This will never work:

UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown has called for a new “social contract” with the world’s banks to make them more responsible to society.

Mr Brown told a G20 meeting in Scotland it was not acceptable that banking success was reaped by the few but failure was “borne by all of us”.

He called for a fund for future bank bailouts to be considered, possibly paid for by a tax on transactions.

Brown seems to fail to understand a few things. First, contracts, social and otherwise, are for the little people. That is why the bankruptcy bill was passed a few years back at the behest of the industry- to keep the proles in line and to guarantee the banks can bleed you dry- while trillions in unmentioned loans and guarantees and bailout bucks are thrown to the banks when they shit the bed. They screw up, we give them trillions, they lavish themselves with bonuses. It is the circle of life in our own global corruptocracy.

Second, privatizing the profit and socializing the costs was not an accident, it was the plan. Go read McClatchy’s recent series on this.

Third, the fund will not work, because the banks will just buy off enough Senators and congressmen to waive the rules as they did for fees during the last decade. And should they actually be required to put some money in a fund, not only will the charges be passed on to us so we can get hit both ways with higher banking fees and taxes spent on propping these robbers up, but then once the money is in the “fund,” you can;t just have it sitting there, can you? You will have to invest it in something! And then you can write unregulated CDS on that, and then you can write some more CDS on the CDS, and you see where this is going, with the inevitable next round of hoocoodanode. Goldman and a few others, with their tentacles deep into the higher reaches of government, will no doubt survive and prosper, and we will be treated to months of sycophants and useful idiots explaining we just don’t truly understand how smart the Goldman guys are. “Best of the best! They know what they are doing!” They sure do…

Nothing short of breaking up all the large banks, executing the credit ratings agencies, and then a strict and ruthless enforcement regime will help, and there simply is no willpower for that. Not only is there no willpower for this, as both parties are bought and paid for in full, but if there was any movement on this front, wingnut teabaggers would scream about socialism and tyranny, Reason magazine would scream about government involvement in the private sector and the free flow of capital and the glory of the invisible hand, moderate Democrats everywhere would worry about such public involvement, Joe Lieberman would spend months posturing in front of cameras with a furrowed brow, and whoever was tasked with enforcement would be found in bed with a hooker or whatever else is required to destroy them.

In short, we’re just screwed. Learn your place, deal with it, and learn how to grow food. Watching the way the big money boys have shaped the debate, whipping people who would be helped into a froth about socialism, it just seems so clear to me now after spending the last two decades in a haze. “Sorry unemployment is at 10 percent and you are losing your health insurance while I give myself a couple million dollar bonus, but socialism and Hitler and abortion on demand and death tax oh my God two gay men want the same rights as you! SANCTITY OF MARRIAGE! SANCTITY OF MARRIAGE!”

Such a joke.

/dirtyfuckinghippy

DougJ’s earlier post today on Cheney reminded me of this article from Walter Pincus the other day:

Morale has sagged at the CIA following the release of additional portions of an inspector general’s review of the agency’s interrogation program and the announcement that the Justice Department would investigate possible abuses by interrogators, according to former intelligence officials, especially those associated with the program.

A. B. “Buzzy” Krongard, the third-ranking CIA official at the time of the use of harsh interrogation practices, said that although vigorous oversight is crucial, the public airing of once-classified internal assessments and the prospect of further investigation are damaging the agency. “Morale at the agency is down to minus 50,” he said.

At the same time, former inspector general John L. Helgerson, whose review of the program was largely declassified Monday, said that the release, though painful, would ensure that the agency confronts difficult issues head on, instead of ignoring or trying to bury them.

Unlike virtually everything else in Fred Hiatt’s fishwrap, I tend to trust Pincus and his body of work, so I have no doubt that morale might be low.

What astounds me, though, is that morale might be low at the CIA because the Justice department might prosecute people who- get this- BROKE THE LAW. Imagine that- the Justice department has duties other than politically motivated prosecutions, micromanaging US Attorneys, and stocking the department with religious nuts and gay-bashers.

