Helping Our Own
by digby
Susie Madrak, pioneer blogger and lively good egg, is having some difficulties. If you can spare some change to help her get through this time, I’m sure she’d appreciate it. With the economy rapidly going to hell, I expect that we will see more of our own facing problems like this and I hope we will do what we can to help them out.
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His Favorite Thing
by digby
President Bush must be having the best day of his presidency. He got to do his very favorite thing for the first time in seven long years: sign a death warrant. And he got to be the first president in 50 years to do so!
President Bush on Monday approved the first execution by the military since 1961, upholding the death penalty of an Army private convicted of a series of rapes and murders more than two decades ago.
As commander in chief, the president has the final authority to approve capital punishment under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and he did so on Monday morning in the case of Pvt. Ronald A. Gray, convicted by court-martial for two killings and an attempted murder at Fort Bragg, N.C., the White House said in a statement.
Although the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the death penalty in the military in 1996, no one has been executed since President Ronald Reagan reinstated capital punishment in 1984 for military crimes.
The last military execution was ordered by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1957, although it was not carried out by hanging until 1961. President John F. Kennedy was the last president to face the question, in 1962, but commuted the sentence to life in prison.
This will be his 153rd execution, I believe. (That number, of course, represents only American prisoners. The hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis killed are also on his ledger, but I doubt he gets the satisfaction he takes in personally signing off on individual executions.)
Bush must have been terribly frustrated over these past few years being unable to enjoy his favorite thing. We all remember the laughs and chuckles he got out of this one:
“Bush’s brand of forthright tough-guy populism can be appealing, and it has played well in Texas. Yet occasionally there are flashes of meanness visible beneath it.
While driving back from the speech later that day, Bush mentions Karla Faye Tucker, a double murderer who was executed in Texas last year. In the weeks before the execution, Bush says, Bianca Jagger and a number of other protesters came to Austin to demand clemency for Tucker. ‘Did you meet with any of them?’ I ask.
Bush whips around and stares at me. ‘No, I didn’t meet with any of them,’ he snaps, as though I’ve just asked the dumbest, most offensive question ever posed. ‘I didn’t meet with Larry King either when he came down for it. I watched his interview with [Tucker], though. He asked her real difficult questions, like ‘What would you say to Governor Bush?’ ‘What was her answer?’ I wonder.
‘Please,’ Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, ‘don’t kill me.’
I must look shocked — ridiculing the pleas of a condemned prisoner who has since been executed seems odd and cruel, even for someone as militantly anticrime as Bush — because he immediately stops smirking.
‘It’s tough stuff,’ Bush says, suddenly somber, ‘but my job is to enforce the law.’ As it turns out, the Larry King-Karla Faye Tucker exchange Bush recounted never took place, at least not on television. During her interview with King, however, Tucker did imply that Bush was succumbing to election-year pressure from pro-death penalty voters. Apparently Bush never forgot it. He has a long memory for slights.”
McCain has never had the opportunity to execute anyone, being a mere Senator and all. But he’s a big supporter of the death penalty and I’m sure he’ll enjoy it now that Bush has broken the logjam. you can’t call yourself a real right winger until you’ve signed someone’s death warrant. It’s a wingnut rite of passage.
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It’s Not An Indictment, It’s A Series of Tubes
by dday
Just so you have a receptacle for comments since it’s the story of the day, here’s the scoop on Ted Stevens, who’s going to need a bigger Hulk tie:
Sen. Ted Stevens, the longest-serving Republican in the U.S. Senate and one of the chamber’s most powerful members, was indicted Tuesday in Washington, a result of a years-long investigation into corruption in Alaska politics.
The 7-count indictment comes nearly one year after federal agents raided Stevens’ home in Girdwood, a resort town about 40 miles south of Anchorage. The Justice Department has scheduled a press conference for 1:30 p.m. to announce the indictment.
A broad federal investigation of public corruption has been under way in Alaska for more than four years, although it didn’t become widely known until Aug. 31, 2006. That’s when teams of federal agents executed search warrants at the offices of six state legislators, as well as others, in Anchorage, Juneau and elsewhere around the state.
The government has since brought indictments against five state legislators. Three have been convicted by juries and two are awaiting trial. Four others — two former top officials with Veco Corp., the former chief of staff of Gov. Frank Murkowski and a private-prison lobbyist – have entered guilty pleas and are cooperating with the government.
No word just yet on what the indictment is actually about. It could be lying to federal investigators and obstruction of justice, or they could have zeroed in on his steering contracts to Veco Oil in exchange for Veco remodeling his home in Girdwood. Plenty on that element of the case here. There are also questions about his ties to the fishing industry.
