Month: September 2009

In Your Name

by digby

I knew several decades ago that it was going to be hard for me deal with the fact that the US had reverted to being a barbaric death penalty nation. Not that there is any dearth of very bad people who deserve to die here, but the idea that our clunky justice system was capable of sorting out such things in anything resembling a just manner seemed impossible to me. The moral implications of the state taking lives of people who are securely locked up as a matter of self-defense is completely illogical, although I guess most people believe there is some value in demonstrating the “eye for and eye” concept as a deterrent. I haven’t seen any evidence that this works, but it’s an intuitive thing that most people seem to feel is important.

Still, reagrdless of where you stand on the morality of executing guilty people, justice is a joke when the state arbitrarily takes the lives of some guilty people and not others and subjects citizens to the capriciousness of a patchwork of laws that vary from one state to the next. It only gets worse when one considers the inevitability of human error, capriciousness and plain old malevolence of those in authority. But nothing in all that compares to the absolute certainty that the state executes innocent people, which is a moral nightmare of such epic proportions that it still stuns me to think that any civilized country would do such a thing. (Well, maybe not so much anymore — after all, we are back to torture now, too.)

Many death penalty proponents have always argued that it hasn’t happened, that among the thousands of people the United States has executed, none were innocent. It’s always been a fatuous claim, considering how many prisoners have been released from death row due to factual innocence, although the pro death people have always said that “proves” that the system works.

Well, we now have proof that it did happen. And it’s the most horrifying story you can imagine, of a man who was convicted and executed for killing his own children in a fire by incompetent police work, witnesses who changed their version of events once the police focused on the suspect, and a jailhouse snitch. He didn’t do it.

In 2005, Texas established a government commission to investigate allegations of error and misconduct by forensic scientists. The first cases that are being reviewed by the commission are those of Willingham and Willis. In mid-August, the noted fire scientist Craig Beyler, who was hired by the commission, completed his investigation. In a scathing report, he concluded that investigators in the Willingham case had no scientific basis for claiming that the fire was arson, ignored evidence that contradicted their theory, had no comprehension of flashover and fire dynamics, relied on discredited folklore, and failed to eliminate potential accidental or alternative causes of the fire. He said that Vasquez’s approach seemed to deny “rational reasoning” and was more “characteristic of mystics or psychics.” What’s more, Beyler determined that the investigation violated, as he put it to me, “not only the standards of today but even of the time period.” The commission is reviewing his findings, and plans to release its own report next year. Some legal scholars believe that the commission may narrowly assess the reliability of the scientific evidence. There is a chance, however, that Texas could become the first state to acknowledge officially that, since the advent of the modern judicial system, it had carried out the “execution of a legally and factually innocent person.”

Just before Willingham received the lethal injection, he was asked if he had any last words. He said, “The only statement I want to make is that I am an innocent man convicted of a crime I did not commit. I have been persecuted for twelve years for something I did not do. From God’s dust I came and to dust I will return, so the Earth shall become my throne.”

It’s not like the authorities didn’t have notice of this before he was executed. They did. They just didn’t pay attention. And even if they hadn’t known about it, it wouldn’t take away the horrifying guilt of the state of Texas executing an innocent person in cold ritualistic fashion, after a long, drawn out period of mental and physical torture in prison. It’s not like they didn’t have an alternative.

There are some thing which the law is simply inadequate to do. Determining to an absolute certainty that someone is guilty is certainly possible. But it’s also possible for that same system to make the same determination that that someone is guilty who isn’t. You can’t allow people’s lives to be taken under a system like that and call it justice.

Read the whole article. It’s important.

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How To Lose The Presidency In Four Years

by dday

George Steph on how to properly punch hippies:

Here are the five key sets of questions they have to confront, both in the Roosevelt Room and in their consultations with Congress:

1. What is “death with dignity” for the public option? Is it better for the president to sacrifice it himself? Or convince Democratic leaders behind closed doors to come to him? Some will argue for taking the public option issue to the floor, passing it through the House and sacrificing it in conference — but once you’ve gone that far, it may be impossible for House Democrats to back down. So, giving it up on the front end in some fashion is likely the preferred option.

