shotgunfreude - bush & cheney versus america

Congressman Inslee To Get The Ball Rolling on Impeaching Gonzales

2007-07-31T06:09:00.001-05:00

Jay Inslee has been one of my favorite Congressmen for a long time. He is one of the best people we've had on conservation and the environment.

Now he gives us one more reason to love him. I got the word first from Kleiman, and many news sources are reporting that Inslee is set to introduce a bill today to open an impeachment investigation into Gonzales.

Impeach Gonzales Now

2007-07-29T14:16:00.000-05:00

Needless to say, the House should also begin impeachment proceedings against Gonzales, whether or not he is locked in the basement of the Capital Building (or in the local slammer on Congress's behalf) in the meantime. His lies and perjury give plenty of well-established justification, and his absurd performances in front of Congress and the delapidation of the entire DoJ under his un-leadership should give all the political momentum needed to pull it off. Lots of people should go for this idea.

Congress's inherent contempt power needs to be revived

2007-07-29T13:27:00.000-05:00

McClatchy has a nice analysis today on Congress's options for moving forward to enforce its prerogatives in multiple confrontations with the executive branch: action on Gonzales's lies and perjury and Miers and Bolten's contempt, and Rove's subpoena. Basically, their list of options includes:

1. filing a lawsuit for criminal contempt;
2. filing a lawsuit for declaratory judgment;
3. filing a lawsuit for civil contempt;
4. conduct their own trial in the House under Congress's inherent contempt power;
5. pass new legislation.

Obviously, new legislation is a non-starter since it would require veto-proof majorities in both houses. Each of the three court options has different degrees of pros and cons. I like what Senator Sheldon Whitehouse has to say about these - he's against the common idea to keep pussyfooting around:

"My personal feeling is that we should take it as far as it goes and get the question answered so we’re not guessing... If the answer isn’t satisfactory to us, we can change the laws, change the rules and figure out what the best way to address it is. The posturing back and forth has not proven effective or helpful to the American people who want to know what the heck is happening in the Department of Justice."

They also quote a law professor, Steve Vladeck, who is perfectly right, that the option of inaction would debase Congress and erode its powers:

"For Congress to do nothing strikes me as a dangerous precedent itself, because it would suggest in future cases that the executive branch can basically forestall serious oversight through coercion... I don’t like the idea that one branch can basically scare the other one off."

They also quote a former House counsel on the conventional wisdom on Congress's inherent contempt power: that it would be unseemly and cumbersome.

However, what is unseemly, and unnecessarily weak, is for Congress to feel the need to take this to court. Miers and Bolten have committed contempt of Congress; Rove will too if he fails to show up. Gonzales has committed contempt of Congress with his lies and perjury. Congress has the authority, and the compelling need, to enforce its own prerogatives and dignity, on its own. Establishing the offices of Sergeant at Arms (initially under other names) was one of the very earliest acts of both the House and the Senate in 1789. "The Sergeant at Arms is authorized to arrest and detain any person violating Senate [or House] rules, including the President of the United States." The House could and should look no further than their own inherent power to enforce their own rules, and have the Sergeant at Arms arrest and detain Harriet Miers and Josh Bolten, and anyone else who thumbs their noses at a subpoena from the Congress of the United States, until they feel like being more cooperative. If the executive branch has a problem with that, let them file a lawsuit, and see where it gets them.

Any action short of that, including running to the courts, would be an unnecessary surrender of Congress's own power. Congress is the closest branch to the People of the United States; they are Article #1 for a good reason.

Alberto Gonzales is losing it

2007-07-28T11:48:00.000-05:00

I already posted about this a while back, but I cannot emphasize this enough: if you have not yet watched the "highlight" (or "lowlights"?) reel of Alberto Gonzales's testimony this week, as put together by Talking Points Memo, you desperately need to watch it right now:

"Highlights" of Alberto Gonzales testimony, July 24

There is so much you miss if you only read about the testimony or only read a transcript. Gonzales literally starts giggling and laughing like a little schoolgirl at several points, in the midst of spouting his endless stream of evasions, claims of ignorance, and plain old lies. He is literally cracking apart, and on the edge of jumping up on the table and singing "I'm a little teapot". Almost sad, to see what the cognitive strain of defending your fairyland universe in front of a skeptical nation will do to a man's mind - or might be sad, if he wasn't criminally complicit in it from the beginning.

Also a necessary read in the damning case against Gonzales, is "The Case Against Gonzales", laid out by Anonymous Liberal, which backs up the irrefutable case that Dr. Gonzo has feloniously lied to Congress. As Anonymous Liberal concludes by pointing out, there is no reason for any other step to be taken at this point other than for the Judiciary Committee to draft articles of impeachment for Gonzales.

Impeaching Gonzales now is a constitutional obligation for Congress just to uphold its dignity and to keep from setting a precedent that such flagrant contempt does not go without consequences. But of course, it also helps that impeaching Gonzales is also politically widely supportable, if not inexorably in demand from all sides; and that it will deprive Bush of one of his most vital retainers and enablers, and ensure that the Department of Justice finally gets the adult supervision it so desperately needs.

Do "New Media" just let us surround ourselves with views we already agree with?

2007-07-26T05:11:00.001-05:00

This is a common canard now among people who fret about the terrible polarization ripping our country apart. Aren't people now able to surround themselves with blogs, websites, cable news programs, and/or radio programs filled with views they already agree with, and become incapable of receiving the wisdom of opposing views, thereby propelling partisan division and rancor?

Two things in response:

1. I read things I disagree with all the time. My favorite magazines and bloggers, I find I disagree with frequently. Look at my beef with Mark Kleiman, below. I had an equal beef with The Economist's recent "leader" (British for "editorial") on Murdoch's prospects for the Wall Street Journal. And even aside from these differences - even if I agreed with Kleiman and The Economist in these posts, how can someone getting their info & analysis from both Kleiman and The Economist possibly be isolating himself to a narrow range of views? (Just to pick two at random.) Beyond that, I purposely seek out and read people I know I'm probably going to have big disagreements with. I read every George Will column; Mankiw's blog; Ross Douthat; Christopher Hitchens; and on. There are other factors involved, but I soak up a lot more different angles on issues of the day than I did in the days before Das Internet-Maschine.

2. Sorry, but all sides in this partisanship are not created equal; I try to select my opposing views carefully, because the outlets that still favor pro-Bush opinions are quite frankly, raving idiots. "Aha", David Brooks says, "so it comes down to plain old partisanship after all!" No, it really truly is a case of lots of intelligent, and widely varying, views in the great reality-based majority, in complete imbalance against the small minority of divorced-from-reality, lockstep, shrieking madmen that set the intellectual standards among the extremist pro-Bush propaganda cabal - partly surrounded by a fringe of milquetoast irrationals (yes David Brooks, this is you) who always redefine "moderate" and "bipartisan" to mean exactly halfway between the reality-based and democratically-minded majority and the stark raving lunatics of our current White House.

Exhibit A for the driveling lunatic irrationality that now governs the dwindling Bushies: I bring back, for our common amusement, the Laffer Curve according to the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page (as covered by some hilarious citizens of reality-based America):

* DeLong: Most Dishonest Wall Street Journal Editorial Ever

* Hilzoy: The WSJ: Twenty-Odd Data Points On A Mission

* Cosmic Variance: Best Curve-Fitting Ever

Note to John Kline: your old superior officer from the Marines is using the term "war crimes" to describe the Bush administration. Where do you stand?

2007-07-26T04:30:00.001-05:00

I posted about this below, but I can't get over how devastating this is. Think about this: a former Marine Corps Commandant and a national security lawyer from the Reagan administration are bringing up the term "war crimes" in condemning the lawlessness of the Bush administration. (Is this expression of righteous anger, from the solid right wing, enough to penetrate the idiot media echo chamber narrative of "opposition to the Bush administration = left wing, by definition"?)

The image of a senior Marine officer hanging out with Reagan, though, brings one image directly to mind, for those of us in the southern suburbs of Minneapolis: John Kline, our man in the House of Representatives, who never fails to conjure up images of himself in uniform rubbing shoulders with Reagan for his campaigns.

With one of the authors of this incendiary attack on Bush's Waffling On Torture having been the Commandant of the Marine Corps under Reagan, at the same time that Kline was a Marine colonel and aide to Reagan, Kline must be familiar with the Commandant under whom he served.

So the question for Kline is: do you think your hero Reagan's Marine Commandant has a good point, that Waffling On Torture is a disgrace and a betrayal of American values? Or are you going to keep lockstep with Bush in what your former superior officer, appointed Commandant under Reagan, believes to be a danger to our own troops and an open invitation to war crimes under the Geneva Conventions?

Banana Republic of America

2007-07-26T03:43:00.000-05:00

George W. Bush may have miraculously converted Maureen Dowd's siblings out of the GOP, but Alberto Gonzales has performed the equally impressive miracle of convincingly portraying the U.S. government as being far behind Nigeria and Tajikistan in its standards of honesty and competence. The completely inevitable documentary evidence that totally contradicts what Gonzo told Congress under oath has taken remarkably little time to surface.

Even after the past six and a half years of outrage fatigue, Gonzo's testimony on Tuesday managed to astonish, with its profound new depths of banal alienation from intelligence, judgment, or American values. Watch the special edition here, thanks to Talking Points Memo.

At this point we all might want to check with our members of Congress and see if they perceive any remaining reason why they should not have Gonzo prosecuted for perjury and contempt, and/or impeached. Preferably both, of course. Congress has a legal and constitutional duty to make that happen.

It's just an added bonus though that this will also mean a new sheriff taking over the reigns of the Justice Department; how many and various are the benefits that would come from that, are left as an exercise for the student.

In other devastating news, the Washington Post is running a tremendous op-ed piece by two former Reagan officials, pouring the wrath of God and Thomas Jefferson all over George Bush for Waffling On Torture. Really, if there is any one thing you would ever not want your leader to waffle over, wouldn't "we shouldn't torture people" come near the top of the list?

The money quote: "Policymakers should also keep in mind that violations of Common Article 3 are 'war crimes' for which everyone involved -- potentially up to and including the president of the United States -- may be tried in any of the other 193 countries that are parties to the conventions."

From the surreal horror dept.: "Cheney pushes Bush to act on Iran"

2007-07-18T01:07:00.000-05:00

The Guardian has the latest word on Cheney's lust for more war. At least Cheney now faces off against a defense secretary who is at least a candidate for the Coalition of the Voice of Reason, and theoretically is more isolated. Or would be, if he did not have a spookily complete hold on Bush's decision-making.

Hat-tip to excellent fellow Minnesotan blogger Mark at Norwegianity for the tip.

Fantastic Filibuster! Get out of Iraq!

2007-07-18T00:12:00.000-05:00

Reid and the Democratic Crew in the Senate look like they're finally getting serious about forcing legislation for a withdrawal from Iraq. It's about time.

Anonymous Liberal has more great ideas for finally putting the smack down on the obstructionist Republicans.

There is no excuse at this point for any member of the Senate or Congress to continue supporting the Iraqi occupation, regardless of how much they might have supported it once upon a time. The entire Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously opposed the trickle - er, "surge" - in December. Remember that idea about "listening to our generals"? Bush's idea of "listening to our generals" is shopping around til he finds a general who tells him what he already thinks, and getting rid of any along the way who are too explicit with their disagreements - although I suppose even Bush could not get away with too much reaction against his entire Joint Chiefs at once. And now, in case we didn't know before, and even through the self-serving pablum for which the National Intelligence Estimates (NIE) have become known under Bush & Co., the new NIE makes quite clear that the U.S. occupation of Iraq is actively serving to empower the terrorists and increase the danger to America.

Fred Kaplan has a terrific discussion of this here.

There is simply no rational, honest argument anyone can give at this point for why we are not pulling out of Iraq right now. The administration and its enablers are still offering arguments, but they are dishonest and/or irrational, and based on just trying to toll the clock til Bush leaves office, as a way to possibly make less obvious, among a few dim yokels, the blame he deserves for the catastrophe he created there.

As for how to recover a rational foreign and counterterrorism policy, a lot of intelligent criticism has sprung up lately in response to Anne Applebaum's recent, poorly researched worries about this... while Barack Obama has an interesting take, centered on the idea of recovering the inherent appeal of a moral high ground that can live up to America's finer foreign policy efforts of the past.

Unelectable Republicans Update: McCain and Giuliani campaigns collapsing; Romney and Thompson try to outrace each other to the extreme right-wing

2007-07-17T22:56:00.000-05:00

McCain is bleeding more staffers every day and dropping like a stone in the polls (more on exactly why, below). The big unreported story so far though is the collapse of would-be GOP frontrunner Giuliani's campaign following close behind. Get this: according to the Gallup polls, Giuliani has dropped steadily in support the past four months in a row, from 35% of GOP respondents in March to just 21% now.

That leaves Romney, never that popular to begin with, and Thompson, not yet in the race, trying to outdo each other in pandering to the extreme right-wing of the base. Although even there, Thompson is an odd choice as the GOP's savior, being a mere one-term Senator as a one-time side hobby to his full-time careers as a lobbyist and actor; while those among the GOP base who don't have a problem with Romney being a Mormon are now getting treated to an intra-party smear job trying to associate him with pay-per-view porn at the Marriott, where he was on the board. Keep on slinging the mud at each other in the primary, GOP candidates, and keep on scorching each other before one of you emerges for the general election.

More on the obstacle of Romney's Mormonism: if the GOP base were enlightened, they would see that Romney's active Mormonism makes him the most committed of hard-core social conservatives, and their natural ally in the issues they are most fervent about. Take that from me, as someone who was raised Mormon myself. But then again, if they were enlightened, they also would not be in the GOP base. As it is, what they are most fervent about includes the "correct" interpretation of their Christian religion, by which a Mormon is a strange heretic. They will never get over that. Romney has also shown that he's not going to try to face it and deal with it head-on. Instead, more new sensational stories about Mormon arcana are going to keep popping up throughout Romney's run for office, and he's going to keep trying to dodge them, or address them piecemeal and weaselly when he is forced. It is going to stay a millstone around his neck and doom his campaign. Our good professor Mark Kleiman is insightfully correct (as usual) about this effect in general: far-right-wing religious extremists are inherently compromised in their effectiveness by their innate urge to sabotage each other as dire enemies, spoiling their capability to organize in pursuit of their identical social-conservative agenda - and therein lies a great bulwark of democracy.

It's easy to see why Giuliani's campaign was doomed from the start, despite the head start from all the 9/11 afterglow effect among a certain mass of Republican voters who haven't been paying much attention. McCain's downfall though, has been blamed variously on his enthusiastic support for the Iraq war (such as by Arianna Huffington), or, quite the contrary, on his departures from the orthodoxy of the far-right-wing GOP base, as well argued by Glenn Greenwald. I think both effects are working simultaneously though, and it's important not to see this as an either-or situation. McCain was peculiar among GOP candidates in drawing a lot of his support from independents and moderates of both parties, who were drawn to his narrative as a maverick and rare straight-talking politician, although of course this appeal as applied to centrists and independents always depended heavily on their not paying too much attention to what were always his very conservative positions on most issues.

McCain has been really outspoken lately about his enthusiastic support for the trickle - er, the "surge" - in Iraq, and his enthusiastic rear-end-kissing of social conservative extremist hypocrites to whom he used to apply his withering, rare straight-talking. All of this has dramatically alienated the moderates and independents that were his core constituency. Simultaneously, he has been really outspoken about his enthusiastic support for Bush's immigration reform plan, restrictions against torture of detainees, campaign finance reform, and other GOP heterodoxies. All of this has dramatically alienated the core, right-wing GOP base. The result of which, his only remaining supporters are people who haven't been paying attention - but among whom, the story is continuing to diffuse, which is going to continue driving his poll numbers ever closer to zero, no matter what else he tries from this point on.

Think about it: what would a current McCain devotee be like? What kind of person would be inspired by the strange combination of actions and positions listed above? The combination could only have been created by a paradox of half-hearted duplicity, and does not occur in the honest priorities of any constituent. His campaign could only have retained life by now if he had gone all the way with embracing the deranged agenda of today's core GOP orthodoxy. Even if he had tried to stick all the way with his honest, heterodox, straight-talking views, those are crucially different now than they were in 2000, for including his stridency for war and urge to escalate with Iran. Is there anyone at all who would appreciate his moderate positions on immigration and campaign finance who would also love and admire his constant, earnest calls for ever-increasing military escalation?

To recap, that leaves us with a Mormon and a career lobbyist racing each other to the far right for the GOP nomination. Or, given both their fundamental weaknesses, I wouldn't rule out the chance for a late upset by Huckabee or Brownback - who might pull out a win by racing to the far right-wing with better credibility.

No matter what the outcome of that, though, the result is the same - the GOP base is now so extreme and so distant from the large majority of the American people, that anyone who emerges successfully from the GOP primary is going to have done so by riding so far to the hard-right that they are poisonously unelectable in the general election.

While all the GOP candidates try to avoid mentioning Bush, they all respond to the absolute need among the GOP base to embrace and to go even further to the right of all of Bush's positions. Whoever emerges from the GOP primary is going to have done so by promising more escalation in Iraq, aggression against Iran, further erosions in Constitutional freedoms and the rule of law, further explosion in the federal debt and downward pressure on the U.S. dollar, and little if any distinction of illegal immigrants from presumed terrorists. Between now and then, an ever greater majority of Americans is going to develop an ever greater revulsion to the Iraqi occupation and to exactly these positions.

Both primaries are really up in the air at this point, but the general election is going to be a massive landslide. The Republican candidate is simply going to be toxically, pathetically unelectable.

Bush and "al Qaeda": perversely symbiotic extremists versus ordinary people

2007-07-12T03:20:00.000-05:00

America's new Newspaper (company) of Record, McClatchy, has another story on Bush's increasing rhetoric explicitly identifying Al Qaeda In Iraq with the original Al Qaeda, even though the former is at best a rebellious franchisee of the original Qaeda, does not have a common chain of command or organization with the latter, and did not even exist until well after the U.S. invasion of Iraq and several years after the terrorist attacks on 9/11. This is more of the same of Bush's transparently desperate attempt to exploit 9/11 to his military misadventures.

I don't have the statistics in front of me, but various polls have shown a surprisingly large number of people believe Iraq was directly behind the 9/11 attacks and that we actually confirmed that Iraq had WMDs. Other polls have shown that those who rely primarily on Fox News are among the least knowledgeable about world affairs than those who rely primarily on any of the other news sources polled about (including the Daily Show and the Colbert Report, whose viewers were far more knowledgeable than viewers of Fox News(!)).

I'm going to venture a pretty safe guess: that there is almost perfect overlap between those who rely on Fox News as their primary news source, those who still believe Iraq was directly behind the 9/11 attacks, and those who make up the 26% or so who still actually hold a favorable opinion of George Bush.

(Of course, Bush himself presumably falls in that group.)

The logical corollary being, if Fox News didn't exist and those viewers had instead been relying on a magical fantasy cable news channel that practiced responsible, effective journalism, Bush's current favorability rating would be approximately zero.

A really interesting point can be drawn, though, from both Zarqawi's group renaming itself "Al Qaeda in Iraq" and Bush constantly trying to push the illusory suggestion that Al Qaeda in Iraq had anything to do 9/11. Both of them exhibit a strong interest in inflating each other's importance. The Islamist terrorists depend on the Bush-Cheney cabal to overreact to their terror campaign, and are delighted with the Iraq occupation, and even moreso the abuses of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, for justifying themselves and recruiting new followers among Islamist sympathizers. Meanwhile, the Bush-Cheney regime magnifies the terrorists' power and importance, elevating them to an enemy like no other we've ever faced, who justify more extreme measures than we've ever countenanced. (Oh please... compared with the Soviets or the Nazi-Fascist-Japanese Axis, the entire Islamist collective are a ragtag bunch of misfits.) So here we have two opposed extremist groups, one based on the other side of the world and the other based in our capital, perversely relying on and symbiotic with each other's extremist acts to justify their own, while the unwilling victims are the masses of ordinary people forming the majority in both societies, who would be far happier just to go to work and come home and enjoy being with their friends and families and live their decent ordinary lives, who get duped for the ride.

Not to confuse this with the appropriate responses America should have made in hunting down and destroying the actual terrorist network that attacked us on 9/11. If only we had done that, while holding to American laws and American values. It's everything Bush and Cheney have done beyond that, in exploiting 9/11 to try to justify their military misadventure in Iraq and their autocratic power grab, that has served to alienate our friends and enlarge our enemies and fuel the vicious cycle of extremists versus the ordinary people.

Sara Taylor and Harriet Miers are committing federal crimes - this is not a close legal question

2007-07-12T02:42:00.001-05:00

Sara Taylor and Harriet Miers are committing federal crimes by not responding fully to Congress's subpoenas. There is no close legal question about this.

For a nice look at the law, see Professor Lederman.

As Mark Kleiman worries, Sara Taylor is sort of a sympathetic witness to use for vindicating Congress's authority. He suggests Libby instead. Excellent idea.

An even more excellent idea at the moment would be Alberto Gonzales. Who could hold less sympathy at this point from the American public, or even Congressional Republicans, than Gonzales? Now that we have a fresh, obvious, unavoidable new example of his testimony before Congress constituting perjury and obstruction, Congress should immediately subpoena him, and then if he pulls another Terri Schiavo impersonation on the stand, have the Sargeant-at-Arms toss him in Congress's own slammer in the basement of the Capitol Building. Better yet, get Gonzales and Libby in there at the same time, and tell them they can come out when they feel like refreshing their memory. No pardon or commutation is going to help them there.

Then send out a fresh round of subpeonas to Miers and Taylor. Their minds should be suitably concentrated at that point.

