Otters!
by digby
Because it’s Friday night. And we need it:
Have a good week-end folks…
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"what digby sez..."
Month: June 2014
How can you trust these people to follow the constitution when they keep poking holes in it?
by digby
I keep thinking about Lindsay Graham’s grave warnings about Obama being impeached over Guantanamo prisoners. Various little threads of memory keep weaving their way into my consciousness, of things said by Graham and others over the years about hostages and impeachment and lying to congress and the “rule ‘o law”:
For instance this very stirring speech keeps coming to mind:
Now the rule of law is one of the great achievements of our civilization, for the alternative is the rule of raw power. We here today are the heirs of 3,000 years of history in which humanity slowly, painfully, at great cost evolved a form of politics in which law, not brute force, is the arbiter of our public destinies.
We are the heirs of the Ten Commandments and the Mosaic Law, a moral code for a free people, who, having been liberated from bondage, sought in law a means to avoid falling back into the habits of slaves.
We are the heirs of Roman Law, the first legal system by which peoples of different cultures, languages, races and religions came to live together in a form of political community.
We are the heirs of the Magna Carta, by which the free men of England began to break the arbitrary and unchecked power of royal absolutism. We’re the heirs of a long tradition of parliamentary development in which the rule of law gradually came to replace royal prerogative as a means for governing a society of free men and women.
HYDE: We’re the heirs of 1776 and of an epic moment in human affairs, when the founders of this Republic pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honors. Think of that — sacred honor — to the defense of the rule of law.
We are the heirs of a hard-fought war between the states, which vindicated the rule of law over the appetites of some for owning others. We are the heirs of the ah century’s great struggles against totalitarianism, in which the rule of law was defended at immense cost against the worst tyrannies in human history.
The phrase “rule of law” is no pious aspiration from a civics textbook. The rule of law is what stands between all of us and the arbitrary exercise of power by the state. The rule of law is the safeguard of our liberties. The rule of law is what allows us to live our freedom in ways that honor the freedom of others, while strengthening the common good.
The rule of law is like a three-legged stool. One leg is an honest judge, the second leg is an ethical bar, and the third is an enforceable oath. All three are indispensable to avoid political collapse.
In 1838, Abraham Lincoln celebrated the rule of law before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, and linked it to the perpetuation of American liberties and American political institutions. Listen to Lincoln, from 1838: “Let every American, every lover of liberty, every well-wisher to his posterity, swear by the blood of the revolution never to violate in the least particular the laws of the country; and never to tolerate their violation by others. As the patriots of ’76 did to support the Declaration of Independence, so the support of the Constitution and laws, let every American pledge his life, his property and his sacred honor. Let every man remember that to violate the law is to trample on the blood of his father and to tear the character of his own and his children’s liberty.
“Let reverence for the laws be breathed by every American mother to the lisping babe that prattles on her lap. Let it be taught in the schools, seminaries, colleges. Let it be written in primers, spelling books, almanacs. Let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls and enforced in the halls of — in the courts of justice.”
So said Lincoln.
My colleagues, we have been sent here to strengthen and defend the rule of law — not to weaken, not to attenuate it, not to disfigure it. This is not a question of perfection; it’s a question of foundations.
This isn’t a matter of setting the bar too high; it’s a matter of securing the basic structure of our freedom — which is the rule of law.
That was Henry Hyde, head House Manager on the grave matter of Bill Clinton lying under oath about a blow job. He sounds like a very principled man, correct?
Well, as was pointed out at the time, in the past, Hyde did believe there were “exceptions” to the rule of law:
“All of us at some time confront conflicts between rights and duties, between choices that are evil and less evil, and one hardly exhausts moral imagination by labeling every untruth and every deception an outrage. We have all been sermonized how terrible lying is, and that is a given….But “the end does not justify the means”–it just seems to me is too simplistic when you have to deal with some very difficult, complex moral situations”
That was Henry Hyde defending the Iran arms for hostages deal that clearly violated the law. He further explained that you could lie under oath if it was really, really important.
Senator Lindsey Graham, former impeachment manager, informed us this week that any other attempts to release prisoners from Guantanamo would be met with impeachment. (I’m guessing they know that impeachment will not hurt them politically — after all Graham became a senator and George W. Bush became president. Just saying. Nobody cared.)
He’s also a real stickler for the “rule ‘o law”, just like his fellow Republican Henry Hyde. Well, unless it’s really, really important to violate it:
Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said it would be “crazy” to exempt Qaeda suspects who are Americans and are arrested inside the country from battlefield-style detention. He argued that, to stop other attacks, they must be interrogated without the protections of the civilian criminal justice system.
