Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

The Scolds Never Stop

by dday

John McCain had another “old man yells at cloud” moment yesterday, complaining about earmarks in last year’s spending bill, and trying to eliminate all of them. His effort lost on a bipartisan basis, probably because this is last year’s spending needed to keep the government running, a shutdown at this point would be completely counter to economic fiscal stimulus, earmarks are 2% of the total bill and half of them were inserted by Republicans, including $76 million from Thad Cochran (R-MS), the overall leader.

However, this hasn’t stopped the Democratic worry warts to fret about spending, at a time when there’s practically no other economic activity other than that coming from the federal government.

Moderate and conservative Democrats in the Senate are starting to choke over the massive spending and tax increases in President Barack Obama’s budget plans and have begun plotting to increase their influence over the agenda of a president who is turning out to be much more liberal than they are.

A group of 14 Senate Democrats and one independent huddled behind closed doors on Tuesday, discussing how centrists in that chamber can assert more leverage on the major policy debates that will dominate this Congress […]

Asked when he’d reach his breaking point, Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson, one of the most conservative Democrats in the Senate, said: “Right now. I’m concerned about the amount that’s being offered in [Obama’s] budget.”

Another attendee, Sen. Mary L. Landrieu (D-La.), said she expected the newly formed caucus to shape Obama’s budget proposal as it moves through Congress.

“We want to give the president a chance, but our concern is going to be on the budget, looking forward,” Landrieu said. She added that she agrees with Obama that there needs to be “fundamental change” in fiscal policy, but she said “we do have to keep our eye on the long term, on intermediate and long-term fiscal responsibility.”

Sen. Evan Bayh, the Indiana Democrat who assembled Tuesday’s skull session, added that he was “very concerned” about Washington’s level of spending, especially in a $410 billion “omnibus” spending bill to fund the government until the start of a new fiscal year in October.

As for the tax increases on high-income earners called for in Obama’s plan, Bayh said, “I do think that before we raise revenue, we first should look to see if there are ways we can cut back on spending.”

“The American people and businesses are tightening their belts,” Bayh added. “I think we need to show that the government can economize as well.”

Ladies an gentlemen, your almost-Vice President, Evan Bayh.

Once again, the path for a Democratic President must go through Democratic fiscal responsibility scolds. And this is coming in the middle of a Great Recession, where investment is non-existent, trade is stalled, and consumer spending isn’t going anywhere, meaning that ONLY GOVERNMENT IS SPENDING. Cutting that spending translates directly into losing thousands of jobs. That’s reality for the next year or so.

If anything, Obama is being modest in his plans. And he is paying for the big investments in his budget by making the tax code more progressive and fair. And that’s the reality of the fiscal scolds – they want to protect the status quo for their buddies and contributors. They would rather the 30-year cycle of radical conservative economic policy continues unabated. Obama’s budget is a a threat to the DC estabishment that is best represented by these “moderates.”

It was his boldest acknowledgment yet of what is slowly becoming clear to the rest of us: That his proposals represent such a dramatic reversal from the course the nation has been following over the last eight years — and even the last three decades — that they will inevitably face intense resistance from Washington’s traditional power centers […]

It’s worth revisiting Obama’s explanation of “how we arrived at this moment” from that joint address:

“The fact is, our economy did not fall into decline overnight. Nor did all of our problems begin when the housing market collapsed or the stock market sank. We have known for decades that our survival depends on finding new sources of energy, yet we import more oil today than ever before. The cost of health care eats up more and more of our savings each year, yet we keep delaying reform. Our children will compete for jobs in a global economy that too many of our schools do not prepare them for.

“And though all of these challenges went unsolved, we still managed to spend more money and pile up more debt, both as individuals and through our government, than ever before. In other words, we have lived through an era where too often short-term gains were prized over long-term prosperity, where we failed to look beyond the next payment, the next quarter, or the next election.

“A surplus became an excuse to transfer wealth to the wealthy instead of an opportunity to invest in our future. Regulations… were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market. People bought homes they knew they couldn’t afford from banks and lenders who pushed those bad loans anyway. And all the while, critical debates and difficult decisions were put off for some other time on some other day.”

The inevitable conclusion here is that establishment Washington is complicit in what went wrong. That includes all the people in positions of power who accepted what was happening as simply politics as usual — even as the country was slowly but inevitably headed to that day of reckoning.