And what I find even more astounding is that the Republicans and Dick Cheney are, so far, successfully pivoting and presenting themselves as the defenders of the CIA, when it has been Dick Cheney and the neocon establishment that has spent the last four decades undermining, attacking, and debasing the CIA. It wasn’t the liberals who cooked up Team B- that would be George Herbert Walker Bush who approved it, Paul Wolfowitz who was part of the team, and Richard Perle who was instrumental in making it happen. It wasn’t Ted Kennedy and the liberals who spent the entire last decade undermining the CIA and basically making George Tenet say whatever the hell Dick Cheney wanted them to say, that would be the Republicans. It wasn’t Dennis Kucinich who ignored the August 6th CIA memo about bin Laden, setting the stage for the largest intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor. It wasn’t the dirty hippies at the DNC who created the Office of Special Plans to create an excuse to attack Iraq and directly undermine the intelligence from the CIA, that was Dick Cheney and Doug Feith and company.

And let’s not forget that it wasn’t Russ Feingold and Barbara Boxer who outed a covert CIA agent and then conducted a full-on media jihad against her and her husband. No, again the honors for that go to Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby, and Bob Novak.

So if morale is low at the CIA and they are feeling a little butthurt, they might want to think about how things have happened the last few decades. They aren’t in the position they are in because of Eric Holder. Far from it. And if they can’t figure this out on their own, and need me to point this crap out, then quite frankly, I don’t think they are smart enough to be handling classified intelligence in the first damned place.

Paul Rosenberg highlights Dean Baker’s 2002 piece about the housing bubble:

This paper shows that there is no obvious explanation for a sudden increase in the relative demand for housing which could explain the price rise. There is also no obvious explanation for the increase in home purchase prices relative to rental prices. In the absence of any other credible theory, the only plausible explanation for the sudden surge in home prices is the existence of a housing bubble. This means that a major factor driving housing sales is the expectation that housing prices will be higher in the future.

Matt Yglesias explains why there is no professional benefit to being prescient in the economic world:

And in the reputational economy of analysts the consequences are even worse. If you go along with the herd and then predict a problem a month before it arises, then you strike everyone as prescient. But if you start warning about something and then it doesn’t happen, and then you keep nagging people, and then you keep complaining about how nobody’s listening to you, you start getting dismissed as a crank. And when you’re proven right, you’re still that crank nobody wants to listen to. You don’t get hailed as a hero. But Ben Bernanke who made very mainstream mistakes and then pivoted adroitly once the bill came due does.

Of course, it’s the same with everything. The people who opposed the Iraq war are are still those cranks that nobody wants to listen to, while George Packer and Fareed Zakaria are hailed as brilliant foreign policy minds. Zakaria and Bernkanke are bright and competent, which is why they’re good examples here: it’s not just that our discourse holds up idiots as experts, it’s also that, within the world of intelligent commentators, those who are wrong are rewarded while those who are right are ignored.

Again, I don’t see how any of this ends well for the United States.

None of you seem to mind my obsession with Ambergate, so I’m going to give it one more whack. Ambinder wrote:

And yet—we, too, weren’t privy to the intelligence. Information asymmetry is always going to exist, and, living as we do in a Democratic system, most journalists are going to give the government the benefit of some doubt, even having learned lessons about giving the government that benefit.

Spencer Ackerman replies:

Talk to anyone who’s handled raw intelligence and s/he will tell you something on the order of this: “I thought it would be like a secret newspaper, but instead what’s already available in open-source materials is often more useful.” Rarely is there ever a clear policy option “implied” by intelligence—that’s a category error. Policymakers read intelligence, use it or discount it in whole or in part, and then make decisions. Intelligence is a text to be interpreted, not a compass pointing to true north. What’s more, those who acquire and analyze intelligence on a discrete subject use the same body of open-source information to shape their judgments as the rest of us do.

