Fact-esque

Wishful Thinking on Our Labor Climate: Tulane v. US Auto Rebound

OK, so when teh shite hit teh fan (supposedly) and the auto companies were facing bankruptcy (supposedly) and the Obama Admin was putting a lot of pressure on the UAW to cut management some slack in order to save their members' jobs (supposedly), fear ran like a little rodent through the union and once again Labor sacrificed so executives could keep their McMansions and their Beamers.

OK, so now that the auto market is strengthening (supposedly) and profits are up again (quite definitely), the unions want management to remember the last their of umpteen sacrifices and give back some of the give-backs the car companies extorted under the guise of "financial difficulties" they had largely brought on themselves, assuming of course that such difficulties actually existed which isn't at all clear when you look at the offshore books.

The PATRIOT Act: Reconsidered, Revised, Revamped, or Dumped?

If you ask the Obama Admin, the answer is: "None of the Above". Even though key provisions of the PA are about to expire, provisions that give Constitutional lawyers nightmares, Obama's assistant attorney general for legislative affairs, one Ronald Weich, sent a letter to Congress suggesting that the PA ought to be left alone but if changes are made, they would be opposed if they "undermine the effectiveness of these important authorities".

Exactly what that means is anybody's guess but given the Obama Admin's affection for Bushian powers to put surveillance on anybody at all by presidential whim, one would be justified in assuming that they mean they won't accept any diminution of presidential power.

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.

Bush III: Obama's Personal Anti-Abortion Advocate & God-Friendly Scientist

I hate to say the same things over and over again but I often don't have much choice: Obama isn't all that different from Bush and it isn't just civil rights or his obeisance to Wall Street. Sarah Posner writes in The Nation that he has just appointed Alexia Kelley, executive director of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good (CACG), to lead the Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Kelley isn't exactly a wingnut but she is anti-abortion in a job that requires her to be objective at the very least. (Via T2A)

Crowley Taps Obama's Chest and Growls, O Man Bows

I wasn't going to weigh in on this idiocy because I expected it would fly South as soon as something more interesting came along, like Sarah's new shotgun. But then it turned ugly. Obama felt it necessary to apologize after Sgt Crowley did some standard cop-whining about how he just didn't understand what Mr Gates got all excited about or why he had to take that kind of...abuse.

“I obviously helped to contribute ratcheting it up,” the president said in an appearance in the White House briefing room. “I want to make clear that in my choice of words, I think I unfortunately gave an impression that I was maligning the Cambridge Police Department or Sergeant Crowley specifically, and I could have calibrated those words differently.”

Maybe it is kind of a weenie-ass, Clinton-esque apology with lots of slick, sliding-around, maybe-I-mean-one-thing-maybe-I-mean-something-else language but even that kind of apology was entirely unnecessary.

The Old Gray 4th of July Ain't What It Used to Be

I won't be celebrating the 4th of July Saturday. Not even a little. After nearly 10 years of low-key Independence Days when I principally tried to forget for a day how Bush/Cheney was eviscerating one of the greatest political documents of all time and betraying the great sacrifices that led to it, I had hoped that when Bush was gone, I could once again look forward to the time that America would abandon the anti-Constitutional, autocratic track we've been going down since 9/11 gave Republicans the excuse they'd been looking for to rule with fear and return to its democratic roots.

Well, Bush is gone and a black, Democratic president is in office with a Democratic majority in Congress after campaigns that promised "change" and I don't see a safer Constitution. Instead, President Obama goes on television and gives a speech in which he basically promises to make illegal, unConstitutional laws legal. He doesn't mention just how he's going to pull off this feat in illogic, and meanwhile his Justice Dept - on his orders, can't blame Bush for this - goes right on with the same Bush policies Obama said on the campaign trail were "unacceptable".

A Great Day for Justice. Not.

Amazing. Two Supreme Court decisions came down yesterday and they are both travesties of anything that looks remotely like justice. First, we got CJ Roberts...well, here's the opening graf of Adam Liptak's NYT article, one of the most jaw-dropping ledes I think I've ever read.

Prisoners have no constitutional right to DNA testing that might prove their innocence, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday in a 5-to-4 decision.

The Right-wing Bush court has just thrown the Constitution out the window because - dig this - it got in the way of a state's right to be stoopid, mean, and vengeful on the wrong guy's ass and - in Alito's words - gave prisoners a new excuse "to play games with the criminal justice system.” Mind you, defendants are not even allowed to provide the tests at their own expense. It's all up to the states. Because, you know, it always has been.

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.

No Excuse Could Ever Be Good Enough

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Dear Teabaggers,

As a fellow grassroots activist, let me first say that I feel your pain.  Some (maybe even most) of you are out there doing the First Amendment thing.  You're frustrated by government.  You feel out of control.  You probably get your news from FOX or another of the cable stations so you're even more misinformed than the rest of us who avoid those corporatist outlets.  You see suffering that's normally reserved for "Cadillac-driving Welfare Queens" and other lazy bums starting to creep up the class ladder and it's scary.  Maybe you're even suffering yourself - lost your job or watched your portfolio take a hit.  It's not exactly wondering where your next meal is coming from or how you'll pay for your kid's asthma meds, but it's still discomforting and, depending on your age, may be genuinely frightening.  You want to get that feeling of control back.  You want people to know what you know and pay attention.  I hear that.  I live that.  So when I see you being mocked and called crazy, I feel some sympathy.  It's not quite empathy because, based on what I understand of this teabagging movement, it's all about not paying taxes and scapegoating the "illegals," which makes me think that your movement is basically lazy and selfish and willing to be led by a truly hideous element of our society.  But I know it hurts to believe something is true and noble and be laughed at because of it.   So I won't laugh at you.

Here's what I will do:  I'll keep organizing communities that work for reduced military spending because our war economy is an abomination.  I will keep working for fair tax policy that works to have everyone and every corporation pay their fair share.  I will keep organizing for health care reform that covers everyone, reduces costs and improves care through the inclusion of a strong and independent public health insurance plan option.  I'll keep working to improve the chances you and your children and their children have to succeed by working to ensure government investment in human needs programs that help all of us - even the lazy bums who don't deserve it because, you know, it's in all our best economic interests to do so and because my moral center compels me to.

In the meantime, here's something you won't see on FOX or the rest of the cable news shows.