Some Mid-July Musings On Bankstas, Mittster, Condi & Our Chinese Comrades

The news last week that independent brokers for Wells Fargo, the nation's largest home mortgage lender, routinely discriminated against black and Hispanic borrowers during the housing boom was not surprising in the least.   Show me a banksta and I'll show you a crook.

The bank, which you and I bailed out to the tune of $25 billion when it shat on its wingtips as the housing boom turned to bust, did not even bother to fight Justice Department and agreed to fork over $175 million to settle allegations that the brokers had charged higher fees and rates to more than 30,000 minority borrowers and steered more than other 4,000 minority borrowers into costlier subprime mortgages when white borrowers with similar credit risk profiles had received regular loans.

Meanwhile, JPMorgan, the nation's largest bank, disclosed that loses from a bad credit debt originally reported as amounting to a mere $2 billion or so actually is more than $7 billion.  JPMorgan CEO Jaime Dimon had repeatedly reassured investors that the losses would be contained.

Well Fargo, of course, admitted no wrongdoing as is typical in banksta settlements and the $175 million will be written off as the cost of doing business, not a lesson learned.  This is because the financial community is incapable of reforming itself and will do things that are detrimental to its customers again and again while further feathering its own platinum-lined nest. 

Which begs a question: Why not start jailing bankstas?  Or better still, taking them before firing squads?  Let's start with the self-righteous Mr. Dimon.

* * * * *

The best line of the month goes to political analyst Charlie Cook, who writes: "If President Obama's campaign machine can define Mitt Romney before his own campaign even tries, my bet is Obama wins reelection."

With Election Day now less than four months out, the president and his surrogates have seized the initiative like a hawk seizes a chicken in its talons and they aren't letting go.  A few members of a news media that overall has been notably uncurious about how Romney became filthy rich are providing the incumbent with a steady stream of new ammunition about how he got that way, while the presumptive Republican nominee seems incapable of fighting back in a meaningful way.

The Boston Globe reported that Romney was listed as CEO and sole owner and chairman for three years after he says he severed ties with Bain Capital in 1999.  A Romney spokesmouth denied the report and provided documentation that seemed to show that it was false, but that ducks a relevant question: Why was Romney listed as holding those positions but it took Bain three freaking years to correct the record and he cited those positions in that time frame when he filed to run for governor of Massachusetts?  And why was he paid $100,000 a year over those three years while ostensibly doing nothing?  Good work if you can get it. 

Oh, wait a minute.  The Romney campaign later did one of those course corrections that have branded the candidate as a flip-flopper possibly without peer and explained that he "wasn't involved in any investment decisions. He was on the SEC filings, because he was still technically the owner, but hadn't transferred ownership to other partners." 

As Henry Blodget notes, this dog won't hunt: "Sorry, Mitt Romney, You can't be chairman, CEO, and president of a company and not be responsible for what it does."

Or put less artfully, does Romney want to argue that being the CEO of a company doesn't mean you have any actual responsibility for it?  Leaving aside the question of whether he committed a felony, let alone perjured himself in SEC filings Andrew Sullivan says that this state of affairs "is a little troubling for a potential president's future accountability."

Sullivan notes that as Bain CEO, Romney once owned Stericycle, a company that disposed of aborted babies. 

"The point is not that Romney actively managed that acquisition; he almost certainly didn't," Sullivan argues.  "The point is simply that he was CEO of the company when it did this and was drawing a salary for it. That means he is formally responsible for it. Romney's response could still be that he disagrees with the transaction, didn't choose it, and wishes that Bain had never touched it. But that kind of parsing of responsibility and trashing of his own company comes off as both weasely and disloyal respectively"

There is a simple way to clear up the apparent "confusion" over his tenure at Bain:

Romney should stop giving contradictory answers to reporters, which he did on Friday in the face of withering attacks from the president to the effect that his opponent is not the solution but the problem.  He should release his tax returns for the relevant period, which is his only lifeline to credibility.  But he shows no sign of doing that because he has something to hide.  Or a lot of somethings.  Or maybe just something huge.

* * * * *

I suspected reports that former Bush lackey Condoleeza Rice was high on Romney's list for vice president was nothing more a passing fancy, or more likely a curtsey to the NAACP after he was roundly booed last week at their annual convention. Republicans concerned about the direction of his listless campaign certainly were praying that was the case.

Rice was utterly inept as George W. Bush's national security adviser, acknowledging after the 9/11 attacks that she was an old-school Kremlinogist who was not focused on Al Qaeda and other contemporary threats.  She was a mediocrity as secretary of state, spending four years telling leaders of states not in sync with the Bush-Cheney axis that if they didn't make nice the U.S. would bomb them.  

With Condi on the ticket, Romney would own the Bush record -- the eight darkest years in modern American history -- and he of course wanted to do no such thing.  Which is why he did not call attention to a fundraiser for him hosted by Dick Cheney at his Wyoming home last week. After all, the former vice president remains the most loathed man in America.

Oops!  It turns out Condi is pro-choice and Romney had vowed to choose an anti-choice running mate.  It should be noted that she does, however, play a mean classical piano.  By the way, the Condi boomlet last less than 72 hours.

* * * * *

Many prospective voters tell pollsters that they don't give a fig if Romney is a 1 percenter and did some not-so-nice things to mom-and-pop businesses, including outsourcing and, it turns out, offshoring to our dear comrades in China. 

But with every passing week Romney's mantra that It's The Economy, Stupid gets trampled he slowly loses ground on the issue while the economy slowly -- okay, painfully slowly -- gains ground.

With every passing week that he refuses to address other issues like health-care reform, deficit reduction and immigration head on, he cedes a little more of an edge to Obama in swing states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida where those crucial independent voters tell the same pollsters that they aren't buying Romney's embrace of the tired,decades old Republican economic formula of further lowering taxes on the wealthy while emancipating Wells Fargo and other bankstas from onerous regulations designed to try to deep them in line.

Asks the Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol puts it: "Is it too much to ask Mitt Romney to get off autopilot and actually think about the race he’s running?"

Photo by Nicholas Kamm/Getty

Cartoon du Jour

Deep Cover via Go Comics

Moral Calculus & Joe Pa: Championships Do Not Counterbalance Sexual Predation

A lot of people believe that late great Penn State football coach Joe Paterno was neither villain nor saint.  I held to that view after the initial revelations that Jerry Sandusky, his longtime defensive coordinator, was a serial pedophile and that the university and possibly Paterno himself had engineered a cover-up in an effort to protect the university's image.  But with the drip, drip, drip of revelations since then and the release today of a damning 267-page report that found Paterno and senior officials failed for more than a decade to take any steps to protect Sandusky's young victims, I have changed my mind.