Which implies choices for journalists. We can choose to treat intelligence as more definitive than it is and enable the presumption of deference to those who say, Well, if only you saw the intelligence I saw… Or we can choose to treat intelligence-based claims as valuable but not definitive, and contextualize such claims within larger bodies of evidence.

In other words, “we weren’t privy to the intelligence” is the new “no one could have predicted”.

This shit never changes. Governments like to bamboozle people. One way they can do this is by claiming there is top secret intelligence proving whatever it is that they people to believe. In Ambinder’s world, even if this stop secret intelligence turns out not to mean what the government said it meant, we were still wrong to question it.

How is that not contrary to the first principles of journalism?

Update. Speaking of Marc Ambinder, this analysis of Fran Townsend’s remarks in an interview with Ambinder is spot on (from Michael Scherer, of all people):

In an interview with Marc Ambinder, Fran Townsend, a former Homeland Security adviser to Bush, says that the White House provided the language to Ridge only because he previewed his speech internally. “So I called him said, here’s what I think should go in it,” Townsend tells Ambinder. “It wasn’t an order. I didn’t regularly see his speeches in advance. He made speeches all the time without running it by us.” This is less of a denial than a startling admission: Townsend, whose job profile had nothing to do with politics, is admitting that she wanted political language praising the President inserted into an election-year statement about new measures to protect against terrorist attack.

Scherer’s whole piece, based on an advance copy of the book, is worth reading.

Not to beat a dead horse, but I think that Marc Ambinder’s “the hippies were wrong to be right” post is such a classic that it merits further discussion. Here’s Paul Krugman:

But I’d like to return to one point: even after retracting his statement about people who correctly surmised that terror warnings were political being motivated by “gut hatred” of Bush, he left in the bit about being “reflexively anti-Bush”. I continue to find it really sad that people still say things like this.

Bear in mind that by the time the terror alert controversy arose in 2004, we had already seen two tax cuts sold on massively, easily documented false pretenses; a war launched with constant innuendo about a Saddam-Osama link that was clearly false, and with claims about WMDs that were clearly shaky from the beginning and had proved to be entirely without foundation. We’d also seen vast, well-documented dishonesty and politicization on environmental policy. Oh, and Abu Ghraib was already public knowledge.

Given all that, it made complete sense to distrust anything the Bush administration said. That wasn’t reflexive, it was rational.

The rules of modern day punditry are almost as complex as those of modern day wingnuts (minus the boycotts, I guess). Whether or not something is rational is of no relevance. Arcane mixtures of “balance”, deference to power, and “seriousness” have completely replaced common sense.

I don’t think anyone will argue that it is better than anything regurgitated by Bill Kristol, and he makes some interesting points and a compelling argument that a decisive defeat of Cheney Republicanism would have been better for the country, but this portion made me think he will fit right in with our nation’s elites:

But the argument isn’t going away. It will be with us as long as the threat of terrorism endures. And where the Bush administration’s interrogation programs are concerned, we’ve heard too much to just “look forward,” as the president would have us do. We need to hear more: What was done and who approved it, and what intelligence we really gleaned from it. Not so that we can prosecute – unless the Democratic Party has taken leave of its senses – but so that we can learn, and pass judgment, and struggle toward consensus.

Got it? Prosecuting those who torture is “taking leave” of your senses.

I used to write stuff like that a couple years ago. I used to agree with Chris Matthews that Bush was someone you wanted to have a beer with and that Gore sighed too much in the debates. Also, at the time, I was writing about all the WMD Iraq had and how they were an existential threat, how of course the Bush administration has a plan for Iraq after the war and how shock and awe was just the bee’s knees, that of course we could stabilize Iraq with 150k troops, and I made fun of the anti-war protesters and that really, you shouldn’t blame the federal for their crappy response to Hurricane Katrina- natural disasters just happen!

The difference between me and Ross, though, is that I apparently paid attention the last eight years.

