World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz admitted on Thursday he made a mistake and apologized for his handling of the promotion and pay increase of his girlfriend and staffer Shaha Riza. “I proposed to the board that they establish some mechanism to judge whether the agreement reached was a reasonable outcome,” Wolfowitz said in a statement he read at a news conference before upcoming meetings of finance ministers in Washington this weekend. “I will accept any remedies they propose,” he added. Wolfowitz defended his actions to send Riza on an external assignment to the U.S. State Department soon after he joined the bank in 2005, saying he was in “uncharted waters” in his new job. “In hindsight, I wish I had trusted my original instincts and kept myself out of the negotiations. I made a mistake, for which I am sorry,” he said. The bank’s board, which includes government representatives from the bank’s 185 member countries, was meeting on the matter on Thursday. After an adjournment, the board resumed their meeting focusing on whether Wolfowitz bent the rules on Riza’s promotion and violated staff rules. But the World Bank’s employee representative group called for Wolfowitz to resign during a staff meeting at the bank. “The president must acknowledge that his conduct has compromised the integrity and effectiveness of the World Bank Group and has destroyed the staff’s trust in his leadership,” according to written remarks presented at the meeting by staff association chair Alison Cave and obtained by Reuters. “He must act honorably and resign,” she said. Cave said it seemed impossible for the institution, whose mission is to fight global poverty, to move forward “with any sense of purpose under the present leadership.” WOLFOWITZ AT STAFF MEETING Witnesses said Wolfowitz came to the meeting and tried to defend his actions. The controversy spilled into the open last week when the staff association questioned the promotion and pay increase of Riza, prompting an investigation by the board. Wolfowitz, who was nominated by President George W. Bush, joined the bank after serving as deputy defense secretary at the Pentagon, where he was one of the chief architects of the U.S. war strategy in Iraq. Lingering distrust among many staff members and resentment over his close ties to the Bush administration and his role in the Iraq war has overshadowed his first two years at the bank. “For those people who disagree with the things that they associate me with in my previous job — I’m not in my previous job,” Wolfowitz said. “I’m not working for the U.S. government.”
Maybe he should have stopped acting like a corrupt Republican then.
Karl Rove’s lawyer on Friday dismissed the notion that President Bush’s chief political adviser intentionally deleted his own e-mails from a Republican-sponsored computer system.
The attorney said Rove believed the communications were being preserved in accordance with the law.
The issue arose because the White House and Republican National Committee have said they may have lost e-mails from Rove and other administration officials. Democratically chaired congressional committees want those e-mails for their probe of the firings of eight federal prosecutors.
“His understanding starting very, very early in the administration was that those e-mails were being archived,” Rove’s attorney, Robert Luskin, said.
The prosecutor probing the Valerie Plame spy case saw and copied all of Rove’s e-mails from his various accounts after searching Rove’s laptop, his home computer, and the handheld computer devices he used for both the White House and Republican National Committee, Luskin said.
The prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, subpoenaed the e-mails from the White House, the RNC and Bush’s re-election campaign, he added.
“There’s never been any suggestion that Fitzgerald had anything less than a complete record,” Luskin said.
Any e-mails Rove deleted were the type of routine deletions people make to keep their inboxes orderly, Luskin said. He said Rove had no idea the e-mails were being deleted from the server, a central computer that managed the e-mail.
There’s no word on why that apparent lunatic from the RNC claimed that they had to take special precautions to keep Rove from deleting his messages.
It’s all very odd. I’ll be looking forward to reading Jane’s take on this. Luskin is her beat and she can read his spin better than anyone. (“There’s never been any suggestion….”)
Stay tuned. This is getting good.
Oh, and on another note, it looks like Gonzales may have cooked his goose. And the DOJ didn’t even bother to clumsily redact it as they usually do.
EJ Dionne has written a good column today about the significance of the Fox Debates debate that I think gets it right:
What Ailes knows is that the campaign to block Fox from sponsoring Democratic debates is the most effective liberal push-back against the network that stars Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity since its debut on Oct. 7, 1996.
Ailes has been brilliant at having it both ways, insisting that his network is “fair and balanced” even as its right-tilting programming built a devoted conservative following that helped it bury CNN and MSNBC in the ratings.
