Whoa. Somebody's pissed.

Digby:

It's pretty clear that all this partisan bickering means the "he said/she said" can't be solved by a truth commission or even a DOJ investigation. After all, they weren't allowed to take notes, and the CIA's records when it comes to torture can't be considered dispositive since they are just a teeny bit implicated themselves. It's a pickle.

But since they are considered by so many people to be reliable and useful, perhaps [we] ought to consider [...]

Read on.

Perils of communicating with "the people:" Part II

Last month, the White House tried their hand at blogging the Prez's Middle East "Democracy Freezes Over" tour.

Now, apparently trying to show a bit more of "the common touch" than might be usual for a government agency whose hallmark is keeping us paranoid, cowed, confused, and inconvenienced, the Transportation Security Administration has made its first foray into a medium best known to many for its informality and participatory atmosphere. Think of it strip searches with a happy face.

The results?

Uhm, not so great, really:

The team of bloggers tried to set a friendly tone by introducing themselves with lines such as: “Hi! My name is Ethel and I’m from Wisconsin. I like music, I love ice cream, and I adore weird facts.” But by mid-day yesterday, comments had already been turned off the original “Welcome” post after “things started to get ugly.” A highlight of the comments:

– “Funny how the government stresses ‘anti-bullying’ in schools but promotes bullying by the TSA.”

– “DHS and TSA are fundamentally broken. Disband both immediately and return our civil liberties.”

– “I think TSA are idiots.”

– “I would like someone to explain the ‘liquids’ thing. It makes no sense to me.”

Call it the "Lehrer Conundrum," for Tom Lehrer's famous observation that "the reason most folk songs are so atrocious is that they were written by 'the people.'"

It's a fine sentiment to want to open dialog with "real people," but that can get a little too real sometimes, especially if your daytime job accustoms you dealing with "real people" by detaining them for hours in a windowless room if anything about them strikes you the wrong way.

Sic transit Rudy

Despite seeming all but inevitable mere weeks ago, the Giuliani presidential campaign has yielded to the apparently inescapable truth that in America at large, just as in New York City, the more voters got to know Rudy the less they liked him.

Enterprising journalists dove for their thesauri to find fresh synonyms for "flame-out" and "implosion" to describe the riches-to-rags conclusion of Giuliani's presidential bid while the rest of their colleagues found that, on the whole, those characterizations served just fine.

His campaign will be remembered for three things:

First, it will have the striking distinction of having had its obituary written, not once but several times, a month before it actually died.

Second, it will mark the moment when a substantial chunk (if not the majority) of the current Republican Party, only two years ago snot-flinging drunk on the heady belief that it would enjoy permanent majority status for the next forty years, showed the world that it would rather be far-right than elect a president. On the left, the conventional wisdom during 2007 was that Republican voters would look past his record of insufficient support for homophobes and forced pregnancy enthusiasts to what is essential: Rudy is a vengeful, secretive, authoritarian stone-crusher who would have quickly outdone even Bush on the dissent-suppression, economic, and military adventurism fronts.

Turns out that might not have been enough for them, without the gay-bashing and hostility to women's reproductive rights, too. (Although I do think the base was still willing to stretch a point more than most commentators allowed on the whole "thrice married" thing, perhaps because they liked the lovely Old-Testament feel of "thrice," which Rudy single-handedly returned to the journalistic lexicon.)

Third, it will -- or should be-- remembered for the moment when telegeniety firmly reasserted itself as an arbiter of electability. Quoth Lance Mannion on the danger awaiting Rudy when a national TV audience (many with HDTV) got its first good close-up look at him:

[P]eople are going to look at his long, narrow head, that high bony bald dome, the sunken eyes, the livid skin, and that toothy rictus of a grin and they're going to say, "Whoa! Who let Death in the room?"

He will frighten children.

