Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Netroots Grows Up

by digby

More good news on the progressive front:

A group of progressive operatives from MoveOn and labor circles have teamed with a prominent Internet pioneer to try to give the Sam Bennetts of the world the final push they need — and send even more Perriellos to Congress. The organization will be the first of its kind exclusively to focus on electing progressive Democrats in congressional elections. It won’t focus its energy on unseating conservative Democrats, but Green, a cofounder, didn’t rule out the possibility. Instead, it will prioritize competitive open-seat primaries and help general election candidates like Bennett and Perriello run effective campaigns. The group’s first forays are likely to be in the Illinois district vacated by Rahm Emanuel, who left to become Obama’s chief of staff. Green says the group is in talks with a progressive labor lawyer, Tom Geoghegan, in that district. Another potential target: the California district emptied by Hilda Solis, who’s been tapped to be labor secretary. “Our belief is there are many more Tom Perriellos out there who are on the cusp of winning,” says Green. “There’s a pattern of progressive candidates who are written off in the beginning and who come inches away from victory, but lose due to inefficient campaigns.” The organization will be dedicated to finding progressive candidates who might have an outside shot at winning and “take them under our wing,” in Green’s words. The group’s name — the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, or the P-triple-C — is a reference to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which financially backs Democratic candidates it thinks have a shot to win but does not prioritize progressive Democrats over conservative Democrats. The DCCC has had a patchy relationship with the liberal blogosphere, which charges it with relying too heavily on old-school expensive Democratic consultants and not being willing to take chances on progressive candidates.[…]
The PCCC aims to be something of a guiding resource for first-time candidates like Bennett. By helping candidates find good campaign staff and make more effective use of the Internet, the group thinks candidates could save tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in consultant fees. Whereas consultants might charge thousands to record and pump out robo-calls, for instance, the PCCC could show a candidate how to do it in-house, online, for a fraction of the cost. “Anybody who pays ten thousand dollars to a consultant for a YouTube video doesn’t know what they’re doing,” said Green. Aaron Swartz is another cofounder and the co-inventor of RSS, which has changed the way people consume information online. Swartz co-founded Reddit, a popular Web 2.0 site depends on user interaction. Staff from Perriello’s campaign, as well as that of Washington’s Darcy Burner, are also involved. Stephanie Taylor, who ran Perriello’s field operation in the campaign’s final month, is a former union organizer with over ten years of field and online experience at SEIU, the AFL-CIO, the DNC and MoveOn.org. Mudcat Arnold was Burner’s field director and Michael Snook was data director and targeting analyst for Perriello. The group expects to raise and spend around $650,000 this year and more in the next. It has already gotten MoveOn backing and is meeting soon with other progressive-leaning organizations. The goal is to raise money from outside sources rather than to charge candidates, though some type of fee may be involved.

This is an essential component of progressive politics. The stale CW of the village Democrats gets passed on to congressional candidates by simple osmosis — there’s no creativity, no use of modern methods and no real progressive message and the progressive ends up losing.

Adam Green is a serious guy with some great ideas and his partners are obviously among the smartest tech people around. This is a very, very exciting project and I’ll be watching with interest to see how it all unfolds.

Update:

For those interested in getting involved, please sign up at the website:
http://boldprogressives.org/

To donate:
http://www.actblue.com/entity/fu…ndraisers/ 21594

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Special Rights

by digby

This is one of the reasons why Tom Goeghagan needs to be in the House of Representatives. He’s a lawyer who actually reads and understands the constitution as a document meant to protect democracy and freedom. The unseemliness of Governors appointing Senators has never been more obvious than it has been this election cycle, what with the Illinois and New York soap operas and the lesser known sideshow of Delaware, where they clearly wished to put in someone to keep the seat warm for the Biden heir. If this doesn’t prove just how wrong it is on principle for these governors to wield such power, maybe Goeghagan’s op-ed will convince you how unconstitutional it is.

Americans should vote for their representatives, period. If the person is legally elected then that should be that. Nobody gets a veto, nobody doesn’t get the job because a phony deadline wasn’t met, legislatures don’t get to step in and offer up a different candidate. All this arcane machinery around our elections, from this appointment process to the electoral college are relics of a time when the country was a far flung frontier that made it difficult to get people in one place and one in which a good many wealthy landowners had aristocratic “special rights.” Enough.

