Politics

by hilzoy

The Washington Post’s articles (1, 2) on Cheney are just stunning — so much so that it’s hard to know where to begin. If you haven’t been reading them in their entirety, do. The second, in particular, is the story of a protracted bureaucratic battle, fought by a master, for the right to commit war crimes. Since this will be long, I’m putting it below the fold.

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by hilzoy

Via TPM, the SF Chronicle:

“Michael Kamburowski, the Australian immigrant hired as a top official in the California Republican Party, was ordered deported in 2001, jailed three years later for visa violations — and has filed a $5 million wrongful arrest lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, according to U.S. District Court documents.

Kamburowski was named in March to be the chief operating officer of the California GOP. He is responsible for the state party’s multimillion-dollar budget and oversees campaign funds and financing for the nation’s largest state GOP organization. (…)

Kamburowski is a former registered lobbyist for Americans for Tax Reform and a top operative for the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project, both founded by conservative activist Grover Norquist. Nehring — also a former senior adviser and consultant to Norquist’s Washington, D.C., operation — worked with Kamburowski at Americans for Tax Reform in the 1990s.

News of Kamburowski’s troubled immigration past comes on the heels of revelations in The Chronicle earlier this month that the state GOP used a highly sought-after H1B visa to hire another immigrant as a top consultant.

Christopher Matthews, a Canadian citizen with no experience in statewide politics, was hired this month after the California Republican party applied for, and received, an H1B visa specifically to fill the role of “political director,” according to U.S. Department of Labor data. (…)

(A)sked about his immigration status, Kamburowski said he has a green card and added, “I am a legal resident. I am a permanent resident, and it can be proven.” He referred all questions regarding the matter to his attorney.”

Actually, it’s not clear from the article that Kamburowski is legal; the story of his immigration travails presented by the article ends with his having been released from custody on a $7500 bond in 2004. And he was pretty clearly illegal before that.

In any case, you’ll never guess why they hired these two. Honest, you won’t:

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by hilzoy

From the NYT:

“John Edwards ended 2004 with a problem: how to keep alive his public profile without the benefit of a presidential campaign that could finance his travels and pay for his political staff.

Mr. Edwards, who reported this year that he had assets of nearly $30 million, came up with a novel solution, creating a nonprofit organization with the stated mission of fighting poverty. The organization, the Center for Promise and Opportunity, raised $1.3 million in 2005, and — unlike a sister charity he created to raise scholarship money for poor students — the main beneficiary of the center’s fund-raising was Mr. Edwards himself, tax filings show.

A spokesman for Mr. Edwards defended the center yesterday as a legitimate tool against poverty.

The organization became a big part of a shadow political apparatus for Mr. Edwards after his defeat as the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 2004 and before the start of his presidential bid this time around. Its officers were members of his political staff, and it helped pay for his nearly constant travel, including to early primary states.

While Mr. Edwards said the organization’s purpose was “making the eradication of poverty the cause of this generation,” its federal filings say it financed “retreats and seminars” with foreign policy experts on Iraq and national security issues. Unlike the scholarship charity, donations to it were not tax deductible, and, significantly, it did not have to disclose its donors — as political action committees and other political fund-raising vehicles do — and there were no limits on the size of individual donations. (…)

Its directors included [“J. Edwin Turlington, a Raleigh lawyer who was the manager of Mr. Edward’s 2003 presidential exploratory committee” — earlier description from NYT article]; Miles Lackey, Mr. Edwards’s former chief of staff; Alexis Bar, his former political scheduler; and David Ginsberg, Mr. Edwards’s current deputy campaign manager.

The $1.3 million the group raised and spent in 2005 paid for travel, including Mr. Edwards’s “Opportunity Rocks” tour of 10 college campuses, consultants and a Web operation. In addition, some $540,000 went for the “exploration of new ideas,” according to tax filings.

Nonprofit groups can engage in political activities and not endanger their tax-exempt status so long as those activities are not its primary purpose. But the line between a bona fide charity and a political campaign is often fuzzy, said Marcus S. Owens, a Washington lawyer who headed the Internal Revenue Service division that oversees nonprofit agencies.

“I can’t say that what Mr. Edwards did was wrong,” Mr. Owens said. “But he was working right up to the line. Who knows whether he stepped or stumbled over it. But he was close enough that if a wind was blowing hard, he’d fall over it.””

Discussion below the fold.

