4.30.05 "Waldron/Yoo Debate on Torture" By Marty Lederman

To which Waldron responded as follows: "I think with regard to some law, you can do the strict separation between the letter of the law and the moral spirit that Professor Yoo has indicated. [W]ith regard to much human rights law, and much international law, and much constitutional law, sometimes you cannot do that; you cannot understand the human rights provisions without understanding—at least in some sense—the moral ideas that inform it, imbue it, give it its coherence, shape its concepts, give us our sense of its importance. I believe that’s true of human rights provisions prohibiting torture. I believe it’s true also of the scheme of protection laid down in the Geneva Conventions. You need to understand this not as a strange set of runes which we will look at as if we’ve never seen them before, and have no idea what they’re trying to do, but [will] try to figure out what the text requires. In some sense, that’s obtuse lawyering, as well as obtuse morally.

I just want to acknowledge to readers that these lines are complex and complicated. TWN prefers the high road but wants to make sure people know that the lines that were crossed when John Bolton "stopped the vote count" in Florida in the 2000 election, and when he served as Jesse Helm's PAC's cost-free attorney, and when he overlooked the foreign financing and highly partisan activities of a non-profit, non-partisan institution he was running that was later stripped of its non-profit status. The biggest lines crossed were those of pounding the intelligence apparatus at the State Department to acquiesce to Bolton's personal view of challenges facing the United States, thus distorting reality to fit one to which he was ideologically predisposed.

The U.S. military staged the interrogations of terrorism suspects for members of Congress and other officials visiting the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to make it appear the government was obtaining valuable intelligence, a former Army translator who worked there claims in a new book scheduled for release Monday.
...
Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has led the legal challenge of detainees' imprisonment and alleged abusive interrogation techniques, said Saar's claims support lawyers' suspicions that the official tours of Guantanamo were phony.
"They couldn't show people what they were really doing, because what they were really doing was illegal and inhumane," Ratner said. "It's such a fraud. It reminds me of the special concentration camps set up in World War II. They would take the Red Cross there to see there was an orchestra and all sorts of nice things."

Berry and vice chairman Cruz Reynoso were responsible for sending a letter to Bush last year asking him to read the Commission's bombshell report: “Redefining Rights in America: The Civil Rights Record of the George W. Bush Administration, 2001-2004.” They were fired just days later and Reynolds was in. (The report was removed from the government website, and can now only be linked in cached form, thanks to some intrepid folks at Pitt's law school.)
Bush hoists his Condi Rices and Colin Powells into highly visible positions, trumpeting his "diverse" appointments and garnering kudos for them, while supporting codified destruction of civil rights for whole swaths of people and starving the very mechanisms that were put into place to eradicate injustices for them. His hypocrisies are not new, but they do grow in magnitude over time, along with his perverse sense of entitlement and pride. What a Christian!"

4.30.05 "Associate of Lobbyist Tied to DeLay Is Questioned on Island Contracts" By KATE ZERNIKE, The New York Times via No More Mister Nice Blog

Mr. DeLay, whose foreign travel arranged by lobbyists has drawn criticism in Congress for possible ethics violations, visited the Marianas in 1998 with his wife and daughter and three aides. Upon his return, he declared dead a bill that Democrats had hoped to pass raising wages and controlling immigration in the Marianas.
In 1999, Mr. DeLay's former chief of staff, Edwin Buckham, and his former spokesman, Michael Scanlon, both of whom later worked with Mr. Abramoff in his lobbying firm, visited the islands to persuade two local lawmakers to change their votes for speaker of the islands' House of Representatives. The DeLay associates wanted the two legislators to support the candidate of the garment industry, Ben Fitial, who was close to Mr. Abramoff, and promised that federal contracts to the islands would follow if they did.
Mr. Buckham later represented Enron in its bid to build an energy plant in the Northern Marianas, and when Enron lost to a Japanese concern, Mr. DeLay worked to get the bidding reopened.
"For years, Mr. Abramoff lobbied to protect a Marianas industry that exploited tens of thousands of women workers, many of whom were channeled into the island sex trade," said Representative George Miller, the California Democrat who called for the investigation of Mr. Abramoff's work in the Marianas.

4.30.05 "Swindler on a Gusher" By MAUREEN DOWD

The Iraqis have thrown us another curveball.
Ahmad Chalabi - convicted embezzler in Jordan, suspected Iranian spy, double-crosser of America, purveyor of phony war-instigating intelligence - is the new acting Iraqi oil minister.
Is that why we went to war, to put the oily in charge of the oil, to set the swindler who pretended to be Spartacus atop the ultimate gusher?

Does anybody still think the path to war wasn't greased by oil?

If you are 45 and if Bush's plan were available today...
Follow George W. Bush's advice, divert $1,000 into your private account, invest it in TIPS, and at the 1.85% per year interest rate you will indeed by able to collect an extra amount worth $10.11 a month in today's dollars when you retire at 65...
But the clawback would reduce your normal Social Security benefit by $14.16 a month. You're $4.05 a month behind.
"Building a nest egg." Feh!

(Interestingly, this high-risk, low-return political strategy is similar to the high-risk, low-return retirement-planning strategy the White House wants to foist on most Americans. So at least there's a synchronicity here that was lacking earlier.)

4.29.05 Jonathan Chait: "A Very Special Kind of Math -- Once again, the Wall Street Journal plops down numbers in arguing that the rich pay too much in taxes. Do figures lie or do liars figure?"