For a wonderful piece on Goeghagan, (and from what I understand Goeghagan blogging will be an ongoing feature) please check out Kathy G’s post at the G Spot. Kathy knows Goehagan very well and is in a unique position to follow this campaign closely.

I only know Goeghagan by reputation and his books, which I mentioned yesterday. And that would be enough to make him a great candidate. But as James Fallows wrote in his endorsement in The Atlantic, Goeghagan actually has a day job that makes him a uniquely qualified progressive candidate:

Day by day for several decades he has been a lawyer in a small Chicago law firm representing steel workers, truckers, nurses, and other employees whose travails are the reality covered by abstractions like “the polarization of America” and “the disappearing middle class.” Geoghegan’s skills as a writer and an intellectual are assets but in themselves might not recommend him for a Congressional job. His consistent and canny record of organizing, representing, and defending people who are the natural Democratic (and American) base is the relevant point.”

If there was ever a time when the congress needed a voice like that, it’s now.

If you would like to follow Goeghagan’s campaign, you can go here.

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Tasering W

by digby

From Huffington Post:

TMZ has released the incredible video of Josh Brolin’s arrest outside of a Shreveport bar last summer, along with his “W” costar Jeffrey Wright. In the video, viewers see Brolin and Wright standing hugging as they are sprayed with pepper spray and then separated by cops. Brolin is made to kneel and is handcuffed while Wright gets laid out on the street and repeatedly tasered, as the cellphone camerawoman screams in protests.

Other video from patrol cars was also recorded by cop cars last July but not released. Coinciding with the video’s release, today charges in Louisiana against Brolin stemming from the brawl are being dropped.

Why is it that the taser videos always show a bunch of cops sauntering around, three or four of them bent over a prone person in handcuffs, blithely administering the taser as if they are merely wiping a speck of dust off the suspects shirt? I think that’s the part I find so chilling — it’s so methodical, so cold, so completely inhuman — that it seems like something out of a dystopian sci-fi novel featuring robots or aliens.

I’ll never forget the horror of seeing the video of those environmental protesters having their eyes calmly swabbed with Q tips soaked in liquid pepper spray, by the Humboldt County sheriffs dept. In searching for the video (which I couldn’t find) I came across this San Francisco Examiner editorial from 1997, that could be written today about tasers:

Justifying Torture

Law enforcement arguments in a federal lawsuit are malarkey – pepper spray used senselessly hurts cops as much as protesters

San Francisco Examiner
Monday, Nov. 17, 1997 Page A 18

It’s almost farcical for law enforcement officials to continue defending pepper spray as a weapon to get protesters to follow orders. A videotape of officers applying pepper spray in liquid form to demonstrators’ eyes shows the technique to be a form of torture.

Yet, attorneys for the Humboldt County Sheriff and the Eureka Police Department argue in federal court that this use of pepper spray is legitimate and unobjectionable. In court papers filed in a protesters’ suit against the cops, police training expert Joseph J. Callahan Jr. says, implausibly, that the videotape could be used as a training film “illustrating modern police practices delivered in a calm, deliberate manner.” (Remind us not to volunteer as guinea pigs for Mr. Callahan.) The videotape was shot by Humboldt sheriff’s deputies at an Oct. 16 demonstration, against logging in the Headwaters Forest, that took place in the Eureka office of Rep. Frank Riggs, R-Windsor. Four women who had chained themselves together with heavy metal “black bears” got liquid pepper spray rubbed into their eyes with cotton swabs, and one woman who refused even then to move had the pepper mist sprayed into her face. This hurts, as the videotaped reactions make clear. But it broke up the demonstration pronto, and that’s what counted for the law enforcers. “At stake,” attorneys for the cops argue, “is whether professionally trained police officers are to be deprived of the use of pepper spray, a substance carried by millions of private citizens in this country.” But this is really not the issue. Most people don’t object to police using pepper spray the way it’s designed to be used: To subdue a suspect who threatens officers or threatens to flee. Neither occurred in the case of the Eureka protesters. Police shouldn’t use pepper spray, or any other weapon, to dish out punishment to suspects. Just because cops are in a hurry doesn’t make it OK for them to take shortcuts, or inflict pain to get things done. The argument doesn’t wash that no lasting damage was done by the pepper spray. By the same logic, police could use branding irons, sharp knives or psychological abuse on recalcitrant protesters as long as “no lasting damage was done.” Other police legal arguments are similarly shallow. An attorney for the cops said the use of heavy metal sleeves linked with chains that made protesters virtually immovable amounted to “active resistance,” justifying the use of pepper spray. In the past, police used metal grinders to cut through the heavy metal in order to oust demonstrators. That takes longer and is inconvenient, but it doesn’t violate anyone’s civil rights or threaten their physical well-being. No one wants to live in a society where police are free to do whatever they wish in order to punish suspected law breakers. Cruel and unusual punishment is outlawed by the Constitution. And anyway, punishment is up to the courts to determine and the penal system to administer. What cops risk through indiscriminate use of pepper spray, and its indiscriminate defense in court, is losing it altogether. If police are too dense to distinguish between legitimate use and torture, the Legislature should eliminate any confusion and outlaw pepper spray, period.