The only real option though should be whom to start with in making an example, not whether they should throw anyone in jail to enforce a subpoena. Taylor and Miers's denial of the subpoenas, backed up by their lawyers' and Fred Fielding's letters, constitutes a big slap across Congress's face. They have a Constitutional duty at this point to respond to that slap with a much bigger slap back. Otherwise, if they back down, they establish a new precedent of Congress's subpoenas being a joke, and validating Fielding's strange theory that outrageously unfounded all-pervasive claims of executive privilege can be reasonably weighed against, and even outweigh, a subpoena from Congress.

The wonderful Dahlia Lithwick is among those making the point that Gonzales is actually providing exactly what Bush wants, as an Attorney General whose main job is to obstruct inquiry of any kind into the executive branch and to turn the Department of Justice into an arm of Karl Rove's political reward and punishment machine, while competence is optional and commitment to justice is definitely not wanted.

No wonder Bush actually, shockingly, interrupted a vacation to fly back to Washington to try to keep Terri Schiavo hooked up to the plug. She was probably his first pick for Attorney General.

CIA Calling Earth: We Cannot Fix Iraq

2007-07-12T01:43:00.000-05:00

"CIA Said Instability Seemed 'Irreversible'"

Here is your real Iraq progress report. I don't know why anyone would bother reading the White House's latest propaganda on it instead of the CIA's realistic assessment.

There simply wasn't any realistic chance of a successful reconstruction of Iraq without going in with at least a third of a million troops in the first place, as General Shinseki candidly and knowledgeably informed us. (History will remember Eric Shinseki as a rare and brave voice of reason who was tragically ignored and punished.) Since fairly early after the invasion, it has become impossible for us to fix Iraq, given how the occupation has steadily made conditions in Iraq ever more tragically difficult to resolve while bleeding our treasury and steadily wearing down our military readiness. Even the current "surge" is horribly misnamed, both as a euphamism for escalation that no self-respecting journalist should have accepted, and even moreso as an exaggeration of what is actually a "trickle"; even its proponents insisted in the first place that it would have to be many times its actual size to succeed.

Nick Kristof has a nice post on this: ‘Inspiring Progress’ on Iraq?

As we debate what to do in Iraq, here are two facts to bear in mind:

First, a poll this spring of Iraqis — who know their country much better than we do — shows that only 21 percent think that the U.S. troop presence improves security in Iraq, while 69 percent think it is making security worse.

Second, the average cost of posting a single U.S. soldier in Iraq has risen to $390,000 per year, according to a new study by the Congressional Research Service. This fiscal year alone, Iraq will cost us $135 billion, which amounts to a bit more than a quarter-million dollars per minute.

... That poll of Iraqis, conducted by the BBC and other news organizations, found that only 22 percent of Iraqis support the presence of coalition troops in Iraq, down from 32 percent in 2005.

If Iraqis were pleading with us to stay and quell the violence, maybe we would have a moral responsibility to stay. But when Iraqis are begging us to leave, and saying that we are making things worse, then it’s remarkably presumptuous to overrule their wishes and stay indefinitely because, as President Bush termed it in his speech on Tuesday, “it is necessary work.”

...It’s nice that Mr. Bush is still confident about Iraq, telling us on Tuesday: “I strongly believe that we will prevail.”

Apparently, we’re doing almost as well today as we were in October 2003 when he blamed journalists for filtering out the good news and declared: “We’re making really good progress.”

Then in September 2004, Mr. Bush assured us that Iraq was “making steady progress.” In April 2005: “We’re making good progress in Iraq.” In October 2005: “Iraq has made incredible political progress.” In November 2005: “Iraqis are making inspiring progress.”

Do we really want to continue making this kind of inspiring progress for the next 10 years?

One of the great underacknowledged factors with Iraq is the distinction between the extremist terrorists, and the militias who are animated largely by rejecting the American occupation and/or defending their own groups from each other. Bush's rhetoric notwithstanding, evidence indicates the latter groups make up by far the majority of all Iraqi combatants. Those are people who might be more likely to settle down and approach a political compromise if the U.S. was gone. Meanwhile, the actual extremists have no capacity for political compromise under any circumstances, and are not going to be mollified by any amount of political progress by the Iraqi government. In that light, the stated rationale for the "surge", to provide breathing space for the Iraqi government to make political progress, looks pretty counterproductive.

Hello to Skippy the Bush Kangaroo

2007-07-12T01:13:00.000-05:00

Skippy likey. Does that mean I'm only two degrees separated from Jon Stewart now?

"The Bush administration has turned the entire government (and the DOJ in particular) into a veritable Augean stable"

2007-07-12T00:32:00.000-05:00

In case you haven't seen this yet, a career Department of Justice prosecutor named John Koppel has run an editorial that nukes Bush and Gonzales's handling of the Department of Justice. This confirms every horror you might easily imagine of what DOJ must be like after watching Gonzales's persistent vegetative state in his testimony to Congress.

"Bush justice is a national disgrace" by John Koppel

In case it's been a while since the last time you perused your Loeb Library, the stable of King Augeas is what Hercules had to clean out in one day as the fifth of his twelve labors. Augeas had the most cattle of anyone in the world, and the cattle had the magical power to stay healthy regardless of their environment - so Augeas had never bothered to clean the stable out, letting all the bovine excrement generated by that largest collection of cattle in the world just accumulate for year after year. John Koppel gets awards not only for courage in the service of democracy, but also for delightfully fresh verbal imagery in the service of vibrant language.

The President has authority to commute a sentence, but not to obstruct justice

2007-07-04T11:39:00.001-05:00

The President has the authority to commute a sentence - but that is a separate issue from the possibility of obstructing justice. Commuting Scooter Libby's sentence removes the pressure on him to testify about whatever it is he lied about to Patrick Fitzgerald. Evidence indicates that those lies were intended to cover up Cheney's actions, and potentially Bush's own actions, in trying to obscure the facts behind their drumbeat for war. If there was any cooperation or communication behind the commuting of the sentence, or if Bush commuted the sentence with the expectation that it would help prevent his own and/or Cheney's misdeeds from coming to light, that is an entirely separate issue from the mere authority to commute a sentence. Whether this was the case demands further investigation.

The Unelectable Republicans

2007-07-04T10:34:00.000-05:00

The surprisingly large disparity, detailed here, that has emerged between Democratic and Republican presidential candidate fundraising, just re-confirms one thing: the Republicans have become simply unelectable. After being twice burned the past two presidential elections, there is just no possibility left that America is going to vote a Republican into the White House in 2008.

The only way out from this is if one of the GOP candidates ran against the Bush-Cheney legacy, in a big, dramatic way. But the current crop of candidates doesn't seem to recognize that. On the contrary, the center of weight of the Republican party has steered so far to the extreme right-wing, and all of the GOP presidential candidates are falling all over each other trying to be the favorite of that extreme right-wing. It's doubtful anyone could win the GOP primary these days without running to the extreme right-wing, but that strategy at the same time ensures absolute unelectability in the general election.

Bush somehow managed to squeek by his reelection in 2004, but it was literally within a month or two of that reelection that his ratings took a nose-dive toward the low thirties to high twenties, from which he has not recovered - with very good reason, of course. All the GOP presidential candidates are running essentially on the Bush platform: they are all aiming for that 28% approval rating, which will be equal to what their draw will be in the general election.

Only, even that is being too generous, because most of them are actually running farther to the right of Bush. Romney, Giuliani and Thompson have all parted sharply with Bush on immigration, including Thompson's astonishingly ignorant and ill-considered suggestion that Cuban immigrants are likely to be dangerous secret agents of Castro. Romney wants to double Guantanamo and make sure habeas rights stay good and dead. Giuliani can't get enough of waterboarding, and thinks it's an awesome idea. Even though McCain has thrown away the only qualities that used to set him apart with many Republican voters to join the rest of the GOP candidates in pandering to the extreme right-wing, at least give him credit for making some noises about waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation being unacceptable. Not much credit though, since he didn't match his words with deeds in helping pass the Military Commissions Act, which purports to immunize officials for torture and make statements gained under enhanced interrogation admissible in a judicial proceeding. And the GOP base has left McCain dwindling into a second-tier candidate for even what half-hearted stabs at American ideals he has made.

At this rate, the GOP candidate in the general election will end up only wishing his share of the vote was as high as Bush's 30% approval rating.

Hiring and firing U.S. attorneys is not illegal... unless it is part of a common plan to pursue malicious prosecution

2007-07-01T13:21:00.000-05:00

What is the U.S. Attorneys scandal all about? It is often discussed in terms of a few U.S. attorneys having been fired and a few new ones having been hired, according to political allegiances. Sounds upsetting, but tell us again how that conflicts with the President's prerogative to control the executive branch as he sees fit?

More and more evidence keeps coming out, though, as to what was behind the partisan-motivated hirings and firings: a common plan, orchestrated from the Department of Justice and the White House, to pursue malicious prosecution of Democrats, and to push fraudulent voting restrictions designed to disenfranchise Democratic voters, ironically in the name of cracking down on voter fraud.

We learned that Bush-appointed U.S. Attorney Steve Biskupic brought charges of corruption against the office of Democratic Wisconsin governor Jim Doyle, throwing one of his career civil servants in jail, before the appeals court found the case so baseless that it took the astonishing step of ordering her released immediately after oral argument.

Then we learned that the Democratic former governor of Alabama, Don Siegelman, who was recently sentenced to over seven years in prison on charges of corruption, was apparently the target of malicious prosecution organized by Karl Rove, according to evidence that includes a sworn affidavit from a Republican lawyer (hooray for the highly endangered conscious of a conservative!). This is just beginning to get notice, including by the editorial board of the New York Times. The U.S. Attorney brought more than 100 charges against Siegelman before most were dismissed, and had asked for a sentence of 30 years in prison and a $25 million fine. Compare this with Republican former Alabama governor Guy Hunt, who was prosecuted for a similar crime: the prosecutors sought probation (and he was later pardoned).

Now, the McClatchy newspapers - rapidly establishing themselves as America's new "newspaper of record" - have a terrific piece on the story behind the firing of U.S. Attorney David Iglesias, due in part to his unwillingness to bow to pressure to prosecute cases of voter fraud where he found the evidence to be without merit. And, lo and behold, the point man for pressuring Iglesias, Patrick Rogers, was heavily involved with the nationwide campaign to pass restrictive voting requirements, a campaign celebrated by Karl Rove last year at a conference of the Republican National Lawyers Association.

The scary part? Patrick Rogers is now a candidate to replace Iglesias.

Bonus scary part: one of Patrick Rogers's colleagues at his pro-disenfranchisment group, Cameron Quinn, was appointed last year as the voting counsel at the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division.

David Iglesias happens to have been one of the experts on the subject of voting fraud, and was convinced the evidence did not support any prosecutions for voter fraud, despite Rogers's repeated promptings.

Rogers's group was also responsible for trumpeting allegations that ACORN was engaging in voter fraud in Missouri prior to the 2006 election, in its drive to register poor and minority voters, based on a few workers whom ACORN had already fired - and those allegations were followed up by indictments brought only a week before the election, a blatant violation of the DOJ's policies, by Bradley Schlozman, the interim U.S. Attorney appointed by Alberto Gonzales. This is the same Schlozman who testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that he did not believe this prosecution could have any possible effect on the election.

So, we have:
1. A Bush-appointed U.S. Attorney in Wisconsin pursued what has been effectively identified by the appeals court as a meritless prosecution, against the Democratic governor of Wisconsin, during a close election;
2. A Bush-appointed U.S. Attorney in Alabama pursued a prosecution against a popular Democratic former governor of Alabama that included over 100 charges that were dismissed by three different judges, and that included sentencing recommendations grossly disproportionate to the alleged crime; the U.S. Attorney also is married to a senior campaign official of the Republican governor who defeated said Democratic former governor, based on a controversial recount; a Republican lawyer signed a sworn affidavit that the prosecution was apparently arranged ahead of time with Karl Rove;
3. A Bush-appointed U.S. Attorney in Missouri opened a voter fraud prosecution against Democratic-leaning campaign workers, a week before a close election; and
4. A U.S. Attorney in New Mexico was fired apparently in part for not bringing meritless prosecutions of voter fraud, and the lawyer who repeatedly prompted him to pursue such prosecutions is being considered as his replacement;
5. Carole Lam, the U.S. Attorney in San Diego, was fired after prosecuting GOP Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham and was preparing to follow that up with prosecutions of his co-conspirators among the Bush administration; etc.

Here is what Congress, the media, and any remaining honest prosecutors need to ask:

Were Karl Rove, Alberto Gonzales, and other officials in Washington organized in a common plan to install U.S. Attorneys who would avoid prosecuting Republicans and who would bring trumped-up, politically timed, or meritless prosecutions against Democrats?

If so, the President's authority to direct the executive branch is irrelevant; anyone involved in such a common plan to break the law would be guilty of a felony.

Minnesotans Blog for a Sustainable Energy Future

2007-06-21T16:24:00.001-05:00

See the fine blog energista for fun and profit.

The Bush administration is now officially finished: today even Orrin Hatch voted to authorize subpoenas for the White House

2007-06-21T15:40:00.000-05:00

Et tu, Orrine? Welcome then.

An ancient apocalypse at Osiris?

2007-02-22T08:53:00.000-06:00

NASA and Nature revealed yesterday that the first direct spectroscopic observations of extrasolar planets have been made - of the repeat favorite HD 209458b (unofficially a.k.a. Osiris) and HD 189733Ab (getting reported as HD 189733b).

From today's issue of Nature: "A spectrum of an extrasolar planet"

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v445/n7130/abs/nature05636.html

NASA press release:

http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/Media/releases/ssc2007-04/release.shtml

The results were totally off the wall. Here's the best part:

"Superposed on this continuum is a broad emission peak centred near 9.65 microm that we attribute to emission by silicate clouds."

Silicate clouds in a gas giant are of course previously unheard of, and I would assume, not yet having read the full Nature article, are dynamically unstable. What would put a silicate dust cloud into the outer atmosphere of a gas giant at 0.045 AU semimajor axis - but a terrestrial planet! One that got too close and plunged headlong into a Jupiter, getting tidally shredded through the Roche limit.

I'm sure it's been depicted in some science fiction novel at some point - but here is evidence of it happening for real. Jeez, can you just imagine? How I would have loved to have sat in a stadium seat with a soda and popcorn to watch that one - from a craft at an appropriate distance.

Also a nice new wet towel to throw at the next person who waxes illogical on the anthropic principle.

I have to wonder if significant amounts of silicate dust in the outer atmosphere is a short-term, dynamic feature, with a characteristic persistence time in only the millions of years after collision of another terrestrial body before the denser rock settles into the inner depths, and we are happening to see Osiris in an era when it relatively recently ate one or more of its rocky brethren. Otherwise, perhaps the rocky material in the HD 209458 system was disrupted from accumulation into planetary-sized bodies from the beginning, a magnification of our own asteroid belt likely due to the constant gravitational pestering of Jupiter in the formation of the solar system; there would have been ample opportunity for either kind of disruption if an almost-Jupiter sized body migrated from the outer solar system to just a few million miles above the star's surface, although Osiris has had plenty of time to settle into its hot-as-hell orbit with eccentricity of about zero.

But, this planet has all kinds of strange new properties; we need to learn more. And each new discovery should be a fresh reminder of the foolish lack of imagination in old models that assumed planets outside our own solar system would be minor variations on the templates of the already familiar planets.

Countdown to the striking down of the Military Commissions Act, volume 1

2006-10-04T01:07:00.000-05:00

Jack Balkin has now posted a great, vitally needed second look at the "Military Commissions Act".

Without going into his comments specifically, the thing that stuck out to me as soon as I first skimmed the Act is that it suspends habeas corpus as a matter of course. Its language therefore creates a suspension of habeas that is far broader and more permissive than the specific provision in the Constitution for habeas to be suspended in a rebellion or invasion that creates an emergency situation in which public safety requires the suspension. In a nutshell, then, this Act is therefore per se unconstitutional, and destined to get struck down.

The scary, anti-American and antidemocratic nature of this Act was driven home to me when, just a couple days after it was passed, I read a news article about the FBI investigating potential links between terrorists and traditional organized crime. Despite the first impression the article gave, it indicated there is no evidence for such a scenario any more substantial than an episode of the Sopranos, and the vigorous speculations of the FBI that seem to be encouraged from the highest levels. And thus we see, already, the effort underway to drive the machinery of the Military Commissions Act toward application to ordinary domestic crime, and to blur any distinctions between suspected terrorists and suspected criminals, or between the dictatorial powers of the Military Commissions Act and the Constitutional criminal procedure that has been a hallmark of America since its founding.

Thankfully, the tireless Center for Constitutional Rights is already filing habeas petitions on behalf of 25 Bagram Air Base detainees that were crafted specifically as a vehicle to challenge the Military Commissions Act, before the President has even had a chance to sign it into law.

The sad thing is not only that the media have given precious little attention to the Military Commissions Act, but that even when they cover it they betray an insufficient understanding of how extreme it is. While they have described the Act as defining anyone who materially supports hostilities against the United States as an unlawful enemy combatant who therefore qualifies to have his Constitutional rights stripped away, they have failed to report that the Act gives equal potential for someone to be defined as an unlawful enemy combatant purely by being labeled as such by a status review tribunal constituted under the authority of the President or the Secretary of Defense, with no objective standards or stated procedure, and with this determination being dispositive. This appears literally to purport that a tribunal set up by the President or Secretary of Defense, under absolutely whatever procedures they feel like following, composed of whomever or however many people they feel like appointing - even just their own selves, would have the statutory authority to strip anyone else of their normal constitutional rights and instead label them as an enemy combatant, who may then be statutorily imprisoned for any length of time with no charges and no trial - and with no possibility of judicial review of the determination by the tribunal.

It sounds too extreme to be true of any government this side of Burma or Sudan. But go read the Act our Congress just passed, and see for yourself.

October Surprise! Mark Foley, Chairman of the House Exploited Children Caucus. No really, I'm serious

2006-10-04T00:27:00.000-05:00

With everyone's wagers now cast as to how many days or hours Dennis Hastert has left before being forced to resign, and whether John Boehner or Tom Reynolds will beat him to it, what is left to be said now of Mark Foley. (Glenn Greenwald has really gone to town on this.)

The only surprising thing about this story is that anyone is still surprised that there is any vice the Republican legislature is not willing to foster and cover up among their supremely hypocritical ranks, and turn around and pretend they are the world's great crusaders against that vice.

From the GOP's perspective, it's pretty bad when their scandals are breaking so fast that they actually get relief from attention on Condie Rice being contradicted by her own State Department about being warned, in the summer of 2001, in the gravest terms, by George Tenet and Cofer Black, about an imminent al Qaeda attack - but that relief only coming at the price of apparently an even more damaging scandal.

The depressing thing about this story is that a House leadership cover-up about one of their own members sexually harrassing and exploiting underage victims, as serious as that is, generates a lot more public outrage than the passage of the "Military Commissions Act" by the House the day before the Foley scandal broke.

The exciting thing about this story is that, over the following days and weeks, more and more information may be coming out about how far Foley's crimes went, and how many of his fellow GOP congressmen knew all about it and kept it hush-hush to avoid political damage, and potentially even conspired to cover it up as an ongoing concern, exposing them not just to political fallout but also to criminal liability - so that, out of this strange tragedy, America can shake off its corrupt Republican masters and get back to being American.

The gleeful thing, the schadenfreude, about this story will be watching all the Republicans keep contradicting each other and then turn on each other and come out with more and more stories to shift blame onto each other, hopefully right up to cutting deals with prosecutors to spill the beans in exchange for leniency.

And hopefully the GOP rank and file will finally shake loose their tinfoil hats and realize that a party leadership that conspires to cover up lying this country's way into a war of aggression is going to cover up absolutely anything.

Early analysis of our new Torture Statute

2006-09-29T05:24:00.000-05:00

Some excellent analysis of our new Torture Statute is out:

Analysis: Many Rights in U.S. Legal System Absent in New Bill, a nice, accurate rundown by the Washington Post, which quotes Sanford Levinson at Balkanization calling the bill a mark of a "banana republic", and Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh saying that "the image of Congress rushing to strip jurisdiction from the courts in response to a politically created emergency is really quite shocking, and it's not clear that most of the members understand what they've done";
a critical analysis signed by 609 law professors;
analysis from Aziz Huq;
analysis by Jack Balkin; and
a few comments by Glenn Greenwald on the Senate passage of the bill.

On the other hand, the NY Times and Washington Post editorial pages are both silent on the matter. I can only assume, because they just commented on this right before the Senate took it up, and they are saving up post-passage whoppers for their Sunday editions.

Senate Also Votes, 65-34, for Arbitrary Detention, Torture, Admissibility of Evidence Produced by Torture, and Denial of Habeas Corpus

2006-09-28T18:16:00.000-05:00

The Senate Voted, 65-34, for a bill that authorizes arbitrary detention, torture, convictions based on evidence produced by torture, denial of habeas corpus, and retroactive immunization from prosecution for past torture.

The voting was live-blogged here, with the good folks of firedoglake.

As one of the commenters said: Writ of Habeas Corpus: 1215-2006. It was nice knowing you.

Yes, 65-34, the absent Senator being Olympia Snowe (R-ME), meaning eleven Democrats lined up with the Republicans to betray the American Constitution. They included both Senators from New Jersey, both Nelsons, Landrieu, and of course, Lieberman.

And after all the huffing Specter did about the bill being clearly unconstitutional, he lined right up with the GOP when it came time to vote.

Now that the Senate has passed essentially the same bill as the House, it will be signed into law probably by next week.

Why such a strong reaction?

Although this bill is filled with antidemocratic provisions, such as the admissibility of evidence produced by torture, the worst of it is probably the combination of the following two provisions:

1. Enemy combatants are denied the writ of habeas corpus.

2. An enemy combatant is defined, in one option, as anyone deemed to be an enemy combatant by a tribunal constituted by the President or the Secretary of Defense, and their determination is final - with no standards of crimes or evidence thereof such a tribunal is required to observe.

