Hullabaloo

Tuesday, January 17, 2006

 
House Slave

by digby


Tweety is gleefully flogging Hillary's "plantation" comment like he just discovered his little winkie.

There has bever been as great a GOP tool as Tweety Matthews. He gets a little bit uppity once in a while so they force feed him some bullshit which he happily regurgitates with gusto so as not make somebody important in the Republican establishment really, really mad at him. (When that happens, as we know, Monsignor Tim reports him to the Big Boys.)

Atrios has put this link up explaining why the Republican Magnolias having the vapors over this plantation comment is a steaming pile of fetid, GOP talking points.

I don't know if any of you would like to tell Chris Matthews how to use Google, but of you would, here's his e-mail: hardball@msnbc.com

Maybe he or his staff would like to look over those links and then explain why he and his Republican pals thinks she's so out of line.


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digby 1/17/2006 02:03:00 PM |

 
What's Wrong With This Picture?

by digby

Speaking of CNN, I don't know what to make of this, but it's interesting. I mentioned yesterday that Bill Schneider said this on the Situation Room yesterday. It was quite soon after gore's speech so I figured he would get an earful from the powers that be and we'd hear the last of it. But today he pretty much repeated it verbatim. To my ears, it sounds non-judgmental veering on positive. Schneider isn't usually a very reliable observer, but this strikes me as pretty fair and pretty provocative toward the Bushies. Am I wrong?

WILLIAM SCHNEIDER, SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Wolf, Democrats heard a voice from the past today, but it's a voice that may be charting a course for the party's future.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

(voice over): Who speaks for Democrats these days? Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are minority leaders. Howard Dean's job is to represent the broad range of Democratic views. Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and John Edwards may run for president, and they are pretty cautious. So is Bill Clinton who is invested in his wife's political future. Enter Al Gore, giving full throated voice to the outrage that many Democrats feel over the administration's wiretapping of American citizens.

GORE: ... What many believe are serious violations of law by the president.

SCHNEIDER: Violations of law? Exactly.

GORE: ... Into these serious allegations of criminal behavior on the part of the president.

SCHNEIDER: That may be grounds for impeachment. Gore never used the I word, but he did call for ...

GORE: ...The appointment of the special counsel to pursue the criminal issues raised by the warrantless wiretapping of Americans by the president.

SCHNEIDER: A special counsel would have to be appointed by the attorney general, who works for President Bush, and how realistic is it to think about impeachment when Congress is controlled by Republicans? Gore's answer?

GORE: It should be a political issue in any race, regardless of party, section of the country, house of Congress, for anyone who opposes the appointment of a special counsel.

SCHNEIDER: Gore is telling Democrats, let's make this our issue.

Just the fact that Schneider brings up Impeachment, which Gore did not, seems to me like a good thing. I must be missing something.



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digby 1/17/2006 01:06:00 PM |

 
Down On The Plantation

by digby

I'm glad to see that CNN has booked two African-Americans agreeing that Hillary Clinton was wrong to compare the Republican House to a plantation, so that's good. The poncy Republican is calling for her to resign but the other thinks that probably isn't necessary. We're getting fair and balanced coverage on this issue.

Apparently, this is an outrageous thing to say. I wonder if anybody thought this article by Joseph Farrah of World Net Daily called "Racism on Dem plantation" (available today only on Google cache for some reason)was out of line. Or how about this one on on Townhall by Cal Thomas who refers to "the Democratic Party and its plantation mentality." And then there's Rush Limbaugh who's been know to refer to anybody who's in the leadership position in the Democratic Party" as "pimps" who attempt to deceive black people into remaining on the "Democratic plantation."

Here's the thing. When the Republicans talk about the "plantation" they are specifically talking about race, claiming that the Democrats are using (presumably stupid) Black Americans against their own interests.

Hillary was talking about the fact that the Republican leadership treats their own caucus (not to mention the minority) like they are slaves.

Now which of those views is racist?

Yet, the Republicans are all over this and they will probably end up getting her to apologise because Democratic politicians have never learned how to respond to being called racist. Until they do, the Republicans are going to use this ridiculous epistemic relativism against them.


Update: As a couple of commenters remind me, perhaps the most famous of these plantation comments cane from none other than Newtie:

"...on the eve of his great electoral victory ten years ago, the speaker-to-be told a reporter he was leading a "slave rebellion" against the Democrats who "run the plantation."

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digby 1/17/2006 12:35:00 PM |

 
The Whole Schmear

by digby

I agree with Kevin that the ineffectiveness of the illegal wiretap program is not the most important issue. The president having unlimited power, even to the extent that he is not bound by the law or the constitution, is the fundamental threat and this wiretap program is just the most recent example of it.

However, this revelation that the illegal wiretapping is a waste of time does refute the most important argument of the other side. That argument is best articulated by today's winner of the Golden Globe for best tease, Trent Lott:

"I don't agree with the libertarians," said Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.). "I want my security first. I'll deal with all the details after that."

If the details show that the FBI is wasting valuable man hours chasing its tail, it's not exactly giving you "your security" is it? Not only is the president breaking the law, he's wasting the valuable time and energy of the FBI which could be spent preventing terrorism and catching criminals. Why on earth would that make a frightened little bedwetter like Trent Lott feel safer? It should scare the lil' guy to death.


Josh Marshall has an insightful post up today about Al Gore's speech yesterday that speaks to how these issues all work together.

The point Gore makes in his speech that I think is most key is the connection between authoritarianism, official secrecy and incompetence.

The president's critics are always accusing him of law-breaking or unconstitutional acts and then also berating the incompetence of his governance. And it's often treated as, well ... he's power-hungry and incompetent to boot! Imagine that! The point though is that they are directly connected. Authoritarianism and secrecy breed incompetence; the two feed on each other. It's a vicious cycle. Governments with authoritarian tendencies point to what is in fact their own incompetence as the rationale for giving them yet more power. Katrina was a good example of this.

The basic structure of our Republic really is in danger from a president who militantly insists that he is above the law.

The illegal wiretap scandal is a perfect example of this --- authoritarianism, official secrecy and incompetence. (No wonder they call it "the president's program.") When you add in endemic corruption, you have a recipe for a constitutional crisis and a political tyranny --- which is exactly what they have been cooking up.

It's awfully hard to respect people who are so frightened they don't know they are helping the terrorists to achieve what the terrorists couldn't achieve on their own.


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digby 1/17/2006 09:59:00 AM |

 
Trent's Slot Safe

by digby


Incumbent Senator Trent Lott called a press conference to announce whether he's running again. He'd hinted that he might not, so the suspense was palpable. A Democrat, after all, was favored to win if Lott didn't run. Would he or wouldn't he? What was going to happen? Oooh, it's the kind of thing that sends chills down your spine. After about ten minutes of stirring oratory celebrating all the fine people he's worked with over the years, he soulfully looks into the camera, nods his head to his staff and then announces ... he's running again.

And now Ed Henry talking about how this sets the stage for him to make a great comeback and win back the majority leader job! Is Trent awesome or what?

None of the CNN anchors even have the decency to look sheepish about being played for morons. But then, why would they?



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digby 1/17/2006 09:08:00 AM |

Monday, January 16, 2006

 
Arlen's Spectacle

by digby

Isn't this special?

In an interview on Sunday, Mr. Brownback said he was heartened by the hearings. He argued that in the 2004 elections, Republicans had showed Democrats that "we can run on abortion rights and win the public," adding, "they are trimming their sails some on it."

The apparent outcome of the Alito nomination may call into question a political assessment that Mr. Specter made after those elections. Mr. Specter said at the time that it was highly unlikely that a Supreme Court nominee who would change abortion rights precedents could be confirmed, in part because of the determined opposition of the Democrats. Some leading Democratic senators publicly agreed.

Conservatives, upset at Mr. Specter's comment, almost unseated him from the chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee.

After the hearings ended on Friday, Mr. Specter said he would vote for confirmation and declined to revisit his earlier comments. But he said it was impossible to know how Judge Alito might vote as a Supreme Court justice. He said abortion rights groups had also opposed Justice David Souter, Justice Anthony Kennedy and Justice Sandra Day O'Connor - all Republican nominees who have voted from the bench to uphold the core abortion rights precedents.

"There are weighty considerations involved in changing Roe v. Wade, very weighty considerations in modifying that principle and a woman's right to choose," Mr. Specter said.

This is why everyone should laugh in Arlen Specter's face when he says this:

A top US Republican senator on Sunday for the first time mentioned impeachment in connection with President George W Bush's authorisation of electronic surveillance inside the United States without a court warrant.

Arlen Specter, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, cautioned it was too early to draw any conclusions as his committee gears up for public hearings into the growing controversy early next month.

But in his appearance on ABC's "This Week" program, Specter insisted the Senate was not going to give the president what he called "a blank cheque."

When asked what could happen if lawmakers find Bush in violation of the law, Specter answered: "Impeachment is a remedy. After impeachment, you could have a criminal prosecution, but the principal remedy ... under our society is to pay a political price."

He made it a point to clarify, however, that he was speaking theoretically and was "not suggesting remotely that there's any basis" for a presidential impeachment at this moment.

[...]

He added that the issue of wartime presidential powers was "a very knotty question" that "ought to be thoroughly examined."

Specter assured he was prepared to listen to the administration's explanations, but warned, "I'm going to wear my skepticism on my sleeve."

Uh huh. This man has run for years as a pro-choice Republican in a swing state. This is probably his last term. And he tossed abortion rights out the window without a second thought. This emerging narrative that Arlen is going to be tough on the administration on these wiretapping charges is total bullshit:

Gonzales said he had agreed with Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, a Republican from Pennsylvania, to testify in hearings on the controversial program that eavesdrops on U.S. phone calls and e-mails.

Gonzales said he would not discuss any operational details at the hearing and would only explain the legal justification.

The testimony will take place in Senate hearings that are expected to be held early next month.

It was unclear whether the judiciary committee would also hear testimony from senior intelligence officials such as the NSA director, Army Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, or Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, the No. 2 U.S. intelligence official who ran the NSA when the eavesdropping program began.

"What we‘re thinking is that this is primarily the attorney general‘s show," said an official who spoke on condition of anonymity because plans for the hearing had not been finalized.

Yeah. Arlen's in charge allright.

Here's what's going to happen. The Republicans will carefully plan and coordinate their strategy. Guys like Jeff Sessions will be in charge of fear-mongering and ad hominem attacks on dissent. Huckleberry Graham will express grave concerns about liberty only to be convinced by the end of the hearing that the gravest threat to the nation is Democratic rudeness. Gonzales will then say this is nothing but a high tech illegal deportation across the Rio Grande. Sam Brownback will offer objections to abuse of presidential power but will concede that it is necessary since godless abortionist terrorists are trying to kill us all in our sleep. His wife will inexplicably start crying and run out of the room. Everyone will agree that Alberto Gonzales has been remarkably forthcoming. Arlen will concede that the constitution does indeed provide for a King.

The Democrats, meanwhile, will take a much needed week long vacation before the hearings. They'll meet up in the mens room just before they begin, to discuss a strategy. (Dianne will watch the door.) Kennedy will suggest that he attack Gonzales on presidential power and Shumer will snap that he's sick of Kennedy getting all the good attacks and insists that Kennedy takes that boring Unitary Executive bullshit this time. Biden will request that he lead the questioning which will make Pat Leahy tell him to go fuck himself. Joe will remind the whole group that he once had a phone call overheard in college so he's been the victim of warrantless wiretapping and can bring the personal touch to the hearings. Feinstein will ask, "what are these hearings about again?" In the end the Democrats will strongly object to Arlen's conclusions that the constitution provides for a King.

Senator Reid: I'm begging you, man. If there is any way you can move these hearings to another venue, please, please do it. I can't go through this again so soon.



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digby 1/16/2006 06:30:00 PM |

 
Civil Obedience

by digby


I can't tell you how moved I was by Bush's speech commemorating Martin Luther King today. Particularly this:

Bush told the crowd at the annual "Let Freedom Ring" performance that Congress must renew provisions of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act that are set to expire next year. The president had previously declined to support the renewal until last month, and the crowd erupted in applause when Bush insisted that it be renewed.

They applauded because he said it as if he had just crawled across the Edmund Pettus Bridge himself. Which was surprising since it was only a year ago that Bush told members of the NAACP that he was "unfamiliar" with the voting Rights Act, which I'm sure was true.

There really is nothing more sickening than seeing the right wing suck up on Martin Luther King Day after all the years they demonized him and how hard they fought to keep this day from beocming a national holiday.

Rick Perlstein writes in to remind me that back in the day some of our most revered conservative icons had a different way of looking at things:

Reagan after the King assassination:

it was just the sort of "great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order, and people started choosing which laws they'd break."

Strom Thurmond:

"We are now witnessing the whirlwind sowed years ago when some preachers and teachers began telling people that each man could be his own judge in his own case."

Just in case it isn't clear, by "people choosing which laws they'd break" and "telling people that each man could be his own judge in his own case," they referred to King's doctrine of civil disobedience.

That, in other words, King brought his own assassination upon himself.

I recall as a kid hearing a lot of that kind of talk. Civil disobedience and passive resistence were considered the work of the commies by many on the right. But then I'm sure they considered Henry David Thoreau a commie too, even if he didn't know it. It was his all-American idea of civil disobedience, after all, that went half way around the world and back again inspiring Ghandi and King and resulting in the liberation and conference of civil rights upon millions of people. You can't get any more commie than that. Anybody who espouses that kind of talk is just asking to be killed.



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digby 1/16/2006 03:00:00 PM |

 
Using Her Power For Good

by digby

Congratulations to Jane Hamsher and her readers for single handedly driving down the sales of Kato Beirne's latest atrocity. I'm pretty sure it qualifies her for sainthood.

Kato's book is just the latest in a long line of tough as nails Republican career women who make money writing books reassuring smug conservative housewives and their impotent husbands that they are better off being second class citizens. It's a racket that goes all the way back to the original beehived Republican icon, Phyllis Schlaffly.

Whenever I see Kato on television lecturing the public about real womanhood, I'm reminded of TBOGG's famous catch some years back featuring Kate and some hot wingnut chicks talkin' bout dick:

ERICA WALTER: Manliness has experienced a renaissance for two reasons: The Bush/Cheney administration has set the tone for the political culture. And 9/11, of course. Why did America fall in love with soldiers and firemen and traditional male occupations? Because we realized we’re at risk. The comeback of manliness is here to stay as long as national security is an issue.

[snip]

CHARLOTTE HAYS: The modern-day loss of respect for manliness is an aberration. Men and their virtues have always been prized. The great epics aren’t about women and their virtues. The post-9/11 love affair with police, firemen, and soldiers is a return of normal relations between men and women. Most people today never needed to be carried out of a burning building. But once they see 3,000 people that need to be rescued, they know it takes men.

O’BEIRNE: We were reminded on 9/11 and again during the military efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq that we depend on manly characteristics to keep us safe. Every single one of the dead firemen heroes on 9/11 were men. This was one group where liberals didn’t ask why there wasn’t a more pleasing gender balance. Because the Upper West Side is not fireproof. What happens in combat in some distant field is abstract to Upper West Side liberals, but they can understand the need to have strong, brave, reckless men in their fire department.

>WALTER: When it comes to role confusion among men themselves, though, I believe the damage of the ’60s and ’70s has persisted.
During my first pregnancy, I rode the Washington, D.C. subway every day. I was amazed at the number of men who didn’t offer me their seat, didn’t lift a finger for me. A Marine friend of mine, who is a normal, manly man, got so angry that he rode the subway with me, and in full cars pointedly asked men: “Would you please give up your seat for this young lady?” The request meant: “Will you do what you’re supposed to do?”

[snip]

O’BEIRNE: I don’t think there has to be a trade off. Men will behave however women demand they behave. I don’t spend time with male boors, so I don’t think most American men lack manners. British men are terribly mannerly, but they’re all wimps. I think well-raised American men have the ability to be thoroughly masculine and mannerly at the same time.

[snip]

O’BEIRNE: Anyone married with children appreciates why children need fathers. The typical mother of a second-grade boy is destroyed if he’s not invited to a certain birthday party. Mothers would wrap sons in cotton. It’s the fathers who instill the sense of risk-taking, of the stiff upper lip.

NAOMI SCHAEFER: But what about daughters? They often need to know how to keep a stiff upper lip, too. Whatever the problems with feminism, I guess I’m sort of glad that it all happened.

CHAREN: It would be wrong not to give feminism some credit for improving women’s place in the world. But I believe many of these changes would have happened organically anyway—with rising prosperity, labor-saving devices in the home, and widespread education. You didn’t need a bunch of bra-burners for that.

[snip]

...and a conversation among these women wouldn't be complete with mentioning....The Clenis™:

ROLLINS: What is your definition of virility? Does it have a role in political leadership?

WALTER: It’s a nebulous quality for a political leader. Bill Clinton was virile—in a very sleazy way. There’s also the sex appeal of someone like Don Rumsfeld. President Bush possesses this intangible something—you really saw it on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln. Testosterone and camaraderie—many people responded to it. In George W. Bush, people see a contained, channeled virility. They see a man who does what he says, whose every speech and act is not calculated. Bill Clinton showed a lot of outward empathy and he was very articulate but I don’t think many of us would have trusted him with our daughters.

GAVORA: If virility equates with strength, then there is no question that Bill Clinton lacked it completely. Bush has shown that he has it. His willingness to go after terrorism root and branch despite the widespread opposition among our European allies and even some at home, and to withstand that pressure, is strength. Bill Clinton made surface gestures. He refused to go against the media, popular opinion, the pinstriped boys at the State Department, because he lacked that strength.

HAYS: The most masculine man I ever knew was my grandfather, who supported seven children and never failed to stand when a woman came into the room. Bill Clinton is virile, but he’s not masculine or mature. He never became a grown man.

O’BEIRNE: When I heard that he grew up jumping rope with the girls in his neighborhood, I knew everything I needed to know about Bill Clinton. There’s no contest between Clinton and Bush on masculinity. Bill Clinton couldn’t credibly wear jogging shorts, and look at George Bush in that flight suit.

ROLLINS: But why do so many American women love Bill Clinton?

SCHAEFER: You can learn a lot jumping rope with girls. It won’t make you sexually attractive, but it will make you a more effective, patient listener.

O’BEIRNE: Bill Clinton did understand, from the matriarchy he grew up in, how to appeal to women in that modern way.

HAYS: Clinton could feel your pain like one of your girlfriends. But he could never make a decision like Bush has had to make. He would still be trying to negotiate with the terrorists. The use of force, which until recently was passé, has come back. Clinton couldn’t use force except in a motel room.

Ok. I know that was unfair so soon after lunch, so I'll give you a moment to purge.

Are you ok now? Good.


Thank you Jane. Destroying her book sales on Amazon is a public service. You are a patriot and a credit to women everywhere.



Update: Kudos also to RenaRF for her superb rant that started the whole thing off.
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digby 1/16/2006 01:36:00 PM |

 
Showdown!

by digby

The number one story on Wolf Blitzer's "The Situation Room"

Blitzer: Unleashing powerful new accusations against the man who defeated him, the Democratic 2000 presidential nominee is today accusing President Bush of criminal behavior by authorizing secret domestic slying. And Al gore is calling for appointment of a special counsel to investigate what he calls a "direct assault on the constitution."

Our correspondents are covering this story, the political motives, the legal fallout of this showdown over spying.

Kenny Boy Mehlman's response to Gore's claims was weak as a newborn kitten. And William Schneider just brought up the "I" word.

Now, everyone is pretending that Arlen Specter is capable of holding serious hearings, but at least we are moving in the right direction. First things first.



Update: Ken Adelman is on now. I sure wish that Wolf would ask him if dealing with a nuclear armed Iran will be a cakewalk.



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digby 1/16/2006 01:02:00 PM |

 
MyDD Polling Project

by digby

MYDD has commissioned a poll and could use a little financial help to get its fundraising over the top.

Here's what they are doing:

Our groundbreaking poll, which will challenge conventional wisdom on a variety of topics—Iraq, withdrawal, terrorism, Bush approval, domestic spying—is about to be brought to the public. This will be the first comprehensive nationwide public survey where the questions are informed by the collective knowledge of the netroots and the blogosphere. You helped to make these questions, and with your help this poll will serve as a direct challenge to the entire field of public polling as it is run by commercial news organizations. Now, we need your help in order to bring the answers to the public.


Even though the poll is about to go into the field, we have not yet completed our fundraising in order to pay for the entire costs of the poll. We still need roughly $6,500 in order to complete fundraising for the poll. We need you to donate to the polling project today.

This is a useful blogospheric project from which we can all benefit. We know the mainstream pollsters refuse to ask questions outside the narrow interests of the beltway establishment and that prevents us from knowing the real lay of the land. That's what this new polling operation proposes to challenge. And because it is blogosphere based, it is not beholden to either the corporate media or the party, which makes it a valuable tool for grassroots opinion makers --- whether it's for blogging, the local Democratic club or around the office water cooler. Check it out. This could be the first of many opportunities we have to find out what the people will say when they are asked real questions.



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digby 1/16/2006 12:36:00 PM |

 
For The Sake Of The Constitution

by digby

Al Gore has become the conscience of the Democratic Party. Following the lead of the new media, and the blogosphere in particular, he just laid out the case as to how the invertebrate Republican congress has sold out its constitutional duty to a president who sees himself as above the law and why this poses an unprecedented threat to our constitution.

There are reasons for concern this time around that conditions may be changing and that the cycle [of presidential overreach during wartime] may not repeat itself. For one thing, we have for decades been witnessing the slow and steady accumulation of presidential power. In a global environment of nuclear weapons and cold war tensions, Congress and the American people accepted ever enlarging spheres of presidential initiative to conduct intelligence and counter intelligence activities and to allocate our military forces on the global stage. When military force has been used as an instrument of foreign policy or in response to humanitarian demands, it has almost always been as the result of presidential initiative and leadership. As Justice Frankfurter wrote in the Steel Seizure Case, "The accretion of dangerous power does not come in a day. It does come, however slowly, from the generative force of unchecked disregard of the restrictions that fence in even the most disinterested assertion of authority."

A second reason to believe we may be experiencing something new is that we are told by the Administration that the war footing upon which he has tried to place the country is going to "last for the rest of our lives." So we are told that the conditions of national threat that have been used by other Presidents to justify arrogations of power will persist in near perpetuity.

Third, we need to be aware of the advances in eavesdropping and surveillance technologies with their capacity to sweep up and analyze enormous quantities of information and to mine it for intelligence. This adds significant vulnerability to the privacy and freedom of enormous numbers of innocent people at the same time as the potential power of those technologies. These techologies have the potential for shifting the balance of power between the apparatus of the state and the freedom of the individual in ways both subtle and profound.

Don't misunderstand me: the threat of additional terror strikes is all too real and their concerted efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction does create a real imperative to exercise the powers of the Executive Branch with swiftness and agility. Moreover, there is in fact an inherent power that is conferred by the Constitution to the President to take unilateral action to protect the nation from a sudden and immediate threat, but it is simply not possible to precisely define in legalistic terms exactly when that power is appropriate and when it is not.

But the existence of that inherent power cannot be used to justify a gross and excessive power grab lasting for years that produces a serious imbalance in the relationship between the executive and the other two branches of government.

There is a final reason to worry that we may be experiencing something more than just another cycle of overreach and regret. This Administration has come to power in the thrall of a legal theory that aims to convince us that this excessive concentration of presidential authority is exactly what our Constitution intended.

This legal theory, which its proponents call the theory of the unitary executive but which is more accurately described as the unilateral executive, threatens to expand the president's powers until the contours of the constitution that the Framers actually gave us become obliterated beyond all recognition. Under this theory, the President's authority when acting as Commander-in-Chief or when making foreign policy cannot be reviewed by the judiciary or checked by Congress. President Bush has pushed the implications of this idea to its maximum by continually stressing his role as Commander-in-Chief, invoking it has frequently as he can, conflating it with his other roles, domestic and foreign. When added to the idea that we have entered a perpetual state of war, the implications of this theory stretch quite literally as far into the future as we can imagine.

This effort to rework America's carefully balanced constitutional design into a lopsided structure dominated by an all powerful Executive Branch with a subservient Congress and judiciary is-ironically-accompanied by an effort by the same administration to rework America's foreign policy from one that is based primarily on U.S. moral authority into one that is based on a misguided and self-defeating effort to establish dominance in the world.

The common denominator seems to be based on an instinct to intimidate and control.

Yes. A president who can so easily toss aside international law, treaties and decades of mutual understanding is now showing that he looks upon the rule of law within our own country much the same way. We should not be surprised. It's clear that this particular political faction has an instinct to dominate and control. It's a facet of human nature and those whose personalities feature it strongly tend to gather together under the banner of authoritarianism.

The Enlightenment was in many ways a study of human nature and those who were educated in its ideas, like the founders of this country, used those observations to understand how power works. Knowing that some leaders will seek ever expanding power is exactly why the constitution was designed with its careful system of checks and balances and why the Bill of Rights was written. It's a flaw in our species which, if recognized, can be held at bay by systemic roadblocks. That's what's being fiddled with here and it's dangerous.

Gore went on to point out the obvious -- that this (oft repeated on the right) aphorism "the constitution isn't a suicide pact" in terms of islamic fundamentalism is absurd considering the threats we've faced in the past:

One of the other ways the Administration has tried to control the flow of information is by consistently resorting to the language and politics of fear in order to short-circuit the debate and drive its agenda forward without regard to the evidence or the public interest. As President Eisenhower said, "Any who act as if freedom's defenses are to be found in suppression and suspicion and fear confess a doctrine that is alien to America."

Fear drives out reason. Fear suppresses the politics of discourse and opens the door to the politics of destruction. Justice Brandeis once wrote: "Men feared witches and burnt women."

The founders of our country faced dire threats. If they failed in their endeavors, they would have been hung as traitors. The very existence of our country was at risk.

Yet, in the teeth of those dangers, they insisted on establishing the Bill of Rights.

Is our Congress today in more danger than were their predecessors when the British army was marching on the Capitol? Is the world more dangerous than when we faced an ideological enemy with tens of thousands of missiles poised to be launched against us and annihilate our country at a moment's notice? Is America in more danger now than when we faced worldwide fascism on the march-when our fathers fought and won two World Wars simultaneously?

It is simply an insult to those who came before us and sacrificed so much on our behalf to imply that we have more to be fearful of than they. Yet they faithfully protected our freedoms and now it is up to us to do the same.

He goes on to say that we must do four specific things:

1) demand a special counsel to investigate the wiretapping leaks. This is exactly the kind of investigation that should not be left in the hands of an executive branch appointee who approved the measures in question.

2) demand comprehensive hearings and go where the facts lead. I and others in the blogosphere have been calling for a select committee to invetigate the wiretap leaks so that we can have legal counsel rather than elected bloviators lead the questioning. This is absolutely necessary.

3) we must not rubber stamp the Patriot Act

4) demand that telecommunications companies cease and desist in their illegal invasion of Americans' privacy.


The Liberty Coalition sponsored this speech today and it looks like they are a non-partisan group working on privacy issues. I'm all for that. Here's their mission statement:

The Liberty Coalition works to help organize, support, and coordinate transpartisan public policy activities related to civil liberties and basic human rights. We work in conjunction with groups of partner organizations that are interested in preserving the Bill of Rights, personal autonomy and individual privacy.

The Liberty Coalition is concerned about the threat to Americans' fundamental and inalienable rights. The Coalition is dedicated to upholding and protecting our basic rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In order to accomplish our task, we seek to protect those freedoms as articulated in the Bill of Rights. We base our concerns on the fundamental values and principles of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, particularly the separation of powers and federalism, and Bill of Rights. These are also embodied in the 14th amendment, especially the due process and privileges and immunities clauses.

To accomplish this mission, the Liberty Coalition seeks to restore, maintain, and improve individuals' right through developing a networked forum for information and policy education and advocacy. The Coalition examines and expresses opinions on legislation and other government actions that would, on the one hand, limit the rights of citizens that would, on the other, advance efforts to enhance citizens' rights.

Our primary focus is on restrictions on privacy, autonomy and liberty related issue such as the Patriot Act, National Identification Cards/National Drivers License and government databanks. We are also concerned with medical and financial privacy and confidentiality, and work more broadly as appropriate The Liberty Coalition seeks politically and judicially to retain our liberty while increasing our safety.

When it comes to this issue of presidential overreach and government spying, the most effective action will be bi-partisan. (Townhall is ostensibly part of the coalition which I'll believe it when they pull their noses out of Bush's spidey hole.) But any conservative or libertarian with intellectual integrity should be on board with this. I can guarantee you that if a Democrat tried what Bus has done I would feel exactly the same way about it. These are not transitory partisan issues, they are fundamental American values.

If you didn't get a chance to see Al Gore give his speech, at least read the transcript (via Raw Story.) He's singing our song today. If he's crazy then so am I and I'm proud of it.



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digby 1/16/2006 10:34:00 AM |

Sunday, January 15, 2006

 
True Believer (kind of)

by digby

Julia has the skinny on Shadegg and the rest of his class of 94 "reformers." What an inspiring group. Shadegg, the self-styled "clean" and principled candidate seeking to replace Tom Delay ran pretty much specifically on the idea of term limits. He strongly believed that politicians shouldn't make a career out of politics. Now, not so much.



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digby 1/15/2006 07:26:00 PM |

 
Mutual Friends

by digby


So I was loooking over the Abramoff e-mails trying to see if there's any evidence in them that Jack directed his Native American clients to give to Democrats and that Democrats knew it (there isn't) when I came upon this notorious note from Ralphie Reed:

From: ralphreed@
Sent: Thursday, November 12, 1998 12:19 AM
To: Abramoff, jack (DC)
Subject: RE: Hi Rlaph

Hey, now that I'm done with electoral politics, I need to start humping in corporate accounts. I counting on you to help me with some contacts. Have you talked to Grover since the Newt development. I'm afraid he took a hit on the consulting side with that since so much of it was Newt maintenance but I hope I'm wrong. I'm getting ready to do some work with mutual friends that we probably ought to discuss. Let's chat.

Hmmm. Remember this?

WASHINGTON, Jan. 24, 2002 - Karl Rove, President Bush's top political adviser, recommended the Republican strategist Ralph Reed to the Enron Corporation for a lucrative consulting contract as Mr. Bush was weighing whether to run for president, close associates of Mr. Rove say.

The Rove associates say the recommendation, which Enron accepted, was intended to keep Mr. Reed's allegiance to the Bush campaign without putting him on the Bush payroll. Mr. Bush, they say, was then developing his "compassionate conservativism" message and did not want to be linked too closely to Mr. Reed, who had just stepped down as executive director of the Christian Coalition, an organization of committed religious conservatives.

At the same time, they say, the contract discouraged Mr. Reed, a prominent operative who was being courted by several other campaigns, from backing anyone other than Mr. Bush.

Enron paid Mr. Reed $10,000 to $20,000 a month, the amount varying by year and the particular work, people familiar with the arrangement say. He was hired in September 1997 and worked intermittently for Enron until the company collapsed.

In interviews today, both Mr. Rove and Mr. Reed said the contract with Enron had had nothing to do with the Bush campaign. But Mr. Rove said he had praised Mr. Reed's qualifications in a conversation about the job with an Enron lobbyist in Texas.

"I think I talked to someone before Ralph got hired," Mr. Rove said. "But I may have talked to him afterward."

"I'm a big fan of Ralph's," Mr. Rove said, "so I'm constantly saying positive things."

[...]

Around the time that Mr. Reed worked out his deal with Enron, he made clear to the Bush team that he was supporting Mr. Bush for president. Mr. Reed once recalled that at a meeting in 1997, he told Mr. Bush, then the governor of Texas: "I hope you go. I hope you run. And if you run, I'll do everything I can to help get you elected."

From then on, Mr. Reed was an unpaid consultant to the Bush organization, though after the race was well under way his firm was paid by the campaign for direct mail and phone banks.

[...]


Mr. Rove, who sold roughly $100,000 in Enron stock last year, months before the company's collapse, said Mr. Reed was clearly on Mr. Bush's team prior to taking the Enron job.

"Ralph Reed made it clear right from the beginning," Mr. Rove said, "that he wanted to be for him, and gave sound and solid advice in the years running up to the president's decision to be a candidate."

Now, I would never dream of jumping to any conclusions about the "mutual friends" Ralphie wanted to chat with his good friend Jack about just as the 98 elections were over and the presidential campaign was lurching into gear. But it was certainly nice of Ralph to be so careful about mentioning the name of whoever it was in that e-mail, wasn't it?


Update: Poor Ralphie

The controversy has confronted Reed with a fierce headwind here. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has published 48 articles and editorials on the Reed-Abramoff connection. The paper's main circulation area includes the suburban and exurban areas surrounding Atlanta, which provide more than half the votes cast in statewide Republican primaries.

[...]

Random interviews on Main Street in heavily Republican Alpharetta -- a rapidly growing town of 37,850 on the far northern suburbs of Atlanta -- suggested that even many people who follow politics casually are aware of the linkage between Reed and Abramoff.

"Ralph Reed? He's a politician," said David Loudenflager, a Republican who retired after working 32 years for the Arrow Shirt Company. "He was involved with Jack Abramoff and the Indians and all those."

Loudenflager does not like the Democratic Party -- "they give away everything" -- but he puts no stock in the Christian Coalition: "All these people running around telling you how good they are, and how right they are. You better be careful and hold on to your wallet."

Todd Guy, owner of Trader Golf, said succinctly in response to an inquiry: "Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition? My God! Abramoff."

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digby 1/15/2006 06:08:00 PM |

 
Buy This Man A Drink

by digby

BLITZER: Should there be a change in attitude after 9/11?

BERGEN: I think the short answer is no. I mean, the nation has faced much more serious crises than 9/11.

We faced an existential crisis in the Cold War and with the Nazis; 9/11, obviously, was a very big deal, but I think we need to have some perspective.

We're not in a situation where our enemies can simply annihilate us as the Soviets could. Certainly, they can do us a lot of damage. But we have to, sort of, weigh that against the fact that we also want to live in a society where constitutional -- the Constitution is paid attention to.

Thank You!

Blitzer looked a little non-plussed because, you know, Bergen was being extremely un-PC. Very few people have been willing to publicly challenge the conventional wisdom that we are facing an evil enemy more threatening than anything ever experienced in human history.

Obviously, he will have to be dealt with. If this keeps up, somebody might just notice that there's no such thing as a war on terrorism either.


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digby 1/15/2006 04:19:00 PM |

 
Breaking The Machine

by digby

TIME magazine has posted an essential article about the effect of the Abramoff scandal on the house Republicans.

Meet the "reform" candidates who would like to replace Tom DeLay:

Boehner is no babe in the woods. He was one of Newt Gingrich's closest allies in bringing Republicans to power in 1994. When they took control of the House in 1995 after 40 years of Democratic rule, Boehner, as the House conference chairman, the No. 4 leadership position, was put in charge of building coalitions with business groups. He ran a meeting every Thursday of more than a dozen top business lobbyists in Washington. The relationship was mutually beneficial: House Republicans pushed through pro-business legislation, while the business groups provided campaign cash and grass-roots support to get bills passed. Boehner, who was part of the so-called Gang of Seven that had attacked Democrats for overdrafts from the House bank in the early 1990s, quickly became less known for his reform actions than for his closeness to lobbyists. He famously handed out campaign donations in the form of checks from tobacco lobbyists to members on the floor of the House in 1995.

[...]

The battle between Boehner and Blunt got ugly quickly. Blunt allies called Boehner a "joy boy" more concerned about partying than about the party. Boehner allies distributed a Rube Goldberg- like diagram, intentionally drawn to resemble opponents' depiction of Hillary Rodham Clinton's failed health-care plan, headlined Rep. Roy Blunt's efforts on behalf of Jack Abramoff and his indian gaming clients.

[...]

Shadegg has the strongest reform credentials of the three contenders. He entered Congress in the famous class of 1994, which campaigned on a pledge to reform Washington after years of Democratic rule. He once headed the caucus of the House's most conservative members of Congress

There you have it, two crooks and a fanatical wingnut. Excellent choices all.

