Month: May 2009

King Edward

by digby

Dday had an astonishing post over at his place the other day featuring Ed Rendell which you should read in its entirety:

I just came across an astonishing interview on The Ed Show with Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell about the potential Specter-Sestak primary. It’s a combination of a threat, Newspeak, muddled and often contradictory logic, and a depiction of how the spoils system works in government, particularly a machine state like Pennsylvania. It’s really something, and it looks almost staged, like an infomercial designed to bash Sestak’s chances in public.

read on for the whole terrible trainwreck …|

I have never been a Rendell fan, particularly after he behaved like as ass during the 2000 Florida recount, rushing out to “inform” the country that Gore would have to concede. But after reading that post I now have an active dislike for him. And I’m more determined than ever to support Sestak’s run. This guy really doesn’t like democracy.

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We The People

by digby

Former Bush OLC lawyer and legal scholar Jack Goldsmith tells us matter of factly that if people insist that the government follow specific laws and the constitution that it will just find other ways to do exactly what it wants to do. Evidently, when it comes to national security there literally is no stopping them. It’s just a given that in order to “keep us safe” they simply must torture and imprison people without due process and that’s just the way it is. They’ll just employ other countries to do the dirty work and they’ll imprison whomever they choose inside the war zone in Afghanistan so as to circumvent the laws that have been put in place for Gitmo.

But he’s against it:

It is tempting to say that we should end this pattern and raise standards everywhere. Perhaps we should extend habeas corpus globally, eliminate targeted killing and cease cooperating with intelligence services from countries that have poor human rights records. This sentiment, however, is unrealistic. The imperative to stop the terrorists is not going away. The government will find and exploit legal loopholes to ensure it can keep up our defenses.

This approach to detention policy reflects a sharp disjunction between the public’s view of the terrorist threat and the government’s. After nearly eight years without a follow-up attack, the public (or at least an influential sliver) is growing doubtful about the threat of terrorism and skeptical about using the lower-than-normal standards of wartime justice.

The government, however, sees the terrorist threat every day and is under enormous pressure to keep the country safe. When one of its approaches to terrorist incapacitation becomes too costly legally or politically, it shifts to others that raise fewer legal and political problems. This doesn’t increase our safety or help the terrorists. But it does make us feel better about ourselves.

Silly citizens, thinking you have some say in these things. Don’t worry your pretty little heads about any of this because even if you do, it won’t make a difference. “The government” does what it needs to do no matter how many laws you pass or how many court decisions are made. They know everything and they know what’s best.

By the way, when do you suppose those WMD are going to turn up?

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Sacramento Syndrome

by dday

If shuttering state parks was the only thing we in California had to worry about, it would be bad enough. But that really only scratches the surface. Among the measures Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed, with little resistance from Democrats, include:

• Eliminating the entire welfare-to-work program, CalWorks
• Eliminating the entire Healthy Families program, which is California’s version of SCHIP. So the whole program that the Congress expanded early this year would be dismantled. California would be the only state in the nation without an SCHIP program.
• Eliminating the entire higher education aid grants program, Cal Grants.
• A 5% reduction in salary on top of previous 10% reductions for every single state employee.
• Eliminating funding for prescription drug help for AIDS patients.
• Education cuts that will lead to canceling all summer school programs in Los Angeles County, for example.

And that’s just a portion. As the California Budget Project explains, 1.9 million Californians could lose their health care coverage as a result of these cuts. Kudos to the LA Times, by the way, for allowing the great unmentionable to get printed on their pages – the decisions made in Sacramento will truly be the difference between life and death.

Schwarzenegger argues that the state’s declining economy and plummeting tax revenues have boxed California into a corner, forcing deep and historic cuts in the health and welfare programs that form the state’s social safety net. Without those tough measures, he says, California will cartwheel toward insolvency.

But a 10-person legislative budget panel, which is reviewing the governor’s proposals, listened during a long day in a crowded hearing room to scores of people who said their survival depends on programs set to be hit by the budget ax.

They heard from mothers of children with autism, representatives of people on dialysis, poor parents whose children see dentists on the government’s dime, former drug abusers set straight by a state rehab program.

And they heard from a woman named Lynnea Garbutt who has lived with AIDS all of her 24 years.

She has survived with the help of a state program that provides the expensive antiviral drugs she takes. Now, with that program facing elimination, she pleaded with lawmakers to save it — and her life.

