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Bill Moyers & Impeachment

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Since Clinton got impeached for doing what any respectable president would do, some people are now arguing that Bush and Cheney should be impeached for numerous reasons (the Iraq war, the Plame incident and subsequent pardon, secret CIA prisons, bad airline food). One of the people exploring this idea is that ninja Bill Moyers. We currently classify Bill as ‘still supporting the forces of good.’

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPfM4I20X7Q[/youtube]

Still, some people argue that impeaching the president undermines the process and validates the Republican impeachment of Clinton. But, as a former administrator of this site pointed out, Bush may be the best example of exactly how and when a president should be impeached. Furthermore, Bill Moyers argues that this is specifically the situation for which the founding ninjas (using term loosely) intended impeachment to be used.

You can check out his video journal here; it’s got the full video. He also has a cool little history of impeachment here.
[Ed: You really have to check out the site about the Scooter Libby pardon]

No Confidence

Congressman Adam Schiff

So there seems to be at least a couple sane people in the House of Representatives. Democrat Adam Schiff and Democrat Debbie Wasserman Schultz are co-sponsoring a motion that hit the floor on Monday that basiclly is calling for vote of no confidence against the Attorney General. I figured I should let you all know about it since yesterday we posted on Gonzales’ pinky-and-the-brain plan for file sharing.

“We do not believe that his continued tenure in the Department of Justice is in the best interests of that Department, and the country cannot wait and drift for another one and half years of his leadership at the helm.”

-Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA)

All this comes on the heels of the blatantly illegal but un-tended fire that resulted from Gonzales’ dispatching of 8 US attorneys for voting against Republican party value-lines.

Rep. Wasserman Schultz compared Gonzales’ behavior with President Richard Nixon’s ‘Saturday Night Massacre’ in order to accuse Gonzales of not being trustworthy in carrying out the law.

“Attorney General Richardson resigned in protest because he refused to engage in acts that he believed were either unconstitutional or illegal, and I honestly don’t have the confidence that if the President asked Attorney General Gonzales to do something in either one of those categories, that he would make that same decision,” she said. “I think he would just carry out instructions, and that is totally inappropriate, unacceptable, and un-American.”

Although it will probably be ignored, it’s something that you should know is going on given the amount of smoke and mirrors and the cavalier attitudes of administrations past and present of breaking the law and not caring.

alberto-gonzales.jpg

The quotes cited are all from this article via The Raw Story. Go read it.

Alberto Gonzales and Thought Crime

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Well, as you all know, for a short while politricks.mnp died of pure apathy, but luckily for you out there in the general population, we’re back. At issue today, the totally Minority Report-ish articles that have been going around the net about the Attorney General’s new plan to neutralize internet piracy. Some of the points under his proposal include:

* Criminalize “attempting” to infringe copyright. Federal law currently punishes not-for-profit copyright infringement with between 1 and 10 years in prison, but there has to be actual infringement that takes place. The IPPA would eliminate that requirement. (The Justice Department’s summary of the legislation says: “It is a general tenet of the criminal law that those who attempt to commit a crime but do not complete it are as morally culpable as those who succeed in doing so.”)

* Create a new crime of life imprisonment for using pirated software. Anyone using counterfeit products who “recklessly causes or attempts to cause death” can be imprisoned for life. During a conference call, Justice Department officials gave the example of a hospital using pirated software instead of paying for it.

* Permit more wiretaps for piracy investigations. Wiretaps would be authorized for investigations of Americans who are “attempting” to infringe copyrights.

* Allow computers to be seized more readily. Specifically, property such as a PC “intended to be used in any manner” to commit a copyright crime would be subject to forfeiture, including civil asset forfeiture. Civil asset forfeiture has become popular among police agencies in drug cases as a way to gain additional revenue, and it is problematic and controversial.

* Increase penalties for violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anticircumvention regulations. Criminal violations are currently punished by jail times of up to 10 years and fines of up to $1 million. The IPPA would add forfeiture penalties.

* Add penalties for “intended” copyright crimes. Certain copyright crimes currently require someone to commit the “distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period of at least 10 copies” valued at more than $2,500. The IPPA would insert a new prohibition: actions that were “intended to consist of” distribution.

