Month: April 2009

Obama’s Decision Point, Explained

by dday

Not to turn Hullabaloo into a breaking news blog, but Marc Ambinder reports that the only redactions in the memos will be of specific names of CIA officers involved in the interrogation. As these are OLC memos, I’m struggling to understand why specific CIA officers would be identified in them, but we won’t know their names. And they will not be prosecuted for their actions.

I might as well post the entire Presidential statement on the release of the memos.

The Department of Justice will today release certain memos issued by the Office of Legal Counsel between 2002 and 2005 as part of an ongoing court case. These memos speak to techniques that were used in the interrogation of terrorism suspects during that period, and their release is required by the rule of law.

My judgment on the content of these memos is a matter of record. In one of my very first acts as President, I prohibited the use of these interrogation techniques by the United States because they undermine our moral authority and do not make us safer. Enlisting our values in the protection of our people makes us stronger and more secure. A democracy as resilient as ours must reject the false choice between our security and our ideals, and that is why these methods of interrogation are already a thing of the past.

But that is not what compelled the release of these legal documents today. While I believe strongly in transparency and accountability, I also believe that in a dangerous world, the United States must sometimes carry out intelligence operations and protect information that is classified for purposes of national security. I have already fought for that principle in court and will do so again in the future. However, after consulting with the Attorney General, the Director of National Intelligence, and others, I believe that exceptional circumstances surround these memos and require their release.

First, the interrogation techniques described in these memos have already been widely reported. Second, the previous Administration publicly acknowledged portions of the program – and some of the practices – associated with these memos. Third, I have already ended the techniques described in the memos through an Executive Order. Therefore, withholding these memos would only serve to deny facts that have been in the public domain for some time. This could contribute to an inaccurate accounting of the past, and fuel erroneous and inflammatory assumptions about actions taken by the United States.

In releasing these memos, it is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution. The men and women of our intelligence community serve courageously on the front lines of a dangerous world. Their accomplishments are unsung and their names unknown, but because of their sacrifices, every single American is safer. We must protect their identities as vigilantly as they protect our security, and we must provide them with the confidence that they can do their jobs.

Going forward, it is my strong belief that the United States has a solemn duty to vigorously maintain the classified nature of certain activities and information related to national security. This is an extraordinarily important responsibility of the presidency, and it is one that I will carry out assertively irrespective of any political concern. Consequently, the exceptional circumstances surrounding these memos should not be viewed as an erosion of the strong legal basis for maintaining the classified nature of secret activities. I will always do whatever is necessary to protect the national security of the United States.

This is a time for reflection, not retribution. I respect the strong views and emotions that these issues evoke. We have been through a dark and painful chapter in our history. But at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past. Our national greatness is embedded in America’s ability to right its course in concert with our core values, and to move forward with confidence. That is why we must resist the forces that divide us, and instead come together on behalf of our common future.

The United States is a nation of laws. My Administration will always act in accordance with those laws, and with an unshakeable commitment to our ideals. That is why we have released these memos, and that is why we have taken steps to ensure that the actions described within them never take place again.

Long story short – the release of the memos is quite an important step. The focus should never be on low-level functionaries who carried out these acts, but those higher up the chain who directed and authorized them. I didn’t want to see a “few bad apples” roundup of the Lynndie England’s of the world and then a washing of the hands of the whole enterprise. Of course, the President says very strongly that “nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.” Which the Broderist apologists will just love, and which we knew would be his decision anyway.

It’s a mistake, in my view. But the release of virtually unredacted evidence of our shameful past is also important and should not be overlooked.

…I generally agree with Glennzilla’s take:

I’ll have more details as soon as these memos are available. One can certainly criticize Obama for vowing that no CIA officials will be prosecuted if they followed DOJ memos (though that vow, notably, does not extend to Bush officials), but — assuming the reports about redactions are correct — there is no grounds for criticizing Obama here and substantial grounds for praising him.

…the memos are here. Reading them now…

…it goes without saying that indemnifying the CIA personnel who committed the torture because they were acting under what they believed to be a legal basis violates the Nuremberg principles.

