Nixon has won Watergate

Jonathan Turley, USA Today

6:03 p.m. EDT March 25, 2013

Four decades ago, Nixon was halted in his determined effort to create an “imperial presidency” with unilateral powers and privileges. In 2013, Obama wields those very same powers openly and without serious opposition. The success of Obama in acquiring the long-denied powers of Nixon is one of his most remarkable, if ignoble, accomplishments.

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Obama has not only openly asserted powers that were the grounds for Nixon’s impeachment, but he has made many love him for it. More than any figure in history, Obama has been a disaster for the U.S. civil liberties movement. By coming out of the Democratic Party and assuming an iconic position, Obama has ripped the movement in half. Many Democrats and progressive activists find themselves unable to oppose Obama for the authoritarian powers he has assumed. It is not simply a case of personality trumping principle; it is a cult of personality.

Long after Watergate, not only has the presidency changed. We have changed. We have become accustomed to elements of a security state such as massive surveillance and executive authority without judicial oversight. We have finally answered a question left by Benjamin Franklin in 1787, when a Mrs. Powel confronted him after the Constitutional Convention and asked, “Well, Doctor, what have we got – a republic or a monarchy?” His chilling response: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

We appear to have grown weary of the republic and traded it for promises of security from a shining political personality. Somewhere, Nixon must be wondering how it could have been this easy.

I would stand on a bridge like Gandalf and thunder- “You can not pass!”

Well, let me tell you, taking a dump in a bedpan while your friends watch cures that a lot.

Today I think about Rosa Parks.

“You can not pass!”

Attorney General Eric Holder’s Contemptible Defense of the DoJ’s Seizure of AP Phone Records

By: Kevin Gosztola, Firedog Lake

Tuesday May 14, 2013 8:21 pm

“Look, you guys will claim classified-and it’s not just you as an administration-any administration claims everything is somehow a national security leak.” He suggested a third party should decide whether a leak was or is going to endanger lives and asked if the president supported that kind of protection for media. Carney declined to address this question.

The New York Times reported in October 2009, “The Obama administration has told lawmakers that it opposes legislation that could protect reporters from being imprisoned if they refuse to disclose confidential sources who leak material about national security, according to several people involved with the negotiations.”

“The administration this week sent to Congress sweeping revisions to a ‘media shield’ bill that would significantly weaken its protections against forcing reporters to testify,” the Times also reported. So, both Carney and Holder are being disingenuous.

To top it off, a reporter asked him what he thought about the Obama administration’s civil liberties record, whether the administration was disappointed and why more had not been done. Holder shiftily answered, “I’m proud of what we’ve done. He cited “the policies we put in place with regard to the war on terror,” the discontinuation of certain “enhanced interrogation techniques,” and the aggressive enforcement of civil rights laws. And, pressed further, he added, “This administration has put a real value on the rule of law and our values as Americans.”

It is unclear what value the Justice Department is promoting when it engages in a wide fishing expedition for records from twenty different phone lines in AP offices that were used by over 100 journalists working for the AP. It is unclear what value is being upheld when two months of time is targeted and it appears that the Justice Department may not only be able to secretly use the material obtained to investigate the leak on the sting operation but also possibly look into the sources for stories by the AP on the US drone program and investigate those sources.

The major sea change in media discussions of Obama and civil liberties

Glenn Greenwald, The Guardian

Wednesday 15 May 2013 10.45 EDT

There are two significant points to make from these events. First, it is remarkable how media reactions to civil liberties assaults are shaped almost entirely by who the victims are. For years, the Obama administration has been engaged in pervasive spying on American Muslim communities and dissident groups. It demanded a reform-free renewal of the Patriot Act and the Fisa Amendments Act of 2008, both of which codify immense powers of warrantless eavesdropping, including ones that can be used against journalists. It has prosecuted double the number of whistleblowers under espionage statutes as all previous administrations combined, threatened to criminalize WikiLeaks, and abused Bradley Manning to the point that a formal UN investigation denounced his treatment as “cruel and inhuman”.

