Month: June 2008

FISA Zombie

by digby

HOUSE CHAIRMAN OPEN TO REPUBLICAN COMPROMISE ON FISA

The House Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat disclosed late Tuesday that he is ready to accept a Republican-brokered deal to rewrite the nation’s electronic surveillance laws, signaling that a long-running congressional impasse could soon be coming to an end.

House Intelligence Chairman Silvestre Reyes told CongressDaily that he is “fine” with language offered by Senate Intelligence ranking member Christopher (Kit) Bond and other Republicans to overhaul the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Notably, the GOP language, which was offered a day before the recent congressional recess, would leave it up to the secret FISA court to grant retroactive legal immunity to telecommunications companies that have helped the Bush administration conduct electronic surveillance on the communications of U.S. citizens without warrants.

About 40 civil lawsuits already have been filed against the companies. The administration, Bond and other Republicans had backed a Senate-passed FISA bill that would have shielded the telecom firms from the lawsuits upon enactment.

“It’s about finding middle ground and we have middle ground,” Reyes said of the compromise offered by Republicans. “It’s not going to please everyone but let’s get on with it.”

Reyes said he believes enough Democrats will support the proposal to pass it in the House. But he said House Majority Leader Hoyer told him that House Democratic leaders want to have the liability of the telecoms reviewed in federal district court as opposed to the FISA court.

A senior Reyes aide clarified his boss’ positions by saying that while Reyes thinks Bond’s proposal is a positive one, he remains supportive of Hoyer’s efforts to improve on it.

A FISA reform bill passed by the House earlier this year would have had the cases heard in district court.

There just isn’t enough money at stake to explain this. Nobody’s suing for the money, they are suing for the discovery. Something bad happened here and the Democrats are helping the Republicans cover it up.

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First Draft

by digby

Here’s a pretty good example of the media’s early post game analysis of the primaries from Gary Langer of ABC. He outlines all the areas where the establishment believes the candidates are strong and weak (which means that even if they aren’t strong and weak in those areas, the candidates will be fighting the perception.)

Here’s the conclusion:

With the war (which McCain supports) unpopular, and the economy and broader outlook deeply negative, some analysts have been tempted to cast the general election as a slam-dunk for the Democrats. That’s not the case; depending on the poll, Obama leads McCain narrowly or not at all, and the two divide public preferences on issues and attributes alike. There are two fundamental reasons. One is that this is more a center-right than a center-left country. On average this year 34 percent of Americans have described themselves as conservatives, vs. 23 liberals. (What closes the gap is that moderates are more closely aligned with the Democratic Party.) The other is a generation-long trend in political party affiliation, which, despite ups and downs, has been in the Republicans’ favor. On average in 1981, when ABC News started polling, Americans were 13 points more apt to call themselves Democrats than Republicans. So far this year, it’s been 9 points. The Republicans did even better — absolute parity with the Democrats — in 2003, before public views of the war and then the economy went sour, prompting an exodus from the president and his party.

That’s an interesting way of looking at it, don’t you think? Americans have been more apt to call themselves Democrats than Republicans for decades, and the fact that Democrats have gained nearly ten points in just four years means the country is — still center right. Isn’t it always?

There is a lot of interesting information in this article. Some of it is even correct. But the facts recounted in it aren’t as important as the conclusions which will, in my view, be the ones that dominate the media’s coverage starting tomorrow.

That leaves us with the last wildcard of 2008, George W. Bush. If the Democrats make the election a referendum on his presidency, they gain a vast advantage. If, instead, it’s a post-Bush election, all bets are off.

It’s not that simple, but they will say it is. McCain is very good at promoting himself as a maverick and they love him for it. They will be anxious to portray this as a post-Bush election because the Bush years are an indictment of them too, (as we’ve seen during this little drama over Scott McClellan pointing out that the sky is indeed, blue.) I don’t think it’s going to be as hard for him to make himself into a “change” candidate as people think it is.