Article 7. The official position of defendants, whether as Heads of State or responsible officials in Government Departments, shall not be considered as freeing them from responsibility or mitigating punishment.

Article 8. The fact that the Defendant acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior shall not free him from responsibility, but may be considered in mitigation of punishment if the Tribunal determines that justice so requires.

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Obama’s Decision Point Made

by dday

I was going to update the last post, but this is enough information to warrant a new one. The New York Times reports that the President will release the torture memos.

After a tense internal debate, the Obama administration this afternoon will make public a number of detailed memos describing the harsh interrogation techniques used by the Central Intelligence Agency against al Qaeda suspects in secret overseas prisons.

The interrogation methods were among the Bush administration’s most closely guarded secrets, and today’s release will be the most comprehensive public accounting to date of the interrogation program that some senior Obama administration officials have said used illegal torture.

This is great, but there isn’t enough information here to explain whether key elements of the memos would be redacted. The Wall Street Journal says:

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is expected to release some operational details of a Central Intelligence Agency interrogation program and its legal rationale, while seeking to keep secret the names of detainees and the way techniques were applied to particular prisoners, two officials familiar with the matter said Wednesday.

An announcement is expected Thursday on the release of memorandums in which Department of Justice lawyers gave legal guidance on CIA interrogations. During a fierce debate, CIA officials have argued for keeping sensitive information secret, while Attorney General Eric Holder and other Obama administration lawyers have favored a full release.

Administration lawyers on Wednesday were still deliberating what portions of three memos would be released. The two officials said the administration plans to propose redacting parts of the memos. In addition to the prisoner names, certain operational details of interrogations are expected to stay secret, they said.

As is typical for Obama, he split the difference in the debate and went right down the middle. He will release the memos with some operational details, but will redact others as well as “the way techniques were applied to particular prisoners.”

This is kind of silly. We have a Red Cross report detailing how these techniques were applied to particular prisoners. And the operational details in the memos do not describe intelligence operations, but what the OLC considered legal for use on prisoners. The overall effect would be to shield the framers of these opinions and their superiors from the actions themselves.

We’ll have to wait and see just what is redacted. But this is basically a split-the-difference approach.

…Andrea Mitchell had former CIA Director and NSA head Michael Hayden (who, shockingly, is now with something called “The Chertoff Group”) on, and he basically said that the American people don’t have the right to know what their government does in their name, and thus the memos shouldn’t be released at all. Then, on the NSA “overcollection” case, he maintained that “the NSA follows the law” and just like journalists, they can’t be right 100% of the time and they do the best they can. Then he claimed that the NSA self-reported the problem, when the NYT article said it came up in a Justice Department review.

Just so you know what a defense of evil sounds like. The interview was amazing.

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Obama’s Decision Point

by dday

The Spanish Attorney General has recommended that the court drop its case against six Bush-era officials for their role in authorizing and directing torture at Guantanamo Bay, for one main reason:

If alleged torture at Guantanamo is going to be investigated at all, that should be done first in the United States, so that the former American officials would have a chance to defend themselves there, Conde-Pumpido added, according to his press chief, Fernando Noya.

It’s entirely possible that the case will go forward (prosecutors objected to this court’s investigation of Augusto Pinochet, but it went ahead anyway), but the Attorney General makes a salient point. American prosecutors should investigate American crimes, and violations of treaties to which America is a signatory. And today, President Obama can show what side he lines up on with respect to that question.

Today is the most significant test yet determining the sincerity of Barack Obama’s commitment to restore the Constitution, transparency and the rule of law. After seeking and obtaining multiple extensions of the deadline, today is the final deadline for the Obama DOJ to respond to the ACLU’s FOIA demand for the release of four key Bush DOJ memos which authorized specific torture techniques that have long been punished (including by the U.S.) as war crimes. Today, Obama will either (a) disclose these documents to the public or (b) continue to suppress them — either by claiming the right to keep them concealed entirely or, more likely, redacting the most significant parts before releasing them.

