The family is going to meet friends at the local pumpkin patch today, so I am off, frolicking, headed for Bates Nut Farm [the fam being as it is, we've called it Nates Butt Farm for decades.]
Scanning the news, I find no emergencies [although everything still feels like it, doesn't it?! It will until Dubby is retired to brush-popping in Crawford, I s'pose ... and perhaps even then.]
Anyhow, I’m posting a few snippits and reads I’ve appreciated in the last few days. MoDo and Colbert, Krugman and Conason, and last, Cenk Uygur.
Happy Punkin’s to you all, today.
Jude
First, here is a video snip that gives Rudy G. a well-deserved black eye.
and … the link to my weekly piece, We Are Strardust.
A Mock Columnist, Amok
MAUREEN DOWD
October 14, 2007
I was in my office, writing a column on the injustice of relative marginal tax rates for hedge fund managers, when I saw Stephen Colbert on TV.
He was sneering that Times columns make good “kindling.” He was ranting that after you throw away the paper, “it takes over a hundred years for the lies to biodegrade.” He was observing, approvingly, that “Dick Cheney’s fondest pipe dream is driving a bulldozer into The New York Times while drinking crude oil out of Keith Olbermann’s skull.”
I called Colbert with a dare: if he thought it was so easy to be a Times Op-Ed pundit, he should try it. He came right over. In a moment of weakness, I had staged a coup d’moi. I just hope he leaves at some point. He’s typing and drinking and threatening to “shave Paul Krugman with a broken bottle.”
I Am an Op-Ed Columnist (And So Can You!)
By STEPHEN COLBERT
Surprised to see my byline here, aren’t you? I would be too, if I read The New York Times. But I don’t. So I’ll just have to take your word that this was published. Frankly, I prefer emoticons to the written word, and if you disagree 
I’d like to thank Maureen Dowd for permitting/begging me to write her column today. As I type this, she’s watching from an overstuffed divan, petting her prize Abyssinian and sipping a Dirty Cosmotinijito. Which reminds me: Before I get started, I have to take care of one other bit of business:
Bad things are happening in countries you shouldn’t have to think about. It’s all George Bush’s fault, the vice president is Satan, and God is gay.
There. Now I’ve written Frank Rich’s column too.
So why I am writing Miss Dowd’s column today? Simple. Because I believe the 2008 election, unlike all previous elections, is important. And a lot of Americans feel confused about the current crop of presidential candidates.
For instance, Hillary Clinton. I can’t remember if I’m supposed to be scared of her so Democrats will think they should nominate her when she’s actually easy to beat, or if I’m supposed to be scared of her because she’s legitimately scary.
Or Rudy Giuliani. I can’t remember if I’m supposed to support him because he’s the one who can beat Hillary if she gets nominated, or if I’m supposed to support him because he’s legitimately scary.
And Fred Thompson. In my opinion “Law & Order” never sufficiently explained why the Manhattan D.A. had an accent like an Appalachian catfish wrestler.
Well, suddenly an option is looming on the horizon. And I don’t mean Al Gore (though he’s a world-class loomer). First of all, I don’t think Nobel Prizes should go to people I was seated next to at the Emmys. Second, winning the Nobel Prize does not automatically qualify you to be commander in chief. I think George Bush has proved definitively that to be president, you don’t need to care about science, literature or peace.
While my hat is not presently in the ring, I should also point out that it is not on my head. So where’s that hat? (Hint: John McCain was seen passing one at a gas station to fuel up the Straight Talk Express.)
Others point to my new bestseller, “I Am America (And So Can You!)” noting that many candidates test the waters with a book first. Just look at Barack Obama, John Edwards or O. J. Simpson.
Look at the moral guidance I offer. On faith: “After Jesus was born, the Old Testament basically became a way for Bible publishers to keep their word count up.” On gender: “The sooner we accept the basic differences between men and women, the sooner we can stop arguing about it and start having sex.” On race: “While skin and race are often synonymous, skin cleansing is good, race cleansing is bad.” On the elderly: “They look like lizards.”
Our nation is at a Fork in the Road. Some say we should go Left; some say go Right. I say, “Doesn’t this thing have a reverse gear?” Let’s back this country up to a time before there were forks in the road — or even roads. Or forks, for that matter.
I want to return to a simpler America where we ate our meat off the end of a sharpened stick.
Let me regurgitate: I know why you want me to run, and I hear your clamor. I share Americans’ nostalgia for an era when you not only could tell a man by the cut of his jib, but the jib industry hadn’t yet fled to Guangdong. And I don’t intend to tease you for weeks the way Newt Gingrich did, saying that if his supporters raised $30 million, he would run for president. I would run for 15 million. Cash.
Nevertheless, I am not ready to announce yet — even though it’s clear that the voters are desperate for a white, male, middle-aged, Jesus-trumpeting alternative.
What do I offer? Hope for the common man. Because I am not the Anointed or the Inevitable. I am just an Average Joe like you — if you have a TV show.
Death of the Machine
PAUL KRUGMAN, NYT
October 19, 2007
“There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money, and I can’t remember what the second one is.” So declared Mark Hanna, the great Gilded Age political boss.
