Torture promoter Marc Thiessen did his best to continue to earn his spot as number 6 on Salon's The War Room Hack Thirty during this interview on Fox's America Live. Thiessen adds his name to the list of conservatives who are bashing the current lame-duck session of Congress as somehow corrupt or, as Thiessen says here, that "they have no legitimacy". As our friends at Media Matters pointed out back in August, conservatives seem to have some selective memory when it comes to how Republicans spent their time when they were in charge of Congress during the lame-duck session when Bill Clinton was president.

Conservatives disappear GOP's Clinton impeachment to bash "corrupt" Democrat-led lame duck session:

Conservative media figures have repeatedly claimed or suggested that it would be unprecedented and "corrupt" for Democrats to address "controversial" issues during Congress' lame duck session following the 2010 elections. But in 1998, Republicans impeached President Clinton during such a post-election congressional session.

Conservatives fearmonger about supposedly unprecedented use of lame duck session to address "controversial" issues

Gingrich: "[A]ny attempt by the outgoing Congress to pass legislation they were unwilling to defend in an election would be an attempt to thwart the will of the people." Writing in Human Events on August 4, Newt Gingrich wrote that "Democratic leaders today have been sending clear signals that they are willing to use the lame duck session of Congress to pass the most unpopular and destructive parts of their agenda," and that, "Like the Federalists' actions in 1801, any attempt by the outgoing Congress to pass legislation they were unwilling to defend in an election would be an attempt to thwart the will of the people." Gingrich continued, "It is hard to think of an attitude more fundamentally at odds with the spirit of our democratic republic than the idea that an elected representative should feel 'liberated' to pass bills the American people do not support once he or she is freed from the burden of having to face the voters." Gingrich urged his readers to asked their members of Congress to sign a pledge not to participate in such a lame duck session because it "smacks of the worst kind of political corruption" and "is an abusive power grab."

Rove: "We've never had a lame duck session that has dealt with a highly controversial and extremely consequential item." Appearing on the August 9 edition of Fox News' Your World With Neil Cavuto, Karl Rove said that "we've never had a lame-duck session that has dealt with a highly controversial and extremely consequential item," adding that it "would really be unusual" for Democrats to deal with issues like cap and trade, card check and tax cuts during the session.

Fund: "It's been almost 30 years since anything remotely contentious was handled in a lame-duck session." In a July 9 Wall Street Journal column, John Fund wrote, "It's been almost 30 years since anything remotely contentious was handled in a lame-duck session, but that doesn't faze Democrats who have jammed through ObamaCare and are determined to bring the financial system under greater federal control."

Geraghty: "Lame-duck sessions are not designed to be shortcuts to ignore the will of the people and erase any sense of legislative culpability." Jim Geraghty wrote in National Review Online's "Campaign Spot" blog on June 16 that "Every Republican challenger ought to be demanding that their Democrat incumbent opponent pledge in writing that they will not pass an energy bill in a lame-duck session if they are defeated" and that "When the people make their opinion clear, fundamental concepts of accountability and responsibility require that the opinion not be ignored." Geragthy added, "Lame-duck sessions are not designed to be shortcuts to ignore the will of the people and erase any sense of legislative culpability."

Beck: Democrats "ramping up civil unrest" with lame duck session. On the July 15 edition of his radio show, Glenn Beck discussed the proposed lame duck session with Rep. Michelle Bachmann (D-MN) and said, "[Y]ou tell me what stops these people. Because this is my real fear. They are ramping up civil unrest."

Read on...

And we can now add Thiessen here.

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Unbelievable. Just insane. Just look at the things we can learn from watching the way bank failures were handled in the UK. From Re: The Auditors, Francine McKenna's specialized site about the business of the Big 4 audit firms:

The leadership of the Big 4 audit firms in the UK has admitted that they did not issue “going concern” opinions because they were told, confidentially, by government officials the banks would be bailed out.

The Herald of Scotland, November 24, 2010: John Connolly, chief executive of Deloitte auditor to Royal Bank of Scotland, said the UK’s big four accountancy firms initiated “detailed discussions” with then City minister Lord Paul Myners in late 2008 soon after the collapse of Lehman Brothers prompted money markets to gum up.

Ian Powell, chairman of PricewaterhouseCoopers, said there had been talks the previous year.

Debate centred on whether the banks’ accounts could be signed off as “going concerns”. All banks got a clean bill of health even though they ended up needing vast amounts of taxpayer support.

Mr. Connolly said: “In the circumstances we were in, it was recognised that the banks would only be ‘going concerns’ if there was support forthcoming.”

“The consequences of reaching the conclusion that a bank was actually going to go belly up were huge.”  John Connolly, Deloitte

He said that the firms held meetings in December 2008 and January 2009 with Lord Myners, a former director of NatWest who was appointed Financial Services Secretary to the Treasury in October 2008.

I’ve asked the question many times why there were no “going concern” opinions for the banks and other institutions that were bailed out, failed or essentially nationalized here in the US.  I’ve never received a good answer until now.  In fact, I had the impression the auditors were not there.  There has been no mention of their presence or their role in any accounts of the crisis.  There has been no similar admission that meetings in took place between the auditors and the Federal Reserve or the Treasury leading to Lehman’s failure and afterwards. No one has asked them.

