Ya can’t make this stuff up!

File this under “Why The Pubs Are Going Down.”

Jude

Sen. Craig to Join Idaho Hall of Fame
Embattled Sen. Larry Craig to Join Idaho Hall of Fame Despite Sex Sting Guilty Plea
ABC news
Oct 7, 2007

BOISE, Idaho - Sen. Larry Craig has been chosen for induction into the Idaho Hall of Fame, despite his well-publicized arrest and guilty plea in an airport sex sting, officials said.

The nonprofit Idaho Hall of Fame Association picked Craig in March, months before he pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct after a Minneapolis airport police officer accused him of soliciting sex in the men’s restroom, the organization’s board chairman said.

“Larry Craig has made a great contribution to Idaho over the period of 20-some years. At the time it was considered, this other matter had not come up,” Harry Magnuson told The Spokesman-Review newspaper Saturday.

But some Republicans said the honor is inappropriate now. Kootenai County Republican precinct committeeman Phil Thompson said Idaho Hall of Fame officials should consider at least postponing the induction.

“Maybe in 10 or 15 years we can think of this hall of fame stuff. Now is not the time,” he said. “It’s a sad day to be a Republican.”

Craig vowed Thursday to serve out the last 15 months of his term, despite a court ruling that left intact his guilty plea in the sex sting operation.

Several people are scheduled to be inducted during the Oct. 13 ceremony alongside Craig, including Gov. Butch Otter, Lt. Gov. Jim Risch, Boise State University football coach Chris Petersen and John Grossenbacher, director of the Idaho National Laboratory nuclear and energy research center.

About 100 people have been inducted into the hall since 1995, including the late Nez Perce Tribe leader Chief Joseph, Coeur d’Alene writer and historian Louise Shadduck, World War II fighter ace Gregory “Pappy” Boyington and newspaper and hospitality magnate Duane Hagadone. ++

Craig’s Reversal Dismays Many Back Home in Idaho
WILLIAM YARDLEY, NYT
October 6, 2007

MIDVALE, Idaho, Oct. 5 — Dismissing the wishes of the bigwigs in Washington often scores points for politicians here in the reluctant stretch of the Republic known as the state of Idaho.

Then there is the unresignation of Senator Larry E. Craig.

“A lot of Republicans in Idaho think they need to sit down on a good shrink’s couch right now,” said Tracy Lotz, a former vice chairman of the state Republican Party. “We’re in shock.”

Unaccustomed to political relevance, Idaho has endured more than a month of political parody. And that was before Mr. Craig provided new material on Thursday by saying he would stay in office after all, notwithstanding a court ruling forbidding him to withdraw his guilty plea in a restroom sex sting.

Some Idahoans profess a respect for Mr. Craig for showing an indigenous “moxie” in telling off the national Republicans who tried to force him out, and some insist he did nothing wrong in the first place. Yet it is also clear from interviews with people across the state that he has lost considerable support as he tries to finish out his term, which lasts until January 2009.

Many people say his repeated revision of his plans to serve and not serve has served only himself and ruined his credibility.

“He’s using politics, and that’s not really what his roots are,” said Jim Warren, superintendent here in the Midvale School District, where Mr. Craig was educated in a one-room schoolhouse until seventh grade. “People here really pride themselves on keeping their word.”

The news broke on Aug. 27 that Mr. Craig, 62, had pleaded guilty to a disorderly conduct charge related to the undercover sex sting, conducted at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. On Sept. 1, under intense pressure from Senate Republican leaders worried about damage to the party, he announced that it was his “intent” to resign by Sept. 30.

But a few days later he suggested that he might stay on if he was able to withdraw his guilty plea. A judge ruled Thursday that he could not withdraw it, and a few hours later the senator said he would remain in office anyway. For some, that reversal was more than one too many.

“I think he should do the respectful thing and just step down,” said Maureen Flaherty, a Democrat who manages a restaurant in Boise. “He already pleaded guilty, and to take back your guilty plea for your own personal reasons, I don’t know.”

Yet while people interviewed on the street in downtown Boise were likely to say the senator was an embarrassment who should have resigned, here in rural Midvale, his birthplace, they were more circumspect. Mr. Warren, the school superintendent, said that townspeople were “disappointed” in Mr. Craig but that he would find them forgiving the next time he comes for a visit.

Mr. Craig has made rural issues a top priority in the 27 years he has served in Congress, fighting for the timber industry and farmers. Members of his extended family have ranched in Midvale, some 90 miles northwest of Boise, since the 1890s, and the Craig surname still appears on school rolls. Midvale has fewer than 200 people, according to the census, but the current school draws about 130 students, from preschool through the high school grades, who live in the town and the surrounding area. More than once the senator has spoken at graduation.

