The Church of the 'Free Market'

Jeb Bush has released a religious tract. It's disguised as an op-ed on economics in the Wall Street Journal, but it's a religious tract.

Congressman Paul Ryan recently coined a smart phrase to describe the core concept of economic freedom: "The right to rise."

Think about it. We talk about the right to free speech, the right to bear arms, the right to assembly. The right to rise doesn't seem like something we should have to protect.

But we do. We have to make it easier for people to do the things that allow them to rise. We have to let them compete. We need to let people fight for business. We need to let people take risks. We need to let people fail. We need to let people suffer the consequences of bad decisions. And we need to let people enjoy the fruits of good decisions, even good luck.

In what way is this a religious tract? Because the argument is backed up only by the strength of Bush's belief. It's a nearly fact-free piece -- the only number he brings up is the population of the United States. He proves nothing, his conclusions are apparently drawn from thin air, his arguments are tired.

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The Mad Neocon

If you ask Dick Cheney, changes in counter-terrorism tactics by the Obama administration mean we're all going to die in a big terrorist attack. And that's what CNN's John King did this weekend; ask Dick Cheney. As always, he was less than convincing. I don't think Dick's capable of excitement and this makes him a pretty bad liar -- his warning of the inevitable destruction of the world's first modern democracy was delivered in the same tone of voice he might use to talk about a flat tire. The destruction of America's unfortunate, of course, but that's just the way things are. No use getting all riled up about it.

Maybe Dick's like Cassandra, who was able to predict the future, but cursed in that no one would believe her. Why knock yourself out with histrionics if no one's going to buy it?

Another possibility is that Dick's not especially worked up over our oncoming doom because he knows it's a bunch of crap. That'd put him in the same boat as most of us, who also aren't extremely concerned about Cheney's doomsaying either. Other than the wingnut right who'll believe anything, we're all pretty sure that Dick's a BS dispenser and we don't lose a lot of sleep over his warnings.

There's a third possibility; that Dick believes what he says because he's a dangerous lunatic prone to paranoia. Cheney's not especially animated at the thought of another 9/11 because he's used to living in a world where disaster is always right around the corner. His lack of excitement doesn't indicate a lack of earnestness, it's just the consequence of living in constant fear.





After all, this is the man who wouldn't let Google Earth display his residence. If you're a paranoiac, the knowledge that satellites really are looking down and watching you must be unbearable. His obsession with secrecy was taken to absurd lengths, when he argued that the Office of the Vice President was actually a fourth branch of government.

Dick Cheney may have said and done crazy things as VP because Dick Cheney's crazy. Take his Vice Presidential Hit Squad. The White House had an "executive assassination ring" that answered to Cheney's office. "Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving," says investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. "That’s been going on, in the name of all of us." It's this sort of that Cheney argues is the only thing standing between us and destruction. He must believe it -- otherwise, why would this hit squad have existed?

"When you go back to the law enforcement mode, which I sense is what they're doing, closing Guantanamo and so forth ... they are very much giving up that center of attention and focus that's required, that concept of military threat that is essential if you're going to successfully defend the nation against further attacks," Cheney told King in the interview.

It's an unfortunate coincidence for Dick that the things he thought had to be done to keep us all safe were revealed that same weekend. In an op-ed for the New York Times, journalist Mark Danner revealed details of a 2006 Red Cross investigation of US treatment of detainees. Not surprisingly, the methods used by US personnel indicate a desperation born of paranoia. These are the sorts of things you'd do if you really did believe the world was going to end tomorrow.

A few accounts from the detainees themselves tell us all we need to know:

– “I was taken out of my cell and one of the interrogators wrapped a towel around my neck; they then used it to swing me around and smash me repeatedly against the hard walls of the room.”

– “Both my feet became very swollen after one month of almost continual standing.”

– “A thick flexible plastic collar would also be placed around my neck so that it could then be held at the two ends by a guard who would use it to slam me repeatedly against the wall..."

Unfortunately for the mental health of the nation, there's no shortage of cowardly "patriots" who are willing to argue that waterboarding isn't torture. Let's see them defend these practices; in what lunatic world is physical beating not torture?

"What we can say with certainty, in the wake of the Red Cross report, is that the United States tortured prisoners and that the Bush administration, including the president himself, explicitly and aggressively denied that fact," writes Danner. "We can also say that the decision to torture, in a political war with militant Islam, harmed American interests by destroying the democratic and Constitutional reputation of the United States, undermining its liberal sympathizers in the Muslim world and helping materially in the recruitment of young Muslims to the extremist cause. By deciding to torture, we freely chose to embrace the caricature they had made of us. The consequences of this choice, legal, political and moral, now confront us. Time and elections are not enough to make them go away."

Torture didn't make us safer, it just proved the terrorist propaganda right. We were evil and unjust.

And how does this keep you safe? I'd point out that all of these people were suspects. None of them had been convicted of a crime. If the US government can grab you off the street, stick you in prison, and torture you without having to prove you did anything at all, how safe are you from the government? 3,000 people out of a population of some 300,000,000 died on 9/11 -- that's one in every 100,000 people. One million are on the terrorist watch list -- that's one in every 300 people. Which set of odds do you like better?

Maybe the time has come to admit the truth; there's a good chance that Dick Cheney -- who many believe was the real power in the Bush White House -- is pretty much completely insane. Keep that in mind the next time some media type seeks out his opinion.

-Wisco


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Planet America

Things are looking good for former Bush administration officials. You wouldn't think this would be the case, looking at some of the news stories that have come out after they'd packed up their stuff and left the White House. But that'd be because you think rationally; that doesn't fly in DC anymore. Post-Bush, the nation's capital is still dominated by denial.

Sure, Bush was an abuser of the law and -- under the paranoiac Dick Cheney's guidance -- played a little fast and loose with legalities. But that doesn't mean he actually broke the law and, since we don't know for sure, we should probably forget the whole thing. When it comes to anti-Constitutional behavior, human rights abuses, and war crimes, it's probably best to ignore things -- no one wants to open up that whole can of worms. We used to say that no one was above the law, now we worry that upholding the law might be inconvenient or embarrassing. As it is now, some people are above the law -- but only if those people are members of the Bush administration.

Outside the US, people don't get this. They insist on bringing this stuff up over and over. Out in the big, wide world, they just don't get that the Bush administration gets a pass for anything and everything, because to do otherwise would be bad politics. Forgive and forget. Look forward, not backward. Let's move on. Some people don't get the simplicity of solving a problem by pretending it never happened.

Take David Crane, an international law professor at Syracuse University. As a former UN prosecutor, Crane is a citizen of that big, wide world and doesn't see things through the lens of political expediency and an insular American media. For Crane, the United States is not a separate planet in its own orbit and things that happen in one nation inform and set precedent for things that could -- and sometimes should -- happen in other nations.

In Crane's world -- which, admittedly, is that part of the world that isn't the US -- a warrant for the arrest of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir means that other leaders could be held accountable for their crimes.

