Status on Arizona's anti-immigrant "Show me your papers" law

Seattle has now become the 11th city to boycott Arizona in reaction to their draconian "Show me your papers" law. Several other cities are considering following suit. The law is scheduled to go into effect on July 23rd, but may be overturned before then as there are presently five legal challenges against it. What would those challenges be based on? Well, a phrase that jumped out at me from Section 2, paragraph B is:

FOR ANY LAWFUL CONTACT MADE BY A LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICIAL OR AGENCY OF THIS STATE OR A COUNTY, CITY, TOWN OR OTHER POLITICAL SUBDIVISION OF THIS STATE WHERE REASONABLE SUSPICION EXISTS THAT THE PERSON IS AN ALIEN WHO IS
UNLAWFULLY PRESENT IN THE UNITED STATES, A REASONABLE ATTEMPT SHALL BE MADE, WHEN PRACTICABLE, TO DETERMINE THE IMMIGRATION STATUS OF THE PERSON. THE PERSON'S IMMIGRATION STATUS SHALL BE VERIFIED WITH THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT
PURSUANT TO 8 UNITED STATES CODE SECTION 1373(c).

What exactly does "lawful contact" mean? That's hard to say. The cited blogger claims that he's searched the Arizona Revised Statutes and has no idea what the phrase actually means. The Arizona Republican House majority's Homeland Security research analyst, Rene Guillen, says:

[L]awful contact is definitely different than reasonable suspicion in terms of the initiation of the contact. So lawful contact is essentially any interaction a police officer may have with an individual through the normal legal, lawful course of the performance of their duties. So it wouldn't just be those suspected of crimes. It could be victims, witnesses or just people who are lawfully interacting with the police officer where through the course of that contact they are able to build reasonable suspicion and therefore inquire.

With 27% of their players being Latinos, the Major League Baseball Player’s Association has taken the lead against Arizona's law.

Players don’t want to go back to an era where they were welcome to play but not welcome to stay. After they play, players want to be able to drive, eat, shop and sleep without being forced to “show their papers.” They don’t want their wives, children and family members hassled and deprived of their due process either.

Attorney General Eric Holder embarrassed himself and his office when he "under repeated questioning by Senator Hunt of Texas, he finally admitted he had not read the Arizona law." The Attorney General shouldn't have read the law simply because he might be questioned on it, but because it's a law that's being intently discussed and the nation's chief law enforcement officer should be knowledgeable about it.

A right-winger I was corresponding with made the charge that the Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, said something similar, so I headed over to Fox News (To ensure that I was getting the most damaging statement possible) and the statement was: "I've not reviewed it in detail. I certainly know of it, Senator." I found this to be less than incriminating. Not great, but not a statement that she simply hadn't read it.

Senator John McCain (R-AZ), who's in a tough re-election fight, showed a less-than-complete familiarity with the law:

“I haven’t had a chance to look at all the aspects, but I do understand why the Legislature would act,” he said. Even though it wasn’t clear to him “whether all of it is legal or not,” he said state lawmakers “acted out of frustration because the federal government didn’t do its job.” [emphasis in blog post]

Not much worse than Napolitano's statement.

The Arizona Association of Police Chiefs is opposed to the law, though they assure us they'll enforce it anyway. Sarah Palin says: "We're all Arizonans now!" Uh, as Tonto says when he and the Lone Ranger find themselves surrounded by potentially-hostile Native Americans: "What do you mean 'we' white man?"

And now this gets really good. The sponsor of SB1070 is now trying to overturn the 14th Amendment and to outlaw "Anchor Babies."

[T]he 1898 case United States v. Wong Kim Ark demonstrated without reservation that an American-born child of foreign parents was automatically a United States citizen, even if those parents were in the country illegally.

Republican State Senator from Arizona Russell Pearce wants to overturn that and to make the children of undocumented persons not-US citizens.

Broder's "reporting"

David Broder starts by lavishly complimenting his subject, Senator Bob Bennett (R-UT).

Bennett, 76, who followed his father to Washington and Capitol Hill, is the kind of legislator reporters value, because he can speak thoughtfully and dispassionately about his colleagues' collective mood without subjecting you to gobs of self-serving rhetoric.

Bennett then complains that the Federal Government is "big and intimidating, and it's out of control." Ehh, I agree that it's big because, well, it's dealing with big problems. It's a nice theory that we can get along with no authority higher than that of a county sheriff, but what is a county sheriff supposed to do about, say, a massive oil leak about a mile under the ocean's surface? If BP could have dealt with the problem by itself, I presume it would have done so.

This uncertainty is compounded by political and economic trends, and by individual companies quietly disregardful imposed regulations.

As the Deepwater incident reveals, shareholders are responding to uncertainty and complexity by demanding additional disclosure on environmental practices, safety protocols, overall risk exposure and a company’s response to forthcoming regulations. [emphases added]

Yes, the Federal Government fell down on the job of regulating BP so that the spill might never have happened, BP was clearly cutting corners, they didn't even have an up-to-date disaster recovery plan in effect, but that's hardly an argument for shrinking the government and making it even less effective. President Obama may not have fixed the problem by now, but he's at least got people working hard to try and solve it.

The Federal Government is "out of control"? Really? How, exactly, has the government demonstrated that it's "out of control"? Bennett's primary example is that

...Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi forced an unusual Sunday session of the House of Representatives to push through an amended version of the Obama administration's health-care bill. "It was a Sunday, which is a very special day for me and my fellow Mormons," Bennett said. "And it was really a display of partisan political muscle."

Awwwww. Weep. Sob. Wail. It of course never occurs to the columnist playing stenographer to the Senator to point out to readers that Republicans were digging in their heels and fighting the passage of the Affordable Care Act every single inch of the way and were using every single, solitary parliamentary trick and procedure at their disposal to delay the vote in any way possible, thereby making a Sunday session a necessity if the wishes of the majority of the American people who voted for a President who clearly and explicitly promised to pass a health care reform bill were to be respected. But nooooo, Broder can't possibly introduce any objectivity, why, that's something only a reporter might do!

Bennett attributed his difficulties to a mainstream reaction against the centralization of power in the capital...

You mean the tea party folks? Not only were the tea party people never the majority of the country, their main figurehead, Glenn Beck, has clearly seen his days of fame and glory come and go.

Think about all the magazine covers, the massive amount of media coverage and free publicity that Beck generated over the past 12 months. Think about the fact that Beck is supposed to be at the forefront -- the media point person -- for a burgeoning political, right-wing revolution that's unfolding across the country. Beck is the anointed leader of the almighty Tea Party movement. And what does he have to show for it one year later in a nation of 300 million people? About 100,000 more television viewers.

Nah, the tea party's big moment in the sun was last year's 9/12 rally in Washington D.C., a gathering of around 70,000 people. Not a bad number to assemble on the National Mall by any means, but there have been no similarly large gatherings since and their lobbying has definitely hit the point of diminishing returns. No, sorry to inform Senator Bennett, but "reaction against the centralization of power" doesn't explain much of anything.

The same sentiment carried to Arkansas, where incumbent Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln was forced into a runoff by her labor-backed challenger, Lt. Gov. Bill Halter.

Uh, Blanche Lincoln failed because she was shown to be a corporate shill who couldn't care less about anybody who makes under a quarter of a million dollars a year. The "same sentiment" had nothing to do with anything. Broder also attempts to draw the once-Republican Arlen Specter into the same corral, but again, his grand, sweeping generalizations have nothing to do with the reality of Tuesday's races.

Sorry, but Broder and his subject, Senator Bennett, have both achieved a major FAIL!

