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Obama Transcript

Laura McGann — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 18:10:13 GMT

Spencer tells me Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign has posted the transcript of his Berlin speech. MSNBC is poring over the text too, noting the wall-tearing imagery reminiscent of Ronald Reagan and the Kennedy-like themes.

I personally perked up in this part of the speech:

I know my country has not perfected itself. At times, we’ve struggled to keep the promise of liberty and equality for all of our people. We’ve made our share of mistakes, and there are times when our actions around the world have not lived up to our best intentions.

But I also know how much I love America. I know that for more than two centuries, we have strived – at great cost and great sacrifice – to form a more perfect union; to seek, with other nations, a more hopeful world. Our allegiance has never been to any particular tribe or kingdom – indeed, every language is spoken in our country; every culture has left its imprint on ours; every point of view is expressed in our public squares. What has always united us – what has always driven our people; what drew my father to America’s shores – is a set of ideals that speak to aspirations shared by all people: that we can live free from fear and free from want; that we can speak our minds and assemble with whomever we choose and worship as we please.

So many great American themes we haven’t heard in a while…

Hoffnung

Spencer Ackerman — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 17:56:36 GMT

I’m barely watching the speech and he already seems like he’s president. And like he’s destined to be president. Challenging Germany to deepen our commitments in Afghanistan? Challenging to world to reduce the nuclear arsenals of the Cold War? Challenging us to embrace a thoroughgoing commitment to liberal internationalism? Yeah, that’s the Obama Doctrine in effect. Are they already wearing t-shirts in Berlin that say Ich Bin Ein Obama?

(*"Hoffnung," I’m told, means "Hope" in German.)

With Hurricane Dolly, McCain May Have To Back Off On Offshore Drilling

Suemedha Sood — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 17:30:51 GMT

As Sen. John McCain continues to tout offshore drilling—and others in Congress start to jump on the bandwagon—he’s found it necessary to downplay the threat of oil spills, even in the face of powerful hurricanes. There’s something ironic, then, about Hurricane Dolly hitting this week.

McCain was scheduled to make another offshore drilling push at an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico today, but the Category 2 storm changed his plans. Dolly has forced energy companies to evacuate some oil rigs and cut oil and gas production in the Gulf by 4.7 percent.

In a recent speech, McCain said, "As for offshore drilling, it’s safe enough these days that not even Hurricanes Katrina and Rita could cause significant spillage from the battered rigs off the coasts of New Orleans and Houston."

Unfortunately, that’s not true. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita resulted in huge oil spills when 113 oil rigs were destroyed and 457 pipelines were damaged, according to government data. There were also smaller storms in 2005 that resulted in 146 small oil spills in federal waters.

For more on Hurricane Dolly’s activity right now, Dot Earth has some good analysis and pictures.

A Note On Message Consistency

Matthew DeLong — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 17:19:40 GMT

Sen. John McCain has an op-ed in the St. Petersburg Times today about the potential government bailout of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Here’s the first paragraph:

Americans should be outraged at the latest sweetheart deal in Washington. Congress will put U.S. taxpayers on the hook for potentially hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It’s a tribute to what these two institutions — which most Americans have never heard of — have bought with more than $170-million worth of lobbyists in the past decade.

Right! We should be outraged—OUTRAGED—at this sweetheart deal! Congress should be ashamed of itself for putting U.S. taxpayers on the hook for this mortgage industry bailout. But wait, here’s the second paragraph:

With combined obligations of roughly $5-trillion, the rapid failure of Fannie and Freddie would be a threat to mortgage markets and financial markets as a whole. Because of that threat, I support taking the unfortunate but necessary steps needed to keep the financial troubles at these two companies from further squeezing American families. But let us not forget that the threat that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to financial markets is a tribute to crony capitalism that reflects the power of the Washington establishment.

WHAAA?!?!? The legitimacy of the potential deal aside, McCain just said Americans should be outraged at Congress…for engineering a bailout that McCain himself supports. He also says that Congressional support—of which he is a part—results from $170 million worth of lobbying, which he goes on to decry. There are several conflicting messages in two consecutive paragraphs. If you are a presidential candidate, and you are publicly announcing your support for something, it might not be in your best interest to preface it by telling Americans they should be outraged at the thing you support. Maybe it’s just me, but that seems pretty basic.

How Much?

Jefferson Morley — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 17:00:00 GMT

The presidential conventions serve many functions—one of which is allow corporate interests a unique opportunity to pump unlimited amounts of money into the political parties. Corporate donations to candidates are banned. Individual contributions to are limited to $2,300. But contributions to the convention committees are not limited. And they don’t have to be publicly disclosed until October.

So our colleagues at Colorado Independent asked the question, if the donors to the convention committees aren’t seeking to secretly influence the political process, they should be willing to disclose how much they are giving, right?

TCI asked all 112 corporate donors to the Democratic presidential convention committee to voluntarily disclose how much money they are giving. Yesterday, reporters J.C. O’Connell and Naomi Zeveloff published their findings. Only 23 (20 percent) agreed.

Last month Minnesota Independent surveyed 53 corporations donating to the Republican convention committee; only eight (15 percent) would voluntarily disclose their donations.

