Rush Limbaugh: Sanford was probably driven in desperation to cheat on his wife and get some small pleasure out of life by Barack Obama’s efforts to destroy America, as in what-the-heck-it’s-all-over-I’m-just-going-to-have-fun.

Full quotes at the link.   At the other end of the world, Congressman Michelle Bachmann is suggesting that the Obama Administration is going to use Census information to round people up that it doesn’t like, and cites the Japanese-Americans rounded up during WW2 and taken to internment camps.

So I guess it’s probably really my fault for voting for Obama and plunging us all into a deep, dark gay socialist hell on earth.  Sorry, Governor Sanford, I just had no idea as to what I was doing.    I was only follwing the instructions of Comrade  Jiang Yu Cai as she was directed by the ChiCom Politburo, too, so they’re involved in the heinous plot.

While retrieving THE FIXER from one of my off-air VHS tapes, I ran across the real-life story that the movie/novel was based on - see the story of the Beilis Trial in late Tsarist Russia in Wikipedia.  Wow.

Interesting observation on the coming Supreme Court selection (which I am otherwise ignoring all the thrash over) in this blog; in short, the base demands that hell be raised and impossible demands be made on Obama to appoint another Scalia, which will never happen.  Nor will he appoint a pot-smoking hippie.  But the level of ranting and screaming on the subject will further alienate the non-base GOP, who are dropping off the Republicans in droves, especially the younger voters who don’t automatically share those views.

…from Think Progress.   Give it a look for a summary of why it’s major bad news, if you didn’t know that already…unless you think you’re Jack Bauer or something.

As Jesse Ventura said on The View:

“If waterboarding is OK, why don’t we let our police do it to suspects so they can learn what they know?” he asked. “If waterboarding is OK, why didn’t we waterboard [Timothy] McVeigh and Nichols, the Oklahoma City bombers, to find out if there were more people involved? … We only seem to waterboard Muslims… Have we waterboarded anyone else? Name me someone else who has been waterboarded.”

And no, I don’t care if half the Democratic leadership knew something about the bad stuff pulled off by Bush; they should have had the guts to stand up at the time and say - NO - but they apparently didn’t.  Them being gutless wonders is not a reason to excuse anyone else from prosecution.  The more in the dock or politically dealt with and squished on this, no problem.

My focus is on justice, the law, and good government.  Torture and other arbitrary government crap has caused an awful pile of hurt to most all of us in some form from the past; just ask a Japanese-American whose family was in internment camps during WW2, or blacks who had to deal with government-backed racism in the South (or North, and I’m talking the Bull Connor sort of thing), or those of us out there who have family who were destroyed in the Holocaust or disappeared in the Gulags behind the Iron Curtain.

Daniel Larison, the thinking man’s conservative pundit:

So, ironically, some of the defenders of the torture regime are making the best argument for the prosecution of past administration officials by their own invocations of past government illegalities. They are unwittingly reminding us that crimes unpunished today can easily become tomorrow’s conventionally accepted “correct” decisions. Every usurpation or instance of lawbreaking that is not challenged and reversed creates a precedent for the next round of usurpation and lawbreaking, and the fact that there is a non-trivial number of people in America who think that the illegal acts of Lincoln, FDR, Truman or others should have some mitigating effect on how we treat illegal acts under a more recent administration is one of the best reasons why crimes committed during the last administration must be investigated and lawbreakers must be prosecuted. Had many past administrations been scrutinized and their crimes investigated and punished, it is less likely that we would have to cope with an executive branch that acts as if it is above the law and which seems to be able to to break the law with impunity. If we fail to hold past administration officials accountable, we not only make a joke out of the rule of law, but we ensure that no legal or institutional constraints will prevent a future administration from committing similar wrongdoing in a time of crisis.

Another note on torture issues.   This post seems to put it all together that the prime people who got good, reliable information in World War 2 were people who followed the same gold standard we followed before George W Bush changed things around; that torture is only good for causing people to suffer and say whatever you tell them to say.   To get them to lie, to get them to scream (and doesn’t it sound lovely?) while you get off thinking you’re Jack freaking Bauer.

There’s been a tag on this journal for a while - sep_reality - and almost all of the tag instances are for situations where people were living in fantasyland, where they could make their own rules and create their own world where you are little people and they are the Big Bad Boss.    Where they could  trick themselves and others into believing that they knew their butt from a hole in the ground, and were running the show with endless ease.   The best trick, of course, was getting you to not understand what they were doing, and think it was awesomely awesome.