Latest updates on BP oil blow-out

Unfortunately, when it comes to the British Petroleum (BP) oil blow-out in the Gulf of Mexico, the one phrase that keeps coming to my mind is the title of the UCMJ charge (Article 92) "Dereliction of Duty." (Frankly, if America were to settle on a single phrase with which to sum up the years of the younger George Bush, that's my nomination) The latest news makes it clear that, sure enough, there was massive failure due to dereliction on the part of regulators. As Stephen Lendman in PhillyIMC puts it:

-- since 2001, 69 deaths and 1,349 injuries have occurred from Gulf drilling operations as a result of 858 fires and explosions on 90 big rigs and 3,500 production platforms;

-- the US Minerals Management Service (MMS) issued 150 reports "documenting non-compliant offshore drilling operations;"

-- 172 Gulf spills exceeding 2,100 gallons have occurred in the past decade;

*snip*

On May 5, Public Citizen's Tyson Slocum reported that BP has "the worst safety and environmental record of any oil company operating in America." In recent years alone, it pled guilty to two crimes (among many), paying over $730 million in fines and settlements to the federal and state governments and civil lawsuits for "environmental crimes, willful neglect of worker safety rules, and penalties for manipulating energy markets."

Lendman cites a lengthy history of violations and the coziness between Barack Obama and BP going back many, many years. Personally, I see the Bush and Obama coziness with oil companies in general as being far more similar than they are different. Sure, Obama may have inherited a bad situation, but he wasn't inclined to do very much to change that situation. By the same token, Bush may have inherited a bad national security situation from Clinton, but there isn't the slightest shred of evidence that he did anything to affirmatively change that situation before 9/11.

So, can we blame Clinton for 9/11 or Bush for BPs appalling record of sloppy and derelict work? Negative. Both Bush and Obama are responsible for the problems on their watch as neither of them did anything to change the situations they inherited. There's no evidence that had either crisis occurred a year later, that the situation would have been any different as neither president was making any effort to change their respective situations.


Heh! President Obama is now planning to "get mad" about offshore drilling. Yeah, a bit late on that.


Does the BP oil spill equal "Obama's Katrina"? Uh, no. That's a truly stupid comparison as Obama's team was on top of the blow-out situation as soon as it occurred and both BP and Obama's team have been making apparently sincere and strenuous efforts to fix the problem. Sure, BP is also strenuously trying to underplay the problem:

"It's been 21 years and the litigation between the federal government and Exxon is still not over."

What he details next, however is telling “The executives at BP must be reading the Exxon spill response playbook because they’re doing exactly what Exxon did,” he said. For those of you without access to the oily inner sancta, the playbook’s rules are these:
1 — Understate the amount of oil spilled.
2 — Understate the environmental damage caused by the oil.
3 — Overstate the effectiveness of your company’s response.
4 — Try to buy off the locals with tiny amounts of money (BP is offering $5,000 each to coastal residents in Mississippi) in exchange for waivers promising not to sue for damages.
5 — Slap gag orders on anyone doing business with the corporation. (Fishermen who want work from BP in the cleanup efforts have to agree in writing not to speak to the media. The gag orders are legally meaningless; it’s the intimidation factor that counts.)

The dispersants that BP has slopped all over the spill are somewhat helpful. Climate Progress says: "Chemically dispersing oil spills 'solves the political problem of visible oil but not the environmental problem,' ” but there's no indication that BP and Obama's team aren't doing their best to fix the leak and to prevent any more oil from gushing into the sea than necessary. The really serious problem is that the bulk of the oil may lie about 200 to 300 feet below the surface, where it's pretty much impossible to track. We may never know where the oil is going to end up until it suddenly starts washing up on beaches hundreds, perhaps even thousands of miles from the spill.


FireDogLake has a whole webpage devoted to tracking the spill and what's being done to stop it.

More on oil well blowout

Investigations are now showing that there were serious problems with one department communicating with another and that engineers wasted many precious hours working with inaccurate diagrams.

Who ordered the alterations in the blowout preventer, the 500,000-pound mass of gears and hydraulic valves that sits atop and underwater well and is intended to snap the pipe if disaster threatens, was the subject of dispute at Wednesday's hearing.
Transocean, the owner of the blowout preventer and of the sunken Deepwater Horizon rig, said any alterations would have come at BP's instigation; BP, which owns the well and hired Transocean to drill it, said it had never sought the changes.
Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, said the changes prevented BP's engineers from activating a "variable bore ram" intended to close tight around the pipe and seal it.
"When they investigated why their attempts failed to activate the bore ram," Stupak said of BP engineers, "they learned that the device had been modified. A useless test ram _ not the variable bore ram _ had been connected to the socket that was supposed to activate the variable bore ram."
"An entire day’s worth of precious time had been spent engaging rams that closed the wrong way.” [emphasis added]

FDL has a webpage summarizing and keeping track of the unfolding disaster.
This reminds me of the time when my father and I were reviewing the Battle of the Monitor and the Merrimack. I came across the item that pointed out that actually, had the Monitor's guns been tested to their full extent, their cannonballs would have torn right through the Merrimack's armor and ended the battle very quickly. Dad pointed out "The people who denied victory to the Union were not the people on the ship. The person who messed up was the guy in charge of the testing program. Had he done his job, the Monitor would have promptly knocked out the Merrimack!" His statement rung true then and rings true today. The battle doesn't always depend on those who are on the front lines. Sometimes, it's the people long ago and far away who are decisive.

Deepwater Horizon BP oil well

Michael "Heckuva job, Brownie" Brown of FEMA during the Hurricane Katrina clusterf*** in New Orleans, had an interview with MSNBC in which he made the wild, hysterical, unhinged claim that the Obama Administration delayed its response to the blow-out of the Deepwater Horizon oil well owned by British Petroleum (BP). To its credit, MSNBC responded with a good deal of skepticism and questioned his claims.

Fox News also hosted Brown and failed to question any of his claims and so got spanked by the President's Press Secretary Robert Gibbs.

The whole idea that the Obama Administration's response to the BP oil spill compares in any possible way, shape or form to Bush's Katrina response completely falls apart once the facts are known.

The problem with, as Brown puts it, the media showing pictures of Bush playing guitar during Katrina was that it made the whole government response look incompetent. And hey, President Obama didn't go to the Gulf of Mexico until very recently. Problem with this theory though, was that the picture of Bush playing guitar as people in New Orleans drowned was that it very precisely describd exactly what the situation in August 2005 was. Bush's whole government was asleep at the wheel and failed to effectively respond until FAR too many days after the disaster. Obama's government, as one person put it "Scored 100 out of 100 in its' response," which is why the press, try as it might, can't seem to find anyone of any seriousness or credibility to say that Obamas' response was slow or in any way faulty.


Good pieces with extensive details on the crisis. One. Two.

Interesting conspiracy theory on the initial blow-out

Evidence, the nature of

I had a dispute with a right-winger today in the comments section to the Inky's letters page. I had commented earlier on the astroturfed nature of the teabaggers (Nah, we can't call them that in these comments as the Inky won't allow those comments to be posted).

Posted 09:05 AM, 05/01/2010

turkytom

rich! Tea party folks are accused of racial taunts against reps, and nothing caught on tape anywhere... Lewis turned down an offer to get $10,000 donated to a black scholarship if he submitted to a lie detector test. The same offer was made for anyone who could produce any recordings of those slurs. Nothing. Yet that lie is still told. But video evidence of not taunts, but outright violence, and you brush it off with "No blood, no injuries, no sort of limp"!!!

To which I responded:

Posted 09:15 AM, 05/01/2010

rich2506

turkeytom, there were several reporters present who testified to the insults. How one Earth did anyone prove anything before the invention of cheap, handheld video cameras?

Later:

Posted 11:14 AM, 05/01/2010

turkytom

Rich, the homophobic comment was reported by several, and the TP'rs turned on the person immediately, Nobody has documented the racial slurs.

Teabaggers turning on the homophobe is news to me (No one ever denied that Representative Barney Frank (D-MA) was called a "faggot"). I certainly never heard of any teabaggers "turning on" the person. But the racial slurs were not documented?!?!? From the Huffington Post:

Three Democratic congressmen – all black – say they heard racial slurs as they walked through thousands of angry protesters outside the U.S. Capitol. A white lawmaker says he heard the epithets too. Conservative activists say the lawmakers are lying.
-----------
The dispute pits the lawmakers – one of them, Lewis, is a leader and survivor of 1960s civil rights battles – against conservatives determined to counter claims of racism within the predominantly white and middle-aged tea party movement.
----------
A fourth Democrat, Rep. Heath Shuler of North Carolina, who is white, backed up his colleagues, telling the Hendersonville (N.C.) Times-News that he heard the slurs.

