ucDems :: Blog

I Got a Crush...On Karfunkel

2007-06-17T21:18:00.000-07:00

It has recently been discovered that our very own Brian Karfunkel makes a cameo in the too hot for youtube "I got a crush... on Obama" video.

Check out the video:

And if you missed it, here's a screen shot of our man:

Go to the Progressive Gala, Ready to Question

2007-05-25T15:46:00.000-07:00

You may have noticed by the calendar entry to the right that this weekend is the big Progressive Gala, a time for all the progressive groups on campus to get together and have a unified progressive time of it. This is a good idea, and it promises to be fun. You should go--hey, James Carville is even headlining.

However, Hollie Gilman, the self-proclaimed originator of the Progressive Gala idea, has an article in today's Maroon in which she says, "Amidst discussions of New Initiatives and ordering food, this basic core idea of the Progressive Gala [i.e. uniting progressives] has been lost." I'm not a big campus insider, and she doesn't really explain what that means, but I take it there is some dissension as to the usefulness of the event.

For my part, while I certainly encourage you to go enjoy yourself at the Gala, I do have a James Carville timeline you may wish to keep in mind:

1992: Bill Clinton retakes the White House for the Democrats after 12 years of Republican rule. James Carville gains fame and adulation as lead strategist.

2002: As recorded in the 2006 documentary Our Brand is Crisis, Carville and allied Democratic strategists enact an eerie presage of the fraudulent sale of the Iraq war to the people of America by traveling to Bolivia. Establishment Bolivian presidential candidate Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada brought in the American hotshots as part of his successful bid to return to the presidency after a one-term absence.

November, 2004: According to Bob Woordward's latest book, John Kerry was all set to fight it out, through recounts if necessary, in Ohio in 2004. There is some pretty clear evidence that significant voter suppression was carried out in Ohio by Republican Secretary of State Ken Blackwell and others, so it might have been productive to challenge that suppression.

Surely, as a loyal Democrat, James Carville would support Kerry in taking a stand and making sure the election was conducted lawfully. But instead, revealed Woodward, Carville called his wife, who was working on the Bush-Cheney campaign. He told her about Kerry's plan, so that Republicans, including Blackwell, could prepare to rebuff any challenges from Kerry. Kerry did not end up making any such challenge.

November 10, 2006: Carville leads the charge amongst out-of-touch DC consultants to depose Howard Dean as chair of the DNC on the heels of the wild successes of the midterm elections. The crux of his argument is that Dean should have lavished more money on third-tier races, ignoring that Rahm Emanuel is the primary reason Democratic money was concentrated on long shots like Tammy Duckworth (IL-06) rather than spread around to lots of long shot candidates. Carville's alternative is to install losing Tennessee Senate candidate (and current chair of the DLC) Harold Ford, who was the only Democratic Senate candidate last cycle who was in a close race and ran a center-oriented DLC-style campaign. Ford was also the only one in such a race who lost.

Since everyone else thought Dean did a great job, even a begrudging Rahm Emanuel, the coup didn't go anywhere. As Chris Bowers wrote on MyDD at the time, under Dean's 50-state strategy, "small donations from progressive movement activists flow to the DNC in record amounts, and most of those donations end up being spent on direct grants to state parties and in the form of state-level field organizers. This is a novel path for Democratic money to take, especially since it generally bypasses both Washington, D.C. based consultants and wealthy donors. It is also exactly why Carville's base of supporters hate Dean so much."

February 12, 2007: Carville appears on the CNN program Situation Room and defends Hillary Clinton's original vote for the Iraq war. Clinton herself usually defends this vote by pointing out that the intelligence the Administration showed her made it look like a really good idea, to which everyone usually replies, "Yah, but it didn't look like that great an idea, especially since other members of Congress had the same intelligence and voted against it."

To which James Carville replies, on Situation Room, "But they weren't from New York. Their state wasn't hit. They didn't have to deal with the grief of these 3,000 people." Confused, everyone else nonetheless has a ready comeback: did you seriously just buy into the fraudulent Bush-Cheney frame that 9/11 had something to do with what happened in Iraq? Really? Even after all this time, when it was conclusively proven years ago that 9/11 had nothing to do with Iraq and Bush knew it?

March 30, 2007: A stir is created in the blogosphere when it is determined that Carville, a Hillary Clinton strategist/analyst, has been appearing on CNN without divulging his attachment to Clinton. The problem is that he uses his time on CNN to trash Obama without any mention that he is on the Clinton campaign. He and CNN show no regret for misleading the public and admit no wrongdoing.

Better Enforcement Through Community

2007-05-22T18:55:00.000-07:00

Last week, a supposed compromise was reached on immigration reform between Bush, Congressional Democrats, and Congressional Republicans. There appears to be a very small chance at best that the compromise will make it into law, not least of all because Bush would have to push it pretty hard--which he doesn't seem particularly interested in doing. Personally, I wouldn't listen to anything he says if I were a policy maker anyway. But it also happens to sound like a really terrible policy.

Check out some of the details of the three biggest compromises in the compromise:

"The first [Democratic concession to conservatives] would make illegal immigrants' access to long-term visas and the new guest-worker program contingent upon the implementation of the border crackdown."
"Another sticking point came from the proposed replacement of an immigration system primarily designed to reunify families with a point system that would give new emphasis to skills and education.... points would be granted to migrants with work experience in high-demand occupations and who have worked for a U.S.-based firm. Additional points would be awarded based on education levels, English proficiency and family ties."
"Finally, immigrants coming into the country under the temporary work program would have to leave when their permits expire, with no chance to appeal for permanent residence. Labor unions say such a system would depress wages and create an underclass."

I don't have a big problem with making it contingent on some improvements to enforcement. But all these crusades to build a wall or a burning river of gasoline or something along the border are idiotic. I also have a problem with the crackdown coming first, since this will mean that a bunch of bitter immigrants will see us being assholes for several years before they ever get to the part that's good for them. Speaking of which, even that part isn't very good for them.

One of the big advantages the US has always had over Europe in terms of immigration is that (a) immigrants can bring their families and (b) they can eventually become citizens. This helps keep them from becoming radicalized. Guest worker programs are more of a European thing, and anyone who is serious about opposing terrorism will oppose them since they prevent (a) and (b) from happening. If anything, Europe should be emulating our system, not the other way around. Let's revisit what happened in Europe:

The mass immigration of Muslims to Europe was an unintended consequence of post-World War II guest-worker programs.... Today, Muslims constitute the majority of immigrants in most western European countries, including Belgium, France, Germany, and the Netherlands, and the largest single component of the immigrant population in the United Kingdom....

Unlike the jumble of nationalities that make up the American Latino community, the Muslims of western Europe are likely to be distinct, cohesive, and bitter. In Europe, host countries that never learned to integrate newcomers collide with immigrants exceptionally retentive of their ways, producing a variant of what the French scholar Olivier Roy calls "globalized Islam": militant Islamic resentment at Western dominance, anti-imperialism exalted by revivalism.

Being a guest worker means you are supposedly in the country temporarily at the discretion of some employer. This means that you have no incentive to contribute to a community you are only visiting. Your employer can exploit you, because he can send you back if you try to organize or demand better treatment. There's no sense bringing a family with you, since it'll be cheaper to support them by sending money back to the home country. Since you will have no family or friends in your new neighborhood, you will be bored and restless and horny. If we're lucky, those ingredients will only be a recipe for an Old West-style environment of vice. If we're unlucky, that will mean your only friend, the only day-to-day reminder of some sort of purpose in your life, is the radical cleric who runs your local mosque.

But corporations, famous for acting in their own interest only, sure seem to like guest worker programs. Let's check in with David Sirota from April:

“Where Are All The Workers? Companies worldwide are suddenly scrambling to manage a labor crunch.” This is the public rationale from corporate executives (especially in the high-tech industries) for massive job outsourcing and exploitation of the H-1B program: We can’t find the workers we need. We are expected, for instance, to ignore academic studies published recently by the National Academy of Sciences showing that, in fact, there is no shortage of high-tech engineers here in America. We are expected to ignore the data showing that companies are using the H-1B program to drive down domestic workers’ wages by forcing them into competition with imported workers from impoverished countries.

Judging by their reaction to the compromise, the captains of industry really are still expecting these things from us. Here, by way of Kevin Drum, is that corporate reaction, playing right into the script:

Robert Hoffman, a VP at Oracle, is unhappy with the new immigration bill, which includes a "point system" that allocates visas to applicants with education and job skills:
"Under the current system," Mr. Hoffman said, "you need an employer to sponsor you for a green card. Under the point system, you would not need an employer as a sponsor. An individual would get points for special skills, but those skills may not match the demand. You can't hire a chemical engineer to do the work of a software engineer."
If nothing else, you have to admire the chutzpah Hoffman demonstrates here.... The idea that someone can simply get a green card without going through a sponsor and then freely work for the highest bidder is not really what high-tech CFOs have in mind when they dream of filling up job slots with foreign workers.

In other words: untying the H-1B visa program from employer sponsorship isn't such a bad idea. But untying immigrants from planting roots and forming communities is a horrible idea. Immigration can indeed be a useful tool in counter-terrorism, as some have hoped. But it is most useful when it gets communities to police themselves, not when it builds a harsher society.

Shifting Coalitions and the Politics of War Crimes

2007-05-18T18:23:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, Karl Rove dreamed of putting together a coalition of voting blocs that would form an unbreakable permanent majority. Bush was at the helm of a conservative movement that would maintain Republicans' current strength with neocons (=neoconservatives, those who believe US might makes right), theocons (=those who support prayer in schools, Moral Majority, et al.), and paleocons (=those who are fiscally conservative but otherwise libertarian, a/k/a Eisenhower Republicans).

Together with some swing voters they were able to lure consistently over several elections, this Republican movement was able to maintain a razor-thin majority in Congress and in presidential elections for several cycles.

Then, somewhere between Katrina and Iraq, Social Security and Terry Schiavo, people realized that Bush was doing a horrible job. His approval ratings tumbled into the low 40% range, and they have been around 28-35% all throughout this year. But despite the consensus that Bush is the worst president ever, he consistently draws about 30% in the polls. So who's been peeling off, and who's left?

One group that has been peeling off is made up of people who are sort of conservative but justd not totally batshit insane. Like former Republican (and commander of forces in Iraq) Gen. John Abizaid:
Senator Jim Webb (D-VA) is another former Republican who couldn't stand it any more. He won his first race last fall.

As you may have guessed, the 30%ers who still support Bush by and large actually are crazy. Check out Paul Krugman's description of the scene at the Republican debate on Tuesday:

[A]side from John McCain, who to his credit echoed Gen. Petraeus (and was met with stony silence), the candidates spoke enthusiastically in favor of torture and against the rule of law. Rudy Giuliani endorsed waterboarding. Mitt Romney declared that he wants accused terrorists at Guantánamo, "where they don’t get the access to lawyers they get when they’re on our soil ... My view is, we ought to double Guantánamo." His remarks were greeted with wild applause....

