On the topic of extra-judicial assassinations of Americans by CIA hit squads, Glenn Greenwald writes:

…government officials often abuse their power and/or err and therefore must prove accusations to be true (with tested evidence) before they’re assumed to be true and the person punished accordingly.

I wonder what he’s talking about.

Veronica Bowers, 35, and her seven-month-old daughter, Charity, were killed when their Cessna was mistaken for a drug plane in 2001…

…A cockpit video tape obtained by ABC News shows how a CIA spotter plane sneaked up behind the Cessna and wrongly identified it as a drug plane. CIA operatives then called in the Peruvian Air Force.

File this under change we can believe in.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said Thursday it was bringing civil charges against senior Bank of America executives, including former company CEO Ken Lewis, for their role in the company’s controversial purchase of Merrill Lynch…

…The lawsuit contends that the bank’s management team understated the losses at Merrill in order to get shareholders to approve the deal, then subsequently overstated the firm’s willingness to terminate the merger to regulators weeks later in order to get $20 billion of additional aid from the federal government.

Anyone know why they are not bringing criminal charges?  ‘Cause I’d like to see some people go to jail.  Is it that bringing criminal charges against rich people is gauche?  Or something else?   Oh, wells.  The important thing is that it’s a friggn’ indictment of high-level wrong-doing.

IOZ suggests that all this caterwauling about Constitutional issues could be self-deception from a people who historically were born on third and thought they hit a triple.

I have long thought that “American Exceptionalism” could largely be attributed to historical accident, i.e., the convergence of enlightenment thinking, the industrial revolution and a fresh petri dish.  It all must have seemed so manifest, eh?

It is tempting to leave it at that.

On the other hand.

One might further assume that the exactly ambiguous wording of the Constitution, prior English law, the magna carta, etc., were also accidental.  

Then let’s also assume that crying out in pain under the sharp elbows of conspecifics and the “alarm substance” given off by damaged fish scales to fellow schoolers are also accidental nonsense.

All accidental associations by mere contiguity, nothing more than a pitcher wearing his “lucky” socks.  Those fastballs down the tube never really happened.  He never really could throw gas.

First, if someone were calling you a “radical,” ask them to define their terms.   The term has such a wide variance of meanings as to be applicable to essentially opposite things, and some things in between, allowing for an absolute lack of accountability in its typically inflammatory usage.

The etymological “root” of radical is the Latin word radix, meaning root, connoting some essential, fundamental, or basic origin.  

Transcript:

Thank you all for coming.  I’ll keep it short.

2009 was no walk in the global park.  Be glad no one got hurt.  Know what I mean?  Let me give yous all some advice on 2010.

First, the banks are our juice.  Keep your prying eyes off their fuckin’ books, capice?

Two.  You Chinese bastards trying to spy on us?  You’re playing with fire.  Don’t get your dicks burned off in Taiwan.

Three [pointing finger].  Iran, yous fucks, you are getting sanctioned and you’re gonna like it.  You want the fuckin’ baseball bats?  D’you see those toughs outside your front door?  They ain’t lookin’ to buy no fuckin’ rugs.

Let’s hope cooler heads prevail in 2010.  That is all.

A Docudharma correspondent recently caught up with Hoover Institution’s very own Brain Trust, Daniel Pipes, for a Q&A on the polymath’s ever-evolving views on a wide range of critical topics.

Q:  What are your thoughts on Barack Obama’s first year in office?

A:  I don’t customarily ask Presidents to bomb Iran, but I’ll make an exception, in this case: Bomb Iran!

Q: You describe the Obama administration as “tottering.”  What do you mean by this?

A:  Obama can only salvage himself by bombing Iran.

Q:  In what ways do you find this administration “ruefully deficient?”

A:  They have failed to bomb Iran.

Q:  What’s the one sure-fire way this administration could pass your “laugh test?”

A:  Bombing Iran.

Q:  Domestically, shouldn’t Obama be sharply focused on a collapsing economy?

A:  Not without a devastating first-strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Q:  You have said that Obama “needs a dramatic gesture to change the public perception of him as a light-weight, bumbling ideologue, preferably in an arena where the stakes are high, where he can take charge, and where he can trump expectations.”  Are you talking about health care reform?

A:  Obama can give orders for the U.S. military to destroy Iran’s nuclear-weapon capacity.

Q: Is there any way for Obama to live up to George Bush’s legacy, piss off liberals, AND make conservatives swoon?

A:   An overwhelming air strike to annihilate, crush, demolish, lay waste and raze to a nub Iranian nuclear sites.

Q: I know you are pressed for time, seeing how you are constantly creating and refining fresh and staggering public policy ideas at Hoover.  Let’s sample some of your more wide-ranging thoughts outside of the partisan political arena using a lightning round of free-association.  I’ll say a word or phrase, and you say the first thing that comes to mind.  Okay?

