Bush and his people are filth. More from the Washington Post on the cesspool they have made of the Department of Homeland Security. Go read it all.

“After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and after the Bush administration assumed a tough new stance on immigration in its campaign against terrorism, the Justice Department still sounded wary about drugging deportees. In March 2002, a Justice lawyer laid out two options. One choice, he wrote, was to “seek a court order … in every case where the alien’s medication is not therapeutically justified.” The other choice was to create a regulation to grant immigration officials explicit permission to sedate deportees, perhaps including safeguards that would give people a warning that they might be medicated — and a chance to object.

Top immigration officials chose neither. Instead, in May 2003, just after ICE was created, they internally circulated a new policy: “[A]n ICE detainee with or without a diagnosed psychiatric condition who displays overt or threatening aggressive behavior … may be considered a combative detainee and can be sedated if appropriate under the circumstances.”

From the normally mild-mannered Bob Herbert, in his New York Times column today. Wow.

…class is not a Clinton forte.

But it’s one thing to lack class and a sense of grace, quite another to deliberately try and wreck the presidential prospects of your party’s likely nominee — and to do it in a way that has the potential to undermine the substantial racial progress that has been made in this country over many years.

The Clintons should be ashamed of themselves. But they long ago proved to the world that they have no shame.

In all the coverage of the subprime mortgage mess, there has been a key element missing: the sales pitch.

This is where the rubber meets the road, where the actual swindle goes down, where the trap snaps shut and the sucker is held fast till he can be skinned alive. It is the Glengarry Glen Ross moment.

We must understand these moments when we listen to the head hogs — Countrywide, Merrill Lynch, Citicorp, AIG and the other giant loan sharks — as they whine that the whole disaster is all the fault of deadbeat borrowers who should have known better.

And these moments are all committed to paper somewhere, except I don’t know how to get my hands on it. So I’m asking for help. Does anybody out there know somebody who was or is involved with a subprime mortgage outfit?

These moneylenders don’t just send their high-pressure sales force into battle unprepared. Like any other high-pressure sales outfit, mortgage brokers must use work sheets, talking points, training manuals and even scripts. These are to be followed, sometimes word for word. That’s what it means when the voice on the phone says, “This conversation may be recorded for training purposes?”

Every reasonable objection the prospect may raise has been anticipated, and a suitably deceptive answer prepared. Every evasion and obfuscation and misdirection has been scripted. And I’d like to put this stuff on the internet where it belongs — not to expose or embarrass any individual, but to expose the shabby trickery of the foundation upon which the huge banking firms are built.

The most likely source for such documentation, it seems to me, would be a remorseful or disgruntled former employee of a mortage broker who hasn’t bothered to throw out the old scripts and manuals.

Do you know any such person? I would offer him or her, and you, complete anonymity of course. Written backwards, my phone number is 0075793068. In the same way, I can be reached on line here: moc.liamg@elttilood.emorej

The Headless Nail passes on this, from the Washington Post:

The House voted 238 to 179 yesterday to kill an Internal Revenue Service program that relies on private debt collectors to pursue scofflaws for back taxes.

Fourteen Republicans joined 224 Democrats in voting to shutter the two-year-old effort, which has the IRS on track to lose more than $37 million as it pays contractors to do what the government’s own tax experts say IRS agents could do more efficiently. Despite aggressive collection tactics, the contractors have brought in only $49 million in revenue, little more than half of what it has cost the IRS to implement the program.

In my opinion the single greatest issue arising from the immoral and inept and illegal Bush/Cheney misadministration is the blowback likely to be generated by the disasters we’ve wreaked around the world. We’ve made enemies of literally millions of people in Iraq alone; five million refugees, internal and external, plus a million dead, and who knows how many lives and bodies left shattered, most of them not initially predisposed to despising us. An economy and social structure in ruins; existing political instabilities exaggerated throughout the region; American and Israeli strength increasingly intertwined, and thus suspicion and guilt increasingly collective in nature.

How will Americans process that knowledge?

My guess is they’ll start with denial, but that river ain’t flowin’. We try to follow our beloved President down the cherry-blossom path, but like him we keep finding ourselves bewildered and deserted. Dana Milbank lists the countries whose governments have changed hands in one sense or another as polities around the world reject the Cheney approach. Spain, Italy, Poland, Japan, Britain, and Australia have all substituted Bush doubters for the Bush promoters who helped, or at least didn’t complain about, the war.

Bush’s pariah status has turned his Coalition of the Willing into a retirement community and given the president an unusual role in the domestic affairs of other countries. In Australia, one of Rudd’s predecessors as Labor leader, Mark Latham, got the top job after describing Bush as “the most incompetent and dangerous president in living memory.” He further described members of Howard’s government as a “conga line of suckholes” to Bush.

Howard, in turn, expressed a view that al-Qaeda terrorists would be praying for a 2008 victory by Democrats in general and Barack Obama in particular.

Bush enjoyed this mutual affection. “I can tell you, relations are great right now,” he said last year in Sydney, which was all but shut down by security measures needed to keep him safe.

Relations are perhaps not quite so great now, but Bush put on a brave face as he welcomed Rudd to the White House Friday. He called the 50-year-old premier a “fine lad” and even praised Rudd’s decision to pull out of Iraq. “I always like to be in the presence of somebody who does what he says he’s going to do,” Bush reasoned.

Rudd, touched by Bush’s manner, said he was designating the president as “an honorary Queenslander,” after the prime minister’s home state.

Will international hostility toward us decrease, as we flush the Bush presidency down the memory hole at top speed while people around the world continue to suffer from our latest war of aggression? Probably it will; there seem to be signs in international polls that the current political campaign has helped our image abroad, if only in showing a lot more engagement by Americans than the world has recently seen from us, and in reminding us all that the nightmare will soon end.

Now the question is, what do we do about it? By “it”, I mean the whole shebang. The Bush wars and the disasters they’ve created, not confined to Afghanistan and Iraq. The loss of honor involved in the revelations of systematic and institutionalized torture. The direct assaults on privacy and civil liberties. And perhaps most disgusting and frightening of all, the attempts to rob us of our most basic American right, to cast a vote that counts toward the decisions we as a nation must make.

If at this transitional moment we succumb to the ease of the remote and switch to another channel, we’ll miss a tremendous opportunity. We could recoup a large amount of the global goodwill that flooded our way after 9/11 if we were to repudiate the conduct and aims of the previous presidency. This to my knowledge the US has never done, but we need to make explicit public record that Bush, Cheney, et.al., violated both the letter and the spirit of our national institutions, and many cases our laws as well.

By default, those institutions will remain in their current configurations, ready for use by the next occupant of the Oval Office. Doubtless, the three most likely occupants will all employ the office with greater reverence for tradition and international coöperation than the current one. But will the next President agree to make warrantless wiretaps illegal? Or will we just agree to define “warrant” and “wiretap” so that whatever we’re currently doing is now okay?

The real question is whether the November election will bring the US to a realistic operating posture with respect to the rest of the world. We no longer dominate. We never should have tried. We can still lead by example, if we admit our mistakes and try to fix them. Or we can hunker down and wait for the incoming, hoping to be raptured.

Don Heiny sends this:

Well, I say that the Democratic Party changed. The Democratic Party today was not the party it was in 2000. It’s not the Bill Clinton-Al Gore party, which was strong internationalists, strong on defense, pro-trade, pro-reform in our domestic government. It’s been effectively taken over by a small group on the left of the party that is protectionist, isolationist and basically will — and very, very hyperpartisan. So it pains me. I’m a Democrat who came to the party in the era of President John F. Kennedy. It’s a strange turn of the road when I find among the candidates running this year that the one, in my opinion, closest to the Kennedy legacy, the John F. Kennedy legacy, is John S. McCain.

The speaker is the despicable Joe Lieberman, on ABC this morning. Here is some earlier moralizing from Holy Joe, Likud’s man in Connecticut and soon to be, if his wettest dreams come true, McCain’s man on the GOP ticket this fall:

WASHINGTON — Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman reluctantly acknowledged Thursday that he does not believe waterboarding is torture, but believes the interrogation technique should be available only under the most extreme circumstances…

The difference, he said, is that waterboarding is mostly psychological and there is no permanent physical damage. "It is not like putting burning coals on people's bodies. The person is in no real danger. The impact is psychological," Lieberman said.

Connecticut resident Jerry Doolittle reluctantly acknowledges that he would rather have just about anybody as his senator but Torture Boy Lieberman. In fact I once put my vote where my mouth is.

It was in 2000, when a Republican no-hoper named Philip Giordano was running against Lieberman for the senate seat that Holy Joe was clinging to for dear life while simultaneously dragging down the national Democratic ticket as the vice presidential candidate.

