Because 1099 times weren't enough.

One of the more subtle pains that comes from having lived under the Bush administration for seven years arises from the fact that abuses now seem too commonplace to talk about. It's not that they're not significant; it's that there's nothing new to say. Signing statements reserving the right to ignore laws Bush can't be troubled to veto? Sure, they represent a terrifyingly anti-constitutional approach to governance, but he's fired off about eleven hundred of them (according to Jon Stewart tonight), and I, at least, pretty much ran out of novel ways to express my disgust back in 2006, when Charlie Savage first started covering them.

So it feels almost boorish to complain about the latest examples. Am I insulting your intelligence? Do you think I think you didn't get the point before? I hope not.

The thing is, this is on the egregious side even for Bush. The man's reserving the right to build permanent military bases in Iraq, to ignore new protections for whistle-blowers, to refuse to turn over "any existing intelligence assessment, report, estimate or legal opinion" requested by Congress, and to block a bipartisan commission on our mercenary/contractor hordes in Afghanistan and Iraq. All of it, clearly, is inconsistent with his view of the presidency as essentially unconstrained by tradition, other branches of government, or common sense - and, again, it's not a surprise anymore.

But the man is signing these laws and then promising to break them. That's it. That's all there is to it. There's obviously no plain-sight basis for signing statements in the Constitution, and the ABA concluded there's no really compelling loophole whose exploitation could lead to their justification. It's just the president expressing an intent to violate the law - in this case, so that mismanagement can continue unexamined and so that the Senate's power to validate treaties can be bypassed. The man's arrogating powers to his office right and left - and abusing them as he does - and apparently the specter of political inconvenience is going to keep the officers of the House and the Senate from pushing back.

And, again, as far as I can tell it's getting very little coverage outside of the Boston Globe and the Daily Show - the people that count just don't really seem to find it remarkable.

That kinda sucks.

Back to the dark side.

Just to make the contrast with that hypothetical Edwards Justice Department all the more profound, the gang we've currently got is exploring new ways to let us down.

Yep, Mukasey came out today to assert that torture's not torture if it might be useful.

Senator Biden just asked the Attorney General how it could be that the legality of waterboarding depends on the "circumstances," as Mukasey wrote in his letter. Mukasey's response was revealing: He pointed to the "shocks the conscience" test under the Due Process Clause and the McCain Amendment, under which, Mukasey argued, the "cruelty" of the technique must be weighed against the potential benefits. Biden did not understand how such sliding-scale variables could affect whether the technique is torture or not. Mukasey began to respond that he was not talking about the torture statute.

What this reveals is that DOJ and Mukasey have concluded that waterboarding is categorically not torture, and is not "cruel treatment" under Common Article 3 (even though it is, by Mukasey's own lights, "cruel" -- go figure). Therefore the only question, in their view, is whether it shocks the conscience under the Due Process Clause. A review of the letter confirms this: Mukasey did not write that whether waterboarding is torture depends on the circumstances; instead, he wrote that there are circumstances where "current law" would (and would not) prohibit waterboarding. Mukasey apparently has concluded that OLC was correct that waterboarding is not torture because it does not entail physical suffering of "extended duration or persistence."

Insert your own snark here.

And now it's two.

Nuts. We've had almost no time at all to celebrate Giuliani dropping out of the race, and now we have to mourn the loss of Edwards. The man ran the most successful losing campaign I can recall, seeming to drag the rest of the Democratic field - particularly Clinton, I think - much further toward the vital left than their tacticians had ever wanted, and his relentless advocacy of anti-poverty and social justice programs has gone some way toward filling a void the national party has suffered for years. I've read some speculation that he might be up for the attorney general gig in an Obama administration, and . . . well, damn, that really would be a good place to put a progressive brawler, wouldn't it?

Either way, he did the country a favor by running.


EDIT: Ezra Klein says more and says it better here. In my defense, I'm still severely undercaffeinated.

Schadenfreude.

The New York Times on the end of Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign.

Short campaign thought from sleep-dep land.

So, here I am, reading Joe Klein's post-SC blog post over at Swampland - and at the moment he's in Good Klein mode, not Hack Klein mode, so it's all to the good.

Anyway, he says that the results on Saturday in large part reflected local genuine outrage at Clinton campaigning (and/or the perception thereof), and that makes him part of a pretty broad media trend. I think it's right as far as it goes, though there are qualifiers: Obama's outreach program has been nothing short of spectacular in every state he's contested so far (except among Latinos in Nevada, admittedly), and he really put a disproportionate amount of effort into South Carolina specifically - everyone expected an historically strong showing. [Hell, I worried that the Clintons would be able to spin a loss of under ten percent as a win.]

But, ultimately, no one expected the blowout we got, and it's hard to see past the firestorm of criticism the Clintons brought down on themselves for a convincing cause.

Again, for an Obama supporter, that's all to the awesome - but it's still faintly unsettling how determinedly the narrative has centered around Senator Clinton and her boisterous husband for the last couple of weeks. We had the story about how New Hampshire was won by a show of emotion, and we had the story of the necessity of her win in Nevada, and now we have the story of the Clintons alienating African-Americans. It's all reasonable, and the trend may be amplified by a certain amount of rope-a-doping from the Obama camp - but the longer this particular manner of emphasis goes on the more it obscures, however subtly, that the campaign is more than an extension of the former first family's ongoing psychodrama.

It's not a big thing, and I'm not even sure that the shadow campaign approach isn't benefiting Obama (this month), but it's just a little bit askew - particularly since an ongoing study of lessons the Clintons have learned and the steps they might take to rehabilitate themselves would amount to an extended free chance for spin. The Obama camp might not have as easy a hook.

