Fact-esque

Defending Bush: The Unlawing of the Law

Apparently the Right has decided that it isn't enough to attack any judicial decision they don't like on the basis of the fact that a judge made it, as per the recent charges over the California same sex decision. No, it is now necessary, from their point of view, to disconnect the law from the social structure altogether and make it, if possible, illegal.

Now the Truth Can Be Told Dept: Why Obama Backed Lieberman

Somebody once said that if you could just stay in the same place on the bank of a river long enough, eventually the answers would all float by you. (Though not, presumably, in sequence.) Well, for all those of us who have been sitting by the river waiting to find out why on earth Obama kissed Joe Lieberman's ass even after the SOB campaigned against him, the Lieberman Amendmend just floated by.

The American Propsect's Adam Serwer notes that, yesterday, Sen. Joe Lieberman successfully inserted into the Homeland Security appropriations bill an amendment -- supported by the Obama White House -- to provide an exemption from the Freedom of Information Act's mandates by authorizing the Defense Secretary to suppress long-concealed photographs of detainee abuse.  Two courts had ruled -- unanimously -- that the American people have the right to see these photographs under FOIA, a 40-year-old law championed by the Democrats in the LBJ era and long considered a crowning jewel in their legislative achievements.  But this Lieberman amendment, which is now likely to pass, undermines all of that and -- as EBay founder Pierre Omidyar put it today -- its central purpose is to "legalize suppression" of evidence of American war crimes.

What BO has got himself here is a shameless Pub-Democrat who's perfectly willingnto take on the nasty job of fucking over the Democratic base with tricky, barely legal parliamentary maneuvers that keep Bushism alive and open for business despite our overwhelming repudiation of it while Obama can play the presidential game of "staying above the fray" and wave his clean hands around so we can see em. "It wasn't me, folks. I just work here."

And so on.

Happy Daze Are Here Again

Well. I'm feeling so much better about our torture policy now that Obama is in charge of it instead of Dick Cheney. Change is happening. Change you can believe in.

For example, that evil rendition policy where we send (likely innocent) detainees to other countries to be tortured for real, not that namby-pamby waterboarding stuff that's like a dip in your 5-Star hotel pool but the Real Thing - electricity through testicles, thumbscrews, Iron Maidens, racks, you know - is going to be totally dumped in favor of a new rendition policy where we send them to the same countries but now we're going to monitor the interrogators to make sure they don't do anything bad.

The Obama administration will continue the Bush administration’s practice of sending terrorism suspects to third countries for detention and interrogation, but pledges to closely monitor their treatment to ensure that they are not tortured, administration officials said Monday.

Yessir, some fine American is going to sit right there in some Syrian prison and if those interrogators get out of line one inch, s/he's going to write a very stern letter to...well, somebody in authority somewhere and they in turn will write a somewhat stern letter to some functionary in Syria who will pass it on to another functionary who will lose it when it becomes convenient. But we'll be watching, that's the point.

Obama: Bush and Cheney Are American Heroes

Leon Panetta has been a busy little bee. Not only is he in the middle of a turf war with National Security Advisor Gen James Jones but he's been writing lengthy, Bush-like defenses of Bush secrecy policies that Obama used to call "a false choice" between security and civil rights. Shortly after testifying in Congress that photos of torture victims at Gitmo must be suppressed on the Nixonian grounds of "national security" (a phrase that has lost a good deal of meaning lately), Panetta found himself writing a similar brief for the SCOTUS arguing that tapes of the interrogations at Gitmo must be suppressed on the Nixonian grounds of...but you've heard all that before.

In an affidavit, CIA Director Leon E. Panetta defended the classification of records describing the contents of the 92 videotapes, their destruction by the CIA in 2005 and what he called "sensitive operational information" about the interrogations.

The forced disclosure of such material to the American Civil Liberties Union "could be expected to result in exceptionally grave damage to the national security by informing our enemies of what we knew about them, and when, and in some instances, how we obtained the intelligence we possessed," Panetta argued.

Actually, the "forced disclosure...could be expected to result in" embarrassment or even war crimes charges against an ex-president, ex-vice president, ex-DefenseSec, ex-WH lawyers, and a number of other Bush Admin figures who conspired against the Constitution so they could have people thrown in jail on a whim and half-drowned just for the hell of it. A lousy reason to suppress evidence of US war crimes by top American officials.

Bush DOJ: Incompetent on Purpose?

It's beginning to look that way. More cases are turning up where "mistakes" on the part of govt lawyers somehow end up helping the kind of defendants who heavily backed the GOP. The latest "mistake" just let WR Grace off the hook after unconscionable actions that killed people.

Chemical maker W.R. Grace and three former executives were acquitted yesterday of charges that they knowingly exposed residents of a small Montana mining town to asbestos over many years and concealed the deadly threat.

The jury, which received the case Wednesday, returned its verdict yesterday morning, quickly dispensing with the government's long-running effort to hold Grace criminally responsible for high rates of lung disease in the mountain community of Libby.

Controversies about evidence loomed large over the case. The federal judge presiding over the trial in Missoula barred prosecutors from using much of the evidence they hoped to introduce, and the government apologized for withholding evidence from the defense.

Complaints of misconduct in the Justice Department's handling of the case echoed similar allegations in the recently dismissed ethics conviction of former senator Ted Stevens, the Alaska Republican. 

