Emptywheel reports on data dump from DoJ re: US attorney purge

Emptywheel has been working overtime. Let me provide some annotated referrals to her posts on the Department of Justice data dump.

• Sara Taylor, aid to Karl Rove, threatened fired US Attorneys if they spoke out. Two days before leaving office, Carol Lam (US Attorney, San Diego) indicted Brent Wilkes and CIA executive Kyle "Dusty" Foggo. Two days after Ms. Lam left, Ms. Taylor contacted Kyle Sampson at DoJ re: NY Times article about Harriet Miers' involvement in Bud Cummins' dismissal. The following Monday Mike Elston, chief of Staff to Deputy AG Paul McNulty, at DoJ Washington called Bud Cummins and threatened retaliation if he went public on the firing. Links included.
  
• Testimony of Deputy AG Paul McNulty to the Senate. Emptywheel connects Mr. McNulty's testimony on the phone calls to the fired US Attorney, and he linked his actions to Karl Rove's White House office, the White House Office of Political Affairs. Links included.
  
• Why did Carol Lam think she was being asked to resign. Ms. Lam asked, no one ever answered her. Emptywheel considers what is known. Links included.
  
• "Dusty" Foggo is trying to get his trial moved. Emptywheel points out that removing Carol Lam was supposed to let the DoJ appoint a compliant prosecutor for "Dusty" Foggo, sort of like the way they did with the Tobaccl Lawsuit. But the "flap" that has grown up around the US Attorney Purge has prevented that. So Foggo's attorneys are trying another tack. Links included.
  
• Time line for James Comey. Comey is going to testify to the Senate tomorrow, so EmptyWheel presents a time line of his connections to the US Attorney Purge and to the earlier firing of the US Attorney Frederick Black. Black was removed as USA for Guam and Marianas Islands because he had started an investigation of the activities of Jack Abramoff.

Catch up on the investigations inside the Department of Justice

Emptywheel and Chuck Schumer spotted these details weeks ago. Monica Goodling was illegally administering loyalty oaths for Assistant US Attorneys. Want a job as an Assistant USA? She has been asking who you voted for as President in 2000 and 2004, and checking which party you donated money to. Democrats need not apply. Since AUSAs are federal civil servants, this is as flagrant a violation of law as -- well, as so many other things the Bush administration has been doing for the last six years.

The article in the Next Hurrah brings everything up to date.

Enjoy the Schadenfreude. It is even more pleasant when you think how very, very little Monica Goodling is enjoying it.

Professor Mansfield - President is above the Law.

Harvard Government Professor Harvey Mansfield has published a treatise that explains why Republicans believe "The Case for the Strong Executive -- Under some circumstances, the Rule of Law must yield to the need for Energy."

Glenn Greenwald explains what Professor Mansfield is trying to say.

Read the Greenwald article, then go look at my article Rule of Law vs. Arbitrary Command. Then ask yourself which society you want to live in.

Senate Judiciary Committee subpoenaed all emails to and from Rove by Gonzales

From Laura Rozen:

The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday subpoenaed Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to turn over all e-mails to or from White House political adviser Karl Rove in connection with the controversy over the firings last year of eight U.S. attorneys.

The subpoena suggests that the congressional inquiry is focusing on Rove and whether he shaped the firings and hirings of U.S. attorneys and whether the purge was influenced by GOP concerns about corruption probes and investigations of voter fraud in battleground states during the last election.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said he took the step only after Gonzales twice declined to turn over such e-mails voluntarily. The subpoena gives Gonzales a May 15 deadline. If he does not comply, Leahy said, he will be asked to appear before the panel to answer questions.

I'm betting that even if Gonzales turns over all the emails to and from Rove, there will me none that are incriminating. That's because the DoJ had Kyle Sampson and Monica Goodling as what I am calling "consigliares" and that in the White House Harriet Miers functioned the same way for Rove. That's why Sampson, Goodling and Miers are gone now, and if they are indicted and tried they will fall on their swords like "Scooter" Libby did for Dick Cheney.

Though Goodling might be a weak link. Her effort to "lawyer up" and the lawyer's comments that she would refuse to testify to the Senate for fear of a "perjury trap" suggests that she realized what her function was to be the fall guy. She's only about 34, and Sampson is only 37. That is awfully young to accept the sacrifice of your future because your boss has to be protected from his criminal activity.

[See the McKlatchy story here.]

Republican 2008 Presidential possibilities.

I have no special expertise in the polls and probabilities of who will become the Republican nominee for President in 2008, nor do I have any direct knowledge or deep study of how the Presidential election is likely to go. But based on what I have seen in the media and read on the blogs, I think that three posts Kevin Drum wrote yesterday seem to express the current situation quite well.

First, Kevin quotes this exchange between George Stephanapolous and George Will from Sunday's "ABC with George Stephanapolous":

George Stephanopoulos: If this now declared deadline of Gen. Petraeus of September, if the political goals haven't been met by then, do you see large scale Republican defections at that point?

George Will: Absolutely. They do not want to have, as they had in 2006, another election on Iraq. George, it took 30, 40 years for the Republican Party to get out from under Herbert Hoover. People would say, "Are you going to vote for Nixon in '60?" "No, I don't like Hoover." The Depression haunted the Republican Party. This could be a foreign policy equivalent of the Depression, forfeiting the Republican advantage they've had since the '68 convention of the Democratic Party and the nomination of [George] McGovern. The advantage Republicans have had on national security matters may be forfeited. [Underlining mine - editor]

This is a very pessimistic view of both the Republican prospects for winning the Presidency in 2008 and for the long-term effects on the republican Party of running while the War in Iraq continues. I do not see any evidence at all that this view is too pessimistic for 2008. I am less certain of the long-term effects.

