I've written a new feature article for my other blog, Demockracy, which focuses on public policy. The article is about why President Obama and the Democrats shouldn't care whether or not the Republicans are on board for health care reform; they don't even need the Republicans.
Glenn Greenwald, you brilliant man, you. Once again, he points out that the media consider a unilateral condemnation on torture to be a a "left" or "hard left" phenomenon. Why is it radical to condemn torture? Why is it radical for a president to be honest about what has been going on in the name of the United States? As Jon Stewart pointed out on Tuesday's The Daily Show, TV pundits are shocked -- shocked! -- that the government would acknowledge that we tortured! That's what they're upset about. They couldn't care less that the United States tortured people (and, by all accounts, we got our intelligence from the people we captured before we tortured them); they care that we admitted to it. Also, Greenwald noted in a Twitter post yesterday that the use of the phrase "torture debate" normalizes torture. Suddenly, when there is a "debate," there are two legitimate opposing sides, and thus torture, which should be unilaterally wrong in all instances, is open for speculation on whether or not it's legal, useful, and ethical. Again, the false dichotomy: by saying that there are two sides to every issue, the opposition's argument -- however wrong -- is legitimized as it is brought up to the status of "debate," when in fact there shouldn't even be a question that torture is wrong, wrong, wrong.
How wrong is torture? Sen. John McCain reminded us, in 2007 (when he was against torture before he was in favor of it), that some Japanese soldiers were executed after World War II for waterboarding American soldiers.
In today's New York Times, the FBI interrogator who interrogated (not tortured! Seriously; both the FBI and the U.S. military refused to engage in the torture the CIA willingly participated in) Abu Zubaydah refutes the Bush administration argument that torturing Zubaydah provided actionable intelligence:
There was no actionable intelligence gained from using enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah that wasn't, or couldn't have been, gained from regular tactics. In addition, I saw that using these alternative methods on other terrorists backfired on more than a few occasions -- all of which are still classified. The short sightedness behind the use of these techniques ignored the unreliability of the methods, the nature of the threat, the mentality and modus operandi of the terrorists, and due process.
And, by the way, 24 is not real and torture doesn't work.
Former Massachusetts Governor and presidential nominee Mitt Romney, who for some reason is still asked his opinion about things, thinks that investigating Bush administration officials for their complicity in torture is just "partisanship." I suppose this means that mercilessly investigating Bill Clinton for eight years in order to get something, anything, to stick and then unsuccessfully impeaching him for perjury is ... justice?
Thankfully, Obama contradicted the statements of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Press Secretary Robert Gibbs by saying that it's up to the Attorney General to decide whether or not to prosecute people for torture.
Paul Krugman connects the dots after eight years and discovers a Grand Unified Scandal going on in our name:
Let's say this slowly: the Bush administration wanted to use 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. So it tortured people to make them confess to the nonexistent link.There's a word for this: it's evil.
According to Ron Suskind, author of The One Percent Doctrine, you can correlate the torture timeline with the events leading up to the Iraq War, providing support for the argument that torture was not used to prevent another terrorist attack, but was instead used to find support -- any support -- for an invasion of a country that had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks. Former Vice President Cheney, however, has waffled on the issue of government secrecy. Once the champion of making sure the American people have no idea what their government is doing, Cheney instead wants the CIA to declassify memos showing how effective torture was. That makes it okay!
All of this revelation doesn't stop Fox News' Shepard Smith from putting his head in the sand. It's as though he's having a flashback to when he was eight years old and woke up in the middle of the night to find his mother replacing the tooth under his pillow with a dollar bill.
One more interesting observation: the Spanish government wants to prosecute six former Bush administration officials for holding and torturing five Spanish residents in Guantanamo Bay. If the U.S. government can lay claim to "extraordinary rendition," then why can't Spain order the kidnapping and rendition of such U.S. citizens as John Yoo and Jay Bybee?
But none of these revelations stop Roger Cohen from telling us to let bygones be bygones. Imagine if we told that to Simon Weisenthal? Germany still wants to have John Demjanjuk extradited to stand trial for crimes he committed as a prison guard during the Holocaust, despite his old age. The Justice Department retroactively revoked his U.S. citizenship because he lied about being a Nazi prison guard. Why don't they look forward, and not backward?
Dateline, Week Two -- Obama and the Democrats want to pass an $825 billion stimulus package designed to support the struggling economy. The package is no mere handout; some Republicans have suggested it amounts to paying $825 billion merely to hire 4 million new workers, for an average salary of $206,000 per person. The plan, though, is not a one-time payout. It is an investment in infrastructure of all kinds: transportation, energy, education, health. Sure, the government could pay people to move dirt from one place to another, with no one getting any utility out of anything. That's what the Republicans claim this does. But that would be stupid. Instead, we'll employ people to do meaningful things. We wouldn't we?
And, furthermore, is this necessary? Turns out yes. Aggregate demand is falling: people, anticipating a recession, spend less. Companies spend less. And, especially in this economy, companies spend less on capital projects that require credit. Banks are still loathe to extend credit, since they can't trust anybody. When aggregate demand falls, the government must step in and take up the slack until people buy things again.
Republicans don't like this idea. They don't like spending money. Unless that money goes to contracts that would result in kickbacks from lobbyists. Or unless that money gets spend on the Department of Defense. And that money spend at DoD results in contracts that would result in kickbacks from lobbyists.
Sorry, sorry. Cheap shot, I know. Let's be post-partisan. Okay, Republicans don't like the idea. Rep. John Boehner, the House Minority Leader (from The Great State of Ohio!) has said his party intends to vote against the bill unless the 2001 Bush tax cuts are made permanent, among other things.
You know what, John Boehner? You go ahead and do that. But first, you might like to catch up on the news you've apparently missed for the last three months. As it turns out, your party lost. And it lost big. Remember that presidency you lost? And the eight Senate seats (not counting Minnesota, where Republican incumbent Norm Coleman will likely lose)? And the twenty-two House seats? Adding up all these numbers, it appears -- and I'm not entirely sure on this -- that you aren't in a position to be making demands. The House can pass whatever it wants even if every Republican votes against it. So can the Senate. And then, the Democratic president will sign it into law. (You may wish to call up your Originalist judges to overturn the law, just in case. They have a firepole, so they can move quick!)
The stimulus package will move ahead, whether you like it or not. It will move ahead with an end to the Bush tax cuts. Senate Republicans can filibuster the bill, and I would love to see Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid let them. At that point, the Republican spin machine would choke and the gears would come to a halt. How could they put their P.R. to work on refusing to stimulate the economy? It bodes nothing but badly for them. Reid would do well to let them dig their own grave and show Americans once and for all that Republicans aren't interested in helping the middle class.
Then again, a filibuster might happen. Not every Republican senator can be so easily duped. I'm looking at Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania. He's shown his willingness to disagree with Republicans before. Democrats would need only two more votes to invoke cloture and end any filibusters.
Thankfully, Democrats do not appear to be backing down. In 2007, they used their newly-minted majority status to ... do everything the Bush administration wanted. Hmm. Well, never let it be said that Democrats know when they're ahead. I guess that prior sentence should be modified: Democrats do not appear to be backing down (but they might!). But once -- just once -- it would be nice for Democrats not to screw things up by acting like a beaten puppy and capitulating at the first sign of conflict. They won; Republicans lost. Now, they have an agenda that they want to advance. Republicans want to stop that agenda, but they no longer have the ability to do so. And what Republicans want is not what Americans want. Not anymore. So they can play their P.R. game and send John Boehner on Meet the Press to explain why it's just too much money, but they'll be left to explain themselves.
And a Republican trying to explain himself is a sure way to clear the room.
By Richard D. Erlich
This is a continuation of what I had to say in an essay stating that life doesn't begin; it began. There I pointed out that the abortion controversy doesn't really have to do with the question of when life begins or "What is life?" but with "What is human?" -- when a living being becomes and should be recognized as a "(human) person under the law."
It's a dangerous question.
Slavery in the US was based in the idea that Blacks were not fully human and, hence, could be bought and sold and exploited like nonhuman animals. Nazi extermination programs were based even more consciously in the idea that Jews and Roma (Gypsies) and other groups were literally degenerate and/or subhuman. I wouldn't want to employ what's been called "The 'Twice is Always' Rule," but it should give us a serious warning to recall that these questions of definition of "human" weren't resolved by argument but by wars.
People aren't always -- or often? -- logical, but we are indirectly governed by logics, plural: where different ideas lead. Push to its end one way to oppose abortion, and the logic goes like this.
Human beings are essentially souls, souls to be saved. (The body is at most the temple of the soul, at worst its prison.)Human beings are "ensouled" at the moment of conception, so a human zygote -- the fertilized egg -- is not just a unique individual organism but an unborn baby, in some variations, an unborn baby who can be saved or damned.
To kill that baby is the murder of an innocent, and possibly worse: the condemning of that innocent to Hell as an unbaptized baby. The abortion rate in the US is now at a very low point, as these things go, but we're still talking some 1.2 million abortions in 2005. If a human zygote, embryo, fetus is a human child, that's a body-count each year of massacre proportions.
Even as it is the shame of the World War II Allies that they didn't do all they could to act against the Hitlerian Holocaust -- including bombing the camps and the rail lines when begged to -- so it is to the shame (and damnation?) of members of our generation to fail to do everything possible to stop a holocaust in unborn, unbaptized babies.
Maybe including, as a last resort, violence, even lethal violence against those one sees -- following such logic -- as mass murderers.
On the other side (the one I'm on) is a logical and historical argument less rigorous, or rigid, but equally powerful: for giving women control over their bodies.
These arguments can't be reconciled by argument, but there is a possibility for a political resolution, and we know what it is. You attempt to make abortion "safe, legal, and rare": which includes actively pushing birth control and hell yes, making condoms readily available to anyone old enough to know what they are -- and making sure U.S. kids know about birth-control/STD-prevention by puberty. It means the opportunity for freely-made, early decisions by women who might want an abortion to have one or to carry the fetus to term. And on the other side, it means legal restrictions on late-term abortions.
Such a resolution is no solution and it neither will nor should satisfy a lot of people (press the Slavery/Holocaust analogy, and you'll see the problem). But most Americans will be able to live with it, and such a messy resolution will allow us to get through a very dangerous period and move on to other conflicts.
Richard D. Erlich is a Professor Emeritus of English at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He lives in Ventura County, California.
If it seems like I haven't been writing here for a while, it's because I haven't. I have been enlisted to write for a political blog, Demockracy, and as such, have been posting much of my stuff there.
But here's something that wouldn't go well on a political blog. It's about a hand transplant patient. David Savage was 19 when he lost his hand in an accident with a metal-stamping machine. Two years ago, he received a hand transplant from a cadaver donor. Now, he is able to feel sensations in his new hand that he could feel in his old one, something that scientists thought was impossible. It was previously assumed that when a limb was lost, the portion of the brain devoted to sensation in that limb was re-used for other functions. It turns out that Savage's brain reprogrammed itself, and now the part of his brain that controlled sensations for the old limb is performing that function for the new one.
What has brought us this marvel? The ability to take a dead person's hand, connect to a live person, and have that live person feel sensation in the new hand?
I'll tell you what didn't bring us this power: mysticism. Belief in, and subsequent fear of, an almighty, overarching, transcendental and inexplicable being did not attach a new hand to David Savage. Rituals, dances, prayer -- these things did not give David Savage a new hand.
Science gave David Savage a new hand. Human ingenuity, empiricism, logic, and reason all did this. Magic and the supernatural did not.
It's important to keep these things in mind as long as Sarah Palin is the vice presidential candidate. Sarah Palin not only believes in God, she believes in a Christian God who created the Earth 5,000 years ago. She further believes that she should be fulfilling the goals of Christianity through her political office.
A Sarah Palin world would not able to reattach hands. A Sarah Palin world would look very much like the Dark Ages, with man struggling to understand the world around him through a lens of religion.
This is not to say that religion is not valuable; it just turns out that it doesn't create things like new hands, longer lifespans, less mortality, going to the moon, flying around the world, spending extended lengths of time underwater, harnessing the world's knowledge and delivering it to everyone's homes. Religion is incapable of doing any of these things for us. By its nature, religion precludes the use of the observable world for any purpose other than serving as a testament to the greatness of a supernatural creator.
Perhaps the only religion that could be useful to a scientist is one in which the supernatural deity creates a world, gives it a set of rules, and lets it go. This idea of the "clockmaker god" has been embraced for hundreds of years, including by amateur inventor Thomas Jefferson. In this use of religion, the deity can be understood, and the rules that govern the operation of the universe can be discerned by human beings.
Sarah Palin's evangelical Protestantism, however, is no such thing. She believes that prayer can heal the sick, that hoping for a cure is just as powerful as using science to create a cure. She believes that creationism carries just as much weight as evolution and that both should be taught in schools. Sarah Palin could do nothing for David Savage; no amount of prayer can bring a man's hand back. But a lot of science, it turns out, can.
Barack Obama must be naive and inexperienced indeed if he is seriously suggesting that maintaining proper tire pressure and keeping cars maintained can save as much oil as offshore drilling would create. I mean ...
Wait? What?
Oh, it turns out he was right. While Republicans are making fun of his plan for the sheer novelty of the suggestion, no one has refuted the merits of what he said. Yes, it's true: keeping your tires properly inflated can increase your gas mileage. This means that it can save you money on gas. And it can do so right now.
New offshore drilling, on the other hand, would have an economic impact ... by the year 2030. What about the Alaskan National Wildlife Reserve (ANWR)? Surely it can produce enough oil to bring down those gas prices! Well, maybe someday. Drilling in ANWR "would have its largest impact nearly 20 years from now if Congress voted to open the refuge today," says U.S. News & World Report.
Republicans would like to find more fuel-efficient ways for us to continue consuming (all goods) at our present rate. Democrats would like to find alternatives to consumption. The latter most necessary; our resources are not finite, and rather than try and come up with new fuel substitutes, we need to learn how not to use so much fuel in the first place. The American way of life trumpeted by Rush Limbaugh and others -- the way of life where every American drives a Hummer and has a three-acre lawn with a sprinkler system -- is quickly coming to an end. As it should, for that lifestyle was not sustainable in the long run. It is an historical abnormality unique to a particular time -- a time when the United States had limitless power and resources. Times have changed, and it's time for proponents of limitless consumption to recognize that.
Former vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro still blames sexism for Hillary Clinton's loss.
Hard to believe, considering that Hillary won big time -- in fact, by the biggest margins of any of her states -- in Kentucky, West Virginia, and Arkansas, Appalachian states in which sexism and "traditional roles" for women are still very much the norm.
Also hard to believe because the most educated, and ostensibly least sexist (or any ist), section of America voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama.
Of course, Ferraro is unable to cite any instances of Barack Obama being sexist toward Hillary Clinton. In Ferraro's mind, sexism is the only clear answer. Clinton's campaign couldn't possibly have failed because people want Obama to be president more than they want her to be president.
Armchair historian George W. Bush last week, in an act of terrifying tactlessness, accused "some" in the United States of wanting to "appease" terrorists the same way that Neville Chamberlain appeased Adolf Hitler. His act is tactless, said Barack Obama, because he criticized Americans in front of a foreign delegation, and all because those "some" Americans disagreed with his foreign policy. But, nevertheless, it may have been valid because his speech was on foreign policy ...
Wait a minute, wait a minute. Whoops! Turns out he was giving a speech as part of the celebration of Israel's 60th anniversary. Happy birthday, Israel! Don't you just hate Democrats?
Chris Matthews of all people took the time to point out to a stupid guest why Bush's immediate distaste for "appeasement" doesn't make sense: the act that makes historians slap their palms to their foreheads is not that Chamberlain met with Hitler -- for, at the time, Hitler had not yet demonstrated his desire for world domination; the problems in Germany were external -- but rather that they gave him Czechoslovakia in return for the promise that he wouldn't go after any other countries. Hitler alleged that Germany had a legitimate claim to the Rhineland in Czechoslovakia. The other European leaders, still stinging from World War I, which is a more horrible war than you've been taught in history class, wanted to avoid another war at any cost.
Talking to leaders was, before 2001, how diplomacy got done. For Bush's analogy to make sense, his political enemies would have had to suggest that they let the other Arab states destroy Israel. To my knowledge, no Democrat has suggested this.
It could be that Bush, with his college-freshman mind, had heard the word "appeasement" in a class somewhere but didn't fully understand what it meant. Or, more sinisterly, he knows full well what it means, and knows that the Israelis know that, too. Perhaps he was sending a code to the Israeli delegation, saying, "If the United States elects a Democrat to the presidency, that person will stand idly by while Iran, Syria, and Lebanon destroy you."
Sadly, though, I don't think Bush is that smart. I think, as Chris Matthews has suggested, he's using the word "appeasement" as a buzz-word in the same way as every other pundit, including right-wing talk show host Kevin James. James was asked two dozen times by Matthews what Chamberlain did that was appeasing. For five minutes, James insisted that "we all know" what he did, and that "he was an appeaser." Finally, James admitted that he didn't actually know what Chamberlain did that was "appeasing."
And still, the election in 2008 will be almost a tie. How can James and others get away with this and have people believe them?
That's what Bill Maher said last week on Real Time with Bill Maher regarding the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. His argument was that Barack Obama could have done the politically expedient thing and distanced himself from Rev. Wright last month. Instead, when video on YouTube emerged of Rev. Wright apparently denouncing the United States (which he didn't do -- more on that later), Obama delivered a cogent and nuanced speech about race that treated Americans as intelligent people instead of as empty vessels into which simple, polarized opinions are poured. Obama's race speech was, sadly, revered throughout the media. I say "sadly" because it's the kind of speech that would be the old hat in academia: a speech in which a subject is carefully analyzed, and the apparent discrepancies are explained, but no solid conclusion is reached. Race is a very complex subject, Obama said, and should not be dealt with using platitudes. Wright, said Obama, is his spiritual mentor; he could no more disown him than he could disown his white grandmother, who also made occasionally racist statements. This kind of speech is not politically expedient, because it does not distill the issue down to talking points and sound bites. For Obama to be lauded for delivering a real speech with actual ideas is a disturbing commentary on how far our country's discourse has fallen.
But I digress. Obama took a bullet for Rev. Wright and was congratulated for it. And we thought it was the end. But the ABC debate that preceded the Pennsylvania primary brought Rev. Wright back into the spotlight, and Wright felt it necessary to go on a press blitz over the weekend. He appeared on Bill Moyers' PBS show as a soft-spoken, intelligent man -- but Moyers never addressed Wright's more inflammatory statements, like his assertion that the U.S. government spread HIV to kill black people. In one of his other appearances over the weekend, he said that Obama's defense of him was due to the fact that he's "a politician."
It's this statement that Bill Maher found most offensive: here is Barack Obama, trying his hardest not to appear like just another politician. Here's Barack Obama, faced with an association with a man who could injure his chance at the presidency. And Barack Obama takes the high road -- risking his candidacy -- to defend Rev. Wright. And how does Rev. Wright repay him? By going on TV and saying that Obama is just another politician, spitting in the face of everything Obama has been doing for the past year. And it is for this reason, I think, that Obama made a clean break with Rev. Wright.
Now, there are some points that Rev. Wright has made that are very good points: his "God damn America" statement is not a unilateral statement of hatred for the United States. God is damning America, according to Rev. Wright, because America fails to care for its impoverished and marginalized people, and because America involves itself in unjust wars that cost billions of dollars while people in this country live in poverty and without health care, among other things. Many commentators have passed judgment on the form of the opinion, but no one has talked about the opinion itself: is it valid or not? And the answer is yes, Rev. Wright's opinion is valid. His comment about HIV comes from his statement that, after the Tuskeegee experiments, he will believe anything. This, however, does not excuse statements that are factually incorrect as well as inflammatory. Like any human being, Rev. Wright makes good statements, but he also makes bad ones.
His statements about U.S. foreign policy are actually not the most offensive statements he has made. What's offensive is that Obama took a bullet for him, and Wright repaid him by throwing him under a bus.
It's official, America. You're a glutton for punishment.
Here you had Barack Obama, a candidate who promised change, a candidate who wasn't another hackneyed politician. He was an activist and a constitutional law professor. He was eloquent and he had solutions. He held the promise that Democrats had been waiting for: someone who wouldn't cower when faced with the Republicans, but wouldn't become one of them, either. He was someone who would hold his ground and stand up for what he believed in.
And you destroyed him, America. You turned him into the politician you wanted to see: you wanted to see the same hackeneyed baloney. You wanted personal attacks, pandering, and feuding. You wanted George Stephanopoulos and Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews and Sean Hannity to officiate a professional wrestling match. You didn't care about issues: I mean, clearly you don't care about issues. President Bush, after all, has a 69% disapproval rating, and still -- still! -- this election is up in the air. The easy decision, the one that could be made by any student from a middling kindergarten class, would be to vote for someone who is different from the person you hate! In your self-loathing, America, you knew that smoking was bad for you, but you kept on doing it, anyway.
Barack Obama had to go on television this week to denounce the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Why did he have to do this? Is it because the American people are so stupid that they would think that, because Obama went to Wright's church, it follows that Obama himself believes that the government spread HIV in black communities? Of course not: Obama went on television to put an end to the Rev. Wright saga. Something is wrong with this country when the first 45 minutes of a debate are taken up with such issues as flag lapel pins and a crazy pastor.* 45 minutes spent on why he doesn't wear a flag lapel pin? What do you mean by "bitter"? And my favorite, from George Stephanoupolos, "Does Rev. Wright love America as much as you do?" If they really wanted to stir up some controversy, they should have asked him if he liked deep-dish or New York style.
This election promised, more than the others in my memory, to deliver real issues. The country is in the midst of an economic crisis. We're mired in an unpopular war abroad. The president doesn't seem to care about the average person. This is prime time for a politician to talk about what he or she plans to do to save the country. And for the first few months of the campaign, we did talk about that. But as the primaries wore on and it was clear that there would be no definite winner, the so-called mainstream media became bored. Twenty-four hours is a lot of time to fill, and the candidates weren't saying anything new or different. What's a twenty-four hour network to do?
Make up controversy, of course!
It's no coincidence that the Rev. Wright "controversy" landed squarely in the middle of the lull between the Ohio primary and the Pennsylvania primary. Undoubtedly the news media were scouring every source they could find in order to shake the grass. Issues are great, but they don't glue people to news "analysis" enough to justify the ad prices. By finding some great YouTube footage of Rev. Wright supposedly denouncing America, there was more than enough analysis to fill twenty-four hours of television: the initial video! The history of Rev. Wright! What should Obama do! What is Hillary's response! Repeat ad nauseum.
Obama looked like the candidate for change. But now he looks just like any other candidate. Gone is the Obama of a year ago who fired up young Americans and made them believe in their leaders again. America couldn't tolerate a candidate who didn't give it bread and circuses. So they pulled Obama down into the muck with them, ensuring that they would have entertainment for the next week, even if it means granting the Bush administration a four-year extension.
... if you count Michigan and Florida. Hillary claimed yesterday that she was 100,000 votes ahead in the popular vote for the Democratic nomination. Her statement was artfully crafted so as to be technically true but nevertheless misleading: "I'm very proud that as of today, I have received more votes by the people who have voted than anyone else," she said. The key clause here is "people who have voted." While people in Michigan and Florida voted, their votes did not count. How odd that Hillary, who once upon a time agreed that she would not campaign in those states and that those states' votes wouldn't count, is now the champion of enfranchising those voters.
This is an excellent example of what to expect from President Hillary Clinton: misleading phrases that are technically true but pragmatically misleading, and support for positions that are politically popular, not right. President Bush is currently the master of the technically-true-but-misleading phrase; with Hillary, we would get at least four more years of that.
While Hillary continues to count Michigan and Florida voters, no one else does. There will be no re-vote in those states, which chose -- against DNC rules -- to hold their primaries before Feb. 5. As a result, their delegates will not be seated.
Here's the problem: Hillary is, in reality, 500,000 votes behind Obama. With her 10-point victory in Pennsylvania, she officially cannot win the nomination with pledged delegates alone. Prior to Pennsylvania, she would have had to win every remaining contest by at least 20 points. She has taken out insurance in the form of trying to coerce superdelegates, but a win financed by superdelegates in spite of Obama's popular victory would make her candidacy appear illegitimate and artificial. Add these two facts -- the fact that she cannot win through pledged delegates and the fact that she must appear to have popular support -- and the sum is that she desperately needs to get the Michigan and Florida delegates seated. That gives her more popular votes, which equals more legitimacy, and if she succeeds in wooing enough superdelegates to her side to win the nomination, she can point to her popular vote numbers as proof that she won through "the will of the people" and not back-room deals with party insiders.
But what would the rest of the country think? Hillary is essentially asking to change the rules now that she dislikes the outcome. Obama didn't campaign in Florida, and he -- along with every other Democratic candidate except Hillary -- wasn't on the ticket in Michigan, since everyone agreed that Florida and Michigan wouldn't count. Hillary was okay with this deal in January because she -- like most of us -- thought the election would be decided in Iowa and New Hampshire like it is in every election. Once she realized that Obama had more popularity than anyone had thought, she panicked and reneged on her agreement under the assumption that votes need to be counted, people need to be recognized, etc. etc. Never mind that there is no right to vote in a party primary. While party primaries are administered by the FEC and local boards of election, they do not hold the same status as official elections. Parties, for example, may limit participation in their primaries to party members only. The notion that voters have a "right" to vote in a primary is a mistaken notion; voters in primaries are subject to the stipulations of the parties involved, unlike a general election.
Seating the delegates outright is out of the question; a contest where Hillary was the only candidate would be plainly unfair, as would a contest in which no other candidates campaigned in the state because they thought (correctly) that that state wouldn't count. All she can do now is mount a P.R. campaign designed to make her appear -- both to voters and superdelegates -- more electable than she really is. The fact is that, in order to win the presidency, the Democratic candidate has to be able to sway not just died-in-the-wool Democrats, but also swing voters and new voters. In Pennsylvania, Obama captured six of ten new voters: he also holds sway among swing voters. Republicans definitely don't like Hillary Clinton, and her candidacy wouldn't make them abandon John McCain. Obama, however, might do just that.
The next contests are May 6 in Indiana and North Carolina. Polls in Indiana are up in the air, ranging from neck-and-neck to a huge Hillary win. North Carolina is definitively Obama country, with the spread ranging from 9 points in his favor to 25 points in his favor. He will soundly defeat Hillary in North Carolina; only Indiana remains a swing state.
If Hillary loses the popular vote and the pledged delegate count, but manages to use the Clinton "victory at any cost" machine to drive right over Obama and secure the nomination, the Democratic party will be in shambles and their victory in November -- which is crucial for the survival of this country -- will be in serious doubt. A McCain victory assures continued involvement in Iraq, continued military spending, no foreseeable health care reform, continued tax breaks for the Americans who need tax breaks the least, and God knows what kind of foreign policy. A McCain victory in November would give added credence to the Republicans, as though "they're back!" Republican inertia would in turn lead to more Republican wins, bringing us right back to where we were in 2002.
Sen. Barack Obama has received a good deal of flack for comments he made last week in San Francisco. Speaking of middle-class workers in Pennsylvania, he said, "It's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." Sen. Hillary Clinton immediately went for the throat, criticizing his comments as "elitist." (In today's CNN Compassion Forum, Clinton added "out of touch" to her characterization of his comments. Please keep in mind that Hillary is a graduate of both Brown University and Yale Law School, hardly bastions of the "common man.")
But are his comments wrong? Clinton has suggested that Obama is being "patronizing" in his suggestion that religion is something that people turn to when times are tough. But she has not answered Obama's argument: namely, that middle-class Americans in economically depressed parts of the country have lost faith in the ability of government to help them, choosing instead to turn somewhere else for help, or to blame others (in this case, immigrants) for the problems that government has caused.
Paul Levinson suggests that this is a non-issue, since working families know how hard their lives are, and for Hillary to suggest that everything is rosy is just as disingenuous as George W. Bush suggesting that the economy is doing just fine. What do Americans want: a politician who insists everything is fine as the country burns around her, or a politican who tells it like it is? John McCain didn't receive the same amount of criticism when he appeared in Detroit earlier in the year and told an audience there that "there are some jobs that won't be coming back." Mitt Romney, on the other hand, went to Detroit and said that they could get jobs back, and he could help.
That's a lie.
Aside from forcing American auto manufacturers from employing Americans in the United States, there's nothing the president can do. Furthermore, the "free trade" types that populate the Republican party would have none of it.
Every time Obama disseminates a harsh truth, Hillary calls him on it, as though the job of the president is to be the nation's cheerleader. What's the point in that? And, if Hillary really wants to make a change, why would she choose to adhere to a George W. Bush tactic; namely, putting an irrationally and incorrectly optimistic spin on a situation that isn't very good?
Elizabeth Drew, writing in The New York Review of Books, characterizes Hillary Clinton's campaign strategy as "molehill politics":
In this fight, the Clinton camp is the more aggressive of the two, and it's adept at what might be called molehill politics: making a very big deal in the press about something that's a very small deal—such as a single word in a mailing or a slip-up by an aide. Clinton's strategists pounce on whatever opportunity presents itself to attack Obama, and try to knock him off his own message, and his stride.
According to Drew, Hillary can't make positive steps forward; all she can do is try to bring Obama down. It's come down to the superdelegates, since Hillary would have to win by at least 20% in every remaining primary contest if she wanted to beat Obama in pledged delegates. Ever since the Texas and Ohio primaries -- which, instead of definitively ending the contest, assured only that it would continue -- Hillary has abandoned the state primaries and instead focused on superdelegates. This, says Drew, is Clinton's goal: "to convince the as-yet-uncommitted superdelegates which candidate would be stronger in the general election -- regardless of who has won the most pledged delegates." The 3 AM ad, the mortgage crisis ad: these are designed to convince superdelegates that Obama is not as electable as Clinton.
In the meantime, according to Daily Kos, the Republican National Committee is trying to get Hillary Clinton seated as the Democratic nominee because they believe she will be easier to defeat.