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by hilzoy

Krugman in the NYT:

“In Tuesday’s Republican presidential debate, Mitt Romney completely misrepresented how we ended up in Iraq. Later, Mike Huckabee mistakenly claimed that it was Ronald Reagan’s birthday.

Guess which remark The Washington Post identified as the “gaffe of the night”?

Folks, this is serious. If early campaign reporting is any guide, the bad media habits that helped install the worst president ever in the White House haven’t changed a bit.”

More below the fold.

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by hilzoy

Dr. James W. Holsinger is George W. Bush’s nominee to be Surgeon General. He has already come under fire for anti-gay bias, founding a church that ministers to “people who no longer wish to be gay or lesbian”, and other things. (Details below the fold.) But now comes the coup de grace: a report (pdf) he wrote for the Methodist’s Committee to Study Homosexuality in 1991, called ‘Pathophysiology of Male Homosexuality’.

Holsinger’s basic argument is that (a) the penis was designed to fit into the vagina — witness the fact “that it has entered our vocabulary in the form of naming pipe fittings either the male fitting or the female fitting depending upon which one interlocks within the other” — while the penis and rectum are not, um, meant for one another in the same way; and (b) one way to see this is to note how many, many, many bad things can happen to a rectum when it is used in this unnatural way. (Yet, oddly enough, “Few anorectal problems and no evidence of anal-sphincter dysfunction are found in heterosexual women who have anal-receptive intercourse.” Does Holsinger take this to show that God designed the female rectum to accommodate anal sex? Inquiring minds want to know.) Holsinger concludes: “when dealing with the complementarity of the human sexes, one can simply say, Res ipsa loquitur – the thing speaks for itself!”

There are long lists of sexually transmitted diseases that accompany homosexual sex, all presented without the comparison set of diseases transmitted via heterosexual sex, not to mention the various potential complications of pregnancy. There is a lengthy discussion of the nature and perils of fisting. But to my mind, the oddest part of all is this alleged piece of evidence that the rectum is not designed for sex:

“The structure and function of the male and female human reproductive systems are fully complementary. Anatomically the vagina is designed to receive the penis. It is lined with squamous epithelium and is surrounded by a muscular tube intended for penile intromission. The rectum, on the other hand, is lined with a delicate mucosal surface and a single layer of columnar epithelium intenuea primarily for the reabsorption of water and electrolytes. The rectum is incapable of mechanical protection against abrasion and severe damage to the colonic mucosa can result if objects that are large, sharp, or pointed are inserted into the rectum (Agnew, 1986).”

Perhaps Dr. Holsinger doesn’t have any first-hand experience of actual vaginas, though this seems unlikely, since he has four children. Possibly his wife just didn’t have the heart to tell him, and has been suffering all these years in silence. However, as someone who has an actual vagina of my very own, I can assure him that if one were to put a sharp or pointed object into one, “severe damage” would, in fact, result. It would be a very, very, very bad idea to insert, say, a poker, or a carving knife, or a pair of scissors, into a vagina. Just as bad as doing any of these things to a rectum. Really.

Maybe, on the other hand, he thinks that penises are sharp and pointed. Who can say?

Do we really want someone who doesn’t know these things to be our Surgeon General? I don’t.

More about Dr. Holsinger below the fold.

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by hilzoy

(1): The Republican candidates for President seem to be engaged in some sort of arms race to see who can say the toughest-sounding things on foreign policy. Since very few of them seem to be constrained by any sort of realism (among the leading candidates, only McCain seems to retain some tenuous connection to the real world), this leads them to say things that are basically insane. Fareed Zakaria, in an article that’s worth reading in its entirety:

“More troubling than any of Bush’s rhetoric is that of the Republicans who wish to succeed him. “They hate you!” says Rudy Giuliani in his new role as fearmonger in chief, relentlessly reminding audiences of all the nasty people out there. “They don’t want you to be in this college!” he recently warned an audience at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta. “Or you, or you, or you,” he said, reportedly jabbing his finger at students. In the first Republican debate he warned, “We are facing an enemy that is planning all over this world, and it turns out planning inside our country, to come here and kill us.” On the campaign trail, Giuliani plays a man exasperated by the inability of Americans to see the danger staring them in the face. “This is reality, ma’am,” he told a startled woman at Oglethorpe. “You’ve got to clear your head.”

