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Weiser Communications Inc.

5/22/09 All right lets cut the shit, I said capitulated? Between the DEMOCRATIC Congress and the DEMOCRATIC House of Representatives and a DEMOCRATIC President we've gotten not just "Bush Light", but a clear statement that this country is ruled by a ONE PARTY Fascist Oligarchy...

My dearest's let me count the ways...

Iraq
Afghanistan
Pakistan
Guantanamo
Special Prosecutor for the Bush Administration
War Crimes Tribunal
Reinstatement Posse Comitatus Act
Torture
Reinstatement Habeas corpus
Government Illegal Wire Taps and Spying on American Citizens
Single Payer Public Health Care Option
Banking Regulatory System Reform
Credit Card Usury
Transfer of Public Money to Bailout Banks and Corporations
Overly Generous Tax Breaks for the Wealthy (including offshore accounts)
Don't Ask Don't Tell (13,000 discharges)
Valerie Plame Wilson (Wilson v. Cheney)

Please make me aware when I can strike "one" of these or add to the list Contact Us -ed

Simply put the Obama administration has capitulated to the powers that truly run this country.. We will get some crumbs but in essence it's same o'le same o'le -ed

Alright the issue of the past administrations disgust for our countries Constitution is obvious, now how about Obama's promises to end the freakin war in Iraq? Not expand the one in Afghanistan the old switch the point of view is on again. How about getting the hell out of Iraq now! -ed

Stop Being Distracted by Loudmouths Like Limbaugh: The Real Problem Is Lousy Democrats Like Evan Bayh and Ben Nelson

Posted by Chris Bowers, Open Left at 3:27 PM on June 10, 2009.
Republicans are not the obstacle to progressive governance. Instead, Democrats who refuse to support a public option are the obstacle.

Here is a message that progressive organizations and media outlets need to start sending to all Democratic party committees and members of Congress:

We are done attacking Republicans until you pass a public option for health care.

Until a public option is passed, I don't want to hear about the latest hate and idiocy spewing from Limbaugh, or Tancredo, or Palin, or Gingrich, or whoever. And to tell you the truth, I don't want to attack them for it, either. Because, right now, Republicans are not the obstacle to progressive governance. Instead, Democrats who refuse to support a public option are the obstacle.

We're Screwed on Everything From Health Care to the Economy If the Dems Don't Shape Up

Posted June 9, 2009.By William Greider, The Nation.

The Dems aid and protect their free-roaming entrepreneurial politicians and don't punish those who undermine the party's larger promises.

The governing party faced an awkward dilemma. People were hurting and furious at the government's generous bailouts for banks. But how could the Democrats do something for the folks without upsetting their friends and patrons in the banking industry? Democrats think they found a way. They are enacting a series of measures described as "breakthrough" reform and "unprecedented" defeat for the bankers. Only these achievements are more accurately understood as "reform lite." The house is on fire and Democrats brought a garden hose.

The Democratic Party is changing in some promising ways, but what's impressive is how much it has not changed. Does that sound harsh? I am relying on private judgments from Washington players regarded as the "white hats" on this subject -- consumer lobbyists and other public-interest reformers, who for years have labored in frustration to enact laws that would restore equity and honest relationships to the out-of-control financial system. These organizations mostly endorse the Democrats' efforts and celebrate their "victories." But a few minutes of private conversation reveals their doubt and disappointment. "It's a good bill," they will say, then after enumerating the shortcomings add, "It's better than nothing."

"This has to be on background, OK?" one of the reformers said. "This crisis brought down the world economy and yet Congress still hasn't passed a bill making sure it doesn't happen again."

Julia Gordon, a lawyer with the Center for Responsible Lending, did not seek anonymity. "We have reached the moment to ask ourselves Rabbi Hillel's question: if not now, when?" Gordon said. "I fear we are letting this crucial moment pass without putting forward-looking rules in place to fundamentally change how mortgages are made and prevent predatory lending. Plus, when we look back at the foreclosure tsunami that devastated so many families, we're going to be ashamed that we did not fix the bankruptcy code to permit mortgage modification. That move alone could have prevented more than a million foreclosures, and while I predict we will revisit the issue in the future, it will be like closing the barn door after the horse has died."

If not now, when? That question ought to haunt the Democratic Party and President Obama, who has been missing in action himself on key issues. Congressional Democrats are responding to this epic conflagration with the same risk-avoidance tactics they learned during many years in minority status. In those days, they could always blame right-wing Republicans for blocking their good intentions. But whom do the Dems blame now that they have the White House and fifty-nine votes in the Senate and a seventy-eight-seat majority in the House? Their standard explanation for not doing more is, "We didn't have the votes." So when might we expect Democrats to achieve more? When they have eighty votes in the Senate?

The party's ideological intentions are being defined with greater clarity in these new circumstances, and so are the President's. It's still early, but the implications are ominous for other issues. If Democrats are reluctant to disturb the power of other major interests, it seems improbable that fundamental change will occur on healthcare, energy conversion or the restoration of work and wages. The problem now is the Democrats, not the Republicans. The party aids and protects its free-roaming entrepreneurial politicians and does not punish those who undermine the party's larger promises. When Republicans were in charge, they enforced party loyalty with Stalinist discipline. Democrats are the party of safe incumbents, weak convictions.

The much-celebrated "Credit Cardholders' Bill of Rights" is a fresh example of how the Democratic Party tries to have it both ways -- avoiding the tough votes while mollifying the folks. The credit card reform measure imposes new rules on the industry and does away with many of the most outrageous gimmicks bankers use to extract more money from debtors. Banks cannot raise interest rates retroactively on old credit card balances or pile on hidden fees or fail to give advance notice for rate increases. These and other changes are worthy.

The achievement seems less courageous if you know that Congress was largely ratifying the regulatory rules already adopted by the Federal Reserve last year. Or that the legislation gives the industry another nine months to gouge their customers before the new rules go into effect. Or that Visa and MasterCard, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase are free to raise future interest rates to the sky -- without limit. That is the industry's intention, as bank lobbyists reported after the bill was passed.

American Usury

One of the fundamental issues that party managers wished to avoid was the scandal of American usury. Usury is the ancient sin of charging inflated interest rates sure to ruin the borrowers. It is considered immoral by Judaism, Christianity and Islam because usury involves the powerful using their wealth to ensnare weak and defenseless borrowers. The classic usurer offers an impossible choice that debtors cannot easily refuse. If they reject the terms of the loan, they will not be able to pay the rent or buy necessities. If they accept the usurious interest rates, their debts will accumulate until they are bankrupted (at which point the creditors claim their property). No civilized society can endure in such conditions.

Usury used to be illegal in the United States but it was "decriminalized" in 1980 -- the dawn of financial deregulation. A Democratic president and Congress repealed all interest-rate controls and the federal law prohibiting usury. Thirty years later, American society is permeated with usurious practices -- credit cards charging 30 percent and higher, subprime mortgages and other forms of predatory lending, the notorious "payday" loans that charge desperate working people an effective interest rate of 500 percent or more. Businesses, especially smaller firms, are also prey to usury in less direct ways.

Needing credit to survive, they submit to the creditor's demands and are often weakened as a result, shedding workers and services that shrink customers and income.

The straightforward way to stop usury is to enact a hard legal limit on the interest rates creditors can charge borrowers. In the House, several legislators introduced interest-rate caps, but party leaders would not let the issue get a roll call vote. Rep. Maurice Hinchey of New York and co-sponsors proposed an interest-rate cap of 18 percent, the same ceiling enacted years ago for credit unions. "Offering the amendment raised a lot of anxiety on the part of a lot of people," Hinchey said.

"It was withdrawn because it had no possibility of success and it would have put a number of people in a tough situation. We had to back off."

A roll call on usury would have compelled legislators to choose between their constituents and their bankers. Rep. Donna Edwards of Maryland proposed a tougher ceiling on interest rates, but the House rules committee rejected her amendment. "Our constituents are so angry with the banks," she observed, "siding with credit-card companies would not be helpful to me, and I expect that's true in other districts." Bankers are contributors, so this is what members call "a money vote." A consumer lobbyist explained. "Let's face it," he said. "The main reason lots of members get on the House Financial Services Committee is because they want to raise money from the financial industry."

In the Senate, Dick Durbin of Illinois, the majority whip who rounds up votes for the party, introduced his own usury bill -- a cap of 36 percent including the non-interest fees and charges. Durbin's bill also empowered state governments to set lower limits. The Consumer Federation of America endorsed it, but the consumer lobbyists asked Durbin not to have a roll call on his measure because it might reveal their weakness.

Nevertheless, the redoubtable Bernie Sanders of Vermont demanded a vote on his bill -- an interest-rate cap of 15 percent.

"When banks are charging 30 percent interest rates, they are not making credit available," Sanders said. "They are engaged in loan sharking." Sanders lost, 33 to 60. Twenty-one Democrats voted with the sharks. Senators Carper, Cantwell, Byrd, Bingaman, Bayh, Baucus, Akaka, Warner, Tester, Stabenow, Specter, Shaheen, Pryor, Ben Nelson, Bill Nelson, Murray, Lincoln, Landrieu, Kaufman, Johnson, Hagan.

The scandal of "payday" lending is being confronted by numerous state legislatures, but the issue stalled out in Congress. The industry pursued a race-based lobbying strategy that targeted black and Hispanic representatives with this pitch -- poor people need these loans; don't mess with them. Rep. Luis Gutierrez of Illinois proposed a bill that usurers found acceptable -- an interest rate cap of 390 percent.

