Public-Private Partnerships - a/k/a P3s - have been ways to build or design or finance or operate roads - or some combination of all of the above . . . and the subject of strong criticism.

In its waning months, the Bush Administration U.S. Department of Transportation issued "Innovation Wave: An Update on the Burgeoning Private Sector Role in U.S. Highway and Transit Infrastructure" (July 18, 2008), a love song to privatization.

Now that the 2008 election is over - and as we know, elections have consequences - what are we likely to see in this area as Congress gets back to work after its summer break?

On Friday I previewed the interview that Dick Cheney gave to Fox News Sunday based upon a McClatchy News report. I argued that the interview reveals the extent to which he is personally concerned about where a Justice Department investigation of torture will lead. I pointed out (a) that Cheney went so far as to say he's "OK" with CIA interrogators who violated the rules (as elastic as they were) by engaging in mock executions etc., and (b) that Cheney claimed rather bizarrely that he knew nothing about who specifically was being waterboarded under his watch. My point was that these extreme statements show that Cheney is worried any investigation will head in his direction.

Here is the transcript of the Cheney interview on Fox News Sunday. Cheney's full comments are even more over the top than one might have expected.

This report by Walter Pincus and Joby Warrick is already generating criticism as yet another installment in the Washington Post's repulsive effort to build public support for Dick Cheney's defense of abusive interrogations (regarding which see this satirical commentary on yesterday's installment). I think something more subtle is going on in today's piece. Pincus and Warrick are airing Cheney's argument that the investigation of CIA abuses damage morale at the Agency, only to cut it down by showing repeatedly that any complaints at the CIA are limited to those few officials who took part in the abuse and now stand to be held accountable for it.

Not only does the current article not align itself with Cheney's position, it provides ammunition against Cheney's argument that we should be concerned about the mental anguish of torturers who now have to suffer through an investigation of their conduct. In fact, some of that ammunition is new and will prove useful in rebutting Cheney's talking points.

This is an update on H1N1 / swine flu along with sites with authoritative information and some cool graphs and charts.

The information here builds on prior unbossed work, including a two-parter on H1N1, examining the science of understanding the likely path and virulence of this variety of flu in Impure Thoughts on Pure Science - Lessons from 2009 H1N1 Swine Flu. Part 1 and information gleaned from the 1918 influenza pandemic - Impure Thoughts on Pure Science - Lessons from 2009 H1N1 Swine Flu. Part 2.

Those stories included information on the disease's virulent attack on the lungs as also being a marker of the pandemic 1918 flu. In addition, an announcement from the World Health Organization (WHO) in the last couple days states that a similar pattern is now being seen with H1N1.

The Washington newspaper today provides a forum for anonymous senior officials in the former Confederate government to make the case that slavery served a crucial service to the country during the crisis that began in 1861. They clearly are seeking to bolster the defense of harsh slave-holding techniques offered repeatedly by President Jefferson Davis and especially Vice President Alexander Stephens since they left office.

The anonymous Confederate officials stress something that has been little reported in the press: Large numbers of slaves and ex-slaves supplied absolutely critical intelligence to the Union side during the war. One of the most important of these slaves, William Jackson, belonged to Jefferson Davis himself. Such formerly truculent, unreliable, and frankly quite scary foreign-born workers thus were transformed into productive and effective spies, a major asset to the Union in its war with the Confederacy. None of that would ever have happened, the former CSA officials point out, without the ground having first been prepared by the much-criticized coercive conditions of slavery.

"What do you think changed the servants' minds?" one former senior Confederate official said this week after being asked about the effect of involuntary servitude. "Of course it began with that."

"We must break the Money Trust or the Money Trust will break us."
- Louis D. Brandeis, 1913

When the economy appeared to be melting down last September, Wall Street bank representatives began showing up in Congress like mobsters walking into a mom-and-pop business looking for protection money.
"Nice economy ya got here.(crash!) It would be a shame if something were to happen to it."

Mobsters and Robber Barons have a lot in common.
Neither has any respect for the law or morals, only for power. Neither can ever be satisfied with any amount of wealth. They will always need to steal more and more and more until they've completely bankrupted their victims.

We are now at the mercy of modern Robber Barons, and if history is any judge, it is either them or us.