Karl Rove has often described Hanna as his role model. And predictions that Mr. Rove and his disciples would succeed in creating a permanent Republican majority — I have a whole bookshelf of volumes with titles like “One Party Nation” and “Building Red America” — depended crucially on the assumption that the G.O.P. would have vastly more money than its opponents. It might even, some thought, match the 10-to-1 advantage Hanna gave William McKinley when he ran against William Jennings Bryan.
Oops. According to data collected by the Center for Responsive Politics, in the current election cycle every one of the top 10 industries making political donations is giving more money to Democrats. Even industries that have in the past been overwhelmingly Republican, like insurance and pharmaceuticals, are now splitting their donations more or less evenly. Oil and gas is the only major industry that the G.O.P. can still call its own.
The sudden burst of corporate affection for Democrats is good news for the party’s campaign committees, but not necessarily good news for progressives. Before I get to the down side, however, let’s talk about why business seems to be giving up on the G.O.P.
To some extent it’s a matter of cold political calculation. Polls, plus a wave of G.O.P. retirements, suggest that next year the Democrats will expand their majority in the House, which is already bigger than anything the Republicans ever had during their 12-year reign. Of the 34 Senate seats up for election, 22 are held by Republicans, and major Democratic gains seem all but inevitable.
Add to this the weakness of the Republican presidential field, and it’s not surprising that lobbyists are casting in their lot with the likely winners. But that’s not the whole story.
There’s also disgust, even in the corporate world, with the corruption and incompetence of the Bush years. People on the left often describe the Bush administration as an agent of corporate America; that’s giving it too much credit.
The truth is that while the administration has lavished favors on some powerful, established corporations, the biggest scandals have involved companies that were small or didn’t exist at all until they started getting huge contracts thanks to their political connections. Thus, Blackwater USA was a tiny business until it somehow became the leading supplier of mercenaries for the War on Terror™.
And the lethal amateurishness of these loyal Bushies on the make horrifies the corporate elite almost as much as it horrifies ordinary Americans.
Last but not least, even corporations are relieved to see the end of what amounted to a protection racket.
In a classic 2003 article in The Washington Monthly, Nicholas Confessore (now at The New York Times) described the efforts of people like former Senator Rick Santorum to turn K Street into an appendage of the Republican Party — not the other way around. “The corporate lobbyists who once ran the show, loyal only to the parochial interests of their employer,” wrote Mr. Confessore, “are being replaced by party activists who are loyal first and foremost to the G.O.P.”
But corporations weren’t happy. According to The Politico, “many C.E.O.’s” used the term “extortion” to describe “the annual shakedowns by committee chairmen with jurisdiction over their industries.” And now that Mr. Santorum is out of office, heading the America’s Enemies program at a right-wing think tank, the faint sound you hear from K Street is that of lobbyists singing: “Ding, dong, the witch is dead.”
All of this greatly increases the odds that the Republicans, far from establishing a permanent majority, will be out of power for quite a while. But it also raises the question of what Democratic rule will really mean.
Right now all the leading contenders for the Democratic nomination are running on strongly progressive platforms — especially on health care. But there remain real concerns about what they would actually do in office.
Here’s an example of the sort of thing that makes you wonder: yesterday ABC News reported on its Web site that the Clinton campaign is holding a “Rural Americans for Hillary” lunch and campaign briefing — at the offices of the Troutman Sanders Public Affairs Group, which lobbies for the agribusiness and biotech giant Monsanto. You don’t have to be a Naderite to feel uncomfortable about the implied closeness.
I’d put it this way: many progressives, myself included, hope that the next president will be another F.D.R. But we worry that he or she will turn out to be another Grover Cleveland instead — better-intentioned and much more competent than the current occupant of the White House, but too dependent on lobbyists’ money to seriously confront the excesses of our new Gilded Age.
Why ‘Socialism’ Evokes No Fear
Joe Conason, TruthDig
Oct 11, 2007
Once among the most frightening epithets in American political culture, “socialized medicine” seems to have lost its juju. Today that phrase sounds awfully dated, like a song on a gramophone or a mother-in-law joke or a John Birch Society rant against fluoridated water.
Yet despite that antique quality, the old buzzwords appear regularly in columns, press releases and speeches. Rudolph Giuliani, Mitt Romney and the rest of the Republican presidential pack run around squawking about socialism whenever anyone proposes health care reform. Syndicated columnist Robert Novak warns that the federally financed, state-run Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) is essentially a socialist conspiracy. So does President Bush, who has vetoed a modest increase in that program’s funding because he doesn’t want to “federalize health care.”
Although the Red threat still triggers an autonomic reaction among GOP true believers, the rest of the country no longer twitches to that high-pitched, far-right whistle. Most polls not only show enormous majorities favoring extension of coverage to every child, but substantial support for a radical change in how we pay and administer health insurance—including the possibility of a single-payer system.
Why doesn’t the traditional propaganda work anymore? Perhaps the demise of the Soviet Union and the withering of communism in China have had a delayed effect on public attitudes here. Both the Russians and the Chinese have turned more capitalist than the West, abandoning their former systems without substituting modern protections. The ex-communists are more of a threat to the health of their own societies than to us. Most Americans may also have noticed that corporate bureaucracy and corruption, which figure largely in the present health care system, are not preferable to government bureaucracy. Doctors who used to wail about the dangers of Medicare have learned how unpleasant it is to deal with dozens of insurance companies, each creating different rules to cut costs and deny care. So have their patients.
This corporate model is more expensive and less efficient than the government plans that provide care in every other industrialized nation.