But, with a few noble exceptions, most major media outlets said little about any of this, except in those cases when they supported it. It took a direct and blatant attack on them for them to really get worked up, denounce these assaults, and acknowledge this administration’s true character. That is redolent of how the general public reacted with rage over privacy invasions only when new TSA airport searches targeted not just Muslims but themselves: what they perceive as “regular Americans”. Or how former Democratic Rep. Jane Harman – once the most vocal defender of Bush’s vast warrantless eavesdropping programs – suddenly began sounding like a shrill and outraged privacy advocate once it was revealed that her own conversations with Aipac representatives were recorded by the government.

Leave to the side how morally grotesque it is to oppose rights assaults only when they affect you. The pragmatic point is that it is vital to oppose such assaults in the first instance no matter who is targeted because such assaults, when unopposed, become institutionalized. Once that happens, they are impossible to stop when – as inevitably occurs – they expand beyond the group originally targeted. We should have been seeing this type of media outrage over the last four years as the Obama administration targeted non-media groups with these kinds of abuses (to say nothing of the conduct of the Bush administration before that). It shouldn’t take an attack on media outlets for them to start caring this much.

Second, we yet again see one of the most significant aspects of the Obama legacy: the way in which it has transformed and degraded so many progressive precincts. Almost nobody is defending the DOJ’s breathtaking targeting of AP, and with good reason: as the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press made clear yesterday, it’s unprecedented:

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(T)here are a few people excusing or outright defending the DOJ here: namely, some progressive blogs and media outlets. They are about the only ones willing to defend this sweeping attempt to get the phone records of AP journalists.

As I noted yesterday, TPM’s Josh Marshall – who fancies himself an edgy insurgent against mainstream media complacency as he spends day after day defending the US government’s most powerful officials – printed an anonymous email accusing AP of engineering a “smear of Justice”. Worse, Media Matters this morning posted “talking points” designed to defend the DOJ in the AP matter that easily could have come directly from the White House and which sounded like Alberto Gonzales, arguing that “if the press compromised active counter-terror operations for a story that only tipped off the terrorists, that sounds like it should be investigated” and that “it was not acceptable when the Bush Administration exposed Valerie Plame working undercover to stop terrorists from attacking us. It is not acceptable when anonymous sources do it either.” It also sought to blame Republicans for defeating a bill to protect journalists without mentioning that Obama, once he became president, reversed his position on such bills and helped to defeat it. Meanwhile, the only outright, spirited, unqualified defense of the DOJ’s conduct toward AP that I’ve seen comes from a Media Matters employee and “liberal” blogger.

During the Bush years, it was conservatives who supported the Bush DOJ and Alberto Gonzales’ threats against the press on national security grounds; now, defenders of such threats to press freedoms are found almost exclusively from progressive circles (similarly, many of the most vicious and vocal attacks on WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning have come from progressives).

This is such an under-appreciated but crucial aspect of the Obama legacy. Recall back in 2008 that the CIA prepared a secret report (subsequently leaked to WikiLeaks) that presciently noted that the election of Barack Obama would be the most effective way to stem the tide of antiwar sentiment in western Europe, because it would put a pleasant, happy, progressive face on those wars and thus convert large numbers of Obama supporters from war opponents into war supporters. That, of course, is exactly what happened: not just in the realm of militarism but civil liberties and a whole variety of other issues. That has had the effect of transforming what were, just a few years ago, symbols of highly contentious right-wing radicalism into harmonious bipartisan consensus. That the most vocal defenders of this unprecedented government acquisition of journalists’ phone records comes from government-loyal progressives – reciting the standard slogans of National Security and Keeping Us Safe and The Terrorists – is a potent symbol indeed of this transformation.

And btw- Electoral Victory my ass.

John Newton Mitchell (September 15, 1913 – November 9, 1988) was the Attorney General of the United States from 1969 to 1972 under President Richard Nixon. Prior to that, he was a noted New York municipal bond lawyer, director of Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign, and one of Nixon’s closest personal friends; after his tenure as Attorney General, he served as director of Nixon’s 1972 presidential campaign. Due to his involvement in the Watergate affair, he was sentenced to prison in 1977, serving 19 months.

