The Crime of a Two-Tiered Justice System

In the context of the vapors experienced by the Beltway fainting virgins at the prospect of prosecuting torturers and murderers for, you know, torturing and murdering, Glenn Greenwald brings us an example of the kind of justice Smirky/Darth and their minions should be receiving.

Homeless man gets 15 years for stealing $100

A homeless man robbed a Louisiana bank and took a $100 bill. After feeling remorseful, he surrendered to police the next day. The judge sentenced him to 15 years in prison.

Roy Brown, 54, robbed the Capital One bank in Shreveport, Louisiana in December 2007. He approached the teller with one of his hands under his jacket and told her that it was a robbery.

The teller handed Brown three stacks of bill but he only took a single $100 bill and returned the remaining money back to her. He said that he was homeless and hungry and left the bank.

The next day he surrendered to the police voluntarily and told them that his mother didn't raise him that way.

Brown told the police he needed the money to stay at the detox center and had no other place to stay and was hungry.

In Caddo District Court, he pleaded guilty. The judge sentenced him to 15 years in prison for first degree robbery.

Fifteen years for feeling remorseful about taking a hundred-dollar bill. By that logic, 4,200-plus counts of pre-meditated murder ought to get Dubya and Dick 10 or 12 lifetimes hanging from a hook in the ceiling by their scrotums.

Greenwald goes into shameful detail about the American criminal injustice system's ludicrous over-sentencing of the powerless and its passes for the powerful. But here's the point:

Under all circumstances, arguing that high political officials should be immunized from prosecution when they commit felonies such as illegal eavesdropping and torture would be both destructive and wrong [not to mention, in the case of the latter crimes, a clear violation of a treaty which the U.S. (under Ronald Reagan) signed and thereafter ratified].

But what makes it so much worse, so much more corrupted, is the fact that this "ignore-the-past-and-forget-retribution" rationale is invoked by our media elites only for a tiny, special class of people -- our political leaders -- while the exact opposite rationale ("ignore their lame excuses, lock them up and throw away the key") is applied to everyone else. That, by definition, is what a "two-tiered system of justice" means and that, more than anything else, is what characterizes (and sustains) deeply corrupt political systems. That's the two-tiered system which, for obvious reasons, our political and media elites are now vehemently arguing must be preserved.

Read the whole thing.

Progressive Progress in the Economic Stimulus

As the Senate girds for battle over the repug-sabotaged economic stimulus, Talking Points Memo brings us a reminder of the progressive priorities that made it into the House bill and deserve saving in the Senate.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus just released a memo that offers a worthy counterpoint to our discussions today about the Republicans' baldly misleading message on the stimulus.

The Progressives have rounded up elements of their proposed $1 trillion stimulus that ended up making it into the Democratic leaders' final bill, in part or in whole. It's a list that's worth remembering while tax cuts seemingly dominate the airwaves.

The highlights of the memo:

• Unemployment benefits (UI) extension. Cost = at least $12.7 billion

• Anti-hunger provisions

* SNAP - 20% temporary increase in maximum food stamp level above the FY2009 level for two years. Cost = approximately $24 billion and increase in funds for state food stamp administrative costs Cost= $250 million;

* WIC - increase funding to make up for shortfall not covered in the current Continuing Resolution. Cost = $450 million and increases for management information system and related infrastructure improvements. Cost = $50 million;

* School meals - provide a 15% increase in funding for breakfast and school lunch programs. Cost = $1 billion;

• Medicaid payments to states (FMAP). Cost = at least $15 billion

• LIHEAP assistance to provide low-income Americans relief from higher energy costs. Cost = at least $5 billion

• Job creation via down payment on rebuilding America's infrastructure and schools, starting with massive investment in commercialization of green technologies and related job training that promote environmental protection and energy independence. Cost = at least $100 billion

** In general:

• No funds for Iraq or Afghanistan wars and no funds for defense procurement.

• Prevailing wage to be paid for jobs created and upholding of Davis-Bacon Act

These are, of course, just a downpayment on the long list of repairs to the New Deal and Great Society needed after three decades of repug destruction.

But if these provisions remain in the final bill and President Obama signs it by Darwin Day, then I'd say we're well on our way to recovery.

Some Bucking Up For Us Hand-Wringers

Bob Cesca at HuffPo reminds us that the repug rejection of the stimulus bill isn't the first time Barack Obama has seemed defeated, only to come roaring back in victory, and it probably won't be the last.

There's a killer web graphic that was created back in the post-Republican Convention days while everyone was writing spasmodic, breathless "Obama should [fill in the blank]" blog entries and "Oh crap! We're gonna lose!" newspaper columns.


SNIP

The web graphic is actually a photograph of Barack Obama from his Invesco Field acceptance speech. In it, he's looking directly into the camera with an expression of fierce determination on his face -- his teeth gnashed in an Eastwood snarl, his left hand gesturing as though he's kung fu fighting his way through an oversized cinderblock made of SlapChop-minced Republican skulls.

The large, white text superimposed at the top reads: "Everyone chill the fuck out." The text at the bottom exclaims: "I got this!"

Sure enough, two months later, we watched as this liberal African American man with the noble yet politically unusual name "Barack Hussein Obama" defied the odds and won red states like Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Indiana and the commonwealth of Virginia.

Fade out the roaring crowds at Grant Park. Dissolve to late January.
The economy continues to creep nearer to the crumbling ledge of yet another Depression -- if it isn't there already. And yet the Republicans who very nearly shoved us over the ledge are prancing around as if their collective Reaganomics don't stink.

SNIP

Their political audacity, while never surprising, always seems to confound expectations and defy logic. Having relegated themselves to the status of a regional, minor party due to their unserious, fear-mongering wedge politics and well-documented record of disastrous policy-making, they remain so hubristic as to crap their cages and demand a seat at the Big Boy Table, as if they're the majority party in Congress -- as if they somehow earned an equal voice in this thing by way of their awesome record on the economy.

They haven't. It's only due to the magnanimity of the president that they haven't been completely steamrolled on this recovery bill. Magnanimity which, by the way, isn't nearly as plentiful or renewable as the Republicans might think.

SNIP

Altogether, it might appear as if the Republicans are using their ridiculousness as a means of duping the president -- hectoring him into capitulation and therefore allowing the recovery bill to be sabotaged with their taint. And when the sabotaged bill fails to help the economy, they'll blame the president. David Sirota outlined this strategy the other day, and while events might seem to point in this direction from time to time, there isn't much evidence to indicate that President Obama is naïve enough to be flimflammed by these very obvious Republican political tricks. Put another way, if you and I can spot the scams, I'm sure he can too. Though, it's important that the Republicans think they can sucker punch the president the same way they've sucker punched Senator Reid over and over.

The president's "I won" remark indicates that there's a limit to both his benevolence and his tolerance for Republican silly season hackery. "I won" means that he won't be played and he won't be taken advantage of. But the Republicans have miscalculated and misinterpreted the president, believing that "bipartisanship" means Democratic capitulation. Save for a few concessions in an otherwise massive spending bill, President Obama isn't calling for any half-and-half bipartisan compromise on this or anything else so far. His process with the Republicans is all about attaining some civility in the tone of the debate -- not caving. There's a difference. And in that process, the president is looking increasingly presidential as his style is contrasted against the smallness of the Republicans.

Recent history has proved that the president's Chess Match style will require a little more patience than we're accustomed to in order to see the endgame -- to see how this all plays out. And while it's crucial to keep a clear eye and critical mind, there's a lot of comfort in that web graphic from last September. Chances are: he's got this.

Read the whole thing.

Insult to Injury

The day after the state announced that Kentucky's unemployment rate in December hit the highest level in 20 (twenty) years, the same department announced that 19 county unemployment offices - including Louisville - are unable to process claims because of power failures.

President Obama Makes His First Bill A Great One

As Salon's Joan Walsh recommends, watch this all the way to the end. This is what classy looks like.

President Obama Is Too Nice to Kentucky

President Barack Obama is a much better person than I could ever be. If the Democratic governor of a Democratic-registered state that had nevertheless voted overwhelmingly for my republican opponent in the last election begged me for help to get his backward state out of an emergency they had basically created themselves, I would not have been this nice:

President Barack Obama last night approved Gov. Steve Beshear's request for an emergency Presidential Disaster Declaration that will expedite assistance to people in need across the commonwealth.

"President Obama called me last night to express his concern about the plight facing our state and many of our people. I appreciate the president's quick response to our request for a disaster declaration," Gov. Beshear said as he traveled throughout Western Kentucky to meet with local officials and survey damage to the region. "We will move quickly to bring power generators, communications equipment and debris removal equipment into the region to help restore power and protect our people in their time of need."