That holds true for all weapons that can be used for torture.

It took three tries and eight years, but the protesters finally won their case against the police in federal court. They were awarded a dollar.

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The Shoes Worked

by dday

Jeb Bush will not be running for US Senate in 2010 to replace one-term Senator Mel Martinez. I guess that means we can all collect our shoes from the Palmetto Expressway. But remember, Jeb!, we can reassemble the shoes in a matter of minutes. Oh yes, we can.

Slightly more seriously, Jeb, no great shakes in his own right, is collateral damage to the worst President in American history. You will not be able to be elected dog catcher with the last name “Bush” for a generation or two. I don’t think the burning bush could get elected at the Vatican (or even in the Bible Belt!) in this environment.

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Going Back To Church

by digby

In dday’s post below he discusses this chatter about a challenge to the retroactive immunity in the wiretapping cases, he quotes McJoan over at DKos saying this:

That should not, however, preclude Congress from finally conducting its own investigation in the form of a reconstituted Church Commission and the Obama administration from cooperating fully with that investigation. There really isn’t a way for Congress to recover everything it lost in its myriad capitulations to a lawless administration. But a bright light shined on the whole affair might just keep it from happening yet again.

Sadly, if history is any indication, that is highly unlikely to happen. Over the holidays, at the behest of Rick Perlstein, I read a book called Challenging the Secret Government: The Post-Watergate Investigations of the CIA and FBIby Kathryn S. Olmsted. I had written something similar to what McJoan says above and he thought I should look more closely into the results of the Church (and Pike) committees and what lessons the congress and the media have likely drawn from them.

It’s always interesting to have one’s own recollections challenged by historians. And this was, to say the least, mindblowing:

When Richard Nixon resigned in August 1974, the United States concluded one of the most traumatic chapters in its history. During the Watergate scandal, Americans had been shocked by the crimes of the Nixon presidency. Investigations by the press and Congress had exposed previously unimaginable levels of corruption and conspiracy in the executive branch. The public’s faith in government had been shaken; indeed, the entire “system” had been tested. Now, with Nixon’s resignation, two years of agonizing revelations finally seemed to be over. The system had worked.

Yet only four months later, New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh disclosed that the government’s crimes went beyond Watergate. After months of persistent digging, Hersh had unearthed a new case of the imperial presidency’s abuse of secrecy and power: a “massive” domestic spying program by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). According to Hersh, the CIA had violated its charter and broken the law by launching a spying program of Orwellian dimensions against American dissidents during the Vietnam War. The Times called it “son of Watergate.”

These revelations produced a dramatic response from the newly energized post-Watergate Congress and press. Both houses of Congress mounted extensive, year-long investigations of the intelligence community. These highly publicized inquiries, headed by experienced investigators Senator Frank Church and Congressman Otis Pike, produced shocking accusations of murder plots and poison caches, of FBI corruption and CIA incompetence. In addition to the congressional inquiries, the press, seemingly at the height of its power after Watergate, launched investigations of its own. The New York Times continued to crusade against CIA abuses; the Washington Post exposed abuses and illegalities committed by the FBI; and CBS’s Daniel Schorr shocked the nation by revealing that there might be “literal” skeletons in the CIA closet as a result of its assassination plots.