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During his successful 1968 campaign, Nixon turned over the details of the day-to-day operations to Mitchell. Allegedly he also played a central role in covert attempts to sabotage the 1968 Paris Peace Accords which could have ended the Vietnam War. After he became president in January 1969, Nixon appointed Mitchell attorney general while making an unprecedented direct appeal to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover that the usual background investigation not be conducted. Mitchell remained in office from 1969 until he resigned in 1972 to manage President Nixon’s successful reelection campaign

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Mitchell believed that the government’s need for “law and order” justified restrictions on civil liberties. He advocated the use of wiretaps in national security cases without obtaining a court order (United States v. U.S. District Court) and the right of police to employ the preventive detention of criminal suspects. He brought conspiracy charges against critics of the Vietnam War, likening them to brown shirts of the Nazi era.

He expressed a reluctance to involve the Justice Department in some civil rights issues. “The Department of Justice is a law enforcement agency,” he told reporters. “It is not the place to carry on a program aimed at curing the ills of society.” However, he also warned activists, “watch what we do, not what we say.” According to biographer James Rosen, he “did more than any executive branch official of the twentieth century.” Near the beginning of his administration, Nixon ordered Mitchell to go slow on desegregation of schools in the South as part of Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”. After being instructed by the Federal courts that segregation was unconstitutional and that the Executive Branch was supposed to enforce the rulings of the Courts, he somewhat reluctantly complied and threatened the withholding of Federal funds for schools that were still segregated as well as threatening legal action against them.

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In 1972, when asked to comment about a forthcoming article that reported that he controlled a political slush fund used for gathering intelligence on the Democrats, he famously uttered an implied threat to reporter Carl Bernstein: “Katie Graham’s gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that’s published.”

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On February 21, 1975, Mitchell was found guilty of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury and sentenced to two and a half to eight years in prison for his role in the Watergate break-in and cover-up, which he dubbed the “White House horrors”. The sentence was later reduced to one year to four years by United States district court Judge John J. Sirica. Mitchell served only 19 months of his sentence, at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama, a minimum-security prison, before being released on parole for medical reasons. Tape recordings made by President Nixon and the testimony of others involved confirmed that Mitchell had participated in meetings to plan the break-in of the Democratic Party’s national headquarters in the Watergate Hotel.[citation needed] In addition, he had met, on at least three occasions, with the president in an effort to cover up White House involvement after the burglars were discovered and arrested.

Cornel West: ‘They say I’m un-American’

Hugh Muir, The Guardian

Sunday 12 May 2013

“We elected a black president and that means we are less racist now than we used to be. That’s beautiful. But when you look at the prison industrial complex and the new Jim Crow: levels of massive unemployment and the decrepit unemployment system, indecent housing: white supremacy is still operating in the US, even with a brilliant black face in a high place called the White House. He is a brilliant, charismatic black brother. He’s just too tied to Wall Street. And at this point he is a war criminal. You can’t meet every Tuesday with a killer list and continually have drones drop bombs. You can do that once or twice and say: ‘I shouldn’t have done that, I’ve got to stop.’ But when you do it month in, month out, year in, year out – that’s a pattern of behaviour. I think there is a chance of a snowball in hell that he will ever be tried, but I think he should be tried and I said the same about George Bush. These are war crimes. We suffer in this age from an indifference toward criminality and a callousness to catastrophe when it comes to poor and working people.”

Can you not cut the president some slack, I ask? Think of what he faced. What did you expect? “I worked to get him elected,” he says, almost indignant. “And I would do it again because the alternative was so much worse. But at the same time, I have to be able to tell the truth. I thought he was going to be a dyed-in-the-wool liberal rather than a weak centrist. I thought he would actually move towards healthcare with a public option. I thought he was going to try to bail out homeowners as he bailed out banks. I thought he would try to hit the issue of poverty head-on.”