No, indeedy, I would not have been nice at all. I would have said something like this:

"Well, Steve, I see the mess you're in and it certainly is a nasty one. But I notice Kentucky had almost exactly the same mess six years ago, and its Democratic leaders made all kinds of promises about burying power lines to make sure this never happened again. Kentucky didn't keep a single fucking one of those promises, did it, Steve? Nope, it sure didn't. And here you are, in a shit hole any idiot could have predicted would happen again with the next ice storm.

"I really would like to help you, Steve, but I've got these Congressional republicans, including four house members and two Senators with KY next to their names, raking me over the coals for wanting to give money to people who don't deserve it. You know, people who promise to do better but don't, people who waste the opportunities they're given to improve themselves. I would just have a hard time explaining to Mitch and Jimbo and Eddie and Hal and Geoff and Brent why I'm helping that notorious welfare queen Kentucky when we all know she's never going to change her behavior.

"And even if I didn't care what the republicans thought, I've got the actual Democratic majority in Congress that would throw a hissy fit if I gave federal emergency status to a state the majority of whose registered Democrats voted just three months ago to re-elect the obstructionist, evil republican minority leader in the Senate.

"So you have my sympathy, Steve, but my hands are tied. See if you can't get your state to sit up straight and fly right for a while, and maybe elect a few actual Democratic candidates next year, then we'll see about letting you have a little money. Until then, you're on your own."

As a Kentuckian with no electricity since Tuesday and no hope of getting any in the foreseeable future, I am grateful that President Obama did not turn his back on the sure-to-be-ungrateful Commonwealth. But I wish he had found some way of using the Declaration to cudgel some sense into our state's so-called leaders.

Cross-posted at BlueGrassRoots.

No Such Thing as a Power Outage

I love it when the universe delivers an engraved, personal invitation to me to rant about a pet peeve.

There is no such thing as a power "outage." It's a power failure. When the power fails, that's a power failure.

Decades ago, power company public relations hacks fooled, lied, pressured and threatened newspapers into calling power failures "outages." Power "failure" sounded way too much like the truth: the power failed. The power company is not omnipotent; it can fail, and does fail - far too frequently. Can't have people thinking that. They might start wondering why they're paying way too much money for something that often fails.

The power didn't "out," like a gay teenager. It failed. Fail, failed, failure. Failure, Failure, FAILURE.

It's especially a power failure when the power fails more than 607,000 people in Kentucky - an all-time record for the state.

The failure is not just of the utility companies, but also of the Public Service Commission, the General Assembly and the Governor, who all FAILED to prevent this catastrophe by forcing the utility companies to bury the power lines.

Although many individuals and entitites share this failure, it remains a failure. A power failure.

Do NOT let anyone get away with using the out-word.

It's a power FAILURE.

Cross-posted at BlueGrassRoots.

First KY Stimulus Project: Bury the Power Lines

There are 500,000 people - 1/8 the entire population - without electricity in Kentucky this morning. Temperature is 25 degrees, dropping into the teens by Friday night.

They are without power - the light switch kind and the political kind - for one reason, and it's NOT the weather.

They are without power because 90 percent of the electric lines in this state are swinging naked 20 feet in the air, taunting giant tree branches that take every opportunity to rip those smart-ass suckers right out of the grid.

I've lived in this state more than 40 years, and every year it's the same refrain: Bury the power lines! It's too expensive! All you silly people who expect the lights to go on in return for the outrageous utility bills you pay: FUCK YOU!

Ice storm, heavy snow, tornado, hurricane remnants, suicide squirrels - overhead power lines are begging for catastrophe, and catastrophe is what we've got.

No, I don't think the taxpayers should cover the cost of something Kentucky Utilities, Louisville Gas and Electric, and all the rural cooperatives should have paid to do decades ago.

I think Kentucky should get stimulus money to bury all the lines, do it ourselves, then force the companies to reimburse us.

Every dime. Plus 10 percent interest per year for the 60 years they've been putting off burying the lines themselves.

Cross-posted at BlueGrassRoots.

Why Obama Can Never Please the Repugs

Because, as the Rude Pundit explains so clearly, the repugs are motherfuckers, and it's ridiculous to expect them to do any other than fuck their mothers.

We don't know what Barack Obama actually said to Republican members of Congress in his closed-door meetings with them yesterday regarding his stimulus plan. But we do know one thing for sure: it accomplished nothing. This is the way it's gonna go, and if you've paid attention at all, you know the steps: Obama will concede shit and Republicans will ask for more (even though they already got more tax cuts than anyone fucking needs), Obama will concede more shit and Republicans will ask for more (even though they're gonna get the family planning funding taken out), Obama will concede more shit and Republicans will ask for more, and then when the vote comes, Republicans will vote against it, saying that no one listened to them and fuck that Obama for lying about bipartisanship. Yet the legislation will have passed in a watered down form from the deep infrastructure and other spending so desperately needed to, you know, create jobs, which will, you know, create taxable income, which will, you know, help actually pay for shit some day.

Obama better know a simple fact: they fucking hate him. Right now, Obama represents the fact that everything they believed was a complete failure. For making that clear to the American people, they fucking despise him. They hate his majority, they hate his coattails, they hate that all over the country people are supporting his ideas. Republicans have nothing right now, which means they have nothing to lose by trying to drag Obama into their pit of shit. They'll smile and say it was a good conversation, but they're waiting in the back halls of the Capitol to fuckin' shiv Obama and laugh while he bleeds. And try to force Americans back into their crooked arms.

That's the thing about motherfuckers. You can tell them, "Okay, you can fuck your mothers, but only for an hour a day." They might agree, but sure as you're reading this, the second they walk away, they will...well, by now, you know.

Obama's damn near the smartest sumbitch in the country right now, and a hell of a poker player. So I still hold out hope that Obama does know this, and that he is giving the repugs rope so that at the last minute, after they reject even his most generous overtures, he can whip the real stimulus legislation out, get it passed by the dems, sign it and tell the repugs to fuck off and die.

Eeek! The Guantanamos Are Coming!

Jon Stewart completely demolishes the fainting-virgin panic over closing Guantanamo.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Guantanamo Baywatch - The Final Season

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

Cratering economy puts even Habitat homes out of reach

You know the economy is completely in the toilet when applications for low-cost, no-interest-loan Habitat homes are down.

From the Bowling Green (KY) Daily News:

They just want to help people get homes - but a plunging economy has made that task more difficult for local Habitat for Humanity officials.

"We are in the business of helping people have homes," said Don Ritter, secretary of the board and chairman of the family selection committee. "We really want to help them have a home, that's what we're about."

The number of qualified applicants for a Habitat home plummeted last year, leaving Habitat officials searching for local residents who can apply.

"We are desperately wanting to get applications," Ritter said. "We're trying to find people who might possibly qualify for a home."

When Ritter began working with the family selection committee about five years ago, about 25 people applied for a Habitat home. Last year, the organization received just four applications.

"And this is the part that hurts," Ritter said. "They all failed the test."

To receive a Habitat home, applicants must meet three basic qualifications: They must need a home; they must be willing to help construct their home; and they must be able to make payments on the home.

"These are not giveaway homes," Ritter said. "These are homes people purchase with a non-interest loan from Habitat."

The ability to purchase a home is one qualification some might lack in the midst of rising unemployment.

"The economy, I'm sure has been hurting us some," Ritter said, "and it's probably getting worse."

SNIP

But the local branch is not the only Habitat organization suffering from a lack of applicants.

Mendoza said he contacted Habitat's state executive director, who said others are experiencing a decrease in applications, and neighboring organizations are "going through the same issues," he said.

SNIP

The city recently donated five lots to Habitat, and the organization is eyeing a few prospects, who hopefully will apply, Mendoza said.

"Right now is a perfect time to buy," he said. "People are just holding back."

What Do You Want on Your License Plate?

Ralph Long, the go-to blogger on the Kentucky General Assembly, has a suggestion for defusing the latest attempt by freakazoids to turn Kentucky into a Talibantastic theocracy.

Regarding two house bills that say precisely the same thing (why isn't legislative redundancy at least a misdemeanor carrying jail time?):

AN ACT relating to motor vehicle license plates. Create a new section of KRS Chapter 186 to establish an In God We Trust license plate as an alternate standard issue license plate; set forth design characteristics and eligibility standards; amend KRS 186.240 to conform; EFFECTIVE January 1, 2010

Long writes:

And finally under the redundant, why are they wasting time on this again, classification we have the burning need to change automobile license plates.

Here’s a suggestion, let’s allow anyone to put anything they want on a motor vehicle license plate, as long as the person is willing to pay for the plate. Kentucky can be the Café Press of state license plates.