Standing With the Sharks

Perhaps the most revealing moment for Democratic timidity was the Senate roll call to authorize bankruptcy judges to intervene on home foreclosures and reduce the burden for failing homeowners. If the bankers refused to make a deal, the debtors could take them into bankruptcy court and hope for better terms. This single reform would shift the balance of power modestly from creditors to debtors and save at least 1.5 million families from foreclosure, reformers estimated. The measure passed easily in the House, but was defeated by the Senate.

Bankruptcy reform lost because twelve Democrats joined the Republicans to vote for bankers and against embattled families. Senators Baucus, Bennet, Byrd, Carper, Dorgan, Johnson, Landrieu, Lincoln, Ben Nelson, Pryor, Specter, Tester.

Dick Durbin could not conceal the bitter aftertaste. He told a hometown radio interviewer: "Hard to believe in a time when we're facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created -- they are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And frankly, they own the place."

Durbin's disappointment may have included the former Illinois senator whom he had championed for president. Barack Obama took a walk on reform. Last year as a candidate, Obama declined to support the bankruptcy provision for the financial-bailout legislation, but he promised reform groups he would support it if elected. The White House wouldn't let reformers include it in the stimulus package or in Obama's first budget. The White House suggested the issue could proceed as a stand-alone measure (guaranteed to fail). On this important reform, the president stands with the sharks.

The Democratic Party ignores its left-liberal-progressive base with some regularity because it knows it can. Politicians understand they will suffer no consequences afterward. The galaxy of mediating organizations, including organized labor, that surrounds and supports the party may stomp and holler, but they do not attempt any retribution that might alter their relationship with power. Reform organizations will not withdraw their support, either money or rank-and-file voters. Nor will they seek to punish any of the wayward Democrats who regularly vote against them with opposition at the next election. The "white hat" reformers are Washington insiders themselves, with a seat at the table and influence on the substance of the party's agenda. They do not want to put their status at risk. Politicians know this from long experience. So do the reformers.

The warped dynamics of the Democratic Party may have sufficed when the GOP was ascendant and the goal was restoring a Democratic majority. But now the majority party resembles a dysfunctional family, badly in need of outside intervention. I say this with sympathy, having known and admired many of the reform activists for many years. Some of them are suffering from a political version of the Stockholm syndrome. Their good intentions are brutally compromised by identifying with the limited imagination and nerve of the Democratic Party.

In some ways, the politicians are prisoners too -- captives of the money politics and the expensive mass-marketing that requires them to raise so much money and thus rely on the moneyed interests. Representatives and senators know how the system works and what they need to do to survive. Now and then, they may try to win one for the folks, but mostly they are resigned to the confinements of the status quo. So long as activist groups will make no attempt to break out of this pattern or penalize incumbents for disloyalty, the party will continue to stiff the faithful.

Moral Awakening

Given all the adversities facing the country, I conclude that meaningful "intervention" is plausible only if it originates with people at large who are more distant from power. I envision the intrusion coming from many "independent formations" free to ignore Washington's insider routines and mobilized by citizens on behalf of their own convictions, their common-sense ideas of what needs to be accomplished. This alternative path is a central theme of my new book, Come Home, America. I describe (somewhat wishfully) how self-directed organizations might develop the power to break through regular politics and overcome the usual barriers.

These groups could function, not as a third party nor as standard "issue" advocates, but as a mixture of these capabilities. They could act like free-roaming guerillas who educate and agitate; like a political party that selectively destabilizes safe-seat incumbents by entering party primaries or running independent challengers; like a representative organization that can demand political relations through direct confrontations or even civil disobedience. This development sounds implausible, I know, especially in Washington. But our crisis demands a more aggressive response from citizens -- something that threatens the power of both parties and makes them insecure.

As it happens, a rough facsimile of what I envisioned is arising now in the politics of financial reform. A network of fourteen community organizations, based in cities from Boston to Washington, DC, and across North America, has come together in alliance and intends to force a moral awakening on the narrow thinking of the status quo. These citizens are developing a political-action agenda around one theme -- usury -- as the efficient expression of the abuses and injustices associated with banking and finance. These are interfaith organizations affiliated with the Industrial Areas Foundation and composed of citizens who are white and black, affluent and working poor, whose local organizations are based in churches and synagogues, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim and others.

Usually, their political action is local and succeeds regularly in building relations with public officials that produce real change in communities. This time, given the crisis, these IAF groups are attempting something they have not done before -- building the voice and influence to join the national debate and change its terms. I sat in on one of their organizing meetings near Baltimore and was asked to contribute my views on the shape of the problem.

"Are you ready to be born again? And again? And again? Do you have the imagination? Do you believe it?" The call was from the Rev. Hurmon Hamilton of the Roxbury Presbyterian Church in Boston, and he inspired the 100 or so community leaders. "Faith is the substance of things hoped for," Hamilton declared, "the evidence of things unseen."

Outlawing Usury

The Rev. David Brawley of East Brooklyn Baptist described a preliminary statement of basic principles. "Reasonable interest rates," he said. "In this financial culture, the nation will return to a time-honored, indeed ancient, practice: the law against usury. Financial institutions and mechanisms that participate in this culture will agree to a maximum of 9 percent interest or so. This was the usual state-mandated rate before the repeal."

Brawley described other principles with radical implications. "The lender holds the loan," he explained. "The financial institution that makes a loan holds the loan for its duration. The borrower and lender enter into a long-term relationship that ends when the loan is fully repaid. This is the fundamental starting point for any return to accountability." That statement of principle challenges the market securitization of mortgages that falsely claimed to reduce risk by dispersing it among many investors. The process instead left no one responsible for sound lending and thus multiplied the costs of failure.

Brawley's final principle was perhaps most threatening to the existing order. "The federal government insists on these core characteristics as the criteria for all further bailout funding. Banks that wish to borrow from the government must accept these simple standards [and] provide consumers with an alternative to the current monopoly of financial transactions dominated and still dictated by the same fifty financial institutions that caused the crisis."

In other words, the social standard of usurious practices should define which banks and financial firms are eligible to participate in all forms of government aid and protection. Why should taxpayers finance the usurers who are injuring the society? The government's undiscriminating approach to aiding banks implicates everyone in supporting the usury. So do the banks and brokerages that collect people's savings and channel the money into usurious practices that produce greater returns by ruining more borrowers. The moral standard poses difficult questions for everyone, not just bankers and politicians.

Arnold Graf, national organizer for the IAF, argues that the moral question can lead people to confront a deeper debate about the future. "What is the kind of society we want to have?" Graf asked. "That's really what we want to talk about -- transforming the society. We're not going to get transformation form the president and Congress. It can only come from the people themselves."

These IAF organizations expect to try different tactics to spread the message and engage the people with power who make decisions. That means directly confronting elected representatives but also the banking institutions with famous names. The alliance hopes the moral principles will mobilize people of faith but also students and workers and investors. Following the example of the civil rights movement, people of conscience have to find ways to turn up the heat on the established order and discomfort the silent citizens who are passive and indifferent. This effort, Graf assumes, will probably take years, not months. Leaders of the community organizations are aware of the risks. They are attempting a leap into the unknown and they might fail. No one listens, nothing changes. They accept the risk because they too have asked Hillel's question. If not now, when?

William Greider is the author of, most recently, "The Soul of Capitalism" (Simon & Schuster).

Howard Zinn: Changing Obama's Military Mindset

By Howard Zinn, The Progressive. Posted May 15, 2009.

Obama once said, 'It's not enough to get out of Iraq; we have to get out of the mindset that led us into Iraq.' What happened to that Obama?

We are citizens, and Obama is a politician. You might not like that word. But the fact is he’s a politician. He’s other things, too—he’s a very sensitive and intelligent and thoughtful and promising person. But he’s a politician.

If you’re a citizen, you have to know the difference between them and you—the difference between what they have to do and what you have to do. And there are things they don’t have to do, if you make it clear to them they don’t have to do it.

From the beginning, I liked Obama. But the first time it suddenly struck me that he was a politician was early on, when Joe Lieberman was running for the Democratic nomination for his Senate seat in 2006.

Lieberman—who, as you know, was and is a war lover—was running for the Democratic nomination, and his opponent was a man named Ned Lamont, who was the peace candidate. And Obama went to Connecticut to support Lieberman against Lamont.

It took me aback. I say that to indicate that, yes, Obama was and is a politician. So we must not be swept away into an unthinking and unquestioning acceptance of what Obama does.

Our job is not to give him a blank check or simply be cheerleaders. It was good that we were cheerleaders while he was running for office, but it’s not good to be cheerleaders now. Because we want the country to go beyond where it has been in the past. We want to make a clean break from what it has been in the past.

I had a teacher at Columbia University named Richard Hofstadter, who wrote a book called The American Political Tradition, and in it, he examined presidents from the Founding Fathers down through Franklin Roosevelt. There were liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats. And there were differences between them. But he found that the so-called liberals were not as liberal as people thought—and that the difference between the liberals and the conservatives, and between Republicans and Democrats, was not a polar difference. There was a common thread that ran through all American history, and all of the presidents—Republican, Democrat, liberal, conservative—followed this thread.

The thread consisted of two elements: one, nationalism; and two, capitalism. And Obama is not yet free of that powerful double heritage.

We can see it in the policies that have been enunciated so far, even though he’s been in office only a short time.

Some people might say, “Well, what do you expect?”

And the answer is that we expect a lot.

People say, “What, are you a dreamer?”

And the answer is, yes, we’re dreamers. We want it all. We want a peaceful world. We want an egalitarian world. We don’t want war. We don’t want capitalism. We want a decent society.

We better hold on to that dream—because if we don’t, we’ll sink closer and closer to this reality that we have, and that we don’t want.

Be wary when you hear about the glories of the market system. The market system is what we’ve had. Let the market decide, they say. The government mustn’t give people free health care; let the market decide.

