As sick as it gets: Cheney gets standing ovation for torture, at CPAC

The Conservative Political Action Conference; gathering place for the near-Fascist right; Dick Cheney is of course their leader.

From Sadly, No!, a description of these maniacs. I’m sorry, but I don’t recognize conservatism in this stuff. It’s just sickness.

Weirdly enough – or maybe not so much – his defense of torture gets a standing ovation, but his praising of our fighting men in uniform does not.

Wisconsin legislature votes to pay unjustly imprisoned state employee

Link

Continued fallout from the U.S. attorneys scandal. From The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

The state Senate on Thursday unanimously approved the payment of legal fees for Georgia Thompson, a state employee whose conviction for mishandling a contract was overturned by a federal appeals court….Senators voted 32-0 to pay $228,793 for Thompson’s legal fees; the bill now goes to the Assembly, where it is expected to pass. There was no debate on the bill, but Sen. Judy Robson (D-Beloit) said it was the “least we can do” for Thompson, who served time in a federal prison before the appeals judges ordered her released.

Of course, the appeals court’s decision to immediately overturn the case was remarkable in itself. But here you have a state legislature working to redress the wrongs of a federal prosecutor. Has this ever happened before? It strikes me as a rather unique situation.

US attorney scandal not going away; federal probe deepens

It is difficult to believe this will result in any indictments, given the suppressive nature of the Bush administration. But it’s a sign that there is still some life in the Justice Department.

link

….recent behind-the-scenes activity in several investigations suggests that the issue that roiled Congress in 2007 could re-emerge in the heat of the election year. Two inquiries by the House and Senate ethics committees are examining whether several congressional Republicans, including one running for the Senate this year, improperly interfered with investigations.

As potent as the congressional probes might be, they appear to be far narrower than a sprawling inquiry launched by the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) and the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR).

Investigators from these offices have been questioning whether senior officials lied to Congress, violated the criminal provisions in the Hatch Act, tampered with witnesses preparing to testify to Congress, obstructed justice, took improper political considerations into account during the hiring and firing of U.S. attorneys and created widespread problems in the department’s Civil Rights Division, according to several people familiar with the investigation.

US surveillance of citizens similar to Russia, China

via Glenn Greenwald:

…the annual survey of worldwide privacy rights conducted by Privacy International and EPIC has been released for 2007, and the U.S. has been downgraded from “Extensive Surveillance Society” to “Endemic Surveillance Society,” the worst possible category there is for privacy protections, the category also occupied by countries such as China, Russia, Singapore and Malaysia. The survey uses a variety of objective factors to determine the extent of privacy protections citizens enjoy from their government, and the U.S. now finishes at the bottom for obvious reasons.
Evidence that we are becoming a lawless surveillance state is abundant. But let’s forget all of that and figure out how we can best micro-manage the internal affairs of Pakistan and Iraq and Russia and Iran so that we can preserve Freedom and Democracy for the world.

Bush tries to intimidate military lawyers

 Another day, another episode of unconscionable political degradation of the judicial/legal system of the United States of America.

Link

The Bush administration is pushing to take control of the promotions of military lawyers, escalating a conflict over the independence of uniformed attorneys who have repeatedly raised objections to the White House’s policies toward prisoners in the war on terrorism.

Andrew Sullivan: torture is not a complex issue

There is nothing very complicated about what torture is, or why it was outlawed, or the fact that Bush authorized it. Read Andrew Sullivan today. The issue is whether or not he will be held accountable.

Congress…an actual part of our government?

TPM: 

No, he hasn’t forgotten. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) took a step today towards contempt proceedings against Karl Rove, two of his former aides, and White House chief of staff Josh Bolten for not complying with subpoenas related to the U.S. attorney firings.

There hasn’t been much movement since this summer, when Leahy issued the subpoenas. The administration claimed executive privilege for all documents and testimony sought, and said that Rove didn’t need to even show up for a hearing. Rove’s aides Sara Taylor and Scott Jennings appeared, but refused to discuss the firings. A subpoena for documents was sent to Bolten, and the White House refused.

Today, Leahy ruled that the claims of executive privilege and immunity were not legally valid, a necessary step toward issuing contempt citations in the committee. He didn’t say when he might do that.

The timing for this might have something to do with what’s going on in the House, where leaders have said they plan to schedule a floor vote to find former White House counsel Harriet Miers and Bolten in contempt for ignoring subpoenas there. That vote has been repeatedly delayed and is currently expected to take place next month.

Florida, Hans von Spakovsky deny vote to 13,000 US citizens

Thanks to Hans von Spakovsky, the crack Florida legislature, and one whacked out Nigerian, 14,000 US citizens in Fl are going to be denied their basic right to vote. Of course, Hans’ targets were blacks and hispanics, and that makes up most of the total, but there must be a bunch of white people, maybe even a few suburban white males in that bunch. I hope to hell the Republicans who got caught in this anti-democratic/Democratic scam will begin to realize what Amerika is coming to under Bush, Rove, Hans von Spakovsky, and their ilk. Via Josh Marshall, link to Southwest Florida’s News-Press:

County election officials say the number of voters lost through Florida’s central registration system is small — 90 percent of applications get voter cards.

oh, by the way; that ten percent: that was 76,000 people on the initial run.
According to Marshall:

The law, first implemented in January, 2006, was based on advice from Hans von Spakovsky — yet another addition to his legacy of voter suppression at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Civil rights groups, calling the measure “disenfranchisement-by-bureaucracy,” have sued to halt the law in an attempt to minimize the effect on the 2008 election.

As far as I know, there was only one person convicted of voter fraud in Florida in the past several years, a confused Nigerian. But under the Bushist regime, we are denying the vote to 14,000 (at this point) mostly minorities:

— three-quarters of them minorities — didn’t make it through that last set of hoops.