He and Obama, the first-time candidate, talked. And then West attended 65 events drumming up support. “He talked about Martin Luther King over and over again as he ran. King died fighting not just against poverty but against carpet-bombing in Vietnam; the war crimes under Nixon and Kissinger. You can’t just invoke Martin Luther King like that and not follow through on his priorities in some way. I knew he would have rightwing opposition, but he hasn’t tried. When he came in, he brought in Wall Street-friendly people – Tim Geithner, Larry Summers – and made it clear he had no intention of bailing out homeowners, supporting trade unions. And he hasn’t said a mumbling word about the institutions that have destroyed two generations of young black and brown youth, the new Jim Crow, the prison industrial complex. It’s not about race. It is about commitment to justice. He should be able to say that in the last few years, with the shift from 300,000 inmates to 2.5 million today, there have been unjust polices and I intend to do all I can. Maybe he couldn’t do that much. But at least tell the truth. I would rather have a white president fundamentally dedicated to eradicating poverty and enhancing the plight of working people than a black president tied to Wall Street and drones.”

A DocuDharma tradition now on The Stars Hollow Gazette

I tease my mother by calling her Emily after Emily Gilmore both because overall my family reminds me very much of the Gilmores and because she’s never met a brand name she didn’t like whereas I’m perfectly content to buy generic.

I thank her among many things for a thorough grounding in the domestic and other arts.

Mom teaches first grade and is actually famous in a quiet sort of way.  The kind parents brag about and angle their kids for though she’s won national awards too.  Of course I owe everything I know about educating to her and among my own peers I’m considered an asskicking trainer.

She also insisted we learn to perform routine self maintenance, little things like laundry and ironing, machine and hand mending. basic cooking.  Of course she always indulged us with trips to museums and zoos, made sure we got library cards, did the usual bus driver thing to swim practice, had this huge second career as a Brownie/Girl Scout Leader for my sister.

At one point when I was old enough for it to make an impression she took her Masters of Fine Arts in Art of all things, so I know a little Art History with Far Eastern.  I understand how to bang out a copper pot and make silver rings because she took me to class once or twice.  She liked stained glass so much that she and dad made several pieces (you use a soldering iron and can cut yourself pretty bad so it’s a macho thing too).  They also did silk screening which taught me a lot about layout and graphic arts.

But she always liked fabric arts and in addition to a framed three dimensional piece in the living room, there are Afghans and rugs and scarves and pot holders and wash cloths and hats and quilts and dolls.

And the training kits and manuals for her mentorship programs, and the adaptations and costumes for the annual first and fifth grade play.  Did I mention she plays 3 instruments, though mostly piano?

She touch types too.

So to Emily, a woman of accomplishment and refinement, Happy Mother’s Day.

Silly liberals wearing crowns

by digby, Hullabaloo

5/11/2013 03:30:00 PM

Watch Glenn Greenwald irritate the hell out of Bill Maher last night with his “silly liberal” opinion that Islam is not some kind of uniquely violent religion — and that US foreign policy might just be partly to blame for its believers’ hostility towards America.

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I would love to know why Maher thinks that making this (to me, obvious) observation makes liberals “feel good.” I can’t speak for anyone but myself, but it makes me feel like shit.

Greenwald and Maher are both wrong

by thereisnospoon, Hullabaloo

5/12/2013 07:30:00 AM

People tend to see the winner of the debate as the one who confirmed their own prior views. Maher’s argument is that Islam is a uniquely violent religion; Greenwald’s is that there’s no difference between Islam and any other religion, but that U.S. imperialism is to blame for any differential blowback.

But the evidence would dictate that they’re both wrong. Both of their arguments are too simplistic to be taken seriously, and both are easily assailable.

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The ease of financing a government with oil money tempts elites into creating an economy without a substantial middle-class tax base, and without a voice of the people in government. The people are free enough to be angry and act on that anger, but not free enough to succeed or create real change. This is when fundamentalist religion is most dangerous.

This is true everywhere, regardless of whether the people in question are Christian or Muslim.

And indeed, one of the more depressing dynamics in American politics is the immediate hope on both sides after any terrorist act that a member of the other tribe be implicated. Conservatives hope to see a Muslim terrorist implicated, while liberals hope it’s a right-wing terrorist extremist. This is pointless and foolish. In fact, progressives should simply note that there’s barely a breath of difference between the two.