National championships do not counterbalance sexual abuse, and Paterno's accomplishments and legacy no longer matter to me.  That he, a Roman Catholic as is Sandusky, could not summon the moral strength to do the right thing and instead deliberately and repeated concealed facts about Sandusky's predatory behavior speaks volumes about the man he really was.  A craven coward for whom image was everything  ("Success with honor" was his motto) and sodomized boys were not to be fretted over.

“Our most saddening and sobering finding is the total disregard for the safety and welfare of Sandusky’s child victims,” said Louis J. Freeh, the former federal judge and director of the FBI who oversaw an investigation belatedly ordered by the university's board of trustees. “The most powerful men at Penn State failed to take any steps for 14 years to protect the children who Sandusky victimized."

“In order to avoid the consequences of bad publicity," the most powerful leaders of Penn State University "repeatedly concealed critical facts relating to Sandusky’s child abuse from the authorities, the board of trustees, the Penn State community and the public at large.”

A new and central finding of the Freeh investigation is that Paterno knew as far back as 1998 that there were concerns Sandusky might be behaving inappropriately with children.

Freeh also confirmed a CNN report two weeks ago about an email in which the high-ranking administration officials planned to tell the Pennsylvania Department of Welfare of a 2001 incident involving Sandusky sexually abusing a boy in a football team locker room shower. After having a conversation with Paterno, it was recommended that they offer Sandusky "professional help" and if he cooperated, then they wouldn't report him. .

Campus police pursued a claim by a mother that her son had been molested by Sandusky in a shower at Penn State, but their investigation stalled because of the lack of cooperation from Paterno and high ranking university officials. The report asserts that Paterno not only knew of the investigation, but followed it closely.

Paterno, in denial to the end, wrote in a letter he had prepared but was not published before his January death that whatever the failings in the Sandusky affair — his or the university's — it did not constitute a "football scandal."

The Paterno family, in an attempt to blunt the force of the critical findings, had issued a statement on Tuesday that sought to undermine the fairness of the investigation.  They too are now complicitous in the horror that will forever tarnish the place called Happy Valley.

Sandusky, who clung to the fiction that he and his victims had merely engaged in horseplay, last month was convicted of 45 counts of sexual abuse. The jury found he had attacked young boys at his home, on the Penn State campus and at other locations over many years, while one of his adopted sons came forward and revealed that his father had repeatedly abused him, as well. 

The fallout from the report is likely to be substantial.

Penn State would seem to be liable and lawsuits by Sandusky’s victims are likely. The university’s multi-million dollar sports merchandise franchise has taken a hit, while he president of Nike Inc. said today that he has decided to change the name of the Joe Paterno Child Development Center, a child care facility at the company’s headquarters.

Oh, and by the way, it is time to take down the statue of Paterno that sits outside of Beaver Stadium.  Now.

Photograph by Paul Vathis/The Associated Press

How Much More Perverted Can The Commonwealth Of Pennsylvania Get?

GOVERNOR TOM CORBETT IS A VERY BAD MAN

The Keystone State is out as a motto for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.  A suitable replacement would be the Perverted State given the serial raping of the state's young and vulnerable at the hands of members of supposedly hallowed institutions who believe themselves to be above the law, as well as the environment and now lawfully registered voters.

A confluence of events make this so. 

Monsignor William Lynn has become the first Roman Catholic Church official to go to prison for his central role in covering up the abuses of pedophile priests in the Philadelphia Archdiocese with, of course, the tacit approval of the Vatican, which it can be said without exaggeration has become the largest criminal enterprise on Earth. 

Jerry Sandusky, a former defensive coordinator at Penn State University, faces major prison time for cherry picking boys from a charity he ran and then sexually victimizing them, in some cases with the knowledge of his wife.  This too was covered up at the highest levels of the university's administration with the encouragement of legendary head football coach Joe Paterno, for whom protecting his beloved Nittany Lions football program was more important than protective vulnerable boys.  Did I mention that Paterno was a Roman Catholic?  As are Sandusky and Corbett?

How ironic if Lynn and the Sandusky ended up in the same wing of a state prison.  That wing could be named the Tom Corbett Wing For Perversion and Cover Ups, which also would be fitting because while attorney general, Corbett failed to act expeditiously once he learned of Sandusky's vile acts and the university's cover up, and as governor has made sure that nothing stands in the way of energy interests that are extracting shale oil wherever they damned well please through a method known as fracking. 

In fact, one of Corbett's first acts as governor was to pay back those interests, which underwrote his gubernatorial campaign, by rolling back environmental regulations to so great an extent that fracking, which leaves a toxic legacy when the last drops of shale oil are extracted, is now permitted in the commonwealth's precious state forests.

This brings us to Corbett's latest perverted act as titular head of the Pennsylvania Republican Party: A campaign to disenfranchise as many as 800,000 registered voters, or about 9 percent of the statewide total, simply because they lack photo IDs such as driver's licenses.  To no one's surprise, many of the about-to-be-disenfranchised are minorities who live in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and other cities without whom President Obama -- who handily won the state in 2008 -- might have a difficult time defeating presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney.

The scheme is not even a secret.  Last month, Mike Turzai, majority leader of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, addressed a meeting of the Republican State Committee where he ticked off a list of the "accomplishments" of the GOP-controlled House and triumphantly noted the new voter ID law, "which is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania," something he otherwise would have a helluva hard time doing because of the party's ever-shrinking base.

If all of this was not perverted enough, the Corbett administration, while cutting back on public education to the tune of millions of dollars, has signed a $249,660 contract with a company run by a Romney fundraiser to produce so-called public service television ads touting the voter ID law.  As if things couldn't get more perverted, the ads include images of civil rights marchers, including suffragettes, and the tagline: "Your right to vote: it's one thing you never want to miss out on.”  

The ads have now been pulled because of protests, but the disenfranchisement drum beats ever louder even though instances of voter fraud are virtually non existent.

Cartoon du Jour

John Cole/Scranton (Pa.) Times Tribune

A Special Report: When Bad Things Happen To Good Dogs. Yes, Yours, Too

Some of the Golden Retrievers in the author's life

Some 71 million American households have at least one dog and the number is growing.  We are increasingly making provisions for them in our wills, buying health insurance for them and pampering them with a dizzying array of special foods and nutritional supplements.

