He sure does. The Board is packed with family friends.

At least 25 of the 41 trustees (61 percent) have personal, financial, and/or political relationships with Bush, and many have been major fundraisers and contributors to his political campaigns. Furthermore, one of the three United Methodist bishops who serve as SMU trustees, Scott Jones, publicly endorsed the Bush project months before a formal proposal was even presented to the Board (Tooley, 2007).

Twenty-two of the trustees have donated to one or more of the Bush political campaigns and/or the Republican National Committee in support of Bush….

Whoosh. So a comfortable majority of the Board are Bush Babies and the vast majority of them are actual Bush donors. “Conflict of interest” is putting it mildly.

And that’s just the beginning. Rev Weaver has uncovered a connection between the library and Bush Buddy oil billionaire Ray Hunt, a man Andrew calls the “central figure in bringing the Bush think tank proposal to SMU.” One of the richest men in the world, Hunt is a long-time Bush donor and appears to have bought himself a seat on the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Hunt and his spouse have donated more than $460,000 to Republican state campaigns, while his company and its employees contributed more than $1 million to Republican causes between 1995 and 2002 (Grimaldi, 2002). He gave $100,000 toward the 2001 Bush inaugural festivities and one of his corporations, Hunt Consolidated, gave another $250,000 toward the Bush 2005 presidential inaugural gala (Public Citizen’s Congress Watch, 2007). In addition, Hunt donated a whopping $35 million toward the Bush library/think tank to secure additional property for the project (Schutze, 2006).

One month after 9/11, Bush honored his friend Ray Hunt with a seat on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), and he was re-appointed in January 2006 (Bryce, 2005). According to the White House, this board operates to offer the president “objective, expert advice” on the conduct of foreign intelligence (Wolffe and Bailey, 2005b). Hunt, with international business interests, has access through PFIAB to intelligence that is unavailable to most members of Congress. This group is privy to the most current and sensitive information gathered by the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the military intelligence organizations, and several others sources (Bryce, 2005). PFIAB operates in complete secrecy. According to Salon magazine, members of this oversight board “are not subject to the Freedom of Information Act and unlike other public servants who work for the president, there is no public disclosure of the PFIAB members’ financial interests” (Bryce, 2005).

That an oil industry billionaire is sitting on an intelligence board at all is – or should be – a major scandal. I should think that if no one else was outraged, rival oil industry execs at least would be livid, but they aren’t. And even the blogosphere has ignored this.

But Andrew still hasn’t scratched the bottom of this slimy barrel. Hunt is a major investor in and a member of the BOD of – wait for it – Halliburton and has been since Cheney was CEO. Despite a raft of Enron-like accounting tricks including offshore tax shelters and lucrative illegal transactions with outlawed countries like Iran, when Bush and Cheney came into office, Halliuburton was in financial straits.

Despite using tax havens and earning millions in profits from rogue states like Iran, Halliburton experienced financial distress. In late 2001, according to Fortune magazine, after a series of financial debacles and billions in asbestos-related liability claims, Halliburton stock plummeted to $8.50 a share, and Wall Street worried about the corporation’s survival (Elkind, 2005). Halliburton’s fortunes changed dramatically with the onset of the “war of choice” in Iraq. Before the war, Halliburton was 19th on the U.S. Army’s list of utilized contractors; by 2003 it was number one. The company has been awarded at least $11 billion in government contracts since Bush took office (Mayer, 2004).

And Ray Hunt has become an even richer billionaire. In March of 2003 Halliburton stock was valued at $20.50 per share and by March of 2007 it was worth $64.12 per share (Rich, 2007). According to the Forbes list of the World’s Richest People in 2003, at the beginning of the Iraq war Ray Hunt was worth $2.3 billion (Forbes, 2003) and by 2007 his fortune had grown to $3.5 billion (Dallas Business Journal, 2007). Both Hunt and Halliburton have been winners in the Iraq war. To provide perspective, the $1.2 billion increase in riches in four years by Hunt is greater than SMU’s total endowment garnered since 1911.

So a $$35M$$ contribution to the library is about the same as you or I dumping 10 bucks into a Salvation Army pot at Xmas, but it was enough to buy Hunt another seat on the SMU board for one of his senior VP’s.

Jeanne L. Phillips, who was appointed as an SMU Trustee in 2004, was personally chosen by Ray Hunt as his senior vice president of corporate affairs and international relations in 2005 (Solomon, 2005).

According to her official U.S. Department of State biography, Ms. Phillips “served as Senior Advisor for National Finance in the Presidential campaign of George W. Bush, developing the original fund-raising plan and structure for the finance organization…” (U.S. Department of State, 2001). She was appointed Ambassador to France and Permanent Representative to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development by President Bush in 2001. She told the New York Times in 2005 that she had been a close friend of the Bushes since 1979 when she worked as a fund-raiser for George H.W. Bush. She postponed her wedding plans to chair the Bush 2005 presidential inaugural events (Solomon, 2005).

There’s lots more here – this is a significant piece of investigative reporting – and the totality does more than just suggest that a majority of the board has been put in place at SMU to make sure Bush’s propaganda center winds up there and remains under his total control. Which – if Rove is running it – will mean making the Nixonian secrecy of Hugh Hewitt’s Nixon Library directorship look like an open-door policy.

Hewitt, now a leading wingnut pundit and the recipient of acres of welfare from conservative foundations, set up the Nixon Library as a sort of twisted joke. (Via Hullabaloo)

The Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace in Yorba Linda has long been the most kicked-around of presidential libraries, and nothing invited more ridicule than the dim, narrow room purporting to describe the scandal that drove its namesake from office.

