Category Archive

On July 5th, I posted one plausible reason why the Democratic leadership in Washington has been so reluctant to institute impeachment proceedings against a clearly corrupt White House. Basically, I suggested that they were waiting until Bush was out of office to begin any prosecutory action in order to avoid any attempts by the alleged president to pardon his minions for their criminal wrongdoing.

I’d like to retract that post, along with anything nice I may ever have said about the Democratic congressional leadership.

The always excellent Glenn Greenwald certainly shot my theory down yesterday. (Not that he was actually taking aim at it or anything. I’m sure he has far better things to do with his time than read my humble little blog.)

In his column at Salon.com (which I strongly encourage reading in full), Greenwald very neatly summarizes the evidence that in fact the principal reason for the Democrats’ inaction is that key members of the Democratic leadership (including Nancy Pelosi) were briefed early on about two of the biggest scandals to come out of this administration: the torturing of detainees in Gitmo and elsewhere, and the illegal wiretapping program that our Democratic-controlled Congress so graciously granted Bush and the telecoms immunity for last week.

Suddenly, the reason for their willingness to roll over on these issues becomes clear: because any investigation in conjunction with impeachment proceedings (or any other prosecution) will inevitably reveal that these key Democrats knew what was going on, and yet said and did nothing to stop it.

Can we just impeach all of them? Now, please? Do we really have to wait until November to throw these people out of office?

-jane doe

Glenn Greenwald, over at Salon.com, has been following the whole FISA fiasco carefully with a lawyer’s eye. He has a great post from yesterday that rather neatly lays out exactly what the Democrats are caving in to, and I strongly encourage anyone who is concerned with privacy and the rule of law to check it out. You’ll have to watch a brief ad before you can read the column, but it is worth it, as he explains the problem far better than I have or likely could.

-jd

Like many others, I have grown increasingly frustrated with the refusal of the Democratic party leadership to impeach our beloved alleged president and his cronies for their many blatant violations of our constitution, our laws, international law, and the Geneva Conventions.

It’s not as if these guys have been terribly subtle about all their law-breaking, after all. They’ve flat-out admitted things that are clear violations of one or more of the above, all the while maintaining that the laws somehow do not apply to them, and their arrogance has been exceeded only by the egregiousness of their crimes.

And yet, despite having a clear majority in the House, and a theoretical majority in the Senate, Democratic leaders like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have made it clear that impeachment is off the table.

This has outraged many, myself included. Forget about justice, what does their failure to impeach tell future holders of that office? That they can do what they want and get away without real repercussions.

Lately, though, I’ve started thinking about it like a lawyer, instead of like an outraged citizen, and I’ve come up with a plausible explanation that, if true, would excuse their current inaction, or at least explain it.

If true. And only time will tell us that.

If you think about all this like a prosecuting attorney planning out the strategy for taking down a big criminal kingpin, the current inaction makes sense. Better to delay a bit so you can be sure of a conviction – at least, as sure as it is ever possible to be in our justice system – than to tip your hand too soon and blow your chance forever.

Let’s say the House of Representatives does decide to bring impeachment proceedings against Bush and Cheney, and successfully impeaches them both for their various high crimes and misdemeanors. What’s the next step?

Trial in the Senate.

The Senate where the Democrats can only be said to hold a majority because Lieberman is still caucusing with them.

You can impeach a president with a simple majority vote, which could be easily done. But actual conviction and removal from office requires a supermajority of 2/3 of the Senate.

There is no way the Democrats could be assured of getting that kind of support in the Senate. Hell, they’d be lucky if they could get all the Blue Dog Democrats to vote to convict, forget about persuading enough Republicans over to their side of the aisle.

Now let’s say you play the waiting game until Bush is out of office. Then where is the trial held?

I don’t know the answer to this one for certain, because there has never been an un-pardoned president whose crimes were on the scale of current chimp-in-chief. But ordinarily, when you have someone accused of serious violations of the federal laws and/or constitution, you have a trial in a federal district court. (Note: see update at end of post)

Now things suddenly get interesting. Because instead of having to convince enough Senators – many of whom have been bought and paid for by the corporate interests who are really calling the shots right now – you instead only have to convince either one judge or a jury of American citizens that Bush and his buddies have committed all these crimes beyond a reasonable doubt.

This strategy makes things very dicey, particularly in the case of a bench trial (judge only), because so many current members of the federal judiciary were appointed by Republican presidents.

I think that anyone who was actually appointed to the bench by the current administration would have to recuse himself or herself from the trial to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interests. Most judges don’t want to appear to have a blatant conflict of interest, particularly in high-profile trials (except in Texas, where they don’t seem terribly troubled by such matters). But if a Bush appointee was tapped to be the trial judge and refused to recuse himself or herself, the prosecutor could still seek recusal of the judge from a higher court.

That still leaves a lot of Reagan and George H. W. Bush appointees as potential judges, with a fair number of Clinton judges and a few left over from the Carter administration to balance the odds a bit. But even if the judge was appointed by a Republican, you would probably stand a far better chance of getting a conviction in that judge’s courtroom than in a Senate full of people who are more concerned with getting re-elected than with seeing justice done.

Frankly, most judges have a deep and abiding belief in the rule of law. They may differ in how they interpret things, but most who are good enough to be appointed to the federal bench won’t engage in or tolerate blatant partisanship in their courtrooms, at least not in a criminal trial. And federal judges don’t have to worry about losing their jobs if they make a politically unpopular decision, which gives them a lot more freedom to act according to their conscience and principles of justice than your average Senator enjoys.