So, the administration is now statutorily authorized to lock up anyone, whether a citizen or not, whether in this country or not, forever, without ever bringing charges against them, constrained by nothing but the administration's own whims.

The bill is certainly unconstitutional. It also purports to place enemy combatants beyond judicial review, and thereby purports to place itself outside of judicial review. To the extent any judge buys that, it will at least slow down the process of getting this odious legislation struck down. But nonetheless, an attorney for a detainee should be able to file a habeas petition based on the constitution with an argument that the statute plainly contradicts the Constitution and is void.

But no thanks to the Senate for creating this mess out of our democracy. This is the single worst law passed in U.S. history.

Torture Bill Protest at John Kline's Office

2006-09-27T23:14:00.000-05:00

From the Dump John Kline blog:

"Protests against Kline's 'Torture Bill' will be held Thursday (9/28) from 7-9 a.m. at the office of John Kline. A media alert will be sent. Kline's office: 101 W. Burnsville Pkwy #20, Bring signs. Suggestions:“Kline Sponsored Torture Bill" “Tell XXX NO to Torture” “Call Rep. Kline: 952-808-1261" read on: ..."

"a tyrannical law that will be ranked with the low points in American democracy"

2006-09-27T21:55:00.000-05:00

So says the New York Times editorial board of the "Military Commissions Act of 2006" that was passed by the House today. This editorial is a must-read. It runs down the frightening litany of dictatorial powers granted by the Military Commissions Act, including the authorization for indefinite detention for anyone at the executive branch's whim, with no possibility of judicial review other than at the whim of the executive.

House Passes Military Commissions Act, With Authorization for Arbitrary Indefinite Detention

2006-09-27T18:19:00.000-05:00

Here's the bill, H.R. 6166 (pdf), was passed by the House today, complete with authorization for arbitrary, indefinite detention. Here is the rundown on how each House member voted, including some notable defectors from both parties from the party lines.

Some Constitutional law experts have already emphasized the point that this bill, as it was changed in the House before passage, appears to give administration-appointed combatant status review tribunals authority to designate anyone at all an unlawful enemy combatant, making anyone vulnerable to indefinite, arbitrary detention.

Look at sections 948a and 948d(c), on pages 3 and 8 on the above pdf file. An enemy combatant is defined in either of two ways, the second being "a person who, before, on, or after the date of the enactment of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, has been determined to be an unlawful enemy combatant by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal or another competent tribunal established under the authority of the President or the Secretary of Defense." (Section 948a.)

Once that determination is made, it is dispositive, i.e. it is settled or determined as final: "A finding, whether before, on, or after the date of the enactment of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal or another competent tribunal established under the authority of the President or the Secretary of Defense that a person is an unlawful enemy combatant is dispositive for purposes of jurisdiction for trial by military commission under this chapter." (Section 948d(c).)

So an enemy combatant is anyone the tribunal appointed by the administration says is an enemy combatant - end of story. Other parts of the act specifically remove the right to speedy trial, etc. Presto, there you go: authorization for arbitrary, indefinite detention.

Is it any wonder that Charles Taylor adopted the GOP's "enemy combatant" rhetoric to crack down on dissidents in Liberia, to the complete neglect of law and order? Such a nice fit for dictatorships.

The administration and its mouthpieces like John Cornyn love to accuse anyone who worries about any standards of law and order of coddling the enemies, without ever acknowledging a possible distinction between being accused of being a terrorist and actually being a terrorist. I guess the wording in the House bill just accurately reflects that equivalence in the minds of its proponents: accusation equals guilt - the same standard all to familiar from the Inquisition and the trials for witchcraft.

Never mind that a large majority of the people held at Guantanamo were not captured by U.S. forces at all, but turned in by locals in exchange for hefty bounties, and many of whom have been definitively shown and acknowledged to have been perfectly innocent. This bill cures what the administration has apparently seen as the grave defect of those persons' innocence coming to light.

Although the House has already passed this grave offense to the core ideals of America, the Senate is taking it up for debate. The current Senate version, though bad enough, still does not have the worst provisions that were added to the House bill in its final maneuvers. Now is the time to rain down our concerns on the members of the Senate. Call them, email them, fax them, let them know the abuses this bill would allow, and urge them not to pass it - either to make dramatic changes, or far better, just to hold the thing up for the short while it would take to keep this odious bill from going anywhere before the coming recess. I've already called my senators. Now is the time. It's hard to think of a single worse blemish on the history of the U.S. House of Representatives than its passage of this bill today. Don't let the Senate make the same mistake.

GOP Presidential Convention Headed to Twin Cities, Home of Shotgunfreude

2006-09-27T17:01:00.000-05:00

This ought to be fun. I guess they figured taking the battle directly to the stomping grounds of Shotgunfreude was the key to the '08 elections.

Stay tuned right here in September 2008 for the Shotgunfreude live blogging of the GOP Presidential Convention.

Republican Campaign Strategy Spoiled by Reality and its Well-Known Liberal Bias

2006-09-26T15:13:00.000-05:00

"Bush to Declassify Parts of Intelligence Assessment on Iraq"

"President Bush said today he has grudgingly ordered declassification of parts of a leaked intelligence report that concludes that the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq has fueled Islamic extremism and contributed to the spread of terrorist cells...

"Bush charged at the news conference that political opponents leaked select parts of the National Intelligence Estimate to media organizations last weekend 'to create confusion in the minds of the American people' in the weeks before the Nov. 7 mid-term elections."

The fulcrum of both the national GOP campaign, and of the justification for this presidency, is flatly contradicted by the consensus of all sixteen federal intelligence agencies - clearly, this is just a confusion of the mind. Lie down with some smelling salts and Fox News for a few hours, and you'll feel much better from that confusing brush with "reality". Pay no attention to those facts behind the curtain.

It gets even better. How do we know the invasion of Iraq actually supported rather than exacerbated the "war on terror"?

'"You know, to suggest that if we weren't in Iraq we would see a rosier scenario, with fewer extremists joining the radical movement, requires us to ignore 20 years of experience," Bush said. "We weren't in Iraq when we got attacked on September the 11th. We weren't in Iraq and thousands of fighters were trained in terror camps inside your country, Mr. President. We weren't in Iraq when they first attacked the World Trade Center in 1993."'

Keep in mind, Bush admitted just a couple weeks ago that Iraq had "nothing" to do with 9/11. But now, we had not invaded it prior to those attacks, ergo, because we have invaded, attacks like that will be prevented.

You know, we also had not invaded England, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Sweden, Canada, Estonia, Uruguay, Botswana, Bhutan, or Vanuatu when we suffered those attacks. How can we remain safe even though we still leave them uninvaded and unoccupied - just like they were on 9/11?! In fact, some of the 9/11 hijackers had actually studied in Germany, giving that country a closer tie to the attacks than Iraq. How can we leave these other nations dangerously uninvaded?

On the occasion of those prior attacks, we also did not have colonies on Mars, we had not completely eliminated the estate tax and social security, and we still allowed political parties other than the GOP to remain organized in the United States. Yet we persist in not ensuring those differences in some aspect of the world relative to the state of existence prior to 9/11. How can we leave these changes undone, under the inexorable logical force of post hoc ergo propter hoc?

Or could it be that the president is once again insinuating without explicitly claiming that Iraq was behind 9/11, after conceding repeatedly that there is no such link? How else do you explain "We weren't in Iraq when we got attacked on September the 11th... We weren't in Iraq when they first attacked the World Trade Center in 1993"? Who is "they" here?

Taken with the president's prior explanations, we're supposed to fill in the blank, that the "they" two words away from the word "Iraq", with no mention of other entities, refers to terrorists unconnected with Iraq. But the GOP campaign depends crucially on one sleight-of-hand above all others - conflating Iraq with the defeat of the pre-existing terrorists. So, the president persists in being incapable of discussing national security in the role of the president of the United States, providing leadership on actually defending our country, and instead can only talk in the role of Republican campaigner-in-chief.

Some good news: "Congress unlikely to pass wiretapping"

2006-09-26T14:25:00.000-05:00

"Congress is unlikely to approve a bill giving President Bush's warrantless wiretapping program legal status and new restrictions before the November midterm elections, dealing a significant blow to one of the White House's top wartime priorities."

We'll see how President Bush's top priorities are handled in January when the House Judiciary Committee chairman is John Conyers.

Mark Kennedy: the reek of desperation

2006-09-20T16:32:00.000-05:00

Minnesota Senate candidate Mark Kennedy laid out an interesting new theory in his televised debate yesterday: he accused the Star-Tribune of completely fabricating its recent poll showing Amy Klobuchar ahead of him by 24 points. (The Star-Trib reports on his comments here.) Apparently, in the world inside Kennedy's mind, the editors of the Star-Trib gathered together and conspired to publish a "pure fiction" of a polling result, to favor Klobuchar's campaign.

What would have led a group of senior editors to betray their duty as journalists, and a for-profit corporation in California to risk discrediting the newspaper it owns? Because Klobuchar's dad was once a columnist for the Star-Trib, of course. And he was such a great guy, or somehow exerts such control over his former employer, that it is willing to lie, cheat & steal to help out his daughter's political campaign.

Kennedy protested that if his father's company had published a poll, it would have shown him to be ahead. Is that because your dad is also adept at publishing complete fictions, Mark?

His ludicrous, childish attack on this poll can only damage Kennedy more than the poll itself did. Who does he think he's going to persuade when his best response to negative news about his campaign is with wild, no-evidence conspiracy theories?

John Kline and his district director issue belligerent non-apologies for use of racial epithets

2006-09-20T12:07:00.000-05:00

As the Star Tribune discloses, John Kline's campaign manager, Mike Osskopp, was caught on film harrassing veterans attending a Coleen Rowley event and complaining about how many of them drove a "Jap car". (Hey Mike, I've got two "Jap" cars. Want to come over to my place and scream about them through that megaphone?)

Naturally, once he is actually caught in the act of his slimy take on campaign tactics, Osskopp had no choice but to publicly apologize. But how did he phrase this apology?

"I apologize if my words offended any Americans of Japanese descent, including my sister-in-law," Osskopp said. "I allowed my emotions to get the better of me and used a phrase commonly used in my youth, but which is now inappropriate and offensive."

That's right... it's not really a slur at all, you see, it was perfectly acceptable in the past, and I just have a hard time keeping up with these crazy politically correct novelties they've rolled out the past few years, he implies. Apparently he really doesn't think slurring Japanese is a problem at all - it's the damn PC police that are the problem.

Pretty classy "apology", Osskopp.

Kline also "apologized" with the same sort of belligerent non-apology:

"That's unacceptable now," Kline said. "We've all seen the John Wayne movies about World War II, and then it was acceptable. Now it's not, and [Osskopp] knows that."

See, back in our day, it was perfectly acceptable. But I guess if you crazy bleeding-heart liberals insist on condemning it, we'll be okay with that...

Sorry Kline, that is worse than the original epithet. You might recall a whole lot of other racial slurs that were entirely "acceptable" fifty years ago that are now universally recognized as abhorrent - but that does not mean they were any less offensive to their targets, and morally abhorrent, when they and the attitudes they reflect were considered acceptable by a wide range of the socially advantaged.

The Star-Trib article keeps getting better: it also reveals that Kline's congressional office keeps a file on at least one critical constituent of his, Paul Bartlett, in which they save not only the emails he has sent to Kline - but Kline also has a staffer searching the Internet for and saving the same guy's blog posts critical of Kline (hat tip Inside Minnesota Politics.) As Bartlett points out, this appears to put Kline alongside J. Edgar Hoover, Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon in the exclusive club of American officials who felt the un-American need to keep an "enemies list". And all on our tax dollar - another terrific "fiscally responsible" expenditure by a charter member of the party that is spending away our children's future earnings like drunken sailors, and that dares not utter the phrase "fiscal responsibility" for apprehension of reminding everyone of back when they could claim to be the champions of fiscally responsible without getting laughed out of the room.

And to top it off, as the Star-Trib reports, Kline's chief of staff compared Bartlett to David Duke - because Bartlett complained about the racial slur.

So let's get this straight: Kline "apologized" for his district director's use of racial slurs by objecting that no one had a problem with the slur in the good ol' days, and has his chief of staff smear someone who objects to the slur by comparing him to David Duke.

Until recently, I was pretty neutral about Kline. I had tremendous respect for him as someone who had served our nation as a Marine, and I didn't really see anything about him that was worse than serving as a spear-carrier in the general GOP decline into subservience to K Street and a dictatorial administration. He seemed like just the sort of decent, mainstream Republican I would have been excited to vote for back in the '90's, when the GOP still stood for something.

Now I see I am represented in Congress by a guy who issues a non-apology not-too-subtly assigning blamelessness to an aide using a racial slur, and using my tax dollars to troll for and compile secret files on people who make negative blog posts and commentary about him - which I suppose includes me, if this is a halfway serious effort. (Hi there, McCarthyist Kline staffer! Sleeping well?) Well congrats, John; I wasn't really focused on my House race before, but you've made a dedicated Rowley campaign activist out of this former Republican.

When can the Minnesota Second get a representative that cares about anything at all other than passing whatever shameful tax giveaways it takes to keep the cashflow coming in from the lobbyists and from his convicted-felon-fellow-Congressmen?

Will the Democrats take over the House... by more than 40 seats? Or only by 20 or 30?

2006-09-19T17:58:00.000-05:00

It cracks me up to see prognosticators still wondering whether the Democratic Party will gain a majority in the House of Representatives or not. The Cook Political Report lists 44 House races (pdf) in the "lean" or "toss-up" ratings as of their last update - with 35 of those currently held by the GOP and 9 by the Democrats. They also list 11 "likely Democrat" races and 20 "likely GOP" races.

But even at that, their ratings are probably still skewed to give the GOP too much benefit of the doubt. For example, on the Senate side they still list Minnesota as a "toss-up" (pdf) - even though every single poll I know of has shown Amy Klobuchar with a double-digit lead that has only grown over time, to a 24-point spread in the latest Star-Trib poll. It's an odd sort of "toss-up" that is discerned from a nearly two-to-one spread.

Another example is the Minnesota Second district, which was solidly blue until four years ago, and where the latest poll shows Coleen Rowley within three points of incumbent John Kline - effectively a tie, since the margin is about the same size as the sampling error. [UPDATE - This poll was taken in only part of the district.] Considering that virtually no incumbent House member was re-elected with less than a five or ten point spread in the last few elections, and the anti-GOP prevailing wind, and the state's and district's traditional Democratic lean, and the fact that Kline's campaign manager was shouting racial epithets at veterans going into a VFW station the other day... this is a damned competitive race.

And yet, the Cook report doesn't even have MN-02 listed at all, even as likely Republican - meaning they haven't even considered it to be competitive.

MN-02 is a genuine toss-up - but apparently it is still less competitive than the sixty GOP-held seats that the Cook Report considered competitive enough to list so far.

Given that, the only big question left in the House elections are how many dozens of seats the Democrats will have to pad their majority.

As an aside... I watch almost no television, but I happened to be in a restaurant yesterday that was showing Fox News, and an ad ran for the Kennedy campaign where he spends the whole ad smiling and snuggling with senior citizens. Which of course immediately raised the question: what does it tell you about his confidence in his own campaign if a GOP candidate feels like he has to spend money to appeal to senior citizens who watch Fox News? That is the most telling indication I have yet seen that the Kennedy campaign faces certain doom.

To follow along with the Minnesota races, here is a round-up of a few other Minnesota blogs. Check out Follow John Kline's Money, MN Publius, Dump John Kline, DFLSenate blog, minvolved, the Power Liberal, Centrisity, and for Minnesotan diversion, Pharyngula.

Is McCain alienating Republicans... or is Bush?

2006-09-18T23:58:00.000-05:00

It's almost a pointless game these days to point out pro-administration bias in the Washington Post (inconsistently at least), but this biased headline deserves special mention: The Washington Post gives us a clear McCain's Stand On Detainees May Pose Risk For 2008 Bid - Opposition to Bush Could Alienate Republican Base. Is that the other Republican base that does not include John Warner, Lindsey Graham, Chuck Hagel Lincoln Chafee, Olympia Snowe, Colin Powell, and every traditional Republican who cannot recognize the massively intrusive government and unprecedented budgetary freefall that have been championed by the weird legion that has taken over both Washington and the GOP the past six years?

How about this headline: "McCain leads ever-widening rift of traditional Republicans shown to be alienated by Bush".

Actually Mr. President, that's the Third Great Snooze Button

2006-09-14T14:05:00.000-05:00

Joel Achenbach at washingtonpost.com achieved this week's High Point in Blogging with a post that made my brain smile.

After discussing a report on observing galaxies at a new record proximity to the origin of galaxies and stars, and a new book on our second-most underappreciated Founding Father of America, George Mason, Achenbach ties such hallmark Enlightenment legacies into contrast with George Bush's world:

The president says we are having a Third Great Awakening...

Here are a few things we didn't know when Jonathan Edwards & Co. ushered in the First Great Awakening:

1. The world is billions of years old.
2. There are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy and at least tens of billions of galaxies and the whole shebang is expanding at an accelerating rate and there may even be other universes outside our own.
3. Life evolves and all living things come from a common ancestor.
4. Continents drift.
5. Complicated stuff involving Relativity.
6. Really complicated stuff involving Quantum Mechanics.
7. Stuff so complicated it cannot even be alluded to.

Maybe the real awakening will come when, after staring into a telescope at a galaxy 12.88 billion light years away, and studying the world around us, we finally grasp our humble place in the universe and our good luck in having evolved in a place that has remained habitable for something like four billion years. And then we'll decide to take better care of it.

Thank you Joel!

Hooray for Keith Ellison, Mike Hatch, and Lori Swanson!

2006-09-13T11:50:00.000-05:00

Congrats to Keith Ellison, Mike Hatch, and Lori Swanson on their primary victories yesterday. Minnesota DFLers made absolutely the right choice in each of these three races.

The Swiftboat Path to 9/11 Exploitation

2006-09-08T22:14:00.000-05:00

David Brin compellingly turns the tables on ABC's right-wing propaganda exploitation of national tragedy, "Path to 9/11" (which Bill Clinton has now blasted), which prompted me to respond thus (cross-post):

As for the potentially libelous depictions of Democratic officials that are apparently featured in ABC's Swiftboat Path to 9/11, John Dean made a compelling argument two years ago that Kerry should have immediately sued the "Swiftboat Veterans for Truth" - not only for the direct purpose of the disinfecting sunlight a court can bring to bear of the otherwise hopeless disputes between different flavors of truthiness, and dissuading against the use of similar tactics in the future, but also to immediately prove a public relations point - that we are confident enough that you are lying your ass off that we are sure the truth will come out on our side.

The various defamed Clintonistas should have filed just such a suit against Disney as soon as the facts on this came out, with a motion for a temporary restraining order against showing it and seeking relief in the form of a permanent injunction to the same effect, and in case it is shown, for a massive damage award and an injunction against further distribution and to issue public retractions. I don't think there's any really good argument against this plan, and again on a public relations perspective, it would give the public the idea, like no amount of bloviating and indignation would, that there is something seriously wrong with the way the facts are being depicted.

And, if one of the defamed officials can come up with standing to sue in someplace like the U.K. or Australia with far more severe standards and penalties for defamation, which shouldn't be too hard, we could compound ABC's reasons to regret their September Surprise.

As for the idea of more reverse September/October surprises, like the new Senate report showing the intelligence indicated no connection, and in fact active enmity, between Saddam and al Qaeda, the release of which was apparently engineered by the Senate Democrats - anyone want to venture what other closet doors Democrats, journalists, or critics of the administration will be able to yank open before the election?

On the other hand, the GOP Congress is pretty effectively pulling a September Surprise against itself - when their political lives are on the line, they've accomplished far less this term than the infamous Do-Nothing Congress of 1948, and the nation is beset with compelling concerns - they parody themselves with a torrential debate about what to do with aging horses, for what even the GOP majority leader referred to as "the horse-shit bill". Are they just trying to get swept? (For what it's worth, I used to eat fried horsemeat on a stick from the corner friet stand when I lived in Belgium. Naturally, it tastes like chicken.)

Dana Milbank puts this Congress's lotus-eating in shocking perspective:

"Even before the horse bill, House leaders had been a bit sensitive about their legislative pace. The People's Representatives have been in session for all of 80 days this year, and with 15 days remaining on the legislative calendar, the House is on pace to shatter all records for inactivity. The "Do-Nothing" House of 1948 was positively frenetic by comparison, passing 1,191 measures in 110 days in session.

The current House has passed barely 400 measures..."

Come to think of it, it seems like the Disney shareholders may also have a decent lawsuit to bring against Disney, for its officers violating the business judgment rule and their duty to maintain and increase shareholder value, by (apparently) pouring tens of millions of dollars into a knowingly defamatory program that is fraudulently represented as being true to the 9/11 Commission Report despite factually contradicting it, and that any reasonable manager would have foreseen would offend and alienate from Disney the two thirds of Americans who disapprove of the Bush administration, thereby damaging the goodwill and customer loyalty attached to Disney and restricting the market for its products and services.

This would be all the more damaging if it turns out, as it now begins to appear, that Disney's production was effectively co-opted by an internal group explicitly dedicated to right-wing propaganda - you know, as opposed to profits, which the corporate officers are responsible for protecting and generating.

Disney might mitigate that liability if they yank the miniseries, although the money has been spent and the damage is already underway.

Of course, shareholder lawsuits aren't my thing, but I'm looking forward to seeing what a corporate lawyer type thinks of this.

Quality Advertising is Job One

2006-09-07T01:23:00.000-05:00

One of the great things about Slate is its fierce dedication to witty titles and captions. Today they gave us this charmer: "Have you driven out a Ford lately?"

