Month: June 2008

Official Bottomfeeder

by digby

Via Avedon Carol, I see that Jeff Gannon has a blog. It suggests that he’s an official blogger of the National Press Club. He isn’t, of course. When you look closely, it becomes clear that it isn’t officially affiliated with the organization. (Note the similarity between the urls.) But he’s sure made it look like it is, don’t you think?

Gannon weighed in last week, naturally, on the Larry Sinclair circus with this letter to Jane Hamsher:

Jane:

Didn’t you hear? I’ve been a member of the National Press Club for over two years and serve on two committees, Newsmakers and New Media.

There is no mystery about becoming the first exclusively online reporter to cover the White House on a daily basis for over two years. I even wrote a book about it: “The Great Media War: A Battlefield Report”
www.thegreatmediawar.com

Grow up and stop the defamation.

Cheers,
Jeff Gannon

The Press Club should probably look into this. Sinclair just rented a room. This guy is using their logo and their name to promote himself. And it turns out that it’s actually true that he’s on those two committees.

What’s up with the National Press Club?

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Cui Bono?

by digby

Hilzoy disagrees with my post just below, pointing out rightly that Democrats are not known for their fealty to their leader and positing that they may have sandbagged Obama on this. That’s certainly possible. But the reason I’m almost positive that this was an agreed upon strategy is that the House brought this to the floor when they didn’t have to. Sure, the Republicans were whining about it, but the Democrats had successfully fought that back in 2006. The politician who is most worried about attacks on his national security credentials and who has a stake in not having this be a thorny issue during his first term and who would possibly want to have these powers at his own disposal isn’t Nancy Pelosi. (He’s also the guy who has to exert his power in the Party after a very close primary race. He can’t put up with being sandbagged on something he really cares about)

Anyway, this is how Democrats always run for national office. Republicans are action, Dems are reaction, particularly when it comes to national security. They’ve already pounded Obama very hard for his debate statement that he’d talk to foreign dictators and the campaign knows that’s just the beginning. The “Muslim terrorist” drumbeat is all about making people feel uncomfortable with this exotic new guy’s ability to keep the country safe. Reacting to that by showing “strength” on issues like this is a choice I think the Democrats probably don’t have to make this time out — the Republican party is so damaged that I think their usual schtick isn’t going to work — but it’s hardly surprising.

This FISA compromise was orchestrated by Pelosi and Hoyer personally. It was not a conspiracy of Blue Dogs, as much as Hoyer may want people to believe it. There’s too much at stake in this election for the Dems to be doing end runs around the nominee and they know it.

Besides, they like to wait until we have a Democratic president before they start openly stabbing him in the back. They get a lot more credit and cachet from the Village press when it’s obvious that they are taking sides with the Republicans against their leader.

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Sistah Soljah’d ?

by digby

There’s lots of blogospheric angst today, and for good reason, around this FISA legislation. Senator Obama’s commitment to support the “compromise,”(while promising to “work” to remove the offensive telcom immunity) is a big disappointment.

I am tempted to say this is a Sistah Soljah moment, wherein Barack makes it clear to the Villagers that he is not one of the DFH’s, despite all their ardent support. Nothing is more associated with us than this issue. It may even make sense on some sort of abstract level. He’s obviously decided that he has to run to the right pretty hard to counteract that “most liberal Senator” label.

But, I actually have no idea what his motivation is any more than the rest of the Democrats, who seem stuck in some 2004 time warp, fighting the battle of Fallujah with Don Rumsfeld. He may genuinely think the legislation is good or just be afraid that the Republicans will use it against him. (I don’t think that’s going to help frankly — he voted against it last time and that’s all they need for the scare ads.) He does say that if he wins, he promises not to abuse the power it gives him, so I guess we should feel good about that.

I do know this: they would not have made this “compromise” and then brought this to the floor without his ok, and probably without his direction. He is the leader of the Democratic Party now, in the middle of a hotly contested presidential campaign. If he didn’t come to them and say to get this thing done before the fall, then they came to him and asked his permission. That’s just a fact. They aren’t going to do anything he doesn’t want them to do.

So, it’s not really a capitulation. It’s a strategy.

Update: Jack Balkin says Obama just wants the power as president. He may be right. That would also be a good reason to keep him from having it.

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No Hope Today

by dday

We live in a bipartisan surveillance state.

Statement of Senator Barack Obama on FISA Compromise

“Given the grave threats that we face, our national security agencies must have the capability to gather intelligence and track down terrorists before they strike, while respecting the rule of law and the privacy and civil liberties of the American people. There is also little doubt that the Bush Administration, with the cooperation of major telecommunications companies, has abused that authority and undermined the Constitution by intercepting the communications of innocent Americans without their knowledge or the required court orders.

