TPM interview Dahlia Lithwick about accountability for the Bush admin crimes next year

Dahlia Lithwick is the legal affairs writer for Slate, and she was on a panel at the Netroots Nation in Austin a couple of weeks ago. While there, David Kurz of TPM interviewed Dahlia and asked some interesting questions, to include how the new Congress in 2009 should deal with the increasing evidence of criminality that has characterized the Bush administration and the Department of Justice.

It's a very interesting discussion. She also makes the case very clearly that the Bush administration has been packing the Supreme Court and the judiciary with extremist Federalist members more to create a monarchical Presidency then to change Row vs. Wade -- and it has almost completely worked.



An irrelevant comment - I've read a lot of Dahlia's work over the years, but I had no idea that she "spoke with her hands" as extensively and as fluently as she does in this interview.

TPM covers that notorious "hate site" Daily Kos

josh Marshall, in response to the frantic warnings given by Bill "O'Goebbels" O'Reilly about the yearly convention of the extreme left hate site Daily Kos, offers to personally attend that convention in Chicago and expose all the viciousness that goes on there. Go watch Josh's video.

[I wonder if Josh will take his son to Chicago. Kos has a son only slightly older, and both look really cute in pictures. Maybe they can have a "cute-off?" Probably depends on whether Mrs. Moulitsas and Mrs. Marshall permit it, of course.]

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This, by the way, is my 2,000th post at this site since I started it in September 2004 under the name "Politics Plus Stuff." It's been fun, and very educational, although I have not yet learned to write short, pithy posts.

I will probably learn to write those short, pithy posts about the same time I get my life organized, and I realized a while back that will occur roughly three days after my funeral.

"We didn't say or do that, and if we did it wasn't wrong - certainly Not Me."

Want to know how a professional Republican lies to Congress and refused to take responsibility for decisions he would allow no one else to make? In terms of purely professional, low-down bamboozlement (have I yet mentioned lying?) and absolutely unethical behavior from someone who screwed up, doesn't want to take responsibility for his screw-up and who would happily, even proudly, do it again no matter how many people his actions hurt, go watch this clip of James Connaughton testifying to Congress about why he deleted warnings regarding the dangers of asbestos and other pollutants in the air in New York City shortly after 9/11 and sent out a Press Release telling residents it was safe to move back home when it wasn't.

This is your Republican government at work. It's not smaller government. it's not useful government. It is dishonest and dangerous government. It's Republican government, and the Republicans cannot be trusted. They order that their whims and fantasies be carried out, regardless of who get hurt. Then the rest of them get together and cover up their screw ups.

We are now getting out the information about how badly the Bush administration cocked up the rescue response to 9/11 (Shades of New Orleans!!) nearly six years later. Who knows how many lives and health problems they created? Show me a Republican - officeholder or voter - who even cares what Connaughton did?

Are the Republicans who refused to hold any Hearings on this murderous behavior by the Bush administration, murderous behavior which can be blamed directly on clearly guilty individuals like James Connaughton, any less guilty than Connaughton himself? What about the people who appointed him to the office he misused and supervised his work there?

Connaughton is clearly wrong. Bush was wrong to put him in his office, and wrong to cover up his actions (and that's assuming that Bush didn't DIRECT those Press Reports be scrubbed of warning before they were released.) Bush was wrong. The the Republican Congress covered it up. They were wrong - every Republican in Congress. Finally, the voters who voted to place these lying, murderous people into office to misgovernment the country and then cover up their errors - every damned Republican who voted for these criminals is guilty of their actions. Connaughton is the poster boy for the Republican Party. Connaughton IS the Republican Party.

The Bush administration was already doing America a bad disservice with its behavior in office. That is one Republican problem. Then it has consistently lied or ignored the problems - a cover up. That is Republican problem number two. But then the Republican leadership of the Senate (under Bill Frist) and of the House (Denny Hastert and his boss, Tom DeLay) concealed what their murderous Republican brethren had done. That is Republican problem number three.

And this all came from the first fracking year of the Bush administration! Before Iraq. Before Katrina/Rita.

When Eisenhower was elected President in 1952 he also came in to office with control of the House and Senate (83rd Congress ). That lasted two years, and the Democrats took Congress back in the midterm elections of 1954 (84th congress.) Before the Bush administration was that was the last time the American voters ever let the Republicans steal gain control of both houses of Congress and the Presidency at the same time. The last six years have demonstrated the wisdom of not letting the Republicans have control of government. Connaughton's testimony is just one more example of why they can't be trusted with power.

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Go back and look at the history of the Republicans in control, in power, and attempting to regain power since 1929 in my previous post Why did LBJ escalate Viet Nam in 1965?. Little has changed since the days of the Robber Barons and since the 1920's.

Part II of the Personal Democracy Forum

Yesterday I linked over to Josh Marshall's video of Part I of the Personal Democracy Forum. Today I want to send you to Part II.

In this installment Josh interviews two more people, one is a journalism professor who is working on how decentralized citizen journalism will work, and the second is a law professor who steps back a bit from the details and describes how citizen journalism and open source software are opening society up, while big businesses since 1990 have been working hard to lock down as much information as possible so that it is not available to most people (Think Disney and the extension of the life of copyrights.)

