picoupdate

The MBS market has picked back up about a third* of yesterday's losses, btw. If this sustains look for rates just just shy of 6%. (5.875, etc.) Rumours are that the Fed and/or Treasury are putting on pressure to keep mortgage rates below 6%, but that's just chatter.

The US dollar has lost most of its gain from Friday almost as suddenly as it climbed. Too busy packing for Boston to figure out why.

* eta because I originally said half because .10 should never mean 10/32nds expressed in fake decimal but does and does not mean 10/16ths in fake decimal and either way it is stupid and annoying. I can deal with fractions DO NOT MAKE THEM FAKE DECIMALS AGH

Horrible thing in my tabs

As everyone knows. Dr. George Tiller was assassinated in a political act against abortion rights and providers. Colorado Right to Life is one of the organisations claiming they aren't condoning but really are condoning the murder, with crap like this, too. People like Hal Turner are going further out and talking about how the only thing the murderer did wrong was get caught, and talking to people about how to get away with it next time. Of course, it worked - with no one to take over, his clinic is shutting down. Here's an interview with Dr. Warren Hern, who has survived other assassination attempts.

And this week, Mr. Obama appoints an anti-abortion and anti-contraception activist to head Health and Human Services' Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. A variety of people (including myself) are not amused. Of course, I'm not amused by "faith-based" being involved in science in general.

Mr. Obama has, at least, suffered a temporary setback in his attempt to suppress evidence of the American torture regime started under Mr. Bush, with the Graham/Lieberman amendment to the greater authorisations bill being withdrawn - for the moment. Keep in mind we defeated FISA a few times before it came back again and passed without significant discussion. Greenwald:

How can it possibly be that, on the one hand, there's nothing new or revealing about these photos -- nothing we need to see; just move along -- yet, on the other hand, release of these photos is going to single-handedly prompt mass bloodshed and conflagration in the Middle East? Don't those two claims rather obviously negate each other?

We've already given the Muslim world a fair amount to be angry about: invading, occupying and bombing two countries for 6 years and counting; massive (and ongoing) civilian deaths; a torture regime; Abu Ghraib and Bagram; imprisonment with no charges. Does anyone actually believe that it will be release of these new photos -- which we're told are nothing new and quite banal -- that's going to be some sort of triggering event that causes mass Muslim attacks on American troops? ...

Regarding the Obama administration's attempt to suppress both the CIA video-destroying documents and the torture photos, The Washington Post's Dan Froomkin writes:

The president who came into office promising to restore our international reputation and return responsibility to government now seems to be buying into the belief that covering up our sins is better than coming clean.

Obama's repeated actions make that statement very difficult to contest.

Also, the New York Times on Sunday ran a pro-torture propaganda article as news on the front page, lying about the content of memos to imply that anti-torture appointees in the Bush administration agreed that the torture programme was not in fact torture and was legal. You can see this article taken apart, here, also here, and, finally here, this last of which I quote:

The lawyers were at the heart of the golden legal shield, and were willing to go through any legal hoops and shenanigans to call what is illegal "legal" because their political masters demanded it. (Notice that Comey even uses quotation marks around "legal" in a memo to Gonzales). He knows what's going on, and while too cowed to actually call unlawful acts unlawful, he nonetheless tries to stop them - because he knew that if people actually knew what Cheney authorized, behind the euphemisms and legal shenanigans, then the Bush administration would go down in history as torturers and pariahs. As they should.

So they destroyed the evidence - the CIA tapes, the last interrogation tape of Padilla, the records at Camp Nama (overseen by McChrystal), and suppressed as many photographs from Abu Ghraib and elsewhere that they could. Without the Abu Ghraib photographs, they would have gotten away with all of it.

Actually, of course, they have gotten away with all of it, subjecting the reservists at the very bottom of the heap to take the fall, as they continue to spin and lie and dissemble and reinvent the past. All with the help, of course, of the New York Times. But Comey was right. This will all come out. And we must not flinch or falter in exposing every single aspect of it.

Sullivan also asks:

Maybe we had just a few months to use the change of administration to force transparency about the Bush-Cheney administration's use of torture and abuse in the war on Jihadist terrorism. But isn't the notion that the documents relating to the illegal torture of prisoners should be withheld because of their propaganda value to al Qaeda the Cheney position? These aren't the video tapes of the torture; they are the documents detailing the torture, what it meant and who authorized it... I guess with the Obama administration appointing those who oversaw torture, i.e. McChrystal, we're back to covering up the Cheney years. Wasn't the point of electing Obama to put an end of the Cheney years? Or did I hallucinate that all last year?

More on Mr. Cheney's torture memos can be found here.

Oh, and Canadian news and research site Global Research (about which I know little; very trivial Google search results imply they are Canadian left) reports that Governor George W. Bush told a Houston journalist by the name of Mickey Herskowitz, then working for the Houston Chronicle, that he would invade Iraq if elected president. Attempts to go public with this story in 2004 were (again, reportedly) rejected by multiple press sources:

...The story was turned down by both The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post. He described the Post as “scared because of the Dan Rather thing, and they said to me, ‘What do you have in the way of evidence?’” Baker replied, “Here’s a tape of Mickey Herskowitz, who’s published 20-some books, long-time journalist of the Houston Chronicle, friend of the Bush family, telling me this story.” The Post said, “It’s not enough. In this climate, we need Bush on tape saying this.” Expressing his disappointment over the rejection, Baker said, “Well, that standard has never applied anywhere.”

The worst part is that I really don't have to add anything to this. It all speaks for itself, I guess.