Some say Mr. Craig has been persecuted for what they view as a minor offense, given transgressions of other Washington politicians. If he can withstand the pressure, they say, let him stay in office, and just maybe he can be an effective senator again.

“He’s done a lot of good for Idaho,” said Rick Graham, who went to high school with Mr. Craig and whose family owns the Midvale Market, the main retail operation here, with an inventory that includes hunting rifles and Reese’s Cups. “I’m going to trust his judgment on this.”

And while top Republicans in the state may be surprised at Mr. Craig’s reversal, virtually none of them have joined national Republican leaders who called early on for him to resign. Idaho’s other senator, Michael D. Crapo, has said he supports Mr. Craig’s decision to stay in office, and Gov. C. L. Otter, who chose a replacement on the presumption that Mr. Craig was going to resign, has said he has a right to remain.

On Friday, J. Kirk Sullivan, chairman of the state Republican Party, issued a carefully phrased statement saying he was “confident Idaho’s Congressional delegation can continue to effectively represent the best interests of Idahoans.”

Bryan Fischer, executive director of the Idaho Values Alliance and one of the few leading conservatives to call for the senator to quit, said he did not share that confidence. “What Idaho families need is a senator who can be an unapologetic, vocal and visible leader on pro-family issues,” Mr. Fischer said. “And Senator Craig is simply not going to be able to do that for next 15 months.” ++

Patti Murphy contributed reporting from Boise.

Novak: Senate Conservatives Knew About Craig’s ‘Weird Conduct,’ ‘Didn’t Do Anything About It’
ThinkProgress
10/06/07

On Bloomberg Television today, right-wing pundit Robert Novak revealed that “sources in the Senate” have told him that Senate conservatives had prior knowledge about Sen. Larry Craig’s (R-ID) “problem” but intentionally kept it “in the closet”:

I have talked to several of my sources in the Senate, and this came as a surprise to me…They knew about it. They knew that he had this problem, and it was in the closet. And it was not just a homosexual relationship. It was this weird conduct. They didn’t do anything about it.

[Open link to] Watch video.

Novak added, “So Republicans, again, as in the case of Congressman Foley, their cover-up is coming back to haunt them.” Novak did not elaborate on what “weird conduct” Craig has carried out in the past.

Recall, then-Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) “and at least three of his aides were told of allegations that then-Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL) had improper e-mail contacts with a former House page months before the incident became public.”

Ultimately, at least a dozen GOP lawmakers and aides admitted to having knowledge of Foley’s lewd behavior, “some of them for a year or more,” but kept the matter secret.

If Novak’s sources are correct, then the Senate ethics investigation into Craig — which conservatives have been aggressively pushing for — should determine what Craig has done in the past and which Senators were involved in covering it up. ++

Republican Senator Larry Craig: Focus on The Family’s Perfect Presidential Candidate
Richard A. Stitt, BuzzFlash Reader Contribution
BuzzFlash on Mon, 10/08/2007

James Dobson, Focus on The Family founder and a strong proponent of what he calls “traditional Christian values,” has said that he and his evangelical following will not endorse any candidate for president unless he is pro-life. There should be little doubt that Idaho U.S. Senator Larry Craig fits their qualifications perfectly.

American citizens can learn much from the votes of pious, sanctimonious Republican legislators such as Senators Larry Craig and David Vitter and Congressman Mark Foley, all of whom presented themselves to the voters as paragons of virtue and practitioners of Christian moral values while simultaneously voting to strip away rights of American citizens and condemning them for the very lifestyles in which they themselves were engaged.

As long as the list of these self-righteous Congressmen is, Republicans who took over our government for over 12 years gained the rock-solid support of the evangelicals, but now they act appalled that anyone is questioning their probity and exposing their tableau of lies and hypocrisy on which they used to worm their way into every governmental agency and institution, the primary purpose of which has been to dismantle programs put in place to serve the public needs.

Here is a partial list which I excerpted from Project Vote Smart — Senator Craig — Voting Record, revealing some of the most recent issues voted on by Idaho Senator Larry Craig, issues near and dear to the hearts of James Dobson’s religious sect who wish to impose their punitive, theocratic policies on every citizen in the United States:

NARAL Pro-Choice America 0 percent in 2006.

National Right to Life Committee 100 percent in 2005-2006.

Christian Coalition 100 percent in 2004.

Eagle Forum 100 percent in 2004.

Republicans for Environmental Protection 0 percent in 2006.

Family Research Council 100 percent in 2006.

American Family Association 100 percent in 2005-2006.

Gun Owners of America 100 percent in 2006.

American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees 0 percent in 2006.

Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology 0 percent in 2006.

Parkinsons Action Network 0 percent in 2006.

National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association 0 percent in 2005-2006.

Disabled American Veterans 20 percent in 2006.

Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America gave Senator Craig a grade of D- in 2006.

