I don’t know about you, but Christmas day for me is all about the food. And I know I’m not alone. Even people who aren’t observers of the day or the American turkey tradition often have some sort of food ritual, like my Jewish pals who always go out for Chinese food or Italians who do lasagna or Mexican friends who eat tamales. I usually listen to Christmas music and spend the entire day in the kitchen, whether I’m cooking the full meal or not.
Today, I’m making dessert for the gathering, so (aside from the traditional cookie selection, which I’ve been working on for some time) I’m making tart tatin and chocolate croissant bread pudding with creme anglaise.
A bunch of readers have sent this story to me today and it fits in quite well with another than that several forwarded to me yesterday. First, we have a vast number of ER docs saying that based upon their observations of injuries, police often use excessive force:
In a survey of a random sample of U.S. emergency physicians, virtually all said they believed that law enforcement officers use excessive force to arrest and detain suspects. The sample included 315 respondents. While 99.8 percent believed excessive force is used, almost as many (97.8 percent) reported that they had managed cases that they suspected or that the patient stated had involved excessive use of force by law enforcement officers. Nearly two thirds (65.3 percent) estimated that they had treated two or more cases of suspected excessive use of force per year among their patients, according to a report of the survey published in the January 2009 issue of the Emergency Medicine Journal. Dr. Jared Strote of the University of Washington, Seattle, and a multicenter team also found that emergency physicians at public teaching hospitals were roughly four times more likely to report managing cases of suspected use of excessive force than those at university or community teaching emergency departments. Blunt trauma inflicted by fists or feet was the most common type of injury cited in cases of suspected use of excessive force, followed by “overly tight” handcuffs. Most emergency physicians (71.2 percent) admitted that they did not report cases of suspected use of excessive force by law enforcement officers. A large majority (96.5 percent) reported that they had no departmental policies on reporting their suspicions or they did not know of a policy to guide their actions, and 93.7 percent said they had received no education or training in dealing with these situations. However, most emergency physicians (69.5 percent) felt that it was within their scope of practice to refer cases of suspected use of excessive force for investigation and almost half (47.9 percent) felt that emergency physicians should be legally required to report cases of suspected use of excessive force by law enforcement officers.
Imagine if tasering were added into the definition of excessive force, as it should be. (It doesn’t usually leave marks, so these doctors don’t see it unless the person is one of the growing number of those who are injured thudding to the ground, suffer heart attacks or … die.)
Two Newburgh Heights police officers and a dispatcher were indicted Tuesday on felonious assault charges for their roles in using a Taser on a drunken driving suspect. Joseph Szelenyi, 31, of Newburgh Heights; Bobby Hoover, 32, of Brunswick; and dispatcher Christopher Minek, 25, of Strongsville are accused of hitting Kim Bankhead several times with a Taser during her arrest and processing following a traffic stop Nov. 25, 2007. Bankhead was driving away from the Crankshaft Bar with her ex-husband about 9 p.m. that evening when Hoover pulled her over. He said she smelled of alcohol and arrested her for operating a vehicle while intoxicated. Szelenyi drove up to assist. Szelenyi used a Taser twice while attempting to handcuff her and place her in the police car, said Ryan Miday, spokesman for Cuyahoga County prosecutor’s office. When they arrived at the station where Minek was working, they handcuffed Bankhead to a bench. Hoover then hit her twice with a Taser and Minek once, Miday said. At her Feb. 25 Municipal Court hearing, Bankhead pleaded no contest to operating a vehicle while intoxicated. Charges of disorderly conduct, driving in a prohibited area, failure to yield and resisting arrest were dismissed. Bankhead filed a civil suit in October against the city and three men. She is asking for $2 million.
The interesting thing about this is that they charged these officers with felonious assault with a taser. Cases like this could lead to some interesting legal reevaluation of weapon. After all, we’ve been told over and over again that there’s no harm in tasering — it’s just a little zap that doesn’t do anyone any harm. But if you can be indicted for using a taser as a weapon then someone, at least, sees that there is inherent harm in shooting people with electricity (it’s hard to believe that isn’t simple common sense) and that police should not be allowed to use them impunity any more than they can use a billy cub or a gun with impunity. In most cases so far, the police are found to be not guilty of a crime, but at some point it’s going to become obvious that these are dangerous weapons and that standards have to be strictly enforced. This zap first and and ask questions later mentality (and the impending use of a new generation of weapons to quell dissent and break up lawful gatherings) is bound to bring these legal question to the fore. Let’s hope we haven’t gone so far down the torture rabbit hole that it’s too late.