It is certainly true that the richest 0.1% are paying a higher share of the national tax burden. Is that because they're getting socked by the tax code? No, it's because the very rich are earning a far bigger proportion of the national income

Two teachers arrested at a 2004 campaign rally for President Bush and strip-searched at a county jail have filed a lawsuit alleging law officers conspired to violate their constitutional rights.
Alice McCabe and Christine Nelson, both in their 50s, were among five protesters arrested at the Sept. 3 rally. The pair were handcuffed, taken to the county jail, strip-searched and charged with criminal trespass. The charges were dropped months later.
...
The lawsuit claims the women's rights to free speech, free assembly, equal protection and due process were violated, and that federal agents conspired with local and state law enforcement to deprive them of those rights

What strikes me most about the Straussians -- and by extension, the neocons -- is that they’ve pushed the traditional liberal/conservative dichotomy of American politics back about 150 years, and moved it roughly 4,000 miles to the east, to the far side of the Rhine River. Their grand existential struggle isn’t with the likes of Teddy Kennedy or even Franklin D. Roosevelt, it’s with the liberalism of Voltaire, John Locke and John Stuart Mill – not to mention the author of the Declaration of the Independence.
Strauss, in other words, wasn’t a neo anything. He was a conservative in the original European sense – fond of hierarchy, tradition and religious orthodoxy; deeply suspicious of newfangled ideas like egalitarianism, rationalism and a political theory based on enlightened self interest and the social contract. Nor was he impressed by Mill’s utilitarian adding machine – constantly calculating the greatest good for the greatest number.
To the Straussians, rationality does not provide an adequate basis for a stable social order. To the contrary, the Age of Enlightenment has ushered in the crisis of modernity, in which nihilism – the moral vacuum left behind by the death of God – inevitably leads to decadence, decline and, ultimately, genocide.
...
If we’re fortunate – as fortunate as America has been through most of its history – the center will hold. Things won’t fall apart. The neocons, having overreached, will be thrown for a big loss and forced to punt. But I’m not as confident as I used to be that the game still works that way.
...
The risk, then, is that by unleashing the forces of religious populism to save America from the inevitable consequences of liberal nihilism, the Straussians conceivably could end up assisting the very catastrophe they claim they’re trying to avoid.
And wouldn’t that be ironic.

4.28.05 "Cut From Cheney's Cloth" By Richard Cohen

But taking the nation to war for false reasons is not a minor blip. It is an unpardonable feat of hubris for which, on a daily basis, Americans die in Iraq. American voters, though, have been oddly forgiving (see the last election), and the Bush administration has neither apologized nor fired anyone for getting things so very, very wrong. The conclusion is inescapable: This was not a war for the wrong reason; this was a war for any reason.
So, in a way, I feel a bit solicitous toward the embattled Bolton. He must wonder why, of all the fibbers and exaggerators and outright liars in the Bush administration, he alone is being asked to account for what he said and what he did. It is a fair enough question and leads me to amend a recent column in which I called Bolton a nut. He is, instead, Cheney's acorn. He did not fall far from the tree.

4.27.05 "U.S. Figures Show Sharp Global Rise In Terrorism -- State Dept. Will Not Put Data in Report" By Susan B. Glasser Washington Post Staff Writer
Via Carpetbagger who asks, "Refresh my memory — didn’t we recently have a presidential campaign in which Bush and Cheney said we had to vote for them or risk facing an increase in terrorist attacks? Just checking.

4.27.05 "Records Show DeLay, Lobbyist Daily Contact" By SHARON THEIMER, apnews

The Northern Marianas billing and correspondence records of Abramoff's former lobbying firm, Preston Gates, were obtained by The Associated Press under an open records request approved by the island government

They provide a day-by-day account of the lobbyist's campaign of fundraising, trip-providing and schmoozing with lawmakers in both parties aimed at, among other things, getting Congress to block Clinton administration efforts to regulate alleged "sweatshop" garment factories in the Northern Marianas. Those rules were never enacted.

All five Republicans on the House ethics committee have financial links to Tom DeLay that could raise conflict-of-interest issues should the panel investigate the GOP majority leader.

Just days after a bitterly divided Senate committee voted along party lines to approve her nomination as a federal appellate court judge, California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown told an audience Sunday that people of faith were embroiled in a "war" against secular humanists who threatened to divorce America from its religious roots, according to a newspaper account of the speech.

An April 26 Wall Street Journal editorial argued that "the overall tax burden grew more progressive" in the last 25 years because upper income taxpayers pay a larger share of total taxes than they did in 1979. But the Journal failed to explain why upper income taxpayers pay a larger share today: The wealthiest Americans earn a much larger share of total income than they did in 1979.

4.25.05 "As Reed Brody, Special Counsel for HRW says, "[I]t's just not credible for the army to keep investigating itself and keep finding itself innocent." Body and Soul

4.25.05 "UN investigator who exposed US army abuse forced out of his job" By Nick Meo in Kabul

4.25.05 "Proof Blair was told war could be ruled illegal" by SIMON WALTERS, Daily Mail

Another source said: "When you clear away the legalese the picture is clear: the Attorney General believed the legality of the war was highly dodgy, and in all likelihood, it was illegal."