Crane says that the Bashir warrant "may even be extended to the former president George W. Bush, on the grounds that some officials in terms of his administration engaged in harsh interrogation techniques on terror suspects which mostly amounted to torture." Turns out that when something's a war crime for one leader, it's a war crime for all leaders.

Crazy, huh?





But has the US actually tortured? We've called what we did "enhanced interrogation techniques." So it can't be torture, because we didn't call it that. Of course, the fact that we've "enhanced interrogation techniqued" people to death kind of puts a ding in that argument.

Griper News:

"[Prisoners] were handcuffed to fixed objects above their heads in order to keep them awake," reads the [Church report]. "Additionally, interrogations in both incidents involved the use of physical violence, including kicking, beating, and the use of 'compliance blows' which involved striking the [prisoners] legs with the [interrogators] knees. In both cases, blunt force trauma to the legs was implicated in the deaths. In one case, a pulmonary embolism developed as a consequence of the blunt force trauma, and in the other case pre-existing coronary artery disease was complicated by the blunt force trauma."

When you've got people dying because of your interrogation techniques, "enhanced" is an understatement. I'd also point out that interrogations are approached from a position of ignorance -- there are things you want to know, which is the entire purpose of the interrogation, and this means there are things you don't know. Among those things, you might reasonably include whether or not the subject knows anything more than you do and whether or not they're actually a terrorist. While many would argue that a terrorist deserves anything they get, not many would argue that we should punish a crime with torture or that we should punish a prisoner for a crime we don't know they committed. The assumption of guilt isn't justice.

But that's all logic and logic is a tool of that big, wide world. It's been banished from the separate planet that is the United States. Our government can do anything to anyone, because that's how they've kept us safe. Logic would dictate that if your government can do anything to anyone, then it can do anything to you, and this doesn't exactly make you safe from your government. Luckily for Bush and Cheney, logic doesn't fly here.

If it did, they might worry about a report on a UN probe of "secret" CIA prisons. I put "secret" in quotes because they're the worst-kept secret the US has -- everyone knows about them.

Of the prisons, Manfred Nowak, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, said, "We call on all governments to cooperate, not just in clarifying the facts, but in ensuring that such secret detention centres will no longer be used in the future." His colleague Martin Scheinin, Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counter-terrorism, went further, calling them "one of the most horrendous practices" that the Bush administration instituted after 9/11.

I'm guessing that Scheinin didn't know about this:

Raw Story:

Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh dropped a bombshell on Tuesday when he told an audience at the University of Minnesota that the military was running an "executive assassination ring" throughout the Bush years which reported directly to former Vice President Dick Cheney.

The remark came out seemingly inadvertently when Hersh was asked by the moderator of a public discussion of "America's Constitutional Crisis" whether abuses of executive power, like those which occurred under Richard Nixon, continue to this day.

"It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently," Hersh said. "They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. ... Congress has no oversight of it."

"It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on," he continued. "Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us."

I think the word you're looking for is "murder." When we weren't enhanced interrogating people to death, we were doing it the easy way -- with an assassin's bullet in their head. Hersh says he's collecting enough evidence to convince "even the most skeptical."

But, as I said, we don't live in the big, wide world where any of this is a problem. We live on Planet America, where the severity of a crime depends on the political convenience of that crime's prosecution. And prosecuting Bush, Cheney, and other former White House officials would be extremely inconvenient -- especially for a Democratic congress that refused to lift a finger while all of this was going on. There were no investigations into these international crimes and talk of impeachment was positively taboo. As a result, many of the Democratic congressional leadership are complicit. They may not have liked this stuff, but they allowed it and blocked every attempt to stop it.

And that's why we aren't going to see Bush or Cheney tried. Guilty of war crimes, guilty of murder, they'll make bundles of money speaking to right wing audiences about just how freakin' great they were. There's a truth commission building, but to be absolutely honest, that won't do a damned thing to keep a future group of White House lunatics and paranoiacs from doing exactly the same thing. Nothing short of arrest and trial would do that.

But that's not going to happen here on Planet America, because we want to pretend that the neocons acted alone. A complicit congress of enablers can't be shown for what they were.

-Wisco


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A Trickle When We Need a Flood

It's one of those good news/bad news things. Yesterday, the Justice Department released nine of the Bush administration's secret memos [all PDF] detailing legal opinions on the president's "War on Terror." What they reveal is a frightening disregard for American principles. Knowing that some of these memos would eventually come out, the Bush administration renounced the arguments put forward in them -- days before the new president took office.

McClatchy Newspapers:

In the waning days of the Bush administration, the Justice Department renounced some of its own sweeping legal justifications, which were enacted after the 9/11 attacks, for spying on Americans and for harsh interrogations of terror suspects.

In a memo written five days before President Barack Obama took office, Steven Bradbury, the then-principal deputy assistant attorney general, warned that a series of opinions issued secretly by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel "should not be treated as authoritative for any purpose."

Bradbury said he wrote the 11-page document to confirm that "certain propositions" in memos issued by the Justice Department from 2001 to 2003 "do not reflect the current views of this office."

They were just spitballin', throwing ideas at the wall to see which stuck, running them up the flag pole to see who saluted. Never mind that, from 2001 to 2003, those legal opinions remained unopposed by the Bush administration -- unused bullets in their arsenal of legal defense.

And, believe it or not, this is the good news part -- that these memos saw the light of day at all. The bad news is that the Obama administration is sitting on "dozens" more.





"We welcome the Justice Department's decision to release these memos, some of which provided the basis for the Bush administration's unlawful national security policies," said Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU National Security Project, in a statement. "These memos essentially argue that the president has a blank check to disregard the Constitution during wartime, not only on foreign battlefields, but also inside the United States. We hope today's release is a first step, because dozens of other OLC [Office of Legal Counsel] memos, including memos that provided the basis for the Bush administration's torture and warrantless wiretapping policies, are still being withheld. In order to truly turn the page on a lawless era, these memos should be released immediately."

Among the unreleased documents are legal arguments detailing "Legal standards for intelligence methods," "Laws and treaties regarding treatment of prisoners," "Criminal charges against American terrorists," and "Options for interpreting the Geneva Conventions."

And the released memos are bad enough. One argues that the president has king-like power to take away a person's rights. "The power to dispose of the liberty of individuals captured ... remain in the hands of the president alone," it reads.

Another stated that the First Amendment was basically a privilege, not a right. "First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully," it said.

"[White House legal counsels John Yoo and Robert Delahunty] said that in addition, the Posse Comitatus Act, which generally bars the military from domestic law enforcement operations, would pose no obstacle to the use of troops in a domestic fight against terrorism suspects," the New York Times reports. "They reasoned that the troops would be acting in a national security function, not as law enforcers." In other words, the president could use troops as police without declaring martial law.

"One of the central facts that we, collectively, have not yet come to terms with is how extremist and radical were the people running the country for the last eight years," writes constitutional scholar Glenn Greenwald. "That condition, by itself, made it virtually inevitable that the resulting damage would be severe and fundamental, even irreversible in some sense. It's just not possible to have a rotting, bloated, deeply corrupt and completely insular political ruling class -- operating behind impenetrable walls of secrecy -- and avoid the devastation that is now becoming so manifest. It's just a matter of basic cause and effect."

