October 2010 archive

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

October 20 is the 293rd day of the year (294th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 72 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1973, Solicitor General Robert Bork dismisses Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox; Attorney General Richardson and Deputy Attorney General Ruckelshaus resign in protest. Cox had conducted a detailed investigation of the Watergate break-in that revealed that the burglary was just one of many possible abuses of power by the Nixon White House. Nixon had ordered Richardson to fire Cox, but he refused and resigned, as did Ruckelshaus when Nixon then asked him to dismiss the special prosecutor. Bork agreed to fire Cox and an immediate uproar ensued. This series of resignations and firings became known as the Saturday Night Massacre and outraged the public and the media. Two days later, the House Judiciary Committee began to look into the possible impeachment of Nixon.

The Saturday Night Massacre was the term given by political commentators to U.S. President Richard Nixon‘s executive dismissal of independent special prosecutor Archibald Cox, and the resignations of Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus on October 20, 1973 during the Watergate scandal

Richardson appointed Cox in May of that year, after having given assurances to the Senate Judiciary Committee that he would appoint an independent counsel to investigate the events surrounding the Watergate break-in of June 17, 1972. Cox subsequently issued a subpoena to President Nixon, asking for copies of taped conversations recorded in the Oval Office  and authorized by Nixon as evidence. The president initially refused to comply with the subpoena, but on October 19, 1973, he offered what was later known as the Stennis Compromise-asking U.S. Senator John C. Stennis to review and summarize the tapes for the special prosecutor’s office.

Mindful that Stennis was famously hard-of-hearing, Cox refused the compromise that same evening, and it was believed that there would be a short rest in the legal maneuvering while government offices were closed for the weekend. However, President Nixon acted to dismiss Cox from his office the next night-a Saturday. He contacted Attorney General Richardson and ordered him to fire the special prosecutor. Richardson refused, and instead resigned in protest. Nixon then ordered Deputy Attorney General Ruckelshaus to fire Cox; he also refused and resigned in protest.

Nixon then contacted the Solicitor General, Robert Bork, and ordered him as acting head of the Justice Department to fire Cox. Richardson and Ruckelshaus had both personally assured the congressional committee overseeing the special prosecutor investigation that they would not interfere-Bork had made no such assurance to the committee. Though Bork believed Nixon’s order to be valid and appropriate, he considered resigning to avoid being “perceived as a man who did the President’s bidding to save my job.” Never the less, Bork complied with Nixon’s order and fired Cox. Initially, the White House claimed to have fired Ruckelshaus, but as The Washington Post article written the next day pointed out, “The letter from the President to Bork also said Ruckelshaus resigned.”

Congress was infuriated by the act, which was seen as a gross abuse of presidential power. In the days that followed, numerous resolutions of impeachment against the president were introduced in Congress. Nixon defended his actions in a famous press conference on November 17, 1973, in which he stated,

“…[I]n all of my years of public life, I have never obstructed justice. And I think, too, that I can say that in my years of public life that I’ve welcomed this kind of examination, because people have got to know whether or not their President’s a crook. Well, I’m not a crook! I’ve earned everything I’ve got.”

U.S. Military Moves to Accept Gay Recruits

The United States military, for the first time, is allowing its recruiters to accept openly gay and lesbian applicants.

The historic move follows a series of decisions by a federal judge in California, Virginia A. Phillips, who ruled last month that the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law violates the equal protection and First Amendment rights of service members. On Oct. 12, she ordered the military to stop enforcing the law.

President Obama has said that the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy “will end on my watch.” But the Department of Justice, following its tradition of defending laws passed by Congress, has fought efforts by the Log Cabin Republicans, a gay organization, to overturn the policy.

Judge Phillips on Tuesday denied requests by the government to maintain the status quo during the appeals process.

The Pentagon has stated its intent to file an appeal in case of such a ruling. But meanwhile, it has started complying with Judge Phillips’s instructions while the dispute over her orders plays out.

With this announcement, Lt. Dan Choi, the Iraq war veteran, Arab linguist, and West Point grad turned “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” repeal activist, decided to take the opportunity to do what he has said he has always wanted to do, serve his country in the military. First, he tried to enlist in the Marine Corps but being 29 made him one year too old. So instead, Dan went to the Army recruiters and filled out the application to re-enlist. He will return at 10 AM to begin processing as an enlisted soldier, most likely a specialist since he is a college graduate.

Dan, you rock.