So when you see the televised pomp and circumstance at the end of the summer, remember the end of the “The Wizard of Oz.” Like the Wizard, the convention donors ask that you pay no attention to the corporations behind the curtain.

Yoo-Bybee II: (Sort of) Revealed!

Spencer Ackerman — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:54:33 GMT

It’s a landmark day for torture-disclosure. Today, the ACLU obtained and released a redacted version of one of the most important building blocks in the Bush administration’s architecture of torture—the very, very, closely-held August 2002 memo, known as "Yoo-Bybee II," from the Justice Dept.’s Office of Legal Counsel that authorized the CIA to perform specific methods of torture when interrogating Al Qaeda detainees. Almost the entire memo is redacted, but it reads a lot like legal guidance on how CIA interrogators can break anti-torture laws and get away with it.

"To validate the statute, an individual must have the specific intent to inflict severe pain or suffering," the memo reads. "Because specific intent is an element of the offense, the absence of specific intent negates the charge of torture." Wow. So if you didn’t mean specifically just to knock the crap out of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, no law can stop you if such an unfortunate knocking occurs.

Unsurprisingly, CIA asked in 2003 and 2004 for further guidance to ensure their operatives wouldn’t get stuck holding the bag, and those were declassified those as well. More soon.

Ackerman on Al-Jazeera

Spencer Ackerman — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:34:55 GMT

Al Jazeera’s Shedrine Tadros does a good piece on the Cheeto-eaters influencing the 2008 election. In addition to swinging by the Flophouse (verrrrrry early on a recent Saturday morning) to interview myself and Matthew "Igylesis," she paid a visit to the Flower Station to chat with our ex-boss, Josh Marshall.

War Criminal's Guide to Autism Treatment

Arthur Allen — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:08:00 GMT

If you were unlucky enough to have to call upon Radovan Karadzic in the 1992-1994 period, as I was on one occasion while a reporter for the Associated Press, the expression "physician, heal thyself" will have a special meaning. Karadzic was a nutty psychiatrist who spent the war spouting lies, fantasies and racist horrors from the village of Pale, the mountain center of the Bosnian Serb enclave. One January I had to travel through snow and ice and Chetnik checkpoints—artillery bases from which shells and sniper bullets rained down upon the residents of Sarajevo—to visit Karadzic at Pale. The great poo-bah was indisposed, so I got his daughter Sonja, his "press spokesman" who was fat as Shelob and just as crazy and vicious. She tore up my Bosnian Serb "visa" and threatened to sic her dogs on me. Lovely family.

So what does a war criminal in hiding do to keep the wolf from the door? Alternative medicine is a good career path, since it’s full of credulous people who mistake the placebo effect for healing hands. Today’s British Guardian, under the headline, ‘Karadzic gave a massage to my wife and my daughters,’ tells how a Begrade family was duped by "Dr. David," a bearded, Dumbledore-looking fella who told them he’d been a faith healer in the United States. Among the details was that Karadzic supposedly helped an autistic boy become more sociable with his peers. To be sure, notes another Guardian columnist, "Just because Karadic was a war criminal, it doesn’t follow that all alternative practitioners are genocidal maniacs, and indeed many practitioners sincerely believe in what they are doing and want to help their clients. But there have surely been enough cases now of blatant recklessness if not outright deceit to confirm that practising alternative medicine is very often the last refuge of the scoundrel."

Obama Out-Raises McCain in Arizona

Matthew DeLong — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 15:05:56 GMT

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. —After a Zogby Online poll earlier this month found Sen. John McCain trailing Sen. Barack Obama in Arizona, new evidence emerged today that McCain may not have a lock on his home state in November. The Arizona Republic features a front-page story reporting that Obama out-raised McCain in Arizona by 38 percent in June—and McCain holds a narrow lead over Obama in total fund-raising in the state. From the Republic:

Barack Obama quietly raised more money in Arizona last month for his presidential campaign than John McCain did, and the Illinois Democrat dominates the overall fundraising map in 43 states and Washington, D.C., records show.

Obama reported $432,000 in donations from Arizonans in June, compared with McCain’s $313,000, based on an Arizona Republic analysis of Federal Election Commission records. Neither campaign properly codes all contributions with a state, making it impossible to know exactly where all donations came from.

Since last year, McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee, has raised at least $4.7 million from his fellow Arizonans, double what Obama reports from the state. But donations this year are nearly even: McCain’s Arizona donors have given him $2 million. Obama’s Arizona donors have given him just $66,000 less.

According to the article, Obama’s fund-raising pattern in Arizona mirrors the national trend—he raised the bulk of his money from small, individual donors.

His average contribution for June in Arizona was $115. McCain’s Arizona donors averaged $241. In his home state of Illinois, Obama has raised more than $20 million. McCain has raised $3.7 million there.

The Republic story also notes the Arizona Democratic Party reports its voter registration in Arizona has jumped by 50,000 since 2006,—but state records show it still trails the Republicans by 110,000.