“If these cuts take place, you’re not just cutting money from the program — you’re cutting my life,” she told the panel, her voice shaking and tears falling. “I choose to live. Please don’t make me die. My choice is life.”

It goes without saying that the weakest, most vulnerable, most voiceless members of society will bear the brunt of the pain from a problem created over thirty years by everyone but them. We have come to expect statements like this from Republicans:

Nearly all of the billions of dollars in cuts the administration has proposed would affect programs for poor Californians, although prisons and schools would take hits, as well.

“Government doesn’t provide services to rich people,” Mike Genest, the state’s finance director, said on a conference call with reporters on Friday. “It doesn’t even really provide services to the middle class.” He added: “You have to cut where the money is.”

In a technical sense, this is of course true. Government doesn’t provide services to the rich, only handouts. In the February budget deal in California, at a time when the deficit was increasing on a daily basis, the only permanent tax solution included was a massive, $1.5 billion/year tax cut to the largest corporations in America, who now get to CHOOSE how they are taxed in California, unlike in any other state in the nation.

At issue is the new “elective sales factor,” a system for determining how much tax a company should pay in the state. Up to now, California’s tax system taxed corporations using a formula based on employment, property and sales in the state, sometimes know as a “triple factor” system.

Many companies have long argued that this traditional way of calculating taxes punishes companies that invest in the state and create jobs, but critics disagree. Under the new elective system, set to go into place for the 2011 tax year, companies can choose to pay under either the triple factor formula or via the “single sales factor” system, based entirely on their sales in California […]

The most vocal critic of these changes is Lenny Goldberg, executive director of the California Tax Reform Association. He said he is opposed to single sales in the first place-but that allowing companies to choose which system they use is even worse. He said companies will now be able to report more revenue to the state in good years and move losses into the state in bad ones.

“Tax policy should be consistently applied,” Goldberg said. “But we’ve given this elective that provides for infinite manipulation.”

By the way, such a tax evasion was pushed as much as anyone by Democrats in areas with high-tech sectors. They have been clamoring for this shift in corporate tax policy for a generation, and they slid this into the budget at the last minute. And… wait for it… reversing it will require a 2/3 vote.

In the same way, Democrats who are supposedly the only hope for the voiceless, the infirm, the sick, the elderly, the poor, and the downtrodden, have been either entirely silent or entirely unhelpful in the face of these cuts. Susan Kennedy, the Democratic Chief of Staff to both Schwarzenegger and former Governor Gray Davis, has decided that “our revenue stream is way too progressive.” (Incidentally, lower-income Californians pay a far higher percentage of their income in taxes than those with a higher income, so when Kennedy claims the revenue stream is too progressive, she must mean not regressive enough.) That would be expected of someone in the executive branch, but enablers like Dianne Feinstein make assumptions that the results of the special election, when voters rejected a series of program cuts, borrowing and spending caps, with only one regressive revenue-raising proposal among the lot, prove that voters wanted these kinds of cuts. This has been echoed by the legislative leadership directly after the election. As I said then:

Where is the argument for DEMOCRACY in these statements? Since 1978 that democracy has crumbled and needs to be completely rebuilt. Everyone knows this but refuses to say it out loud. This is why the legislature and the Governor have historically low approval ratings. People are starved for actual leadership and see none. Only democracy will save us. This failed experiment with conservative Two Santa Claus Theories has now become deeply destructive. Because the democrats have provided no leadership and ceded the rhetorical ground, California public opinion holds the contradictory beliefs that the state should not raise taxes and also not cut spending. And if it persists without leadership and advocacy to the contrary, nothing will change.

Here’s the problem, in a nutshell. In 1978 California passed Prop. 13, and Democrats have run for cover ever since. They should have put up a fight immediately. They should have outlined the consequences of mandating a 2/3 majority for tax increases but not for program cuts, the consequences of aligning commercial property tax caps along with residential, the consequences of the supermajorities making the state ungovernable and the Constitutional mandates pushed by special interests and written in by the voters making the state unfixable. But instead, Democrats cowered in fear of losing power, despite the demographic shifts in the state since the mid-1990s, so they lay low and never advocate for the necessary reforms, and buy completely into the myth that the 70’s-era tax revolt remains alive and well, and they take public opinion polls on this as static and unchangeable through anything resembling leadership. Obviously Republicans are insane in this state, but they can barely manage 1/3 of the legislature (and if we had a half-decent campaign apparatus among California Democrats they’d lose that too) and shouldn’t be feared in any respect. Yet our Democratic leadership exists in a post-1978 fog, a kind of “Sacramento Syndrome,” where they’ve come to love their captors on the right, and have bought into their claims.