But there is plenty to work with. Obama doesn’t have to run against McCain the Bush clone. I think he needs to run against Republicanism. Right now there is no more loathed brand name in America.

Update: Thomas Edsall recounts the fascinating tale of how the reformers of the 60s and 70s created the nominating system under which Obama won.

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Luckie Duckie Black People

by dday

It takes a special dementia and a deep-seated sense of aggrievement to come up with this statement:

On the June 2 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio program, while discussing Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy, Rush Limbaugh asserted that the Democratic Party was “go[ing] with a veritable rookie whose only chance of winning is that he’s black.”

I think we can take a look at the 230-year record of African-Americans in the electoral arena and make a decent judgment on this one. But this is standard-issue Nixonland backlash stuff. “The blacks” get the jobs, the government handouts, the special treatment, and now they’re being handed the Presidency. That’s the particular view of the world that Limbaugh is endorsing here. The Republican Party, demoralized and frustrated, is hoping to rile up the country with an identity politics-based campaign intended to speak to white people as a captive, persecuted minority against the big, bad un-American black majority waiting to install themselves in the White House and send every Caucasian to a re-education camp. As Jesse Taylor (welcome back!) at Pandagon writes, by the end of this campaign…

Obama is going to become Blackazoid, the Nubian Avenger, here to right all the perceived wrongs black people illegitimately feel were heaped on them since we solved racism in 1963. Reparations? He wants them. Islam? Prepare to pay a prayer mat fee for your kids’ next school year. I can’t wait to hear the shit we didn’t even know was racist – did you know Obama wants to put elastic bands on all our pants? And ban straws?

Blackness is about to become the best privilege imaginable, and stories of disadvantaged white people the new currency of the Republican realm.

This is inevitable, and as the election grows closer it’s only going to get more overtly offensive.

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Can The Iraqis Save Iraq?

by dday

A unified front is forming in Iraq among Sunnis and Shiites, opposed to the terms of the draft of a long-term security agreement to keep US forces in the country. Muqtada al-Sadr tapped into a populist rejection of the US occupation and the Iraqi government, for now, is playing hardball.

Iraq’s chief spokesman acknowledged differences with the United States over a proposed long-term security agreement and pledged yesterday that the government will protect Iraqi sovereignty in ongoing talks with the Americans.

Chief government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said that the Iraqi negotiators have a “vision and a draft that is different” from the Americans’ but that the talks, which began in March, were still in an early stage.

“There is great emphasis by the Iraqi government on fully preserving the sovereignty of Iraq in its lands, skies, waters and its internal and external relations,” Dabbagh said. “The Iraqi government will not accept any article that infringes on sovereignty and does not guarantee Iraqi interests.”

If we reach December without an agreement, the US presence in Iraq would actually be illegal. And this is not just a Sadrist movement – Shiite clerics from Maliki’s own party are publicly opposing the agreement.

While US negotiators claim that they have no interest in permanent bases in Iraq, they are asking for freedom of movement throughout the whole country, and the right to fly in Iraqi air space up to 29,000 feet. Juan Cole notes that they want to be able to arrest and detain any Iraqi they deem to represent a threat to security, and full immunity protection in Iraqi courts for military personnel and contractors. And the contract proposals that have been signed in recent weeks show the desire for a continuing presence, and it’s not too hard for the Iraqis to catch on to this.

The contracts call for new spending, from supplying mentors to officials with Iraq’s Defense and Interior ministries to establishing a U.S.-marshal-type system to protect Iraqi courts. Contractors would provide more than 100 linguists with secret clearances and deliver food to Iraqi detainees at a new, U.S.-run prison.

The proposals reflect multiyear commitments. The mentor contract notes that the U.S. military “desires for both Ministry of Interior and Ministry of Defense to become mostly self-sufficient within two years,” a time outside some proposals for U.S. combat troop withdrawal. The mentors sought would “advise, train [and] assist . . . particular Iraqi officials” who work in the Ministry of Defense, which runs the Iraqi army, or the Ministry of Interior, which runs the police and other security units.

