Us liberal blogging types are such a destructive bunch, aren't we?  We hardly know anything if you go by what the MSM says.  

But what confuses me most is that the press seems ignorant of the CIA transition process as anything more than Brennan, and now perhaps, Hayden.  I have read very little on any other possible candidates.  Wondering if Obama will appoint a progressive, who agrees with his views, is apparently beyond them.  Even if that guy is one of his advisers!

So here is my suggestion, made once before, now expanded into its own diary.  Beers for CIA Director.

FDR is undisputedly one of the greatest American Presidents, but the greatness of the Great Depression was greater than the greatness of FDR.

Year Unemployment (% labor force)

1933 24.9
1934 21.7
1935 20.1
1936 16.9
1937 14.3
1938 19.0
1939 17.2
1940 14.6
1941 9.9

FDR canceled almost half the New Deal's increase in employment with his reactionary balanced budget in 1937, and it wasn't until the United States began tooling up for WWII that employment finally climbed out of what anybody would call a deep depression.

Center-right Democrats are busy creating low expectations for their new best friend Barack Obama, with nostalgic references to <span class="caps">FDR </span>and all the "radical" people and programs associated with the New Deal.

"Maybe Obama won't be as "radical" as <span class="caps">FDR, </span>but times have changed, he's the best we could hope for now, " and so on.

I supported Dennis Kucinich in the Democratic primaries primarily because I was afraid of a full-scale economic collapse, and because Dennis Kucinich isn't the sort of Democrat who gives away more money to speculators at failing banks than the most money Obama is even considering for economic recovery.

Wouldn't it be lovely if we could somehow recover that $850 billion give-away that Obama supported and Kucinich opposed?

What did we the public get for all that money? Did it turn around the stock market.

No.

Did it ease the flow of credit?

No.

We got nothing, and Congressional Democrats like Obama didn't even bother to ask where that mountain of money was going before they kissed it goodbye.

Paulson knows best! Let him decide!

Now Obama has an economic team that Hank Paulson could also play for, if he hadn't been drafted by Bush, and center-right Democrats and the center-right media are conditioning us to expect less from Obama than FDR.

But remember, out of all those millions of people who were out of work in 1933...

75% of them were still out of work five years later.

The BJP and international press have a vested interest in presenting an attack on foreigners in five-star hotels as religious violence, but anyone outside the media bubble might notice that a five-star hotel isn't a Hindu temple.

It couldn't be more obvious that the target of the attacks in Mumbai was globalization, but that particular story is too unpleasant for corporate media and their multi-national owners, so we're deluged with reports about religious animosities originating in pre-history.

But the peculiar fact remains, that the targets in Mumbai were foreigners in five-star hotels, and it's hard to imagine a more obvious symbol of globalization than foreigners in five-star hotels, unless it's the World Trade Center in New York.  

Even the foggiest outline of computerized exchanges exchanging billions of shares in an instant is already outside the realm of what any reasonable person would claim to comprehend, and that's just the phenomenon, the brute fact to be explained. Not even Newton could understand the physics of three orbiting bodies, much less a trillion, and if you found an explainer talented enough to explain a trillion computer-generated financial packages each impinging on all the others...

An explainer talented enough to explain this thing even to the most intelligent human could probably also explain it to a hamster, because the cognitive magnitude of the problem imposes a perspective where human intelligence and hamster intelligence dwindle analogously into specks on an infinitely distant horizon, and between one speck and another, there isn't much room for superiority.

But it may be possible to simplify our circumstances until our miniscule understanding can encompass them, and the first step down that road is renouncing our futile projects for understanding the world we live in now.

In an article posted on Salon November 24, Glenn Greenwald lists several catastrophic devices and projects of the Bush administration, like torturing suspected terrorists and propping up convenient dictatorships, and Mr. Greenwald mistakenly identifies these policies and devices as "pragmatic."  

"It is only ideological beliefs that permit opposition to those polices even if they are 'beneficial' to our 'national self-interest.'"

Glenn Greenwald isn't really discussing ideology here,  he's redefining it to mean "ethics,"  and this redefinition threatens to further impoverish political discussion on the internet, which is already vacuous enough.

The real problem is that exactly the wrong people are now classified as "ideologues" by the mainstream media and their Republican owners. For example, the New York Times says "Mr. Obama is planning to govern from the center-right of his party, surrounding himself with pragmatists rather than ideologues."

But it's the center-right Democrats who endorsed the invasion of Iraq and acquiesced in Phil Gramm's deregulation of banks, and if those guys were really "pragmatists," then their go-along-to-get-elected strategy probably wouldn't have had so many horribly impractical consequences.