You might reasonably have surmised that Dick Cheney fears where an investigation into the torture and mistreatment of terrorist suspects could eventually lead. Until now Cheney has restricted himself to lying about the effectiveness of the CIA and DoD interrogation programs, claiming to know decisive information that remains classified, and denouncing those who seek to investigate the government officials who abused prisoners under the color of law. But now we have some direct evidence of how rattled Cheney has become by Attorney General Holder's decision to initiate what is after all an extremely limited investigation. Its scope currently is limited to the CIA interrogations that employed even more abuse than the torture memos had actually authorized.

In an interview that will be aired on Sunday, Cheney made a couple of really remarkable statements according to McClatchy's Warren Strobel. First, Cheney endorsed the behavior of CIA officers who blatantly ignored the restrictions placed upon interrogators by government lawyers. This only a few days after the release of a 2004 CIA Inspector General report that revealed lurid details of prisoner abuse! Cheney had to know that he would be derided and denounced for coming out in favor of such things as mock executions, promises to rape and murder the family members of suspects, and threats with a gun and electric drill.

And secondly, Cheney rather transparently tried to build distance for himself with regard to the use of waterboarding, for which he has been the most vocal public advocate since at least 2006 (his original endorsement of waterboarding was a story broken here at unbossed). Cheney wants us to believe that though he was aware of the existence of the practice in general, he wasn't informed about any particular applications of waterboarding to specific prisoners. This even though reams of evidence have accumulated that interrogators who employed waterboarding were in very regular contact with CIA headquarters, and that the White House was deeply interested in the progress of those particular interrogations to the point of asking for multiple updates for days on end!

Among the documents that the ACLU forced the government to release is this CIA guide to its use of abusive rendition and interrogation techniques from late 2004 (PDF). It acknowledges that the goal of these processes is systematically to condition the prisoners into a state of "learned helplessness and dependence". And this in a document faxed to the Justice Department. By summarizing these abusive techniques in clinical fashion, the CIA has fashioned a deeply horrifying record of what it became under George W. Bush, one that in the past we might have associated with the Stasi's files.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this repulsive document is one of the many redactions. In the second (?) paragraph, the CIA describes the purposes of its interrogations of terrorist suspects at "Black Sites" (its term). At least one of those purposes is redacted. In other words, the purpose remains classified! This is one with the evolving series of justifications that the CIA has offered over the years for the interrogation program. It cannot decide quite what it wants the rest of us to believe was the ultimate rationale for treating prisoners in ways that plainly are unAmerican.

There's been a lot of talk recently about the economy. Has it bottomed? Are we recovering? Will we see a "V" shaped bounce? Or a "U"? Or a "W"?
Since most of the economic numbers are still negative, it seems a little premature to talk about a recovery. Nevertheless, since the cheerleaders of the economy have brought it up, let's examine exactly what is going to lead this economy out of our deep recession.

In order to do that we must look at a topic that the Green Shoots crowd doesn't mention much - the fundamentals of the economy.

The ACLU finally has managed to force the Obama administration to release a less severely redacted version of the May 2004 report on the CIA's abusive treatment of terrorist suspects (PDF). The report was done by the CIA's Inspector General, John Helgerson, and (to judge by what remains unredacted) seems to be fairly critical of those abuses and of their legal underpinnings. There's plenty to say about the contents of this report – for example, the bizarre tortures it catalogues (summarized here).

One thing stood out in the early pages of the document: Bush administration lawyers wrote an undated memo sometime before June 16, 2003 which among other things advanced a flagrantly false interpretation of the UN Convention against Torture.

Anne Kornblut, one of the best WaPo reporters, makes a gross factual error her report on the circumstances under which terrorism suspects will be interrogated in the Obama administration. There's to be a new unit of specially trained interrogators. The unit's purpose allegedly will not be to obtain information to put the prisoners on trial, but "to glean intelligence, especially about potential terrorist attacks". That was also the thrust of George W. Bush's infamous interrogation programs. The new unit will be housed in the FBI but report directly to the National Security Council. It will operate under the rules set out in the newly (2006) revised Army Field Manual.

Kornblut parrots the line propagated initially by the Bush administration, and repeated by Democrats: that the AFM strictly adheres to the Geneva Conventions and prohibits all forms of torture, abuse, and degradation of prisoners. Quite the contrary is true. The new Army Field Manual rules (while a vast improvement over the outrageous practices used by the CIA and DoD and authorization from the Bush administration) do in fact specify ways that prisoners may be abused. The abuse is euphemistically termed 'separation' and codified in Appendix M of the Manual.

My father did us all a favor. He died suddenly, years before we had expected it, though given the family history it was no surprise.

