I don’t like Steny Hoyer. There’s just no way around it. Now he’s conspiring with Jay Rockefeller to force retroactive telecom immunity through Congress, so George Bush and his criminal conspiracy won’t have to answer any questions about violating the Constitution by spying on American citizens without warrants.

Again.

Did I mention I don’t like Steny Hoyer?  Read more 

This is good to hear, I wish them luck. As SI notes, it’s stupid because it just encourages people to make mirror sites. Stupid suits, still too dense to understand how the intertubes operate as they War on Freedom. Lots of livelinks in the original.

Note to Bank: Don’t Wage War With the Internets

If you follow the political blogs, you probably know about the Wikileaks case. In a nutshell, last week a district court judge ruled in favor of Swiss Bank Julius Baer and ordered the Wikileaks domain name shut down because a former bank employee allegedly used the site to post proof that the bank is involved in a money laundering scheme. Wired’s Threat Level gives an excellent, thorough run-down of the story.

Last night the ACLU, the ACLU of Northern California and the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a motion to intervene in that lawsuit.  Read more 

What follows is a post I wrote some time ago, shortly after Bush’s 2nd Inaugural. I thought it might be worth reposting on this particular day, since it includes a comparison of both Lincoln and Truman to Bush, and seeks to discuss political rhetoric and its discontents. I also thought it might be a pleasant respite from our current obsession with the Democratic Presidential primary, as well as offering a frame for contemplating the ruin Bush’s second terms has wrecked not only on the country, but on his own likely historical reputation.

Dubya’s Dubious Second Inaugural:The Bad Faith Of George W. Bush

Four years ago, at the time of Bush’s 1st Inaugural Address, despite the bitterness left behind by the manner in which the 2000 presidential election was decided, despite the “winner’s” inability to find a graceful way to acknowledge the extraordinary circumstances that had brought him to the Presidency, or even an ungraceful way, swept up in the grandeur of that peaceful transfer of power without which no democratic republic can long endure, I was able to acknowledge the surprising power of some of Bush’s rhetoric, and to feel some hope that he actually meant some tiny fraction of what he was saying.

Nunca mas, as they have had occasion to say in Argentina.

Bush made it easy last Thursday; everything about his second inaugural address, its grandiosity, its simple-minded diction and biblical intimations, the insistent refusal to acknowledge complexity, its wildly overstated and pitifully under-defined ambitions, its ahistorical smugness, struck me as downright preposterous, which will explain my amazement at the credulity with which the speech was received; yes, there were some reservations expressed at the practical implications and applicability of such a pure statement of American idealism, but rather less comment willing to point out that the speech’s efficacy as a statement of policy could be measured in inverse proportion to its almost demented insistence that ideas exist in some ethereal space untouched by anything as gritty and unpleasant as a fact.

Instead, once again we were asked to wonder at the poetic eloquence of Michael Gerson’s prose, and if we happened to be liberals, admonished not to get too picky about the fathoms-deep divide between Bush’s rhetoric and the reality of his policies, lest we peg ourselves, once again, as outside the great and grand ideas upon which our republic stands.

Chris Suellentrop, for instance, writing in Slate, parses the speech to bolster his own praise for it as a wonderful piece of oratory, credits it with announcing a second Bush doctrine, (the first, preemptive war, this second, the peaceful pursuit of democracy everywhere, and nary a hint the two doctrines might contradict one another), then proceeds to question the validity of the speech’s central thesis, which strikes Chris as being as simple-minded as the formulation by “some” on the left, that 9/11 was caused by poverty, and then finishes by warning liberals — well, unlike Mr. Suellentrop, I shall let him speak for himself:  Read more 

Via Digby:

Delahunt: You said if an opinion was rendered, that would insulate him from any consequences.

[Mike Mukasey, Attorney General of the United States, before the House Judiciary Committee today]: We could not investigate or prosecute somebody for acting in reliance on a justice department opinion.

…

Delahunt: If that opinion was inaccurate and in fact violated a section of US Criminal Code, that reliance is in effect an immunity from any criminal culpability.

MM: Immunity connoted culpability. [Well, is anyone culpable? -scar]

…

Delahunt: I find that a new legal doctrine. The law is the law.  Read more 

Watch for King George’s proclamation regarding earmarks tonight. Finally (i.e. now that Dems run the Congressional roost), he has had enough of them.

Because our dear Ruler lacks the Line-Item Veto, he’s simply going to sign an Executive Order that says, FUCK YOU, Congress - you only write the laws - the government (aka W) is not going to enforce those parts we (aka HE) doesn’t agree with.

Vetoing is too messy, I guess. W wouldn’t get those parts of the legislation he wants.

