The codes used by the president to launch a nuclear strike were mislaid for months during the Clinton administration, the former highest-ranking US officer has said.

Ex-chairman of the joint chiefs of staff Gen Hugh Shelton made the claim in a new book.

The codes are usually held by an aide who remains close to the president.

Gen Shelton said there was an incident where an aide said the codes had been lost.

They were immediately replaced, but an internal inquiry was conducted.

Gen Shelton said the incident had taken place “around the year 2000″.

Under the procedures, an official was sent every month to check the codes, and that they were replaced every four months with new codes.

According to Gen Shelton’s book, Without Hesitation, an official had gone to check one month and been told by the aide that the codes were on the president’s person but that he was in an important meeting and could not be disturbed.

A different official went to do the same check a month later and was told a similar story. When it came time to change the codes, an aide admitted they had been missing for months.

Gen Shelton said it was apparent that the president had not had the codes and that he had been unaware that an aide had lost them.

The general described the episode as a “comedy of errors”.

The story is a little short on details. And Ret. Air Force Lt. Col Robert Patterson told a rather similar story in his own book seven years ago, similar but differing in key details:

Shelton claims the story has never been released before, but Ret. Air Force Lt. Col Robert Patterson told a very similar account in his own book, published seven years ago.

Patterson was one of the men who carried the football (note: that’s the briefcase, kept by an aide always near the president, that contains instructions for launching a nuclear attack), and he says it was literally the morning after the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke that he made a routine request of the president to present the card so that he could swap it out for an updated version.

“He thought he just placed them upstairs,” Patterson recalled. “We called upstairs, we started a search around the White House for the codes, and he finally confessed that he in fact misplaced them. He couldn’t recall when he had last seen them.”

In Patterson’s telling of the story, the President lost the biscuit (the card with the nuclear codes) in 1998, but according to Shelton, the card went missing in 2000.

Lt. Col Robert Patterson was much closer to the action. He not only places the incident in 1998, but also blames the president for misplacing the codes (and not telling anyone till he was asked). So, given that it is extremely unlikely that the codes were misplaced twice — and if they were, surely the good general would have said so — the veracity of Gen. Shelton’s account is certainly in question. But my point is not to quibble about that.

By both accounts, it was a very big deal when the biscuit was lost. Not because there was any real risk of the codes being misused. The codes are no good without the nuclear briefcase, and the military officers who carry (and guard) the briefcase aren’t going to let anyone other than the president access the briefcase.

It was a very big deal because until the codes were replaced — more than two months by Shelton’s account, and some unspecified shorter period by Patterson’s — if the President needed to launch nuclear missiles for whatever reason, he would have been unable to. Temporarily, we simply did not have nuclear weapons capability.

What baffles me is that we do not seem to have any double redundancy built into the system. Nothing that covers the contingency that the codes get misplaced. It’s not like this possibility has never occurred to anyone either. According to ABC News, the codes were at least rumored to have been misplaced once before:

If the facts seem murky, that’s not unusual when national security matters are involved. Consider the old story that Jimmy Carter left his biscuit in a suit that got sent to the dry cleaners. Today, no one will confirm the story, but no one will deny it either.

Even if the story is untrue, just the fact that the possibility was recognized surely means that someone should have woken up and realized that double redundancy was called for?

Gen. Shelton called his incident a comedy of errors. Actually, it was a lot more than that. It’s unfathomable that the Pentagon officer who’s charged with making “an in-person verification” that the codes were safe was satisfied, two months in a row, with taking someone else’s word for it. Procedures have now been changed to make it clear that’s never supposed to happen again:

Shelton says the president was given new codes within minutes when the previous codes could not be found, and the procedures have since been changed, so that the Pentagon aide who carries out the monthly check is required to wait at the White House until he or she can visually confirm the codes are in the possession of the president or an aide who is with him.

But the fact remains that, till very recently, at least, we safeguarded our nuclear missile launch capability like a bunch of clowns.

And I have it on very good authority that we have the finest military in the world.

Unfortunately, over the last decade, we’ve not done what’s necessary to shore up the foundations of our own prosperity. We spent a trillion dollars at war, often financed by borrowing from overseas. This, in turn, has short-changed investments in our own people, and contributed to record deficits.

But there’s no getting away from the fact that these statements apply equally to the first two years of the Obama administration.

