Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

No Day In Court For The Schloz

by dday

The Justice Department’s Inspector General report on politicization under the Bush regime was so overwhelming that they had to cut it into sections. Yesterday’s release of the section concerning the Civil Rights Division once again invites us to witness the glory that is Bradley Schlozman:

In sum, we concluded, based on the results of our investigation, that Schlozman improperly considered political and ideological affiliations in the recruitment and hiring of career attorneys in the Civil Rights Division, and in doing so, he violated Department policy and federal civil service laws, and committed misconduct.

We found evidence that Schlozman told others in the Department about his success in hiring conservatives. In addition, in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Schlozman admitted making such boasts. Numerous e-mails from Schlozman described above also demonstrate that he sought conservative candidates and rejected liberal ones. Further, Schlozman admitted to Special Litigation Section Chief Cutlar in March 2007, after allegations of partisan hiring surfaced in the media: “I probably made some mistakes. . . . I probably considered politics when I shouldn’t have.” Moreover, a statistical overview of the political and ideological affiliations of attorneys hired in the Division during his tenure showed that Schlozman hired far more Republican or conservative attorneys than Democrats or liberals. At the same time, political and ideological affiliations did not appear to have been a factor when attorneys were hired without Schlozman’s involvement […]

We concluded that Schlozman inappropriately considered political and ideological affiliations when he forced three career attorneys to transfer from the Appellate Section.

As noted above, Schlozman frequently criticized the attorney staff in the Appellate ection and talked of his plan, when he “came into power,” to move certain attorneys from the section to make room for “real Americans.” Based on our interviews and our review of numerous e-mails, we found that Schlozman used the term “real Americans” to
refer to individuals with conservative political views. Appellate Section Chief Flynn also told us that Schlozman named Appellate Section Attorneys A, B, and C as among several in the section whom he considered to be “disloyal,” “not one of us,” “against us,” “not on the team,” or “treacherous” and whom he wanted to move out of the section […]

We concluded that Schlozman inappropriately used political and ideological affiliations in managing the assignment of cases to attorneys in the sections of the Division he oversaw. According to Section Chiefs Flynn, Cutlar, and Palmer, Schlozman placed limitations on the assignment of cases to attorneys whom Schlozman described as “libs” or “pinkos,” and he requested that “important” cases be handled by conservative attorneys he had hired. In addition, Schlozman expressly inquired about the politics of Cutlar’s nominees for performance awards.

On June 5, 2007, Schlozman testified under oath before the Senate Judiciary Committee in connection with its investigation into the use of political considerations in the hiring and firing of career attorneys at the Department of Justice. At the time of his testimony, Schlozman was Associate Counsel to the Director of EOUSA.

On September 6, 2007, after resigning from the Department, Schlozman responded by letter to supplemental questions for the record posed to him in writing by several Senators as a follow-up to his Senate Judiciary testimony.

We believe that Schlozman made false statements to the Senate Judiciary Committee, both in his sworn testimony and in his written responses to the supplemental questions for the record. In this section, we describe Schlozman’s statements and the evidence that we believe demonstrates their falsity.

That’s the bill of particulars, and I believe the words “preponderance of evidence” apply.

And yet, Schlozman will only see the inside of a courtroom in his continued capacity as a lawyer, despite an investigation clearly detailing numerous crimes.

Because the US Attorney in DC, after reviewing this report (which is dated July 2, 2008, and obviously held back until right before Bush leaves town), declined to prosecute.

We referred the findings from our investigation to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia in March 2008. We completed this written report of investigation in July 2008.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office informed us on January 9, 2009, of its decision to decline prosecution of Schlozman. The Interim U.S. Attorney, Jeffrey Taylor, was recused from the matter and the decision.

So, after taking ten months to decide whether or not to prosecute (ten months which happened to include an election in which one of those named in the report–Hans Von Spakovsky–served on FEC), they now release the report. Nice.

There you have the latest from the culture of accountability.

If I follow this, a Bush appointee committed crimes by hiring ideological soulmates. The Inspector General reported the crimes to Bush’s Justice Department, and they held the report. The Bush appointee at the US Attorneys office in DC recused himself, and let his staffers reject the findings. And those ideologues hired through criminal practices will REMAIN in the Justice Department, protected by civil service laws, well into the future.