But Thomas Sowell's statement ( Bio.)

When I see the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our media, our educators, and our intelligentsia, I can't help wondering if the day may yet come when the only thing that can save this country is a military coup.

Dr. Sowell's claim to fame is that he is a Black man with an ability to write extremely conservative literature. In this statement he appears to be as pessimistic as George Will, and thinking in the kind of extreme right-wing manner that led the Spanish General Franco to rebel against the Spanish government in the 1930's. Let's just say that Dr. Sowell has no real hope for a Republican win of the Presidency in 2008.

So in the absence of any well-known Republicans providing more positive prediction for 2008, the next question is who will the Republicans nominate to run for President in 2008. Kevin provides the currently obvious pick. The choices are:

• John McCain.
  Currently Sen. McCain is spiralling into irrelevancy. He hung his hat on his hawkish rhetoric to expand the war in Iraq and win, assuming that bush would do the sensible thing and accept the lifeline thrown by the Baker-Hamilton group. When instead bush rejected that and went for the surge, the total unreality of McCain's rhetoric was exposed. That then accentuated the age problem. McCain just looks and acts too old to be President, two years before he could take office. He is toast.


• Rudy Guiliani.
  New Yorkers are simply waiting for Rudy to implode in front of a camera somewhere. It's just a matter of time.
• Fred Thompson.
  He is just a display of how desperate the Republican Party is for someone plausible to run. The Republicans look back to Reagan is their last, best President, and since he was an actor, maybe they can get the actor Fred Thompson to run and be another Reagan. While the Republicans could do a lot worse, the general public isn't going to buy someone just because he is on TV all the time in the popular Law & Order shows. That's just desperation speaking.
• Mitt Romney.
  Ex-Governor of Massachusetts who has had to sharply revise his political views literally overnight from those acceptable to the generally liberal Massachusetts voters to those acceptable to the Republican social conservatives. He is, however, wealthy and attractive on TV. Personally I doubt that most Republicans would be happy voting for a Mormon, but it looks like he is all they have.

So Kevin Drum and I pretty much agree that as of right now, Mitt Romney has the best chance of getting the Republican nomination for President in 2008.

The result is that the Republicans themselves don't give themselves any real chance of winning the Presidency in 2008, and all of their candidates are badly flawed, but most are flawed a lot worse than Mitt Romney, so he will probably be chosen to make the sacrificial run for the job.

At the moment, things look really dark for the Republican possibilities of winning the Presidency in 2008. However, things change very fast in politics, and it is a really long time until the Republican Convention and the Presidential election in 2008. When training for the military I was introduced to the concept of "begin morning nautical twilight" (BMNT). Just prior to that moment is the last really dark part of the night. After that, the sun is close enough to the horizon to begin to shed a little light. While the military teaches that as the most likely time to start an attack, it also has psychological ramifications. It is the darkest the night can get then, and can be followed by slowly increasing amounts of light. I'd rather hope that right now is really end evening nautical twilight (EENT)for the Republicans, suggesting that a long dark night is ahead for them.

I'm just not ready to count on it.

This I can't resist. (I slow down for car-wrecks, too.)

Tom DeLay is blogging away furiously. His motto?

No Retreat, No Surrender

(I'm surprised he doesn't add "No Reality".)

Why no investigation of the Niger forgeries by FBI?

The basis for the "16 words in the State of the Union Speech" was a set of forged documents called, collectively, the Niger forgeries. They were provided by the Italian Intelligence Service (SISMI) to both the U.S. and to the British. They were the alleged "proof" that Dick Cheney was told several times by the FBI Director, George Tenet, was not credible. Tenet had references to them removed from at least two speeches given by Cheney in the Fall of 2002.

In his Sunday "60 Minutes" interview Tenet says that the reference to Iraq seeking Uranium in Africa should have been removed from Bush's 2003 State of the Union speech, but that he did not himself read the speech before it was given and it slipped through. (This should be verified with whoever Tenet delegated the vetting of the speech to.)

Sen. Rockerfeller asked the FBI to thoroughly investigate the Niger forgeries years ago. And what has happened? Josh Marshall brings the story up to date.



Between Congressional the government oversight that the Democrats have reinstituted since regaining control of Congress, and the civil suit which Valerie Plame has filed (against Dick Cheney and a cast of characters from the White House), more will come out. Soon, I suspect.

Personally, I think that a key figure is going to be Michael Ledeen, a long-time radical Neoconservative who has strong right-wing connections in Italy and who was deeply involved in the Iran-Contra Affair during the Reagan administration.

So now we wait for the next shoe to drop.

---

As always, references to Wikipedia should not be considered authoritative. They provide good references.

Murray Waas - Gonzales delegated US atty firings to Sampson, Goodling

I wondered what Murray Waas was doing since "Scooter" Libby was convicted. Now we know.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales signed a highly confidential order in March 2006 delegating to two of his top aides ... extraordinary authority over the hiring and firing of most non-civil-service employees of the Justice Department. [Snip]

In the order, Gonzales delegated to his then-chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, and his White House liaison "the authority, with the approval of the Attorney General, to take final action in matters pertaining to the appointment, employment, pay, separation, and general administration" of virtually all non-civil-service employees of the Justice Department, including all of the department's political appointees who do not require Senate confirmation. Monica Goodling became White House liaison in April 2006, the month after Gonzales signed the order.