The most recent information on this suggests that Obama was siding with the CIA to redact information from the memos revealing the most graphic tactics used in interrogation. In particular, there is one technique whose release concerns the Administration.

Among the details in the still-classified memos is approval for a technique in which a prisoner’s head could be struck against a wall as long as the head was being held and the force of the blow was controlled by the interrogator, according to people familiar with the memos. Another approved tactic was waterboarding, or simulated drowning.

A decision to keep secret key parts of the three 2005 memos outlining legal guidance on CIA interrogations would anger some Obama supporters who have pushed him to unveil now-abandoned Bush-era tactics. It would also go against the views of Attorney General Eric Holder and White House Counsel Greg Craig, people familiar with the matter said.

Top CIA officials have spoken out strongly against a full release, saying it would undermine the agency’s credibility with foreign intelligence services and hurt the agency’s work force, people involved in the discussions said. However, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair favors releasing the information, current and former senior administration officials said […]

Intelligence officials also believe that making the techniques public would give al Qaeda a propaganda tool just as the administration is stepping up its fight against the terrorist group in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Some former administration officials have also argued that releasing all the memos could help terrorists train to endure the most extreme interrogation techniques.

Marcy Wheeler explained that this is nonsensical, because it’s already been disclosed by the ICRC report, meaning that whatever propaganda value Al Qaeda could glean from such disclosure already exists.

And Greenwald notes that these are legal documents, from the Office of Legal Counsel, and not intelligence documents that would compromise sources and methods. These were the secret laws under which the United States was governed in the Bush era with respect to their view of the laws on interrogation techniques, and failure to disclose them would essentially means that Obama agrees with the opinion that the United States executive branch should govern itself secretly and outside the purview of the people who hired him.

This renders blatantly frivolous the Bush-mimicking excuse that will almost certainly be offered in the event of substantial redactions today (and which anonymous Obama officials previewed yesterday in the WSJ): namely, that non-disclosure is compelled by the Safety of the American People. Aside from the fact that the “enhanced interrogation techniques” which these memos authorized are supposedly barred from use by President Obama’s own Executive Order — thus rendering any national security claims for concealment of “operational details” absurd on their face — how can it be the case that legal opinions about what is and is not legal in the view of the Government should be kept secret? To justify the non-disclosure of these memos is to affirm the right of the U.S. Government to operate under secret laws — about the most anti-democratic state of affairs imaginable.

Andrew Sullivan summarizes the decision today.

If Obama, for some reason, decides to prevent us from seeing exactly what was done then he will achieve only one thing: he will tell the world that the US has indeed authorized and practised war crimes while simultaneously telling the world that America will not be accountable for it.

He will betray all of us who supported him to restore the rule of law. He will, in fact, merely confirm the worst fears of what was actually done while making himself an accomplice to protecting the war criminals who did it.

And indeed, we will have to assume, in the absence of this disclosure, that at least some of these techniques are still going on. The fact that a Guantanamo detainee recently called Al Jazeera with his telephone privilege to complain of abuse at the hands of his captors offers a glimpse into the current situation at Guantanamo. Without full disclosure, we have to surmise the reasons for the protection of Bush doctrine, and one possible option is that it’s still in place.

On a day where we hear of more civil liberties abuses at the heart of our government, the President can choose to defend those past abuses, or by opposing, end them. His choice.

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Misinformation And Its Discontents
by tristero

Here’s a Republican misinformation talking point that, in the hands of Bloomberg News, goes transparently awry:

President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, earned $2.73 million last year and paid $855,323 in federal taxes, an amount that would be higher by about $102,000 if his budget plan were in effect.

But the article also reports Biden’s income and taxes:

The administration also released the tax return filed by Vice President Joe Biden and his wife, Jill. It shows they paid $46,952 in federal taxes for 2008 on $269,256 in adjusted gross income. They also paid $1,827 in alternative minimum tax, a levy the Obamas avoided because their income was too high. The Bidens paid $11,164 in Delaware state income tax.

You notice something?