What we need to realize is that the infamous "Bush bubble," the administration’s no-reality zone, extends a long way beyond the White House. Millions of Americans believe that patriotic torturers are keeping us safe, that there’s a vast Islamic axis of evil, that victory in Iraq is just around the corner, that Bush appointees are doing a heckuva job — and that news reports contradicting these beliefs reflect liberal media bias.

And the Republican nomination will go either to someone who shares these beliefs, and would therefore run the country the same way Mr. Bush has, or to a very, very good liar.

The 30%ers who still support Bush are the remainder of the coalition, now that the reasonable people have split off. The paleocons like Abizaid and Webb have left over issues like torture. And since they applaud waterboarding but sit on their hands when their candidate speaks against torture, it becomes clear that the 30%ers will not support a candidate unless he supports war crimes:

At the end of the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East of which the United States was a leading member (the Tribunal was established by Douglas MacArthur) convicted former Japanese Prime Minister Tojo and numerous other generals and admirals of a panoply of war crimes. Among them was torture:
The practice of torturing prisoners of war and civilian internees prevailed at practically all places occupied by Japanese troops, both in the occupied territories and in Japan. The Japanese indulged in this practice during the entire period of the Pacific War. Methods of torture were employed in all areas so uniformly as to indicate policy both in training and execution. Among these tortures were the water treatment...

The so-called "water treatment" was commonly applied. The victim was bound or otherwise secured in a prone position; and water was forced through his mouth and nostrils into his lungs and stomach until he lost consciousness. Pressure was then applied, sometimes by jumping upon his abdomen to force the water out. The usual practice was to revive the victim and successively repeat the process.

Support for war crimes makes Rudy Giuliani a good choice for the neocon wing. But the theocons just can't get behind a guy who has such a dodgy record of marriages and support for abortion. So the 30%ers are threatening to splinter even more.

There is some danger that people will only see Bush's criminally poor job performance as a reflection of his unique leadership abilities, when in fact his performance has been the perfect embodiment of his movement's principles. Conservatives may be disowning Bush, but they are not abandoning his horrible world view. Some people are worried that the lack of philosophical unity among the new Democratic supporters will translate to flimsy support. I don't think we have anything to worry about as long as Republicans stick with Bush in principle, if not in name.

Breaking the Camel's Back

2007-05-16T19:23:00.000-07:00

If ever there was any doubt that George W. Bush needs to be impeached, the testimony we heard yesterday should lay it to rest. A former top aide to Attorney General John Ashcroft testified yesterday about a series of events that sounds more like the climax of a Hollywood thriller than like a government playing by the rules. From the Post:

On the night of March 10, 2004, as Attorney General John D. Ashcroft lay ill in an intensive-care unit, his deputy, James B. Comey, received an urgent call.

White House Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales and President Bush's chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., were on their way to the hospital to persuade Ashcroft to reauthorize Bush's domestic surveillance program, which the Justice Department had just determined was illegal.

In vivid testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday, Comey said he alerted FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and raced, sirens blaring, to join Ashcroft in his hospital room, arriving minutes before Gonzales and Card. Ashcroft, summoning the strength to lift his head and speak, refused to sign the papers they had brought. Gonzales and Card, who had never acknowledged Comey's presence in the room, turned and left.

That's right, John Ashcroft, who liberals love to hate for trampling civil liberties with the Patriot Act and various other awful conservative offenses, is actually the good guy here. He recognized that Bush's blatantly illegal domestic spying order was illegal, and he refused to sign off on it. The second in command of the Department of Justice had to bring the head of the FBI to Ashcroft's hospital bed to keep Bush's goons from forcing his signature.

Apparently Comey also testified that if he, Ashcroft, Ashcroft's chief of staff, and the head of the FBI hadn't all threatened to resign over the program, Bush would have gone ahead with it anyway. Now, just to be clear, the program is still illegal, to this very day. So whatever change Bush conceded to in order to appease Comey et al. doesn't solve the problem or make Comey and Ashcroft into actual good guys. But in this Administration, just being less evil makes you look like a saint.

As Glenn Greenwald implies today, there is no solution for the problems this creates short of impeachment:

The overarching point here, as always, is that it is simply crystal clear that the President consciously and deliberately violated the law and committed multiple felonies by eavesdropping on Americans in violation of the law.
Recall that the only federal court to rule on this matter has concluded that the NSA program violated both federal law and the U.S. Constitution...

Yet even once Bush knew that both Aschcroft and Comey believed the eavesdropping was illegal, he ordered it to continue anyway. As Anonymous Liberal wrote yesterday:
That's a rather stunning fact, and one that I wish at least a few mainstream journalists would attempt to grasp the significance of. The White House authorized a program that everyone of significance in the Justice Department had determined to be lacking any legal basis. They willfully violated the law.

As Dan Froomkin writes today, trying to get a sick guy to sign a paper is never going to be considered the worst thing this Administration has done. But it may be the one thing that makes all the other stuff make sense. It might exemplify the rest of the misconduct, somehow symbolizing it for people who don't have time to follow the ins and outs of emails about purging prosecutors. It might, in other words, step into the role the Mark Foley scandal played last fall. To quote myself:

the Mark Foley scandal from last October--it's not that Republican leadership really influenced policy by protecting a sexual predator, it's [that] they helped people condense the narrative of corruption and arrogance that surrounded the Republican Congress. We also know from the groundbreaking work of Samuel Popkin that voters tend to form a narrative and then adjust it with new information, rather than constantly weighing and reweighing all the evidence.

But as cool as I feel for drawing that analogy, I felt even more vindicated to see the following in the Post editorial page:

JAMES B. COMEY, the straight-as-an-arrow former No. 2 official at the Justice Department, yesterday offered the Senate Judiciary Committee an account of Bush administration lawlessness so shocking it would have been unbelievable coming from a less reputable source.

You may recall that my very most recent blog post was about how the Administration got away with so much just by doing things that people couldn't believe an Administration would do. At that time, I relied on Kevin Drum's assessment of the situation, which I now re-cite:

One of the great discoveries of the Republican Party over the past decade or two is that an awful lot of the rules we take for granted are, in reality, just traditions. Like redistricting only once a decade, for example, or keeping House votes open for 15 minutes. And what Republicans have found out is that if you have the balls to do it, you can just ignore tradition and no one can stop you. It's that simple. Alberto Gonzales has learned this lesson well. Normally, cabinet officers who have been caught in multiple obvious lies have to either resign or else seriously try to defend themselves. But Gonzales realizes this is just tradition.

So the Washington Post editorial board provides the other reason this may be such an important development in the scandal. Just to review, the first reason is that this is easy to remember, and it symbolizes the larger problem. The second reason is that the gatekeepers of establishment knowledge, who are too blind to see the obvious when it is spread out in front of them, may finally get it when it is sitting in front of them nicely gift-wrapped. Let's hope so.

US Congress, featuring Fleetwood Mac

2007-05-11T18:32:00.000-07:00

The House Judiciary Committee invited Alberto Gonzales to testify yesterday, but he apparently heard an invitation to come tell lies, in the finest Fleetwood Mac tradition.

Although, to be fair to Gonzales, some of the things he said would be more accurately classified as non-sequiters than lies. Slate's Dahlia Lithwick has been providing excellent coverage of the Gonzales saga, and she chimes in with an perceptive take on the proceedings in yesterday's issue.

Lithwick describes "a divine moment of stunned silence when he insists, toward the end of the hearing, that 'it would be almost impossible to make a political decision in the Justice Department. ... If that happened we would read about it in the paper.' " Technically, this is a lie. The paper trail has shown just how easy it would be to make a political decision in the DoJ. You can also tell it's a lie, because you have in fact read about it in the papers. But it's just such an obvious, brazen lie, really only half-heartedly masquerading as truth, that it seems like a joke. A non-sequiter, something so random as to be inherently hilarious.

The "testimony" Gonzales gave yesterday is full of these fun little nonsensical moments. Lithwick goes on:

[T]he AG proves himself to be as defiantly incurious as his boss. He tells the committee at various times that he didn't read the CRS report detailing how previous administrations handled U.S. attorney dismissals. He didn't read the University of Minnesota study that broke down the disparity in investigations of Democrats over Republicans. He tells Maxine Waters, D-Calif., that he still has not read the fired U.S. attorneys' personnel files. He notes several times that he hasn't much read the newspapers. He tells Sanchez that he still doesn't know who at Justice had more than "limited input" into these decisions. The most revealing moment, perhaps, is when Gonzales inadvertently confesses that some members of this secret cabal of senior leaders may not have even "known that they were involved in making this list."

These statements are probably a lot more true, but they have the same non-sequiter property that the lies do: instead of describing something obviously false, though, they describe someone obviously incompetent.

For someone who is so incompetent at running the Department of Justice (and at testifying before Congress, for that matter), Gonzales sure sounds like he was relaxed. But why shouldn't he be? He doesn't serve the American people, he serves the White House. And the White House is behind him all the way, and he knows it. Plus, the longer he doesn't resign, the easier it is for Republicans to claim that the fact he hasn't resigned shows nothing bad could have happened.

There are several possible reasons why Bush might not want to fire Gonzales. For one, if Gonzales leaves, Bush will need to submit a new candidate for AG to Senate confirmation hearings. If that happens, all sorts of fun documents will probably come to light. For another, Bush is obdurate and often refuses to do the right thing simply because he wasn't doing it already (see also: Iraq, invasion and occupation of).

But the most convincing explanation is the one Kevin Drum has articulated:

One of the great discoveries of the Republican Party over the past decade or two is that an awful lot of the rules we take for granted are, in reality, just traditions. Like redistricting only once a decade, for example, or keeping House votes open for 15 minutes. And what Republicans have found out is that if you have the balls to do it, you can just ignore tradition and no one can stop you. It's that simple. Alberto Gonzales has learned this lesson well. Normally, cabinet officers who have been caught in multiple obvious lies have to either resign or else seriously try to defend themselves. But Gonzales realizes this is just tradition.

I would add to his examples the tradition of not lying. That seems basic and obvious, but I really think respect for that tradition is what allowed many people to rationalize letting us get into Iraq in the first place. The evidence for WMDs was shaky at best, but surely the President wouldn't say it if it weren't true. Either way, Drum is right: our democracy is not well set up to stop people who intentionally try to destroy it from the inside.

Got to Give it Up

2007-05-09T18:22:00.000-07:00

In my last post, I talked about the hypocrisy of Republicans who are setting a timeline in September after dragging every other proponent of a timeline through the mud for years. Well, this may shock you, but I found some more Republican hypocrisy since then. This time they're trying to harass the Iraqi politburo, or whatever joke of a legislative body "runs" their country, into giving up its two month summer vacation.