Which is what the market has been doing—and that’s why we have forty-eight million people without health care. The market has decided that. Leave things to the market, and there are two million people homeless. Leave things to the market, and there are millions and millions of people who can’t pay their rent. Leave things to the market, and there are thirty-five million people who go hungry.

You can’t leave it to the market. If you’re facing an economic crisis like we’re facing now, you can’t do what was done in the past. You can’t pour money into the upper levels of the country—and into the banks and corporations—and hope that it somehow trickles down.

What was one of the first things that happened when the Bush Administration saw that the economy was in trouble? A $700 billion bailout, and who did we give the $700 billion to? To the financial institutions that caused this crisis.

This was when the Presidential campaign was still going on, and it pained me to see Obama standing there, endorsing this huge bailout to the corporations.

What Obama should have been saying was: Hey, wait a while. The banks aren’t poverty stricken. The CEOs aren’t poverty stricken. But there are people who are out of work. There are people who can’t pay their mortgages. Let’s take $700 billion and give it directly to the people who need it. Let’s take $1 trillion, let’s take $2 trillion.

Let’s take this money and give it directly to the people who need it. Give it to the people who have to pay their mortgages. Nobody should be evicted. Nobody should be left with their belongings out on the street.

Obama wants to spend perhaps a trillion more on the banks. Like Bush, he’s not giving it directly to homeowners. Unlike the Republicans, Obama also wants to spend $800 billion for his economic stimulus plan. Which is good—the idea of a stimulus is good. But if you look closely at the plan, too much of it goes through the market, through corporations.

It gives tax breaks to businesses, hoping that they’ll hire people. No—if people need jobs, you don’t give money to the corporations, hoping that maybe jobs will be created. You give people work immediately.

A lot of people don’t know the history of the New Deal of the 1930s. The New Deal didn’t go far enough, but it had some very good ideas. And the reason the New Deal came to these good ideas was because there was huge agitation in this country, and Roosevelt had to react. So what did he do? He took billions of dollars and said the government was going to hire people. You’re out of work? The government has a job for you.

As a result of this, lots of very wonderful work was done all over the country. Several million young people were put into the Civilian Conservation Corps. They went around the country, building bridges and roads and playgrounds, and doing remarkable things.

The government created a federal arts program. It wasn’t going to wait for the markets to decide that. The government set up a program and hired thousands of unemployed artists: playwrights, actors, musicians, painters, sculptors, writers. What was the result? The result was the production of 200,000 pieces of art. Today, around the country, there are thousands of murals painted by people in the WPA program. Plays were put on all over the country at very cheap prices, so that people who had never seen a play in their lives were able to afford to go.

And that’s just a glimmer of what could be done. The government has to represent the people’s needs. The government can’t give the job of representing the people’s needs to corporations and the banks, because they don’t care about the people’s needs. They only care about profit.

In the course of his campaign, Obama said something that struck me as very wise—and when people say something very wise, you have to remember it, because they may not hold to it. You may have to remind them of that wise thing they said.

Obama was talking about the war in Iraq, and he said, “It’s not just that we have to get out of Iraq.” He said “get out of Iraq,” and we mustn’t forget it. We must keep reminding him: Out of Iraq, out of Iraq, out of Iraq—not next year, not two years from now, but out of Iraq now.

But listen to the second part, too. His whole sentence was: “It’s not enough to get out of Iraq; we have to get out of the mindset that led us into Iraq.”

What is the mindset that got us into Iraq?

It’s the mindset that says force will do the trick. Violence, war, bombers—that they will bring democracy and liberty to the people.

It’s the mindset that says America has some God-given right to invade other countries for their own benefit. We will bring civilization to the Mexicans in 1846. We will bring freedom to the Cubans in 1898. We will bring democracy to the Filipinos in 1900. You know how successful we’ve been at bringing democracy all over the world.

Obama has not gotten out of this militaristic missionary mindset. He talks about sending tens of thousands of more troops to Afghanistan.

Obama is a very smart guy, and surely he must know some of the history. You don’t have to know a lot to know the history of Afghanistan has been decades and decades and decades and decades of Western powers trying to impose their will on Afghanistan by force: the English, the Russians, and now the Americans. What has been the result? The result has been a ruined country.

This is the mindset that sends 21,000 more troops to Afghanistan, and that says, as Obama has, that we’ve got to have a bigger military. My heart sank when Obama said that. Why do we need a bigger military? We have an enormous military budget. Has Obama talked about cutting the military budget in half or some fraction? No.

We have military bases in more than a hundred countries. We have fourteen military bases on Okinawa alone. Who wants us there? The governments. They get benefits. But the people don’t really want us there. There have been huge demonstrations in Italy against the establishment of a U.S. military base. There have been big demonstrations in South Korea and on Okinawa.

One of the first acts of the Obama Administration was to send Predator missiles to bomb Pakistan. People died. The claim is, “Oh, we’re very precise with our weapons. We have the latest equipment. We can target anywhere and hit just what we want.”

This is the mindset of technological infatuation. Yes, they can actually decide that they’re going to bomb this one house. But there’s one problem: They don’t know who’s in the house. They can hit one car with a rocket from a great distance. Do they know who’s in the car? No.

And later—after the bodies have been taken out of the car, after the bodies have been taken out of the house—they tell you, “Well, there were three suspected terrorists in that house, and yes, there’s seven other people killed, including two children, but we got the suspected terrorists.”

But notice that the word is “suspected.” The truth is they don’t know who the terrorists are.

So, yes, we have to get out of the mindset that got us into Iraq, but we’ve got to identify that mindset. And Obama has to be pulled by the people who elected him, by the people who are enthusiastic about him, to renounce that mindset. We’re the ones who have to tell him, “No, you’re on the wrong course with this militaristic idea of using force to accomplish things in the world. We won’t accomplish anything that way, and we’ll remain a hated country in the world.”

Obama has talked about a vision for this country. You have to have a vision, and now I want to tell Obama what his vision should be.

The vision should be of a nation that becomes liked all over the world. I won’t even say loved—it’ll take a while to build up to that. A nation that is not feared, not disliked, not hated, as too often we are, but a nation that is looked upon as peaceful, because we’ve withdrawn our military bases from all these countries.

We don’t need to spend the hundreds of billions of dollars on the military budget. Take all the money allocated to military bases and the military budget, and—this is part of the emancipation—you can use that money to give everybody free health care, to guarantee jobs to everybody who doesn’t have a job, guaranteed payment of rent to everybody who can’t pay their rent, build child care centers.

Let’s use the money to help other people around the world, not to send bombers over there. When disasters take place, they need helicopters to transport people out of the floods and out of devastated areas. They need helicopters to save people’s lives, and the helicopters are over in the Middle East, bombing and strafing people.

What’s required is a total turnaround. We want a country that uses its resources, its wealth, and its power to help people, not to hurt them. That’s what we need.

This is a vision we have to keep alive. We shouldn’t be easily satisfied and say, “Oh well, give him a break. Obama deserves respect.”

But you don’t respect somebody when you give them a blank check. You respect somebody when you treat them as an equal to you, and as somebody you can talk to and somebody who will listen to you.

Not only is Obama a politician. Worse, he’s surrounded by politicians. And some of them he picked himself. He picked Hillary Clinton, he picked Lawrence Summers, he picked people who show no sign of breaking from the past.

We are citizens. We must not put ourselves in the position of looking at the world from their eyes and say, “Well, we have to compromise, we have to do this for political reasons.” No, we have to speak our minds.

This is the position that the abolitionists were in before the Civil War, and people said, “Well, you have to look at it from Lincoln’s point of view.” Lincoln didn’t believe that his first priority was abolishing slavery. But the anti-slavery movement did, and the abolitionists said, “We’re not going to put ourselves in Lincoln’s position. We are going to express our own position, and we are going to express it so powerfully that Lincoln will have to listen to us.”

And the anti-slavery movement grew large enough and powerful enough that Lincoln had to listen. That’s how we got the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth and Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

That’s been the story of this country. Where progress has been made, wherever any kind of injustice has been overturned, it’s been because people acted as citizens, and not as politicians. They didn’t just moan. They worked, they acted, they organized, they rioted if necessary to bring their situation to the attention of people in power. And that’s what we have to do today.

Howard Zinn is the author of “A People’s History of the United States,” “Voices of a People’s History” (with Anthony Arnove), and “A Power Governments Cannot Suppress.” Thanks to Alex Read and Matt Korn for transcribing Zinn’s talk on February 2 at the Busboys and Poets restaurant in Washington, D.C., from which this is adapted.

A Question Of The Rule Of Law

Andrew Sullivan

Clive Crook defends himself:

The earlier cases do not prove that waterboarding as practised during the Bush administration was illegal, only that waterboarding carried out in certain ways and under certain circumstances has been successfully prosecuted. The designers of the policy knew the law and manoeuvred--absurdly and offensively, perhaps, but they would not be the first lawyers to stoop to that--to stay within it.

I have to say I find this defense unpersuasive and a little beside the point, to put it mildly. The entire spirit of the UN Convention and the Geneva Conventions is not to see whether governments can find clever, legal loopholes in the ban on torture, abuse, inhuman treatment and outrages on human dignity - but to see that no government ever comes near the kind of prisoner abuse and torture that we have seen throughout history. I cannot begin to believe that those who drafted both conventions believed that waterboarding, for example, was okay if it is done in certain ways and not others. And to even countenance such a sophistry is to have capitulated to the logic that the executive - empowered with massive force and enormous secrecy - should always get the benefit of the doubt when applying the rule of law.

The lawyers we are talking about, after all, are lawyers for the president, whose oath of office demands that he faithfully execute the laws. These lawyers are not there to help him circumvent or break the law, but to ensure that it's followed. They violated that core responsibility and the sheer shoddiness of their work reveals that they knew it.