There is another advantage to waiting until the bastards have left office before you begin prosecuting them: you would be able to go after all of them, including Cabinet members and high level staffers, without fear of having the convictions overturned by a presidential pardon.

Just think: you could go after Karl Rove, Alberto Gonzales, and a host of others.

You can’t force them to take the stand in their own trials, but you can at least force them to testify at each others’ trials. And here’s a fun fact: under the fifth amendment, a criminal defendant can just flat-out refuse to testify at his or her own trial. But for anyone else’s trial, the person must sit up in the witness chair, and respond “I refuse to answer that question because the answer may tend to incriminate me,” if he or she wants to hide behind the fifth amendment. Which is as good as an admission of criminal behavior, at least in the public eye.

Of course, this strategy will only work if Obama wins the election in November, because I think it’s a safe assumption that McCain would use the presidential pardoning power to keep any of the key people from even going to trial, just like Gerald Ford did with Nixon.

Still, it is a possibility.

Of course, this assumes that the Democratic leaders in Congress can actually get their acts together enough to come up with a plan like I’ve described here and follow through with it. Their current actions in the face of the alleged president’s demands for a new FISA bill with telecom immunity makes this seem less likely than one would hope.

Still, I can dream, can’t I?

And in case you were wondering, yes, I still think the bastards ought to be impeached.

-jane doe

Update: One big caveat here: the Supreme Court could decide to intervene and conduct the trial(s) themselves, I suppose. It would be to my knowledge unprecedented, but then again, that’s never stopped the current cohort of justices.

Second update: On looking back over this, I think there’s another possible option, which is that some sort of special court or panel could be assembled to hear the charges and cases against various members of this administration, in which case all bets are off. Also, I should note that it’s been a long time since my Federal Courts class in law school, and this was not the sort of thing I ever dealt with as a lawyer, so I could be completely wrong on all this, in which case I do hope some other lawyer with more knowledge in these matters will set me straight.

A storm’s moving in here in Redstatesville. The wind doesn’t seem to know quite which direction it wants to be blowing, and there will be lighting and thunder for certain before I go to bed tonight.

I look at the news - the war in Iraq, the reviving war in Afghanistan, the potential war in Iran (if Dick Cheney gets his way), elections, White House scandals, the economic mess, the cost of oil (both in dollars and in human terms), the insanity of our Middle East policy, religious extremism (Christian as well as Islamic), the environment and global warming, our eroding civil liberties and loss of privacy, and the constant, deafening efforts of right-wing politicians and pundits and priests trying to paint scientists, liberals, artists, academics, and anyone else who objects to all this insanity as anti-American and in league with the terrorists - and it’s hard not to think something similar is going on on a national scale, building toward some serious thunder and lighting, and maybe a bit of destruction before the year is through.

It’s all got me feeling a bit twitchy.

It’s not any one thing in particular that has me so nervous. Rather, it is an aggregation of things. Stories glimpsed briefly, often in the non-mainstream news and the blogosphere, that individually would qualify one for a lifetime membership in the Tinfoil Hat Brigade if one were to make a big deal out of them, but when looked at together, begin to seem more than a little ominous, like storm clouds building.

Like this story in the Denver Post about how “hundreds of police, firefighters, paramedics and even utility workers have been trained and recently dispatched as ‘Terrorism Liaison Officers’ in Colorado and a handful of other states to hunt for ’suspicious activity’ — and are reporting their findings into secret government databases.”

Or this one, from May 2007, about the Bush administration contracting with Halliburton to build “detention camps” within the continental United States for use in the event of a “national emergency.”

Or this presidential directive, also from May 2007, granting the president extensive, extra-constitutional authority over the operations of the government in the event of a “catastrophic emergency.”

Or this story about a plan prepared by the Pentagon for “massive airstrikes against 1,200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians’ military capability in three days.”

Twitch, twitch.

It’s like we’re building toward some big, possibly transformational event, and I can’t help feeling that it all comes down to who wins the presidential race in November. The candidate who promises change, or the one who promises only more of the same.

And I’m very much afraid of what may happen if we end up with the latter option.

-jane doe

Finally got to see War, Inc., last weekend when I was in Chicago. The showing I saw was on Sunday afternoon, and at that hour, unfortunately, the theater was more empty than full. Still, a fine time was had by all, I think.

Looking around on the net, one sees that War, Inc., has gotten rather mixed reviews from mainstream sources, and I can only conclude that those people don’t get it.

Me? I loved it.

War, Inc. is subversive, rebellious, twisted, and, most importantly, funny. The filmmakers made their political and social points without being heavy-handed, and clearly had fun doing so. This is what a good satire should be like.

The film stars John Cusack (who also co-wrote and co-produced it) as hitman Brand Hauser. Hauser is hired by Tamerlane, a US-based corporation run by a former Vice President (Dan Aykroyd) which has just successfully invaded a country called Turaquistan in the first-ever entirely corporate-fought war, to kill a competitor who has the temerity to build an oil pipeline in his own country in competition with Tamerlane.

Whew. That was a lot of info to fit in one sentence.

Tamerlane is a rather deliberate hybrid of Halliburton and Blackwater, and any resemblance between Iraq and Turaqistan (or between Aykroyd’s character and Dick Cheney) is purely intentional, I’m sure.

