Gone hysterical …

… and loving it [like the guilty pleasure of that second pot of java this morning ... twitch, twitch!]

It’s in the air, I guess … our own little April assault of anxiety, common-denominator sorrow and addictive hyper-sensationalism — the cold air coming in from the north to make us shiver, the hot air coming out of government and media to make us sweat. To entertain us, we’ve got flashing pictures of a young man turned killer, a series of studied self-portraits to sell a legacy of righteousness that will find no buyers — and no matter how carefully posed, images of a child-man playing at death … and delivering it; we protest and decry that they find a public format … and none of us turn away.

We’re inundated with images and rhetoric and sound bites — we don’t know where to turn from the constant drum-beat of bad news, and some of us don’t dare lest the sky fall … so we’ve all got a case of the screaming mimi’s. [And it doesn't help when once admired, but now gone wingnut, John McCain sings a Beach Boy knockoff, "Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran" to a small town VFW gathering.]

The wingnut that sexed up our low-lying mimi’s into hysteria is, of course, the mentally ill and self-aggrandizing Cho Seung-Hui who brought mindless murder to Virginia [an interesting statement from a Great-Aunt in Korea indicates that he was always as we found him on that last day, silent, dark and damaged.] On the other hand, the use of the word “massacre” … the default word used by the media for this event … gives us a mental and emotional picture that’s sure to make us clutch our hearts.

Massacre. Bloody white scalps hanging from Indian lances. An ocean turned red from the blood of sacrificed advancing American forces at Omaha Beach. Twisted and brutalized bodies lying in a pile like those of hapless villagers at Mi Lai.

Jeez!

Micro-managing the events of the day has amazing potential, but sometimes it feels like we were better off gathered around the boob tube at 7 pm, with a choice of three commentators. At least we got a clear overview of what was truly important and the reports weren’t full of emotion-provoking language.

I have to tread carefully here, I’ve been accused of using words like a bludgeon myself, and irresponsibly [from those who wrongfully assume I hate America] and I’m mindful that the pen IS mightier than the sword, ultimately. But when the sword is turned to point at our throat, muddle our emotions and push us down the plank to a leap over the edge, it should at least be noted that we had a choice.

And I’m not talking about the flap over whether CBS should have given the shooter air time to spew his confusion or show pictures of his self-infatuation — “don’t ask, don’t tell” is NOT a responsible position for media to take, but neither is the ‘bread and circus” tenor of all this. I swear, as much as my heart sank as I watched the ongoing campus drama on TV on Monday, my sorrow was for a nation that would lookey-loo itself in a feeding frenzy for months to come. Sadly, I called that one correctly.

The long anticipated Gonzales grilling played out thus on CNN this morning, as I tried to keep tabs on what the Senators were asking:

Specter chiding Gonzales
3 min.

cut to
CNN promo
30 sec.

cut to
bucolic view of Virginia Tech grounds
10 sec.

cut to
interview with a student who knew somebody who knew somebody who died
5 min.

cut to
CNN promo
30 sec.

cut to
Schumer chiding Gonzales
3 min.

cut to
CNN promo
30 sec.

cut to Commercial Break
six offerings
3 min.

cut to
update on the astounding kill rate in Iraq yesterday
30 sec.

cut to
pictures of the shooter wearing his ninja outfit, brandishing a knife
30 sec.

cut to
group analysis on whether the pictures should have been shown or not
5 min.

yadda, yadda, ad infinitum … blah blah overwhelming-blah.

In case some of you think I appear insensitive to the Virginia killings, I should mention that I “said it all” in an upcoming article for the Weekly — and my heart is as bruised as everyone else’s at this event. But … ya know … at some point, maybe just shutting up and letting us FEEL THIS would be a hell of an idea??

Hysteria … it’s what’s for dinner. I’m mindful that Saturn will turn direct after four long months in the next few days and the winds will blow us another way; but which way? Frankly — that’s the question that drives my need to watch unfolding news, no matter how vapidly presented.

A collection of thought-provoking reads, including Bob Herbert from the NYT’s, below.

Jude

UPDATE: Saturn goes direct TODAY … oopsie, my bad. Guess we’ll find out where all this will take us pretty quickly.
J

233 Killed in Iraq on Wednesday; 183 in Single Incident in Baghdad; More Than 430 Dead Citizens Since Sunday
American Media Stays Fixated on VTech Killings; George W. Bush Still Not in Jail…
Bradblog
2/19/07

Killed or Found Dead (So Far) This Week in Iraq…
Sunday: 65
Monday: 51
Tuesday: 85
Wednesday: 233

Look, I hate to keep banging this same drum, but someone needs to.

While the American media continue their infatuation with the horrible shootings at VTech on Monday where 33 students were killed, the carnage continues, several times over, every single day in Iraq. Never mind all that “signs say that the surge is working” bullshit you’ve been hearing from wingnuts and repeated in the Mainstream Media. It doesn’t seem to be doing anything of the kind.

233 were killed or found dead across Iraq today (Wednesday) in a country of 27.5 million.

183 of them were killed in a single car combing incident in the exact same marketplace where 137 were killed at once in a February bombing the month before last.

That follows 85 killed or found dead on Tuesday, 51 killed on Monday, and 65 killed on Sunday (when 20 police officers were also taken captive).

None of that takes away from the tragedy of the 33 killed on Monday at Virginia Tech. But in the United States, a country of more than 300 million, where such mass killings are exceedingly rare — versus horrifically daily occurrences, year after year after bloody year on end in a country less than one-tenth the size of the U.S. — one might think the American Mainstream Media would finally pause to take a serious review of the way in which they cover news events.

In case you feel, as one emailer suggested to me, that Americans seem to view the lives of non-American citizens as somewhat less valuable than those of American citizens, I’ll also remind you that the killings in Iraq — though you wouldn’t necessarily know it based on American news coverage — also result in dead Americans.

Some 3,312 American troops have now been killed in Iraq.

3,312.

To date, George W. Bush has failed to attend even one funeral, or ordered flags lowered to half-staff for a single one of them.

Leading me to ask again…At what point does the entire debacle become a criminal action? I suspect that point occurs just as soon as the Mainstream Media realizes that it is, and begins to regard the murders of U.S. Troops and Iraqi Civilians in the same light they view the VTech murders.

Perhaps Nancy Grace can make an honorable woman of herself yet. But I seriously doubt she will.

ATTENTION! SICKNESS! and Attention Sickness
Marty Kaplan, HuffPo
04.18.2007

Have the past few weeks of eyeball-grabbing overload left you feeling as sick as I do? I don’t mean meta-sick; I’m talking about the very real nausea that culture (to use a kind word for it) can cause.

First the BIG THING was ANNA NICOLE. Then it was WAR FUNDING. Then it was SANJAYA, and vote-for-the-worst sadism.

Then it was CANCER, and our national debate about parental responsibility. Then it was GONZALES, and US ATTORNEY FIRINGS, and MISSING EMAILS. Then it was IMUS, and our national debate about race. Now it’s VIRGINIA TECH, and the national debate about — what? Mental illness? Gun control? Security policy? Life-can-change-in-an-instant? Iraq isn’t sitting this one out, either, with single-day casualties topping 125. And who knows what it’ll be tomorrow. The criminalization of abortion? The new season of “Heroes”?

Confronted by these attempts to get our attention, we are pigeons, B.F. Skinner’s pigeons, our nervous and limbic systems automatically responding to the stimuli. Short of retreating to Walden, it’s virtually impossible to escape the onslaught. Of course, that’s what the senders of all these messages set out to accomplish. Terrorists, mass-murderers, networks, Drudge: they’re all in the business of trying to capture our attention. I can’t believe that the DSM - the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders - doesn’t already list a category like “attention sickness,” a box on insurance forms that shrinks can check off.

This red-alert hype of continuous intentional distraction - OMG! LOOK AT THIS! NO, THIS! NO, THIS! - makes everything seem the same. It’s next to impossible to think proportionately, to give commensurate, differential, appropriate attention to the various info-storms assaulting us. We may know rationally that the carnage at Virginia Tech and the carnage in Iraq require totally different kinds of notice and understanding. We may intellectually grasp the difference between the danger Bush poses to democracy and the danger a spring snowstorm poses to travelers. But in the great Skinner box of modern media culture, our higher minds are no match for the sparklies that stimulate us, and which — not incidentally — raise the profits of business and serve the agendas of politics.

