Quote of the day, is our children learning edition; or, measure everything and don’t do anything you can’t measure

From Kay at Balloon Juice, with emphasis in the original except where noted:

Michelle Rhee came to Ohio and lobbied my state legislature on her last national tour. She was treated like a celebrity. No one questioned any of her claims, which is unsurprising if you actually live in this state because all of her reforms involve union busting, pension looting and shifting public money to private operators(emphasis added). She’s a Right wing ideologue’s dream come true. They bought it because they believed it before she walked onto the floor that day.

The school reform industry response to the Atlanta cheating scandal was to call for better test security. As usual, the reform industry spokespeople are missing the larger point, the bigger picture. The truth is they based their reforms on high profile “turn arounds” in Atlanta and (especially) DC. If the scores in these places where they ran their experiments were bullshit, they “reformed” the US education system based on bullshit. They’re supposedly “data-driven” and most of them are billionaires. I shouldn’t have to point this out.

Hire an independent prosecutor like they did in Atlanta. Let’s find out. In the meantime, get a different opinion on “school reform.” Stop relying on the billionaires who backed this, the politicians who swallowed it without question, the hundreds of lobby shops who now exist because of it and the celebrities who promote it to evaluate it. They’re biased, they’re all in, they believe they are the “best and the brightest” and the top-tier analysts and executives are making a lot of money. It’s a recipe for disaster.

Well, disaster for ordinary taxpayers. For the grifters (and, remember, grifters are gonna grift), not so much.

Lynndie England did not die for our sins, but we know who should

I miss a lot of good stuff while school’s in session, but this was worth not leaving behind:

A United Nations investigator has demanded that the US publish classified documents regarding the CIA’s human rights violations under former President George W. Bush, with hopes that the documents will lead to the prosecution of public officials.

Documents about the CIA’s program of rendition and secret detention of suspected terrorists have remained classified, even though President Obama’s administration has publicly condemned the use of these “enhanced interrogation techniques”. The US has not prosecuted any of its agents for human rights violations.

UN investigator Ben Emmerson, the UN special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights while countering terrorism, said that the classified documents protect the names of individuals who are responsible for serious human rights violations.

“Despite this clear repudiation of the unlawful actions carried out by the Bush-era CIA, many of the facts remain classified, and no public official has so far been brought to justice in the United States,”Emmerson said in a report to the UN Human Rights Council, according to Reuters.

Kept in secret prisons around the world, the CIA’s detainees were subjected to torture including waterboarding, sleep deprivation and various other interrogation techniques that violate human rights. The detainees were often subjected to clandestine transfers to secret prisons known as CIA ‘black sites’.

“There is now credible evidence to show that CIA ‘black sites’ were located on the territory of Lithuania, Morocco, Poland, Romania and Thailand, and that the officials of at least 49 other states allowed their airspace or airports to be used for rendition flights,” Emmerson said, describing how suspected terrorists were often detained without being charged for any crimes, receiving extradition procedures or having access to lawyers.

Emmerson has urged the US to prosecute any public official who was involved in setting up the CIA “black sites” at which human rights or legal violations occurred. Even though the Obama administration has condemned those who promoted the use of such facilities for inhumane procedures, the administration has taken no steps to punish any of its public officials. Attorney General Eric Holder has said that the Justice Department would not take legal actions against those who “acted in good faith” and followed the guidelines provided by the Office of Legal Counsel during the Bush era.

But without names and details about the involvement of US officials at CIA black sites, the government is maintaining a level of secrecy and “perpetuating impunity for the public officials implicated in these crimes,” Emmerson said.  A Senate committee led by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) previously investigated the CIA’s interrogation program and may have had complete access to classified information about it.

Emmerson has called for this information to be published “without delay, and to the fullest extent possible.”

He ain’t the only one. I spent long years here during the reign of Bush the Lesser, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Addington, Yoo, and my freshman hall counselor, Jim Haynes, calling for the people responsible for ordering torture and other crimes against humanity (including the unilateral military invasion of Iraq, a country with which we were not legally at war, in violation of both ratified treaties and U.S. statutes) to be investigated, indicted, tried where appropriate and punished as needed. In the case of torture or other crimes against humanity that result in the death of another human being, the punishment is execution. And I’ve been a tough-on-crime conservative my whole life.

And I’ve been consistent. I called for Obama’s impeachment barely more than a year after his inauguration when it became clear that he intended to target U.S. citizens for extrajudicial assassination,  an intent on which he has acted successfully since.

A war criminal is a war criminal. A murderer under international laws of human rights is a murderer under international laws of human rights. The Constitution makes our legal priorities plain: It itself and our ratified treaties, which define these crimes, constitute the Supreme Law of the Land. So hang ‘em all, and let God sort ‘em out.

But that’s only where it should start. If we deserve to be called free and self-governing people, we also need to look in the mirror and figure out how and why we let these crimes happen — because many, if not most, could have been prevented if we as a body politic had taken our responsibilities as citizens seriously. Instead, we knew of torture at least six months before the 2004 election and did nothing. The New York Times knew about warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens in criminal violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act a year before the 2004 election and held its story. When Democrats retook Congress in 2006, Speaker-apparent Nancy Pelosi took impeachment “off the table,” and the voters let them do it. And President Obama and Attorney General Holder have repeated their desire to “look forward, not back,” and the voters have let them do THAT, too.

Imagine the people of Germany, circa 1946, claiming that intent and ask yourself how we would have responded. And we had conquered them by force and yet wanted to rehabilitate West Germany as a bulwark against communism. How much easier should it have been, how much less should we have needed to worry about the tender sensibilities of the Washington establishment and its courtiers in the press, than it was to punish individual Germans while keeping Germany on our side?

The UN is by no means a perfect organization. But the U.S. is by no means a perfect country. Let us follow the facts and the law — which, remember, we willingly signed and ratified — wherever they lead us, and let us act as the law obliges us to act. If you want an omelette, you need to break a few eggs. In this case, incontrovertibly, if we want to restore our own honor as a free and self-governing people, we need to break a few necks.

Driftglass summarizes “Hubris” for you because I had to study

This is just a taste. And I am grateful to him for the service (which was live-tweeted, thus the weird diction/syntax in places; also, I did a quick search-and-replace on some of the more vapors-inducing participial adjectives):

• Remember David Brooks’ column calling people who opposed Wolfowitz antisemitic? No? That’s the firetrucking problem.
• Remember David Brooks’ columns mocking Liberals who opposed Iraq war as deluded Bush-deranged posers? No? That’s the firetrucking problem
• Remember David Brooks calling people cynical assholes who objected to Dubya’s flightsuit tango? No? That’s the firetrucking problem.
• Remember when the collaborators at the NYT gave a firetrucking weekly column to Bloody Bill Kristol? No? That’s the firetrucking problem.
• Remember when David Brooks leveraged his Liberal bashing tripe into a column-for-life at the NYT? No? That’s the firetrucking problem.
• Remember Steve Gilliard? No? That’s the firetrucking problem.
• Remember when the wingnutosphere went nuts trying to discredit every alarming report out of Iraq? No? That’s the firetrucking problem.
• Remember when palette-trucks of shrink- wrapped taxpayer cash just firetrucking vanished into Iraq? No? That’s the firetrucking problem.
• Remember when everything that is now settled history was America-hating surrender-monkey treason? No? That’s the firetrucking problem.
• Remember when a gay hooker Conservative “reporter” w/ a fake name sat 100 ft away from Dubya for 2 yrs? No? That’s the firetrucking problem
• Remember when Halliburton made $$ selling American soldiers in Iraq toilet water? No? That’s the firetrucking problem.
• Remember when the GOP made “[Forget] Reality” into American national policy? No? That’s the firetrucking problem.
• Remember when Phil Donahue got fired for telling the truth and Conservatives got promoted for lying? No? That’s the firetrucking problem.
• Remember how the Cheney clans got really, really rich sending kids off to die for their lies? No? That’s the firetrucking problem.
• Remember when 60 million Americans re-elected these deficit-creating war criminals? No? That’s the firetrucking problem.
• Remember the incompetent children of GOP campaign contributors were put in charge of governing Iraq? No? That’s the firetrucking problem.
• Remember when Fox News told soldiers rolling into battle to look into the camera and say “Fox Rocks!” No? That’s the firetrucking problem.

You know, I stack this list up against the whining from Politico reporters that I mentioned below, and I think perhaps I should call Mike Allen or Jim Vandehei at Politico and tell them, “There are better ways you could be spending your time, and some pseudonymous blogger in flyover country has just handed you a double fistful of them for free, so pack a lunch and get busy.“

That, also, is the polite version. Too. Here’s kind of what I really feel like saying.

Sen. John McCain gets something right. Seriously.

McCain is on the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is expected to approve on Thursday a 6,000-page report on the Bush administration’s torture program. And McCain wants that report made public. His reasoning is that we didn’t get any useful information out of the torture program, in particular not any information that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden. To me, that’s threading the needle a little too finely; the damn thing should be public because it’s about torture, hello? It should be made public because it’s about crimes committed by our government, not because of the utility, or lack thereof, of those crimes. But McCain, who hasn’t done much right lately, is, to his credit, on the right side of both morality and history on this one. I just hope his committee colleagues agree with him.

Brian Moynihan can say only one thing to keep himself out of prison, and it’s a lie.