As we reported previously, McCain held a couple of open-press campaign events in Arizona recently—an unusual occurrence for the senator, who frequently spends the weekend at his ranch in Sedona. McCain is expected to be home again this weekend, and we’ll be keeping a close eye on his activities. If he invites the press along anywhere, it could be a further indication that the campaign is taking these indicators seriously—and is not taking his home state for granted.

Safe and Sound

Sridhar Pappu — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 14:45:00 GMT

COLUMBUS, Ohio—And now for a laundry update…..

At 6 A.M this morning I was awoken from my nightly dream of another Cincinnati Reds World Series victory with a knock at the door of my downtown hotel room. And there it was: The sight of my TaylorMade shoulder bag with my clothes, toothbrush, razor and running shorts and Tae Bo DVD. As I wrote in The Streak yesterday, all of the baggage of the McCain press corps had been left behind in Pennsylvania while the bags of the presumed Republican presidential candidate and the Secret Service showed up without problem. This left the group, already feeling unloved as we worked in the shadow of those journalists covering Sen. Barack Obama’s world tour feeling even more so.

But now I have my stuff. And I’d like to thank my two adopted sons, Bengals quarterback Carson Palmer and rookie Reds outfielder Jay Bruce for their support during this troubled time. As for those who reached out to me with telegrams and packages of boxer shorts and socks all I can say is Today…Today I feel like the luckiest man on the face of the Earth.

So Now The Surge Equals The Anbar Awakening?

Spencer Ackerman — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 14:31:00 GMT

The McCain-Surge death-spiral continues. In a supermarket cheese aisle, McCain submits that the surge is really a… counterinsurgency strategy… and so any counterinsurgency strategy is a surge… and the Anbar Awakening was part of a counterinsurgency strategy… so even though it occurred months before the surge, it’s still… a surge! (Via Ilan Goldenberg.) The following exchange with an incredulous reporter is both telling and best read in a Hans Moleman voice.

McCAIN: ... Prior to that they had been going into places, killing people or not killing people, and then withdrawing. And the new counterinsurgency ‘surge’ entailed going in, and clearing and holding, which Col. MacFarland had already started doing. And then of course later on, there were additional troops. And Gen. Petraeus has said that the surge would not have worked and the Anbar Awakening would not have taken place—successfully—if they hadn’t had an increase in the number of troops. So, I’m not sure, frankly, that people really understand, that a surge is part of a counterinsurgency strategy, which means going in, clearing, holding, building, building a better life, providing services to the people, and then, clearly, a part of that, an important part of that, was additional troops to ensure the safety of the sheikhs, to regain control of Ramadi, which was a very bloody fight, and then the surge continued to succeed in that counterinsurgency.

REPORTER: So when you say ‘surge’ then, you’re not referring to just the one that President Bush initiated, you’re saying it goes back several months before that?

McCAIN: Yes.

And here’s where McCain has lost the plot. Remember that McCain is making an argument that he can prosecute not only a better war than Barack Obama can, but also a better one than President Bush has. Key to that has been his dual invocation that he supported the new troop surge of 2007 but also was a fierce critic of a mismanaged war during the years prior. Here’s what he says on his campaign website about that:

John McCain has been a leading advocate of the “surge” and the counterinsurgency strategy carried out by General David Petraeus. At the end of 2006, four years of a badly conceived military strategy that concentrated American troops on large bases brought us near to the point of no return.

Oops! By conflating the pre-2007 approach with the post-2007 approach—all to save his ass from simply admitting that he doesn’t understand what the surge and the Awakening actually are—McCain completely messes up his own argument for why he’s better equipped to prosecute the war. Unless the July 2008-era-McCain wants to argue that we really were succeeding in Iraq in 2005! (After all, that’s when Bush unveiled the clear-hold-build-based "National Strategy for Victory.")

This week has been a total disaster for McCain and it’s only Thursday morning.

Kurds Reject Provincial Elections in Iraq

Spencer Ackerman — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 14:27:28 GMT

To return to my obsession with the powder-keg known as northern Iraq, Kurdish anger over the prospect of dividing Kirkuk—they want to whole megillah—has led Iraqi President/Kurdish potentate Jalal Talabani to veto the latest provincial elections bill. The elections were supposed to be held in October; then they were delayed to December; now they might be held… who knows. There’s supposed to be another national election in 2009, so maybe they’ll try to hold the provincials at the same time. Reports The New York Times:

Iraq’s president, Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, and at least one of his vice presidents vetoed the legislation, according to Mahmoud Othman, an independent Kurdish politician. Mr. Talabani’s office earlier in the day had issued a statement promising a veto, saying that the legislation in its current form would deepen “the sectarian and national isolation and expand the circle of extremism.”

Pay attention to that "expand the circle of extremism" quote. I don’t know what, in context, it actually refers to. But one plausible reading is that the in-crowd in Iraq—Maliki’s Dawa Party; the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq; the Kurds; to a lesser extent, the Iraqi Islamic Party’s National Dialogue coalition of Sunnis—doesn’t want to hold the elections because they don’t want the Sadrists and the Awakening Councils to win, which they’re expected to do. The fear of losing power to a new nationalist coalition helped drive Maliki to embrace withdrawal in 2010, an attempt to steal the Sadrist thunder. And the Kurds really don’t want a nationalist coalition in power to mess with their long-term strategy for secession.

