The NRA's Pro-Assassination Argument

According to George Mason University Historian Christopher Hamner, John Wilkes Booth was very clear on his reason for assassinating President Abraham Lincoln. Booth, considering himself a southern patriot, had plotted elaborate plans to kidnap the president, most of which were completely unrealistic fantasies; one "involved capturing Lincoln in his box at Ford’s Theater and lowering the president to the stage with ropes," Hamner writes. But it wasn't until he'd heard a speech by Lincoln that he settled on the easier and more realistic scheme of killing the president. The war was all but over, the confederacy had clearly lost, and Lincoln was looking ahead toward the future.

...Lincoln’s speech that evening outlined some of his ideas about reconstructing the nation and bringing the defeated Confederate states back into the Union. Lincoln also indicated a wish to extend the franchise to some African-Americans—at the very least, those who had fought in the Union ranks during the war—and expressed a desire that the southern states would extend the vote to literate blacks, as well. Booth stood in the audience for the speech, and this notion seems to have amplified his rage at Lincoln. “That means nigger citizenship,” he told Lewis Powell, one of his band of conspirators. “Now, by God, I’ll put him through. That is the last speech he will ever make.”

And so, on the night of April 14, 1865, a shot rang out in Ford's Theater, accompanied by the slogan, "Sic semper tyrannus!" -- "Thus always to tyrants."

The reason I bring this up is because the word "tyranny" is being thrown around a lot by demagogues and the gullible types who hang on their every word. Most recently, it's come up in the debate over limits on guns. Gun nuts argue that the Second Amendment is some sort of inoculation against tyranny, so it pays to ask: who gets to decide who's a tyrant?

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GOP Stuck on the Edge of the Fiscal Cliff

An article in the New York Times titled, "Criticized as Weak in Past Talks, Obama Takes Harder Line," is the sort of thing that puts a smile on liberals' faces. Long story short, it describes a president who does what he said he would do during a successful reelection bid. And Republicans hate it.

Amid demands from Republicans that President Obama propose detailed new spending cuts to avert the year-end fiscal crisis, his answer boils down to this: you first.

Mr. Obama, scarred by failed negotiations in his first term and emboldened by a clear if close election to a second, has emerged as a different kind of negotiator in the past week or two, sticking to the liberal line and frustrating Republicans on the other side of the bargaining table.

Disciplined and unyielding, he argues for raising taxes on the wealthy while offering nothing new to rein in spending and overhaul entitlement programs beyond what was on the table last year. Until Republicans offer their own new plan, Mr. Obama will not alter his. In effect, he is trying to leverage what he claims as an election mandate to force Republicans to take ownership of the difficult choices ahead.

Ezra Klein has already covered this new Obama, writing that he's stopped negotiating with himself. Paul Krugman agrees:

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Mitt Romney's Speech: Lukewarm Mashed Potatoes and a Plan to Create the Sunrise

Last night's acceptance speech for the nomination to the top of the Republican ticket was, by most accounts, a plate of warm mashed potatoes. Not too hot, not too cold, not overly seasoned or anything to get excited about. It was a speech, he didn't trip over the podium and fall into the audience in giving it, and the absence of humiliating failure is a success of sorts. What will be remembered will be Clint Eastwood's rambling, incoherent stand-up routine (at least, I think it was supposed to be comedy of some sort). Advice to future convention planners: if a prominently scheduled speaker can't give you any advanced copy of a script, do not let them go on. I don't care who it is or how starstruck you are -- if it's not in writing, it doesn't get broadcast. Abraham Lincoln, risen from the grave by the personal hand of God had better have a stack of 3x5 index cards someone can look over. If not, hit the road you spooky undead emancipator.

Inspiring it was not. It will never be quoted by someone with tears in their eyes. Jonathan Bernstein pretty much nailed it when he summed it up this way: "A generic speech and a generic convention for a generic Republican candidate." It was a speech by a guy who's running for president. Not the first and not the last and certainly not noteworthy. If speeches had a color, this one would be beige.