“That is why last year I opposed the so-called Protect America Act, which expanded the surveillance powers of the government without sufficient independent oversight to protect the privacy and civil liberties of innocent Americans. I have also opposed the granting of retroactive immunity to those who were allegedly complicit in acts of illegal spying in the past.

“After months of negotiation, the House today passed a compromise that, while far from perfect, is a marked improvement over last year’s Protect America Act.

“Under this compromise legislation, an important tool in the fight against terrorism will continue, but the President’s illegal program of warrantless surveillance will be over. It restores FISA and existing criminal wiretap statutes as the exclusive means to conduct surveillance – making it clear that the President cannot circumvent the law and disregard the civil liberties of the American people. It also firmly re-establishes basic judicial oversight over all domestic surveillance in the future. It does, however, grant retroactive immunity, and I will work in the Senate to remove this provision so that we can seek full accountability for past offenses. But this compromise guarantees a thorough review by the Inspectors General of our national security agencies to determine what took place in the past, and ensures that there will be accountability going forward. By demanding oversight and accountability, a grassroots movement of Americans has helped yield a bill that is far better than the Protect America Act.

“It is not all that I would want. But given the legitimate threats we face, providing effective intelligence collection tools with appropriate safeguards is too important to delay. So I support the compromise, but do so with a firm pledge that as President, I will carefully monitor the program, review the report by the Inspectors General, and work with the Congress to take any additional steps I deem necessary to protect the lives – and the liberty – of the American people.”

“Work to remove” telecom immunity should be rewritten to “maybe show up to vote on some amendment that will surely be struck down and then whimper away.” What a colossal failure of leadership.

Obama earns a Wanker of the Day from Atrios. And it’s well-deserved. I thought he’d issue some vague statement of disapproval and then miss the vote. This endorsement of a X’ing out the Fourth Amendment is waaaay out of bounds.

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Yo Steny

by digby

This ad is going to be running in the Washington Post next Thursday, thanks to your contributions, via Color of Change and Blue America PAC:

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They Were Only Following Orders

by digby

Roy Blunt and Steny Hoyer are practically tongue kissing on the floor right now and congratulating each other on their mutual fabulousness in negotiating the rape of the constitution this morning. It’s quite a love fest.

The lesson from this is that your Representatives really believe that if “the government” tells you to do something, you do it, even if it’s illegal. The good news is that if you are a multibillion dollar corporation with massive access to to the private lives of ordinary American, you will never be held liable.

Greenwald quotes Kit Bond saying this explicitly:

This article from Dow Jones, celebrating that the telecom industry is completely off the hook as a result of this bill, has the full quote from Sen. Bond, which is even better (h/t C_O):

“I’m not here to say that the government is always right, but when the government tells you to do something, I’m sure you would all agree that I think you all recognize that is something you need to do,” Bond said.

Even when the Government is wrong, even when it orders you to do something illegal, your role is not to question but to obey. That’s what he is saying explicitly.

That used to be called the Nuremberg Defense, but that’s as quaint as the Geneva Conventions these days.

A couple of months ago we thought we’d at least beaten this back until a new president could be elected and a new Justice Department could take a fresh look at what the hell went on here. That was not to be. For reasons they never adequately explained (during the debate today their explanations were specious and insulting) they simply had to give amnesty to these corporate lawbreakers right this minute.

It goes to the Senate next week where all indications are that it will pass. Nobody sees a filibuster on the horizon right now (although it’s still possible.) They seem to want to get this neatly taken care of so they can get on with telling us all to relax and enjoy our freedoms.

Here’s the latest on the Strange Bedfellows campaign from Glenn:

Our first ad, featuring Steny Hoyer, is almost finished and will run as a full-page ad in The Washington Post and in numerous newspapers in his district, aimed at his core Democratic base. We are excited that Color of Change — the online, grass-roots African-American organization devoted to demanding more responsiveness from Washington officials — has now joined our coalition and is directly working with us on this ad campaign against Hoyer. And we hope to expand our work with them to include the other campaigns we are doing, including — just for now — the ones against Rep. Chris Carney and Rep. John Barrow. The total amount we have for this campaign is now almost $250,000. The response has been overwhelming. I know that many of you have donated as much or even more than you could, but the more we raise, the more of an impact we can make against the individuals responsible for this travesty. Making them know there is a real price to pay when they do this — not by getting deluged with angry phone calls or merely having primary challenges, but doing everything possible to expose their real character, remove them office and put a permanent end to their political careers — is the only real way to deter its repetition. Contributions can be made here.