McCain Stumbles on Domestic Issues

Sridhar Pappu — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 13:09:23 GMT

WILKES-BARRE, Penn. —The woman refused to give her name, but was happy to share her problems. She’d seen her friends on fixed incomes struggle with rising gas prices and the cost of health care. She herself, at age 66, didn’t see retirement as a financial possibility. In short, things were bad, and she wanted someone to make them better.

"I want to know what he’s going to do," she said of the man she was supporting for president, Arizona Sen. John McCain, the presumed Republican nominee.

The woman had come to Wilkes-Barre’s F.M Kirby Center to see her man in the 2008 presidential race late in the morning of July 23. Now she was sitting in a grand, refurbished theater at the heart of a place that used to actually make stuff, where family-run businesses ran garment mills and factories while they served as the town’s benefactors, but, like the rest of the region, had fallen hard.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Now she and 800 others were waiting for the Straight Talk Express to come riding through. On the other side of the globe, McCain’s Democratic rival, Sen. Barack Obama, was meeting with world leaders, holding court with the anchors of the Big Three TV networks, photographed in presidential style as he surveyed the situation in Afghanistan and Iraq, Israel and Germany.

Now was the time for McCain to prove his mettle when it came to domestic issues and show himself as a man who really understood the great fears and problems of the country, to feel our pain. And he was blowing it.

"I could easily go the other way if something strikes me right," the woman said, moments before McCain took the stage for another town hall.

More than blowing it, McCain was exposing his perceived weaknesses. He seemed bitter and jealous of the attention Obama was getting. His comments about both Obama’s experience and sense of moral duty have been getting harsher. Rather than seeing the dignified man talking to his country about its problems, people were beginning to see the disgruntled old man, who seemed angry at everything Obama represented—youth, idealism and the fulfillment of promises made by the martyrs of the New Frontier.

Left to himself, McCain sadly chose not to follow in the footsteps of Macaulay Culkin’s character in “Home Alone.” He should have. Culkin, you might remember, ran wild through his house, did everything his brothers and sisters wouldn’t let him, helped that old weird guy reunite with his family and even stopped crime.

McCain, on the other hand, had chosen not to take advantage of Obama’s absence. Instead, McCain chose to complain. He and his campaign bristled about the amount of coverage Obama was getting, and even issued fake press credentials on Tuesday evening on the tarmac here in Wilkes-Barre that read “McCain Press Corps/JV Squad/’Left Behind to Report in America.” Publicly, McCain made fun of the fact that only now was Obama meeting with Gen. David Petraeus, though he had called for a 16-month withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq throughout his campaign.

What McCain failed to do was use the opportunity to run amok, Culkinesque, across the country. Instead he was shoring up weaknesses of his campaign. A recent ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 54 percent of Americans trusted Obama to handle the economy, while a paltry 35 percent said they trusted McCain. As for immigration, 48 percent said they trusted Obama on this issue, a good 10 percentage points ahead of the Arizona senator. On the federal deficit, 50 percent said they trusted Obama to handle it, with 36 percent siding with McCain.

The message of these numbers would seem clear: It’s nice to talk about Iraq dude, but it’s time for some “Straight Talk” about Ohio and Pennsylvania, Maine and New Hampshire.

Instead McCain whiffed on a hanging breaking ball. This began beneath the darkened skies of Portland, Me. After a photo appearance with first father and former President George H.W. Bush at the old-money environs of the Bush compound at Kennebunkport, he arrived at a picnic outside a small military museum. As usual, the audience was filled with veterans who have come to love McCain over his great bravery during Vietnam. The day had grown muggy, but Good Humor trucks offering up Spider-Man pops, complete with gumball eyes, made things tolerable.

Shelia Filippone, 66, a nurse from Newton, Mass., was ready to hear something, anything that related to the rhythm of her life. Like many people I’ve met during this campaign, Filippone said she’d like to retire but simply couldn’t. She was looking for answers, real answers, from McCain about what he would do to make her life better.

“I’d like to hear what he has to say about Social Security and how he plans to shore it up,” Filippone, on her first year of Social Security said. “What’s he going to do about the minimum wage? We have a major health-care crisis in place, and I want to see what McCain plans to do. I don’t know what his plan is.”

Filippone would leave the event with her questions unanswered. Taking the stage, McCain — sporting his Navy baseball cap—looked out into the audience, thanking the veterans for their service. He brought up a young boy from the front row, wearing the same cap as his, and began to riff. McCain presented the energy crisis and dependence on foreign oil as the greatest crisis facing the country, then argued for new sources of power— wind, solar, nuclear and, sigh, tide. McCain then declared that we had, in fact, succeeded in Iraq, and that soldiers coming home would do so as victors. He closed with a story from his time as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, meant to bring the crowd to a patriotic fervor.

Such a turn, such a story, would have seemed strange just a few months ago. But as I’ve written before, McCain has begun to bring out the experience of those terrible years more and more. Once, it seemed like he was unwilling to talk about his POW experience. But now one can expect to hear about the torture and concrete slabs, about how he chose to stay a captive when offered an early release as the son and grandson of admirals.