This one’s for my friends and family in Charlotte.

Brian Moynihan is the CEO of Bank of America. Last May, unbeknownst to most of us, he was deposed by lawyers for insurance companies suing Bank of America and Countrywide, the “mortgage” company that BofA acquired. The insurance companies lost a metric shit-ton of money because Countrywide spent years originating a boatload of mortgages to anyone with a pulse, mortgages that were doomed to fail, and then packaged and sold them as AAA-grade bonds, which were even more attractive investments at the time because MBIA and other prominent companies had insured them.

When BofA acquired Countrywide, for no small amount of money despite the company’s obvious worthlessness at that point, Moynihan famously promised to make good on all his company’s new acquisition’s misdeeds, a promise that, if kept, could render BofA so much more insolvent that even the government wouldn’t be able to ignore it any longer. And I haven’t kept close track, so this may all be over and done with, but Moynihan also may have legal problems with BofA stockholders who have claimed they weren’t fully informed of  Countrywide’s problems at the time of the acquisition, as securities law requires.

Anyway, this little Q&A between MBIA lawyers and Moynihan  runs on to 223 pages, and if we are to take its protagonist at his word — a dangerous thing to do, as we shall see in a moment — then he not only has no business serving as the CEO of anything more important than watching moss grow, he also desperately needs full-time dementia care. (And having had friends and relatives with Alizheimer’s, I don’t throw that metaphor out  lightly.)

Moynihan essentially had three choices in answering these questions. He could tell the truth and, in all likelihood, admit under oath to securities fraud, conspiracy and a host of other crimes. Or he could lie and say these things did not happen on his watch when they manifestly did, and face perjury charges. Or he could say he didn’t recall. (I suppose he had a fourth possibility, taking the Fifth Amendment, but a quick scan suggests he either didn’t do that or else did it very obliquely.)

Well, to absolutely no one’s surprise, Brian the Job Creator chose Door No. 3. At the moment, if you Google the phrase “great amnesiacs of history” in quotes, you get no hits. I suspect that’s about to change, as Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone comments:

If you’re a court junkie, or have the misfortune (as some of us poor reporters do) of being forced professionally to spend a lot of time reading legal documents, the just-released Moynihan deposition in MBIA v. Bank of America, Countrywide, and a Buttload of Other Shameless Mortgage Fraudsters will go down as one of the great Nixonian-stonewalling efforts ever, and one of the more entertaining reads of the year.

In this long-awaited interrogation – Bank of America has been fighting to keep Moynihan from being deposed in this case for some time – Moynihan does a full Star Trek special, boldly going where no deponent has ever gone before, breaking out the “I don’t recall” line more often and perhaps more ridiculously than was previously thought possible. Moynihan seems to remember his own name, and perhaps his current job title, but beyond that, he’ll have to get back to you. …

Taibbi’s account alone is both hilarious and outrageous. Now that the semester is over, I can’t wait to read the actual deposition. (Hey, it’s how I roll.)

In the deposition, attorney Peter Calamari of Quinn Emmanuel, representing MBIA, attempts to ask Moynihan a series of questions about what exactly Bank of America knew about Countrywide’s operations at various points in time.

Early on, he asks Moynihan if he remembers the B of A audit committee discussing Countrywide. Moynihan says he “doesn’t recall any specific discussion of it.”

He’s asked again: In the broadest conceivable sense, do you recall ever attending an audit committee meeting where the word Countrywide or any aspect of the Countrywide transaction was ever discussed? Moynihan: I don’t recall.

Calamari counters: It’s a multi-billion dollar acquisition, was it not?

Moynihan: Yes, it was.

[Q:] Well, isn’t that the kind of thing you would talk about?

Moynihan: not necessarily . . .

This goes on and on for a while, with the Bank of America CEO continually insisting he doesn’t remember ever talking about Countrywide at these meetings, that you’d have to “get the minutes.” Incredulous, Calamari, a little sarcastically, finally asks Moynihan if he would say he has a good memory.

“I would – I could remember things, yes,” Moynihan deadpans. “I have a good memory.”

Calamari presses on, eventually asking him about the state of Countrywide when Moynihan became the CEO, leading to the following remarkable exchange, in which the CEO of one of the biggest companies in the world claims not to know anything about the most significant acquisition in the bank’s history (emphasis mine):

Q: By January 1st, 2010, when you became the CEO of Bank Of America, CFC – and  I’m using the initials CFC, Countrywide Financial Corporation – itself was no longer engaged in any revenue-producing activities; is that right?

Moynihan: I wouldn’t be the best person to ask about that because I don’t know.

There are no sound effects in the transcript, but you can almost hear an audible gasp at this response. Calamari presses Moynihan on his answer.

“Sir,” he says, “you were CEO of Bank Of America in January, 2010, but you don’t know what Countrywide Financial Corporation was doing at that time?”

In an impressive display of balls, Moynihan essentially replies that Bank of America is a big company, and it’s unrealistic to ask the CEO to know about all of its parts, even the ones that are multi-billion-dollar suckholes about which the firm has been engaged in nearly constant litigation from the moment it acquired the company.

“We have several thousand legal entities,” is how Moynihan puts it. “Exactly what subsidiary took place [sic] is not what you do as the CEO. That is [sic] other people’s jobs to make sure.”

The exasperated MBIA lawyer tries again: If it’s true that Moynihan somehow managed to not know anything about the bank’s most important and most problematic subsidiary when he became CEO, well, did he ever make an effort to correct that ignorance?  ”Do you ever come to learn what CFC was doing?” is how the question is posed.

“I’m not sure that I recall exactly what CFC was doing versus other parts,” Moynihan sagely concludes.

The deposition rolls on like this for 223 agonizing pages. The entire time, the Bank of America CEO presents himself as a Being There-esque cipher who was placed in charge of a Too-Big-To-Fail global banking giant by some kind of historical accident beyond his control, and appears to know little to nothing at all about the business he is running.

In the end, Moynihan even doubles back on his “we’ll pay for the things Countrywide did” quote. Asked if he said that to a Bloomberg reporter, Moynihan says he doesn’t remember that either, though he guesses the reporter got it right.

Well, he’s asked, assuming he did say it, does the quote accurately reflect Moynihan’s opinion?

“It is what it is,” Moynihan says philosophically.

There’s nothing surprising about any of this – it’s natural that a Bank of America executive would do everything he could to deny responsibility for Countrywide’s messes. But that doesn’t mean it’s not funny. By about the thirtieth “I don’t recall,” I was laughing out loud.

It’s also more than a little infuriating. In the pre-crash years, Countrywide was the biggest, loudest, most obvious fraud in a marketplace full of them …

One of the biggest indictments you can level against U.S. news media is that U.S. financiers were engaging in this level of world-historical theft, fraud and conspiracy right out in the open for a decade and more, and yet no one of consequence has done any hard time for it.

If we are to take Moynihan at his word, the only way you could have been more delusional and out of touch than he was to have believed on election night that Mitt Romney was going to win big. But as the deposition makes clear, taking Brian Moynihan at his word  would make a box of rocks look like a Davidson valedictorian.

“I’ve got $3 in my wallet and it feels like a million.”

My friend and fellow blogger Billy Jones has been through a rough few years. He just had an experience most of us who are more comfortable would describe as somewhere between bad and awful. And yet, in a message to me, he calls it a small victory.

I’ll let you decide just how small.

Will the presidency stand in Scott Walker’s posterity? Uh, quite possibly not.

Thou hast it now: king, Cawdor, Glamis, all,

As the weird women promised, and I fear

Thou played’st most foully for ’t.

Banquo, “Macbeth,” Act III, Scene 1

Scott Walker won the governorship of Wisconsin, turned on some of the very working people who helped get him elected, and then, when they turned on him in kind, fended them off in a recall election whose outcome was narrow but clear.

Now Scott Walker is being talked about among the GOP White House contenders for 2016. And why not? He won an election and a recall, he’s enough of a hippie-puncher to satisfy all but the most rabid of the right-wing nutjobs, and unlike, say, Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, if you Google him, you might immediately find offensive things, depending on your political persuasion, but not outright ridiculous things.

But just as Macbeth reached the throne of Scotland by climbing over the corpses he’d killed, Walker — who, even if nothing else goes wrong, still would face a tough fight for the GOP nomination with the White House open — may yet be shown to have played almost as foully, by 21st-century standards, as Macbeth did a millennium ago in Shakespeare’s play.

Consider:

Gov. Scott Walker and his top campaign and Milwaukee County aides were named Monday as part of a team that routinely commingled political and official county business.

The disclosures came during the sentencing of a former aide to Walker during his last year as Milwaukee County executive. Kelly M. Rindfleisch, 44, was sentenced by Milwaukee County Circuit Judge David Hansher to six months in jail and three years of probation on a single felony count of misconduct in office. The judge stayed the sentence pending Rindfleisch’s appeal to the Wisconsin Court of Appeals or the state Supreme Court.

In a lengthy presentation during Rindfleisch’s sentencing, Assistant District Attorney Bruce Landgraf displayed numerous emails between Rindfleisch and key members of Walker’s campaign staff in which they discussed how to manage county government in 2010, while Walker was a candidate for governor.