Hauser’s cover on this assignment is that he has to act as the trade show host for Tamerlane, which is showcasing all the wonderful products the company makes to help rebuild the country…sort of…most of the products seem to be things like inflatable prisons, weapons, security devices, and artificial limbs. Does any of this sound familiar?

While on assignment, Hauser is aided by his super-efficient assistant, Marsha Dillon (played by sister Joan Cusack). The relationship between these two characters seems very reminiscent of the roles the two Cusacks portrayed in Grosse Pointe Blank, but it works in this movie, too.

Hauser also finds himself interacting with lefty reporter Natalie Hegalhuzen (Marisa Tomei), an about-to-be-married 18-year-old Middle East pop star named Yonica Babyyeah (Hilary Duff), her piggish husband-to-be, Ooq-Mi-Fay (I’ll leave it to you to figure out the piglatin translation), their entourage, and the voice of an OnStar-like guidance system (Montel Williams).

Mayhem ensues.

I’ll refrain from detailing the storyline more than I already have, because I don’t want to spoil it for anyone. Suffice it to say, there is sufficient plot excitement to keep the film moving along at a good pace, but probably no huge surprises as the story unfolds.

The performances from all the major actors are great. Cusack is again wonderful in the conflicted hitman/everyman role. Marisa Tomei, Ben Kingsley, and Dan Aykroyd all nailed their parts. And much to my surprise, Hilary Duff was great as Yonica, the Middle East’s Britney Spears. I’m not familiar with her earlier work, and I’d kind of assumed that her acting talent would be about on par with Britney Spears, as well, but she showed a great ability to disappear into the character - I really wouldn’t have recognized her if I hadn’t already known she was playing the role.

There’s a lot going on in this movie at any point in time, beyond the main focus of the scenes. The advertising signs scattered all over the place in Turaquistan were hilarious, and there was a lot of funny stuff that you would miss if you blinked. I’m really looking forward to getting this movie on DVD, so I can figure out some of the things that went by too fast on the screen to be appreciated.

The soundtrack is good, which is no surprise since Cusack has shown a real talent for pulling together nice soundtracks in earlier movies where he’s been involved in the production (e.g., the Grosse Pointe Blank soundtrack, which is awesome). A fitting selection of tunes for the big scenes, plus some original songs written by Paul Hipp for Yonica’s performances in the film, like her trade show number, I Want to Blow You…Up, which, as you might expect from its title, is heavy on the innuendo, hold the subtlety.

My overall recommendation on this movie is this:

If you are a neo-conservative, don’t bother. Either you won’t get it, or it will piss you off. Of course, from the absence of badly-spelled troll-like comments I receive on this blog, I assume not many neocons are reading this, anyway.

For everyone else: If you are sick of the Iraq war, if you are tired of the way the Bush White House is running this country for the benefit of its corporations instead of its citizens, go see this movie.

Make a little noise.

Get rowdy.

And don’t forget to VOTE in November.

-jane doe

This evening, I had originally planned to post a nice review of War, Inc., which I finally got to see when I was in Chicago last weekend. It really is wickedly funny, and all the more topical given yesterday’s announcement about certain American and British oil companies going back to work in Iraq on no-bid contracts (read about that here). I’ll have to write that review tomorrow, though. Sorry.

The simple fact of the matter is, I’m too angry at the moment to write a good review.

The House Democrats sold us out today, folks. There’s no other way to describe it. And in doing so, they’ve pushed us a bit closer to that blurry, indistinct line that separates our democracy from fascism.

That’s assuming we haven’t crossed that line already. I’m really not completely sure, since it’s never been precisely clear to me what the defining characteristics of fascism are. There certainly seems to be a lot of debate about that on the internet. And it’s not like any modern government or political party will announce that it is hoping to institute a fascist form of government anymore, not since World War II. Still, we’ve seen the Bush White House use a lot of tactics that seem to come out of the Hitler playbook. Yes, I know that remark is likely to bring comments about Godwin’s Law — or it would if any of you, my dear non-existent readers, ever left comments, anyway. I don’t care. Sometimes, the Hitler analogy is appropriate from a historical perspective, and it has been increasingly so as this administration’s tenure has progressed.

But I digress.

The Democrats have a controlling majority in the House of Representatives. It’s not like the Senate, where they can only claim to have a majority because Joe Lieberman is still caucusing with them (even if he doesn’t vote with them on anything). So they didn’t have to cave.

They didn’t have to give in on the so-called compromise FISA measure. which grants the president expansive powers to spy on us without warrants — our phone calls, our e-mails, our internet surfing habits.

They certainly didn’t have to give the telecoms immunity. How the fuck does that make us any more secure, I ask you?

Yet this is precisely what they have done today. In doing this, they are giving us government not of the people, by the people, and for the people, but of, by, and for the major corporations. And for Big Brother.

In doing this, they betrayed us. The American people.

And it’s leaving me wondering what to do now?

See, here’s the thing. I used to be this corporate attorney. Big law firm, big business deals, big money. Well, big money for the number of years I was out of law school, anyway — lots of people were making a lot more money than me. I wore designer suits, I ate in nice restaurants, and I had a lovely office in…well, you don’t need to know which city, and I don’t want to make it too easy to identify me, for reasons I’ve already discussed elsewhere in this blog.

At first, the work was real easy to rationalize. Most of the clients I did work for were non-profit corporations performing essential services. So there I was, on the side of the angels, right? But the reality was, they were in competition with for-profit corporations, and in order to continue their operations, they had to engage in some of the same practices that the for-profits did just to remain financially viable.

This was very disturbing to me.