The premise of Clive's argument, in other words, is that it's perfectly legitimate for a president to treat the law as something to be defined away rather than followed. And it shows how successful a bully Dick Cheney is. He has managed - even with a very shrewd journalist like Clive - to shift the terms of the debate from why on earth is any of this happening? to how can we let these people off the hook?

There is and was a legal and constitutional way to tackle the terrible crisis Bush faced after 9/11.

If the president believed that following the law at that point would lead to the imminent deaths of thousands of people, then his constitutional responsibility was either to urge the Congress to repeal the Geneva Conventions and UN Convention, or to break the law because this one moment necessitated it and then present himself for trial. That's the Lincoln model. What Bush did instead was secretly break the law, invoke a constitutional theory that the executive can always break such laws in the furtherance of national security and order his lawyers to provide specious reasons why he had not done so. Then he lied about it repeatedly in public. Then when photographs from Abu Ghraib showed in graphic detail the horrifying reality of much milder techniques than the ones he had explicitly authorized, he blamed low-level soldiers and allowed them to take the fall. Then, over a year after Abu Ghraib and four years after 9/11, he set up an elaborate, ongoing program to torture prisoners, replete with lawyers, doctors, professional torturers, and psychologists. Then, when the International Committee of the Red Cross gave him a report detailing what it described as unequivocal torture, he shelved it, further violating his core responsibility to enforce the law.

This is an ongoing, premeditated conspiracy to systematically break the law and violate treaty obligations.

I guess you could find all sorts of ways to say that this illegal behavior should be ignored because the chief executive has used every sophistry in the book to parse legal statutes against their plain meaning and intent. But why would that be your argument, rather than the simple one that the law be enforced as plainly written, and that a failure to enforce the law when the chief law-breaker is supposed to be the chief law-enforcer is a serious threat to our entire system of government?

I know it's a trauma for a society to have to go through this. I do not relish it. It's already been very very painful. But a society seriously committed to the rule of law will undergo trauma if it has to, especially if it is the only way to get over this. And this is not our collective responsibility. The trauma is entirely the responsibility of those who broke the law, shocked the conscience and tortured defenseless human beings in the name of the American people. They refuse to show remorse, threaten to use their political party to return the torture regime to power when they can, and have threatened to blame any future terror attacks on the return of the US to the rule of law.

This is why Cheney remains a threat to the constitution and the liberties it guarantees.

And that is why he cannot simply be appeased.

The Effective Crime

by Hunter

Mon May 04, 2009 at 07:50:03 AM PDT

In an oped in yesterday's NYT, Al Hunt says:

Alberto Mora says it’s "politically unthinkable" to criminally prosecute the top Bush administration officials who sanctioned torture. He also says it’s "legally unthinkable" not to hold them accountable.

It is a fine synopsis of the supposed conundrum that has gripped all of the people in America who purport to be experts on such things. But consider it plainly, for just a moment. Which of the two is worse?

If you have something that is "politically unthinkable", and something that is "legally unthinkable", are those truly two equal evils? Are we truly going to submit, as hypothesis, that in a choice between taking an action which is politically convenient but criminal, or politically devastating but legal, that it should be a tough decision for a government to make?

This is why the entire debate makes me ill. I think we are all used to the notion that there are monsters among us: Charles Krauthammer is as divorced from both morality and reality as one could possibly be, which is precisely why he continues to retain supposedly respectable venues for his scribblings long after every one of his prognostications has proven to be as wrong as his arguments are corrupt. It is another thing, though, to find the stomach to accept that indeed, an even share of our supposed greatest minds truly find any of this to be a quandry. Can we follow this law, if important people violated it? Or would asking that our laws be followed even by the powerful be -- shudder -- vengeful?

Mora says, as cited by Hunt, that prosecutions of political elites would "tear the country apart." It is astonishing how well-travelled that particular canard is. It made it from the age of Nixon to our present day with surprisingly little wear and tear, so carefully has it been tended to by our political betters (mostly the same tenders now as then, uncannily enough.)

But again, what is the greater danger to a nation: that the law be applied to the politically powerful, or that the politically powerful be declared immune from inconvenient laws? Is this truly something worth pondering? Is there any bulb so dim, in our political string of lights, to honestly, genuinely believe that this country cannot stomach abiding by the laws it sets out for itself?

It seems an argument that could only spring from insipid cowardice. The author of the "tear our country apart" argument is saying, by proxy, that they themselves cannot bear to see the law applied in a particular case, and fear chaos because they naturally assume the rest of the nation is as corrupt as they are, or as enamored with the privileged as the privileged themselves are. I think neither is likely to be the case, but I am fairly certain that a continued history of immunity from the consequences from their actions would be a corrupting influence.

I am honestly not sure what else could possibly be said. Last week saw President Obama state, directly: "I believe waterboarding is torture." He need not have put the qualifier, "I believe," because waterboarding has been considered torture since long, long before we currently pretended at a debate about such a thing. Torture is a violation of both American and international law.

That should be the last words on the subject from the president's mouth: from here we should expect to see not a "truth commission", or a "blue-ribbon panel", or any of the other vacuous approximations of justice that are hastily constructed when something abominable is done by somebody too significant to be merely judged by the standards and laws held out for every last one of the rest of us, but a criminal investigation that uncovers what was done, how it was done, and who did it.

It is impossible to maintain the fiction that waterboarding even a heinous criminal one hundred and eighty-some-odd times, keeping a medical staff and preparations for immediate tracheotomy on standby in case something "goes wrong," does not rise to the level of torture. For that matter, you cannot claim that anyone who is knowledgeable enough about what waterboarding is, with enough expertise to know how to do it "safely", would never have been exposed to the rather central fact that the process was historically considered to be torture, regardless of whatever legal documents were horked up just before or just after the act.

Imagine how monstrous it would be -- how indescribably vile, how shudderingly evil -- if an investigation uncovered evidence that waterboarding was indeed done as futile attempt to find links between al Qaeda and Iraq that never existed. That the hundredth or hundred-fiftieth torture event was undertaken to get "evidence" that the prisoner could never have had to begin with, not after the first session of torture, the second, or the first few dozen.

No, we cannot even think such a thing. The first assertions from the torturers were that we did not torture; then the argument was that we did, but only for scant moments. No we know that we did it often, that we made a policy by Executive Order of treating prisoners inhumanely, in violation of our laws. The bargain we are asked to accept now, in this current round of justification for carving away at our own humanity, is that yes, we may have done it, we may have committed that which we would consider a war crime if done by any other nation, but it was effective. We gained from it -- and more than we lost, I would presume. According to Krauthammer and dozens of others, the current distinction between a war crime to be prosecuted and one to be ignored is now simply one of effectiveness.

So now we will have that debate as well, and a year or two from now we will, I hope, appropriately feel like monsters for even entertaining such a thing, but not before a great many people furrow their brows and consider it a while. Likewise, we will consider Mr. Mora's words, and whether or not we can stomach risking our fine nation on such a trivial and petty thing as enforcing our own laws and moral fiber.

But we are at least beyond the point where we can pretend the actions of the proponents of "enhanced interrogations," to use their own euphemism, were legal. That would seem to make the next required steps very clear indeed.

President Obama, We Want the Truth About the Bush Administration

By Marie Cocco, Washington Post Writers Group. Posted April 30, 2009.

Confronting our own misdeeds is a measure of our character. And yes, the whole world is watching

His interest, President Barack Obama says, is "the achievement of a full, frank and just acknowledgement of the facts."

His topic was the delicate question of what to call the slaughter of 1.5 million ethnic Armenians at the hands of Turkey during World War I, a festering historical sore no American president can genuinely hope to heal.

But Obama’s professed desire for a complete and just accounting raises the question: If it’s good for the Armenians, why isn’t it good for Americans? Why can’t we also have a "full, frank and just acknowledgement" of the facts surrounding torture and other moral horrors that were carried out in our name during the Bush administration’s global war on terror?

History demands it.

Obama doesn’t want to bog his administration’s ambitious agenda down in partisan recriminations over past practices. Fair enough. But it does not follow that no official inquiry should be held. There is more to find out, because much information is still being kept secret -- sometimes by the very perpetrators of the shameful practices, who press on in the courts, for example, to attain what they hope will be a permanent shroud.

A copious report by the Democratic staff of the House Judiciary Committee, released last month, provides a chilling compendium of what we know, and what we don’t.

We do not officially know whether the "enhanced interrogation tactics" used by the Bush administration were in fact criminal violations of federal statutes prohibiting torture and war crimes. We do not know what laws may have been broken through the use of "extraordinary rendition." This was the practice of sweeping people up and transferring them to secret CIA "black sites" or to countries -- Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Pakistan, for example -- where torture is believed to be practiced.

We do not know how many people were jailed and interrogated in this system. Estimates range from 100 to 150 to "several thousand renditions of terror suspects," the judiciary report says. We don’t know how a program of "rendition" that was occasionally used in prior administrations to deliver a suspect to face prosecution in a country where he was wanted on criminal charges metastasized into a global sweep of those who were detained for interrogation. We do not know what happened to "ghost" detainees held by the U.S. in Iraqi prisons -- prisoners who were never registered or identified and, for all we know, disappeared.

We do not know the full extent of the warrantless wiretapping of Americans that continues, in some form, to this day.

Sweeping this all aside in the interest of moving on isn’t a mark of how mature our political system is. It is an indictment of it.

It acknowledges that we cannot withstand the clamor of television talking heads -- that somehow the distraction of their empty chatter is as weighty in its consequence as the heinous acts that smear the nation’s reputation. Do we really want to surrender to the purveyors of partisan hot air? This is the ultimate capitulation. It shows us to be so weak that we really should worry about how this act of cowardice is perceived around the world.