Ok. We learn that the Obamas’ taxes will rise, But for some strange reason, no one at Bloomberg bothered to calculate what the Bidens – who reported a low, but nevertheless quite comfortable, six-figure income last year – would pay in taxes if Obama’s budget plan goes into effect.

There’s a good reason for that omission. The article implies, or if you prefer, insinuates:

Because Obama’s own taxes will rise under his plan, and because politicians never act against their own interests, therefore everyone’s taxes will rise.

Now, that screwy logic would be contradicted if they reported that Biden’s tax rate wouldn’t return to pre-Bush levels – which, of course, is precisely the case (see the third comment to this post, from Brian J, for example ), and which the article leaves for readers to work out for themselves.

Who Could Have Predicted?

by digby

It was so inevitable that I can’t even find the energy to get worked up about it (which, when I think about it, was probably their cunning plan):

The National Security Agency intercepted private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans in recent months on a scale that went beyond the broad legal limits established by Congress last year, government officials said in recent interviews.

Several intelligence officials, as well as lawyers briefed about the matter, said the N.S.A. had been engaged in “overcollection” of domestic communications of Americans. They described the practice as significant and systemic, although one official said it was believed to have been unintentional.

The legal and operational problems surrounding the N.S.A.’s surveillance activities have come under scrutiny from the Obama administration, Congressional intelligence committees, and a secret national security court, said the intelligence officials, who were speaking only on the condition of anonymity because N.S.A. activities are classified. A series of classified government briefings have been held in recent weeks in response to a brewing controversy that some officials worry could damage the credibility of legitimate intelligence-gathering efforts.

[…]

The questions may not be settled yet. Intelligence officials say they are still examining the scope of the N.S.A. practices, and Congressional investigators say they hope to determine if any violations of Americans’ privacy occurred. It is not clear to what extent the agency may have actively listened in on conversations or read e-mail messages of Americans without proper court authority, rather than simply obtained access to them.

The intelligence officials said the problems had grown out of changes enacted by Congress last July in the law that regulates the government’s wiretapping powers, and the challenges posed by enacting a new framework for collecting intelligence on terrorism and spying suspects.

While the N.S.A.’s operations in recent months have come under examination, new details are also emerging about earlier domestic-surveillance activities, including the agency’s attempt to wiretap a member of Congress, without court approval, on an overseas trip, current and former intelligence officials said.

You hate to say “I told you so,” but …

After a contentious three-year debate that was set off by the disclosure in 2005 of the program of wiretapping without warrants that President George W. Bush approved after the Sept. 11 attacks, Congress gave the N.S.A. broad new authority to collect, without court-approved warrants, vast streams of international phone and e-mail traffic as it passed through American telecommunications gateways. The targets of the eavesdropping had to be “reasonably believed” to be outside the United States. Under the new legislation, however, the N.S.A. still needed court approval to monitor the purely domestic communications of Americans who came under suspicion.

In recent weeks, the eavesdropping agency notified members of the Congressional intelligence committees that it had encountered operational and legal problems in complying with the new wiretapping law, Congressional officials said.

Officials would not discuss details of the overcollection problem because it involves classified intelligence-gathering techniques. But the issue appears focused in part on technical problems in the N.S.A.’s ability at times to distinguish between communications inside the United States and those overseas as it uses its access to American telecommunications companies’ fiber-optic lines and its own spy satellites to intercept millions of calls and e-mail messages.

One official said that led the agency to inadvertently “target” groups of Americans and collect their domestic communications without proper court authority. Officials are still trying to determine how many violations may have occurred.

The safeguards were so confusing they caused them to “inadvertently” do even more unconstitional spying than before. Awesome.

Separate from the new inquiries, the Justice Department has for more than two years been investigating aspects of the N.S.A.’s wiretapping program.

As part of that investigation, a senior F.B.I. agent recently came forward with what the inspector general’s office described as accusations of “significant misconduct” in the surveillance program, people with knowledge of the investigation said. Those accusations are said to involve whether the N.S.A. made Americans targets in eavesdropping operations based on insufficient evidence tying them to terrorism.

