Month: April 2007

For Their Own Good. And Nothing Else.

NOTE: UPDATE AT END

by tristero

The NY Times:

American military commanders in Baghdad are trying a radical new strategy to quell the widening sectarian violence by building a 12-foot-high, three-mile-long wall separating a historic Sunni enclave from Shiite neighborhoods.

Soldiers in the Adhamiya district of northern Baghdad, a Sunni Arab stronghold, began construction of the wall last week and expect to finish it within a month. Iraqi Army soldiers would then control movement through a few checkpoints…

The American military said in a written statement that “the wall is one of the centerpieces of a new strategy by coalition and Iraqi forces to break the cycle of sectarian violence.”

In other words, the American military is building a wall to physically separate a despised minority from their neighbors in order to protect them. And vice versa.

But let’s not infer the worst here. After all, history teaches us that sealing off ghettos does reduce violence. That’s simply an indisputable fact. For example, attacks against Sunni Jews declined markedly and rapidly under the Nazis. Had they not built walls around the ghettos, which enabled an entire Jewish population of a given city to be quickly rounded up and sent off to the camps, attacks on Jews would have gone on for much, much longer.

In short, behaving like Nazis is an eminently sensible, and, in fact, a deeply compassionate, idea. Bush and the military high command should all be commended for having the courage to approve of such bold initiatives in order to make us safe from the terrorists who perpetrated 9/11.

[UPDATE: Usually, even if I disagree, I try to see the point of view of the commentators to my posts. And indeed there were some interesting points made by some that added substantially to my understanding of the situation. However, I am genuinely horrified by responses like these:

his wall-building business sounds to me less like nazi ghettos than like the “peace walls” of Belfast;

It is possible to compare the dangers which you have considered , but to me it looks like a rolling boil . The whole poisonous exploding nightmare hardly allows an exception for one form of mass murder in comparisons of excess . It is thoughtful and it gave me pause but Derry was my first thought . Despite the ominous record you refer to any respite from the wholesale killing seems worth a try .

Look some level of physical separation of Sunnis and Shias will be necessary.

Maybe it could work, you never know.

Yes. Building walls = Nazism. Thank you for the brilliant “logic”.

Seriously, people, what are you waiting for, Kristallnacht? This is what it looked like to Germans in the 30’s, and they made exactly the same rationalizations as these I’m reading right here, right now. I guess I should back up and explain that nothing good can come from sealing up the Sunnis. Regardless of how long the US stays, eventually the troops will leave. And there will be the Sunnis, in their ghetto, entry and exit controlled by the majority Shia. How long do you think it will take for an atrocity to occur – 1 month, 6 months, a year? Don’t think it will? Wanna bet?

As for the situation getting better while the Americans stay so this “temporary wall” may help, oh, please. Who do you think is running this fucking war, Abe Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant? Nothing will help and this has the distinct possibility of inflaming the entire Middle East. Sooner or later, the Shia will find a way to lob rockets in, or infiltrate the ghetto and perpetrate terrible atrocities. Who’s to blame? The US who will be seen beyond a shadow of a doubt as silent collaborators. No amount of kiss kiss and handholding will make that sit well in Riyadh. And they just might think it’s time to go and liberate their fellow co-religionists.

Furthermore, as someone mentioned, those control stations are ripe for attack and y’know what that means, right? More grieiving mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and husbands and wives in America joining Iraqis in crying to heaven for the horrors to stop. And let’s not forget that not only are there Sunni and Shia in Iraq (and Kurds), but there are many many factions within both groups. And that means, very simply, that life within the ghetto will be a living hell even if the Sunni act like St. Francis. And I assure you, they won’t.

One comment deserves a little further discussion:

…your comparison of this wall to the Nazi formation of Jewish ghettos is absurd and actually offensive to me as both an American and a Jew. You really have no idea what you’re talking about.

Not only had I no intention to offend either Americans or Jews (or Jewish Americans), I also have offended neither.

When the Bush administration acts like Nazis – and that is exactly how they are acting by sealing off the Sunni ghettos – someone better call it like it is before there’s hell to pay. Given the situation in Iraq, you will need to explain to me why this isn’t a recipe for a genocidal atrocity.

One more point. As I’ve mentioned many times in the past, Bush will guarantee that leaving will create as much catastrophe as staying. He is that incompetent. Imagine 8 months from now that Bush actually is forced to do what everyone wants and get the troops out. Imagine those Sunni in their ghetto as the last troop leaves. Then imagine the unspeakable stench three days later when they’re wiped out.

I can’t believe that anyone – even Bush and Rove – could be sick enough to deliberately make the situation as bad as possible in Iraq if the troops leave, but they sure as hell are doing everything they possibly can to compound disaster upon disaster. That’s what happens when you act like Nazis. You lose, and a lot of people end up dead.]

Running Out Of Choices

by digby

Is this some kind of a joke?

Several other officials said Republicans have begun discussing a possible replacement.

One name that consistently comes up is Ted Olson, former solicitor general. Olson is seen as having the experience, reputation and credibility needed to steer the department for the next year and a half, through the end of Bush’s term.

What an excellent idea. De-politicize the Justice Department with one of the guys who ran the Clinton witch hunt. I guess the Republicans think it’s still 2001 and Orrin Hatch is still Chairman of the Judiciary Committee. They can’t seem to grasp their changed circumstances.

Here’s an article from the NY Times from when they rammed Olsen through as solicitor general:

Underlying the dispute is the role Mr. Olson played, along with his wife, Barbara, during the Clinton presidency, when both engaged in harsh, even vituperative criticism of both President Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton. Mr. Olson has never denied being a leading figure in anti-Clinton circles, but the dispute has involved his connection to a specific venture at The American Spectator known as the Arkansas Project.