While Ailes knew precisely what he was doing, his competitors flailed. They dumped one format after another, sometimes trying to lure conservative viewers from Fox by offering their own right-leaning programs. Loyal conservatives preferred the real thing and stuck with Fox.
My hunch is that Ailes, one of the toughest and smartest in a generation of Republican political consultants, sees his adversaries as playing the kind of political hardball he respects. It’s why he’s angry. The anti-Fox squad won a second round on Monday when Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton joined John Edwards in announcing that they would not appear at a debate to be sponsored by Fox and the Congressional Black Caucus in September.
The Fox debate saga is amusing, but it’s more than that. It marks a transformation on the left driven by the rise of Internet voices and the frustration of liberals at the success of conservatives in using a combination of talk radio, Fox and the Web to propagate anti-liberal, anti-Democratic messages.
From the late 1960s until the past few years, media criticism was dominated by conservatives railing against a supposedly “liberal media.” Hearing mostly from this one side, editors, publishers and producers looked constantly over their right shoulders, rarely imagining they could be biased against the left or too accommodating to Republican presidents. This was a great conservative victory.
The Bush years have changed that. Aggressive media criticism is now the rule across the liberal blogs, and new monitoring organizations such as Media Matters for America police news reports for signs of Republican bias, often debunking charges against Democrats. When you combine liberal and conservative media criticism you get a result that is more or less fair and balanced. Score a net gain for liberals.
Dionne is right that the conservatives were very successful at cowing the press into leaning right. It’s one of the ways it kept its momentum. By the time of the dreadful coverage of the Clinton impeachement and the 2000 election, some of us on the left had become actively hostile toward it, and rightfully so, I believe.
As Dionne writes, Fox has been allowed to pretend that it is “non-partisan” with a wink and a nod for more than a decade now. It has never actually fooled anyone, least of all its owners and certainly not liberals, who rarely watch unless they are masochists or media observers like me. They very cleverly used a few greedy Democratic operatives and a lot of timorous pols to build their phony “fair and balanced” network and it worked for them. But live by the sword and die by the sword. As their patron, the Republican party, goes down, they can’t expect that they can call all the shots anymore.
I don’t know that liberal blogs or other internet entities can take credit for forcing the media to look over its left shoulder as well as its right, but we certainly have been screaming in a rather unpleasant manner for the last few years because it has been extremely difficult to get their attention. They were immersed in rightwing cant to such a degree that they simply couldn’t hear anything that wasn’t processed through that filter. (I remember watching Chris Matthews sometime in 2004 insisting that “the liberals” ran everything in Washington.) And as the Imus affair illustrated, the insularity of the elite DC press still hasn’t been fully penetrated.
I don’t particularly want to be a media critic. I like media and I respect the talent of most of those who do it professionally. I never wanted to be some crank carping at the television set — I’m interested in politics. But there was simply no choice. Since the 80’s the right systematically set out to convert the political press into their friendly collaborators even if they didn’t know it. They had lots of cash and knew how to show everyone a good time. And they mau-mau’d them to death. It worked beautifully.
And while they did that, they set about creating an alternate media that could feed the wingnut base directly while feeding the mainstream more discretely. It came into full bloom during the late 90’s and ushered in this presidency. And predictably, a nation softened up by years of rightwing propaganda was ready to put him on a pedestal when the country was attacked on 9/11 — even though his actual performance at that time was laughably inept. Iraq was the result.
That was when the whole operation jumped the shark. Liberals of all stripes, bloggers and others, were by that time unanimously appalled by the GOP, Fox, talk radio and the mainstream press and began to fight back. We shall see if we have the staying power to keep it up.
I have long had a rather simplistic belief that American political power was properly seen as a tug-of-war rather than a pendulum. For decades, the left was sort of holding on to the rope with one hand, checking out the scenery, enjoying the fruits of the New Deal and tolerant social change and forgetting that they had to put all their weight into the game or the other side would pull them completely over the center line. The 1994 Republican Revolution jerked me awake and I watched in horror for the next decade. Over that period many more liberals woke up to the fact that we were no longer standing firmly on our side of the line anymore. I realized that the “third way” stance the Democrats had taken during the late 80’s had been a brief tactical success, but a long term strategic mistake. In the tug of war, you simply can’t rely on the other side, particularly when its infused with revolutionary fervor, to stop pulling once you reach the “middle.”