And most Americans may have learned by now that such systems prevail in Western countries that aren’t normally categorized as “socialist,” including the United Kingdom, Japan, Spain, Canada, Germany, France, Denmark, Norway and Sweden. All these nations manage to provide their citizens with high living standards, industrial and technological innovation, and broad political and economic freedom, even after 50 years of national health insurance.
Meanwhile, the credibility of conservatives has diminished steadily. These days they cannot even achieve clarity on the meaning of their favorite cliches. For instance, the president hates “federalized health care,” but sponsors a Medicare prescription drug program that wastes hundreds of billions on drug companies and private insurers. Right-wing definitions no longer seem so clear, either. When the government awards a billion dollars in sweetheart mercenary contracts to a wealthy Republican family in Michigan, that’s “private enterprise.” But when the government helps a struggling middle-class family in Maryland send its children to the doctor, that’s creeping socialism.
Conservative ideology’s declining relevance is again encouraging the politics of personal destruction. That must be why right-wing voices on the Internet, talk radio and the Fox News Channel have launched a nasty attack on the family of Graeme Frost, a 12-year-old Maryland boy who appeared in a Democratic radio commercial endorsing the SCHIP program. He and his younger sister, both victims of a terrible car accident that left the little girl with permanent brain damage, have both needed federal assistance because their parents were unable to afford private insurance. Certain conservative bloggers and pundits, seeking to prove that the Frost family is too affluent to qualify for SCHIP assistance, have harassed them, their neighbors and their co-workers. They have spread myths and lies about the family, their house and the schools that their children attend. And they have made repeated telephone calls to the Frost home, demanding answers to questions about their personal finances.
It doesn’t seem to occur to any of these strict Christian moralists that the Frosts have enough trouble trying to care for their disabled daughter, or that the state of Maryland, under the SCHIP regulations, has determined that the Frost children are fully eligible for the help they obviously need. Let us not hear again from these mean-spirited people about “family values” or “compassionate conservatism.”
Such is the devolution of conservatism in our time—from a philosophy concerned with overweening state authority to a movement that bullies children in the name of freedom.
Joe Conason writes for the New York Observer.
The Washington Bubble
Cenk Uygur, Smirking Chimp
Oct 18 2007
George W. Bush has finally caught Richard Milhous Nixon. It was a historic race but Bush has finally caught him from behind. George Bush now stands at a 24% approval rating in the latest Zogby poll. That is the same approval rating that Richard Nixon had the day he walked out of the White House in shame.
This president is deeply, consistently and historically unpopular. Yet, we still can’t break through to the Washington bubble. The country can’t stand this president. They think he is incompetent, uncaring and dangerous. Meanwhile, Congress and the DC media elite still think the best solution is to move toward the president rather than away from him.
This boggles the imagination. How can the Senate Democrats decide today to strike a deal with the president to give the telecommunication companies retroactive immunity for the laws that they have broken? How can they possibly think that agreeing with a president at 24% approval rating is a good idea? Let alone, necessary. Necessary? Are you kidding me?
Meanwhile in the House, Democrats backed down from tougher FISA legislation because Republicans wanted to vote on an amendment saying that disagreeing with the president on this issue meant you were giving into Osama bin Laden. Literally. They wrote that into the amendment. Have you seen anything so politically craven and pathetically obvious?
And this actually worked. It stopped the Democrats in their tracks. You knuckleheads, why don’t you write an amendment back that says, “Giving away American citizens’ liberties and rights is exactly what Osama bin Laden wants most of all, so anyone who votes against our bill loves Osama!”
If they’re going to be children about this, hit them back with what I learned in third grade, “I am rubber, you are glue. Whatever you say bounces off of me and sticks to you.”
Come on, please don’t tell me that you’re still scared of these guys. The Republicans in Congress are running for the hills. They can’t leave Congress fast enough. Seventeen Republican Congressmen and Senators are hightailing out of town before they get their ass handed to them in the next election. Hastert indicated today that he doesn’t even have the stomach to stay for the rest of his term (and that’s saying a lot).
And Bush is at 24%. 24%! He is polling as the most unpopular president of all time. He’s caught Nixon as Nixon was heading out the door. They should be having hearings on how to throw the bum out of office, not on how to cave in to him. Do you have any common sense at all?
Meanwhile, David Broder and David Ignatius are still writing columns about what a great idea it would be for the Democrats to compromise with the president. The deans of the decrepit, useless DC media tell us that the best answer to the country’s great frustration is to go closer to the president, not farther away. Are they nuts?
The middle of this country does not lie between Dick Cheney and Hillary Clinton. The DC establishment is obsessed with civility and neutrality to the point that they are paralyzed into subservience. And they disguise that subservience as so-called moderation.
Meeting Dick Cheney and George Bush halfway is not moderation, it is madness. It is radicalism. It is deeply unpopular. It is terrible politics and terrible policy.
You can’t argue that the halfway point between George H. W. Bush and the Democratic Congress of 1990 is the same place as the halfway point between George W. Bush and the Democratic Congress of 2006. The middle of the two parties is not always the right answer! It depends on context, it depends on the situation, it depends on where the parties lie at the time. But you need a brain to figure that out, not a slavish, thoughtless adherence to “neutrality” and “centrism.”
