Month: November 2007

Stated Secrets

by digby

They were just cooperating with the government:

Yahoo aided the Chinese government in the arrest of a journalist, then its general counsel deliberately or negligently mislead the U.S. Congress about the company’s role during 2006 testimony, a senior lawmaker charged Tuesday.

Representative Tom Lantos, a California Democrat and chairman of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, also lectured Yahoo and General Counsel Michael Callahan for failing to notify the committee when the company discovered his February 2006 testimony about Yahoo’s role in the arrest of journalist Shi Tao. And he questioned why a company with Yahoo’s resources has not come to the aid of Shi’s family.

Yahoo has had no direct contact with Shi’s family, but it has been working to get him released from a 10-year prison sentence, Yahoo co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang told the committee.

But Lantos, one of several lawmakers who criticized Yahoo at Tuesday’s hearing, suggested that wasn’t good enough. “Why is it such a complicated issue to help a family whose breadwinner is in prison because of Yahoo’s cooperation?” he said.

Yahoo “could do better” to help the family, Yang answered.

“You couldn’t do less,” Lantos shot back.

Callahan, in February 2006, testified that he did not know the nature of the investigation when Chinese authorities demanded Yahoo China turn over the IP (Internet Protocol) address for a person who turned out to be Shi. Callahan later learned that several employees of Yahoo China knew at the time that the demand for the information was part of an investigation involving “state secrets.”

That’s awful isn’t it? Thank goodness we don’t live in a country that asks corporations to do things like that and thank goodness corporations have enough respect for and knowledge of the rule of law that they would never allow themselves to be used by the US governmen tlike that.

Oh wait:

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 15 — Lawyers for the Bush administration encountered a federal appeals court Wednesday that appeared deeply skeptical of a blanket claim that the government’s surveillance efforts cannot be challenged in court because the litigation might reveal state secrets.

“The bottom line here is the government declares something is a state secret, that’s the end of it. No cases. . . . The king can do no wrong,” said Judge Harry Pregerson, one of three judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit who grilled administration lawyers at length over whether a pair of lawsuits against the government should go forward.

That’s what the FISA telcom immunity is all about. The Telcoms broke the law at the behest of the administration and are now being sued. They believe the government should protect them against lawsuits by their customers should they ever find out they helped the government spy on them without a warrant. The government has tried valiantly to use this “state secrets” excuse to do that, but as you can see the courts are not necessarily impressed by their assertion. Seeing as it’s pretty much the same thing that a King — or a communist dictator — would do, it’s not surprising that some courts in the United States of America might just find it a little bit well … unseemly to see their president behaving as if he is just that.

It’s almost numbing to see how much this administration assumed tyrannical powers because some religious fanatics turned some airplanes into missiles and killed 3,000 people. It was a very bad day, but I cannot believe that most Americans thought they had been turned from citizens into subjects when it happened.

Christy at FDL has the latest from the whistleblower who blew the lid off this story here, and asks some pointed questions about what these high priced corporate lawyers knew and what the government promised them. I’ve been wondering the same thing.

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The Right Wing Relativists

by digby

I have a new post up over at CAF about the PoMo Republicans and their “torturous” relationship to reality —- and morality.

And Perlstein has a good one about how the Republicans are punking the Dems left and right:

The Republican minority has obstructed as much before one half of this Congress is over with than the Demcoratic minority did the entire previous Congress. Rovemort’s strategy is working. Republicans are blocking the will of the American people. And they’re managing to saddle Democrats with the blame. Bob Borosage predicted it exactly. But the mainstream media simply doesn’t get it. Jay Leno jokes about the Democratic Congress’s four-day work week—but the previous Congress only worked two days a week! NPR quotes retiring Republican Congressman David Hobson: “I don’t think they’re learning from our mistakes.” They’re “trying to ram their bills through instead of finding a compromise.” But the SCHIP bill, with 18 Republican Senate votes, and the FISA bill, crafted to precisely fix the technical problem the White House complained about, already were compromises. The Republicans blocked them nonetheless. “It would seem to me that reaching out and working together is what the public wants,” they quote Hobson. But that’s exactly what the Democrats have been doing.

