Cocktailhag, the blog

When I was growing up, we always laughed at the relentlessly upbeat statements that came from the old Soviet Union, where even disasters were turned into triumphs, and leaders, statues, and the names of places themselves switched magically as fashion and leadership  required, which usually worked out better for the places renamed than the people thus discarded.  One never assumed that an honest transfer of power had taken place, nor were the myriad other rosy scenarios to be believed.  We probably never knew the whole story, but most likely life for the average commie (unlike at Lake Wobegone, all commies are assumed to be average) was pretty close to what we all thought it was, and pretty much the opposite of what we heard from Pravda.  In short, it was a dreary, if not impoverished life, where a few oligarchs controlled the masses through a robust police state and propaganda machine while they pursued their imperial dreams into eventual bankruptcy for everybody.  Thanks to St. Ronnie, such a thing could never happen here, which is certainly reason enough to put his pancaked mug on the $50, where most of the rabble won’t ever see it at the rate we’re going.

What was most sinister about the Soviet system, though, was its Orwellian addiction to rewriting history simply because, well, it could.  Thus, the foibles great and small of the current cabal in power could be transformed into an immaculate arc of righteous progress against the pure evil of its every opponent, whose name and face must immediately be wiped from every street sign, monument, or book, to be replaced by those in favor, whose health often would then become a topic of conversation.  Outside of weapons, one of the best industries to be in would have been statue making, and I’m sure that the commie system produced its fair share of little Richard Cheneyovs to take advantage of this.  (The commies invented no-bid contracts, you know…) Book printing would have been something of a gold mine too, since every few years whole libraries would have to be replaced to protect the next generation from the dangerous ideas and subversive people recently laid to rest (the latter more literally than the former), no doubt drawing the attention of some little Rupert Murdokovitch, who would definitely have liked the lack of competition, anyway.

Well, now that we already have the shady elections, compromised media, widespread poverty, bloated military, gulags, and unaccountable ruling class, what’s really left to “win” from the commies but their curious approach to history?  Someone needs to think of the children, and fortunately, in Texas, they are, using their singular power to rewrite all Americans’ textbooks to exalt Jesus, Phyllis Schlafly, and Ayn Rand, not necessarily in that order.  Move over, Abe Lincoln, Jefferson Davis just brought back the Fairness Doctrine, and the Contract with America has now officially kicked the New Deal’s sorry ass to the curb where it belongs.  This new American Ministry of Culture has leapt boldly into commie territory, its Commissars hastily declaring who’s up and who’s down in public school textbooks, because the craziest members of the State Board of Education have been involuntarily retired by the notoriously crazy-friendly Texas voters, and only have 10 months to cut and paste.

Just like Krushchev banging his shoe, these chicken-fried Stalinists are not being at all shy about how many statues they still have to pull down; separation of church and state, the Great Society, Imperialism (the word, not the thing, of course), and best of all the Recent Unpleasantness we used to call Civil Rights, which children might as well henceforth learn hasn’t amounted to much beyond a lot of “unrealistic expectations of equal outcomes.”  In their place, the heroic doings of the Heritage Foundation, The National Rifle Association, the Moral Majority, and going back a bit, Stonewall Jackson, will step into the footlights beside the one true God besides Jesus, Free Enterprise, accompanied by stirring “country and western” music.  Seriously.

Please, Texas, secede already.  We’ll risk the children being left behind.

You know, you really have to hand it to the Republicans.  They started out with a plan that was seemingly so audacious and unlikely to succeed that Democrats never saw it coming, much less moved to counter it.  Selling plutocracy to the rubes, via a systematically concentrated media, has turned out to be like taking candy from a baby, minus the crying;  the guys who once obsessed over commies and fluoride in the water have moved on to crazier and crazier things, but this time they are treated as, well, sane.  Worse, regardless of such ephemera as elections and such, they are assumed to be in charge of the government by nearly all members of the media, even in exile.  Win or lose, Republicans dominate the talk shows and the evening news;  the vast majority of their unpopular policies are treated as holy writ, which Democrats blaspheme at their peril.    But now that we’re pretty sure that Bush never won either election honestly, this seems to me to be a rather astonishing departure from reality, and surely a grave disservice to the long-suffering audience.

But why not?  The media rapture over Republicans never ebbed after Reagan, particularly since he got rid of that pesky Fairness Doctrine and annoying public service obligations that had heretofore made it awkward for media outlets to simply join the government in looting the treasury and bombing the planet.  Whether they were doing any good or not is neither here nor there; the point is that they were doing well, very well.  The ultimate effect of Reagan’s efforts to “deregulate” the media was in fact the opposite; the idea was to concentrate the media into fewer and fewer wealthy hands, who could certainly be relied upon not to rock the boat when the rising tide rolled in, as it did.  Like a tsunami.