And so, since he's polling far too low to create any mischief in the emerging McCain-Romney cage match anyway, there's no reason to delay presenting Rudy with this lovely parting gift--an official p3 "Good Riddance" bumper sticker--and quickly ushering him off the right (but not right enough) side of the stage.

Annotated apology

We would like to apologize for the way in which politicians are represented in this programme. It was never our intention to imply that politicians are weak-kneed, political time-servers who are concerned more with their personal vendettas and private power struggles than the problems of government, nor to suggest at any point that they sacrifice their credibility by denying free debate on vital matters in the mistaken impression that party unity comes before the well-being of the people they supposedly represent, nor to imply at any stage that they are squabbling little toadies without an ounce of concern for the vital, social problems of today, nor indeed to we intend that viewers should consider them as crabby ulcerous little self-seeking vermin with furry legs and an excessive addiction to alcohol and certain explicit sexual practices which some people might find offensive. We are sorry if this impression has come across.

Monty Python's Flying Circus, 1972

What you don't know can't hurt Bush

With the help of p3 correspondent Doctor Beyond, I used to try to keep track of all the information the government normally made available to the public that the Bush administration was, now, as a matter of routine, keeping buried.

I finally gave up--there was just too much.

As TPM put it,

They've discontinued annual reports, classified normally public data, de-funded studies, quieted underlings, and generally done whatever was necessary to keep bad information under wraps.

Well, the good news is that TPM sicced two of its research interns on it, and have come up with, if not quite the definitive list (in this case, that would almost be like proving a negative), a pretty extensive list all the same. (p3's own research intern left months ago with my five dollars, supposedly stepping out to get me a large Earl Grey decaf with a splash of half-and-half and a toasted bagel, and never returned.)

Do you think you're entitled to the truth? For example:

Do you think we should know what the Surgeon General would have said in Congressional testimony about stem cell research?

Think we're entitled to know whose names are on the visitors logs for the Vice President?

Or what the U.S. Geological Survey's scientists are finding in their global warming research?

Ditto with the Centers for Disease Control?

How about presidential records dating back (surprise!) to Reagan?

How about information from the Department of Health and Human Services about substance abuse and treatment options for gays and lesbians?

Or photographs of servicemembers' coffins returning from overseas?

Or IRS information on the job performance of its own people?

Or monthly statistical data on the number and size of layoffs by US corporations?

Well, Bush and Cheney have determined that you can't handle the truth!

Some of these will sound familiar, but the list just goes on and on and on.

Keep in mind, this is not information about the nuclear launch codes. This is information that other administrations have routinely provided to the public about government performance, or the economy, or government whistleblowers, or public safety--or the weather--and in many cases the administration is required by law to provide the information it's refusing provide.

Even if we elected the best possible president in 2008, who in turn assembled the best possible team, it would still take years--decades--to undo the harm that Bush and his people have done to our form of government.

Reprise: The most beautiful sound I ever heard

It's been a tough week to be Alberto Gonzales--never a situation you'd really want to find yourself in anyway, I'd think, but worse now than usual.

Gonzales and his people have pretty evidently been lying to Congress under oath. Sen. Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, knows this. Gonzales knows Leahy knows. Everyone in Washington knows Gonzales knows Leahy knows.

Thus the almost unbelievable sight of a United States Attorney General spending the month of April desperately, and none too successfully from the sound of it, cramming like a hungover sophomore for his Senate testimony tomorrow--testimony where, if he and his department are as Simon-pure as the administration claims, he should have nothing more challenging to do than tell the truth.

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales has retreated from public view this week in an intensive effort to save his job, spending hours practicing testimony and phoning lawmakers for support in preparation for pivotal appearances in the Senate this month, according to administration officials.

After struggling for weeks to explain the extent of his involvement in the firings of eight U.S. attorneys, Gonzales and his aides are viewing the Senate testimony on April 12 and April 17 as seriously as if it were a confirmation proceeding for a Supreme Court or a Cabinet appointment, officials said.