If it hurts the economy to finance these huge war expenditures by borrowing, then why has Obama made exactly zero efforts to do anything about it? I don’t see how it’s a defense to say “But Bush started it!” Maybe, but Obama cheerfully continued it. As if there was no choice but to do so. And, of course, the whole point of that quote from his speech is that there was always a choice. There was a choice for Bush. And there was a choice for Obama. And Obama made the same choice as Bush. Even though he’s been criticizing Bush’s choice for the last three years.

I really think that Obama should have proposed a “Bush’s Wars” tax increase early in 2009. Perhaps a temporary increase, to be phased out as the wars wound down.

Clearly, the wars needed to be paid for. And there was no reason for Obama to take the political heat for this necessity. But it really shouldn’t have been too difficult — even for the hapless Democrats — to hang this fairly and squarely around Bush’s neck.

I’m not saying the Republicans — together with the elements of the Democratic Party who have proven time and again that they are easily intimidated by Republican rhetoric — would have actually allowed the tax increase to go through. But doesn’t Obama’s consistent rhetoric on the irresponsibility of funding these two wars by borrowing require that he should at least have tried?

And wouldn’t he have won politically even by losing?

Reid and Howard Dean sitting in a tree,
S-M-O-K-I-N-G?

Though the jobs crisis shows few signs of abating and the unemployment rate continues to hover near 10 percent, Congress allowed extended unemployment benefits to expire at the beginning of June, causing so far more than 1.2 million long-term unemployed to miss checks.

During normal times, state provide 26 weeks of unemployment benefits for workers laid off through no fault of their own. Federally-funded extended benefits have given the unemployed additional weeks during eight recessions since the 1950s. If Congress fails to reauthorize the current round of extra jobless aid, it will be the first time since then that extended benefits have been allowed to expire when the national unemployment rate is above 7.2 percent.

Yesterday, with the support of Republican senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine, Democrats were able to muster 59 votes to defeat the Republican filibuster. So it looks like the bill that the rest of The Party of Over-My-Dead-Body shot down yesterday — with the able assistance of Ben “Democrat, ha ha!” Nelson — will finally pass after the Senate reconvenes on July 12 and Sen. Byrd’s replacement is sworn in. But by then a hell of a lot of Americans who are really hurting will have had their unemployment checks cut off:

House leaders were planning to take up the jobless bill Thursday and said they expect it to pass. But its failure in the Senate ensures that more than 2 million people will have their checks cut off before Congress returns to Washington after a week-long break. The Labor Department estimates that more than 1.2 million people already have been affected.

The Republican Party counts this as a major triumph, one that will pay huge dividends at the ballot box.

Wouldn’t it be both poetic justice and truly hilarious if the expected gains for Republicans in November don’t actually materialize? (I am saying that with my Swami Sarabeth hat on, by the way. I am deeply convinced that even if the Republicans make gains in the House and the Senate, the gains will be much much less than what has been predicted so far.)

Nearly two years after the American financial system teetered on the verge of collapse, Congressional negotiators reached agreement early Friday morning to reconcile competing versions of the biggest overhaul of financial regulations since the Great Depression.

A 20-hour marathon by members of a House-Senate conference committee to complete work on toughened financial regulations culminated at 5:39 a.m. Friday in agreements on the two most contentious parts of the financial regulatory overhaul and a host of other provisions. Along party lines, the House conferees voted 20 to 11 to approve the bill; the Senate conferees voted 7 to 5 to approve.

Members of the conference committee approved proposals to restrict trading by banks for their own benefit and requiring banks and their parent companies to segregate much of their derivatives activities into a separately capitalized subsidiary.

There was much celebration throughout the land:

Now that Democrats have agreed on a Wall Street reform bill, President Obama is set to have an incredible year of accomplishments. He’s already signed major health care reforms into law and is more than likely to have energy/climate change legislation on his desk later this year. Not since FDR has a president done so much to transform the country.

This turned out to be premature jocularity. Sen. Robert Byrd passed away, and several Republicans (and a pseudo-Democrat) decided that it was so not fair that banks should be asked to contribute to cover the costs of cleaning up after them:

Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) is prepared to kill the bill over a modest bank fee that would help pay for the broader reform effort. Yesterday, Maine Sens. Susan Collins (R) and Olympia Snowe (R) said they’re also prepared to walk away from the bill over the bank fee. Making matters even worse, Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) said he’s “concerned” about the fee, suggesting his vote is far from secure, too. Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), who supported the GOP filibuster last month, is non-committal, for now, as is Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who backed the filibuster but supported final passage.