And all the while, John McCain is portrayed as a "maverick" in the so-called mainstream media even as he adjusts his positions to match those of the Republican mainstream. McCain, who has never been particularly religious, switched to evangelical Protestantism in order to appease that wing of the Republican party. McCain's foreign policy has also taken a turn toward neoconservatism, ensuring that this once-maverick politician joins the Republican mainstream and delivers us four more years of what we've seen since 2001.
By Richard D. Erlich
"Freedom isn't free" is a true statement that became a cliché, so we no longer think about what it means, nor its implications.
We need to think about it.
John F. Kennedy said that we Americans would "pay any price, bear any burden [...] to assure the survival and the success of liberty." Within a few years, a bitter observation had it that the world would be better off if Lyndon Johnson was a more consistent Machiavellian and hadn't applied such Kennedy-esque idealism to Vietnam. Ideals can be pushed too far when the cost is human lives.
Usually, though, people go too far in the other direction, arguing that "If it saves just one life, it" -- all sorts of "it's" -- is justified. Safety can be idealized and presented as an infinite good, and that, too, is a problem.
I have heard people say, "Nothing is more important than protecting our troops?" If nothing is more important than protecting our troops, we should keep them out of war zones. If they're in combat on a justified mission, accomplishing the mission is more important than their safety.
Similarly, George W. Bush has said that his main duty as President was protecting the American people. Actually, what a president swears most specifically to do is "to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States." The president's job includes protecting Americans, but his primary job is protecting America, which can be something different. To protect America, the president may have to send to their deaths American troops.
Civilians, too, need to take risks, and the cost of freedom includes civilian deaths.
Freedom can be dangerous. I'm a life-member of the American Civil Liberties Union, but I'll tell you that most Americans, most of the time -- even most members of most minority groups -- would be safer in a police state.
Part of the cost of freedom is the blood of Americans who would not have died or been wounded or maimed if we lived in a police state.
Racism complicates things, but most of us would be safer -- at least initially -- in an America without the Bill of Rights: disarmed (no Amendment 2) with constant surveillance (Amendment 4), and no troublemakers free to openly spread dangerous doctrines (Amendment 1). Most of us would be safer in a country without trials and legal technicalities, where the authorities could just throw known or suspected evil-doers into jail indefinitely and torture them for information -- or just to break them -- or, for "the worst of the worst" of the evil, send out death squads to kill them (Amendments 5-8).
Freedom isn't free, and neither is safety, and a fair number of American civilians seem willing to pay high prices in military blood for freedom, and the blood of foreign civilians, but not take too many risks for themselves or their kids. Many of us will trade a whole bunch of freedom for at least a sense of safety.
And to get done other handy things.
If you don't believe this, check out a sampling of American schools and then ask about bringing some medical marijuana with you on a commercial air flight. Kids don't have the same rights as adults, but to preserve their safety we've made a lot of schools very like prisons -- complete with "lockdowns" -- and have quietly dropped critical thinking and Civics as part of the "basics" kids should know. These practices have contributed to a generation or two with little sense of a right to privacy, and little knowledge of or dedication to most of the US Bill of Rights.
Oh -- and if you openly bring marijuana of any sort onto a commercial air flight, you'll be arrested: extraordinary laws to protect us against terrorists are used against the most ordinary sorts of crimes.
We need to take seriously "Freedom isn't free," and liberals, conservatives, and civil libertarians need to talk openly and honestly about the price they are willing to pay, and ask others to pay, for freedom. We need to discuss how much courage we can demand from ordinary people.
Justice Louis D. Brandeis said, "The makers of the Constitution conferred the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by all civilized men -- the right to be let alone." If we are to maintain that right, we Americans need to carefully balance the claims of liberty and security -- and take more risks. As Steven Stills said, we must "Find the cost of freedom," and be willing to pay.
Richard D. Erlich is currently the main content provider for the Clockworks 2 wiki, which people interested in science fiction should visit and help build since, even including the hard-copy, hard-cover Clockworks [1] (Greenwood Press), is a radically incomplete List of Works Useful for the Study of the Human/Machine Interface in SF.
Today, President Bush held a press conference that dealt with many issues. One of the questions asked was about the Protect America Act. Bush once again said that it was necessary for our security, including the part about retroactive immunity for telecom companies. But he introduced a fun new argument into play that only Dick Cheney had used up to that point:
It was legal. And now, all of a sudden, plaintiffs attorneys, class-action plaintiffs attorneys, you know -- I don't want to try to get inside their head; I suspect they see, you know, a financial gravy train -- are trying to sue these companies. First, it's unfair. It is patently unfair. And secondly, these lawsuits create doubts amongst those who will -- whose help we need.
Financial gravy train? Who does Bush think is filing these lawsuits? I know that, in his mind, the only law firms that exist are giant, corporate law firms that sue to prevent dishing out workers compensation claims, but let's be reasonable! Giant, profit-making law firms are not engaging in these lawsuits. Non-profit organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are filing these lawsuits. They're not making any money! If they thought there were money to be made, giant, profit-making law firms would be leading the charge of class-action lawsuits against these telecom companies.
Today, Sen. Hillary Clinton lambasted Sen. Barack Obama for insinuating, through campaign mailers, that Hillary's healthcare plan will be mandatory and will punish people who don't join. "Sen. Obama knows it is not true that my plan forces people to buy insurance even if they can't afford it," she said today.
So, are these allegations true or false? Hillary appeared on This Week on Feb. 3. Even then, the Obama campaign was telling people that Hillary's healthcare plan would force people to purchase insurance. Host George Stephanopolous asked Hillary to answer these charges:
Stephanopolous: "They're claiming this issue of the penalty, and a lot of healthcare experts, many who side-- who worked with you in 1994, say that without these enforcement mechanisms, you simply can't get to universal coverage, you can't claim to have universal coverage, so there's no difference between your plan and Senator Obama's, and, and, and, I mean, you talk about automatic enrollment. Will you garnish wages of people who, uh, don't comply, don't buy the insurance?"Hillary: "George, we will have an enforcement mechanism. Whether it's that or it's some other, uh, mechanism through the tax system or automatic enrollment--"
In what way do the words "whether it's that [meaning garnishing wages] or some other mechanism" not translate into forcing people to buy insurance? And incidentally, this controversy has been around since the beginning of February. Only now is Hillary drawing new attention to it as she tries -- desperately, I might add -- to win Ohio and Texas on Mar. 4.
In an essay for The Atlantic Monthly entitled "Goodbye to All That," Andrew Sullivan presents a novel reason why Obama is fundamentally different from any candidate we've seen in our generation:
Unlike any of the other candidates, he could take America—finally—past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation that has long engulfed all of us. So much has happened in America in the past seven years, let alone the past 40, that we can be forgiven for focusing on the present and the immediate future.[...]
At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war—not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a momentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade—but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war—and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama—and Obama alone—offers the possibility of a truce.
Vietnam and the culture wars of the 1960s, says Sullivan, have informed political discourse ever since then, and only Obama is young enough not to have politically matured during that time. He has not been affected by the "triumphant post-Reagan conservatism" that has kept Democrats on the defensive since the 1980s. Even today, it seems, Democrats have to justify to the country why their ideas are not ludicrous, while Republican ideas are accepted as normal. Going to war in Iraq? Sounds great. Suggesting we don't go to war in Iraq? Whoa, there, buddy! You'd better have a good reason for us not to go to war. The beauty of the Iraq War is that President Bush didn't have to do very much actual convincing. The narrative of our nation's politics said that the Republicans knew how to protect the nation, so Bush knew best.
Which brings us to why Obama would make a great president: "He is among the first Democrats in a generation not to be afraid or ashamed of what they actually believe, which also gives them more freedom to move pragmatically to the right, if necessary." Nowhere was the polarization of something as basic as an opinion demonstrated than in 2004. On the one hand, we have George W. Bush, a man who believes so much in his own opinion -- and others' faith in his opinion -- that he has not once changed his mind about anything. He has made no mistakes, and he has no regrets. Undoubtedly, if someone asked if he would do anything about his preidency differently, he wouldsn't have an answer. Even when he is wrong, he refuses to back down, as though his own stubbornness is prima facie evidence of how correct he is -- because, seriously, how could someone who is wrong be so unwilling to admit he's wrong? He dares people to call him on his hubris, and largely, his supporters never do, assuming that he's either completely correct or a totally tactless moron.
John Kerry was on the other end of the spectrum, constantly changing his mind when he realized it would be politically expedient to do so. He famously said of a defense spending bill, "I voted for it before I voted against it." This only gave his opponents more ammunition in their gunfight to demonstrate to voters that he didn't have any firm positions. A successful "Google bomb" shot John Kerry's campaign website to number one as the search result for "waffles."
The fear of Republicans is driving this congress. It's the reason why Democrats have consistently refused to stand up to President Bush when he is urging for the passage of stupid laws, like a provision for warrantless wiretapping. It's the reason why they haven't done the investigations they should be doing. Democrats take Bush's comments about them to heart and are terrified that, after twelve years of being browbeaten by Republicans, the hard-earned gains of 2006 will disappear when voters believe it when the president says that Congress is spending too much money and wasting time with investigations and attempts to end the war in Iraq.
Obama knows that the president is bluffing. He knows that Democrats don't pay any attention to what he says, and the president's conservative audience already doesn't like the Democrats, so there's no reason to pander. Obama isn't afraid of Bush and he isn't afraid of Republicans. It takes a certain amount of idealism to think that you're doing what's right. Bush has that idealism, but he's carried it too far, to the point where he's doing what only he thinks is right and doesn't come to a consensus with anyone. When the Senate intimated that it might not confirm Michael Mukasey as Attorney General, Bush was fine with that. We just won't have an Attorney General, then, he told the Senate. In no uncertain terms, he told them that they would be confirming Michael Mukasey, and if they didn't like it, then he would publicly blame them for the lack of an Attorney General. He would not be nominating anyone else.
Obama, though, is not unilateral. But he's not a chicken. And, says Sullivan, he brings with him more than pragmatism:
If you believe that America’s current crisis is not a deep one, if you think that pragmatism alone will be enough to navigate a world on the verge of even more religious warfare, if you believe that today’s ideological polarization is not dangerous, and that what appears dark today is an illusion fostered by the lingering trauma of the Bush presidency, then the argument for Obama is not that strong. Clinton will do.
For some reason, CNN keeps giving superdelegates to candidates. "Superdelegates" are delegates that are not pledged to a specific candidate. For example, Arizona has 67 delegates and 11 superdelegates. This means that, after the Feb. 5 primary, 67 delegates will be obligated to vote for a particular candidate, and 11 will be free to make up their minds how they want. Liken them to "at-large" delegates. But their allegiances are far from certain.
CNN makes guesses about who gets superdelegates, adds them to the pledged delegate totals, and then puts the sum on their Election Center front page. It's 725 for Hillary to 636 for Obama, which sounds like quite a disparity, until you remove the superdelegates. In terms of pledged delegates, Hillary has 532, while Obama has 530. The race is much closer than it initially appears.
Bloomberg News reports that Hillary Clinton "took in $823,087 from registered lobbyists and members of their firms in 2007." And Barack Obama? None. Obama "doesn't take money from registered lobbyists." How can Hillary Clinton talk about change while she takes money from the very people for whom change is bad?
With 22 states poised to have primaries on Tuesday, the battle for the Democratic nomination could be decided in a few days. Barack Obama is the best choice for the Democratic nomination, hands down.
A year ago, I was hesitant to consider Barack Obama due to his lack of experience. He has been a U.S. senator for only three years; what could he possibly have to offer? It seems, though, that Obama's perceived lack of experience is not as important as what he could bring to the table. Obama likes to say that he offers "hope," and this is true: Obama doesn't behave the same way that Hillary does. His outlook on the way government ought to work is different from Hillary's, and it's different from the way that politics has been conducted as far back as I can remember.
Consider the personalities: who is leveling personal attacks? When Barack Obama said that he thought Ronald Reagan took advantage of a time when the country wanted to hear his new ideas, Hillary took the comment and spun it wildly out of control, claiming that Obama revered Ronald Reagan and thought that he had better ideas than the Democrats. When Hillary Clinton said that Martin Luther King, Jr., couldn't have accomplished his dream of civil rights reform without Lyndon Johnson in the White House, everyone in the media pounced on her, assailing her for daring to suggest that King had any flaws. The media turned that comment -- which is, actually, probably true -- and spun it into an issue of "race." But guess who didn't jump on that bandwagon? Barack Obama, the very person who would have benefitted most from such spin.
Most of their policies are pretty much the same. Healthcare reform, for example. Both Hillary and Obama want to allow people to buy into the same kinds of federal health plans that Congress uses. Both of them would allow people to keep their private insurance, if they wanted. Both of them want to cover children (although Obama says explicitly that he wants mandatory healthcare coverage for children) and both of them want to allow the use of generics where possible, with Obama adding that he would allow the purchase of drugs from other developed countries. Neither candidate is out to create a Canadian or British-style single-payer system. That's a shame, but it's also realistic. Moving to a federal healthcare system for people who can't afford private health insurance is the first step toward creating a single-payer system. Both Hillary and Obama would strengthen oversight over the healthcare industry and modernize the systems they use, so as to keep costs down. (Paul Krugman, the columnist Republicans love to hate, estimates that 25% of the money we spend on healthcare is eaten up by administrative costs; that is, pushing paper from one place to another.)
Even though she is more in favor among Latino voters, Hillary's website doesn't go into specifics about her immigration policies. Obama is unsurprisingly centrist about immigration, not using the "a"-word, but not allowing for an exploitative guest worker program. Under an Obama immigration policy, illegal immigrants would pay a fine and then go to "the back of the line" to get their citizenship, a process that can take up to fifteen years on a good day (which includes a few years to get an immigrant visa, a few more years to become a permanent resident, and then several years after that to become a citizen). Our immigration and naturalization system is tremendously bureaucratic and broken. Obama won't fix that to my satisfaction. Neither will Hillary.
What are we left with? The Iraq War. As a state senator from Illinois, Obama was opposed to the Iraq War. Hillary voted to use force in Iraq. During last week's debate, she attempted to spin her support for the war as though she had no idea the president would actually use force. She voted, she said, for the president to enforce U.N. Resolution 1441, something she thought he would do through diplomacy.
Are we really supposed to believe this? A president beats the drums of war for months before invading, and Hillary is naive enough to think that he won't go to war? She never admitted that she was naive, or that she was duped, or even that she was wrong. That sends her on the path to the Dark Side toward a policy of never admitting you're wrong, kind of like a certain president I know.
Hillary has also never said definitively if she would remove troops from Iraq. She has said that she might do it, but there are no guarantees. Obama is explicitly promising a withdrawal from Iraq. This is something that I find necessary in a candidate. The Iraq War was a sham and a mistake from the very beginning, and to continue it is to continue legitimizing that lie. The war has to end as soon as possible, and only Obama has promised to do it.
The impression that I get out of Obama is that he will actually act as a voice for change. Not since 1994 have the Democrats had a candidate so charismatic and so promising. The Al Gore of 2000 was not the Al Gore that spoke passionately about global warming; the Al Gore of 2000 was boring and didn't seem nearly as amiable as George W. Bush. In 2004, the Democrats trotted out John Kerry, a candidate who gained the support of people who didn't want to vote for George W. Bush. Kerry was, if at all possible, less enigmatic than Gore and conceded defeat despite obvious voting irregularities in Ohio. Hillary has too many political and corporate connections to be a real voice of change. She -- and her husband -- have the same penchant for secrecy that George W. Bush has now. We will never know how the Clinton healthcare plan was formed, since the records are still secret. A Hillary presidency may attempt to stonewall government transparency, but I believe that an Obama presidency never will. He has never been anything but honest with the American people.
Hearing Obama speak cogently and honestly about the issues at hand actually does give me a sense of hope, as though the evil of the last eight years can be undone, our government can be made to function once again, corruption can be placed under control, and our cynical war for money in the Middle East can end. No wonder the Obama logo looks like a rising sun.
Imagine that you're a political campaign with at least three times the notoriety of Ron Paul but one-sixth the number of party delegates. Imagine that you've been running on a platform of national security, but not much else, and not even a good platform of national security, at that.
Your name is Rudy Giuliani, and things aren't going well for you. After contests in Iowa, New Hampshire, Michigan, South Carolina, and Wyoming, you've picked up only one delegate. Ron Paul, crazy Texas libertarian and Internet darling, has six delegates. How could this happen? You were supposed to be the Republican golden boy. You were "America's Mayor." You were Time magazine's Person of the Year in 2001. Where did you go wrong?
For one, in several debates, Giuliani demonstrated that he knows next to nothing about formulating policy. In the very first Republican debate last year, Paul schooled Giuliani on "blowback" and why our Middle East policies may have created an environment for people like Osama Bin Laden to gain supporters. Giuliani would have none of it, insisting that Paul was blaming the United States for the September 11 attacks. At the end of the day, though, Giuliani's protestations about the evil terrorists revealed only that he has the same lack of understanding about the world that George W. Bush does.
And speaking of September 11, Giuliani speaks of September 11 a lot. His invocation of September 11 has entered the realm of the farcical, and prompted former presidential candidate Joe Biden to remark of Giuliani, "There's only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun, and a verb and 9/11." He has no clear policy positions, and his only credentials -- getting New York out of September 11 -- are based on doing exactly what anyone else in his place would have done. Doing the obvious does not make Giuliani an expert on national security. And continuing to invoke September 11, even in situations where it doesn't seem appropriate or necessary, only serves to strengthen the notion that he stands on the pedestal of September 11 because he has no other credentials.
Giuliani also managed to alienate the religious core of the Republican party with his stances on abortion and gay marriage. He used to be just peachy with abortion and gay marriage, but Giuliani has definitively come out against them now that it's politically expedient to do so. Christian conservatives wouldn't have anything to do with a candidate who isn't explicitly in line with their beliefs. While Giuliani may have changed his mind, it won't help him secure the nomination.
And most dastardly, Giuliani bypassed South Carolina altogether. Conventional wisdom tells us that no Republican has secured the party nomination without carrying South Carolina. Giuliani, rather than get into that brawl, opted instead to put all of his eggs into Florida, where he's been campaigning heavily. It is surely this misguided notion that will end Giuliani's chances at getting the nomination. Florida's delegates have been cut in half by the Republican National Committee as punishment for having their primary earlier than the RNC allowed. Florida has 57 delegates to pass out among the Republican candidates, and even if Giuliani wins most of them, it's not enough to surpass Mitt Romney, the current Republican leader. Perhaps Giuliani hopes that a win in Florida will give him a morale boost -- both for himself, his supporters, and the media -- but he should realize that he's dropped off the national radar. His decision to focus on Florida to the exclusion of all else has meant that he has pulled the plug on his own campaign, and even if he does win Florida, that can't help him win the nomination. He's lost too much already.
First, a lesson in how statistics work. This is addressed chiefly to CNN.
You see, if a candidate is two points ahead of another candidate, but the margin of error for that poll is more than two points, then there is no definitive statement that can be made about that poll. Yet, time and again, news outlets report that one candidate is inching out another by mere millimeters even though the margin between the candidates is well within the margin of error for the poll. Example: if a poll says that 34% of people support Hillary, but 32% support Barack Obama, and the margin of error is +/- 3 percentage points, then who wins the poll? The CNN answer -- and subsequent headline -- is, "Hillary ekes out two-point lead over Obama." The real answer is that the actual poll results could conceivably be that Obama has 35% and Hillary has 31%!
Okay. On to the show.
Here we are, ten years into a twenty-year long political campaign, and what do we have to show for it? Examine the situation: President Bush is a lame duck president facing off against a Congress controlled by the opposing party. A minority of the country supports him, and he has led the country into an expensive war that will be in its fifth year this March. This president has decimated civil liberties, destroyed science, and alienated every moderate person in the world with his cavalier, shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later "Don't mess with [the popular caricature of] Texas" style of governance. You'd think that all a candidate would have to do is be breathing in order to gain support. Terri Schiavo for president!
But it's not so. No candidate has emerged that is truly the winner. The Democrats have three plausible contenders: Obama, Clinton, and John Edwards. Any one of these people has a shot at the nomination. Seriously. But they poll very close to each other. It's almost as though they're -- dare I say it -- indistinguishable from one another.
The Republicans are faring worse. There has been no Republican savior, no heir to the Reagan mantle. Fred Thompson was touted as the true scion, but after his three months on the road, he's closer to winning the Grampa Munster Lookalike Contest than the presidency. Rudy Giuliani has enthralled his supporters but scared the bejeezus out of the rest of us. John McCain is that Little Engine That Wants To, but his staunch support of the Iraq war and even torture (!) in some cases makes us suspicious. And at the end of the day, no matter how hard Bush beats him, he comes back, insisting, "It was my fault. Bush really is a good person. It's just that sometimes he wants to win so much that he spreads rumors about me in South Carolina." Mike Huckabee is just as frightening as Giuliani, but he hates gays more. Mitt Romney is an android.
Sadly, in the Republican camp, no one is coming out on top. Again, Terri Schiavo should be able to do it. Sure, Mike Huckabee won Iowa in a surprise victory, but McCain won New Hampshire. At the end of the day, there is no one candidate who appeals to all people. Where is the Super Candidate? The Republicans have spent eight years in the White House because they're good at keeping the team together: stay on message, or Karl Rove will eat your skull.
Instead of a spicy burrito of a campaign with many different, exotic ingredients, this election -- like most others -- has turned instead into a gray, indiscernible goulash that doesn't taste much like anything but smells a lot like money. It's appalling that we're in the state that we're in right now: the White House is ripe for the picking, but no one can figure out how to build a ladder to pick it.
It's not that I don't like Ron Paul. I think he's a good senator, but it remains to be seen whether or not he will make a good president. As I have written before, Paul is definitely a libertarian, and while he may own Rudolph Giuliani in presidential debates, that doesn't mean that he would make a good president.
Ron Paul was debating the other day with SEDHE Villain of the Forever candidate Glenn Beck about abolishing the income tax. It's funny to watch Beck say that he agrees with Paul, and then proceed to disagree with him. Beck, of course, is a Christian conservative who believes that the government should be fiscally conservative and dictate morality. Paul is a fiscal conservative who also believes that the government shouldn't dictate morality. Beck, it seems, doesn't understand how someone can be in favor of small government and a government that doesn't care whether or not you are gay (even though Ron Paul does care if you're gay; see above link). But that's a writing for another day.
The problem with Ron Paul is that, while he wants to eliminate the income tax, he really has no plan for replacing it with anything. Paul's answer to this is just to make the government smaller. But there are a lot of government programs that are good -- like Medicare and Medicaid -- that would suffer from Ron Paul's idea of a bare-bones government.
Paul's website mentions nothing about his desire to destroy the IRS and the Federal Reserve. There are vagueries about returning to the Constitution (whatever that is supposed to mean in this case -- unless the sixteenth amendment isn't part of the Constitution?) and lowering taxes, but nothing to indicate the nature of his position. How many Ron Paul supporters know what he really thinks? You certainly wouldn't gather that from his web site. The Internet loves Ron Paul for saying what he thinks, but even on the Internet, he doesn't say what he really thinks. He reserves that for television.
Sure, the Bush administration has taken us thirty years backward in terms of surveillance, privacy, environmentalism, and science. It fights hard against enforcing the nation’s environmental laws, even going to the Supreme Court to argue that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant and shouldn’t be regulated by the EPA. It supports wrong-headed scientific opinions -- like the president’s stem cell policy and his endorsement of abstience-only education -- that are based not on science, but on the religious beliefs of a few people in positions of power. Is there anything else the Bush Time Machine can do? Turns out there is. The magic word is “secrecy.”
Let’s go back to a time when the earth and Dick Clark were young. The year was 1972 and agents of the president were caught breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Hotel in Washington, DC. The break-in to the hotel was the first in a series of revelations collectively called the “Watergate scandal” that exposed the government’s role in illegal activities that ranged from surveillance to information leaks. Over the course of two years, America learned that not only was the government engaging in illegal activities against its own citizens, but it was actively covering up those activities through a combination of legal maneuvering, plausible deniability, and -- when all else failed -- the paper shredder.
The Watergate scandal resulted in a number of changes to the way government operates. The Office of Special Counsel was created to serve as an independent investigatory arm. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) prohibited the executive from spying on Americans without a warrant. The Presidential Records Act placed the National Archives in charge of the paper being shuffled around the White House: it would decide what would be classified or declassified, shredded or preserved for posterity. United States v. Nixon declared that executive privilege could not be asserted in criminal investigations. The Nixon administration tested the limits of government accountability and oversight, and perhaps thanks to Nixon, we have laws on the books preventing those same abuses from happening again.
Until now. Wiretapping, leaking, and cover-ups have become fashionable again with the Bush administration. And it has little to do with the War on Terr’ and a great deal to do with the mindset of President Bush and Vice President Cheney, who see transparency as a threat to their power. Let’s not forget that Bush fought vehemently against a committee to investigate the events of September 11, 2001. As the administration engages in surveillance for surveillance’s sake, so too does it engage in opacity for opacity’s sake.
The Bush/Cheney penchant for hiding information from the public they serve is not about national security. Recall that, in 2001, Cheney met with several unknown persons in order to churn out the the president’s energy policy. The energy policy was fossil fuel-centric, leading groups like the Sierra Club to sue the administration. They smelled the influence of energy company executives and wanted to know for sure with whom the vice president had met. The administration asserted executive privilege, and the Supreme Court agreed.
Fast forward to 2007, when the Senate Judiciary Committee subpoenaed Harriet Miers and Karl Rove to find out how much they knew about the firing of US attorneys. The administration sent a friendly letter stating that it would be asserting executive privilege. The Judiciary Committee held both Miers and Rove in contempt, but that would prove to be pointless. It is the US attorney for the District of Columbia who files contempt charges, and the Justice Department -- then under the control of President Bush via Alberto Gonzales -- ordered the DC attorney not to file contempt charges. Problem solved! This is one of the reasons why Gonzales resigned: the public soon began to understand that he did whatever the president did, without question, regardless of its legality. By virtue of his being president, Bush could never break the law.
In that case, what was at issue was not national security information. It was the potential embarrassment of having the nation learn that what we suspected all along was true: the US attorney firings were politically motivated. The administration tends to cover up things that could be potentially embarrassing, as it attempted to do when the Jack Abramoff scandals hit the streets in 2006. Bush insisted that Abramoff may have visited the White House a few times, but refused to relinquish the White House visitor logs to prove it. The logs were normally kept by the Secret Service, but Bush ordered them sent to the White House and then destroyed. It soon became policy to destroy White House visitors logs rather than keep them. It is plain that there is no national security interest here, nor any executive privilege claim. The White House simply didn’t want anyone to know who came calling and then use that information against the executive branch. All that changed yesterday, when a federal court judge ruled that, despite what Bush may have ordered, the White House visitor logs are Secret Service records, and as a result, the National Archives has control over them.
Earlier this year, the National Archives’ investigative office complained that the president and vice president were not complying with an executive order signed by President Clinton regarding declassification of executive documents. Bush and Cheney were deciding for themselves what documents would remain classified; in fact, the authority to declassify presidential documents rests with the National Archives. The fear here was that, perhaps, the National Archives would declassify documents that did not contain information damaging to national security, but did contain information damaging to Bush and Cheney. Cheney refused to allow the inspector to even enter his office. He then asserted that he did not have to be in compliance with the law because the vice president’s office was not part of the executive branch. Bush also jumped on the bandwagon and insisted that the Office of the President was exempt from the order. We all had a good laugh for about a week, and then Bush and Cheney relented after the House of Representatives threatened to cut the Office of the Vice President out of the executive branch’s budget, since he wasn’t a member of that branch. The scary part of that week was that Bush and Cheney weren’t joking -- they even entered the realm of irreality to prevent oversight, so much was their desire to prevent anyone from knowing what was going on.
And it will continue into the future. Bush has signed orders keeping his own records, and those of his father, sealed until far into the future. The Bush conceit of secrecy is obviously an attempt to save his own behind. Whenever a scandal arises, cover it up! And if someone causes a scandal, leak something! Valerie Plame learned that the administration plays hardball with its critics. At the same time, though, it keeps information close to its chest. The attitude is reminiscent of the Nixon administration, where G. Gordon Liddy occupied an office in the basement with the name “Plumber” on the door. It was Liddy’s job to plug leaks (hence the title “White House plumber”), but it was also his job to strategically make leaks. The worlds of Nixon and Bush collided on a Fox News show where Liddy had the audacity to insist that it was okay for the Bush administration to leak Valerie Plame’s CIA status. This from a man who has the moral high ground because he went to prison for his role in the Watergate scandal. President Bush is a man deeply concerned about his legacy. With any luck, history will look back on him as the man who unearthed Richard Nixon and wore his skull around as a Halloween mask.
Here's one: at Sunday's summit of OPEC leaders, Chavez -- president of oil-rich Venezuela -- suggested that "OPEC should set itself up as an active political agent," according to The Houston Chronicle. He means, of course, that OPEC should use oil as a bargaining tool. He means, of course, that OPEC should greatly increase the price of oil specifically to harm the United States, which Chavez has set up as the enemy that only he can vanquish.
Tilting at windmills much? As if Chavez didn't already have dictatorial tendencies (which have before been chronicled in this space), now we have him creating an enemy for his people to hate, with the promise that he will save them from that enemy. This is chapter four of the Dictator's Playbook, one used to good advantage by Mssrs. Hitler, Stalin, and honorable mention for the Party in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Nothing unites people like a common foe.
Both Chavez and his new best friend, Iranian president and winner of the Definitely Not Crazy Wet T-Shirt Contest at the Hooter's in Persepolis, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, blamed the rising price of oil on the weakening U.S. dollar. Oil is traded in U.S. dollars, and as the value of the dollar decreases, countries would have to increase the price of oil to compensate. This makes sense only if you discount the fact that the price of oil started increasing before the U.S. dollar went into decline, which was before this summer when the credit crunch caused the world's faith in the U.S. markets to decline. May I also add that, as both Chavez and Ahmadinejad are Princeton-trained economists, their statements are totally earnest and in no way an attempt to lash out at the United States.