Today Dr. Sanjay Gupta on CNN interviewed a neurologist who — based on her inspection of the MRIs and X-rays of the brains of many mass murderers — theorizes that Cho Seung-Hui might have had a particular kind of brain tumor, one that impedes people’s ability to contain rage. That’s the kind of tumor, she said, that Charles Whitman had, the tower shooter on the campus in Austin in the ’60s. It’s also, I learned, the kind of tumor that a number of Texas death-row inmates had, the ones who were executed after Alberto Gonzales told Governor George W. Bush there was no reason they shouldn’t die.

I wonder whether President Bush and Vice President Cheney do what they do not because they’re blinded by their moral arrogance, but because there’s something physiologically screwy in their brain pans. I wonder whether the Sunni and the Shiia hate one another because of something in their history, or something in the water. I wonder whether Cho Seung-Hui’s massacre was part of God’s plan for us. I wonder whether Cho’s murder, on Yom Ha-Shoah - Holocaust Remembrance Day - of Virginia Tech professor Liviu Librescu, a survivor of the Nazi Holocaust who barricaded the classroom door so his students could flee through the window, has profound, inherent meaning, or whether it is just the typical kind of coincidence that a meaningless, random, arbitrary and chaotic universe occasionally taunts us with, a decoy tale to make us think human existence has pattern and purpose. I wonder whether some rogue cell in my body will someday capriciously gift me or someone I love with cancer. I wonder whether a drunk driver, an earthquake, a flu epidemic, or a suitcase bomb will make all my grand passions and quotidian anxieties seem retroactively pointless.

At the same time, I also wonder whether someone will give Heather Mills the smackdown she deserves, what the hell CBS is going to do about Katie Couric, who does Larry Birkhead’s highlights, and which one I despise more, Michael Nifong or Nancy Grace.

I just don’t know whether there’s room in my noggin, or in our collective consciousness, for all this stuff, this indiscriminate mix of crap and content. But I do know that it’s really hard to build a progressive political movement, and to keep our eyes on what’s truly important, in an attention economy in the midst of hyperinflation — in a bread-and-circuses culture that is (in Neil Postman’s prophetic phrase) amusing itself to death.

A Volatile Young Man, Humiliation and a Gun
Bob Herbert, NYT
Wednesday, April 18, 2007

“God I can’t wait till I can kill you people.”

~ A message on the Web site of the Columbine killer Eric Harris.

In the predawn hours of Monday, Aug. 1, 1966, Charles Whitman, a former marine and Eagle Scout in Austin, Tex., stabbed his wife to death in their bed. The night before he had driven to his mother’s apartment in another part of town and killed her.

Later that Monday morning, Whitman gathered together food, water, a supply of ammunition, two rifles, a couple of pistols, a carbine and a shotgun and climbed the landmark 30-story tower on the campus of the University of Texas.

Beneath a blazing sun, with temperatures headed toward the mid-90s, Whitman opened fire. His first target was a pregnant teenager. Over the next 80 or so minutes he killed 14 people and wounded more than 30 others before being shot to death by the police.

More than four decades later we still profess to be baffled at the periodic eruption of murderous violence in places we perceive as safe havens. We look on aghast, as if the devil himself had appeared from out of nowhere. This time it was 32 innocents slaughtered on the campus of Virginia Tech. How could it have happened? We behave as if it was all so inexplicable.

But a close look at the patterns of murderous violence in the U.S. reveals some remarkable consistencies, wherever the individual atrocities may have occurred. In case after case, decade after decade, the killers have been shown to be young men riddled with shame and humiliation, often bitterly misogynistic and homophobic, who have decided that the way to assert their faltering sense of manhood and get the respect they have been denied is to go out and shoot somebody.

Dr. James Gilligan, who has spent many years studying violence as a prison psychiatrist in Massachusetts, and as a professor at Harvard and now at N.Y.U., believes that some debilitating combination of misogyny and homophobia is a “central component” in much, if not most, of the worst forms of violence in this country.

“What I’ve concluded from decades of working with murderers and rapists and every kind of violent criminal,” he said, “is that an underlying factor that is virtually always present to one degree or another is a feeling that one has to prove one’s manhood, and that the way to do that, to gain the respect that has been lost, is to commit a violent act.”

Violence is commonly resorted to as the antidote to the disturbing emotions raised by the widespread hostility toward women in our society and the pathological fear of so many men that they aren’t quite tough enough, masculine enough — in short, that they might have homosexual tendencies.

In a culture that is relentless in equating violence with masculinity, “it is tremendously tempting,” said Dr. Gilligan, “to use violence as a means of trying to shore up one’s sense of masculine self-esteem.”

The Virginia Tech killer, Cho Seung-Hui, was reported to have stalked female classmates and to have leaned under tables to take inappropriate photos of women. A former roommate told CNN that Mr. Cho once claimed to have seen “promiscuity” when he looked into the eyes of a woman on campus.

Charles Whitman was often portrayed as the sunny all-American boy. But he had been court-martialed in the Marines, was struggling as a college student and apparently had been suffering from depression. He told a psychiatrist that he absolutely hated his father, but he started his murderous spree by killing his wife and his mother.

The confluence of feelings of inadequacy, psychosexual turmoil and the easy availability of guns has resulted in a staggering volume of murders in this country.

There are nearly 200 million firearms in private hands in the U.S., and more than 30,000 people — nearly 10 times the total number of Americans who have died in Iraq — are killed by those guns each year. In 1966 Americans were being killed by guns at the rate of 17,000 a year. An article in The Times examining such “rampages” as the Charles Whitman shootings said:

“Whatever the motivation, it seems clear that the way is made easier by the fact that guns of all sorts are readily available to Americans of all shades of morality and mentality.”

We’ve learned very little in 40 years.

Gimme a Bomb Shelter
Steven Weber, Huffpo
04.18.2007

It’s a gorgeous morning here in Los Angeles. I rose at about 5 A.M., actually. My mom’s flying in from New York to see us. The wind’s whipping the treetops. The air is clear and crisp as it seeps through the acceptable gaps in my windows and fills the spacious interior with an autumnal chill.

Everything is splashed with a luminous orange, aglow with the rising sun’s caress.
And I’m getting a bomb shelter.

Been looking online for them. Something that is big enough for me, the wife and kids, water, food, filtration systems, and possibly a last minute pity survivor to either breed with or cannibalize down the line.

I’m looking out at my backyard. I’m lucky, as I have a nice one. Sizable. Grassy. Been damn lucky, that’s for sure. Shall I sink the 50 foot corrugated rebar concrete reinforced tube back beneath the bed of lupins or demo the blacktop driveway and embed Weber’s Ark three to eight feet below the primary crust? Because as much psychological and geographic distance as there is between me and any lone shooter or knapsack-sporting jihadist or box cutter-wielding terrorist, I guess it never hurts to be terrified. I mean prepared.

And while there is clearly a cottage industry that exists solely because of an ingrained sense of panic that has been steadily nurtured for decades in expectation of an impending nuclear freakout that has the fear merchants wringing their hands and licking their teeth like cartoon misers as schmucks such as myself ponder spending thousands for something that will likely never be used for anything other than a place to stash the glut of show jackets and caps, or as a teenage Masturbatorius Subterraneus, I still want to do it. Build a bomb shelter, that is.

What the fuck is wrong with me (except that I loathe punctuation)? I’ll tell you: I get scared as hell. Forget that death is waiting to take your hand at the end of the hopefully long queue. I’ve made peace with that long ago. It’s the violence that seems to prevail in most of the advertised accounts. It’s the visual image of the panic that seizes the victims of a violent confrontation that ends in death: the wide-eyed helplessness, the voiding of the bowels, the vain cries for assistance. It’s perfectly acceptable and logical that we humans are no more than the equivalent of microbes in the scheme of things, crawling about, digging meandering tunnels with our faces, carrying glucose crystals in our mandibles (Sorry. I’m scared and confused.). I really don’t need to think that humans are anything other than a teensy cog in the armature that guides the swivel that suspends the leg that wears the boot that kicks the marble that runs along the gutter that trips the string that causes a Big Bang in the mammoth Rube Goldbergian framework of the universe. But I do have a problem with some extremist dickhead who takes religion oh so literally and who thinks his own ascent to Elysium will be hastened by the snuffing out of nameless, faceless heathens, such as myself. And you, of course.