Mr Rains, Mr Claud Rains? Please pick up the white courtesy telephone. (And by the way, it’s bugged.)

More on this tomorrow from all the usual suspects, I’m sure. Meanwhile, I’m, going to spend the rest of the night re-reading all the moving speeches that were made on the Senate floor just a year ago, talking about how we didn’t need to look in the rear view mirror and the safeguards in the bill would solve all problems.

Elections Are A Minor Inconvenience

by dday

Minnesotans want Norm Coleman to concede, by a two-to-one margin, so they can move on with full representation in their government. And the DNC has turned up the pressure by demanding that Coleman concede. But Norm Coleman and his business buddies don’t care.

A group of several dozen of the most influential business lobbyists in Washington is vowing to raise and spend whatever it takes to bankroll Norm Coleman’s upcoming appeal fight, in the wake of a three-judge ruling declaring that Al Franken defeated Coleman in the Minnesota Senate race.

The group of lobbyists, which calls itself “Team Coleman,” is made up of some of the biggest players in D.C.’s permanent lobbying establishment, and includes executives from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Federation of Independent Business, the National Restaurant Association and others.

“We will raise as much as is necessary,” Dirk Van Dongen, a leading member of Team Coleman and the president of the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors, told me in an interview. “We’ll keep raising money as Norm needs it. We continue to be active in raising resources for Norm to carry out this fight to the end.” […]

But Democrats are likely to point to the lobbyists’ fundraising as proof that they’re merely keeping this battle alive to keep the seat vacant and prevent Dems from getting a leg up in the big upcoming policy battles involving the business lobbies, such as the battle over the Employee Free Choice Act.

Van Dongen (who is the father of WhoRunsGov editor Rachel Van Dongen) rejected that claim.

“That’s a side benefit,” Van Dongen said, when asked if the goal was to keep the seat vacant. “But this is all about us doing everything we can to be sure that Norm has had a fair election and to get him back in his Senate seat. We’d be doing exactly the same thing if the Republicans were in the majority.”

Well, there you have it. The amount of corporate money plowed into a doomed-to-fail project is a small price to pay for the “side benefit” of keeping that 59th Democratic vote out of the Senate. I wonder if Team Coleman funded any of the tea parties, too.

And we’re beginning to see this obstruction and delegitimizing of the election system as a pattern. In NY-20, where Scott Murphy has moved into the lead on the strength of absentee votes and is heavily favored for victory if the numbers continue to flow in at this level, the Republican candidate Jim Tedisco and his buddies from the Brooks Brothers Riot Roger Stone and John Sweeney have decided that their best option is to suppress as many votes as possible, and use the language of “voter fraud” to deny legitimate voters the franchise. Despite the fact that actual cases of fraud are almost nonexistent. Not even the junior Senator from New York has been spared.

This just in from Columbia County: when Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s absentee ballot came up in the queue, the poll watchers for Jim Tedisco objected to it, saying the senator was in the county on election day and should have voted in person.

Gillibrand’s office maintains that she wasn’t in the county on Election Day.

And today, a judge said that most of Tedisco’s 1,200 objections are invalid. But this statement by a Tedisco ally says it all.

They’re not doing it because they believe the votes to be illegitimate, really. What they’re doing, in the days and now hours leading up to the court hearings that will decide the outcome of the race between Republican Jim Tedisco and Democrat Scott Murphy, is creating a fact on the ground for the judiciary to overturn, if it dares […]

“It’s always better to be ahead-that’s the whole goal of this process,” said Nick Spano, a Yonkers Republican and former state senator who came out on the right side of a lengthy recount process in 2004, eventually winning by 18 votes.

This will never end. The Coleman and Tedisco cases can be put on a continuum. Conservatives now see electoral results as simply a starting point. They have adopted the cries of “stolen elections” from 2000 and 2004 and turned them right around. It was all so very predictable. They’ve had a plan for stealing elections for years and years, and Coleman and Tedisco are just following the playbook.

