Good for a grin

Good luck and Godspeed, spammers! --- Noticed a visit to this site from Adebowale, Nigeria via a Yahoo! search for "compiled current e-mail addresses". Judging by where the search led my Nigerian visitor, I'm hopeful Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) and Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) may be getting some e-mail offering them incomparable business opportunities just for helping out a guy in a jam. And you know -- those two are such selfless servants to humanity they just might go for it.

Fafblog! unpacks some of the unknown unknowns of Iraq and terrorism ---

Q. There are more terrorists now than before the war. Is the occupation causing more terror?
A. Well, nobody can say for sure if that’s a man-made terror increase. It may just be a periodic shift in the natural terror cycle.
Q. Tell me more about this “not our fault” theory – I find it oddly compelling.
A. Like weather, terror is affected by seasonal fluctuations. The jet stream carries hijackers from continent to continent; El Nino causes suicide bombers to condense in the upper atmosphere. Is this affected by human activity or just part of a natural warming trend for terror? We just don’t know!

What Everyone Should Know about Blog Depression -- "It's a mood disorder that affects bloggers of all types and all ages." Check it out; the drawings are perfect little self-help pamphlet sendups. But you'll find wisdom there, too:

Some Action You Can take
Get a Grip -- try to remember a blog is elastic and open ended unless you are selling something it has no specific purpose. so relax damn it.

"Getting tired of this damned siege. I’d love to give that fruitcake Paris a smack for getting us all into this."-- from Under Odysseus, a Trojan War blog by Eurylochos. This is actually seriously good stuff, have a look; the link leads to the first post.

Tbogg's dog got neutered, which is kind of sad. "On the other hand, once the DSCC heard that he was going to lose his balls they offered to help fund his campaign, so I guess that's a silver lining of sorts..."

Actual words in National Review Online -- "Ah, but here President Bush reveals his moral depth. He grasps how one of the fundamental lessons of Sophocles’ Antigone applies to this case: in a democracy the purpose of the state is to safeguard the dignity of each and every individual."

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NOTES: "What everyone should know" via Gary Farber; "Under Odysseus" via Stygius; Bush grasping Sophocles' Antigone via Roy Edroso, who likes to imagine Dubya "tentatively mouthing "Soffi -- soffi -- sofficle --". posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:04:00 PM -- |    

 
Cosponsor the censure resolution yourself

The President must be held accountable for authorizing a program that clearly violates the law and then misleading the country about its existence and its legality.

The President’s actions, as well as his misleading statements to both Congress and the public about the program, demand a serious response.

If Congress does not censure the President, we will be tacitly condoning his actions, and undermining both the separation of powers and the rule of law.

I therefore sign on as a citizen co-sponsor to Senator Feingold's resolution to censure the President.

Via Lindsay Beyerstein ("Majikthise"). I'm willing to hear folks' reasons for not backing Feingold right away. But I'm not going to wait with them.

Meanwhile, the ranks of censure supporters in the Senate have swelled to 5, according to Jane Hamsher: Feingold, Kerry, Boxer, Harkin, and Menendez.



UPDATE, 3/16: You're not going to be the only one in favor:

Do you favor or oppose the United States Senate passing a resolution censuring President George W. Bush for authorizing wiretaps of Americans within the United States without obtaining court orders?
3/15/06	Favor	Oppose	Undecided
All Adults	46%	44%	10%
Voters	48%	43%	9%
Republicans (33%)	29%	57%	14%
Democrats (37%)	70%	26%	4%
Independents (30%)	42%	47%	11%
Based on 1,100 completed telephone interviews among a random sample of adults nationwide March 13-15, 2006. The theoretical margin of error is plus or minus 3 percentage points, 95% of the time.

-- American Research Group, via Glenn Greenwald. Notice that the spread widens from 2% more in favor among all adults to 5% more in favor among voters -- more than the margin of error. Censure has legs -- and support for impeachment isn't far behind. posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:11:00 AM -- |    

 
Worth reading -- contrarian edition
A few posts and articles that challenge conventional wisdom on the left a bit:

The Parasite Within, Timothy Burke ("Easily Distracted") --- Burke does the hard thing and offers an interesting, limited defense of the neoconservative ideology -- at least as some may have wished it to be -- as opposed to King Bush idolatry. Burke -- among other things, a close observer of African politics and colonial history -- is skeptical of the track record of international treaties and institutions generally, and shares the neocon view that the U.N. is "largely captive to corrupt statist elites and bureaucratic inefficacy." He adds:

Equally, what the neoconservatives had to say about the contradictions and inconsistencies in a lot of existing postures taken by their critics was legitimately potent. I went to a meeting here at Swarthmore a year before the Bush Administration took office where speakers condemned the suffering to innocents caused by continuing sanctions against Iraq; by December 2001 some of the same people were calling for the extension and tightening of the sanctions regime as a preferable alternative to war.

