daily Beast placed a call to Cheney’s office and will post a response if we get one.)

Without admitting where the suggestion came from, Duelfer revealed that he considered it reprehensible and understood the rationale as political—and ultimately counterproductive to the overall mission of the Iraq Survey Group, which was assigned the mission of finding Saddam Hussein’s WMD after the invasion.

“Everyone knew there would be more smiles in Washington if WMD stocks were found,” Duelfer said in the interview. “My only obligation was to find the truth. It would be interesting if there was WMD in May 2003, but what was more interesting to me was looking at the entire regime through the slice of WMD.”

But, Duelfer says, Khudayr in fact repeatedly denied knowing the location of WMD or links between Saddam’s regime and al Qaeda and was not subjected to any enhanced interrogation. Duelfer says the idea that he would have known of such links was “ludicrous”.

[snip]

More than one-quarter of all footnotes in the 9/11 Report refer to CIA interrogations of al Qaeda operatives subjected to the now-controversial interrogation techniques. In fact, information derived from the interrogations was central to the 9/11 Report’s most critical chapters, those on the planning and execution of the attacks.

The NBC analysis also showed—and agency and commission staffers concur—there was a separate, second round of interrogations in early 2004, specifically conducted to answer new questions from the 9/11 Commission after its lawyers had been left unsatisfied by the agency’s internal interrogation reports.

Human-rights advocates, including Karen Greenberg of New York University Law School’s Center for Law and Security and Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights, have said that, at the least, the 9/11 Commission should have been more suspect of the information derived under such pressure.

Commission executive director Philip Zelikow (later counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice) admitted, “We were not aware, but we guessed, that things like that were going on. We were wary…we tried to find different sources to enhance our credibility.” (Zelikow testified before the Senate on Wednesday, May 13, that he had argued in a 2005 memo that some of the tactics used on suspected terrorists violated the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.)

A former senior U.S. intelligence official told me the Commission never expressed any concerns about techniques and even pushed for a second round of interrogations in early 2004, as the Commission was finishing up its work. The second round of interrogations sought by the Commission involved more than 30 separate interrogation sessions.

“Remember,” the intelligence official said, “the Commission had access to the intelligence reports that came out of the interrogation. This didn’t satisfy them. They demanded direct personal access to the detainees and the administration told them to go pound sand.”

“As a compromise, they were allowed to let us know what questions they would have liked to ask the detainees. At appropriate times in the interrogation cycle, agency questioners would go back and re-interview the detainees. Many of [those] questions were variants or follow-ups to stuff previously asked.”

At least four operatives whose interrogation figured in the 9/11 Commission Report have claimed that they told interrogators critical information as a way to stop being “tortured.” Those claims came during their hearings in the spring of 2007 at the U.S. military facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

And these are the people for whom Barack Obama, Mr. Hope and Change, is covering.

Lovely.

So, Senator…where were you when all this was going on?

John McCain’s answer to the credit crisis on Wall Street? His “bold plan” to “restore transparency and accountability”?

Yup. Form a commission to study it:

So what’s he saying, that he’s been asleep while Wall Street firms packaged bad debt and sold it as “investment vehicles”?

So, Senator, what do you think of the fact that your own campaign’s financial adviser, Phil Gramm, who’s up to his eyeballs in this and who lobbied Congress to stop legislation that would have instituted industry regulations that could have PREVENTED this crisis? Do you want your so-called “commission” to take a look at that? Or how about back in March, when you blamed people who bought houses they couldn’t afford because they believed shyster mortgage brokers who told them they could — and at the same time called for even MORE deregulation to “eliminate obstacles to the ability of financial institutions to raise more capital.”

McCain invoked the 9/11 Commission as a model. But if that’s the case, then why was the roll call on enacting the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission the ONLY vote he missed on March 13, 2007?
.

OK, that’s it. This woman is a wacko who shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near Washington

Is anyone else reminded of Britney Spears in Fahrenheit 9/11 while watching this clip from Sarah Palin’s interview by Charles Gibson?

This is what’s scary:

GIBSON: Are you in favor of putting Georgia and Ukraine into NATO?

PALIN: (shrugs) Ukraine, definitely yes…and Georgia. Putin thinks otherwise, obviously he thinks otherwise, but —

GIBSON: But under the NATO treaty, wouldn’t we then have to go to war if Russia went into Georgia?

PALIN: (Nods) P..perhaps so. I mean, if that is the agreement, when you are a NATO ally is that when another country is attacked, you’re going to be expected to be called upon and help.

