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Looking For a Benghazi Talking Points Villain? It Was David Petraeus, Not Barack Obama

Kevin Drum — Wed, 22 May 2013 04:31:48 +0000

After reading through the Benghazi "talking points" emails and doing some additional reporting, Scott Wilson and Karen DeYoung confirm what's been pretty obvious for a while now. The House committee that originally asked for the talking points wanted only some basic facts so that no one would mistakenly disclose classified information to the press, but CIA Director David Petraeus—"a master of the craft of media cultivation"—understood the reputational stakes immediately and acted accordingly:

A close reading of recently released government e-mails that were sent during the editing process, and interviews with senior officials from several government agencies, reveal Petraeus’s early role and ambitions in going well beyond the committee’s request, apparently to produce a set of talking points favorable to his image and his agency.

The information Petraeus ordered up when he returned to his Langley office that morning included far more than the minimalist version that Ruppersberger had requested. It included early classified intelligence assessments of who might be responsible for the attack and an account of prior CIA warnings — information that put Petraeus at odds with the State Department, the FBI and senior officials within his own agency.

This was especially galling to the other participants in the review process because (a) the Benghazi annex was a CIA installation and CIA was responsible for its security, (b) the talking points were supposed to be limited to what we knew about the attack, and (c) the whole point of producing the talking points was to avoid endangering the investigation by revealing classified information about suspects and methods.

In the end, as Wilson and Young point out, "The only government entity that did not object to the detailed talking points produced with Petraeus’s input was the White House, which played the role of mediator in the bureaucratic fight that at various points included the CIA’s top lawyer and the agency’s deputy director expressing opposition to what the director wanted." This entire controversy has been much ado about nothing from the beginning, but if you absolutely insist on singling out a villain, the choice is now pretty obvious. David Petraeus was the Machiavellian manipulator of the narrative here, not Barack Obama.

VIDEO: Elizabeth Warren Grills Treasury Secretary On Too Big To Fail

Erika Eichelberger — Wed, 22 May 2013 00:03:11 +0000

At a Senate banking committee hearing Tuesday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) grilled Treasury Secretary Jack Lew on too-big-to-fail banks—financial institutions that are so large that their failure would endanger the entire financial system.

"How big do the biggest banks have to get before we consider breaking them up?” she asked.

Too big to fail is far from over. The largest financial institutions are still ballooning in size. In the past few years, banks have been beset by one scandal after another—from money laundering, to rate-fixing, to foreclosure fraud, and have mostly received wrist-slaps as punishment—probably because, as Attorney General Eric Holder recently warned, prosecuting too-big-to-fail banks for bad behavior might spook the entire financial system.

Too big to fail almost died three years ago. Warren noted that as the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law was being crafted, an amendment was proposed that would have broken up the banks, but it didn't pass—in large part, she reminded Lew, because the Treasury Department (then under Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner) was against it.

"Have you changed your position," Warren demanded, referring to the Treasury department. "Or are you still opposed to capping the size of banks?"

Lew responded that "ending to big to fail is our policy and we're aiming to do it." But Warren wouldn't let him weasel out of the question with generalities. "I want to focus you in here," she pushed. "My question is about capping the size of largest financial institutions."

Lew refused to commit. "Our job right now is to implement … Dodd-Frank," he said. "I think this is not the time to be enacting big changes."

"Let me try the question a different way," Warren persisted. "How big do the biggest banks have to get before we consider breaking them up?" she asked, adding that the largest American banks are 30 percent larger than they were five years ago. "Do they have to double in size? Triple in size? Quadruple in size? Before we talk about breaking up the biggest financial institutions?"

Lew said that too big to fail "is an unacceptable policy", but urged Warren to have some patience.

She'd have none of Lew's excuses: "What we've seen… is one scandal after another in these largest financial institutions," she said. "It's clear they have not changed their risk bearing practices nor have they decided that they're suddenly going to start following the law."

The Most Absurd Religious War in Geek History is in the News Today

Kevin Drum — Tue, 21 May 2013 23:53:15 +0000

The creator of the GIF, Steve Wilhite, caused a firestorm today by weighing in on the correct prounciation of his creation:

He is proud of the GIF, but remains annoyed that there is still any debate over the pronunciation of the format. “The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations,” Mr. Wilhite said. “They are wrong. It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘jif.’ End of story.”