Suddenly, the obligatory 60 votes to break the obligatory Republican filibuster seemed a pipe dream. So yesterday, the conference committee went back to work, with the very specific intent of appeasing Brown, Snowe and Collins. Which they think they have done in short order:

Congressional negotiators briefly reopened the conference proceedings on a sweeping financial regulatory bill on Tuesday after Senate Republicans who had supported an earlier version of the measure threatened to block final approval unless Democrats removed a proposed tax on big banks and hedge funds.

Conference negotiators voted to eliminate the proposed tax and adopted a new plan to pay the projected five-year, $20 billion cost of the legislation.

The new plan would bring an early end to the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the mammoth financial system bailout effort enacted in 2008, and redirect about $11 billion toward heightened regulation of the financial industry.

The conferees also voted to increase the reserve ratio of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, but specified that small depository institutions — those with less than $10 billion in consolidated assets — be exempt from paying any increase.

They also voted to permanently set the maximum deposit insured by the F.D.I.C. at $250,000 per account, a change that would further raise the amount banks must pay toward the coverage.

Last time, 57 Democrats voted for cloture, and Brown, Snowe and Collins provided the last three votes to break the filibuster.

This time around, Sen. Byrd’s vote isn’t there. So either another Republican has to be enticed to vote against the filibuster, or one of the two Democrats who supported the filibuster have to be persuaded to step up.

For obvious reasons — mostly his own past behavior, which makes it hard for anyone on the Democratic side of the aisle to put much trust in anything he says — nobody is pinning their hopes on Chuck Snake-in-the-Grassley.

Russ Feingold has already made it clear that he has no intention of opposing the filibuster, and allowing the bill to come up for a vote, because a) he believes the bill is not as tough as it should be, and b) he believes that the perfect should jolly well be the enemy of the good.

Which leaves everyone looking at Maria Cantwell, who hasn’t committed herself one way or the other.

In fact, the whole strategy of killing the bank fee to buy the votes of Brown, Snowe and Collins seems to be predicated on the presumption that Cantwell can be persuaded or embarrassed into voting for cloture, even if she opposes the bill when it comes up for a majority vote.

Senate Republicans on Thursday once again blocked legislation to reinstate long-term unemployment benefits for people who have exhausted their aid, prolonging a stalemate that has left more than a million people without federal help.

With the Senate apparently paralyzed by partisan gridlock, the fate of the aid, as well as tax breaks for businesses and $16 billion in aid for cash-strapped states, remains unclear. …

Republican lawmakers — joined by Democrat Ben Nelson of Nebraska — maintained a unified front to sustain a filibuster of the $110-billion bill. The vote was 57 to 41; the majority was three short of the 60 needed to cut off debate and bring the bill to a final vote.
[...]
It was the third time in two weeks that Democrats failed to circumvent unified GOP opposition, despite making a series of changes to accommodate complaints about deficit spending.

The latest bill was a pared-back version of the $140-billion measure approved by the House. Last week, Democrats agreed to slash unemployment benefits by $25 billion to cut costs. In the latest version, Democrats scaled back funding for Medicaid aid to states.

The Labor Department estimates that more than 1.2 million long-term unemployed will have lost their benefits by the end of this week.

So millions of long-term unemployed will lose their benefits. The economy, which has barely been managing to keep moving uphill, will once again start losing traction. Everybody will get screwed just a little more than they already were.

All because the clowns who added trillions to the national debt without blinking or thinking suddenly chose to get that old-time religion when Obama came to power. And by now they have their whole electoral strategy riding on a weak and tepid economy. So they’re going to fight to keep it weak and tepid every which way they can.

The only thing Republicans have opposed in this debate are job-killing taxes and adding to the national debt,” (Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell) said.

The unemployment extension would add about $30 billion to the national debt. Democrats say all the provisions in the bill are offset by spending cuts and tax increases except the jobless benefits, which Congress traditionally has approved as an emergency without looking for a way to pay for them. Benefits for the long-term unemployed lapsed at the end of May because of the congressional stalemate.

It’s pretty transparent what Republicans are up to. May they collectively rot in hell for it.

Time to update the car-ditch metaphor:
These guys put us into a car, and drove us into a ditch, and then just walked away, refusing to lift one damn finger to help us get out of the ditch. These same guys want to persuade us to get back into the same car with them, so that the same drivers, in the same impaired state, can drive us down the same damn road again. Meanwhile, the car is still in the ditch. And now these guys have decided that they won’t even let the tow-truck through. Because what passes for their brain has told them that if we stew in the car-in-the-ditch long enough, maybe that will make us willing to get back in the car with them. (And we might just be collectively dumb enough to fall for it.)