4.24.05 "Any Kerry Supporters On The Line? -- The Bush Administration punishes some Democrat backers" By VIVECA NOVAK AND JOHN DICKERSON, Time Online

The Inter-American Telecommunication Commission meets three times a year in various cities across the Americas to discuss such dry but important issues as telecommunications standards and spectrum regulations. But for this week's meeting in Guatemala City, politics has barged onto the agenda. At least four of the two dozen or so U.S. delegates selected for the meeting, sources tell TIME, have been bumped by the White House because they supported John Kerry's 2004 campaign.

Just to give you a flavor of what we're talking about, here's an excerpt from the agenda for the Working Party on Terrestrial Fixed and Mobile Radiocommunication Services:

   Recommendation for 400 MHz bands
    RLAN in the 5 GHz band
    Recommendation on harmonized frequencies for property protection
    Revision to Recommendation PCC.II/REC. 67 (XIX-01) on Low Power Radiocommunication devices,
    Radio frequency identification devices (RFID)
    Broadband Power Line Communications (BPL)
    Refarming of 700 MHz band
    Answer to Market questionnaire on IMT 2000 and systems beyond
    Results of the video conference on wireless broadband

4.24.05 "A High-Tech Lynching in Prime Time" By FRANK RICH

Perhaps the closest historical antecedent of tonight's crusade was that staged in the 1950's and 60's by a George Wallace ally, the televangelist Billy James Hargis. At its peak, his so-called Christian Crusade was carried by 500 radio stations and more than 200 television stations. In the "Impeach Earl Warren" era, Hargis would preach of the "collapse of moral values" engineered by a "powerfully entrenched, anti-God Liberal Establishment." He also decried any sex education that talked about homosexuality or even sexual intercourse. Or so he did until his career was ended by accusations that he had had sex with female students at the Christian college he founded as well as with boys in the school's All-American Kids choir.
Hargis died in obscurity the week before Dr. Frist's "This Week" appearance. But no less effectively than the cardinals in Rome, he has passed the torch.

4.24.05 "Uncle Dick and Papa" By MAUREEN DOWD

The two, from rural, conservative parts of their countries, want to turn back the clock and exorcise New Age silliness. Mr. Cheney wants to dismantle the New Deal and go back to 1937. Pope Benedict XVI wants to dismantle Vatican II and go back to 1397.
...
Moral absolutism is relative, after all. As Bruce Landesman, a philosophy professor at the University of Utah, pointed out in a letter to The Times: "Those who hold 'liberal' views are not relativists. They simply disagree with the conservatives about what is right and wrong."

4.24.05 "Top Army Brass Cleared in Abu Ghraib Case" By ROBERT BURNS, AP Military Writer Yahoo!

4.23.05 "Is Rice Obstructing the Bolton Investigation?" Think Progress

4.21.05 "Districts and Teachers' Union Sue Over Bush Law" By SAM DILLON

Opening a new front in the growing rebellion against President Bush's signature education law, the nation's largest teachers' union and eight school districts in Michigan, Texas and Vermont sued the Department of Education yesterday, accusing it of violating a passage in the law that says states cannot be forced to spend their own money to meet federal requirements.
...
"If the facts about educational spending are as the plaintiffs allege, then this lawsuit has good prospects of winning," said David B. Cruz, a constitutional law professor at the University of Southern California. "It is a strong case because the statutory language is clear. The law says nothing in the act shall be interpreted to impose requirements that aren't being funded."

4.20.05 "The Lesson of Sativex" By Rob Kampia, AlterNet.

By approving liquid marijuana, the Canadian government has just certified that virtually everything our own government has been telling us about marijuana is wrong.

The blurb for Jeffrey Rosen's NYT Magazine cover story on the terrifying "Constitution in Exile" movement:

Imagine that the interpretation of the Constitution was frozen in 1937. Imagine a country in which Social Security, job-safety laws and environmental protections were unconstitutional. Imagine judges longing for that. Imagine one of them as the next Supreme Court nominee.

For years, the Heritage Foundation sharply criticized the autocratic rule of former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad, denouncing his anti-Semitism, his jailing of political opponents and his "anti-free market currency controls."
Then, late in the summer of 2001, the conservative nonprofit Washington think tank began to change its assessment: Heritage financed an Aug. 30-Sept. 4, 2001, trip to Malaysia for three House members and their spouses. Heritage put on briefings for the congressional delegation titled "Malaysia: Standing Up for Democracy" and "U.S. and Malaysia: Ways to Cooperate in Order to Influence Peace and Stability in Southeast Asia."
Heritage's new, pro-Malaysian outlook emerged at the same time a Hong Kong consulting firm co-founded by Edwin J. Feulner, Heritage's president, began representing Malaysian business interests. The for-profit firm, called Belle Haven Consultants, retains Feulner's wife, Linda Feulner, as a "senior adviser." And Belle Haven's chief operating officer, Ken Sheffer, is the former head of Heritage's Asia office and is still on Heritage's payroll as a $75,000-a-year consultant.

Threshold rights enable civil society to know what government is doing and to rein in abuses. Think of it this way: temporary restrictions on some forms of privacy enable the government to know what you are doing, which is troubling enough. Threshold rights enable you to know what the government is doing, and that’s why they form the core of democratic society. The degree to which a society protects threshold rights speaks to whether it is free and open, and whether self-correction can occur without violence. If the press is free, the electorate has open elections, and the courts are performing their sworn duty, even a president who tries to assume the powers of an emperor can be dealt with.

