So what did they talk about at that hastily called Congressional Democrat/Presidential caucus designed to eclipse Alan Grayson’s hearings on NSA spying during the last day before the August recess?

Why, what a swell guy Larry Summers is of course.

Obama defends Summers to congressional Democrats, says he’s not close to Fed chair decision

By Ed O’Keefe, David Nakamura and Paul Kane, Washington Post

Updated: Wednesday, July 31, 2:40 PM

In a tense exchange with Rep. Ed Perlmutter (D-Colo.) during a closed-door meeting with House Democrats, Obama defended Summers’ role in helping to restore the U.S. economy and “expressed frustration” with a growing negative campaign against him, according to one lawmaker who was present.

…

The potential Summers nomination came up in separate meetings with both House and Senate Democrats, according to attendees. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Obama only discussed Summers when asked about the Fed selection process.

“It wasn’t really about Larry Summers – it was about how important this decision is, the ramifications of who the chairman of the Fed is and is there for a long time to come and recognizing that there are differing views in our caucus on the subject and how we go forward, but understanding that whoever the president chooses will be received with great respect by our caucus,” Pelosi told reporters.

Obama also faced questions about Summers during a more than hour-long session with Senate Democrats. According to one Democrat present, the president appeared to grow frustrated at the questions about Summers and Yellen. Obama described their ideological differences on economic policy as “paper thin,” the senator said, requesting anonymity to describe the president’s private discussion.

…

White House press secretary Jay Carney later said Obama was defending Summers as a valued former member of his economic team that helped craft policy to help the nation recover from the Great Recession.

Obama defends Summers, tells Dems: Don’t believe everything in HuffPost

By Mike Lillis and Peter Schroeder, The Hill

07/31/13 01:31 PM ET

“He gave a full-throated defense of Larry Summers and his record in helping to save the economy in the dark days of ’09,” Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) said after the meeting. Obama, Connolly added, “felt that Larry had been badly treated by some on the left and in the press.”

Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) said Obama told the Democrats “not to believe everything you read in The Huffington Post,” a reference to the liberal website that’s been critical of Summers’s record.

…

After Obama held a similar meeting with Senate Democrats, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) acknowledged that Democrats have differing opinions about which candidate is best-suited to replace Bernanke. But he was quick to emphasize that the choice is ultimately Obama’s to make.

“That decision comes from the president,” Reid told reporters in the Capitol. “And whoever the president selects this caucus will be for that person.”

…

Pelosi added she would ultimately back whomever the president selects. On Wednesday, Pelosi downplayed the Summers discussion.

“It wasn’t really about Larry Summers,” Pelosi told reporters after the meeting. “It was about how important this decision is, the ramifications of being chairman of the Fed will be there for a long time to come, recognizing that there are differing views in our caucus on the subject and how we go forward, but understanding that whoever the president chooses will be received with respect by our caucus.”

At the meeting, Obama also argued that “it’s unfair to criticize Summers for the fact that the stimulus bill wasn’t even larger, because who amongst us thinks that you could have passed a larger stimulus bill?” Sherman said.

Don’t send Summers to the Fed

Felix Salmon, Reuters

Jul 24, 2013 14:59 UTC

The arguments for Yellen are very strong; the arguments against Summers are strong; the arguments for Summers are weak; and the arguments against Yellen are all but nonexistent. (While there are lots of people who think that Summers should not be Fed chair, there’s pretty much no one who feels the same way about Yellen.)

As a result, if Obama picks Summers, it won’t be on the merits; instead, it will be on the grounds that Obama likes Summers, and is in awe of his intelligence. (Summers is, to put it mildly, not good at charming those he considers to be his inferiors, but he’s surprisingly excellent at cultivating people with real power.)

What’s more, the move would be a calculated snub to bien pensant opinion. Never mind the utter shambles that Summers made of Harvard, or the way he treated Cornel West, or his tone-deaf speech about women’s aptitude, or the pollution memo, or the Shleifer affair, or the way he shut down Brooksley Born at the CFTC, or his role in repealing Glass-Steagall, or his generally toxic combination of ego and temper – so long as POTUS likes Larry, and/or so long as Summers is good at working key Obama advisors like Geithner, Lew, and Rubin, that’s all that matters.

The choice of Summers would also be the clearest signal yet that Obama feels that he did what needed to be done to deal with the financial crisis, and that financial reform is, for the rest of his presidency, going to be a very low priority. Summers is a deregulator in his bones; he didn’t like the consumer-friendly parts of Dodd-Frank, and his actions have nearly always erred on the side of being far too friendly to Wall Street. He considers monetary policy to be largely irrelevant in a zero interest rate environment, and there is no chance whatsoever that he would take a robust leadership role with respect to the Fed’s other big job, which is regulation. If you want to repeat all of the Clinton-era mistakes of financial regulation, you can’t do better than appointing Clinton’s very own Treasury secretary.

Not Even Wall Street Wants Larry Summers at the Fed

By: Jon Walker, Firedog Lake

Monday July 29, 2013 7:59 am

One of the few potential justifications for President Obama picking Larry Summers to head the Federal Reserve, despite the strong opposition to him from many liberals, was that Wall Street preferred him. According to a CNBC poll, though, this is not the case. Summers is even less popular with Wall Street than he is with liberal bloggers and Democratic senators.

…

It seems the only real qualification Summers has going for him is that Obama really likes him. He is not the most experienced, the best qualified, the most popular, the easiest to confirm or the politically smartest choice.

Yellen/Summers and the Twilight of the VSPs

Paul Krugman, The New York Times

July 31, 2013, 6:31 am

Whatever happens with the Fed succession – and boy, did Obama’s inner circle make a gratuitous mess of this one – it’s been one heck of a revealing episode, and not just because of the sexism on display, which started out with thinly-veiled talk of “gravitas” and eventually went into full-blown masculinity panic.