That said, Klein ends his post with this . . .

It may well be true that any Democrat is going to have to handle that sort of sewage in the general election, but I've now--belatedly!--figured out that the real audacity in Barack Obama's campaign--far more than his positions on the issues, which almost seem an afterthought--is his outrageous belief that the entire country, not just Democrats, wants to see a straight up election; that the entire country is tired of the pestilence of tactical tricks that the Clintons learned from their co-dynasts, the Bushes. (The latest example being their sudden, sociopathic emphasis on the importance of the Florida primary, a contest all three candidates had agreed to eschew at the behest of the Democatic National Committee.)

It is a hell of a bet Obama has made. And nearly 40 years of political, uhm, experience tells me that it isn't a very wise one...but I must also say that it is truly sad to see Bill and Hillary Clinton on the wrong side of it.

. . . so maybe I shouldn't worry so much.

Ted Kennedy endorses Obama!

I have at least one Republican friend who's going to take that as proof that Obama is all hype and, like all true liberals everywhere, eats babies.

Still, for those of us in the blue camp, this is about as big as endorsements get - not because the man commands legions of prospective voters outside of Massachusetts (though I gather the Obama team is hoping Ted's cred will help with Latino voters), but because it represents about the most dramatic schism with the left-hand side of the Democratic establishment the Clintons could suffer unless FDR himself rose from the grave to campaign. Between this and Obama's speech last night (to say nothing of the campaign and the results that preceded it), undecided Super-Tuesday voters have probably gotten the best push they could possibly get.

Here's hoping it doesn't make the Clintons more unhinged.

The perfect is the enemy of the good.

Once again, the Bushies would rather see people die than cope with moral complexity. Matt Yglesias brings us (indirectly) the new example:

Apparently there's a nasal spray called Narcan that can reverse the impact of a heroin overdose. Doctors give it to patients, but it doesn't actually require training to use effectively, so public health workers around the country have started giving out OD kits to drug users, saving thousands of lives. Naturally, the Office of National Drug Control Policy wants to shut this down. As Mark Kleiman observes the logic here seems to be that we should make heroin use as dangerous as possible, the better to scare off potential users: "Why not just go all the way and poison the heroin supply? If withholding Narcan in order to generate more overdoses in order to scare addicts into quitting were proposed as an experiment, it could never get past human-subjects review. But since it's a failure to act rather than an action, there's no rule to require that it be even vaguely rational."

I know quoting a paraphrase is pretty low, even by blogging standards, but I'm tired and I don't trust myself not to lapse into creative and disturbing invectives.

Redemption for the New York Times editorial page!

A few more like this and I may just forgive them for endorsing Senator Clinton.

FYI.

Spencer Ackerman has a good, quick look at the Bush-Iraq negotiations up over here. The really, really short version is that the Bushies are trying to get a weak Iraqi government to agree to be propped up by the U.S. forever, with the expectation that that'll make it extremely awkward politically for the next administration to make any substantive changes. [Apparently, these guys are aware that other administrations typically consider it inappropriate to unilaterally abrogate agreements made by their predecessors. Who knew?]

All of that said, the U.S. government isn't terribly popular even within the Iraqi government, and demands for sweeping legal protections up to and including immunity for our Blackwater guys and their peers aren't going to win it any new friends. I don't expect the negotiations to break down or anything, but any agreement reached may not be as stable on the Iraqi side as the president and his coterie might want.

The next ugly Florida election fight.

Apparently, the Clinton camp is pushing to get Florida and Michigan delegates relegitimized, now that it's clear she'd benefit, and they're daring other campaigns to come out and advocate stripping the citizens of those states of their right to be represented in the nomination process. It's a deeply, deeply cynical move.

It's also a defensible argument, albeit one that should've been made way earlier in the primary season. Personally, I supported stripping the states of their delegates - (1) it's not like the state party leaders weren't made fully aware of the consequences when they set out to rewrite the primary calendar, and (2) I was pissed off - but the ugly truth is that it is a collective punishment, and it is unfair to the actual voters in the states. Citizen participation in the nomination process isn't a hard constitutional right in the same way participation in general elections is, but that doesn't mean it isn't hugely important to the health of our representative system. I still think the national Democrats were within their rights, and I still think it's too late in the campaign to turn things around, regardless, but I am aware that there's a good-faith argument that could be made to the contrary.

It's just a shame the Clintons are making said argument seem so unclean.



LATE EDIT: More here from Ezra Klein.

But if this pushes her over the edge, the Obama camp, and their supporters, really will feel that she stole her victory. They didn't contest those states because they weren't going to count, not because they were so committed to the DNC's procedural arguments that they were willing to sacrifice dozens of delegates to support it. It's as hard as hardball gets, and the end could be unimaginably acrimonious. Imagine if African-American voters feel the rules were changed to prevent Obama's victory, if young voters feel the delegate counts were shifted to block their candidate.

Dodd watch, part two.

Okay, so when I said it was on, I hadn't fully appreciated it was on.

See, the Republicans who have filibustered more bills in the last term than any group of individuals ever in the history of the republic in the same period of time have been allowed a very decorous way of doing so. They announce a filibuster is planned, Harry Reid accepts it, and a threshold of sixty votes is automatically required to move a bill along.

When Chris Dodd announces he's going to filibuster any bill with immunity for the telecoms (and, specifically, this one), Harry Reid says this:

[I]f people think they are going to talk this to death, we are going to be in here all night. This is not something we are going to have a silent filibuster on. If someone wants to filibuster this bill, they are going to do it in the openness of the Senate.