Although all breeds of dogs, and mutts as well, draw from the gene pool of the species Canis lupus familiaris, each my Golden Retrievers and the Goldies on the farm where I long lived had their own distinctive personalities, even in the cases of a mother and daughter and two brothers.  If you did not like dogs, you were not welcome to become a housemate at that farm and one of us short circuited a budding romance after the woman he had fallen for admitted that she didn't particularly care for them.

Our dogs, most of them anyway, looked out for us, barking furiously when a car approached and growling when they sensed a visitor was up to no good.  The dogs played us like cheap violins, manipulating us emotionally in ways that we never would allow people to do.  And we loved it.  We loved practically everything they did, from fetching the newspaper at the end of the driveway in the morning to putting their heads on our feet when we sat at the kitchen table at night.

Dogs are full-fledged members of many of our families and when they die we mourn them as we would a child or parent.   And die they all eventually do, although some breeds do so at an alarmingly young age of by now  predictable conditions and diseases.

My own non-scientific view, one based on a lifetime of experience, is that dogs live longer and healthier lives when fed good food (forget about special foods and nutritional supplements, which can be quite expensive, make little difference but are cash cows for many veterinarians), don't eat on demand and are given bowls of kibble in the morning and evening, based on their ideal body weight, aren't given table scraps, and perhaps the key element -- are exercised daily.  Not when you feel like getting off your lard ass but every single day no matter the season or weather conditions.

* * * * *

The smorgasbord of conditions and diseases that now seem ever present in most breeds is borne out in "Mortality in North American Dogs from 1984 to 2004: An Investigation into Age-, Size-, and Breed-Related Causes of Death" that was published last year in the Journal of Veterinary Internal Medicine.  And make no mistake about it, many of these pathologies are a result of overbreeding, or to be charitable, breeding for desired characteristics that can considerably shorten a dog's life span.

The study is a must-read for dog lovers and especially those who have or are interested in breeds whose life expectancies -- in the case of Goldies once 15 or 16 long years and now often as short as 9 or 10 years, and sometimes even shorter -- as well as greedy breeders who keep prospective owners in the dark about breed-specific conditions and diseases, which far too many do, as well as clueless, hands-off veterinarians, which far too many are.

Study co-authors Dr. Kate Creevy and Daniel Promislow examined data from the Veterinary Medical Database to determine the cause of death for nearly 75,000 dogs over the 20-year period from 1984 through 2004.  They classified the deaths into organic system and pathophysiologic process catagories and further analyzed data by breed (some 82 in all), age and average body mass.

Here is a breakdown of the five breeds with the highest relative proportion of causes of death in the two major categories:

 ORGAN SYSTEM

Gastrointestinal: Great Dane, Gordon Setter, Akita, Shar Pei, Weimaraner.

Cardiovascular: Newfoundland, Maltese, Chihauhua, Doberman Pinscher, Fox Terrier.

Neurologic: Dachshund, Miniature Dachshund, Dutch Pug, Miniature Pinscher, Boston Terrier:

Musculoskeletal: Saint Bernard, Great Pyrennes, Irish Wolfhound, Great Dane, Greyhound.

Urologenital: Scottish Terrier, Airedale Terrier, Dalmatian, Norwegian Elkhound, Standard Schnauzer.

Respiratory: Bulldog, Borzoi, Yorkshire Terrier, Afghan Hound, Treeing Walker Coonhound.

PATHOPHYSIOLOGIC PROCESS

Neoplastic: Bernese Mountain Dog, Golden Retriever, Scottish Terrier, Bouvier des Flandres, Boxer.

Infectious: Treeing Walker Coonhound, American Staffordshire Terrier, Greyhound, English Pointer, Cardigan Welsh Corgi.

Congenital: Newfoundland, Bulldog, Akita, Yorkshire Terrier, Maltese.

Traumatic: Australian Heeler, American Straffordshire Terrier, Jack Russell Terrier, Miniature Pinscher, Australian Shepherd.

* * * * *

Good scientific studies sometimes raise more questions than they answer, and "Mortality in North American Dogs" does just that.  One particularly interesting finding is that while larger breeds tend to have shorter lifespans, the larger examples of these breeds tend to live longer.

The study's authors note that "Dogs from larger breeds seemed to be spared death because of neurologic or endocrine diseases.  Neoplastic disease was a more frequent cause of death in dogs from larger breeds, whereas dogs from smaller breeds had increased risk of death because of metabolic processes.  Traumatic causes were responsible for death in dogs from larger and smaller breeds at similar rates.  Given these findings, we support future research into the disproportionate rates of musculoskeletal and neoplastic disorders in dogs from larger breeds to better understand their shorter lifespans."

Amen, while I hasten to add what the authors only allude to: Some dogs will live to ripe old ages if they don't contract these disorders earlier but will succumb to others later.  Then there are the victims of traumatic causes of death, most often being hit by motor vehicles.

The three most represented breeds in the study are, in order, Mixed Breeds, Labrador Retrievers and Golden Retrievers and Goldies have been of special concern to me because of my own premature death experiences and those of friends.

As I write here, the outlines of the Golden epidemic have been clear for over 10 years, but organizations like the Golden Retriever Club of America (GRCA), while funding studies on and supporting research into the cancers, have done little or nothing to rein in greedy member breeders who play God in knowingly selling interbred, cancer-prone puppies to unsuspecting buyers who end up heartbroken.

This blog post has become somewhat of a Wailing Wall for people who have lost their Goldens. Some 52 of them have shared stories of their losses over the last four years. The average age of these dogs was only 7.8 years.

The rationale of he GRCA is, in so many words, that it's not their job to educate breeders and owners about the epidemic. The club's homepage contains no mention of the epidemic and it has not updated its National Health Survey of the breed since 1999.

The GRCA has gone so far as to recommend that owners give their Goldies a regular regimen of a drug that has been shown to inhibit cancers, which is not unlike a car manufacturer recommending that drivers wear crash helmets when using vehicles that it knows cause an inordinate number of fatal accidents.

* * * * * 

An abstract of the study is available here online.  A copy of the entire study costs $35, but if you email me at kikokimba@gmail.com and provide your name and snail-mail address, I will send you a copy gratis.

