In the past, I’ve been guilty of contributing to the anger that makes rational debate impossible. I was wrong and I’m sorry I did so. I can’t change the past, although I intend to go back and edit what I have written before, but I can use the future and this web site to try and promote civility and coalition building for a better America.
Because when all is said and done we’re not really conservatives or liberals or moderates. We’re not really Democrats or Republicans or Libertarians or any other stereotyped political label.
I must add one qualifier–my qualifier, not Mr. Thompson’s: This applies only insofar as one accepts underlying American values. To the extent one does not, one places him- or herself outside of this playing field.
The gains went largely to the top 1 percent, whose incomes rose to an average of more than $1.1 million each, an increase of more than $139,000, or about 14 percent.
The new data also shows that the top 300,000 Americans collectively enjoyed almost as much income as the bottom 150 million Americans. Per person, the top group received 440 times as much as the average person in the bottom half earned, nearly doubling the gap from 1980.
I heard a good part of Sampson’s testimony, since I was working at home that day. I couldn’t figure out what he thought he was accomplishing.
But, never fear. Rush thunders to the rescue (you can see it in the link above):
By the way, Bush needn’t worry, because Rush Limbaugh has his back. Which brings us to the quote of the day. After citing a new USA Today-Gallup poll which shows that 72 percent of the American people support a congressional probe of the firings, Rush had this to say: “72 percent of the American people, a bunch of blithering idiots who have no idea what they’re talking about….that is just an indication of so much ignorance out there, lack of civics education and what have you.”
Sooooo, 72 percent of the American people are a bunch of blithering idiots.
Because, I guess, they expect their elected representatives to Adhere to the Rule of Law and to Tell the Truth.
Allegations of voter fraud — someone sneaking into the polls to cast an illicit vote — have been pushed in recent years by partisans seeking to justify proof-of-citizenship and other restrictive ID requirements as a condition of voting. Scare stories abound on the Internet and on editorial pages, and they quickly become accepted wisdom.
But the notion of widespread voter fraud, as these prosecutors found out, is itself a fraud. Firing a prosecutor for failing to find wide voter fraud is like firing a park ranger for failing to find Sasquatch. Where fraud exists, of course, it should be prosecuted and punished. (And politicians have been stuffing ballot boxes and buying votes since senators wore togas; Lyndon Johnson won a 1948 Senate race after his partisans famously “found” a box of votes well after the election.) Yet evidence of actual fraud by individual voters is painfully skimpy.
Addendum–er, Where’s my Playboy Calendar? Oh, it was moved for the painter–3/29/2007:
And with every utterance of that phrase, he sinks deeper into sophistry and deception.
(As if that could be possible.)
The Current Federal Administrator claims that his hands are tied by what the “Commanders on the Ground” say or do not say.
No move can be made without permission of the “Commanders on the Ground.”
The Commander-in-Chief is hostage to a flock of generals and colonels, simple because they are “on the Ground.”
What he fails to mention, of course, is that he put them on the blinking ground to begin with.
What a marvelous technique for avoiding responsibility for one’s actions.
Jeez, next time (I hope there’s not a next time) I get pulled for speeding, maybe I can say that the “Commanders on the Ground” failed to inform me that what I was doing was wrong.
Harold Myerson wonders why, in the face of overwhelming defeat in the 2006 Congressional elections, the Current Federal Administration and Congressional Minority Party continue to act as if nothing has changed. He points out that the really big time Congresssional investigation going on right now–into the firing of reputable and competent U. S. Attorneys–took place after the elections.
He offers four theories. I’m betting on number four, with a liberal dollop of number three mixed in:
There are, I think, four possible, partial explanations. The first is Rudy-ex-machina– the hope that the party will nominate somebody who is not perceived to be part of their current mess and who will sweep them back into power no matter how big a hole they may now be digging for him. The second is a strategy to make it impossible for the Democrats to pass any legislation, and then run against the do-nothing Democrats.
The third is that the alternative reality conveyed by the Republican media — Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and their ilk — has created a Republican activist base that is genuinely not reality-based, and from which the current generation of Republican pols is disproportionately drawn. And the fourth, pertaining specifically to the inability of the administration to stop politicizing government, is that good government is just not in their DNA. Bush and Rove are no more inclined to create a government based on such impartial values as law and science than they are to set up collective farms.
Officers arrested 24-year-old Garth M. Flaherty on Sunday for allegedly stealing 500 to 1,500 pairs of women’s underwear from area laundry rooms since last summer.
When he was White House counsel, for instance, he was widely seen as being under the thrall of vice presidential counsel David S. Addington on such signature issues as torture and presidential power.
It’s not as obvious who has been his minder since he became attorney general two years ago. But presumably either he or, more to the point, the staffers who write his speeches and draw up his talking points still get their marching orders directly from the West Wing.
Andrew Cohen on the Gang that Couldn’t Fire Straight:
The Bush administration’s manufactured connection between the Iraq war and the bigger “war” against terrorism has been made so politically explosive (and the actual connection is so strained) many fall into the trap of seeing one pitted against the other. Get out of Iraq to “fight” the terror war, they argue. Get rid of the Bush administration to focus on Afghanistan and al Qaeda and the still unfinished Sept. 11 business.
Two pieces in The Washington Post should remind us that this is a false and even dangerous assumption. One is an opinion piece by Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor that questions what the war against terror has accomplished other than creating a culture of fear in America. Who would have thought that once hawk and consummate ex-Cold Warrior Zbigniew Brzezinski would become one of the best minds today puncturing the bipartisan embrace of “war”?
Charles Krauthammer doesn’t recognize the difference between “politics” and “making stuff up to win elections.”
