Category: Politics
What Jonathan Singer Said
He comments on the fact that Democratic investigations in the House and Senate have had the side effect of slowing the approvals of Bush Judicial Nominees.
However, an article on the front page of Wednesday’s Washington Post penned by Jerry Markon perhaps adds to the case that the investigations into Gonzales and the administration, more broadly, are bringing benefits — tangentially related, but related nonetheless — both to the Democratic Party and to the progressive movement. Specifically, as the Senate Judiciary Committee works on these and other investigations, it is not taking up potential judicial nominees sent to Capitol Hill by President Bush.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, long considered one of the nation’s most conservative appellate courts, is shifting to a moderate direction with the balance up for grabs. A growing list of vacancies — now five — has left the court evenly divided between Republican and Democratic appointees.
With an election year approaching, experts predict the court will tilt decisively to the left if Democrats keep control of Congress and reclaim the White House.
“There is a very good chance that this court will be solidly Democratic for many, many years,” said Arthur D. Hellman, a University of Pittsburgh law professor. He said the current 5-5 split — which began July 17 when Judge H. Emory Widener Jr., a Republican appointee, took semi-retirement — is “tremendously significant.”
To clarify, I’m not arguing that the Democrats pursue investigations of spurrious charges in order to slow the confirmation of ultra-conservative jurists. Far from it. But at the same time, the positive consequences that have come out of the fact that the Congress has been holding the Bush administration’s feet to the fire are not limited to a few subpoenas here and there, a few resignations here and there, and the truth beginning to come out. And if, as a result of these investigations appellate courts around the country do not shift to the right — or even shift to the left, as this article seems to indicate is the case with the fourth circuit — that’s not necessarily a bad thin.
Well said.
Hero Tells Bush: No Photo Op.
Jeremy Hernandez saved the 50 children on the school bus during the Minneapolis bridge collapse.
As a result, Dunwoody College of Technology had offered him a full scholarship toward a degree in applied science. (Sounds like an associates degree.)
What’s more, he’s turned down a photo op with George Bush:
Mr. Hernandez was not available to comment on the offer; Ms. Schwartz said he left town for northern Minnesota late on Friday, overwhelmed by the attention and concerned that his co-workers were being overlooked. He spent the weekend fishing. When President Bush’s staff contacted him to request a photo opportunity, “He was just, like, ‘Nope,’ ” she said.
Props to him if he just doesn’t want to make too much out of this, humility is far too rare these days.
Double props if he decided that he did not want to shake hands with Bush.
Adventures in Thievery: Bear Stearns Caymans Bankruptcy Filing
When people call for the unfettered free market, they are really calling for these sorts of larcenous behaviors.
One of the little observed parts of the 2005 bankruptcy law allows American firms to go venue shopping for places with phony tax laws, phony regulation and phony courts to avoid any consequences of their actions.
Creditors may argue that the main case should proceed in the U.S. To do so they must show the U.S. bankruptcy judge that the hedge funds had their “center of main interests” in the U.S, said Robin Phelan, of Haynes & Boone, who represented hedge fund InverWorld Inc. in its 1999 liquidation in the Caymans.
Because the two hedge funds were incorporated in the Cayman Islands, that’s presumed to be the center of main interests, according to Phelan.
Of course, the plaintiffs are not angels either, investing in predatory lending as a way to make money.
If there were only a way for both sides to lose.
Signs of the Apocalypse: The WaPo Editorial Page Gets it Right
They cut the Democrats a new one for rolling over on warrantless surveillance.
Truth, the WaPo editorial page being what it is, which is to say only marginally more sane and truthful than the Wall Street Journal and New York Sun editorial pages, one wonders if this is more an attempt to cut the Dems a new one, like the rest of the beltway kool kidz krowd, and less of a real statement of values.
Abstenance Only Education Spreads AIDS
The Republican Party and the Religious Right: Giving your Children Aids since 1996.
BTW, thank you Bill Clinton for signing this into law in the first place.