I may be wrong, but I'm under the impression that the Republicans - when they were the majority party - didn't impose this kind of burden on the opposition, let alone any members of their own party.

Dodd watch!

Looks like the telecom immunity fight is on.

Lovely news from the Sudan.

Its president has just appointed Musa Hilal, a Janjaweed leader and proponent of black African ethnic cleansing, as "a senior adviser in the government." Apparently, it's meant to reassure the agents of genocide that the Sudanese government is strong enough to resist calls from the West to turn them over to justice.

I suppose we should be looking at any nascent and/or possible schism between the government and the more genocidally-inclined Arab tribes as an opportunity, but, man, it's hard to look past the disgust. I haven't heard much about UNAMID's efforts to curtail violence against refugee camps and the like over the last few weeks, but . . . well, what can you say? Here's hoping they're effective enough to justify some nervousness among the guilty.

A feature, not a bug.

For years, the Bush administration has relied on an inadequate archiving system for storing the millions of e-mails sent through White House servers, despite court orders and statutes requiring the preservation of such records, according to documents and technical experts.

President Bush's White House early on scrapped a custom archiving system that the Clinton administration had adopted under a federal court order. From 2001 to 2003, the Bush White House also recorded over computer backup tapes that provided a last line of defense for preserving e-mails, even though a similar practice landed the Clinton administration in legal trouble.

As a result, several years' worth of electronic communication may have been lost, potentially including e-mails documenting administration actions in the run-up to the Iraq war.

More here, if you just can't get enough.

One point about the campaign.

I missed the debates last night, but scanning TPM, Yglesias, Ezra, Tapped, and all the other sites I've hit today - to say nothing of the Washington Post - has led me to believe that Senator Clinton basically decided it was time to go after Senator Obama with deceit and brass knuckles.

Now, sure, there's a case to be made that if Obama can't defend himself against this kind of thing, it's good to know it early. Still, to all those who say the real argument for Hillary Clinton is that she's too dirty a fighter to ever let the 2000 and 2004 races happen to her (see here and, particularly, here), I guess I'd caution that we're not actually going to relive those races. Yeah, rightwing dishonesty and scumbaggery is a given - all the stories we've heard about Hussein Obama at the radical Islamic madrassas are early proof of that - but I suspect it's going to be much more decentralized this time around, particularly if Freedom's Watch does indeed spread two hundred fifty million dollars around the country for random acts of character assassination.

Remember, the Republican in the last two contests has been George W. Bush, a dry drunk frat boy with a limited capacity for empathy and a sense of entitlement ten miles wide, and his campaigns reflected that. By the time the 2000 Republican primaries had hit South Carolina, we'd already seen McCain slandered for his illegitimate black baby and his torture-induced insanity; we also had a track record of ugly and ill-considered executions left uncommuted in Texas (see, in particular, Tucker Carlson's 1999 exchange with Dubya on the execution of Karla Faye Tucker). We were starting to see that Bush was a rare kind of monster, even if we didn't want to believe it.

McCain, Romney and Huckabee just don't seem to be cut from the same cloth. They'd all be disastrous presidents, and they'll all be running desperate campaigns, but so far it seems to me that they're much lesser evils than the guy currently in the White House - and, again, their campaigns reflect it. If the Democrats come at any of them personally as though it's October 2004 and only savagery can save us, we may end up doing ourselves more harm than good with the general public; at the very least, we won't be as adaptable as we need to be. We need tactics appropriate to the current fight.

Hillary Clinton on torture.

Andrew Sullivan points to Hilzoy, who points to this, which I had somehow missed the first time around, in October, 2006. The money passages:

Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) said she supports legalizing the torture of a captured terror suspect who knows about "an imminent threat to millions of Americans" - making an exception to her opposition to torture and marking a key difference from her possible rival for the White House, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). "If we're going to be preparing for the kind of improbable but possible eventuality, then it has to be done within the rule of law," Clinton said in a phone interview Friday, expanding on comments to the Daily News Editorial Board. She said the "ticking time bomb" scenario represents a narrow exception to her opposition to torture as morally wrong, ineffective and dangerous to American soldiers. "In the event we were ever confronted with having to interrogate a detainee with knowledge of an imminent threat to millions of Americans, then the decision to depart from standard international practices must be made by the President, and the President must be held accountable," she said. "That very, very narrow exception within very, very limited circumstances is better than blasting a big hole in our entire law." Clinton's stance comes days after a complex bill on the treatment of terror suspects became law, a compromise between McCain and President Bush. McCain and some human rights groups said the bill bans cruelty to detainees. Clinton and other advocates said it gives the President the power to mistreat prisoners. McCain's chief political aide, John Weaver, mocked Clinton's willingness to make an exception. "I'm shocked Sen. Clinton would try to have it both ways," Weaver said in an e-mail. A Human Rights Watch official, Tom Malinowski, said he was disappointed by her exception. "Once you open the door to this sort of thing, you legitimize the practice," he said. But the argument over the extreme ticking time bomb case isn't crystal clear. McCain, who was tortured in Vietnam, doesn't rule out torture in that unlikely case, but he argues it would be better for officials to break the law than to legalize any torture. "To carve out legal exemptions to this basic principle of human rights risks opening the door to abuse as a matter of course," he wrote in Newsweek. "It is far better to embrace a standard that might be violated in extraordinary circumstances." Clinton compared her proposal to legislation permitting the President to order the shooting down of a hijacked commercial airliner. But Malinowski said Clinton's stance was in line with Bush's failed push to legalize some forms of torture for fear of the ticking-bomb scenario. "The idea that she was flirting with here is virtually identical to what the administration tried to persuade McCain to accept last year," he said.