Proceeding to diagnosis and prescription, Burke thinks the truest neocons were naifs, used by people (like Cheney and Rumsfeld, I assume) with more "expedient, instrumental" support for the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Politically, the torch has been passed elsewhere:

What’s happening now, if you read the emergent structures of argument within the blogging world pretty widely, is that the realist parasite within neoconservatism has pretty much burst through the chest of its host and is grinning with sharp alien teeth at onlookers. Start tallying it up, and you’ll see a lot of wingnuts overtly discarding any pretence of being constrained by the ideals of “freedom” in their views of what the US should do in Iraq. Bit by bit, what is being advanced instead is the proposition that it’s time to stop playing by the rules, to give as good as we get, to abandon restraint. [...]

Now that the intellectual shallowness and credulousness of the neoconservative understanding of historical causality has been inalterably revealed, there are really only two choices left for those who supported and still support the war. Either demand that the Bush Administration finally get serious about the promotion of freedom, which entails closing Gitmo, firing Rumsfeld, and a massive host of other policy shifts in that consistent direction or stop pretending to idealism.

In that respect, it's been interesting to see neo-con pretenders try to preserve a well-chosen flicker of that "idealism" -- call it about an emir's worth -- on behalf of poor widdle Dubai Ports World, while one of the real McCoys (aka the usually awful Michael Ledeen) actually provided one of the most sensible ideas about how to handle that question. But I think neocon "idealism" was misguided, too, re Iraq. You can smash a tyranny with cannons, but you can't plant a democracy with them, and that's mostly what we've tried to do.

The reaction from Feingold's colleagues, Steve Benen, "The Carpetbagger" --- Trying to figure out why there's been so little early support for Feingold's censure resolution, Benen does something the Washington Post should consider: it's called "reporting" (ruh-port-ing -- finding out what's going on, not just getting quotes off CNN and phoning in a "Dems in disarray" piece). Senate staffers he called gave "five principal responses, which turned out to be more compelling than I expected," among which were stepping on a port security bill, galvanizing Republicans, and this:

Third, there was not even a hint of party strategy on this. The past couple of years, there's been an effort to try and have Dems coordinate more on major political and policy initiatives. Coordinating Dems is like herding cats, but there's been some progress of late. Feingold, however, decided to go his own way; he announced his resolution without even letting his colleagues know it was coming and with no real regard for what it would do for the party's short-term agenda. Some see this as a slap in the face — if Feingold wanted party support, they said, he should have worked within the party. Instead, Feingold took the lead, and no one followed.

Indeed, Feingold's "cowering Democrats" quote seems to be the principal result of his censure motion so far. Needless to say, that's not all his fault by a long shot, but Feingold's gambit hasn't panned out yet, either.

At the end of the day, I think Feingold is right -- what Al Gore has called the "unilateral presidency" is the key issue of 2006, and I think leading Democrats should have been more nimble in covering Feingold's back on this. But I guess I can also understand not wanting to dance to Feingold's tune without being consulted. And trying to stick to a game plan. If I understood what it was.

Good Girls Understand, eRobin ("fact-esque") --- eRobin comments on Kate Michelman pulling out of the Pennsylvania Senate race:

Kos and Singer are happy that Michelman has publicly reconsidered an independent run against Casey in the fall. They both say that without her in the race, Casey has a better chance to win in November. Kos, in his typically obtuse pragmatic fashion, says that Michelman "understands." How generous of him to acknowledge that Michelman, former leader of NARAL, among other accomplishments, understands national politics. [...]

For the record, I don't think that Michelman sat down or shut up. I think she did the smart but not courageous thing by getting out.

It's ironic that many of the same people decrying the lack of Democratic guts in following Feingold's lead show so little of their own by not opposing execrable Democratic candidates like Bob Casey in Pennsylvania. If Casey loses to Santorum, they've got nothing. If he wins -- they've still got nothing. Why not support Chuck Pennacchio instead?

When would Jesus bolt?, Amy Sullivan ("Washington Monthly") --- I told you this would be contrarian. I think the much (and often justly*) maligned Ms. Sullivan has written a genuinely useful, interesting article here. "Busy busy busy"** et al notwithstanding, it doesn't seem to me like some kind of screed against us seculars. Instead, I think it's a pretty constructive take on peeling away a few of the earnest Christian conservative types from a right-wing coalition that has a lot of potential fissures.