Unfortunately, it was also the generic speech for a generic Republican in a way worth remarking on. While it steered mostly away from substance and toward humanizing a seemingly robotic candidate, you can't have a completely substance-free acceptance speech, no matter how badly you might want one. You're going to have to talk about your opponent. You're going to have to talk about policy. You're going to have to make a case beyond, "No really, I do have a pulse."

And it was in those moments that Mitt slipped into the old habit of slinging the BS.

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GOP Fights Akin-Like Lunatics of Their Own Making

Todd Akin has become a real headache for the GOP. But there are more of these headaches in the pipe. And those headaches are self-inflicted, like a hangover after an ideological bender. Observe:

ThinkProgress:

In a local television interview, Hillsborough County (New Hampshire) sheriff candidate Frank Szabo said that he values the life of an unborn fetus so much that, when it came to elective and late-term abortions, he’d be willing to kill for it:

But Szabo may have inflamed the issue further when asked if he would use deadly force to prevent an abortion.

“I would respond specifically by saying that if someone is under threat, a full-grown human being, if they’re under threat, what should the sheriff do? Everything in their power to prevent them from being harmed,” he said.

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No End in Sight

Ezra Klein calls last night's primary contest in Michigan a "win that made Romney look weak." In delegate math, a win is a win and Team Romney's probably happy to take it, but I've written before about polls influencing polls. The candidate is losing his electability argument and last night's performance didn't do much to revive it. If people are looking for a candidate who can win, he didn't inspire confidence. His weak win in one race may affect voters in later ones. This morning, much of the punditry are taking the "he didn't lose" point of view, rather than the "Romney won" side. He's not the winner of last night's primaries, he's the survivor. And Romney didn't help himself much on that point in his victory speech, as Klein points out:

...Romney was right in his victory speech. “We didn’t win by a lot, but we won by enough and that’s all that counts,” he said. His advisers might have preferred if he'd omitted that unusually honest look into the dynamics of the campaign. But Romney did win by enough. He remains the frontrunner. He remains strong enough to dissuade any new entrants. Which means the status quo continues. Romney vs. Santorum. The Republican Party will continue to have nowhere else to turn and independent voters will continue to see a side of Romney they don't much like. You can argue that Michigan produced three kinds of winners last night. Romney, who didn't lose. Santorum, who almost won. And the Obama campaign, which gets to sit back and watch this primary go on for that much longer.

And "that much longer" means beyond Super Tuesday. If anyone drops out of the race after then, it'll probably be Ron Paul (or maybe Gingrich -- more on that later), since he probably won't win any states. And it may not be a big Romney night, either. He's heading for a huge landslide in Massachusetts and a sizable win in Vermont (the RealClearPolitics polling average in those states is +48 and +19 respectively), but other candidates are looking at big wins too. Ten states are up that night and RCP has polling averages for six. Of that six, Mitt takes two.

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So BofA Dropped Their Debit Card Fee -- You're Still Being Screwed

When Bank of America announced they were dropping plans to institute a $5 monthly debit card fee, that was a win for consumers. The fee was an end run around new banking regulations that limited the amount banks could charge merchants for processing debit card purchases. In other words, the banks took a "stop screwing people" law and applied it as a "screw different people" law. It didn't go over real well.

The move was a PR disaster and other banks that had been planning similar fees backed off as well. For now, the debit card fee is all but dead. But that doesn't mean that a "stop screwing people" law has to be taken as a "stop screwing people" law. Meet the stealth screw.

New York Times:

Even as Bank of America and other major lenders back away from charging customers to use their debit cards, many banks have been quietly imposing other new fees.

...Facing a reaction from an angry public and heightened scrutiny from regulators, banks are turning to all sorts of fees that fly under the radar. Everything, it seems, has a price.

