Black Helicopters and Birthers

Rick Perlstein has a piece in the Washington Post that would make H.L. Mencken proud.

The American rightwing is not crazy, just ignorant, bigoted and foolish. Makes for some lively entertainment.

In America, Crazy Is a Preexisting Condition
Birthers, Town Hall Hecklers and the Return of Right-Wing Rage

By Rick Perlstein
Sunday, August 16, 2009
In Pennsylvania last week, a citizen, burly, crew-cut and trembling with rage, went nose to nose with his baffled senator: 'One day God's going to stand before you, and he's going to judge you and the rest of your damned cronies up on the Hill. And then you will get your just deserts.' He was accusing Arlen Specter of being too kind to President Obama's proposals to make it easier for people to get health insurance.

In Michigan, meanwhile, the indelible image was of the father who wheeled his handicapped adult son up to Rep. John Dingell and bellowed that 'under the Obama health-care plan, which you support, this man would be given no care whatsoever.' He pressed his case further on Fox News.

Washington Post Continues Soviet Drift

Dan Froomkin, a consistently independent anti-torture voice and critic of the Bush White House at the Washington Post, has been fired.

The Post's editorial voice has taken a sharp neoconservative turn becoming effectively a propaganda vehicle for the American rightwing, purging critical voices for not "giving readers the most value... ."

Nicole Belle at Crook and Liars and Glenn Greenwald at Salon have the story.

Belle posts the contact info for the Post's Ombudsman Andrew Alexander at: ombudsman@washpost.com.

From Greenwald:

This is what one finds -- just from today -- on the Op-Ed page of The Washington Post, which yesterday fired Dan Froomkin:
* Neocon Charles Krauthammer: attacking Obama for indifference to Freedom in Iran
* Neocon Paul Wolfowitz: attacking Obama for indifference to Freedom in Iran
* Establishment/CIA spokesman and war supporter David Ignatius: demanding that Obama do more to support Freedom in Iran and refuse to negotiate with the Iranian regime
* Bush CIA and NSA Director Michael Hayden: warning that America will be in danger if CIA officials involved in torture continue to be criticized and questioned about what they did

Diane Wood for SC Already Under Attack

The National Review (NRO) hates that Diane Wood acclaimed the humanity of gays in questioning the Christan Legal Society, an anti-abortion and anti gay outfit, during oral arguments in Christian Legal Society v. Walker, No. 05-3239.

Wood, a justice on the Circuit Court of Appeals for the Seventh District is considered a leading candidate for Justice Souter's seat.

Bigotry and discrimination are not "about hatred, it is about love. To tell something, somebody something that's wrong is right is not loving, and that's what this chapter would be doing," said the CLC attorney. The NRO's Ed Whelan writes this exchange shows Wood "displayed a hostility to orthodox Christian beliefs."

Trying to fire up the religious right just maybe.

This nomination fight is going to be more fun than I thought, and I thought it was going to be a lot fun!

The NYT has a profile on Diane P. Wood who is drawing attention as a leading candidate to fill Justice Souter's expected vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Wood famously (in Wisconsin) voiced disgust towards Stephen Biskupic, former U.S. Atty for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, who launched several political prosecutions during his tenure with the Bush administration's Department of Justice, including the political prosecution of an innocent woman, Georgia Thompson, and GOP-inspired voter fraud prosecutions.

"It strikes me that your evidence is beyond thin; I’m not sure what your actual theory in this case is,” said Wood to Biskupic.

Of the GOP voter fraud obsession, the New York Times reported Wood saying of a Biskupic prosecution (many of which were overturned): "I find this whole prosecution mysterious. I don't know whether the Eastern District of Wisconsin goes after every felon who accidentally votes. It is not like she voted five times."

Reads the NYT profile

WASHINGTON — When President Bill Clinton had a rare opportunity in 1995 for a Democratic president to fill a vacancy on the federal appeals court based in Chicago, a bastion of conservative thinking, he received an unusually strong recommendation from Senator Paul Simon.

Mr. Simon, an outspoken liberal from Illinois who died in 2003, told the president the new judge should be a reliable progressive who would be cerebral enough to go up against the court’s two formidable conservatives, Judges Richard A. Posner and Frank H. Easterbrook. He said it should be Prof. Diane P. Wood of the University of Chicago law school.

Self-reinforcing Global Warming

From Kari Lydersen in the Washington Post:

CHICAGO, Feb. 14 -- The pace of global warming is likely to be much faster than recent predictions, because industrial greenhouse gas emissions have increased more quickly than expected and higher temperatures are triggering self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms in global ecosystems, scientists said Saturday.