And I'm sorry, I really hate quoting Bill O'Reilly as the sensible voice of reason here, but:

O'Reilly said, "Just because it's not on tape doesn't mean it's fabricated."

And I agree, since when does the lack of video evidence prove anything? If there was no video of the name-calling, well, there very simply was no video of it. I don't blame Lewis for not wanting to drag the issue out by submitting to a lie-detector test. I frankly think he was probably pretty insulted by the notion that he might have lied and would have to prove otherwise.

Widely accessible video cameras are a pretty recent invention. Did people have no way of proving anything before video cameras? Nothing was considered "documented" until it could be electronically recorded? Needless to say, such a concept would be news to a lawyer, who deals in eyewitness evidence all the time.

BTW, the dispute that "turkytom" refers to is over Kenneth Gladney, who another commenter described as "savagely beaten." That description would lead one to believe that Gladney spent some time in intensive care, followed by recovery time in a hospital bed. In reality, Gladney never even took any medical complaints to a paramedic, let alone a doctor. The video that was shot of that incident shows Gladney tussling with a union person, then getting right up minus any visible evidence of any sort of injury. Not saying that the union person was right to be tussling with Gladney in the first place, but "savagely beaten" is obviously an absolutely HUGE overstatement.

Perceptions of strength/weakness

Daily Kos, in their daily Pundit Round-up, reprinted a bit of Thomas Friedman's column today:

Thomas Friedman:

Have no illusions, the rest of the world was watching our health care debate very closely, waiting to see who would be the strong horse — Obama or his Democratic and Republican health care opponents? At every turn in the debate, America’s enemies and rivals were gauging what the outcome might mean for their own ability to push around an untested U.S. president.
It remains to be seen whether, in the long run, America will be made physically healthier by the bill’s passage. But, in the short run, Obama definitely was made geopolitically healthier.

The site responded:

That's very funny, because it's exactly how pundits react. It's why Bush got a pass for so many years from the Heathers in the press. Friedman was no exception.

My own response to Friedman's column was:

Re: "Everybody Loves a Winner" Apr 21

Many years ago, I attempted to test the prevailing assumption I found among the right wing that certain nations were either strong or weak in their pursuit of military objectives (The theory had already taken a big hit when the Jewish people, historically considered weak because they had no state of their own, suddenly became perceived as strong when they prevailed over their Arab neighbors) and looked at France's withdrawal from the Second Italian War of Independence in 1859 and again at France's performance in World War I, specifically during the battle of Verdun in 1916. In 1859, after the French-assisted victory at Solferino, Napoleon III surveyed the battlefield, became sickened by the carnage and withdrew his forces short of final victory over the Austrian occupiers of Italy. In 1916, Frenchmen stood firm against the German assault and ultimately prevailed and joined the final Allied push against the Germans in 1918.
What was the difference? Very simply, the goals. In the first instance, Napoleon III was simply interested in glory and empire-building. In the second, France was fighting for survival itself.
To think that one can learn something meaningful about how President Obama will handle foreign crises by observing how he deals with Republicans strikes me as a typically right-wing perspective. That's like saying that the US was perceived as weak in 1975 because it got booted out of Vietnam. Nonsense! Perceptions of US power were unaltered by the Vietnam debacle because political leaders around the world are not, by and large, idiots. Political leaders are, as a group, generally smart enough to realize that how hard a nation fights for a goal has absolutely everything to do with how important that goal is.

Update: Poor Friedman simply has no clue. The guy babbles on about a "Green Tea Party" as though the teabaggers could possibly care less about the environment.

Digby:

One more time, with feeling. They are not populists and they are not libertarians. They are what is known as the far right. And their organizing principle is hatred of liberalism (and those it serves) and government when it is in the hands of the Democratic Party. That's all there is to it.

Balloon juice:

And those crowds of angry white old people screaming “keep government out of my medicare” and waving signs of “Drill, baby, drill?” They sure as hell don’t care about the environment and are not going to become some sort of “Green Tea Party.”

Friedman then babbles on about the "radical center" and how Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and John Kerry (D-MA) are cooperating on energy legislation, but Graham has (Quite sensibly, if you look at it from a purely tactical perspective) declared that he's willing to toss out months of work if he doesn't get his way on the bill. Look for lots of liberal cave-ins and concessions and hand-wringing about how if we don't give Graham everything he wants, he'll walk.

The Tea Partiers

Well, the numbers are in. The polls have been done and the people who support the Tea Parties are essentially the ol' "Bush dead-enders," the people who continued to stand by G.W. Bush after the Terri Schiavo mess (Terri was brain-dead, but the anti-abortionists refused to take her husband's solemn word on that and insisted that Terri be kept on a feeding tube) and the flooding of New Orleans that resulted from Hurricane Katrina and Bush's apparent indifference to the city's agony. Keep in mind that Bush rushed back to Washington DC in order to sign a bill demanding that Schiavo be kept on her feeding tube, but that he didn't meaningfully react to the declaration of a state of emergency in New Orleans by Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco (August 26th) until September 2nd, when he took an aerial tour of the city and serious federal help didn't arrive until two days after that.

The Tea Party folks are the same quarter of the country that continued to support Bush even after these two incidents. The hardest of the hard-core Tea Partiers, people who watch Glenn Beck's show on the Fox News channel, have hit their numerical peak and his audience has begun to decline. A few albums after Michael Jackson released Thriller, someone commented "His big earning years are behind him." Jackson remained culturally relevant for many more years, but he had already seen what Bruce Springsteen would have referred to as his "Glory Days." So too, will Beck continue to be culturally relevant, but it's apparently safe to say he's seen his "big earning years" come and go.

Are the Tea Party folks historically unprecedented? Are they a unique thing to have burst upon the national scene? No. The US saw just such an angry, bitter movement in reaction to the election of a Democratic President in 1961, 1977 and 1993. There's nothing new or unusual about the Tea Party movement save for the fact that the Tea Partiers are supported by corporate PR firms practicing what's referred to as "astroturf" (As opposed to "grassroots") politics. See especially action item 2 on this press release ("Final showdown against Obamacare 2.0 this weekend!")

2) Protest outside the local, district office of your Congressman at 12pm on Saturday. You can find his or her office location by clicking here. Bring your friends and some signs, and alert the local media.

It's not that astroturf efforts are illegitimate, but such efforts have less credibility than true grassroots efforts that take place because citizens are spontaneously reacting to an issue and forming up without a whole lot of leadership from "above." A look at how the Tea Parties are actually run:

I noted a few months back TPM Media's report that the PAC that organized the Tea Party Express, a series of right-wing nationwide bus tours and rallies, had sent nearly two thirds of its spending during a recent reporting period right back to the GOP consulting firm that spawned it. Today, Politico's Ken Vogel provides more details of the Tea Party Express' operations, including the original memo from a consultant with the firm, Russo Marsh + Rogers, proposing its creation.

The same piece goes on to note how Fox News' management reacted when one of its TV hosts tried to cash in for himself as opposed to pitching in to help out his corporate supervisors.

What's next for the Bush dead-enders? Well, it looks like they're planning a Second Amendment March in Washington DC. Unfortunately, these folks now seem to be actively promoting sedition, a term last heard before and during the Civil War. When protesters begin actively brandishing weapons, the movement has gone beyond mere peaceful, civil protest and starts to become truly dangerous.

The Affordable Care Act a few weeks later

So, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) passed the House on March 21st and now it's all a matter of implementation. How is that going? Well, in an entirely predictable and in fact, widely predicted move, the private, for-profit health insurance industry is working very energetically to find all the possible loopholes and fuzzy definitions and anything else they can use to defeat the whole purpose for passing the ACA to begin with. That this was going to be a problem became clear on the 25th, less than a week after the ACA was passed in the House

President Obama endured some mockery from the press corps when his answer to a single constituent question stretched all the way to 17 minutes, but the blogger writing about it was cheered by the fact that Obama defended the whole idea of activist government that picks up where private enterprise leaves off, where private enterprise simply can't do the necessary job.