…

Anyway, it’s also clear that Summers made some pretty big mistakes in his campaign. Neil Irwin points to his silence on monetary policy, which was supposed to be cagey but ended up looking slippery; John Cassidy points to his failure to offer any kind of mea culpa for past errors, which arguably was about preserving gravitas but ends up making him seem unreformed.

But why did Summers make these errors? In part because he is a whip-smart academic, the terror of the seminar room, who likes to play political operator – and as a political operator, he’s a great academic. But there is, I’d argue, a larger issue: Summers did not recognize the extent to which the political world has changed. He’s been carefully cultivating an image as a Very Serious Person, in a world where VSPness has gone from a source of cachet to being a liability on both right and left.

Think about it. Carefully cultivating a reputation for Seriousness does you no good on the right in a world where the Republican Party is more or less officially committed to crank economic doctrines, and where the GOP’s universally acknowledged intellectual leader is an obvious flimflam man.

Meanwhile, many if not all Democrats are well aware that the VSPs have been wrong about everything for the past decade or more, from the risks of financial deregulation to the fear of nonexistent bond vigilantes. Coming across as the return of Robert Rubin may have seemed savvy back in, say, 2008; it’s worse than useless now.

I suppose Summers might still get the job – but if so, it would be purely because the president is willing to spend a substantial amount of political capital on his behalf. The point is that behavior that was supposed to make Summers a safe choice has actually ended up making him unappealing to both sides.

Ted Kaufman is a former Democratic Senator from Delaware.

Why DOJ Deemed Bank Execs Too Big To Jail

Ted Kaufman, Forbes

7/29/2013 @ 9:30AM

I guess you have to be something of a masochist to quote yourself being so wrong. In my defense, who could have imagined that:

a) The six largest banks would pay $62.2 billion in fines to settle lawsuits in the past three years, led by Bank of America, Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase. (SNL Financial estimate)

b) It will take $24.7 billion to settle pending suits, most of them involving the mortgage junk sold to investors. (Compass Point estimate)

c) Despite the fact that a+b=$86.9 billion, not one bank has ever had to admit to any wrongdoing.

d) Not one dollar of the $86.9 billion has been paid by any bank executive. Shareholders took all the hits.

…

Why? Why has no one been held responsible? There are many reasons, including the complexity of the cases and the lack of criminal referrals from the regulatory agencies. But perhaps the key reason is that those most responsible for indicting and prosecuting Wall Street executives seem to believe that, just as there are banks that are too big to fail, there are people who are too big to jail.

In a speech he gave last fall, the retiring head of the Criminal Division in the Department of Justice, Lanny Breuer, explained that position: “To be clear, the decision of whether to indict a corporation, defer prosecution, or decline altogether is not one that I, or anyone in the Criminal Division, take lightly. We are frequently on the receiving end of presentations from defense counsel, CEOs and economists who argue that the collateral consequences of an indictment would be devastating for their client. In my conference room, over the years, I have heard sober predictions that a company or bank might fail if we indict, that innocent employees could lose their jobs, that entire industries may be affected, and even that global markets will feel the effects.

“Sometimes-though, let me stress, not always-these presentations are compelling. In reaching every charging decision, we must take into account the effect of an indictment on innocent employees and shareholders, just as we must take into account the nature of the crimes committed and the pervasiveness of the misconduct. I personally feel that it’s my duty to consider whether individual employees with no responsibility for, or knowledge of, misconduct committed by others in the same company are going to lose their livelihood if we indict the corporation. In large multi-national companies, the jobs of tens of thousands of employees can be at stake. And, in some cases, the health of an industry or the markets is a real factor. Those are the kinds of considerations in white collar crime cases that literally keep me up at night, and which must play a role in responsible enforcement.”

From my point of view, this is certainly a novel approach to prosecutorial decision-making. It is doubly puzzling because, back in 2009 and again in 2010, I chaired two Judiciary Committee Hearings on the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act. In extensive testimony in those hearings, and in meetings in my Senate office, Mr. Breuer never said anything like it.

…

Nothing I have seen in the past four years leads me to believe that Wall Street as a whole learned much from the events of 2008-2009. The government’s bailouts that helped the big banks survive have been pretty much forgotten. The multimillion-dollar bonuses are back with a vengeance, and with them incentives to cut corners and, for some, to circumvent the law.

I only wish that Justice Department action matched Attorney General Holder’s words when he said, introducing his task force, “The mission is not just to hold accountable those who helped bring about the last financial meltdown, but to prevent another meltdown from happening.”

Duh.

Radicals

Jay Ackroyd, Eschaton

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

The Village and the Democratic leadership really is embarked on a radical restructuring campaign, to gut the social insurance programs, lower wage rates and establish long-term partnerships between powerful private interests and powerful public sector agencies.

Doing this is really unpopular, and so can’t be brought directly to a vote–hence the Gangs, and the Commissions, the classified trade talks, and the terrifying debt crises and, sadly, the 60 vote Senate. None of this has worked so far.

But that doesn’t mean they won’t keep trying.

Zombie rising

by digby, Hullabaloo

Monday, July 29, 2013

Apparently, no matter how low the deficit goes or how much the president publicly repudiates the deficit framework,  the White House is still offering what it offered back when the deficit was widely considered the greatest threat the world has ever known:

…

The president admitted in his NY Times interview that the deficit “framework” has been “damaging” and perhaps he finally believes that. But that means he must really believe that the elderly are living high on the hog on their Social Security and need to be forced to shop a little more smartly. How else to explain why they continue to offer this deal?

…

The Villagers are far from willing to give up their favorite stale tropes. They never are. Remember, there was a time not long ago when the deficit was gone and we had a projected surplus. They still fretted about the old people stealing the food out of baby’s mouths.

…

(T)he wealthy celebrities and aristocrats of the Village will never stop fear mongering that these programs are going to swallow up everything.  If the president is on the same page then he could very well have been saying in his interview that “austerity” is damaging while still believing we need to destroy these programs in order to save them. This belief is not a policy in Washington DC — it’s a religion.