Mike McConnell wants to spy on 100% of Internet traffic.

“Americans will have to trust the government not to abuse the authority it must have in order to protect our networks, and yet, historically the government has not proved worthy of that trust.”

Here are the parts of this that I don’t understand. What do you mean “will have to trust” and “must have”?

Via She with excellent tata holders:

More than a hundred computer chips containing voting machine software were lost or stolen during transit in California this week. Two cardboard shipping tubes containing 174 EPROMs loaded with voting machine software were sent via Federal Express on December 13th from the secretary of state’s office in Sacramento to election officials in San Diego County for use in optical-scan machines made by Diebold Election Systems. But on Monday, the two shipping tubes arrived empty.”

Avedon asks:

I can’t help having a fantasy that brave freedom fighters are trying to prevent the use of these machines by direct action….

It would be nice, and it’s a fantasy I share.

On Friday, President Bush issued a Memorandum of Disapproval on H.R. 1585, the “National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008.”

In the Memorandum, the President states he is “pocket vetoing” the legislation. Yet in the same document, the President states he is sending the bill back to the House with objections. So which is it - a pocket veto or a veto?

More importantly, why the transparent attempt to do both?  Read more 

Okay, maybe it’s only one cheer.

A provisional cheer at that, although I’m inclined to make that two provisional cheers.

What I’d like to suggest, no doubt to the consternation of most readers, is that Reid’s decision to pull the FISA bill Monday evening was pretty much what Reid had in mind the whole time.

What I’m sure of is that the many comments I’ve read that characterize what happened on the Senate floor on Monday as Reid having been forced to pull the bill by Chris Dodd’s threat of a filibuster simply don’t match what I saw, via C-Span’s live streaming.

Before I proceed, let me make clear that I wish to take nothing from Chris Dodd’s role here. He deserves all of the praise he’s getting and then some.

His speeches on the Senate floor were magisterial. I’ve been watching him for more years than most of you and I have never seen him so compelling. And yes, it counts that he left his campaign in Idaho to come back and lead the opposition to a version of the Senate bill that was inadequate to the task of restoring the good sense, the respect for civil liberties and constitutional government, that had fueled the passage of the first FISA legislation in the late 1970s.

As Dodd graciously acknowledges in the video Lambert has posted here, many Democrats contributed to the sense I had, watching the debate on Monday, that I was not looking at a dispirited, disunited, frightened caucus, without a clue about how to oppose the policy of obdurate obstructionism employed so successfully in the past six months by the Bush administration and its enablers in the Republican Senate caucus.

Democrats were on the attack, making compelling, easy-to-understand arguments that have wide-spread appeal among a majority of Americans, and they were ready and able to shoot down the lies and prevarications employed by key Republicans, like Orrin Hatch. Most important, the list of Democratic contributors to this success was long and varied, and included Harry Reid.  Read more 

You really should go read this post by Scott Horton over at Harper’s.

I’ll wait.

You know I find it fascinating to read all of these libertarian Republican types (Andrew Sullivan) who are suddenly astonished by the rise of the evangelical whackos and their power. “Where’d these folks come from?” they seem to be asking.

You know who empowered these people? You and your kind, Andy, that’s who. It’s like these folks haven’t been paying attention the last twenty years. You guys enabled these people, in the 1980s and 1990s you avidly courted them. Did you not pay attention to the political history of the last twenty years?  Read more 

CD updating the update to reflect the latest news: Reid has pulled the bill.

Well, we’re into it - a full-throated Senate debate on many of the dearest, in all senses of that word, fundamentals of constitutional government,

The opening, as Lambert has suggested, was a bit confusing.

Dodd gave a passionate analysis of the many strands of this new FISA legislation, meant, mainly on the Democratic side, to correct the excesses of last August’s Protect America Act, which more or less gutted the FISA court as a check on the power of the executive branch to secretly ignore the civil liberties of Americans not to be spied upon by their own government.

To talk process for a moment, the thrust of Dodd’s first speech was in support of the many and profound reasons why the Senate should not proceed on the matter at hand as long as the Intelligence Committee’s version is the basis of the debate and the subsequent voting on the entire issue. In other words, he was arguing against the imposition of cloture, so that the Senate might spend time debating the merits of substituting the Judiciary Bill as the basis for debate and amendment.

It didn’t look or sound to me like this was Dodd’s attempt to get a genuine filibuster going, and indeed, the vote was lopsided in favor of cloture, all Republicans voting yes, only ten Democrats voting no.

This is not the end of the debate by any means, though, and from what I’ve seen thus far, do not despair that passage of the Intelligence Committee’s version of this new FISA bill is a done deal, including the extending of amnesty to those Telecoms which choose to go along with the administration. Here’s why:  Read more 

Hooray! Congress has now made us 100% safe.