He Played First Base For The Yankees, Too

by digby

Steve Benen and Josh Marshall are keeping track of Giuliani’s serial exagerrations about his own accomplishments. I’m sure you’ve all noticed that whenever he talks, you’d think he’d been running the Roman Empire for 25 years and planned and executed D-Day, for all of his experience as a great and wonderous world leader. He’s also an expert in just about anything you mention. Josh says:

…the pattern of personality-cult-in-making kinds of silly claims of expertise and experience. You know, the way that most dictator’s bios have them not only being experts in power politics but also accomplished scholars, great singers, script writers and various other nonsense. But there’s one really choice one Steve has that really belongs in the line up. Rudy apparently claims that he’s been “studying Islamic terrorism for 30 years.” That one comes from an August article in Time. So basically, back in the 1970s and 1980s, Rudy was already a student of Jihadism. Time’s Amanda Ripley shows pretty handily that all the available evidence shows that Rudy gave little or no attention to Jihadism before 9/11. But I’m less taken by the falsity of the claim than the boffo personality-cult-in-his-own-mind wackiness of it. Is there any topic he can allow himself not to be the most expertest person there is on the subject?

Nope. I’ve got another one:

GIULIANI: I honestly think we might have gotten tougher questions during the Fox interview, but they were substantive questions. During the MSNBC situation, we got some really good questions. But we also got some of the trick questions: Shia and Sunni.

You know, do I know the difference between Shia and Sunni? I felt like I was, you know, defending my doctoral thesis. It happens that I am a student of the history of religion.

HANNITY: Sure.

GIULIANI: So I knew the answer to that.

He’s actually something of an expert:

“I have very, very strong views on religion that come about from having wanted to be a priest when I was younger, having studied theology for four years in college,” he said. “It’s an area I know really, really well academically.

Perhaps it was in his study of the history of religion that he also became an expert on torture.

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Health Care Queens

by digby

Sweet Jellybean Jesus, Rudy Giuliani is a piece of work. Seriously, is there no limit to how much of a jackass he can be?

Now, many Republicans who feel obliged to have some kind of health care “plan” endorse the health care tax deduction. Most just don’t care very much about the uninsured. Giuliani, by contrast, is not indifferent to the plight of the uninsured. He actually seems to revel in it:

I don’t like mandating health care. I don’t like it because it erodes what makes health care work in this country–the free market, the profit motive. A mandate takes choice away from people. We’ve got to let people make choices. We’ve got to let them take the risk–do they want to be covered? Do they want health insurance? Because, ultimately, if they don’t, well, then, they may not be taken care of.

Where does this bizarrely punitive view of the health care system come from? It apparently arises from Giuliani’s experience with welfare reform, which he constantly likens to health care. “You don’t start off by promising you’re going to insure everybody,” he warned earlier this year. “It’s the same mistake the Democrats made with welfare.” So providing health coverage to the uninsured will make them irresponsible.

Of course, this analysis is insane, unless you think most of the uninsured lack coverage because they’d rather splurge at Best Buy than spend money on health insurance. Alas, this appears to be exactly what Giuliani believes. “[The uninsured] may be buying a television, … they may be buying a cell phone,” he said at last week’s debate.

Giuliani also thinks that insulating people from the costs of sickness or injury will make them more likely to get sick or injured. “There is no incentive to wellness,” he complains. Perhaps you thought wellness was an incentive in and of itself. Obviously, you lack Giuliani’s grasp of free-market homilies. As Giuliani understands, when you don’t pay the cost of a good, you have every incentive to consume more of it. That’s why those of us with insurance are always borrowing handkerchiefs from people with communicable diseases or juggling steak knives barefoot.

Rudy’s stump talk reminds me more and more of that creepy drunken crank at the end of the bar who shouts out at inappropriate moments, “they’re schhhcum I tell you …you know it…anIknowit.”

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Tweety Of The Day

by digby

“This gender thing is so tricky. Here’s my theory. Men voted in the first part of the last century to give women the vote. They had all the votes and decided to share them. They thought, ‘they’re smart, we’re married to them, if momma’s not happy nobody’s happy’ sort of thing.”