I only knew two things about Giordano. One was that he was mayor of Waterbury, which is significant in Connecticut politics. It signifies that you haven’t been indicted yet, but hold your horses. You’ll get there soon enough.

The second thing I knew was that Giordano wasn’t Joe Lieberman, which left me with no option but to cast the first vote of my life for a Republican.

Meanwhile the FBI had already been quietly investigating Giordano for corruption, a process which is triggered more or less automatically when a new Waterbury mayor takes office.

During “Operation LandPhil,” as the Bureau called it, the wiretappers snapped to attention one day when they overheard Giordano making arrangements with a local prostitute to bring two girls, aged nine and ten, to his office for oral sex. Now the former Marine is doing 37 years in federal prison.

And still I don’t regret my vote. I’d rather be represented in the Senate by a pedophile than by a whiny, smarmy, sanctimonious warmonger with the blood of innumerable nine- and ten-year-old girls on his hands.

Those who have been following the Eliot Mess closely will recall that the FBI staked out Spitzer’s hotel room during an earlier Washington visit in December, but came up empty-handed.

What do you suppose led them to do that, since the FBI almost never goes to these lengths in prostitution cases? Unless maybe they get a tip from a scummy GOP dirty tricks artist? For which, see this Miami Herald story:

Almost four months before Gov. Eliot Spitzer resigned in a sex scandal, a lawyer for Republican political operative Roger Stone sent a letter to the FBI alleging that Spitzer ‘‘used the services of high-priced call girls’’ while in Florida.

The letter, dated Nov. 19, said Miami Beach resident Stone learned the information from ‘‘a social contact in an adult-themed club.’’ It offered one potentially identifying detail: The man in question hadn’t taken off his calf-length black socks “during the sex act.”

BBC moved this story at 10:22 p.m. (EST) Thursday, and the 11 o’clock news only carried a sentence or two on it. But it will be all over the news by Friday morning, barring massive media misconduct. Which of course we can’t bar at all.

The US Department of State has fired two contractors and disciplined a third for accessing the passport file of presidential hopeful Barack Obama.

A spokesman for the department, Sean McCormack, said the cases were likely caused by “imprudent curiosity.” But he said it was not clear what the employees may have seen or what they were looking for.

A spokesman for Mr Obama suggested that the government could be using private information for “political purposes.”

The BBC’s North America editor, Justin Webb, says it is an extraordinary lapse in security which allowed temporary state department employees access to personal information on a man who is guarded by the secret service day and night .

The state department tracks those who access its passport database. Breaches occurred on three separate dates — 9 January, 21 February and 14 March.

“We believe this was out of imprudent curiosity, so we are taking steps to reassure ourselves that that is, in fact, the case,” Mr McCormack said…

In case you think for a moment that the Feds’ investigation of Eliot Spitzer was just law enforcement business as usual and mighty bad luck for the governor, read this story. Now read it again, substituting Arnold Schwarzenegger for Eliot Spitzer, and ask yourself if an investigation would have even gotten off the ground. Pay particular attention to the moment when it became obvious to the Republican U.S. Attorney that no tax fraud or political corruption was involved.

Addendum: see this for a fuller treatment. The whole mess is starting to “shine and stink like rotten mackerel by moonlight,” as John Randolph of Virginia once said.

More disgusting news from Halliburton, Vice President Richard Cheney’s favorite war profiteer:

…The inspector general's report said some troops noticed problems with the water. Between October 2004 and May 2005, troops at Camp Ar Ramadi said bathwater was discolored and had an unusual odor. The report said KBR failed to treat the nonpotable water and monitor water quality during the same period.

At Camp Q-West, KBR inappropriately delivered chlorinated wastewater for showers and latrines without informing military preventive medicine officials, the report said. "KBR did not monitor or record the quality of water at point-of-use containers before April 2006, even though the ... contract required the company to do so," the report added.

Medical records for troops at Camp Q-West indicated 38 cases of illnesses commonly attributed to problem water. These include skin abscesses, cellulitis, skin infections and diarrhea. Doctors diagnosed 24 of the cases in January and February 2006, the same period when medical officials warned of a rise in bacterial infections at the base…

More news from Halliburton, which as you will recall has Vice President Dick Cheney on its payroll to this day. I urge you to read it the whole story in the Boston Globe. Benumbed as we are from our long wallow in the squalor of the most corrupt administration in American history, this still retains the power to shock.

CAYMAN ISLANDS — Kellogg Brown & Root, the nation’s top Iraq war contractor and until last year a subsidiary of Halliburton Corp., has avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars in federal Medicare and Social Security taxes by hiring workers through shell companies based in this tropical tax haven.

When Texas pipe-fitter Danny Langford applied for unemployment compensation after being let go by Service Employers International Inc., he was rejected, he was told, because he worked for a foreign company.

More than 21,000 people working for KBR in Iraq — including about 10,500 Americans — are listed as employees of two companies that exist in a computer file on the fourth floor of a building on a palm-studded boulevard here in the Caribbean. Neither company has an office or phone number in the Cayman Islands.

The Defense Department has known since at least 2004 that KBR was avoiding taxes by declaring its American workers as employees of Cayman Islands shell companies, and officials said the move allowed KBR to perform the work more cheaply, saving Defense dollars…

Just when you were thinking Bush’s Justice Department couldn’t get any more despicable, it gets more despicable. Here’s the latest maggot to issue from the rotting corpse of Justice.

Sioux Manufacturing, a North Dakota company, has produced millions of helmets over the years for our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. These were supposed to have been built, as is normal in such matters, to certain specifications set by the customer in what the law calls a “contract.” Unhappily, however, Sioux Manufacturing had a competing and overriding moral obligation — its duty to maximize profits. The Pentagon’s specifications would just have to go.

So the looms were set to short-weight the helmets on Kevlar, the polymer thread which makes them resistant to bullets and shrapnel. Less Kevlar made for lighter helmets. The company therefore added resin to bring them up to the specified weight. This further reduced protection for the troops, since resin made the helmets less elastic and more brittle.

The evidence for all this comes from tape recordings, extensive company records, and the testimony of two plant managers who filed suit under the federal whistle-blower law for $159 million in damages. They were of course fired.

Bush’s U.S. Attorney for North Dakota, Drew H. Wrigley, has just cleaned up this whole sorry mess, thank God, and brought the suit to “an appropriate resolution.” Wrigley stamped his tiny foot and forced those naughty Sioux to settle for $2 million with no admission of wrongdoing.

And as if that weren’t enough, 12 days before the settlement an outraged Pentagon had smacked the reeling company with a $74 million contract to replace all the substandard helmets it had already bought from them.

Cost-plus, no doubt.

Never heard of these guys before now, but if this music is any indication of what else they’re doing, I’m going to look for their CD’s. Hope you hear them all too. Far too many of the politicians don’t seem to want to listen. And check out the sponsor too, the Common Ground Collective. Solidarity, not charity.

These snippets are from a Village Voice story by Wayne Barrett that ran last summer. And there’s lots, lots more where this came from.

In response to his critics' most damning sound bite, Giuliani is attempting to blame a once-valued aide for the decision to put his prized, $61 million emergency-command center in the World Trade Center, an obvious terrorist target. The 1997 decision had dire consequences on 9/11, when the city had to mobilize a response without any operational center.

“My director of emergency management recommended 7 WTC” as “the site that would make the most sense,” Giuliani told Chris Wallace’s Fox News Channel show in May, pinpointing Jerry Hauer as the culprit.

Wallace confronted Giuliani, however, with a 1996 Hauer memo recommending that the bunker be sited at MetroTech in Brooklyn, close to where the Bloomberg administration eventually built one …

Hauer says Denny Young, the mayor’s alter ego, who has worked at his side for nearly three decades, eventually “made it very clear” that Giuliani wanted “to be able to walk to this facility quickly.” …The formal city document approving the site said that it “was selected due to its proximity to City Hall,” a standard set by Giuliani and Giuliani alone …

Giuliani’s office had a humidor for cigars and mementos from City Hall, including a fire horn, police hats and fire hats, as well as monogrammed towels in his bathroom. His suite was bulletproofed and he visited it often, even on weekends, bringing his girlfriend Judi Nathan there long before the relationship surfaced. He had his own elevator.

Great concern was expressed in writing that the platform in the press room had to be high enough to make sure his head was above the cameras. It’s inconceivable that the hands-on mayor’s fantasy command center was shaped — or sited — by anyone other than him.

From Jim Dwyer’s sidebar on the Kerik trial in the Times:

Across the courtroom, in the jury box, courtroom artists peered at Mr. Kerik through opera glasses, sketching him in profile. During the 16 months he served as police commissioner under Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Kerik had a stash of 30 miniature plaster busts of his own head — paid for by a private police foundation — that he gave to those deserving of such a memento.