The main person Sullivan writes about is Christian radio, music, and voter registration entrepreneur/activist Randy Brinson. Brinson is no Ted Kennedy, but he's no Pat Robertson either. After finding himself dissed by Republicans more interested in perpetuating culture wars than resolving them, Brinson decided to give some congressional Democrats a listen:

What they found is that their interests overlapped: The Democrats wanted to reach out to evangelicals, and Brinson wanted to connect with politicians who could deliver on a broader array of evangelical concerns, like protecting programs to help the poor, supporting public education, and expanding health care. It had seemed natural for him to start by pressing his own party to take up those concerns, but Democrats appeared to be more willing partners. They even found common ground on abortion when Brinson, who is very pro-life, explained that he was more interested in lowering abortion rates by preventing unwanted pregnancies than in using the issue to score political points.

That doesn't sound bad at all to me. I think digby misses Sullivan's point that it needn't take a lot of such defections to make an important difference in battleground states and congressional districts. And whatever the (small) raw numbers of defections would be, I think the perception of rapprochement -- without selling out anyone relying on the left, as far as I can tell -- could be pretty valuable in its own right. Ms. Sullivan might be right; alliances with people like Randy Brinson are worth a closer look, and maybe even a gamble.


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* I don't think Ms. Sullivan had any business making her recent notorious "Finally, a religious candidate [Brownback -- ed.] who actually deserves the scorn of the knee-jerk left" comment either. The left-wing spectrum has banded together time and again behind very religious candidates from Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton to John Kerry to Jesse Jackson to etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. I have no idea what she was doing there other than a cheap shot.
** "Shorter Amy Sullivan: Secular people should have no trouble compromising away their principles, since they don't believe in anything that matters anyway. " I just don't find that in this particular article.

EDIT, 3/16: "The Carpetbagger" is Steve Benen, sentences rewritten accordingly.
UPDATE, 3/17: good discussion with Elton Beard ("Busy Busy Busy") about Ms. Sullivan's piece

posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:07:00 AM -- |    

 
Resolutions of inquiry
From the conclusion of "House Resolutions of Inquiry", by Louis Fisher of the Congressional Research Service:

House resolutions of inquiry have been an effective means of obtaining factual material from the executive branch. Even when committees report the resolutions adversely or succeed in tabling them on the House floor, a substantial amount of information is usually released to Congress. In fact, arguments that the Administration has complied with a resolution are frequently the reason for reporting a resolution adversely and tabling it. On occasion, a resolution of inquiry is reported adversely because it competes with other investigations (either in Congress or in the executive branch) that are considered the more appropriate avenue for inquiry. In some situations, resolutions of inquiry have been instrumental in triggering other congressional methods of obtaining information, such as through supplemental hearings or alternative legislation.

Such resolutions of inquiry have been used to reasonably worthwhile effect on several occasions in the recent past, in the face of executive branch resistance -- and even legislative branch resistance -- to Congressional oversight. For example, in the runup to the Iraq war, Dennis Kucinich gained access to the 12,000-page Iraqi declaration on its weapons of mass destruction.

Similarly, before the Gulf War in 1991, Barbara Boxer introduced a resolution of inquiry about the prospective casualties and costs of that war. Building on this after the war began, Representatives Leon Panetta and Charles Schumer developed HR 586, requiring regular reports from the administration on pain of a resolution of inquiry if it failed to comply. It turns out resolutions of inquiry have 14 day deadlines, so regular oversight was preferable to the Pentagon.

Depending on your particular Congresscritter's politics and love for the rule of law under our (previous?) constitutional system, you may want to direct him or her to this report, and suggest he or she undertake a House Resolution of Inquiry regarding the NSA warrantless surveillance issue. Whether he or she succeeds or fails, the effort will be worthy -- and maybe newsworthy as well.

Via Steven Aftergood at the Federation of American Scientists site Secrecy News. posted by Thomas Nephew at 9:46:00 PM -- |    

 
Good faith
"The president may be wrong," [Senator] Specter [R-PA] said, "but he has acted in good faith."
-- New York Times, March 14, 2006

George W. Bush, April 20, 2004, Buffalo, New York:

Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires—a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so. It's important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution.

George W. Bush, July 14, 2004, Fond Du Lac, Wisconsin:

First of all, any action that takes place by law enforcement requires a court order. In other words, the government can't move on wiretaps or roving wiretaps without getting a court order.

George W. Bush, June 9, 2005, Columbus, Ohio:

Law enforcement officers need a federal judge's permission to wiretap a foreign terrorist's phone, a federal judge's permission to track his calls, or a federal judge's permission to search his property. Officers must meet strict standards to use any of these tools. And these standards are fully consistent with the Constitution of the U.S.