That Hilzoy piece also notes that the senator has been somewhat less than explicit in disavowing waterboarding and other techniques the current administration has been known to employ - but I'll note she did seem to fall in on the right side of the line when it came to the Mukasey nomination, so maybe she deserves the benefit of the doubt. Your mileage may vary.

Still, that she'd legalize torture under any circumstances scares the hell out of me. No jury would ever convict in the scenario she describes, and no president would fail to pardon - it's just a non-issue. On the other hand, the Bushies have taught us that it's generally not a good - or even very American - idea to assume that the government is too virtuous to abuse powers meant to be used selectively.

I understand her argument, and I'm sure she's making it in good faith, but it's the sort of thing that could be a deal-breaker for me in November. There are lines we simply shouldn't cross, and if she - or any Democratic presidential candidate - disagrees with me on torture, that part of my ballot is going to stay blank.

[Exceptions will be made if the Republican is an out-and-out sociopath.]

The dream.

The speech. Or, rather, one of many - the man had his moments.


EDIT: There's a lot of MLK out there today, appropriately enough, but I'll recommend a couple of posts from Matt Yglesias, here and here, if you're in the mood for quick beats on nonviolence and political integrity.

Nobody but the guy who's leading.

So, McCain pulled in a win in S.C., which I guess formally makes him a contender. On the other hand, it sounds this was also the end for Fred Thompson - though there's been no formal announcement - which might well mean still more of the southern conservative vote is going to end up going to Huckabee.

Which is to say, the Republican race is still very much up in the air, particularly since McCain still hasn't won a state where the Republicans who acutely dislike him haven't been offset by independents, and Huckabee's pretty radioactive to everyone outside the cultural south. Romney is, of course, even more the front-runner now than he was this morning, but TV guys seem to hate the man and adore McCain, so building momentum is probably going to be trickier for him than it would seem on paper.

Looks like maybe 80,000 independents voted in S.C. today, which means they can't come out to vote for Obama next week. I'm pretty sure that makes them terrible human beings.

. . .

I'm not proud of having written that.

The establishment candidates take Nevada.

On a related note, I am bummed.

Well, that's only half-true - or, rather, it's entirely true, but only because the results that disappoint me matter more than the results with which I'm pleased. I'm glad Romney won on the Republican side, both because he seems like one of the easier ones to beat and because he is (though perhaps the most pathetic and insincere guy in the contest) probably the least likely Republican to let dumb ideology get in the way of actual governance if he somehow gets the job.

The Clinton win, on the other hand, is just worrisome. The emerging consensus is that Edwards' candidacy has been benefiting Obama - so Senator C. enjoys all the institutional advantages that come from her ties to the party leadership, is currently gaining momentum, and is likely to get a reasonably substantial gain in support when Edwards is finally forced to concede his candidacy isn't viable. A win for Obama today would've helped correct at least some of those trends, but . . . well, didn't happen.

It's still early days, and a big win in S.C. could do Obama wonders, but at this point it seems to me that the contest is really already Clinton's to lose.

Which, to my mind, sucks.


EDIT: Maybe Obama won the most delegates, despite coming in a few points behind on the popular vote? Ah, democracy.

Still, my worries are unchanged. One delegate's not likely to make any kind of difference in the final count, and the Clinton camp can still rightly claim the win here. Obama needs excitement to boost turnout; if the Clintonites can decisively crush the hopes of younger voters early on, I think they pretty much walk away with the nomination.

Building a better Big Brother.

So, it looks like AT&T is working hard to find new and better ways to monitor everything its internet service customers download; you can read up on it here, if you like. Given that the American ISP market isn't yet robust enough to guarantee the consumer loads of alternatives to big telecoms out to institutionalize routine violations of privacy, I'd really like to see some watchdogging (preferably from a part of the government that doesn't stink of Cheney or the NSA) almost immediately - but that's not really the point of this post.

The point of this post instead touches upon AT&T's perfunctory "If you're not a criminal, you don't need privacy!" message. [In spokesman-speak, it's "'Ultimately, our customers and their online experience come first,' said Michael Balmoris, a spokesman for AT&T. 'This is not about the vast majority of customers who consume content online legally. This is about combating illegal activity.'"] Now, obviously, that's not so much reassurance as it is an effort to preemptively discredit and/or intimidate potential critics - Anyone who claims to think that private companies shouldn't assume powers of surveillance constitutionally presumed to be too damn dangerous for representative government must really be downloading bootlegs of Shrek! - and under ordinary circumstances you could just say it was par for our increasingly cynical course.

But, come on. At the same time this is going on, AT&T and its industry peers are leaning hard on Congress in the hopes of being granted retroactive immunity for turning over massive amounts of customer information to the Bush administration without warrants and judicial supervision. More simply, they're demanding a pass for a sustained series of actions for which they think they could be prosecuted. Call me crazy, but this does not seem to me to be a position from which a company should generally be encouraged to argue that its executives have moral and legal judgement which I should trust exceeds my own.

The point of this post, then, is that these guys have some big, brazen balls.

Quiet Friday.

Seriously, I'm trying to get back into part-time blogging in a reasonably disciplined way, but the only thing I'm seeing in the papers and the big-time blogs that even surprises me a little is that Bush apparently isn't demanding that his tax cuts be made permanent in the name of staving off recession. And that's a happy surprise, which doesn't play upon my normal blogging motivations at all!