I also recently watched a movie called Threads. Big mistake. Great movie, though. Real, bleak, real bleak. It was made in 1984 and dramatizes what the results of a nuclear exchange between the Soviet Union and America would be like (over an incident involving Iran, no less) starting with the immediate aftermath of the attack and spanning 13 years to the point where the remaining survivors live in an environment reminiscent of an Hieronymous Bosch painting. Lesions, cataracts, periodontal disease, you name it. If anyone ever took a date to see this movie it’s a good bet they didn’t get any you know what. But viewing this very realistic film put me in mind of the possibility that with all the ’round the clock assurances that the world will not end anytime soon, there is still that wild card out there waiting to be dealt on the felt. And since the perspective between the average citizen and reality seems to be becoming ever more distant then the possibility of a sociopathic event taking place becomes more probable and with increasingly devastating results.

I am not reaching this conclusion based on color coded alerts or assertions that “if we don’t fight them there we will fight them here” horseflop. I am basing it on increased probability due to the widespread conditioning of the population to achieve an abstracting of violence. For most of us there is always a television screen between our safety and their calamity, between our security and their suffering. And rather than imbue me with a sense of well being I am instead petrified. And that’s good business. I am ready to purchase virtually any Anti-Petrification Thing any smart, caring manufacturer can come up with. I have taken into consideration my own fear conditioning, having tasted the tail end (ahem) of the now chic, once hair whitening Atomic Age, having participated as a 9 year old in some duck-and-cover drills in elementary school. I add to that conditioning my current distrust of the war-mongering, brush clearing sociopath in the White House. And to that I add my aforementioned wild card scenario. Just watch Threads and ass over kettle you will go, only to land on your own carbonized keister, the soft, pleasant flesh and muscle having been scalded away during the first instants of nuclear roasting.

So in conclusion, I am not warming up to any Ted Nugent survivalist bandolier-wearing, camouflage sporting “God, Guns and Guts Made America Free” spouting philosophy when I get my estimate from the bomb shelter manufacturer. I’m just scared shitless of those people and taking evasive action. I wonder if they make a “green” bomb shelter?

There Are Some Problems a War Can’t Solve
Justin Krebs, WorkingForChange
Thursday, April 19, 2007

This has been a difficult week. The terrible shooting in Virginia frightens us and we wonder what steps — if any — could have prevented this horror.

We hear news of 171 deaths in a single day in Baghdad. There are no easy answers to end that violence.

The Supreme Court hands down a reactionary decision — we can no longer rely on courts to overrule bad legislation, and how we fight the ruling becomes more complicated

In New Jersey, a Governor who has faced down opponents in both parties and triumphed in commerce and politics, lies prone from a car accident, leaving his State’s course uncertain.

None of these challenges have easy answers…but it’s clear that more bombs wouldn’t have stopped a deranged gunman, isn’t the right recourse to a misguided court, couldn’t have kept Corzine’s car on the road, and hasn’t helped quell the carnage in Iraq.

There are some problems that a war can’t solve.

The war in Iraq hasn’t fixed the world. It distracts attention and resources from complicated challenges. And it’s emblematic of a President who keeps trying to bomb his way to solutions…and instead, just keeps bombing.

It’s time to end this Occupation. Then we need to get serious about healing and helping this world.

Media mine Web searches for readers
BRIAN BERGSTEIN, AP Technology Writer
Wed Apr 18

If you Googled “Virginia Tech shooting” or “Virginia shooting” this week, the Internet search engine served up dozens of links to news about the university massacre. Yet some media outlets weren’t taking the chance of missing readers’ attention by being bumped down the list.

The New York Times and The Washington Post, for example, bought keyword ads that put their coverage into the prominent “sponsored links” atop the Google results page. So did The First Post, a British online news magazine. The Times, CNN and Fox News got similar links up on Yahoo; Fox News also mined MSN.

Buying keyword ads to run alongside search engine results is a well-established practice. All kinds of companies, in and out of the media, do it when sporting events or TV shows turn something into a hot topic.

But for top-tier news organizations to advertise their Virginia Tech coverage this way illuminates the massive power the Web now wields in the traditional media. No longer can the Times or the Post assume that readers would naturally come to them, even when a huge event breaks.

“An increasing number of users go directly to a search engine when news breaks rather than going to a news site,” said Peter Hershberg, managing partner of Reprise Media, a search marketing company.

As a result, news organizations need an analogue to last century’s newsboys in knickers who barked out “Extra! Extra!” on urban street corners:

“Shooting at Virginia Tech,” the underlined link for the Times read. “The New York Times has the latest news and updates.”

“Special Report on Va Tech Shootings,” CNN’s link proclaimed. “Timeline of the tragedy and reports from VA Tech students.”

“America mourns college gun rampage massacre. News, analysis, pics here,” said The First Post’s come-on.

Representatives for the Times and the Post both said their organizations regularly buy keyword ads in hopes of grabbing readers who might not otherwise check out the newspapers’ Web sites. They declined to share how much they spend on such campaigns.

The costs can vary wildly: Generally, search ads are automatically generated at any given moment based on how many nickels or dimes a sponsor is willing to pay the Internet companies every time someone checks out the link.

Google and Yahoo, the top two search engines, also factor in how frequently the ads actually get clicked. The goal is to increase the odds that the sponsored links will be relevant to what the Web surfer was exploring.

It’s not foolproof, of course: In addition to the news ads on Yahoo on Wednesday, “Virginia shooting” at times returned a link sponsored by the FFF Hunting Preserve, touting its “9 station range Shooting course in Virginia.”

One potential problem for news organizations is that keyword ads “can also leave you looking crass — that you’re tapping in for a business purpose on a tragedy,” said Danny Sullivan, editor of the SearchEngineLand.com newsletter. “It could make some people’s eyebrows go up … `Did you have to go after that particular term?’”

But Sullivan added that if news sites have “substantial information” to share about a search term — even if that information is, after all, a commercial product — “I would err on their side of that — that it’s not so bad.”

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
losing virginity teens asian/shitting pissingfree lesbians fuckinghairy puissyflower interracial tucci sexteen underage russiangirls tity ebony bigmen breasts lactating who suck Map

Add comment April 19th, 2007

When "rude" is acceptable

Quick note: we’ve made info gathering a little easier, as you can now find these posts at either PoliticalWaves.com or PoliticalWaves.net.

Now — Fredo goes to the Hill.

Put off for two days as the Virginia murders sucked away the oxygen, the Congress went after Alberto Gonzales today in what seemed to be a, happily, bipartisan vetting. “Rude” ruled the day, with politicians showing aggressive anger and verbal sword-clash … and although I don’t like rude, this would be the appropriate time for it. The level of frustration on this issue is the same one that rests below the laughter in the Abbott and Costello “Who’s On First” routine — because we’re never gonna get the response we’re waiting for … the years of lies that have built a barricade to truth are deep and thick, and so tangled it will take historians a life’s work to unstring.

For weeks now, the Attorney General has practiced his response to Congress, memorized his lines … today Dems AND Pubs were nailing him in what is being reported as a “heated and sharp” grilling. In blogistan, Fredo is being referred to as “the pinata.” I still don’t think he’s going to make it through this — not because he’s a fledgling fascist, but because his falling under scrutiny has made him an increasingly ineffective one, despite serving at the “pleasure of the president.” The president’s pleasure is criminal … you lay down with dogs, yadda … and when the public wants accountability and can’t get the Top Dog, they’ll take whoever’s next in the pack. [Witness Wolfowitz, another NeoNut who serves at the Boy Kings pleasure and a scourge to those who do business with the World Bank. It's all crime with a thinning veneer of governmental sanction.] As usual, FireDogLake is keeping a running dialogue from the event, as it unfolds.

