Month: July 2008

The Power Of Sustained Memory

by dday

Digby called attention to this stunning excerpt from Jane Mayer’s new book, where she reveals that DoJ lawyers (and from context, this could be Jim Comey and Jack Goldsmith, two extremely high-level officials) were speaking in codes because they suspected their government was wiretapping them to determine their motives. It’s really only the latest in a long, long series of outrages, and it’s not even the most amazing one of the week:

As long as CIA agents could convince themselves they were not deliberately inflicting severe pain or suffering on detainees, they were free to do virtually anything in their questioning of suspected terrorists, including waterboarding. Furthermore, the agents’ belief they weren’t in fact torturing their captives didn’t even need to be “reasonable.”

These are the implications of a controversial August 2002 memo from the Justice Department to the CIA that was released Thursday. The American Civil Liberties Union obtained several internal Bush administration documents it says authorizes the CIA to torture detainees.

We have faith-based initiatives, a faith-based economy, and now here is faith-based torture, a transparent attempt to shield interrogators and their minders at the highest levels from prosecution for war crimes.

And we all know that torture just scratches the surface, if that can be believed. Slate has now put together an interactive guide to all the lawbreaking. The very fact that you can make a rich media interactive guide is enough to make you vomit. While more and more information leaks out every day, there’s certainly enough to make a credible case for just about any prosecution you can imagine. The question, of course, is: will there be any justice?

On Friday, the House Judiciary Committee held a not-impeachment hearing. They literally couldn’t use certain words that would suggest the President or his staff lied, broke laws, or violated the public trust. Just informational and all that. It was very prim and proper, and while Democrats and Republicans and libertarians alike testified to the scope of the unconstitutional rogue Presidency under which we’ve all lived since January 2001, and allies like the ACLU praised the first step, let’s be honest – in the accountability-free culture of Washington, holding a hearing that avoided the word “impeachment” or indeed any kind of responsibility for the actions outlined, is about as far as anyone wants to go.

If you’re looking for accountability, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll get it from either potential incoming Administration. Cass Sunstein’s interview on Democracy Now put an end to any hopes of that, rejecting prosecution for “non-egregious” crimes that would amount to the criminalization of politics. Anyway, the Military Commissions Act effectively nullified any opportunity for War Crimes Act prosecutions domestically. And since the conservative movement goes apeshit at just the hint of accusing these guys of what they’ve admitted to doing, there’s little chance any Democrat will have the stomach for following through.

And yet, there are other intriguing possibilities. The very fact of this surfeit of lawbreaking has bred a new kind of Democrat, a reform-minded type who will run on – and possibly win on – accountability. If we had 20 Alan Graysons in Congress, you bet something would happen.

Alan Grayson: I’m Alan Grayson, and I’m the Democratic candidate for Congress in Florida’s district eight. And I’m the attorney of record in every single case now pending in Federal court involving war profiteers in Iraq. These are cases in which I represent whistleblowers. The Florida civil rights association named me Humanitarian of the Year for my work in this regard, taxpayers against fraud named me lawyer of the year, and I’ve been featured in Vanity Fair magazine, in media like CBS evening news, 60 minutes, and even Dailykos, imagine that.
I’m running because I’m fed up with the government mismanagement, the Bush administration’s shameless pandering to war profiteers. I think they set out on a deliberate course to make this war good for the people who were their friends. And I want to try to hold them accountable when I’m in Congress. When I’m in Congress… the Bush administration’s worst nightmare is going to be me with subpoena power because I know everything that they’ve done, and I’m going to hold them accountable for it.

Matt Stoller: But wait wait, let me just interrupt you there, the Bush administration’s gone in 2009.

Alan Grayson: Oh but all the people they set up as the new kings and queens of America are still around. What Eisenhower said, that we need to fear the military industrial compex, has become true because they have manufactured a five year war that they want to perpetuate for a generation or even a century so that they can keep lining the pockets of their friends, the war whores.

Matt Stoller: So, people are going to say, let bygones be bygones, or let’s have some sort of truth and reconciliation commission, what do you think needs to happen?

Alan Grayson: We don’t need truth and reconciliation, we need punishment. We need people to be held accountable for all the mistakes that they made that have screwed us up in this war and screwed us up in this economy. The economy is falling apart, the chickens are coming home to roost. You cannot spend $10,000 for every man, woman, and child in America for a war that never should have taken place in the first place.

Right on. Now how this manifests itself is unclear, but there is talk of a 21st-century Church Committee to relentlessly investigate and bring to light the worst abuses of the past eight years, and with someone like Grayson involved in it there’s at least hope that the road leads to prosecution instead of admonishment.

But I prefer actions like this:

New Zealand students protesting the Iraq war offered a reward to anyone who carries out a citizen’s arrest of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during her visit to the country Friday.

The Auckland University Students’ Association is seeking Rice’s arrest for her role in “overseeing the illegal invasion and continued occupation” of Iraq, Association President David Do said. The group is offering a $3,700 reward.

And this:

Des Moines police arrested four people Friday who attempted a citizen’s arrest of former White House adviser Karl Rove.