David Shuster spent most of the morning insinuating that there is more to the Blago-Obama story than meets the eye. In a conversation between Shuster and Jim Warren (fo0rmerly of the Chicgo Tribune) I learned that Rahm and Blagojevich were very close and that there’s something nefarious about Rahm and the replacement of his own House seat (which is not an appointed position.) And the fact that Obama listened to some of the tapes when he met with Fitzgerald is a very bad sign. I don’t know why.
Then Warren starts to speculate about what might have been:
Warren: I think they were a little bit too legalistic at the start particularly with the president elect saying there was no communication between him and Blagojevich, which was literally true, but we now know that Rahm Emmanuel was a conduit for the perfectly predictable set of names that Obama threw Blagojevich’s way…
But at the same time Patrick Fitzgerald is the one who is running this and I think he made it quite clear he didn’t want any folks talking and remember, you have the unusual situation there when once you have the Chicago Tribune disclose that there was some sort of taping going on, then Patrick Fitzgerald was caught sort of in mid-stream and that’s why you’ll sort of remember that the initial press conference that say was sort of the plaintive call if anybody out there had any more information. So you had the unusual situation here where he was caught a little bit flat-footed, an investigation underway and one can only imagine what might have happened if there had not been that disclosure and if Fitzgerald had been able to play this out another step or two, to keep listening unknown to the participants and see what might have happened when it came to any serious discussion of a quid pro quo for for the senate seat. But that all came crash a couple of weeks ago with the disclosure of the system…
Yes, just imagine. Perhaps they could get the Jim Henson people to create some Muppets to act out the various parts so we could really feel what those conversations would have been like if they ever took place. (And, of course, the mere fact that they are talking about the possibility of unethical conversations featuring Obama and Emmanuel has the appearance of impropriety and bad judgment right there.
Shuster is very unsatisfied and has many questions about what’s missing from the report. And the Republicans are very disappointed that Obama lied. They had such high hopes for him and he’s let them down. They are asserting that Obama promised that he would not “weigh” in on the Senate seat replacement and now it turns out that he did. (I don’t recall this promise, but it seems to be an article of faith he made it.)
And the fact that Rahm put forth some names means that Blago would take it as an order from the president that he had to pick one of them. So, Obama was, in essence, strong arming poor Blagojevich into naming the person he chose, which is probably why the prosecutor forced him to sit down and tell all he knows. And that has the appearance of impropriety and shows bad judgment, right there.
But the real problem is that Obama refused to come clean with the media:
Shuster: There’s been no evidence of wrongdoing, but the idea of going into a shell for a couple of days before Fitzgerald told them to. If from the beginning they had said, “of course we had conversations with the Governor, of course I had conversations about my house seat, here’s everything that I heard, here’s what I didn’t hear.” I think if they had said that from the beginning, and as well had told the press, “we’re going to look for more information,” I think this wouldn’t have been a three week story as it’s dragged out.
Haha! That Shuster is funny. If only Obama had said immediately that his staff had had conversations with the Governor about both Obama’s senate seat and Rahm’s house seat then the press would have shrugged its shoulders and let the whole thing go. That’s a good one.
They are obviously convinced that Rahm is guilty of conspiring with Blagojevich and today they seem to be hinting that Obama must have known about it. It’s the “chicago way,” after all. They have no proof, but they are going with that assumption anyway and it colors their coverage. I have no love for Rahm and I actually blieve he was hired by Obama partly because of his ability to put together coalitions of Blue Dogs and Republicans, which makes me feel rather ill. But this is nonsense. Whatever Rahm may have done, the press has no right to spend its time speculating and insinuating without proof and that is what’s happening all over the cable gasbags shows, particularly on Fox and MSNBC.
I agree with those who say that the public isn’t paying attention right now, but that’s not the point. The kewl kidz media clique is paying attention and they are beginning to draw conclusions based upon their own little feedback loop. That’s where the trouble always begins.