The TIME article from which I excerpted the above has a great lede that should be sent around to everyone you know. It encapsulates the whole ugly business:

The spreadsheet, bristling with million-dollar totals, jumped from flat screen to flat screen last winter in the Washington underground of fund-raising consultants and political-action committees. It had been created by allies of Congressman John Boehner, an Ohio Republican known for massive, raucous late-night parties. A window into the science of the shakedown, the spreadsheet calculated the "efficiency" of fund-raising committees headed by various leaders of the House, showing which were most generous to other Republicans. Boehner's backers were thrilled when the widely forwarded spreadsheet produced a front-page headline in The Hill, a newspaper focused on Congress, saying boehner boasts of big bucks. Eight months later, his team smiled again when the paper ran a list of Boehner's "K Street Cabinet," loyal lobbyists and other power brokers who would help run the show if he achieved his longtime ambition of becoming House Speaker or majority leader. With Tom DeLay's machine still in charge of the Capitol, those were the credentials that would get an aspiring lawmaker taken seriously.

They didn't even try to hide it.

Haven't you ever wondered why it is that we are told constantly that it's nearly impossible for the Democrats to take back the house because they've been safely gerrymandered and yet Republicans spend almost all their time fundraising? If their seats are safe, what do they need all this campaign cash for?

It's a money laundering operation. The lobbyists give money to the GOP as campaign cash, the recipients gain power and influence in the party by spreading that campaign cash around. The Republican leadership allows the lobbyists to write their own legislation and the members earmark large sums of money to their own personal special interests. The taxpayers then pay back the lobbyists at a very nice profit.

The taxpayers are thereby funding the Republican party. Nice racket isn't it? And anybody who doesn't understand that this is a distinctly Republican problem (like the inexplicable Deborah Howell who refuses to see the forest for a couple of twigs on the side of the road) is willfully blind.

In 1995, DeLay famously compiled a list of the 400 largest PACs, along with the amounts and percentages of money they had recently given to each party. Lobbyists were invited into DeLay's office and shown their place in "friendly" or "unfriendly" columns. ("If you want to play in our revolution," DeLay told The Washington Post, "you have to live by our rules.") Another was to oust Democrats from trade associations, what DeLay and Norquist dubbed "the K Street Strategy."

[...]

It took the 2000 elections, which gave Republicans the White House and Congress, to completely change the climate. In the months after, Santorum became the Senate's point man on K Street and launched his Tuesday meetings. Working on the outside, Norquist accelerated what he calls the "K Street Project," a database intended to track the party affiliation, Hill experience, and political giving of every lobbyist in town. With Democrats out of power, these efforts are bearing fruit. Slowly, the GOP is marginalizing Democratic lobbyists and populating K Street with loyal Republicans. (DeLay alone has placed a dozen of his aides at key lobbying and trade association jobs in the last few years--"graduates of the DeLay school," as they are known.) Already, the GOP and some of its key private-sector allies, such as PhRMA, have become indistinguishable.

The piece in TIME ends with this:

...in the warrens of the Capitol, Republicans debate how they can project change while keeping things much the same. The big totals on future spreadsheets depend on it.

It is hard to overemphasize how important this Abramoff scandal is. It's not just "gotcha" politics. This Republican political machine is one of the most corrosive forces this country has ever seen. They are literally stealing huge sums of money from the taxpayers, sometimes blatantly for personal financial gain, as with the Dukestir. But in a larger sense they are blatently using our money, the people's money, as the primary way to fund their party and keep it in power. The exposure of this scam has shaken the foundation of their long term strategy.

The combination of their proven undemocratic impulses with their propensity for thuggishness and corruption has made the modern GOP one of the most pernicious political factions in our history. Putting an end to their shakedown racket is a necessary first step to breaking up their coalition and restoring some sanity to our two party system.



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digby 1/15/2006 04:00:00 PM |

 
Nattering Nabobs of Negativism

by digby


My good friend William Henders has written in to help me understand the errors of my leftist ways.

Dear Digby,

Once again it falls to me the thankless task of instructing you and your rabid base of liberal mouth-foamers on a few realities of public life in America.

It is true that in recent times the current administration and the GOP as a whole has proven sporadically incompetent, sleazy and downright mendacious in dealing with a host of matters of grave national importance. The list of such transgressions has been ably chronicled by you and your ilk in the partisan hack brigade. There is little need for me to run through it - WMDs, Katrina, Abramoff, Plame, FISA violations, torture, etc. etc., blah blah blah, yada yada yada.

Yes, you folks have had all these and more little "gotcha" moments, upon the discovery of which the Left has regularly shown itself to be basely thrilled to toot its own horn as "speakers of Truth to Power."

What your side fails to appreciate is that as terrible as any crimes by Republicans in leadership positions might be, it is in fact the whole concept of "speaking Truth to Power" that is the real cancer destroying our country from the inside out. The British of the Raj had a word for it: "Croaking."

The American polity understands this. It's why few on our side fear that the Democrats will regain any semblance of power in 2006, 2008 or beyond. But because you, Digby, and others like you so clearly have a tin ear to the concerns of real Americans, allow me to explain.

We are at war. When President Bush concedes that there exist "responsible ways" to debate our progress in the War on Terror, he is being overly generous (to his credit). But there is simply no "responsible way" to undermine through criticism of any stripe our leadership's actions to protect us, no matter how plainly mistaken, inadequate or served by ulterior motives those actions may be. There may be time for future historians to do so, though the nature of this particular war means that the proper time for such revisionism will be at least decades from now.

An analogy: The "facts on the ground" are that we Americans have, through the democratic process, lined ourselves up behind a lead dog in a sled race against Islamofacism. Even though we may at times think that this lead dog is dragging us towards thin ice, or miring us in soft snow, or hurtling us over a cliff, the only purpose served by "fouling the traces" through criticism of the leader is to lessen our resolve to compete in this Global Iditarod against Terror at all.

Nor is the profound problem of the Left's counterproductive harping limited to the affairs of war. What did incessant criticism of the President's handling of the Katrina disaster do but promote more despair amongst the victims, who clearly needed a reason for hope as much as they needed relief supplies and an evacuation plan? Who amongst the survivors will find the inner spirit to rebuild, when the Digbys of the world are constantly reminding them of promises unkept by their leaders?

In an economy that is increasingly stratified and underserving of a growing underclass mired in debt and with vanishingly few options for entry into positions of financial health, the Left would only add to the problem by putting the brakes on any optimism that may naturally, if fitfully, arise under such conditions. How? By relentlessly picking apart every failed initiative by our leadership, by doggedly bringing to light every omission of relevant data in the administration's projections ... when instead of such micro-criticism of details, a macro-optimism towards Bush economic strategy is called for, nay incumbent upon any who would call himself a
patriot.

To put it bluntly, the problem is not the efficacy of any particular plan for war, disaster relief or economic growth put forward by our leaders, but rather the real threat that under the assault of liberals like you, we may have no leaders and no plans at all.

Cordially, etc.

William G. Henders

He's right, of course. It's no secret that the left has perversely signed on to the independent feline political style. (Check out that evil look in their eyes.)We will not foolishly expend our energy waging a useless, marathon Iditarod Against Terror. (We like to sleep a lot.)

However, like the lethal lion pride we are, we will encircle the Republican dogs, chained to their lead dog Balto Bush and his driver Karl "over the cliff" Rove as they optimistically yip and bark around their campfire. And then we will go in for the kill. On the veldt of American politics, the predators always win in the long run. (Why do you think the Chairman of the DNC is known for his leonine roar?)

To Mr Henders' larger point that we endanger our country's physical and economic security when we criticize the president, I can only hang my head in shame. I understand now that if you aren't willing to unquestioningly support your president you don't believe in freedom. QED.



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digby 1/15/2006 10:54:00 AM |

Saturday, January 14, 2006

 
Grover's Eunuchs

by digby

Wolcott says:

I was traveling the cable dial this afternoon where I came upon a panel on CNBC's Kudlow & Company just as Lanny Davis, his insipid, ingratiating grin firmly in place, was saying that he hoped Democrats wouldn't "politicize" the Jack Abramoff situation but simply let the facts of the case emerge.

[...]

Beltway Dems like Davis and the DLC crowd don't want to politicize the Iraq war, or the Alito hearings, or the Katrina clusterfuck, or the NSA spying scandal; they shy away from every prospective fight and prevent any ongoing debate or controversy from gaining traction. Just as Jack Murtha's bombshell was gaining momentum, in droops Joe Lieberman to back up the president with a gift-wrapped testimonial. Yes, I know Lanny Davis is not an elected official but he was representing the Democratic side along with Harold Ford against John Fund of WSJ and Arizona congressman Jeff Flake (R). Given how Davis was fawning over Flake (who was making mild reformist noises about the need to clean house)--saying that he wished he could vote for someone so bright and sensible--and how Ford was prudently urging us to stay the course in Iraq and Afghanistan, it was more of a barbershop quartet than a doubles match. Kudlow, of course, couldn't have been more pleased by the civility and consensus shown by the fab four. Lanny Davis and Harold Ford were his kind of Democrats--reasonable, moderate, mainstream, and completely housebroken. They were good little guests.

Sadly, that brings to mind Grover Norquist's observation after the last election:

"Once the minority of House and Senate are comfortable in their minority status, they will have no problem socializing with Republicans. Any farmer will tell you that certain animals run around and are very unpleasant, but when they've been fixed, then they are happy and sedate. They are contented and cheerful. They don't go around peeing on the furniture and such."

To be fair, this does not apply to all Democrats. The leadership of Reid, Pelosi and Dean have been very aggressive. And the old dogs like Kennedy have been unafraid to raise a challenge. The problem lies with the alleged moderates like Ford and the gasbags like Biden who don't know the difference between partisan rhetoric and action (and fail to publicly play the game with any finesse.) But the biggest problem is the "liberal" pundits like Davis who should all be shunned. They don't speak for me and I don't think they speak for the Democratic party. They seem to speak for the conventional wisdom of the beltway which places a premium on obedient, neutered Democrats.


Again, it's the the old joke:

"Harry and Lanny are facing the firing squad. The executioner comes forward to place the blindfold on them. Harry disdainfully and proudly refuses, tearing the thing from his face. Lanny turns to him and pleads: "Please Harry, don't make trouble!"

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digby 1/14/2006 12:41:00 PM |

 
"Intelligent Design" Creationism Is So 2005

by tristero

Now, it's "intelligent evolution" creationism. Same lousy ideas. Same lack of peer-reviewed scientific evidence.

As PZ says, let's remember exactly what Dembski wrote when they claim that they've got an entirley new product that's not creationism:

I therefore offer the following proposal if ID gets outlawed from our public schools: retitle it Intelligent Evolution (IE). … [H]ey, it would still be evolution, and evolution can be taught in schools. In fact, I think I'll title my next book Intelligent Evolution: The Mindful Deviation of Evolutionary Pathways. Perhaps this book has already been written.

Note to anyone who wants to argue against science and for "intelligent design" creationism: As always, first please go to Pharyngula and convince PZ Meyers that you're right. When he's satisfied, come on back here and I'll be happy to discuss the subject with you. Until then, any attempt to "engage" will be answered by a boilerplate response to convince PZ first before wasting our time.
tristero 1/14/2006 10:32:00 AM |

 
Message From Beyond The Fourth Dimension

by tristero

In tomorrow's NY Times Magazine (no link yet), Yale Law professor Kenji Yoshino has a fascinating, provocative and nevertheless profoundly weird article about changes in discriminatory behavior.

The law, Professor Yoshino argues, has effectively eliminated discrimination by group membership; it is illegal to fire someone simply because she is black, for example. However, discrimination continues through the legal suppression ("covering") of any expression of minority group membership. So an African-American flight attendant can be fired simply for wearing cornrows, as a company regulation prohibits all braided hairdos. Professor Yoshino argues that while the law can address a small part of this kind of discrimination, the best way to fight against this obsession with minimizing differences is in other cultural arenas. After all, even two seconds of thought makes it quite clear that an important question to ask about the flight attendant case is why there is a company regulation prohibiting cornrows in the first place. And the more one thinks about it, the more it seems like something that couldn't possibly matter at all in the flight attendant's workplace except to prohibit any hint of diverse cultural expression. And that is discrimination, argues Professor Yoshino.

Now, I got some problems with the details of his argumentation here, but I am on the good Professor's side; he's got a point. A very important point. He's identified quite clearly an important, little noticed pattern of unfair discrimination. So the next step is for those of us who care about discriminatory practices to argue out the problems in Yoshino's thesis and find ways, both little and small, to bring them to bear on American culture.

And it is at this point, it becomes distressingly clear how truly weird Professor Yoshino's article was.

Although he says he teaches at Yale, which is in New Haven, Connecticut in the United States, I honestly don't know what country Professor Yoshino is living in. As it happens, I too live in a country called the United States, where coinicidentally there also is a New Haven and a Yale Law School about 2 hours or so away from where I live. But in the country in which I live, initiatives to broaden and extend the cultural definition of discrimination are unimaginable. In my country right now, we are trying to find a way to rebuild an entire city that was predominantly African American until they were flooded out of their homes and whose awful plight has been met with foot-dragging, racist indifference by the national government. "Extend" civil liberties? How about, you know, simply making sure that one's skin color doesn't determine the speed with which one's home is cleaned of raw sewage?

In my country, we are seeing, as David Neiwert documents so painfully over at Orcinus, a resurgence in the crudest form of elimationism rhetoric, "mainstream" think tanks and "respected" pundits rationalizing the internment of Japanese citizens during World War II as well as the murder, torture, and rape of prisoners today. Non-whites buying cellphones in bulk is deemed reasonable cause for fear of terrorism. To make matters worse, the very same people obsessed with excusing this kind of behavior seem all but indifferent to the crimes and terrorism being planned and committed by all white militia gorups.

In Professor Yoshino's America, the citizens care about eliminating racism and discrimination because, apparently, they believe that by doing so they will develop a stronger America whose diversity will give it the flexibility and mental suppleness needed to confront 21st century problems. But here in my America, we're arguing whether the Ku Klux Klan really was a racist organization or a legitimate expression of an aggrieved ethnic group.

Now the latest, hippest theories in physics tell us that there very well may be parallel universes, identical to ours but with different values for the natural laws. If that is so and Professor Yoshino's paper is a communique from an alternate reality, does anyone know how that paper could have ended up in THIS universe? And more importantly, does anyone know how I can leave this reality and enter his? Like today?

However, if, by some slim chance, the latest theories of multiverses are wrong, and Professor Yoshino and I are in fact citizens of the same country on the same planet and are presumably experiencing the same reality, then one of us (at least) is talking pie-in-the-sky nonsense. Because nothing close to Professor Yoshino's aspirations for increased civil liberties are conceivable in this America until Bushism collapses and the Enlightenment values which informed this country's founders are once more affirmed and practiced. And frankly, I don't see a chance of that happening anytime soon.


{Update: Added the Malkin Terrorist Cellphone Caper.}
tristero 1/14/2006 09:35:00 AM |

Friday, January 13, 2006

 
Can't Have It Both Ways

by digby

The Editors quote Pat Buchanan on the GOP's hispanic problem:

Today, a Republican can sweep the white vote 55 percent to 45 percent, and still lose. And as President Clinton merrily predicted a few years ago, white folks will be just another minority in 2050, as they are already in California and Texas.

In short, Republicans need minority voters to survive as America’s Party. The Bush-Rove solution to the looming demographic disaster is to go all-out to court the nation’s fastest growing minority, Hispanics, who now number 40 million and 13 percent of the U.S. population. But, in seeking to win the Hispanic vote, the inherent defects of the Bush-Rove strategy have become manifestly clear.

First, Hispanics have never voted Republican in any presidential election. In his 49-state landslide in 1984, Reagan, despite a macho image that appealed to Hispanics, managed to win only 44 percent. In national elections, the Hispanic vote ranges between 56 percent and 75 percent Democratic. Thus, the more Hispanic America becomes, the more Democratic America becomes. […]

The question Bush and Rove face is this: Can the GOP be both the party that secures the border against Hispanic invaders and sanctions employers who hire them, and still be the party Hispanics will vote for? In the old imagery, if Bush reaches for the bird in the bush, the Hispanic vote, by favoring open borders and amnesty, he may lose the bird in the hand, the support of the white working and middle class that is the heart of the Republican coalition.

Bush and Rove think they can have both. They can’t. But if George Bush’s father, 15 years ago, had only sealed and secured the border and begun to deport illegals, his son and Rove would not be facing the seemingly insoluble problem the GOP is presented with today.

Either Bush and Rove secure the border now, or we can kiss the GOP goodbye.

The Editors, wise as always, add:

Pat’s got personal reasons for wanting to paint a bleak picture, of course, and there’s no fundamental reason why “God, gays and guns” wouldn’t work on socially conservative Latinos as well as it worked on socially conservative whites. Of course, there’s no fundamental reason why it wouldn’t work on socially conservative blacks, either, but it sure as shit doesn’t. That’s because - as Pat is at pains to avoid discussing - the reason the Nixon/Reagan strategy worked was not because conservative whites suddenly developed an interest in religion, marksmanship, and heterosexuality. The reason was race. The reason, as Pat more or less admits, is still race. It wouldn’t be impossible for the Republicans to appeal to Latinos, but it’s impossible to do that and hold on to the conservatarian whites who voted for Reagan, Nixon, and Bush. If the Republicans are still in trouble in November, a little media-driven race war could really help turn out that vote.

It might not be enough. Get this:

The Latino Coalition, a conservative group close to the GOP, has now provided just that: a new nationwide poll of Hispanics which, as it happens, confirms the trend away from the GOP shown in the June poll. Indeed, this poll shows the GOP in even worse shape among Hispanic voters than was suggested by that earlier poll. And, given who conducted it, you certainly couldn’t accuse this new poll of Democratic bias. Indeed, Latino Coalition Hispanic polls in the past have typically produced results substantially more favorable to the GOP than contemporaneous results of DCorps and other national polls of Hispanics. So it’s a real eye-opener to get these very, very unfavorable results from this particular organization at this point in time.

Let’s start with the generic Congressional contest. This poll finds Democrats with a stunning 61-21 lead over the GOP among Hispanic registered voters, which translates into a 50 point lead (75-25) among those who express a preference. The analogous figure among those who expressed a preference in the June DCorps poll was “only” 36 points. By way of comparison to the last two off-year elections, 2002 and 1998, Democrats carried the Congressional vote by 24 and 26 points, respectively.

The new poll also finds Democrats with a 35 point lead (58-23) in party identification among voters.

This issue buried the GOP in California for the last decade. So, let Pat (and Tom Tancredo) rant. The last time he got on this bandwagon he helped usher in a Democratic president.



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digby 1/13/2006 05:32:00 PM |

 
Honest Graft

by digby


Matt Yglesias, guest hosting TPM for the day, makes an important observation:

Abuse of the government contracting process is bad, and perpetrators of wrongdoing should in no way get off the hook. Nevertheless, the entire concept of farming government out work to private firms is a more-or-less open invitation to corruption. There are instances when contracting is the only reasonable solution. But for some years now -- predating Bush, predating the DeLay era -- all the pressure has always been to privatize more and more government functions. The theory is that the private sector is more efficient than the public sector, so contracting functions out to private firms should save money. The reality has had a lot more to do with union-busting, machine-building, and "honest graft" than money saved or improved efficiency.

I know it's ridiculous to even ponder the idea that we might look to some of the endemic graft that's grown into our new "free market" guvmint, but it's there, nonetheless. The chances of reforming it are almost nil, of course. It's the union buster, machine builders gift that just keeps on giving.



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digby 1/13/2006 05:09:00 PM |

 
A Matter Of Trust

by digby


Kevin Drum, Marshall Wittman and John Dickerson all issue dire warnings to the Democrats not to:

a) challenge the Republicans on the illegal NSA wiretapping scandal (and by extension the administration's belief that the president has the power as both a unitary executive and commander in chief to ignore the laws) because the Republicans will wipe the floor with us just as they did over the Homeland Security issue in 2002.

and

b) get too excited about Abramoff because with Iran out there threatening, Bush will be able to use national security as effectively as he did in the past.

To all of that I say balderdash. Times have changed. There is no longer a single "boogeymahn" narrative. Not after Iraq.

The politics are very different now than they were in 2002. This country is no longer in thrall to a president with an 80% approval rating. Iraq is a huge drag, the Republicans' credibility is in shreds because of it --- and the Abramoff scandal just reinforces the whole ugly mess. The man with the bullhorn is now seen as the man with the bullshit to around 60% of voters.

Here are some numbers on the NSA scandal:

"As you may know, the Bush Administration has been wiretapping telephone conversations between U.S. citizens living in the United States and suspected terrorists living in other countries without getting a court order allowing it to do so...Do you think the Bush Administration was right or wrong in wiretapping these conversations without obtaining a court order?"


Right Wrong Unsure
50 46 4


Even when its worded in the most administration friendly way possible("between US citizens and suspected terrorists") half the country is against it. What do you think will happen when most people understand that the conversations were not just with "suspected terrorists?" After all, all these thousands of Americans who have allegedly been chatting to suspected terrorists overseas are still walking free; the only thwarted plot they've mentioned was some bozo from Cleveland who wanted to dismantle the Brooklyn bridge with a blowtorch.

Here's another polling question to ponder:

"Do you think the Republican Party or the Democratic Party can do a better job of writing laws which help the government find terrorists without violating the average person's rights?"


Republican/Democrat/Both/Neither/Unsure
1/5-8/06 33 42 5 7 13
12/7-10/01 33 26 14 7 20


As long as we are being crassly political, this is an important question:

"After 9/11, President Bush authorized government wiretaps on some phone calls in the U.S. without getting court warrants, saying this was necessary in order to reduce the threat of terrorism. Do you approve or disapprove of the President doing this?"


Approve/Disapprove/Unsure

ALL adults 49 48 3
Republicans 82 17 1
Democrats 31 67 2
Independents 41 54 5

From an electoral standpoint, (unless you think that the 31% of Democrats who support this will vote for Republicans because of it) the number to look at there is the independent voter. That's the swing vote and they don't like it.

Finally, there's this:

"During wartime, some presidents have either received or assumed special war powers, which give the president more authority to act independently when he feels it is necessary. In the current campaign against terrorism, is it a good idea or a bad idea for the president to have the authority to make changes in the rights usually guaranteed by the Constitution?"


Good Idea/Bad Idea/Unsure
1/5-8/06 36 57 7
12/7-10/01 64 29 7


To be fair there are a bunch of questions in this poll that indicate that people don't care much about this or support the president. They are all over the map. Which means that this is one of those issues about which people are still open to persuasion.

I do not think this is the same country that it was in 2002 and we are finally able to look at these issues with a bit of reason and dispassion. It's time to make the case for rational assessment of the risks. I do not bleieve that the public is nearly as willing to jump on any national security whim as they were four years ago. At least I think it's time to find out. If we don't, there may be no going back.

And while some are apparently willing to take Bush at his word that he has only used the illegal wiretapping for purely national security reasons, nobody can be sure of that because there is no oversight. Which is the problem. Nobody says that the president shouldn't be able to monitor Americans who are talking to suspected terrorists. But at least half the country doesn't see why he couldn't find a way to do that legally. Certainly, the more than a dozen whisteleblowers who came forward to the NY Times think he could have and that is what raises suspicions about his motives.

I think a good part of his motive is a desire to institutionalize Presidential Infallibility Doctrine and that is bad. People are not aware of this yet, but hearings, if done properly, could serve to educate them a bit.

But there is also ample reason to doubt the president's word that this has not been used as he says it's been used. And that's because it has recently been revealed that the Pentagon has been monitoring protestors and political groups. The president's most trusted advisor (who is possibly going to be indicted for perjury, I might add) along with a legion of his supporters, say publicly that "liberals" are unpatriotic. The president himself is going all over the country as we speak saying that anyone who questions his motives is giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

One can certainly see a scenario in which a president who thinks this way could also think that it is necessary to monitor American dissenters on national security grounds. And under his reading of the constitution, we have no right to inquire or demand that anyone review a decision like that. I continue to believe that most Americans would find that repugnant.

And that leads us to the Abramoff scandal. This issue of corruption and graft in the Republican party is hugely important and it is going to have a life of its own even if we do nothing. It plays directly into the idea that Republican leadership believes that they are above the law. Just like the president.

As for Iran, I have no idea what will happen politically. But I'm willing to bet big money that the president will not get the same benefit of the doubt he got on Iraq. And that is just sad because he blew his credibility on bullshit to the detriment of our country's national security. Had he maintained the mystique of American power instead of proving to the world how incredibly fucked up we really are, we might have some clout to deal with Iran today. Iran with nukes is not good.

However, the consensus is that they cannot get one for another five years. So, I think we can afford to hold back any patriotic impulse to support this lying sack of shit until we can elect a new congress that can provide some oversight. This administration has damaged American credibility so badly that we are going to be lucky if we can persuade the world to believe us when we say the sun is coming up tomorrow. For the sake of national security I think it's vitally important that we neuter him as much as possible. Every word he utters now makes this world a more dangerous place to live.

We cannot continue to worry about whether the Republicans are going to call us chickenshits on national security. They are. But I'm betting that the time is ripe to turn that back on them. There is an undercurrent of discontent with this administration and the Republican party in general, particularly on Iraq and public corruption. It's all a matter of trust and they are losing it. We won't benefit from that by playing it safe on matters of fundamental principle.

Right now the Democrats have a distinct advantage when it comes to the question of who "will write laws that will help the government find terrorists without violating the rights of the average American." That is what we build upon. And if we lose in November, then we lose having at least begun to make a real case for progressive principles instead of losing because we tried to convince people that we weren't quite as bad as they say we are.



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digby 1/13/2006 04:25:00 PM |

 
Going Chris Matthews One Better

by tristero

Should the president have the right to break the law and gather information after 9/11? Chris Matthews tells us what he thinks:

MATTHEWS: We're under attack on 9-11. A couple of days after that, if I were president of the United States and somebody said we had the ability to check on all the conversations going on between here and Hamburg, Germany, where all the Al Qaeda people are, or somewhere in Saudi [Arabia], where they came from and their parents are, and we could mine some of that information by just looking for some key words like "World Trade Center" or "Pentagon," I'd do it.

TICE [a former NSA official]: Well, you'd be breaking the law.

MATTHEWS: Yeah. Well, maybe that's part of the job.

Well, I'll see Matthews and raise him. I think the president of the United States should have detained for questioning the relatives of anyone suspected of involvement in 9/11. I don't care what anyone says about guilt by association, if you're related to bin Laden, for example, then by God, nothing in the weeks after 9/11 should stop the US Government from keeping you around for some extended questioning.

The thing is... nothing did stop the the Bush administration from detaining bin Laden's relatives and other Saudi nationals here in the US after 9/11 for as long as they wanted. Except, of course, the Bush administration itself.* Oh, and it would have been perfectly legal to detain them, but they didn't bother. That's right: no laws had to be broken. Bush just had to exercise some common sense and summon the patriotic will to disobey his Saudi masters... oops, I mean good friends.

A corollary question: Would an illegal wiretap have prevented 9/11? Well, if it takes breaking the law to gather that kind of information, then yeah, let's Dirty Harry Cleans Up Frisco, fellas! Screw the law.

But y'know what's kinda funny? It really wasn't necessary to break any laws to gather information that would have prevented 9/11. But it really is pretty important to have someone around who understands the language when they first come in::

Before Sept. 11, U.S. agencies collected about 30 communications from suspected al Qaeda operatives or other militants referring to an imminent event, but many were false alarms, a U.S. intelligence official said on Monday.

"You can't dismiss any of them, but it doesn't tell you tomorrow is the day," the official told Reuters on condition of anonymity. [Oh?? Shades of Austin Powers: "That's not my Swedish Penis Pump." Read on.]

Messages from members of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network included the phrases "Tomorrow is zero hour" and "The match begins tomorrow," which government sources have said were picked up on Sept. 10 by National Security Agency eavesdropping on global communications.

Those two messages were not translated from Arabic until Sept. 12.

But let's cut the crap. Matthews' little conversation was about quite a serious topic, but the topic wasn't the security of the United States which is adequately served by its security laws (the competence of its agencies under Bush is a different story). You don't gotta be a cowboy to be president. Or a torturer, or a murderer of prisoners. And Matthews knows this. And he also knows what his real topic is:

Is it ok for George W. Bush to continue to violate the laws of the people and the government of the US? Is it ok for Bush to insist he is answerable only to the Voice of God in his head but not to any court of law?

Chris Matthews thinks that's just fine. And y'know something? I don't think Bush even has to pay him to say so. Kinda gives you the creeps, doesn't it?



*Now, you may have noticed, if you clicked the link to Snopes, that they make a point of debunking the claims that the flights of bin Laden relatives and Saudi nationals occurred immediately after 9/11 and before the FBI questioned them. No argument with that: I'm not claiming Jim Garrison-style conspiracy, just incredible incompetence mixed with political pressure from on high (and no one believes permission for those flights didn't come straight from Crawford's Answer To Churchill himself).

Now the flights to evacuate the Saudis started a mere five hours after airspace opened up on 9/13. Most of the fugitives... I mean passengers, were not interviewed. Then, on Sept. 20, only nine days after the attacks, a flight with 26 passengers, mostly related to the terrorist mastermind left the US. Now twenty two of these people were interviewed and swore they knew nothing. Wouldn't you? And they scrammed out of the country.

That's what I call a thorough investigation.
tristero 1/13/2006 01:07:00 PM |

 
Too Important For Bloviators

by digby

I would like second Glenn Greenwald's call for a special Select Committee to investigate the illegal NSA wiretapping scandal. This issue is obviously too complex and difficult to be handled by Arlen Specter's Judiciary Committee. I realize that the nation can't get enough of Blowhard Biden and Huckleberry Graham after their riveting Kabuki star turns over the past week but I would hate to see them get over exposed. Trying to stay awake while boring senators get turned inside out by much more nimble witnesses is thrilling TV, I know, but we don't want to overdo it.

Glenn points out that the House has a select bi-partisan committee up and running right now to investigate the federal response to hurricane Katrina so it's not as if this is unusual. It is commonly used for hearings of national importance like the Katrina response, the Clinton impeachment hearings, Iran Contra, Watergate and others. This is that important and it should be treated that way. If it's left up to Huckleberry's cornpone lectures and Tom Coburn's insane ramblings the hearings will be quickly made irrelevant by the incompetent questioning and bored media reaction alone.

These hearings are going to be about a fundamental constitutional understanding of how our system of government works. The stakes are very high. We could be setting a precedent for a unitary executive that completely abrogates the system of checks and balances. The committee will interview legal experts who are going to make arguments that the president has a right under the constitution to ignore the laws and I don't want Dianne Feinstein being the one to challenge them.

The other side is going to question opposing views with a simple bullshit rationale about saving the babies from the boogeyman. We cannot leave the much more complicated opposing argument to gasbag senators questioning much more agile legal minds than theirs. We need real, practising lawyers who know the issues and know how to question a witness.

After watching the soporific Alito sideshow this week, it's quite clear to me that the judiciary committee is not a venue in which to get to the bottom of this.



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digby 1/13/2006 11:16:00 AM |

 
"Who's Being Naive, Kay?

by digby

Today, I'm calling a moratorium on calling Democrats spineless losers. This op-ed column by Harry Reid is one of the most in-your-face challenges I've seen in quite some time and it gets right to the heart of the matter:

In 1977, I was appointed chairman of the Nevada Gaming Commission. It was a difficult time for the gaming industry and Las Vegas, which were being overrun by organized crime. To that point in my life, I had served in the Nevada Assembly and even as lieutenant governor, but nothing prepared me for my fight with the mob.


Over the next few years, there would be threats on my life, bribes, FBI stings and even a car bomb placed in my family's station wagon. It was a terrifying experience, but at the end of the day, we cleaned up Las Vegas and ushered in a new era of responsibility.

My term on the gaming commission came to an end in 1981, and when it did, I thought I had seen such corruption for the last time. Unfortunately, that has not been the case. It is not quite the mafia of Las Vegas in the 1970s, but what is happening today in Washington is every bit as corrupt and the consequences for our country have been severe.

Our nation's capital has been overrun by organized crime — Tom DeLay-style.

The gangsters are the lobbyists, cronies and lawmakers who have banded together and abused their power to serve their own self-interest. The casinos are the Capitol, which has had its doors thrown open for special interests to waltz in and help themselves, and the victims, of course, are the American people.

There is a price to pay for the culture of corruption, and we can see it in the state of our union.

Consider the state of our economy. On one side is Big Oil, which reaped $100 billion in profits in 2005. On the other side are middle-class families. Their wages are declining at the same time they are paying more for gas, heat, education and other needs.

Take the state of health care. On one side are the HMOs that benefited greatly from a $10 billion slush fund in the Medicare bill. On the other side are seniors who face gaps in their coverage and the high cost of prescription drugs.

And then there is our national debt. On one side are the special interests and the multimillionaires who have received tremendous tax breaks over the last five years. On the other side are our children and grandchildren who will pay for these tax cuts when they inherit billions in debt.

In our country today, we are seeing what happens when lawmakers and lobbyists conspire to put the needs of special interests before the needs of the American people. We have a country that grows more dependent on foreign oil each day. We have cronyism like that exposed by Hurricane Katrina, and we have a national security policy that does a good job of protecting Halliburton's bottom-line but not a good enough job protecting the American people.

Damn!

This is exactly how this should be framed. They are a criminal mob. Democrats should not shy away from using that exact language because it's absolutely true.

"I AM the federal government."

- Comment uttered by Tom DeLay to the owner of Ruth's
Chris Steak House, after being told to put out his cigar because of federal government regulations banning smoking in the building, May 14, 200

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digby 1/13/2006 10:06:00 AM |

Thursday, January 12, 2006

 
Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds

by digby


Hindquarters writes yesterday:

George W. Bush is Churchill's heir in our century.

He explains:

Regular readers of this site know that we admire, above all others, Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill. President Bush's reference to "victory" as the mandate he gives to his commanders recalls, intentionally, I am sure, Churchill's great speech upon becoming Prime Minister in May 1940--the speech in which he said, "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat."

This is what brought the comparison to mind. First, here's Junior:

So that was a good question. Thank you. (Applause.)

Let's see, yes, ma'am. I'm running out of time here. You're paying me a lot of money, and I've got to get back to work. (Laughter.)

First of all, I expect there to be an honest debate about Iraq, and welcome it. People can help, however, by making sure the tone of this debate is respectful and is mindful about what messages out of the country can do to the morale of our troops. (Applause.)

I fully expect in a democracy -- I expect and, frankly, welcome the voices of people saying, you know, Mr. President, you shouldn't have made that decision, or, you know, you should have done it a better way. I understand that. What I don't like is when somebody said, he lied. Or, they're in there for oil. Or they're doing it because of Israel. That's the kind of debate that basically says the mission and the sacrifice were based on false premise. It's one thing to have a philosophical difference -- and I can understand people being abhorrent about war. War is terrible. But one way people can help as we're coming down the pike in the 2006 elections, is remember the effect that rhetoric can have on our troops in harm's way, and the effect that rhetoric can have in emboldening or weakening an enemy.

That "I can understand people being abhorrant about war" passage really sings, doesn't it? You can easily see why it would bring to mind this passage from Churchill:

You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.

Bush is complaining about his political opponents pointing out that he's a lying sack of shit. Churchill is bucking up the British people as they are being bombed mercilessly by the Germans duiring the blitz. Who could fail to be moved by the comparison?


Now that I look at it, I can see another analogy. Bush begging his kool-aid drinkers to come out and vote is necessary to ensure his party's survival. When we win, it's going to be a nasty few years for Republican politicians as they face the consequences of their criminal reign.


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digby 1/12/2006 07:33:00 PM |

 
Pat Robertson Has High Standards

by tristero

And they're all green. See, with a 50 million buck Israeli real estate scam deal on the line, Pat now thinks it was "clearly insensitve at the time" to say Sharon's stroke was divine retribution for the Gaza withdrawal.

It never ceases to amaze me how clearly phony, how greedy, and how cynically irreligious America's "spiritual leaders" are. And how many people are willing not only to respect their whacked ideas, but actually send them oodles of their hard-earned money. What a racket.

