Motives

The two political issues (apart from the permanent cloud of Iraq, and the "war on terror") are the nomination of Gonzo as AG, and Social Security.

A memo, outlining strategy was recently leaked (and nods to Josh Marshall for the pointer). outlining the strategy.

Let me tell you first what our plans are in terms of sequencing and political strategy. We will focus on Social Security immediately in this new year. Our strategy will probably include speeches early this month to establish an important premise: the current system is heading for an iceberg. Peter Wehner (a Rove Deputy)

What caught my eye was the use of the word premise.

premise[n] a statement that is assumed to be true and from which a conclusion can be drawn; "on the assumption that he has been injured we can infer that he will not to play"

Note that they didn't say,to the faithful (or the at least suadable) the facts needed to be laid out, no they were making an argument, based from a premise. They know they are pulling a fast one. Why?

"For the first time in six decades, the Social Security battle is one we can win -- and in doing so, we can help transform the political and philosophical landscape of the country."

What does it mean to win the battle on Social Security? It means to kill it. Never mind that it works. That it makes absolute penury less likely (it was never meant to be a way to live in ease, just to live) that with a small amount of foresight one might be comfortable in one's old age.

Which is a philosophical point I find repugnant.

Never mind that it is immune from the business cycle (at least insofar that if one took the same money and ran it against the Dow Jones for the last 40 years SS came out on top). Never mind all that.

In my heart of cynical hearts, I think the real opposition is that it requires employers to match. It forces them to contribute to a pension plan they can't scheme. And now the Administration plans to steal it from us.

Call your Rep, write your Senator. Make them defend the position they are taking. Point out that SS works, and the books are cooked.

While you at it, tell them to kick Alberto, "I like Torture" Gonzales to the curb.

Spine

Barbara Boxer stood up.

This election had irregularities. The irony of them is to be found in Ukraine. In Ohio (and a couple of other places, as I recall) the exit polls said one thing, and the tallies another. We were told this was a fluke (never mind the mathematicians who said it was, in one locale, improbable, in two locales, implausible and three, well to shift to another style, once is happenstance, twice is co-incidence, thrice is enemy action).

Me, I was willing to sit it out. I don't think conspiracy theories are good for the republic (which is why I would have preferred an investigation rather than the, pitiful, excuse offered up by the Republicans; that the Dems ahad managed to find out where the exit pollsters were going to be and packed the polls).

Fast forward. Ukraine has an election. The guy in power wants to move more to the Russian orbit. The challenger wants to move west (to Europe, but that still means more toward us). The election seems flawed. Our gov't complains, says a fair and honest election, free of the taint of implied impropriety needs to be held.

What was the basis for this allegation of fruad... the exit polls and the tallies didn't match.

So some Reps. from Ohio wanted to challenge the returns. Four years ago the congressmembers who wanted to do that for Florida were left sanding in the cold.

This morning Barbara Boxer, who will be up for re-election in the next presidential cycle, stood up and said she would support the request from Ohio to look into the electoral votes in Ohio.

Will it change anything? No. The Parties are too rigid for that (unless enough Republicans, in both houses voted to reverse the count, Bush still wins, and any Republicans who voted, and lost, to reverse the count would be out in the cold, for the rest of their, short, political career).

So why am I happy? Because it means, if we can get the press off of, "Beat 'em 'til they talk" Gonzales, maybe we can get some meaningful debate about ho we vote. Just maybe we can get real accountability.

Washington State had a win for the system (though the Republicans tried to torpedo that, and the loser is still trying to use the courts to reverese the will of the people). We need to establish a system that ensures the people get heard. That votes are accountable, and that the local satraps (like the Secratary of State in Ohio) don't have as much power in affecting who can vote, and how the votes get tallied.

First, and it seems a simple fix. The secratary of state ought to be a non-partisan office. Certainly letting one be the chair of a candidate's campaign ought to be forbidden. But right now it isn't, and for the second, in as many elections we have seen a state, where just that happened, possessed of questionable returns, and deciding who sits in the Oval Office.

The system is flawed, it needs to be fixed, and this can be the first step.

What a day (and I ought to be cooking)

Arnie amazes me.

As much for his McCain like understanding that he has to sell out some of what he believes to get attention from the people running the Party he belongs to (and his understanding that to be a player he has to belong to a party) as his maverick status.

He never, if he hoped to gain my respect, should have spoken at the convention. That level of support for the man in the Oval Office (who by every measure I can think of has been a disgrace to the Office, and a disaster for the Nation) was unconscionable.

But he has made his pitch for a shake-up (and drastic, a 9.0 on the political Richter Scale) in the way districts are drawn in Calif.. He wants to hand it over to retired judges.