We’re starting to see some consideration put to the planned escalation in Afghanistan, and a lot of people are finally getting around to asking the “why” instead of accepting that Obama will fulfill a campaign promise by sending 20-30,000 more troops into that hostile environment and a rapidly deteriorating occupation. The first person asking why is, interestingly enough, Afghan President Hamid Karzai:
President Hamid Karzai pressed America’s top military leader Monday on the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan and preparations to pour up to 30,000 more forces into the country, reflecting Karzai’s concerns over civilian casualties and operations in villages. Karzai asked Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, what kinds of operations the newly deployed troops would carry out and told him that the Afghan government should be consulted about those missions.
The Afghan president, stinging from a series of civilian casualties in U.S. military operations in recent years, said he doubts that sending more American forces into Afghan villages will tamp down the insurgency, and he has questioned a U.S. plan to deploy 3,500 U.S. forces in two provinces on Kabul’s doorstep next month.
Karzai told Mullen that U.S. troops must take more care during operations in Afghan villages and stop searching Afghan homes. He asked the chairman to investigate allegations that U.S. forces killed three civilians in a raid last week in Khost province, a reflection of increasing concern about civilian casualties. The U.S. says three militants were killed.
This is the central problem. A larger footprint for occupiers will do nothing for security and is likely to turn the population further against an effort they are after seven years beginning to resent. Karzai acknowledges a possible need for border protection, but troops in major Afghan cities and villages is counterproductive.
Indeed any option in Afghanistan is fraught with pitfalls right now. A surge of troops would have made sense when the population was still behind the effort and the Taliban wasn’t reconstituted as an insurgency force. Now the Taliban pretty much controls the countryside and the amount of troops needed to perform a counterinsurgency campaign cannot be brought into the country without much resentment and hatred.
“We may have missed the golden moment there,” said Lawrence Korb, a former Pentagon official who has long advocated an increased U.S. focus on Afghanistan.
The tension between the short-run need for more muscle to thwart the Taliban and the long-term trap of becoming the latest in a long line of foreign intruders bogged down in Afghanistan forms the core of the dilemma confronting Obama.
There are efforts underway to recruit local tribal militias to bolster the paltry amount of native security forces in a kind of “Afghan awakening,” but they are likely to have little or no control from the central government, not historically a factor in the country, and more likely to rule over their own areas and increase bloodshed among ethnic rivals.
“There will be fighting between Pashtuns and non-Pashtuns,” said Salih Mohammad Registani, a member of the Afghan Parliament and an ethnic Tajik. Mr. Registani raised the specter of the Arbaki, a Pashtun-dominated militia turned loose on other Afghans early in the 20th century.
“A civil war will start very soon,” he said.
NATO forces would like to stem the poppy trade that is funding the insurgency and encourage alternative crop development, but many member nations are wary of involving themselves in counter-narcotics actions.
NATO officials in Brussels declined to list the nations that have opposed widening the alliance mandate to include attacks on drug networks, and no nation has volunteered that it has legal objections.
But a number of NATO members have in broad terms described their reluctance publicly, including Germany, Italy, Poland and Spain. Their leaders have cited domestic policies that make counternarcotics a law enforcement matter — not a job for their militaries — and expressed concern that domestic lawsuits could be filed if their soldiers carried out attacks to kill noncombatants, even if the victims were involved in the drug industry in Afghanistan.
There are discussions about splitting off Taliban elements and causing a rift in the insurgency through negotiations and entry into the government, but there’s absolutely no sign that any Taliban fighter would be amenable to it.
Overall, everyone knows that a major strategic shift is needed, but there’s simply no evidence that any of these shifts would produce something resembling success, or any indication that anyone knows what “success” means. In fact, “success” is most likely defined as “an end to total failure.”
“Right now there is a sense you need to apply a tourniquet of some kind,” said a senior Defense official who spoke on condition of anonymity when discussing contacts with the transition team. “You need to control bleeding at the site of the wound, you need to stabilize, and you need to see what you need to do next.”
After a record number of U.S. deaths in Afghanistan this year, national security officials consider it crucial for the new administration to act soon after taking office. The senior Defense official said Obama would have a limited time period to announce a new strategy for Afghanistan and build up the troop strength.
