Everybody’s talking about Nancy Pelosi’s press conference yesterday. I’m listening to Republicans on cable yapping about this contradiction or that contradiction. But what I’ve seen very little attention to is the fact that Pelosi had an answer that really answers all the questions, a plenary answer you might say: she supports a Truth Commission.
Here’s where we are. There are various documents and recollections from around through the news ether. Pelosi’s accusers are saying she knew more than she admits. She says that many of these claims are false and the documents perhaps erroneous, and that she’s been consistent and true to her opposition to torture. And then she says, and I think there should be a broad-ranging Truth Commission to investigate what happened, who’s telling the truth and who isn’t. You can see it here at about 3:45 in.
That says it all. She wants it all investigated. The whole point of this storm about Pelosi is that her critics want her to be embarrassed and stop supporting a Truth Commission or any sort of examination of what happened. But she’s not. She still says there should be an investigation. Her critics still want the book closed. That says it all. She’ll have to stand or fall with the results of an actual investigation. Her opponents on this are simply risible hypocrites.
One of the big developments yesterday was Robert Windrem’s report about Dick Cheney’s attempt to get Charlie Duelfer (the guy in charge of searching for WMD in post-invasion Iraq) to waterboard a senior Iraqi intelligence official to get him to admit to links between Iraq and al Qaida. Remember, at this point it’s about getting a retrospective rationale for the invasion. Rachel Maddow had Windrem and Duelfer on her show last night discussing what happened. Check it out here. Maddow has a really good run-down of the key events and then the key interview begins a bit after six minutes in.
The undisclosed location is so yesterday: We review recent sightings on the Dick Cheney Magical Media Tour.
Contrary to media spin, GOPers think their party does have a clear leader. Just none of them agree on who it is.
If we need torture to keep the country safe, why did Bush and Cheney stop doing it in early 2004?
Maybe we’re lucky that President Bush didn’t get his hands on all the Social Security money just in time to blow it all an extremely over-heated stock market. But not all is lost. Not long after his Social Security privatization scheme went down in flames, President Bush appointed Charles Millard the head of the Pension Benefits Guaranty Corporation. And the former Lehman executive decided to invest a good bit of it into the stock market and real estate. This was back in 2007 and 2008. It’s not clear how much of the funds had been subjected to the new “strategy” before the markets crashed.
That was where things stood before investigators looked at it and saw a suspicion pattern of communications with big investment houses just before Millard piled tons of money into their funds. And now senators are asking for a criminal investigation. Moe Tkacik reports on the latest. And here’s our run-down of the key facts from the draft report of the Inspector General’s audit.
Former Sen. Graham explains how the press is getting bamboozled into focusing on Nancy Pelosi’s briefing at the expense of figuring out what US torture policy was.
Over at Cafe, we’ve been discussing Kim Bobo’s impressive new book, Wage Theft in America.
Today, Steven Greenhouse weighs in with a basic Q: what don’t corporate executives understand about “Thou Shalt Not Steal?”
You can find the week’s discussion here. Join us.
As TPM Reader BR notes, they don’t make Wall Street sharks like they used to …
I saw your post on Charles Millard, by chance, just as I was reading about a fascinating historical parallel. The book I’m reading is After Wilson, The Struggle for the Democratic Party 1920-1934, by Douglas B. Craig, University of North Carolina Press, 1992.
The very conservative DNC Chair John J. Raskob, who had been the treasurer of DuPont and General Motors and later was a leader of the anti-New Deal Liberty League, in 1929 wrote what Craig calls a famous article called “Everybody Ought to be Rich” in the Ladies Home Journal. Here’s Craig on p. 151:
He suggested the creation of a “Working Man’s Investment Trust” which would invest workers’ savings in gilt-edged securities. By agglomerating individual workers’ small savings, the trust would be able to buy large quantities of stocks and reinvest the dividends. If workers deposited $15 per month in such a scheme, he predicted, they could expect to have accumulated a retirement fund of $80,000 at the end of twenty years.
But wait a minute! Craig reports on the next page that:
Raskob himself recognized that stock prices in 1929 were unrealistically high, and he refused to countenance the creation of the trust until they stabilized.
Obviously, the standards of our robber barons have declined since 1929…