Ed Gillespie, a former Republican National Committee chairman, and Timothy E. Flanigan, who worked for Gonzales at the White House, have met with the attorney general to plot strategy. The department has scheduled three days of rigorous mock testimony sessions next week and Gonzales has placed phone calls to more than a dozen GOP lawmakers seeking support, officials said.

Gonzales is seeking to convince skeptical lawmakers that he can be trusted to command the Justice Department after the prosecutor firings, which he initially described as an "overblown personnel matter." Subsequent documents and testimony from his former chief of staff have shown that Gonzales was regularly briefed on the process, revelations that have led to calls for his resignation.

Justice officials and outside experts said the effort is further hampered by legal conflicts among Gonzales and his senior aides. Top Democrats have also accused department officials of misleading Congress in previous testimony, leading Justice lawyers to insist on limiting contact between key players to avoid allegations of obstructing a congressional investigation, officials said.

Digby notes that, with two days still to go before Gonzales has to testify, he's already publicly rehearsing saying "I don't recall" to questions he hasn't been asked yet.

And, while we're on the general subject, Karl Rove's getaway to Oregon last weekend probably didn't do much to help him forget his troubles, either. Rove, you might recall, is at the center of a story involving five million missing emails sought by congressional investigators, emails that are most likely covered by the Presidential Records Act of 1978:

A lawyer for the Republican National Committee told congressional staff members yesterday that the RNC is missing at least four years' worth of e-mail from White House senior adviser Karl Rove that is being sought as part of investigations into the Bush administration, according to the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

GOP officials took issue with Rep. Henry Waxman's account of the briefing and said they still hope to find the e-mail as they conduct forensic work on their computer equipment. But they acknowledged that they took action to prevent Rove -- and Rove alone among the two dozen or so White House officials with RNC accounts -- from deleting his e-mails from the RNC server. Waxman (D-Calif.) said he was told the RNC made that move in 2005.

His own people had to specifically prevent Rove from deleting his email records? Should we conclude that direct instructions from a Special Counsel not to do so just, you know, slipped his mind?

And--alas for the White House--the story doesn't stop there, since the don't-delete-the-emails instructions date back to the beginnings of the Scooter Libby Plamegate investigation.

And if the U.S. Attorneys scandal leads straight to Gonzales's door, and the missing documents problem points directly and personally at Rove, the Libby trial was always a load of birdshot aimed directly at the Vice President's face.

Representative Henry A. Waxman, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, yesterday sent a letter to Gonzales asking that all nongovernment e-mails sent by White House officials be preserved.

Waxman cited media reports alleging that Rove has sent 95 percent of his e-mails via a nongovernment account, and expressed concern that many of those e-mails apparently were not preserved.

Waxman said his committee would examine whether e-mails were deleted in violation of the Presidential Records Act.

The fact that e-mails are missing was noted -- but not widely and publicly noticed -- in the perjury trial of Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

In January 2006, prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald sent a letter to Libby's lawyer that noted that "we have learned that not all of the e-mail of the Office of the Vice President and the Executive Office of the President for certain time periods in 2003 was preserved through the normal archiving process of the White House computer system."

And how do we know what fragmentary bits we do know about Gonzales's stretchers, Rove's fast ones, and Cheney's schemes?

I'll give you a hint:

It's an eight-letter Latin word that can be translated as "under pain."

One of my best bits of parody in the last couple of years--and most from the heart, I might add--got lost in the post-election roar last November. I'm reprinting it here, with a slightly-updated title (because when I published it originally, it wasn't clear that the Dems had recaptured the Senate). I'm giving it a second outing partly because, unlike some of the other bits of fugacious ephemera I've banged out over the years (to borrow a Lehrer-ism) this one seems to have some staying power in the struggle to keep up with current events. (And partly for the pleasure of remembering the works of Frank Jacobs, another of my literary heroes.)