“Over time, it will be harder to put more stuff in,” the official said. “You have a window where you can do dramatic things. But the opportunity to do dramatic things reduces over time.”
But what are those “dramatic things” and how will they produce improvements in both American security and the lives of the Afghan people? If the goal is now to tread water and not fail so badly I can’t see how staying makes sense. Tourniquets can be refashioned into nooses, after all. The plans for Afghanistan 2.0 are all based on such wishful thinking, and suffused with so many potential drawbacks, that it almost looks like they are designed to do nothing but draw our military further into an intractable conflict. There are regional diplomatic solutions that make sense at providing space for a withdrawal without leaving behind any group that can project power beyond their borders. That does not have to include thousands more troops of dubious effectiveness.
I don’t look kindly on suggestions that we “must do something dramatic” in cases like this, on the grounds that something dramatic always and forever works to our benefit. I agree with Spencer Ackerman on this one – we need to at least pretend to think about the interests of the Afghans at some point.
What I did see was an overwhelming desire for security among the population. Lots of people said something to me that boiled down to, “When the Taliban were in power, the roads were safe, food was cheap and gas is cheap. Now the Americans are here and none of that is true.” The major factor that made the tribal revolt in Anbar work was that the population, including the extremists, understood that Al Qaeda offered them a bleaker future than even the occupation. Nothing like that exists in Afghanistan — or, at least, there is an alarming lack of evidence for that crucial proposition.
People need to take a very deep breath. To judge by the available evidence, the Afghan population wants security. It does not want more militias. The Afghan Senate has actually rejected this proposal explicitly. Is there any actual appetite among Afghans for a Sons-of-Afghanistan program? Or is this a case of hubristic Americans coming into Afghanistan and imposing a template from Iraq upon an overwhelmingly different country and overwhelmingly different set of conditions? You can tell what I suspect from the way I framed the question.
My fear is that we aren’t looking at the concerns of Afghanistan policy through the lens of “is this policy good or bad” rather than “does this make us look like we are responding to the problem.” That way lies disaster.
More than that, he asks a simple question: Had he been elected, would Al Gore have taken the same path as George Bush? He concludes, overwhelmingly, that he would have.
Given the prevailing mood in the aftermath of 9/11, the institutional structures that surround the president, the political and social pressures of the time, the accepted wisdom regarding Saddam Hussein and the international factors at work, says Harvey, Gore “[would have been] compelled … to make many of the same interim (generally praised) decisions for many of the same reasons. Momentum would have done the rest.”
There are several threads to Harvey’s argument, which you can read in its entirety here. At the risk of oversimplifying a very detailed examination, here are a few of the arguments he makes:
• Despite its universal acceptance, the prevailing theory of the war, which Harvey calls “neoconism” “remains an unsubstantiated assertion, a ‘theory’ without theoretical content, an argument devoid of logic or perspective … Even the most superficial review of its central tenets reveals serious logical, empirical and theoretical flaws.”
For instance, he notes, it presumes that Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and a few like-minded ideologues “had the intellectual prowess and political skills to manipulate the preferences, perceptions and priorities” of non-neocons such as Tony Blair and Colin Powell; the majority of both parties in both houses of Congress; the leadership of foreign policy and intelligence committees in the House and Senate — including every senior Democrat; most European leaders; “every member of the UN Security Council (including France, Russia and China) who unanimously endorsed UN Security Council Resolution 1441; and 60%-70% of the American people at the time.
• The “neocon” argument presumes Gore, in the same circumstances, would not have been presented with similar advice or faced pressures to act in a similar way. Harvey suggests this is wishful thinking. “In fact, all of the relevant evidence from Gore’s entire political career – his speeches on Iraq, contributions to the 2000 campaign debates on foreign affairs, policy announcements and interviews” argue Gore would have been at least as aggressive as Bush. As Harvey points out:
“Gore was a foreign policy hawk. He consistently opposed efforts to cut defense spending, supported Reagan’s decisions to bomb Libya, invade Grenada, aid the Contras in the 80s, and fund the B-1 and B-2 bomber and MX missile programs.” Gore and his running mate, Senator Joe Lieberman, both backed the 1991 Gulf War. As Vice President, Gore supported military actions in Bosnia and Kosovo, and “consistently adopted the hardest line in the Clinton administration when dealing with Saddam Hussein.” When President Clinton decided to abort his four-day bombing of Iraq in 1998, Gore opposed backing down “despite the absence of UN Security Council endorsement.”