The mentors will assist an U.S. military group that previously began to implement what are described as “core processes and systems,” such as procurement, contracting, force development, management and budgeting, and public affairs.

Mentors would have to make a one-year commitment, with options for two one-year contracts after that. As a reminder of what they are getting into, the mentors must supply their helmets, protective body armor and gas masks, according to the announcement.

The marshals service would be organized by the State Department’s bureau responsible for developing rule of law programs in Iraq. It “has plans to create an Iraqi service to be known as the Judicial Protection Service (JPS), modeled to some degree after the U.S. Marshals Service, that will ensure the safe conduct of judicial proceedings and protect judges, witnesses, court staff, and court facilities,” a notice published last month said.

State’s plan is to hire a contractor as a judicial security program manager, who would work out details of how such a service could be put together for the Iraqis. That person or group would develop not only the mission, size and structure of an Iraqi JPS service, but also the personnel, budgeting and training materials necessary, plus “all other aspects of creating the new organization so that the project can be contracted out.”

In short, State wants a contractor to put together all the elements so the department can contract the project to another contractor.

The occupation is big money. All these middlemen and contractors and sub-contractors are getting rich. Byron Dorgan is running a one-man crusade to try and put an end to the waste and the profiteering, but if the United States remains in Iraq, there will be big pots of money to be had by corporate interests. And in addition, there’s clearly an effort to pry open Iraq’s natural resources and allow the oil companies to come in and add to their fortunes. The only entity committed to putting a halt to this seems to be the Iraqi people.

US officials still expect to wrap up the negotiations by July, and I’m sure the cheerleader-in-chief is whispering entreaties like “Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out! We are not blinking!” in their ears. It’s kind of sad that the Iraqis are standing in their way instead of the supposed opposition party in this country, which has slightly more ability to oppose.

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Fear Of Bush

by tristero

In his latest column, Dan Froomkin does discuss that the press was disgracefully out to lunch in the run-up to the disaster known as the Bush/Iraq war, covering the march to war rather than critically examining whether the war was either a good idea or necessary. But nowhere does he mention one of the crucial reasons why, because doing so would come a bit too close to exposing – to coin a phrase – an inconvenient truth.

The fact of the matter is that by November, 2001 Bush decided – for whatever passel of reasons you care to muster – that he would invade and occupy Iraq. To be explicit, Bush made it quite clear to all and sundry that if they stood in the way of his war, he would not only destroy critics personally. That went without saying. Going further, Bush was prepared to provoke an overt constitutional crisis if, say, Congress voted against the war.

What provided this amount of power was Bush’s insanely high approval ratings after 9/11, which the press had done its level best to abet. (In reality, the Bush administration was criminally negligent in deliberately shifting its attention away from bin Laden in the first nine months of the Bush regime. But the press portrayed 9/11 as some kind of weird triumphal moment for Bush rather than the spectacular failure it really was.) Fortified by those approval ratings, an administration that believed itself possessing dictatorial powers literally dictated to Congress and press what was going to happen. And what would happen if they opposed the administration.

Not only careers were on the line, but the fate of the US as a democratic republic. People were scared and acceded to Bush’s demands. They probably assumed that Bush’s will to power was limited to this one war, and that he would accept the limits the Constitution places on the president’s power in other ways – remember, this was before people understood exactly what Guantanamo was and Abu Ghraib was close to unimaginable. They were wrong.

Bush was not joking when he said it would be easier if the US was a dictatorship with himself as dictator. So he’s made it easier on himself, and we are now living in a a country whose fundamental principles bear only the vaguest relationship to what they were 8 years ago. Today, you can be arrested without any cause – and imprisoned indefinitely = on the whim of the president, you can be charged and convicted of crimes without ever seeing the evidence against you. Your telephone company can, and has, turned over to the government wiretaps on private citizens that were ordered merely on the president’s say-so. Call this system of government whatever you want, anything but American democracy.