On June 10, a group of technology-focused business leaders — including Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist John Doerr, and the current or former chief executives of General Electric, DuPont, Lockheed Martin, and Xerox — issued a mayday manifesto urging a massive public-private effort to accelerate research into clean-energy innovations. Without such a commitment, they warned, the United States will remain vulnerable to energy price shocks; continue to “enrich hostile regimes” that supply much of the United States’ oil; and cede to other nations dominance of “vast new markets for clean-energy technologies.” At precisely the moment these executives were scheduled to unveil their American Energy Innovation Council report, the Senate was to begin debating a resolution from Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, to block the Environmental Protection Agency’s plans to regulate the carbon dioxide emissions linked to global climate change.

Murkowski’s proposal would have blocked the EPA from using the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon emissions to fight global warming. It lost by four votes (47 to 53). But every single Republican (and six Democrats, namely Bayh, Rockefeller, Pryor, Landrieu, Lincoln and Ben Nelson) voted for the proposal. (How could anyone in the party of obstructionism fail to support a proposal to obstruct something? Especially something that’s urgently necessary.)

Yes, the Murkowski proposal lost, but as Ron Brownstein points out:

… the substantial support that Murkowski’s proposal attracted highlights the political obstacles looming in front of any policy that aims to seriously advance alternatives to the carbon-intensive fossil fuels that now dominate the United States’ energy mix. Her resolution collided with the Innovation Council report like a Hummer rear-ending a hybrid.

The Innovation Council has made a passionate plea for action on a new energy policy, pointing out that the stakes are no less than the future of the American economy, of American competitiveness in the global economy:

The council frames the need for a new energy direction as being as much of an economic imperative as an environmental one. It calls for a national energy strategy centered on a $16 billion annual federal investment in energy research — as much, the group pointedly notes, as the United States spends on imported oil every 16 days.

Equally important, the group urges that government catalyze the development of energy alternatives by sending “a strong market signal” through such mechanisms as mandates on utilities to produce more renewable energy or “a price or a cap” on carbon emissions. Such a cap is precisely what the Senate resolution sought to block. But the business leaders said that it is one of the policies that could “create a large, sustained market for new energy technology.”

One of the council’s key insights was to recognize that expanded energy research and limits on carbon (or other mandates to promote renewable power) are not alternative but complementary policies: One increases the supply of new energy sources; the other increases demand for them. Earlier this month, the nonpartisan Information Technology & Innovation Foundation echoed this conclusion in a report warning that the United States is already faltering in the race for new markets. With the world readying to spend $600 billion annually on clean-energy technology by 2020, the group noted, the United States is now running a trade deficit in these products and facing “declining export market shares” virtually everywhere.

Other nations are seizing these opportunities faster. In China, stiff mandates to deploy renewable sources domestically are nurturing local companies capable of capturing international markets. It’s revealing that even as venerable an American firm as California-based Applied Materials, which produces the sophisticated machinery used to manufacture solar panels, opened a research center last fall in Xian, China. “If the U.S. becomes a bigger market for us, definitely we’d have to readjust our strategy,” general manager Gang Zou recently told visiting journalists. “But today, our customer market is in Asia.”

Yes, there are six Democrats who are aligned with Republicans in obstructing any progress on a new energy policy. But, ultimately, a new energy policy is currently outside the realm of political possibility because of the united opposition of Senate Republicans. Every single Republican stands staunchly opposed to any action. Including such alleged moderates as Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins and Scott Brown.

The Republican Party’s position is crystal clear. Here’s what they are singing to one clear harp in divers tones:

Fuck the US economy! Fuck US competitiveness in global markets! All we care about is obstructing every single thing that Democrats propose. It doesn’t matter if a proposal makes perfect sense. It doesn’t matter if it proposes action that’s urgently necessary. It doesn’t matter if opposing the proposal will screw us for generations. We’re simply going to obstruct it. Because we see that as the only way that we can possibly get back in power. Doesn’t matter how slim the prospect of getting back in power actually is. It’s the only way we see, so that’s that. And nothing is more important than getting back in power. Because then we can go back to totally buggering up the economy all over again. The economy, and everything else in sight.

Specter … changed his party affiliation from Republican to Democrat in 1965 to challenge the incumbent Democratic district attorney in Philadelphia for his first electoral victory before changing back to Republican in his Senate bids…

How long will he stay a Democrat this time? Is he more likely to change back into a Republican if he wins or if he loses today?