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Giving the Center Finger to Centrism

Paul Krugman identifies a problem around which many other problems orbit. I hesitate to call it a "philosophy," because it's too reactionary to really qualify. But the correct word escapes me, so "philosophy" it is. It's the philosophy of those who believe with all their little hearts that the grass is always literally greener on the other side of the fence. It's a philosophy born of wishful thinking.

Watching our system deal with the debt ceiling crisis -- a wholly self-inflicted crisis, which may nonetheless have disastrous consequences -- it's increasingly obvious that what we're looking at is the destructive influence of a cult that has really poisoned our political system.

And no, I don't mean the fanaticism of the right. Well, OK, that too. But my feeling about those people is that they are what they are; you might as well denounce wolves for being carnivores. Crazy is what they do and what they are.

No, the cult that I see as reflecting a true moral failure is the cult of balance, of centrism.

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Caterpillar Exec to Congress in May: "Make Our Crime Legal"

I was cruising through Reddit last night when this item caught my attention:

Bloomberg News:

Caterpillar Inc. used offshore subsidiaries in Switzerland and Bermuda to avoid about $2 billion in U.S. taxes from 2000 to 2009, boosting its earnings through a "tax and financial statement fraud," according to a Caterpillar executive’s lawsuit.

The company, the world's largest construction-equipment maker, sold and shipped spare parts globally from an Illinois warehouse while improperly attributing at least $5.6 billion of profits from those sales to a unit in Geneva, according to the suit filed by Daniel J. Schlicksup. He was a global tax strategy manager for Caterpillar from 2005 to 2008.

Schlicksup, 49, sued in U.S. District Court in Peoria, Illinois, in 2009, claiming he was moved to a job that limits his career opportunities because he complained to superiors that the "Swiss Structure" ran afoul of U.S. tax rules. He's seeking a court order to give him back his old job and prevent any retaliation. He also seeks stock options that he claims were wrongly withheld as well as legal fees and punitive damages.

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Well, At Least it's Not a Buck and a Half's Worth of Arugula!

In 2008, Barack Obama was an elitist. This was the worst thing ever. He supposedly ate in fancy restaurants and ordered unearthly foreign delights like arugula. This meant he was out of touch with the average person, unlike his opponent John McCain who -- as you might remember -- couldn't remember exactly how many houses he owned.

Human Events, 2008:

John McCain may be gaining what Obama is losing among women because of Obama's "Arugula Gap."

"Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and see what they charge for arugula?" Obama asked an Iowa crowd in 2007. I had to Google "arugula" to discover it's a leafy substitute for lettuce in trendy restaurant salads. Most people don't shop at Whole Foods (which specializes in "organic" foods and other environmentally-fashionable products). And most women, I suspect, aren't looking for a presidential candidate who reminds them more of their high school French teacher than of John F. Kennedy.

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The Paranoid Mindset of the Rightwing Blogosphere

Blogger will be in read-only mode while we resolve some maintenance issues. Sorry for the inconvenience.

If you'd checked Google's Blogger Status on Thursday, you'd have found that message. When I found that I wasn't able to access my blogs to publish a post, the first thing I did was check Status. Google was down and it was confirmed. I would have to wait. Patiently or impatiently, I was going to have to wait.

One thing that I've learned about the internet over the years -- and have come to accept -- is that it doesn't really work. Not very well, anyway. Services are unreliable. Connections can be spotty. Machines break down and code, being written and configured by humans, can be faulty. In the early years, Blogger wasn't super reliable. But over time it's developed into a pretty solid and stable platform. This latest outage was the exception to the rule.

Others haven't learned that the internet doesn't really work. And those people went nuts. I cringed reading some comments on the Blogger Help forum. Another thing to remember when dealing with Blogger is that it's free. Pretty much the only thing Google does to make money off it is to make it easy to add Adsense ads. You get unlimited bandwidth and an infinite amount of blog posts for nothing. Let me emphasize that fact -- nothing. Yet people were "demanding" that their blogs be restored to their previous functional state, as if engineers were just sitting around waiting for someone to tell them to get on the ball. It was embarrassing. I'd imagine that many a middle finger was raised at many a monitor at Google's Blogger division this weekend.