Of course, the inconvenient part was that all the policies the righties had dreamed up were, putting it delicately, unlikely to succeed, and lo and behold.  Now, if I were Tom Friedman, Bill Kristol, or Liz Cheney, I’d be nervous as a whore in church on Meet the Press, but as luck would have it, everyone else on the set all embraced the same dumb ideas you did, so it’s easier to sell such inanities than it would be, say, on the subway.  Consequently, we have landed in something of a pickle: the minority party and the media have together become so deeply divorced from reality, in lockstep, that they can no longer tell any semblance of the truth without making asses of themselves.

Fortunately, they approach this problem by lying even more extravagantly, to a point where a five year old would question their credibility.  Victory in Iraq?  Nostalgia for Bush?  (maybe they meant neuralgia…)  Socialism?  Fascism?  Perhaps it was different when Bush’s absurd claims about the distribution of his tax cuts were wanly accepted and repeated ad nauseam; the real world consequences, and they’ve been dreadful indeed, of the much crazier stuff that happened afterward continue to unfold, and the media that equally bears responsibility is as invested in “looking forward” as John Yoo.   Thus, they make even bigger asses of themselves, and the “credibility” of the media is but a corn-dotted turd from that predictable and noisy orifice making its final circle.

One really does wonder when premature announcements of “victories” at home and abroad, always from the same source, will finally begin to ring hollow inside the Washington bubble, as they have outside it for several years.  In this important way, the right is reaping the downside of its own success…  you can only fool all of the people some of the time, and that time has passed.

When my Dad was practicing criminal law in Portland in the 1960’s, he exposed my innocent, Holy Names educated mother to a lot of street smarts and lingo that stuck with her forever, and every so often she would unexpectedly astonish me with some expression or term more suited to a jaded beat cop than the sweet first grade teacher I knew. I was once attempting to repair and paint a particularly crappy cabinet in the basement stairwell, and she said, “Well, some rapist built that.  Your father thought I’d be safe because I was eight months pregnant at the time.”  I had already learned that the reason she drove so many strange cars when we were little also had to do with this curious aspect of criminal law finance, and I could never help but wonder what the guy who gave us the Kirby vacuum with its 700 attachments was accused of doing.  Another time, she almost absently told me that she had spotted and reported two hookers that had shown up at the Thunderbird bar, the hotel/restaurant where she also worked as a cashier to make ends meet and eagerly helped get me a job there busing tables as soon as I was old enough.  ”How did you know they were hookers?”  I asked, naturally curious as all teenagers are about such things, and chagrined that I hadn’t been there.  ”Oh, you could tell.  They were a salt and pepper pair.” (!)   Other times I would point out some frightening looking dive bar, and she’d say, as often as not, “I’ve been in there.  Your father took me once so he could meet a witness.”

Since my parents divorced when I was too young to have experienced this weird underworld first hand, and since then Dad had moved to Burns, Oregon where he had become a respectable country lawyer and later DA, all this seemed almost too unbelievable, in a good way, to be true.   His firm even represented the locally infamous Nate Zussman, who owned night clubs that were extra profitable because they had what was then called “procuring” as a side business.  This proved fleetingly awkward when somebody started to try to make an “arrangement” with my mom while he and my dad were conferring across the crowded room, and Nate had to run over to intervene, if only for appearance’s sake.  ”Of course he’s guilty,” Dad later dismissively told my mom by way of explanation.  Zussman also didn’t settle his bills with Oldsmobiles, vacuum cleaners, or bad cabinetry, needless to say, so the matter was thus settled.

Probably my favorite term I learned through these sporadic inquiries was the one used for those who liked to expose themselves to the unsuspecting, “lily wavers,” but I’d forgotten it for many years until today, when I read a story about Rahm Emanuel.  (h/t Huffpo…)

Outgoing Rep. Eric Massa (D-NY) had some choice words for White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel during a recent radio interview in which he called the top Obama adviser “the son of the devil’s spawn.”

“He is an individual who would sell his mother to get a vote. He would strap his children to the front end of a steam locomotive,” Massa said of Emanuel’s desire to lock up vital votes on health care reform. “You think that somehow they didn’tcome after me to get rid of me because my vote is the deciding vote in the health care bill? Then, ladies and gentlemen, you live today in a world that is so innocent as to not understand what’s going on in Washington, D.C.”

According to an account given by Massa, he and Emanuel have had tense confrontations in the past, including one particularly memorable incident in the shower of the Congressional gym.

“Let me tell you a story about Rahm Emanuel,” Massa started. “I was a congressman in my first eight weeks, and I was in the congressional gym, and I went down and I worked out and I went into the showers…I’m sitting there showering, naked as a jaybird and here comes Rahm Emanuel not even with a towel wrapped around his tush, poking his finger in my chest, yelling at me because I wasn’t going to vote for the president’s budget. Do you know how awkward it is to have a political argument with a naked man?

