Month: April 2006

No Double Clicking The Mouse

by digby

Lucy’s Love Shop employee Wanda Gillespie said she was flabbergasted that South Carolina’s Legislature is considering outlawing sex toys.

But banning the sale of sex toys is actually quite common in some Southern states.

The South Carolina bill, proposed by Republican Rep. Ralph Davenport, would make it a felony to sell devices used primarily for sexual stimulation and allow law enforcement to seize sex toys from raided businesses.

“That would be the most terrible thing in the world,” said Ms. Gillespie, an employee the Anderson shop. “That is just flabbergasting to me. We are supposed to be in a free country, and we’re supposed to be adults who can decide what want to do and don’t want to do in the privacy of our own homes.”

Not according to RepresentativeRalph who doesn’t want the women of South Carolina to have unapproved orgasms.

Perhaps he feels that if he takes away women’s sex toys they might want to have sex with him instead. Here is his picture.

I don’t think it will work.

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There Were No Limits

by digby

Via Salon, I see that General Geoffrey D. Ripper has skated once again. He baldfacedly lied to the congress and nothing happens. Seems there’s a difference between “briefing ” someone and “directly discussing” something:

The Army inspector general has concluded that Miller, who set up detention operations at Abu Ghraib just before the infamous abuse there, did brief a top Pentagon intelligence official about his work at the Iraqi prison. Miller had been accused of lying under oath to Congress in May 2004, when he told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he had “no direct discussions” with Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone. He later admitted to delivering a briefing to five senior Pentagon officials, including Cambone.

In a report obtained by Salon through the Freedom of Information Act, the inspector general found that the two seemingly contradictory statements were both true, a distinction that has a Senate Democrat crying foul.

“Maj. Gen. Miller’s apparent position that he did not discuss the subject with Undersecretary Cambone but that he briefed Cambone on the same subject is a distinction without a difference to me,” said Sen. Carl Levin, the senior Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Miller is a central player in the detainee abuse scandals at Abu Ghraib and at the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where he was previously the commander. A separate Army investigation found Miller should be admonished in connection with the “degrading and abusive” treatment of so-called 20th hijacker Mohammed al-Kahtani at Guantánamo in late 2002. Miller’s superior later rejected that recommendation.

Miller, you may recall, is the artillery officer who was sent in to Gitmo to “take off the gloves.” He knew nothing about interrogation or prisons, but Rummy thought he was his kind of sadist. He did such a good job of torturing prisoners at Guantanamo that they sent him to Iraq when the “terrorist” Iraqis they were capturing by the thousands weren’t giving over — mostly because they were just poor schmucks who’d been captured in sweeps and knew fuck all about anything. We know what happened then.

For reasons we can only speculate about, Miller seems to be getting a lot of protection in the Pentagon. I don’t suppose it could be because of this:

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was personally involved in the late 2002 interrogation of a high-value al-Qaida detainee known in intelligence circles as “the 20th hijacker.” He also communicated weekly with the man in charge of the interrogation, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the controversial commander of the Guantánamo Bay detention center.

During the same period, detainee Mohammed al-Kahtani suffered from what Army investigators have called “degrading and abusive” treatment by soldiers who were following the interrogation plan Rumsfeld had approved. Kahtani was forced to stand naked in front of a female interrogator, was accused of being a homosexual, and was forced to wear women’s underwear and to perform “dog tricks” on a leash. He received 18-to-20-hour interrogations during 48 of 54 days.

Little more than two years later, during an investigation into the mistreatment of prisoners at Guantánamo, Rumsfeld expressed puzzlement at the notion that his policies had caused the abuse. “He was going, ‘My God, you know, did I authorize putting a bra and underwear on this guy’s head?'” recalled Lt. Gen. Randall M. Schmidt, an investigator who interviewed Rumsfeld twice in early 2005.

These disclosures are contained in a Dec. 20, 2005, Army inspector general’s report on Miller’s conduct, which was obtained this week by Salon through the Freedom of Information Act. The 391-page document — which has long passages blacked out by the government — concludes that Miller should not be punished for his oversight role in detainee operations, a fact that was reported last month by Time magazine. But the never-before-released full report also includes the transcripts of interviews with high-ranking military officials that shed new light on the role that Rumsfeld and Miller played in the harsh treatment of Kahtani, who had met with Osama bin Laden on several occasions and received terrorist training in al-Qaida camps.

In a sworn statement to the inspector general, Schmidt described Rumsfeld as “personally involved” in the interrogation and said that the defense secretary was “talking weekly” with Miller. Schmidt said he concluded that Rumsfeld did not specifically prescribe the more “creative” interrogation methods used on Kahtani. But he added that the open-ended policies Rumsfeld approved, and that the apparent lack of supervision of day-to-day interrogations permitted the abusive conduct to take place. “Where is the throttle on this stuff?” asked Schmidt, an Air Force fighter pilot, who said in his interview under oath with the inspector general that he had concerns about the length and repetition of the harsh interrogation methods. “There were no limits.”