Of course, just by coincidence, THESE folks are the most affected:

Blacks were 6 1/2 times more likely than whites to be rejected at that step.

Hispanics were more than 7 times more likely to be failed.

Too bad; better luck next life, if you are reborn as either white or a Republican:

Unaccepted but also not denied, they remain in limbo as “incomplete” or, often, sitting in Florida’s new statewide voter registration system with no designation at all.

State law requires those “lost” voters to be notified; most contacted said they were unaware of the problem…. Applications that don’t match are reviewed by the Department of State, fixed by hand if the problem is obvious, and forwarded to the county for its own determination of whether to fix the application or leave it in limbo.

By law, applicants must be told if their registrations are incomplete. Voting rights advocates complain those notices, when they are sent, often fail to explain the problem.

The Nigerian I mentioned: yes, US Attorney Gregory Miller’s coup that allowed him to get off the US Attorney hit list:

Gregory R. Miller, United States Attorney for the Northern District of Florida, announced today that KOLAWOLE A. OLAOGUN a/k/a YOMI OLAGUN, 53, of Tallahassee, Florida was convicted by a jury of one count of falsely claiming United States citizenship for the purpose of registering to vote, one count of falsely representing himself to be a United States citizen on a voter change of address form, and two counts of illegally voting in a federal election. Evidence introduced at trial established that Olaogun falsely claimed to be a United States citizen when he registered to vote and later voted during federal elections, including the 2004 Presidential Election. As a lawful permanent resident, Olaogun did not have the legal right to vote.

The idea has always been to encourage people to vote, not the reverse. Judge Mukasey/Dianne Feinstein, where do you stand on this issue? What are you going to do about 14,000 Floridians who are being denied the vote? What do you think of the nomination of von Spakovsky to the FEC? How about enforcing the Voting Rights Act? is that an idea? Doesn’t the Clue Train stop at your station four times a day? How about offloading a few?

Sullivan: We traded our soul for bad intelligence

Andrew Sullivan:

A very useful summary by The Week. No reputable or knowledgeable source says it isn’t torture. and there is simply no question that it is illegal  – which is why the Bush administration went to such lengths to get war criminals like AEI’s John Yoo to argue that the president is bound by no laws and no treaties in the war on terror. But its impact in poisoning and distorting vital intelligence is also crucial to understand. Money quote:

When Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the Sept. 11 attacks, was waterboarded, he revealed valuable details about the operations of al Qaida, the Bush administration says. But CIA agents say Mohammed also “confessed’’ that al Qaida was plotting to kill former presidents Clinton and Carter and Pope John Paul II, making them realize that he was inventing sensational information to satisfy his interrogators. Another al Qaida operative who was waterboarded, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libbi, blurted out details about the connection between al Qaida and Saddam Hussein, saying that Iraq had trained terrorists in the use of chemical and biological weapons. But al-Libbi later recanted, and the CIA concluded that he “had no knowledge of such training or weapons, and fabricated the statements because he was terrified of further harsh treatment.”

We traded our soul for bad intelligence. The perpetrators need to be brought to justice.

Which leads me to ask, by the way, where is the religious right on torture? what would Jesus do?

John Nichols: Mukasey (much) worse than Gonzales

at Common Dreams:

Like Gonzales, Mukasey refuses to accept that the president of the United States must abide by the laws of the land, beginning with the Constitution. …. actually takes a more extreme position in defense of an imperial presidency than did Gonzales.

When questioned by Judiciary Committee chair Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont and Constitution sub-committee chair Russ Feingold, D-Wisconsin, during the key hearing on his nomination, Mukasey embraces an interpretation of presidential authority so radical that it virtually guarantees more serious abuses of power by the executive branch.

There is no question that one of the ugliest manifestations of that expansion of authority involves the Bush-Cheney administration’s embrace of extraordinary rendition and torture as tools for achieving its ends. But those who focus too intensely on Mukasey’s troubling dance around the waterboarding question make a mistake. Even if the nominee were to embrace the Geneva Conventions — not to mention the 8th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution — and condemn all forms of torture as the cruel and unusual punishment that they are, he would still be an entirely unacceptable choice to serve as the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer.

And while some Democrats on the Judiciary Committee have made their peace with Mukasey — shame on New York’s Chuck Schumer and California’s Dianne Feinstein — the fight to block this nomination cannot be abandoned. Mukasey’s critics on the committee, led by Leahy and Feingold, should do everything in their power to re-frame the debate to focus on the broader question of whether a president can break the law — and on the nominee’s entirely unacceptable answers to it. They should pressure Schumer and Feinstein to reconsider, and they should reach out, aggressively, to “Republicans who know better” such as Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter.

Mukasey has made the case against his confirmation more convincingly than any of his critics.

The former judge has defended the administration’s attempts to dramatically expand the definition of executive privilege, telling the Judiciary Committee that it would be inappropriate for a U.S. attorney to press for contempt charges against a White House official who claimed to be protected by a grant of executive privilege. Under this reading of the law, U.S. attorneys would cease to be independent defenders of the rule of law and become mere extensions of the White House.

As such, Mukasey accepts a politicization of U.S. Attorneys far more extreme than that attempted by Gonzales and former White House political czar Karl Rove when they sought to remove U.S. Attorneys who failed to fully embrace the administration’s electoral and ideological goals.

But Mukasey does not stop there.

Under questioning from Feingold, Mukasey endorsed the administration’s argument that congressional attempts to define appropriate surveillance strategies and techniques could infringe inappropriately on presidential authority.

When pressed by Feingold, Mukasey refused to say whether he thought the president could order a violation of federal wiretapping rules. Feingold’s response was measured. “I find your equivocation here somewhat troubling,” said the senator.