After all, since the Reagan era, even mainstream Democratic leaders have internalized the trickle-down, free-market, small-government mentality which Obama now blames for our woes. Few in the Democratic party — or the mainstream media — did much more than watch as the economic playing field tilted further and further to the advantage of the rich.

And yes, it’s true that many of Obama’s initiatives could well be described as pent-up Democratic goals. But you might also call them nearly-forgotten goals, as far as the current batch of Democratic leaders is concerned. Even when they controlled Congress, they failed to block budgets that turned out to be blueprints for disaster. And they either didn’t fight for their principles or flinched in a pinch. I described some of their capitulations to former president George W. Bush in this December 2007 column. These very same leaders may well be motivated to — at least — complicate or modify Obama’s proposals to validate their own previous inaction.

Exactly, I don’t remember Evan Bayh or Ben Nelson or any of these scolds raising an eyebrow to any of the radically destructive policies the Bush Administration trafficked in on a daily basis. It’s only with a Democratic President attempting to lead on Democratic principles that their spines stiffen.

Fortunately, Obama remains extremely popular, and he has shown an growing aptitude for this kind of conflict. However, his favorability is favored more than his policies at this point. I’m not sure if Republicans will get their act together to exploit this, but they can certainly get a boost from these “moderates” to revive their political fortunes.

…on the other hand, Obama’s procurement reform announcement today is a shot across the bow of these moderates, saying that he can find plenty of cuts in the budget – in the billions of waste passed on to military contractors in no-bid contracts. This is a good counter-move.

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The Smoking Wreckage Of Limbaugh Nation

by digby

Limbaugh is now calling people “butt boys.” This is on top of his adorable comments that Republicans are being asked to “bend over and grab their ankles” because Obama is black. I realize that the term “butt boy” is fairly common in junior high locker rooms as a synonym for sycophant, but when did it become ok to say this on radio? Does the FCC know that it literally means submissive, teenage anal sex (with a strong implication of coercion?)

I suppose this new frankness about gay sex could be seen as some sort of breakthrough for the right but I wonder what all the morality scolds have to say about it? In fact, someone should ask our new BFF Rick Warren what he thinks about the new Republican leadership. He was quite happily driving a wedge in the Democratic party recently, maybe he’d like to practice some bipartisanship and speak out against this crude piece of work on the conservative side. It would be quite revealing to know what he thinks.

I’ve written many posts about Rush over the years so all this new interest in him as a leader of the Republican Party is old news to me. I think this one, from 2006, may the most pertinent:

Notice how Limbaugh and the preachers pander to the depraved imagination? It’s not religious values these people are selling. They are selling a brutal, domineering, degenerate culture, making their listeners and viewers wallow in it, plumbing the depths of the subconscious, drawing forth Goyaesque images of bestiality and violence and death. That’s a feature of some religions, to be sure, but it’s not the nice upright Christian morality everybody’s pretending it is.

If the culture is careening into a crude, dog-eat-dog corrupt “Pottersville” it’s because the greedheads and the juvenile authoritarian thugs, whether in street gangs or talk radio or K Street, have taken it over. And it is hard for liberals to counter this because our bedrock values include tolerance, free expression and personal autonomy and that unwittingly enables this decadent turn in some ways. But let’s make no mistake, it is only on the right that purveyors of brutal, sadistic, depraved political discourse are welcomed into the houses, offices and beds of the nation’s political leadership…

LIMBAUGH: And these American prisoners of war — have you people noticed who the torturers are? Women! The babes! The babes are meting out the torture…You know, if you look at — if you, really, if you look at these pictures, I mean, I don’t know if it’s just me, but it looks just like anything you’d see Madonna, or Britney Spears do on stage. Maybe I’m — yeah. And get an NEA grant for something like this. I mean, this is something that you can see on stage at Lincoln Center from an NEA grant, maybe on Sex in the City — the movie. I mean, I don’t — it’s just me.

When Limbaugh came under fire for those vulgar comments, the leading lights of the Republican party quickly came to his defense.

Rush’s angry, frustrated critics discount how hard it is to make an outrageous charge against him stick. But, we listeners have spent years with him, we know him, and trust him. Rush is one of those rare acquaintances who can be defended against an assault challenging his character without ever knowing the “facts.” We trust his good judgment, his unerring decency, and his fierce loyalty to the country he loves and to the courageous young Americans who defend her. For millions of us, David Brock is firing blanks against a bulletproof target.