These severe program cuts are nothing more than a shock doctrine being placed on the citizens of California, with the burden anything but equally shared. Sadly, there is absolutely no one with any authority willing to stand up and say no. There are organizations outside the Capitol trying to lead and engage in systemic reform. But the Democrats in Sacramento are scared to death of it – that unknowable circumstance they cannot control. So the short term will deliver nothing but pain.

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Terrorism

by digby

It appears that President Obama’s call for a more respectful dialog on abortion has fallen on deaf ears:

George Tiller, the Wichita doctor who became a national lightning rod in the debate over abortion, was shot to death this morning as he walked into church services.

Tiller, 67, was shot just after 10 a.m. at Reformation Lutheran Church at 7601 E. 13th, where he was a member of the congregation. Witnesses and a police source confirmed Tiller was the victim.

No information has been released about whether a suspect is in custody. Police said they are looking for white male who was driving a 1990s powder blue Ford Taurus with Kansas license plate 225 BAB.

[…]

Tiller has long been a focal point of protest by abortion opponents because his clinic, Women’s Health Care Services at 5701 E. Kellogg, is one of the few in the country where late-term abortions are performed.

“We are shocked at this morning’s disturbing news that Mr. Tiller was gunned down,” anti-abortion group Operation Rescue said in a statement on its Web site. “Operation Rescue has worked for years through peaceful, legal means, and through the proper channels to see him brought to justice. We denounce vigilantism and the cowardly act that took place this morning. We pray for Mr. Tiller’s family that they will find comfort and healing that can only be found in Jesus Christ.”

Protesters blockaded Tiller’s clinic during Operation Rescue’s “Summer of Mercy” protests during the summer of 1991, and Tiller was shot by Rachelle Shannon at his clinic in 1993.

Tiller was wounded in both arms, and Shannon remains in prison for the shooting.

Tiller’s clinic was severely vandalized earlier this month. According to the Associated Press, his lawyer said wires to security cameras and outdoor lights were cut and that the vandals also cut through the roof and plugged the buildings’ downspouts. Rain poured through the roof and caused thousands of dollars of damage in the clinic. Tiller reportedly asked the FBI to investigate the incident.

It seems as if there’s somebody shooting up churches and killing cops on the basis of some wingnut obsession every few months now. I wonder why?

How many years has it been since there was a left wing terrorist killing in the US?

Update: While I know that most of my readers (with a couple of exceptions) are not cretinous enough to say that this doctor deserved to die because he performed therapeutic late term abortions, it must be noted that he was one of only a handful of doctors who will perform this vital service for women under the new law. If you think that women should have to endanger their lives in order to give birth to a fetus with no brain, then you probably think this man was a murderer. For the women who went to him, and for whom he put up with a horrifying amount of harrassment and violence before they finally managed to kill him, he was a Godsend.

More here from Carla at feministe

Update II: The right weighs in, via Instaputz.

And more here:

Many anti-abortion groups condemned the killing of Tiller, a prominent abortion provider in Kansas. But they expressed concern that abortion-rights activists would use the occasion to brand the entire anti-abortion movement as extremist. They also worried that there would be an effort to stifle anti-abortion viewpoints during questioning of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor. Her exact views on abortion aren’t known, but conservatives fear she supports abortion rights. Said the Rev. Patrick Mahoney, an anti-abortion activist: “No one should use this tragedy for political gain.”

Perhaps we could just sweep it under the rug and carry on with the slut shaming, bloody pictures and calling doctors murderers. No need to bring up this little bump in the road. It would be rude.

h/t to bb

Hoping For A Scandal

by digby

These Republicans really are something:

Just hours after President Obama nominated Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, conservative talker Rush Limbaugh declared that Obama had nominated a “racist.” In the following days, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) and former Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO) followed suit, while Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) and Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) appeared to come to the same conclusion.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) denounced such attacks as “terrible” late last week. This morning on Meet the Press, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) — who will help lead Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings — said that “he would prefer his colleagues refrain from calling Sonia Sotomayor a racist.” Similarly, on Fox News Sunday Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said the accusations of racism were wrong, remarking that Limbaugh was simply attempting to “entertain” his audience.