Repeatedly, Landgraf argued that Rindfleisch knowingly broke the law by doing campaign work at the courthouse. In a new development, the prosecutor made clear – without saying it was illegal – that top Walker campaign officials influenced, even directed, county strategy.

“You guys are in the driver’s seat,” Rindfleisch wrote in one message to Keith Gilkes, Walker’s then-campaign chief of staff.

At another point, Rindfleisch said in an email regarding an effort by the campaign to plant stories about problems at the state Mendota Mental Health Institute: “This needs to be done covertly so it’s not tied to Scott or the campaign in any way.”

Landgraf said “The Campaign Group” included Walker, Gilkes, campaign spokeswoman Jill Bader and campaign adviser R.J. Johnson. It also included several top county aides to Walker: Cindy Archer, who was county administration director; county chief of staff Tom Nardelli; spokeswoman Fran McLaughlin; housing director Timothy Russell; and Rindfleisch.

Rindfleisch served as Walker’s policy adviser and later his deputy chief of staff at the county.

Five members of the group spoke by phone daily at 8 a.m. to make sure the county executive’s office was “in sync” with the “image” the campaign was advancing of Walker in his Republican race for governor against Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, according to an email Landgraf presented in court …

A bit of background for you non-cheeseheads: Wisconsin has a long history of what political wonks call “good government,” a term of art and culture dating to the early 20th-century Progressive movement  that means not just that the roads get paved but also that conflicts of interest and corruption are just not done. By any party. And part and parcel of that culture is that governing — paving the roads, running the firehouses, building the schools — and campaigning are kept separate, not only by custom but also by criminal law.

Before being elected governor, Walker was the Milwaukee County executive and Kelly Reindfleisch was an aide to him in that job. Officially she worked for the taxpayers of Milwaukee County alone. In real life, she was coordinating between Milwaukee County government staff and Walker’s gubernatorial campaign staff, and barring a win on appeal, she’s going to prison for six months for it. Not only that, members of Walker’s campaign team, Reindfleisch’s prosecutor said in court, were dictating county government policy, apparently in an effort to benefit Walker’s campaign.

Reindflesch isn’t the first former Walker aide to be headed to the hoosegow. One former aide, Kevin Kavanaugh, is headed to prison for stealing $51,000 from a veterans’ service organization, for crying out loud. Although Walker himself was not implicated in that case (at least so far as I can tell), the so-called John Doe (whistleblower) grand jury investigation that grew from it has expanded into issues, including Reindflesch’s role, that do threaten Walker.

And it ain’t over, Esquire’s Charlie Pierce notes:

It is that most dangerous of all grand-jury investigations — patient, thorough, and damned near leakproof. (I was in Milwaukee last week and, while there was some chatter downtown about something big breaking in the case, nobody really knew what it was.) This case has been built slowly and methodically, and it is beginning to produce results in the way the most dangerous grand juries do – a little at a time, in a fashion whereby people higher up the food chain first become collateral damage in other cases, and then wind up in hip-deep in the fudge themselves.

Rindfleisch was the first real domino to drop. She widely was believed to be the liaison between Walker’s campaign staff and the members of his campaign team, who were not supposed to be in contact at all. (This kind of thing may seem penny-ante to people in Louisiana …  but Wisconsin takes good-government principles very seriously, having invented most of them. The penalties for breaking those statutes are relatively draconian.) The e-mails presented by the prosecutors at her sentencing make her function pretty clear. …

This is not going to come to a quick and easy end. Rindfleisch is the fourth person to be convicted in connection with Walker’s days as Milwaukee county commissioner. … It’s plain at this point that the office was a snake pit of quasi-legal chicanery, and fully illegal machinations. The investigation continues, still thorough, still patient, still silent. Some day in the future, Scott Walker is going to wake up and wish very much that he were back in New Hampshire, listening to the cheers of strangers.

Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” villainous as he was, was fictional. But Walker is a real-life character, and in real life it’s beginning to look as though he may never make that trip to New Hampshire to hear the cheers of strangers, let alone climb Dunsinane Hill to the White House. Instead, Birnam Wood may be trudging, slowly and methodically, patient and silent, toward Madison, the camouflaging branches of a secret grand jury investigation concealing certain doom.

Hallefreakinlujah in Happy Valley

Maybe, just maybe, we’re going to see something we haven’t seen in America in a long time – institutional justice as well as personal punishment:

Graham B. Spanier, the former president of Penn State, was charged Thursday with helping to cover up the child abuse allegations involving Jerry Sandusky that have roiled the university and its famed football program over the past year.

During a news conference, Pennsylvania’s attorney general, Linda Kelly, said Spanier faced five charges: perjury, obstruction of justice, endangering the welfare of children, criminal conspiracy and failure to report suspected child abuse. She also said that two other former university officials — Gary Schultz, the former university vice president, and Tim Curley, the former athletic director — would face the same five charges.

Schultz and Curley were already scheduled to stand trial in January on charges of perjury and failing to report child sexual abuse. Kelly specifically mentioned incidents in 1998 and 2001 when Spanier, Schultz and Curley spoke about allegations that Sandusky had abused boys on campus but did not take measures to stop him.

See, Justice Department? That wasn’t so hard. If a state attorney general can do it, how ’bout the feds go after the child-molesting priests and their enabling bishops and Pope? You know, seek … um, what’s it called again? Oh, yeah, justice.

Quote of the Day, Civility & Priorities Edition

Commenter Batocchio at Roy Edroso’s blog:

Civility has its place, but honesty over civility, accuracy over politeness. Alternatively, if you define “civility” in part as showing respect for the truth, a liar has broken the implicit contract of the debate/discussion, and as a moral matter should be called out. (Not that that happens much in the Village, but boy, it’s awesome when it does.)

 

Your liberal media, part the bajillionth

This, kids, is what they call a teachable moment, courtesy of BooMan. Suppose this story were going around …

Mitt Romney isn’t really a Mormon. He’s an atheist who only went along with his father’s faith so he could duck the Vietnam draft. He didn’t actually try to convert anyone when he was in France either. In reality, he spent all his time in Monte Carlo gambling and buying high-end hookers. When his daddy found out what he was doing, he made him come home and marry his high school sweetheart. Actually, he only made him marry her after the second time she got pregnant. The first time, they got an abortion. Then Romney started using some of the mafia connections he had made in Marseilles to import heroin. By the time he became governor, they were flying it straight into a secret airport they set up in the Berkshires. When one of the pilots started to talk, Romney had him killed.

If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s an amalgam of stuff that has been said about our past two Democratic presidents, personalized a bit for Romney.

Now. Sen. Harry Reid has claimed that a source whom he won’t name, but who supposedly was involved in Romney’s firm, Bain Capital,  says Romney paid no federal income taxes for 10 years. Not only has the Poynter Institute’s Politifact claimed that Reid’s pants are on fire, even liberal pundits like Kevin Drum are accusing Reid, on the basis of zero evidence, of lying. BooMan concludes with this useful observation:

Now, if we started telling these stories to people, and a substantial percentage of the population started to actually believe these stories, and if congressmen humored and even encouraged the people who believed these stories, and if media figures talked about these stories, and if Congress actually had hearings about some of these stories, then Mitt Romney would know what it’s like to be treated like a Democrat.

Stuff like this is where the notion that there’s a lower bar for the GOP, that IOKIYAR*, originates.

Now, I really wish Reid’s source, if the person exists, would come forward. And if the source doesn’t exist, then I’ll be the first to say Reid deserves whatever happens to him, whether it’s being hauled up before the Senate Ethics Committee, toothless as it might be, or sued.

But as much as I respect U.S. journalists who attempt to fact-check politicians, they have committed some serious failures of both logic and context in criticizing Reid for an accusation that, while unproven, is not demonstrably false and that Romney himself could easily disprove if it were.

Letter from Greece

Tom Levenson of Balloon Juice datelines his post from the Lion Gate of Mycenae, where no little bloodletting began and ended (internal links copied from elsewhere in Tom’s post for clarity):

Wars are not Homeric poems, which is something Homer himself clearly understood, if Odysseus’s conversations with the heroes who preceded him into Hades offer any hint.  They wreck people, and not simply those who are obviously war’s casualties. I’m not going to belabor that thought in this forum, because so many here know this as well or better than I.

So: idiots will be with us always, and two otherwise utterly inconsequential folks like Messrs. Nicholson and Davis—barely public figures at all—aren’t worth the spit it would take to express my true opinion.

No: what matters is that this kind of talk can’t take place without the tacit permission of actual leaders—informal ones, like Limbaugh, and the actual political actors on the right, figures like Boehner, McConnell, Cohen, Ryan, McCain, whoever.  First among them, of course, is the man who would be president, Mitt Romney.

Leaders shape the frame of argument.  They delineate the forms of dissent and opposition.  They define, both by what they say and by what they fail to rule out, whether we have a small “r” republican approach to government, or rule by the manipulators of the manipulated mob.  When they stay silent they are the cowards of the headline, passive bystanders as their followers betray the basic principles of (small “d”) democratic politics.

Greece is a good place from which to think about this.  You don’t have to go back to Agamemnon or to Plato; living memory—the civil war, the colonels, very recent memory indeed offer regular reminders of the fragility of government by consent of the governed.  Words matter here, and have for millennia.