Rove was in Des Moines to speak at a fundraiser […]

The four accused Rove of election fraud and conspiracy to commit offense or to defraud the United States in the time before the Iraq war.

Now on the surface it appears that actions like this are futile, just a way for protesters to vent and make Administration officials’ lives just a smidge less comfortable. But let’s face it. Though a new Church Commission or a wave of reformers would be nice, the idea that Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Feith and Wolfowitz and Rice and Rove will get anything approaching their just consequences for what they have done is remote (though that’s no reason not to keep pushing). However, there’s a cumulative effect, I imagine, to the spectacle of people being arrested for trying to serve you with a summons everywhere you go for the rest of your life. I guess the Amish culture has shunning, and this is the opposite. I’m well aware that these people aren’t well acquainted with the concept of shame. But the idea that forever more, they will have to run from one car to the next, have to use subterfuge to escape criminal prosecution abroad, can never walk down the street in comfort, and need to always look over your shoulder, is at least something. And one of these days, one of them will slip up. It’s the equivalent of holding up a mirror, forcing these people to look at themselves for all their ugliness, forever. Aside from the psychological impact, it builds the movement for accountability. And it keeps the signature issues – torture, illegal spying, lying in service to endless war, extreme executive power – in the spotlight, so that the next set of conservatives won’t be able to enter the White House so stealthily. The goal here is to prosecute, of course, but also to discredit, to nuclearize, to keep these actions out of the memory hole. We cannot do any less.

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Dearly Beloved

by digby

The Michigan wedding of Durango newlyweds Andy and Ania Somora came to an abrupt end last weekend after the bride and groom were tasered by local police and spent their wedding night in jail.

According to a news release from the Chikaming Township (Mich.) Police Department, Officer Jeff Enders responded Saturday to the Burnison Art Gallery in Lakeside, Mich., after gallery owner Judi Burnison asked for assistance with unruly guests at the Somoras’ wedding reception.

Burnison, who rented the gallery to the Somoras for the reception, told Enders the party had gotten out of hand, and there were broken glasses and spilled drinks.

Burnison declined to comment Wednesday, but she said her lawyer would respond to questions.

However, no call was received as of Wednesday evening.

Enders told the assembled guests to leave, but many became upset, police said. Enders called for backup, and 14 law-enforcement agencies responded to help clear the crowd. Police said that many of the 100 guests left peacefully, but several continued to be disorderly and to swear at the officers.

However, eyewitness Kacpar Skowron, a professional Chicago photographer and friend of Ania Somora, said police overreacted and ruined a perfectly good wedding.

“My perspective is that the main officer (Enders) handling it was cool at first, but then he started threatening that everybody would be arrested. But trying to kick the party out at 11:20 (p.m.) on a wedding night when we had a contract to be there? He was a big jerk,” Skowron said.

Skowron said the crowd got particularly unruly after police handcuffed Andy Somora’s father and put him in the back of a police cruiser. He said the elder Somora, whom he described as “a distinguished older gentleman,” was trying to talk to Enders to defuse the situation.

“I didn’t believe it, but I witnessed it. It was brutal, and that’s when Andy got really mad,” he said.

Skowron said Andy Somora had to be restrained by police and was tasered at least twice. His wife also received a shock because she was touching her husband during one of the incidents. Skowron said husband and wife were both arrested, but Chikaming police would not confirm that claim, and no mention of the use of a taser is included in the news release.

Maybe there was no taser. But I wouldn’t be surprised. Wedding receptions are notoriously dangerous and there were only 14 different law enforcement agencies present. The police must have felt overwhelmed and would naturally need to taser the groom or risk having to use deadly force instead. That, after all, is the rationale for taser use.

Here’s a picture of the police having to defend themselves against the bride:

Hat tip to Susie Madrak

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Old Faithful Erupts

by digby

We all know it’s bullshit, but like so many other zombie narratives, here’s an old perennial stomping its way through the graveyard ready to snatch the souls out of anybody who has the temerity to suggest it isn’t actually … alive:

Haters of the mainstream media reheated a bit of conventional wisdom last week.

Barack Obama, they said, was getting a free ride from those insufferable liberals.

Such pronouncements, sorry to say, tend to be wrong since they describe a monolithic media that no longer exists. Information today cascades from countless outlets and channels, from the Huffington Post to Politico.com to CBS News and beyond.

But now there’s additional evidence that casts doubt on the bias claims aimed — with particular venom — at three broadcast networks.

The Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University, where researchers have tracked network news content for two decades, found that ABC, NBC and CBS were tougher on Obama than on Republican John McCain during the first six weeks of the general-election campaign.

You read it right: tougher on the Democrat.

During the evening news, the majority of statements from reporters and anchors on all three networks are neutral, the center found. And when network news people ventured opinions in recent weeks, 28% of the statements were positive for Obama and 72% negative.

Network reporting also tilted against McCain, but far less dramatically, with 43% of the statements positive and 57% negative, according to the Washington-based media center.

[…]

The media center’s most recent batch of data covers nightly newscasts beginning June 8, the day after Hillary Rodham Clinton conceded the Democratic nomination, ushering in the start of the general-election campaign. The data ran through Monday, as Obama began his overseas trip.