Marginalizing Fox is an important step in the process but it’s going to take a sustained effort. I’ve been watching the right for too long to believe they are doing anything but taking a breather right now. It is a very, very big mistake to ever let up on the rope. The Bush administration has been a massive laboratory experiment in what goes wrong when the Democrats make a huge strategic error and the media completely fails in its duty. We really can’t let this happen again.
Can someone please explain to me why this should be necessary?
Gonzales, meanwhile, has been preparing for a pivotal appearance on Tuesday before the committee, including mock testimony sessions lasting up to five hours a day, officials said.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has virtually wiped his public schedule clean to bone up for his long-awaited April 17 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee–a session widely seen as a crucial test as to whether he will survive the U.S. attorney mess. But even his own closest advisers are nervous about whether he is up to the task. At a recent “prep” for a prospective Sunday talk-show interview, Gonzales’s performance was so poor that top aides scrapped any live appearances. During the March 23 session in the A.G.’s conference room, Gonzales was grilled by a team of top aides and advisers–including former Republican National Committee chair Ed Gillespie and former White House lawyer Tim Flanigan–about what he knew about the plan to fire seven U.S. attorneys last fall. But Gonzales kept contradicting himself and “getting his timeline confused,” said one participant who asked not to be identified talking about a private meeting. His advisers finally got “exasperated” with him, the source added. “He’s not ready,” Tasia Scolinos, Gonzales’s public-affairs chief, told the A.G.’s top aides after the session was over, said the source. Asked for comment, Scolinos told NEWSWEEK: “This was the first session of this kind that we’d done.”
I can hardly believe that this isn’t either a national joke or a scandal. The Attorney General of the United States should not have rehearse for five hours a day to truthfully answer questions from the US congress. It’s ludicrous. Just how stupid is this guy, anyway?
I’m telling you if we ever have to endure another presidency like this because the press thought the food was better on one of the campaign planes and they thought the other candidate was, like, so totally icky, my head will explode.
Just as the nation wanted a “fun” president, George W. Bush also surrounded himself with guys he’d like to have a beer with — and naturally those guys are halfwits just like he is. I guess we should be thankful that he wasn’t allowed to put Gonzales or Miers on the Supreme Court.
I figured they would do it, but it’s still hard to believe they’d go this far:
“As I stated in my earlier letter to the Republican National Committee today, the Judiciary Committee intends to obtain the relevant emails directly from the RNC,” Conyers said in reaction to the Fielding letter. “The White House position seems to be that executive privilege not only applies in the Oval Office, but to the RNC as well. There is absolutely no basis in law or fact for such a claim.”
We know that MC Rove and the Mayberry Machiavellis have been running the world as though it were a crooked race for a seat on the Dallas schoolboard, but the idea that executive privilege extends to the Republican National Committee seems a tad excessive even for them.
We shall see if all these strict constructionists on the federal bench agree.
It also exposed the dual electronic lives led by Mr. Rove and 21 other White House officials who maintain separate e-mail accounts for government business and work on political campaigns — and raised serious questions, in the eyes of Democrats, about whether political accounts were used to conduct official work without leaving a paper trail.
Is it really necessary to frame that as a partisan thing? It’s quite obviously legitimate to ask questions about this, whether Democrat or Republican:
The committee appears to have changed its e-mail retention policies twice, possibly in response to the investigation by a special prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, into the leak of the name of a C.I.A. officer. When that inquiry began, in early 2004, the committee’s practice was to purge all e-mail from its servers after 30 days.
But in August of that year, according to the Republican official, the committee decided that e-mail sent by White House officials would be kept on the server. Still, the change did not prevent White House officials from manually deleting their e-mail, and some, including Mr. Rove, apparently did. So in 2005, the committee took steps to prevent Mr. Rove from doing so.
“Mr. Kelner did not provide many details about why this special policy was adopted for Mr. Rove,” Mr. Waxman wrote. “But he did indicate that one factor was the presence of investigative or discovery requests or other legal concerns.”