In order to think this is an important problem, you have to assume that the legislative body there actually controls anything about the country. But from the violence and failed infrastructure, combined with the foreign military occupation and mass resignations, I would say they don't.

But Dick Cheney says they do. Specifically, he was scheduled to say that on his visit today. At the press availability this morning, the US Ambassador to Iraq mentioned that Cheney would talk about the vacation:

"The reality is, with the major effort we’re making, the major effort the Iraqi security forces and military are making themselves, for the Iraqi parliament to take a two-month vacation in the middle of summer if [sic] impossible to understand," [US Ambassador Ryan] Crocker said.

I would have to say I agree with that. But I'm quite surprised to hear about it coming from this party. The 109th Congress (last term's; dominated by Republicans) worked the fewest days AND failed to even complete its most basic legislative duties. Bush set the record for laziest President ever (measured by vacation days) almost two years ago. Most famously, Bush insisted on prolonging his vacation while thousands died in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.

But this problem of vacations just dovetails with the larger Republican problem of connection with reality. Guys: it's too little too late. Sing it with me now: you got to give it up. If working on this pressing problem (so pressing that approximately 3,400 Americans are dead because of it) was so important to you, why did you take all those vacation days? And that brings us to Cheney's other statement. Apparently today he was scheduled to say, among other things, that:

We’ve got to get this work done. It’s game time.

As others have pointed out, what is it about a war ravaging through the Middle East for the last four years that makes it "game time" only just now? Was there a time when this was not important? Were you only giving this partial effort before, since it wasn't game time? Up til now, have we just been talking about practice?

Tenet and Iraq

2007-05-07T10:10:00.000-07:00

Former CIA director George Tenet was in the news last week for his new book on the build up to the invasion of Iraq. Basically no one is buying the premise of the book (although people appear to be buying the book itself, which ranks #11 on Amazon as of this writing). In the words of Wonkette, the premise can be expressed thusly: George Tenet's Book Absolves George Tenet.

Basically everything I've read about the book (although I have not and will not read the book itself) agrees with Wonkette: it is a self-serving pile of crap. Conservatives think he is rewriting history to make the Administration look bad, and just about everyone else thinks he is rewriting it to make himself look good. If he really felt so uncomfortable with the invasion, one might note, well, he was pretty much the one person in the best position to stop it.

But instead, he marched along to the invasion drumbeat when that's everyone else wanted, and, now that everyone else wants out of Iraq, he has a book saying that's what he always wanted too. Many people have seen the Medal of Freedom Bush gave Tenet as a sort of quid pro quo for (a) not blowing the whistle on the bogus WMD intelligence and (b) stepping down to take the fall for the failure to actually find any. Of course, despite all his righteous indignation, Tenet has announced that he will not be returning that particular medal, thank you very much.

As luck would have it, yours truly 'got' to hear a speech from Tenet himself a couple years back. I and several hundred of my classmates got to hear Tenet on May 17, 2003. George W. Bush had just steamrolled us into Iraq, and the invasion was already a mission accomplished. War opponents such as myself had essentially no representation around Washington, whether in government or my classrooms. When the speech concluded, I swallowed the bile building up in the back of my throat long enough to clap, but I was the only one I could see who wasn't standing. I was grateful and proud when I found out that the only people in the family section who didn't stand were in my family.

Anyway, said Tenet (emphasis added).

International politics is all about "being true to your values. About having the spine to stand up for what is right. About making choices that are not simply practical or clever, but good and beneficial."
[...]
"[W]hile we must work to make things what they can be, we must never lose sight of what they should be."
[...]
Culminating his list of 8 secrets to his success:
"Seventh: Pray. Ask God for the guidance and strength to meet the challenges of life. Put on His armor to face the forces of evil. Manifest His goodness in caring for those who are weak and in need, showing love for others each and every day.

Finally, I would say to all of you-it is a little old fashioned, but you need to hear it: Love and serve your country."

That's right. We should focus our lives on praying to defeat terrorism. But more to the point, if there's any single thing that you could now say about Tenet, it is that he had anything but the spine to stand up for what was right.

As a postscript, let me just briefly mention a couple recent developments on Iraq. One of the favored tactics of Republicans trying to keep us in Iraq is the reassurance that in just a couple months things will be better and/or Republicans will bolt. Minority Leader John Boehner was the latest to use the line this weekend, but it's not new (and probably no more accurate than it was before).

On the Democratic side, the Washington Post reported last week that Democrats were all set to abandon all their principles on Iraq. It made for a great page one headline and fit right into the typical narrative that Democrats can't stand for anything they believe in. That's why it's such a shame that the story was a sham. Oh well. Maybe we'll just have to see how the debate unfolds after all!

What do we remember?

2007-05-01T16:18:00.000-07:00

Well, it's May 1st. There are a whole bunch of things traditionally celebrated on May Day, but I usually think of International Workers' Day. Most industrialized countries celebrate their Labor Day today, in memory of the workers who were brutally suppressed at Haymarket Square right here in Chicago back in the 1880's. The raw emotions so many people attached to that event in the United States led President Cleveland to put US Labor Day in September. But people still remember. For example, immigrant laborers remember. They took to the streets of Chicago in a peaceful demonstration one year ago today:

Cleveland failed to make people forget about Haymarket just by moving the holiday. Ironically, George W. Bush, the most anti-labor President since the Great Depression, has distracted people from that tragic day without doing anything labor-related. You see, Democrats remember May 1st, 2003 as the day Bush declared "Mission Accomplished" aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. Democrats sent the supplemental funding bill to Bush today as a means of commemorating that great speech.

The Bush camp has denied having anything to do with the infamous banner, but it's a powerful image nonetheless. And, not surprisingly, the denials also happen to be a lie:

White House press secretary Scott McClellan later acknowledged that the sign was produced by the White House.

Part of remembrance is using it to help guide you in the future, so it is fair to ask, what is our current mission? both in Iraq and generally?

Some have argued that our new mission should be energy independence. The Apollo Alliance has teamed unions up with activists to push for creation of a lot of new skilled jobs, ripe for unionization, by ramping up alternative energy. But what chance do a bunch of panty-waist liberals have of getting something like this going? Those sissies that care about things like jobs and planets--who cares what they think?

Well, it turns out the most macho organization on Earth, the US military, needs to care about it, too. You'd think the strategic costs alone would have made energy independence obvious to the military long ago, since getting fuel to troops in the field has become extremely problematic. And the troops in the field need nothing like they need fuel: an Abrams tank gets a whopping 0.6 miles/gallon!

But now the military officially knows the obvious, as the Boston Globe revealed today that the Department of Defense has received a report telling them about it:

A new study ordered by the Pentagon warns that the rising cost and dwindling supply of oil -- the lifeblood of fighter jets, warships, and tanks -- will make the US military's ability to respond to hot spots around the world "unsustainable in the long term."

The study, produced by a defense consulting firm, concludes that all four branches of the military must "fundamentally transform" their assumptions about energy, including taking immediate steps toward fielding weapons systems and aircraft that run on alternative and renewable fuels. It is "imperative" that the Department of Defense "apply new energy technologies that address alternative supply sources and efficient consumption across all aspects of military operations," according to the report, which was provided to the Globe.
...
The Department of Defense is the largest single energy consumer in the country. The Air Force spends about $5 billion a year on fuel, mostly to support flight operations. The Navy and Army are close behind.

Of all the cargo the military transports, more than half consists of fuel. About 80 percent of all material transported on the battlefield is fuel.
...
The costs of relying on oil to power the military are consuming an increasing share of the military's budget, the report asserts. Energy costs have doubled since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, it says, and the cost of conducting operations could become so expensive in the future that the military will not be able to pay for some of its new weapon systems.

Creating three million new union jobs in alternative energy production, as the Apollo Alliance wants, seems to me like the perfect way to remember appropriate parties while moving forward with a new mission. In a few years, hopefully we can remember the days when labor was on the decline in America as income inequality was on the rise. And hopefully we can likewise look back on the days when we fought wars half-way around the world over oil.

Rahmblin' Man

2007-04-27T23:06:00.000-07:00

Anyone who read this blog during the 2006 midterms (i.e. my Mom) knows how many, uh, suggestions I had for the way Rahm Emanuel should do his job as DCCC chair. But I tried not to lose sight of the fact that Rahm and I are still on the same team, even if we don't see eye to eye all the time. That's why I was so happy to see the text of his recent speech to the Brookings Institute.

Rahm's speech was about the over-politicization of government that the Administration has engineered. As anyone who has read this blog lately knows, I've been interested in the purposeful destruction of the Enlightenment principles of liberalism that have shaped our government since at least 1789. So it would seem that Rahm and I have some real common ground here.

Some choice quotes from the speech:

[T]he U.S. Attorney scandal will be to public corruption what Hurricane Katrina was to incompetence in the Bush Administration.
...
Instead of promoting solutions to our nation's broad challenges, the Bush Administration used all the levers of power to promote their party and its narrow interests.
...
The Attorney General could offer no coherent explanation for the [US Attorney] fiasco, because to do so would unveil the guiding principle at the core of this White House—insinuating partisan politics into every aspect of government and bringing politics into what used to be a political-free zone—the Justice Department.
...
The corporations don't have to lobby the government, because they are the government.

Unfortunately, just when it looks like Rahm might have gotten himself re-invited to my birthday party, he ends up not going far enough. After mentioning examples of politicization such as cronyism in Iraq reconstruction contracting, outsourcing Walter Reed hospital operations, quashing climate change data, revelations from former White House insiders O'Neill and DiIulio about the lack of policy interest, the student loan scandal, the recent GSA/Hatch Act controversy, and the RNC email controversy, his analysis basically peters out. He concludes that political appointees are a good thing but that these particular ones are too political.

It's not that he's wrong, it's just that he undersells the danger the Administration poses. The corruption we've seen isn't some freak occurrence of corruption, it is a purposeful occurrence of an active effort to destroy our way of government. It's not a culture of corruption, it's an ethos of corruption.

Mark Schmitt, in a review of the new Rahm book The Thumpin’: How Rahm Emanuel and the Democrats Learned to Be Ruthless and Ended the Republican Revolution, emphasizes the essence of the Rahm situation. As he says, it is probably an exaggeration to claim that the Democrats won in spite of Rahm rather than because of him. After all, he did raise a lot of money, and he did seem to understand some things. To wit,

And that is what makes Emanuel a little different from, say, former Democratic National Committee chair Terry MacAuliffe: he understands that politics has to be
about something, and more than just a vague statement of values.