These memos came out as a result of an ACLU request under the Freedom of Information Act. However, while the ACLU requested "dozens" of these documents, the Obama administration has released nine. You'd hope more are on the way and that this isn't just the administration throwing the ACLU a bone.

But it very well may be the latter. The Obama administration has been surprisingly helpful to the previous administration's policy of secrecy. While it may be that these remaining documents are still under review -- they've been declared state secrets, after all, and it would be foolish to release them without being sure you're not giving anything away -- it may also be that Obama's unwilling to give up all the power Bush and Cheney centralized in the Oval Office.

"[E]ven a quick review of these newly disclosed documents leaves no doubt about their historical significance," writes Greenwald, calling them a "grotesque blueprint for what the U.S. Government became" under Bush. Greenwald says these aren't just memos (they're all very large files, not just notes), but rather "the official and formal position of the U.S. Government -- at least of the omnipotent Executive Branch -- from the time it was issued until just several days before George Bush left office..."

So that's the bad news. There are more of these things still secret than those that have been revealed. If these are the only memos that will be released, then it'll be hard to argue that Obama's not protecting Bush and, by extension, the expanded executive powers Bush claimed.

Those powers are a legal fiction and applying them is an abuse by default. Hanging on to Bush's legal arguments can't possibly serve any purpose helpful to you or me. It can only help a president abuse his office.

-Wisco

Shooting Down Missile Defense

Long, long ago, shrouded in the mists of ancient history (i.e., December 2006), I wrote a post I titled "The Only Purpose of Missile Defense is to Waste Money." At that point in time, we had blown $95 billion on missile defense systems since Ronald Reagan jotted his "Star Wars" notion on the back of a matchbook. What we got out of all this spending and research was nothing. We still have no working missile defense system. Worse, after the fall of the Soviet Union, missile defense became a solution in search of a problem -- its reason for being is to counter a threat that no longer exists.

In that post, I wrote:

So why is the Bush administration pushing this? Did I mention that we've spent $95 billion on it? Throwing pots of cash at defense contractors is what Bush does. It doesn't make any difference whether or not it works -- a failed test is exactly as expensive as a successful one -- the only thing that matters is that it allows people who are already unbelievably rich to reach into your wallet and grab your tax dollars. Who cares if it works?

Oddly, with all the Republican complaining about wasteful spending, missile defense hasn't really made an appearance. Obama has signaled that he might be open to placing a missile defense system in Poland, so it's not like the subject hasn't come up. For the GOP, wasteful spending means monitoring volcanoes so we're prepared for eruptions, not throwing money at stupid-expensive missile systems that may not actually work and have never been adequately tested. Bailing you out because you got suckered into a crap mortgage is "pork," while throwing billions at defense contractors for what amounts to a lucky charm is sound fiscal policy.

Starting to see how we got into this economic mess in the first place?





Since Obama's election, Bush loyalists have been quietly freaking out that he may not really be willing to waste money hand over fist on missile defense anymore. The military has never been very excited about missile defense (Pentagon officials refer to civilian MD advocates as "missile defense moonies"), so it's not like they see any worth to the systems. But those Bush loyalists sure do. And they've made repeated attempts to get you to panic at the thought of abandoning it.

Wall Street Journal, "Obama and Missile Defense," former Ambassador to the UN John Bolton, Nov. 2008:

Freeing America from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty's antiquated constraints is rightly regarded as one of President Bush's most significant achievements. In 2001, we believed that the Russian strategic threat had eased. But the emerging threats from rogue states possessing a few nuclear-capable ballistic missiles required that we develop adequate defenses -- especially because many emerging nuclear-weapons states do not accept the same calculus of deterrence that maintained the Cold War's uneasy nuclear standoff. The demise of the ABM Treaty allows America to defend itself from these threats.

For a new Obama administration to retreat from this achievement, as many in the arms-control "community" have advocated, would be a significant step backward. His campaign position about deployment after the technology is "proved" is an excuse never to deploy missile defenses -- because nothing in the military field is ever conclusively proven for all time. Rebuffing [Polish President] Kaczynski is also precisely the wrong response to [Russian President] Medvedev's provocation. It will surely be read as weakness, and not only in Moscow. In fact, Moscow announced yesterday there would be no more missile-defense negotiations before Jan. 20.

Missile defense is only unproven because it can't be proven. It seems that firing a missile and knocking it down isn't proof -- mostly because our missile defense system can't do it. If it won't work in controlled situations, why assume it'll work in the field? The word for that is "faith." I'm not convinced we should be spending billions on faith-based weapons systems. And many in the know think Obama isn't either.

"I think it's on the back burner," James F. Collins, director of Russia studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former ambassador to Moscow, told FOX News earlier this month. "I read the Obama and other statements more or less as tentative about this system in the sense that they aren't going to put huge investment in it unless they can figure out it's going to work."

More recently, Obama himself gave missile defense moonies reason to worry. "In this budget, we will end education programs that don’t work and end direct payments to large agribusinesses that don’t need them," the president said in his address to a joint session of congress this week. "We’ll eliminate the no-bid contracts that have wasted billions in Iraq, and reform our defense budget so that we’re not paying for Cold War-era weapons systems we don’t use." That budget comes out today. Whether or not MD takes a hit remains to be seen.

But you'd hope that sanity will finally prevail. Missile defense is an idea that should be allowed to die. It's never worked, no one can explain how it's ever going to work, and it answers a threat that doesn't actually exist. What I said in 2006 is just as true today -- the only purpose of missile defense is to waste money.

-Wisco

Bush's Loose Nukes

George W. Bush has no plans to retire any time soon. A post at Think Progress reminds us that Bush plans to make "ridiculous" amounts of money on the speaking circuit. While he'd probably be more valuable as a frank and honest witness to his own incompetence, criminality, and hubris, this is George W. Bush we're talking about here. Bush doesn't plan any truth-telling tours, putting all his mistakes on display so we can all learn from them. Former president Bush plans to be exactly like then-president Bush -- three gallons of smart in a fifty gallon drum, with BS making up the difference.

What people will spend the big money to hear will be Baron George Von Munchausen spinning tall tales of his own greatness. That is, if his bio at his agency -- Washington Speakers Bureau -- is any indication:

President George W. Bush served in the Oval Office for eight of the most consequential years in American history. Faced with challenges from a terrorist attack to a global financial crisis, he made difficult decisions that will shape the nation’s course and world affairs for decades to come. His leadership after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, was an inspiration to millions of Americans. His policies, while controversial at times, kept the country safe for more than seven years and liberated more than 50 million people from tyranny.

Say what you like about President George, but he kept us safe -- that is, if you start counting right after the most deadly terrorist attack in American history. If you throw 9/11 into the mix, Bush averages more than one terrorist murder on American soil for every day of his presidency. In the "keeping us safe" category, Bush sucked just as badly as he did at everything else.