The existence of the order suggests that a broad effort was under way by the White House to place politically and ideologically loyal appointees throughout the Justice Department, not just at the U.S.-attorney level. Department records show that the personnel authority was delegated to the two aides at about the same time they were working with the White House in planning the firings of a dozen U.S. attorneys, eight of whom were, in fact, later dismissed. [Snip]

An original draft of Gonzales's delegation of authority to Sampson and Goodling was so broad that it did not even require the two aides to obtain the final approval of the attorney general before moving to dismiss other department officials [From Murray Waas, published April 30, 2007 in the National Journal.]

This explains Gonzales' total lack of understanding of the process by which the U.S. Attorneys were fired on Pearl Harbor Day of 2006. Gonzales was establishing plausible deniability for himself. Then when he appeared before the Senate, he allowed himself to look like a total doofus rather than point to this letter delagating the authority to Sampson and Goodling. Looking like an idiot or an incompetent must have been easier than explaining why he signed this document.

The choices for Gonzales at the Senate testimony have been to

• Look like an idiot and incompetent, (he's not)
• appear to be a total failure as a manager, (possible) or
• protect the White House involvement in the firings and the politicization of the Department of Justice. (My bet.)

This also explains why the emails [See the January 9, 2006 email from Kyle Sampson to Harriet Miers. Presumably the process of politicizing the Department of Justice preceded the effort at covering it up.] discussing the firings went from Sampson to the White House Counsel, Harriet Miers, without even a Cc to Gonzales. Miers, of course, worked closely with Karl Rove and President Bush. Neither of them wanted to be addressed in such documents, so their only contact would have been verbal. Again, plausible deniability.

Harriet Miers, Kyle Sampson and Monica Goodling have all resigned from the government, Sampson and Goodling over the U.S. Attorney firings and Miers for "personal reasons."

More to come on this I am sure.

Reagan WH knowingly aided Pakistan to build nukes

A news report published today by the Raw Story describes how the Reagan White House avoided the law and helped the sale of nuclear components to Pakistan. Then they lied to Congress about what had been done, and ignored when Pakistan passed nuclear plans and components to North Korea.

In 1988, Pakistan would detonate its first atomic bomb.

Former Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers has said that the CIA was monitoring Khan from the beginning. He asserts that the US turned down offers to detain Khan in 1975 and 1986 because they wanted to “gain more information” about the scientist’s activities.

Intelligence information later showed that the US and its allies allowed Pakistan to clandestinely acquire most of the technology for its nuclear program from abroad, unwittingly facilitating the spread of nuclear weapons technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya over the past several decades. [Snip]

In 1985—following the arrest of a Pakistani agent in the US who attempted to procure specialized switches for nuclear detonators—Congress took steps to prevent Pakistan from developing nuclear weapons, passing bills that would cut off economic and military aid to Pakistan if it were found to be involved in nuclear activities.

One amendment declared that all overt aid to Pakistan—which came to over $4 billion in 1986—must cease unless the President certified annually that Pakistan did not possess a nuclear device. Another prohibited aid to any “non-nuclear” nation found to be illegally exporting nuclear materials from the US.

Given Pakistan's proliferation activities, this meant the ongoing aid to Pakistan was illegal. However, President Reagan wanted military and economic aid to continue flowing to Pakistan to ensure its ongoing support of his covert war against the Russians in Afghanistan.

The Reagan White House cold warriors wanted Pakistan's cooperation in the clandestine war the U.S. was fighting against the USSR in Afghanistan at any cost. The non-proliferation forces took a longer view and considered the proliferation of nuclear weapons to unstable third-world nations too high a price to pay to keep Pakistan totally supporting Charlie Wilson's War.

More important, in my opinion, is that the (mostly) Republican super-hawks, who had never accepted the idea that Nixon did anything to cause his resignation in the face of almost certain impeachment, were reinforced in their belief that Congress was a major barrier in the way of their efforts to "defend" America from its enemies. That justified their efforts to avoid Congressional control - at "any cost."

This same group, many even the same individuals, were utterly shocked that somehow the Democratic hick from Arkansas got elected President in 1992, setting off the perpetual war to remove him. Again, this was worth "any cost." When the impeachment failed, they got George W. Bush to run for President in 2000 and eliminated any other candidate - again at "any cost." Ask Sen. McCain.

That set of attitudes, together with the combination of voter suppression and an extra-Constitutional Florida election decision by the Supreme Court has given us the current Bush White House.

This story is one more building block in the sad structure of failures that characterizes the last six years of the Bush/Cheney regime.

Looks like no fun being a Republican now.

Christy Hardin Smith at Firedoglake offers a list of failures, fiascos and pure ignorance and incompetence that has been reported on the current administration this last week.

Members of the Bush administration must be feeling a lot like they are in the path of a growing political hurricane, the darkness is increasing fast, it's too late to evacuate and FEMA isn't returning their phone calls.

It sure is fun having a Democratic Congress that is offering oversight, just as the Bush administration has begun many of its most extreme anti-American activities.

Are we really watching the beginning of a political sea change?

When I read this from Glenn Greenwald, I was rather sucked in and feeling good. It's a very good article, and I feel like there is a lot of truth in it. I also watched the Friday Night Bill Moyer Report on PBS with Jon Stewart followed by Josh Marshall. Stewart is a very bright man with singular insight into current politics. Josh Marshall is another bright, capable person, but he goes back to an older form of journalism. You know, fact-based and carefully sourced. He makes sure he follows leads and finds out where his stories come from, and then follows up. I don’t see much of that these days.

News narratives.

I wasn’t the only person in the blogosphere to believe there was something special in that PBS show. Here is Booman at Booman Tribune. Then someone named "Gator" presented this diary at dKos. The common thread seems to be that with the blogosphere, shows like that of Bill Moyers and Jon Stewart, and Josh Marshall's return to solid journalism we seem to be seeing a new source of “news narrative” in American politics.