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Ponzi Punditry

by digby

Somerby discusses yesterdays atrocity on Hardball, so I don’t have to. He sums it up quite nicely here:

Short story? The plutocrats are trying to pick your nominee, as they tried to do in 1999. Then, these same tools puffed the wondrous Bradley, and viciously went after fake, phony Gore. And just so you can see who they are—these people who try to select your nominees—here they are, on last night’s show, discussing Social Security:

RUSSERT (11/5/07): If you’re going to make tough decisions as a president, you have to answer tough questions. What are you going to do? Show us how you’re going the lead us. Everyone knows Social Security, as it’s constructed, is not going to be in the same place it’s going to be for the next generation [sic]. Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives.

MATTHEWS: It’s a bad Ponzi scheme, at this point.

RUSSERT: Yes.

It’s a bad Ponzi scheme, the boys both said. Everyone knows it, Russert asserted. Of course, here’s Paul Krugman, on the day of that remarkable Dem debate, saying exactly the opposite. In fact, no leading Dem—save, perhaps, Obama and Edwards—thinks anything like what Russert and Matthews said. But plutocrats have pushed those scripted deceptions at the public for twenty-five years. Last night, their well-paid “Lost Boys” were pimping again—and telling you, you Democrats, who you should pick for your candidate.

Sadly, Matthews and Russert are so balls-out stupid that they may believe the things they said. They got their narrative about Social Security from the club long ago; they may not even know it’s a fraud. But these are the people who fought very hard to pick your nominee eight years ago, and they are trying, very hard, to treat you like things they own now.

Somerby is right. These people are determined to pick your nominee for you — and then they will help the Republicans destroy whoever that is in the general election. That is what they did to Al Gore, that is what they did to Howard Dean (and the John Kerry) and that is what they are currently doing to Hillary Clinton. This is not a case of only going after the front-runners, because you see very little of this kind of coverage about Giuliani, who is a veritable font of misinformation, hallucinations and lies. Neither can it be ascribed to “speaking truth to power” and going after the party that is expected to win, because they went after Howard Dean at a time when Bush was expected to win re-election handily.

I don’t care if you are a Hillary fan or not, it ends up being bad for liberals in general, particularly when they use things like the lethal lie that screws up the entire Democratic agenda when it gets any traction: social security is most definitely not a ponzi scheme. As Somerby says, this is a plutocrat agenda item that only willfully dishonest millionaire pundits like Russert and Matthews would ever characterize that way. (They know which side their tax cuts are buttered on.)

And anyway, even though they trash Clinton most gleefully, they make sure to give other Democrats a working over in the process, just in case one of them catches on. I heard some “analyst” on MSNBC say that the new Edwards “Heroes” ad, which I thought was very effective, looked like it was a “Lifetime Channel, made for TV movie — all those people standing beside their uhm, barns, waiting for their quilting bees.”

There was a time when midwestern farmers were talked up as the salt of the earth Real Americans who decide elections. But I guess that’s only true when they are Republicans. Appearing in a Democrat’s ad, they are smugly derided as a bunch of rubes or Hollywood phonies.

I am tired of the media presuming to decide who is worthy to be our elected leaders. They don’t speak for anyone but themselves. They infect our politics with their pinched insular viewpoint and then presume to tell us that’s what we all think too. It’s insulting.

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Making Nancy Mad

by digby

Donna Edwards is about $15,000 away from raising $100,000 online to defeat Bush Dog Al Wynn in the primary. Those of you who are cynical about politics and think there isn’t dime’s worth of difference between them should really take a look at Edwards. She’s a real live true blue progressive who is trying to unseat a crooked, sell-out Democrat.

If you think politics in this country are hopeless and just want to complain that’s certainly your privilege. If, on the other hand, you want to do something, you can throw a few dollars to people like Donna Edwards and help us get the ball rolling for real change.

Matt Stoller mentioned this campaign to Nancy Pelosi last night at a NYC fundraiser (which he points out is the only place to get any real face time with your representatives.) Here’s what happened:

I went up to Pelosi after her odd speech to ask her in person about her support for Al Wynn. I said ‘I helped organize a fundraiser for Donna Edwards’, and I was about to talk about retroactive immunity and ask her to take this as a sign of frustration, as well as to tell her how proud she makes me as the first female Speaker of the House. But the moment I mentioned Al Wynn, Pelosi’s whole face abruptly changed, her smile melted away, and she got hostile and said in an icy voice ‘I know about that.’ She then turned away to talk to someone else.