UPDATE: The indictment is here. Looks to me at first read that it’s about Stevens failing to disclose gifts from Bill Allen (CEO of Veco) and his company, including improvements to his home in Girdwood, and performing actions on behalf of Veco as part of his duties as a US Senator. Pretty damning stuff. You know what Veco did to the house, right?
From in or about June 2000 to in or about April 2001, multiple VECO employees and contractors participated in renovating the Girdwood Residence. That renovation work included jacking up and resting the house on stilts, building a new first floor with two bedrooms and a bathroom, renovating the existing residence, and adding a garage with workshop and a second-story wraparound deck. Among other tasks, VECO employees and contractors also installed electrical, plumbing, framing, heating, and flooring materials in the Girdwood Residence.
Allen also apparently gave Stevens a brand-new Land Rover in 1999 in exchange for some jalopy, basically an in-kind donation.
It’s not impossible that Stevens continues on to try and keep his job – actually I’d put the odds at around 50/50. He has challengers in an August 26 primary, however, including a couple self-funding millionaires. One of them, businessman Vic Vickers, launched a $400,000 ad buy just yesterday, with all the ads to specifically focus on Stevens’ corruption.
I think it’s worth asking whether or not he was tipped off by the Feds. We know that the Bush Justice Department is an arm of the RNC. If they don’t think Stevens can win, the combination of an indictment and two months of attack ads would be a way to tighten the pressure on him to get out of the race.
All right, speculate away!
…I’m not talking about Vickers being tipped off to an indictment per se, as it was well-known inside Alaska that this was going to happen. I’m talking about the timing. Vickers’ ads start TOMORROW, and they take place in front of the very house in Girdwood that’s the focus of the indictment.
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Good Reading
by tristero
I have my head down trying to finish a new, big piece (about which more in a week or two) so sorry for the lack of posts (although Digby and dday have been posting plenty of great stuff, so I don’t feel too guilty!). However, this NY Review of Books article is so good that I wanted to share it.
Boumediene v. Bush is one of the most important Supreme Court decisions in recent years.[1] The Court held by a 5–4 vote that aliens detained as enemy combatants in Guantánamo have a constitutional right to challenge their detention in American courts. The decision frees none of them, some of whom have been held without trial for six years, but it makes it possible for them to argue to a federal district court judge that the administration has no factual or legal ground for imprisoning them. If that judge is persuaded, he must order their release. American law has never before recognized that aliens imprisoned by the United States abroad have such rights. The disgrace of Guantánamo has produced a landmark change in our constitutional practice.
The case raised complex constitutional issues that I must describe, but the principle the Court vindicated is simple and clear. Since before Magna Carta, Anglo-American law has insisted that anyone imprisoned has the right to require his jailor to show a justification in a court of law. (The technical device through which this right is exercised is called a writ of habeas corpus. Addressed to the jailor, it announces that he has custody of a certain person’s body and demands that he justify that custody.)
The Bush administration, as part of its so-called “war on terror,” created a unique category of prisoners that it claims have no such right because they are aliens, not citizens, and because they are held not in an American prison but in foreign territory. The administration labels them enemy combatants but refuses to treat them as prisoners of war with the protection that status gives. It calls them outlaws but refuses them the rights of anyone else accused of a crime. It keeps them locked up behind barbed wire and interrogates them under torture. The Supreme Court has now declared that this shameful episode in our history must end. By implication, moreover, the decision goes even further. It undermines the assumption, widespread among lawyers and scholars for decades, that the Constitution as a whole offers substantially less protection against American tyranny to foreigners than it does to America’s own citizens.
Boumediene was decided by the slimmest of margins. The Court now often divides, in cases of high importance, into a conservative phalanx of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito, and a more liberal group of Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Ginsberg, and Stephen Breyer.[2] The ninth justice, Anthony Kennedy, holds the balance of power; in this case he rejected the phalanx, joined the more liberal group, and wrote the Court’s opinion on their behalf.
The conservatives were outraged but self-contradictory in dissent. Roberts declared that the Court’s decision would have at best a “modest” impact and would be of no use to the detainees because it left them, as a practical matter, with no more opportunity for freedom than they had before. If anything, he said, the decision made it less likely that any of them would be released soon. Scalia insisted, with his usual splenetic flamboyance, that the decision would free dangerous terrorists and “almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.” Each of the four conservatives signed both dissenting opinions, apparently unconcerned by the contradiction.
Senator John McCain called the decision “one of the worst” in the country’s history. The conservative press was horrified: The Wall Street Journal said that Kennedy had turned the Constitution into a “suicide pact.” No one explained why it would destroy America to allow people who claim innocence of any crime, or threat, a chance to defend that claim before an American judge who is presumably just as worried about his family’s security as the president is. Why would it be suicidal to allow them the same opportunity for defense that we allow people indicted as serial killers?
