Bob Shrum should shut his piehole

Mojo and I were just talking about this Roll Call article (sub required) where Congressional Dems and other Beltway players were complaining about DNC Chairmans Deans spending on local party infrastucture. Although Dean set a new fundraising record for the DNC in an off cycle year, he spent most of it on building up local party infrastructure, in addition to the money he has been raising directly. Mojo had some issues with how the DFA people here in CA were behaving, and he can lay that out for you himself. But this touches upon a few of my chief concerns about the party:

First, as Amy Sullivan lays out in this Monthly piece, the party consistently uses the same worthless consultants and pollsters, despite the fact they clearly aren't contributing to success. Part of that model is the fundraising/spending model the DNC has used; saving money in a big kitty to target a few key races. That model has not worked, period. Dean is engaged in precisely the strategy he said he would implement if made Chair, building locally and not concede any state, no matter how red it may appear. I support that as a strategy. His plan depends on execution, and how well it comes off remains to be seen, but the old strategy clearly wasn't working, so Dean deserves the chance to try something different.

Next, The polling methodology Dems use isn't adequate compared to what the GOP is using. The GOP utilizes a far more sophisticated polling methodology that creates detailed profiles of voters. This touches upon what James was talking about with his post a while back about branding. Brands are, in part, the products of detailed and sophisticated methods of measuring customer behaviors and lifestyles. The GOP was able to use their resourcs more effectively in key areas like Ohio, without the Dems or the Unions even knowing what they were up to. The folks at MYDD are playing with some different polling methods, take a look.

Part of what DCCC is assed up over is the loss of gatekeeping power they exercised previously. Now local parties can run campaigns or candidates without having to genuflect to them. IN light of their incompetence in the last several cycles, I say that's a good thing.

And before everyone chimes in with their pet peeve about National Dems, I'm not defending or ruling anything out. You might have a perfectly legitimate gripe to lay on them. But these are mine, and I wanted to lay out why the DCCC and the rest of the crew should STFU about Dean's fundraising. He's doing exactly what we want him to do. If Bob Shrum or Donna Brazille and the rest of the repeat failures who are so skilled at ruining Dem Campaigns don't like it, then get the fsck out and go play somewhere else. You are losers and no one cares what your worthless opinions is on Dean. If Dean fucks up, then fine, at least he didn't simply try and run the same old worthless DCCC strategy that continues not to work.

Our First Contestant?

Tell me this guy is not thinking hard about running for President...

mojo sends

Why Isn't Anne Coulter in Jail?

So in the process of Anne Coulter telling the kids at a traditionally black college, Phillander Smith in Arkansas that the crack cocaine problem has gone away, she also openly called for the assassination by poison of Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens.

In spite of her saying it was only a joke, we live in a post 9/11 world don't you know... we simply don't joke about killing national leaders. In fact, such a thing could be seen as a violation of new anti-terrorism laws.

I guess it's only terrorism if you disagree with the President.

mojo sends

Time For Cake!

Over in the comments to this post at Orcinus, I just had the sublime pleasure of provoking Bill White, the spokesman for the National Socialism Movement into calling me evil.

Naturally, this made my day. Yay, me! I'm going to treat myself to a slice of cake!

"I've Got A Brand New Shiny Helmet And A Pair Of Kinky Boots"

The proposed United States Secret Service, Uniformed Division, part of the USA PATRIOT IMPROVEMENT AND REAUTHORIZATION ACT OF 2005.

A lot of folks are getting twisted up about Sec. 3056a (b)(1) (B), which says...

make arrests without warrant for any offense against the United States committed in their presence, or for any felony cognizable under the laws of the United States if they have reasonable grounds to believe that the person to be arrested has committed or is committing such felony

The phrase "reasonable grounds" is a little weird. Why doesn't this say "probable cause" here?

I'm weirded out by that, sure— but I think Sec. 3056a (a)(7-13) is the more interesting excerpt.

`(a) There is hereby created and established a permanent police force, to be known as the `United States Secret Service Uniformed Division'. Subject to the supervision of the Secretary of Homeland Security, the United States Secret Service Uniformed Division shall perform such duties as the Director, United States Secret Service, may prescribe in connection with the protection of the following:

[...]

`(7) Foreign diplomatic missions located in metropolitan areas (other than the District of Columbia) in the United States where there are located twenty or more such missions headed by full-time officers, except that such protection shall be provided only--

`(A) on the basis of extraordinary protective need;

`(B) upon request of an affected metropolitan area; and

`(C) when the extraordinary protective need arises at or in association with a visit to--

`(i) a permanent mission to, or an observer mission invited to participate in the work of, an international organization of which the United States is a member; or

`(ii) an international organization of which the United States is a member;

except that such protection may also be provided for motorcades and at other places associated with any such visit and may be extended at places of temporary domicile in connection with any such visit.

`(8) Foreign consular and diplomatic missions located in such areas in the United States, its territories and possessions, as the President, on a case-by-case basis, may direct.

`(9) Visits of foreign government officials to metropolitan areas (other than the District of Columbia) where there are located twenty or more consular or diplomatic missions staffed by accredited personnel, including protection for motorcades and at other places associated with such visits when such officials are in the United States to conduct official business with the United States Government.

`(10) Former Presidents and their spouses, as provided in section 3056(a)(3) of title 18.

`(11) An event designated under section 3056(e) of title 18 as a special event of national significance.

`(12) Major Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates and, within 120 days of the general Presidential election, the spouses of such candidates, as provided in section 3056(a)(7) of title 18.

`(13) Visiting heads of foreign states or foreign governments.

I think a picture here may be worth more than anything I could write.



[Deep, formal bow to the Virtual Museum of China '89 for the image.]

The Credibility of No Such Agency

Let me see if I get this straight...

According to General Micheal Hayden, the Deputy DNI, the Presiden't illegal wiretap program...

"is not a drift net over Dearborn or Lackawanna or Freemont, grabbing conversations that we then sort out by these alleged keyword searches or data-mining tools or other devices that so-called experts keep talking about. This is targeted and focused."

Well that's reassuring.

Except, this is the NSA. We should believe this is General Hayden trotting out anything other than an official public denial of the existence of a classified intelligence gathering operation? Um, why? Because he's just such swell guy?

When Donald Rumsfeld told us that Congress could pull the plug on Total Information Awareness but it wouldn't stop him from secretly mining electronic message networks, did anyone else think he was serious?

Apparently not. Kevin Drum [here and here] as well as Comrade Joshua [here] and Matthew Yglesias [here], seem to be eating this up with a spoon.

I just love these "serious" moderate Democrats. They're oh so happy to rail about the lies and the lying liars who tell them [apologies to Al Franken], but only after they've got egg on their faces for credulously believing the lies in the first place. I keep asking: at what point will these supercilious and self-righteous bastards wake up and stop giving these people the credibility they desperately need to keep perpetuating the bullshit?

And the thing about the "serious" moderate Democrats that really pisses me off is how useless they really are most of the time. If you're a conservatarian GOP running-dog imperialist goon, you have to be thinking to yourself: who the fsck needs Josh Marshall, Kevin Drum and Big Media Matt to help out with hammering home the narrative? We've got the entire top-down media on our side, and these small-beer players are just not playing their weight class!

For the record: No, I don't believe a word of General Hayden's bullshit. The man is a professional liar. If his natural impulse was to tell the truth to the press, then I doubt he could have been hired to clean the toilets at the NSA, much less serve as the Deputy Director of National Intelligence.

Update 1.0: I was right to be suspicious. Glenn Greenwald tells us how full of shit General Hayden was when he said that "probable cause" was the issue with FISA compliance.

Sammy the Gavel Gets Ticket Punched...

Sammy "The Gavel" Alito will get sent to the full Senate today by the Judiciary Committee.

The vote will be 10-8; maybe 11-7 if Herb Kohl jumps the shark...

Please let me know where the Republic's wake will be so I can send flowers...

mojo sends

Update 1.0: It is done... 10-8 to send to the full Senate

The Sound of One Mojo Clapping...

Well, it's not very often that I get to sound off regarding my own prognostication ability, but I was checking up on a post I wrote on August 10, 2005 on the strange and terrible fate of Lt. Gen. Kevin Byrnes.

After reading a post by Lindsay Bernstein at the redoubtable Majikthise blog wondering about the official explanation on the canning of Byrnes, I too became curious.

The word from on high had it that Byrnes, the head of the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), was caught in an extramarital dalliance and that such exposed behavior was not in keeping with the highest traditions of the U.S. Army and so Byrnes was summarily packed off to the Island of Misfit Flag Officers, ne'r to be seen in uniform again...