Certainly they are moving stories, not fit for any sort of belittlement. However, there is only so much one can rely on the emotion evoked by what Oliver Wendell Holmes, after the Civil War, called the “incommunicable experience of war,” where, in one’s youth, “hearts were touched with fire.”

But they have little to do with, to quote Obama quoting the late Martin Luther King Jr., the “fierce urgency of now.” They do well for McCain in reminding people why he has the character to lead, but do little to illustrate that he understands the problems faced by those he wants to lead.

McCain seemed to further that impression when he dismissed Obama as "someone who has no military experience whatsoever."

That seemed a turning point for McCain—one he might not recover from. Before he’d dismissed Obama as a man who didn’t understand military strategy or the rules of wartime engagement. Now he had called Obama out as someone who didn’t deserve to lead the country because he — like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt— had never experienced war, and was somehow lacking because he had never been beaten or fired a shot for his country.

Such attacks were in evidence when McCain returned to his spiritual second home, New Hampshire the next day. The event was a town hall— McCain’s favorite forum — in a small opera house in Rochester. He had come back to the state where he’s an honorary favorite son, where he took the 2000 GOP primary and then again, eight years later, on his way to an improbable nomination win. It was where he could rely on the loyalty of friends.

“I think he certainly has a lot more experience with these issues, with domestic affairs,” said Rob Martin, sitting with his wife Marin. “He can reach across the aisle. It’s not at all clear whether Obama can reach out to Republicans.”

Evidence of that ability wasn’t there as McCain was greeted with the warm New England hug. As the press filed from a slanted wooden table in a corner of the building, McCain was simply vicious—despite a polite exchange with an elderly woman who expressed an opposite world view when it came to the United States’ occupation in Iraq. McCain again talked about clean coal and the need for offshore drilling, about better treatment for veterans. He made a reference to expanding health care, to illustrate his counter-proposal to Obama’s comprehensive, universal package.

But then, in perhaps his harshest attack on the junior senator from Illinois to date, McCain nearly accused Obama of treason when he said, "It seems to me Sen. Obama would rather lose a war to win a campaign."

On Wednesday, when McCain began his town hall in the refurbished theater in the bucolic downtown of Wilkes-Barre, it seemed like he might finally have realized that he could run the table on the domestic agenda with Obama abroad. He spoke of the great economic challenges and gas prices, about the need for charter schools and, sigh, the need for wind and solar and tide power, along with offshore drilling. With the gas tax holiday he merely wanted to give the average guy a break.

“I strongly believe our best days are ahead of us,” McCain said. “I believe in the fundamental greatness of America.

But it was too little, too late. McCain had had a week to himself, to show the public he was more than a war hero, to illustrate that he had a plan to help America rise from the depths of this dark and terrible time. But he had squandered his opportunity. Soon he will be rejoined on the continent with his rival, no longer able to take advantage of being left behind, a man alone.

And All Their Liquids Are Gone Too

Sridhar Pappu — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 00:37:17 GMT

COLUMBUS, Ohio—"We’re all going commando!"

That was the cry from the front of the John McCain press corps bus following our landing here in the heart of the heart of the country. Soon after reporters arrived in the Ohio capital, it was revealed that none—NONE—of the press luggage was boarded on the Straight Talk plane from Pennsylvania. This followed the scrapping of a planned trip to New Orleans due to weather, which thus brought us to the center of my home state. For the record, the luggage of both the Secret Service and the presumed Republican presidential nominee arrived safely.

Thus a group, already feeling like the beat-writers for the Los Angeles Clippers as our counterparts travel the globe with Sen. Barack Obama, have been left with merely the clothes on our backs, our laptops, Blackberries and, well ourselves. Should the bags not come before 7 a.m. tomorrow, a group outing to Banana Republic is planned. For the record, I’m planning on getting some non-slim fitting pants and an orange polo shirt. However, donations to the Sridhar Pappu Clothing Fund can be sent via PayPal. (I hear my managing editor plans to send me some Chuck Taylors emblazoned with TWI on the heel. Thanks a lot.) A clean pair of boxers and a Cincinnati Reds t-shirt will be accepted in lieu of cash.

McCain Cancels Trip to New Orleans Amid Competing Disasters

Matthew DeLong — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 00:35:04 GMT

Sen. John McCain’s trip to New Orleans just wasn’t in the cards this week. McCain was scheduled to visit the Crescent City tomorrow to meet with Louisiana Gov, Bobby Jindal—who today said he will not be McCain’s running mate—to promote his offshore drilling plan with a photo-op on an oil rig. However, Mother Nature had other plans, and the trip was canceled due to bad weather. If you’ve been watching cable news today, you might have heard something about a little hurricane named Dolly that is currently pummeling San Padre Island and the southern Texas coast. As a result, numerous oil production platforms and rigs in the Gulf of Mexico have been evacuated. The timing of the storm led Politico’s Jonathan Martin to proclaim in a humorous headline that the weather, like the media, is liberal and therefore biased against McCain. Martin links to The New Republic’s Jason Zengerle, who makes a strong case:

It’s not just the press that loves Obama, Mother Nature does, too. Jonathan Martin reported that the McCain campaign would "counterprogram" Obama’s big Berlin speech tomorrow by having their guy helicopter from New Orleans to an oil rig off the Gulf Coast and give a speech on off-shore drilling. At last, McCain would have a visual to compete with Obama’s. But then along came Hurricane Dolly, and now it looks like the event is off. Meanwhile, Karen Tumulty reported that the weather that greeted Obama in Israel today was "as close to perfect as it is possible to be on this planet."

