The new party is the Surprise Party

Via The Inspiration Room.

News from Bernard Sanders (I-VT):

Sen. Bernie Sanders on Friday provided suggestions for tax reform to the Senate Finance Committee, Politico reported. Chairman Max Baucus and ranking member Orrin Hatch had asked for member input and offered to keep any suggestions secret for 50 years. Sanders declined the offer of secrecy, The Hill reported online. “Given the fact that my suggestions represent the interests of the middle class of this country and not powerful corporate special interests, I have no problem with making them public,” he said. LINK, LINK

 This is kind of amazing. As Bloomberg Businessweek remarks,

Tax negotiations, then—Congress’s basic constitutional responsibility—are to be held to the same standard of secrecy as the investigation of the Warren Commission.... [jump]

Senators are scared. Some tax loopholes are just indefensible to voters. There is no way to pretend that they help our kids, or jobs. They just go to people and companies that donate money. That’s what this secrecy is for. The only possible reason for it to exist is to prevent senators from having to defend their choices to the public.

Of course it could be the other way around: maybe the senators want to make proposals that the donors wouldn't like—carbon taxes, inheritance taxes, raised caps on social security and medicare contributions—one can think of lots of things. Maybe Senator Baucus, before he makes his own move to quietly sumptuous digs on K Street next year, wants to give his colleagues a chance to do something for the voters without letting the lobbyists know about it. Maybe he'll buy me a pony, too.

Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me.“Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” 

The Vision of Ezekiel. From Cowpatty Patty.

Speaking of secrets,

Prosecutors accuse [Bradley Manning] of “aiding the enemy,” and three in particular: al-Qaida, al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula and a “classified enemy” referred to by a Bates number, which is a form of legal document identification. Three professors of military law – Yale Law School’s Eugene Fidell, Duke University School of Law’s Scott Silliman and Texas Tech University School of Law’s Richard Rosen – told Courthouse News they had never heard of a case involving a “classified enemy.” After being informed that the phrase stumped the professors, a military spokeswoman insisted that the confusion stemmed from a misunderstanding, because “who the enemy ‘is’ is not classified.” “What ‘is’ classified is that our government has confirmed that this enemy is in receipt of certain compromised classified information, and that the means and methods of collection that the government has employed to make that determination are classified,” the spokeswoman said in an email. - (Emptywheel)

If you have a hard time understanding how Bradley Manning's Wikileaks disclosures could have "aided the enemy", keep in mind that we have enemies we're not allowed to know about, or rather whose emnity we are allowed to know about, but whose ability to access the Wikileaks files is a secret. Hm.

I'm guessing it's the FBI. We know Federal employees aren't or weren't permitted to read the Wikileaks documents, and we know the FBI has had some serious computerization issues in the past, so it might be a secret that they're able to access the information. As to being the enemy, it's no secret that most apprehended terrorists in the past decade have been closely associated with the FBI. I didn't realize we were supposed to know that the FBI is the enemy, but perhaps we're meant to believe it's a secret when it isn't, if you know what I mean. Wheels within wheels.