Having said all that, a marked improvement over Bill Kristol. I actually thought a couple times while reading it, instead of retching.

Rep. Peter Hoekstra writes in Pravda the WSJ op-ed pages:

Congress Knew About the Interrogations

It was not necessary to release details of the enhanced interrogation techniques, because members of Congress from both parties have been fully aware of them since the program began in 2002. We believed it was something that had to be done in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks to keep our nation safe. After many long and contentious debates, Congress repeatedly approved and funded this program on a bipartisan basis in both Republican and Democratic Congresses.

At some point they are going to figure out that for most of us, we don’t care if the person has a ( R ) or (D) behind their name when they were instituting a policy of torture. That is what is so depressing (to me, at least) about the Ari Fleischer’s and the Thiessen’s of the world. They honestly seem to think this is nothing more than a partisan witch-hunt, the same old Washington gotcha poltics. It isn’t. When you torture people, you have crossed a really clear line. Innocent people are dead. Lives have been ruined. Our international reputation has been destroyed. Yes, the Bush administration will get most of the blame, but that is because they were in charge and they did this, not because of what party they happen to belong to. If Jane Harman and Nancy Pelosi knew about this and ok’d it, they are just as culpable.

Roger Cohen has become a mostly thoughtful voice on foreign policy at the Times, but this makes next-to-no sense:

To some degree, words failed us all in the aftermath of 9/11, a time of fear and disorientation. Journalists did not meet the challenge of holding the executive branch accountable, politically and morally, in the run-up to the Iraq war. Such failures, it is true, were not gross manipulations of the law in the service of inhumanity, but they were failures nonetheless. And they carried a human price.

So I’m wary of the clamor for retribution. Congress failed. The press failed. The judiciary failed. With almost 3,000 dead, America’s checks and balances got skewed, from the Capitol to Wall Street. Scrutiny gave way to acquiescence. Words were spun in feckless patterns.

[....]

That, of course, is Obama’s favorite word: responsibility. I think it demands some acknowledgment that, “There but for the grace of God go I.”

I understand being ambivalent about prosecutions. I am ambivalent myself, without knowing in advance what an investigation might unearth. But this “we all failed” stuff is just bullshit. There are plenty of dirty fucking hippies who opposed the craziness every step of the way. Words didn’t fail them.

And while I can sympathize with CIA interrogators who in some cases may have been following orders, how many of us really look at Dick Cheney, who may have in effect ordered most of this, and think “There but the grace of God, go I?”

It’s worth revisiting the point in January 2002 when Paul Krugman predicted that Enron and the system that allowed it would have a more lasting impact on America than 9/11.

Sept. 11 told us a lot about Wahhabism, but not much about Americanism.

The Enron scandal, on the other hand, clearly was about us. It told us things about ourselves that we probably should have known, but had managed not to see. I predict that in the years ahead Enron, not Sept. 11, will come to be seen as the greater turning point in U.S. society.

It still seems like a fair comparison. The lessons of both Enron and 9/11 went largely ignored in Washington, so we can think of them a matched pair. Let’s grant that Iraq, spying and torture have no more to do with 9/11 than (cue the tortured cries of Mike Godwin) a burning building caused WWII*. It seems fair to grant that even a guy like Krugman, who anticipated a lot, could not predict that only a tiny handful of the imponderably multitudinous possibility branches that filled a time-space light-cone centered on the 2001 attacks could out-stupid the next six years of Bush.

On the other hand, Krugman and a minority of others did not need a crystal ball to see a landscape crowded with firms like Enron. Fiscally speaking these firms lived on nothing. Many, especially but not exclusively derivatives traders, engineered complex schemes that had the ultimate effect of making a financial dirt sandwich look nutritious. These bogus schemes succeeded so well that by the early Bush years ginormous firms had already died, financially speaking, but still walked around because they didn’t know or wouldn’t admit it.