There’s more here, including a peek into the classiness of these folks.

Slapping down “a bunch of . . . attorneys really did get the blood pumping and was even enjoyable once in a while,” Schlozman wrote three years later when he left to become the U.S. attorney in Kansas City, Mo.

Schlozman surrounded himself with like-minded officials at the Department of Justice. When he was due to meet in 2004 with John Tanner, then chief of the voting section, he asked how Tanner liked his coffee.

“Mary Frances Berry style — black and bitter,” Tanner replied by e-mail, referring to the African American woman who chaired the U.S. Civil Rights Commission from 1993 to 2004. Schlozman circulated the e-mail. “Y’all will appreciate Tanner’s response,” he wrote.

Did the fun ever stop?

So this is the inevitable result of an attitude of “looking forward” and making sure abuses “never happen again” instead of prosecuting clear crimes. There were civil service laws violated as well as, you know, lying to Congress. Republicans love to talk about deterrence in the criminal justice system unless they’re the defendant. Likewise, the establishment Villagers love to punish the wicked with their knowing glances and poison pens and scorn, unless, you know, one of their own is in trouble.

Here’s Pat Leahy.

I really wish that the current U.S. attorney’s office appointed by this administration had prosecuted. I think that the only way you stop such blatant criminal violations by people who know better, people who are sworn to uphold the law, (unint.) that they know they’ll go to jail for breaking the law. That’s what should have been done. And just because they broke the law in the Bush administration and the Bush administration did not, or deemed not to prosecute, I think that raises real questions. Prosecution should be done no matter who breaks the law. I think about one of the people who testified that same investigation and said that, uh, “we swear an oath to President George Bush.” I said, “no, you swear an oath to uphold the Constitution. That constitution is the constitution you’re sworn to uphold and I’m sworn to uphold and it’s the constitution that reflects all Americans.” […]

And when somebody deliberately, purposely sets out to subvert the constitution of the United States, and then lies about it, lies about it, Mr. President, I find that a heinous crime. We will see some kid who steals a car, they’ll be prosecuted as they probably should. But when you have a key member of the DoJ lie about it under oath, who subverts the consitution of the United States, all the more reason to prosecute that person.

Silly Leahy. Justice is for those other people.

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Anointing The Transom

by digby

I always find it astonishing that so many people, including America’s Pastor Rick Warren, say they could never vote for an atheist, but they can vote for people like this:

On January 7, second-term Republican Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia and two friends prayed over a door. It was not just any door, but the entranceway beneath the Capitol that President-elect Barack Obama will pass through as he walks onto the inaugural stage to take the oath of office. “I hope and pray that as God stirs the heart of our new president that President Obama will listen and will heed God’s direction,” Broun proclaimed.

And then they anointed the door with oil.

In case you are wondering who is praying for our new president and anointing the door through which he’ll walk:

While the Capitol prayer partners appeared earnest in the prayers for the president elect’s success, they have each distinguished themselves from their Christian right comrades by leveling some of the most paranoid imprecations Obama has faced since he arrived in the Senate. On November 10, 2008, a week after Obama’s election victory, Broun took umbrage at the President-elect’s call for a national civilian security force, a proposal also backed by George W. Bush. According to Broun, who acknowledged the possibility that he might be “crazy,” Obama had revealed himself as a radical Marxist Nazi socialist comparable to Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. “It may sound a bit crazy and off base,” Broun told an AP reporter, “but the thing is, he’s the one who proposed this national security force. I’m just trying to bring attention to the fact that we may—may not, I hope not—but we may have a problem with that type of philosophy of radical socialism or Marxism. That’s exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it’s exactly what the Soviet Union did. When he’s proposing to have a national security force that’s answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military, he’s showing me signs of being Marxist.” After seeming to back away from his comments when he was heavily criticized, Broun announced that he was “not taking back anything [he] said.” “I firmly believe that we must not fall victim to the ‘it can’t happen here’ mentality,” he declared in a press release. “I adhere to the adage ‘eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.’” The son of a Democratic state senator from the liberal college town of Athens, Georgia, Broun attributes his conservative transformation to the wonder working power of Jesus. Broun’s born-again moment arrived in 1986, during the height of the Reagan Revolution, while he toiled as a doctor in rural Georgia, struggling to keep afloat during the first year of his marriage. He had suffered through several “broken marriages and episodes of broken relationships and financial problems,” Broun recalled during a November 2007 speech on the House floor. While watching an NFL game, Broun became entranced by a “gentleman with this big type hair wig on” holding a “John 3:16” sign. “As I sat there in my office that fall trying to figure out life, I picked up the Bible and read John 3:16,” Broun said. He suddenly transformed into a true believer, a cadre of the Christian right.(The wigged “gentleman” was Rollen Stewart, an evangelical fanatic and fixture at sports events who is currently serving three consecutive sentences in jail on kidnapping charges as well as several minor sentences for stink bomb attacks).