If I were Miller I wouldn’t plan on taking any trips to foreign countries during my retirement. Many of them tend to be testy about sadistic war criminals.

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Preturnaturally Confident

by digby

Jane has a great Karl Rove Plamegate primer up tonight in case you’ve forgotten all the minutia of the case and want to get back up to speed.

Karl has now testified before the grand jury five times, which most lawyers say would never happen in a normal case. Karl, however, believes he can wiggle out of this so he keeps volunteering to go back to the grand jury and explain himself.

He has always thought he was very, very good at this kind of thing:

Rove was no lawyer but he carried a kind of preturnatural confidence in court cases. Like in his high school debates, he always felt better than anybody in the room. He could beat anybody with the strength of his argument or the weight of his will. When a team of blue-chip lawyers in a tobacco case grilled Rove for a deposition some years earlier, he was not just confident, but arrogant, fending off their questions with playful insults. On the stand in the Kay Bailey Hutchison trial, he was masterful in frustrating the prosecution. Now he had a former U.S. Attorney General in his cross hairs, and as Rove sat at the table in the federal courthouse, he turned his head slowly and looked over at the defense table with the thin sliver of a smile. It was a dark smile, determined, and there was not mistaking the message: You are my enemy and you will pay.(Bush’s Brain p. 190)

Waddaya think? Does the recently demoted Karl still have that kind of mojo? Or was it his “preturnatural confidence” that led him to think he could lie his ass off to the FBI and the Grand Jury and nothing would happen?

He doesn’t seem quite so formidable these days does he? A 32% approval rating and massive policy failure will do that to you.

Update: According to the Washington Post, Rove is using the “it would have been stupid to lie so it’s ludicrous that I would have done so” defense. It sounds like he’s as arrogant as ever.

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Net Neutrality Vote Today

by digby

Seeing The Forest has a list and relevant links to the representatives who can be moved on the Net Neutrality issue that comes to a committee vote today.

Click over and make a couple of calls if you have time. This issue sounds like the most boring thing in the world, but it could result in something quite terrible happening to the internet.

I saw this comment over on Political Animal yesterday that I think illustrates the issue quite well:

What the telecoms are trying to get away with is like this: suppose you ran a business, and your product was delivered by FedEx, with your customers paying FedEx for it. Now suppose FedEx came to you one day and said, “You are making a nice profit off our delivery service. Besides what your customers pay, I also want you to pay us for it, or else your deliveries are going to be a lot slower, if they make it there at all.”

(If only my ISP were as reliable as Fed-ex.)

Basically this is what they are trying to do. They want to shake down the content providers like Google for a piece of their action even though they are already being paid for their service by their customers.

And, of course, once we abandon the idea that ISP’s cannot decide what content to provide we open the door to them deciding they don’t want to provide certain content. Some may very well decide that they don’t like liberal bloggers who use the “f” word. And then where will we be?

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Fantasy Wednesday

by digby

So Rove is testifying before the GJ for the fifth time. John Amato says that Norah O’Donnell is reporting that he is going to be issuing a statement later today.

Am I the only one who thinks that’s strange? Has any witness to the GJ issued a statement after their testimony? Certainly, Rove hasn’t.

Allow me to don my tin foil sombrero for a moment here. What if this statement (if it even happens) is something truly meaningful? They just brought in Snow. Rove was demoted. Maybe he’s getting ready to …

Ok, I’m dreaming. Never mind.

update: Sid Blumenthal connects the Snow-Rove stories too.

update II: Luskin just released the statement, which says nothing. Actually, according to Wolf, it was written earlier and “embargoed” until after the testimony was over. Why the networks went along with that is anybody’s guess.

The statement:

Karl Rove appeared today before the grand jury investigating the disclosure of a CIA agent’s identity. He testified voluntarily and unconditionally at the request of Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald to explore a matter raised since Mr Rove’s last appearance in October 2005. In connection with his appearance, the special prosecutor has advised Mr Rove that he is not a target of the investigation. Mr Fitzgerald has affirmed that he has made no decision concerning charges. At the request of the Special Counsel, Mr Rove will not discuss the substance of his testimony.

Odd lawyerly sentence, ripe for parsing:

In connection with his appearance, the special prosecutor has advised Mr Rove that he is not a target of the investigation.

Why not just say the prosecutor has advised Mr Rove that he is not a target?