Anti-Tax Republicans Once Again May Save Social Security

By: Jon Walker, Firedog Lake

Tuesday July 30, 2013 7:02 am

Despite a half dozen failed tries to get a grand bargain, President Obama is still working hard at a new attempt. Fortunately, this latest effort seems likely to fail for the same reason as all the others.

…

If insanity is trying to do the same thing over expecting different results, than the administration is clinically ill.

Given that there is a fundamental and unbridgeable disagreement on this issue the administration should have moved on to basically anything else, but it has become Obama’s white whale. It is the dangerous obsession which has repeatedly brought needless destruction.

The article goes on to remind everyone that Obama is both open and even eager to cut Social Security benefits as part of a deal. The only thing that has repeatedly saved the program is Republicans refusal to increase taxes.

Is a grand bargain out of reach?

By MANU RAJU and JOHN BRESNAHAN, Politico

7/29/13 7:33 PM EDT

Republicans and the White House both agree on proposals to cut Social Security known as chained CPI, referring to reduced payments to beneficiaries because of how annual cost-of-living adjustments are calculated. And the two sides seem to be on the same page regarding reducing benefits that wealthy seniors now receive from entitlement programs, a proposal known as means testing.

But the White House wants new taxes in exchange for those entitlement cuts, something at which the GOP continues to balk. And Republicans have pushed for the two sides to agree on going beyond the typical 10-year budget projections and instead examine how much the budget picture will worsen over the next 30 years. But the White House is resisting a 30-year budget projection, believing the numbers are unrealistic.

…

Even if the group reaches a deal with the White House, it’s hardly clear new taxes could win over any additional Republicans – in the House and Senate. And a White House offer on entitlements would turn off scores of Democrats who have vowed to protect the social safety net programs.

Without a grand bargain, to cut deficits by about $4 trillion over the next decade, Congress and the White House may instead simply try to find a way to prevent the government from shutting down in October. But the House GOP and the Senate Democrats remain tens of billions of dollars apart. And as Republicans are demanding fresh spending cuts in order to increase the debt ceiling, the White House and Senate Democrats say they will only pass a debt ceiling increase with no strings attached.

Obama proposal would cut corporate taxes, boost spending

By Jonathan Easley and Justin Sink, The Hill

07/30/13 02:19 PM ET

Obama’s plan would cut the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 28 percent, with a preferred rate of 25 percent for manufacturers. It would also allow small businesses to write off $1 million in investments.

Obama also wants Congress to sign off on new infrastructure spending, aid to community colleges, and investment in manufacturing hubs. The White House did not say how much Obama wants to spend.

To pay for the infrastructure investments and other spending, Obama proposed that companies be able to repatriate foreign earnings back to the U.S. subject to a one-time “transition fee.”

Obama Offers to Cut Corporate Tax Rate as Part of Jobs Deal

By MARK LANDLER and JACKIE CALMES, The New York Times

Published: July 30, 2013

The terms of Mr. Obama’s tax plan are those that Timothy F. Geithner, his former Treasury secretary, first proposed in early 2012, as the presidential campaign was getting under way: the corporate tax rate would be reduced to 28 percent, from 35 percent, with a lower rate of 25 percent for manufacturers.

…

For two years, Republicans have rejected the bulk of Mr. Obama’s initiatives to create jobs by investing in public-works projects, higher education, advanced manufacturing and scientific research. A big reason was that he previously has paired those ideas – to offset the spending and avoid adding to annual budget deficits – with proposals to repeal or reduce tax breaks for wealthy individuals and corporations, especially oil companies, that Republicans reject.

Obama Proposes ‘Grand Bargain’ for Jobs

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: July 30, 2013 at 11:52 AM ET

The president has previously insisted such business tax reform be coupled with an individual tax overhaul. His new offer drops that demand and calls only for lowering the corporate rate from 35 percent to 28 percent, with an even lower effective tax rate of 25 percent for manufacturers.

Obama wants those rate changes to be coupled with significant spending on some sort of job creation program, such as manufacturing, infrastructure or community colleges.

Congressional Republicans have also long insisted on tying corporate and individual tax reform so that small business owners who use the individual tax code would be offered cuts along with large corporations. But they oppose using the revenue generated from changes in the corporate tax structure for government spending programs.

…

Senior administration officials described the corporate tax proposal as the first new economic idea Obama plans to offer in the coming months, with budget deadlines looming in the fall. Administration officials wouldn’t put a price tag on the proposal or say how much would be a “significant” investment in jobs since the dollar figures would be part of negotiations with Congress. But in an example from this year’s State of the Union address, Obama proposed $50 billion to put Americans to work repairing roads and bridges and other construction jobs.

Obama Urges Business Tax Rewrite to Help Spur New Jobs

By Julianna Goldman, Bloomberg News

Jul 30, 2013 2:15 PM ET

Under the proposal, Obama would seek a business tax change that produces a one-time revenue gain, and that would be earmarked for the repair of roads and bridges or other public works, innovation centers for manufacturing and community college training to close skill gaps.

…

“It represents an unmistakable signal that the president has backed away from his campaign-era promise to corporate America that tax reform would be revenue-neutral to them,” said Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader.

The jobs-related programs would be funded by a one-time transition fee associated with the $2 trillion in foreign earnings that are currently held overseas, said an administration official who asked not to be identified to discuss details before the speech.

The officials declined to specify how much money would be generated and didn’t detail how it would be structured.

…

Obama, in February 2012, proposed reducing the top corporate rate for most companies to 28 percent from 35 percent. The plan would eliminate tax breaks and change core tax-code features such as interest deductibility. He’s also proposed lowering the rate for manufacturers to 25 percent and expanding and making permanent the research-and-development tax credit.