On CNN’s State of the Union, however, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said that he has “better things to do” than to ask members of his party to refrain from accusing Sotomayor of being a racist. Host John King noted that McConnell is the “highest elected Republican in the United State of America” and asked, “would it be best that language like racist not be used?” McConnell demurred:

KING: Are Rush and Newt making it a lot harder by using language like that? […]

MCCONNELL: They’re certainly entitled to their opinions. … Look, I’ve got a big job to dealing with 40 senate Republicans and trying to advance a nation’s agenda. I’ve got better things to do than to be the speech police over people who are going to have their views about a very important appointment.

Update: Asked if Sotomayor is a “racist,” Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) ducked the issue on CBS this morning. “I’m not going to get involved in characterizations before I’ve even met her,” Kyl said.

They know they can’t stop her. But they are going to rough her up and keep the door open for a “public hair on the coke can” moment.

You have to love the fact that Lindsey Graham says that conservatives find calling people racist “entertaining.” It’s true, of course, but you’d think they’d be at least a little bit embarrassed by it.

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Defending Abusive Priests

by tristero

Halfway through the extraordinary interview with Bill Donohue posted below, I reacted with nausea and disgust.

Donohue is someone who, in the face of overwhelming evidence of rampant, chronic sexual and physical abuse of children by Catholic priests, can actually accuse one of the victims of hysteria. But that is not why I started to feel sick.

Incredibly, this repulsive creep is accorded the status of a reputable voice in the American media, regularly seen and heard on talk shows watched and listened to by millions. (Based on the reactions in this interview, it is unlikely he will be accorded anything near such status anywhere in Ireland.) But even the fact that this slime has routine access to a mic and a camera in the US didn’t set me off, or even the fact that so many drooling lunatics actually agree with him.

What got to me, what appalled me beyond measure, was the horrible realization that millions of Americans who would never agree with Donohue’s filth nevertheless find him entertaining. They listen to this trash, as they listen to G. Gordon Liddy, for fun. Instead of simply relaxing with some good music or an interesting story, a huge swath of the American public actually enjoys, even seeks out, this violently pornographic excuse for public discourse. And, through advertising, is willing to pay for it.

That is nauseating.

h/t Pharyngula.

Saturday Night At The Movies

SIFFting through cinema, Pt. 1

By Dennis Hartley

The 2009 Seattle International Film Festival is in full swing, so for the next several weeks I wanted to take you along (especially since you helped make it possible for me, ahem).

Navigating a film festival is no easy task, even for a dedicated buff. This year’s SIFF is screening 392 features over 25 days. It must be great for independently wealthy slackers, but for those of us who work for a living (*cough*), it’s a bit tough finding the time and energy it would take to catch 15.68 films a day (yes, I did the math). I do take consolation from my observation that the ratio of less-than-stellar (too many) to quality films (too few) at a film festival differs little from any Friday night crapshoot at the multiplex. The trick lies in developing a sixth sense for which titles feel like they would be up your alley (in my case, embracing my OCD and channeling it like a cinematic divining rod.)

Some of the films I will be spotlighting will hopefully be “coming to a theatre near you” soon; there may be a few that will only be accessible via DVD. So let’s go SIFFting!

Live bait: The Yes Men chum for corporate sharks

What do you get when you throw Roger & Meand The Sting into a blender? Probably something along the lines of The Yes Men Fix the World. An alternately harrowing and hilarious documentary featuring anti-corporate activist/pranksters Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, this is a more focused follow up to their ballsy but uneven debut, The Yes Men. In that 2003 film, they established a simple yet amazingly effective Trojan Horse formula that garnered the duo invitations to key business conferences and TV appearances as “WTO spokesmen”. Once lulling their marks into a comfort zone, they would then proceed to cause well-deserved public embarrassment for some evil corporate bastards, whilst exposing the dark side of global free trade. (Most amazingly, they have managed not to suffer “brake failure” on a mountain road, if you know what I’m saying).

In this outing, Bichlbaum, Bonanno and co-director Kurt Engfehr come out swinging, vowing to do a takedown of a very powerful nemesis…an Idea. If money makes the world go ‘round, then this particular Idea is the one that oils the crank on the money-go-round, regardless of the human cost. It is the free market cosmology of economist Milton Friedman, which the Yes Men posit as the root of much evil in the world. Of course, there is not much our dynamic duo can do at this point to take the man himself down (as the forlorn expressions on their faces during a visit to his gravesite would indicate); but the Idea survives, as do those who would “drink the Kool-Aid”. And thus, the fun begins.