It was terribly embarassing and an ill omen to hear Alan Mullaly, in his introduction as the new honcho, respond to the inevitable question of what he drives right now: "A Lexus... but I can't wait to drive a Ford." He could not quite come anywhere near pulling off an impression of sincerety in that patently ridiculous assertion. And knowing the inevitable need for him to trade down, and with them having had a few months to prepare for this, could he not have picked up a Ford ahead of time? Taken an early lifestyle hit for the sake of his new corporate charge?

Although the greedy UAW deserves some blame too for overreaching, I remain convinced the old Big Three American automakers were maimed into permanent decline by decades of poisonous American management culture - one that regarded technological products as static commodities, scoffed at R&D, and put all effort and emphasis into salesmanship - the attitude of the new executive who takes over a company and says, "I have no idea what a [widget X] is, but we're going to sell more of them!" (This is a straight paraphrase from an incoming manager at one of America's largest corporations about 25 years ago.)

Meanwhile, Toyota and Honda had the radical ideas that cars are technological works in progress, that you can sell more in the long run if you do the R&D to make them better - and while your focus is on engineering instead of vacuous, no-value-added, quarterly-earning-obsessed sales gods, it makes sense to have engineers promoted from within also running the company.

And who knew, but pouring your effort into constant betterment through engineering also happens to make for a more efficient economy.

Besides other recent failures - thinking genetic dynasty was somehow a qualification to run one of the world's largest companies, thinking the SUV craze was going to fly indefinitely in the face of long-term trends in oil prices and public attitudes toward the environment - the question is, when, if ever, will Ford and GM complete the cultural shift to the Honda mindset that they need to survive? Probable answer: when Kerkorian succeeds at clearing out the top spot at GM to make room for superhuman auto executive Carlos Ghosn - who happens to have risen up through the ranks of engineering R&D.

Shorter GOP: concern for national deficit or for crunch on nation's middle class = "class warfare"

2006-09-06T22:48:00.000-05:00

Another cross-posting from comments to The Fix - if there's one trope I can't stand that I haven't said anything about yet, it's the GOP rhetoric that any opposition to their squeezing out the middle class and grinding the nation's finances into the most ludicrous debt in the history of the world, is "class warfare". Jeez. Real class warfare in the 1800's meant French peasants and servants taking up arms against the aristocrats and both slaughtering each other - kind of like actual "warfare". But naturally the same people who insist the sectarian bloodbath in Iraq "is not a civil war!" have no problem slinging around rhetoric of "class warfare" to shut down any debate on Congress's feverish addiction to filling out every credit card offer they get for another Great Big Bank of China Credit Card.

Who's actually waging class warfare while casting blame elsewhere, as opposed to being blamed for it? The Bush-GOP Congress team has done more damage to the U.S. Gini coefficient than at any time since George III, thanks in large part to tax breaks overwhelmingly tilted to the highest incomes coupled with a deficit-fueled decline of the dollar and passing on the tax burden to the states with unfunded mandates, and in large part to this GOP crew's fervent practice of cronyist economics as opposed to actual free market capitalism - how many hundreds of billions of federal tax dollars have they doled out to their good buddies among the wealthiest few through sweetheart corporate welfare tax breaks, no-bid contracts, federal land natural resource extraction leases at pennies on the market value dollar, and federally legislated windfalls for big pharma (medicare part D) and wall street (privatized social security, they hope) - right down to the ludicrous tax avoidance / wealth transfer scam of Barbara Bush earmarking a "charitable donation" to be funneled to Neil Bush's Ignite software company by way of the Katrina (Slush) Fund.

That is the difference between the classically liberal free market economics of Adam Smith and of the U.S. laissez-faire conservative tradition, as opposed to the wealth-accumulation-by-government (i.e. central planning economics) of the current GOP, who have gone full circle in their economic philosophy back to what was considered "conservative" in Adam Smith's day - for the lion's share of economic rewards to be doled out by diktat to the nobles and the king's other buddies in the form of royally granted monopolies, import patents, and sinecures. Sound familiar?

The reality is, the economic policy that emerged from Clinton-Gore and a less extremist GOP Congress forced to work together was a thousand times more faithful to free market capitalism than the disastrous all-GOP Bush/extremist-Congress team has been.

A single-issue election: Whither the American rule of law?

2006-09-06T18:58:00.000-05:00

Cross-posted from comments to Chris Cillizza's The Fix - which got me on a roll about the upcoming election.

I am one of those who are far more enthusiastic to vote this year than in most previous elections - and while I voted almost straight-ticket Republican through the 2000 election, I have since re-registered as an independent and am now enthusiastic to vote for, and contribute to, Democratic candidates.

While I still value many of the stances Republicans traditionally espoused prior to 2000, the party under this administration has been hijacked into extremist policies bearing little resemblance to anything that attracted me to the GOP in the first place - like, say, a prudent fiscal policy, or wise and effective use of the military, or the overriding principle that government's primary job is to stay out of our business - all of which are now anathema to the Republicans in charge.

The way I see it, this is a single-issue campaign. The Republicans now in power have embraced, as their primary policy, an aggressive opposition to the Bill of Rights, to the separation of powers, to the rule of law - in short, to the Constitution that has been the foundation of America since its beginning. Their only political philosophy now is to fantasize that the Founding Fathers of America intended to create a presidency even more powerful than the office of king under George III - that they fought a war of revolution because they just couldn't bear being ruled by a chief executive who didn't hold enough arbitrary power over their lives.

While most Democrats have not had enough spine to take a stand on this (with a few terrific exceptions), nevertheless the Democrats, simply by default, have become the party of *not* vigorously trying to tear down the American rule of law. That is the only issue for me. If that fails, we have nothing.

Even before learning a single thing about what the Democrats have to offer, I cannot imagine how any thinking person of whatever American political tradition could listen to a rhetoric that is founded on surrendering all competing interests to overriding fear, and equating the large majority of Americans who disagree with the administration's policies with Nazi appeasers, and boasting of secret CIA prisons as a campaign highlight to excite their base, and not feeling the overriding need to run them out of office.

And with a president who campaigns based on letting Osama bin Laden dictate our entire foreign policy, despite having said before the election four years ago that "I don't know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don't care. It's not that important. It's not our priority", and who has been unable to do anything about this one lousy guy despite having a military that has gone through a cumulative budget of over two trillion dollars since 9/11 and that has the cooperation of the governments of both Afghanistan and Pakistan, and who let a great American city be largely destroyed even with all the advance warning of a disaster that one might hope for, assuring disaster managers from his vacation hideaway that everything would be just fine -- it seems impossible that any thinking person might still be suckered into the GOP sales pitch that they are somehow a better option for national security, rather than be aghast at the breathtaking military incompetence of this administration, and desperate to return to the kind of administration that actually proved itself in Kosovo to be a master of military effectiveness with no U.S. fatalities and no degradation in military readiness or diplomatic standing -- the kind of administration that understands and responds to the reality-based world rather than just grand theories, grand photo-ops, and grand soundbites.

Is Ned Lamont Way Too Into "Memento"?

2006-08-27T16:07:00.000-05:00

All he needs to do is take off the tie, and Lamont is sporting the trademark cream suit / blue shirt combo that Leonard Shelby sported for most of Memento, after swiping it from Jimmy Grantz. (Okay, so I helped Lenny try on Lamont's tie to complete the match.) Maybe Lamont wanted to suggest in dramatic fashion that his prior votes for Republicans are all but lost to his memory, and that he is single-minded in his determination to track down and avenge himself on the mysterious stranger who broke into his home state and supported George Bush.

As long as Lamont is sartorially bringing up the analogy, we could easily take it further:

Uygur on the Pakistan Solution

2006-08-13T12:02:00.000-05:00

Cenk Uygur argues that our involvement with Pakistan is the right way to fight terrorism throughout the world - diplomatic engagement wherever possible, and enlisting the help of Islamic governments to work together to combat the true terrorists. There are a few things I'd add.

Another thing we've done exactly right in Pakistan that Uygur doesn't mention is the large amount of American aid provided to Pakistan in the aftermath of the terrible earthquake there last year. It wasn't even that much aid, or that expensive - but it caused a substantial rise in public sympathy toward America among the Pakistani public - no small feat.

If we went further and engaged in the kind of "weapons of mass salvation" campaign advocated by Jeffrey Sachs, even though it would involve a large rise in our foreign aid spending, it would still be only a drop in the bucket of defense spending, to which it might properly be compared, since could do a lot to shift sentiment to our favor in would-be "terrorist breeding grounds", in a grand extension of the Pakistan earthquake aid effect, and genuinely make our nation more secure.

Another major characteristic to account for in Pakistan's case is a leader who seems to be guided by rational pragmatism rather than dogmatic fervor, in Pervez Musharraf - something shared in common with Mohammad Khatami and maybe Bashar al-Assad, but unfortunately not with Ahmedinejad, or the clerics who wield the true power in Iran, or, say, Kim Jong-il. Opportunities for diplomatic engagement with those leaders on the level of our engagement with Musharraf don't exist, nor do the distinctions between them and rogue elements within their borders in terms of threats to the American interest.

The example of the Pakistan Solution also can't be discussed without mentioning that allying with Pakistan has still been something of a deal with the devil - it means going along with a nation armed with nukes that it never should have been allowed to acquire, even overlooking its past proliferation of nuclear technology to other unsavory regimes, strengthening the undemocratic administration of a general who seized power in a coup d'etat, and supporting a perennial threat to a great democratic nation on its border, India - which works as long as we are closely involved, but that is only a quasi-stable state.

The Pakistan Solution, or better yet, a magnified version of it, might work with Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, possibly with Sudan and Burma. Iran is a unique case, with a large and well-educated and generally pro-American citizenry. In North Korea, the regime is the problem and there is no domestic element with competing interests to the state. If there is one state more than any other that has little chance for a successful resolution without a proactive policy of regime change, and a compelling need for such resolution to liberate its people and remove its capacity for imminent threat, it is the regime of the "Dear Leader" Kim Jong-il.

The "far left wing" now encompasses Goldwater

2006-08-13T11:31:00.000-05:00

Never one to absorb a new insight no matter the evidence, or to distinguish the difference between news and editorial, the Washington Post's Dan Balz is still hammering away his Rove-issued propaganda on the Connecticut Senate race being about "the politics of anger". For two paragraphs in a row, he equates Lieberman with "civility" and "bipartisanship". Given this administration, why should civility be the highest priority? (Although, Balz's only "example" of Lieberman's civility is to quote Lieberman announcing that the Lamont victory was being celebrated by terrorists. Vote for me or you're a pawn of the terrorists - a real paragon of civility, Joe.) And what does bipartisanship mean when Lieberman is too far right-wing for a traditionally Republican voter like me? Balz must be reacting against that far-left-wing extremist who said, "I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!" That Barry Goldwater's edict is equated with the uncompromising far left wing shows how ludicrously well certain elements in the national debate have internalized Karl Rove's spin.

To Lieberman, from one of your former campaign donors: drop the towel already and get behind Lamont

2006-08-12T15:48:00.001-05:00

I donated to Lieberman's presidential campaign in 2004. I had been mostly a Republican voter prior to the Bush administration taking office and turned the GOP into a party of opposition to fundamental American principles. Without going through the specifics, I thought Lieberman represented the best ideas without regard to partisan affiliation.

That is no longer the case, for reasons best laid out in this editorial by the New York Times - and the background for which is best laid out in this memorandum by then General Counsel of the U.S. Navy, Alberto Mora. As the Times put it:

In his effort to appear above the partisan fray, he has become one of the Bush administration’s most useful allies as the president tries to turn the war on terror into an excuse for radical changes in how this country operates. Citing national security, Mr. Bush continually tries to undermine restraints on the executive branch: the system of checks and balances, international accords on the treatment of prisoners, the nation’s longtime principles of justice. His administration has depicted any questions or criticism of his policies as giving aid and comfort to the terrorists. And Mr. Lieberman has helped that effort.

Anyone who actually tries to paint Ned Lamont's stance on the war as far-left-wing, or the rejection of Lieberman as an enforcement of narrow Democratic Party dogma, is shockingly out of touch with the American people, around two-thirds of whom are against the continuing presence in Iraq and against the Bush administration, as the polls make clear. This includes not just Democrats, whether far-left-wing or not, but an overwhelming number of independents, including former Republicans driven into exile from the hostile takeover of their party, such as myself, and people like John Dean and Cenk Uygur.

It is continuing support for the status quo of our occupation of Iraq, with its disastrous mismanagement, inadequate troops, and disregard for human rights or distinguishing the innocent, that is a radical extremist position. And it is the broad bipartisan opposition to that status quo among the American people that Lamont laid claim to. Lieberman needs to recognize this, and bow out of his increasingly embarrassing independent run.

The Lamont victory in the Connecticut primary can be viewed in part as a victory for the influence of blogs - and none moreso than firedoglake, which has been promoting Lamont since his name recognition in his own state was within statistical noise of zero. Now firedoglake is promoting Dave Mejias for New York's third district, on Long Island, opposite Peter King. And what do you know, but the Cook Political Report has added NY-3 to its list of competitive House races, bringing the total of vulnerable GOP House members in all categories up to 55 (compare the previous month). The Cook doesn't do that lightly - it declined to recategorize the Minnesota Senator race from "toss-up" even after several polls have shown Amy Klobuchar with a double-digit lead (hooray!). Take a look at Mejias.

Journalistic standards slipping at Maxim?

2006-08-12T14:53:00.000-05:00

A nice little gem inside this piece about Maxim laying off some of its staff... Maxim actually had a fact-checker to lay off in the first place?!

"Unitary executive" power: honest belief, or flimsy excuse from the start?

2006-07-19T17:38:00.000-05:00

This is one of the most significant stories of the week: Alberto Gonzales acknowledged before the Senate Judiciary Committee that President Bush personally directed the DoJ to deny security clearances to its own Office of Professional Responsibility lawyers so that they could not investigate the NSA warrantless domestic spying program - with the excuse that each extra person who knows about the program is another potential leaker; in other words, the ethics lawyers at the OPR can't be trusted. But when it comes time to investigate who might have leaked information about the program, a huge crowd of lawyers and non-lawyer investigators from a variety of agencies were given security clearances without a second thought, putting paid to the excuse for blocking out the OPR.

Not only that - as the ever-vigilant Glenn Greenwald points out, this clear dichotomy serves as evidence for a culpable mens rea in the White House. The excuse that so many people have named as a last resort - that even if the administration's actions are illegal, they were being pursued with a good faith belief in their legality - is in shambles.

Update - Froomkin also reviews the revelation, comparing it to Nixon's firing of Archibald Cox, and puts it all in perspective: Bush blocked an investigation into the possible unlawfulness of his own program. The OPR had never previously been blocked from making an investigation since it was founded, 31 years ago - amid the effort to protect against any recurrence of the Nixon debacle. How many more parallels will cast this administration as the second coming of Watergate?

The mark of the tipping point has arrived: the major media actually refrain from labeling any Bush critic as a liberal by definition

2006-07-18T23:41:00.000-05:00

The Washington Post finally acknowledges that Conservative Anger Grows Over Bush's Foreign Policy, maybe after being prompted by yet another incisive blast of the Bush administration by their own George Will, although the category of conservative Bush critics is enormous and growing. Come to think of it, it's hard to think of any actual conservatives, in any definition under which that term was understood prior to the Bush administration, who remains an enthusiastic Bush supporter.

Of course, this Post article is discussing not the condemnation of the Bush administration's authoritarianism and lack of interest in the form of government established by the Constitution, but rather the disappointment in Bush's foreign policy dithering by the military überadventurers who for some reason are shelved on the conservative aisle these days. Even for the Kristol Krowd though, I can't understand why they still want the Bush administration to pursue any of their overseas objectives. Eliminating foreign threats and spreading democracy, per se, are excellent goals. But the Bush administration pursues these goals with such disastrous incompetence, and such offense to innocent bystanders and would-be friends and allies, that it is turning neoconservativism into a hiss and a byword to persist for the next two generations. I can't imagine a greater harm to inflict on their cause than to continue encouraging the present administration to serve as its champion.

Actually, their truest champion should be the leader behind the most successful recent intervention to act aggressively against a fascist dictator - who hadn't even attacked us - and promote democracy among the oppressed - that intervention being in Kosovo, where we accomplished those goals without a single American combat fatality, and that leader being Bill Clinton.

Speaking of alienation between the Bush administration and conservative principles, I'm going to be attending and blogging John Dean's visit in a few days, while he promotes his new book, Conservatives Without Conscience. Should be lots of fun.

"Dear Mr. Data, You Made Me Love You"

2006-05-23T19:50:00.000-05:00

Trust Camille Paglia to provide the most exuberantly accurate diagnosis of Star Trek. [UPDATE: Link fixed courtesy of tip by commenter.]

"You know that crushing feeling of general helplessness that envelops you like a leaden blanket? Vodka can make it go away."

2006-05-16T20:57:00.000-05:00

Amelie Gillette comes up with the best marketing campaign ever. Check it out.

I had no idea how much conservatives hate Bush all the sudden...

2006-05-16T20:40:00.000-05:00

Greenwald surfs the right-wing blogosphere so we don't have to, to get the flavor of conservative reaction to Bush's big new immigration red herring, and comes up with astonishing news to report: apparently, the full-scale abandon-ship of the axis of right-wing bitterness. After carefully hand-crafting a political engine of xenophobia, it's tough to stay on for the whole ride.

And they say the Democratic base is just a loose collection of independent interests - the interests don't get more independent, or more mutually opposed, than the cheap-labor-loving big-business interests that provide the money and command the truly heartfelt loyalty of the GOP, and the social conformist-isolationists the GOP has counted on to get out the vote and who are now turning immigrants into the new scapegoat.

Bush's approval rating was already going to keep tanking - the bungled Iraq war alone is enough to keep pushing the national sentiment toward those responsible for it ever further downward, for as long as it goes on - whether or not America has as much righteous indignation over warrantless domestic spying and prisoner abuse as it should. But with the very core of his base now finding excuses to desert him and trade fantasies of impeachment, I would not place even money on Bush finishing out the summer without pulling a federal version of a Bob Taft, and hitting a new all-time lowest approval rating of any president in the history of polling.

If only the country would stop thinking of impeachment as a drastic step, and think of it more like a European parliament voting no confidence in their prime minister. Impeachment is a vital tool for expressing the democratic will - in this case, the democratic will to dispose of executives who commit not just high crimes, but even just misdemeanors - even just little infractions - as we would expect of an executive who remains subservient to the people and their elected legislature, as the Framers intended.

"Bush approval rating hits new low" - again... and again... and again...

2006-05-08T15:53:00.000-05:00

How many times does this headline have to run before it's no longer newsworthy to note that Bush's approval rating has once again inexorably declined? It's kind of like a headline that says "Thousands dead from old age". I guess it will be newsworthy again when Bush actually breaks the record for lowest approval rating of any president in the history of polling. But at this rate, that's coming up in about two weeks - the papers might as well hold off til then to keep the story fresh.

Zen blog koan: what is the sound of an empty post?

2006-05-02T02:43:00.000-05:00

Did Exxon CEO Lee Raymond Inspire a Star Wars Alien?

2006-04-16T14:09:00.000-05:00

Did Exxon CEO Lee Raymond Inspire a Star Wars Alien? The Post has some terrific evidence. Lucas named the alien Nute Gunray after Newt Gingrich and Ronald Reagan, whom he was intended to resemble. Maybe this was more of the same.

(For the uninitiated, the guy on the right is Twi'lek senator Orn Free Taa.)

What difference does public debate make when the administration has blockaded itself away from democracy?

2006-04-13T10:55:00.000-05:00

There's never an unprovocative moment reading Glenn Greenwald, as he shows us again with his post, Does the debate over Iran matter? He makes the persuasive point that the participation we take for granted in democratic, national decision-making is made into a fool's errand by the administration's claims toward dictatorial powers.

In short, any debate over the proper pursuits of our government - including what to do about Iran - has to turn back into a debate over how democratic debate can once again matter in the guidance of our country. The only answer to that is to bring the administration under control, by Congress or the Supreme Court finally taking away the whiskey and shotguns figuratively away from Bush and literally away from Cheney, and telling the administration to shape up or ship out. And the best way to make that happen is to throw the Republican bums out of Congress this November.

As for Iran, Bush and Ahmedinejad are sordidly in each other's embrace now - each looking to the other to hurl feces and beat his chest, as the only hope of whipping up nationalist sentiment and salvaging his own clout at home.

I found a different interpretation, though, behind Mr. Greenwald's characterization that "The administration... sees its powers as being tantamount to those exercised by Abraham Lincoln..."

Actually, Bush has far surpassed the powers exercised by Lincoln, because the Constitution specifically provides that "Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it"; and furthermore, Lincoln wrote to Congress at the earliest reasonable opportunity asking it to retroactively authorize his actions - and thereby expressly acknowledged the supreme authority of Congress over the president's execution of his duties.

Yoo's and the DOJ's reading of the Constitution is willfully dishonest. No other possibility makes sense. Their position has been adopted because that's the legal advice Bush and Cheney were shopping for, in the same way their purported advice from their military commanders is only precisely the product of shopping for commanders willing to read them their fantasy script.

The Constitution grants Congress the sole authority to "make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution... all... Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof", which manifestly includes the President. Conversely, it specifically obligates the President to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed" - those same Laws that Congress has the sole authority to "make all" of.

Even further, in case that wasn't clear enough, the Constitution grants Congress the additional, exclusive power "To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces", above and beyond the exlusive power to make all laws governing the actions of the executive. "Rules for government and regulation" defines a lot more particular, intrusive, hands-on, micromanagement than "merely" having sole authority to "make all Laws" for carrying out the executive function.

To take one example, the rules for the Patent & Trademark Office mandate what sizes of paper you may (8&1/2x11 or A4) or may not (anything else) use to submit anything to the Office. There is little if any limit to the closeness and intimacy of control implied by a sole authority to make rules and regulations, in addition to just laws, to administer an organization.