2. How do you get the price tag down, likely to about $700 billion? At that cost the most unpopular tax increases will not be necessary. And moderates in both the House and Senate have already signaled that they can live with it at that level. Which leads to question 3:

3. Can you still make a convincing case that the country is on a path to universal coverage? What mix of phase-ins and triggers are necessary to make that case?

I can’t take it. (If you’re interested, 4 asks if any Republican votes other than Olympia Snowe can be gathered – even the White House knows that answer is no – and 5 queries how to do the speech, possibly with a joint session to Congress.)

Stephanopoulos is very plugged in, and so this could very well be the discussion at the White House. Who apparently have yet to figure out that forcing millions of Americans into buying crappy insurance that can only come from private industry will be so massively unpopular that, if Republicans don’t repeal it, Democrats will be forced to themselves. That would be the quickest and easiest way to squander the majority possible, which at times I think is the Washington Democratic establishment’s metier.

Number two is arguably scarier. Practically all of the money spent in this health care bill goes to two things – expanding Medicaid and subsidies for individuals to buy insurance. That’s it. Reducing the cost of the bill either keeps more people off Medicaid or reduces the subsidies, making forced insurance under an individual mandate unaffordable. There’s this notion that bloggers and progressive groups don’t care about the poor, but we’re not writing the bill, and kowtowing to the lunatic moderates who put a price tag above morality except when talking about war. I have understood that the coverage expansion elements of the bill were crucially important, and the same thinking that artificially lowered the stimulus cost to the detriment of state budgets and public investment would doom the coverage expansion elements.

And after all that, after assuring us that the wise course would be to ditch a public insurance option that would only exist to cut costs, and reducing the coverage expansion funds and subsequently putting the burden of universal coverage on the backs of poor people, Stephanopoulos asks, basically, “How can we lie about this to the public?”

I find it hard to believe that the White House would be so stupid as to think that making the least popular choices to the majority of Americans making under $50,000-$60,000/year would be just the ticket to increase the President’s popularity. Actually, just kidding, I don’t find it so hard.

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Simply The Best

by digby

Senator Saxby Chambliss:

“This country has the best health care in the world and the best health insurance in the world, but we can still improve it and make it better.”

American health insurance far outstrips other countries’ health insurance. (At least if you’re a stockholder, which must be what Saxby’s talking about here.)

He also said this:

He said he does not support any bill that interferes with the relationship between a patient and a doctor.

“Every individual has the right to choose their own doctor and that’s why I’m opposed to universal health care,” Chambliss said. “There will come a point where the right to choose your own doctor will be made by the government and not the individual, and that is fundamentally wrong.”

But it’s obviously ok for our great health insurance companies to tell us which doctors we can choose — and nobody minds because they know their insurance company is the best. If my doctor isn’t on their list, it’s no problem at all because I’m sure they’ll find me a good one. After all, there are no insurance companies better than them in the whole wide world and it’s very important that we keep them that way. Indeed, it would be very bad for the health of the insurance industry to second guess them about such things.

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“corpus delicti”

by digby

Former prosecutor Sheldon Whitehouse points out the obvious to anyone who lives in the real world:

The prosecutor is often first presented with a case as a “corpus delicti” — a bullet-riddled body in the street, for instance. That ordinarily is enough to justify investigation. Through investigation, the evidence may prove that there was not in fact a crime (it was a suicide or an accident) or that the fatal acts were privileged or enjoy a legal defense (self-defense or justifiable shooting by an officer of the law). But one begins by investigation.

The judicial branch (which, under Marbury v. Madison, has the ultimate duty to determine “what the law is”) has determined that waterboarding is torture (see U.S. v. Lee, decided in 1984 by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit). The Bush administration has admitted to waterboarding captives. The corpus delicti of that crime exists. For there to be investigation now is unexceptional.