Venturing into that room, visitors learned that Watergate, which provoked a constitutional crisis and became an enduring byword for abuses of executive power, was really a “coup” engineered by Nixon enemies. The exhibit accused Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein — without evidence — of “offering bribes” to further their famous coverage.

Most conspicuous was a heavily edited, innocent-seeming version of the “smoking gun” tape of June 23, 1972, the resignation-clinching piece of evidence in which Nixon and his top aide are heard conspiring to thwart the FBI probe of Watergate.

This was history as Nixon wanted it remembered, a monument to his decades-long campaign to refurbish his name. Nixon himself approved the exhibit before the library’s 1990 opening.

“Everybody who visited it, who knew the first thing about history, thought it was a joke,” one Nixon scholar, David Greenberg, said of the Watergate gallery. “You didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.”

***

[F]rom the start, the library had trouble being taken seriously. Its first director, Hugh Hewitt, announced that researchers deemed unfriendly would be banned from the archives, singling out the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward as a candidate for exclusion. Scholars cried foul; Hewitt revoked the plan.

You can bet your bottom dollar and the farm that Bush Library Director Karl Rove won’t.

Longtime civil rights activist Al Sharpton headlined an energetic rally at the Douglas County courthouse Thursday in support of Genarlow Wilson, who is serving a 10-year prison sentence for engaging in oral sex with a 15-year-old girl when he was 17.

“Ten years in jail is not a correction,” Sharpton, a onetime Democratic presidential candidate, told a crowd of elected officials, clergy and other supporters that county authorities estimated at more than 250. “It is wicked… It is immoral… And it is illegal.”

Wilson’s mother, Juannessa Bennett, stood by Sharpton’s side as he spoke at the entrance to the county courthouse, where Wilson stood trial.

“The case of Genarlow Wilson … is a national issue,” Sharpton said, “because if they can establish a precedent in Georgia, it will be a precedent that we will have to live with in California, New York, Oregon and everywhere.”

“And as long as they can lock up her son,” he added about Bennett, “they can lock up your son.”

Douglas County District Attorney David McDade, whose office originally prosecuted Wilson, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

I’m not surprised. McDade is one of the two nitwits who created this situation and he’s been hiding from the press ever since. Sharpton’s rally may not have had any effect on him, but it had an effect on somebody. Today the State Supreme Court reversed itself and voted to hold both the appeals hearing and the bond hearing two months earlier than expected.

A hearing is now set in Genarlow Wilson’s case for July 20 at 10 a.m. In voting today, the court reversed an earlier decision to deny a speedier process, a ruling that would have delayed a hearing on the appeal until October.

Attorney General Thurbert Baker is appealing a Monroe County Superior Court judge’s decision to reduce Wilson’s felony conviction to a misdemeanor and free him from prison. Baker said the judge overstepped his authority when he granted Wilson’s habeas corpus last month. Wilson’s attorney is arguing his 10-year prison sentence is cruel and unusual punishment.

The court also decided to hold an expedited hearing on a Douglas County Superior Court judge’s decision to deny bond for Wilson pending Baker’s appeal.

Well, it’s a step in the right direction.

Chris Bowers at MyDD writes every so often about the phenomenon of blogging itself. His thoughts/insights are usually interesting but it has often seemed to me that he, like a lot of others in the online world, misses a key point:

Online life ain’t real life.

Essentially, Chris is trying to explain the difference between the MyDD and dKos “communities” (you’ll see in a minute why I put quotes around that word). The groundwork:

Literally dozens of prominent blogs and bloggers have arisen out of the Dailykos community, and as such these blogs and bloggers still have a tendency to share links, readers and commenters with one another. In a real way, it is just a new transformation of the community. Considering how much they share, it should also come as no surprise that these blogs also have a tendency to share arguments with one another, and the physical space represented by the many different blogs allows those arguments to create factions, and increasingly entropy, much more so than any other time in the past.

The comparison:

I am not sure at all why so many bloggers are obsessed with their stature within the Dailykos community, and the level of personal respect they receive from Markos. Dailykos obsession actually does not even make sense to me as a way to grow your blog, since if you treat your blog as an extension of Dailykos, it will never truly come into its own. Apart from being stuck on Dailykos, I also wonder if it has something to do with having a close-knit, socializing community on a blog that tends to function at its best (that is, have its most political impact) when it operates in a more work-oriented, professional manner.

***

As far as I can tell, the reason there is no such thing as Meta-MyDD is because there is no MyDD community, as such. Sure, we have frequent commenters and diarists, but what really separates MyDD from sites like Dailykos, BooMan Tribune, Fire Dog Lake and My Left Wing is that while they build a family-like community, we instead act as though we are political professionals.

The conclusion:

There are benefits to communities, but there are dangers too. The “meta” fights we have seen recently are clearly one of the dangers. How to approach the balance between the serious, political work of a blog and the social, informal, pleasurable work of meeting people online is clearly one of the main dilemmas of anyone with a large blog. On MyDD, we tack hard toward the professional side of things, perhaps to the determent of our community. Historically, on sites like Dailykos, the social side of the equation has been foregrounded to a greater extent, which for most people probably makes the site more fun to participate in than MyDD. However, given the nature of online communication and the difficulty of coherence within large groups, depressing, mean-spirited, fractious “meta” wars are perhaps an inevitable side-effect. Part of the community will always be in turmoil, and for some prominent members of the community, death by meta will eventually result.