…

The idea of taxing approximately $2 trillion in accumulated overseas earnings as a transition to a new system resembles a proposal from Representative Dave Camp, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. Spending the proceeds on jobs programs, though, may run counter to the Michigan Republican’s goal of a revenue-neutral approach.

Camp’s 2011 draft would require companies to pay 5.25 percent on all offshore funds, regardless of whether they are brought home. He plans to include that in legislation he wants to move through his committee this year.

Under the current tax system, U.S.-based companies must pay the U.S. rate of 35 percent on all the income they earn around the world. They get tax credits for payments to foreign governments and don’t owe the U.S. unless they bring the profits home. Companies such as Caterpillar Inc. and United Technologies Corp. have called for the U.S. to switch to a so-called territorial system that wouldn’t tax most future offshore earnings.

…

Even as the economy continues to expand and add jobs four years into the nation’s recovery from its worst recession since the Great Depression, Americans at the middle of economic ladder haven’t regained lost prosperity.

The economy grew at a 1.8 percent rate during the first three months of the year, more slowly than its 2.5 percent average pace during the last two decades. The unemployment rate, at 7.6 percent in June, remains above its 6 percent average over the past 20 years.

While the benchmark Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index is up more than 18 percent this year and has almost doubled since Obama took office in 2009, the median household income of $51,500 in May is 5 percent lower than in June 2009, the official end of the recession, according to estimates by Sentier Research.

President Obama’s ‘grand bargain’ for the middle-class

By Jamelle Bouie, Washington Post

Published: July 30 at 11:04 am

The details of the proposal are straightforward: For Republicans, he offers a cut to corporate income taxes, from 35 percent to 28 percent, along with fewer loopholes and a preferred rate for manufacturers. And to gain Democratic support, he includes a series of projects meant to “invest” in the middle-class and boost the economy.

While it’s hard to say how much ordinary Americans would gain from the proposal if it were to become law, what is apparent is the extent to which this “grand bargain” is a boon for business, which wants tax cuts and new investments in infrastructure (which makes it easier to conduct business). Indeed, if Amazon is any indication, the kinds of jobs that might come out of this “better bargain for the middle class” aren’t great.

Java.  We hateses it.  I think I have it cranking enough to do the timing and scoring thing, but you never know and it’s come at the expense of a more detailed exposition.

Mediums and Softs.  Hamilton on the pole which has rotated between Red Bull and Mercedes.  Grosjean and Ricciardo unexpectedly high, Webber didn’t even bother with Q3.  At the halfway point Alonso and Räikkönen hunting Vettel, Hamilton a rather sad 4th.  Mercedes and Scuderia Marlboro duking it out for second, McLaren looking lost in 6th behind Force India.

Hmm… not that there aren’t developments, but many of them are unresolved and require more research and clarification.

Let’s start with the big one, the Concorde Ageement.  Reuters reports they are getting closer to one but the details of what’s in it are sketchy at best and it could easily blow up BECAUSE…

Bernie has finally been indicted in the Gribkowsky bribery scandal.  If convicted ‘El Supremo’ is pretty surely going to be dumped by CVC so they can proceed with their $15 Billion IPO.

Not that getting rid of Bernie is a bad idea.

Speaking of personnel changes, the duel for Webber’s soon to be vacated Red Bull seat seems to have narrowed down to Raikkonen and Ricciardo.  The smart money is on Ricciardo, the inferior driver, because Vettel doesn’t want a rival.

At Nürburgring a camera man was taken out (broken bones!) when a wheel came off Webber’s Red Bull in Pit Lane.  As a consequence access to the pit has been restricted and the speed limit has been lowered from 60 to 50 (like that will help).  The bottom line is that pit stops are going to take longer, whether that will change the racing remains to be seen.

This is pretty much the mid-point of the season, race 10 of 19.  There will be 22 races next year as they are adding New Jersey, Austria, and Russia.  When they return on August 25th there will be two European races left (Spa and Monza) before they head out to the far east.

The Hungaroring is the second slowest circuit after Monaco.  It’s very hot and because it’s seldom used there are rubbering issues.  On offer are Mediums and Softs, 2013 compounds on 2012 Kevlar bodies.  Because of the earlier ‘secret’ test with with Pirelli, Mercedes was barred from a general test during the recent break.  Though they’re complaining up a storm, it’s hard to figure if they’re at a competitive disadvantage or not as the ‘public’ test used only developmental drivers and teams were forbidden to change the set ups.

Majority Concerned Domestic Surveillance Will Go Too Far

By: Jon Walker, Firedog Lake

Thursday July 25, 2013 7:59 am

The latest NBC/WSJ poll found that majority of Americans are concerned the government will gone too far.

According to the poll 56 percent of Americans believe that the government’s “anti-terrorism” monitoring programs will go too far and violate the privacy rights of regular people. By comparison only 36 percent are more concerned that the government’s surveillance efforts might not go far enough.This is real shift since 2006 when a plurality worried the government wasn’t going far enough.

This is the second national poll to find a big shift in public opinion following the Snowden’s whistle-blowing. A Quinnipiac poll from earlier this months found that as Americans finally learn the extend of the NSA’s activities they are growing increasingly concerned that the government is violating individual’s civil liberties.

Snowden’s Whistleblowing Creates Climate for Critical House Vote on NSA Surveillance

By: Kevin Gosztola, Firedog Lake

Wednesday July 24, 2013 9:24 am

(A) new Washington Post-ABC News poll indicates, “Nearly three-quarters of Americans say the NSA programs are infringing on some Americans’ privacy rights, and about half see those programs as encroaching on their own privacy.”

“Most of those who see the programs as compromising privacy say the intrusions are unjustified,” the Post reports.