The only exceptional thing is the parties involved: the former vice president of the United States, his counsel David Addington, Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) lawyer John Yoo and their private contractors Bruce Jessen and Jim Mitchell, psychologists who designed the torture program. But in America, high office does not put one outside the law. Indeed, it borders on unethical for a prosecutor to refuse to investigate the corpus delicti of a crime because of concern as to where the evidence may lead.

With the corpus delicti present, a prosecutor looks to see whether theories of criminal liability can be eliminated by evidence the investigation reveals (a suicide note in the pocket, a police officer’s convincing description of a “clean shoot”). But as long as a viable theory of criminal liability remains, the investigation continues.

Hence the question: Looking only at the evidence that has become public so far, is there a viable theory of criminal liability arising out of this corpus delicti, the torture of America’s captives?

He goes on to lay out the possibilities and says, unsurprisingly, yes and that investigation is warranted.

But you don’t have to be a former prosecutor to know that. You only have to be a person who lives in the United States, where investigations are launched every day against average citizens on the basis of virtually nothing.

We know what’s happening here. Dick Cheney and his Republican allies are saying that if they are investigated they will launch a jihad against this administration once they retake power that will make previous witch hunts look like ring around the rosie.

My only question is why anyone thinks they won’t do it anyway?

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Oh, Here’s A New Idea

by digby

I just love it when some “top officials” in the White House run to the press to telegraph their plans to screw their most ardent supporters. It only happens in Democratic administrations, so it’s rare, but it looks like we may be about to see more of this treat in the future:

Top officials privately concede the past six weeks have taken their toll on Obama’s popularity. But the officials also see the new diminished expectations as an opportunity to prove their critics wrong by signing a health care law, showing progress in Afghanistan, and using this month’s anniversary of the fall of Lehman Brothers to push for a crackdown on Wall Street. On health care, Obama’s willingness to forgo the public option is sure to anger his party’s liberal base. But some administration officials welcome a showdown with liberal lawmakers if they argue they would rather have no health care law than an incremental one. The confrontation would allow Obama to show he is willing to stare down his own party to get things done.

This makes perfect sense because his problem is that he’s been kow-towing to the left so much that he’s lost the country, what with all the war crimes investigations, the tax hikes for the rich, the crackdown on the banks, the repeal of “don’t ask don’t tell” and the thumbing of his nose at the Republicans every chance he gets. Not to mention the plans for full withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan by 2012 and his full blown assault on the health care industry and insistence on a Canadian style health care system. You’d think Obama would have been far, far more cautious so as not to give the Republican freakshow any possible path to demonize them as “far left.” It’s not like they could just make stuff up and a lot of people in America would believe it, right?

And let’s face facts, no president ever lost the good opinion of the village once he triangulated and Sistah Soljahed and “stared down his own party.” Unless you count Johnson, Carter and Clinton, of course. Running that game is such a tried and true road to either a one term presidency or an impeachment that it’s hard to believe the Republicans don’t do the same thing.

Obviously, we don’t know if this article is correct or if the “top official” is floating a trial balloon or simply trying to affect the debate inside the White House. (Again, the conventions of American journalism require that we sift through the runes to actually figure out what’s going on.) But taking this official at his word that he speaks for the White House on this matter, I can’t say I would be surprised if this were the consensus. It’s the kind of thing I’ve seen Democrats do as long as I can remember.

It will be bad enough if Obama capitulates on health care and tries to sell it as a victory. If he also ostentatiously dismisses his base to show he can “stare down his own party” the only celebrations he sees will be held on K Street and Wall Street. The Republicans won’t participate, of course. The liberals he armtwists will resent him for forcing them to walk the plank with their own voters. His base will be demoralized and verging on active hostility. The mythical “center” will shrug their shoulders and move on to the next issue. (They are, by their own definition, disloyal.) Only the Blue Dog and DLC politicians who got paid by the medical industry will happily stand by his side at the signing ceremony, with visions of lobbyist cash dancing in their heads. I hope he really, really likes them because they will be the only enthusiastic supporters he has left after this.

