‘Repugnant’, but legal, eh Michael? Not really sure where to stand, Michael? Why not test it out on yourself! Go ahead, give it a whirl… then get back with us, mkay?

Mukasey unsure on waterboarding legality

Attorney general nominee Michael Mukasey “expected to be approved without significant objection.”

Attorney general nominee vows to follow law, calls technique A-repugnant-

WASHINGTON - President Bush’s nominee for attorney general told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday that he does not know whether it is legal for interrogators to use waterboarding, a technique that simulates drowning.

In an effort to satisfy senators from both parties who question his views on terrorism-related matters, Michael Mukasey pledged to study the waterboarding issue. He called the technique “repugnant to me.”

“If, after such a review, I determine that any technique is unlawful, I will not hesitate to so advise the president and will rescind or correct any legal opinion of the Department of Justice that supports the use of the technique,” Mukasey wrote to the committee’s 10 Democrats.

MSNBC.com

GOP Senators to Push Judicial Nominee

WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican senators are ready to try again to get one of President Bush’s judicial nominees from Mississippi onto the federal appeals court. But some Democrats seemed ready to put up a fight to keep Leslie Southwick off the bench.

“I am not convinced that he is the right nominee for this court at this time,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
[...]

Southwick has some supporters among Democrats, however, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. “Judge Southwick is a qualified, sensitive and circumspect person,” said Feinstein, who said the nominee was neither insensitive or a racist.

Feinstein provided the winning vote for Southwick in the Senate Judiciary Committee in August, which approved his nomination on a 10-9 vote.

Associated Press

Source: AP

Hear, hear!

What say you, Arlen, that we take a quick peak at Southwick’s record?

Two strong cases to vote no, eh Arlen? If not, there’s more… probably… we really don’t know. You see, “not all of Southwick’s record has been provided to the Judiciary Committee, including records from his tenure in the Bush 41 Department of Justice and more than two year’s worth of unpublished decisions by the Mississippi Court of Appeals in cases on which he voted but did not write an opinion.”

Unsurprisingly, Dan Froomkin has a splendid round-up of editorials, articles and blog posts on the recent, horrendous FISA bill. (All the cartoons were linked by Froomkin, except the last one, which I’ve meaning to use for a while now.)

Crooks and Liars has video of Glenn Greenwald and Marjorie Cohn discussing these issues here with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! The full show is here.
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I must admit, I do smell bacon!

Rove Linked to Prosecution of Ex-Alabama Governor

One day soon, perhaps.

In the rough and tumble of Alabama politics, the scramble for power is often a blood sport. At the moment, the state’s former Democratic governor, Don Siegelman, stands convicted of bribery and conspiracy charges and faces a sentence of up to 30 years in prison. Siegelman has long claimed that his prosecution was driven by politically motivated, Republican-appointed U.S. attorneys.

Now Karl Rove, the President’s top political strategist, has been implicated in the controversy. A longtime Republican lawyer in Alabama swears she heard a top G.O.P. operative in the state say that Rove “had spoken with the Department of Justice” about “pursuing” Siegelman, with help from two of Alabama’s U.S. attorneys.

The allegation was made by Dana Jill Simpson, a lifelong Republican and lawyer who practices in Alabama. She made the charges in a May 21 affidavit, obtained by TIME, in which she describes a conference call on November 18, 2002, which involved a group of senior aides to Bob Riley, who had just narrowly defeated Siegelman in a bitterly contested election for governor. Though Republican Riley, a former Congressman, initially found himself behind by several thousand votes, he had pulled ahead at the last minute when disputed ballots were tallied in his favor. After the abrupt vote turnaround, Siegelman sought a recount. The Simpson affidavit says the conference call focused on how the Riley campaign could get Siegelman to withdraw his challenge.

According to Simpson’s statement, William Canary, a senior G.O.P. political operative and Riley adviser who was on the conference call, said “not to worry about Don Siegelman” because “‘his girls’ would take care of” the governor. Canary then made clear that “his girls” was a reference to his wife, Leura Canary, the U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Alabama, and Alice Martin, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama.

Canary reassured others on the conference call - who also included Riley’s son, Rob, and Terry Butts, another Riley lawyer and former justice of the Alabama supreme court - that he had the help of a powerful pal in Washington. Canary said “not to worry - that he had already gotten it worked out with Karl and Karl had spoken with the Department of Justice and the Department of Justice was already pursuing Don Siegelman,” the Simpson affidavit says. Both U.S. attorney offices subsequently indicted Siegelman on a variety of charges, although Leura Canary recused herself from dealing with the case in May 2002. A federal judge dismissed the Northern District case before it could be tried, but Siegelman was convicted in the Middle District on bribery and conspiracy charges last June.