And that is why every day I wake up and pray for The Rapture to come., "Please God, take all these self-righteous clown up to their Final Reward and leave me down here." I mean, is that too much to ask from a truly merciful Divinity?
tristero 1/12/2006 03:27:00 PM |

 
Ripper Takes The Fifth

by digby


It looks like General Geoffrey D. Ripper might finally be coming into the crosshairs. It is long overdue. This sadistic piece of rubbish is largely responsible for instituting the war crimes that have contributed to our becoming a pariah state. Junior and the Nixon Retreads loved the guy.

Not that I'm holding my breath, but this article in the WaPo this morning indicates that he's suddenly taking the fifth now that the notorious Col. Pappas has been granted immunity in return for his testimony:

Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, a central figure in the U.S. detainee-abuse scandal, this week invoked his right not to incriminate himself in court-martial proceedings against two soldiers accused of using dogs to intimidate captives at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, according to lawyers involved in the case.

The move by Miller -- who once supervised the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and helped set up operations at Abu Ghraib -- is the first time the general has given an indication that he might have information that could implicate him in wrongdoing, according to military lawyers.

Harvey Volzer, an attorney for one of the dog handlers, has been seeking to question Miller to determine whether Miller ordered the use of military working dogs to frighten detainees during interrogations at Abu Ghraib. Volzer has argued that the dog handlers were following orders when the animals were used against detainees.

[...]

Miller's decision came shortly after Col. Thomas M. Pappas, the commanding officer at Abu Ghraib, accepted immunity from prosecution this week and was ordered to testify at upcoming courts-martial. Pappas, a military intelligence officer, could be asked to detail high-level policies relating to the treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib.

He also could shed light on how abusive tactics emerged, who ordered their use and their possible connection to officials in Washington, according to lawyers and human rights advocates who have closely followed the case. Pappas has never spoken publicly. Crawford said Miller was unaware of Pappas's grant of immunity. "This could be a big break if Pappas testifies as to why those dogs were used and who ordered the dogs to be used," said Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. "It's a steppingstone going up the chain of command, and that's positive. It might demonstrate that it wasn't just a few rotten apples."

[...]

Eugene R. Fidell, a Washington expert in military law, said that Miller's decision is "consistent with his being concerned that he may have some exposure to worry about." Fidell added: "It's very unusual for senior officers to invoke their Article 31 rights. The culture in the military tends to encourage cooperation rather than the opposite."

Miller has long been in the spotlight of the Abu Ghraib abuse investigations, largely because he was sent to the Iraq prison in August and September 2003 with the goal of streamlining its intelligence-gathering operations, using Guantanamo Bay, commonly called "Gitmo," as a model. Officers at Abu Ghraib have said that Miller wanted to "Gitmo-ize" the facility, and that harsh tactics migrated from the Cuba facility via "Tiger Teams" that Miller sent to Iraq as trainers.

[...]


In an interview with defense attorneys for those MPs in August 2004, Miller said he never told Pappas to use dogs in questioning detainees. Photos of the dog handlers scaring detainees at Abu Ghraib were among the most notorious to emerge from the prison. Dogs were also used at Guantanamo Bay.

"At no time did we discuss the use of dogs in interrogations," Miller said, according to a transcript.

Volzer, who represents Sgt. Santos A. Cardona, one of the military dog handlers charged with abuse, said he believes the grant of immunity to Pappas will essentially clear his client, because Pappas already has admitted in administrative hearings that he improperly ordered the use of dogs. Volzer said he believes that Pappas was taking direction from Miller, and that Miller was acting on instructions from Defense Department officials. Cardona and Sgt. Michael J. Smith are scheduled to be tried in separate courts-martial in February and March.

"I think the command is hiding something, and I think what they're hiding is material that is exculpatory that says the interrogation techniques were approved by powers above General Miller," Volzer said. "Having Pappas available to testify may have given Miller the impression that he is next to be accused of doing something inappropriate or giving inappropriate orders."

No kidding. Miller was an artillery officer who replaced the original Gitmo Commandant who was accused of being too soft on the prisoners and not getting enough intelligence. Miller fixed that. He got reams and reams of "intelligence" with his methods. The only problem was that it was all bullshit. But they liked his bullshit so much they sent him to Iraq to torture even more bullshit out of the Iraqis.

This was during the period when Cambone, Rumsfeld and Rice were leaning heavily on the military to provide them with piles of paper to prove how well we were doing --- "in-box metrics." No bin Laden, no WMD. But lots and lots of reports.

Miller was the best brown-nosing sadist they could find to generate a flurry of paperwork based on coercive techniques virtually designed to gain false intelligence. Sadly, as a result of these ineffective and immoral methods bin Laden is still at large and we managed to create a violent anti-American opposition in Iraq. Oh yes, and we have also lost all the moral authority we built up over the course of our history. Excellent work all around.

He is a war criminal. And so are his bosses.



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digby 1/12/2006 10:54:00 AM |

 
Always Alert

by digby


I know everybody loves a Nixonian Republican named Martha who cries, but would it be too much for the press to actually report the backround on this little kabuki today?

TIME wrote last night:

The always-alert Creative Response Concepts, a conservative public relations firm, sent this bulletin: "Former Alito clerk Gary Rubman witnessed Mrs. Alito leaving her husband's confirmation in tears and is available for interviews, along with other former Alito clerks who know her personally and are very upset about this development."

In case that was too much trouble for the journalists, the firm also e-mailed out a statement from the Judicial Confirmation Network calling "for the abuse to stop."

This was all spontaneous, of course. Any resemblance to Clarence Thomas' "high tech lynchings" or Lynn Cheney's "this is not a gooood man" is purely coincidental.

I think it's time for Ted Kennedy to haul some little girls who were strip searched in to testify. You wanna play? Bring it.

And it's also time for Democrats to see this as the gift it is. For once the snivellers are the Republicans, playing against type. But that means we're playing against type also. It's not often that the country sees us as "too tough." We should play like Pat Fitzgerald and say "we're just doing our jobs, ma'am. This is important business." Let Huckleberry and the boys whimper like little old ladies.



Via Talk Left's fine analysis of yesterday's hearings

Update: Rending his garments and speaking in tongues, Roger L. Simon hits a new low.

Update II: Uncomfortable with being seen as the delicate Ashley and Melanie's they are, there's this:

And I think Mrs. Alito was crying because she couldn't jump out of her seat and beat the living hell out of those arrogant condescending bastards who were making those false and scurrilous implications about her husband.

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digby 1/12/2006 09:12:00 AM |

 
Wedge Politics

by digby


David Neiwert's got a must read piece up on immigration, the Minutemen and the Australian race riots. Nobody does this difficult subject better than he does. Get ready. it's going to be one of the big topcis coming up in this next year whether we like it or not.

It's happening everywhere -- in the Northwest, in California, in the Midwest, in the South, even in pockets in the Northeast. What's important to understand is that much of this agitation is taking place under the radar, by well-financed organizations who operate through focus groups and "think tanks." Minneapolis Star-Tribune columnist Nick Coleman described just such an operation taking place recently in Minnesota under less-than-upfront circumstances:

The woman moderator, who said she was from Maryland, wanted very much to talk about immigrants. The participants already had discussed any issues they were concerned about, except the war in Iraq. There would be no talk about Iraq, the woman said. But up to that point, no one had mentioned immigration, much to the annoyance of the moderator. So she prodded the group to complain about immigrants.

"I haven't heard anybody talk about immigration," Peoples, an independent, recalls her saying. "Anybody have a problem with the illegal aliens coming in?"

The group's response to the question was "a deafening silence," Peoples says. But the woman pushed harder, listing some of the complaints she said she had heard in other states where she had conducted focus groups. Still, no one obliged her. Instead, Peoples mentioned the immigrant workers in a nearby town, praising them for how hard they seem to work.

Not the correct answer. Someone was paying money for this. They wanted problems.

"She shut me off," Peoples recalls. "Then she said, 'Aren't you having problems here?' "

The state Republican and DFL parties each deny having sponsored the mystery focus group, as does the Republican congressman for the area, Gil Gutknecht, and his DFL challenger, Tim Walz. Also in denial mode was the office of Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who recently poured gasoline on the immigrant issue with the release of a crudely overstated report designed to inflame opinion and make immigration into a wedge issue.

That last bit was opinion. But this is fact: Anti-immigration forces are working hard to raise resentment and to exploit immigration for political gain, cozying up to politicians who will help them fence the borders.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of all this is the big picture: the anti-immigrant push really represents a significant incursion of right-wing extremism into mainstream conservatism. Each is busy empowering the other, with the end result being an American right pushed even farther to the right.

I'm not looking forward to fighting this battle. Some fair minded good people are getting caught up in it because they don't understand that it is a manufactured political wedge issue. It's going to be unpleasant.

If Democrats can muster the self discipline keep our poweder dry on this, it will work as a much deeper wedge into the GOP. If we don't, we'll be split by it too.


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digby 1/12/2006 08:45:00 AM |

 
Proverbs For Bloggers

by tristero

1. A blogger who knows not irony, knows not a lot:

The headline reads A Plea for Civility. And the lede begins:

After the Democrats' thuggish behavior yesterday...

Update: Tx to kc and cleek in comments for reminding me that John Hinderaker once provided a fellow blogger with an exceptionally clear object lesson in civility.
tristero 1/12/2006 06:30:00 AM |

Wednesday, January 11, 2006

 
You Go Girl!

by digby

We Democrats have a penchant for calling our party spineless and complaining that they never challenge the Republicans.

Well, get a load of this:

Bush said the war's critics should stop questioning the motives that led him to launch the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

"The American people know the difference between responsible and irresponsible debate when they see it…. And they know the difference between a loyal opposition that points out what is wrong, and defeatists who refuse to see that anything is right," Bush said.

"I ask all Americans to hold their elected leaders to account and demand a debate that brings credit to our democracy — not comfort to our adversaries," Bush said.

[...]

Karen Finney, the Democratic National Committee's communications director, said "the Bush administration's attack, distract and distort tactics reflect a Nixonian paranoia that is un-American."

Of course, saying things like this might make Laura cry and cause lil' Huckleberry Graham to clutch his opera length pearls and purse his purdy lips together in a pout, but, you know, fuck it. This is not a goooood man.



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digby 1/11/2006 07:00:00 PM |

 
Sniffling Kabuki

by digby

Following up my post below, is there anyone besides me who thinks that Huckleberry Graham's grandmotherly lecture and the teary Mrs Alito's exit seemed just a bit too pat?

Huckleberry, after all, served as Stripsearch Sammy's coach for the hearings. I'm just saying...



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digby 1/11/2006 03:58:00 PM |

 
Miss Manners


by digby


Does anybody but me get tired of listeing to Huckleberry Graham constantly lecture the senators about their manners? Every damned time he gets in one of these situations he pulls his Andy Taylor talking to Opie voice and drones on and on about good people not wanting to be in government because Democrats are so rude.

Wring your little lace hankie someplace else, Lindsay. This is important shit. Give a little weekly lecture to your thuggish Republican colleagues why don't you? They could use a little Miss Manners.

Jayzuz. This cornpone sanctimony makes me want to hurl.



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digby 1/11/2006 01:52:00 PM |

 
First Things First

by digby


There is some discussion about whether the Democrats should concentrate on accusing the Republicans of criminal behavior or putting forth a competing reform plan, which might imply that the system itself is at fault for the Republican abuses. I'm not sure that we have to choose so starkly, but I do think that tactically we need to make sure that this scandal is clearly framed as a Republican scandal before we produce any larger reforms. Right now the public is just starting to get a sense of what this scandal is about and we have an opportunity to exploit some existing images and archetypes to paint the Republicans as the criminals they are before we launch a national campaign to clean up the mess.

It pays to keep in mind that the 1994 Republicans didn't put out their "Contract On America" until six weeks before the election. They've pretended that it won them the election but that's a joke. (They did use bogus polling to give that impression.) What won that election was relentless criticism over the course of many months leading up to it. They built upon a reserve of discontent about a slow economic recovery by placing the blame for everything squarely on the "liberals" and the Democratic party. Their "positive" agenda was just gilding the lilly.

Whatever 10 point reform plans we produce, and we should produce them, the message has to be simple and straightforward: "The Republicans are crooks and we have to clean house to make sure they can't do it again"

Newtie and Noonan and others have been out there furiously trying to convince the media that the problem is big government (and we know who loves Big Govmint, don't we?) This is no accident. They use every opportunity, even when they are under the gun, to advance negative images against the other side and boldly use that negativitity to advance themselves. They are positioning themselves for a reform message that blames a Democratic value (government) for the Republicans' problems in Washington. "Don't blame us, the Big Government made us do it."

They are saying this because they know very well that the most dangerous negative meme that haunts Republicans is the image of abuse of power and criminal behavior: there are words and phrases that bring this right to the surface like "slush funds," "illegal wiretapping" and "bribery." It's all connected to a certain type of governance ---- that we happen to be witnessing in real time. Again. Nixonian Republicanism.

The GOP has understood for years that they can gain great traction by piggybacking every criticism on existing negative images of Democrats (usually some version of effeminate, undisciplined cowards.) Here we have one of the most vivid negative examples of the Republican archetypes. The greedy little man on the Monopoly Box. We are fools if we don't come at them with everything we have, focusing our fire on the corrupt political machine and the arrogant imperial presidency. In the wake of the faux GOP outrage at the trivial Clinton scandals, which are even fresher in people's memories than Nixon, this could cripple them for a good long while if we handle it correctly.

I realize that some Democrats are feeding at the trough. We need to deal with that. But first things first. This is about a complex criminal political enterprise and there is simply no comparison between it and the rather workaday corruption of politicians generally, including Democrats. Their purpose was to build a permanent majority using whatever illegal and legal means at their disposal. And they planned to create an executive branch that operates entirely independently and is answerable only to an "accountability moment" every four years.

I think it's a big mistake to treat this as just another in a long line of reforms that become necessary every few years. It simply was not business as usual.

Here's a rather amusing example of GOP think on this from a commenter, who offered it up apparently without irony:

allow me to explain why the Abramoff scandal, like so many others before it, will prove to be more devestating to the Dems then it could possibly be to the GOP, much less conservatives.

The Dems bleat daily that they are the "minority" party. That they are the "loyal opposition." Yet who actually does something when a scandal arises? Who opened the investigation into the Plame non-leak? Who is pursuing the leak of an NSA program that threatens national security and possibly civil liberties? Who addressed possible torture at Abu Ghraib? Who is set to clean house over the Abramoff tempest in a teapot that threatens to implicate some of the biggest names in the Republican Party, perhaps the very culture of Republican politics?

Not the "loyal opposition" ... but rather the Bush Administration.

Teh public knows this. Or is growing to know this with each passing day. They, the voting public, will be left to wonder, if the "loyal opposition" cannot even muster the courage to bring such scandals to the light of day, then for what are they good for?

Americans are already starting to realize that if a "loyal opposition" cannot even do its job of defeating the party in powers' corruption and misgovernance (examples of which are legion, apparently), then how can we possibly entrust them with the real job of governing the nation?

Rather, American voters will know they would be wiser to turn to the REpublican Party, which has made some partisan, ideological and hubristic missteps, yes - even engaged in a pattern of criminal behavior it would seem. All those sins, yes, but still the GOP is not so grossly incompetent or lacking in power that it would allow what it has done over the past few years to pass, if it had been the Democrats who had done it.

Truly, the Dems attack the Abramoff scandal at their peril.

William G. Henders |

It's hard to know if he's serious. But he could be. It's a twisted Rovian view in the extreme. No matter what, attack the Dems for being chickenshit. Works like a charm.

I think that we can all agree that ten point plans don't win elections. We have to bring to the surface people's almost palpable discomfort with Republican governance, as measured in the president's approval rating, the right track/wrong track numbers and everything else. We have to make people willing to admit to themselves what they already know and we need to do it in clear no nonsense terms --- or that fellow's mind boggling strategy might just work.



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digby 1/11/2006 12:44:00 PM |

 
Spinning Out

by digby


Bush needs to cut down on the coffee. He's so wound up this morning he looks like he's going to spin off the stage. There is something wrong with this man.





I appears that he is taking Rove's advice over his "younger staffers." He's adopted the super aggressive swagger attitude favored by his guru:

President Bush warned Democratic critics of his
Iraq policy on Tuesday to watch what they say or risk giving "comfort to our adversaries" and suffering at the ballot box in November. Democrats said Bush should take his own advice.

[...]

Tuesday's ... sharp message represented an attempt by the president to neutralize Democrats' ability to use Iraq — where violence is surging in the wake of December parliamentary elections and messy negotiations to form a new coalition government — as an election-year cudgel against Republicans.

Bush acknowledged deep differences over Iraq among casualty-weary Americans, just 39 percent of whom approve of his handling of the war, according to AP-Ipsos. Without specifically mentioning Democrats, the president urged campaigning politicians to "conduct this debate responsibly."

I'm always touched when Republicans show such concern for Democratic electoral prosepcts. I know they only have our best interests at heart.


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digby 1/11/2006 10:46:00 AM |

Tuesday, January 10, 2006

 
K.I.S.S.

by digby

Samela writes in the comments:

I think the simplest story that reveals the difference between what people perceive as 'big-business influence through lobbying" (which they relate to both parties) and the Culture of Corruption swirling around the Republicans is the one involving the Magazine Publishers of America.

Back in 2000 the magazine industry hired Abramoff as a lobbyist (he was then at Preston Gates Ellis) to help stem a proposed rise in postal rates. Now, most people can understand why the magazine industry would not want higher postal rates: it affects the bottom line of their business. Aside from printing, postage is one of their biggest costs. No one, of course, likes higher postal rates (and no one particularly wants magazine subscription rates to rise). But sometimes they are necessary to keep the postal system running. Nonetheless, it would seem perfectly legitimate for the MPA to hire a lobbyist to try to put their case before congressional members. One would assume the USPS would similarly be trying to jawbone legislators to present their side of the story, arguing FOR the need to raise postal rates. Senators and representatives should then duly consider the arguments from both sides and come to a decision about whether rates should rise or not.

This is not what happened. Mr. Abramoff was paid $525,000 by the MPA to seek a postal rate reduction in Congress. Did he make a heckuva case for them? Not exactly: he asked the MPA to give an additional $25,000 to a Seattle-based charity (slush fund) he'd helped found--and then he used that money (as well as another $25K from elottery) to help pay the salary for the wife of Tom Delay staff member Tony Rudy. It's called money laundering and bribery.

It's okay for lobbyists to collect money from clients to argue their cases before legislators. It's even okay (though problematic) for businesses or interests who have a stake in congressional legislation to try to elect the people they think can help them by donating to their campaigns, within the law. (Though I'd like to see changes in those laws.) What's not okay is money laundering and bribery. That is what a number of Republican Congressmen and their staffers are involved in here .... but no Democrats, to our knowledge.

The Democrats may be too tied to corporate contributions, and it's a problem that needs to be addressed. But we have thus far not seen any widespread shakedown, extortion, bribery, money-laundering schemes to which high-level Democrats or their staffers were party.

It's an easier story to understand than the baroque Indian tribe one (though smaller in scale). But it's been going on a long time, and DeLay and his staffers were at the very heart of it.

And yeah.... the Republicans are famous for defending their own until the fire gets too hot. The Democrats let go of Trafficante the moment his shenanigans hit the fan (it might even have been before), disavowing him. The Republicans have been trying to defend DeLay even AFTER his indictment. They got him to relinquish his leadership role, but they have in no way repudiated him formally.

samela

There you have it.


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digby 1/10/2006 02:51:00 PM |

 
How Can He Be Even More Right? A Modest Proposal.

by tristero

George W. Bush's latest thoughtful speech was, as usual, boldly audacious. With his demand that responsible debate over Iraq must be limited entirely to arguments over exactly how much praise he deserves, The President's speech will go down in history as among the most remarkable utterances ever.

The American people know the difference between responsible and irresponsible debate when they see [sic] it. They know the difference between honest critics who question the way the war is being prosecuted and partisan critics who claim that we acted in Iraq because of oil, or because of Israel, or because we misled the American people. And they know the difference between a loyal opposition that points out what is wrong, and defeatists who refuse to see that anything is right.

In other words:

Is the Bush administration doing (1) a heckuva job; (2) a heckuva great job; or (3) a totally heckuva great job? And how can we help The President be more right?

Before we can answer that second question, we need to understand exactly why The President refuses to consider the topics he mentions as worthy of responsible discussion.

Of course, we didn't invade Iraq because of oil. Why this isn't obvious to everyone is one of the mind-boggling mysteries of our epoch. Briefly, all we're trying to do is grow the Iraq economy. Now, everyone knows the world is in a post-industrial phase, where it's high tech that rules, not Big oil-gobbling Iron. Therefore, it's vital to Iraq's infrastructure that they make use as soon as possible of their most abundant resource - sand - and become the major player they deserve to be in the international chip market.

All we're doing is expediting that process by purifying the sand. We're simply eliminating all that putrid-smelling retro petro-pollution from their valuable natural mineral resource and shipping the smelly sludge - at our own companies' expense, mind you - back to the US. This is not about oil but about transforming a volatile region into a Land Of Milk and Honey. And Sand. Because of The President's actions, I can predict with near certainty that within five years Iraq will become the pre-eminent Silicon Desert of the Middle East.

As for Israel, it simply must be recognized that any critic who mentions Israel in the same sentence with Iraq is not only thoroughly irresponsible but clearly an out and out anti-Semite. Now I admit, Pat Robertson may have been overstretching a bit, but only those who refuse to acknowledge cause and effect fail to see the connection between Sharon's recent stroke and the unremitting criticism he received in the past few months by all those here in the US who refused to support the Iraq war.

Now regarding the alleged misleading of the American people, I submit that The President never did such a thing. The proof, as if any is needed (he is after, all The President, and doesn't need proof), can be found in this very speech of 10 January, 2006. Notice how carefully and repeatedly The President distinguishes between "Saddamists" and "foreign terrorists." He's telling us he's known all along that there's a difference and that he's never confused them. Furthermore, notice how he fearlessly deplores the utterly unprecedented abuse of Iraqi prisoners by Iraqi security forces. This also subtly alludes to the moral axis of The President's actions in Iraq. After all, where else could those murderous Iraqi security police possibly have learned to perpetrate such horrors if not while suffering under the obscene guidance of the monstrous Sons of Saddam - Uday and what'shisname?

But The President goes even further in clearing our mind of dangerous clutter. Little noticed by the punditocracy - at least so far - The President makes it very clear he has secret evidence American troops never blew up innocent wedding parties. Those were suicide bombers disguised as American planes and Blackhawks.*

But we digress. Back to that second question: How can The President be more right? Okay. I'll tell you and I'm not going to mince words. And I don't care who wants to turn me in for saying them!

I think the Big Problem is that everyone thinks The President is wrong and they won't trust his judgment. I think it's wrong that these people are wasting The President's time by making him worry that he's only doing a heckuva job. I think responsible debate should be limited to whether The President is doing a heckuva great job or better. If this proposal is adopted, The President by definition would immediately be more right! And that's what we, and he, want.

I think if irresponsible opponents weren't clogging The President's time with so many questions and empty scandals that his presidency has begun to resemble a New Orleans sewer, The President would have been able to sign the necessary emergency orders for more upper body armor for our troops. Now, let me be crystal clear about this: Because The President couldn't find time to sign that order, the critics of the The President's performance are responsible for much more - way much more - than aiding and comforting our enemies. The irresponsible critics of The President are systematically killing our soldiers. And I don't care who knows it.

Now, the Doomsayer Democrats object to certain wiretaps made without authorization. I say if they don't like them, here's a plan that will end the "illegal" wiretaps debate immediately. Disconnect the critics' telephones! And while we're at it, deny 'em ADSL. Let them rant over a 28.8k AOL connection and see how well they like it.

Bottom line: The President couldn't be more right. After all, he wouldn't be The President if that wasn't so. That's self-evident, just like it says in the Constitution. Or somewhere.



*Don't let yourself be misled by the irresponsible rantings of mere eyewitnesses who swore they were American planes. They weren't and I have a reason why they were mistaken.

Now, of course I have only the greatest sympathy for a bride whose husband was turned into viscous red goo in the middle of their vows, but, to be perfectly blunt, such an hysterical woman does not a reliable witness make. Indeed, probably very few men would either, in her position (not as the bride of another man, of course, nor did I mean to imply by "her position" anything smutty, it's just that I meant...oh, you get it, I don't need to explain).
tristero 1/10/2006 12:46:00 PM |

 
Corrupt Reformers

by digby


I admire Rich Lowry's intellectual integrity in pointing out that no matter how much the Republicans might wish to portray the Abramoff scandal as bi-partisan it just isn't. But his prescription just won't do.

You see, this graft and corruption has been going on in plain sight for a long time and GOPers had their mouths so full of pork they apparently couldn't say a word about it until a Republican Justice Department public integrity section stumbled over Jack Abramoff. The Republican party has no standing to reform itself now. It's like the mafia saying they promise to clean up their act once Sammy the Bull blew the whistle.

The Abramoff scandal is about corrupt lobbying and money laundering, which was coordinated at the highest levels of the party, run by the majority leader of the House of representatives. But that's just one of many corrupt GOP practices. There are the perjury and obstruction cases in the CIA leak investigation. And the SEC investigation into the majority leader of the Senate. There are the numerous payola and propaganda schemes. Bribes on the floor of the House. Crooked Pentagon appropriations and missing billions in Iraq. Dirty tricks in New Hampshire. Hiding the real cost of the prescription drug program (and Billy Tauzin being on Pharma take when he got it passed.) The list goes on and on.

(Here are just a few of the alleged GOP ethics abuses from the Washington Post. Here's an even longer one. And here's Think Progress' indispensible compendium of Abramoff criminals.)

This Republican party is crooked. And despite what George Will says, it's not because of big government. Government spending has exploded under the allegedly "small government" Republicans while delivering less and less to average Americans. They have proven that they are completely full of shit on that issue and anyone who votes for them on that basis is an idiot. Judging by their performance the only things they actually care about are padding their own pockets and protecting their own power. If there are a hoard of "reform" Republicans out there who have been objecting to this pillaging of the treasury, they haven't exactly been speaking up. All I've heard is "praise God and pass the contributions."

I expect Republicans to take potshots at Clinton and his supporters whenever possible so I don't usually respond, but this statement is too self-serving to let pass:

Republicans must take the scandal seriously and work to clean up in its wake. The first step was the permanent ouster of Tom DeLay as House Republican majority leader, a recognition that he is unfit to lead as long as he is underneath the Abramoff cloud. The behavior of the right in this matter contrasts sharply with the left's lickspittle loyalty to Bill Clinton, whose maintenance in power many liberals put above any of their principles.

That might be an apt analogy except for the fact that Democrats defended Clinton out of the principle that a rabid partisan witchunt into a president's sex life was beyond the pale.

By contrast, both the Republican president and the invertebrate Republican congress have engaged in or silently acquiesced to blatant graft and corruption for years while the Democrats impotently screamed into the void. The party was keeping the seat warm for months while the majority leader remained under indictment. They changed the rules so that an indicted leader could keep his seat until the public outcry forced them to retreat, for crying out loud, and then they launched a grassroots campaign to defend him:

Conservative leaders are crafting plans to launch a public campaign to defend House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas).

The move follows a meeting last week among DeLay, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), the chief deputy majority whip, and nearly two dozen conservative leaders, including David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union; Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council; Morton Blackwell, president of the Leadership Institute; and Edwin Feulner, president of the Heritage Foundation.

Perkins, Keene and Feulner called the meeting, according to participants.

“It was a rallying cry to our conservative community that we are under assault. We need to fight back. We’re going to have a challenging year with the judicial issue bubbling up in the senate and the impact it may have on our ability to get things done,” said Cantor, who said he described to the group how Democrats and liberal groups have waged a coordinated battle to raise doubts about DeLay’s conduct.

Several of the conservative leaders who met last week are planning to launch a grassroots campaign targeted at conservatives in the districts of House Republican lawmakers whose support for DeLay may be wavering.

This man is a corrupt thug who ran a corrupt political machine. Everybody in Washington knew it. Republicans celebrated it and bragged about it publicly. For them to now go all Claude Rains about it is just funny.

It's possible that the voters will not care or will not hold Republicans responsible for this corruption. But these are early days in the 2006 election cycle and many more shoes are going to drop over the next few months. I wouldn't want to place a bet that Americans won't laugh at any Republican claiming the mantle of reform come election day. It's going to be very easy to find pictures of Republicans kissing the ring of Tom DeLay.


Update: Read this great post by Tom Watson (via Wolcott)on this topic.


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digby 1/10/2006 10:35:00 AM |

 
Wallflowers

by digby

I feel so dirty. My Alito the freeper post is linked on both The Corner and Free Republic. Seems bedwetters don't like my armchair analysis of the chickenhawk pathology one little bit.

Here's Jonah:

I DUNNO... [Jonah Goldberg]

Byron - Seems to me the cops at the '68 convention proved their "manhood" without going to Vietnam or joining the croud chanting "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh!" and echoing Che Guevara's call for "two, three, many Vietnams."

Also, it's kind of funny listening to liberals argue that getting laid "a lot" makes you a man.

Addendum: I posted too fast. I meant to say it's kind of funny listening to liberals argue that there are only two paths to becoming a man -- getting laid "a lot" and going to war. And here I thought they didn't like social Darwinism.

He actually wrote the words "getting laid a lot makes you a man" and then came back with an oops "I posted too fast." You can't make this shit up.

Of course if he'd read the post in question he would know that I didn't actually say that there are only two paths to manhood, but that's just nitpicking. He's right. There is a tried and true path to manhood for right wing chickenhawks: they can host Kaffee Klatches for mama, Linda Tripp and Michael Isikoff and then make a whole career out of it.


The best freeper comment is this:

This Freeper will gladly meet Mr. "Digby", anytime, anywhere, for a little test of "physical courage". Hygiene-challenged, hairy little socialist creeps who throw like girls ought not write checks their skinny butts can't cash. I know: when the phone doesn't ring...I'll know it's him. Chickenhawk? Chickensh!t.

Me thinks the lady doth protest too much.


Here's a thread to vote on Alito's freeper handle over at MYDD. I'm thinking "wallflower".



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digby 1/10/2006 08:58:00 AM |

Monday, January 09, 2006

 
Freeping The Court

by digby

I watched the Roberts hearings and couldn't help being impressed by the guy even though I knew he was way too conservative for me. He was obviously intelligent, confident and smooth and I ended up thinking that anybody who was smart enough to keep a good distance between himself and the Federalist Society might just be smart enough to see through their more ridiculous theories. That's probably wishful thinking, but still.

By contrast, I just had a chance to see Alito's opening statement and I have to say that I think he came off as an asshole:

And after I graduated from high school, I went a full 12 miles down the road, but really to a different world when I entered Princeton University. A generation earlier, I think that somebody from my background probably would not have felt fully comfortable at a college like Princeton. But, by the time I graduated from high school, things had changed.

And this was a time of great intellectual excitement for me. Both college and law school opened up new worlds of ideas. But this was back in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

It was a time of turmoil at colleges and universities. And I saw some very smart people and very privileged people behaving irresponsibly. And I couldn't help making a contrast between some of the worst of what I saw on the campus and the good sense and the decency of the people back in my own community.

This is the same guy who wanted to keep women out of Princeton. Presumably, they wouldn't have "felt comfortable" there. But that's not what made that statement so revealing. It's this notion of smart and privileged people "behaving irresponsibly."

I think it's fairly certain that he's not talking about branding frat boys' asses or getting drunk and stealing Christmas Trees. He's talking about anti-war protestors, feminists etc. And like so many campus conservatives of that era, he sounds like he's still carrying around a boatload of resentment toward them.

Roberts apparently came out of all that unscathed. Confident in his own abilities and social prowess, he didn't appear to have this puny, pinched view of liberalism as a threat to decency and morality. (He may have it, but it didn't show --- or he was smart enough to hide it in his hearings.) Alito is one of those other guys. You know the ones:

The only political aspirants among those three groups who failed to meet the test of their generation were the chickenhawks. And our problem today is that they are the ones in charge of the government as we face a national security threat. These unfulfilled men still have something to prove.

And, I suspect because their leadership of the "conservative" movement has infected the new generation, we are seeing much of the same pathology among younger warhawks as well. This is why we hear the shrill war cries of inchoate bloodlust from these quarters every time the terrorists strike. It's a primal scream of inner confusion and self-loathing. These are people whose highest aspirations and deepest longings are wrapped up in their masculinity, and yet they are flaccid failures. They are in a state of arrested development, never having faced their fears, never becoming men, remaining boys standing in the corner of the darkened hallway watching Bill Clinton emerge from a co-ed's dorm room to lead a rousing all night strategy session --- and sitting in the bus station on the way home for Christmas vacation as Chuck Hagel and John Kerry in uniform, looking stalwart and strong, clap each other on the back in brotherly solidarity and prepare to see what they are really made of. They have never been part of anything but an effete political movement in which the stakes go no higher than repeal of the death tax.

In other words, he's a freeper. I say filibuster the creep.



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digby 1/09/2006 07:20:00 PM |

 
Welcome Back Newtie

by digby

As much as I love having Newtie back on the scene reprising his former role as a fake Republican reformer, I can't help but wonder how he hopes to explain the fact that he was officially reprimanded as Speaker for his unethical behavior by a special counsel . I realize that this happened almost ten years ago, so it's ancient history, but it was quite the circus at the time:

The House ethics committee recommended last night that House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) face an unprecedented reprimand from his colleagues and pay $300,000 in additional sanctions after concluding that his use of tax-deductible money for political purposes and inaccurate information supplied to investigators represented "intentional or . . . reckless" disregard of House rules.

The committee's 7 to 1 vote came after 5 1/2 hours of televised hearings and the release of a toughly worded report on the investigation by special counsel James M. Cole. The recommendation, which followed a week of partisan conflict that has split the House into warring camps, sets the stage for a resolution of this investigation into Gingrich's actions.

Gingrich earlier admitted he had violated House rules and was prepared to accept the committee's recommendation for punishment. If the full House votes as expected on Tuesday, Gingrich would become the first speaker to be reprimanded for his conduct and would begin his second term politically weakened and personally diminished.

[...]

Cole said he had concluded that Gingrich had violated federal tax law and had lied to the ethics panel in an effort to force the committee to dismiss the complaint against him. He said the committee members were reluctant to go that far in their conclusions, but said they agreed Gingrich was either "reckless" or "intentional" in the way he conducted himself.

[...]

Cole made clear he had concluded that Gingrich's activities were not random acts but part of a pattern of questionable behavior. "Over a number of years and in a number of situations, Mr. Gingrich showed a disregard and lack of respect for the standards of conduct that applied to his activities," he said.

Newtie was always loosey goosey about ethics, even as he excoriated the Democrats. (He did it just recently, saying that people expect the Democrats to be corrupt.) And like all Republicans, his hypocrisy knew no bounds:

How sweet a victory it must have been when Newt Gingrich ran former House Speaker Jim Wright (D-Texas) out of town because he made $55,000 off the bulk sale of his book to lobbyists. The trick was turned by Gingrich's insistence that an independent counsel be appointed. As Gingrich put it back in 1988: "The rules normally applied by the Ethics Committee to an investigation of a typical member are insufficient in an investigation of the Speaker of the House, a position which is third in line of succession to the Presidency and the second most powerful elected position in America. Clearly this investigation has to meet a higher standard of public accountability and integrity." Gingrich's words must haunt him now, when his own far more lucrative and questionable book deal has been added to complaints filed with the House Ethics Committee alleging his improper use of political-action-committee and nonprofit-foundation money.

Gingrich has attempted to squiggle out of the book controversy by giving up the $4.5-million advance from HarperCollins, the book publishing company owned by Rupert Murdoch...he had met secretly with Murdoch -- Mr. Multinational himself, a man who built his media empire by hustling legislators on three continents -- Nov. 28, three days before he began negotiating the book contract. But when the book deal was announced in December, Gingrich's press spokesman, Tony Blankley, told reporters he didn't know whether his boss had ever met with Murdoch. Why didn't Gingrich step forward then and admit to the meeting if there was nothing to hide? Why was it only after the New York Daily News broke the story that he confessed?

