This Sunday, tens of thousands of people plan to march on the National Mall in Washington, DC in an effort to persuade Congress and the Obama administration to tackle immigration reform in 2010. More than 700 buses are bringing an estimated 100,000 supporters to the nation's capital for the March for America. Participants are hoping to show strength in numbers on the ground, and flex muscle on Capitol Hill as well.
Advocacy groups are organizing countless phone banks and Congressional office visits to encourage lawmakers to support a pathway to citizenship for the estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants who live and work in the United States.
On top of that, immigrant rights supporters are eager to note that President Barack Obama promised to overhaul the immigration system during his campaign, and said that immigration reform would be a "top priority in my first year as President of the United States of America." But now that year has passed, and with Congress still deadlocked on health care and economic issues, reform supporters just can't wait any longer.
While an immigration reform bill has been proposed in the House of Representatives, the same can't be said for the Senate. If the Senate fails to propose a reform bill this Spring, it won't be on the agenda for 2010 either. With elections at the end of the year, there's an aura of uncertainty over how possible it will be to pass reform after that, since the resulting congress could be more conservative.
Keeping a promise
For Obama and the Democratic lawmakers, keeping the promise of immigration reform could be essential to their political future. As Feministing noted this week, "the March is meant to send a message to Congress: immigration reform cannot wait. It's also a message to President Obama to keep good on his word and push immigration reform."
Obama's promise to reform the immigration system helped earn him 67 percent of the Latino vote in 2008, exit polls show. Latinos-who make up approximately 15 percent of the U.S. population and are the fastest growing minority in the nation-also delivered Democratic victories in states like Colorado, Florida, and Ohio during that same year.
But with 81 percent of undocumented immigrants in the United States originating from Latin America, a failure to take action on immigration reform could prove disastrous for Democrats and the White House. Numerous polls show that Latino voters want immigration reform, in part because nearly 9 million people in the country live in "mixed-homes," where some family members are documented and others are not, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.
In a story about the upcoming march, TPMDC reports that "organizers of the rally have a simple retort for Democrats: pass reform now, or lose Latino support in November." The news site quotes march organizer Gabe Gonzalez, who expresses frustration with the slow movement on immigration reform. "I cannot tell you how angry and outraged people are," she says. "I have conversations with my progressive friends and they're always surprised at how visceral it is."
About-face
On the other side of the political spectrum, conservative politicians who do not have a reputation for embracing immigration reform are trying to change course. The population of Latino voters will only continue to grow as children of undocumented immigrants reach voting age. Both Republicans and Democrats are fighting to secure that demographic as a reliable voting bloc.
In 2003, 63 percent of the 4.3 million children born to undocumented parents in the U.S. were citizens. By 2008, there were 5.5 million children in the same situation and 73 percent of them were born in the country. This new generation signifies what could be a significant political shift as Latinos continue to gain prominence and influence in the U.S.
There is a rift on the right when it comes to immigration, as AlterNet explains. "One segment of the Republican Party completely understands that critical political fact. They understand that to compete successfully in the future -- on a national scale -- they must be able to contest for a sizeable segment of the Hispanic vote. ... But there is another group of Republicans who want to use immigration as wedge issue to win short-term political advantage among anxious voters who think of Latinos as threats to their culture, their tax dollars, and their jobs."
Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks notes that both sides of the immigration argument are very passionate. "You got a lot of people in the country saying 'Aw, we need a border fence, and the damn immigrants are taking our jobs, etc.,'" he says. "On the other side you have people who are in favor of immigration, making it into some sort of sane system."
Although reform supporters are hopeful that a bill will be proposed in the Senate this Spring, whether it will have a wide bipartisan backing remains to be seen. But with changing demographics and an organized movement for reform, passing immigration reform would empower a reliable--and organized--voting block that is growing more significant by each election. In the end, it could change the political climate of the United States for generations to come.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about immigration by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Diaspora for a complete list of articles on immigration issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, and health care issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, and The Pulse. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
From today's earlier thread on the Kucinich announcement, I'd like to flag one comment from ArthurKC:
Kucinish carefully answered a broad question about concessions to him for his vote in a way that did not close the door to him having asked for and gotten a deal on ERISA. He answered in terms of denying anything particular to him or his district. And, it seems that both he and the WH are aware of the blowback on the Louisana Purchase and had gamed out what would be said to avoid stepping in a similar pile on ERISA.