Christian Fundies Think That Jesus is a soft-on-crime Pinko
Well it looks like the wacko fundamentalists have decided that all that stuff about casting the first stone is some sort of communist secular humanist plot.
They are now sending “court watchers” out to make sure that judges are sufficiently punitive. Teaching a man to fish is just too pinko.
…. Yet, she added that she doesn’t feel pressured by the presence of Court Watch participants.
Let me guess…elected judges…nope…no pressure there. The independent judiciary, yet another bastion of modern thought opposed by the Talibaptists.
Neither does Circuit Judge R. Cletus Maricle, who said, “Some judges probably feel they are there to intimidate him. If the judge is intimidated, that’s his fault.”
I just had to note….Circuit Judge R. Cletus Maricle????? There is not one “hillbilly” joke that could be funnier that that reality.
Congress Gives Bush a Win
Thankfully, it’s only for 6 months.
These folks do not need any additional police power. It’s clear that at every level, the political wing dominates the agenda of Bush and his evil minions™, and giving him anything is a bad idea.
At the very least, a 6 month extension of SCHIP should have been attached.
Neocons are to Journalism as Ebola is to French Kissing
This is a very interesting article describing why everyone at the Jerusalem Post views Conrad Black’s conviction on fraud with the same glee as HPers did over Fiorina’s departure.
Larry Derfner puts it nicely:
THERE’S ONE other misconception about him that ought to be cleared up – that he was a friend of Israel. Maybe in his words he was, but in his deeds? In his deeds he went as far as he could to gut an Israeli newspaper that’s been around for 75 years, one that’s very important to this country and the Diaspora.
Furthermore, he fired hundreds of Israelis, he destabilized hundreds of Israeli families, for nothing but his own greed. He had more money than even his wife could spend, yet for 14 years he fired as many Jerusalem Post employees as he could manage.
No, Lord Black of Crossharbour isn’t a friend of Israel; he’s as contemptuous of Israelis as he is of anybody else.
He’s due to be sentenced on November 30. He could get up to 35 years in prison for fraud and obstruction of justice. I wish the Post would throw a party that day and invite all the hundreds of people Black pushed out of here to come to the newsroom and wait for news of the verdict. I guess it’s just a fantasy.
But reality ought to be festive enough. There will be dozens of current Post employees, many of them Hollinger survivors, in the newsroom on the day of Black’s sentencing. All will be newspapermen and newspaperwomen, all of them pro-Israel – right-wingers, left-wingers and centrists, religious and secular, all sharing the same hope or prayer.
And on that day, God willing, when a roar of exultation is suddenly heard from the old Jerusalem Post building on Yermiyahu Street, it will mean that there is still some justice in the world.
Republican Are For Rules for Everyone Else
The New Yorker has an interesting comment on a little piece of Republithug rule gaming.
Two weeks ago, one of the most important Republican lawyers in Sacramento quietly filed a ballot initiative that would end the practice of granting all fifty-five of California’s electoral votes to the statewide winner. Instead, it would award two of them to the statewide winner and the rest, one by one, to the winner in each congressional district. Nineteen of the fifty-three districts are represented by Republicans, but Bush carried twenty-two districts in 2004. The bottom line is that the initiative, if passed, would spot the Republican ticket something in the neighborhood of twenty electoral votes—votes that it wouldn’t get under the rules prevailing in every other sizable state in the Union.
These were the same people who were screaming that a lost (stolen) election in 2000 had to be played under the rules that were there.
Hendrik Herzberg’s final words on this are definitive:
It’s the lotusland equivalent of Tom DeLay’s 2003 midterm redistricting in Texas, except with a sweeter smell, a better disguise, and larger stakes. And the only way Californians will reject it is if they have a chance to think about it first.
Breaking the Military
As a consequence of Bush’s policies, the military is increasingly broken. To use just one metric, the number of incoming soldiers with prior felony arrests or convictions has more than tripled in the past five years.
A number of these are gang bangers who be bringing back their training to the streets when they get out.