Citizens who are suspected of joining Al Qaeda are opening themselves up “to imprisonment and death,” Mr. Graham said, adding, “And when they say, ‘I want my lawyer,’ you tell them: ‘Shut up. You don’t get a lawyer. You are an enemy combatant, and we are going to talk to you about why you joined Al Qaeda.’ ”
Because we just “know” if they are guilty of this, correct? He went on to say this after the Boston bomber — and American citizen — was caught:
Now that the suspect is in custody, the last thing we should want is for him to remain silent,” the two Senators said in the statement. “It is absolutely vital the suspect be questioned for intelligence gathering purposes. We need to know about any possible future attacks which could take additional American lives. The least of our worries is a criminal trial which will likely be held years from now.”
“Under the Law of War we can hold this suspect as a potential enemy combatant not entitled to Miranda warnings or the appointment of counsel. Our goal at this critical juncture should be to gather intelligence and protect our nation from further attacks.”
The least of our worries is “the rule of law.” We could be in danger! To how many other situations could you apply that logic?
I’m not easily shocked by these people anymore but these comments by a US Senator strike me as so outrageous that I can hardly believe he’s still in the Senate. (I’m stunned that he’s a lawyer.) But the ease with which he spouts these ideas as vif they are perfectly normal should make any critic of us civil liberties cranks stop and think for a moment. Is it possible that he’s an outlier? Or are there a lot of people in government who think that “the rule of law” is a nice construct to be dredged up when its politically expedient to make soaring speeches on the floor of the congress but which can be discarded any time they think it’s “necessary” to keep us safe? I’m going to guess that Lindsay Graham is not alone.
How can we possibly trust people like this to follow the constitution? They openly portray it as full of holes as a chunk of swiss cheese.
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I guess this is one way to “rebrand”
by David Atkins
New Republican strategy: if you can’t beat them, pretend to be them and lie. A lot.
A Republican who twice tried — and twice failed — to be elected has changed his name from “Scott Fistler” to “Cesar Chavez,” his party affiliation from GOP to Democrat, and just filed to run for Congress in a heavily Hispanic district.
Much like Dave Wilson, the white anti-LGBT activist in Houston, Texas who used stock images of African-Americans in his campaign literature to deceive low-information voters about his race, Chavez is trying to convince voters in Arizona’s 7th Congressional District that he shares a common cultural and racial heritage with them.
His official campaign website is cluttered with images of excited people cheering for “Chavez” — the majority of which come from news reports about former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
The Arizona Capitol Times contacted Chavez for comment, but he claimed his office was too “flooded with calls and emails” for him to substantively reply.
“There is just simply not enough Cesar Chavez to go around,” he wrote. “We may resume questions starting May 10th.”
Mary Rose Wilcox, another Democrat candidate looking to represent Arizona’s 7th District, told the Capitol Times that she “thinks that’s really poor taste.”
“My husband and I grew up under the leadership of Cesar Chavez (the labor leader) and he means so much to our community,” she said. “Voters aren’t going to be fooled. If he thinks he can fool them, it’s a real affront to the community. He should be ashamed.”
Ay caramba.
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On the worst of the worst. Well one of them anyway.
by digby
We’ve heard a lot about the “worst of the worst” at Gitmo over the years and most of it’s turned out to be BS. nbsp;So too have the lurid assertions about the Taliban prisoners in the Bergdahl swap. The LA Times has the whole story here:
A closer look at the former prisoners, however, indicates that not all were hard-core militants. Three held political positions in the Taliban government that ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001 and were considered relative moderates. A fourth was a mid-level police official, experts say.
The fifth, however, has a darker past. Mohammed Fazl was chief of staff of the Taliban army and is accused of commanding forces that massacred hundreds of civilians in the final years of Taliban rule before the 2001 U.S.-led invasion. He was arrested in November 2001 after surrendering to U.S.-allied warlords in northern Afghanistan.
“Fazl is the only one of the five to face accusations of explicit war crimes and they are, indeed, extremely serious,” Kate Clark of the Afghanistan Analysts Network, a Kabul-based research group, wrote in a commentary published Wednesday.
The backgrounds of the prisoners, who are confined to the Persian Gulf nation of Qatar for one year under the terms of the exchange, indicate that they would have little utility on the battlefield after more than a decade in prison. They range in age from 43 to 47.