At one point a regulatory framework kept stinkier firms from chewing through too many brains legitimate enterprises, once, but twelve years of Reagan, eight years of Clinton (who, in a fair world, would be CATO’s favorite living president) and eight more years of fundamentalist Clif’s notes Reaganomics took care of that. By 2002 clued-in economists like Krugman and Nouriel Roubini must have looked at the national scene and seen late-period Romero.

Then there’s the twist that even Krugman may not have seen coming. Who would guess a large enough pack of zombies could go on feeding even after everyone from illiterate no-English farmhands all the way down to Michelle Bachmann realized what was happening? Read DougJ’s post below. Check out the graphs at Drum’s. It seems obvious as hell, now, while we watch Dr. Gramm’s undead experiments gnawing away at the federal government.

If I drag this analogy out a little further**, maybe now everyone knows they should have listened the crazy-sounding expert with the stories about the zombies, the alien brain worms, the volcano that we all thought went cold, the gremlin on the wing or whatever. Given time they might start listening to him.

Crazier things have happened.

(*) Strong chance that this minor point will consume the thread. Oh well.
(**) Only one thing will kill this metaphor.

Secretary of State Clinton, today in Mexico:

“Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade,” she said, using unusually blunt language. “Our inability to prevent weapons from being illegally smuggled across the border to arm these criminals causes the deaths of police officers, soldiers and civilians.”

So far, so good. An honest recognition of the problem. Next:

For instance, Mrs. Clinton said, the United States will help supply Mexican law enforcement officers with helicopters and night-vision goggles and other equipment to take on the cartels, which are armed to the teeth.

“We’ve got to figure out how to stop these bad guys,” she said. “These criminals are outgunning the law enforcement officials.”

American guns are part of the problem. Here are some bigger guns.

I guess everyone in DC managed to completely ignore that editorial from all the former heads of state whose countries we have helped to throw into chaos. If you are interested in some reading, head here.

Reader Zuzu’s Petals digs up the relevant NY Times story from 1995 that describes the mindset when they decided to stop requiring banks to pay FDIC premiums:

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation decided today to virtually eliminate deposit insurance premiums for most commercial banks after concluding that its insurance fund had enough money to cover bank failures in the coming months.

Bankers welcomed the unanimous decision by the agency’s board, which will take effect on Jan. 1 and save them $946 million a year in premiums. Industry lobbyists waged a vigorous campaign to eliminate the premiums, arguing that they were unnecessary after the Bank Insurance Fund late last spring reached its Congressionally mandated target of $1.25 in reserves for every $100 of insured deposits.

Ricki Helfer, the chairman of the F.D.I.C., said premiums needed to be reduced because of the banking industry’s current health, the economy’s strength and the expectation of F.D.I.C. examiners that few banks would fail soon. Premiums will still be collected for some banks with risky business practices and less solid finances. Still, the income from premiums as a share of insured deposits will fall to the lowest level in the 62 years of Federal deposit insurance.

Consumer activists and even some of the board’s members criticized the decision. “Under a better system, we would be allowed to build up a surplus in better times that we would run off in bad times,” said Jonathan L. Fiechter, the acting director of the Office of Thrift Supervision and one of the four sitting members of the F.D.I.C.’s board.

But Mr. Fiechter voted for the premium reduction anyway, saying that current law left the board with little choice once the fund had clearly met the target for reserves.

Ralph Nader, the consumer activist, contended that the $25.08 billion now in the Bank Insurance Fund could be exhausted easily by the collapse of one or two of the giant banks now forming from the industry’s many mergers, leaving taxpayers with the burden of paying for any further failures. Today’s decision “is a prescription for another round of corporate bank welfare,” he said.

At some point, I don’t know when, idiots like me are going to be ignored and the folks who time and time again have been proven right will be given a say. And Jonathon Fiechter, who knew what he was doing but voted the wrong way anyway, deserves a special kick in the junk. Oh- look! Ari Fleischer, who spent the last eight years either being wrong or lying about everygoddamnedthing, is being rewarded with another appearance on Hardball.