So it is in this place, with that history in mind, that I am reminded once again that the habit of dismissing crap like that spewed by Nicholson and Davis as wingnuts being wingnuts is not acceptable.  The speakers themselves may not count for much, but for a nominally civil society to allow such speech to pass without massive retaliation, actual leadership from those who would lead from that side…well, that’s how individuals get hurt, and democracies die.  It’s happened before, not many miles from where I sit as I write this.

But … but … but … Rev. Wright!!111!!1eleventy

IOKIYAR.

Notifying the U.S. Attorney of a crime in Pennsylvania

Here’s Mike Turzai, leader of the Republicans in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives:

Note what he’s saying here: his party plans to carry the state by suppressing the votes of Pennsylvania Democrats who are legally entitled to vote.

For the record, under 18 U.S.C. 241, conspiring to deny a person his civil rights is a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

If any Blog on the Run readers live in Pennsylvania, you might want to contact Peter J. Smith, United States Attorney for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, and make him aware of Mr. Turzai’s conspiracy. You can contact Mr. Smith at P.O. Box 309, Scranton, PA 18501-0309.

The North Carolina Governor’s School and the GOP majority in the General Assembly

I was fortunate enough to attend the Governor’s School of North Carolina in the summer of 1977. Begun in the early 1960s under then-Gov. Terry Sanford, the program brings gifted and talented kids from across North Carolina together for six weeks of focus on their areas of interest, plus an introduction to epistemology and other meaty subjects. It’s a helluva program, and a lot of its alums are doing great things in North Carolina and elsewhere today.

The Republican majority in the General Assembly wants to eliminate state funding for the program. (They’re also trying to cut nine figures from the state budget so they can give their rich friends a tax break. These two phenomena are not unrelated.) Alumni and other interested friends raised enough money to keep the program alive — barely — this year, but its future is by no means assured. So last Friday I wrote the following email to state Sen. Phil Berger, the president pro tem of the Senate:

Dear Sen. Berger:

I write as a native and near-lifelong resident of North Carolina, a graduate of Davidson College, a Republican since 1978 and a member of the Governor’s School of North Carolina Class of 1977 to implore you and the Senate to include full funding for Governor’s School in this year’s and future budgets.

As you no doubt know, Governors School alumni have gone on to successful careers in a wide variety of fields. My own case is an example. My work as an editor on the Governor’s School newspaper in 1977 sparked an interest in journalism that led me to an award-winning (if I may say) 25-year career with newspapers in Statesville, New Bern, Gastonia and Greensboro. And while I didn’t make any professional connections there, I did meet the guy who has been my best friend ever since — Tony Patterson, now an IT professional in Chapel Hill with a company that has operations and clients worldwide.

My sister Jane, who lives in Raleigh, attended Governor’s School also, in 1984, and has gone on to a career in stage productions (theater, concerts, etc.) based on an interest she developed while there.

I realize times are tight, and I applaud the General Assembly’s desire to keep taxes and spending low, particularly while our economy is still muddling along with not enough people at work.

But the talent pool of college-educated professionals is getting tighter, too: The New York Times reported recently that college graduates, more than ever, are moving to large metropolitan areas, leaving small and mid-sized markets such as Asheville, Wilmington, Charlotte, the Triad and the Triangle behind. (The maps published in 2006 with this article by The Atlantic illustrate starkly how much of the country is being drained of its talent. And that article was published on the basis of 2000 data; the 2010 data show the trend accelerating.) Governor’s School is an investment in this state’s talented young people that can make a critical difference when they’re deciding where to go after college. We need that talent here in North Carolina to be competitive.

$800,000 a year is a lot of money. But I think the General Assembly also has an obligation to look at what that money is buying and the difference it can make in the quality of life and the competitiveness of the economy for North Carolinians. I hope you will support full funding for Governor’s School now and in the future.

Thank you for your government service.

Best,

Hooper “Lex” Alexander IV

I got the following response from an aide:

Dear Mr. Alexander,Thank you for your email regarding the North Carolina Governor’s School program. Senator Berger understands your concern and appreciates you taking the time to write.

Senator Berger recognizes the value of the Governor’s School program and commends the determined effort to secure the funding for 2012 through private means. That is an admirable achievement and the success of that effort provides clear evidence of the fact that there are many supporters who believe in and deeply value the program.

At this time, the General Assembly is still in the process of reviewing all aspects of our State’s current financial situation in advance of the budget adjustments that will be made during the short session. Although many factors are still being reviewed at this time, your comments will be taken into consideration.

On Senator Berger’s behalf,

Sara Riggins
Constituent Liaison
Office of the Senate President Pro Tempore

Granted, I’m pretty new to the writing-letters-to-elected-officials thing, but do all elected officials treat all their constituents as if they’re this stupid?

I wrote back:

Ms. Riggins, thanks for responding. Please answer a yes-or-no question for me. Does Sen. Berger support full state funding for Governor’s School, or does he not?

Thank you.

Best,

L.

And she wrote back:

Dear Mr. Alexander,

Thank you for following up. Unfortunately, with the budget review process still underway, I am unable to provide any more details than in my previous response.

Even so, thank you for your sincere interest and concern.

On Senator Berger’s behalf,

Sara Riggins

I can think of two possible reasons why she didn’t answer a simple, yes-or-no question: She didn’t care enough to get an answer, or she knew the answer and knew I wouldn’t like it. Well, screw that:

Thanks for getting back to me, Ms. Riggins.  The senator’s opposition to Governor’s School funding is duly noted. I know double-talkin’ jive when I hear it.

Best,

Lex

The modern Republican party not only has convinced itself that the world was created all at once 6,000 years ago and that global warming is a myth, it also has convinced itself that it can crap on our shoes and call it pudding. But, like Axl Rose, I got no more patience. And God knows I am not alone.

Fire Robin Saul.

My friend Ed Cone has ragged on the News & Record in recent days because of its (lack of) coverage of Amendment One, the proposed amendment to our state constitution now before North Carolina voters that would deny legal recognition to any union except the marriage of one man and one woman. (If you’re not from around here and want to know more about the proposal, Google is your friend.)

He’s particularly annoyed that it hasn’t taken an editorial position on the issue. I’ve been annoyed, too, but only a little. First, the referendum isn’t ’til Tuesday, so I figured there was still time for the paper to take a stand. (Which stand is irrelevant for the purposes of this discussion, although obviously I have a preference.) Second, I left the N&R more than three years ago, and while I miss the people, I don’t miss the job. So I don’t worry overmuch about its internal politics. Third, the place is so short of resources now that major gaps in its coverage no longer surprise me.

So I wasn’t inclined to get involved in online discussions about the N&R’s coverage. What prompts my involvement now is that apparently, in the past few days, multiple people contacted media blogger Jim Romenesko, who for years covered media for the Poynter Institute for Media Studies before going out on his own several months ago. Could Jim inquire, they asked, why the N&R hasn’t yet run an editorial on Amendment One?

So Jim did.

This is the email I sent to [publisher Robin] Saul and editorial page editor Allen Johnson III:

Good afternoon Robin and Allen,

One of my readers sent this email:

“I would be grateful if you could get publisher Robin Saul on the record regarding whether he has banned editorials on ‘moral issues,’ including but not limited to the upcoming referendum on Amendment One, which would add a ban on all civil unions besides heterosexual marriage to North Carolina’s constitution.”

I’d appreciate a response to this.

Johnson sent this reply:

Jim, thanks for your note.

Here’s an official statement:

The News & Record editorial board could not come to a consensus on the marriage amendment issue. Therefore, we’ve elected not to officially support or oppose it. We’ll leave this highly personal decision to individual voters.

Note that the statement does not address the alleged “moral issues” ban.

* * *

I have a number of problems with the response Romenesko got. To explain why, I’ll provide a short bit of background for non-newspaper folks, starting with an explanation of what a newspaper editorial board is and does.

That board is the people who, at most medium-sized and large papers, determine a paper’s editorial position on an issue. (At smaller papers, it might be just one person — editorial-page editor, executive editor, even the publisher — who does this.) Who’s on the board varies from paper to paper, but at most papers with boards, the board includes everyone who writes editorials for the paper — the unsigned opinion pieces that represent the opinions of the paper as an institution. And it also typically includes the publisher. Some publishers take part in the daily discussion, some just want to know what the rest of the board has decided before anything goes to press, and some fall somewhere in the middle. Each paper and each publisher chooses the arrangement that seems to work best for the institution’s unique circumstances.

Editorial boards, particularly large ones dealing with complex issues, commonly fail to reach a consensus. But if the issue or election is of any import, lack of consensus is just a step in the process, because from the standpoints of journalism, ethics and business, ignoring the issue is not an option. The culture of newspapers says that on big issues, you find out all you can and you render a considered, informed opinion based on the facts and what you see as your public’s best interests because that’s why Jefferson, Madison et al. put freedom of the press into the First Amendment and the First Amendment into the Constitution.

So the board haggles until it reaches consensus, or the majority wins, or in extreme cases the publisher may break a tie or even overrule the majority. All these mechanisms are accepted and considered ethical in the business as mechanisms, even when a publisher overrules his united staff. People might disagree bitterly with the publisher on a particular issue, but everyone knows that he has the right to impose his viewpoint as the official, institutional opinion of the paper. What’s not an option, what’s not OK, what’s never acceptable, is to let a major issue slide by without comment and just hope that nobody notices.