A:  Bombs away.

Haitian earthquake –> Bomb Iran

Wall Street reform –> Bomb Iran

Tim Tebow –> Bomb Iran

Cadbury Eggs –> Bomb Iran

M51 spiral nebula –> Bomb Iran

Punxatawney Phil with shadow –> Bomb Iran

Punxatawney Phil sans shadow –> Bomb Iran

Thank you , Daniel Pipes, Homo universalis.

David Brooks is a strange animal.  In today’s column, he asks his elders to either forego their pensions due to their heretofore unrecognized elderly capacities, or he’s asking them to go die on an ice floe.   I’m not sure which.

First, I had no idea David Brooks was an ontogeneticist.  The Times must pay him a pretty penny for all of his untold scholarship.  No wonder they are going broke.  As this century’s Piaget of the elderly, Brooks tells us that all previous thinking and research about the elderly is bunk.  Dr. Brooks informs us that instead of being accurately characterized as a general functional decline, old age is positively bursting with juvenile alacrity that finds its greatest happiness in service to the young (and social hermaphroditism?), the “generativity” of which creates its own happiness.  Sweet and comforting narrative, Dr.    

However, there are political “downsides” to elders, namely that the happy-go-lucky, adept old-timers are meanwhile taking money, freedom, and opportunity away from the youngsters, like the agile, alert, and knowing fucking geezers that they are!

The odd thing is that when you turn to political life, we are living in an age of reverse-generativity. Far from serving the young, the old are now taking from them. First, they are taking money. According to Julia Isaacs of the Brookings Institution, the federal government now spends $7 on the elderly for each $1 it spends on children.

Second, they are taking freedom. In 2009, for the first time in American history, every single penny of federal tax revenue went to pay for mandatory spending programs, according to Eugene Steuerle of the Urban Institute. As more money goes to pay off promises made mostly to the old, the young have less control.

Third, they are taking opportunity. For decades, federal spending has hovered around 20 percent of G.D.P. By 2019, it is forecast to be at 25 percent and rising. The higher tax rates implied by that spending will mean less growth and fewer opportunities. Already, pension costs in many states are squeezing education spending.

In the private sphere, in other words, seniors provide wonderful gifts to their grandchildren, loving attention that will linger in young minds, providing support for decades to come. In the public sphere, they take it away.

Old people are truly the fork against humanity: good on one tine, bad, bad, bad on the other.  You think government can help?  Forget it, says Dave.  The old folks should start a spontaneous political movement to make the “unthinkable” “thinkable.”

It now seems clear that the only way the U.S. is going to avoid an economic crisis is if the oldsters take it upon themselves to arise and force change. The young lack the political power. Only the old can lead a generativity revolution – millions of people demanding changes in health care spending and the retirement age to make life better for their grandchildren.

In short, the elderly are okay people, but they are fucking net takers!

David Brooks will be escorting his grandparents out to the ice floe later this afternoon, for ritual, mutually beneficial parracide.  Dave will make a buck, and his elderly kin will feel good knowing they helped.

President Obama is now perhaps the foremost contender for the Worst President Ever epithet.  Stealing that crown from Bush was a virtual impossibility, but Obama appears to be up for the challenge.  Obama said he recognized the need to change course, he was elected on that basis, and he expressly resisted change at every opportunity.  The endemic fraud of the Bush administration has more deeply retrenched in the persona of Obama.   The slick marketing campaign around the concepts of change we can believe in, we can do better, and yes we can was utterly fraudulent.  In the most charitable characterization, whatever self-justifying internal narrative propelled him to stump on change, his conception of change is now shown to be completely at odds with the public’s understanding.  This gulf of understanding is only bound to widen.  It wouldn’t be surprising to see The Gulf of Understanding completely militarized before this Presidency ends.

Americans apparently aren’t too concerned about wars of aggression, torture, illegal wiretapping, the rule of law, the separation of powers, the constitution, and so on, nor do they care much about how the US economy works, but they do care about their pocketbooks.  Not surprisingly, Obama’s fraudulent image is souring most saliently in the public’s attitude toward the bank bailouts, and more generally, the economy (Recall that his election was only cemented when the economy turned sharply south; that’s when Obama left McCain doddering in the polling dust).  Most of the economic damage was probably irreversible before Obama even took office, but he supported Bush’s actions wholly, upped the ante after taking office, and he’s been going “all in” ever since.  

During the SOTU, Obama said something quite attention-grabbing:

“We’re working to lift the value of a family’s single largest investment — their home [..]”