Senator Barack Obama, on the other hand, welcomed the decision, so the Court’s action may well become an important issue in the coming presidential election. McCain has already promised that if elected he will appoint more justices like Roberts and Alito. It would take only one such appointment to make further decisions like Boumediene impossible, and probably reverse that decision itself.
As they say, read the whole thing. Long and worth it. And let’s take to heart the warning in the last paragraph quoted above. It is not an exaggeration to state that with Supreme Court appointments alone, the election of John McCain would ratify the dismantling of American democracy undertaken by Bush. As it is, it will easily take all of Obama’s terms to assess and reverse the incredible damage Bush has done. And that is being optimistic.
BTW, the New York Review has many good articles this month, including a scathing one by Jane Mayer called “The Battle for a Country’s Soul” which is available here . There’s also a review I haven’t yet looked at for Matt Yglesias’s book for which Matt deserves a hearty congratulations.
Last Year’s Fashion
by digby
One of the most annoying aspects of the faith based movement in politics is the extent to which some of the lobbyists for the Religion Industrial Complex are willing to twist facts and data to support the idea that they are the determining factor in elections. It’s a little bit unnerving that people who are pushing the idea that the Democratic party must appeal to this strata of the voting public on the basis of moral and religious principles are so … devious.
Today we have a perfect example of a Democratic religion lobbyist spinning the numbers for their industry. ( Think of it as a sort of “Thank you For Praying”):
Because Obama is convinced the federal faith-based initiative is worth saving, he is in a position to critique the problems in the current system and insist on changes. One big step is to make sure that programs receiving government funds actually work. From the beginning, Bush has talked about accountability for faith-based organizations, using the word “results” 16 times at one 2005 conference. In 2002, then-HUD Secretary Mel Martinez declared that “faith-based organizations should be judged on one central question: Do they work?” Yet the president never put in place measures to track the effectiveness of programs receiving grants. Unlike those Democrats who see in the faith-based initiative an overflowing slush fund, Obama has also recognized that the real scandal is how small the pots of money for religious and secular non-profits have become over the past eight years. Even conservative supporters of the faith-based initiative, like former Bush aide Michael Gerson, agree with Obama’s charge that the effort has been “consistently underfunded.” In fiscal 2007, $2.2 billion was disbursed to faith-based groups. But while that figure may seem high, it is roughly equivalent to what religiously affiliated organizations like Catholic Charities and Habitat for Humanity received before Bush took office.
Wow, there’s an argument for you — the programs show no results AND the Democrats want to throw more money at them. Say jalapeno!
And for those who haven’t figured it out yet, the fact that groups like Catholic Charities were receiving money from the government before the “faith based” program was instituted, means that Bush must have changed something when he took office, right? There were always “faith based” organization receiving money from the government. It’s just that they weren’t allowed to proselytize or discriminate before Bush, something that nobody wants to talk about because it is politically dicey to admit that that was the whole point of the initiative.
BTD at Talk Left argues that the big political payoff for all this religious outreach that everyone is expecting is not materializing so far either:
Amy Sullivan is at it again, urging, and in this case, cheering on, Obama’s “reachout” to “values” voters. She thinks Obama has hit a home run. Strangely enough, an American Spectator writer agrees with her. But the funny thing is the data the Spectator writer relies upon simply does not support his assertions. For example, the Spectator writer states:Polls still show that conservative Christians favor McCain, but Obama is faring better than Kerry did in 2004.
But the linked Pew poll does not say that at all. Indeed, Obama is faring worse with white evangelical and white non-hispanic Catholics than even John Kerry.
Obama’s outreach to “values” voters has been a total flop. Al Gore was getting 28% of white evangelicals in June 2000, according to Pew, Kerry got 26% in June 2004, according to Pew and Obama gets 25% according to Pew. In terms of white Catholics, according to Pew, Kerry was receiving 47% of the vote in June 2004, Gore received 45% of the vote in 2000. Obama receives 40% now. Obama is running about even with Kerry (but well behind Gore) is so called white mainline voters (presumably non-Evangelical non-Catholics.)
