Month: February 2008

Tyrants

by dday

George Bush doesn’t want anyone sitting around and taking pictures with tyrants:

Sitting down at the table, having your picture taken with a tyrant such as Raul Castro, for example, lends the status of the office and the status of our country to him. He gains a lot from it by saying, look at me, I’m now recognized by the President of the United States.

Except, of course, him. Bush has personally met with the leaders of human rights-abusing countries like Russia, China, Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan, the latter of whom likes to boil his political opponents alive. And there are all kinds of pictures.

And not only has Bush taken pictures, he’s openly supported such tyrants, even when it angers the population of that country.

The Bush administration’s continued backing of President Pervez Musharraf, despite the overwhelming rejection of his party by voters this month, is fueling a new level of frustration in Pakistan with the United States.

That support has rankled the public, politicians and journalists here, inciting deep anger at what is perceived as American meddling and the refusal of Washington to embrace the new, democratically elected government. John D. Negroponte, the deputy secretary of state, said Thursday during a Senate panel hearing that the United States would maintain its close ties to Mr. Musharraf.

Pakistanis say the Bush administration is grossly misjudging the political mood in Pakistan and squandering an opportunity to win support from the Pakistani public for its fight against terrorism. The opposition parties that won the Feb. 18 parliamentary elections say they are moderate and pro-American. By working with them, analysts say, Washington could gain a vital, new ally.

Bush obviously feels very at home with tyrants, especially those who don’t listen to their citizens, crush dissent and pursue their own agendas. Curious, no?

I guess Bush is also opposed to his looking in the mirror.

…incidentally, nothing can help Barack Obama more than having this President make political attacks against him. If I were Obama I’d run an ad just showing Bush making the attacks over and over. You could be looking at a landslide if Mr. 19% keeps this up.

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Murmurs of Another Cave?

by dday

I was just about to write a post about how the Democrats were getting some backbone. This week we’ve had Nancy Pelosi pursuing contempt of Congress citations for Josh Bolten and Harriet Miers strenuously, Democrats in the Senate holding firm on a proposal to reverse bankruptcy laws to protect homeowners subject to foreclosure, and House oversight investigators even forcing John Ashcroft to testify over no-bid contracts awarded to the US Attorney for New Jersey Chris Christie. And in the face of a ridiculous series of attacks by the White House and right-wing groups over FISA, the Democrats appeared to be unafraid.

Except:

To break an impasse over legislation overhauling the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, House Democratic leaders are considering the option of taking up a Senate-passed FISA bill in stages, congressional sources said today. Under the plan, the House would vote separately on the first title of the bill, which authorizes surveillance activities, and then on the bill’s second title, which grants retroactive legal immunity to telecommunications companies that aided the Bush administration’s warrantless electronic surveillance activities. The two would be recombined, assuming passage of both titles. In this way, Democratic leaders believe they can give an out to lawmakers opposed to the retroactive immunity provision. Republican leadership sources said their caucus would back such a plan because not only would it give Democratic leaders the out they need, it would provide a political win for the GOP. It remains to be seen if such a move will placate liberal Democrats who adamantly oppose giving in to the Bush administration on the immunity issue.

House Speaker Pelosi said that Democrats hope to have a solution worked out by March 8. But she also indicated that Democrats want language included in the bill that would clarify that FISA is the exclusive means under which the government can conduct electronic surveillance. The White House and some congressional Republicans have argued that the 2001 authorization of military force to launch the war on terrorism gave Bush the authority to conduct warrantless electronic surveillance. They also say the president has inherent constitutional authority to do what is necessary to protect the country. Senators have battled over whether to include so-called exclusivity language in their FISA bill. In the end, an amendment from Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., that states FISA is the exclusive means for conducting electronic surveillance failed to win a needed 60 votes in a roll call that split mainly along party lines.

This has all the makings of a trial balloon, being floated to see what the membership and the outside issue groups think. The ACLU is, um, not pleased.

We vehemently oppose the Senate’s Title 1 that allows mass, untargeted surveillance of every communication coming into and going out of the United States . If the House is to take up the measure, we greatly hope that important safeguards are built back in far above and beyond “exclusivity.” There really is no benefit to declaring FISA the exclusive foreign intelligence surveillance law if it allows the AG and DNI to singlehandedly decide when tap innocent Americans on American soil.