But voting for an atheist is nuts.
You can see the video at the link.

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Wouldn’t Be Prudent

by digby

There’s a lot of jockeying about what to do with the unspent portion of the TARP bailout and even more jockeying about how much to spent on a new stimulus package. But nobody’s talking about the huge sums of money the Federal Reserve has been loaning to banks and other entities around the world since the financial crisis hit.

Yesterday, Blue America congressman Alan Grayson actually asked Vice Chairman of the Fed Donald Kohn where the money is going. And you won’t believe the answer he got:

Apparently, it wouldn’t be prudent for the American taxpayers to know where these trillions are going. The man simply refused to answer.

For a primer on what this is all about, go here. This is actually a big deal and the stakes are huge:

The bottom line is that Bernanke has made a gamble with something approaching 2 trillion. If the gamble wins, taxpayers owe nothing. If the gamble loses, taxpayers are committed to borrow a sum equal to any losses and start making interest payments on it.

The sum we’re talking about is more than the amount that the CBO cited last week as the impending federal deficit — and which caused a group faint among the villagers. But nobody’s talking about this except a progressive freshman congressman from Florida.
There are more hearings scheduled and Chariman Frank’s ears certainly seemed to perk when the vice chairman declined to say where the money was going and couldn’t give a good reason why so I expect this isn’t the last we’ll hear of it.
Just how much are we on the hook here? And for whom?.

Breaking: Bob Woodward Has A Library Card!

by dday

I’m baffled as to why the Washington Post put this on the front page, and why most other papers referred to it as if Bob Woodward had a Watergate-esque scoop.

The top Bush administration official in charge of deciding whether to bring Guantanamo Bay detainees to trial has concluded that the U.S. military tortured a Saudi national who allegedly planned to participate in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, interrogating him with techniques that included sustained isolation, sleep deprivation, nudity and prolonged exposure to cold, leaving him in a “life-threatening condition.”

“We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani,” said Susan J. Crawford, in her first interview since being named convening authority of military commissions by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in February 2007. “His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that’s why I did not refer the case” for prosecution.

Crawford, a retired judge who served as general counsel for the Army during the Reagan administration and as Pentagon inspector general when Dick Cheney was secretary of defense, is the first senior Bush administration official responsible for reviewing practices at Guantanamo to publicly state that a detainee was tortured.

Al-Qahtani’s interrogation logs, clearly showing torture, have been released. TIME Magazine published them over three YEARS ago. Phillippe Sands wrote an entire book about it, Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values. In it, many people unequivocally state that we tortured al-Qahtani.

As for the supposed scoop that Crawford is the first Bush Administration official to admit to torture, um, how about Dick Cheney? CIA Director Michael Hayden? George W. Bush?

There is some news value in Crawford’s remarks, on a couple of fronts. She admits that a combination of techniques that were authorized, administered in succession and over a long period of time, can have the same effect as torture. And the fact that she held back military lawyers from prosecuting him because of the torture used underscores what some are calling the difficulty with closing Guantanamo and dealing with the detainees.

The Qahtani case underscores the challenges facing the incoming Obama administration as it seeks to close the controversial detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, including the dilemmas posed by individuals considered too dangerous to release but whose legal status is uncertain. FBI “clean teams,” which gather evidence without using information gained during controversial interrogations, have established that Qahtani intended to join the 2001 hijackers. Mohamed Atta, the plot’s leader, who died steering American Airlines Flight 11 into the World Trade Center, went to the Orlando airport to meet Qahtani on Aug. 4, 2001, but the young Saudi was denied entry by a suspicious immigration inspector.