But, of course, we aren't supposed to point that out. We're supposed to pretend that 9/11 happened, they turned on the batsignal on top of the White House, and George W. Bush answered the call. We're supposed to pretend that a president eight months into his first term had just moved in and was unpacking. We're suppose to believe that George W. Bush was virtually born on 9/11 and everything that happened before then didn't actually occur.

And Bush would have us dismiss the problems after 9/11 as mere "controversy." For the Bush administration, spin has always been the answer. All problems were problems of public relations and could be fixed with photo-ops, propaganda campaigns, and nifty catch-phrases. And this approach to problem-solving (i.e., problem-not-solving) is still coming back to us.

Government Executive:

A number of institutions with licenses to hold nuclear material reported to the Energy Department in 2004 that the amount of material they held was less than agency records indicated. But rather than investigating the discrepancies, Energy officials wrote off significant quantities of nuclear material from the department's inventory records.

That's just one of the findings of a report released on Monday by Energy Department Inspector General Gregory Friedman that concluded "the department cannot properly account for and effectively manage its nuclear materials maintained by domestic licensees and may be unable to detect lost or stolen material."

Auditors found that Energy could not accurately account for the quantities and locations of nuclear material at 15 out of 40, or 37 percent, of facilities reviewed. The materials written off included 20,580 grams of enriched uranium, 45 grams of plutonium, 5,001 kilograms of normal uranium and 189,139 kilograms of depleted uranium.

"Considering the potential health risks associated with these materials and the potential for misuse should they fall into the wrong hands, the quantities written off were significant," the report tells us. "Even in small quantities normally held by individual domestic licensees, special nuclear materials such as enriched uranium and plutonium, if not properly handled, potentially pose serious health hazards."

Suddenly, I feel a lot less safe -- even in retrospect. "Significant quantities" of nuclear materials are missing and the administration's solution was to fix the numbers so they match. Problem solved. Meanwhile, there are still materials out there somewhere, doing who knows what who knows where for who knows what purpose. Nearly two metric tons of depleted uranium alone are missing; a possible ingredient in a "dirty bomb" -- i.e., a polluting device meant to spread radioactivity and cause panic. That's "keeping us safe," as defined by Bush's Department of Energy.

So Bush can start his new job as historical turd polisher -- he may even manage to get a nice shine on the turd that was his presidency. But it's still a turd and stories like this one will still come out. That's the problem with history; it comes with consequences.

But that's just "controversy." The man born on 9/11 is a big freakin' hero and an example of presidential perfection.

What, you don't believe me?

Ask him yourself.

-Wisco

What if Bush was the Peanut Guy?

The Peanut Corporation of America is responsible for hundreds of cases of salmonella in the United States. Investigators found "dead rodents, rodent excrement and bird feathers" in its Plainview, Texas processing plant, prompting the Texas Department of State Health Services to recall every product ever made from peanuts shipped from the facility. In Blakely, Georgia, the story is the same -- Peanut Corporation of America ran an astonishingly unclean operation. All told, 600 people have suffered food poisoning. Nine have died. Calls to the company's telephone number "elicited a recording that said it was no longer in service." For all intents and purposes, Peanut Corporation of America no longer exists.

But the man ultimately responsible for his company's operations still exists. PCA owner Stewart Parnell was subpoenaed to testify to congress. He pleaded the fifth and refused to testify.

Clearly, congress has hit a dead end. Parnell can't possibly be prosecuted, his company is in no danger of ever returning to poison people, and it's time to let bygones be bygones. What we need to do is find out what happened, so we can avoid it ever happening again. And the best way to do that is to put together a blue ribbon panel and hold a third world style truth and reconciliation commission. No one will be charged, no one will go to jail, no one will pay any price, Parnell can get on with his life and we can get on with ours. But we'll get the truth and that's what really counts.

You might've noticed that my little synopsis veered off into crazy town around the third paragraph. Of course Stewart Parnell should be prosecuted -- along with those managers and executives who helped him sell garbage to unsuspecting families. So what if his company is shut down and will never sell poison again? So what if he won't testify? So what if all this has happened in the past?

Parnell lacks one quality that would apparently put him above or beyond the law -- he's not a former President of the United States. Stewart Parnell is just a former Poison Peanut King. When anyone else has committed a crime, they have to face the legal system. When a former President has committed a crime, we have to have a truth commission -- without prosecutions -- to get to the bottom of the crime and let the criminals walk away. There will be no jail time, there would only be embarrassment for the accused -- that is, if he weren't shameless. But the accused is shameless, so there wouldn't even be that. He would face the wagging finger of justice and retire to Dallas a rich, rich man. Maybe hire a ghost-writer and put out a memoir. And his example would do absolutely nothing to prevent future executives from committing similar crimes. After all, the crime without any real consequence might as well be legal -- without punishment, there is no crime.





But this is Sen. Patrick Leahy's solution -- not to the garbage vendor's crimes, of course, just to Bush's. What we need is a truth and reconciliation commission that, in any practical sense, would be a panel put together to write history. They'd have subpoena power and the ability to prosecute perjury, but no power to prosecute the underlying crimes. We'd get the truth, while criminals in the Bush administration get off scott free.

"People would be invited to come forward and share their knowledge and experiences, not for purposes of constructing criminal indictments, but to assemble the facts," Leahy said. "If needed, such a process could involve subpoena powers, and even the authority to obtain immunity from prosecutions in order to get to the whole truth."

Some find Leahy's suggestion a frustratingly wrongheaded. "There's no question that torture occurred here," constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann tuesday. "There's no question that it was a war crime. And so the only reason to have a commission of this kind is to avoid doing what we're obligated to do under a treaty."

"It is shameful that we would be calling for this type of commission..." Turley continued. "We're obligated to investigate. This whole discussion in front of the whole world is basically saying that we are not going to comply with the promise we made, not to ourselves, but to the world." Not surprisingly, law professor Turley is absolutely correct about our obligations under international law. Prosecuting torture is not optional. In other words, Leahy's solution is most likely illegal.

"At the end of the day, no one believes that people will be prosecuted for a known war crime -- and when we do that then we will become accessories," Turley said. "Those crimes of President Bush will become our crimes. His shame will become our collective shame."

Even worries that prosecutions would be politically unfeasible are misplaced. A USA Today/Gallup poll finds that about two thirds support investigations and, of those who want probes into Bush crimes, about 61% want to see prosecutions. In fact, more people (34%) would rather do nothing than those who'd like to see Leahy's proposal (24%). And it's hard to imagine that many who preferred Leahy's idea would be heartbroken if there were prosecutions. I think if you polled people and asked them which solutions they opposed most, you'd probably wind up with very different numbers.

If Leahy's truth and reconciliation commission is the best we get, I'll take it. But it's not the best we can do. We can hold criminals accountable for their crimes, no matter who they are or what position they used to hold. It doesn't matter if they were the president of a peanut company or President of the United States, the law is for everyone and applies to everyone. We shouldn't let crimes go unpunished unless we've got a damned good reason to do so.