Gore was surrounded by advisers who shared his hawkish views, whose speeches, statements and policy positions at the time give no hint they were reluctant to use force to bring Saddam Hussein into line.
• Bush did not invent the conditions or attitudes at the time. Gore would have been presented with the same flawed intelligence on Iraq’s weapons capabilities, faced the same public fears and pressures and the same international concerns. “Every member of the UN Security Council (including the war’s strongest critics, France and Russia)” unanimously endorsed the belief that Saddam had maintained proscribed weapons and was actively frustrating UN efforts to find them, Harvey writes.
“Anyone looking for reasons to be worried about Iraq could easily ignore speeches by Bush, Cheney or Rumsfeld and focus instead on those delivered by Clinton (Bill or Hillary), Gore and Kerry; they could ignore the 2002 [National Intelligence Estimate] and read the NIEs published over the previous five years; or they could simply read the reports by UNMOVIC’s chief weapons inspector Hans Blix, or UNSCOM’s inspector Scott Ritter (one of the war’s strongest critics).”
• The faulty intelligence was backed up by Saddam’s bizarre efforts to encourage such beliefs, in hopes it would reduce the danger of a second conflict with Iran. There is no reason to believe Saddam would have acted differently under a Gore administration.
Uhm, no. We know that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld were considered to be nutso on the subject by almost everyone who had any sense, especially the counterterrorist types like Richard Clark who was stunned that they actually seemed persuaded by kooks like Laurie Myelroie. We know that they “stovepieped” the intelligence and creatively edited the NIE. We know, in fact, that they just made stuff up. We don’t know what motivated Tony Blair, but it may have just been that he didn’t want to buck the Americans at a time when they were acting irrationally. (Or maybe he just agreed with Cheney.) We know that most of the world disagreed with Bush and forced him to invade without the sanction of the UN.
We know many things they did that a Gore administration wouldn’t have been motivated to do. Most importantly, we know what Gore actually did, which was speak out against the war at the time. And he did it at a time when it was widely expected that he would run for president in 2004. On September 23, 2002, when the Bush administration was rolling out its new product ion earnest, Gore gave a speech before the Commonwealth Club of California that began with this:
Like all Americans I have been wrestling with the question of what our country needs to do to defend itself from the kind of intense, focused and enabled hatred that brought about September 11th, and which at this moment must be presumed to be gathering force for yet another attack. I’m speaking today in an effort to recommend a specific course of action for our country which I believe would be preferable to the course recommended by President Bush. Specifically, I am deeply concerned that the policy we are presently following with respect to Iraq has the potential to seriously damage our ability to win the war against terrorism and to weaken our ability to lead the world in this new century.
Nothing had changed in terms of Iraq since Gore had left left office, except the perception among a bunch of pantswetting neocons that 9/11 made all countries which might someday pose a threat subject to immediate invasion. Perhaps the cynics can persuade themselves that any president would have done what Bush and Cheney did, just because they could. But Al Gore’s speech that day, at a time when the Democratic nomination was his for the taking, laid out the case against the war in both practical and principled terms that have since proven to be correct in every detail. It was based upon a fundamental difference in the way he, and many others, understood the United States’ power. It concluded with this:
Does Saddam Hussein present an imminent threat, and if he did would the United States be free to act without international permission? If he presents an imminent threat we would be free to act under generally accepted understandings of article 51 of the UN Charter which reserves for member states the right to act in self-defense. If Saddam Hussein does not present an imminent threat, then is it justifiable for the Administration to be seeking by every means to precipitate a confrontation, to find a cause for war, and to attack? There is a case to be made that further delay only works to Saddam Hussein’s advantage, and that the clock should be seen to have been running on the issue of compliance for a decade: therefore not needing to be reset again to the starting point. But to the extent that we have any concern for international support, whether for its political or material value, hurrying the process will be costly. Even those who now agree that Saddam Hussein must go, may divide deeply over the wisdom of presenting the United States as impatient for war. At the same time, the concept of pre-emption is accessible to other countries. There are plenty of potential imitators: India/Pakistan; China/Taiwan; not to forget Israel/Iraq or Israel/Iran. Russia has already cited it in anticipation of a possible military push into Georgia, on grounds that this state has not done enough to block the operations of Chechen rebels. What this doctrine does is to destroy the goal of a world in which states consider themselves subject to law, particularly in the matter of standards for the use of violence against each other. That concept would be displaced by the notion that there is no law but the discretion of the President of the United States. I believe that we can effectively defend ourselves abroad and at home without dimming our principles. Indeed, I believe that our success in defending ourselves depends precisely on not giving up what we stand for.