Mind you, it looks like there's a pretty solid case to be made that the stimulus plan the president is demanding won't actually do a whole lot of good, so it's not like I'm being forced to embrace out and out optimism or anything.

Good news from Nevada.

The NSEA's efforts to block nine "at large" caucus sites in Vegas have officially failed. The Clinton camp is understandably bummed (if you haven't been following the story, the thing to take away is that this is expected to benefit Obama), and made the mistake of stepping out from behind their proxies to say so.

In a statement, the Clinton campaign pointed out that other voters won't receive the same advantages as the bellhops and waitresses along the strip.

"Make no mistake," the statement said, "the current system that prohibits some shift workers from being able to participate, while allowing others to do so, would seem to benefit other campaigns. More importantly, it is unfair."

Yeah, we all know the system is imperfect, but I like to think that most of us don't think the proper way to improve upon it is to make sure as many people as possible are disenfranchised so that numbers can balance out.

Another great moment in American history.

"Canada Puts US on Torture Watch List."

Darn these innocent mistakes, part 2: the revengening!

The White House tried Thursday to tamp down a growing e-mail controversy, dismissing suggestions that millions of electronic messages are missing from the early days of the Bush administration.

The comments by spokesman Tony Fratto shifted away from White House statements last spring that expressed uncertainty over whether the allegations were true or not.

The latest round of questions began Wednesday when the White House, under a court order to disclose, was forced to admit that it had undercut its last line of defense for preserving any missing electronic messages by recycling its backup tapes — taping over its previously backed-up electronic documents, raising the possibility that some e-mail was erased.

In response, the White House went on the offensive.

"We have no reason to believe that there is any data missing at all" from White House computer servers, said Fratto. "And we've certainly found no evidence of any data missing." The court filing about recycling of backup tapes also stated that the White House is undertaking an independent assessment to whether any e-mail is missing.

Fratto's comments also shifted away from what the White House apparently told the prosecutor overseeing the CIA leak investigation two years ago.

. . .

Regarding allegations of missing e-mails, the White House tried to bolster its position by casting doubt on a chart created by a former White House employee that suggested there is a large amount of missing e-mail.

"We tried to reconstruct some of the work" in the chart and "could not authenticate the correctness of the data," said Fratto. "We have no evidence and we have no way of showing that any e-mail at all are missing."

In response, one of the private groups suing the White House over the issue noted that the chart is one of 3,470 pages including spreadsheets and related documents that may be responsive to the issue of missing e-mail and which the Bush administration refuses to make public.

Also, in a briefing for congressional investigators last May, two White House lawyers said a review of the e-mail system had apparently found some days with a very small number of preserved e-mails and some days with no e-mails preserved at all, according to an account of the briefing by Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee.

Regarding the disclosure that backup tapes had been recycled, the sworn declaration by Theresa Payton defended the White House's conduct by saying that recycling backup tapes was "consistent with industry best practices."

An e-mail technology expert disagreed.

"The best practice is to archive and store everything in a system that's searchable for e-mail and kept in an orderly and organized way," said Rurik Bradbury, vice president of strategy for Intermedia, which runs e-mail systems for a quarter of a million companies.

"In the financial industry and the accounting and law fields, there are federal and industry regulations which require them to keep all e-mail for a period of many years in a separate archive, and that archive has to be searchable," said Bradbury.

Requirements for industry and government are different, with stringent requirements for preservation of federal and presidential records. The Federal Records Act contains criminal penalties of up to three years in prison for destruction of government documents.

Ah, yes. The "You can't prove the tapes we improperly deleted weren't basically blank to begin with!" defense.

The whole thing is here.

Darn these innocent mistakes!

Today was supposed to be a court-imposed deadline for the White House to produce emails from the first couple of years of Bush’s presidency. Just a few minutes before midnight, the White House came up with a new rationale for failing to cooperate — it deleted the emails and taped over the backups.

Whoops!

I tried to watch the debates tonight. I really did.

Couldn't last, though. Couldn't make it. See, at this point, my feelings for Tim Russert are probably very much like what your average would-be world conqueror feels for James Bond. I don't just want him off the scene; I want him strapped to a table with a death laser aimed for his talking points, forced to listen to me rant on and on about his lack of a place in my new world order.

Makes it hard to concentrate on what the Democratic candidates are saying.

But, hey, Ezra Klein summarized the first half hour or so here, and it seems to be consistent with what little I did catch, so maybe I can fake my way through any conversations that touch on the rest of it. "Man, that sure was an insult to our great republic!" I'll say, and all the people around me will nod sagely.

Meh.

Meanwhile, Romney won the Republican vote, which puts him way the hell in the lead, delegate-wise (insofar as one can be way the hell in the lead on January 16th). On the other hand, a nine point lead in your family's home state after massive advertising buy-ins is . . . well, it's better than losing, but it's not the stuff of which avalanches of support are made. Mitt may be the national front-runner at this point, but that's more because big chunks of the Republican establishment really loathe Huckabee and McCain than because he's Ronald Reagan reborn in the body of a Ken doll. He could still very well lose, or end up crawling into a brokered convention.

Sorry if all that's painfully obvious. Most of my attention's still focused on anti-Russert death traps.

Just a reminder: Huckabee is scary.

Now, he also seems to be a genuinely nice guy, and in a lot of ways even admirable. I mean, take stuff like this, from 2004:

If you're wondering how Gov. Huckabee's hundreds of clemencies compare with neighboring states, get ready for a shocker.

Huckabee leads the pack.

He has issued more commutations and pardons than all of the six neighboring states combined.

Governors seldom reduce sentences in other states – and almost never for murderers serving life without parole or for rapists or for habitual drunk drivers, while in Arkansas it's a regular habit with Huckabee.