But in the interview, Mr. Lieberman said that he grew apprehensive when a formal proposal began to take shape. He said he worried that the program would lead to financial trouble and contribute to the instability of the existing Medicare program.
And he said he was particularly troubled by the overly enthusiastic reaction to the proposal by some liberals, including Representative Anthony Weiner, Democrat of New York, who champions a fully government-run health care system.
"Congressman Weiner made a comment that Medicare-buy in is better than a public option, it's the beginning of a road to single-payer," Mr. Lieberman said. "Jacob Hacker, who's a Yale professor who is actually the man who created the public option, said, 'This is a dream. This is better than a public option. This is a giant step.'"
Lieberman went so far as to name liberals (albeit somewhat inaccurately) whose opinion he took seriously and used them as justification for throwing away the deal. It seems to me if you could pick any liberal liking something who could make conservative House Democrats think twice about supporting this bill, 499 out of 500 panelists would pick Dennis Kucinich announcing some awesome concession he got to push this bill to the left.
As an organizing discussion I'm sure this will start an interesting conversation over whether, when dealing with Joementum in the future, the Weiners and Hackers of the world should be lying in public and saying the compromise sucks just so he is tricked into being satisfied.
I suppose we'll know when this is all said and done.
MITCH MCCONNELL:
Since we can't let Obama succeed,
It's "a clean sheet of paper" we need.
We'll hem and we'll haw --
He'll change not one law! -- And the voters will say: "He can't lead."
HARRY REID:
McConnell must think I'm a dunce --
I've already passed this thing once!
I'll pass it once more! In November the score
Will embarrass that "genius" Frank Luntz.
Howie Kurtz makes a point about the legitimization of Fox News:
President Obama is going on Fox News.
He must really want to pass that health-care bill.
No, he's not going to get emotional with Glenn Beck. But Obama will sit down with anchor Bret Baier for an interview that will air Wednesday on the 6 p.m. newscast "Special Report."
This would be unremarkable -- the president is constantly on TV -- except for last year's White House campaign attacking Fox News as an arm of the Republican Party. Fox executives insisted there is an important distinction between its news operation and opinionated hosts such as Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity. In sitting down with Baier, Obama -- who cordially greeted Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes at a White House Christmas party -- seems to be accepting that distinction.
Jed Lewison doesn't think Obama is accepting that distinction, but I think what misses the point there is that there is no distinction between the programming when it comes to the overall Fox empire. Good content, be it an exclusive interview with Obama or Democratic Strategist arguing with someone, drives viewers. Few people drive viewers more than the President of the United States. Viewers drive ratings, ratings drive ad revenue. It's not hard to understand. Whether Obama goes on with Baier or Hannity or Wallace, it all drives (a) legitimization of Fox as a credible news outlet since, after all, the President is appearing on it (b) ratings (c) ad revenue. Thus, in which Obama, as well as all other progressives/Democrats, financially contribute to Fox News when they go on.
To me, that's the underlying point that's always being missed.
The other thing is that this is a validation of what I called the "send Fox to their room" theory of media control:
Like I wrote back when this first started, this is akin to spanking FOX, sending them to their room, and expecting things to change. They are, and always will be, either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party (and those aren't even mine, those are Dunn's words, speaking for the White House!). They were before Obama came. They will be after Obama leaves. This is a long-term issue, which doesn't justify the White House's "FOX is being mean to us so we spanked them and they'll do better" mindset.
The reason I say that is because we've seen this game before. Flashback to 2008:
Barack Obama is going where his campaign has never gone before: Fox News, where he'll be interviewed by Chris Wallace this weekend on Fox News Sunday.
