I Did Not Know This

Funny how Johnny Carson pops up when I realize I've just formed a new nueral pathway in my brain. Anyhoo, this article in today's NYT was quite interesting. &, as a Wiscoite, I learned another way that we are progressive. I know, we must atone for the evil Joe McCarthy, &, of course, Ed Gein, well know lampshade maker, but I think we are making a stab at it with, well, the UW-Madison, the Green Bay Packers, & beer, & the abolishment of for profit bail bondspersons, among other things.

“It’s a very American invention,” John Goldkamp, a professor of criminal justice at Temple University, said of the commercial bail bond system. “It’s really the only place in the criminal justice system where a liberty decision is governed by a profit-making businessman who will or will not take your business.”

Although the system is remarkably effective at what it does, four states — Illinois, Kentucky, Oregon and Wisconsin — have abolished commercial bail bonds, relying instead on systems that require deposits to courts instead of payments to private businesses, or that simply trust defendants to return for trial.

Most of the legal establishment, including the American Bar Association and the National District Attorneys Association, hates the bail bond business, saying it discriminates against poor and middle-class defendants, does nothing for public safety, and usurps decisions that ought to be made by the justice system.

Enron

So much for accountability. I'm getting that fatigue again. Nobody cares.

I'm Not Holding My Breath

But this is somewhat encouraging. It would be great that in addition to the investigation, the goddamned Congress would get up off its collective keister & impeach the bastards.

The U.S. Justice Department opened a criminal investigation into the destruction of CIA interrogation videotapes, and Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey said Wednesday that he appointed an outside prosecutor to oversee the case.

The CIA acknowledged last month that it destroyed videos of officers using tough interrogation methods while questioning two al-Qaida suspects. The acknowledgment sparked a congressional inquiry and a preliminary investigation by Justice.

"The Department's National Security Division has recommended, and I have concluded, that there is a basis for initiating a criminal investigation of this matter, and I have taken steps to begin that investigation," Mukasey said in a statement released Wednesday.

UPDATE:More from Crooks & Liars here & here.

More On Abu Al

If the Attorney General's reputation and status were shaky before this latest revelation, surely this morning they are downright dissolved.



Why? Because now he is established in the court of public opinion if not yet in a court of law either to be a liar or a fool. Either he misled us all, via live television a la former President Clinton, when he told us two weeks ago that he wasn't involved in these sorts of conversations, Or he wasn't sharp enough to remember his presence and role at this meeting and comprehend the notion that,eventually, this information would tumble into the public realm. Either way, this latest embarrassing episode alone (never mind all the other reasons) disqualifies Gonzales to serve as the nation's top lawyer and its chief law enforcement official. Either way, it undercuts a core premise of the defense the Justice Department and the White House had tried so hard this past week to sell us: the Attorney General is a good guy who was shocked-- shocked!-- to find his subordinates playing fast and loose with well-established (if unwritten) rules about the political dismissal of U.S. Attorneys. It's no wonder that there are now two separate investigations underway at the Justice Department to determine the scope of the wrongdoing.

Andrew Cohen.






UPDATE: More from Crooks and Liars.

Here's the problem, though. As Marty Lederman points out, the relevant statute–28 U.S.C. 541(c)–vests the power to remove U.S. Attorneys with the president ("Each United States attorney is subject to removal by the President.") As we've repeatedly been told, U.S. Attorneys serve at the pleasure of the President–not the pleasure of the Attorney General (and certainly not the pleasure of the Attorney General's chief of staff). The decision to fire a U.S. Attorney–much less eight of them–is unquestionably one for the president to make, so if President Bush was truly out of the loop on this, that's a problem in and of itself.

Emphasis added.

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Abu Al Gonzales, An American Embarassment, No, Criminal

Holden over at First Draft, turns us on to the following blog posts in the Washington Post.

From the first entry:

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales is the 80th attorney general of the United States and if recent events in the law and at the Justice Department are any indication, he is rapidly staking a claim to being among the worst.
....
Gonzales has been charged, over and over again and both before and during his current tenure, as being President's Bush's in-house and in-court "yes" man, a lawyer whose main role has been to try to justify legally, at least on its face, what his boss already has decided for political or moral reasons to do anyway. This indeed, sometimes anyway, is one of the roles of attorney general. But it is wholly at odds with the other role, that of hands-off protector of the Constitution against both internal and external threats to its viability.
....
But he believes that Gonzales "falls short of any ideal I can think of" and says that Gonzales has inappropriately balanced his "loyalties to the President" with his "responsibilities as a lawyer." Gonzales, says Katz, "doesn't seem to see past the relationship with his boss" and has been "a willing accessory" to some of what Katz sees as the "worst excesses" of the administration's policies.