The truth leaked out when a Murdoch spokesman the next day conceded that an NBC lawsuit against the Murdoch-owned Fox network, based on the foreign-ownership issue, was discussed. And two days later, we learned from Murdoch's Washington lobbyist, Preston Padden, who was also at the meeting, that this was not a chance courtesy call but rather was planned to counter NBC's lobbying.

This week, Gingrich was dissembling once again: "They said something to me about, 'We are in this big fight with NBC,' and I said fine. I mean, I don't care. I never get involved in individual cases like that."

And then, of course, there's this:

In August 1999, Gingrich revealed that he had been carrying on an extramarital affair for the past six years with a House clerk twenty-three years his junior, Callista Bisek. Critics noted that Gingrich's adultery had taken place while he was leading moral attacks against Bill Clinton during the Lewinsky scandal. Because of the similarity of the situations, critics charged Gingrich's attacks on Clinton had been grossly hypocritical

Still, despite his checkered past, we really shouldn't be surprised that Newtie is the Republicans' front man on ethics and a likely candidate for president. At this point he's about the cleanest they've got.



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digby 1/09/2006 03:33:00 PM |

 
Tolerance In The Heartland

by digby


TBOGG has the scoop on the Utah theatre that banned "Brokeback Mountain". It's quite strange when you think about it because Mormans were traditional adherants of polygamy which Rick Santorum contends is the inexorable consequence of legalizing gay marriage.

In fact, I find all this Utah intolerance to be quite puzzling. Here's Orrin Hatch in 2003:

'I'm not here to justify polygamy,'' he said. ''All I can say is, I know people in Hildale who are polygamists who are very fine people. You come and show me evidence of children being abused there and I'll get involved. Bring the evidence to me.''

Hatch said he could not take unsubstantiated claims and enforce law, and he would not ''sit here and judge anybody just because they live differently than me.

''There will be laws on the books, but these are very complicated issues,'' Hatch said.

Gee, and gay sex isn't even illegal.


For those looking for the bigger picture, here's the latest on the grosses for the film that everyone assumned would fail big time in Real Murika:

Don't look now, but Brokeback Mountain is selling in the heartland. The gay cowboy romance, which has been cleaning up in early awards races, was considered a difficult box-office sell nationwide because of its subject matter.

But Brokeback Mountain is averaging $10,000-plus per screen in such markets as San Antonio, Nashville and Columbus, Ohio, according to Nielsen EDI.

The Ang Lee film was ninth at the box office this weekend with $5.8 million on 483 screens, a healthy $11,904 per-screen average. That's a higher average than the No. 1 movie of the week, Hostel.

"It's been humbling to see how the movie is getting received across the country," says Jack Foley, head of distribution for Focus Features. "We knew we were getting good reviews and doing well at the awards. But that's never a guarantee you can sell your movie across the country — particularly the most conservative parts of it."

And all the Oscar talk is bringing in couples, including a lot of hetero men who suffer from Larry David syndrome:

Comedian Larry David joked in a New York Times commentary that "cowboys would have to lasso" him into the theater, because he's sure the voice in his head would say, " 'You like those cowboys, don't you? They're kind of cute.' "

I think everyone can agree that Jake Gyllenhall does have a purdy mouth.



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digby 1/09/2006 01:28:00 PM |

 
Who's A Terrorist?

by digby

Kevin responds to Joe Klein's tremulous admonition that Democrats should temper their criticism of the NSA illegal spying because it makes us look like we don't care about terrorism:

Politically, I continue to think Democrats should make it absolutely clear that what they're attacking isn't necessarily the NSA program itself, but the fact that the president unilaterally decided that he could approve the program without congressional authorization. In the world of 10-second sound bites, that might end up being a difficult distinction to make, but it's worth making it over and over anyway. We're not opposed to cranking up our intelligence efforts, but we are opposed to a president who thinks that a vague and indefinite state of war gives him the authority to do anything he wants.

Absolutely. But then, I don't understand why anyone is worried about this in the first place. I don't think anyone seriously suggests that the government doesn't have the power to spy on suspected terrorists. The polls show that a majority of people already believe that the president should have to get a warrant before spying on American citizens. Indeed, I think all of us naturally assumed that the FBI has been doing that for years and those in the know understood that the NSA had the ability to do it through the FISA court. I don't know of anyone who is saying that the government should be able to do this at all --- this idea that people are just "against wiretapping" is a straw man.

There is no downside to criticizing this administration for illegally wiretapping Americans in no uncertain terms. But, I think we can take it one step further. We need to be asking why they couldn't even get John Ashcroft to sign off on the renewal of this program back in 2003. Why did the FISA court deny more applications after 9/11? It's impossible to imagine that they were tightening existing rules at a time like that. The history of this program is suspicious and it isn't just unAmerican civil libertarians like me who are aware of the potential for abuse. Even people who support the program see it. Here's a quote from the AP poll over the week-end:

The issue is full of grays for some people interviewed for the poll, including homebuilder Harlon Bennett, 21, a political independent from Wellston, Okla. He does not think the government should need warrants for suspected terrorists.

"Of course," he added, "we all could be suspected terrorists."

This is an issue that cuts across all the abuses of power in the GWOT, from rendition to torture to illegal wiretapping. What constitutes a suspected terrorist? Without due process how do we know that innocent people aren't being accused? There is no review. There is no oversight. We are asked not only to take the word of the president that he is using these extra-legal powers judiciously, we are asked to believe that all the people he's judiciously using these powers against are guilty.

Some Americans don't trust this president. Some Americans wouldn't trust a Democratic president. And some of us don't trust any president with the power to unilaterally decide who is a terrorist and who isn't and then unleash extra-legal actions against them. Certainly, we don't believe that any president can unilaterally declare someone guilty.

Yet that is exactly what has been happening. And we know that many of the people who the president has decided are guilty were not. A fair number of those who were beaten, abused and tortured in our custody at Gitmo and elsewhere have turned out to be cases of mistaken identity. Others were "sold" to Americans as terrorists by rivals. Still more were low level grunts who had no operational knowledge of anything. This has happened quite often. Yet, we have accepted it because we "we're at war" excuses a great deal of inhumane behavior (which is why we should always be careful about saying that we are waging one.) It's very easy for people to fall into a primitive tribalism --- the old "the only good Muslim is a dead Muslim" or perhaps "if you don't want to be seen as a terrorist, don't be a Muslim."

But this NSA illegal spying issue has brought all that home. We have a president who believes that he knows who is guilty and who is not. He believes that he has the inherent constitutional power to declare American citizens "unlawful combatants." He interprets the office of president to be above the laws. When you have a president who takes this position, it is not illogical to assume that he might declare some innocent Americans to be suspected terrorists as well. And that innocent American could be anyone.

The supporter of wiretaps who I quoted above knows that, too. I can't see any reason why Democrats and civil libertarians of all stripes should be afraid to make that point openly. It's why due process was made a part of the Bill of Rights in the first place.

If we willingly discard this principle in the case of morons who are planning to attack the Brooklyn Bridge with a blow torch, why on earth should we adhere to the principle in cases of dangerous gangs or serial killers or child molesters? After all, throwing those people in jail without due process, wiretapping them without a warrant, holding them indefinitely without trial could easily be seen as the president upholding his personal oath to "protect the American people" which has now officially usurped his official oath to protect the constitution.

The fourth amendment is in place to protect innocent people who mistakenly or purposefully get caught up in the government's hugely powerful maw. To pussyfoot around that bedrock principle is to help destroy it.

I'm betting that Joe Klein and his band of would-be tough guy liberals are on the wrong side of this. Fifty-six percent of the country already believes that the government should have to follow due process. Even that guy who supports wiretaps knows very well that there is a danger in allowing anyone the unilateral power to decide who is a suspected terrorist. I hope that Democrats ignore the mewling of timorous pundits and call upon Americans' regard for liberty and their healthy skepticism of government power to make this argument explicitly.



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digby 1/09/2006 10:42:00 AM |

 
Presidential Infallibility

by digby


Atrios flags this catch by Weldon Berger regarding Bush's use of "signing statements" (which I admit I only vaguely understood until until recently.) Weldon writes:

Bush doesn’t veto bills because in his view, he doesn’t have to; he can simply ignore the ones he doesn’t like.

The administration have made that argument explicit, but only in terms of the president’s capacity as “commander in chief” during an endless war, as with the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping, the decisions to ignore various Geneva Conventions and the selective suspension of habeas corpus. According to the Hutcheson story, though, it isn’t only legislation dealing with national security issues that the White House asserts the right to ignore.

The Hutcheson story lays out how Bush has used these signing statements:

President Bush agreed with great fanfare last month to accept a ban on torture, but he later quietly reserved the right to ignore it, even as he signed it into law.

Acting from the seclusion of his Texas ranch at the start of New Year's weekend, Bush said he would interpret the new law in keeping with his expansive view of presidential power. He did it by issuing a bill-signing statement - a little-noticed device that has become a favorite tool of presidential power in the Bush White House.

In fact, Bush has used signing statements to reject, revise or put his spin on more than 500 legislative provisions. Experts say he has been far more aggressive than any previous president in using the statements to claim sweeping executive power - and not just on national security issues.

"It's nothing short of breath-taking," said Phillip Cooper, a professor of public administration at Portland State University. "In every case, the White House has interpreted presidential authority as broadly as possible, interpreted legislative authority as narrowly as possible, and pre-empted the judiciary."

Signing statements don't have the force of law, but they can influence judicial interpretations of a statute. They also send a powerful signal to executive branch agencies on how the White House wants them to implement new federal laws.

In some cases, Bush bluntly informs Congress that he has no intention of carrying out provisions that he considers an unconstitutional encroachment on his authority.

"They don't like some of the things Congress has done so they assert the power to ignore it," said Martin Lederman, a visiting professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. "The categorical nature of their opposition is unprecedented and alarming."

Lest anyone think that this is a unique practice of the Bush administration, the article points out that other presidents have issued signing statements too. But Bush has made a fetish out of them by issuing more than 500 of them, often specifically citing the Presidential Infalliibility Doctrine (aka the "Unitary Executive Theory").

Here's what I find fascinating about that. Other presidents issued signing statements to bills. (I have no idea if they also cited the Presidential Infallibility Doctrine.)But they were almost always working with a congressional majority of the other party. You can see why a president would want to establish his interpretation of a hard fought negotiation with political opponents. So, although I am appalled at the idea of unchecked presidential power under any circumstances, I can at least see the logic of a typically authoritarian Republican using these tactics when dealing with a liberal Democratic congress. But you have to ask yourself why he can't get laws passed exactly the way he wants them to in his rubber stamp congress? He couldn't get Bill Frist, his own handpicked puppet, and Tom DeLay, his own Tony Soprano, to pass bills in language that he could agree with? After 9/11?

The answer is of course he could have. He chose not to:

The roots of Bush's approach go back to the Ford administration, when Dick Cheney, then serving as White House chief of staff, chafed at legislative limits placed on the executive branch in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal and other abuses of power by President Nixon. Now the vice president and his top aide, David Addington, are taking the lead in trying to tip the balance of power away from Congress and back to the president.

Weldon Berger puts it this way:

The upshot of this is that until someone gets around to challenging the White House, Congress is just an advisory body with the authority to dole out bucketloads of cash. For now, we have a coup.

I can't help but chuckle mordantly at these chickenshit congressional Republicans who have laid down their integrity and their duty to the constitution for this spoiled little Dauphin and his evil grey eminence, Dick Cheney. But then, they've been paid handsomely in mountainous piles of pork, so I suppose they've been amply rewarded for their pusillanimous gluttony.

Barring a filibuster, it looks as if Alito will be confirmed on a party line vote (or close to it.) There is little doubt in my mind that he believes in this doctrine. However, after Bush vs Gore, I also no longer have any illusions that the Supreme Court is above partisan politics. I suspect that Alito and others will have qualms about codifying the Unitary Executive Theory because someday a Democratic president could face a Republican congress.

But it doesn't matter. The president doesn't believe that the Supreme Court has the power to rule on the issue of presidential power in the first place. I'm sure the Federalist Society will come up with an appropriate remedy should a Democrat ever become president and decide to exercise the same power.


If you are interested in going deeply into this topic, Michael Froomkin is an expert on this doctrine of presidential infallibility (aka "the Unitary Executive Theory") and has been writing about it for quite some time:

[This is] an argument popular with the Federalist Society, but not taken seriously by mainstream academics, for unlimited, uncontainable, Presidential power. The so-called “unitary executive” argument is set out most clearly in a Harvard Law Review article, Steven G. Calabresi & Kevin H. Rhodes, The Structural Constitution: Unitary Executive, Plural Judiciary, 105 Harv. L. Rev. 1155 (1992). My explanation as to why this article is profoundly wrong and dangerous can be found at A. Michael Froomkin, The Imperial Presidency’s New Vestments, 88 Nw. L. Rev. 1346 (1994), which in turn sparked separate and not entirely consistent answers from each of the two authors of the Structural Constitution article. My rebuttal article Still Naked After All These Words, 88 Nw. L. Rev. 1420 (1994) is also online.

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digby 1/09/2006 08:23:00 AM |

Sunday, January 08, 2006

 
Sickness

by digby

New details have emerged of how the growing number of prisoners on hunger strike at Guantánamo Bay are being tied down and force-fed through tubes pushed down their nasal passages into their stomachs to keep them alive.

They routinely experience bleeding and nausea, according to a sworn statement by the camp's chief doctor, seen by The Observer.

[...]

Edmonson's affidavit, in response to a lawsuit on behalf of detainees on hunger strike since last August, was obtained last week by The Observer, as a Guantánamo spokesman confirmed that the number of hunger strikers has almost doubled since Christmas, to 81 of the 550 detainees. Many have been held since the camp opened four years ago this month, although they not been charged with any crime, nor been allowed to see any evidence justifying their detention.

Thanks to Lindsey "Goober Pyle" Graham, they never will, either:

This and other Guantánamo lawsuits now face extinction. Last week, President Bush signed into law a measure removing detainees' right to file habeas corpus petitions in the US federal courts. On Friday, the administration asked the Supreme Court to make this retroactive, so nullifying about 220 cases in which prisoners have contested the basis of their detention and the legality of pending trials by military commission.

Someday, US Army grunts and innocent Americans with no operational information are going to be held captive by another country and that country is going to use the same rationale for imprisoning and tormenting them indefinitely. And the people who do it will eventually go to the ninth circle of hell and join George W. Bush and Dick Cheney as they scream into the void for eternity about how they had to become sadistic monsters in order to prove they weren't afraid.



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digby 1/08/2006 03:29:00 PM |

 
Nixonian Rhapsody Part Deux

by digby

Glenn Greenwald has an excellent post up today about the latest Republican "public intellectual's" assertion that president has a right to use the constitution as toilet paper whenever he unilaterally decides that we are at "war." Someone named "fly" writes in the comment section:

As a "Bush defender" I would like to point out that the NYT article entitled "Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts" encourages readers to conclude that this is a first in domestic surveillance ...

Reader Poputonian wrote this in response:

As a Bush supporter, fly, you are absolutely right to point out that he is not the first president to use the wiretap illegally. At least one past president confronted matters of grave national security by shifting the legal locus of control to his own domain. He understood how secret spy programs were necessary to preserve this great nation of his. He believed that citizens would willfully surrender their liberties to him, and he knew the threat constituted by a hostile media, and he knew what to do about it. He also understood how to make a nation of bedwetters feel more secure. But his theory died when an activist judge ruled against the argument of executive privilege, a ruling which was later upheld by the Supreme Court. By then, what might be called ‘harangue fatigue’ was creeping into the American living room and, frankly, people were sensing that they had reached their limit.

All of which now necessitates Mansfield’s illusory extra-legal theory of what the founders really meant when they designed this system of government. Let’s call it -- 'Mansfield's Separation of Powers, Except' -- clause to the Constitution. Naturally, it would tip off the enemy if this were stated directly in the Constitution, so what the founders did was they cloaked it in mysterious ambiguity so only a future ideologue could detect its presence. But make no doubt about it, as a previous Chief Executive had ascertained, a very close reading of the Constitution shows the founders' original intent, and it was as plain as the nose on his face. It really does give the president extra-legal power, in spite of what the courts ruled.

Some might argue whether or not history repeats itself, but one thing is sure -- it often rhymes.

He's right. This isn't unprecedented. In fact, it's a pattern.



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digby 1/08/2006 02:39:00 PM |

 
Culture Of Conservatism

by digby

Frank Rich's column today is getting lots of attention as it should. It's great. But I have to take issue with one passage:

Real conservatives, after all, are opposed to Big Brother; even the staunch Bush ally Grover Norquist has criticized the N.S.A.'s overreaching.

Norquist isn't a "real conservative." In fact, there is no such thing as a real conservative in the Party or movement leadership. The only "real conservatives" left are regular citizens, a few scholars and a couple of pundits.

This is an easy trap to fall into. Whenever their leaders inevitably suck the treasury dry, usurp the constitution, turn America into an international pariah (you know, the usual) "conservatives" protect their valuable brand by simply saying that these particular leaders weren't really "conservative" after all.

Grover Norquist believes in one thing and one thing only --- the perpetuation of Republican power. His job is managing the leaders of the GOP base --- which he fatuously calls "the leave us alone" coalition:

The Leave Us Alone Coalition is an idea popularized by conservative/libertarian activist Grover Norquist for a wide-ranging and loose collaboration among various elements of U.S. politics, united by a common desire for minimal involvement with and restrictions from government, especially the U.S. federal government. There is no actual organization by this name, rather, it is a description of a hoped-for reality of cooperation between social conservatives, libertarians / free market supporters, and various single-issue voters such as gun rights supporters.

He has to say that he opposes the NSA wiretaps if he hopes to keep this political devil's bargain together. Here's what Norquist is really all about:

"The Republicans are looking at decades of dominance in the House and Senate, and having the presidency with some regularity," Norquist told the New York Times last week. A few days earlier, he made the same point, with slightly less confidence, to CNBC Washington bureau chief and Wall Street Journal columnist Alan Murray: "For the next 10 years in the House and Senate, we're looking at Republican control." In the Washington Post last month, Norquist wrote of a "guarantee of united Republican government" that "has allowed the Bush administration to work and think long-term."

[...]

[I]n the November 1992 American Spectator, he wrote an article titled "The Coming Clinton Dynasty," in which he admitted that "any vision of conservatism as the ultimate winner in a two-steps-forward, one-step back Leninist march, is a flawed one."

Instead, Norquist explained, the way a party ensures its perpetual dominance is by controlling the levers of power. In 1974, Watergate led to the election of 75 new Democrats in the House. In Norquist's view, "this liberal band of congressmen" was "willing to change the rules to ensure their continuation in power." Without the benefits of incumbency (bigger staffs, larger budgets, taxpayer-funded mail, pork, and the ability to "extort campaign contributions from industries"), Norquist argued, the Democrats could not have remained in office for the subsequent 18 years. Power perpetuates itself. The correctness of conservative ideas paled before the ruthless "minority ideological cabal" in Congress.

It's shocking that such a delusional person is so influential in American politics, but he is. And despite his rare faux libertarian statements of principle he quite clearly desires a permanent Republican state endowed with unlimited power. He just worries that someone he disagrees with might try to do the same thing. I don't think that's conservatism. He's just a good old authoritarian statist. Here's Grover on his idol Josef Stalin:

He was running the personnel department while Trotsky was fighting the White Army. When push came to shove for control of the Soviet Union, Stalin won. Trotsky got an ice ax through his skull, while Stalin became head of the Soviet Union. He understood that personnel is policy.

This article in the WaPo from January 2004 on Grover is very entertaining and informative. I particularly liked this part:

Some conservatives have stopped attending the meetings because, they say, the institution has "gone Beltway." Now that Republicans are in power, the emphasis has shifted from ideology to lobbying for rich clients, they say. At one session, former representative Bob Livingston (R-La.) promoted a telecom client. At another, former Oklahoma governor Frank Keating (R) talked to the audience as president of the American Council of Life Insurers. One coalition dropout dismissed Norquist as a "homo economicus" -- driven by market forces rather than by social issues.

Part of the reason for "having the personnel in place," of course, is to ensure that money is funnelled where it needs to be. And Grover, along with his best pals from the College Republicans, Abramoff and Reed, made sure that this happened. Norquit's name has already come up in the Abramoff proble and I would expect it to come up again. He's right in the middle of that mess.

But why wouldn't he be? As you can see from the quote above, he believes that corruption is the method by which a political party maintains power. And there is nothing Grover cares about more than maintaining power.

Basically, he ascribes to George W. Bush's political ideology:

"If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator,"

There you have it; modern conservatism in a nutshell.


Update: For more evidence of the mindset, check this out from Josh Marshall:

You have to love this. Three and a half years ago members of the New Hampshire state Republican party, the Republican National Committee and others entered into a criminal conspiracy to disrupt Democratic get-out-the-vote activities on election day.

[...]

Now, in recently filed court papers, the Republican State Committee’s attorney, Ovide Lamontagne, is claiming that the Dems' suit is "in attempt to use the court system to interfere with the (GOP’s) constitutionally protected election activities." There's a certain amount of sense to this, I suppose, since the Republican party, in its current incarnation, does seem to rely heavily on law-breaking as an electoral tool. Still, I've never heard it alleged that such criminality is constitutionally protected

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digby 1/08/2006 12:02:00 PM |

 
Nixonian Rhapsody

by digby


Finally, somebody in the press wakes up:

"But the climate of those years was so grim that half the Washington press corps spent more time worrying about having their telephones tapped than they did about risking the wrath of Rove, Libby and Cheney by poking at the weak seams of a Mafia-style administration that began cannibalizing the whole government just as soon as it came into power. Bush's capos were never subtle; they swaggered into Washington like a conquering army, and the climate of fear they engendered apparently neutralized The New York Times along with all the other pockets of potential resistance. Bush had to do everything but fall on his own sword before anybody in the Washington socio-political establishment was willing to take him on."

Oh sorry. Transcription problem. That was actually Hunter S. Thompson, in the October 10, 1974 Rolling Stone, writing about the Nixon administration. My bad.



Thanks to Rick Perlstein for the gonzo catch. I have a feeling we're going to see a whole lot of juicy stuff like that when he publishes his new book.
digby 1/08/2006 11:32:00 AM |

 
Private Partisans

by digby

Via Political Cortex

As it hunted down tax scofflaws, the Internal Revenue Service collected information on the political party affiliations of taxpayers in 20 states.

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., a member of an appropriations subcommittee with jurisdiction over the IRS, said the practice was an “outrageous violation of the public trust” that could undermine the agency’s credibility.

IRS officials acknowledged that party affiliation information was routinely collected by a vendor for several months. They told the vendor last month to screen the information out.

“The bottom line is that we have never used this information,” said John Lipold, an IRS spokesman. “There are strict laws in place that forbid it.”

[...]

In a letter to Kelly, Deputy IRS Commissioner John Dalrymple said the party identification information was automatically collected through a “database platform” supplied by an outside contractor that targeted voter registration rolls among other things as it searched for people who aren’t paying their taxes.

They don't mention who the contractor was, unfortunately, and that is worth finding out. As we know, Brownies have been rewarded by the GOP patronage machine all over the place, both in and out of government. Anybody want to place a little bet?

I have long thought that privacy is a potent issue for Democrats and all these nasty revelations about Republican snooping and interefering in people's personal decisions just make it more so. With the exception of a few sincere Goldwaterites who have all passed on, the libertarian strain in the Republican party was always just a simple cultural appeal on guns and taxes. History shows that they clearly favor big government that serves their corporate special interests and are more than willing to use the full force of the state at their discretion. (This is most vividly demonstrated by the new presidential infallibility doctrine on one hand and Terry Schiavo on the other.)

Between the Bedwetter Caucus and the Christian Right you also have a very large faction of the GOP that considers people with opposing views to be dangerous. The true philosophy of modern conservatism is about control and domination, not freedom and equality.

I posted this (Warning pdf) before, but it's worth posting again.

What makes you feel free?

36.

Next I am going to read some basic American rights. For each one, please indicate whether this is crucial to your own sense of freedom, very important but not crucial, somewhat important, or not important at all.


Crucial---very important---Somewhatimportant---Not Important---No opinion



The right to vote 60 37 2 1 *

Freedom of religion 55 39 5 1 *

The right to free speech 52 40 7 1 *

The right to due process 52 37 7 1 3

The right to privacy 47 44 9 * *

The right to petition the government 44 37 15 2 2

Protection against unreasonable searches/seizures 40 39 16 2 2

Freedom of the press 36 37 22 4 1

The right to keep and bear arms 30 26 27 15 2

You'll notice that the right to privacy is considered more crucial than some other rights that are explicitly written into the Bill of Rights. (You'll also notice that number one is not a right --- which was noted by none other than Uncle Nino during the Florida debacle. Too bad the press was so busy handwringing about preganant chads that it didn't bother to discuss that fact in any depth.)

And this issue pertains to Republican (and, frankly, certain Democratic) partners in crime as well --- the corporations and the "contractors" who are invading citizxens' privacy these days as if all information is not only public, it is also for sale.

John at Americablog caught this one yesterday:

Anyone can buy a list of your incoming and outgoing phone calls, cell or land-line, for $110 online.

He bought his own records so he knows it's true. And it turns out that the congress has known all about this and doesn't give a damn.

I support the idea of Democrats introducing a constitutional amendment to codify a right to privacy once and for all. I have heard some say that we should not do this because people will then realize that we don't already have that right. I think that's weak. The only people who are currently concerned with that argument in any practical sense are judges and they understand the issue very well. This is about taking a public stand and fighting for something that most Americans, not just Democrats, believe in and care about.

A constitutional amendment is a very difficult thing to do and would probably require decades to accomplish, but it is something that we can hang our hats on as a matter of fundamental principle. It should be a standard Democratic line along with "health insurance for all Americans" or "equal rights under the law." People need to understand that when the Republicans say there is no right to privacy in the constitution, they like it that way --- and that we disagree. Strongly.



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digby 1/08/2006 08:26:00 AM |

Saturday, January 07, 2006

 
Puppet Theatre

Did anyone catch the ignominious debut of the new MSNBC freakshow called "Week-ends With Maury and Connie" today?

I could be wrong, but I think they might be trying to do a sort of grandparents version of The Daily Show. It could also be a tribute to early television pioneer Dave Garroway and his chimp, J. Fred Muggs (Maury is playing the part of the chimp.)

I honestly don't know what to make of it. I'm pretty sure that Maury is working with Michael Jackson's plastic surgeon, though. I never saw the resemblance between him and Lena Horn before.



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digby 1/07/2006 05:24:00 PM |

 
Christian News Network

by digby

I see that conservative evangelical leaders have stepped up to criticize Pat Robertson's wacko statements:

I'm appalled that Pat Robertson would make such statements. He ought to know better," said Richard Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest U.S. Protestant denomination.

"The arrogance of the statement shocks me almost as much as the insensitivity of it," Land said in an interview.

[...]

Land, who sat next to Robertson at a Washington event last year honoring Sharon, said that Robertson spoke for "an ever diminishing number of evangelicals, and with each episode like this the rate of diminishment accelerates."

Land said Robertson might have isolated himself from anyone but yes men. "When you're the head of your own organization, if you don't cultivate people telling you what you don't want to hear, sometimes you don't hear it," Land said.

The Rev. Kevin Mannoia, chaplain at Azusa Pacific University and past president of the National Assn. of Evangelicals, was among those who suggested that Robertson's comments could have been a misguided effort to restore his once powerful standing as a religious and political voice in America by creating new controversy.

"I wonder whether, consciously or subconsciously, this is an effort on the part of an individual who has significant influence in the church and the country and recognized that influence is waning," Mannoia said.

"He continues to try to maintain that influence by increasingly controversial statements — perhaps statements out of desperation, perhaps statements out of [wanting] more attention," he said.

Meow. Pull your claws in, boys.

No matter what they say, Pat Robertson is incredibly influential among the rank and file Christian Right through his immensely successful tax exempt television empire, Christian Broadcast Networks. From the Columbia Journalism Review, May/June 2005:

CBN’s new digs are abuzz with activity. The Republican Senator Trent Lott came by for an interview earlier in the day, as did Jim Towey, who directs the White House office of faith-based initiatives. Now Lee Webb, the CBN anchor in from Virginia, sits behind the desk in one of the studios preparing to deliver the network’s first half-hour nightly newscast from this gleaming set. Behind him is a floor-to-ceiling world map illuminated in violet and indigo and a screen emblazoned with CBN’s logo. At his side, just beyond the camera’s view, sits a squat pedestal that holds a battered American Standard Bible. Webb lowers his head and folds his hands. “Father, we are grateful for today’s program,” he says. “We pray for your blessing. We ask that what we’re about to do will bring honor to you.” Then the cameras roll.

To many people — especially in blue-state America — God, news, and politics may seem an odd cocktail. But it’s this mix that fuels much of CBN’s programming.

CBN’s flagship program, the 700 Club with Pat Robertson, is familiar to many Americans. But few outside the evangelical community know how large the network is — it employs more than 1,000 people and has facilities in three U.S. cities as well as Ukraine, the Philippines, India, and Israel — or how diverse its programming...As Christian broadcasting has grown, pulpit-based ministries have largely given way to a robust programming mix that includes music, movies, sitcoms, reality shows, and cartoons. But the largest constellation may be news and talk shows. Christian public affairs programming exploded after September 11, and again in the run-up to the 2004 presidential election. And this growth shows no signs of flagging.

[...]

Christian radio news networks experienced their largest growth spurt in the months after September 11. That was also when CBN launched NewsWatch, the first nightly Christian television news program. The show is on three of the six national evangelical television networks, as well as regional Christian networks and the ABC Family Channel. FamilyNet TV, part of the Southern Baptist Convention’s media empire, followed suit in 2004 by hiring a news staff. And at the 2005 NRB convention, Christian television networks from around the world joined forces to form a news co-op. They intend to pool footage and other resources as a means of improving coverage and helping more Christian stations get into the news business.

Pat's getting at least a million viewers a day on the 700 Club alone. And to those who were listening to his broadcast, his faux pas about Ariel Sharon wouldn't have sounded the least bit odd:

Christian news networks devote an enormous amount of airtime to Israel, and their interest has theological underpinnings. In addition to being the place where many biblical events unfolded, Israel plays a pivotal role in biblical prophecy. Most evangelicals emphasize that God granted Israel to the Jews through a covenant with Abraham. They believe that the Jews’ return to Israel was biblically foreordained, and that Jewish control over Israel will trigger a cascade of apocalyptic events that will culminate in Christ’s second coming. Israel’s strength is vital to their own redemption.

Such beliefs explain the unwavering support for Israel expressed by some evangelical talk show hosts. Among them is Kay Arthur, whose radio and TV program, Precepts For Life, offers audiences biblical solutions to everyday dilemmas such as divorce and addictions. She took to the stage at the Israeli Ministry of Tourism Breakfast, held in conjunction with the 2005 NRB conference, and told the hundreds of broadcasters in the audience, “If it came to a choice between Israel and America, I would stand with Israel.” Janet Parshall, host of a popular political program that also runs both on radio and TV, implored the Israelis in attendance, “Please, please, do not give up any more land.” Lest anyone think her alone in her zeal, she urged all those who believed “in the sovereignty of Israel” to stand. Virtually everyone in the room got up.

[...]

The Israeli government has responded with gratitude. Senior officials meet regularly with evangelical broadcasters. Former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sent Pat Robertson a taped message for his seventy-fifth birthday, thanking him for his stalwart support.

I'm sure that Pat's good friend Benjamin had no problem with his comment that Sharon's stroke was divine retribution. He might even agree.

Pat's been popular with conservative politicians for a long time, as everyone knows. But even though he's been spouting off like a lunatic every couple of months (America was asking for it on 9/11 etc.) the Republican party knows which side of the communion wafer its bread is buttered on:

... a few months after the 2000 presidential election, when President Bush invited the NRB’s executive committee to join him and Attorney General John Ashcroft for a meeting in the Roosevelt Room at the White House. After the gathering the NRB’s board chairman wrote an exuberant message to members, saying there was a “new wind blowing in Washington, D.C., and across the nation . . . . The President has surrounded himself with a wonderful staff of people of faith. And it’s obvious that people of faith are being welcomed back to the public square.” The message also urged members to seize the opportunity to “make a difference in our culture” — which in the parlance of religious conservatives generally means effecting political change.

In the months that followed the Roosevelt Room gathering, the NRB executive committee continued to meet periodically with senior White House staff members. On occasion, Bush himself attended. And monthly NRB-White House conference calls were established to give rank-and-file NRB members a direct line to the Oval Office.

George W. Bush also attended NRB’s 2003 convention and gave a speech, much of it dedicated to promoting the looming war in Iraq. At the event, the NRB passed a resolution to “honor” the president. Though the NRB is a tax-exempt organization, and thus banned from backing a particular candidate, the document resembled an endorsement. The final line read, “We recognize in all of the above that God has appointed President George W. Bush to leadership at this critical period in our nation’s history, and give Him thanks.”

Just last spring, when Pat opened up his shiny new DC CBN studios during the fight over judicial nominees, the Republican leadership happily stepped forth to kiss Pat's ring and genuflect appropriately:

The judiciary was also front and center during opening week at the network’s new Washington bureau. A parade of senators — all of them Republican — made their way into the studio, to go on camera advocating the nuclear option. During his interview, broadcast as part of NewsWatch’s inaugural Washington, D.C., program, Trent Lott stood with studio lights glinting off the American flag pin on his lapel, and held up a scrap of paper with a list of senators’ names and how they intended to vote on the initiative. The tally seemed to be stacking up in his favor. Pat Robertson, who interviewed Lott, asked no tough questions and offered not even a passing nod to opposing viewpoints. Instead, Robertson scored Democrats for trying to “eliminate religious values from America” by blocking the appointment of conservative judges. All the while, the dizzying blend of God, news, and politics that he has crafted and honed was bouncing off satellites, winding through thousands of cable systems, rippling over the airwaves, and glowing on television screens across America.

And contrary to what Reverend Land and others are trying to say, Pat's news and entertainment network is growing, not shrinking:

January 2005:

The 700 Club's average daily audience, according to AC Nielsen's November sweeps, is up 26% over last year. At a time when most daily shows are struggling The 700 Club is experiencing tremendous increases. November's average daily audience of 922,000 households is the highest in ten years and we experienced the same success in October and November.

I suspect that some of this criticism of Pat is simple jockeying for influence in the Christian broadcasting field. You'll notice that Land's Southern Baptist Convention has its own competing network. Pat's the Rupert Murdoch of religious programming and there are a number of little Mini Pats nipping at his heels.

But I'm not worried about him. He's got two thirds of born again Christians watching his news show and they're not going to stop watching because of something he said about Ariel Sharon:

( Mar 14, 2005) The reshaping of Americans’ lives is evident in various facets of their life, including the spiritual dimension. A new nationwide survey conducted by The Barna Group indicates that while 56% of adults attend church services in a typical month, a much larger percentage is exposed to religious information and experiences through various forms of media. Radio and television are the most popular Christian media, but faith-related Internet sites as well as religious magazines, newspapers and books also enjoy significant exposure...Two-thirds of the born again population views Christian programming each month, which is more than double the proportion of non-born again adults (30%) who follow that pattern.

It isn't just FOXNews. CBN is a powerful force in the Mighty Wurlitzer too. Robertson may be a nutcase, but he's also a huge player in GOP politics whether they like it or not.


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digby 1/07/2006 02:36:00 PM |

 
Who Knew?

I just want to follow up a little bit on Glenn's fine post on this blog (and on his own) in which he takes on Highpockets' pathetic argument defending the Bush apologist war cry that revealing the NSA illegal spying scandal harmed national security.

I agree, of course, that despite the fact that Bush likes to talk about how they hide in caves, islamic terrorists aren't cave men. They can read as well as anyone. And because they have what you might call a "particular interest" in such things, they would be more likely than 99% of Americans to know about American surveillance law and practices such as FISA, if such things concerned them.