My mother was another matter.

A new study out on Social Security provides a window into the level of communitarianism in the US and into support for healthcare and other reforms. Assuming that these results are accurate, the strongest argument for Single Payer health care – and related reforms in the way we deliver basic services in general – is to appeal to a desire to ensure than we provide a basic decent quality of life to everyone. The study makes me truly optimistic about my fellow citizens and the future of this country.

The tour has just begun. Check out the link below to see if and when it will come to your state.

The Alliance for Climate Protection’s Repower America campaign, in partnership with the Blue Green Alliance and its labor and environmental partners, has embarked on a nationwide Made in America Jobs tour, highlighting the benefits to American workers and businesses of transitioning to a clean energy economy that will create millions of jobs.

More information here from the blue-green alliance.

In 2004 the CIA Inspector General produced a damning report on the Agency's abusive interrogations of terrorist suspects under inhumane conditions of confinement abroad. Due of a FOIA request, that report will be made public on Monday. In advance of its release, Newsweek and the Washington Post report that CIA interrogators threatened at least one prisoner with a gun and with an electric drill. They also staged several mock executions to terrorize terrorist suspects. Under the UN Convention against torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment as well as under federal law, it is a crime to threaten a prisoner with injury or death.

A watershed occurred today in the history of the Obama administration. For the first time, a major voice in the corporate media has stated what many other political observers must have been thinking for months now: that the President has shown that he can be rolled. Whether or not one agrees with that assessment, it has now become a definite part of the political landscape in Washington by virtue of having been enunciated in the press. The debate is on, whether Obama "can be rolled".

Sooner or later the President will have to address the problem of that perception, whether he wants to or not. It will seep into every major political struggle for the foreseeable future. If Obama cannot demonstrate the opposite - that he's willing and able to push back against his political opponents - then it will become a dominant perception and a nearly intractable political force for the remainder of his presidency.

An investigative report originally published at RH Reality Check.org.

In just five short years, the primary movers and shakers in the absolutist anti-abortion/anti-choice movement seeking to promote the “personhood” of zygotes (the single cell that forms after a sperm fertilizes an egg) have amassed nearly $58 million in tax-deductible contributions for their cause.

Conservative pundit, David Frum, is getting a lot of air time lately by taking a position contrary to that of the most active and visible elements of the Republican Party / conservative movement in this country. He asks: What would it mean to “win” the healthcare fight?

And the answer is not good for anyone, really, and especially not good for conservatives and the Republican Party. But not good for any us. We are one country, and we sink or swim together.

A new study from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) finds that taxing the very very generous employer provided health care plans of the very very well paid would have direct benefits for the rest of us.

One of the themes in the discussion on healthcare reform is that “my [healthcare]” might be taken away. It comes in the form of “Don’t Take Away My Healthcare” or the “Hands Off My Healthcare” folks, otherwise known as Patients First.

Before exploring the meaning of those ideas to individuals, let’s look at the messengers and supporters who make it possible for protesters at town hall meetings to hold slickly done posters and to have the support of one honkin’ big tour bus.

A guest commentary by Michael Winship of PBS' Bill Moyers Journal. Reprinted with permission.

When I was 15, my father was in a near-fatal car collision with a semi-trailer truck. At Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, NY, he lay in a coma for two months.

As the medical bills mounted and the insurance was running out, my mother had to make an agonizing decision. My father would have to be airlifted to the VA Medical Center in Kansas City, where his veteran's benefits would defray the costs. She would go there with him; arrangements would have to be made for someone to take care of her home and kids while she was away. For how long, no one was certain.

I had a near town hall experience recently that left me musing about the state of our country. I wish I had answers, but, I’m afraid the best I can say is that this is a very sick country, one that is terribly ill, so ill I fear we cannot recover.

Part 1 described one of the memoranda issued by the Obama administration to end the abusive privatization that existed under the Bush kleptocracy. Part 2 examined a second memo also issued July 29, by OMB Director Peter R. Orszag.

This memorandum, also issued July 29 by Peter Orszag, discusses hidden costs to government and governance of libertine privatization. Privatization of that sort eats away at government agencies and eventually makes it impossible for agencies to perform their missions.

Orszag gets a lot right, but he also needs to take a page from Ford’s new playbook.

Part 1 described one of the memoranda issued by the Obama administration to end the abusive privatization that existed under the Bush kleptocracy. This part looks at a second memo issued July 29, this one by OMB Director Peter R. Orszag.

