Obama never had much of a record to run on, but thanks to a series of absurd decisions between the election and today's inauguration, he has finally made a little mark on reality, in contrast to the volatile impressions of voters, and the stock market has already unpacked the message encapsulated in that little mark.

It isn't hope.

Here's a summary from Spengler, the sphinx of Asia Times Online:

From the day Obama was elected to 9:30am Tokyo time on Monday morning, the S&P 500 index has lost 17% of its value, after absorbing Obama's proposed cabinet and hearing the gist of his economic stimulus plan. That can't be blamed on Bush. It counts as the Obama crash.

Americans of all political persuasions are claiming to be optimistic about the next four years, but almost nobody is investing in anything, or lending anyone else any money to invest, or even buying the toys that Americans typically trade their lives for.

The pitiful discrepancy between optimistic blather in the polls and terrified hoarding is what makes Spengler's christening of "the Obama crash" so appropriate, and behind the pomp and circumstance of inaugural balls and parades, the hard world of dollars and jobs is whispering an entirely different message.

It isn't hope.

On the subject of the CIA, Digby writes a very good piece on torture - referring to a piece by BTD "Why The Torture Issue Can't Be Swept Under the Rug."  To quote mutual source Hayden from the LA Times again:

"These techniques worked," Hayden said of the agency's interrogation program during a farewell session with reporters who cover the CIA. "One needs to be very careful" about eliminating CIA authorities, he said, because "if you create barriers to doing things . . . there's no wink, no nod, no secret handshake. We won't do it."

For a while it looked like the only two guys in Washington who wanted to flush another $350 billion down the unaccountable black hole of Hank Paulson's discretion were George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

President George W. Bush's (decided) Monday to act on Obama's behalf and ask Congress for access to the remaining $350 billion of the money Congress authorized to rescue the nation's financial sector.

What a beautiful bipartisan moment!

Meanwhile Democrats were promising to make the next $350 billion give-away much more transparent than the previous $350 billion give-away, which means about as much as saying that a peanut is much more massive than a subatomic particle.

What else could you do with a grand total of $700 billion, except give it away to the same sub-prime speculators who destroyed the American economy?

Well, since sub-prime mortgages comprise less than 7% of all mortgages in the United States, meaning 7% of $10 trillion, meaning $700 billion...

You could pay off all the sub-prime mortgages in the United States for the same amount of money that Bush/Obama are disappearing into an almost unaccountable give-away to financial speculators.

So why is it so much more bipartisan to give away $700 billion to financial speculators instead of (for example) erasing all the mortages that made this huge mess?

For Barack Obama, it's just a matter of paying his existential debt to Penny Pritzker, the Queen of Sub-Prime Banking who created him out of nothing.

But what is it for the rest of us?

The Washington Post turns in a remarkably loving portrayal of John Brennan here.  It's not all their fault though - apparently the Obama staffers love them some Brennan too. And love is blind.

The latest addition to Obama's senseless Cabinet is Leon Panetta as Director of the CIA. Panetta is a budget wonk with a deep commitment to environmental issues and no expertise or experience in intelligence, so he fits right in with the totally sensless majority of Obama's senseless Cabinet, like the healthcare wonk Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, and the foreign-policy wonk Bill Richardson at Commerce, although he contrasts with the far-right-center minority of incoming Secretaries like Kenny "Offshore" Salazar and Ron "NAFTA" Kirk.

What we really needed at CIA is an expert in exactly the kind of intelligence that CIA has shriekingly failed to procure, which is to say human intelligence, and it would be frosting on that beautiful cake if we could also get a person of unquestioned integrity and generally good judgement in the bargain.

That person is Colonel (Ret.) W. Patrick Lang, who formerly supervised HUMINT operations worldwide for the Department of Defense, with a rank equivalent to Lieutenant General in the arcane hierarchy of Defense Intelligence.

He was the very first Professor of Arabic at West Point. At the Defense Intelligence Agency, he was the Defense Intelligence Officer (DIO) for the Middle East, South Asia and counter-terrorism, and first Director of the Defense Humint Service. He literally wrote the book on HUMINT with Intelligence: the Human Factor.

He was one of the few high-profile intelligence professionals who criticized the invasion of Iraq before it happened, and he later analyzed Bush/Cheney's distortion of intelligence to produce pro-war hysteria, in articles like "Drinking the Koolaid" for the Journal of the Middle East Policy Council. (Anyone who takes the trouble to read this linked article is likely to agree with the thesis of this diary wihout further ado.)

Pat Lang is a tough, brilliant, principled intelligence professional with high-level expertise and experience in exactly the places where the United States has to get it right , right now, after eight long years of blunders and lies. As Deputy Director of CIA, Pat Lang would allow Leon Panetta to deploy his outstanding political skills for the good of the Agency, instead of submerging them in the ocean of an arcane bureaucracy where he hasn't got a clue.  

   

Spencer Ackerman links to me today in his piece, "Do We Really Have to Call Steve Kappes a Torturer?" He picks up on the central charge of my post, that Kappes signed off on the rendition of Abu Omar. He writes as follows:

"The most serious charge against Kappes, as best I can tell, comes from his role in the abduction and rendition of Abu Omar, the Egyptian cleric taken by the CIA off the streets of Milan and tortured in Egypt. A 2007 article from The Chicago Tribune about the rendition reports briefly that Kappes was "one of those who signed off on the Abu Omar abduction." (h/t TalkLeft.) No doubt that's troubling. Extraordinary rendition is legally and morally problematic. Italy is prosecuting in absentia the CIA agents involved in the Abu Omar rendition."