I also agree that this alleged revelation about "switches" and "encryption" is a red herring. In the first place the Times story didn't mention it, but even if it did, it makes no difference. All this technological information was in the public domain, as were the laws, so if any terrorist was concerned about how the US went about surveillance or the state of technology that enables it, they could have easily found out.

But none of that really matters. The NY Times story revealed nothing that would give a terrorist pause because the fact is that everyone in the world assumed that we were monitoring terrorists' electronic communications. I assumed that. So did Osama bin Laden. I further assumed that American friends of terrorists and their friends would be monitored, too. And I have no doubt that Osama bin Laden assumed the same. But while both Osama bin Laden and I undoubtedly made exactly the same assumptions, only one of us has any interest in the NY Times revelation that the surveillance was illegal --- and it isn't Osama.

This article from the Washington Times, via Glenn, bears that out, saying that all this surveillance has resulted in no good intelligence about al Qaeda in the US.

U.S. law enforcement sources said that more than four years of surveillance by the National Security Agency has failed to capture any high-level al Qaeda operative in the United States. They said al Qaeda insurgents have long stopped using the phones and even computers to relay messages. Instead, they employ couriers.

"They have been way ahead of us in communications security," a law enforcement source said. "At most, we have caught some riff-raff. But the heavies remain free and we believe some of them are in the United States."

But even if that were not true and American suicide bombers were plotting their next attacks in AOL chat rooms, the government would have no trouble getting warrants to spy on them. And that's the rub. I just don't see any scenario in which a FISA judge would not retroactively grant a warrant in a case that thwarted a terrorist plot. Neither can I imagine that if the administration made a case to the congress that it needed to extend the 72 hour retroactive limit to three weeks (or three months!) that the GOP congress wouldn't have gone along. Nor would they have withheld the money required to hire all the people needed to do the paperwork, or whatever the excuse of the day is. The administration would have gotten whatever it needed to legally monitor terrorist suspects. In fact, the terrorists and Anmericans alike assumed it had already done so.

Therefore, the only logical reason that the administration believed that it had to secretly and illegally spy on Americans is because they knew that Americans would not approve of which Americans they were monitoring. As Glenn says, the only security threatened by the revelations in the NY Times story is the Republican Party's political security.



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digby 1/07/2006 10:45:00 AM |

 
Hanging In Wingnutland

by digby

Man, am I one lucky lil' blogger or what? Let's have a hand for Julia of Sisyphus Shrugged and Glenn Greenwald of Unclaimed Territory. I'm sure you will all be visiting their great blogs often. If there were an award for best guest blogging, they would be shoo-ins. Many thanks to both of them for filling in while I was hanging with the wingnuts.

How is FoxNews indoctrinating the subjects these days, you ask? Well, it's interesting. From this small subset of wingnuts, it looks like the Abramoff scandal is spawning a kind of feverish excitement, although they don't seem to realize that it's going to affect their favored political party more than the hated liberal traitors. The atmosphere was very reminiscent of gatherings during Whitewater and Monicagate and it occurred to me that they are either addicted to scandal in general or they were so conditioned during the Clinton years that they now automatically associate scandal with an advantage to their side.

Keep in mind that while these are wingnuts they are not Pat Robertson wingnuts, so they aren't faithbased. However, they are military and their tribal indentification with the GOP is very stong. They are unable to admit, as yet, that this is a throughly Republican scandal, but they are scandalized nonetheless. They say generic stuff like "it's time to throw all those bums out" which, if you knew these particular wingnuts, is as close as they are ever going to get to openly admitting that the Republicans have fucked up.

They also complained that Bush is on TV too much. His hectoring bozo-ism embarrasses them now.

Of course they were also saying, "somebody ought to put a stop to that woman."

Baby steps.




Corrected shoo-in

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digby 1/07/2006 09:07:00 AM |

 
Hey, me too...

What he said. Thanks for the conversation, and for making me feel at home, and thanks to Digby for inviting me.

Since this came up in the comments of an earlier post, Wampum (home of the Koufaces, and they're still a little short the money they need to pay for them, if you happen to think of it when you drop by), firedoglake and his rooness all have smart posts up explaining why if you think that "the tribes donated to Democrats" means that Democrats are implicated in the Abramoff scandal, you don't really understand what the Abramoff scandal is about.

That makes me kind of nervous. We're the ones who are paying attention. Imagine what impressions the people who aren't paying attention are getting.

I think we need to get on message here, folks.

Just, you know, saying.

edit: Oh, man. I almost forgot to make Digby profoundly uncomfortable by suggesting that you head over to the Bloggies with this blog in mind.

Best writer seems to be the popular category.
julia 1/07/2006 08:34:00 AM |

 
A couple of last points

by Glenn Greenwald

Thanks to Digby for asking me to blog here while he was away, and thanks to all of his readers for the lively and provocative comments in response to mine and Julia’s posts. This is the place where one finds what I think is the most consistently superb writing and analysis on the Internet, and I've enjoyed blogging here these last few days.

I wanted to bring two final items to your attention:

(1) The nonpartisan and independent Congressional Research Service released a Report yesterday (.pdf) which analyzed and, in a mild though clear tone, decimated the legal theories advanced by the Administration to defend George Bush’s lawless eavesdropping.

Though lengthy and legalistic, the Report is well worth reading. Of particular note is its discussion of the history of eavesdropping abuses on U.S. citizens by the Executive Branch which necessitated the protections of FISA (page CRS 13); the Report’s destruction of the Administration’s claim that the AUMF (the Congressional resolution authorizing military force against Al Qaeda) can be read to have provided Bush an "exemption" from the mandates of FISA (CRS 32); and its emphatic rejection of the notion that a President can simply violate a Congressional law (rather than asking Congress to amend it) simply because the President views the law as undesirable for national security (CRS 41).

(2) Atrios has spent the last several days repeatedly asking if there are any Bush followers, anywhere, who can answer this question:

Can anyone - anywhere - explain, just a little bit - just one time - how "national security has been damaged" by revelations that the Administration was eavesdropping without FISA-required warrants and judicial oversight rather than with them?

One of the most devoted and loyal Bush followers, John at Powerline, has courageously stepped up to the plate, and attempted to provide an explanation as to how it can be said that disclosure of the illegality of the eavesdropping program "harmed national security."

It’s the first such attempt (at least which I’ve seen) to answer this question. For reasons that I point out here on my blog, John’s explanation is not just astoundingly incoherent, but conclusively demonstrates that John -- as I believe is the case for many Bush followers -- does not have any idea what FISA says or what this scandal is actually about.

The utter emptiness of his response makes quite clear that the only thing "harmed" by disclosure of this illegal program is George Bush’s political interests, not American national security interests. The rage and "treason" accusations arising from this scandal rest on the borderline-religious belief that to criticize and undermine George Bush is the same as criticizing and harming the United States, and harming George Bush’s political interests -- even by pointing out that he broke the law -- is, therefore, by definition, to commit treason. That really is the premise of those who are defending George Bush in this scandal.
Glenn Greenwald 1/07/2006 05:05:00 AM |

Friday, January 06, 2006

 
Hanging the Messenger

by Glenn Greenwald

Atrios asked this question yesterday:

So, what if it does come out that the administration was spying on journalists, political opponents, etc... How WILL the broders/russerts/matthews/hiatts/ roberts/humes of the world react?

I’m not sure exactly what those commentators would say (although I’m sure it would be appropriately balanced and would give due deference to the view that Bush had good arguments for such spying and did so only with the best of intentions for all of us), but I definitely know what Bush’s followers would say: It’s about time, and it doesn’t go far enough. Bush’s blogosphere followers have already begun justifying and excusing the Administration’s potential spying on journalists.

But clearly they believe that a lot more should be done to anti-Bush journalists than simply spying on their calls. Since the New York Times disclosed the undisputed fact that George Bush ordered his Administration to eavesdrop on American citizens with no judicial oversight and outside of FISA, the attacks on the media by the Administration and Bush’s followers have seriously escalated. Since this scandal arose, they have been relentlessly calling the Times and its sources "subversives" and "traitors," and have been openly claiming that they are guilty of treason.

When Bush followers use terms like "subversives" and "traitors," and when they accuse people of engaging in "treason," many assume that they are joking, that it’s a form of political hyperbole and it’s only meant symbolically. Pajamas Media member and Instapundit favorite Dean Esmay wants it know that the terms "traitors" and "treason" are used literally, and that these traitors must meet the fate which traitors deserve:

When I say "treason" I don't mean it in an insulting or hyperbolic way. I mean in a literal way: we need to find these 21st century Julius Rosenbergs, these modern day reincarnations of Alger Hiss, put them on trial before a jury of their peers, with defense counsel. When they are found guilty, we should then hang them by the neck until the are dead, dead, dead.

No sympathy. No mercy.Am I angry? You bet I am. But not in an explosive way. Just in the same seething way I was angry on 9/11.

These people have endangered American lives and American security. They need to be found, tried, and executed.

Similarly, on Powerline yesterday, Big Trunk shared some of his dirty fantasies about criminally prosecuting and imprisoning the reporters and editors of the Times who were responsible for having disclosed the fact that his Leader ordered the Government to eavesdrop on American citizens in violation of the law:

Assuming that the terms of the statute apply to the leaks involved in the NSA story, has the Times itself violated the statute and committed a crime? The answer is clearly affirmative. . . .

Is the New York Times a law unto itself? In gambling that constitutional immunity protects it from criminal liability for its misconduct, the New York Times appears to me to be bluffing. Those of us who are disinclined to remit the defense of the United States to the judgment of the New York Times must urge the Bush administration to call the Times's bluff.

Even discussions of this sort have the effect, by design, of intimidating the nation’s media into remaining quiet about illegal acts by the Administration. With an Administration which throws American citizens indefinitely into military prisons without so much as charges being brought and with access to lawyers being denied, or which contemplates military attacks on unfriendly media outlets, isn’t it just inevitable that all of this talk about treason and criminal prosecution of the Times and its sources is going to have some substantial chilling effect on reporting on the Administration's wrongdoing?

None of this is new. It’s all been tried before. The New York Times previously obtained classified documents revealing government misconduct with respect to the Vietnam War, and the Nixon Administration argued then, too, that the Times’ publication of that classified information was criminal and endangered national security. The U.S. Supreme Court in New York Times Co. v. The United States (the Pentagon Papers Case) 403 U.S. 713 (1971), barred the Nixon Administration from preventing publication by the Times of this information.

In doing so, Justice Hugo Black wrote a concurring opinion which makes clear just how dangerous and perverse it is for the Administration and its followers to seek to silence the media from reporting, truthfully, on the Administration’s illegal eavesdropping. I’m quoting from it at length because it is so instructive and applicable to what is occurring today:

Our Government was launched in 1789 with the adoption of the Constitution. The Bill of Rights, including the First Amendment, followed in 1791. Now, for the first time in the 182 years since the founding of the Republic, the federal courts are asked to hold that the First Amendment does not mean what it says, but rather means that the Government can halt the publication of current news of vital importance to the people of this country. . . .

Yet the Solicitor General argues and some members of the Court appear to agree that the general powers of the Government adopted in the original Constitution should be interpreted to limit and restrict the specific and emphatic guarantees of the Bill of Rights adopted later. I can imagine no greater perversion of history. . . .

In the First Amendment the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government.

The subtle and not-so-subtle threats against journalists for committing "treason" are not confined to the rabid Bush followers in the blogosphere. Bush’s closest political allies routinely make similar accusations, and Bush himself, in his very first Press Conference after disclosure of his eavesdropping, accused those responsible for the disclosure of “helping the enemy,” i.e., committing treason:

There is a process that goes on inside the Justice Department about leaks, and I presume that process is moving forward. My personal opinion is it was a shameful act for someone to disclose this very important program in a time of war. The fact that we're discussing this program is helping the enemy. . . .

With a Congress that is controlled by Republicans and hopelessly passive, and with a judiciary increasingly packed with highly deferential Bush appointees, the two remaining sources which can serve as meaningful checks on Executive power are governmental whistle-blowers and journalists, which is exactly why the most vicious and intimidating attacks are now being directed towards them.
Glenn Greenwald 1/06/2006 09:31:00 AM |

 
I'm frequently dispirited at the way the obvious doesn't seem to be obvious to the people who provide our news coverage, but every so often I read something that makes me feel as if perhaps someone is paying attention.

Frequently it's written by EJ Dionne

It almost makes you feel sorry for Jack Abramoff.

Republicans once fell all over themselves to get his "moolah," the term used famously by the disgraced superlobbyist, and to get his advice on dealing with that warm and cuddly entity known as "the lobbying community."

Suddenly, Abramoff enters two plea bargains, and these former friends ask, in puzzled tones, "Jack Who ?"

Over the past few days, politicians -- from President Bush and House Speaker Dennis Hastert on down -- raced to return Abramoff contributions, or compassionately sent the moolah off to charity. There's a scramble to treat him as a wildly defective gene in an otherwise healthy body politic, and to erase the past. But seeing the record of the past clearly is essential to fixing the future.

Abramoff, who used to pall around with close Bush allies Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed in the College Republicans and who has been a central figure in the rise of Republican dominance in Washington, is not a lone wolf. He is a particularly egregious example of how the GOP's political-corporate-lobbying complex has overwhelmed the idealistic wing of the Republican Party.

Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, insisted on Wednesday that Bush does not know Abramoff personally. But the record makes clear that Abramoff was a loyal and serious player in Bush's circles.

According to an Oct. 15, 2003, story in Roll Call, Abramoff was one of a half-dozen lobbyists who raised $100,000 for Bush's 2000 campaign. When Bush was battling Al Gore's efforts to recount Florida's votes, Abramoff was there with the maximum $5,000 contribution Bush was taking for the effort. A September 2003 National Journal story noted that Abramoff was so confident he would meet his fundraising goals for the president's 2004 campaign that he was planning, as the lobbyist generously put it, "to try to help some other lobbyists meet their goals."

The administration, in turn, was open to Abramoff. As National Journal reported in its April 20, 2002, issue, "Last summer, in an effort to raise the visibility of his Indian clients, Abramoff helped arrange a White House get-together on tax issues with President Bush for top Indian leaders, including Lovelin Poncho, the chairman of the Coushattas," one of the tribes Abramoff represented.

When journalists would raise questions about Abramoff's role as a lobbyist-fundraiser just a couple of years ago, Bush's lieutenants played down his influence peddling and proudly claimed Abramoff as one of their own.

On an Oct. 15, 2003, CNBC broadcast, journalist Alan Murray asked Ed Gillespie, then chairman of the Republican National Committee, about fundraising by "people like Jack Abramoff, who represents Indian tribes here," and another lobbyist whose name I'll leave out because he has not been implicated in any scandals. "Are you going to sit here and tell us that their contributions to your party have nothing to do with their lobbying efforts in Washington?"

"I know Jack Abramoff," Gillespie replied. He mentioned the other lobbyist and insisted: "They are Republicans; they were Republicans before they were lobbyists. . . . I think they want to see a Republican reelected in the White House in 2004 more than anything."

Roll Call reported on March 12, 2001, that "GOP leaders on and off Capitol Hill are organizing a new drive to lean on major corporations and trade associations to hire Republicans for their top lobbying jobs." The article spoke of a "Who's Who of Republican lobbyists" who had held a meeting on the subject the week before. At the top of the list was Jack Abramoff...

There's been quite a flurry of attempts to play this unholy mess as a bipartisan scandal (I particularly enjoyed this bizarrity from the ever Republican-friendly Gallop, where they make a valiant attempt to "prove" that corruption is a bipartisan problem for Congress in the wake of blanket news coverage of Mr. Abramoff's activities based on polls taken, um, a while ago).

It's not working, and we shouldn't let it work. That means, among other things, you might want to consider defending the Democrats. After all, individual lobbyists weren't making tens of millions of dollars selling both sides of the mall to anyone with money when we held them (pace the junior generation of the Boggs family). Maybe we should grab them back.

If we showed a bit of enthusiasm for the good our team is trying to do rather than focussing on what they're not doing the way we would, it might help.

Just saying.
julia 1/06/2006 09:04:00 AM |

 
An ideology of lawlessness

by Glenn Greenwald

When Rudy Giuliani first became Mayor of New York in 1993, he famously ordered the Police Department to begin enforcing relatively minor "quality of life" laws -- long-ignored prohibitions on things like jumping turnstiles and panhandling. These actions were based on the "Broken Windows" theory of criminality long touted by conservative theorist James Q. Wilson, which held that allowing even small infractions of the law is to endorse criminality which, in turn, leads to more serious crimes and then all-out lawlessness. To this day, whenever it is their turn to pay tribute to the heroic greatness of Rudy Giuliani, conservatives heap lavish praise on his refusal to overlook law-breaking and his glorious re-instatement of the rule of law.

But like the Geneva Convention, precepts of due process and so much else, "rule of law" theories are now quaint relics being cast aside by the so-called conservatives running our Federal Government. In their place, we now have a governmental culture where violations of the law are literally the norm.

What we have in our Federal Government are not individual acts of law-breaking or isolated scandals of illegality, but instead, a culture and an ideology of lawlessness. It cannot be emphasized enough that since September 11, the Bush Administration has claimed the power to act without any constraints of law or checks from the Congress or the courts. Its view of its own power and governing philosophy is based upon, and perfectly encapsulated by, this single paragraph from the incomparably pernicious September 25, 2001 Memorandum, written by then-Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo:

In both the War Powers Resolution and the Joint Resolution, Congress has recognized the President's authority to use force in circumstances such as those created by the September 11 incidents. Neither statute, however, can place any limits on the President's determinations as to any terrorist threat, the amount of military force to be used in response, or the method, timing, and nature of the response. These decisions, under our Constitution, are for the President alone to make.

That decisions about what actions our country takes "are for the President alone to make" – without any interference from the Congress, the courts, or anything else – is not a fringe academic theory. It is a definitely authoritarian and lawless ideology that has truly -- expressly -- become the governing philosophy of George Bush and his Administration. And it is not something the Administration has merely embraced in theory. It has been aggressively exercising these limitless powers.

When the President and the Vice President assure us that all of their actions are in "full accordance with the law," what they mean by "the law" is what is described in the Yoo Memorandum. For everything broadly relating to the undeclared and eternal "war" on terror -- not just on international battlefields but domestically as well -- decisions are "for the President alone to make." Pursuant to this theory, even when the President acts in violation of what we used to understand as "the law" (i.e., acts of Congress which are signed into law by the President), he is still acting "in accordance with the law," because the power to make such decisions rests exclusively with him.

The NSA scandal has received the bulk of the media’s attention over the past month, and deservedly so. But it has drowned out other acts of wanton law-breaking by the Administration. We have learned recently that multiple federal agencies have been tracking the computer activities of American citizens in patent violation of the law. And it was disclosed in the last couple of days that the Administration some time ago unilaterally granted itself an exemption to the National Security Act of 1947, whereby it has refused to brief the Senate and House Intelligence Committees with regard to the NSA’s eavesdropping activities as required by that law. And in violation of the President’s (itself illegal) Executive Order directing the NSA to eavesdrop only on international calls in violation of FISA, the NSA has eavesdropped on domestic calls as well.

Such individual acts of law-breaking are always either excused as being inconsequential or defended as being necessary for our safety. But the dangers posed by this theory are self-evident and severe.

Just two weeks ago or so, I wrote a post asking Bush followers how any limits at all could be recognized on George Bush’s powers in light of the theories of the Yoo Memorandum, and specifically wondered why the debates we were having about things like renewal of the Patriot Act and prohibitions on torture even matter, if, as Bush claims, "such decisions alone are for the President to make." Both Matt Welch at Reason and Scott Lemieux asked the same question with regard to other powers that the Administration could assert. It did not take long for those questions to be answered, and the answer -- coming directly from the Administration -- is that there are no cognizable limits on the President’s law-breaking power.

This answer was delivered in the form of a woefully under-reported "signing statement" which was issued last Friday by the President when he signed into law a defense appropriations bill passed by Congress. That bill included the McCain Amendment, which bans the use of torture as an interrogation tool and which the Administration aggressively argued against. As Marty Lederman has detailed, Bush’s signing statement plainly amounts to a re-iteration – a reminder to all of us – of the theory of the Yoo Memorandum: that while the President was participating in the symbolic ritual of signing the McCain Amendment into "law," he has the power to violate it should he deem it in the national interest to do so. Here is what Bush said in his statement:

The executive branch shall construe Title X in Division A of the Act, relating to detainees, in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President to supervise the unitary executive branch and as Commander in Chief and consistent with the constitutional limitations on the judicial power, which will assist in achieving the shared objective of the Congress and the President, evidenced in Title X, of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks.

So this new "law" will be interpreted "in a manner consistent" with the Administration’s view of "the constitutional authority of the President to supervise the unitary executive branch and as Commander in Chief." Of course, the Administration’s view regarding the President’s "constitutional authority" is that such decisions are not for Congress to make, but "are for the President alone to make," which is just another way of saying that the President can violate the law the minute he thinks he should.

Lest anyone think that this description of the President’s view of his right to break the law is exaggerated or unfair, we should listen to what the Administration itself is saying about this matter:

A senior administration official, who spoke to a Globe reporter about the statement on condition of anonymity because he is not an official spokesman, said the president intended to reserve the right to use harsher methods in special situations involving national security. . . .

But, the official said, a situation could arise in which Bush may have to waive the law's restrictions to carry out his responsibilities to protect national security. He cited as an example a ''ticking time bomb" scenario, in which a detainee is believed to have information that could prevent a planned terrorist attack.

''Of course the president has the obligation to follow this law, [but] he also has the obligation to defend and protect the country as the commander in chief, and he will have to square those two responsibilities in each case," the official added. ''We are not expecting that those two responsibilities will come into conflict, but it's possible that they will."

Isn’t it rather extraordinary to observe the Congress pass a much-debated bill which the Administration vigorously opposed, and watch the President sign it into law, only for the Administration, on the very same day, to actually come right out and say that the President "may have to waive the law’s restrictions"?

Since when do we have a system of Government where the President can simply "waive" away laws? This law was enacted specifically to prohibit acts of torture which the Administration has engaged in, and the President is openly telling us that he may have to unilaterally "waive" the law. Generously, we hear that he hopes not to have to break the law, "but it’s possible" that he will.

The NSA law-breaking scandal cannot be seen as some isolated act. It is merely the most flagrant symptom (thus far) of the fact that we have a President -- with three full years left in office -- who has claimed for himself the right to ignore Congressional law and who believes that virtually all decisions of any real significance in our country are his "alone to make." FISA. The National Security Act of 1947. The McCain Amendment. These are all federal laws -- laws -- which the Administration is openly claiming it has the right to violate.

Shouldn’t we be having much more of a discussion than we have had about the fact that we have a President who believes he has the power to ignore laws? We have had all sorts of vigorous and sweeping debates lately about things like torture, habeas corpus, surveillance powers under the Patriot Act. But those debates are all just gestures. Like George Bush’s signing a "law" which he simultaneously claims he has no obligation to obey, the oh-so-heated debates we’ve been having are all just some sort of illusory role-playing, where we pretend that we have a representative Congress which makes laws. But what we actually have is a President who says he can violate those laws at will because such decisions are "his alone to make."

Maybe Americans want to have a President who has these powers and can operate without much restraint. Other countries at other times have decided that they want that, usually as a means for protecting themselves against perceived external threats. But shouldn’t we be having this discussion much more explicitly and with much greater urgency than we have had it thus far?

The "war" which is said to justify these extraordinary powers isn't going anywhere any time soon. The Administration itself constantly reminds us that it's a long struggle which could last decades. That means that whatever law-breaking powers we permit to be vested in the President are ones that George Bush, and then subsequent presidents, are going to wield for a long time to come. At the very least, such a radical shift in how our government functions should not be effectuated in secret and without real debate.
Glenn Greenwald 1/06/2006 03:49:00 AM |

Thursday, January 05, 2006

 
FYI

The Talking Dog, who is a bit of a lawyer himself, professionally, has been interviewing the lawyers for a number of the defendants who have been caught up in the current administration's no-constitutional-rights-for-citizens-we-say-are-terrorists (only we don't have to prove it) legal policy.

Today, he posted an interview with Mr. Padilla's lawyer.

As you may or may not know, the current administration is attempting to transfer Mr. Padilla's case from the military courts to the criminal courts in an attempt (unsuccessful, so far) to keep the Supreme Court from deciding on the constitutionality of their denial of constitutional protections to Mr. Padilla, on the basis of their argument that the executive branch has the right to ignore the constitution.

That right, presumably, emanating from the penumbra of something or other. Love me some original intenters.

Anyway, read. It's fascinating stuff.
julia 1/05/2006 07:16:00 PM |

 
O bliss o glee o joy for all my former woes a thousand times repaid...

The Abramoff mess has spread to Maryland, where it is now complicating the life of my beloved Governor Ehrlich.

I'm a lucky girl.
julia 1/05/2006 12:46:00 PM |

 
why the White House is not returning between $100-200 thousand bundled by pioneer Jack Abramoff

President George Bush is giving $US6000 ($8000) in political contributions from Abramoff, his wife and a client to charity, but will keep more than $US100,000 that Abramoff collected for Mr Bush's 2004 re-election campaign, officials said.

The White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, said the $US6000 from the Abramoffs and the Saginaw Chippewa tribe of Michigan would go to the American Heart Association.

A Republican National Committee spokeswoman, Tracey Schmitt, said the money Abramoff raised as a "pioneer" for the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign would be kept. "There is nothing to indicate that those contributions reflect anything but support for the re-election campaign," she said.

And truly, Mr. Abramoff's associates and clients (he doesn't appear to have too many friends, now, does he?) had a long list of reasons to be very, very interested in keeping Our Fearless Leader in the White House.

A few highlights:

Abramoff Arranged White House Meeting at in Exchange for Donation to Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform. A lawyer for the Saginaw Chippewa Indian tribe in Michigan revealed that tribal leaders had "three or four" meetings at the White House—including one with Bush and another with Rove—after they gave a $25,000 donation to Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform at Jack Abramoff's request. ATR later confirmed that Norquist arranged White House meetings for Indian tribal leaders and others who were "supportive of the president's agenda." [Newsweek, 5/2/05]

Jack Abramoff Advised Department of Interior Transition. Abramoff advised the Interior Department during the Bush transition. [Wall Street Journal, 3/19/01]

Abramoff's Former Assistant Became Rove's Gate Keeper. In 2001 Abramoff's personal assistant, Susan Ralston, took a similar job under Karl Rove in the White House. This move essentially made Ralston, "Rove's gatekeeper." [New York Times, 5/1/05]

Lobbying Network Involved Bush Administrator. According to The Washington Post, "in an attempt to influence the Interior Department -- which has the final say on a tribe's gambling ambitions -- Abramoff directed his tribal clients to give at least $225,000 to the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy, a conservative group that was founded by Gale A. Norton before President Bush chose her to be his interior secretary. [Washington Post, 3/13/05]

DC Lobbyist Jack Abramoff Advised Bush Interior Department Transition While Representing Indian Tribes. Abramoff advised the Interior Department during the Bush transition. Aside from the Department of Homeland Security, which regulates coastline gaming, and the Department of Treasury, which regulates illegal financial transactions, the Bureau of Indian Affairs is one of the few means the Federal Government has to regulate the gaming industry, specifically the Native American gaming industry. [Wall Street Journal, 3/19/01; www.doi.gov]

Abramoff Directed Tribal Clients Contributions to Interior Secretary Gail Norton's Foundation. According to The Washington Post, "in an attempt to influence the Interior Department -- which has the final say on a tribe's gambling ambitions -- Abramoff directed his tribal clients to give at least $225,000 to the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy, a conservative group that was founded by Gale A. Norton before President Bush chose her to be his interior secretary. [Washington Post, 3/13/05]

Abramoff Also Arranged A Meeting With Interior Secretary Gail Norton For the Coushattas Tribe. Abramoff also invited the Coushattas to a fall 2001 dinner party attended by Interior Secretary Gale Norton. The Coushattas provided Abramoff with millions in consulting fees and contracts. [National Journal, 4/20/02]

Obviously Mr. Abramoff's little circle was extremely anxious to keep the current team in place.

After all, they'd already paid a great deal of money to Mr. Abramoff in return for favors from inside the White House. They had an investment to protect.

The DCCC has updated their scandal website with the latest noisome details.
julia 1/05/2006 11:51:00 AM |

 
Attacking Bush's only weapon: Fear

by Glenn Greenwald

Among those who now recognize that the Bush Administration has not just deliberately and repeatedly broken the law, but is literally claiming that George Bush has the “wartime” power to continue to break the law, there is a growing impatience to move to the next step – to take action to ensure that there are serious consequences from Bush’s brazen law-breaking. But in order for that to happen, Bush opponents must finally overcome the one weapon which has protected George Bush again and again: fear. Fear of terrorism is what the Administration has successfully inflamed and exploited for four years in order to justify its most extreme and even illegal actions undertaken in the name of fighting terrorism.

Without pause, the Administration has sought to make Americans as frightened as possible about terrorism and has used that fear to justify its actions with regard to almost every issue. Here is Dick Cheney, just yesterday, proudly defending the Administration’s illegal NSA program by arguing that Bush’s warrantless eavesdropping on Americans, like everything else the Administration does, is justified by fear of terrorists:

As we get farther away from September 11th, some in Washington are yielding to the temptation to downplay the ongoing threat to our country, and to back away from the business at hand. . .

The enemy that struck on 9/11 is weakened and fractured yet it is still lethal and trying to hit us again. Either we are serious about fighting this war or we are not. And as long as George W. Bush is President of the United States, we are serious -- and we will not let down our guard.

As always, Cheney urgently warns Americans not to let our fear of terrorism diminish. George Bush has also been fueling these flames of fear in almost every speech he’s given since September 11, 2001. Here he is in a quite typical speech delivered on October 6, 2005, transparently attempting to whip up as much fear as possible in order to bolster support for our ongoing occupation of Iraq:

We know the vision of the radicals because they've openly stated it -- in videos, and audiotapes, and letters, and declarations, and websites. . . . Their tactic to meet this goal has been consistent for a quarter-century: They hit us, and expect us to run. They want us to repeat the sad history of Beirut in 1983, and Mogadishu in 1993 -- only this time on a larger scale, with greater consequences.

"The militants believe that controlling one country will rally the Muslim masses, enabling them to overthrow all moderate governments in the region, and establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia. With greater economic and military and political power, the terrorists would be able to advance their stated agenda: to develop weapons of mass destruction, to destroy Israel, to intimidate Europe, to assault the American people, and to blackmail our government into isolation."

"Our enemy is utterly committed. As Zarqawi has vowed, 'We will either achieve victory over the human race or we will pass to the eternal life.' And the civilized world knows very well that other fanatics in history, from Hitler to Stalin to Pol Pot, consumed whole nations in war and genocide before leaving the stage of history.

"The murderous ideology of the Islamic radicals is the great challenge of our new century. Yet, in many ways, this fight resembles the struggle against communism in the last century. . . .

With the rise of a deadly enemy and the unfolding of a global ideological struggle, our time in history will be remembered for new challenges and unprecedented dangers.

Islamic terrorists here, as always, are depicted as omnipotent villains with quite attainable dreams of world domination, genocide, and the obliteration of the United States. They are trying to take over the world and murder us all. And this is not merely a threat we face. It is much more than that. It is the predominant issue facing the United States -- more important than all others. Everything pales in comparison to fighting off this danger. We face not merely a danger, but, in Bush’s words, an "unprecedented danger" -- the worst, scariest, most threatening danger ever.

And literally for four years, this is what Americans have heard over and over and over from their Government – that we face a mortal and incomparably powerful enemy on the precipice of destroying us, and only the most extreme measures taken by our Government can save us. We are a nation engaged in a War of Civilizations whose very existence is in imminent jeopardy. All of those plans for the future, dreams for your children, career aspirations, life goals – it’s all subordinate, it’s all for naught, unless, first and foremost, we stand loyally behind George Bush as he invokes extreme and unprecedented measures necessary to protect us from this extreme and unprecedented threat.

It is that deeply irrational, fear-driven view of the world which has to be undermined in order to make headway in convincing Americans that this Administration is engaged in intolerable excesses and abuses of its power. The argument which needs to be made is the one that we have seen starting to arise in the blogosphere and elsewhere: that living in irrational fear of terrorists and sacrificing our liberties and all of our other national goals in their name is the approach of hysterics and cowards, not of a strong, courageous and resolute nation.

Several weeks ago, Digby wrote a widely-discussed post describing how Bush followers are driven by their all-consuming and pitifully child-like fears of terrorists, leading them to consent to any measures taken by George Bush as long as he promises to save them. And this weekend, Kos wrote a similar post, in which he contrasted the classic and previously defining American bravery of Patrick Henry with the frightened Bush followers who beg the Government to restrict their liberties in exchange for saving them from the terrorists.

If the blogospheric reaction of Bush supporters is any indication, this argument is as politically potent as it is self-evidently true. Kos’s post provoked shrieking seizures among the tough-guy, blindly loyal Bush followers -- the ones who revealingly give themselves play name like Rocket and Captain and who never tire of touting their own toughness. In response to Kos’s post, they squealed and they yelled and they called him all kinds of names – they did everything but refute the argument.

And notably, in their anger, there was none of that smug bravado or all-too-familiar attacks on the courage of Bush opponents, because with this plainly accurate depiction, they stand revealed as being driven by nothing other than limitless, irrational fear. They are scared and they want to continue to implant their extreme fear into our national policies and onto our national character.

There is no more important goal than exposing and undermining the cowardly and exaggerated fear which lies at the core of the Bush agenda. If, as has been the case, we are bullied into starting from the tacit premise that Islamic terrorism is a unique and unprecedented evil which threatens our very existence -- rather than one of many challenges which we must calmly face and overcome -- then it is a foregone conclusion that whoever advocates the most extreme “anti-terrorist” measures, no matter how excessive and regardless of whether they comport with legal niceties, will prevail.

If that fear-mongering premise is left unchallenged – if we are too afraid to dispute the premise that Islamic terrorism is the “unprecedented” existential threat to the United States which, at any moment, is likely to cause our cities to be in flames and our children to be glowing with radiation and therefore must outweigh every other issue and concern – then we will lose that debate every time, which is what has been happening.

After all, if it really were the case that Islamic terrorism constituted the sort of imminent, civilization-ending threat which the Administration has spent the last four years drumming into everyone’s head, then it would be extremely difficult to gin up much outrage over an eavesdropping program, warrants or not. When one’s very survival is at stake and is in imminent danger, what will matter is being protected from that danger. Everything else will pale in importance, and there will be extreme gratitude towards those who seek to save you, even if they break a few abstract rules to do it.

What must be emphasized is that one can protect against the threat of terrorism with courage, calm and resolve – the attributes which have always defined our nation as it has confronted other threats. Hysteria and fear-mongering are the opposite of strength. The strong remain rational and unafraid.

In a rational world, the basic principle of risk is that it equals impact times probability: "In professional risk assessments, risk combines the probability of a negative event occurring with how harmful that event would be." But the Administration has spent four years urging Americans to ignore that way of thinking and instead assent to any Government measure, no matter the costs or comparative harms, as long as they are pursued in the name of fighting this Ultimate Evil.

In fact, it is now essentially prohibited in good company to even raise the prospect that the threat of terrorism is exaggerated. It is an inviolable piety that there is no such thing as overstating the terrorism risk. One is compelled to genuflect to, and tremble before, the paramounce of this Ultimate Threat upon pain of being cast aside as some sort of anti-American, terrorist-loving loon.

During the 2004 election, John Kerry accidentally stumbled in his clumsy and half-hearted way towards challenging this fear-mongering when he told The New York Times Sunday Magazine: ‘’We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance." That provoked the predictable outraged and pious braying that Democrats are unserious about the Terrorist Threat and too weak to protect our children from this unparalleled menace. And as happens almost always when Bush opponents express a view that meets with some initial disapproval, all sorts of apologetic backtracking and retraction ensued, and that topic has been basically off-limits since.