Faith Based Missile Defense
You don’t have to be delusional to work for bush, but it helps….A LOT!!!!!
This craziness starts at the top here, where Bush and his evil minions™ see missile defense as an unadulterated good, even if it is incapable of stopping a single missile.
The technology for creating penetration aids can be purchased at your average party supply store (mylar balloons with a shiny aluminum coating), it seems that testing should be done before deployment.
Why We Need an Agressive and Competent Labor Bureaucracy.
It appears that Universal Media Group has been cheating its employees out of overtime pay.
Luckily for them, this has occurred in California, because, “the employees will receive 25 per cent of fines rewarded”.
The department permits these exemptions for computer systems analysts, computer programmers, software engineers, and other similarly-skilled workers in the computer field. Under California regulations, an exempt IT employee must primarily perform work that is “intellectual or creative and requires the exercise of discretion and independent judgment.” In addition, the employee must earn over $41 per hour.
The UMG workers, who are employed as “IT Support Engineers,” claim the company has illegally classified them as exempt to skip out of paying overtime. The employees are seeking back wages and civil penalties under California’s Private Attorney Act. Under the Private Attorney Act, employees can sue an employer for fines based on labor law on behalf of the state of California. If successful, the employees will receive 25 per cent of fines rewarded, while California will receive the rest.
Note that this is a private lawsuit. Here’s why:
The Law Offices of Michael Tracy, the firm representing the employees….. said the employees had previously filed the overtime complaint with California’s Labor & Workforce Development Agency, but the organization refused to investigate. In response, the employees are suing for the labor fines.
My guess is that Arnold was the reason that they refused to investigate.
Nuclear Welfare Queens
Well, it looks like the lobbiests slipped a provision in the Senate’s energy bill allowing for the taxpayer to cover billions in loan guarantees for the Nuclear industry.
As before, the Department of Energy would be allowed to guarantee 100 percent of the loans and up to 80 percent of the total cost to build a reactor.
But the bill essentially allows the department to approve as many loan guarantees as it wants for both new reactors and plants that use other “clean” technologies.
That is a big change. Under current law, the government is only allowed to guarantee a volume of loans authorized each year by Congress. Last year, Congress limited the government to awarding just $4 billion in loan guarantees for clean energy projects during the 2007 fiscal year.
It’s a big sloppy kiss for the Nuclear Industry.
Mr. Bingaman, the bill’s primary architect, said that he was aware of the provision but believed that it would apply only to reactors with fundamentally new technology.
“I would be amazed if this generic loan program applied to most of the plants that are being proposed, either for the nuclear industry or coal industry,” Mr. Bingaman said Monday night. “The idea of this is not just to help an industry build plants. It’s to demonstrate new technology that meets the nation’s energy needs.”
But industry officials say the measure would directly affect the reactors on the drawing board
Somehow, even if the law is written in the manner that Sen. Bingaman says, I think that the Bush Admin is going to engage in an orgy of loan guarantees, to ensure that 20 or 30 (at least) of these expensive white elephants are issued, on the theory that it guarantees profits for their friends, and consulting gigs for themselves after 2009.
Australian Government Lies Through His Teeth
Well, it appears that the Australian government is using secrecy as an excuse for covering up their own incompetence:.
As an American, let me say to the Australian general public that I feel your pain. I am rather familiar with corrupt politicans screaming “terrorism” for political gain, and screaming “secrecy” to cover up their screw ups.
Secret material used to cancel the visa of an Indian doctor falsely accused of terrorism cannot be released as it may jeopardize investigations, Australia’s immigration minister said Tuesday.
Kevin Andrews said he wanted to release the “protected material” to demonstrate why he cancelled Mohamed Haneef’s working visa but the Australian Federal Police had advised him against it.
So they are claiming that they had a reason to kick him out of the country, but not enough to hold him, even though, as a result of his initial detention, he has detailed knowledge of Australian interrogation techniques.