I know the press doesn’t think its job is to “raise questions” that some Democrat hasn’t put out in a press release, but this is ridiculous. This doesn’t look bad just in the eyes of those dastardly partisan Dems. Anyone with a functioning brain, including even writers and editors at the NY Times, can surely see that something looks fishy about Karl Rove systematically deleting all his emails and the RNC later making a special policy to prevent him from doing it.
As the media elite and various political insiders continue to behave as if they’ve just been hit over the head with a cudgel on this Imus matter, perhaps they should wake up and recognize that there have been people out there noticing the raw hypocrisy among this Imus Elite for years. And this does not just come from the more recent bloviating by scruffy bloggers in their deplorable “efficiency” apartments.
There have always been a handful of columnists and journalists who got it. And no one got it better than the late Lars Erik Nelson:
Daily News (New York)
September 22, 1995, Friday
POLS WHO TALK NICE AND ACT NAUGHTY
BYLINE: BY LARS-ERIK NELSON
SECTION: Editorial Pg. 41
LENGTH: 583 words
Washington Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) came to the Senate floor with
a look of sad concern on his face. He was deeply troubled, he said, at the vulgar, morally repugnant content of the new TV season. “We are lowering the standards of what is acceptable in our society and we are sending a message to our children,” he said. He denounced an “acceptance of rude language, foul imagery and gross behavior in the entertainment mainstream.”
Then, warning parents who might be watching on C-SPAN to move their little children away from the TV sets, Lieberman cited a few of the outrages: On ABC’s “Wilde Again,” a character asks to be called “Daddy’s little whore.” Another ABC program showed an upraised middle finger. CBS’ “Bless This House” used the phrase “little hooters” in reference to a girl’s breasts. “Profoundly disturbing,” Lieberman intoned. “Sophomoric.”
Funny thing: The previous morning, Lieberman had been a guest, as is his regular custom, on the Don Imus radio show on WFAN, a program that seems to get the bulk of its yuks from penis references.
If you have never heard the Imus show, listen in. It is a cross between an endless infomercial and a bunch of 8-year-olds telling doo-doo jokes into a tape recorder. It is rescued only by increasingly rare moments of inspired, hilarious brilliance.
Tune in any morning and you’ll hear Imus or one of his sidekicks joking about having “lipstick on the dipstick” and much worse. This is nationwide morning radio.
Lieberman worries, on the Senate floor, that the increasing vulgarity of network TV “is lowering the standards of what we accept on television, particularly in what used to be family programing hours.”
But he’s talking out of both sides of his mouth. This week’s moments of supposed humor on Imus, broadcast at an hour when children are rising for school, included a reference to Attorney General Janet Reno in crotchless pantyhose, an interview with Screw Magazine’s Al Goldstein and a drunken woman saying “s—” over the air. Teehee.
Lieberman is alarmed that some child watching an 8 p.m. TV show might hear the word “hooters.” Yet he legitimizes, by his regular presence, a radio show that will fill the child’s ears with far more vulgarity, sly racist jokes, gay-baiting and all-around bad taste than the child is ever likely to hear on TV.
Why jump into this sewer? Votes. Imus is free media. His audience consists mainly of those 18-to-34-year-old males who are so hard for a politician to reach.
The temptation is overwhelming. Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.) will in one breath deplore the coarsening of our national discourse and the state of race relations, then appear on Imus where the idea of a neat joke is to suggest a black football player might be a carjacker.
Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.) righteously denounces Hollywood for its raunchy movies and then joins the gang on Imus for a little friendly guy banter.
You can’t blame Imus for being what he is. He even serves the positive purpose of making current events entertaining. His parodies only make sense if you have been paying attention to the world around you.
But for Lieberman there is no excuse. One moment he joins the snickering on Imus, the next he’s on the Senate floor as the pious defender of family virtue against encroaching vulgarity.
By all means, Lieberman, Bradley, Dole and the rest should go on Imus. But if they do, spare us the sanctimonious sermons about the vulgarity of modern broadcasting.