* Require Homeland Security to alert the Recording Industry Association of America. That would happen when CDs with “unauthorized fixations of the sounds, or sounds and images, of a live musical performance” are attempted to be imported. Neither the Motion Picture Association of America nor the Business Software Alliance (nor any other copyright holder, such as photographers, playwrights or news organizations, for that matter) would qualify for this kind of special treatment.

From CNET (News.Com) [Check out their podcast on the issue]

bush_alberto_gonzales_attorney_general.jpg

The referenced article also highlights that, in terms of Hollywood, the Democrats seem to be more closely allied to Hollywood than the Republicans. It would be interesting to see how such a bill would be handled in congress.

I, for one, am not comfortable with all that “attempted” language. Furthermore it seems like this may be just some type of diversion on the part of Gonzales to take attention away from his recent lawyer firing scandals. Since the mainstream media drops any scandal that doesn’t payout in 2 weeks like a horse at a glue factory it seems like only the bloggers are all over it. The administration seems to be pointing its big hairy finger right back at the internet.

While it’s common sense that a democracy (er.. of capitalistic nature) needs intellectual property protections, I’m still not sure how far our government should go to be protecting and industry with antiquated business models. For a bunch of old fogeys who still can’t make money off the internet for some unbeknownst reason (Apple seems to be doing well despite the stock scare) the RIAA cats still seem to be doing well for themselves. By “how far” I mean why should homeland security be involved in fighting piracy? I thought they were supposed to be securing the homeland against a perceived threat.

Go Read and Form Your Own Opinion

Can Gore Let It Rip?

Next time he runs for president, things will be different. That was Al Gore’s pledge to Democrats after the 2000 election: “If I had to do it all over again, I’d just let it rip. To hell with the polls, the tactics and all the rest. I would have poured out my heart and my vision for America’s future.”

Will Gore run in 2008? The question will echo throughout his appearances Wednesday before the House and Senate committees dealing with climate change. It likely will echo through all of American politics for months to come. There are two ways to ponder the question.

The logic of politics suggests Gore has already given his answer. He is not raising money. He is not urging friends and associates to stay on the sidelines until he makes a decision. He has said repeatedly that he has no plans to run. Shouldn’t we take him at his word?  Not yet, we shouldn’t. The logic of psychology and even history suggests that Gore should run. And if he should run, it is hard to believe that a man who has organized most of his adult life around public service and the pursuit of the presidency won’t in the end actually do it.

For the moment, Gore’s legacy in American politics rests on two opposing facts:

– From the perspective of Democrats, no politician has been more right, more often, on more important questions. On global warming, words that had a radical edge in 1992 — and still do, to many conservative ears — Gore wrote “Earth in the Balance,” anticipating mainstream liberal rhetoric by a decade. Many Washington Democrats cringed at what they regarded as his shrill people-vs.-powerful 2000 convention speech, when he warned that a Bush presidency would favor special interests and the wealthy. They cringed even more in 2002 at what they regarded as Gore’s naive warnings that the coming Iraq war was a disaster in waiting and a distraction from other fronts in the campaign against terrorism. But within a year or so of both speeches, most Democrats inside Washington and beyond essentially embraced Gore’s argument and tone.

– From the perspective of people who believe, as nearly all Democrats do, that the Bush presidency has been a historic debacle, no Democratic politician is more culpable for these consequences than Gore himself. A more poised, focused and self-confident campaign surely would have won the election and not just the popular vote in 2000. As the chosen leader of his party, Gore had a responsibility to wage that campaign.

[Politico]

The Lessons of Iraq

Former Senator and Presidential Candidate Gary Hart has published a great piece on the Huffington Post:

Very soon a new industry called “The Lessons of Iraq” will be born, even as the search for the end-game continues against the back-drop of the theme “who lost Iraq.” Partisan strategists will be allocating blame while more thoughtful citizens will try to draw lessons for future generations.

Some lessons are apparent. Do not manufacture justification for invasions. Plan for all eventualities, including the most unpleasant. Do not pay exiles to tell you what you want to hear. Deal honestly with Congress and the American people. Be candid about possible costs in lives and money. And an endless list of common sense, and Constitutional, dos and don’ts.