Yes! Make mine read: "In the Flying Spaghetti Monster We Trust." Or "Put Not Your Faith in Invisible Sky Wizards." Or "My Physicist Can Beat Up Your God."

Long concludes: "I'm sure this idea will offend someone, freedom of speech usually does."

If I may add for the Constitutionally-impaired: it's not freedom of speech if people who disagree with it don't have access to the same forum. A bumper sticker reading "Steve Beshear is a Repug-Fellating Coward" is free speech. A license plate reading "In God We Trust" is government establishment of religion.

Cross-posted at BlueGrassRoots.

Not a Miracle: Science, Training, Experience and Unions Trump the Sky Wizard

mir·a·cle
1: an extraordinary event manifesting divine intervention in human affairs
2: an extremely outstanding or unusual event, thing, or accomplishment
- Merriam-Webster Dictionary

The near-perfect ditching of Flight 1549 last week and the almost casualty-free rescue of its passengers and crew was not a miracle. Nope, not even by that second definition.

Rather, it was perfect vindication for those of us who put our faith not in invisible sky wizards, but in science and technology, big-government regulation, union-demanded training and experience, professionalism and humanity.

Rachel Maddow opened her show the day after the "crash" emphasizing just this reality.

It is good fortune and individual skill and heroism and pluck that explains yesterday‘s happy ending, but it is also testament to us having some good systems and some good institutions in place—to mitigate damage, to maximize people‘s options in worst-case scenarios, to ensure that people who could encounter worst-case scenarios are trained to deal with them, to respond quickly, to avoid panic.

These systems, professional accreditations, regulations, code enforcement, disaster preparedness, training, equipment, you know what this stuff is? This is the backbone of our national resilience—our ability to handle the unexpected, to be ready for worst-case scenarios, to react with speed and intelligence, to be able to react effectively when disaster strikes.

This type of resilience does not happen on its own. It is the product of us investing in being resilient as a nation and communities. And that kind of investment is often overlooked, it‘s taken for granted until something like this incredibly dramatic story happened like it did yesterday, until an airplane blows out two engines over the Bronx somewhere and winds up gliding just barely over the George Washington Bridge and coming down safely into a New York City river.

So, as all of the inevitable and necessary “what went wrong” investigations get underway now, it may also be smart and useful to look at what went right yesterday. What we can learn from what happened. How we can use those lessons to become a more resilient country.

Her guest, Stephen Flynn, a retired Coast Guard officer, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of "The Edge of Disaster: Rebuilding a Resilient Nation" elaborated:

And all of this basically suggests how important it is that we think about being prepared as a society and investing in the kinds of things that we must have when things go wrong, because they do go wrong from time to time. What a contrast this was—wasn‘t it—between the president, last night, giving a speech, taking credit for seven years of keeping us safe from another act of terror, there‘s no question that that‘s a good thing.

But all the things that we saw on display in New York harbor yesterday were not things that we‘ve been investing at the federal level. And we haven‘t spending a lot of time building the local capability. We haven‘t spent a lot of time informing citizens of what to do when thing go wrong. We haven‘t done the kinds of training, and in some cases, regulation we need to make sure that things that are really critical in our society bend but don‘t break when things go wrong from time to time.

Slate's "Ask the Pilot" Patrick Smith provides a probable tick-tock of the crash, emphasizing the crew skills that made a "miracle" unnecessary.

I'm rather uneasy at calling them heroes. Nothing they did was easy, but on the whole they did what they had to do, what they were trained to do, and what, we should hope, most other crews would have done in that same situation. I reckon Sullenberger and Skiles would readily admit as much. Not out of false modesty but out of due respect for their colleagues everywhere. It was not heroics that saved the day; it was, to use a word I normally dislike, professionalism.

And remember this:

Captain Sullenberger, First Officer Skiles and the three flight attendants are all members of strong, independent unions. Captain Sullenberger was the chair of the Airline Pilots Association's safety training committee. He also had served many times on accident investigation teams deployed by the National Transportation Safety Board, a federal government regulatory agency.

So the next time somebody bitches about big unions and big government, tell them that the 150 people on Flight 1549 have the power of unions and the power of federal government regulation to thank for their lives.

Cross-posted at BlueGrassRoots.

Not a Miracle: Science, Training, Experience and Unions Trump the Sky Wizard

mir·a·cle
1: an extraordinary event manifesting divine intervention in human affairs
2: an extremely outstanding or unusual event, thing, or accomplishment
- Merriam-Webster Dictionary

The near-perfect ditching of Flight 1549 last week and the almost casualty-free rescue of its passengers and crew was not a miracle. Nope, not even by that second definition.

Rather, it was perfect vindication for those of us who put our faith not in invisible sky wizards, but in science and technology, big-government regulation, union-demanded training and experience, professionalism and humanity.

Rachel Maddow opened her show the day after the "crash" emphasizing just this reality.

It is good fortune and individual skill and heroism and pluck that explains yesterday‘s happy ending, but it is also testament to us having some good systems and some good institutions in place—to mitigate damage, to maximize people‘s options in worst-case scenarios, to ensure that people who could encounter worst-case scenarios are trained to deal with them, to respond quickly, to avoid panic.

These systems, professional accreditations, regulations, code enforcement, disaster preparedness, training, equipment, you know what this stuff is? This is the backbone of our national resilience—our ability to handle the unexpected, to be ready for worst-case scenarios, to react with speed and intelligence, to be able to react effectively when disaster strikes.

This type of resilience does not happen on its own. It is the product of us investing in being resilient as a nation and communities. And that kind of investment is often overlooked, it‘s taken for granted until something like this incredibly dramatic story happened like it did yesterday, until an airplane blows out two engines over the Bronx somewhere and winds up gliding just barely over the George Washington Bridge and coming down safely into a New York City river.

So, as all of the inevitable and necessary “what went wrong” investigations get underway now, it may also be smart and useful to look at what went right yesterday. What we can learn from what happened. How we can use those lessons to become a more resilient country.

Her guest, Stephen Flynn, a retired Coast Guard officer, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of "The Edge of Disaster: Rebuilding a Resilient Nation" elaborated:

And all of this basically suggests how important it is that we think about being prepared as a society and investing in the kinds of things that we must have when things go wrong, because they do go wrong from time to time. What a contrast this was—wasn‘t it—between the president, last night, giving a speech, taking credit for seven years of keeping us safe from another act of terror, there‘s no question that that‘s a good thing.

But all the things that we saw on display in New York harbor yesterday were not things that we‘ve been investing at the federal level. And we haven‘t spending a lot of time building the local capability. We haven‘t spent a lot of time informing citizens of what to do when thing go wrong. We haven‘t done the kinds of training, and in some cases, regulation we need to make sure that things that are really critical in our society bend but don‘t break when things go wrong from time to time.

Slate's "Ask the Pilot" Patrick Smith provides a probable tick-tock of the crash, emphasizing the crew skills that made a "miracle" unnecessary.

I'm rather uneasy at calling them heroes. Nothing they did was easy, but on the whole they did what they had to do, what they were trained to do, and what, we should hope, most other crews would have done in that same situation. I reckon Sullenberger and Skiles would readily admit as much. Not out of false modesty but out of due respect for their colleagues everywhere. It was not heroics that saved the day; it was, to use a word I normally dislike, professionalism.

And remember this:

Captain Sullenberger, First Officer Skiles and the three flight attendants are all members of strong, independent unions. Captain Sullenberger was the chair of the Airline Pilots Association's safety training committee. He also had served many times on accident investigation teams deployed by the National Transportation Safety Board, a federal government regulatory agency.

So the next time somebody bitches about big unions and big government, tell them that the 150 people on Flight 1549 have the power of unions and the power of federal government regulation to thank for their lives.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....

Detainee Released by Bush Then Attacked U.S. Embassy

You read that right. A terrorist released from Guantanamo two years ago at the order of then-president George W. Bush later bombed an American embassy.

The emergence of a former Guantanamo Bay detainee as the deputy leader of Al Qaeda's Yemeni branch has underscored the potential complications in carrying out the executive order President Obama signed Thursday that the detention center be shut down within a year.

The militant, Said Ali al-Shihri, is suspected of involvement in a deadly bombing of the United States Embassy in Yemen's capital, Sana, in September. He was released to Saudi Arabia in 2007 and passed through a Saudi rehabilitation program for former jihadists before resurfacing with Al Qaeda in Yemen.

As Steven Benen notes:

I get the idea behind reports like these -- Guantanamo has housed some dangerous folks, and if we let them go, they'll do dangerous things. Therefore, we better not let them go, and Obama should rethink all of his recent announcements.