DEATHS from cervical cancer could jump fourfold to a million a year by 2050, mainly in developing countries. This could be prevented by soon-to-be-approved vaccines against the virus that causes most cases of cervical cancer - but there are signs that opposition to the vaccines might lead to many preventable deaths.
...
In the US, for instance, religious groups are gearing up to oppose vaccination, despite a survey showing 80 per cent of parents favour vaccinating their daughters. "Abstinence is the best way to prevent HPV," says Bridget Maher of the Family Research Council, a leading Christian lobby group that has made much of the fact that, because it can spread by skin contact, condoms are not as effective against HPV as they are against other viruses such as HIV.

4.17.05 " Reports undercut Iraq, al-Qaeda link. A TOP Democratic senator (Carl Levin) has released formerly classified documents that he says undercut top US officials' pre-Iraq war claims of a link between Saddam Hussein's regime and the al-Qaeda terrorist network." The Weekend Australian.

4.16.05 "The Miracle That Wasn't" By JOHN TIERNEY, The New York Times

But the single most important cause, he says, was an event two decades earlier: the legalization of abortion in New York State in 1970, three years before it was legalized nationally by the Supreme Court.
The result, he maintains, was a huge reduction in the number of children who would have been at greater than average risk of becoming criminals during the 1990's. Growing up as an unwanted child is itself a risk factor, he says, and the women who had abortions were disproportionately likely to be unmarried teenagers with low incomes and poor education - factors that also increase the risk
...
But he says the correlations are clear: crime declined earlier in the states that had legalized abortion before Roe v. Wade, and it declined more in places with high abortion rates, like New York.

4.16.05 "Wall St. Suffers Worst Day in Two Years" By MICHAEL J. MARTINEZ, AP Business Writer

NEW YORK - Wall Street suffered its worst single day in nearly two years Friday, with the Dow Jones industrial average falling 191 points for its third straight triple-digit loss. Deepening concerns over economic growth and higher prices led to the worst week of trading since August.

The attack on the judges who refused to order the feeding tube reinserted may be trivial by itself. But it is of a piece with something much more important. In recent years, some conservative politicians have been insisting that federal judges should strike down affirmative action programs, protect commercial advertising, invalidate environmental regulations, allow the president to do whatever he likes in the war on terrorism, use the Constitution to produce tort reform, invalidate gun control regulation, invalidate campaign finance laws and much more — regardless of whether they can find solid justification for these steps in our founding document.
Now, the battle over the confirmation process has become enmeshed with this third and most extreme stage of conservative thinking. What we are seeing, for the first time, is a fundamental challenge to the rule of law itself.

... other current and former officials charged that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's office ordered "Patterns of Global Terrorism" eliminated several weeks ago because the 2004 statistics raised disturbing questions about the Bush's administration's frequent claims of progress in the war against terrorism.
...
According to Johnson and U.S. intelligence officials familiar with the issue, statistics that the National Counterterrorism Center provided to the State Department reported 625 "significant" terrorist attacks in 2004.
That compared with 175 such incidents in 2003, the highest number in two decades.
The statistics didn't include attacks on American troops in Iraq, which President Bush as recently as Tuesday called "a central front in the war on terror.

4.15.05 "IRS Denies It's Refusing to Release Papers" By MICHAEL J. SNIFFEN, Associated Press Writer via Yahoo!

The Internal Revenue Service recently refused to provide two university researchers with records requested under the Freedom of Information Act while simultaneously asserting, "We are not denying the release" of the documents.
...
Their lawyer, Scott Nelson of Public Citizen Litigation Group, said, "As tax day 2004 looms, it appears that there are now three certainties: death taxes and improper government reliance on national security as a pretext to stonewall FOIA requests."

I think this would be a good time to make a big public demonstration of what's wrong with these people -- do it at the exact time the broadcast is on the air. And since Frist, Perkins, and so on are arguing that the nominees are being "targeted ... for reasons of their faith or moral positions," maybe the Democrats should talk about some of those "moral positions."
William Pryor's view of punishment is a good place to start. Yeah, I think this is just what Jesus would do:
Defending the "hitching post"

In Hope v. Pelzer, 536 U.S. 730 (2002), [William] Pryor vigorously defended Alabama’s practice of handcuffing prison inmates to hitching posts in the hot sun if they refused to work on chain gangs or otherwise disrupted them. ... The post was a horizontal bar to which inmates were handcuffed "in a standing position and remain[ed] standing the entire time they [were] placed on the post." 536 U.S. at 734. The plaintiff in this case, Larry Hope, charged that he had been handcuffed to a hitching post twice, one time for seven hours, during which he was shirtless "while the sun burned his skin ... During this 7-hour period, he was given water only once or twice and was given no bathroom breaks. At one point, a guard taunted Hope about his thirst. According to Hope’s affidavit: '[The guard] first gave water to some dogs, then brought the water cooler closer to me, removed its lid, and kicked the cooler over, spilling the water onto the ground.'" 536 U.S. at 734-35.
Pryor’s brief contended that Mr. Hope had not been subjected to cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment...

4.15.05 Steve Clemons: "A vote for Bolton now has political consequences for all of them -- because it is no longer about Bolton's skepticism or deep opposition to the institution of the United Nations -- it is about bombastic, abusive behavior. It is about a loose cannon. It is about someone who has repeatedly made very bad judgment calls."

