Take a look at this photo. It's not begging for a caption. That smirk on a face non-Texans might not recognize belongs to David Medina. The one y'all might have seen before, over to the right, is Governor Rick "Goodhair" Perry. Back in 2004, when Perry refused despite receiving expert reports and evidence that Cameron Todd Willingham's conviction for arson didn't withstand a second look, never mind real legal scrutiny, Medina was General Counsel for the Governor's Office. It's entirely possible Medina and Perry sent an innocent man to death in Huntsville. A few years later Medina's house burned, and both he and his wife were indicted for arson; at trial they benefitted from the same kind of experts whose work Perry didn't consider when Willingham's life was at stake.

Great coverage of this continues at Northstar's place, at Dog Canyon, and at Burnt Orange Report.

I don't know

Burnt Orange Report is asking the question: has Texas' governor, Rick Perry, desperate to keep his job, undertaken Nixonian tactics?

Short answer: Sure looks that way. The Cameron Todd Willingham execution in 2004 has attracted attention -- but there're more examples, and the Willingham case appears now to be the one that's picked up public notice.

At first, I was barely interested in the whole "birther" debate, but now, after the last week's reactions to Obama's bland-as-a-mayonnaise-sandwich-on-enriched-white-bread-with-crust-cut-off sandwich speeches, I've come to a hypothesis I would like to share.

Is it possible that the reaction to Obama (as mainstream, unconfrontational and bland as he is) - in the form that he "deserves no respect as a valid President" - is a logical outcome of the desire by a segment of the political spectrum for a Unitary Executive President?

In this mindset, a legitimate Unitary President is all-powerful and so must be faithfully obeyed. Anything else is treasonous at worst, disloyal at best. For these folks, only if the President is NOT legitimate, can he be freely dissented from. So the only legitimate way for a person who believes in the Unitary Exectuive to dissent from the President is for that person to first not agree that individual is a legitimate President.

Put this down as one more bad legacy of the Cheney administration.

Go on over to Digby's for details. There's also a link to the devastating story and video   Read more…

Four years ago a hurricane slammed into the Gulf Coast of the United States. Early in the morning it looked like the threatened city of New Orleans, Louisiana, in the storm's path, might have "dodged a bullet." The rest of the Coast had been whacked hard, but the storm, unlike Allison in Houston, hadn't "parked" above New Orleans. Then the levees failed. We all know what happened after that. Not all the stories were tragedy; heroes arose, as they'd done in September 2001 in Pennsylvania and DC and New York.

We heard rumors that speculators were having an effect on the price of oil in the spring and summer of 2008, when it went over $140 a barrel and gas began to cost as much as $4 a gallon across the USA. We were assured that such things weren't really true: the Bush Commodity Futures Trading Commission wouldn't let it be! Turns out ... the assurances were false and the rumors dead-on. the assurances were false and the rumors dead-on -- and there's no mechanism in place to stop it happening again.

Note that Taibbi’s hardly the first person to say that the money from the housing bubble moved to form the commodities bubble, which remember, not only sent gas prices skyrocketing but helped cause dangerous food disruptions around the world.

He is one of the first prominent journalists I’ve seen to report that the massive oil spike had little or nothing to do with supply and demand for the physical product. I’d like to see some more reporting on that. If he turns out to be right, the financial press is going to have an awful lot of explaining to do.

It seems clear the CFTC report will lend credence to Taibbi’s assertion that Wall Street and Goldman Sachs (an Audit funder) caused the oil spike, which he says wouldn’t have happened if trading were limited to those who had physical control of the oil, excluding those betting with derivatives.

The Columbia Journalism Review has more, including the warning that the bubble machine's not been turned off yet.

I'm sure you all recall the early days of the NSA Hoovering up all domestic data warrantless wiretapping scandal, when they referred to it as the "Terrorist Surveillance Program" and assured us that they were only targeting Al-Qaeda operatives.

Naturally, this turned out to be a lie enhanced duplicity technique, because it turns out they were spying on all of us everyday American citizens. Nobody was off the target list, and we were all potential Al-Qaeda operatives.

Now, there's a big hubbub about some sketchy CIA assassination ring, apparently answering to Cheney himself. Nobody's willing to talk about the nitty-gritty details, but it's enough to have even Nancy "off the table" Pelosi spooked or pissed off enough to start publicly discussing how fucked-up it was, whatever "it" was.

The public justification for this shadowy, super-classified, apparently reprehensible death squad?

They were only targeting Al-Qaeda operatives.