The notion that the United States today is in grave danger of sitting back and going on the defensive is bizarre. In the last five and a half years, with bipartisan support, Washington has invaded two countries and sent troops around the world from Somalia to the Philippines to fight Islamic militants. It has ramped up defense spending by $187 billion—more than the combined military budgets of China, Russia, India and Britain. It has created a Department of Homeland Security that now spends more than $40 billion a year. It has set up secret prisons in Europe and a legal black hole in Guantánamo, to hold, interrogate and—by some definitions—torture prisoners. How would Giuliani really go on the offensive? Invade a couple of more countries? (…)

The competition to be the tough guy is producing new policy ideas, all right—ones that range from bad to insane. Romney, who bills himself as the smart, worldly manager, recently explained that while “some people have said we ought to close Guantánamo, my view is we ought to double [the size of] Guantánamo.” In fact, Romney should recognize that Guantánamo does not face space constraints. The reason that President Bush wants to close it down—and it is he who has expressed that desire—is that it is an unworkable legal mess with enormous strategic, political and moral costs. In a real war you hold prisoners of war until the end of hostilities. When does that happen in the war on terror? Does Romney propose that the United States keep an ever-growing population of suspects in jail indefinitely without trials as part of a new American system of justice?

In 2005 Romney said, “How about people who are in settings—mosques, for instance—that may be teaching doctrines of hate and terror? Are we monitoring that? Are we wiretapping?” This proposal is mild compared with what Rep. Tom Tancredo suggested the same year. When asked about a possible nuclear strike by Islamic radicals on the United States, he suggested that the U.S. military threaten to “take out” Mecca.”

“Take out Mecca.” That’s the ticket. I wonder who will be the first to suggest preemptively turning the entire Middle East — or, better yet, the entire rest of the world — into radioactive glass on the grounds that we can’t wait for Muslims to become terrorists; we have to nip them (all of them) in the bud? Surely that’s the logical endpoint of this little bidding war.

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by hilzoy

From the Washington Post:

“I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, former chief of staff to Vice President Cheney, was sentenced today to 30 months in prison and fined $250,000 for lying to investigators about his role in leaking the identity of an undercover CIA officer.

The federal judge who presided over the case indicated that he may not be sympathetic to allowing Libby to remain free pending appeal, but scheduled a hearing on the matter for next week.

“Evidence in this case overwhelmingly indicated Mr. Libby’s culpability,” U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton said moments before he handed out the sentence. The judge said he was sentencing Libby “with a sense of sadness. I have the highest respect for people who take positions in our government and appreciate tremendously efforts they bring to bear to protect this country.”

At the same time, Walton said, “I also think it is important we expect and demand a lot from people who put themselves in those positions. Mr. Libby failed to meet the bar. For whatever reason, he got off course.””

Good. People who break the law should do the time.

There’s also this gem:

“Cheney released a statement this afternoon lauding Libby’s long public service and expressing hope that his conviction will be overturned. “Scooter is also a friend, and on a personal level Lynne and I remain deeply saddened by this tragedy and its effect on his wife, Harriet, and their young children,” Cheney said. “The defense has indicated it plans to appeal the conviction in the case. Speaking as friends, we hope that our system will return a final result consistent with what we know of this fine man.””

I believe that Libby lied to protect Cheney. If so, then however “saddened” Cheney might be, he wasn’t concerned enough about Libby to step up to the plate himself. It’s a bit rich for him to expect the legal system to make up for his deficiencies as a human being.

Salon has posted the letters that people wrote on Libby’s behalf. I haven’t read them all, but most of the ones I have read go on about how completely out of character the crimes he has been convicted of are. He is a person of unimpeachable integrity, a man of honor, a person of high principle, even, according to Gen. Richard Myers, “a man of integrity who always put our national security first.” (I didn’t know it was possible to put our national security first while outing a CIA agent. Live and learn.)

Oddly, none of the letter-writers go on to ask how someone of such honor and principle could have found himself, inexplicably, committing perjury and obstruction of justice. A brain spasm? A sort of anti-miracle? Inquiring minds want to know. Unfortunately, none of those inquiring minds belong to the people who wrote these letters. Funny thing, that.

One more note below the fold.