Most on-air statements during that time could not be classified as positive or negative, Lichter said. The study found, on average, less than two opinion statements per night on the candidates on all three networks combined — not exactly embracing or pummeling Obama or McCain. But when a point of view did emerge, it tended to tilt against Obama.

That was a reversal of the trend during the primaries, when the same researchers found that 64% of statements about Obama — new to the political spotlight — were positive, but just 43% of statements about McCain were positive.

They don’t bother to discuss the other Democrats’ coverage in this piece, but suffice to say that a large part of the coverage of Hillary Clinton was negative during that period. So, let’s not pretend that there was any systemic “liberal bias” during the primaries either. When you combine the negatives of Obama and Clinton compared to McCain, his coverage was a cakewalk.

It might be tempting to discount the latest findings by Lichter’s researchers. But this guy is anything but a liberal toady.

In 2006, conservative cable showmen Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly had Lichter, a onetime Fox News contributor, on their programs. They heralded his findings in the congressional midterm election: that the networks were giving far more positive coverage to the Democrats.

More proof of the liberal domination of the media, Beck and O’Reilly declared.

Now the same researchers have found something less palatable to those conspiracy theorists.

But don’t expect cable talking heads to end their trashing of the networks.

Repeated assertions that the networks are in the tank for Democrats represent not only an article of faith on Fox, but a crucial piece of branding. On Thursday night, O’Reilly and his trusty lieutenant Bernard Goldberg worked themselves into righteous indignation — again — about the liberal bias they knew was lurking.

Goldberg seemed gleeful beyond measure in saying that “they’re fiddling while their ratings are burning.”

O’Reilly assured viewers that “the folks” — whom he claims to treasure far more than effete network executives do — “understand what’s happening.”

Again, those of us who read blogs and watch the media through a critical lens know that this is just the stupidest meme one earth. After watching them have a mass four year orgasm over George W. Bush standing on a pile of rubble with a bullhorn saying “Ah hear you. And the people who did this are gonna hear from us real soon! yuk, yuk” like he was reciting Shakespeare’s Henry V St Crispin’s day speech, it’s a little bit hard for me to take seriously the idea that they have anything but a bias toward cheap, shallow ignorance (which naturally favors movement conservatism.)

The danger in this is that this narrative is an easy off the shelf taunt that results in the media immediately overcompensating, particularly since many of them were, early on, admittedly smitten with Obama. I knew that the end result of that would be the resurgence of the old standby “liberal media” critique and it would end up being a problem for Obama (or any Democrat who was the recipient of their attentions.) This is the phenomenon that the right tweaks and manipulates whenever there is the slightest tilt to a Democrat.

It’s completely absurd, of course, because the press has been giving John McCain a perpetual “happy ending” for years now. Even after he has completely proven himself to be a pandering, corrupt sell-out to everything he ever said he believed in, they excuse him by saying it’s ok because he doesn’t really mean it. (That’s my all-time favorite: any other politician is excoriated for being “inauthentic” if he changes his mind about what to order in a diner. But McCain openly selling his soul to get elected is seen as evidence of his integrity. You’ve gotta love that.)

The problem with our media isn’t that they like or dislike a politician that we also like or don’t like. It’s that they treat politics like a celebrity game show and it makes it very difficult for the people to even know what their interests are, much less who best represents them. It doesn’t help us if they are temporarily enamored of one of our candidates — they are like children, easily manipulated for the right’s purposes and after decades of pounding home the myth of the “liberal media” all it takes is the tiniest bit of open affection toward a Democrat to get the wingnut noise machine cranked up and ready to go.

It’s theoretically possible that we could change this around, over time, and create a “conservative media” theme. But really, the best thing to do would be to try to get the press to cover politics better. They don’t have to treat it like a horse race or a talent show — they could stop blackberrying each other all day to swap tired conventional wisdom and checking in with Drudge every half hour to get the latest dirt and just do reporting. There are plenty of journalists who manage to do it. They just don’t cover politics.

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Speaking In Code

by digby

I haven’t finished Jane Mayer’s book The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals yet, but so far it’s the probably the creepiest book I’ve read yet about the Torture Regime. (Philippe Sands’ book Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Valuesis also in the running.)

For those of you who haven’t read it, you can get a good idea about it’s thesis from her articles in the New Yorker, and this interview on Bill Moyers’ Journal on Friday.

I thought this passage was especially interesting:

BILL MOYERS: Who were some of the other conservative heroes, as you call them, in your book?

JANE MAYER: A lot of them are lawyers. And they were people inside the Justice Department who, one of whom, and I can’t name this one in particular, said when he looked around at some of the White House meetings – he was in where they were authorizing the President, literally, to torture people – if he thought that was necessary, he said, “I can’t, I could not believe these lunatics had taken over the country.” And I am not talking about someone who is a liberal Democrat. I’m talking about a very conservative member of this Administration. And there was a-

BILL MOYERS: Your source?

JANE MAYER: My source.

BILL MOYERS:And, yet, when these conservatives – as you write in your book – when these conservatives spoke up, Cheney and company retaliated against their own men.