Except, the evidence doesn't match the conclusion. Obama isn't saying that he wants to just open the Gitmo doors, he saying he wants to review the pending cases and present evidence against the bad guys as part of a legal process. Ali al-Shihri returning to al Qaeda isn't evidence of a flawed Obama process, it's evidence of a flawed Bush process. Why did Bush let a dangerous guy this guy go? Did Bush's team not consider, I don't know, bringing charges against him before setting him free?

The same is true with the incessant media fascination with the 61 former Guantanamo Bay detainees who've since become alleged terrorists. First, the confirmed number is 18, not 61. Second, even that number isn't considered entirely reliable.

And third, again, the argument about how this relates to Obama is flawed. As Atrios noted, it wasn't Obama's policy that led to their release. The administration created this nightmare at Guantanamo, which was supposedly necessary for U.S. national security. What do we have to show for the former president's efforts? A series of bad guys who went free, and many more bad guys we'll struggle to prosecute because the Bush administration broke the law and tortured them.

As John Cole noted, "The moral of this story is not the danger for Obama going forward with his Gitmo decommissioning, the moral is that when venal, shallow, small men are given unfettered power and authority, they do incompetent, stupid, and evil things."

Glenn Greenwald takes the argument further.

All of this is pure fear-mongering -- the 2009 version of Condoleezza Rice's mushroom cloud and Jay Rockefeller's "we'll-lose-our-eavesdropping-capabilities" cries. Both before and after 9/11, the U.S. has repeatedly and successfully tried alleged high-level Al Qaeda operatives and other accused Islamic Terrorists in our normal federal courts -- in fact, the record is far more successful than the series of debacles that has taken place in the military commissions system at Guantanamo. Moreover, those convicted Terrorists have been housed in U.S. prisons, inside the U.S., for years without a hint of a problem.

SNIP

Both pre- and post-9/11, there are numerous other individuals who have been convicted in U.S. civilian courts of various acts relating to terrorism inspired by Islamic radicalism, including many alleged to be high-level Terrorists, who are now serving sentences inside the U.S., in U.S. prisons. Moreover, terrorists accused of being members of Al Qaeda and affiliated groups have been successfully tried in the regular courts of other countries -- including Britain and Spain -- and currently sit in those countries' regular prisons, without a whiff of a problem.

If it were really the goal of Terrorists to attack American prisons where their members are incarcerated and if they were actually capable of doing that, they already have a long list of "targets" and have had such a list for two decades. If U.S. civilian courts were inadequate forums for obtaining convictions of Terrorism suspects, then the above-listed individuals would not be imprisoned -- most of them for life -- while the Guantanamo military commission system still has nothing to show for it other than a series of humiliating setbacks for the Government. As is true for virtually every fear-mongering claim made over the last eight years to frighten Americans into believing that they must vest the Government with vast and un-American powers lest they be slaughtered by the Terrorists, none of these claims is remotely rational and all of them are empirically disproven.

SNIP

The crime for which Omar Abdel Rahman was convicted and for which he's currently serving a life sentence in Colorado is the February 26, 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, of which Rahman was the alleged "mastermind." That terrorist attack took place just seven weeks after Bill Clinton was inaugurated, but after that attack -- to use the Beltway parlance -- Clinton kept us safe, for the rest of his presidency. No more foreign Terrorist attacks on the Homeland. It wasn't until Clinton left the Oval Office and George Bush became President were Islamic Terrorists able to strike the Homeland again.

Therefore, using the reasoning of Bush followers everywhere, this means that Clinton's counter-terrorism policies -- i.e.: trying accused Terrorists in civilian courts and incarcerating them in U.S. prisons -- have been proven to be extremely effective in keeping us safe (since, as any beginning student of Logic will tell you: if A precedes B, then it means that A caused B -- as in: A = "waterboarding, torture and GITMO," and B = "no Terrorist attack on U.S. soil from 2002-2008"). Using that same "logic": A = "trying Terrorists in civilian courts and imprisoning them in the U.S.," and B = "no foreign Terrorist attacks in the U.S. from February, 1993 through the end of the Clinton presidency

Smirky/Darth, their accomplices and their apologists are desperate to prevent people from discovering just how much danger their Excellent Iraq Adventure placed the nation in, and uncovering the full extent of their crimes.

It's now obvious that every argument - every argument - made in defense of the bush maladministration is at best deluded and more likely a pack of lies.

Don't let them get away with it.

Cross-posted at BlueGrassRoots.

Saving Lives Instead of Destroying Them

This afternoon, President Obama cancelled a bush maladministration policy that cost lives in numbers to rival the six-figure casualties of the Iraq clusterfuck.

The "global gag rule" reversed by Obama did far worse than its usual description of "denying funds to organizations that mention abortion."

The rule, in actual practice, forced rural health clinics that served impoverished families in Africa, Asia and South America to close down altogether. One raped 11-year-old saved from a lethal pregnancy put at risk all the life-saving vaccinations and medications and surgeries needed by the thousands served by a single clinic.

This is why the claims, even on the left, that Smirky's "AIDS policy" was one good thing to his credit, are utter bullshit.

If rural clinics in Africa closed for lack of funding that Bush withheld because the clinics distributed factual information about birth control, abortion and using condoms to prevent HIV transmission, then Smirky's "AIDS policy" was not saving people, it was killing them.

The "Mexico City" policy prohibits US dollars and contraceptive supplies from going to any international family planning program that provides abortions or counsels women about their reproductive health options. The policy isn't about money going to pay for abortions. Even those groups that use only private funds for abortion services -- where abortion is legal -- are barred from assistance. This is money going to family planning programs. [...]

[N]ot only are organizations that provide or counsel about abortion services affected; those that dare to take part in a public discussion about legalizing abortion are also affected (hence the name "global gag rule").... This policy has nothing to do with government-sponsored abortions overseas. Ten years before the gag rule was in place the law strictly prohibited that. This policy is about disqualifying prochoice organizations from receiving US international family planning funding.

Under Bush's policy, organizations that play a vital role in women's health are forced to make an impossible choice. If they refuse to be "gagged," they lose the funding that enables them to help women and families who are cut off from basic health care and family planning. But if they accept funding, they must accept restrictions that jeopardize the health of the women they serve.

The most tragic ramifications have been felt in the developing world. In Kenya, for example, two of the leading family planning organizations have been forced to shut down five clinics dispensing aid from prenatal care and vaccinations to malaria screening and AIDS prevention. Kenya's experience is common, according to "Access Denied," a report on the impact of the global gag rule on developing nations. Researchers found that programs for rural communities and urban slums have been scaled back by as much as 50 percent. As a result more women are turning to unsafe abortion -- a leading cause of death for young women in much of Africa -- because they lack access to family planning information and essential contraceptive supplies.

As Steve Benen noted earlier, "In the 1990s, the United States helped lead on international family planning, promoting sustainable development, empowering women, and saving lives. If Obama acts today to end the gag rule, we can again."

Any policy that directly results in people not receiving life-saving health care is not just ineffectual. It's homicidal. Or in this case, genocidal.

That goes for abstinence-only "education" and the pope's edict that it's better to die of AIDS than use condoms. Pure, unadulterated genocide.

Cross-posted at BlueGrassRoots.

Real Bipartisanship

The indispensable Rude Pundit explains how bipartisanship should work in the Obama era. (Warning: X-rated)

Well, of course Barack Obama took the oath of office again. The man knows who he's dealing with: the petulant little fucks of the right who will do anything they can to invalidate his presidency.

SNIP

Here’s what bipartisanship meant to Republicans: let’s say a Republican and a Democrat are stuck on a desert island. The Republican knows how to survive in the wild, the Democrat knows how to build a raft. They need each other, right? They’re stuck there, and while they may hate each other, they gotta work together or they’re gonna die on the island. While the Democrat is, you know, building the raft, the Republican is gathering coconuts, keeping the fire lit, you know, that kind of shit. It’s all nice and cooperative. And then, when the raft is done, the Republican slits the throat of the Democrat, eats his flesh, drinks his blood, and uses his bones and his clothes for a sail. Bye-bye, island.

Here’s the Rude Pundit's deal: we’ll be bipartisan if you apologize. Not just an eye-rolling “We’re sorry.” Not good enough. We each need to come up with a way for Republicans to apologize. For the Rude Pundit, it’s simple. Blow jobs. He wants to get blow jobs from Republicans. Every time he meets a Republican, he wants to just point at his cock and have them nod, get on their knees. And blow him.

I'll take public professions of belief in and support for evolution, gay marriage, secular humanism, abortion on demand, drastic measures to reverse global warming, and the prosecution of George W. Bush for Desertion of his Military Post in a Time of War.

How do you want repugs to demonstrate bipartisanship?

Read the whole thing.