Full article at TIME

(Cross-posted at Vagabond Scholar)

(Via Politics TV.) I had thought this story about the White House pressuring a sick man to approve their domestic spying program was bad enough when reading about it. That’s not to mention the “You mean even Ashcroft wouldn’t sign off on this?” angle. However, listening to NPR last night and hearing Comey’s voice, I started getting furious. Here’s the video.

Glenn Greenwald has two good pieces on this, “Gonzales’ yearlong effort to block Comey’s testimony” (5/15/07) and “Comey’s testimony raises new and vital questions about the NSA scandal” (5/16/07). Hilzoy has a good examination of some of the key testimony in “When Christ Told Us To Visit The Sick In Their Sickrooms, This Is Not What He Meant.”

I think at this point we can dispense with the ridiculous fiction that the Bush administration somehow didn’t know what it was doing or possesses any innocence whatsoever. They knew what they were doing was illegal, they knew going through the proper process would stymie them, so they used every trick they could and abused their power to try to get what they wanted. They’ve blocked investigations, prevented oversight and lied to Congress and the American people to try to get away with this. It’s a familiar pattern. Still, the conduct described in this testimony isn’t just illegal, it’s inhuman. The Bushies aren’t just bad public officials, they’re bad people. We still haven’t obtained the full details of the abuses leading to war (we have the broad strokes), but there’s ample evidence that the Bush administration are indeed worse than the Nixon crew and they’ve committed high crimes and misdemeanors. Democrats have an obligation not only to manage the country in this moral and managerial vacuum, they have a prosecutorial duty to continue to dig, and build an iron-clad case for impeachment. If nothing else, using the government to achieve something positive and just would make a nice change of pace, don’t you think?

Update: No surprise, Dan Froomkin’s column today, “High Drama - and High Crimes?” is also superb.

(Cross-posted at Vagabond Scholar)

Len Hart, “The Existentialist Cowboy,” has a great post titled “Why the Bush regime is illegitimate” (hat-tip to Mike’s Blog Roundup). He provides a great overview of some key philosophical and legal foundations of America’s founding, and how the Bush administration has systematically attacked them. My favorite passage that he quotes is (emphasis mine):

The struggle between Liberty and Authority is the most conspicuous feature in the portions of history with which we are earliest familiar, particularly in that of Greece, Rome, and England. But in old times this contest was between subjects, or some classes of subjects, and the government.

[...]

That (it might seem) was a resource against rulers whose interests were habitually opposed to those of the people. What was now wanted was, that the rulers should be identified with the people; that their interest and will should be the interest and will of the nation.

- John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

The authoritarians of the Bush administration and their allies are not solely seeking power within the existing American system of government. They have been trying to undo the system itself. The Bushies and King George really aren’t far from the monarchists of years past.

(Cross-posted at Vagabond Scholar)

Caesar: Antonius!
Antony: Caesar.
Caesar: Let me have men about me that are fat;
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o’ nights.
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.
Antony: Fear him not, Caesar, he’s not dangerous;
He is a noble Roman, and well given.
Caesar: Would he were fatter!
- Julius Caesar, 1.2, 190-198, William Shakespeare

Bush’s men are both fat and still hungry. As corrupt as these men and women get, they are never satiated. But they-ve been choking these past few weeks. Our boy-emperor need not fear plots with daggers - but subpoenas are another matter.

Libby has been found guilty. The FBI’s abuse of the Patriot Act and their lies about their activities have been revealed. Alberto Gonzales has been laid bare as the fraud and liar he is. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are testing the limits of how low an approval rating can go. And Karl Rove, who is still accusing the Democrats of playing dirty politics, is watching more and more of his dirty tricks being exposed.

The more we learn about the Bush administration, the worse they look. And hallelujah, Congress is scrutinizing them, and the general public is seeing more of the truth.

A year ago, this U.S. attorney scandal, a mere fraction of the wrongdoing perpetrated by this administration, would have been furious fodder for liberal blogs, but little probably would have been done. This time, the liberal blogs were right as usual - and the mainstream media actually listened. Is this a dream? Not that all the coverage is fantastic, but isn-t this widespread furor over obvious misdeeds, incompetence and villainy exactly what’s supposed to happen? Not that everything is going well, but isn-t this cause for hope?