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Crying Wolf

by digby

I was going to write about this Max Boot column, but Kevin beat me to it. Boot writes:

I want journalists to cover the present struggle as a fight between good and evil. And when the good guys — that would be U.S. officials — say that certain revelations would help the bad guys, I want them to be given the benefit of the doubt. So, I suspect, do most Americans.

Kevin replies:

Nice try, Max, but FDR earned the benefit of the doubt. This gang hasn’t. They’ve made it crystal clear that they consider the war on terror little more than a good campaign topic of unlimited duration.

Can you believe it? No matter how big a fuck up (like the fact that they insisted that we needed to invade a country on the basis of its arsenal of weapons of mass destruction and it turned out there weren’t any!) this administration is supposed to be given the benefit of the doubt. Even when it comes to their assurances that they are only illegally wiretapping terrorists. Or that they are only torturing and imprisoning guilty terrorists. Or that they aren’t agitating for another war using exactly the same set of rationales they used for the earlier war. And on and on.

Apparently Boot would march off a cliff with Bush no matter what he does. Contrary to what he says, considering the current opinion polls, it appears that most Americans do not agree with him.

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MoDo

by tristero

Gotta give her credit: When she’s on, she’s on. And in her latest column, she’s on:

Trying to calm the yips in his party and the country over exploding gasoline prices, the president sounded a bit like a wild-eyed Ozone Man himself yesterday, extolling the virtues of alternative fuel derived from cooking grease, sugar, grass, wood chips, soybean oil and corn.

But then he got ahold of himself. “You just got to recognize there are limits to how much corn can be used for ethanol,” he said, standing in front of a bucolic mural. “After all, we got to eat some.”

You could run a fleet of S.U.V.’s on the gas that W. was spewing about fuel.

…

The U.S. could have begun developing alternative fuels 30 years ago if Dick Cheney hadn’t helped scuttle an ambitious plan in the Ford administration.

By the time these guys get gas from cooking grease, global warming will have us cooked.

101st Fighting Keyboarder Uniforms

by digby

Whenever you visit a rightwing site, you are sure to see “those” tshirts. I saw an ad for them on the Washington Times the other day. Now, I know that wingnuts have great sense of humor as you can tell by the huge number of successful comedians and humorists on the right. (Dennis? PJ? Are you getting tired?)I assume that these t-shirts are what passes for humor in their lives.

They are big on gun stuff and death and violence but I just can’t help but notice that with only a few exceptions, these t-shirts aren’t about killing terrorists or fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here. This is what they’re all about:

Via TBOGG, I that Michelle Malkin, who has recently been posting the phone numbers of liberal college students on her blog and who subsequently had a full fledged fit claiming that her family was threatened in retaliation has a new web site (called “Hot Air,” I kid you not) that is sponsored by these t-shirts.

I have said before that while the left has plenty of people who cannot be called angels, it’s the right that makes a profit at this violent, eliminationist discourse. As long as they are selling this shit on their sites I can see no reason why we should listen to their whining about leftist incivility.

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The Lying King And His Money

by digby

Matt sez:

The GOP, as we all know, is desperately afraid of the possibility that the 2006 midterms will put Democrats in a position to hold some hearings. If we do get that lucky, I worry a bit that there may be a temptation to engage in overkill — a hundred hearings a day on a thousand subjects — when the smart play is to focus in a few key topics. The wildly underexplored subject of what’s been going on with the money being spent in Iraq strikes me as something that should be a prime candidate.

I agree with Matt that the Democrats need to be smart about how they go about investigating the Bush administration and should concentrate on the key areas that best illustrate their massive failure. I also agree that war profiteering is an overlooked subject that focuses on the corrupt crony capitalism that has fueled this administration from day one. (Jane was on this a year ago.) It’s long past time people started asking where in the hell all that money went.

I would suggest that the other two issues that are ripe for investigations, and which would capture the worst of the egregious actions of the Bush administration, are presidential abuse of power and the manipulation of intelligence and strategic errors of Iraq. Those are the areas in which it is important to demand accountability from the administration and demonstrate to the American people that mature, responsible leadership will not allow such behavior to go unpunished.

Republicans are working themselves into a frenzy about these impending investigations and they are worried for very good reason. They have treated the congress like their own private fiefdom and ignored every standard of normal political decency. It’s not going to be pleasant for them. But it is essential that this happen. No forgive and forget this time. It was the Democrats’ failure to follow through (after a good start in the post Watergate years) when Iran-Contra happened. They got spooked by Reagan’s mystique and Republican cant and it led to the revival of these pernicious, undemocratic practices that came out of the Nixon era. This time they went so far as to openly launch a pre-emptive war of aggression. We cannot allow that to happen again.