Cross-posted at BlueGrassRoots.

The Nobel Peace Prize for Pete Seeger

I had the privilege, many years ago, of seeing Pete Seeger in concert. I even heard him sing the same "forbidden" verses of "This Land is Your Land" that he sang for Obama's Inauguration. And yes, the crowd back then - dirty fucking hippies all - wept as we sang along, because it was the Reagan Era, and Pete reminded us of the values we thought were gone.

Now that peace and social justice are coming back into style, Peter Rothberg at The Nation writes that it's time to honor one of the movement's last living legends.

This past Sunday, Pete Seeger became the oldest person to perform publicly as part of Barack Obama's inauguration festivities.

Singing the "greatest song about America ever written" (Bruce Springsteen's words) before 500,000 people and tens of millions more on television, the 89-year old legend crooned two little-known verses of his friend Woody Guthrie's 1940 patriotic standard, "This Land is Your Land" -- one about Depression-era poverty, the other about trespassing on private property -- restoring the song to its former glory over the sanitized version that ruled for so many years.

Watch the performance:



Seeger has been an inimitable ambassador for peace, social justice and the best kind of patriotism over the course of a remarkable lifetime. As a prominent musician his songs have engaged people, particularly the youth, to question the value of war, to ban nuclear weapons, to work for international solidarity and against racism wherever it is practiced, and to assume ecological responsibility.

A particular hero to the civil rights movement on whose behalf he worked so tirelessly, Seeger made his first trip south at the invitation of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1956, and returned in '65, again at King's personal invitation, to join the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. Amid the tension and heat, Seeger went from campfire to campfire when the march stopped for the night, raising people's morale with rollicking sing-alongs of new freedom songs.

One of the seminal political events in his life, and the one which solidified his intent to make actively combating racism a lifelong pursuit, was the 1949 Peekskill race riots. In this short video, Seeger recounts his experiences:



Without doubt the most influential folk artist of the past century, Seeger deserves at least one more moment on the world stage -- at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Norway. The prize is only bestowed on the living. Although still spry, Seeger turns 90 on May 3. And, as writer and activist Peter Drier writes on the Huffington Post, a Nobel Peace Prize would be "a fitting and much-deserved final tribute for the world's preeminent troubadour for peace and justice" and would serve as important recognition for the many progressive causes to which Seeger has lent his name.

To advance the idea, a new campaign has begun in earnest to persuade the American Friends Service Committee -- which is entitled to put forward submissions -- to enter Seeger as its nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize 2009. Join the cause by signing the petition asking the AFSC to nominate Seeger by the February 1 deadline and check out nobelprize4pete.org for more info on how you can help.

Dishonoring 9/11 Victims at Guantanamo

President Obama's order to suspend the ludicrous "military commissions" at Guantanamo came just after a heart-wrenching scene that illuminates just what torture George W. Bush has inflicted - not on detainees, but on the families and loves ones of those who died on 9/11.

Following Monday's hearings, the Office of the Military Commissions held a press conference with several 9/11 family members, who had reportedly been selected by lottery to travel to the base to attend the hearings. Visibly angry, and holding up large photographs of their relatives who died on 9/11, they appealed to President Obama to keep Guantánamo open.

"Today we were in the presence of true evil," said Donald Arias, who lost his brother Adam in the attack on the World Trade Center. "Mr. Obama needs to reexamine his decision and keep these tribunals going."

Joe Holland, who lost his son in the World Trade Center, trembled with rage as he took the podium.

"My name is Joe Holland and I lost my son in 9/11," he said. "When I said I was coming down here, people asked me what they could do. I said, 'Write a letter to Obama saying that this place should stay open.'"

When journalists asked Holland about the possibility of trying the 9/11 suspects in federal court, he replied, "No, right here, at Guantánamo," then excused himself from the podium as he fought back tears.

One of the most horrific acts committed by George W. Bush is the cruel trick he played on the loved ones of 9-11 victims.

In their names, he justified a "war on terror" that has accomplished nothing but increase global terror and make this nation far more vulnerable to terrorist acts.

In their names, he bungled the search for bin Laden, allowing the actual 9/11 criminal to escape and remain free for more than seven years.

In their names, he launched an illegal war against one of bin Laden's greatest enemies, thus giving great aid and comfort to the person who killed their loved ones.

In their names, he authorized torture that made it impossible to try and convict bin Laden's captured confederates.

In their names, he did nothing to assuage their loss, but instead everything to ensure that no one actually responsible would ever pay for the crime of 9/11.

If you must write to Obama on behalf of the loved ones of the victims of 9/11, then write to demand he prosecute the people in the recent maladministration who have spent the last seven years desecrating their memories.

Cross-posted at BlueGrassRoots.

If Only They Could Have Been There

Talking Points Memo has been posting readers' take on the inauguration of President Obama. This one hit me hardest.

From TPM Reader MJ ...

As an African-American, there is, of course, a sense of pride, but its certainly one tempered by a sense of loss.
I still remember the stories from 2004, when the Red Sox won the World Series, and Bostonians...one of the first things they did was go to Cemeteries and lay Red Sox hats and gear over the graves of loved ones. It was a way of saying "even though you are not here, you are a part of this" and "we want you to be a part of this.

That's an almost silly demystification of the incredibly complex feelings that most African-Americans are going through right now. Black people will not be laying Obama hats on gravesites. And note that I said going through, as if to suggest a sense of survival or endurance.

There is joy, no doubt. You're seeing it on the TV right now. Inevitably thoughts turn to those not here, about the African-Americans who actually walked the walk, the ones who marched, the ones who suffered under not just the lash of Jim Crow, but the lash of actual slavery, even if their faces and the names remain lost to us in time. Those are the people who inevitably deserve this moment the most, to see that their sacrifice, their pain, produced the America we were told about, but never quite could believe in.

The distance between that America, and the America we actually live in dissolved in a flash, and most African-Americans, myself included, are still not certain what that means. That's why one of the first things that so many people did was call relatives, call family, just call other black people. We went out to find meaning in each other, in each other's loss. We did this because there were so many people we couldn't call, couldn't talk to.

"So and so would have loved to have seen this..."

"Could you imagine if so and so had been alive to see this??"

But the joy is real. The sense of pride and pain that are so much a part of this day is why the joy is so palatable. We are celebrating for so many others. It's why if you watch CNN right now, you see people in the crowd already dancing in the streets (Martha Reeves and the Vandellas).

In the end, though, this is an American moment, no matter you came to it, even if you didn't vote for its existence. I wish there was something pithy or poetic I could say that could wrap this up in fine style, but the enormity of the task that lay before us saps both words and strength. I'll let the final word be the President Elect's.

Obama Must Prosecute Bush War Crimes

Keith Olbermann's Monday night Special Comment:



Here's the transcript.

In Case You Missed It

Media Czech has the transcript.

Second Time as Farce

It's so reassuring that Lexington never learns from history. Once a generation, it it destroys a historic downtown landmark so young people can appreciate the aesthetic and cultural value of a giant empty shithole.

Twenty-seven years before developers raped and murdered The Dame block for a Cock-and-Balls Tower that will never be built, Wallace "The Weasel" Wilkinson demolished the two-century-old Phoenix Hotel.

The site that would become the Phoenix Hotel originally housed Postlethwaite's Tavern, which was constructed in 1800. Several name changes occurred between 1800 and 1820, one of which was to Wilson's Tavern, which was visited by Col. Aaron Burr in 1806. The Phoenix Hotel opened on this site in the 1820s. [1] After it was established, the hotel quickly became a well-known landmark. As a prominent structure closely linked with travelers and tourism in the early history of the city, it helped to give Lexington the reputation that led it to be called "Athens of the West".

The Phoenix Hotel was demolished in 1981 by Wallace Wilkinson, who planned to use the site to construct the World Coal Center skyscraper. This was never constructed, and is considered the largest failed development in the cityscape of Lexington. In its place, the Park Plaza was opened in 1987, followed by the construction and opening of the modern-day Phoenix Park.

Correction: the World Coal Center used to be the largest failed development in the cityscape of Lexington.

"Daddy, why is there a trash dump the size of a whole city block on Vine Street?"

"That's a monument, son. A monument to greedy, lying developers and the politicians who worship them."

Media Czech interviewed Lexington Mayor Jim Newberry at the Bluegrass Ball in D.C. last night and got the scoop.

Asked about if he's happy with CentrePointe's progress, he says yes. Blamed the citizens for its delay and said that construction will resume in the next couple of weeks.

I asked him if he knows who is financining the Webb's project, unlike anyone else in Lexington. He said he's confident that they have funding. Asked if he knows who it is or if the Webb's have shown him the financing. He says he has no idea, gave a flat no. Face getting a little nervous.