JANE MAYER: People told me, “You can’t imagine what it was like inside the White House during this period.” There was such an atmosphere of intimidation. And when the lawyers, some of these lawyers tried to stand up to this later, they felt so endangered in some ways that, at one point, two of the top lawyers from the Justice Department developed this system of talking in codes to each other because they thought they might be being wiretapped. And they even felt-

BILL MOYERS: By their own government.

JANE MAYER: By their own government. They felt like they might be kind of weirdly in physical danger. They were actually scared to stand up to Vice President Cheney.

We have been told over and over again by the political media establishment that we are being paranoid freaks for suspecting that the Bush administration used their wiretapping powers for political purposes. And it was assumed that by that we meant spying on political opponents or media figures, which certainly may have happened. But one of the more insidious uses of these powers may very well have been against dissenting members of the administration itself — potential whistleblowers, members of congress and those who resisted the edicts of the Cheney cabal. (Nixon did it…)

Here’s Mayer again, in an interview with Scott Horton:

You spend more time showing how the torture process compromised lawyers than how it compromised health care professionals. One of the more revealing cases involves Jessica Radack, a young career attorney in the Justice Department’s Honors Program, who dispensed ethics advice concerning plans for the interrogation of John Walker Lindh. It seems that her advice was contrary to the ethical views of senior Bush Administration lawyers, and you note that when a federal judge demanded to see the internal Department of Justice records relating to the matter, all of Radack’s emails, including the advice actually dispensed, had been deleted and the hard copies removed, and none of this was furnished to the court. Did the Justice Department ever undertake an internal probe into the obstruction?

Radack was in some ways an early guinea pig showing how high the costs were for anyone—including administration lawyers—who dissented from the Bush Administration’s determination to rewrite the rules for the treatment of terrorists. Her job in the department was to give ethical advice. She was asked whether an FBI officer in Afghanistan could interrogate John Walker Lindh and use his statements against him in any future trial. By the time she was asked this, however, as she knew, Lindh’s father had already hired a lawyer to represent him. So she concluded that it would not be proper for the FBI to question him outside the presence of his counsel.

To her amazement, the FBI agent went ahead and did so anyway, and then the prosecutors in the Justice Department proceeded to use Lindh’s statements against him in their criminal prosecution. She told me, “It was like ethics were out the window. After 9/11, it was, like, ‘anything goes’ in the name of terrorism. It felt like they’d made up their minds to get him, regardless of the process.” Radack believed that the role of the ethics office was to “rein in the cowboys” whose zeal to stop criminals sometimes led them to overstep legal boundaries. “But after 9/11 we were bending ethics to fit our needs,” she said. “Something wrong was going on. It wasn’t just fishy—it stank.”

What happened next was truly scary. She tried to ensure that a judge overseeing the case, who asked for all information regarding the Department’s handling of Lindh, was given the full record, including her own contrary advice. But instead, she said she found that her superiors at Justice sent the judge only selective portions of the record, excluding her contrary opinion. Her case files, she said, were tampered with, and documents missing. Among the senior Justice Department officials who were sent her files, she said was Alice Fisher, a deputy to Michael Chertoff who followed him as head of the Department’s Criminal Division.

Michael Chertoff, who was the head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division when Zubayda was caught, downplayed his role… But according to a top CIA official directly involved at the time, as well as a former top Justice Department official involved in a secondhand war, Chertoff was consulted extensively about detainees’ treatment. The former senior Agency official said with disgust, “Chertoff, and Gonzales, and all these other guys act like they know nothing about this now, but they were all in the room. They’re moonwalking backwards so fast, Michael Jackson would be proud of them.”
—From The Dark Side

Radack complained about what she thought were serious omissions of the record being withheld from the judge. Within weeks of disagreeing with the top Justice Department officials, Radack went from having been singled out for praise, to being hounded out of the department. Radack got a job in private practice, but after her story appeared in Newsweek, with copies of some of her emails, the Justice Department opened a leak investigation. The U.S. Attorney then opened a criminal investigation. Radack has since become an advocate for whistle-blowers’ rights. But the episode served as a warning to anyone in the government who stood in the way of the so-called, “New Paradigm.” It is unclear to me what sort of investigation, if any, there has been of this case, including of the potential obstruction.

You can certainly understand why members of the administration would speak in code, believing that they were being spied upon, can’t you?

This isn’t just a fever dream of the liberal left and the libertarian right. Too bad government just passed a law covering the whole thing up. Mayer believes that there will be no prosecutions and that the verdict on these people will be left to history. I wish she was right, at least in the sense that history will be the judge of what all went wrong. The problem is that these fascist zombies keep doing this stuff over and over again and we’ve just had an eight year training session for the next generation of authoritarian devilspawn.

If history is any guide, if left to nurse their wounds and plan their next assault on the constitution, they are going to be worse than those who preceded them. They always have been up to now. History won’t come soon enough to save the country from the next installment of “Conservative Rule.”

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Fanboy Interrogations

by digby

Dahlia Lithwick has a great column in this week’s Newsweek about the biggest influence on the thinking of members of the Bush administration in regards to its “interrogation” policies: Jack Bauer.