Now might not be the best time to visit New Orleans to push oil drilling anyway. Fox News reports a barge loaded with 419,000 gallons of fuel oil split in half after colliding with a 600-ft. tanker on the Mississippi River near New Orleans early this morning, spilling an unknown quantity of oil into the river. The article states 29 miles of the river are now closed to ships—possibly for days—and the smell of diesel was detectable in the French Quarter. While it is a coincidence—and not directly related to oil exploration or drilling—it is hard to view this as anything but a bad omen for McCain. Voodoo, maybe? It’s probably best to just spend the night in Ohio.

Another Reason to Embrace Non-Profit News

Mike Lillis — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 20:05:36 GMT

The reality that the news industry is struggling is hardly news, but some of the remedies being tried these days are getting a bit out of hand. For example, a Fox TV affiliate in Las Vegas has entered a contract with McDonald’s to have the station’s news anchors keep glasses of McDonald’s ice coffee on their desk during programming—golden arches facing the camera. The Las Vegas Sun reported the story Monday, noting:

But wait, here’s the best part: They’re not real. Fake coffee on the real news, two plastic cups permanently filled with some kind of bogus drink. The anchors aren’t even supposed to acknowledge them, McDonald’s reps explain. That’s part of their genius, my little lambs! They get into your mind without you knowing it. So they just sit there, two logo-emblazoned plastic cups, percolating into the psyche. Made-to-scale models that weigh something like seven pounds each – refreshing, and bottom-line boosting!

Some will probably argue that such a move is simply sign of a creative company searching ways to survive in the flailing news business. But how’s your smiling news anchor going to criticize McDonald’s when the company’s product rests in full sight just a few inches away?

Kelly McBride, the ethics group leader for Poynter Institute, the nonprofit journalism training organization, isn’t convinced. Product placement in a newsroom, she worries, represents the "slippage" of news into advertisement, a descent into a dark world where conglomerate companies control coverage.

What’s next, Pete Rozelle headbands?

McCain Adviser: Obama's 'Words Matter, Except When They Pose an Inconvenient Truth'

Matthew DeLong — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 19:27:24 GMT

The McCain campaign hosted a conference call with reporters to celebrate the one-year anniversary of Sen. Barack Obama’s pledge that he would be willing to meet without precondition with several hostile foreign leaders. The McCain campaign had seized on the statement as a gaffe on the part of Obama, and focused on it as an example of the presumptive Democratic nominee’s naivete. Randy Scheunemann, a senior foreign-policy adviser to Sen. John McCain, took the opportunity to compare Obama’s comments from one year ago at the CNN/YouTube Democratic debate in Charleston, S.C., to those made earlier today in Sderot, Israel:

Randy Scheunemann: It’s important to highlight what [Obama] said a year ago and what he said just about an hour ago at a press conference in Israel. He was asked July 23, 2007, at the presidential debate in South Carolina: “Would you be willing to meet separately, without pre-condition, during the first year of your administration, in Washington or anywhere else, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, in order to bridge the gap that divides our countries?”

Sen. Obama’s answer was: “I would.”

Today, Sen. Obama was asked: “A year ago you said you would meet in your first year as president…Is there anything you’ve heard today in your discussions with Israeli leaders to make you rethink that pledge, or are you standing by that?”

Today, Sen. Obama said: “I think you have to look at what the question was…”

I just read the question for everybody.

“…and how I responded…”

I just read his response. Sen. Obama said today: “But I think what I said in response was that I would, at my time and choosing, be willing to meet with any leader if I thought it would promote the national security interests of the United States. That continues to be my position.”

There you have it. What he said a year ago and what he said today. This is revealing about Sen. Obama in several respects. First, it shows his inexperience in making such an uncategorical statement a year ago in the presidential debate. Second, it shows his stubbornness in adhering to such a position for so long. And third, and what we’ve seen more recently, it shows his malleability in trying to rewrite history and refusal to admit a mistake in what he originally said…I guess for Sen. Obama, words matter—except when they pose an inconvenient truth.

However, Obama’s answer to the question at the debate was considerably longer and more nuanced than the two words offered by Scheunemann. From the transcript:

OBAMA: I would. And the reason is this, that the notion that somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them—which has been the guiding diplomatic principle of this administration—is ridiculous. (APPLAUSE) Now, Ronald Reagan and Democratic presidents like JFK constantly spoke to Soviet Union at a time when Ronald Reagan called them an evil empire. And the reason is because they understood that we may not trust them and they may pose an extraordinary danger to this country, but we had the obligation to find areas where we can potentially move forward.

And I think that it is a disgrace that we have not spoken to them. We’ve been talking about Iraq—one of the first things that I would do in terms of moving a diplomatic effort in the region forward is to send a signal that we need to talk to Iran and Syria because they’re going to have responsibilities if Iraq collapses.