I tried going in-house at an organization that I believed then and still believe now to be very ethically run, but the business aspects were still getting to me. And when I have trouble believing in what I’m doing, I do not perform at my best.

Seven years out of law school, I was completely burnt-out.

I decided to go back to grad school to re-tool for a new career. I figured I would get my PhD, and then I could start working with certain organizations to educate legislators at the state and federal level about what scientific research was telling us about the field, and what the implications of that were for making policy applicable to that field.

Seems like a good fit, right? See, I already speak lawyerspeak, and politicianspeak and bureaucratspeak are both really just dialects of that language. So I thought I could help translate the scientific research (another language of its own) for the people making the policy, so that we don’t end up with policy that is so at odds with what all the research is telling us about certain things. (And yes, I’m dancing around the field I’m studying in, as well as the field I concentrated on in law. I’m trying to remain anonymous, remember.)

But then I watch things like what happened today, with the Democrats caving in to the President and the telecoms, instead of upholding the constitution. And I think about how the Democratic leadership has made it clear that impeachment is off the table. And I look at all the ways that the Democrats could have stood up for us since the 2006 election — on the Iraq war, on the economy, on our civil rights, on health issues, on torture and habeas corpus and corruption and no-bid contracts and the use of the Department of Justice for political ends and… the list just goes on and on and on.

And I wonder, am I fighting the wrong fight?

Should I be working within the system to bring about change?

Or should I be trying to change the fucking system?

I just don’t know anymore.

Any suggestions?

-jane doe

No, wait. They’re all connected. I promise.

See, I was checking out the blogs this morning, and I came across a couple stories in rapid succession that seemed to me closely related.

The first was this story in the Denver Post about someone who claims to have video of a space alien peering into the windows of his home. The story includes a copy of the video — dark and somewhat grainy, but seeming to show a face with enormous eyes peering into a window, which the story helpfully tells us is eight feet off the ground. The story also informs us that the homeowner had set up a security camera because he suspected peeping Toms of looking in the windows at his teenage daughters, and instead caught footage of a space alien.

The second was this story on Politico.com (h/t to HuffPo) about Bill Clinton’s “enemies list”:

With Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign on the verge of defeat, Bill Clinton has been placing blame on enemies including a brazenly biased media that tried to suppress blue-collar votes, a powerful anti-war group that endorsed rival Barack Obama and weak-willed party leaders unable to stand up to either of these nefarious forces.

Now, I know what you’re saying, my dear, non-existent readers. “How can these two stories possibly be related?” But trust me — there is a connection in my warped little brain.

Let’s start with the space alien story, shall we? As you read the story, you find out that the guy who got the video was trying to see if there were peeping Toms looking into his house (thus explaining the videocamera pointed at a window). And you might think, “Okay, this seems unlikely, but the video isn’t obviously faked, so I’ll reserve judgment for the moment.”

But then, if you read a bit further into the article, you find out that the homeowner who captured the video images also “claims to have had more than 100 encounters with aliens” and asserts that he was abducted by extraterrestrials.

Suddenly you find yourself thinking, “Maybe this guy didn’t see any aliens. Maybe he’s just a complete nut[1].”

Because one chance unexplained occurrence from someone with no history of such claims might be legitimate, or at least worth exploring. But when you see someone who claims repeated encounters with aliens — when no one else of your acquaintance can make similar claims — you have to think that it’s a bit improbable, and that there is likely some other explanation, probably involving psychotropic meds.

It’s like the stranger you meet in a bar, who is ranting and raving about his ex-wife who (according to him) was a psychotic bitch-monster from hell.

Now, if you talk to this stranger for a while longer, he may provide evidence to support his claim. Maybe she really was a psychotic bitch-monster from hell. It happens.

On the other hand, a longer conversation may reveal that not only was his ex-wife a psychotic bitch-monster from hell, but so was the girl he was dating before he met his wife. And the girlfriend before her. And his mom. And his sister. And his secretary. And his boss. And his third, fourth, seventh, and tenth grade teachers. And…well, you get the idea.

You kind of have to start thinking, “It’s not the women who are the problem. It’s you, buddy.”

Which brings me back to the Clintons.

Throughout the race, they seem to have done nothing but blame and complain. It’s the media. It’s MoveOn.org. It’s black voters. It’s white males. It’s young voters. It’s sexism. It’s the caucus states. It’s the right-wingers. It’s the talking heads. And did I mention the media?

And I can’t help thinking, “Bill, Hillary, maybe it’s not the media. It’s not MoveOn.org. It’s not the Obama supporters. It’s not even the vast right-wing conspiracy.”

Hillary started out as the media-anointed candidate, considered all but a sure thing to win the Democratic nomination. For a long time, all the other candidates, Obama included, were being covered by the press as “also-rans”. Because who could possibly conquer the Mighty Clinton Fundraising Machine(tm)?

But at the end of the day, there were just more people backing Obama where they were needed, netting him more votes, more delegates, and more donations. And those people had a lot of different (and legitimate) reasons for backing Obama. Reasons that may have had little or nothing to do with the media, or MoveOn.org, or whatever.

Game over for Bill and Hillary.

If Bill and Hillary are smart and willing to be honest with themselves (if not anyone else), maybe, just maybe, they’ll take a long look in the mirror, and think, “What could we have done differently, that would have turned the nomination our way?”

But I doubt it. It’s much easier, after all, to blame everyone else than to admit that maybe you could have done something differently to win more voters.

On an only marginally related note, I still think Bush and Cheney ought to be impeached.