“There’s no doubt in my mind he would’ve been on one of those planes had he gained access to the country in August 2001,” Crawford said of Qahtani, who remains detained at Guantanamo. “He’s a muscle hijacker. . . . He’s a very dangerous man. What do you do with him now if you don’t charge him and try him? I would be hesitant to say, ‘Let him go.’ “

These decisions have to made for a relatively small group of individuals, maybe a dozen. And really, the answer is that the government should have thought of this before deciding to torture. As it is, they’re going to have to do some investigative work and find the evidence of Al-Qahtani and other suspects’ involvement rather than relying on unreliable confessions gained through torture. If you can find that, and it should be fairly available, you charge them. If not, you are going to have to release them. This is popularly known as “the legal system.” US courts have dealt with hundreds of terrorism trials and have methods for dealing with classified information. The sham military commissions need to stop. They’re not even effective in dealing with the suspects they were DESIGNED to adjudicate, as this case shows.

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High Level Diplomacy

by digby

Did he agree to do this without preconditions?

He motorcaded to a house in Maryland this evening, and if the press pool report is accurate, he is breaking bread with William Kristol and David Brooks. (If Brooks and Kristol seem to be unusually briefed about Obama’s thinking, you’ll know why.)

CBS News’s Dan Raviv tells the pool that the house, on Grafton Street in Chevy Chase, belongs to George Will. (Unless he’s moved.)

That’s nice. But lest you think he’s not being fair and balanced:

Tomorrow, I hear Obama has another private meeting with non-Republican opinion columnists.

Ellen Moran, the incoming White House communications director, set these meetings up.

Again — establishment opinion matters to the Obama communications team.

You don’t say.

If HotAir is right, he may be breaking bread with the Big Kahuna too:

Coincidentally, I got an e-mail from a reader shortly after noon noting that Limbaugh had a surprise guest host today who spent the beginning of the show dropping hints that Rush had been called away to urgent business in D.C. and that it might have to do with something he said yesterday about giving Obama advice. I ignored it — but now they’re dropping hints on the EIB homepage, too.

I’m sure Rush will lead the whole crew in a rousing rendition of “Barack, The Magic Negro” over brandy and cigars.

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Time To Have The Debate About Afghanistan

by dday

This week, a number of bloggers have formed a coalition called Get Afghanistan Right, dedicated to breaking out of the narrow boundaries of the Afghanistan debate and open the discussion about what it means to escalate in a part of the world that has historically proven to be a graveyard of empires. I have seen a shift both in online and offline media over the last several weeks, with writers more willing to challenge assumptions about this war in its eighth year and what can be done outside of military escalation that meets with our national security and foreign policy goals. I’ve written a lot about Afghanistan, and I think my concerns with a de facto escalation rests on a number of big myths that have proven false:

1) It’s not a “good war”. Thomas Ricks speaks for me when he says that he finds the notion of a “good war” to be offensive. All wars are painful and cost both lives and treasure. By casting Afghanistan as unimpeachable and just, we hide the consequences, which are becoming greater as the years pass – more coalition forces died there than in Iraq last year. I’m perfectly willing to have a debate about Afghanistan, but not under the terms that it’s a “good war,” which is tautological.

2) There is something to “win.” This has been ill-defined throughout all of Bush’s wars, but particularly in Afghanistan. Andrew Bacevich has a brilliant little treatise based on this premise. Once you talk about “winning,” you have to define victory, and given our Western biases, we assume that to mean a democratic state able to defend its borders and become an ally in freedom. That is ahistorical to the Afghanistan experience.

Afghanistan is a much bigger country—nearly the size of Texas—and has a larger population that’s just as fractious. Moreover, unlike Iraq, Afghanistan possesses almost none of the prerequisites of modernity; its literacy rate, for example, is 28 percent, barely a third of Iraq’s. In terms of effectiveness and legitimacy, the government in Kabul lags well behind Baghdad—not exactly a lofty standard. Apart from opium (last year’s crop totaled about 8,000 metric tons), Afghans produce almost nothing the world wants […]

U.S. officials tend to assume that power in Afghanistan ought to be exercised from Kabul. Yet the real influence in Afghanistan has traditionally rested with tribal leaders and warlords. Offered the right incentives, warlords can accomplish U.S. objectives more effectively and cheaply than Western combat battalions. The basis of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan should therefore become decentralization and outsourcing, offering cash and other emoluments to local leaders who will collaborate with us in keeping terrorists out of their territory.

