Financial Times – Obama to offer Bernanke second term
What do you do when you find out that you’re $9,000,000,000,000 in the hole instead of just $7,000,000,000,000 and are running up the numbers at a rate four times higher than ever before? Reappoint the guy who will print the money to pay it all off.
Looking to soothe markets that have gotten jittery after a brief, good run and, most of all, distract from today’s release of revised debt projections that were already delayed a month to coincide with the president’s vacation, President Obama today will announce that he is reappointing Ben Bernanke to another four-year term.
Bernanke, whose term runs five more months, should please investors and many on Capitol Hill who like his interventionist approach – printing money to buy Treasury debt, etc. – to markets.
Reappointing Bernanke is only a short-term fix and may look wise or foolish depending on inflation. Bernanke, who has actively campaigned for another term in unprecedented fashion, promises that he can rein in the oversupply of money as the economy improves – not so soon as to kill the recovery and not so late as to allow ruinous inflation to take hold.
Writer Krishna Guha gives the lay of the land for Bernanke:
“It follows Mr Bernanke’s extraordinarily aggressive efforts to fight the economic crisis, including radical interest rate cuts, loans to non-bank financial institutions, Fed-led bail-outs of AIG and Bear Stearns and and gigantic asset purchases – exploiting the Fed’s powers to their legal limits in an effort to prevent a second Great Depression.
Economists, investors and fellow central bankers overwhelmingly favour Mr Bernanke’s reappointment. However, disquiet in Congress over the exercise of extraordinary Fed powers has raised a cloud over his future.
The Fed chairman’s reappointment still has to be approved by the Senate, but his prospects look good. Chris Dodd, chairman of the Senate banking committee, on Monday said that ‘reappointing chairman Bernanke is probably the right choice’, though he promised a ‘thorough and comprehensive confirmation hearing’”
New York Times — C.I.A. Abuse Cases Detailed in Report on Detainees
A big day on U.S. terror policy.
At Justice, Attorney General Eric Holder two reports on CIA policy that detail more harsh interrogation techniques and the information that those techniques obtained. Holder also gave the green light to a federal prosecutor who had already been working on a case against agents for destroying videotapes of interrogations to make a case against agents for violating the actual interrogation policies. Holder also freed from the Guantanamo Bay prison and returned to Afghanistan a Taliban fighter who confessed to a grenade attack on U.S. troops that severely injured two soldiers. The discharge came after a federal judge threw out his case and the U.S. stopped using information obtained through controversial means. President Obama, meanwhile, gave the go-ahead to continue the practice of rendition – sending foreign terror suspects to third countries for interrogation so as to avoid dealing with the American judicial system – but with new rules.
The dump on terror policy points on the first full day of the president’s first vacation shows how fraught these issues are for the administration. After Obama’s damaging political showdown with former Vice President Dick Cheney over Guantanamo Bay at the start of the summer, the administration learned about the dangers in trying to shift public opinion on terrorist treatment. There are probably no good outcomes on the prosecutions and Guantanamo and federal prosecution questions from here on in for the administration. But some, like a public trial of a CIA officer or an investigation that drags on for years and reaches high into the Bush administration, would be worse than others. The good news is that at least people are talking about something other than health care.
Writers Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane share some details that may form the foundation of the charges against American intelligence officers who interrogated Kahlid Sheik Mohammed, 9/11 mastermind, and Abd al-Rahim al Nashiri, who plotted the USS Cole attack that killed 17:
“In another session of questioning, the report said, one C.I.A. interrogator told investigators that Mr. Mohammed was told that if there was another attack on American soil, the C.I.A. would ‘kill your children.’ Mr. Mohammed’s young sons were in the custody of Pakistani and American authorities at the time.