The second kind of lessons are less obvious and have to do with the new realities of the 21st century:

First, treat jihadist terrorism more like organized crime than traditional warfare. By declaring “war on terrorism” we made the fatal mistake that it could be crushed using conventional warfare and massed armies…

Second, liberate the U.S. from dependence on Persian Gulf oil. We can then sharply reduce the U.S. military presence in the region and remove the single most important incentive for jihadism…

Third, restore principle to American foreign policy. Neoconservatives who dominate the Bush administration have used the Wilsonian rhetoric of “democratic idealism” even as they pursue the most cynical and dishonest policies…

Fourth, engage the nations of the world in achieving security for the global commons. Security in the 21st century now means much more than it did in the Cold War 20th century.

Read the full article at the link below:

[HuffingtonPost]

F.B.I. Is Warned Over Its Misuse of Data Collection

WASHINGTON, March 20 — House Republicans joined Democrats on Tuesday in warning the F.B.I. that it could lose the power to demand that companies turn over customers’ telephone, e-mail and financial records if it did not swiftly correct abuses in the use of national security letters, the investigative tool that allows the bureau to make such demands without a judge’s approval.

The warnings came at a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee into a recent report by the Justice Department’s inspector general, Glenn A. Fine. The report found that the F.B.I. had repeatedly violated the rules governing the letters, sometimes by invoking emergency procedures to exercise them when there was no emergency, and had bungled record keeping so badly that the number of letters exercised was often understated when the bureau reported on them to Congress.

“I just want to convey to you how upset many of us are who have defended this program and have believed it is necessary to the protection of our country,” Representative Dan Lungren, Republican of California, told Valerie E. Caproni, the bureau’s general counsel.

[NYTimes]

Before Jon Stewart

The truth about fake news. Believe it.

Fake news arrives on doorsteps around the world every day, paid for by You, Time magazine Person of the Year, a.k.a. Joe and Jane Citizen, in one way or another. Take for instance, the U.S. government’s 2005 initiative to plant “positive news” in Iraqi newspapers, part of a $300 million U.S. effort to sway public opinion about the war. And remember Armstrong Williams, the conservative columnist who was hired on the down low to act as a $240,000 sock puppet for the president’s No Child Left Behind program? Williams’s readers had no idea he was a paid propagandist until the Justice Department started looking into allegations of fraud in his billing practices.

Fake news has had its lush innings. The Bush administration has worked hand-in-glove with big business to make sure of it. Together, they’ve credentialed fringe scientists and fake experts and sent them in to muddy scientific debates on global warming, stem cell research, evolution, and other matters. And as if that weren’t enough, the Department of Health and Human Services got caught producing a series of deceptive video news releases— VNRs in p.r.-industry parlance—touting the administration’s Medicare plan. The segments, paid political announcements really, ended with a fake journalist signing off like a real one—“In Washington, I’m Karen Ryan reporting,” and they ran on local news shows all over the country without disclosure. All of this fakery taken together, it may be fair to say that the nation’s capital has been giving Comedy Central a run for its money as the real home of fake news.

[CJR::via::RawStory]

White House official: No probe launched into Plame leak


Rep. Waxman – House Oversight Committee

In testimony given today before the house oversight committee, James Knodell, Director of the Office of Security at the White House, revealed that the the administration had never launched an internal probe to determine the source for the outing of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame in 2003. In addition to revealing a deep reluctance on the part of the administration in determining the party responsible for the leak, Knodell’s testimony directly contradicted a prior statement from President Bush promising a full internal probe.

Ms. Plame Wilson, who in testimony earlier today confirmed her status at the time of the scandal as a covert CIA official and struck down assertions that she designed her husband’s 2002 mission to Niger, told the committee, “My name and identity were carelessly and recklessly abused by senior officials in the White House and State Department. I could no longer perform the work for which I had been highly trained.”

Asked about an obligation of federal officials to report on any knowledge of a leak to a security officer, Knodell confirmed the requirement and admitted that not a single member of the administration had come to speak to him.

Committee chair Henry Waxman, who in his opening statement described the the panel’s duty to “determine what went wrong and insist on accountability,” was taken aback by the implications of Knodell’s testimony, describing it as “a breach within a breach.”

[RawStory]

Ex-Milan CIA chief goes into hiding over kidnapping of Muslim cleric

Robert Lady, the former CIA chief in Milan, has gone into hiding, the German newspaper Der Spiegel reports Tuesday. But “to this day, he continues to pay his $4,000 mortgage.”