I’m giving you links to MSM, today, and I’ve scouted out some of the more interesting analysis; don’t miss the last couple of articles, reporting on claims from retiree’s and whistle blowers who tell us that “Summa cum laude graduates of both Yale and Harvard were rejected…” leaving us with graduates from Messiah College who feel that Jesus wants them to take the Fifth.

The New York Times gave us a series of four op/eds today, with suggested questions for our Enforcer in Chief, you’ll find them first– one is by David Iglesias. Look for the article on voter fraud in this collection — we’ll continue to hear about that. It’s Huge. And kudos to the smaller print providers, like McClatchy, for giving us the dots to connect — MSM still hasn’t got much to toot its whistle about … all they’ve got is corporate shareholders.

Jude

Here’s the ledelines over at Huffy and the link:

Video: Gonzales Gets Heated With Sen Specter: “I’ve Already Said That I Misspoke”…

Sen Leahy: Mounting Evidence Of Improper Actions…If You Have Nothing To Hide Then The White House Should Stop Hiding It…

Sen Specter: This Is A Reconfirmation Hearing…

Sen Schumer: This Is A Predicament Of The Attorney General’s Own Making…

Kennedy: Documents Don’t Show Any Clear Rational For The Firings…

Sen Kohl: Many Americans Wonder What Is The Rational For You To Continue As Attorney General…

Gonzales’ Prepared Statements
Wall Street Journal

A Dozen Questions for Alberto Gonzales
JEFFREY ROSEN, RON KLAIN, STEVEN G. CALABRESI and DAVID C. IGLESIAS, New York Times
April 19, 2007

With Attorney General Alberto Gonzales testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee today, the Op-Ed page asked four legal experts to step into a senator’s shoes and list three questions they would ask Mr. Gonzales.

A Little Discretion
DAVID C. IGLESIAS
April 19, 2007

1. Since 1981 there have been several hundred United States attorneys appointed by the president. According to the Congressional Research Service, before the recent firings, only a handful were dismissed or resigned under questionable circumstances. In light of this history, was it prudent to ask seven United States attorneys in December to resign where there have never been allegations of misconduct?

2. Do you agree with the following statement: “The prosecutor has more control over life, liberty and reputation than any other person in America. His discretion is tremendous. … The citizen’s safety lies in the prosecutor who tempers zeal with human kindness, who seeks truth and not victims, who serves the law and not factional purposes.” Would it make a difference to your answer to know that Robert H. Jackson, the former United States attorney general and Supreme Court justice, said this in a speech in 1940? What does prosecutorial discretion mean to you?

3. Is it ever appropriate for a member of Congress to contact a United States attorney and, without identifying the constituent concerned, inquire about “sealed indictments”? Or to ask about the timing of yet-to-be-filed indictments involving allegations of political corruption by members of the opposite political party?

David C. Iglesias was United States attorney for the District of New Mexico from October 2001 until February.

Congress’s Role
STEVEN G. CALABRESI
April 19, 2007

1. Can politics truly be kept out of the investigations into the recent dismissal of several United States attorneys if such oversight is being led by a senator who is himself responsible for the election of Democratic senatorial candidates in 2008?

2. Doesn’t the Constitution make the president the law enforcement officer in chief precisely so he can make sure that all 93 United States attorneys are following the law enforcement priorities that he was elected to enforce? And doesn’t the Constitution specifically limit Congress’s role in removal of United States attorneys to impeaching them or their superiors for high crimes and misdemeanors?

3. Have you, President Bush or anyone else in the administration ever, to your knowledge, sought to stop or start a criminal investigation by a United States attorney for political reasons?

Steven G. Calabresi is a professor of law at Northwestern and the co-founder of the Federalist Society.

Voter Supression and Rising Crime
RON KLAIN
April 19, 2007

1. Several United States attorneys were terminated because of a supposed lack of aggressiveness in cases of voter fraud. But while studies suggest that voter fraud is relatively rare and isolated, there has been a recent escalation of voter suppression and illegal tactics to prevent voting, especially in minority communities. If some attorneys were terminated because they failed to combat voter fraud, why weren’t any terminated for failing to prosecute voter suppression?

2. Your administration rejected the community-based crime-fighting policies of the Clinton administration, and instead adopted a more “hard-line” approach. E-mail messages show that several of the ousted United States attorneys had sparred with your office over anticrime policy. But if you believe that we should be holding prosecutors accountable for performance, what are we to make of the fact that, during your term as attorney general, violent crime has risen by the largest amount in 15 years? Is this spike because eight United States attorneys refused to follow your direction, or is it because more than 80 of them did?

3. In your previous post as White House counsel, you played a major role in the selection of United States attorneys. Indeed, the fired prosecutors represented nearly one-tenth of all the serving United States attorneys whom you helped select — a record level of performance-related terminations. If such a high percentage of attorneys had to be removed for performance reasons, what does this say about the selection process that you oversaw?

Ron Klain was the chief of staff to Attorney General Janet Reno from 1994 to 1995

Loyalty First
JEFFREY ROSEN
April 19, 2007

1. Your determination to fire prosecutors who were not “loyal Bushies” has its intellectual roots in the theory of the “unitary executive,” which holds that the president should be able to extend his political control over all executive branch officers, including not only political appointees but also lower-level career officials. Are you familiar with the leading scholarly defenses of this theory, and do you agree with them?

2. The original defenders of the unitary executive theory in the Reagan administration recognized the need for neutral, professional prosecutors in the Justice Department, but you and your aides evaluated prosecutors purely in terms of their political loyalty. Did that lead you to try to intervene in specific prosecutions for partisan ends, which everyone agrees would be improper if not illegal?

3. Because of your decision to screen all Justice Department appointees for their loyalty to President Bush, young lawyers who applied for even nonpolitical jobs have been routinely administered political litmus tests. How can Americans have faith in the ability of the Justice Department to defend the rule of law impartially and professionally when all of its employees are hired or fired for their politics?

Jeffrey Rosen, the legal affairs editor of The New Republic, is the author of “The Supreme Court: The Personalities and Rivalries That Defined America.”

Gonzo Has ‘The Fear’
Bob Cesca, HuffPo
4/19/07

Attorney General Gonzales has been preparing for his Judiciary Committee testimony around the clock for days now, and due to the tragedy in Virginia, he has another few hours to cram. The reports from Justice seem to indicate that he’s essentially devolved into a sweaty, unpredictable maniac, exasperating his staffers as he desperately grasps for loopholes through which he can escape the obvious fact that he’s lied since the Attorney Firing Scandal began.

I like to imagine a literal interpretation of his “Gonzo” nickname… At this frantic zero hour, it’s not difficult to envision Alberto Gonzales locked away in his waterboarding rumpus room thrashing around, fully clothed, in a tub of filthy water — Dr. Gonzo from Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas.

“I hate to say this,” he says through intrusive hiccupping, “but this place is getting to me. I think I’m getting The Fear.”

His only friend in this thing, President Bush, fumbles with a cassette of Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit and urges him not to resign, “Nonsense. We came here to find the American Dream, and now we’re right in the vortex you want to quit?”

Then again, in Fear And Loathing, Rauol Duke (Hunter Thompson) and Dr. Gonzo (Oscar Acosta) were significantly more centered, talented, smarter and, this is saying a lot, more lucid than Gonzales and President Bush have ever wished to be. The comparison, however, doesn’t end with the nickname. Both Gonzos served as counsel to their respective pals. Both Bush and Duke had issues with illegal chemical substances. And now, Bush/Gonzo are locked in that lonely hotel room, struggling for a way out — for a way around the human and psychological barriers preventing their escape from this latest scandal.

So now is the time to strike. Gonzo has The Fear, so use it. How can Senators Leahy, Feingold, Durbin and the rest of the Democratic members of the committee trip up Gonzo while he’s seized in his present state of dysphoria? If you’ve ever been around someone whose resistance is low and whose stress is at a boiling point, all it takes is some clever questions — and some props. Perhaps a solo album by, say, Buckethead. Then sit back and… enjoy.