— Kate O’Beirne is Washington Editor for National Review.

Figure out how to deal with that and we might be able to make some headway.

That was written three years ago and things have changed. And I think it’s pretty clear that it changed because people finally realized that this nihilistic, juvenile form of politics was incredibly destructive. After all, George W. Bush was the perfect Limbaugh president: a sophomoric, violently aggressive, anti-intellectual, macho, phony cowboy. He was the man Limbaugh always wished he could be and Ann Coulter always wished she could date: their angry, white male dreamboat. And he failed on an epic scale. The country could have chosen an older even more sarcastic and angry version of Bush in John McCain. They chose instead someone who appealed to their hopes instead of their hatred and spite.

The problem is that the Republican Party went all in with the conservative movement over the past 25 years. George W. Bush’s America was Limbaugh Nation and Limbaugh Nation was George W. Bush’s America — they have nothing else. They are nothing else.

Reagan was right just as George W. Bush is today, and I really believe that if Reagan had been able he would have put his hand on Bush’s shoulder and say to him, “Stay the course, George.” I really believe that. — Rush Limbaugh Reagan Tribute June 7, 2004

“Long after we’re all dead and gone, when historians who are not yet born begin to write about this era, they’re going to place George Bush in the upper echelon of presidents who had a great vision for America, who looked beyond our shores, who didn’t just restrict himself to domestic policy niceties.” — Rush Limbaugh, May 3, 2007

Media Matters has created a Rush web site for easy access to some of his greatest hits.

Update: Boy, that Limbaugh really is powerful. He’s even got Democrats apologizing now.

From Down With Tyranny:

Late this afternoon, in keeping with apologies to Rush Limbaugh from Georgia Republican Phil Gingrey and RNC Chairman Michael Steele, Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) issued the following statement:

“I’m sorry Limbaugh called for harsh sentences for drug addicts while he was a drug addict. I’m also sorry that he’s bent on seeing America fail. And I’m sorry that Limbaugh is one sorry excuse for a human being.”

The Congressman then rejoined his Democratic colleagues in working on cleaning up George W. Bush’s mess.

Monster Chiller Horror Theater

by dday

Apparently, allowing workers making something approaching the minimum wage the ability to collectively bargain instead of having their rights trampled by management, their organizers fired, their workplaces shut down rather than stay a union shop, and their colleagues intimidated is the central threat to the very fabric of American life. Hearing these landed gentry talk using the language of end-times apocalypse is pretty nuts.

“Radical Islam and Employee Free Choice are the two fundamental threats to society” is my personal favorite.

Congress could take up this bill as early as next week, and clearly it’s going to provoke a lot of opposition. But the media-hyped language of “smackdown” and “nuclear war” and “Armageddon” obscures the point – all this act would do is enforce the violations to labor law made routinely by management, and give employees the choice to decide how to have an election for unionization rather than having one imposed upon them. It’s only “Armageddon” if you’re absurdly wealthy and you want to and you want to preserve the extreme inequality, that is partly to blame for this economic crisis, far into the future. It signals the end times, all right, but only for this new Gilded Age in which we live.

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Set It Aside

by dday

Norm Coleman thinks that we shouldn’t argue anymore about who beat who and just try again in the spirit of compromise:

For more than a month, Norm Coleman stressed flaws in Minnesota’s election system.

And on Monday, Coleman lawyer Jim Langdon wrote the three-judge panel to suggest the problems are so serious they may not be able to declare a winner.

“Some courts have held that when the number of illegal votes exceeds the margin between the candidates — and it cannot be determined for which candidate those illegal votes were cast — the most appropriate remedy is to set aside the election,” Langdon wrote in a letter to the court.

Coleman continued this line of reasoning in an interview today, saying that “there is a question whether this court can certify who got the most legally-cast ballots.”

This is basically an admission of defeat, as this DSCC spokesman said cleverly today (“I’m sure Senator John McCain would like to throw out the results of November 4, 2008 as well”), but even if it doesn’t succeed, it furthers the conservative project. There has been a simmering effort in conservative circles to delegitimize the election process – to characterize any poor or black voter as a potential fraudster, to accuse community groups like ACORN of stealing elections, to cast doubt on the process in general. This serves two purposes – 1) it sets the stage for increasingly draconian voter ID laws that intentionally suppress Democratic votes, and 2) it throws a shroud of suspicion over any Democrat who happens to get elected. Al Franken will never be seen as a legitimate Senator to the majority of the right – despite his going through the regular channels of the recount process, he will be painted as a thief, a usurper, an illegitimate pol who used the activist courts to take away Norm Coleman’s rightful place in the Senate.