Cartoon du Jour

Gregory/The New Yorker

Romney's Campaign In A Word: Pathetic

By all rights, Mitt Romney should be kicking Barack Obama's butt withBy all rights, Mitt Romney should be kicking Barack Obama's butt with a struggling economy and the widespread disaffection with the Affordable Care Act, the president's signature first-term accomplishment.  But most national polls show the two in a statistical dead heat or Obama slightly ahead, with Obama ahead in the crucial swing states of Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania. 

And now comes bad news for the presumptive Republican nominee: Obama's summer swoon appears to be over as today's Labor Department jobs report showed that 80,000 jobs were added in June, while one private data research firm put the number at a little more than double that.

What gives?

For starters, Romney and his handlers -- at least for now -- have decided to focus exclusively on the economy, hence his wishy-washy responses to the Supreme Court upholding the ACA and Obama's young illegal immigrant initiative, his silence on the botched Fast and Furious operation, and a neck-breaking flip-flop on global warming, which along with health-care reform was a matter of great import to him as Massachusetts governor.

 "This ain't Etch-A-Sketch, Mitt. Go hard or go home," wrote Joel B. Pollack at Breitbart, while Congressional Republicans also are not happy with Romney's languid or non-existent responses to the issues of greatest concern to them even as he raised $100 million for the second consecutive month.

 "Romney is quickly proving himself to be what some of us expected, very reactionary without a clear alternative to Obamacare," one congressman told The Weekly Standard. "The American people want and need the truth from him. Romneycare was both legal and a failure at the state level. Romney should just come clean."

Never mind that Romneycare has been a huge success by most measures, remains enormously popular in the Bay State and that the ACA's individual mandate is not a vast tax increase on the middle class as GOP leaders endlessly claim. Romney simply has been unable to seize the initiative and claim the high ground.

The reasons have been obvious since Romney entered the primary/caucus season:

* He is a moderate in conservative's clothing and risks alienating the Republican Party base if he tries to connect with independent and woman voters on the issues that they most care about, a factor that was at work in his muddled response to the Supreme Court ruling and his muted response to the immigration initiative.  The GOP base deeply opposes the initiative but the Hispanic voters he needs to win a swing state like Florida are wildly supportive of it.

Romney has tied himself in some pretty tight knots over the Affordable Care Act.  He has said that Romneycare was a good law but that the ACA, which closely resembles the Massachusetts law in key respects, is bad, which is an inane argument. He first flipped on the Supreme Court ruling, mischaracterizing it, and then flopped, agreeing with Chief Justice Roberts' tax interpretation, which infuriated party leaders and the deep thinkers on the Wall Street Journal editorial board.

"In a stroke, the Romney campaign contradicted Republicans throughout the country," the editorial stated. "Why make such an unforced error? Because it fits with Mr. Romney's fear of being labeled a flip-flopper, as if that is worse than confusing voters about the tax and health-care issues."  Hmm.

* His repeated claims that he would turn the economy around by creating jobs does not hold up to scrutiny.  He is, in fact, vulnerable because of his stewardship of Bain Capital, which destroyed jobs and lives when it gutted mom-and-pop businesses and outsourced and offshored jobs, as well as the skeletons in his financial closet, which include offshore holdings in Bermuda, the Caymans and Switzerland that only 1 percenters can take advantage of in avoiding the taxes that you and I must pay.

It is amazing that Romney continues to play high-risk-of-disclosure footsie regarding his financial portfolio and you can expect additional revelations like the news this week that his portfolio includes secret holdings like Sankaty High Yield Asset Investors Ltd., a Bermuda-based company, which suggests that he may be worth more than the $250 million estimated by his campaign.

"The question isn’t whether people can relate to a candidate who has tons of money," writes Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post. "It’s whether they will connect with a man who didn’t make his money the old-fashioned way -– by building a better widget -– but by sending capital hither and yon via clicks of a computer mouse to take advantage of arcane opportunities most people never even know about."

And it bears mentioning yet again that country is not a company. The U.S., as Nobel economics laureate Paul Krugman of The New York Times pointed out today, still sells 86 percent of what it makes to itself, while the tools of macroeconomic policy -- interest rates, tax rates, spending programs -- have no counterparts on a corporate organization chart.  And despite the bleatings of Ann Romney, who has her bustle in a knot because of the Obama campaign's "attacks" on her honey bunny, what was good for Bain Capital wasn’t good for America, and the campaign has every right to point that out.

Journal head honcho Rupert Murdoch twittered recently: “Met Romney last week. Tough O Chicago pros will be hard to beat unless he drops old friends from team and hires some real pros. Doubtful.”  Translation: The Romney campaign just isn’t ready for prime time.

Romney, it appears, will try to finesse his way through to November by saying nothing of substance, perhaps because he has no substance himself and his agenda is simply to become president.  He will offer no plans long on specifics whether it be health-care reform, jobs creation, deficit reduction or campaign financing.  And of course continue to flip-flop whenever it is expedient.  

That strategy might work under other circumstances.  But Obama is a formidable campaigner who had not yet really begun to campaign in earnest, is likely to eat Romney alive in one-on-one debates, especially when it comes to foreign policy, and has the power of incumbency to call on.

What this translates into five months out is an Obama victory and, barring a huge economic downturn or scandal, a victory by a substantial margin.

Cartoon du Jour

Jeff Danziger/New York Times News Service

Obamacare & Why The Ability To Change One's Mind Can Be A Mark Of Greatness

I have come, however circuitously, to the view that the ability to change one's mind about things that matter is a mark of maturity -- and sometimes greatness.  Few pundits, let alone politicians, were able to change their minds about the Iraq War after the premises through which it was launched were revealed to be bogus and the body count grew and grew.  Nobel laureate and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman's sea-change metamorphosis as an economist comes to mind as a rare instance in which a high-visibility media figure acknowledges that he was wrong about important stuff. Mitt Romney's willingness to change his mind repeatedly about everything big and little marks him as a man as small as President Lincoln was large because of his metamorphosis from being just another American who thought blacks were inferior to their emancipator.

This brings us to U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Roberts, who it would appear had initially rejected the individual mandate -- the keystone of President Obama's Affordable Care Act -- and was ready to side with the high court's conservative justices but then found that the mandate could be considered a tax that falls within the purview of Congress and sided with the eventual 5-4 majority.