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The Right's Increasing Desperation to Take Credit for Bin Laden's Downfall

It's a case of hearing what you want to hear. The right is so intent on giving Bush all the credit for the death of Osama bin Laden that they're trying (and, perhaps, succeeding) on reopening the debate about torture. And, in doing so, they're practicing selective listening.

The Daily Caller:

CIA Director Leon Panetta stomped on the White House's political script when he told Tuesday night's broadcast of NBC Nightly News that the waterboarding of jihadi detainees contributed information that led to the location and killing of Osama bin Laden.

"We had multiple series of sources that provided information with regards to this situation… clearly some of it came from detainees [and] they used these enhanced interrogation techniques against some of those detainees," he told NBC anchor Brian Williams.

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Clinton and the 'War on Terror'

At the Democratic presidential debates in New Hampshire last night, Iraq was the centerpiece. It's difficult for dems to run against each other when the party platform is 'George W. Bush sucks -- a lot!' In order to win, the dem nominee will run against Bush, not whatever uninspiring boob a scrambling and disunified GOP finally settles on. Predictably, there were few differences in message. One standout was Hillary Clinton. And not in a good way.

Responding to John Edwards' assertion that the term 'war on terror' is a 'political slogan, a bumper sticker,' she said, "I have seen first hand the terrible damage that can be inflicted on our country by a small band of terrorists."

"I believe we are safer than we were."

Dang, that's Bush's line. Didn't she get the memo? Bush sucks. And, of course, Clinton is wrong. 'War on terror' is a bumper sticker slogan -- a meaningless string of Republican PR BS on the lines of 'family values.' Problem number one; it doesn't make a damned bit of sense. Terrorism is a tactic, not an ideology -- it's not even a goal.

And how well has this war been going? Not very. Iraq's in the loss column, no matter how the Bush administration spins it or what crazy-assed BS they believe. Islamist ideology is probably more popular now than it's ever been. So far, so bad.

But the real measure is how well our terror warriors are doing in the field of the terror war. Over the weekend, a bunch of terrorists were busted for a 'major terrorist plot' that was pretty much in the notional stage.

CBS News:

In the latest terrorist threat to New York City, the alleged terrorists are all middle-aged men. The oldest is a 63-year-old Guyanese immigrant Russell Defreitas who was arrested at a diner in Brooklyn. The feds say he was the mastermind of the plot to ignite the jet fuel farm at John F. Kennedy International Airport.

People who know Defreitas however, are astounded at the charge.

"For him to be mastermind of this was utterly ridiculous," said Ricardo Johnson, a friend of the suspect. "He's not a leader. He doesn't have the capacity."

OK, let's pretend for a moment that these guys -- like those involved in all 'major terrorist plots' we've disrupted -- aren't the al Qaeda equivalent of the Keystone Kops. What military action was it that stopped these guys? What beach head had to be invaded? What army was defeated?

It doesn't actually work that way. A drug dealer sold them out. And -- surprise, surprise -- the info wasn't tortured out of him at Gitmo, it didn't come from wiretaps, and it didn't come from library records. He approached law enforcement. He wasn't an al Qaeda number two locked in a secret CIA obliette with battery chargers hooked up to his privates, he was Huggie Bear from Starsky & Hutch with the word on the street.

In fact, if you look at all of these terrorist plots that have been stopped beforehand, they've all been busted by cops -- not marines. While the military is failing spectacularly overseas (due entirely to a poorly thought out and objectiveless mission), law enforcement offers our only victories in this 'war on terrorism.'

Meanwhile, all this crap that we're told is essential to the 'war on terror' never turns up anything. Wiretaps give us nothing, the PATRIOT ACT gives us nothing, the war in Iraq gives us nothing. Bush tells us 9/11 'changed everything', but it hasn't changed reality -- the stuff that worked before still works, while none of this new stuff does.