And that’s the other part of this – to question the impartiality of judges and the legal process. The Minnesota Supreme Court made a few rulings during the recount process, but by and large the elections system was allowed to work on its own. But that doesn’t matter – if and when the court issues a final ruling, the Coleman camp will not only appeal but blast the legal system for handing the election to Al Franken. The more sinister prospect here is to further the depiction of judges as wild liberal activists who must be stopped. Related to that is Republicans’ new demand to the President, signed by every Senator in their ranks, to confirm George Bush’s judges or face filibusters:

President Barack Obama should fill vacant spots on the federal bench with former President Bush’s judicial nominees to help avoid another huge fight over the judiciary, all 41 Senate Republicans said Monday.

In a letter to the White House, the Republican senators said Obama would “change the tone in Washington” if he were to renominate Bush nominees like Peter Keisler, Glen Conrad and Paul Diamond. And they requested that Obama respect the Senate’s constitutional role in reviewing judicial nominees by seeking their consultation about potential nominees from their respective states.

“Regretfully, if we are not consulted on, and approve of, a nominee from our states, the Republican Conference will be unable to support moving forward on that nominee,” the letter warns. “And we will act to preserve this principle and the rights of our colleagues if it is not.”

In other words, Republicans are threatening a filibuster of judges if they’re not happy.

And thus we see how the conservative movement always moves forward, like a shark. I eagerly await the Republican Senator who says “Obama would rather deny these fine jurists and nominate people like the ones who stole the election for Al Franken in Minnesota.” The Coleman lawsuit is really a textbook example of how one issue is used to chip away at multiple other ones. I know that conservatives appear to be imploding at the moment, but under the radar they are always working to undermine American institutions.

Update from digby: Sorry to intrude, but I think this is so important.

dday writes:

And that’s the other part of this – to question the impartiality of judges and the legal process.

Justice John Paul Stevens wrote a very famous dissent in Bush vs Gore, a portion of which was widely misconstrued as being solely directed at the high court’s interference in the case when it was also speaking directly to the case at hand and that pernicious strategy that dday discusses.

When John Bolton rushed in to the room screaming “I’m here to stop the count!” the state was in the process of doing a statewide recount. But it wasn’t being done by the clerks and political actors who had been doing it before. The count they stopped was being done by judges, who were specifically chosen for that job because it’s their sworn duty to make impartial judgment about facts and the law every day. The Supreme Court basically ruled them a bunch of hacks when they said that their verdict couldn’t possibly be fair.

Stevens wrote:

“The [opinion] by the majority of this Court can only lend credence to the most cynical appraisal of the work of judges throughout the land. It is confidence in the men and women who administer the judicial system that is the true backbone of the rule of law. Time will one day heal the wound to that confidence that will be inflicted by today’s decision. One thing, however, is certain. Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s Presidential election, the identity of the loser is pellucidly clear. It is the Nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.”

And it was. Coleman is playing on that cynicism today, and it won’t be the last time the Republicans (and possibly the Democrats) employ such methods to meddle in the Democratic process. It serves to undermine what little faith people have in the legitimacy of democracy and that always serves entrenched power in the end.

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Too Stupid To Fill My Teeth

by digby

It’s this kind of economic illiteracy that is going to allow some demagogic, fascist jackass to win a future election if things go wrong. Jamison Foser reports:

ABC News reports on “upper-income taxpayers” who are trying to reduce their income so they avoid proposed tax increases on those earning more than $250,000.

According to ABC, one attorney “plans to cut back on her business to get her annual income under the quarter million mark should the Obama tax plan be passed by Congress and become law.” According to the attorney: “We are going to try to figure out how to make our income $249,999.00.” ABC also quotes a dentist who is trying to figure out how to reduce her income.

This is stunningly wrong.

The ABC article is based on the premise that an individual’s entire income is taxed at the same rate. If that were the case, it would be possible for a family earning $249,999 to have a higher after-tax income than a family earning $255,000, because the family earning $249,999 would pay a lower tax rate.