Gore’s speech wasn’t based only upon some idealistic understanding of American “goodness” although he clearly It was based upon the idea that after 9/11 it was damned dangerous for the US to turn itself into a pariah nation by telling the world that its president could do anything he damned well pleased. It’s the central practical argument against what they did.
The Bush administration took its 70% approval rating (built on breathless gasbag hagiography) and steamrolled the political establishment into a war the neocons had long been looking for an excuse to start. That is indisputable. And Al Gore was the most prominent opponent of that war at the time. The idea that he would have taken the same path is ludicrous.
The water main break in Montgomery County, Maryland had some compelling visuals to it, with water pouring from the ground and drivers trapped in their cars, so it received some treatment on the cable shoutcasts today. It’s a good thing, too, because the rupture of a 44 year-old pipe causing this kind of chaos does show the need for infrastructure repairs, not only as part of a larger fiscal stimulus, but to avoid catastrophes and their ancillary costs, and to maintain vital services which will have tangible benefits for years to come.
But a massive coal ash spill like we saw today in Tennessee – the result of a burst dam at a private coal processing plant – is actually far more dangerous with far more lasting consequences, even if the visuals aren’t as stellar.
You’re talking about hundreds of acres of toxic sludge, the residue plants create by burning coal to produce energy, which includes mercury, arsenic and lead, spilling into the tributaries of the Tennessee River, poisoning the water supply for multiple communities, including Chattanooga.
And it’s a direct result of our continued reliance on an industry that makes us sick but uses slick PR terms like “clean coal,” happily parroted by politicians of both parties, to maintain viability.
“This spill shows that coal can never be ‘clean,’” said Kate Smolski, Senior Legislative Coordinator for Greenpeace. “If the Exxon Valdez was a symbol of pollution 20 years ago, the Tennessee Coal Spill of 2008 is the symbol of it today.”
Incredibly, this spill occurs at a time when the Bush Administration is trying to loosen environmental rules that would allow the coal industry to dump rock and dirt from mountaintop mining into nearby streams. In other words, they want to make a disaster like this the norm. Environmental groups are suing to stop them, but what will stop the coal companies from their inattention to basic safety?
It’s key that we use the opportunity of major fiscal stimulus to improve crumbling infrastructure. It would also be nice if, in the process, we started taking a critical look at companies whose very existence threatens public health and the future of a sustainable planet. And making sure that existence doesn’t continue. Coal is not clean.