If it's not clear by now that terrorism is a crime without a military solution, you just haven't been paying attention. Fighting terrorism with a military would work if there were some Terroristan out there where they all come from, but there's not. If we chased all of the terrorists out of Iraq (an oversimplification, but that seems to be what the Bush administration wants us to believe), they'd go someplace else. We fight in Iraq, for example, while a new taliban festers in Somalia.

So yes, 'war on terror' is a slogan. If we're safer, it's not because of a Republican PR tactic. It's because the Bush administration, which hadn't taken terrorism at all seriously, was forced to deal with it again.

9/11 Commission (emphasis mine):

[Acting FBI Director Thomas] Pickard said in late June and through July he met with Attorney General Ashcroft once a week. He told us that although he initially briefed the attorney general regarding [domestic terrorist] threats, after two such briefings the attorney general told him he did not want to hear this information anymore. The Justice Department has informed us that Attorney General Ashcroft, his former deputy, and his chief of staff deny that the attorney general made any such statement to Pickard.

It seems that worrying about terrorism was cutting into more important issues, like naked boobs on the internet and on statues. After 9/11, resources that had been taken from domestic terrorism investigation was given back. In other words, the mistake was corrected and that's what's made us safer. And 'safer' is a relative term. We're safer than we were after the Bushies screwed it all up, but just as safe as we were before then. At least, in a domestic sense.

Hillary's got this one very, very wrong. It's not any idiotic 'war on terror' that's made us safer. It's going back to the older strategy of letting law enforcement worry about the crap that matters that's made us safer. It's law enforcement that we should be concentrating on, since that's the only place we've had any success at all in fighting terrorism.

The rest of this 'war on terror' has been a awe inspiring failure of massive proportions. Putting aside the fact that the Bush administration did absolutely nothing to prevent 9/11, how many americans have died in Iraq? More than the number who died on 9/11. If americans are supposed to be safer, then why are so damned many of us dead? I suppose you could argue that it's impossible to be in danger and deceased -- that no one is safer than the dead -- but I get the feeling that most people don't define 'safety' as 'the state of being somewhere around room temperature.'

Terrorism is a serious problem and no one's suggesting that we ignore it. But the fact is that what works isn't a 'war' approach, but a police approach.

Hillary's statement at the debates is a case study in not getting it, ignoring recent history, and playing to a group of voters who probably wouldn't vote for her anyway. Worse, it's awfully reminiscent of Bush's habit of ignoring reality in favor of stuff that sounds good.

We've seen where that goes. It's not leadership.

--Wisco

Technorati tags: politics; Iraq; Democrats; elections; 2008; John Edwards; If Hillary Clinton thinks the 'war on terrorism' is anything other than propaganda, she shouldn't be the dems choice

A Fine Couple of Sociopaths

The Bush administration fetishizes death so much that if you're not as bloodthirsty as they'd like, you may find yourself out of a job. At least, that's the situation several of the purged federal prosecutors found themselves in.

Chicago Tribune:

Margaret Chiara, a former U.S. attorney in Grand Rapids, Mich., appealed several times to the Justice Department against having to seek the federal death penalty. In hindsight, for her it was a risky business.

No prisoner has been executed in a Michigan case since 1938, but the Bush administration seemed determined to change that.

Indeed, under Attys. Gen. John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales, far more federal defendants have been dispatched to Death Row than under the previous administration. And any prosecutors wishing to do otherwise often find themselves overruled.

The Bush administration has had a long love affair with the death penalty. George W. Bush served only one complete term as Governor of Texas, but his administration allowed 131 prisoners to be put to death. Guilt or innocence seemed to be unimportant.

New York Times:

In one-third of those cases, [a report by the Chicago Tribune] showed, the lawyer who represented the death penalty defendant at trial or on appeal had been or was later disbarred or otherwise sanctioned. In 40 cases the lawyers presented no evidence at all or only one witness at the sentencing phase of the trial.