King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia may approve of lashing a woman 200 times for the crime of being raped (although, in Saudi Arabia's defense, the crime wasn't that she got raped, but that she talked about it publicly and tried to get her attackers prosecuted), but that doesn't mean he's a fool. "Those who want OPEC to take advantage of its position are forgetting that OPEC has always acted moderately and wisely," he said.
It's true that OPEC meets the technical definition of a cartel: a small group of firms in an oligopolistic market that meet to set prices so as to take advantage of the relative inelasticity of demand. But in the past, OPEC has used its cartel-power to make money, not political statements. And whenever OPEC has set its prices, Saudi Arabia -- whose number one customer is the United States -- has always caved in. If they give us cheap oil, we won't press for "regime change" in a country run by a theocratic dictator whose government supports terrorism. But trust us: Saddam Hussein was the most heinous threat facing our nation, much like the guy who ran that stop sign should be arrested before the guy who's driving over a hundred and weaving in and out of traffic.
Disappointingly, not many nations have joined Chavez and Ahmadinejad's new after-school club for countries that hate the United States. President Bush is only shooting himself in the face with a hunting rifle by making macho condemnations of Iran, fueling their sense of outrage and making the United States even less of a diplomatic power. (Note to GWB: You forgot the "speak softly" part.) For now, our enemies will remain our enemies in private, deciding -- unlike the Gruesome Twosome -- to publicly remain our friends. It would be bad for business for most other countries in the world (of course, it doesn't cost Chavez or Ahmadinejad anything; they don't trade with us, anyway!).
Bloggers, geeks, and other online types tend to be more libertarian than anything else. As a result, much of the Internet is fawning over Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) as much as Oprah is fawning over Barack Obama. I wonder, though, how much of the Internet knows how much crazy there still is in Rep. Paul. Sure, he p0wned Rudy Giuliani earlier this year at a Republican debate, but that doesn't mean that he will make a good president. Here's a sampling of the legislation authored by Ron Paul:
Crazytown Level: High. This is explicitly a repeal of the Sixteenth Amendment, which amended the Constitution to permit Congress to levy income taxes. But how will the government get money?
Crazytown level: Low. I heartily disagree with this amendment, but anti-immigration proponents have been after this for years, citing some EU countries as examples. (Again, contemporary legislation from other countries is acceptable as a prototype only when you agree with it; otherwise, you must limit yourself to vague, uncodified doctrines of "Western tradition." Justice Scalia, I'm looking at you!) As crazy legislation, this isn't so crazy, as natural citizenship is one way Those Mexcians get their feet in the door here.
Crazytown level: High. While Congress is explicitly granted the power to regulate the federal courts' appellate jurisdiction, it hasn't exercised it. I suppose Rep. Paul's idea here is that the federal government should stay completely out of our lives, even in adjudication. The problem is that, to preserve the government's non-intrusion into our lives, we need the court to tell the government to stop it. Oh, and by the way, if a judge violates this law, it's an impeachable offense. Oh, and by the way, any past cases that deal with any of the above issues are no longer admissable as a precedent. That section goes way, way too far. Judges grab precedents from cases that don't, on first appearance, have anything to do with their current cases. Don't tell judges how to do their jobs (as the Republicans tried to do with Terri Schiavo).
Crazytown level: High. For a guy who purports to be a libertarian, how can he write this stuff? I give this a "high" Crazytown level because it's so hypocritical.
Crazytown level: High. We started the freaking United Nations. We're not going anywhere anytime soon, despite what John Bolton wants.
Crazytown level: Very high. Here's the text of 31 USC 5103: "United States coins and currency (including Federal reserve notes and circulating notes of Federal reserve banks and national banks) are legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues. Foreign gold or silver coins are not legal tender for debts." Yes, folks, in this bill, Rep. Paul wants to eliminate Federal Reserve notes (e.g., dollar bills) from being used as legal tender. I wonder why the bill contains hardly any references to the fact that paper money and coinage would no longer be used in transactions. And what else does he want us to use? Gold? I'm starting to get the feeling that Rep. Paul would be happier living in Ayn Rand's capitalist utopia. As a corollary, Rep. Paul also wants to repeal the Federal Reserve Act and eliminate federal banks. I thought we settled this in 1913?
Crazytown level: High. Also, this legislation is unconstitutional. The Constitution gives Congress the sole authority to "grant letters of marque and reprisal" (Art. I, § 8). Ignoring that for a second, this would give bounty hunters the authority to track down members of al-Qaeda or seize their property. A letter of marque is a warrant "authorizing the designated agent to search, seize, or destroy specified assets or personnel belonging to a party which has committed some offense under the laws of nations against the assets or citizens of the issuing nation." They were once granted to state-sponsored pirates, like Sir Francis Drake, to provide them with a legal basis for raiding enemy ships. Ignoring that, do we want Dog the Bounty Hunter going out into the wide world to alienate even more Frenchmen?
So, before you decide that Ron Paul is the greatest guy in the world because he understands the concept of "blowback" and isn't afraid to speak truth to Giuliani, keep in mind that he lives in Crazytown. He's the author of good legislation, as well (like this and this), but he would make a pretty awful president.
Why pay for insurance if the insurance company isn't going to pay for the services that you signed up for them to pay for?
Kos, proprietor of Daily Kos, lives just up the road in Berkeley and has had a heck of a time trying to get his insurance provider, Blue Shield, to pay for an anesthesiology procedure. "Of course, we never asked them to process this at the 'preferred rate'," he says. "We ask [sic] them to pay for the service. That's why we're paying over $800/month in insurance premiums. To be insured." He concludes, "How could a government-run service be any worse than these unaccountable, unethical, disgusting creeps?"
Opponents of government-run healthcare claim that such a system would be inefficient, but in the United States, people with private insurance often have to deal with each physician individually if they're taken care of by a team of physicians (e.g., if a person had surgery, that person may have to deal with each doctor's billing individually). Furthermore, even though you're paying hundreds of dollars per month for that insurance, there's no guarantee that the insurance company will pay for your treatment. This goes back to what I said the other day: insurance companies are more than happy to pay for a prescription here or there, but when it comes to expensive procedures, they don't want to pay, and they insert language into your contract that gives them the right to waive payment for expensive procedures whenever they want. You may think that you're covered, but for any given procedure, there may be a loophole that exempts the healthcare provider from paying for it.
The price of healthcare (guess what? It's steep)
A study published by the Kaiser Family Foundation in 2004 found that the price of healthcare is rising faster than employee wages:
“Since 2000, the cost of health insurance has risen 59 percent, while workers wages have increased only 12 percent. Since 2001, employee contributions increased 57 percent for single coverage and 49 percent for family coverage, while workers wages have increased only 12 percent. This is why fewer small employers are offering coverage, and why fewer workers are taking-up coverage,” said Jon Gabel, vice president for Health Systems Studies at the Health Research and Educational Trust.
Let's be completely clear: "employer-provided" does not always mean that the employer pays for your healthcare. What is more likely than not is that you pay a certain amount per month for your healthcare. At my job, $30 is deducted from each paycheck to pay for my healthcare plan, if I elect to enroll in a healthcare plan (which, of course, I emphatically do).
And for the people out there who insist that, if you don't have employer-provided healthcare, you should just purchase your own: let's crunch the numbers. Purchasing your own healthcare is very expensive; in fact, it could be considered a regressive tax (the tax rate increasing as income decreases), since people at the lowest incomes are less likely to have jobs that provide them with healthcare, forcing them to obtain private healthcare at a cost many times that of what employees with employer-provided healthcare pay. The Kaiser Foundation found that people who purchase their own insurance pay an average of $308 for single coverage; as I mentioned above, I pay $30 a month. Does it make much sense that the people who are least in a position to pay a lot for healthcare are the ones who are most often going to pay a lot for healthcare?
Or you could just go without healthcare. President Bush feels that we have a very robust healthcare system for those who don't qualify for Medicare or Medicaid, or don't have their own insurance. "The immediate goal is to make sure there are more people on private insurance plans," he said in Cleveland on July 10. "I mean, people have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room." Bush is technically correct in that federal law requires emergency rooms to treat patients regardless of their ability to pay; however, this near-sighted philosophy ignores the fact that (1) emergency room care is very expensive; and (2) the cost of treating the emergency patient could have been significantly reduced had the patient had access to preventative care, eliminating his need to use expensive emergency care.
But, to paraphrase Kanye West, George Bush doesn't care about poor people. He has demonstrated time and time again that it is more important to allow private industry to make money than it is to permit people to survive -- and by "survive," I mean "not die." This is also the situation in Iraq, where incompetent private contractors get no-bid contracts and then proceed to not do things they said they would.
Part of the reason that we have a separation of powers in the Constitution is that the authors of the Constitution wanted to force compromise to happen. With no one branch of government, or even one person, singly in charge of every state process, making unilateral decisions would be difficult. Compromises that everyone could agree to had to happen for business to get done.
For six years, President Bush has been executive and legislator. As head of his party, which was also in control of Congress, he was able to dictate whatever he wanted. If a particular Republican voted in a way that he didn't like, Karl Rove's political machinery would work to make sure that person wasn't re-elected. Like the political bosses of turn-of-the-century New York, Bush kept a tight ship; everyone who didn't fall into lockstep with the Bush/Cheney philosophy was smeared, or ousted, or both.
Once the Democrats were in charge, Bush suddenly had to do something he had never done before: compromise. Except he never compromised. He always refused to budge, insisting that whenever Democrats held hearings, or demanded accountability for the war in Iraq, or oversight over warrantless wiretapping, they "lost sight of the fact that we're at war."
Hey, guess what! He said that yesterday! Apparently, during a time of war, Congress should acquiesce and do whatever the president wants. Failure to do so may result in another terrorist attack.
Yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committee hinted that it may not recommend that Judge Michael Mukasey, Bush's nominee for Attorney General, be sent to the full Senate. Some senators have expressed reservations that he refused to say whether or not "waterboarding" -- an interrogation technique banned by the Army but maybe (or maybe not) currently being used by the CIA -- counts as "torture." Mukasey said that he couldn't say whether or not it was torture. This article from The New York Times indicates that, if Mukasey did say waterboarding constituted torture, the administration (which, let's be honest because we're all adults here, is doing, otherwise their knickers wouldn't be in such a twist about it) could be liable domestically and internationally for war crimes.
But what I'm more concerned about is Judge Mukasey's apparent belief that the president may not necessarily be bound by the law, as long as the violation of that law is because he is defending the country. Read as Judge Mukasey takes a page from the Alberto Gonzales Doublespeak Playbook:
LEAHY: Can a president authorize illegal conduct? Can the president -- can a president put somebody above the law by authorizing illegal conduct?MUKASEY: The only way for me to respond to that in the abstract is to say that if by illegal you mean contrary to a statute, but within the authority of the president to defend the country, the president is not putting somebody above the law; the president is putting somebody within the law.
Can the president put somebody above the law? No. The president doesn't stand above the law.
But the law emphatically includes the Constitution. It starts with the Constitution.
"Putting somebody within the law" doesn't make any sense. If you thought Mukasey's views on executive power were any less erroneous or made-up than Alberto Gonzales', then you thought wrong.
President Bush also said yesterday, "People who say we are not at war are either disingenuous or naïve." I'm surprised he's using words like "disingenuous," which is a big word for him. But does he know what it means? Perhaps he doesn't realize that it is also "disingenuous" to state that the United States does not torture, and then turn around and refuse to outlaw specific acts that could constitute torture, or to sign into law, without equivocation, a bill that bans the use of torture in the War on Terr'. Now that you have a fun new word to use, Mr. President, would you call the latter acts "disingenuous"?
The president's solution to Congress' refusal to allow Mukasey to get a full hearing is ... nothing. In a speech to the conservative Heritage Foundation, Bush said, "If the Senate Judiciary Committee were to block Judge Mukasey on these grounds, they would send a new standard for confirmation that could not be met by any responsible nominee for attorney general. And that would guarantee that America would have no attorney general during this time of war." Apparently, it's asking way too much for an Attorney General nominee to take a stand on executive authority that doesn't feature the president as the head of all three branches of government. Equally burdensome is asking Mukasey to state his opinion on waterboarding. Since we don't officially know that waterboarding even goes on, what's the harm in asking him his opinion?
The end result will be not a compromise, but a whole lot of nothing. Bush will pout, fold his arms and hold his breath while Congress does the same. The onus, however, is on Bush to find a nominee that Congress likes. This is one of Congress' checks on the president: the latter's nominees require "the advice and consent of the Senate." No consent, no nominee. In much the same way that the president is allowed to fire any U.S. attorney at any time, for any reason, it is within the Senate's purview to refuse to consent to a president's choice for Attorney General for any reason.
The president is not beyond compromise, though. In 2006, he withdrew the nomination of Harriet Miers because the political cost-benefit analysis showed that she wasn't worth the humiliation of her being voted down by the Senate, which she would have been, by both Democrats and Republicans. Justice Alito's approval by the Senate was due in part to a pact entered into by Bush and then-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee Arlen Specter (R-PA). Specter didn't like Alito, anyway, but in exchange for Alito making it out of committee, Bush would agree that the Judiciary Committee -- and not the secretive Intelligence Committee -- would be the venue for hearings about the warrantless wiretapping program.
The political meme of "all these Democrats do is waste people's time with their hearings and their frivolous spending" that began two weeks ago has reached a head, as Bush triumphantly smiles his asinine, shit-eating grin while the Democrats stall his nominee and appear to prove him right. This is a power play for Bush, and to back down now would signal that the Democrats do have real authority, an impression the president would like to avoid. The Miers withdrawal was bi-partisan and mitigated by a news release indicating that she withdrew herself. Okay, maybe she couldn't stand the heat; she can at least reasonably be given the benefit of the doubt. But a Mukasey withdrawal will emphatically be interpreted as having occurred because the Democrats successfully blocked him. And if it appears that the Democrats actually have some authority, they may (yikes) actually start to act like they do.
It's a doozy. From Paul Krugman, we have the story of why President Bush loves outsourcing everything, from emergency management to the army. Krugman refers specifically to the recent Blackwater controversy in Iraq, in which the U.S. contract-security firm may have killed 8-20 Iraqi civilians without any reason. This is just business as usual for the Bush administration, which trumpets the virtues of the private sector over those of the government:
But it's also worth noting that the Bush administration has tried to privatize every aspect of the U.S. government it can, using taxpayers' money to give lucrative contracts to its friends -- people like Erik Prince, the owner of Blackwater, who has strong Republican connections. You might think that national security would take precedence over the fetish for privatization -- but remember, President Bush tried to keep airport security in private hands, even after 9/11.
The private sector has, in the last six years, entered many areas of the government, usually with anything but virtue. Remember 2005, when it was revealed that Halliburton subsidiary KBR overcharged the government for meals that were never delivered and laundry that was never washed -- or that never even existed?
The best way for rich investors to make money is to get government contracts. Here's how the process works, in my Handy Guide to Outsourcing the Government:
Next, from Philip Boffey, the use of the nasty "s-word." It was brought up repeatedly by opponents of the State Children's Health Insurance Program expansion. (The word is "socialism," by the way.) How are Republicans claiming that not expanding healthcare for uninsured children -- children! -- is a good thing? They're pulling the old Soviet ghosts out of the closet, dusting them off, and brandishing them with as much scare as a 50-year-old straw man can be brandished. Dana Perino, the president's spokeswoman, and Sen. Lindsey Graham, both used "socialized medicine" to refer to the SCHIP program. Expanding the program, they say, is just the Democrats' way of getting their foot in the door so that they can sneak Dr. Stalin and Dr. Castro in to perform unnecessary surgery on your right to pay way too much money to a private insurance company (and then spend the next six months in customer support hell as you try to explain that the surgery to remove your almost-exploded gallbladder really wasn't frivolous).
Boffey points out that, in making these arguments, Republican opponents (and they are all Republican) of SHCIP ignore the fact that we already have socialized medicine in this country, in the form of Medicare, Medicaid, and VA hospitals.
Your grandmother is being strangled by Karl Marx right now! Our boys in uniform are being slaughtered by the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, who's been dressed up to look like Che Guevara! Except that millions of Americans use socialized medicine, and they aren't trying to topple the government and institute a dictatorship of the proletariat. Paul Krugman once observed that opponents of socialized medicine use hip surgeries as a benchmark for efficacy of medical treatment. The United States, he says, has the best record for hip surgery in the world. But what those opponents fail to note is that hip surgeries are, by and large, performed on the elderly -- the same elderly who are using Medicare. In their attempt, then, to prove that socialized medicine is not as good as "private" medicine, opponents of socialized medicine have only confirmed that socialized medicine is better than private medicine.
In the same way that Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth propelled global warming from its status of "maybe it's not happening" to "we need to do something about this right now," so too has Michael Moore's Sicko brought government healthcare into the light. It's no longer a debate about whether or not we should have it, but when we're going to have it and what it will look like. This film single-handedly clued Americans into how broken, unfair, and stupid our medical system really is. The issue can no longer be shuttled back into the shadows by Republicans (like former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, whose family runs one of the nation's largest private hospital systems).
WASHINGTON -- The Associated Press reports that President Bush will pick Michael Mukasey, a retired federal judge and judicial advisor to the Giuliani campaign, as his nominee for Attorney General. I don't know very much about Mukasey, but he appears not to be a member of the Bush Good Old Boys Network. This is heartening news; with a Democratic majority in the Senate -- and with Republicans tired of Gonzales' cronyism -- Bush was forced to pick a nominee based not on his history with the president, but on -- what's that? His credentials?!
This is exactly what the Founding Fathers hoped for in writing the Constitution: that requiring the "advice and consent" of the Senate would mean that the president would have to compromise. For six years, the president and the Senate were the same party, so Bush could pretty much appoint whomever he wanted (unless the nominee was hilariously unqualified, as with Harriet Miers). Now, though, with Democrats in the majority, Bush is forced to actually pick a candidate that everyone will be happy with, and that kind of candidate is not someone who has been with Bush for the last fifteen years (cf. Gonzales, Miers, Karl Rove, et al.).
Mukasey seems eminently qualified. He first served as a U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York in the 1970s and was then appointed as a federal judge for the same district in 1987. He left that position in 2006, returning to the New York law firm he worked for from 1976 to 1987. He does not appear to have any strong ties to President Bush; or, at least, his ties aren't nearly as strong as Gonazles'. Let's hope Mukasey's tenure signals the end of Bush cronyism in Washington.
After almost six months of haranguing, arguing, disputing, questioning, lying, hearings, ad hominem attacks, and constitutional showdowns, Alberto Gonzales has stepped down as Attorney General, effective Sept. 17. Prior to being Attorney General, Gonzales was White House Counsel. Prior to that, he was President Bush's personal counsel. Prior to that, he was a justice on the Texas Supreme Court. Gonzales has been a Bush man through and through for at least the last ten years. Despite President Bush's assertions to the contrary, Gonzales has handled the Justice Department not with incompetence when it comes to doing his job, but incompetence when it comes to engaging in the lies and cover-ups that are a necessary part of daily life in the Bush administration.
It's no secret that the Bush administration is secretive, going to great lengths to prevent its critics and even the American people from knowing what's really going on in the White House. This tendency first became clear in the summer of 2001, when Vice President Cheney met with unnamed people to craft the administration's official energy policy. Environmental groups suspected that the petroleum-centric nature of the National Energy Policy meant that oil company executives -- who are not strangers to Cheney and Bush -- were involved. Judicial Watch and The Sierra Club sued for the right to know who exactly was involved. The case went to the Supreme Court, which affirmed the administration's justifications of executive privilege in keeping this information secret.
It went only downhill from there. September 11 was a terrific reason to start painting over the White House windows; requests for information could be -- and have been -- rejected due to "national security."
As a Bush acolyte, Gonzales was right up there with Harriet Miers. The two could have been King and Queen of the Bush Loyalty Prom. By all accounts, Gonzales was good at his job. As White House Counsel, it was he who drafted the first legal arguments that the president didn't have to adhere to the "quaint" Geneva Conventions when dealing with enemy combatants. According to former Deputy Attorney General James Comey, Gonzales and White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card tried to get a drugged-up John Ashcroft to authorize an extension to the administration's warrantless wiretapping program, despite the fact that Ashcroft had transferred the powers of the Attorney General to Comey prior to entering the hospital for pancreatitis. Being bad at his job wasn't the problem. As we'll see, being bad at the Bush cover-up game was his problem.
As Attorney General, Gonzales vetted the roles of U.S. attorneys, removing anyone who was not a "loyal Bushie." But it was these same U.S. attorneys who would ultimately begin his downfall. Questions began: were these people fired for political reasons? The administration and its loyal mouthpieces (Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Bill Kristol) quickly fired back that U.S. attorneys served at the pleasure of the president, political reasons or not. And while this is true, the firing of these attorneys -- in the middle of a term, not at the beginning of one like the Clinton purges -- was tacky, nevertheless. And so Gonzales visited the Senate for questioning. From March onward, it seemed like he was testifying every week.
So began his downfall.
Gonzales soon found himself caught in a web of lies of Rumsfeldian proportions. He said he had nothing to do with the firings, that other people below him prepared lists of names and all he, Gonzales, did was sign the paperwork. Then we found out that he had attended meetings about the attorney firings, and it seemed that he was the only one who didn't remember them. Gonzales' faulty memory became chronic as he was suddenly unable to remember where he was on particular days, that he had signed particular documents, or that he had talked to particular people.
This initial investigation spawned spin-off investigations. The original series U.S. Attorney Firings morphed into mid-season replacements like Violations of the Hatch Act, Whose Wiretapping Is It, Anyway? and the favorite prime-time drama of the summer, Wheel of Perjury. Gonzales had lied himself into several corners, and when he wasn't intentionally lying, he was accidentally telling the truth, as he did when he inadvertently revealed the existence of another as-yet undisclosed warrant-less wiretapping program earlier this summer. Gonzales was to Congressional investigations what Norman Lear was to TV sitcoms of the 1970s and '80s.
At the end of six months of investigations, where did we end up? The administration refused to budge on the issue of executive privilege. Harriet Miers and Karl Rove ignored Congressional subpoenas, refusing even to show up on Capitol Hill. (Only former White House political director Sara Taylor testified, and many of her answers included the words "executive privilege," but hey, at least she put in an appearance.) We all knew, in our heart of hearts, that these attorneys were fired for political reasons, not the "performance" problems we had been told back in March. But we had no evidence to prove it. Once Gonzales is no longer Attorney General, he will not be in the spotlight. Another poor shmuck -- perhaps Solicitor General Paul Clement or even Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff (late of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, you know) will get the unenviable task of fixing the Justice Department. It doesn't really matter who gets the job, as long as he or she isn't as much of a Bush lackey as Gonzales was.
Which begs the question: why was Gonzales so loyal? He owed his entire career to George Bush, from his post as Justice on the Texas Supreme Court to Attorney General. He continued riding the Bush Train to Hell even when it became painfully clear what the destination was. That's loyalty.
Republicans will suggest that Gonzales' so-called incompetence was caused by Democrats and their incessant hounding of him. "If only they had let him do his job at Justice instead of calling him in for testimony every other day," they'll say, "the Department wouldn't be in the shape it is." But it's not Congress' fault for exercising its role of oversight. That's like a felon who shot at the police blaming them for a gunshot wound. Gonzales thatched his roof; now he had to live under it. Now that he's moved out of that house, with the way the housing market is going, he won't get back nearly what he put into it.
Last week, Fox News host John Gibson took the high road toward criticizing those who would dare to criticize the president and his Iraq War. On his syndicated radio show, Gibson played a tape of Daily Show host Jon Stewart's tear-filled post-September 11 monologue and ridiculed it. Show co-host (?) "Angry Rich" called Stewart a "phony" because, in Gibson's opinion, it is inconsistent for a person to feel badly about September 11 and criticize the president.
Forget for a moment that this doesn't make sense, and let's leap into the mind of John Gibson, Bush Acolyte. Bush has polarized the country, and he has polarized its opinions, especially for Republicans. I'm not sure that Republicans actually believe half the things they say, because if they did, then perhaps they should look into careers as mental asylum inmates. But for the sake of argument, let's pretend that they actually believe what they say. This means that Republicans believe that criticism of the government, President Bush, or his policies, including (but not limited to) the Iraq War, is a rejection of American values and an implicit endorsement of terrorism. Does it stand to reason that, because you're against the war, you are necessarily in favor of terrorism? Only in the tortured minds of Fox News correspondents does this hold true.
How disingenuous and irresponsible for John Gibson to suggest that it is impossible to simultaneously feel sorrow for September 11 and contempt for President Bush. How are these opinions inconsistent? Perhaps it's the delusion that President Bush somehow "saved" the nation after September 11? How would he have done this? He did send troops to Afghanistan, but shortly afterward, he diverted those resources to Iraq. Here's inconsistency for you: suppose that a nation attacks us. Our only logical course of action is to retaliate. Suppose, also, that there exists a nation that has never attacked us. Should we divert resources from the nation that did attack us to the nation that didn't? Even though that action sounds really stupid, it's what happened. Iraq never attacked us. Why did we attack them?
As Jon Stewart pointed out on last night's Daily Show, it's only Republicans -- only Republicans -- who are calling their opponents' patriotism into question. Why resort to this tactic in a debate? Is it because they're out of real arguments and have to resort to the ad hominem attack? Is it because they can't debate properly? Is it because they're immoral, selfish douchebags? I think the answer is "(D) All of the above."
Yes, John Gibson earns the distinction of being a SEDHE Villain of the Forever for being one of the aforementioned immoral, selfish douchebags. He also earns that distinction for not only mocking legitimate sorrow but also for encouraging another September 11 attack.
Alberto Gonzales and The Truth have kind of a hate-hate relationship. If you've been watching C-SPAN for the last several months, you've seen Attorney General Gonzales try to spin his way out of a web woven over the past six years by himself, President Bush, and other administration insiders.
Most recently, Gonzales suggested that, when he (as White House Counsel) and then-White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card visited then-Attorney General John Ashcroft in the famous Hospital Room Meeting, they discussed not the administration's warrantless wiretapping program, but a different program. At the time, we thought he was lying, attempting to suggest that he wasn't trying to "take advantage of a sick man," Attorney General Ashcroft, who had already voiced his disapproval of the wiretapping program.
Did you think the administration didn't have its lies surrounded by a mantle of more lies, all protecting a solid, inner core of some kind of truth? Turns out Gonzales, in attempting to lie, actually ended up telling the truth! This man is so incompetent, that even when he tries to lie, he can't do it right!
The Raw Story reports that, after September 11, 2001, President Bush signed an executive order authorizing a "series of secret surveillance activities." So, it turns out, Gonzales accidentally let slip that there were other surveillance activities going on without anyone's knowledge. What else has been going on that no one outside of the Bush administration knows about?
Can you believe that I started this blog back in 2003? Four years later, we're at post number 600. Whoa! Of course, I've had help from people like Brian, Elizabeth, Mike, and Rich Erlich, who contributed articles. I mustn't forget them!
Post number 600 is about Rudy Giuliani, courtesy of Digg. Here, we have a speech made by Rudy Giuliani in 1994. He's talking about freedom, and here's what he thinks of it:
We look upon authority too often and focus over and over again, for 30 or 40 or 50 years, as if there is something wrong with authority. We see only the oppressive side of authority. Maybe it comes out of our history and our background. What we don't see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.
So, what's presidential hopeful Rudolph Giuliani saying here? Earlier in the speech, he says, "We constantly present the false impression that government can solve problems that government in America was designed not to solve." So it appears that he's saying that authority can't solve our social problems. Then, in the above blockquote, he says that it's not authority that's the problem: it's freedom! Yes, if everyone would just submit to authority, we wouldn't have the law enforcement problems we have now. It's not that the government should be more forceful; it's that people should be more submissive to their governments! That way, we can have authoritarianism while still claiming that we have less government intrusion into people's lives.
So, not only is Rudolph Giuliani a shameless self-promoter and ignorant about foreign affairs, he is also for authoritarianism cloaked as willing submission to the government, so that it doesn't appear that the government is stronger.
Will Rudolph Giuliani win a Republican nomination? He would be a terrible candidate, so hopefully so (for the Democrats), but probably not, as I hope people aren't that stupid. With John McCain's most recent financial troubles, though, Giuliani might be the front runner. Are Fred Thompson's odds even that good? Does anyone really know who he is, outside of "that guy from Law and Order"? Oh, and he was in The Hunt for Red October.
If he isn't one already, I think I'll take post number 600 to make Rudy Giuliani a SEDHE Villain of the Forever.
Things don’t look good for the new Democratic Congress. Even with a majority in both houses, even with subpoena power, even with President Bush’s approval rating in the twenties and Vice President Cheney’s even lower, there’s still something missing.
Documented law-breaking.
Since November, we’ve had scandal after scandal that appeared to be really bad, but beneath the appearances, no laws were broken.
In March, we learned that nine U.S. attorneys were fired in 2005 and 2006 for undisclosed reasons. The attorney firing was one blunder after another, with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales initially blaming the firings on “performance.” Then, when the fired attorneys all said that they had never received any indication that they weren’t up to par – and, indeed, when it was revealed that they actually received excellent reviews, the P.R. machine needed to find a new tactic. Gonzales then disclaimed all responsibility for the firings, saying that the decisions were ultimately made by his deputies, Kyle Sampson and Monica Goodling. That explanation worked – until both Sampson and Goodling testified that they had had several meetings with Gonzales about the firings. Just after the scandal broke, Sampson resigned. Goodling asserted her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, refusing to testify until the Senate granted her immunity. In her testimony, she suggested that Gonzales had met with her to get their stories straight, which made her “uncomfortable.”
During the weeks of testimony that ensued, the names Karl Rove and Harriet Miers came up. At the time, Rove was Deputy Chief of Staff and Miers, White House Counsel. Both of them were involved in decisions about whom to fire, contradicting Gonzales’ assertions that Justice bureaucrats made the decisions and assembled the lists. The White House, as it turns out, was intimately involved.