4.15.05 "White House Said to Impede Education Probe" By BEN FELLER, The Associated Press, via The Washington Post.

Carpetbagger: "As a rule, when Bush administration officials act like they have something to hide, it's because they have something to hide"

4.14.05 Josh Marshall: "It's such a tough spot for the bug man, having all these unanswered questions swirling at a time when there's no functioning ethics committee. How could he have known that purging the ethics committee of its three non-DeLay loyalists and forcing through a re-write of the committee's rules to prevent it from issuing any more 'admonishments' of his behavior would lead to such an unhappy impasse?"

4.15.05 Josh Marshall: "An interactive listing of the Bankruptcy Bill vote roll call, sortable by caucus, vote, party and Representative, as well as by the median household income of their districts. The same for the Inheritance tax abolition vote. And Steve Soto's list of the 31 House Dems who voted for both."

See also: "The American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), a legal group started by TV preacher Pat Robertson, announced yesterday that it had filed suit in state court on behalf of two pharmacists who insist the law — which requires them to do their jobs — requires them to act against their consciences and violates the Civil Rights Act."

4.14.05 "Wisconsin joins the list of 9 other states that are suing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for their limited mercury regulation guidelines." JBC, Meat Eating Leftist

4.14.05 "Suit Details Abuse Allegations at Guantanamo" Via Drudge

4.14.05 "ENDING FILIBUSTERS -- IT'LL COME BACK TO "BITE US" Gun Owners of America

4.14.05 "Major media ignoring Gingrich rejection of DeLay defense: "DeLay's problem isn't with the Democrats. DeLay's problem is with the country" Media Matters

4.14.05 "Lawmakers With Relatives on Payroll" By The Associated Press Yes, the other kids do it, but it's a question of proportion. See also Atrios quoting the Wall Street Journal regarding DeLay's Luxury Travel. Via Memeorandum

4.14.05 "Not Just A Bad Dream Anymore" Corrente/Riggsveda

Today the House will vote on the bankruptcy bill, and as Forbes observes, it's pretty much a done deal:
...
And this on the heels of the repeal of the estate tax, that horrid burden on the uberwealthy that affects about 600 families and, according to some, could result in a net loss to the US Treasury of about 745 billion dollars over 10 years. But it's ok, because they'll make it back when they cut services to vets, kids, and the working poor, disabled, and elderly.

Perhaps the best way to correct the courts' drift away from democratic accountability is to increase democratic accountability elsewhere. My unoriginal solution: real filibusters. Senators like the current filibuster rules because blame is diffused in the confusion of institutional logjam, parliamentary procedure and generic partisan squabbling. The old system required senators to pack a thermos and ramble from a podium for hours or days on end. Restoring the old-school filibuster would put a human face on these fights. It would give partisans someone to jeer and someone to cheer. It would create drama and force the media to explain why that fuddy old senator is reading from the phone book. And, best of all, it would allow voters to punish or reward specific senators at the polls for stopping the people's business.

By two 54-46 votes, the Senate blocked efforts Tuesday to add money for veterans’ health care to the 2005 supplemental appropriations bill.
Sens. Patty Murray, D-Wash., and Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, both members of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, sought to add $1.9 billion to the $80.6 billion wartime emergency supplemental appropriations bill to cover costs of treating returning combat veterans for war-related injuries and to cover shortfalls in funding for VA programs.
The Bush administration sought no VA money as part of its supplemental funding request, and none was included in the version of the bill passed by the House in March.
Murray, however, said funding for veterans is critical because wounded service members will be seeking treatment from already underfunded facilities.

4.13.05 Harold Meyerson "So, democracy in Ukraine? We'll be there. Lebanon? Count on us. Kyrgyzstan? With bells on. Mexico? Where's that? Maybe they should move to Central Asia, change their name to Mexistan and promise to privatize the oil. That's the kind of democracy the Bush guys really like."

4.13.05 "Olaf Rotkohl thinks that the pursuit of power over others is in itself a corruption, and those who seek such power are fundamentally corrupt"

4.13.05 "Questioning Mr. Bolton" The New York Times Editorial "With America's credibility as low as it is, the last thing the nation needs is a United Nations envoy who tries to force intelligence into an ideological construct."

4.13.05 "Borderless blogs vs. Canada press ban" By Rondi Adamson, The Christian Science Monitor "A Canadian publication ban and an American blogger clashed last week. The court-ordered ban did not survive the impact. The blogger was overwhelmed with visitors."

4.13.05 Digby

Yes, by all means, let's adopt the biggest political cock-up the Republicans have made in the last twenty years as our own.
...
I sincerely hope that we are not dumb enough to portray ourselves as the party of the do-gooder church lady just when they are in the process of proving to the entire country that they are the party of nosy mother-in-law.

The huge looming tax increase is caused by two things. The first is that the exclusion level for the alternative minimum tax is not adjusted for inflation, so the tax affects more people each year as nominal incomes go up. The second, paradoxically, stems from Mr. Bush's tax cuts of 2001 and 2003.
Those cuts reduced regular tax rates at all income levels but did not change the alternative minimum tax. At the same time, some of the cuts came in the form of expanded deductions - the child tax credit, child care tax credits and bigger exemptions for married couples - that are not allowed under the alternative formula.
...
The prohibited deductions include those for state and local taxes, medical expenses, employee business expenses and interest on home-equity loans. The A.M.T. would then apply a flat tax of 26 percent (28 percent for couples who earn more than $175,000). The couple must pay whichever is higher, the tax calculated under the traditional method or the one under the A.M.T.