However, the need to drag Rahm kicking and screaming into talking about the war and contesting more seats still haunt his record. Plus, he's kind of a jerk. As Schmitt explains,

[A]s a twenty-five-year-old working on Senator Paul Simon’s first campaign, Emanuel was known as “the nuclear fund-raiser,” and colleagues would gather to eavesdrop on him loudly accusing elderly Jewish donors of betraying the state of Israel if they failed to max out, in their grandchildren’s names as well as their own, to Simon’s campaign. Apparently the strategy worked.

Together, all this evidence highlights the Rahm dilemma: you like having someone feisty on your team who won't take no for an answer, who knows it takes more than statements of values to win. You just wish he could take it to the next level, where he would understand the bigger philosophy instead of just the list of violations or the intimidation of elderly donors.

Exit Strategy

2007-04-25T09:02:00.000-07:00

Also, Student Government Elections are happening this week. Many people on the Dems Exec Board are running.

Vote here.

Unitary Execution

2007-04-24T09:14:00.000-07:00

When people describe Attorney General Alberto Gonzales as a "loyal Bushie", they are essentially referring to his support for the wacko 'theory' of the unitary executive. For example:

As long as Gonzales remains front and center in the furor over last year's mass firing of U.S. attorneys -- as long as his goofy stonewalling continues to distract attention from all the elements of the purge that point so incriminatingly toward the White House -- he simply enhances his position as the ultimate "loyal Bushie."

The 'theory' basically holds that the President is an elected autocrat who doesn't need one or even two coequal branches of government in order to preside. It is the unifying principle behind basically every disgusting thing the Bush Administration has done. To wit,

Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez sent a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter “clarifying” testimony he gave on February 6. In what amounted to a “By the way, I kind of perjured myself before you,” Gonzales said that when he said the “Terrorist Surveillance Program” was “all that [President Bush] has authorized” in the area of warrantless surveillance, “I was confining my remarks to the Terrorist Surveillance Program as described by the President.” This tautological sleight-of-hand can lead one only to conclude that there are other “programs” of surveillance. But don’t ask what they might be.
Gonzales also noted that when he said—three times—that the Justice Department had not conducted any analysis of whether purely domestic wiretapping without a warrant might be legal, he might have left the “misimpression” that the Justice Department had not conducted any analysis of whether purely domestic wiretapping without a warrant might be legal. Oops.

The response from the Judiciary Committee, of course, was a great big pile of nothing. By now such admissions have become so routine, they fail to bring attention beyond a story buried deep in the back pages of The Washington Post. After all, this is the administration that leaked the identity of a CIA operative in order to discredit a political opponent. (Remember Bush’s promise to fire anyone involved?) This is the president that claims “we don’t torture,” then fights to retain his prerogative to torture. When forced by political fallout to sign a law outlawing said torture, he issues a “signing statement” making clear his intention to ignore the law when he feels like it. Potential appointees to scientific panels are asked whether they voted for President Bush. Regulations on environmental and occupational safety that the administration finds distasteful lie fallow and unenforced. Treaties signed by the United States are derided as “quaint,” then cast aside. When the Government Accountability Office issues a ruling that the administration’s use of phony “video news releases” purporting to be real news constitutes “covert propaganda” and is therefore illegal, the White House simply ignores them and continues the propaganda campaign.

Gonzales' testimony before the Senate last week on the US Attorney scandal was another perfect example of the unitary executive in execution. The Justice Department is of course a cabinet department, and cabinet departments are part of the executive branch, which make them virtually indistinguishable from the (Bush) White House. For example, since Clinton left office, the number of White House officials who are allowed to comment on ongoing DoJ investigations has increased by over 10,000%!

Bush issued some effusive praise yesterday and over the weekend for the outstanding (but plainly awful) performance Gonzales gave last week. I believe it comes back to two explanations, the first of which is the heavy involvement of the White House, and especially Karl Rove, in the US Attorney firings.

One White House adviser (who asked not to be ID'ed talking about sensitive issues) said the support reflected Bush's own view that a Gonzales resignation would embolden the Dems to go after other targets—like Karl Rove. "This is about Bush saying, 'Screw you'," said the adviser, conceding that a Gonzales resignation might still be inevitable.

The other reason, though, is this business with the unitary executive. If the executive branch really is allowed to govern without the other branches of government (bear with me here), then testifying before Congress is a sort of optional theatricality at best.

For anyone who regularly reads the progressive blogs, Slate's Dahlia Lithwick was a little late to the party, but her article on Friday was still right on (and still lightyears ahead of the media establishment):

Assuming the president watched so much as 10 minutes of his attorney general being poleaxed by even rudimentary questions from the Senate judiciary committee, it strains credulity to believe that Gonzales still has Bush's "full confidence."
...
For six impressive hours, the attorney general embodied the core principles that he is not beholden to Congress, that the Senate has no authority over him, and that he was only there as a favor to them in their funny little fact-finding mission.
...
This record reflects either a Harvard-trained lawyer—and former state Supreme Court judge—with absolutely no command of the facts or the law, or it reveals a proponent of the unitary executive theory with absolutely nothing to prove. Gonzales' failure to even mount a defense; his posture of barely tolerating congressional inquiries; his refusal to concede that he owed the Senate any explanation or any evidence; his refusal to even accept that he bore some burden of proof—all of it tots up to a masterful display of the perfect contempt felt by the Bush executive branch for this Congress and its pretensions of oversight. In the plainest sense, Gonzales elevated the Bush legal doctrine of "Because I said so" into a public spectacle.

This is yet another reminder of why fighting Bush tooth and nail is so important. This battle isn't just about whether some bad policies get enacted and whether some bad people get positions in government. This isn't just about what happens in Iraq or what happens to the economy. This is about government itself, about our way of life and our very identity as Americans. The Administration is attacking liberalism itself, and it is absolutely imperative that Bush be stopped if we have any intention of continuing to live in a democracy.

Told Ya So

2007-04-18T15:42:00.000-07:00

On Monday, gunman Cho Seung-Hui killed 32 people at Virginia Tech, plus himself. On Wednesday, bombs killed 178 people in Baghdad. In 1993, some guy killed 8 people in San Francisco. More children die in swimming pools each year than die from guns. How do we talk about tragedies? And what do we say when we do?

On Tuesday, there was a vigil for the fallen 32 at Virginia Tech, which politicians tripped over themselves to appear at. President Bush was there, within one day of the event itself. On a side note, it took him 4 days to even show up in New Orleans after Katrina, which killed over 1,300.

So where was the vigil for the 178 killed in Baghdad yesterday? Or the 650,000 needlessly killed there since the ill-conceived invasion began? That question is obviously rhetorical, since there are some pretty big differences in the two situations. (a) It's different having a tragedy in your own community instead of half way around the world, and (b) it's not like 650,000 have to die before you can call something a tragedy.

But another difference between Iraq and Tech is how we talk about them. On Iraq, we are told that anything we say or do that contradicts the Administration is hurting the troops. It's a pretty ridiculous claim, not unlike Walter's claim that little Larry is killing his father:

Even worse is the claim by conservatives that we shouldn't say anything about how our every endeavor in Iraq is a failure (it is), since this would make the families of fallen soldiers feel bad for having lost their loved one in vain. I'm sorry, but this is a classic instance of the blame the messenger mentality, and it doesn't hold up. Eventually these families are going to have to face the fact that indeed they did lose their loved one for George W. Bush's vanity war.

To pretend otherwise is deeply dishonest and counterproductive. It's like knowing your friend's boyfriend cheated on her and not telling her about it. When she finds out, it's going to really suck for her, and she's going to be really mad. But she's going to figure it out eventually, and whatever you say about it doesn't change what it actually was. It may seem like something that's not very respectful to say, but it has to be said. (Note to all my attached female friends: this example is purely hypothetical.)

Fortunately, we haven't seen the same kind of timidity from gun control advocates in the wake of Monday's shootings. The right wingers usually love to trash anyone who disagrees with them on anything. But Bush merely used the vigil to talk about something near and dear to him (but irrelevant to public policy): prayer. The usual conservative hit men don't seem to be stepping in to call the gun control advocates any names this time. However, gun control has more or less disappeared from the Democratic agenda since 1994, the last time meaningful legislation was enacted.

In 1993, Gian Luigi Ferri went to the 34th floor of the 101 California Street office building in San Francisco and opened fire with a pair of TEC-9 handguns. Then he took the elevator down to the 33rd floor and opened fire there. It is extremely fortunate that in the end only 8 people died. But it's also fortunate that the specter of anonymous gunmen spraying bullets around office buildings provided enough legislative momentum for a ten year ban on assault weapons, which Democrats forced through Congress in 1994.

Democrats went on to be routed in historic fashion in the 1994 midterms, and gun control has basically been regarded as a politically untouchable bogey man ever since. I was a little young, but I remember when 101 California happened. I remember more clearly gazing out at the 101 California building from the windows of the downtown San Francisco firm where I worked in 2004, thinking about the Republican Congress letting the assault weapons ban expire on September 13th of that year.

The shooter at Virginia Tech, Cho Seung-Hui, reportedly used a couple of basic sidearms, rather than the powerful killing machines favored by Ferri and the Columbine shooters. Nonetheless, unlike that other notorious killer--swimming pools--all guns are designed for one purpose only: killing things. You just can't say that about swimming pools or really anything else. I'm not taking a position at this point on swimming pool policy, but it seems fairly clear that we don't have anything to lose by restricting gun sales.

Conservatives are fond of making the argument that if only more people had guns, we could just shoot everyone who tried to start something, and then he wouldn't be able to kill 32 people. They call it "self defense". Some conservatives are even saying that if only all those Tech students hadn't been so cowardly, things would have turned out better. This canard is easily disposed of, since tales are emerging of the brave and heroic things many of the victims and would-be victims actually did do.

No one likes to politicize tragedy, but the fact is that politics is designed to respond to tragedy. I'm sure no one at the vigil on Tuesday wanted to hear every politician using the occasion to grind whatever political ax he's always had. And no one wants the sacrifices our nation's families have made in Iraq to be cynically exploited for votes. But we need to talk about gun control, and we need to be honest about the situation in Iraq. To do otherwise won't help anyone in the long run.

Volunteer for Dick Durbin

2007-04-17T19:27:00.000-07:00

On Friday, May 4th, there will be a gala dinner downtown to fête (and raise money for) Illinois' senior senator, Dick Durbin. All the big shots will be there, including Senate leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. And guess what? you can be there too!

Kate Hermann with the Durbin campaign is recruiting volunteers to help out at the event, hob nob, get free food, and I believe receive a free T shirt. Plus you get to spend a glamorous evening at a swank downtown hotel ballroom without actually being swank yourself. (N.b. You do have to dress up a little: for gentlemen, jacket and tie--for ladies, whatever the chick equivalent of jacket and tie is.)

The other catch is that you need to spend one evening next week (either Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday) doing a phone bank in Near North. There will be pizza provided at the phone bank. So please, post a comment or email Kate Hermann at katherine.hermann@gmail.com as soon as you can if you want to take advantage of this exciting opportunity.

