Post-Convention Cull Day

Wow, a LOT apparently happened while I was busy at, or recovering from, the convention I worked at this past weekend. Too much for me to keep track of, or research, or comment in detail on.

So... it's Cull Day!

First off: Oklahoma becomes the first state to begin organizing its secessionist army.

Frustrated by recent political setbacks, tea party leaders and some conservative members of the Oklahoma Legislature say they would like to create a new volunteer militia to help defend against what they believe are improper federal infringements on state sovereignty.

. . .

"Is it scary? It sure is," said tea party leader Al Gerhart of Oklahoma City, who heads an umbrella group of tea party factions called the Oklahoma Constitutional Alliance. "But when do the states stop rolling over for the federal government?"

Incidentally, folks, it should be borne in mind that, just before the Civil War, most newspapers in the South were agents of the fire-eating secessionist wing of the Democratic Party, deliberately ginning up fear, hatred and paranoia among their readership. Today... we have Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, NewsMax.com, Drudge, National Review... so, yeah.

The Tea Parties are trying to unite... except, well, it's only those tea party groups funded and run by Republican Party activists that are uniting:

Mark Skoda, a Tea Party leader from Memphis (and a founder of the recent Tea Party Convention), is serving as the chief spokesman for the effort, and appears to have played a leading role in putting it together. Skoda, working closely with Judson Phillips of Tea Party Nation, had helped organize and promote February's convention, at which Sarah Palin delivered the keynote speech and which enjoyed widespread media coverage. Also part of the new coalition is the Tea Party Express, the brainchild of a team of California Republican political consultants.

But one prominent group, the Tea Party Patriots (TPP), doesn't appear to be joining the party. Jenny Beth Martin, a leader of TPP noted to TPMmuckraker that her group already considers itself the largest grassroots Tea Party organization, and said it hadn't been involved in planning the new federation. TPP had also stayed away from February's convention.

It should be noted that Tea Party Nation is the group founded and led by former Republican leader Dick Armey. This is a clear case of the Republican Party trying- and failing- to co-opt the teabaggers, who are definitely much more radical and bigoted than the national average. Even Fox News is calling the teabaggers out on their lunacy, now that they realize they won't be controlled.

Even as Virginia Governor McConnell apologizes and backtracks on his leaving slavery out of the Civil War, Mississippi governor Haley Barbour brushes slavery off as unimportant:

CROWLEY: You know what I'm trying to get at here is that there's a sort of feeling that this is insensitive. But you clearly don't agree?

BARBOUR: To me, it's a sort of feeling that it's a nit, that it is not significant, that it's not a -- it's trying to make a big deal out of something doesn't amount to diddly.

So, yeah: slavery was wrong, "everybody knows that," but apparently it wasn't important at all to the Confederacy. Riiiiight.

Matthew Yglesias cuts right to the heart of both the Republican desire to celebrate the CSA, and the core of teabagger support:

... something that links the mentality of today’s right to the mentality of the slaveowners and segregation proponents is the white southern political tradition’s very partial and selective embrace of majoritarian democracy. As long as national institutions are substantially controlled by white southerners, the white south is a hotbed of patriotism. But as soon as an non-southern political coalition manages to win an election—as we saw in 1860 and in 2008—then suddenly the symbols of national authority become symbols of tyranny and the constitution is construed as granting conservative areas all kinds of alleged abilities to opt out of national political decisions. Even if you think opposition to the Affordable Care Act has nothing whatsoever to do with race, the underlying political philosophy by which a George W Bush or James Buchanan is a national president but an Abraham Lincoln or a Barack Obama merely a sectional one remains incoherent and pernicious.