Among a litany of C.I.A. tactics, the report describes the ‘hard takedown,’ when a detainee was grabbed and thrown to the floor before being moved to a sleep-deprivation cell. It details baths given to Mr. Nashiri, saying he was sometimes scrubbed with ‘the kind of brush one uses in a bath to remove stubborn dirt’ to induce pain. In July 2002, the report says, a C.I.A. interrogator grabbed a detainee’s neck to restrict the prisoner’s carotid artery until he began to faint. Another officer then ‘shook the detainee to wake him,’ and the ‘pressure point’ technique was repeated twice more.
Interrogators also staged a mock execution in 2002 to intimidate a detainee. C.I.A. officers began screaming outside the room where he was being interrogated. When leaving the room, he ‘passed a guard who was dressed as a hooded detainee, lying motionless on the ground, and made to appear as if he had been shot to death.’”
Wall Street Journal — More Afghan Candidates Claim Fraud
The first of the results in the Afghan elections are expected today, and the fraud claims are mounting. Now the men expected to finish third and fourth, including repatriated Afghan-American with ties to the Clinton state department, Ashraf Ghani, say that President Hamid Karzai and likely runner up Abdullah Abdullah of stealing the election.
Karzai’s people were already claiming their man won 70 percent of the vote, further fueling claims of fraud. Both Karzai and Abdullah have claimed victory, but Ghani could get into a runoff with the two if enough of the ballots are thrown out in the canvassing.
Writers Anand Gopal and Matthew Rosenberg look at what today’s results may bring.
“Afghan and international monitors said over the weekend that the election was marred by fraud, especially in the south and east, where Mr. Karzai’s support is strongest. ‘The insinuations of fraud will hurt the credibility of whoever is elected president,’ said Prakhar Sharma, senior researcher at the Center for Conflict and Peace Studies in Kabul.
Some Western officials fear that turnout numbers will be far lower than the 70% in the last Afghan election. Low turnout with widespread fraud allegations, could hurt the legitimacy of the election further and boost the Taliban, who tried to intimidate voters away from the polls with a campaign of attacks.”
Washington Post — Specter Prods VA On End-of-Life Advice
Giving advice on end-of-life arrangements for terminally ill patients is wonderful for a family doctor or a pastor, but the Veterans Administration wasn’t up to the job.
Arlen Specter, looking to avoid the end of his political life after two weeks of sputtering and complaining about the treatment he got from some of his constituents over Democratic health aims, has jumped on the so-called “death book” from the VA.
The document, suspended by the Bush administration and revived by the Obama administration, tries to help ill veterans decide under what circumstances life is worth living. It’s also a foretaste of what end-of-life planning counseling would be like under Obamacare and why suggesting federal savings through streamlining the whole death process is such a horrid political proposal.
Writer Steve Vogel has the details:
“The controversy stems from an opinion piece published last Tuesday in the Wall Street Journal and written by Jim Towey, who was director of the Bush White House’s Office of Faith-Based Initiatives from 2002 to 2006.
The booklet, Towey noted, includes a worksheet titled ‘What makes your life worth living’ that presents various scenarios, such as being confined to a wheelchair, relying on a feeding tube or being unable to ‘shake the blues.’
Towey compared the wording of the worksheet to a political ‘push poll’ meant to steer readers to a predetermined conclusion.’”
Fouad Ajami — Obama’s Summer of Discontent
Ajami usually focuses on foreign affairs, so his take on the current state of American politics is crisp and rather bracing.
For those of us who have been spun and re-spun so much this summer that we don’t know up from down sometimes, his piece is a tonic.
“In contrast, there is joylessness in Mr. Obama. He is a scold, the ‘Yes we can!’ mantra is shallow, and at any rate, it is about the coming to power of a man, and a political class, invested in its own sense of smarts and wisdom, and its right to alter the social contract of the land. In this view, the country had lost its way and the new leader and the political class arrayed around him will bring it back to the right path.
Thus the moment of crisis would become an opportunity to push through a political economy of redistribution and a foreign policy of American penance. The independent voters were the first to break ranks. They hadn’t underwritten this fundamental change in the American polity when they cast their votes for Mr. Obama.”
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