The older narratives came from the two political parties mediated by the journalists. Each party presented the narrative as they see it and the journalists are there report those narratives and to give readers a feeling for how closely the reported narratives matched with reality. This is not working as well as we used to think it did.

News organizations, financing and centralization.

Political journalism is a side effect of a healthy, competitive group of well-financed mass news organizations. Those mass news organizations are financed primarily by advertising revenue. News must be collected and then distributed. As more methods of distributing news are developed (newspapers, magazines, radio, TV, and now the internet) each method of distribution competes with more organizations for the same advertising dollars. As revenue for each organization drops, costs must be cut. But distribution costs are fixed by the technology used, and can’t be reduced significantly for mature distribution technologies. That means that organizations tend to centralize news collection and distribute the news through more outlets. Two reporters at a central location feeding news to half a dozen newspapers can often replace a single reporter at each newspaper. This has reduced the number of outlets that offer different points of view for national and international news.

The technology of both Radio and broadcast TV allows an organization that centralizes production of content over a number of outlets to under price individual outlets that produce their own content. The more outlets any one corporation has, the lower the cost of content for each of them. Since the cost of distribution is already established, the networks have a big cost advantage.

News versus entertainment.

News is not a major factor in this, since entertainment is what draws the big bucks advertising. But for TV, with four broadcast networks and any number of cable networks drawing off low-cost high-audience productions like sports, content production funds are best spent on providing entertainment. For news itself, to become a revenue producer requires that it be both entertaining and cheap. That’s what gives the public news of O. J. Simpson, Lacey Peterson, Brittany Spears and Anna Nicole Smith. Those are cheap. Investigatory stories and foreign news bureaus are expensive luxuries most TV news providers and no radio news can afford.

Newspapers face the same competition for advertising dollars, and ALL they can offer is news and advertisements. Since TV news sets the news agenda, foreign news bureaus are unnecessary for regional newspapers and too expensive to maintain even for cachet. Real news is a loss leader to attract readers to advertisements. Expensive news can be less and less afforded. So the major newspapers also centralize into a few groups that exchange news. The larger groups have a Washington bureau, the rest depend on news services like the Associated Press. National political news produced by experts in politics has become a specialty of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Sun Times, and the Los Angeles Times, with only the first two really having a large effort. Foreign bureaus are primarily for the New York Times and the Washington Post. The LA Times still has some Latin American bureaus (I think) but they are under pressure to close them.

National politics is not a big draw to newspaper audiences. TV presents the headlines, and very few people who read advertisements also look for extensive explanations behind the headlines. Except for extremely unusual news items like the tsunami in the Indian Ocean or the (misnamed) Iraq War there is no demand for foreign news at all. (Consumer Demand is not the same as the NEED for that news. A lot more is needed.) TV does not do in-depth investigations, nor do most newspapers. Investigatory journalism of any kind is being priced out of the market. Name the last big story CNN or FOX has broken based on an in-depth investigation. I don't know of one. Such stories cost too much and don't increase advertising rates.

The political reporting process.

The result of the above competitive pressures is that national political journalism has been reduced to a few overworked reporters each getting a statement from a candidate or incumbent from one party, sometimes (clearly not always) asking for the response from the other party, typing it up and publishing it. Getting additional statements from independent experts has become quite rare. The reporter probably knows when one side is lying and the other is not, but to say so is "unbalanced" and unbalanced is "Unfair." If nothing else, it will cause a conflict the editors don’t want to deal with. So the readers or viewers are given two sides in what may be a multi-sided story (or may be a one sided story contradicted by lies from opponents like the Swift-boaters) with no information that allows the news consumer to determine which side is closer to accurate.

The result is that the major journalism outlets have become little more than channels for the two political parties to use to present their spin. There is no one in journalism with the time, expertise, or independent stature to present a judgment on what each side says.

Most of this is because of the inherent economics journalism, primarily broadcast TV journalism, together with the ability of the executives who control the TV and radio networks to get government to let a few of them centralize and shut out the competition from independent stations and smaller potential network groups. The Republican Party, with its "Free Market" ideology and objection to government regulation is the natural place for the executives of the TV and radio networks to go to get what they want.

Control of centralized news organizations.

There is a good argument that the pressures forcing centralization of control of the news allows too few people to determine what everyone can read or see. If the current economic market remains, then the results will be a small number of generalist reporters acting as stenographers for the two major parties. Their results will dominate all the news outlets. This will give the cheapest, lowest quality news to the widest possible audiences.

The Democrats have generally bought into the misplaced free market rhetoric and let them get away with it. The last time they did this was with banks in the 1920's. Banks create the majority of the money supply. The Great Depression was a result, in part, of unregulated and unprotected banks going bust, taking many of their customers with them, and causing a sharp contraction in the money supply, which led to even more banks and businesses going bust. (Or so Milton Friedman rather convincingly wrote.)

For the banks this has required the government to change market conditions so that banks do not independently manipulate the overall money supply. This has become the job of the Federal Reserve and is accomplished by control of the fractional banking system. To shrink the money supply the Fed will increase the amount of bank assets required to support each dollar of loans they make. But the key is that the government modified the market so that banks competed in areas where their expertise provide the best results for the overall economy.

A change in the market for news could be mandated to create a market for competing organizations that provide National news, political news and foreign news. One way to do this would be to limit the amount of allowable news organization centralization, and require each local news outlet to buy its national, political and foreign news from specialized news producers. Long-term contracts for this kind of news would be prohibited. This would create a new market for these types of news. The Associated Press and UPI used to fill this market. The Washington Post and New York Times news services would have to be set up as independent news services to compete with AP and a newly independent UPI.