Meanwhile, if you haven't had enough reminders of innate Republican evil, Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's chief of staff in the State Department, testified that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld knew full well they were imprisoning- and torturing- innocent people in Guantanamo and elsewhere:

I came to understand that there were several different reasons for the refusal to release detainees in Guantánamo, even those who were likely innocent. These reasons continued to the time of my departure from the Department of State in 2005. At least part of the problem was that it was politically impossible to release them. The concern expressed was that if they were released to another country... the leadership of the Defense Department would be left without any plausible explanation to the American people...

. . .

Another part of the political dilemma originated in the Office of Vice President Richard B. Cheney, whose position could be summed up as “the end justifies the means”, and who had absolutely no concern that the vast majority of Guantánamo detainees were innocent, or that there was a lack of any useable evidence for the great majority of them. If hundreds of innocent individuals had to suffer in order to detain a handful of hardcore terrorists, so be it. That seemed to be the philosophy that ruled in the Vice President’s Office.

Of course, with Dawn Johnsen's nomination to the Office of Legal Counsel scuttled, the last faint hope of Obama ever following up on this testimony has long since flown away.

And finally, a recent federal court ruling puts a major kink in plans for net neutrality regulations. That said, it was almost certainly the right ruling:

If “ancillary jurisdiction” is enough for net neutrality regulations (something we might like) today, it could just as easily be invoked tomorrow for any other Internet regulation that the FCC dreams up (including things we won’t like). For example, it doesn't take much imagination to envision a future FCC "Internet Decency Statement." After all, outgoing FCC Chairman Martin was a crusader against "indecency" on the airwaves and it was the FCC that punished Pacifica radio for playing George Carlin’s “seven dirty words” monologue, something you can easily find on the Internet.

Of course, this ruling can- and probably will- lead to more direct and stringent regulation of telecoms and internet providers by the FCC, since they won't be allowed to do spot-checks on egregious incidents. This issue is by no means settled.

What Have I Got Against Obama?

Some of you coming into this blog cold may be confused- I was an Obama supporter, vanished for a year and a half, and came back an Obama basher. What gives?

Well, I wasn't totally silent in that year and a half- I just gave up doing a separate political blog and dumped everything on LiveJournal. And here below are links to the many and various reasons I have for thinking Barack Obama has turned his back on those who voted for him and does not deserve a second term as president. (For a while I even advocated his impeachment- because impeachment is the only constitutional punishment for a lawbreaking president- but I retracted that when some racist teabaggers opened up an impeachment website.)

Here's my reasons:

First, let's begin with one of my last pre-hiatus LYAN posts, where I called out then-candidate Senator Obama for voting for telcom immunity for illegal Presidential-ordered wiretaps. Despite that, I voted for Obama, on the grounds that he would restore a constitutional presidency and constitutional government after eight years of Bush/Cheney's "unitary executive."

So, what did we actually get? Well, Obama telegraphed his intent before he was even inaugurated when he said that Dubya was a nice guy who just made some bad policy decisions with the best of intentions. (Yes, because apparently torture is only "a bad choice.") He went on to nominate an attorney general who promised, as part of his nomination hearings, not to prosecute anyone for ordering torture or committing other war crimes. Obama's officials made it crystal clear that there would be no prosecutions so long as they could prevent it, going so far as to continue the Bush administration's cover-up policies and to squash attempted prosecutions in Spain and Great Britain through diplomatic threats. They even defend the use of torture in our courts and defend those who claimed that it isn't torture if it doesn't kill or maim you.

And finally, even when Obama issued his famous executive order banning the use of torture, he left a loophole that allows the CIA to continue torturing- with special permission from the President. This marks Obama, bluntly, as pro-torture. At the very least, he and his advisors refuse to rule out the use of torture in the future.

Torture, and protecting those who did it, was not the only way Obama betrayed his promises of change. Obama's Justice Department vigorously defended illegal warrantless wiretapping, White House secrecy, and the indefinite/permanent imprisonment of prisoners in Guantanamo and Bagram. This initially was with Bush-appointed lawyers, but Obama appointees were just as vigorous in defending warrantless wiretapping. He's even resisted court orders to release Guantanamo prisoners found completely innocent. He declared his intent to continue the use of presidential signing statements in order to ignore the laws passed by Congress. He protected the corrupt AIG executives whose trading of credit default swaps nearly destroyed the world economy. He sided with the big corporations on copyright extension and enforcement- that is, suing downloaders.