The Arkansas Project was a venture at the magazine for which Richard Mellon Scaife donated $2.4 million to pay for negative research about the Clintons’ behavior in Arkansas. In sworn testimony before the committee, Mr. Olson has unequivocally denied knowledge of the project from 1994 into 1997.

”I was not involved in the origin, management or supervision of the Arkansas Project,” Mr. Olson testified under oath and repeated in written answers to the Judiciary Committee. Although he was involved in some of the negative Clinton articles at the magazine and even wrote some himself, he sought to make a distinction between those activities and those directly related to the Scaife-financed Arkansas Project.

Right:

The first meeting of the Arkansas Project took place in 1994 at Olson’s Washington law office and was attended by Olson, Stephen Boynton, Dave Henderson and others from the American Spectator and other Scaife-funded organizations, according to reporting by Jonathan Broder and Joe Conason. In a subsequent article about the extravagant, “tax-exempt” lifestyle of American Spectator editor R. Emmett Tyrrell, a third of whose $598,000 McLean, Va., home was owned by the nonprofit foundation that publishes the magazine, Salon obtained documents outlining “frequent visitors to Bob’s home/office for business purposes” and “dinners and meetings at RET’s home” in 1996 and 1997. Theodore Olson was among those “frequent visitors” — a list of whom reads like a who’s who of anti-Clinton journalists. As reported by Salon’s Jake Tapper, Olson amended his response in a letter he sent to Leahy last week: “I do recall meetings, which I now realize must have been in the summer of 1997 in my office regarding allegations regarding what became known as the ‘Arkansas Project.'” Olson elaborates in the letter that he was the American Spectator’s attorney during the same period of time that the Arkansas Project took place. Olson also confirms that he did, in fact, convene a meeting about the Arkansas Project in his office prior to 1998. Of the 1994 meeting, he writes, “I do not recall the meeting described.” Olson adds, “I certainly was not involved in any such meeting at which a topic was using Scaife funds and the American Spectator to ‘mount a series of probes into the Clintons and their alleged crimes in Arkansas.'”

I think it’s time for Republicans to realize that their political hitmen are going to have to take a rest and go out into the private sector and make some millions for a while. I’m sure they’ll be back. They always come back. But right now, the VRWC needs to take a break. They aren’t installing any more dirty trickster, character assassins for the next two years. Nah guh happ’n.

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“We’re brainstorming, and we’re having fun”

by digby

That’s our good friend Leslee Unruh of South Dakota in the LA Times reflecting on the Supreme Court’s decision this week upholding the ban on so-called partial birth abortion. You remember Leslee, don’t you?

NOW did another one of its interesting shows on the South Dakota abortion ban last friday; it’s now available on the website if you missed it. They went deep into the forced pregnancy movement in South Dakota and once again, I was struck by the profound dishonesty of many of its leaders. You will see spin and gibberish that even Karen Hughes would be ashamed of:

HINOJOSA:
MEET LESLEE UNRUH…SHE FOUNDED THE ALPHA CENTER IN 1984 BUT MOST PEOPLE NOW KNOW HER AS ONE OF THE MOST POTENT PRO-LIFE ACTIVISTS IN THE STATE…

UNRUH HAD AN ABORTION HERSELF IN THE 1970’S. AND WHILE SOME MIGHT THINK THAT BANNING ABORTION IS AN ATTACK ON WOMEN’S FREEDOM, UNRUH SAYS SHE WANTS TO BAN ABORTION PRECISELY TO PROTECT WOMEN’S FREEDOM.

UNRUH:
This freedom, sexual freedom is costing women and their lives. Where’s the sexual freedom? There is none. Because those of us who have suffered through the abortion, we’re not gonna be silent anymore. We’re gonna speak up and we’re gonna tell the truth. Because abortion hurts women. Silent no more.

[…]

UNRUH:
I’ve been that woman. There is no freedom after an abortion. You carry an empty crib in your heart forever. There’s no freedom.

HINOJOSA:
And so, when you hear people saying, “Someone like Leslie is trying to actually take away women’s rights and taking away their freedoms–“

UNRUH:
I’m giving women freedom. We are giving back the women what they really want. This is true feminism.

This woman is “giving” women back their freedom by taking away their right to abortion. She’s smiling, upbeat, cheerful and sunny — the all-American gal. And to me, she seems downright otherworldly. I don’t know what she’s talking about. She’s babbling incoherently.

It turns out that Unruh is more interesting than your usual forced pregnancy zealot. She’s also the prime mover of the state’s abstinence only education movement. Freedom is having no sex at all.

And then there’s this:

HINOJOSA: LAST FRIDAY NIGHT, YOUNG GIRLS FROM AROUND SOUTH DAKOTA CAME TO SIOUX FALLS FOR A SPRING BALL. THIS ONE IS CALLED “THE PURITY BALL” IT’S A YEARLY EVENT RUN BY LESLEE UNRUH’S ABSTINENCE CLEARINGHOUSE.

THE IDEA IS THAT THESE YOUNG WOMEN COME WITH THEIR FATHERS. TO CELEBRATE THEIR SEXUAL PURITY.

UNRUH:We think that its important for fathers to the be the first ones to look into their daughters eyes and To tell her that her purity is special, and its ok to wait until marriage.

HINOJOSA:IT MIGHT HAVE ALL THE TRAPPINGS OF A REGULAR PROM… BUT THIS ONE ENDS A LITTLE DIFFERENTLY.