(Man oh man, it’s amazing how he contorts himself to defend the indefensible.
And, in the meantime, he tries to revitalize the discredited talking point that Clinton’s firing all the US Attorneys at the beginning of his term, something the Current Federal Administrator also did, with firing sitting U. S Attorneys appointed by the Current Federal Administrator at the beginning of his own malfeasance term during mid-term (something that has happened extremely rarely) , because they “weren’t loyal Bushies.”
There are lots of pretzel factories in Lancaster County, Pa., who can use Mr. Krauthammer, should he retire from being a Bushie apologist columnist.)
How could he allow his aides to go to Capitol Hill unprepared and misinformed, and therefore give inaccurate and misleading testimony? How could Gonzales permit his deputy to say that the prosecutors were fired for performance reasons when all he had to say was that U.S. attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president and the president wanted them replaced?
And why did Gonzales have to claim that the firings were done with no coordination with the White House? That’s absurd. Why shouldn’t there be White House involvement? That is nothing to be defensive about. Does anyone imagine that Janet Reno fired all 93 U.S. attorneys in March 1993, giving them all of 10 days to clear out, without White House involvement?
Wonder what Mr. Krauthammer would have had to say if Clinton fired a bunch of political appointees, not in 1993, when his term began, but, say, in 1997?
You know, I started out just to list some interesting links from today’s late evening reading.
When I was younger and the part of the world in which I grew up was still a truck-farming area, as opposed to a grain-farming area, the migrant stream that came through every year numbered in the tens of thousands. It tripled the population of the county during harvest time.
(Indeed, for three summers I worked with the “Migrant Clinic,” a state and federally-funded project that actually provided medical and dental services to the migrants. My buddy and I did the paperwork and dragged the clinic–which was housed in a house-trailer–from one site to another.)
Ratty, broken down labor camps littered the area, with no toilets other than privies, running water only at a faucet somewhere in the central area of the camp, and, with luck, screens on the windows.
The business model was simple. The farmer dealt with a “labor contractor” (crew leader). The crew leader provided the labor.
The farmer paid the crew leader.
The workers generally got paid, well, not much of anything. You see . . .
It was a mobile company town–everything the workers got they were charged for–food, transportation, whatever. At the end of the week, through some miracle of accounting, the workers owed the crew chief more than their wages. (The descendants of those accountants are now preparing the Current Federal Administrator’s next budget proposal, but that’s another story.)
And God help the worker who tried to get away. If he got away from the camp, where was he? Stuck in the middle of a Jim Crow community with no money, no resources, no one to turn to, and, likely, no bath for a week. He was lucky to make it to the bus stop before he got caught. And, if he were Mexican, he probably didn’t speak enough English to ask for help.
Now, the farmers knew this was how it worked. Hell, I learned how it worked from the farmers. It was sort of common unspoken knowledge.
But they needed the labor. So they turned pretty much just decided not to know what they knew.
(And how often does that still go on, as we turn our backs on the evil around us?)
And the crew leaders knew the farmers knew, but the crew leaders realized that, as long as the crops got picked and no fuss was made, things would be okay and they could move on the the next stop.
And the workers, well, for many of them, it was the only life they knew. They had no way out.
Well, we don’t have many migrants any more. Mechanization has made obsolete the great migrant streams that used to flow up the US on the East Coast, in the Mississippi Valley, the western Midwest, and the West Coast.
(Aside: not all the crew leaders were bad–there were a few who came through each year with pretty much the same crews and who treated them fairly–but they were rare. I do remember one fellow who deserted his crew to run away with a carnival. The next year he was back with the crew. He said of the carnival, “Man, every vehicle they had was stolen–that was no place for me!”)
Thanks to the latest Friday night document dump, let’s just simply compare what attorney general Alberto Gonzales said on March 13, and what he did last Nov. 27.
On March 13, he felt compelled to address the burgeoning evidence that eight U.S. attorneys (all Republicans) had been fired in an unprecedented fashion for being insufficiently zealous about President Bush and the GOP cause. He denied that he had played any role in the firings. Here’s the money quote: “We never had a discussion about where things stood.”
Now it turns out, courtesy of an item on the Justice Department calendar, that Gonzales met with his top aides last Nov. 27, to have a discussion about where things stood. They met in a Justice conference room at 9 a.m., and the title of the meeting was “U.S. Attorney Appointments.” The firings were engineered on Dec. 7.
With any luck, the first of many firings. But one hopes the next round of firings will be justified.
It’s time to let truthfulness back in the front door of the White House.
But I fear it will not be welcomed by the current occupents of that address.
The Nov. 27 meeting, in which the attorney general and at least five top Justice Department officials participated, focused on a five-step plan for carrying out the firings of the prosecutors, Justice Department officials said late yesterday.
There, Gonzales signed off on the plan, which was crafted by his chief of staff, Kyle Sampson. Sampson resigned last week amid a political firestorm surrounding the firings.
Or, as White House Watch reader Charles Posner wrote to me in an e-mail yesterday: “Dan – I think everyone is looking at the Justice Dept. scandal form the wrong end – it’s not the firing, but the hiring that’s the crux of the issue. Rove has a plan and a list. The plan is to install partisans in the prosecutors’ office in order to target Democratic congressmen. Of course, Rove can hand pick each prosecutor without Congress’s involvement as allowed by the secret provisions of the Patriot Act. Now, where’s his list?”
Once a party demonstrates a propensity to issue false explanations and refuses to tell the truth voluntarily, no rational person would trust that party to make voluntary disclosures. One could trust (if at all) only on-the-record testimony, under oath, where there are criminal penalties for lying (if they have questions about that motivational dynamic, they can ask Lewis Libby).