On the other side of the aisle, right-wingers are absolutely miserable about it. They feel America is becoming "indistinguishable from the Canadians and the Europeans" and, wonder of wonders, they consider that to be a bad thing. Looking at the comments on the Inky's letters page one would get the impression that the tea partiers were not screaming, tantrum-throwing, out-of-control wingnuts, but were instead just cheerful, earnest, honest citizens who were outraged about out of control government spending, which of course, didn't bother them the slightest under the last president. Fortunately, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) doesn't appear to think that there's much chance that the ACA will be repealed, even as Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) appears to be pining for the "good ol' days," which doesn't sound like he means just the pre-Obama era, but appears to share with many other right-wingers a desire to return to the "Gilded Age" of the 1880s. A major problem with that, of course, is that the Republican Party is caught between a rock and a hard place where spending on specific projects is actually quite popular, even if spending in general is theoretically frowned upon.

Oh, and encouraging words on interrogation practices from the head of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service

And both I and a fellow progressive wrote about the problems the Roman Catholic Church is having with the Pope and pedophilia.


And no, I'm very unimpressed with the Vatican's pushback published in the Inky.


Update: Digby is the blogger who came up with the term "The Village" with which so many describe the traditional media press corps today. It's funny how "The Villagers" do these cute little anthropological-type expeditions out into "The Real America" and always seem to find right-wingers. They never appear to run across any liberal or non-white groups and they have a tendency to focus on small, yes, villages, to focus on. Hmm. Very interesting how that happens.

Institutional privilege

On the balancing act between institutional privilege and credibility with the public. Is a "win-win" solution possible or is it a "zero-sum" or "win-loss" kind of "game"?

In a piece in the Inky, we learn of the Roman Catholic Church's response to Americans seeking to hold the Vatican, and specifically the current Pope, accountable for pedophile priests.

Court documents obtained yesterday show that Vatican lawyers plan to argue that the pope has immunity as head of state, that U.S. bishops who oversaw abusive priests weren't employees of the Vatican, and that a 1962 document is not the "smoking gun" that shows proof of a cover-up.

Would that the Vatican would concentrate only upon the last defense! That's the only part of their legal strategy that bears directly upon the Pope's guilt or innocence. The other two defenses are purely ones of institutional privilege. I can understand institutional privilege and can see why people defend it, but that's at direct cross-purposes with giving a credible explanation that would, in turn, build trust.

Wonkette reproduces a press briefing wherein the Press Secretary Tony Snow discusses the balancing act between institutional privilege and openness, transparency and credibility. Snow tries to convince the press corps that golly-gee willikers guys, we'd be open and honest and transparent, but hey y'know, Congress is seeking to impinge upon the institutional prerogatives of the President and associated subordinates.

MR. SNOW: What you’re saying is that every time somebody wants to try to mount a charge you ought to be able to get hauled up and testify under oath, with a presumption of criminality, rather than a presumption of goodwill. I’m not going to buy that.

Of course, as 911truthmovement.org makes clear, the people who wanted haul up Bush & Cheney upon "a presumption of criminality," were actually on very solid ground to make that presumption. About a year after Snow's scolding of the press corps, Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta confessed that there were several war games that were being conducted on 11Sep01, at the same time that the 9/11 attacks were taking place. The question this raises is:

...did the NORAD war games (Vigilant Guardian, Vigilant Warrior, Northern Vigilance) being run on 9/11 impact in any way, positively or negatively, the response by the military that morning?

But

[Richard Clarke] denied that there were multiple exercises.

The georgewashington.blogspot.com concludes that:

...the dedicated rank-and-file personnel at Norad were misled, intentionally, by the planners of 9/11. Specifically, the good and dedicated lower-level military people were confused by the events of 9/11 because 9/11 occurred at the same time as the multiple war games with their live fly exercises, plane into building scenarios, false radar inserts, and apparent interference by Cheney. [emphasis in original]

Were there any such war games taking place? That's hard to say because institutional privilege allowed Bush & Cheney to testify under the following conditions:

The two leaders were not under oath and no recording was made of the private session at the White House.

--snip--

It was eventually agreed that the meeting would be held in the Oval Office, alongside Mr Cheney. There were no television cameras and also no photographs or transcripts of answers given by the two men.
Democrats had suggested the president's joint appearance with Mr Cheney might be an attempt to eliminate the possibility of providing contradictory testimony over whether the White House did all it could to head off the attacks.
But Mr Bush laughed off the suggestion.

It's very difficult to have any confidence that candid answers were given at the 2004 meeting considering that the record, even years later, still has so many troubling holes in it. By the same token, how are either Catholics or non-Catholics supposed to have any confidence that the problem of pedophile priests was properly or will ever be appropriately dealt with? The current, decades-old problem first came to the attention of the public in 2002:

Ultimately, it became clear that, over several decades in the 20th century, priests and lay members of religious orders in the Catholic Church had sexually abused minors on a scale such that the accusations reached into the thousands. Although the majority of cases were reported to have occurred in the United States, victims have come forward in other nations such as Ireland, Canada and Australia. A major aggravating factor was the actions of Catholic bishops to keep these crimes secret and to reassign the accused to other parishes in positions where they had continued unsupervised contact with youth, thus allowing the abusers to continue their crime. [emphasis added]

The real damage to the Church's credibility wasn't simply that it was embroiled in a scandal about adults abusing their positions of authority for their own sexual pleasure, it was in the fact that these crimes were enabled by a hierarchy that should have put the interests of the young people first. So, while I fully understand why the Church puts its institutional privileges first and acts to protect its "chain of command," the price of such protection is their credibility with the public.

-----------
The author is a Congregationalist Protestant, a New England denomination that is a direct theological descendant of English Puritanism. As such, he's mildly suspicious of the Roman Catholic Church in general, but only as an institution. He doesn't go so far as to hold Catholicism against anyone in a personal manner.

Kudos for Kurtz

Howard Kurtz gets slammed a lot for being a lousy, lazy journalist but I noticed one of the final paragraphs in his report on Glenn Beck and Fox News:

In a recent online interview, CBS's Katie Couric asked Beck about critics who say he "resorts to inflammatory, unfair, despicable, hateful rhetoric." Beck's response: "Did they say that when I was saying the same things about George W. Bush, or is this new?" (Beck has criticized Bush, but not with the harsh language he employs against Obama.)

Y'see, Kurtz's last sentence in parentheses is what we call real, live, actual journalism!!! This is where a reporter supplies meaningful context to what his subject says and doesn't just engage in "he-said, she-said" stenography.

Asked if he regretted saying the president has a "deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture," Beck said: "I'm sorry the way it was phrased."

Kurtz makes it clear that Beck was given a chance to, but refused to, clarify said remarks. So what Beck means by "sorry" is far from clear.

Also, FAIR points out that Beck is hardly an historian. Beck hates Woodrow Wilson and there is indeed quite a bit worth hating. But Beck's assertion that Wilson promoted Prohibition is simply inaccurate. Wilson vetoed the 1919 Volstead Act, which was the enabling legislation for the 18th Amendment which had put Prohibition into place.

And that said, it was also quite interesting to see that, according to Kurtz, Beck is fast becoming the face of Fox News. That's far from being a good thing as many advertisers have abandoned the network, precisely because of Beck's influence.

More than 200 companies have joined a boycott of Beck's program, making it difficult for Fox to sell ads. The time has instead been sold to smaller firms offering such products as Kaopectate, Carbonite, 1-800-PetMeds and Goldline International. A handful of advertisers, such as Apple, have abandoned Fox altogether.

I had to chuckle when I read this bit:

Television analyst Andrew Tyndall calls Beck an "activist" and "comedian" whose incendiary style has created "a real crossroads for Fox News."

"They're right on the cusp of losing their image as a news organization," he declares. "Do they want to be the go-to place for conservative populist ideas on television, or do they want to be a news organization? Ailes has done a good job of doing both."

Good job?!?!? Uh, no he hasn't. Among informed audiences, Fox has long since lost any image of being even remotely in even the general vicinity of being a real news organization.