Perhaps “fun” isn’t quite the appropriate term, but there are definitely hijinx afoot, and you’ll find yourself chuckling through most of the film (when you’re not crying). However, the filmmakers have a loftier goal than mining laughs: they want to smoke out some corporate accountability; and ideally, atonement. I know that “corporate accountability” is an oxymoron, but one still has to admire the dogged determination (and boundless creativity) of the Yes Men and their co-conspirators, despite the odds.

Case in point: the 1984 Bhopal disaster in India, when a Union Carbide pesticide plant mishap exposed 500,000 people (200,000 of them children) to a toxic gas. Between 8,000 and 10,000 deaths occurred within 3 days. Since then, an estimated additional 25,000 Bhopal residents have since died from complications due to exposure. Union Carbide eventually paid an insurance settlement to the Indian government of 470 million dollars in 1989 (it sounds like a lot of loot…until you split it 500,000 ways). To add insult to injury, Union Carbide pulled up stakes (read: fled the scene of the crime) without ever cleaning up the site; to this day residents are drinking groundwater leached by toxins.

In 2004, BBC News did a special report on the 20th anniversary of the tragedy, which included an appearance by a spokesman for Dow Chemical (the corporation that had just recently acquired Union Carbide at the time of the broadcast). The spokesman, a Mr. “Jude Finisterra” made an astounding, headline-grabbing announcement: In an effort to truly atone for the Bhopal incident, Dow Chemical was going to invest a tidy sum of 12 billion dollars to clean up the area and compensate the victims. For several hours, all hell broke loose; Dow stockholders panicked and dumped over 2 billion dollars worth of stock in record time. To anyone with a soul, it was too good to be true-corporate criminals coming clean on live TV, in front of 300 million viewers? There’s hope for humanity! Well, not exactly. “Jude Finisterra” was really a member of our intrepid duo.

But the point was made; in fact, the real beauty of the ruse didn’t come into full flower until the Yes Men were “exposed”. When the “real” Dow Chemical spokespeople jumped into the fray to denounce the prank, they only made themselves look more ridiculous (and culpable) by essentially saying “Obviously, we would not commit such a large amount of money in this manner (i.e. of course we would never publicly take responsibility for the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people).” The most distressing thing on display is how quickly the MSM jumps in to toe the corporate line; in the case of the Dow sting (and later in the film, when they pose as HUD spokesmen, announcing that the government agency will provide housing for all the Katrina victims it had originally displaced in order to clear the way for redevelopment by private sector contractors) the newspapers and TV news anchors condemn the “cruel hoax” that gave “false hopes” to the victims of Bhopal and Katrina, respectively. When the concerned Yes Men travel to Bhopal to personally apologize to the residents for their “cruelty”, they are greeted with open arms; one Bhopal victim tells them that even though he was admittedly disappointed, he was, for an hour or so, “in Heaven”. By the end of the film, the Yes Men may not actually “fix the world”, but they certainly succeed in giving it hope with their sense of compassion and infectious optimism. And for an hour or so, I was in Heaven.

Previous posts with related themes:

Network

Michael Clayton

There Will Be Blood

We Live in Public: Marshall McLuhan is spinning.

So, how many “internet pioneers” were there, anyway? All jokes about Al Gore “inventing” the web aside, it seems like every time you turn around, yet someone else (usually someone you’ve never heard of) gets credited for being “the” visionary who put “us” where “we” are today (wherever the hell that is, in a virtual sense). Take the naked guy in the photo above, for instance. His name is Josh Harris. He’s an internet pioneer. Ever hear of him? God knows, I hadn’t, until I screened a fascinating new documentary called We Live in Public. The film represents a 10-year labor of love for director Ondi Timoner (DiG!!). Depending on who you ask, her subject is either an unheralded genius, or he’s a complete loon who got lucky during the dot com boom (he’s a bit of both). By 1999, Harris had built a personal fortune of 80 million dollars by cannily presaging the explosion of online social networking. In less than ten years, he was completely broke and had expatriated himself to Ethiopia (um, yes, there is most definitely a story in between, and the resulting profile plays like a cross between Weird Science and 54).