Some of the attorneys were fired to make way for political appointees, like Tim Griffin, a former Rove aide who was installed as the U.S. attorney for Arkansas. Some of the attorneys appeared to have been fired for refusing to take on the cases that Republican representatives wanted them to, as in New Mexico with David Iglesias.
But then it gets weirder. Former Deputy Attorney General James Comey testified that Gonzales and White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card went to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft’s sickbed in 2004 to try and get the Attorney General to sign off on the administration’s wiretapping program, even though Ashcroft had previously refused to do so. Ashcroft was in the hospital recovering from pancreatitis, and before he left, he vested the powers of the Attorney General in Comey. "I thought I just witnessed an effort to take advantage of a very sick man,” said Comey.
More testimony and documents led to the discovery that Karl Rove and his aides held several meetings in 2004, designed to discuss how best to get Republicans elected in key states and districts. House and Senate oversight committees raised their eyebrows at this possible violation of the Hatch Act, which prohibits political campaigning, fundraising, or strategizing on government property. The White House claimed that the presentations were “informational briefings about the political landscape.” The Office of Special Counsel is investigating these charges.
At the same time, House and Senate panels tried to gain access to White House emails to see whether or not the topic of U.S. attorney firings had been discussed, only to find that such emails didn’t exist. At least eighty White House staffers were using email addresses provided by the Republican National Committee for official government correspondence. These emails weren’t secure (they weren’t hosted on White House servers) and weren’t backed up, in violation of the Presidential Records Act. When the House Judiciary Committee brought up the subject of an actual violation of the law, the emails – previously believed lost forever – were suddenly available.
Two weeks ago, we learned that Vice President Cheney’s office had been ignoring an executive order requiring the executive branch to report to the National Archives statistics on documents its classifies. Not only had Cheney been ignoring the order since 2003, but when the Information Security Oversight Office, the agency charged with making sure classified information is handled properly, tried to inspect Cheney’s physical office, they were shut out. Cheney then suggested that the office should be disbanded. When we found out that Cheney had been in flagrant violation of the law, Cheney asserted that he was not a member of the executive branch and was thus not subject to the order. President Bush also jumped on the bandwagon, insisting that the order didn’t apply to the Office of the President, either.
Last week, the House subpoenaed all documents relating to the firing of U.S. attorneys, as well as the testimony of Harriet Miers. The White House has, predictably, refused to hand over the documents, citing executive privilege.
Where are the results?
The list goes on, since before the Democrats took office, but this is a smattering of the kinds of things that have seen the light of day in the past four months. To any reasonable person, it appears as though the Bush administration is flaunting the law, giving the American people the legal equivalent of, “Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah, you can’t touch me!”
The Bush administration’s rhetoric has always occupied a dark space between fiction and reality. Some of the things that come out of the White House are technically true, but phrased in such a way as to be misleading. For years, Bush used the words “Saddam Hussein,” “al-Qaeda,” and “September 11” in the same sentence, words away from each other, without expressly saying, “Saddam Hussein was in league with al-Qaeda and was responsible for the September 11 attacks.” To a frightened and loyal public, those words weren’t necessary: in 2005, 47 percent of Americans polled believed that Saddam Hussein ”helped plan and support” the September 11 attacks, compared with practically none who believed that immediately after the attacks. Even after the September 11 Commission determined that there was “no significant operating relationship” between Saddam and al-Qaeda, the administration continued repeating that they were in cahoots, based on a meeting between Iraq and al-Qaeda officials in Prague. Even this story is known by international intelligence to be untrue. Nevertheless, the administration claims that it thought Iraq and al-Qaeda were in cahoots.
As for those attorney firings, weren’t they illegal? Actually, no. All U.S. attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president, and he is within his rights to dismiss them at any time, for any reason. Goodling testified that questions about political affiliation were part of the screening process for prospective attorneys; even that isn’t illegal. The only reason a president may not fire a U.S. attorney is to obstruct an investigation, and while it appears that that may have happened in the case of Iglesias, there’s no evidence that it was true for the other attorneys.
Violations of the Hatch Act may have happened, but there’s no definitive evidence for that. The Presidential Records Act may have been violated, but the emails were ultimately produced, so no “injury in fact” happened.
As for the subpoenaing of documents, that’s a trickier issue. The White House can claim executive privilege only as long as it is not doing so to obstruct a criminal investigation. It’s unclear what crimes the administration is being accused of: possibly only the charge of removing an attorney to interfere with an investigation (the case of David Iglesias). President Bush offered months ago to have Harriet Miers and Karl Rove testify, off the record and not under oath, before Congress. The House Judiciary Committee rightly rejected that patronizing offer for what it was: insulting to the Judiciary Committee as an oversight body.
But it would be hard to get past the assertions that internal executive deliberations about which attorney generals should be removed is confidential. That is, after all, the point of executive privilege: for the president to get advice from his staff without fear that the staff’s comments will become public knowledge. It is only in this way, goes the doctrine, that a president can get honest counsel. In United States v. Nixon, the Supreme Court ruled that President Nixon could not use the claim of executive privilege when it came to criminal investigations. Things looked bleak for Nixon in 1973, as his office increasingly became responsible for violations of election laws and even some state criminal laws (breaking and entering suddenly comes to mind).
While everyone knows in their Heart of Hearts that the Bush administration has broken the law and has the utmost contempt for any checks placed on what President Bush and Vice President Cheney believe are the president’s absolute powers, it is difficult to actually pin any crimes on them. “Scooter” Libby was the fall guy for Cheney, who set out to destroy presidential critic Joe Wilson by revealing that his wife was an undercover CIA operative. If this were a movie, everyone in the audience would complain, “Well, of course Cheney leaked Valerie Plame’s identity!” But in the judicial system, what everyone knows doesn’t meet the standard of reasonable doubt. For this reason, “Scooter” Libby is in jail right now and Vice President Cheney is living large in the vice presidential residence at the U.S. Naval Observatory – where, by the way, all visitor logs were ordered destroyed by the Secret Service.
Senator Barack Obama has come out against Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s articles of impeachment against Cheney, insisting that impeachment is reserved for only the gravest of crimes. And, implicitly, only the most obvious ones. This administration has done of good job of covering up its tracks while breaking the law, or flexing enough to be within the technical boundaries of the law, or, failing all that, re-writing the law so that its actions are legal. The Democrats hold a thin majority in both houses, and some of those Democrats are afraid of appearing to be too critical of the administration. The already tepid P.R. the Democrats have in their favor could quickly turn ice-cold if the public perceives them to be on an impeachment fishing expedition. Nixon, by contrast, was on record as being deeply involved in White House scandals, and Vice President Agnew had just resigned. There was hard, undeniable evidence of obstruction of justice, burglary, and more. This Congress has no such luxury. This administration’s lips are sealed tight and leak only at the strategic say-so of the president or vice president.
It may be years before we know the true scope of Bush and Cheney’s destruction of our country. Cheney will have to be dead before that happens, as he will vehemently fight against declassification of anything. Bush may not have to be so dead; he is deeply concerned about his legacy, and how history will look at him, but repentance might be enough to make us tolerate him. He could go with Prime Minister Tony Blair’s lament in his farewell address, “I did what I thought was right.” But much time will pass before we know what he thought, as the fog of secrecy still hangs heavy in the Land of Washington, where the shadows lie.
Two nights ago, half a dozen Republican presidential candidates met in South Carolina for another TV debate, this one sponsored by Fox News. The shining star of the debate was Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, the only one of the candidates to oppose the Iraq War. Paul is an "old-school" conservative who believes that the Republican party has lost its way "because the conservative wing of the Republican Party always advocated a noninterventionist foreign policy," as he told moderators Brit Hume and Wendell Goler. Of the Iraq War, he said, "And my argument is that we shouldn't go to war so carelessly. When we do, the wars don't end." Goler then asked if the United States' non-interventionist policies hadn't changed with September 11. And so began an exchange that would separate the idiots from everyone else, an exchange that would expose Rudy Giuliani as an opportunist:
MR. GOLER: Congressman, you don't think that changed with the 9/11 attacks, sir?REP. PAUL: What changed?
MR. GOLER: The non-interventionist policies.
REP. PAUL: No. Non-intervention was a major contributing factor. Have you ever read the reasons they attacked us? They attack us because we've been over there; we've been bombing Iraq for 10 years. We've been in the Middle East -- I think Reagan was right.
We don't understand the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics. So right now we're building an embassy in Iraq that's bigger than the Vatican. We're building 14 permanent bases. What would we say here if China was doing this in our country or in the Gulf of Mexico? We would be objecting. We need to look at what we do from the perspective of what would happen if somebody else did it to us. (Applause.)
MR. GOLER: Are you suggesting we invited the 9/11 attack, sir?
REP. PAUL: I'm suggesting that we listen to the people who attacked us and the reason they did it, and they are delighted that we're over there because Osama bin Laden has said, "I am glad you're over on our sand because we can target you so much easier." They have already now since that time -- have killed 3,400 of our men, and I don't think it was necessary.
MR. GIULIANI: Wendell, may I comment on that? That's really an extraordinary statement. That's an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of September 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq. I don't think I've heard that before, and I've heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11th. (Applause, cheers.)
And I would ask the congressman to withdraw that comment and tell us that he didn't really mean that. (Applause.)
MR. GOLER: Congressman?
REP. PAUL: I believe very sincerely that the CIA is correct when they teach and talk about blowback. When we went into Iran in 1953 and installed the shah, yes, there was blowback. A reaction to that was the taking of our hostages and that persists. And if we ignore that, we ignore that at our own risk. If we think that we can do what we want around the world and not incite hatred, then we have a problem.
They don't come here to attack us because we're rich and we're free. They come and they attack us because we're over there. I mean, what would we think if we were -- if other foreign countries were doing that to us?
Giuliani is in trouble. He has already demonstrated that he has very little knowledge of foreign policy. He departs from the rest of his party on the issues of gay rights and abortion. The only thing going for him are his credentials as mayor of New York during the September 11 attacks. But it turns out that waving the flag of September 11 doesn't make you a good presidential candidate. In this exchange, Giuliani misconstrues what Paul says, implying that if we say that our foreign policy toward the Middle East contributed to the September 11 attacks, we're simultaneously saying that we "deserved" to be attacked. This is not true.
Paul appears to be fed up with the simplistic explanation given by our president that "they hate us for our freedoms." As Pat Buchanan noted in an op-ed today, Osama bin Laden and friends -- formerly the mujahideen of Afghanistan -- were our allies in the 1980s. " What Ron Paul was addressing was the question of what turned the allies we aided into haters of the United States," wrote Buchanan. "Was it the fact that they discovered we have freedom of speech or separation of church and state? Do they hate us because of who we are? Or do they hate us because of what we do?" It turns out that viewers who tuned in to the debate weren't misled by Giuliani's simplistic opportunism; text-message polls showed that viewers believed it was Paul who won the debate that night.
The fact that Giuliani couldn't get away with what President Bush was able to get away with many times before signals a welcome change in political discourse: simple explanations won't cut it anymore. With a majority of the American people wanting to get out of Iraq, we've learned that President Bush can't be trusted. Bush is a man who takes Occam's Razor too literally: not only must the simplest explanation be true, but the true explanation must necessarily be the simplest one. Do Middle Eastern countries hate the United States because of thirty years of foreign policy or because we have freedom of speech, and they don't, and they're either jealous of our freedom of speech, or they hate the idea of freedom of speech? Thirty years of foreign policy is a lot to delve into; catchy slogans not so much. Bush is a president who likes complex ideas distilled into bumper sticker-length slogans. The American public is tired of being deceived by simplicity.
Oh, and I think both Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan are deserving of becoming SEDHE Heroes of the Week.
If only Democrats were calling for Alberto Gonzales' head, then the administration's insistence that Democrats "like to get headlines more than they like to get the facts" regarding the U.S. attorney firing scandal would make sense. But the administration is continuing to insist that this is a partisan political game at the same time that both Democrats and Republicans think that Gonzales' answers don't add up. Sens. Arlen Specter (R-PA), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Chuck Hagel (R-NE) all find Gonzales' answers unacceptable. The list of Republican senators calling for Gonzales' resignation includes John McCain (R-AZ), Tom Coburn (R-OK), John Sununu (R-NH), and Gordon Smith (R-OR).
In order for the administration to believably cry "partisan politics," it would have to be just Democrats saying Gonzales should resign. Sadly for them, that's not the case. Now, the Office of Special Counsel is investigating whether or not Karl Rove's aides may have violated the Hatch Act in making political "presentations" to various executive agencies.
Whereas crying foul to Republicans used to work, Republicans are either (1) no longer capable of plausibly following the Bush party line and appearing as though they're upholding the laws, or (2) actually getting sick and tired of all this politicking interfering with national business.
Mike posted a comment to my previous post, entitled "Exactly how stupid is our president?" The comment is pretty long, so I won't repost it in its entirety; rather, I'll address each section in turn.
I think building schools, hospitals, infrastructure, etc. is good news. Yes, when terrorists blow up our public works projects, that's bad news. And I'll concede that there's more bad news than good coming out of Iraq. But there is good news there.
Point taken. Yes, there may be some good news coming out of Iraq. But a majority of Iraqis (and especially those in Baghdad) don't feel that things are going so well and they actually wish Saddam Hussein were back in power. Why is this? Saddam's brutal repression didn't impact the average man-on-the-street very much. There was water, there was power. There weren't bombers blowing people up every day (and suicide bombers are now a daily occurrence in Iraq). Yes, Saddam was a dictator, and yes, dictators are always evil. But the Iraqis themselves don't necessarily feel that way. If his dictatorship touched them, it wasn't very much -- unless they were Kurds or dissidents (and, actually, "Iraqi Kurdistan," as it calls itself, is actually doing quite well; there are hardly any bombings up there, but then again, things were always better up there). Was did touch them was infastructure and the basic necessities of life. Saddam -- and to an even greater degree, the government -- kept that stuff running. Now that Saddam is out, there's no security, and you have situations where insurgents are destroying power lines and killing repair crews that come to repair the power lines. I submit that life for the average person in Iraq is getting worse. And people are fleeing Iraq to the tune of about 100,000 per month. Some countries, like Canada, have recognized that Iraq's situation is special and has granted refugee status to Iraqis. Again, there may be good things happening, but by and large, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan, the Iraqis are worse off than they were four years ago.
2. Believing things were better under Saddam is not the same as believing Saddam is good.
Of course not. Nevertheless, you say, "But I would not be pining for the good ol' days of totalitarianism, even if I did recognize that Saddam imparted a certain stability." The problem is that there are Iraqis "pining for the good ol' days of totalitarianism." And this is a problem for us, because one of our many reasons for going into Iraq was to "spread democracy." If democracy is so great, why don't the Iraqi people realize it? The answer is that democracy is great, but we severely botched our implementation of democracy in Iraq to the point that people would rather have the greater security and lesser freedom of Saddam than the lesser security and greater freedom of an Iraq without Saddam. This reflects poorly on our leaders' handling of the situation. Democracy should be good in and of itself, without explanation, but in this case, we created a half-assed democracy that has all the appearances of a democracy (elected leaders, independent branches of government) without the substance of one. The fact that Iraqis would rather live under a repressive Saddam than a free Nouri al-Maliki is a testament to how bad the situation there is.
3-4. This all could have been cleared up if Iraq had been more forthcoming with UN inspectors. The onus was on them.
Granted; Saddam could have been more forthcoming about the fact that he didn't have WMDs (most likely, he didn't want the U.N. wandering around and finding massive human rights abuses, instead). But President Bush also prematurely removed U.N. weapons inspectors from the country in 2003 before they had a chance to finish their inspections, and then he spun it to make it seem as though it was Saddam who had tossed the weapons inspectors out. When President Bush claimed that all diplomatic means had been exhausted, he was lying. All diplomatic means had not been exhausted; rather, Bush put an end to diplomacy in order to begin military action, the latter of which he had been intending to use all along regardless of whether Saddam complied with weapons inspectors (cf. The Downing Street Memo).
5. Your argument amounts to the old "but officer, I saw two other guys speeding too, and you didn't give them tickets" bit. No sale.
Yes, sale. Bush's arguments about why Saddam was more evil than other dictators in the world were unconvincing. He offered no hard evidence as to why we should go after Saddam rather than, say, North Korea or Saudi Arabia. This argument speaks more to our intentions than anything else. Was our intention to do away with an evil dictator? If so, then why didn't we go after the more evil dictators who really did have weapons of mass destruction? Answer: because our intentions had nothing to do with the altruistic notion of removing an evil dictator from power. That was a ruse and it only proves that we have been consistently lied to for four years. Why go after a dictator who -- evil though he may be -- is not a direct threat to us? I still regret not asking P.J. O'Rourke this question when he came to Miami. Here's what I would have asked him: "Sometime in 2003, all of America went to sleep, and Iraq was a distant threat. Sure, it was run by a dictator, but it was a nebulous, indirect, and not urgent threat to the United States. Then, the next day, suddenly Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was on the verge of developing nuclear weapons, and they had to be taken out now. Why did the administration's view on Iraq change so dramatically and so suddenly?" The bottom line: Saddam was not a threat to us. There were other nations that were threats to us. And yet we attacked the country that was not a threat to us. Why did this illogical situation occur?
6. Maybe I'm dense (it's a distinct possibility) but I don't remember anyone but Bush opponents giving out the "Iraq = al-Qaeda" line.
There's a great book out there called All the President's Spin which actually analyzes the ways in which the Bush administration went to great lengths to equate Iraq and al-Qaeda without explicitly saying the words. By casually mentioning Iraq and al-Qaeda together, coupled with the words "September the eleventh," Bush was able to create the impression that Iraq had something to do with September 11 while all the time retaining plausible deniability by not overtly saying the words. "What? Iraq was involved in September 11? I never said that!" And it's true that he never said the words, but he has excellent P.R. people working for him who know how to sell an idea without actually coming out and saying "Iraq = al-Qaeda = September 11." Advertising is all about subtlety. The American people were sold on this war as though it were blue jeans or Camel cigarettes. Sure, Camel doesn't come out and say that smoking is cool, but it's difficult to say that its advertising doesn't suggest that. In 2003, 40 percent of Americans thought that Iraq was responsible for September 11. Where could they have gotten that idea, especially since Iraq has never bombed us and al-Qaeda has bombed U.S. properties (embassies in Africa, the USS Cole) several times? Remember: You're a lot smarter than the average American, so just because you didn't fall for it doesn't mean that other people didn't.
"He never defines what the 'job' is, or what 'done' means ..."
Granted. Bush defines "job" every time he says it: "an Iraq that can govern itself, sustain itself, and defend itself." But he repeats it so often that it has become less a policy argument than a catch-phrase.
He may not be the smartest man ever to occupy the post of president, I'll concede that; but an incurious and uncaring man, interested only in self, wouldn't start a pre-emptive foreign war justified, in his words, by dangers to the nation's long-term survival.
Here's the cynical part: I don't believe that President Bush does care about our nation's long-term survival. He may offer these reasons as justifications for his war, but they are all bromides. Bromides for what, I don't know; I've been spending four years wondering what his true reasons for the Iraq War are. A just war requires no convincing. Take our action in Afghanistan, with which I completely agreed. Al-Qaeda, supported by Afghanistan's Taliban government, attacked us. I believe we were completely justified in retaliating, and the rest of the world agreed. And if President Bush is so concerned about democracy, why did he "cut and run" in Afghanistan? He left that country "before the job [was] done" so that he could focus on Iraq. One of these was a war of necessity (if such a thing can exist); the other was a war of choice. Our retaliation against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan was a natural step that any president -- yes, even Al Gore -- would have taken. The war in Iraq is one that was undertaken by President Bush of his own volition. And he took resources from Afghanistan -- where, by the way, there are still problems that remain unfixed -- to fight his pre-emptive war of choice in Iraq.
It was only after we went to war in Iraq that the goodwill we had generated after September 11 was gone. The bipartisan bickering was back, and the world was more resentful toward us than ever before. Recall what former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke said: that, after the September 11 attacks, Bush and Rumsfeld ordered the CIA to find intelligence -- any intelligence, reliable or not, that might link Iraq to those attacks. Their reaction was not, "Let's find out who did this"; rather, it was, "Let's find out how we can blame Iraq for this." For me, this serves as a terrible bit of evidence indicating that Bush was itching for a war with Iraq from the start.
It's not that I disagree with the way the president has handled this war. It's that I disagree with the war itself; there is no "good" way to operate this war, since it shouldn't have happened to begin with. I believe that it was unjustified, illegal, and morally reprehensible. I find it further terrible that President Bush makes bold, idealistic justifications in public when there is substantial evidence to indicate that his real reasons are more cynical, sinister, and less motivated by the public welfare. (Recall that Bush wanted to goad Iraq into war by painting a U.S. spy plane in U.N. colors, encouraging them to fire on it. He must have been reading Lyndon Johnson's The Art of War.)
Thanks for your comments, Mike. I hope you find this response less hate-filled. Years of lies, swagger, immature smugness, and a disregard for reality have left me with a deep distaste for this president -- a distaste that I had only finally put to words in that previous post.
Let it never be said that I'm so partisan and foolishly blind as to believe that the Democrats can do no wrong. Case in point: Rep. Charles Rangel, D-NY. Today, on CBS's Face the Nation, Rangel said that he would introduce legislation to re-instate the draft.
Ugh. I'm pretty sure that most Democrats don't want to reinstate the draft, so this legislation will most likely die in committee. But let's hear Rangel's reasoning for this:
There's no question in my mind that this president and this administration would never have invaded Iraq, especially on the flimsy evidence that was presented to the Congress, if indeed we had a draft and members of Congress and the administration thought that their kids from their communities would be placed in harm's way.
Earth to Chuck Rangel! Members of Congress would never write legislation that would ever require their children to serve in the military. Members of Congress want other people's children to fight their wars for them! Of course they would write exemptions into any draft legislation that would allow their children to stay out of the military. During the Vietnam War, exemptions were granted for people who were in college or pursuing a graduate degree. Vice President Cheney certainly used up his share of deferments; he got five of them!
Not to mention that there would be six kinds of uproar about mandatory conscription into a war that 69% of Americans disapprove of. We drafted young men for Vietnam, and that went just swimmingly.
Rangel tried to re-introduce the draft in 2003, but military leaders were actually against it, saying that a volunteer army would be better than a conscripted one. His 2003 proposal died in the Republican-controlled House. Imagine what a tortorous death it will be in a Democratic House.
Bush's tone in his speech last Wednesday was very somber, a marked and welcome change from his normal gratuitous self. This was no doubt brought on by the realization that he's lost his carte blanche and must now engage in actual diplomacy with the Democrats. Diplomacy is not one of his strong points. Suddenly, though, Bush was the most conciliatory person in the world, noting that the midterm election results showed that America was a strong democracy. (In private, though, he's probably cursing up a storm.)
Now that George Allen has conceded defeat, the Democrats are in control of both the House and the Senate. On Thursday, when Allen conceded, U.S. generals said that there would probably be a shift in our Iraq policy. No kidding! Here's a list of things that will also change:
Now we get to spend the next two years figuring out what's been going on behind our backs for the last five years. Oh, and Germany is planning on filing criminal charges against Donald Rumsfeld for the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison. (Not that the charges would mean anything; the U.S. isn't a party to the International Criminal Court, only to the Geneva Conventions.)
If you're a Democrat, that is. Last night, the Democrats pwned the Republicans, gaining 28 seats in the House, enough to give them control of that chamber. The Senate went pretty well, too. Pennsylvania crazyman Rick Santorum was ousted from his seat there. In Ohio, Mike DeWine was upset by Sherrod Brown, and in Missouri, Clair McCaskill beat Jim Talent. Democrats captured six governorships, as well.
Ours will continue to be the state of Caleefoahneah, as Governor Terminator soundly trounced Democratic challenger State Treasurer Phil Angelides. All of the statewide ballot initiatives, including Proposition 85 and Proposition 90, failed. Hey, as long as 85 and 90 failed, I'm happy.
And then what do I see when I go to cnn.com to check on election results? "Rumsfeld Quitting As Defense Secretary." Holy crap! Remember last year, when everyone wanted Bush to dump Rumsfeld, and he declared, "I'm the decider"? Yeah, it looks like the American people are deciding once again. Bush even acknowledged that the decision was motivated by last night's election results, noting, "I recognize that many Americans voted last night to register their displeasure with the lack of progress being made." Rumsfeld will be replaced by former CIA head Robert Gates.
With the Democrats at least in control of the House, we can start to have hearings -- under oath, even! -- that finally get down into what's been going on for five years: Iraq, intelligence failures, scandals, Halliburton, torture, secret prisons, habeas corpus, on and on and on. With their control of the House, Democrats will now be in charge of House committees. CNN projects that the Democrats have won 5 of the 6 seats they need to gain a majority in the Senate. Even if they do only get a majority of one, that puts them in control of committees -- especially the important Senate Judiciary and Intelligence committees.
It's even more interesting to note where the upsets happened: Missouri, Ohio, Indiana, Montana. These are "Middle America"; the strongholds of the Republican base. The people there have apparently woken up from their haze and discovered that they've been screwed for the past five years, and they've decided that it needs to stop.
Good work, America!
Michael Kinsley, writing in The Washington Post, observed in a Sept. 29 column that President Bush’s stance on the “right to life” is very capricious. Bush’s stance, like many religious conservatives, is that life begins at conception:
Even tiny embryos composed of a half-dozen microscopic cells, he thinks, have the same right to life as you and I do. That is why he cannot bring himself to allow federal funding for research on new lines of embryonic stem cells or even for other projects in labs where stem cell research is going on.
Even though the possibility exists that the destruction of these embryos could help extend the lives of already-born human beings, the moral dilemma for Bush is no dilemma at all. Even if there existed the possibility that destroying embryos could help people, the destruction of these embryos is so evil that nothing could justify said destruction.
Okay, fine. Makes sense. But what about Iraq? Kinsley presents us with an ethical conundrum. On the one hand, the president refuses to kill a “human” (in quotation marks because, while the president believes it, I do not) even though, in that death, more humans might be saved. But in Iraq, Bush does not refuse to stop killing humans, even though, in their death, more humans might be saved. Kinsley writes:
But it is hard -- indeed, I would say it is impossible -- to reconcile Bush's absolutism over allegedly human life when it is a clump of unknowing, unfeeling cells with his sophisticated, if not cavalier, attitude toward the loss of innocent human life when it is children and adults in Iraq. [...] And -- oh, yes -- there is still the question of whether a clump of a half-dozen cells you can't see without a microscope is actually a human being in the same sense as a 6-year-old girl blown up as she skips off to kindergarten in Baghdad.
While Kinsley proves what we’ve known all along -- namely, that President Bush is a hypocrite who doesn’t take a great many things into account when making decisions -- it is still interesting to examine what he is doing and consider that he is still in office.
WASHINGTON -- President Bush is lobbying Congress to make "clarifications" to its interpretation of the Geneva Conventions, alleging that "alternative tactics" are sometimes necessary in order to extract information from terrorist suspects. One reason for this "clarification" is that the Geneva Conventions are vague on its definition of torture -- and let's be clear about this. "Torture" is what Bush and Cheney want to do. Given all of the puzzle pieces -- (1) the Abu Ghraib scandal; (2) the existence of secret prisons out of the reach of U.S. law; (3) the president's signing statement attached to the Detainee Treatment Act, where he said that his authority as the president gives him the ability to ignore certain non-torture provisions -- it is quite clear that the Bush administration wants to be able to torture detainees. Whether it's shrouded in euphemisms like "alternative," "tough," or "enhanced," the idea remains the same: President Bush wants the legal authority to torture suspects.
John Negroponte, Director of National Security, argues in a USA Today op-ed that the Geneva Conventions need "clarification" so as to protect interrogators: "Thus, the president has asked that Congress clarify our treaty obligations just as it has done on so many other occasions. Absent such clarification, our intelligence professionals would be subject to unpredictable legal interpretations, including those of foreign courts." A wonderful sentiment, but this is exactly why the United States is not a party to the International Criminal Court (ICC). The U.S. refuses to join the ICC because it is afraid of the authority the ICC would have over its military operations. If the U.S. were a party to the ICC, American servicemen could be prosecuted under international law for war crimes or violations of international war treaties. Negroponte's argument fails to convince because it addresses a situation that doesn't exist.
But we already know why torture is bad from an ethical standpoint: torture is wrong. Period. But does torture actually work as a method of gathering intelligence? Perhaps the show Twenty-Four -- probably one of the most pro-government shows on TV -- is the most guilty of inspiring the notion that torture is necessary for instances in which there's a bomb somewhere right now and only this guy knows where it is so we need to beat that information out of him!. These instances -- like aborting a fetus or embryo to save the life of the mother -- are rare and apocryphal. In his Sept. 11 speech last week, Bush insisted that torture of detainees held in secret CIA prisons has stopped terror plots from being executed, but how are we to know that he's telling the truth?
There are far better ways to get information than by torture. Scotland Yard and MI-5 foiled the British liquid explosives attacks through old-fashioned policework: they went through the arduous process of obtaining wiretapping warrants (amazing, isn't it? A terror plot foiled even though they got warrants!), listened on the phone, got names and addresses, and then arrested people. A simple interrogation of those people -- without torture -- yielded more names and more information. Perhaps the U.S. is just lazy; we have fewer undercover operatives around the world than we ever have. (Of course, it's hard to spy on the enemy when conservative columnists publish the names of covert operatives and the Army fires homosexual Arabic translators because it's more important to enforce Jerry Falwell's morality than it is to have competent people who speak al-Qaeda's language.)
(Incidentally, the British terrorist plot wasn't nearly as ready as the news made it out to be. The terrorists didn't even have passports yet, so it wasn't something that was going to happen even in the next month.)