Chris has latched onto a half-truth – which is, I suppose, better than none – but his personal/professional categorizing approaches the main truth even as it skips right on by it: online communities aren’t and never can be real communities.

Maybe graduate school stunted his ability to see the obvious (read that first, virtually impenetrable, graf). Wouldn’t be the first time that happened. For whatever reason, he seems to think the “community” breakdown online is a function of size – that as dKos got bigger, the social element got pushed to the back to be replaced by competition for attention. His analysis of the problems size creates is accurate as far as it goes, but size only exacerbates the tensions already present but less visible – and risible – when a blog community is smaller. The bigger it gets, the more competition there is, but getting bigger didn’t create the competition, it only shoved it to the surface and made it more cut-throat.

Let’s start with the basics: blogs are a communication tool. And that’s all they are. Any social function they take on isn’t real. Social interaction absent a focus on a larger communicative purpose is an illusion, a mirror that mimics reality but isn’t itself real.

There has been a lot of guff written over the last few years about how online communities are changing the way we think about socializing and the patterns of that socialization. It’s all bullshit. It can’t be done. Socializing is a personal, irl activity only.

Any decent psychologist could have told you that 20 years ago. They used to point out in Psych 101 that writing letters as the sole instrument of social contact was a subtle way of avoiding true contact because it put the personalization at one remove, making it both safe and – in effect – impersonal by evading the complication of face-to-face interactions. That is even truer online than it is in the real world. What Chris describes as “flame wars” – and what we’ve all seen and would describe with the same phrase – are, if you think back on it, perfectly recognizable as the equivalent of massive, frenzied, 8th-grade note-passing.

To put it bluntly, anybody who thinks online communities can replace or supplant real-life socialization, or are the equal of it, is fantasizing. They can’t. They can be adjuncts and/or extensions, but only if they are tightly tied to a communicative purpose because that’s all words are good for. They can’t replace touch, sight or sound, and without the full involvement of all senses, as well as that invisible radar that operates below conscious level whenever you interact with someone irl, no social contact can be anything more than a thin, insubstantial reflection of actual social interaction.

Words have power but they also have limits, and the limits are pretty severe. The list of what verbal/written communication can’t achieve is far longer than the list of things it can achieve. The turn of dKos into a mecca for flame-wars was inevitable the minute it allowed socialization to become an important element of its identity, regardless of its size. Getting bigger only aggravates the inherent flaws in any verbal-only “community”. An online community that puts purpose above socializing will mitigate the weaknesses of verbal interaction and maximize its strengths. An online community that reverses that emphasis will eventually find itself trapped in the 8th-grade lav, bitching and pitching gossip.

This has nothing to do with good intentions or the character of any given leader. It’s in the nature of the beast. The Gutenberg press did not – because it could not – revolutionize human verbal communication. It only broadened its scope and changed the way it was presented. I don’t want to minimize its effect but it’s important to understand the limits of its core function in this context: the internet is the 21st century Gutenberg press. It can – and has – revolutionized the way communication between human beings is presented and effected mechanically, but that’s all it can do. It won’t – can’t – change our neurological imperatives or the way our synapses fire. It can’t replace so much as the raise of an eyebrow or the curl of a lip, much less tell you whether that curve is a smile or a snarl.

There is a general misperception nowadays that verbal-only communication is as vibrant, as comprehensive as real-life interaction. That’s hogwash. It isn’t. Tone is an incredibly important, perhaps crucial, element in interpersonal relationships but it takes a really good writer to make words accurately reflect the intended tone of a communication. Even a cursory examination of blog-writers, let alone their myriad commenters, proves quite conclusively that good writers are as rare in the blogosphere as they are everywhere else. It’s difficult – when it’s not impossible – to tell whether most writers here are throwing flowers or brickbats, thus the invention of emoticons. Which can be useful in establishing that tone but have limitations of their own.

Worse, it can be difficult – when it’s not impossible – to figure out what somebody is trying to say, or, indeed, whether they’re saying anything at all. I have read hundreds of posts and comments so badly written that they amount to nothing more than gibberish. You don’t know what the writer means, let alone how s/he means it.

Verbal-only communication is rife with opportunities for misunderstanding. It’s hard to fully socialize irl with all elements alive and pumping away. It’s impossible when you only have words. What you can do is pass information and connect with people on the basis of shared interests or purpose. Expecting more than that is bound to be an exercise in futility.

Because the whole construct, as I argued in a series called “The Myth of Corporate-Style Governing” (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, with support here), was mythology. Corporations in fact often – even usually – reward ass-kissing over efficiency, waste enormous amounts of money in executive perks and bad ideas, produce shoddy and over-priced goods, are almost always satisfied with the appearance of success rather than the reality, have an unswerving faith in PR and advertising as replacements for quality, and have cultures which foster management teams and executives who are so far removed from the real world, so arrogant, and so used to blind obedience that they will deny problems and difficulties right up to the point where the company implodes in its own lies. (See Enron, WorldCom, the S&L’s, and too many other examples to enumerate here.)

If none of that sounds familiar, you haven’t been paying attention. Every standard corporate idea/belief/fad/illusion/technique/management style has been on display in the Bush Administration for the past 6 years. Not surprising given that virtually the whole admin was staffed by ex-corporate executives, lawyers, PR flacks, and lobbyists. We have been given the chance to find out just what “running govt like a corporation” looks like, and it’s not pretty.