From the main story:

The tax fraud charges include failing to report as income the $255,000 in renovations to his Bronx apartment, $236,269 in rent on the Upper East Side apartment for two years beginning in December 2001, consulting fees of $20,000 for two months in 2002, and royalties of $75,953 on a book of photographs about the Sept. 11 attacks.

Mr. Kerik had written a foreword for the book. Others involved, including the publisher and Fire Commissioner Thomas Von Essen, donated more than $500,000 in proceeds to the New York Police and Fire Widows’ and Children’s Benefit Fund.

At a meeting of former White House speechwriters last week I learned that my old boss, Jim Fallows of The Atlantic, has a blog on the magazine’s site. Here’s an excerpt from a recent post:

On crucial points, Mukasey's second-day testimony amounted to a request that he and the Administration be trusted to do the right thing. Nothing against him personally, but the time for trust has passed. Unless Mukasey explicitly repudiates the most abusive parts of his predecessor's (and his President's) record, the Senate would be negligent and reckless to approve him.

A specific point: the "waterboarding" outrage. As is now becoming famous, Mukasey said this, when asked by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse whether waterboarding was constitutional:

“I don’t know what is involved in the technique,” Mr. Mukasey replied. “If waterboarding is torture, torture is not constitutional.”

Either way you slice it, this answer alone is grounds for rejecting Mukasey. If he really doesn't "know what is involved" in the technique, he is unacceptably lazy or ill-informed. Any citizen can learn about this technique with a few minutes on the computer…”

So, if Mukasey was telling the truth in this answer, he is too lazy for the job. If he was lying, he's too dishonest.

Jim seems to think that proven laziness and dishonesty disqualify a man for high office. They don’t, not in a democracy. Take Bush’s reelection. Please.

If Mukasey is even remotely interested in the technique of waterboarding — which is doubtful, ignorance being bliss — he can read a first-hand account from a survivor right here on Bad Attitudes. And below is a helpful diagram, from 16th century Antwerp.

Remember a fat rich kid named Richard Mellon Scaife, the slime artist who bankrolled the slime artists who tried to slime Bill Clinton out of office?

Slime doesn’t come cheap. Perjurers and slanderers and blackmailers and pathological liars and sociopaths and forgers and crooked “journalists” and mad-dog attack lawyers and friendly judges and right-wing stink tanks and sleazy P.I.’s and smear sheets posing as newspapers cost plenty.

How can even a fat rich kid afford all that? Here’s a clue, from the divorce proceedings pitting Richard against his second wife, Ritchie:

“The most remarkable feature of the relevant and material issues of consequence in this case is the number of zeroes after Mr. Scaife’s disposable income,” wrote Ritchie Scaife’s lawyers, Gary Gentile and William Pietragallo II, in a pretrial statement filed Oct. 23. They put his monthly income on earnings from nine various trusts at $3.9 million.

“Incredibly, this fantasia of monthly distributions is taxed at an aggregate rate of slightly less than 15 percent,” they write.

The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.
  — The Merchant of Venice

Speaking of Shylock, Arnold Schwarzenegger has set his yachts upon the sea. And the people’s little ship is sailing forth, while Bob Dylan’s words echo in the haunts in the harbor.

Making good on a promise to trim the state budget, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger eliminated a $55-million program Friday that advocates say has helped thousands of mentally ill homeless people break the costly cycle of hospitalization, jails and street life.

None of the cuts elicited a more virulent outcry than the elimination of the program for the homeless mentally ill.

The program had been on the chopping block all summer. Advocates, including the architects of California's effort to overhaul its troubled mental health system, had staged a furious lobbying effort to stave off the cut.

One official was quoted: “A $45-million tax break for yacht owners stays in the budget. And a nationally recognized, incredibly effective program to end homelessness for those living with mental illness gets thrown under the bus.”

The summer before I went off to college I sold hugely overpriced vacuum cleaners to poor people who couldn’t afford the payments. My commission was sixty percent.

Presently, however, I accepted common decency as my personal Savior and thus did not wind up like one Angelo R. Mozilo, the loathsome shylock who runs Countrywide Financial Corporation. Read all about his racket here. Excerpts:

According to dozens of loan documents, [Countrywide] routinely charges tax service fees of $60, far above what other lenders charge, for information about any outstanding tax obligations of the borrowers. Credit checks can cost $36 at LandSafe, double what others levy. Some Countrywide loans even included fees of $100 to e-mail documents or $45 to ship them overnight. LandSafe also charges borrowers $26 for flood certifications, for which other companies typically charge $12 to $14, according to sales representatives and brokers familiar with the fees …

Rarely a buyer of Countrywide shares — he has not bought a share since 1987, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings — [Mozilo] has been a huge seller in recent years. Since the company listed its shares on the New York Stock Exchange in 1984, he has reaped $406 million selling Countrywide stock.

As the subprime mortgage debacle began to unfold this year, Mr. Mozilo’s selling accelerated. Filings show that he made $129 million from stock sales during the last 12 months, or almost one-third of the entire amount he has reaped over the last 23 years.

You no doubt heard the reports, mostly but not entirely snarky, about Cindy Sheehan’s arrest in the office of John Conyers. I admire her commitment, but it seems to me that her view of the problem is the reverse of reality.

I certainly believe that the current situation calls for, indeed requires, that both the President and the Vice President be impeached. No one can honestly question whether they have committed impeachable offenses. The question is what to do about it, and in this regard the leading Democrats in Congress are proving to be as spineless a majority as they were a minority.

But Conyers is not the problem. It seems clear that he favors impeachment, but to overcome opposition from the Speaker, he needs an overwhelming number of colleagues to back him. Which, in my view, makes Nancy Pelosi the problem. Her office would be a better place to get arrested to make a political point.

As Nader says, what we need is not a third party, but a second one. The Democrats, following the Clinton pattern, talk progressive but act DLC. They need the progressive votes (usually, though in 2008 not so much), but they’re mostly corporatist. The wide-spread recognition of that fact might explain some of the high fives that Edwards got for his two best lines in the recent debate:

Do you believe that compromise, triangulation will bring about big change? I don’t. I think the people who are powerful in Washington — big insurance companies, big drug companies, big oil companies — they are not going to negotiate. They are not going to give away their power! The only way that they are going to give away their power is if we take it away from them!

and

We can’t trade our insiders for their insiders.

Which of course is why the media hates him: they’re insiders whose employers are owned by the big corporations that currently exercise the real power. It’ll be interesting to see if any changes come from the video his campaign released, showing clips of important stuff happening in the world while playing the song “Hair”. Will they get it? (Will they be allowed to?)

In the end, I think Ruth Conniff is on the money with her observations at The Progressive. She mentions Russ Feingold’s proposal to censure Bush and Cheney, the classic wimpy-liberal response to the difference between reality and what the wingnuts demand. This is why the right wing is powerful and the left wing gormless: the right fights and the left compromises.

Conniff talked with John Nichols of The Nation about Feingold’s comment at Kos: “The history books will show we were vocal in condemning the President’s abuses of power.” (That won’t keep the next President from doing the same things, though; do we care?)

While Democrats give voice to public discontent with the Bush administration, the leadership is still operating on the theory that as Bush and the Republicans head off the cliff, the best course of action is to get out of the way. Politically, Nichols concedes, they might be right: “They should just stand up and say if we abdicate our constitutional responsibilities and don’t do our job, we’ll reap the benefits. It will allow us to do good things. They might be right. Standing by and letting a crash occur might benefit you. That’s a credible case.”

Immoral, but credible. That’s the real problem the Democratic leadership faces: they know their strategy is immoral, so they can no more afford to state it than Bush can be honest about imperialism and oil.

Witness the recent Democratic meme that impeachment would keep them from getting useful work done.

“The idea that taking up impeachment will keep us from acting on health care, gay rights, etc., is ahistoric,” Nichols says. “The fact of the matter is that during the impeachment of Nixon back in the 70s, the reason Congress was so effective and got so much done was that Nixon was scared and, in a calculated move, started cooperating with Congress to avoid impeachment. So the right thing to do is move immediately — see what you can get out of Bush.”

For that theory to win the day, the pressure on Congress from voters has to continue to grow.

That means us. Have you contacted your Representative?

Posted November 10, 2005:

The sputtering fuse under what remains of Bush’s administration isn’t the warmongering Scooter Libby, who will surely keep his mouth shut in return for the inevitable pardon. It’s an old Bush family tradition, you’ll recall, with George Herbert Walker Bush pardoning all the Irangate criminals who could have testified against him.