This should be really simple. The telecoms knowingly broke the law. They shouldn’t be taken off the hook for doing so. And FISA is perfectly fine to protect the country from terrorists while respecting civil liberties. The President is a reviled figure and his bleatings have produced little or no momentum in the public. There’s simply no reason to do this.

Peter Sussman, a plaintiff in two of the lawsuits against phone companies, writes in the Sacramento Bee about how this deal would be un-American.

After Saddam Hussein was executed, President Bush reassured the world that the Iraqi dictator received “a fair trial – the kind of justice he denied victims of his brutal regime.”

The Bush administration has similarly promoted “the rule of law” and “an independent judiciary” for countries such as Cuba, Burma and Iran.

Yet that same president is pressuring Congress to deny Americans our day in court before an independent judiciary by repealing the rules of law that guarantee the right to sue a private company for illegal infringements on our privacy rights […]

Before Congress is sucked into this rhetorical swamp, consider that AT&T and other phone companies that buckled to secret administration demands for our records had a legal alternative: They could have insisted that the administration first obtain the court order that they – or their corporate attorneys – knew was necessary. That’s what another large phone company apparently did, demonstrating more respect for the rule of law than AT&T apparently has. AT&T would have been legally obligated to respond to a valid warrant, saving “millions of lives” at that “very moment.”

Instead, AT&T chose to violate federal and state law.

I and my fellow plaintiffs don’t stand to win any money through our lawsuit, much less billions of dollars, but we do hope to assure governmental accountability, to open to public scrutiny the actions of corporations and government that have teamed up to deny citizens the rights guaranteed by law.

Your House member needs a phone call. There is no public constituency demanding that the phone companies get amnesty. The “rule of law,” pro-Constitution constituency must rule the day.

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They Weren’t Raised To Be Writers

by digby

Via Atrios, I see that Rove’s Christian right liaison is a plagiarist. But we shouldn’t be surprised:

Goeglein recalled a dinner party that he and his wife recently attended in Northwest. Out of the six couples around the table, Goeglein and his wife were the only Republicans.

As is inevitably the case, he said, the conversation soon turned to the couples’ children — most 5 or 6 years old — and aspirations for their future occupations. One parent said editor; another, publisher; a third wanted the child to go into education.

“I was intrigued by the question, and the answers of every one of our Democratic friends,” Goeglein said. Not one parent, he said, gave an answer that would be more typical of Republicans. “Our party, in the way it is constituted, we think of medicine, we think of law, we think of business. We don’t think, gee, I hope my son grows up to be a great playwright or painter or poet,” he explained.

In their party, “the way it’s constituted,” they believes that stealing other people’s work leaves time for more important, useful, pursuits. Like gaming the system, rigging the game and pillaging the treasury. Being all prissy about silly pursuits like writing and editing and publishing is for girly-men, not heroic Randian businessmen and deeply religious party hacks. It would be more embarrassing for a real Republican to write his own words than be caught stealing another’s.

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Our Prison Problem

by dday

This story in the New York Times today just broke my heart.

For the first time in the nation’s history, more than one in 100 American adults is behind bars, according to a new report.

Nationwide, the prison population grew by 25,000 last year, bringing it to almost 1.6 million. Another 723,000 people are in local jails. The number of American adults is about 230 million, meaning that one in every 99.1 adults is behind bars.

Incarceration rates are even higher for some groups. One in 36 Hispanic adults is behind bars, based on Justice Department figures for 2006. One in 15 black adults is, too, as is one in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34.

If you add in those on parole or probation, you’re probably up to 1 in 50 Americans involved in the prison system.

The full Pew report is here (PDF), and it’s really an eye-opener. I cover prison policy issues fairly extensively at Calitics, as the Golden State has one of the worst, if not the worst, prison system in the entire country. Most people are familiar with the heinous “three-strikes” sentencing law passed by voters in 1994 (one of the great victories of ALEC, the conservative movement’s legislative arm that is designed to push these kinds of policies through the states), but that was just the most extreme example of a thirty-year trend toward increasing sentencing laws; in fact, in those thirty years the state legislature passed over 1,000 laws increasing sentencing for all manner of crimes, and not ONE reducing sentencing. As a result, state prisons are woefully overcrowded, the nonviolent offenders who enter them don’t get treatment or job placement or rehabilitation but essentially a college-level program in how to commit violent crime, and this facilitates the nation’s worst recidivism rate. So incarcerating more and more citizens does not make anyone safer; in fact, it has the opposite effect.