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If You Build It

by digby

I’ve always thought that one of the perverse consequences of a libertarian utopian government that does nothing but national defense, policing and dispute resolution would be that this government would naturally seek to expand its powers in those areas. If a state’s only function is policing, it functions as a … police state.

We’ve watched the fake small government conservatives spend huge sums of money on war profiteering, oily pork and tax breaks for their rich contributors. But where they have really made their mark is with these ridiculously expanded executive and police powers. And they continue to suck up more of them every day:

Amid intense debate over how far the government can go to keep its secrets secret, Congress is taking up an expansive intelligence measure that proposes tougher steps in cracking down on leaks of classified information and authorizes broad arrest powers for security officers at intelligence agencies.

Provisions tucked into the legislation, which the House is expected to vote on as early as tomorrow, represent a major departure from traditional intelligence agency roles in plugging leaks and conducting domestic law enforcement, according to government watchdog groups and intelligence professionals.

If the measure is approved by Congress, the nation’s spy chief would be ordered to consider a plan for revoking the pensions of intelligence agency employees who make unauthorized disclosures. It also would permit security forces at the National Security Agency and the CIA to make warrantless arrests outside the gates of their top-secret campuses.

The new proposals, which have received little public attention, dovetail with an ongoing Bush administration crackdown on unauthorized leaks.

[…]

Critics described the potential penalties outlined in the measure as “draconian.”

“In a moment when the intelligence community should be looking forward toward what it does best, the arrest powers represent a step back toward the Nixon-era abuses,” said Jason Vest, an investigator with the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit watchdog group.

The plan by Congress to target the pensions of intelligence agency employees would harm the overall spy effort, according to critics. Some, including former senior intelligence officials, warned that it would create an overly repressive environment within the agencies that could inhibit officers from speaking up, even internally, and discourage risk-taking.

The proposal to penalize leakers with loss of pension will do nothing “but keep good people from going to work in the [intelligence community] agencies,” according to a senior intelligence official, who was quoted anonymously yesterday in a letter to the House Intelligence Committee from the Project on Government Oversight.

[…]

The measure also directs Congress to conduct a study of possible new sanctions against those who receive leaks of classified information, including journalists.

Steven Aftergood, a government secrecy expert with the Federation of American Scientists, said that such sanctions would represent a significant departure by the government, which usually targets only the person who leaks information, not the recipient.

“That is not the prevailing understanding under the law,” he said. “If it were, [Washington Post reporter] Bob Woodward would not be a wealthy, best-selling author. He would be serving a life sentence.”

At the request of National Intelligence Director John D. Negroponte, the legislation would allow agency security forces at the NSA and CIA to make arrests outside the grounds of those agencies. Ware said the measure is “just clarifying the authority” of agency security officers “to arrest individuals.”

It would apparently overrule a written opinion by the Maryland attorney general’s office, which stated that the NSA’s police powers are limited to the agency’s grounds and to streets within a 500-foot perimeter of its Fort Meade campus.

The June 2005 opinion concluded that, under Maryland law, NSA officers “may make a citizen’s arrest” and would have no immunity from liability for their actions if they are outside their jurisdiction. It notes that NSA officers can only carry firearms within that jurisdiction. The bill would allow them to carry guns.

[…]

Loch Johnson, a top Senate aide on the Church Committee, which investigated CIA abuses in the 1970s, called it a “worrisome” expansion of power.

“That’s why we have the FBI and other law enforcement officials,” he said. “I don’t know that this needs to be an intelligence officer’s function. I wouldn’t think it should be.”

Aftergood termed the proposal “shocking” and said “it raises the specter of a secret police force that is unaccountable and operates outside of the normal law enforcement parameters.”

I know I feel safer already, don’t you?

This is the kind of stuff that’s going on right now in the Congress, even as the president’s approval rating sits in the low 30’s and the Republicans appear to be poised to lose their majority in the fall. They are like sharks, mercilessly pursuing their agenda no matter what is going on around them. They know that it is much more difficult to reverse this kind of thing than it is to enact it. Their gargantuan, national security bureaucracy replete with gun-toting NSA “security” authorized to arrest anyone they choose will be institutionalized and anyone who tries to end it will be tarred as a Democratic sissy for the next generation. If they can sneak this one through, they will.

This letter from the Project On Government Oversight to Rep. Peter Hoekstra and Jane Harmon outlines the various issues of concern. It’s hard to believe that these people would have the gall to use this leak controversy as an excuse to create two new secret police forces in the CIA and NSA, but that’s what they’re doing (among other heinous things.)

I will look forward to another sanctimonious lecture from intelligence chairman Pat Roberts on the horrors of unauthorized leaking when this legislation gets to the Senate. He knows wehat he’s talking about. After all, he committed one of the most egregious leaks in recent memory.

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