The subject of an extradition order from Italian authorities for the role he played in the kidnapping of radical Muslim cleric Abu Omar in Milan… Lady was in Florida last, but reportedly moved on already. The only place the former agent can feel truly safe is the United States, now that an Italian court has issued an arrest warrant for him — just as it has done for 25 of his colleagues, who are said to have been involved in the Feb. 17, 2003 abduction of radical Muslim cleric Abu Omar along Via Guerzoni in downtown Milan.”

“The suspects are expected to be tried, in absentia, in June at Milan’s Palace of Justice in what will amount to the world’s first-ever trial against CIA agents accused of kidnapping,” Der Spiegel adds. “Until very recently, it seemed certain that the case would move ahead. But last week the Italian government asked the country’s highest justices at the constitutional court to determine whether the trial could proceed. This has fueled hope for Seldon and, indeed, the entire US administration, that a legal drama might still be prevented.”

“According to recent findings brought to light by American journalist Matthew Cole, writing in the March issue of GQ, it’s not just the agents involved in the abduction who need to be protected,” the paper adds. “Those truly responsible are to be found in the higher echelons of the US administration, according to Cole, who claims that current US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice personally approved the operation when she served as President George W. Bush’s National Security Advisor. She apparently OKed Abu Omar’s abduction and then, according to Cole’s report, “fretted” during her meeting with the CIA over how she would inform Bush about the operation.”

[RawStory]

“Obama more liberal than Kucinich, analysis reveals”

WASHINGTON _ The most liberal member of Congress running for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination isn’t Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio.

It’s Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois.

And the Republican candidate who’s grown less conservative over his years in Congress? Sen. John McCain of Arizona.

Those are among the interesting findings in a recent analysis of votes by all the members of Congress who are running for president.

They cut to the heart of debates going on among activists in both major parties: Can a liberal Democrat win a general election? Which Republican is ideologically pure enough to win support from conservatives?

The study, released this month by the National Journal, a respected inside-the-Beltway research report, will help voters cut through the spin and hype of TV sound bites in coming months and judge these candidates for themselves.

Read more of the findings at the link below:

[RawStory/McClatchy]

Talking About Israel

Another great piece from Nicholas Kristof:

There is no serious political debate among either Democrats or Republicans about our policy toward Israelis and Palestinians. And that silence harms America, Middle East peace prospects and Israel itself.

Within Israel, you hear vitriolic debates in politics and the news media about the use of force and the occupation of Palestinian territories. Yet no major American candidate is willing today to be half as critical of hard-line Israeli government policies as, say, Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper.

Three years ago, Israel’s minister of justice spoke publicly of photos of an elderly Palestinian woman beside the ruins of her home, after it had been destroyed by the Israeli army. He said that they reminded him of his own grandmother, who had been dispossessed by the Nazis. Can you imagine an American cabinet secretary ever saying such a thing?

…You can argue that Arabs pursue a double standard, focusing on repression by Israelis while ignoring greater human rights violations by fellow Arabs. But the suffering in Palestinian territories, while not remotely at the scale of brutality in Sudan or Iraq, is still tragically real…

…Hard-line Israeli policies have profoundly harmed that country’s long-term security by adding vulnerable settlements, radicalizing young Palestinians, empowering Hamas and Hezbollah, isolating Israel in the world and nurturing another generation of terrorists in Lebanon. The Israeli right’s aggressive approach has only hurt Israeli security, just as President Bush’s invasion of Iraq ended up harming U.S. interests…

[NYTimes]
(Times Select subscription required)

Bush’s Shadow Army

The Bush Administration is increasingly dependent on private security forces to do its dirty work, Jeremy Scahill reveals in his new book, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. 

The often overlooked subplot of the wars of the post-9/11 period is their unprecedented scale of outsourcing and privatization. From the moment the US troop buildup began in advance of the invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon made private contractors an integral part of the operations. Even as the government gave the public appearance of attempting diplomacy, Halliburton was prepping for a massive operation. When US tanks rolled into Baghdad in March 2003, they brought with them the largest army of private contractors ever deployed in modern war. By the end of Rumsfeld’s tenure in late 2006, there were an estimated 100,000 private contractors on the ground in Iraq — an almost one-to-one ratio with active-duty American soldiers.