4.12.05 "Videos Challenge Accounts of Convention Unrest" By JIM DWYER, The New York Times

Dennis Kyne put up such a fight at a political protest last summer, the arresting officer recalled, it took four police officers to haul him down the steps of the New York Public Library and across Fifth Avenue.
"We picked him up and we carried him while he squirmed and screamed," the officer, Matthew Wohl, testified in December. "I had one of his legs because he was kicking and refusing to walk on his own."
Accused of inciting a riot and resisting arrest, Mr. Kyne was the first of the 1,806 people arrested in New York last summer during the Republican National Convention to take his case to a jury. But one day after Officer Wohl testified, and before the defense called a single witness, the prosecutor abruptly dropped all charges.
...
Among them was Alexander Dunlop, who said he was arrested while going to pick up sushi.
Last week, he discovered that there were two versions of the same police tape: the one that was to be used as evidence in his trial had been edited at two spots, removing images that showed Mr. Dunlop behaving peacefully. When a volunteer film archivist found a more complete version of the tape and gave it to Mr. Dunlop's lawyer, prosecutors immediately dropped the charges and said that a technician had cut the material by mistake.

The most telling thing about today's hearing may be that Bolton displayed not the slightest bit of energy, one way or the other, when discussing the challenges facing international organizations. President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have said several times, since the second term began, that the United Nations will be a forum where some of the day's central challenges, Iranian nukes, Lebanese independence, an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord, may be played out. Apart from all the other doubts about Bolton's suitability, does the U.S. Senate really want a U.N. ambassador who seems, at bottom, so uninterested in what goes on there?

A Gallup-CNN-USA Today poll at the end of last week found that 50 percent of American adults now believe that the Bush administration "deliberately misled" them about why we had to go to war in Iraq.

Even though the economy added 2.2 million jobs in 2004 and produced strong growth in corporate profits, wages for the average worker fell for the year, after adjusting for inflation - the first such drop in nearly a decade.

Whenever appeals courts are asked to resolve contentious social disputes, one thing is certain. The losing side is unhappy. Protests against an "imperial judiciary" have existed since the earliest days of the Republic.
But the latest round, long percolating and now nearing a boil in Washington, is a particularly nasty mix of intolerance, opportunism and religious fervor.

Michael Schwartz must have thought I was just another attendee of the "Confronting the Judicial War on Faith" conference. I approached the chief of staff of Oklahoma's GOP Senator Tom Coburn outside the conference in downtown Washington last Thursday afternoon after he spoke there. Before I could introduce myself, he turned to me and another observer with a crooked smile and exclaimed, "I'm a radical! I'm a real extremist. I don't want to impeach judges. I want to impale them!"
...
Meanwhile, 66 percent of respondents to a March 23 CBS News poll thought Schiavo's feeding tube should be removed. The notion that the Christian right's agenda is playing well in Peoria must be accepted on faith alone.

National groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council charge in eight other lawsuits here and in Seattle, Baltimore and other cities that the Environmental Protection Agency has failed to regulate pesticides as required by the 1996 Food Quality Protection Act.

"But it’s not just DeLay. The pattern repeats itself in the international realm as well. For instance, the world and the United Nations opposed our war, so we ignored it (along with international law) and invaded anyway. Similarly, the Constitution limited our detention policies, so the executive branch tried to claim that it was above the Constitution and could not be checked. Both of these positions rely on trust. We must trust that America will use its unchecked war power (or detention power) humanely. But trust is precisely what conservatives have (wisely) never had. Unchecked power leads to abuses. It always has, and it always will. That’s the nature of man and that’s why we can’t take the ring to Mordor."
...
"Make no mistake, the goal of this bunch is emasculate the judiciary. They want a judiciary that will essentially read the First Amendment (church/state part anyway) out of the Constitution and one that will ratify all of their political preferences regardless of the law. More than anything else, they want to remove an impediment to their power, it’s no different than what Putin did. And it violates every principle that our Constitution is founded upon.

"There’s no more glaring contradiction to Bush’s "culture of life" than the Texas criminal justice system. But liberals shouldn’t say, "I oppose your culture of life because you support the death penalty." They should say, "I oppose the death penalty because I support a culture of life."
...
We can’t let the Dobsons outmaneuver us on this one. Opposing stem cell research is the opposite of promoting a culture of life.
...
It might be a stretch (and I’d welcome comments on this), but the ultimate coup would be to redefine "culture of life" in a way that includes policies that improve the quality of life as well."

For more than a year, as the toll in Iraq mounted, officials said armor production was running flat out. At Christmas, the Army's sole humvee supplier took its usual week off. The armoring plant had two four-day weekends. Owners say they could have built more - if the Army had ordered more.
...
When Rumsfeld said armored humvees couldn't be built any faster, O'Gara officials told reporters they actually could build 100 more a month.

Rep. Waxman also revealed that although Halliburton was paid in significant part from Iraqi oil proceeds in the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI), the Administration — acting at Halliburton’s request — concealed these overcharges from the international auditors charged by the United Nations with monitoring the expenditures from the DFI (LINK).
...
A review of these audits shows that references to overcharges and other questioned costs were blacked out over 450 times in the versions of audits sent to the IAMB.