Even with Congress authorized to make all rules for the military, the Founders had debated whether the military was too great a threat to democratic control of government, and debated adding to that clause, "provided that in time of peace the army shall not consist of more than thousand men." (Aug. 18, 1787, Constitutional Convention)

In his Commentaries on the Constitution (1833), Joseph Story explained that this clause was added without objection, and was motivated specifically to avoid the type of executive control of the military that they had seen so abused by King George of England: "The whole power is far more safe in the hands of congress, than of the executive; since otherwise the most summary and severe punishments might be inflicted at the mere will of the executive."

The President, the military, and the entire executive branch were intended by the Founders to be the humble handmaidens of Congress, the branch closest to the People. The gang in power now haven't exaggerated the Constitutional role of the president; they have declared open rebellion against it.

(This got a lot bigger than I'd planned on for a comment on Mr. Greenwald's site, so I cross-posted.)

Clinical trials by for-profit companies are unscientific by definition

2006-04-12T09:12:00.000-05:00

The Post reports on findings of systemic error in pharmaceutical trials sponsored by companies making the drug being tested, which lie squarely in the definition of Cargo Cult science. No one fluent in science can possibly be surprised by these results. The only question is why supposedly scientific experiments to compare the efficacy of different products are still given any thought at all; why the government acknowledges them, why any supposed scientist puts his name on them, why any supposed scientific or medical journal publishes results from them, when they are unscientific by definition. By that I mean, the definition of science includes at its core taking all possible steps to eliminate bias, to proactively investigate all possible sources of bias and do everything you can to root them out, out of recognition that human perception is slippery, and will always - always - skew interpretation of experimental results.

The Great Master said it best:

“But there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in Cargo Cult Science… It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty – a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid – not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked – to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.

“Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can – if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong – to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. …

“In summary, the idea is to try to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.” (Richard Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, pp. 209-210.)

Leaks are bad things... leaks are good things...

2006-04-11T05:56:00.000-05:00

Bottle of Blog has a hilarious recap of Dubya's antics.

(P.S. If you need reminding of the reference...)

Centrisity interviews Obama

2006-04-10T17:40:00.000-05:00

Update on the Amy Klobuchar - Barack Obama rally: Centrisity got a great blog interview with Obama. Check it out.

The origins of patent law

2006-04-10T13:00:00.000-05:00

Hat tip to Brad DeLong for pointing us to the new blog by Greg Mankiw.

One of his posts prompted me to make the following observation:

This article by Paul Romer is a great reference.

However, I have to take exception with his assertion that "The British invented patents and copyrights in the seventeenth century."

Aristotle in "Politics" criticizes what he says is a proposal by the architect Hippodamus of Miletus for the state to provide a system of rewards for those who make useful inventions. The first true patent law that we know of was an act passed by the Senate of Venice in 1474. It said in part,

"...every person who shall build any new and ingenious device in this City, not previously made in this Commonwealth, shall give notice of it to the office of our General Welfare Board when it has been reduced to perfection so that it can be used and operated. It being forbidden to every other person in any of our territories and towns to make any further device conforming with and similar to said one, without the consent and license of the author, for the term of ten years..."

Patent laws tended to spread throughout Europe from Italy after that, often with the express intention of luring Italian glass makers; most of the first patents granted by other governments were issued to Italians. Venice was followed by patent acts in various German principalities and France; then they were introduced in England by Elizabeth I's chief minister, William Cecil the Lord Burghley, again with the explicit intention of luring continental craftsmen to England.

James I abandoned the role of patents as rewards for new inventions, issuing them instead as monopolies for cronies on almost any kind of trade, prompting Parliament to pass the Statute of Monopolies of 1623, forbidding all grants of exclusive privileges, with a sole exception in section 6 for patents on new inventions to be issued "to the true and first inventor and inventors..." Similar laws were quickly picked up in the American colonies, and Massachusetts issued the first patent in America in 1641.

The Washington Post editorial page gets it horribly wrong again... this time about the NSA illegal domestic spying program

2006-04-10T01:14:00.000-05:00

The Washington Post editorial page is perfectly dazzled by the administration's and its congressional enablers' campaign to make it seem like something is actually being done about the NSA illegal domestic spying program. While admitting that "critics have confidently denounced it as illegal" - not mentioning that that includes most Republicans and conservatives who have actually given it serious thought - and, in the understatement of the month award, that the administration has nothing but a "less-than-compelling legal theory" to back up their claim - the Post editorial is assured that all is well from pronouncements by a couple members of Congress that their briefings on the matter have had "great detail".

Worst, the Post echoes the groundless and ignorant conventional wisdom foisted from the desk of Karl Rove, that "It's impossible to assess whether the program is legal or lawless, important or abusive without a comprehensive understanding of what it is..."

That's just not the case; comparing what the administration has already admitted to against the law, makes it perfectly clear that the program is illegal; a massive, illegal and unconstitutional program engaged by our administration continuously for over four years.

What's more, the administration has also said it has no obligation to follow any laws, whether already on the books or anything Congress cooks up now that the illegal program is in the light. So despite the Post pointlessly venturing that "The goal should be for a bipartisan group of senators and representatives, literate in the program's details, to agree about whether it is legal and necessary -- and what to do about it...", the administration has already proclaimed that it doesn't give a barrelfull of quail shot what Congress decides to do about it at the end of all their pontificating.

One more worthless, somnambulant petard puffed out by the Washington Post editorial page to lull the unsuspecting readership into a false sense of complacency.

But then again, they didn't have any credibility left to lose by this point.

Senator Norm Coleman reminds me why this November is a single-issue election: Does the United States Constitution still mean anything?

2006-04-09T13:37:00.000-05:00

I got a response from Norm Coleman to the letter I sent my two senators, him and Mark Dayton. It still blows me away that Coleman was first elected to public office (mayor of St. Paul) as a Democrat. Coleman wasted no time playing the war and terror card:

Dear Mr. ...,
Thank you for taking the time to contact me concerning S. Res. 398, a resolution to censure President George W. Bush.

I reject the idea of the President being censured. We must keep in mind that we are a nation at war and a country under threat of terrorist attacks. ...

That's a convenient way to cut off debate - except that neither Coleman nor any other enabler of the new monarchy has even tried to explain how spying without warrants contributes anything at all to national security compared with surveillance under FISA.

He continues:

I believe we must explore this matter deliberately and not use it for partisan political purposes. After careful consideration of the legal and security issues involved, I support the National Security Agency (NSA) Terrorist Surveillance Program[®].

So his need for deliberate exploration of the program was apparently satisfied with his unelaborated careful consideration of the legal and security issues involved. If they satisfy him, I sure wish he would take the time to explain them to me, because from where I'm sitting it sure looks like the President is breaking the law and violating the Constitution.

Joined to the hip with the all-purpose war and terror card is the blanket accusation that any criticism is just for "partisan political purposes". I guess it's inevitable that any effective manner of redressing the administration's law-breaking would reduce the political standing of the administration and its allies relative to those opposing them to defend the Constitution. Since that's inevitable, then any action taken against any crime or corruption could be just as fairly labeled as for "partisan political purposes". If it's a choice between a criminal government and the partisan political purpose of those who oppose it, I'll take the partisans.

Coleman goes on to extoll the virtues of the seven-member Congressional Capitulation Subcommittee in providing greater Constitutional oversight of the illegal domestic spying program, in which the seven senators will have all the authority of adorable fuzzy little teddy bears to investigate and exercise oversight of the program, as I discussed earlier.

Jack Balkin has another powerful post on the administration's self-anointment as a monarchy: while it's dismaying to learn from Abu Gonzales now that the administration is spying on purely domestic communications, it's also completely unsurprising based on the power they've already claimed: namely, the power to wake up every day and decide what the law will be that day. The very definition of a dictator is one who dictates: one who says what the law is from day to day, so that the only law is the dictator's word. It can't at all surprise us that they claim under that power to be entitled to spy on purely domestic communications, because they have already claimed the power to make what the law is a new surprise every day.

That's just the point here, the point that has not yet sunk into the popular consciousness of the Bush power grab: this is not just about spying.

This is about never again being certain what law the administration might or might not feel itself constrained to follow from one day to the next.

Once the President reserves for himself the power to ignore any law that he personally decides isn't compatible with his office, who can possibly say what law we might still be able to rely on? Or what rights, if any, we still have, that the administration does not feel free to ignore?

That is why this November is a single-issue election, with one issue so important that all other questions are insignificant in comparison:

Is our government still based on the United States Constitution? Or is it based only on the whims of what can only be called a dictator?

The entire Republican party has apparently aligned itself with unlimited presidential powers and devoted itself to enabling that coup d'etat from within, allowing the Democratic party by default to become just that, in far more than name: Democratic, as in the party of Democracy - and the only major party on the ballot supporting Democracy as the form of our government.

Even many in the Democratic party have not stood up against dictatorship and for Democracy - but many in the Democratic party have done so, and they will command the consensus once in power. So, the most important task we can accomplish right now is to vote out the legislators supporting a government that declares for itself what the law is and what our rights are, if any, from one day to the next; and to fill the Congress with lawmakers - enough to take control of one or both houses - who are loyal to the United States Constitution and who will defend the United States as a Democracy.

"Senator Feingold makes standing on principle and demanding accountability seem so effortless"

2006-04-08T18:39:00.000-05:00

VoxMía has a transcript of a terrific barrage Feingold unleashed on Faux News: "...when the president breaks the law and doesn’t admit that he’s broken the law, and then advances theories about being able to override the law on torture... what he’s trying to do is change the nature of our government..."

Blogging the Amy Klobuchar - Barack Obama Rally

2006-04-08T17:33:00.000-05:00

I went to today's Amy Klobuchar - Barack Obama Rally in St. Louis Park, Minnesota. Mark Dayton was there too - I haven't seen two senators together in person since I was in New Hampshire.

Amy Klobuchar was great, and she'll make a great senator. Anyone who wants this country back on track should donate to her campaign, here.

Minnesota is ranked by the Cook Political Report as the only toss-up among Senate seats currently held by Democrats, but Klobuchar looks like a tough campaigner with broad appeal among Minnesotans. There's an outstanding chance the Democrats will not lose a single seat, while picking up the six rated as toss-ups from the Republicans. And if John Kyl's new perpetration of fraud on the U.S. Supreme Court in collusion with the DOJ, and/or a new indictment related to the incident, gets some legs among Arizona voters, the Democrats may get to pad their new Senate majority.

Obama was a thrill to listen to live, clapping amid five thousand other supporters, in a way you don't get from watching on a screen. He quoted Martin Luther King, our twentieth century Founding Father, several times, to define the positive vision of the America we are striving for - one where an injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

Obama also said he wouldn't have thought he'd be citing Newt Gingrich, but then he made good on Gingrich's wry observation that the Democrats would have a stellar slogan with simply, "Had enough?" Obama turned it into a litany: Had enough of spending $400 billion on a war that has made us less safe? Had enough of exploding the amount of debt ordinary Americans owe to Chinese and South Korean and Japanese central bankers, so the rich can get tax breaks to make them even richer? Had enough of warrantless wiretapping and the trampling of civil liberties?

...Well now that you put it like that... yeah, I sure have had enough.

He also compared the current administration's approach to a teenager with a six-pack and the keys to his dad's car: "There's no adult supervision in the White House today!" He got a huge reaction to that.

Maybe Bush just wants to get impeached so he can go home already

2006-04-07T01:54:00.000-05:00

Cenk Uygur has another of his wittily written great ideas: maybe Bush is doing all he can to get impeached, because he's just tired and wants to go home and get back to a fun job, like clearing brush. It would certainly explain a whole lot... it almost makes too much sense not to be true.

If only he didn't have a Congress so exasperatingly dense: "Sheesh, what do I have to do to finally get you guys to haul me in before an impeachment hearing?"

Harry Taylor's Freedom of Speech

2006-04-06T19:22:00.000-05:00

"...in my lifetime, I have never felt more ashamed of, nor more frightened by my leadership in Washington..."

Read about Harry Taylor, American citizen and omen of the meltdown, putting the leader of the free world in his place.

Thanks to Sauntering for putting these two side by side.

P.S. Interesting strategy Bush is using, sarcastically laughing off this kind of criticism - along the same lines as Cheney continuing to keep his marksmanship fresh in everyone's memory with flippant humor about having shot someone in the face. What a pal.

IPthoughts: The Risks of Being a Patent Attorney

2006-04-06T15:34:00.000-05:00

Hat tip to Patently O for pointing out the new patent attorney blog IPthoughts - which has an interesting post on the explosion of potential liability for patent prosecutors. The blogger - a very seasoned practitioner - questions whether becoming a patent prosecutor is even worth the risk anymore! But it's true that patent prosecutors face a potential liability far out of proportion with probably any other field.

Consider the recent Blackberry settlement. Can you imagine if the parties had been negotiating a settlement that established the value of a patent at $612.5 million - but then RIM had been able to pull an invalidity holding out of the court? I'm sure the original prosecutor of NTP's patents was not having a pleasant time until the signatures were on that settlement.

Here's a cross-post of my comment at IPthoughts:

The chances of this are not infinitessimal - it happened to a co-worker of a brother of a co-worker of mine (got that?).

It also points out the ridiculously disproportionate potential liability of patent prosecutors compared to any other field, even surgeons. Which suggests that there should be some kind of solution: statutory relief for patent prosecutor liability.

No nuclear power plant would ever have been able to have been built if not for government-provided catastrophic liability coverage under the Price-Anderson Act. Government-provided catastrophic care coverage is often mentioned as an important component in restraining the explosive growth of private health insurance costs. Needless to say, the plight of patent prosecutors hasn't gotten quite the public or media attention, but government-provided catastrophic liability coverage for patent attorneys is the only way I see of ensuring fairness for patent attorneys and preventing gross distortions in the labor market.

It would not only be important to patent attorneys; a strong case could be made that the threat of such catastrophic liability is already restricting the labor market for patent prosecutors by intimidating many potential workers from pursuing the field - this post and several of the comments on it are evidence of that. This restriction on the labor market in turn drives up the costs for an inventor to seek patent protection, a burden likely to fall disproportionately on small businesses, which as we often hear, are responsible for two thirds of the job creation in this country.

So, time to lobby for a Job Creation Protection Act of 2006, to include a patent prosecutor version of the Price-Anderson Act. Every entity with an interest in facilitating the patent system and keeping down the costs of prosecuting patents should want to get behind this.

"Strategery" for seeking accountability for the warrantless domestic spying program

2006-04-05T13:39:00.000-05:00

Anonymous Liberal has a great discussion at Unclaimed Territory on how best to go about seeking to hold the administration accountable for the illegal warrantless domestic spying program. He's got some terrific ideas, though I disagreed with him on a few points:

As for the question of retroactive effect of any new legislation baptizing the warrantless domestic spying, this would make a standing argument more difficult, but I don't think impossible. The administration would still have spent four and a half years continuously violating a criminal statute; those who were subject to it are still victims of a crime (and those who have reasonable suspicion of having been victims still have the same argument that the secrecy of the program necessitates compelled discovery); and while they arguably lose the ability to seek injunction as a remedy, they could still seek compensation and punitive damages for having been the victim in the past.

Even then, I think they would still have a reasonable argument to seek an injunction under the argument that the administration ignored the statute before and claimed the right to do so, so it is likely that they are continuing to violate the terms even of the new legislation, whatever form it takes.

And as for the political inability of Congress to discipline the executive, instead waiting to defer to the courts: I think Congress could and should do so without waiting for the courts. This assumes the Democrats take control of one or both houses this fall, as is likely. Politically it may polarize committed Republicans, but I think past experience with Clinton particularly has ingrained on us an overbroad understanding of political risk, when the facts were very different. Clinton was a very popular president who was impeached for an offense only obliquely related to his office. Stonewall Jackson also enjoyed far more popular support and committed a far less offensive act than Bush before Jackson was censured. Bush and Cheney are deeply unpopular with the general electorate, and their offense is against the core of the rule of law and the Constitutional separation of powers. Their situation is not comparable to those of the past. Never before has a president openly claimed the power to ignore the law.

The real problem is they have still successfully framed the NSA scandal as a debate on national security. We need to reframe the argument in the popular understanding: The law already provided an eminently effective way to gather intelligence on domestic telephone lines. The warrantless domestic spying program did nothing at all to add to, and is irrelevant to, our national security. Rather, this is strictly a debate about the rule of law and the Constitutional separation of powers: is the President bound to faithfully execute the law as the Constitution mandates, or has the Constitution been replaced by whatever secret legal memos the President orders up from the OLC from one month to the next.

If the public and Congress understand the debate in this, its true nature, there will be no political price at all outside of further alienating the fairly small immoveable core of GOP-according-to-Bush loyalists who are apparently going to be alienated anyway by any development away from Bush reigning as a dictator.

Beyond that, even the general understanding that Congress must wait for the courts to hold the president accountable is a reflection of the dangerous erosion of Congress's powers that has been in progress for decades. The Founders intended Congress to be the pre-eminent branch, authorized not coincidentally in the very first article of the Constitution. The Constitutional Convention discussed the possibility of Congress appointing and dismissing executives as they were needed to accomplish discrete tasks. One of their long-running debates was whether to have a single chief executive or a group of co-equal top executives, and the terms of the debate centered on which option would be weaker and more easily accountable to the Congress; it was because they decided a single chief executive that would meet these conditions that they went with that option (see e.g. the record for June 1 and June 4, 1787). Other democracies have little problem calling new elections and replacing their prime minister when they grow dissatisfied with the one in office. Our office of president is different, and is impeachable only for high crimes and misdemeanors. Still, the double condition implies that it is not only high crimes, but also misdemeanors, i.e. minor crimes, that should disqualify the president from remaining in power. We should get used to treating our chief executive as firmly accountable to the legislative branch as other democracies do and as the Founders intended for our own nation. Continuing to treat Congress as unable to check the authority of the President, even if for chiefly political reasons, can only further cement this precedent as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Michael Bolton New White House Chief of Staff

2006-03-28T14:56:00.000-06:00

"I have complete confidence in Michael Bolton", said Bush. "He has shown the hunger to succeed, to be the soul provider to this administration. I depend on him so much I sometimes ask myself, how am I supposed to live without you?"

Glenn Greenwald on the futility of legislative restraints on Bush

2006-03-25T21:46:00.000-06:00

Glenn Greenwald hammers home the point that the conventional wisdom among Congressmen and journalists ignores: the Bush administration is vowing to disregard any new laws Congress passes, even if Bush goes through the charade of signing it into law (accompanied presumably by his unconstitutional signing statements fetish).

Sure, the DOJ claims the President is unrestrained by any check on his authority only in those cases involving protecting the nation - as he interprets it. How many times have he and his officials described any criticism of or disagreement with anything they say as giving "aid and comfort" to the enemy? Note the portentous phrasing; they are describing the constitutional standard for treason. Dissent from the Bush camp equals treason; and the president alone can determine what constitutes a national security issue that then he alone has the power to combat, resorting to any means. The entire democratic ideal of political disagreement and compromise vanishes in the Bush substitute for law.

The Bush administration's arguments for constitutional power are from a different planet, an alternate universe, from the Constitution of the United States. They can't once refer to the Constitution without simply ascribing its purpose as maximizing the president's powers for the purpose of "protecting the country", when neither the Constitution itself nor any random page flipped to from the entirety of the constitutional convention debates and the Federalist Papers could make any plainer that the overwhelming purpose of the Consitution is to prevent the government from accruing too much power. It's a perverse testament to the mass ignorance of the media that it has so often treated this as a close call with reasonable arguments going both ways.

No mere legislation is going to make a dent on the steamroller bearing down on our democracy. Only censure, or withholding executive branch funding, or an impeachment inquiry, can make a difference; and whatever the format, must be backed by a public outcry clear enough to give our administration convictions of a new, more modest ideal of its own power.

This is Bush and Cheney's master campaign plan? They're in even worse shape than we knew

2006-03-25T18:59:00.000-06:00

The Wapo reports that Bush and Cheney's central thrust for campaigning for GOP legislators is to "hammer Democrats on national security and the economy". I can hardly wonder how to view this, except as a gift: they want to draw attention to two nations that we have spent years and hundreds of billions of dollars on, only to have them both on the verge of disintigration, as well as threatening to "become the biggest corruption scandal in history"? They want to remind people that they were more interested in making a buck than in blocking one of the three governments in the world that recognized the Taliban government of Afghanistan, and whose ports were the transit point of choice for the nuclear black market of Abdul Qadeer Khan, from taking over six major U.S. ports? They want to emphasize their responsibility for an economy that has driven a greater share of American households into poverty, lowered the real income of most Americans, raised the national debt by almost 50% so far, and left the popular suspension of disbelief as the only remaining foundation of stable U.S. bond prices, all for the sake of further enriching the richest people in the country? So be it. Apparently they've just decided they'd really like the GOP to lose out this year.

There is hardly any other explanation for the perverse own-foot-shooting of a statement from Bush like, "If you want the government in your pocket, vote Democrat," when what could put the government more in your pocket - literally in the case of cellphones - than the knowledge that Bush enthusiastically breaks the law to listen in on our phone calls?

And what other explanation can there be for Ken Mehlman saying: "The Democrats' plan for 2006? Take the House and Senate, and impeach the president... With our nation at war, is this the kind of Congress you want?" Hmmm... yes, that's precisely the Congress I want. Very well put, Ken.

Or maybe it's because those are the least damaging topics they can come up with, when there is no topic left related to the responsibilities of national government in which the GOP rule has not proven to be a disaster.

Still, how else can we explain Cheney reminding us all that "the leaders of the Democratic Party have decided to run on the theme of competence", when the polls show that "incompetent" is now the one word that comes to people's minds most often to describe the Bush-Cheney administration.

And while everyone has been discussing the appearance of "incompetent", "liar", and "idiot" as three of the top four words Americans used to describe Bush and Cheney, I haven't seen anyone point out the equally interesting fact that the list now includes "ass" for the first time.