I have a question: is it true that Real Americans greatly admire politicians who loathe their own supporters and publicly and repeatedly kick them once they obtain office? I honestly don’t know the answer to that, but it seems that the Democrats are convinced of it. It’s an interesting psychology, to say the least, but one which I have never understood.

Update: Keep in mind that it ain’t over til it’s over. Obama is worried about his approval ratings, but he’s not stupid. He sees the same legislative roadblocks that everyone else sees and has to realize by now that the path to health care is through the Democratic Party alone. And that means the liberal are still in play whether he likes it or not.

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Four Years Ago Today

by digby

Peggy Noonan wrote this:

As for the tragic piggism that is taking place on the streets of New Orleans, it is not unbelievable but it is unforgivable, and I hope the looters are shot.

A hurricane cannot rob a great city of its spirit, but a vicious citizenry can. A bad time with Mother Nature can leave you digging out for a long time, but a bad turn in human behavior frays and tears all the ties that truly bind human beings–trust, confidence, mutual regard, belief in the essential goodness of one’s fellow citizens.

There seems to be some confusion in terms of terminology on TV. People with no food and water who are walking into supermarkets and taking food and water off the shelves are not criminal, they are sane. They are not looters, they are people who are attempting to survive; they are taking the basics of survival off shelves in stores where there isn’t even anyone at the cash register.

Looters are not looking to survive; they’re looking to take advantage of the weakness of others. They are predators. They’re taking not what they need but what they want. They are breaking into stores in New Orleans and elsewhere and stealing flat screen TVs and jewelry, guns and CD players. They are breaking into homes and taking what those who have fled trustingly left behind. In Biloxi, Miss., looters went from shop to shop. “People are just casually walking in and filling up garbage bags and walking off like they’re Santa Claus,” the owner of a Super 8 Motel told the London Times. On CNN, producer Kim Siegel reported in the middle of the afternoon from Canal Street in New Orleans that looters were taking “everything they can.”

If this part of the story grows–if cities on the gulf come to seem like some combination of Dodge and the Barbarian invasion–it’s going to be bad for our country. One of the things that keeps us together, and that lets this great lumbering nation move forward each day, is the sense that we will be decent and brave in times of crisis, that the fabric holds, that under duress it is American heroism and altruism that take hold and not base instincts born of irresponsibility, immaturity and greed.

We had a bad time in the 1960s, and in the New York blackout in the ’70s, and in the Los Angeles riots in the ’90s. But the whole story of our last national crisis, 9/11, was courage–among the passersby, among the firemen, among those who walked down their stairs slowly to help a less able colleague, among those who fought their way past the flames in the Pentagon to get people out. And it gave us quite a sense of who we are as a people. It gave us a lot of renewed pride.

If New Orleans damages that sense, it’s going to be painful to face. It’s going to be damaging to the national spirit. More damaging even than a hurricane, even than the worst in decades.

I wonder if the cruel and stupid young people who are doing the looting know the power they have to damage their country. I wonder, if they knew, if they’d stop it.

Noonan sure had the right culprits pegged, didn’t she?

Not that she was entirely wrong. Our national spirit was permanently damaged all right, by the cruel and stupid people who failed to do their jobs, at least partially because of hyperbolic fantasies such as this one. They flew all over the national media as overstimulated wingnuts like Noonan got excited at the prospect of “cruel and stupid” young men rampaging about in New Orleans like animals — where, oddly, cameras were everywhere but nobody got any pictures of it.

We will never know what would have happened if the authorities hadn’t been hesitant to enter the city with less than an army to help them shoot the non-existent rampaging mobs of young (black) men, as Noonan casually said needed to be done. But it isn’t hard to imagine that they would have at least let the Red Cross into the city before thousands of people were left stranded for days without food and water.

The people who went crazy weren’t the victims of the hurricane. They pretty much kept it together. It was the febrile wingnuts with night terrors of marauding gangs destroying civilization as we know it who lost their minds.

It later turned out that most of those left in the city were poor young mothers, their children and old people, not that it mattered. By the time everyone figured that out, they were living in a breakdown of civilization of another kind altogether.