Well, if you’re a repressed homo, which it seems that Massa is, and you’re also sort of doughy and revolting in the nude, and a wiry, aggressive guy like Rahm who probably knows about you gets in your space, it could be awkward, indeed.  The kind of lily wavers my dad used to defend were blessedly free of any political agenda, much less one as reprehensible and sleazy as Rahm’s, and would probably disaffiliate Rahm from their guild for such a breach of protocol.  Lily waving is for pleasure, not business.

UPDATED BELOW: Wolf Blitzer apologizes, sort of.

Outside of Wolf Blitzer’s pathetic show, Liz Cheney’s McCarthy Palooza against the Obama DOJ isn’t going quite as planned, despite the enthusiastic boost it received from the LA Times.  Numerous prominent conservatives have branded Cheney’s insultingly ignorant fear-mongering as reminiscent of or worse than McCarthy, and even Condi Rice called the campaign, “unfortunate.”  When you’ve lost Condi Rice, you’ve lost America, Liz. I always thought it was odd that any credence and or airtime would be given to A) the unqualified daughter of the most despised politician in America, and B) the dumbest and most often wrong Neocon flak of that same dark and repudiated era, but the US media is an odd place, where no show is too unpopular to take on the road, once again.

Fortunately for Kristol and Cheney, but unfortunately for the party they think they’re boosting,  only FOX-addled Americans and overpaid media gasbags sit around worrying about terrorism anymore…  the rest of the country has its own problems, which have the advantage of being real.  The fact that they’re playing the terror card this early simply shows that they don’t have anything else, which is pretty foolhardy, since most Americans realize that Obama is as far to the right as any President could go on terror without getting hauled into the Hague.  Worse than that, these cynical, fear-based campaigns remind Americans of the worst aspects of Bush’s disastrous Presidency, something any smart Republican ought to be running from as fast as they can.

But they aren’t, of course.  A party which offers nothing but war abroad and police-state repression at home can only sell itself through fear, and as the recently released RNC PowerPoint starkly revealed, that’s what they’re going to do.  Of course, since Cheney and Kristol are more interested in papering over their shameful pasts than they are in getting Republicans elected in the future, they’re peddling the same fears from the glory days of 2002-2004, striking a dissonant note when the new, improved fears are supposed to be about creeping socialism and whatnot.  Micael Steele ought to tell Cheney to shut up, but he obviously doesn’t know what that means.

If the Republicans think, seriously, that such tired, discredited strategies will do anything but play right into the hands of the feckless Democrats who, having few good alternatives either, have already picked the Bush years as their opponent in 2010, they will remain in the minority for a long time.  The Bush years were not just about ruinous economic policies, reckless spending, and corruption at all levels, but more importantly they were about a manipulative and sleazy method of governing by fear, smear, and innuendo.  And while the former have remained stubbornly unchanged, America is happy to be free of the latter.

Liz Cheney utterly fails to recognize this, and after having successfully harangued the DOJ into making public the names of the perfectly mainstream lawyers she vilely called the “Al Qeada Seven,” is still beating her dead horse:

Cheney, for her part, shows no signs of relenting. Hours after her organization was able to browbeat the DoJ into releasing the names of the seven officials who previously represented detainees, it put out a statement demanding even more disclosure.

“We regret that they still refuse to tell the American people whether any of these lawyers are currently working on detainee issues inside the Department,” said Aaron Harison, the executive director of Keep America Safe. “The American people have a right to know whether lawyers who voluntarily flocked to Guantanamo to take up the cause of the terrorists are currently working on detainee issues in President Obama’s Justice Department.”

“Flocked to Guantanamo to take up the cause of terrorists?” Really?  How dumb and blindly hateful does Liz Cheney think we are?  Americans fell for fear in 2002 and 2004, and, unlike the media, remember what it got them.  They also remember that almost all of it was unmitigated horshshit, much of it coming from someone named Cheney.  Liz should be glad she didn’t inherit her father’s looks, but sadly, she did get his personality, and that’s good news for Democrats.

UPDATE: Mistakes were made, apparently, at CNN:

On Friday, Blitzer apologized for the graphic and called DOJ lawyers “patriotic.”

“CNN had no intention of suggesting that the Justice Department supports terrorism. Lawyers at the Justice Department are patriotic Americans and we certainly regret any confusion that may have been caused by our graphic.”

Not by his insultingly ridiculous reporting, natch, but it’s something.

Having found such a gold mine of authoritarian propaganda in the “news” pages of the poor Los Angeles Times over these last two days, I couldn’t help dropping in again for a look-see this afternoon.  Would there be yet another journalistic equivalent of an overturned dump truck in the Cahuenga Pass?  So enamored am I by the dateline, “reporting from Washington” at this point that I can’t stop clicking in, and even though Rick Serrano was evidently too busy at Fox Nation to write anything, there was a little piece by his colleague, Julian Barnes, which more than sufficed for my Pravda fix, deceptively titled, “Top Military Official Outlines Tempered Approach to War.”