Yeah, okay, I'm gonna go ahead and call bullshit. Does anyone seriously doubt that what we'll eventually learn is that they formed a group to assassinate American citizens in the National Interest? Consider this, via TPM:

Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism chief, told TPMmuckraker that because we've been in a state of war against al Qaeda since just after September 11, there would have been no need for a secret CIA program that received special legal authorization...

As for what the program did involve, Cannistraro suggested that it involved Americans as targets, and that it went beyond surveillance, but declined to elaborate. He added that, though Cheney may have directly ordered the CIA to keep Congress in the dark, the veep wasn't acting alone. "The approval was from the president," said Cannistraro.

Hmm, I wonder...

He starts by warning that he'll upset bloggers with his defense of the former Vice President, and then he couches his apologia in the language of reason and debate, but Richard Cohen is wrong about torture -- even if in some.

But where I reserve a soupçon of doubt is over the question of whether "enhanced interrogation techniques" actually work.

See, Richard -- can I call you Richard? Because, you know, with the last name Cohen, that you can even suggest efficacy defends torture makes me want to vomit, and I'm not going to refer to you respectfully as Mr. Cohen or sir -- whether or not torture "works" doesn't matter. It isn't germane. It's not important. What matters is that using "enhanced interrogation techniques" reduces the user to what, in the simplest of terms, we all call "Bad Guy." It doesn't matter whether it was done for "information" or "the hell of it" as you so carefully explain. What matters is that it's done at all. The USA is not a TV show; it's not a bad movie; it's not Dick Cheney's fantasyland; it's the real world and all the Jack Bauer

I will harp again on this point. We must not let George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Cheney, Libby, Yoo, Bybee, Rove, Hughes, and the cabal with which they infested Washington, D.C. for eight years walk away scot free. We must not. Why?
Because these sorry excuses for homo sapiens made this happen:

On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand a foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food, or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves and had been left there for 18 24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold. . . . On another occasion, the A/C had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room probably well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night.
Sensitive but Unclassified FBI Memo Apr 2, 2004

and because we cannot let them get away with it. Some things, to misquote that old Tex Ritter song about High Noon, are indeed worth the fight. "And I must face a man who hates me, or lie a coward, a craven coward, or lie a coward in my grave." I don't believe there's a question left about whether the draft-dodging high officials in the past administration are or ever were anything but craven cowards.

Because we are the United States of America. We are not a Bush League Nation. I don't give a flying damn what post-partisanship demands -- those who authorized, ordered, okayed, torturing prisoners belong behind bars. Preferably for life, without possibility of parole. I would not demand solitary confinement; but I damn sure would lobby for hard labor -- based on the work they did to destroy our country in the name of their values and their morals and their enhanced interrogation techniques, to feed their sadistic need to appease their rage and enlarge our fears, they've earned it.

Hanging is too good for them.

Texas Tech University may be paying speakers' fees to Karl Rove and Karen Hughes for the commencement addresses this Friday and Saturday. I don't know, and I don't know how much those fees would be (I hope they'd be nonexistent, but we are talking about Texas Tech here). Now, if we happened to have any INTERPOL agents or Spanish police in Lubbock that day ...

But it looks like WT (aka West Texas A&M) isn't overpaying:

This will not cost WT too much cash.
They're basically paying for Roves trip from Austin to Canyon.
The next day he'll be speaking in Lubbock at the Texas Tech School of Law.

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Can we indict w now? As if desertion wasn't enough, as if stealing the nation's highest office via lawsuit and riot wasn't enough, the Federal Bureau of Investigation refused to have its personnel participate in interrogations George W. Bush's signed executive order authorized because the methods used were torture. (It's a PDF or I'd post it here. Invictus has a link.)

The video runs nearly 10 minutes. Toward the end even the CNN moderator's losing his cool. But look how Bush's apologist finally describes David Sirota's simple question,
"Did the Bush administration keep the country safe ON 9-11-01? They were warned."

  Read more…

Interesting times:

(TPM link)

So, as far as I can tell, Rep. Jane Harman [D-Ca] was conspiring with the Israelis to drop some spy charges in exchange for some lobbying on her behalf, and Alberto Gonzales had an NSA warrantless wiretap™ (wait for it) on her phone and overheard the deal.

In exchange for not investigating, Gonzales asked her to attack the NYT's exposé on (wait for it) NSA warrantless wiretapping. The one she had personally requested be held back until before after the 2004 election (Department of With Democrats Like These, anyone?)

And so she goes free, although the Israelis didn't get her that committee chair she wanted in the first place.

One has to wonder just how much dirt Hoover Gonzales and Rove had on everyone in Washington, and more importantly, how many other favors they blackmailed out of people. And it certainly explains some of those bizarre, neo-Maoist ritual apologies.