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American As Apple Pie

by digby

Turns out teabaggers have always been teabaggers:

“If something is not done shortly, this country is going the way of…Italy, Germany…or Russia, and it is high time we did something,” exclaimed Irénée du Pont, one of the more prominent conservatives of the 1930s. Many of his fellow Americans agreed there was good cause to be alarmed: a new Democratic president was proposing an unprecedented expansion of federal power that would increase taxes on the well-off and dole out benefits to the jobless and other unfortunates. Several spokesmen on the right made more ominous vows: “So help me God, I will be instrumental in taking a Communist from the chair once occupied by Washington,” declared Father Charles Coughlin, who commanded one of the largest radio audiences in the nation.

[…]

This tradition is, in fact, as old as the nation itself. During the 1760s colonists along the Eastern Seaboard were convinced that King George III and his ministers meant to abolish their liberties and yoke their economy to the venal desires of the imperial court in London. They made a revolution to thwart this wicked plot, one that historians now agree never existed. Even after the Constitution was ratified, Americans were more comfortable when state and local governments levied taxes and enforced moralistic laws like Prohibition than when the feds tried to do the same thing.

The article (subs only) goes on to discuss all the times the right has succeeded, with the notable exception of Roosevelt who had the dubious advantage of an economy so devastated that the people no longer trusted the private sector.

But there’s another layer to this besides the internalized colonial fear of despotism (which didn’t seem to bother the right when it came to George Bush the Second) and it has something to do with this rather ugly strain in the American character:

After many months of conservative claims that Barack Obama and the Democratic Party are determined to engineer a “government takeover” of the private sector in order to “redistribute” income, Steele is upping the ante to suggest that Obama wants to redistribute healthcare – and perhaps even the opportunity to take another breath – as well.

This should be familiar to any political observer over the age of 30 as a new version of the old “welfare wedge”: the emotionally powerful conservative argument that Democrats want to use Big Government to take away the good things of life from people who have earned them and give them to people who haven’t.

As Lee Atwater correctly predicted, they have had to give up their explicitly racist welfare wedge: it’s now just implied. But I think we all know what it means —- these fine Americans believe that lazy shiftless inferiors are going to benefit from these their hard work and they are having none of it, even if they themselves have to go without. The health care debate has actually brought this right out into the open: people are saying right up front that they refuse to pay taxes for something that might end up benefiting people they don’t like.

Those early Americans didn’t like the distant King confiscating their money for his own use, for sure. But they had a little problem with giving their money to the government to help those less fortunate as well. Our vaunted revolutionary spirit looks just a bit less valiant when you see the whole picture for what it is.

Michael Kazin summarizes in the piece I linked to first above:

If Obama and his progressive allies hope to defeat the latest assault on
federal power, they will need to go beyond the president’s artful ambivalence about the subject. Like FDR, they will have to talk about government as the property of all the people and push through programs that make its benefits palpable to the great majority…For all its flaws, the national state is the only common political ground we have. To make that case does not advocate socialism; it advances
democracy.

That’s true, but at this stage I think Obama would have to start by making a case for democracy as well. I’m not sure a whole lot of Americans know what it actually means.

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Little Helpers

by digby

Chris Bowers says that health care reform and the president himself aren’t suffering in the polls because of teabaggers but because the economy is so bad. I think that’s true, but I think the teabaggers do have have something to do with it, even though they are not the central cause.

They are out there actively putting a face on people’s free floating anxiety and a lot of people are already predisposed to loathe a face looks like Big Liberal Government, or less abstractly for some, Barack Obama. The right knows it must have an enemy and they always produce one, whether it’s the Evil Empire, welfare queens, tax ‘n spend libruls, Bill Clinton’s immoral pants, the terra-ists or Barack the Kenyan socialist. They know that people don’t understand these policy differences and so they consciously point people toward those who they want them to hate (and always away from the true culprits.)