But this is a message which Americans are clearly ready to hear, if there are people willing to deliver it. We are four years away from September 11 and, despite the dire warnings of the Bush Administration, people in rural Kansas and suburban Georgia and everywhere else are beginning to realize that on the list of problems and threats which endanger their children and impede their dreams, the potential of an attack by Islamic terrorists is not anywhere near the top of that list. We are not engulfed by the Civil War or fighting World War II. And it is past time to bolster that growing recognition by pointing out over and over that the Bush Administration’s insistence that we live in never-ending fear and panic of terrorists is the opposite of the American virtues of strength and courage in the face of threats.

And it's a message which Americans can understand. Most people know individuals in their lives who live in this type of irrational, all-consuming fear on the micro-level – people who are scared before they are anything else, pathologically risk-averse, always hiding and exerting excess caution lest something go wrong. In its more extreme version, that sort of fear manifests as a life-destroying mental disorder. It is a pitiful image, and such people typically achieve very little. They cannot, because their fear is paralyzing.

The Bush Administration has been trying for four years to reduce this country to a collective version of that affliction. And it is hard to imagine what a nation which is fueled by such fear can accomplish. Hysteria and paranoia have never been the American national character, but along with the founding principles of our Republic, the Bush Administration has been attempting to change that, too.

The Administration has managed to get away with the Orwellian depiction of fear as being the hallmark of courage, and conversely, depicting a rational and calm approach as being a mark of cowardice. They were aided in this effort by a terrified national media and a national political elite who live in Washington, DC and New York and were so petrified of further attacks that they were easily whipped into a state of passive, uncritical compliance in exchange for promises of protection. But we are far away from the emotional shock of September 11, and the power of that Fear weapon is breaking down.

In order to persuade the population that George Bush must not be allowed to claim the powers of a King, literally including the power to break the law, Bush opponents must attack that fear as the by-product of weakness and cowardice which it is. A strong nation does not give up its freedoms or sacrifice its national character in the name of fear and panic. But that is what George Bush has spent the last four years urging the country to do, and it is what he is counting on -- it is the only chance he has -- for having this NSA law-breaking scandal join the litany of other scandals which have meekly and inconsequentially faded away in a cloud of manufactured fear.

Glenn Greenwald 1/05/2006 05:36:00 AM |

Wednesday, January 04, 2006

 
What happened to conservative legal theories?

by Glenn Greenwald

Listening to the Bush Administration and its defenders try to justify George Bush’s deliberate and ongoing violations of the law, one can’t help but notice that the Constitution and Congressional statutes sure do seem quite "flexible" in the hands of those seeking to defend him -- a particular irony given how stridently Bush followers rail against such legal theories in other contexts. The defenses being dredged up to justify Bush’s law-breaking certainly are notable for the liberties they take with "conservative" principles of legal argument, as well as with how sharply they contradict the legal views which the Administration itself previously claimed it believed in.

The central problem for the Administration is that George Bush deliberately engaged in conduct which FISA clearly and expressly makes it a crime to engage in. All of the legalistic smoke screens aside, the issue really is that clear. That’s because the Administration cannot escape the plain and easy-to-understand language of Section 1809 of FISA:

"A person is guilty of an offense if he intentionally— (1) engages in electronic surveillance under color of law except as authorized by statute."

The Administration itself admits, as it must, that it engaged in electronic surveillance in a way that FISA expressly prohibits (by doing so secretly and without judicial approval). Section 1809 says that anyone who does that is guilty of a criminal offense. The law here is clear, and Bush’s violations of the law are equally clear. That presents the Administration with obvious difficulties in defending George Bush.

Because there is no plausible argument to make that Bush’s eavesdropping complied with the requirements of FISA, Alberto Gonzalez’s Justice Department is insisting that Bush had the legal right to eavesdrop on Americans in violation of that law. The DoJ issued a detailed Memorandum (.pdf) advocating its two principal legal theories as to why George Bush was permitted to engage in conduct which FISA makes it a crime to engage in. Both theories are about as far away as possible from the conservative legal principles which Bush has always claimed to believe in and which he says he wants his judicial appointees to apply.

Thus, we have one argument which claims that the 2001 Congressional Resolution authorizing military force in Afghanistan and against Al Qaeda (the “AUMF”) -- a resolution which obviously never mentioned FISA, eavesdropping or surveillance, because it had nothing to do with any of those things -- should nonetheless be "construed" and "interpreted" to have "impliedly" amended FISA by giving Bush an "exemption" entitling him to eavesdrop in violation of that law. And this argument is made even though the Congress which supposedly gave Bush that exemption says that it did no such thing, but to the contrary, expressly refused to provide that very authority.

And then we have the second Bush-defending argument: a dressed-up Constitutional theory which claims that George Bush has the "inherent" authority under Article II of the Constitution to violate Congressional law and eavesdrop on American citizens without the judicial oversight required by FISA – even though nothing in Article II mentions or even references the power to eavesdrop, the power to engage in surveillance, or the right to violate Congressional statutes. Indeed, the only express clause in Article II which seems to relate to this controversy is one that would rather strongly undercut the claim that the President has the right to violate Congressional law. That’s the part mandating that the President "shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed . . . "

So much for plain language and original intent. Who has time for those fancy constructs when George Bush needs defending? What we have in their place are implied, hidden amendments to laws which are silently buried in other laws which don’t even reference the law which it supposedly amended. And that's backed up by a claim that George Bush has certain Executive powers which the Constitution doesn’t mention, but which instead, one presumes, are lurking quietly somewhere in Article II of the Constitution, maybe hiding behind some penumbras or sprouting from the evolving, breathing document.

Just how frivolous (and, for self-proclaimed judicial conservatives, hypocritical) these defenses are is demonstrated by the fact that the Bush Administration itself has aggressively argued against the exact legal theory which it is now trying to peddle in order to argue that Congress silently gave Bush an "exemption" to FISA. In the case of Breuer v. Jim’s Concrete of Brevard, 538 U.S. 691 (2003), the Administration vehemently (and successfully) argued in a Brief to the U.S. Supreme Court (.pdf), signed by Bush’s own Solicitor General, Theodore Olson, that a statute (such as FISA) cannot be "amended by implication" in the absence of clear Congressional intent to amend it. Thus, the Bush Administration itself just two years ago emphasized:

the cardinal rule that repeals by implication are not favored, and will not be found unless an intent to repeal is clear and manifest. . . . In the absence of an affirmative showing of an intention to repeal, the only permissible justification for a repeal by implication is when the earlier and later statutes are irreconcilable. In other words, where the two statutes are capable of co-existence, it is the duty of the courts, absent a clearly expressed congressional intention to the contrary, to regard each as effective.

So, before George Bush needed an excuse for intentionally violating FISA, this was the Administration’s own argument -- that Congress cannot be said to have silently repealed its own law except where it subsequently passes a new law that is in direct conflict with the first one.

The Administration’s previous view of this matter is, of course, the precise opposite of its position now. The Administration now seeks to claim that the Congress -- when it enacted its 2001 resolution authorizing the use of military force in Afghanistan and against al Qaeda -- somehow intended with that Resolution to amend FISA and thereby silently and "impliedly" gave the Administration the right to engage in exactly the secret, warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens which FISA makes it a criminal offense to engage in.

What we really have from these paragons of Judicial Restraint trying to defend George Bush is everything except plain language and original intent – the very tools of construction which these "conservatives," when not concocting legal defenses for the President, claim that they believe in. That’s because the plain language of the law is crystal clear ("A person is guilty of an offense if he intentionally— (1) engages in electronic surveillance under color of law except as authorized by statute") and leaves no doubt that George Bush broke it.

The clarity of this law is why the Administration is reduced to peddling legal theories which, no matter how they are sliced, amount to a claim that George Bush has the right to break the law. And to argue that he has that right, they are employing on George Bush's behalf the very legal theories which advocates of "judicial restraint" have spent the last two decades ridiculing and attacking.
Glenn Greenwald 1/04/2006 01:59:00 PM |

 
Leave it to MSGOP

Winners and losers in the Abramoff scandal
The GOP could suffer, opening the way for a third-party movement

It's really kind of sweet.

Mr. Fineman and his friends at the courthouse are shocked to discover that since the party they favor of the two existing parties has taken complete control over the federal government, the influence of money has sullied the spiritual purity of Washington.

Clearly, the answer is a new party who are nothing like Democrats and who are not called Republicans (Mr. Wittmann, your moment has arrived).

You know, it's just that kind of bold thinking by Mr. Fineman and his friends that made us what we are today.

A country controlled by an incredibly corrupt single party that cares more about money than PhDs, and about the people not at all.

Congratulations.
julia 1/04/2006 11:32:00 AM |

 
Lucky Duckies

by digby

Unfortunately, I have to leave town for a couple of days and won't be able to post. However, I am sure you will enjoy the blogospheric stylings of two fantastic guest bloggers: Julia of Sisyphus Shrugged and Glenn Greenwald of Unclaimed Territory.

Enjoy. I'll see you on the week-end.



.
digby 1/04/2006 11:27:00 AM |

 
Credibility

by digby

Back when The NY Times was relentlessly flogging Whitewater, I agreed with Franklin Foer that it would be a bad idea to help discredit the mainstream press because their reputations would be so sullied that eventually they'd have no clout to protect sources and tell the truth.

I thought when the Washington Post took every self-serving leak from the Starr investigation and put it on the front page like it was VE Day that it probably wouldn't be a good idea to vilify their obvious slavishness to GOP operatives because it would be bad when we need the media to have credibility on other major issues.

I was angry about the fact that more than 60 newpapers, including the NY Times editorialized ("until the Starr investigation, 'no citizen ... could have grasped the completeness of President Clinton's mendacity or the magnitude of his recklessness.'") that Clinton should resign because of a personal indiscretion. But I didn't rail against the press for jumping on this Republican manufactured bandwagon because I thought that it was important not to paint mainstream journalism with a broad brush just because they were being absurdly obtuse in this particular case.

When the media treated Al Gore like a circus clown and overlooked the fact that George W. Bush was a gibbering idiot (and admitted openly that they did it for fun) I held in my intemperate remarks because I thought it would harm the party in the long run if we attacked the press as the Republicans do. When they reported the election controversy as if it would create a constitutional crisis if the country had to wait more than a month to find out whether they had the right president I kept my own counsel. After all, who would defend democracy when something truly serious happened?

After 9/11 when they helped the president promote the idea that the country was at "war" (with what we didn't exactly know) I knew it was a terrible mistake and would lead to a distorted foreign policy and twisted domestic politics. But I didn't blame the media because it was very difficult to fight that at the time. They're human, after all.

And when they helped the government make their case for this misbegotten war in Iraq, I assumed that they knew what they were talking about. After all, I had been defending their credibility for years now, in spite of everything I've mentioned. If they would screw up something like this, then for what was I holding back my criticism? This was the most serious issue this country had faced in many a decade.

When no WMD were found and I was informed that they had assigned a neocon shill to report the story, and then defended her when she was implicated in a white house smear to cover up its lies going into Iraq, I no longer saw any need to defend the NY Times.

This is fifteen long years of watching the Times and the rest of the mainstream media buckle under the pressure of GOP accusations that they are biased, repeatedly take bogus GOP manufactured scandals and run with them like kids with a brand new kite, treat our elections like they are entertainment vehicles for bored reporters and generally kowtow to the Republican establishment as the path of least resistence. I waited for years for them to recognise what was happening and fight back. It didn't happen. And I began to see that the only way to get the press to work properly was to apply equal pressure from the opposite direction. It's a tug of war. They were not strong enough to resist being dragged off to the right all by themselves. They needed some flamethrowers from our side pulling in the opposite direction to make it possible for them to avoid being pulled all the way over.

So, it is with great respect and reverence for the press, which I consider to be indispensible to democracy, that I have become a rabid critic. It did this country no good to allow the Republicans to perpetuate their permanent "mau-mau the media" campaign for 25 years. And it does the press no good to be defended by liberals when they succumb to the mau-mauing. Indeed, history shows that their reaction is to lean even more closely to the GOP to show they are not liberal themselves.

I have criticized the press for its absurd behavior in the Plame leak --- refusing to write about it, protecting their powerful administration sources even when they've been used as a weapon for political purposes, their trivial cocktail party insularity. The politically powerful should not be allowed to use the press to do their ratfucking for them. There is, of course, a huge difference between that and protecting genuine whistle-blowers, which I defend unconditionally.

But I will no longer defend the press unconditionally. They have proved that they can't resist the powerful pull of rightwing intimidation and seduction without some counterbalance on the left and I'm more than willing to call a spade a spade to do that. It has not served my politics or my country well to quietly support the media so that they could maintain crediblity. I honestly don't see that we have anything more to lose when presidents are being impeached for trivial reasons, elections are being stolen and wars are being waged on lies. Just how bad would it have to get to justify criticizing the press for its complicity in those things?



.
digby 1/04/2006 10:49:00 AM |

 
in light of the deaths of 12 coal miners, a timely reminder that Mr. Alito is on the record as deciding that the Federal Mine Safety and Health Act should protect miners less than it does.

It's also worth remembering that since reaching office, Our Fearless Leader cut MSHA (Mine Safety and Health Administration) funds in real dollars, fired a whistleblower, put a mining company executive in charge, reduced staff by 170, tried to slash funding even more, and exempted the MSHA from the Freedom of Information Act.

He did, however, arrange a photo op with the last group of high-profile miners trapped in the ground, and said this for the cameras:

"It was their determination to stick together and to comfort each other that really defines kind of a new spirit that's prevalent in our country, that when one of us suffer, all of us suffers."

Mr. Bush, we are told, has given up spirits.

edit: are we all suffering now?

Scott and Barb tell us that the mine in question had (among other issues) a full 273 safety violations in the past two years

Leah puts all this into context
julia 1/04/2006 10:17:00 AM |

 
Good morning.


I'm Julia, and Digby's asked me to put some stuff up here for a few days.

I thought I'd introduce myself by giving you a little background on our local New York Republican mess, since it's been in the national papers quite abit lately, and there's nothing quite so... operatic... in its sheer byzantine silliness as our local New York Republican mess.

from the Times: Republican federal corruption OG Al D'Amato sticks his oar in on behalf of the Democrat

Alfonse M. D'Amato, the former senator, sharply criticized a leading Republican candidate for governor, William F. Weld, saying last night that Mr. Weld was under the "cloud" of a federal investigation for once running a "sham college."

Mr. D'Amato, a Republican, also chastised Mr. Weld for resigning as governor of Massachusetts in 1997, before his second term was over, and then seeking to lead New York "without any real experience here."

...

Mr. D'Amato also said that Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for governor, had done an "excellent" job in office.

This is remarkably interesting for what it says about the current state of New York Republican politics.

a brief digression about Mr. Pataki, Mr. D'Amato and local politics, recent and not-so-recent, here in New York

Mr. D'Amato was, for many years, the autocrat of the New York Republican party, and he pretty much invented our departing Republican governor (mostly to piss Rudy Giuliani off - New York Republicans don't much like Mr. Giuliani, but Mr. D'Amato likes him less than most. Mr. Giuliani is also a bit of a crook, but not part of this group). Unfortunately for the former Senator, Mr. Pataki isn't doing all that well, and the rest of his current political stable is - shall we say - not quite ready for prime time.

Mr. Pataki (like NYC Mayor Mr. Bloomberg) cut a sweetheart deal with a politically well-placed union to get their endorsement in his re-election campaign. This hurt him badly with the national Republicans he's desperately courting for a federal appointment (he's pretty much played out here in New York).*

In this, parenthetically, he differs from Mr. Bloomberg, a billionaire who is in it for the good the Republican party can do his media empire through judicious deregulation. There are those cynical souls who think that his single-minded focus on the good of media company stockholders might have had something to do with the universal press support he got at election time for his less-than-universally-appreciated performance in office, but I digress.

Back to the strike: Like Mr. Bloomberg, Mr. Pataki saw an opportunity to get himself back in the good graces of fiscal hawks by cracking down on the transit union. With his usual deft political touch, he saw this opportunity after Bloomberg, badly bloodied in the court of public opinion, caved, declared victory and went home.

Part of Mr. Bloomberg's cave-in was a deal to give the transit workers a refund of pension contributions they had made prior to an earlier contract which lowered the percentage of their pension contributions. This is particularly humiliating for Mr. Bloomberg, since the givebacks will more than cover any Taylor Law fines (two days' pay for every day out on strike-public employees are barred by law from striking in New York) that were levied against unionmembers during the course of the strike, but of course Mr. Bloomberg doesn't much care how much of the MTA's money he spends to make his little problems go away (you'd want to keep in mind that Mr. Bloomberg might only control four out of the nine MTA board, but Mr. Pataki needs Republican friends with money very badly right now).

This left the field wide-open for Mr. Pataki, who is currently playing to the balcony by attempting to retroactively derail the contract agreement. Says the MTA board (which kept him apprised of the negotiations) never told him about the giveback (they say they did). Now he wants to unilaterally change the MTA's agreement with the union to remove the givebacks, which would most likely send the union back out on strike, as well as (and here's the beauty part) removing the "bargaining in good faith" component of the MTA's negotiations that trigger the Taylor Law.

Honestly, it's better than All My Children. You just have to find someplace other than the Times to read about most of it. I recommend Newsday.

end of brief digression about Mr. Pataki and local politics, recent and not-so-recent, here in New York

Back to Mr. D'Amato and Mr. Weld: it seems that the former Senator is still a bit testy about the former Governor leading the Justice Department investigation of the former Senator's brother for misusing the former Senator's office for private profit which ended in the conviction of the former Senator's brother (later overturned on appeal). This is one of the factors that led to the former Senator's defeat by Mr. Schumer, thus ending a staggering series of ethics violations and endless televised bootless trips to the fishing hole on Whitewater.

Amusingly, Mr. Weld's experience in Tennessee is controversial specifically because it involved, er, for-profit education, working-class students getting screwed and backdoor union-busting.

It's a shame. He sounds like Al's kinda guy.



*This has been a real boon to New York politics watchers who needed a good laugh, as the national party gifted us with Mrs. Pirro's short-lived Republican challenge to Hillary, which was the greatest thing since State Senator Espada and we all appreciated it
julia 1/04/2006 08:43:00 AM |

 
MSM Kudos

by digby


Multiple props to Janet Hook and Mary Curtius of the LA Times for getting the lead of this excellent story 100% correct.

See, it can be done:

The corruption investigation surrounding lobbyist Jack Abramoff shows the significant political risk that Republican leaders took when they adopted what had once seemed a brilliant strategy for dominating Washington: turning the K Street lobbying corridor into a cog of the GOP political machine.

Abramoff thrived in the political climate fostered by GOP leaders, including Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas), who have methodically tried to tighten the links between the party in Congress and business lobbyists, through what has become known as the "K Street Project."

GOP leaders, seeking to harness the financial and political support of K Street, urged lobbyists to support their conservative agenda, give heavily to Republican politicians and hire Republicans for top trade association jobs. Abramoff obliged on every front, and his tentacles of influence reached deep into the upper echelons of Congress and the Bush administration.

Now, in the wake of a plea agreement in which Abramoff will cooperate in an influence-peddling investigation that might target a number of lawmakers, some Republicans are saying that the party will need to take action to avoid being tarnished.

"This is going to be a huge black eye for our party," said Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.), a senior member close to House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.). "Denny's going to have to be very tough and really speak out against people who are indicted. He's going to have to do it quickly and decisively and frequently."

Hastert moved Tuesday to inoculate himself from the scandal by announcing that he would give to charity about $60,000 he received from Abramoff and his clients. He is the latest of several lawmakers who have returned or redirected money they received from Abramoff-related sources.

That's the story folks. If Democratic staffers would keep their yaps shut about how scared they are of "innocent people getting swept up" and if the party would come out swinging, the truth might get out. This needs reinforcement.



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digby 1/04/2006 07:38:00 AM |

 
Democrats Are Wimps, Republicans Are Crooks

by digby

Those two memes are the fundamental negative images people have held of the two parties for the last quarter century. The Abramoff scandal offers the Democrats an opportunity to change their negative meme and reinforce the GOP's by swinging hard against this corrupt political machine.

Unfortubately it seems they are going to change it by turning it into "Democrats are wimps AND crooks, Republicans are just crooks."

While Mr. Abramoff is most closely linked to Republicans, even Democrats, many of whom also benefited from his largesse, acted skittish.

"We're talking about people who have longstanding careers in Congress who took contributions from somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody who knew Jack Abramoff," said a Democratic Congressional aide who insisted on anonymity so as not to drag his boss into the scandal. "Now they're panicked. The hope is that this investigation will root out the wrongdoing without innocent people getting hit with the ricochet."

Mr. Abramoff's plea bargain is scary to Washington's power brokers precisely because he was so entangled with so many of them.

His ties to Grover G. Norquist, a leading conservative strategist and president of Americans for Tax Reform, and Ralph Reed, the former director of the Christian Coalition who is now a candidate for lieutenant governor in Georgia, date from his college days.

He once worked as a lobbyist alongside David H. Safavian, who was the head of the White House procurement office until just before his arrest last fall in the Abramoff investigation. And Mr. Abramoff's former personal assistant once worked for Karl Rove, President Bush's chief political strategist.

At the White House, administration officials have been reluctant to comment on the case, referring questions to the Justice Department and declining to defend Mr. Safavian. But on Tuesday morning, the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, denounced Mr. Abramoff's actions.

We have Abramoff intimately connected with two of the most powerful movement conservatives in Washington and directly with the White house and Karl Rove. This is the kind of thing that used to set the cable gasbags afire with speculation in the Clinton White House. Victoria Toensing's head would be spinning like a top while she screeched about dirty money the rule of law. And Dan Burton and Orrin Hatch would be liberally quoted in the NY Times saying that there was a need for immediate congressional investigations to determine the length and breadth of Democratic corruption and if leads directly to the president, well, so be it.

Yet, right out of the box, the Democrat quoted in this article is an anonymous staffer discussing how afraid the Democrats are that a couple of them might be caught up in the scandal. Nancy Pelosi and others did speak out yesterday and they aren't given any prime space in this article. But the truth is that the Democrats do seem skittish and it's just plain stupid. There should be great joy and energy in Democratic circles at the idea of crippling the GOP machine --- Delay, Norquist and Rove are all in trouble and that is unalloyed good news. It won't destroy the machine entirely, but those three are extremely valuable cogs that are not easily replaced. And there is also the potential to expose these scam artists and strong arm thugs for what they are --- thus proving that we aren't actually wimps. Instead we are reinforcing that impression --- and allowing the Republicans to frame this as some sort of abstract "Washington" problem. The press, needless to say, is going where the action is. Since we are motionless, they are focusing on the GOP response.

Why we are skittish about this I do not know. There is no serious downside for us. The scandal is just the latest in a series of Republican screw ups and it's a doozy.

I just heard Newt Gingrich talking on Fox about how the Republicans need to take up the mantle of reform and vow to clean up the corruption in Washington. He said this without irony because he's quite serious. He mentioned that the Democrats were investigated ten years ago for illegal foreign campaign contributions. He didn't mention that there was never any there there. But it sounds good, doesn't it? And the Republicans may just be able to finesse this because Democrats are so skittish about a couple of their brethren being caught up in the sweep that they are pulling their punches.

Republicans beat a decorated war hero with a fey draft dodger during wartime because they skillfully exploited the public's long held anxieties about Democratic bona fides on national security. If Democrats can't can't run on the corollary "Republicans are crooks" meme in the midst of the biggest government abuse and corruption scandal since Watergate, then we really are useless. We saw this coming for months. And yet we are caught flat footed and the GOP is going to run as the party of reform. Dear gawd.


Update: Sam Rosenfeld has much more on this here. Highly recommended.
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digby 1/04/2006 07:37:00 AM |

Tuesday, January 03, 2006

 
Jack's Loyal Friend

by digby


Tom: You were around the old timers -- and meeting up on how the family should be organized. How they based them on the old Roman legions and called them regimes -- the capos and the soldiers. And it worked.

Abramoff:Yeah, it worked. Those were the great old days you know. And one was like the Roman Empire. The Family was like the Roman Empire.

Tom: It was once. Jackie -- when a plot against the Emperor failed -- the planners were always given a chance to let their families keep their fortunes.

Abramoff: Yea -- but only the rich guys Tom. The little guys -- they got knocked off and all their estates went to the Emperors. Unless they went home and uh, killed themselves -- then nothing happened. And their families -- their families were taken care of Tom.

Tom: That was a good break -- nice funeral.

Abramoff: Yeah -- they went home -- and sat in a hot bath -- opened up their veins -- and bled to death. And sometimes had a little party before they did it.

Tom: Don't worry about anything Jackie Five Angels.

Abramoff: Thanks Tom -- thanks.


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digby 1/03/2006 07:17:00 PM |

 
Socially Close

by digby

Jane makes a vital catch.

What in gawd's name is Alice Fisher doing anywhere near a political case? She should recuse herself immediately. Full stop.

The probe is being overseen by Noel Hillman, a hard-charging career prosecutor who heads the Public Integrity Section and who has a long track record of nailing politicians of all stripes. But politics almost certainly will creep into the equation. Hillman's new boss will soon be Alice Fisher, who is widely respected but also a loyal Republican socially close to DeLay's defense team.

Now, ask yourself if an investigation was being held into powerful Democrats under a Democratic administration if there would be shrieking harpies flying all over the airwaves today demanding a special prosecutor.

Yeah, I know. Whatever.


update: More from Jane on Alice.


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digby 1/03/2006 02:14:00 PM |

 
Bipartisan BS

by digby

The media is working hard to make this into a bi-partisan scandal but that is simple bullshit. Ed Henry on CNN, for instance, couldn't stop talking about Byron Dorgan being implicated in this scandal. I don't know if Dorgan's going to be swept up, but let's just say that if he is he probably deserves it because he would be the stupidest man in the world. He's the top Democrat on the Indian Affairs Committee and even Steno Sue writes:

Dorgan has asked some of the toughest questions in the committee hearings probing the $82 million Abramoff and Michael Scanlon charged their tribal clients.

I suppose some people would think this is a normal thing for a man on the take to do, but I would suggest that it's unlikely. Here's a good rundown on the Dorgan connection (and the media's predictably bad reporting on it) from Media Matters.

Fasten your seatbelts. The press is surely under tremendous pressure from the Republicans to report this as a bi-partisan scandal and they are already buckling under. But that doesn't change the fact that this is a GOP operation from the get --- and they know it.


I wrote a piece a few months back about Abramoff and his two college Republican lieutenants Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist called Nixon's Babies in which I discussed just how important Abramoff is to the "movement." And I highly recommend reading Nina Easton's Gang of Five: Leaders at the Center of the Conservative Ascendacy Anybody who looks at Jack Abramoff and sees anything but a hard core GOP influence peddler who was paid very well to finance the GOP machine is either a shill or a fool.

I just saw CNN's Henry again say that this was a bi-partisan scandal and that Democrats were going to find it very hard to make the "culture of corruption" charge. This was not "he said/she said" --- he was editorializing in his piece and his opinion is either uninformed, myopic or biased. This piece was followed by another from William Schneider in which he helpfully points out that while the public indicates that it thinks Democrats are less corrupt than Republicans that's only because the public understands that it's because the Republicans are in power and have more opportunity.

Bullshit. The reason people think this is because every few years we find out that Republicans leaders have no respect for the law. It's like clockwork. If they aren't selling themselves outright to big business on the floor of the congress they are claiming the constitution allows them to break any law they choose. Just in the past couple of weeks we've had news reports about legal trouble for corrupt Republicans George W. Bush, Ken Lay, Tom DeLay, Bill Frist, Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, Duke Cunningham, Ralph Reed and Jack Abramoff. Lot of dots there. Is it too much trouble for the media to connect them?

This characterization of the scandal as being "bi-partisan" is typical bad mainstream journalism, particularly the emphasis they are placing on the very small handful of Democrats who've even been mentioned (much less included in any legal procedings.) Not only are they creating some equity and illegality where none exists, by doing it they are missing the real story, as usual.

This isn't a story about power corrupting or about a few bad apples. This is about a corrupt political machine --- a system of money laundering and public corruption on behalf of one political party. It's about a party that has used every tool at its disposal to legally and illegally enrich itself and enhance its power. It's right there. It's unravelling before our eyes.

And all Dana Bash and Ed Hanry can say is that Jack Abramoff lent his skybox to Democrats and Republicans alike. Which he did. He lent it 1% of the time to Democrats and 99% of the time to Republicans. That makes all of them equally corrupt.


Update: Crooks and Liars has some great Tweety spin footage. Seems it's not partisan because Abramoff is Satan.



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digby 1/03/2006 12:52:00 PM |

 
Press The Meacham

by digby


Media Matters caught Jon Meacham calling Howard Dean insane on Russert yesterday. I think that's especially rich considering Meacham is the guy who penned this crazy shit:

The uniqueness—one could say oddity, or implausibility—of the story of Jesus' resurrection argues that the tradition is more likely historical than theological.

He's also the guy who told Imus (scroll down) that Joe Wilson went on his trip to Niger after we had invaded Iraq to "discover if those 16 words were true." He really knows his stuff.



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digby 1/03/2006 09:40:00 AM |

Monday, January 02, 2006

 
Pratfalls

by digby

Watching Hardball, I just saw Bush's full face in his appearance yesterday. He looks like shit. It's not just the scratch on his forehead, which I realize could be the result of some extreme brush clearing over the week-end. There's something wrong with his lip too and his eyes are all puffy.

I will say it again. It is not normal for a healthy 59 year old man to injure his face as often as this guy does. It just isn't.

Here's today (the picture doesn't do justice to how bad he rally looks):




Here are a couple of pictures from previous pratfalls in the first term:






The first one was the pretzel incident. The second was a fall from his bike in May of 2004. There was another incident just last July when he fell off after crashing into a security officer in Scotland.

I continue to think this is very odd, even for a daredevil brush clearing cycler like Junior.



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digby 1/02/2006 03:05:00 PM |

 
Contextualizing

by digby

Jane discusses this article in today's NY Times about how blogging is affecting journalism and she makes this important point:

They do not spend the hours and days sifting through raw data now available to average people on the internet. I cannot emphasize this strongly enough. That is not what they do. If you want to know some obscure detail about something Judith Miller did or said in June of 2003 you call emptywheel. If you need to know about journalists named in the subpoenas sent to the White House in January 2003 you email Jeralyn. If you expect that kind of depth of knowledge about details from the people whose job it is to dig up new dirt in this case, they don't have it. They don't have the time.

In this light bloggers serve the function of analysts. Or re-analyzers, more aptly, who attempt to contextualize as they sort through available data and look for patterns, inconsistencies and greater truths. For my money if I was trying to marry a blog with a newsroom that's where I'd start -- I'm constantly amazed that with all the access to information now available the big news bureaus don't have a deeper pool of researchers to be the adjunct memories of people who spend their time in the development of external news sources.

There was a guy who did this kind of journalism long before technology made it possible for many of us to carry on the tradition. At their best, bloggers are the heirs to IF Stone, whose methods wwere described by his friend Victor Navasky this way:

His method: To scour and devour public documents, bury himself in The Congressional Record, study obscure Congressional committee hearings, debates and reports, all the time prospecting for news nuggets (which would appear as boxed paragraphs in his paper), contradictions in the official line, examples of bureaucratic and political mendacity, documentation of incursions on civil rights and liberties. He lived in the public domain. It was his habitat of necessity, because use of government sources to document his findings was also a stratagem. Who would have believed this cantankerous-if-whimsical Marxist without all the documentation?

Sound familiar? And while we scruffy bloggers are (mostly) not marxists, we are greeted with great skepticism because we are unregulated, uncredentialed, and in some cases psuedonymous, so we also must go to great lengths to document our findings. Luckily, the technology that gives us such amazing instant access to reams of information also gives us the ability to link directly to our source material --- as Arianna once described it "showing our work." And over time we gain credibility with our readers the same way that newspapers do.

What Jane says about contextualizing is absolutely correct. If you followed the Whitewater scandal (or attempted to) you came to realize that the journalists who were writing about it were so caught up in day to day reporting that somewhere along the line they lost sight of both the big picture and the details. It became a daily exercize in futility trying to sort out what exactly was going on. Until Gene Lyons' articles in Harpers (that led to his book "Fools for Scandal") and then a couple of jury trials, I honestly couldn't figure out what was going on. And I read three or four papers a day at the time. It was a story in desperate need of context, research and command of detail, mostly because it was a story being dribbled out a daily basis by political operatives and Arkansas opportunists to journalists who, in the midst of daily reporting, couldn't see the larger story. (I have no idea where their editors were.)

I didn't know how that worked in those days, thinking that journalists would see through spin and report it if it was clearly partisan. But I was wrong. They did fall for that story and turned it into an unintelligible, meaningless scandal that harrassed the president from almost his first day in office.

Today, certain bloggers would keep meticulous track of details, speculation and obvious spin and would report and discuss them in real time. Others would bring the whole story into historical perspective. Still others would try to tie all the disparate threads together to show larger patterns and trends. And many would speculate about the meaning of the scandal and the political ramifications. The scandal might happen anyway, but at least there would also be informed, engaged readers and easy access to those who have taken the time to analyze and contextualize the story as it unfolds. The alternative is to continue to allow the powerful triumverate of official sources, professional PR flacks and political operatives to lead the press (and, therefore, the country) around by the nose as they have so often in the last 15 years.

I'm not suggesting that blogging is a replacement for mainstream journalism. The daily papers, news broadcasts and news weeklies are indispensible. But more and more, people are recognizing mainstream journalism's vulnerability to conventional wisdom, establishment pressure and partisan spin. And the longstanding reliance on he said/she said "objectivity" is simply no longer adequate in the modern world of sophisticated public relations. Blogs fill in some of the gaps.

I'm a little surprised that so many reporters are fighting them so hard instead of doing the smart thing, which is co-opt them. Good bloggers can be a reporter's best friends if he learns how to use them.



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digby 1/02/2006 10:11:00 AM |

 
Up Down By 15 Points!

by digby


Steve Benan points out that Elaine Chao needs to find a standard of success other than the Dow Jones to tout this fabulous Republican economy:

[W]hile it was the 0.6% decline for the year that generated headlines, most seem to have overlooked the fact that on the day Bush was sworn into office in January 2001, the Dow Jones stood at 10,732.46. As of now, it's at 10,717.50.

In other words, after five years of Bush's presidency, the stock market has a cumulative gain of negative 15 points.

Under Reagan, the Dow went up 148%. Under Clinton, it grew 187%. After five years, Bush isn't quite breaking even.

This reminds me of an article I read in the LA Times over the week-end. In the relativistic fashion we've come to love in the Bush era, that inconvenient fact has made many people simply decide that the Dow is no longer relevant:

As for the Dow, many believe the 109-year-old index of 30 large, blue-chip companies hasn't been an accurate barometer of the economy or the broader stock market for the past two years.

Yes, and we're actually winning in Iraq and global warming is a hoax --- which you'd never know just by looking at the facts. Clearly, the facts are biased.



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digby 1/02/2006 08:34:00 AM |

Sunday, January 01, 2006

 
Hold Harmless

by digby

Hey all you macho Republicans. Do you know why you elected Junior Bush to be the president?

I was elected to protect the American people from harm.

Thank goodness for Daddy.

And here I thought the Republicans were against that sort of fuzzy wuzzy kumbaaya pussified crapola. I guess not. How about a federal helmet law for bicyclists, then? (Gawd knows he needs one) Maybe he could outlaw pretzels and alcohol too. Or driving over 35 miles an hour. Or trans-fats. If protecting us from harm is what we elect presidents to do then he's been seriously falling down on the job. There's a ton of harm out there he hasn't done even one thing about.



Oh, and isn't it inappropriate for the administration to be talking about this while there's an ongoing investigation? Seems I heard that somewhere.



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digby 1/01/2006 09:16:00 PM |

 
Divine Right Of Republicans

by digby

This Newsweak story is, well, weak:

The message to White House lawyers from their commander in chief, recalls one who was deeply involved at the time, was clear enough: find a way to exercise the full panoply of powers granted the president by Congress and the Constitution.

