CPAP presidential straw poll

I'm surprised, too, at how much I'm following the happenings at the Conservative Political Action Conference. I expected to ignore it. Yet headlines keep leaping out at me.

The results of their straw poll of presidential hopefuls are just out, and I must admit I'm surprised. Of course we have to remember this is not the same as the Tea Party crowd. Still, most of what has happened there so far echoes people catering to the right fringe.

So now the poll results:

Ron Paul 31%
Mitt Romney 22%
Sarah Palin 7%
Tim Pawlenty 6%
Undecided 6%
Newt Gingrich 4%
Mike Huckabee 4%

Sarah Palin a distant third at 7% -- and only 1% ahead of Tim Pawlenty -- and Undecided ??? And Newt and Huckabee tied at only 4%?

This is not an overall poll of the people. This is people attending the CPAC. I am more than surprised. I'm astounded. There's a strong libertarian segment (Paul) and next a more maintstream Republican segment (Romney and Pawlenty). The fringes are distant also-runs (Palin, Huckabee, etc.)

I guess the lesson is: being a publicity darling isn't the same as having your conservative politicians supporting you.

Ralph

Bob Barr booed by CPAC crowd

It shows how far to the right the CPAC crowd is, that former GA Congressman Bob Barr was a standout for going against the conservative red meat issues -- and was booed for his positions. More Libertarian than Republican, Barr is particularly concerned with individual freedom and civil liberties, more than with the culture war hot issues.

Appearing at CPAC on a panel on the balance between national security and personal freedoms, he defended the DoJ's attempt to try some terrorists in civilian courts. As described by Sam Stein, that's when the boos started cascading around him.

Then, as he has done before, he opposed waterboarding:

"It's not enhanced interrogation techniques. Waterboarding is torture. How would you like to be waterboarded? Try that!"

He even suggested that those who used waterboarding should be brought before a judge.

Barr and I are still far apart on most issues . But his libertarian stance on civil liberties brings us together on some issues. And he stood his ground at CPAC. Bully for you, Bob Barr.

Ralph

Bybee and Yoo were not "cleared"

The New York Times today has a more nuanced article on the release of the report from the Justice Department's own internal investigation into the so-called "torture memos" written by John Yoo and signed off on by John Bybee.

According to the Times article, the first draft from the ethics lawyers in the Office of Legal Council had concluded that Bybee and Yoo had demonstrated "professional misconduct" by ignoring legal precedents and providing slipshod legal advice to the White House, "in possible violation of international and federal laws on torture." Were that conclusion to have prevailed in the final report, they could possibly have lost their licenses to practice law. Despite the fact that the final report from the Justice Department softens that to "poor judgment," they were not "cleared" of wrong-doing. Read on:

But David Margolis, a career lawyer at the Justice Department, rejected that conclusion [professional misconduct] in a report of his own released Friday. He said the ethics lawyers, in condemning the lawyers’ actions, had given short shrift to the national climate of urgency in which Mr. Bybee and Mr. Yoo acted after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. . . .

The report quotes Patrick Philbin, a senior Justice Department lawyer involved in the review, as saying that because of the urgency of the situation, he had advised Mr. Bybee to sign the memorandum, despite what he saw as Mr. Yoo’s aggressive and problematic interpretation of the president’s broad commander-in-chief powers in trumping international and domestic law.

Mr. Philbin said that “given the situation and the time pressures, and they are telling us this has to be signed tonight — this was like 9 o’clock, 10 o’clock at night on the day it was signed — my conclusion” was that it was permissible for Mr. Bybee to sign the memorandum. “They” apparently referred to White House officials. . . .

The Office of Professional Responsibility, however, suggested in its report that the legal conclusions were in effect pre-ordained. It said that John Rizzo, the C.I.A. lawyer who requested the opinion, had “candidly admitted the agency was seeking maximum legal protection for its officers” against possible criminal prosecution. Mr. Rizzo objected to the way his remarks were characterized by the office.