Those who favor escalation have an obligation to define the end state of the mission, as well as how additional troops can accomplish that better than local forces and diplomatic measures.

3) The Afghanistan war is about Afghanistan. Actually, it’s about a comprehensive strategy for the entire region. Pushing Taliban remnants and extremists out of Afghanistan and into Pakistan could destabilize a nuclear power. And that doesn’t disarm the ostensible goal of US policy, to deny a safe haven for terrorist planning and activity. That requires local law enforcement globally, as well as a strategy of winning hearts and minds that is disabled by violence and chaos far away from Kabul:

More than a thousand Afghans signed up on Thursday to say they wanted to go and fight Israel in the Gaza Strip, many of them blaming the United States which has some 30,000 troops in Afghanistan, for supporting the Jewish state.

Accusations by Taliban militants and some Muslim clerics that Israel and its main ally, the United States, aim to destroy Islam have a strong impact on public opinion in Afghanistan, where Washington plans to almost double its troop numbers this year.

Scores of young men crowded into the library of Kabul’s Milad ul-Nabi mosque, lined with banners reading “Death to Israel” and “Death to America,” to sign up to fight Israel.

There is a regional strategy that can blunt the influence of extremism globally and increase our national security without a major troop surge. Bringing me to my next point…

4) Surges always work. The cause and effect between the troop surge in Iraq and the modest security gains there, which has been misread as a direct action, colors the potential for throwing troops at the problem in Afghanistan. But the situations are very different. Increasing the footprint of occupation on a country wary of outsiders is perilous. And the Taliban, growing in strength in the country, are not seen as outsiders imposing their views on the locals but locals speaking the language of rebellion and fighting for freedom. Peter Beaumont has more. The top US commander in Afghanistan has said that an Iraq-style surge cannot work.

5) We have to “do something.” This is the common lazy style of thinking in Washington, which thinks that actions only have good consequences, and therefore any action must be supported over none at all. Today we saw a tacit admission of this in the Washington Post:

President-elect Barack Obama intends to sign off on Pentagon plans to send up to 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, but the incoming administration does not anticipate that the Iraq-like “surge” of forces will significantly change the direction of a conflict that has steadily deteriorated over the past seven years.

Instead, Obama’s national security team expects that the new deployments, which will nearly double the current U.S. force of 32,000 (alongside an equal number of non-U.S. NATO troops), will help buy enough time for the new administration to reappraise the entire Afghanistan war effort and develop a comprehensive new strategy for what Obama has called the “central front on terror.”

With conditions on the ground worsening by nearly every yardstick last year — including record levels of extremist attacks and U.S. casualties, and the expansion of the conflict across Pakistan and into India — Obama’s campaign pledge to “finish the job” in Afghanistan with more troops, money and diplomacy has encountered the daunting reality of a job that has barely begun.

I imagine that the Obama team has seen the assessments and they are dire. The Bush Administration muddled through with no overarching strategy and wasted valuable time. But how do you tell a soldier that you’re deploying him to buy time while you can come up with a way out? How does that meet the interests of the military, or our national security?

It’s in some ways encouraging that the Obama team does not expect a “surge” to automatically succeed. And they have talked about building a developmental and diplomatic counterpart to the military action, so I am confident that the mission will also be concerned with reconstruction and improving regional ties (the admission by Gen. Petraeus that the US and Iran share interests in Afghanistan is a very good new way to think about this conflict). But just airlifting in troops, without a settled strategy or even how to best deploy them seems unwise.

Afghanistan in 2009 does not lend itself to an obvious solution, and there are arguments for more troops that have a certain logic to them. But these lines of debate should be open, instead of arguments against escalation marginalized as the “unserious” alternative in Afghanistan. Hopefully this effort will go a long way in bringing those viewpoints more into the mainstream.