I will leave it to greater minds than mine as to whether Roberts bowed to pressure from the White House, which I happen to think he might have, or understood that overturning the ACA would, in the eyes of many voters, brand his court as ideologically driven and open it to attacks from moderates and liberals, which I also happen to think he might have.  But justices do change their minds during the highly secretive deliberations that precede any major decision, and it may simply be that this strict constitutionalist -- which he has been most of the time in his seven years on the court; yes, probably even in the smoking turd of a ruling known as Citizens United.  At the end of the day, Roberts settled on the It's A Tax argument that had been pitched by Obama's solicitor general during oral arguments on whether the act should be overturned in the service of judicial restraint.

Which the aforementioned Romney has kind of sort of agreed with while angering Republican leaders who don't want to go off-message.  Romney himself, meanwhile, has his own health-care reform plan, but as The Times' David Brooks trenchantly put it today, he "now keeps in a secret compartment in subsection C in the third basement of his 12-car garage.

The reaction from conservatives to Roberts like the despicable John Yoo speaks volumes.

Yoo, the shameless former Bush Justice Department official who rationalized the use of torture, said that if reports that Roberts changed his mind are true, he "has not just made a mistake of constitutional interpretation, but of political leadership [emphasis mine].  His job is not to finesse the place of the Supreme Court in the political world, in which he and most justices are rank amateurs, but to get the Constitution right first and then defend the institution second.”

I am no fan of Roberts.  He lied through his teeth during his confirmation hearings and has tacked the court -- with an ample assist of the Three Stooges (Alito, Scalia and Thomas) -- to the right and to the point that it has become a de facto arm of the Republican Party. 

But in one instance, at least, the Constitution of which Yoo was and remains so disdainful, which leading Congressional Republicans also have shown themselves to be, deeply mattered to Roberts.  And because of that the U.S. at long last has a shot at reforming a health-care system built on greed and waste that has left upwards of 45 million Americans out in the cold when they have an accident, get sick or contract a disease.

Cartoon du Jour

Matt Davies/Westchester (N.Y.) Journal News

Cartoon du Jour

Jeff Danziger/New York Times News Syndicate

Supreme Court Upholds Obamacare As Roberts Joins Four Liberal Justices

America's great shame -- and there is much shameful about this once great nation these days -- is that it has been alone among industrialized countries in not offering its citizens access to affordable health care.

Consequentially, over 40 million people have no health insurance, emergency rooms are overwhelmed with people who have no doctor to turn to when they become ill, and the infant mortality rate is unconscionably high because so many women are unable to afford prenatal care.

The Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, was a huge step toward bringing the U.S. in line with those other industrialized countries by creating a more rational health insurance market while stopping well short of establishing a government-run program such as those in England, Canada and elsewhere. 

Obamacare would help an estimated 33 million people buy health insurance, cap insurance premiums for the poor, help those under age 26 stay on their parents' health plans, protect those with pre-existing conditions, require insurers to spend most of every premium dollar on medical care, as opposed to administrative and advertising costs, accelerate a decrease in health care costs, and provide generous tax credits to small businesses who provide health insurance for their employees. 

The 2010 law would require adults to pay either a modest $695 or 2.5 percent of their annual income, whichever is greater, through what is called an individual mandate, beginning in 2014. The mandate is a recognition that some people will not be able to afford insurance and aims to keep down the cost down through a mandatory surcharge on people who can afford it. There would be a modest penalty for those who refuse to participate.

But to most Republicans, Obamacare isn't about health care, let alone helping their fellow citizens from cradle to grave. In their view, the law and especially the individual mandate provision is an unconstitutional affront to the almighty free market. In other words, if people have an accident, get sick or contract diseases and cannot afford to be treated, that's their tough luck.  Really tough luck at a time when millions of people remain out of work.  Never mind that the profits-always-trump-patients crowd would never acknowledge that the almighty free market has resulted in a staggering level of health care spending per capital in the U.S. that is the highest in the industrialized world and more than double most nations.

Requiring Americans to buy health insurance is a violation of their "freedom and liberty," according to Representative Michael Bachmann, a vociferous opponent of the law and, with Sarah Palin on the sidelines, a leading peddler of the death panel myth, which has it that under a provision of Obamacare federal bureaucrats would rule on whether you and I should live or die if we are gravely ill.

That was the stark ideological divide -- The Democrats extending a helping hand and the Republicans slapping it away -- confronting the U.S. Supreme Court when it agreed to rule on a lawsuit seeking to strike down the individual mandate brought by 26 states -- all not coincidentally led by Republican governors.

The plaintiffs asserted that the individual mandate is unconstitutional because Congress overstepped its bounds in regulating interstate commerce by requiring people who lack health insurance to purchase it, while the provision in the law expanding Medicaid to cover millions of additional low-income people is an unconstitutional use of power over the states. The Obama administration responded by arguing that because everyone needs medical care at some point in their lives, they already are engaged in the economic activity of deciding how to finance their care and the Affordable Care Act merely regulates how they must go about performing that activity.

Based on the tone and substance of the justices’ questions and comments over three unprecedented days of oral arguments in March, it appeared that the relatively liberal Justices—Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan—would vote to uphold the mandate; Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito would vote to strike it down; and Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kennedy were potentially swing votes.  The cipher Thomas remained mute during the arguments, as has long been his custom, but his vote would be easy to predict.

The court's conservative majority has revealed itself to be a de facto arm of the Republican Party because of Citizens United, a decision that in effect allows corporations and wealthy individuals to buy elections, and other decisions based on ideology and not law.  As recently as Monday it struck down a Montana campaign finance law that would have circumvented Citizens United in an effort to put an end to a deeply-rooted culture of political corruption in that state that allowed ranching and mining interests to . . . yes, buy elections, while in siding with a minority of justices in overturning Arizona's draconian anti-immigrant law Justice Scalia unleashed a vindictive and deeply unethical attack on President Obama's amnesty for young illegal aliens born in the U.S.

The so-called smart money had it that in ruling on the Affordable Care Act, the high court would at least "sever" the individual mandate while letting the rest of the law stand, if not throw out the entire law. A minority, myself included, hewed to the view that a majority would take a more sensible approach and allow the law to stand because it is, in essence, little different from requiring Americans to pay income taxes or contribute to Social Security.  Or to riff on a Republican value, it is about personal responsibility.

I am happy beyond belief to have been correct as the Supremes ruled 5-4 this morning that the individual mandate is not unconstitutional and upheld the entirety of Obamacare with the exception that the federal government's power to terminate states' Medicaid funds is narrowly read.  Chief Justice Roberts, apparently drawing on his background as a strict constitutionalist -- or as "an institutional conservative rather than a radical reactionary," as Andrew Sullivan put it, joined Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan.