Less than a month after leaving the presidency and amid nationwide anger over his last minute pardons, Bill Clinton tried to excuse, in a New York Times op ed article, his pardon of Clinton donor Marc Rich and his partner by claiming, among other things, three “distinguished Republican attorneys” had “reviewed and advocated” the pardons.

One of the three was the then little known I. Lewis Libby, who, Clinton wrote, to emphasize his legitimacy, was the new vice president’s chief of staff.

Clinton claimed the Republicans agreed he had substantial “legal and foreign policy reasons” for pardoning the millionaire who fled to Switzerland to avoid a prison term for making illegal oil deals with Iran while Americans were being held hostage there and for evading more than $48 million in taxes. But he didn’t make the charges sound quite that lurid, saying only Rich and a colleague had been indicted “on charges of racketeering and mail and wire fraud, arising out of their oil business.”

Then, to show that Republicans also felt Rich had been wrongly prosecuted, Clinton named three alleged Republican advocates, Libby, Leonard Garment and William Bradford Reynolds. Garment had been a well known lawyer for President Richard Nixon and Reynolds was a top Justice Department official under Ronald Reagan.

All three had also been lawyers for Rich for years, a little fact omitted by Clinton.

A few days later, the Times reported all three had vigorously denied any involvement in the pardon and also noted Clinton’s office had altered the article as the first copies of that Sunday edition of the Times were being printed. A sentence reading, “applications were reviewed and advocated” by Libby and the others, was changed to “the case for the pardons was reviewed and advocated.” In the same story, the paper said Clinton had later agreed with the three lawyers that none of them had reviewed his pardon applications or lobbied for pardons.

Among the well known critics of the pardon was the mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani, who said Clinton “talked just to one side, got their view and totally ignored the view of even his own Justice Department.”

But regarding Libby, he praised Bush, saying that “after evaluating the facts, (Bush) came to a reasonable decision and I believe the decision was correct.” Bush did not get “the view of even his own Justice Department” either but I guess things change.

The former president, campaigning with his wife in Iowa, said nothing about the commutation but candidate Hillary Clinton was righteously indignant, saying “this commutation sends the clear signal that in this administration, cronyism and ideology trump competence and justice.”

And so the same I. Lewis Libby, a bit player in the Rich pardon, is back in the pardon news, this time costarring with a president who found Libby’s 30-month prison sentence excessive and no months just right.

How small — in every sense — is the world of presidential pardons.

From the McClatchy Newspapers story on how convicted liar Irve Lewis Libby, Jr., AKA Germ Boy and Scooter, was turned loose to lie again by the Liar-in-Chief.

Bush had vowed at the start of the investigation in 2003 to take a hard line against anyone involved in the leak. He ordered his staff to cooperate with investigators and threatened to fire the leaker.

“If there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. And if the person has violated law, the person will be taken care of,” he said then.

True to his word for once, Bush has indeed taken care of his consigliere’s consigliere.

Administrations come and, though it sometimes takes forever, they go. Individuals last a bit longer; but arguments outlive us all.

Consider, for example, the argument between the Parliamentarians and the Royalists that caused the English Civil War in 1642, leading to the execution of King Charles I and the exile of his son, later Charles II. Apparently the historical knowledge required to make useful comparisons was insufficiently widely distributed. (Unfortunately Decline and Fall would not be published for 135 years.) What were they thinking, not killing the kid? Mercy and regicide don’t mix. Not that the alternative always succeeds, mind you; but you gotta start somewhere.

In American Theocracy, Kevin Phillips talks about the connections between the English Civil War and the American one. New England, after all, was favored with lots of Puritans, who were generally sympathetic to Cromwell’s Roundheads. Many New Englanders shipped back to England to fight against Charles I.

Big Men in the Southern states, on the other hand, expected the privileges their patrons back in England had of owning and ordering, and basically living in a Cavalier fashion (how else?). The Province of Carolina, for example, was named after the headless king. It was granted to eight supporters by Charles II when he regained the throne. (One of whom, Lord Shaftesbury, employed a secretary named John Locke.) Most of the Southerners who returned to England to fight in the Civil War were Royalists. They tended to believe in centralization of power, since they were in the center. Unfortunately we’re not able to do a controlled experiment in this regard, but had their quarters been swapped for those of their slaves, they might have thought differently.

The conflict, in other words, was inherent in the soul of the United States from long before it became an independent political entity. Monarchy or Parliamentarianism? You’re either with us or against us.

Which adds a bit of back story to the current conflicts between Congress and the White House over whether, despite Tony Snow’s ruling, Congress has, and will execute, Constitutional oversight responsibilities with respect to the executive branch.

Kanye West might be right, though it seems to me that Shrub cares more about money than skin color; he and Snoop seem to be cool with each other, for example. But I can name one black person George Bush does care about: John Conyers, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and the only member who was involved in the Congressional fight to get documents from the Nixon White House. Then there’s Henry Waxman, neither the most beautiful Representative nor the most riveting speaker, but something of a progressive Javert. John Dean says Waxman “may be the nation’s most diligent and vigilant member of Congress”. That, beloveds, is truly what the Founding Fathers intended, Federalist Society be damned.

In the Senate, the White House faces Patrick “Go Fuck Yourself” Leahy, who just might harbor a bit of resentment against the Cheney administration’s imperial style. And Leahy, like Waxman, was elected to Congress for the first time in November, 1974, three months after Nixon resigned.

“This is a further shift by the Bush administration into Nixonian stonewalling and more evidence of their disdain for our system of checks and balances,” said [Leahy]. “Increasingly, the president and vice president feel they are above the law — in America no one is above law.”

The question now is what to do about the obvious facts — namely, that the President and the Vice President, among others, have committed serious crimes, in my view including war crimes and crimes against humanity, and violated their Constitutional responsibilities.

There’s an X-Files episode about Mulder and Scully going to Texas on an investigation, and filing reports afterward. Their reports are quite different, and the episode shows flashbacks from both points of view. It’s one of their silliest; the scene with Mulder explaining that it’s surprisingly difficult to shoot out the tires on an RV making circles in a parking lot is great. It’s filmed in black-and-white, and includes a sheriff who Mulder recalls as a country bumpkin with buck teeth and Scully recalls as a southern gentleman of whom Mulder is jealous.

Turns out the town is infested with the undead. Our heros realize this when, as a result of ordering pizza, they wake up with their shoelaces tied and the pizza uneaten. Aha, says Mulder, vampires.

When they finally get the scoop, they realize the sheriff is also a vampire. The vampires, it seems, have learned to live in relative peace with the surrounding community by keeping their heads down and only feeding in ways that the locals can dismiss as religious visions or alcohol-induced fantasies. The sheriff, realizing he’s got a sympathetic audience in the FBI agents, confesses, and apologizes for the pizza-delivery boy: “He never got the concept of low-profile.”

Which, I assert, is a metaphor for government. Like vampiring, government resembles typography and refereeing; when it’s done well, it’s unnoticeable. In a basketball game, where calls make much more difference than in baseball, football, soccer, or tennis, the best referees are quiet: they call all the blatant stuff and let the dinky stuff go, and they do so in a relatively even manner. This is what people want when they petition for referees to “let the players decide the game”.

Problems arise when one side adopts a consistent strategy of not simply pushing the envelope of the rules but openly flaunting its refusal to obey them. How then can a fair referee “let the players decide the game”? Inadvertent rule violations are one thing; cheating is another, and the nature of things in such cases is that the “activist” referees control the outcome. And we saw how well that worked in 2000.

The question now is, God help us, what the Supreme Court will do if the dispute over subpoenas arrives there. I doubt there’s any pro-Monarchist position that couldn’t attract Scalia and Thomas, and probably Alito. But I think, for now, that the rule of law might hope to get five votes. We’re very likely to get Kennedy, who’s often called The Swing Vote; and we might even get Roberts on the issue of separation of powers, an area in which the Court has historically guarded its prerogatives, and where the Chief Justice’s own power and prestige are affected.

Thorsten Veblen describes another kind of vampire in his Theory of the Leisure Class. The Wikipedia entry notes, among other things, that Veblen’s critique is more radical than that of Marx, who grants the superiority of capitalism over feudalism. Veblen doesn’t; he considers capitalism to be the modern manifestation of primitive tribal behavior, in which status is the highest value.

In Veblen’s view, the development of human society grew from the prehistoric search for necessities, specifically food. At first, everyone brought back what they found, and everyone ate. Then some people realized that they could intimidate others, or attack them and steal their take, and avoid the hard work of gathering.

Over time, this “leisure class” did less and less real work. They preferred hunting to gathering. Hunting generates food when it’s successful, but it burns a lot of calories with uncertain results. They might occasionally raid neighbor tribes and bring back booty that was useful to everyone, thus provoking Paleolithic blowback. Which in turn creates the requirement for a constant vigil to protect the home land.