& here we go with Part II.

The Attorney General's record at the Justice Department strongly suggests that he has still acted as a docile and dogged "facilitator" for White House initiatives rather than as a wise, high-minded legal counselor willing and able on occasion to exercise independent judgment and power.
....
...Gonzales' appallingly unprofessional work on death penalty cases when he was counsel for Gov. Bush. According to Berlow, Gonzales "repeatedly failed to apprise Bush of some of the most salient issues in the cases at hand: ineffective counsel, conflict of interest, mitigating evidence, even actual evidence of innocence" (emphasis in original) in a series of memoranda Gonzales prepared for the governor's review as part of the state's clemency process. Berlow believes that this was not mere negligence on the part of Gonzales -- that would have been bad enough -- but rather part of a concerted effort by both men to ensure for both political and ideological reasons that there would be no clemency petitions granted. The dice were loaded, you might say, by the man who now is the nation's top lawyer.
....
...he cited two examples wherein Gonzales legal advice to Gov. Bush ran afoul both of constitutional law and the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. In one case, involving a Mexican national name Irineo Tristan Montoya, Berlow writes that Gonzales told Mexican officials that since Texas had not signed the Vienna Convention the state was not bound to determine whether local police had violated it when they arrested Montoya for murder. Problem is, as Berlow noted, Article 6 of the Constitution states that federal treaties are the "supreme law of the land" and cannot be trumped by state laws or policies. That's first-year law school stuff, by the way.
....
"His priority has always been to do his boss's bidding." Berlow also told me that Gonzales' pre-Justice record shows a cavalier pattern of carelessly justifying policy decisions.
....
"Sycophant" is just one of many uncomplimentary but pointed words used by my sources for this series to describe Gonzales' work and attitude toward his role as counselor.

I know this is hard to take, & that we've all known what an awful man Gonzales was & is, but we must proceed to Part III.

Brought into the President's cabinet amid oft-stated concerns that he was a mere crony and "facilitator" for the President, and with a controversial record as White House counsel and counsel to then-Texas Governor Bush, Alberto R. Gonzales' record since he took office as Attorney General is a dismal one. In fact, whether it is the legal war on terrorism or garden-variety issues of crime and punishment, it is hard to identify a single area of unchallenged success. And even where the current team at the Justice Department has enjoyed good news-- say, for example, in the area of increased sexual assault prosecutions or solid white-collar convictions-- the wheels for such victories already were in motion before Gonzales took on the job.
....
...we have on our hands an Attorney General who still shills for the President as if he were working out of the White House or the Governor's mansion in Austin.
....
Now, an Attorney General with this sort of a hapless record no doubt would like to be able to say to the American people: "in spite of all of this, I have helped make you safer where you live." But, here, too, Gonzales has failed. According to the National Association of Police Chiefs and Sheriffs, big-city murder rates have risen 10 percent over the last two years. The Federal Bureau of Investigation itself puts the violent crime increase at 3.7 percent for January-June 2006. Also, drug use apparently in increasing in the nation's heartland. What does the Justice Department intend to do about this disturbing trend? Here is what the press release said last December: "Attorney General Gonzales in October announced the Initiative for Safer Communities. Through this initiative, DOJ teams are visiting 18 cities around the country to meet with state and local law enforcement agencies to find out what is causing this increase and to determine which crime-fighting efforts are most effective." In other words, it intends to study the matter.

Emphasis added. Oh, & feeling any safer? Didn't think so.

The NYT's Editorial

For tomorrow brought to you tonight. The highlights:

During the hearing on his nomination as attorney general, Alberto Gonzales said he understood the difference between the job he held — President Bush’s in-house lawyer — and the job he wanted, which was to represent all Americans as their chief law enforcement officer and a key defender of the Constitution. Two years later, it is obvious Mr. Gonzales does not have a clue about the difference.