They can start by mounting the committee dais on a rotating platform. Gonzo, if the metaphor holds, will have a hell of a time dismounting this carousel of revolving senators during a recess. It’ll disorient and confuse him. His mental state will be aggravated further when the committee members appear wearing creepy reptile costumes. Committee staffers can festoon the walls with paintings of Barbra Streisand. By the time the questioning is underway, Gonzo will be reduced to psychotic, disheveled salmagundi of twitches and nonsensical outbursts and then, at the peak of this mania, the truth will ooze out; the truth about the political motivations for the firings; the truth that he orchestrated the firings from the beginning “at the pleasure of the president;” the truth that he’s lied all along.

In reality, the committee could subpoena the hard drives used by Rove and the rest for those mysterious RNC-based e-mails. Then they can download readily available programs that are designed to recover deleted e-mail messages, like this one, this one or this one. As Senator Leahy said with a surprising amount of tech savvy, e-mails are never truly lost. If they want to freak out Gonzo and Rove, resurrecting those deceased e-mails is a good start.

Or they can cut to the chase and look to this evidence from an e-mail dated June, 2006:
“AG [Attorney General] has given additional thought to the San Diego situation [fired USA Carol Lam] and now believes that we should adopt a plan” that would lead to her removal if she “balks” at immigration reform, [Kyle] Sampson wrote.

That’s crazy, since Gonzo said on March 13, 2007, “I was not involved in seeing any memos, was not involved in any discussions about what was going on … That’s basically what I knew as attorney general.”

INT. MINT HOTEL SUITE BATHROOM - NIGHT.

DR. GONZO: “I dig my own graves.”

The other way to nab Gonzo is to wait for him to mention that George Washington’s attorney general, Edmund Randolph, fired US Attorneys and deleted e-mails to cover his tracks. Gonzo tried a similar excuse a year ago in testimony to the Judiciary Committee when he inexplicably alluded to George Washington tapping phone conversations without warrants: “President Washington, President Lincoln, President Wilson, President Roosevelt have all authorized electronic surveillance on a far broader scale.” Anyone who can’t keep straight the well-known timeline of technological innovation is sure to contradict himself on the timeline of his own involvement in the firings.

Whatever tactic the boys employ, trapping someone so awash in his own self-incriminated pool of crapola should be a slam dunk for the best and brightest of our Senate Democrats. If they orchestrate everything correctly on Thursday, we could finally witness Gonzo walking up that flight of jetway stairs — waving Nixonian V-for-victory gestures with his hands — just before flying back to Texas where he can torture small animals (with Rove) instead of continuing on as one of the masterminds behind America’s rapidly diminishing credibility and reputation.

Administration tried to curb election turnout in key states
Campaign against alleged voter fraud sought to bolster the GOP
Greg Gordon, Mcclatchy/Baltimore Sun
April 19, 2007

WASHINGTON / For six years, the Bush administration, aided by Justice Department political appointees, has pursued an aggressive legal effort to restrict voter turnout in key battleground states in ways that favor Republican political candidates, according to former department lawyers and a review of written records.

The administration intensified its efforts last year as President Bush’s popularity and Republican support eroded heading into a midterm battle for control of Congress, which the emocrats won.

Facing nationwide voter registration drives by Democratic-leaning groups, the administration alleged widespread election fraud and endorsed proposals for tougher state and federal voter identification laws. Presidential political adviser Karl Rove alluded to the strategy in April 2006 when he railed about voter fraud in a speech to the Republican National Lawyers Association.

Questions about the administration’s campaign against alleged voter fraud have helped fuel the political tempest over the firings last year of eight U.S. attorneys, several of whom were ousted in part because they failed to bring voter fraud cases important to Republican politicians. Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales could shed more light on the reasons for those firings when he appears today before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Civil rights advocates contend that the administration’s policies were intended to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of poor and minority voters who tend to support Democrats, and by filing state and federal lawsuits, civil rights groups have won court rulings blocking some of its actions.

Justice Department spokeswoman Cynthia Magnuson called any allegation that the department has rolled back minority voting rights “fundamentally flawed.”

She said the department has “a completely robust record when it comes to enforcing federal voting rights laws,” citing its support last year for reauthorization of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the filing of at least 20 suits to ensure that language services are available to non-English-speaking voters.

The administration, however, has repeatedly invoked allegations of widespread voter fraud to justify tougher voter ID measures and other steps to restrict access to the ballot, even though research suggests that voter fraud is rare.

Since President Bush’s first attorney general, John Ashcroft, a former Republican senator from Missouri, launched a “Ballot Access and Voter Integrity Initiative” in 2001, Justice Department political appointees have exhorted U.S. attorneys to prosecute voter fraud cases, and the department’s Civil Rights Division has sought to roll back policies to protect minority voting rights.

On virtually every significant decision affecting election balloting since 2001, the division’s Voting Rights Section has come down on the side of Republicans, notably in Florida, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Washington and other states where recent elections have been decided by narrow margins.

Joseph Rich, who left his job as chief of the section in 2005, said these events formed an unmistakable pattern.

“As more information becomes available about the administration’s priority on combating alleged, but not well substantiated, voter fraud, the more apparent it is that its actions concerning voter ID laws are part of a partisan strategy to suppress the votes of poor and minority citizens,” he said.

Former department lawyers, public records and other documents show that since Bush took office, political appointees in the Civil Rights Division have:

• Approved Georgia and Arizona laws that tightened voter ID requirements. A federal judge tossed out the Georgia law as an unconstitutional infringement on the rights of poor voters, and a federal appeals court signaled its objections to the Arizona law on similar grounds last fall, but that litigation was delayed by the U.S. Supreme Court until after the election.

• Issued advisory opinions that overstated a 2002 federal election law by asserting that it required states to disqualify new voting registrants if their identification didn’t match that in computer databases, prompting at least three states to reject tens of thousands of applicants mistakenly.

• Done little to enforce a provision of the 1993 National Voter Registration Act that requires state public assistance agencies to register voters. The inaction has contributed to a 50 percent decline in annual registrations at those agencies, to 1 million from 2 million.

• Sued at least six states on grounds that they had too many people on their voter rolls. Some eligible voters were removed in the resulting purges.

New Allegations of “Hijacking of Hiring” at Justice Department for Entry Level Lawyers, not just U.S. Attorneys
BuzzFlash
Wed, 04/18/2007

An anonymous letter sent to the House and Senate Judiciary Chairmen, signed “A Group of Concerned Department of Justice Employees,” thanked Democrats for exposing the “overtly political” firing of United States Attorneys, but warned that the Department was also politicizing the non-political ranks of Justice employees.

The letter claims that the traditional, objective process of hiring top students from law school was being superceded by top officials. After mid-level employees painstakingly pored over applications and resumes to select the best candidates as usual, senior Justice officials dramatically purged the final list in an unprecedented manner.

The letter charges that “Most of those struck from the list had interned for a Hill Democrat, clerked for a Democratic judge, worked for a ‘liberal’ cause, or otherwise appeared to have ‘liberal’ leanings. Summa cum laude graduates of both Yale and Harvard were rejected. . .”

Click here to see the (shocking) letter

Letter: Justice Dept. had political litmus test in hiring Michael Roston
RawStory
Wednesday April 18, 2007

An anonymous group of Justice Department employees have written to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees and accused staff under Attorney General Alberto Gonzales of implementing a political “litmus test” in determining which of the nation’s top law school graduates would be hired as government attorneys.

“When division personnel staff later compared the remaining interviewees with the candidates struck from the list, one common denominator appeared repeatedly: most of those struck from the list had interned for a Hill Democrat, clerked for a Democratic judge, worked for a “liberal” or otherwise appeared to have “liberal” leanings,” the anonymous staffers said in a letter faxed to the Committees on April 9.

In response, Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) said he would investigate the matter.

“I take any accusations of undue politicization of career staff seriously,” he wrote. “We have already identified concerns in Department’s Civil Rights Division. These new accusations are clearly something we will want to consider as well.”