They never stopped. in fact three years later Lieberman took to the floor of the Senate and “helped” Bill Clinton by saying to the whole world that he was immoral. All of these moral scolds, but most especially Lieberman, are rank hypocrites.
I do not want to hear another word from these people about civility, rudeness and the decline of the discourse. And I certainly don’t want to hear any more BS about blogging ethics and good manners on the internet from any of them. For more than a decade we had to endure lectures from many of these people about “values” and more recently we’ve had to listen to them call for the smelling salts over the degradation of the public square from the barbaric polloi. Yet throughout they loved to hang around with that overgrown adolescent and let him sell their books for him when he wasn’t cruelly disparaging everything in his sights, including them. If those are the decent values Joe Lieberman has been braying about incessantly for the last decade, he certainly got what what he was looking for.
And might I also add that this whining about rappers is pretty much the same thing? I know it’s been a long time since these guys were kids, but didn’t their mothers tell them that just because some of their schoolmates jump off a bridge it doesn’t mean they should do it too?
I hate the misogyny of some rap music — it’s not all misogynistic — but rappers didn’t invent sick notions of black women as sexual objects in America; those ideas have an old, old history here, going back to the days when the chains black men wore weren’t bling. As I said to Scarborough and Ridley, when we have “Snoop Dogg Country” on MSNBC, and Young Jeezy’s doing the morning drive-time show instead of Imus, then let’s talk about how rappers deserve the outrage Imus brought on himself. In my opinion, hundreds of years of the racist misogyny of white men like Imus and McGuirk are far more responsible for misogynistic rap music than the reverse. And as I type this I’m thinking, is that even up for debate? Fellas, please.
TPM points to this post by Josh Green referring to his 2003 piece referencing Karl Rove’s history of crying “voter fraud.” As it happens, some of you may remember that I flagged Green’s piece back in March to illustrate the same point — that while “voter fraud” has long been a GOP rallying cry to explain why nobody likes them, Rove has made a career out of using it to steal elections.
I felt before the last election that Rove was preparing a full-on voter fraud challenge if the numbers were close enough in key states. But the GOP was just too damned unpopular everywhere to even try to steal it. Had this US Attorney scandal not turned this rock over and revealed the the festering politics beneath, this plan would have gone forward for 2008.
To fully understand how they were laying the groundwork among the wingnuts, here’s that nice lady, Howard Kurtz’s new bff, writing for the racist organization VDARE back in 2004:
The Illegal Alien Swing Vote
By Michelle Malkin The right to vote is precious, the politicians preach. Our democracy hangs in the balance, the pundits screech. Yes, but if we all value the sanctity of the voting process so highly, why is it that I’ve never once been asked to produce identification of any kind in the 16 years I’ve been a voter, from Ohio to California to Washington State to Maryland? And why is it that we can’t protect our elections from people who have no right to vote, no right to be here, and no right to undermine our safety or sovereignty? While unhinged Democrats spread fear about the alleged discriminatory disenfranchisement of American citizens, they have supported the indiscriminate enfranchisement of untold numbers of foreign outlaws—including suspected al Qaeda operatives and terrorist sympathizers. Last week, the Columbus Dispatch reported that illegal alien Nuradin Abdi—the suspected shopping mall bomb plotter from Somalia—was registered to vote in the battleground state of Ohio by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), a left-wing activist group. Also on the Ohio voting rolls: convicted al Qaeda agent Iyman Faris, who planned to sabotage the Brooklyn Bridge and had entered the country fraudulently from Pakistan on a student visa.[ “Long gone but still registered Ohio’s Election Day rolls include people who couldn’t—and shouldn’t—vote ,October 24, 2004, Jon Craig The Columbus Dispatch“] In the battleground state of Florida, indicted terror suspect Sami Al-Arian illegally cast his ballot in a Tampa referendum in 1994 while his citizenship application was pending. He claimed the unlawful vote was the result of a “misunderstanding.” State officials declined to prosecute. You’ve heard about those satirical “10 out of 10 terrorists agree: Anybody But Bush” bumper stickers? There may be more truth to them than you think. John Fund, author of Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy, reports that at least eight of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers were eligible to vote in Virginia or Florida while they plotted to kill Americans. What’s to stop the next foreign terrorist plotter from casting a tainted