Given the atmosphere of government intimidation back in 2002/2003, the press and Congress’s behavior of appeasement of Bush is understandable but it remains inexcusable. When danger reared its ugly head, they turned the other way and fled. Yet, many of us knew as early as the 2000 recount what the true nature of the Bush administration would be. We, too, were scared, but many of us felt compelled to speak out, and millions marched in protest as Bush pursued his mad war.

Yet, today, those protests – the largest in history! – are all but forgotten. And, in the press, those who obeyed Bush’s demands still have their jobs, cheek to jowl with those who got the Bush/Iraq war completely wrong. We can, fairly rapidly, punish elected officials for their craven votes in favor of the war in 2002 – Clinton may have lost crucial support, for example, because of hers. But changing the media will take concerted effort, and a lot of time.

A lot of time.

Martyr McCain

by digby

SteveAudio responds to tristero’s observation that McCain’s problem with Hagee is that it reveals a craven side to McCain’s character — for seeking out his endorsement and then equivocating when his bigotry was revealed for all to see.

Steve writes:

Here’s the point Tristero misses, which is the idiot-savant genius of McCain’s campaign: No one on the right, NO ONE, cares about Hagee, with the possible exception of a few moderate genuine conservatives, that is. All 3 of them.

But the far-right Evangelical end-times Christians, for whom Hagee is a dog whistle the size of a Marshall stack, will still support McCain, even more now than before. Not only is he a “true believer” by courting and wedding Hagee, but now he’s been bloodied by the secular humanists that threaten the Christian way of life. His rejection of Hagee’s support isn’t a betrayal of Hagee’s prophecy, but a tactical retreat in the face of the abortionists, school desegregationists and gay-marriage supporters whose defeat his administration will hopefully bring about. And thus is a stronger hero born.

I hadn’t actually thought of it that way, but McCain being “forced” to repudiate Hagee actually reinforces the Christian Right’s feelings of victimization at the hands of the secular majority. It’s entirely possible that this will strengthen McCain among some of the Christian Right. They live for that stuff.

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Liars Or Fools

by digby

From Crooks and Liars comes this gem from Byron York on Fox News Sunday:

York: … I think the thing that kind of distinguishes McClellan is he was amazingly naive and his belief that George W. Bush would kind of bring us all together which was why he comes to Washington. Uh, if you remember that conference where Bush is asked to name a mistake that he’s made. And he gives an awful performance. He can’t name a mistake and this is terrible. And, but Bush realizes, and he told McClellan, he said look if I name a mistake my enemies are just going to keep pushing for more and more and more. And McClellan doesn’t see if that way. He actually writes in the book “I believe that by embracing openness and forthrightness, he could have, it could have redeemed him. It could have transcended partisanship and brought together leaders of both parties to try to consensus his way forward on Iraq. (crosstalk)

That is a naive point of view.

Yeah, It’s hard to figure out where anyone got the idea that Bush was that kind of guy. As C&L points out:

Bush used the phrase I’m a uniter not a divider, over and over again.

I believe all laws and public policy should support strong families. I believe in individual responsibility, that all individuals are responsible for their actions and decisions. A responsible leader sets a clear agenda and brings people together to achieve it. Responsible leadership sets a tone of civility and bipartisanship that gets things done. I am a uniter, not a divider and, as the governor of Texas, that is how I have led. It is how I will lead in the White House. Finally, together we can give this nation a fresh start after a season of cynicism. In that spirit, I make this pledge to you, the American people: Next January, when I put my hand on the Bible, I will swear not only to uphold the laws of our land, I will swear to uphold the honor and dignity of the office to which I have been elected, so help me God.

Perhaps the most touching speech of this kind was the night of the Supreme Court decision, when he promised to “lead the entire nation” and work across the aisle in the spirit of reconciliation after a disputed election result. it was very heartwarming.

Of course many of us weren’t buying, considering what we knew about how the Republicans play politics, but there were a few who did. And nearly all of them were addled Village gasbags like Richard Cohen:

“Given the present bitterness, given the angry irresponsible charges being hurled by both camps, the nation will be in dire need of a conciliator, a likable guy who will make things better and not worse. That man is not Al Gore. That man is George W. Bush.”