The story about Alaska’s GOP Senate Candidate Joe Miller’s detaining and handcuffing a reporter at public event on public property because he didn’t want to take questions was bad enough. Now it turns out that the “security guards” were Active Duty members of the Armed Services. These men may be in a some trouble since they are in direct violation of the Department of Defense Directive 1344.10 titled “Political Activities by Members of the Armed Services”. While these fellows may have a lot of explaining to do to their commanding officers, that aside, as Glenn Greenwald stated:

The legality is the least of the concerns here.  That directive exists because it’s dangerous and undemocratic to have active-duty soldiers taking an active role in partisan campaigns; having them handcuff journalists on behalf of candidates is so far over that line that it’s hard to believe it happened.  

The real issue, though, is Joe Miller: the fact that he did this and then emphatically defended it reveals the deep authoritarianism of many of these “small-government, pro-Constitution” right-wing candidates.  Any American of minimal decency should be repelled by this incident.

We may have laughed at the bearded Mr. Miller’s “pompous piety”, as Matt Taibi of Rolling Stone described the disclosures of Mr. Miller and his family having benefited from the very welfare state that he currently rants against in his campaign for the Senate, but he has clearly stepped over the line with his use not only of unnecessary and excessive force but using Active Duty Military to carry out his orders. This incident was anti-democratic and un-American and should be completely intolerable.

In total there are 87 commissioned ships in the Royal Navy.

No more Falklands.  In fact, speaking as an armchair war gamer, it’s hard to see who they can beat unless you buy into the Special Ops/Single Bullet/Kentucky Rifle theory of war.  Unfortunately there are a billion Kalishnikovs out there and only so many of you.  Quantity is is its own quality, Shermans were not better than Panzer IVs, Panthers and Tiger Is and IIs, they were more (umm, arguably T-34s were better, just like Kalishnikovs).

And “insurgents” and “terrorists” live there and we’ve all seen that happen enough times that we should have learned a lesson- they are like fish in the ocean.  It is the beginning of the end of an Empire and I’m not talking about Britain.

Britain takes axe to armed forces in savings push

by Katherine Haddon and Alice Ritchie, AFP

Tue Oct 19, 3:31 pm ET

LONDON (AFP) – Britain announced Tuesday it will shrink its armed forces and scrap key assets like its flagship aircraft carrier, in a defence review that forms part of stinging cuts across the whole public sector.

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As part of eight percent cuts to the 37 billion pound (42 billion euro, 58 billion dollar) Ministry of Defence (MoD) budget, the Royal Navy’s flagship HMS Ark Royal aircraft carrier is also being scrapped immediately along with Britain’s fleet of Harrier jets.

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The changes in the defence review suggest that in the long-term, Britain could not engage in wars such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It assumes the armed forces will only be equipped to send 6,500 troops for a long-term operation and a maximum of 30,000 troops for a short-term conflict.

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Cameron insisted Britain’s defence budget would remain the fourth largest in the world and would meet NATO’s target for members to spend more than two percent of GDP on defence.

UK’s Cameron announces military austerity plan

By DAVID STRINGER, Associated Press Writer

Tue Oct 19, 6:28 pm ET

Outlining the first defense review since 1998 – intended both to sweep away strategies crafted before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the U.S. and to help clear the country’s crippling national debt – Cameron said 17,000 troops, a fleet of jets and an aging aircraft carrier would all be sacrificed.

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The numbers were stark. Naval warships, 25,000 civilian staff and a host of bases will also be lost, while the country’s stockpile of nuclear warheads will be trimmed from 160 to 120.

Two new aircraft carriers will be built at a cost of 5 billion pounds ($8 billion) – but one will effectively by mothballed and another won’t have any British fighter jets to transport until 2019.

Instead, Britain will invest in its much admired special forces and develop expertise on cyber threats to secure the country’s status as a major global power, Cameron said.

Defence and security review: Groping for a strategy

The Guardian

Wednesday 20 October 2010

There will be no carrier at sea with British jets on it for the next 10 years as a result of the decision to decommission the Ark Royal and retire the Harrier jump jet. One of the new carriers will have no aircraft on it for at least three years, while costing £1bn a year, and will then be mothballed or sold, and the second carrier will be adapted with catapults and arresting gear to take French and US planes. One bright day Britain will have both a carrier and planes to put on it, but not for some time yet. Even by the low standards of defence procurement, the continued muddle is madness. Rather than fashioning defence forces around real needs, Britain continues to pretend it is capable of providing the full spectrum of military roles.