ballot in the nation he has sworn to destroy? Not much. According to the Franklin County Board of Elections, the Dispatch reports, the office simply “takes a person’s word, that they’re (sic) a U.S. citizen.” In the battleground state of Wisconsin, the story is the same for those who are responsible for registering other people to vote. Not only do we regularly do nothing to verify the citizenship of people voting, but we also shrug our shoulders at the citizenship status of election workers. I recently obtained a disturbing set of investigative reports from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), outlining how the city of Racine neglects to ask deputy registrar applicants for identification or proof of citizenship. FAIR’s investigation also alleges that a deputy registrar in Racine registered two individuals—one posing as an admitted illegal alien—and reportedly advised them to lie on their forms. The report notes that the deputy registrar—working for the open borders lobbying group, Voces de la Frontera—then gave the couple information on other illegal alien benefits, including employment rights and bank accounts. Law enforcement officials in Wisconsin—which has been swamped with voter fraud shenanigans—have copies of the report, affidavits from the couple who dealt with the registrar, and recordings of their conversations. But no action, if any, is likely until after the Nov. 2 election. Democrats at the state and federal levels have aggressively courted the illegal alien swing vote. The most-egregious example, of course, was the taxpayer-funded Citizenship USA program under the Clinton-Gore administration, which abandoned criminal background checks to naturalize 1.3 million immigrants (including scores of criminal alien felons) in time for the 1996 elections. Ethnic and racial grievance groups, with backing from the likes of Hillary Clinton and Ted Kennedy, have forcefully opposed basic ID requirements at the polls. And they have armies of lawyers standing by to assist them. Responsible election officials who ask for proof of citizenship will be accused of “harassment” and “intimidation.” They will be accused of causing a “chilling effect”—never mind the corrosive effect of unchecked illegal alien voter fraud on law, order, and the integrity of our electoral system. Political correctness cost us 3,000 lives on Sept. 11. It may cost us an election on Nov. 2.
You will, of course, note that she specifically talks about Wisconsin where massive pressure was brought to bear against the US Attorney there to bring indictments. Indeed, in the last few days it’s become known that he may have been on the list to be fired for failing to “make it work”, but for reasons about which we can only speculate (a well-timed political show trial) he was allowed to keep his job.
This article in today’s NY Times shows definitively that even with the full force of the White House pressuring people to come up with evidence of voter fraud, there just isn’t much to find.
It doesn’t address the real dangers however, which Malkin in her infinite wisdom sees so clearly:
What’s to stop the next foreign terrorist plotter from casting a tainted ballot in the nation he has sworn to destroy?
It’s one short step from terrorism to fraudulently voting for Democrats. My God, these barbarians will stop at nothing.
So CBS said sayonara to Imus. The fabulously wealthy man is out of a job at least until he can put together a satellite deal, which is fine. If people want to subscribe to his bullying, sophomoric show, they can have at it. And if all these beltway types want to further sully their reputations by yukking it up with that mean, crude, nasty man, they can do that too. But I don’t know how many books it will sell for them …
But before we all dance around the campfire singing ding dong the witch is dead, take a moment to absorb this, from a C&L post of a couple weeks ago:
Hugh Hewitt Wrong againThis is what he said on The Situation Room:HEWITT: “No, that’s not right, because talk radio, when you look at Rush, at Sean, at myself, at Laura Ingraham, Michael Medved, Dennis Prager, we all conduct ourselves appropriately on the air, or the FCC will smack — smite — smack us down.—So, I think what we have got is basically a monopoly on responsible new media on the center-right side, and talk radio is responsible new media, even though that fever swamp on the left, the Michael Moore-disease-ridden Democrats on the left, they don’t want to admit that, so they won’t. But, in fact, talk radio is quite responsible.”He’s quite selective in his reporting which is nothing new. The fact that he says he starts from “the center” is laughable. Here’s a quick example of the fine, responsible right wing talk radio:Boortz: I saw Cynthia McKinney’s hairdo yesterday — saw it on TV. I don’t blame that cop for stopping her. It looked like a welfare drag queen was trying to sneak into the Longworth House Office Building. That hairdo is ghetto trash. I don’t blame them for stopping her…Michael Savage wants people to burn the Mexican flag.Glenn Beck called hurricane survivors in New Orleans “scumbags,” said he “hates” 9-11 families.