The Obama camp has more or less shut out Fox ever since they ran with the fake story about him supposedly being educated in a madrassah, so this is a big break from the standard practice. Even before that, Obama didn't have much time for Fox -- by the channel's count, the time between his last sit-down interview with them and this upcoming one will have been 772 days.
Obama already shut out Fox once before- the 2008 campaign- before going on for an interview. Then they did so again last year before giving in again this year. It is funny to me how the Obama team gets mad at Fox, shuts them out, then kisses and makes up after a cooling-off period. All this happens while Fox uses his appearances to go even higher in ratings and rakes in revenue to pay Glenn Beck an estimated $2 million per year, launch new initiatives like Fox Business Channel, push smears like the madrassa story and Barack Hussein Obama, continue punching ACORN, SEIU, Alan Grayson and others, and lie on the issues.
In a lengthy interview on Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman, Congressman Dennis Kucinich explained why he would not vote for the present health care bill and defended his position against attacks from people on the left like Markos Moulitsas. He also spoke about the subjects of Afghanistan, campaign finance, and the passing of activist Granny D.
I mean, I have a responsibility to take a stand here on behalf of those who want a public option. There's about thirty-four members of the Senate, at least, who have signed on to saying they support a public option. If I were to just concede right now and say, "Well, you know, whatever you want. All this pressure's building. Just forget about it," actually weakens every last-minute bit of negotiations that would try to improve the bill. So I think that it's really critical to take this stand, because without it, there's no real control over premiums. Without it, we have nothing in the bill except the privatization of our healthcare system.
Remember this August, and what a terrible month it was for President Barack Obama? Remember the town hall meetings, progress stymied on health care, and falling approval ratings?
It seems that every August is a tough month for President Barack Obama. Last August Republican nominee John McCain was slowly cutting into Mr. Obama's lead, mocking him as a celebrity and "the one." By the middle of September, Senator McCain would take a lead in polls - albeit not for long.
The August before that, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton was ahead by double-digits in national polls. Barack Obama's campaign was on its heels everywhere - journalists were buying her campaign's theme of inevitability, while Mrs. Clinton outperformed the Illinois senator in debate after debate.
In August 2000, Obama was deciding to challenge Congressman Bobby Rush for Illinois's first congressional district. The next month he announced his candidacy, in a race he would go on to lose 2-1.
And in August 2004, conservative Republican Alan Keyes announced his...Actually, let's not go there.
It appears that, barring the Alan Keyes example, August is just a bad month for our president. One wonders what terrors next August will bring. And the one after that.
I sometimes think in terms of mathematical metaphors, even if I'm just being suggestive when I do so. Some measures--particularly economic ones--really can be measured and found to be an "order of magnitude" too small for the problem they're meant to address. (Or, in the case of the current $15 bllion "Jobs Bill", two orders of magnitude too small.) But more often when I think that, it's not literally true, it simply suggests how vastly inadequate a policy or an idea is. Likewise, when I think of ideas along a spectrum being a standard deviation or two away from reality. I'll leave it up to you to judge how well the following fits the social network model of human interconnectedness--"Six Degrees of Separation made famous in the experiments and Psychology Today article by Stanley Milgram, the play by John Guare, the movie starring Stockard Channing, Donald Southerland and Will Smith, the parlor game starring Kevin Bacon and three earlier links you'll have to read the Wikipedia article to discover.
Anyway, here goes:
(1) Excluding Discussion of Solutions that Could Work
This is where the Obama Administration lives 24/7. Which is not to say it never goes out for ice cream--or a smoke. But, from excluding any talk about single-payer health care to ruling out investigations of Bush/Cheney war crimes and "mere" violations of domestic law in the interest of "looking forward, not back", to refusing to consider nationalizing bankrupt megabanks/brokerage firms, to refusing to even talk about reinstating Glass-Steagall, or getting rid of mercenary firms like Blackwater, it often seems like the Obama Administration does little else except for putting the kibosh on solutions that could actually solve some of the most important problems that we face.
The Washington Post reports today that President Obama's advisors are planning to recommend that the administration reverse its decision to try the September 11 suspects in federal court and instead opt for military commissions. That's more than just disappointing, given the overwhelming consensus of military and legal experts that civilian courts are more effective for prosecuting terrorists. If the president were to heed that advice, it would also be astonishingly bad politics.