I am a centrist. I lie between the George H.W. Bush administration and the 1990 Congress. At this point, that place in the political spectrum is way to the left of the current Democratic party. And it’s miles away from George W. Bush. You’ve already gone so far right, you’re about to fall off the map. The American people are trying to warn you. And the Washington bubble keeps on insisting on going further right.
When is this bubble going to burst? When are the people in charge of this country going to realize they have run this ship aground and the American people are frustrated and furious? If 24% doesn’t do it, what will? Does the president have to be at 11%? 3%?
What will it take to wake up Washington? Stop following this man. Stop caving in to him. Stop listening to his silly threats. Stop moving toward him. Start moving away from him as soon as you possibly can. The American people are waiting, in the real center of the country.
“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
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October 19th, 2007
There are some things … many, actually … that continue to startle me about this period in history. WHAT keeps the momentum going on the Bush coup? WHAT can a man with a national approval rating of 24% — a man who turns himself into a stand-up comedian every time he opens his mouth, who no longer commands respect or even attention and certainly not from any of the Pub candidates seeking to replace him, a man who is transparently and embarrassingly a “legend in his own mind” — still perpetrate on an awakened electorate if they decide they want none of it?
WHAT the hell’s STILL wrong with Kansas???? [That's an ich bin ein Kansan question.]
And for that matter, WHAT the hell’s wrong with PELOSI????
Here’s the non-sense of the day … FISA, Mukasey, our new HHS nazi … articles by McGovern and Froomkin … an interesting collection.
Jude
Senate and Bush Agree On Terms of Spying Bill
Some Telecom Companies Would Receive Immunity
Jonathan Weisman and Ellen Nakashima, WaPo
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Senate Democrats and Republicans reached agreement with the Bush administration yesterday on the terms of new legislation to control the federal government’s domestic surveillance program, which includes a highly controversial grant of legal immunity to telecommunications companies that have assisted the program, according to congressional sources.
Disclosure of the deal followed a decision by House Democratic leaders to pull a competing version of the measure from the floor because they lacked the votes to prevail over Republican opponents and GOP parliamentary maneuvers.
The collapse marked the first time since Democrats took control of the chamber that a major bill was withdrawn from consideration before a scheduled vote. It was a victory for President Bush, whose aides lobbied heavily against the Democrats’ bill, and an embarrassment for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who had pushed for the measure’s passage.
The draft Senate bill has the support of the intelligence committee’s chairman, John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), and Bush’s director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell. It will include full immunity for those companies that can demonstrate to a court that they acted pursuant to a legal directive in helping the government with surveillance in the United States.
Such a demonstration, which the bill says could be made in secret, would wipe out a series of pending lawsuits alleging violations of privacy rights by telecommunications companies that provided telephone records, summaries of e-mail traffic and other information to the government after Sept. 11, 2001, without receiving court warrants. Bush had repeatedly threatened to veto any legislation that lacked this provision.
Senate Democrats successfully pressed for a requirement that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court review the government’s procedures for deciding who is to be the subject of warrantless surveillance. They also insisted that the legislation be renewed in six years, Democratic congressional officials said. The Bush administration had sought less stringent oversight by the court and wanted the law to be permanent.
The domestic surveillance issue has been awkward for Democrats since the administration’s secret program of warrantless counterterrorism surveillance became public in late 2005. In August, a coalition of Republicans and dissident Democrats passed a measure backed by the White House that put that program on firm legal ground by expressly permitting the government to wiretap foreign targets without a court order, including, under certain circumstances, when those targets are communicating with people in the United States.
But Democratic leaders insisted that the law expire in February, so they could try again to impose more restrictions on the administration’s ability to spy domestically. Most Democratic lawmakers and party members — backed by civil libertarians and even some conservatives — wanted the new legislation to ensure for example that future domestic surveillance in foreign-intelligence-related investigations would be overseen by the foreign surveillance court. The court was created in response to CIA and FBI domestic spying abuses unmasked in the mid-1970s.
But conservative Democrats worried about Republicans’ charges that the Democratic bill extended too many rights to suspected terrorists. “There is absolutely no reason our intelligence officials should have to consult government lawyers before listening in to terrorist communications with the likes of Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda and other foreign terror groups,” said House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio).
The measure “extends our Constitution beyond American soil to our enemies who want to cut the heads off Americans,” said Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.).
An adroit Republican parliamentary maneuver ultimately sank the bill. GOP leaders offered a motion that would have sent it back to the House intelligence and Judiciary committees with a requirement that they add language specifying that nothing in the measure would apply to surveilling the communications of bin Laden, al-Qaeda or other foreign terrorist organizations.
Approval of the motion would have restarted the legislative process, effectively killing the measure by delay. Democratic leaders scrambled to persuade their members to oppose it, but with Republicans accusing Democrats of being weak on terrorism, a “no” vote proved too hard to sell, and so the bill was pulled from the floor.
Stacey Bernards, a spokeswoman for House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), called the Republican maneuver “a cheap shot, totally political.”
Caroline Fredrickson, director of the Washington legislative office of the American Civil Liberties Union, called it a “perfect storm” of progressive Democrats who did not think the bill protected basic constitutional rights and of Republicans who took advantage of the lack of unity. “It was too precipitous a process, and it ended up in a train wreck,” she said. “It was total meltdown.”
The House bill contained safeguards against spying on U.S. citizens that the Bush administration said would have interfered with its national security investigations. Some liberals, on the other hand, complained that it still allowed the surveillance of Americans to occur without individual warrants.