-jane doe

[1]“Complete nut” being the technical, psychological term, of course.

Well, the snow is bad enough here in Redstateville that my evening classes were canceled, leaving me free to camp out in front of my TV to watch the results of the various primaries across the country. I won’t be live blogging, precisely, but I will be posting occasionally here as the evening progresses. I am watching MSNBC primarily, though I may duck over to CNN at times. Or maybe even Faux News, if I’m in need of a good laugh.

Let the good times roll, my dear non-existent readers!

- jane doe

NB: All times given below are EST.

6:18 pm: Chris Matthews just welcomed southern Africa to the MSNBC audience, which raises an interesting point: the outcome of our presidential election is of interest not just here, but throughout the world. Remember: it’s not just us liberals who are counting down the days until Bush leaves office!

6:25 pm: Why is it that the pundits insist on talking about Clinton in terms of female voters and Obama in terms of African-American voters? Last time I checked, there are still a few white males in the Democratic Party: Clinton and Obama can’t possibly be getting by just on votes by people who are demographically similar to them.

Random thought: Do you think the Bush administration is loving the primaries, since all the news coverage is focusing on the election instead of to the latest misdeeds of the White House?

6:40 pm: Several of the talking heads seem to take it as a foregone conclusion that McCain has sewn up the Republican nomination. I’m not entirely certain whether that’s appropriate at this hour — so far the only state that’s announced its results is West Virginia, which went to Huckabee.

6:42 pm: On MSNBC, Pat Buchanan’s sister, Bay, who is apparently with the Romney camp, is raging about abortion, illegal immigrants, and whether McCain is really a true conservative. What prompted them to put her on? She’s practically frothing at the mouth. I really hope they’re not going to keep going back to her all night!

6:51 pm: They just reported on a poll of Republican voters which found that 71% of Republicans still support Bush’s handling of the Iraq war. What I missed (if you saw this, please reply in the comments) was whether this was among actual primary voters (which would suggest that these are the hard-core Republican supporters) or among the larger group of people who are registered as Republicans. Is it possible that the Republican voters are that far out of alignment with the rest of the country? Or are these just the die-hard Republicans who won’t admit that Bush has royally screwed things up in the Middle East?

7:00 pm: The polls just closed in Georgia, and within seconds MSNBC called it for Obama. No word on what the margin of victory was — one of the pundits (sorry, can’t remember which one) said if he doesn’t beat Hillary by at least 10%, Obama is toast. Seems a bit excessive, but I suppose the pundits feel like they have to make pronouncements like this…

7:03 pm: Sorry, I really should also be mentioning the Republican results in Georgia…except that they are apparently still too close to call, with Huckabee a strong candidate along with Romney and McCain.

7:15 pm: Okay, apparently they are going to spend this entire hour riffing on Georgia because it’s the only state where the polls have closed. I’m tuning out for a while, and will tune back in when the next batch of polls close.

8:00 pm: More results:

• Obama takes Illinois, and Clinton takes Oklahoma among the Dems
• McCain takes Illinois, New Jersey, and Connecticut for the Repubs; Romney is forecast to win Massachusetts

None of these are real surprises. The big surprise seems to be Huckabee bringing in far more votes than anyone expected, due to those infamous conservative “values voters” (a total misnomer: liberals vote their values, too — we just have different values).

8:06 pm: Currently, Huckabee is actually in the lead in Georgia (that’s in terms of actual votes, not poll projections). The Republican candidates are still running very close in Georgia, though, so the leader may change several times over the evening as more results come in.

8:09 pm: Apparently, Romney and Huckabee are having a big old catfight. Romney is pissed because they think Huckabee is taking away more votes from Romney than from McCain.

8:15 pm: MSNBC just called Tennessee for Clinton, by a narrow margin…narrow enough that I would have thought they would hold off forecasting a winner. But what do I know?

Okay, time to check out what the other major news channels are saying:

8:19 pm: Holy crap! Faux News has Karl Rove commenting on the primaries. I don’t know what he’s saying, though, because as soon as I switched to that station, they cut to a commercial break. But it’s Karl Rove, and it’s Faux News, so it’s probably safe to assume that whatever he was saying would annoy me.

8:22 pm: CNN is actually giving results for Ron Paul, unlike MSNBC, which hasn’t mentioned him so far. His results are laughable, but they are actually getting coverage, so I guess that will make his fanatics happy.

8:26 pm: Apparently, Arkansas — unlike every single other state — closes polls on the half hour instead of the hour. Results to be reported shortly.

8:31 pm: Surprising absolutely no one, Clinton and Huckabee are the projected winners for the two parties in Arkansas.

8:36 pm: Interesting polling numbers on Evangelical voters: they are apparently dividing almost evenly among the three major Republican candidates. The other interesting thing: I don’t think anyone is asking the Democratic voters about their religious affiliation. No one is reporting on the religious affiliation of Democratic voters, at least that I’ve seen so far. It seems like they should at least be asking, instead of just assuming that the Democrats don’t get any Evangelical voters. Yeah, I’m sure most of them go to the Republicans, but I can’t help thinking there are at least a few Evangelical Democrats.

8:56 pm: NBC has apparently called Massachusetts for Hillary, by a fairly healthy margin. I was switching between stations, so I don’t know what the Republican result was for that state. Wait, are there any Republicans in Massachusetts?

9:00 pm: New York was just projected for Hillary within seconds of the polls closing. A bunch of other states just had their polls close, too, but Keith is going back over the states they’ve already called again, instead.