Experts in the field of torture have come to realize the same thing: torture is ineffective as a means of obtaining information. Israel, the world's expert when it comes to anti-terrorism, takes a dim view of torture for precisely this reason. The assumption made about torture is that the person being tortured is telling the truth; but the torturee's goal is not to tell the truth, but rather to stop the torture. For this reason, he is all the more inclined to tell the torturer what he wants to hear in the hope that the torture will stop. This is why a slew of military officers -- including Sen. John McCain, who was himself tortured in Vietnam -- has spoken out against torture, citing not only its inefficacy, but also its dehumanizing nature.
But interestingly, notes Naomi Klein in The Nation, getting information may be only ancillary to torture's true goal:
This is torture's true purpose: to terrorize--not only the people in Guantánamo's cages and Syria's isolation cells but also, and more important, the broader community that hears about these abuses. Torture is a machine designed to break the will to resist--the individual prisoner's will and the collective will.This is not a controversial claim. In 2001 the US NGO Physicians for Human Rights published a manual on treating torture survivors that noted: "perpetrators often attempt to justify their acts of torture and ill treatment by the need to gather information. Such conceptualizations obscure the purpose of torture....The aim of torture is to dehumanize the victim, break his/her will, and at the same time, set horrific examples for those who come in contact with the victim. In this way, torture can break or damage the will and coherence of entire communities."
Torture thus sends a message to potential terrorists: if we capture you, you'll get the same treatment, so don't even think about becoming a terrorist. Torture comes from the same machismo that inspired Bush to tell terrorists, "Bring it on." In economics, this is called the Jackie Chain fallacy: what is good for Jackie Chan is not necessarily good for everyone.
And, at its heart, is torture not also about that most ubiquitous of human emotions -- revenge? The desire to see the enemy injured in the same way -- indeed, in a worse way -- than one's dead compatriots must surely be a part of it. The Geneva Conventions are our attempt to take war and make it more civilized. As humanity has become civilized, our baser instincts have not, and even though we've tried to create rules to control them, they come out, anyway. And now we have an administration that attempts to use rational justifications to legalize an irrational and barbarous practice.
Did you even notice the subtle shift in language that Republicans have begun using when referring to the Democratic Party? You see, for Republicans, the noun and the adjective are the same: "Republican." But for Democrats, the noun and the adjective are different.
The problem is, if you're a Republican, talking about the "Democratic" party makes it sound as though that party founded the idea of democracy. It makes it sound as though they are more about democracy than you are. What's a Republican to do?
Manipulate language, of course! In recent speeches, President Bush has taken to calling the party of Democrats the "Democrat party" instead of the gramatically-correct "Democratic" party -- ostensibly because he doesn't want anyone to perceive that the Democrats are more democratic than the Republicans.
The connotation, though, is that the democrats are not the party of Democracy. Republicans have begun using the term pejoratively to describe Democrats -- as though they (the Democrats) didn't believe in democracy.
The evidence comes from Media Matters, a left-leaning nonprofit organization that analyzes and criticizes the U.S. media. Their analysis:
The ungrammatical conversion of the noun "Democrat" to an adjective was the brainchild of Republican partisans, presumably an attempt to deny the opposing party the claim to being "democratic" -- or in the words of New Yorker magazine senior editor Hendrik Hertzberg, "to deny the enemy the positive connotations of its chosen appellation." In the early 1990s, apparently due largely to the urging of then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) and Republican pollster Frank Luntz, the use of the word "Democrat" as an adjective became near-universal among Republicans.
Hertzberg argued against the use of the word "Democrat" as an adjective because it was ungrammatical. What would Republican stalwart William F. Buckley, Jr. say? While Buckley is the founder of National Review, he is -- like many old-school Republicans (notably James J. Kilpatrick) -- crazy about proper grammar. Will their love of correct English trump their hatred of Democrats? It appears that, among new-school neo-cons, hatred wins the day.
The word 'fascist' takes on new meaninglessness
In "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell argued that the word fascist -- which once had a specific meaning, referring to a dictatorial, hyper-patriotic, militaristic, hyper-capitalist form of government -- no longer had any meaning, as it was bandied about as an insult toward anyone the speaker didn't like. So, too, did "communist" cease to be a description of a centralized economic system, becoming instead an insult hurled at any left-leaning person.
Well, "fascist" is back, thanks to President Bush, Donald "Duck" Rumsfeld, and Vice President Cheney. CNN reports:
President Bush in recent days has recast the global war on terror into a "war against Islamic fascism." Fascism, in fact, seems to be the new buzz word for Republicans in an election season dominated by an unpopular war in Iraq.Bush used the term earlier this month in talking about the arrest of suspected terrorists in Britain, and spoke of "Islamic fascists" in a later speech in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Spokesman Tony Snow has used variations on the phrase at White House press briefings.
[...]
White House aides and outside Republican strategists said the new description is an attempt to more clearly identify the ideology that motivates many organized terrorist groups, representing a shift in emphasis from the general to the specific.
"I think it's an appropriate definition of the war that we're in," said GOP pollster Ed Goeas. "I think it's effective in that it definitively defines the enemy in a way that we can't because they're not in uniforms."
But, again, the word "fascist" is being used incorrectly. Fascism, the governmental system, is defined by Mirriam-Webster as "a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition." For Ed Goeas to say that a group is "fascist" because it is "not in uniforms" is stupid: fascism is a type of government. Muslim terrorist groups are not governments.
And guess what, NASCAR fans: not all Muslim terrorist groups are the same!
Al-Qaeda, formed in the 1990s, devoted itself to three objectives: (1) getting U.S. troops out of Saudi Arabia; (2) destroying Israel; and (3) creating a pan-Islamic movement to destroy the West, if at all possible. Hezbollah, Hamas, and the PLO exist only to destroy Israel, and they are not pan-Islamic movements.
So why lump all Muslim terrorist groups into a poorly-named container called "fascism"? Because it's good P.R. The gum-chewing public knows that "fascism" is bad; it has been ingrained in our culture. So, without any further explanation, the Bush administration can say "terrorists = fascists" and its audience gets the message without any further explanation.
Nick Gillespie isn't just the husband of one of my Miami University English professors. He's also the Editor-in-Chief of the Libertarian magazine Reason. One of Reason's online offerings this month is a conglomertation of articles called "Immigration Now, Immigration Tomorrow, Immigration Forever: Reason's Guide to Reality-Based Reform." It's a very good source of information for people who think current immigration restrictions are stupid -- for economic reasons.
And security ones. As Gillespie points out in "Bush's Border Bravado," there are freedom concerns in play. Bush, in a May 15 speech, touted identification cards as one method of making sure that workers are legal. This is where liberals and Libertarians agree: government surveillance is bad, and identification cards are bad. They take away privacy while not replacing that void with an equal amount of security. It's not like The Bad Guys are going out and getting fake IDs; they're not college frat-boys, and they're not that stupid. If an identification system is implemented, they will go out of their way to game the system until the system issues them a legitimate ID card with fake information. (ID-based security systems -- in the form of passports and visas -- didn't stop the September 11 hijackers from entering the country; they had legitimate identification.)
Criticizing Bush's call for a "tamper-resistant identification card," Gillespie correctly notes that "there ain't no such thing as a tamper-resistant anything." Also, an identification card separating guest workers from regular workers would mean "that all workers -- regardless of country of origin or citizenship -- will have to show a 'tamper-resistant identification card.'"
Want another reason to allow more immigrants? More tax money! Immigration opponents say that immigrants are leaches who get government services without paying for them; however, Gillespie notes that "[a]bout two-thirds of illegals pay Medicare, Social Security, and income taxes. All pay sales tax and property taxes." Gillespie says that the best way to address concerns about illegals taking government services "is by making it easier for illegals to function in the light of day, where they would have every reason to pay all the taxes the rest of us do."
Here we are in Year Six of the Bush Administration, and President Bush is about to use his first veto ... ever.
Were you aware? In his first term, Bush didn't veto a single bill. Now, halfway through his second term, he finally vetoes a bill. And what is it about? It's a bill authorizing federal funding for stem cell research. Recall that, back in 2001, before he became the Terror President, Bush had nothing better to worry about than stacked energy policies and stem cells. The Religious Right -- which is at the core of Bush's base -- detests using embryonic stem cells for research, and in 2001, Bush issued an Executive Order placing a moratorium on federal funding for new embryonic stem cells lines. There were already sixty embryonic stem cell lines in existence, he said, and the government will continue to fund those. (Of course, it is now well-documented that Bush lied when he said there were sixty stem cell lines. Currently, there are about twenty viable lines, with "viable" being the key word.)
The bill, passed in 2005 by the House and Tuesday by the Senate, allowed couples who had embryos frozen in fertility clinics to donate them to research. Bush vetoed the bill this morning, saying that the bill "crosses a moral boundary that our decent society needs to respect. "
"Oh, really?" counters Salon contributor Scott Rosenberg:
Here is why Bush's position is a joke: Thousands and thousands of embryos are destroyed every year in fertility clinics. They are created in petri dishes as part of fertility treatments like IVF; then they are discarded.If Bush and his administration truly believe that destroying an embryo is a kind of murder, they shouldn't be wasting their time arguing about research funding: They should immediately shut down every fertility clinic in the country, arrest the doctors and staff who operate them, and charge all the wannabe parents who have been wantonly slaughtering legions of the unborn.
But of course they'll never do such a thing. (Nor, to be absolutely clear, do I think they should.) Bush could not care less about this issue except as far as it helps burnish his pro-life credentials among his "base." This has been true since the first airing of Bush's position in 2001, as I said back then. So he finds a purely symbolic way of taking a stand, but won't follow the logic of his position to the place where it might cause him any political harm -- as opposing the family-building dreams of millions of middle-class Americans would doubtless do.
If Bush stated his opposition to the destruction of embryos as including fertility clinics, there would be riots in the streets and he would never be spoken to again. So, instead of being put to some use, these embryos from fertility clinics will be destroyed anyway! "They remind us of what is lost when embryos are destroyed in the name of research," he said of children born of "adopted" embryos from fertility clinics. But these are few and far-between; thousands of embryos will be destroyed -- not in the name of research -- but in the name of nothing! The argument is the same as that for abortion: "You could be aborting the next Einstein." The point is moot! There's an equal chance that I'm aborting the anti-Christ; it really doesn't matter. The same goes for posturing with these children: sure, it's great that they were born from adopted embryos. That's great. But if they hadn't been born from those embryos, because the embryos were destroyed, we wouldn't miss them at all! What Bush should have done is brought a vial of frozen embryos on stage to cuddle with. Of course, humans don't respond to frozen embryos the same way they do to babies, so some of the pathos gets lost.
Sen. Ted Stevens, R-AK, has proven himself to be a giant idiot time and again. Never mind his championship of last year's biggest pork-barrel project, the Bridge to Nowhere. Never mind that, as chairman of the committee investigating high gas prices last September, he refused -- even at the insistence of Democratic colleagues on the committee -- to place the presidents of the nation's largest oil companies under oath.
Last Thursday, Sen. Stevens has voiced his opposition to net neutrality in the Senate because of his own hilarious misunderstanding of how the Internet works. According to Sen. Stevens, there are two "internets": the commercial Internet and the personal Internet. Sometimes, the commercial Internet gets too clogged with things from the personal Internet, slowing down the commercial Internet, and this is why we need two Internets.
Now, I understand that Sen. Stevens thinks his "tubes" analogy is just a metaphor for how the Internet really works. But the Internet still doesn't behave in the way that he claims it does.
Please, people who live in Alaska, don't re-elect this guy. (Brian, tell your sister to dump his ass.)
In Berkeley, everything is "organic." The hippies who live here would have nothing less. Even the University of California at Berkeley is ramping up its food purchases to include more organic items.
What the hell does "organic" mean, anyway? It sounds like it means "good" or "healthful." But it depends on who you are; "organic" sort of means whatever you want it to mean. Like Orwell's example of "fascism" in his essay "Politics and the English Language," the word "organic" has been taken to mean something different from what it originally meant.
Let's start with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which is responsible for food labeling. There are rules in place for what you can call food -- "organic," "fat-free," "low-fat," etc. These rules are written by either the USDA or the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). In this case of "organic," it is the USDA that controls what can and cannot be labeled that way.
According to the USDA's National Organic Program Labeling and Marketing Information, "organic" foods "must consist of at least 95 percent organically produced ingredients (excluding water and salt). Any remaining product ingredients must consist of nonagricultural substances approved on the National List or non-organically produced agricultural products that are not commercially available in organic form." There are other regulations and requirements for foods that are not themselves totally organic, but may be labeled as "made with organic ingredients." The USDA levies a $10,000 fine upon any person who knowingly mislabels a product as "organic" when it doesn't meet the above standards.
But the organic foods movement isn't just about food, as Stephen Shapin explains in a New Yorker article entitled "What Are You Buying When You Buy Organic?" The modern organic movement was as much about liberal politics and anti-capitalism as it was about food:
The organic movement that sprang up in America during the postwar years, manured by the enthusiasm of both the hippies and their New Age successors, supplemented [English agronomist Sir Albert] Howard’s ideas of soil health with the imperative that the scale should be small and the length of the food chain from farm to consumer short. You were supposed to know who it was that produced your food, and to participate in a network of trust in familiar people and transparent agricultural practices. A former nutritionist at Columbia, who went on to grow produce upstate, recalls, “When we said organic, we meant local. We meant healthful. We meant being true to the ecologies of regions. We meant mutually respectful growers and eaters. We meant social justice and equality.”
Buying organic is supposed to be about buying from a place that is local, where the profits go directly to the people growing the food, not to a nameless, faceless corporation like ArcherDanielsMidland. Buying organic is also supposed to be about food grown "naturally"; that is, without pesticides and without genetic modification. The organic movement operates using the same paradigm as the Romantic idealization of nature: nature is, in itself, virtuous, and humans -- or anything artificial -- is necessarily evil. The closer you are to nature, and the further you are from humanity, the more virtuous you become. The corollary for this axiom is that people who are further from man-made structures (i.e., without material wealth or societal power, which translates into "marginalized peoples") are necessarily more virtuous. People on the fringes of society -- farmers, children, the poor, and the insane -- are all virtuous because of their distance from human institutions. In the polar world of Romantic idealism, there are only two possibilities: being close to humanity or being close to nature. Being close to nature means, necessarily, being further from humanity, and vice versa.
The organic movement feels the same way. Food grown far from the impact of humanity is more virtuous than food grown by a large agribusiness using pesticides and genetic modification (did you ever think your food could be virtuous?) But the modern organic movement has abandoned this and, as usually happens, large corporations have seen money in a new trend and have capitalized (no pun intended) on it. Whole Foods -- the nation's number-one organic food chain -- would certainly not be endorsed by Berkeley's organic hippies if they knew some interesting facts. "[T]he company is as ferociously anti-union as Wal-Mart -- John Mackey, the volubly libertarian founder and CEO, has called unions 'parasites,'" writes Shapin. The nation's largest organic retailer fails the organic movement immediately by not staying true to liberal political principles, which would hold that the store should be unionized. Whole Foods is also definitely not your local, home-town grocery: says Shapin, "Last year, its total revenue was more than $5 billion and its gross profit was more than $1.6 billion. In 2004, according to the Financial Times, Whole Foods was 'the fastest-growing mass retailer in the US, with same-store sales rising 17.1 per cent quarter-on-quarter.'" Thus, the organic movement is no longer a "counterculture" movement; rather, it has become decidedly mainstream. Organic food is also no longer grown by moms and pops in the backyard and sold at the farmer's market: Earthbound Farm, one of Whole Foods' suppliers and the nation's largest producer of organic produce, grows its "organic" food "on giant farms in six different counties in California, two in Arizona, one in Colorado, and in three Mexican states. [...] By 2004, Earthbound was farming twenty-six thousand acres; its production plants in California and Arizona total four hundred thousand square feet, and its products are available in supermarkets in every state of the Union."
So, what's the problem with this? First of all, "organic" food was never designed to be mass-produced. It takes, on average, four times as many resources to grow organic food as it does "regular" food, since much of the crop is lost to pesticides and disease. Remember: organic growers cannot use pesticides and they cannot use genetic modification that might make a crop resistant to disease. This is why Earthbound needs so much space: to produce the same amount of food as conventional farming, they need to grow more food, with the understanding that much of it will be lost.
Corporations, though, don't like to do things -- and, indeed, can't -- do things on small scales. Organic is fine for individuals, but it stinks as a growth method for a nation or the world. There's as much an ethical dilemma in producing all the world's food organically as there is in nameless, faceless corporations producing all the world's food. Organic food is more expensive than regular food; what about the poor? The very people who are idealized and romanticized by the organic movement (at least, according to me, based on my reading of the organic movement and its relationship to the Romantic movement) can't afford organic food! Shapin hits on something about organic food that I've been saying for a long time:
Genetically modified, industrially produced monocultural corn is what feeds victims of the African famine, not the gorgeous organic technicolor Swiss chard from your local farmers' market. Food for a "small planet" will, for the forseeable future, require a much smaller human population on the planet.
I'll refrain from re-stating my opinion that the sinister implication -- whether conscious or not -- of the "sustainability" movement is the requirement that most of the world's population die of starvation. But the point remains: the world's famine problems will be solved by pesticides and genetic engineering, not organic food. Thomas Malthus famously predicted that we would all starve in the twentieth century, since humans grow geometrically while plants can only grow arithmetically. He famously forgot the influence of technology that coudl allow plant growth to keep up with human growth. The organic movement negates that technology.
And, thirdly, modern pesticides and -- especially -- genetic engineering are harmless. Says Shapin:
According to Samuel Fromartz, ninety per cent of “frequent” organic buyers think they’re buying better “health and nutrition.” They may be right. If, for any reason, you don’t want the slightest pesticide residue in your salad, or you want to insure that there are no traces of recombinant bovine somatotropin hormone (rbST) in your children’s milk, you’re better off spending the extra money for organically produced food. But scientific evidence for the risks of such residues is iffy, as it is, too, for the benefits of the micro-nutrients that are said to be more plentiful in an organic carrot than in its conventional equivalent.
The organic food movement isn't "bad." For a person to eat organically is acceptable. For a whole group of people to try and foist organic lifestyles on the world is not. Behind the organic movement is a political movement. If you're going to have a political movement, then present it as a political movement, not something else designed to draw in supporters who would otherwise not support you if they knew what you were really up to. Second, I don't know how many "organic" supporters know what organic means these days. It means big companies like Whole Foods overcharging you for food that comes from a place you're just as unfamiliar with as the food that comes from Safeway or Kroger. I fail to see how organic food is necessarily better simply because it's "organic." And I hope that I can educate some organic-types who didn't know that their organic movement wasn't as close to nature as they thought it was.
WASHINGTON -- President George W. Bush announced in a surprise press conference today that he would launch nuclear weapons against countries that the United States deemed too small.
"Small countries take up a good deal of space that could be used to better advantage by larger countries," he told the White House Press Corps today in the Rose Garden. "Large countries can do things more efficiently than small countries, and as a result, they waste fewer resources. It's called 'economy of scale.' Look it up. I have an MBA from Harvard, so I don't need to look it up. I already know. But you have to look it up. You don't know."
Later in the day on the Fox News Channel, anchor Brit Hume defended Bush's remarks. "It's high time countries like Micronesia, Fiji, and Monaco gave up their land and resources to somebody else. They're only standing in the way of progress. What is this, the seventh century? We're not nation-states anymore."
A source within the White House said that Bush came to the conclusion late on Saturday, when his computer's hard drive became full. "The president called in one of our technical experts, who showed him how to uninstall unnecessary programs and delete old files. The president was amazed by this ability to free up space on his computer, and wondered out loud to the technician if this would work to clear what he called 'the hard drive of the world.' According to the technician, he responded by replying, 'I don't know, sir. I'm just desktop support."
According to the source, Bush made an emergency phone call to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and asked her whether what he called "the hard drive strategy" would work. Dr. Rice replied that it was a very good analogy and suggested they implement the plan immediately. After securing Vice President Dick Cheney's approval, a team of speechwriters met Sunday morning while the president was at church to outline the plan for destroying the world's unnecessary countries.
A spokesman for Microsoft, manufacturer of Windows, the world's most popular computer operating system, said that the president had contacted Bill Gates, the company's chairman, to secure an endorsement. "Mr. Gates told the president that while 'the hard drive strategy' was a good strategy for computers, it probably wouldn't work in the real world," said the spokesman.
"We need to go further than just cleaning out the world's hard drive," said syndicated talk radio host Rush Limbaugh earlier today. "We need to clean out the world's RAM, which means dissolving the United Nations. We need to go back to a mainframe/terminal architecture, in which all nations get their orders from the United States. Our embassies will be like terminals. It will save the world's diplomatic and computing resources! What good is a computer when its different parts have different ideologies?"
Some world diplomatic experts questioned whether or not global policies should be formulated based on an analogy, but they were quickly dismissed by critics who said that they were just raising pointless issues because they want to see the terrorists win. "It's the same old thing you see with all these cretins," said syndicated columnist Ann Coulter. "These diplomatic eggheads in their liberal ivory towers want to make everything theoretical so that they can prevent the common man from understanding what's going on in the world. You know what's going on? Muslims are blowing up Christians and Jews, and these Commie wackos in their comfortable universities are cheering them on. They hate Christianity, they hate America, and they don't even like computers. They're against this computer analogy because they want to take us back to a time before typewriters, back when we were using pencil and paper. I think our university system has a corrupt header block, and we should re-initialize all of these professors to get rid of the corruption."
White House Press Secretary Tony Snow cautioned that the plan would take time to implement. "First, we need to scan the world to see what countries are too small. Then, we have to actually 'delete' them with nuclear weapons. It will take several months to assemble a team to scan the world, so I expect that the American people have nothing to worry about. I'm going to place this hourglass on the podium like so, and that will tell us when our scanning team is done scanning. If for some reason they encounter a problem, the hour glass will stop, and we'll have to start all over again. But I repeat that the American people have nothing to worry about in the near future."
And I couldn't think of a better story to report on for my 500th entry! It's been three years and five hundred entries since I started this blog back in 2003. That's a long time.
The New York Times reports today that Sen. Arlen Specter, R-PA, is furious with Vice President Dick Cheney. In a letter sent to Cheney and the press, Specter revealed that the vice president intentionally kept him out of negotiations with other members of the Senate Judiciary Committee -- of which he is the chairman -- regarding the illegal, poorly-justified, warrantless wiretaps of United States persons. Cheney and other Republicans on the committee apparently came to an agreement that no telecom company executives would testify in front of the Judiciary Committee -- a decision that Specter is unhappy with. He is one of the few Republican voices that dares criticize the Bush administration. In his letter, he said that "the administration is continuing warrantless wiretaps in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and is preventing the Senate Judiciary Committee from carrying out its constitutional responsibility for Congressional oversight."
If Cheney manages to threaten enough Senate Republicans, the other Republicans on the committee could vote Specter off the Judiciary Committee altogether. Specter has been critical of the administration's broad (and largely self-invented) assertions of executive power, which could get him into trouble with Cheney.
Last week, the Boston Globe revealed that Cheney's assistants personally review every piece of legislation that is scheduled to come before the president and check for any language that might limit the president's power. The assistants then recommend that the president add a "signing statement" in which he says that he refuses to abide by any law that limits his constitutional powers as president. It helps, of course, if you believe that the Constitution places no limitations on your presidential power, and therefore any legislative oversight at all (like the anti-torture amendment introduced by John McCain) is a limitation that the president won't abide by.
It should be noted that, in his five years in office, Bush has issued more than 750 "signing statements," more than every president before him combined. If a signing statement issue came before the Supreme Court, I'm quite confident that the Supremes would declare the signing statement's weight as law unconstitutional for the same reasons they declared the line-item veto unconstitutional.
Cheney is at the forefront of taking power from the legislature and giving it to the executive, whether through quasi-legal means, like signing statements, or through outright intimidation via Karl Rove. Specter has called him out on it; now how will the administration smear him? Will it suggest that he wasn't invited to meet with the vice president because, like Richard Clarke, he's "out of the loop"? (And, like Richard Clarke, when you're the chairman, it's hard to be "out of the loop" unless you're deliberately excluded.)
Zarqawi killed in Iraq
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of the terrorist group called Al-Qaeda in Iraq, was killed in an airstrike yesterday. This is good news. Osama bin Laden remains at large. This is bad news.
I wonder if warrantless wiretapping tipped the U.S. off to Zarqawi's whereabouts?
The Senate is scheduled to vote later this week on permanently repealing the estate tax. Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-AL, wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post last week in which he recommends the permanent repeal of the estate tax. Sadly, the editorial makes use of the same old falsehoods about the estate tax.
One of the arguments is that, while the super-rich can afford the estate tax, people on the cusp of wealth cannot. The oft-provided example -- and it is repeated by Sessions -- is that of the family farm. The farm has a monetary value, and when the farm is passed on after death, the value of the farm is taxed. But since the value of the farm's land isn't liquid until the property is sold, children who receive the land as inheritance must sell some of the land to pay the tax. As a result, many family farms have gone out of business because of the estate tax. Horrors! Sadly, however, this isn't true.
A Washington Post editorial from last year cited a Congressional Budget Office report on the estate tax. Sessions, in his op-ed, mentions that the estate tax "is one of the IRS's most painful taxes," "hits hardest at heirs of small-business owners and family farmers," and other superlatives. But he never mentions another interesting superlative: that it is the most exclusive tax. The CBO report estimates that there were between 4,641 and 5,308 estates owned by farmers in 2000. The Post reports, "The numbers that owed estate tax, the CBO found, were paltry, and the number without enough cash on hand to pay the bill even punier: In 2000, for example, just 1,659 farm estates had taxes due, of which 138 didn't report enough liquid assets to cover their tax liability," This is not a tax that most people are going to have to pay.
The estate tax is a tax only on the super-rich, as there is a $1.5 million exemption currently in place. In 2009, the exemption will increase to $3.5 million. In 2000, "only 300 farm estates in 2000 would have owed any tax at all -- and of those, just 27 would have a tax bill in excess of their liquid assets." Under the 2009 exemption, the CBO projects that "65 farm estates would owe taxes and 13 would not have enough cash to cover the bill."
Sessions even claims that the estate tax is bad for minority-owned business, and cites what is probably the most prominent example of a minority-owned business having to pay the estate tax: the Chicago Defender, which had to pay $3 million in estate tax when its founder died in 1997. Estate tax opponents try to appeal to minorities with this single instance of an African-American-owned business that faced a large estate tax bill, suggesting with this one piece of support that "death taxes are killing black businesses." As argument, this is poor: one incident does not a trend make.
You might expect the world's wealthiest people to be against the estate tax. Warren, Buffett, CEO of the investment firm BerkshireHathaway, has an estimated net worth of $42 billion. And he opposes the--
What a second. No, Warren Buffett is in favor of the estate tax! So is liberal baby-killer, terrorist sympathizer, and Cindy Sheehan puppetmaster George Soros! Are these guys nuts, or just nuts?
The estate tax places the burden of payment on those who can afford to pay. In a perfect world, we wouldn't have an estate tax; indeed, we would have no taxes. But the government needs to run somehow, and the $28 billion tax shortfall that would come from eliminating the estate tax needs to come from somewhere (we need all the money we can to fund stupid wars, illegal wiretapping, and bogus news releases about the Medicare prescription drug plan). Then again, if we cut government revenue, then we can shut the doors on departments we don't like, and we can say, "Well, we just didn't have the money." This sounds a lot less political than "I didn't like the department and I was looking for any way to kill it that I could."
First, a timeline of events.
Last August
An FBI investigation of Jefferson's home reveals $90,000 in cash stashed in his freezer. The cash was part of a $100,000 bribe an FBI informant gave to Jefferson. The informant was wearing a wire. Oops!
January
Former Jefferson aide Brett Pfeffer pleads guilty to aiding and abetting the bribery of a public official.
Earlier this month
Kentucky businessman Vernon Jackson, as part of a plea bargain, admits that he bribed a member of Congress in order to get contracts for his electronics products in the U.S. federal government and some west African governments. The plea did not identify Jefferson, D-LA, by name, but referred to a member of the House as "Representative A." Jefferson's own spokesmen later confirmed that he was the "Representative A" mentioned in the plea. According to the plea agreement, Jackson paid $367,500 over four years to a company controlled by Jefferson's family in exchange for helping Jackson's company win government contracts.
Last week
The House Ethics Committee opens an investigation against Jefferson and Rep. Bob Ney, R-OH. Apparently, the Justice Department was interested in their alleged ties to the now-jailed Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
Last Saturday, May 20
As part of the the Justice Department's investigation, the FBI raids Jefferson's office at 7:15 PM, seizing both paper and digital documents and records.
Wednesday, May 24
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-CA, sends a letter to Jefferson, asking him to resign from the powerful House Ways and Means Committee.
Later in the day, in a surprising move, Pelosi and Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, R-IL, release a joint statement condemning the FBI raid. "The Justice Department was wrong to seize records from Congressman Jefferson's office in violation of the constitutional principle of separation of powers, the speech or debate clause of the Constitution, and the practice of the last 219 years," they wrote. Jefferson's attorneys also filed a motion to have the documents returned, alleging that the search was unreasonable because requests by one of Jefferson's attorneys and by the House's general counsel to witness the search were rebuffed.
Everyone asks the FBI to surrender documents they had seized.
Thursday, May 25
President Bush steps in! He directs the FBI to surrender any seized materials to U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement for safe-keeping. Bush then orders the seized items sealed for 45 days while this thing cools down.
Friday, May 26
Pfeffer, Jefferson's former aide, is sentenced to eight years in prison for aiding and abetting the bribery of a public official, after pleading guilty in January.
On the same day, House leaders concede that the FBI does have a right to search the offices of members of Congress, as long as it has a warrant.
Saturday, May 27
The New York Times reveals that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, and FBI Director Robert Mueller were prepared to resign Thursday if President Bush had ordered the FBI to return documents seized in the raid on Jefferson's office.
So what?
So the FBI raided the office of a congressman. As long as they (1) had a warrant (2) issued by a judge who (3) was not working under the auspices of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 and (4) applied the probable cause standard in issuing the warrant, what's the problem?