But that isn’t actually how income tax works.

In reality, a family earning $255,000 will pay the higher tax rate only on its last $5,001 in income; the first $249,999 will continue to be taxed at the old rate. So intentionally lowering your income from $255,000 to $249,999 is counter-productive; it will result in a lower after-tax income.

Apparently, even people who make over a quarter of a million dollars a year and are respected professionals don’t know the most rudimentary things about their own finances. That’s too dumb to be handling a dentist drill in my book.

This is a teachable moment, but the media gasbags are so stunningly uninformed themselves that they are incapable of doing it.Maybe somebody could get Oprah, Dr`Phil, Suze Orman, Flavor Flav —anyone who people actually respect to explain this to the American people?

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Keeping Up The Pressure

by digby

The deficit is a graver threat than a rogue nuclear bomb? That’s what the American people have been led to believe by wealthy con artists like Pete Peterson, who has now commissioned a poll (sadly, by a Democratic pollster) to validate his propaganda.

Peterson Foundation to Release National Survey Results Gauging

Americans’ Concerns about the Economy, Deficit and Debt

Strong Support for Bipartisan Task Force to Address U.S. Fiscal Challenges, Other Findings to Be Shared on Media Conference Call

NEW YORK (March 3, 2009) – Peter G. Peterson Foundation CEO and former US Comptroller General David M. Walker invites the media to join a conference call examining the results of the most comprehensive study of public attitudes toward America’s fiscal policies since the economic downturn.

Conducted by Peter D. Hart Research Associates and Public Opinion Strategies, the survey shows that:

· Voters rank the need to address our budget challenges as a top priority for the Obama Administration, second only to the preeminent need to get the economy back on track and get Americans back to work.

· Americans see the threat to our future posed by our growing deficit and debt as more grave and significant than global warming, declines in education and manufacturing, and the prospect of a rogue nation developing a nuclear weapon.

· There is broad support for a bipartisan, beyond-the-Beltway approach to tackling these challenges in the form of a commission that would engage the public and make a series of recommendations on which Congress would be required to vote.

I’m not surprised. Wealthy oligarchs like Ross Perot and Pete Peterson have been haranguing the public for decades about the deficit. And yet, for some reason, when George W. Bush campaigned with the slogan “it’s your money” and vowed to give back the surplus (which a Democratic administration had been forced to create) to wealthy individuals, they were nowhere to be found. In fact, Alan Greenspan said that paying down the debt would be a danger to the economy!

The big story here is this desire to create a “beyond-the-beltway” commission, which is undemocratic and unnecessary. Despite their assertions that the American people are more afraid of deficits than terrorism and abject poverty, they know that if citizens knew what these people wanted to do they would object. This “plan” which huckleberry and Hoyer just love, must be rejected. It’s a very, very bad idea.

As far as I’m concerned, anyone who lobbied for privatization of social security should be forced to march up and down Wall Street naked under sandwich boards that say “Don’t Listen To Me, I’ve Always Been Wrong About Everything.” And Pete Peterson should be at the head of the line.

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Poker

by digby

This is good:

President Obama’s budget director said the White House would consider using a Senate procedural tactic so that only 50 votes would be rquired to pass major healthcare and energy reforms.

Peter Orszag, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, said the administration would prefer not to use the budget reconciliation process to push through its package. But he added: “We have to keep everything on the table. We want to get these…. important things done this year.” Orszag called healthcare in particular “the key to our fiscal future.”

Orszag made the comments on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.”

Because they can not be filibustered, budget reconciliations only require 50 votes to pass the Senate. Democrats hold strong majorities in Congress, but still come up short of the 60 votes necessary in the Senate to end debate, which makes it easier for Republicans to block legislation. House rules in comparison make it harder for the minority party to stop bills.

Still, using budget reconciliation to pass policy proposals is controversial, even among some Democrats who believe doing so strains Senate rules and tradition.

The Obama blueprint calls for major changes in both energy and healthcare policies that is likely to engender significant opposition from Republicans and business lobbies. The reforms are expect to win widespread support from Democrats and more left-leaning constituencies.