9:02 pm: Okay, Keith just rattled off a bunch of Republican results, but he was going too fast for me to keep track. Plus, it’s the Republicans, so I have no emotional investment in any of the candidates. Obama is apparently winning Delaware, though.

9:20 pm: Hillary wins New Jersey, apparently. And apparently McCain is winning everywhere. Except where he’s not.

9:33 pm: How the Tucker has fallen. Didn’t he have his own show on MSNBC for a while there? Does he still? I can’t stand the guy, so I’ve never really paid much attention. But they’ve got him stuck at one of the Republican candidate’s headquarters like a regular reporter/guest pundit type. He’s not looking real happy, either.

9:37 pm: Romney cannot be happy right now. He won Massachusetts, but everywhere else so far is going to either McCain or Huckabee. The Romney people are talking about Colorado, and I would imagine he’ll do pretty well in Utah as well, but he was probably not figuring on falling behind Huckabee in so many states.

10:00 pm: As predicted, Romney won Utah. Yawn.

10:12 pm: Huckabee is on TV at the moment, giving a speech to his minions supporters, but I am done for now. I may check in again after the polls close in California, but I’m sick of listening to pundits and politicians. G’night everyone!

I guess the ever-dwindling slate of Republican presidential candidates is having another debate tonight, which is being trumpeted as the “last Republican debate before Super Tuesday.” And if I were a good political blogger, I would be watching it. But frankly, I’m already feeling less than healthy, so I see no reason to subject myself to any upchuck-inducing displays of political…umm…well, not sure what the word I want here is. Acumen? Prowess? Oh, no, I remember, I mean bullshit. Yeah, that’s the term. Plus, I just sat through most of a Republican debate six days ago, and see no reason to repeat the experience. It’s not like any of the Republican candidates has a hope in hell of getting my vote.

Can we please just go ahead and impeach Bush and Cheney? Do we really have to wait until 1/20/09 to get rid of these constitution-destroying, power-hungry, warmongering bastards?

- jane doe

I was going to try to put together a post that really fact-checked Bush’s speech from last night. Fortunately, Think Progress has already done the work there, putting together an excellent, well-referenced piece that debunks some of the major…well, let’s be charitable and call them distortions, shall we?

It all adds up to just another reason why Bush and Cheney ought to be impeached.

-jane doe

Okay, listening to the MSNBC coverage of the speech. And Olbermann starts out with calling Bush on distortions and outright lies about terrorist plots the government has allegedly stopped. Also compares Bush’s words about Iran with the stuff he was saying in the run-up to the war with Iraq — which, as we know, turned out to be almost entirely false or inaccurate. Thank you, Keith!

- jane doe

Okay, going to try to stomach the alleged president long enough to watch the SOTU this evening. As usual, here are my thoughts in more or less chronological order:

• Okay, first, I’m watching the coverage on MSNBC, of course, even though that means listening to Chris Matthews. Because, hey, it also means listening to Keith Olbermann, who, as I have noted before, is a god.
• WTF? Did the Republicans import busloads of frat boys to cheer for the shrub?
• We believe…blah blah blah.
• “Trust people with their own money” = “Let’s privatize Social Security”
• He’s tackling the economy first, and talking up his stimulus package.
• “This Congress MUST pass it as soon as possible.” Yeah, like you’re in a position to demand anything.
• Ooh, shot of the chamber there. Sure is easy to see which side of the room the Republicans are sitting on. One side just gave him a standing ovation (over making the tax cuts from earlier in his administration permanent), while the other side is sitting on their hands.
• $18 billion in budget cuts in the budget. He says they are from “bloated” programs. Like what? Would be really nice to know where these cuts are coming from.
• Oh my god, did you see that smirk? (at 9:16pm EST)
• “We share a common goal, making healthcare affordable and accessible for all Americans.” Yeah, which is why you vetoed SCHIP.
• Eliminating “tax penalties” for those who don’t get their insurance at work. Well, that helps some people, but many of the people who most need insurance are in the lowest tax brackets.
• Oh, jeez, now he is going on about No Child Left Behind. “And today, no one can doubt its results.” Well, newsflash: its results are terrible in urban schools. Jeez, and he wants to strengthen NCLB?
• $300 million “Pell Grants for Kids” to allow inner city kids to attend parochial (sorry, “faith-based”) schools? Rather than fixing the public schools? Yeah, that makes sense.
• “Purveyors of false populism” — which would mean, what, people in developing nations who are trying to make things better for the little guys?
• Chertoff is one scary looking dude. Just a thought.
• NEW-CLEE-ARR. Not nucular. Moron. (I refuse to believe he can’t get that right, and that no one on his staff has tried to correct him by now. He just continues to pronounce it incorrectly to be obnoxious.)
• Wow, lots of “empowering” in this speech.
• Ooh, “ethical medical research”
• Legislation that “bans unethical practice such as the buying, selling, patenting, or cloning of human life.”
• Whining about judges not being approved fast enough. Of course, we won’t mention how the Republican Congress did that to Clinton (to a much higher degree than the Dems are doing to Bush).
• Mentions “armies of compassion” which sounds positively ominous, even if he is talking about volunteerism.
• Ooh, foreign policy stuff, now. “Advancing liberty” — well, I suppose that’s one creative euphemism for our little war of aggression in Iraq (and the one certain administration officials want to start in Iran). Hey, we’re not invading, we’re advancing liberty!
• Wow, that’s some gross oversimplification of terrorism he is perpetrating there.
• Hey, we’re so successful in Afghanistan that we have to send more troops! Hooray for us!
• Wow, I am suddenly reminded of that classic book, How to Lie with Statistics. He is qualifying the hell out of his assertions that violence is down in Iraq — e.g., “high profile terrorist attacks” are down. But WTF is a “high profile” attack, as opposed to a low profile one? Are fewer people actually dying?
• And again and again, only half the chamber — the Republican half — is applauding.