Somehow, through mindless showings of 24, or Kyriakou’s ‘torture made them sing’ stuff, now proven to be false, people got the very wrong idea that brave torturers got the goods on the bad guys and made ‘em fess up, saving us all.    And then the secret memos from the insiders started coming out of the Department of Justice and other areas, basically saying that people using the gold standard of persuasion got everything out of the Al Qaeda dudes, and then People With Orders came in and tortured the terrorists many dozens of times in a month’s time, demanding more information.  Information they didn’t have.

My guess is that as more things come out, the specific questions they wanted answered will come out.  And my strong bet is that the entire point of that torture was to get a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam, something they could then present as a ‘Saddam did this, let’s get him’ excuse to invade Iraq.

I don’t know this, and I certainly have no love lost for Al Qaeda or Saddam.  But I don’t like it when people lie to me to get me to support them in something they wanna do because I’d never support it otherwise.  As an American, I would hope that we’re better than that.

And frankly, the people who gainsay ooh-go-torture forget the long history of this country towards the protection of the rights of the individual.  Watch this clip from A MAN FROM ALL SEASONS, about the need for the law, and you see, perhaps, that once you allow the law to fall, you may be the next one up when you end up on the wrong side of people who have more power than you do.   Manzanar can be rebuilt for new tenants anytime, and with less reason.

• I wonder how many of the people who are going on about “teabag” protests understand the common slang usage of the term?
• Retail vacancies at malls and shopping areas are soaring.
• Men aren’t buying new underwear, which was one of Alan Greenspan’s classic uh-oh-the-sky-is-falling barometers of how well business is doing.
• My question on Coleman-as-sore-loser-and-endlessly-litigating-this is  - if Pawlenty decides to not certify the election until all appeals and whatnot have ended, how much in-state political doom will he create for himself in Minnesota?
• Normally, the rate of how-long-cars-stay-on-the-road fluctuates between 10 and 15 years, but at the current sales rates, people must be expecting them to stick around for over 26 years.
• Warren Buffett’s company just lost their AAA rating.  No, we won’t talk about how the rating agencies tried to shnooker us into believing all of the mortgage-related paper was made of gold, too, and busily bankrupted all sorts of small towns who went in for goofy paper arrangements.
• Our constitutional right to whup our children.  Well, real soon now…

The People at the US Attorney’s office in NYC who didn’t bother vetting emails that they got in after a call for statements from people who were rooked by Bernie Madoff.  They included with a ton of other emails a ‘Nigerian scam’ style email “If you can assist, I am willing to give you 10% of the funds that is US$3.5Million” that some joker sent in.  Sheesh.

(h/t to cakmpls) Laotian-American high school student in rural Iowa is seventh in her class with a 3.9 GPA, and school administrators are beating her up over her refusal to take a yearly Dick-And-Jane-Run-With-Spot-Run-Spot-Run test of her English abilities.

The administrators point to the fact that her parents aren’t really very good in English, and speak Laotian at home, so she’s obviously doing English As A Second Language.

The girl points out that the adminstrators are mindless pinheads because she’s more than damn fluent in English, and not struggling with it, and couldn’t be to do so well in school, and that’s it’s insulting to have to have to take this stupid Run-Spot-Run test that most second-graders could pass and keep taking it Every Damn Year, and she’s had enough.

On Wednesday, Phanachone finished serving three days of in-school suspension for what school administrators say is insubordination. She faces another three days for continuing her silent protest with a second refusal to take the test. According to a written statement presented to her Wednesday, Phanachone said, she could be suspended again and then expelled for a fourth refusal.

“Mr. Ruleaux (assistant principal Beau Ruleaux) told me I was ‘no Rosa Parks’ — that I should give up because I would not succeed in my protest,” Phanachone said.

Until she was ordered to serve in-school suspension last week, Phanachone said, she had A’s in speech, accounting, chemistry and English composition. Her poorest grade, a B-plus, was in pre-calculus. But she said she fears what might happen to her grades as a result of her suspensions and time out of the classroom.

Of course, as the dad of a bright Asian-American whose first words to me were Chinese, I have my own thoughts about this sort of mindless bureaucratic crapola.  Digging around, I found out that the Iowa rules don’t mandate this sort of situation at all. It’s just their interpretation of it.

While the Democratic establishment is working on a plan to flush Burris out of his seat with a special election, Burris is countering with a threat to challenge it through the courts and hope that the Democratic poobahs give up.  Also, Burris is inspiring various black Chicago notables to talk like Burris inherited the Senate seat from Obama as the Official African-American Senate Seat.   What next?  Beats me, but I can’t see a swift resolution to this one unless Burris dies or implodes a lot further legally.