Mr. Margolis said that in rejecting harsher sanctions, “this decision should not be viewed as an endorsement of the legal work that underlies those memoranda.” But he said the legal advice of Mr. Yoo and the other lawyers, while “flawed” and insufficient in some areas, did not rise to the level of “professional misconduct,” which could have resulted in bar reviews or other disciplinary action. . . .

Mr. Margolis, who has served at the Justice Department for more than three decades and handles many high-level disciplinary issues, saved some stinging criticism for Mr. Yoo.

“While I have declined to adopt O.P.R.’s findings of misconduct, I fear that John Yoo’s loyalty to his own ideology and convictions clouded his view of his obligation to his client and led him to author opinions that reflected his own extreme, albeit sincerely held, view of executive power while speaking for an institutional client,” Mr. Margolis said. . . .

The report said “situations of great stress, danger and fear do not relieve department attorneys of their duty to provide thorough, objective, and candid legal advice, even if that advice is not what the clients want to hear.”

Representative John Conyers, Jr., the Michigan Democrat who leads the House Judiciary Committee, said the ethics office report released Friday made clear that the authors of the interrogation memorandums “dishonored their office and the entire Department of Justice." . . .

The ethics report is not the last word on the emotional national dispute about torture. In August, Attorney Gener Eric H. Holder, Jr. opened a criminal investigation to determine whether the C.I.A. interrogation program broke the law, and that inquiry is expected to continue for months.

Of course our sound-bite-bedazzled media and conservative commentators will ignore the ethics lawyers' harsher conclusions and pounce on the misleading factoid that the Bybee and Yoo were "cleared," which is the way the AJC headlined its brief blurb on it today. And 90% of Americans are too busy or not engaged enough in the issues to care to find out more: so it will be widely believe, and trumpeted by the conservative crowd, that Bybee and Yoo were cleared and that all this investigation into the torture disaster is just so much liberal opposition to Bush/Cheney.

By releasing both the DoJ report and the Office of Legal Council's ethics lawyers' first draft, Conyers has assured that the fuller story will be known and recorded for history -- for those who care to know the truth.

Ralph

DoJ "Torture Memos"

From an email from the Alliance for Justice on Friday:

Today House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) publicly released not only the final Department of Justice Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) report, but also the first and second drafts of the report and the responses from Yoo and Bybee.

The long-awaited report is the product of a five-year investigation by OPR, the DOJ's internal ethics review board, of the authors of the "torture memos": John Yoo, Jay Bybee and Steven Bradbury, former senior lawyers in DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC).

The OPR report reveals new facts about the involvement of senior White House officials in the OLC lawyers' preparation of the "torture memos," raising further questions about improper political interference with DOJ's legal work. The released first draft of the OPR report concluded that Yoo and Bybee violated their professional responsibilities in drafting the most infamous 2002 "torture memo," the final report released today has been softened to conclude only that they showed "poor judgment." Under DOJ rules, "poor judgment" does not amount to professional misconduct and therefore does not trigger a referral to state bar associations for disciplinary review.

Regardless of OPR's conclusion about the lawyers' ethical conduct, the report adds to the mounting evidence that warrants a full-scale investigation of those who ordered, designed, and justified torture. Releasing the OPR report is an important first step in promoting transparency, but OPR's investigation alone cannot provide resolution for what led our country to torture. The OPR report is just the latest damning piece of a puzzle that irrefutably calls for an independent inquiry into those who provided legal cover for torture.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) announced that his panel will hold a hearing on the report next Friday morning. He also called for Judge Bybee’s resignation.

Dick Cheney publicly brags about supporting "enhanced interrogation techniques" and thinks Obama is endangering the country by "taking them off the table." That clearly reflects the mind-set that asked the Justice Department for legal cover for what they were doing.