Liberals have been extremely hard on MSM figures and Democrats who patronized Imus and we have held their feet to the fire these last few days.
How much are we betting that the “conservatives” do the same?
The TPM empire is chasing down the voter fraud issue with its usual zeal and Josh is connecting the dots and putting things into perspective. (Here’s a nice write-up of the Rove speech to the RNLA.)
As everyone knows, the Republicans have been throwing around this voter fraud trope for years as a way of intimidating minority voters. And I’m sure it works. Between the long lines and the harrassment at the polls, a lot of people just won’t bother. That, of course, is exactly the point.
Last week I wrote about this paper done by the Center for Voting Rights before the 2004 election which discussed in depth the GOP’s modern voter intimidation operation, which is called the Republican National lawyers Association. It turns out that it was formed for the purpose of combatting “voter fraud” which, as Josh explains in his post, is pretty much non-existent in any systematic way and is usually some guy faking signatures on a registration form to earn money, not actual people voting. They are trying to intimidate people into not voting and the way they do this is by making an example of some poor person in a minority community who made a mistake and filled out a form incorrectly, like this one:
Another example is that of Pakistani immigrant Usman Ali. He’d been in the US for ten years and owned a jewelry store. He was in line one day at the DMV when a clerk put a registration form in front of him along with other forms. Ali hastily filled it out. He never made any attempt to vote. But the mistake got him deported back to Pakistan where he’s now trying to rebuild his life with his US citizen wife and daughter.
Again, note that these random “crimes” rarely include actual illegal voting. They are almost always some snafu related to registration paperwork. (See this NY Timesarticle debunking the myth of widespread voter fraud.
How all this relates to the US Attorney scandal is partly what Marshall points out today — all roads lead to Karl Rove’s white house office where he directed various schemes which may have obstructed justice, but in any case were unethical interference from the political side of the administration.
But there’s more than just Karl’s direct efforts. In a post on the subject at All Spin Zone, Richard writes:
I have no doubt that RNLA-trained and equipped lawyers are now serving in U.S. Attorney positions around the country. And most of them are regarded as “loyal Bushies” first, and instruments of the proper administration of the U.S. Department of Justice second. That’s the way the Bush regime works.
In his day job, Christian Adams writes legal briefs for the voting rights section of the Justice Department, a job that requires a nonpartisan approach.
Off the clock, Adams belongs to the Republican National Lawyers Association, a group that trains hundreds of Republican lawyers to monitor elections and pushes for confirmation of conservative nominees for federal judgeships.
Vice President Dick Cheney credited the 3,000-member association in 2005 with helping the Republicans win the previous two presidential elections. Last year, President Bush’s political adviser Karl Rove shared with the group his insights on winning elections in key battleground states. At a conference the association organized last month, speakers called the controversy over whether eight U.S. attorneys had been fired for partisan political reasons “farcical” and “ridiculous.”
According to the group’s Web site, Adams is one of dozens of Bush administration appointees or civil servants who are members, including at least 25 in the Justice Department, nine in the Department of Defense and others in the Labor and Commerce departments, the White House and the Office of Special Counsel, which oversees investigations into allegations of ethical misconduct by government employees.
Some are entry-level employees; others are high-ranking political appointees.
Their names appeared on the organization’s Web site under the heading “Find a Republican Lawyer,” in many cases along with their federal government e-mail addresses and work telephone numbers.
While government employees are permitted to be members of political organizations, the prominent listings on the Republican National Lawyers Association’s Web site strike some current and former Justice Department lawyers as inappropriate, especially given that several members of the group work in the Justice Department’s voting section, criminal division or as assistant U.S. attorneys.
Lawyers in those jobs are supposed to be especially careful to avoid the appearance of partisanship, because of the sensitive political nature of the cases they may handle, including voting access lawsuits and public corruption cases.
Justice Department officials deny any improper politicization, but after McClatchy Newspapers contacted Adams, his affiliation with the Justice Department was removed from his listing on the association’s Web site. He declined to comment.