Religion in the news - round-up

Texas State Board of Education (Dominated by 10 Republicans with only five Democrats in opposition) decides, without using any testimony from historians, sociologists, or economists, that Senator Joe McCarthy's suspicions were confirmed, that Milton Friedman and Frederick Hayek should be added to the textbooks as economists to study and that Thomas Jefferson is to be tossed out and St. Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin brought in as influences on the Founding Fathers. Worthy people, of course, but Jefferson was staunchly secular and the two named replacements were religious people.

"Glenn Beck has repeatedly attacked the concept of social justice and churches that promote it, asserting that it is 'code language for Marxism' and warning that 'when you see those words, run.'"
Beck: "...social justice and economic justice are code words. Look for those code words, and then ask your church, 'What do you mean by that? What is that?' Because they're code words..."
The piece doesn't mention Methodism or any other type of non-Evangelical Protestantism, but I think we can safely assume that the First United Methodist Church of Germantown (FUMCOG) would be on Beck's target list.

The religious right appears to be unhappy sharing the same party with the teabaggers and corporate enablers.

And no, the teabaggers of the right wing have nothing in common with liberals. There's simply not much prospect of all of us ever working together to solve common problems. Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI), the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, is a devoted follower of Ayn Rand and has a considerable following in the Republican Party. Unfortunately, that means he doesn't see the Bush years as disastrous (Speaking here in an economics sense). He sees them as bright, happy days where the right philosophy was applied.

Here's a dose of reality to counter Ryan's notion:

Jane Hamsher, the proprietress of firedoglake.com, has long had a real problem with both the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) and Planned Parenthood for being in the tank for abortion opponents. They were both caught off-guard and completely flat-footed when Representative Bart Stupak (D-MI) sprang his antiabortion-rights health care provisions on the House right before their bill was passed. The good news is that NARAL and Planned Parenthood have both denounced the Stupak provisions, but "...neither NARAL nor Planned Parenthood scored either the House or the Senate bill — making a complete mockery of their entire scorecard system."

Thankfully, Stupak and his provisions have run into problems, even though none of those problems can be traced to either NARAL or Planned Parenthood.

On the even-more-positive side for news on health care, serious issue is taken with Representative Dennis Kucinich's (D-OH) position that if we can't get the public option into the health care bill right now, that it's doomed never to go in.

Had to shake my head when I saw this: Iran is prosecuting people who tortured dissidents while the US feels free to lecture other countries, including Iran, on human rights.

Torture and the meanings of words

Karl Rove writes in his memoir:

"[T]he president never authorized torture. He did just the opposite by making sure the EITs [enhanced interrogation techniques on high-value terrorist detainees] did not cross the legal line into torture."

Of course, this immediately reminded me of Bill Clinton's famous line:

It depends on what the meaning of the word "is" is.

I don't think Rove is precisely lying in his sentence. Not precisely, anyway. But it seems to me that the sentence is very, very fuzzy. And deliberately so. What precisely does Rove mean by "EITs did not cross the legal line into torture"? Who exactly drew that line? How was the word "legal" defined? Using exactly what authority and which precise laws? "Torture?" Who defined torture for the purpose of this sentence?

As we read President G. W. Bush's order of 7Feb2002, it's very clear that Bush is not using the Geneva Conventions as his guide.

Our nation recognizes that this new paradigm - ushered in not by us, but by terrorists - requires new thinking in the law of war, but thinking that should nevertheless be consistent with the principles of Geneva.
2. Pursuant to my authority as commander in chief and chief executive of the United States, and relying on the opinion of the Department of Justice dated January 22, 2002, and on the legal opinion rendered by the attorney general in his letter...

a. I accept the legal conclusion of the Department of Justice and determine that none of the provisions of Geneva apply to our conflict with al-Qaida in Afghanistan or elsewhere throughout the world...

And Bush's qualification as to why we don't simply brutalize captured personnel:

3. Of course, our values as a nation, values that we share with many nations in the world, call for us to treat detainees humanely, including those who are not legally entitled to such treatment. Our nation has been and will continue to be a strong supporter of Geneva and its principles. As a matter of policy, the United States Armed Forces shall continue to treat detainees humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva.
4. The United States will hold states, organizations, and individuals who gain control of United States personnel responsible for treating such personnel humanely and consistent with applicable law.

What's not at all clear from this description is why the order was written in the first place. If US forces are going to deal with captives "in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva," why not just keep the Conventions in force? Why go to all the trouble of saying what the US was and wasn't legally permitted to do if al Qaeda and/or Taliban personnel were in US custody? The Torture Memo Analysis (TMA) has numerous links to what it considers relevant documents and it doesn't contain anything that answers this question.


BTW, an analysis written on 30Jan2003 disputes the logic in the Bush order of 7Feb2002:

If asked, most states would point to numerous provisions of Hague and Geneva Law as still binding on this conflict [The US vs al Qaeda & the Taliban], even though it does not meet the definition of armed conflict in those instruments.
---------
This is not to suggest that every scenario in the "war on terrorism" is addressed by customary international law.
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The question, however, is whether those ambiguities can and should be resolved through a new round of codification, or whether other methods are open to decisionmakers.

The burden needs to be on those calling for revision to demonstrate exactly what needs to be improved.

As we know, of course, the Bush Administration never applied to any international bodies to resolve any such disputes. Bush relied instead on memos written by subordinates. As the aforementioned TMA makes clear, the 22Jan2002 memo from Jay Bybee is simply making an argument that the Geneva Conventions aren't applicable, the memo is not stating that as a fact.


As the TMA makes clear:

5) That protection is not merely procedural. As long as the Convention protects an individual, grave breaches of its provisions constitute a breach of both U.S. and international law.

6) Article 130 of the Convention provides that grave breaches include "... any of the following acts, if committed against persons or property protected by the Convention: wilful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, including biological experiments, wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, compelling a prisoner of war to serve in the forces of the hostile Power, or wilfully depriving a prisoner of war of the rights of fair and regular trial prescribed in this Convention."

Looking at the photos of how captured personnel were treated at the Iraqi prison known under both the dictator Saddam Hussein and the US occupation of Iraq as Abu Ghraib, I don't believe there can possibly be any serious question that Article 130 of the Convention was very consciously, willfully and deliberately violated.


Bush admitted in 2008 that:

I was the Commander-in-Chief of a military where these disgraceful acts took place

He tried to add lots of qualifications and exceptions, trying to distance himself from those horrific acts, but as a piece by the Center for American Progress makes clear:

We now know that Major General Antonio Taguba produced a 53-page report detailing alleged torture in Abu Ghraib for Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, senior commander in Iraq. Sanchez received this report in February 2004 – two months before the first graphic photos of abuses were shown publicly on 60 Minutes II.

Taguba's report documents numerous instances of "sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses at Abu Ghraib" dating from October to December 2003.

If the President and his subordinates were not fully aware of these abuses, they most certainly should have been. Also, Sourcewatch details the reaction of an Administration that just didn't really feel much concern over how persons in US custody were treated. 

It says absolutely nothing good about the Office of Professional Responsibility that it cleared Presidential subordinates John Yoo and (now Judge) Jay Bybee of "professional misconduct" meaning they were not referred to a bar association for them to lose their legal licenses, but were merely guilty of exercising "poor judgment." Still, that's not exactly a resounding declaration of good legal analysis.


So, did the President "authorize torture"? Personally, I think he did, but he did so via winks and nods and through, at best, poorly written memorandums that were highly questionable from a legal standpoint. So is Rove being truthful? Perhaps in a very highly technical, very carefully qualified sense, he is.

Obama Administration facing crisis

The WaPo puts out a truly subservient, hero-worshiping, fanboy-type piece on President Obama's Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel. Emanuel is clearly meant to be viewed as having a halo around his head, he's described as being the "White House voice of reason." What, pray tell, is this awesome "reason" based on? The first one given (The same point was made earlier by another WaPo reporter) is:

In December 2008, Obama, Emanuel and Republican Sens. John McCain (Ariz.) and Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) met in Obama's transition headquarters in Chicago to discuss detainee policy. According to Graham, Obama turned to him at one point and said, " 'I'm going to need your help closing Guantanamo Bay. . . . I want you and Rahm to start talking.' " They did, and as the discussions progressed, Emanuel grew wary that closing the U.S. military prison in Cuba was possible without opening a slew of other politically sensitive national security problems " 'This stuff is like flypaper,' " Graham recalled Emanuel saying. " 'It will stick to you.' "

Graham said Emanuel was well aware that his and any other Republican support for closing Guantanamo Bay hinged on keeping alleged Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed out of civilian court.