GIRLS RECITING PLEDGE:”I make a promise this day to God…

HINOJOSA:
THE YOUNG WOMEN HERE ALL MAKE A PROMISE TO THEIR FATHERS THAT THEY WONT’ HAVE SEX UNTIL THE DAY THEY GET MARRIED.

GIRLS RECITING PLEDGE:…to remain sexually pure…until the day I give myself as a wedding gift to my husband. … I know that God requires this of me.. that he loves me. and that he will reward me for my faithfulness.

You have to see it to believe it. They are all dressed up like prom goers, the dads in tuxes and the daughters in evening gowns looking all grown up. They dance, they laugh, they giggle. And then father and daughter stand up, holding each others hands, staring into each others’ eyes and the girls make these vows as if in a wedding ceremony.

As I watch it occurs to me that this is why they don’t have an exception for rape and incest. It’s one of the creepiest things I’ve ever seen.

You will notice that there’s no “mother-son” ceremony in which boys pledge to their mothers to stay pure until they give themselves as a gift to their wives. There is a Victorian impulse at work here that has nothing to do with fetuses. This is about women being autonomous, independent, sexual humans.

Here’s Unruh again. If you aren’t listening closely, the cadence of her speech makes it sound like she is perfectly reasonable. But she might as well be speaking in another language for all the sense it makes.

UNRUH:
I think there should be no abortions in my state.

HINOJOSA:
So to get to that point, you want to prevent unwanted pregnancies.

UNRUH:
Yes.

HINOJOSA:
And people might say, “Well, the way you prevent unwanted pregnancies is through contraception.”

UNRUH:
No. It’s wrong. We don’t need, we don’t have a shortage of condoms in this country. We should not be worshipping condoms. Let’s start just telling the truth.

HINOJOSA:
But when some people say that truth might be, Leslee, that by limiting the information, by limiting access to contraception, that you may– you may unintentionally be contributing to more unwanted pregnancies–

UNRUH:
No. I think it’s– by “limiting” is all spin. Let’s quit making people think that everybody can go out there and just as long as they have a condom, they’re safe. They’re not safe emotionally. They’re not safe physically. Let’s just start telling the truth.

Yes, Leslee Unruh is that fabulous gal from the “Purity Balls” (which is probably the most frequently linked post I’ve ever done.)

Leslee is very excited about her “win” as you can tell. She’s not just “brainstorming and having fun.” It’s like she’s “going shopping”

“I’m ecstatic,” said Leslee Unruh, an antiabortion activist in South Dakota. “It’s like someone gave me $1 million and told me, ‘Leslee, go shopping.’ That’s how I feel.”

Isn’t that special? But it’s true. The LA Times article discusses in some detail all the ways this decision will further curb the right to choose. And the really neat thing is that since they’ve more or less “opened it up to the states” pro-choice forces will now have to fight on dozens of fronts all over the country thus raising the costs exponentially. Ne wonder Leslee is ecstatic.

Here are just a few of the battles the pro-choice movement is going to be fighting now:

We’re moving beyond putting roadblocks in front of abortions to actually prohibiting them,” said Troy Newman, president of Operation Rescue, a national antiabortion group based in Wichita, Kan. “This swings the door wide open.”

He and other strategists said they hoped to introduce legislation in a number of states that would:

• Ban all abortions of viable fetuses, unless the mother’s life is endangered.

• Ban mid- and late-term abortion for fetal abnormality, such as Down syndrome or a malformed brain.

• Require doctors to tell patients in explicit detail what the abortion will involve, show them ultrasound images of the fetus and warn them that they may become suicidal after the procedure.

• Lengthen waiting periods so that women must reflect on such counseling for several days before obtaining the abortion.

It is far from certain that the Supreme Court would uphold all those proposals. But antiabortion activists clearly think momentum is on their side.

No kidding. I’ll quote Professor Balkin again:

…it would mean that plaintiffs could not directly challenge new abortion regulations as soon as they were passed. Instead, a series of plaintiffs would have to go to court and prove that the law was unconstitutional as applied to their individual circumstances. This process would be time consuming and expensive, and it would take years to produce a jurisprudence limiting the statute’s unconstitutional reach. Thus, the effect… would be to allow states to pass significant restrictions on abortion and keep them in force for long periods of time until a series of time consuming and expensive cases gradually eliminated their unconstitutional features. Indeed, precisely because creating an appropriate factual record for an individual as-applied challenge by a pregnant woman may be time consuming and expensive, the series of suits may never be brought, with the result that a whole host of abortion limitations that are actually invalid under the undue burden test will remain in force and will be applied to limit women’s right to abortion.

Now can we see why Leslee Unruh immediately thinks of this as a shopping spree and she and her pals are “brainstorming and having fun?”

You read what Unruh says above: “Where’s the sexual freedom? There is none. Because those of us who have suffered through the abortion, we’re not gonna be silent anymore. We’re gonna speak up and we’re gonna tell the truth. Because abortion hurts women. Silent no more,” and you think she’s a crank. Beyond goofy. Clearly part of the fringe.

Think again.

Balkin also identified the most shocking aspect of this ruling, and the thing that leaped out at me immediately when I read it and which Justice Ginsberg addressed most blisteringly in her dissent. It’s what Balkin calls the “new paternalism.”

Here’s Linda Greenhouse in today’s NY Times:

[N]ever until Wednesday had the court held that an abortion procedure could be prohibited because the procedure itself, not the pregnancy, threatened a woman’s health — mental health, in this case, and moral health as well. In his majority opinion, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy suggested that a pregnant woman who chooses abortion falls away from true womanhood.

“Respect for human life finds an ultimate expression in the bond of love the mother has for her child,” he said.