It's curious that both Pelosi and Hastert teamed up on this one. It's understandable that Pelosi would think that the FBI was overstepping its authority in raiding the offices of a member of her own party -- but Hastert? Either Pelosi and Hastert are both dopes in the ways of civil liberties -- unlikely, as it appears that the FBI was completely legitimate in conducting the raid -- or they have something to hide.
It's hard siding with the Democrats, especially when they try to suggest that whenever a Democrat gets involved in a scandal, it's never as bad as when a Republican gets caught in a scandal. Guess what, guys: no one should be taking bribes! Pelosi and Hastert's double-teaming of President Bush suggests that there are bi-partisan scandals going on, some that both Hastert and Pelosi may be involved in, and they don't want to be next on the raid list. The FBI's investigation of Jefferson had gone on for over a year, and given the facts at hand, any judge would have been more than willing to grant a search warrant to the FBI. Given his history of bribery, it can be assumed that there might be more information in his office. That's how warrants work: if the state can prove that, based on evidence it has already found, there's "probable cause" that there might be more evidence in a place they need a warrant to get to, a judge will grant the warrant. This is not an issue of "getting" anyone. This is not an issue of overstepping civil liberties. Pelosi and Hastert are sour grapes. Pelosi either because she has something to hide or she's upset about one of her own being investigated; Hastert most likely because he has something to hide. As Speaker of the House, he would take quite a fall if implicated in a scandal.
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN), though -- a person who is actually currently under investigation for a scandal, but has not been charged (his shares in the nation's largest for-profit medical company were supposed to be in a blind trust, but it turns out his shares were taken out just before the stock price tanked) -- would seem like Person No. 1 to object to searching the office of a member of Congress. Frist, though, had no problem with the search; although, he is meeting with Justice Department lawyers to hammer out a procedure for searching congressmen's offices.
It's quite telling to see that there was wide disagreement within the echelons of government. Gonzales, normally a Bush syncophant and apologist, threatened to resign if the president ordered him to return the seized records. Hastert -- who holds the same syncophantic titles as Gonzales -- also strongly disagreed. The Bush Machine is usually very good about keeping inter-administration disagreements out of the news, so as to foster the image that everyone in the White House agrees with him. (Notable exception: Colin Powell.) What happened this time? And why was there so much disagreement? Bush managed to come up with a solution that, instead of resolving the dispute, delayed the time necessary to resolve the dispute so that the parties involved could have a little chat. It was a good way to avoid making a decision that would alienate either Democrats or members of his own cabinet.
Now we shall wait and see what U.S. District Judge Thomas F. Hogan says about all this.
Every year, the White House Press Corps gets together and schmoozes with the administration in what is known as the White House Press Corps Association Dinner. Usually, the press hires some comedians to poke gentle fun at the administration, all without any serious criticism.
Until now.
Stephen Colbert, formerly of The Daily Show and now host of his own Comedy Central show, The Colbert Report, turned the dinner from a moderately funny distraction from the horrors of the Bush administration into a stinging criticism of the administration. For twenty minutes, Colbert deadpanned biting criticisms of the administration in his Colbert Report persona: a pompous conservative zealot (in the mold of Bill O'Reilly or Joe Scarborough) who makes the Bush administration and conservatives appear ridiculous whiel he's trying to defend them. This Boing Boing link provides a link to a summary of the routine, as well as links to videos and torrents of videos of Colbert's twenty-minute speech, as well as the whole dinner.
Though he normally silences or ignores critics, President Bush was a captive audience as Colbert lambasted him and his administration, often speaking directly to him. Bush was reportedly fuming as he was forced to actually listen to criticism of his administration. The White House now says that, next year, comedians will be screened more carefully.
While Colbert is clearly a satirical hero -- speaking directly to the object of satire as that object is forced to sit and listen, something that satirists from Aristophanes to Jonathan Swift must have dreamed about -- the press has remained remarkably quiet, and only recently has the so-called mainstream media talked about Colbert's performance, dubbing him unfunny. Salon suspects this is because Colbert was also criticizing the media's complicity in the Bush machine's takeover:
Colbert's deadly performance did more than reveal, with devastating clarity, how Bush's well-oiled myth machine works. It exposed the mainstream press' pathetic collusion with an administration that has treated it -- and the truth -- with contempt from the moment it took office. Intimidated, coddled, fearful of violating propriety, the press corps that for years dutifully repeated Bush talking points was stunned and horrified when someone dared to reveal that the media emperor had no clothes. Colbert refused to play his dutiful, toothless part in the White House correspondents dinner -- an incestuous, backslapping ritual that should be retired. For that, he had to be marginalized. Voilà: "He wasn't funny."
And so, instead of The New York Times talking about Colbert as a comedy hero, it talked about fluff, which is the best way to play down something's significance: "Bush impersonator funny!"
For taking on the administration and winning, Stephen Colbert joins John Stuart Mill as a SEDHE Hero of the Forever.
In an attempt to make it appear as though policy will change and that there is some kind of accountability, the Bush administration has announced some staffing changes. They began a while ago by replacing White house Chief of Staff Andrew Card with Josh Bolten.
Yesterday, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan announced his resignation.
Whaa! It looks like ethics have finally gotten to McClellan, who has spent two years either outright lying to members of the Press Corps or trying to spin statements made by Bush, cabinet members, or former Press Secretary Ari Fleischer. Perhaps his conscience -- which we thought shared the same metaphysical standing as Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and the Tooth Fairy -- really exists after all.
McClellan is so good at spinning the truth that he was even able to put a positive spin on his own resignation:
The White House is going through a time of transition. Change can be helpful. This is a good time and a good position to help bring about change. I'm ready to move on. I've been in this position a long time and my wife and I are excited about beginning the next chapter in our life together.
It goes without saying that McClellan did not resign of his own volition; rather, the administration and McClellan probably agreed that he should be replaced in an effort to make it appear that the administration is being all shook up. Several generals are calling for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and instead, Bush gives them Scott McClellan and ... what's this? Karl Rove?
Karl Rove isn't being fired; he's just being given a different job. The White House Sleazeball-in-Chief -- who probably leaked Valerie Plame's name to Bob Novak, suggested that democrats wanted to coddle our enemies after September 11, and spread rumors in South Carolina that John McCain had adopted "a black baby" -- will "will no longer focus on policy but will be involved in long-term strategic planning as a deputy chief of staff and a senior adviser," says CNN.
Nevertheless, even though a few administration officials are getting fired or moved around -- and Fox News watchers will insist that Bush is really, really shaking things up, here, so baby-killing liberals should stop making a fuss -- there is little change happening. Rove continues to be the little voice in Bush's ear; Rumsfeld continues to be in charge of the military; the Project for a New American Century continues to be in control of national policy.
And, based on Pentagon testing in Nevada, it looks like we're going to nuke Iran. While Iran's dictator is clearly crazy, there is the same pressing, immediate threat there that there was in Iraq three years ago -- which is to say, none. Iran is, according to nuclear scientists, several years from developing a nuclear weapon. The number of centrifuges they have (a small number) combined with the size of aluminum tubes they have signals exactly what they've been saying all along: that they're trying to develop nuclear power, which is their right under the law. And if they're lying? Then let nuclear inspectors determine that, not a trigger-happy U.S. president.
Last week, many retired generals and admirals -- some former members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (an advisory committee composed of the heads of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard, and Marines) -- signed letters asking President Bush to fire Secretary of Defense Donald "Duck" Rumsfeld.
Making Light has a round-up of the comments that military brass have been making this week. Some stand-out names include Gen. Anthony Zinni of U.S. Central Command and Lt. Gen. Anthony Newbold, Director of Operations to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The military's complaint with Rumsfeld is that he is tactically incompetent and lacks integrity. Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, in charge of training the new Iraq army, said, "He has shown himself incompetent strategically, operationally and tactically, and is far more than anyone responsible for what has happened to our important mission in Iraq." NYT has more on this story.
How will the Bush admnistration smear these people? Hard to say. They've managed to smear grieving mothers, ambassadors, CIA operatives, distinguished servicemen from their own party, and whistle-blowers (can you guess who these people are? Scroll down to see if you were right!) Can the administration say that this group of generals doesn't know what's going on down there, that they're not in the heat of battle? Nope; some of these criticisms are coming from people in the heat of battle. Can the administration claim that these people hate America? Come on; they're generals. Also, they're not against the War on Terr', either. They're against the way it's being fought, and while I disagree with the whole War on Terr' concept, I think the generals and I can agree that, putting the war itself aside, it's been fought pretty crappily.
But at least the administration has a stranglehold on the minds of America's youth, what with maniacs like David Horowitz out there. Wait a minute: could it be that there are West Point graduates out there who are against the war? Turns out there are!
Once you get past the 1997-style design, West Point Graduates Against the War indicts Bush and Rumsfeld for failing to live up to the codes of honor and integrity that they were taught as students. If military cadets have a higher level of integrity than the Commander-in-Chief or the Secretary of Defense, then something is very wrong.
The website takes a lot of cues from Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, a former president and, before that, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe during World War II. Eisenhower became a liberal favorite at the end of his presidency when he warned of "the military-industrial complex" in his farewell address. It's a shame it took him until the last day of his presidency to realize the dangers that happen when the government and defense contractors sleep together, but his warning is still well-taken:
Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peace time, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence, economic, political, even spiritual, is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
Eisenhower isn't entirely correct in saying that there was no armaments industry before World War II. Winchester, Colt, and the Springfield Repeating Arms Co. certainly weren't going hungry, but neither were they producing arms on such a massive scale, both in terms of quantity and sheer size of armaments before World War II.
The scary thing about the military-industrial complex is that, to military contractors, it doesn't matter who the enemy is, as long as there's an enemy. War becomes devoid of meaning -- it's not war for a particular purpose, it's war for war's sake, because the revenues of companies like United Defense depend on there being war. No war, no need to make tanks. No tanks, no sales. No sales, no revenue. But if war were perpetual, then comapnies in the business of war would always be guaranteed a customer. It's no surprise, then, considering that members of the administration come from defense companies, that we are nearing a state of perpetual war. It's to their advantage to go to war, as it increases the shares of company stock that they received as part of their severance packages. (To this day, Dick Cheney receives income from Halliburton as part of his severance package.)
The more incompetent the Secretary of Defense, the longer war can go on. And the more money Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld will make in the process.
Answers to Smears
"Grieving Mother": Cindy Sheehan was portrayed by the Republican Spin Machine as a puppet of George Soros at the least, and treasonous at the most.
"Ambassadors": Former Ambassador Joe Wilson went to Niger to investigate whether or not Iraq had tried to purchase uranium there. He concluded that they hadn't. The Republican Spin Machine went all out to discredit Wilson, suggesting that he spent his trip to Niger sipping green tea by a pool. In June, 2003, Bob Novak revealed that his wife was a CIA operative, most likely in an administration attempt to punish him for writing a NYT op-ed criticizing the administration's suggestion in the State of the Union speech that Iraq tried to purchase uranium from Niger.
"CIA operative": Valerie Wilson, alias Valerie Plame, wife of Joe Wilson, was an undercover operative outed by Bob Novak, apparently on orders by someone in the administration. Novak also outed Brewster Jennings, the CIA front company Plame used when talking with international arms dealers.
"Distinguished servicemen from their own party": Karl Rove spread rumors through South Carolina that John McCain had adopted "a black baby." McCain lost the Republican primary in South Carolina. McCain fought in Vietnam -- something that Bush, Cheney, Rove, or Rumsfeld ever did -- and spent six years as a POW at the infamous "Hanoi Hilton."
"Whistle-blowers": Former counterterrorism official Richard Clarke was smeared in 2004 after he wrote a book suggeting that the administration ignored obvious signs that al-Qaeda was planning to attack the United States. Dick Cheney publicly said that Clarke was nothing more than a disgruntled former employee with a book to sell.
Last Thursday, indicted former Vice Presidential Chief of Staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby testified to a grand jury that it was President Bush himself who authorized the leak of Valerie Plame's name in 2003. Plame, you'll recall, was an undercover CIA operative. Her husband, Joseph Wilson, was a former U.S. ambassador sent to Niger to investigate whether or not Iraq had tried to purchase yellowcake uranium there. Wilson published an op-ed in The New York Times indicating that Iraq had not tried to purchase uranium from Niger and the administration was incorrect in asserting that it had. A few months later, Plame's identity surfaced, leading many to believe that the administration was somehow "punishing" Wilson for criticizing the administration.
For months, President Bush said that he didn't know who the leaker was, but if anyone in the White House was involved in the leak, they would be "dealt with." Last summer, when U.S. prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation moved closer to the White House, Bush broguht his standard of evidence up to a person who was convicted of wrongdoing. Shortly thereafter, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan refused to "comment on an ongoing investigation."
Hmmm.
The White House's response? McClellan finally came out of the cave of "ongoing investigation" and offered the White House's opinion on the matter: it wasn't illegal.
On Friday, the White House responded to the allegations by noting that Bush declassified a national intelligence estimate so that the public could have access to the same intelligence legislators had when they voted to authorize force against Iraq. The national intelligence declassification apparently included mentioning Plame, and thus what the administration did was not illegal, since the information about her identity was no longer classified.
McClellan on Friday proceeded to make a tortured (no pun intended) analogy between intelligence the benefits the public (which apparently includes outing an undercover CIA operative) and intelligence that threatens national security (such as when someone in the administration lets the American people know about illegal, warrantless, poorly justified wiretaps on Americans. Did I mention that the wiretaps are illegal and that no law professor at even the most podunk, two-bit law school would ever accept Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' legal reasoning in support of this program?).
So, it's okay for the administration to out a CIA operative, because that's in the public interest. But it's not in the public interest to let the American people know that their president is wantonly and flagrantly breaking the law? Apparently all presidents are equal, but some presidents are more equal than others.
Now that President Bush's illegal, warrantless wiretapping program is out of the bag, conservatives are on spin control the only way they can be: by suggesting that President Clinton also engaged in warrantless wiretapping. Many conservative commentators have made this accusation, which is designed to mark liberal critics as hypocrites (if they supported warrantless wiretaps under Clinton, but not under Bush, then they're clearly against Bush's warrantless wiretaps just because they don't like him). Even Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has suggested that President Clinton used warrantless wiretaps, as though President Clinton's use of warrantless wiretaps constitutes a justification for President Bush's use of warrantless wiretaps.
If it were true, it would be a weak and silly argument. Thankfully, it's a lie, which spares Gonzales the embarrassment of making such a weak and silly argument. Now he has only to deal with the embarrassment of lying.
Presidents Clinton signed an executive order in 1995 authorizing the Attorney General to approve physical searches without a court order for a period of up to one year in order to acquire foreign intelligence information. The order, however, only authorizes such searches "if the Attorney General makes the certifications required by that section." "That section" is 50 U.S.C. 1802(a), where the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is catalogued within the U.S. Code. "The certifications" the Attorney General would have to make are that the targets of such searches are not "United States persons."
Matt Drudge alleges that President Carter authorized warrantless wiretaps in 1979 just like Bush did. Also not true. President Carter, like President Clinton, authorized warrantless wiretaps only "if the Attorney General makes the certifications required by that section." Again, "that section" was 50 U.S.C. 1802(a), and the certifications were that the wiretaps would not intercept any communications "to which a United States person is a party.”
No orders regarding President Bush's program have been made public, so we have no way of knowing what is and isn't permissible. Some reports have indicated that "United States persons" accidentally had their conversations intercepted. Bush claims that "a few" people are being bugged by the NSA; Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff has indicated it could be thousands of people. Whatever the number, neither Carter nor Clinton authorized the same warrantless wiretapping that Bush did, since they both mandated that warrantless searches must be conducted within the confines of FISA. Bush has made no such requirement, and indeed, none of his orders are public in the same way that Bush's and Carter's were.
Don't even think of asking about the State of the Union! If we were to tell you, that would help the terrorists.
The theme of President Bush's State of the Union address last night was, "Terrorism will just continue to happen, and I'm going to need to keep doing what I'm doing."
President Bush began by defending the War on Terr', suggesting that it has led to democratization in the Middle East. He also put his opponents on the defensive by labeling anyone who disagrees with the War on Terr' an "isolationis[t] and protectionis[t]."
He then defended his illegal, warrantless domestic surveillance program as necessary "to aggressively pursue the international communications of suspected al Qaeda operatives and affiliates to and from America." He justified his program by noting, "Previous Presidents have used the same constitutional authority I have," which is dubiously true, since the actions of the presidents who used this "constitutional authority" were questionably legal (and there is no such authority in the Constitution; Bush infers from his role as Commander-in-Chief that he has such authority). He also said, "Federal courts have approved the use of that authority." This is what Al Franken calls a weasel statement: a statement that is technically true but is designed to mislead. Federal courts have approved the use of that authority in the past, but they have later been overruled. The final word on the issue is that warrantless wiretapping is not allowed. Also, the statement may be designed to confuse viewers into thinking that a court approved his wiretaps. It didn't. The FISA Court didn't receive any applications for his warrantless surveillance program. The president broke the law; is someone going to enforce the law?
Turning to domestic issues, the president wants to make his tax cuts permanent (a bad idea), and yet he still plans to cut the deficit in half while still spending the same amount of money or more fighting the War on Terr'.
As I've said before, we are also engaged in a War on Math.
Following the failure of his Social Security plan, the president created a commission "to examine the full impact of baby boom retirements on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid." Okay, Congress, you didn't like my idea, so you come up with something.
Too-little, too-late, the president suggested we should look into alternative fuel sources. This on the same day that Exxon-Mobil reported the highest profits of any U.S. company in 2005. This is a far cry from his 2001 energy strategy, which involved continued reliance on fossil fuels and maybe, someday, a venture into examining the merits of alternative fuels, sometime in the future.
It was a standard-issue State of the Union address. Lots of policy suggestions, lots of self-promoting. "Bushie, you're doing a heck of a job."
But when Bush said the following, I nearly threw up:
I am pleased that members of Congress are working on earmark reform, because the federal budget has too many special interest projects. And we can tackle this problem together, if you pass the line-item veto.
Whaa? Whoosa--? Whaa? Line-item veto? That phrase again? In 1996, Congress gave Clinton the "line-item veto," the ability of a president to veto specific sections of a bill without vetoing the whole thing. The Supreme Court, however, took that away from him; they declared it unconstitutional. Does Bush now think that he has enough clout on the Supreme Court to be able to keep the line-item veto? It was a terrible idea under Clinton, and it's a terrible idea now. You think his "signing statements" are dubiously endowed by the weight of law? Watch what happens when he vetoes whole sections from bills. He won't be abiding by any torture restrictions. Is Bush really so brash as to think that he can get a line-item veto not only passed by Congress, but approved by the Supreme Court? (Curiously, Breyer, O'Connor, and Scalia were the three dissenters in that case -- quite a motley crew.)
This line-item veto thing is something to worry about. Legally, it's wrong, because it gives the president the power of a legislature. The Supreme Court has said as much. But if Bush packs the Supreme Court with enough people who want to see him have a lot of power (like certain brand-new justices, who helped invent the philosophy of the "unitary executive"), well, it's all over for the United States.
At a USA PATRIOT Act rally in Buffalo in April, President Bush said this:
Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so. It's important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution.
This quote has been played at least five times a day on The Al Franken Show, but surprisingly, there are some people who haven't heard this quotation before. The point of the sound bite is that, in April 2005 when Bush made that statement, he was engaged in wiretapping without a court order. President Bush was completely, unabashedly lying to the American people. No spin is possible. No backtracking is possible. He said it, and it wasn't true.
One of Al Franken's guests today was Timothy Lynch of the Cato Institute. Though a convservative think-tank, the Cato Institute is old-school conservatism, meaning it wants the government to keep its big nose out of everyone's business, and it's very upset about the president's warrantless wiretapping program. Commenting on the president's attitude that we should trust him when it comes to deciding who to wiretap, Lynch said, "The Constitution is based on the idea that we don't trust anyone in power." Wow! What a guy! Later, he acknowledged that the government should be allowed to conduct certain activities in secret; however, "one branch doesn't decide for itself what those secrets will be." Lynch demands some sort of oversight and balance among the three branches of government in matters of secrecy. Remember that Congress wasn't even informed about the warrantless wiretapping. No one knew about it except the highest members of the executive branch.
This president -- and by president, I mean Dick Cheney -- has nothing but contempt for the legislature. Even as a senator from Wyoming, Cheney tried to dilute the power of the legislature. If there's anyone who wants to be a unitary executive, it's Cheney.
Congressional Republicans, in an attempt to deflect some of the fallout of the Jack Abramoff scandal, have decided that their collective talking points will be, "Oh yeah? Well, Democrats took money, too!" Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean has said that not a single Democrat received a dime of Abramoff money. What's the deal, here?
It all depends on how you define "money from Abramoff." Jack Abramoff is being indicted for -- and has pled guilty to -- offering legislators money or other things of value in exchange for political favors. That's bribery, and it's illegal. Abramoff personally bribed legislators to the tune of $127,000, according to Bloomberg News.
And who got this money? Apparently, money directly from Abramoff went only to Republicans.
Abramoff also gave money to other lobbying firms and it was these lobbying firms who gave a total of $1.4 million to over 200 senators and representatives, Democrats and Republicans. The issue, though, is one of legality: while it is morally reprehensible for congressmen to take campaign donations from anyone, it is also illegal to take personal favors or money in addition to campaign donations. This is the picayune detail: Democrats accepted campaign contributions from Abramoff clients and related firms; Republicans did the same, but they also accepted money and favors directly from Abramoff.
In the end, though, who cares? The story here is not who accepted money, but the fact that money was accepted at all! The election finance system is broken, and it's bad for Democrats to be accepting money from XYZ Corporation into their election coffers in exchange for favorable legislation toward XYZ Corporation. (The NRA and Big Tobacco, for example, give to both Democrats and Republicans.) The Howard Dean debate about whether or not Democrats got money is moot: the point is that this bribery on a massive scale was allowed to happen, and that is what we should be outraged about.
Recently, the president signed into law H.R. 2863, the Department of Defense Appropriations Act. Deep within the gargantuan omnibus spending bill is a section called Title X, the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005. This little piece of legislation does a good thing. It's the amendment that McCain wanted, the one that prevents any U.S. operative from using torture. Well, actually, it says:
No person in the custody or under the effective control of the Department of Defense or under detention in a Department of Defense facility shall be subject to any treatment or technique of interrogation not authorized by and listed in the United States Army Field Manual on Intelligence Interrogation.
But the government still has the problem of people trying to contest their status as enemy combatants. What is an administration involved in a not-war war to do about this? Well, fortunately, the Constitution allows Congress to determine what cases federal courts can hear (Art. III, § 2). And, with the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, they have exercised this power. Read and be dumbfounded:
(e) Judicial Review of Detention of Enemy Combatants-(1) IN GENERAL- Section 2241 of title 28, United States Code, is amended by adding at the end the following:`(e) Except as provided in section 1005 of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, no court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider--`(1) an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of an alien detained by the Department of Defense at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; or
`(2) any other action against the United States or its agents relating to any aspect of the detention by the Department of Defense of an alien at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, who--`(A) is currently in military custody; or
`(B) has been determined by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in accordance with the procedures set forth in section 1005(e) of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant.'.
In the tradition of Orwellian names for Bush administration legislation, the "Detainee Treatment Act" does deal with detainee treatment, but it also assures that no foreign detainee can ever demand a writ of habeas corpus, meaning he will never be able to (1) contest his status or (2) be charged with a crime or (3) know why he has been detained. A foreign enemy combatant can only receive a review by a military tribunal. Many of the people in Guantanamo Bay are not terrorists, but illegal aliens or people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time and were rounded up with terrorists. Now, those people have no right to object to their incarceration or go to court to prove that they are not terrorists.
Last night, Caleefoahneea governator Arnold Schwarzenegger gave the State of the State address in which he was, actually, pretty conciliatory.
While the nation's only cybernetic governor has no problem killing innocent bystanders, he had a much more difficult problem last night: how to deal with the overwhelming defeat of his special election in November. Schwarzenegger actually made the defeat sound good, suggesting that he may himself have been too partisan and that the people's reaction to his issues indicated that, while Californians may tolerate a killer robot from the future, they won't tolerate a partisan killer robot from the future:
I've thought a lot about the last year and the mistakes I made and the lessons I've learned. What I feel good about is that I led from my heart.Now it's true that I was in too much of a hurry. I didn't hear the majority of Californians when they were telling me they didn't like the special election. I barreled ahead anyway when I should have listened.
I have absorbed my defeat and I have learned my lesson. And the people, who always have the last word, sent a clear message - cut the warfare, cool the rhetoric, find common ground and fix the problems together. So to my fellow Californians, I say, "Message received."
Wow! Who knew that Conan the Barbarian could be so diplomatic? He admitted that he made mistakes, and then said that he learned from those mistakes. He didn't try to blame Democrats for the failure of the special election; he didn't blame special interests; he didn't blame anyone but himself.
After initially breaking the ice by admitting his mistakes, Schwarzenegger proceeded to describe his agenda for California in the future (the near future, not the far-off future in which we're at war with the machines). He suggested that with California continuing to grow, it needs to make long-term investments in education and infastructure (which will be hard with Schwarzenegger himself cutting money for education) in order to keep up with that growth.
He announced a Strategic Growth Plan for accomodating California's growth. This plan includes:
And how does Ahnold plan to pay for all this? The "fiscal discipline" of the past two years must continue, he said. Budgets must still be cut. But Arnold wants the General Assembly to do the following:
Is Arnold changing his tune after the failure of his special ballot? Is he catering to what the voters want rather than trying to impose his desires upon them? His CPU must be "a neural net processor, a learning computer," because Arnold has learned from the failure of November. Unless this is all a bunch of happy, sappy crap calculated to make us feel better. But even the Democrats in the General Assembly were pleased to hear that Arnold was less willing to make unilateral decisions and more willing to work with his opponents. He's turning from a trustee, who does what he feels is right on behalf of the voters, to a delegate, who does what the voters want.
"Come on, Cohagen, you've got what you want, now give dese people infastructure improvements!"
And now for something completely different
CalTrans reported when it began building a second, earthquake-proof eastern span of the Bay Bridge that the span would cost about a billion dollars. Now, it's changing its tune, saying that the single tower will cost a billion dollars. The entire project is expected to be completed in 2012, at a cost of over $6 billion. Here, Read!
The New York Times' revelation last week that President George W. Bush signed an order in 2002 authorizing the NSA to conduct domestic surveillance without warrants was mind-blowing. But did the administration violate federal law?
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 outlines what the government's powers are and are not when it comes to conducting electronic surveillance operations. The USA PATRIOT Act made some changes to FISA, but the changes were, in my opinion, not very substantial. The USA PATRIOT Act brought FISA up-to-date with the times; for example, it re-defined "wire communication" to "cable" communications systems and packet-switched networks (i.e., the Internet). The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is known to history as 50 U.S.C. 1801, et seq.
Curiously, there should be no need to enact secret orders to spy on people. FISA has a provision for authorizing warrants for foreign intelligence surveillance: the foreign intelligence surveillance court. This is a special court composed of 11 U.S. District Court judges (3 of whom must live within 20 miles of Washington, D.C.) who have the authority to hear applications for electronic surveillance. If any one of these 11 judges rejects an application for foreign intelligence surveillance, then the decision gets reviewed by a panel of three other foreign intelligence surveillance court judges. If this panel rejects an application, then the decision can be appealed, under seal, to the U.S. Supreme Court. Since its inception in 1978, the foreign intelligence surveillance court has rejected only 4 applications for electronic surveillance, and those were all in 2003. (The court does, however, modify applications for various reasons.) The foreign intelligence surveillance court is, essentially, a rubber stamp.
And yet, the Bush administration felt that even this rubber-stamp authority was too restrictive for the activities it wanted to engage in. When an administration is upset that a secret order has become public knowledge, that's when we should be concerned. The administration didn't want the American people to know that the NSA was conducting surveillance on domestic targets, and that should be cause for concern. Once our government actively tries to hide things from us, we become more like all those oppressive dictatorships we claim to hate.
The National Security Agency (NSA) is probably the least-public of the three U.S. intelligence agencies, the other two being the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The agency was founded in 1952 by an executive order of President Truman. Its function is to monitor domestic communications, especially government communications, and collect and analyze foreign communications. It is especially concerned with cryptography. The NSA's charter prohibits it from conducting domestic surveillance. (For more information, watch the movie Sneakers.)
Did the president break the law? 50 U.S.C. 1802(a) allows the president, via the Attorney General, to "authorize electronic surveillance without a court order" if and only if the targets of such surveillance are exclusively "foreign powers." As defined in 50 U.S.C. 1801(a), a foreign power can be a foreign country, an agent of a foreign country, or "a group engaged in international terrorism or activities in preparation therefor." I went into this analysis believing that the president broke the law, but after reading this stuff, it's pretty nebulous. The definitions of "foreign power" have been so watered down that if the government can prove that it was conducting surveillance on domestic members of an international terrorist group, then its activities would be legal. This is not to say, of course, that Bush's activities are right -- I think they're wrong -- but whether or not they're within the boundaries of the law is a different issue. Fortunately, this information was revealed at precisely the time that the Senate is debating whether or not to renew particular elements of the USA PATRIOT Act. Currently, the debates are stalled and it doesn't look like the Act's provisions will be renewed before they sunset at the end of the year, since the Senate will soon take a Christmas recess.
After the revelations came to light last week, Bush was unapologetic and brazen as he declared that, yes, he had ordered such surveillance to be conducted, and such surveillance would continue. So, the president will continue to spy on Americans without warrants and without oversight. We just have to trust that he won't abuse his power. Man, what a relief!
We also learned last week that the FBI has been conducting surveillance of activist groups "in causes as diverse as the environment, animal cruelty and poverty relief". Forty years ago, activist groups were investigated for having even the mildest of communist slants. Now, activist groups are being investigated for having anti-war or pro-peace slants. Oh, and they're still being investigated for having communist slants. You know what they say: the more things change, the more every red-necked American betrayed his country by voting for a president based on his ability to keep the gays away.