Picking Nits?

2007-04-13T12:26:00.000-07:00

Now that Democrats run Congress, some interesting investigations are getting underway, just as Republicans warned us they would. There are now some big, sexy scandals brewing as a result. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) has been holding hearings on pretty much every aspect of the corruption and incompetence surrounding Iraq. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) has been pursuing the sordid US Attorney firing scandal. But there is a much less sexy scandal brewing as well: White House staffers have been misusing their email accounts.

Various rules and regulations demand the following of White House employees:

Using official government resources for political/party purposes is prohibited
Using political/party resources for official government business is prohibited

Many White House employees do political work in addition to their official government duties, which is not prohibited. In order to comply with the demands of the rules, the Republican National Committee provided many White House employees, especially Karl Rove, with laptops and Blackberries to use in performing their party duties. You see, it would be not just unethical but illegal for them to use their White House email accounts to conduct party business.

The problem is that they also used their RNC emails for official government business. Business such as the politically motivated firings of US Attorneys. Froomkin explains:

The use of non-government e-mails first became an issue about four weeks ago, when some of the e-mails turned over in a congressional investigation of the firing of eight U.S. attorneys showed that Rove deputy Scott Jennings repeatedly used an RNC e-mail address (sjennings@gwb43.com) in his official communications. One e-mail to Rove was sent to a kr@georgewbush.com address.

But the problem extends beyond just using the wrong email account for the wrong job function. The White House email servers are set up to automatically back up every single email, while the RNC email servers allow users to permanently delete whatever they want. Sure enough, many vital emails were in fact deleted:

Countless e-mails to and from many key White House staffers have been deleted -- lost to history and placed out of reach of congressional subpoenas -- due to a brazen violation of internal White House policy that was allowed to continue for more than six years, the White House acknowledged yesterday.
...
Since 2004, White House staffers using those accounts have been able to save their e-mail indefinitely -- but have also been able to delete whatever they felt like deleting. By comparison, the White House e-mail system preserves absolutely everything forever, in accordance with the Presidential Records Act.

It is fairly easy to come up with some knee-jerk objections to Waxman's pursuit of such a minor 'scandal'. One could argue that Republicans all warned everyone during the 2006 campaign that a Democratic Congress would just do non-stop investigations instead of pursuing a positive agenda, and the email scandal plays right into that narrative. Since there are so many other scandals going on right now, one could argue that citizens will get so-called "scandal fatigue", whereby the marginal increase in shame per scandal goes down as the number of scandals goes up. One could also argue that by pursuing small-bore stuff like email archiving, the Democrats are just going to look like they're being vindictive as a result of the Clinton impeachment.

But, assuming Democrats handle themselves correctly, I believe this email scandal could be an essential piece of the narrative Democrats ought to be creating for 2008. For one thing, all the fishiness around Iraq and the US Attorney scandal has established a narrative of malfeasance in the White House that puts the onus on to the Administration to counter. Even if people don't pay too much particular attention to it, the email scandal could help contribute to this narrative.

An analogy can be drawn to the Mark Foley scandal from last October--it's not that Republican leadership really influenced policy by protecting a sexual predator, it's they helped people condense the narrative of corruption and arrogance that surrounded the Republican Congress. We also know from the groundbreaking work of Samuel Popkin that voters tend to form a narrative and then adjust it with new information, rather than constantly weighing and reweighing all the evidence. The email scandal could thus be extremely helpful as one more thread in a richly woven tapestry of corruption.

But better yet, since RNC email accounts were involved, it provides a link between the Bush White House and the entire Republican party (by definition) that, if properly invoked, could help in virtually every other campaign around the nation next year.

Brinkmanship

2007-04-10T22:42:00.000-07:00

One of the things you can always count on Republicans doing is sticking to their guns, no matter how misguided. George W. Bush didn't spend the last six plus years ignoring reality just to start acknowledging it now. That's why it's so important for Democrats to be firm in their opposition to Republicans. On two crucial issues, taxes and Iraq, the Democrats will have prime opportunities to make their stand.

Taxes
The elephant in the room, as it were, when it comes to taxes is the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT). The AMT was instituted in the late 60's to stop millionaires from taking advantage of so many loopholes they ended up not paying any taxes at all. One potential solution would have been to close the loopholes, but instead this crazy, complicated parallel tax system was invented. The problem is, no one ever indexed it to inflation, so next year it is set to affect way more people (middle class people, specifically) than it was ever intended to. There is bipartisan agreement that this is a bad state of affairs, but no agreement has yet been reached on how to fix things.

This article from the NYT details Democrats' intention to overhaul the AMT so that it once again only affects the truly rich. The problem is that by doing so, billions of dollars of currently projected government revenue will dry up. The article has what I consider to be a fairly limited view of the range of options Democrats face:

House Democrats see multiple political benefits from seeking a permanent fix. Some are eager to position themselves as tax cutters. Others want to show their ability to tackle a big and difficult initiative. Last but not least, the alternative minimum tax has a disproportionate impact on states with higher average incomes and high state and local taxes — like New York and California — which tend to vote Democratic.

“It’s a tax cut to the 23 million American families who have no concept that they’re going to get hit with this tax increase,” said Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus.

Rahm's comment at the end there demonstrates the political peril of the AMT situation. Politics is NOT an arena in which, as the saying goes, "when you've done your job right, no one will be able to tell you've done anything at all. " In politics, when you do something right, you hit the road and the airwaves to make sure everyone and his sister knows. Fix the AMT now, and no one will really know you helped them because they will simply continue not paying a ridiculously high AMT. Don't fix it, and everyone will be mad at you for not having fixed it. What to do?

If the Democrats can stomach the brinkmanship, this could be a prime opportunity to reverse a core piece of Republican ideology. You see, for the last 25-30 years, it has been political poison to suggest raising taxes. But the sentiments that drove that political reality look like they may be fading, and fixing the AMT might be a good opportunity to get the ball rolling on our counterattack.

John Edwards, the candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, has already announced that his universal health care plan will have to involve some higher taxes. Even some supply-side conservatives are now admitting that it is unrealistic to constantly lower taxes without ever raising them. As Mark Schmitt wrote in Washington Monthly recently, taxes will have to go up soon if we are to retain a government that can act on behalf of its people, but it's going to take some smart political planning to get us there. Schmitt goes on:

But the truth is that we are heading down a path toward fiscal crisis that will inevitably require a major increase in revenues. In case that sounds like a euphemism, I’ll say it plainly: Taxes must go up. If Democrats try to avoid that fact, they’ll become mired in trench warfare with Republicans over small-bore increases that will cost them political support and won’t really address the problem. But if Democrats seize the opportunity to define a new era of the politics of taxes, as Republicans did 30 years ago, they can shape the debate in a way that may actually help them to achieve some of their most-cherished policy goals.
...
[T]o make it possible to talk about revenues when the opportunity arrives to actually do something about revenues, Democrats and anyone else who is serious about avoiding economic crisis must spend the next two years thinking and planning how to condition the political environment so that politicians can move with courage. That will require, first, establishing the idea that taxes must increase as a non-debatable fact; second, fixing the political process that has greased the way for tax cuts; and, third, setting the framework in which we talk about taxes.

Fixing the AMT could be the opportunity to lay some effective groundwork for a new era in which taxes can actually be raised when appropriate. Democrats should use AMT debates to highlight the enormous loss of revenue that fixing the situation will cause. They should frame a choice between continuing popular programs and letting government wither away. They can offer Republicans the chance to work with them on overhauling other parts of the tax code to make up for the lost revenue. After making this offer, though, it gets tricky.

The Republicans will hear the offer, and their knees will jerk, and they will reject any form of increasing government revenue, no matter if the net effect keeps revenue constant. Republicans will offer their usual style of compromise (see below): you give up on your position and we get everything we want, in this case rolling back the AMT without doing anything about replacing revenue.

At this point in the process, there will be enormous pressure on Democrats to cave and do what the Republicans want. Instead, they must have the courage to let people get hit with a year's worth of really high taxes, if necessary. People will be furious. But, if Democrats have done their job right, they will have made sure everyone knows that they are paying more as a result of Republicans refusing to come to the table. Once a precedent like this has been set (that sane debate over revenue can and should take place), Congress' budget talks might start taking place in a whole new paradigm.

Iraq
The Democratic-controlled House and Senate recently passed supplemental funding bills for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that set dates for American withdrawal from Iraq. Since that isn't precisely what Bush wanted, he's naturally kicking and screaming a bunch of nonsensical BS about how Democrats hate the troops. In times gone by, Democrats would have immediately run away with their tails between their legs at the very invocation of troop support.

One such bygone time was two weeks ago, when Barack Obama did precisely that. Obama was busily admitting that after Bush vetoes the Democratic supplemental bill, Congress will go right ahead and give him the money with no strings attached anyway. The best part was when he said that no one "wants to play chicken with our troops," which is such a great Republican talking point it might as well have been said by Karl Rove.

In times gone by, Democrats would have been sensitive to calls for compromise with Republicans. Such calls would lead to some very earnest press conferences and meetings, at the end of which Republicans would have everything they wanted and Democrats would have done all the compromising. This is Joe Lieberman's idea of compromise, and it's what snarky bloggers call "date-rape bipartisanship". It's also what the insider's insider (and noted U of C alumnus) David Broder thinks of as compromise.

Fortunately, the Democrats look like they are going to abandon Obama's idea of negotiating and Broder's idea of compromise in favor of principled action. (To be fair, Obama apparently improved his post-veto rhetoric this evening.) When Bush accuses Democrats of playing political games with troop safety, the correct response is what it looks like Dems might actually do: point out how we passed the damn bill already and now he's the one playing the games.

In particular, Harry Reid's statement hits all the right notes. Quoth Reid (emphasis added):

"The American people want the President and the Congress to work together to bring a responsible end to the war in Iraq. Congressional Democrats are willing to meet with the President at any time, but we believe that any discussion of an issue as critical as Iraq must be accomplished by conducting serious negotiations without any preconditions. Our goal should be to produce an Iraq supplemental bill that both fully funds our troops and gives them a strategy for success.

"With his threat to veto such a plan for change in Iraq, President Bush is ignoring the clear message of the American people: We must protect our troops, hold the Iraqi government accountable, rebuild our military, provide for our veterans and bring our troops home.

"The President is demanding that we renew his blank check for a war without end. Despite the fact that the President persists in trying to score political points at the expense of our troops, congressional Democrats have repeatedly reached out in the spirit of cooperation. We renew our request to work with him to produce a bipartisan bill that provides our troops and our veterans with every penny they need, but in turn, demands accountability."