The Dems are scared, and with some reason. The present gerrymanders favor them.

The Republicans are lukewarm, and with more reason. A fairer apportioning of people to districts (with a mix,so a lock isn't assured) would mean more Republicans get elected, but at a price.... they would have to be more moderate. They would need to pay attention to what people like me, think. They would also have to pay attention to what those who are actully registered as democrats think.

If they won by a mere 1 percent, they would spend the next year and a half looking over their shoulder, wondering who was going to make a case for better serving those constituents. Heck, they might have actually pay attention to the people they represent.

Go figure.

As if torture weren't enough

Who thinks I might be willing to give the benefit of the doubt to Good Ol' Bertie Gonzales?

No one? Well perhaps I am being unfair. Maybe he was just too busy with unknown things as Bush's Whute House Counsel to read the memoranda he signed (or perhaps he has an autopen) in which case he isn't guilty of actually supporting torture, just of misfeasance.

So maybe, with a mmore weighty office he'll be more attentive, and that means we ought to give him another bite at the apple of public office.

Nope. He has a track record, and it ain't good.

I am not, per se, against killing people (heck, I take a pittance of your tax dollars to do it, so being dead set against it would seem hypocritical). I am against the state doing it, because the state can't do it fairly.

But Gonzales... he is all for it (along with Scalia, which means his priest ought to refuse him communion... he hasn't made the distancing step that Kerry did, nope Scalia has said the more Christian a country is, the more capital punishments it will carry out). How much is Gonzo for it?

Enough that when evidence of non-guilt was presented to him, he chose to leave it out of his review of at least one petition for clemency.

The Washington Post says Gonzales's Clemency Memos Criticized (registration required). Some excerpts.

In 1995, a one-eyed drifter named Henry Lee Lucas was headed for execution by injection in a Texas prison for the murder of an unnamed woman, one of hundreds he confessed to killing in a crime spree lasting more than a decade.

The task of recommending whether then-Gov. George W. Bush should grant a reprieve or commute Lucas's death sentence fell to Alberto R. Gonzales, Bush's counsel. In a memo to Bush dated March 13, 1995, Gonzales marshaled a case for Lucas's guilt. He noted that Lucas had given a sheriff a drawing of the victim, and attached a record of Lucas's eight other Texas murder convictions, each of which led to lengthy or life prison sentences.

Left out of Gonzales's summary was any mention of a 1986 investigation by the Texas attorney general's office that concluded that Lucas had not killed the woman, and that he had falsely confessed to numerous killings in an effort to undermine the veracity of his confessions to the crimes he did commit.

While the six-page memo factually summarizes Lucas's court appeals, "it does not really address in any way . . . all the questions that were raised about his guilt," said Jim Mattox, the Texas attorney general from 1983 to 1991, who instigated an investigation of police conduct in the case.

...

White House spokesman Brian R. Besanceney said in response to the complaints yesterday that Gonzales and his colleagues in the Texas counsel's office "treated each clemency petition with careful scrutiny and sensitivity." He also said the summaries Gonzales prepared represented "a small fraction of the information provided to the governor" and sought only to document "the governor's final decision" rather than recommend a course of action.

Pete Wassdorf, head of the general counsel's office for the Texas attorney general, who served as Gonzales's deputy at the time, also said additional information about some of the cases was provided to Bush in other documents. But only a few of the 62 clemency memos Gonzales prepared for Bush between January 1995 and November 1997 make any reference to additional documentation.



This is the level of care we see in matters of life and death... how much can we expect in lesser matters?

Myopia (mine)

Bertie has (though I forget it sometimes... I am not free of tunnel vision) a more damning statement than the torture paragrapgh.

He thinks the President is the law.

Ponder that.

It's a staggering claim, the authority to set aside the laws is "inherent in the president."

Inherent. Part and parcel of the office is the ability to set aside the laws. If the President says do it, it isn't a crime. If the law says do it, and the President says don't, that isn't a crime either.

Forget Nuremburg. Forget Nixon (though he tried that gambit) forget the Rule of Law (how can one who is able to set a law aside, break one? The don't apply). Forget the consent of the governed. Forget the Magna Carta.

The President is above, nay, beyond the law. He defines it. He is the same, in effect, as Louis XIV. "L'Etat, C'est Moi"

Everyone should recoil. Republicans should be apalled. Democrats should be disgusted. Libertarians should tremble with righteous indignation.

But all of us should step back and think on it.

The proposed head of law enforcement for the United States has said that his boss answers to nothing but his sense of right and wrong.

I recall a previous leader of the people of America who thought that. His name too was George; George III.