Many at the time were saying that something about that story simply did not seem right. Mark Kleinman wrote that "it did not pass the sniff test." Lindsay essentially agreed and asked if anyone had any competing theories...

I did a little net-mining and hit a vein of promising ore, which I quickly refined into cold rolled sheets of theoretical byzantine intrigue regarding a potential ruffling of feathers (as well as potentially phat stax of post military service bank) regarding control of a program called LandWarNet.

Reading the history, it looked as though Byrnes may have punked Gen. Steven Boutelle, U.S. Army's G-6, (or Chief Information Officer), regarding the future of the digital Army. Boutelle had his own program, but ended up being told to go to Congress to pimp for Byrnes' pet project instead.

Suddenly, less than a year later, Gen. Byrnes gets spaced out the airlock...

At the time, I was interested to see who then got control of LandWarNet in the wake of Byrnes' demise, saying it would auger well for my theory if it ended up back in the hands of G-6.

Well, I didn't think much of it at the time, other than being vaguely amused at my own ability to think conspiratorily and use the Internet to help me with that...

Then yesterday, the military fetishists at "Global Security" updated their LandWarNet entry, to wit:

The idea behind LandWarNet is how to best support the warfighter, the Soldier. It will give Soldiers the ability to reach up and grab that information they need. LandWarNet brings together the Active and Reserve Components and connects them into the GIG. TRADOC is still focused on the warfighting piece of LandWarNet, but now the G-6 has the overall responsibility for the infrastructure and service

I love it when a plan comes together...

mojo sends

Oh, And Another Thing...

This goes to vanmojo's first point in the previous article, i.e. that the power to forbid abortion is also the power to coerce abortion.

Closer to home, it's also the power to sterilize. The United States was the first country to adopt a serious policy of compulsory sterilization, and we did it for both punitive and eugenic reasons. It was greatly curtailed, but not eliminated, by a Supreme Court decision, Skinner v. Oklahoma, which specifically struck down compulsory sterilization for punitive purposes.

Believe it or not, the last forced sterilization for eugenic purposes was performed in Oregon in 1981. Eugenics passed out of popular favor in the wake of the Nazi holocaust, but its proponents have never gone away. Here in California, it was really popular until a few years ago. Still, you find the loudest arguments for reinstating eugenics programs coming not from pro-choice advocates, but from abortion opponents. Most abortion opponents are really opponents of reproductive freedom in general, and they're often opponents of women's reproductive freedom in particular.

Here at MojoWire, you'll find that the three of us have pretty consistent views on the relationships between social problems and the civil liberties that must be protected when addressing them.

For example...

• We're big supporters of intellectual freedom, but we think patents and copyrights are necessary for promoting the arts and sciences.

• We're big supporters of freedom of the press, but we go around and around with each other about whether shield laws for reporters are a good idea.

• We're huge supporters of the right to keep and bear arms (and yes, we're shooters), but we think small arms proliferation is a serious problem that needs the attention of government to mitigate.

• We're loud and proud on freedom of religion, but even the atheist on the masthead thinks that Michael Newdow is an annoying git for focusing all the attention on stupid distractions like the pledge of allegiance, to the exclusion of the problem that atheists are frequently excluded from public service because of their religious affiliation.

...and finally, yes...

• We're big supporters of reproductive freedom, but we know there is a role for the state in assisting with the prevention of unwanted pregnancies. We don't believe you can prevent unwanted pregnancies by restricting the availability of safe and legal abortion. And even if you could, we think you shouldn't.

Why? Simple. If the reason you're making it difficult to get an abortion is to force women to accept higher risks of unwanted pregnancy, to force them to accept even more severe consequences of sexual abuse and the physical consequences of abnormal pregnancies, and to force them not to have non-procreative sex, then why aren't you demanding their sterilization for punitive and eugenic purposes? You've already gone most of the way— you're deciding that the State has an overriding interest in what women do with their reproductive systems, and can move to prevent women from exercising control over themselves to advance its own ends at their expense. It's only a matter of time before you start reaching for eugenic compulsory sterilization to fix your favorite pet social problems, and that is unacceptable.

Do you hear me? UNACCEPTABLE!

An Answer for TheRobb

In the rather heated exchange going on in Sean's recent post on Alito, our good friend TheRobb asks the question:

"Why do (Dems, Liberals, Leftists) appear to be 'hung up' (for lack of better words) on protecting Roe v. Wade?"

And I endeavor to answer...

Now, I don't pretend to speak for Sean, S9, or anyone else on my team, but to my mind there is a very easy answer for this, in two parts; part one, is that most people who support Roe do not view unviable foetuses as persons, with all rights and obligations thereunto pertaining. A potential, certainly; but not a full fledged person.

Part two, the classic liberalism that many of us passionately defend is predicated on a certain self-determination and freedom from undue influence over our own particular destinies.

Now, whether we believe that undue influence takes the form of capital run amok over of the lives of ordinary people to the point where they are enslaved by an allegedly "free-market" ...

--or--

whether we believe the threat to freedom stems from a callous, incompetent and self-interested government working openly against the interests of personal liberty in order to guarantee its own self-perpetuation ...

Or some combination of the two...

The basic starting point is the same, the previously mentioned personal control over one's own destiny.

And there are two arguements that I like to use in this situation:

a1: Not really so much an arguement as an observation... Our position is soley about freedom and choice. A government that has the ability to prevent abortion, also has the ability to enforce abortion (c.f. The People's Republic of China). The door really does swing both ways.

a2: The concept of making abortion unlawful and putting it in the category of "crimes against the person (e.g. murder, manslaughter, assault) leaves most people in a curious position on this.

If we postulate that a foetus at any point in gestation is a legal "person" then anyone who takes a deliberate act to harm that foetus is guilty of one of those aforemention "crimes against the person."

At that point, I believe it morally obligates those who take that stance to support putting doctors and would-be mothers in jail for the rest of their lives for terminating a pregnancy. Perhaps even the death penalty here in California, because the laws againt torture and "mayhem" (basically dismembering someone) would require it.

And yet, I see very few people who are willing to go there. The question becomes, if we put a mother in jail for murdering her kids in a bathtub, like that lady in Texas, then why wouldn't we put her in jail for terminating a pregnancy?

And if you do believe that is what should be done, then at least I would respect the consistency of your belief, but I don't know if that is how you really think about this.

Why is there such vitriol involved?

I think part of the answer is at least that both sides see the issue as a matter of a fundamental right or part of human nature. It goes straight to the very dignity of our existence and our right to order our own lives. Both sides see the other as an anathema to everything we believe is important about our country and our society.

Quite simply, these two substances cannot occupy the same space.

But also, I think a lot of the vitriol on both sides is artificial. Both in the safe snarkiness of the Internet where no one really knows who (or what) they are talking to as well as the relatively controlled nuclear reaction of street action where the cops are on hand to make sure no one gets too far out of hand.

There is also the media angle. As a former news reporter, I often used to notice that those who were the most outrageous and loud on an issue often got the coverage as opposed to the circumspect or quiet. You wanna get your name and your issue in the paper, say something wild.

No, I didn't (and still don't) think that is a particular good way to present news and issues to the public, but that's the way it works. And it is a shame.

But some of the vitriol simply comes from being attacked. I have had people spit on me, physically assault me, call me all manner of ugly names (all in the name of Christian love, you understand). After a while, that kind of pseudo-combat becomes second nature.

For example, I regard the Kelo v. New London decision as much more of a disgrace than Roe.

I whole-heartedly agree with you on that one, and I am doubly disappointed because the majority in that case came from the justices with whom I usually find myself in agreement. I was deeply distressed by the court's reasoning in Kelo. And to my mind, I find cases like that far more instructive on a justice's potential jurisprudence than an abortion litmus test.

Although, to return to Roe for a moment in that context, I think the issue is not so much whether a justice supports abortion in an of itself, but whether that justice can find a reasonable reading of the Constitution that says a woman has an absolute right to control her reproductive destiny. This was essentially the arguement in Griswold.

So at the end of the day, I don't think it's so much about "abortion" as a concept as it is about the government's ability to declare very intimate aspects of our lives as public domain and susceptible to government control.

And I would hope in this moment of clarity and non-snarkiness, that you would at least acknowledge that liberals are not all about government control of people's lives, like we have been trying to tell you for, lo, these many years.

I got into it the other day with the children over at Moonbattery (Even consider the name of the blog, as to why we get worked up...) And a guy was wondering aloud about the persecution of Christians compared to some kid in the upper mid west who won the right in court to wear his Sikh dagger (part of the religious garb of Sikh's, like a yarmulke for Jews).