In the case of George W. Bush and his administration, that "damned good reason" just isn't there. As I said, if you don't punish a crime, then it might as well be legal. With Leahy's proposal, some future president considering crime could look back in history and say, "Let's go ahead and do it, the worst that could happen is that we wind up like Bush."

No one fears the wagging finger of justice.

-Wisco

'The Only Solution Given is Pills'

The Army has a bit of a problem. Despite efforts to curb suicide among troops, Army suicides continue to rise. "One week after the U.S. Army announced record suicide rates among its soldiers last year, the service is worried about a spike in possible suicides in the new year," CNN reported yesterday. "The Army said it already has confirmed seven suicides, with 17 additional cases pending that it believes investigators will confirm as suicides for January.

"If those prove true, more soldiers will have killed themselves than died in combat last month. According to Pentagon statistics, there were 16 U.S. combat deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq in January."

In fact, the Army has seen a rise in suicide every year for the past four years. To combat the problem, the service has created a "battle-buddy" program, which is basically the buddy system for suicide, but this has turned out to be as ineffective as you might have thought it would be.

In 2005, in testimony to a House Appropriations subcommittee, the Army’s surgeon general placed the blame squarely on the troops. "That’s still part of our culture: Real men don’t see [mental health counselors]…" said Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley. "I would like to see a culture that resets the force mentally." Macho, tough guy culture was killing troops, but it seems a pretty safe assumption that this culture had been with the Army longer than its suicide problem. I don't remember the Army having a previous reputation as being a place for sharing and emotional support. Clearly, this "real men" culture -- which, of course, includes real women -- may be aggravating the problem, but it couldn't possibly be the cause.

For their part, the Army seems at a loss to explain the real cause of the suicides. "This is terrifying," Col. Kathy Platoni, chief clinical psychologist for the Army Reserve and National Guard told CNN. "We do not know what is going on." She speculated that maybe it was winter blahs.

"There is more hopelessness and helplessness because everything is so dreary and cold," she said.

"But Platoni said she sees the multiple deployments, stigma associated with seeking treatment and the excessive use of anti-depressants as ongoing concerns for mental-health professionals who work with soldiers," CNN reported.

Now we're getting someplace.





"Unfortunately, I don't find [the rise in suicides] very surprising," John Soltz, an Iraq war vet and founder of VoteVets.org, told MSNBC's Tamron Hall. He said that, of the some 160,000 troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, "twenty thousand of them are medicated on different things like Prozac and Zoloft."

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD, Soltz said, wasn't considered seriously enough and, if a soldier does complain of mental or emotional stress, Army doctors will "just give you a pill and send you back to combat."

In a June TIME magazine piece titled "America's Medicated Army" journalist Mark Thompson spoke to a service member about his experience in Iraq. "You don't always know who the bad guys are. When you search someone's house, you have it built up in your mind that these guys are terrorists, but when you go in, there's little bitty tiny shoes and toys on the floor -- things like that started affecting me a lot more than I thought they would," said Sergeant Christopher LeJeune. "It's not easy for soldiers to admit the problems that they're having over there for a variety of reasons. If they do admit it, then the only solution given is pills." LeJeune says he was given the antidepressant Zoloft and the antianxiety drug clonazepam.

Looking at the warnings, this seems like an insane combination. Zoloft warnings include, "You may have thoughts about suicide when you first start taking an antidepressant, especially if you are younger than 24 years old." Meanwhile, clonazepam users are warned, "People who have underlying depression should be closely monitored while taking clonazepam, especially if they are at risk for attempting suicide."

In May of 2006, the Hartford Courant did an investigation of the military's drug prescription practices and found "a growing number of mentally troubled service members who are being kept in combat and treated with potent psychotropic medications -- a little-examined practice driven in part by a need to maintain troop strength."

Among the paper's findings:

-Antidepressant medications with potentially serious side effects are being dispensed with little or no monitoring and sometimes minimal counseling, despite FDA warnings that the drugs can increase suicidal thoughts.

-Military doctors treating combat stress symptoms are sending some soldiers back to the front lines after rest and a three-day regimen of drugs -- even though experts say the drugs typically take two to six weeks to begin working.

-The emphasis on maintaining troop numbers has led some military doctors to misjudge the severity of mental health symptoms.

If John Soltz's numbers are correct, these conditions are true for 12.5% of troops stationed in Afghanistan and Iraq. And the Army isn't tracking this at all. The TIME article tells us, "At a Pentagon that keeps statistics on just about everything, there is no central clearinghouse for this kind of data, and the Army hasn't consistently asked about prescription-drug use, which makes it difficult to track." In fact, TIME tells us:

Military families wonder about the [Army's reliance on prescription drugs], according to Joyce Raezer of the private National Military Family Association. "Boy, it's really nice to have these drugs," she recalls a military doctor saying, "so we can keep people deployed." And professionals have their doubts. "Are we trying to bandage up what is essentially an insufficient fighting force?" asks Dr. Frank Ochberg, a veteran psychiatrist and founding board member of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.

Given everything we know about the use of psychotropic drugs to medicate soldiers, it seems amazing that few would make the connection with the rising suicide rates. But admitting the connection would've meant an admission of failure by the Bush administration -- something they just didn't do. The military was "completely overextended by the Bush administration," said Soltz, adding that he hoped the Obama administration would do a better job of addressing these issues.

That hope should be shared by most of us, since it seems pretty clear that we're killing our own troops in an attempt to keep them in the field.

-Wisco

The Man in the Iron Bubble

Maybe if we all take up a collection, we can raise enough money to bribe Dick Cheney to just go away. He may be the most politically tone deaf politician in recent history, acting as if everyone agrees that the Bush administration's policies have been dazzling in their genius. You wonder if Dick actually checks any news sources or if he just relies on a circle of fawning sycophants who only tell him what he wants to hear. If Bush was the boy in the bubble, Cheney's may be the model that bubble was based on.

Or maybe "bubble" is the wrong word. More like "armored iron sphere." Not only doesn't truth seem to reach Dick, but it seems to be actively repelled. Nothing sinks in, because no truth ever gets close enough to touch him. There's a certain segment of the population who seem to believe that you can force your beliefs to become fact. All it takes is a sincere and fervent faith that your view of the universe is correct and it magically becomes true, true, true. You see it with creationists, Holocaust-deniers, global warming naysayers, free market moonies, and other various and assorted species of flatearthers. No fact can get in, because facts are the enemy of faith. Every bit of evidence that your position is wrong -- no matter how damning or conclusive -- is rejected immediately. The logic of this illogical thinking is simple; you're right, therefore, any evidence to the contrary must be wrong. That's all the proof you need to keep believing that the Earth is in the thrall of UFO overlords or that Vladimir Putin is really a robot or that Dick Cheney is right.

Of course, it may just be that the former-VP is just slinging propaganda when he pretends to be as ignorant and stupid as he often seems to be. It may just be that Dick's familiar with reality, but uses lies and fearmongering to try to change our perception of it. It may just be that he's not wrapped in a cocoon of yes men.