Climate legislation is returning to the Senate's docket, and leaders on Capitol Hill are hoping that this version, a compromise bill spearheaded by Sens. John Kerry (D-MA), Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT), can pass without getting caught in the morass of money and politics that has delayed action so far.
A long, long time ago...
Remember, there was a time when Congress was going to pass climate legislation before the international climate change negotiations in Copenhagen. President Barack Obama was going to show up with a bill in hand and lead the world towards a better climate future. After the House passed its climate bill in June 2009, the Senate began discussing climate change, and a first stab by Sen. Kerry and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) went nowhere. Now, Kerry has turned to less liberal colleagues to draft an alternative that would appeal to moderates and even Republicans.
Now the Massachusetts senator is promising that climate change isn't dead. A new bill is coming-more information may be in the offing as early as today, as Kate Sheppard reports at Mother Jones.
Third time's the charm
Sen. Kerry is trying a new tactic to pass climate legislation. He's waiting to release his plan until he knows the bill has the 60 supporters it needs to circumvent a filibuster. The details have not been hammered out yet, and even the Senators who've been in talks with Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman don't seem to have a clear sense of what will be in the version that will emerge.
In the House, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee, released an ambitious draft of the legislation, let lobbyists and members of Congress fight over it, and passed a much-changed edition months later. Sen. Kerry tried a similar plan on his side of Capitol Hill (that was the Kerry-Boxer bill), but it did not work.
With this piece of legislature, Sens. Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman are working out the compromises before they release the legislation. Both reporting and speculation about their bill say that it will abandon the cap-and-trade system passed in the House. Cap-and-trade restricts carbon emissions across the economy; a variation on that policy that the Kerry-Graham-Lieberman bill may favor will limit the system to a few sectors.
Will it work?
Kerry's expected bill may be a much weaker plan than any proposed so far, yet it is still not certain that the Senate will support it. The lead authors of the bill have been meeting with conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans, as Sheppard reports, but those targets have not promised support yet. Coming out of a meeting, Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH) told reporters: "There were some interesting things that were discussed in there and like everything else in the United States Senate, the devil is in the details."
From a distance, banner-day climate legislation still seems possible. Environmental groups like the Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Foundation, and the National Resources Defense Council believe that they will see a bill this year that caps carbon. These green groups would be able to live with the incentives handed to industry groups so far, according to Campus Progress' Tristan Fowler.
"There are compromises [that can go] too far. Fortunately, I don't think we're getting near that territory at the moment," Josh Dorner, a spokesman for the Sierra Club, told Fowler.
Sickly green
Before getting too excited about stamping a green seal of approval on Congress' legislation, consider Johann Hari's testimony in The Nation about the relationships between environmental groups and the industries that they oppose.
Hari has reported on climate change issues for years, and at first, he "imagined that American green groups were on these people's side in the corridors of Capitol Hill, trying to stop the Weather of Mass Destruction. But it is now clear that many were on a different path-one that began in the 1980s, with a financial donation."
Hari argues that as environmental groups began to reach out to polluters, handing them awards for green behavior and accepting support from their deep pockets, they learned to compromise too readily and accept political excuses for delaying action on climate change. While in other realms these compromises might fly, when the stakes are as high as they are on environmental issues, that behavior turns the stomach.
"You can't stand at the edge of a rising sea and say, 'Sorry, the swing states don't want you to happen today. Come back in fifty years,'" Hari writes.
The green future
When Kerry, Lieberman and Graham do release the compromised bill, watch for a tsunami of money and influence that could pack the bill with prizes for specific industries-or derail it altogether. Just this week, the natural gas industry's lobbyists told The Hill, a D.C.-based newspaper, that they were ready to fight with the coal industry over incentives in the Senate bill. At AlterNet, Harvey Wasserman writes that the nuclear industry spent $645 million in the past decade to get back into the energy game, according to a new report from American University's Investigative Reporting Workshop. (Hint: that $645 million is working in their favor.)