This is not a problem isolated to California, as the Pew report shows. It is, however, driven by the same factors.

In exploring such alternatives, lawmakers are learning that current prison growth is not driven primarily by a parallel increase in crime, or a corresponding surge in the population at large. Rather, it flows principally from a wave of policy choices that are sending more lawbreakers to prison and, through popular “three-strikes” measures and other sentencing enhancements, keeping them there longer. Overlaying that picture in some states has been the habitual use of prison stays to punish those who break rules governing their probation or parole. In California, for example, such violators make up a large proportion of prison admissions, churning in and out of badly overloaded facilities. Nationally, more than half of released offenders are back in prison within three years, either for a new crime or for violating the terms of their release.

Nothing makes a local legislator smile more than being able to go back to his home district and tell them that he or she just passed a bill to protect their children. It’s a bipartisan problem, this disease of having to be seen as “Tough on Crime.” But the electoral benefits are just a segment of this. The real issue is the rise of the prison-industrial complex, which at the state level is approaching the power of the military-industrial complex at the national level. For many towns in America, building a prison is tantamount to building a factory in the 1950s. Without a solid manufacturing base, having a stable industry that can create jobs, both inside the prison and in the ancillary businesses catering to it (food and lodging for visitors and support services for families, for example), is very compelling. PBS did an episode of P.O.V. on this phenomenon of “prison towns” last year. This provides a boost to local economies, but at a cost.

Stories like these are increasingly common in rural America where, during the 1990s, a prison opened every 15 days. The United States now has the dubious distinction of incarcerating more people per capita than any other country in the world. Yet this astonishing jailing of America has been little noted because many of the prisons have opened in remote areas like Susanville. “Prison Town, USA” examines one of the country’s biggest prison towns, a place where a new correctional economy encompasses not only prisoners, guards and their families, but the whole community.

Nestled in the picturesque foothills of the California Sierras, Susanville once thrived on logging, ranching and agriculture. Even today, the town offers a postcard image of small-town America under majestic peaks — if you keep the prisons out of the frame. Susanville, along with much of rural America, has seen its local agricultural economy go the way of the family farm. And like other communities that don’t want to become ghost towns, Susanville decided to take a chance on the only industry that came calling — California’s burgeoning prison system, hungry for space, new guards and low visibility.

And when sentencing laws eventually produce an overwhelming fiscal burden on the state (the cost of housing prisoners has jumped from $10 billion in 1987 to $44 billion last year), there aren’t many choices: cut education or health care or social services to compensate, or contract the job out to private for-profit industry to reduce the expense. Of course, then those industries become reliant on “new customers” for their bottom line, and legislators are again pressured into increasing sentences, and the death spiral continues. There is a direct line between the campaign donations of the private prison industry and the states with the strictest sentencing laws.

The prison privatization trend is finally on the wane, as lawmakers begin to understand that government actually can be more efficient if the remove the interest of filling the jails from the equation. (Although, just last year Governor Schwarzenegger produced a video attempting to entice inmates into moving into private facilities to help reduce overcrowding. It was eventually ruled unconstitutional.)

There are actually other ways to look at this issue, and the latest trend is starting in Red America.

Kansas and Texas are well on their way. Facing daunting projections of prison population growth, they have embraced a strategy that blends incentives for reduced recidivism with greater use of community supervision for lower-risk offenders. In addition, the two states increasingly are imposing sanctions other than prison for parole and probation violators whose infractions are considered “technical,” such as missing a counseling session. The new approach, born of bipartisan leadership, is allowing the two states to ensure they have enough prison beds for violent offenders while helping less dangerous lawbreakers become productive, taxpaying citizens.

This, incidentally, is one area in which Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius, a Democrat, has been so effective. Getting the Kansas legislature to move in this direction must have been a monumental task.

We desperately need a more progressive prison policy that recognizes the actual intention of imprisonment, to rehabilitate and return the jailed back to society with opportunities for advancement. Locking the problem offenders away for longer and longer hasn’t worked. Sentencing that focuses on treatment, and which pairs tougher sentences to actual risk, is far preferable. Chris Bowers calls this one of the untouchable symptoms that lawmakers have to this point been loath to challenge. But the cost has become too high to ignore. I think it’s an area where a more transformational politics would be a godsend.

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Transformative Politics

by digby

I have a new post up at The Big Con today about what transformative politics really are — and how the political establishment will try to stop it.