They have been acting irresponsibly up until this point. But if we tell them that we are not going to be a permanent occupying force, we are in a position to say that they are going to have to carry some weight, in terms of stabilizing the region.

The verdict: Both Obama and the McCain campaign are doing a bit of history rewriting. Obama did not really say anything about any potential meetings taking place "at the time or place" of his choosing, as he said in Israel today. But the totality of his response to the question from last year’s debate indicates that he was talking in terms of furthering the national-security interests of the United States. Scheunemann ignored this, in favor of a concise, two-word response that better serves the McCain camp’s purposes. Finally, I would almost guarantee that we will be hearing the "inconvenient truth" line from the McCain campaign again in the future.

Using Law to Justify Torture

Daphne Eviatar — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 18:51:30 GMT

For months now, Atty. Gen. Michael Mukasey has refused to investigate whether Bush administration officials committed war crimes by authorizing the torture of suspected terrorists. His reasoning? Any actions were authorized by the administration’s lawyers, and so cannot constitute a crime. As he wrote to Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), one of 56 House Democrats who last month called on Mukasey to appoint a special counsel: “It would be both unwise and unjust to expose to possible criminal penalties those who relied in good faith on … prior Justice Department opinions.”

But can the alleged use of torture be so easily waived away? Since the so-called “war on terror” began, the Bush administration has, by its own admission, used "enhanced interrogation techniques" like forcing detainees to stand for 40 hours; simulated drowning and dousing detainees’ naked bodies with cold water in chilled prison cells. Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld formally approved the use of "stress positions," attack dogs, sexual humiliation and physical violence. And these are just the officially sanctioned techniques the public knows about.

As the photos and written accounts of torture, sodomy and murder at Abu Ghraib have revealed, the American public may only know a limited amount when it comes to abuse of detainees in U.S. custody. Indeed, Human Rights First in 2006 found that in the previous four years, at least eight U.S. prisoners had been tortured to death.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

The Democrats’ call for an independent investigation has received little attention – perhaps because the Justice Dept. has consistently denied that policymakers could be culpable. After all, they were acting on the advice of legal counsel.

Indeed, evidently anticipating the Democrats’ charges, in 2002 the White House, Justice and Defense Departments began creating a paper trail of legal memos in the hopes of insulating their actions. Thus the infamous “torture memos,” written by former Justice Dept. lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee, were drafted to define torture narrowly – and were careful not to rule it out. Last week, the legal commentator Stuart Taylor Jr. accepted Mukasey’s position without question. Taylor wrote in Newsweek that there was no sense in prosecuting government officials. President George W. Bush, Taylor argued, should pardon everyone; the matter of culpability should be dropped.

But do the administration’s legal memos put the matter to rest? Does soliciting a set of self-serving opinions actually shield senior government officials from prosecution?

Probably not, according to many constitutional scholars and lawyers. Indeed, the Justice Dept. itself would never accept, on face value, any suspected criminal’s defense that he had been relying on advice of counsel. Rather, legal experts say, that advice must have been a reasonable interpretation of the law, based on a thorough knowledge of the facts, and provided before the suspect acted. So when it comes to policymakers authorizing torture, the administration’s defense appears to fail on all grounds.

First, without an investigation establishing who advised whom, of what and when, we don’t even know if Mukasey’s claim is true. Sure, the White House has turned over legal memos written by the Justice Dept.’s Office of Legal Counsel. But at least 17 other memos, including the most recent, have not been released, on the basis of attorney-client privilege.

“We don’t know what these memoranda say,” said Scott Horton, a human-rights lawyer and professor at Hofstra Law School. “The ones operative now have not yet become public. We know that they go to the really rough stuff.” That includes "the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency," according to a New York Times report on a 2005 OLC memo.

For the Justice Dept. now to claim that an “advice of counsel” defense eliminates even the need to investigate is disingenuous at best. “Typically, in a white-collar case, DOJ is going to look to challenge your assertion that you have a viable ‘advice of counsel’ defense every way possible,” said a prominent criminal-defense attorney, who doesn’t want to be named because he frequently squares off against the Justice Dept. That means a suspect must reveal what he told his lawyer, and what his lawyer told him. In other words, he waives the attorney-client privilege that the government is now invoking.

Even if it turns out a lawyer did sanction criminal conduct, no one gets a pass by saying they relied blindly on that advice. The reliance has to be reasonable. “They would have to subjectively believe what they were doing was not against the law,” said Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Could any U.S. official have reasonably believed torture was legal? “Given the history of the U.S. adherence to the U.N. Torture Convention, it’s a well-established fact that torture is unlawful,” stated Amrit Singh, a lawyer for the ACLU, who has sued the Defense Dept. to obtain documents regarding the treatment of prisoners. “To then plead innocence based on legal advice would eviscerate the whole purpose of these laws.”

The United States has even codified the international ban on torture into federal law, providing for the death penalty when the torture turns fatal. Notably, by March 2005 more than 108 prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan had died in U.S. custody, most of them violently, according to government data provided to the Associated Press.