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by hilzoy

Josh Marshall points to this article by Richard Hasen, and it’s really good. It’s about an organization called the American Center for Voting Rights, which came into existence in March of 2005, just days before it was invited to testify before Congress. (Curiously, the head of this non-partisan, tax exempt organization neglected to mention that he had been the National Counsel for Bush/Cheney ’04.) Then:

“The group identified Democratic cities as hot spots for voter fraud, then pushed the line that “election integrity” required making it harder for people to vote. The group issued reports (PDF) on areas in the country of special concern, areas that coincidentally tended to be presidential battleground states. In many of these places, it now appears the White House was pressuring U.S. attorneys to bring more voter-fraud prosecutions.”

And now, strange to say, it has disappeared!

“With no notice and little comment, ACVR—the only prominent nongovernmental organization claiming that voter fraud is a major problem, a problem warranting strict rules such as voter-ID laws—simply stopped appearing at government panels and conferences. Its Web domain name has suddenly expired, its reports are all gone (except where they have been preserved by its opponents), and its general counsel, Mark “Thor” Hearne, has cleansed his résumé of affiliation with the group. Hearne won’t speak to the press about ACVR’s demise.”

It won’t be too hard to clean out their offices, though. Here’s a picture (it’s from BradBlog, where it appeared in an article subtitled: “Photos suggest ACVR web developers most likely very very tiny Republicans!”):

In the rest of the article, which I recommend, Hasen connects this to the US Attorneys’ scandal, and explains and rebuts the Center’s arguments about voter fraud. He also provides a lot of links to other work on the topic, e.g. here and here (pdfs). He concludes:

“So Hearne let the organization collapse, and in a bit of irony, a Washington lawyer who bought the ACVR domain name has set it to redirect to the Brennan Center’s Truth About Fraud Web site, which debunks ACVR’s claims of polling-place voter fraud. But despite the collapse of ACVR, the idea that there is massive polling-place voter fraud has, perhaps irrevocably, entered the public consciousness. It has infected even the Supreme Court’s thinking about voter-ID laws. And it has provided intellectual cover for the continued partisan pursuit of voter-ID laws that may suppress minority votes. Just this week, Republican members of the Texas state Senate are trying to push through a voter-ID law over a threatened Democratic filibuster. Their political machinations have already required a Democratic state senator recovering from a liver transplant to show up to vote—and they almost passed the bill when another Democratic senator came down with the stomach flu.

Texas legislators should be ashamed. All of this effort to enact a law that would stop a nonexistent problem. If only there were a way to ensure that spurious claims of polling-place voter fraud could have disappeared with ACVR.”

***

There are some jobs that really make me wonder: how can the person who takes them look him- or herself in the face? Lobbying for Robert Mugabe, for instance, or being one of the scientists paid to come up with studies proving that cigarettes don’t cause cancer. Spending your days trying to make voter fraud look like a serious problem* when it isn’t one, by telling lies, all in order to convince people to pass restrictive voter ID laws because you think that the people who will be prevented from voting as a result are likely to favor your opposition is one of them.

It’s one thing to fight for your convictions. It’s another to try to rig the game in your favor by keeping people from exercising their right to vote. It’s hard to express how furious this sort of thing makes me. I normally hate saying that things are un-American, but this surely is.

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by hilzoy

Via TPM, the AP:

“In grudging concessions to President Bush, Democrats intend to draft an Iraq war-funding bill without a timeline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops and shorn of billions of dollars in spending on domestic programs, officials said Monday. (…)

While details remain subject to change, the measure is designed to close the books by Friday on a bruising veto fight between Bush and the Democratic-controlled Congress over the war. It would provide funds for military operations in Iraq through Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year.

Democrats in both houses are expected to seek other opportunities later this year to challenge Bush’s handling of the unpopular conflict.

Democratic officials stressed the legislation was subject to change. They spoke on condition of anonymity, saying they were not authorized to discuss provisions before a planned presentation to members of the party’s rank and file later in the day.

Democrats in Congress have insisted for months they would not give Bush a blank check for his war policies, and officials said the legislation is expected to include political and military goals for the Iraqi government to meet toward establishment of a more democratic society. [Ed. note: Why imposing benchmarks on the Iraqis constitutes not giving Bush a blank check eludes me. “Stop being mean to your little sister, or I’ll take away someone else’s allowance!”]

Failure to make progress toward the goals could cost the Iraqis some of the reconstruction aid the United States has promised, although it was not clear whether Democrats intended to give Bush power to order the aid to be spent regardless of progress. (…)

Either way, Democratic leaders have said they hope to clear a war spending bill through both houses of Congress and send it to Bush’s desk by week’s end. They added the intention was to avoid a veto.”