He also made it clear that he won’t let his desire for bipartisanship undermine important initiatives. “I’m an eternal optimist,” he said. “That doesn’t mean I’m a sap.”

But beyond his specific policies (and whether one supports them or not), Mr. Obama is emerging as the very model of the type of person one would want in high public office. He is intelligent, mature, thoughtful, calm in the face of crises and, if the nation is lucky, maybe even wise.

When asked about the sharp drop in the stock markets after Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner announced an expanded bank bailout plan last week, Mr. Obama replied:

“I am not planning based on a one-day market reaction. In fact, you can argue that a lot of the problems we’re in have to do with everybody planning based on one-day market reactions, or three-month market reactions, and as a consequence nobody was taking the long view.

“My job is to help the country take the long view — to make sure that not only are we getting out of this immediate fix, but we’re not repeating the same cycle of bubble and bust over and over again; that we’re not having the same energy conversation 30 years from now that we had 30 years ago; that we’re not talking about the state of our schools in the exact same ways we were talking about them in the 1980s; and that at some point we say, ‘You know what? If we’re spending more money per-capita on health care than any nation on earth, then you’d think everybody would have coverage and we would see lower costs for average consumers, and we’d have better outcomes.’ ”

To me, it’s about time someone was a grownup and took the long game rather than the quarterly report and the overnight ratings.

A French court has ruled that the Vichy government of France during World War II was instrumental in the handing over of Jews and others to the Nazis for extermination camps.

Calling for a “formal admission of the state’s responsibility and of the prejudice collectively suffered”, the court said it had concluded that acts such as the arrest, internment and dispatching of Jews to transit camps were clear indicators of the government’s guilt. “As they led to the deportation of people considered Jewish by the Vichy regime, the acts and activities of the state … became its responsibility,” it added.

The move was welcomed by historians and Jewish groups, many of whom have expressed disbelief at France’s unwillingness to face up to its actions. From 1942 to 1944 a stream of Jews were rounded up by Vichy authorities, and by the end of the war some 76,000 had been deported to Nazi concentration camps. Although under the overall control of the SS, the main transit camp of Drancy, from which 63,000 people were sent to their deaths, was run by Paris’s police force.

“It is a decision with which I am content,” Serge Klarsfeld, the leading French historian of the Holocaust, told Le Figaro. “France is showing now that she is at the forefront of countries which are confronting their past, which was not the case even in the 1990s.”

For decades after the war, the suffering of French Jews at the hands of their countrymen was buried, along with the shame of collaboration, at the back of national consciousness. François Mitterand, president from 1981 until 1995, insisted France “was never involved” in ill-treatment of its Jewish population, and it was not until Jacques Chirac in 1995 that a head of state admitted France’s “inescapable guilt”.

Now Attorney General Lisa Madigan (major Democratic pol in Illinois) wants Burris investigated.  He’s toast, sooner or later.    His desire to run for the seat in 2010 was feeble at best, but this and the Republican upset over things will make it impossible to win even the Primaries, and it’s obvious that he BS’d the impeachment committee about his contacts with Blago.  He’s too proud of a man to quit, though.  We’ll see what happens.

I’d forgotten about this: The American Service Members Protection Act of 2002, courtesy of Messrs Bush and Helms.  It authorizes the US President to use any and all means to yank US citizens and soldiers out of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, including invading the Netherlands on a rescue mission.   It also prohibits any office in the US from assisting the ICC or extraditing people out of the US to the ICC, or letting ICC investigators into the US.   If another country wants American military aid, they have to sign a  waiver that says that they will not accept an extradition request for Americans to the ICC (doesn’t apply to NATO, Israel, Egypt, Taiwan).  Good question as to what the future holds on this.

Article about Michael Isikoff of Newsweek’s latest investigative direction: that the internal DOJ oversight office delivered a report to the Attorney General under Bush that said, essentially, that the DOJ’s legal papers from John Yoo and others that backed up torture with a film of legal justification were  BS that were way off the line of legal research and were basically worthless; the AG sent it back with a ‘how dare you’ response and tried to deep-six it.

The Peanut Corporation of America, the slimeballs responsible for the salmonella cases (and deaths) nationwide, has gone into Chapter 7 bankruptcy (liquidation of assets).  My guess is that the corporate veil is about to riddled full of holes and that the people in charge there are going to be broke one way or another via lawyers, civil suits and criminal prosecutions.