The latest and most elaborate of these jokes is the urban legend that American elections are rife with voter fraud, particularly in the kinds of poor and minority neighborhoods inhabited by Democrats. In 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that fraudulent voting would be a major target of the Department of Justice. As the New York Times reported last month, the main result of this massive effort was such coups as the deportation of a legal immigrant who mistakenly filled out a voter-registration card while waiting in line at the department of motor vehicles.

But the administration has remained ferociously committed to suppressing voter fraud — as soon as it can find some. In April of last year, Karl Rove warned a Republican lawyers’ group that “we have, as you know, an enormous and growing problem with elections in certain parts of America today. We are, in some parts of the country, I’m afraid to say, beginning to look like we have elections like those run in countries where the guys in charge are, you know, colonels in mirrored sunglasses. I mean, it’s a real problem.

“I appreciate that all that you’re doing in those hot spots around the country to ensure that the ballot — the integrity of the ballot is protected, because it’s important to our democracy.”

The goals here are to intimidate and alienate people from the voting process, suppress as many votes as possible, and delegitimize the victory, even if the Democrats manage to run the legal gauntlet and win. Eventually, Al Franken and Scott Murphy will be seated in Congress. But there’s no harm for the Republicans to just keep on with the same dirty tactics, with a look to the next election, when they can whisper about how “the Democrats stole the last one.”

…Howard Dean on Hardball today: “This could be a national pattern … this looks like a national attempt by the Republicans to keep people out of office if they have a D after their name.”

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Originalists Of The Species

by digby

Lisa aLa Figa went to some rallies in the LA area today and saw this sign:

Considering the level of historical knowledge we see on the right these days it’s reasonable to assume that this is just another illiterate wingnut. But it’s not. Apparently, this is a right wing slogan supporting the notion that poor people who don’t pay income taxes should not be allowed to vote because they vote for government benefits. In other words, poor people shouldn’t be allowed to vote.

Not that this is a particularly original idea. Elites fretted about democracy from the get, worrying that the polloi would use the vote to steal the landowners’ money.

In fact, these tea baggers really are “originalists.” They want to go back to the colonial system:

The basic principle that governed voting in colonial America was that voters should have a “stake in society.” Leading colonists associated democracy with disorder and mob rule, and believed that the vote should be restricted to those who owned property or paid taxes. Only these people, in their view, were committed members of the community and were sufficiently independent to vote. Each of the thirteen colonies required voters either to own a certain amount of land or personal property, or to pay a specified amount in taxes.

Many colonies imposed other restrictions on voting, including religious tests. Catholics were barred from voting in five colonies and Jews in four.

The right to vote varied widely in colonial America. In frontier areas, seventy to eighty percent of white men could vote. But in some cities, the percentage was just forty to fifty percent.

The American Revolution was fought in part over the issue of voting. The Revolutionaries rejected the British argument that representation in Parliament could be virtual (that is, that English members of Parliament could adequately represent the interests of the colonists). Instead, the Revolutionaries argued that government derived its legitimacy from the consent of the governed.

This made many restrictions on voting seem to be a violation of fundamental rights. During the period immediately following the Revolution, some states replaced property qualifications with taxpaying requirements. This reflected the principle that there should be “no taxation without representation.” Other states allowed anyone who served in the army or militia to vote. Vermont was the first state to eliminate all property and taxpaying qualifications for voting.

So, the tea party thing isn’t metaphorical; they literally want to go back to the original understanding of suffrage too.

I assume they also believes that the Second Amendment gives them the right to carry a musket.

Scolds and Tea Bags

by digby

They’re are out in force today:

Why your taxes could double

By David Walker

Even under the best of economic circumstances, tax season is a tense time for American households. The number of hours we collectively spend working on our returns is probably a lot more than government agencies claim.

The burden in financial terms is even greater: A recent independent survey found that the average American’s total federal, state and local tax bill roughly equals his or her entire earnings from January 1 up until right before tax day.

Now imagine that tax bill doubling over time.