Hmmm.  Sounds reasonable enough.  Closer reading reveals, however, that Julian and Rick are actually the same person, kind of like Hayley Mills in “The Parent Trap.”  That’s my theory, anyway.  To wit:

Reporting from Washington – (Don’t you just love that?  You can almost hear the teletypes in the background…) The U.S. military must use measured and precise strikes, not overwhelming force, in the wars it is likely to face in the future, the nation’s top uniformed officer said Wednesday in outlining a revised approach to American security.

Yes, the dozens and dozens of wars in addition to the current ones.  It was only in those boring old days that we sat around waiting to see if we won or lost to come up with new strategies for the next time(s).

The view outlined by Adm. Michael G. Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, differs both from the doctrine of overwhelming force advanced by Colin L. Powell, a onetime Joint Chiefs chairman, and the “shock and awe” approach of former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

Yeah, Powell wasted time thinking about the aftermath, and Rumsfeld didn’t bother with such minutia.  Both never were involved with actually winning any wars, but why not start with them?  They both certainly knew how to sell wars, and that’s all that matters these days.

“There is no single, defining American way of war,” Mullen argued. “It changes over time, and it should change over time, adapting appropriately to the most relevant threats to our national security.”

I’ll say, not when we have so many wars we can’t even keep up.   But wait, there’s actually a “relevant” threat out there?  Do tell, Mr Admiral man.

Mullen’s views, presented in a speech at Kansas State University, mirror the latest U.S.-led offensive in Afghanistan, a showcase effort in which troops in Marja are trying not only to seize control of territory but to obtain influence over the local population in a bid to break the hold of insurgents.

His comments are significant because the Joint Chiefs chairman under the Constitution serves as the president’s chief military advisor.

And thus, in the new and improved America, he pretty much tells the pissant President what’s what.

Mullen held out Marja as a model of the kind of warfare he was describing. There, the military announced in advance plans to retake the city and emphasized careful use of force.

“We did not prep the battlefield with carpet bombing or missile strikes,” he said. “We simply walked in, on time. Because, frankly, the battlefield isn’t necessarily a field anymore. It’s in the minds of the people.”

Well, then why not have a seminar or something?  Is refraining from carpet bombing the new touchy-feely?  Sheeesh.  Who could type up such horseshit without laughing?

The ideas outlined by Mullen are not universally accepted within the military. For instance, to minimize the risk of civilian casualties, Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan, placed restrictions on the use of bombs and other air power.

Some officers and analysts think that those self-imposed restrictions have allowed the Taliban to escape the most effective and potent U.S. weapons, potentially endangering American and allied troops.

Here we’re listening to the bonkers rantings of a modern-day Atilla the Hun with $700 billion in borrowed Chinese money to throw around each year, and even crazier people than he are calling him a peacenik, and this is considered worthy political discourse.  May I suggest that Mr. Barnes broaden his circle of friends, if only for his own safety?

In addition, the Marja offensive showed that even deliberate, measured force can produce civilian casualties.

Which no one cares about, of course, but can always be dragged in from the cold as a talking point, in a pinch.

In another shift in thinking, Mullen said in his speech that policymakers now and in the future should consider the U.S. military not as a last-resort solution in a crisis, but as part of early American responses to conflicts and disasters.

Ah, what was once merely “on the table” has now shoved everything else off, and henceforth we bomb first, ask questions later.  I’d noticed that happening, but thanks for clarifying.

“Military forces are some of the most flexible and adaptable tools available to policymakers,” Mullen said. “Before a shot is even fired, we can bolster a diplomatic argument, support a friend or deter an enemy.”

And afterward, boy howdy!  Another 20-year war or three is born.  These guys are geniuses!

Mullen emphasized that military power must be used alongside other government tools. Similarly, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, speaking at the same venue in 2007, called for increased spending on the State Department.

As long as the general trend continues toward completely draining the treasury for somebody’s pointless and delusional dreams of world domination, some panty-waist diplomacy stuff will have to be tolerated here and there too, especially if it helps to bring Tom Friedman along.  Luckily, this means more moats (literally, at least in London…) around our embassies, which sound like economic recovery to me.  Maybe Blackwater can supply the gators, cost plus.

“U.S. foreign policy is still too dominated by the military,” Mullen said, “too dependent upon the generals and admirals who lead our major overseas commands and not enough on the State Department.”

I had not noticed that.  Had you?

Overall, the speech represents a refinement of military doctrine, reflecting the wrenching policy and strategy review last year over Afghanistan as well as the debates in 2006 concerning strategy in Iraq.

Which were all resolved, you guessed it, in favor of the military industrial complex over the needs of everyone else, natch.

Policy and strategy, Mullen said, must “constantly struggle with one another.” Rather than setting a strategy and stepping aside, political leaders must remain involved. The day the U.S. stops adjusting is the day the country loses, he said.

Guess what, Mike?  We already lost.  But don’t tell the remaining readers of the LA Times.  They all loved Dr. Strangelove down there, I hear.