What separates Harris from the rest of the typically nerdy, pocket-protected web entrepreneurs is his self-styled persona as an “artist” (he apparently was referred to by some as the “Warhol of the Web”). He considered his “art” to be his life (and the lives of others), as filtered, documented and shared through the matrix of digital technology.

In December of 1999, Harris bankrolled a “social experiment” that could have been cooked up by Hunter S. Thompson and Jim Jones on an ether binge. Harris narrowed down scores of applicants to 100 “subjects” who would cohabitate in a bunker-like underground environment for 30 days. Each person had to consent to having a CCTV camera exclusively trained on them 24/7. Everybody also had their own monitor, and access to “flipping channels” to watch what any of the other 99 people were doing at any given time (showers and toilets were communal, and there were no bedroom doors, to answer the most obvious question). The complex was generously stockpiled with all manner of food, beverages…and guns (to be used in a firing range, so people could “blow off steam”). Each person was housed in a “sleeping pod”. Harris hired psychologists, who would methodically grill residents in stark interrogation rooms. It was fun and games for the first couple weeks, but things quickly went downhill when people started losing their sense of reality. When New York City law enforcement caught wind of these (literally) underground shenanigans, they pictured a possible Heaven’s Gate-type cult scenario, and Harris’ “experiment” was abruptly shut down on January 1, 2000. Orwellian implications aside, the idea itself was prescient; especially when you consider the current popularity of personal webcam internet sites and the glut of TV reality shows.

Harris soon took the concept to the next level when he wired up every room in his home with cameras and launched the “We Live in Public” website with his girlfriend, enabling any one with an internet connection to peek in on their daily life (with absolutely no holes barred). By the time Harris pulled the plug six months later, his girlfriend had left him, daily hits were down to a handful, and he appeared to be in the middle of a mental meltdown (watching the footage of Harris moping about, I was reminded of Charles Foster Kane’s waning days, listlessly pacing the sad empty halls of his Xanadu mansion).

From a purely cinematic standpoint, Timoner has assembled an absorbing and stylishly kinetic portrait; but curiously, her subject remains somewhat of an enigma by the film’s end. Is he truly a “pioneer”, or is he just a glorified exhibitionist? What did he “pave the way” for, ultimately-Katie Couric’s televised colonoscopy? Is there such a thing as “too much information” in the Information Age? Does EVERYBODY necessarily need their “15 minutes”? If so,why? IS the medium the message? And while I’ve got your attention, have you seen this video of my kitty with a bag stuck on his head? Oh, kitty!

Somebody’s watching me: The Truman Show, EdTV , Guy, Pleasantville, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Being There, Network , Real Life, Sherman’s March, Time Indefinite , Six o’clock News, sex, lies, and videotape, Following, Manhunter, Henry – Portrait of a Serial Killer, Man Bites Dog, Peeping Tom, Rear Window, Blow Up, Auto Focus, The Anderson Tapes, The Conversation, Monsieur Hire, The Lives of Others, 1984, Brazil, Enemy of the State, THX 1138, The End of Violence, Until the End of the World .

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Panic Artists

by digby

I have been desperate for someone other than bloggers to say this for years. Here’s Richard Clark:

[L]istening to Cheney and Rice, it seems that they want to be excused for the measures they authorized after the attacks on the grounds that 9/11 was traumatic. “If you were there in a position of authority and watched Americans drop out of eighty-story buildings because these murderous tyrants went after innocent people,” Rice said in her recent comments, “then you were determined to do anything that you could that was legal to prevent that from happening again.”

I have little sympathy for this argument. Yes, we went for days with little sleep, and we all assumed that more attacks were coming. But the decisions that Bush officials made in the following months and years — on Iraq, on detentions, on interrogations, on wiretapping — were not appropriate. Careful analysis could have replaced the impulse to break all the rules, even more so because the Sept. 11 attacks, though horrifying, should not have surprised senior officials. Cheney’s admission that 9/11 caused him to reassess the threats to the nation only underscores how, for months, top officials had ignored warnings from the CIA and the NSC staff that urgent action was needed to preempt a major al-Qaeda attack.

Thus, when Bush’s inner circle first really came to grips with the threat of terrorism, they did so in a state of shock — a bad state in which to develop a coherent response. Fearful of new attacks, they authorized the most extreme measures available, without assessing whether they were really a good idea.