The South Dakotans in my family are big Tom Daschle fans; I’ve never warmed to him, personally. Maybe it’s because I’m not the ”organization-Democrat” sort. Twice in my life I’ve been personally involved with such people, and I’ve found that I’m more the independent hell-raiser sort. Yes, I understand the intricacies of politics; I didn’t get that political science degree for nuttin’. But as a personal note, I’m Mr. Good Government, and I’m always nervous at best about such machines and organizations as a conglomeration of people who are willing to let things go too easily and concentrate on the maybe easily possible rather than the way things ought to be.

I thought when Daschle was nominated that yeah, he might be able to maneuver things around for a health bill, but I wasn’t convinced – and I remembered that since he left his Senate seat, he’d been (along with his missus) three feet deep in the heart of big lobbyist stuff. I didn’t think that would play well in a clean-house Obama administration. And it turned out that I was right.

Along with that, I also knew that Daschle had recognized Obama’s star qualities early, and a lot of Daschle’s people went to work for Obama when he came into the Senate and since. Daschle was probably the main go-to-for-advice person that Obama went to on health issues, and he probably also saw Daschle’s ability as a necessary thing, and focused on that.

The problem is, with all of the crapola that the Bushies pulled, and the crapola that the Wall Street people pulled on bonuses, junkets and goodies for themselves, there was no way Obama could get past hanky-pank with the rules on taxes and whatnot. He had one free shot at getting past tax problems, and it went to Tim Geithner. Daschle’s problems sounded larger and far more plushy (costs of the car and driver from the tycoons), and I’m glad for everyone’s sake that Daschle saw the NYT editorial that his time was up, and that his nomination was a dead issue.

In the long run, it’s probable that the worst damage is that Obama won’t have a old pol on his team for the health plan push. I don’t think it’s going to really mess up Obama more than that.

The reality is that many people get cute with their taxes, because they don’t have the press and tax experts poring over their returns. But the cutes of the Big Bidness People are getting on a lot of people’s nerves because The Little Guys Are Losing Their Jobs or Sweating It Bigtime, and the rich bozos are having a blast with taxpayer dollars. As Barney Frank told the fat cats:

“People really hate you, and they’re starting to hate us because we’re hanging out with you. And you have to help us deal with that.”

Robert Reich put it well:

Typical Americans are hurting very badly right now. They resent people who appear to be living high off a system dominated by insiders with the right connections. They’ve become increasingly suspicious of the conflicts of interest, cozy relationships, and payoffs that seem to pervade not only official Washington but our biggest banks and corporations. In short, many Americans who have worked hard, saved as much as they can, bought a home, obeyed the law, and paid every cent of taxes that were due are beginning to feel like chumps. Their jobs are disappearing, their savings are disappearing, their homes are worth far less than they thought they were, their tax bills are as high as ever if not higher — but people at the top seem to be living far different lives in a different universe. They’re the executives and traders on Wall Street have lived like kings for years off a bubble of their own making while ripping off small investors, the financial louts who are now taking hundreds of billions of taxpayer bailout money while awarding themselves huge bonuses and throwing lavish parties, the corporate CEOs who are earning seven figures while laying off thousands of workers, the billionaire hedge-fund and private-equity managers who are paying a marginal tax rate of 15 percent on what they say are capital gains while people who earn a fraction of that are paying a higher rate, and, not the least, the Washington insiders who have served on the Hill or in an administration and then gone on to pocket millions as lobbyists for the same companies they once regulated or subsidized. To the American who’s outside the power centers — the places of entitlement and I’ll-scratch-your-back-while-you-scratch-mine deal making — the entire system seems rotten.

That’s something the fat cats have a real problem wrapping their heads around. Me, I think Claire McCaskill’s rant about executive pay reductions is going to be something that may get into law a whole lot faster than it might have six months ago, when it should have been part of the rules on the original bailout. But back then, the Powers That Be couldn’t countenance such a thing – it was socialism, I’ll have you know.

There are some who say that nobody expected the Master Of The Universe on Wall Street to be so dumb; well, ladies and gents, being stupid with money allegedly for their own benefit is what got them and us into this situation. Didn’t surprise me that they were willing to go right on being stupid as long as they could get away with it.   Or that the Same Old Same Old in Washington would continue on unabated by calls for change and reform.

If you notice, the Republicans who are against the Stimulus are the ones who don’t actually have to run a government. The ones who do, such as State Governors, are going for it, because they’re stony broke. California’s Republican Governor is issuing State IOUs rather than paying people because they ran out of money.  Those won’t pay people’s bills, nossir.