It would have empowered the special surveillance court to issue warrants allowing the government to intercept for up to one year the phone calls and e-mails of groups of foreign targets, such as al-Qaeda or Hamas, without requiring that the surveillance of each person be approved. If the foreign target of the surveillance was calling a person in the United States significant enough also to be deemed an intelligence target, then an individual warrant would be required, as provided under past law.
The bill would have required the court to review the government’s surveillance procedures to ensure that they were designed to target only people outside the country. Such reviews could be delayed up to 45 days after surveillance began in emergencies. It also would have barred warrantless physical searches in the United States, including of homes, offices, computers and medical records, and made clear that the National Security Agency and the CIA could not eavesdrop on targeted Americans, even those abroad, without a traditional court warrant.
It was unclear late yesterday whether similar provisions are included in the Senate version of the bill that attracted bipartisan support from lawmakers and key intelligence officials.
The Senate deal was reached after the White House made available to the intelligence committee some of the documents underlying the administration’s post-Sept. 11 warrantless surveillance program, to encourage the panel to include the telecommunications immunity provision.
Democrats warned yesterday that the Senate intelligence panel’s consensus bill must gain the approval of the Senate Judiciary Committee, whose chairman and ranking Republican have said, like their House counterparts, that they are wary of granting immunity to telecommunications companies.
In June, the Judiciary Committee subpoenaed the documents underlying the warrantless surveillance program, and Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) and ranking Republican Arlen Specter (Pa.) said they wanted to see those documents before endorsing any immunity clause. “I’m not going to buy a pig in a poke and commit to retroactive immunity when I don’t know what went on” in the past, Specter said Tuesday on CNN’s “Situation Room.” “I agree with Arlen,” Leahy said on the program.
Mukasey’s Testimony Answers, Raises Questions
Maya Schenwar and Matt Renner, t r u t h o u t | Report
Thursday 18 October 2007
During his Senate confirmation hearing Wednesday, Judge Michael Mukasey, President Bush’s nominee for attorney general, dodged controversial questions related to the CIA’s use of torture and the federal government’s domestic surveillance program.
Democrats in the Senate did not prod Mukasey for detailed answers.
Mukasey received strong support from powerful Democrats and made statements that set him apart from his combative and controversial predecessor, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.
Throughout the hearing, Mukasey returned to his notion of the attorney general as an agent for the Constitution, not a pawn of the administration. “Legal decisions and the progress of cases are decided by facts and law, not by interests and motives,” said Mukasey in his opening statement. Under questioning by Sen. Arlen Spector (D-Pennsylvania), Mukasey later added that, should the president flout his advice and violate the Constitution, he would be prepared to resign his position. “I would have two choices,” he said. “I would either try to talk him out of it, or I would leave.”
Mukasey’s pledge of independence will be tested almost immediately as Congress probes the president’s warrantless spying program, the firing of US attorneys, and the rights and treatment of prisoners held at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility.
Spy Powers
Congress is in the process of revising a hastily passed law that greatly expanded the president’s power to conduct surveillance. Bush has demanded that Congress give retroactive immunity for telecommunication companies who may have broken the law by giving the Bush administration access to their networks.
During his confirmation hearing, Mukasey seemed to disagree with Bush on this point, saying, “The president can’t immunize illegality.”
Mukasey ducked the majority of questions regarding the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), saying he has not yet been informed about the Bush administration’s spying program.
However, Mukasey made clear he does not necessarily agree with critics of the Bush administration who claim the president acted improperly in circumventing the law by allowing warrantless surveillance. Mukasey quoted former Carter administration Attorney General Griffin Bell’s interpretation of FISA, saying the “Limits of FISA do not reach the limits of presidential authority. There is some gap between where FISA left off and where the Constitution permits the president to act.”
Congressional Contempt
As attorney general, Mukasey would have the responsibility of enforcing Congressional statutory contempt citations. Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said he would not allow Congressional contempt citations targeting Bush administration officials to reach a Grand Jury.
In July, the House Judiciary Committee took the first step in charging White House chief of staff Joshua Bolton and former White House counsel Harriet Miers with contempt of Congress for failing to provide testimony and documents for the Committee’s ongoing investigation into the firing of nine US attorneys. The resolution passed by the Committee awaits a vote by the full House.
Mukasey was asked about his willingness to enforce Congressional contempt charges by Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Mukasey could not give a direct answer and instead explained the decision would be made by “the Executive,” if Congress acts.
“Unless the US attorney can say that it was unreasonable for the person that is proposed to be held in contempt to have relied on a privilege or an order of the president, that person cited for contempt can’t be found to have had the state of mind necessary to warrant charging her or him with criminal contempt. And, therefore, that evaluation is going to have to be made by the Executive when as and if it happens,” Mukasey said, adding, “I hope and pray for a lot of things. One of them is that I don’t ever have to make that decision.”
However, there is a strong possibility that Mukasey will be forced to decide this issue as soon as next month. According to a report in Roll Call Newspaper on Wednesday, an unnamed Democratic aide said that the full House will likely vote on contempt charges in November. If the House Democrats vote together, the contempt citation will pass and will be Mukasey’s responsibility.