Pinstripe fans seem disappointed today, but it was Cliff Lee, the Rangers’ Ace, and he went 120 pitches so you don’t have to worry about him for the rest of the series.  What you should be worried about is the bullpen implosion.  Six runs in the 9th?

I’d bring back CC on short rest tonight so that if he’s good and you need it he can pitch the 7th game too.  If he struggles then you have AJ to pick up the pieces.  Evidently Joe disagrees.

I understand a Senior League sporting team is also engaging in athletic competition today.  I think they should strive to succeed so they get their away split in the bag, but so far thei offense has been lacking.

And there are other things you can watch, mostly premiers on broadcast.

• AMC– Friday the 13th Part 3, Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter x 2
• Disney– Under Wraps
• Discovery– Dirty Jobs (Season Premier)
• E!– Knocked Up
• Food– Private Chefs of Beverly Hills (premier)
• FX– Cloverfield
• SciFi– Stargate Universe, Caprica (premiers)
• Turner Classic– Design for Living, Middle of the Night (Fredric March night)
• Toon– Tower Prep, Sym-Bionic Titan, Clone Wars (this week’s)
• Vs.– Bruins @ Capitals

Later-

• SciFi– Stargate Universe, Caprica (instant repeats), Friday the 13th: The Series
• Speed– Monster Jam
• Turner Classic– The Barretts of Wimpole Street (more March)
• TV Guide– Weeds marathon (just means it will be useless)

No Dave, Jon, or Stephen, 10/7, 10/13, 10/13.  No Alton.

Boondocks– The Return of the King (an excellent and surprising episode)

Zap2it TV Listings, Yahoo TV Listings

Evening Edition is an Open Thread

1 A million protest pensions plan as fuel shortages bite

by Charles Onians, AFP

1 hr 7 mins ago

(h/t Joe Sudbay @ Americablog)

Obama’s surrender on outside spending

By: Ben Smith, Politico

October 19, 2010 04:47 AM EDT

Democrats enter the homestretch of the 2010 elections complaining vocally about the flood of Republican money, much of it anonymous, pounding their candidates.

But as the White House points the finger at outside Republican groups, many Democrats point the finger back at the White House, which dismantled the Democratic Party’s own outside infrastructure in 2008 and never tried to rebuild it.

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(T)o some of its more practical-minded allies, the White House is protecting the brand at a very real cost to the party.

“The leadership of the Obama campaign warned their donors against giving to outside groups, including many of the key issue groups that motivate progressives. The leadership in the White House has done the same thing,” said Erica Payne, one of the founders of the Democracy Alliance, a group of the largest liberal donors, who now heads the Agenda Project. “As a result, the administration often looks like Will Ferrell in the movie ‘Old School’ – running through the street naked, shouting, ‘Come on, everybody’s streaking,’ when in reality they are all by themselves.”

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That active discouragement began in earnest in May 2008 as Democratic fundraisers began joining hands to try to take back the White House. A first effort, a 527 called the Fund for America, had boasted in March that it would spend $150 million. As it fizzled, a new nonprofit group called Progressive Media USA announced in April that it would raise and spend $40 million from anonymous donors to attack John McCain.

Then, in early May, in a conference call and at a meeting of Obama’s national finance team, Finance Chairwoman Penny Pritzker told donors and fundraisers that Obama didn’t want them helping outside groups. The money stopped so abruptly that Progressive Media was left unable to spend enough on nonpolitical causes to preserve its tax status and was folded into the Center for American Progress.

You piss on your friends and suck up to your enemies, you get what you deserve.

Reality check ala Rachel:

There was not an ideological coherence to what’s going on in right wing politics.  There’s not a cogent argument to make about what kind of challenge these folks present and what’s going to happen in these elections.

It’s not the deficit.  It’s not big government.  It’s not the stimulus.

It’s not Obamacare.  It’s not populism.  It’s not that all of these people are outsiders.

It’s none of these things.  These things are all provably not what’s going on.  They’re not bolstered by the facts no matter how many times you hear from the Beltway media.  This is not what’s happening.

But the media dressing these guys up like there is some coherent narrative, like there is some cogent argument here, that conveniently obscures what’s really going here, which is that we are on the precipice of elevating the federal office, the most extreme and in some cases strange set of conservative candidates in a lifetime.

Yes, this has happened to a smaller degree before.  In 1994, in the first midterm election after the last Democrat president was elected, we got a slate of candidates that included Helen Chenoweth of Idaho, Steve Stockman of Texas.  These two were so close to the militia movement in this country that Mr. Stockman actually received advance notice that the Oklahoma City bombing was going to happen.

