From the NYT:
The Obama administration said Friday that it would appeal a district court ruling that granted some military prisoners in Afghanistan the right to file lawsuits seeking their release. The decision signaled that the administration was not backing down in its effort to maintain the power to imprison terrorism suspects for extended periods without judicial oversight.
[W]hatever one [thinks] should be done with large financial institutions as a policy matter, surely we [can] agree that the executives at these institutions are primarily bad people. … These are people primarily motivated in life by greed. Not just by a desire to make some scratch, mind you. … They’re multi-millionaires who want to earn millions more. …
[I]t’s a sign, I think, of a kind of sickness running through American society that we’ve lost the willingness to just say clearly that ceteris paribus greedy behavior is not virtuous behavior. In the spirit of decency, of course, we recognize that none of us are without sin. It would be crazy to try to condemn everyone who’s ever done anything greedy to the gallows. But the fact still remains that greedy behavior is not admirable behavior and that, as Krugman says, it’s very unlikely that the “best” young people were going into finance. And to say that they’re not necessarily good people need not entail that they’re criminals. Simply the fact that the best people are people who aren’t primarily driven by greed.
We were Josh-less this week, but our small staff managed to crank out some pretty cool stuff in his absence.
Former President George W. Bush has withdrawn from current political debates to work on the historical legacy of his own administration — but Karl Rove and other old hands are soldiering on. That and other political news in today’s TPMDC Saturday Roundup.
Gen. Odierno says he believes “it’s a ten” that the U.S. will be out of Iraq by late 2011 — but also allows for some flexibility in removing combat troops by mid-2010, with the Iraqis having final approval over any changes. That and other political news in today’s TPMDC Sunday Roundup.
U.S. merchant marine captain is free and three of the four Somalia pirates holding him hostage are dead.
NYT public editor Clark Hoyt has weighed in on the Madoff op-ed disclosure issue. You know, the issue that editoral page editor Andrew Rosenthal blew off our questions about last week.
Does the rescue of Capt. Phillips’ really burnish Obama’s national security credentials? The AP seems to think so. That and the day’s other political news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.
Late Update: Spencer Ackerman thinks it does burnish them to a degree — but takes issue with the meme that says Obama needs his cred burnished to begin with.