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William Buckley And The Tattooing Of AIDS Patients: A Correction

by tristero

Yesterday, in reminding folks that William Buckley had once called for the tattooing of AIDS sufferers, I mentioned that I heard he had changed his mind after hearing that his pal Roy Cohn was dying of AIDS.

Well, if “the father of modern conservatism” had decided that it was just a little too reminiscent of The Final Solution to suggest that the unhealthy be tatooed, then Buckley reverted to his first instinct towards the end of his life (ht, RP in comments):

The objective is to identify the carrier, and to warn his victim. Someone, 20 years ago, suggested a discreet tattoo the site of which would alert the prospective partner to the danger of proceeding as had been planned. But the author of the idea was treated as though he had been schooled in Buchenwald, and the idea was not widely considered, but maybe it is up now for reconsideration.

A discreet tattoo. A discreet tattoo.

My God.

The Democratic Rules

by dday

If we had a press that applied the same rules to John McCain that it has to Democrats as of late…

You’d hear every Democratic strategist on the talking head shows, and direct questions to the candidate himself, about how he is America’s Worst Senator for Children. And sure, the number is a function of McCain missing so many votes – so what. That’s basically how Sen. Obama’s National Journal ratings were conceived, and as long as that is a fair data point, then so should this statistic from the Children’s Defense Fund. “Sen. McCain, why are you considered America’s Worst Senator for Children?”

We’d have constant questions asking McCain to renounce or reject or oppose or renouncereject or just say no to the support of John Hagee, a Biblical end-timer who believes that God caused Hurricane Katrina for its gay pride parades, that Muslims are programmed to kill nonbelievers, and that we must hasten the Rapture by invading every country in the Middle East. McCain should be asked about every single one of those statements and whether he explicitly supports them. I mean, I know Hagee’s not black, but you’d think his rhetoric of hate would be held to the same standard as Louis Farrakhan.

…my preference would actually be that all of these petty side issues be put in the proper context, and substantive reporting be prioritized. But you know, level playing field, and all that.

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The Stellar GOP Field

by dday

Yes, they’ve come up with another fantastic list of candidates for the 2008 election, fresh off of such 2006 luminaries as Mistress Strangler Don Sherwood, Frequent Frat Party Guest John Sweeney, and of course, Maf54. So who’s stepping up to the plate this year?

First off, we’ve got Stormin’ Norman Coleman, our favorite Brooklyn-born Senator from Minnesota, whose campaign sent out a form letter to the editor criticizing his potential opponent, our favorite Minnesota-born New York-born, Minnesota-bred challenger Al Franken. Problem was, his supporters sent it to multiple newspapers without changing the text whatsoever, leading the campaign to have to apologize for astroturfing.

A new entry for the GOP, a rising star if you will, is former University of Missouri running back Brock Olivo, who is running in the 9th District in Missouri. And hey, he’s got some qualifications:

“Not only was I football player, but I also was in social studies class, and I have a passion for how this country works,” Olivo said.

I actually have more of a problem with “not only was I a football player,” as if that should be part of the reason to elect him, but you know, not the WHOLE THING.

And then there’s the potential candidate in South Dakota’s Senate race, whose story is so deranged that it takes a whole column in The Hill to explain it:

Folks often joke about the blood-sucking parasites that infect politics, but the gibes about politicians and lobbyists are usually just that — jokes. Yet the charge gets uncomfortably close to being literal when discussing former South Dakota lieutenant governor and potential Senate candidate Steve Kirby.

Following the sale of his prominent Sioux Falls family’s surety bond company, Kirby branched out into more exotic business terrain when he founded Bluestern Venture Capital in 1992. Among Bluestern’s portfolio companies was a Massachusetts-based biotech firm called Collagenesis — a company whose business model couldn’t have been more foreign to the stolid world of South Dakota surety bonding.

Collagenesis specialized in processing donated skin off cadavers into cosmetic surgery products, and was subject to a blistering five-part investigative series by the Orange County Register beginning on April 17, 2000. “Burn victims lie waiting in hospitals as nurses scour the country for skin to cover their wounds, even though skin is in plentiful supply for plastic surgeons,” read the lede of the Register report. “The skin they need to save their lives is being used instead for procedures that could wait: supporting bladders, erasing laugh lines and enlarging penises.”

Suffice it to say that penis enlargement represented a slight departure from the Kirby family’s traditional business of bonding hard-working Sioux Falls mason contractors.