"We are basically looking now at a future climate that's beyond anything we've considered seriously in climate model simulations," Christopher Field, founding director of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University, said at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

"Beyond Thin" Judge Draws Notice for a SC Vacancy

Justice Diane P. Wood is drawing attention as a leading candidate to fill the first vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Wood is famous in some circles (especially in Wisconsin) for her judicial equivalent of voiced disgust shown towards Stephen Biskupic, former U.S. Atty for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, who launched several political prosecutions during his tenure with the Bush administration's Department of Justice, including the repulsive political prosecution of an innocent woman, Georgia Thompson.

Wood was nominated to serve as an appellate judge by President Clinton and confirmed in 1995.

As Mark Pitsch notes in a State Journal piece in 2007 [largely an it's-not-what-Biskupic-did-that-really-matters piece]:

Georgia Thompson, a state purchasing agent for Doyle's Department of Administration, was indicted in January 2006 and convicted six months later in the midst of a heated gubernatorial election.

She spent four months in prison before the federal appeals panel reversed the conviction and ordered her immediately set free - with one judge saying the evidence was 'beyond thin.'

The same judge, Diane P. Wood of the 7th U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago, also had harsh words when the panel rejected a 2005 voter fraud conviction won by Biskupic's office against a woman who voted despite having a felony record, The New York Times reported.

'I find this whole prosecution mysterious,' Wood said. 'I don't know whether the Eastern District of Wisconsin goes after every felon who accidentally votes. It is not like she voted five times.'

Biskupic said he hasn't prosecuted for political reasons.

The evidence for the conclusion that Biskupic was an apolitical US atty is beyond thin, and Wood was not shy about pointing out the many deficiencies in Biskupic's prosecutions.

Wood's name has been mentioned in numerous news reports on President Obama's likely leaning toward appointing a woman to the court, and Wood came up again today in a piece in the Washington Post by Carrie Johnson:

At the White House, advisers already had begun drafting a short list for the court in case one of the several aging justices decided to retire this summer. Speculation has been that the list includes Harvard Law School Dean Elena Kagan, who has been nominated to serve as solicitor general; Judge Sonia Sotomayor of the Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit; Judge Diane Wood of the 7th Circuit; and Stanford University law professor Kathleen M. Sullivan.

-

via mal contends

The Insipid One: Ruth Marcus

Check out Glenn Greenwald on the Washington Post's Ruth Marcus.

Marcus advocates the ultimate self-contradictory claim: we need to forget about prosecutions in order to 'ensure it never happens again'.

Read Some History on Deep Throat in Post Coverage

Lots of good stuff in the Post this morning.

W. Mark Felt Sr., the associate director of the FBI during the Watergate scandal who, better known as "Deep Throat," became the most famous anonymous source in American history, died yesterday. He was 95.

U.S. Interrogator Speaks out for Human Rights

Among the many things we won't miss from the Bush administration: Torture.

From this morning's Post:

These interrogations were based on fear and control; they often resulted in torture and abuse.

I refused to participate in such practices, and a month later, I extended that prohibition to the team of interrogators I was assigned to lead. I taught the members of my unit a new methodology -- one based on building rapport with suspects, showing cultural understanding and using good old-fashioned brainpower to tease out information. ...

It's no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me -- unless you don't count American soldiers as Americans.

Two Issues for President-elect Obama

Not forgoing the gigantic issues of the national debt and budget deficit, illegal invasion of Iraq, energy independence, health care reform, the crisis on Wall Street, and human rights violations, listed below are two areas of concern that President Obama should launch as major priorities within our government.

Bush has self-consciously thrown the country into crisis in his attempt to eradicate Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, but these contemptible actions by the outgoing demonstration ought not to prevent us from addressing the following two issue areas that are not quite so sexy as to make the front pages of the Washington Post.

US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) – Appoint a new VA Secretary who is a veterans benefits advocate and adopt rules and procedures that are found as fact in the class-action veterans rights case argued last year, [argued pro bono by attorneys at Morrison and Foerster establishing that veterans are experiencing unconscionable delays in seeking health care treatment]. The case, Veterans for Common Sense et al. v. Nicholson; Case No. C 07 3758, U.S.D.C. (N.D. Cal. 2007), was tossed because the Court ruled that the remedy to the deplorable situation had to come from Congress.

It was so easy to make war for the chicken hawks, bu the dead and 100,000s of wounded will suffer for decades. That was war does.

Secrecy – Within all departments of government, Obama should demand a list of recommendations to make the people’s government more transparent, codifying a new openness, including expediting FOIA requests and auditing all departments of government to implement a new transparency of the people’s government.