He has never stopped being consigliere to Mr. Bush’s imperial presidency. If anyone, outside Mr. Bush’s rapidly shrinking circle of enablers, still had doubts about that, the events of last week should have erased them.
....
Mr. Gonzales does not directly run the F.B.I., but it is part of his department and has clearly gotten the message that promises (and civil rights) are meant to be broken.
....
The attorney general helped formulate and later defended the policies that repudiated the Geneva Conventions in the war against terror, and that sanctioned the use of kidnapping, secret detentions, abuse and torture. He has been central to the administration’s assault on the courts, which he recently said had no right to judge national security policies, and on the constitutional separation of powers.
....
The Justice Department has been shamefully indifferent to complaints of voter suppression aimed at minority voters. But it has managed to find the time to sue a group of black political leaders in Mississippi for discriminating against white voters.
....
...Mr. Gonzales symbolizes Mr. Bush’s disdain for the separation of powers, civil liberties and the rule of law.

Emphasis added.

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Holy Crap

Tbogg has this exceptional musical post up. Take some time listen to all three versions. My personal favorite is The Clash. What's yours?

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Libby Is A Convicted Felon

Celebrate!

Good news on a cold & snowy March day in northern Wisco. Of the four counts he was convicted of, two are obstruction of justice & lying to the FBI. Tip of the old hat to The SideKick, AKA,. Shutterwi, who called me with the news. The public library is awash in happiness, no kidding & no shit.

Celebrate!

Finally, some accountability.

Rule Of Law

Not so much. Typical ReThug values.

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More Sanity

From our friends up north.
Makes Nova Scotia look better all the time.

Canada's Supreme Court unanimously struck down the use of secret testimony to imprison and deport foreigners as possible terrorism suspects, ruling Friday that the procedures violate Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

While it leaves a year of confusion for a few men, it certainly declares that the rule of law cannot be something we only care about some of the time.

It's A Start

#1

The U.S. House of Representatives denounced President George W. Bush's Iraq troop buildup on Friday in a symbolic challenge to his unpopular war strategy that is expected to lead to a mighty struggle over financing the extra troops.

#2

U.S. military prison doctors and staff must testify in court about the treatment of suspected al Qaeda operative Jose Padilla while he was held by presidential order as an "enemy combatant," a judge ruled on Friday.

#3

An Italian judge indicted 26 Americans on Friday, most of them C.I.A. officers, in what will become the first trial of the American program of secretly whisking away terror suspects. Italy’s former top spy was also indicted.

#4??

America, America

Let's not forget, as I've said before, that weekends are the creation of unions, of people getting together for their own benefit, & in the long run, the benefit of the society in which they live. Working people have been in rough shape the last 27 years. They have been disrespected by the leaders of both parties, frankly, & actually it's a wonder that anyone is still organized. Here's something to read & to think about. & again, no bullshit about corrupt union leaders, blah, blah, blah. Remember, it's so Jimmy Hoffa.

Recounting his experience during last week’s House subcommittee hearings on the Employee Free Choice Act, Camilo broke down as he described devoting 35 years to his employer, only to have Blue Diamond treat him as if he were a disposable, inanimate machine part.
....
Among the witnesses at the hearings was Gordon Lafer, a professor at the University of Oregon, who has studied how the NLRB union representation election process really works. Lafer also gave a briefing to Hill staffers in which he said the so-called NLRB election process resembles what happens in rogue regimes abroad rather than anything we call American.

Even though the process ends in a secret ballot, it is not fair, Lafer said. He compared what happens in union representation elections to the standards the United States sets for what is “free and fair” in foreign elections and says “every aspect of the NLRB process violates U.S. standards of free and fair.” In a report for American Rights at Work, Lafer compares U.S. standards for foreign and domestic elections with the union representation election—get the list here.

In fact, employer interference in the management-controlled election process by which workers currently are forced to form unions is off the charts. Every 23 minutes a person is fired or discriminated against for supporting a union.

Call. write, email, fax your Representative & Senators urging them to support the Employee Free Choice Act. It's the least we can do in America, for America.

No Justice

No peace.

John McKay, the former U.S. attorney for Western Washington, confirmed Wednesday that he was ordered to resign last month and "given no explanation" for a move that critics immediately denounced as politically motivated.

Texas Justice

Stinks.

Feeling Safer Yet?

Apparently, the pursuit of justice doesn't include non-corporate people,illegally held for years without charges. These ReThugs have only one goal - fascism. Sure it's a loaded word, but goddamnit, the word fits these power mad bastards.