As for the Catholic vote, well, I’m still reeling from this op-ed in the NY Times last week-end which claims that Europe is experiencing a new Black Death because its people are secular. Let’s hope that American Catholics will continue to ignore their leadership on this one, because they are getting more conservative rather than less:
FORTY years ago last week, Pope Paul VI provoked the greatest uproar against a papal edict in the long history of the Roman Catholic Church when he reiterated the church’s ban on artificial birth control by issuing the encyclical “Humanae Vitae.” At the time, commentators predicted that not only would the teaching collapse under its own weight, but it might well bring the “monarchical papacy” down with it. […]
In a nutshell, “Humanae Vitae” held that the twin functions of marriage — to foster love between the partners and to be open to children — are so closely related as to be inseparable. In practice, that meant a resounding no to the pill.The encyclical quickly became seen, both in the secular world and in liberal Catholic circles, as the papacy’s Waterloo. It was so out of sync with the hopes and desires of the Catholic rank and file that it simply could not stand. And in some ways, it didn’t. Today polls show that Catholics, at least in the West, dissent from the teaching on birth control, often by majorities exceeding 80 percent. But at the official level, Catholicism’s commitment to “Humanae Vitae” is more solid than ever. During his almost 27-year papacy, John Paul II provided a deeper theoretical basis for traditional Catholic sexual morality through his “theology of the body.” In brief, the late pope’s argument was that human sexuality is an image of the creative love among the three persons of the Trinity, as well as God’s love for humanity. Birth control “changes the language” of sexuality, because it prevents life-giving love.That’s a claim many Catholics might dispute, but the reading groups and seminars devoted to contemplating John Paul’s “theology of the body” mean that Catholics disposed to defend the church’s teaching now have a more formidable set of resources than they did when Paul VI wrote “Humanae Vitae.”In addition, three decades of bishops’ appointments by John Paul II and Benedict XVI, both unambiguously committed to “Humanae Vitae,” mean that senior leaders in Catholicism these days are far less inclined than they were in 1968 to distance themselves from the ban on birth control, or to soft-pedal it. A striking number of Catholic bishops have recently brought out documents of their own defending “Humanae Vitae.” Advocates of the encyclical draw assurance from the declining fertility rates across the developed world, especially in Europe. No country in Europe has a fertility rate above 2.1, the number of children each woman needs to have by the end of her child-bearing years to keep a population stable. Even with increasing immigration, Europe is projected to suffer a population loss in the 21st century that will rival the impact of the Black Death, leading some to talk about the continent’s “demographic suicide.”Not coincidentally, Europe is also the most secular region of the world, where the use of artificial contraception is utterly unproblematic. Among those committed to Catholic teaching, the obvious question becomes: What more clear proof of the folly of separating sex and child-bearing could one want?
I don’t think I need to point out just how illiberal that is, on nearly every level. I don’t begrudge Catholics their right to believe anything they want, but if these beliefs are ever taken more seriously by the flock then I am quite worried about how that will affect society at large, particularly if liberal politicians continue to believe they must be pandered to on these issues. The right to choose is hanging by thread and I believe will likely be gone before I’m dead. Birth control is the logical next step and you can believe that the Religion Industrial Complex will be in there fighting for it — and persuading liberals that they have to go along because the country demands it.
The politics of all this religiosity in this election are particularly interesting. First, you have these lies about Obama being a Muslim (terrorist.) That alone has necessitated the campaign to hit harder on Christian themes than most. But it doesn’t seem as if that’s the main reason. All the Democrats running followed this playbook, largely I would guess, because of the dishonest spinning that was done after the 2006 elections:
Party strategists and nonpartisan pollsters credit the operative, Mara Vanderslice . . . with helping a handful of Democratic candidates make deep inroads among white evangelical and churchgoing Roman Catholic voters in Kansas, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Exit polls show that Ms. Vanderslice’s candidates did 10 percentage points or so better than Democrats nationally among those voters, who make up about a third of the electorate.
[…]
The midterm elections were a “proof point” for arguments that Ms. Vanderslice had made two years before, said Mike McCurry, a Democratic consultant and former spokesman for President Bill Clinton who worked with Ms. Vanderslice on the Kerry campaign. For the Democrats, Mr. McCurry said, Ms. Vanderslice and her company “were the only ones taking systematic, methodical steps to build a religious component in the practical campaign work.”
The problem was that their numbers didn’t add up. Not that it mattered. It was all the rage. Just as the religious right rushed forward to claim credit in the days after Bush’s win in 2004 (even though it was crapola), the Democratic religious lobby rushed in after 2006 to do the same thing. It’s a very clever strategy. Unfortunately, it has the effect of making politics even more conservative at a time when people are actually getting tired of conservatism.