I’ve written a ton about this shocking phenomenon over the years, but even I didn’t know that John Yoo actually cited the show in his book:

“What if, as the Fox television program ’24’ recently portrayed, a high-level terrorist leader is caught who knows the location of a nuclear weapon?”

… And we know for sure he knows and he knows we know he knows and we know he knows we know he knows and he STILL won’t give it up even if we give him ice cream? Then what, huh? Will you be willing to waterboard him then, you lily livered terrorist symps?

I honestly don’t know if this is some Straussian ruse to try to pull one over on the rubes or if these people actually believe the things they see on television. Scalia cited Bauer too. They held a seminar at the Heritage Foundation with the shows actors and producers featuring Chertoff and Limbaugh in which Chertoff said:

SECRETARY CHERTOFF: …In reflecting a little bit about the popularity of the show “24” — and it is popular, and there are a number of senior political and military officials around the country who are fans, and I won’t identify them, because they may not want me to do that (laughter) I was trying to analyze why it’s caught such public attention. Obviously, it’s a very well-made and very well-acted show, and very exciting. And the premise of a 24-hour period is a novel and, I think, very intriguing premise. But I thought that there was one element of the shows that at least I found very thought-provoking, and I suspect, from talking to people, others do as well.

Typically, in the course of the show, although in a very condensed time period, the actors and the characters are presented with very difficult choices — choices about whether to take drastic and even violent action against a threat, and weighing that against the consequence of not taking the action and the destruction that might otherwise ensue.

In simple terms, whether it’s the president in the show or Jack Bauer or the other characters, they’re always trying to make the best choice with a series of bad options, where there is no clear magic bullet to solve the problem, and you have to weigh the costs and benefits of a series of unpalatable alternatives. And I think people are attracted to that because, frankly, it reflects real life. That is what we do every day. That is what we do in the government, that’s what we do in private life when we evaluate risks. We recognize that there isn’t necessarily a magic bullet that’s going to solve the problem easily and without a cost, and that sometimes acting on very imperfect information and running the risk of making a serious mistake, we still have to make a decision because not to make a decision is the worst of all outcomes.

And so I think when people watch the show, it provokes a lot of thinking about what would you do if you were faced with this set of unpalatable alternatives, and what do you do when you make a choice and it turns out to be a mistake because there was something you didn’t know. I think that, the lesson there, I think is an important one we need to take to heart. It’s very easy in hindsight to go back after a decision and inspect it and examine why the decision should have been taken in the other direction. But when you are in the middle of the event, as the characters in “24” are, with very imperfect information and with very little time to make a decision, and with the consequences very high on a wrong decision, you have to be willing to make a decision recognizing that there is a risk of mistake.

Here’s Rush at the same seminar:

RUSH: I asked Mary Matalin, by the way, on this trip to Afghanistan, we were watching this, and I asked her — she worked for Vice President Cheney at the time — I said, “Do we have anything like this?”

SURNOW: (Laughter.)

RUSH: She said, “Not that I know of.” What about the possibility of government officials — back to the scholars — government officials watching this program (we know they do) can they get ideas, creative ideas on dealing with these problems from this show, or are they strictly fans, do you think?

[…]

Speaking just as an American citizen, you mentioned the operation in Canada. This is why the show has an impact on people. We have a political party trying to shut down the program that enabled that operation in Canada to be a success. It’s being called “domestic spying,” when it’s not. These guys put the same kind of conflict in the program. Jack Bauer, who never fails, always is the target of the government, somebody, being put in jail. It’s amazing how close it is.

Rush was actually asking the right question. I laughed at him at the time,thinking he was an embarrassing torture fanboy. But it turns out that the military really was getting ideas from the show:

According to British lawyer and writer Philippe Sands, Jack Bauer—played by Kiefer Sutherland—was an inspiration at early “brainstorming meetings” of military officials at Guantanamo in September of 2002. Diane Beaver, the staff judge advocate general who gave legal approval to 18 controversial new interrogation techniques including water-boarding, sexual humiliation, and terrorizing prisoners with dogs, told Sands that Bauer “gave people lots of ideas.”

This probably worries me as much as anything I’ve heard about the antics of the Bush administration. These people are so fundamentally unserious that they found inspiration in a television show when the stakes were about as high as they could possibly be. It’s horrifying to think these powerful people were this daft. But they were.

I realize that John McCain was tortured and it is widely assumed that he’s being sincere when he says that he would not endorse the practice. I don’t believe him. He negotiated that atrocity of the MCA and has lied repeatedly about all manner of things, all the while posing as a “man of honor” whose integrity is unassailable. I think he’ll keep torturing.

Last week, The Hill caught up with John McCain as he imagined personally maiming America’s foes. “I shoot one guy’s kneecap off, only one,” McCain quipped to reporters Tuesday. “A red-hot poker is planted in someone’s chest, but other than that, there is no torture.”

What a kidder. McCain, in fact, was talking about his cameo on last night’s episode of 24, and the story went on to explain that the senator—a former guest of the Hanoi Hilton and recent sponsor of a law explicitly banning cruelty to terror suspects, known as the torture amendment—would play only the tiniest of parts on Fox’s homeland-security action hit. “Don’t blink,” said the Arizona Republican. But my eyes got itchy, and I did, and McCain’s contribution to February sweeps eluded me.