Sorry, folks, that’s all I can stomach. I just can’t sit through the last fifteen minutes of the speech. The hypocrisy and the doublespeak is just making me gag.

- jane doe

• Oops, had to add something, because he is saber rattling on Iran again. “We will defend our vital interests in the Persian Gulf.” Okay, but what does that actually mean?
• Plus, he’s going on about terror again. Ah, here it is. He’s finally getting around to FISA now. We must pass FISA or we’re all going to die.
• And BTW, how is stopping terrorists on par with providing immunity for the telcos for laws that they have clearly broken with respect to American citizens? Can someone please explain that for me?
• Wait, I missed that — what is he saying about a “new war”??? I’m sorry Mr. President, but you can’t start any new wars until you finish the ones you’ve already got going.

Seriously, how many debates have the political parties had at this point?

At least they’re getting down to a semi-manageable number of participants at this point. Tonight we have Romney, McCain, Huckabee, Giuliani, and Ron Paul. The real nutjobs have mostly dropped out of the race, with one or perhaps two exceptions. Which is kind of a shame, because the nutjobs keep the debate entertaining, but whatever.

Anyway, I’m going to watch this for as long as I can stomach. Past experience suggests this will be somewhere around seven and a half minutes. Here in more or less chronological order are my thoughts as I watch this fiasco:

• Ooh, Brian Williams’ tie is certainly purple.
• Romney makes me very nervous, but I can’t pinpoint what it is that makes me think that. Maybe it’s just residual nausea induced by big business types in general.
• On the economy questions McCain only seems to want to talk about the “bridge to nowhere” and making the Bush tax cuts permanent.
• Giuliani looks like he spent a little too much time at Mystic Tan. McCain, on the other hand, looks like he needs to schedule a visit (at least on my TV screen).
• Giuliani is talking about major reductions in spending on the “civilian” side. Translation: social programs will be cut, but the military will still get a blank check.
• McCain also looks like he has too much concealer below his eyes.
• Dammit, Huckabee is actually making sense on the economic issues. He points out that money for the stimulus package is probably going to be borrowed from China, and to the extent that the package puts money back into consumers’ pockets will be spent on products that were made in China. So whose economy is being stimulated by it? (I say dammit about Huckabee, by the way, because he actually kind of scares me on some of the religious issues.)
• Romney is talking about his experience in business, again. Because we’ve done so well with the current president, who ran on a campaign of bringing business expertise to the White House.
• McCain, here’s a clue: the Republicans didn’t lose in 2006 because of a few pork projects. You lost because of Iraq and other Bush administration misdeeds. (It would be nice if a few Democratic politicians remembered that as well.)
• Ron Paul is speaking the Libertarian party line. As usual. (And out come the Ron Paul supporters to leave me nasty comments about how he’s the greatest thing since sliced bread. Forget it, guys, I’m a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, you aren’t going to change my mind about the man.)
• Giuliani is asked about the big bankers going abroad to get cash to stay afloat, so naturally, he turns the discussion to 9/11.
• Russert just asked a killer question on the economy — pointing out where we were in 2000 as opposed to where we are now, then asking the candidates why the voters should trust the Republicans on economic matters going forward?
• McCain just mentioned the famous “bridge to nowhere” for the second time so far in this debate.
• Romney again touts his expertise in the private sector. Of course, he obviously did pretty well there, since he can apparently afford to run for president largely out of petty cash.
• Romney just claimed that Republicans “ARE the party of fiscal responsibility” (or words to that effect). He also mentions the bridge to nowhere.

Sorry, folks, that’s as much as I can handle for now - though I’ve set a personal record by sitting through nearly 30 minutes of Republican posing. I can’t take anymore, though — McCain is going on about how we are succeeding in Iraq. If I want my television to be in working order tomorrow, I’m going to have to turn it off right now, before I’m forced to throw something through the screen.

Of course, it goes without saying that nothing I saw tonight changes my belief that Bush and Cheney really ought to be impeached.

- jane doe

Actual quote from a White House press briefing about the whole mess in Pakistan (h/t to Jason Linkins at HuffPo):

Reporter: Is it ever reasonable to restrict constitutional freedoms in the name of fighting terrorism?

Dana Perino: In our opinion, no.

Wow. That’s all I can say. Just, wow. That is some really impressive Doublethink on the part of Ms. Perino, there. Frankly, I’m in awe. To see someone who is an integral part of an administration that has done more to restrict our constitutional freedoms than any other in recent memory state that it is never reasonable to restrict constitutional freedoms in the name of fighting terrorism — the mind boggles. Pardon me while I go pound my head against a brick wall for a few minutes.

Which ultimately just provides one more reason why I really think that Bush and Cheney ought to be impeached.

-jane doe

Last night’s Special Comment by Keith Olbermann, prompted by our alleged president’s commutation of an unrepentant Scooter Libby’s prison sentence before all the appeals had even run their course, but also recapping Bush’s (and Cheney’s) other many crimes against this country, our Constitution, and the laws of man, was in it’s own way as powerful and moving as the words of Thomas Jefferson in our Declaration of Independence, adopted 231 years ago today.