I’m pretty sure we don’t have any freedoms left for the terrorists to hate us for.

The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday overwhelmingly approved a bill saying that anyone offering an open Wi-Fi connection to the public must report illegal images including “obscene” cartoons and drawings—or face fines of up to $300,000.

That broad definition would cover individuals, coffee shops, libraries, hotels, and even some government agencies that provide Wi-Fi. It also sweeps in social-networking sites, domain name registrars, Internet service providers, and e-mail service providers such as Hotmail and Gmail, and it may require that the complete contents of the user’s account be retained for subsequent police inspection.  Read more 

Campaigned for him even though not old enough to vote for him, she hastens to add.

Well, Mitt Romney gave his “Kennedy” speech on the place of religion in American life and the one thing it wasn’t was Kennedy-esque.

How have our mighty constitution and the great founding documents of our democratic republic fallen? Let us count the ways.

ROMNEY: “Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom.”

That will be the headline of all media discussions of Romney’s speech this morning. But what does it mean?

ROMNEY: “Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.”

Yes, that’s right, almost nothing, except, of course, that it implies that freedom and being a religious church or synagogue attendee are inextricably linked.

Romney rightly declined to discuss or defend the tenets of the Mormon church, and he allowed that there should be no religious tests for office holders. As did John Kennedy. What a difference though. Here’s Romney.

ROMNEY: There are some who may feel that religion is not a matter to be seriously considered in the context of the weighty threats that face us. If so, they are at odds with the nation’s founders, for they, when our nation faced its greatest peril, sought the blessings of the Creator. And further, they discovered the essential connection between the survival of a free land and the protection of religious freedom. In John Adam’s words: ’We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion… Our constitution was made for a moral and religious people.’

Here’s how John Kennedy began his famous speech:  Read more 

Really long, but worth it. Bottom line: America has lost the War on Drugs, in every effective measure of those words. You knew that, of course, but what fascinated me about this piece was that despite the moderate, non-foily tone, it’s impossible not to come away with the conclusion that our drug policy is directed by complete idiots or corrupt players or both. More radically minded people like me will point out that a big chunk of the failure must be the result of endemic corruption, but even without that, the shift is complete. The time when we can hopefully and unabashedly speak about drug policy reform is here, even if the media has yet to realize that fact. It’s because there are three groups of people in this country, and one of them is finally in the majority.

The first, and largest, are those who believe it is time for sensible drug policy reform, from top to bottom. That group includes not only dope-smoking hippies and Rave-tripping teens, but experienced law enforcement officials and conservative politicians. One of many choice quotes from the article:

“What we learned was that in drug work, nothing ever stands still,” says Coleman, the former DEA official and current president of Drug Watch International, a law-and-order advocacy group. For every move the drug warriors made, the traffickers adapted. “The other guys were learning just as we were learning,” Coleman says. “We had this hubris.”  Read more 

I agree with Rudi Giuliani  Read more 

Overturning Roe v Wade, which keeps the decision on pregnancy with the person who is, like, pregnant, is no long enough for some Republicans. Dear, sweet, populist, fun-to-have-a-beer-with Mike Huckabee hath spoken: (via AP:

Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee rejects letting states decide whether to allow abortions, claiming the right to life is a moral issue not subject to multiple interpretations.

“It’s the logic of the Civil War,” Huckabee said Sunday, comparing abortion rights to slavery. “If morality is the point here, and if it’s right or wrong, not just a political question, then you can’t have 50 different versions of what’s right and what’s wrong.”

“For those of us for whom this is a moral question, you can’t simply have 50 different versions of what’s right,” he said in an interview on “Fox News Sunday.”

You sure can’t accuse him of dog-whistling, I’ll give him that.  Read more 

DC-based advocacy group Americans United for the Separation of Church and State is celebrating its 60th anniversary.

Earlier this week, along with several other anti-theocracy bloggers, I had the opportunity to meet a lot of AU-affiliated folks. I found them a cordial and committed bunch that includes ministers, rabbis, and a smattering of heathens like yours truly (though relatively fewer of the latter than I might have expected), all committed to helping protect Thomas Jefferson’s goal of unfettered freedom of belief.

At the end of our visit, they helped us schedule meetings at our respective Representatives’ or Senators’ offices, so we could discuss pending legislation, notably H.R. 1431, a slow-tracked and innocuous-sounding bill that is vaguely worded enough that it could extend way beyond its goal of clarifying the most commonly requested and most uncontroversial religious-expression rights potentially supported by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. As-is, it might bless, so to speak, employees whose actions break the Golden Rule — asserting their beliefs in a way that denies yours.  Read more 

The grounds of mental retardation are established as reason for preventing execution because the accused has to have an understanding of his crime. In Texas, a retarded man was supposed to be kept from doing others harm, but a just sentence must take into account humane regard for what is inflicted on a person afflicted with mental incapacity to act in what is considered normal realms.