…As The Hill pointed out, McCain had earlier professed his affection for the program on The Daily Show: “I watch it all the time. I’m sort of a Jack Bauer kind of guy.”

I agree.

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Sandbagged

by digby

I thought this was a little bit too convenient. The military sandbagged the Obama campaign with this troops visit nonsense.

They’d better get used to it and prepare for it. The military brass are hostile to Democrats, particularly one who is young and has no military experience or relationship to military culture. One of his greatest tests as president will be asserting his authority with the Pentagon and fighting off their bureaucratic end runs and dealing with their sympathetic starry eyed machismo worshippers in the press. It’s a serious challenge.

Update: Let the phony emails begin:

Hello everyone,

As you know I am not a very political person. I just wanted to pass along that Senator Obama came to Bagram Afghanistan for about an hour on his visit to ‘The War Zone’. I wanted to share with you what happened. He got off the plane and got into a bullet proof vehicle, got to the area to meet with the Major General (2 Star) who is the commander here at Bagram. As the Soldiers where lined up to shake his hand he blew them off and didn’t say a word as he went into the conference room to meet the General. As he finished, the vehicles took him to the ClamShell (pretty much a big top tent that military personnel can play basketball or work out in with weights)
so he could take his publicity pictures playing basketball. He again shunned the opportunity to talk to Soldiers to thank them for their service. So really he was just here to make a showing for the American’s back home that he is their candidate for President. I think that if you are going to make an effort to come all the way over here you would thank those that are providing the freedom that they are providing for you.

I swear we got more thanks from the NBA Basketball Players or the Dallas Cowboy Cheer leaders than from one of the Senators, who wants to be the President of the United States. I just don’t understand how anyone would want him to be our Commander-and-Chief. It was almost that he was scared to be around those that provide the freedom for him and our great country. If this is blunt and to the point I am sorry but I wanted you all to know what kind of caliber of person he really is. What you see in the news is all fake.

In service,

TF Wasatch
American Soldier

Update II: Via K Drum, I see that this letter has been dubunked. Not that it matters. Obama isn’t a Muslim either. It’s “out there.”

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Saturday Night At The Movies

Knight and the city

By Dennis Hartley

I love this dirty town.

Psst…Have you heard? There’s this new Batman movie out this summer. Rumor has it that it might have legs. Personally, I think the whole thing sounds a little iffy. I hope that the film studio will be able to recoup its modest $100 million promotion expenditure. Furthermore, I…oops, hang on; someone is sending me a text message. Ah-it’s from one of my inside sources. It says: “$155,000,000 opening weekend.” What a relief (whew!).

(Disengage “irony mode”) I occasionally get chastised around this here series of tubes for having a propensity for reviewing films that “nobody has seen”. Well, we can all certainly rest assured that I’ve sent my sniveling inner film snob scurrying back to its special place under the bed for this week’s post (oops…now disengage “sarcasm mode”).

Some leading critics are hailing The Dark Knight as the best “superhero” movie of all time. I can’t weigh in on that angle, because it’s not one of my favorite genres (although I admit being pleasantly surprised by Iron Man, which I reviewed here). However, one thing I can tell you with assurance about Christopher Nolan’s sequel to Batman Begins is this: it is one of the best contemporary film noirs I’ve seen since Michael Mann’s Heat

Giving you a detailed synopsis would be a moot exercise; I think there is already enough media out there right now spouting the major plot points (not to mention the endless discourse bubbling in thousands of fan boy chat rooms, for those unafraid to slog through waist-deep in “spoiler alerts”). Suffice it to say that crime-ridden Gotham City still enjoys the nocturnal protection of the Batman (Christian Bale), the masked vigilante who is the alter-ego of wealthy industrialist playboy (corporate fascist?) Bruce Wayne. He continues his uneasy alliance with the stalwart Lt. Gordon (Gary Oldman) an Elliot Ness-type lawman who has vowed to round up all the bad guys in Gotham and outfit them in striped PJs. In this outing, they are joined by “incorruptible” D.A. Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart).

A spanner in the works arrives in the person of The Joker (the late Heath Ledger) a vile criminal mastermind who has formed an uneasy alliance of his own with an assortment of Gotham’s most unsavory recidivists, like the city’s mob boss (Eric Roberts). However, the Joker’s increasingly twisted, nihilistic acts of mayhem even begin to repulse his underworld cohorts. He is the embodiment of purely soulless anarchy, which brings us to Ledger’s performance, which is what lies at the very (black) heart of this film.

This is one part of the considerable hype surrounding the film that doesn’t just blow smoke; Ledger is mesmerizing in every single frame that he inhabits. This definitely isn’t your father’s Joker (Cesar Romero’s vaudevillian cackler in Batman ’66) or even your Uncle Jack’s Joker (Nicholson’s hammy Kabuki in Batman ’89). Ledger plays his Joker like a psychotic mash-up of Malcolm McDowell’s Alex in A Clockwork Orange, Tim Curry’s evil clown in Stephen King’s It (with maybe some occasional sampling from Frank N. Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show ) and Gene Simmons on crack. He’s John Wayne Gacy, coming for your children with a paring knife, and in the clown costume. I don’t know what war-torn region of the human soul Ledger went to in order to find his character, but I don’t ever want to go there, even just to snap a few pictures. There’s nothing cartoonish or campy about this Joker; he scared the living crap out of me.