When I was in the Army, a popular phrase was “F—- Up, Move Up,” because the people who screwed up always seemed to get promoted, while the ones who were right are either punished, ignored, or some combination of the two. I am glad to see this is the guiding principle for our government, too.

*** Update ***

From the comments:

I think there’s a misunderstanding here. The premiums were reduced in 1996 because the fund had reached its statutory reserve level. That wasn’t so much the problem. Everybody was happy. (Except the thrifts, which had by no means reached theirs—but that’s another story).

The problem really came about five years later (2000/2001) when the FDIC realized that many changes in banking (such as increading levels of consolidation), plus inflation, had made that reserve level too low, and there was no way for them to change it. Also, newer banks, which themselves had never paid any premiums, were unfairly coasting on the previous premiums made by older banks. And many other complications with the system.

That’s why in 2001 they lobbied congress for statutory authority to have flexible control over the reserve levels, to match the actual state of the banks. Congress did not make banks start paying premiums again until 2006. So, as Bair, puts it, “five years were wasted.”

It is more complicated than just that they stopped collected premiums, with apologies to Fiechter.

I don’t understand:

Factory jobs disappeared. Inflation soared. Unemployment climbed to alarming levels. The hungry lined up at soup kitchens.

It wasn’t the Great Depression. It was the 1981-82 recession, widely considered America’s worst since the depression.

That painful time during Ronald Reagan’s presidency is a grim marker of how bad things can get. Yet the current recession could slice deeper into the U.S. economy.

If it lasts into April — as it almost surely will — this one will go on record as the longest in the postwar era. The 1981-82 and 1973-75 recessions each lasted 16 months.

Unemployment hasn’t reached 1982 levels and the gross domestic product hasn’t fallen quite as far. But the hurt from this recession is spread more widely and uncertainty about the country’s economic health is worse today than it was in 1982.

I don’t get it. The Republicans and some in the media are calling this the Obama recession and the Obama bear market and the Obama economy, but this says it will be the longest recession on record. Yet Obama has only been President for a few weeks. The math just doesn’t seem to work.

Sometimes I think the media and the Republicans are just making shit up.

On a serious note, the last few years have been really eye opening for me. I was never one of the Republicans who thought the media was liberally biased. I always felt they were just lazy and superficial (and MoDo is a fine example) and on issues outside their safety zone (faith and religion, for example), and they just were not equipped to discuss them. However, it becomes more and more clear every day that the media is not biased towards liberal or conservatives, but rather, it is simply in the business of defending the status quo for the wealthier members of society. The reason social conservatives and progressives both hate the media is because they really don’t care about either group or their issues. This is about protecting the amassed wealth of the few.

The past couple of weeks we have faced nothing but story after story about how the market (translation, the folks who created this mess) are nervous about the Obama plans, when no one will admit that the “markets” will only react positively to bail out after bail out with no pain for the people at fault. The same people who created this mess are now bitching about the attempts to fix it, and upset because it might not continue to reward them. The MSM is providing no critical analysis but serves merely as a platform for people kvetching about reverting to the tax rates that were in place just a few years ago. The fact that the same people whose buddies are receiving trillions in taxpayer dollars to fix their mistakes are allowed to go on television and chant socialism is mind-numbing.

It really is breathtaking (especially since most families in the country just got a tax cut from the Obama administration). Can anyone give me any reason why Jim Cramer is asked for advice on anything, let alone given a broad forum to savage the attempts to fix the mess he helped to create?

[poll id = 8]

Pick up to three.

I watched the final Bush press conference this morning, and something was bothering me all day about something he said regarding the “Mission Accomplished” banner. Here is the relevant portion of the press conference:

THE PRESIDENT: Yes.

Q And I’m not trying to play “gotcha,” but I wonder, when you look back over the long arc of your presidency, do you think, in retrospect, that you have made any mistakes? And if so, what is the single biggest mistake that you may have made?