Yesterday, Glenn Greenwald linked to what he describes as a "very realistic, and rather Obama-sympathetic, point of view regarding his appointments and what he intends to do."  This link was to Jane Hamsher's diary "Obama and a Paucity of Progressives."  

I have wanted to write something on John Brennan that has to do with his post-CIA business dealings and his chairmanship of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (which dates from Spring 2007 til about a week ago).  Like most other aspects of Brennan, his business and INSA dealings disturbingly reflect the status quo at the CIA and will in practice undermine Obama's stated goals if he is appointed CIA Director.

For this diary I will be leaning heavily on Meteor Blades' review of Tim Shorrock's "Spies for Hire" and Tim Shorrock's book itself, portions of which can be read for free on Google Books.  I want to use their insights to demonstrate Brennan's involvement in the corruption of the Bush administration.

Recently, I wrote a diary outlining the many reasons why John Brennan should not serve in any capacity, particularly as head of the CIA, in the Obama administration.  Fortunately the number of people questioning Brennan's association with Obama has grown.

If Obama appoints Brennan to head the CIA, it is truly a big deal and a big problem.  It is not enough that Brennan does not approve of waterboarding at this moment.  

not asked of Obama Sunday night on 60 Minutes which would tell anyone else out there what needs to be known (not that we haven't already figured it out):

"Is waterboarding torture?"

A now-deceased lawyer friend used to do products liability lawsuits.  In such cases, the defense would invariably present some flavor of products engineer who would testify as an expert that the product was not defective.  My late colleague's lead deposition question for the proposed  defense expert was really simple:  "Which is more important - safety or profit?"

Note that it was not a "when did you stop beating your wife" question.  Nope.  Far more subtle.  The follow up to a "profit" answer was along the lines of "So, how much profit is an eye (or arm or leg or whatever) worth, particularly when a guard (or warning or whatever) would cost another nickel per unit produced?"

The follow up to a "safety" answer was "Guess your client failed, 'cause the plaintiff was injured".

In this case, if Obama answers "yes", then his resistance to prosecuting torturers runs directly counter to his proclamation about "we don't" and it also runs directly counter to his upcoming oath.  Not only that, but "we don't want to look back" also creates a nice defense argument for every criminal accused of anything.

If Obama answers "no", then he accepts Bush's definition and there goes the "Change we can believe in".

If he tries anything other then "yes" or "no", he sounds like Bush parsing and tapdancing.

One time, in trying a products case alongside my departed colleague (he represented an injured kid and I was defending the kid's parent, whom the company had tried to blame for the kid's injuries), he led off with Question One.  That proposed expert held forth for close to 10 minutes, playing with "profit" and "safety", going back and forth.

At one point, he answered "profit" and at another he answered "safety".  We just sat there and watched him fill pages of transcript.

He wound up looking like a fool and, being relatively new to the business, actually seemed embarrassed about it.  We won the case.

I have no doubts about how Obama would answer the question, and it wouldn't be pretty.

As Obama puts together his transition teams for various departments and looks to future appointments, and we approach the exciting day of January 20th, I think it is important to be clear and to provide a strong body of resources for progressive opposition to John Brennan.  

I think it is important to recognize that we can do a lot better than John Brennan.  The purpose of this diary is to collect important sources, show evidence of Brennan's complicity in the worst of the Bush administration's programs, demonstrate Brennan's association with the most conservative aspects of the intelligence community, and show that there are better experts out there.

Thanks to the people who authored these sources, and esp. to BTD for bringing up Brennan in the first place.  I hope this is not too repetitive but I think it is important to gather all this information in one diary/place.

We boo because we care.

And Sarah Palin got it, but good.  She had it coming.  

If you were wondering how Philly fans knew when and how to boo - it's a required course.  I've attended it.

Driving through PA and listening the the main Philly sports-talk radio station, I once heard an entire hour devoted to a call-in seminar on "The Theory and Practice of Booing".  Summed up, per one caller in a seriously-thick Northeast Philly accent:

"The true fan has three duties:

"To show up,
"To boo, and

"To cheer."

Actually knowing the game is implicit in being a fan.

Meet the Democratic candidate for MI-9--Gary Peters.

According to the Swing State Project:

Michigan's 9th Congressional District will be one of the top targeted races for 2008. The DCCC has already aired ads exposing Knollenberg's awful record on veterans. Knollenberg is under fire from citizen action groups, and has been constantly bashed in letters to the editor throughout the district. Knollenberg is beatable. He narrowly won the '06 election with 51% of the vote, and has 15% less money now than he did this time that cycle.

It appears the 9th District has undergone a sudden blue trend. However the Democratic base in the district has been growing steadily for the last eight years. Despite the growing Democratic base, Joe Knollenberg continues to cruise to electoral success versus weak challengers. (emphasis added)