How this will affect the November election remains to be seen. Chris Cilizza had an interesting item today about Gallup’s new poll which points out a largely undiscussed demographic factoid:
The most interesting divide that is apparent from the Gallup results is that people living in western states are significantly less likely to believe in God than residents of any other geographic region of the country. Less than six in ten Americans living in the West say they believe in God as compared to more than 80 percent who say the same in the east, Midwest and South. (Not surprisingly, the South features the highest percentage — 86 percent — of people who say they believe in God.) That doesn’t mean, however, that Westerners don’t believe in any sort of higher power. Nearly three in ten say that have faith in a “universal spirit or higher power” — more than double the percentage of people who say the same in any of the other three regions. “The fact that, as compared with other regions, those from the Western United States have the lowest likelihood of believing in God does not come as a total surprise given other data showing that the West has a lower level of religiosity overall,” writes Gallup poll director Frank Newport. “Still, the contrast between Westerners and those from other regions reflected in these data is fairly substantial.”
Cilizza goes on to note this inconvenient truth:
The data is also particularly telling given the primacy of the West to the electoral calculations of both John McCain and Barack Obama. While McCain has represented Arizona for more than two decades in the Senate, Democrats have made considerable gains in the West over the last few elections — winning the governorships of Arizona, New Mexico, Montana, Wyoming and Colorado and taking House and Senate seats in Colorado, Montana and Arizona. As a result, Obama is heavily targeting the region this fall in the belief that the West is moving inexorably in his party’s favor. The data from the Gallup poll seems to affirm the growing appeal in the region for Democrats who have traditionally done far better among secular voters than among those who consider themselves religious. The numbers also make for an intriguing political calculation this fall for Obama. The Illinois senator has spoken far more openly about his faith and its importance in his life than past Democrats — a development that many within the party have greeted with open arms, believing that it is the only way Democrats can close the God gap. But, what if Obama’s overt talk of his faith turns off voters in the West where Democrats seem to be ascendant?
I doubt if it will. It has become common to hear politicians speak in these terms and Obama has a particularly winning way with his religiously laced rhetoric. But it’s a useful question for someone to ask. (McCain has the help of the media on this one, who are always in there to vouch for the fact that he doesn’t really like those awful far right preachers, he just has to kiss their rings to get elected — which makes him authentic!)
But whoever benefits from this western godlessness, the fact remains that much of the “faith outreach” is based on a bogus understanding of what drives the electorate which has been dishonestly sold to both parties by religion lobbyists.
I’ve written many times about the Barna group’s polling of religious attitudes. And nobody ever seems to notice one very important piece of data, which has been noted by Barna over and over again:
Since 1991, the number of unchurched has nearly doubled from 39 million to 75 million, according to The Barna Group, a company that follows trends related to faith, culture and leadership in America. The latest study shows that the percentage of adults that is unchurched – defined as not having attended a Christian church service, other than for a holiday service, such as Christmas or Easter, or for special events such as a wedding or funeral, at any time in the past six months – has risen from 21 percent in 1991 to 34 percent today…The unchurched are also younger (median age: 38) than most U.S. adults (median age: 43). Born-again adults are substantially older than either group (median age: 46). While one-quarter (26 percent) of American adults are single-never-married, nearly two-fifths(37 percent) of the unchurched fit that definition. The study revealed that the unchurched are also less likely to participate in elections, less likely to donate to non-profit organizations, and less likely to use media or to engage in community activities. “The unchurched are more likely than others to be somewhat isolated from the mainstream activities of the society in which they live,” said director of the study, author and researcher, George Barna. Barna also described the group as “non-committal” and “independent.” He noted that to unchurched people, embracing church life is “both counter-cultural and counter-intuitive.” “Unchurched people are not just lazy or uniformed,” the researcher continued. “They are wholly disinterested in church life — often passionately so.
You can understand why this rapidly growing part of the population is resistant to politics and American civic activities since traditional Christianity seems to be more and more intertwined with them. But it would seem to me that this group should not be disparaged and ignored. They aren’t all atheist heathens. Many of them consider themselves to be Christians, but they reject the strictures of formal religiosity.
Here’s how Barna describes the trend;
There are, indeed, millions of unchurched people who want nothing to do with organized religion or spiritual development. The more important trend, however, is that a large and growing number of Americans who avoid congregational contact are not rejecting Christianity as much as they are shifting how they interact with God and people in a strategic effort to have a more fulfilling spiritual life. This data, combined with other studies we have recently been conducting, suggests that we are on the precipice of a new era of spiritual experience and expression.” Barna expects the percentage of adults who are unchurched to grow during the coming decade…We anticipate substantial growth in the number of people who are not connected to a congregational church but who are committed to growing spiritually.
It would be sadly typical of the Democrats to get in on the big church awakening bandwagon just when it’s over and miss the opening for engaging people who are looking for meaning, community and service in other ways. Obama has made a good start with them I think, but going overboard on the traditional religious aspect could derail it.
After years of propaganda, everyone believes that the big demographic prize is people who go to church once a week or more. Maybe the Democrats should think a little bit more about the huge and growing number of people — religious and not religious — who never go to church at all and try to tailor at least some of their their message to them.