He was complaining that some kid could now wear his ceremonial knife to school, but they still couldn't put a crèche out on the lawn of the courthouse. And I attempted to explain to him the difference between the freedom to wear religious accessories on one's person as a spiritual fashion statement as opposed to placing a religious display on public property where people would now have to pay for subsidizing a religious display that they might violently oppose...

And yet this person could not see the difference (or at least claimed he couldn't, but I have my doubts there). As far as this person was concerned, there was no difference between wearing a cross or crucifix on one's person, and erecting a giant cross on public property subsidized by the taxpayers.

I know I have wondered a little far afield from the original questions, so I will cut it off here, but these are my answers, such as they are without snark or sarcasm.

I hope this helps clarify my position for you.

mojo sends.

What, again?!

So now they are threatening to ban me over at Moonbattery.

But I actually feel a little bad about that one. As weird as they were at JYB at least they had takes, as wack as they were...

Given the quality of their topics and their take, I am starting to wonder if the Moonbattery cadre isn't actually some kool-aid® drinking teenyboppers who think they are being all cool, edgy and urbane... That would suck if I'm actually teeing-off on kids here...

mojo sends

Bye Roe..

I think it unlikely that Alito's appointment to the Court will be defeated. While I believe that his appointment should be filibusted, I doubt the Dems will be able to pull it off even if they have the will for it. Based solely on his judicial record, I think it is clear he will vote to overturn Roe and defend the Administrations power grabs wherever they rear their ugly head before the Supreme Court.

We need to get our heads around this. The test cases are probably ready to go, or soon will be. And despite Alito's testimony, I would not stay too attached to Griswold.

So let me be among the first to welcome you to Jesusland. Mind the cursing and the spitting, and don't forget to kiss our Lords Holy Posterior lest he give you a stroke or a catagory 5 hurricane or something equally unpleasant. And watch out for the GAY, they are tricky and have been known to sneak into your home and make it and you more tasteful.

Got a problem with that hippie?

American Heroes

Digby, once again, reminds us of things we would all prefer not to have to notice. But we do. We do.

New details have emerged of how the growing number of prisoners on hunger strike at Guantánamo Bay are being tied down and force-fed through tubes pushed down their nasal passages into their stomachs to keep them alive.

I'm really ever so sorry to harsh your buzz, Redstate... but these are your American heroes doing this, you panty-wetting little pantloads.

Click through the link to Digby's post. The horror deepens when you find out what else there is to know about this story. Digby finally concludes thusly:

Someday, US Army grunts and innocent Americans with no operational information are going to be held captive by another country and that country is going to use the same rationale for imprisoning and tormenting them indefinitely. And the people who do it will eventually go to the ninth circle of hell and join George W. Bush and Dick Cheney as they scream into the void for eternity about how they had to become sadistic monsters in order to prove they weren't afraid.

"Hell is other people." —Jean-Paul Sartre

Ouch, That's Gotta Hurt...

I'm sorry. I just have to give props to Teresa Nielsen Hayden, one of the proprietors of Making Light, for cracking off this masterful flame at our friend Alec Rawls.

For those who don't know, Alec Rawls is the son of John Rawls, political philosopher of the American gods. Young Alec appears not to be endowed with quite so much potential for keen insight— he's the source of all that wacky conspiracy theory coming out of Lower Wingnut Blogistan about how the Flight 93 Memorial site design is a Shrine to Islamo-fascism.

Click through to comment thread at TBogg's place I linked above. Teresa's comment is full of all kinds of interesting trivia, but I'm primarily interested in bringing her snarky quip at the end of the comment to your attention.

When she finally concluded with the following paragraph...

If any of the corrected methods for more accurately identifying and bisecting the tips of the crescent show that the memorial is in fact pointing toward Istanbul, I'm willing to entertain the notion that what we have here is an actual Byzantine conspiracy; but that's as far as I'm willing to take it.

...I laughed so hard, I scared the cats. (The cats are usually pretty blasé about my belly-laughs, so that's saying something.)

IRS Collecting Data On Individual Political Party Affiliation

Now, isn't this just the most precious thing you've ever heard?

Oh, don't worry, RedState— I believe every word out of the mouth of a Deputy Commissioner of the IRS.

...Deputy IRS Commissioner John Dalrymple said the party identification information was automatically collected through a “database platform” supplied by an outside contractor that targeted voter registration rolls among other things as it searched for people who aren’t paying their taxes.

“This information is appropriately used to locate information on taxpayers whose accounts are delinquent,” he said.

I'm sure it's used for exactly that purpose. For some definition of "appropriate" in that context...

The Godfather

The latest news from Pat Robertson:

Our heavenly Godfather has the Archangel Luca Brazzi push the button on Ariel Sharon for refusing to sell his casinos in Gaza to "La Familia."

Outstanding take, Pat...

mojo sends

The Wiretaps Were Illegal... So What?

I think it's time our legions of wireheads faced up to a harsh reality.

When the Bush Administration is found to have used its illegal wiretap capability on journalists and political opponents— no, Redstate, I don't want to hear it: when not if... WHEN— you need to be ready for the response from conservatarian supporters of the President.

Wiretaps on journalists and political opponents is perfectly acceptable to these people. Illegal wiretaps on journalists and political opponents is a necessary tool in the President's kit for protecting the American people from terrorism. The only reason they're illegal is that enemies of the American people have so far kept the Congress from giving the President the powers he needs to keep us safe. The very fact the wiretaps were illegal just goes to show how necessary they were to our security.

Here's how we beat these people at this game. Use satire to criticize President Bill Clinton for not violating the law when he was President. I'm sure we can come up with a long list of wonderful examples where Bubba could have exercised his constitutional authority as the Commander In Chief of the Republic to circumvent the procedures of the law to make Americans safer from the threat of domestic terrorists in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing.

Why, if Bush had been President when Timothy McVeigh struck the Murrah building, all those terrorists in the Militia Movement would have been smoked out of their caves, captured like Osama bin Laden and put on trial like Uday and Qusay Hussein. Instead, look at what happened on 9/11! NEVER FORGET!

UPDATE 1.0: Atrios is asking the question answered in this post. I don't think he's ready to believe it yet, but it probably won't be very long before we'll have a definitive answer.

Ask not for whom the bell tolls,

It tolls you for you GOP!

The overture in the Operatic tragedy of Tom Delay and the holy crusaders of Conservativism has ended and Act I, Scene I is about begin. Along with Jack, Michael Scanlon, former press fluffer for Tom Delay has already cut a deal with Federal Prosecutor to sing Castrati. The long night is about to start for Wingnuttia. Can't wait for the Ralph Reed sold into bondage in the prison exercise yard part! I might cry...

Have You Seen This Man?

Republic Or Autocracy? That Is The Question.

Over at Empire Burlesque, Chris Floyd hits one out of the park with The Last Stand of the American Republic. We need to make some space in the radio program to read this one aloud on the air.

So now, at last, the crisis is upon us. Now the cards are finally on the table, laid out so starkly that even the Big Media sycophants and Beltway bootlickers can no longer ignore them. Now the choice for the American Establishment is clear, and inescapable: do you hold for the Republic, or for autocracy?

Go read the whole screed. He nails it. How will the Establishment respond? Republic or Autocracy? Do they even understand anymore that it has to be one or the other? It can't be both.

We shall see. We shall see.

Helping Them Find The Toad

Good news, comrades. Our mad scientists have cracked the neurosignaling of the marijuana munchies. Huzzah!

Now, where did I put my vaporizer? It was right here, somewhere...

British Torture Memos Published?

The Daily Kos claims to be republishing some British "torture memos" (not to be confused with the Al Jazeera Memos referenced by the banner on the right). Unfortunately, the source of these documents has already been pulled offline, presumably by Her Majesty's Government.

These documents appear to say in black and white what anyone who has been paying attention has known there was good reason to believe since day one of this story. The USA and Britain have been avid consumers of "intelligence" they knew full well was derived from confessions produced in Uzbekistan under torture.

We've long known that Uzbekistan tortures its prisoners. We've long known that the USA and Britain have been "rendering" people into the tender mercies of Uzbekistani prison wardens. These facts have been beyond reasonable dispute for years. Years! All these documents do is show that the USA and Britain have known that specific intelligence was derived from confessions produced by specific acts of torture and they continued deliberately to look the other way while feeding more prisoners to the torturers.

If these documents are authentic (and I, personally, find that claim pretty credible), then these are evidence of violations of the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhumane and Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Now, it should be remembered that the USA ratified this treaty but it took a "reservation" against the definition of torture in Article 16, because it insisted on using the broader prohibition against "cruel and unusual punishment" in Amendment VIII of the U.S. Constitution. Nevertheless, the U.S. State Department is on record describing the treatment of prisoners in Uzbekistan as torture.