The way we treat our fellows is how we can judge not just criminals, but those administering our laws. In the state that has executed a man who had more than one grounds to be spared, and in our highest court, there is a lot of disregard for humanity and for life.

Today a member of the legal team that was trying to stave off the execution of Michael Richard, now deceased, has spoken out about the massive failures of humanity that sent Richard to his death.  Read more 

[Welcome, Eschatonians, and thanks to Lord Atrios for the link. I called up Hoyer’s office, and courteously informed the young staffer about the link. And you know what? They didn’t know who Atrios was. So, this is a teachable moment_{MR SUBLIMINAL And be polite, dammit!} to show Hoyer that (a) restoring Constitutional government is good politics, and (b) it’s good to have the blogosphere with you. Why not call his office and do some teaching? (202) 225-4131. Did I mention that you should be polite?*]

Here’s a very interesting speech that Representative Hoyer gave yesterday over at Georgetown Law School.** (I’m not clued into Village mores enough to know if the location is significant, but I’m guessing it is. Heck, it’s the Beltway’s own law school…). Here’s the text of the speech, and some of what he had to say; I’m leaving out the terra-terra-terra ass-covering boilerplate to focus on what’s new:

We also swear an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States, and to honor the values and principles that are contained therein for example, the Fourth Amendment right that Americans be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures, and the Fifth Amendment right to due process of law.

Honoring the system of checks and balances carefully established by the Framers of our Constitution will make us more, not less, safe. This was the conclusion of those men in 1789 who had just fought a war, and who faced a very uncertain and dangerous future.

[Here follows a long list of abuses and usurpations; essentially, the same critique we’ve been developing on torture, surveillance, the rule of law, abuse of power, et cetera, et cetera.]

Nor have we helped our cause by dispensing with centuries-old legal concepts such as habeas corpus. And, the Administration s penchant for presidential signing statements that assert a right of the President to effectively ignore all or part of the laws he signs must give all of us pause.

It is long past time for effective Congressional oversight and Judicial review of this Administration’s actions.

And now comes something I personally find amazing:  Read more 

I’m with Kevin Drum and Jim Henley in their befuddlement that this story, reported over the weekend, has kicked up so little dust.

Kevin brought it to my attention with a short post to that effect, one of the reasons he is invaluable. Others, like Jim, are beginning to pick up on it, and Mr. Henley supplies some fascinating background. With a story like this, the more the merrier; we need to get it noticed by the village, and the name, “Hagazy,” as well known as “Hamden.”

One reason it hasn’t broken big, a small blogger reported it, and yes, reported is the operative word, just like a real journalist. The “small” describes only the probable stats of the blog, “Psychsound,” not the blogger, Steve Bergstein, a lawyer with two blogs, both of them involved in this story. The other reason is that the village elders are quite uninterested in pursuing evidence that Bush & co is running one of the most corrupt and unlawful administrations in our history.

In fact, Bergstein, whose other blog, “Wait A Second,” tracks and analyzes the civil rights decisions that come out of the the Second Circuit Federal Appeals Court located in Manhattan, became involved in the story itself, by catching while it was happening, an act of censorship being practiced on the written decision itself, a redaction of a large portion in the name of protecting our national security.

Yeah, I suppose that could be said to compute, if you think that every dumb thing any part of your government does, like, for instance, how the FBI got a false confession from a visiting Egyptian, that he was part of the 9/11 conspiracy, who was ultimately proven to be innocent of owning the suspicious device found in the closet of his hotel room, needs to be shielded from scrutiny because otherwise the terrorists will win. Hint: They didn’t get the confession with a decoder ring, knowledge of which could allow Al Queda to profit from our technology.  Read more 

The mind-numbingly confused episode in District Judge Fish’s courtroom that he declared a mistrial was worse than simply incoherence. In declaring a mistrial, the judge allows the charges to be brought again, and tried again, at huge public expense.

Charges brought are that the Holy Land Foundation was channeling money to Hamas. The proof included unnamed Israeli secret agents (the accused has the right to know who his accuser is in U.S. courts), bumperstickers and keychains with Hamas symbols found in offices where the Holy Land Foundation funds were directed, pre-1995 (when Hamas was declared a terrorist organization) donations to charitable Middle Eastern organizations (that fed the hungry and helped with living expenses and other such monstrous acts in addition to Hamas activities) - which did not convince the jury.  Read more