Hold at least four to five prime-time press conferences every six months, inviting a wider range of attendees including bloggers and Republican and Democratic and Green activists.

Announce that the scripted press conferences that Bush used are over and that Obama will try to reach as many questioners as time permits.
- mal contends

End of American Capitalism or Something

The End of American Capitalism? asks Anthony Faiola in this morning's Post.

The worst financial crisis since the Great Depression is claiming another casualty: American-style capitalism.

What's interesting is that queries of a pharmacist, a dry-cleaning worker, a clerk, coffee shop workers, and a support staff person in the Madison area their opinions on the week-long crash get vague and Palinesque words of comprehension.

I don't get it.

George Will Blasts John McCain

Though taking care to hit the American left and to not veer from his own residence in market-based unreality, George Will lets McCain have it today in the Post.

"It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency," says Will.

Bush-Cheney Skipping Convention, Lying Low

President George Bush and Vice President Cheney are sitting out tonight's first session of the Republican National Convention to attend to Hurricane Gustav.

Hurricanes have a way of focusing attention on GOP incompetence. Would you want Bush and Cheney at your party? (Not that McCain is any better.)

The fact is McSame needs to shake off the incumbent administration while simultaneously activating the GOP base and appealing to political independents and casually political Democrats.

His first major act in picking a religious right lightweight with the thinnest credentials for vice-president in modern times that has objective observers nearly laughing out loud is not a step in the right direction.

The fact is McCain's biggest barrier remains George W. Bush. See The Friend He Just Can't Shake by Robert G. Kaiser in this morning's Post:

"The fact is that I have agreed with President Bush far more than I have disagreed. And on the transcendent issues, the most important issues of our day, I've been totally in agreement and support of President Bush. . . . My support for President Bush has been active and very impassioned on issues that are important to the American people. And I'm particularly talking about the war on terror, the war in Iraq, national security, national defense, support of men and women in the military, fiscal discipline, a number of other issues. So I strongly disagree with any assertion that I've been more at odds with the president of the United States than I have been in agreement with him."

Wisconsin Is Not in 'Holding Pattern'

Update: Obama Ground Report: Canvassing in Waukesha, Wisconsin and Record-low seventeen percent of Wisconsin voters think the country is going in the right direction

The political wisdom of some (the Washington Post's Dan Balz, for example) is the next 10 days in August will see the presidential race in a holding pattern.

Nothing could be further from the truth of course, and this applies emphatically in Wisconsin.

Two dynamics continue here:

- Barack Obama's on-the-ground field operation (that rivals his Internet operation's superiority to the McCain camp's) is hitting the ground running

- Barack Obama will pull away in fundraising, no matter the sleazy finance machinations of John McCain and the rightwing independent slime merchants

In Dane County (Madison), Wisconsin, Obama's field headquarters are being bombarded with requests for yard signs [people are told they have to wait a few weeks].

It's August, and Obama has already amassed a large local volunteer base left over from the February 19 Wisconsin primary that arguably set Obama's victory in the Democratic primary in stone.

On the air waves, John McCain is everywhere in Wisconsin, which is viewed as a major Republican takeover target. The flush and agile Obama campaign matches McCain ad-for-ad. But not in McCain's negativity that McCain views, reasonably on a national level in a certain desperate sense, as his only conceivable path to victory, a la Hillary Clinton.

McCain's problem in Wisconsin, as his campaign has settled on the Karl Rove attack strategy and embraced a Karl Rove clone as chief-message-attack (they are the same for McCain) man, is that Wisconsinites more than most, do not like personal attacks in politics.

I mean Wisconsin is not Tennessee. But you would not know it from John McCain's TV spots.

McCain's people either don't know or don't care.

And we have not seen the large-scale operations Obama has in store yet.

To use a baseball metaphor: Obama is ahead by six runs, it's the bottom of the sixth inning for the home team Obama, the bases are loaded and Prince Fielder just came up to bat.

By the time the convention theater opens in late August and the supposed holding pattern ends, McCain will have already lost Wisconsin, and Obama will have done more than enough to win the nation.

UW's Shapiro, Charo Hit Bush Effort to Limit Women's Reproductive Freedom

A woman's right to choose is dead if John McCain is elected president.

But the Bush administration is fighting to inflict as much damage as possible on women prior to that sickening possibility of choice disappearing, including decreasing the availability of contraception.

From today's Washington Post:

The Department of Health and Human Services is reviewing a draft regulation that would deny federal funding to any hospital, clinic, health plan or other entity that does not accommodate employees who want to opt out of participating in care that runs counter to their personal convictions, including providing birth-control pills, IUDs and the Plan B emergency contraceptive.