It appears that the administration learned its lesson on the stimulus and won’t be going into the negotiations under the assumption that the other side wants comity and so will act as partners. They are prepared to drive a real bargain this time. I’m much relieved. They are far more likely to get something that actually works, which is the key to everything including the party’s political future, if they don’t assume the other side will act in good faith. They are far better off assuming it’s going to be a battle and going into it with no illusions. Who knows, a few Republicans might even see the light.

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Boulder Democrats

by digby

I’ve been hearing rumblings since the election that Democrats in congress were getting wobbly on the Employee Free Choice Act and that the administration was inclined to push it down the agenda. Presumably this is because the wingnuts are planning to stage a mass case of the maidenly vapors the minute they bring it. It’s one of those bizarre issues that animates the cretins, like tort reform, purely because of the slogan. I don’t think they have any idea what it means. In fact, I’m not sure they even know “they want to take away the secret ballot” has something to do with unions. But regardless, they’ve ben conditioned to completely lose their minds when the issue comes up, and I suspect that the Dems are getting gun shy.

I also have to wonder if the party poohbahs aren’t looking for some people who have not made any promises to help them table this one. Maybe that’s why this happened, from Todd Beeton at MYDD:

When asked, Sen. Michael Bennet either “doesn’t know” if he supports The Employee Free Choice Act or “hasn’t decided” yet. Truly amazing. Bennet, who, you’ll recall, was appointed to the Senate by Gov. Bill Ritter (D-CO) to replace Sen. Salazar, hasn’t had to be accountable to the people of Colorado so I guess doesn’t see any reason to ruffle any feathers by actually taking a stand on one of the most important pieces of legislation he’s likely to vote on in the coming year.

Go here to take action.

The Republicans are well aware that stopping unionization is an imperative. They are the party which represents the owners of America above all others. (So are Democrats, mind you, just to a lesser degree because their coalition is much broader, which may also be why they are suddenly having a hard time putting together enough votes for this legislation now that it could actually be signed.) They are readying a full court freak-out — if you think Rush’s caterwauling about socialism and Stalin is bad now, just wait.

Todd continues:

The thing is, this really shouldn’t be difficult or controversial. This is, as Darcy says, about the basic rights of workers to organize. EFCA is a bill that passed the House in 2005 and 2007 on a bi-partisan basis. While it came up short of a filibuster-proof super majority in the Senate in 2007, cloture garnered the votes of every single Democrat in the Senate (including Landrieu, Lincoln, Pryor and, yes, Salazar) plus both Independents and even Arlen Specter. Add to that the fact that during his run for the US Senate last year, freshman Colorado Sen. Mark Udall had been a co-sponsor of EFCA in the House, promised to support it as a Senator, and won by 11% despite the fact that EFCA foes ran ads targeting Udall as someone who would “take the secret ballot away.” Yet even knowing all of this, Bennet can’t quite bring himself to take a stand on EFCA and now even Udall is wavering.

The Republicans are always going to stage a hissy fit on this, no matter what, so there’s no point in trying to find “the right time.” They have signaled that they have no intention of cooperating on any legislation that doesn’t only benefit rich people it’s useless trying to bargain either. In for a penny and all that rot. Might as well do it while the doing is possible.

You can sign a petition here, asking the Colorado delegation to stop being foolish and support the legislation.
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Separated At Birth?

by digby

Oh my goodness. This Rush thing is really causing some dissonance in the GOP. I’ve been watching them dance on the head of a pin all day trying not to offend him while not endorsing his comments. It’s almost painful.

But he is, as some of us have been pointing for years, the true leader of the Republican Party. And we were told by all the serious people that he was a harmless, mainstream entertainer and that we should all just lighten up — even as luminaries of the Republican party and the luminaries of the conservative movement bowed and scraped like abused streetwalkers at the feet of their violent pimp. They defended his comments about Abu Ghraib, fergawdsake. He can literally do no wrong.

Sure enough, like clockwork, the head of the RNC just went crawling on his belly and begged for forgiveness for suggesting otherwise:

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele says he has reached out to Rush Limbaugh to tell him he meant no offense when he referred to the popular conservative radio host as an “entertainer” whose show can be “incendiary.”

“My intent was not to go after Rush – I have enormous respect for Rush Limbaugh,” Steele said in a telephone interview. “I was maybe a little bit inarticulate. … There was no attempt on my part to diminish his voice or his leadership.”