Yesterday LA Times crack reporter Rick Serrano published a story that was straight off the Republican Noise Machine, willfully deceptive about the nature of our legal system, and, well, old.  To do so and make it plausible, he “interviewed” such heavyweights as Sen. Jeff Sessions, a bunch of anonymous Republicans, and carefully pored over a McCarthyite scare commercial from Liz Cheney’s front group, the inaptly named “Keep America Safe.”  In the interest of being Fair and Balanced, he quoted a weeks-old letter from the Justice Department.

When I wrote to him and rather intemperately criticized his dangerously ignorant and shoddy work, he promptly wrote back, basically telling me to go Cheney myself, then evidently went right back to Fox News to “research” his next article.  You see, the justice department lawyers Cheney and co. were smearing as the “Al Qeada Seven” had been named, after Serrano had implied that the Justice Department was hiding something sinister, so he busily typed up FOX’s “breaking” story, and submitted it without attribution (h/t sysprog).  Along the way he left out quite a bit, as you’ll see. (h/t Jim Montague for the Fox link.)

Reporting from Washington – The Justice Department identified seven additional political appointees Wednesday who had done prior legal work on behalf of captives in the war on terrorism, after GOP lawmakers accused the Obama administration of stacking the department with top officials sympathetic to “enemy combatants.”

Now, I’m not “reporting from Washington,” but even if these lawyers were, in fact, “sympathetic” to enemy combatants (itself a made-up term), I think that seven lawyers would make a pretty small stack in that sprawling department.

Matthew Miller, a senior spokesman at the Justice Department, said the names were not released earlier because “we will not participate in an attempt to drag people’s names through the mud for political purposes.”

No, leave that to Liz Cheney and the LA Times.

In recent weeks, Republican lawmakers have voiced strong concerns about conflicts of interest for Justice Department officials who previously represented detainees. But Miller insisted that the political appointees with experience working for captives at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, will recuse themselves if a conflict surfaces. Some Justice Department officials during the George W. Bush administration also had done legal work for detainees.

My attempts to explain to Serrano the difference between defending criminal suspects and “sympathizing” with them clearly failed to sink in, as you see.

Jonathan Cedarbaum, in the Office of Legal Counsel, and Eric Columbus, who works under the deputy attorney general, were part of a legal defense team for Bosnian Algerian detainees and brought a case to the Supreme Court that resulted in the right of captives to challenge their detention.

What?  He won the case?  Maybe the Supreme Court is a bunch of terrorist sympathizers, too.

Karl Thompson, now in the Office of Legal Counsel, helped represent Omar Khadr, a youth captured after a firefight in Afghanistan in which a soldier was killed by a hand grenade.

Little Omar was of course about nine years old at the time, and imprisoned without trial until he was old enough to drink in a bar, but Serrano didn’t think that that, or the fact that he was never convicted, was worth including here.

Joseph Guerra, principal deputy associate attorney general, worked on legal briefs on behalf of Jose Padilla, accused of plotting a “dirty-bomb” attack.

Never mind that Padilla was an American citizen, and the charges were laughed out of court until he was finally nailed on some lesser charge.

Tali Farhadian, who works in Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr.’s office, contributed to appellate briefs for Ali Saleh Kahlah Al-Marri, a Qatari student designated an enemy combatant when he was about to go trial on fraud charges in Illinois.

Ooh, he was “designated” something?  Sounds weighty, although the term appears nowhere in any law book I’ve read.  And “contribut(ing) to appellate briefs” is practically the same thing as strapping on his suicide bomb and dropping him off at the day care center.

Beth Brinkmann, a deputy assistant attorney general, collaborated on Supreme Court briefs for detainees and advocated more protection of detainees’ rights.

Well, that hippie chick is clearly anti-American….  She thinks “detainees,” (another made-up extralegal term) ought to have rights.  Maybe she’s worried about those freedoms they hate us for.

Tony West, an assistant attorney general who heads the Civil Division, served on the legal team for John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Taliban who was captured in Afghanistan.

Both Fox and Serrano skip over the fact that the Lindh case was discussed at length during West’s confirmation hearing, and West was repeatedly grilled by Serrano’s “sources,” no less.

Earlier identified were Neal Katyal, principle deputy solicitor general, who won a Supreme Court victory for Salim Ahmed Hamdan, former driver and bodyguard for Osama bin Laden; and Jennifer Daskla, former senior counsel for Human Rights Watch, who now serves as an attorney in the Justice Department’s National Security Division.

Clearly, the lesson here is that lawyers who win cases before the Supreme Court ought to be passed over in favor of losers, to Keep America Safe.

McJoan has more about this controversy, and the Justice Department’s flaccid response, over at DKos, and If I know Glenn Greenwald, I bet he’ll be writing more about it, too.  Reading the LA Times, though, seems like something of a waste of time, since they were scooped by FOX.