We have a contemporary model for how to conduct a politically sensitive inquiry properly, without undue theatrics and with respect for classified information. It is the 9/11 commission, a sober and thorough panel that explored systemic failures that preceded the terrorist attacks and put to rest false claims -- including the Bush administration’s contention that Saddam Hussein somehow was behind it. The panel operated outside the partisan hothouse of Congress, yet drew freely on the expertise of those inside and outside the government. Its final report became a best-seller, not because it inflamed political passion but because it was unconventionally -- and thus, believably -- dispassionate.

The Bush administration opposed the creation of the 9/11 commission, then resisted with much force many of the panel’s requests for information. In the end, determined lobbying by victims’ families and their acumen at airing their demands in the media forced officialdom to create the panel, and helped the commission surmount obstacles that were placed in its way.

Now we have no tearful widows or orphaned children to plead on television for a just accounting. But how we handle the grievances of the voiceless and confront our own misdeeds is yet another measure of our character. And yes, the whole world is watching.

See more stories tagged with: bush, torture, cheney, marie cocco

Marie Cocco is a prize-winning syndicated columnist on political and cultural topics for The Washington Post Writers Group. She is a frequent commentator on national TV and radio shows.

The Legal Case Against Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Et Al., Is Murder One, Not Just War Crimes

Submitted by mark karlin on Wed, 04/22/2009 - 9:42am. EditorBlog

THE BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG

by Mark Karlin

BuzzFlash fully supports trying Bush, Cheney, and their band of fellow sadists for war crimes, but while they are in the courtroom, let's not forget Murder One. Apparently, many in the mainstream press and blogosphere already have.

The focus right now is on legal memos justifying the horrifying and numbing repetition of torture against "high profile" targets. We have a short memory in America -- and most of what was in these memos -- except for the diabolical excess of the waterboarding and the medieval torture by insects -- was, as President Obama has said, pretty much already known.

Also known, but not discussed at this time, is that less upper echelon Al-Qaeda figures were murdered as a result of the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld torture jihad (euphemestically called in the mainstream corporate press "harsh" or "enhanced interrogation").

Uh, remember those photos of bludgeoned prisoners in body bags that came out of Abu Ghraib? (And we still have only seen a small portion of the visual evidence.) Those people were murdered as a result of the green light on torture. Even the Pentagon has declared some of the Guantanamo dead were victims of homicide. Then there are many "renditioned" individuals who disappeared into torture prisons around the world and have never reappeared.

In 2008, Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell and a man who came over from the dark side to tell the truth, testified before Congress that a minimum of 25 people died in U.S. detention as a result of homicides -- and that the figure was probably higher.

Indeed, other estimates put the figure much, much higher -- and that doesn't include the prisoners who were sent to "black holes" and never reappeared. It doesn't include the hundreds of Taliban prisoners who were transported to a remote spot in Afghanistan (shortly after the U.S. invasion) and machine gunned to death in container tracks by Afghan soldiers with a green light from Rumsfeld.

The number of people murdered during torture ("harsh interrogation") will likely never be known, but as a governor in Texas, George W. Bush executed the highest number of people for far fewer murders each. Some of them just killed one person, unlike Bush, Cheney and their crew of arm chair executioners.

If there is an Anne Frank who symbolizes the horrific death that befell those who fell into the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld torture machine, it is the innocent Afghan whose story of being murdered while mistakenly incarcerated and tortured was compellingly detailed in the 2008 Academy Award winning Alex Gibney documentary "Taxi To the Dark Side."

Some background on "Taxi to the Dark Side" reveals, once again, that we should be concentrating both on War Crimes and Murder One when it comes to pursuing charges against Bush Administration officials:

In December 2002, Dilawar, a young rural Afghan cabdriver, was accused of helping to plan a rocket attack on a U.S. base, clamped into prison at Bagram, and subjected to physical torture so relentless that he died after two days of it. But Dilawar was innocent--and he'd been denounced by the real culprit, who thereby took the heat off himself and won points with U.S. forces by giving them "a bad guy." Dilawar was the first fatal victim of Vice President Dick Cheney's devotion to "working the dark side"--torturing, humiliating, and otherwise abusing prisoners in the "Global War on Terror." His story, developed in horrific detail with testimony from the soldiers who tortured him, and also from two New York Times investigative reporters, becomes a prism for slanting light onto the "dark side" policy and the mindset behind it. The program at Bagram was deemed such a success that it served as the model for Abu Ghraib the following year in Iraq, and both prisons became pipelines to the detainee facility at Guantánamo, Cuba.

And Vincent Bugliosi, the author of a book on how the Supreme Court stole the 2000 election for Bush, penned a "J'Accuse" whose title makes the case that we are asserting on BuzzFlash: "The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder."

Even for progessives, the news cycle has been shortened to a nano-second; and right now the focus is on the legalese used in the just-released memos to justify torture. And the Bush defenders are countering with an allegation that the torture of two or three suspects produced important information (which thus far has not been proven by any facts).

But in some ways, the focus on two or three Al Qaeda leaders has taken attention away from an organized system of torture that resulted in untold deaths, also known as murder.

For these murders, George W. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld -- who have always had a mean streak of sadism running through their blood, as they micro-managed torture and personally reviewed torture tapes -- should be charged and tried for War Crimes -- and Murder One.

Out of such trials, perhaps the truth will be revealed about the number of detainees who died under "harsh interrogation," as did the innocent taxi driver from rural Afghanistan who was pulverized to death in a matter of just two days at Bagram.

If we do not bring justice to their deaths, who will?

Tuesday April 21, 2009 08:27 EDT

The Pulitzer-winning investigation that dare not be uttered on TV

(updated below - Update II)

The New York Times' David Barstow won a richly deserved Pulitzer Prize yesterday for two articles that, despite being featured as major news stories on the front page of The Paper of Record, were completely suppressed by virtually every network and cable news show, which to this day have never informed their viewers about what Barstow uncovered. Here is how the Pulitzer Committee described Barstow's exposés:

Awarded to David Barstow of The New York Times for his tenacious reporting that revealed how some retired generals, working as radio and television analysts, had been co-opted by the Pentagon to make its case for the war in Iraq, and how many of them also had undisclosed ties to companies that benefited from policies they defended.

By whom were these "ties to companies" undisclosed and for whom did these deeply conflicted retired generals pose as "analysts"? ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN and Fox -- the very companies that have simply suppressed the story from their viewers. They kept completely silent about Barstow's story even though it sparked Congressional inquiries, vehement objections from the then-leading Democratic presidential candidates, and allegations that the Pentagon program violated legal prohibitions on domestic propaganda programs. The Pentagon's secret collaboration with these "independent analysts" shaped multiple news stories from each of these outlets on a variety of critical topics. Most amazingly, many of them continue to employ as so-called "independent analysts" the very retired generals at the heart of Barstow's story, yet still refuse to inform their viewers about any part of this story.

And even now that Barstow yesterday won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting -- one of the most prestigious awards any news story can win -- these revelations still may not be uttered on television, tragically dashing the hope expressed yesterday (rhetorically, I presume) by Media Matters' Jamison Foser that "maybe now that the story has won a Pulitzer for Barstow, they'll pay attention." Instead, it was Atrios' prediction that was decisively confirmed: "I don't think a Pulitzer will be enough to give the military analyst story more attention." Here is what Brian Williams said last night on his NBC News broadcast in reporting on the prestigious awards:

The Pulitzer Prizes for journalism and the arts were awarded today. The New York Times led the way with five, including awards for breaking news and international reporting. Las Vegas Sun won for the public service category for its reporting on construction worker deaths in that city. Best commentary went to Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post, who of course was an on-air commentator for us on MSNBC all through the election season and continues to be. And the award for best biography went to John Meacham, the editor of Newsweek magazine, for his book "American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House."

No mention that among the five NYT prizes was one for investigative reporting. Williams did manage to promote the fact that one of the award winners was an MSNBC contributor, but sadly did not find the time to inform his viewers that NBC News' war reporting and one of Williams' still-featured premiere "independent analysts," Gen. Barry McCaffrey, was and continues to be at the heart of the scandal for which Barstow won the Pulitzer. Williams' refusal to inform his readers about this now-Pulitzer-winning story is particularly notable given his direct personal involvement in the secret, joint attempts by NBC and McCaffrey to contain P.R. damage to NBC from Barstow's story, compounded by the fact that NBC was on notice of these multiple conflicts as early as April, 2003, when The Nation first reported on them.

Identically, CNN ran an 898-word story on the various Pulitzer winners -- describing virtually every winner -- but was simply unable to find any space even to mention David Barstow's name, let alone inform their readers that he won the Prize for uncovering core corruption at the heart of CNN's coverage of the Iraq War and other military-related matters. No other major television news outlet implicated by Barstow's story mentioned his award, at least as far as I can tell.

The outright refusal of any of these "news organizations" even to mention what Barstow uncovered about the Pentagon's propaganda program and the way it infected their coverage is one of the most illuminating events revealing how they operate. So transparently corrupt and journalistically disgraceful is their blackout of this story that even Howard Kurtz and Politico -- that's Howard Kurtz and Politico -- lambasted them for this concealment. Meaningful criticisms of media stars from media critic (and CNN star) Howie Kurtz is about as rare as prosecutions for politically powerful lawbreakers in America, yet this is what he said about the television media's suppression of Barstow's story: "their coverage of this important issue has been pathetic."

Has there ever been another Pulitzer-Prize-winning story for investigative reporting never to be mentioned on major television -- let alone one that was twice featured as the lead story on the front page of The New York Times? To pose the question is to answer it.