While there is no shortage of the requisite budget-busting action sequences that one expects in a summer crowd pleaser, it’s the surprisingly complex morality tale simmering just beneath the biff! pow! and bam! in Christopher and Jonathan Nolan’s screenplay that I found to be unexpectedly engaging; it even verges on being (gulp!) thought-provoking.

Nolan is no stranger to the noir sensibility; previous films like Insomnia , Memento , and Following bear that out. His visual sense and gift for atmosphere tells me that he has closely studied some of the great genre stylists; in fact the bank robbery that opens The Dark Knight contains an obvious homage to the heist scene in Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing. There are a lot of classic noir themes at work here as well, in particular the hard-boiled notion that no one who lives and breathes is incorruptible; everyone has their price. This idea informs the nexus between the “heroes” and “villains” of the piece; nearly everyone eventually “crosses the line” to get what they want (even if it’s “justice”). That is what is most frightening about this particular incarnation of the Joker; his sole raison d’etre is to orchestrate a perpetual scenario of fear and anarchy so as to reduce all players to a base primal state of instinctual self-preservation-and then sit back and enjoy the show. “I am an agent of chaos,” he states at one point, and you believe him.

I wouldn’t recommend bringing the kids (or the squeamish) to this film, it’s hands down the most brutally violent of the Batman series. The violence feels very “real”; and I think that is what makes it disturbing. Despite the fact that it is, after all, a super hero fantasy, the film carries an overall tone of gritty realism that is unique for the genre. One scene in particular, set in an interrogation room of a police station and involving Batman and his nemesis, begins to reek uncomfortably of Eau de Jack Bauer (Holy Gitmo, Batman!).

I have a couple of other issues, but they are not enough to sink the movie. Superb actors like Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Cillian Murphy feel under-utilized in their relatively underwritten parts. I thought there were two or three too many false endings; as a consequence a few subplots, like the transition of a principal “good guy” into another signature Batman nemesis, seem to get short shrift. Undoubtedly, these loose ends were primarily tacked on as sequel bait, which I suppose is par for the course.

So should we have more installments of the franchise? Judging from the record breaking opening weekend take, it’s probably a purely academic question at this point. I’m happy to let the fan boys debate that issue until the bats fly home. Even if you’re not really Bat-crazy (like yours truly) you still might want to catch the The Dark Knight, if only for Heath Ledger’s singularly unique contribution to the cinema’s screen villain hall of fame.

Update from digby:

Oh no, he di-unt…

What Bush and Batman Have in Common

A cry for help goes out from a city beleaguered by violence and fear: A beam of light flashed into the night sky, the dark symbol of a bat projected onto the surface of the racing clouds . . .

Oh, wait a minute. That’s not a bat, actually. In fact, when you trace the outline with your finger, it looks kind of like . . . a “W.”

Legal Disenfranchisement

by dday

A lot of people are talking about these allegations about Karl Rove’s role in stealing Ohio in 2004. Certainly worth paying attention to and following up. It’s just as important to note that the right is not only continuing these tactics, but mainstreaming them.

At a little remarked-upon hearing this week, Rep. Keith Ellison grilled liberal blogdom’s favorite punching bag Hans von Spakovsky over the voter ID laws he championed which led to disenfranchisement a couple months ago in Indiana:

ELLISON: Now here’s something that happened on the May 7th Indiana election. A dozen nuns and another unknown number of students were turned away from the polls Tuesday in the first use of Indiana’s stringent voter ID law since it was upheld last week by the United State Supreme Court. Mr. von Spakovsky, you wanna stop nuns from voting?

VON SPAKOVSKY: [silence]

ELLISON: Why don’t you want nuns to vote, Mr. von Spakovsky?

VON SPAKOVSKY: Congressman Ellison, uh-

ELLISON: I’m just curious to know.

VON SPAKOVSKY: Those individuals, uh, were told, were- knew that they had to get an ID, they could have easily done so. They could have voted, uh, by absentee ballot- uh, nursing homes under the law are able to get-

ELLISON: …Mr. von Spakovsky, are you aware that a 98-year old nun was turned away from the polls by a-

VON SPAKOVSKY: They all had passports-

ELLISON: Excuse me.

VON SPAKOVSKY: They had expired passports which meant that they could have gotten-

ELLISON: Mr. von Spakovsky, do you know a 98-year old nun was turned away from the polls by a sister who’s in her order and who knew her, but had to turn her away because she didn’t have a government-issued ID? That’s okay with you?

VON SPAKOVSKY: Yes…

Okay with him? It’s his most fervent dreams realized!