That worked out really well.

Scott McClellan apparently didn’t realize that his boss and mentor George W. Bush was a baldfaced liar. He was a naive true believer. The real question is why the Villagers were so taken in by what nearly half the country could see was an anti-intellectual manchild with a mean streak a mile wide? Are they baldfaced liars too or just naive fools like Scott McClellan? They are one or the other — and either makes them unfit to be political commentators.

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Dirt Diggers

by digby

The Center For Public Integrity is doing a four-part series on dirty politics this cycle which is probably a good primer to prepare us for what we are going to be seeing over the next few months. Of particular note is the one that focuses on the Republican primary, which reminds us just how lethal these people really are. Even to each other:

Rudy Giuliani also experienced this phenomenon before he withdrew from the race. In late November 2007, Iowa Republicans started receiving an e-mail titled “Giuliani and his Pedophile Friends.” The e-mail read, “If Rudy becomes president, is he planning on putting people like Catholic priest Msgr. Alan Placa in his Cabinet? I hope not! Remember Fr. Placa when you go to the caucuses, and make sure your friends know, too!” (In 2003, a grand jury in Suffolk County, New York, accused a “Priest F” of child molestation and of covering up sexual abuse by other priests, but did not indict any of them because too much time had passed for the alleged offenses to be prosecuted. Placa, a longtime Giuliani friend who now works for Giuliani’s consulting firm, acknowledged that the grand jury report was referring to him and stepped down from active service as a priest, but he denies the substance of the allegations.)

The e-mail was made to look as if a prominent backer of Mitt Romney had sent it. It was a classic dirty trick: a smear that delivers a one-two punch by disseminating negative information about one candidate while making another candidate look bad for launching a smear, even one that is substantiated by facts.

Similar attacks were going on in New Hampshire, where the state attorney general is investigating allegations that anonymous telemarketers called state residents asking whether they knew, among other things, that then-frontrunner Romney is a Mormon and that he spent the Vietnam War in France as a missionary. The calls mentioned John McCain favorably, suggesting that he’d arranged for calls disguised as an opinion poll but whose intent was to smear. McCain vehemently denied this, a denial made believable because of his own experience of similar though more malicious and false attacks on him during his race against Bush during the South Carolina primary in 2000. Anonymous calls and e-mails suggested that he had fathered a black child out of wedlock, that his wife was a drug addict, and that he was mentally unstable.

The New Hampshire calls aimed at Romney were traced to a Utah telemarketing firm that has had various indirect ties to Romney himself and also had done work on behalf of Giuliani. But these calls were made at the behest of an Oregon firm, which told reporters that it was conducting legitimate opinion research, not a smear campaign. Nevertheless, it would not divulge the identity of its client. A spokesman for the state’s attorney general told the Center that, as of May 30, the office is “still in the midst of investigating” the matter.

According to The Politico today, the Drudge Report is a reliable, fair and balanced news service because it has given decent coverage to Obama over the past few months. (They fail to note the longstanding loathing and hatred for Hillary Clinton as a possible motivation, but whatever.) I would expect this meme to catch on because the media are desperate to rationalize their Drudge dependence as being something other than sophomoric gossip mongering. But it will, in the end, serve to validate the right wing smears that will make their way through the Drudge report. (Look for the inevitable “even the Obama supporting Drudge says …”)

The series notes that dirty politics have always been around and are as American as apple pie, as anyone who watched Paul Giamatti’s teeth rot out in HBO’s John Adams now knows if they didn’t before. But the party of Richard Nixon has created a new art form, which they are refining with every technological advance at their disposal.

Update: Also, this article on Roger Stone by Jeffry Toobin in the New Yorker is not to be missed.

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Wooden Ships, On The Water, (Not) Very Free

by dday

Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric, once said that his ideal factory would be situated on a barge, so it could be “hauled around the world to law-wage areas, where it could operate without labor rules, environmental protections or other standards.” The US government under Bush and Cheney took it one step further – the ideal prison would be on a ship, where they could best avoid human rights standards and laws.