Health care, as I’ve written before, is a particularly difficult nut to crack because the only time you really seem to reach critical mass for comprehensive reform is during a recession — and it’s at that moment that the deficits usually rise, thus bringing out the fiscal scolds to dishonestly imply to everyone that debt is root of the country’s economic problems and the free spending welfare queens are going to take what little money you have left and give it to the undeserving. What is necessary to get political support for reform is also used as the excuse not to pass it.

Now, if the Democrats thought like Republicans they would have demagogued the hell out of the malefactors of wealth and the previous administration for being craven, avaricious thieves who nearly destroyed the country until our brave Knight came along and saved everyone. Instead we are fighting with a bunch of wonky, arcane “plans” while the other side shrieks about Hitler. It’s not a fair fight.

The teabaggers wouldn’t be effective if the economy were good, but they do the dirty work when the economy is bad. In a bad economy, people are afraid and are looking for solidarity and someone to blame. The Democrats are offering neither while the Republicans offer both, even if it’s just a sideshow. It won’t necessarily help them at the polls but it’s all they need to stop the momentum.

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Hello

by digby

Not that it’s relevant since the only polls the village cares about are ones that reinforce their own narrative, but this seems interesting to me:

Less than half (48 percent) of those questioned now say they approve of President Obama’s handling of the situation in Afghanistan, down from 56 percent in April. While a majority of Democrats still approve, just 31 percent of Republicans agree.

Fifty-two percent of Americans say the war in Afghanistan is going at least somewhat badly for the United States, and just 37 percent say it is going well.

[..]

The poll results are at odds with what NATO and U.S. commanders on the ground say they need. Military and civilian sources say top U.S. commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal is likely to request more troops for the Afghan war later this year.

I would guess that we are going to have a domestic Battle Royale over Afghanistan that makes health care look like tiddly winks before this is over. Pelosi said earlier that the supplemental this year was one of the hardest votes she had this year, and for good reason:

Health care is not the hardest vote I’ve had this year. Not by far. That was the [war] supplemental. That was the worst. Energy was a heavy lift. But you’re talking substance. You’re discussing issues with people. But we had never thought we’d have to do another supplemental. Not that we would have to vote for. But then the president brought home the IMF and Republicans all took a hike. Then we were stuck with it. Oh brother! That was the hardest. Budget, stimulus, those were all heavy lifts. None of it is easy. But you get ready for things like energy, health, education, and budget. But the supplemental? That’s where we have to do a heavy lift? We all said we were never ever voting for this again. But in any event, I think the administration knows that that was it.

Does anyone think Rahm isn’t going to do the same thing next time, looking for similar results? And with only 31% of Republicans now supporting the troops, what happens then?

The poll has another interesting element that is of no use to anyone because it doesn’t reinforce the village view that the whole country is as much in favor of torture as they are:

According to the poll results, half of the public believes the Justice Department’s appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate interrogation tactics used by the CIA is a good idea. Just 38 percent say it is a bad idea.

You’d never know that from listening to the gasbags, would you?

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Blowing Off Steam

by digby

Patriots on the payroll:

Drunken brawls, prostitutes, hazing and humiliation, taking vodka shots out of buttcracks— no, the perpetrators of these Animal House-like antics aren’t some depraved frat brothers. They are the private security contractors guarding Camp Sullivan, otherwise known as the US Embassy in Kabul. These allegations, and many more, are contained in a letter sent to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Tuesday by the Project on Government Oversight, which has been investigating the embassy security contract held by ArmorGroup North America (a subsidiary of Wackenhut, which is in turn owned by the security behemoth G4S). The contractor was the subject of a congressional probe earlier this summer that found serious lapses in the company’s handling of the embassy security contract, which internal State Department documents said left the embassy compound “in jeopardy.” Nevertheless, the government opted to extend the company’s 5-year, $189 million contract for another year.

It would be wrong to look in the rearview mirror and play the blame game here. After all, if we hold anyone accountable for such behavior, these fine Americans will refuse to guard the embassy for fear they’ll be investigated and then the terrorists will win.

By the way, this is just the latest in a long line of similar crimes committed by our vaunted, overpaid “security” companies overseas. This one, featuring sex slaves rings in Bosnia comes to mind.