In recent years, the federal government has spent more money than it takes in at an increasing rate. Total federal debt almost doubled during President George W. Bush’s administration and, as much as we needed some stimulus spending to boost the economy, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office now estimates total debt levels could almost double again over the next eight years based on the budget recently outlined by President Obama.

Regardless of what politicians tell you, any additional accumulations of debt are, absent dramatic reductions in the size and role of government, basically deferred tax increases. Remember the old saw? “You can pay me now or you can pay me later, with interest.”

[…]

Unless we begin to get our fiscal house in order, there’s simply no other way to handle our ever-mounting debt burdens except by doubling taxes over time. Otherwise, our growing commitments for Medicare and Social Security benefits will gradually squeeze out spending on other vital programs such as education, research and development, and infrastructure…

Effectively addressing these issues will require tough choices and comprehensive reforms, including budget controls, changes to our entitlement programs, reductions in health care costs, other spending cuts, and yes, tax increases. But as the old saw goes, paying now, or paying soon, won’t be as painful as paying later.

So as you file your tax returns this year, bear in mind that no matter how much you’re paying now, you’ll pay much more in the future because of Washington’s failure to get its finances in order. If you don’t like the idea, then get informed and get involved. And by listening rather than punishing, help encourage our elected officials to speak the truth about our financial condition, even if it means reforming entitlements, cutting spending, and yes, raising taxes.

Now call me crazy, but it seems to me that about eight years ago a president left the nation a surplus and a new president came in on a platform of “no new blowjobs” and “it’s your money.” And Walker’s anti-deficit benefactor, Pete Peterson, went strangely silent while that president and his party spent the country into oblivion on useless wars and tax cuts for the rich. They have no credibility.

The owners of America nearly destroyed the golden egg (again) and they are gathering their forces to ensure that they will pay no price for their thievery. If they can manage to destroy the American safety net while they’re at it, all the better.

All these wealthy front groups are coming together to fight any kind of reform that will benefit the average person. There is nothing more threatening to the ruling class than the possibility of average citizens becoming politically empowered and actually voting their own self interests.

h/t to steve a

Teabagging You Can Believe In

by tristero

Courtesy La Vida Locavore, and there are some other really groovy recipes over there in addition to this one:

Darjeeling Ice Cream

(any ice cream recipe can be adapted, simply by infusing the liquid with your favorite tea)
makes about 1 quart

1 cup whole milk
2 cups half and half (can use heavy cream for a richer ice cream)
¾ cup sugar
5-6 Darjeeling tea bags
5 egg yolks

Warm the milk, half and half, and sugar in a saucepan. Remove from heat, place tea bags in the pan, cover and steep at room temperature for an hour. Remove tea bags.

Rewarm tea-infused milk. Wisk egg yolks together in a separate bowl. Slowly pour the milk mixture into the bowl with egg yolks, whisking constantly.

Return the milk and egg mixture to the saucepan, and cook over medium heat, stirring and scrapping the bottom of the pan constantly until the mixture thickens to a custard and coats the spatula.

Cool the mixture completely, and freeze in your ice cream maker.

If You’ve Done Nothing Wrong, You Have Nothing To Worry About

by dday

Last week, the Department of Homeland Security released a report on right-wing extremism, being fueled by the recession and the disturbing increase in activity from white supremacy groups after the election of the nation’s first black President. Basically, fear and economic uncertainty breed a certain strain of anger that could morph into violence. And in particular, the targets here are anti-government hate groups, who may recruit and radicalize American citizens, including veterans.

Of course, this has set off conservative media, who claim that the President is directly targeting conservatives with this report. Never mind that the report initiated with the Bush Administration, and was a companion to a similar report on left-wing groups potentially using cyber-attacks (Here’s a separate report referring to left-wing groups back in 2001). Somehow conservative media groups take a look at murderous extremists like Timothy McVeigh and see themselves. Here’s Dave Neiwert, an authority on the subject:

Because, you know, the report — which in fact is perfectly accurate in every jot and tittle — couldn’t be more clear. It carefully delineates that the subject of its report is “rightwing extremists,” “domestic rightwing terrorist and extremist groups,” “terrorist groups or lone wolf extremists capable of carrying out violent attacks,” “white supremacists,” and similar very real threats described in similar language.