In the Senate, the influence of oil companies will play an important role, according to David Roberts at Grist.
"While coal has a lot of power in the House, oil has enormous power in the Senate, particularly over the conservadems and Republicans needed to put the bill over the top," Roberts explains.
No matter what legislation passes and what incentives it contains, environmentalists need to continue putting pressure on their representatives in Congress and on national environmental groups to push back against polluting industries and work to fix the world's climate.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Many people mistakenly believe that the Eastern Martial Arts like Karate, and Jiujitsu They are really not. Rather they are about the application, direction, and management of force. Whether it is physical, mental, or in some cases political.
One of the best and easiest to learn lessons of martial arts is that if you are being attacked, it is often for the best to not meet force with force. In fact what is best is if you can just move out of the way of the enemies attack, and let their excessive force cause them to over balance, leaving them vulnerable to your attack. What is even better is if they have put so much energy into attacking that they end up damaging themselves without you having to lift a finger.
I think we all remember the 2008 Democratic primaries, that exciting and epic battle. In many ways the campaign caused more excitement than the general election, whose result was never really in doubt (especially after the financial crisis).
Both candidates drew upon distinctly different coalitions. In an influential article, Ronald Brownstein analyzes the difference this way:
Since the 1960s, Democratic nominating contests regularly have come down to a struggle between a candidate who draws support primarily from upscale, economically comfortable voters liberal on social and foreign policy issues, and a rival who relies mostly on downscale, financially strained voters drawn to populist economics and somewhat more conservative views on cultural and national security issues.
President Barack Obama assembled a coalition from the former, these "wine-track" Democrats. When most Americans think of liberals, they think of wine-track Democrats. Mr. Obama, then, was the liberal candidate; Mrs. Clinton the "beer-track," working-class representative.
So candidate won the most liberal place in America?
The answer below (or, alternatively, in the title).
Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) likes to tout his experience as a former military lawyer. Graham apparently thinks this makes him sound more convincing when he goes around advocating military trials for all suspected terrorists, as he's been doing lately. Graham's now trying to get that idea signed into law in a bill he's introduced in the Senate. A similar provision is likely headed to a vote today in the House of Representatives.
In a post on Salon today, Glenn Greenwald reveals to readers the essential tactic of the Democratic Party leadership. It's not trying to get Republican support, it's not filibuster reform, it's not registering people to vote. It's much more manipulative than that.
It is an explanation for the "lack of spine" that Democrats are often said to have - which, we can now see, is merely a convenient illusion for prominent Democrats. It is a scapegoat that they can use so that progressives will continue voting for them even though we get nothing that we ask for, and instead have to take whatever crumbs are given to us.
So what is it?
This is what the Democratic Party does; it's who they are. They're willing to feign support for anything their voters want just as long as there's no chance that they can pass it.
The One About Better Protecting The Welfare Of Animals Is An Important Step In Improving Our Humanity!
(Stay tuned immediately after today's article for a special announcement)
Every once in a while I get to read and share with you my loyal readers some genuinely happy news. This article in the New York Times, is a perfect example.
A quick digest of the week's social media news with a side of fun? You're welcome. Introducing CRUSH, the weekly web-show that takes the news on the social media newsladder and crushes it down to reveal the gems.
In this weeks' edition, we discuss the coincidence of Google releasing Buzz at about the same time they struck a deal with the NSA to share info. No relationship - just like Glenn Beck getting a show on Fox the day before Obama was inaugurated.
Facebook, meanwhile made changes to its privacy settings allowing users more control of what info is shared. That won't help people who choose to share their info though. With the growth of location sharing, there is a new website that points out a nagging issue with letting people know where you are all the time.
On the political side of thigs, this past week marked the one year anniversary of the signing of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Organizing for America released this video to mark the occasion, and the House Committee on Education and Labor realeased a great video as well. This is not the first time the Ed and Labor committee has turned to creative webvideos to spread a message, and we hope it will not be the last.