But there's still hope. Just today, NYT reported that the NSA domestic spying program captured purely domestic communications, and that is 100% pure illegal. FISA was enacted precisely to prevent the domestic surveillance abuse that happened during the Vietnam War, when J. Edgar Hoover's FBI conducted surveillance on anti-war groups just for the hell of it. "Well, it's Thursday. Time to infiltrate the Black Panthers. Then we'll go to lunch."
And with Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay being indicted and Ralph Reed and Bill "I can diagnose a patient from the Senate floor and then later lie through my teeth by saying that I did no such thing" Frist under investigation for insider trading, things are looking good for Americans who don't want to be involved in a pointless war and who care about their civil liberties. But, wait! That's not all the Republicans have done! Doug Bandow, a scholar at the Cato Institute, a conservative think-tank, resigned last Friday after it was revealed that he, too, took money from Abramoff in exchange for columns that were favorable to Abramoff clients. Ah, it feels good to be on the side of justice!
Guess what? This time it wasn't! The New York Times, which can't be trusted because it's at the forefront of the Liberal Media Conspiracy, reported today that the NSA has been spying on U.S. citizens for the last three years.
President Bush, who has been definitively caught engaging in sneaky, underhanded activities, signed an order in 2002 authorizing the National Security Agency to monitor "international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible 'dirty numbers' linked to Al Qaeda."
And now, the administration wants to renew the USA PATRIOT Act, asking us to trust that it won't abuse those powers. The USA PATRIOT Act is, for some reason, adored by conservatives because ... they want to spy on people? What happened to the Republican party as the party of small government? Unless it's the party of small government for only the Republicans. As for everyone else, their lives will be micro-managed and the intimate details of their personal conversations will be recorded in the name of the War on Terr'.
I feel ill. And so does the head of Richard Nixon, who engaged in similar actions when he was president.
Unless we torture. But we don't -- unless we do. And it turns out that we do. The Associated Press reports that a European investigator found "mounting indications" that the United States held War on Terr' detainees in European countries, but quickly moved them last month when it was revealed that the United States had secret prisons.
But those prisons didn't exist. Unless they did ... which, apparently, they did.
WASHINGTON -- In a move that startled both Republicans and Democrats in the nation's capital, President Bush became the first president in U.S. history to not pardon the White House turkeys.
Traditionally, the White House has been given a turkey and one alterate turkey to be killed for the White House Thanksgiving dinner. Each year, presidents "pardon" the turkeys, sparing them from being killed. This year, however, President Bush announced that he would not pardon "Marshmallow" and its alternate, "Yam."
"Killing these turkeys will send a message to turkeys everywhere: we will not bow down under pressure from animal rights groups. We will not cower in the face of challenges to our freedom. These turkeys are vicious killers, possibly carriers of the bird flu, and pardoning them would tell the animal kingdom that it is okay to infect us with diseases which threaten our American way of life," said Bush this morning on the South Lawn of the White House.
Bush also suggested that the turkeys may have links to al-Qaeda, but a senior White House official told SEDHE that the intelligence supporting that link was questionable, at best. "We heard that the turkey Marshmallow may have met with Mohammed Atta in Prague, but that information comes from a source we know to be uncredible."
Nevertheless, the White House has not mentioned that the informant's credibility was in question and chose to act as though the intelligence were sound.
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) criticized Bush's handling of the situation. "Every president before him has pardoned the White House turkey," he said. "I have introduced a bill into the Senate that would require the president to pardon every turkey from now on."
In response, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) called McCain a "coward" and suggested that years of torture in Vietnam had driven him crazy. "He also adopted a black baby," she said in a statement on the Senate floor that drew jeers from Democrats and some Republicans.
President Bush has said that he will veto any legislation that requires him to pardon the White House turkey. "We're in a war on turkeys. We need to be able to confront the enemy any way we can." Bush said that alternate turkey Yam would not be killed immediately; rather, he would be held at an undisclosed location, without being charged for a crime, and interrogated until he told CIA officials how to cure the bird flu.
With the administration running damage control in the wake of Bush's and Cheney's insane comments ("It's perfectly all right to question why we want to war, as long as you don't question why we went to war"), Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was sent out to take bullets on no fewer than four Sunday news shows: FOX News Sunday, Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, This Week, and Face the Nation.
What's most fascinating are the comments Rumsfeld made on CNN's Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer. Blitzer tells Rumsfeld that the administration's push for war was made based on faulty intelligence. He cites an instance in which the administration claimed that there was a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda, only to have its source for that information discredited later. Rumsfeld's response:
There is no question that there are fabricators that operate in the intelligence world. And there's also no question you can find intelligence reports on every side of every issue.When you look at the reams of intelligence information that the United States develops from different agencies, they gather from other friendly foreign liaison services, you can find in any given week intelligence that conflicts with each other. The implication that there's something amazing about that is just ridiculous.
Finally! An administration official that actually answers a question instead of bringing up September 11, al-Qaeda, or "Saddam Hussein was a very bad man."
Rumsfeld's response to this question is, "There will always be bad intelligence." Fair enough. And it's the job of intelligence experts at the CIA to separate the "good" intelligence -- substantiated information based on credible sources -- from the "bad" intelligence -- unsubstantiated information that comes from uncredible sources (like the implication that Mohammed Atta met in Prague with Iraq officials -- that one comes from a source known to be uncredible).
And then, in a moment that I will remember forever, Rumsfeld said this:
It's clear the intelligence was wrong.
Whaaa? Whoosa-- ? Whaaa? Is this a Bush administration official telling the truth? Start the presses! Alert the newsmedia! Get Hearst on the phone! Prepare the teletype!
Yes, Rumsfeld admitted that the intelligence was wrong. So, what do we have here? On Veterans Day, Bush said that it was irresponsible to suggest that the administration manipulated intelligence, and besides, he said, Democrats got the same intelligence and they still voted for war. Bringing together Rumsfeld's statement that the intelligence was wrong, we can come to the following conclusions:
In the first case, the administration is malicious; in the second, the administration is incompetent. If we take Bush at his word -- I know, you'll have to suspend disbelief for a second -- then the administration's overarching reason for going to war was, "We were too dumb to be able to discern the bad intelligence from the good intelligence." They're pleading stupidity as a reason for sending 2,000 people to die! "Oops, our bad" is the administration's position on the war. "But, hey, we're there already and we can't leave now."
It's a sorry sign when the administration has to resort to pleading stupidity in order to save its own ass.
(By the way, there is a good deal of evidence to suggest that case number one -- the administration disseminated intelligence as fact even though it knew that said intelligence was false -- is actually what happened. Take, for example, Joseph Wilson's trip to Niger and his conclusion that documents showing that the Iraqis bought yellowcake uranium were obvious forgeries, a conclusion every other intelligence agency in the world came to. Bush is also lying when he says that every other intelligence agency in the world believed that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and was willing to use them.)
Thursday, Representative John Murtha (D-PA) called for an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. Friday, House Republicans said, "Okay, you want to withdraw troops? Let's withdraw troops" and presented a resolution for withdrawing troops. While the Democrats were brave enough to suggest an Iraq withdrawal, they completely -- how shall I put it? -- pussied out when it came to an actual resolution. An AFP story about the resolution observes, "Republicans put up their own version of the resolution, calling for 'the deployment of United States forces (to) be terminated immediately,' aiming to make the Democrats appear unpatriotic if they voted for the measure." The resolution, H.R. 571, was defeated 403 to 3, with spineless Democrats voting to defeat the resolution. Which House members aren't spineless? Cynthia McKinney of Georgia, José Serrano of New York, and Robert Wexler of Florida. Apparently, Democrats will talk all day long about doing things, but when it comes to actually doing things, they're afraid of appearing "unpatriotic."
Why are they so afraid? President Bush is on the defensive, or at least, he should be. He attacked his critics on Veterans Day and followed up earlier this week. He sent Cheney out to repeat the talking points that war critics are trying to "revise history." Any junior high school-level debater should be able to take these speeches down; Bush and Cheney make a lot of claims, but offer no evidence to support their assertions. In contrast, war critics offer a plethora of evidence indicating that the administration cherry-picked intelligence -- whether true or not -- in order to support its attempt to convince the world and the American people that we needed to go to war with Saddam Hussein right now!
Instead, the Democrats do nothing. If Bill Clinton's White House were in charge of the Democratic Party, we would be seeing a lot more criticisms of the war and we would be seeing the Democratic Party trying to "win the hearts and minds" of moderate Americans who are unsure of what to believe.
Instead, they send Howard Dean to Meet the Press with the nebulous promise that "sure, we have ideas, and our ideas are better than the Republicans' ideas, but we can't tell you what our ideas are. Just trust us on this one."
The strongest criticisms of the administration are coming from what might be considered the fringes of the Democratic Party -- blogs like Daily Kos, and Air America Radio. Put these people on Capitol Hill and you'll see the Republicans quaking in their boots, which are made from the skin of the poor.
But the Republicans have a coordinated media strategy, something Democrats don't have. The RNC sends out daily talking points, and Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, and Rush Limbaugh all obediently repeat the talking points like the syncophantic, despicable lap-dogs that they are. This means that, in the heartland of America (and I dare you to find a state in the midwest where you hear Rush on more stations than you hear Air America shows), voters hear day in and day out that Democrats are lying, and Republicans are just trying to spread freedom, and the Iraq War is going really swell, and by the way, if you keep voting for us, we'll take care of that whole gay marriage and abortion thing and we'll give the richest one percent of Americans cherry tax breaks because, hey, they work really hard and deserve it more than you do.
If the Democrats want to do anything about the administration, they have to be unafraid to challenge the administration where it counts.
Oh, and in other news, THOMAS, the Library of Congress's searchable database of legislation, has updated its look. The web page no longer looks like it was designed in 1995.
GYEONGJU, South Korea -- Barely a week after first going on the offensive by suggesting that Iraq War critics want to "rewrite history," President George W. Bush yesterday leveled his harshest criticism yet against war critics while on a multi-nation Asian tour.
"Now, I understand when the American people want to criticize the conduct of my war," Bush said, "the First Amendment gives them that right. But I want to let them know who else uses the First Amendment. Osama bin Laden uses the First Amendment. He uses freedom of speech to spread his message of violence and hate. He uses the First Amendment to recruit dangerous killers who want to murder women and children."
At a press gaggle later in the day, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan assuaged reporters' fears that the president somehow equated war critics with terrorists. "I want to be very clear on this point," said McClellan, "the president did not suggest that people who exercise their First Amendment rights to free speech are like Osama bin Laden. I think that if you go back and look at what the president said, you'll find that he said exactly the opposite of that."
King Features Syndicate columnist Helen Thomas, however, challenged McClellan. "I don't know why you would say that. The president very clearly equated people who utilize free speech with Osama bin Laden," she said.
"No, Helen, that's not what he said," replied McClellan. "I'm not going to stand up here and listen to you play the blame game. I'm not going to stand here and watch you play politics and take the president's comments out of context. The president was very clear on this point and I'm not going to watch you endorse the actions of dangerous killers."
Vice President Richard Cheney, appearing later that day in a press conference in Washington, D.C., defended the president's comments. "I don't know how any American who pretends to call himself patriotic can criticize the president's handling of the war, especially when we have such convincing intelligence that Osama bin Laden, the person responsible for the horrific, terrible events of September the eleventh, is such an ardent defender of free speech. I think it's reprehensible that any person who loves this country would be doing the same thing that terrorists do," he said.
Following Bush and Cheney's speeches, the Department of Justice released a new policy initiative aimed at cutting down on what Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales called "the problem of aiding terrorists by lowering troop morale at home." The policy paper recommended solving the problem by declaring critics of the war to be "unlawful comabatants" and placing them in secure military prisons where they would be held without a trial or other constitutional protections. "A strict reading of the Geneva Convention of 1949 reveals that war critics cannot be guaranteed the same protections as other citizens." Calls to the Department of Justice were not returned by press time.
"Finally, we're seeing a policy that makes sense," said FOX News host Bill O'Reilly on his radio show, The Radio Factor. "I'm glad that the liberal terrorist sympathizers are finally going to be dealt with in a fitting way. Their vile words have demoralized the troops and provided aid and comfort to the deranged killers that we are trying to fight around the world."
Lance Eddington, a Professor of Law at the Pakled University School of Law, said that the president's comments were wildly out of proportion. "The suggestion that war critics are like terrorists is very offensive and dangerous," said Eddington. "The First Amendment is one of our most sacred protections, and yet the president is suggesting that people who exercise this right are attempting to kill Americans. This is a dangerous precedent."
Argyle Schotenstein of the conservative Manhattan Institute for Policy Research disagrees. "The president's statements are not at all without precedent," he said. "In order to stave off war, James Buchanan suspended the writ of habeas corpus for anyone who suggested that the United States should go to war to deal with the issue of slavery. William McKinley routinely imprisoned critics of the Spanish-American War. And I won't even go into the issue of John Adams and the Sedition Act. This president is only exercising all the options available to him. We're involved in a global war on terror, and we can't afford to send our troops mixed messages, messages that only increasing the terrorists' resolve."
The White House has not yet indicated when it would implement the Justice Department's policy, or if the policy would apply to members of Congress or other government officials. Requests made to the White House for interviews or clarification were repeatedly and systematically denied.
Howard Dean, Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, appeared on Meet the Press yesterday. Tim Russert says, "Do you believe that Democrats have a clear message, a vision for the future? Fifty-two percent of independent swing voters say no. One in four Democrats say you have no clear vision, no agenda, no clear message."
Sounds good. This is Howard Dean's big chance to prove that the Democrats do have a clear agenda.
Dean responds:
We have an alternative agenda. We made it very clear. We want a strong national security based on telling the truth to our people at home, our soldiers and our allies. We want jobs in America that'll stay in America, and we believe that renewable energy is one of the areas where we can do that. We want a health-care system that covers everybody, just like 36 other countries in the world. We want a strong public education system. And most of all, we want honesty back in government. I think that's a pretty good agenda.
Okay, you've got an agenda. Russert asks, "What do the Democrats stand for?"
Dean replies, "Tim, first of all, we don't control the House, the Senate or the White House. We have plenty of time to show Americans what our agenda is and we will long before the '06 elections."
Okay, Howard Dean. Fair enough. I mean, right now you don't control the Senate or the House or the White House. But, I mean, you're on national television and you could persuade all those swing voters that your ideas are better than the Republicans' ideas. So, come on, humor us. What do Democrats stand for?
Right now it's not our job to give out specifics. We have no control in the House. We have no control in the Senate. It's our job is to stop this administration, this corrupt and incompetent administration, from doing more damage to America. And that's what we're going to do. We're doing our best. Look at the trouble they're having putting together a budget. Why is that? Because there's still a few moderate Republicans left who don't think it's OK to cut school lunch programs, who don't think it's OK to do some of the appalling things that they're doing in their budget. I saw a show last night which showed a young African-American man in California at the UC of Davis who hoped to go to law school. The Republicans want to cut $14 billion out of higher education so this kid can't go to law school. We're going to do better than that, and together, America can do better than that.
You're killing me, Howard Dean. I mean, it's great to talk about what the Republicans are doing wrong. We've been talking about that for years. Seriously; I want to know what the Democrats are going to do to fix the country. I mean, I don't like George Bush or the Republicans. I was going to vote Democrat, anyway. But what about all those people on the fence? How are you going to persuade them by merely criticizing the Republicans? You need to make a positive argument! Tell me why you're better than the Republicans! If you guys want to get elected in 2006, it sure is your job to give out specifics.
Okay, Howard Dean, you get one last chance. Tim Russert, lead the way.
MR. RUSSERT: But is it enough for you to say to the country, "Trust us, the other guy's no good. We'll do better, but we're not going to tell you specifically how we're going to deal with Iraq."DR. DEAN: We will. When the time comes, we will do that.
MR. RUSSERT: When's the time going to come?
DR. DEAN: The time is fast-approaching. And I outlined the broad outlines of our agenda. We're going to have specific plans in all of these areas.
MR. RUSSERT: This year?
DR. DEAN: In 2006.
I give up. Howard Dean is as bad as any political pundit out there. This is why the Democrats can't get elected, even in the face of a corrupt and incompetent Republican party. Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote that if you "build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door." Howard Dean and the DNC are still trying to figure out how to make cheese.
Time columnist Joe Klein, in last week's issue of the newsmagazine, is finally saying in the "mainstream" media what people on the lefter-leaning Air America radio station have been saying all along: there's something wrong with the Bush administration.
His column centers around The Permanent Campaign, a phrase coined by Jimmy Carter pollster Patrick H. Caddell to describe how the president should act as though he is constantly trying to be re-elected by constantly appealing to voters and what voters want. "Dick Morris even asked voters where Bill Clinton should go on vacation," writes Klein.
Writing a paper for President Carter in 1976, Caddell observed that "too many good people have been defeated because they tried to substitute substance for style." Klein's thesis is that the Bush administration has perhaps gone too far, substituting style for substance. It was supposed to be Bush's straight-talking, shoot-from-the-hip Texas attitude that endeared him to "average" voters. At the same time, though, Bush infuriated intellectuals who saw him for what he was: a very dim bulb being manipulated by others, a man who went to Yale and Harvard Business School not because he earned it, but because his father was a former Massachusetts senator, CIA director, and -- oh, yeah -- President of the United States. The secret to Bill Clinton's popularity was that he really was the son of middle-class parents. His step-father -- Clinton's biological father was killed in a car accident before Clinton was born -- was a car salesman. The family lived in Hope, Ark., not Kennebunkport, Maine. (Let it be known that whenever the right criticizes Ted Kennedy for being a "liberal elite," they must watch as their noses grow six sizes, for Bush is a scion of the "conservative elite.") Clinton became a Rhodes scholar and attended Yale Law School because he was extremely intelligent, not because his father got him in.
But beyond Bush's obvious stupidity, there is another side to the Bush administration: it is more P.R. than anything else. "Indeed, his Administration represents the final, squalid perfection of the Permanent Campaign: a White House where almost every move is tactical, a matter of momentary politics, even decisions that involve life and death and war," writes Klein. The Bush administration uses style -- in the form of vague generalities about "evil killers" and empty pleas that involve the word "freedom" -- to conceal the fact that it has no substance. Or, it uses style to conceal the fact that a particular program might be detrimental to the country. Take the Orwellian names given to Bush legislation: the "Healthy Forests" initiative would make forests "healthy" by allowing lumber companies to cut down more trees; the "Clear Skies" initiative would make skies clearer ... by increasing the acceptable levels of pollution that industries could produce. The "No Child Left Behind" act has left lots of children, mostly poor children from cash-strapped school districts, behind (including the schools of Hamilton, Oh., where Bush made a big show of signing the bill into law).
And whenever someone criticizes the administration, the Bush team is there to destroy that person. Klein refers to this as the White House Iraq Group, which "was created to market the war and smear the President's opponents." The phrase "market the war" is chilling: it suggests that the public had to be persuaded that the war with Iraq was a good idea. The Bush administration tried to suggest to the American people that war was a good idea by using a variety of techniques: first, Saddam was a killer (but so were dozens of other world dictators, including the rulers of Saudi Arabia); then, he violated U.N. resolution 1441 (but ninety U.N. resolutions are currently being violated); then, he wouldn't let weapons inspectors in (but Bush pulled them out before they had completed their job and then blamed Saddam for not letting them finish inspecting); then, Saddam was on the verge of developing nuclear weapons (but Saddam abandoned his nuclear program after the Persian Gulf War); then, Saddam was developing weapons of mass destruction (but we have found none).
Yesterday, Veteran's Day, Bush showed that he was a "uniter, not a divider" by attacking the people who disagreed with him, suggesting that people who believed that the administration manipulated intelligence were trying to "rewrite history." But evidence shows that the Bush administration -- to use a John Kerry phrase -- "cherry-picked" intelligence that supported its case for war, regardless of the veracity of such intelligence. After the war began, the Bush administration, through a concerted campaign of media manipulation and smearing, tried to convince the United States that the war was somehow justifiable. "But worse, far worse, was the tendency of the White House -- particularly Karl Rove's message apparatus -- to see the war as part of the Permanent Campaign, as a political opportunity at first, and then, as the news turned bad, merely another issue to be massaged," says Klein.
Bush's massage strategy: personally attack critics, even Republicans, if they disagree with the administration. And if you can't come up with a good way to personally attack them, then make stuff up. Send talking points to Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Rush. ("Cindy Sheehan is a puppet of George Soros," for example.) Divide the country with social issues, and proclaim the whole time that you're a divider, not a uniter. Destroy anyone who gets in your way. But don't make it look like you're destroying. Promise that, as long as middle America votes for you, you'll keep the gays away.
Under the presidency of George W. Bush, this country has reached a new low. Lower than the scandals of Rutherford B. Hayes, Warren G. Harding, and Richard Nixon, combined. The American people are an audience trying to be sold a product, as though the Iraq War were Diet Cherry Coca-Cola. We're demographics to be won by an administration whose thought process is "shoot first, ask questions later." This war was not thought out. Bush's asinine landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln, in which he declared that "major combat operations are over," marked the beginning of "major combat operations." Invading the country took three months; for the last two years, we have attempted to retain control of a country that was not ours to take. The media spin machine has been in overdrive, attempting to conceal the fact that the invasion of Iraq was the first step in a neo-conservative effort to control whatever part of the world it liked. (Why not? After all, the suits declaring war would never actually have to fight, nor would their children. It's like a game of Battleship.)
We have a president who is running the country by style, not substance, as though appearing to know what you're doing is the same thing as actually knowing what you're doing. But this emphasis on style is not, as was the case of Jimmy Carter, designed to make voters like the president more. Bush's emphasis on style is designed to conceal the fact that the country is being operated by a neo-conservative intelligensia led by Dick Cheney, and anyone who thinks so is unpatriotic, treasonous, and deserves to be killed by terrorists. The emphasis on style is designed to sell to the American people policies which are, in fact, detrimental to most of the American people. This administration has done an unfathomable amount of damage to the country, at home and abroad. It has destabilized the world, putting otherwise peaceful nations (Jordan, anyone?) at risk.
Has all of this been undertaken for money? Raw power? The worst part of all this is that there is no clear motivation on the part of the administration. They appear to be reactionary, resulting in an absurd, uncoordinated policy of spin and lies with no logical end. Maybe they thrive on disorder and chaos. Maybe they like knowing that they have the power to kill recent high school graduates from middle America. Whatever their motivation, they are destroying this country, and no one seems to be noticing. They're too blinded by the sequins and neon lights of the Permanent Campaign.
In California, all four Arnold-backed ballot measures -- Props. 74 (teacher tenure), 75 (union speech), 76 (altering state spending procedures), and 77 (redistricting) -- failed. So did Prop. 73 (abortion notification), Prop. 78 (drug coverage without a discount from companies), Prop. 79 (drug coverage with mandatory discount from companies), and Prop. 80 (electricity re-regulation).
In Ohio, all four state constitutional amendments failed.
Texas, however, joins 18 other states in ratifying a constitutional amendment prohibiting gay marriage; now, almost 40 percent of the country hates gays. That's promising.
And, in Pennsylvania, the school board that promoted intelligent design as an equally weighted scientific theory alongside natural selection, was tossed out by the voters. The school board is the subject of the current lawsuit Kitzmiller v. Dover, in which plaintiffs Kitzmiller, et al. challenge the teaching of intelligent design on the grounds that it violates the First Amendment. The new school board consists of members who are critical of intelligent design as a scientific theory.
And in Virginia and New Jersey, voters replaced Republican governors with Democratic ones. So, it seems like we won yesterday. California, Virginia, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania did well. Ohio and Texas did not.
Ah, entry number 400! And what a great entry it is! Oh, how I pine for the days of Mystery Science Press Conference 3000, when Matt and I would watch Ari Fleischer -- and then his successor, Scott McClellan -- distort the truth until it looked like a Picasso painting of the truth.
Today, Scott McClellan became hostile and sarcastic toward reporters who wanted to know one thing: if it is the Bush administration's policy that we don't torture people, then why is Dick Cheney asking for an exemption allowing CIA officials to engage in torture? At first, McClellan argued with 10,000-year-old White House correspondent Helen Thomas, the grandmotherly-looking lady who sits in the front row at press briefings. But be warned: Helen Thomas doesn't take crap from anyone, especially anyone as weasely as Scott McClellan:
Q I'd like you to clear up, once and for all, the ambiguity about torture. Can we get a straight answer? The President says we don't do torture, but Cheney --MR. McCLELLAN: That's about as straight as it can be.
Q Yes, but Cheney has gone to the Senate and asked for an exemption on --
MR. McCLELLAN: No, he has not. Are you claiming he's asked for an exemption on torture? No, that's --
Q He did not ask for that?
MR. McCLELLAN: -- that is inaccurate.
Q Are you denying everything that came from the Hill, in terms of torture?
MR. McCLELLAN: No, you're mischaracterizing things. And I'm not going to get into discussions we have --
Q Can you give me a straight answer for once?
MR. McCLELLAN: Let me give it to you, just like the President has. We do not torture. He does not condone torture and he would never --
Q I'm asking about exemptions.
MR. McCLELLAN: Let me respond. And he would never authorize the use of torture. We have an obligation to do all that we can to protect the American people. We are engaged --
Q That's not the answer I'm asking for --
MR. McCLELLAN: It is an answer -- because the American people want to know that we are doing all within our power to prevent terrorist attacks from happening. There are people in this world who want to spread a hateful ideology that is based on killing innocent men, women and children. We saw what they can do on September 11th --
Q He didn't ask for an exemption --
MR. McCLELLAN: -- and we are going to --
Q -- answer that one question. I'm asking, is the administration asking for an exemption?
MR. McCLELLAN: I am answering your question. The President has made it very clear that we are going to do --
Q You're not answering -- yes or no?
MR. McCLELLAN: No, you don't want the American people to hear what the facts are, Helen, and I'm going to tell them the facts.
Q -- the American people every day. I'm asking you, yes or no, did we ask for an exemption?
MR. McCLELLAN: And let me respond. You've had your opportunity to ask the question. Now I'm going to respond to it.
Q If you could answer in a straight way.
MR. McCLELLAN: And I'm going to answer it, just like the President -- I just did, and the President has answered it numerous times.
Q -- yes or no --
MR. McCLELLAN: Our most important responsibility is to protect the American people. We are engaged in a global war against Islamic radicals who are intent on spreading a hateful ideology, and intent on killing innocent men, women and children.
Q Did we ask for an exemption?
MR. McCLELLAN: We are going to do what is necessary to protect the American people.
Q Is that the answer?
MR. McCLELLAN: We are also going to do so in a way that adheres to our laws and to our values. We have made that very clear. The President directed everybody within this government that we do not engage in torture. We will not torture. He made that very clear.
Q Are you denying we asked for an exemption?
MR. McCLELLAN: Helen, we will continue to work with the Congress on the issue that you brought up. The way you characterize it, that we're asking for exemption from torture, is just flat-out false, because there are laws that are on the books that prohibit the use of torture. And we adhere to those laws.
Q We did ask for an exemption; is that right? I mean, be simple -- this is a very simple question.
MR. McCLELLAN: I just answered your question. The President answered it last week.
Q What are we asking for?
Q Would you characterize what we're asking for?
MR. McCLELLAN: We're asking to do what is necessary to protect the American people in a way that is consistent with our laws and our treaty obligations. And that's what we --
Q Why does the CIA need an exemption from the military?
MR. McCLELLAN: David, let's talk about people that you're talking about who have been brought to justice and captured. You're talking about people like Khalid Shaykh Muhammad; people like Abu Zubaydah.
Q I'm asking you --
MR. McCLELLAN: No, this is facts about what you're talking about.
Q Why does the CIA need an exemption from rules that would govern the conduct of our military in interrogation practices?
MR. McCLELLAN: There are already laws and rules that are on the books, and we follow those laws and rules. What we need to make sure is that we are able to carry out the war on terrorism as effectively as possible, not only --
Q What does that mean --
MR. McCLELLAN: What I'm telling you right now -- not only to protect Americans from an attack, but to prevent an attack from happening in the first place. And, you bet, when we capture terrorist leaders, we are going to seek to find out information that will protect -- that prevent attacks from happening in the first place. But we have an obligation to do so. Our military knows this; all people within the United States government know this. We have an obligation to do so in a way that is consistent with our laws and values.
Now, the people that you are bringing up -- you're talking about in the context, and I think it's important for the American people to know, are people like Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, Abu Zubaydah, Ramzi Binalshibh -- these are -- these are dangerous killers.
Q So they're all killers --
Q Did you ask for an exemption on torture? That's a simple question, yes or no.
MR. McCLELLAN: No. And we have not. That's what I told you at the beginning.
Q You want to reserve the ability to use tougher tactics with those individuals who you mentioned.
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, obviously, you have a different view from the American people. I think the American people understand the importance of doing everything within our power and within our laws to protect the American people.
Q Scott, are you saying that Cheney did not ask --
Q What is it that you want the -- what is it that you want the CIA to be able to do that the U.S. Armed Forces are not allowed to do?
MR. McCLELLAN: I'm not going to get into talking about national security matters, Bill. I don't do that, because this involves --
Q This would be the exemption, in other words.
MR. McCLELLAN: This involves information that relates to doing all we can to protect the American people. And if you have a different view -- obviously, some of you on this room -- in this room have a different view, some of you on the front row have a different view.
Q We simply are asking a question.
Q What is the Vice President -- what is the Vice President asking for?
MR. McCLELLAN: It's spelled out in our statement of administration policy in terms of what our views are. That's very public information. In terms of our discussions with members of Congress --
Q -- no, it's not --
MR. McCLELLAN: In terms of our members -- like I said, there are already laws on the books that we have to adhere to and abide by, and we do. And we believe that those laws and those obligations address these issues.
Q So then why is the Vice President continuing to lobby on this issue? If you're very happy with the laws on the books, what needs change?
MR. McCLELLAN: Again, you asked me -- you want to ask questions of the Vice President's office, feel free to do that. We've made our position very clear, and it's spelled out on our website for everybody to see.