The leisure class concentrated on two things:

• Warfare, manufacture of the associated weapons and propaganda, and rules to restrict the knowledge of weapons
• The development of various forms of status to differentiate the two classes

There are several natural results of this social structure, such as endemic warfare and lies, and the endless struggle for alpha-dog status. (“I think I need a football team.”)

Veblen argues that status quickly dissociated itself from utility, to the point that one can now determine the status of an activity largely by judging its usefulness: the more useful it is, the lower its status. Think farming versus bond trading. Even activities that might seem to have useful side effects, such as the physical fitness required to play football, can be masquerades, according to Veblen, who considers that the “relation of football to physical culture is much the same as that of the bull-fight to agriculture”.

Thus he derives the concept of conspicuous consumption, consuming more than you need: if you can waste, you must have a lot, so waste indicates high status. Once you’re consuming as much as you can, you want people to know it, otherwise you don’t get the status points.

Next there’s conspicuous leisure. If you can sit on the porch and wave as the neighbors leave for work, you’re higher status than they are. Then comes vicarious consumption — your dependents are also wasteful — and vicarious leisure — your servants sit on the porch and wave.

Veblen proceeds to apply this viewpoint to a variety of society’s oddities, often with comic effect. You can tell, he says, that society affords God very high status by looking at the number of people employed for his vicarious leisure. He has about two pages on why dogs are higher status than cats that is hilarious. In his view, hunting is an expression of the right of the leisure class to do whatever useless thing strikes its fancy. The fox hunt, for example, is certainly not done for the sake of calories, and that inefficiency is a hallmark of status. The more useless, the higher the status.

He must have been pretty popular at cocktail parties back in 1899 with that kind of line.

So when I catch myself having Nixon flashbacks, I remind myself: yes, this is really a new version of the same battle. Yes, this is a battle that’s apparently endemic to American life. Yes, it even goes back three and half centuries to the English Civil War. And, okay, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that it’s what humans have always done. We’ve also always killed each other. Doesn’t mean we can’t stop.

We’re not seeing replays from the Nixon years randomly. This struggle’s been going on for centuries. Should the United States have an all-powerful executive, kinda like a pope or, here’s an idea, a king? Or should we elect, say, a legislature or a parliament to make the rules?

It comes down — surprise! — to the rich and powerful few against the meek and voiceless many. And the rich are way richer now, compared to the rest of us, than they were only a decade or two ago. Maybe, after all, we should just return to a feudal society and admit the rich will always control us. Feudal serfs, after all, were assured food, clothing, and health care, such as it was, by the lord’s need for laborers at the next harvest. We peasants had some value. (Especially after the Black Death, when the number of laborers dropped in Europe dropped by about a third in a year and a half. Good times!)

Alternatively, we could shoulder our burdens as citizens and try to emulate the founders, or rather to realize their highest statements of ideal. We are many, and we have recently found new ways to organize and to make ourselves heard.

There is much to do. War still rages in Iraq, there is still great poverty in the richest nation in history, and many of our citizens are without health care. Past generations of Americans have surmounted obstacles more difficult than these. It is our turn.

It’s possible that we’re on the verge of a new flowering of democracy in America — of all places! — arising from the abuses of the Cheney administration.

But if so, the first step is to confront the abuses and the lawbreaking head-on. I don’t mean that we’re ready to confront our own national nature as couch-potato bullies; that’ll have to be put off. At a minimum, though, we must accept that our government can be hijacked by people whose actions, whatever their statements or even intentions, are destructive to the point of criminality.

And that this affects us all.

The President and the Vice President command, and to some extent control, the entire federal bureaucracy, including what amounts to a private army in the CIA, and a huge and nearly unaccountable intelligence community with an unknown budget. I haven’t read everything written by the founders, but I have yet to encounter anything I could interpret as countenancing a President’s private army or an unaccountable spy network. This, it seems to me, is exactly what they were rebelling against. And exactly how things happened in Rome.

In this continuing argument, I’m reminded of the judgement of Lazarus Long:

Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.

I’m basically a libertarian in that I don’t want government to tell me what to do. But I also think we can do things collectively that we can’t do alone: schools, roads, hospitals, moon shots, cures for cancer. What do we call the entity that executes our wishes in this collective fashion? I think the word is government, but I’m not stuck on that.

I’m also a socialist in that I think our collective actions should have the goal of increasing the common wealth. And it seems to me that a big part of our common wealth is our heritage of participatory government.

If we fail to confront the blatant law-breaking by the President and the Vice President in some institutional way, we will take a big step down Rome’s path. Probably we can’t impeach both Bush and Cheney before the 2008 election. But we should try.

And there’s no statute of limitations on war crimes.

More from Jeffrey Toobin’s book, Too Close to Call, on the theft of the White House in 2000:

Gore had a somewhat undeserved reputation as a computer whiz. He surfed the Web occasionally, sent e-mail on a wireless BlackBerry device … and used a laptop computer now and then. His habits were not totally unlike those of George W. Bush, who was an inveterate e-mailer.

And now we turn to Bush’s father, George Herbert Walker Bush, in a Fox “News” interview:

GRETA: You are a letter writer. Tons of letters.

H.W. BUSH: Not anymore. Because now I use the email. And the computer. And I find that I don’t do near as much writing as I used to, letters as I used to. I don’t save them. And I am worried about that a little bit not that I have that much more to say, but I think it’s too bad in a way that email will detract from the historical record of presidents. I don’t think that the President Bush uses email.

BARBARA BUSH: He doesn’t.

H.W. BUSH: You worry about it. People are going to subpoena the email records and we are going to, you know, you’ve gotta prove that you were telling the truth and all this stuff.

Two possibilities here. One is that George W., a reformed drunk who clings desperately to his little daily habits, went cold turkey on his inveterate e-mail jones when somebody told him about the Presidential Records Act of 1978.

Another possibility, a good deal more possible than the first, is that Bush has been using that Republican National Committee e-mail back channel just like the rest of his crew.

I’d like to find out whether the RNC had the technological smarts to set up its own server. If not, all that stuff is probably piled up somewhere just waiting for the right subpoena. And if so, there should still be a substantial mess of incriminating messages on the hard drives and servers of outside recipients.

Something might even turn up on the Google.

From a story in today’s New York Times about the manifold, endemic, revolting and ultimately pointless crimes of the CIA in the 1960s and 1970s. These were called by the agency, without any apparent ironic intent, the “family jewels.”

In one of the conversations, Henry A. Kissinger, then serving as both secretary of state and national security adviser, denounced the efforts of William E. Colby, director of central intelligence, to push an aggressive investigation of the agency’s past transgressions.

Mr. Kissinger said the accusations then appearing daily about agency misconduct were “worse than in the days of McCarthy,” and expressed concern that they would intimidate C.I.A. officers, so that “you’ll end up with an agency that does only reporting and not operations.”

“What Colby has done is a disgrace,” Mr. Kissinger said, according to the transcript, posted along with the others by the National Security Archive at George Washington University (nsarchive.org).

“Should we suspend him?” Mr. Ford asked.

“No,” Mr. Kissinger replied, “but after the investigation is over you could move him and put in someone of towering integrity.”

A year later, Mr. Ford replaced Mr. Colby as director with George Bush.

Career people at the federal Department of Education saw the student loan payola scandal coming in the late 1990’s, and the Clinton Administration bequeathed to Bush a sensible plan to deal with the problem. Result? Plan killed. Career personnel muzzled. Large financial supporters placated.

This of course is a matched set with the U.S. Attorney scandal: both are a result of W’s fundamental belief that career civil servants are the enemy, and must be stopped before they enforce the law again. These two matters have come to light recently; somewhat longer ago, we can recall the number of brave diplomats and other government functionaries who quit their jobs to protest the run-up to the Iraq war; we can only imagine the thousands of other instances, in every unexplored nook and unknown cranny of the vast federal castle, in which good public servants have been squelched.

It looks like the Torture Boys are going to be facing a relentless onslaught for the next two years. Only problem is, Chinese water torture was said to have been designed to make the victim go insane. Can an insane person be made more insane? Probably not, but at least they face the music.

This week’s first item of drippage is now out of the faucet and is featured in today’s Washington Post. Stay tuned. There are two more years to cover the last six years of fraud, corruption, graft and malfeasance so there is a great deal of water left in the tank.

Witnesses have told congressional investigators that the chief of the General Services Administration and a deputy in Karl Rove’s political affairs office at the White House joined in a videoconference earlier this year with top GSA political appointees, who discussed ways to help Republican candidates.