In Illinois, the new Governor (not the mental and moral midget who is running around like a ADHD chihuahua on crack to the media) is trying to get a grip on what to do about the state budget, and one state senator is querying as to why the state allows companies that pick up sales taxes from the people who shop there are keeping such large proportions of the sales taxes for their own use – at least in such large amounts. As in the state not getting $126 million it could use elsewhere.

from Salon:

“If the mood and the speeches at the winter meeting are any guide, Republicans are seeking refuge from electoral defeat in an alternate reality, one where the public still loves them — or would if they could only improve their sales pitch. And where going along with President Obama’s agenda just isn’t in the cards.” If any further evidence is needed, consider this little gem: On the afternoon the 168 national committee members were electing Michael Steele their new chairman, fully 10 days into the Obama administration, the “national leadership” page on the RNC’s Web site still depicted George W. Bush and Dick Cheney as president and vice president.

Along with that, there’s always the Bush-Cheney Alumni Association.  I not you kid.

Several GOP leaders have, indeed, pointed out the risk of the GOP becoming a regional party, and my call on that is that there’s plenty of truth to that, in general.  Surveys like this one from Gallup,  showing a big drop from the GOP has some truth to it, but the real problem is that We’re Not Talking Sense here.   The Republicans have been taking this big dive away from studied, responsible good government towards a reflexive system of government that values fears over hope, ive-got-mine-jack over the common good, and ignorance over inspiration.

A big factor in the whole situation is that the GOP gets a jump from all sorts of things, including people who are serious low-information sorts or vote out of fear of various things that they associate with the Democrats, such as the <insert racial or ethnic group> or <insert foreign power> will take over if you let the Democrats in concept.   This has been stirred up so at length by far right talk radio that the GOP sorts don’t dare cross the on-air bozos, for fear of being marked as a Pariah Against The Cause.

But the cause is not responsible government, it’s manipulating the masses towards supporting corruption and opportunism of the worst sort:

When the G.O.P. talks, nobody should listen. Republicans have argued, with the collaboration of much of the media, that they could radically cut taxes while simultaneously balancing the federal budget, when, in fact, big income-tax cuts inevitably lead to big budget deficits. We listened to the G.O.P. and what do we have now? A trillion-dollar-plus deficit and an economy in shambles.

This is the party that preached fiscal discipline and then cut taxes in time of war. This is the party that still wants to put the torch to Social Security and Medicare. This is a party that, given a choice between Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan, would choose Ronald Reagan in a heartbeat.

Why is anyone still listening?

Thus the whole ‘I hope Obama fails’ rot, and so on.  If Obama ‘fails’, we are in the deepest of crapola, and I don’t know how we get out of it.  You would end up with something very akin to The Sheep Look Up where only the plutocrats have anything, and everything else is a godforsaken mess.  I do not want to hand off that sort of world to Mere and her peers.

Interesting list of the people that Bush said ‘no clemency’ to as he left. Leonard Peltier and John Walker Lindh, I expected.   The rest, including Duke Cunningham, not so much.

Gitmo: People reviewing the cases of prisoners are finding out that there’s really no solid files as such on anyone,  and that a lot of material is suspect or worthless - and scattered, disorganized and fifth-hand.   The realization is coming through that people were supposed to get confessions and information first and worry about anything else waaaaaaaay later, and that bunches of people in Gitmo and the other ‘black’ jails, like the taxi-drivers in Abu Ghraib, were just Joe Blows scooped up in a wide net and tortured at length for information they didn’t have.

25. The written statement allegedly containing Mohammed’s confession and thumbprint is in Farsi. Mohammed does not read, write, or speak Farsi. There are several factual assertions in the statement that are false, including Mohammed’s name, his father’s name, his grandfather’s name, his uncle’s name, his residence, his current residence, his age, and an assertion that he speaks English. The statement’s account of the grenade attack — the responsibility for which the statement ascribes solely to Mohammed — conflicts with the eyewitness accounts of the American victims. Yet, it was this statement that Respondents and their agents primarily relied on as a basis for Mohammed’s detention, and for the charges brought against him in the Guantanamo Military Commissions.\

That was written by one of the prosecutors, folks.

He was the lead prosecutor against a detainee, Mohammed Jawad, until he resigned last September. After spending over a year on the case, he became convinced that the government had no good case against Jawad, that Jawad had been badly mistreated and was suffering serious psychological harm, and that continuing to hold him was “something beyond a travesty.” (p. 1) That’s why he wrote the declaration in question, in support of Jawad’s habeas petition.