This is not the first time Wilhite has handed down this decree. It's never been the end of the story before, and needless to say, it was not the end of the story this time either. But I bring this up not to declare my own allegiance, but to ask a different question. I need some honest input from old timers here.

As near as I can remember, controversy over the pronunciation of GIF has existed practically from the day of its birth. Nevertheless, my recollection is that 20 years ago, most people pronounced it JIF. The hard-G contingent was a distinct minority. But that seems to have changed over time. Today, my sense is just the opposite: most people pronounce it with a hard G, and the Jiffies are now a small rump fighting a rearguard action.

Everyone has such strong opinions about what the pronunciation should be that it's hard to solicit opinions on the purely empirical question of how it has been pronounced. But I'm going to ask anyway. Please don't bother answering unless you were born before 1970. For those of you who were, and especially for those of you who worked in the tech industry in the 80s and 90s, what's your recollection? Has the favored pronunciation changed, or has the hard G always been the more popular choice?

Judges Strike Down Arizona's 20-Week Abortion Ban

Kate Sheppard — Tue, 21 May 2013 22:48:36 +0000

On Tuesday, judges on the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down an Arizona law that would have banned abortions at 20 weeks. The judges called the law "unconstitutional under an unbroken stream of Supreme Court authority." This is the first 20-week ban to be struck down in court.

The judges wrote that Arizona "may not deprive a woman of the choice to terminate her pregnancy at any point prior to viability," echoing the Supreme Court's ruling in Roe v. Wade 40 years ago that abortion should be legal up to the point that a fetus is can survive outside of the womb, which is usually construed as 24 weeks.

Anti-abortion state legislatures have passed a number of laws in recent years shortening the period in which abortion is legal. Arizona's 20-week ban was not the first in the US, but it was the first one that national reproductive rights groups challenged in court. It was, at the time, the strictest in the country, as it dated the 20 weeks from a woman's most recent menstruation rather than from the date of conception. (Taking basic biology and math into account, the bill actually banned abortion 18 weeks after the woman became pregnant). But after the Arizona law was passed in April 2012, other states passed even stricter rules; Arkansas banned abortions at 12 weeks in March 2013, and North Dakota banned them at 6 weeks a few weeks later.

Meanwhile, an anti-abortion lawmaker from Arizona has been trying to export the law. Republican Congressman Trent Franks introduced a bill last week that would impose a 20-week ban in Washington, DC as well.

Reproductive rights groups hope that Tuesday's ruling sends a warning to other states that might consider similar restrictions. "Today's decision is a huge victory in the fight to protect women's fundamental reproductive rights, and it should send a clear message to anti-choice politicians that their attempts to deprive pregnant women of critical health care are clearly unconstitutional and will not hold up in court," said Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which joined with the ACLU to challenge the Arizona law.

The Center for Reproductive Rights also filed suit against another anti-abortion law in North Dakota earlier this month, and is expected to challenge the state's 6-week ban as well. CRR and the ACLU also won a preliminary injunction last week blocking Arkansas' 12-week ban from taking effect.

How the World's Dullest Story Became the Target of a Massive Leak Investigation

Kevin Drum — Tue, 21 May 2013 21:07:41 +0000

Four years ago, Fox News reporter James Rosen wrote a story saying the CIA had learned that North Korea planned to carry out a nuclear test if the UN approved additional sanctions:

What's more, Pyongyang's next nuclear detonation is but one of four planned actions the Central Intelligence Agency has learned, through sources inside North Korea, that the regime of Kim Jong-Il intends to take — but not announce — once the Security Council resolution is officially passed, likely on Friday. The other three actions include the reprocessing of all of the North's spent plutonium fuel rods into weapons-grade plutonium; a major escalation in the North's uranium-enrichment program; and the launching of another Taepodong-2 intercontinental ballistic missile.

The Justice Department immediately launched a leak investigation, which culminated in charges against Rosen's source, Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, an analyst at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who had been detailed to the State Department. As part of this investigation, DOJ tracked Rosen's movements and subpoenaed his phone records. Journalists are apoplectic about this, but Jack Shafer wonders just what Rosen thought he was doing:

Although Rosen's story asserts that it is "withholding some details about the sources and methods ... to avoid compromising sensitive overseas operations," the basic detail that the CIA has "sources inside North Korea" privy to its future plans is very compromising stuff all by itself. As Rosen continues, "U.S. spymasters regard as one of the world's most difficult to penetrate."