I’m sure these are not guys you’d want your daughter to marry. Nobody likes the Taliban. But there are many thousands of Muslim extremists all over the world who are younger and stronger and more than capable of leading their movement — and who will no doubt be less than willing to step aside for these old lower level duffers who were caught up in Afghan politics and the Taliban revolution, not jihad against America. Even the one who is obviously a war criminal is accused of committing war crimes against other Afghans not the US.
And anyway, the idea that any single individual is so dangerous that to let them go is to jeopardize national security betrays either a very cynical PR strategy or a very stupid threat assessment. I hate to be the bearer of bad news but there will never come a day when we’ve imprisoned or killed all the “bad guys.” New ones are born every day — many of them because of that godforsaken black hole of a prison camp where we are holding people forever.
If all these patriots were really concerned about national security they’d be for closing Guantanamo instead of holding on to a rapidly aging group of prisoners, turning them into martyrs, and pretending that it is keeping us safe. It’s doing the opposite.
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Sanity-1 Wayne LaPierre-0
by digby
The NRA chief likes to spout this lame aphorism every chance he gets:
“The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun”
Au contraire, Monsieur LaPierre:
Meis, who was working at the time as a monitor who sits at a desk in the lobby, near the Hall’s front door, quickly moved in to pepper-spray the gunman, then he tackled him to the ground. Police arriving moments later moved in to handcuff and arrest the suspect, other witnesses said.
But hey, maybe some “good guys” with guns could have helped create even more chaos bloodshed by firing even more deadly projectiles all over the place. That really is an optimal outcome. Because freedom.
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QOTD: Ezra Klein
by digby
I’m a climate pessimist. I don’t believe the United States — or the world — will do nearly enough, nearly fast enough, to hold the rise in temperatures to safe levels. I think we’re fucked. Or, at the least, I think our grandchildren are fucked.
And then he goes on to lay out exactly why. It’s exceedingly depressing. But probably true.
If only we could find a way to make our lawmakers believe that dealing with climate change would reduce the deficit then we might get somewhere.
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He’s still got it
by digby
I can’t imagine this old fella would want to be anywhere else today. It’s pretty unlikely he’ll be around for the 80th anniversary:
An 89-year-old WW2 veteran who was banned by his nursing home from going to France for the D-Day commemorations sneaked out and went anyway.
The pensioner left the Hove home at 10:30 BST on Thursday and was reported missing in the evening, police said.
The nursing home received a call from a younger veteran later on saying he had met the un-named veteran on a coach.
The two were on their way to France and said they were safe and well in a hotel in Ouistreham, Sussex Police said.
Hundreds of veterans have been marking the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings in France, with events on the beaches of Normandy.
If you’re a traveler and you’ve never made a trip to the Normandy beaches it really worth going. It’s not only a really great part of France, the feeling for the history there is right on the surface.
70 years ago today it looked like this:
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No surprise: voter ID-supporting state legislators don’t want Hispanics to know they can vote
by David Atkins
A lot of academic “work” is the sociological and political sciences is fluff. But this study is worth its weight in gold:
Demonstrating racial bias is not easy — as I’ve discussed before, nobody actually calls themselves racists, because much racial bias happens at the subconscious level — so the USC researchers developed a novel real-world field experiment to test bias among state legislators. In the two weeks prior to the 2012 election, they sent e-mail correspondence to a total of 1,871 state legislators in 14 states. The e-mails read as follows:
Hello (Representative/Senator NAME),
My name is (voter NAME) and I have heard a lot in the news lately about identification being required at the polls. I do not have a driver’s license. Can I still vote in November? Thank you for your help.
Sincerely,
(voter NAME)The key to the experiment lies in that voter name field. One group of legislators received e-mail from a voter who identified himself as “Jacob Smith.” The other received email from “Santiago Rodriguez.” Moreover, half of the legislators in each of these two groups received e-mails written in Spanish, while half received English-language e-mails.
The researchers then measured the lawmakers’ response rates to these e-mails. Crucially, in each state in the study, legislators really could have simply responded with a “yes” — drivers’ licenses were not required in any of the states in order to vote.
The researchers found that legislators who had supported voter ID laws were much more likely to respond to “Jacob Smith” than to “Santiago Rodriguez.” This gap reveals a preference for responding to constituents with Anglophone names over constituents with Hispanic ones.
There was also an Anglophone preference among legislators who had not backed ID requirements, but crucially this preference was much smaller. This finding held true among legislators who received English-language e-mails, as well as legislators who received Spanish e-mails.