Justice Department’s Independence ‘Shattered,’ Says Former DOJ Attorney
Tony Mauro, Legal Times
April 16, 2007

Since the day he arrived at the Department of Justice in February 2005, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has “shattered” the department’s tradition of independence and politicized its operation more than any other attorney general in more than 30 years.

So says Daniel Metcalfe, a senior attorney at the department who retired in January, before the current controversy over the firing of U.S. Attorneys erupted. He views the episode as an “awful embarrassment” that has only worsened already-low morale at the department, especially among career attorneys.

Metcalfe, 55, served most recently as director of the Office of Information and Privacy. He co-founded the office in 1981 with Richard Huff. But his career at the department began in 1971. He started as an intern, working at the department full-time while attending law school at George Washington University. Later, he worked as a trial attorney in DOJ’s Civil Division before founding OIP.

At that office, Metcalfe oversaw Freedom of Information Act policy throughout the executive branch. He gained a reputation as a principled official who would adhere to the policies of whichever administration he served, but not at the expense of following the letter and spirit of FOIA. “Dan earned great respect for the policies he helped form, even though they sometimes put him at odds with access advocates,” says Paul McMasters, the recently retired First Amendment ombudsman at the Freedom Forum. Metcalfe plans to begin teaching law in coming months.

In interviews in person and by e-mail with Legal Times Supreme Court correspondent Tony Mauro, Metcalfe recently detailed his views about Gonzales and the politicization of the department, as well as information policy. The transcript follows.

Q: How do you view the current controversy at the department? Is this a time, as a recent retiree, when you would be missing the “excitement” of being at the department right now?

A: I miss many things about the Justice Department after having been there for so many years, not the least of which are the challenges that came up almost daily. One of the wonderful things about the position I held is that every single day held the prospect of bringing some new issue, or new potentially sensitive record, to be analyzed and addressed. With very limited exception, everything that the federal government does is reduced to a record, and any record can suddenly be “placed on the hook,” as it were.

So when I walked in each morning, I knew I could be dealing with a difficult legal issue in virtually any area of governmental activity — and as much as I’ll enjoy teaching law, it’ll be hard to ever top that. But if what you mean by “excitement” is the recent U.S. Attorney imbroglio, which is such an awful embarrassment to the department as an institution, I don’t miss such things at all.

As a matter of fact, knowing that the office I headed for 25 years has been drawn into that controversy by, among other things, playing so visible a role in political e-mail processing, I’m frankly glad that I avoided any prospect of moral discomfort involved. In short, I never had to decide whether to participate in such a highly questionable, obfuscation-laden enterprise because it belatedly erupted in 2007, not in 2006.

Q: You began in the Justice Department during the Watergate years. How would you rank Alberto Gonzales in terms of politicization of the department in comparison to the other AGs you have worked for?

A: Actually, I began earlier, in the first Nixon administration, as a college intern in 1971. But I was there again in the Watergate era, when I worked in part of the Attorney General’s Office during my first year of law school in 1973-1974, and then continuously as a trial attorney and office director for nearly 30 years. That adds up to more than a dozen attorneys general, including Ed Meese as well as John Mitchell, and I used to think that they had politicized the department more than anyone could or should. But nothing compares to the past two years under Alberto Gonzales.

To be sure, he continued a trend of career/noncareer separation that began under John Ashcroft, yet even Ashcroft brought in political aides who in large measure were experienced in government functioning. Ashcroft’s Justice Department appointees, with few exceptions, were not the type of people who caused you to wonder what they were doing there. They might not have been firm believers in the importance of government, but generally speaking, there was a very respectable level of competence (in some instances even exceptionally so) and a relatively strong dedication to quality government, as far as I could see.

Under Gonzales, though, almost immediately from the time of his arrival in February 2005, this changed quite noticeably. First, there was extraordinary turnover in the political ranks, including the majority of even Justice’s highest-level appointees. It was reminiscent of the turnover from the second Reagan administration to the first Bush administration in 1989, only more so. Second, the atmosphere was palpably different, in ways both large and small. One need not have had to be terribly sophisticated to notice that when Deputy Attorney General Jim Comey left the department in August 2005 his departure was quite abrupt, and that his large farewell party was attended by neither Gonzales nor (as best as could be seen) anyone else on the AG’s personal staff.

Third, and most significantly for present purposes, there was an almost immediate influx of young political aides beginning in the first half of 2005 (e.g., counsels to the AG, associate deputy attorneys general, deputy associate attorneys general, and deputy assistant attorneys general) whose inexperience in the processes of government was surpassed only by their evident disdain for it.

Having seen this firsthand in a range of different situations for nearly two years before I retired, I found it not at all surprising that the recent U.S. Attorney problems arose in the first place and then were so badly mishandled once they did.

Q: Was the politicization a contributing factor to your decision to retire?

A: Yes it was, but probably not in the way you might think. It certainly is true that before Gonzales arrived I had never planned to retire as soon as I became eligible at age 55 (much to my wife’s dismay), but it also is true that I had relatively little difficulty with substantive matters in my areas of responsibility under either Ashcroft or Gonzales. In fact, there were only two such policy conflicts. One was entirely averted through my own type of political maneuvering (to the great dismay of the department’s acting assistant attorney general for legal counsel), and the other involved political appointees wanting to make greater disclosure, not less, which ultimately became the result.

But the process of agency functioning, however, became dramatically different almost immediately after Gonzales arrived. No longer was emphasis placed on accomplishing something with the highest-quality product in a timely fashion; rather, it became a matter of making sure that a “consensus” was achieved, regardless of how long that might take and with little or no concern that quality would suffer in such a “lowest common denominator” environment. And heaven help anyone, career or noncareer employee, if that “consensus” did not include whatever someone in the White House might think about something, be it large, small or medium-sized.

In short, the culture markedly shifted to one in which avoiding any possibility of disagreement anywhere was the overriding concern, as if “consensus” were an end unto itself. Undergirding this, what’s more, was the sad fact that so many political appointees in 2005 and 2006 were so obviously thinking not much further than their next ( i.e., higher-level) position, in some place where they could “max out” by the end of Bush’s second term.

The day that I decided to retire, for example, was one on which I was asked to participate in a matter in which a significant part of the department’s position was aiming to be — there’s no other word for it — false. Briefly stated, someone in the White House had determined that it would be a good idea for an op-ed piece on the subject of government secrecy to be prepared, and although its subject matter extended beyond the Justice Department’s jurisdiction in multiple respects, it was decided that the Justice Department’s Office of Public Affairs would take on that task nevertheless. I was perfectly able to make several corrections and substantive improvements to a last-minute draft that I received but drew a line at even attempting to “improve” a Defense Department-related paragraph within it that was incorrect by a full 180 degrees.

Knowing what the facts of that matter actually were, I flatly refused to aid that part of the enterprise, pointedly observing that the Gonzales-era political appointee who was behind the draft did, in fact, to my own certain knowledge, know them as well. I suppose I can take some small satisfaction that the false part of that “final draft” was then entirely replaced with something that was at least arguably true, but that’s hardly the point. (That political appointee, by the way, did indeed receive his promotion, but is no longer in Washington.)

[Editor's Note: The op-ed in question appeared in USA Today on March 13, 2006, and was titled "Committed to Being Open."]

Yes, it became quite clear that under Gonzales, the department placed no more than secondary value on the standards that I and my office had valued so heavily for the preceding 25 years — accuracy, integrity, responsibility and quality of decision-making being chief among them. Had I stayed as director of OIP, I might have been working for a Monica Goodling protege by now.

Q: Are there any possible benefits to this “decision-making by consensus” approach?

A: Yes, but they accrue only to the participants in the process. Indeed, by operating in this way, they manage to avoid any singular responsibility for the result, or any part of it, which is another way of saying that they see themselves as running no risk of blame if anyone beyond the group has any problem with what they’ve done at any point.