Maybe that’s why we don’t hear that mantra all that much any more. The Republicans who used to run – and win – on a platform centered around making govt perform like a business have abandoned that approach wholesale as “corporate-style governing” has come to be synonymous with corruption, inefficiency, and incompetence. Various members of the Bush Admin illustrate the usual corporate management types that are familiar from business literature:
Bush: the “son” who walks into the Head Office without either experience or knowledge of the business and proceeds to destroy it through ignorance, arrogance, and greed;
Cheney: the “faux-military leader” who cracks out orders like a drill sergeant, punishes dissenters, and demands unthinking, unswerving loyalty while insisting even as the ship sinks that running for the lifeboats shows an unacceptable level of “negativity”;
Rice: the “negotiator” whose chief talent lies in her ability to suck up to the Boss and parlay her sheer ignorance into an image of thoughtful open-mindedness ideal for arbitrating disagreements between rival factions;
Rove: the “genius” whose relative intelligence although not all that great makes him stand out in this confederacy of dunces, and whose unscrupulous, conscienceless behaviour makes him much admired by the others as “somebody who knows how to get things done”.

These are all well-known prototypes of corporate managers, forged in the incubator-like hothouse of cut-throat corporate politics, who, like rare tropical fish developed specifically for aquariums, could never survive outside their corporate bubble because they have no actual skills valuable in the real world. Michael Moore used to go around asking CEO’s to do some simple thing that was central to their company’s product (for instance, he once challenged the Chairman of IBM to format a CD; he couldn’t do it) and discovered that most of them were helpless, totally ignorant of the product they were supposed to be in charge of making.

Which brings us, in a roundabout but significant way, to Donald Rumsfeld and the Iraq war.

In today’s WaPo, Andrew Cockburn – who just finished a biography of Rumsfeld that’s coming out this week – examines Rummy’s managerial style and finds that for all the conventional wisdom about his “competence”, the reality is: he sucked.

Defending Donald H. Rumsfeld in the face of a furious critique by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Vice President Cheney paid tribute last week to the former defense secretary’s “superb job in managing the Pentagon under extraordinarily difficult circumstances.”

Cheney’s is not a unique view. Even many of Rumsfeld’s detractors tend to assume that he was an effective manager, however disastrous his decisions on Iraq may have been. Throughout his Pentagon tenure, he carried the useful reputation, bolstered by his well-advertised spell as a college wrestler and his experience as a corporate CEO, of being a tough executive who brooked no nonsense from trembling subordinates to get the job done.

***

But an examination of his record reveals that, in fact, Rumsfeld was a very poor manager. Despite his gruff theatrics, he shirked the task of leadership at the Defense Department, failing to restrain the services in their pursuit of parochial agendas. Though he spewed ideas and injunctions daily, he routinely neglected to follow them up. Pledged to the “transformation” of the cold war military establishment in 2001, he left it six years later almost entirely untransformed, save for the wreckage wrought by the Iraqi adventure. Even in concept, his program for “transformation” amounted to little more than notions articulated as bumper stickers, and poorly thought out ones at that.

This description would tend to identify Rumsfeld as yet another standard corporate manager-type: the “Big Picture” guy with meta-ideas – most of them half-formed and unrealistic – and no interest in or ability for the detail work necessary to make them happen. That guy is a “delegator”: he leaves the details to underlings that he can blame when his unrealistic ideas prove to be unrealistic.

The “Big Picture Guy” is also recognized by his short attention span. He tends to spin out “big ideas” in gross lots. Upper execs and boards of directors are always dazzled by the very magnitude of his idea output and fooled into thinking he’s an innovator. In fact, he can rarely remember any given idea from one week to the next and follow-up is almost non-existent. Thus:

The notion that Rumsfeld at least exercised tight control of the sprawling Pentagon bureaucracy is encapsulated in his well-known use of “snowflakes,” short memos of injunction, query or complaint that he dictated and distributed in manic quantities. True, junior officials may have quaked at the sight of a Rumsfeld emissary approaching with the dreaded missive in hand. As often as not the note reflected some querulous Rumsfeld whim, such as the July 2001 complaint, notorious among his personal staff, regarding the width of the lemon slices served with the secretary’s iced tea. Over time, subordinates came to realize that their fearsome chief seldom followed up on these memos. Once written (and there were often more than 100 a day) they were often forgotten.

The missives usually set a date, sometimes within a day, for confirmation that the assigned task had been completed. “In the beginning,” said one formerly high-ranking individual who routinely received scores of snowflakes, “I’d work late to get the job done and respond by the set time. Then I started letting it slide for a week, and no one seemed to notice.” Eventually he stopped responding altogether, and still heard nothing.

The fact that Rumsfeld earned his reputation as a successful CEO from a single tenure at a single company suggests that the work responsible for the turnaround at Searle & Co, a global pharmaceutical firm, probably wasn’t his. He failed miserably in his other two stints as a CEO, being fired from one company and resigning from the second to return to govt.

Government is in many ways a lot less forgiving than the private sector to a screw-up. Real people get hurt and they get hurt right out in public where everyone can see them. Rumsfeld’s hopeless incompetence could be covered up in the private sector, and was by companies worried about their reputations. At the top of the Washington food chain, however, there are a lot fewer places to hide.

Rumsfeld is a classic example of why corporate types should probably NEVER be put in positions of power in the govt.

They’re just not up to it.

While a majority of Republican voters continue to support Mr. Bush and the Iraq war, including the recent increase in American troops deployed, there are concerns that the war is undermining the party’s political position.

Would some one please explain to the Times that that train done left the station, like, a year ago?