Other governors use their clemency power only rarely, while Huckabee has made it routine. As we've told you before, he has issued more than 700 pardons and commutations during his eight years in office – more than 137 this year alone – and more than his three predecessors combined.

It's an approach that led to at least one genuine horror - Wayne Dumond - but it was politically courageous, and as far as I can tell it was rooted in a sincere desire to see people better themselves. It may not have been universally wise, but it was decent - and I presume he would be the first to say that it was his way of putting his religious faith, his belief in redemption, into action. Fair enough.

But then that desire to take his faith to politics brings us to things like this, from MSNBC's morning programming, earlier today.

"I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution," Huckabee told a Michigan audience on Monday. "But I believe it's a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living god. And that's what we need to do -- to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards so it lines up with some contemporary view."

Now, actually, I respect that. He doesn't seem to be saying that the Constitution's already an expressly Christian document, that we've all been reading it wrong, and that if he's president he'll ignore what it actually says in favor of what he believes it's meant to say; instead, apparently, he wants to change it - and that's fair! The document is meant to be amended, if that's the will of the people, and if he wants to go out and try to make his case in public view, then that's his prerogative. More power to him!

It's just, y'know, the case he wants to make is a really, really unhealthy one.

Not cool from Republicans, not cool from Democrats.

Voter suppression, that is. The short version of the story, as I understand it, is that Nevada's teachers' union has sued to block the use of "at large" caucus sites, meant for workers whose places of employment are prohibitively far from the caucus locations assigned by home addresses. Of course, it turns out that the teachers' union (or, more properly, the Nevada State Education Association) backs Senator Clinton, while the workers most affected by the lawsuit are likely to be under the umbrella of the Culinary Workers Union, which backs Senator Obama, and no legal action was taken until after the CWU made its endorsement. There's more on the story here, along with a little bit of analysis of the strength of the NSEA's case (summary: the Las Vegas Sun doesn't think it's very strong at all).

I was on my blissful sabbatical from blogging the last time the Clinton campaign and its hangers-on tried to argue that it was improper for Obama supporters to come out and vote - in that case, it was Iowa college students - so I didn't sit up and grouse against it. I regret that now.

Don't get me wrong: I think that Hillary Clinton will be a decent president if she gets the job. Her domestic agenda (outside of Net Neutrality, anyway) is excellent, and - okay - her foreign policy instincts are the most suspect of any of the Democrats, but I like to think that she'd be more responsible in considering her duties in the White House than she has been, on occasion, in the Senate.

Still, man, she's running an ugly, cynical campaign. There's the stuff above, there's the "Is it racist or is it just stupid?" media framing exercise of the last couple of weeks, there's the misrepresentation of Obama's record, there are the quiet little terrorism threats - and, however effective it all may ultimately be, I'm in no hurry to embrace it.

This year, all the stars are in alignment for Democrats. The Republicans have run the country into the ground, and the voters know it, while those of us in the tribe on the left actually enjoy a pretty broad consensus about what we think needs doing; if we're confident, respectful, and honest, we can make a case for ourselves that would convince an entire generation. The idea that we might instead run a slash-and-burn campaign meant to depress turnout on the other side and to frighten just enough swing voters into pulling the right levers is grounds for despair - and yet you can see the seeds of it in what the Clinton camp is doing in our own party sandbox.

Somebody asked me this weekend why I hate Hillary Clinton, and . . . well, it startled me, because I don't. I originally opposed her for the presidency simply because I thought the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton progression would be an unfortunate precedent for this country - but she herself is an intelligent, distinguished citizen, and it's clear she loves this country passionately. She's actually a pretty awesome person!

But, man, right now I'd vote for almost anybody else on the Democratic side. I don't like who she thinks we all have to be to win.

Is it next January yet?

In public, President Bush has been careful to reassure Israel and other allies that he still sees Iran as a threat, while not disavowing his administration's recent National Intelligence Estimate. That NIE, made public Dec. 3, embarrassed the administration by concluding that Tehran had halted its weapons program in 2003, which seemed to undermine years of bellicose rhetoric from Bush and other senior officials about Iran's nuclear ambitions. But in private conversations with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert last week, the president all but disowned the document, said a senior administration official who accompanied Bush on his six-nation trip to the Mideast. "He told the Israelis that he can't control what the intelligence community says, but that [the NIE's] conclusions don't reflect his own views" about Iran's nuclear-weapons program, said the official, who would discuss intelligence matters only on the condition of anonymity.

More here.


Late edit (Tuesday morning, 3 AM edition): there's still more here.

Another win for democracy in Iraq?

Hey, remember that new law in Iraq I mentioned the other day? The one designed to ease restrictions on ex-Ba'athists serving in the government?

Well, funny thing: it turns out that the ex-Ba'athists were bitterly against it, while the Sadrists were its strongest proponents. In fact, it looks pretty likely that the thing's gonna turn out to have been an elegant, Orwellian play to keep potentially sympathetic Sunnis out of power for the foreseeable future.

Here's hoping Professor Cole is being too cynical, for what little it's worth.

Just what we love to see.

Somebody let the nation's crazy uncle out of the attic and gave him a microphone again.

Bush cast the broader campaign for democracy in terms of the battle against terrorism, saying there was a desire for freedom from terrorism, oppression and injustice. "We see this desire in the ordinary people across the Middle East, who are sick of violence, who are sick of corruption, sick of empty promises — and who choose a free future whenever they are given a chance."

Except when they choose Hamas, I guess.