Democratic establishment unmasked: prime defenders of NSA bulk spying

Glenn Greenwald, The Guardian

Thursday 25 July 2013 05.09 EDT

The extraordinary events that took place in the House of Representatives yesterday are perhaps the most vivid illustration yet of this dynamic, and it independently reveals several other important trends. The House voted on an amendment sponsored by Justin Amash, the young Michigan lawyer elected in 2010 as a Tea Party candidate, and co-sponsored by John Conyers, the 24-term senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee. The amendment was simple. It would de-fund one single NSA program: the agency’s bulk collection of the telephone records of all Americans that we first revealed in this space, back on June 6. It accomplished this “by requiring the FISA court under Sec. 215 [of the Patriot Act] to order the production of records that pertain only to a person under investigation“.

The amendment yesterday was defeated. But it lost by only 12 votes: 205-217. Given that the amendment sought to de-fund a major domestic surveillance program of the NSA, the very close vote was nothing short of shocking. In fact, in the post-9/11 world, amendments like this, which directly challenge the Surveillance and National Security States, almost never get votes at all. That the GOP House Leadership was forced to allow it to reach the floor was a sign of how much things have changed over the last seven weeks.

…

In reality, the fate of the amendment was sealed when the Obama White House on Monday night announced its vehement opposition to it, and then sent NSA officials to the House to scare members that barring the NSA from collecting all phone records of all Americans would Help The Terrorists™.

Using Orwellian language so extreme as to be darkly hilarious, this was the first line of the White House’s statement opposing the amendment: “In light of the recent unauthorized disclosures, the President has said that he welcomes a debate about how best to simultaneously safeguard both our national security and the privacy of our citizens” (i.e.: we welcome the debate that has been exclusively enabled by that vile traitor, the same debate we’ve spent years trying to prevent with rampant abuse of our secrecy powers that has kept even the most basic facts about our spying activities concealed from the American people).

The White House then condemned Amash/Conyers this way: “This blunt approach is not the product of an informed, open, or deliberative process.” What a multi-level masterpiece of Orwellian political deceit that sentence is. The highly surgical Amash/Conyers amendment – which would eliminate a single, specific NSA program of indiscriminate domestic spying – is a “blunt approach”, but the Obama NSA’s bulk, indiscriminate collection of all Americans’ telephone records is not a “blunt approach”. Even worse: Amash/Conyers – a House bill debated in public and then voted on in public – is not an “open or deliberative process”, as opposed to the Obama administration’s secret spying activities and the secret court that blesses its secret interpretations of law, which is “open and deliberative”. That anyone can write a statement like the one that came from the Obama White House without dying of shame, or giggles, is impressive.

Even more notable than the Obama White House’s defense of the NSA’s bulk domestic spying was the behavior of the House Democratic leadership. Not only did they all vote against de-funding the NSA bulk domestic spying program – that includes liberal icon House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, who voted to protect the NSA’s program – but Pelosi’s deputy, Steny Hoyer, whipped against the bill by channeling the warped language and mentality of Dick Cheney.

…

Remember when Democrats used to object so earnestly when Dick Cheney would scream “The Terrorists!” every time someone tried to rein in the National Security State just a bit and so modestly protect basic civil liberties? How well they have learned: now, a bill to ban the government from collecting the telephone records of all Americans, while expressly allowing it to collect the records of anyone for whom there is evidence of wrongdoing, is – in the language of the House Democratic Leadership – a bill to Protect The Terrorists.

None of this should be surprising. Remember: this is the same Nancy Pelosi who spent years during the Bush administration pretending to be a vehement opponent of the illegal Bush NSA warrantless eavesdropping program after it was revealed by the New York Times, even though (just as was true of the Bush torture program) she was secretly briefed on it many years earlier when it was first implemented.

…

So the history of Democratic leaders such as Nancy Pelosi isn’t one of opposition to mass NSA spying when Bush was in office, only to change positions now that Obama is. The history is of pretend opposition – of deceiving their supporters by feigning opposition – while actually supporting it.

But the most notable aspect of yesterday’s events was the debate on the House floor. The most vocal defenders of the Obama White House’s position were Rep. Mike Rogers, the very hawkish GOP Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and GOP Congresswoman Michele Bachmann. Echoing the Democratic House leadership, Bachmann repeatedly warned that NSA bulk spying was necessary to stop “Islamic jihadists”, and she attacked Republicans who supported de-funding for rendering the nation vulnerable to The Terrorists.

Meanwhile, Amash led the debate against the NSA program and repeatedly assigned time to many of the House’s most iconic liberals to condemn in the harshest terms the NSA program defended by the Obama White House. Conyers repeatedly stood to denounce the NSA program as illegal, unconstitutional and extremist. Manhattan’s Jerry Nadler said that “no administration should be permitted to operate beyond the law, as they’ve been doing”. Newly elected Democrat Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, an Iraq War combat veteran considered a rising star in her party, said that she could not in good conscience take a single dollar from taxpayers to fund programs that infringe on exactly those constitutional rights our troops (such as herself) have risked their lives for; she told me after the vote, by Twitter direct message, that the “battle [was] lost today but war not over. We will continue to press on this issue.”

In between these denunciations of the Obama NSA from House liberals, some of the most conservative members of the House stood to read from the Fourth Amendment. Perhaps the most amazing moment came when GOP Rep. James Sensenbrenner – the prime author of the Patriot Act back in 2001 and a long-time defender of War on Terror policies under both Bush and Obama – stood up to say that the NSA’s domestic bulk spying far exceeds the bounds of the law he wrote as well as his belief in the proper limits of domestic surveillance, and announced his support for Amash/Conyers. Sensenbrenner was then joined in voting to de-fund the NSA program by House liberals such as Barbara Lee, Rush Holt, James Clyburn, Nydia Velázquez, Alan Grayson, and Keith Ellison.

…

To say that there is a major sea change underway – not just in terms of surveillance policy but broader issues of secrecy, trust in national security institutions, and civil liberties – is to state the obvious. But perhaps the most significant and enduring change will be the erosion of the trite, tired prism of partisan simplicity through which American politics has been understood over the last decade. What one sees in this debate is not Democrat v. Republican or left v. right. One sees authoritarianism v. individualism, fealty to The National Security State v. a belief in the need to constrain and check it, insider Washington loyalty v. outsider independence.