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“Proper Privy Council Inquiry Into The Origins And Conduct Of The Iraq War.”

by digby

This is interesting. Apparently it wasn’t just Cheney who strong armed members of his government into creating a basis for an illegal war:

Fresh questions over the legality of the Iraq war were raised today after the government admitted it could not substantiate its claim that Lord Goldsmith had changed his mind over the legal basis for the invasion before a highly controversial meeting with two of Tony Blair’s closest allies.

The admission has revived allegations that the former attorney general was pressured to revise his opinion that an invasion could be illegal without an explicit UN resolution.

Opposition MPs have renewed calls for a full Iraq inquiry in light of the new information.

The revelation comes ahead of a ruling on whether the government should publish minutes of two prewar cabinet meetings at which Goldsmith’s advice was discussed.

Two weeks before the invasion, in March 2003, Goldsmith gave Blair a detailed legal opinion that doubted its legality.

Six days later, on 13 March, Goldsmith met Lord Falconer, then a junior minister, and Sally (now Lady) Morgan from Blair’s office.

On 17 March, he published a single-page parliamentary answer, asserting that the war would be legal on the basis of existing UN resolutions.

In 2006 Richard Thomas, the information commissioner, ordered the government to disclose details of the process by which Goldsmith had come to his revised conclusion.

However, rather than requiring the publication of actual documents, Thomas allowed the government to publish a narrative account and include material that was not based on documentary evidence.

The Cabinet Office then issued a “disclosure statement” which claimed Goldsmith had informed his legal secretary of his new opinion before he met Morgan and Falconer.

But in response to a new freedom of information request, it has admitted it has “no information” to support this sequence of events.

The Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman, Ed Davey, told the Guardian: “This latest revelation shows there is no evidence to back up government claims that Lord Goldsmith was not leant on by Blair’s inner circle before deciding the war would be legal.

“We may never know the full truth but, as the official version slowly unravels, the credibility of Goldsmith’s changed legal position is further called into question. A full inquiry is our only hope that we can force the full truth out.”

The Tory shadow foreign secretary, William Hague, said: “It is surprising that the Cabinet Office is unable to supply further information on this matter.

“This adds yet further weight to the case for a proper privy council inquiry into the origins and conduct of the Iraq war.”

Last November, Lord Bingham, a former senior law lord, said Goldsmith’s view was “flawed” and called the invasion “a serious violation of international law and of the rule of law”.

[…]

It emerged during the tribunal hearing in November that the minutes could prove there was insufficient cabinet discussion of the legality of the war.

The attorney general missed the first cabinet meeting, on the day that he reached his new conclusion, but attended the second, at which the cabinet was presented with his single-page view.

Most ministers were not shown Goldsmith’s original advice or told that he had expressed doubts on the issue.

The former minister Clare Short has claimed that she was prevented from asking Goldsmith why he had taken so long to provide an opinion and whether he had any doubts.

Why Blair threw in so hard with Cheney on this, I’ll never understand. It’s true that the foreign policy elite in both countries were in agreement and that any attempt to stop the steamroller would have been seen as a rupture of the special relationship. But Blair seemed to sincerely buy into the whole thing with the fervor of the most committed neocon. It’s not that I would have expected him to be French or anything, but his enthusiasm for the project was disconcerting.

It appears the Brits aren’t unwilling to play the blame game and it will be very, very interesting if they manage to find out just what it was the Blair people told Goldsmith to make him change his mind on something so significant as the legality of an invasion. Maybe someday we’ll do something like that here in the US.

h/t to bb

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No Good Deed

by digby

As I watch the gasbags “analyze” the Clinton confirmation hearings, it seems clear to me that the village will not rest until they force Bill Clinton to close down the Clinton Global Initiative and remove himself from his own foundation. By allowing foreigners to support these projects, Clinton is obviously committing treason.

Whenever I see some little diaper wearing toady like David Vitter get all filled with righteous indignation about conflict of interest and setting precedents I just have to laugh. George W. Bush’s entire family was a walking conflict of interest for eight years — his father even accepting money directly from the Saudi Arabian government for his own personal use. It was assumed that Poppy was clean because well …. he was one of them, if you know what I mean.