UPDATE BELOW: My letter to the intrepid journalist, and his oh, so redeeming reply.

This morning, Glenn Greenwald had an excellent post about the despicable fear-mongering ad Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol had slapped together to smear not just the Obama DOJ, but basically the entire tradition of western jurisprudence, the evenhandedness of which seems to offend vermin like them.  Watching the ad and considering its source, I didn’t really give it much more thought; surely such spurious McCarthyite smears have long passed their due date, and surely no non-Fox journalist would ever take them seriously.  Well, no they haven’t, and yes they would, and stop calling the Los Angeles Times Shirley.

Behold:
Reporting from Washington – Nine top political appointees at the Justice Department previously worked as lawyers or advocates for “enemy combatants” confined at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, prompting new questions from Congress and conservative critics about the integrity of the administration’s handling of detainees.

Ooh, sounds scary, and “new,” to boot.

The Justice Department insists that the officials have not involved themselves in matters dealing with enemy combatants. But the department has revealed the names of only two of the nine appointees, making it difficult to independently assess the claim. And one of the named officials — Jennifer Daskal, a lawyer in the national security division — sits on a task force weighing the future of Guantanamo prisoners. She is a former senior counsel for Human Rights Watch, which worked on behalf of ensuring constitutional rights for detainees during the George W. Bush presidency.

Since everybody knows that only people with a demonstrated desire to kill all Arabs indiscriminately should ever be allowed to work at the Justice (!) Department.

The other named official is Neal Katyal, the principal deputy solicitor general, who argued before the Supreme Court on behalf of Salim Ahmed Hamdan and won a 2006 ruling that Bush’s military tribunal system violated the rules of military justice and the Geneva Conventions. Hamdan, a former bodyguard and driver for Osama bin Laden, later was released and returned to Yemen.

According to congressional sources, one of the other seven appointees is Tony West, an assistant attorney general who heads the civil division. In 2002, he was part of the California-based legal team that represented John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Taliban.

I have a list of names, said the drunken sociopath from Wisconsin….

These kinds of backgrounds and connections “raise serious questions about who is providing advice on detainee matters,” a group of Republican senators told Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. last week.

“Some say.”  Can you believe this?  Who?  Michelle Malkin?

One of the sharpest critics is a group called Keep America Safe, run in part by Liz Cheney, daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney. It has derided the unidentified appointees as the “Al Qaeda 7,” and in a video on its website Tuesday asked, “Whose values do they share?”

Ah, finally a disinterested observer willing to go on the record.  It gets worse, though, when the pussies at DOJ, instead of calling such fascist propaganda what it was and giving this un-American cabal a little needed history lesson, this lame capitulation comes forth:

In a Feb. 18 letter to the senators, Ronald Welch, an assistant attorney general, said five Justice Department lawyers provided legal counsel to detainees and four filed friend-of-the-court legal papers on behalf of detainees or advocated on their behalf. He identified them only as working in Holder’s office, for the deputy attorney general and in other top positions at the department.

“To the best of our knowledge,” Welch wrote, “during their employment prior to joining the government, only five of the lawyers who serve as political appointees represented detainees, and four others either contributed to amicus briefs in detainee-related cases or were otherwise involved in advocacy on behalf of detainees.”

Others, he said, “came to the department from law firms where other lawyers represented detainees.”

In naming Katyal and Daskal, Welch said both appointees had been careful not to overstep rules governing professional conduct.

He said Katyal, after joining the Justice Department, had “participated in litigation involving detainees who continue to be detained” at Bagram air base in Afghanistan. He said Katyal also has participated in litigation involving Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, who was arrested in Illinois and accused of being an Al Qaeda sleeper cell agent.

Welch said Daskal had “generally worked on policy issues related to detainees” but that “her detainee-related work has been fully consistent with advice she received from career department officials regarding her obligations.”

In referring to all of the political appointees, Welch said that none “would permit or has permitted any prior affiliation to interfere with the vital task of protecting national security, and any suggestion to the contrary is absolutely false.”

Wait a minute.  Did one or more shriveled but still rule of law supporting gonad actually threaten to descend?  Quick, bring in somebody else….

In addition, Tracy Schmaler, a department spokeswoman, said Tuesday that “department attorneys are subject to ethics and disclosure rules as required under both department guidelines and the administration’s own ethics rules, which are the strongest in history.” She added that “it should be clear that fighting terrorism and keeping the American people safe is our No. 1 priority.”

That’s more like it.  Naturally, the right-wing nutjobs who dreamed up this little putsch couldn’t have been more delighted, or more theatrically outraged, at a pathetically weak response as that, and went on, and on.

Nevertheless, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, led by Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, said the Justice Department had not given a full accounting of who and how many top appointees might have conflicts.

Sessions said the issue was whether “the attorney general believes that treating terrorists like civilians enhances or damages our ability to gather crucial intelligence.” He said that issue could not be answered until the other seven names were released.