Then reestablish the Fairness Doctrine together with the idea that radio and TV stations used the public airwaves and needed to return public benefits for the right to do so have been effectively eliminated.

The blogosphere provides a new look at all this, but it will not eliminate the need for decentralization of news organizations.

The blogosphere is a new factor.

The blogosphere is an additional way for those of us who feel left out by the executives running the Democratic and Republican Parties and the excessively centralized news organizations to get the additional information they don't want us to have. The blogosphere is not going to replace the mass media. But it will sharply effect how many of us react to it. It is becoming a major source of “truth-squadding” the news. It is far from perfect, but it is still in an infant stage.

The mass media depends on customers who want other things, like being entertained, to tune in and as a side effect, get some news. The mass media assumes that we are all alike, and that as customers our news needs can be predetermined and packaged for a few large groups. Those groups are then sold to advertisers who want to sell something to them.

The political effects of this kind of news distribution.

Since the media operates that way, the two American political parties operate that way. That is a requirement of using the top-down media system. Polls are a method of getting some idea of what the market wants, but even the polls are designed as top-down systems. They present the questions and the customers respond. Anything else is too expensive to be efficient.

Centralized political organization.

The Republican Party is also a very centralized organization. This is in part because of the psychological needs for certainty of many of the people who currently vote Republican, and in part because such an organization works better with centralized media organizations, large centralized businesses, and centralized religious organizations.

Centralized and tightly controlled organizations have a real advantage when getting large numbers of people to quickly work for the same goal is important. Centralized and tightly controlled organizations are also quicker to react to existential threats to their being. That's why a major rule of war is unity of command. Such organizations are frankly more efficient, especially when a fast response is required.

Decentralized political organization.

The Democratic Party is a coalition of many groups with different goals and needs. As such it does not have a strong central hierarchy to control it.

(I'm going to speculate here.) Once upon a time the Democratic Party had its own internal sources of information, but when America became a nation that was essentially run by the Democratic Party those sources were no longer needed. The national news media was enough. As long as the news organizations reported what was really happening, an internal news organization for Democrats was redundant. So it disappeared.

The Republicans did not have the luxury of depending on the public news media. Its assumptions, procedures and traditions frequently conflicted with conservative beliefs, particularly since the news organizations saw themselves as reporting the independent truth. So the Republicans began to develop their own news channels.

This news channel development took two routes. The first was the Fundamentalist Christian route. They operated through their churches, bookstores, and more recently their specialized radio and TV stations. These were both self-financing and were a way to cut the true believers off from the rest of the media world.

The second route is newer. It is the takeover and control of what were previously normal news distribution outlets. It includes the establishment of the Washington Times, its takeover of United Press International, and the creation of the FOX TV channels. These were more purely political. But with these sources as a base, the conservatives have moved on to try to take over the rest of the media - or at least to force it to act more conservative.

The growth of these conservative channels was accompanied by the massive attack on the rest of the media for its' liberal bias. Since there is no liberal hierarchical organization to feel threatened and respond, this pincer movement on the mainstream media was not responded to. Since the mainstream media was also under massive economic pressure, they caved in to much of the political pressure. They were already losing audience/readers anyway. Perhaps the conservatives could replace the ones they were losing.

My reaction to these things.

Enter the blogosphere, stage left. No one else was responding to the rather massive attack on the media from the political and religious right. The right-wing top-down hierarchical corporate anti-democratic anti-Union anti-woman and anti-minority views do not represent me, nor do they represent what I think the Anglo-Saxon history, the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution and the (small “d”) democratic history of America have given us. The Right-wingers want to take democracy, Human Rights, freedom and opportunity away from those of us who are not heads of corporations or their equivalent. Today it is my opinion that American politics and the American media are becoming less American and more authoritarian. After Reagan and Bush 41, Clinton was a Godsend. AL Gore was the logical savior of the American Dream.

Then Bush 43, Jeb Bush and the U.S. Supreme Court stole the election in Florida in 2000. There were enough news stories to show that the most likely outcome of any real recount statewide was a decision for Gore. But there were no real news follow-ups.

I did not know anyone - or even know of very many people who I trusted who agreed with me. But no one ever disproved the reports from Greg Palast or even discussed them. It was an effective tie, the Florida courts went for a recount, and the Federal Supreme Count decided, by a five to four decision on very weak grounds, to shut down any recount. Then they did it with a decision in which they specifically stated in their decision could not be used as a precedent for any future Supreme Court decisions. No law. No precedent. Just an arbitrary decision in which they were not willing to say it was a precedent for future decisions. That was a decision outside the Constitution and the law if there ever was one. That one incident told America what to expect from the Bush 43 administration and the movement conservatives. The major news organizations effectively ignored all this. They might have started some digging, but 9/11 shut that down.

The news I got from the newspapers, TV news and the newsweekly magazines let these issues drop. But something was really missing. I started searching the Internet for better news and analysis to explain what had happened.

I quickly found Talking Points Memo, Digby's Hullabaloo, daily KOS, Kevin Drum and Billmon. They all pointed me towards the smaller news items that reflected the really important events. Each time I found something that was interesting I would file it away or go Google for similar news reports. What I was doing (but didn't realize it then) was establishing some new narratives for myself, narratives not supported by the mainstream media or the two main political parties. I'm still doing that.

The sites I went back to provided analysis and sources rather than insults and politically inspired rhetoric. The analysis I found on the Internet let me work on the narratives that the mainstream media was glossing over. To my surprise, those sources have also been feeding back into the mainstream media and letting them know that important stories were being overlooked.