Guantanamo Detainees and Torture
Justice Department lawyers recently raised the prospect of a new round of hearings for Guantanamo Bay detainees. Mukasey’s views - and contentious past rulings - on that subject became another main focus of Wednesday’s hearings. In 2002, as a federal judge, Mukasey decided the case of Jose Padilla, the American citizen convicted of working with al-Qaeda to build a “dirty bomb,” ruling that Padilla could be detained indefinitely as an “enemy combatant.
When Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-California) asked Mukasey to clarify his position, he returned to his emphasis on law and precedent. “The authority of president to seize US citizens and detain them without charge, leaving aside for a minute where that happens, was in fact sustained at Hamdi,” Mukasey said, referring to the Supreme Court decision Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, which recognizes the government’s right to detain “enemy combatants” indefinitely. “Hamdi left open the question of where the battlefield is and who defines the battlefield,” Mukasey added.
Hamdi, however, also granted detainees the right to legal counsel, and in the Jose Padilla case, Mukasey allowed the prisoner access to a lawyer.
Mukasey told Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S. Carolina) he would be open to establishing a military tribunal to try detainees, “as long as we don’t compromise our ability to gather intelligence.” He added that, should a tribunal be established, he would be “uncomfortable” with any coerced testimony being used in trial.
The issues of coercion and torture set the grounds for a rare moment in the hearing, when Mukasey drew upon ethical considerations before legal ones. “We don’t torture not simply because it is against the law,” he said. “It is antithetical to everything this country stands for.”
Here Mukasey set a clear distinction between himself and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who, during his own confirmation hearing, did not deny the president’s authority to allow torture.
HHS APPOINTMENT
Birth-Control Foe To Run Office on Family Planning
Christopher Lee, WaPo
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
The Bush administration again has appointed a chief of family planning programs at the Department of Health and Human Services who has been critical of contraception.
Susan Orr, most recently an associate commissioner in the Administration for Children and Families, was appointed Monday to be acting deputy assistant secretary for population affairs. She will oversee $283 million in annual grants to provide low-income families and others with contraceptive services, counseling and preventive screenings.
In a 2001 article in The Washington Post, Orr applauded a Bush proposal to stop requiring all health insurance plans for federal employees to cover a broad range of birth control. “We’re quite pleased, because fertility is not a disease,” said Orr, then an official with the Family Research Council.
Critics panned the appointment last year of Eric Keroack, a physician who worked at a Christian pregnancy-counseling organization that opposed the use of birth control. He resigned in March.
“We have another appointment that just truly politicizes family planning,” said Mary Jane Gallagher, president of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association. “The last time I looked, both Republicans and Democrats used contraception in America.”
HHS spokesman Kevin Schweers said Orr’s “breadth of programmatic and managerial experience makes her highly qualified to serve as acting director.”
Pelosi And The NSA
Ray McGovern, TomPaine
October 16, 2007
[thanks, Eileen]
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has admitted knowing for several years about the Bush administration’s eavesdropping on Americans without a court warrant. She was briefed on it when she was ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee when President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney took office. But was she told that within days of their taking office, the National Security Agency’s electronic vacuum cleaner had already begun to suck up information on Americans—criminal law and the Constitution be damned?
In a Washington Post op-ed of Jan. 15, 2006, Pelosi, with a uniquely long tenure on the Intelligence Committee, acknowledged that she was one of the privileged handful of lawmakers who were briefed. Referring to her seniority as ranking member, she wrote in her Post apologia sans apology, “This is how I came to be informed of President Bush’s authorization for the NSA to conduct certain types of surveillance.” She then proceeded to demonstrate her remarkably—one might say unconstitutionally—subservient attitude toward the Executive Branch:
“But when the administration notifies Congress in this manner, it is not seeking approval. There is a clear expectation that the information will be shared by no one, including other members of the intelligence committees. As a result, only a few members of Congress were aware of the president’s surveillance program, and they were constrained from discussing it more widely.”
How did the American people react upon reading in the New York Times in December 2005 of this glaring infringement on their Constitutional rights? Most responded as they have been conditioned to react—out of the old fear-factor shibboleth: “After 9/11/2001, everything changed.”
Yes, just as after 2/27/1933, the night of the burning of the German Parliament (Reichstag) in Berlin, everything changed.
As Sebastian Haffner, a young German lawyer and insider wrote from Berlin at the time:
“What one can blame them [German politicians and populace] for, and what shows their terrible collective weakness of character, is that this settled the matter. With sheepish submissiveness the German people accepted that, as a result of the fire, each one of them lost what little personal freedom and dignity was guaranteed by the Constitution; as though it followed as a necessary consequence. If the Communists burned down the Reichstag, it was perfectly in order that the government took “decisive measures.”
—”Defying Hitler, a Memoir,” p. 121
And if the terrorists attacked on 9/11, it was perfectly in order that the Bush administration took “decisive measures” of similar kind. Shamefully, far too many American politicians exhibited sheepish submissiveness, when the White House PR machine pulled out all stops to exploit the trauma brought on by the attacks of 9/11.
Now we have learned that it is even worse. The eavesdropping abuses began as soon as the Bush administration came into office—well before 9/11.
In recent days, thanks to an enterprising reporter for The Rocky Mountain News, we find that the president, vice president and CIA director—not to mention the credulous crowd around Nancy Pelosi—have all been regurgitating a king-sized whopper aimed at providing “justification” for the NSA program. Administration PR consultants made this easy by inventing a clever—if retroactive—label to the program: The “Terrorist Surveillance Program.” Nothing to fear, folks, unless you’re telephoning or emailing Osama bin Laden.