There are extremist candidates who from time to time survive the churn of electoral politics and actually make it into the mainstream.  There’s always a few.  But there has never been this many.

None of this makes any sense.  We’re just about to elect a whole bunch of extremists-unless thing change in the next two week.

Listen as Rachel debunks the campaign lies and the MSM narrative as she exposes the Republicans “wish list” for the extremist agenda that it is.

Two weeks out.  How do Democrats run against this?  

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Robert Reich The Perfect Storm

It’s a perfect storm. And I’m not talking about the impending dangers facing Democrats. I’m talking about the dangers facing our democracy.

First, income in America is now more concentrated in fewer hands than it’s been in 80 years. Almost a quarter of total income generated in the United States is going to the top 1 percent of Americans.

The top one-tenth of one percent of Americans now earn as much as the bottom 120 million of us.

The perfect storm: An unprecedented concentration of income and wealth at the top; a record amount of secret money flooding our democracy; and a public becoming increasingly angry and cynical about a government that’s raising its taxes, reducing its services, and unable to get it back to work.

We’re losing our democracy to a different system. It’s called plutocracy.

Dean Baker: Liar Liens and Wall Street’s Foreclosure Scam

The highest rates of foreclosure are on the quick and dirty loans made at the peak of the bubble.

As we all know there is a major philosophical divide in U.S. politics. One the one hand there are those who think it is the role of government to help ensure that the vast majority of the population can enjoy a decent standard of living. On the other side are those who believe the role of government is to transfer as much money as possible to the rich and powerful. The latter group seems to be calling the shots these days.

This is seen clearly in the ” liar lien” scandal: the flood of short order foreclosures that ignore standard legal procedures. The banks have been overwhelmed by the unprecedented volume of defaulting mortgages in the wake of the housing crash. Even under normal circumstances foreclosure rates that in some areas exceed ten times normal levels would create an administrative nightmare.

But these were not ordinary loans. The highest rates of foreclosure are on the quick and dirty loans made at the peak of the bubble. These loans were issued to be sold. Almost immediately after the ink was dry, the issuers would sell these loans off to Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, or other investment banks to turn them into mortgage backed securities. The investment banks themselves were running short order operations. More rapid securitization meant more profits.

Robert Kuttner: Recovery, Please

Will the recession just go on and on and on? In the absence of far more vigorous government action, it certainly looks that way.

At a recent conference sponsored by several think tanks, Paul Krugman declared that the recession could literally continue indefinitely because the economy is stuck in a cycle of depressed wages, reduced consumer purchasing power, damaged banks, and business hesitancy to invest — and no strategy on the political horizon is about to alter this dynamic.

It’s not surprising to hear that from Krugman. The startling thing was that his two co-panelists, former Reagan chief economist Martin Feldstein and the chief economist of Goldman Sachs, Jan Hatzius, agreed that massive stimulus spending was the necessary cure.

This is no laughing matter. The Obama Justice Department is defending the worst Attorney General, John Ashcroft, from being sued by an American citizen whose Constitutional rights were clearly violated by AG Ashcroft’s stated policy to use the material witness law to prevent terror attacks by rounding up Muslim immigrants.

Last night on Countdown with Keith Olbermannn, Constitutional Law Professor, Jonathan Turley discussed the Prosecuting of John Ashcroft and the ramifications of a possible decision favoring the Obama administration’s support of abuse of the law by Ashcroft.

Jonathan Turley:

The amazing thing about this case is that there is an old expression of bad cases making bad law. This is a case of a bad guy making a bad law. They’re going to have to pitch this to the heart of the court to support one of the most abusive Attorney Generals in history. What will be left is truly frightening.

This is a case, as you have mentioned, where false statements were given to a Federal court to secure a warrant, a person was held without access to a lawyer, was held in highly abusive conditions and you have an Attorney General who was virtually gleeful during that period about his ability to round up people. This was at a time when material witness rationale was being used widely and rather transparently to simply hold people.

Smith, the judge, wrote a really incredible opinion, one of the better opinions I’ve read in the last ten years and he basically noted st the end, this is what the Framers fought against. And he right, we have become what the Framers fought against. What it is we defined ourselves against, this is what the Framers were talking about, arbitrary detention.

And my God, you have the Obama Administration arguing that you cannot hold an Attorney General liable for such an egregious and horrible act.