Republicans are now officially OUT. Of favor, of time, of patience. The country (see, “election, Nov ‘06″) has had it. We’re fed up to the teeth with the whole clinically-insane lot of them. With their wars and their stupidity and their greed and their theivery, with their nutbag theories and their bragging and their lies and their lack of connection to any kind of actual, observable reality – all of it.

Maybe we ought to re-name it the New York Times-Warp.

Vice President Dick Cheney’s office refused to cooperate with an agency that oversees classified documents, then tried to abolish the office when it challenged the actions, House oversight committee Chairman Henry Waxman said.

The National Archives’ Information Security Oversight Office is charged by presidential order with ensuring that classified information and documents are properly handled by executive branch agencies.

According to a letter from William Leonard, director of the oversight office, Cheney’s office argued it did not meet the definition of an executive branch agency and therefore was exempt.

When Leonard unsurprisingly refused to accept this absurd interpretation, Cheney threatened to abolish the ISOO altogether, claiming there’s a “presidential order under consideration” right now that would do just that.

It’s all about making sure nobody can see – ever – Bush Administration documents that Cheney wants only loyal Bushies who can be trusted to a) keep their mouths shut, or b) twist whatever they find in the presidential papers to reflect the party line. In the background is the Bush Library to be built at SMU.

I said when I heard that Rove was putting himself in position to run it that Bush and Chenry intended to make it a propaganda outlet with severe restrictions as to who could see what, and that historians were going to go postal when they discovered that only Bush Republicans, tame GOP hacks, and the most extreme of tame neoconservative whackos would be allowed to see the “secret files”.

Meaning the only files open to genuine historians will be of the “what the president had for breakfast” and “presidential golf scores while on vacation” variety.

But the bald arrogance displayed by the patent silliness of his justification is breath-taking. It’s as if he’s reached the point where he believes he’s so powerful, so untouchable, so god-like unreachable that his explanations don’t have to make even the slightest, most casual sense. As if he could just as easily have said he doesn’t have to obey the law because the Great Golden Mouse appeared to him in a dream and told him he didn’t have to, and that we should consider that explanation Good Enough.

That’s our dictatorial VP’s “unitary executive” in action: a few words denoting his Imperial wishes are all that’s needed to gut the entire section of the Constitution dealing with the Executive Branch: the VP isn’t part of it any more because the VP says so and his puppet prez will sign an order to that affect whenever L’il Dick tells him to.

And as if that weren’t bad enough, take a gander at the responses:
Henry Waxman thinks Cheney’s unilateral disembowelment of the Constitution is “problematic because it could place national security at risk.” WTF?! Uh, Henry? How about because it puts the Constitution at risk?
When Leonard tried to audit the VP’s office to make a determination – legally mandated -if the VP was handling documents properly, he was thrown out of the office. When he wrote asking why the VP wasn’t willing to comply with the law, Cheney’s COS, David Addington, handed him the “my VP ain’t no stinkin’ executive” line and dismissed him. Leonard responded by expressing concern that such a legal stance “could impede access to classified information by the OVP staff….”

Are you guys kidding with that shit? The Vice President of the United States declares he isn’t part of the Executive Branch and can do anything he damn well pleases without oversight or interference, fuck the Constitution, and all you’re worried about is “national security” (gimme a break) and your potential loss of access?

Absolutely stunning. We are at this stage so apparently inured to monomaniacal statements of supreme power coming out of the mouths of this Admin’s chief members that we don’t even notice them any more. They excite no comment, much less dismay and/or anger.

I reckon it’s time for the Democrats to have to admit that between Bush’s “signing statements” declaring the law doesn’t apply to him and Cheney’s arbitrary and unilateral re-writing of the Constitution whenever he feels like it, never mind all the rest of it – secret prison systems, Americans being “disappeared”, massive electronic eavesdropping programs, illegal wars and illegal detentions, the casual destruction of rights like habeus corpus, and on and on and on – the “Constitutional crisis” they’ve been trying to avoid is already on us and has been for at least 3 years.

Get off your asses. Impeach the bastards. These guys are why the Founders created impeachment. For chrissake, use it.

Update 6/23/07: My pessimism in thinking this was going to be ignored as so many other similar statements by Cheney and the Bushies have been was, for once, unfounded. Last night it was a Big Story on NPR’s ATC -which was nothing short of shocking – and today it’s everywhere.

* Eli at Firedoglake has a nice round-up you can start with, including a precious quote from Rahm Emanuel, of all people, and a nail-in-the-coffin quote from a Constitutional scholar.

“Here’s a guy who raises ‘executive privilege’ to historic levels to exempt himself from all rules and oversight, and now he says he’s not part of the executive branch?” said [Berkeley Constitutional scholar Gordon] Silverstein. “Here we have a subordinate part of the executive branch asserting independent constitutional authority even against its own superior. It is flabbergasting.”

* The Mahablog’s Barbara O’Brien tries giving Cheney a 6th-grade-level lesson in Civics, but I’m not too sure but what even that is over his head.Dick:

There are three branches of government. Those are the executive, the legislative, and the judicial. The Constitution puts the Vice President’s office in the executive branch. If you aren’t part the executive branch, then what branch do you think you are in?

* Digby reminds everyone that Josh Marshal picked up this story five2 months ago, a lot of progressive bloggers were all over it and the media ignored it. Now it’s a “big story”?

Granted, it’s unreasonable for me to think that any reporters read this blog, but many of them read Josh Marshall and certainly they must have read the story in US News that followed the original item several days later. It evoked a huge yawn and the rest of us finally gave up. Apparently nobody cares that the Vice president doesn’t even believe her has to comply with presidential executive orders. Personally, I find that odd, and if I had been a reporter I might have asked the president if he thinks the VP answers to him or not.