A blogger asks:

Lindsey Graham is one of 41 Republican senators. He has the capacity to be reasonable. And yet when he’s faced with people who know more than he does, he acts like a baby, as with his petulant treatment of longtime FBI counterterrorist Ali Soufan last year. He is not the chairman of anything. He is not the ranking member of anything. He controls no money. If you believe he has the power to rally along GOP votes, ask how that climate change bill is coming. There is absolutely no legal or procedural way that the road to shutting Guantanamo down runs inexorably through Graham’s office. That’s a political choice.

The WaPo piece makes no attempt to explain the blogger's question as to why Senator Graham is so important. Keep in mind that the blogger's piece came out on February 15th whereas the WaPo piece came out on March 2nd. It's not like the WaPo stenographer/reporter didn't have time to ponder the question.

Nor is there any legitimate, established reason as to why Republicans want to avoid a civilian trial for Khalid Sheik Mohammed. If Emanuel were trading in legitimate concerns and balancing them off against one another, that'd be one thing. He's instead, balancing off a reason that Graham and McCain more or less just plucked out of thin air versus a legitimate legal reason based on legal tradition and the Constitution.

There is simply no requirement for an accused terrorist to be tried outside of America's judicial system.

The position staked out by Lindsay Graham et al. favoring military commissions over federal criminal trials for the Gitmo detainees we plan to charge with wrongdoing as the “best way to render justice, win this war and protect our nation from a vicious enemy,” is not especially more coherent. Among other things, after 8 years, the commissions have convicted 3 defendants, 2 of whom are already back on the streets. In the same time, according to NYU, the criminal justice system has pursued 800 terrorism prosecutions with a conviction rate of 90%. The new and improved commission process is certain to generate just as much litigation as the last one – and commission defendants will enjoy a host of potentially powerful defenses to their prosecution they won’t have in criminal trials.

The piece goes on to point out that the Rahm Emanuel-induced moral and political compromises that the Obama Administration is now making are absolutely killing the Administration's credibility on the whole issue of how to deal with terrorism suspects.

But it’s hard to have a coherent much less dominating message when talking out of all sides of the mouth. It is not news that the Obama Administration seems to have been struggling for some time with internal divisions on these issues.

It's not as though the rest of the world hasn't noticed either, that the US policy on terrorist suspects is morally bankrupt. A blogger points out that Pakistan, a country far more on the front lines of terrorism than the US ever will be, is nevertheless applying due process.

Yet what happens when they want to imprison foreign Terrorism suspects? They indict them and charge them with crimes, put them in their real court system, guarantee them access to lawyers, and can punish them only upon a finding of guilt.

The US stands with an inferior, scotch-tape-and-band-aids, carelessly-constructed system that doesn't even deliver convictions. I have to say, I'm completely baffled as to why Emanuel thinks this case shows him as anything other than a hopeless clown. He's constructed a lose-lose scenario whereupon Democrats surrender upon matters of deep and serious principle, end up looking completely without morality and gain absolutely nothing in return. McCain and Graham continue to filibuster along with their fellow Republican Senators each and every single time they possibly can. Where and how they're doing anything to help the Administration is a complete mystery.

It's not like the policy on terrorism suspects is isolated, either.

We’ve already seen the Administration’s energy/climate change initiative so watered down in the House that it caused deep splits in the alternative energy/environmental community. Those who pleaded for pragmatic patience on the House Bill are now tearing their hair out watching the Senate become a bastion of delay and denialism, with little effective push back from the Administration.

Again, we're seeing a complete lack of principle and coherency from the Administration. Again, we're seeing a lose-lose situation from people who are allegedly smart. Obviously, President Obama is a grown-up and obviously, Emanuel was appointed by Obama and has Obama's full confidence. But Emanuel's fingerprints are apparent.

The head man of "The Village," David Broder, got very snippy and aggravated about Emanuel's obvious disloyalty being on display with all the planted stories about President Obama being to blame for the poor performance of his Administration (Not that Broder would actually accuse Emanuel of doing the leaking, o-o-oh no-o-o!!!) and made a very interesting charge:

The underlying problem, in their eyes, is a badly damaged economy that has sunk Obama's poll numbers and emboldened Republicans to blockade his legislative program.

Okay, let's take Broder's word for this. It's not like the economy was considered to be in good shape when Obama took the oath of office. But what happened? The stimulus package passed in February 2009 was too small. And why was it too small? "...Obama and the U.S. Congress - driven by centrist senators from both parties - have decided..." (emphasis added). And who is the great champion of "centrism"? Yup, his name is Rahm Emanuel.

I don't see Emanuel as exercising some mysterious, nefarious, Rasputin-like influence. I think it's far more likely that Emanuel sincerely believes that centrism and compromising principles in return for fleeting, evanescent advantage is the way to go. I believe Obama trusts that Emanuel knows what he's doing. What's also obvious to us DFH's, the dirty hippie bloggers, is that Emanuel's strategy simply isn't working. It never was working and it never will work. I'm not sure whether Emanuel should be fired or simply overruled, but either way, the Obama Administration has to do something and has to do it soon.

Democratic leadership and primaries

Y'know, I've felt this way for a long time anyway, but I think it needs to be re-stated upon the President's endorsement of Senator Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) to be re-elected. The Democratic National Committee (DNC), the House and Senate Democratic Campaign Committees (DCCC & DSCC) need to stay out of primary races. They should never express any sort of opinion and they should never chip in as much as a nickel to any primary campaign.

First off, it's not the slightest bit surprising that in each and every single, solitary case that the White House and the rest of the Democratic leadership group will habitually support the incumbent in their primary battles. I mean, that's just a given. Obviously, these groups want to continue working with people that they've gotten to know. Obviously, they feel that "our buddy" has contributed to "the fight" and will continue to do so, whether or not they've actually contributed very much or, in the case of Ben Nelson (D-NE), they've actively worked against the better interests of the Democratic Party as a whole and used up money that could have been put to more worthwhile purposes.

I have nothing but good things to say about how MoveOn has responded to the Blanche Lincoln-Bill Halter primary. MoveOn appears to understand why primaries exist.

Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln is one of the worst Democrats in Washington, siding with corporate interests to obstruct progress.
----------------
Bill Halter is the progressive lieutenant governor of Arkansas. Halter has fought to make sure every child in Arkansas can afford to go to college, has helped organize free clinics to offer health care to people without insurance, and opposed vicious anti-gay ballot measures.

The Nation finds Lincoln very uninspiring:

Senator Blanche Lincoln, the exceptionally uninspired (and uninspiring) Arkansas Democrat who has dragged her heals [sic] on health-care reform, labor-law reform and just about every other major issue that matters to grassroots Democrats while at the same time backing bank bailouts and trade policies that batter Arkansas workers and farmers, will face a serious primary challenge from the state's lieutenant governor.

Bill Halter, who was elected to Arkansas' No. 2 job with 57 percent of the vote in 2006, has positioned himself as a far more progressive player on education, health care and, above all, economic issues than Senator Lincoln.

The Nation feels that "old-fashioned populism is the only message that will keep Democrats competitive in states such as Arkansas" and clearly, if the Democratic leadership group is not going to be part of that populist initiative, they'd better get out of the way and let the more progressive, energetic people take charge.


Rachel Maddow agrees and questions DNC Chairman Tim Kaine about this. The piece with that video also runs a quote from Steve Rosenthal, a veteran Democratic strategist and former top AFL-CIO official: "People voted for change in ’08 and feel like they’re not getting the change they voted for.”

Fluff vs substance

My roommate back in college admitted once that he spent an awful lot of time complaining about things (Usually justifiably, I thought) but felt he really had to make an exception once and to declare that the meal we were eating at a usually not-so-great cafeteria was really first-class. In the same light, I'd really like to commend the front-page piece in the Inky today summing up the health care summit yesterday. It's a solid, substantive piece that lets one know where all the players in the health care game are standing and where they're headed.