That’s why the only defenders of the NSA at this point are the decaying establishment leadership of both political parties whose allegiance is to the sprawling permanent power faction in Washington and the private industry that owns and controls it. They’re aligned against long-time liberals, the new breed of small government conservatives, the ACLU and other civil liberties groups, many of their own members, and increasingly the American people, who have grown tired of, and immune to, the relentless fear-mongering.

The sooner the myth of “intractable partisan warfare” is dispelled, the better. The establishment leadership of the two parties collaborate on far more than they fight. That is a basic truth that needs to be understood. As John Boehner joined with Nancy Peolsi, as Eric Cantor whipped support for the Obama White House, as Michele Bachmann and Peter King stood with Steny Hoyer to attack NSA critics as Terrorist-Lovers, yesterday was a significant step toward accomplishing that.

Close House Vote on Amash Amendment to Curb the NSA a Blow to the Security State

Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

I happened to be on the phone with a political expert and insider when the result of the Amash amendment vote in the House of Representatives hit the news wires. While I am sure readers will be disappointed that this proposal to curb the NSA was defeated (see background here), the margin of victory for the bad guys was so stunningly narrow that it shows how badly support for the NSA has fallen even among its normal allies. When I read the vote results to my expert, 205 to 217, his reaction was uncharacteristically heated (he describes his degree of sang froid as somewhere between that of a Chinese sage and a dead dog):

Holy shit, this is huge. The NSA must be shitting in its pants. They got this close to beating them when the opponents had no time and no organizing, and the White House was throwing its weight behind this too.

In a stunning race to the bottom, recent popular policies like spying an all Americans, proposing cuts to earned benefits, and prosecuting whistleblowers and journalists instead of fraudulent Bansters have sent Obama approval ratings soaring to heights not seen since the very same period in the mega awesome presidency of George W. Bush.

Poll: Obama’s job approval plunges; Congress, especially GOP, still unpopular

By David Lightman, McClatchy

Monday, July 22, 2013

Stung by Americans’ persistent worries about the economy and a capital gripped by controversy and gridlock, President Barack Obama is suffering his lowest job approval numbers in nearly two years, according to a new McClatchy-Marist poll.

The plummeting numbers – still higher than those of Congress – come after weeks of rising gasoline prices, revelations about domestic spying and turmoil in the Middle East.

…

“Clearly six months into his second term there’s been falloff across the board. It’s not like one group bailed on him,” said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion at Marist College in New York, which conducted the poll.

…

The president has been weathering a succession of spring and summer political storms. In May, news broke that the Internal Revenue Service had targeted for special scrutiny tea party groups seeking tax exemptions. In June, the administration was rocked by revelations about secret government programs that collect data from U.S. phone records and the Internet.

Foreign policy is also taking a political toll. This month, Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi was ousted, and Syria remained a bloody battleground. By a 48-41 percent margin, people disapproved of how the president is handling foreign policy. In April, approvals slightly outnumbered disapprovals.

…

And though the nation has technically been in an economic recovery for four years, most Americans aren’t feeling it. Fifty-four percent said they thought the U.S. remains in a recession, and 60 percent saw the country going in the wrong direction.

Poll: President Obama nears all-time low

By TAL KOPAN, Politico

7/24/13 6:47 AM EDT

Just 45 percent of those surveyed in the NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll said they approved of the job the president was doing, a drop of 3 points from June. Fifty percent said they disapproved.

That’s close to the lowest numbers registered for Obama in the poll, a 44 percent approval and 51 percent disapproval rating registered in November 2011.

The poll’s numbers reflect Americans’ assessment of how Obama is handling the economy: Forty-four percent said they approved and 51 percent said they disapproved.

Pollsters also pointed to a drop in support among African-Americans as a possible explanation for Obama’s falling numbers, as 78 percent approve of Obama’s work, a 10 point drop since June and 15 point drop since April.

Obama’s approval rating is the same as George W. Bush’s was at this point in his second term, while Bill Clinton’s approval rating was significantly higher, at 56 percent, during this point in his second term, The Journal said.

About the only bright spot is Congress is doing worse-

When asked if they would vote for a ballot measure that would replace every member of Congress, 57 percent of adults polled said they would.

Let’s hear it for electoral victory!

First Time in Over a Year Democrats and Republicans Are Tied in the Generic Ballot

By: Jon Walker, Firedog Lake

Wednesday July 24, 2013 11:16 am

The latest NBC/WSJ poll has some good news for Republicans. They are tied with Democrats in the Congressional generic ballot with each party currently at 44 percent. An equal number of Americans want the next election to result in a Republican controlled Congress as want it to result in a Democrat controlled one.

This is the first time in almost two years Republicans have finally closed the polling gap. Democrats have held at least a small lead over Republicans in NBC/WSJ polling since October of 2011.

This is especially good news for Republicans because they don’t even need to win more votes than the Democrats to make real gains in Congress next year.

Yes, Neoliberal policies are poised to deliver the same kind of resounding success they did in 2010.  Heck of a job, congratulations.

I just love these last minute votes.  I’m convinced they hold them this way so we don’t have time to organize.

Yay democracy.

GOP insurrection heats up over surveillance

By David Sirota, Salon

Monday, Jul 22, 2013 2:56 PM UTC

In an attempt to prevent Washington lawmakers from having to publicly declare their position on the National Security Administration’s mass surveillance, will congressional leaders formally snuff out one of the last embers of democracy in the U.S. House? This is one of the big questions this week in Washington, as the Republicans who control the House are resorting to brass knuckled tactics in an effort to thwart one of their own.