If you've been paying attention during the last month or so you know about the tent cities. But the truth is they aren't new. The truth is, they go back to the era of Reagan and "entitlement cutbacks." They're not limited to the USA; the causes are worldwide the same, though -- governments not meeting their responsibilities to ensure affordable shelter for the populace:

Tent cities have much in common with the squatter camps of the Great Depression, but to simply call them Hoover-villes is to ignore their complexity. To truly understand them, one must look at current trends in the developing world, where informal urbanism -- a form of "slum" development that takes place outside the conventions of city planning -- is now the predominant mode of city-making.

Informal urbanism, characterized by unauthorized land occupation, makeshift construction and a lack of public utilities, is how many burgeoning nations meet their housing needs. It thrives in places like Fresno, where poverty is endemic and there is a wide gap between rich and poor.

Rahul Mehrotra, a professor at the MIT Institute of Urban Studies and Planning, said there's a real kinship between Taco Flat and the squatter settlements of Mumbai, India, where he runs an architectural firm.

"It's really a reflection of the government's inability to provide housing affordably across society," Mehrotra said. Informal urbanism also thrives wherever people face exclusion from the mainstream markets for work and shelter, he added, whether for ethnic, economic or political reasons.

So, President Obama. Change has come to Washington. Will it be change that brings back jobs? Call center jobs, construction jobs, seasonal work in harvesting or planting -- like jobs generations of Americans used to pull themselves into the middle class in such industries as the telephone company, the power company, the automakers or support industry for the automakers, GE's washer-and-dryer division, Boeing, Raytheon, Convair, General Dynamics, US Steel, Maytag, AT&T, SBC -- these jobs just like the better stronger jobs they replaced in our "service economy" at the behest of the "global free market" -- are gone. The doubt that they'll return grows stronger every day. Corporations have been turning away from US labor since at least the middle of the 1980s, and consumers, lulled by the promise of "lower prices every day" and its poisonous cousin, "easy credit," have been missing the point of saving a little longer to pay for a better quality or US made or both item instead: the job you save might be your own. I'm so old I remember when in some neighborhoods in the US, buying a Toyota or a Datsun bought you a car-egging, if not   Read more…

Again last week more than 600,000 Americans lost their jobs. One professor on leave from UC Berkeley was not among them, and at the very least that's a dirty shame, despite this fawning tribute from Esquire.

Is this a war? How can the president respond? Can he use the Army? Will he need congressional approval? Is this a war?

“It’s like pornography,” one student says. “You know it when you see it.”

It’s just semantics, says another. “When there’s something as powerful as war, we don’t want the president to just go ahead.”

But why not? Yoo asks.

“Because we like checks and balances and we like the Constitution?”

“So you’re worried about one person making mistakes. War is so dangerous, the stakes are so high, you wouldn’t want one person making that decision?”

“That’s why it’s so important to have checks and balances,” the student agrees. “Otherwise the president could run wild. Like we have today, with the powers of an unchecked president -- I call that running wild.”

“So you’re worried about errors,” Yoo answers, perfectly calm. “That’s certainly the case with Iraq. We overestimated the benefits and underestimated the costs.”

But now the hour is up and the students gather their papers -- and Yoo still keeps shooting out last-minute questions. “Is the president really prone to error more than the other branches? Isn’t that also true of Congress? If you require Congress to give preapproval for every conflict, what is the cost? Why didn’t Truman ask for a declaration of war in Korea, even though Congress would have given him one?”

That taxpayer funds continue to keep this guy afloat seems to me at least as rotten a proposition as anything AIG execs did with their bailout money -- because they were crooks, but this guy wasn't just a garden-variety swindler, a member of the "ownership society" -- he was an ADVOCATE for violating the Geneva Conventions and turning the US into a nation that does, in fact, torture.

Who? John Yoo.

Bush is out of a job.

Cheney isn't working.

Even Randian disciples Rumsfeld and Rice are reduced to writing books and seeking professorial pulpits from which to pontificate on the brave new world they sought to create during the past eight years. But this guy is still drawing a salary -- and he works for the government, in a state with a multi-dozen-billion-dollar deficit.

So who do I want to see moved out of his comfort zone? The guy who wrote the pro-torture memos for President George W. Bush. The guy whose legal expertise -- if you want to call his right-wing hard-line inhumanity anything other than psychopathic raving -- brought us Gitmo and Abu Ghraib and helped gut Posse Comitatus as well as the First and Fourth Amendments, all the while claiming the US Constitution itself could justify overturning the rights it spells out for the citizenry.