Hmmm. There's really no other way to get information this detailed except from a source inside North Korea, so it's not clear to me that Rosen really gave anything away with that line. At the same time, it's not clear why Rosen published this story at all. As Michael Tomasky says:

No offense intended to Rosen, but...I don't even see where that's such big news. Of course North Korea was going to do something to protest a UN sanctions vote. Do what? Well, missile tests is what it's been doing for the last several years now to scare people, so...a missile test. I mean, if I'd read that on June 11, 2009, I'd have stopped after three paragraphs and thought tell me something I don't know. So why was the government so up in arms about it in the first place?

Tomasky's point is that it's outrageous that DOJ would go ballistic over a story that basically revealed nothing. But that misses the point. The story is completely uninteresting. And yet, by its very publication, it alerted North Korea to a possible mole in high places. So why would you run a piece like this? Here's Josh Marshall:

It’s difficult for me not to be more shocked by the self-interested preening of fellow journalists over a comically inept reporter and source than the arguable dangers this episode holds for press freedoms. Indeed, I’ve tried and failed. I can’t.

I don't like the fact that the Obama administration has been so aggressive at investigating leaks, and so aggressive at targeting reporters when they do. But it's stuff like this that prevents the American public from sympathizing much. When they look at a case like this, most of them don't see the government eroding a reporter's First Amendment rights. They see a reporter recklessly divulging legitimately sensitive information and destroying a career in the process —and apparently doing it just for the hell of it.

I still don't condone the DOJ actions in this case—especially since they basically had Kim's confession and didn't really need Rosen's phone records—but at the same time I'd sure be interested in hearing Rosen's defense. What was he thinking when he did this?

Former IRS Chief: "I Certainly Am Not Personally Responsible" for Tea Party Scandal

Andy Kroll — Tue, 21 May 2013 21:00:49 +0000

Former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman, a George W. Bush appointee who ran the tax agency when low-level employees wrongly singled out conservative groups for special scrutiny, testified on Tuesday before Congress for the first time since the scandal erupted on May 10. Senators hoping for new revelations or a mea culpa from Shulman, however, were left wanting. He said little about why IRS staffers targeted tea party groups and others for some 18 months, and he repeatedly downplayed his own role.

But one thing was clear from the hearing: The fallout from the IRS' tea party debacle isn't over, and its implications may spill over into campaign finance rules. J. Russell George, the Treasury Department inspector general who investigated the IRS' actions, said his office will be auditing how the IRS oversees politically active nonprofit groups and presumably how the agency determines which nonprofits are too political. That's potentially big news for the money-in-politics world: Nonprofits spent hundreds of millions of dollars during the 2012 campaign, and as the IRS scandal has further revealed, the agency's process for determining how much politicking by a group runs afoul of regulations is vague and confusing.

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Are Republicans Getting Ready to Shoot Themselves in the Foot?

Kevin Drum — Tue, 21 May 2013 18:34:58 +0000

Greg Sargent has been arguing for a while that Republicans run the risk of turning off voters if they go overboard on scandalmania. A new Washington Post poll bolsters his argument:

The Post poll finds a majority believes the Obama administration is trying to “cover up” facts about the IRS scandal and that a plurality thinks it is trying to cover up Benghazi facts. These numbers are at odds with yesterday’s CNN poll, which found more Americans think Obama is being truthful. But that aside, in spite of these negative findings about the scandals, the Post poll also finds that Obama’s approval rating is holding steady, at 51 percent, and the economy may be the reason why: Majorities believe the economy is beginning to recover and are optimistic about where the economy will go in the next year.

I'll play devil's advocate here. First, I think 1998 was probably unique: The nature of the scandal was clear to everyone and a majority of Americans simply didn't think it was very serious. The nature of our current set of contretemps isn't yet clear, and the Post poll makes it plain that most Americans do take them seriously. As we learn more, there's every chance that the public could view them as even more serious. In fact, they probably will. After all, a big pile of scandals in the sixth year of a presidency usually spells trouble. 1998 is the sole exception, and I wouldn't hang too much on it.