I strongly recommend that you sit through the video. And if it starts sort of hanging up then starting again, the data is not downloading as fast as it is being displayed. The solution is to start the video, pause it, and let it download a lot before restarting it.

Watching this video is a little like seeing the future. The first interview is a nuts-and-bolts how to do it for citizen journalism using the internet, and the second interview provides a quick glimpse of how the slow innovation is lagging behind tne new technologies and the people using them. So go watch it.

Josh Marshall reports on the Personal Democracy Forum 07

The --- What? Huh?

That was my first reaction. Probably yours, too. So get past it and go watch the video at TPM. Here's why.

It is about the use of technology, the Internet and its many and expanding permutations, in politics. Josh's video itself is an example. It is a tool of journalism, distributed by Internet rather than TV. It opens journalism to everyone.

The video itself is overall interesting. The first significant part was an interview with Andrew Raseij starting at about 1 minute 40 seconds. Andrew's challenge to the candidates is to ask "Who is America's first tech President? What are the candidate's positions on such issues as Net Neutrality? Providing broadband access to every American?"

The second significant part is the interview with Jeff Jarvis. Mr. Jarvis is watching the way the world changes. He likes to watch the election through U-Tube. Mr. Jarvis' issue is how the candidates use the Internet to get elected to office, and how voters and potential voters can use U-tube to excerpt candidate statements on a particular issue and aggregate them over time. This would display inconsistencies, which the next interviewer should ask about - then post on U-Tube.

The video is worth watching - maybe even the first minute and forty seconds if you are happy with a distant shot of a smiling Tom Friedman and pictures of New York City from a cab. I have to ask -- why did Josh publish his cab ride to the conference? I got nothing from that. I am also sufficiently non-social so that I really don't care who he was schmoozing with. The rest was really worthwhile, though, so watch it.

Josh also promises more. For someone reading this, Josh is exploring where the medium we are using right now is going in the context of its impact on politics.

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For more on this, see does the Democratic Party have an advantage on-line?. It is about the nexus of the Internet, sociology (or social psychology) and politics. The Internet is the rapidly changing element in that triad, and the other two elements are being dragged along and adapting to the changes.

Poll: Public wants aggressive Dem investigation of Republican crimes, corruption

I hope the Comgressional Democrats read this set of polls. The public wants the criminal actions and corruption of the Bush administration investigated.

The story that investigating the Republicans will cause a blowback on the Democrats is frankly B*llsh*t. The real blowback will be on the Democrats if they don't thoroughly investigate the garbage the Republicans have been pulling for the last six years.

Credit for pulling the media into US attorney-gate goes to bloggers - TPM first.

Eric Alterman traces the origins of the media coverage on the US Attorney scandal that is about to remove Attorney-General Gonzales from office.

Here is what I consider to be Eric Alterman's money-quote:

Whatever its final outcome, I suppose the Bushites should congratulate themselves for getting away with it this long, and the rest of us who care about the continued functioning of our democracy should be grateful that we still have newspapers and we now have blogs. Because if all we had were television stations, well—as the playwright Tom Stoppard has written, “No matter how imperfect things are, if you’ve got a free press, everything is correctable. Without it, everything is concealable.”

But a free press only works if the press itself works. And altogether too often, broadcast and cable prefer to look the other way.

It's a good article. Go read it.

As for the results of the media reaction (after TPM prodded them into action), at the end of the Roundtable on ABC's Sunday morning talking heads show "This Week", George Stephanapolus asked his four panel members (Brazile, George Will and two others) who among them thought that Gonzales would still be Attorney-General in a month. The silence and lack of movement was carefully covered by the cameras for what must have been almost a full minute.

Looks like Gonzales is toast. These are the last people to admit to the obvious after everyone else has done so.

Josh Marshall summarizes coverage of hearings on US Atty firings

Yesterday (Tuesday, March 6, 2007) both the Senate and the House held hearings on the US Attorneys who were suddenly dismissedby the Department of Justice. Paul Kiel of Talking points Memo provided a running commentary on (liveblogged) the hearings, and This is Josh Marshall's summary of the statements.

The Department of Justice has one story, and the fired U.S. Attorneys had another. Today, AG Gonzales declared that the scandal is "an overblown personnel matter."

Yeah, Right.


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The story of the fired Federal Attorneys. What were they getting too close to?

A standard way of ignoring criminal misconduct has long been to label it "A Conspiracy Theory" and lump it in with the thousands of (mostly fantastic) "explanations" of who assasinated JFK. The problem these days is that the I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby trial has shown very clearly that there is a dangerous conspiracy at the heart of the White House in the Office of the Vice President.

Sort of makes it harder to dismiss an assertion that something is "Only a conspiracy theory" an effective way to dismiss charges when the Cheney-centered conspiracies are so clearly true.

That said, Media Matters lays out the outline of the recent firings of eight Federal Attorneys (a story that has been well reported by Josh Marshall and his TPM crew.) Go read it, and see if it doesn't seem to need to be more deeply investigated.