Once the culture of death at its most virulent intersects with politicians in power, it starts to inflict damage on the living.
When those leaders, led by the Bush brothers, wallow in this culture, they do a bait-and-switch and claim to be upholding John Paul's vision of a "culture of life." This has to be one of the biggest shams of all time. Yes, these politicians oppose abortion, but the number of abortions has in fact been going down steadily in America under both Republican and Democratic presidents since 1990 - some 40 percent in all. The same cannot be said of American infant fatalities, AIDS cases and war casualties - all up in the George W. Bush years. Meanwhile, potentially lifesaving phenomena like condom-conscious sex education and federally run stem-cell research are in shackles.

4.10.05 Morbo:

"I disagree with just about everything Scalia has ever written, but I can assure you of this: Scalia isn’t about to uphold a law simply because Congress passed it. If Scalia thinks the law is unconstitutional, it’s going down. (One of the few times I agreed with Scalia was when he wrote that a Congress-passed flag-burning statute was unconstitutional. You think Scalia cared that a majority in Congress passed it, and that polls showed most Americans backing it? He at least has the sense to realize that those things are irrelevant to judging.)

Scalia is the most conservative justice on the court — and even he doesn’t buy the kook right’s argument that federal judges must bow to the whims of an imperial Congress.

Thousands were demonstrating today all over the country. Many areas in Baghdad were cut off today for security reasons and to accomodate the demonstrators, I suppose. There were some Sunni demonstrations but the large majority of demonstrators were actually Shia and followers of Al Sadr. They came from all over Baghdad and met up in Firdaws Square- the supposed square of liberation. They were in the thousands. None of the news channels were actually covering it. Jazeera showed fragments of the protests in the afternoon but everyone else seemed to busy with some other news story. Thanks to E. for sending me this link. Check out the protest Here

BBC and EuroNews were busily covering the wedding between Prince Charles and the dreadful Camilla. CNN was showing the Pope's funeral. No one bothered with the demonstrations in Baghdad, Mosul, Anbar and the south. There were hundreds of thousands of Shia screaming "No to America. No to terrorism. No to occupation. No to the devil. No to Israel." The numbers were amazing and a little bit frightening too.

Alrighty- someone explain to me why I am wrong to instinctively oppose this:

The Bush administration is developing a plan to give the government access to possibly hundreds of millions of international banking records in an effort to trace and deter terrorist financing, even as many bankers say they already feel besieged by government antiterrorism rules that they consider overly burdensome. ...

Again, instinctively, this frightens the living daylights out of me. I can't tolerate any more expansion of government powers- even in the fight against 'terrorism.' I have had enough. We need to reign the damn government back in.

And see Billmon:

So just remember, Unitarian Jihad: You can run, but you can't hide. We're going to smoke you out of your holes, dig you out of your caves, pull you out of your overstuffed armchairs at Starbucks. Then we'll see how skeptical you really are -- when you have to face the subtle syllogisms and brilliant arguments of our Grand Inquisitor: (robertson.jpg)"

4.10.05 Delay may be headed for hotter water: Newsweek, By Michael Isikoff

"DeLay and his aides have said repeatedly they were unaware of Abramoff's behind-the-scenes financing role. "Those S.O.B.s," Abramoff said last week about DeLay and his staffers, according to his luncheon companion. "DeLay knew everything. He knew all the details."

Conservative leaders meeting in Washington yesterday for a discussion of "Remedies to Judicial Tyranny" decided that Kennedy, a Ronald Reagan appointee, should be impeached, or worse.
...
Ominously, Vieira continued by saying his "bottom line" for dealing with the Supreme Court comes from Joseph Stalin. "He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: 'no man, no problem,' " Vieira said.
The full Stalin quote, for those who don't recognize it, is "Death solves all problems: no man, no problem."

4.9.05 "Records Give Voice to Guantanamo Detainees" By PETE YOST and MATT KELLEY, Associated Press Writers, via Yahoo!

4.8.05 "Sayanora, Credibility" John Cole speaks out:

Look at the recent behavior of Republicans in Congress towards REPUBLICAN APPOINTED CONSERVATIVE JUDGES. Forget 'screw me once, shame on you.' This new breed of fanatacism is "Slight me in any discernable way, even a mild disagreement, and I will publicly destroy you."
And for what?
- So Tom DeLay can stuff his pockets with PAC money?
- So the banking interests that bankroll Washington can get their bankruptcy bill, ensuring higher and higher profits and usurious interest rates?
- So Jim Sensennbrenner can put people in jail for broadcasting things he finds obscene?
- So that Congress can insert itself into your marriage, change your end-of-life decisions, because they don't like them?
- So we can make sure gays don't get married?
- To make sure something like evolution and other nasty science things aren't taught in school?
What, exactly are we trying to accomplish, and why, exactly, should I be in favor of it? Other than Iraq and Afghanistan, which are going well and are a success (yet still works in progress), what have we accomplished? I'm serious. Remind me what we are trying to do here- why this is a good thing.

4.8.05 "States Told Not to Steer Beneficiaries to Drug Plans" By ROBERT PEAR The New York Times

The Bush administration has told states that they cannot steer Medicare beneficiaries to any specific prescription drug plan, even if state officials find that one or two insurance plans would provide the best deals for elderly people with low-incomes.

Of all the knives that HUD has put in New York City's back, this is the longest and deepest," Mr. Schumer said in an interview. "I've never seen anything like this in the magnitude of the cut and the sneaky way in which it was delivered."