I believe this zeal stemmed in part from concerns about the 2004 presidential election. Many in the White House feared that their inaction prior to the attacks would be publicly detailed before the next vote — which is why they resisted the 9/11 commission — and that a second attack would eliminate any chance of a second Bush term. So they decided to leave no doubt that they had done everything imaginable.

The first response they discussed was invading Iraq. While the Pentagon was still burning, Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld was in the White House suggesting an attack against Baghdad. Somehow the administration’s leaders could not believe that al-Qaeda could have mounted such a devastating operation, so Iraqi involvement became the convenient explanation. Despite being told repeatedly that Iraq was not involved in 9/11, some, like Cheney, could not abandon the idea. Charles Duelfer of the CIA’s Iraq Survey Group recently revealed in his book, “Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq,” that high-level U.S. officials urged him to consider waterboarding specific Iraqi prisoners of war so that they could provide evidence of an Iraqi role in the terrorist attacks — a request Duelfer refused. (A recent report indicates that the suggestion came from the vice president’s office.) Nevertheless, the lack of evidence did not deter the administration from eventually invading Iraq — a move many senior Bush officials had wanted to make before 9/11.

On detention, the Bush team leaped to the assumption that U.S. courts and prisons would not work. Before the terrorist attacks, the U.S. counterterrorism program of the 1990s had arrested al-Qaeda terrorists and others around the world and had a 100 percent conviction rate in the U.S. justice system. Yet the American system was abandoned, again as part of a pattern of immediately adopting the most extreme response available. Camps were established around the world, notably in Guantanamo Bay, where prisoners were held without being charged or tried. They became symbols of American overreach, held up as proof that al-Qaeda’s anti-American propaganda was right.

Similarly, with regard to interrogation, administration officials conducted no meaningful professional analysis of which techniques worked and which did not. The FBI, which had successfully questioned al-Qaeda terrorists, was effectively excluded from interrogations. Instead, there was the immediate and unwarranted assumption that extreme measures — such as waterboarding one detainee 183 times — would be the most effective.

Finally, on wiretapping, rather than beef up the procedures available under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the administration again moved to the extreme, listening in on communications here at home without legal process. FISA did need some modification, but it also allowed for the quick issuance of court orders, as when President Clinton took stepped-up defensive measures in late 1999 under the heightened threat of the new millennium.

Yes, Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice may have been surprised by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 — but it was because they had not listened. And their surprise led them to adopt extreme counterterrorism techniques — but it was because they rejected, without analysis, the tactics the Clinton administration had used. The measures they uncritically adopted, which they simply assumed were the best available, were in fact unnecessary and counterproductive.

I was talking to someone the other day about this and we mused about what would have happened if these guys had been in charge during the Cuban Missile Crisis. As it happens, there were many of the same knee-jerk pants wetters among Kennedy’s advisors, but his instincts were to find a way to avoid a terrible confrontation rather than seek one. If Cheney had been in charge, there is no doubt in my mind that we would have had nuclear war. Indeed, you’ll recall that conservatives were out there proclaiming WW III (and WW IV!) with more glee and excitement than sugar addled six year olds at the circus.

They were partisan hacks who panicked and now they are desperately trying to justify themselves after the fact. Even the best case scenario shows a bunch of people who wanted to “get it right this time” rather than evaluating the threat on its own merits. Thoughtful leadership was MIA in the executive branch (not that it was anywhere obvious for a long, long time anywhere else in the government either.) This behavior from the people who routinely deride liberals for ostensibly operating out of emotion rather than reason, is just funny. They lost it to such an extent that Cheney seized dictatorial powers and basically took over the US military in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, even ordering planes shot out of the air on his own authority.

We didn’t know what happened on the inside at the time, but it was clear they were losing it from the very first moments. Having Bush race all over the country on the first day, the bellicose stupidity of their rhetoric and the absurd reaction to the anthrax attacks showed that our leadership was anything but calm, cool and collected. The media jumped in immediately with breathless, uncritical hero worship of Rumsfeld’s lunacy and Bush’s cowboy rhetoric, turning the instantaneous, opportunistic pivot to Iraq into an inevitability.