In this charged atmosphere, editorial writers, columnists, political scientists, historians, and even former officials of the CIA weighed in with various suggestions for reforming an agency that many agreed had become a ”monster.” Several policymakers, including presidential candidates Fred Harris and Morris Udall, called for massive restructuring or abolition of the CIA. Media and political pundits suggested banning CIA covert operations; transferring most CIA functions to the Pentagon or the State Department; or, at the very least, devising a new, strict charter for all members of the intelligence community.

Few barriers seemed to stand in the way of such reforms. The liberal, post-Watergate Congress faced an appointed president who did not appear to have the strength to resist this “tidal shift in attitude,” as Senator Church called it. Change seemed so likely in early 1975 that a writer for The Nation declared “the heyday of the National Security State’, to be over, at least temporarily.

But a year and a half later, when the Pike and Church committees finally finished their work, the passion for reform had cooled. The House overwhelmingly rejected the work of the Pike committee and voted to suppress its final report. It even refused to set up a standing intelligence committee. The Senate dealt more favorably with the Church committee, but it too came close to rejecting all of the committee’s recommendations. Only last-minute parliamentary maneuvering enabled Church to salvage one reform, the creation of a new standing committee on intelligence. The proposed charter for the intelligence community, though its various components continued to be hotly debated for several years, never came to pass.

The investigations failed to promote the careers of those who had inspired and led them. Daniel Schorr, the CBS reporter who had advanced the CIA story at several important points and eventually had become part of the story himself, was investigated by Congress, threatened with jail, and fired by CBS for his role in leaking the suppressed Pike report. Seymour Hersh’s exposes were dismissed by his peers as “overwritten, over-played, under-researched and underproven.” Otis Pike, despite the many accomplishments of his committee, found his name linked with congressional sensationalism, leaks, and poor administration. Frank Church’s role in the investigation failed to boost his presidential campaign, forced him to delay his entry into the race, and, he thought, might have cost him the vice presidency.

The targets of the investigation had the last laugh on the investigators. “When all is said and done, what did it achieve?” asked Richard Helms, the former director of the CIA who was at the heart of many of the scandals unearthed by Congress and the media. “Where is the legislation, the great piece of legislation, that was going to come out of the Church committee hearings ? I haven’t seen it.” Hersh, the reporter who prompted the inquiries, was also unimpressed by the investigators’ accomplishments. “They generated a lot of new information, but ultimately they didn’t come up with much,” he said.

This was immediately post-Watergate, probably the most likely time in history for the government and the press to be able to change the way things were done. The new congress, the bumbling appointed president, the country’s weariness with Vietnam and the shocking revelations of Nixonian overreach all argued in favor of the congress being able to step up and make serious changes. And I actually thought they did. But I misremembered. The sturm and drang of the period and my own youthful political leanings led me to believe that the Pike and Church Committees resulted in real reforms. And because it so damaged the careers of so many of those involved who tried, the political lesson is pretty stark.

Not So Fast, Immunity Granters

by dday

Marcy Wheeler has a series of posts taking a look at some intriguing events in the courtroom of Vaughn Walker, the judge who the Bush Administration – and many Democrats – thought would be forced to rubber-stamp the immunity provisions in last year’s FISA law. The biggest issue with that blanket amnesty was that we would never know the extent of the lawbreaking and that there would subsequently be no accountability for those who authorized and directed it. Well, Judge Walker isn’t going along with that.

I just finished reading Vaughn Walker’s opinion explaining that the government will have to give him the document that–the lawyers for al Haramain claim–shows they were wiretapped without a warrant under Bush’s illegal wiretap program, so he can determine whether it really does show what the lawyers claim it shows. If it does, you see, then someone will finally be able to sue Bush and his cronies for violating FISA.

The al Haramain case was one where the lawyers for the prosecution accidentally gave the defense a secret transcript of the defendants (an Islamic charity), proving they were eavesdropped on without a warrant. At the time, a court ruled that even with a hard document like that, the defendants in al Haramain couldn’t show standing, and they couldn’t enter it into evidence because it was classified. Now Walker is essentially vacating that decision. Threat Level has more.