But, as always when we're talking about neocons, I'll go ahead and take them at their word on what they believe and don't believe. I'll assume that Dick Cheney's not a lying sack, but just a stupid and ignorant man. Honestly, you can't be generous with these people -- it's completely impossible. Your choices are always "they're lying" or "they're stupid." Somewhere along the line, we've established that it's a terrible, terrible thing to call these guys liars, so we're left with stupid. And that's being charitable.





While it's both fun and easy to throw rocks at Dick like this, I do have a reason to revisit the bad old days of a couple of weeks ago, when Dick Cheney and his sidekick (some guy named Bob Shrub or Jimmie Tree or Lennie Asparagus... something like that) worked in the White House, desperately trying to rewrite history in their favor. It was called the "Legacy Project" and the idea was to make a last, Hail-Mary attempt to rehab the neoconservative image after eight long years of nearly uninterrupted disaster.

But there's no reason that the attempt has to stop after the Bush administration (that's the name! Bush) left the White House. As former administration officials, they can still get a reporter or two to come a'runnin' whenever they feel the need drop some whoppers and try to get everyone to wet their pants just one more time.

In this case, it was three reporters; Mike Allen, Jim Vanderhei, and John Harris of Politico. I guess dealing with the sheer volume of horse crap here is a big job that takes many hands.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney warned that there is a “high probability” that terrorists will attempt a catastrophic nuclear or biological attack in coming years, and said he fears the Obama administration’s policies will make it more likely the attempt will succeed.

In an interview Tuesday with Politico, Cheney unyieldingly defended the Bush administration’s support for the Guantanamo Bay prison and coercive interrogation of terrorism suspects.

That's right, one more pitch for torture. I won't say "one last pitch," because I'm sure it's not. If Dick's as much of a psycho- or sociopath as he seems to be, I'd imagine that it's hard to get him to shut the hell up about torture. I so don't want to know what sites the bookmarks on his laptop link to.

I could go through and point out the problems with Dick's view, but that'd just mean rewriting older posts. Suffice it to say that Dick only knows one song -- "WE'RE ALL GOING TO FREAKIN' DIE!!!" We all know how it goes, it's been stuck in our heads for the last eight years. Dick can come up with nothing new, despite the fact that the mojo wore off this particular spell a long time ago. We're tired of being terrified. It's probably time to give courage a spin.

But Dick's in his iron bubble and it doesn't make any difference whether the bubble is real or he's just pretending it is. Either way, he can't stop behaving as if we're all on the same page, 100% behind the path the mastermind Bush administration laid out for us.

It's almost sad, really. This tired, sick old mental patient babbling away as if anything he said made any sense and as if every word hadn't worn out its welcome a long, long time ago. Like a lunatic on street corner, Dick yells out "The end is near!" to anyone who comes within shouting distance.

Maybe it's time everyone started avoiding that street.

-Wisco

There's Only One Side to This Story

It's easy to look at a new Rasmussen poll and think that the United States is no longer a nation of laws. In that poll, 54% think war crimes weren't committed by the Bush administration. Worse, only 25% do. 70% believe "it would be bad for the United States if the former president and senior administration officials were brought to trial for war crimes," with even 54% of Democrats agreeing.

But these are the results of a population kept in ignorance. The media, with their stupid "two sides to every story" reporting, felt the need to pretend that no one really knows what torture actually is. Congress, spineless throughout the Bush's two terms -- even when his approvals were in the tank -- got the vapors and fell into a faint every time someone mentioned holding any Bushie accountable for anything. There were investigations into all sorts of crimes, complete with sacrificial lambs, but when it came right down to it, the investigations didn't accomplish anything, because there was no action taken on the findings. If the public thinks torture isn't a war crime, the press and Congress can be blamed for it. When it comes to this issue, both have failed miserably. The correct response to Rasmussen's question about war crimes should've been "how the hell should I know? No one tells me anything."

Those who study the issue closely and have some expertise in determining torture have done just that -- determined that the US, under orders from the Bush administration, has tortured. There isn't any gray area here; it's a crime like rape or theft -- either you did it or you didn't, you can't kind of do it a little, but not really.





In July 2008, the Red Cross determined that torture was being used by the United States. The report, cited in Jane Mayer's "The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals," tells us that the methods used on Abu Zubaydah were "categorically" torture and included being confined in a box "so small he said he had to double up his limbs in the fetal position" and waterboarding. The Red Cross told the CIA "that the abuse constituted war crimes, placing the highest officials in the U.S. government in jeopardy of being prosecuted."

Similarly, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Manfred Nowak told CNN recently that the US had an "obligation" to investigate war crimes by the Bush administration, saying that there's already enough information out there to prosecute former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

"We have clear evidence," he said. "In our report that we sent to the United Nations, we made it clear that former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld clearly authorized torture methods and he was told at that time by Alberto Mora, the legal council of the Navy, 'Mr. Secretary, what you are actual ordering here amounts to torture.' So, there we have the clear evidence that Mr. Rumsfeld knew what he was doing but, nevertheless, he ordered torture."

But, as I said, the media has this idiotic "two sides to every story" theory, which allows any idiot to spew BS and cast doubt on any issue -- no matter how settled. They do it with global warming, they do it with evolution, they even did it with tobacco and cancer, and now they're doing it with torture. This doesn't inform, all it does is confuse.

"The problem for the Bush administration is that they perfected plausible deniability techniques," constitutional law expert Johnathan Turley told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow in an interview about Red Cross report. "They bring out one or two people that are willing to debate on cable shows whether waterboarding is torture and it leaves the impression that its a closed question.

"It's not..."

As a result, people watch pundits try to talk over each other on cable news shows and actually come away from it less informed. There has never, in the entire legal history of the United States, been a time when waterboarding wasn't clearly torture. There has been no case where the defendant was charged with torture, but was later found innocent because it was "just waterboarding." It is torture and it is a crime.

Speaking to MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, Turley explained that Obama is required to investigate and prosecute torture. If not, Barack Obama becomes an accessory to the crime. He told Olbermann he had "very little sympathy for the people that committed this torture. I've heard President Obama say we don't want talented people at the CIA looking over their shoulders. Well those talented people in this circumstance would be torturers."

"But in reality nobody thinks that they're going to be prosecuted," Turley continued. "They have something called the estoppel defense where they can say that they were told by people like John Yoo and others that what they did was legal. That does not protect the president and the vice president, and they're the ones and the people just below them who deserve to be investigated and they must be prosecuted if they've committed war crimes or we will shred four treaties and at least four statutes."

The majority of Americans who believe that war crimes weren't committed can hardly be blamed for their confusion. Torture apologists have used the media's "two sides to every story" reporting to their advantage, throwing doubt on what was once a widely accepted truth -- just as creationists have.

But the Barack Obama administration can't make the same claim. They know a crime has been committed and they have a choice to make. Barack Obama has said that we have to look forward, rather than look backward.

I can only hope this doesn't mean he'll look the other way. Because that would be a crime.

-Wisco

Gitmo's Closing, Everybody Panic!