She’s clearly just throwing words around and making stuff up. Her peeps like tough talk, so she’s talking tough. Yes, folks, Sarah Palin wants to prove how big her penis is by going to war with Russia. But hey, at least she’s not black, right? Who cares if she’s willing to provoke global thermonuclear war, at least she’s not a ni—- with a funny name. And hey, she’s a hockey mom and you can see Russia from Alaska. That makes her a Russian expert, right?

In Idiot America, yes.

(h/t)

Meanwhile, lost amidst the pearl-clutching of the McCain campaign…

While the McCain campaign is having the vapors over an expression that McCain himself has used in the not-so-distant past, Barack Obama is trying to do something about the atrocity that is the golden parachutes being offered to the heads of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as rewards for running their companies into the ground and passing their mismanagement on to future generations via a government bailout:

Senator Barack Obama and two other prominent Democrats urged federal housing regulators on Tuesday to cut the golden parachutes of the ousted leaders of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, another sign that the government bailout of those mortgage giants could reverberate through the presidential campaign.

Mr. Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, asked that any “inappropriate windfall payments” to the chief executives and senior managers of those agencies be voided, in a letter to Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. and the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the new regulator for Fannie and Freddie.

Together, Daniel H. Mudd of Fannie Mae and Richard F. Syron of Freddie Mac are eligible for as much as $24 million in severance, retirement benefits and deferred compensation.

“Under no circumstances should the executives of these institutions earn a windfall at a time when the U.S. Treasury has taken unprecedented steps to rescue these companies with taxpayer resources,” Mr. Obama wrote.

Funny how it’s only Democrats in Congress (including Jack Reed of Rhode Island and Chuck Schumer of New York) writing these letters. Perhaps Congressional Republicans approve of these pay packages. Their standard bearer, Sarah Palin John McCain, has given lip service to the rescue not turning into a bailout for executives and investors while on the campaign trail, but is obviously unable to do his job for Americans at the same time.

Meanwhile, another big brokerage house is trying to keep afloat by throwing ballast overboard and a major bank is about to founder as well:

Amid mounting worries about its viability, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. said it would unload a chunk of troubled assets, sell a majority stake in its money-management unit and slash its dividend 93 percent.

Its problems shook the rest of the financial sector.

The 158-year-old investment bank announced the moves as it reported a $3.9-billion fiscal third-quarter loss – far bigger than its $2.8 billion second-quarter hit.

The loss came after the Wall Street firm wrote down the assets on its books by $7.8 billion. That included a $5.3 billion reduction on investments tied to residential mortgages. The company, which has operations in Utah and 24,000 employees worldwide, also said it would shift up to $30 billion in commercial real estate assets to a new entity, which will be spun off to shareholders.

To conserve cash, Lehman is chopping its annual dividend to 5 cents a share from 68 cents.

”This is an extraordinary time for our industry and one of the toughest periods in the firm’s history,” CEO Richard Fuld said in a statement.

Fuld, 62, the longest-serving CEO on Wall Street, said the firm would examine all other options – including a total sale of the company he joined right out of college. Finding a buyer might pre-empt any hostile takeovers now that Lehman’s stock has plunged from $67.73 a year ago to $7.25 Wednesday, down 54 cents.

The contagion spread to other financial companies. Washington Mutual Inc. plunged 74 cents, or 22.4 percent, to $2.56 after setting a multiyear low of $2.30 earlier. WaMu, among the banks hit hardest by the housing mess, has seen the value of its shares plunge 76 percent this year, as it battles rising mortgage delinquencies and defaults. The drop also signaled that the company’s recent CEO shake-up may not have been enough to placate anxious investors.

Shares of Citigroup, JPMorgan, Bank of America Corp. and Wachovia Corp. also fell.

And the dominoes are beginning to fall. Great Depression, anyone? It’s coming.

Of course, there is no situation Republicans cannot use for political gain. Keith Olbermann had a special comment last night on their appropriation of the 9/11 attacks into a brand:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22425001/vp/26649407#26649407

…and now a county Republican chairman in Michigan is about to use the foreclosure crisis to throw a bunch of voters off the voter rolls for the November election.

It’s no wonder the McCain campaign is resorting to “MAAAA! He called me names!!” If they can get voters to regard Barack Obama as a Mean Tough Black Man Who’ll Stick a Knife In Your Gut As Soon as Look At You, they won’t bother to look at their own checkbooks.

If she’s tough enough to be president, why treat her like a fragile flower?

Ah, the big strong military hero protecting the flower of white wimminhood against the Evil Black Man:

I’m not sure how you fight this kind of thing, these lies and innuendo that play to people’s most base fears; the things that keep them up at night, the notions they don’t dare talk about. It’s long past time for Obama to take the gloves off, but with the McCain campaign tapping the reptilian brain like this, I’m not sure what would work.