Ellison didn’t let up there. He asked von Spakovsky pointedly about the greatest hits of US Attorney/voter fraud cases in Minnesota (where US Atty Thomas Heffelfinger was fired for ignoring voter fraud claims) and Missouri (the infamous Bradley Schlozman prosecution over a separate voter fraud case involving ACORN). Ellison basically accused him of lying to the committee and von Spakovsky became indignant. This guy was on the Federal Election Commission, just to let you know how far these completely bogus charges have progressed into the mainstream.

This voting stuff isn’t going away, and if anything it’s going to get more intense as Republicans get more desperate. I can’t believe that this article didn’t get more attention when it came out a few weeks ago. There’s no question that this will became an enormous issue literally out of nowhere this fall.

Election officials worry that the state’s home foreclosure problem will pose a problem this November for voters still registered at their former address, a newspaper reported Sunday.

Voters in pivotal Ohio with outdated addresses face possible pre-election challenges and trips to multiple polling places. They also are more likely to cast provisional ballots that might not be counted.

“It’s a real issue,” said Daniel Tokaji, an Ohio State University law professor who specializes in elections. He wonders whether foreclosures might explain the increasing percentages of provisional votes cast between 2004 and Ohio’s latest election, the presidential primary in March.

Ohio provided President Bush with an 118,000-vote victory in 2004, giving him the electoral votes he needed to win the election.

All of a sudden you’re going to hear that these families forced out of their homes and relocated across the country are actually fraudsters trying to steal the election for Obama. The very fact of vacancy at the addresses where these people are registered makes hundreds of thousands of people prime suspects for voter caging. And you can be sure that re-registering isn’t paramount on their minds, either. In battleground states like Nevada, one out of every 120 or so homes is in foreclosure right now. This seems like a huge under-the-radar issue that is receiving literally no attention.

And there’s a nexus here between these potential minefields and the voter ID laws conservatives are pushing.

Ohio’s requirement that voters show identification at the polls makes it more important that they keep their registration information current, said Jeff Ortega, a spokesman for Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, Ohio’s elections chief.

In 2004, the Ohio Republican Party challenged more than 31,000 newly registered voters statewide after letters it mailed out came back as undeliverable. The challenges failed, but Brunner said a new state law requiring counties to mail their own notices to all registered voters could lead to another round of pre-election challenges.

There may be plenty of illegal disenfranchisement, but is anybody paying attention to the legal version?

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They’re Just Kidding

by digby

These Obama people are funny:

Obama’s vice presidential search team has floated the name of a former member of President Bush’s first-term cabinet, Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman, as Obama’s running mate.

[…]

The mention of Veneman’s name surprised Democratic lawmakers. The low-profile Republican was close to food and agriculture industries but clashed with farm-state Democrats and environmentalists during her tenure, which lasted from 2001 to 2004.

[…]

The selection of a Republican could bolster Obama’s unifying message, a Capitol Hill Democrat familiar with the discussion said.

“You select a strong independent woman who appeals to Republicans and independents, and so that’s hard to beat,” the Hill source said, explaining the logic of the possible choice. “Choosing someone like [Veneman] doesn’t hurt you with the Democrats. It just doesn’t hurt you. But it helps you with Independents and Republicans.”

[…]

Choosing Veneman would be a way to “show that he can get things done without all the partisanship,” said the Democrat familiar with the discussions. “Her appeal would be nonideological. It would be, ‘I’m just here to get the work done.’ She’s not a hot-button conservative.”

[…]

Though Veneman’s biography and Republican affiliation make her a plausible, if surprising, candidate to be Obama’s running mate, the mention of her name was met with incredulity on Capitol Hill.

“Are you serious?” one lawmaker asked vetters when Veneman’s name came up, a second source familiar with the conversations said.

The surprise stems from the fact that, while Veneman was seen as an experienced leader for her department, she often clashed with Democrats on a central battle front of the Bush years: regulation. Veneman was criticized by some Democrats and environmentalists, and praised by agriculture and food interests, for lightly regulating the industries and for encouraging trade and biotechnology during her tenure.

When she resigned, the American Meat Institute praised her “vision and commitment.”

She also clashed with Democrats — including then-Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, who is now an Obama confidant — over subsidies for small farmers, which they sought to expand.

In the best-known incident of her tenure, she led the administration’s response to cases of Bovine Spongiform Encephalitis, known as mad cow disease. The epidemic was contained, but the relatively light U.S. testing regime has led to continuing barriers for American beef exports.

It’s ridiculous, of course.

Isn’t it?

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Blogging While Brown

by digby

Pam Spaulding is live blogging the Blogging While Brown conference at Pam’s House Blend. Following up on the post below about female bloggers being unable to monetize their blogs, this is interesting:

Gina McCauley, the host of the conference, discussed BWB sponsorship, and the fact that major publications such as Ebony, Essence and traditional media outlets had zero interest in backing projects like this, and quite frankly these outlets have seemed like a waste of time; new media companies came to her to offer sponsorship.

I’ve always felt that a nexus of new media and blogs would eventually become their own revenue stream. It hasn’t happened yet in any reliable fashion but it’s probably the way things will go. Political blogs have a special set of issues, but I would hope there is some kind of synergy

Check out her liveblogging for updates of the conference. There’s a link to a live stream as well.

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