Nothing about conservatives. The word never appears in the report.

Because, you know, we always thought there was a difference between right-wing extremists and mainstream conservatives too. My new book, The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right, does explain that the distance between them has in fact shrunk considerably, thanks to the help of people like Malkin […] The report itself, in fact, is all about accurately identifying very real looming threats. And, while it’s obvious Malkin hasn’t been paying attention, there in fact is considerable data coming over the transom to indicate that there’s a real problem looming with the far right.

Don’t forget: Before he’d even been sworn into office, we had skinheads [photo above] being arrested for plotting Obama’s assassination.

Those who are slightly smarter than to describe themselves in the same breath as neo-Nazis are trying to shift the issue and claim that the report attacks veterans. Some good examples of this whining are Joe Scarborough, who said the Obama Administration is “more focused on targeting veterans than on protecting our border,” and Newt Gingrich, who claimed that the White House “used terrorism to describe worrying about Americans but the word has been banned for describing foreigners.” To their credit, some conservatives have maintained their sanity in discussing a report targeting violent extremist groups with a stated goal and long history of committing acts of terrorism.

Now, I think there is a potential danger of government over-reaching in the name of national security when it comes to monitoring citizen groups. I’ve ALWAYS thought so. That’s why the utter hypocrisy coming from the right on this issue is too insane to ignore.

The political faction screeching about the dangers of the DHS is the same one that spent the last eight years vastly expanding the domestic Surveillance State and federal police powers in every area. DHS — and the still-creepy phrase “homeland security” — became George Bush’s calling card. The Republicans won the 2002 election by demonizing those who opposed its creation. All of the enabling legislation underlying this Surveillance State — from the Patriot Act to the Military Commissions Act, from the various FISA “reforms” to massive increases in domestic “counter-Terrorism” programs — are the spawns of the very right-wing movement that today is petrified that this is all being directed at them.

When you cheer on a Surveillance State, you have no grounds to complain when it turns its eyes on you. If you create a massive and wildly empowered domestic surveillance apparatus, it’s going to monitor and investigate domestic political activity. That’s its nature […]

I was in Minneapolis and St. Paul during the 2008 GOP Convention and witnessed first-hand massive federal police raids and “preventive” arrests of peaceful, law-abiding protesters and even the violent arrests of journalists, and I don’t recall any complaints from Jonah Goldberg or Michelle Malkin. I don’t recall Glenn Reynolds or Mark Steyn complaining that the FBI, for virtually the entire Bush administration, was systematically abusing its new National Security Letters authorities under the Patriot Act to collect extremely invasive information, in secret, about Americans who had done nothing wrong. Russ Feingold’s efforts to place limits and abuse-preventing safeguards on these Patriot Act powers in 2006 attracted a grand total of 10 votes in the Senate — none Republican.

Indeed, thanks to the very people who are today petulantly complaining about politically-motivated federal police actions (now that they imagine it’s directed at them rather than at people they dislike), the Federal Government today has the power to eavesdrop on telephone calls and read the emails of American citizens without warrants; monitor bank records without court approval; obtain all sorts of invasive personal records, medical and financial, without Subpoenas; and obtain and store a whole host of other personal information about American citizens who have not been accused, let alone convicted, of having done anything wrong.

It was obvious that the same cheerleaders for excessive government surveillance, warrantless wiretapping, and police-state crackdowns would turn on a dime the moment that the federal apparatus transferred to Democrats. And it was obvious they would not fall back on their previous justifications – “If you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about,” – once their party lost power. So they really have no right to complain at all. If they had any intellectual honesty at all, maybe they’d work with civil liberties groups to dismantle the national security state and put an end to the threat of concentrated power in the hands of the few. But they won’t, because they’re perpetual victims and rage addicts who just want to feel oppressed by their enemies.

Oh yeah, and one more thing: love it or leave it.

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