After all, it was “the group” that did it (whatever that might be), and they achieved presumptively benign “consensus” (at all costs) before moving forward. You can imagine how important this is to someone whose primary interest in most any government action is to make sure that it doesn’t somehow get in the way of securing that next (but not necessarily last) position before the end of a presidential administration. And remember that there’s little downside to operating in this way if your basic view of government (in line with your inexperience) holds little respect for it in the first place. In other words, if it doesn’t really matter so much to you how well or efficiently a government activity is handled, just so long as it eventually is handled, then the thinking is: Why not handle it in the way that most effectively minimizes personal risk? What this breeds, of course, is an utter lack of individual responsibility — the very antithesis of good government.

Q: Do you see the department’s decision-making weaknesses that you’ve just sketched out here as connected to its current problems with what it did on the U.S. Attorneys?

A: Certainly. You can clearly hear distinct echoes of this in the recent public statements of Kyle Sampson before the Senate Judiciary Committee. He described what to many listeners was an absolutely astonishing process by which he and a small group of others within the Justice Department handled the matter of U.S. Attorney replacement. By all accounts, no one person was in charge (Kyle described himself as merely the “aggregator”), it operated strictly by “consensus” (a word that he wielded as if it were an indisputably favorable one), and the end result was something that even he could not fully explain.

Yet it became the “groupthink” recommendation to the AG, an unprecedented “hit list” to be endorsed uncritically, as if it were something upon which Gonzales could rely without thinking. (And with nary a paper trail, by the way, which, I can tell you is no small consideration.) One might ask: Exactly whose dispositive decision was it to include the U.S. Attorney for the District of New Mexico (let alone the threshold question of why) on that final list? Was there really a good case for including U.S. Attorney John McKay of the Western District of Washington, whom I personally knew to have made tremendous contributions in the area of law enforcement information-sharing programs?

Conversely, could it really be so that, as Kyle testified, one U.S. Attorney (I won’t repeat from where) actually was “saved” from being on the list merely because Monica Goodling happened to know of, and think well of, her work in a particular area? [Editor's Note: According to Sampson's testimony, that U.S. Attorney was Anna Mills Wagoner of the Middle District of North Carolina.]

Yes, this decision-making “process,” if it even deserves to be called that, was no different than what I saw played out time and again, albeit on a different scale, during my last two years at Justice. And as I see it, from the vantage point of someone who has considerable experience in government decision-making in general and at the Justice Department in particular, the greatest and most damning dereliction is on the part of the person who knowingly permits such a “process” to exist on a matter of such public importance within the realm of his ultimate responsibility. Sure, it might induce that official to think (and even defensively say), “I was no more involved than that.” But that never used to be good enough (or even minimally defensible) at the Justice Department prior to 2005. And that, as much as anything, should be impossible to defend now.

Q: Are we witnessing a deterioration of the department that can be explained in part by the fact that this is now the second half of a second term? What happens to a bureaucracy in this kind of period?

A: That’s a particularly timely question, given that the time period that we’ve been discussing is the early days of a second presidential term. I’ll now say something that might sound partisan, even coming from a purposely nonpartisan registered independent, but it’s really not: In my experience over 11 presidential administrations, from Nixon I to what can be called Bush III, there is an unmistakable drop-off in overall appointment quality during a second presidential term — and this definitely is more so during a Republican administration. Perhaps this is due to there being a lower quality of political appointees in Republican administrations to begin with, given that, by and large, they give up more than Democrats do to enter government service, especially with the post-Watergate ethics restrictions that all government officials face.

This observation is nothing new, by the way; one need only look at the relative ages and experience levels of comparable appointees in successive administrations to see it. So when you enter the second term of a Republican administration, you get the worst of all possible worlds: You actually see some influential political appointees who are, to put it bluntly, too subject-matter ignorant to even realize how ignorant they are. (This is assuming that, if they knew, they’d actually care.)

And compounding this, as mentioned earlier, is the strong drive of political appointees at all levels (perhaps more so if they are attorneys, whose background is amenable to legal positions throughout the executive branch) to obtain that maximum capstone position before the second term ends. What happens to bureaucracy at such a time is that it becomes sluggish to the point of constipation, driven only by expediency as gauged from a political or personal agenda, and it sometimes yields some truly mind-boggling results, such as the current U.S. Attorney nightmare.

Speaking of which, this second-term drop-off, so to speak, has much to do with the U.S. Attorney situation, both as to the replacement decisions themselves and also how they were implemented. It is clear by now that the department — and, perhaps more than anyone, Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty — was grossly disserved and betrayed by the relatively young aides who participated in that “consensus process” from its very beginning. To those who know the players involved, it’s not hard to see how frictions could develop between such high-level Main Justice staffers and the U.S. Attorneys whom they attempted to “oversee.”

On one side, you had hard-nosed prosecutors who, for the most part, already had several years’ experience under their belts (with little micromanagement from Ashcroft’s people) and knew what they were doing already. On the other side, you had political aides who, among other things, had precious little management experience for their positions and were not necessarily adept at playing well with others, even when those others were political appointees like themselves. One need look no further than the extensively disclosed e-mails from Kyle Sampson, Mike Elston [chief of staff to McNulty], Monica Goodling and [Deputy Associate Attorney General] Will Moschella to get a clear picture of this.

Does this mean that at least some of the eight replaced U.S. Attorneys made the list because they failed to get along in a sufficiently deferential fashion with such Main Justice appointees? I’d certainly bet the oldest of my two cars on it, perhaps even the newer one, based upon what I’ve seen over the years and what I’ve read in e-mail form more recently. And it surely follows from everything else I’ve observed that in such a situation, even with the presumed cover of “consensus” decision-making, such appointed aides would scramble mightily, in the most derisive of terms (captured only partially on the disclosed e-mails), to castigate the U.S. Attorney victims of their management inexperience, lest they themselves be held to blame.

And that then, with little sense (of irony or otherwise), they would proceed to publicly tarnish the reputations of several U.S. Attorneys while in the next breath redacting records based on an asserted need to “protect their (i.e., the U.S. Attorneys’) privacy.” Even putting such callousness and privacy violations aside, and moving swiftly past the image that they “eat their young,” it is painfully clear that these political aides got carried away again and again.

This is the type of thing that a second term at its very worst can bring — though I remember well that even the second Reagan administration, for all its flaws, was never quite as bad. And it cannot help but reflect disastrously on the person sitting at the top of that heap — who either knew of this and at a minimum tacitly condoned it or else turned a fatally blind eye to it through overdelegation to underlings because he just didn’t care (and take care) nearly as much as an attorney general should. Either way, it’s hard to see how anyone could ever place trust in such a situation again.

Q: How would you describe the morale in the department when you left, and since you have left (among career people especially)?

A: I won’t presume to speak for the noncareer appointees at Justice when it comes to morale (though I have a good basis for doing so), but I certainly can say that morale among the career ranks, especially the more experienced folks, is as low as you would expect it to be.

You have to remember that this is a Cabinet department that, for good reason, prides itself on the high-quality administration of justice, regardless of who is in the White House. Ever since the Watergate era, when Edward Levi came in as attorney general to replace former Sen. William Saxby soon after Nixon resigned, the Justice Department maintained a healthy distance between it and what could be called the raw political concerns that are properly within the White House’s domain. Even Reagan’s first attorney general, William French Smith, did not depart greatly from the standard that Levi set; as for Meese, I knew him to be more heavily involved in defending himself from multiple ethics investigations than in bringing the department too close to the White House, even though he came from there.

More recently, of course, the DOJ-White House distance hit its all-time high-water mark under Janet Reno, especially during Clinton’s second term. And even John Ashcroft made it clear to all department employees that, among other things, he held that traditional distance in proper reverence; he proved that this was no mere lip service when, from his hospital bed, he refused to overrule Deputy AG Comey on what is now called the “terrorist surveillance program.” Especially in the wake of 9/11, which strongly spurred the morale and dedication of Justice Department employees, myself included, I saw only a limited morale diminution in general during the first term.

But that strong tradition of independence over the previous 30 years was shattered in 2005 with the arrival of the White House counsel as a second-term AG. All sworn assurances to the contrary notwithstanding, it was as if the White House and Justice Department now were artificially tied at the hip — through their public affairs, legislative affairs and legal policy offices, for example, as well as where you ordinarily would expect such a connection ( i.e., Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel). I attended many meetings in which this total lack of distance became quite clear, as if the current crop of political appointees in those offices weren’t even aware of the important administration-of-justice principles that they were trampling.