Isn't it about time the USA and Britain come clean and denounce the Convention Against Torture under the terms of its Article 31? If they did that, at least their credibility in signing treaties wouldn't be irreparably damaged. They'd still be monsters on the world stage, but at least they would be monsters with which you can negotiate a peace treaty.

Another Bullet Dodged

In addition to not falling for the hoaxed reports of Fatherland Security goons visiting college students about their habits of reading Mao in the original Chinese, it appears we here at The MojoWire have another reason to give ourselves props for keeping out of a pundit frenzy.

It seems our private suspicions about Micheal Scheuer, the former CIA agent and anonymous author of Imperial Hubris, may yet turn out to have been warranted. Over at Sisyphus Shrugged, there is quite an interesting collection of quotes from the man. It concludes with speculation that maybe the guy is a little unhinged.

We refuse to speculate, but as Bellatrys wisely remarks in the comments there: "It always surprised me that so many people thought Anonymous Mike was a good guy, just because he criticized Bushco a bit for their obvious clusterfuckery."

Yeah. What she said.

Take a moment please,

And remember Admiral James Stockdale, former VP candidate and POW who died this year. The Carpetbagger Report links to a New York Times Magazine story (sub. required) about Admiral Stockdale that is worth checking out. Here is the part that grabbed me:

After his release, Stockdale became president of the Citadel, a civilian military college in South Carolina, but only lasted a year. Stockdale apparently wanted to curb the school's violent hazing culture, his board blocked his efforts, so he quit. As he later told a friend, "When you've been tortured by professionals, you do not have to put up with amateurs."

We have discussed torture on this blog and in our radio show quite a bit in the last few years. I think it is instructive to consider the treatment of American POW's in the Hanoi Hilton in truly grasping the depths of human degradation and evil that torture represents. Not to mention, for you *realists*, the complete and utter failure it was in this context for providing useful information or even propaganda. Admiral Stockdales resistance, and his almost superhuman efforts to retain his dignity and humanity in the face of his brutal treatment, deserves a moment of reflection on his memory, and as inspiration to redouble our efforts to restore the honor of this nation and it's ideals and end the support and practice of torture by this country.

Godspeed Admiral.

Paging Dr. Strych9...

Dr. Strych9, please respond to the Economic Rough Trade Wing's Bond Yield Curve Inversion ward, stat!

mojo sends

Warrantless Searches Should Lead to Impeachment

Okay hippies, listen up:

There is no question. The President admitted he engaged the National Security Agency in warrantless searches of electronic communications. He did it, he's proud of it, and said he'll do it again.

He also said it was legal... somehow.

Well, here's the law, comrades:

50 USC §1809

Criminal sanctions
(a) Prohibited activities
A person is guilty of an offense if he intentionally—
(1) engages in electronic surveillance under color of law except as authorized by statute; or
(2) discloses or uses information obtained under color of law by electronic surveillance, knowing or having reason to know that the information was obtained through electronic surveillance not authorized by statute.

(b) Defense
It is a defense to a prosecution under subsection (a) of this section that the defendant was a law enforcement or investigative officer engaged in the course of his official duties and the electronic surveillance was authorized by and conducted pursuant to a search warrant or court order of a court of competent jurisdiction.

(c) Penalties
An offense described in this section is punishable by a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment for not more than five years, or both.

(d) Federal jurisdiction
There is Federal jurisdiction over an offense under this section if the person committing the offense was an officer or employee of the United States at the time the offense was committed.

There's the law for violating the FISA statute. May we now please proceed to the articles of impeachment...

mojo sends

(P.S. hat tip to Rob in Baltimore)

Atrios Is Right...

...you should just go read Tbogg. When you're done, you can tell me, again, who is going to police these retards.

Tyrants In Black Robes, Indeed...

Help me out here... this is an excerpt from an article in yesterday's Izvestia On The Potomac:

A federal judge in Washington ruled yesterday that the continued detention of two ethnic Uighurs at the U.S. prison facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is "unlawful," but he decided he had no authority to order their release.

U.S. District Judge James Robertson criticized the government's detention of Abu Bakker Qassim and Adel Abdu Hakim, who have been jailed at Guantanamo for four years; they have been cleared for release because the government has determined they are not enemy combatants and are not a threat to the United States. But Robertson said his court has "no relief to offer" because the government has not found a country to accept the men and because he does not have authority to let them enter the United States.

Robertson wrote that the government has taken too long to arrange a release for the men, who cannot return to their Chinese homeland because they would likely be tortured or killed there. U.S. authorities have asked about two dozen countries to grant the men political asylum, but none has accepted, in part out of fear of angering China.

The Uighurs -- along with seven other detainees who have been found to be "no longer enemy combatants" -- are in Guantanamo's Camp Iguana, a less-restrictive area of the prison. They were cleared by a combatant status review tribunal about nine months ago, but no solution for their release has been reached. Robertson wrote that their situation is untenable.

[...]

Let me see if I get this straight...

• They're "no longer enemy combatants."
• Their continued detention is "unlawful."
• They can't be rendered back to China, because they would "likely be tortured or killed" there.
• Nobody, presumably not even the United States of America, dares anger the Chinese Red Army by granting them political asylum.
• A U.S. federal judge has no authority to order any relief.

I'm supposed to believe that the tyrants in America are the judges?

And would somebody please explain to me— really, one of you wingnuts with the answers to everything ought to be able to just pop in here and straighten this out with a simple one-liner, I figure— what the fsck is the United States of America planning to do with these guys? Keep them detained in Camp Iguana for the rest of their natural lives?

Why am I paying taxes to pay for this?

It Was A Hoax

I knew there was something fishy about that story out of U. Massachusetts— the one about the political science student getting a visit from scary men in black from the Department of Fatherland Security supposedly just because he requested a copy of Mao's Little Red Book on inter-library loan.

I was right: it was a hoax. That's why I didn't post about it here. Looks like none of the other editorial board at The MojoWire got fished into this one either, for which I'm grateful. We've been gulled by hoaxes almost as bad as this one, and we've never failed to admit those mistakes. We promised to be more cynical, and this should serve as evidence of our efforts to be more suspicious of stories like these.

Anyway... would somebody please smack that kid around for me? I hate time-wasting little snots like him.

A MojoWire Christmas

I would like to tell you all a story... a Christmas story ... A Christmas story about Santa Claus.

I call this story, "Santa Claus and His Numerous Violations of the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution."

You all know the song "He sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake, he knows if you've been bad or good so be good for goodness sake..."

Unfortuantely for Santa Claus, acting as he does in a quasi-state capacity as the leader of a sovereign territory, (and his involvement in nuclear disarmament activities), his warrantless searching of children's bedrooms not only represent nearly an a priori violation of Fourth Amendment protections against such intrusion, but at least in the state of California, there are several Penal Code sections that specifically prohibit non-guardian adults from gathering information about children (c.f. PC §637.9).

To begin, the act of such intrusion is itself prohibited, but then this allegedly jolly old elf uses evidence gathered without probable cause in this illegal fashion to pronounce summary judgment (we'll get to due process in a minute) in violation of the "fruit of the poisoned tree" doctrine in the exclusionary rule.

But even if he met the hurdles of fourth amendment jurisprudence for his no-knock entries of houses without any judicial oversight, he clearly runs afoul of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.

For instance, in the case of Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965) Justice Douglas writes for the majority:

"The Fifth Amendment in its Self-Incrimination Clause enables the citizen to create a zone of privacy which government may not force him to surrender to his detriment."

And since we deem Santa to be acting in at least a quasi state actor role, we feel his activities are covered by the Fifth's protections of a "zone of privacy." And to reiterate, in the state of California, the penal code is especially protective of children given their status as the most vulnerable in our society to abuse and harm.

But let's pretend for the moment that the exigencies of the fourth and fifth amendments are met. Easily the most severe violations of constitutional rights are Santa's blanket disregard for due process as protected by the Sixth Amendment.

I don't even know where to start with this one. I mean, starting from his inability to prove-up his apparently self-appointed jurisdiction over all the children (who I might add, are still considered citizens, with all rights thereunto pertaining) of the United States.

Then there is the issue of judgment being pronounced on these children without any form of hearing or judicial process, much less giving children, or their parents, guardians, ad litems or other legal representatives an opportunity to make a case on their behalf.

We don't even want to go into the whole problem with his judgment being pronounced ex cathedra without any statutory authority for leaving lumps of coal in stockings (we won't even go into the CEQA rules about unregulated distribution of bisthmus coal in a residential setting...)