There were not five votes to uphold the law on the ground that Congress could use its power to regulate commerce between the states to require everyone to buy health insurance. However, five Justices -- Roberts, Ginsberg, Sotomayor, Breyer and Kagan -- did agree that the penalty that someone must pay if they refuses to buy insurance is a kind of tax that Congress can impose using its taxing power. ax if they don't. The other justices split 4-4, with four wanting to uphold it as a mandate, and four -- Kennedy, Alito, Scalia and Thomas -- opposed to it in any form.

Lyle Denniston, the dean of Supreme Court journalists, writes at SCOTUSBlog that:

"Essentially, a majority of the court has accepted the administration's backup argument that, as Roberts put it, 'the mandate can be regarded as establishing a condition -- not owning health insurance -- that triggers a tax -- the required payment to IRS.' Actually, this was the administration's second backup argument.  Its first argument was the Commerce Clause, the second was the Necessary and Proper Clause, and third was as a tax. The third argument won."

Because the mandate survives, the court did not need to decide what other parts of the statute were constitutional, except for a provision that required states to comply with new eligibility requirements for Medicaid or risk losing their funding. On that question, the court held that the provision is constitutional as long as states would only lose new funds if they didn't comply with the new requirements, rather than all of their funding.

The decision, which affirms the greatest achievement of President Obama's first term, is an enormous victory for he and Congressional Democrats. 

In addition to the political reverberations, the case helps set the rules for one of the largest and fastest-growing sectors of the economy, although it also will be a rallying point for conservatives -- which is to say Republicans.  The health care debate remains far from over and Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has promised to undo the law if elected, although his argument that Romneycare was different than Obamacare is now fatally wounded.

Under Roberts, the court has delivered numerous major victories to conservatives in addition to Citizens United. It could take up other major issues to which conservatives are opposed, including affirmative action, same-sex marriage and the Voting Rights Act in its next term.  And while conservatives were angry that Roberts, a George W. Bush appointee, had betrayed them, other presidents have regretted some of the decisions made by their appointees, most notably Richard M. Nixon’s appointees forcing him to hand over the Watergate tapes that sped his resignation from office.

David Bernstein, writing at the Volokh Conspiracy, notes that at first glance Scalia’s dissent reads like it was originally written as a majority opinion:

"Back in May, there were rumors floating around relevant legal circles that a key vote was taking place, and that Roberts was feeling tremendous pressure from unidentified circles to vote to uphold the mandate. Did Roberts originally vote to invalidate the mandate on commerce clause grounds, and to invalidate the Medicaid expansion, and then decide later to accept the tax argument and essentially rewrite the Medicaid expansion . . . to preserve it?  If so, was he responding to the heat from President Obama and others, preemptively threatening to delegitimize the Court if it invalidated the ACA?"

Notes Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo:

"[W]e may learn that President Obama sacrificed his presidency to push through this piece of legislation — the Dems already lost Congress over it. But presidencies are for doing important things not just for getting elected to second terms in office. And I strongly suspect that even if Mitt Romney wins and gets a Republican Congress, they still won’t be able to get rid of this law.

"That counts. That matters."

Reaction from opponents of Obamacare was fast and furious while Democrats seemed more relived than celebratory.

“It’s never been more important that we elect a president who understands the marketplace and will make job creation his top priority,” said Governor Bob McDonnell of Virginia, the chairman of the Republican Governors Association. “By replacing Barack Obama with Mitt Romney, we will not only stop the federal government’s health care takeover, but will also take a giant step towards a full economic recovery.”

Tea Party Express, a group opposed to the law, issued a statement saying it is committed to repealing it.

“The Supreme Court ruled to uphold this unprecedented intrusion of the federal government into our personal health care decisions. The American people still reject this legislation as bad policy and unwanted government interference with their lives."

"We will continue to implement this law and we'll work together to improve on it," said Obama, speaking somberly in the White House East Room, the same setting he used to announce the 2011 death of Osama bin Laden.  "What we won't do -- what the country can't afford to do -- is re-fight the political battles of two years ago or go back to the way things were. . . . It's time for us to move forward."

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, took to the Senate floor to praise the court, saying “the rule of law” had been place “ahead of partisanship.” Reid suggested the law would be tweaked in Congress to address some unpopular elements. “We will do that working together,” he said. “Our Supreme Court has spoken,” he said, cautioning against Republicans’ insistence on legislative repeal.

Michelle Bachmann, attempting to speak outside of the Supreme Court, had to shout over chants of "four more years." 

Click here to read the decision.

Photo courtesy of Garyhe.

Cartoon du Jour

Signe Wilkinson/Philadelphia Daily News

Cartoon du Jour

Pat Oliphant/Universal Press Syndicate

The Summer Of Love Reconsidered

America is still suffering the horrible consequences of hippies who thought utopia could be found in joints and intentional disconnect.

~ TED NUGENT

It has been 45 years since the Summer of Love and those unlovable right-wingnut Republicans, led by their knuckle-dragging shoot 'em up poster boy, are waging class warfare anew against a favorite target. But is it possible that gun-loving, Obama hating Ted Nugent has a point?

The Summer of Love actually began in January 1967 with the first Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco (photo) and ended with the Death of the Hippie March in Haight Ashbury in October of that year. In between, tens of thousands of high school and college kids drawn by media and first-hand accounts of the birth of the so-called hippie counterculture poured into the city.

" . . . [I]ts creators did not employ a single publicist or craft a media plan," writes Sheila Weller in an occasionally overwrought essay in the July issue of Vanity Fair.  "Yet the phenomenon washed over America like a tidal wave, erasing the last dregs of the martini-sipping Mad Men era and ushering in a series of liberations and awakenings that irreversibly changed our way of life."

Yes, I was part of the horde, although I spent most of my brief stay across the bay in Berkeley, which also was awash in free dope, free love, free music and free lentil loaf.

This from a 2007 Wall Street Journal op-ed piece by Nugent, who in his unrelenting bottom crawling recently declared that "I will either be dead or in jail" if Obama is re-elected:

"Turned off by the work ethic and productive American Dream values of their parents, hippies instead opted for a cowardly, irresponsible lifestyle of random sex, life-destroying drugs and mostly soulless rock music that flourished in San Francisco. . . . The bodies of chemical-infested, brain-dead liberal deniers continue to stack up like cordwood. . . . The 1960s, a generation that wanted to hold hands, give peace a chance, smoke dope and change the world, changed it all right: for the worse."  