In a way, Obama's right: no one truly wants to throw our troops out on the curb. But the solution to that problem is not to cave to Bush, especially when we can fund the military through July without passing the supplemental funding bill. The correct solution is to stand our ground as long as we can and keep making sure the American people realize this is Bush's mess, and he's the one who is refusing to get us out of it.

Conclusion
Cautious observers are partly right: it is a dangerous game of brinkmanship for Democrats to call Republican bluffs on taxes and Iraq. But these are very dangerous times. The last twelve years of Republican Congressional dominance have proven there is nothing for Democrats to gain from timidity. I am encouraged by their refusal to blink on Iraq so far, and I hope they can bring that same resolve to our fiscal mess.

The Tides of Change Reach Vote Fraud

2007-04-06T13:15:00.000-07:00

News from Florida
First, the big story: Florida has rolled back its odious voting restrictions for ex-felons. The story begins many years ago, at the tail end of the Civil Rights era. Many states were frustrated at their powerlessness to deny the vote to black people, so they restricted voting by ex-felons, who they knew would be mostly black as a result of other existing inequities.

As bad as that sounds, in Florida's case it has actually been worse than that. The 2000 presidential election is mostly remembered for the recount debacle in Florida, but there is a racial story behind that debacle. What jumps to mind about that election are images like little old ladies (lifelong Democrats) having their ballots counted for Pat Buchanan, chads hanging, and protesters (who turned out to be paid GOP operatives rather passionate citizens) demanding an end to the recount.

It just so happens that there is pretty solid evidence that Gore really did win that election by a couple hundred votes, which would be common knowledge if the recount had been allowed to proceed. Unfortunately, in one of the most disgraceful moments in its history, the Supreme Court stepped in with a highly biased, partisan, and poorly reasoned ruling to stop the recount, which legal scholars have strongly criticized.

But Gore would have won by a much more comfortable margin if ex-felons, who are disproportionately black and therefore disproportionately Democratic, had been allowed to vote. And Gore's margin would have been much larger still if the ex-felon voting restriction hadn't been illegally applied to tens of thousands of non-felons. Greg Palast explained in 2002:

Two of these “scrub lists,” as officials called them, were distributed to counties in the months before the election with orders to remove the voters named. Together the lists comprised nearly 1 percent of Florida's electorate and nearly 3 percent of its African-American voters. Most of the voters (such as “David Butler,” (1); a name that appears 77 times in Florida phone books) were selected because their name, gender, birthdate and race matched - or nearly matched - one of the tens of millions of ex-felons in the United States. Neither DBT nor the state conducted any further research to verify the matches...

Thomas Alvin Cooper (2), twenty-eight, was flagged because of a crime for which he will be convicted in the year 2007. According to Florida's elections division, this intrepid time-traveler will cover his tracks by moving to Ohio, adding a middle name, and changing his race...

Rather than release this whacky data to skeptical counties, Janet Mudrow, state liaison to DBT, suggested that “blanks would be preferable in these cases.” (Harper’s counted 4,917 blank conviction dates.) The one county that checked each of the 694 names on its local list could verify only 34 as actual felony convicts.

(my emphasis; original emphasis removed)

Florida's move to finally allow many ex-felons to vote is therefore not just a breakthrough for the civil rights of ex-felons. It also has huge implications for the civil rights of every black person in Florida, any one of whom could have been removed from voter roles very easily through this type of chicanery.

Nationwide Implications
The roll-back of ex-felon restrictions in Florida was spearheaded by a Republican, new Governor Charlie Crist. I was shocked to hear that a Republican had led the charge, but apparently Crist was genuinely struck by a sense of injustice tugging at his conscience. It's an inspiring example that goes to prove that merely being a Republican doesn't automatically entail being a bad person inside.

But it helps. For example, former governor Jeb Bush, who presided over the illegal felon disenfranchisement in 2000 to help his brother, is a rotten shell of a human being. Less publicized than even the 2000 disenfranchisement in Florida was the 2004 disenfranchisement there, which Jeb also presided over.

The 2004 edition was actually led by Karl Rove protégé Tim Griffin. After the recent purge that has become such a scandal, Griffin was nominated to take over as US Attorney in Arkansas. As I mentioned in Wednesday's entry, it should be no surprise that Republicans want subpoena powers for one of their dirtiest thugs in the state where Hillary Clinton spent most of her adult life.

The 2004 voter suppression, as orchestrated by Griffin, is emblematic of the new approach Republicans take to voter suppression in general: challenging the ballots and registrations of regular minorities, regardless of their criminal record. Griffin was challenging absentee ballots from black communities in Florida, but a favored tactic in other states has been to challenge registrations from registration drives by Democratic groups. This tactic is likely to have played a large role in deciding Ohio in 2004, for example.

But Griffin isn't the only connection between this tactic and the US Attorney scandal. It turns out some of the purged attorneys were fired for inadequately prosecuting such cases of alleged voter fraud.

This recent tactic is directly connected to Karl Rove (via Griffin), but aggressive pursuit of voter fraud has Rove written all over it, anyway. The defining Rove strategy, generally speaking, is to take your own weakness and turn it into your opponent's weakness. Think of how in 2004 draft-dodging George W. Bush somehow looked like the patriotic defender of his country while decorated veteran John Kerry looked like the pansy. It's the same deal in this case: Republicans commit massive voter suppression, yet they try to make it look like Democrats are the ones manipulating the voter roles.

Conclusion
The recent Florida decision and the uncovering of the crass politicization of justice represented by the US Attorney purge are steps in the right direction. I compliment Crist for listening to his conscience and helping more people vote instead of less, like the rest of his party seems to be doing. Ken Blackwell, the Ohio Secretary of State in 2004, lost badly in his bid for the Ohio governor's mansion last year. Conscientious liberals have launched a project to get responsible people in Secretary of State offices across the nation. We're not there yet, but the tides of voter suppression may be turning.

Enlightenment Watch - April

2007-04-04T17:26:00.000-07:00

In a liberal democracy, the government is the people. You may be familiar with this concept from examples such as the times I have written about it or ambient culture, like The People vs. Larry Flynt. The concept of the government and the people being coterminous stems from the Enlightenment philosophers. The ultimate power in any society, according to that view, rests with its people--agents of a state are only using power delegated to them by the people.

In a totalitarian dictatorship, by contrast, the government is the party. You may be familiar with this concept from the examples of the Soviet Union or Mussolini's Italy. The concept of the government and the party being coterminous stems from the legacy of every warlord, despot, and regional strongman in the history of humanity--whatever faction seizes control is the only one with a right to power.

The Bush Administration, Karl Rove, and other Republicans have made it more clear than ever that under their watch, the government of the United States will be coterminous with the Republican Party. The continuing sagas of the US Attorney firing scandal and the suddenly disputed right of habeas corpus, joined by a new scandal at the General Services Administration, all reveal the sad truth of this Republican governing philosophy.

Habeas Corpus
Glenn Greenwald, the blogging jewel in Salon.com's crown, filed a little-reported update in the Republican war on the 800-year-old right this weekend. According to Greenwald, two of three Republican frontrunners for the 2008 nomination are convinced habeas corpus exists. As far as I know, John McCain still supports habeas, but neither Romney nor Giuliani do.

We're not just talking about some contemporary issue like trade deficits or abortion here: habeas corpus is the very foundation of all democracy. The importance of this issue was summed up nicely by that famous bleeding heart hippie liberal Winston Churchill (as quoted by Andrew Sullivan by way of Greenwald):

The power of the executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him judgment by his peers for an indefinite period, is in the highest degree odious, and is the foundation of all totalitarian governments whether Nazi or Communist. [emphasis added]

GSA Corruption
It was revealed this month that the General Services Administration, which oversees office supplies and real estate for the federal government, was being directed to help Republican candidates win elections in 2008. The GSA is not the first place you would look for partisanship, especially since using its resources and capabilities for partisan purposes is illegal. But one of Karl Rove's deputies was dispatched to give a slideshow on such strategies this January.

US Attorneys
A typical Republican defense for the firing of the eight US Attorneys is that all US Attorneys serve at the pleasure of the President, and he may remove them for any or no reason. I don't know of anyone who is disputing that fact. But the Justice Department initially claimed that the USA's were fired for performance reasons, yet it has become obvious that they were removed for political reasons. We probably wouldn't have had a scandal if the Administration had just been up front about that. But, like the best mystery novel detectives, sometimes the best way to solve a case is to wait for the perp to slip up.

"But detective, how did you know I committed the murder?"
"I didn't. You just told me."

The politicized aspect of the US Attorney firings that gets the most attention is the involvement of many of the fired prosecutors in corruption and fraud probes. For example, Carol Lam was fired from her position in Southern California after getting a conviction on Rep. Duke Cunningham (R-CA) in a defense contracting corruption case. Recently it also became apparent that Lam's ongoing corruption probe was getting close to the Vice President's office. US Attorneys in New Mexico and Washington were allegedly fired for failing to adequately prosecute election fraud, which turned out to mean they didn't manufacture the evidence their superiors wanted to see on Democratic election fraud.

Less attention has been paid to the proposed (and subsequently withdrawn) appointment of Tim Griffin to replace Bud Cummins as US Attorney in Arkansas. You may be thinking, "So what? It's a politically appointed post, why not install a former Karl Rove protégé like Griffin?" It just so happens that Griffin used to be an opposition researcher for the RNC. During that time, Griffin likely committed grave voter fraud felonies himself. More to the point, it would seem like an unlikely coincidence that the Administration wants to give their top opposition researcher subpoena power in the home state of Hillary Clinton, just in time for her presidential candidacy.

As Johnathan Alter summarizes it in this Olbermann clip,what Rove was trying to do is in jurisdiction by jurisdiction, protect Republicans, go after Democrats, and essentially turn our criminal justice system into what they have in a banana republic [i.e. any totalitarian system].

Conclusion
I should qualify that I don't think most rank and file Republicans are interested in destroying democracy from its very foundations. But the Republicans in power sure seem to be. This means that in this case the opponents of liberalism are probably not accurately described as conservatives. But what, then?

Andrew Sullivan makes a crucial distinction between membership blocs of the Republican party: "If conservatism is about preserving one's own past, fundamentalism is about erasing it and starting afresh." There is no question that things like habeas corpus are part of "one's own past" for most Americans, and the people in power are obviously not interested in "preserving" them. Yet, Bush & Co. also don't seem to be interested in "starting afresh" so much as in recreating the type of despotism that dominated the world prior to 1776.

Survey of Local Democratic Cleavages

2007-03-30T18:33:00.000-07:00

As the authors of Crashing the Gate, a netroots essential, have written, liberals need to stop infighting to have a chance of moving forward on the national political stage. On a local level, in a situation dominated by Democrats, it's not so bad: you've got a big Democratic pie, and you're fighting to distribute it. But on a bigger scale, these street-level divisions are crucially important to resolve.