With GSA Administrator Lurita Alexis Doan and up to 40 regional administrators on hand, J. Scott Jennings, the White House’s deputy director of political affairs, gave a PowerPoint presentation on Jan. 26 of polling data about the 2006 elections.

Lurita Alexis Doan, administrator of the General Services Administration, is to appear Wednesday before a House committee.

A Political Invitation
In January, political appointees at the U.S. General Services Administration were invited to participate in a videoconference with agency chief Lurita Alexis Doan and the deputy director of Karl Rove's White House Office of Political Affairs.

When Jennings concluded his presentation to the GSA political appointees, Doan allegedly asked them how they could “help ‘our candidates’ in the next elections,” according to a March 6 letter to Doan from Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Waxman said in the letter that one method suggested was using “targeted public events, such as the opening of federal facilities around the country.”

On Wednesday, Doan is scheduled to appear before Waxman’s committee to answer questions about the videoconference and other issues. The committee is investigating whether remarks made during the videoconference violated the Hatch Act, a federal law that restricts executive-branch employees from using their positions for political purposes. Those found in violation of the act do not face criminal penalties but can be removed from their jobs.

Given the unending stream of lies, distortions, half-truths, and plucked cherries flowing from the White House over the last six years, I’m surprised to find myself thinking there might be some truth in their explanation of the whole attorney-firing thing.

To wit: the original explanation, I believe, was that they were fired for performance reasons. This seems transparently true: they were performing according to what law and ethics require, so they were fired. Nothing tricky, or out of step with Bush administration practices, about that.

Personally, I’m hoping Bush keeps Gonzales for the rest of his term, and Cheney and Rice and Hadley as well. Then there will be no question about the list of war criminals, who won’t be able to travel openly without protests and fear of arrest a lá Pinochet.

What I find funniest about the latest Presidential claim of executive privilege is the concept that someone might in fact come into the office of the most bubble-bound President in history and tell him exactly what they think. I mean, when was the last time that happened?

Then there are Republicans like Adam Putnam of Florida, number three in the House, who are pointing out that their colleagues are reluctant to make statements of support for Gonzales because they remember what happened when they made statements of support for Rumsfeld right before the election.

When you’ve even screwed your allies one time too many, you start to feel really alone. Or you dive into denial.

All in all, I find the spectacle of the self-destruction of Rove’s Republican reich both enjoyable and invigorating. And, I can’t deny it, validating. I never thought you could build a stable power base of any size, certainly not one big enough to call itself a majority, by lying, cheating, and stealing elections (and that’s just the part we know about). If, in addition, you use the power you cheat your way into to lie your way into an immensely profitable war, you better not get caught. Everyone you’ve cheated, everyone whose relatives your war killed or maimed, will be out to get you. If they know who you are.

One really good way to make sure people know who you are is to appear in public under-oath testimony in a Senate hearing on the firing of prosecuters who were pursuing corruption. Even the MSM will manage to sniff out a story there.

First, read this depressing piece about the Bushniks’ refusal to use email at all, except for official messages secretly (and illegally) sent from nonofficial sites. Bush knows about the Google, but not about the Google mail (or the Yahoo, or the AOL). Boy oh boy, these guys are slick as goose grease, ain’t they just?

Second, I’m about to take off for a week or so in the Okefenokee swamp, looking for higher life forms than those referenced above. Principally water mocassins. Back in a week or ten days. Play nicely with Chuck and Buck and Joy while I’m gone.

Congress seems likely to roll back Bush’s little-noticed maneuver, in the wake of 9/11, to keep secret forever the presidential crimes of himself, his father, and Reagan. High time, too. The only disinfectant that works on creatures that live under the rocks is sunlight.

These excerpts are from a piece by Dick Ahles, a former television journalist who writes a column that runs in our local weekly, The Lakeville Journal:

In normal times, Bush probably wouldn’t have gotten away with this assault on history but November 2001, when he signed his order, wasn’t a normal time. It was barely a month after 9/11, the country and indeed, the political parties, were blindly, and as it turned out, mistakenly united behind the president and even if they hadn’t been, both branches of the government were in Republican control …

But now, the times, as they always do, have changed. With the end of one party rule, rubber stamps are out and accountability has suddenly become fashionable again. A week ago, a bill was introduced in the House to overturn Bush’s executive order and revive the provisions of the 1978 Presidential Records Act. It is expected to pass and should not be hindered, even by one of those rare Bush vetoes.

Here’s what I’m hoping for.

One source tells CBS News he’s never seen the administration in such deep denial…

When it reaches the point in your administration where the standard method of explaining your actions is to say you’re in denial, it almost doesn’t matter what you do. Or more exactly, what you need to do in order to be taken seriously is to have your actions meet with the approval of two very demanding audiences: a skeptical public, and future events. That’s a trick few have pulled off.

In the immediate future loom votes in both Houses of Congress. House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, a phrase that is doubtless sending shudders through the West Wing on a regular basis these days, has said his panel will vote this week on subpoenas for Karl Rove, Harriet Miers, and others. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, whom you may remember had a friendly exchange with the Vice President on the Senate floor some time back, has scheduled a similar vote this week. On Sunday he said he was not

…particularly open to any compromises, such as a private briefing by the administration officials.

“I want testimony under oath. I am sick and tired of getting half-truths on this,” Leahy said. “I do not believe in this, we’ll have a private briefing for you where we’ll tell you everything, and they don’t.”

Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter, the top Republican on the committee, said he had a long talk with Fielding on Friday and was reserving judgment. Specter said he would like to see Rove and Miers’ open testimony because there were numerous precedents for it.

“I want to see exactly what the White House response is,” Specter said. “Maybe the White House will come back and say, ‘We’ll permit them to be interviewed and we’ll give them all the records.’”

That’s apparently why they call him Senator Magic Bullet. Or maybe not. But I do appreciate his pre-emptive strike against the no-precedent talking point.

Anyway, with enemies like Conyers and Leahy, whom the White House has carefully cultivated over the years and said good things about at every opportunity, the Attorney General’s job is probably safe. At least, as safe as that of the President himself. Did you note Tony Snow’s particularly vehement denial?

Asked if President Bush himself might have suggested the firings, Snow said, “Anything’s possible … but I don’t think so.” He said Mr. Bush “certainly has no recollection of any such thing. I can’t speak for the attorney general.”

“I want you to be clear here: Don’t be dropping it at the president’s door,” Snow said.

So the President has no recollection of any such thing. And he never said he was never “stay the course”. Here’s what I mean: these guys are not only in denial, Nixon-level. They’ve got the simple-minded hubris it takes to be involved in an off-the-shelf, stand-alone, self-sustaining enterprise that has appreciably accelerated the demise of the American empire. For that I give them credit, except that they did it for the most despicable of reasons. And you know who collects on the debt of hubris, don’t you? It’s a goddess named Nemesis.

Right now I expect Karl would name Nemesis Patrick, or perhaps John.

I think Alberto is gone. But, as Froomkin has harped on, Gonzales is not the point. He was never more than a flunky. Who drove the policy?

Bud Cummins of Arkansas, one of the fired U.S. attorneys, said Gonzales should step down if it is proved that he was involved in the firings.

“They need to go around the room and say, ‘Who knew about the bases for these decisions as they went along? Who knew that the White House had this much input, was able to inject this much improper political consideration into these decisions?’

“Because each of those people really don’t need to be at the Department of Justice anymore. If he’s one of them, then maybe he does need to resign,” Cummins said.

Not nearly enough, but it’s a good first step.

The invaluable Paul Krugman has had the mother wit to wonder not about the eight U.S. attorneys fired by Bush, but about the ones who kept their jobs. His full column is behind the Times’s pay-to-play wall, but here, hand-copied by me especially for you, is the money shot:

Donald Shields and John Cragan, two professors of communication, have compiled a database of investigations and/or indictments of candidates and elected officials by U.S. attorneys since the Bush administration came to power.

Of the 375 cases they identified, 10 involved independents, 67 involved Republicans, and 298 involved Democrats. The main source of this partisan tilt was a huge disparity in investigations of local politicians, in which Democrats were seven times as likely as Republicans to face Justice Department scrutiny.

How can this have been happening without a national uproar? The authors explain: “We believe that this tremendous disparity is politically motivated and it occurs because the local (non-statewide and non-Congressional) investigations occur under the radar of a diligent national press. Each instance is treated by a local beat reporter as an isolated case that is only of local interest.”

I won’t link to Firedoglake since their servers stay overloaded, but keep your toes straight, we’re supposed to get a verdict at noon. And Cheney is back in town, just in time.

I just came across a website devoted to driving John Doolitle from his seat representing California’s 4th District in the United States Congress — and immediately added it to the Bad Attitudes blogroll.