Seriously, very few despotates are lucky enough to create the likes of Nelson Mandela or Aung San Suu Kyi through their oppression; usually, what you get are traumatized and/or desensitized radicals organized around tribal or religious lines (because those are the affiliations robust enough to endure against state pressure) - and when violence is in the mix, you get asymmetrical tactics (which is to say, terrorism). What you hope is that those groups can eventually become invested in productive peace processes and nation-building, and trade in the paranoia and militarism as they go.

Or, rather, that's what you hope if you're a functioning adult - if you're, instead, the current president of the United States of America, apparently you're putting down bets that the Democracy Fairy will come to Gaza in the night and replace guns with unconditional love for the West. Now, we're all entitled to our own little idiosyncratic bouts of irrationality, and that one probably even plays well in the American south; on the other hand, I have to assume that it sounds condescending and dishonest to the rather more jaded audiences in the Middle East.

But, wait! He's not done!

Bush appeared to put the danger posed by Iran on par with that from al-Qaida, which the U.S. national intelligence director, Mike McConnell has said is America's greatest threat.

"One cause of instability is the extremists supported and embodied by the regime that sits in Tehran," Bush said. "Iran is today the world's leading state sponsor of terror.

Bush said Iran funds militant groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad and sends arms to the Taliban in Afghanistan and Shiite extremists in Iraq. "The other major cause of instability is the extremists embodied by al-Qaida and its affiliates," he said.

Good of him to throw in al-Qaeda, obviously.

Anyway, the cynical among us might suggest that part of why Iran is at the top of the list is because the likes of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan have been excluded. Why? Well, because we tend to need their good will, and because - in practice - defining an entire state as evil basically limits the approaches we can use toward dealing with them; it's one of our many ways of painting ourselves into corners. [Not to be indelicate about it, but you'll note that we haven't exactly elicited much positive change from Iran, Syria, North Korea, Sudan and Cuba over the years.]

Right. Let's keep going.

Also Sunday, the U.S. focused new attention on the Jan. 6 confrontation between American and Iranian naval vessels in the Strait of Hormuz.

U.S. Vice Adm. Kevin Cosgriff, commander of the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet, which patrols the Gulf, briefed Bush on the incident before the president left Bahrain on Sunday morning.

Cosgriff told Bush that he took it "deadly seriously" when an Iranian fleet of high-speed boats charged at and threatened to blow up a three-ship U.S. Navy convoy passing near Iranian waters. The Iranian naval forces vanished as the American ship commanders were preparing to open fire.

White House press secretary Dana Perino said that "all the military people remember what happened in the past, such as the USS Cole." Seventeen American sailors were killed in a terrorist attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000.

Hey, funny thing: the USS Cole was attacked by al-Qaeda, not Iran. Now, I'm certainly not saying that there isn't good reason to be terrified that an engagement at sea couldn't blow up into something nightmarish - in no small part because both certain members of our government and factions under Ahmadinejad would probably welcome it - but falsely conflating nation-states with specific al-Qaeda attacks on American interests went a long way toward convincing the American public that invading Iraq was a good idea, and I really don't think I could bear to live through that twice.

Also, it's worth noting that the threats Vice Admiral Cosgriff cites quite possibly didn't come from the Iranian vessels at all. In fact, I have at hand another article touching on salient quotes from Cosgriff, and, in part, it reads:

Central to the depiction of the incident as involving a threat to U.S. warships is a mysterious pair of messages that the sailor who heard them onboard immediately interpreted as saying, "I am coming at you...", and "You will explode after a few minutes." But the voice in the audio clearly said "I am coming to you," and the second message was much less clear.

Furthermore, as the New York Times noted Thursday, the recording carries no ambient noise, such as the sounds of a motor, the sea or wind, which should have been audible if the broadcast had been made from one of the five small Iranian boats.

A veteran U.S. naval officer who had served as a surface warfare officer aboard a U.S. Navy destroyer in the Gulf sent a message to the New York Times on-line column "The Lede" Wednesday pointing out that in the Persian Gulf, the "bridge-to-bridge" radio channel used to communicate between ships "is like a bad CB radio" with many people using it for "hurling racial slurs" and "threats". The former officer wrote that his "first thought" was that the message "might not have even come from one of the Iranian craft".

Pentagon officials admitted to the Times that they could not rule out that the broadcast might have come from another source

The five Iran boats involved were hardly in a position to harm the three U.S. warships. Although Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman described the Iranian boats as "highly maneuverable patrol craft" that were "visibly armed," he failed to note that these are tiny boats carrying only a two- or three-man crew and that they are normally armed only with machine guns that could do only surface damage to a U.S. ship.

The only boat that was close enough to be visible to the U.S. ships was unarmed, as an enlarged photo of the boat from the navy video clearly shows.

The U.S. warships were not concerned about the possibility that the Iranian boats were armed with heavier weapons capable of doing serious damage. Asked by a reporter whether any of the vessels had anti-ship missiles or torpedoes, Vice Adm. Kevin Cosgriff, Commander of the 5th Fleet, answered that none of them had either of those two weapons.

"I didn't get the sense from the reports I was receiving that there was a sense of being afraid of these five boats," said Cosgriff.

It goes on to add that the "floating objects" dropped by the Iranian ships obviously weren't mines - because mines sink - and the American vessels sailed past them without concern or investigation.

*sigh*

Should we blindly trust the Iranians? No. The boats in question are indeed under the command of one of the more belligerent factions, and probably did act provocatively enough to get the propaganda ball rolling. Stipulated.