Now political blackmail doesn’t work the way it used to just a few months ago, when the healthcare reform bill turned into a multi-ring circus. And it doesn’t work even on Democrats, who practically had it written into their party constitution: “Thou shalt capitulate to any and all blackmail attempts on every bill that looks like it might be close.”

Yesterday, Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska joined the Republicans in filibustering the motion to proceed to debate on the Wall Street reform bill. This is despite the fact that he himself had previously (just six months ago) declared such a filibuster to be patently ridiculous:

“If you don’t like the bill, then why would you block your own opportunity to amend it?” Nelson said. “Why would you stop senators from doing the job they’re elected to do — debate, consider amendments, and take action on an issue affecting every American?”

So why did he do it?

I don’t know, Ben, why would a member stop senators from doing the job they’re elected to do?

Nelson said in a statement that he “cannot support proceeding on a bill I haven’t seen.” But that’s silly — Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) published a draft more than a month ago, and released the official legislative language 10 days ago.

Of course, it’s not exactly a mystery as to why Ben Nelson sided with Republicans to prevent a debate on Wall Street reform. The Democratic bill includes tough new restrictions on derivatives, and Warren Buffet, a billionaire Nebraskan, has tens of billions of dollars in derivatives contracts. Buffet, not surprisingly, has been urging Nelson to help protect his business, and the senator seems inclined to do what his wealthiest constituent wants.

Over the weekend, Nelson sought a special side deal (yes, again) that would have created an exemption, shielding existing derivatives from new regulations, and in the process relieving Buffet of any new burdens. Dodd thought this was absurd, rejected Nelson’s plea, and apparently pushed Nelson into blocking a debate.

Note the shift in Democratic strategy, as compared to last fall: Dems are so confident Republicans will eventually come around on Wall Street reform, they don’t feel the need to give in to Ben Nelson’s ridiculous demands. With health care, Dems had no other options.

This used to be the party of “No Can Do!” Now, they are saying “No Can Do!” to blackmail demands. Hmmm…

And the damnedest thing, of course, is that that’s exactly what Stupak did back in November, when the House version of the heathcare bill came up for a vote.

In November, the face-saving non-concession Stupak embraced was an agreement that he would be allowed to bring up an abortion amendment for a vote, so that it could be duly voted down. Now, four and a half months later, he called off his charade in exchange for an agreement that President Obama “will sign an executive order stating, essentially, that the law will follow the law.”

So what’s the deal here? Is Stupak just stupid? Is he a charlatan exploiting the gullibility of a few easily-blinded, pro-life Democrats in the House to snatch some quality time in the political spotlight?

Or could he possibly be Nancy Pelosi‘s secret weapon, signing on to play the heavy in a well-conceived script designed to grease the healthcare bill through the House without the kind of ransom shenanigans we saw repeatedly in the Senate at the eleventh hour?

Back in December, first Joe Lieberman had his way with the Senate healthcare bill. Then, we had the Ben Nelson travesty. And, at that point, the question on everyone’s mind was: who’s going to show up with a ransom note next? And, being the principled gentlemen they are, it was not entirely out of the question that Nelson or Lieberman would show up in the ransom line again. (This paragraph was corrected Monday night.)

Of course, this kind of last-minute holding-to-ransom didn’t exactly come as a surprise to anyone. And just as anyone with an IQ exceeding their age could see it coming in the Senate, perhaps Pelosi and her advisers could see it easily happening in the House as well? It was, after all, abundantly clear that the vote on the healthcare bill was going to be pretty damn close.

So what ends up happening? In the crucial days just before the two critical House healthcare votes, Stupak enters stage right. Armed with a surefire hot-button issue, he steps confidently into the spotlight. And proceeds to suck up all the last-minute-hold-up oxygen. No room for anyone else to grandstand and push their own little ransom notes. And, each time, Stupak doesn’t relinquish the spotlight till the very last minute. Each time, Stupak’s last-minute cave results in passage of the bill. By a wafer-thin margin.

And Stupak’s well-scripted shenanigans don’t just crowd out other would-be for-profit obstructionists. They also allow the House Democratic leadership to twist the arm of every genuinely wavering Democrat. With Stupak-and-Stupakers sitting on the fence, and the vote count teetering so precariously right on the very edge of the magic number for passage, everyone could be easily brought to appreciate that now was the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party.

Without Stupak’s strategery, I’m really not sure if I would ever have got to enjoy my three-establishment celebration dinner. The only real question, I think, is: did Stupak achieve this inadvertently, or was it all an extremely well-conceived and scripted piece of political theater?