The Dish

"The financial meltdown has given the federal government greater sway over individual companies than at any time since the Depression — and this kind of economic clout is likely to continue if the Republicans regain power … The Supreme Court has raised the potential of the ultimate wink-and-nod political quid pro quo — federal economic assistance in exchange for overt corporate political support. This is a new quasi-legal temptation awaiting any president of either party running for re-election," – Walter Shapiro.

A message worth listening to:

I know readers are befuddled by my relative silence on this. It strikes me as an extreme interpretation of the First Amendment, as extreme as this court's interpretation of the Second Amendment. And I think it will tilt the political balance toward a fusion of government and corporatism – even more than we have already. I'll leave the rest to Fallows here and here.

So we have a government fused with corporations, a legislature run by corporate lobbyists who have just been given a massive financial gift to control the process even more deeply; we have a theory of executive power advanced by one party that gives the president total extra-legal power over any human being he wants to call an "enemy combatant" and total prerogative in launching and waging wars (remember Cheney did not believe Bush needed any congressional support to invade Iraq); we have a Supreme Court that believes in extreme deference to presidential power; we have a Congress of total pussies on the left and maniacs on the right and little in the middle; we have a 24-hour propaganda channel, run by a multinational corporation and managed by a partisan Republican, demonizing the president for anything he does or does not do; we have the open embrace of torture as a routine aspect of US government; and we have one party urging an expansion of the war on Jihadism to encompass a full-scale war against Iran, an act that would embolden the Khamenei junta and ensure that a civilizational war between the nuttiest Christianists in America and the vilest Islamists metastasizes to Def Con 3.

There's a word that characterizes this kind of polity. It's on the tip of my tongue …

A petition from 47 health reform experts urging the House Dems to pass the Senate bill.

Josh Marshall talks to some sources:

There does seem to be some continuing effort to see how a Senate bill plus amending bill deal might work — both for what would be needed in political terms and what would be workable under reconciliation rules. But there's also a lot of happy talk about generally marginal and meaningless reforms that might be pushed through as consolation prizes. And what seems unmistakably clear is that the White House is taking an extremely hands off approach to the whole situation.

That should change, in my view. More of the latest chatter on the Hill here. My rethink of the lessons of the last week due soon.

Some pushback against the usual denialism. Joe Carter writes the following:

If he had bothered to do his homework (rather than relying on his ghostwriting interns) he might have discovered that a Democratic president— Mr. Obama—is implicated in the purported “cover-up.” According to the AP story that he linked to (but obviously didn’t read), Obama’s Justice Department looked into the the claims and found them baseless. Surely Sullivan isn’t claiming that Obama is in on the cover up too?

Actually, I read thoroughly the Seton Hall report a month ago. I have followed this case very closely. And in my original post on the subject, I wrote:

And the only reason we do not know more about this is because of the criminal cover-up under the Bush administration and the enraging refusal of the Obama administration to do the right thing and open all of it to sunlight.

I have subsequently complained that then Holder DOJ is refusing to investigate. Carter should not presume that we are all as blindly partisan as he is. Carter also argues that Horton's entire story rests on one soldier. It doesn't. It rests on the testimony of

four members of the Military Intelligence unit assigned to guard Camp Delta, including a decorated non-commissioned Army officer who was on duty as sergeant of the guard the night of June 9.

It also rests on the extraordinary lacunae and non-explanations and inconsistencies in the previous Pentagon reports, as analyzed by Seton Hall University. 

Carter does what fundamentalists often do.

He does not inquire into or rebut the full pattern of evidence we see before us, he simply smears the sources – "To say that Harper’s Magazine has the credibility of the National Enquirer would be an insult to the supermarket tabloid"; "I’ve never understood why anyone would ever take Sullivan seriously. His propensity to believe the most outlandish conspiracy theories should make anyone embarrassed to be associated with him." As in the case of Palin's bizarre pregnancy stories, the obvious recourse – to simply get the readily available proof and settle the matter for good and all – is dismissed. Why? If you're so sure that something is true, why would you oppose any serious attempt to test it? And why is a journalist advocating less information rather than more?

Carter has made his name as a Christian. It seems to me that very credible evidence that three prisoners may have been tortured to death by the US government would be worth any Christian's concern. It seems to me that a Christian would want to ensure that this potential horror is investigated by independent sources to ensure that it didn't take place. In a war governed by rules that led to widespread torture and murder of prisoners in US custody – again, factually indisputable – it seems to me that a Christian would seek to discover the full truth without relying on ad hominems, avoidance of the majority of the evidence, ignorance of the sourcing, and denigration of a human rights lawyer.

But then I actually believe the torture is evil. And that power can corrupt. And that freedom and decency requires vigilance from the citizenry, not blind trust in a God-fearing leader.

Fallows adds to his earlier post about the disproportionate power of 41 GOP senators:

Five Justices of the Supreme Court, outvoting their four colleagues, can work a fundamental change in election law that goes far beyond the issues presented by the parties to the case. (Among many accounts, see these two on Slate, here and here, and National Journal here.) Courts always have the option of deciding cases narrowly or broadly. The breadth of this one, reaching far beyond the merits of the case so as to enact the majority Justices’ views, is staggering even to a non-lawyer like me. A one-person margin* is enough for a change of this magnitude. In the least accountable branch of government, the narrowest margin prevails; in our elected legislative branch, substantial majorities are neutered.

Jay Leno will be headlining the advertizer-lobbyist suck-up fest that is the WHCD.