And their plan gets even better:

The short-term goal is stabilize Bush's low public-approval ratings by talking about the progress and prospects for victory in Iraq. The White House also hopes to minimize intramural GOP feuding with a skeletal domestic agenda. Congressional leaders have a legislative schedule that will have members out of Washington much of the time.

So, the master GOP plan is to try to slow down or stop the freefall of Bush's approval rating; apparently to try to do this by reminding everyone of the incomprehensibly wretched job they've done in Iraq; and because since doing anything at all in Washington seems to keep making things worse, they will just try to do nothing at all to run this country.

But as this article points out, Bush and Cheney are already campaigning furiously for endangered GOP incumbents, and for good reason: they know it is their own hides they are trying to save, since a loss of GOP control of either house of Congress is an instant winning ticket to some real investigations into the vast taxonomy of GOP scandals.

Which is why Bush and Cheney have been reduced to sending "word to Capitol Hill that they would be happy to raise money even for those candidates who, for political reasons, want to put some distance between themselves and the White House." In other words, even though you are fleeing for your political lives from the nationwide stinkbomb of our approval ratings, please please let us help you in some way to get reelected, since at least you won't open impeachment hearings against us.

The new Mars probe is now imaging the planet at 2.49 meters per pixel

2006-03-24T14:13:00.000-06:00

Gorgeous.

See here for more.

Yeah, Ben Domenech sure does appreciate the attention

2006-03-24T13:18:00.000-06:00

Famous last words: "Two clarifications for the many folks who have risen up in force to attack the existence of this blog (I appreciate the attention, by the way)..."

So much for Red America... and, given the conditions under which Domenech (career over at 24... so sad) was outed as a racist and plagiarist, strike another point for the rising power of blogs.

Out of all his banal bigotry, he gets busted for... stealing a review of Final Fantasy?! That's rich.

The next question is how much heat Jim Brady and/or someone else at WPNI is going to take for this.

El Wapo.com closed their apology for hiring the dude by obligatorily pointing out "We also remain committed to representing a broad spectrum of ideas and ideologies in our Opinions area." Presumably they're going to try to come up with a replacement conservative blogger (after a far more thorough review of the candidates).

Here's an idea: give George Will a raise if he'll post a few blogs a week. He represents the critically endangered species of a proven solid intellectual conservative with his own original, worthwhile ideas (and even his own Pulitzer) rather than just being a human router for Fox News and Ann Coulter propaganda. And they don't have to look any farther than their own op-ed desk.

Just a thought.

Bush's arguments for executive power are "hauntingly familiar" to Nixon's Watergate lawyer

2006-03-24T13:01:00.000-06:00

John Dean has penned one of his best columns yet.

Racism and trademark protection

2006-03-24T11:06:00.000-06:00

Now that everyone has dug their trenches over the Red America fiasco, the Washington Post is taking great pains to point out that it is under different management than Washington Post-Newsweek Interactive (WPNI), the company that runs the washingtonpost.com website and that the Post would not hire someone like Ben Domenech. However, that distinction is fine enough to be lost not only on almost all readers, but also on trademark law. A trademark is fundamentally based on its owner policing the quality of the goods and services provided in association with the trademark. Whether or not the print paper and the website are under different management, someone up there, presumably The Washington Post Company, owns the "Washington Post" trademark, and they'd better take a studied interest, in the extremely near future, about whether they want that trademark to be associated in the minds of its current and potential consumers with someone who has been shown to have plagiarized, called Coretta Scott King a "communist", and expressed some retch-inducing racist rhetoric. (He tried to pass it off as "satire" or something, as emptily as Ann Coulter tries to claim "satire" as an all-purpose moral escape hatch for calls to kill liberals and other hate speech. Read and decide for yourself.)

Of course, Brad DeLong has made the all-too-plausible hypothesis that Red America is the Post's secret plan to discredit the extreme right. What better way, after all, than to pick out a Heckuvajob Brownie of PR - an unqualified hack who was appointed in the Bush administration clearly for no reason other than his connections, which happen to include Jack Abramoff, and whose writing education was apparently little more than a steady diet of Ann Coulter - and present him as the prototypical spokesman for Bush's red-state core constituency?

A brilliant plan, except that it is taking the Washington Post name down with it. Which is why I recently sent the following email - to the parent company, since WPNI and the print paper have been ducking for cover:

To: The Washington Post Company < TWPCoReply@washpost.com >
Cc: Jim Brady < executive.editor@wpni.com >, Deborah Howell < ombudsman@washpost.com >

Hi,

Regarding the uproar over the "Red America" blog on WPNI's washingtonpost.com website, The Washington Post newspaper has apparently been deflecting all complaints to WPNI, saying they have no managerial oversight of WPNI. However, the distinction between the two outlets will not be made by most of the market, particularly since both use the "Washington Post" trademark.

As a concerned customer, I sincerely hope that you at the parent company, who do have managerial control over both the paper and the website, are considering prompt action to protect the market's association of the "Washington Post" trademark with journalistic integrity, and to protect the value of that association to the share price of The Washington Post Company, by putting an end to a rapidly spreading market association with a blogger who has apparently been revealed to have plagiarized, called Coretta Scott King a "communist", and made truly despicable comments about African Americans that can only be descibed as promoting racial hatred.

Yours truly,
***

WARNING: ...
The information contained in this transmission does not
constitute legal advice. If you require legal assistance,
promptly seek the counsel of an attorney admitted to
practice in your jurisdiction. The information contained
in this transmission does not constitute financial advice.

"The founding fathers didn't trust George Washington with unlimited power. Why should we trust George Bush?"

2006-03-24T10:20:00.000-06:00

Hat tip to Mark Kleiman of the Reality-Based Community (as I hope we all are) for pointing this out: a candidate to succeed Spitzer as NYAG based his first commercial on a pledge to sue the Bush administration over the warrantless spying scandal, if he's elected. He came up with the fantastic line, "The founding fathers didn't trust George Washington with unlimited power. Why should we trust George Bush?" Maloney even has a sample complaint, or at least what appears to be a rough draft of one.

It would help if he made a more solid case for the State of New York to have standing to sue, at least for discovery of whether residents of New York have been targeted, because of the impossibility of establishing standing otherwise combined with a preponderance of the evidence that New Yorkers have been targeted. Establishing standing to get into court is I think the biggest weakness the complaint would have. Of course with more time and effort he could strengthen his case by finding individual plaintiffs with a strong case for standing, as the ACLU and CCR did.

I also found it a little odd that he refers to violated Fourth Amendment rights as "privacy", a famously penumbral constitutional principle, rather than the straightforward right to freedom from unreasonable search. It was also interesting that he alleged violation of people's First Amendment rights to free speech and free association, which I haven't seen argued regarding the NSA program, but could justify a good argument. As Justice Scalia has persuasively argued, the First Amendment freedom of speech includes the right to control the audience to which you direct your speech.

Mike DeWine's checks and balances: if a Senator attempts to check the adminstration's power, he spends the balance of his life behind bars

2006-03-21T01:35:00.000-06:00

Update on the disclosure penalties for Mike DeWine's Congressional Capitulation Act of 2006. Section 8 makes a felony out of disclosing any information about the warrantless domestic spying, with penalties of up to a one million dollar fine and up to a fifteen year prison sentence; and this is for any person who is authorized to receive information under the Congressional Capitulation Act or the old-fashioned FISA. This appears to mean not only staffers to the Congressional Capitulation Subcommittees, but judges, House members, Senators; they are all authorized to receive information by one of the two acts. So the oversight consists of a few members of Congress occasionally listening to some form of briefing - but if they communicate to anyone else what anything they learn in these briefings - say, that the administration is flagrantly violating criminal law, which is true now - your person you voted to represent you in Congress could be locked away for fifteen years. That is the "oversight" authority Mike DeWine proposes to give Congress.

That is why, when you think of Mike DeWine and his bill, you might find it accurate to associate him with Congressional capitulation.

What is the epistemology of the most influential person who is unaware of the meaning of the term?

2006-03-20T22:59:00.000-06:00

I was reading the letters in response to Slavoj Zizek's intriguing op-ed in the New York Times, when an insight on the Bush administration dawned on me. The first letter-writer, apparently a reverend, pulled up the boring old canard that of course atheists can be just as atrocity-prone as religious fanatics (wow, quite a stirring defense of the faith sir), because look at the Nazis and the Soviets! To which the all-too obvious reply is, it is not religion that enables people to regard their fellow mankind as sub-human, and to act like sub-humans themselves - it is dogmatism.

The Nazis and Soviets were just as dogmatic as the Catholic and Protestants of the thirty-years' war, as the witch-burning Puritans, as the disgustingly anti-Semitic Ferdinand and Isabella and Martin Luther, as the Wahhabists and Taliban and al Qaeda, as the Iranian clergy-fascists and purely Orwellian cult of the Dear Leader of Pyongyang. The Nazis and Soviets happened to be ruled by dogmas without traditionally religious themes, but that is just surface gloss.

The core of all dogmatism, that each of those societies and leaders of societies hold in common, is emotional-instinctual epistemology. They decide what to believe is true based on what instinctually and emotionally feels true. They are societies built on truthiness.

At the opposite of dogmatism, is the reliance on rational epistemology: deciding what to believe is true based only on what you can reason out in your mind, based on systematically gathered observational evidence, actively working to contradict and re-test assumptions and ideas, with an awareness of the trickiness of human perception and the tremendous capacity of the human mind to fool itself and to want to fool itself. Rational epistemology is the root of science, of law, and of democracy. It is a lot tougher than instinctual epistemology, because the latter is our natural state, while the former requires education, cleverness, devotion to curiosity, and hard work.

Once you accept your epistemology, everything else falls into place. Having chosen one option, you perceive and understand the world according to a set of arbitrarily accepted axioms initially selected for their emotional appeal, and compartmentalize away or simply deny or ignore all objective evidence that does not confirm your axioms, though you seize upon and proclaim the truth of any selective evidence you can interpret to support your pre-set beliefs.

Or having chosen the other option, you engage in a continual feedback loop of learning more about the world around you, and using your increasing understanding to continue to learn still more, you are able to tolerate ambiguity and learn from your mistakes, you are intellectually honest and humble in the face of all that still remains to be discovered. Rational epistemists will always have the intellectual humility to acknowledge the absence of claims to absolute authority and the potential validity of unfamiliar observations and experiences related by others; and to use reason to pursue the truth together. Yes: actual, objective truth. Which is why there is no such thing as American and Arabic and Japanese and African physics and biology (despite the navel-lint-picking of the (emotional-instinctual-epistemological) Strong program). There is only physics and biology.

(This also despite my law school mentor, who taught that there is no truth, there are only arguments. Shows what comes from not starting with a physics degree I guess.)

Part of the fallout of this is that, because the initially seized-upon assumptions of the instinctual epistemists are arbitrarily selected or imposed, instinctual epistemists are doomed forever to remain in insoluable conflict with one another.

It seems like the political fault lines in America have split generally along that rift between the epistemologically rational and the epistemologically instinctual. That is a far more relevant picture for today's political divide than the tired old hag of left and right. There is certainly no shortage of emotional-irrational epistemists on today's left - but the modern Republican party has enforced and achieved an astonishingly pure hegemony of emotional-irrational epistemology, in which reason-based epistemology is emphatically unwelcome.

This is true despite a variety of emotional-instinctual epistemologies working side-by-side within the modern GOP establishment; not only the fundamentalist Christian epistemological group, but also the Reaganomics trickle-down fundamentalist believers, the anti-science "intelligent design" and "global-warming-is-a-conspiracy" fundamentalist believers; the simple "liberals(or)gays-are-the-source-of-evil" hate-driven fundamentalist believers; etc.

As for what type Bush is, I think that's a trick question. This is just my impression, but I don't think he really has core beliefs of his own; I think his pride in leadership by delegation extends to delegating decisions on what basic assumptions to base his worldview on. I think that's the only explanation for his strange transformation from moderate, easy-going governor; that was just due to his temporary absorption of the worldviews of the lieutenants he happened to surround himself with in Austin. His very different nature after becoming president was a reflection of the very different nature of the people he surrounded himself with in Washington: mainly Cheney and Rumsfeld, although he had enough room to internalize all the modern GOP emotional-instinctual epistemologies listed above.

The proper question then is, what flavor is Cheney and Rumsfeld's epistemology, which they also imbue onto Bush as his primary mindset. I used to have sort of an impression that they have a rational epistemology. Then in the last few days, I read Zizek's essay and the letters responding to it, and Don Rumsfeld's defense of the good Iraq war. Then it came to me: Cheney and Rumsfeld's epistemology is emotional-instinctual after all, based on axiomatic internalization of Leo Strauss. That’s why they are perfectly certain that they are always right, that they know better than everyone else; that their own ideas about how many troops to send in to Iraq or what the reception would be like or how to rebuild the country were infallible to the point that all contradictory experts' ideas were worthless. That’s why they see themselves as the heroes of a struggle to defeat the very concept of terror and rid the world of evil, and why they believe in the need for an all-powerful executive, for a disregard of “quaint” concepts of constitutional rights, and for an absolute right to govern in secrecy – all despite a wealth of contradictory evidence and despite any obstacle of existing law. The axiomatic, irrational Straussian worldview is the root cause of the antidemocratic thrust of this administration.

Of course, it’s just a hypothesis; we need more objective evidence to rationally evaluate the idea…

(* As for Rumsfeld's column in the Post, I found myself agreeing with much of it: the rationale for a free and democratic Iraq is as compelling today as it was three years ago. I remain deeply disappointed by the Michael Moore wing of administration critics who ignore the fact of atrocity and terror as a way of life for twenty million Iraqis before we invaded. No matter how many phones have been tapped, America today is a land of tremendous freedom and dignity compared with the truly atrocious Iraq under Saddam. The problem with Rumsfeld's column is I don't believe it represents what he really believes - otherwise they would not have distorted the evidence to make the case for war; they would not have ignored the well-attested need to go in with two and a half times as many troops; they would not have flushed away five years' worth of expert State Department planning for rebuilding the country; and above all, they would not have permitted, and apparently encouraged, the savage abuse of detainees - which was not only despicable, but strategically stupid, in surrendering the claim to clear moral superiority to the previous regime and in inspiring ordinary Iraqis to hatred against the occupation. If we had had leaders who avoided each of those mistakes and did the invasion right, Iraq would be peaceful and prosperous right now with almost no U.S. troops remaining.)

UPDATE: Eugene Robinson is one of many, I'm sure, who is also busy wondering about Cheney and Rumsfeld's perception of reality.

What is the NSA domestic spying scandal?

2006-03-20T22:13:00.000-06:00

This is a basic intro to the NSA domestic spying scandal, a primary topic of shotgunfreude. This will remain permanently linked from near the top of the sidebar.

The administration of George W. Bush has been violating criminal law for the past four years, continues to do so, and claims that it has the authority to do so - that the law cannot restrain it. This is demonstrated most clearly in its program for the National Security Agency (NSA) to spy on American people, on American soil, without judicial warrants, which the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act clearly makes a felony. The administration's actions and claims usurp the checks and balances at the foundation of our Constitution and our democracy. It will either be brought to an end soon by Congress and the courts, or it will become institutionalized and our Constitution will cease to function except in official rhetoric.

If you'd like to learn more, please investigate the following excellent sources of information:

A first letter and a second letter by 14 top legal scholars including Harold Koh, David Cole, Marty Lederman, Geoffrey Stone, Laurence Tribe, etc.;
A first memo and a second memo by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, the investigative arm of the U.S. Congress;
A memo by David S. Kris, President Bush's former Associate Deputy Attorney General for national security;
An essay by John Dean, former Republican Counsel to the President;
An essay by law professor David Cole;
An essay by law professor Edward Lazarus;
A further collection of essays and references by attorney Glenn Greenwald; and
Another collection of posts by law professors Jack Balkin, Marty Lederman and friends.

Other relevant references and discussion are scattered throughout this blog.

The administration - in the words of Mssrs. Bush, Cheney, Rove, McClellan, and Gonzales - has frequently defended its disregard for the law by saying "Our position is that if someone in America is talking to al Qaeda, we want to know about it" - implying that its law-breaking program is needed to combat terrorism, that we cannot defeat terrorism unless we abandon democracy. This flagrantly misrepresents the positions of those who insist that the president remains bound by the rule of law. No politician has argued that we should not conduct intelligence on terrorists. But the law already provides all the tools needed to track and fight terrorism. The administration has simply chosen to ignore the law.

Even many Republican leaders such as Senator Arlen Specter have said the NSA program violates the law. There has been a huge push from both sides of the aisle to investigate the program further and/or to write a new law to restrain the scope of the program and/or simply legalize to varying degrees. However, all of these efforts are a waste of time: since the administration openly admits to violating the law, that fact is known by everyone prior to any further investigation; and since the administration claims the right to violate the law, this would apply equally to any future law Congress comes up with. The only option remaining for Congress, if it is to remain a functioning body, is to ensure the administration decides it must be governed by law after all - either by taking action sufficient to convince the present administration to humble itself, or by clearing out the current administration and making room for a new one, by impeachment proceedings.

That is why the least disruptive meaningful step to take right now (as of March 2006) is Senator Russ Feingold's resolution to censure the president. Anything less, at this point, is a meaningless waste of time - as indicated above. It might be hoped that the ever-increasing attention, investigation, and opprobrium by Congress and the public spurred by the censure resolution will suffice to motivate the administration to submit itself to the rule of law. If it does not, then impeachment will become the only remaining solution to the disruption of our democracy.

I'm an attorney in private practice and I was a solid Republican voter until 2002, after going through our first stiff dose of the Bush administration. (It did more than turn me off to this particular president - it made me fundamentally reconsider all my basic political assumptions.) I write about this stuff here, and in letters to members of Congress etc., because I'm a huge fan of American democracy and I'd like it to still be around in twenty years.

Is a flame-engulfed theater not really burning if only one person yells "fire"?

2006-03-20T21:00:00.000-06:00

That is Rove's talking point of the week, which he has been even more successful than usual at instantly massaging into the brains of our somnambulant media.

"Mainstream media", that is - not like the bright Lindsay Beyerstein at Majikthise, who of course calls it like it is: Russ Feingold's "preemptive strike against would-be collaborators in his own party" will prove to be the Agincourt rallying cry that calms the shivering knees and restores resolve to the hearts of his congressional band of brothers and sisters - and that happy few along with the rest of us will know to whom credit for the victory belongs.

"Quattrone Wins His Appeal" - shotgunfreude art object #001

2006-03-20T17:40:00.000-06:00

Important Update on the "Congressional Capitulation Act of 2006"

2006-03-17T13:30:00.000-06:00

Glenn Greenwald and Marty Lederman point out that, contrary to media reports, DeWine's warrantless spying "oversight" bill, the Congressional Capitulation Act of 2006, would not even require approval from a congressional subcommittee after 45 days - it only requires the administration to brief the House and Senate Warrantless Spying Capitulation Subcommittees, and certify that continuing the program is "appropriate", every 45 days.

Wow, what an amazing oversight power they've wrested from the White House.

Here then is our new Fourth Amendment According To Mike DeWine:

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, unless the chief executive feels like it would be appropriate."

While they're at it, the bill needs one more tweak: instead of senators and house members on the Warrantless Spying Capitulation Subcommittees, require the administration to provide its briefing and certification every 45 days to a subcommittee of stuffed Elmo dolls. The Elmo dolls would have just as much capability of meaningful oversight as the members of Congress are giving themselves in this bill, and the Elmo dolls would free up the legislators' time for more important things, like fundraising or busily preparing for their next unconstitutional surrender of their own power.

Oh and in case you're not thrilled yet, I noticed it also (in section 8) makes a felony out of disclosing any information about the warrantless domestic spying, to the tune of a one million dollar fine and a fifteen year prison sentence. That'll teach any whistleblowers to try to alert James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of massive lawbreaking by the administration.

UPDATE: I made this for the April 9 post...

"Any other laws you're breaking that we could rewrite to match your whims, sire?"

2006-03-17T02:32:00.000-06:00

Some Senators are still trying to pass a bill blessing the warrantless domestic spying program. The three biggest problems with this attempt are:

It would make a mockery of the Fourth Amendment; as even Arlen Specter said, there is no way we're going to let the government "do whatever the hell it wants" for 45 days; and even after that, applying for a warrant to four out of seven Senators, who not only have far more things than judges to worry about but are also eminently subject to political tides, does not make the search Fourth-Amendment-reasonable, as Anonymous Liberal cogently discussed. [* See update above...]
As Jack Balkin points out, to reward the administration's law-breaking by offering to rewrite the laws to reflect the king's wishes renders Congress a puppet body - a mere courtly scribe to jot down the way their master feels things should be that day, rather than "All legislative Powers [being] vested in a Congress of the United States..."
Most of all, since Bush's fundamental argument is that Congress is not authorized to pass laws that he must follow, whatever "compromise" laws Congress comes up with are an exercise in futility, since Bush will feel no more need to follow new laws than he feels to follow the laws already on the books. Al Gonzales made that position pretty clear when he humiliated the Senators trying to grill him by saying "to the extent that Congress wants to suggest legislation, obviously, we'll listen to your ideas", but would regardless carry on according to its own interpretation of its own power. Nothing Congress does will have any meaning until they can effectively ensure that the President will once again be bound by the laws already on the books.

More plain and simple lies to defend warrantless spying - now from the Wall Street Journal

2006-03-16T16:22:00.000-06:00

The Wall Street Journal has attacked Feingold's censure resolution. No big surprise there - but what is shocking, for supposedly the respectable upper crust of the right-wing media, is that every point of their argument can easily be shown to be outright lies – or at the minimum, a complete disregard for the distinction between truth and lies. This just goes to show their only interest is propagandizing for the administration. Here's the one paragraph on their editorial page where they take a break from horse-race handicapping the resolution, and try to dismiss its merits:

As a legal matter, Mr. Feingold's censure proposal is preposterous. The National Security Agency wiretaps were disclosed to Congressional leaders, including Democrats, from the start. The lead FISA court judges were also informed, and the Attorney General and Justice lawyers have monitored the wiretaps all along. Despite a media drumbeat about 'illegal domestic eavesdropping,' Mr. Bush's spirited defense of the program since news of it leaked has swung public opinion in support.