On a less obstruction-of-justice level, Obama pursued bipartisanship at the cost of his own agenda. He sabotaged his own stimulus package by allowing Congress to craft it... with his only contribution being a demand that tax cuts be included, over the objections of his own economists and advisors. He personally intervened to quash a Supreme Court hearing to overturn Don't Ask Don't Tell, while his Justice Department chose a rabid homophobe to write a defense of the Defense of Marriage Act that basically implies homosexuals have no civil rights worth respecting.

And in personal peeves, he cut hydrogen technology research funds in favor of horribly polluting and inefficient biofuels, he supported the weakest and worst of the five committee bills on health care reform, killed what could have been a workable 60-vote public-option Senate bill, backed Joe Lieberman's filibuster threat...

... and as you read yesterday he's about to effectively kill manned exploration of deep space.

All of THAT is why I'm angry at Barack Obama... and regret having voted for him.

Guantanamo: 50 Prisoners to be Held Forever

So McClatchy reports:

The review has angered human rights advocates, however, by concluding that "roughly" 50 of the detainees should be held indefinitely, even though there isn't enough valid evidence to prosecute them.

Only 35 of the men should face trial, either in civilian or military courts, the review concluded. That's far fewer than the 60 or 70 cases that the Pentagon's chief prosecutor has said his unit is preparing to try before military commissions.

. . .

The decision to hold as many as 50 detainees without charges rankled human right advocates, and it marks a turnabout for an administration that criticized the Bush administration for its indefinite-detention regime.

Like Bush, Obama has invoked Congress' authority to wage war and take prisoners after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks as legal justification for holding the 50. A key distinction: The Obama administration has embraced federal court review — called habeas corpus — to examine the intelligence agencies' justification for holding the men, while the Bush administration fought the right of Guantanamo detainees to sue for their freedom, twice to the U.S. Supreme Court, and lost.

The problem, of course, is that these fifty people, or however many it ends up being, all have some evidence against them, but either that evidence was gained through torture (and thus inadmissible in civilian court), or the prisoners themselves were tortured (and thus prosecution would be extremely difficult).

For my part, the answer is simple: make the point that since the Bush administration ordered torture and spoiled the case- in the same way Bush administration prosecutors ruined the corruption case against former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens- we can't try or hold these prisoners; let them go, and blame Bush and Cheney.

Unfortunately, Obama has closed the door on blaming Bush for anything, and indeed for acknowledging that torture was anything other than "a policy difference." He wants torture to be a closed subject, which means that he doesn't dare reopen it by admitting that he can't prosecute these people because of it.

So, instead, he's going to turn his back on yet another campaign promise- the promise to restore habeas corpus. He's going to hold these prisoners "indefinitely." Since there's no real hope that conditions will change so that either they will be harmless or that they can be justly prosecuted, that amounts to "forever."

No lawyers, no challenging their imprisonment, no contact with relatives, nothing. Just four walls, forever.

To any of you who say, "And good job, too- those Guantanamo prisoners are the worst of the worst!", I say: you've drunk Cheney's Kool-Aid. The facts are in the article linked above:

The prison camp has held about 770 prisoners since it opened eight years ago . . . Nearly 580 have been released over the years, according to the official. "More than 530" of those were released during the administration of President George W. Bush, the official said.

So, more than three-quarters of Guantanamo prisoners were completely innocent of anything. And even Bush's corrupt cronies were forced to admit this and release them.

Obviously justice has not been done here- not to those released, and not to those still held.

And equally obviously, Obama is unwilling to do justice now... because doing so would open a subject he desperately wants kept silent.