Unfortunately one of my sons has the same name as this repellent political specimen from Cupertino. And like the Republican congressmen, my son is a lawyer. Unlike the congressman, however, he is an honest one.

Some of you may remember Representative Doolittle from the movie Fahrenheit 9/11. He was the pudgy, shapeless organism running down an alley in a panic to escape Michael Moore. The pudgy, shapeless cinematographer was shouting after the congressman, asking why he didn’t sign up for military service in the Iraq war for which he had voted so enthusiastically.

If you think I am being in the least bit unfair to a poor fellow who is only trying his best to do the right thing for his country and constituents, click instantly on this link to find out otherwise.

Then tell your friends, send money, take any steps you can to help drive this disgrace from public office. A grateful nation will thank you, and an honest lawyer in Maine will particularly do so.

The only man I ever knew who turned out to be a serial child molester was also an alumnus of The National Review’s editorial staff. Why was I not surprised when his crimes came out? Because the secret sinner all dressed up in sanctity, sobriety and family values was, after all, an old cliché.

All right, but how did it get to be a cliché? Well, someone calling himself or herself the Armchair Subversive (link via Librocrat, in a page titled “Republican Values Create Child Molesters,” has gone to the trouble of assembling a handy, pocket-sized guide to GOP pedophiles. No doubt the list has absolutely no clinical or statistical significance, but don’t let that stop you from clicking here.

Still nauseous after reading below about America’s Senator, Joe Lieberman? Then try this. (Thanks to the Rude Pundit for the link.) As you read, bear in mind that to this day the vice president of the United States is on the Halliburton payroll. Older members of the class will remember that once upon a time, in the reign of King Richard the Virtuous, a vice president was forced from office just because he took a measly $2,500 bribe from a contractor. In Bushworld, this wouldn’t fix a parking ticket.

The New York Times had an excellent editorial today outlining the benefits of a bill that would help to put Karl Rove and his merry band of election thieves out of business.

Two Democratic senators, Barack Obama of Illinois and Charles Schumer of New York, are introducing a bill today that would make deceiving or intimidating voters a federal crime with substantial penalties.

I urge everyone visiting here to contact your Senators and ask them to support this important legislation, The Deceptive Practices and Voter Intimidation Prevention Act of 2007.

For more information or to read the bill, go here.

Texas may (probably does) or may not lead the nation in venal, squalid, plain old roll-in-the-mud rotten government, but it’s certainly number one in lack of shame about it. Consider this (via Juanita’s) from the San Antonio Express-News:

AUSTIN — A Texas official who receives any sum of cash as a gift can satisfy state disclosure laws by reporting the money simply as “currency” without specifying the amount, the Texas Ethics Commission reiterated Monday …

“The question here is whether the description of a gift of cash of over $250 is required to include the value of the gift,” the Ethics Commission opinion said in part. “The term ‘description’ is not defined in Chapter 572 of the Government Code, nor is it defined anywhere else in the Government Code.”

For your reading enjoyment I rescue this morsel from page 15 of the New York Times:

SAN JUAN, P.R., Nov. 17 (AP) — The military said on Friday that it planned to build a $125 million compound at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba where it hopes to hold war-crimes trials for terrorism suspects by the middle of next year.

The compound, designed to accommodate as many as 1,200 people, would include dining areas, work spaces and sleeping accommodations for administrative personnel, lawyers, journalists and others involved in trials. It would create three courtrooms to allow for simultaneous trials, and a separate high-security area to house those on trial.

My question is, how many suspected terrorists could you fly to American courtrooms for $125,000,000?

Here’s how the Republic party can win this election: by cutting off the names of their opponents. Inadvertently, of course.

U.S. Senate candidate James Webb’s last name has been cut off on part of the electronic ballot used by voters in Alexandria, Falls Church and Charlottesville because of a computer glitch that also affects other candidates with long names, city officials said yesterday.

Although the problem creates some voter confusion, it will not cause votes to be cast incorrectly, election officials emphasized. The error shows up only on the summary page, where voters are asked to review their selections before hitting the button to cast their votes. Webb’s full name appears on the page where voters choose for whom to vote.

Election officials attribute the mistake to an increase in the type size on the ballot. Although the larger type is easier to read, it also unintentionally shortens the longer names on the summary page of the ballot.

Thus, Democratic candidate Webb will appear with his first name and nickname only — or “James H. ‘Jim’ ” — on summary pages in Alexandria, Falls Church and Charlottesville, the only jurisdictions in Virginia that use balloting machines manufactured by Hart InterCivic of Austin.

What state is Austin in?

Still, as long as you have a name shorter than James H. Webb, you’re fine. Say, if your name is George Allen.

Every candidate on Alexandria’s summary page has been affected in some way by the glitch. Even if candidates’ full names appear, as is the case with Webb’s Republican opponent, incumbent Sen. George F. Allen, their party affiliations have been cut off.

Well, that’s comforting. Allen’s hurt as much by not being announced as a Republican as Webb is by not having his last name appear. So at least it’s fair.

Election officials in Alexandria said they have been vexed by the problem since they purchased the voting machines in 2003. Although the problem has raised eyebrows among confused voters, elections officials said they are confident that the trouble has not led voters to cast ballots incorrectly.

And Virginia, Senator Macaca’s state, is, as you would expect, on top of the problem.

Jean Jensen, secretary of the Virginia State Board of Elections, who said yesterday she only recently became aware of the problem, pledged to have it fixed by the 2007 statewide elections.

“You better believe it,” Jensen said. “If I have to personally get on a plane and bring Hart InterCivic people here myself, it’ll be corrected.”

That’s the spirit. Don’t let this kind of thing slide for more a couple of elections before you promise to get it fixed.

… Republican congressional corruption. This time, it’s an FBI investigation of GOP Rep. Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania improperly getting lobbying jobs for his inexperienced daughter.

This little beauty ran in the Times yesterday. Aside from the blaming the victim aspect, isn’t it kind of wonderful that the fools running Congress are incapable of running a small boarding school? But at least LaHood admits it, and acceptance is the first step. Maybe he and his pals in the House “leadership” should carry his suggestion a little further by abolishing Bush’s occupation of Iraq.

Straining to hold the party together five weeks from Election Day amid unfolding revelations about the case, Mr. Hastert and his leadership team held a conference call with House Republicans on Monday night and heard blunt advice and criticism from participants who pressed for further action to reassure voters.

“This is a political problem, and we need to step up and do something dramatic,” Representative Ray LaHood of Illinois said afterward, adding that he had proposed abolishing the Congressional page program.

Long before Republican Congressman Foley was revealed as a pervert with a desire for young boys, I wondered to a friend, “Are all Republicans pedophiles ?”

A local GOP rising star had just been arrested for feeding beer to underage boys and accosting one of them. In 2003 a judge-elect of Monroe County, Pennsylvania, my home, was charged with indecent assault for molesting his young daughter at a rock concert in the front row of a packed Wilkes-Barre auditorium.

The attorney, Mark Pazuhanich, was a favorite of the old guard GOP organization who had served two terms as district attorney. Before he molested his daughter in public, Mark had been particularly hard as a prosecutor on sex perverts who preyed on children. Like Foley, it turned out he was part of the problem.

He pleaded nolo to charges relating to the incident and was stripped of his judgeship, given 10 year probation and placed on Megan’s List with all of the other local pedophiles. Quite a come down for a distinguished graduate of Columbia Law School.

Paying high prices for gas on the West Coast, or about to lose your job in Alaska? Timing is everything and Greg Palast provides us with a sordid tale of greed and corruption that is every bit as evil and corrupt as anything Enron could conceive of. Selected excerpts are below, but read the whole thing:

First a little history:

BP’s CEO of Alaskan operations hired a former CIA expert to break into the home of a whistleblower, Chuck Hamel, who had complained of conditions at the pipe’s tanker facility. BP tapped his phone calls with a US congressman and ran a surveillance and smear campaign against him. When caught, a US federal judge said BP’s acts were “reminiscent of Nazi Germany.”

…and now for current events:

Why shut the pipe now? The timing of a sudden inspection and fix of a decade-long problem has a suspicious smell. A precipitous shutdown in mid-summer, in the middle of Middle East war(s), is guaranteed to raise prices and reap monster profits for BP. The price of crude jumped $2.22 a barrel on the shutdown news to over $76. How lucky for BP which sells four million barrels of oil a day. Had BP completed its inspection and repairs a couple years back — say, after Dan Lawn’s tenth warning — the oil market would have hardly noticed.

But $2 a barrel is just the beginning of BP’s shut-down bonus. The Alaskan oil was destined for the California market which now faces a supply crisis at the very height of the summer travel season. The big winner is ARCO petroleum, the largest retailer in the Golden State. ARCO is a 100%-owned subsidiary of … British Petroleum.