Without further ado:

A Brief Lyric On The Occasion of the Democrats Recapturing Control of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives After 14 Years of Republican Mismanagement, Incompetence, Corruption, and Dereliction of Duty

The most beautiful sound I ever heard:
Subpoena,
Subpoena, Subpoena, Subpoena . . .

Watch Republicans freak at a single word:
Subpoena,
Subpoena, Subpoena, Subpoena . . .

Subpoena!
The Dems finally get to subpoena,
And oversight will be
So painful for the GOP.

Subpoena!
They'll long for the days of Katrina.
Gonzales will work late,
To get his stories straight,
You'll see.

Subpoena!
Say it loud and Karl Rove starts forgetting,
Say it soft and watch Tony Snow sweating.

Subpoena!
Dick Cheney will choke on subpoenas.

The most beautiful sound I ever heard:
Subpoena.

Without any mental reservations or purpose of evasion

I sometimes like to imagine a non-existent moment of testimony from a never-going-to-happen Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. In my reverie, it goes something like this:

Senator: Sir, are you familiar with the phrase "a government of laws, not of men?"

Bush Administration Official: Yes, Senator, I am.

Senator: Can you summarize its meaning for us this morning?

Bush Administration Official: [Covers microphone with hand, whispers with staffer, who begins thumbing through briefing books] Uhm, Senator, I . . .

Senator: Sir, let me see if I can help you out. Doesn't it refer to a form of government under which laws are designed to operate honestly and fairly, regardless of who happens to be in charge of executing and enforcing those laws on any given day?

Bush Administration Official: [Looks sharply at staffer, who stares back, frozen in terror] Senator, to the best of-- [Looks at briefing book for a moment]--Senator, I suppose that is a fair interpretation of the phrase. Yes.

Senator: And do you believe that phrase describes the American system of laws and justice?

Bush Administration Official: [Eyes dart from one Committee member's face to the next, find no safe haven, finally returning to the Senator] Yes, I suppose so.

Senator: I'm glad to hear it. Sir, in your testimony today--and, I might add, in your testimony before this Committee on numerous previous occasions--you have asked us to give you unprecedented power to ignore the will of Congress and of the American people, to escape essential Constitutional limitations of the Executive Branch, and to commit acts which are destructive of the fundamental civil liberties enjoyed by Americans, liberties which define our great nation. And you assure us that we may rest comfortably in the expectation that you will not abuse these extraordinary powers, that you will only use them with extreme constitutional caution and only in the most limited and exigent circumstances--that we may rest assured that in giving you these powers we will not soon regret it, because you have given us your word that you would never abuse these powers for personal or partisan advantage. Is that essentially your testimony? Would you say that correctly summarizes your position here today?

Bush Administration Official: I . . . I . . .

Senator: I have good news for you, sir. Because America is the sort of place you've agreed that it is--because it is fundamentally a nation ruled by laws, not men--you are relieved of the burden of offering us your personal assurances on this matter. We have something far better upon which to rely.

No, the guarantee that you will not abuse these powers is not your solemn word that your principles or character would not allow you to do so; it is the fact that the law will swiftly and publicly visit justice upon you if you should attempt it. With that in mind, federal marshals are now passing among you and your staff, distributing subpoenas. I look forward to the pleasure of discussing this matter with you in considerable detail in the near future.

And so on. It's a lovely idyll, isn't it? But then I always wake up.

A year ago, I was finding ample opportunity to mock then-Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee Arlen Specter, who as a Bush loyalist made sure that there was no congressional oversight of the Bush administration's lawlessness, yet always professed shock and dismay at each new round of constitutional fast ones by the executive branch.