An Internet search reveals Republican scandals breathtaking in scope, yet they are only the tip of the iceberg when you consider the mountain of criminal activity conducted by the entire G. W. Bush Administration whose modus operandi over the last 6 years has been to ignore laws they don’t like and make up their own — just like a dictator or totalitarian government would.

Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales decided that Bush has the right make up new laws with vague interpretations that he uses as his Constitutional authority to wage war, spy on American citizens, negate habeas corpus, torture with impunity, pass new laws such as the Military Commissions Act, denying detainees and those named by Bush to be “enemy combatants” access to U.S. courts.

These acts are totally repugnant to everything our U.S. Constitution represents. Abominable as they are, they represent the core values that James Dobson supported and still seeks to impose on the rest of America.

Larry Craig should stick around at least until November 2008 so the public gets a clear picture of what this depraved Republican Party truly represents. But, the rest of the (cognizant) country needs to observe this odious, repulsive vermin over the next 14 months as he tries to insulate himself in his little cocoon of self-righteousness. Watch his charade as he tries to foist himself off as a man of superior spiritual and moral values, traits that are nothing but a veneer and a cloak of lies, reflecting the dishonesty of the entire Republican Party and their sordid hypocritical characters such as Idaho Senator Larry Craig.

Lies and deceit were the catalysts that prompted Bush to bomb, invade, and occupy Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. Lies prompted former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to usher in a new era of totalitarian government when he said that Bush has unbridled powers to torture with impunity, murder tens of thousands of Iraqi men, women, and children, put 3,810 U.S. military in body bags and send over 27,000 wounded U.S. Marines and soldiers home, many with lifetime disabilities.

Lies were told to the American people that mushroom clouds would appear over U.S. cities unless we forfeited our civil liberties and freedoms and authorize Bush to spy on, arrest without cause, deny access to our courts or legal representation, any person, including American citizens.

So why should Larry Craig, one of Bush’s most loyal anti-U.S. Constitution enablers, be drummed out of the U.S. Senate for acting in a manner any different from his corrosive, corrupt Republican colleagues who never saw a miasma too noxious or a toilet stall too putrid for any of them to drink their swill from?

Focus On The Family founder James Dobson has drunk from that ladle of swill so often in the past that his dream of Armageddon can only be hastened by a presidential candidate such as Republican Senator Larry Craig, who precisely radiates the values of that political party’s dep~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007ravity. Larry Craig is James Dobson’s perfect candidate. ++

“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.”

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.

Add comment October 8th, 2007

Extra, more

I inadvertently left Andrew Sullivan’s article out of the prior collection … so consider this a post script to the original. Feels a little Merc retro, to me — and that will officially bite us on the 13th.

While I’m “announcing,” I should mention that I will be taking my yearly trek home [California] starting next weekend … yes, flying on the 13th itself, and against the odds. It’ll be worth it — my arms have been aching to hug grandarlins for months now, see all those dear faces, family and extended, that light me up … you know I go to “fill up.” With life as it is, lately, keeping your heart filled is sooooo important. My tanks been empty too long. So keep me on your prayer list for Traveling Mercies, if you will.

I’ll be out and about for six weeks, and my intention is to get at least one post into your inbox most weekdays — I’ll be in Tucson for awhile as well, so on traveling days we’ll go dark. But you Wavers are super savvy and know where to look for news; so if I seem a bit distracted, and you find something that you feel MUST be covered in the next month and a bit more, just drop a line. I’m always pleased to hear from you.

Jude

Bush’s torturers follow where the Nazis led
Andrew Sullivan, Times UK
October 7, 2007

I remember that my first response to the reports of abuse and torture at Guantanamo Bay was to accuse the accusers of exaggeration or deliberate deception. I didn’t believe America would ever do those things. I’d also supported George W Bush in 2000, believed it necessary to give the president the benefit of the doubt in wartime, and knew Donald Rumsfeld as a friend.

It struck me as a no-brainer that this stuff was being invented by the far left or was part of Al-Qaeda propaganda. After all, they train captives to lie about this stuff, don’t they? Bottom line: I trusted the president in a time of war to obey the rule of law that we were and are defending. And then I was forced to confront the evidence.

From almost the beginning of the war, it is now indisputable, the Bush administration made a strong and formative decision: in the absence of good intelligence on the Islamist terror threat after 9/11, it would do what no American administration had done before. It would torture detainees to get information.

This decision was and is illegal, and violates America’s treaty obligations, the military code of justice, the United Nations convention against torture, and US law. Although America has allied itself over the decades with some unsavoury regimes around the world and has come close to acquiescing to torture, it has never itself tortured. It has also, in liberating the world from the evils of Nazism and communism, and in crafting the Geneva conventions, done more than any other nation to banish torture from the world. George Washington himself vowed that it would be a defining mark of the new nation that such tactics, used by the British in his day, would be anathema to Americans.