Scooter’s pals are obviously ratcheting up the pressure on Junior to pardon him again. I even heard the foul nutball Pat Robertson going on and on about it (in the same breath as he followed Gingrich’s manipulatively unctous directive to slather Obama with praise during this period — bleccch.) But the villagers may not want to draw attention to this again. Murray Waas has a scoop:
Vice President Dick Cheney, according to a still-highly confidential FBI report, admitted to federal investigators that he rewrote talking points for the press in July 2003 that made it much more likely that the role of then-covert CIA-officer Valerie Plame in sending her husband on a CIA-sponsored mission to Africa would come to light. Cheney conceded during his interview with federal investigators that in drawing attention to Plame’s role in arranging her husband’s Africa trip reporters might also unmask her role as CIA officer. Cheney denied to the investigators, however, that he had done anything on purpose that would lead to the outing of Plame as a covert CIA operative. But the investigators came away from their interview with Cheney believing that he had not given them a plausible explanation as to how he could focus attention on Plame’s role in arranging her husband’s trip without her CIA status also possibly publicly exposed. At the time, Plame was a covert CIA officer involved in preventing Iran from obtaining weapons of mass destruction, and Cheney’s office played a central role in exposing her and nullifying much of her work. Cheney revised the talking points on July 8, 2003– the very same day that his then-chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, met with New York Times reporter Judith Miller and told Miller that Plame was a CIA officer and that Plame had also played a central role in sending her husband on his CIA sponsored trip to the African nation of Niger. Both Cheney and Libby have acknowledged that Cheney directed him to meet with Miller, but claimed that the purpose of that meeting was to leak other sensitive intelligence to discredit allegations made by Plame’s husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, that the Bush administration misrepresented intelligence information to go to war with Iraq, rather than to leak Plame’s identity. That Cheney, by his own admission, had revised the talking points in an effort to have the reporters examine who sent Wilson on the very same day that his chief of staff was disclosing to Miller Plame’s identity as a CIA officer may be the most compelling evidence to date that Cheney himself might have directed Libby to disclose Plame’s identity to Miller and other reporters.
Of course he did. I’m just surprised he hasn’t openly admitted it on his “yeah I ordered torture, whatcha gonna do about it?” tour. I honestly don’t know what Cheney cares about except the big money boyz getting access to the federal treasury, so he may push for a pardon — or not. I don’t think he gives a damn one way or the other.
Beltway elites almost always hate talk about messy civil rights issues and icky reproductive freedom policies because they just make social events so unpleasant. It get’s so tiring listening to those people whine, whine, whine about being free and equal. Can’t they just be patient and wait until the appropriate time instead of being so rude all the time?
But every once in a while you’ll find one who takes the liberal side of one of these issues because their lives are somehow touched by an American with a problem. Every once in a while you’ll see a hard core right winger who pushes funding for a particular health initiative because his granddaughter happens to get the disease or a mushmouthed centrist type who rails against police state tactics when his nephew is harassed by the cops.
Today we have Richard Cohen with a column about Rick Warren’s anti-gay bigotry, which I feel confident he wouldn’t have written were it not for the fact that his much loved sister is gay. He’s certainly not known for his grasp of abstract issues. But when you think about it, there are a lot of people like Cohen out there, aren’t there, and you have to wonder just how thrilled they are about Warren being warmly welcomed into the big tent. Cohen certainly doesn’t seem to like it much.
And I wonder how all the families of the 18,000 Californians who are being forcibly divorced feel about it:
“Please don’t divorce…” Courage Campaign community photo project Infamous prosecutor Ken Starr has filed a legal brief — on behalf of the “Yes on 8” campaign — to nullify the 18,000 same-sex marriages performed in California between May and November of 2008. It’s time to put a face to Ken Starr’s shameful legal proceedings. To put a face to the 18,000 couples facing forcible divorce. To put a face to marriage equality. Because, gay or straight, YOU are the face of the Marriage Equality Movement.
Please click through the photos in the slideshows below and then submit your own photo, as an individual, a couple or in a group (perhaps with your family over the holidays). Take a picture holding a piece of paper that says “Please don’t divorce us,” “Please don’t divorce my moms,””Please don’t divorce my friends, Dawn and Audrey,” “Please don’t divorce Californians” or whatever you want after “Please don’t divorce…” and send it to: pleasedontdivorce@couragecampaign.org.
Click here to see the pictures. They will break your heart. how anyone can say that these loving families do anything but strengthen the institution of marriage is beyond me.
I know you’re all as excited as the news media is to hear all about the Obama transition team’s internal review this afternoon, but in case you aren’t able to drop everything and catch it live, let me just tell you what’s going to happen and you can continue with your holiday preparations or last minute work responsibilities.
The report will say that the Obama teams contacts with Blogojevich were all perfectly normal discussions about the possible replacements for Obama’s senate seat and included no quid pro quos or any other kind of inappropriate or illegal compensation. supBut … even though last week they had huge hissy fit over the fact that the Obama team delayed the release of this posedly vital document, the press corps will shrug its shoulders at the results saying that the report is meaningless because it’s an internal document which is now, by definition, unreliable and useless. They will intone very seriously that this story “will not go away” until the prosecutor weighs in.