“It’s time for these policies to meet the light of day — and for the public to get the answers they deserve,” Sessions said.

Good job, LATimes.  And always give the last word to the scariest neoconfederate sore loser in the Senate, those types always have a lot to contribute to an informative discussion of human rights and such.  This genius article was typed by:

richard.serrano@ latimes.com

I think I ought to pour a little something and write to him.

UPDATE: (whatever unlikely replies will be eagerly appended….)

Dear Mr. Serrano,
Have you ever read the Constitution?  What about the Magna Carta?
Heck, did you ever watch Sesame Street?  Considering what you wrote
today about the flagrantly un-American attacks a discredited
neofascist like Liz Cheney made on not just the Obama DOJ, but the
entire idea of western jurisprudence, I can only conclude not.
I’ll type slowly for you…  We have, in those parts of the world that
are nominal democracies, what’s known as an adversarial system of
justice.  All alleged (do you know what that word means?) criminals
are entitled to legal representation, whether or not they are
citizens, and whether or not some chickenhawk nutjob has
extrajudicially pronounced them guilty.  This is kind of a big thing
and has been since 1215 or so, but  maybe you’ve been busy with other
things.
I know that those of you in the withered shell of our media are
desperately afraid of being called “liberal,” but when “liberal” means
not accepting medieval despotism, it would be sort of your duty as an
American to go ahead and risk the scarlet letter.  Who knows?  If such
a thing caught on, people might start reading newspapers again.
It’s worth a try, since the way you’re going about it is having the
opposite effect.
I only want to help.

Cocktailhag

Portland, Oregon

Reply

Serrano, Richard to me

show details 2:58 PM (3 minutes ago)

Cocktailhag,
You say you will type slowly for me. Why don’t you not type at all.

Regards
Rick.

Boy, did he show me, I tell you.  I’m so glad I get to call him Rick.

Is it just me, or is GOP giddiness about their chimerical but purportedly inevitable “sweep” in the next election leading them into near daily outbursts of unseemly candor?  Those of us on the left know quite well that they hold their non-rich supporters in utter contempt, but they at least used to recognize that most of them are capable of understanding simple phrases.  ”Personal Responsibility” certainly stood for a lot of punitive and harmful things, but until the Palin/Beck Cuckoo Crack-up of 2008-9, they didn’t actually come out and just say them.  My, what a difference a  year or two of teabagging makes.

When I look back at the cringe-inducing but disarmingly vague expressions of George Bush, like “armies of compassion,” I have to admit that Chris Matthews, for perhaps the fourth time in his career, might actually be correct about something; a little nostalgia for Bush is probably in order.  After all, the horror of eight years of zero job growth, a ruined economy, two lost but continuing wars, and a soaring deficit “forcing” draconian social spending cuts are a little easier to tolerate when Bush at least had enough respect for the voters’ intelligence not to proudly sell such shockingly undesirable outcomes in advance.   His ideological soulmates still in office, however, see no more need for such gauzy and effeminate euphemisms as they busily deflect blame and promise dreadful consequences for the catastrophe they themselves caused.   They just come right out and say that poor people should be starved so they can’t breed, sick people deserve to die for their dissolute habits and poor planning, so-called “terrorists” should be locked up and tortured if not summarily executed without so much as a trial, and the millions of unemployed should be cut off without a cent so they get off their slovenly asses and fix the Servant Problem.  Unlike the more politely imperious ruling classes of yore, this bunch proudly blurts this stuff out right in front of said servants in a way I find, at least tactically, a bit dumb, and that’s putting it mildly.

Just to make things even more blindingly obvious, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell gleefully exulted over the Republican-engineered Citizens United ruling, probably the least popular Supreme Court Decision of my lifetime, as though even the most spelling-challenged teabagger would fall for the idea that corporations ought to be “free” to, well, buy elections.  Illinois Representative Paul Ryan one-upped him, though, when he came out and said that Medicare and Social Security, unfortunately, would have to go, too, because the rich are nervous about their portfolios again.  Once such radical and obnoxious affronts to what remains of our status as a nominal democracy were greeted in the media with nodding approval, why wouldn’t Kentucky Sen. Jim Bunning say “tough shit” while singlehandedly dumping millions of the unemployed into destitution?  Don’t like it?  Talk to the finger.  And why wouldn’t multiple right-wingers use the Chilean earthquake to set diligently to work on the murderous CIA-installed right-wing dictator Augusto Pinochet’s “legacy project?”  Crazier things have worked before.

As I’ve said before and will again, a grim necessity for which I apologize in advance, the relentlessly uncritical parroting by the media of Republican “ideas” as their proponents continue to spin further into the vortex of their own vanity, greed, and risibly unwarranted delusions of superiority will leave them in an uncomfortable spot come November, unless they go back to lying, and pronto.  You may be able to say what you really think on television, and have everyone on your side of the red light think it’s both wise and prescient (although even George Bush, for all his flaws, was usually smart enough not to do so), but it bodes ill when you forget that there are actually real people watching who have a lot more free time to watch, thanks to your brilliant stewardship of the economy.