How could I been so naive?

If it happened in the UK, why not in the US?

Does Andrew Ross Sorkin have any notes about this that didn’t make it to his book?

Will Ted Kaufmann call the auditors to account now that he is Chairman of the Congressional Oversight Panel?

Is there still time to call the four US leaders to testify in front of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission?

What is the recourse for shareholders and other stakeholders who lost everything if the government was the one who prevented them from hearing any warning?

Certainly the auditors are now more inside the room than outside.  I never take them for toadies, just standing in the corner waiting for their orders after the big boys talk, even though others have said I give them too much credit for being strategic.  Their complacence is calculated. They are much too tied into the work, and the millions in fees, that have been generated by the aftermath of the crisis. Are the millions in fees for supporting the Treasury and the Fed’s cleanup of the crisis their reward for going along? Is this the same acquiescence that doesn’t seem to bother their UK colleagues one bit?

Reuters: John Griffith-Jones, chairman of KPMG in Europe, said the banking industry is built on confidence and that full disclosure is absolutely fine in a stable environment.

“Come a crisis, the government of the day and Bank of England of the day may prefer the public not to know… to control events in those circumstances,” Griffith-Jones said.

And so the government has controlled information about the auditors’ role in the US.

No one knows whether similar meetings were held between audit leadership and the Federal Reserve Bank and US Treasury.   No one has asked them to testify before a Congressional Committee. When their presence in meetings at Goldman Sachs and AIG, for example, was exposed via emails and correspondence subpoenaed by Congressional investigators, the names were redacted at their request.

Contracts with the Treasury and the New York Federal Reserve Bank are similarly redacted.  We can’t trace whether the audit firm professionals working for the government now are the same ones working for their clients who failed.  We can’t check that those who looked the other way when balance sheets were manipulated and assets valued unrealistically are the same ones now advising how to optimize the value of those same assets for the taxpayer.  We are unable to verify if the same partners who failed us at the banks, at AIG, at Lehman, and at Bear Stearns are now managing their assets for the taxpayer.

I'm always glad to see our court jesters like Letterman and Stewart and Colbert do their best to make sure something that the public should be paying attention to doesn't fly under the radar. David Letterman did just that with this Top Ten segment and so you didn't have to be a reader of The Nation or watch Rachel Maddow's show to know the U.S. screwed the pooch on this one.

How we ended up negotiating with some fake Taliban leader is beyond me but as Scahill pointed out, it doesn't bode well for any of our supposed intelligence on the ground in Afghanistan.

Black Friday!

I am so tired of this "Obama needs to move back the the middle" meme constantly being pushed by our Beltway Villagers. Andrea Mitchell and Charlie Cook took their turn this week while wondering if President Obama might face a primary challenge from the left. Of course, what they completely ignore here is that the Republicans have done everything humanly possible to keep the economy from improving.

Steve Benen wrote a piece last week on how the Republicans are sabotaging the economy for political gain, which apparently didn't sit too well with former Bush speech writer Michael Gerson. The fact that they're playing this zero sum game with our economy to regain power is apparently a topic of little concern to Mitchell and Cook; just whether they're going to benefit from the results of their obstruction. Once again the Republicans can behave terribly and they never pay a price for their actions by the media because as we all know, no matter what happens, it's bad news for the Democrats.

Mitchell: With his approval rating at 45% President Obama could face a primary challenge in his reelection hopes next year. A new McClatchy/Marist poll shows 41% of Democrats want someone to challenge the president for the party’s 2012 nomination. That percentage jumps to 56% when you ask independent voters who are just leaning Democratic. […]

What does he face, the president and especially looking at the economic climate, because that’s really what’s going to dictate what happens?

Cook: This is what’s scary is if you think about the fed issues…

Mitchell: Scary for the Democrats?

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It's very depressing to see what passes for sane economic policy in Ireland. In negotiating with the same financial terrorists who got them into this mess, Ireland is only asking for more of the same. I'm still baffled, and not just about Ireland: Just how did these financial "experts" manage to make the rest of us responsible for the reckless judgment (and likely fraud like that of the Anglo-Irish Bank) of those involved with these high-flying banks? Paul Krugman points out just how crazy it all is:

Before the bank bust, Ireland had little public debt. But with taxpayers suddenly on the hook for gigantic bank losses, even as revenues plunged, the nation’s creditworthiness was put in doubt. So Ireland tried to reassure the markets with a harsh program of spending cuts.

Step back for a minute and think about that. These debts were incurred, not to pay for public programs, but by private wheeler-dealers seeking nothing but their own profit. Yet ordinary Irish citizens are now bearing the burden of those debts.

Or to be more accurate, they’re bearing a burden much larger than the debt — because those spending cuts have caused a severe recession so that in addition to taking on the banks’ debts, the Irish are suffering from plunging incomes and high unemployment.

But there is no alternative, say the serious people: all of this is necessary to restore confidence.