* Steve Benen notes that the reasons are obvious but even for this gang, Cheney’s off the map.

Look, I can appreciate the fact that the White House is in a jam here. Bush, Cheney, and the rest of the gang repeatedly mishandled classified materials during a time of war, got caught, ignored their own rules, and is now struggling to rationalize their conduct. When the federal agency responsible for oversight tried to do its job, the Vice President reportedly tried to abolish the agency. This isn’t a fact-pattern that’s easy to spin.

But the explanations thus far have been transparently ridiculous, up to and including the notion that the Vice President, as defined in Article II of the Constitution, isn’t actually part of the executive branch of government.

As for the MSM, it’s toeing a thin line, by-and-large concentrating on it as part of the on-going power struggle by Cheney to keep everything he does secret.

* The WaPo’s Peter Baker tries “putting it in context” – as usual, a euphemism for ducking the main issue and avoiding calling a spade a, you know, spade.

The dispute centers on a relatively obscure process but underscores a wider struggle waged in the past 6 1/2 years over Cheney’s penchant for secrecy. Since becoming vice president, he has fought attempts to peer into the inner workings of his office, shielding an array of information such as the names of industry executives who advised his energy task force, costs and other details about his travel, and Secret Service logs showing who visits his office or official residence.

The aggressive efforts to protect the operations of his staff have usually pitted Cheney against lawmakers, interest groups or media organizations, sometimes going all the way to the Supreme Court. But the fight about classified information regulation indicates that the vice president has resisted oversight even by other parts of the Bush administration.

A quick scan of several other papers – including the NYT and, surprising to me, the Globe – suggests that most of the MSM is doing what it did before: ignoring the whole thing in favor of coverage of the newly released Red Herring Papers, wherein the Bush Admin hopes to avoid scrutiny for a few days by turning the attention of our ADD-laced media onto some 40-yr-old antics by the CIA in which a major right-wing bugaboo – Kennedy – figures prominently.

Call this one: Enabling enablers enable.

Update 2: Tony Snow stand-in Dana Perino defended L’il Dick’s out-where-the-buses-don’t-run proclamation of untouchability by calling it a “non-issue” and explaining that the Emperor never thought the Exec Order he signed applied to either of them.

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Cheney is not obligated to submit to oversight by an office that safeguards classified information, as other members and parts of the executive branch are. Cheney’s office has contended that it does not have to comply because the vice president serves as president of the Senate, which means that his office is not an “entity within the executive branch.”

“This is a little bit of a nonissue,” Perino said at a briefing dominated by the issue. Cheney is not subject to the executive order, she said, “because the president gets to decide whether or not he should be treated separately, and he’s decided that he should.”

Their arrogance is getting more and more bald, just like I said. Now the WH PR flack thinks nothing of asserting that Bush gets to do anything he wants, including open;ly flouting laws he signed, just because he says so. When the PR flack is that open about it, it means they’re not bothering even to pretend they aren’t monarchists any more. The Imperial Presidency is now openly dictatorial in everything but name. If you’ve got a legitimate solution to this short of impeachment, which the Dems WILL NOT DO, we’d sure like to hear it.

So when a high-priced corporate attorney suggested a legal scam to get outside insurers to pay for the clean-up instead, the Council jumped on his plan with both feet. Except for Susan Hitchcock, ‘who was derided by colleagues and threatened with censure when she was the only city official to oppose the plan.’

‘The plan’ was a complicated swindle that involved blackmailing the city’s insurance carriers with endless lawsuits and legal delays, tying them up in court for years until they agreed to settle even though the city had never bought insurance from them that covered this situation (it would have been ‘too expensive’). But the plan needed financing to cover legal costs until such time as the insurance companies paid up. Since going to the taxpayers was off the table, the lawyer who suggested the swindle, Michael C Donovan, went to Wall Street and brought in Lehman Bros.

The plan went like this: The city would borrow $16 million from Lehman at 25% interest to finance a barrage of lawsuits. Donovan and his firm would pursue the suits, billing at rates of up to $425 an hour. Courts would shift all the costs to insurance companies. In the end, Lodi would clean up the problem without having to pay for it.

Get out your calculator and figure 25% on $$16MIL$$–Lehman Bros had poached the Lodi City Council like they were eggs. Susan Hitchcock:

“Boy, were we duped. The more I learn, the more I realize it was about greed. There is no free lunch, and everyone knows that.”

Everyone but the rest of the Council, it seems. The result of their paticipation in this scheme was predictable.

Today, the strategy is a shambles, picked apart by state and federal courts and condemned by a federal judge as “environmental litigation for profit.”Donovan has been fired, along with the Lodi city attorney who pushed the plan. Lodi has sued Lehman, alleging the deal was illegal. Lehman has countersued to collect its debt — roughly $25 million to date, city officials say — pitting some of the country’s biggest law firms against a city that once made national news for banning silly string from its downtown parade.

Lodi’s financial future is in question. Interest is accumulating at $325,000 a month. The pollution has spread. And criminal investigations are underway.

This is a cautionary tale. The anti-tax brigade is willing to poison you tomorrow to keep a few bucks in their pockets today. They’re willing to sign onto complicated fraud schemes, engage in legal blackmail, and mortgage the city–your city–to big corporate bankers rather than spend a dime of their own to clean up a mess they helped make. They acknowledge no–NO–responsibility to the society which nurtured them, and no call that society might have on their purses, however legitimate. They would rather watch you die–that’s a price they’re willing to pay.