The dust-up comes at a time when top Democrats are trying to make Limbaugh the face of the Republican Party, in part by using ads funded by labor. Americans United for Change sent a fund-raising e-mail Monday that begins: “The Republican Party has turned into the Rush Limbaugh Party.”

Steele told CNN host D.L. Hughley in an interview aired Saturday night: “Rush Limbaugh is an entertainer. Rush Limbaugh — his whole thing is entertainment. He has this incendiary — yes, it’s ugly.”

Steele, who won a hard-fought chairman’s race on Jan. 30, told Politico he telephoned Limbaugh after his show on Monday afternoon and hoped that they would connect soon.

“I went back at that tape and I realized words that I said weren’t what I was thinking,” Steele said. “It was one of those things where I thinking I was saying one thing, and it came out differently. What I was trying to say was a lot of people … want to make Rush the scapegoat, the bogeyman, and he’s not.”

That’s just sad.

BTW: Am I the only one to see a bizarre and freakish resemblance between these two pimps?

*I thought of this when I read Tom Watson’s amusing take on Rush’s speech.

** In case you don’t have HBO, the other pimp is this guy.

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Unitary Executive Theory Makes A Comeback

by dday

Marcy Wheeler and Glenn Greenwald say basically all that needs to be said about the Obama Administration’s shameful efforts to block a ruling on warrantless wiretapping in the Al Haramain case. It’s not only that this White House is running interference for the last White House, it’s the basic copying of the same dangerous theories of unitary executive power that should have everyone worried.

The brief filed by Obama on Friday afternoon (.pdf) has to be read to believed. It is literally arguing that no court has the power to order that classified documents be used in a judicial proceeding; instead, it is the President — and the President alone — who possesses that decision-making power under Article II, and no court order is binding on the President to the extent it purports to direct that such information be made available for use in a judicial proceeding. From page 5 of the Obama Brief, filed after its loss on Friday:

“In addition, the relevant Executive Branch official must determine that plaintiffs’ counsel have a “need to know” the information. In this case, the relevant official, the Director of the National Security Agency (“NSA”), has determined that counsel do not have a need to know. This decision is committed to the discretion of the Executive Branch, and is not subject to judicial review. Moreover, the Court does not have independent power, either under its supervisory authority, or under authority analogous to that granted by the Classified Information Procedures Act (“CIPA”), 18 U.S.C. App. 3, to order the
Government to grant counsel access to classified information when the Executive Branch has denied them such access.”

That’s about as clear as it gets. There is only one branch with the power to decide if these documents can be used in this Article III court proceeding: The Executive. What the President decides is final. His decision is unreviewable. It’s beyond the reach of the law. No court has the authority to second-guess it or to direct the President to comply with a disclosure order. That’s the mentality — and even the language — drawn directly from the earliest Yoo Memorandum that created the theoretical foundation for what would be the omnipotent presidency.

Just for a little background on the Al Haramain case – the Islamic charity, in an accidental court filing from the Bush Justice Department, discovered they had been spied upon illegally by the government, without a warrant. Their certainty is due to the transcript of the eavesdropped conversation that the government gave them. Since that time, both the Obama and Bush Administrations have ordered that the document, and therefore the evidence for illegal conduct, is classified and cannot be admitted into court. Despite several rulings to the contrary, this President – like the one before him – is claiming that only the executive can decide what may be done with classified information, with the potential being that any President can just classify whatever compromising information exists about his or her activities and shield it from the view of the Congress, the courts, and the people. It is an expansive and un-American view of the Constitution, used in this case to service a massive cover-up.

And this effort to use the state secrets privilege to this degree has been thoroughly rejected in this case. But the government continues to appeal. Aside from admitting that Bush’s DoJ lied to the presiding judge in an earlier filing, there is nothing redeemable about Obama’s conduct.

There is simply so much that Obama’s team has had to overturn from the Bush regime, they’re probably getting heartburn from all of the decisions. Yet while, in isolated respects, they’ve done a decent job, it cannot excuse this conduct. I don’t know whether it’s foreknowledge of the extent of the lawbreaking, or pressure from the telecoms to save their immunity (which could absolutely be threatened by this ruling, as there’s a pending case with the same judge, Vaughn Walker) or what, but Washington is united in really, really not wanting the truth on warrantless wiretapping to come to light. It is despicable that this has become so vital that Obama, a constitutional law professor, would adopt the same unitary executive theory than he actually swore an oath to reject.

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