And when and if the prosecutor weighs in, they will draw the distinction between “illegal” and “wrong” the latter of which they will define for us any number of ways. My favorite in this particular scandal is the AB Stoddard approach: if Rahm didn’t report all his conversations, regardless of their content, to the Depratment of Justice, he is guilty of “bad judgment” the most elastic of all media indictments, and often the most useful (“He may not have done anything illegal, unethical or inappropriate, but it showed bad judgment.”) Another good one is “it has the appearance of impropriety” — which is worse than actual impropriety because it showed (you guessed it) bad judgment.
Here’s Ed Henry from CNN:
Again, this is an internal investigation from team Obama, so it’s not likely to be the final word is likely to come from prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. But we need to stress that so far he’s given no indication whatsoever that there was any wrongdoing, criminal or otherwise in the president elect’s world so I think what this is more about is political exposure rather than legal exposure. Team Obama is eager to turn the page so they’re not associated with any of this pay-to-play politics back in Chicago that sort of contradict the message of change we’ve heard so much of from Barack Obama.
This story is over when the press corps says it’s over and not a minute sooner. It’s possible that they will let it go as a sort of honeymoon present, but the minute some other vague “corruption” story comes along (or they can find a way to tie in Rezko, Blago and —God willing — a prostitute or something) they’ll be right back here.
The best thing Obama has going for him is the fact that Fitzgerald does not leak. That’s a real pity for the scandal mongers — if they had a Ken Starr type, we’d be hearing all sorts of delicious little, out of context tid-bits being dribbled out at opportune moments to make Obama look bad. So they will fall back on their other method to keep these stories simmering —- endless, groundless speculation about what “could” have happened, which will, over time, color everyone’s perception until they assume that at least some of it must be true or it wouldn’t have garnered all this interest. (There’s a lot of important gossip reporters can’t talk about publicly, dontcha know.)
It’s not to say that things will unfold exactly the same way. Nothing ever does. But, as much as I am skeptical of the press corps, I have to admit that I’ve ben gobsmacked to see how closely they’ve been following the playbook with this Blago scandal. (Somerby is too.) Even I, in all my cynicism, didn’t expect them to fall back into their old patterns quite so cleanly. It’s as if they are on autopilot.
Obama is not Clinton and has many attributes that make him a different sort of subject. The political balance of power is far different as well. However, the same problems exist over the long term. As Lyons and Conason so brilliantly showed, the biggest problem (aside from the vast right wing conspiracy, which certainly did exist) was the media’s fascination with an exotic political culture they didn’t really understand and which took them for a ride.
There are quite a few of these exotic political cultures in America and Chicago is one of them. (I would say that Florida, Louisiana, Alaska, Arkansas, New Jersey and Pennsylvania are among them. There are others I’m sure.) Some places just generate strange political stories that leave the media open to all kinds of manipulation from those in the know — they are both naive and intrigued and that’s a very dangerous thing for any national politician.
Obama partisans want desperately to just ignore this thing, pointing to polls that say that none of it is having any effect on his popularity (even though nearly half think his team did something either unethical or illegal.) .Well, polls don’t tell the tale. Clinton remained very popular throughout his ordeal and it didn’t stop them. This is about Village power and if the public isn’t in tune with them, they will fight all the harder to convince them. It’s the worst kind of Catch 22 for a president.
And if you think it can’t limit his ability to get things done, you’re wrong. It’s a distraction and potentially a serious erosion of political capital. It needs to be aggressively challenged by all those who agree that the unelected members of the press shouldn’t be dictating the political agenda in this country. If the right gets its act together and cranks up the old noise machine to just the right pitch and the press continue to party like it’s 1997, we will have a problem on our hands that we just can’t afford.
I always thought that the Clinton scandals were a terrible indulgence that could only be afforded by a country that was living in a time of peace and prosperity. After the last couple of weeks, I’m not convinced that’s true anymore and if I’m right, the consequences could really be awful.
and Michael Isikoff’s 
. (Without any sense of self-awareness at all, Isikoff’s shows what happens when a president becomes a reporter’s white whale because he is credulous about all manner of cynical, character assassination from political players. He’s all over the Blago story too, so be advised …)