Whopper? Well yes. It turns out that seven months before the threat of terrorism garnered much White House attention (despite the best efforts of then-counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke to install it on everyone’s screen-saver, so to speak), the administration instructed NSA to suborn American telecommunications companies to spy illegally on Americans.
At the time, the general counsel of Qwest Communications advised management that what NSA was suggesting was illegal. And to his credit, the then-head of the company stuck to a firm “No” unless some way was found to perform legally what NSA wanted done. Qwest’s rivals, though, took their cue from the White House, adopted a flexible attitude toward the law, and got the business. They are now being sued. Lawsuit filings claim that, seven months before 9/11, AT&T “began development of a center for monitoring long distance calls and Internet transmissions and other digital information for the exclusive use of the NSA.”
Adding insult to injury, draft legislation now being pushed by the White House would hold AT&T and other collaborators harmless for playing fast and loose with our right to privacy in order to enhance their bottom line. For its principled but, in government eyes, recalcitrant attitude, Qwest apparently lost out on lucrative government contracts.
Yes, Before 9/11
These illegal operations, including those prior to 9/11, were enabled by Michael Hayden, then head of NSA and now director of the CIA. Hayden has been out in front “justifying” illegal eavesdropping by what happened on 9/11. Did he know the illegal activities started before then? Of course; he was ordered to orchestrate them.
Did he know they were illegal? Another no-brainer. While director of NSA, Hayden had emphasized what had long been known as NSA’s First Commandment: “Thou Shalt Not Eavesdrop on Americans.”
But in testimony at his confirmation hearings, Hayden said that in the wake of 9/11 he “could not not do” what the president wanted him to do with the “Terrorist Surveillance Program.” The hypocrisy is well nigh unbearable.
Martinet
When the program was revealed in the press in late 2005, Hayden agreed to play point man with smoke and mirrors. (Small wonder that the White House later deemed him the perfect man to head the CIA.)
Nevertheless, a whiff of conscience showed through his nomination hearing, though, when he flubbed the answer to a soft-pitch from administration loyalist, Sen. Kit Bond, R-Missouri:
“Did you believe that your primary responsibility as director of NSA was to execute a program that your NSA lawyers, the Justice Department lawyers, and White House officials all told you was legal and that you were ordered to carry it out by the president of the United States?”
Instead of the simple “yes” that was in the script, Hayden paused and spoke rather poignantly—and revealingly: “I had to make this personal decision in early October 2001, and it was a personal decision…I could not not do this.”
Why should it be such an enormous personal decision whether or not to obey a White House order? No one asked Hayden, but it requires no particular acuity to figure it out. This is a military officer who, like the rest of us, had sworn to defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; a military man well aware of the strictures against obeying an unlawful order.
President George W. Bush assured us on Jan. 23, 2006, “I had all kinds of lawyers review the process.” Right. The same ones, no doubt, who were busy devising ways to “legalize” torture and indefinite detention without due process.
No American, save perhaps retired Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, who as NSA director was present at the creation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (and who has said the Hayden-approved activities are illegal), knew FISA better than Hayden.
Nonetheless, Hayden conceded that he did not even require a written legal opinion to satisfy himself that the surveillance program, to be implemented without warrant and without adequate consultation in Congress, could pass the smell test.
Small wonder that one of Hayden’s predecessors as NSA director, upon learning what Hayden had agreed to do, said angrily, “He ought to be court-martialed.”
And who was the NSA general counsel at the time? Robert L. Deitz, who is now a “trusted aide” to CIA Director Hayden. Deitz, we learn from recent news reports, has just been launched on an investigation of the CIA Inspector General—yes, that’s right, an investigation of CIA’s statutory Inspector General John Helgerson, who apparently does not fit in with the elastic ethos Hayden and his immediate predecessors brought to the agency.
It appears Helgerson is not a “team player,” resisting, as he has, the reintroduction of the Nixonian dictum “It’s legal if the president says it’s legal.” He has been taking his job too seriously for Hayden’s taste-conducting honest investigations into abuses like torture. Fortunately for Helgerson and the rest of us, Hayden cannot fire him, which is handy proof of the wisdom of having statutory inspectors general.
Congress’ Role, and Pelosi’s
What was Pelosi doing all this time?
When the illegal eavesdropping was exposed, many asked why the administration did not simply go to Congress to secure changes in the already flexible FISA law, if such were needed. In an unguarded moment at a press conference on Dec. 19, 2005, then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales let slip that the administration did take soundings in Congress:
“This is not a backdoor approach. We believe Congress has authorized this kind of surveillance. We have had discussions with Congress in the past—certain members of Congress—as to whether or not FISA could be amended to allow us to adequately deal with this kind of threat, and we were advised that that would be difficult, if not impossible.”
Dear Madam Speaker, were you one of those with whom Gonzales had discussions? Whether you were or you weren’t, in either case it appears you were derelict in your duty.