As Jane says,

If for no other reason than to say thanks to Matt Stoller for making that entrenched, do-nothing system just a little bit more uncomfortable to acquiesce to, please consider giving to Donna today.

If you want change, you’ve got to start somewhere.

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The Village Social Tabbies Hiss And Yowl

by digby

Mrs Tim Russert has a new article in Vanity Fair this month about the Village hostesses. Apparently they are very upset. Nobody seems to have good dinner parties any more.

It all started with Carter who refused to serve drinks. Luckily, Reagan came in and brought back the glittering social life these people know they deserve. But it wasn’t to last:

Lea Berman: I remember at the end of the Reagan years we got Democrats in Congress, and it really got ugly at dinner parties. We were just under siege the whole dinner. I told my husband, “I am not going to go through that again.” People of different parties weren’t really friends.

The Bush Sr administration was pretty good because they entertained a lot of foreign leaders and those were simply wuuunderful parties.

You know what happened next:

Sally Quinn: In terms of entertaining being partisan, it started with Clinton. The people who were seen as “hostesses” were people who had money or were raising money.… When the stuff about Clinton and women started appearing, in the second term, things shut down. Everybody wanted to go hide in a cave. For people willing to defend him, it became intolerable for them to go out.

In 2000, after being elected to the Senate, Hillary Clinton bought a fashionable house near the British and Italian Embassies. Before her run for the presidency, she added on to the house in order to have more space for entertaining.

Since Hillary has been here in the Senate for the last eight years, I think I’ve seen her twice. Otherwise, she is at fund-raisers. She entertains constantly, but it is all political. It is people who work for her or raise money for her.

(I won’t be ignooored, Hillary.)

Mrs Russert continues in her own words. Apparently, she was afraid that people didn’t know the history of the stupid, trumped up scandals that came to nothing in the Clinton administration, so she felt it necessary to give her readers some detail — and then trash the one hostess (who is evidently outré among the cats) of the moment:

The Clintons’ second term was mired in the Monica Lewinsky scandal and ended with the president’s shocking eleventh-hour pardon of the fugitive financier Marc Rich. Favored hostesses during the time were Clinton fund-raisers, who are now hoping a second Clinton presidency will provide a new opportunity to shine. One of the most aggressive contenders still vying to become a successor to the likes of Pamela Harriman is Beth Dozoretz, former Democratic National Committee finance chair.

Dozoretz, who constantly touted her close, personal relationship with Bill Clinton and pledged to raise $1 million for the Clinton library, is a onetime garment-industry executive married to Ron Dozoretz, a psychiatrist and the C.E.O. of a behavioral-health-care company that is heavily dependent on state contracts and that has been criticized in the past for providing substandard services. He contributes to both Republicans and Democrats. His wife first became known to the public when she took the Fifth Amendment before Congress in order not to have to answer questions about her role in the Marc Rich pardon. Last February, Clinton friends were taken aback when the Dozoretzes hosted a fund-raiser for New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, a presidential candidate, but that should not have been surprising considering the contract for a reported $325 million that Ron Dozoretz’s FHC Health Systems has in New Mexico. Beth Dozoretz is said to phone media outlets to tout her parties and ask to be included on “A-lists,” and in the middle of dinners she allegedly confers with her husband to discuss whom they’ve spoken with and whom they should cultivate.

Meow.

Bush Junior is portrayed rather glumly, but is excused because he had this heckuva war to contend with. And anyway, the real problem is, as usual, that horrible “partisanship:”

Ken Duberstein: The result of partisanship is gridlock—nothing gets done—and Washington and Capitol Hill have become the laughingstock of the nation. If you had a more nonpartisan social life, people would understand one another better as individuals, understand people’s motives and integrity, and not see everything in terms of political one-upmanship. You also know that if they ever have to decide between being on a cable program and your dinner party, it’s no contest.

Capitol Hill hasn’t become the laughing stock of the nation because of its partisanship. It’s become the laughing stock of the nation because the Republicans have spent the last seven years diagnosing brain injuries from the floor of the senate, molesting high school boys, stealing the country blind and starting wars for no good reason (all of which the Republicans seemed to “get done” very handily.) In the eight years before that they spent the entire time obsessing about phony scandals and semen stains. If we don’t laugh we’ll never stop crying about what they’ve done to our country.