Of course, there was a time when politicians made vague public religious comments and a strong pitch for tolerance for the religious and the non-religious alike so they didn’t have to take sides in these things. It was probably a good idea which many would love to try again, I’m sure, but the RIC and the media won’t let them. The theme of the “values voters” is a faith-based proposition and there’s no arguing with that.
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This Too Is Terrorism
by dday
A man in Knoxville, Tennessee walked into the Tennessee Valley Universalist Unitarian Church, which had a newly hung sign up welcoming gays and lesbians into their congregation, and opened fire, killing two before being wrestled to the ground by congregants. Earlier, he wrote a letter explaining his motives:
The shotgun-wielding suspect in Sunday’s mass shooting at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church was motivated by a hatred of “the liberal movement,” and he planned to shoot until police shot him, Knoxville Police Chief Sterling P. Owen IV said this morning.
Jim D. Adkisson, 58, of Powell wrote a four-page letter in which he stated his “hatred of the liberal movement,” Owen said. “Liberals in general, as well as gays.” […]
Owen said Adkisson specifically targeted the church for its beliefs, rather than a particular member of the congregation.
“It appears that church had received some publicity regarding its liberal stance,” the chief said. The church has a “gays welcome” sign and regularly runs announcements in the News Sentinel about meetings of the Parents, Friends and Family of Lesbians and Gays meetings at the church.
The church’s Web site states that it has worked for “desegregation, racial harmony, fair wages, women’s rights and gay rights” since the 1950s. Current ministries involve emergency aid for the needy, school tutoring and support for the homeless, as well as a cafe that provides a gathering place for gay and lesbian high-schoolers.
As the terror alert level has just been raised (it is, after all, an election year, and the Federal Election-year Antiterror Repsonse, or F.E.A.R. Unit, has to justify its budget), I suspect we’re going to hear a whole lot about how the Bush Administration has kept us safe from attacks on US soil. Except that this is also terrorism, designed to terrorize and intimidate a particular sect or group, and instead of paying attention to right-wing domestic extremists, the White House has directed its homeland security efforts at peace groups and Quakers. So they once again have failed at protecting the nation from acts of terror. In fact, given that the conservative movement’s amping up of violent rhetoric has been so obvious to many, this failure is either a dereliction of duty or a complicit action. To wit:
Inside the house, officers found “Liberalism is a Mental Health Disorder” by radio talk show host Michael Savage, “Let Freedom Ring” by talk show host Sean Hannity, and “The O’Reilly Factor,” by television talk show host Bill O’Reilly.
Assuming causation may be an imperfect science, but these are the same folks who blamed Marilyn Manson for Columbine so I don’t have much sympathy.
So we can all debate whether Adkisson’s murders were a function of a lack of guns in the hands of church members (although they got him to the ground in 15 seconds without firearms), but we should not forget that this was a terrorist attack from a committed right-wing fundamentalist. The conservative movement has created an ideology of hate, and while the vast majority of its adherents are not inspired to actual violence, just one murder is too many.
Somehow I don’t think this will be inserted into the discussion of terrorism.
Update: from digby
From the you can’t make this shit up files, here’s Crooks and Liars with a right wing rationale:
You know what I think? He didn’t hate liberals. He hated Christians. He wanted to leave the impression that he is conservative who hates liberals, however, to discredit conservatives. Evil.
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Working The Kewl Kidz
by digby
The minute I read Ben Smith’s report last Thursday that Obama had “refused” to visit the wounded soldiers, I wrote about it and suggested that it could have some legs. If you have followed the way the right wing noise machine and the press operate over the past couple of decades, you can smell a “sticky” story that pushes the desired narrative a mile away. And what do you know, Media Matters has spent the last few days documenting the press pushing the story:
Monday, July 28, 2008
- MSNBC’s Hall falsely suggested that Obama did not “visit[] wounded American troops” on overseas trip
- Reuters uncritically reported McCain campaign’s misleading claim that Obama “made time to go to the gym, but canceled a visit with wounded troops”
Sunday, July 27, 2008
The story is a bit convoluted (you can click any of the links above for full explanation) but this flap is just so typical of the right’s approach and the media’s reflexive response. It also fits in with the arrogant, aloof, “presumptuous” (uppity) meme that’s sweeping the village, which McCain himself is stoking with his plaintive cries of “feeling left out” by the media and as a spokesman for the poor neglected Real American who Obama allegedly doesn’t care about in favor of liberal elites and Frenchmen (essentially the same thing.)