Second, there's overreach and then there's overreach. In 1998, Republicans didn't just go a little overboard, they actually impeached Bill Clinton. As long as Republicans steer clear of impeachment this time around, they should be OK.

Third, I'd like to see the crosstabs for the Post poll. How partisan are the results? Where do independents stand? If this is already a pure partisan battle, it won't go anywhere. But if Democrats are wavering, or if independents are mostly agreeing with Republicans, that could spell trouble.

Finally, approval ratings have a certain amount of inertia. It's possible that there just hasn't been time yet for all of this stuff to affect Obama's approval rating. It may well start to suffer in the coming months, even if the economy does keep improving.

Do I actually believe all this? Sort of. But Republicans still have several problems. First, they're having a hard time tying anything serious to President Obama, and I don't expect that to change. Second, even if they avoid going down the impeachment rabbit hole, they show all the signs of a party just itching to shoot itself in the foot. The bogus email leaks are a case in point: you lose the press when you pull stunts like that. Finally, this is all happening too early. Maybe Republicans can keep up the outrage for a few months, but a year and a half? I really have a hard time seeing that.

Right now, Republicans are benefiting from a press corps that's offended by the AP subpoenas and Jay Carney's evasions over the Benghazi talking points. But their pique won't last forever. In the end, Sargent is probably right: these "scandals" are going to fade, and Republicans are going to get more and more desperate to keep them in the spotlight. That's pretty likely to lead them down a road to disaster.

America 10 Years After Sequestration

Mattea Kramer and Jo Comerford — Tue, 21 May 2013 17:53:53 +0000

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

The streets are so much darker now, since money for streetlights is rarely available to municipal governments. The national parks began closing down years ago. Some are already being subdivided and sold to the highest bidder. Reports on bridges crumbling or even collapsing are commonplace. The air in city after city hangs brown and heavy (and rates of childhood asthma and other lung diseases have shot up), because funding that would allow the enforcement of clean air standards by the Environmental Protection Agency is a distant memory. Public education has been cut to the bone, making good schools a luxury and, according to the Department of Education, two of every five students won't graduate from high school.

It's 2023—and this is America 10 years after the first across-the-board federal budget cuts known as sequestration went into effect. They went on for a decade, making no exception for effective programs vital to America's economic health that were already underfunded, like job training and infrastructure repairs. It wasn't supposed to be this way.

Traveling back in time to 2013—at the moment the sequester cuts began—no one knew what their impact would be, although nearly everyone across the political spectrum agreed that it would be bad. As it happened, the first signs of the unraveling which would, a decade later, leave the United States a third-world country, could be detected surprisingly quickly, only three months after the cuts began. In that brief time, a few government agencies, like the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), after an uproar over flight delays, requested—and won—special relief. Naturally, the Department of Defense, with a mere $568 billion to burn in its 2013 budget, also joined this elite list. On the other hand, critical spending for education, environmental protection, and scientific research was not spared, and in many communities the effect was felt remarkably soon.

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Conviction of Genocidal Dictator Efrain Rios Montt Overturned by Guatemala's Highest Court

Asawin Suebsaeng — Tue, 21 May 2013 17:43:53 +0000

On Monday, Guatemala's Constitutional Court overturned the conviction of former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, an army general who ruled as de facto president from 1982 to 1983. On May 10, Ríos Montt, 86, was found guilty by a three-panel tribunal on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity, and sentenced to 80 years in the slammer; he is the first former head of state in the Americas to stand trial for genocide. But less than two weeks later, Guatemala's highest court threw out all proceedings in the case dating back to April 19, in part thanks to an aggressive lobbying effort by the nation's most influential business federation. Due to the court's 3-2 decision, the way forward—for Ríos Montt's opponents, for his supporters—has been thrown into question. After Monday's ruling, Ríos Montt was sent back to house arrest, where he had been since the case started in January 2012.

Here's a quick reminder of who Efraín Ríos Montt is, and what he did.

1. During his 17-month stint as military dictator, he oversaw the genocide by his armed forces of at least 1,771 members of the indigenous Maya Ixil population. Roughly 100 survivors testified during the course of his trial.