My mother had a favorite expression about serial liars, “He’d lie when the truth would sound better,” which was at least a standard to which one could formerly hold Republicans.  Now they’re telling the truth, and it isn’t pretty.

Nice sunrise today on the Hag veranda

UPDATED BELOW:

When I was a kid in the 70’s, everybody listened to KGON, the local FM rock station, and it was avowedly liberal: pro-pot, anti-Nixon, anti-war, with a great cast of hippie-ish DJ’s that became like family.  As Archie and Edith wistfully sang, “Those Were the Days.”  They had a feature in the morning, “Nukes in the News,” which poked fun at the near-daily shutdowns, cost overruns, and other problems that always plagued that particular branch of corporate welfare, and this was before Three Mile Island and “The China Syndrome.”  Somehow, back then people understood, and it was uncontroversial to say on the airwaves, that Nixon was a crook, drug laws were stupid, wars were pointless disasters, and nuclear power was about the dumbest idea anybody ever thought of.   All these things are of course still true today, but few in our media understand this, and fewer recognize that the fact that such plain truths are still contested, much less denied, is a searing indictment of the way these bozos have screwed up doing their jobs over the last few decades.

President Obama announced recently that part of our efforts to combat global warming would be to “invest” in “new” nuclear power.  This cuckoo idea has been a favorite of such “liberal” rags as the NYT and WaPoo, and of course involves large corporations scooping up copious amounts of taxpayer dough, so it’s the sort of idea any politician might find attractive.  But honestly, just because the media was born yesterday doesn’t mean actual Americans were, and will never support nuclear power in their communities, and all it will take is the first plant going up amid protests and doubling and trebling of its budget that this idea will slither into the swamps from which it emerged, along with the reputations of the feckless politicians who supported it.

Forty years of nuclear power fiascoes has taught us a number of things, President Obama, so please take note:

1) The private market will never risk its money on nuclear power, owing to the 50% default rate and ruinous risks.

2) There is still no permanent place to store waste that will remain toxic for 100,000 years.

3) There will be accidents, given the appalling safety record of the industry, and

4) There is ZERO public support for this demented waste of money.

Those who would forget history are doomed to repeat it, and too bad Obama didn’t listen to KGON.  Whenever government takes a big leap into nuclear power , it always turns out the same, just ask the bonkers former Republican governor of Washington, Dixy Lee Ray (KGON called her Risky Delay).  This outspoken anti-environmentalist plunged her state into a decade-long financial and public relations disaster with her wanton embrace of the aptly named WPPSS (Washington Public Power Supply System), which set out to build seven nuclear plants based on wildly overstated demand projections; only one ever went briefly online, and the rest were mothballed, abandoned, or aborted after Bechtel and the like made off with billions in state funds.

This time, the giveaway is even more flagrant, since the federal government is proposing to take on all the risk without even participating in any of the potential upside like Dixy did; whatever fake “profits” the corporate welfare queen, in this case Southern Companies, makes by overcharging its customers for “new” nuclear power it will get to keep to buy lead-lined private planes, US Senators, and such.  Ain’t bipartisanship grand?

Had KGON not long ago been bought out by Clear Channel and vanished into prerecorded obscurity, they would undoubtedly be dusting off “Nukes in the News.”

UPDATE: Alert Hag reader Jebbie reports that one of the WPPSS plants is still operating, # 2.  What an interesting name.  A later google search also revealed that there were only 5 WPPSS plants, not seven.  CHNN regrets the error, and will fire whoever was responsible when the hangover wears off.

I went to look at this dump on Alameda that a client might buy, and as you can imagine, she said, “What can we do about the yard?”  She was using the term “yard” rather loosely, as you can see.  From the front, the house is a perfect Christmas center-hall colonial sitting about ten feet from the sidewalk, but it has an enormous triangular lot that drops as much as forty feet, and vertigo can start to set in on the second (of four) floors.

The former garage on the side and accessed from the upper street is now just a driveway, an additional garage on the lower street is connected to the house by an impossibly perilous flight of steps that call to mind “Young Frankenstein.”  The house has been standing securely on its Hoover Dam-looking foundation since 1912, so I don’t worry too much about it going ass over teakettle, but the disproportionately large balcony on the top floor does vaguely resemble the brontosaurus ribs on Fred Flintstone’s car window, and we all know how that turned out.

I’m recommending that any regrading to attempt to connect the house and yard be as minimal as possible, little islands of flat terrain connected by stone steps set on a random assortment of low stone walls,  kind of like this site a few blocks away.  (Even this will require a few truckloads of rock and fill….)  Difficult sites like these are often the price one pays for a spectacular view, which this dump definitely has, and the price may well be right because of it.  You’ll never be able to play croquet there, but would you miss it?