So from all of us here at the MojoWire: van.mojo, Dr. Strych9, Sean we wish all of you (even the asshats who come by) a very Merry Christmas.


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mojo sends

No More Bets...

No more bets, please...

The book is closed...

mojo sends

Things That Make You Go Hmmmm....

The latest on Iraqi democracy from MSNBC.Com...

[...]
The election results in Iraq may present Chalabi’s ardent U.S. supporters with a quandary: Chalabi, as well as other losing candidates, is alleging fraud in the election, even though the Bush administration hailed the vote as a historic step for democracy in Iraq.
[...]

Of course, Ahmed "Super Crypto Spy Man" Chalabi isn't the only one to have made this argument in recent days.

In the meantime, naturally, we here at The MojoWire are waiting with bated breath to find out whether 1) Iraq's new Jeffersonian Democracy is still the best thing to happen in the HeartOfTheArabWorld™, or 2) election fraud in Iraq is preventing Jeffersonian Democracy from breaking out in the HeartOfTheArabWorld™.

Inquiring Minds Want To Know What To Think!

Racist Scumbag Alert!

You knew they were rattling around inside the South Carolina affiliates of Fox Broadcasting Corp, didn't you? You didn't? Well, now you do. [Via ThinkProgress.Com]

Birckner’s praise of StormFront didn’t go unnoticed by Jamie Kelso (”Charles Lindbergh”), the site’s Senior Moderator, 11/14/05:

One detail that I forgot (until just yesterday) was to unmoderate our new Stormfront Member, FOXSC, so that Fox could post more easily on Stormfront.

Birckner told Think Progress that she is unsure whether or not she will be doing a follow-up piece and is waiting to hear more from the “local community.” When asked why she didn’t include some voices that were critical of StormFront, she replied she did the story exactly as she was told to and that officials at the network were very pleased with her coverage.

For those of you unfamiliar with Stormfront,Org, they are unreconstructed racist, white supremacist scumbags. They do not deserve fair treatment in the media. They are Evil and Insane, and they should be run like dogs— not fluffed with airy kisses from an affiliate of an international media behemoth.

Does anyone need further proof that Fox Broadcasting is an enemy of the United States? No? I didn't think so.

Your Shoes Are Ready For You, RedState...

Just go read this post by Michael Bérubé. Yes, RedState— we are mocking you.

p.s. Like Michael, I have to confess I'm beginning to resent being called a "liberal" too. The other names just make me laugh.

The BigWord™ Of The Day

an·ti·no·mi·an·ism n.
1. Theology. The doctrine or belief that the Gospel frees Christians from required obedience to any law, whether scriptural, civil, or moral, and that salvation is attained solely through faith and the gift of divine grace.
2. The belief that moral laws are relative in meaning and application as opposed to fixed or universal.

I bring this word to your attention in the context of these remarks from our friend Paperwight, who said...

The very existence of that talking point [that Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi were told about the spying project months ago], the fact that it's viable, says a lot about the modern Republican Party. Think about it. The response to "Hey, that's illegal" is: "We told some of the people who represent you, and they did nothing."

That response is completely orthogonal to the rule of law and to the very possibility of any form of democracy. It plainly grows out of a nasty swamp comprising equal parts antinomianism [emphasis added —s9] and authoritarianism, which has at its rotten heart the maxim: "There is no law. There is only power."

Allow me to simplify this for the ignorant Jethros in our tiny and rapidly dwindling readership.

Antinomianism is a fancy word that means Moral Relativism. The "It's Okay If You Are Republican" (IOKIYAR) thing is what we're talking about. When you combine it with Authoritarianism, what you get is a Party Doctrine that goes like this:

Conservatism frees Republicans from required obedience to any law, whether scriptural, civil, or moral, and patriotism is attained solely through loyalty and the gift of political favor.

Are we starting to hit home with some of you people yet?

I guess there really is a Santa Claus

Federal Indictments are coming to town! From the Post:

Former lobbyist Jack Abramoff, facing trial on fraud charges Jan. 9 in Florida, is negotiating a possible deal with the Justice Department, in which he would agree to plead guilty and cooperate in the wide-ranging political corruption investigation focused on his dealings with members of Congress and executive branch officials, people familiar with the talks said last night.

Abramoff would provide testimony about numerous members of Congress and their staffs if he and the Justice Department reach an agreement, the sources said. Negotiations have been ongoing for several months, people knowledgeable about the discussions said, but pressure is mounting because of the pending trial.

Crikey! This is going to turn into an episode of I, Claudius. They are going be knifing each other in the parking structure of the U.S. Attorneys office to see who gets there earlier to get a better deal. Talk about coal in your stocking.

Who am I really looking forward to being cuffed and sent to man jail? Ralph Reed, that pompus and evil little punk who, along with Grover Norquist, fancies himself quite the tough guy. Memo to you Ralph, you aren't Gordon Liddy. You are a pimped out Alfalfa who is looking at doing serious time. I wonder what Pat Robertson thinks of his little protege now?

How many packs of smokes to you think Ralph is going to be worth in the open bitch market at Leavenworth?

More Little Victories...

Here is another one of those little victories... ANWR drilling gets punked.

One of my favorite little bits from this was Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens getting in the well of the Senate and saying that without ANWR drilling, there will be no money to pay for Katrina victims and avian flu vaccine. That is stellar work, Mr. Wizard...

Tell me Senator, how will revenues from oil, that don't appear for a decade or more effect the Katrina recovery or public health funding efforts now?

We'll just wait here for that answer...

mojo sends

Nice Job, W, Iran Wins Iraq Election...

We get the following from Voice of America about the official results of the Iraqi Election...

The Iraqi Electoral Commission on Tuesday released more preliminary voting results from the country's December 15 election for a new National Assembly. The largest Shi'ite coalition appears to have kept most of its seats in Iraq's 275-member Assembly.

The Iraqi election chief, Adil Al Lami, says 90 percent of the votes have been counted. Although the official tally will not be certified until early January, the preliminary results show that the United Iraqi Alliance will hold the largest number of seats in the country's new four-year, fulltime National Assembly.

The United Iraqi Alliance currently holds a narrow majority in the National Assembly. It also has most of the positions in the powerful ministry of the interior. The prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, is also a member.

The Alliance is a conservative grouping of Islamist parties with ties to Iran. Sunnis accuse the current government of allowing Shi'ite militiamen, thinly veiled as police and interior ministry forces, of harassing, detaining and killing them.

The issue here is of course that in spite of intense Sunni turnout at the polls, we had reports on the eve of the election of Iranian ballot tampering. Of course, all the asshats didn't seem to be worried about that, in spite of being given pretty good reason to.

So in spite of all their chest thumping faux patriotic flag waving on the march of freedom, when the Iraqi people get an election stolen right out from under them by the Axis of Evil they are no where to be seen. Typical, they would rather see a crooked election that will screw up their long run plans than have to admit that there was something wrong in the first place.

The ultimate triumph of style over substance.

Although I certainly wouldn't put it past certain elements to be willingly looking the other way... now, why would they do something like that?

mojo sends

Update 1.0: Apparently, we here are not the only ones who noticed that something was wrong with the Iraqi election. And now, the dissaffected parties, including secular Shi'a political groups, are calling for a boycott of the new government if these charges are not investigated seriously.

The Pushback Continues

I've been listening to Rush Limbaugh on the way to work all this week because I can count on him to present the Bush administration pushback on the spying scandal without delaying it or hedging it.

Today, the line appears to be a fetid load of rancid fertilizer stemming from a column by John Schmidt in today's Chicago Tribune (boo, hiss— do we need to remind you of the editorial bias at the trib?) that falsely argues the President had legal authority to order the wiretaps we've been talking about all week. I heard Limbaugh rant for a good twenty minutes on this subject. (And may I just say— dude needs to go back on the little blue ones. He's starting to go all Michael Savage on us, and that is not pretty.)

This latest argument is all of the same piece as the other attempts to muddle the debate we brought to your attention earlier this week. The fine folks at ThinkProgress.Com are all over this one. They are quite handily deconstructing this bullshit-on-demand.

[...] It features this selectively edited excerpt from a 2002 decision by the FISA appeals court:

“All the … courts to have decided the issue held that the president did have inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence…We take for granted that the president does have that authority.” [...]

Actually, the quote doesn’t begin with the word “all”; it begins “The Truong court, as did all the other courts…” The Truong case was decided in 1978 — the same year FISA was passed — and did not deal with the FISA law.