For the record, Democrats from the President on down appear to have really lost patience with Republican delaying and filibustering and offering "deals" that Democrats simply can't accept, primarily the "deal" of starting from scratch with a blank piece of paper and then building up a brand new health care bill from the ground up. Democrats absolutely refused to start over or to promise not to use the reconciliation process in order to bypass the filibuster.

A columnist from the WaPo, which is a source that is again a frequently unsatisfactory place for political news, does an excellent job delineating where all the political players are and their statements as to what they stand for. Although the columnist is clearly a liberal, he's very fair in sketching out the proposals of four Republicans, showing us that these are good and worthwhile proposals. He also points out their problem in getting anyone to take their observations seriously:

What we didn't hear from Kyl, or Camp, or Coburn or McCain, however, was an offer to vote for a health reform plan if these problems were fixed and their ideas were incorporated. Without even the hint of such offers, there was little reason for a willing president and his unwilling allies to even consider serious compromise. Now the losers will be the American people, who could have surely benefited from such productive dealmaking.

As for the "fluff" guys, ho-o-o-o boy!!! These "news" pieces leave me so completely unenlightened about where people stand and how the legislation is proceeding, the pieces are so full of useless "he-said, she-said" and mindless complaints about how substance-free the Blair House meeting was, I felt my IQ going down just reading that trash. Supermarket tabloids give me more substantive news about celebrities and their romantic liaisons.

On Jon Stewart's Daily Show last night, Stewart pointed out that, well of course, Fox News had fluffy, uninformative, "he-said, she-said" pieces that told citizens nothing of value. Much worse was the fact that Fox portrayed the summit as a game that the two sides were "winning" or "losing." Stewart made it clear that this completely missed the point of the summit. Disturbingly CNN, an allegedly serious source for news, a place where objectivity is valued and that's supposedly information-heavy, took much the same approach. They also saw the health care summit as being about winning and losing. I checked out the CNN piece on the web this morning and was not surprised to see that Stewart was right, but was absolutely appalled to see how completely and utterly worthless CNN's "reporting" was. Their primary summary piece was basically a lot of complaining and griping and carrying on about how worthless the summit was. As the WaPo piece that I earlier cited showed, the summit was extremely helpful for showing the American people that the Republicans are simply not interested in pushing the health care bill forwards and simply want to stand in the way. The CNN piece leaves readers completely in the dark about that.

The Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall St Journal (Murdoch also owns Fox News and the New York Post) also dis-served citizens by mocking the anecdotes that Democrats told to put a human face on the problems with health care in America these days. Apparently, if Democrats are moved by their human feelings to note that their fellow citizens require assistance with their medical needs and then Democrats try to express this with personal anecdotes, that's unacceptable. I guess we can tell now just how much Murdoch cares about his fellow human beings.

PRAWN party on the 20th of February

The Philadelphia Regional Anti-War Network (PRAWN) threw a party on Saturday, 20 February. We had a member of the Poor People's March give a talk on that upcoming event. From 4 April to 20 June of this year, there will be a march from New Orleans, LA to Detroit, MI. The Philadelphia Weekly recently did a piece on how "The Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign is currently reaching out to property owners across the city and linking them up with neighbors who are in a similar predicament so that they can [peacefully and nonviolently] resist en masse."

Next up was Bill Perry, along with his wife Terry Perry and their friend Emma Grigore (Bill Perry is a leading member of the Delaware Valley Veterans For America, but the group had no connection to the subject of the night's slideshow) and they all spoke on the attempt by 1400 people to visit Gaza ("Largest Open Air Prison in the World") around New Years 2010. Link is to selected pictures taken by Perry and posted to his Facebook page. Photoessay contains links to all three Facebook albums that in turn contain lots and lots of other pictures. Ultimately, only 70 people went into Gaza. 100, including Perry, were permitted in, but 30 of them stayed outside out of respect for the soldarity of their fellow Gaza Freedom March members.

The party went well. Food was plentiful and good. Naturally, our being a liberal, progressive and leftist crowd meant that the dishes were really heavy on vegetables as opposed to meats. We had plenty of coffee and tea and served dessert after the two speakers. We were missing a component for getting sound from Perry's computer to our speakers, but our audience could hear the supplied sound anyway and that problem has since been fixed, the component has been obtained. In a very good sign that the party was successful, people didn't just bolt out the door, but hung around and chattered for a bit.

Obama's loan guarantees on nuclear energy

[Full disclosure: My father worked on nuclear energy projects for about 40 years]

So it seems that

the President wants to provide loan guarantees to spur nuclear power development

[snip]

Mr. Obama portrayed the decision as part of a broad strategy to increase employment and the generation of clean power.

Is that a good idea? The important thing to remember about nuclear energy is that

No American power company has ordered a new nuclear power plant since 1978, and all reactors ordered after the fall of 1973 ended up canceled.

Why might this be? Cost is a very major factor.

In January 2008, MidAmerican Nuclear Energy Co said that prices were so high, it was ending its pursuit of a nuclear power plant in Payette County, Idaho, after spending $13 million researching its economic feasibility.

Also, consider that nuclear plants are very significant users of water. A plant with a "once-through" cooling system (As opposed to a "closed-loop" system) uses water at the following rates (PDF) of gallons per minute:

504,000 gpm at Millstone Unit 2 (CT); 918,000 gpm at Millstone Unit 3 (CT); 460,000 gpm at Oyster Creek (NJ); 311,000 at Pilgrim (MA); and 1,100,000 gpm at each of the two Salem reactors (NJ).

By contrast, the US is currently using irrigation systems on roughly 18.5 million acres of farmland. It takes about two acre-feet (Two acres of water, one foot deep) of water per year to produce crops, which works out to 651,702 gallons. So that means that the water used by a nuclear plant in a single minute very roughly equals that used by an acre of farmland all year.

Is there an alternative to using nuclear power? As a matter of fact, wind power is currently roughly comparable per kilowatt to what nuclear power is. Commercial nuclear power began in 1948, so nuclear power is a mature technology, a technology where we aren't likely to see any great cost reductions anytime soon. Wind power is currently in a stage where we can reasonably expect serious cost reductions over the next decade or so.

The author of a study in SolveClimate

arrived at an average cost for a nuclear plant: $8 billion for 2.21 GW [GigaWatts]

[snip]

At $1,920/kW, the capital costs of the wind farm would be $10.31 billion -- or $5.49/watt or $5,486/kW. That's 37% higher than our average nuke.

But that price advantage may not be permanent. The turbine is the biggest cost element of the wind farm setup. Fortunately, that's the element that's also the most likely to come down in price with technological development. And costs for nuclear power plants are soaring:

In the middle of 2006, reactor vendors estimated the overnight costs at $1,500 - $2,000 per kW. This year, only two years later, they now estimate $3,000/kW. That excludes the owner's costs and financing.

So yes, nuclear power is measurably cheaper than wind power now, but that doesn't look like a permanent state of affairs.

Update: My sister reminded me that if President Obama really wants to help America's energy picture, he might help the nuclear industry to re-start something that my father's company was working on when it went bankrupt. That would be a standard, basic nuclear plant such as France already has. Currently, one of the real problems with US plants that adds to their cost is that nuclear plants are all custom-built. For each and every plant, all of the spare parts have to be manufactured specifically for that particular plant. This adds enormously to the cost of maintaining those plants. Although it may be tempting to say "Let's never build a nuclear plant again," it's worth keeping in mind that nuclear plants were built to last 40 years, after which they have to be mothballed or pretty much entirely rebuilt.

It's also important to keep in mind that we're really not likely to be able to live without the nuclear plants we have for the foreseeable future. The Oildrum looks at the energy source that the US has after nuclear, wind and solar power, and that's hydrocarbons or oil. A report by six European companies might invite skepticism because they all have a strong vested interest in seeing substantial investments made in renewable energy. Nevertheless, it's worth noting that their report says that "peak oil" is already here (The world has already pumped half of all the oil there is). As China and India are rapidly expanding their economies (Indian and Chinese citizens watch American TV and like the idea of living like the characters in "Burn Notice" and "90210"), China and India are competing with the US for what oil remains, meaning the idea that America can do without nuclear energy for at least the next several decades is sheer wishful thinking.