No, Mr. Specter, you little twit. The President is wrong, and he knows it, so he's lied about it for years.

"...we're talking about getting a court order before we do so"... "any action that takes place by law enforcement requires a court order" ... "Law enforcement officers need a federal judge's permission..."

There's your President, Senator Specter -- lying through his teeth. "I did not f**k with that Constitution." That ring a bell? posted by Thomas Nephew at 5:27:00 PM -- |    

 
137-0: Maryland House wants Diebold out of 2006 elections
Computerworld's Mark Songini reports that Diebold touch-screen electronic voting technology may soon be out for Maryland's 2006 elections:

The state of Maryland stands poised to put its entire $95 million investment in Diebold Election Systems Inc. touch-screen e-voting systems on ice because they can't produce paper receipts.

The state House of Delegates last week voted 137-0 to approve a bill prohibiting election officials from using AccuVote-TS touch-screen systems in the 2006 primary and general elections. The legislation calls for the state to lease paper-based optical-scan systems for the 2006 votes. State Delegate Anne Healey estimated the leasing cost at $12.5 million to $16 million for the two elections.

This vote passes the House version of HB244/SB713, which has evolved into a combined model voting systems bill mandating voter verification technology and audits as a general rule in Maryland elections, and a specific call for optical scanning voting machines (which are inherently voter-verified) in 2006.

Given the cost savings (after about four years) of the simpler optical scanning technology (think SAT tests, and filling ovals with a marker) compared to paper trail electronic voting, this could be a real beginning of the end for touch-screen e-voting in Maryland. Healey's bill would probably be signed by Governor Ehrlich, given that he recently voiced strong doubts of his own about electronic voting.

The real remaining challenge will apparently be Democrat and media dead-enders like Senate President Thomas Miller (D-Calvert) and the Baltimore Sun editorial board. The Annapolis Capital runs with an AP report:

Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller, D-Calvert, has questioned the wisdom of leasing optical-scan machines which read ballots marked by hand. Maryland has already spent about $90 million acquiring and maintaining the Diebold machines, and the lease requirement for optical-scan machines would add another $12.5 million this year, supporters said.

Meanwhile, the Baltimore Sun uses words like "Luddite" and "hysteria" in its March 11 editorial "Machine politics," claiming:

...while there are legitimate security challenges posed by touch-screen machines, including the absence of a so-called paper trail, these shortcomings pale compared with the problems spawned by this 11th-hour push to replace them with optical scan machines.

The Sun misses the point with its (debatable) claim that optical scan technology is more error prone than paperless touch screen voting; the primary issue is whether such errors can be detected and corrected by the voter. Moreover, the door to touch screen voting -- whether using Diebold equipment or some other vendor's -- remains ajar:

Healey says the law would require the vendor to provide a paper trail before the 2008 elections or risk losing its contract to supply machines in the state.

While the group I trust on this subject, TrueVoteMD.org, hasn't yet reacted to the vote on their web site, leader Linda Schade seemed delighted with the March 8 vote. Baltimore Sun reporter Kelly Brewington:

"The rallying cry now is: 'Diebold out of Maryland,'" said Linda Schade with Takoma Park-based TrueVoteMD. "It's unbelievable. They should not be signing any more contracts with Diebold, they should be suing Diebold."

Schade was referring to a last-ditch proposal by Diebold to include some Diebold voting machines in each precinct for the 2006 elections.

I suppose I'm less permanently allergic to touch screen voting, and less focused on Diebold per se than Ms. Schade seems to be. I'm open to a touch-screen technology provider -- even Diebold, I suppose -- proving their system records voter preferences more accurately, verifiably, and securely than optical scan technology does. But I also remain pretty mistrustful of Diebold, because of the company's long fight against voter verification.


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EDIT, 3/14: article pulled, rewritten to note Senate prospects, Baltimore Sun opposition, and TrueVoteMD comments to the Sun.
EDIT, 3/17: "long fight against" for (blush) "and its allies' prolonged misrepresentations in Maryland regarding the paramount need for" posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:30:00 PM -- |    

 
Jill Carroll

Jill Carroll, a freelance reporter working for the Christian Science Monitor newspaper, was kidnapped in Baghdad over two months ago. All indications are that she is still alive. The Monitor has started a campaign, using Iraqi television, to distribute a video asking for Iraqis to help find and free Jill.

The Committee to Protect Bloggers isn't particular that Ms. Carroll isn't a blogger, and asks that everyone link to the Christian Science Monitor's Jill Carroll video, which I'm glad to do.