I have to think that the hard working straight shooters at GAO must be loosening their ties, adjusting their eye shades, and breathing a real sigh of relief to read this memo (not that I'm stereotyping them - some of my best friends work for GAO - yours too).

Not only does this memo come done for truth, justice, and the American way of life, it shows that someone . is . listening . to . what . GAO . has . been . saying !!!! The folks at GAO must just be ecstatic over these actions.

Amazing though it may seem, private contractors were awarded contracts worth $500 billion last year . . . and yet the federal government continued its long practice of letting private contractors off the hook and not demanding that they be held accountable. This is hardly secret information. Unbossed has reported on GAO after GAO study that has regularly found shoddy work by private contractors, harm to private data, and no accountability. Now that seems to be changing. . . .

Debra Saunders complains that leftists have forgotten that dissent is patriotic now that a Democrat occupies the White House. A shame that Republicans on the whole didn't seem to think so during the last eight years.

But what's her evidence of vast left-wing hypocrisy? A gross – and apparently deliberate - misreading of a blog post at the White House website. Saunders goes so far as to rewrite the post to transform it into the very thing she wants to decry. Her best defense, in the circumstances, would be that she cannot actually read.

Last week the House voted 237 - 185 for Say on Pay to require shareholder approval of executive compensation and provide regulation and oversight to protect the economy from harmful pay practices. Meanwhile, the Senate was busy with hearings on related issues - Protecting Shareholders and Enhancing Public Confidence by Improving Corporate Governance: Securities, Insurance, and Investment

And then, Andrew Cuomo's report on executive bonuses was released.

I’ve been on the road recently in some oddly remote regions and more or less out of touch with the news in all forms. Well, except for that too close encounter with Fox News a few days ago.

I may be the last person on earth never to have watched an episode of Fox News, except for a few YouTubed versions. It was on in the dining room of the place I was staying.

I have always assumed that Left criticisms of Fox News were a bit overblown. Mea maxima culpa. I was very wrong.

I'd guess that many readers have heard of Americans who are tied to poorly paying or unsatisfactory jobs because they or a family member have health problems and simply cannot give up their employer's health insurance. With a pre-existing condition, they become immobilized almost as if they were indentured. Well, there are other ways that the arcane and illiberal health insurance industry in the US oppresses Americans as if it were a law unto itself. One phenomenon, little discussed, is the way that some of our fellow citizens are forced to live in exile abroad due to the exigencies of the for-profit American health insurance industry.

Healthcare reform has been stalled in Congress all summer as Sen. Max Baucus (Montana) slowly hashes out a "compromise" bill in private with a small group of colleagues, originally seven in number. The majority were Republicans, though they're vastly outnumbered in the Senate. Now that Orin Hatch has dropped out of the group, Democrats have parity in the remaining gang of six.

Many bloggers – though few corporate journalists - have pointed out that Baucus' group is grossly unrepresentative of America. All six senators come from sparsely populated states, five of which lie between the Rockies and the Mississippi. Between them, there's not a single large city. They have less than 4% of the country's population.

Well, here's another way to measure the unrepresentativeness of Baucus' group, via this new survey from Gallup of political affiliations across America. Gallup finds that Democrats have an edge of 5% or more in party identification over Republicans in all but 13 states. But four of the senators in Baucus' original group of seven come from those 13 Republican bastions.

Perhaps more significant still is the almost total absence of Democratic senators from solidly Democratic states. These are the members of the Senate who are best positioned, politically, to make the case for reforms that Democratic voters want.

The Sunday Washington Post publishes an extraordinarily disingenuous op-ed (I know!) in which Leon Panetta, taking his cue from a foreign spook, argues that Congress should not hold anyone in the CIA accountable for past wrongdoing because the country needs to be "totally focused" on the present.

Last month, at a meeting overseas of intelligence service chiefs, one of my counterparts from a major Western ally pulled me aside. Why, he asked, is Washington so consumed with what the CIA did in the past, when the most pressing national security concerns are in the present? It was a very good question.

Panetta evidently did not point out to this foreigner that the US is a nation of laws, or that other significant parts of the federal government (such as the Justice Department and FBI, SEC, FEC, Treasury Department, the EPA, and Interior Department) regularly manage to investigate wrongdoing in the past (where wrongdoing traditionally is to be found) while performing other duties as well. It would be interesting to know whether the IRS is finding that tax cheats have adopted the Obama administration's line, "No investigating the past!"