Still, it's reasonably clear Bush is once again overstating, misrepresenting, and in some cases just plain babbling, all in order to win support for a course of action that, if plainly stated, would be rejected as reckless and strategically counterproductive. It's pretty much all he does.

Anyway, brace yourselves. It may well get worse from here.

Meanwhile, in Iraq . . .

Okay, I wouldn't be surprised if Bush's stated willingness to kill the de-surge was related to the new legislation from Iraq changing (in currently obscure ways) the official policy of the government toward former Ba'athists. My original assumption was that it might have been a quid pro quo - Bush guaranteeing elevated troop levels as a reward for nominal political progress - but I'm increasingly coming to think that it's more likely that said nominal political progress gave Bush some cover to do what he wanted to do anyway.

Either way, it's worth noting that the reason the surge was supposed to end in early 2008 wasn't that, say, Democrats are a sorry bunch of wimps who want America to fail. It's that the Army and the National Guard are horrifically overextended. Military readiness was badly undermined even before the surge (see here and here for a flashback to early 2007, if you can bear it, or here for a more recent look), and it's not like the troops and their equipment have had a lot of down time since. The president's own secretary of defense came out pretty strongly in favor of pulling back in the fall . . .

[This isn't the strongest article I recall seeing, but it does the trick for my current purposes.]

. . . but I guess it didn't count for much.

We tend to look at the president's decisions in this war as being primarily political, and therefore safely removed from actual long-term consequences, but it just ain't so. Prolonging the surge has a genuine downside, much as the president would prefer us to overlook it, and even if we ultimately decide it's justified - which I certainly don't guarantee - it's good to be reasonably aware.

[While I'm on the subject, we should probably also all be more conscious than we are of the fact that we've directly or indirectly killed a lot of Iraqi civilians. But, yeah, that's kind of a downer for a Saturday night.]

Maybe it's good Chris Dodd's staying in the senate.

He probably would've been a fine president, if we lived in the kind of world in which he'd be elected - but we are where we are, and he seems to've worked a minor miracle with his peers. So, win.

Specifically, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Harry Reid is backing off from telecom immunity, which . . . well, wow. I'm not sure I've ever seen civic activism and responsible leadership trump the marriage of big business and exuberant police-statism before, but I think I like it.

The little white cat is dead.

He came back from the vet's yesterday, after ten hours or so on an IV, pumped full of antibiotics for an infection he just hasn't been able to shake.

Hadn't. He has now. Precision in all things.

And, anyway, everything seemed fine, for all of ten minutes, until he couldn't get himself up a flight of stairs. He tried - made it half-way, even - but his hind legs couldn't hold his weight. He was down to all of six pounds by then, but it was still too much. Over the course of the night, I think his kidneys basically shut down (assuming, of course, I have any accurate understanding of what they do). He wasn't processing fluids, and they weren't coming out - and he got weaker and weaker. For most of the night, he could at least walk a few steps at a time . . .

I know, because I was hovering nearby.

. . . but by five this morning he couldn't even sit up. He tried, and collapsed in on himself, his legs splayed out, looking for all the world like a cruel parody of a Warner Brothers cartoon animal after a bad fall. His head was up and moving; he just didn't understand why the rest of his body wasn't working.

By the time we got him to the emergency vet's, even his head was down. You couldn't have a clearer argument for euthanasia if the hand of God himself came down and wrote instructions in ten foot flaming letters, and I'm pretty sure at some point - maybe even soon - I'm going to find some kind of comfort in that.

But I love him, and it's breaking my heart that now I can't look out for him anymore. All I can do is say that if there's a place in some other world that's reserved for me and my family, he's welcome there and safe. That's all there is.

And I feel like that's a betrayal, somehow. He's such a good little guy.

Three points.

One: happy new year!

Two: there's a really interesting piece up in the LA Times about the nature of the power structure in Iran. The whole thing is worth reading (assuming its author has the expertise to be trusted), but if you want a short synopsis it would go something like, "Things are really complicated, and there are way more institutional checks on Ayatollah Khameini's power than you might think, and that's not always a really good thing in practice." But that makes it sound ominous and dark, when it's really just murky.

Whatever. Worth a look if you're registered at the Times.

Three: Matt Yglesias has let us in for a special look at the kind of metacritical thinking that goes into writing a blog - "Pakistan People's Party's new chairman will be a nineteen year-old whose main qualification is that he's Benazir Bhutto's son. I was going to say something snarky about how that reflects on the PPP's credentials as tribunes of liberalism and reform, but of course the odds of us going Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton in the White House look pretty good so there's really no call for jokes." - and while it's true as far as it goes, I think it is worth noting that while electing Hillary Clinton president would have the effect of bringing dynastic succession in as a political norm at the upper echelons of American politics, that's not really the logic underlying her appeal.

Which is to say, I think many of the people voting for her are doing so with an eye toward a restoration of the Clinton White House of yore, rather than a kind of sideways-directed generational shift within the family - and, as such, maybe the support enjoyed by her campaign campaign could be seen as a kind of popular questioning of the logic of presidential term limits. It's not done until a majority of the voters have spoken, sure - and, for my own part, I really hope they speak otherwise - but . . . well, it's a reminder that an arbitrary constraint on the length of a president's term in office is in some ways anti-democratic. I'm not saying the Twenty-Second Amendment isn't/can't be a useful safeguard, but it is one that can occasionally cut against the will of the people, which can lead to . . . well, weird proxy campaigns.

That said, Bush I was voted out of office, and that didn't stop Bush II from sleazing his way in - so maybe you'll get weird proxy campaigns either way, as long as political branding can help in getting votes.

Meh.

Happy new year, again!