It is time to fish or cut bait. If the Bush administration did not inform you regarding eavesdropping on Americans before 9/11, you need to reflect now on what such disregard for the laws and Constitution on matters of this importance means for future of our republic, and cease covering up for the White House. Familiarize yourself with the orderly process the Founders wrote into the Constitution to address this kind of abuse of power. It is called impeachment; there is no reason to be afraid. You may wish to locate a copy of the Constitution and read Article II, Section 4:
“The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”
I cannot believe that, with your pedigree and schooling, you now forget the difference between the indicative and the subjunctive mood. The Founders did not. The Constitution does not say the president “may be” impeached, unless the speaker of the House decides for some reason to keep impeachment off the table. Given the long train of abuses and usurpations of this administration, you have no choice but to begin impeachment proceedings, Madame Speaker, if protecting our rights under constitutional government means anything to you.
If the Bush administration did keep you fully informed and, out of obeisance to the executive branch, you acquiesced and said nothing, you should lay down your duties as House leader forthwith and consider resigning from the House before you further endanger our freedoms
Bush: ‘I Am Relevant’
Dan Froomkin, WaPo
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
[open link for entire article]
A defensive President Bush insisted that he was still relevant this morning in a news conference dominated by his bitter complaints about the Democratic Congress.
Asked how he found himself vetoing a children’s health insurance bill that had passed Congress with bipartisan support, Bush insisted that using a veto is “one way to ensure I am relevant.”
When a reporter followed up and asked Bush if he felt he was losing leverage and relevance, Bush replied: “I’ve never felt more engaged and more capable of getting the American people to realize there’s a lot of unfinished business.”
Which, let’s be blunt, is hard to believe.
Everything you need to know about today’s hastily scheduled press conference was telegraphed by John Whitesides of Reuters:
“
Deepening unhappiness with President George W. Bush and the U.S. Congress soured the mood of Americans and sent Bush’s approval rating to another record low this month, according to a Reuters/Zogby poll released on Wednesday. . . .
“Bush’s job approval rating fell to 24 percent from last month’s record low for a Zogby poll of 29 percent. A paltry 11 percent gave Congress a positive grade, tying last month’s record low.”
“There is a real question among Americans now about how relevant this government is to them,” pollster John Zogby told Whitesides. “They tell us they want action on health care, education, the war and immigration, but they don’t believe they are going to get it.”
Bush has now tied President Nixon’s all-time low approval rating as measured by the Gallup Poll. But Congress is doing even worse.
“Congress has little to show for all the time that has gone by” since Democrats gained control in January of both the House and the Senate, Bush said.
At the end of the press conference, Bush celebrated what he called his “bully pulpit,” telling reporters “I was trying to get your attention focused on the fact that major pieces of legislation aren’t moving, and those that are, are at a snail’s pace. And I hope I did that. I hope I was able to accomplish that.”
An Epitaph for the Bush Era
Tom Engelhardt, The Nation
10/17/2007
“I made my arguments and went down in flames. History will prove me right.”
Yes, that was George W. Bush. No, he wasn’t talking about Iraq. The date was September 1993 and Bush, then managing general partner of the Texas Rangers, had voted against “realignment and a new wild-card system” at a Major League Baseball owners meeting. “Bush,” writes Jerry Crasnick of ESPN.com, “was the lone dissenter in a 27-1 vote.”
Skip a few years to February 2003, when Bush found himself involved in another owners’ meeting involving “realignment” — in this case, of the Middle East — and what was certainly an attempt to install a new “wild-card system.” Again, he cast his lone vote. At stake was the fate of the planet and, unlike in 1993, it didn’t matter, in the end, how the other owners, then gathering at the United Nations, voted.
The catastrophic results of this realignment effort, we now know well; that Bush again believes history will prove him “right,” we also know. Whatever documentation may exist for that 1993 baseball meeting, recently we received a striking document from February 22, 2003 — a transcript, published in the Spanish newspaper El País, of a conversation at the President’s “ranch” in Crawford, Texas, between Bush and Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar. This was less than a month before the President launched his invasion of Iraq. As recorded, his was a remarkable performance, a window into the Presidential mind — and, as with the famed Downing Street Memo when no one else in the mainstream was willing to publish it, the New York Review of Books is publishing this transcript, newly translated, in its upcoming issue. (It can now be read at the Review’s website.)
Mark Danner, who has covered the Iraq War and the Bush administration for the Review, has written an illuminating piece on what we can now see of a President, at the edge of an invasion, and eerily “at peace with himself.” More than four-and-a-half years and the same President later, it remains a chilling vision of the man the Supreme Court put in charge of what his followers once loved to hail as the planet’s “lone superpower,” its New Rome.
Danner concludes with this passage, which might be a painful epitaph for an era:
“Prime Minister Aznar is gone now, having been fatally weakened by his support for the Iraq war and the failure to obtain United Nations support for it; almost exactly a year after the war began, jihadists targeted the Madrid train station, killing nearly two hundred Spaniards and sending the prime minister to electoral defeat. Tony Blair, the star of the Downing Street Memo, is gone as well, his popularity having never recovered from his staunch support of the war. George W. Bush, on the other hand, nearly five years after he launched the war, remains confident of victory, just as he was confident he would win that second UN resolution. There is no sign that his confidence is any more firmly rooted in reality now than it was then. Instead of reality we have faith — in himself, in the deity, in ‘the unstoppable power of human freedom.’ He stands as lead actor in his own narrative of history, a story that grows steadily paler and more contested, animated solely by the authority of official power. George W. Bush remains, we are told, ‘at peace with himself.’”
“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.
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October 18th, 2007