And then there is the British Chilcot Inquiry of the past few weeks that has revealed much of what went on inside Tony Blair's government as he colluded with George Bush to invade Iraq. Many things we suspected have been confirmed as to how the run-up to the war with Iraq was "fixed" to fit Bush's agenda of removing Sadaam from power.

And the U.S. media all but ignored the entire story -- except to report on superstar Tony Blair's testimony. Mickey Nardo's blog posted daily reports from the inquiry from the British papers.

More and more pieces of the puzzle are being put in place.

Ralph

More from CPAC meeting

Conservative shill and daddy's little girl Liz Cheney had this to say at the Conservative Political Action Conference:

I worry though when we capture these leaders that we no longer have the option of using any of the enhanced interrogation techniques because the president took those off the table. When you've got people in captivity we'd like our CIA officials in particular to have the capacity to do more than just ask the terrorists to please tell us what they want.

Spencer Ackerman at The Washington Independent wrote in response:

I guess it’s not so surprising that a Cheney loves torture, but I don’t recall Liz Cheney being quite so explicit about her enthusiasm for torturing people. More significant is her presumption that only torture is effective in eliciting intelligence, which every experienced interrogator -- Ali Soufan, Malcolm Nance, the people at the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group — will tell her is the direct opposite of the truth. It would be interesting to hear her tell Gen. David Petraeus why the Central Command leader is wrong about the relationship between torture and success in counterinsurgency, to say nothing of Petraeus’ views on the relationship between torture and the moral fabric of America. No one who doesn’t have the last name Cheney or hasn’t ever depended on a Cheney for a position or a paycheck believes that Liz Cheney has more credibility on this subject than these individuals.

Is there some CPAC rule that says those dangerous weapons, intelligence and truth and logic, must be checked at the door?

Ralph

"Obama is killing too many terrorists"

Sam Stein of Huffington Post is good at finding the quirky or outrageous side of the news.

But this takes the cake.

Has there been any doubt that the political conservatives have a gag-reflex aversion to anything Obama does? Not really. But sometimes it must tax their ingenuity to find the negative.

Viet Dinh, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center and one of the authors of the USA Patriot Act when he worked in Bush's Justice Department, seems to have taken the prize

As reported by Sam Stein, in a talk to the Conservative Political Action Committee meeting, Dinh complained that:

Obama is killing too many terrorists.

I kid you not!

See, the guy who brought us the Patriot Act, reasons that: if we kill them, then we can't torture them and find out what they know. Actually he didn't say "torture;" he said that we don't find out what they know. But you get the idea -- I'm sure his crowd did. They applauded wildly.

Oh, well . . . . It's not like we expected anyone to praise Obama at the CPAC meeting. But the utterly laughable extremity of their negativity is astonishing.

Ralph

Our broken Congress

Of late, my motto has become: "Nothing gets done in Congress, because the system is broken."

So a letter to the editor in the New York Times caught my eye. It says it so well. It's from Edie Freedman of Gloucester, MA.

"How times have changed.

In the 1950s, my grandmother served in the Connecticutt Legislature.

When she in her late 90s, I brought a friend of mine to meet her. As I made the introductions, I mentioned that she had been in politics. She drew herself up straight and rather starchily said: "Government, dear. I was in government."

Well said. That's why Congress is broken: politics has replaced government. Too bad we don't have more people who know the difference.

Yes, I know. I have often defined politics positively as "the art of the possible." There is, of course, a good side of politics.

What has tainted it of late and makes this anecdote so apt, is that it seems to have shifted from: politics as the art of the possible in the service of the people, to: politics as the manipulative schemes of the powerful for personal gain -- or to destroy the opposition with utter disregard for the needs of the people.

Ralph

Cheny - war criminal?

I use the long distance telephone service provided by Credo (formerly Working Assets), which has a strongly liberal, social activist stance; and a percentage of what I pay for services goes to good causes.