So that’s the editorial board. Now a little bit about the job of publisher. Being a newspaper publisher in a market this size is a pretty sweet gig. Even as your paper in particular and the industry in general circle the drain, you get paid very well, and among the local establishment you’re considered a player, which is a benefit if that sort of thing matters to you. If you make your numbers, then generally you can keep the job as long as you like, and as long as you don’t actually commit fraud, no one whose opinion matters to you is going to care much how you make your numbers, even if it means destroying the paper’s credibility and laying a lot of people off and ruining their lives. Sucks for your employees and your readers, but for you, life, in short, is good.

But once every few years, a candidate or an issue comes along that a newspaper simply has to take a stand on — in its news pages, its editorial pages or both — or else it is committing malpractice and undercutting an intangible but very real part of its already-dwindling financial net worth. And that’s the one time when being the publisher can get sticky. The guy who runs the bank or the insurance company or the factory has his own problems, but at least he doesn’t have to deal with this one.  The newspaper publisher does, and in most of those situations, no matter what he does, he’s going to make a lot of people very angry, and some of those people may be quite wealthy and powerful. Most of the publishers I worked for during a quarter-century in journalism did a more than fair job of this, which is why, in general, I’ve never particularly begrudged the publishers I’ve worked for their pay and perks.

With that background perhaps you can begin to see where Robin Saul has gone wrong.

First, the decision not to publish an editorial on this proposal is cowardly. (As Ed notes in the comments on Romenesko’s piece, the story of a blanket ban on editorials on “moral issues” appears to have been just that: a story, and one intended only for internal consumption at that.) Amendment One is the most important statewide ballot initiative in my 52 years of living in this state; it could have serious and negative everyday implications for my fellow citizens and appears likely if enacted to generate a whole passel of lawsuits. As I just noted, newspaper publishers don’t get a pass on things like that.

But Robin Saul did just the opposite (and I’ll explain in a second why I single him out rather than blaming the paper as an institution). He took a pass. He chickened out. He dismissed as a “highly personal decision” what is in fact the most important public-policy issue to go before my state’s voters in more than half a century.

That’s bad enough. What’s more, by issuing the statement that the paper did, Saul is trying to deceive readers in such blatant fashion that one can’t avoid the inference that he thinks his readers are idiots. Now, here’s why I say this:

First, recall what I said above about editorial boards and their duties. Now note that the News & Record’s editorial board, according to the box on page A10 of Thursday’s print edition, consists of only three people: Robin Saul, editorial page editor Allen Johnson and editorial writer Doug Clark. Nobody else. Allen and Doug have taken individual stands in their respective signed columns. And those stands agreed. Therefore, if the editorial board “failed to reach consensus,” it was because Robin Saul disagreed with Allen and Doug and is overruling them not by making them run a pro-Amendment One editorial, which at least would be consistent with industry ethics, but by making the paper sit this one out.

That’s being a coward.

For Robin not only to obscure his role in this dynamic but also to dismiss Amendment One as a “highly personal decision” suggests that he thinks readers are stupid.

And if he had stopped there, that would have been bad enough. But he didn’t. Instead of taking a stand himself, accepting the responsibility that goes with the pay and perks, he sent Allen Johnson out to lie to Romenesko and the world for him.

That’s being a bully. Indeed, to paraphrase a federal prosecutor in the closing arguments of televangelist Jim Bakker’s fraud trial, it was the kind of thing only a person who is used to exploiting, manipulating and humiliating human being after human being, without ever suffering any consequences, would even have had the guts to try.

I haven’t talked to Allen about this. But he and I worked together for 22 years, disagreeing often but respectfully. Allen is smart, proud, dignified and honest, and I don’t care how bad things are at 200 East Market, he deserves better than this. What could he possibly have done to make Robin choose to humiliate him in this way?

Of course, almost no one will care. Journalists like to pretend otherwise, but the truth is that no one much cares what goes on in a newspaper office as long as the paper arrives on time, dry and accurate, and most days that’s only for the best. But this is not one of those days.

We now have incontrovertible evidence that the man running the News & Record is a liar, a coward, a menace to the human resources he is paid to steward and a man who believes his readers are idiots.

I quit mourning for the News & Record and the journalism business a long time ago; most of their wounds were self-inflicted anyway, and they started long before Robin Saul came to town. But outrage at bullying is an evergreen for me, one that transcends era, job, industry, geography, race, class, gender and all the other things that divide us. Bullying enrages me as much at age 52 as it did at age 12. And almost everything that’s wrong in this country today and that has gone wrong throughout our nation’s history essentially boils down to bullying, whether it’s slavery or driving the Cherokee to Oklahoma or robosigning mortgage documents or, for that matter, arrogating the power of a secular state government to tell gay couples they can’t have the same rights you enjoy, because the Bible says so.

And while Jesus had nothing to say on gay marriage, he was clear on bullying. He said the most important thing you can do is to love God, and that the way that you love God is by loving that part of God that is in every other human being you meet, even — especially — the people who are lower on the totem pole than you. That’s as clear a ban on bullying as you can find everyanywhere. And everything else, he said, depends on that, nothing else you do or refrain from doing matters unless you do that, and he made it that easy to understand because he knew how hard it would be for us to do, how very much against our paranoid, selfish, fearful, clannish, sinful natures it would be for us to obey those two simple laws.

And he was dead serious about it: When he came into the temple and found the banksters of his day ripping off the devout, the Prince of Peace put his sandaled foot up their asses.

I have no idea what religious beliefs, if any, Robin Saul holds. But if he thinks of himself as a Christian, he had better pray that Jesus doesn’t come back tomorrow. Otherwise, the fact that he ought to be fired will be the least of his problems.

Citizens United and this other thing; or, How to steal an election

This short post by Charlie Pierce at Esquire on a World War II veteran who was denied the right to vote on Tuesday because elections officials refused his government issued Department of Veterans Affairs card is a model of providing context, a key function that journalists now more or less refuse to do because it’s hard and they might get called a bad name or something:

As the election year goes on, these kind of stories are going to become a staple of campaign coverage, like watching the candidates try to eat corn dogs in Iowa, flip pancakes in New Hampshire, and pretend to care about baseball in Florida. There is going to be a story like this in every media market. Some ambitious young reporter is going to be assigned to the Old Guy Who Voted In Every Election Since FDR But Who Couldn’t Vote This Time Because Of The New Law beat. There will be pathos. There will be drama. But the fundamental fact that these laws are an organized national assault on the right of the people to elect their own leaders, because sometimes the people elect leadersof whom the rat******s of the organized right do not approve, like Kenyan Muslim Usurpers Of The Alinsky Underground, will get lost in all the pathos and drama. These people will be treated as sob stories, not cautionary tales. They will be used as background election-day “color.” They will be depicted as individual figures of pity and not of what they are: American citizens cheated out of the most precious right they have by a nationwide conspiracy to defraud. See the trees. See the forest, too.

A small quibble: I don’t think it’s “conspiracy to defraud” so much as “conspiracy against rights” as defined in Title 18, Section 241 of the U.S. Code:

If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same;…

They shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; and if death results from the acts committed in violation of this section or if such acts include kidnapping or an attempt to kidnap, aggravated sexual abuse or an attempt to commit aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to kill, they shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for any term of years or for life, or both, or may be sentenced to death.

I think “oppress” covers what’s going on here, and given emails that already have been made public, there’s no lack of evidence.

Now, back to Pierce. There are, in order of increasing degree of difficulty, three types of hard-news stories.

There is the event story, such as that of our unfortunate voter.

There is the pattern story, which would note a confluence of similar events.

And, finally, there is the system story, which explains what gives rise to these patterns.

In one reasonably short paragraph, Pierce illustrates how this works. (I won’t say “shows how it’s done” because he makes assertions that, while provable, are not documented in this short blog post.)

The Republicans, given a clown car full of big red noses at the top of the ticket and a nearly unbroken string of losing issues from their economic plans to their drumbeats for war with Iran to their unconscionable defense of Rush Limbaugh to their attempts to ban contraception and shrink government enough to turn it into a transvaginal probe, know that there are only two ways to win in November: outspend their opponents overwhelmingly via the mechanisms made possible by Citizens United v. FEC, and keeping the other side from being able to vote. And if you have to break a few state and federal laws to do it, well, screw the Constitution, we’ve got an election to win.

There have been some encouraging developments along this front, but this was is not over and the good guys — by which I mean the people who believe that every eligible American citizen who wishes to vote should be enabled to do so and not frustrated by government efforts — will not stop.

Let me offer one last bit of systems reporting, or analysis of other people’s reporting, bringing in a topic that might appear mostly unrelated.

There has been a movement afoot among some conservatives lately to repeal the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which was enacted to ensure that states that had been the most egregious offenders against minorities in the Jim Crow era didn’t act with respect to voting and elections in ways that would unduly burden minorities. One attractive argument for repeal is that we’re now in a “post-racial era” in which the sins of Jim Crow have been expunged.

But as the effort to enact photo-ID requirements for voting gains steam, it is clear that Jim Crow has not left the building: Racial and ethnic minorities are disproportionately less able to obtain photo ID of the type some states are requiring, and requiring people to pay for. (So are the very old, the very young, the disabled, those who do not or cannot drive, ex-offenders who have had their citizenship rights restored, and other groups, all of whom share a tendency to vote disproportionately for Democrats.) Not only does requiring people to pay to get ID suitable for voting violate Supreme Court rulings banning poll taxes, it also violates the Voting Rights Act, which bans not only the intent to discriminate against minorities, but even measures that have the unintended effect of disproportionately harming minorities.