Sarah Palin was asked what she thought the biggest threat to America is, and when her supporters shouted 'Obama' she felt the need to clarify that they had said it, not she. She didn't correct them though. If Mrs. Palin cared about 'those little facty things' she and her supporters might want to thumb through the Quadrennial Defense Review, which catalougues the various security threats to the nation as determined by, well, the people who spend their careers assessing threats to our nation.
Finally, this is from Ben Whitehair on Facebook, and it is hilarious:
5 steps to an AWESOME day: Step 1: Go to google maps... www.google.com/maps Step 2: Search for 39 Rugdeveien, Bergen, Hordaland, Norge Step 3: Zoom in until you get to street view Step 4: Look to the left of the truck and see two men in scooba gear Step 5: Click to make the truck go down the road and watch the men chase the truck....
This is basically Rahm saying on his way out, I was right all along and these guys were wrong. Maybe it's a last minute attempt at a Hail Mary to swing the decision in his favor if he can start a conversation in DC about how he had offered better advice than the other three to Obama (by the way, everything he claims to have been right about inside the article was disastrous advice that led Obama further and further away from his voters). But either way, that means he thinks he is very close to being on his way out the door.
If anything can be said of Barack Obama, it's that no one is so indispensable to him that he won't gladly feed that person to the sharks in order to save his political ambitions. This was evident in his vicious attacks on Jeremiah Wright during the campaign, and in his dismissal from the White House any and all of the few progressives in it. That Emanuel, perhaps the most powerful mouth blabbing in Obama's ear to shunt aside the Democratic base in favor of large business interests, is expendable is indicative of just how worried the chief executive is about his prospects for re-election and his party's all-but-nonexistent control over Congress.
So perhaps Emanuel is finally on his way out, as he should be. But if he is, he certainly should not be the last to go. All of Team Obama must be replaced with genuine progressives, people from among the base of the party that put him in office. If they don't, then all Emanuel's departure from the White House will be is more window dressing on a crumbling house.
Welcome back to the special weekend edition of The One About...., known as The One About Book Club. Currently at The Book Club I'm taking an in depth look at The 48 Laws Of Power. Last week I offered an over view of the book, and delved into the first two chapters, or Laws. Today I'll be looking at Laws 3 and 4, and tomorrow Laws 5 and 6.
Don't look now, but Obama may have actually earned his Hitler mustache--By covering for Bush/Cheney
Josef Altstötter. Wilhelm von Ammon. Günther Joel. Herbert Klemm. Ernst Lautz. Wolfgang Mettgenberg. Rudolf Oeschey. Oswald Rothaug. Curt Rothenberger. Franz Schlegelberger.
These were the Nazi judges found guilty in the Judges Trial, the third of twelve Subsequent Nuremberg Trials, following the initial trial of the highest level Nazis. The principal charges they were convicted of were:
* War crimes through the abuse of the judicial and penal process, resulting in mass murder, torture, plunder of private property.
* Crimes against humanity on the same grounds, including slave labor charges.
(Rothaug was acquitted of the first, convicted of the second.)
The Judges Trial was immortalized in the 1961 movie Judgment at Nuremberg starring Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Marlene Dietrich, Maximilian Schell, Judy Garland, and Montgomery Clift. Now that is an all-star cast. And the quality of the cast was a way of underscoring the seriousness and importance of the film's message--the message of the original trial itself.
Judgment at Nuremberg was the sort of movie that helped me feel like I was not a freak when I was growing up. It helped me feel that I was the real American, and bigoted wingnuts I ran into from time to time were the despicable un-American scum.
But now, Obama & his "Department of Justice" has effectively declared that those men were unjustly convicted. They were right, and the men who prosecuted them were wrong. They may have been guilty of bad advice, or bad legal decisions, but misconduct? Come on!
This isn't just a matter of "being on the wrong side of history." This is changing sides more than 60 years after the fact, on the great issue of what constituted good and evil in World War II. Sure, we expect the sociopathic neocons to come down on the side of the Nazis, and clueless fratboy Bush to sign on with his signature, "Whatever." But Obama was supposed to be elected to clean up that mess. To restore us to constitutional rule, at the very least. Instead, he has given his impremature to reversing the judgment at Nuremberg.