This matters greatly to Justice Department employees of my generation. They are now the senior career cadre there, with the high-grade institutional knowledge that carries the department from one administration to the next, and when they see a new attorney general come from the White House Counsel’s Office with a wave of young “Bushies” in tow and find their worst expectations quickly met, they just as quickly lose respect for nearly all of the department’s political leadership, not to mention that leadership’s “policy concerns.” That respect is a vital thing, as fragile as it is essential, and now it’s gone.

Q: In your view, what needs to be done to repair the department?

A: Based upon my experience, it’s very hard to imagine how the department can viably move forward now without a Watergate-style repair. By that I mean the appointment of a new attorney general, one who by reputation, background and temperament is well-suited to at least begin the process of restoring the department’s previous reputation for political independence and the reliably even-handed administration of justice.

With that, and the necessary “woodshedding” of any future political aides who might be inclined to allow their inexperience to overcome their boss’ better judgment, the department’s external standing would rise, and in time, its internal morale problems would begin to solve themselves. At bottom, the Justice Department is a tremendously satisfying place to work, especially in a post-9/11 world. I’m optimistic that it will bounce back from this in time, just as it did in the mid-1970s. After all, if the past two years have shown anything, it’s that much can change in a surprisingly short period of time.

Q: On the secrecy/FOIA front, I think there’s a general assumption that the first impulse of all governments is to conceal. Is that true, and how did you deal with that attitude as you sought to oversee implementation of a law such as FOIA?

A: Yes, that is indeed the first impulse of virtually any government — or large institution, for that matter. Think of it as simply a macrocosm of individual human nature — would you want “your” information made public if you could easily avoid it? But I think that one has to be very careful with a word such as “conceal,” as it suggests some surreptitiousness of a type that might be highly questionable and even wrongful. The overwhelming bulk of government information nondisclosure has nothing even remotely to do with “concealment” or anything improper.

The very fact that a law such as the FOIA has several robust exemptions from disclosure — for items of personal privacy, business confidentiality and law-enforcement sensitivity, for example — stands as testament to the fact that many government records, in whole or in part, cannot be publicly disclosed without causing unwarranted harm.

That said, I agree completely that a major part of any FOIA officer’s job, or the role of someone like me who works to lead them in the right direction, is to firmly grapple with this problem attitude — an attitude that can quickly become ingrained within the culture of any part of an agency, sometimes on four-year cycles as a new president (either Republican or Democrat) comes into office.

I think the best approach is to confront this attitude directly — to explicitly acknowledge it as an immutable aspect of both human and institutional nature and, in so doing, to attack it head-on. Someone who blatantly resists a legal requirement such as the FOIA is not unlike a bully, I’ve found, and the best response to that can be a verbal two-by-four across the bridge of the nose. This works more often than you might imagine, even with new political employees. My former colleague Dick Huff, who was a colonel in the Army Reserve, sometimes liked nothing more than to explain to a general or an admiral in no uncertain terms that his or her information-withholding inclinations were violative of the law and just could not properly be carried out.

Though I’ve been dealing with information policy and the FOIA for more than 30 years now, I didn’t have the dubious pleasure of trying to “re-culturize” the federal government upon the FOIA’s enactment in 1966. But I’ve given advice to nearly 100 other nations and international governing bodies worldwide as they’ve considered enacting and then implementing their own versions of our FOIA. The United Kingdom is a good case in point, as it recently implemented its FOIA counterpart (in a radical departure from the tradition of its Official Secrets Act) by broadly applying it to more than 100,000 distinct governmental units, at all levels of its government.

In meetings with the Lord Chancellor’s Office over there, and subsequent speeches in London and elsewhere in England, I advised the U.K. (as well as many other nations) to strive to capture the attention of its civil servants (not to mention its political class) by expressly recognizing that implementing its new law would involve a massive “culture change” within all government circles, and that this was exactly what the law was designed to bring about. The one major drawback of this, though, comes into play whenever a civil servant can reasonably conclude that his or her government has failed to provide anything even close to enough funds to meet such new legal requirements. If that happens, then agency employees tend to lose basic respect for the law, and no amount of hortatory admonition can completely overcome that.

Q: In the current administration, there has been a memo that was seen as anti-FOIA, then an executive order that seemed to point in the other direction. How did that seeming contradiction come about?

A: Well, the short answer to that is, first, that there is no real “contradiction,” in that the Ashcroft FOIA memorandum and the FOIA executive order address two distinctly separate parts of FOIA administration. The former, which replaced Janet Reno’s counterpart memorandum in 2001, sets the current administration’s policy emphasis for FOIA-exemption decision-making ( i.e., as a matter of substantive policy), whereas Executive Order 13,392, issued in December 2005, speaks to procedural FOIA matters such as timeliness, backlog reduction, request tracking and the proper treatment of FOIA requesters.

If they are seen as pointing in different directions, then that most likely is because the former, as a replacement for Janet Reno’s more “liberal” policy memo, is viewed most simplistically as therefore an “anti-requester” document, while the executive order certainly appears on its face to be “pro-requester” in so many respects.

But there is more to the story than that. It’s no secret that this first-of-its-kind FOIA executive order was issued in the context of proposed FOIA-amendment legislation — media-sponsored bills that were introduced on an atypically bipartisan basis — and that it served as enough of a countermeasure to forestall full action on those potent bills during the last Congress. I surely had no illusions to the contrary as I nonetheless worked very hard to vigorously implement that executive order from the day it was issued until the time of my retirement on Jan. 3. But would it have been issued by this administration in any other situation, or for any other purpose? I know of no one, inside of government or out, who would credibly assert that. So if this helps explain any residual “contradiction” that is perceived here, then there you have it — at least in its short version.

Q: Did you ever feel you were pressured in the Bush administration (or any previous one) to perform your FOIA work to serve the administration’s political agenda?

A: This answer might surprise many people, but in the 25-year history of OIP from 1981 through 2006, there were only three instances in which it was overruled by the political appointees for whom I worked — and, actually, two of those three situations (one of which was in a Republican administration) resulted in greater disclosure than I thought was appropriate as a matter of law and sound policy. There was only one time in which an attorney general decided to take a matter out of OIP’s hands in order to withhold information that otherwise would have been disclosed, and that was during the very early 1980s.

With that said, it is important to note two key parts of this question: the words “pressured” and “political.” Together, they connote something nefarious at play, which could give a false impression. There truly is nothing wrong with any administration (or new Justice Department leadership within an administration) determining what that administration’s policy agenda will be in an area like the FOIA — so long as it is within the proper bounds of the law — and it is not undue “pressure” to expect that career professionals will do their best to craft and implement such policies as strongly as an administration desires. Against this backdrop, I can say that, at least during my quarter-century of leading governmentwide FOIA policy, nothing quite so blatantly nefarious occurred.

Two further caveats are necessary here, however: First, I made a practice of determining, in advance, what I thought was a reasonable policy line for whatever administration was coming into power. Hence, when I conceived the “foreseeable harm” standard of FOIA-exemption decision-making for Janet Reno in 1993, she adopted it, rather than having to push OIP in that direction herself. The same was true even of the much-reviled Ashcroft FOIA memorandum in 2001, which, to my pleasant surprise, was accepted by him exactly along my proposed policy lines, even with the suggested “sound legal basis” standard, going further in the direction of openness than any previous Republican administration had ever gone.

Second, candor compels me to acknowledge that there in fact was a situation in which, rather than being asked to do something for purposes of a political agenda, I surely was asked to refrain from doing something quite ordinary for a reason that I later learned (and earlier had surmised) was indeed very much a “political” type of agenda. That situation does stand apart in my government experience, but I will refrain from saying anything more about it here, other than that it did occur during the early months of 2005.

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
accrington club rotaryknow pathway all i ringtonedelaware americinn harringtonmacon barrington ga hall 301 dralice peacock ringtones who i ams los barrington angeles 2112 cafree lil boosie alltell ringtoneslibrary college rossendale accrington Map

Add comment April 19th, 2007