…

As I learned from four-plus years working in the Capitol’s lower chamber during President Bush’s first term, the U.S. House of Representatives runs like a politburo did in a typical Soviet satellite state. Decisions about what even gets voted on – much less passed – usually happen behind closed doors, with a handful of party leaders handing down orders to the rest of the body’s loyal apparatchiks. That means most legislative drama can’t be seen by voters, and it means congresspeople rarely have to cast public votes on anything the House Speaker doesn’t want them to vote on. By design, this system (which differs from the Senate, where all members can force votes on almost anything) deliberately protects majority party House members from having to cast embarrassing campaign-ad-worthy public votes against the minority party’s proposals.

…

Assuming Amash and the bipartisan coalition around his amendment doesn’t back down, there should be little doubt that Permanent Washington and supporters of mass surveillance will soon pivot to the “support our troops” frame. As they always do, they will insist that any delay of any bill relating to the military – in this case the Defense Appropriations Bill – is akin to not supporting the troops. Appealing to the most cartoonish mantras of militarism to try to force the bipartisan coalition to back down, the assertion will be that Amash’s amendment is unpatriotic and treasonous because it might delay the passage of the bill, which would supposedly then leave American troops naked and unarmed on various battlefields across the world.

…

Amash’s amendment says the opposite – that Congress needs to have an open debate over that program. In the process, he and his bipartisan coalition have engineered a big moment in the fight over liberties and rights – and that includes Americans’ basic right to know where their own elected officials stand on issues as fundamental as privacy and mass surveillance.

Should lawmakers respond to such a critical moment by blocking a vote on the amendment and then passing a defense bill funding more surveillance, the harrowing message should be clear: Congress will be saying that We the People shouldn’t be permitted to see where our government officials stand on key public policy questions, but government officials should be allowed to continue surveilling, collecting and datamining the most intimate details of all of our lives.

Yet despite their best efforts there will be a vote- probably tomorrow.

Amash (R-MI) & Conyers (D-MI) offer amendment to curtail NSA, NSA against it, vote soon

by Gaius Publius, Americablog

7/24/2013 10:00am

If you want to make a difference, lobby your member. House member phone numbers are at the link. Please use it. And if there’s an extra phone call in your future, you might check out the names in this list. They’re lobby-able as well. So far we’re on the upswing and the tide is with us. Might as well use it.

Me, I’m scoring this vote, and I’ll publish the list of heroes and villains as soon as I have it.

You, please do lobby. I’ll tell you why tomorrow, but for now, just know it’s not useless to act. You won’t always win, but please, do act. Rush Holt’s bill repealing the Patriot Act is also coming; you can join those who are causing a scene, and feel very good about it at the same time. After all, the NSA already knows what you think about them, so there’s nothing to lose, is there.

Snowden’s Whistleblowing Creates Climate for Critical House Vote on NSA Surveillance

By: Kevin Gosztola, Firedog Lake

Wednesday July 24, 2013 9:24 am

Introduced by Republican Representative Justin Amash and Democratic Representative John Conyers (both from the state of Michigan), it would restrict the “federal government’s ability under the Patriot Act to collect information on Americans who are not connected to an ongoing investigation. The bill also requires that secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court opinions be made available to Congress and summaries of the opinions be made available to the public,” according to the amendment’s sponsors.

A press release indicating at least thirty members of the House support the amendment contends the Limiting Internet and Blanket Electronic Review of Telecommunications and Email Act (LIBERT-E Act) imposes reasonable limits on the federal government’s surveillance.” It “puts some teeth into the FISA court’s determination of whether records the government wants are actually relevant to an investigation, and “it also makes sure that innocent Americans’ information isn’t needlessly swept up into a government database” by attempting to prohibit the “type of government dragnet that the leaked Verizon order revealed.”

President Barack Obama, however, opposes this effort to curtail the power of the NSA. White House spokesperson Jay Carney said, “We oppose the current effort in the House to hastily dismantle one of our Intelligence Community’s counter-terrorism tools.” And, “His blunt approach is not the product of an informed, open, or deliberative process. We urge the House to reject the Amash Amendment, and instead move forward with an approach that appropriately takes into account the need for a reasoned review of what tools can best secure the nation.” (Notice the White House does not mention the name of the Democratic Representative who also introduced the amendment, misrepresenting the bipartisan support for this amendment.)

NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander also spent yesterday holding emergency "top secret" meetings with Republicans and Democrats to convince them not to restrict the power of the NSA to conduct surveillance that would broadly sweep up Americans’ communications.

The Liars Are "Very Concerned" Program They Lied About Will Be Defunded

By: emptywheel

Tuesday July 23, 2013 10:11 pm

Buried at the bottom of a broader story on opposition to the Amash-Conyers amendment, CNN offers a very solicitous account of the White House statement opposing it, making no note of how absurd the entire premise is.

…

CNN does, however, provide James Clapper and Keith Alexander an opportunity to give their readout of the TS/SCI briefings they gave Congress.

In spite of reporting describing it as a lobbying session, these noted prevaricators claim their job wasn’t to persuade, it was just to answer questions.

…

Sort of gives you the impression they failed to persuade, huh?

But if their mission was really to “provide information” and “get the facts on the table,” then what have all the unclassified briefings been about? Is this claim they were only now “providing information” yet another indication that they were, perhaps, misinforming before? Again?

That, to me, is a big part of this story: that two men who have lied repeatedly about these programs felt the need to conduct Top Secret briefings to provide information that hadn’t been provided in the past.

…

This program is problematic for several reasons: it is overkill to achieve its stated purpose and it violates the intent of the Fourth Amendment.

But add to that the trust those overseeing the program chose to piss away by lying about this collection repeatedly in the past.

If Amash-Conyers does pass (and it’s still a long-shot unless each and every one of you manages to convince your Rep to support it), it will be in significant part because Clapper and Alexander abused the trust placed in them.

Update:

Amash-Conyers Fails 205-217

By: emptywheel

Wednesday July 24, 2013 7:00 pm

In one of the closest votes in a long time for civil liberties, the Amash-Conyers amendment just failed, but only barely, by a vote of 205-217.