Asked if he's running for re-election in 2010- says he doesn't know, and he'll decide within the next 6 months.

I asked him about the email he sent criticizing the "media" and fellow citizens for opposing and questioning CentrePointe. Refused to elaborate on it at all. Asked him why he sent it out. Said that the media was spreading lies about it, and he wanted to counteract that with the truth (snort!)

ASked why this project will be different from all the other hotel projects around the country that are going belly up. Says that Marriot knows what they are doing, and it won't suffer half capacity like the other hotels because it serves the "higher end" folks.

Asked him if he regretted how he presented CentrePointe, surprising both citizens and council members. He said he regreted nothing, and he fully briefed the council on it before he presented it to the city. (oh REEEEEALLY?)

He said it won't be built by the 2010 Equestrian Games, and he NEVER said or implied that it would be ready by then. Hmmm.

Asked what he thought about how Lexington looked downtown with the big crater. This is big: He said that it will look good once CentrePointe OR SOMETHING ELSE is there. He then said it again: CentrePointe or SOMETHING ELSE. I noted that he said something else twiced and asked him if he thought it's possible that it will be something other than CentrePointe. He gave a flat angry NO and cut off the interview right there.

I'll make an easy prediction here. The carcass of the Dame will sit there abandoned and rotting for at least seven years - a year longer than the Phoenix languished.

And twenty years later, Dudley Webb, from his bed in the dementia unit of some stinking nursing home, will persuade yet another Lexington mayor that he can save the city with an expensive skyscraper.

All we have to do it let him demolish Ashland, Henry Clay's home.

Cross-posted at BlueGrassRoots.

Oaths Have Consequences

In the eight years since Dubya committed perjury when he swore to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America, we seem to have forgotten that the Presidential Oath of Office is not an introduction to a speech, but a legal, enforceable oath.

Through eight years of dictatorial rule by an imposter placed in office by a judicial coup, we've forgotten that the president has actual duties he must fulfill or be removed from office and prosecuted for malfeasance.

Hilzoy explains how the Oath of Office binds Barack Obama to constitutional duties ignored by Smirky/Darth and why those duties give him no choice but to prosecute George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzales and their whole mob organization for war crimes.

Some Facts For Obama To Consider

(1) According to Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution, the President "shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed".

(2) According to Article VI of the Constitution, "This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land".

(3) The United States is a party to the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.

(4) As Dahlia Lithwick reminds us, the Convention Against Torture not only prohibits torture, it imposes a set of affirmative obligations on its parties.

SNIP

It seems to me that these facts imply that if Barack Obama, or his administration, has reasonable grounds to believe that members of the Bush administration have committed torture, then they are legally obligated to investigate; and that if that investigation shows that acts of torture were committed, to submit those cases for prosecution, if the officials who committed or sanctioned those acts are found on US territory. If they are on the territory of some other party to the Convention, then it has that obligation. Under the Convention, as I read it, this is not discretionary. And under the Constitution, obeying the laws, which include treaties, is not discretionary either.

On Thursday, Eric Holder, Obama's nominee, for Attorney General, stated categorically in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, countless television cameras, the FSM and everybody:

"No one is above the law."

That doesn't just mean that neither the new president nor any member of his administration may break the law or undermine the Constitution. It means they have the affirmative duty to enforce the law, including international treaties.

Failing in that duty - breaking his Oath of Office - in the name of "moving forward" or "bipartisanship" or "changing the tone" or getting 80 votes for the economic stimulus is a crime in and of itself for which brand-new President Obama would deserve impeachment.

Not prosecuting Bush war crimes is not an option.

Read the whole thing.

Cross-posted at BlueGrassRoots.

Because It's Still Not Over

And because we must swear eternal vigilance against every form of bush-worship rationalization over the facts of history:

There’s one final myth about this President that the Rude Pundit would like to put to rest: George W. Bush is not a man you would want to have a beer with. No, not because if you saw him in a bar, you'd react like you had gone on the sex offender registry in Dallas and discovering that a guy who fucked babies in his basement was now living in the downstairs apartment. It's that, despite any feints at finding him charming, he is not, in his soul, a kind or decent person.

SNIP

The Rude Pundit doesn't drink with irredeemable dickheads, with self-righteous balls of fuck who think their very existence demands your respect and attention, with privileged cockmongers who can't manage even a moment of self-awareness.

SNIP

Yet we can't just bury this presidency alive in the cold, cold ground and have a picnic on the earth above it, joyously toasting as it screams and claws and tries to get free before it inhales dirt, gags, vomits, and dies horribly, not knowing why it deserved such an awful fate. No, alas, no.

Because the reason I will unreasonably hate this man, these men, these women, as human beings, and not just for ideologies and actions, is because neither I nor most of you will live to see the day that all their hurt is healed.

Read the whole thing.

"The resilience of our democracy"

I have long been among those who warned that Smirky/Darth will not give up power willingly. Their many crimes, known and unknown, made it essential that they create some kind of national emergency to suspend the election or overturn its results.

They'll attack Iran, we said. They'll fake an attack from North Korea. They'll do anything, except accept a peaceful transfer of power, especially to a Democrat.

In this, as in so many things, Barack Obama has proven himself more of a believer - more faithfully American - than the rest of us.

Together, we know that this is a time of great challenge for the American people. Difficult days are upon us, and even more difficult days lie ahead. Our nation is at war. Our economy is in great turmoil. And there is so much work that must be done to restore peace and advance prosperity. But as we approach this time-honored American tradition, we are reminded that our challenges can be met if we summon the spirit that has sustained our democracy since George Washington took the first oath of office.

Addressing the nation that day, Washington explained his decision to serve, saying, “I was called by my country, whose voice I can never hear but with veneration and love.” This Tuesday, we can reaffirm our own veneration and love for our country and our democracy. We can once again provide an example to the world, and move forward with a renewed sense of purpose and progress at home.

Read the transcript.

"A small, small man"

Hilzoy reviews Smirky's 2000 Inaugural address and reflects on what it means today.

He's a small, small man, who ought to have spent his life in some honorary position without responsibilities at a firm run by one of his father's friends. Instead, he ruined our country, and several others besides. He wasted eight years in which we could have been shoring up our economy, laying the groundwork for energy independence, making America a fairer and better country, and truly working to help people around the world become more free. Instead, he debased words that ought to mean something: words like honor, decency, freedom, and compassion.

To this day, I do not think he has the slightest conception of the meaning of the words he took in vain.

Sometimes, when I write things like this, people think I am trying to excuse Bush -- as though I cannot condemn him unless I take him to be a scheming leering monster. I disagree. I think that when someone who is not mentally incompetent gets to be Bush's age, if he has no conception of the meaning of honor or decency, he has no one to blame but himself. And to say of a person that he does not understand those things -- that he could stand before the nation and speak the words Bush spoke in 2000 with so little sense of what they meant that it's not clear that we should count him as lying -- is one of the worst things I think it's possible to say about a person.

Read the whole thing.

KDP Can't Wait to Lose Jim Bunning's Seat in 2010

Kentucky Senator Jim "Non-Compos Mentis" Bunning's seat would be an easy pickup for the dems in 2010.

Would be, that is, if the Kentucky "Democratic" Party lived on the same planet as the Democratic Party that elected Barack Obama in a historic landslide and gained eight Senate seats.

But the Kentucky "Democratic" Party managed to lose not only the presidential race to a republican ticket that lost Indiana, not only a U.S. Senate seat to a very vulnerable Mitch McConnell, but also every single congressional, state house and state senate race without a democratic incumbent.

In fact, the KDP has not lost this huge in the entire history of the state party.

Here on Reality Planet, that would have resulted in the mass resignations/firings/public executions of every party official and central committee member and a radical overhaul of the party machinery.

What do you think happened on Planet Kentucky-Democrats-Are-Worthless? Exactly. The same idiots who turned a 2-1 registration advantage into Unprecedented Failure are feverishly planning a rerun for 2010.

At BlueGrassRoots, Rdemocrat notes Lt. Governor Dan Mongiardo's recent gesture toward announcing his run, and considers him the likely front-runner, along with Sixth District Congressman Ben Chandler

Besides his 0-and-1 record against Bunning, Dr. Dan has several handicaps: liberal democrats won't vote for him because we have never forgiven him - and never will forgive him - for sponsoring the 2004 gay hate constitutional amendement. Conservative democrats won't vote for him because they still think he's gay, despite or possibly because of Mongiardo's recent marriage to a girl 25 years younger than him. Forget beating Bunning; Dr. Dan won't survive the primary.