That’s why Republicans, particularly, want to repeal the Voting Rights Act: Repeal would allow them to use the most potent weapon they have to suppress the votes of people who are unlikely to vote for them. They know damn well that racism hasn’t gone away, but that’s almost beside the point. The point is that they’re trying to prevent people from voting who almost certainly will vote against them. (The claim that voting fraud is a substantial problem in the real world, for which photo ID is a practical solution, is a canard. In the real world, vote fraud is vanishingly rare, in part because of the enormous personal risk relative to the reward.)

When people engage in this kind of behavior in almost any other realm, we call it cheating. In elections, we call it a federal felony and assign a significant, meaningful punishment. It’s long past time we started punishing people.

Limbaugh sliced, diced, dissected and wreckeded

I’ve never met John Cole, the proprietor of the blog Balloon Juice. But this much I know: I never want him to become my enemy.

Rush Limbaugh has been an enemy of Cole’s for a while, but his baseless attacks last week against Sandra Fluke have made Limbaugh Cole Enemy No. 1.

I don’t often say this (12 times in 10 years of blogging, in fact — this is the 13th), but, seriously, go read the whole thing. Not only is it a serious contender for Blog Post of the Year, it also is an encapsulation and indictment of just how thoroughly debased, divorced from fact and context, and vicious (in the older sense: vice-ridden) our public discourse has become, and how few consequences there are for severe, serial social deviance therein.

And that was on top of this public challenge to Hot Air (sorry, I ain’t linking to them) proprietor Ed Morrissey:

For those of you who can not watch videos, here is a .pdf of the transcript. At no point anywhere in her testimony did Sandra Fluke make any mention of her sexual activity. Never.

I challenge Ed right now — show me where she talked about her sex life in that testimony, and I will write a check for $1,000.00 to the RNC [Republican National Committee]. She simply didn’t make her sex life the topic of discussion, and Ed is lying out his ass. You could watch that video or read the transcript, and as far as you could tell, Miss Fluke might very well be a virgin.

Ed is lying. The people who made this issue, which was about medical health, into an issue about Sandra Fluke’s sex life are Rush Limbaugh and all the amoral cretins like Ed who decided that just like Graeme Frost, anyone who goes against what the right wants RIGHT NOW, is a target who needs to be destroyed.

So take the challenge, or apologize for lying, Ed. $1000.00 to the RNC the moment you can show me where she discussed her sex life, you lying sack of [excrement].

In a sane society, people like Limbaugh would live in locked, padded rooms, and whatever Cole is doing, we’d find a way to incentivize him to do more of it.

Hitting Rush where it hurts, cont.: local stations, local advertisers

In the past 72 hours, while I’ve struggled with work, school, my kids’ schedules and a migraine, a great exodus has taken place among Rush Limbaugh’s national advertisers after his abuse of law student Sandra Fluke for trying to stand up for basic health-care rights for women. I won’t rehash the merits of the issue, which by now are pretty well settled among those with ears to hear. (I’ve tweeted about it a bit if you want to go look.)

The question now is: What else can we do to put pressure on Rush and his parent corporations? One thing we can do is pressure the local advertisers on the stations that carry his show. Commenter “Jager” at Balloon Juice provides instructions on how to go about this [I've added a few clarifications in brackets], and as a former radio guy I can say he’s more or less on the money:

Go after the local advertisers on his show. There are very few local advertising [slots] on Rush’s show and they sell at a premium. Monitor the Rush station, make a list of the local advertisers and do the following:

1. Call the advertiser; be polite.
2. Write a letter to the advertiser; be polite.
3. Copy the station and the Federal Communications Commission with the advertiser letter.
4. Politely call the General Manager of the station, tell the GM what you are doing and why, tell them you have contacted the advertiser and copied the FCC.
5. If the local advertiser uses an agency, contact the agency, as well. Just ask the local business [whether] they use an agency.

[It's not clear to me why the commenter thinks calling the agency will help, unless you're also threatening to boycott any of the agency's other advertisers, or any other stations with which the agency places advertising, or in some other way putting pressure on the agency's revenue stream. -- Lex]

It won’t take many letters and phone calls to get their attention and remind the station that the letters need to be placed in the station’s public file. (the public file is an FCC requirement)

Local stations don’t get many local [advertising slots] in Rush’s show and many [stations] pay a huge fee to Premiere [Radio Networks, the Bain Capital/Clear Channel Communications subsidiary that syndicates the show] to run the show. If they start losing business because of that [expletive], they will raise hell with Premiere.

Although I don’t think there’s any guarantee of that because I think 27% of Americans would be happy if Rush killed infants and ate their entrails live from noon to 3 weekdays, I do think the commenter’s suggestions are about the likeliest approach of any to get results. So if you want to apply financial pressure to Rush to at least start behaving like a civilized member of society, target the local advertisers on your local Rush station. I’ll update this post when I’ve had the time to even figure out who that is in this market — that’s how out of it I’ve been lately.

UPDATE: Well, duh, it’s Rush Radio — WPTI (94.5 FM).

Mailing Address
2-B PAI Park
Greensboro, NC 27409

Phone number – 336-822-2000
Program Director – Angie Vuyst – angievuyst@rushradio945.com
Sales Manager – Tom Hennessey – tomhennessey2@clearchannel.co

“He captured it in a way that made amnesia no longer an option.”

On the 50th anniversary of the National Book Award for William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, the folks at the Smithsonian remind us not only why the book was so valuable then but also why it is so valuable today.

A lot of people on both sides of the aisle are still trying to argue that amnesia about our own sins is an option. Right now they’re winning, but I’m pretty confident of history’s verdict.

“When the Constitution became a puppet show.”

Charles Pierce on the impending 25th anniversary of Iran-Contra:

It remains the great lost opportunity. If the crimes of what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal had been investigated the way they should have been — which is to say, had they been investigated all the way up to criminal indictments at the top of the executive branch, and impeachment inquiries into the conduct of relevant officials, including the president — the political world would have been changed utterly, as Mr. Yeats once put it. The ongoing project of turning Reagan into a secular saint at least would have been slowed to a crawl had an inquiry proven in court that he engaged in peddling arms to a terrorist-sponsoring state. (Instead, when we all went nutty on the subject of terrorism in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Iran-Contra hardly got a mention and, to this day, people seem more concerned about the Muslim influence on Butterball turkeys than in the fact that Saint Ronnie once sold missiles to the mullahs.) The George H.W. Bush administration might never have happened, for all that would have meant to George W. Bush’s eventual career. Criminalizing the constitutional crimes that are the inevitable result of the theory of the “unitary executive” might have encouraged the nation to ignore the ravings of an authoritarian lycanthrope like Richard Cheney.

I can remember what happened instead. Washington decided, quite on its own, that “the country” didn’t need another “failed presidency,” so what is now known as The Village circled the wagons to rescue Reagan from his crimes. There was the customary gathering of Wise Men — The Tower Commission — which buried the true scandal in Beltway off-English and the passive voice. There was a joint congressional investigation that served only to furnish people like Oliver North with legal loopholes that prevented their incarceration. There was poor Lawrence Walsh, the special prosecutor, whom everybody wished would simply go away, but who pressed on, making a case that ultimately forced President Poppy Bush to pardon everyone except Shoeless Joe Jackson on his way out the door in 1992.

The press was next to useless. (Mark Hertsgaard’s On Bended Knee is the essential text here.) Hell, the scandal was uncovered by two guys in Beirut with a mimeograph machine. And while there was some excellent work done in spots by the elite American press, the general tone was that the scandal was “too complex” for the country to follow, which led to its having “dragged on too long” and to the eventual dissipation of its political force. (This was a trial run for the infantilization of political self-government, by which the self-governing public is treated as though it were made of candyglass. The masterwork in this regard was the haste to settle the “dangerous uncertainity” surrounding the 2000 presidential election, when almost every poll indicated that the country was perfectly willing to live through a constitutional crisis so long as the crisis followed the Constitution.) This was, of course, nonsense. The Whitewater scandal was insanely complex, largely because there was virtually nothing to the damned thing, and that dragged on all the way to an impeachment trial in the Senate.

Compared to a real-estate scam masterminded by crooks and loons in Arkansas that somehow led to hearings on what the president did with his pee-pee, Iran-Contra was a straightforward constitutional B&E. The Reagan people wanted to fight a war in Central America. Congress did its constitutional duty and shut off the money. The administration then broke the law by arranging private funding for its pet war. One of the ways it did that was to sell military hardware to the government of Iran, which sponsored not only terrorism, but also the kidnapping of various American citizens abroad. All of this was in service to a private foreign policy, devoid of checks and balances, and based on a fundamental contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law. As [the National Security Archive's Peter] Kornbluh writes, the following ensued:

There were illegal arms transfers to Iran, flagrant lying to Congress, soliciting third country funding to circumvent the Congressional ban on financing the contra war in Nicaragua, White House bribes to various generals in Honduras, illegal propaganda and psychological operations directed by the CIA against the U.S. press and public, collaboration with drug kingpins such as Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega, and violating the checks and balances of the Constitution.