Today, as they do from time to time, they sent out a letter inviting signatures for a petition. This one is to Attorney General Eric Holder urging him to prosecute Dick Cheney for war crimes. Here's the letter:

On ABC News last weekend, former Vice President Dick Cheney confessed to playing a key role in the commission of war crimes during the Bush administration.

"I was a big supporter of waterboarding," boasted Cheney.

Waterboarding is torture and a war crime. The UN Convention on Torture, the Geneva Conventions, the Red Cross, and constitutional governments around the globe agree on this point of law. More to the point, Attorney General Eric Holder has stated publicly that waterboarding is torture. Cheney's confession legally obligates Holder to prosecute him.

Of course, that won't happen. But at least there is a move to call Cheney to account. It feels good.

Especially against the hullabaloo he created at the Conservative Political Action meeting in Washington today. He made a surprise appearance at the end of Liz Cheney's speech and was met with an enthusiastic ovation. To which he is said to have quipped: "A welcome like that is almost enough to make me want to run for office again."

Even I would not have predicted that Liz would be so brazen -- and so foolish -- in her ill-founded criticism of Obama. In her prepared speech, she accused the Obama administration of missing intelligence warnings of the Yemini terrorist attack. And she told the crowd, "There's no polite way to put this, but that kind of incompetence gets people killed."

What hypocrisy !!! She offers no evidence that there were warnings. And in fact we have proof that the president's top secret briefing in August 2001 specifically warned against an attack on the U.S. by al Qaeda. Supposedly George W. Bush and Dick Cheney read that briefing? So what are you saying about your Daddy, Liz? "That kind of incompetence," indeed.

Ralph

Tyranny of the minority

Our Constitution was created so as to prevent the tyranny of the majority.

Senate rules seem of late to have been created to allow the tyranny of the minority.

Exhibit A: The fact that current Republican senators have forced a cloture vote on 70% of the major, controversial legislation. One senator can put a "privilege hold" on 70 of Obama's nominations, and in fact held up one nomination to an important post for 8 months, after which the nominee was confirmed by 96-0. In other words, no one had any objection to this particular nominee, who was highly qualified; it was a political tactic.

Fallout B: Obama cannot fire any of his current appointees or he might not be able to get a replacement confirmed. And nobody better resign.

These are dark times for the people's business.

Ralph

Now that's journalism

This morning on Meet the Press, Rachel Madow challenged Congressman Aaron Schock (R-IL) in the way politicians should be called to account. Here's the exchange as reported on HuffingtonPost:

A heated exchange took place during NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday when MSNBC host Rachel Maddow accused Rep. Aaron Schock (R-Ill.) of hypocrisy for railing against a spending bill in public while touting its benefits in his home district.

Appearing alongside each other during a panel session, Maddow pivoted from a discussion on job creation to note that Schock had appeared at an event Friday touting a grant program that he had voted against.

"You, in your district, I just read that you were at a community college touting a $350,000 green technology education program, talking about how great that was going to be for your district," she said. "You voted against the bill that created that grant. That's happening a lot with Republicans sort of taking credit for things that Democratic bills do and then Republicans simultaneously touting their votes against them and trashing them. That, I think, is a problem that needs to be resolved within your caucus. Because you seem like a very nice person but that is a very hypocritical stance to take."

Schock was caught off guard, but eventually came back and asked Rachel if she was going to give back the Bush tax cuts that she received, while continuing to rail against them.

That's not quite to the point. Schock went home and talked about the program as though it were something he supported, when he had voted against it. I don't think Rachel pretends to like the Bush tax cuts, even though she doesn't turn down what she's legally entitled to.

Even the very conservative Washington Times takes a dim view of this tactic, reporting:

"More than a dozen Republican lawmakers, while denouncing the stimulus to the media and their constituents, privately sent letters to just one of the federal government's many agencies seeking stimulus money for home-state pork projects."

Hypocrisy lives.

Ralph