The debate was lively, with Mike Rogers, Michele Bachmann, and Iraq verteran Tom Cotton spoke against the amendment; Amash closely managed time to include a broad mix of Democrats and Republicans.

The amendment outlawed U.S. assistance to the Contras for the purpose of overthrowing the Nicaraguan government, while allowing assistance for other purposes.

Beyond restricting overt U.S. support of the Contras, the most significant effect of the Boland Amendment was the Iran-Contra Affair, during which the Reagan Administration circumvented the Amendment in order to continue supplying arms to the Contras, behind the back of Congress.

House forces vote on amendment that would limit NSA bulk surveillance

Spencer Ackerman, The Guardian

Tuesday 23 July 2013 15.26 EDT

Republican congressman Justin Amash prevailed in securing a vote for his amendment to a crucial funding bill for the Department of Defense that “ends authority for the blanket collection of records under the Patriot Act.”

“The people have spoken through their representatives,” Amash told the Guardian on Tuesday. “This is an opportunity to vote on something that will substantially limit the ability of the NSA to collect their phone records without suspicion.”

…

In a sign of how crucial the NSA considers its bulk phone records collection, which a secret surveillance court reapproved on Friday, its director, General Keith Alexander, held a four-hour classified briefing with members of Congress. Alexander’s meeting was listed as “top-secret” and divided into two two-hour sessions, the first for Republicans and the second for Democrats. Staffers for the legislators were not permitted to attend.

…

Amash’s amendment, supported by a Michigan Democrat, John Conyers, unexpectedly made it through the House rules committee late on Monday night, a feat for which the second-term legislator credited House speaker John Boehner.

The amendment would prevent the NSA, the FBI and other agencies from relying on Section 215 of the Patriot Act “to collect records, including telephone call records, that pertain to persons who are not subject to an investigation under Section 215.”

…

(Oregon Senator Ron) Wyden, in a wide-ranging speech, reiterated a warning that the authorities government officials believe themselves to have under Section 215 of the Patriot Act might also allow the NSA or FBI to retain bulk medical records, gun purchase records, financial transactions, credit card data and more. “Intelligence officials have told the press that they currently have the legal authority to collect Americans’ location information in bulk,” he noted

Wyden assailed administration and intelligence officials for describing their surveillance as limited in public remarks while secretly briefing legislators about their broad scope.

“The public was not just kept in the dark about the Patriot Act and other secret authorities,” Wyden said. “The public was actively misled.”

On July 2, James Clapper, the US director of national intelligence, apologized to Wyden for erroneously saying the NSA did “not wittingly” collect data on millions of Americans. While not naming names, Wyden alluded to a comment made by Alexander last year in which the director of the NSA said publicly: “We don’t hold data on US citizens.”

“When did it become all right for government officials’ public statements and private statements to differ so fundamentally?” Wyden said in his speech.

“The answer is that it is not all right, and it is indicative of a much larger culture of misinformation that goes beyond the congressional hearing room and into the public conversation writ large.”

That culture faces one of its first major legislative challenges as early as Wednesday with the vote on Amash’s amendment. There are others: a Senate bill introduced in June and co-signed by Wyden would compel declassification of the rulings of the secret Fisa court that sets broad rules for the NSA and FBI’s collection and analysis of phone records and online communications.

Additionally, the NSA itself has indicated its willingness to consider abandoning the phone-records collection provided the telecommunications companies it partners with retains the data. And a former judge on the Fisa court wrote an op-ed for the New York Times advocating the secret surveillance court adopt an adversarial process, with a lawyer appointed to “to challenge the government when an application for a FISA order raises new legal issues.”

The 100th Edition of Le Tour de France comes to a close today under the lights for the first time ever on the Champs-Élysées.  By tradition there will be no actual racing except for a 10 lap sprint from the Place de Etoile to the Place de la Concorde.  This could in fact change a few results which I’ll list first below, but for the most part we are already done.

You may ask yourself, well, how did we get here?

Chris Froome, the Maillot Jaune, has continuously worn it since Stage 8, Castres / Ax 3 Domaines, first day in the Pyrenees featuring a Beyond Category and Category 1 climb, when his kick in the final 5 km put him :51 ahead of his team mate Richie Port and about a minute and a half ahead of everyone else.

This lead was cemented the very next day on Stage 9, Saint-Girons / Bagnères-de-Bigorre featuring 4 Category 1 climbs, when Froome overcame the absence of Porte and finished even with every other major contender, 1:25 in front of his closest rival, Alejandro Valverde.

It was as close as things got.

The standout from this year’s Tour has to be Nairo Alexander Quitana Rojas who not only won the Young Rider competition (eh), but also King of the Mountains(!) and finished 2nd in the General Classification.  Pretty damn impressive.

Your penultimate standings in the order of Classifications that may see any change at all-

The overall Points title goes to Peter Sagan walking away 100 points clear of his nearest rival, Mark Cavendish.  Where you might see some movement is in the 5th and 6th slots were Alexander Kristoff and José Joaquin Rojas are separated by a single point.

Points

Team time is determined by the top 3 riders to finish so it’s barely possible there may be a swap between AG2R in 2nd and Radioshack in 3rd.

Team

I suppose Andrew Talansky could fall off his bike but 1:20 is much larger than it looks.

Young Rider

King of the Mountains is done.

King of the Moutains

C’mon, you’ve got to be kidding me.  Any actual change would be a huge scandal of bad sportsmanship, even if someone did fall off their bike.

General Classification

Hope you enjoy the stately parade.

Sites of Interest-

• Wikipedia
• Versailles / Paris Champs-Élysées (83 miles, Le Tour)
• Versailles / Paris Champs-Élysées (Guardian)
• The Guardian
• Guardian Interactive Route Guide
• Le Tour

The Stars Hollow Gazette Tags-

• Le Tour
• 2010 Le Tour
• 2011 Le Tour
• 2012 Le Tour