U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker said the lawyers’ amended lawsuit, even absent the classified document, showed there was enough evidence for the case to continue. The amended lawsuit pieces together snippets of public statements from government investigations into Al-Haramain, the Islamic charity the lawyers were working for and, among other things, a speech about their case by an FBI official.

“The plaintiffs have alleged sufficient facts to withstand the government’s motion to dismiss,” Walker ruled in a 25-page opinion (.pdf). Walker said the nation’s spy laws now demand that he view the classified document and others to decide whether the lawyers were spied on illegally and whether Bush’s spy program was unlawful.

The case concerns lawyers Wendell Belew and Asim Ghafoor, whose case appears now the most likely to lead to a ruling on the legality of Bush’s warrantless-wiretapping program. That program started after the Sept. 11 terror attacks and involved various initiatives that peered into Americans’ phone and internet usage without court approval — a surveillance program ratified by Congress last year in legislation immunizing participating telecommunication companies.

The deadline for the government to hand over the incriminating document for Judge Walker is the day before the inauguration. And Marcy lays out the additional stakes.

Remember, Vaughn Walker has more than just this FISA mess on his plate. He is also–as we speak–deliberating on EFF’s suit to prevent the awarding of retroactive immunity to the telecoms for their role in the illegal wiretap program. In fact, last we heard from him, Walker was wondering why he shouldn’t wait until the new President comes in, to see whether that President’s Attorney General is really so sure that the retroactive immunity for constitutional violations was as legal as Michael Mukasey claims it to have been. BushCo, of course, insisted that it’s unheard of for a new Attorney General to reverse what the prior Administration’s Attorney General has said […]

Mukasey has made his representations on this issue–both about the constitutionality of retroactive immunity, and about the legality of the underlying program–based on his typical crap about Yoo’s OLC opinions.

But he’s also about to hand over a document to Walker that proves that there are aggrieved parties that can sue the government for violating FISA. He’s about to hand over a document that will demonstrate clearly that Bush broke the law.

It’s going to be a lot harder for Walker to find retroactive immunity legal (not least because he’s contemplating the same issues of separation of powers that has him so riled up here), and it’ll be a lot harder for Mukasey’s successor to continue to affirm the program itself was legal, if Walker is in the process of affirming that Bush broke the law.

Once again, when Congress cannot be trusted to uphold the rule of law, the judicial branch takes steps to bail them out. However, as mcjoan notes:

…it’s very possible that we could finally have some light shed on the warrantless wiretapping program in this case. That should not, however, preclude Congress from finally conducting its own investigation in the form of a reconstituted Church Commission and the Obama administration from cooperating fully with that investigation. There really isn’t a way for Congress to recover everything it lost in its myriad capitulations to a lawless administration. But a bright light shined on the whole affair might just keep it from happening yet again.

It will be interesting to see what the Obama Administration does with this once they come into office. The legal team assembled over the last few weeks doesn’t seem like they’d be willing to carry forward Mukasey et al.’s warped legal theories, and yet Obama himself voted for immunity. Should be another early test.

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The Real Deal

by digby

Congratulations to Matt Stoller who is taking the DFH spirit to the Hill. Matt’s a good friend of mine, so I’m biased, but I can’t think of a person with more integrity or more passion for the progressive movement, and if he’s crashing that gate, then change is no longer a slogan.

I’m sure that Matt will benefit greatly from getting an inside view of the nuts and bolts. But more importantly, I think the Hill will benefit greatly from getting a dose of Matt Stoller. Viva la revolucion.

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Torture Ideology

by digby

Did Chuck Todd recently attend a Mark Halperin seminar on how to be an insufferably obtuse purveyor of stale and useless insider conventional wisdom? (Or does he just have a natural talent for it?)