Here are the WSJ arguments compared to the facts:

WSJ: "The National Security Agency wiretaps were disclosed to Congressional leaders, including Democrats, from the start."
Fact: The warrantless NSA wiretaps were disclosed to eight members of Congress, including four Democrats; all eight were prohibited from making any recordings, taking any notes, or making any disclosure to anyone about what they learned. Needless to say, they had no way of engaging in any oversight; they were not allowed any questions.
Conclusion: How was this different in effect than wheeling in eight slabs of tenderloin and briefing them on the NSA program? The eight members of Congress were bound and gagged; they were literally not allowed any way to investigate further or to let what little knowledge they had been provided from having any effect on the world outside their own minds. Some of them, like Jay Rockefeller, had grave concerns, but were frustrated in taking any action.

WSJ: "The lead FISA court judges were also informed..."
Fact: Only the chief judge of the FISC - originally Royce C. Lamberth, then Colleen Kollar-Kottelly - was briefed. They, like the eight members of Congress, were forbidden from taking any notes or making any disclosure to anyone else. They, like some of the eight members of Congress, had grave concerns about the program, but had no real way of acting on those concerns.

WSJ: "...and the Attorney General and Justice lawyers have monitored the wiretaps all along."
Fact: At least some Justice lawyers were in on the program, but even the Deputy Attorney General for national security, David S. Kris, was not informed of it, despite it going on for two years while he held that position.
Conclusion: Many Justice Department attorneys, like James Comey and Jack Goldsmith, and even John Ashcroft and John Mueller, were concerned about whether the program was legal. Comey and Goldsmith are gone, and Kris was apparently never even informed; when the administration says they had lots of DOJ lawyers approve the program, what this really means is that they pre-determined the legal conclusion beforehand, then relied on those lawyers willing to rubber-stamp that pre-determined conclusion.

WSJ: "Despite a media drumbeat about 'illegal domestic eavesdropping,' Mr. Bush's spirited defense of the program since news of it leaked has swung public opinion in support."
Fact: dozens of news outlets have reported on the warrantless domestic spying program, including the fact that dozens of legal scholars, from across the political spectrum - including conservatives like David S. Kris, Bruce Fein, Bob Barr, Bill Sessions, Richard Epstein - have concluded that the program is illegal. The public opinions of the major media and most Democratic senators, following the lead and/or intimidation of the GOP propaganda machine, have been dismissive of censuring Bush, but the actual public opinion of the American people has been 33% approval of the President, 52% approval for Congress considering impeachment if Bush wiretapped American citizens without the approval of a judge (which he did), and 46% in favor, compared with 44% opposed, to the Senate passing a resolution censuring Bush for authorizing wiretaps of Americans within the United States without obtaining court orders.
Conclusion: Responsible reporting from virtually every news outlet not connected to the GOP propaganda cabal of the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, et al. is dismissed as a "drumbeat", without any substantive rebuttal of their reportage. Bush did indeed come out swinging on this after it was made public by the New York Times, because he was trapped in a corner - it was plainly obvious that he was violating the law, and he only had a few options remaining, all of them desperate - the one he went with being the declaration that he is authorized to ignore the law. The major media and the Senate are caught in an echo chamber listening to each other, and both lagging far behind the American people, who overwhelmingly disapprove of Bush. With a plurality of the public already in favor of the censure resolution despite its recency and the overwhelmingly negative commentary surrounding it, the demand for censure is only going to keep rising.

Going back to the beginning of the paragraph, the WSJ says "As a legal matter, Mr. Feingold's censure proposal is preposterous." So the WSJ argues that the warrantless spying was in fact legal because it was disclosed, under secrecy orders, to eight legislators, one judge, and some executive branch employees. I hope the WSJ editorial board doesn’t include any lawyers; if it does, they should go back to their law schools and demand a refund.

What does the law actually require?

The law requires that:

“On a semiannual basis the Attorney General shall fully inform the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence [the entire committees – not to eight members under a gag order] concerning all electronic surveillance under this subchapter. Nothing in this subchapter shall be deemed to limit the authority and responsibility of the appropriate committees of each House of Congress to obtain such information as they may need to carry out their respective functions and duties.”

50 U.S.C. 1808(a)(1).

The administration clearly violated this law.

The law also requires that:

“…when the Attorney General reasonably determines that: (1) an emergency situation exists with respect to the employment of electronic surveillance to obtain foreign intelligence information before an order authorizing such surveillance can with due diligence be obtained; and (2) the factual basis for issuance of an order under this subchapter to approve such surveillance exists; he may authorize the emergency employment of electronic surveillance if a judge having jurisdiction under section 1803 of this title is informed by the Attorney General or his designee at the time of such authorization that the decision has been made to employ emergency electronic surveillance and if an application in accordance with this subchapter is made to that judge as soon as practicable, but not more than 72 hours after the Attorney General authorizes such surveillance.”

50 U.S.C. 1805(f).

In other words, (1) the Attorney General’s determination that the need for a wiretap is an emergency has to be reasonable; (2) he or his designee must inform a FISC judge that they decided to wiretap before getting a warrant, as soon as they make that decision, as a separate requirement from getting the warrant within 72 hours; and (3) he must file a warrant application within 72 hours.

The administration clearly violated each of these three aspects of this law.

What is preposterous is not Mr. Feingold's censure proposal, but rather the Wall Street Journal’s disregard for the plain and simple truth.

Et tu, Barack?

2006-03-16T02:43:00.000-06:00

"I haven't read it", "it" being Senate Resolution 398, on the censuring of George W. Bush.

Yet, Obama has a photo on his senate.gov home page of himself standing at Feingold's side. Does this mean he's thinking about co-sponsoring the censure?

Maybe he just needs a day or two to make sure he's thought things through before joining the call for censure and the effort to educate America on the reasons for it. Come on, Barack, you can do it.

And on the topic of Brutuses (Bruti?), even The Times falls into the same Rove-scripted spin on the censure resolution, passing on Minitrue's propaganda with nary a critical glance...

...at least until the last line: "It looked bizarre, too, when Father Robert F. Drinan and a handful of others, such as John Conyers Jr. in 1972 similarly were planning for the impeachment of President Nixon... When the moment of truth came, they were ready."

This one has to bubble up from below too, since the Democrat rank and file are in shivering milquetoast mode wondering how they could avoid appearing weak if they actually stand up for something... even though, as Cenk Uygur wryly as ever notes, Note to Moronic Democratic Senators: Americans Can't Stand George Bush.

He points out how depressingly obviously wrong the Democrat leadership took away the moral of the story of Kenneth Starr - "taking action against the sitting president is really unpopular" - when there are a couple of little distinctions that make the comparison about as apt as comparing a Bordeaux with an asteroid impact: (1) Clinton's approval rating was 72%, while Bush's is 33%; and (2) Clinton's crime was lying about an affair, while Bush's is - or rather, includes - claiming not to be subject to the law - a big part of the reason for difference number (1), because we the people of America know which one of those offenses gravely threatens America, and trying to cover up adultery is not it.

Support Feingold's Censure Resolution: A Letter to my Senators

2006-03-15T21:36:00.000-06:00

I just wrote and faxed this to my two Senators, after feeling prompted by Jane Hamsher. We'll see how they reply. I can't help but wonder how Paul Wellstone would have replied, if a plane crash hadn't handed the election to Coleman.

Huge hat tips to Harold Koh, David Cole, Marty Lederman, Geoffrey Stone, Laurence Tribe & friends, Koh and friends again, the Congressional Research Service, the Congressional Research Service again, David Kris, John Dean, Edward Lazarus, Glenn Greenwald, and many more for keeping on top of this.

I removed my name and address and added hyperlinks for this web version. Visible URLs are as included in the letter.

March 15, 2006

The Hon. Mark Dayton
Federal Building, Suite 298
Fort Snelling, MN 55111
Fax: 612-727-5223

SR-123, Russell Office Bldg.
Washington, DC 20510
Fax: 202-228-2186

The Hon. Norm Coleman
2550 University Ave W, Suite 100N
St. Paul, MN 55114
Fax: 651-645-3110

320 Senate Hart Office Building
Washington, DC 20510
Fax: 202-224-1152

Via Fax and U.S. Mail

Dear Senators Dayton and Coleman:

I would like to learn whether you intend to co-sponsor S. Res. 398, relating to the censure of George W. Bush, sponsored by Senator Feingold. I sincerely hope you do.

FISA couldn’t be clearer; it requires the government to apply for a warrant within 72 hours for a domestic wiretap (50 U.S.C. 1805(f)); it sets itself as the exclusive law authorizing domestic wiretaps (18 U.S.C. 2511(2)(f)); and it makes any wiretapping outside of its framework a felony (50 U.S.C. 1809).

The Justice Department’s two purported legal justifications for the warrantless domestic spying program are ridiculously shabby. It claims the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) of Sept. 18, 2001 actually authorized an exception to FISA (without you, the lawmakers, being aware of it). However, FISA itself also specifies that in case of a declaration of war, domestic wiretaps may be used for fifteen days before applying for a warrant (50 U.S.C. 1811). An AUMF is less grave than an actual declaration of war. It might plausibly have justified for the fifteen day exception – but not an exception for the past four years and into the indefinite future. Furthermore, for a later act to have repealed the very detailed and elaborate provisions of FISA would have required “overwhelming evidence” and that “the earlier and later statutes are irreconcilable.” J.E.M. Ag. Supply, Inc. v. Pioneer Hi-Bred Int’l, Inc., 534 U.S. 124, 137, 141-42 (2001).

Legal scholars from across the spectrum have concluded the same thing – even George W. Bush’s own former Assistant Deputy Attorney General for national security, David S. Kris, concluded that “It is essentially impossible to read it [i.e., the AUMF] as repealing FISA’s exclusivity provision.” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/
documents/NSAProgramQuestions.pdf – see also “Ex-Justice Lawyer Rips Case for Spying: White House's Legal Justifications Called Weak”, Washington Post, Thursday, March 9, 2006; Page A03; http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/
article/2006/03/08/AR2006030802360.html)

The Justice Department’s second supposed justification derives from Article II of the Constitution, which the Department of Justice claimed in its memo of January 19, 2006 (“Legal Authorities Supporting the Activities of the National Security Agency Described by the President”, http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/whitepaperonnsalegalauthorities.pdf) gives the President authority to act without regard to federal law due to an alleged exclusive authority over “the means and methods of engaging the enemy”. This claim is patently refuted by the plain language of the Constitution, which gives Congress the exclusive power to “make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution... all... Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof”; which also gives Congress the exclusive power “To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces”; and which specifically obligates the President to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed”.

Furthermore, every single time throughout American history that the U.S. Supreme Court has addressed the question of whether the President is authorized to defy federal law, it has rejected such an authority. See e.g. Little v. Barreme, 6 U.S. (2 Cranch) 170 (1804); Ex parte Milligan, 71 U.S. (4 Wall.) 2 (1866); Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579 (1952); Rasul v. Bush, 542 U.S. 466 (2004). In fact, in Rasul, the Bush administration argued that the very same purported exclusive Article II authority prohibited construing a statute to restrain the President’s actions. The Supreme Court flatly rejected this asserted power. The fact that the DOJ memo goes 42 pages without once making reference to Rasul, despite that it is the one precedent most directly controlling of the administration’s position, clearly shows (besides that the DOJ lawyers are violating legal ethics) that the Article II argument is based on simply ignoring contrary law.

The administration’s legal arguments are therefore transparently bogus. With no legal escape hatch, the plain fact remains that the President violated federal law and continues to do so. Congress must respond to put a stop to this now, or a precedent will be created that the Constitutional checks and balances do not apply to the President. This concern was echoed by Bruce Fein, former Assistant Deputy Attorney General under Ronald Reagan: “On its face, if President Bush is totally unapologetic and says I continue to maintain that as a war-time President I can do anything I want – I don’t need to consult any other branches – that is an impeachable offense. It’s more dangerous than Clinton’s lying under oath because it jeopardizes our democratic dispensation and civil liberties for the ages. It would set a precedent that … would lie around like a loaded gun, able to be used indefinitely for any future occupant.” (The Diane Rehm Show, National Public Radio, WAMU, December 19, 2005; http://www.wamu.org/programs/dr/05/12/19.php)

That’s what concerns me, and I suspect that’s also a large part of the reason why the President’s approval ratings resemble Nixon’s at the climax of Watergate. I don’t really care about wiretapping; if Congress had passed a law beforehand authorizing the NSA program, I would feel fine about it (although even in that case it is doubtful Congress would have authority to pass such a law in the face of the Fourth Amendment). What concerns me is that the President has openly and defiantly admitted to violating federal law, and claimed the authority to continue doing so as he sees fit.

Mr. Bush has a 33% approval rating (“Bush Approval Falls to 33%, Congress Earns Rare Praise”, The Pew Research Center, March 15, 2006; http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=271) in large part because the vast majority of American people condemn his usurpation of the Constitutional system of checks and balances. It is dramatic evidence that we the public are yearning for Congress to reign him in. While Congress is of course obligated to investigate his activities further, no further investigation is needed to know that the President has violated federal law; his own admission of that fact is clear.

The censure resolution is emininently justified and sorely needed. Please contact me at the address below to let me know if you will be supporting it, and what additional actions you will be taking in response to President Bush’s warrantless domestic spying program and to his claims to be authorized to ignore federal law.

Yours truly...

It's official: the bald lies being used for defending warrantless domestic spying are standard-issue talking points

2006-03-14T09:31:00.000-06:00

The Fix has a nice commentary on Feingold's move to defend our democracy and Frist's demagoguery in attacking him. Frist's talking points set up the same straw man we've heard from Dick Cheney, Scott McClellan, Karl Rove, and Sean Hannity: the Democrats don't want to wiretap Al Qaeda:

Somewhere in America today, a radical Islamic terrorist could very well be picking up their phone and receiving a call from their overseas counterpart. They will discuss plots to infiltrate U.S. cities and mount devastating attacks... If Russ Feingold had his way, U.S. authorities would do this with the intercepted phone call: hang up.

That is a whole lot easier to attack, and to explain in the first place, than trying to argue that "The Democrats want us to wiretap people suspected of links to Al Qaeda but to do so within the law, meaning we can immediately set up a wiretap on any phone call or person, as long as we apply for a warrant within 72 hours. And by the way, Bush explicitly said three times that this was still how it was being done, although he later admitted otherwise."

The "Democrats don't want to wiretap Al Qaeda" slur really makes me wonder two things: (1) who is going to be dumb enough to believe that Democrats actually don't want to wiretap Al Qaeda? and (2) who, if they actually read what Feingold said after listening to Frist, Cheney et al., is going to be dumb enough to believe the law did not permit anyone to wiretap Al Qaeda and the president had to break the law to protect America?

The answer to both, I suppose, is people who accept any announcement from Frist, Cheney, or Sean Hannity as authoritative, without ever investigating other sources or employing the rudiments of intelligent thought - in other words, many of the same people who still think Saddam Hussein was giving orders to the 9/11 hijackers.

But it's easy to see that the administration's Rovian talking points are intended to smother the rudiments of intelligent thought and instead serve as a somnolent mantra. For comparison, here is a passage from Frist's attack on Feingold:

So while the Democrats flock to the TV cameras to grandstand and play politics with national security, we'll continue to focus on the principle of prevention. And we'll continue to do whatever it takes to protect American lives.

An here's a passage from a political screed of a similar depth of thought:

All the ‘best people’ from the gentlemen's clubs, and all the frantic fascist captains, united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror at the rising tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of poisoned wells, to legalize their own destruction of proletarian organizations, and rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoise to chauvinistic fervor on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out of the crisis.

The latter of course is one of Orwell's paragons of the decay of thought as represented in the English language. Orwell might as well have been speaking of either one of these samples in his description of...

ugliness... staleness of imagery... lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house... every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one's brain.

So to criticize the administration can be condemned, without exposing onesself to the actual message, as to "grandstand and play politics with national security". Whatever the administration does is "whatever it takes to protect American lives." How can you not end all debate, and end any further rational thought on the matter, when to do otherwise would be to question "whatever it takes to protect American lives"? Notice the sinister confluence of meanings there: naturally we want to do everything we can to "protect American lives." But protecting American lives demands "whatever it takes". No possible action might lie outside of "whatever it takes" - even if what it takes is an ongoing violation of a criminal statute, or scoffing at the central elements of the Constitution. And so many Democrats are still trapped by the GOP's corruption of language - they pivot around the mere threat of being called "soft on defending the homeland", despite that those words have lost all objective meaning, from an administration that has acted as if homeland security were only a matter of conducting enough military adventures and abuse of detainees, and has done its best to resist spending money on securing our ports or borders, or the single most vital possible element of ensuring our security: tracking and decommissioning nuclear materials around the world.

The Fix has got it right that, besides whatever defense or threat to our democracy posed by either of these Senators, Frist and Feingold have both likely stoked the loyalty of many members of the solid base of their respective parties. The sad question is why solid Republicans would cheer for such a nakedly moronic affront to the Constitution and the rule of law. (Not all solid Republicans - see Bruce Fein, Bob Barr, George Will, David Kris, Bill Kristol, Bruce Bartlett, etc. and at least to some extent Arlen Specter, Olympia Snowe, Chuck Hagel, Lindsay Graham, Christie Todd Whitman, etc...)

It seems like so long ago now that the Republican party was where I felt at home. Almost a party slogan was "I love my country but I fear my government." One wonders how the current followers of the administration can possibly include a single person in common with the Republican Party of Bill Clinton's first couple years in office.

Time and democracy are on Russ Feingold's side (and on the side of those conservatives like Bob Barr who still exercise their own capacities of independent thought and buck the herd mentality). Just as Feingold's initially "radical" positions on the Patriot Act and the invasion of Iraq have been redeemed by history and become accepted as mainstream, so also, to his credit, will the great majority in this country soon look back with admiration on Senator Feingold's lonely leadership on defending the rule of law.

"Dissent = thoughtcrime" say Cheney, Frist, McClellan, Rove, Hannity

2006-03-14T00:21:00.000-06:00

Glenn Greenwald has a terrific post pointing out how desperate the administration's defenses of its warrantless domestic spying program are:

It is a potent reflection of how little the White House can say in response to the accusation that the President broke the law that they can respond only by: (a) flagrantly and dishonestly distorting the argument against it (by pretending that this is about whether we should eavesdrop on Al Qaeda), or (b) accusing those who protest the President's law-breaking of committing treason.

The administration isn't making these ad hominem attacks, and the ludicrous arguments of authorization by the AUMF or Commander in Chief clause of the Constitution, because they want to. They are making these attacks and arguments because their yearning to keep the program secret failed, and these flimsy excuses and accusations are the best plan B they can come up with.

"...it would be spiritually wrong" not to drink a Guiness in the car

2006-03-13T00:52:00.000-06:00

...in a St. Patrick's Day parade. How long would I have to live in Texas to be authorized to vote for this guy?

Feingold-Obama '08

2006-03-12T23:37:00.000-06:00

Our hero Russ Feingold is introducing a resolution to censure Bush for breaking the law with his warrantless domestic spying program.

Glenn Greenwald has some great comments on it. Regarding Frist's reaction to Feingold: "It is not possible to exemplify how an authoritarian cultist thinks and acts any more vividly than Frist did in making this statement..." But tell us what you really think, Glenn.

In the statement to which Greenwald refers, Frist repeats the frequent accusation that any form of disagreement with Bush equals aiding terrorists. It doesn't give much comfort to hear reassurances that the warrantless domestic spying program is only targeted at terrorist groups and those who affiliate with or provide aid and comfort to terrorist groups, when they also so often equate dissent with providing aid and comfort. Even when that dissent takes the form of expecting our leaders to follow the Constitution.

Frist's reaction needs to be repeated here, so we can see what he's saying:

FRIST: George, what was interesting in listening to my good friend-Russ, is that he mentioned protecting the American people only one time, and although you went to politics a little bit later, I think it's a crazy political move and I think it in part is a political move because here we are, the Republican Party, the leadership in the Congress, supporting the President of the US as Commander in Chief, who is out there fighting al Qaeda and the Taliban and Osama bin Laden and the people who have sworn, have sworn to destroy Western civilization and all the families listening to us. And they're out now attacking, at least today, through this proposed censure vote, out attacking our Commander in Chief. Doesn’t make sense.

In other words:
(1) Feingold is attacking the President
(2)(a) But the President is fighting the terrorists -
(2)(b) Therefore, it doesn't make sense to attack the President
((2)(corollary) So, as long as the President is fighting terrorists, he should be immune from criticism; the substance of that criticism doesn't come into the equation at all - even if the President is violating the law and the Constitution, it "doesn't make sense" to get to the point of asking in the first place whether that is a possibility.)

Feingold repeats what is clear to everyone who has considered this: we all want to fight and capture or kill terrorists who mean harm to this country. But the issue here is whether to hunt terrorists in conformity with or in violation of FISA, leading to the issues of whether there is any difference in the security effectiveness of getting FISC warrants versus failing to secure warrants, and whether America and its servants in Congress will hold the federal law and the Constitution to be meaningful, or whether "it doesn't make sense to criticize the President or hold him accountable to the law" is the only constitution left in effect in this country.

The administration's only defense for violating FISA, i.e. for failing to seek warrants for their domestic spying, is that all that paperwork is a burden - apparently annexing an asterix to the entire Constitution saying *To be followed as long as you feel like doing the paperwork. They haven't shown any reason why following FISA wouldn't be just as effective at neutralizing terrorist groups. We can defend this country from its external enemies just as well - more effectively, in fact - within the rule of law. No lousy Islamist extremists have the power to destroy America. The only way America could be destroyed is from within - if we, in the form of what we allow our government to do, are too weak and fearful to maintain those noblest ideals of our Constitutional democracy in the face of threats by cowardly death-cult Islamists.