4.7.05 "Florida eyes allowing residents to open fire whenever they see threat" Yahoo!

4.5.05 " Introducing The Constitution Restoration Act -- Say Hello To Taliban America And Goodbye To Godless Judges, Courts And Law." by W. David Kubiak

4.3.05 "The president still has many to convince of his Social Security proposal -- including an investing club near his Texas ranch." By Warren Vieth, LA Times Staff Writer

Club president Labens, a Waco City Council member and retired appliance store owner, said he could not support Bush's personal account proposal as long as the president refused to spell out the specifics, something the White House has preferred to leave to Congress.
"If I came to you and said, 'We're going to make you a millionaire, but we're not going to tell you how it's going to work,' how much credibility would I have?" Labens asked. "You wouldn't go out and start buying big automobiles all of a sudden."

3.31.05 Army Memo Released By ACLU Suggests Perjury In Lt. Gen. Sanchez Sworn Testimony on Torture

The American Civil Liberties Union today sent a letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales asking him to open an investigation into possible perjury by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the theater commander at the outset of the Iraq War. The ACLU said that a memo sent by Lt. Gen Sanchez flatly contradicts sworn testimony given by him before the Senate Armed Services Committee, in which he denied authorizing highly coercive interrogation methods.
...
The memorandum, dated September 14, 2003, was signed by Lt. Gen. Sanchez and laid out specific interrogation techniques, modeled on those used against detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for use by coalition forces in Iraq. These include sleep "management," the inducement of fear at two levels of severity, loud music and sensory agitation, and the use of canine units to "exploit [the] Arab fear of dogs."
During sworn testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Lt. Gen. Sanchez flatly denied approving any such techniques in Iraq, and said that a news article reporting otherwise was false.

In a subtle but ultimately very radical piece, Eric Cohen argues that the will of the vegetative person to be allowed to die, even if expressed in a living will or supported by all her family, is not the real issue here. People cannot be allowed to revoke life simply because it is theirs' to revoke:
...
They have gone from saying that a pregnant mother has no autonomy over her own body because another human being is involved to saying that a person has no ultimate autonomy over her own body at all. These are the stakes. The very foundation of modern freedom - autonomy over one's own physical body - is now under attack. And if a theocon government won't allow you control over your own body, what else do you have left?

... after the United States obtained amendments to exempt Americans from the tribunal's jurisdiction.
The vote of the 15-member Council was 11 in favor, with four abstentions- Algeria, Brazil, China and the United States.
...
American objections to the court are based on the view that it is unaccountable and could become a forum for politically motivated prosecutions against Americans abroad. The Clinton administration signed the 1998 Rome treaty setting up the court in December 2000 but the Bush administration revoked the signature in May 2002.
John R. Bolton, President Bush's nominee to be ambassador to the United Nations, was the official who signed the letter abrogating the American signature and he said afterward that the experience had afforded him "the happiest moment in my government service."

A study of U.S. military operations in Iraq, prepared for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, sharply criticizes Pentagon attempts to plan for the aftermath of the U.S.-led invasion two years ago, saying stabilization and reconstruction issues "were addressed only very generally" and "no planning was undertaken to ensure the security of the Iraqi people."
...
The report recommends setting up "some process for exposing senior officials to possibilities other than those being assumed in their planning."

Operating with permission from a secretive U.S. court that meets regularly at Justice headquarters, the FBI has used such warrants to break into homes, offices, hotel rooms and automobiles, install hidden cameras, search luggage and eavesdrop on telephone conversations. Agents also have pried into safe deposit boxes, watched from afar with video cameras and binoculars and intercepted e-mail

4.1.05 Via Carpetbagger:

"Rep. Bob Beauprez said Thursday in a radio show interview that he didn’t have anything to do with the expulsion of three Denver people from a town hall by the President on Social Security. He told AP his office did not "purify" or "homogenize" the audience.
"This is a very independent thing from any of our offices whether it is the governor’s office or one of our congressional offices or a senatorial office,” Rep. Bob Beauprez, R-Colo., said on KHOW-AM. "The White House does the deal. They literally come in and take over."

... on the comic side, The Times reported yesterday that administration officials were relieved that the new report by a presidential commission had "found no evidence that political pressure from the White House or Pentagon contributed to the mistaken intelligence."
That's hilarious
As necessity is the mother of invention, political pressure was the father of conveniently botched intelligence.

The incompetence described in the report occasionally descends into farce, particularly over an Iraqi defector codenamed Curveball, whose fabricated tales about mobile biological laboratories and their influence on US decision-makers were reminiscent of Graham Greene's accidental spy in Our Man in Havana. Despite warnings that he was "crazy", "a waste of time", and that he had not even been in Iraq at the time of an event he supposedly saw, his claims became the subject of almost 100 Defence Intelligence Agency reports and a focus of the National Intelligence Estimate in October 2002

But in a few telling paragraphs among more than 600 pages, the panel allowed that some analysts were influenced by the conventional wisdom, which said Saddam Hussein was hiding an arsenal, and "the sense that challenges to it - or even refusals to find its confirmation - would not be welcome."
Little wonder. In the months before the war, Vice President Cheney said there was "no doubt" Saddam was amassing weapons. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that even "a trained ape" knew it was true. President Bush repeatedly made the case not just that war in Iraq was necessary, but that it was urgent

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