It’s pretty much all up to the press at this point, and since the press has latched onto the “lipstick on a pig” thing and taken the McCain line that it’s a slur against Palin, I guess we’re pretty much screwed seven ways to Sunday.

Enjoy your new Christian Dominionist overlords, and enjoy yourself when they get the Battle of Armageddon they so desperately want.

What the McCain/Palin theocracy will look like

Oh, that Sarah Palin is a piece of work. No wonder she makes the Republican base so happy, she sees nothing wrong with using state funds to travel to her to her old church in Wasilla to exhort the youth to “make sure God’s will be done here”:

State records show that Palin submitted a travel authorization for a quick round-trip visit to attend the June 8 graduation of the Master’s Commission program at the Wasilla Assembly of God, the church where she was baptized at age 12. The only other item on the agenda for that trip was a “One Lord Sunday” service involving a network of Mat-Su Christian churches earlier that morning at the Wasilla sports complex.

The records show Palin flew from Juneau to Anchorage on Saturday, June 7. She returned to Juneau that Monday afternoon. The plane tickets cost the state $519.50, and she claimed an additional $120 for meals and other expenses.

Palin couldn’t be reached for comment Friday as she campaigned for vice president. Her spokeswoman at the McCain campaign said she wouldn’t grant an interview.

Of course not. Asking any questions of Sarah Palin is sexist, don’tcha know.

What kind of chumps do they take us for?

First class, apparently.

The Republicans have put up a woman who used to be a broadcaster as their Vice Presidential nominee, and now they want to pass her off on us not by doing interviews, but by as a scripted mannequin, delivering speeches, presumably written for her just the way her speech last night was written for her:

According to Nicole Wallace of the McCain campaign, the American people don’t care whether Sarah Palin can answer specific questions about foreign and domestic policy. According to Wallace — in an appearance I did with her this morning on Joe Scarborough’s show — the American people will learn all they need to know (and all they deserve to know) from Palin’s scripted speeches and choreographed appearances on the campaign trail and in campaign ads.

It seems to me that this insults Palin as much as it insults the voting public. Not only does it say that we have no right to know what the #2 to a 72-year-old man who has had multiple bouts of melanoma knows about major issues, but the McCain campaign is also implying that Palin shouldn’t worry her pretty little head about such big topics, that she should just leave it to the menfolk and just get up there and look pretty.

Haven’t we had enough of an unaccountable Executive branch for one lifetime?

(h/t)

Around the Blogroll and Elsewhere: Special Republican National Convention edition

Taking a trip through Blogtopia (™Skippy) to see what other people are saying about the St. Paul Clown Car this week, and the occupants therein:

DCap on how with Cindy McCain around, who needs comedy writers?

Driftglass examines the Palin selection process.

Earth-Bound Misfit puts it all in context.

Warren Street on how someone who wasn’t even vetted at all got to be the Republican Vice-Presidential candidate. McCain’s Viagra must have been kicking in, big-time. Are we allowed to ask questions about McCain’s judgment yet?

Mick Arran on the Bush Administration deciding that Congress needs to re-affirm his war powers — and why Congressional Democrats need to for once in their lives stand up to him.

Digby has poll numbers, thus proving that perhaps this country will get the leadership it deserves in President Palin. I just wish they wouldn’t drag the rest of us down with them.

Glenn Greenwald on the Gestapo-like tactics being used against protesters in St. Paul.

And now that I’m thoroughly depressed, I’m going to cheer myself up by doing housework. Yes, that’s what it’s come to.

Poor, Pitiful PUMAs

Talk about “you know….morons” — meet Debra Bartoshevich, the Hillarion Rove dupe who thinks John McCain is pro-choice.

Hey Debra, you stupid twit: What part of “I do not support Roe versus Wade. It should be overturned” do you not understand? How does it feel to have fallen right into Karl Rove’s trap? How does it feel to have your ignorance exposed in front of the entire nation? And how does it feel to know that your tantrum about your so-called feminist icon may very well set back women’s rights by fifty years?

It’s probably a bit late for you to wake up, Debra, since all you know is your grievances, but you might take some time and read up on who your PUMA buddies really are.

Well, that didn’t take long

11:33 AM: “Morning Joe” runs the clip of Joe Biden from 1988 allegedly “plagiarizing” Neal Kinnock.

So are we going to play this way, then? Is everything from the 1980’s fair game? OK, then…so are “Keating Five”, bigamy, and we’ll have to see what other goodies from John McCain’s 1980’s we can dig up.