In 29 cases, the prosecution used testimony from a psychiatrist who -- based on a hypothetical question about the defendant's past -- predicted he would commit future violence. Most of those psychiatrists testified without having examined the defendant: a practice condemned professionally as unethical.

Other witnesses included one who was temporarily released from a psychiatric ward to testify, a pathologist who had admitted faking autopsies and a judge who had been reprimanded for lying about his credentials.

Asked about the Tribune's reporting of his record as governor, Bush said, according to NYT, "'We've adequately answered innocence or guilt' in every case. The defendants, he said, 'had full access to a fair trial.'"

The best case scenario is that Bush and company found capital punishment popular and exploited it to create a 'tough on crime' reputation. The worse case scenario is that they're all a bunch of freakin' psychopaths. But there's no way you can argue that anyone involved in any of this was overly concerned with justice.

And one of the people involved was then-legal counsel to then governor-Bush -- Alberto Gonzales. In an article reviewing memos between Gonzales and Bush regarding death penalty cases, Alan Berlow wrote in The Atlantic that Gonzales "repeatedly failed to apprise the governor of crucial issues in the cases at hand: ineffective counsel, conflict of interest, mitigating evidence, even actual evidence of innocence." Clearly, the idea was the more executions, the better -- guilt or innocence be damned.

Specific cases are unforgivably egregious.

John Dean, FindLaw:

Take the case of Terry Washington, a thirty-three-year-old mentally retarded man with the communications skills of a seven-year-old executed in 1997. Gonzales's clemency memo, according to Berlow, did not even mention his mental retardation, or his lawyer's failure to call, at trial, for the testimony of a mental health expert on this issue. Nor did it mention that the jury never heard about Washington's history of child abuse; he was one of ten children, all of whom "were regularly beaten with whips, water hoses, extension cords, wire hangers, and fan belts."

And plainly, Washington's counsel had been ineffective: his strongest argument was never pressed. (Similarly, with respect to death row inmate Carl Johnson, "Gonzales failed to mention that Johnson's trial lawyer had literally slept through major portions of the jury selection.")

For these reasons, Gonzales' silence about Terry Washington's retardation is both inexplicable and stunning.

This is the typical Bushie attitude -- truth is malleable and justice is just a word. I've written before that this administration reminds me of Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment -- people who believe that history's movers and shakers are above the law.

In one hundred, two hundred years, who will remember the name 'Terry Washington?' No one, that's who. But Bush and Gonzales thought they'd go on to rebuild the world. If some Texas retard has to die to help that happen, then some Texas retard has to die. Washington was without consequence. He'll be forgotten and names 'George W. Bush' and 'Alberto Gonzales' will be printed in history books. Screw Terry Washington; he's just another of history's forgotten.

If we look at the Bush administration over the years, we see it again and again; a complete disregard for others. From the Iraq war to outing a CIA operative to the abuse of the death penalty, they do the things they want to do and they don't give a damn if other people live or die because of their actions. There's a reason why Bush invited attacks on US forces with his 'Bring it on' comment -- he doesn't give a a hot bowl what happens to the troops, but he thought it made him look tough.

There's a word for this sort of mindset. The idea that consquences don't exist unless they're personal consquences, the belief that the structures of society -- like justice and law -- are secondary to your own interests, the notion that other people don't matter and their lives are worth less than your own.

That word is 'sociopath.'

Seriously, the more you look at these guys, the more you become convinced that there's something drastically wrong with their heads. It was Gonzales who argued that torture was legal and Bush who argued that it was a great idea. The political career of Alberto Gonzales is probably over. He has no friends in Washington outside of the administration. Bush is another matter.

Bush needs to be impeached. And I don't much care what for -- pick anything. But we can't afford to keep this basket case in the Oval Office.

--Wisco

Technorati tags: politics; law; Texas; Bush and Alberto Gonzales use the death penalty as a political tool -- so much for a 'Culture of Life'