Billmon

Before he mysteriously quit a few years ago, Billmon was one of my favorite bloggers. He popped up on the radar screen today: "The Great White Hope".

If you get anti-Obama emails from folks you know (like Dez does), here is a nice link to send in a reply. Scroll down the the second video clip. There is also a link at the bottom that has more of same.

And, I made an eggplant parmesan with a couple of eggplants from Dez's garden last night. It was good.

Serving at his Pleasure

Rape and pillage. Pulitzer Prize for Journalism winner, Charlie Savage:

WASHINGTON — On May 17, 2005, the White House’s political affairs office sent an e-mail message to agencies throughout the executive branch directing them to find jobs for 108 people on a list of “priority candidates” who had “loyally served the president.”

“We simply want to place as many of our Bush loyalists as possible,” the White House emphasized in a follow-up message, according to a little-noticed passage of a Justice Department report released Monday about politicization in the department’s hiring of civil-service prosecutors and immigration officials.

The report, the subject of a Senate oversight hearing Wednesday, provided a window into how the administration sought to install politically like-minded officials in positions of government responsibility, and how the efforts at times crossed customary or legal limits.

Tighty Whiteys

Garden

Bill Moyers

Is the Fourth Estate a Fifth Column?
Corporate media colludes with democracy’s demise
I would quote, but every word is worth reading. The corruption of public discourse is the fundamental problem of our nation. On the one hand, we need a functioning public educational system to provide a people with reasoning skills, and on the other, we need media that serve the public interest and provide basic information for public consumption. All of our problems are symptoms of our dysfunctional public discourse.

And last night on PBS's Bill Moyers Journal, he hosted a terrific example of televised rational discussion. He had on two leading conservatives, Mickey Edwards and Ross Douthat, and they discussed the fall of the Republican party. It's excellent.

Friday Links

War Crimes:

WASHINGTON — Red Cross investigators concluded last year in a secret report that the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation methods for high-level Qaeda prisoners constituted torture and could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes, according to a new book [The Dark Side] on counterterrorism efforts since 2001.

The book says that the International Committee of the Red Cross declared in the report, given to the C.I.A. last year, that the methods used on Abu Zubaydah, the first major Qaeda figure the United States captured, were “categorically” torture, which is illegal under both American and international law.

Saturday Morning War Crimes Update:

Greenwald writes a good one, and . . .




4th Amendment:

Feingold: "I sit on the Intelligence and Judiciary Committees, and I am one of the few members of this body who has been fully briefed on the warrantless wiretapping program. And, based on what I know, I can promise that if more information is declassified about the program in the future, as is likely to happen either due to the Inspector General report, the election of a new President, or simply the passage of time, members of this body will regret that we passed this legislation. I am also familiar with the collection activities that have been conducted under the Protect America Act and will continue under this bill. I invite any of my colleagues who wish to know more about those activities to come speak to me in a classified setting. Publicly, all I can say is that I have serious concerns about how those activities may have impacted the civil liberties of Americans. If we grant these new powers to the government and the effects become known to the American people, we will realize what a mistake it was, of that I am sure."

When the day comes that the mistake is painfully obvious to everyone, we will get a replay of the "no one said we shouldn't go into Iraq" game. There was significant public opposition to invading Iraq, but it was kept out of the press. Now the primary voices on TV are those that were wrong in the first place, and they say we shouldn't talk about the past. They say "if only they had prosecuted the war" the way I thought they should have, everything would be great. Bill-friggin-Kristol has been hired at the NYT. Dems that voted for the AUMF said they were duped, yet it was clear the claims were bogus then. Expect the same with this FISA law.


Anthrax: Incredible exchange here.

Leahy: "We're paying Hatfill millions of dollars, the indication being the guy who committed the crime went free."

Don't forget: the anthrax was linked, via ABC's dishonest anonymous source, to Iraq. Powell had a vial of it at the U.N.. It was a central part of the WMD propoganda, right up there with the bogus yellow cake.


Non-Internet Media:

This is the week that should have effectively ended John McCain's efforts to become the next president of the United States. But you wouldn't know it if you watched any of the mainstream media outlets or followed political reporting in the major newspapers.

During this past week: McCain called the most important entitlement program in the U.S. a disgrace, his top economic adviser called the American people whiners, McCain released an economic plan that no one thought was serious, he flip flopped on Iraq, joked about the deaths of Iranian citizens, and denied making comments that he clearly made -- TWICE. All this and it is not even Friday! Yet watching and reading the mainstream press you would think McCain was having a pretty decent political week, I mean at least Jesse Jackson didn't say anything about him.

Dark Day for Civil Liberties

Congress Erodes the 4th Amendment.

With their vote today, the Democratic-led Congress has covered-up years of deliberate surveillance crimes by the Bush administration and the telecom industry, and has dramatically advanced a full-scale attack on the rule of law in this country.