The work phone number, e-mail address and biography of counterterrorism adviser Frances Fragos Townsend also were removed at her request after McClatchy contacted the White House.
White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said Townsend “is a member in her personal capacity. That is perfectly lawful.” He added that Townsend told him “she’s not active really at all.”
Former and current Justice Department officials said the Web site listings were an example of how government lawyers had become more open about their political leanings as federal agencies took a more permissive – even encouraging -stance toward partisan political activism.
The concept of political corruption has become adorably quaint at Versailles on the Potomac, but to the rest of us out here in the hinterlands, the idea that current members of a legal organization formed for the express purpose of partisan electioneering are working in the Justice Department seems just a little bit troubling. These guys have the full force of the federal government at their disposal, after all. Federal agencies like the Justice Department taking a more “permissive” stance toward partisan political activism and using the taxpayers money to do it seems like a bad idea if you care about maintaining people’s faith in the justice system. (Perhaps they really don’t care about that, being the relativists they actually are…)
But hey, even the “liberal Richard Cohen” thinks finding this sort of thing troubling is “criminalizing politics,” so best we say no more about it. The decadent insiders have determined that we citizens are being stickers about things we don’t understand. Using tax dollars to rig the vote for Republicans is just business as usual.
Vonnegut, who often marveled that he had lived so long despite his lifelong smoking habit, had suffered brain injuries after a fall at his Manhattan home weeks ago, said his wife, photographer Jill Krementz.
“He’s the closest thing we’ve had to Voltaire,” Tom Wolfe, whose first book had a blurb from Vonnegut, told Bloomberg News Service. “It’s a sad day for the literary world.”
Vonnegut had been scheduled to speak in Indianapolis on April 27 as part of the ongoing “Year of Vonnegut” celebration honoring his life and work. Vonnegut’s son Mark planned to give the 2007 McFadden Memorial Lecture written by his father.
The author’s writing was distinctive for its combination of the satirical and the fantastical, and leavened by a black humor that looked disdainfully upon humankind’s capacity for destruction.
“I will say anything to be funny, often in the most horrible situations,” Vonnegut, whose watery, heavy-lidded eyes and unruly hair made him seem to be in existential pain, once told a gathering of psychiatrists.
The most popular post featuring Vonnegut that I had written was Blown Circuits: An Autopsy Of The PPs. In that one the master ranted on about the psychopathic personalities now running America.
Labor Day Thoughts borrowed quotes where Vonnegut discussed Socialism and Christianity, and the Sermon on the Mount. That one drew out some nice commentary by Hullabaloo’s best.
In Cortez The Killer, I clipped Vonnegut’s thoughts about music but left out something important that he’d said:
No Matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religious and charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful.
If I should die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD WAS MUSIC
I’m going on sabbatical now and wanted to wish the best to all the Hullabaloovians. I close with an excerpt from Vonnegut’s book A Man Without A Country. This piece was recommended by a commenter to the Blown Circuits post linked above.
I apologize to all of you who are the same age as my grandchildren. And many of you reading this are probably the same age as my grandchildren. They, like you, are being royally shafted and lied to by our Baby Boomer corporations and government.
Yes, this planet is in a terrible mess. But it has always been a mess. There have never been any “Good Old Days,” there have just been days. And as I say to my grandchildren, “Don’t look at me, I just got here.”
There are old poops who will say that you do not become a grown-up until you have somehow survived, as they have, some famous calamity — the Great Depression, the Second World War, Vietnam, whatever. Storytellers are responsible for this destructive, not to say suicidal, myth. Again and again in stories, after some terrible mess, the character is able to say at last, “Today I am a woman. Today I am a man. The end.”
When I got home from the Second World War, my Uncle Dan clapped me on the back, and he said, “You’re a man now.” So I killed him. Not really, but I certainly felt like doing it.
Dan, that was my bad uncle, who said a man can’t be a man unless he’d gone to war.
But I had a good uncle, my late Uncle Alex. He was my father’s kid brother, a childless graduate of Harvard who was an honest life-insurance salesman in Indianapolis. He was well-read and wise. And his principal complaint about other human beings was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”
So I do the same now, and so do my kids and grandkids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”