THE PRESIDENT: Gotcha. I have often said that history will look back and determine that which could have been done better, or, you know, mistakes I made. Clearly putting a “Mission Accomplished” on a aircraft carrier was a mistake. It sent the wrong message. We were trying to say something differently, but nevertheless, it conveyed a different message. Obviously, some of my rhetoric has been a mistake.

I pretty clearly remember that event, because I was in full-fledged wingnut phase, and I remember cheerleading the landing on the carrier. But something about Bush’s version today just didn’t seem right, and just a couple minutes ago while watching the Colbert Report, it dawned on me- what Bush said today was incompatible with what the administration said back when this happened.

If you remember correctly, when things started to go to shit six months after the Mission Accomplished banner, the administration said it was the Navy’s idea:

The president told reporters the sign was put up by the Navy, not the White House.

“I know it was attributed somehow to some ingenious advance man from my staff—they weren’t that ingenious, by the way,” the president said Tuesday.

Now his statements are being parsed even further.

Navy and administration sources said that though the banner was the Navy’s idea, the White House actually made it.

***

White House spokesman Scott McClellan told CNN that in preparing for the speech, Navy officials on the carrier told Bush aides they wanted a “Mission Accomplished” banner, and the White House agreed to create it.

“We took care of the production of it,” McClellan said. “We have people to do those things. But the Navy actually put it up.”

They later walked back even more:

The perfect photo-op has flopped. Engineered by the most image-conscious White House in history, the carrier landing portrayed Bush as master and commander, an ideal bookend to his spontaneous performance with a bullhorn in the rubble of the World Trade Center after 9/11. Instead, the hothouse tableau already sharply at odds with the reality in Iraq did even more damage to White House credibility last week. Asked at a news conference whether the “Mission Accomplished” banner had been prematurely boastful, the president backed away from it, saying it had been put up by the sailors and airmen of the Lincoln to celebrate their homecoming after toppling Saddam’s regime.

Not long afterwards, the White House had to amend its account. The soldiers hadn’t put up the sign; the White House had done the hoisting. It had also produced the banner — contrary to what senior White House officials had said for months. In the end, the White House conceded on those details, but declared them mere quibbles. The point was, they said, that the whole thing had been done at the request of the crewmembers. Even that explanation didn’t sit well with some long-time Bush aides. “They (the White House) put up banners at every event that look just like that and we’re supposed to believe that at this one it was the Navy that requested one?” asked a senior administration official. Others remember staffers boasting about how the president had been specifically positioned during his speech so that the banner would be captured in footage of his speech.

And now, today, Bush confirms what some of you knew all along. The Navy had nothing to do with the “Mission Accomplished” banner- it was a complete Bush WH operation.

No one could have predicted this would happen. John Yoo and John Bolton, in the NY Times, discuss the need to limit executive authority.

Up next, David Addington and Dick Cheney write in the Washington Post on the need to reject Unitary Executive theory.

I knew these wankers would do this, I just didn’t expect it immediately and so brazenly. The balls on these people.

Whatcha gonna do when they come for you:

KopBusters rented a house in Odessa, Texas and began growing two small Christmas trees under a grow light similar to those used for growing marijuana. When faced with a suspected marijuana grow, the police usually use illegal FLIR cameras and/or lie on the search warrant affidavit claiming they have probable cause to raid the house. Instead of conducting a proper investigation which usually leads to no probable cause, the Kops lie on the affidavit claiming a confidential informant saw the plants and/or the police could smell marijuana coming from the suspected house.

The trap was set and less than 24 hours later, the Odessa narcotics unit raided the house only to find KopBuster’s attorney waiting under a system of complex gadgetry and spy cameras that streamed online to the KopBuster’s secret mobile office nearby.

On a scale of one to ten for awesome, this rates an eleven. You would think the Odessa police would have better things to do, but what with the money-making aspects of the ridiculous war on drugs via asset forfeiture, it is much more lucrative to chase down pine trees than it is to fight crime.

Radley Balko has more.