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This isn’t about imperialism or about Islam. This is about fundamentalism, and the need to uproot it in favor of a more ecumenical, open-minded progressivism wherever it exists.

No sorry David, Glenn Greenwald is not wrong

by digby, Hullabaloo

5/12/2013 09:26:00 AM

It’s interesting that David Atkins thinks that both Greenwald and  Maher are wrong since I came down heavily on Greenwald’s side just yesterday. I suppose he was being polite. But obviously David’s screed requires a response from me since he could just as easily have put my name in the title of his post.

Let me first say right upfront that I don’t dictate what anyone writes on this blog.  It’s a free forum and just because I might disagree with the thesis, in this case quite vehemently, I would never remove the piece simply on that basis. Free speech and clash of ideas and all that rot. But I do reserve the the right to respond when I think it’s necessary. So.

Unfortunately, David chose to represent Greenwald’s views as being some sort of simplistic “blaming” of all the world’s ills on imperialism. That’s not what he said. Indeed he said several times, in response to Maher’s repeated insistence, that he did not believe that. He was referring specifically to the perennial question of “why they hate us.”  He believes that the beef stems from American foreign policy of the past six decades and not out of some religious hatred for The Great Satan.  In other words, he doesn’t think they hate us for our freedoms or because Allah told them so, but rather for our insistence on interfering in the rest of the world’s business both economically and militarily.  (Yes,  that’s “imperialism” and we are an empire, which is indisputable.)

My big black dog-

tins is a straight out apparatchik for the institutional Democratic Party and has been since his first days at dK.  He has no special intuition or skill, and I’ve worked enough of my life in actual consumer research (where you get fired when you’re as egregiously wrong as he always is) to know that.

digby is a willing shill for the lesser of… experiencing buyer’s remorse.

Boo who?

Without dday the place is an empty shell hardly worthy of notice except as a justification for my tendency to quote sources extensively (what digby says).

I assume some of you are anticipating my death match with TheMomCat but outside the inherent ugliness of 2 struldbrugs covered in goo we mostly disagree about who radicalized who and our disputes are as interesting as a Boca Raton early bird dinner argument over the tip.

I really can’t think of anything I’d like less to do this weekend than write about Formula One.  I could be getting a good nap for instance, the insides of my eyelids miss me.

Frankly the only new news is tires (again) and I’m tired of them.

The developing story line is that Pirelli has strengthened the steel belts in its steel belted radials (remember when those were going to save the world from random boards with nails sticking out?)  to the point that under stress huge chunks of rubber fly off leaving you to drive on square wheels and rims.  So they’re forced to re-formulate which throws out all your testing (which was done at this very race track by the way).

It’s mildly amusing that the silver arrows (f1 hip speak for Mercedes) are in the Front Row (Bob Uecker, which really is hip) and McLaren’s champion, Jenson Button, didn’t make it out of Q2 despite all the aero tweaks (which many teams are sporting, they must be bored).

Massa and Gutierrez both have 3 grid penalties for impeding during Qualifying.

For you GP2 enthusiasts (c’mon, there must be some)-

There’s No Clear Path for Racing Drivers on the Way Up

By BRAD SPURGEON, The New York Times

Published: May 10, 2013

Although there are probably more racing series lower down the racing ladder than ever before, these training grounds are not only inadequate, but there are far too many and they are too disparate to form an authoritative route to the pinnacle of world auto racing.

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As a result of several recent complaints by team directors and drivers that they haven’t any time to adapt, Formula One decided to act. Starting this weekend, as the series begins its season in Europe at the Spanish Grand Prix outside Barcelona, the teams have an extra set of tires for the Friday morning practice session to allow drivers to spend more time driving on the track rather than sitting in the garage.

In fact, the rookies were not the only consideration. In the first four races this season, there was little track action in the first session of the weekend, which meant a failure to provide a show for the spectators.