I think that is going to be the future of the blogosphere. It will not replace the major news media, even as that news media continues its economic decline. But the Blogosphere is going to play much the same role of evaluating the reporting of the major media and truth-squadding the rhetoric put out by the two major parties.

Most people won't bother with the blogosphere. It's too much work and takes too much time. But for the people who want that level of information and analysis, it has no real competition. There is no effective barrier to entry for any contributor. No paycheck, so you can't be fired. No editor to hold up publication of your best work. Blogger lets anyone establish a blog for publishing. Getting attention means having something (hopefully worthwhile) to say on subjects that other people want to know about, and getting on the search engines. Traffic and referrals provide an indication of when something is worth looking at. With all of that providing date, most of my time has been trying to learn enough to judge what is and is not reasonable.

To recycle the excellent quotation from Glenn Greenwald's article:

I have to say that a remarkably intimate, yet expansive, community of thought seems to be forming across television, film, and the Internet. There's a rather quiet, yet intense, movement of thought and expression building. It focuses not so much on any particular ideology ("right" or "left"), but on a common, critical-mass thirst to dispel the deception, irrationality, and utter hubris that has been corroding our proud country for what seems like an eternity.

An undeniable intellectual and social confluence is rapidly gaining momentum and solidarity. This solidarity is amazingly organic, not hierarchical -- its only guide is the sixth sense of skepticism, outrage, and, yes, reason. It transcends party. It is oceanic, atmospheric. An intellectual, moral, societal, and psychological gestalt as ancient as humanity itself, kept underfoot by a long winter, but indelibly germinating once again with the thaw.

It is literally everywhere now. The voices of blindness and rage cannot shake me anymore. I haven't felt such hope in a very long time.

I think there is something to that. I'm not sure what it is yet, but is seems quite positive compared to the way information is currently being shut down or drowned out.

The near future should be quite interesting.

[Note: Article revised significantly for clarity and organization - April 30, 2007 9:50PM.]

What Iraq war? The one that lasted 3 weeks is over.

We have been in Iraq for four years now, and the casualty rate has gone back up to the highest level since the end of the war itself.

End of the war? Yeah. It ended when the Iraqi army disappeared. That was after about three weeks of combat. We won that war. Sort of. We learned there were no WMD's, and we removed Saddam from power. Those were the reasons we went into Iraq. Remember?

Then we tried to occupy the country. Without a plan, without any effective leadership, and with a totally inadequate and improperly trained military force we tried to occupy Iraq. That has failed. So it is time to leave. Now.

So why shouldn't we leave? Because it would leave chaos behind us? There is no effective government and no effective military or police force. Whenever we leave it will be chaos. Our military will bleed until we make the effective decision and start to leave.

The other reason, the talking point of Dick Cheney, Sen. John Cornyn and many other Republicans is that when we leave we have lost the war. But look at the beginning of my essay. We have already won the war. What do we lose when we leave? The occupation? So what?

We get nothing good from the occupation. It is time to go.

Someone needs to phone Muktada al Sadr and ask him what he'll offer us to leave. Then ask the President, Maliki, the same question. Get the best deal and them get the heck out of Dodge.

Ignore the right-wing war-mongerng rhetoric of the NeoCons and Dick Cheney. We won the Iraq war. We don't need the occupation. we don't need Iraq. It's time to go.

It really is that simple.

Standard White House lie - "Clinton did it!"

The players in this little drama are a reporter (Q) and the Press Secretary, Dana Perino (MS. PERINO). The setting is another White House Press Briefing.

This scene started when the reporter asked Ms. Perino about the political briefings to political appointees assigned to federal agencies. The first question was:

Q Okay, on the political briefings, there seems — there’s no shortage of political information out there. Why does the White House feel it’s necessary to give these employees these briefings in the first place?

The White House spokesperson first tried misdirection. Note how she fails to answer the question.

MS. PERINO: I think that’s kind of ridiculous question. I mean, there’s — sorry, I usually don’t say those things, but I do think that that one was. Look, there is nothing wrong with political appointees providing other political appointees with an informational briefing about the political landscape in which they are working.

Kudos to the reporter. Here is the followup.

Q I understand. That’s not an answer, as ridiculous as the question was.

She tries more obfuscation, along with belittling.

MS. PERINO: What, you think that we should just look at the CBS/New York Times poll and make our decisions based on that?

This is followed by the reporter trying to frame a more specific question so as to get a real answer, with Ms. Perino doing what I would have to call filibustering. Her responses are a little more closely related to the question than reading the telephone book would be, but not much.

Q It’s 20 briefings –

MS. PERINO: Jim would agree.

Q Well, I’m trying to get to the motivation for this, and it’s 20 briefings –

MS. PERINO: The motivation is to provide people information.

Q But why? Why do they need this information –

MS. PERINO: Why are you asking me these questions? You’re asking information, as well.

Q No, no, but –

MS. PERINO: My point was that you’re asking –

Q Was there any intent to try to tell people that they need to do something about the election, and to take some action?

MS. PERINO: These are information — they’re informational briefings about the political landscape.

Clearly Ms. Perino is wriggling like an eel caught on a fishing line trying to avoid any substantive answer. But she actually used the word "intent" from the question in her answer, and the reporter jumped on this as a possible way to pin her down. So he expands on the idea of "intent" in his next followup.

Q Okay, so there was — there was no intent to do that? Who — did they ask for the briefings, or was it the White House that decided they wanted to give these briefings?