But Bush decided that 9/11 changed all that. Islamists were apparently more dangerous than the Nazis or the Soviets, whom Americans fought and defeated without resorting to torture. The decision to enter what Dick Cheney called “the dark side” was made, moreover, in secret; interrogators who had no idea how to do these things were asked to replicate some of the methods US soldiers had been trained to resist if captured by the Soviets or Vietcong.

Classic torture techniques, such as waterboarding, hypothermia, beatings, excruciating stress positions, days and days of sleep deprivation, and threats to family members (even the children of terror suspects), were approved by Bush and inflicted on an unknown number of terror suspects by American officials, CIA agents and, in the chaos of Iraq, incompetents and sadists at Abu Ghraib. And when the horror came to light, they denied all of it and prosecuted a few grunts at the lowest level. The official reports were barred from investigating fully up the chain of command.

Legally, the White House knew from the start that it was on extremely shaky ground. And so officials told pliant in-house lawyers to concoct memos to make what was illegal legal. Their irritation with the rule of law, and their belief that the president had the constitutional authority to waive it, became a hallmark of their work.

They redefined torture solely as something that would be equivalent to the loss of major organs or leading to imminent death. Everything else was what was first called “coercive interrogation”, subsequently amended to “enhanced interrogation”. These terms were deployed in order for the president to be able to say that he didn’t support “torture”. We were through the looking glass.

After Abu Ghraib, some progress was made in restraining these torture policies. The memo defining torture out of existence was rescinded. The Military Commissions Act was crafted to prevent the military itself from being forced to violate its own code of justice. But the administration clung to its torture policies, and tried every legal manoeuvre to keep it going and keep it secret. Much of this stemmed from the vice-president’s office.

Last week The New York Times revealed more. We now know that long after Abu Ghraib was exposed, the administration issued internal legal memos that asserted the legality of many of the techniques exposed there. The memos not only gave legal cover to waterboarding, hypothermia and beating but allowed them in combination to intensify the effect.

The argument was that stripping a chained detainee naked, pouring water over him while keeping room temperatures cold enough to induce repeated episodes of dangerous hypothermia, was not “cruel, inhuman or degrading”. We have a log of such a technique being used at Guantanamo. The victim had to be rushed to hospital, brought back from death, then submitted once again to “enhanced interrogation”.

George Orwell would have been impressed by the phrase “enhanced interrogation technique”. By relying on it, the White House spokesman last week was able to say with a straight face that the administration strongly opposed torture and that “any procedures they use are tough, safe, necessary and lawful”.

So is “enhanced interrogation” torture? One way to answer this question is to examine history. The phrase has a lineage. Verschärfte Verneh-mung, enhanced or intensified interrogation, was the exact term innovated by the Gestapo to describe what became known as the “third degree”. It left no marks. It included hypothermia, stress positions and long-time sleep deprivation.

The United States prosecuted it as a war crime in Norway in 1948. The victims were not in uniform – they were part of the Norwegian insurgency against the German occupation – and the Nazis argued, just as Cheney has done, that this put them outside base-line protections (subsequently formalised by the Geneva conventions).

The Nazis even argued that “the acts of torture in no case resulted in death. Most of the injuries inflicted were slight and did not result in permanent disablement”. This argument is almost verbatim that made by John Yoo, the Bush administration’s house lawyer, who now sits comfortably at the Washington think tank, the American Enterprise Institute.

The US-run court at the time clearly rejected Cheney’s arguments. Base-line protections against torture applied, the court argued, to all detainees, including those out of uniform. They didn’t qualify for full PoW status, but they couldn’t be abused either. The court also relied on the plain meaning of torture as defined under US and international law: “The court found it decisive that the defendants had inflicted serious physical and mental suffering on their victims, and did not find sufficient reason for a mitigation of the punishment . . .”

The definition of torture remains the infliction of “severe mental or physical pain or suffering” with the intent of procuring intelligence. In 1948, in other words, America rejected the semantics of the current president and his aides. The penalty for those who were found guilty was death. This is how far we’ve come. And this fateful, profound decision to change what America stands for was made in secret. The president kept it from Congress and from many parts of his own administration.

Ever since, the United States has been struggling to figure out what to do about this, if anything. So far Congress has been extremely passive, although last week’s leaks about the secret pro-torture memos after Abu Ghraib forced Arlen Specter, a Republican senator, to proclaim that the memos “are more than surprising. I think they are shocking”. Yet the public, by and large, remains indifferent; and all the Republican candidates, bar John McCain and Ron Paul, endorse continuing the use of torture.

One day America will come back – the America that defends human rights, the America that would never torture detainees, the America that leads the world in barring the inhuman and barbaric. But not until this president leaves office. And maybe not even then. ++

“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.

Add comment October 8th, 2007