But you go ahead and vote for them again. Vote for the fantasy, vote for their charm and ‘optimism’. Vote for how good they look on tv and how easy they make everything sound. After all, life is just a reality tv show, and if yours gets cancelled, why, there’ll be another along in a minute to take its place.

Over at Norwegianity, The Wege has nominated Witness for not one but two – count ‘em, two (2) – Koufax awards.

I would be flabbergastedly honored beyond belief and/or credulity were it not for the fact that I have a sneaking suspicion he may have been imbibing a wee bit too much in celebration of his rash clearing up. Still, his other choices seem sane (except that he doesn’t understand the difference between a “community blog” and a “group blog”), so maybe it wasn’t a drunken accident after all. If not, then I own to being flabbergastedly honored beyond belief and/or credulity. So there. Learn more about SEO Company!

Incidentally, Wege, a “community blog” is a diary site like dKos or My DD; a “group blog” is a blog with multiple users posting to it. The American Street would be a group blog.

Having been offline for the whole year, I’m not going to participate in the awards because I’m too far out of touch. Some of my favorite blogs have disappeared or are about to, and I haven’t even begun to catch up on the new ones. But if I was going to vote, here’s who I’d vote for:

Best Blog

Ordinarily, I’d agree with Wege on Hullabaloo, but the thing is, it’s now a group blog since two other people post there regularly. I’d have to go with Eric Martin’s Total Information Awareness, a blog that is consistently thoughtful, challenging, and provocative. It’s also nicely written for a policy wonk.

Best Blog – Pro division

David Sirota (Sirotablog) – he always gets there first.

Best Blog Community

Talk to Action, which tracks the doings of the religious right and is almost invariably well-written.

Best Writing

Hands down, the Wege is right: James Wolcott. There’s a lot of good writing out there but Walcott is in a class by himself, a real original in Blogistan. (Michael Berube would be a close second but he’s quitting.)

Best Post

Disqualified. Having been offline for the year, I couldn’t even hazard a guess.

Best Series

David Neiwert’s “Eliminationism in America”, a comprehensive unmasking of the frightening totalitarianism advocated and supported by our crazy right wing extremists (you know, the “fringe” that’s been in charge of the govt the past 6 years).

Best Single Issue Blog

I’d have to go with Jordan Barab’s Confined Space, a blog devoted to safety issues in the workplace which is not just well-written but relentless in tracking those issues and advocating for workers. Jordan’s series of posts on the BP explosion is outstanding and heart-breaking. (If only he’d called it a “series”, he’d have given Orcinus a run for its money.)

Best Group Blog

I agree with the Wege again: The American Street, an almost perfect mix of personalities and POV’s.

Most Humorous Blog

With the apparent demise of Fafblog (a great loss), this one is wide open as far as I’m concerned. If pressed, I think I’d have to give the nod to Jon Swift, who is the only blogger I’ve read recently who wrote 3 posts in a row that I laughed out loud at. Satire befitting his namesake.

Most Humorous Post

Disqualified. Same reason as above.

Most Deserving of Wider Recognition

As the Wege claims he’s been taken out of this by definition, Fact-esque, a blog that covers everything and covers it well.

Best Consonant Level Blog

As requested and deserved, The Wege. There are a lot of link-blogs around but Nowegianity is clearly the best of them. A certain amount of spicy commentary (not enough for my taste) and every link is worth clicking through. (If you wrote more, Wege, I think you’d be up there for Best Blog. I’d vote for you.)

Best Expert Blog

This is a tough one. Lawyers, Guns, and Money and Phil Carter’s Intel Dump are both excellent but again, they’ve become group blogs since I’ve been away. I think I stand with the Wege once more: Pharyngula. PZ never quits.

Best New Blog

Well, modesty forbids….

Best Human Equality Blog

I have to admit to a real weakness for Echidne of the Snakes, where snark, righteous anger, and intelligent criticism meet in the name of human (especially female human) rights – an unusual combination of characteristics in only one person. (She desperately needs a site makeover, though. Ugly ugly….)

Best Coverage of State or Local Issues

Another tough one, but my pick is Blue Oregon. It covers everything in the state from soup-to-nuts (especially nuts) – the most comprehensive of the local blogs that I’ve read.

Best Commenter

Disqualified. For the third time and the same reason.

FWIW, that’s it. Those of you who’ve been online and have opinions, you can vote here. Good luck to everybody. As for me, I’m just glad I was mentioned a bare month after I came back. I was never mentioned during the four previous years, but I’m not bitter.

I’m not.

Really.

Much….

Steeped in biblical morality and evangelical scholarship, the framework for public engagement could change how the estimated 30 million evangelicals in this country are viewed by liberals and conservatives alike.It affirms a religiously based commitment to government protections for the poor, the sick and disabled, including fair wages, healthcare, nutrition and education. It declares that Christians have a “sacred responsibility” to protect the environment.

But it also hews closely to a traditional evangelical emphasis on the importance of families, opposition to homosexual marriage and “social evils” such as alcohol, drugs, abortion and the use of human embryos for stem-cell research. It reaffirms a commitment to religious freedom at home and abroad.

In the midst of a presidential election year, war and terrorism, the framework says Christians in their devotion to country “must be careful to avoid the excesses of nationalism.” In domestic politics, evangelicals “must guard against over-identifying Christian social goals with a single political party, lest nonbelievers think that Christian faith is essentially political in nature.”

“This is a maturing of the evangelical public mind,” said Richard Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, one of the nation’s principal evangelical schools. “Instead of just assuming an automatic alliance with a specific party — and that’s been traditionally the Republicans — it says evangelicals ought to be more thoughtful.”