The McCain campaign is coming hard after Obama right now, being very aggressive and nearly hostile, adopting a tone of righteous indignation that this interloper is trying, basically, to steal the country from its rightful owners. It’s pretty standard right wing populism and it’s always been an effective approach for Republicans during hard times. We’ll see if he can make it work, but I would hope that the Democrats start fighting this back right now. It’s not going to get any better and there’s no margin in letting it lie.
Oh, and by the way, lest you think that this whole thing isn’t designed to get the media chattering, think again:
Okay, this is interesting: It looks as if the new McCain ad falsely attacking Obama over his canceled troop visit may not really have a lot of money behind it, suggesting that its real purpose isn’t getting it before voters directly.
Rather, the real target audience may be the media — meaning that the McCain camp’s goal is largely to get the ad debated in the press and to drive the conversation that way.
Evan Tracey, who tracks media buys at the Campaign Media Intelligence Group, took a look at the McCain buys and discovered that an earlier McCain foreign policy attack ad, as well as the troop visit attack spot launched this weekend, are running in almost no battleground-state markets, with the new spot only running in Denver and Washington, D.C.:
It seems to be working …
Update: Media Matters has more
MSNBC’s Buchanan falsely suggested Obama did not visit wounded troops, repeated smears of Obama’s patriotism MSNBC on-screen text attributed to Obama camp claim that Obama met with troops in Iraq without press — but NBC had reported it as fact
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The Goodling Legacy
by dday
The DoJ Inspector General released the findings of their investigations into the politicization of hiring at the Department, particularly by Monica Goodling and senior staff. A PDF of the report can be found here. It’s everything you expected and more. I mean, Goodling already admitted to Congress that her hiring decisions “may have been influenced in
part based on political considerations.” So the report just fills in some of the details. And the details are pretty incredible.
As a routine for hiring both political and career positions in the Department of Justice, Goodling would ask the following questions:
Tell us about your political philosophy. There are different groups of conservatives, by way of example: Social Conservative, Fiscal Conservative, Law & Order Republican.
[W]hat is it about George W. Bush that makes you want to serve him?
Aside from the President, give us an example of someone currently or recently in public service who you admire.
We found that this last question often took the form of asking the candidate to identify his or her most admired President, Supreme Court Justice, or legislator. Some candidates were asked to identify a person for all three categories. Williamson told us that sometimes Goodling asked candidates: “Why are you a Republican?”
When someone answered “Condoleezza Rice” to that last question, Goodling mused, “but she’s pro-choice.”
Another candidate for a position, a “top counter-terrorism prosecutor,” was denied because his wife was a Democrat.
He was an experienced terrorism prosecutor and had successfully prosecuted a high-profile terrorism case for which he received the Attorney General’s Award for Exceptional Service. … The candidate’s wife was a prominent local Democrat elected official and vice-chairman of a local Democratic Party. […]
[Executive Office for United States Attorneys (EOUSA) Michael] Battle, [EOUSA Deputy Director and Cheif of Staff] Kelly, and EOUSA Deputy Director Nowacki all told us that Goodling refused to allow the candidate to be detailed to EOUSA solely on the basis of his wife’s political party affiliation. Battle said he was very upset that Goodling opposed the detail because of political reasons.
Another woman was denied an Assistant US Attorney position because Goodling believed she was a lesbian.
Goodling and her predecessor as the hiring manager, Jan Williams, apparently Googled candidates to determine their professional, political and ideological histories, as it was official White House policy. Check this out.
At some time during the year Williams served as White House Liaison, she had attended a seminar at the White House Office of Presidential Personnel and received a document entitled “The Thorough Process of Investigation.” The document described methods for screening candidates for political positions and recommended using www.tray.com
and www.opensecrets.org to find information about contributions to political candidates and parties. The document also explained how to find voter registration information. In addition, the document explained how to conduct searches on www.nexis.com, and included an example of a search string that contained political terms such as “republican,” “Bush or Cheney,” “Karl Rove,” “Howard Dean,” “democrat!,” “liberal,” “abortion or pro-choice,” as well as generic terms such as “arrest!” and “bankrupt!”
As the report spells out pretty clearly, this is all completely illegal. John Conyers and Linda Sanchez today considered a criminal referral of these charges.
“Today’s report describes ‘systematic’ violations of federal law by several former leaders of the Department of Justice,” said Conyers. “Apparently, the political screening was so pervasive that even qualified Republican applicants were rejected from Department positions because they were ‘not Republican enough’ for Monica Goodling and others. The report also makes clear that the cost to our nation of these apparent crimes was severe, as qualified individuals were rejected for key positions in the fight against terrorism and other critical Department jobs for no reason other than political whim. The Report also indicates that Monica Goodling, Kyle Sampson, and Alberto Gonzales may have lied to the Congress about these matters. I have directed my staff to closely review this matter and to consider whether a criminal referral for perjury is needed.”