Prime Minister John Howard this week ruled out an apology and Andrews dismissed calls for a judicial review of the case, which was the first time tough counter-terrorism laws introduced after 9/11 had been put to the test.Andrews had faced heavy criticism in Australia over his decision to exercise a little-used discretionary power to cancel Haneef’s visa then refuse to reinstate it when the terrorism case against the doctor collapsed last week.
….
Haneef was charged with recklessly supporting a terrorist organisation but returned home at the weekend after more than three weeks in custody when the case against him collapsed due to lack of evidence and bungles by prosecutors.
….
Prime Minister John Howard this week ruled out an apology and Andrews dismissed calls for a judicial review of the case, which was the first time tough counter-terrorism laws introduced after 9/11 had been put to the test.
And is desparately trying to avoid showing that they failed, and theat they are the threat to basic human rights that its critics have always said.
Is Rumored Arms Sale to Iran a Pretext for An Attack?
There is a report that Iran will be buying a significant number of Sukhoi Su-30 multi role jets in the Jerusalem Post.
The specific report says that they will be buying 250 fighters, they will be purchasing aerial refueling tankers.
I call bull s$%#.
Let’s look at the points:
- This amounts to a very significant chunk of change. At least $6 billion, and more likely $25 billion total cost. They don’t have the money for this. They have already had riots over gas rationing, because they lack sufficient money to reimport enough gasoline (they lack refining capability) for their needs.
- They have no experience with the aircraft.
- This is roughly equal to the total number of fighters that they currently deploy.
- They have a significant amount of western systems that would be difficult to integrate into the platform.
- The Russian government, and Sukhoi both deny it vehemently, which would not be the case with this huge an order.
I think that this got leaked to a friendly source (the J. Post) in the sort ot PR campaign that we swa before the invasion of Iraq.
Another 911 is Inevitable, What Next?
It’s a statistical certainty. When looking at the current “thwarted terrorist attacks”, it’s apparrent that what our state security apparatus is catching are not hardened trained terrorists, but rather fanboy terrorist wannabees.
Even so, if we were to have a competent anti-terrorist effort, another successful attack is inevitable. No defense is one hundred percent.
This is the question that Marty Kaplan asks:
But no more than King Canute could stop the tide, no more than a Big One in California can be prevented, no more than the hundred thousand people who will die in accidents this year will evade their untimely ends, an act of domestic terrorism is inevitable. What counts is how we think about it right now, how we prepare today for when it happens tomorrow, and how we handle it — politically, emotionally, morally — when, as it must, it occurs.
Is there any doubt that the Bush administration, and its dead-ender allies in the Republican Party and the media, will use an act of domestic terrorism as a fresh opportunity to further demonize their political opponents and further compromise the Constitution? Will they truly be able to resist the temptations of martial law, emergency powers, and the phony prerogatives of the unitary executive in wartime? In Britain, in Israel, in Spain, in Ireland, we have seen political leaders decline the invitation to demagoguery that domestic terrorism has offered, and instead to put violence in perspective, to refuse to compromise reason and democracy, to summon their citizens to remain themselves rather than become their enemies. When the unthinkable happens to us again, will the politicians who pissed away the unity following 9/11 in the sands of Iraq have the moral wherewithal to remind us that no matter how grief-stricken we may be, the sky has not fallen and the republic has not failed?
If I could manage to be smarter about risk than I usually am, I would worry less about the possibility of terrorism, and more about the probability that the same chickenhawks who exploited it before to sell us on war without end, will exploit it again to sing the virtues of temporary fascism.
We know that the Bush and his Evil Minions™ are incompetent, and that their code places power and personal loyalty above everything else.
Even if we grant them that they have some limits, and that they won’t let a terrorist attack happen for political gain, and I DON’T grant them the benefit of the doubt, we know that another attack will happen, and that they will use this as an excuse to consolidate political advantage.
How do we deal with this fact?
Why The US is Hated
This article by Mohsin Hamid gives an excellent picture of the lack of concern in both the American policy apparatus and the American public to the tremendous damage that is done by American policies towards people and institutions who are NOT the target of these operations.