Like George “This sucker could go down” Bush before him, Obama was referring to the DEBT-o-nation of actual mortgages underlying and triggering the chain reaction of mortgage backed securities that are still set to take out lower Manhattan and the rest of the global economy like a controlled demolition.  The entire scheme was nothing less than the biggest fraud ever committed, and a lot of people were on to it at its early stages.  Spitzer, for example, wasn’t taken out for whoring.  Thus, the problems of the TBTF have only gotten bigger and failer.

Unfortunately, the debt-o-nation continues apace.

The U.S. still wants to declare war on Iran, or short of that, exact barbaric and debilitating sanctions on its people in the hopes of causing unrest and ultimately regime change, but China has no interests in that game:

Clinton had warned China it would come under a “lot of pressure” to recognize the threat from Iran’s nuclear program and to join international calls for further sanctions. She said pressure would come as Washington and other powers “move away from the engagement track, which has not produced the results that some had hoped for, and move towards the pressure and sanctions track” to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions, which Tehran insists are for peaceful purposes.

Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi said of the US’s US$6.4 billion arms package for Taiwan that Washington should “truly respect China’s core interests and major concerns, and immediately rescind the mistaken decision to sell arms to Taiwan, and stop selling arms to Taiwan to avoid damaging broader China-US relations”.

According to the official China Daily:

“From now on, the US shall not expect cooperation from China on a wide range of major regional and international issues. If you don’t care about our interests, why should we care about yours?”

In other words, Smell the glove!

In the mockumentary, the original cover, according to recording company representative Bobbi Fleckmann, featured “a greased, naked woman on all fours with a dog collar around her neck and a leash, and a man’s arm extended out…holding on to the leash and pushing a black glove in her face to sniff it.” The production company, Polymer Records, ultimately refused to release the cover because of pressure from retailers such as Sears and Kmart and gave the album a solid black cover instead. Upon learning of the concerns of Polymer, David St. Hubbins said, “You know, if we were serious and we said, ‘Yes, she should be forced to smell the glove,’ then you’d have a point, but it’s all a joke.” Bandmate Nigel Tufnel replied, “It is and it isn’t. She should be made to smell it, but…” which David clarified with the statement, “But not, you know, over and over.”

So much for being Number One.

What an embarrassment.

Update via Pluto: Chinese military going worldwide.  Absolutely precious!  

Andrew Sullivan has a funny sense of accountability.  Essentially, because the Chilcot Inquiry forced Tony Blair to be “answerable,” in words only, and defiant words at that, for his role in a war of aggression, the most heinous criminal acts imaginable, the “most serious crimes of concern to the international community,” crimes against peace, including

(i) Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances;

(ii) Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (i).

Sullivan thinks a score has been settled?  An account has been balanced?  A debt has been paid?  Tony Blair is no longer in arrears?

Neil Barofsky says gub’mint bail-out is not only a big fat fail, but has exacerbated the risks:

from the SIGTARP Executive Summary, pdf

The substantial costs of TARP – in money, moral hazard effects on the market, and Government credibility – will have been for naught if we do nothing to correct the fundamental problems in our financial system and end up in a similar or even greater crisis in two, or five, or ten years’ time.  It is hard to see how any of the fundamental problems in the system have been addressed to date.

• To the extent that huge, interconnected, “too big to fail” institutions contributed to the crisis, those institutions are now even larger, in part because of the substantial subsidies provided by TARP and other bailout programs.

• To the extent that institutions were previously incentivized to take reckless risks through a “heads, I win; tails, the Government will bail me out” mentality, the market is more convinced than ever that the Government will step in as necessary to save systemically significant institutions. This perception was reinforced when TARP was extended until October 3, 2010, thus permitting Treasury to maintain a war chest of potential rescue funding at the same time that banks that have shown questionable ability to return to profitability (and in some cases are posting multi-billion-dollar losses) are exiting TARP programs.

• To the extent that large institutions’ risky behavior resulted from the desire to justify ever-greater bonuses – and indeed, the race appears to be on for TARP recipients to exit the program in order to avoid its pay restrictions – the current bonus season demonstrates that although there have been some improvements in the form that bonus compensation takes for some executives, there has been little fundamental change in the excessive compensation culture on Wall Street.

• To the extent that the crisis was fueled by a “bubble” in the housing market, the Federal Government’s concerted efforts to support home prices – as discussed more fully in Section 3 of this report – risk re-inflating that bubble in light of the Government’s effective takeover of the housing market through purchases and guarantees, either direct or implicit, of nearly all of the residential mortgage market.

Stated another way, even if TARP saved our financial system from driving off a cliff back in 2008, absent meaningful reform, we are still driving on the same winding mountain road, but this time in a faster car.

Congrats, Bush, Obama & The Rubinites!  This one is going platinum.  What was once just “Bigger and Deffer!” is now “Biggerer and Defferer!”