Iran-Contra was the moment when the country decided — or, alternatively, when it was decided for the country — that self-government was too damned hard, and that we’re all better off just not knowing. It was the moment when all the checks and balances failed, when our faith in the Constitution was most sorely tested, and when it was found most seriously wanting. Iran-Contra is how all the crimes of the subsequent years became possible.

I would make three  additional points.

First, contra (pardon the pun) Pierce, the Archive’s Christian Mixter makes clear that although Reagan broke the law, prosecuting him would have been “a close call” because he had been advised by then-Attorney General Ed Meese that the sales of missiles to Iran via Israel were legal. (Lawyers supposedly can’t just pull this stuff out of their rear ends and get away with it, and yet they do.)

Second, if the news media ever were liberal, they stopped being liberal the instant Jimmy Carter was elected (remember how allegations that Hamilton Jordan had used cocaine were pursued as feverishly as Watergate had been?).

Third, it’s true that Iran-Contra made the crimes of the Bush 43 administration possible, but I return again to this: The pardon of Richard Nixon by Gerald Ford for the crimes of Watergate made Iran-Contra possible.

I miss the rule of law.

Theft baked in

Fraud and conspiracy were written into the computer code that handled mortgage foreclosures, reports Matt Stoller at New Deal 2.0 (h/t Fec):

The same banks that ran the corrupt home mortgage securitization chain are now committing rampant fraud in the foreclosure crisis. Here’s New Orleans Bankruptcy Judge Elizabeth Magner discussing problems at Lender Processing Services, the company that handles 80 percent of foreclosures on behalf of large banks (emphasis added):

In Jones v. Wells Fargo, this Court discovered that a highly automated software package owned by LPS and identified as MSP administered loans for servicers and note holders but was programed to apply payments contrary to the terms of the notes and mortgages.

The bad behavior is so rampant that banks think nothing of a contractor programming fraud into the software. This is shocking behavior and has led to untold numbers of foreclosures, as well as the theft of huge sums of money from mortgage-backed securities investors.

Here’s how the fraud works: Mortgage loan notes are very clear on the schedule of how payments are to be applied. First, the money goes to interest, then principal, then all other fees. That means that investors get paid first and servicers, who collect late fees for themselves, get paid either when they collect the late fee from the debtor or from the liquidation of the foreclosure. And fees are supposed to be capitalized into the overall mortgage amount. If you are late one month, it isn’t supposed to push you into being late on all subsequent months.

The software, however, prioritizes servicer fees above the contractually required interest and principal to investors. This isn’t a one-off; it’s programmed. It’s the very definition of a conspiracy! Who knows how many people paid late and then were pushed into a spiral of fees that led into a foreclosure? It’s the perfect crime, and many of the victims had paid every single mortgage payment.

(That would be the same Wells Fargo that just took over all the branches of Wachovia, which had been a venerable institution in this state for decades.)

A prediction: No one will go to prison for this. That’s because a federal bankruptcy judge is waving a red flag, banging on a fire alarm and yelling, “Fraud! Fraud!” and the Justice Department is doing exactly jack squat. IANAL, but I could run the Justice Department better than Eric Holder. In fact, my kitchen table could run the Justice Department better than Eric Holder.

UC-Davis: It was unquestionably illegal

The UC-Davis police’s pepper-spraying of nonviolent protesters was contrary to the controlling law in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which includes California.

As The Atlantic’s Garance Franke-Ruta documents, illegal violence by law enforcement against peaceful demonstrators has become commonplace. And it must stop. This is not how a free country governs itself.

UPDATE: The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal argues that the officer who did the spraying is just the product of the system of policing that we constructed. While true, that argument opens the door for the Nuremberg defense, and that door is one we want to stay firmly closed. Police officers have an affirmative duty not only to obey the law themselves but also to disobey illegal commands. No one gets off the hook. No one.

Want to know why the Koch brothers are trying to kill public higher education?

They can’t stand this.

 

What police brutality, and nonviolent resistance, look like

Yesterday at the University of California at Davis:

Angry Black Lady at Balloon Juice comments:

Today [Friday -- Lex] at Occupy Davis, a police officer approached a group of students sitting in a line peacefully on the ground, walked up and down the line and pepper-sprayed them directly in the face—as one would spray pesticide on weeds. What you’ll see in this video is such a callous display of police brutality, I don’t know how this police officer is going to go home and look at himself in the mirror.

As the students cry “Shame on you!” the police arrest a few students; but as the crowd circles them—non-threateningly, but insistent—the police begin to retreat. Then, amazingly, the students (via People’s mic) offer the retreating police a moment of peace: “We are willing to give you a brief moment of peace so that you may take your weapons and your friends and go. Please do not return.”

And the police do.

If you’d like to object to this crime by the university police, you can call the university chancellor’s office at (530) 752-2065 and/or the UC Davis police at (530) 752-1727. The officer who pulled out the pepper spray was identified as Lt. John Pike. You can contact him at (530) 752-3989 or  japikeiii@ucdavis.edu. (UPDATE: Forget calling the chancellor’s office. Chancellor Linda Katehi has demonstrated that she doesn’t know the difference between legitimate law enforcement and unprovoked brutality.)

Unless or until the Bill of Rights is repealed, what Pike did in this video is a crime. He should be prosecuted and punished.

UPDATE: John Cole at Balloon Juice agrees:

It’s really just amazing that any administration official would think that [Katehi's] is the appropriate response. It’s mind-boggling that anyone with law enforcement training thinks that was the appropriate response. Lt. John Pike wasn’t maintaining the public order or using appropriate force, what he did was to physically assault a bunch of kids who pay a hell of a lot of money to be on that college campus. He shouldn’t have a job today, and if any of his colleagues had any balls or any sense, they would have arrested him on the spot on multiple counts of assault. …

The balls on this lady. She orders the cops in riot gear to go pepper spray the kids, then when everyone is horrified at what she has done, she forms a task force to figure out what happened. You don’t need a [expletive] task force to figure out what happened. You’re the problem. Just look in the mirror and ask yourself “Why am I such a blithering idiot?” And then resign.

 

“If you build a police state, they will use it.”*

And they’ll start with the kids:

The videos taken by protesters, journalists and casual observers show UC Berkeley police and Alameda County sheriff’s deputies in riot gear ordering students with linked arms to leave a grassy area outside the campus administration building Wednesday. When the students didn’t move, police lowered their face shields and began hitting the protesters with batons.

University police say the students, who chanted “You’re beating students” during the incident, were not innocent bystanders, and that the human fence they tried to build around seven tents amounted to a violent stance against police.

But many law enforcement experts said Thursday that the officers’ tactics appeared to be a severe overreaction.

Both the ACLU and the National Lawyers Guild said they had “grave concerns about the conduct” of campus police.

“Video recordings raise numerous questions about UCPD’s oversight and handling of these events, including whether law enforcement were truly required to beat protesters with batons,” the two groups wrote in a letter to campus officials.

In total, 39 people were arrested Wednesday; 22 were students and one was a professor, police said. All but one were taken to jail and released.

“The individuals who linked arms and actively resisted, that in itself is an act of violence,” UC police Capt. Margo Bennett said. “I understand that many students may not think that, but linking arms in a human chain when ordered to step aside is not a nonviolent protest.”

Capt. Margo Bennett, you, ma’am, are an idiot, and the officers under your command are violent criminals who should be going to prison for assault with a deadly weapon and depriving American citizens of their rights under color of law.

*h/t & quote from Digby

You want to know why I’m not quite ready for life after newspapers?

This. (Although Paterno needs to be gone yesterday.)

With all due respect to the women who filed complaints against Herman Cain back in the 1990s …

… I think this is a bigger deal:

Herman Cain’s two top campaign aides ran a private Wisconsin-based corporation that helped the GOP presidential candidate get his fledgling campaign off the ground by originally footing the bill for tens of thousands of dollars in expenses for such items as iPads, chartered flights and travel to Iowa and Las Vegas – something that might breach federal tax and campaign law, according to sources and documents.

Internal financial records obtained by No Quarter show that Prosperity USA said it was owed about $40,000 by the Cain campaign for a variety of items in February and March. Cain began taking donations for his presidential bid on Jan. 1.

Prosperity USA was owned and run by Wisconsin political operatives Mark Block and Linda Hansen, Cain’s current chief of staff and deputy chief of staff, respectively.

The authenticity of the records was verified by two individuals close to the firm.

It is not known if Cain’s election fund eventually paid back Prosperity USA, which now appears defunct. The candidate’s federal election filings make no mention of the debt, and the figures in the documents don’t match payments made by the candidate’s campaign.

Campaign law can get squishy sometimes, but it remains, for now, indisputably illegal for a corporation to run someone for president, the article’s legalistic use of  ”might breach federal tax and campaign law” notwithstanding. (My guess? The writer and/or editor inserted the “might” to save themselves the expense of getting a lawyer to vet the story.) And this story makes pretty clear that that’s exactly what happened.

I no longer seriously expect a U.S. attorney to go out and do his or her job against a prominent Republican, but the Federal Elections Commission can create enough civil and financial trouble to jack Cain’s legal bill into the stratosphere.