Hoyer’s constituents need to know what their Representative did here. He is a guy who believes in the rule of law when it comes to sentencing drug users and shop lifters. He has no problems seeing people go to jail for kiting a 100 check when they don’t have any food in the house. But he’s damned if he’ll let multi billion dollar corporations have to spend a dime defending themselves when they knowingly violated the law — “because the government told them to.”

Oh, and as for the politics of this. It isn’t working. Guess what the media are saying about all this:

House and Senate leaders agreed yesterday on surveillance legislation that could shield telecommunications companies from privacy lawsuits, handing President Bush one of the last major legislative victories he is likely to achieve.

…the negotiations underscored the political calculation made by many Democrats who were fearful that Republicans would cast them as soft on terrorism during an election year.

Capitulating to the most unpopular lame duck president in history because they are afraid of him. Makes you proud to be a Democrat doesn’t it?

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Authentic Nonsense

by digby

According to the AP:

Overall, the race between Obama and McCain amounts to an authenticity contest.

Voters are craving change from typical Washington ways and each candidate is claiming he offers a new brand of politics that transcends poisonous partisanship. Yet, each candidate, in what he says versus what he does, also is undermining his own promises not to become the politics of usual.

Nobody knows the dangers of cliche writing on the run better than a blogger. But this is ridiculous. The run for the presidency is not an “authenticity” contest. That’s a tired Village narrative that always favors the so-called “manly man” who “tells it like it is.” In other words, if favors the phony macho dude over the geeky, smart guy — Republican over Democrat.

The press told us back in 2000 that Al Gore was a big phony, remember? And George W. Bush was a down to earth, “uniter not a divider” who would bring “honor and dignity” back to the White House. That worked out really well.

This is a stupid way to evaluate candidates. How “authentic” can any politician reasonably be? His whole job is to try to be as many things to as many people as possible. (And anyway, just try to be yourself and order and orange juice in a diner instead of coffee (omg!) and see where it gets you.)

“Transcending poisonous partisanship” is shaping up to be the catch phrase of the year. The only problem is that we have no idea what it means. Most often they use it to indicate the necessity for compromise and conciliation to “get things done.” But they only haul that out when Democrats take power. When Republicans are in power “transcending poisonous partisanship” is defined as “resolve” and “sticking to principle.” Head I win, tails you lose.

These tropes are not the defining issues in the campaign, but they create the framework around which the media covers it. This “authenticity” meme is more destructive to Obama than it is to the old warhorse McCain, about whom the most important thing people know is that he was a POW. (“He’s been to hell and back, he’s not afraid of anything or anyone.”) People are just wrapping their minds around the new guy and his image is more malleable.

If they have to do character studies of the candidates, how about just straight reporting about their history, work habits, accomplishments, likes and dislikes and let the people judge for themselves whether it comes off as authentic or not. Humans are remarkably well equipped to do that on their own. There are whole fields of study devoted to understanding the complex mechanisms by which people size other people up. (Sometimes people actually prefer someone who is “inauthentic” in certain ways.) We can’t rely on the press to interpret these things for us. They are too insular, too parochial and too subject to group-think to be trustworthy interpreters of these people’s characters. These are the same people, after all, who said that George W. Bush was a humble man of low ambition. And then he ran his presidency as if he’d been born a king.

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All In The Timing

by dday

I’m sure the military judge, in consultation with the Defense Department, threw his Khadr dart at the calendar to come up with this date:

Canadian Omar Khadr was told by a military judge Thursday at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, that his trial on war crimes charges will begin on Oct. 8.

The judge, Col. Patrick Parrish, said the date for trial by the controversial military commissions process can be changed for legal reasons if necessary.

Khadr, 21, faces up to life in prison if convicted on charges of killing a U.S. army medic with a grenade during a firefight in Afghanistan in 2002. He was 15 years old at the time.

Parrish was presiding over Khadr’s pre-trial hearing for the first time.

The Toronto-born detainee’s military lawyer, Lt.-Cmdr. William Kuebler, has accused the Pentagon of making last month’s surprise change in judges to speed the process of getting his client to trial.

The last judge, Col. Peter Brownback, who had been on the case from the outset, was more concerned with following legal procedure, and leery of many aspects of the prosecution case, Kuebler has alleged.