The United States is operating “floating prisons” to house those arrested in its war on terror, according to human rights lawyers, who claim there has been an attempt to conceal the numbers and whereabouts of detainees.

Details of ships where detainees have been held and sites allegedly being used in countries across the world have been compiled as the debate over detention without trial intensifies on both sides of the Atlantic. The US government was yesterday urged to list the names and whereabouts of all those detained […]

Ships that are understood to have held prisoners include the USS Bataan and USS Peleliu. A further 15 ships are suspected of having operated around the British territory of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, which has been used as a military base by the UK and the Americans.

Reprieve will raise particular concerns over the activities of the USS Ashland and the time it spent off Somalia in early 2007 conducting maritime security operations in an effort to capture al-Qaida terrorists […]

The Reprieve study includes the account of a prisoner released from Guantánamo Bay, who described a fellow inmate’s story of detention on an amphibious assault ship. “One of my fellow prisoners in Guantánamo was at sea on an American ship with about 50 others before coming to Guantánamo … he was in the cage next to me. He told me that there were about 50 other people on the ship. They were all closed off in the bottom of the ship. The prisoner commented to me that it was like something you see on TV. The people held on the ship were beaten even more severely than in Guantánamo.”

Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve’s legal director, said: “They choose ships to try to keep their misconduct as far as possible from the prying eyes of the media and lawyers. We will eventually reunite these ghost prisoners with their legal rights.

We have to remember that this Administration is run by a self-described “CEO President.” It should come as no surprise that they’re putting to use practices like offshoring, outsourcing, etc., to avoid American law. That’s why Guantanamo has been put into service and that’s the point of these ghost ships. Operating in secrecy and outside the auspices of the law, whether to avoid taxes or labor standards or the penalties for environmental degradation, is a tactic used often by the more psychopathic of corporations. This was about burying the evidence, hiding the extent of the abuse, and floating on that barge to hide away.

Your tax dollars at work.

Update: (from digby) An emailer writes in with this:

So one of the ships where this prisoner abuse is being perpetrated is named the USS Bataan? Does anyone else spot the irony there? The reason the name Bataan is remembered at all, even among non-WWII-history-buffs, is because of the notorious abuse of US and Filipino POWs there at the hands of the Imperial Japanese Army. And, why yes, funny you should ask, we did prosecute people for that in Tokyo after the war. I’m sure any such irony was completely lost on the Bushies.

Irony is not their strong suit.

PsychoPastor Hagee

by tristero

A few days ago, I wrote:

The crazy, far-right Hagee is no real friend to Israel and I suspect it is only a matter of time, if Lieberman persists on perpetuating Hagee’s national status by attending his wingdings, before more, and even less ambiguous, anti-semitic remarks from Hagee surface.

Well, lo and behold:

On March 16, 2003, on the eve of the United States’ invasion of Iraq, Pastor John Hagee took to the pulpit to warn of the coming Antichrist. In his sermon, “The Final Dictator,” Hagee described the Antichrist as a seductive figure with “fierce features.” He will be “a blasphemer and a homosexual,” the pastor announced. Then, Hagee boomed, “There’s a phrase in Scripture used solely to identify the Jewish people. It suggests that this man [the Antichrist] is at least going to be partially Jewish, as was Adolph Hitler, as was Karl Marx.”

This “fierce” gay Jew, according to Hagee, would “slaughter one-third of the Earth’s population” and “make Adolph Hitler look like a choirboy.”

That Hagee and/or his enablers are taken seriously in American politics these days is prime evidence that the Far Right has taken this country to a very sick, very dangerous place.

Lieberman surely knows plenty of clergy, of all faiths, who are both enthusiastic supporters of Israel and not anti-Semitic. For Lieberman to stoop so low as to associate himself with an anti-Semitic madman like Hagee – and continue to do so after being confronted again and again with evidence of his poisonous bigotry – displays a self-hate that itself borders on the pathological.