Justice Kennedy conceded that “we find no reliable data” on whether abortion in general, or the procedure prohibited by the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, causes women emotional harm. But he said it was nonetheless “self-evident” and “unexceptional to conclude” that “some women” who choose to terminate their pregnancies suffer “regret,” “severe depression,” “loss of esteem” and other ills.

Consequently, he said, the government has a legitimate interest in banning a particularly problematic abortion procedure to prevent women from casually or ill-advisedly making “so grave a choice.”

[…]

In an article to be published shortly in The University of Illinois Law Review, Professor Siegel traces the migration of the notion of abortion’s harm to women from internal strategy sessions of the anti-abortion movement in the 1990s to the formation of legal arguments and public policy.

[…]

On his blog, Balkinization, Prof. Jack M. Balkin of Yale Law School defined the message behind what he called the “new paternalism”: “Either a woman is crazy when she undergoes an abortion, or she will become crazy later on.”

Despite the activity in the states, the anti-abortion movement’s new focus remained largely under the radar until it emerged full-blown in Justice Kennedy’s opinion. As evidence that “some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained,” Justice Kennedy cited a brief filed in the case by the Justice Foundation, an anti-abortion group that runs a Web site and telephone help line for women “hurting from abortion.” The brief contained affidavits from 180 such women, describing feelings of shame, guilt and depression.

It is not trivial shrillness to take huge exception to the fact that the Supreme Court seems to have based a decision on the rather insane ramblings (and cunning strategy) of Leslee Unruh and her friends in the pro-life industry, who want their daughters to pledge their virginity to their fathers and who apparently believe that they are “giving back the women what they really want” by making them second class citizens.

It makes my head hurt.

Justice Ginsberg got to the heart of the matter when she said that when you get down to it, challenges to restictions “center on a woman’s autonomy to determine her life’s course, and thus to enjoy equal citizenship stature.”

A person’s autonomy to determine one’s life course would seem to me to fall under one of those “inalienable rights” that really shouldn’t have to be articulated, but I guess that we are now answering to the likes of the Leslee Unruh/Anthony Kennedy school of jurisprudence. Welcome to 1807. I hope you enjoyed your flight.

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Deliver Us

by digby

Assuming that any future Democratic president will be unfairly pounded by the Republicans for all the things the Bush administration did for eight years, it seems to me that there should be an opening for sincere (if there are any) small government conservatives to vote for the Democrats.

Check this out:

Under Clinton from 1992 to 2000, according to Princeton political scientist David Lewis, political appointees in the federal government dropped by nearly 17 percent – from 3,423 to 2,845. From 2000 to 2004, that figure climbed back up 12.5 percent to 3,202. Similarly, political scientist Paul Light found that after holding steady during most of the Clinton administration, the number of senior title holders increased by 9 percent, to 2,592, between 1998 and 2004 — the vast majority of which occurred under Bush. Light also found that 14 departments added new executive titles between 1998 and 2004. The Department of Veterans Affairs topped the list with six additional titles, followed by Defense, Education, Energy, and Justice with four, and Labor with three. Light wrote, “The fastest spreading titles continue to be ‘alter-ego’ deputies, including chiefs of staff to secretaries, deputy secretaries, under secretaries, deputy under secretaries, assistant secretaries, deputy assistant secretaries, associate deputy assistant secretaries, associate assistant secretaries, administrators, deputy administrators, associate administrators and assistant administrators.”

The Democrats will never be allowed to do this. It’s impossible to even dream that they could create a massive new patronage machine and bureaucracy like the Department of Homeland Security with a Democratic majority or expand the government the way the Bush administration has. In fact, if the Dems win in 08, they will come almost immediately under pressure to shrink the government. It’s like an inverted sort of Nixon China thing. The Democrats will be forced to do the Republicans’ unpleasant work for them.

The broadcast and cable media, by the way, will help the Republicans do this by failing to ever properly put into perspective the fact that all the things the Republicans will be accusing the Democrats of, they did themselves. They are already failing to inform their audience, even though the print media have put it out there:

To President Bush, they are “pork-barrel projects completely unrelated to the war,” items in the House and Senate war-spending bills such as peanut storage facilities and aid to spinach farmers that insult the seriousness of the conflict and exist only to buy votes.

But such spending has been part of Iraq funding bills since the war began, sometimes inserted by the president himself, sometimes added by lawmakers with bipartisan aplomb. A few of the items may have weighed on the votes for spending bills that have now topped half a trillion dollars, but, in almost all cases over the past four years, special-interest funding provisions have been the fruits of congressional opportunism by well-placed senators or House members grabbing what they could for their constituents on the one bill that had to be passed quickly.

[…]

The 2005 emergency war-spending bill included $70 million for aid to Ukraine and other former Soviet states; $12.3 million for the Architect of the Capitol, in part to build an off-site delivery facility for the Capitol police; $24 million for the Forest Service to repair flood and landslide damage; and $104 million for watershed protection — the lion’s share meant for repairing the damage to waterways in Washington County, Utah, at the request of the state’s Republican senators.

The fight this year over $120 million for shrimp and menhaden fisheries in the Gulf, $74 million for peanut storage facilities in Georgia, and $25 million for California spinach farmers devastated by an E. coli scare is louder than past disputes but is substantively not much different, budget analysts said. Virtually all of the $3.4 billion in agriculture spending in the House bill had been worked out by farm-state lawmakers long before Democratic leaders settled on the Iraq troop-pullout language at the center of the White House’s showdown with Congress, Lilly said.