The Democratic primary is likely to be the most crowded in decades. Page One Kentucky insists that the leading Democratic candidate is Attorney General Jack Conway, and they're probably right, but the list gets long after that: Auditor Crit Luallen, Lt. Col. Andrew Horne, House Speaker Greg Stumbo, Sixth District Congressman Ben Chandler, Third District Congressman John Yarmuth, Perennial Losing Candidate Bruce Lunsford, Loser to Lunsford Greg Fischer, disgraced former Lt. Governor Steve Henry, defeated former House Speaker Jody Richards, and possibly my auto mechanic.

Among those, Luallen would absolutely make the best Senator, but even the pleas of a million desperate Democrats will not persuade Luallen to run. She passed up easy election to the Governor's Office in 2007, proving she's not interested in higher office.

Chandler and Yarmuth are rising rapidly in the Democratic Congress and probably won't sacrifice that for a chance to be a Senate rookie.

Stumbo just beat Richards in a Speaker's race he had no chance to win, reminding us never to count Greg out of anything.

Lunsford, Fischer, Henry and Richards would run on pure ego, but losing huge has yet to deter any of them.

I have a soft spot for Horne, who would have beaten Mitch McConnell last year if he hadn't withdrawn from the primary under pro-Lunsford pressure from the DSCC and Governor Beshear.

I like Jack Conway, but the reports that he's the favorite of the same people who dumped Horne for Loser Lunsford worry me.

And if the RNC does succeed in pushing Bunning out of the race in favor of Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson, all bets are off.

Cross-posted at Watching Those We Chose.

Bush Legacy: Eight Years in Eight Minutes

Friday night, Keith Olbermann covered the Bush Legacy as only Keith can.

Why Didn't the Curse Get Bush?

A piece in Slate speculates on how George W. Bush escaped the Curse of Tecumseh.

The history, at least, is straightforward enough. Starting with William Henry Harrison, elected in 1840, eight American presidents elected at 20-year intervals have died (or almost died) in office. Harrison caught a cold and expired after just a month as president, the shortest tenure ever. Everyone knows what happened to Abraham Lincoln, elected in 1860. James Garfield, elected in 1880, lasted four months before Charles J. Guiteau, upset about not receiving an ambassadorship, shot him. William McKinley, re-elected in 1900, was shot by anarchist Leon Czolgosz. Warren G. Harding (1920) and Franklin D. Roosevelt (1940) died of natural causes. And the circumstances of John F. Kennedy's death, like those of Lincoln's, are well-known.

So what of this Tecumseh guy? In 1811, Harrison, commanding about 1,000 troops, defeated some American Indians in the Battle of Tippecanoe. Depending on who tells the tale, either Tecumseh, the defeated chief, or his brother, the prophet-cum-medicine man Tenskwatawa, issued a spiritual fatwa on the head of Harrison, predicting his death as president and then the deaths of presidents elected every two decades thereafter.

It concludes that Bush may have broken the curse which was, in any case, severely bent by Ronald Reagan's survival of an assassination attempt in 1981.

I disagree.

Personally, I never wanted to see Smirky/Darth assassinated, as such events tend to create martyrs out of the most undeserving victims. But if Bush had succumbed slowly, painfully and publicly of some horrific venereal disease I probably wouldn't have mourned much.

No, Smirky didn't break the curse. The curse didn't apply to him because he wasn't elected in 2000 - he was put in office through a judicial coup d'etat. The man who actually was elected president in 2000 never served in the office, and therefore the curse didn't apply to him, either.

If the curse is real, whoever's elected in 2020 is still at risk.

Cross-posted at BlueGrassRoots.

Quote of the Day

The Rude Pundit on Wednesday, at the end of a post on Cheney's "Torture? What Torture?" tour:

For so very long, torture had stayed out of the mainstream media. Once John McCain and Barack Obama declared they would both close Guantanamo, the issue was off the table for the duration of the campaign. Now that the Obama administration is coming in and members of the House and the Senate are threatening to investigate the Bush White House's actions, now that Obama had to put up or shut up on Gitmo, all of a sudden the media is treating the issue like it matters, like somewhere, hidden in a deep, dark place is this curled up, frightened little American soul and we're trying to figure out how to coax it out of the corner, wondering if we have earned the right to hold out our hands and say, "Come on out. It'll be okay."

Don't Believe the Lies: Court Did NOT Absolve Bush

The overarching lie used to falsely justify all of George Bush's domestic crimes, war crimes and treason is that of unlimited presidential authority.

Never mind Article One Congressional powers, never mind Separation of Powers, never mind Constitutional limits on the executive, for eight years it's been "because I'm the president and I said so!"

Thus he justified: breaking treaties, ignoring bin Laden and allowing 9/11, launching an illegal invasion, wiretapping and spying on innocent citizens, torture, rendition, detention and every other way he could imagine to shred the Constitution and shit diarrhea all over the remnants.

Now Smirky/Darth's slimy apologists are claiming a FISA Court decision has endorsed Bush's "if the president does it it's not illegal" theory.

Bullshit, as Steve Benen explains.

There's been some talk today that the FISA court has endorsed the notion that the president has the authority to engage in warrantless wiretaps. That's not what happened today, and the details matter.

SNIP

The decision has nothing to do with the president's inherent authority, and everything to do with Congress' ability to shape surveillance law, giving the White House far more authority than it was previously allowed.

Put another way, the case was about the legality of the Protect America Act. It cleared the court's examination. But as A.L. explained, this doesn't lend "credence" to the administration's legal arguments at all.

Quite the contrary. From the moment the NSA program was first disclosed in December of 2005, the issue has always been whether the president has the "inherent authority" to disregard a statute like FISA that purports to place restrictions on his ability to conduct surveillance of Americans. The Bush administration claimed it had such powers, despite overwhelming legal authority to the contrary. When Congress passed the Protect America Act, it statutorily authorized the President's subsequent surveillance activities, assuming he stays within the rather wide confines of that law. The court here has merely upheld Congress's prerogative to pass such a law.

There's nothing here that lends any credence whatsoever to claims of law-breaking authority made by the Bush administration over the last few years.

Several far-right blogs insisted today that Bush has been "vindicated" and was "right all along." That's simply not what happened.

Read the whole thing.

Cross-posted at Watching Those We Chose.

What the Pentagon Defines as Terrorism

It's a damn good thing the Pentagon is keeping track of what those detainees released from Guantanamo get up to after they get back home.

Some of them are ungrateful, recidivist and unrepentant enough to perpetrate vicious acts of terror like this one:

What the DoD actually counted as their "return to the fight" was-- I hope you're sitting down -- the fact that one of them published op-ed in the New York Times. Here is part of his act of war column:

"I learned my respect for American institutions the hard way. When I was growing up as a Uighur in China, there were no independent courts to review the imprisonment and oppression of people who, like me, peacefully opposed the Communists. But I learned my hardest lesson from the United States: I spent four long years behind the razor wire of its prison in Cuba.

I was locked up and mistreated for being in the wrong place at the wrong time during America's war in Afghanistan. Like hundreds of Guantanamo detainees, I was never a terrorist or a soldier. I was never even on a battlefield. Pakistani bounty hunters sold me and 17 other Uighurs to the United States military like animals for $5,000 a head. The Americans made a terrible mistake.

It was only the country's centuries-old commitment to allowing habeas corpus challenges that put that mistake right -- or began to. (...) Without my American lawyers and habeas corpus, my situation and that of the other Uighurs would still be a secret. I would be sitting in a metal cage today. Habeas corpus helped me to tell the world that Uighurs are not a threat to the United States or the West, but an ally. Habeas corpus cleared my name -- and most important, it let my family know that I was still alive.

Like my fellow Uighurs, I am a great admirer of the American legal and political systems. I have the utmost respect for the United States Congress. So I respectfully ask American lawmakers to protect habeas corpus and let justice prevail. Continuing to permit habeas rights to the detainees in Guantanamo will not set the guilty free. It will prove to the world that American democracy is safe and well."

Well, now we know why Smirky/Darth fought so hard to eliminate the 800-year-old principle of habeas corpus: It's a terrorism tactic.

If only King John had known.

Celebrate the Inauguration With a Day of Service

So you can't get to D.C. for the Inauguration of a Lifetime. You can, however, honor the star of that event by responding to his request that you join him on Monday for a Day of Service in your own community.



Click here to find a Martin Luther King Day volunteer service event in your community.

I used it to search for volunteer service events within 50 miles of my rural Kentucky home and got a list of 60 from a wide variety of organizations.

Find an event near you, and get this administration started off right.

Destroy the Village to Save It

TPM picks up the latest evidence that Mitch McConnell is making the fatal error of thinking President-Elect Obama is stupid.

Republicans roll out new plan to revive the economy by destroying Social Security ...