Voter ID laws are all about preventing minorities from voting. Always have been. Still are. The intentions and biases of these legislators could not be more clear.
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POW turncoats
by digby
As the wingnuts gin up a new rumor that Bergdahl joined the Taliban and was allegedly seen playing soccer and otherwise fraternizing during his five years of captivity, I was reminded of this New York Times story from a few years back about how Americans reacted to POWs from the Korean war:
After the war, thousands of American P.O.W.’s returned under suspicion of having collaborated with the enemy while in captivity. A handful, on orders from their captors, had, in fact, falsely accused the United States of conducting germ warfare against North Korea. Congress was transfixed by “the fear that the soldiers could have been brainwashed by the Chinese and still be spying for them,” Col. Elspeth Cameron Ritchie wrote in the journal Military Medicine. Dread that the Chinese Communists had created zombie sleeper agents spread quickly and ran deep.
A Dutch psychologist, Joost A. M. Meerloo, caught the apocalyptic tone in a New York Times Magazine article in 1954: “The totalitarians have misused the knowledge of how the mind works for their own purposes. They have applied the Pavlovian technique — in a far more complex and subtle way, of course — to produce the reflex of mental and political submission of the humans in their power.”
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Clandestine prisons were created in occupied Germany, occupied Japan and the Panama Canal Zone. “Like Guantánamo,” said a charter member of the C.I.A., Thomas Polgar. “It was anything goes.” In these cells, the agency conducted experiments in drug-induced brainwashing and other “special techniques” for interrogations. These continued inside and outside the United States, sometimes on unsuspecting human guinea pigs, long after the Korean War ended in 1953.“There was deep concern over the issue of brainwashing,” Richard Helms, the former director of central intelligence, told the journalist David Frost 25 years later. “We felt that it was our responsibility not to lag behind the Russians or the Chinese in this field, and the only way to find out what the risks were was to test things such as L.S.D. and other drugs that could be used to control human behavior. These experiments went on for many years.”
While the government chased after truth serum, fiction raced behind reality. The theory of a robot-like Manchurian Candidate was posited by the C.I.A. in 1953, six years before Richard Condon published the novel of that name, nine years before the book became a movie. William Burroughs, in “Naked Lunch” (1959), created a drug-addled mad scientist, Dr. Benway, “an expert on all phases of interrogation, brainwashing and control.”
In the 1960s, brainwashing began to fade as a nightmare, though it was revived when captured soldiers and pilots released by North Vietnam made antiwar statements. In 1967, a Republican presidential contender, Gov. George Romney of Michigan (Mitt’s dad), was ridiculed when he said he had been brainwashed by American generals about how well the war in Vietnam was going.
Flash forward to 2002. American military and intelligence officers, looking for better ways to interrogate prisoners in the war on terror, went combing through government files. They found that the best institutional memory lay in the interrogation experiences of American P.O.W.’s in Korea. They reprinted a 1957 chart describing death threats, degradation, sleep deprivation — and worse — inflicted by Chinese captors. And they made it part of a new handbook for interrogators at Guantánamo.
We know a lot about POWs under duress from our own prisoners being held captive in he past and our own experiments on the subject. In some respects we wrote the book.
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Doctor Feelgood
by digby
In an exclusive interview with CNN, Coburn said he is convinced that Bergdahl “had been drugged” in the video, “either with an anti-psychotic or hypnotic drug,” he said.
How could he tell?
“It’s easy,” Coburn replied, “His speech was slurred, he was having trouble reading, and he had what’s called ‘nystagmus.’ I mean, he’d been obviously drugged. “
Coburn went on to emphasize that he was making that observation as a physician
“I’m speaking as a doctor, yeah,” said Coburn.
Coburn is an obstetrician gynecologist.
Yeah, that’s right. The same guy who said this:
“Lesbianism is so rampant in some of the schools in southeast Oklahoma that they’ll only let one girl go to the bathroom. Now think about it. Think about that issue. How is it that that’s happened to us?”
and this:
I thought I would just share with you what science says today about silicone breast implants. If you have them, you’re healthier than if you don’t. In fact, there’s no science that shows that silicone breast implants are detrimental and, in fact, they make you healthier.”
and this:
“I am a global warming denier. I don’t deny that.”
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. So perhaps he isn’t all that credible when it comes to diagnosing someone in a video. The next time CNN wants a long distance video diagnosis from a Republican doctor they should check with Bill Frist. He’s experienced.
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