If you read the whole thing, and compare notes with our previously linked comments, it will be plainly apparent that this pushback is all stemming from the same source. Somebody, probably somewhere inside the Justice Department or the White House, is purposely misquoting FISA and pretending it doesn't say what it does. Specifically, they want you to believe that 50 USC 1802 doesn't limit the definition of a "foreign power" to which it applies to a subset of the categories defined in 50 USC 1801 that specifically excludes international terrorists. The Congress explicitly and deliberately wrote the law this way.

Once again, apologists for the President are deliberately lying about the text of the law and the judicial record. The President has authority to order electronic surveillance without a court order on foreign agents narrowly defined to exclude international terrorists. These people are trying to pretend that the Congress did not explicitly limit the President's authority to prevent his office from ordering what George W. Bush admitted in front of God and C-SPAN he did.

p.s. "Deliberately" is a really fun word in this context— you should look it up, RedState!

Look On The Bright Side!

At least, now we know the government will have no trouble identifying who are the firearms enthusiasts when it comes time to disarm the civilian population.

A data mining operation to find a list of all the Americans with significant private armories should be trivially easy to do once you've decided it's a national security priority. I cannot wait for President Clinton to take office!

More Dingbattery To Shoot Down

On 2000-04-12, CIA director George Tenet testified to this before Congress [emphases added —s9]:

I’m here today to discuss specific issues about and allegations regarding Signals Intelligence activities and the so-called Echelon Program of the National Security Agency…

There is a rigorous regime of checks and balances which we, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and the FBI scrupulously adhere to whenever conversations of U.S. persons are involved, whether directly or indirectly. We do not collect against U.S. persons unless they are agents of a foreign power as that term is defined in the law. We do not target their conversations for collection in the United States unless a FISA warrant has been obtained from the FISA court by the Justice Department.

I'm bringing this to your attention, not just because the wingnuts are pushing the line that the Echelon program was identical to Bush's program. Yes, the program was apparently called— I shit you not— "the President's program" during at least part of its life.

It was not the same as Echelon. President Clinton did not approve a violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. President Bush is the one who has decided unilaterally that FISA warrants are unnecessary.

Rush Limbaugh was pushing this dingbat meme today, and it's all over the wingnut-o-sphere, i.e. here, here, here and here. (Thanks to ThinkProgress and Atrios for the heads-up.)

Update 1.0: Now, here comes Peter Daou with an explanation of why this matters.

Christian Ethicists On Torture

Want to know what Christian intellectuals in America are really thinking on the subject of torture? The often problematic Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost is hosting an "online symposium" on the subject. He's got a lot of big names in Christian ethical philosopher going on the record. He deserves praise for rounding this up for us.

I frequently bad-mouth Joe, but I'm giving him props for this. Thanks for pinning these guys down.

What Is The White House Trying To Do?

[This article has been updated twice since its original posting.]

Somebody needs to talk me down off the ledge.

I've been out here on this ledge since, like— oh, I'm not sure I even remember— sometime around January 2002 or so. Right about the time the President stood up in front of the Naval Academy and announced that the Project for a New American Century had written our new, improved defense doctrine.

I keep looking at the big scandals of this White House, and the same question keeps coming up: why the fsck are these people doing it this way? The whole extraordinary rendition, prisoner abuse, Geneva conventions thing is one case in point. The latest one to capture the public attention, i.e. the warrantless electronic surveillance order, has been trundelating along for some time now as well.

In both of these cases— though, what's noteworthy about the warrantless surveillance order is how blatant it's been— the White House has gone out of its way, for completely indefensible and incomprehensible reasons, to assert that the President's authority to exercise discretionary war power is "plenary" and unchecked by Congress or the courts.

It's like they're deliberately trying to provoke a constitutional crisis.

That's why I'm saying somebody needs to talk me down off this ledge. The President and his supporters can't— really, they just can't— be that far gone, right? They are not trying to provoke a constitutional crisis. They just can't be. That would be Unamerican. It would mean our oaths to defend the Constitution against its domestic enemies would seem to be in play— which would be kinda difficult to manage under the circumstances, seeing as how said "enemies of the Constitution" would have all the tanks and planes and missiles.

So, all you right-wing freekbots— and you liberal interventionists, too— it's time to jump on the team and come on in for the big win.

You're going to explain to me, in the comments forum please, what useful purpose is served by tapping the phones of Americans without bothering to comply with the ridiculously easy terms of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, i.e. you can get a warrant 72 hours after the fact from a court that has never denied a request and would probably authorize a tap on a ham sandwich if the DHS asked for a warrant.

Why would you throw down that glove to the Congress and the courts? Why else would you do it except to provoke a constitutional crisis?

Really, I would dearly love to have a sensible answer to that.

Update 1.0: Over at The Left Coaster, Steve Soto is asking all the same questions I'm asking (some of them in the comments below, and others I've been asking elsewhere).

+ Why haven’t we had more prosecutions here at home?

+ Why haven’t we had more arrests here at home?

+ Why haven’t you gone to the Foreign Intelligence Services Act court and received warrants on all these people?

+ If the current law was insufficient, why haven’t you tried to expand it in the last four years?

+ Why can’t you share [the names of wiretapped citizens] with the top four members of the congressional intelligence committees, who are already bound to confidentiality now?

I'd really like to hear a plausible answer from the President other than "Fsck off, hippie. I'm the President, and if you don't like it, you can wait until you get another President." As near as I can tell, he's deliberately trying to engineer a constitutional crisis. Really. I've been trying to avoid this conclusion for going on four years now. I'm -->this<-- close to giving up.

Update 2.0: Finally, Kevin Drum has a plausible explanation for me. He actually doesn't come out and say it, but I think we all know what he's talking about.

His theory is much more believable: the President doesn't want to comply with the need to obtain a FISA court warrant because the system that decides who gets wiretapped and for how long is now thoroughly automated (or, more accurately, it soon will be if everything goes according to plan). To keep the new wiretapping system running at peak efficiency, it would require a case load at the FISA court that would utterly swamp it with requests.

If you assume that the President simply refused to shut down the Evil Dr. Poindexter's Total Information Awareness program when the Congress ordered him to do it, then every last one of Steve Soto's questions has an obvious and easily inferred answer.

Q: Why haven’t we had more prosecutions here at home?
A: Because Total Information Awareness doesn't work.

Q: Why haven’t we had more arrests here at home?
A: You mean, why haven't we had more arrests publicized here at home, right? When most of the people you're investigating turn out to be non-prosecutable, then you either don't arrest them, or you bind them into complete silence with non-disclosure agreements.

Q: Why haven’t you gone to the Foreign Intelligence Services Act court and received warrants on all these people?
A: Because that would mean 1) explaining how we got their names, and eventually— once the system is out of beta testing— 2) overflowing the capacity of the FISA court to hear requests by several orders of magnitude, and there's no way they'd sit for that without pitching an unholy fit.

Q: If the current law was insufficient, why haven’t you tried to expand it in the last four years?
A: Hello? The Congress made it quite clear they didn't want us using data mining operations to generate the names of our terrorism suspects!

Q: Why can’t you share [the names of wiretapped citizens] with the top four members of the congressional intelligence committees, who are already bound to confidentiality now?
A: If we did that, we'd have to admit how we came up with their names and why we thought they might be terrorists.

So, you see— it's very simple. The President isn't trying to engineer a constitutional crisis. It's just an unfortunate side effect of his approach to governing.

We Read Eschaton For You

Atrios links to an excellent deconstruction by Glenn Greenwald of some conservatarian legal "analysis" currently getting play among the dumber and dumberer wings of the wingnutosphere.

Sez Greenwald...

Defenders of the Bush Administration are resorting to outright distortions and deliberate falsehoods about the Foreign Intelligence Security Act (FISA) in order to argue that the Administration's warrantless eavesdropping on U.S. citizens complies with the mandates of that statute. To do so, they are simply lying -- and that term is used advisedly -- about what FISA says by misquoting the statute in order to make it appear that the Administration’s clearly illegal behavior conforms to the statute.

I recommend reading the whole thing. It's short and it lays out in depressing detail how this lie got planted, how it grew, and how it continues to be defended.

Here at MojoWire, we've seen all this before. We can tell you what will happen next.

These false talking points will be picked up by some chowderhead with an SPJ membership, carried in the Wall Street Journal or repeated on some other "respectable" top-down media network. Next thing you know, people like us will have our hands full debunking a lie rather than actually advancing a narrative about how the Bush Administration never needed to violate the FISA and refuses to explain why the President's order to violate the FISA was necessary.

If anybody tries to tell you that what President Bush did was not a violation of the FISA, don't waste any time on them. Send them straight to that Glenn Greenwald piece. You shouldn't have to put up with this bullshit. (And, yes— I use the word "bullshit" with great care.)

Bow before Fafblog fool!