Greg Sargent reports that the leadership will not confirm this. One of the guys at AmericaBlog thinks it might be a trial balloon. So, on the off chance that they are interested in my opinion: No. No. No.

Hell no.

More below the fold.

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by publius

On the immigration front, the emerging dilemma for progressives is whether to support an imperfect bill or hold out for a better one. This question will obviously turn on the final details (Hilzoy has an excellent outline of the big picture issues), but my view is that progressives should err on the side of passing legislation, even if it means swallowing some bad provisions (note that this is a working presumption rather than an unyielding position).

First, I think people need to understand (1) how unique (and fleeting) the current political coalition is; and (2) why this uniqueness matters. One of the main arguments for waiting is that the 2008 election will create a more favorable environment for immigration reform if the Democrats win (both the White House and Congress). I think, though, that this view is fundamentally mistaken. In reality, immigration reform will be far more difficult (if not impossible) in a government controlled entirely by Democrats.

Immigration has soured me on Mickey Kaus, but he’s right about one thing – immigration reform is an electoral loser for the Democrats (at least in the short term). I’m not sure what the national polls say, but I don’t think they’re all that relevant. What is relevant is that immigration is a big loser in the marginal districts (and states) that will decide which party controls Congress. Without strong Republican “cover,” a large, veto-holding chunk of Democratic legislators (particularly the freshmen) would oppose comprehensive reform. In short, Democrats cannot (in the short term) hold political power if they are perceived as owning immigration reform.

At the same time, and for more obvious reasons, it’s risky for Republicans to support comprehensive reform as well. It’s true that the business community generally gets what it wants. But that maxim only holds true to the extent it doesn’t cause “political death” in primary elections. The conservative base is passionately, even hysterically, anti-reform. For that reason, it’s the type of issue of which primary challenges are made.

That’s why the White House’s strong support for comprehensive support is so important. On the one hand, it gives enormous political cover to the Democrats. Notice, for instance, how much of the conservative base’s relative wrath is being channeled toward the White House rather than Dems. In addition, White House support gives cover to nervous Republicans and frees them to do either what they think is right, or what their corporate patrons want them to do. Substitute Hillary Clinton for Bush, and you’d see a lot more GOP opposition.

The White House then is really the glue holding this compromise together. And the White House support is itself unique (and fleeting). It’s not just that it’s a Republican administration, it’s that this particular administration — for somewhat contingent reasons (roots in Texas; Rove’s demographic faith; etc.) — has made progressive immigration reform a top priority that it will spend capital on. None of the major Republican candidates in 2008 should be expected to do the same if they win. People like Romney are already running against “amnesty,” while McCain’s precarious relationship with the base would limit his freedom of movement.

Bottom line — the stars are truly aligned. The current Republican administration supports immigration reform, and this support provides the political cover necessary for both Congressional Democrats and Republicans to strike a deal. When Bush leaves (or perhaps ascends), immigration reform leaves with him.

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by hilzoy

From the Washington Post:

“World Bank President Paul D. Wolfowitz resigned yesterday, effective June 30, yielding to demands from governments around the world that he leave to end the ethics controversy that has consumed the institution.

Wolfowitz’s resignation, negotiated in recent days with the bank’s executive board, closed the leadership crisis that has essentially paralyzed the institution for almost two months. It preempted what had been a growing likelihood that the board would reprimand or fire him after a committee report found that he broke ethics rules in awarding a substantial raise to his girlfriend. (…)

Staff members described a celebratory mood inside the World Bank’s headquarters near the White House, with people embracing, singing songs and hoisting flutes of Champagne.”

A few suggestions for his successor:

(1) If you don’t want to resign under a cloud, don’t create one.

(2) If you think people are out to get you, don’t hand them ammunition.

(3) If you are worried about your reputation, remember that it is not enhanced by clinging so tightly to your job that when you are finally dragged away, you leave claw marks.

(4) Insisting that the Bank “clear your name” is pointless. Everyone knows that the nice things people say in order to get rid of someone they despise mean nothing. If you insist that they say such things, all that will happen is that people will be reminded that adults should not throw temper tantrums in public. Moreover, your willingness to put something this petty and stupid above the needs of an institution whose aim is to eliminate poverty will destroy any tattered remnants of your reputation.

Seriously …

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