I have no doubt that the tax and spend mantra will continue to be used by shameless, hypocritical Republicans to keep Democrats from funding the government they way it needs to be funded. I don’t think it has the salience it once had, for obvious reasons, but it’s still a good line that everybody in the country is comfortable nodding their heads and agreeing with over the kitchen table. After all, the GOP treated Bill Clinton like he was Lyndon Johnson when he was actually more like Nelson Rockefeller (which maybe was worse, in their minds…)And they will do it without any sense of irony or self-awareness and the majority of the media will never confront them on it. Indeed, when Democrats bring up Republican corruption and pork barrel politics under Bush they will be greeted with eye-rolling and head shaking from the punditocrisy for “living in the past” and “failing to solve the problems real Americans care about.” It’s a very predictable process.

So, my feeling is that the Dems should make a virtue of this somehow. Since they will simply not be allowed to get away with anything close to what Bush has done, both because of existing stereotypes and the massive mess the Republicans have made, they should at least make a case for being effective and efficient with the taxpayers money. (The PR on this supplemental “pork” thing doesn’t give me a good feeling…) After Clinton and Gore’s successful streamlining effort, watching this Bush trainwreck these last few years might convince a few of the last non-ideological, fiscal conservatives out there that Democrats are always the better choice to run the government. You wouldn’t think you’d even have to make the argument — a high school student council could have done a better job than Bush and boys — but it’s hard to break habits in politics. Dems have to put the nation’s economic house in order and do necessary things like universal health care and deal with global warming and they are going to have to think of some way to do that while the Republicans and the lazy portions of the press corps ding them mercilessly from the sidelines about “pork” and “special interests” and “tax and spend” in a way they never did during the dark GOP majority years. Personally, I would like to see a case made for government that delivers. I’ll be very interested to see how the presidential candidates approach this.

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Brownie Points

by digby

In response to Steve Benen’s post about Bush’s rambling, incoherent answers at that Townhall yesterday, one of his commenters pithily replied:

Bush leveraged a national tragedy into reelection. He’s seeded the federal government with true believers, expanded executive authority while marginalizing Congress and appointing 2 radically conservative SC judges. He’s expanded government surveillance of our phones, e-mails, libraary borrowings, bank accounts and medicine cabinets. He’s stalled efforts to curb global warming, cut protections once provided by the EPA, FDA, and silenced scientists who dare refute the literal word of bible or the backward beliefs of those who claim to know the mind of the almighty. The US can now torture, imprision without providing cause and prosecute without allowing a reasonable defense. He’s built bases in the middle east, and fattened the bank accounts of those whose bank accounts were already obscene. The middle class — the masses — have not been so economically impotent in decades.

For such an idiot, this guy has been awfully successful.

That’s worth thinking about. He’s only been an epic failure in terms of keeping the nation secure, safeguarding our constitution and making America more prosperous and successful. When you look at it from Bush’s perspective, however, he’s done a heckuva job.

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Trust ‘Em?

by digby

Via Christy’s righteously indignant post this morning, I read this column from the Chicago Tribune on the ramifications of Rove’s influence on the justice department:

A DOJ process that exalts partisan political loyalty over independence and fairness is a fundamentally flawed one. Political blinders are critical to a prosecutor because, without them, important decisions about how cases are investigated and prosecuted can be hijacked by improper considerations with tangible (even tragic) consequences. Naturally, this is most critical in political corruption cases, the legitimacy of which hinges on the political independence of the prosecutive team’s work.

It reminded me of something that someone said the day that the Department of Justice raided Congressman Jefferson’s office. Everyone knew that Jefferson was worthy of suspicion, but members of both parties protested the raid because of the separation of powers issues it raised. It was, in fact, unprecedented, as such issues had previously been dealt with by the more common use of subpoenas rather than a Saturday afternoon raid which resulted in the DOJ seizing Jefferson’s papers and computers.

Most people at the time thought the bipartisan congressional hoopla was ridiculous. Here we had a sitting congressman who had been found with piles of cash in his freezer. Are you telling us that the FBI doesn’t have the power to go into his office and seize his papers? It sounds rather absurd.

Here’s what I wrote about it at the time:

I am quite sure that Congressman Jefferson is nobody I want to defend (for his politics and much as his criminality.) But the FBI and the executive branch have a long sordid history of using their power for political ends. (Even Hoover never believed they could raid a congressman’s office, however.)

Recently, the FBI’s conservative culture has led to some in the bureau covertly helping Republicans as we saw during the Clinton years. Convicted spy Robert Hanssen had a relationship with Robert Novak that seemed to be based upon his political loathing of Janet Reno, although as with so many of these cases, it’s hard to tell what motivates individuals. But history shows that the FBI can be used by any party for nefarious purposes which is bad enough and requires constant vigilance and oversight. When it is used for partisan reasons directly against the congress you have a problem of an even greater dimension.

The reason to be against this is political (and constitutional), not legal. It’s entirely possible that the warrant they got was proper and that their cause is just. And I have no doubt that Hastert had a hissy fit and got Bush to seal the documents to cover his own ample ass. But the bigger issue is something that someone wrote in an email a couple of days ago:

This Republican Justice Department, led by a lifetime Bush loyalist and good friend to Karl Rove now has every Democratic strategy memo that ever came across Congressman Jefferson’s desk. Trust ’em?

Uh, no.

It never really made much sense to me that of the long line of GOP corruption cases that came through the congress in past few years, the only one in which the DOJ took the unprecedented step of raiding their congressional office and seizing their papers was the lone Democrat. Very odd, don’t you think?