Ms. Perino seems to have decided that this was a way out of her dilemma. Pure non-answers weren't working, and both she and the reporter knew it. Maybe a different type of non-answer?

MS. PERINO: I think it sort of goes both ways. I do know that political appointees around the government — I used to work at an agency, and you are interested in — the reason that you’re here working for the President is that you want to support his policies and his agenda, and so it’s good to get information from time to time.

It was a slightly different tack, so the reporter riffs off of her response to throw in a new question.

Q Well, who’s idea — it was the White House idea, initially, or was it the agencies?

To which Ms. Perino responded with what must have seemed safe as she said it, but is simply a lie.

MS. PERINO: I think that these briefings — well, I know the Clinton administration had similar briefings. Where did they originate? I don’t know. I couldn’t give you a date.

Sure she doesn't know when they originated. She is dreaming it up on the spot. But it effectively closes down that line of questioning for the moment because no one at the Press gaggle could do effective real-time fact-checking.

These meetings on government property were clearly violations of the Hatch Act which has been in effect since 1939. It is a basic part of the mechanism of governing this nation. Either the members of the Bush administration knew about the Hatch Act and knew they were violating it, or they did not know and refused to listen when someone told them about it. They were knowingly violating the law. But their spokesperson, Ms. Perino, cannot stand up and say that "Oops. We goofed." This administration does not say that.

Lies are better than admissions of crimes. Ask any modern Republican. Ask Rove. Of course, he'll lie, but ask him anyway.

[Note: the transcript is from Think Progress.]

Rep. Renzi (AZ - R) expected to resign as soon as today

According to The Business Journal of Phoenix Arizona Rep. Rick Renzi is expected to resign from Congress in the near future, perhaps as early as today. This is fall out from the suspicious land deal which led to the FBI search on April 19, 2007 of the Insurance Agency that he established and turned over to his wife to run when he was elected to Congress.

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Addendum 5:19 PM CDT
Rep. Renzi states that he intends to serve out the remainder of his term.

We can hope. If he does serve out the remainder of his term he makes it harder for the Republican to keep the seat in 2008. Apparently his district has a small predominance of Democrats, but they are conservative Democrats.

How do you create an authoritarian state out of a democracy? Easy. Ten steps.

Naomi Wolf discusses what is required to take down a democracy and replace it with an authoritarian government in the Guardian.

If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.

As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration. [Snip]

It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable - as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realise.

Let me provide just an overview of her excellent article:

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy - "war footing"; a "global war" against a "global caliphate" intending to "wipe out civilisation"; terrorists. (But terrorism is a technique of fighting, not an identifiable enemy.)


2. Create a gulag - Guantánamo Bay; The CIA's secret gulag. Prison camps in isolated locations for "illegal immigrants."


3. Develop a thug caste - Blackwater and other security firms deployed in New Orleans. Privately run and staffed prisons. The Republican thugs who shut down the vote recount in Miami in 2000.


4. Set up an internal surveillance system - The secret program to wiretap citizens' phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions; Uncontrolled National Security Letters that include a total gag order on the people who have to turn over the documents, like librarians, booksellers, income tax preparers, etc.


5. Harass citizens' groups - Infiltrate and investigate organizations like Churches and Environmental organizations. IRS investigations to remove tax exempt status of churches that oppose Bush while giving funding to those churches that support Bush.


6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release - The ways to get on the No-Fly list are completely arbitrary, while there are no known ways to get off. Any citizen or other person in the U.S. can be arrested, declared an “enemy combatant” and refused all access to an attorney, the courts, or habeas corpus. The federal government is not even required to tell people who inquire if you have been detains, or if so, where. This is outside the law, by definition it is arbitrary at the whim of the individual who decided to detain you.


7. Target key individuals - The U.S. Attorneys fired in the Pearl Harbor Day Massacre are an example.


8. Control the press - See Moyers delivers the goods. The Washington Press corps should wear hoods and sunglasses and Glenn Greenwald dissects the Bill Moyers PBS report.


9. Dissent equals treason - "Cast dissent as "treason" and criticism as "espionage". Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of "spy" and "traitor"." [*]
   
   Just listen to Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, and the commenters on Little Green Footballs.


10. Suspend the rule of law - "The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency - which the president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can send Michigan's militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state's governor and its citizens." [*]

[*] Quote from Naomi Wolf

This process of creating an authoritarian state is not a new one. It hasn't been done here in the U.S. before, but we are further down the process than we have ever been before.

The really scary part if that people just don't want to hear or to believe this is possible.

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And don't bug me about the difference between an authoritarian government and "Fascism," the term used by the headline writer in the Guardian. There is no distinction that matters. None at all.

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Addendum 8:37PM
Consider the above post with the summary of techniques listed above with those Bill Moyers illuminated last night in his PBS show last night and which are summarized at FireDogLake. A lot of overlap there. Why did Bush and the NeoCons really want to attack Iraq?

David Iglesias filed Hatch Act complaint April 3rd.

The discussion of the U.S. Attorney Purge has begun to include reports of an investigation of violations of the Hatch Act recently. Now Think Progress has published a report of an interview with fired U.S. Attorney for New Mexico, David Iglesias. Mr. Iglesias says he filed a complaint against Gonzales, McNulty, Sampson and Goodling on april 3, 2007 and has spoken to the Office of Special Counsel’s (OSC)chief Scott Bloch who has begun the investigation.

Mr. Iglesias' complaint is that he was fired from a Hatch Act protected job for refusing to conduct politically-motivated investigations. Mr. Iglesias believes that his complaint may be what has led the OSC to look at the actions of Karl Rove.

