Repulsive progressive hypocrisy

Greenwald nails it again.

There’s only one electable Republican in the 2012 race. Unfortunately, he’s running as a Democrat.

© wigwam

Gotta love those Firebaggers.

Via digby...

Officer Friendly, right over there in the white shirt, has been identified as one Anthony Balogna.

On the other hand, the NYPD says he was Just Following Orders. I guess white is the new brown.

And from the bowl-me-over-with-a-feather department, a link to the past:

On the Open Salon version of my previous entry, some right-winger who supports Obama kept trying to lay the blame for next year's results on the left for failing to properly support the candidate who has done far more to pass the Republicans' agenda than any GOP office-holder could have.

I am about certain Obama will be a one term president--and that one of the Republican clowns will win in 2012. Most of the blame for that will fall with the unrealistic expectations and shortsightedness of people devoted to a progressive agenda.

Salon.com has a piece up urging Democrats to dump Obama and go with a candidate who will restore their party to its New Deal era politics. According to the column by Matt Stoller, there are a number of reasons why they should, including:

If would be one thing if Obama were failing because he was too close to party orthodoxy. Yet his failures have come precisely because Obama has not listened to Democratic Party voters. He continued idiotic wars, bailed out banks, ignored luminaries like Paul Krugman, and generally did whatever he could to repudiate the New Deal. The Democratic Party should be the party of pay raises and homes, but under Obama it has become the party of pay cuts and foreclosures. Getting rid of Obama as the head of the party is the first step in reverting to form.

[Welcome Confluence readers! -- Lambert]

Sorry folks, there is no activism today. I'm still processing my feelings about the shocking developments of last Sunday evening.

What I've ultimately settled upon, after my initial excitement has faded, is a feeling of despair.

The responses to my previous entry were exactly what I hoped they would be: lively. And I'm not done yet, not by a long shot. I'm going to expand upon a comment I made in the other thread.

I seem to recall that someone, late last month, posted an entry arguing that it is immoral for Democrats not to run a primary challenge against Barry Obama in 2012, in light of the things he's done to institutionalize Bush-Cheney crimes. (Glenn Greenwald chronicled the latest violation of the Constitution by Obama on his own blog, which you can read here). This argument is proven truer every day as more crimes are committed against the Constitution and as the concept of the rule of law is increasingly marginalized.

At what point will party loyalists realize that their political organization will not survive if they continue to support this right-wing dictator who has proven to be even worse than his right-wing predecessor?

For that matter, at what point do we as a movement acknowledge that politics and morality are inextricably bound?

Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship. ...voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

Hermann Goering

Paul Domowitch in the Inky:

The NFL Tailgate Party is one of the premier events of Super Bowl week. It's a tougher ticket to get than the game ticket. The invited guests include A-list celebrities like Harrison Ford and Jennifer Aniston, as well as league owners and Super Bowl sponsors. But with the league focused on straightening out the seating snafu, the tailgate party turned into chaos.

According to league sources, many sponsors were forced to wait in line for as long as 2 1/2 hours to get into the tailgate party and were not pleased with the shabby way they were treated.

Andrew Kolin's new book "State Power and Democracy: Before and During the Presidency of George W. Bush" actually begins with the war for independence and continues into the Obama years. A 231-page monotone recounting of endless facts, it doesn't pick up with Bush the Lesser until page 137. Kolin chronicles a gradual slide into an imperial presidency that really got going after World War II. Along the way he chronicles the damage done to the forces of resistance, making a compelling case that our movements for peace and justice are weak in part because of the extreme repression of recent decades.

By David Swanson

Franz Kafka's book "The Trial" begins "Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning." There follow many thousands of words describing the ordeal of someone denied the right to know the charges against him, to face his accusers, to be given a fair and speedy trial by a jury of his peers, and so forth. We have read thousands of stories of such "Kafkan" experiences since the advent of the Global War of Terror. But we need a different kind of story now.

By David Swanson

We're about to witness the pretense of war lawyer hearings without the war lawyers (commonly known as torture lawyers by those willing to ignore their role in "legalizing" aggressive war). This may highlight for many observers the little-known fact that Congress no longer has the power of subpoena.

At what point do progressives stop being Democrats' whipped dogs and start acting like a movement capable of putting the Dems in their proper place as the party of the people? David Sirota wrote today about Obama's latest call to increase war spending beyond its already ludicrous proportions.

How many of the extreme right-wing and criminal policies of Bush-Cheney has Obama adopted? How many of those extreme right-wing policies has he exceeded? Last month, knowledge that Obama has gone a step further than Bush, authorizing the executive branch to murder American citizens on the flimsiest of rationales. This sh__ has GOT to end.

By David Swanson

No one disputes that Jay Bybee's name is at the bottom of memos that were, and to some extent still are, treated as laws which legalized aggressive war at the pleasure of a president and a variety of acts of torture. For many months the House Judiciary Committee has had two excuses for not impeaching Judge Bybee, even while proceeding with the impeachments of a judge for groping and another judge for petty corruption. The private excuse has been that impeaching Bybee would be opposed by Fox News. The public excuse has been that the Justice Department has not yet released its Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) report on the crimes of Bybee and his former colleagues.