Interestingly, the one group that is conspicuously left out of the article are the political media. But then they didn’t need to be included, did they? Mrs Russert speaks for them. And I think it’s pretty clear that they agree wholeheartedly with the rest of the feline howlers.

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Torture Chronicles

by digby

Scott Horton commemorated “Counterterroism Day” from London in a most educational fashion:

For centuries, Guy Fawkes Day marked the event. Englishmen were taught of the need to be vigilant in the defense of the realm, and particularly to remember the threat from within, from the disloyal Catholics. But mostly they enjoyed the privilege of lighting bonfires and engaging in pranks on a chilly autumn evening.

But today Britons have a take on Guy Fawkes that is much at odds with the historical one. Once Fawkes was a symbol of the traitor within. The people were called to be on guard against his like. No longer. Today Guy Fawkes is increasingly viewed as the heroic figure prepared to stand against an unjust and oppressive state, as a martyr and a victim of torture. What are the lessons of Guy Fawkes Day for 2007? I propose three:

Read on.

And then read this other astonishing post from Horton:

When was the last time that the American secretary of state’s senior legal adviser was an object of near-universal ridicule in the international legal community? In my lifetime, only once: right now. The legal adviser in question is Jim Bellinger. Earlier this year, he delivered a talk at The Hague. A British colleague who had attended alerted me to it, and I wrote about it in “The Report from Cloudcuckooland.” The audience’s reaction, I was told, was “derisory, barely polite.” And the reason for the public contempt consistently shown Bellinger by the legal community is simple: He finds it impossible to condemn torture. No legal adviser before him had any problem with that proposition. Alas, Bellinger is responsible for defending the posture of the Bush Administration, which “does not torture,” except, of course, when it tortures with gusto.

Bellinger professed his defense of torture most recently in a debate with Professor Philippe Sands, one of Britain’s preeminent international-law authorities. And in so doing, Bellinger used almost exactly the same studied dodges and evasions that were used by Michael Mukasey in his recent appearance before a Senate committee, which suggests that they have now emerged as some fairly formal doctrine.

He goes on to quote at length from this speech, in which this high level legal counsel finds it impossible to condemn this torture even if inflicted on American soldiers.

These people who have built their entire movement on the backs of the troops have so twisted themselves into a moral pretzel that they have no choice left but to officially declare that it’s legal to torture them too.

Unbelievable.

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“I’m not saying we won’t get our hair mussed”

by digby

Sure, there were a few problems, and my main man turned out to be a criminal, but hey, he knew how to get things done, if you know what I mean:

Giuliani has accepted responsibility for his role in Kerik’s embarrassing 2004 withdrawal as President Bush’s Homeland Security nominee after revelation of tax problems. Ethics questions and corruption allegations also have swirled around Kerik. But the former New York mayor said the results of the commissioner’s time in New York far outweigh isolated incidences.

“Bernie Kerik worked for me while I was mayor of New York City. There were mistakes made with Bernie Kerik. But what’s the ultimate result for the people of New York City? The ultimate result for the people of New York City was a 74 percent reduction in shootings, a 60 percent reduction in crime, a correction program that went from being one of the worst in the country to one that was on ’60 Minutes’ as the best in the country, 90 percent reduction of violence in the jails.”

“Sure, there were issues, but if I have the same degree of success and failure as president of the United States, this country will be in great shape,” Giuliani said.

Hey, you wanna make an omelette, sometimes you gotta break a few eggs, you know?

I’m finding myself more and more obsessed with the Giuliani campaign because it really appears to me that the Republicans may just nominate someone dumber than Bush and crazier than Cheney. And without the morals of either of them. How is that even possible?

Imagine this man in charge of the FBI during what he calls “wartime.”

In a way, Giuliani said, his own mistakes just show how experienced he is.

“When you do a lot of things, there are more things where you’ve made mistakes,” he said. “Anybody running for president that hasn’t made their share of mistakes is probably not ready to be president. The question is, in spite of the mistakes that you make, are most of your decisions correct?”

So you recommend a criminal to the most important law enforcement job in the country. It means you have the experience required to be president.

Update: And then there’s this. It seems he was for universal health coverage for five minutes after he got cancer and then was against it when he went into remission. Nice guy. But then he’s married to a saleswoman who once performed unnecessary surgery on live dogs to flog surgical instruments so what should I expect?

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