Y'know, it's funny...

It's funny how for years and years, right-wingers would express great derision and contempt for those who discover new rights. Roe vs Wade saw privacy rights that weren't expressed before, "Human Rights" in the late 1970s were considered a dangerous innovation, detainees incarcerated by the US under "War on Terror" theories were challenging their imprisonment based on habeas corpus (Does that doctrine apply to prisoners of war? Did the detainees even have that status?) etc.

A bit of background: In September 2002, President Bush made a speech about Iraq that was supposed to have Americans quaking in fear over Saddam Hussein's Weapons of Mass Destruction and anxious to rush over there and stomp the whole country. Instead, two weeks after the speech, a substantial number of opponents of the proposed war showed up in Washington DC to conduct a protest against it.


This is a picture I took an hour before the protest began. This was the first and last time I saw a policeman openly taking pictures of protesters. Did protesters make a legal complaint or did the police decide that their picture-taking wasn't having any deterrent effect? Who knows? Note that the crowd is like "Okay, our protest is being surveilled. Well, that's the price we pay for freedom and dissent." We collectively understood that political activity carried a bit of risk and we accepted that price.

So I had to chuckle mirthlessly when Rick Santorum published a piece in the Inky today about proponents of Proposition Hate Eight being politically attacked (They had signed a petition stating that they didn't wish to see equal rights extended to gays and lesbians, progressive groups asked that their names be revealed, they panicked at the thought that their neighbors would know their political leanings) and how those who have expressed hatred for their fellow citizens should be protected from discovery by their neighbors.

Now, I'm generally in favor of all sorts of new rights and privileges being extended to citizens, but since when did we ever have the right to support controversial political causes anonymously? Voting is an act where we must register with our town or city with our full name and address, give our signature and in Pennsylvania at least, must sign a register before voting. If we give money to a political group or to a candidate for office, we need to fill out a form declaring who we are, where we live, how much we're giving, etc. No one is permitted to wear a mask at a protest rally due to (More or less reasonable) fears that they might be a terrorist who might set off a bomb and then escape without anyone knowing who they are.

Santorum decries the liberal lack of respect for people who wish to deny their fellow citizens the same rights that they have and to some extent, he's got a point. But that point extends equally well to his side of the political spectrum. The town hall mini-mobs of August 2009 were not exactly exercises in decorum or respect. The bulldozing of CDs made by the Dixie Chicks reminded people of the burning of books in 1930s Germany. And the commentaries by prominent people like Glenn Beck don't really help the cause of civility.

So, I'm sorry, but I really can't work up much concern over people who want to engage in politics anonymously.

Heartening news

[I wrote this for the Organizing For America/MyBarackObama website - Rich]

I was extremely heartened to see this in Daily Kos:

Charles Blow:

Since the State of the Union address, the president has been bounding about, displaying a new sense of vigor and confidence and a fighter’s spirit. He almost looks like the president people thought that he would be — a paladin, not a pacifist.

Why? Simple. Doing it Rahm's way didn't work, so now he's doing it his way.

I've never been impressed with Clintonian centrism. I've always felt that being successful on your own terms is vastly more useful to America and vastly more appreciated by voters than trying to slice ever-thinner slices of baloney and trying to target ever-more precisely that elusive middle-of-the-road voter's opinions. Centrism has proven over and over again to be an utter failure. The V-Chip was a much-appreciated centrist issue, a bloodless, technocratic, passion-free solution that President Clinton was happy to use. It was a good-enough campaign issue for 1996, when Clinton was up against Senator Bob Dole, a guy even my Republican father felt was simply too old for the job and a Right-wing vote that was split with Ross Perot. It was a fair-weather solution that was appropriate for good, sunny, trouble-free times.


Of course, it was obvious at the time that Clinton had no coattails and that for a politician to declare "I'm a loyal Clintonian" meant nothing of substance to voters. I noticed at the time that no one ever followed the collapse of Hillary Clinton's health care plan by trying to appeal to what she tried to do. There was no glory to recall, no battle-cry to revive. When the plan was defeated, it simply sunk without a trace. I felt that 2002 saw the complete and utter collapse of the DLC strategy. It's quite rare for an out-of-office party to actually lose seats in a mid-term election, but the DLC managed that highly unusual feat. I simply can't imagine why the DLC or its centrist strategy has had any credibility since then.


Apparently, the loss in Massachusetts has jolted the Obama Administration to realize anew the sheer folly and bankruptcy of trying to appeal to some mythical centrist voter that no one can ever locate precisely anyway. Obviously, Massachusetts would never have been a loss had the Democratic Party still been using Howard Dean's 50-State Strategy. Rahm Emanuel clearly thought Dean's ideas were no longer relevant. I'm happy to see the Obama Administration learn from its mistakes and that Emanuel simply does not have the better strategy.


As a proud DFH blogger, I strongly urge the whole Obama Administration to keep going on their new path. Whack the Republican obstructionists at every opportunity. Don't play the victim, but keep pointing out to the voters where the problems in Washington are and that you're trying your best to overcome the obstacles that Republicans keep throwing in your way. Getting all 60 of the Senators in the Democratic Caucus to vote for everything in the health care bill was an awful idea as getting those last few votes from Senators Joe Liebeman and Ben Nelson resulted in tearing the guts out of the bill and leaving just the really unpopular parts behind.


And remember, above all else keep this constantly in mind, the press corps is not your friend. These are a bunch of silly, vapid, go-along-to-get-along, mindless fashion victims who know nothing outside The Village, outside their Versailles-on-the-Potomac. Sure, go ahead and "consult" them, do what you must to stroke their egos, but please don't let yourselves be fooled into thinking they have any worthwhile insights to impart.

Round-up on the news

Following up on the Inky's piece on the scientist caught up in "Climategate" (Comments following the piece are FULL of right-wingers claiming Global Warming/Climate Change is a hoax), the blog Booman Tribune goes into further detail, it reproduces the "hockey stick" graph wherein the temperature follows a fairly steady, very gradual cooling (with an especially deep dip in the late 1400s) with a very sharp sustained upward movement starting around 1900. Yes, there have been rises and falls in temperatures over the millennia, but not this quick. The graphs I've seen usually have changes taking place over very long periods of time. For the temperature to go up this sharply, this quickly, is unprecedented.

Very interesting piece on the origins of the housing bubble. I've noticed that neither of the progressive economists that I read, Dean Baker or Paul Krugman (For the record, they're both Keynesians and yes, they've both "called" many economic issues correctly) have a whole lot to say about what really caused the housing crisis, they both focus on the lack of action by the Federal Reserve once it was clear that there was a bubble. The right-wingers are correct in blaming Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac/the Community Reinvestment Act, but the two economists I cited and James Galbraith here make it clear that the crisis was a whole lot bigger than just those liberal institutions.

Democrats are convinced that the message of the Massachusetts special election to replace the late Senator Kennedy was "Jobs, jobs, jobs."
The only real point of dispute was that many of them feel that getting health care done and done right, is crucial to economic health

How IS health care going? Hard to say. Kudos to Speaker Pelosi for keeping up the good fight, and refusing to just pass the weaker Senate bill but there's so much behind-the-scenes stuff going on that we just don't know.

Media Matters has been having a huge amount of fun following the misadventure of James O'Keefe, who entered the office of Senator Mary Landreiu (D-LA) wearing the outfit of a telephone repairman and claiming he was there to fix her phone system.
And no, it's not the slightest bit believable that Andrew Breitbart, O'Keefe's employer, wasn't fully informed as to what O'Keefe was planning to do.
Very, very interestingly, Landreiu is the senior Democratic member of the Homeland Security Committee, which means her office receives all KINDS of VERY highly classified information.
Could this case be far more serious than it appears?

A blogger looks at that ol' question about political opponents who use blatantly bad arguments: "Stupid or evil?"