Fafblog saves Christmas from the heathen liberal and their space weapons of secular humanism, enjoy.

Here is my favorite part:

[...]
Every year around Christmastime Santa's little helpers set up thrones for Santa in thousands of Santa temples across the land so allll the children a the world can come an swear their allegiance to his jolly name. If you've been good he'll give you a candy cane! If you've been bad his unholy gaze will fill you with a burning madness that will consume you for the rest of your days. Oh don't cry Little Timmy! It's a real good candy cane.

Update 1.0 (s9): Reformatted.

A Reminder About Our Policy On Tactical Syntax

Here is our policy on the use of the "Delete Comment" and "Ban This IP Address" features for comment moderation.

We love a good rumble. We don't kick comments just because they disagree with us. We don't kick comments just because they're rude, crude or obnoxious. We don't kick comments for using "profanity" or other forms of harsh language. The comments forum at MojoWire is not child-safe.

Also, we don't kick off-topic flames. We don't ban people for trolling— even for engaging in trolling competitions. Hell, we do that ourselves from time to time. Suit up, and remember to bring enough to share. If you can keep treading water at Eschaton, then you can probably manage to stay afloat here.

Q: What will get my comment deleted from the forum here? Simple. If, in the entirely subjective [and probably drunken or drug-addled] judgment of any single member of the MojoWire Editorial Board, you post something one of us thinks is egregiously commercial spam, or something explicitly intended to send a terrorizing message [i.e., overtly threatening of violence, and loaded with racist, sexist, or homophobic content], or otherwise get us into trouble with the Ministry of Fatherland Security unless we take the time to delete it, then the comment will get deleted. No explanation. No notification. (Though, we reserve the privilege of cracking back about it, should our bile rise sufficiently.)

Q: What will get my IP address banned? Simple. If we get tired of deleting your comments manually on a case by case basis, then we'll start banning your IP addresses until you run out of them.

Q: What will happen if I have too many IP addresses for y'all to ban? Consider the immortal words of Socrates, from the classic dialogue by Nathaniel Kerr, in which the great philosopher said, "Justice is only the will of the stronger. What do you think about that, asshole?"

We may be hippie cranks, but we don't back down from threats designed to shut us up.

Update 1.0: Updated to clarify what "terrorizing" means in our minds.

One for the Good Guys!

Woot! Looks like the USA Patriot Act won't be renewed today, at least.

Here's to the little victories...

mojo sends

Update 1.0: As a side note, in case there was anyone out there still wondering about the craptacular-bee-yatch-full-ness that is Sen. Majority Leader Bill Frist, his website is still urging comrades to vote for cloture, even though in the final vote, he sensed the wind blowing against him, and voted with the winning side...

Dolchstoßlegende!

(Via Paperwight, The Carpetbagger Report and Slate...)

The GOP is running a web video that pretty clearly accuses its opposition of undermining the U.S. armed services. It's currently linked from the front page of RNC.Org. You really have to see it to believe it's really coming from the Republican National Committee and not some gang of mouth-breathers operating out of a boiler room in West Virginia.

The reason RNC must be feeling the need to do this is obvious. They've been stoking the irrational hopes among their base of support that Iraq will suddenly break out with Jeffersonian Democracy after the elections today. Yet, they know that's an impossible outcome.

As I wrote in the comments to a post over at HolyCoast.Com (yet another X-tian "conservative" blog based in The O.C.), where Rick Moore has been drinking the Kool-Aid™ like we drink Irish whiskey around here:

That's a false hope.

Even if you discount the credibility of the widespread reports of SCIRI ballot forgery, it's completely unreasonable to hope the results of these elections will "get the [Iraqi] government off and running" very far.

The Iraqi "government" is a Failed State. Virtually no order it gives is any more likely to be implemented than if it were to order the precise opposite. It has no army deserving of any respect, and it cannot control even the most secure of its provinces— much less the ones where the insurgency operates with unmitigated freedom. Its parliamentarians are often under attack, and sometimes they're killed, with utter impunity. Its oil pipelines are routinely bombed, depriving it of critical financial capital. It faces a powerful guerrilla insurgency that openly bears contempt for the results of electoral processes in general, and it just wants to overthrow the new order by any means at its disposal, including the massacre of unaligned civilians.

How are elections likely to change any of this?

They have no answer to that. Instead, they're preparing the ground for when the new Iraqi "government" fails, and the American troops are driven into strategic retreat, back to Kuwait and Turkey or elsewhere, so that when those men and women rotate home, they will know whom to blame.

As Paperwight said... Dolchstoßlegende. That's what this is about. Salon notes that this has never happened before in American political history. Dolchstoßlegende, gentlemen. Dolchstoßlegende. Make sure you have your exit visa ready.

Am I dreaming this?

The American Prospect has posted an article about John Bolton's first 100 days in office. It is clear that everything people opposed to Bolton's nomination said would occur is coming to pass. The article details Boltons successful campaign to derail reform at the U.N. , a legitimate process that would have implemented real changes. Naturally, countries hostile to the U.S. such as Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela have benefited from Bolton ruining the process.

My favorite part though, is how it is has become crystal clear that part of Boltons mission, no doubt on behalf of VP Cheney and SecDef Rumsfeld, is to subvert and undermine Secretary of State Condaleeza Rice at every opportunity. Check this:

Rice’s involvement came after Bolton had won round one in the Syria battle. Bolton and Rice’s bureaucratic tiffs over Syria had actually boiled over two weeks prior to the Security Council vote. Journalist Ibrahim Hamidi, writing in the Arabic-language newspaper Al-Hayat, reported -- and the Prospect has independently confirmed -- that Bolton had leaked to British newspapers that the Bush administration had signaled its willingness to offer Syria a “Libya-style deal” -- a reference to Libyan President Muammar Quaddafi’s decision last year to give up pursuing weapons of mass destruction and renounce terrorism in return for a restoration of relations with the United States and the United Kingdom. According to The Times of London, Syria responded positively to the secret U.S. offer, which was made through a third party. But after Bolton publicly aired the details of the potential deal -- which would require Syria to cooperate with the Mehlis investigation, end interference in Lebanese affairs and alleged interference in Iraqi affairs, and cease supporting militant groups like Hamas and Hezbollah—Damascus quickly denied that such a deal was in the offing.

“It is no secret that Mr. Bolton and Dr. Rice are not the closest friends,” a well-placed UN official told the Prospect. “Indeed, I’ve heard it said that the main reason he came here was that she didn’t want him in Foggy Bottom.” The animosity between the two is, in fact, well established, as they locked horns on Iran. On April 18, 2005, The Washington Post reported that Bolton let Rice go on her first trip to Europe as secretary of state without briefing her on European opposition to his one-man campaign to seek the ouster of the International Atomic Energy Agency Chief Mohammed ElBaradei. ElBaradei was a popular diplomat -- and would later win the Nobel Peace Prize for his work -- but Bolton thought ElBaradei was too “soft” on Iran.

Now, bureaucratic infighting is a refined art in Washington, but this is of a completely different order. Bolton is Rice's subordinate, yet look at the effort she has to put out to neutralize him on important negotiations. And consider what a bunch of worthless clowns the U.S. looks like to our most critical allies when, as the article details, Rice has to send THREE minders to ensure Bolton doesn't fuck everything up at a public event. Let's think about that: The State Department cannot trust the U.N. Ambassador from ruining critical negotiatons without adult supervision.

Now it was clear to us here at the Wire what Bolton's mission was, but he has made no effort to hide it now that he has his interim appointment. And that mission has a few objectives, among them clearly are to undermine the United Nations at every opportunity, sabotage any effort at reform that could result in improving its legitimacy, use his unique positon near the center of American diplomacy to subvert any action by Condi Rice and her fellow travelers in the Administration by any means possible. Those are just a few of the obvious ones.

This is absurd. Top diplomats of the U.S Government are engaged in open warfare with each other, sabotaging each other to advance their own agenda's, and making it impossible to establish a functional, working relationship with virtually anyone else in the world, most importantly our most important and closest allies. Our enemies are clearly taking advantage of this to advance their own agenda, as the Prospect article clearly lays out.

The Bush Administration transcends any previously held notion of what is bad government. This isn't just bad policies being advanced by losers and flunkies. This is patheticly stupid behavior that is undermining the stated goals of the administration, to combat international terror groups and rogue states. Diplomacy, forging alliance, establishing international norms are a part of that. But to Bolton and the people pulling his strings, those are just obstacles to blown up or undermined. It is obtuseness and myopic behavior on an unprecedented scale. What the fuck is going on with these people? And can someone explain to me exactly why the President appoints Condi Rice to the State job, and then appoints Bolton and allows him to undermine Rice? What is the fucking point of doing that? What good does it do to have your foreign policy a running tragicomedy when you have over 130,000 combat troops engaged in a bloody mess in Iraq, and you are trying to fight a war against international terror?