Three traditionally liberal groups that University of Chicago students are familiar with include students (duh), Blacks, and labor unions. Unfortunately, these groups don't always get along perfectly in Chicago.

You may have seen copies of the free weekly Black newspaper N'Digo (note: a saucy soul soundtrack awaits anyone who actually clicks this link) lying around the waiting rooms of various Hyde Park businesses. I picked up the latest issue yesterday at Lung Wah on 53rd, and there was an interesting editorial on a division between Blacks and labor.

The editorial's author, N'Digo publisher Hermene D. Hartman, describes the efforts of unions to target Aldermen they consider to be anti-union. So far it sounds like a reasonable thing for a union to do. Since unions are such an important way to organize liberal votes around the country, I actually wish they would do more of it.

But the problem for Hartman is that (a) many of the targeted Aldermen are highly regarded leaders in the Black community and (b) many of the unions haven't done a good job of accepting Black members into their ranks. It's quite a shame, since unions and Blacks could gain quite a bit from cooperating--in particular, getting more Black laborers organized would be a proverbial win-win situation.

Students have fewer common interests with unions and Blacks. Moreover, sometimes students have trouble getting involved in local issues. We're not from here, we're only here for a couple years, etc. But the University and the community are stuck with each other, and the administration is the permanent face of students to the community. This hasn't always worked out well.

The University has a bad history of trampling neighborhood interests in the name of redevelopment, which still creates resentment. Hyde Park has been "successfully" gentrified over the past 40 years, but the Woodlawn neighborhood (south of the Midway) has not been interfered with to the same degree. But as the University expands operations there with the construction of a big new dorm, old tensions come bubbling back to the surface.

On a more positive note, recent activism by the SOUL group to encourage the University to negotiate a better contract with about 600 of its unionized employees was a welcome example of cross-group cooperation. It's probably also a good example of really the best action students can take: pressuring the University, as our representative, to deal respectfully and fairly with local groups.

Democratic Messaging Follies

2007-03-26T17:01:00.000-07:00

About a month ago, the Democratic National Committee mailed me a survey. It's called the 2007 Democratic Strategy Survey (see pictures below), and it appears to be an attempt to learn what rank and file donors want from the party. But sometimes these voter surveys come across as a little clunky or ideological. One wonders if the purpose is to reinforce the Democratic message in the minds of the donors. To paraphrase Lisa Simpson, what's the deal with these surveys?

The first thing I notice about this survey is the instruction section. It says that my answers will be kept confidential, which is something any IRB will like because it protects privacy. However, an IRB would like it more if you also keep people's answers separate from any identifying information beyond a case ID. The instructions are therefore the first indication that this survey might be about finding out what is important to the donors who give the most.

But right near the top of the survey are a couple questions about withdrawing troops from Iraq. Maybe it is about planting the Democratic message.

Skipping down to question #5, the survey asks us donors whether we "support raising the minimum wage from its current level of $5.15 per hour". The response choices are essentially yes and no, but the survey provides a whole bunch of superfluous rationale, too. Instead of just being "yes", the affirmative option reads "Yes, the minimum wage should be increased to help workers make ends meet." The negative option reads "No, raising the minimum wage will hurt small businesses and cost jobs."

Does it seem like question #5 is designed to measure opinion, or is it intended to implant talking points? It doesn't do either well, so it's hard to tell.

Assuming for the moment that the point is to measure opinion, then adding the detailed rationale is not a good idea. It confuses the data. What if I oppose raising the minimum wage, but not because it will hurt small businesses and cost jobs? Or what if I support the minimum wage increase, but only because I think it will reduce government expenditure on food stamps? What answer do I choose? The DNC would end up with a pretty skewed version of what respondents think no matter what someone who doesn't fit the question chooses to do.

Since gathering information doesn't appear to be the real purpose, let's assumed the survey is designed to expose me to the Democratic platform. To do so, it should expose me to a false choice. That is, both options should be in line with the Democratic agenda. By choosing between degrees of liberal, instead of between liberal and conservative, the reader is anchored to a leftward conception of what the available options even are.

But that's not what the survey does. The "yes" option, is appropriately in line with the Democratic agenda, based on its emotional appeal to nurturing the less fortunate. But the "no" option reflects the traditional Republican rationale that distributing money more fairly throughout a community will hurt jobs.

As a side note, the supposed harm of minimum wage hikes has been pretty much objectively disproven, as even many small business owners will tell you.

If Democrats were trying to convince me about their talking points, they wouldn't actually give me the choice between their version and the opposing version. The "yes" option as written would be fine, but the negative option should be something like this: "No, there are more pressing and efficient ways to promote economic justice." If I disagree with the minimum wage raise, there's no reason to remind me why I feel that way.

The rest of the survey proceeds pretty much along the same lines. Question #9, for example, asks whether I support tax cuts for working families. It happens that I don't, but not just because of their suggested rationale: "additional tax cuts at this time will only worsen the federal deficit."

The reason I don't support more tax cuts is that I support a civic culture where everyone contributes their fair share to the common good (government). Constantly talking about tax cuts makes people feel like they're entitled to always pay less and less. Remember that under a classically liberal form of government such as ours, the government is the people. Constantly putting the government on sale encourages the conception that you need to go bargain hunting like you would at Wal*Mart.

In the end, I can't tell what the DNC is really trying to get out of this survey. The DNC survey distribution list comes from previous donations, the DCCC's list, and so forth. They know the people they send the survey to are not Republicans. If they were really trying to gather information, they wouldn't bother trying to find out whether I like Republican talking points. (They should know damn well that I don't. ) They would also provide a more methodologically sound opinion instrument. Likewise, if they want to keep Democratic messages in my head, they shouldn't be exposing me to reasonable-sounding iterations of Republican rationale.

The DNC should be able to use surveys like this both to read Democratic opinion and solidify messaging. We're not talking about some mom 'n' pop charity that gets the receptionist to design the survey because they operate on such a small scale. In improving this survey, you wouldn't want to make the questions too stilted or too dry. People won't fill it out if they think the survey is pure manipulation, but draining too much slant from the questions will eliminate the messaging benefit. By way of closing this entry, let me suggest a few relevant changes to #14.

Old question: "What is your opinion about our environmental laws in America?"
New question: "What is your opinion about laws protecting America's environment?"
Old choice 1: "We need stronger environmental laws to protect our air and water, clean up toxic waste, safeguard wildlife and habitat, and combat global warming."
New choice 1: "Current environmental laws do not go far enough protecting our world, our neighborhoods, and our families from polluters."
Old choice 2: "Our environmental policies are about right; no new laws are needed." (This choice can stay as is.)
Old choice 3: "Our environmental laws burden businesses and hurt our economy."
New choice 3: "We have too many laws protecting our environment."

Enlightenment Watch

2007-03-12T21:21:00.000-07:00

I've blogged previously about Bush's contempt for the enlightenment and about his dream of becoming a Sun King. A couple things came up last week that demand an update to this line of criticism. But first, a trip down memory lane.

My opponent thinks the government -- the surplus is the government's money. That's not what I think. I think it's the hard-working people of America's money and I want to share some of that money with you so you have more money to build and save and dream for your families. It's a difference of opinion.

This quote is from George W. Bush in the October 10, 2000 presidential debate. Everyone knows that because of Bush and his insatiable desire for cutting taxes and increasing spending, we have a crushing deficit far larger than anything we could have imagined in 2000. I would contend that having a solvent government would have helped the American people more than shifting the tax burden off the absurdly wealthy and onto the middle class.

But what he describes in this passage is goes beyond the woulda-shoulda-couldas of policy. It is less a a difference of opinion than a difference in the fundamental philosophy of what government is. Al Gore, apparently, supported a classical liberal view, the view that this country was founded on, the view that came out of the Enlightenment itself. George W. Bush supported, and supports to this day, a regressive view that would take us back before the Enlightenment.

You see, in a liberal democracy, the people are the government. There is no opposition between paying down the debt and rewarding the people for their hard work and prudence. The people of the United States are in debt up to their eyeballs, both personally and socially.

Fun fact: repealing the estate tax entirely would cost the people of the United States over $8 billion over the next ten years from the Walton family (owners of Wal*Mart) alone.

Anyway, on to the two updates: outsourcing tax rules and signing statements.

#1: a continued emphasis on destroying the rational-bureaucratic norms that are a central feature of all modern societies. This time it's back to the IRS, which apparently is pushing to allow private tax attorneys and accountants to just rewrite tax rules as they see fit.

In the Conservative mind, this is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Who better to write tax rules than the people who deal with them every day? So much the better that these people are willing to do it for free! There's probably no catch, and if there were, it probably wouldn't be based on rigging the tax rules to favor their clients.

In the liberal, Enlightenment view, by contrast, the people regulate themselves through the intermediary of a meritocratic bureaucracy. The bureaucracy is employed using money collected from the people and directed by politicians elected by the people. This system is good because everyone involved is accountable to everyone else. Doing it their way, the doers are accountable only to their captain of industry clients.

#2: the issue of signing statements is finally upon us in a much more tangible way. To provide a brief refresher, signing statements are the mechanism Bush has been using to assert an unjustifiably extravagant amount of Constitutional authority. The hubbub over signing statements is about a year old, but heretofore it has been largely hypothetically. Last week, the FBI put a much more real face on the situation.

It all begins with the reauthorization of the PATRIOT Act in the fall of 2005. One of the measures included was an unreasonable ability for the FBI to infringe on privacy with virtually no supervision. Some people complained about this at the time, but of course that would have meant the terrorists win. To the surprise of approximately no one, the FBI promptly turned around and abused their awesome, completely unchecked power by breaking even the modest oversight requirements in the law.

The connection here is that the signing statement Bush issued with the reauthorization of the PATRIOT Act is the very one that drew attention to the controversy over signing statements to begin with. And that signing statement spelled out very clearly that Bush intended to ignore the portions of the law that the FBI has now, indeed, ignored.

This could force a real showdown over the Constitution, which one has to believe was the intention of the Administration all along. After all, if Bush wanted to just get away with one, why would he announce he was going to break the law? Democrats in Congress, and self-respecting pundits, are already making noise about getting Alberto Gonzales to resign. Between this scandal and the politically motivated firing of otherwise competent US Attorneys, it is starting to look like Gonzales may not be able to make it too much longer, which can only be good for the country: it's time we stopped assaulting the Enlightenment.

Full Frontal

2007-03-07T22:48:00.001-08:00

So I recently read an article on the illustrious Slate.com concerning a new technology called Back Scanning.

Basically its like that thing from Total Recall (bellow), a machine which can be used to identify weapons (or in this case drugs or even less dense objects) concealed on people's bodies.

Unlike Total Recall, you get a peak at a person's form rather then their skeleton. This basically presents a fundamental privacy issue as guards at the airport will potentially be checking out your goods as you get on a plane. The Slate article suggests that this isn't so bad, as long as this process is totally divorced from the individual.