First of all, I'm sick of this bullshit about the president being the commander in chief all the time. This isn't a military dictatorship. Citizens, and even lawyers in the Justice department, don't have a commander in chief. We have a president. I know that's not as glamorous or as, like, totally awesome, but that is what it is. A civilian, elected official who functions as the commander in chief of the armed forces.

But that's nit-picking. This is some real bullshit:

When the story of the NSA's program broke in The New York Times on Dec. 16, there was an immediate uproar in the press and on Capitol Hill. The reaction was predictably partisan. Most Republicans and conservatives defended Bush for safeguarding the country (though warrantless spying gave libertarians some pause). Most Democrats and liberals cited the eavesdropping program as more damning evidence that Bush and Cheney, already caught countenancing torture and jailing detainees without any legal rights, were running roughshod over civil liberties.

This is wrong. The Cato institute, which I think everyone in the DC orbit will agree is a libertarian think tank said this:

Cato senior fellow in Constitutional studies Robert A. Levy says, "President Bush's executive order sanctions warrant-less wiretaps by the National Security Agency of communications from the United States to foreign countries by U.S. persons. Reportedly, the executive order is based on classified legal opinions stating that the president's authority derives from his Commander-in-Chief power and the post-911 congressional authorization for the use of military force against Al Qaeda. That pernicious rationale, carried to its logical extreme, renders the PATRIOT Act unnecessary and trumps any dispute over its reauthorization. Indeed, such a policy makes a mockery of the principle of separation of powers.

Crook and Liars has footage of libertarian (and Republican hitman) William Safire joining with the critics this morning on Press the Meat.

That's more than a pause. It's a full stop, hold your horses, what the fuck do you think you're doing? This is a partisan issue to the extent that the Republicans are invertebrate, hypocritical chichenshits who would be having a full on case of the vapors if anybody but their Dear GOP Leader tried a stunt like this. They certainly called for the smelling salts often enough over a couple of furtive blowjobs, shrieking to high heavens about tyranny and the rule 'o law.

Harken back to the immortal words of Henry Hyde:

That none of us is above the law is a bedrock principle of democracy. To erode that bedrock is to risk even further injustice. To erode that bedrock is to subscribe, to a "divine right of kings" theory of governance, in which those who govern are absolved from adhering to the basic moral standards to which the governed are accountable.

We must never tolerate one law for the Ruler, and another for the Ruled. If we do, we break faith with our ancestors from Bunker Hill, Lexington and Concord to Flanders Field, Normandy, Iwo Jima, Panmunjon, Saigon and Desert Storm.

Let us be clear: The vote that you are asked to cast is, in the final analysis, a vote about the rule of law.

The rule of law is one of the great achievements of our civilization. For the alternative to the rule of law is the rule of raw power. We here today are the heirs of three thousand years of history in which humanity slowly, painfully and at great cost, evolved a form of politics in which law, not brute force, is the arbiter of our public destinies.

We are the heirs of the Ten Commandments and the Mosaic law: a moral code for a free people who, having been liberated from bondage, saw in law a means to avoid falling back into the habit of slaves.

We are the heirs of Roman law: the first legal system by which peoples of different cultures, languages, races, and religions came to live together in a form of political community.

We are the heirs of the Magna Carta, by which the freeman of England began to break the arbitrary and unchecked power of royal absolutism.

We are the heirs of a long tradition of parliamentary development, in which the rule of law gradually came to replace royal prerogative as the means for governing a society of free men and women.

We are the heirs of 1776, and of an epic moment in human affairs when the Founders of this Republic pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honor - sacred honor - to the defense of the rule of law.

We are the heirs of a tragic civil war, which vindicated the rule of law over the appetites of some for owning others.

We are the heirs of the 20th century's great struggles against totalitarianism, in which the rule of law was defended at immense cost against the worst tyrannies in human history. The "rule of law" is no pious aspiration from a civics textbook. The rule of law is what stands between all of us and the arbitrary exercise of power by the state. The rule of law is the safeguard of our liberties. The rule of law is what allows us to live our freedom in ways that honor the freedom of others while strengthening the common good. The rule of law is like a three legged stool: one leg is an honest Judge, the second leg is an ethical bar and the third is an enforceable oath. All three are indispensable in a truly democratic society.

Very moving, no? All those fine words about the rule of law safeguarding our liberties, the arbitrary exercise of power and Bunker Hill, Lexington and Normandy went right out the window on 9/11. That was when Henry and the rest of his stalwart defenders of the rule of law promptly wet their pants and then let their president use the constitution to clean up the puddle.


Update: For a full compendium of conservative critics of the president on the NSA illegal spying scandal (including one leg of the Powerline stool!) read this excellent post by Glenn Greenwald.


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digby 1/01/2006 06:48:00 PM |

 
Shaft of Sunlight

by digby

I wrote the other day that I thought it was time for some angry Justice Department lawyers to step up and reveal what in the hell went on with the White House cherry picking and stovepiping the legal advice that allowed them to create a new commander in chief infallibility doctrine.

It looks like we know the name of one of them and he's a biggie, James Comey. Comey is, by all accounts, a very straight arrow. He's exactly the kind of guy whose credibility is required to make this case if there is one. If this article is true, he refused to sign on on their little plan when he was filling in for Ashcroft when he was in the hospital. Jane has all the details. She's been following Comey for a long time and will have lots of tid-bits about this development for us I'm sure.

Also, Walter Pincus reports this morning that the NSA shared its illegally obtained information with other departments, including the pentagon, which we know has been tracking anti-war protestors.

The picture gets clearer every day. The evidence increasingly points to the possibility that NSA and others illegally monitored Americans who disagreee with administration policy and shared that information with all the federal police agencies in the government. This does not surprise me. They've called us unpatriotic to our faces. They've written best-selling books calling us treasonous. It's not exactly a stretch to suspect that these were not just rhetorical flourishes.



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digby 1/01/2006 10:01:00 AM |

Saturday, December 31, 2005

 
Happy New Year Everyone!







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digby 12/31/2005 07:58:00 PM |

 
Clearing The Ranchette

by digby

This is the wierdest damned article I've read in ages. I knew that Junior did the brush clearing thing, but I assumed that he did it for photo-op purposes. It turns out that he's actually obsessed with it.

He's obsessed with brush clearing.

On most of the 365 days he has enjoyed at his secluded ranch here, President Bush's idea of paradise is to hop in his white Ford pickup truck in jeans and work boots, drive to a stand of cedars, and whack the trees to the ground.

If the soil is moist enough, he will light a match and burn the wood. If it is parched, as it is across Texas now, the wood will sit in piles scattered over the 1,600-acre spread until it is safe for a ranch hand to torch -- or until the president can come home and do the honors himself.

President Bush, shown clearing cedar at his Crawford, Tex., ranch in 2002, has not lost his enthusiasm for the task during recent trips to what aides call the Western White House.

Sometimes this activity is the only official news to come out of what aides call the Western White House. For five straight days since Monday, when Bush retreated to the ranch for his Christmas sojourn, a spokesman has announced that the president, in between intelligence briefings, calls to advisers and bicycling, has spent much of his day clearing brush.

This might strike many Washingtonians as a curious pastime. It does burn a lot of calories. But brush clearing is dusty, it is exhausting (the president goes at it in 100 degree-plus heat), and it is earsplitting, requiring earplugs to dull the chain saw's buzz.

For Bush, who is known to spend early-morning hours hacking at unwanted mesquite, cocklebur weeds, hanging limbs and underbrush only to go back for more after lunch, it borders on obsession.

The president of the United States likes to spend his suburban ranchette vacation killing time cutting stuff down with a chainsaw and then torching it. Holy shit. Does it get any more symbolic than that?

(It reminds me of the tales his pals told about his childhood, stuffing frogs with firecrackers and blowing them up.)

Certainly the 1,583 acres of rugged canyons and rocky hillsides, creeks and pasture land on Prairie Chapel Ranch contain a lot of brush. Bush, a creature of habit, is not in danger of finishing the job. The Bush ranch, however, is not a working ranch. The president has kept only a handful of cattle on the property since Kenneth Engelbrecht, who sold him the former hog farm six years ago, stopped leasing back some pasture land that supported a herd of cows.

[...]

Real ranchers, who need to clear a whole lot of brush for pasture land, either hire someone to spray herbicides from the air or run an excavator through it. They tend to tend cattle, several said.

Bush, by contrast, practices a selective, do-it-yourself sculpting to enhance his enjoyment of his property, local experts say. He will clear underbrush to preserve beautiful live oaks and pecan trees, or to prepare the 50 acres where Laura Bush is cultivating native grasses, or to help carve nature trails through the ranch's many canyons.

"It's a selective control of the brush," said Sam Middleton, owner of a West Texas ranch brokerage, who added that this enhances a ranch's value.

Then again, there will be times when the president drives around his property and "will see a stand of cedar trees and say 'Let's clear those,' " said Joseph Hagin, Bush's deputy chief of staff, who has been cutting brush with his boss all week. They do not talk a lot of policy over the sound of their chain saws, he said.

You can't compare this to his bicycling or running obsessions, because those have a certain meditative yet thrilling physical challenge. This is something else entirely. This is the the only thing he can think of to do when he isn't running or biking. Mindless, loud, repetitive manual labor. It's like obsessively jackhammering sidewalks for fun.

A reader wrote me an e-mail asking me what conclusions I had come to about Bush after all this time. Is he evil? Is he stupid? Is he a religious fanatic, a spoiled frat boy, what?

I haven't actually changed my mind from the first impression I had of him when he said "Christ. He changed my life" in answer to the debate question about favorite political philosophers. He's simple but well-trained. And he hasn't changed. The person we have been watching for the last five years is the same inarticulate, testy, arrogant and shallow, rich mediocrity he was when he took office.

He's also as laughably robotic and unresponsive as ever. (Only Scott McClellan is less spontaneous.) But the Republicans discovered that if the president doesn't submit himself to spontaneous situations and is disciplined in his message, people will get used to it after a while and stop expecting him to actually answer questions. This was new. Reagan wasn't a genius, but he understood the public after a lifetime of training in what they wanted from a celebrity. He also had a good sense of humor and great timing. He was very capable of dealing with the press. Clinton was a master of detail who could riff on anything. His intellect and his obvious enjoyment in governing prepared him to answer any question that was thrown at him. Bush senior was bumbling but professional. He responded.

Junior simply doesn't engage unless he is forced to, seeing encounters with the press as nothing more than an oppportunity to get out the message of the day and run out the clock. He is a living stone wall who speaks in strange parables and cliches and sometimes just pure gibberish. He falters, he stammers, he looks uncomforatble and weak. Yet he was until fairly recently perceived by most to be a strong and resolute leader. (The post 9/11 delusion was some powerful mojo.)

I know that it's not considered wise to "misunderestimate" him and I've heard many people say that he's got political acumen that we elitist nerds just don't get. I don't believe it. I know what I see. The man has been in over his head since the day he entered the presidential race and he's still in over his head. 9/11 got him reelected in 2004, but he and his administration have been hanging on by their fingernails since the day they took office. They wear suits and ties and say sir and ma'm, but it's all to cover for the fact that they had no idea how to govern and by now it's clear they never will.

I see a man who is barely holding back his panic; a man who clings to his pathetic "war president" image like a talisman. He looks confused and hurt by the criticism he's receiving from people who he thought bought into the program and reportedly knows on some level that he's been duped by his advisors. He has no choice but to keep barreling along pretending that he knows what he's doing. He barks at underlings and pretends to be in charge even as he gets more and more confused. He's distanced from his father, the one person everyone thought could help guide this callow airhead if the shit came down. He trusts no one now.

So he clears brush like a madman everytime he gets the chance, hiding behind his Oakley's, blessedly unable to hear anything over the sound of chainsaws ---- maybe even the voices inside his head that remind him that he's still got three more years of this horrible responsibility he knows he cannot handle.



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digby 12/31/2005 03:25:00 PM |

 
Constitutional Thuggery

by digby

Mark Kleiman makes a point about the NSA sping scandal that I think is essential:

Of course the Rasmussen Poll purporting to show 64% support for the Bush secret eavesdropping policy is an artifact of artful question design.

But, unlike some of my liberal friends, I don't think the answer would be much different if the phrase "without a warrant" had been included. The key missing word was "illegally."

The word wiretapping should always be preceded by the word illegal. That's the qualifier. Nobody thinks that wiretapping is always wrong and nobody knows from warrants. I have little doubt that most people assumed the government was wiretapping terrorists suspects and their suspected friends. What we didn't assume was that the president would consciously break the law to do it --- and that he believes himself immune from all laws during "wartime," (which he alone defines.)

Kleiman goes on to say that the issue should be framed as "rule of law" rather than civil liberties and I slightly disagree with that. I think you must do both. The frame of civil liberties is important for our party's long term health because it is a fundamental value --- and we need to be willing express those even when the country as a whole might not agree. Right now a good many people think that the only things we believe in are gay rights and abortion, and they have no concept of the fundamental values that undergird our positions on those issues. Liberals should not be afraid to wave around the Bill of Rights any more than the right waves around the only amendment it cares about (the second.)

I do not think that conflicts with the argument that America is a land of laws not men. Indeed, I would suggest that the two messages go quite well together. If you want to go all "originalist" on us, the belief that the president cannot violate the laws and the Bill of Rights whenever he feels like it is as fundamental as it gets.

As I listen to the Bush apologists on Fox and elsewhere, it's become clear to me that they are hinging their argument solely on the idea that the president was "protecting" us infantile Americans and was only monitoring the "bad guys." This shows the weakness of their argument. They are not standing up and saying "yes, even if they did illegally listen in your phone calls, comrade, it's the least you can do to keep the homeland safe" or "if you have nothing to hide you won't mind if the government illegally spies on you." The ramifications of data mining aside, they are saying that only guilty people were monitored. Sure.

As Kleiman points out, there is already one excellent example of using the power of the federal government for political purposes in a post 9/11 environment:

The ability to spy on domestic conversations is obviously abusable. And we already know that Tom DeLay tricked the Department of Homeland Security into tracking the whereabouts of Texas Democratic legislators who had fled to Oklahoma to try to block a quorum for DeLay's redistricting scheme. And we know that DeLay got away with it. So if the question on the table is "Will the Republicans abuse domestic-security powers for political purposes?" we know that the answer is "Yes."

Governor Bill Richardson, who isn't exactly shrill (he's running for president as a centrist) is very suspicious that the NSA illegally tapped his domestic calls to Colin Powell regarding the North Korean crisis --- and then illegally gave the transcripts to John Bolton:

"The governor is upset that his conversations with Secretary Powell would be intercepted since most of them were domestic calls," said Richardson spokesman Billy Sparks. "The governor felt his calls about North Korea were confidential."

This is where the Plame scandals and the NSA illegal spying scandals intersect. It's the ethics, stupid. These people are partisan thugs. They used journalists to leak classified information for political purposes. They are now going to try to destroy both whistleblowers and journalists for political purposes. And if that doesn't tell you that they are willing to illegally monitor citizens for political purposes then you are absurdly naive. In fact, this government is the poster child for the division of power and the rule of law. They were written into the constitution with these guys in mind.



Update: I don't know how reliable Wayne Madsen usually is,(Michael Froomkin says he's not a nut) but in the course of writing that post, I came upon this:

December 30, 2005 -- More on Firstfruits. The organization partly involved in directing the National Security Agency program to collect intelligence on journalists -- Firstfruits -- is the Foreign Denial and Deception Committee (FDDC), a component of the National Intelligence Council. The last reported chairman of the inter-intelligence agency group was Dr. Larry Gershwin, the CIA's adviser on science and technology matters, a former national intelligence officer for strategic programs, and one of the primary promoters of the Iraqi disinformation con man and alcoholic who was code named "Curveball."

Gershwin was also in charge of the biological weapons portfolio at the National Intelligence Council where he worked closely with John Bolton and the CIA's Alan Foley -- director of the CIA's Office of Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control (WINPAC) -- and Frederick Fleitz -- who Foley sent from WINPAC to work in Bolton's State Department office -- in helping to cook Iraqi WMD "intelligence" on behalf of Vice President Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby.

In addition to surveilling journalists who were writing about operations at NSA, Firstfruits particularly targeted State Department and CIA insiders who were leaking information about the "cooking" of pre-war WMD intelligence to particular journalists, including those at the New York Times, Washington Post, and CBS 60 Minutes.

The vice chairman of the FDDC, James B. Bruce, wrote an article in Studies in Intelligence in 2003, "This committee represents an inter­agency effort to understand how foreign adversaries learn about, then try to defeat, our secret intelligence collection activities." In a speech to the Institute of World Politics, Bruce, a CIA veteran was also quoted as saying, "We've got to do whatever it takes -- if it takes sending SWAT teams into journalists' homes -- to stop these leaks." He also urged, "stiff new penalties to crack down on leaks, including prosecutions of journalists that publish classified information." The FDDC appears to be a follow-on to the old Director of Central Intelligence's Unauthorized Disclosure Analysis Center (UDAC).

NSA eavesdropping on journalists and their sources is sending chills throughout Washington, DC and beyond.

Meanwhile, WMR's disclosures about Firstfruits have set off a crisis in the intelligence community and in various media outlets. Journalists who have contacted WMR since the revelation of the Firstfruits story are fearful that their conversations and e-mail with various intelligence sources have been totally compromised and that they have been placed under surveillance that includes the use of physical tails. Intelligence sources who are current and former intelligence agency employees also report that they suspect their communications with journalists and other parties have been surveilled by technical means.

Scroll down to December 28th to get the first story on "Firstfruits." Bob Baer mentioned this tracking of journlaists on Hardball a week or so ago too, causing Andrea Mitchell to blink hard a few times.

For a primer on the meaning of the biblical word "Firstfruits" try this. Feel free to speculate in the comments as to why you think they chose it to describe a surveillance program.

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digby 12/31/2005 09:49:00 AM |

Friday, December 30, 2005

 
Cui malo?

by digby


Krauthamer just said that he needs to see a case of abuse before he is convinced that the leakers in the illegal NSA spying case are whistle blowers. That's interesting. It shouldn't be required to show harm in a criminal case like this, but perhaps on a public relations level this is really what needs to happen.

I believe there is only a one percent chance that this extra-constitutional power grab did not result in abuse. The FISA court and the justice department both pulled in the reins in 2004 for a reason. The president kept this program secret long past the time he could have developed some reasonable legislation to accomplish what he needed to accomplish. There is something very wrong with this program or they wouldn't have handled it the way they did.

Considering the history, "trust us we're only monitoring the bad guys" doesn't pass the smell test. We need real hearings and if we get them Krauthamer may very well get the examples of abuse that he needs.



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digby 12/30/2005 03:49:00 PM |

 
Our Allies

by digby

Kos has the story on the Uzbek torture memos that are being leaked to blogs in the UK (and preserved by blogs in the US.) I honestly don't know what to say about this except reiterate futile statements about oil, the Great Game and moral clarity.

If we are in the business of invading countries to depose tyrants, there's no good reason that we didn't go to this one first. That it is our ally in the "War on Terror" is a cosmic joke of epic proportions.

Here's just a small excerpt of one of the memos:

The Economist of 7 September states: "Uzbekistan, in particular, has jailed many thousands of moderate Islamists, an excellent way of converting their families and friends to extremism." The Economist also spoke of "the growing despotism of Mr Karimov" and judged that "the past year has seen a further deterioration of an already grim human rights record". I agree.

Between 7,000 and 10,000 political and religious prisoners are currently detained, many after trials before kangaroo courts with no representation. Terrible torture is commonplace: the EU is currently considering a demarche over the terrible case of two Muslims tortured to death in jail apparently with boiling water. Two leading dissidents, Elena Urlaeva and Larissa Vdovna, were two weeks ago committed to a lunatic asylum, where they are being drugged, for demonstrating on human rights. Opposition political parties remain banned. There is no doubt that September 11 gave the pretext to crack down still harder on dissent under the guise of counter-terrorism.

Yet on 8 September the US State Department certified that Uzbekistan was improving in both human rights and democracy, thus fulfilling a constitutional requirement and allowing the continuing disbursement of $140 million of US aid to Uzbekistan this year. Human Rights Watch immediately published a commendably sober and balanced rebuttal of the State Department claim.

Oh, and we commonly "render" suspects to Uzbekistan for interrogation. I'm sure they promise not to boil them though.


Update:

correction: "render-ed." Via Upyernoz I see that we have, apparently, seen the light and cooled our relationship with Uzbekistan since the government there opened fire on a bunch of civilians last May. Still, people wonder why (considering that we didn't object to the boiling and all) a little random shooting into crowds would cause our relationship to suddenly be strained. I suggest that someone look into Vladimir Putin's soul for the answer.


Update II:

Americana has more on this.



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digby 12/30/2005 11:28:00 AM |

 
Missed Opportunities

by digby


I've been thinking about what might be the biggest cock-up of this metaphorical war on terrorism and there are so many that it's hard to limit it to just one. Invading Iraq has to be the grandaddy, but Gitmo, abu Ghraib and letting bin Laden go at Tora Bora rank right up there. (Speaking of bin Laden at Tora Bora, I don't know why this story by Seymour Hersh about Konduz has been flushed down the memory hole.)

Making enemies of the entire world wasn't such a great idea. Secret prisons in Europe not so much either.

After giving it some thought, I think that it's possible that our biggest mistake in dealing with radical islam is our failure to respond with everything we had to the Pakistani earthquake. And we should have done it in tandem with our response to Katrina and the Tsunami, with a full-on international disaster response led by the United States. If we can afford to spend a billion a week on this misbegotten war, we could have come up with a plan to help these poor people all over the world, even in our own country, who were the victims of natural disasters. Bush should have been all over the TV. He should have gone to Pakistan personally and made a pledge to every single victim there that we would do everything we could to help.

I know that sending Karen Hughes around to share her experiences as a suburban mom with poor women in Indonesia is extremely useful in changing our image overseas, but this was a tremendous opportunity lost.

Instead, we pretty much did nothing to help the people who live in the very center of militant radical islam. Husain Haqqani, Kenneth Ballen of the the Carnegie Endowment wrote last November:

The most critical location for immediate international engagement is not Iraq or Afghanistan but Pakistan.

The devastation in Pakistan from the earthquake is as devastating as Southeast Asia's tsunami last year. But the international response has fallen short. The death toll has risen to 87,000 and the severe Himalayan winter is only weeks away. Equally horrendous is the number of people displaced - three times as many as those affected by the Indian Ocean tsunami. And yet international assistance provided following the tsunami dwarfs the aid provided to Pakistan. Eighty per cent of the aid pledged for the tsunami (more than $4-billion) was given with two weeks. Pakistan so far has only received $17-million, just 12 per cent of aid pledged. According to the United Nations, pledges to date total only 25 per cent of what is needed.

For the tsunami, 4,000 helicopters were donated to ferry life-saving aid to stricken areas, and in Pakistan just 70 - even though there are almost three times as many people who need the food and shelter to survive than after the tsunami.

International humanitarian assistance doesn't just save lives, it helps fight the war on terror. According to post-tsunami polls conducted by the Maryland-based, non-profit group Terror Free Tomorrow, support for Osama bin Laden dropped by half as a result of international assistance to tsunami victims in the world's largest Muslim nation.

In nuclear-armed Pakistan right now - another of the world's largest Muslim nations, where 65 per cent of the population think favourably of Mr. bin Laden - radical Islamist parties are mobilizing and are in the vanguard of those helping in the most-stricken areas. The void left by the Pakistan government, the United States and the international community has been filled by Jamaat-ud-Dawa and the Al-Rasheed Trust, both groups linked to al-Qaeda, as well as Jammat-i-Islami, the leading radical Islamic party in Pakistan.

Even Pakistani Interior Minister Aftab Khan Sherpao had to acknowledge that the radicals are now "the lifeline of our rescue and relief work."

In fact, radical Islamic groups have vigorously opposed U.S. and international aid because they know this will weaken their propaganda efforts. In a speech last week, Jamaat's leader, Qazi Hussain Ahmed, said, "The Americans are [providing relief in Pakistan] to damage the solidarity of the country, and will work for materializing their ulterior motives."

The United States and the world community must now do nothing less than spearhead a response similar to that following the tsunami, not only for self-evident and overwhelming humanitarian needs but also for long-term national security.

I know that it would have been difficult to muster the relief effort after Katrina, but that's what leadership is about. If the administration really wants to fight the scourge of Islamic terrorism, they need to come up with something other than torture, imprisonment and incoherent military occupations to do it. Coming to the rescue in this terrible disaster --- or at least visibly mustering an international response --- would have gone a long way toward helping our allies regain some faith in our good intentions and persuade the people most vulnerable to al Qaeda's arguments that we are not the great Satan. We didn't do it.

But maybe Karen Hughes can go over later this year and share her secret for eliminating ring around the collar, so that's good.



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digby 12/30/2005 10:29:00 AM |

 
No Comment

by digby

So the Justice Department is going to investigate the leak of the illegal NSA spy scandal. Fine. I assume this also means that nobody from the White House will be able to comment in any way since there is an ongoing investigation.

And that means no matter what comes up, Scotty is required to stonewall. Even when he doesn't want to. Thems the rules.



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digby 12/30/2005 10:10:00 AM |

Thursday, December 29, 2005

 
The Sequel


From the great uggabugga:





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digby 12/29/2005 03:23:00 PM |

 
Patrick Henry Democrats

by digby

As much as I appreciate all these Republicans offering us advice about how we are endangering our political prospects by not supporting illegal NSA spying, I have to wonder if they really have our best interests at heart. I just get a teensy bit suspicious that it might not be sincere.

The truth is that I have no idea where the NSA spying scandal is going and neither do they. The Republicans would like it to go nowhere for obvious reasons and so they are trying to psych out timid Dems. What I do know is that the most important problem Democrats have is not national security; it's that nobody can figure out what we stand for. And when we waffle and whimper about things like this we validate that impression.

In Rick Perlstein's book, "The Stock Ticker and The Super Jumbo" he notes that many Democrats are still reeling from the repudiation of the party by the Reagan Democrats. And while they continue to worry about being too close to African Americans or being too rigid on abortion or too soft on national security, they don't realize that the most vivid impression people have of the Democrats is this:

"I think they lost their focus"
"I think they are a little disorganized right now"
"They need leadership"
"On the sidelines"
"fumbling"
"confused"
"losing"
"scared"


The reason people think this is because we are constantly calculating whether our principles are politically sellable (and we do it in front of god and everybody.) We've been having this little public encounter session for well over 20 years now and it's added up to a conclusion that we don't actually believe in anything at all.

Perhaps the NSA scandal is a political loser for Dems. We can't know that now. But it is a winner for us in the long term. We believe in civil liberties and civil rights. With economic fairness, they form the heart of our political philosophy. If this particular issue doesn't play well, that's too bad. People who believe in things sometimes have to be unpopular. Over time, they gain the respect of the people which is something we dearly need.

A party that is described as fumbling, confused and scared is unlikely to win elections even if they endorse the wholesale round-up of hippies and the nuking of Mecca. People will listen to us if we can first convince them that we know who we are and what we believe in.

I'm of the mind to adopt "give me liberty or give me death" as my personal motto. If I have to kowtow to a bunch of childish Republican panic artists who have deluded themselves into believing that fighting radical Islam requires turning America into a police state, then it's just not worth it.



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digby 12/29/2005 02:08:00 PM |

 
Imperial Nutball

Julia connects the dots on Michael Scheuer and concludes that he is a bit unhinged. I'm inclined to agree.



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digby 12/29/2005 01:52:00 PM |

 
No Likee

by digby

I know this will come as a great disappointment to Republicans who have taken to saying that the NSA spy scandal boosted Bush's approval ratings ten points, but the new CNN/USA Today poll has his job approval rating at 41%, which is down a point from the last one. In fact, his rating has been pretty steady at around 40% since last August.

Just as point of contrast:

December 20, 1998
Web posted at: 10:48 p.m. EST (0348 GMT)

(AllPolitics, December 20) -- In the wake of the House of Representatives' approval of two articles of impeachment, Bill Clinton's approval rating has jumped 10 points to 73 percent, the latest CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll shows.

Bush also hit a new low in "favorable opinion" down to 46%. Some might think he would be described as unpopular since they called him popular until he hit 48%. But no. He's now "poised for a comeback."



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digby 12/29/2005 01:21:00 PM |

 
Uh Oh

by digby

This gives me the creeps.

Via ReddHedd at firedoglake, the LA Times reports:

A little-noticed holiday week executive order from President Bush moved the Pentagon's intelligence chief to the No. 3 spot in the succession hierarchy behind Rumsfeld. The second spot would be the deputy secretary of defense, but that position currently is vacant. The Army secretary, which long held the No. 3 spot, was dropped to sixth....

But in its current incarnation, the doomsday plan moves to near the top three undersecretaries who are Rumsfeld loyalists and who previously worked for Vice President Dick Cheney when he was defense secretary.

ReddHedd points out that this is taking cornyism to new heights, which it is. But, I got a sick little shiver when I read it. Do they know something? Failed military coup? Bin laden determined to strike in the United States, perhaps?

Under the new plan, Rumsfeld ally Stephen Cambone, the undersecretary for intelligence, moved up to the third spot. Former Ambassador Eric Edelman, the policy undersecretary, and Kenneth Krieg, the undersecretary for acquisition, technology and logistics, hold the fourth and fifth positions.

If something happens, pray for Rumsfeld's health because Cambone is an even wilder nutcase than Rummy is. Jesus. Three more years of this?


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digby 12/29/2005 12:53:00 PM |

 
Mistakes

by digby

The National Security Agency's internet site has been placing files on visitors' computers that can track their web-surfing activity despite strict federal rules banning most of them.

These files, known as "cookies," disappeared after a privacy activist complained and The Associated Press made inquiries this week, and agency officials acknowledged Wednesday they had made a mistake. Nonetheless, the issue raises questions about privacy at a spy agency already on the defensive amid reports of a secretive eavesdropping program in the United States.

They say they are strictly listening to conversations between terrorists and their American friends who are plotting to blow up weddings. They don't need anyone looking over the shoulders, not even a rubber stamp secret Star Chamber. They are professionals who aren't interested in tracking people for any reason but terrorism. No oversight necessary, nosirree.


Yet we are supposed to believe they don't know they have a fucking cookie allowing them to track every visitor to their web site and we are also supposed to believe that they aren't making any other "mistakes" in their data mining of American citizens' communications. The alternative, of course, would be to believe that they knew very well they had a cookie on their site and were, in fact, tracking the surfing habits of those who vistited it, in which case we know for a fact that they aren't just monitoring communications with al Qaeda. Either way, I think this little episode proves that the NSA could use a little oversight, don't you?

Maybe not. In a debate at the WaPo yesterday on the subject, a fine Republican wrote:

An al Qaeda operative can walk into any Radio Shack, buy X number of cell phones, activate them with an American company (thereby acquiring a US phone number), then take them to another country to use.

The Fourth Amendment offers protection to Americans against UNREASONABLE searches. Is it unreasonable, after 9/11, to monitor the phone calls of foreign al Qaeda operatives to those using cell phones with American numbers when we know in hindsight that Atta -- while in this country preparing for the attack -- communicated with al Qaeda's leadership abroad? Is it unreasonable for the government to do whatever it can to intercept such conversations, knowing that Able Danger had identified Atta as an al Qaeda operative before the attack? What about the civil rights and liberties of those slaughtered on 9/11 by al Qaeda?

IF these phone calls really were domestic spying, I, too, would object. But, they're not. They are international calls with one end outside the country. The remedy is simple and involves personal responsibility: If an American citizen does not want his calls monitored, then he shouldn't be chatting with foreign al Qaeda operatives on the phone. And to me, it is that simple.

Simple.

But just in case the NSA is making more "mistakes," (or fibbing just a little bit) the best thing to do to be perfectly sure the government isn't spying on you is to not make any phone calls. Or surf the internet. Or leave the house. But the very best thing to do is vote Republican and support the war and you won't have any trouble at all. (Shhhh. Don't tell the terrorists.)


Update

To be clear:

All I'm saying is that if the nation's premiere surveillance agnecy can make "mistakes" about something as simple as a cookie, they can certainly make mistakes about much more complicated and serious matters.


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digby 12/29/2005 12:16:00 PM |

 
Kept Down By The Pansies

by digby

Yglesias notes that Marshall Wittman is whining that liberal hawks get no respect. He points out that despite representing almost no actual Democrats, Democratic hawks have dominated the Democratic leadership in congress virtually forever. And that leadership has failed to win elections that would justify to liberals who were against the Iraq war that they should continue to support them.

They don't deliver votes, they join in Republican calumny against the Democratic Party and they are wrong. Why, exactly should they have even more influence than they already do?

And what in the hell is up with these powerful conservatives of both parties who see themselves as constantly being beseiged by people who they simultaneously perceive as weak and useless? Does this make any sense at all?



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digby 12/29/2005 11:59:00 AM |

 
Hollywood Confidential

by digby

Matt Stoller has a very interesting post up over at MYDD. It's written by his brother, Nick Stoller, a screenwriter whose new movie "Fun With Dick and Jane" has an extremely funny trailer, so I'm looking forward to seeing it.

I've always thought of the original "Fun With Dick and Jane" starring George Segal and Jane Fonda as the quintessential "malaise" movie. It was the chronicle of a middle class family who fell through the cracks in a harsh economy and ended up robbing banks. It's a comedy, of course, but for those of us who lived through the late 70's it had a bit of a bite. When I saw that it was being re-made I had one of those "of course" moments. I had just been reading about rising gas prices and GM lay-offs. Deja vu all over again.

Stoller's post asks why Democrats don't rely more on Hollywood for expertise instead of just fund-raising. I've been asking that question for years. Politics today requires narrative and stagecraft --- and Hollywood knows from narrative and stagecraft. It's about heroism, spectacle and soap opera. It's about myth. I realize that this offends our wonky souls on some level but it's a fact that the Republicans understand and exploit to their great advantage and we don't.

In the final days of the presidential campaign as John Kerry was being introduced by Bruce Springsteen on the stump with a moody, soulful solo rendition of "No Surrender" (which I loved) George W. Bush was landing in stadiums at sunset on the Marine one helicopter to fireworks and the theme to "Top Gun" screaming from the speakers. Which one do you suppose felt more like a rally?

The Bush administration has been working with a very defective product as we all know; a barely literate ignoramus with dismal communications skills. Yet they were able to bring him close enough to steal it in 2000 and eke out a narrow victory in 2004. They did it almost entirely with image, iconography and an archetypal warrior/leader narrative. And they used professionals to pull it off:

Officials of past Democratic and Republican administrations marvel at how the White House does not seem to miss an opportunity to showcase Mr. Bush in dramatic and perfectly lighted settings. It is all by design: the White House has stocked its communications operation with people from network television who have expertise in lighting, camera angles and the importance of backdrops.

[...]

''They understand the visual as well as anybody ever has,'' said Michael K. Deaver, Ronald Reagan's chief image maker. ''They watched what we did, they watched the mistakes of Bush I, they watched how Clinton kind of stumbled into it, and they've taken it to an art form.''

The White House efforts have been ambitious -- and costly. For the prime-time television address that Mr. Bush delivered to the nation on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, the White House rented three barges of giant Musco lights, the kind used to illuminate sports stadiums and rock concerts, sent them across New York Harbor, tethered them in the water around the base of the Statue of Liberty and then blasted them upward to illuminate all 305 feet of America's symbol of freedom. It was the ultimate patriotic backdrop for Mr. Bush, who spoke from Ellis Island.

For a speech that Mr. Bush delivered last summer at Mount Rushmore, the White House positioned the best platform for television crews off to one side, not head on as other White Houses have done, so that the cameras caught Mr. Bush in profile, his face perfectly aligned with the four presidents carved in stone.

And on Monday, for remarks the president made promoting his tax cut plan near Albuquerque, the White House unfurled a backdrop that proclaimed its message of the day, ''Helping Small Business,'' over and over. The type was too small to be read by most in the audience, but just the right size for television viewers at home.

''I don't know who does it,'' Mr. Deaver said, ''but somebody's got a good eye over there.''