Mr. Obama has told Republicans he is open to suggestions, and Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said his conference would urge Mr. Obama to consider a two-year suspension of payroll taxes to benefit individuals and corporations.

Mr. McConnell said Senate Republicans were intensely interested in the idea, which was presented at their own weekly lunch by Lawrence B. Lindsey, who was President Bush's top economic adviser from 2001 to 2002, and John H. Makin, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research.

If Mitch McConnell and the rest of the repugs had to choose between destroying terrorism and destroying the New Deal, they'd pick the latter in a heartbeat.

The Right Way to "Move Forward"

edger makes the case for pushing Obama hard to name a special prosecutor for Bush/Cheney war crimes and treason.

Yesterday George Will, of all people, was comparing Obama refusing to prosecute Bush and Cheney to Ford pardoning Nixon.

If a far right crazed wingnut can get it right, why can't the rest of us?

This comparison is one that we can use to good effect, but only if we do it continuously and loudly.

He's got the evidence, the passion, Jane Hamsher and The Petition.

Read the whole thing, then, in the immortal words of Blue Girl: Sign the fucking petition already!

Simple Answers to Stupid Questions

It's going to be tough enough for the next few years fighting the already widespread lies about Smirky/Darth's true legacy to the nation and the world. The last thing we need is pseudo-progressives doing the wingnuts' work for them by publishing fake critiques that perpetuate the bushies' lies.

Granted, Jake Weisberg has been for years one of the most gullible and least insightful "journalists"on the subject of Smirky/Darth, the Iraq clusterfuck, the War On A Noun and destructive repug idiocy in general, but this really takes the cake.

As George W. Bush once noted, "You never know what your history is going to be like until long after you're gone." What I think he was trying to say is that, over time, historians may evolve toward a more positive view of his presidency than the one held by most of his contemporaries.

No, what he actually was saying is "as I have done for my entire life, I'm going to escape accountability, not to mention punishment, for my many war crimes and acts of treason."

At the moment, this seems a vain hope. Bush's three most obvious legacies are his decision to invade Iraq, his framing of a global war on terror after Sept. 11, and the massive financial crisis. Each of these constitutes a separate epic in presidential misjudgment and mismanagement.

No, the Iraq clusterfuck, delcaring war on a noun to justify torture and shredding the Constitution, and destroying the economy are not, by any stretch "misjudgment and mismanagement." They are major crimes and acts of treason.

It remains a brainteaser to come up with ways, however minor, in which Bush changed government, politics, or the world for the better. Among presidential historians, it is hardly an eccentric view that 43 ranks as America's worst president ever. On the other hand, he has nowhere to go but up.

No, there's a long, long fall to the eternal damnation Smirky has richly earned. After he's arrested, tried, convicted and imprisoned, spent decades getting his anus dry-reamed with a barbed dildo by the family members of dead American soldiers and marines, and become a curse in the mouths of former supporters who blame him for the complete distruction of the republican party, THEN we can talk about whether he has anywhere to go but up.

In a different sense, however, Bush's comment has some validity to it.

No, nothing Smirky says has "validity" except in the sense of incriminating evidence.

We do not know how people will one day view this presidency because we, Bush's contemporaries, don't yet understand it ourselves.

No, those of us with functioning reasoning capacity and an ounce of personal and professional integrity understand it perfectly well. It's only sniveling apologists like Jake Weisberg who pretend they don't understand.

The Bush administration has had startling success in one area—namely keeping its inner workings secret. Intensely loyal, contemptuous of the press, and overwhelmingly hostile to any form of public disclosure, the Bushies did a remarkable job at keeping their doings hidden for eight years.

No, it's been pretty fucking obvious to most of us for at least three years exactly what is and has been going on in the overlowing toilet that used to be the White House, despite the efforts of the repug dupes and cowardly transcribers of the Village to pretend otherwise.

Probably the biggest question Bush leaves behind is about the most consequential choice of his presidency: his decision to invade Iraq.

No. This question was answered in Ron Suskind's 2004 book, in which Smirky/Darth started planning to invade Iraq about 35 seconds after the Inauguration.

When did the president make up his mind to go to war against Saddam Hussein?

January 20, 2001. And it was never a "war." It's an illegal invasion.

What were his real reasons?

Dictatorial power. He admitted as much when he said his father didn't get re-elected because he ended the Gulf War instead of keeping it going forever.

What roles did various figures around him—Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Condoleezza Rice—play in the actual decision?

For pity's fucking sake, Weisberg, have you read nothing but Harry Potter for the past five years? Shit, even that repug tool Woodward managed eventually to document all of this.

Was the selling of the war on the basis of WMD evidence a matter of conscious deception or of self-deception on their part?

Again, read a fucking book. To name just one, Fiasco proves irrefutably that it was deliberate deception.

Bob Woodward, Ron Suskind, and I recently debated in Slate the issue of how much we really know about Bush's biggest decision. Woodward, the author of four inside accounts of the Bush administration, believes that we do know the most important facts. He argues that Bush decided to invade Iraq in January 2003, that the reason was 9/11, and that Bush himself was the real decision-maker. Suskind and I argued that we don't know really how, when, or why the decision was made—though we suspect it was much earlier. By the summer of 2002, administration officials and foreign diplomats were hearing that Bush's course was already set.

Wrong. January 2001, as Suskind himself documented. What kind of pharmaceuticals were distributed at this "debate?"

The disputed dates and details go to the most interesting larger issues about what went wrong during the Bush years.

No, they don't, and no, they aren't disputed, except by tools, apologists and accomplices.

Did Bush's own innocence and incompetence drive his missteps?

He's neither innocent nor incompetent, and they aren't missteps. He's a psychopath, and what he did are high crimes and acts of treason.

Or was it the people around him, most importantly his vice president, who manipulated him into his major bad choices? On so many issues—the framing of the war on terrorism, the use of torture, the expansion of executive power—it was Cheney's views that prevailed.

Darth's evil does not absolve Smirky's eager treason. To say Cheney "manipulated" him is like saying I "manipulated" my dog into eating his favorite snack.

Yet at some point, perhaps around the 2006 election, Bush seems to have lost confidence in his vice president and stopped taking his advice.

So what and who cares? These are Smirky's crimes and treason, from beginning to end. Darth has his own crimes and treason for which he must pay. Stop trying to muddy each with the other.

To reckon with the Bush years, we need to understand what went on between these two men behind closed doors.

Oh gag. I just ate.

Yet despite some superb spadework by journalist Barton Gellman and others, we know very little about Cheney's true role. We have seen few of the pertinent documents and heard little relevant testimony. Congressional investigations and litigation have shed only the faintest light on Cheney's role in Bush's biggest blunders.

Wrong, irrelevant and stop calling murder and treason "blunders."

The same is generally true of Bush's most important political relationship, with Karl Rove, and his most important personal one, with his father. Only with greater insight into these connections are we likely to be able to answer some of the other pressing historical questions. To what extent was Bush himself really the driver of his central decisions? How engaged or disengaged was he? Why, after governing as a successful moderate in Texas, did he adopt such an ideological and polarizing style as president? Why did he politicize the fight against terrorism? Why did he choose to permit the torture of American detainees? Why did he wait so long to revise a failing strategy in Iraq?

Bleeding baby jeebus. Smirky has done everything to acquire power, authority and popularity without work, responsibility or accountability. He is engaged to the extent required by acquire power, authority and popularity without work, responsibility or accountability. He was NOT a successful governor, but merely a repug with a famous name in a repug state, who knew just enough to avoid offense in a constitutionally weak office. He showed his true self as president because the office permitted him to do so. He politicized terrorism, encouraged torture and ensured we'd never get out of Iraq because all those things acquired power, authority and popularity without work, responsibility or accountability.

It seems unlikely that the memoirs in the works from Rove and Rumsfeld will challenge Bush's repeated assertions that he was not only in charge but in control. As for the president himself, we're unlikely to get much: Bush has a poor memory and is too unreflective to have kept the kind of diary that would elucidate matters. In time, however, other accounts are sure to emerge. Congressional investigations will shed new light. Declassified documents and e-mails may paint a clearer picture.

Was this written five years ago? C'mon, Jake - there are dozens, if not hundreds, of books out there that have answered every one of these questions over and over and over again. Pretending this is all still a mystery makes you look like a tool or an idiot.

Once the country is rid of Bush, perhaps we can start developing a more nuanced understanding of how his presidency went astray. His was no ordinary failure, and he leaves not just an unholy mess but also some genuine mysteries.

Don't you listen to your own Fearless Leader? Smirky doesn't do nuance. There is no nuance. There is no mystery. It's as obvious as a five-buck whore.

Cross-posted at BlueGrassRoots.