Kuebler said Parrish has been described in an internet posting as “rocket docket” and has been parachuted in to get his client to trial before President George W. Bush leaves the White House early next year, something his predecessor, Brownback, was in no hurry to do.

Could somebody get me the significance of October 8, please? I mean other than the fact that it’s a few weeks before the Presidential election. I’m not SO cynical to suggest that a high-profile trial of a Terrorist would fall at that time on purpose.

It has to be numerology or something.

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Lazy, Stupid Bigotry

by digby

This is so bad I hardly know what to say:

That’s the cartoonist Pat Oliphant, who showed his sensibilities earlier in the campaign toward Clinton as well:

Wingnuts like to call Oliphant a liberal. If he is, then liberalism really has lost its meaning.

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Talk To The Hand

by digby

I’m getting some questions about why the blogosphere is so obsessed with FISA and the civil liberties stuff when it’s clear that both sides are equally corrupt. Evidently, it’s a silly waste of time to even think you can change anything until the whole edifice of our political system is reduced to rubble and we can begin anew. Viva la revolucion.

Here on planet earth, the civil liberties issues, along with torture and Guantanamo and the entire GWOT legal regime is a central concern because I have watched a very ruthless and cynical right wing show themselves to be bent on rebuilding the police state of J. Edgar Hoover and the imperial presidency of Richard Nixon. I don’t think it’s a good idea. It’s not that I don’t realize that the Democrats have an equally awful history or think they are the exemplars of all that is true and good, it’s just that in recent years the Republicans have shown they have a real fetish for undemocratic authoritarianism, and in a complicated system, you have to focus on those who are creating the most obvious and immediate threats.

Democrats have certainly enabled them over the years and will likely continue to. They are politicians, after all, not comic book superheroes. But there should be no doubt to anyone who isn’t wrapped up in immature freshman dorm cynicism, that there is a distinct difference between those who believe in the concept of an imperial presidency and those who are simply weak and corrupt. They both undermine freedom, but the first is many orders of magnitude worse than the second.

Perhaps that’s not much to work with, but it’s all we’ve got and in the end there will be no one around to acknowledge the intellectual superiority of those who sat on the sidelines, starry eyed and impotent, railing about third parties and revolution, while the world went to hell. (See: Communist Party, Germany, 1932) But hey, everybody has a right to their own kind of therapy and ineffectual whining is as legitimate as anything else. Whatever gets you through the night.

Just this week McClatchey has been running a series on the Bush Cheney torture regime. Every day it’s something worse than the day before:

An eight-month McClatchy investigation of the detention system created after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks has found that the U.S. imprisoned innocent men, subjected them to abuse, stripped them of their legal rights and allowed Islamic militants to turn the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba into a school for jihad. Here’s a guide to the contents of our online report.

• Sunday: We got the wrong guys
• Monday: ‘I guess you can call it torture’
• Tuesday: A school for Jihad
• Wednesday: ‘Due process is legal mumbo-jumbo’
• Today: ‘You are the king of this prison’

These are all stories we’ve heard something about, at least. But put together it paints a shocking picture of a prison camp and torture experiment. It’s something out of Solzhenitsyn, only run by the Keystone Cops. It’s horrifying and as bad as anything America has ever done. There’s the story of the “War Council” of wingnut lawyers who cooked this whole thing up in secret. The hiding of prisoners from the red cross. (why?) The documented evidence of torture and abuse across the gulag of American prison camps. It goes on and on.

Meanwhile we have General Taguba, the man who investigated Abu Ghraib, going on the record:

Writing the forward to a Physicians for Human Rights study of 11 former detainees who were apparently tortured by US military personnel and later released, Army Maj. General Antonio Taguba (Ret.) writes that “there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”

Probably not, but they definitely won’t if nobody gives a damn.

The FISA controversy is just one more example of this assault on the constitution. Yes, Democrats have been complicit in covering up for this after the fact. They were and are weak in fighting it off even today. Some are even true believers, I’m sure. In fact, they are about to vote for a band-aid that will keep the American people from ever finding out just what the government asked those corporations to do in the days after 9/11.

But I see no alternative to documenting what’s going on and trying to leverage the political system, rewarding those who stand up and punishing those who promise to do the right thing and then go back on their word. If you’ve got a better idea, please share it. (We talked a lot about “bringing down the state” 40 years ago and it wasn’t all that successful, so we probably need to think twice about whether that’s going to work any better this time.) If all you want to do is sit around and carp about how there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the two parties, and complain that this is all pollyanna nonsense because the Big Boyz are in it together, have at it. But nobody’s listening. It’s white noise.

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