That’s almost fictional, given its metaphorical possibilities: a Republican literally profiting off the skins of the dead.

These are the best and the brightest, people. And somehow John Boehner thinks it surprising that his comrades can’t get off their dead asses and raise money for this gang.

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Cokie’s Law

by digby

Chris Matthews today:

John McCain runs afoul of right wing radio hosts. Again. As has been the case throughout this election season, going to war with the right. Is he gonna come down in the middle like Harry Truman? It may be the smart move for him to have some enemies on the right as well as the left.

It may be the brilliant, triangulization of John McCain.

Hmmm. From C&L:

Yesterday one of the big stories was when walkie-talkie Bill Cunningham voraciously attacked Barack Obama warming up a crowd for John McCain. He was so over the top that supposedly the McMaverick campaign told John about his performance and after the crowd left—McCain apologized to Obama. Cunningham was so incensed over being repudiated by McCain that he pulled the Limbaugh trick of saying he’s now supporting Hillary Clinton.

Cunningham: His people told me to give the faithful red meat. Give them red—raw—meat.

A reader reminded me of something I’d written back when this campaign was in its paleolithic era many millennia ago, about the way the right wing works this stuff:

Karl Rove is smiling this morning. Wolf Blitzer just used a clip from Rove’s appearance on C-SPAN last week in which he said that Barack Obama looked weak because he failed to confront Hillary Clinton on the fact that she and her husband could release all their records with a phone call and they refuse.

We’ve been over this. He’s a liar and he’s simply tickling an ear worm they developed four years ago when they accused John Kerry of not “releasing his records.” The claim is bullshit, and FactCheck.org has the explanation right here. The whole phony issue (which Tim Russert happily ran with on the previous debate) is a manufactured GOP smear featured prominently on the RNC website.

But notice how Rove does it. He not only makes the Clintons look they’re hiding something, he does it by claiming that Obama is weak. It’s a twofer.

In this case, McCain not only gets these insults against both Democratic candidates aired over and over again, he makes himself look good for “repudiating” it. It’s “out there” which is the best of all possible worlds.

Those of us who’ve been following the mores of the Village for a while will also recognize this gambit as an example of “Cokie’s Law.”

“At this point,” said Roberts, “it doesn’t much matter whether she said it or not because it’s become part of the culture. I was at the beauty parlor yesterday and this was all anyone was talking about.”

The media have been playing those insults of Obama and Clinton over and over again on a loop — along with that straight talking flyboy angrily dismissing the comments. The media gave him high marks for his integrity, as usual. Today, they are calling it a brilliant “triangulization” strategy. Talk about a win-win-win for McCain.

Matthews: I think McCain can pick up three votes for very vote he loses on the right, because I think you’re right, the right will vote and I also think those suburbs are looking for a candidate still. That’s why we keep hearing about Bloomberg.

Right. When the GOP has failed on a massive level in every possible way and all indications are that Democrats are on the verge of winning the presidency and expanding their congressional majority with a popular policy agenda, it’s really an expression of a deep national yearning for maverick Republican leadership and Democratic bipartisanship.

Update: From the comments comes an apt analogy, which I missed. Cunningham is this season’s Sistah Soljah.

Update II: Another one from the comments, by Joe:

Yeah, so the “twofer” triangulated by McCain produces a really, really grotesque effect: McCain is transformed into the “true” postracial, principled candidate, while Obama is smeared as “the black” or “the Muslim” candidate (see AP article linked to at TPM) and Clinton is smeared as the unprincipled, win-at-all-costs candidate. Both Democrats smeared, regardless of who wins the nomination, and McCain clean as an _Irish_ (Russertian) whistle.

yeah.

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Say What You Want About William F. Buckley…

by tristero

but his ideas were more repugnant than a bad case of halitosis:

Everyone detected with AIDS should be tatooed in the upper forearm, to protect common-needle users, and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals.

I understand that, after hearing that a friend of his, the odious Roy Cohn, had contracted AIDS, he changed his mind. Fair enough, but most of us sober up and think better of our most repellent ideas before publishing them in the first place.

Spectacularly rotten judment combined with a gratuitously violent nastiness. Those are William F. Buckley’s most influential bequests to the conservative movement. And every day they do homage to these character traits, and indeed, to his entire enormous legacy of pretentious snobbery, bigotry, homophobia, and stupidity.

I would tell you what I really think of Buckley but I thought I would go easy today.