Bailout nation

The Army has just lost its fourth Gitmo prosecutor, which speaks highly of the ethics of Army attorneys. 

An Army prosecutor has resigned from the Guantanamo war court in a crisis of conscience over plans to try a young Afghan accused of throwing a grenade rather than settle the case out of court, according to an affidavit filed with the court Wednesday.

Army Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, a reservist from the Pittsburgh area, becomes the fourth known prosecutor to quit the Pentagon’s controversial military commissions, which the Bush administration set up after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

A former chief war crimes prosecutor, Air Force Col. Morris Davis, quit last year, saying he had been pressured to rush trials ahead of the national elections and to sacrifice transparency. 

In war, their soldiers try to kill our soldiers. That doesn’t make their soldiers murderers, not in any meaningful historical sense of the word. And, needless to say, under Bush’s rules any of our troops who get captured are TOTALLY FUCKED.

Then again, when your military experience consists of going AWOL, the idea of being a POW probably never occurs to you.

Christy Hardin Smith has more. 

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Fight Bush.

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Actual economists respond to the infamy of conservative blame shifting to minority communities.

Fannie and Freddie got into subprime junk and helped fuel the housing bubble, but they were trailing the irrational exuberance of the private sector. They lost market share in the years 2002-2007, as the volume of private issue mortgage backed securities exploded.

In short, while Fannie and Freddie were completely irresponsible in their lending practices, the claim that they were responsible for the financial disaster is absurd on its face — kind of like the claim that the earth is flat. Free market conservatives know that the claim that Fannie and Freddie were responsible is ridiculous. They just say it because they know that news outlets like Market Place will treat it as a serious proposition and thereby muddy the waters in the mind of the public. 

Dean Baker

 

Fannie and Freddie had nothing to do with the explosion of high-risk lending a few years ago, an explosion that dwarfed the S.& L. fiasco. In fact, Fannie and Freddie, after growing rapidly in the 1990s, largely faded from the scene during the height of the housing bubble.

Partly that’s because regulators, responding to accounting scandals at the companies, placed temporary restraints on both Fannie and Freddie that curtailed their lending just as housing prices were really taking off. Also, they didn’t do any subprime lending, because they can’t: the definition of a subprime loan is precisely a loan that doesn’t meet the requirement, imposed by law, that Fannie and Freddie buy only mortgages issued to borrowers who made substantial down payments and carefully documented their income.

So whatever bad incentives the implicit federal guarantee creates have been offset by the fact that Fannie and Freddie were and are tightly regulated with regard to the risks they can take. You could say that the Fannie-Freddie experience shows that regulation works.

Paul Krugman

Blame shifting, scapegoating — whatever you call it, conservatives are again showing their bright YELLOW colors by refusing to accept the blame for a mess they made, a mess they aggressively created. A mess that grownups tried to clean up, but each time they tried they were shouted down by the very loud, astonishingly infantile hard right. [Who are rivaled only by the infinitely wise economists who understand and forgive all, especially when it comes to grossly overpaying CEOs!]

Rick Perlstein recounts some of the Right’s favorite economic myths, while David Sirota questions Warren Buffet’s potential windfall profits.

After a 28-year binge of drunken optimism and blind nationalism – often punctuated by chants of “USA, USA!” and “We’re No. 1!” – Americans are waking up with a painful hangover, facing a grim “morning in America,” not the happy vision that Ronald Reagan famously sold them on.

Robert Parry

See also Lily Ledbetter on where George Bush can shove his suggestions.

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Lacking any significant criticisms, wingnuts go after the NY Times crossword puzzle for political favoritism.

These are people for whom the number 4,171 has no meaning, or at least no significance comparable to the DJIA. (And forget the bloody mess in Afghanistan all together.)

But yes, the Right will defend to their last spittle-flecked rant the right of John McCain to stiff David Letterman to do Katie Couric.

At no time ever do these ass clowns rise above petty politics to address the real crises facing our nation, but for some reason they think John “hasn’t cast a vote in Congress since April 8th” McCain has all the solutions. Then again, anything would be better than letting Norman “let Paulson and Bernanke decide” Coleman call the shots.

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Glenn Greenwald issues an apology.

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Veep debate to be cancelled? Rumors are that McCain’s people will go to almost any length to keep Palin from speaking publicly while unscripted, and it’s pretty damned hard to script an entire debate.

More on flopsweat.

In other rumors, yes, Chuck Grassley is going to start drug testing his speechwriters.

More Tild.

WINston on the “other meth.”

 

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