Now that Barack Obama has signed an executive order to close the detention facility (read "prison camp") at Guantánamo Bay, one thing is becoming clear -- we're all going to freakin' die. Depending on which right wing nut you ask, the president will have no choice but to move at least one deadly terrorist into either your bedroom or your closet. We are doomed.

Writing for the Center for American Progress, blogger Matthew Yglesias helpfully lays out the arguments being advanced by talking heads in the media. Unfortunately for those same talking heads, he translates the arguments from BS into English:

-The fact that the Bush administration has let dangerous terrorists go free means Obama should keep innocent people detained.

-The fact that the Bush administration screwed up the paperwork on detainees shows that there was more wisdom to Bush’s policies than Obama acknowledged on the campaign trail.

-Obama’s promise of change was empty and hypocritical because it will take time to implement his executive orders.

-The “Guantánamo” issue is primarily about the physical location of the facility rather than the legal status or treatment of the detainees.

-Since many liberals live in San Francisco, anyone who thinks it would be ill-advised to transfer prisoners to a museum in the San Francisco Bay that hasn’t been a prison for decades is a hypocrite.

When you put it that way -- i.e., in plain English -- the arguments don't look so good. No fair using logic, because reality has a liberal bias.





But the argument that's being thrown around the most is that released detainees are "returning to the battlefield." This isn't so much true. The Pentagon has claimed that 61 detainees have "returned to the fight," but can't confirm that number. In fact, of those 61, 43 are "suspected" of terrorist activities.

"[T]hey’ve failed to identify names, numbers, dates, times, places, or acts upon which their report relies. Every time they have been required to identify the parties, the DOD has been forced to retract their false IDs and their numbers," wrote Mark Denbeaux of Seton Hall Law School. "They have included people who have never even set foot in Guantánamo—much less were they released from there. They have counted people as 'returning to the fight' for their having written an Op-ed piece in the New York Times and for their having appeared in a documentary exhibited at the Cannes Film Festival. The DOD has revised and retracted their internally conflicting definitions, criteria, and their numbers so often that they have ceased to have any meaning—except as an effort to sway public opinion by painting a false portrait of the supposed dangers of these men."

So writing for the New York Times or being interviewed for a documentary is terrorism. Someone arrest William Kristol immediately. He obviously plans to kill us all.

Also ignored is the unfortunate fact that the Guantánamo prison has done nothing to reduce terrorism in the world. In fact, it's had the opposite effect.

Agence France-Presse:

A US closure of Guantánamo Bay could deprive militants of a major propaganda tool and help Pakistan in the fight against extremism, analysts said Sunday.

Opened in January 2002 after the United States invaded Afghanistan to oust the Taliban regime for sheltering Al-Qaeda, the prison detained hundreds of alleged militants without judicial review.

As the United States sought to fend off accusations that tactics at Guantánamo amounted to torture, the prison became fodder for militants who used its imagery to capture young minds and recruit volunteers to drive extremist attacks.

[...]

Pictures of open-air cages, inmates wearing orange jumpsuits with black bags over their heads and testimony from ex-prisoners about ill-treatment made Guantánamo a symbol of the worst excesses in the US-led "war on terror".

Worse, many of the people we put there weren't terrorists. These people developed an understandably poor opinion of the United States while they were in our torture camp. Far from keeping us safer, Gitmo has been a terrorist recruitment center.

"A McClatchy investigation found that instead of confining terrorists, Guantánamo often produced more of them by rounding up common criminals, conscripts, low-level foot soldiers and men with no allegiance to radical Islam — thus inspiring a deep hatred of the United States in them — and then housing them in cells next to radical Islamists," Wrote McClatchy Newspapers' Tom Lasseter in June of 2008. "The radicals were quick to exploit the flaws in the U.S. detention system."

How many of these terrorists "returning to the battlefield" are actually fighting for the first time? It may be impossible to know. But we do know that more terrorists have come out of Gitmo than have gone in. Lasseter calls it a "school for Jihad." Guantánamo is having exactly the opposite of its intended effect. It doesn't reduce terrorism, it increases it -- either by giving terrorist organizations a propaganda tool or by radicalizing non-terrorist detainees.

In the end, there is no good reason to keep Guantánamo open. None of the arguments in favor of it are any good and all of the arguments in favor of closure are sound and reality-based.

If you still feel the need for something to freak out about, then freak out about the fact that Gitmo's still operating. Every day it exists increases terrorism in the world.

-Wisco

Leader of the Chumps

Right wing media has always been home to demagogues and ridiculous boobs. Hannity, O'Reilly, Beck, etc. are the opinionmakers for the dimwitted, the slow, the gullible, and the Kool-Aid drinkers. Faced with the presidency of Barack Obama, their tiny heads seem ready to explode with apoplectic nutbaggery. They tend to pretend that George W. Bush leaves office tremendously popular and those 73% of us who were glad to see him go are just the lunatic fringe -- a small group of gripers and "Bush haters." Luckily for the BS slingers, right wing media fans are bad at math -- if they weren't, they wouldn't support Bushian economics -- and don't realize that the numbers say that they're the kooks on the outer reaches of public opinion.

But seldom has the idiocy of right wing media been so well demonstrated as it was by Rush Limbaugh recently. In talking about "a major American print publication" that wanted a 400-word statement of his "hope for the Obama presidency," Limbaugh took a trip through the valley of sour grapes:

So I’m thinking of replying to the guy, “Okay, I’ll send you a response, but I don’t need 400 words, I need four: I hope he fails.” (interruption) What are you laughing at? See, here’s the point. Everybody thinks it’s outrageous to say. Look, even my staff, “Oh, you can’t do that.” Why not? Why is it any different, what’s new, what is unfair about my saying I hope liberalism fails? Liberalism is our problem. Liberalism is what’s gotten us dangerously close to the precipice here. Why do I want more of it? I don’t care what the Drive-By story is. I would be honored if the Drive-By Media headlined me all day long: “Limbaugh: I Hope Obama Fails.” Somebody’s gotta say it.

The problem, Rush, is that this isn't extremely logical (big surprise there, huh?). If liberalism is the problem, you don't actually have to hope it fails -- it will. What Rush is doing -- besides putting ideology above the good of the nation -- is putting ideology above effectiveness. The sort of policies Rush espouses have most definitely failed -- 68% of us think so.





So, if modern Republicanism has failed, then Limbaugh is illogically defending those failed policies. In hoping that Obama fails, Rush not only ignores the smoking ruin left behind by Bush, but the possibility that he's been wrong for his entire career. The only reason he wishes disaster on an Obama administration is because it'll hurt what he calls "liberalism" -- but if this liberalism succeeds, then wouldn't that be evidence that it actually works better?

Of course it would be, which is why Rush hopes it fails. He's too invested in the ideology of right wing media to accept the possibility of success coming from the Democratic party. Limbaugh has to hope Obama will fail, because he has no confidence at all that Obama will fail. And, of course, if President Obama's a big success story, Limbaugh will spend most of his time trying to convince the easily convinced that it's not. It doesn't have anything to do with what's good for America, it has to do with what's good for the Republican party. Because that's what's good for Rush Limbaugh.