Now, to be sure, the DOJ's Office of Professional Responsibility found that there had been misconduct, and that sanctions were appropriate. And they were over-ridden by a career attorney--David Margolis--not an Obama appointment. But it's also the case that Obama & Holder knew that it would play out this way, that Margolis was determined from the outset to shield Woo Yoo and Bybee, and by letting it play out this way, by the sin of ommission they are fully responsible for this outcome.
This is an act of pure evil. It doesn't get any evilier than this. You make think the act of torture is as evil as it gets. But sending the message that those who set torture in motion were just a bit careless, nothing more--that opens the way for a future descent into the abyss, in which acts of torture become the norm.
"All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." -- Edmund Burke.
Obama & Bush, together in "whatever." The banality of evil on steroids.
Yesterday, I wrote a diary, "Why does Chris Matthews hate America?", focused on his utter cluelessness regarding basic civics, and the importance of defendant's and suspects rights in US history and the Constitution--something I was taught in grade school, then again in junior high, then again in high school.
I had originally intended to say more about his lack of grasp about separation of powers as well, as a comment by comment by Thomas Twinnings reminded me, but the flow of the diary had a mind of its own, and I let it be. Now I'd like to say just a little bit about that as well. As Thomas rightly notes, military tribunals are part of the executive--as is all of the military. Trying suspected terrorists there is a violation of separation of powers. Separation of powers is the core of the constitution, its basic architecture. Separation of powers is the means by which government power is checked by being divided against itself. It's the structural key to preserving limited government--government with limited powers, as opposed to absolute government, government with absolute powers. Republicans--who claim to love "limited government," but don't even know what it means, and who claim to hate government tyranny--have been undermining separation of powers every which way they can when it suits them, at least sine the time of Richard Nixon. And Obama's willingness to continue blurring the lines himself show just what kind of "constitutional scholar" he is (no kind at all, just a teacher, as someone said in a comment I now can't find--Grrrr! Arrrgh!) But I'll have more to say about Obama on the flip. First, let's turn to David Broder.
This week, Broder wrote yet another career-ending op-ed. He's written more of them than most people have written words. But to have an elite pompous ass like Broder lecturing the rest of us about our pompous elitism for not seeing and appreciating Palin's "pitch perfect populism" on the same day that his own paper is out with a poll showing that "Forty-five percent of conservatives now consider her as qualified for the presidency, down sharply from 66 percent who said so last fall." Well, that's just priceless.
Matthews and Broder are beacons of Beltway Babbitry. They epitomize how things are done, undone and not down in Versailles. Obama supposedly ran to change all that, but instead he's shown himself to be the ultimate champion of it--even as it's strangling him politically. But don't worry too much about Obama getting strangled, worry instead about him strangling us, as with his plans for a deficit catfood commission to cut back Social Security and Medicare. As Dean Baker says:
In Part I, I dealt with the introduction and transition of Gerard Alexander's WaPo commissioned editorial, "Why are liberals so condescending". In Part 2 and Part 3 I dealt with the first two of the four liberal narratives Alexander cites as manifestations of so-called "liberal condescension." This diary deals with the third such narrative.
If Alexander's second narrative has a germ of truth to it, he more than makes up for that with his third purported liberal narrative of condescension: conservative exploitation of racial prejudice. It should be obvious that overt racism of the kind that was commonplace until the 60s and 70s is no longer socially acceptable in most places, and plays a relatively insignificant role in mainstream politics. But that hardly means that race no longer matters, or that more subtle forms of racial politics are not powerfully at work. One can see this quite clearly in the composition of the two parties, as measured by Gallup in June of last year ("Republican Base Heavily White, Conservative, Religious"):
With figure like these--a Republican base that's 89% white--it boggles the mind to hear anyone pretend that race has no impact on politics. Examples of racial messages in political campaigns are both abundant and notorious, as well. But above all, for the purpose of refuting contrary claims by conservatives such as Alexander, we have the testimony of one of the GOP's most influential party operatives, Lee Atwater. From Wikipedia:
The Judges Trial was immortalized in the 1961 movie 