Wring the hyperbole from Nugent's purple prose and he makes a very serious allegation: Those wild and crazy Sixties ushered in an era of moral decay that my generation has infected America with from family room to factory floor.

If you think you know where I come down on this, you might be surprised that I don't entirely disagree with Nugent, although the kernels of truth in what he says are obscured by his rank blunderbussing.

One kernel of truth is that the Summer of Love and flowering of the counterculture was open season for people who were more adept at changing hash pipe screens than their kids' diapers, let alone the world. This is where I do have a real problem. Driving a VW Beetle until it runs out of oil and blows up is one thing, but screwing up your kids' lives is another. And unforgivable even under the most lax standards of the time.

The vast majority of people who rode the counterculture wave have turned out just fine and arguably better than the right-wing crackpots who are hung up about anyone who won't worship their God, play by their rules and doesn't share their recidivistic intellectual constipation.

Many of us have indeed tried to make the world a better place and succeeded in many small ways. This is because the experience of the Summer of Love and what followed made us more curious, more compassionate, more humble and . . . well, more human. 

I have known a few of the disreputable slacker types, although there is something about human nature that has empowered most of their kids to shun their parents' behavior and grow up to lead comparatively normal lives.

Having dealt with that kernel, let's move on to the big nut: My circle of friends from that era – the folks who went on the road with me to like really far out Grateful Dead concerts, man -- are for more typical of the era.

One became a pediatrician, one a dentist, one a public defender, one a nurse, one a gourmet chef, one a building contractor and two school teachers. All have given back more than they have taken, and all have voted in every election, given to charities, done volunteer work, tried hard to be good parents and helped care for their parents when they became infirm. Yes, one of them died of acute alcoholism, but I believe that he was genetically hard wired for the disease and would have suffered the same fate no matter when he had come of age.

There is one more kernel of truth: 

Although Nugent doesn't address it head on, I suspect that many graduates of the counterculture have been remiss in not being candid about their own experiences with their children when the time comes to talk about stuff like sexuality and drugs.  

I come down somewhere in between, although I have been unrelenting in passing on a message that I took to heart in the Sixties: Listen to your elders. Listen to public officials and politicians. But decide what is true and right for you.

Colorized photograph, original by Jim Marshall, via Vanity Fair

Cartoon du Jour

Mike Thompson/Detroit Free Press

The Insidiousness Of Citizens United, Capitalism Run Amok & The Vampire Elite

Is the paltry consideration of a little dirty pelf for a few to be placed in competition with the essential rights and liberties of the rest, and of millions yet unborn?

~ GEORGE WASHINGTON

The U.S. Supreme Court's 2009 Citizens United decision was a perfect storm. As in the destructiveness of a Category 5 hurricane.

In one fell swoop, the court's conservative activists put a stake through the heart of our most cherished civil right -- freedom of speech -- in a ruling that conflated spending with speech and was easily the most twisted in 150 years.  In doing so these justices tacitly acknowledged what I and other clear-eyed observers of of our society have come to understand: America is now ruled by a corporatocracy that in some respects is even more powerful than the federal government, and at its head is a vampire elite represented by Mitt Romneys who thanks to Citizens United can use corporations and so-called Super PACs to buy elections.

And you're naive if you don't think that the Republican Party and its extraordinarily wealthy supporters won't try to buy Romney's way into the White House since Citizens United allows them to raise as much money as they can.  Or to fall back on the Supreme Court, which has become a de facto arm of the GOP, if dirty pelf doesn't do the job.

* * * * *

A five justice majority ruled in Citizens United that the First Amendment prohibited government from placing limits on independent spending for political purposes by corporations (and by unions, as is less well known) and bestowed on both the free speech rights of individuals.

The insidiousness of Citizens United was on display during the Republican presidential primary season as billionaire casino owner Sheldon Adelson kept Newt Gingrich's cash-starved campaign alive with a $5 million donation through a super PAC that was 1,000 times the $5,000 he could legally give directly to Gingrich before the ruling.

And this insidiousness was on display again when the Montana Supreme Court upheld a tough state campaign finance law designed to put an end to rampant political corruption in the form of corporate mining and ranching interests packing the state legislature by bankrolling candidates sympathetic to their interests.

Opponents of Montana's campaign finance law screamed blue blooded murder, declared that Citizens United voided the law and appealed the state Supreme Court decision to the U.S. Supreme Court.  Meanwhile, 22 other states and the District of Columbia are siding with Montana as the high court reviews the case.

A striking difference between the Montana law and Citizens United is that the law was upheld by the state high court after a review that determined that political corruption was indeed rampant while Citizens United was conjured out of thin air with no evidentiary record whatsoever.

* * * * *

This brings us in a roundabout way to the vampire elite who run the corporatocracy.  These include the banksters who drove the U.S. into deep recession and the private equity gurus who run firms like Bain Capital, where presumptive Republican president candidate Romney got filthy rich by buying and then gutting companies, most of them community-oriented mom and pop operations, stripping workers of their pensions and then selling the companies for obscene profits.  (Oh, and trickle-down economics, a favorite of Republicans, still doesn't work, and Romney's new best buddy, Donald "Birther" Trump, makes me want to vomit.)

The first people to make a fuss over Romney's tenure at Bain were not Democrats.

They were Gingrich, who declared that "The Bain model is to go in at a very low price, borrow an immense amount of money, pay Bain an immense amount of money and leave. I'll let you decide if that’s really good capitalism. I think that’s exploitation."  He was seconded by Rick Perry, who called Romney as a "vulture capitalist" and said that "There is something inherently wrong when getting rich off failure and sticking it to someone else is how you do your business. I happen to think that that is indefensible."

It is indefensible, but not when President Obama and his surrogates raise the issue and are accused by Republicans of wanting to destroy capitalism. In fact, there is nothing wrong with capitalism, let alone private equity or so-called free markets.  It is the excesses of capitalism such as insider trading that are wrong as several million out of work Americans can attest to.

Obama is spot on in noting that just because Romney was a buyout king doesn't make him fit to the run the American economy.  Nor does the fact that he became wealthy because the system is rigged, allowing him to pay lower taxes by exploiting Mack truck-sized loopholes.

A president cannot maximize profits for shareholders. He cannot create jobs with a wave of a hand like Romney destroyed them.  And by the way, when Romney finished his single term as governor of Massachusetts the state was ranked 47 out of 50 in job growth.