From the Esquire interview:

But (Yoo's memos) remind us of what we have done and what we will continue to do. Consider the fight over Michael Mukasey’s nomination for attorney general, when Mukasey refused to call waterboarding torture. He said he didn’t want to put the CIA officers who made these judgments in the heat of battle “in personal legal jeopardy.” It seemed so ridiculous, right out of 1984. The Khmer Rouge used waterboarding. We prosecuted Japanese generals for doing it. But Mukasey was confirmed anyway, and four months later President Bush vetoed a law that banned waterboarding. Consider also that courts and Congress have endorsed many of Yoo’s opinions, including the use of military commissions and the extended detention without criminal charges of “enemy combatants” who are American citizens.

Yoo recently whined

The Motley Fool has this:

Congressman Paul E. Kanjorski of Pennsylvania reveals some shocking information regarding a bank run which occured right here and indeed brought this country and the entire world economy to within three hours of complete and systemic financial collapse. In this video, Congressman Kanjorski reveals (at about the 2:15 mark) that the move to raise the move to guarantee money market funds up to $250,000 was an emergency measure to stave off a massive run on the banks that removed $550 billion from the system in a matter of just a couple of hours. Treasury then injected $105 billion to no avail, and shut the system down to prevent a panic continuation of this electronic bank run.

Bloomberg's got a note about the UK system nearly going belly up in October. Now we're hearing Geithner say the bailout must go on, to shore up the economy.
The 1987 Stock Market Crash resulted from a computer glitch -- or, did it? Note the probable causes include derivatives in the 1987 crash, as well as "illiquidity". The feared recession didn't materialize in 1987 (yeah, right; but no, it wasn't as bad as it could've been) because the Fed stepped in. Did the September and October 2008 bank runs arise from a similar source?

Won't embed, here's the url: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pD8viQ_DhS4

That video makes me wonder. Yeah, I know -- it's not exactly firsthand. But there are others out there, according to the Fool, who has some serious links at his post on the subject (quoted above).

That's where the Bush gulag bodies are, Lambert. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The ones not yet decomposed are resting, not in peace, somewhere Cheney probably could show you.

Today, according to the New York Times, a Presidential pen stroke rendered an executive order rescinded.

This was a Gonzales writeup and GWB signature, and what it did was prevent the disinfecting power of sunlight from being used on not just Bush II's first term, but both terms of the William Jefferson Clinton Presidency as well as BushI's and Reagan's records. Good riddance.

The new order still reserves some records from immediate disclosure, but that might not be pure evil.

Hurricanes are big storms. In 2005 a big storm hit the Gulf Coast, followed shortly thereafter by a second storm, nearly as big, that hit a bit further West. Katrina trashed the Gulf Coast, and Rita extended the damage. Three years plus thereafter, the mother of all Cat-2 'Canes hit Galveston Island -- and two months later Texans are still waiting on Bush's Federal Emergency Management Agency.

"It's unfortunate we can't drop houses overnight on people who need them," FEMA spokesman Simon Chabel said.

Here is to the end of the mayhem.

While Poppy was in the White House, petty thieves developed a strategy of delighting in petty vandalism -- destroying stuff they didn't steal, vandalizing the kitchen with wasted groceries, etc.
Now that Junior's skulking out toward (well-deserved IMNVHO) D-list celebrity / trivia question post-Residency, his administration's doing the same to the regulations that protect the environment and consumers, says today's WaPo.

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Nice to know the Patriot Act and FISA don't just apply to civilians. According to an article at Military.com:
The Senate Intelligence Committee is examining allegations by two former U.S. military linguists that the super-secret National Security Agency routinely eavesdropped on the private telephone calls of American military officers, journalists and aid workers.

One year ago today the Dow closed at an all-time high.

One year ago today Hillary Clinton was believed to be the "inevitable" Dem nominee for President.

Today the Dow Jones index closed at 8589. That's the first time in more than five years it's been below 9000. The drop is as bad as when the dot-com bubble fell apart about five years ago.

Go find a Republican and ask 'em if they're still proud of W.

...since that day W spent flying all over hell and half the country hiding from a hint of a threat.

We should've noticed, folks. He got on Air Force One in Florida and ran like a scalded dog that day. Karen Hughes came on tv as the evening wound down to tell us he was all right, nothing to worry about, the President safe.

The country fixing to go to hell in a handbasket with a tied-down lightproof airtight plastic trashbag around it, but the President's all right.

[Welcome, Crooks and Liars readers!]

Reuters:

The Polish prosecutor's office is investigating allegations that there was a CIA prison in Poland where al Qaeda suspects were questioned and guards might have used methods close to torture, the prime minister's top adviser said on Friday.

I suppose this is happening now because the Bush administration has, er, disposed of the prisoners? Because the birds have all flown? One more little problem cleaned up before the perps enter the dreaded private sector?