In an interview with Sean Hannity, Limbaugh expanded on this theme. He went on some insane rant that the recognition of the fact that Barack Obama is America's first black president is racism. Seriously. Just acknowledging a historical fact is racist.

LIMBAUGH: We are being told that we have to hope he succeeds, that we have to bend over, grab the ankles, bend over forward, backward, whichever, because his father was black, because this is the first black president.

No, we should hope he succeeds because if he fails, we fail. It's pretty simple.

I suppose you could argue that, if the shoe were on the other foot, I might feel the same way. But I've seen what a failed presidency looks like. Among the consequences is a tremendous death toll, even if you ignore the economic craphole we're in. There's no way I want to go through that again, no matter who gets elected.

This is what we'll be going through for the next four years -- at least. Stupidity, whining, and BS from the right. No matter how badly their ideology fails, it'll always be right and the left will always be wrong. And not because they worry about what's best for America, but because they know which side their bread is buttered on.

And all those slow learners, all those chumps, will repeat everything the right wing media says, because they're too damned sheepish and afraid to try thinking for themselves.

--Wisco

Not Prosecuting Torture is a Crime in Itself

George W. Bush wasn't going to be the president forever. That seems obvious to most people, but it almost seems to have caught Republicans in Washington by surprise. The president who brought his party to near irrelevance is gone now, but his actions linger on. Bush, having brought even more disaster to the Republican party than he did to the nation, leaves behind a legacy of crime and scandal. Having once hoped he would rebuild American government to match his vision, Bush left DC in worse shape than he found it -- the nation is impatient to see the vision undone.

Still, some Republicans seem to be completely unaware of these new realities, behaving as if nothing had changed, as if the Republican party were still wildly popular, and as if Bush's legacy is anything other than one of failure.

Politico:

Eric Holder’s confirmation vote before the Judiciary Committee will be delayed for up to a week as Republican senators continue to press him on his views about interrogation and other Bush administration intelligence methods.

The Judiciary Committee was originally scheduled to vote today on Holder’s nomination as attorney general, but Republicans have objected, and under committee rules they can delay the vote for up to a week. Holder was grilled last week by Republicans on his views about interrogations, Guantanamo Bay and his involvement in the 2001 pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) is seeking more information from Holder on whether the Department of Justice will pursue criminal prosecutions of "intelligence personnel" involved in detainee interrogations.

It was going to be the pardon of Marc Rich that was going to be the bump in the road to Holder's confirmation, but he went and told the senate in testimony that waterboarding is torture. Of course, it's their fault for asking him -- no one who's given it serious thought thinks it's not. "If you look at the history of the use of that technique, " Holder said, "we prosecuted our own soldiers for using it in Vietnam... Waterboarding is torture."





The question here isn't whether Holder will be confirmed -- it's a near certainty that he will. The question is what the hell answer was it they expected? The idea that waterboarding doesn't fit the definition of torture was always a legal fiction designed to create a loophole. Only ideologues and fools bought it. Any honest reading of the law would find it to be torture.

Which leaves John Cornyn, whose vocal support for torture would cause any principled human being to be ashamed of himself, in a bit of a quandary; he can try to block Holder's confirmation, but what would be the point? The next nominee would give the same answer -- and the next and the next. See, that's the problem with being dead wrong. You have to look long and hard for someone who'll agree with you.

In fact, the torture debate is pretty much over. Turns out, we're pretty solidly against it. A Washington Post/ABC News poll finds that most respondents opposed torture -- in any circumstance. In a question that suggests even the ridiculous "ticking time bomb" scenario, people where asked, "Obama has said that under his administration the United States will not use torture as part of the U.S. campaign against terrorism, no matter what the circumstance. Do you support this position not to use torture, or do you think there are cases in which the United States should consider torture against terrorism suspects?"

58% -- a clear majority -- said no, torture should never be used, regardless of the circumstance. This would've been higher, but Republicans continue to be outside the mainstream and throw the average. For Democrats, 71% said no. Independents against torture number 56%. Only Republicans support torture, with just 42% believing it should never be used. Still, even that number shows only weak support for torture.

Their support may be a moot point, however. In their grilling of Holder over waterboarding, they may have opened a big can of worms. Not only is torture illegal, but the law requires that it be investigated and prosecuted. By getting Holder to drop the "T" word, the senate may have begun a sequence of events that guarantee prosecutions.

When Ronald Reagan signed on to the Convention Against Torture, he brought us into the realm of international law. The convention is a treaty and treaties are the be-all and end-all if international law -- torture's illegal because we agreed it should be. That convention reads, "Each State Party [i.e., signatory nation] shall ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law," and that, if torture is committed, the nation must "submit the case to its competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution."

There aren't any exceptions here. It must happen. If Holder -- or any other would-be Attorney General, for that matter -- believes that we've waterboarded detainees (and no one thinks we haven't), he has to prosecute. His hands are tied.

In fact, torture prosecutions could happen outside the US, since torture is a violation of international law and a war crime. Manfred Nowak, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, has called on the United States to prosecute George W. Bush and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Citing the Convention Against Torture, Nowak says the US has a "clear obligation" under law. If it doesn't happen here, it might just happen in The Hague.

Republicans seem to suddenly have become aware of reality and, like John Cornyn, are trying to put the brakes on what may very well be inevitable. They're trying to slow things down long enough to figure out what the hell to do and it may just be that there's nothing at all that can be done.

-Wisco

44th Inaugural by the Numbers

Number of people in attendance at Barack Obama's inauguration: At least 1.5 million.

Rank of inaugural in terms of attendance: 1.

Number of those who were in attendance who were arrested: 0.

Number of words in Obama's inaugural address: 2598.

Mentions of former President Bush in the speech: 0 1.

Mentions of the word "hope": 2.

Mentions of the word "change": 4.

Mentions of the word "I": 13.

Of "we": 51.

Former presidents in attendance (including George W. Bush): 5 4. (I really can count...)

Number of those former presidents whose name is Bush: 2.





Number of those former presidents who are Republican: 2.

Bush's approval rating as he leaves office: 22%.

Obama's initial approval numbers, as projected by polling seer Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com: 76%.

Bush's initial 2001 approval rating: 57%.

Bush's initial 2005 approval rating: 50%.

Percentage that believe that the economy is either in "not so good" or "poor" shape: 92%.

Percentage who believe Barack Obama will be able to improve the economy: 75%.

Percentage who believe economic recovery will take at least two years: 68%.

Number of groups that burned sage to drive evil spirits from the White House: 1.

Shoes thrown at giant inflatable Bush effigy: a "hundred or so."

Again, number of those who were arrested for doing so: 0.

Ranking of Barack Obama in number of African-American presidents: 1st.

Ranking of George W. Bush in number of white presidents: 43rd.

Date Martin Luther King jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech in Washington: August 28, 1963.

Date Barack Obama delivered his inaugural address: January 20, 2009.

Percentage of black Americans who believe King's dream has been realized: 69%.

Percentage of whites who think so: 46%.

Number of inaugural balls attended by Barack and Michelle Obama: 10.

-Wisco