Obama fails his first meaningful test since winning the nomination.

In Obamaworld, apparently wrecking the Fourth Amendment is roughly equivalent to ridiculing some obscure rapper. The only thing more depressing than the conceit that supporting unconstitutional measures is a way to “signal” to swing voters that you are not a radical loon bent on “ideological purity,” which is basically to make defending the Constitution a position held only by radicals and extremists, is the dishonest representation of support for the compromise legislation as being a pro-civil liberties position.

DDay

The Title II provision of immunity sets an extremely dangerous precedent that undermines the rule of law and expands executive power. From now on, the stated law of the land will be that corporations, small businessmen or even individuals must comply with illegal orders from the state if they are given a piece of paper telling them they must. That won't be how the statute is written, but it's undoubtedly the implication.

Just a little reminder of a post from a few days ago about Hersh's article: the Democratic leadership also went along with the idiotic covert ops currently going on in Iran.

Beets

Dez just harvested some of the first beets. These are chioggia beets, which have a ringed pattern, alternating white and red, when you slice them open. When these started growing, they popped out of the ground a bit, and the sun bleached them where they were exposed. When she sliced them open, they were mostly white with a bit pink, where we had expected dark red rings. We were worried we had screwed up somehow and that they would be tasteless, but they were the sweetest beets either of us had ever eaten. The greens were delicious too, even better than the kale and collards.

Flowers

Fire School

I just found these pics on a camera we don't use much. Dez went to fire school in College Station last summer. It counts as pro. dev. for her job as plant nurse at Chevron/Phillips (Cedar Bayou).

Uncle Steve

comes bearing gifts. Speed Racer and the Mach V. It's now the most prized car in the collection, even faster than Lightning McQueen.


Uncle Steve has a secret: it's tickle time.



Jameson has decided that Aunt Beth is coming tomorrow. It would be nice, and we hope to see her soon. In the mean time, we are thinking about you and sending our love.

Iran: here we go

Seymour Hersh's "Preparing the Battlefield"

My forehead hurts. Hersh describes a Presidential Finding in regard to the funding of covert operations inside Iran.

The Democratic leadership’s agreement to commit hundreds of millions of dollars for more secret operations in Iran was remarkable, given the general concerns of officials like Gates, Fallon, and many others. “The oversight process has not kept pace—it’s been coöpted” by the Administration, the person familiar with the contents of the Finding said. “The process is broken, and this is dangerous stuff we’re authorizing.”

It's also remarkable given the reason for the Democratic landslide victory in the 2006 midterms. Fallon, no DFH, resisted (thus his "resignation") because he, like the Dems, was kept out of the loop, and it was interfering with his command.

“The coherence of military strategy is being eroded because of undue civilian influence and direction of nonconventional military operations,” Sheehan said. “If you have small groups planning and conducting military operations outside the knowledge and control of the combatant commander, by default you can’t have a coherent military strategy. You end up with a disaster, like the reconstruction efforts in Iraq.”

The purpose of these covert operations is to gather intelligence on Iran's suspected nuclear weapons program, to perform assassinations (wink wink, nudge nudge), and to work with opposition groups in order to bring about regime change. These opposition groups include, wait for it, Al Qaeda types.

The use of Baluchi elements [did we give up when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?], for example, is problematic, Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. clandestine officer who worked for nearly two decades in South Asia and the Middle East, told me. “The Baluchis are Sunni fundamentalists who hate the regime in Tehran, but you can also describe them as Al Qaeda,” Baer told me. “These are guys who cut off the heads of nonbelievers—in this case, it’s Shiite Iranians. The irony is that we’re once again working with Sunni fundamentalists, just as we did in Afghanistan in the nineteen-eighties.” Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is considered one of the leading planners of the September 11th attacks, are Baluchi Sunni fundamentalists.

I seem to recall McCain recently saying something about Iran supporting Al Qaeda inside Iran. We (Dems included) are giving money to one of the terrorist groups that is responsible for 9/11. Hersh runs through more examples. These groups, big surprise, lack much influence inside of Iran, and their increased activity, with our support, is rallying Iranian public opinion behind the current regime. It's also pissing off Iraq and Pakistan. The main point is to set up a bombing strike. Sweet.

Update: DDay, Ackerman and Emptywheel.

Greenwald who?

Olbermann slowly begins to get it, though there are still big holes in his take. He doesn't realize that FISA does not need to be amended, and that the bill erodes the fourth amendment. It's as simple as that. As an aside, he gives Greenwald the high hat.



At just after the six minute mark, he mentions John Dean has been "comparing notes" with lawyers at the ACLU. Greenwald is a lawyer for the ACLU.

Update: Greenwald's response. He and Texasyank have a surprising amount in common on Obama's flips.

Here's what might, hopefully, flip Obama back.