Tea Party Movement Loses Steam

Conservatives are having no trouble spinning Gov. Sarah Palin’s (R-Alaska) surprise cut-and-run from her office as an act of personal heroism that will help her political career. Fox News anchor Stuart Varney, running the network’s coverage right now, has opened the gushers, saying that Palin “represented real people with real values” and that by resigning the way she did “she was speaking the way, I think, Americans want her to speak.”

- Rep. John Culberson (R-Texas), also on Fox, had fulsome praise for Palin, saying that she showed “backbone” by quitting her job, and that the fact that she “drove the left crazy” emphasized what a strong candidate she was.

- Mike Huckabee, who might be/have been a 2012 contender against Palin, said that “what she’s showing is what a lot of us loved about her: Her spunk.” He said that her supporters wouldn’t punish her decision: “They’re going to feel like she was, in essence, hounded from the opportunity to serve.”

- Patrick Ruffini, a Republican media strategist, tweeted: “Is the media / political environment now so bad that it is driving our candidates insane?”

- Kathryn Jean Lopez of National Review tweeted: “If she does want to reinvent herself a little, this could be a great sabbatical time.”

In five minutes, Gov. Sarah Palin (R-Alaska.) announced she would skip the 2010 gubernatorial race, resign her own office at the end of July (her term is up December 2010), and, according to the pundit class, effectively take herself out of the 2012 election.

On Fox News, Bill Kristol said that “the more he thought about it,” Palin’s decision looked like a “shrewd gamble.” On MSNBC, Pat Buchanan compared Palin to Richard Nixon, who made a political comeback in 1966 by campaigning for Republican candidates.

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The $150,000 in fines so far charged to Los Angeles clothing maker American Apparel for allegedly employing illegal immigrants may be a welcome change from the notorious factory raids by federal agents that led to hundreds of jailed and deported employees. As The New York Times reported on Friday, it suggests a shift in strategy on the part of immigration officials at the Department of Homeland Security.

But it still doesn’t explain why the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, or ICE, after promising to crack down on employers who illegally hire immigrants and treat them as slave labor, is going after a company that starts its low-skilled workers at $10 – $12 an hour plus health benefits — far above the legal minimum wage. The government hasn’t even alleged that the company knowingly hired undocumented workers, only that an audit of its records shows that about a third of the workers might not be legal and may have shown fake documents when they were hired.

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Word’s coming now that the Obama administration is seeking to withhold the CIA’s 2004 inspector-general report on the implementation of its former “enhanced interrogation regime” until August 31. The ACLU, which had an agreement with the administration to declassify the report as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, is going to challenge the administration’s efforts. More soon.

Update: Just got a hold of the court documents. Check them out after the jump.

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Here’s another point I should have made in my piece earlier today: Just because President Obama’s Justice Department has been asserting a remarkably broad, Bush-like view of his detention authority pursuant to the laws of war in the Guantanamo detainees’ habeas corpus cases, that doesn’t mean the president has to stick with that definition in the future. And those civil liberties and national security lawyers I mentioned who’d support an executive order on detention are hoping fervently that he won’t: specifically, they want any such order explicitly to narrow the scope of the government’s authority so that it can’t just pick up suspected terrorists anywhere in the world and imprison them indefinitely in the name of the global “war on terror.”

As David Remes, executive director of Appeal for Justice who represents about a dozen Yemeni detainees at Guantanamo, explained to me earlier today, “If you look at the fine print of the Obama refined definition, you’ll see it’s limited to this litigation,” referring to the habeas cases. In the meantime, Obama has set up a team of people — a detainee policy task force — to study and consider and decide what U.S. detention policy should be going forward. “So it could be different than what DOJ has argued in the habeas cases,” says Remes.

But will it be?

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So after I wrote this post, I checked in with State Department contacts to see what’s on the horizon for resourcing the Marine offensive in the Helmand River Valley. The biggest piece of news I can report: lots of diplomats are anticipating a relaxing Fourth of July. But there’s more.

The two State Department and USAID officials now in Helmand have been there for two years, so they’re not starting from scratch in terms of understanding the area, which is a necessary trade-off of a so-called civilian surge into Afghanistan. This weekend, another USAID stabilization expert arrives in Helmand, with three more to follow in the coming weeks, and two other USAID employees will accompany Marine maneuver units this weekend. A USAID development adviser is scheduled to arrive on July 7.  By the end of the month there should be 20 new USAID employees in Helmand and Kandahar, though I don’t have a breakdown of who’s going where or doing what.

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The regime crackdown has broken up the large demonstrations and the international media has largely moved on — enabled unintentionally by Michael Jackson’s death — but don’t think the Iranian opposition is done for, according to Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council. Parsi just held a conference call to reinforce the point. “The is not one-trick pony … and it’s not just street demonstrations,” Parsi said. While the crackdown has left the opposition with the sensible calculation that assembling in the streets would be tantamount to a suicide wish, the opposition still has a potent weapon: “Ahmadinejad and Khamenei himself have lost a significant amount of legitimacy in the eyes of average Iranians.”

Well, OK, sure. But what good is that if the regime can withstand legitimacy-based challenges through the use of brute force? I asked Parsi if the opposition’s goal was still to overturn the election, given that its legal recourses are few, and if not, what a new goal might be. “The goal at this stage remains” a fair election result, he replied, since the “wiggle room is still extensive” for overturning the election. Contingencies could emerge, compelling an overturn of the results, such as “a large number of senior ayatollahs com[ing] out to criticize the legitimacy of the electoral results” or if the opposition could “get a majority of 86 people on the Assembly of Experts to come out, that can really threaten Khamenei and his institutions.”

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