This could have enormous consequences between now and November, no doubt, but even more important in my mind is its recognition and rejection of the Christian theocratic movement that has been using many of these evangelical churches as launching pads–a workable power-base–in their efforts to force America to become a Christian nation with a Christian govt run by Christian ministers using Biblical law rather than the Constitution.

Christian Reconstructionists long ago wrote off the mainstream Protestant sects, but they assumed–and acted as if–evangelicals would support them without much thinking about it. Two of the strongest Christian theocrats with the largest followings–Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell–have been insisting for years that evangelicals were in agreement with them and that they represented the entire movement. It must have been a shock to discover that their encroachment on mainstream evangelical territory had been denounced by the very people they claim to represent.

One of the NAE’s most heartening statements is aimed directly at the Robertson/Falwell/Randall Terry end of the spectrum.

[U]nder the new public engagement framework, evangelicals may find themselves sometimes at odds with political allies in the culture wars that have buffeted the country for two decades. Genuflecting to political realism, the new framework calls on evangelicals to seek to work with whom they disagree in common cause. The framework also recognizes that in the give and take of political compromise, they may frequently have to settle for “half a loaf.”

This is an explicit rejection of the growing radical right-wing Christian policy of refusing even to talk to its opposition on the grounds that anyone who disagrees with them is the spawn of Satan promoting his agenda and can therefore have nothing to say that a god-fearing Christian should listen to. While Falwell has at least ‘genuflected’ toward the need to ‘open a dialogue’ with the Enemy, though he avoids doing it himself, Robertson and his ilk have consistently denounced those who would compromise their definition of ‘Christian values’, and their views have been gaining political ground. Tom DeLay, who never loses an opportunity to expound on his born-again evangelical roots, has used the House rules to bar Democrats from House conferences and done everything else he can think of to make them so marginal as to be irrelevant to the governing process. As a practicing evangelical, he would now have to revise that strategy and start consulting them on upcoming bills and otherwise treating them as actual members of the House of Representatives. (Don’t hold your breath ’til he does it, though.)

This is the most encouraging sign I’ve seen in years that, as a core group, the evangelicals are not going to allow themselves to continue to be used as CR cannon-fodder without at least discussing if that’s how they want to end up. It’s even more encouraging that they have reaffirmed the Sermon on the Mount–the basis for traditional Christian attitudes toward society’s weak links–as a ‘core Christian value’ and explicitly identified the environment as a Chrsitian concern, something that’s been missing the last twenty years or so.

It’s equally encouraging that nowhere in this document will you find the power of corporations as surrogates of god affirmed–or even mentioned.

An eighth U.S. attorney announced her resignation yesterday, the latest in a wave of forced departures of federal prosecutors who have clashed with the Justice Department over the death penalty and other issues.

Margaret Chiara, the 63-year-old U.S. attorney in Grand Rapids, Mich., told her staff that she was leaving her post after more than five years, officials said. Sources familiar with the case confirmed that she was among a larger group of prosecutors who were first asked to resign Dec. 7. (emphasis added)

What “other issues”? The only reason Alberto ever gave was “performance issues”, whatever they are. That covers a lot of ground. Reporter Dan Eggan has been talking to these unnamed “prosecutors” who have been feeding him…what? Legitimate information or Gonzales talking-points? Deputy AG Paul McNulty, Alberto’s go-to PR guy, stuck to the script with one exception.

Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty told senators earlier this month that all but one of the prosecutors were fired for “performance-related” reasons. McNulty said that former U.S. attorney Bud Cummins of Little Rock was removed so the job could be given to a former aide to presidential adviser Karl Rove.

He gave them that one because he had to but they’re standing firm on the others: “performance-related”. Except:

U.S. District Judge Robert Holmes Bell, the chief judge in Michigan’s Western District, said in an interview yesterday that Chiara has an excellent reputation in Grand Rapids.

“This is a very classy, distinguished, highly regarded public servant,” said Bell, who was appointed to the bench during the Reagan administration. “She’s one of the best United States attorneys we’ve had in this district, and all of my colleagues agree. . . . To have her suddenly disappear without warning catches us all flat-footed.”

The scuttlebutt Eggan is picking up, wherever it originated, is that Chiara’s out because she doesn’t believe in the death penalty. Uh-huh.

Chiara — who had once studied to be a nun — is personally opposed to capital punishment, but in 2002 she presided over the first death penalty case in Michigan in more than 60 years.

So she’s doing her job even in a case where the outcome is anathema to her. Yet Gonzales is firing her for supposedly poor performance. Apparently “performance” is being defined by Bush Lapdog Alberto to be synonymous with “personal belief”. It isn’t enough for the Bushies if you do what they tell you to do, you have to believe in it.

But this all smacks of red herring to me. What I suspect is actually happening is that Gonzales is demanding his US Attorneys pursue courses some of them are resisting either because the cases are bogus (Padilla comes to mind) or because the prosecutions themselves would force prosecutors to defend patently illegal activities by the Bush Administration or its Republican supporters, or to drop cases that embarrass them. The Randy Cunningham prosecution, for example, has been nicely sidelined by the firing of the US attorney who was handling it, Carol Lam.

Nearly all of the dismissed prosecutors had positive job reviews, but many had run into political trouble with Washington over immigration, capital punishment or other issues, according to prosecutors and others. At least four also were presiding over high-profile public corruption investigations when they were dismissed. (emphasis added)

Wouldn’t have been against Republican defendants by any chance, would they?

That’s what I thought.