Via Stygius. posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:39:00 AM -- |    

 
A good start

Resolved, That the United States Senate does hereby censure George W. Bush President of the United States, and does condemn his unlawful authorization of wiretaps of Americans within the United States without obtaining the court orders required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, his failure to inform the full congressional intelligence committees as required by law, and his efforts to mislead the American people about the authorities relied upon by his Administration to conduct wiretaps and about the legality of the program.

-- Senate motion to censure the President by Russ Feingold, D-WI

It's a good start, and it doesn't preclude sterner measures. Talking with ABC's George Stephanopoulos, Feingold said "this is right in the strike zone of the concept of high crimes and misdemeanors" and that "I'm not ruling out other actions." The conversation continued:

STEPHANOPOULOS: So you might go for impeachment down the road?

FEINGOLD: I think we have to look at all the options. But I think this one could help us resolve this.

The problem here is that we're trying to just gloss this over. Almost every member of Congress is saying, "Well, yes, he broke the law -- but let's see if we can fix the law."

Well, if we have that kind of a system, if we don't answer the president now with a censure, then we're not going to get back on track.

I agree with comments at at a "firedoglake" blog post ("Connecting Some Feingold Bush Censure Proposal Dots") about this. "Pachacutec":

He's opening the door to discussion of impeachment but doing it in a way that even Republicans can potentially discuss: censure. Starting out with "censure" is a more effective wedge than "impeachment" is, and it still gets you into the same conversation, reframing the debate the way you want it.

Then ReddHedd:

If nothing else, it sure opens the door to a whole lot of discussion about law-breaking by this Administration in the press -- and at the water coolers and lunch tables and pub counters around the country. And that is some public discussion that is music to my ears.

This is as good a time as any to take up a Washington Post column by Harold Meyerson last week. In a column constructed as an open letter to his pro-impeachment mother -- unaccountably lauded by Matthew Yglesias and Sam Rosenfeld, among others -- Meyerson unaccountably counseled against pushing for impeachment. I say "unaccountably" (twice) because on reading it, I could see no concrete reasons that Meyerson offered against impeachment other than "not now," i.e., the tacit concession that it would lose in the House or failing that, in the Senate:

Dereliction of duty and lying us into a war may be mortal sins, but that doesn't make them provable high crimes. Domestic surveillance without a court order, by contrast, does look to be a flat-out violation of the law of the land. But it's hard to believe that Arlen Specter's Judiciary Committee will recommend any punitive action even if it concludes the policy was against the law. For that you'd need a different Judiciary Committee -- one controlled by Democrats.

And for that, of course, the Democrats need to win in November -- a goal that looks increasingly within reach, and the goal on which the growing legions of Bush haters should focus their attentions. To dwell on impeachment now would be to drain energy from the election efforts that need to succeed if impeachment is ever truly to be on the agenda. To insist on support for impeachment as a litmus test for Democratic candidates would be to impede those efforts altogether.

What Meyerson does here is to move the goalposts from "impeachment" to "impeachment as a litmus test for Democratic candidates." But more than that, this kind of argument also ignores the way impeachment as a national campaign issue could change the terms of the debate and the election more to the favor of those in favor of an idea that Meyerson agrees has some merit, after all ("flat-out violation of the law").

To wit, openly stating what is wrong and saying what you plan to do about it beats pussyfooting and hemming and hawing about it and not saying what you plan to do about it -- let alone not thinking there's anything terribly wrong in the first place, as folks like Joe Lieberman (DINO-CT) on rightwards would prefer to believe.

I'm not surprised Lieberman instinctively shies away from confronting Bush head-on -- he's been doing that since November, 2000 at latest. I'm a bit more disappointed with Meyerson, who winds up arguing that even were impeachment politically feasible, it still would not be warranted:

As a general rule, though, bad faith and worse policy should be subject to political remedy, not criminal prosecution, unless there have been crimes so unambiguous and momentous that no political remedy is suitable. The combination of administration misdeeds and the absence of congressional oversight may rightly enrage Americans who still expect a functioning government, but that doesn't make the angriest possible response the best one. Not yet, certainly. Not now, Mom. Not now.

Well in heaven's name, when exactly? Meyerson seems here to have conflated articles of impeachment with the guillotine or armed insurrection. I can certainly see "not now" for those; but I can't see dropping the idea of impeachment for reasons as weak as those Meyerson advances. Feingold's censure motion may be a good start, but I think it should not be the end of the debate about what to do about George W. Bush.


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NOTE: Feingold/Stephanopoulos transcript via The Raw Story, via Crooks and Liars where there's a link to a video feed of the ABC "This Week" segment. posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:15:00 PM -- |