UPDATE: Media Matters has more on the glaring omissions in Brian Williams' "reporting" and on the pervasive impact of the Pentagon's program on television news coverage. Williams' behavior has long been disgraceful on this issue, almost certainly due to the fact that some of the "analysts" most directly implicated by Barstow's story are Williams' favored sources and friends.

On a different note, CQ's Jeff Stein responds today to some of the objections to his Jane-Harman/AIPAC/Alberto-Gonazles blockbuster story -- quite convincingly, in my view -- and, as Christy Hardin Smith notes, the New York Times has now independently confirmed much of what Stein reported.

UPDATE II: For some added irony: on his NBS News broadcast last night suppressing any mention of David Barstow's Pulitzer Prize, Brian Williams' lead story concerned Obama's trip to the CIA yesterday. Featured in that story was commentary from Col. Jack Jacobs, identified on-screen this way: "Retired, NBC News Military Analyst." Jacobs was one of the retired officers who was an active member of the Pentagon's "military analyst" program, and indeed, he actively helped plan the Pentagon's media strategy at the very same time he was posing as an "independent analyst" on NBC (h/t reader gc; via NEXIS). So not only did Williams last night conceal from his viewers any mention of the Pentagon program, he featured -- on the very same broadcast -- "independent" commentary from one of the central figures involved in that propaganda program.

On a related note, Howard Kurtz was asked in his Washington Post chat yesterday about Mike Allen's grant of anonymity to a "top Bush official" that I highlighted on Saturday, and Kurtz -- while defending much of Allen's behavior -- said: "I don't believe an ex-official should have been granted anonymity for that kind of harsh attack."

-- Glenn Greenwald

Feingold Unloads On Peggy Noonan: "Never Heard Anything Quite As Disturbing"

Updated below

Senator Russ Feingold, one of the harshest critics of the Bush administration's national security policies, says he cannot bring himself to support President Obama's apparent decision not to investigate or prosecute illegalities from those years.

"Part of what troubles me are the lawyers -- we should see their law school degrees -- who consciously wrote these memos justifying and explaining full well those outrageous arguments," the Wisconsin Democrat said on Tuesday in reference to the Bush-era torture memos released last week. "I cannot join the president, or his spokesman, or [chief of staff] Rahm Emanuel, who said we aren't going [to prosecute these people]. I can't. I just disagree with them."

Later, the Senator took a swipe at some of the rationalizations for avoiding prosecution that have been voiced by Washington lawmakers and pundits.

"If you want to see just how outrageous this is, I refer you to the remarks made by Peggy Noonan this Sunday," he said, referring to the longtime conservative columnist's appearance on ABC's This Week. "I frankly have never heard anything quite as disturbing as her remark that was something to the affect of: 'well sometimes you just have to move on.'"

"Some things in life need to be mysterious," Noonan said on Sunday about the release of the torture memos. "Sometimes you need to just keep walking. ... It's hard for me to look at a great nation issuing these documents and sending them out to the world and thinking, oh, much good will come of that."

Feingold's remarks, delivered before the Religious Action Center convention, represent some of the most forceful pushback against the line coming out of the White House to date. Emanuel and senior adviser David Axelrod have suggested that prosecution of Bush officials is likely off the table due to the political sensitivities that would accompany such retroactive action. On Tuesday morning, however, the New York Times reported that White House "aides did not rule out legal sanctions for the Bush lawyers who developed the legal basis for the use of the techniques."

A member of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a long-time critic of torture, Feingold viewed investigations and, perhaps, prosecutions as a key tool to restoring America's moral standing.

"It is truly horrifying and unforgivable that anybody operating under the auspices of the United States of America had involvement in any of this," he said. "So I'm not even completely ready to [cede the argument] that people who devised these techniques should be off the hook. I understand the argument. I also remember when people said that they were just following orders. So that troubles me and I am thinking about it."

UPDATE: Feingold responds to Obama's statement that he is open to prosecutions of some Bush officials:

"I am pleased that the president made clear that he has not ruled out investigations or prosecutions of those who authorized torture, or provided the legal justification for it. Horrible abuses were committed in the name of the American people, and we cannot look the other way, or just 'move on.' The final decision will be up to the attorney general and the president, but I urge the Justice Department to take this matter very seriously."

The Tortured Path
by Hunter
Tue Apr 21, 2009 at 08:14:03 AM PDT

I can only fathom that we are supposed to beg.

I think we are supposed to get down on our knees, even grovel for it, and beg that our nation act in accordance with its own laws, with international laws, and with basic decency. We among the more expendable classes are supposed to write passionate editorials; we are supposed to form grass roots movements; we are supposed to make the usual dozens of phone calls, and be ashamed, and debase ourselves -- and then, perhaps, if we are very lucky, and if beg enough and with the right arguments and place enough pressure in the right, most uncomfortable spots, then our own government will relent, and our laws will be followed, and investigations conducted, and if warranted, those responsible will be prosecuted. And we will finally as a nation, at long last, reject torture in practice as well as in words.

But they will not do it, unless they are bowed to it by the collective weight of their own citizens. That seems to be, still, the message: they will not acquiesce unless bludgeoned into doing it. It is ceded to us to decide if America will have the smallest shard of conscience, and once again the voices of basic decency will be cast as the unreasonable ones, the foolish ones, the troublemaking rabble pestering those that know better, and we shall have to rise above it yet another time.

That is the only conclusion I can come to. It seems transparently obvious to Washington, to the Obama administration and its allies, to the Republicans and the Democrats of Congress, to all the very important people working very serious jobs, that while we can with great fanfare and self-satisfaction no longer torture prisoners in our care -- a war crime, in any context not involving ourselves -- it is far more challenging a proposition to think that we would actually take steps to enforce the myriad laws and conventions against it.

And in that sense, torture by the United States of America is as good as legalized, because we have all but declared that it will never be that illegal, the kind of illegal that leads to investigations and punishment. It will merely remain a deplorable act -- a war crime, in any context not involving us doing the torture -- that we will never, ever use, except when we do, and without consequence. We will not condone it but, like in Serbia, or Guatemala, or Cambodia, or the thugs of any one of a hundred pissant groups and countries that used the practice to vicious effect, when to their advantage, we will ignore the laws, the treaties and conventions, and we will not prosecute our torturers. Or, God forbid, those that specifically ordered the practice. Or those that sought to legalize it, on pen and paper, with arguments comprehensible only to sociopaths or monsters.

It apparently needs to be stated, yet again, that this is not a case of seeking vengeance. When powerful people are caught in illegal acts, it is nearly always the case that they claim prosecuting them would be "vengeance": it never enters the minds of our leaders, whether they be in government or in business, that perhaps the law should be applied to them simply because it is the law. There always needs to be additional motive attributed; it goes nearly without saying that, without the additional motives of vengeance, or revenge, or punishment then naturally those in power are not held to the laws required of the rest of us. You know you have arrived, in America, when you can break a law at will and have the government itself argue against your prosecution on the grounds that doing so would be controversial or divisive.

Whether or not any of the parties involved are actually convicted, whether even a single one of them see a day of jail time is not the question. Whether we preclude that possibility, as policy of government, is the more damaging question. For in precluding even the possibility of justice, we immunize the act, and if we immunize the act then it is not, in any meaningful sense, actually illegal.

It is not about revenge: it is about demonstrating that even for the most powerful among us, even for our own government, there are laws, and they are not optional. It is about demonstrating that we are a country in which law has a substance that overrides the credentials of the person breaking it. It is the brightest shining example of what we as a nation are or are not: it is our moral measure.

Knowing that torture was condoned in our names is an abominable thing. This parlor game of moving forward, not backward, of letting bygones be bygones, admitting error, and just getting the hell on with our days is just as dismal, because this, finally, internalizes the message that we citizens, our government, and other nations will take from this sorry affair, which is that while we begrudgingly acquiesce to stopping, we will, even now, refuse to recognize the act itself as truly criminal.

There is absolutely no pride to be gained in no longer torturing, but blocking justice in those instances in which we have. It is no act of courage; it is no enlightened position. It is merely the easiest path, and the one followed in nearly every instance by nations proven to have committed foul acts. Sorry, but we're not about to do anything about it. We'll stop, but in exchange for stopping we expect the episode to be forgotten. What would count as a war crime for you other countries counts for us as an internal matter, and we consider it closed.

I do not feel like begging. After years of railing against the practice (to be largely ignored, because in those days the majority of voices presumed torture to have positive effects, and therefore be justified), after years of government denial that any such thing was happening (in spite of clear and demonstrable evidence that it did), the last thing in the world that I feel like doing is once again begging, at long last, and to the supposed reasonable people that replaced the last reasonable people, that we actually follow our own goddamn laws, or treat crimes by our powerful with the same grave manner as we do crimes by anyone else in the nation.

I am fucking sick of it, and I am fucking sick of hearing how we have entered a new age of enlightenment merely because we have stopped a transparently abominable practice, one that we condemn with vigor when undertaken by any other nation. I am fucking sick of myself, my compatriots and the rest of the public having to act as collective conscience for all those in power that, apparently, have long since evolved past even common sense, much less common shame.

I know by tomorrow or next week I will relent, and I will start the cause anew, and I will join all the others in penning yet another fervent message explaining why, at long last -- at long fucking last -- we cannot simultaneously condemn torture and yet declare a casual, dismissive amnesty for all those that ordered it, and planned it, and justified it, and executed it, under the usual theory of the powerful that crimes by the powerful simply cannot be prosecuted lest chaos or embarrassment ensue.