Q We don't need a website, we need you from the podium.
MR. McCLELLAN: And what I just told you is what our view is.
Q But Scott, do you see the contradiction --
In this 1,300-word exchange, McClellan mentions September 11, "dangerous killers," and twice mentions a "hateful ideology." At no time does he address the inherent contradiction between the vice president's actions and the president's statement. Also, the version of the press conference that I have posted, which comes from the White House website, has been edited to make McClellan appear less hostile. His last sentence was, actually, "And what I just told you is what our view is. Weren't you listening?"
So, what is McCain lobbying for, anyway? Here is the text of McCain's amendment, in PDF format. It prohibits any person in the custody of the Defense Department from being subjected to "any treatment or technique of interrogation not authorized by and listed in the United States Army Field Manual on Intelligence Interrogation." It also says that "[n]o individual in the custody or under the physical control of the United States Government, regardless of nationality or physical location, shall be subject to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment."
Okay, fair enough. But is Cheney lobbying for an exemption to this, or is Helen Thomas just a treasonous bastard? The Washington Post reported Oct. 25 that Cheney had drafted a proposal similar to McCain's, with the exception that "the measure barring inhumane treatment shall not apply to counterterrorism operations conducted abroad or to operations conducted by 'an element of the United States government' other than the Defense Department." So, yes: as predicted, Scott McClellan is lying. Cheney is asking for a CIA exemption to torture. And now they've been caught, and now Scott McClellan is becoming exasperated in attempting to do damage control; but the old Bush tactic of repeating talking points until they become true isn't going to work this time.
Why does the Bush administration, speaking through Cheney, opposed to this amendment? Because the administration was able to use legal weaseling to use torture in violation of the Geneva Convention. The language of this amendment is so clear that no legal maneuvering could get past it; therefore, the amendment has to be stopped, because the Bush administration wants to continue to engage in torture around the world.
And, finally, Andrew Sullivan made this most excellent of comments:
A man who avoided service in Vietnam is lecturing John McCain on the legitimacy of torturing military detainees. But notice he won't even make his argument before Senate aides, let alone the public. Why not? If he really believes that the U.S. has not condoned torture but wants to reserve it for exceptional cases, why not make his argument in the full light of day? You know: where democratically elected politicians operate.
I forgot about Ohio! If you're voting there, you had five statewide issues to vote on.
State Issue 1 would sell bonds "to finance, or assist in financing, public infrastructure capital improvements for local governments." Fair enough.
State Issue 2 would amend the Ohio Constitution to allow anyone to vote by mail thirty-five days before an election, for whatever reason. If you get a ballot mailed to you, but the county board of elections hasn't received it by election day, you can cast a provisional ballot, just in case.
State Issue 3 would amend the Ohio Constitution to impose limits on political contributions, to both candidates and Political Action Committees (PACs). It would, among other things:
State Issue 4 would amend the Ohio Constitution to alter the redistricting procedure in Ohio. Under the proposed procedure, a commission of five people -- composed of two sitting judges and three people appointed by the first two people or chosen by lot -- would redistribute state representatives. But this provision is scary: "the commission may consider whether to alter a plan to preserve communities of interest based on geography, economics, or race, so long as the reconfiguration does not result in a competitiveness number that is more than two points lower for a congressional plan and four points lower for a general assembly plan." The "competitiveness number" for a district attempts to keep the district roughly balanced between Republicans and Democrats. If you ask me, I think districts should be drawn based on geography alone.
State Issue 5 is a response to lots of controversy from the 2004 presidential election, in which Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell -- a staunch Republican -- may have deliberately caused voting irregularities (such as the delivery of too few election machines to certain districts or failure to count some ballots) in order to get Bush to win in Ohio. Issue 5 would amend the Ohio Constitution to eliminate the Secretary of State's control over elections and create a nine-member board (four appointed by the governor, four by members of the General Assembly who are not of the same party as the person being appointed, and one by unanimous vote of the justices of the Ohio Supreme Court). Issue 5 would also require the state to hire an administrative director to oversee state elections.
Currently, with two-thirds of the votes in, all four of the constitutional amendments were failing two to one, according to The New York Times.
Tomorrow marks the day when California voters will decide on eight ballot initiatives, Propositions 73-80. I've talked about them here, here, and here. And here.
To recap:
Vote no on Proposition 73. It's designed to make abortions harder to get, effectively making them illegal without making them illegal.
Vote no on Proposition 74. Proposition 74 makes it easier to fire teachers. So if an administrator doesn't like a teacher or wants to get rid of him or her, all it takes is two consecutive unsatisfactory evaluations, and the teacher is gone.
Vote no on Proposition 75. This is designed to silence public employees unions.
Vote no on Proposition 76. This gives the governor new and broader budgetary authority.
Vote no on Proposition 77. It takes redistricting control out of the hands of legislators, but a new dedistricting plan would go into effect before the voters could vote on it. Also, it uses census numbers from 2000, effectively ignoring the millions of people who have moved to California since then.
Vote no on Proposition 78. Why? Proposition 79 is better.
Vote yes on Proposition 79. This initiative not only provides more drug discounts to more people (because it allows discounts to be given through employers), but it also requires that drug companies provide the drugs at a discount to the state, saving the taxpayers money over Prop. 78.
Vote yes on Proposition 80. Clearly, the lesson we must take from the Enron scandal/California power outages of 2001-2002 is that electric utilities -- a public good -- must be regulated. Prop. 80 re-regulates electric utilities, repealing the 1998 initiative that de-regulated them in the first place.
In Panama today, President Bush fielded questions from reporters about whether or not the U.S. approves of torture:
"We do not torture," Bush declared in response to reports of secret CIA prisons overseas.Bush supported an effort spearheaded by Vice President Dick Cheney to block or modify a proposed Senate-passed ban on torture.
"We're working with Congress to make sure that as we go forward, we make it possible, more possible, to do our job," Bush said. "There's an enemy that lurks and plots and plans and wants to hurt America again. And so, you bet we will aggressively pursue them. But we will do so under the law."
But we do torture! First of all, Vice President Cheney tried as hard as his heart would allow to get a Senate amendment defeated. This amendment would make it illegal for U.S. officials to torture captives. When Cheney couldn't get the entire amendment defeated, he at least lobbied to have an exemption made for the CIA. If the United States doesn't torture people, then why must an exemption be made?
Second, the amendment enjoys overwhelming bipartisan support. In a recent test vote in the Senate, the amendment garnered 90 votes for and 9 votes against. Nevertheless, Bush has promised to veto legislation with such an amendment. This is why John McCain has vowed to insert this amendment into every piece of Senate legislation until the amendment becomes law. Why would President Bush veto legislation containing an amendment which enjoys such bipartisan support? He proclaimed himself to be "a uniter, not a divider." And yet, even though he maintains that the United States does not torture, he would veto a bill condemning torture.
Third, we have many memoranda showing that the Bush administration does not consider enemies captured in the War on Terr' to be prisoners of war as defined by the Geneva Convention, and therefore, they do not have the rights afforded prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention.
Oh, and the other ballot initiative I forgot to mention was a Denver initiative de-criminalizing marijuana. That measure passed by a 7 percentage-point victory. Now, adults in Denver over 21 years old are allowed to have up to an ounce of marijuana in their possession . . . sort of. Marijuana possession is still a state and federal offense, and Denver prosecutors can still prosecute people under state law, so the victory for pot is more a moral victory than anything else.
Which brings me to my topic of discussion: how would the government go about dealing with legalized marijuana? Marijuana advocates often compare marijuana to alcohol because alcohol is the only mind-altering substance that's legal to consume.
Alcohol, even though it can cause death in large enough doses, is legal to sell. Alcohol can become physically addictive and can cause a myriad of health problems, including cirrhosis of the liver, a condition in which the liver processes so much alcohol over such a long period of time that it becomes damaged and scarred. Tobacco cigarettes and cigars are also legal to sell, despite moutains of evidence that tobacco smoke causes lung cancer. Cigarettes contain over five hundred carcinogens, including formaldehyde (the stuff used to preserve dead tissue) and nicotine, which has been used for thousands of years as a pesticide. With these examples in mind, the argument that "marijuana is dangerous" is invalid; here are two examples of dangerous drugs that are legal to use. Marijuana is not physically addictive and has not been proven to cause any chronic diseases. There has never, ever in recorded history been a case of death from a marijuana overdose. To see examples of alcohol overdose, all you need to do is live in a college town and read the newspaper.
Reasonable restrictions are placed on alcohol and tobacco. First, the government regulates the purity of the substances so that when you have a drink, you know what you're getting. You know that beer is going to be about 5% alcohol and that shot of whiskey is going to be about 40% alcohol. The legalization of alcohol and tobacco may mean that the government believes that using these substances are okey-dokey. Or it could mean that the government takes no moral stance on the issue of alcohol and tobacco and instead leaves the decision up to you, the citizen. Either way, the government understands that you're making a decision to use alcohol or tobacco of your own free will, with full knowledge of the risks those actions entail. Ensuring that the products are uniform in their purity means that there are no risks involved that are not within your knowledge; that is, you know that the alcohol doesn't contain bleach or that the cigarettes don't contain cocaine or some other non-cigarette impurity. While alcohol and tobacco are both dangerous, it is not the government's duty to stop you from using them; rather, it is the government's duty to ensure that you are aware of all the risks involved and that there are no "surprise" risks. If you choose to engage in these actions, government ought to make them as safe as possible up to the point of the natural level of danger incurred by engaging in an action that is harmful to you. This is why the government mandates that food contain nutrition information on the box: so that you can determine, with the most data available to you, whether you want to consume that food. The government mandates purity of food so that the only risk you take when consuming the food is the content of the food itself, not some lethal extra-food additive.
Reasonable restrictions are also placed upon what you can and cannot do with these drugs in public. While you may have made the decision to harm yourself in spite of your knowledge of risk, there are other people who have chosen not to harm themselves, and in a public setting, your personal decision starts to erode other people's personal decisions. This is why we have laws banning smoking in public places: smoking is an activity that has the potential to harm others if done in the presence of others. The government is defending their decision not to smoke, and since smoking is a harmful activity, the government errs on the side of protecting the individual decisions of the people who have chosen not to engage in that harmful activity. While you may have a right to engage in a harmful activity as long as that decision affects only you, you do not have the right to force your decision upon others. This is why driving under the influence of alcohol is illegal: your decision to drive while drunk is a decision that affects others besides yourself, and it affects them in a profound way. After all, drunk driving is lethal, and it is unfair to subject others to the consequences of a personal decision of yours; it was not their decision to make for them to be killed by a drunk driver.
And so we come to marijuana. And, indeed, we come to all illegal drugs. Why is it the government's business what consenting adults do to themselves? The same case can be made for pornography or homosexuality or any other decision to which certain people object. "Drugs are bad." Very well, then, drugs are bad. But it is my decision to take those drugs. The government is not here to be my parents. Government is here to make sure that, whatever I choose to do, I'm free from what might be called dangers that are external to the dangers inherent in the activity. if I decide to drink, the government must make sure that the only danger involved is the danger posed by drinking alcohol. If I decide to smoke, the government must make sure that the only danger involved is the danger posed by my smoking. If I decide to eat chili cheese fries, the government must make sure that the only danger involved is the danger posed by eating chili cheese fries. The same goes for sex and drugs. (But curiously not for rock 'n' roll, as the government has yet to declare the Rolling Stones illegal because they pose dangers to your sense of taste outside the normal dangers incurred when listening to rock music.) Hence, condoms. Hence, needle exchange. Hence legalized (but regulated) marijuana.
Sure, the government can try to talk me out of an activity that is potentially harmful. I'll accept that as the government informing me of the dangers of the activity I'm about to undertake. "Surgeon General's Warning: Qutting Smoking Now Reduces Serious Risks to Your Health." Very well, Surgeon General. I'll take that into consideration . . . or not. But I appreciate the effort.
The reasons for keeping certain drugs illegal, for making pornography illegal, and for making homosexual sex illegal (until Lawrence v. Texas, anyway) are all the same. They're bad for you and we, the government, don't want you to do bad things for you. We know what's best for you. It's a very paternalistic attitude that should be offensive to adults. Perhaps the very definition of "liberty" is having the freedom to do something that is contradictory to your own self-interest. The definition of "authority" is "having the ability to make someone do something he doesn't want to do." In other words, authority means forcing someone to do something he doesn't want to do. Liberty means allowing someone to do something he shouldn't do. Again, liberty extends only as far as the individual, so while I may have the right to do something that's harmful to me, I most definitely do not have the right to do that thing to someone else, especially if that person has decided that he or she doesn't want to do that thing. There's an old saying about civil liberty which says that the rights of my fist end where your nose begins. That's very true; I'm the only person who should have to deal with the consequences of my decision. Other people shouldn't have to, and the government must protect their decisions, as well. This means that, in private, I can do whatever I want. In public, or any other situation in which others might be affected, the government is obliged to protect their decisions not to do something.
And if the government wants to tax the crap out of marijuana, good for it. Government can go right ahead. It can demand that people pay an economic price to offset the social cost of a dangerous activity, but it mustn't impose such a burden that it effectively uses the "power of the purse" to make a dangerous activity unreasonable instead of illegal. (Imposing high costs on abortion, for example, is one tactic that anti-abortion legislators use to make abortion de facto illegal by making it extremely difficult to obtain.)
And, finally, some words from the philosopher John Stuart Mill, from his essay "On Liberty":
The likings and dislikings of society, or of some powerful portion of it, are thus the main thing which has practically determined the rules laid down for general observance, under the penalties of law or opinion. And in general, those who have been in advance of society in thought and feeling, have left this condition of things unassailed in principle, however they may have come into conflict with it in some of its details. They have occupied themselves rather in inquiring what things society ought to like or dislike, than in questioning whether its likings or dislikings should be a law to individuals.[...]
There is, in fact, no recognized principle by which the propriety or impropriety of government interference is customarily tested. People decide according to their personal preferences. Some, whenever they see any good to be done, or evil to be remedied, would willingly instigate the government to undertake the business; while others prefer to bear almost any amount of social evil, rather than add one to the departments of human interests amenable to governmental control.
[...]
The object of this Essay is to assert one very simple principle, as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control, whether the means used be physical force in the form of legal penalties, or the moral coercion of public opinion. That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise, or even right. These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him, or visiting him with any evil, in case he do otherwise. To justify that, the conduct from which it is desired to deter him must be calculated to produce evil to some one else. The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.
There you have it. May I also induct John Stuart Mill as the first person to have the honor of being a SEDHE Hero of the Forever.
AURORA, Co. -- I've been so focused on California's eight propositions that I completely neglected Colorado's ballot initiatives. They're not nearly as interesting, though.
Yesterday, Colorado voters decided on two state-wide initiatives, Referendum C and Referendum D. Colorado has a weird law called the Taxpayer's Bill of Rights (TABOR) which requires taxpayers to approve any state fiscal measure that would affect their taxes in some way. Referendum C would increase state funds by $3.7 billion over the next five years by taking that money from taxpayers' state sales tax refunds (apparently, in Colorado, taxpayers get refunds of sales tax as well as income tax). Referendum D, which would only take effect if Referendum C were passed, allows the state to borrow $2.1 billion from state tax revenue.
But where would this money go? According to Colorado's 2005 State Ballot Information Booklet, the text of Referendum C says that this $3.7 billion will be used "to fund health care; to fund education, including any capital construction projects related thereto; to fund retirement plans for firefighters and police officers, so long as the General Assembly determines that such funding is ncessary; and to pay for strategic transportation projects included in the Department of Transportations's Strategic Transportation Project Investment Program."
Sounds great, right? I mean, who doesn't love firefighters? Not so fast, there, chief. It turns out that the General Assembly doesn't have to spend money on the stuff they said they would; the legislature can change the spending priorities at any time. For this reasons, Referendum C is not such a good idea, but it looks like the voters thought it was. With 95% of precincts reporting, 53% of voters supported Referendum C. Much like Proposition 77 in California, just one clause in a piece of legislation is enough for me to throw out the whole thing; in the case, the clause is that the legislature can change the spending priorities.
There was also a ballot initiative in Denver, and it was a terrible idea. The initiative in Denver would tie teacher salaries to student performance. As Levitt points out in Freakonomics, they tried this is in California, and instead of teachers and students getting better, they found a lot of teachers cheating. The incentive to cheat is too great when teacher salaries are tied to student performance. If you have a bad teacher with dumb students, it's easier for the bad teacher to cheat and change students' test answers rather than improve the students' performance.
"Colorado: Come for the Skiing, but Stay for the Conservatism."
The University of California at San Francisco, one of the nation's foremost medical colleges, published a brief [PDF] about the efficacy of parental notification laws in other states. This is, of course, completely related to the upcoming Proposition 73 vote.
The brief, from the Bixby Center for Reproductive Health Research & Policy at UCSF, suggests that parental notification laws are not effective in curbing abortions, which is what they are designed to do.
The first argument in favor of parental notification laws is that they will force families to communicate (although if it says in any constitution that families must communicate, I'm hard-pressed to find it). The UCSF study suggests that notification laws don't increase communication:
A comparison of adolescents visiting abortion clinics in states with (Minnesota) and without (Wisconsin) notification requirements demonstrates that adolescents involve their parents in their decision at similar rates (65.3% and 62.1%, respectively). There is no evidence that a government mandate will positively increase the frequency or quality of communication for adolescents and their families.
Notification laws are also designed to delay the abortion process, something that can make the abortion more dangerous.
Perhaps most compelling is the suggestion that, in the absence of convenient abortion, adolescents will just travel to a state that doesn't require parental notification:
In the 20 months following the implementation of Massachusetts’ parental consent law, half as many minors obtained an abortion as had done so prior to the law’s implementation. During this same time period, more than 1800 minors (88% of the decrease in abortions) traveled to 5 neighboring states to have an abortion.
Not only does parental consent not significantly influence abortion numbers, it causes teenagers to travel out-of-state to seek abortions and causes them to delay abortions to the point at which the abortions are physically dangerous.
California Proposition 77 would remove control of the redistricting process from the legislature and governor and place it in the hands of a panel of retired judges. The left-leaning blog Daily Kos has been looking for reasons to vote against 77, since it's supported by the Governator, but it can't find any. And besides, notes Chuck Todd, quoted in the Daily Kos entry,
Bottom line, California initiatives are like colds, they're very catchy. If this reform measure passes in California, every other state with an initiative/referendum process would likely follow suit. And there are far more gerrymandered states in favor of the GOP right now than the Democrats. Redrawing the districts in these states would lead to Congress being much more representative of the national mood.
But there's still something that worries me. One of the arguments against Prop. 77 says, "Redistricting plans made from Prop. 77 automatically go into effect WITH NO APPROVAL FROM THE VOTERS" (hysterical caps in original). Where is this in the text of the legislation? If it's there, it's worrisome. If it's not, then the opponents are lying.
Here's how the proposed process would work, as explicated from the text of Prop. 77 (which you too can read by clicking on "California Proposition 77," above):
So, is it a false statement to say that "[r]edistricting plans made from Prop. 77 automatically go into effect WITH NO APPROVAL FROM THE VOTERS"? Yes. That is 100% false. It is a complete and total lie. Prop. 77 requires that a redistricting proposal be approved by voters for it to go into effect.
Is it a false statement to to say that "PROP. 77 TAKES AWAY THE RIGHTS OF THE VOTERS to reject redistricting plans before they go into effect" (hysterical caps in original)? Yes. That is 100% false. It is a complete and total lie. Prop. 77 allows anyone to object to a plan approved by the Special Masters, but it does institute a window of 45 days for such an objection. Imposing such a limitation is not unheard of and not uncommon.
In summation, the opponents of Prop. 77 are out-and-out lying about what Prop. 77 does and does not do. (The same goes for opponents of Prop. 75, who suggest, in a radio advertisement, that almost any union would be restricted under that initiative. That suggestion is completely untrue; Prop. 75 would affect only public employee unions. While I oppose Prop. 75, I do not approve of its opponents making completely untrue statements about Prop. 75. if you're going to oppose something, oppose it with a reasoned argument, not lies and scare-tactics.)
Even though Prop. 77 is supported by the Governator, there's nothing wrong with it. There's no reason not to vote yes on Prop. 77.
As I was writing the last entry, I flipped over to Yahoo! News to search for that AP story about George Takei, and guess what headline greeted me? "Cheney Adviser Indicted in CIA Leak Case." Earlier this morning, Al Franken reported on The Al Franken Show that Vice-Presidential Chief of Staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's office was being boxed up. He said he was serious and that his source was ABC News. He then said that there would be no indictment announcement until 2 PM EST (7 PM GMT).
Apparently, there are indictments now.
The Associated Press reports that Libby was indicted on five counts, including obstruction of justice, perjury, and making a false statement. The indictment says that Libby lied, under oath, about who told him that Valerie Plame was a covert agent with the CIA and when he received the information. Documents obtained by government prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald suggested that Libby learned about Plame's identity from Dick Cheney himself and that Cheney and Libby discussed Plame's identity, as well as ways in which they could exploit that identity, at least a month before Chicago Tribune columnist and SEDHE Villain of the Forever Robert Novak published a column in which he revealed Plame's identity.
And just within the last hour, Libby announced that he was resigning as Cheney's chief of staff.
President Bush's Supreme Court nominee, Harriet Miers, has withdrawn herself from nomination.
I can't tell you how good this makes me feel. Miers was in no way qualified to be a judge on the highest court in the land. She was barely qualified to be a judge on one of the nation's 13 second-highest courts.
Several factors helped to make Harriet Miers unlikeable by anyone. First, the hardcore neo-cons didn't like her. These people, which consist of half religious fanatics like James Dobson and half corporate executives, couldn't be sure how she would rule on the abortion issue if it were to come before her as a justice. After discovering than John Roberts wasn't as hard-right as they thought, the neo-cons wanted a nominee who they could be sure was 100% anti-abortion. And they wanted proof. Harriet Miers brought no proof of her opinions to the table, save apocryphal conversations with Dobson and Republican leaders in which she assured them that she was pro-life. But this wasn't good enough; the neo-cons want abortion illegalized now.
Second, the regular Republicans didn't like her because she was patently unqualified. Conservative columnist George Will wrote in Oct. 5's Washington Post, "Furthermore, there is no reason to believe that Miers's nomination resulted from the president's careful consultation with people capable of such judgments. If 100 such people had been asked to list 100 individuals who have given evidence of the reflectiveness and excellence requisite in a justice, Miers's name probably would not have appeared in any of the 10,000 places on those lists." Miers had no previous judicial experience and no experience working for the government. Her only governmental experience was that of White House Counsel, not a position in which she would have to deal with constitutional issues of national importance. (Contrast this with John Roberts' position as Deputy Solicitor General.) Miers spent twenty-some years as a private practice lawyer in Texas. In no way did she have the minimum qualifications to deal with constitutional issues of national importance.
Third, Democrats didn't like her because she was extremely close to the president. Since Bush became governor of Texas in 1994, Miers has been close to him. In 2001, he brought her to the White House in the position of White House Secretary. In 2005, when Alberto Gonzales became Attorney General, Miers became White House Counsel. Democrats were rightly concerned with whether or not she would be objective in dealing with issues of executive power. If there were any cases dealing with torture or prisoner abuse or the War on Terr', she would probably have to recuse herself, since she was in on the policymaking behind these issues. And, as we found out earlier this week, any and all work she did as White House Counsel would not be given to the Senate Judiciary Committee, since it would be under executive privilege protection. So, whatever little we knew about her already, we would know even less.
Now the search is on for another (female) Supreme Court nominee. This is some retirement for Sandra Day O'Connor; she won't get to move to Florida until at least January, and by then all the tourists will have snagged the good parking spaces.
In other news
President Bush un-suspended the Davis-Bacon Act yesterday. The Davis-Bacon Act requires contractors performing work for the federal government to pay their employees the prevailing wage in the area (not the "union wage," as critics of Davis-Bacon often claim). A Wall Street Journal piece sent to me by Ned reinforces the old conservative talking points about Davis-Bacon: it's unnecessary, it's a holdover from the 1930s, it's racist, it's only good for unions, etc. The article is very small, so here it is, reprinted in full, from Ned's email to me:
George W. Bush compares favorably with his father when it comes to his commitment to free-market economics. But the elder President Bush at least had the good policy judgment to suspend an expensive and cumbersome law called the Davis-Bacon Act to facilitate reconstruction after Hurricane Andrew in 1992 -- only to see President Clinton reinstate it as a pay-off to organized labor in one of his first acts in office.Now, less than two months after doing the same in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, this Bush White House has reversed itself on the issue. We're told yesterday's decision to reinstate Davis-Bacon in the affected Gulf states on November 8 came after a meeting last week between Chief of Staff Andrew Card and about 20 Republican Congressmen from union-heavy districts. The move can only increase the cost and slow the pace of reconstruction. And as an act of unprincipled political calculation it ranks right up there with the decision to impose tariffs on imported steel during Mr. Bush's first term.
Davis-Bacon is almost always cast as "worker-friendly" legislation that requires federally funded construction projects to pay the "prevailing" wage rate in a given area. But in reality the anti-competitive 1931 law is a relic of the Jim Crow era. New York Congressman Robert Bacon was upset about an Alabama contractor who had brought a largely black construction crew to build a federal hospital in his district. "Colored labor is being brought in to demoralize wage rates," complained the American Federation of Labor at the time. Many economists and minority leaders recognize that Davis-Bacon continues to be a cause of minority unemployment in the construction sector to this day. In addition to that ugly history, Davis-Bacon is known for creating mountains of paperwork and unnecessary compliance costs.
We know the White House is well aware of all these points, since it alluded to them when it suspended Davis-Bacon on September 8. So the sudden reversal now -- well before hurricane reconstruction is finished, and at a time when the administration should be using all means necessary to expedite it and lower the price tag -- is a special disappointment.
What about worker protection? Just as people loudly proclaim that we don't need affirmative action or feminism anymore -- ostensibly because racism and sexism have been eliminated -- so, too, do people proclaim that unions are obsolete. All they do is drive up the market-clearing wage, leading to a shortage of jobs, since firms will hire 5 employees at $10 an hour instead of 10 employees at $10 an hour. But the world is more than hard economics. Classical economics provides a model for looking at the world, but it is by no means a complete picture of the world. It fails to take into account the welfare of the workers; in this case, we have people from New Orleans trying to rebuild their lives, something they can't do when wages are ridiculously low. And in the latter case, wages are artificially ridiculously low, since firms can charge a very low price for labor, and since demand for labor after Hurricane Katrina is inelastic, workers will work at any price. Davis-Bacon equalizes the playing field, offsetting one counter to the market with another.
There are eight ballot measures being voted upon in the state of California. Come Nov. 8, if you live there, you'll need to make some tough decisions. Here's how I would vote on each of these propositions.
Proposition 73 requires a minor child to notify her parents before getting an abortion. The parents don't need to approve the abortion; they just need to know about it. This is dangerous because (1) parental notification laws are designed to make abortion more difficult to obtain; (2) this is an amendment to the state constitution, and (3) language in the measure refers to an embryo or fetus as an "unborn child." VOTE NO ON PROP. 73
Proposition 74 makes it easier to fire teachers. This is a Governator-backed ballot initiative focused on punishing teachers, who really don't like him. If Prop. 74 were passed, "permanent teachers who received two consecutive unsatisfactory performance evaluations" could be fired. These evaluations could come from anyone, including principals who don't like them or school board members who are trying to cut the budget by firing experienced teachers and hiring new, cheaper teachers. VOTE NO ON PROP. 74
Proposition 75 would mandate that public employees unions could not donate money to political candidates or organizations without the express, written consent of all their members. These organizations will never be able to get the express, written consent of all their members, so the ballot measure is designed to limit unions' freedom of speech. VOTE NO ON PROP. 75
Proposition 76 changes the state's budget process, most notably by giving the governor newer, broader authority to "unilaterally reduce state spending during certain fiscal situations." This is dangerous, especially for a governor who is a killer cyborg from the future and wants to cut social programs. VOTE NO ON PROP. 76
Proposition 77 changes the way the state draws congressional districts. As it is, the legislature draws new districts and the governor approves the changes. Under the system envisioned by Prop. 77, political districts would be drawn by retired judges (picked by the legislature) and the new districts would have to be approved by voters. This makes the redistricting process harder -- which is good -- and puts control in the hands of the voters. VOTE YES ON PROP. 77
Proposition 78 allows people who are too wealthy to qualify for Medicaid and too young to qualify for Medicare to receive discount prescription drugs. Proposition 79 is practically the same thing. Prop. 79 requires drug manufacturers to provide prescription drugs to the state at a discount, while Prop. 78 does not. On the flip side, the eligibility requirements for the program are explicitly listed in Prop. 78. Prop. 79 says that the State Department of Health Services will determine eligibility requirements. But Prop. 79 also establishes a drug-discount program to assist certain businesses, creates a panel to review drug prices, and makes it a civil violation for drug manufacturers to engage in profiteering from the sale of drugs. Prop. 79 does more for the people and the state than Prop. 78. VOTE NO ON PROP. 78; VOTE YES ON PROP. 79
Back in 1998, the California legislature voted to de-regulate the electric utilities industry. This, of course, was a disaster and led to rolling blackouts, high prices, and the Enron scandal. Proposition 80 repeals all of that de-regulation stuff, making the electric utilities once again regulated by the state. I think -- and someone correct me if I'm wrong -- that most states regulate electric utilities; Ohio certainly does, with PUCO (Public Utilities Commission of Ohio). VOTE YES ON PROP. 80
For more information, including the text of the legislation, legislative analyses, and arguments for and against each of these initiatives, visit the California Secretary of State's "Elections and Voter Information" page regarding these eight initiatives.
Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) went on Meet the Press this past Sunday to disseminate the new Republican talking points: Democrats are "criminalizing politics" with their attempts to prosecute people for crimes. What?! Prosecute people for committing crimes! In what kind of backwards Arab society do that do that?!
Most startling, hypocritical, and stupid were Sen. Hutchison's comments regarding Rov