Check this out:

Competence And Ideology: One reason why intelligence has become such a tough nut for Obama to crack: There’s a lot of Democratic rhetoric on intel from the presidential campaign, and it’s something that Obama is allowing the intellectual left to have veto power over. Obama finds himself caught in this first intra-party vise between his instinct to pick competence over ideology. His first rumored choices for CIA were competent picks — but both would have been eviscerated by the intellectual left because of their anger at Bush over interrogation practices. He’s allowing ideology to trump competence for the first time in one of his major appointments. Now, the pick of Dennis Blair to be DNI is a tip toward competence, while the Obama folks hoped Panetta was a compromise between competence and ideology (Panetta was praised as a smart manager during the Clinton White House years). But it looks like it ain’t being received that way…

Apparently being against torture is now a crazed left wing ideological position built on “anger” at George Bush. And it’s incompetent, to boot.

I don’t know how many times people have to make this point, but when it comes to torture it is not a matter of being mad at bush or even simple human decency. It is a matter of competence as well. Not only does torture not work as an intelligence tool, the sincere and public repudiation of torture is essential to the success of Obama’s foreign policy. If he were to choose someone who was implicated in or associated with Bush’s torture regime, his credibility around the world would be damaged before he even begins. It would be dramatically incompetent for him not to make a clear distinction both to the intelligence community and the rest of the world between his policies and the Bush administration’s.

The fact that this is considered ideological at all by the vaunted centrist villagers tells you everything you need to know about their morals, their intelligence and their competence. But that’s no surprise. These are people, after all, who giddily supported Bush and Cheney taking the gloves off, even though it was clear that it would end up making the country an international pariah and obviously, therefore, less safe. (Superpowers without a moral compass are inherently seen to be untrustworthy — duh.)

As Greenwald said, the mere fact that the complicit whiners Feinstein and Rockefeller (who, you’ll notice, immediately ran crying to the press) are upset about it, reflects well on the decision. I’m sorry that the intelligence community believes that the lefties are out to get them, but they really need to get a grip. As I’ve written before, the left has always supported the intelligence community and defends their intelligence gathering and analysis against the ongoing right wing attacks on them for being wimps for underestimating the threat. The left understands the need for intelligence, but they draw the line at secret coups, assassination, torture and other illegal activities. The community seems to be perfectly willing to take endless crap from the right for being befuddled, stupid and cowardly, but it goes into high dudgeon when anyone asks them to stop their more violent and illegal activities. That tells you more about them than it does about the “intellectual left.”

h/t to bb

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I Gotcher Progressive For Ya, Right Here

by digby

If you want to know what a real progressive candidate looks like, this is the guy. He’s running for Congress to fill Rahm Emmanuel’s seat (which formerly belonged to Rod Balgojevich!)

Here’s his statement:

Why I’m Running

By Tom Geoghegan

I’m running for Congress in the Fifth District of Illinois. As a Chicago lawyer for thirty years I have fought for working people in this District and throughout the city. I have represented unions as well as people with no unions to protect them. In plant closings I have helped them recover health and pension benefits. I obtained health care for the uninsured. I’ve been pressing the State of Illinois to crack down on payday lenders. In my life as a lawyer I have lived out a commitment to one cause above all – to bring economic security to working Americans, in our District, in our country. That’s the same commitment I will bring to Congress. We’re deep in an economic crisis unlike any other we’ve known. It may last years. We need new and creative ways to protect working Americans, especially our older working people who have no real pensions to live on. For years we’ve heard the doomsayers: “We can’t afford Social Security.” “We can’t afford ‘single payer’ national health.” One thing we all learned from the $700 billion bailout: We’ve got the money to do all of this and more. At the moment, the Federal Reserve is literally printing money, to give not billions but trillions to banks and financial firms. To the people of this District, the banks and others have gotten their money. Now it’s your turn. Here’s the bailout I will go to Congress to get: First, I want to expand Social Security, our public pension system, to replace, not overnight but in stages, the private pension system which has collapsed. Social Security now pays about 38 to 39 percent of your working income. In other developed countries, it averages 65 percent. That’s where our fiscal stimulus should be: a commitment to reach this goal, a public pension that ordinary working people can live on. Second we have to move to single payer health care program, at least in phases: we might begin with extending Medicare to children, but the government should ultimately be the single payer for all. That’s not because single payer is the only ethical and efficient way to protect us all. No, it’s also because it is crucial to making us competitive globally. Through single payer and expanded Social Security, the goal is to pick up the “non-wage” labor costs that employers now have to pay. That’s already how other countries out-compete us: they have the government and not the private employer pick up these non-wage health and pension costs. Unless we have government pick up the costs of pensions and health care, our companies can’t compete, and we’ll go on piling up huge trade deficits. We’ll have debacles like GM, which has collapsed in part because of the health and pension costs that the federal government should have been paying all along. For years, the conservatives have said: “We can’t do this. The money isn’t there.” Well, the money is there. It was there for the Iraq war, a colossal waste of money, and for the bailout, the first half of which has been a colossal waste as well. And if we now have the government pick up non-wage labor costs with the use of general revenues, we will in fact make it cheaper and easier for our companies to hire. This is in fact the best and most realistic approach for a long term recovery. Finally we have to put limits on returns to financial firms. We should re-enact the usury laws, the interest-rate caps that were in place in America up till the 1970s. We need to stop the rates of 30 to 35 percent, the hidden fees, the hundreds of ways that banks pull our money out of industry and into gambling and speculation. In my campaign, I will have a single minded focus on the economic security to working Americans, that’s why I so strongly support the Employee Free Choice Act and other changes in our labor laws. And that’s why I support policies that will reduce the debt of working Americans. Overall, the plan I am setting out here will help make our country more competitive. I’m a strong supporter of President Obama. Yes, I strongly support his program to repair our infrastructure. Even so, we don’t have to pave the streets with gold. If not the meltdown then the bail out should have opened our eyes. The real fiscal stimulus has to be the kind that brings financial security to the middle class. The message of this campaign is: We’re moving beyond the bailout. Now it’s your turn.