"The breadth of this is potentially immense," said Robyn S. Shapiro, a bioethicist and lawyer at the Medical College of Wisconsin. "Is this going to result in a kind of blessed censorship of a whole host of areas of medical care and research?" ... Critics charge that the proposal is the latest example of the administration politicizing science to advance ideological goals. ... Others said the rule could have additional implications, including justifying discrimination against gays, single women or others seeking health care.
"As soon as you have a definition in one part of federal law, it can become the inspiration for the reinterpretation of other statutes," said R. Alta Charo, a lawyer and bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

McCain is even more anti-choice than Bush. It will be interesting to see where McCain lines up on this initiative.

Is this late initiative intended as a way for McCain to shore support with the religious right, though this would hurt him with political independents?

Or is this George W. Bush just being the fool to whom we have become accustomed?

One thing is certain, all women and all who value women's civil rights should be outraged.

Lies Catching Up to Bush Administration

Famed journalist I.F. Stone warned "All governments are run by liars and nothing they say should be believed."

Like in many other aspects of government, the Bush administration has veered to the extreme in its mendacity.

Guantánamo Bay holds only the worst of the worst, the administration repeatedly assured the American public after preventing examination of the evidence holding the accused.

Turns out the administration (as McClatchy news demonstrated in its America's prison for terrorists often held the wrong men in mid-June) is the worst of the worst in its commitment to bald-faced lying.

Today's Post and Times report on the duplicity of the administration that contends in legal arguments that because the Chinese government said so and the assertions were repeated several times by American officials, accused terrorist, Huzaifa Parhat, a Uighur Muslim who fled a persecuting Chinese government, must be a terrorist.

The argument was ridiculed and dismissed by a conservative, unanimous appellate panel:

From the Times:

With some derision for the Bush administration’s arguments, a three-judge panel said the government contended that its accusations against the detainee should be accepted as true because they had been repeated in at least three secret documents.

The court compared that to the absurd declaration of a character in the Lewis Carroll poem “The Hunting of the Snark”: “I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.” ...

The Uighur Muslims, who come from an area of far western China they call East Turkestan, claim oppression at the hands of the Chinese government, including forced abortions and relocations of educated people to remote areas.

The Chinese government has described the East Turkestan Islamic Movement as a terrorist organization. American officials agreed in 2002, when they were pressing for Chinese support for military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

See the opinion at Huzaifa Parhat v. Robert M. Gates et al (No 06-1307).

American Concern for Human Rights Waning

McClatchy's America's prison for terrorists often held innocent men piece yesterday ought to have produced screaming headlines and constant chatter about the crimes that the Bush administration had committed at Guantanamo.

The findings by the comprehensive, unprecedented McClatchy interviews "...conducted with former Guantanamo detainees by a U.S. news organization" and US officials talking on background produced nothing of the kind, telling us much about the politcal culture.

In sum, the administration tortured innocents who they knew to be innocent, devised a legal framework to shield the US government from being held accountable, and broke the international laws on human rights self-consciously and shamelessly.

Among the findings:

- A series of White House directives placed 'suspected enemy combatants' beyond the reach of U.S. law or the 1949 Geneva Conventions' protections for prisoners of war. President Bush and Congress then passed legislation that protected those detention rules.

- In 2002, a CIA analyst interviewed several dozen detainees at Guantanamo and reported to senior National Security Council officials that many of them didn't belong there, a former White House official said.

- Despite the analyst's findings, the administration made no further review of the Guantanamo detainees. The White House had determined that all of them were enemy combatants, the former official said.

- Rather than taking a closer look at whom they were holding, a group of five White House, Justice Department and Pentagon lawyers who called themselves the 'War Council' devised a legal framework that enabled the administration to detain suspected 'enemy combatants' indefinitely with few legal rights.

The threat of new terrorist attacks, the War Council argued, allowed President Bush to disregard or rewrite American law, international treaties and the Uniform Code of Military Justice to permit unlimited detentions and harsh interrogations.

- The group further argued that detainees had no legal right to defend themselves, and that American soldiers — along with the War Council members, their bosses and Bush — should be shielded from prosecution for actions that many experts argue are war crimes.

- With the support of Bush, Cheney and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the group shunted aside the military justice system, and in February 2002, Bush suspended the legal protection for detainees spelled out in Common Article Three of the 1949 Geneva Convention on prisoners of war, which outlaws degrading treatment and torture.

Today a Washington Post piece, Report Questions Pentagon Accounts,
Officials Looked Into Interrogation Methods Early On, contains similar revelations.