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“Death Is Terrible”

by digby

Just shoot me in the face. I missed this earlier and once again I am gobsmacked that a man who is less sophisticated and intellectually mature than the broccoli eating baby hamster is running the most powerful country on earth. It still amazes me. Every time.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Mr. President, how would you respond to the rather mistaken idea that the war in Iraq is becoming a war in Vietnam?

BUSH: Yes, thank you. The, there’s a lot of differences. A first, the Iraqi people voted for a modern constitution. And then set up a government under that constitution.

Secondly, that’s as opposed to two divided countries. North and south. The, in my judgment, the vast majority of people want to live underneath the constitution they passed. They want to live in peace. And what you’re seeing is radical on the fringe, creating chaos and order to either get the people to lose confidence in the government or for us to leave.

A major difference as far as here at home is concerned as far as the military is it’s an all-volunteer army. We need to keep it that way. By the way, the way you keep it that way is to make sure the troops have all they need to do their job and to make sure their families are happy.

And there are some similarities, of course. Death is terrible. There’s no similarity, of course, is that Vietnam is the first time that a war was brought onto our TV screens to America on a regular basis. Looking around, looking for baby-boomers, I see a few of us here. A different, for the first time, the violence and horror of war was brought home. That’s the way it is today.

Americans rightly so, are concerned about whether or not we can succeed in Iraq. Nobody wants to be there if we can’t succeed, especially me. And these violence on our TV screens affects our frame of mind. Probably more so today than what took place in Vietnam.

I want to remind you that after Vietnam, after we’d left, the millions of people lost their life.

I guess while we were there is was like a spring day in Indiana.

Check out the YouTube of this is you haven’t seen it over on Eschaton. It’s even worse watching him struggle and stall and try so hard to figure out what he’s supposed to say.

I will say it again. When a politician appears to be this stupid (and he seems exactly the same as he did when he was running for president in 2000) it’s not a good idea to assume that it’s just an act. Look at the results.

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Not Good Enough

by digby

I ran across this article in the course of researching the post below and I hadn’t seen it before. (Perhaps it’s been everywhere and I just missed it.) I found it pretty amazing:

Voter Probes Raise Partisan Suspicions
Democrats, Allies See Politics Affecting Justice Department’s Anti-Fraud Efforts

By Jo Becker and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, September 20, 2004

Earlier this month, U.S. Attorney David Iglesias in New Mexico launched a statewide criminal task force to investigate allegations of voter fraud in the upcoming presidential election. The probe came after a sheriff who co-chairs President Bush’s campaign in the state’s largest county complained about thousands of questionable registrations turned in by Democratic-leaning groups.

“It appears that mischief is afoot and questions are lurking in the shadows,” Iglesias told local reporters.

Civil rights groups say Attorney General John D. Ashcroft’s focus on minority registrants is meant to deter likely Democratic voters.

But Democratic Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron, named to the task force to allay concerns that the probe was politically motivated, said the investigation is unnecessary.

“This is just an attempt to let people know that Big Brother is watching,” Vigil-Giron, New Mexico’s chief elections official, said in an interview. “It may well be aimed at trying to keep people away from the polls.”

The probe is one of several criminal inquiries into alleged voter fraud launched in recent weeks in key presidential battlegrounds, including Ohio and West Virginia, as part of a broader initiative by U.S. Attorney General John D. Ashcroft targeting bogus registrations and other election crimes. The Justice Department has asked U.S. attorneys across the country to meet with local elections officials and launch publicity campaigns aimed at getting people to report irregularities.

The focus on registration problems comes amid a fiercely contested presidential race and at a time when many Democrats are still angry over the 2000 election, in which ballot irregularities in Florida prompted the U.S. Supreme Court to declare the winner. And it puts the Justice Department in the middle of a charged and partisan debate over when aggressive fraud enforcement becomes intimidation.

Justice officials say it is the department’s duty to prosecute illegal activities at the polls, and stress that civil rights lawyers are also working to ensure that legitimate voters can cast their ballots without interference. Justice Department spokesman Bryan Sierra said that “the department must strike a proper balance and we cannot be deterred from investigating allegations of criminal voter fraud.”

Civil rights advocates and many Democrats, however, complain that the department is putting too much emphasis on investigating new voter registrations in poor and minority communities — which tend to favor Democrats — and not enough on ensuring that those voters do not face discrimination at the polls. More attention should be given to potential fraud in the use of absentee ballots, which tend to favor Republicans, the critics say.

They also charge that announcing criminal investigations within weeks of an election — as was done in New Mexico on Sept. 7 — is likely to scare legitimate voters away from the polls.

“I’m concerned that the Justice Department is being overtly political,” said Nancy Zirkin, deputy director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. “Bells are going off for me because searching for voter fraud has often been a proxy for intimidating voters.”

The Justice Department’s guidelines say prosecutors “must refrain from any conduct which has the possibility of affecting the election itself.”

Iglesias did what he was supposed to do in 2004 like a good Republican boy. He held press conferences just before the election and and said all the right things about “questions lurking in the shadows.” Except, of course, the questions were all trumped up GOP scare tactics to keep Hispanics and native Americans from voting. Not illegal, just low and snakelike.

Unfortunately for him, by 2006, Rove was panicking and that wasn’t good enough. He was supposed to actually indict somebody (see: Wisconsin) and he refused. He got his head chopped off.

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Hans Across America

by digby

Sometimes I feel as if I’ve been writing about the same things over and over again for years and it never adds up to anything. But in the case of this “voter fraud” issues, I have been concerned about what the Bush administration was up to for some time and it appears to be adding up to something quite huge. (Of course, I’m not the only one who was following this — many people knew it was happening.)