I first found out about Geoghegan through his friend Rick Perlstein some years back, who turned me on to Geoghegan’s books. They were the kind of books liberals always try to write but rarely pull off — intelligent, informative and … inspiring. They teach you how to see the legal system, American society and the world:

Which Side Are You On?: Trying to Be for Labor When It’s Flat on Its Back

The Law in Shambles

See You in Court: How the Right Made America a Lawsuit Nation

The Secret Lives of Citizens: Pursuing the Promise of American Life

In America’s Court: How a Civil Lawyer Who Likes to Settle Stumbled into a Criminal Trial

If you want to support a real progressive to fill Rahm’s seat you can donate through Act Blue.

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Village Ceremonial Burying Of Secrets

by dday

It’s more than a little surprising to me that the choice for CIA Director of Leon Panetta, who I considered a card-carrying Villager if there ever was one, is ruffling such feathers inside official Washington, particularly official Democratic Washington. At first blush this looked like whining about not being informed, but it seems like there’s more there. Here’s the relevant section from the LA Times:

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who this week begins her tenure as the first female chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said today that she was not consulted on the choice and indicated she might oppose it.

“I was not informed about the selection of Leon Panetta to be the CIA director,” Feinstein said. “My position has consistently been that I believe the agency is best served by having an intelligence professional in charge at this time.” […]

A senior aide to Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), outgoing chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that the senator “would have concerns” about a Panetta nomination.

Rockefeller “thinks very highly of Panetta,” the aide said. “But he’s puzzled by the selection. He has concerns because he has always believed that the director of CIA needs to be someone with significant operational intelligence experience, and someone outside the political realm.”

Most of the intelligence professionals at the top over the past eight years had plenty of “experience” and that didn’t work out too well. The one who came from the political arena, Porter Goss (who was a former spy), wasn’t so objectionable to Dianne Feinstein – I mean she voted to confirm him, after all. Of course, he was a Republican, which makes everything OK.

But I don’t think this is about Panetta’s lack of experience; it’s his wealth of it, which presages a change in culture inside the agency.

Panetta’s selection suggests that Obama intends to shake up the agency, which has had little public accounting of its role in detaining top terror suspects and transferring others to regimes known to use torture, a procedure known as extraordinary rendition.

The CIA, which denies subjecting detainees to torture, is part of a 16-agency intelligence community whose annual budget now exceeds $47.5 billion. The agency keeps its own budget and number of employees secret. Its successes, too, are mostly kept secret while some of its failures reach front pages.

Panetta has suggested that Obama could do much to signal a break with Bush administration policies by signing executive orders during his first 100 days that ban the use of torture in interrogations and close the Guantanamo Bay prison.