A year later, Specter's lost the gavel, but, as Glenn Greenwald points out, he's clearly learned nothing (ad viewing required for link):

Now that even Alberto Gonzales' DOJ has acknowledged that the FBI has been violating the law with regard to its NSL powers, there are some important lessons that one can learn, if one is so inclined, about how our country has operated for the last six years. Let us begin with the fact that the Inspector General's Office which issued this report is merely a mid-level subordinate DOJ office that reports to the Attorney General, and its conclusions (particularly its exculpatory ones) are hardly dispositive. The oversight here is not the Report itself. That is just the start. The oversight is the Congressional investigation which must follow to determine the scope of the wrongdoing and what actually motivated it.

But the good little authoritarians who always reflexively embrace every unchecked pronouncement by the Bush administration as though it is the Gospel Truth -- the attribute which is, at its core, the defining one of a mindless authoritarian -- are (consistent with that mindset) now running around shrilly insisting that the Leader did no real wrong, because the DOJ Report said that nothing was really done with malicious intent here. The DOJ has spoken, and that settles that. With this mentality, these reflexive Bush defenders are exhibiting precisely the profound character flaw that has led to all of these abuses in the first place: namely, blind, gullible, cult-like and distinctly un-American trust in the assurances of the Leader without any demands of scrutiny, accountability, corroboration or oversight. […]

As is so often the case, Arlen Specter enables excellent insight into how this mindset functions. With these revelations of the FBI's lawbreaking yesterday, Specter was strutting around making all sorts of dramatic protest noises, acting as though he is some sort of guardian of checks and balances and civil liberties. In fact, as Judiciary Committee Chairman from 2002 until 2006, Specter eagerly enabled a virtually complete dismantling of the system of checks and balances on presidential power, and did so by blindly and timidly relying upon administration assurances that they were acting properly.

The same Specter who now professes such grave concern over the abuse of the NSLs is the very same one who led the fight on behalf of the administration to re-authorize the Patriot Act by stampeding over concerns about, among other things, the potential for abuse of NSLs. On December 12, 2005, Specter wrote this letter (.pdf) to six Senators (including 3 Republicans) who were resisting renewal of the Patriot Act due to concerns about the potential for abuse by the Bush administration of NSLs.

Specter's letter -- written after publication of Barton Gellman's documented expose of NSL abuses in The Washington Post -- emphatically assured those worried Senators that there was absolutely nothing to worry about, because the administration secretly assured the Intelligence Committee that everything was being handled properly, and that settles that […]

(Read the rest of Greenwald's essay. It's also going onto the Reading list in the sidebar.)

Such was life under the gavel of Specter the partisan hack and Bush button man. And yet, even in Democratic hands, the Judiciary Committee may still prefer to be swindled, and to let Senators like Russ Feingold--who warned a year ago that the fix was in--continue to wander in the desert.

Coming soon to a bookstore near you:

Another work of cognitive psychology and politics.

If you liked George Lakoff's Don't Think of an Elephant, you'll love George Bush's Don't Mention a Polar Bear!

Remember these numbers: 770, 10, 5, and 0

770: The approximate number of captives held in detention at Guantanamo by the Bush administration.

10: The number of those 770 who have actually been charged with any crime (terrorism-related or otherwise).

5: The number of years that some of these detainees have been held, without access to an attorney, without judicial review, without knowing the charges against them.

0: The number of convictions the Bush administration has won against this collection.

Attorney General Gonzales blames this 770-and-0 record on the legal challenges that have, against all odds, been mounted by pesky lawyers on behalf of the incarcerated.

The 2006 p3 Top-10 Meta-list

From the p3 Institute for Strategic Redundancy Institute international headquarters, this year’s top-10 list of top-10 lists:

Top 11 most outrageous comments by conservative commentators in 2006 (Media Matters): Hannity on things worth dying for! Limabugh on obesity! Colter on love and death!

Top 10 national stories of 2006 (Steve Gilliard @ The News Blog): ISG report--DOA. The Karl Rove mystique--over. Gay Republicans--apparently flourishing, as it turns out, thanks for asking.