Today, McClatchy has a barn burner of an article about the Bush administration’s efforts to suppress the vote. It’s no longer possible to argue with a straight face that they didn’t use the power of the Justice Department for partisan reasons. The Bush administration has been pursuing phony voter fraud like it was a massive scourge, helping states enact all kinds of specious laws that only result in disenfranchising legitimate voters — the kind who tend to vote Democratic. (I wonder why?)

Read the whole article and then come on back and we’ll unpack just a tiny little piece of it, blog style.

Longtime readers will recall that way back when I wrote a bit about “Buckhead” the man who miraculously discovered in a few short moments that the kerning and fonts of the Dan Rather memos were “off” and put his “findings” up on Free Republic. You all know the results of his magnificent bit of internet sleuthing. In researching Buckhead, whose real name is Harry McDougal, I found out that in addition to being a member of the Federalist Society and someone who helped write anti-Clinton briefs for Kenneth Starr, he was a member of the Fulton County elections board which ruled that the extremely dubious Sonny Perdue and Saxby Chambliss wins in 2002 were perfectly a-ok. The guy got around.

It turned out that another interesting Republican fellow had previously been on that elections board by the name of Hans von Spakovsky, whom you just read about in that McClatchy piece. He was hired by the Bush Justice Department’s civil right’s division shortly after his stint down in Florida during the recount. Anyway, Von Spakovsky is not just another Atlanta lawyer. He had for years been involved with a GOP front group called the “Voter Integrity Project” (VIP) which was run by none other than Helen Blackwell, wife of notorious conservative operative Morton Blackwell. (Many of you will remember him as the guy who handed out the “purple heart” bandages at the 2004 GOP convention but he’s actually much better known for years of running the dirty tricks school “The Leadership Institute” and is even credited with coining the name “Moral Majority.” Let’s just say he’s been a playah in GOP circles for a long time — and the VIP is one of his projects.

Salon published a piece on the Voter Integrity Project back in 2000:

VIP chairwoman of the board is Helen Blackwell, also the Virginia chairwoman of Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum, whose husband, Morton, serves as executive director of the conservative Council for National Policy. It took lumps for being partisan earlier this year from Slate writer Jeremy Derfner. “In fact, almost everything about the Voting Integrity Project makes you wonder. Though VIP’s members assert that they are both independent and nonpartisan, the organization is essentially a conservative front,” Derfner wrote.

VIP has vigorously opposed efforts to liberalize voting procedures — railing against everything from Internet voting to Oregon’s mail-in balloting to the Motor Voter bill. But it is VIP’s involvement in partisan political fights that makes Democrats charge the group is a Republican front group.

VIP sent investigators into largely black areas in Louisiana after Mary Landrieu’s 1996 U.S. Senate victory over Republican Woody Jenkins.

“The VIP conducted its investigation over a 10-day period from December 26 through January 4, during which time they concentrated on the Orleans Parish voting activities,” a VIP release says. “The VIP examined and independently verified substantial amounts of evidence gathered by the Jenkins campaign, as well as gathering its own evidence concerning vote buying, vote hauling and improprieties by elections officials tasked with protecting voting machines.”

VIP chairwoman Helen Blackwell told the Senate Rules Committee, “Many claims of the Jenkins campaign have merit and should be investigated to the fullest extent of the law.”

In a few short years, former VIP lawyer Von Spakovsky, who had made his name calling for voter roll purges in Georgia, was working in the Justice Department, with the full resources of the federal government behind him.

From the McClatchy article:

In late 2001, Ashcroft also hired three Republican political operatives to work in a secretive new unit in the division’s Voting Rights Section. Rich said the unit, headed by unsuccessful Republican congressional candidate Mark Metcalf of Kentucky, bird-dogged the progress of the administration’s Help America Vote Act (HAVA) and reviewed voting legislation in the states.

One member of the three-person political unit, former Georgia elections official and Republican activist Hans von Spakovsky, eventually took de facto control of the Voting Rights Section and used his position to advocate tougher voter ID laws, said former department lawyers who declined to be identified for fear of reprisals.

Those former employees said that Spakovsky helped state officials interpret the Help America Vote Act’s confusing new minimum voter identification requirements. He also weighed in when the Voting Rights Act required department approval for any new ID law in 13 states with histories of racial discrimination.

In November 2004, Arizona residents passed Proposition 200, the toughest state voter ID law to date, which requires applicants to provide proof of citizenship and voters to produce a photo ID on Election Day. The Voting Rights Act state requires states to show that such laws wouldn’t impede minorities from voting and gives the Justice Department 60 days to approve or oppose them.

Career voting rights specialists in the Justice Department soon discovered that more than 2,000 elderly Indians in Arizona lacked birth certificates, and they sought their superiors’ approval to request more information from the state about other potential impacts on voters’ rights. Spakovsky and Sheldon Bradshaw, the division’s top deputy and a close friend of top Gonzales aide Kyle Sampson, a former Bush White House lawyer, denied the request, said one of the former department attorneys.

Jeffrey Toobin wrote an article back in 2004 about this subject which everyone who is following this case should read (or re-read) to see just how pervasive this “voter fraud” initiative was in the Bush Justice department. Karl Rove was almost certainly running it from the white house. But it was being pushed from throughout the Republican establishment that had recognized for years that they couldn’t win fair and square. I think 2000 scared the hell out of them. If it hadn’t been for Ralph Nader and Jebby and Poppy’s political machines they would have lost that one and they had put everything they had into winning it.

So where is our friend Von Spakovsky now?

Saturday, December 17, 2005

President Bush nominated two controversial lawyers to the Federal Election Commission yesterday: Hans von Spakovsky who helped Georgia win approval of a disputed voter-identification law, and Robert D. Lenhard, who was part of a legal team that challenged the constitutionality of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law.