Sen. Leahy has a fairly strong statement out as well. The IG will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday.
The very familiar question here is, who will be held accountable, if anyone? Under the relevant statutes, much of the punishment concerning Hatch Act violations like this concerns removal from office, and most of those implicated in this report have already left DoJ (though one, EOUSA Deputy Director John Nowacki, who lied to senior DoJ officials about Goodling’s politicized hiring practices, remains). Goodling and her pals may get disbarred for illegal hiring and lawbreaking, or maybe not. The IG’s recommendations all concern how to prevent illegal hiring practices like this in the future, and have little effect on the sins of the past. More importantly, we don’t even know how many career positions throughout the DoJ, particularly those working as immigration judges, are the ones who passed Goodling’s loyalty tests and are now permanently installed inside the government. You can say that a new Democratic Administration should immediately fire everyone Goodling hired and start the process over again. I’m not sure that is legal under civil service reform laws dating back to Chester Arthur in the 1880s. What Goodling and her team did was to go around the spoils system that was the impetus for civil service reform, but there would have to be some kind of executive finding that the hiring process was polluted and would need to be reworked. And this would of course be a major undertaking for the DoJ, although I would argue a necessary one.
If this is ignored, you are going to see all kinds of whistleblowers and martyrs coming out of the woodwork in an Obama Administration, telling lurid and probably false tales accusing them of exactly what the Bush Administration put into practice and more. And they will be held up on the right as shining examples of patriots who understand how the rule of law must be respected at all times.
And they will probably have been hired by Monica Goodling.
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My God
by digby
This is so terrible it makes me want to vomit:
KY 3 News’ Sara Sheffield reports on an injured teen from Ozark, Missouri who was tasered up to 19 times by police. Passing motorists called Ozark police out of concern for the teen as he walked along the busy overpass. When the police arrived, the young man was lying on the shoulder of the highway directly underneath the 30 foot high overpass with a broken back and foot. Doctors believe 16-year-old Mace Hutchinson broke his back and heel after falling, as his injuries are consistent with such a fall. The boy’s family does not understand why police would have tasered the the teen 19 times after he was so seriously injured. The teen’s father said that the use of the taser caused Mace to develop an elevated white blood cell count, leading to a fever that delayed the young man’s otherwise immediate surgery by two days. Ozark Police Capt. Thomas Rousset attempted to explain why the taser was used: “He refused to comply with the officers and so the officers had to deploy their Tasers in order to subdue him. He is making incoherent statements; he’s also making statements such as, ‘Shoot cops, kill cops,’ things like that. So there was cause for concern to the officers.” Ozark police say that while there remains unanswered questions in the case, the reason for the use of the Taser is not one of them.
Right. A kid lying on the ground with a broken back was allegedly saying “shoot cops, kill cops” so they had to taser him 19 times to “subdue” him. Sure, that makes sense.
What is it going to take to end this reign of terror? Every single day we hear of police officers somewhere tasering people who present no threat to them and who could easily be dealt with without shooting them with electricity to make them comply. In this case, it’s perfectly obvious that the kid was injured and couldn’t get up! The police interpreted that as non-compliance, which they seem to automatically use as an excuse to shoot citizens full of electricity these days.The police do not have the right to torture people into compliance. We don’t have laws against police brutality only when it leaves marks. We have laws against police brutality because the government is not allowed to physically hurt people except in self defense. This case is worse than most because the kid couldn’t comply (after all, he had a fucking broken back) but it wouldn’t make any difference if he didn’t. Unless the cops’ only alternative is deadly force, they aren’t supposed to be shooting people full of electricity. Period.
I’ve been sympathetic to the idea that tasers can be useful and the cops simply need more training and stricter regulations. No more. The abuse is too widespread. These things are torture devices that we have empowered the government to use on us whenever they want to, no repercussions, no regulations. I’ve seen too many pictures of a group of uniforms holding someone on the ground, screaming in their faces, delivering electric shocks while the subject of their torture begs for them to stop. It’s disgusting. Tasers need to be outlawed.
H/T to BD
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And They Call Obama Presumptuous?
by digby
I didn’t think Obama’s Berlin speech was as bad as Scott did. Actually, I could have given large chunks of it myself, although perhaps not with a straight face.
Except, you know, nobody would ever want to hear a speech by some blogger from Minneapolis named Highpockets and even if someone asked him to give one, approximately 3 people would show up to hear it. But, hey, he could go over to Germany and stand on that spot and start talking if he wanted to. Or he could go to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and say “I Have A Dream.” It wouldn’t make the comparison any less absurd.
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