Just wake me when the nightmare is over.

Anyone Interested in the Rule of Law?

Scott Horton has an interesting piece up at Professor Jack Balkin's Balkinization about the word honor in a classic understanding of the word and how it applies to the law on torture.

He also links from that page to an interesting Columbia Law Review article Jeremy Waldon on "Torture and Positive Law."

It's a bit long and kind of an academic slog, but its worth the read... mojo says check it out.

mojo sends

Salam Pax Writes From Iraq

In Guardian Unlimited, he writes:

[...]
I found out yesterday that Iraqis all over the world get to vote before us in Iraq. The state-run station has been broadcasting pictures from everywhere, from Britain to Iran, all doing the Iraqi democracy finger salute; purple index finger held up. I bet the majority of these bomb-scare-free, minimal-security voters do not know that their votes will only count towards the 45 "compensatory seats". The fight for the rest of the 230 seats happens on Iraqi ground.

The insurgency is doing its best to defy all the security measures and has blown up the electricity generator that feeds the main water pumps to Baghdad. Most of the city is without running water and the municipality says they hope to get everything running again by tomorrow afternoon. Let's hope that's the only thing insurgents are going to blow up for the next two days.

Whoever you talk to says they think voter turnout will be just as good as last time. I do believe that for many Iraqis the fact that this time we are voting for people who are staying in government for four years has sunk in. We've been through three trial runs and this time it's for real. Keep your fingers crossed for us, will you?

Some of his earlier comments in that piece, which I did not reprint, are instructive. I'll reprint one more, but you should just click through and read the whole thing. Salam Pax is one of my heroes.

Obviously, the question of how free and fair elections are in an environment of continued violence has never been answered. In a week we go to vote again hoping that we won't be blown to pieces. And I really believe that we Iraqis do deserve a bit of credit for having done that twice now. I don't think there is a better demonstration of the will to get this political process rolling and keeping it rolling than participating under the threat of violent death. I know I make fun of it all the time but this is not to be mistaken for belittling the courage of all those who participate.

If anybody reading this is confused about whether we at The MojoWire do not appreciate the courage of the Iraqi electorate who participate in the balloting, let them stand up and identify their positions now. Please be so kind as to hold still while we compute the best trajectory for the anvilgrams.

We'll Stop Calling This Crew Orwellian...

...when they stop using 1984 as an operations manual.

Via The New Pravda (linked above), we find that the Pentagon is responding to the imminent passage of the McCain Amendment by rewriting US Army Field Manual 34-52.

The Army has approved a new, classified set of interrogation methods that may complicate negotiations over legislation proposed by Senator John McCain to bar cruel and inhumane treatment of detainees in American custody, military officials said Tuesday.

The techniques are included in a 10-page classified addendum to a new Army field manual that was forwarded this week to Stephen A. Cambone, the under secretary of defense for intelligence policy, for final approval, they said.

The addendum provides dozens of examples and goes into exacting detail on what procedures may or may not be used, and in what circumstances. Army interrogators have never had a set of such specific guidelines that would help teach them how to walk right up to the line between legal and illegal interrogations.

Nota Bene: the new guidelines use the "improved" torture standards— the ones that brought the world pictures of a grinning Charles Graner giving a nitrile-gloved thumbs-up next to a "previously enjoyed" information container.

[Mad props to ThinkProgress.Com]

Update 1.0: Added a link to the specific Charles Graner photo to which I am referring.

Meanwhile, Deep In The Jungle...

Doug Payton, over at Stones Cry Out (a Christian "conservative" blog), is convinced that we're winning something.

He's riffing off an appalling display, by the wankers at Powerline—Time Magazine's 2004 Blog Of The Year— of how far the U.S. military will go to run psy ops on the home population without running afoul of the laws against ratfscking the domestic press. (Bloggers aren't The Free Press, you must understand. They're just these guys, you know?)

Anyway, if anybody knows what Doug Payton and his like-minded friends think we're supposed to be winning— and, more importantly, when the prizes will actually be arriving in the mail— I'd like to know. Does anyone have a clue? Thanks.

Election Rigging in Iraq...

This whole parliamentary election in Iraq has really become a carnival of dark comedy.

The most recent news is that border guards in the south west part of Iraq intercepted a tanker truck coming across the frontier from Iran, stuffed to the gills with forged ballots. See New York Times story here.

Of course, the source from the Interior Ministry spoke on conditions of anonymity, given that he was not an "authorized" spokesperson. However, he also said the this tanker truck was only one of a fleet of them that had apparently crossed in the last couple of days with freshly printed ballots from Iran.

Interior Minister Bayon Jabor of course denies the report, saying this was just some malcontent attempting to question the legitimacy of the election.

And yes, this is the same Minister Jabor who is a member of the Iranian-government, Shi'a-backed Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Yeah, the guy who told the Saudi foreign minister after hearing criticisim of an Iraqi constitution leaning too much towards Iran: "[...]Some Bedouin riding a camel wants to teach us!"

The guy in charge of the "anti-terror" hit squads and the detention centers where American troops have been rescuing tortured Sunnis.

Yeah, why would this guy lie about Iranian printed forged ballots crossing the border...

Maybe you should up the voltage?

Just go here. (Props to alicublog for the link)
Finished? That's right, Clinton is responsible for an increase in Blow Jobs..

Apparently HE IS THE GREATEST PRESIDENT IN OUR HISTORY!!!

How much of a freakin nutjob do you have to be to make this argument? Actually cook it up, submit to an editor and expect it to be published. Some innoncuous story about Bill Clintons new diet sends dimtwitted cranks into some kind of lather, running around the common room of the mental institution they post from screaming about blowjobs and Bill Clinton and the increase in mouth sores and other insane jabberings. Are you people determined to get Hilary Clinton elected to the White House? Look, she's not my candidate, but do not for a minute believe I won't laugh my ass off if she does ascend to the White House and sends these cranks into some kind of hysteria of clawing their own eyes out. And remember Red State, your fearless representives in Congress are determined to make the expansion of the powers of the Executive branch in the Patriot Act permanent. What do you think the odds are she won't avail herself of it to payback some of you people? It will suck to be you RedState. Nothing says Happy Holidays than a national security letter being issued and FBI agents whisking the talking heads of Fox News off to the CIA's new vacation resorts in Eastern Europe. I'm not remotely kidding Red State. The Clintons cut their poltical teeth in Arkansas, a state not exactly reknowned for Political forgiveness.

Cranking like this is only going to make you people look even more freakin crazy than you actually are, a level of insanity so intense, Lovecraftian horrors will avoid catching your eyes on the Subway. The Clintons are counting on this. In fact, they are going to start pushing your buttons soon. And like a three old who cannot help themselves, the Freak right wing media will get their Clinton on something fierce, and Hilary will secure the Democratic nomination and roll over the Republican nominee on the "Jesus these people are freakin crazy" platform. Yes, even if Condi Rice runs, you morons.

So keep it up RedState. Don't listen to us, just go ahead and write your blowjob screeds and your Mena Arkansas coke smuggling ring takes....You've been warned.

The Unitarian Jihad Strikes Back

GOD REST YE, UNITARIANS
by Rev. Chris Raible

God rest ye, Unitarians, let nothing you dismay;
Remember there’s no evidence
There was a Christmas Day;
When Christ was born is just not known,
No matter what they say,

O, Tidings of reason and fact, reason and fact,
Glad tidings of reason and fact.

Our current Christmas customs come
From Persia and from Greece,
From solstice celebrations of the ancient Middle East.
This whole darn Christmas spiel is just
Another pagan feast,

O, Tidings of reason and fact, reason and fact,
Glad tidings of reason and fact.

There was no star of Bethlehem,
There was no angels’ song;
There couldn’t have been wise men
For the trip would take too long.
The stories in the Bible are historically wrong,

O, Tidings of reason and fact, reason and fact,
Glad tidings of reason and fact.

[ObAttributionDammit]

BANNED!

B. Preston writes in JYB: You didn’t demonstrate any bad faith in the post. I said that you must or you’re banned. You didn’t, so you’re banned. Good day.

Oh dear, I called him and his crew out on the idiocy of comparing WW II to the Iraq War and now he is all sad and angry and can take no more... And even after I dared him and his crew of neo-fascists to roll into our blog and rumble, only one half-hearted attempt.

And I am banishéd to the nether regions. Oh s9, oh Sean, I am feeling faint with the vapors... whatever shall I do...

mojo sends