Despite all of Cheney’s attempts at redemption and the ongoing conservative insistence that their policies “kept the country safe” the truth is that they behaved hysterically and irrationally after the attacks and reinforced every bad American stereotype in existence. Because of their blindered conservative worldview, they simply assumed that anything that had been done by someone other than the airbrushed version of Ronald Reagan had to be wrong and that anything other than schoolyard bully tactics were a form of weakness.

It’s true that 9/11 did present an opportunity. America could have shown mature and intelligent global leadership. But it didn’t. It behaved like a wounded adolescent giant, its leadership carrying on with “bullhorn moments” and talk of wanted posters and playing cards while an irresponsible media entertained the masses with war porn.

It was an embarrassing — and dangerous — display. If there was ever a time for the leadership of this country to play it cool it was then. And they failed the test in almost every way. Good for Richard Clark for calling them out on this.

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As California Goes …

by digby

The good news is that there will never be any new taxes for wealthy people because they create jobs, so that’s good:

Nearly every state park in the Bay Area — from the towering redwoods at Big Basin to Angel Island, Mount Tamalpais to Mount Diablo and every state beach from Año Nuevo in San Mateo County to Big Sur — would close as part of budget cuts proposed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

In all, 220 of California’s 279 state parks, about 80 percent, would be padlocked starting as soon as Labor Day, under details of a historic closing plan released Thursday night by the state parks department.

“We’ve never been in as serious a predicament as we are facing right now. It is potentially devastating,” said state parks spokesman Roy Stearns.

[…]

But Friday, Democratic leaders said the budget hole is so great they expect some parks will close. The main reason: Sales tax, income tax and other revenues flowing into Sacramento have collapsed during the economic downturn and Republican leaders have said they will not support any increase in taxes or fees.

And this will lead to an ever more downward spiral:

Goldstein noted that a study by the University of California-Berkeley found that for every $1 in public money spent on state parks, $2.35 is returned to the state in taxes from tourism and other revenue they generate.

It will be the environment and the animals that will suffer, which is just the first step.

When his park’s famous elephant seals began arriving in the 1970s, Strachan said, there were no regular rangers. After a story about the seals ran in Sunset magazine, visitors began descending on the area without supervision.

“It was a nightmare. People were getting bitten and chased. Pups were getting harassed,” Strachan said.

If the parks close, a small crew of rangers would patrol wide areas, checking in on closed parks. People still would park on highways and walk to beaches. But rangers, park managers and legislators are worried that with almost no supervision across 1.5 million acres of parklands, it is almost certain there will be vandalism, animals poached and a high risk of wildfires from trespassers.

Old people and children are next on the chopping block.

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Good Cop Bad Cop

by digby

Don’t be fooled. This is a tag team effort:

Newt Gingrich does not seem to be deterred by the new message of the Republican leadership, such as Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), that he and Rush Limbaugh should stop calling Sonia Sotomayor a racist.

Gingrich has now sent out a fundraising e-mail, asking for help to send blast faxes to every member of the Senate demanding that the Sotomayor nomination be defeated. He even says that she shouldn’t even get a vote in the Senate, but should just have to withdraw.

Gingrich warns that all of American civilization is at stake here. “If Civil War, suffrage, and Civil Rights are to mean anything, we cannot accept that conclusion,” he writes. “It is simply un-American. There is no room on the bench of the United States Supreme Court for this worldview.”

He is throwing red meat to the base and the pompous Senatorial windbags will, meanwhile, play the role of statesmen and “lower the temperature,” trying to keep the Latino vote from abandoning the party completely. But they are each playing a role — they aren’t really in contention.

Nobody expects that she will not be confirmed. At the end of the day, most of the Republican Senators will probably “reluctantly” vote against her for a variety of bogus reasons, but with the filibuster off the table, it doesn’t matter. They hope to preserve some semblance of credibility with Latinos while giving the base what it craves.(And I would assume they want to leave the door open for something juicy to come along that would shake the whole thing up — an Anita Hill for wingnuts.)It’s all kabuki.

But Newt cut his teeth as a bomb throwing back bencher and understands better than anyone how you build power in the GOP from the outside in. (In fact, it’s really his only gift.) And every GOP Senator, most of whom came out of the same school, understands how this works as well. They are following their own playbook. Whether it will work again or not is anyone’s guess, but there’s nothing unusual about it.

*This is not to say that the GOP isn’t in disarray and fighting among themselves. But this little pageant is familiar and I think it indicates that they are starting to get themselves together and organize around being a minority party. And they are pretty good at that.

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