Crooks and Liars had the video clip posted within hours of the broadcast last night (and possibly within minutes of the west coast broadcast, which is where I think Nicole Belle is based), and Salon.com posted the full transcript (with permission from Olbermann and MSNBC) today — as always, if you’re not a subscriber, you have to watch a short ad, but it is worth it.

A little later today, I will be posting a piece where I will go through the original Declaration of Independence and pull out all of the original King George’s offenses that could be said to apply equally to our current self-styled King George, but in the meantime, go watch or read Olbermann’s speech at one of the links posted above. He has done a far better job cataloging this administration’s crimes and articulating his condemnation thereof than I ever could.

Happy Fourth of July, everybody! And lest there be any doubt about it, I want to emphasize that I really think that Bush and Cheney ought to be impeached.

-jane doe

I don’t even know where to begin with the latest on the Cheney front. I mean, back at the beginning of the current administration, he claimed he did not need to disclose information about his secret energy meetings because they fell under the cloak of executive privilege, but now he is claiming he is not a part of the executive branch as far as National Archive recordkeeping requirements are concerned. It’s all rather disingenuous.

What it really comes down to is that he doesn’t want anyone to know what he is doing.

And what is he doing? All sorts of nasty things, apparently, as you know if you’ve been reading the news lately. It seems like Dick Cheney’s fingerprints are all over just about every shady, controversial, or constitutionally questionable action the current administration has taken. Torture? Wiretapping? Habeas corpus? Iraq? Plamegate? Department of Justice shenanigans? Destruction of records and logs? It all keeps coming back to Dick Cheney.

Over the past few years, of course, individuals within the executive branch (and I include Dick Cheney in their number, even if he doesn’t) have been working steadily to erode our rights as citizens of the United States. Invading our privacy, limiting our freedoms, reading our e-mails, listening to our telephone conversations, you name it, they’re doing it these days. All in the name of protecting us against the terrorists of course. But we’re told not to fret — as long as we aren’t breaking any laws, we have nothing to worry about.

If that is indeed true, I fear that there is only one conclusion that can be drawn about Dick Cheney’s refusal to provide any information to the various government officials that have been requesting it from him: he is attempting to hide or destroy evidence of various high crimes and misdemeanors committed by himself and members of his staff. After all, using the administration’s own logic, if he weren’t breaking any laws, he wouldn’t have anything to worry about, right?

Which is just one more reason why I feel that Bush and Cheney ought to be impeached.

-jane doe

“I acknowledge that mistakes were made.”
–Atty. Gen. Alberto Gonzales

Isn’t the passive voice a wonderful thing? It’s a way to appear responsible, without actually taking any responsibility. A handy rhetorical tool for those in politics, and one which we got to see in use just today, as our Chief Rationalizer for the Undermining of the Constitution, also known as the Attorney General, tried to justify the political firing of eight U.S. Attorneys while at the same time pretending he had nothing to do with it.

“Mistakes were made,” certainly, but when phrased that way, it leaves open the very important question, who by? Please, tell us, exactly who made these mistakes? You? Karl Rove? The alleged president? The American people, by voting these weasels into power? I submit to you, my nonexistent readers, that there is a world of difference between saying “mistakes were made,” and admitting that “I made a mistake.”

In fairness to Gonzales, he is hardly the first political-type to try to weasel out of a tight spot using the passive voice, and he certainly won’t be the last. Examples abound of this sort of creative use of the passive voice in politics. I seem to recall someone in the Reagan administration saying it in connection with the Iran-Contra affair, and others have used similar words in similarly awkward or appalling political situations.

And there are good reasons why we see so much of this from the mouths of politicians. A rather startling percentage of politicians are lawyers, after all, and while law students are generally urged by their writing instructors to use the active voice, those same instructors will be the first to tell you that the passive voice can be your friend when you want to accurately describe the facts in a brief without making your client look guilty of whatever he or she (or it, in the case of corporate clients) has been accused of. Consider the following example:

Imagine you are representing a defendant in a civil lawsuit in which one party is being sued for, hypothetically speaking, shooting the plaintiff in the face while the plaintiff and the defendant were out hunting after having a few beers. Which of the following sentences would you rather include in your legal brief?

“Plaintiff was shot in the face while hunting.”

–OR–

“Defendant Cheney then accidentally shot the plaintiff in the face.”

The first option acknowledges that the plaintiff was shot in the face, but provides no information about who pulled the trigger. Conversely, even putting in the word “accidentally” in the second statement doesn’t help our poor defendant out very much there, does it?

In fairness to the Republicans (and make a note that I am trying to be fair to the slimy bastards), Democrats are probably just as guilty of abuse of the passive voice. In the face of reporters trying to get Hillary Clinton to admit that she was wrong to vote in favor of the Iraq war, the most I have heard anyone get from her is an acknowledgment that “it was a mistake” — not that she made a mistake. (Shame on you, Hillary. You’re not fooling anyone with half a brain and that will work against you, since you’re not running for the Republican Party’s nomination.)

Some reporters push the issue, but it seems like many more dutifully repeat what is said to them without further inquiry. And of course, on Faux News, they just stick to whatever talking points they’ve been handed by their Republican Party overlords. We need to start forcing the issue when we are confronted with politicians trying to passive-voice their way out of a sticky situation. Otherwise, mistakes will continue to be made, and responsibility will continue to be ducked.

–jane doe