Did the divine inspiration and brilliant instincts of George W. Bush warn him of this? Has Dick Cheney’s unerring judgment fled to an undisclosed location? Did Karl Rove see this in the entrails of a crony, or have his powers of prognostication left him?

In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Marc Antony says:

The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interrèd with their bones.

The truth always comes out eventually. But there’s now real hope that some of the evil can be dug out while the culprits are still alive, or even while they-re still in office. Every lie exposed and misdeed challenged is a small victory. And the permanent discrediting of these knaves and scoundrels is a matter of national security. There is providence in the fall of an attorney general. (Or something like that.)

Happy Ides of March!

(Cross-posted at Vagabond Scholar)

Welcome to the Chart Project! This is the first and probably weightiest installment of a week-long series. All of these charts are works in progress, imperfect and perhaps dealing in gross overgeneralizations, but they result from my desire to try to visualize some of the dynamics at work in society and politics today.

Derrida and many post’structuralists would argue that Western civilization tends to see everything in terms of binary oppositions, and furthermore, that one half of the pair is seen as slightly superior: male-female, white-black, etc. Regardless, it’s certainly the case that much political reporting and commentary traffics in oversimplifications, false dichotomies and false equivalencies.

For instance, most media outlets will approach any political issue using this framework:
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By LINDA DEUTSCH, AP Special Correspondent 11/28/06

LOS ANGELES - A federal judge struck down President Bush’s authority to designate groups as terrorists, saying his post-Sept. 11 executive order was unconstitutionally vague, according to a ruling released Tuesday.

The Humanitarian Law Project had challenged Bush’s order, which blocked all the assets of groups or individuals he named as “specially designated global terrorists” after the 2001 terrorist attacks.

“This law gave the president unfettered authority to create blacklists,” said David Cole, a lawyer for the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Constitutional Rights that represented the group. “It was reminiscent of the McCarthy era.”

Continue reading

Go Janet Go!!

By MATT APUZZO
The Associated Press
Monday, November 20, 2006; 10:27 PM

WASHINGTON — Former Attorney General Janet Reno and seven other former Justice Department officials filed court papers Monday arguing that the Bush administration is setting a dangerous precedent by trying a suspected terrorist outside the court system.
It was the first time that Reno, attorney general in the Clinton administration, has spoken out against the administration’s policies on terrorism detainees, underscoring how contentious the court fight over the nation’s new military commissions law has become. Former attorneys general rarely file court papers challenging administration policy.

Suspected al-Qaida sleeper agent Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri is the only detainee being held in the United States.

More here

Two recent news items have me pondering this question.

Doc’s appt. angers family planning group

ANDREW BRIDGES, AP Writer

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration, to the consternation of its critics, has picked the medical director of an organization that opposes premarital sex, contraception and abortion to lead the office that oversees federally funded teen pregnancy, family planning and abstinence programs.

The appointment of Eric Keroack, a Marblehead, Mass. obstetrician and gynecologist, to oversee the federal Office of Population Affairs and its $283 million annual budget has angered family-planning advocates.

Keroack currently is medical director of A Woman’s Concern, a Christian nonprofit. The Dorchester, Mass.-based organization runs six centers in the state that offer free pregnancy testing, ultrasounds and counseling. It also works to “help women escape the temptation and violence of abortion,” according to its statement of faith. And it opposes contraception, saying its use increases out-of-wedlock pregnancy and abortion rates.

“A Woman’s Concern is persuaded that the crass commercialization and distribution of birth control is demeaning to women, degrading of human sexuality and adverse to human health and happiness,” its contraception policy reads in part.

“The appointment of anti-birth control, anti’sex education advocate Dr. Eric Keroack to oversee the nation’s family planning program is striking proof that the Bush administration remains dramatically out of step with the nation’s priorities,” Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a statement.

More

Democrats warned not to block judges

LAURIE KELLMAN, AP Writer

WASHINGTON - The Senate’s next Republican leader issued a veiled threat to block action on legislation if Democrats refuse to allow confirmation votes on President Bush’s troubled judicial nominations.

Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who will become minority leader Jan. 4, told the conservative Federalist Society Friday not to feel bad about the Senate election results because Republicans will hold 49 seats in a body that requires 60 votes to end a filibuster and bring legislation or presidential nominees to a final vote.

If the “Democrats want our cooperation, they’ll give the president’s judicial nominees an up-or-down vote,” McConnell said.

Vice President Dick Cheney told the same group Friday that Republicans’ loss of Congress in last week’s election won’t dissuade Bush from continuing to nominate strict-constructionist judges to the federal bench.

More

Surely with their majority status Democrats can neuter the control the theocratic mindset has, right?