That somebody, White House officials and television executives say, is in fact three or four people. First among equals is Scott Sforza, a former ABC producer who was hired by the Bush campaign in Austin, Tex., and who now works for Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director. Mr. Sforza created the White House ''message of the day'' backdrops and helped design the $250,000 set at the United States Central Command forward headquarters in Doha, Qatar, during the Iraq war.

Mr. Sforza works closely with Bob DeServi, a former NBC cameraman whom the Bush White House hired after seeing his work in the 2000 campaign. Mr. DeServi, whose title is associate director of communications for production, is considered a master at lighting. ''You want it, I'll heat it up and make a picture,'' he said early this week. Mr. DeServi helped produce one of Mr. Bush's largest events, a speech to a crowd in Revolution Square in Bucharest last November.

To stage the event, Mr. DeServi went so far as to rent Musco lights in Britain, which were then shipped across the English Channel and driven across Europe to Romania, where they lighted Mr. Bush and the giant stage across from the country's former Communist headquarters.

A third crucial player is Greg Jenkins, a former Fox News television producer in Washington who is now the director of presidential advance. Mr. Jenkins manages the small army of staff members and volunteers who move days ahead of Mr. Bush and his entourage to set up the staging of all White House events.

''We pay particular attention to not only what the president says but what the American people see,'' Mr. Bartlett said. ''Americans are leading busy lives, and sometimes they don't have the opportunity to read a story or listen to an entire broadcast. But if they can have an instant understanding of what the president is talking about by seeing 60 seconds of television, you accomplish your goals as communicators. So we take it seriously.''

The president's image makers, Mr. Bartlett said, work within a budget for White House travel and events allotted by Congress, which for fiscal 2003 was $3.7 million. He said he did not know the specific cost of staging Mr. Bush's Sept. 11 anniversary speech, or what the White House was charged for the lights. A spokeswoman at the headquarters of Musco Lighting in Oskaloosa, Iowa, said the company did not disclose the prices it charged clients.

[...]

''They seem to approach an event site like it's a TV set,'' said Chris Carlson, an ABC cameraman who covers the White House. ''They dress it up really nicely. It looks like a million bucks.''

Even for standard-issue White House events, Mr. Bush's image makers watch every angle. Last week, when the president had a joint news conference with Prime Minister José Mariá Aznar of Spain, it was staged in the Grand Foyer of the White House, under grand marble columns, with the Blue Room and a huge cream-colored bouquet of flowers illuminated in the background. (Mr. Sforza and Mr. DeServi could be seen there conferring before the cameras began rolling.) The scene was lush and rich, filled with the beauty of the White House in real time.

''They understand they have to build a set, whether it's an aircraft carrier or the Rose Garden or the South Lawn,'' Mr. Deaver said. ''They understand that putting depth into the picture makes the candidate or president look better.''

Or as Mr. Deaver said he learned long ago with Mr. Reagan: ''They understand that what's around the head is just as important as the head.''

Stoller asks:

Why didn't Michael Bay direct an awesome action adventure ad where John Kerry singlehandedly blows up the terrorist insurgency with a solemn nod of his granite-chiseled chin? Why weren't the writers of SNL and the Daily Show brought in to create hilarious, ruthless anti-Bush spots that would have been forwarded all around the internet? Why wasn't James Brooks hired to create a touching, pull-the-heartstrings Kerry-Edwards-cares-about-the-voter commercial? This schlock works -- remember that 9/11 Bush ad where he's holding the crying girl? With the Hollywood talent the Democratic party has at its disposal, we could have blown that spot out of the water, made it look like a mediocre episode of Touched by an Angel next to our sinking of the Titanic. I don't care if you think "I am king of the world" is a cheesy line -- it made people cry. Nothing Kerry said made people cry. Except perhaps accidentally, out of boredom or pain.

[...]

In the end, there is no intersection between Hollywood and the Democratic Party (or none that I have noticed besides that of fundraising). This is a missed opportunity of gargantuan proportions. There are hundreds of writers and actors and directors who are angry and who want to do something besides give money. We are expert message machines offering our (generally overpriced) services for free and the Democratic Party does not use us. We create villains and good guys, we write America's jokes, we create the narrative of America, the lines that are repeated by boys and girls, men and women, over lunch and the water cooler and we have been left completely un-consulted.

If I were to guess, I would suspect that it's because political consultants believe that the liberal Hollywood elites don't understand average Americans.

Think about that for a minute. The purveyors of television, films and commercials don't understand average Americans. After all, only the brie 'n cheese eating set watch any of that stuff, right? Everyone else in America does nothing but homeschool and pray in their free time.

If I'm right and political consultants tell their employers that they shouldn't consult with professional show business, they should be fired. In today's world if you ignore the show business aspect of politics you lose. The Republicans have been on to this for decades and it (at least partially) explains why they've become more successful despite the fact that a minority of people support their policies.

I'll give you one word: Schwarzenneger. The man won the governorship of the most populated state by simply repeating the tag lines from his movies. Nothing else. He had no platform, no policies and no ideas. And latte liberals and anti-immigrants alike voted for him in droves. (Now, remember, I'm talking about getting elected here, not about governance --- a whole different issue.)

The fact is that as much as endorsing an ideology, people cast the role of "Leader" and choose "Best Story" when they vote and it behooves us to recognize this. Our culture is awash in showbiz values. I'm not crazy about this development but it's real and we ignore it at our peril.

Stoller also says:

Fun with Dick and Jane" (which, again, you should all see) has a relatively overt liberal message. However, that message has received none, or very little, mention in the press. Creatively, I discovered something interesting. At the beginning of the process, I was incredibly excited to fill the film with political message (like in Hal Ashby's Shampoo). However, every Gore-Lieberman poster (the movie takes places in 2000) and Bush reference takes one out of the movie, distracts from the laughs. Movies are supposed to be entertaining. Anything that distracts from entertainment feels preachy and extraneous.

And that's just fine, too. Regardless of whether the Democrats wise up and use its resources more wisely, Liberal Hollywood still provides an essential service by keeping our values, if not our politics, mainstream. There have always been Hollywood films with an overt political message, from "The Grapes of Wrath" to "Syriana." But it's the comedies like "Fun with Dick and Jane" that show the plight of the downsized or even an ostensibly "conservative" show like "Law and Order" which educates people about the legal system in a compelling and complex way, that really carry the liberal mail. "Will and Grace" goes into homes all over the country, not just San Francisco and it's probably been more influential in mainstreaming gay life than any activism. "The Simpsons" and now "The Family Guy" are two of the most liberal subversive television shows in American history --- and they are both on Fox.

And here's the great thing about it. Nobody is selling this stuff out of the goodness of their hearts or for propaganda purposes (as the right does with its communistic subsidized media.) Hollywood produces this stuff because there is a massive audience for it. They must make money or die. And through this virtuous feedback loop our values of tolerance and freedom, social and economic justice are kept alive in a period of reactionary politics.

Why do you think the Republicans hate us Hollywood liberals so much anyway?



Update: I should also add that the GOP sadists who endorse torture should thank liberal Hollywood for mainstreaming it in endless shows that have cops routinely beating the shit out of suspects to get information. Nobody's perfect.
digby 12/29/2005 09:01:00 AM |

Wednesday, December 28, 2005

 
Just Another Republican Hustler

by digby

Via Susie Madrak

IT WAS astounding enough for Washington’s political elite: last month they discovered that the man at the heart of a scandal over the planting of US propaganda in Iraqi newspapers was a dapper but unknown 30-year-old Oxford graduate who had somehow managed to land a $100 million Pentagon contract.

What is even more remarkable however, after an investigation by The Times, is that just ten years ago Christian Bailey, whose US company is under investigation for planting fake news stories in Iraqi newspapers, was a nerdy, socially awkward English school-leaver called Jozefowicz.

[...]

The journey from the Royal Grammar School, Guildford, which Mr Bailey left in 1994, to the heart of K Street in Washington, the centre of money and influence in the US capital, has been remarkably rapid. Today he has a reputation in Washington for being a socialite with links to influential Republicans. He is a helicopter and aircraft pilot and his home is in a fashionable area.

Through a Lincoln Group spokesman, Mr Bailey answered questions from The Times to help to explain how, at just 30, he landed the Pentagon as an important client. He was born Christian Martin Jozefowicz on November 28, 1975, in Kingston upon Thames, to Jerzy and Anne Jozefowicz.

[...]

In his third year at Oxford he hired an assistant to help him to run his first proper company, Linck Ltd, which sold self-help tapes. In 1998, he changed his name to Bailey. “Following his father’s death, Bailey assumed the name for family reasons, something which children commonly do,” a Lincoln Group spokesman said. In the late 1990s he moved to San Francisco to try his hand as a dotcom entrepreneur, and then to New York, where he became treasurer of the Oxonion Society, a club for intellectual Anglophiles. He became co-chairman of a networking group for young Republicans. With his Republican contacts growing, Mr Bailey moved to Washington, where he spotted a golden business opportunity: the looming war in Iraq. He formed a partnership with Paige Craig, a former US Marine who served in Iraq.

In early 2003, just before the invasion, Mr Bailey formed a Lincoln subsidiary, the Lincoln Alliance Corp, offering “tailored intelligence services [for] government clients faced with intelligence challenges”. He also formed another subsidiary, Iraqex, which won a $6 million Pentagon contract to launch “an aggressive advertising and PR campaign that will accurately inform the Iraqi people of the c oalition’s goals and gain their support”.

The big breakthrough came in June this year when the Pentagon awarded the Lincoln Group a contract worth up to $100 million over five years to support the US military’s “joint psychological operations”, known as “psyops”.

I think this guy has a future in the ministry.



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digby 12/28/2005 01:33:00 PM |

 
Stovepiping The Legal Findings

by digby

This review of John Yoo's book in the New York Review of Books illuminated something that I hadn't fully understood before:

Few lawyers have had more influence on President Bush's legal policies in the "war on terror" than John Yoo. This is a remarkable feat, because Yoo was not a cabinet official, not a White House lawyer, and not even a senior officer within the Justice Department. He was merely a mid-level attorney in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel with little supervisory authority and no power to enforce laws. Yet by all accounts, Yoo had a hand in virtually every major legal decision involving the US response to the attacks of September 11, and at every point, so far as we know, his advice was virtually always the same— the president can do whatever the president wants.

I hadn't realized that Yoo was not a senior officer in the justice department. I guess I just assumed that he was quite high level. This makes me wonder if we are looking at another case of stovepiping and cherry-picking.

We know now that the pre-war WMD findings were subject to extreme pressure to conform to the administration's desire to substantiate their claims of an Iraqi threat. It looks like they may have done something similar with the legal findings supporting the president's desire to seize unprecedented power. They relied exclusively on the one guy who could be counted on to tell the president he could do anything he wanted.

The internal battles between and within the CIA, pentagon, state department and the white house have come to light because of the glaring reality that there were no WMD found. A mistake like that forces information out into the public domain as people step up to defend themselves. Up to now, despite a lot of controversy, that has not happened with the Justice Department. Perhaps it never will. It's always possible that the administration never asked anyone but John Yoo and Alberto Gonzales for advice, both of whom they knew would radically expand presidential power. But if there was any dissension within the Justice Department, it may be time for certain fed-up lawyers to step up and set the record straight if they value their reputations.

This NSA spying scandal is the tipping point, in my opinion. It's not the worst of the legal atrocities (I would argue that the sickening finding on torture remains the gold standard) but the culmination of all these revelations show that this president understood 9/11 to be a threat so dire that his vow to preserve and protect the constitution had been superceded by a new vow to protect the American people by any means necessary.

I know that the fevered warbloggers agree that the 9/11 attacks were the opening salvo in a war in which civilization itself is under attack by an unimaginable, all powerful evil. Others, not so much. To many of us who spent our childhoods diving under our desks in nuclear drills, the idea that the oceans had always protected us and this was the most frightening threat the world has ever known is ridiculous.

Frightened people overreacted to 9/11 and sought out people who would justify their actions. (All you have to do is look at the My Pet Goat footage of a paralyzed leader in a time of crisis to know it's true.) John Yoo, with his radical, untested theories was there to provide them. The question now is whether there are any lawyers in the Justice department at the time who presented opposing views. If there were, perhaps these hearings won't be the bust we are all expecting them to be.


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digby 12/28/2005 01:17:00 PM |

 
Don't Worry Be Happy


by digby

I don't know how many of you are watching CNN today, but something terrible has happened. It has been taken over by the writers of Republican Hallmark cards.

The man who performed in the Dunkin Donuts commercials died over the week-end, leaving a hole in our hearts. Puppies are tearfully reunited with their masters. Saxby Chambliss and Carol Lin are weeping together over baby Noor. Military moms keep a stiff upper lip. All morning, over and over again.

And right now Carol Lin is implying that it's disrespectful to veterans for a man to put up a sign that says "Remember The Fallen Veterans" (with the numbers) next to a recruiting center. She says that Iraq veterans are angry about it.

Who says that the Clinton News Network doesn't report the good news?



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digby 12/28/2005 12:26:00 PM |

Tuesday, December 27, 2005

 
Standards

by digby

Matthew Yglesias points out that William Kristol is acting dumb, which he is. This ridiculous excuse that Bush had to act quickly in the days after 9/11 to "perteckt thea Murican peepul" makes no sense at all in light of the fact that the administration continues to do it more than four years later.

I would also point out that all this nonsense about how the administration couldn't ask the pansy ass congress to amend the law because they wouldn't appreciate the administration's need for unfettered power, neglects the fact that since January of 2003, the congress has been a rubber stamp herd of invertabrate GOP sheep who would do anything their Dear Leader required when it comes to the GWOT. If they couldn't get that congress to pass this vital change in the FISA law then they need to take it up with Bill Frist and Tom DeLay. (And if the administration didn't think they could get the invertebrate herd of GOP sheep to do something you really have to ask yourself what in Gawd's name they wanted them to do.)

But there is, of course, much more to this than just congressional bedwetters not having the guts to defend the nation from islamofascists.

There's also this, from the original NY Times article:

In mid-2004, concerns about the program expressed by national security officials, government lawyers and a judge prompted the Bush administration to suspend elements of the program and revamp it.

For the first time, the Justice Department audited the N.S.A. program, several officials said. And to provide more guidance, the Justice Department and the agency expanded and refined a checklist to follow in deciding whether probable cause existed to start monitoring someone's communications, several officials said.

A complaint from Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, the federal judge who oversees the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court, helped spur the suspension, officials said. The judge questioned whether information obtained under the N.S.A. program was being improperly used as the basis for F.I.S.A. wiretap warrant requests from the Justice Department, according to senior government officials. While not knowing all the details of the exchange, several government lawyers said there appeared to be concerns that the Justice Department, by trying to shield the existence of the N.S.A. program, was in danger of misleading the court about the origins of the information cited to justify the warrants.

"...concerns about the program expressed by national security officials, government lawyers and a judge."

Clearly, this program has had problems even by the standards of an administration that thinks the president has the inherant constitutional right to ignore specific laws passed by congress if he deems it necessary in order to "perteckt thea Murikan peepul." That bar is mightly low and yet there still were problems that were subject to suspension and revamping.

I realize that we are just supposed to trust this president in spite of the fact that he has repeatedly and blatantly lied to our faces, but I would think that this would pique the interest of even the most vociferous bush defenders. If the Ashcroft Justice department had issues with this program that ought to be enough even for Bill Kristol to question its legality.

After all, as I have written before, Bill has a history of holding presidents to very high standards:

The lines have been drawn. What Republicans now need is the nerve to fight. They must stand for, to quote Helprin again, "the rejection of intimidation, the rejection of lies, the rejection of manipulation, the rejection of disingenuous pretense, and a revulsion for the sordid crimes and infractions the president has brought to his office." (William Kristol, Weekly Standard, May 25, 1998, page 18.)

Of course the president in question was secretly surveilling Monica Lewinsky's underwear, which was a terrible threat to the nation. Kristol had no choice but to throw the book at him.



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digby 12/27/2005 07:21:00 PM |

 
Jihadi Media

by digby

Over pictures of people who are handling rocket launchers and wearing ski masks with strange suits, the braindead Brit who is filling in for Cavuto today asked John Podhoretz if the New York Times should be charged with treason.

Charging a newspaper with treason seems like a stretch, but I could be wrong. I think the proper legal charge would be sedition. But implying that the New York Times staffers are jihadis seems a bit inflammatory to me.

The Pod was unpleasant.



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digby 12/27/2005 04:12:00 PM |

 
Just Don't Count 'Em

Steve Benen of the Carpetbagger Report is filling in for Kevin over at Political Animal and he has an interesting post up about the new movement to deny automatic citizenship to babies born in the United States. It's one of those Lou Dobbs obsessions that's gaining ground among the wingnuts.

His post reminded me of another Dobbsian boogeyman that I've been meaning to discuss which will have a very pernicious effect on politics if it is enacted: the anti-immigrant fanatics want to change the census to only include citizens. And they quite openly say it is because they want to change the make-up of the congress.

This is another one of those Karl Rove specials. It's ostensibly about the scourge of illegal immigration, and plays perfectly into people's cultural anxieties, but it's really about structural political change.

Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson's exceedingly interesting book Off Center talks (among other things) about how the Republicans have gone about creating a "backlash proof" system in which Republican seats are safe no matter how unpopular their beliefs or voting records are in the country at large. It's a huge part of their long term strategy to change the political system in their favor. The book doesn't mention this specifically, but it's exactly the kind of thing that Karl and Tom would try to push to assure a long term majority.

This article in the Arizona Republic, shows that the estimate is that the seats lost would mostly be in Democratic states:

The U.S. Constitution should be changed so that only legal citizens can be counted when determining a state's number of congressional districts, a Republican lawmaker argued Tuesday.

"This is about fundamental fairness and the American ideal . . . of one man or one woman, one vote," said Rep. Candice Miller, R-Mich, testifying to a U.S. House subcommittee on federalism and the census.

The 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution requires that, "Representatives of the (U.S.) House shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state . . . "

But Miller, backed by 29 House co-sponsors, is pushing a vote on an amendment that would change the word "persons" to "citizens," excluding non-citizens as a factor in determining how many of the 435 U.S. House seats each state gets.

According to the 2000 census, there were more than 18 million non-citizens in the country, representing about 6.6 percentof the nation's total population. They included as many as 8 million undocumented immigrants, along with guest workers, foreign students or others on temporary visas.

[...]

Recent studies, including one in May by the Congressional Research Office, show that had only citizens been counted in the most recent apportionment based on the 2000 Census, California - with more than 5.4 million non-citizens -- would have six fewer U.S. House seats.

Texas, New York and Florida would each have one seat less.

Lower-immigration states like Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, Wisconsin and Indiana would each have one more seat.

There could be a shift of 10 seats affecting 15 states if non-citizens are excluded in 2010, according to early projections by Polidata, a Lake Ridge, Va., firm that analyzes demographic information.

Arizona would not lose any of its seats. The state's 462,239 non-citizen residents represent 9 percent of its total population - the seventh highest percentage in the nation. However, even if these individuals were not counted, Arizona's population would still be high enough to still qualify for eight congressional seats in 2010.

But removing non-citizens from those calculations would have impact within the state. Arizona's congressional district lines would have to be drawn much differently than they are now to equalize "citizen" representation.

For instance, based on their existing congressional districts, Rep. Rick Renzi, a Republican, is currently representing 620,000 "citizen" residents in his largely rural district, while Rep Ed Pastor, a Democrat, represents 480,000 citizen residents in his central-southwest Valley district. If non-citizens are no longer be counted , both Renzi' and Pastor's districts - as with all of Arizona's congressional districts -- would have to be redrawn so that they have more-comparable citizen numbers.


... an estimated 10 million legal permanent residents in the nation who are eligible to become citizens are Latino, and that 77 percent of these Latinos live in California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey or Arizona.

While not disputing there are large undocumented populations in these states, Gonzalez said, "the reality is that these states also have hundreds of thousands of immigrants who are law-abiding citizens, have played by the rules and are preparing to become full participants in this nation."

Kenneth Prewitt, director of the Census bureau from 1998-2000, warned Miller's amendment would lead to less cooperation by immigrants who are already too often wary of census takers, and a less complete and less accurate census.

I think it's pretty clear which party would benefit from this, don't you? It's true that a couple of upper midwest swing states might gain a seat or two, but for the most part it's the big blue population centers that will suffer. And you can bet that the necessary gerrymandering that comes with such a scheme will be well planned to take care of Republicans in states in which immigrant communities suddenly "disappear" from the body politic.

These are the little landmines that Karl and company have set throughout our political structure that are going to have reverberations for decades. Right now the immigration debate is dividing the GOP more than the Republicans and Democrats. But who knows where things will be in a couple of years? Karl and company play the long game and bet that it's always better to institutionalize their strict numerical advantage.

Short term they may be trying to play to the hispanic vote, but ultimately it's all about solidifying their base to such an extent that they never have to do more than win a few showy races to maintain a majority. Big business doesn't care one bit about whether legal and illegal immigrants are represented in the census. If it takes the heat off of the cheap labor debate, they would be perfectly happy to support it. And this feeds the angry white vote nicely.

This is how you keep a political machine well oiled and working even if you wind up spending quality time in a federal prison. The mob works this way too.



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digby 12/27/2005 12:39:00 PM |

 
Clutched Pearl Cluster

The Kippies have been announced and each one is more perfect than the rest. I do have one quibble, however. My personal favorite, Chris Matthews, didn't win Best Wank for his repeated exhortation that a man, a real man, a manly man filled with masculinity, be sent in to save the day in New Orleans. Is there a bigger public wank in history than this?

Will the most powerful vice president in American history become the man who ramrods the rise of the new South and with it a legacy that could promote a draft for a Cheney presidency? The question is a big one. Is Cheney charging down South to serve as President Bush's executioner or full-fledged viceroy?

[...]

"a tough guy...smart politician.. trying to figure out how to get his president out of a jam... smart guy, tough warrior..aware that now that he's put his [huge] boots on the ground he has a stake in this. How big a foot is he going to land on this issue."

Fo shizzle my nizzle

I'm sorry that Chris didn't win a Kippie this year despite his many heroic paeans to Republican manly manness. But then Cary Grant never won an Oscar either. Sometimes life isn't fair. (As with so many of the greats, maybe the problem is that he just makes it look so easy.)

Chris can take heart that he earned the Media Matters "misinformer of the year" so it's not like his stand-out performance went unrewarded. And there's always next year --- all the commentators are telling us on a loop that Bush is poised for a comeback, and there is no greater chronicler of the rise of the codpiece than our man Chris.


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digby 12/27/2005 11:36:00 AM |

 
Truthiness

by digby

Jane appropriately excoriates the WaPo ombudsman, Deborah Howell, for her he said/she said prescription for even more confusing and useless reporting. I think this column may just be the perfect example of everything that's wrong with modern journalism.

Howell comments on a report about military recruiting that stated that more recruits are coming from low income and rural families:

Numbers aren't just facts. They can be interpreted in many ways, even if they come from the same or similar sources.

Ann Scott Tyson, a respected military reporter just back from Iraq, wrote in a front-page story Nov. 4 that "newly released Pentagon demographic data show that the military is leaning heavily for recruits on economically depressed rural areas where youths' need for jobs may outweigh the risks of going to war."

[...]

The story, which was largely based on Pentagon data, included some analysis done by the National Priorities Project (NPP), a liberal-leaning think tank that questions the war in Iraq. The NPP also used Pentagon, census and Zip code data. A different analysis, released by the conservative Heritage Foundation a few days later, was reported by other media outlets.

In looking at the story, I talked to Curt Gilroy, who, as director of accession policy for the secretary of defense, has oversight of all active-duty recruiting; Tim Kane, a Heritage researcher; Betty Maxfield, demographer of the Army; Bruce Orvis, director of the Manpower and Training Program at the Rand Corp.'s Arroyo Center, and Robert Brandewei, director of the Defense Manpower Data Center in Monterey, Calif.

All said the story and NPP analysis lacked context because they did not report trends over the past several years and did not look at "nationally representative data" or the entire recruit population. A statement from Gilroy and Maxfield said that "incomes and socioeconomic status of recruits' families closely mirror the U.S. population. These findings are contrary to those" in Tyson's article.

[...]

My bottom line on polls and surveys, no matter what kind: Look for the widest context. Ask as many experts as possible what the numbers mean. Numbers can be right but not tell the full story, and that's the case with the article on recruiting.

Shorter Deborah Howell:

There are those who think with their heads and those who know with their hearts... But the gut's where the truth comes from...I know some of you may not trust your gut yet. But with my help you will. The truthiness is that anyone can report the news to you, but I promise to feel the news at you.

Unfortunately for Howell, her "clarification" only leads to a muddy, unfathomable mess. After reading her further reporting, you have absolutely no idea what the truth is. She should have written her cute little opener to say "numbers are partisan and have an agenda. If you are a supporter of the administration you can believe the pentagon and Heritage analysts. If you are a liberal traitor, you can believe this crappy NPP think tank. It's all about choice."

Howell is promoting that absolute worst kind of he said/she said journalism in this piece. She does not recommend any kind of context in the reporting that might illuminate the Pentagon or Heritage agendas, such as the trouble the military has had with recruiting or the different sales pitches that the military uses in different areas. She does not seek out an academic statistician who might be able to look at all the statistics and sort them out in some way so that readers could come to a reasonable conclusion.

And for someone who so believes in telling all sides of a story, I think it might have been helpful if she told her readers what prompted her to write on this subject in the first place, don't you? Was it, perhaps, a complaint from the pentagon which pointed out the conservative Heritage Foundation's contradictory figures? (We know it wasn't average readers, whom she and others at the Post consider nuisances.)

I do not know if the WaPo's new ombudsman is political but she is remarkably willing to assume liberal bias in the Post's reporting and recommend a "counterbalance" of right wing bullshit to even it out. In fact, this seems to be the Post's answer to everything, lately.

As we have all written about ad nauseum in the blogs these last few years, this is what we hate about mainstream journalism these days. This idea that "numbers aren't just facts." Yes, they fucking well are. Numbers are numbers. They don't have feelings, they aren't obscure. They are what they are. They can be used in different ways, yes, but the job of journalists isn't just to point out all the different interpretations and let the reader choose on the basis of which political party they belong to, it's to reveal how they being used in different ways and why.

I already know that the Heritage Foundation and the pentagon have an agenda. I take Howell at her word that the NPP is a liberal think tank that is against the war. I don't give a shit about any of that. What I would like to know is whether or not the military is recruiting more from lower income and rural areas and if so, why?

The editor of the paper defended the original piece by saying this:

Post National Editor Michael Abramowitz said, "Ann set out to tell the story of what kind of young people are joining today's military. Obviously the armed services draw from a range of demographic, income and ethnic groups. The Pentagon's own numbers indicate that that the military is drawing disproportionally from rural and southern communities, and from families with slightly lower incomes than the population in general.

"The numbers also show a close correlation between the unemployment rate and recruiting. These are the phenomena that Ann accurately described in her story. While we did note some trends, such as the growth in wealthier recruits, we probably could have done a better job highlighting some of the nuances in recruiting patterns and providing more context. But the overall thrust of the story still seems accurate and sound to us."

That's not good enough for Howell, whose further consultations with pentagon, Heritage and Rand analysts report a bunch of arcane gobblodygook that I defy Howell or anyone else to interpret.

But then, I guess that's the point. In order to be fair one must go out of one's way not to tell the truth. The facts, after all, are biased.



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digby 12/27/2005 10:02:00 AM |

Monday, December 26, 2005

 
Southern Fried

Atrios links to Novakula's column today in which he discusses Trent Lott's agnizing over whether to seek another term. I think we've all wondered if Katrina would have an impact on the GOP in Mississippi and Alabama and this may be the test. (New Orleans' African American disapora is very likely to result in a stronger Louisiana GOP) I suspect he thinks it's time to cash out. They'll never be a better opportunity.

Atrios also highlights Novak's last line which I also think is the most interesting aspect of the piece:

When George W. stood aside while Trent Lott was tossed out, I wrote on Dec. 23, 2002, that the secret liberal theme behind his defenestration was that "the GOP's Southern base, the bedrock of its national election victories, is an illegitimate legacy from racist Dixiecrats.

Now, three years later, that bedrock may be eroding.

I don't know why he thinks it was secret. That view is right out in the open and it happens to be true. Both the Republicans and Democrats have been talking about the southern strategy for decades. (Perhaps Novak thinks the mass defections from Democrat to Republican in the south directly on the heels of the voting rights act of 1964 was a coincidence?)

In any case, that's not what's interesting. It's that he thinks the "bedrock" of the southern GOP base may be eroding. Personally, I doubt it, at least in any significant sense. However, many of the structural problems conservative writer Christopher Caldwell predicted in his famous contrarian article "the Southern Captivity of the GOP" from 1998 could be coming to fruition.

9/11 obscured them but the problems remain. Here are some excerpts from that article:

The party's 1994 majority came thanks to a gain of nineteen seats in the South. In 1996 Republicans picked up another six seats in the Old Confederacy. But that only makes their repudiation in the rest of the country the more dramatic. The party has been all but obliterated in its historical bastion of New England, where it now holds just four of twenty-three congressional seats. The Democrats, in fact, dominate virtually the entire Northeast. The Republicans lost seats in 1996 all over the upper Midwest -- Michigan, Wisconsin (two seats), Iowa, and Ohio (two seats). Fatally, they lost seats in all the states on the West Coast. Their justifiable optimism about the South aside, in 1996 it became clear that the Democratic Party was acquiring regional strongholds of equal or greater strength.

[...]

The Republican Party is increasingly a party of the South and the mountains. The southernness of its congressional leaders -- Speaker Newt Gingrich, of Georgia; House Majority Leader Dick Armey and House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, of Texas; Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, of Mississippi; Senate Majority Whip Don Nickles, of Oklahoma -- only heightens the identification. There is a big problem with having a southern, as opposed to a midwestern or a California, base. Southern interests diverge from those of the rest of the country, and the southern presence in the Republican Party has passed a "tipping point," at which it began to alienate voters from other regions.

As southern control over the Republican agenda grows, the party alienates even conservative voters in other regions. The prevalence of right-to-work laws in southern states may be depriving Republicans of the socially conservative midwestern trade unionists whom they managed to split in the Reagan years, and sending Reagan Democrats back to their ancestral party in the process. Anti-government sentiment makes little sense in New England, where government, as even those who hate it will concede, is neither remote nor unresponsive.

[...]

Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, ... and insists that libertarians and moralists can still cohabit. And since Norquist is a key -- if not the key -- adviser to Newt Gingrich, his interpretation can be taken as a semi-official Republican understanding of what's left of Ronald Reagan's electorate. "The Reagan coalition is the Leave Us Alone coalition," Norquist says. "Tax activists want their paychecks left alone. Pro-family people want their kids left alone. Ralph Reed's constituents are not interested in running other people's lives. They don't care what odd people do in San Francisco on Saturday afternoon."

For his part, Reed, formerly the executive director of the Christian Coalition and now a Georgia-based political and public-affairs consultant, thinks the two wings get along as well as ever. Looking at the Republican field for President in 2000, he says, "Traditional supply-siders like Steve Forbes are enthusiastically embracing the social dogma of the party. Lamar Alexander is moving to the right, guys like John Ashcroft are picking up steam, John Kasich is talking about faith in God. I see a holistic message developing." To an extent Reed is right: this is not 1963 or 1964, when the Rockefeller wing and the Goldwater wing fought an intraparty civil war. Yet there is something more troubling going on. Every Republican candidate now has to "make his bones," to prove his good faith by declaring his unequivocal willingness to alienate the "elites" of the country. Describing the Christian right to a reporter last fall, the former Washington congressman Randy Tate, who is now the executive director of the Christian Coalition, said, "They don't just want to be given crumbs off the table and taken for granted." Far from proving Republican tolerance, the rapprochement Reed points to is merely the sound of the Republicans' cosmopolitan wing crying "Uncle."

This southern takeover is part of a natural, if paradoxical, transformation. It parallels the way the Goldwater debacle of 1964 destabilized the Democratic Party -- by sending alienated northern Republican progressives into the Democrats' ranks. These progressives joined with northern urbanites to forge a party that was more to their liking, though it was too liberal for the Democratic Party's stalwart southern conservatives -- and, eventually, too liberal for the nation as a whole. In like fashion, Democratic excesses since the seventies may have destabilized the Republican Party by chasing those southerners into the fold, transforming the Republican Party into a machine that is steadily becoming too conservative for the country.

There has always been tension between the Republicans' constituent wings. What long masked it was the Cold War. The Reaganite party was never a two-part but always a three-part coalition, of social conservatives, economic conservatives, and foreign-policy hawks. The hawks' group was minuscule, but it happened that their passion (anti-communism) was shared by Christians and capitalists alike.

[...]


When the Republicans can no longer promise tax cuts, they're left with only the most abrasive aspects of the Reagan message, kept under wraps throughout the 1980s: the southern morals business. If the Republicans didn't believe in shrinking government, they didn't believe in the freedom that it was supposed to promote -- which made it much harder to argue that their moral agenda was being advanced in the name of live and let live. And what did they have besides the moral agenda?

The Republicans are too conservative: their deference to their southern base is persuading much of the country that their vision is a sour and crabbed one. But they're too liberal, too, as their all-out retreat from shrinking the government indicates. At the same time, the Republicans have passed none of the reforms that ingratiated the party with the "radical middle." The Republicans' biggest problem is not their ideology but their lack of one. Stigmatized as rightists, behaving like leftists, and ultimately standing for nothing, they're in the worst of all possible worlds.

There is messaging "gold" in that article now that it is crystal clear that the Republicans are not the party of small government and it lies here:

If the Republicans didn't believe in shrinking government, they didn't believe in the freedom that it was supposed to promote -- which made it much harder to argue that their moral agenda was being advanced in the name of live and let live.

How can Norquist's "leave us alone" coalition exist in a party that supports the government spying on its citizens and supports intrusion into a family's most difficult medical decisions? How can a "leave us alone" coalition support a president who acts like a king? How can decent people who believe in moral values continue to work hard and support a party that is corrupt to its core?

They can't.

Caldwell concluded with this:

Their party is now directionless, with only two skills to recommend it: first, identifying and prosecuting the excesses of its opponents; second, rigging the campaign-finance system to protect its incumbency long after it has ceased having any ideas that would justify incumbency. The Republican Party is an obsolescent one. It may continue to rule, disguised as a majority by electoral legerdemain. But it will be a long time before the party is again able to rule from a place in Americans' hearts.

They gave up trying to rule from a place in America's heart some time ago and are now ruling from some place in America's gut. Fear (or the fun "horror movie" version of it anyway) is what they use to keep the disparate threads of Norquist's coalition together. I think, however, Bush's misdhandling of Iraq and Katrina -- not to mention the ridiculous overplaying of the terrorist threat --- may have dampened their prospects for a repeat of their successful communist fearmongering of the past.

I think that Caldwell's thesis is proven by the fact that Bush won so narrowly in 2004 and that they were unable to gain any Senate seats outside of deep red territory. They couldn't win any house seats outside of the rigged Texas gerrymander. Bush's popular vote margin came from turnout in the deep south, not because of any gains elsewhere. I ask you, if a Republican incumbent couldn't win big in that election, when we were just three years from a major terrorist attack and deeply engaged in wars in two countries, then what will it take?

They've got the south for the time being. The question for them is if they can legitimately win anywhere else. If Novak is right and they are starting to lose their grip a little bit there then they've reached their high water mark.



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digby 12/26/2005 01:34:00 PM |

 
Jeanne D'Arc needs a new computer.

I can't imagine a blogosphere without Body and Soul, can you?

It's common wisdom that this administration has, from the outset, and right up to the present, made a habit of accusing others of what it is guilty of. I've always thought of that as just an effective technique -- put your opposition on the defense, so that, at best, no one notices what you're doing, and, at worst, people excuse your crimes because the other side supposedly does it too.

But when self-described Christians are choosing to replicate the history of their faith in reverse, casting themselves in the villains' place, while somehow still claiming the innocence of holy victims, it looks more like pathology than political spin. They remind me of Alex in A Clockwork Orange, aroused by Christian iconography, fantasizing himself as a Roman soldier. Then throw in something too twisted for Alex --fantasizin