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In July, the former Formula One driver Gerhard Berger was assigned by the International Automobile Federation, or FIA, the series’ governing body, to create a clear-cut system that would take drivers all the way from karting up to Formula One.

“People are complaining that the best drivers are now all spread out and so you cannot look at the British Formula 3 Championship, for example, and say that he is certain to get to Formula One,” Berger was quoted as saying in an article in an FIA publication. “These days the best drivers are all over the place: one in Formula 3, one in GP3, one in Formula Renault and one in Formula Abarth. The system no longer does what it is supposed to do, which is to give a highly talented driver a C.V. he can use to progress to Formula One.”

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The rookie who was probably the best prepared this season is Valterri Bottas at the Williams team, who was carefully groomed and given track time last year during Friday practice sessions when he was a back-up driver for the team.

“For how it is nowadays in Formula One, I really got the best development for my first races,” Bottas said, “and even with that I would have preferred to drive more.”

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“Testing is one thing, the racing is another,” said Daniel Ricciardo, who is in his second year as a driver at Toro Rosso. “Testing is definitely going to help you 80 percent, and that 20 percent you can only learn on the track out there Sunday.”

Williams is no more competitive this season than it was last, perhaps less.

• Spanish Grand Prix
• Circuit de Catalunya
• Guardian Interactive Track
• Formula One Interactive Track

• Formula One Official Site
• NBC Sports Motor Sports

Pretty tables below.

Democratic strategist: Party ‘in decline’

By JAMES HOHMANN, Politico

5/10/13 5:05 AM EDT

“Since Obama was elected President, the Democrats have lost nine governorships, 56 members of the House and two Senate seats,” Doug Sosnik, the political director in Bill Clinton’s White House, writes in a new memo.

While Republican branding problems get the lion’s share of attention, the Democratic Party’s favorability rating has declined by 15 points since Obama took power. A Pew Research Center survey this January showed that the Democratic Party was viewed favorably by 47 percent of Americans, down from 62 percent in Jan. 2009.

With the likelihood of gridlock and near-record-low confidence in public institutions, Sosnik expects 2014 to bring the fourth change election in the past eight years.

…

Obama neither directly campaigned nor raised money for down-ticket Democrats last year. The post-election creation of Organizing for Action to push his own agenda has upset party regulars because it makes the Democratic National Committee less relevant than ever, squeezes fundraising for other Democratic groups and emphasizes issues that put moderates in a bind.

“Obama not only got elected by running against the party establishment, but he has governed as a President who does not emphasize his party label,” writes Sosnik. “It’s hard to be a change agent if you are lugging around a party label in an era where voters are so strongly disaffected from our institutions.”

Three week break my ass, I hate writing about sports.

Following Formula One means going to bed late and getting up early,  No big deal for a junky, but my fundamental indifference rears its ugly head.

We will be running Hards and Mediums and during practice teams have been coerced by bribes and sportsmanship to test replacements for the failed Softs and Super Softs which throw chunks of rubber on pit lane.  Compounds have reverted to 2012 since 2013 is a huge fail so far.

Speaking of fail, commentators are pimping Williams and prominently ignoring McLaren.  Williams has been mired in last place forever and McLaren is wasting pots of money on a chassis that will be junked next year when they switch to blown 6es.

Why talk about Red Bull, Lotus, Ferarri, or Mercedes when you can obsess about the also rans and Danica?

Of course the casual slap dash coverage is because the sporting press is swimming in saliva about Monaco which is hardly a race but more an exposure of what Formula One is really about-

Money.

Of course any failure by Mercedes is due to rear camber stiffness.

• Spanish Grand Prix
• Circuit de Catalunya
• Guardian Interactive Track
• Formula One Interactive Track

• Formula One Official Site
• NBC Sports Motor Sports

The Secret of the Seven Sisters

Al Jazeera

26 Apr 2013 13:12

On August 28, 1928, in the Scottish highlands, began the secret story of oil.

Three men had an appointment at Achnacarry Castle – a Dutchman, an American and an Englishman.

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Four others soon joined them, and they came to be known as the Seven Sisters – the biggest oil companies in the world.