To the great satisfaction of the war industry, before Rumsfeld resigned he took the extraordinary step of classifying private contractors as an official part of the US war machine. In the Pentagon’s 2006 Quadrennial Review, Rumsfeld outlined what he called a “road map for change” at the DoD, which he said had begun to be implemented in 2001. It defined the “Department’s Total Force” as “its active and reserve military components, its civil servants, and its contractors — constitut[ing] its warfighting capability and capacity. Members of the Total Force serve in thousands of locations around the world, performing a vast array of duties to accomplish critical missions.” This formal designation represented a major triumph for war contractors — conferring on them a legitimacy they had never before enjoyed.

Contractors have provided the Bush Administration with political cover, allowing the government to deploy private forces in a war zone free of public scrutiny, with the deaths, injuries and crimes of those forces shrouded in secrecy. The Administration and the GOP-controlled Congress in turn have shielded the contractors from accountability, oversight and legal constraints. Despite the presence of more than 100,000 private contractors on the ground in Iraq, only one has been indicted for crimes or violations. “We have over 200,000 troops in Iraq and half of them aren’t being counted, and the danger is that there’s zero accountability,” says Democrat Dennis Kucinich, one of the leading Congressional critics of war contracting.

[AlterNet]

Iraq experts say draft oil industry law fraught with problems

AMMAN (AFP) – Some Iraqi oil experts and politicians are aghast over their government’s approval of a bill that many fear will deliver the country’s oil wealth to international firms on a platter.

In February, capping months of bitter wrangling, the Baghdad government approved a draft law that aims to distribute revenue from crude oil exports equitably across Iraq’s 18 provinces and open the sector to foreign investors.

The multi-party government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki sees the legislation as a key plank in moves to reunite a country torn apart by sectarian violence, and hopes that parliament will ratify the bill in May.

But former Iraqi oil industry officials, experts and lawmakers gathered in Jordan to debate the bill have warned that the timing is wrong, and expressed strong concerns that
Iraq would lose control of its own “black gold.”

shocking, right?

[AFP/Yahoo!]

The Ides of March 2003

Our ninja Frank Rich does it again:

TOMORROW night is the fourth anniversary of President Bush’s prime-time address declaring the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom. In the broad sweep of history, four years is a nanosecond, but in America, where memories are congenitally short, it’s an eternity. That’s why a revisionist history of the White House’s rush to war, much of it written by its initial cheerleaders, has already taken hold. In this exonerating fictionalization of the story, nearly every politician and pundit in Washington was duped by the same “bad intelligence” before the war, and few imagined that the administration would so botch the invasion’s aftermath or that the occupation would go on so long. “If only I had known then what I know now …” has been the persistent refrain of the war supporters who subsequently disowned the fiasco. But the embarrassing reality is that much of the damning truth about the administration’s case for war and its hubristic expectations for a cakewalk were publicly available before the war, hiding in plain sight, to be seen by anyone who wanted to look.

[NYTimes]
(Times Select subscription required)

McCain Stumbles.

First on HIV prevention:

Q: “So no contraception, no counseling on contraception. Just abstinence. Do you think contraceptives help stop the spread of HIV?”

Mr. McCain: (Long pause) “You’ve stumped me.”

Q: “I mean, I think you’d probably agree it probably does help stop it?”

Mr. McCain: (Laughs) “Are we on the Straight Talk express? I’m not informed enough on it. Let me find out. You know, I’m sure I’ve taken a position on it on the past. I have to find out what my position was. Brian, would you find out what my position is on contraception – I’m sure I’m opposed to government spending on it, I’m sure I support the president’s policies on it.”

Then, the racism slips:

Republican presidential contender John McCain on Friday used the term “tar baby,” considered by some a racial epithet, and later said he regretted it.

Answering questions at a town hall meeting, the Arizona senator was discussing federal involvement in custody cases when he said, “For me to stand here and … say I’m going to declare divorces invalid because of someone who feels they weren’t treated fairly in court, we are getting into a tar baby of enormous proportions and I don’t know how you get out of that.”

After the event, McCain told reporters: “I don’t think I should have used that word and I was wrong to do so.”