Clever. Nobody wants to start prosecuting lawyers for making mistakes. Of course when the "mistakes" are fundamental, Legal Procedures 101-type "mistakes", maybe somebody ought not be allowed to practice law in the first place. Or prevented from practicing if they slipped through the system by, say, attending a Xtianist "law school".

Corporate Media Still Listening to Cheney Defend Torture Despite His Past History of Lies, Lies, and More Lies

Li'l Dick hasn't allowed a straight honest word past the perpetual sneer on his lip in almost 30 years. He has been caught in lie after lie after lie, virtually nothing he has said in public (and probably not in private) as VP has been true, yet here come the media acting like he may have a point when he is trying to defend his torture policy - a policy that came straight out of his office as VP (Addison worked for him and so did Yoo) - by making blanket claims for its effectiveness.

Senior Bush administration officials, led by Vice President Dick Cheney and cheered by many Congressional Republicans, are fighting a rear-guard action in defense of their record. Only by using the harshest methods, they insist, did the intelligence agency get the information it needed to round up Qaeda killers and save thousands of American lives.

***

In a twist this week, Mr. Cheney, a fierce defender of secrecy as vice president, called for the release of more classified memorandums that he asserted prove the effectiveness of the coercive techniques.

The self-serving nature of Cheney's defense and the typically evidenceless assertions that we've gotten so used to from him and other conservative hacks are being thrust at us as if they might actually be genuine. You know, this time as opposed to all those other times. Cheney, of course, claims that the proof is in those secret memos he wants revealed. Apparently he's no longer concerned about "national security". Now that it's his ass on the line at the Spanish War Crimes Tribunal, fuck national security.

SCOTUS Prepares Establishment Clause for Populist Rejection

When I'm wrong, I admit it.

When I wrote about the Pleasant Grove v Summun case last week, I was incensed as well as flabbergasted that the vote was unanimous and that not a single Justice seemed to question the deeper issues.

I was wrong.

Frederick Clarkson at Talk to Action went more deeply into it than I had time to do and discovered that indeed one Justice had expressed misgivings.

Justice David Souter was the only one to worry about the religious establishment implications of Pleasant Grove City: "But the government could well argue, as a development of government speech doctrine, that when it expresses its own views, it is free of the Establishment Clause's stricture against discriminating among religious sects or groups. Under this view of the relationship between the two doctrines, it would be easy for a government to favor some private religious speakers over others by its choice of monuments to accept."

No shit, Sherlock.

If Conservatives and Corporate Media Pundits Ruled the World

This is what you'd hear in your average courtroom if justice for the Bushies was justice for all:

Prosecutor: And so Mr Rummysfelt has admitted that he knocked an elderly woman on the head with a tire iron in order to steal her purse after she cashed her Social Security check.

Judge:(to Defense) So your client is pleading guilty?

Defense: No, Your Honor, my client isn't pleading at all. My client wants the charges dropped.

The Times They Are A-Changin': FISA and the Future of American Democracy

These have been strange times indeed. The conservatives who have worked tirelessly - with the support ultrarich who have put a great deal of money into the effort - to turn the society upside down have succeeded in a lot of areas. For instance, for the first time in our history: 

• Productivity has exploded while jobs have disappeared (overseas or been bundled into a single position);
• The "a rising tide raises all boats" economic law has been suspended for a quarter century as the economy improved but for only one segment of society;
• Torture is now an acceptable defense mechanism;
• Illegal wars are now accepted defense mechanisms;
• The Constitution is no longer the foundation of our law so much as a quaint, outmoded document to be by-passed whenever its restrictions are inconvenient to power;
• The power of the president has been expanded until it rivals the power of a king while the power of the Congress has been reduced to a combination rubber stamp/debating society;
• Govt officials are no longer expected to obey the law and need suffer no consequences when they break it;
• And neither political parties nor individual politicians seem to care what voters think.

It is this last which is perhaps the oddest of all for a putative democracy. For over 230 years our nation has been, through thick and thin, war and peace, panics and boom times, in the last analysis powered by the people and the Constitution. Political parties which did not build on that basis died and were replaced by ones that did (anybody remember the Whigs? the Know-Nothings?). The Constitution required it, the parties obeyed it (with some notable and brief exceptions), and our freedom rested on it.

In eight short years that has all changed.

Bush DOJ Discriminated When Hiring Anti-Discrimination Lawyers

Not that we haven't known this before but a new internal DOJ investigation confirms it: Monica Goodling was acting on orders from above.

A former senior official at the Justice Department routinely hired Republicans, Federalist Society members and “R.T.A.’s” — “Right-Thinking Americans”— for what were supposed to be nonpolitical posts and gave them plum assignments on civil rights cases, an internal department report released Tuesday found.

The former official, Bradley Schlozman, who helped lead the Civil Rights Division for about three years beginning in 2003, also gave false statements to Congress when he denied factoring politics into his hiring decisions, the report from the inspector general and Office of Professional Responsibility at the Justice Department found. But last week federal prosecutors declined to bring criminal charges against Mr. Schlozman, who left the department in 2007 amid an uproar over accusations of widespread politicization.

In the Civil Rights Division, regarded as a cornerstone of the Justice Department since the days of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, the investigation found that political supervisors charged with enforcing federal bias laws had illegally discriminated against job applicants seen as too liberal. The report said Mr. Schlozman’s superiors had ignored warnings about his brash management style and his political agenda.

Of course they ignored the warning. They were being warned that he was going to do what they appointed him to do.