Basically, somewhere, someone will see you naked. But they'll never know it was you. As you can see from these images from the TSA, each person (be they white, black, arab or asian) is pretty much reduced to a sort of zombie like blur. So as long as that blur is never put next to the person it belongs to, we should all be ok and can avoid the awkward screening and pat down system we have now.

One concern immediately raised on the Slate's Fray by a user named Fozzy is basically that these will become the new metal detectors, and the frequency of their use will decrease any kind of privacy standard like the kind mentioned at airports .

I'd say Fozzy's concern is very valid and really underscores the most depressing aspect of this war on terror: when are we safe. Technology like Back Scanners will let us peak deeper and deeper into people's lives to make sure their not going to blow us up. We're consistently asked to bear all in the name of our country.

The thing that I find most disturbing about Back Scanning is how quickly I agree with it and would condone it. Because it beats pat downs and racial profiling, right? Because it keeps us safe, right? In the coming century, we as individual's will become easier and and easier to scrutinize. Trust will become less of a word and a code and more of a fact, verifiable by scans and probes which let us see when its safe.

"People willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither and will lose both." said Benjamin Franklin. I think this quote is especially pertinent given our current mindset about security after 9/11. I'm not saying that we can't be free and safe. But one has to ask themselves where that line lies and if we trust ourselves to stay to the right side.

Faith-Based Policies

2007-03-06T09:50:00.000-08:00

I'm no lawyer, but generally I approve of having some sort of standard of evidence. Which is why it's so funny to see the oil industry shills with their backs up against the wall.

Fact: global warming is happening right now, and humans are responsible for it. The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report spells it out as starkly as such a document can. In an ironic bit of metaphor, global warming is an effect that will only snowball - the more heat gets trapped, the more the forces that trap heat speed up. There's really no denying that this is a huge problem that only we are responsible for. There's also no denying that we will have to wait until 2009, when a less evil president assumes office, in order to get started on implementing the policies we so desperately and urgently need.

As if this weren't enough reason to for the oil industry to worry, peak oil is also starting to rear its ugly head. Production at some of the largest, most productive oil fields in the world (including the crown jewel fields of Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and Alaska) has started to decline despite increased drilling. We may soon see an irreversible worldwide decline in production.

So what is the oil industry response? Via their front group, the American Petroleum Institute, it appears to be make-believe. As observed in this diary on DailyKos, the industry shills are telling us that proven reserves aren't what matter - we should be looking at un-proven reserves. In other words, let's make our policy based on faith. In oil companies. Yep, that's probably superior to evidence.

It's truly astonishing that they have now taken up methods that not even Police Detective Riley would use. Per Jack Handey:

Police Detective Riley was a no-nonsense kind of guy. Before, he really loved nonsense, and would use it a lot in his murder investigations. But he found that most people didn't appreciate it, especially the family of the victim.

Now, granted that whoever was speaking for the API was probably a PR guy, which would make him the spinmeister for a spin group. Hardly someone you should trust. But clearly the American Petroleum Industry trusts this guy, so somebody is actually embracing nonsense as a methodology for science and policy.

Fortunately, supporting this kind of statement actually does seem to finally be eroding the credibility of the oil industry. And with Obama and McCain jointly sponsoring global warming legislation, it looks like 2009 may be the beginning of the end for the oil industry. I therefore issue the API, the industry at large, Bush, and that whole gang this challenge, by way of Homer Simpson:

You couldn't fool your own mother on the foolingest day of your life with an electrified fooling machine!

Leadership Vacuum

2007-03-05T21:02:00.000-08:00

In the previous post, my colleague Benediktion writes about the difference between moral high ground and action in the context of divesting from Darfur and stopping the Iraq occupation. Although I disagree with several of the things he says, I'm glad he brought it up. These are vitally important issues, and the context in which we deal with them lends itself well to Sartre's analysis of man: his identity is constructed by his actions, not his words.

Last November, Americans came out and took action en masse, giving form to their dissatisfaction by kicking the Republicans out of power in Congress. But outside of elections, the people in a representative democracy retain their ability to speak while delegating their ability to act. So, despite the fact that there are various issues on which the people demand action, the beltway politicos are content to make sure their demands stay mere words.

First case in point: Iraq. Three quarters of respondents to the most recent CBS News/New York Times poll thought things were going badly or very badly in Iraq. Iraq was clearly a major factor in the 2006 elections. Yet so far, the Democratic majority has responded by letting Bush's escalation go forward, not supporting measures with teeth to bring an end to the occupation, and letting Joe Lieberman give the weekly radio address. The Administration promised the escalation would be different because this time we were seriously going to hold the Iraqis to some benchmarks. Now that benchmarks have already been missed, no one is pressing the administration on it.

Second case in point: health care. A stunning poll was released last week that was basically ignored by most media. It turns out Americans support single payer health care. Big time. Health care is the most important issue for a majority (not just a plurality) of the respondents, 64% think the government should guarantee coverage, and 60% we would be willing to pay more in taxes so that everyone could have guaranteed coverage. A popular mandate for the best solution to the preeminent domestic policy problem of our day would seemingly translate to major action by the government, right? So why haven't the Democrats jumped at this opportunity to help people and make themselves look good?

As Michael Tomasky notes,

What we don't know about the Democrats at this point is whether the party has an interest in summoning Americans to think about the world from a broader perspective than how a given issue affects them directly.

Because that's what health care and Iraq are about. Sure some people are directly affected by the health care crisis or Iraq, but most people aren't. Or at least they don't feel like it. But people recognize that these are the important issues in America today. People want them solved. Visionaries are those who solve big issues, not those who solve easy ones.

Visionaries are what we need, and it is easier to be a visionary from the White House (or at least a presidential campaign) than it is from the halls of compromise (read: Congress). Fortunately, Democrats currently have a bumper crop of great presidential candidates, at least so goes the conventional wisdom. Edwards, Clinton, and Obama are considered to be form an unusually strong field for Democrats.

Unfortunately, all these great candidates are taking equally cowardly approaches to substance. Obama, especially, has "decided to run--à la Gary Hart in 1984--on the notion of new ideas without actually offering any." Establishment Democrats clearly need more encouragement to start acting on the values they sometimes seem to have. We spent a really long time (from 1994 to present) in this defensive crouch, so I guess it's too much to expect one little election to immediately break the bad habits. But it's frustrating - our people are finally in office, so why aren't they doing the things we want? For now, all we can do is keep the pressure up on our representatives. Hopefully sooner or later one of these great candidates will emerge to make Democrats do what they must know they need to do.

Moral Superiority

2007-03-04T16:17:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago we all heard how the University’s Board decided not to divest from Darfur. Though certainly not happy with that decision, I was neither surprised nor particularly saddened. I wasn’t surprised because, hey, this is the UofC board of stodgy unconnected intellectuals, and nobody was really expecting anything less of them.

I wasn’t particularly saddened, however, because looking at it rationally, divestment does very little. Yes, it “sends a message,” and it could be argued that it grants “us,” whatever we are as a collective, the moral high ground. But in reality, we’re talking about divesting less than one million dollars from multibillion dollar, multinational or state-owned firms. They wouldn’t notice.

Though I respect what STAND has done and continues to do on campus, the fact of the matter is that their actions would do almost nothing to end the actual genocide, whether or not they actually achieved their policy goals. The only thing that divestment would actually accomplish is making some people feel good about themselves, and give them the ability to say, “I told you so.”

I’m quite sure that the family of one of the hundreds of thousands dead in Darfur is not completely comforted by the fact that some first-world people are very sorry for what’s happening to them and their people. In fact, I’d wager that they’d prefer some action to lessen the genocide over the united first world saying that we’re really sorry and do not at all support what is happening.

While having the moral high ground may help some of us watching the horror feel better about ourselves, it’s doing nothing for the actual victims. I think that a grief-stricken mother would prefer her son back than to have some more people express their apologies and do no more, no matter whether that mother is from Darfur, or is from the United States with her son in a flag-draped coffin flying back from Baghdad on an Army cargo plane.

The sad fact about the genocide in Darfur is that there’s very little that an individual, or even a group of students or activists, can do about it. The same cannot be said about ending the war in Iraq. Whether through direct action or through the Congress, the people of the United States have the ability to bring an end to the Iraqi War, and every day we chose not to, we become culpable for more and more deaths.

Look back for a second to the 1972 presidential election. Richard Nixon wins on a promise to end the Vietnam war, a platform he’s forced to adopt because of George McGovern’s promise of immediate withdrawal. The same George McGovern that beat Muskie, Humphrey, and Wallace in the primaries on the strength of one of the first real grassroots campaigns, on the backs of people who were willing to work to bring their friends, lovers, brothers, and sons back from a lost cause in the jungles of Vietnam.

We have the same power in 2008 as the students, the progressives, the caring of this nation had in 72. We can force this war to end, whether or not we win the presidency (which we will, but that’s for another column).
But even if the war ends in two years, that’s two years of dead friends, of dead sons and daughters, which is two years too many. Congress has been talking about a nonbinding resolution expressing their displeasure over the war. It passed the House, and failed a procedural vote in the Senate, with 53 supporting (not the 60 needed to force a vote), so a majority of both houses supported this resolution.

Of course, the resolution was nonbinding, and our dear President could, and all but said he would, completely ignore the will of Congress and the directive of the American people, and not only continue the war but send more soldiers into the mouth of Hell, leaving us to watch in dismay as yet another hero fell.

In that sense, the resolution and divestment are exactly the same thing. The people of America, the people of the world, have stood up, made their disapproval heard, and watched in dismay as the horrors continued. The tragedy has lead us to conclude what must be a central ideal of this new progressive movement, the one that can actually hold power in this country: Moral superiority is no longer enough.

Moral superiority is divesting from Darfur, is a nonbinding resolution. Moral superiority is setting things up se we can se “We told you so.” And moral superiority does nothing at all to save somebody’s son or daughter’s life. While it is certainly a tragedy that we cannot do more in Darfur (even the UN is powerless because of Sudan’s government), we can do more to end the war in Iraq. We, through Congress, hold the pursestrings. We control the billions of dollars that this war needs to continue.

Call your Congressman, call your Senator. Get the word out that cutting the purse does nothing to harm the troops, to endanger our friends, lovers, sons and daughters, beyond force the executive to bring them home. We can win this battle and end this war, before 2008. We cannot, and we must not, remain content with this war being a “Republican” problem, with us saying “We told you so.” Because even if it’s good for us politically, even if it gets us the Presidency, it costs us in lives, a trade-off that no progressive can make.

Moral superiority is not enough anymore, friends. We must act, we must see results. Central to the progressive movement is the belief that we can improve people’s lives. I put forth that there’s no better way to do this than by saving them.

May the God of your choice bless you,
Benediktion