Von Spakovsky and Mason are Republican appointees, while Lenhard and Walther are Democratic picks for the bipartisan six-member commission.

In a letter to Senate Rules Committee Chairman Trent Lott (R-Miss.), Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) wrote that he is “extremely troubled” by the von Spakovsky nomination. Kennedy contends that von Spakovsky “may be at the heart of the political interference that is undermining the [Justice] Department’s enforcement of federal civil laws.”

Career Justice Department lawyers involved in a Georgia case said von Spakovsky pushed strongly for approval of a state program requiring voters to have photo identification. A team of staff lawyers that examined the case recommended 4 to 1 that the Georgia plan should be rejected because it would harm black voters; the recommendation was overruled by von Spakovsky and other senior officials in the Civil Rights Division.

Before working in the Justice Department, von Spakovsky was the Republican Party chairman in Fulton County, Ga., and served on the board of the Voter Integrity Project, which advocated regular purging of voter roles to prevent felons from casting ballots.

In a brief telephone interview, von Spakovsky played down his role in policy decisions in the Civil Rights Division. “I’m just a career lawyer who works in the front office of civil rights,” he said. He noted that the department has rules against career lawyers talking to reporters.

That takes some gall, don’t you think? He actually tried to pass himself off as a career lawyer for the justice department when he was nothing but a political hack from the moment he hit DC. Chutzpah doesn’t even begin to describe it.

Bush gave him a recess appointment a month later. A couple of months after that, this came out

I’m sure everyone is aware by now that the recent study by the NY Times pretty much takes voter fraud off the table as anything but a partisan Republican tool for suppressing the Democratic vote:

Five years after the Bush administration began a crackdown on voter fraud, the Justice Department has turned up virtually no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections, according to court records and interviews.

Frankly you had to be something of an historical illiterate not to recognize from the beginning that these folks are up to the same tricks they’ve been using for decades. They tried mightily, with everything they had, the federal government, the Republican Lawyers Association, the country awash in patriotic paranoia, and they still couldn’t prove this case — even crookedly they couldn’t do it. In fact, their insistence on finding it where there was none is what has caused their whole edifice to crumble.

Oh, and by the way, von Spakovsky has now been formally nominated by Bush to the FEC and will have to undergo Senate confirmation. Here’s a blistering critique of his performace at the DOJ as well as his predictably awful tenure on the FEC from a former attoreny in the civil rights division. He concludes:

But even putting aside his controversial tenure at DOJ, von Spakovsky’s performance at the FEC over the last year independently raises questions of whether he is worthy of Senate confirmation. His comments at FEC meetings have often been caustic and extraneous to the issue at hand. He has consistently scoffed at the spirit of campaign finance laws, thumbing his nose at the law as he seeks to help create routes of circumvention. He even accuses those reformers who seek regulation of the role of money in our political process as attempting to take us back to the days of the Alien and Sedition Acts. This is an easy accusation to make, and von Spakovsky has employed it a number of times, and it certainly is easier to attack those he disagrees with rather than to explain principled reasons for his own actions.

The Senate Rules Committee hearings will begin soon. When they do, the American people have the right to know all the details of von Spakovsky’s roles in both the Texas and Georgia matters, and his handling of FEC matters as a recess appointee. That record, if compiled, will make the vote on his confirmation quite easy.

Let’s hope so.

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Not A Bug

by digby

Perlstein gives us a little historical perspective on Alberto Gonzales:

He wouldn’t be the first right-wing attorney general to be a sinister man willing to break the law out of a twisted means-justifies-the-ends morality. He’s not even the second. John Mitchell, Richard Nixon’s attorney general, boasted proudly in 1972 that “this country is going so far to the right you’re not even going to recognize it,” then did his part to make it so by helping lead the Watergate conspiracy to steal the 1972 president election as Nixon’s campaign manager. And here’s an amazing story about the nation’s next right-wing attorney general. It was told in Lou Cannon’s latest Reagan biography, Governor Reagan: His Rise to Power, though it’s not widely known. Reagan had a close advisor named Phil Battaglia that a cabal of Reagan’s other advisors, including chief of staff Edwin Meese, wished to get rid of. (One of the reasons they wished to get rid of him was that he was insufficiently right-wing.) They suspected he was a homosexual. So they bugged Battaglia’s hotel room in order to get the goods. They failed. But it’s astonishing to think about. This is the man Ronald Reagan made the chief law enforcement officer of the United States–where he turned out to be the subject of an investigation by the United States Office of the Independent Counsel.

Republican politicians are crooks. Always have been. Always will be. Never forget it.

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Update: Fergawdsakes. Please amend my statement to say modern Republican politicians are all crooks. (Although if you add “incompetent” you can go all the way back to harding and that’s quite an impressive run.) I stand by it. They aided and abetted and are accessories pretty much across the board. Hell, nobody even said a word when they didn’t fire Scooter Libby until the day he was indicted and they’re still defending the convicted liar. I can’t think of even one Republican since Richardson and Ruckleshaus who resigned in protest at the illegality, immorality or even the incompetence of any Republican administration in the last 30 years.(I could be wrong and if you think of some, please let me know.) It seems that rather than distance themsleves from the actual criminals in their midst, the party applauds them.

Yes, Lincoln was a great man and the first Republican president. I suspect his little contretemps back in the 60’s (the 1860s) would not make him a member in good standing of the southern dominated GOP, however. In Dixie he was for over a hundred years the most unpopular man in history. In fact, one of them killed him over it.

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