The last article I read before bedtime was by The Man, Walter Pincus:

David A. Burtt II, director of the Counterintelligence Field Activity, the Defense Department’s newest intelligence agency whose contracts based on congressional earmarks are under investigation by the Pentagon and federal prosecutors, told his staff yesterday that he and his deputy director will resign at the end of the month.

Why would the top two guys in CIFA resign at the same time? Well, maybe they’re looking at some technical violations of the privacy and bribery statutes.

The agency was criticized in December after it was revealed that a database managed by CIFA contained unverified, raw threat information on Americans who were peacefully protesting the war in Iraq at defense facilities, including recruiting offices.

Last March, as a result of the continuing federal investigations arising out of charges against former congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-Calif.), prosecutors said they were reviewing CIFA contracts that went to MZM Inc., a company run by Mitchell J. Wade, who had pleaded guilty in February to conspiring to bribe Cunningham.

The article says that a counterintelligence official estimated that CIFA had 400 full-time employees and 800 to 900 contractors working for it. In other words, it was another Bush ATM.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s thorough article in Rolling Stone about the stealing of the 2004 election is last week's news, I know. But it's worth putting up anyway, if there's a chance it might reach even one person who hasn't yet read it.

Late on election night when the results began diverging from the exit polls, it was plain that the fix had to be in. Particularly in Ohio, where the election was under the thumb of a Clarence Thomas wannabe called J. Kenneth Blackwell. Dickens himself never christened a character with such deadly accuracy, at least not that I kenneth.

But Kerry just rolled politely over and played dead, in predictable obedience to Vince Lombardi's first principle: "Show me a good loser and I'll show you a loser." Nor has the Democratic leadership let out more than a peep of protest since.

But now George W. Bush is rolling around on the ground mortally wounded after having shot himself in both feet and the scrotum. The time may have finally arrived when a stuporous nation can finally be roused to reexamine just how in the hell we were tricked into our present mess in the first place. If enough of us make enough noise, maybe even the Democratic leadership will join the parade, in its usual position at the rear.

Atrios links to a Roll Call [subscription required] article indicating that some members of the Democratic party are kowtowing to the interests of their corporate masters on the substantial issue of net neutrality. Perhaps Pelosi is kowtowing to her corporate masters as well but I’m in favor of net neutrality and I’m just a small time consumer. Anyone know who the offending Democrats are?

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is drawing the ire of telecommunications giants after she came out against them in a fight between corporate titans of long-standing importance to Democrats — and encouraged her party colleagues to fall in line behind her.

The battle — over the relatively obscure issue of “net neutrality,” which concerns whether and how the federal government should regulate the Internet — pits cable and phone industry giants against tech heavies such as Google, which is based in Pelosi’s home turf of the Bay Area, as well as an array of consumer groups.

That the debate has turned partisan is angering cable and phone-friendly Democrats, who accuse Pelosi of trying to impose her personal views on the party.

“She’s taking this bill personally. It’s a constituent issue for her, and she’s generalized it into a Caucus issue,” said a senior aide to a Democrat on the Energy and Commerce Committee.

Think Progress opines that HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson has broken the law. Quoting from The Dallas Business Journal:

After discussing the huge strides the agency has made in doing business with minority-owned companies, Jackson closed with a cautionary tale, relaying a conversation he had with a prospective advertising contractor.

“He had made every effort to get a contract with HUD for 10 years,” Jackson said of the prospective contractor. “He made a heck of a proposal and was on the (General Services Administration) list, so we selected him. He came to see me and thank me for selecting him. Then he said something … he said, ‘I have a problem with your president.’

“I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘I don’t like President Bush.’ I thought to myself, ‘Brother, you have a disconnect — the president is elected, I was selected. You wouldn’t be getting the contract unless I was sitting here. If you have a problem with the president, don’t tell the secretary.’

“He didn’t get the contract,” Jackson continued. “Why should I reward someone who doesn’t like the president, so they can use funds to try to campaign against the president? Logic says they don’t get the contract. That’s the way I believe.”

[Update: Reacting to the quick criticism coming from all quarters, Secretary Jackson alerts us that he didn’t really mean what he said literally, he was just telling us a parable about how Washington works. I’ve searched the Good Book and can’t find a parable from the Great Master of us all that reconciles with Secretary Jackson’s newfangled parable — thus we can only conclude that Brother Jackson is working for that other Master.]

As Chuck points out below, the Secret Service plans to release visitor logs showing exactly how many visits Jack Abramoff made to the White House, and to whom. This cannot be good news for the fixer’s many former friends in the highest places.

But nor can it be unexpected. His pals must have known that feces and fan were about to meet bigtime the moment they saw the famous photos of Abramoff made after he pled guilty on the second of January.

Our Jack didn’t just happen to grab that black hat and trenchcoat as he dashed out of the house that morning. In his racket a man rises or falls on perception, spin, flash, first impressions, image. When Abramoff stepped before the cameras looking like something out of The Untouchables, he knew exactly what he was doing.

He explained the coat later by saying that it was supposed to rain that day, although nobody else in the crowd seemed to have heard the same weather report. The fedora was simply because he was obliged, as an Orthodox Jew, to wear a hat outside. And his usual yarmulke, alas and alack, would have seemed like parading his piety in a pitch for pity.

A quick image check on Google proves this last to be the bullshit it smells like. He goes bareheaded outdoors all the time. Abramoff’s fashion was making a statement all right, though, and here it is:

Take a good look at these threads, guys. That’s right, I just ratted on you. When your hands were out I was your asshole buddy but now I got the same two words for you that you got for me. Which are fuck and you. You want bad guy, I’ll give you bad guy. See you in the slammer.

I shamelessly lift the following off of Cursor’s roundup of the news because it ties in neatly with Wayne’s now famous, or perhaps infamous, Purple Lips post and I don’t it think can be done much more succintly. We just need to go ahead and draft Spitzer.

David Sirota sees “the beginning of a frontal attack by Corporate America on the progressive movement,” in an account of the launching of The Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution, “using the Democratic Party as an all-too-transparent cloak of legitimacy.”

Ella made it sound real nice, but I couldn’t find this story anywhere else, so this one will have to do, but Ella, we need your voice now more than ever. And hey, you reading this, you too, just like Ella said in the lyrics, “Why don’t you play your part?”. This could indeed be the start of something big.

Around the annual meeting scene they are known as the “kooks”, the “loose cannons”, and the “bleeding hearts.”

And that’s just the names we can publish.

They come from small but active fund companies, from monasteries in Minnesota, from environmental strongholds in Oregon and California. Sometimes they’re just investors who are fed up.

They propose codes of ethics, corporate governance policies, environmental standards. They get five minutes to step up to the microphone, give their speeches and ask questions of top management. They are cheered, mostly jeered and then cut off.

At Morgan Stanley, they also have a new name: the winners.

On Tuesday, the kooks stunned one of Wall Street’s biggest firms when shareholders approved a measure that would require Morgan Stanley to put outsized severance packages — those 2.99 times or bigger than the employee’s annual salary and bonus — to a shareholder vote.

Booman Tribune reminds us once again that democracy might just be a pipe dream:

Yet, the e-voting machines are just part of the digital problem facing U.S. voters. Diebold’s election software packages include what many activists describe as “one stop shopping” for election fraud. Most of the e-voting machine companies also sell software that creates digital electronic voter registration databases. In the Cleveland area, an estimated 7000 voters were knocked off the voter registration rolls when Cuyahoga County Board of Elections adopted the Diebold registration system. The e-voting machine companies can control everything electronically, from voter registration to election day vote recording to final vote tabulation and recounting.

Neither the Times nor USA Today nor any other major national publication has been willing to take the problem to its logical conclusion. None have seriously investigated how these very electronic machines were used to help steal the presidential election in Ohio 2004, or to defeat two electoral reform issues in Ohio 2005, or to swing key US Senate races in places such as Georgia, Minnesota and Colorado in 2002.

But the fact that these publications are finally acknowledging the obvious, overwhelming mechanical “glitches” with these machines is at least a start. Now that the Government Accountability Office has confirmed electronic voting equipment is easily hackable for mass vote stealing, and now that the Times and USA Today have reported that there are serious mechanical problems, maybe somebody at one of these media outlets will finally come to the obvious conclusion: electronic voting machines are merely high-tech devices designed to steal elections. And that is precisely why George W. Bush is in the White House today.”

Of course, in the Gospel according to Rick, charity really does begin “at home”. In this case, a very, very large home indeed. One that makes Tara in Gone with the Wind look like the cookhouse out back. To see the story behind what God hath begotten, today’s Philadelphia Daily News gives u