This Guatemala City newspaper reads, "Ríos Montt charged with 11 massacres." Via Granito: How to Nail a Dictator/Facebook

2. Along with the mass murder, his military regime carried out a policy of forced displacement, forced assimilation, torture, systematic rape and sexual assault, starvation, and arbitrary execution against those labeled as political opponents.

3. Due to his staunchly anti-communist attitudes during the Guatemalan Civil War, the general received plenty of financial, military, and political support from President Ronald Reagan's administration and friends in the United States. (Ríos Montt is an alumnus of the School of the Americas, a Department of Defense-owned institute and notorious tyrant-mill at Fort Benning, Georgia that taught torture, blackmail, death-squad tactics, and counter-insurgency to numerous Latin American strongmen and human rights abusers.)

Here's Reagan speaking to reporters following his meeting with Ríos Montt in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, on December 4, 1982:

Well, ladies and gentlemen, President Ríos Montt and I have just had a useful exchange of ideas on the problems of the region and on our bilateral relations...I know that President Ríos Montt is a man of great personal integrity and commitment. His country is confronting a brutal challenge from guerrillas armed and supported by others outside Guatemala. I have assured the president that the United States is committed to support his efforts to restore democracy and to address the root causes of this violent insurgency. I know he wants to improve the quality of life for all Guatemalans and to promote social justice. My administration will do all it can to support his progressive efforts.

For all the accusations of obscene human rights violations, Reagan maintained that Ríos Montt was simply getting a "bum rap" from naïve activists.

Is Climate Change to Blame for the Oklahoma Tornado?

Harry J Enten — Tue, 21 May 2013 16:48:52 +0000

The story first appeared on the Guardian website and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Global climate change and politics are linked to each other—for better or worse. No clearer was that the case than when Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island gave an impassioned speech on global warming in the aftermath of Monday's deadly Oklahoma tornado, and the conservative media ripped him. Whitehouse implied that at least part of the blame for the deadly tornado should be laid at the feet of climate change.

Is Whitehouse correct? It's difficult to assign any one storm's outcome to the possible effects of global climate change, and the science of tornadoes in particular makes it pretty much impossible to know whether Whitehouse is right.

Let's start with the basics of what causes a tornado. A piece from my friend (and sometimes co-chatter) Andrew Freedman two years ago sets out the basics well.

First, you need warm, humid air for moisture. The past few days in Moore have featured temperatures in the upper 70s to low 80s, with relative humidity levels regularly hitting between 90 percent and 100 percent and rarely dropping below 70 percent.

Second, you need strong jet stream winds to provide lift. As this map from Weather Underground indicates, there were definitely some very strong jet stream winds on Monday in the Oklahoma region.

Image: Weather Underground

Third, you need strong wind shear (changing wind directions and/or speeds at different heights) to allow for full instability and lift. This mid-level wind shear map from the University of Wisconsin shows that there were 45 to 50 knot winds, right at the top of the scale, over Oklahoma on Monday.

Image: University of Wisconsin

Fourth, you need something to ignite the storm. In this case, a frontal boundary, as seen in this Weather Channel map, draped across central Oklahoma, did the trick.

Image: Weather Channel

The point is that all the normal ingredients were there that allowed an EF-4 tornado to spawn and strike. (Examination of the storm site may cause an upgrading to EF-5.) It happened in tornado alley, where warm moist air from the Gulf of Mexico often meets dry air from the north and Rocky Mountains for maximum instability. There wasn't anything shocking about this from a meteorological perspective. It was, as a well-informed friend said, a "classic" look.

The long-term weather question is whether or not we'll see more or less of these "classic" looks in our changing meteorological environment. It turns out that of all the weather phenomena, from droughts to hurricanes, tornadoes are the most complex to answer from a broader atmospheric trends point of view. The reason is that a warming world affects the factors that lead to tornadoes in different ways.

Climate change is supposed, among other things, to bring warmer and moister air to Earth. That, of course, would lead to more severe thunderstorms and probably more tornadoes. The issue is that global warming is also forecast to bring about less wind shear. This would allow hurricanes to form more easily, but it also would make it much harder for tornadoes to get the full about lift and instability that allow for your usual thunderstorm to grow in height and become a fully fledged tornado. Statistics over the past 50 years bear this out, as we've seen warmer and more moist air as well as less wind shear.

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