He is in a unique position to understand this, having spent his time from ages 6-9 in the US before moving back to Lahore, Pakistan, and then returning to the US for college.
…
For another, growing up in Pakistan in the 1980s let me see firsthand the devastating effects that the best of U.S. intentions can have.
…
But there is another major reason for anti-Americanism: the accreted residue of many years of U.S. foreign policies. These policies are unknown to most Americans.
They form only minor footnotes in U.S. history. But they are the chapter titles of the histories of other countries, where they have had enormous consequences.
America’s strength has made it a sort of Gulliver in world affairs: By wiggling its toes it can, often inadvertently, break the arm of a Lilliputian.
He moved back to Pakistan just as the civil war that Jimmy Carter and Zbigniew Brezinski bought* was ramping up, and he saw the effects:
- “Kalashnikov assault rifles from those camps began to flood the streets of Lahore, setting in motion a crime wave that put an end to my days of pedaling unsupervised through the streets.”
- Zia began an ongoing attempt to Islamize Pakistan and thus make it a more fertile breeding ground for the anti-Soviet jihad.
- Public female dance performances were banned, female newscasters were told to cover their heads and laws undermining women’s rights were passed.
- Secular politicians, academics and journalists were intimidated, imprisoned and worse.
- The angry groups of bearded men who began enforcing their own morality codes became a fact of life.
- An explosion in cheap Heroine, and hence addiction and associated problems, as a result of it being Mujahideen’s primary revenue source for their activities.
He makes the very wise commnet, “Simply because America has — often for what seemed good reasons at the time — intervened to shape the destinies of other countries and then, as a nation, forgotten those interventions.”
The Taliban and al Queida are a result of both our policies in the Afghan civil war, and then our ignoring the mess that we made.
*It’s clear that the Afghan civil war was a product of American to create it. While there was always banditry in Afghan countryside, Brezinski, with Carter’s approval paid money to, and armed those bandits, with the hope of creating, and embroiling the Soviets in, a Vietnam Style civil war.
It worked all too well, and given that this was about half a decade from the fall of Saigon, they both had to know the suffering and death that this would create.
Johnah Goldberg Calls for Return To Jim Crow Laws
Jonah Goldberg, the second most egregious example of hepotism taken to extremeshas an editorial in the Los Angeles Times in which he calls for a return to Jim Crow era voter qualification tests.
He asks, “Why not test people about the basic functions of government? Immigrants have to pass a test to vote; why not all citizens?”
Well, given that Fox News watchers are the least informed news consumers out there, this could benefit Democrats.
So let’s ask some basic questions of citizens:
- Which Branch of government has the exclusive right to delcare war?
- Give conditions in which executive privilege do not apply.
- How does the 13th amendment effect the powers of the states?
- Who appoints federal judges?
- Who appoints Ambassadors?
- Who appoints Cabinet Members?
Here re the answers: Senate, almost all of them (at least from the rulings from the Clinton days), that all rights in the constitution apply to the states too, Senate, Senate, Senate
The president does not appoint these folks, he nominates them, the senate appoints them.
Seriously the only person stupider than Goldberg is the idiot who suggest that he write OP/Eds for the LA Times.
Eating Our Seed Corn: The Minnesota Bridge Collapse
In staring at the rubble that was a bridge on CNN today, the question is “why?”
Speaking strictly as an engineer, I can say that there was either a point load, or a tensile load (the strength of ceramics over time in tension is zero) leading to a failure.
That misses the big picture.
The big picture is that at least since the 1970s, the United States has created prosperity, or the illusion of prosperity, through eating its seed corn.
Eating one’s seed corn is a metaphor. It refers to a farmer eating seed that is reserved for planting the next year. It feeds his belly now, but creates a disaster the next season.
Through the systematic dismantling of protections on things workers rights and speculative investments, along with literally running infrastructure constructed over 40 years ago into the ground, we have created a little pop.
Things seem fine, but at some point, the poper must be paid.