Top 10 Myths about Iraq 2006 (Juan Cole @ Informed Comment): Starts with the myth that the Iraq war/occupation is something that we can somehow "win" at this point, and marches steadily and depressingly on through the evidence from there.

Top 10 time-shifted TV programs in 2006 (Nielsen ratings, via Lostremote.com): Number One is "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip," which may take some of the logistical heat off Lance Mannion if he’s going to keep live-blogging it--now he can simply wait until Wednesday or Thursday to do it.

Top 10 Yahoo! Searches in 2006 (Yahoo!): Here’s a shocker: Iraq, Israel and Lebanon, and the North Korea nuclear program didn’t quite manage to nose out Steve Irwin’s death and Anna Nicole Smith’s baby.

Top 10 places to live in the US in 2006 (Money Magazine): And for those of you outside the state, Oregon is nowhere on the list. Honest. Nothing to see here. Keep moving. Have a lovely visit. Don’t stay.

Top 10 books of 2006 (NYTimes): Comedies of manners, searing memoirs, revisionist histories, and the inevitable, even obligatory allusion to Borat.

Top 10 online scams of 2006 (Consumer Affairs): Approach at your own risk: I wrote about the Nigerian scam last summer, and within a week or two the amount of that crap my email filters were catching went up by an order of magnitude. I’d recommend reading this list on a friend’s computer. You never know.

Top 10 insider political events in Oregon in 2006 (NW Republican): They’re absolutely right to list the rise of the Oregon-based political blog (including Blue Oregon and my cronies over at Loaded Oregon as well as their own blog) near the top. The comments are as juicy as the list.

Top 10 viral videos (The Viral Factory, via Countdown with Keith Olbermann): The enduring clip of Oregon’s exploding whale (350 million hits) is #3, but it probably says more about the ephemeral nature of the overall topic that #10 is already no longer available.

Top 10 signs of the impending US police state (Alternet): Nothing new here, alas, but it's definitely disturbing to see them lined up end-to-end. The Democratic Congress has its work cut out for it. If they’re up to it.

The unforgiving fact (yet more)

Government information on women's workplace rights, pay differentials between women and men, the rights of gay/bi/lesbian workers in the public workplace, the poor success rate of national anti-drug ad campaigns, research findings suggesting that oil industry subsidies aren't effective--these are all items to be added to the on-going tally of things the Bush administration thinks you don't need to know.

If ignorance really is bliss, then the Bush administration clearly aims to take that "pursuit of happiness" thing to a whole 'nother level.

The unforgiving fact (continued)

Here's another item on the ever-growing list of instances where the Bush administration simply stopped publishing an inconvenient fact rather than address (or even admit to) the problem the fact points to.

This time the topic is oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

The idea that the head of the most secretive and distrustful administration in American history is gearing up to build a half-billion dollar library named after himself is, at times, a lot to work one's mind around. Many wags have predicted that the building will house a copy of The Pet Goat and that's about it. My guess is that it will store all these no-longer-public reports and accountings--and that no one will be allowed to check anything out.

Bush to America: You can't handle the truth!

It took some digging, but TPM Muckraker has discovered that the Pentagon has classified the monthly number of attacks in Iraq.

As Doonesbury once observed, this information is hardly "secret" to the people who are getting blown up over there. They're only a secret from us. Once upon a time US government propaganda and government secrecy were weapons directed toward the enemy. It's the peculiar genius of the Bush administration to target its own fellow citizens with them.

The Muckrakers are calling for suggestions: What other pieces of information has the Bush administration simply classified and hidden away rather than having to address the problem the information reflects? (Usually, it's a problem only insofar as it contradicts the Bush ideological party line on tax cuts, deregulation, privitization, or reproductive freedom.) Check out the list they've assembled so far, and prepare to be appalled.

I started keeping track of this trend in 2005, but soon got swamped, and a little depressed. You can read the examples I cataloged here, here, and here.