If we were to allow our government to continue abusing detainees, we would inevitably become ever more accepting of it - as the soldiers and agents following orders, and as American people. I am tired of apparatchik politicians deriding criticism of detainee abuse as concern for terrorists. We have seen that many of the people being held at the overseas prisons were apparently lacking any connection with anti-American groups. Whether that is true in individual cases is besides the point: the point is that:

we don't even have a due process in effect to find out if they are innocent,
we are effectively cruelly punishing everyone there regardless of objective evidence, and
once we have gotten used to it being "okay" to strip away all rights and human dignity of foreigners, it would be only a matter of time before it became "okay" to do the same with Americans.

Orwell liked to quote Mussolini saying that democracy and fascism can never co-exist for very long; they are both a grave threat to one another, and one of the two must quickly destroy the other. It's a little ironic that Bush's foreign policy rhetoric embodies that view as to foreign governments - which is wonderfully admirable, despite the undemocratic provincialism of some reactionary leftists - while at home he seems determined to exalt the executive above the rule of law. That is precisely the fate which the Constitution was set up to avoid. Fear of an unbounded, monarchial executive saturates the Constitution and the contemporaneous writings of the Founders, it drips from every page of their thoughts.

Nor do I think the current state of affairs can persist much longer. Despite the depressing, cynicism-inspiring Apparatchik-speak exemplified by Frist's remarks above, there are too many decent American people throughout every corner of government and society to remain forever ignorant or tolerant of un-American programs like the warrantless domestic spying or the abuse of foreign detainees. People like Alberto J. Mora - or like some old personal friends of mine in the NSA and other government agencies, whom I trust implicitly.

The Dubai ports debacle didn't have that much to do with Dubai or ports - it seemed like every quotation from members of Conngress referred to their patience having been exhausted with trying loyally to defend the administration on warrantless domestic spying, detainee abuse, etc. The overwhelming Congressional rejection of the President's position on the ports, and the currently tanked poll numbers, are symptoms of America's immune response to the foreign tissue the administration tried to transplant into the body politic - the disregard, foreign to our nature, for the rule of law and universal human dignity.

The growing rebellion of conservatives - Bruce Fein, Bob Barr, George Will, David Kris, Bill Kristol, Bruce Bartlett, etc. - against the excesses of the administration, shows that the American ideal weighs more heavily in the collective American conscience than ideological or party loyalty. Ultimately, the Constitution of the United States is the American ideal branded in the hearts and minds of all its citizens. That Constitution cannot be waived away with secret orders and slapdash legal memos.

What did the founders really mean by "unitary executive"?

2006-03-12T02:46:00.000-06:00

I'm cross-posting from material I wrote for the Wikipedia entry on Unitary executive theory, pointing out what a crock it is:

Critics of the theory point out that the Constitution grants Congress the exclusive power to "make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution... all... Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof"; that the Constitution grants Congress the exclusive power "To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces"; that the Constitution specifically obligates the President to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed", where the "Laws" are defined as that which the Congress has the exclusive power to pass.[3] [4] They have also indicated that in every single Supreme Court case involving a statutory restriction of the power of the President, the statute has been upheld, including several in which the statute was only held to imply the limitation on Presidential power, let alone explicitly limit it; [5] that the phrase "unitary executive" that was discussed in the Constitutional Convention referred merely to having a single individual fill the office of President, as proposed in the Virginia Plan, rather than have several executives or an executive council, as proposed in the New Jersey Plan and as promoted by Elbridge Gerry, Edmund Randolph, and George Mason [6] [7]; and that the Constitutional Convention debates show that the Founders' primary concern behind whether to have a single executive or an executive council was to choose the one that would ensure that the executive would be relatively weaker and more easily restrained by the legislature; that those who argued for a unitary executive advanced the argument because they considered that the best way to limit the executive’s power and keep it subordinate to the legislature, in opposition to arguments that a plural executive would support the executive’s independence; and the term "unitary executive" was thereby bound up with the intention of keeping executive power checked and restrained. [8]

# [3] U.S. Constitution
# [4] Letter to Congress regarding FISA and NSA, Bradley, et. al., January 9, 2006; see cases listed therein.
# [5] Letter to Congress regarding FISA and NSA, Bradley, et. al., February 2, 2006; p. 5 (e.g. “The argument that conduct undertaken by the Commander in Chief that has some relevance to “engaging the enemy” is immune from congressional regulation finds no support in, and is directly contradicted by, both case law and historical precedent. Every time the Supreme Court has confronted a statute limiting the Commander-in-Chief’s authority, it has upheld the statute. No precedent holds that the President, when acting as Commander in Chief, is free to disregard an Act of Congress, much less a criminal statute enacted by Congress, that was designed specifically to restrain the President as such.” (emphasis in original) – 14 legal scholars including the current dean of Yale Law School and the former deans of Stanford and the University of Chicago law schools.)
# [6] Ralph Ketchum, ed. The Anti-Federalist Papers and the Constitutional Convention Debates (Signet Classic, 1986), p. 67 (“MR. [James] WILSON entered into a contrast of the principal points of the two plans [i.e. the Virginia Plan and the New Jersey Plan]… These were… A single Executive Magistrate is at the head of the one – a plurality is held out in the other.”)
# [7] Robert Rutland, ed. The Papers of George Mason (3 volumes, Chapel Hill, 1970), vol. 3, pp. 896-898; Ralph Ketchum, ed. The Anti-Federalist Papers and the Constitutional Convention Debates, pp. 47-49 (“If strong and extensive Powers are vested in the Executive, and that Executive consists only of one Person, the Government will of course degenerate, (for I will call it degeneracy) into a Monarchy – A Government so contrary to the Genius of the People, that they will reject even the Appearance of it. … If the Executive is vested in three Persons… Will not such a Model of Appointment be the most effectual means of preventing Cabals and Intrigues… Will it not be the most effectual Means of checking and counteracting the aspiring Views of dangerous and ambitious Men, and consequently the best Security for the Stability and Duration of our Government upon the invaluable Principles of Liberty? These Sir, are some of my Motives for preferring an Executive consisting of three Persons rather than of one.” George Mason, Constitutional Convention, June 4, 1787)
# [8] Ralph Ketchum, ed. The Anti-Federalist Papers and the Constitutional Convention Debates, pp. 42-43 (“MR. [John] RUTLEDGE… said he was for vesting the Executive power in a single person, though he was not for giving him the power of war and peace. A single man would feel the greatest responsibility and administer the public affairs best. MR. [Roger] SHERMAN said he considered the executive magistracy as nothing more than an institution for carrying the will of the Legislature into effect, that the person or persons ought to be appointed by and accountable to the Legislature only, which was the depository of the supreme will of the Society. As they were the best judges of the business which ought to be done by the Executive department, and consequently of the number necessary from time to time for doing it, he wished the number might not be fixed, but that the Legislature should be at liberty to appoint one or more as experience might dictate. MR. [James] WILSON… The only powers he conceived strictly Executive were those of executing the laws, and appointing officers, not appertaining to and appointed by the Legislature. MR. [Elbridge] GERRY favored the policy of annexing a Council to the Executive in order to give weight and inspire confidence. MR. [Edmund] RANDOLPH strenuously opposed a unity in the Executive magistracy. He regarded it as the fetus of monarchy. … MR. WILSON said that unity in the Executive instead of being the fetus of monarchy would be the best safeguard against tyranny.” Constitutional Convention, June 1, 1787; see also comments by George Mason, previous footnote.)

The O.K. Corral On K Street Project

2006-03-07T03:17:00.000-06:00

Bill Moyers has written some wonderfully hard-hitting jeremiads, along with some great reform ideas. But after going to pains to paint himself as a pure non-partisan truth-teller, he undermines his arguments by splicing a few of his own political preferences into his deconstruction of the antidemocratic status quo. To wit:

...the deregulation of the banking, securities and insurance sectors which led to rampant corporate malfeasance and greed and the destruction of the retirement plans of millions of small investors; the deregulation of the telecommunications sector which led to cable industry price gouging and an undermining of news coverage; protection for rampant overpricing of pharmaceutical drugs; and the blocking of even the mildest attempt to prevent American corporations from dodging an estimated $50 billion in annual taxes by opening a PO Box in an off-shore tax haven like Bermuda or the Cayman islands. In every case the pursuit of this legislation was driven by big money.

Well, the deregulation of banking, securities and insurance created a more flexible playing field that has produced wealth by creating new efficiencies; rampant corporate malfeasance and the implosion of all those 401(k)'s was the fault of a ring of spectacularly corrupt executives, but where's the causal connection? Enron, Worldcom, Tyco, and Adelphia didn't include a banking, securities or insurance business among them. Other structural defects may be blamed for enabling all the Lays' and Scrushys' crimes, like the all too hype-happy financial journalists, the brokers incentivized to issue "buy" recommendations and the poor saps who were dumb enough to ignore those incentives and take the brokers seriously, and most of all the lazy and/or Scrushily immoral boards of directors who failed in their duty to their shareholders to poke and prod into their business's dealings with persistent, sharp questions. Any director, large investor, or broker could have read Andy Fastow's plain-as-day assertions on the S-1s that the company has such-and-such off-balance sheet partnerships, and started making phone calls: who are these partners, what are the terms of the partnerships, why are they off the balance sheet?

The deregulation of the telecommunications sector led to long distance service being made available at 3.9 cents a minute or twenty dollars a month flat, and incredibly low rates for many international calls. I fail to see the corruption of democracy in that. It might have helped promote democracy by allowing lots of Ukrainians and Georgians (and Iranians...?) to spend a lot more time chatting with their American cousins and college student children and learning more about the freedoms we in America take for granted.

Rampant "overpricing" (otherwise known as "recouping investment") of pharmaceutical drugs is directly responsible for "rampant" funding of research and development of new pharmaceuticals to provide the next generation of medicines, and the next. There are tremendous problems with pharmaceutical costs - which we might address primarily by tweaking tax and business incentives to shift incentives more toward research and development spending and away from advertising and distribution, so we can translate costs into new medicines more efficiently - and by a nationalized program to help people pay for their drugs. For all its problems, something like Medicare Part D is basically a good idea - too bad it has been such a hack job in the details.

Striking the right policies on business taxation between nations is tricky and important, and sometimes a U.S. company really does reduce its tax burden just by staffing a few secretaries in a low-end suite in the Bahamas - but the big picture is not so black and white. As someone I work with related to me, his company's products are designed in part by engineers in Singapore; are made in China, with components from around Asia; and about half are sold in Asia. Why should it have been required to remain a U.S. corporation, when it is so international in nature? The system has still been abused - witness the "amnesty" tax break window for transferring foreign income into the U.S. - but let's try to fix those abuses, or the Congress-lobbyist incest that enables those abuses, instead of decrying all off-shore corporate tax strategy as corrupt.

The mind of god tied around his neck: Michio Kaku handwaves to Neverland

2006-03-07T02:04:00.000-06:00

The misguided Michio Kaku was on the radio today promoting his new book by declaring superstrings to be The Mind Of God that Einstein sought, and that the strings define physics as the harmony of the universe, chemistry as the melody, and the universe as a symphony. It's high time for Berkeley to revoke his Ph.D. for crimes against public understanding. What do any of those poetic claims have to do with any actual theoretical framework for explaining quantum mechanics?

He feels no need to interrupt his flights of flourishing hand-waving to distinguish between actual discoveries, well-supported theories, and speculative theories that have made no falsifiable predictions supported by subsequent observations that might distinguish the theory from competing possibilities, and to make clear that superstrings belong squarely in the third category. Sure, you can't get the general public to understand non-commutative geometry and anti-de Sitter space in the space of one radio show - but trying to do so would be less unhelpful than making authoritative pronouncements that spontaneous inflation of our universe out of the multiverse shows that the judeo-christian creation and the buddhist timelessness of the world both had part of the truth. Yech.

He led straight from superstrings into the discovery of dark energy without a hint that dark energy, like all other recent important new physics discoveries, spectacularly failed to have been predicted by any flavor of string theory; or, conversely, that all predictions that have been made by superstring theory have been either impossible to observe or were confronted with contradictory evidence (proton decay...) in which case the predictions were tweaked to remove the possibility of observation. Or, that despite more man-hours of study prior to any confirming observation than any other theory in the history of physics, it still hasn't adequately incorporated spacetime, instead just assuming spacetime to be a flat background for stringy particles. I.e., it still hasn't gotten past, or even to, the "assume the chicken is a sphere" stage; even a sphere has the same fundamental physical basis as a chicken.

We've known that space and time can't be treated as a flat background for 80 years. Superstrings are not the height of today's physical knowledge; they are eighty years behind the times, and counting.

And don't even sully yourself to read Kaku's arguments that we must remove RTGs from space probes to keep from exposing outer space to dangerous radiation. Seriously, Berkeley, maybe at least an apology for granting this guy his degree?

(P.S. - An automated Google ad on a search on Kaku produced this delightful Zen koan: "How You Can Master Holographic Time To Gain Extreme Wealth & Success!"

Still, does the ad's love of hyperbole match Kaku's own?)

The central animating principle of the Constitution is to vest power where it is accountable to the people.

2006-03-01T00:50:00.000-06:00

With Bush's approval rating now at an all-time, Nixonian low, and Cheney's at 18%, one of the lowest approval ratings for any politician in the history of ratings, where and how does the breaking point take form, of the White House finally responding to America's ever-growing cry for restoring basic democratic norms of American government, and apologizing for the bizarre Yooian misadventure into the unilateral executive?

The terminology of "unitary executive" to refer to a president with uncheckable powers (except those of the purse, Yoo says) is itself a blatant misrepresentation of constitutional jurisprudential language. The founding fathers used the term "unitary executive" to refer to the idea of a single person at the head of the executive, rather than a voting body - or a privy council, as George Mason called it. The issue of whether to have one person or several at the head of the executive was separate from the issues of what powers the head of the executive should have and what checks on those powers should be distributed to the Congress and the courts. The founding fathers were wary that a tyranny of many would be equally as dangerous as a tyranny of one.

Or even moreso. In fact, a driving motivation for ultimately choosing the unitary executive - a single individual at the head of the executive - is because they thought this would help keep the head of the executive relatively weak, and readily accountable to the legislature and to the people; that the lone individual would not be encouraged and strengthened in executive excesses by the example or support of peers at the head of the executive.

No scholar could claim otherwise without recklessly or willfully distorting the plain and simple facts.

Rejection of an unanswerable, unilateral executive in favor of a mere president, checked by and balanced against the other branches of government, was the central animating inspiration and ultimate goal of the independence from England and the formation of this new nation and its constitution. No idea is more offensive to the idea of America than the idea of an executive having authority to disregard duly passed statutes at his own whim. It is no coincidence that the lion's share of the Declaration of Independence is a recitation of the unaccountable acts of the unitary executive; and that the Article of the Constitution dealing with the legislature comes first. The language could hardly be more plain:

"The Congress shall have Power... To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof."

Gonzales: "Err... what I meant to say was..."

2006-03-01T00:07:00.000-06:00

Big shocker here: Gonzales is already changing his tune on his NSA warrantless domestic spying testimony. Senator Leahy is not impressed with "...their shifting legal analysis for this illegal domestic spying..."

Unfortunately, El Wapo is gullibly reporting that Arlen Specter's proposed legislation "would allow the FISA court to rule on the program's constitutionality and to oversee aspects of the surveillance operations." As so often, Marty Lederman is there to set the story straight at balkinization. He describes how, astonishingly, Specter's bill would constitute "a substantive amendment to FISA that would vastly increase the surveillance authority of the President. It would give the Executive branch everything it has always wanted, and much more: The punishment for having broken the law with impunity would be a wholesale repeal..." of FISA. Lederman's remarks are a must-read corrective to understand this supposed remedy, going forward.

And in case you missed it so far, The Times is suing the Defense Department for access to truckloads of documents on the NSA warrantless domestic spying. This is getting interesting.

Feeling impeachy

2006-02-24T19:20:00.000-06:00

Bonnie Erbe joins the ranks of those in the "Time to impeach Bush" camp. She talks about the Zogby poll in which 52% of Americans want Congress to consider impeaching President Bush "if he wiretapped American citizens without a judge's approval", which he did - which means the only reason there isn't an outright national majority for impeachment right now is that some people haven't been paying attention. Although, Erbe lists lots of other reasons she views as more compelling than the warrantless domestic spying.

However, the warrantless domestic spying program is the definitive issue on which Bush must concede defeat or face impeachment. Why? Because, without any way to pussyfoot around it, he threw all his savings into the ante and said he had authority for the warrantless domestic spying program because the Johnyoostitution of the United States says the president is unbounded by any statute, judicial decree, or guarantee of the Bill of Rights. In other words, Bush has staked a claim on the power of a tyrant - on an abandonment of American government and the rule of law.

Domestic wiretapping without a warrant is mild compared to some of Bush's other offenses that Erbe lists, such as bleeding the nation's finances and manipulating intelligence on Iraq. Not only mild but it has been legal in the past, before FISA. But that's not the issue - the issue is that if Bush succeeds in establishing the power he claims, we will have no recourse to stop such offenses, mild or otherwise, except for this or any future President's own good nature.

Who really wants to find out where that leads?

John Dean gets it.

UPDATE - Lewis Lapham drives home a few comments on impeachment, in his own flourishy, polemical way. (The link is an excerpt, in case you haven't read your hard copy of this month's Harper's yet.)

Smoking doobies in Dubai

2006-02-24T17:54:00.000-06:00

Karl Rove announced Bush's backing off from the DP World deal - sometimes it's hard to remember there's anyone there who remembers the concept of responding to public sentiment.

It's fairly ridiculous, and once again hypocritical of America on free trade, to suggest Dubai Ports wouldn't do just as well as the British firm it's buying at running lots of our port operations. The Emirates have in fact been a reliable ally of the U.S. Since when does a terrorist being from there imply guilt for the country as a whole? We still do business with Timothy McVeigh's home country.

It's also unfair to blame Bush for rhetoric turning around on him - he has gone out of his way several times to make the point that we are at war with terrorists, not with Arabs or Muslims. It is not Bush but the Coulters and Malkins and Mike Savage we have to blame for stoking genuine, outright bigotry in this country.

But I can't help but delight at the uproar (or even feel shotgunfreude), just to see the Republican stranglehold across the branches of government continue to break apart. It's almost as if the GOP Congress were just looking for excuses at this point to drive wedges between themselves and the White House. The steaming feculence of the unilateral executive power grab, and its malodorous fumes of detainee abuse and mass illegal spying on ordinary Americans, are not something anyone running for office in the next century is going to want to stay standing near.

Wieseltier's going down!

2006-02-24T16:18:00.000-06:00

As a former book review editor, I can only wonder where The New York Times came up with Sam Tanenhaus, its book review editor, the guy who mistakes reviewers incapable of anything more than ranting slurs for those who offer actual, thoughtful criticism - as I mentioned in this earlier post. Several other bloggers have caught onto Leon Wieseltier's review of Breaking the Spell by Daniel Dennett - including Lindsay Beyerstein and coturnix at Majikthise, the Mad Scientist at The Daily Trascript (of RNA), and Brian Leiter at Leiter Reports.

The Mad Scientist hits it on the head:

Wieseltier attacks Dennett's reasoning by reasoning that reason can't be used to study religion. What the bloody hell??? In other words, please don't ask rational questions.

That sums it up pretty well: it's really a choice not of what to believe, but how to believe: to rely on emotional or spiritual feelings to decide what is true, or to accept as truth only that which is supported by objective observation and rational analysis. To pursue a reasoned critique of Dennett would only be giving in to Dennett's commitment to reason - whereas Wieseltier's preference for emotionally discerned "truth" leads him to believe the only criticism needed is a huffing, puffing appeal to emotion.

Turning to Dennett's book, without having read it yet (soon...), it would be ridiculous with all we know at this point, not to investigate the potential evolutionary origins of the widespread human impulses to religious belief and the collection of behaviors that make up religion.

...and A.Q. Khan appointed Secretary of Homeland Security

2006-02-22T15:58:00.000-06:00

Following up on the sale of major American ports to Dubai, the White House announced today that Abdul Qadeer Khan has been appointed to replace Michael Chertoff as Secretary of Homeland Security. Bush learned of the appointment from Scott McClellan after the press conference, but after a thorough investigation, concluded ten minutes later that he was confident in Khan's appointment. Bush warned the Senate against interfering with a fair up-or-down vote for Khan. He then issued a signing statement saying that a "no" vote would be void due to unconstitutionally interfering with his unilateral executive powers, although he was interested to hear any suggestions the Senate might pass, in its Article 1 capacity to make all Suggestions which shall be acceptable to the President for carrying into Execution the powers of government.

Another top Navy lawyer to the rescue of the American soul

2006-02-19T23:45:00.000-06:00

Alberto J. Mora is a hero who stood up for American values - by persistently opposing the Pentagon's un-American new policy of treating detainees as untermenschen.

Former top Navy lawyer John Hutson has also been a tireless opponent of detainee abuse.

More power to them.

"Money quote", as Andrew Sullivan loves so much to say - this is Admiral Mora to the chief lawyer of the DoD: "Even if one wanted to authorize the U.S. military to conduct coercive interrogations, as was the case in Guantánamo, how could one do so without profoundly altering its core values and character?"

Here's more on Mora:

The New Yorker article

Marty Lederman's comments

Best of all, read Alberto Mora's memorandum, a tour de force of insistence on legal and moral principle.

Sunset on the five-finger premium

2006-02-19T23:32:00.000-06:00

Wolfowitz is once again taking bold action to lift up the poor and oppressed - as he gets results in the World Bank's rising war on corruption.