Jon Walker over at Fire Dog Lake makes a very effective argument about why learning the wrong lesson from the defeat of Martha Coakley in Tuesday's Massachusetts Senate race will lead to disaster.

In which apology would be warranted for being prematurely correct....

The time was one year ago, and fresh off Teh Greatest Inaugural Speech Evah, President Barack Obama grandly (and with no small amount of self-congratulation) signed an executive order to close Bush's illegal imprisonments at Guantanamo Bay. He gave a deadline of one year.....

AP:

The government on Friday released a long-secret list of some 645 detainees held at a military base in Afghanistan, providing the information as part of a lawsuit seeking details of the treatment of terror suspects.

The list was just a small part of roughly 2,000 pages of documents that were released related to various lawsuits seeking government papers about detainees.

The identities of the detainees at Bagram air base had been sought by the American Civil Liberties Union. The list is dated Sept. 22, 2009.

ACLU lawyer Melissa Goodman said the government should also provide the details of how the inmates were captured and why they are being held.

An organization of attorneys, journalists, and advocates today filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act requesting the long-suppressed report from the Department of Justice's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) regarding the conduct of President Bush's top lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel who authored memos purporting to authorize torture and aggressive war.

The request, reproduced below along with a transmittal letter, asks for the OPR report that has long been promised by Attorney General Eric Holder, as well as an earlier OPR report completed during the last months of the Bush administration. The request also seeks the 10 page rebuttal of the 2008 report by then- Attorney General Michael Mukasey.

We're right back where we've really always been, aren't we?

"I share the President’s conviction that as a nation, we must, to the extent possible, look forward and not backward when it comes to issues such as these. While this Department will follow its obligation to take this preliminary step to examine possible violations of law, we will not allow our important work of keeping the American people safe to be sidetracked.

Greg Sargent's reporting on the release of CIA documents, apparently requested by Dick Cheney. From his RSS feed today:

I’ve also confirmed that the CIA will release a declassified version of the chapter in the CIA Inspector General’s 2004 report that’s widely expected to conclude that there’s no proof torture foiled any attacks.

What this means: The debate over whether torture worked is going to flare up in a big way today — and there may be a strong blast of evidence knocking down Cheney’s claims.

I get email from the ACLU, which I've donated membership fees to and wait my card to carry from. But this is a serious matter, and I'm asking y'all to join me in sending this video to the Attorney General along with a letter asking him to appoint a special prosecutor to look into the torture of POWs under the Bush regime.

My somewhat personalized version of the letter's over the jump:

A United States Air Force Reservist, Major David Frakt, JAG Corps, has promised to continue fighting on behalf of his client, as the Obama Administration is opposed to the young man's release. Major Frakt's expertise has earned accolades outside the courtroom, from the ACLU to firedoglake.

A federal judge who had earlier challenged the government's evidence against the detainee ordered him released today, offering a further curb to the unitary executive.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/31/us/31gitmo.html

“Enough has been imposed on this young man to date,” the judge, Ellen Segal Huvelle, said in a courtroom crowded with people drawn by what had become a confrontation between the judge and the Obama administration.

But it was not clear Thursday whether Judge Huvelle’s order will mean freedom for the detainee, Mohammed Jawad, who has long faced American charges that, as a teenager, he threw a hand grenade in Kabul in 2002 that injured two American servicemen and their Afghan interpreter.

The ruling on Thursday came after a concession by the government last week that it could no longer defend Mr. Jawad’s military detention in the habeas corpus case before Judge Huvelle. She had declared that the administration’s case for continuing his detention after nearly seven years was “riddled with holes” and that virtually all of the government’s evidence came from confessions he made after being threatened with death.

Justice Department officials said they were studying whether to file civilian criminal charges against Mr. Jawad. If they do, officials say, he could be transferred to the United States to face charges, instead of being sent to Afghanistan, where his lawyers say he would be released to his mother.

“It is a very real possibility,” a Justice Department official said in an interview, “but whether we can compile enough evidence to support a case is a question we don’t yet know the answer to.” The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the department does not discuss investigations.

Mr. Jawad’s military lawyer, Maj. David J. R. Frakt, said he would file court challenges to any effort by the administration to move his client to the United States to face charges. But Major Frakt conceded that the Aug. 21 deadline Judge Huvelle gave the government to send Mr. Jawad to Afghanistan also gave prosecutors time to work on a grand jury investigation.

“We have won the battle,” he said outside the federal courthouse here. “Have we won the war? Perhaps it remains to be seen.”

Mohamed Jawad's age is unknown. He was accused of taking part in a 2002 grenade attack that injured two GIs and a translator in Kabul, but Major Frakt has provided evidence that at least three adults

From the Daily Mail:

Hillary Clinton has threatened to end intelligence sharing with Britain if the High Court publishes its findings on what happened to former terror detainee Binyam Mohamed.

Letters from the U.S. Secretary of State and the CIA to the Government warn they will cease co-operation with British counterparts if two judges release details about Mr Mohamed's alleged torture.

Human rights campaigners yesterday claimed the threat - which could put British lives at risk - was merely a ' smokescreen', but Foreign Secretary David Miliband insisted it was serious.