Just 39 Percent See Hillary as honest and trustworthy

Just 39 percent see Hillary Clinton as "honest and trustworthy" in a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

I hope this is right, certainly fits in with the reaction among progressives to her despicable campaign.

Write Anne E. Kornblut and Jon Cohen:

PHILADELPHIA, April 15 -- Lost in the Hillary Rodham Clinton campaign's aggressive attacks on Barack Obama in recent days is a deep and enduring problem that threatens to undercut any inroads Clinton has made in her struggle to overtake him in the Democratic presidential race: She has lost trust among voters, a majority of whom now view her as dishonest. ...

Clinton is viewed as "honest and trustworthy" by just 39 percent of Americans, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, compared with 52 percent in May 2006. Nearly six in 10 said in the new poll that she is not honest and trustworthy. And now, compared with Obama, Clinton has a deep trust deficit among Democrats, trailing him by 23 points as the more honest, an area on which she once led both Obama and John Edwards.

Hillary's Lie Caught by Washington Post

Update: See Hillary's Campaign-ending Lie-Updated

Hillary's lie about "... landing under sniper fire" during her trip to Bosnia has been blown out of the water by the Washington Post.

I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base."

--Hillary Clinton, speech at George Washington University, March 17, 2008.

Hillary Clinton has been regaling supporters on the campaign trail with hair-raising tales of a trip she made to Bosnia in March 1996. In her retelling, she was sent to places that her husband, President Clinton, could not go because they were "too dangerous." When her account was

challenged by one of her traveling companions, the comedian Sinbad, she upped the ante and injected even more drama into the story. In a speech earlier this week, she talked about "landing under sniper fire" and running for safety with "our heads down."

There are numerous problems with Clinton's version of events. ...

The First Lady's schedule, released on Wednesday and available here, confirms that she arrived in Tuzla at 8.45 a.m. and was greeted by various dignitaries, including Emina Bicakcic, (whose name has mysteriously been redacted from the document.)

You can see CBS News footage of the arrival ceremony here. The footage shows Clinton walking calmly out of the back of the C-17 military transport plane that brought her from Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany.

Read the whole piece at the Washington Post.

McCain: Ethics for Thee, but Not for Me

Update III: DNC to File FEC Complaint Against McCain Campaign
Update II: Cap Times: Apply McCain Standard to McCain
Update: See also: McCain's Character Is Now Fair Game for Reporters and Blogs

Suppose that Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton were the Chair of the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee.

Suppose further that this hypothetical Committee Chair:

- Was using a corporate president's corporate jet numerous times
- Taking $28,000 contributions from the corporation and its law firm
- Writing unusual letters to the regulatory agency deliberating on aspects of the corporation’s strategic business plans
- Spending a large amount of time with the corporation’s lobbyist who was hyping her access to the Chair
- Lied about conversations with the corporate head
- Writing another unusual letter threatening the regulatory agency with an overhaul if it closed a broadcast ownership loophole crucial to another client of the aforementioned lobbyist
- Utilized the work of a slew of high-powered lobbyists in a presidential campaign
- And all the while, the Chair presented himself as a champion of ethics and the scourge of lobbyists as central tenets of his campaign for the president of the United States

This would bring howls of hypocrisy, arrogance and screaming denunciations quickly bringing the presidential plans of a hypothetical Committee Chair, a Senator Obama or Clinton, to a screeching halt.

But this is precisely the situation with Sen. John McCain the last 10 years, and for the presumptive Republican nominee for the presidency, these circumstances are in the words of McCain’s attorney: No “big deal,” and McCain and Co have graciously moved on to more pressing matters.

See also:
McCain Disputed On 1999, MeetingBroadcaster Recalls Urging FCC Contact

The Anti-Lobbyist, Advised by Lobbyists

Links to Female Lobbyist Exposed, Straight Talker Clams Up

Just Music This Weekend

The power of music presents in the capacity to reach into another's experience and manifast itself in a manner that linguistic communication fails to fully describe.

"What music does is reach down into parts of our brain, it opens networks and pathways that you can't get to via language," said University of Wisconsin-Madison scholar Craig Werner, who is studying the music of the Vietnam War (with Doug Bradley) and its prominance in veterans' memories and experience.

The McGill University scientist Robert Zatorre, Washington Post writer Shankar Vedantam notes (in the piece linked above), concludes that music activates evolutionally ancient parts of the brain.

Music breaks through human separation, inspiring such activity as love, peace, and a powerful feeling to create and share. You know, the bad things Republicans hate and guard us against.

This weekend's music:

- Happy Xmas (War Is Over)

- Mind Games

- In My Life

- Black Books

- Ohio

- Bring the Boys back Home

- Comfortably Numb

- Wish You Were Here

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