* * * * *

As noted near the top, Republicans will stop at nothing to try to buy Romney's way into the presidency.

Just the other day, The Politico reported that a confederation of prominent Republicans including Karl Rove, the Koch brothers and Tom Donohue of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which is another de facto arm of the GOP, plan to spend $1 billion to make that happen with the Koch brothers alone dropping $400 million into the bucket.

By comparison, John McCain raised $375 million for his presidential campaign while Obama raised $750 million.

What we have here, folks, is a political system with national elections that are quickly becoming cage matches between rival billionaires with the GOP continually ratcheting up efforts to suppress the non-white vote.

All of that must stop.

Cartoon du Jour

DonkeyHotey

Doc Watson (1923-2012)

More here.

The Banish Cable TV Revolution Is Being Televised & That's Just The Start

Frank "The Fixer" Tagliano is a former New York mafiosi and restaurant owner who after testifying against his mob boss joins the witness protection program. Intrigued by Lillehammer after watching the 1994 Winter Olympics, he is relocated by the FBI to the picturesque town in northern Norway under the assumed name of Giovanni "Johnny" Henriksen.

That is the outlandish premise of Lillyhammer, Netflix first original series.  And while the series abounds with cliches, it is hilarious as Johnny, played to perfection by Steve Van Zandt and backed by an all-Norwegian cast, soon discovers that being an unemployed immigrant is not easy.  Johnny resorts to his old ways, which include buying a restaurant and getting what he wants through intimidation, when necessary, and sometimes worse. 

Van Zandt is, of course, a legend.  He played Silvio Dante in The Sopranos, is the longtime rhythm guitarist in Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band and has his own solo career. 


Reviews have been mixed since all eight 45-minute episodes of Lillyhammer became available through webstreaming in February.  Some critics were put off by the cliches (one local tells Johnny that "You seem to know a lot about guns and pistols for a restaurant guy") and others found the  subtitles annoying.  Meh. 


Van Zandt, who co-produced Lillyhammer, has described it as a "dramedy" and there indeed are dramatic elements.  A local constable believes that Johnny is a terrorist in Norwegian mufti who was released from Guantánamo Bay and is up to no good, the mob boss he ratted out gets wind of his whereabouts, and other shenanigans.  But it is over-the-top funny with only dollops of violence.

"We're pushing the envelope as far as violence is concerned," Van Zandt told an interviewer. "[The Norwegians] just don't have any -- they don't allow it. You can have sex in prime time there, but violence is not cool."

* * * * *

When I shuttered the pied-à-terre and I moved to the mountain retreat fulltime, I bid an unfond adieu to a $50 a month cable television bill.  Beyond Turner Classic Movies, The Weather Channel and occasional sports, the other 80 or so channels had gone unwatched.  

For about $1,000 -- or less than two years worth of cable -- I bought a 37-inch HDTV, a Blu-Ray DVD player, wireless Internet router and a Roku, a marvelous little box through which we webstream movies, television and other content that are mated to a 10-year-old Sony amplifier-tuner and Bose speakers and an eight-year-old MacBook laptop.  Oh, and two ridiculously expensive HDMI cables, which are Digital Age counterparts of RCA cables.

Roku streams Netflix, Amazon, Crackle and dozens of other channels, including the estimable TED Talks.  Netflix sets us back $16 a month for both DVDs and webstreaming, while Amazon is substantially free because we are Amazon Prime members, and Crackle, TED Talks and many other channels are just plain free.


There will be some additional expenses en route to webstreaming nirvana.  

Speaking of the Olympics, we will want to watch the London Games this summer, but not what NBC Sports wants us to watch, which is lots of swimming, gymnastics, track and field and . . . did I say gymnastics?  We will be able to cherry pick events and watch them at our leisure.  Without commercial interruption.

Cartoon du Jour

Matt Bors/Universal Uclick

Iraq: Your Precious Tax Dollars At Work

Save for some Republicans who remain blindered to larger realities, most people concluded long ago that the Iraq war was a fool's mission that wasted thousands of American and many tens of thousands of Iraqi lives, bled resources from the war in Afghanistan, bankrupted the federal treasury, lowered the U.S.'s standing in the world, and accomplished none of its goals save for taking out Saddam Hussein, who while a very bad man posed no threat to the U.S. or the Middle East, let alone had any links to the 9/11 attacks.

One of the goals of Operation Iraqi Freedom was to transform the country into a democracy, in this case at point of gun, which of course has not happened.  In point of fact, Iraq today is less stable than it was at the outset of the 2003 invasion with a Shiite thug beholden to Iran -- which has emerged as the big winner in the wake of the eight-year American occupation -- as its prime minister.

The latest casualty of the war is an ambitious multibillion-dollar State Department police training program that was to be the centerpiece of the post-occupation civilian mission.  The original 350 American law enforcement officers, backed by 1,000 support personnel, have been scaled back to 50 and even they may be withdrawn by the end of the year.

The failure of the program is a metaphor for waning American influence, indifference on the part of many Iraqis, and muscle flexing by the government led by Prime Minister Al-Maliki, whose assertion of national sovereignty took U.S. officials by surprise and hastened the withdrawal of the last combat troops.

Besides which, no one at State bothered to asks the Iraqis if they even wanted the program.  Oh, and repeated efforts by auditors for the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) to examine the program's books have been rebuffed with "trust us, we're the government" rejoinders.

In all, some $7.3 billion has been spend on police training since 2003, which prompted HuffPo commentator Peter Van Buren to write, "Ka-ching! Anybody's hometown in need of $7.3 billion in federal funds? Hah, you can't have it if you're American, it is only for Iraq!"

Meanwhile, a SIGIR investigation found that some U.S. commanders believe funds for relief and reconstruction may have ended up benefiting insurgents.

The watchdog agency surveyed officers and officials associated with the Commander's Emergency Response Programme (CERP), a fund used by American military officers for projects totaling $4 billion to boost rebuilding in their areas of responsibility.

"Some commanders indicated that the diversion of CERP project funds may have benefited insurgents," SIGIR said in a report.  "Money . . . was found during raids on insurgents (along with) admission from contractors that they paid money 'for protection' . . . There was substantial evidence that the local authorities were stealing right off the top."

About 150 U.S. troops remain in Iraq under the authority of the U.S. embassy in Baghdad.

Photograph by Ayman Oghanna for The New York Times