The sudden revelation of ancient sexual-harassment charges just as Cain surges to the top of the GOP polls has Karl Rove (who’s working for rival Romney) written all over it. But this? I’m pretty sure you score it as an unforced, unassisted error.

The West Memphis Three are free. So, party time, right?

Uh, wrong, says former federal prosecutor bmaz:

Yes, it is good, and truly heartwarming, to see “The Three” in sunshine. That said, justice and the rule of law are a little more dead for the effort if they are truly innocent. And the facts, including the key absence, indeed exclusion, of DNA evidence, now known – almost unequivocally – militate to a conclusion of innocence. While people should be happy, no thrilled, they are out of custody, I cannot believe there is not concurrent shrieking at the highest levels as to how exactly that has transpired.

Let’s be honest, no prosecutor in his right mind walks these three men out the front door of the courthouse if he truly believes they are guilty and there is even the slightest chance in hell he can make the charges stand up in a retrial. And no prosecutor lets them do it through Alford pleas. I do not care what kind of happy pablum they spew to the television cameras and press, it is really just that simple.

So, what we have here is nothing but a reaffirmation, ratification and craven ass covering of the original miscarriage of justice that railroaded the West Memphis Three. There will be no words of commendation here for the prosecutors, nor for Judge David Laser for giving the court’s imprimatur of propriety to this; in fact, they should all be questioned as to their ethics and morals.

This is nothing short of Mike Nifong making the Duke lacrosse players take misdemeanor pleas and register as sex offenders in order to save his precious reputation and job, and stop civil damage suits. Nifong did not get away with such depravity in Durham, and the prosecutors in Jonesboro, Arkansas, should not either.

Convicting innocent defendants on the basis of flimsy cases ought to be impossible. Even in the imperfect world in which we live, such behavior could carry serious, even career-ending, consequences — if we chose to make justice a priority.

Back in the mid-1980s in Iredell County, an inexperienced assistant district attorney lost a death-by-motor-vehicle case because he didn’t ask the questions of his witnesses that would have elicited the answer he needed to get a conviction: He didn’t get a witness to identify the defendant as the person who had driven the car in question. It wasn’t that the witness couldn’t have testified to that effect; the prosecutor simply forgot to ask the question. And then he rested his case.

And the defense attorney, having noticed the omission, promptly asked the judge for a directed verdict for acquittal, which was the legally correct thing for him to do, and the judge granted the acquittal, which was the legally correct thing for him to do.

That prosecutor lost his job.

The people who put three innocent young men behind bars (and one of them on Death Row) for 18 years have suffered no consequences for their actions beyond a brief bit of media criticism mostly swamped by the good feelings that properly accompany the liberation of the innocent. But this was a far grosser miscarriage of justice.

Too big to govern? There’s an app for that.

Having a job and all, I did not watch Murdoch’s Parliament testimony today except briefly while my flat tire was being fixed (pictures, no sound), nor did I have time to read much about it. But I gather one of his defenses was that News Corp. is so big he couldn’t possibly be expected to know about a vast, wide-ranging illegal electronic surveillance program that victimized, at a minimum, upwards of 4,000 people, evidence of which Scotland Yard somehow managed to sit on for more than five years.

(This is, of course, the same defense offered by Alberto Gonzalez for allowing the United States Department of Justice to be converted into a wholly-owned subsidiary of Karl Rove to root out U.S. attorneys who refused to gin up fake, politically motivated criminal cases: The department employs more than 100,000 people, he couldn’t possibly be expected to know what they’re all up to, yadda yadda yadda.)

Let’s manually disarm our BS detectors for just a moment and do something utterly counterintuitive: Let’s take Rupert at his word.

What, then, are the implications?

Rupert Murdoch is 1) the world’s pre-eminent media baron and 2) utterly incapable of detecting, let alone preventing, a years-long, widespread, continuing criminal enterprise within the company he supposedly runs — because that company is too large. Accordingly, we must conclude that if he, with his vast skills and knowledge, can’t keep crimes like this from occurring in such a large enterprise, then no one can.

Therefore, no such large enterprises can be allowed to exist, and those that exist now must be broken up into much smaller, more governable entities, so that even the typical, not-especially-brilliant CEO can run one without running afoul of RICO. Heck, we’ve even had a mechanism on the books for a century that would go pretty far toward allowing us to do that.

So, OK, Rupert, you’re right. Lesson learned. Off you go.

(**turns BS detector back on**)

This is not difficult

Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein has broken the law and should go to prison for five years.

I don’t mean in terms of conspiring to commit fraud or other complicated areas, although I personally believe he has broken the law there, too. I mean he has done the same simple, stupid thing that got former baseball star Roger Clemens indicted: He lied to Congress.

Matt Taibbi helpfully explains:

Though many legal experts agree there is a powerful argument that the Levin report [a report stemming from an investigation led by Sen. Carl Levin -- Lex] supports a criminal charge of fraud, this stuff can keep the lawyers tied up for years. So let’s move on to something much simpler. In the spring of 2010, about a year into his investigation, Sen. Levin hauled all of the principals from these rotten Goldman deals to Washington, made them put their hands on the Bible and take oaths just like normal people, and demanded that they explain themselves. The legal definition of financial fraud may be murky and complex, but everybody knows you can’t lie to Congress.

“Article 18 of the United States Code, Section 1001,” says Loyola University law professor Michael Kaufman. “There are statutes that prohibit perjury and obstruction of justice, but this is the federal statute that explicitly prohibits lying to Congress.”

The law is simple: You’re guilty if you “knowingly and willfully” make a “materially false, fictitious or fraudulent statement or representation.” The punishment is up to five years in federal prison.

When Roger Clemens went to Washington and denied taking a shot of steroids in his ass, the feds indicted him — relying not on a year’s worth of graphically self-incriminating e-mails, but chiefly on the testimony of a single individual who had been given a deal by the government. Yet the Justice Department has shown no such prosecutorial zeal since April 27th of last year, when the Goldman executives who oversaw the Timberwolf, Hudson and Abacus deals arrived on the Hill and one by one — each seemingly wearing the same mask of faint boredom and irritated condescension — sat before Levin’s committee and dodged volleys of questions. …

Lloyd Blankfein went to Washington and testified under oath that Goldman Sachs didn’t make a massive short bet and didn’t bet against its clients. The Levin report proves that Goldman spent the whole summer of 2007 riding a “big short” and took a multibillion-dollar bet against its clients, a bet that incidentally made them enormous profits. Are we all missing something? Is there some different and higher standard of triple- and quadruple-lying that applies to bank CEOs but not to baseball players?

In fairness to both Taibbi and Sen. Levin and his investigators, there appears to be ample proof on the record that Goldman as a corporation and its individual officers committed a multitude of crimes — enough that any sane state would give Goldman the death penalty and lock the officers up for the rest of their natural lives. But those are, to a greater or lesser degree, complicated charges, challenging to prove. Lying to Congress? No-brainer.

They got Al Capone not for murder but for tax evasion. Lloyd Blankfein doing five years for lying to Congress wouldn’t be justice, but it would be a start.

One other question, perhaps more difficult: Why is it that you, I, Carl Levin and some scruffy reporter for Rolling Stone can see this but the Attorney General of the United States cannot? Are we just smarter, or what?

UPDATE: Apparently we’re smarter than the Attorney General on the John Ensign case, too.

Clarence Thomas v. Anthony Weiner

As it happens, I was on vacation during that frenzied week or so in the fall of 1991 when Clarence Thomas’s then-near-certain confirmation as an associate justice of the Supreme Court blew up when Anita Hill’s allegations against him became public. If I recall correctly, I watched Anita Hill’s testimony in an airport and Clarence Thomas’s testimony in a bar. Two things became very clear to me as I watched: 1) One of them was — had to be — lying, and 2) it damned well wasn’t Anita Hill.

So, lately, this whole bidness with Anthony Weiner has come up. I’ve made my feelings on that case in isolation pretty clear and have nothing more to say about it. However, Allan Brauer at Angry Black Lady has pointed out an interesting fact of timing: The Weiner story is coming out just as a number of congresscritters led by Weiner were looking into the fact that between 2003 and 2009, Thomas, on the annual income disclosure form Supreme Court justices must submit, had failed to disclose $680,000 or so that his wife, Ginni, had received from the Heritage Foundation and other conservative outfits with business before the high court. Thomas filed his 2010 documentation the Friday of Memorial Day weekend. Stuff that government officials badly want to be overlooked by the media typically gets put out late on a Friday, often the Friday of a long weekend, in hopes that journalists who badly want to get out of the office will overlook it.

So far as I know, there is, at best, only circumstantial evidence that the Weiner story is fabricated (though apparently it wouldn’t have been very difficult, as stupid computer tricks go) and no directly probative evidence that it is false. At the same time, like Gibbs, I don’t believe in coincidence. It is entirely possible that the Weiner story is true AND that it is being made public at this particular time in order to draw attention away from Weiner’s probe of the Thomases’ unethical and potentially illegal behavior. And at this point, I’m not ruling out the possibility that the Weiner story was an utter fabrication intended to protect the Thomases. The Democrats lied us into a war in 1964, the Republicans in 2003; I put nothing past either party anymore.

UPDATE: Weiner ‘fesses up, apparently. Moronic, but it doesn’t get Clarence and Ginni off the hook.

‘NOTHER UPDATE: Restored AWOL link to Brauer’s original post.