The village doesn’t like Clinton doing this work because it makes their obsessive loathing look petty and shallow, which it is. They insist that there must be something nefarious about it, because they are still convinced that Bill Clinton came to town and trashed the place and they cannot rest until everyone in the world agrees with them. Which it never will.

This is how ridiculous this is: Bill and Hillary Clinton are pretty much accused by these jackasses of selling out their country — to help people around the world deal with AIDS and climate change, no less. It makes no sense at all unless you are a spoiled elite who actually believes that helping AIDS victims and working on climate change is somehow in conflict with America’s policies, which I’m sure they do.

Never let it be said that the establishment doesn’t require accountability of politicians. They certainly do — it’s just that the only people they ever require it of are named Clinton. Imagine if they spent even a tiny portion of the energy they expend endlessly harassing those two for non-existent crimes on prosecuting war criminals or denouncing torture instead …

*Here’s just the first page of nearly a thousand projects which must be destroyed in order that the elites be allowed to continue to indulge their never ending quest to portray Bill and Hillary Clinton as crooks.

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Dance Completed

by dday

Looks like the Obama team either acquiesced to Democratic lawmakers or allowed themselves to look like the serious bipartisan centrists while orchestrating the whole thing:

Bowing to widespread Democratic skepticism, President-elect Barack Obama will drop his bid to include a business tax break he once touted in the economic stimulus bill now taking shape on Capitol Hill, aides said last night.

Obama suggested the $3,000-per-job credit last week as one of five individual and business tax incentives aimed at winning Republican support. He proposed $300 billion in tax relief in a bill that could reach $775 billion, and he resurrected the jobs-credit proposal from the campaign trail as one of his main provisions […]

“We’ve always said we’re open to other ideas. This was never set in stone,” said a senior Obama adviser of the decision.

Whether it was all kabuki or not, the perception that this President listens to the other major actors and arrives at a compromise without anger or territorial concerns is probably the kind of tone they wanted to strike. In addition, they are signaling a responsiveness to pressure from within the Democratic caucus that is a good portent for progressives, who must keep pushing. Sirota has a good post on the best strategies moving forward.

While I totally agree that now is simply not the time to seriously discuss deficits or entitlement “reform” when a crisis is afoot, it’s important to recognize that there are progressive solutions to that hurdle, when we get to it. Bob Herbert discusses this today.

Well, there’s a good idea floating around that takes its cue from the legendary Willie Sutton. Why not go where the money is?

The economist Dean Baker is a strong advocate of a financial transactions tax. This would impose a small fee — ranging up to, say, 0.25 percent — on the sale or transfer of stocks, bonds and other financial assets, including the seemingly endless variety of exotic financial instruments that have been in the news so much lately.

According to Mr. Baker, the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, the fees would raise a ton of money, perhaps $100 billion or more annually — money that the government sorely needs.

But there’s another intriguing element to the proposal. While the fees would be a trivial expense for what the general public tends to think of as ordinary traders — people investing in stocks, bonds or other assets for some reasonable period of time — they would amount to a much heavier lift for speculators, the folks who bring a manic quality to the markets, who treat it like a casino.

“It raises money in a way that comes primarily at the expense of speculation,” said Mr. Baker. “The fees would be a considerable expense for someone who is buying futures, or a stock, or any asset at 2 o’clock and then selling it at 3. The more you trade, the more you pay.

“For the typical person holding stock, who is planning to hold it for a long period of time, paying the quarter of one percent on a trade is just not that big a deal.”

Making the people most responsible for this mess pay for it? The devil you say!

Rather than cede the argument, progressives must engage at all levels. You want to talk about the deficit? Here’s a remedy. You want to talk about entitlements? Cost controls through universal health care. Obviously, there’s a balance to this, and prioritizing the problem is important. But let’s not forget that there are plenty of ways to deal with these challenges beyond the usual right-wing off-the-shelf solutions.

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Looping back to some of the other important discussions we’ve been having in the last couple days about the new Administration and civil liberties, I’m actually on a panel tonight discussing those issues with the Pasadena chapter of the ACLU. For those of you in Southern California, the location is:

NEIGHBORHOOD UNIVERSALIST CHURCH
301 North Orange Grove Blvd. Pasadena, CA 91103
7:30pm

It would be nice to see you if you can make it.