[...] In early 2009, a joke was making the rounds: “What’s the difference between Iceland and Ireland? Answer: One letter and about six months.” This was supposed to be gallows humor. No matter how bad the Irish situation, it couldn’t be compared with the utter disaster that was Iceland.

But at this point Iceland seems, if anything, to be doing better than its near-namesake. Its economic slump was no deeper than Ireland’s, its job losses were less severe and it seems better positioned for recovery. In fact, investors now appear to consider Iceland’s debt safer than Ireland’s. How is that possible?

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Time for your weekly podcast from The Professional Left, our own Driftglass and Bluegal. I hope everyone enjoyed their holiday and have a great weekend everybody.

You can listen to the archives or make a donation to help keep these going if enjoy their weekly podcasts as much as I do at http://professionalleft.blogspot.com/.

Sarah Palin's still pushing hard on her "drill baby drill" mantra hard, especially in terms of the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, which she can barely wait to open up for drilling and a new pipeline. She went on Greta Van Susteren's show on Thanksgiving Day to criticize "the extreme politicians over on the left who want to buy into those extreme environmentalists who claim that there's no way you can responsibly develop a plot of land that was set aside for oil and gas development" -- particularly President Obama:

SARAH PALIN: Well, Obama needs to get up here. If he has as much time as he has on his hands to take all these vacations, maybe he should vacation in ANWR. At least fly over it, Mr. President, or play -- you know, play golf or do what he does. This is a national security need. This is -- there's that inherent link between security and our own domestic development. I think it's inexcusable that our president won't come up here and look at it.

Does anyone know what Palin's talking about here? Earlier this summer, Republicans tried attacking Obama for taking a vacation, until the WaPo pointed out that Obama at that point had taken far fewer days of vacation than his predecessor, the inimitable proprietor of the Lazy W Ranch in Crawford:

Obama has embarked on nine "vacations" since taking office, bringing his total days off to 48. Some of those trips lasted a day and some, like his Christmas holiday in Hawaii, more than a week.

By comparison, Bush had visited his ranch in Crawford, Tex., 14 times at this point in his administration and spent 115 days there.

Indeed, FactCheck found that Obama also took less vacation time than the revered Saint Ronnie, too -- though more than those lazy liberal Democrats, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter.

Maybe Palin has in mind Obama's trip to Asia, since her pal Michele Bachmann had gone on national TV and lied about its magnitude and cost -- even though its utter falsity was quickly established.

Indeed, the wingnuts of the wingnutosphere have insisted on referring to it as Obama's "vacation" in India. They were helped along in this by Glenn Beck, who described the trip as "$2 billion for ten days so [Obama] can go see the festival of lights."

BECK: All on the heels of his wife's lavish trip to Spain, now our president is planning another lavish trip. And our dollar is losing value and the Chinese are warning us. The media again is missing it. The bickering today back and forth about how many hundreds or maybe -- maybe billions of dollars this is going to cost to insure the president's security but no one is asking, "Wait a minute, it could cost up to $2 billion to make sure he's safe? Then why is he -- has he seen the Grand Canyon?"

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On this day in 1947 the world was still recovering from the affects of World War 2. The austerity plan was in full swing and the argument on Capitol Hill was how much we were going to be giving over for European recovery. Meanwhile, the glacially creeping Cold War got a notch colder with accusations of Imperialism being leveled by the Soviet Union during discussions on the Marshall Plan.

On the domestic front there were still arguments for and against rationing as we geared down from a war footing and tried to gear up for peace. As Thanksgiving loomed (remember, November 26, 1947 was a Wednesday) we were still in a celebratory mood, with a report from Hollywood on the Santa Claus Lane parade and even the Alka-Seltzer commercials of the time were geared up for the occasion.

Here are two newscasts - the first one being the evening news and the second one being a Special Edition of the evening news of the day for November 26th.

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving and that you didn't have to spend any time arguing with your right-wing relatives about this nonsense.

Right Wing Continues to Push “Socialist Pilgrims” Myth:

Despite a comprehensive repudiation by historians of the belief that the original Pilgrims were socialists who only began to succeed and prosper once they turned to capitalism, on this Thanksgiving conservative leaders and writers continue to spread the urban legend that the settlers were almost doomed by their socialist-ways.

Some background: according to real historians, the Pilgrims held their land in common “in the interest of realizing a profit sooner, and was only intended for the short term; historians say the Pilgrims were more like shareholders in an early corporation than subjects of socialism.” But the settlers, who came from different part of England, “spoke different dialects and had different methods of farming, and looked upon each other with great wariness.” Because of such difficulties, the colony scrapped the land arrangements in 1623, yet the colony held the first Thanksgiving in 1621 and the original “arrangement did not produce famine.”

But that hasn’t stopped the Right from propagating the myth that the failures of “socialism” forced them to embrace capitalism. In order to make the myth seem true, Fox News commentator John Stossel simply moves the date of the first Thanksgiving from 1621 to 1623.

And Rep. Todd Akin continued to embarrass the state of Missouri with some similar nonsense as well.

Rep. Todd Akin: The Pilgrims Came To America To Flee ‘Unbiblical’ Socialism In The 1620′s :

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