Iglesias also said that while evidence of Rove’s potential illegal actions is currently only circumstantial, “I believe if OSC digs in, they can get direct evidence.”

[T]he Justice Department papers everything. I mean, the most minute issue has an incredible researched and memoed product. There has to be a paper trail. I haven’t seen it yet. If it’s not at the Justice Department, it has got to be at the White House.

Finally, Iglesias said he believes that Monica Goodling — former counsel to Alberto Gonzales and the Justice Department’s liaison to the White House — holds the “keys to the kingdom” in terms of uncovering the roots of the U.S. Attorney purge, since she can describe the communication that took place between the White House and the Justice Department.

Yesterday the House Judiciary Committee voted to grant immunity to Monica Goodling, which prevents her from taking the Fifth Amendment to avoid testifying for fear that she would be convicted for her testimony.

The OSC "Hatch Act" investigation is one more front on which the White House has to defend itself. There are so very many fronts now. I am sure that Dick Cheney is having a lengthy "deja vu" experience returning to feelings he must have had in the embattled Nixon White House before Nixon resigned.

Glenn Greenwald dissects the Bill Moyers PBS report

Glenn Greewald does a really good job of telling us what we saw when we watched last night's Bill Moyers PBS special "Buying the War." I'll admit that I have been sitting here thinking "Yeah, I knew it was bad, but this bad?"

Greenwald takes the next step, which should have been obvious to me but wasn't until I read what he wrote:

Moyers' documentary is a superb piece of journalism and makes inescapably clear how profoundly corrupt our dominant political and media institutions were prior to the invasion. But most national "journalists" will simply ignore the whole program (as Digby notes, The New York Times, one of the principal culprits, did not even review it). [Editor - highlighting is mine.]

Has America become so corrupt that it now subordinates the goals of building a better nation, better people and providing an environment of Freedom has become subordinate to greater money-making and building worldwide power? What has happened to the two century experiment in democracy on the North American continent?

Instead of a nation of the people, by the people, and for the people have we succumbed to the disease of Imperialist wars in support of an ever wealthier elite who gather all power to themselves? We have let them centralize control of the broadcast media and the daily and weekly print media. This gives the elite the wealth to rob the rest of us of any control of our nation.

So the wealthy American elite buy an all-volunteer military and send them on a fool's errand to occupy Iraq for the primary purpose of overawing the major oil supplying nations in the world. Control of the the flow of energy supplies allows those wealthy elite to gain greater power and wealth without spreading more than a minimum of that wealth to the mass of the people who actually create it.

Bush may have overreached himself when he has decided to ignore Congress and the American people in their desire to get out of the fighting in the Middle East. But why should he listen to the American People? He has the major media and the pundits on his side?

Is this what it means to say that our democratic institutions have become corrupted? Sure looks like it to me, when Bush can steal elections without having the media tattle on him, ignore Congress with signing statements and eliminate habeas corpus by Presidential decree.

The Romans didn't really recognize that the Republic had been destroyed and replaced by the empire until generations later. We may recognize the change here sooner, but can we then prevent it? What is happening to the two century experiment in democracy? Is it over now?

Tom Tomorrow quotes the pundits

Bill Moyers in his "Buying the War" last night made a major point that the pundits who actively pumped public opinion to support the preemptive invasion of Iraq and downplayed the risk are all still in business on TV and newspaper OpEd pages today. So Tom Tomorrow offers a cartoon panel that identifies many of the more significant offenders. Go read.

More on the very fishy Debra Yang bribe job offer

EmptyWheel discusses the situation in which the U.S. Attorney for Los Angeles, Debra Yang, who was investigating Rep. Jerry Lewis (CA - R) for corruption resigned as U.S. Attorney and went to work for the law firm who defends Rep. Jerry Lewis.

Don't miss the comments. People knowledgeable in what it takes to get hired as a Senior Partner with a $1.5 million signing bonus normally have to do to get it discuss the situation and its really rotten appearance.

Click on the label "Yang" to see my earlier stories on the Yang story. Click on "Purge" for the overall set of stories on the firing of U.S. Attorneys.

Moyers delivers the goods. The Washington Press corps should wear hoods and sunglasses.

The hour and a half PBS special "Buying the War" was on this evening and well worth the time to watch. He essentially documents the manner in which the Washington Press Corps lay down and let the Bush administration walk all over them, while burying all questions and doubts by either not covering them, or by putting the assertions from the administration on the front page while occasionally reporting the contradictions deep inside the paper. TV simply never bothered with the contradictions and questions. They just put the administration spokes-liars on and let it go at that.

If you missed the TV show, the video is available here.

Then over at Salon today Glenn Greenwald goes after the same press for the way they accepted the lies the military told about Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman and trumpeted those lies as great stories about American heroes. both did well as soldiers, but the stories the Army put out in each case was a pack of lies designed to ... who knows what? Cover up a screw-up? Create another photogenic American hero?

Back to Moyers - he makes it clear that the one press organization in Washington that got the stories it covered right was Knight-Ridder. They repeatedly got the real story and published it. No major media organizations joined them, to their perpetual shame.

So I have a question. About a years ago the financial markets determined that Knight-Ridder was not making enough money, so they forced the company to find a buyer. An even smaller chain called McClatchy bought the Knight-Ridder chain out, and now has sold off a few of the previous Knight-Ridder newspapers. Was Knight-Ridder forced to sell itself off because it was out of step with the major media organizations? Was this a way the other media organizations punished Knight-Ridder and got control of them so they wouldn't show them up as they did in the run-up to the Iraq War?

I find it suspicious that the one news outlet that was out of step with the major news organizations and showed them up is the one that Wall Street forced to be sold off.