Everyone agrees it was a major story today for the Minnesota State Canvassing Board to declare Al Franken the official winner of the recount -- but is it the end of the story?  We all know Norm Coleman can file a lawsuit to contest the results further, but will that really delay Franken's entry into the Senate?

Some blogs have suggested that Minnesota law is kind of unique in that the winner of an election doesn't get officially certified as long as there's a dispute pending in court, and John Cornyn has vowed to filibuster Franken if the Democrats try to seat him before he's officially certified.  So can Franken get certified by the state now, or does he have to keep waiting?

As specialized as the Internet is, I'm frankly surprised that there's not some source like the "Minnesota Election Law Blog" that answers all these arcane questions in the most minute detail -- and maybe there is, and I'll be hearing about it soon.  But absent some authoritative source, I thought I'd try to research the question myself.

I just read over andgarden's 2007 Daily Kos diary on Donnie McClurkin.  I pretty much agree completely with andgarden's extremely well-written and principled comments on this subject.  And I knew that anyway.  So why go back to 2007?  Because the comments to this older diary made for extremely interesting reading.  Unfortunately, the discussion about McClurkin unfolded almost exactly as the discussions about Warren have on the left.

The Power of One
by Nightprowlkitty, Docudharma, December 26, 2008
Also at Docudharma, Daily Kos, My Left Wing, Open Left, They gave us a republic, Show Me Progress, The Sanctuary, Edgeing and OOIBC

If you wish to repost this essay you can download a .txt file of the html here (right click and save). Permission granted.

Give Bush and Cheney a fair trial -- something they have not bothered with since they stole office.

It's funny how the powers that be in the media and government are running around with their big fat excuses as to why we can't hold these criminals accountable for their crimes.  It all boils down to "It's too hard!!!"

It's too hard.  It would affect too many people.  It would interfere with the crucial work of restoring our economy.  Blah blah blah.  Not one of these folks say, however, that no crime has been committed, no law has been broken.  No one says that.

I find that stunning.  We all know, at least those of us who have been paying attention, that Bush and his crew of crooks have broken the law over and over again.

And Cheney says "What you gonna do about it?"  And Cheney says "oh, the Dems knew about this and approved it, hell they wanted us to be even tougher than we were!"

And we should believe Cheney ... why?

I don't want speculation any more.  I want the truth, the facts, what really happened.  Only a special prosecutor can get that information, someone who is inured to the politics of Washington D.C. by being given the independent power to investigate.

It has been reported (here and here) that Stephen Kappes, current Deputy Director of the CIA, is a leading candidate for Director of the CIA under President-Elect Barack Obama. The NY Daily News goes so far as to say that "Some Democrats on Capitol Hill have strongly advocated" the nomination of Kappes.

Critics of the bloggers who were against John Brennan's nomination to a top intelligence position frequently whined that he was getting a bad rap (see Greenwald's article "The CIA and its reporter friends: Anatomy of a backlash"). One critic goes so far as to say "Brennan's hands were not very dirty at all. He was apparently thrown under the bus because some ill-informed bloggers thought they were [dirty] and the transition folks didn't have the will to explain that they were wrong." (as quoted by Greenwald from Jeff Stein's CQ article).

Let's see how they choose to defend Stephen Kappes. There can be no vague denials that Kappes had dirty hands - at his feet rests the responsibility for the bungled and unnecessary rendition of Muslim cleric Osama Mustafa Hasan Nasr aka Abu Omar.

News item, December 24, 2008: Bush withdrew the pardon, announced yesterday, to the real-estate fraudster whose dad gave the RNC $28,500.

It isn't suprising that when an old media dinosaur like Newsweek forecasts the future of the internet, what they see looks a lot like old media.

But even if you're expecting garbage, Newsweek has cooked up a surprisingly dismal brew.

Among the five WebMasters who are "changing the face of the internet," the most obvious pick from Newsweek's corporate perspective is probably Hulu, because recycled network TV programs are essential to all carbon-based life-forms.

Your internet future looks a lot like TV, and if one appliance isn't enough for you, the new internet also looks a lot like your cellphone, because Twitter and especially their amazing new feature StockTwits will be there for you. Order your Stock Twit t-shirt from their online store now!

But it's Newsweek's #1 top pick that fulfills their corporate promise to make every feature article nauseatingly banal, and... wait for it... the #1 WebMaster of the Future Internet is...

Tina Brown?

Yup. Tina Brown and her new capital venture with Barry Diller are filling that screaming void in your online-life that only pictures of Brad Pitt, Britney Spears, Mariah Carey, and Jay Leno can fill, and there they are, right now at 5:31 PM EST on the front page of the Daily Beast!

There's also some of what passes for journalism in the MSM on dailybeast.com, and there may even be lots and lots of it, because "considering that the penny-pinching site is rumored to pay a mere 50 cents per word, you can expect the budget--and talent--to go far."

It may also be worth considering what isn't part of Newsweek's future internet, and the first absence I noticed is...

You and me. We're not there.

And not just us unpaid political bloggers and commenters down here in the reader blogs... YouTube is destined to be replaced by Hulu, and, in general, anything that the little people used to do on the internet will soon be done bigger and better by our corporate masters, and Newsweek is their Prophet!

Now we know.