But for today, I can only say damn you all to hell. Damn you all for making us -- us, of all people, average citizens with no positions of power, with no power at all save whatever we can wring out of the thin air, and with nothing at stake but a sense of shared, basic, foundational morality -- yet again rail for our own country to exercise a shred of the morality, the justice, the national greatness that it professes for all to hear. I was once outraged; I was, after that, ashamed; now I am only incredulous. With every passing day my nation acts less like a guiding beacon, and more like a crook.

Nadler: Impeach Torture Memo Author

Rep. Jerry Nadler, a senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, called Monday for the impeachment of federal judge Jay Bybee, one of the principal authors of the torture memos released last week by the Obama administration.

"He ought to be impeached," Nadler said in an interview with the Huffington Post. "It was not an honest legal memo. It was an instruction manual on how to break the law."

Nadler, a New York congressman, is chairman of Judiciary's Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties Subcommittee. Bybee is currently serving a lifetime term on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, appointed in 2003 and confirmed before it was publicly known that he had authorized the torture of detainees.

Nadler is meeting with Attorney General Eric Holder on Tuesday to argue that the release of the torture memos further buttresses a call he had made earlier for a special prosecutor on torture.

"Any special prosecutor on torture would have to look at the authors of those torture memos," said Nadler. "And certainly you have real grounds to impeach him once the special prosecutor took a good look at that. I think there ought to be an impeachment inquiry looked at in any event. Which should happen first, I'm not sure."

On Sunday, the New York Times called for Bybee's impeachment in an editorial. Impeachment hearings would begin in the judiciary committee.

Bybee authorized various forms of torture, including waterboarding, slamming detainees into a wall, hitting them in the face and abdomen, confining them in small boxes with crawling bugs and depriving them of sleep for up to 11 days.

"He should be a target. Yoo should be a target. There are a number of targets," said Nadler, referring to for Bush administration counsel John Yoo, who also authorized torture and is now a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Bybee, noted Nadler, "is the only one who's a federal court judge now."

Nadler dismissed Obama's call to look forward rather than backward, arguing that the United States is obligated to investigate whether crimes were committed. "This whole call of looking forward rather than backwards -- you can't say that. The fact is, if crimes were committed, we are duty-bound under our law, we must -- the United States must investigate torture if it happened in America. That's the law. And the fact is, the law specifically says that instructions from higher officials is not an excuse. And we are obligated to investigate and, if indicated, to prosecute. The failure to at least investigate would be a violation of law," he said.

Filed by Ryan Grim

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"Executive Assassination Ring" Answered to Cheney, Had No Congressional Oversight

To my readers, it was my intention to shut down or reuse this sight for other purposes once the election was concluded.
Sad to say there is still unfinished business --ed

The Obama Deception 2hr video most distressing

Charlotte Dennett: Leahy's Truth Commission Hits the Skids

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Charlotte Dennett

Those of you following the prosecution trail will be interested to know that Patrick Leahy's Truth Commission is a no-go. I was in a meeting with Leahy and four other Vermonters on Monday when he broke the news to us. We had asked for the meeting to learn why he supported a Truth Commission over the appointment of a special prosecutor. Halfway through the allotted 30-minute meeting (with him taking up much of the time explaining why he was not generally opposed to prosecution, since he had been a DA for 8 years and had the highest conviction rate in Vermont), he told us his Truth Commission had failed to get the broad support it needed in Congress, and since he couldn't get one Republican to come behind the plan, "it's not going to happen."

It was a sobering exchange. The meeting had begun with our expressing serious concerns about ongoing dangers to our democracy, with the trend going to executive power while damaging our constitution. "We are a nation of laws," said Dan DeWalt, who had helped organize 36 Vermont towns to vote for impeachment of Bush on town meeting day. "If we have a system of justice, why not let it take its course? It seems to many Americans that the rich and powerful don't have the same system of justice, and they're getting away with torture, murder, fraud, and Ponzi schemes."

By the end of the meeting, we were beginning to wonder whether anything at all was going to done -- by Congress, by Attorney General Holder, by President Obama -- to hold the Bush team accountable for its crimes.

Leahy's own aversion to appointing a special prosecutor appeared to be more practical than philosophical.

"We don't want another Abu Ghraib," he said. "You know, 'Boy did we get those privates and corporals. So many up on high will never get touched. It's like the war on drugs -- let's get those black kids on cocaine." So it's not that he had a problem with prosecutions per se. "I just worry that the prosecutions will be done only on middle-level people."

Well then, what would happen to the higher-ups? Leahy had said, on previous occasions, that the purpose of his Truth Commission was to grant immunity to those willing to testify -- presumably middle-level people - and we could infer from that that they, in turn, would spill the beans on their superiors. If any of the witnesses lied under oath or were less than thorough in their answers, he had told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow a month ago, they could be prosecuted for perjury. But that still left the destiny of high government officials uncertain.

Leahy had hinted to Maddow that if officials refused to honor subpoenas, they, too could be prosecuted. But in the real world, as Monday's news suggests, the people most responsible for the crimes will continue to get off free.

We should at least be content, Leahy said, with his success in forcing former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' resignation.

After Leahy left the meeting, his aide, Chuck Ross, assured our group that there was no one more devoted to protecting the Constitution than Leahy. "He has been persistent in the face of obfuscation. He got rid of Gonzales. I would challenge you to find someone who has done more to defend the Constitution."

Then Ross let out a memorable one-liner. "He's all you've got."

What? Leahy is all we've got to protect the Constitution? And we have to accept Gonzales' resignation as the only punishment for years of gutting the rule of law? It took about five minutes for all this to sink in. Then fellow Vermonter John Nirenberg spoke, I think, for all of us. "If he's the only guy, this is not a healthy situation."

It is, perhaps, no coincidence, that the same time Leahy downplayed the Truth Commission, Congressional aides were quoted by reporter Jason Leopold of Consortium News that "the focus has shifted to the economy and that pressure for a special prosecutor to bring criminal charges over the Bush Administration's past actions could become a distraction to that focus." Leahy's aide Ross had said the same thing. Everyone was focusing on the economy.

So now, it seems, the wrecked economy -- complements of the Bush Administration -- is becoming the excuse for Congressional inaction after eight years of unremitting malfeasance. This is serious, folks. Appointing a special prosecutor had been the top issue on President Obama's Web site when he took office. Either he's not listening any more, or his supporters are "moving forward, not backward," just as he prefers -- and just as his right flank (the CIA, the neocons, and everyone else who has something to hide) desperately want. It remains to be seen if Obama's huge base can get through to him on this issue, now that he occupies the White House. If they cannot, then the failure to hold even a Truth Commission, let alone prosecutions, signals a return to the same old way of doing things. Deterrence be damned.

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION

Charlotte Dennett is a lawyer and investigative journalist. She recently ran for Attorney General in Vermont on a pledge to prosecute George W. Bush under state criminal statutes for murder (i.e., for sending troops to their deaths in Iraq under false pretenses). She also promised, if elected, to appoint legendary Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi as her special prosecutor. She lost the election but has continued to keep abreast of developments within the accountability movement.

Do the Secret Bush Memos Amount to Treason? Top Constitutional Scholar Says Yes
By Naomi Wolf, AlterNet.

In early March, more shocking details emerged about George W. Bush legal counsel John Yoo's memos outlining the destruction of the republic.

The memos lay the legal groundwork for the president to send the military to wage war against U.S. citizens; take them from their homes to Navy brigs without trial and keep them forever; close down the First Amendment; and invade whatever country he chooses without regard to any treaty or objection by Congress.

It was as if Milton's Satan had a law degree and was establishing within the borders of the United States the architecture of hell.

I thought this was -- and is -- certainly one of the biggest stories of our lifetime, making the petty burglary of Watergate -- which scandalized the nation -- seem like playground antics. It is newsworthy too with the groundswell of support for prosecutions of Bush/Cheney crimes and recent actions such as Canadian attorneys mobilizing to arrest Bush if he visits their country.

The memos are a confession. The memos could not be clearer: This was the legal groundwork of an attempted coup. I expected massive front page headlines from the revelation that these memos exited. Almost nothing. I was shocked.

As a non-lawyer, was I completely off base in my reading of what this meant, I wondered? Was I hallucinating?

Astonished, I sought a reality check -- and a formal legal read -- from one of the nation's top constitutional scholars (and most steadfast patriots), Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has been at the forefront of defending the detainees and our own liberties.

Here is our conversation:

Naomi Wolf: Michael, can you explain to a layperson what the Yoo memos actually mean?'

Michael Ratner: What they mean is that your book looks moderate in respect to those issues now. This -- what is in the memos -- is law by fiat.

I call it "Fuhrer's law." What those memos lay out means the end of the system of checks and balances in this country. It means the end of the system in which the courts, legislature and executive each had a function and they could check each other.

What the memos set out is a system in which the president's word is law, and Yoo is very clear about that: the president's word is not only law according to these memos, but no law or constitutional right or treaty can restrict the president's authority.

What Yoo says is that the president's authority as commander in chief in the so-called war on terror is not bound by any law passed by Congress, any treaty, or the protections of free speech, due process and the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. The First, Fourth and Fifth amendments -- gone.

What this actually means is that the president can order the military to operate in the U.S. and to operate without constitutional restrictions. They -- the military -- can pick you or me up in the U.S. for any reason and without any legal process. They would not have any restrictions on entering your house to search it, or to seize you. They can put you into a brig without any due process or going to court. (That's the Fourth and Fifth amendments.)

The military can disregard the Posse Comitatus law, which restricts the military from acting as police in the the United States. And the president can, in the name of wartime restrictions, limit free speech. There it is in black and white: we are looking at one-person rule without any checks and balances -- a lawless state. Law by fiat.

Who has suspended the law this way in the past? It is like a Caesar's law in Rome; a Mussolini's law in Italy; a Fuhrer's law in Germany; a Stalin's law in the Soviet Union. It is right down the line. It is enforcing the will of the dictator through the military.