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Incentives

by digby

I’ve long worried about the gradual open acceptance of torture and have written a lot about the expanding police apparatus and what that means to our civil liberties. (“If you build it, they will use it.”)

In a post questioning the usefulness of creating yest another alternate legal system to deal with the Guantanamo prisoners, Hilzoy puts her finger exactly on why it is a very dangerous idea, and cites what I consider to be a chilling example of how it’s likely to be abused:

One of the ways in which we protect ourselves from torture is by making it clear that evidence gained through torture is inadmissible in court. Creating an alternative legal system in which such evidence was admissible would create horrible incentives for law enforcement. This is particularly true since many terrorism statutes are broadly written. Consider this case:

“For the past three years, a 24-year-old construction worker named Edgar Morales has been in jail, awaiting trial on murder and terrorism charges that could send him to prison for life. Mr. Morales, however, does not belong to Al Qaeda or Hamas.

Instead, prosecutors say, he is a member of the St. James Boys, a group of recreational soccer players who formed a street gang that terrorized the Mexican and Mexican-American population of the west Bronx for several years and killed a 10-year-old girl in 2002. (…)

The Bronx district attorney, Robert T. Johnson, says the law is an apt tool in his effort to prosecute violent street gangs.

“The obvious need of this statute is to protect society against acts of political terror,” Mr. Johnson said in a statement. “However, the terror perpetrated by gangs, which all too often occurs on the streets of New York, also fits squarely within the scope of this statute.””

This case concerns a state statute, but the relevant part of it — defining terrorism as acts that violate the law and are intended to “intimidate or coerce a civilian population” — is also found in federal law. This means that a lot could count as terrorism in the hands of a creative prosecutor, and if, in all such cases, an alternate legal system was available in which evidence gained through torture was admissible, that would have huge implications.

Of course Obama would say that the new justice system could only be used in the “right” kind of terrorist trials. And he would probably make sure that they were. But down the road, suppose we have a crime wave or there becomes some kind of extreme dissent on an issue or someone like David Koresh gets the attention of the authorities and you have these “terrorist” laws on the books and a special justice system all ready to deal with them? After what we’ve seen (and the clear lesson that there will never be any ramifications for such behavior) why would anyone think that the government wouldn’t use them? They already are. (“Terrorism” is a very elastic term and one that is wide open for abuse in a nation where sadistic sheriffs are so celebrated that they are given their own reality TV shows.)

We have a civilian legal system and a military legal system under our constitution, both of which have been developed over centuries and tested from a myriad different directions. And as sophisticated as they are, they are still imperfect and often produce unjust results. It’s impossible to develop yet another legal system from scratch that will even function much less have any credibility. We’ve seen that with the military commissions that are nothing more than staged Kangaroo courts where even the judges don’t have a fundamental understanding of how the thing works. It’s just not possible.

This isn’t as complicated as they say, but it will require some effort:

This report released by the Center for Constitutional Rights includes the newest and most comprehensive numbers and lists of detainee status by nationality. The three simple steps are: 1) send those can go home home, 2) secure safe haven for those who cannot, and 3) charge those who can be charged and try them in ordinary federal criminal court. It has been often repeated that closing Guantánamo will be a challenge. The reality is that the restoration of the rule of law to that offshore prison—and this country—should be significantly less complicated than the dismantling of the law has been. The time to close Guantánamo is long overdue—and it can be done in three months. The new administration must repatriate those who can be released safely, secure safe haven in the United States and other countries for those who cannot be repatriated safely, and prosecute in federal criminal courts those who should be prosecuted. Only 250 of 779 men remain in the prison camp. Most can be returned to their home countries through vigorous diplomacy. A smaller number need to be offered protection in the United States or third countries, many of whom have already begun to come forward to offer help to the new administration. There is no justification for continued detention without trial or the creation of special courts; such proposals would continue the human rights disaster rather than end it. For more information on CCR’s 100 Days campaign to restore, protect and expand the constitution, click here.

And in the spirit of being supportive when it’s warranted, the ACLU has a nice action going to show your appreciation to President-elect Obama for pledging yesterday to issue an executive order to close Guantanamo on his first day. You can sign the letter, here.

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