“Issuing executive orders on issues such as prohibiting torture or closing Guantanamo Bay would make clear that his administration will do things differently,” Panetta wrote Nov. 9 in a regular column he published in his local newspaper, the Monterey (Calif.) County Herald […]

“He will be an outsider and I think the president wants an outsider’s perspective on the CIA,” said Lee Hamilton, a former Indiana congressman and a former chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence who heads the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. “The intelligence community has lost a lot of confidence with the American people and the Congress. I’m talking about 9/11, the Iraq war.”

It’s that he’s an outsider with enough institutional power to actually make changes, and the moral compass to make those decisions based not on burying the past but rooting it out. THAT’S what has DiFi and Jello Jay spooked. In fact, they wanted Michael Hayden’s right-hand man to take over.

NBC News has learned that Senate Democrats — including Dianne Feinstein and Jay Rockefeller, who are the incoming and outgoing Intelligence chairmen — have privately recommended a career CIA officer to head the agency.

Democratic sources indicate that both have recommended deputy CIA Director Steve Kappes, a veteran CIA intelligence officer who is widely credited with getting the Libyans to give up their nuclear program. Kappes also was former Moscow station chief […]

One potential downside for Kappes: Like former counter-terror chief John Brennan, some critics says he had line authority over controversial decisions involving interrogation and detention. Brennan was taken out of contention for the CIA job after criticism on the Web on that issue, even though he says he privately objected to the policies and was not in the chain of command at the time.

Panetta isn’t going to be sneaking through the Middle East collecting human intelligence; he’s going to be managing a large bureaucracy. But moral lepers like DiFi value “experience” that will lock in the status quo over experience that will reveal the agency’s sins, and by extension her own. They don’t want to risk any culpability on their part from becoming public, so they’d rather “keep it in the family.” By the way, the resultant fight suggests that “liberal bloggers” were only the excuse for the Obama transition to disqualify John Brennan; in fact, they wanted a strong manager with a spine who would follow the rules. That is distasteful to those Senate Dems who don’t want the family secrets spilling out.

And lest this become abstract, read today’s New York Times:

When Muhammad Saad Iqbal arrived home here in August after more than six years in American custody, including five at the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, he had difficulty walking, his left ear was severely infected, and he was dependent on a cocktail of antibiotics and antidepressants.

In November, a Pakistani surgeon operated on his ear, physical therapists were working on lower back problems and a psychiatrist was trying to wean him off the drugs he carried around in a white, plastic shopping bag.

The maladies, said Mr. Iqbal, 31, a professional reader of the Koran, are the result of a gantlet of torture, imprisonment and interrogation for which his Washington lawyer plans to sue the United States government […]

Mr. Iqbal was never convicted of any crime, or even charged with one. He was quietly released from Guantánamo with a routine explanation that he was no longer considered an enemy combatant, part of an effort by the Bush administration to reduce the prison’s population.

“I feel ashamed what the Americans did to me in this period,” Mr. Iqbal said, speaking for the first time at length about his ordeal during several hours of interviews with The New York Times, including one from his hospital bed in Lahore.

Mr. Iqbal was arrested early in 2002 in Jakarta, Indonesia, after boasting to members of an Islamic group that he knew how to make a shoe bomb, according to two senior American officials who were in Jakarta at the time.

Mr. Iqbal now denies ever having made the statement, but two days after his arrest, he said, the Central Intelligence Agency transferred him to Egypt. He was later shifted to the American prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, and ultimately to Guantánamo Bay.

Much of Mr. Iqbal’s account could not be independently corroborated. Two senior American officials confirmed that Mr. Iqbal had been “rendered” from Indonesia, but could not comment on, or confirm details of, how he was treated in custody. The Pentagon and C.I.A. deny using torture, and American diplomatic, military and intelligence officials agreed to talk about the case only on the condition of anonymity because the files are classified.

There are hundreds of human beings like this – at least the ones who are alive – who really don’t care if Dianne Feinstein or Jay Rockefeller will be “embarrassed”. They were flown around the world, interrogated and tortured, and in the process, America not only created thousands of new terrorists while received no actionable intelligence, but lost its soul. The road to restoration has nothing to do with the delicate sensibilities of Senate Democrats.

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