NW: The mainstream media have virtually ignored these revelations, though it seems to me this is the biggest news since Pearl Harbor.

MR: I think that's right. We had a glimmering of the blueprint for some of this -- when they picked up Jose Padilla, the military went to a prison and snatched an American citizen as if they had a perfect right to do so.

Now we can see that these memos laid the legal groundwork for such actions. We knew the military could do this to an individual. We did not know the plan was to eliminate First Amendment constitutional rights for the entire population.

NW: If Bush only wanted these powers in order to prosecute a war on terror, why does he need to suspend the First Amendment? Isn't that the smoking gun of a larger intention toward the general population?

MR: Part of this plan was actually implemented: for instance, they tried to keep people like Padilla from getting to a magistrate. They engaged in the wiretapping, because according to these memos there was no Fourth Amendment.

They had to be planning some kind of a takeover of the United States to be saying they could simply abolish the First Amendment if the president believed it was necessary in the name of national security. It lays the groundwork for what could have been a massive military takeover of the United States.

Here they crept right up and actually implemented part of the plan, with Padilla, with the warrantless wiretapping. Yet they are saying in the White House and in Congress that it is looking backward to investigate the authors of these memos and those who instructed Yoo and others to write them.

But investigation and prosecutions are really looking forward -- to say we need the deterrence of prosecution so this does not happen again.

NW: What about the deployment of three brigades in the U.S.? How should we read that?'

MR: With terrorism as less of a concern to many, but now with the economy in tatters there is a lot more militant activism in U.S. -- the New School and NYU student takeovers, protests around the country and strikes are just the beginning. I think governments are now concerned over people's activism, and people's anger at their economic situation. I don't think those brigades can be detached from the idea that there might well be a huge amount of direct-action protest in the U.S.

There could have also been a closer election that could have been stolen easily and then a huge protest. Those troops would have been used to enforce the will of the cabal stealing the election.

NW: As a layperson, I don't fully understand what powers the memos actually manifest. Are they theoretical or not just theoretical? What power did the memos actually give Bush?

MR: They were probably, in fact almost for sure, written in cahoots with the administration -- [Karl] Rove, [Dick] Cheney -- to give them legal backing for what they planned or wanted to carry out.

What I assume happened here is people like Cheney or his aides go to the Office of Legal Counsel and say, "We are going to need legal backing, to give a face of legality to what we are doing and what we are planning." When the president then signs a piece of paper that says, "OK, military, go get Jose Padilla," these memos give that order a veneer of legality.

If you are familiar with the history of dictators, coups and fascism (as I know you are), they (the planners) prefer a veneer of legality. Hitler killed 6 million Jews with a veneer of legality -- getting his dictatorial powers through the Reichstag and the courts.

These memos gave the Bush administration's [lawless] practices the veneer of legality.

NW: So are you saying that these memos actually created a police state that we did not know about?

MR: If you look at police state as various strands of lawlessness, we knew about some of this lawlessness even before this latest set of memos.

But the memos revealed how massive the takeover of our democracy was to be -- that this wasn't just going to be a few individuals here or there who suffered the arrows of a police state.

These memos lay the groundwork for a massive military takeover of the United States in cahoots with the president. And if that's not a coup d'etat then, nothing is.

NW: Can I ask something? I keep thinking about the notion of treason. In America now, people tend to read the definition of treason in the Constitution as if they are thinking of a Tokyo Rose or an American citizen acting as an agent for an enemy state -- very much a World War II experience of the traitor to one's country.

But I've been reading a lot of 16th and 17th century history, and it seems to me that the founders were thinking more along the lines of English treason of that era -- small groups of Englishmen, usually nobility, who formed cabals and conspired with one another to buy or recruit militias to overthrow the crown or Parliament.

The notion that a group might conspire in secret to overthrow the government is not a wild, marginal concept, it is a substantial part of European, and especially British, Renaissance and Reformation-era history and would have been very much alive in the minds of the Enlightenment-era founders. (I just visited the Tower of London where this was so frequent a charge against groups of English subjects that there is a designated Traitor's Gate.)

So clearly you don't have to act on behalf of another state to commit treason. The Constitution defines it as levying war against the United States or giving aid and comfort to its enemies. It says nothing about the enemy having to be another state.

When the Constitution was drafted, the phrase "United States" barely referred to a singular country; it referred to a new federation of many united states. They imagined militias rising up against various states; it was not necessarily nation against nation.

Surely, when we have evidence Bush prepared the way to allow the military to imprison or shoot civilians in the various states and created law to put his own troops over the authority of the governors and the national guard of the various states, and when the military were sent to terrorize protesters in St. Paul, [Minn.], Bush was levying war in this sense against the united states?

Hasn't Bush actually levied war against Minnesota? And if our leaders and military are sworn to protect and defend the Constitution, and there is clear evidence now that Bush and his cabal intended to do away with it, are they not our enemies and giving aid and comfort to our enemies? Again, "enemy" does not seem to me to be defined in the Constitution as another sovereign state.

MR: You are right. Treason need not involve another state. Aaron Burr was tried for treason. I do think that a plan to control the military, use it in the United States contrary to law and the Constitution and employ it to levy a war or takeover that eliminates the democratic institutions of the country constitutes treason, even if done under the president of the United States.

The authority given by these memos that could be used to raid every congressional office, raid and search every home, detain tens of thousands, would certainly fit a definition of treason.

This would be the president making war against the institutions of the United States.

Now my dear friends did we dodge a bullet here. Unless these criminals Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, are brought to justice another administration could.. --ed

Those poor, demonized lobbyists

by kos

Tue Mar 24, 2009 at 08:50:04 AM PDT

Oh woes! Lobbyists are joining those other poor souls, Wall Street bankers, on the list of the persecuted:

Irate over the demonization of their profession, lobbyists say they will push back against a new White House directive aimed at limiting lobbyists’ influence on how the government doles out $787 billion in stimulus funds.

The Obama administration memo released Friday says lobbyists cannot meet or speak with executive branch officials regarding specific stimulus projects or applications.

Instead, lobbyists are relegated to submitting written comments about stimulus funding, which will be posted publicly within three business days.

Lobbyists may talk with administration officials as long as the conversation is about “general Recovery Act policy issues,” according to the memo.

However, executive branch and agency staff must still document the date of those meetings, who was at the meetings and what was discussed for the public to review within three business days.

Several lobbyists e-mailed back and forth furiously over the weekend, expressing their outrage over the new rules and the possibility that the Obama administration might expand the provisions beyond the stimulus package.

“It’s setting up a behavior of discrimination of law-abiding citizens,” American League of Lobbyists President David Wenhold said about the new rules.

Wenhold, who has been fielding e-mails and calls from upset members, said ALL is in discussions with its board over what action it should take.

While the ALL board has made no decisions yet, Wenhold said it is keeping all options open, including litigation.

“This smacks of segregation, discrimination, and I honestly feel it is unconstitutional,” Wenhold said.

Some lobbyists, such as Golin Harris’ Michael Fulton, said the new policy is not only upsetting but will also end up hurting Obama’s goal of jump-starting the economy.

“I am personally offended, and so are many of our clients,” Fulton said. “The White House and the president need to understand that the lobbying community is part of the solution, not the problem.”

How dare the Obama Administration limit the ability of lobbyists to use insider connections to purchase and cajole favors and legislation and make all contacts with administration officials part of the public record? It's unconstitutional!

It's too bad the link is subscription only, because the whining of these lobbyists is almost shocking and must be read to be believed. One whines that making their contacts public is "needing to go through all these hoops", another cries that the rules make them "second-class citizens" (as if any regular citizen can get an appointment with administration officials to garner billions in stimulus dollars). And of course, there's the quote about "segregation", since lobbyists are fighting for the exact same rights that Martin Luther King fought for.

I am particularly struck how these lobbyists, like Wall Street bankers, think they are entitled to the trappings of privilege. But while Wall Street feels entitled to their wealth, these guys feel entitled to their access to power. What seems like common sense restrictions on their access to government -- access no regular citizen enjoys -- to them is a personal affront.

Let those lobbyists push back. In fact, I hope they do. They haven't seen demonization the likes we'd dish out if they really try to push these arguments into the public or legal realms. Times are tough, and the last thing America wants to hear is a bunch of spoiled assholes whining about how their corrupting powers are being curtailed. They can truly go fuck themselves.

If only Congress would enact similar rules, we'd be that much closer to an ethical congress, not bought and paid for by shadowy interests.

Citigroup Said to Commit $10 Million for New Executive Suite

By Erik Schatzker

March 19 (Bloomberg) -- Citigroup Inc. plans to spend about $10 million on new offices for Chief Executive Officer Vikram Pandit and his lieutenants, after the U.S. government injected $45 billion of cash into the bank.

Affidavits filed with New York’s Department of Buildings show Citigroup expects to pay at least $3.2 million for basic construction such as wall removal, plumbing and fire safety. By the time architect’s fees and expenses such as furniture are added, the tally for the offices at the bank’s Park Avenue headquarters will be at least three times as high, according to a person familiar with the project who declined to be identified because he’s not authorized to comment. Citigroup said the project will help it save money over time.

Pandit, criticized by lawmakers over Citigroup’s use of U.S. bailout capital, canceled an order for a company jet in January and told Congress on Feb. 11 that, “I get the new reality and I’ll make sure Citi gets it as well.” Of the biggest U.S. banks that received federal aid, only Citigroup has turned to the government three times for rescue. The company, once the biggest U.S. bank by assets and market value, has agreed to limit perks and restrict executive pay.

“In this environment, it absolutely sends the wrong message,” said Charles