The United States is also a signatory to the torture prohibitions of the Geneva Conventions. These apply “not only to prisoners of war, but to all prisoners,” said Singh, a position the Supreme Court affirmed in the Hamdan case in 2006. The Geneva Conventions also outlaw “humiliating or degrading treatment.”

Not surprisingly, then, government officials have strongly disagreed about the legality of extreme interrogation techniques, like waterboarding. February 2003 memos from the Judge Advocate General’s Corps to the Pentagon opposed them unequivocally. A report last month by the Justice Dept.’s inspector general described White House meetings where the controversial methods were hotly debated.

“Many people in the government were nervous or upset about implementing the president’s post-9/11 counterterrorism policies,” writes Jack Goldsmith, head of OLC from October 2003 to June 2004, in his book, "The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration." That included some in the CIA “who were reportedly anxious about the special interrogation program for high-value detainees.”

John Rizzo, acting general counsel of the CIA in 2002, confirmed this in Congressional testimony last year. "There had been some concerns that were expressed" by CIA interrogators who feared prosecution, he said.

After Goldsmith took over OLC, he rescinded the now-infamous Aug. 1, 2002 “torture memo” that defined torture as inflicting pain as intense as "the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." The memo refused to rule out such torture for interrogation purposes.

“The message of the Aug. 1, 2002 opinion was clear,” writes Goldsmith. “Violent acts aren’t necessarily torture; if you do torture, you probably have a legal defense; and even if you don’t have a legal defense, the law doesn’t apply if you act under color of presidential authority.”

The CIA had been through this before. Most notoriously in 1975, when the Senate’s Church Committee, headed by Sen. Frank Church, publicly scrutinized and penalized the agency for using illegal methods. So CIA officials desperately wanted what Goldsmith calls the “golden shield” to protect them from future prosecution—which they hoped the torture memos would provide.

It turns out, with good reason. New Yorker writer Jane Mayer, in her new book, "The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals," writes that the International Committee of the Red Cross issued a secret report to the CIA concluding that interrogation techniques it had used on suspected Al Qaeda members, dating back to before August 2002, were “categorically” torture and “constituted war crimes, placing the highest officials in the U.S. government in jeopardy of being prosecuted."

One such case involves the 2002 interrogation of Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah, whom the administration has admitted was subjected to waterboarding. Former Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft acknowledged the problematic timing of the Zubaydah interrogation just last week, when he testified to the Judiciary Committee that Zubaydah was likely mistreated months before such actions were legally sanctioned. According to Mayer, Zubaydah told the Red Cross that he was waterboarded "at least 10 times in a single week and as many as three times a day."

“I think the evidence is quite strong that the torture program began almost immediately after 9-11,” said Ratner of the CCR. “So the memos don’t help them there.”

In fact, if lawyers wrote the memos approving torture techniques at the request of officials who had already used them, the lawyers themselves could be guilty of conspiring to commit war crimes. “If the lawyer’s opinion is seriously wrong," said Horton, "then the lawyer risks being tied into the criminal conduct.”

Indeed, after World War II, the U.S. military tribunal at Nuremberg prosecuted a group of German lawyers who had advised the Nazis on its wartime policies—including the treatment of prisoners. “They were held criminally liable," said Horton, "on account of legal advice they gave.”

Lawyers are still held criminally accountable today. For example, Horton noted, the Justice Dept. is now prosecuting a prominent attorney in Miami, whose clients have included former Vice President Al Gore, for allegedly approving payments of legal fees that derived from illicit drug proceeds.

But legal experts say that authorizing torture rises to a whole other level of criminality. “The prohibition on torture is not just one rule among others, but a legal archetype – a provision which is emblematic of our larger commitment to non-brutality in the legal system,” Jeremy Waldron, professor of law and philosophy at New York University Law School, wrote in the Columbia Law Review.

That’s certainly how it was viewed in the Nuremberg era. As the U.S. Supreme Court wrote in 1944: “There have been, and are now, certain foreign nations with governments … which convict individuals with testimony obtained by police organizations possessed of an unrestrained power to seize persons suspected of crimes against the state, hold them in secret custody, and wring from them confessions by physical or mental torture. So long as the Constitution remains the basic law of our Republic, America will not have that kind of government.”

Today, Mukasey would add one caveat: unless the government’s lawyers say otherwise.

Mukasey on Guantanamo

Matthew Blake — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 18:17:39 GMT

The House Judiciary Committee is, thankfully, taking a recess from its plodding interrogation of AG Michael Mukasey. The most notable moments have occurred when lawmakers asked Mukasey about innocent people now detained at Guantanamo Bay. If Mukasey is losing sleep over providing justice for these people, he’s not showing it. He just told Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) that everybody detained at Guantanamo is an illegal enemy combatant. But what about people that might challenge their detention and be released? Mukasey seems most concerned that those people don’t end up in America, because they don’t have U.S. citizenship rights and would, therefore be illegal immigrants.

Does Mukasey think Guantanamo should be closed? He answered by noting that in World War II the U.S. held thousands of prisoners of war. What about the fact both Barack Obama and John McCain have mentioned closing Guantanamo? Mukasey elusively says "they would want to close it responsibly, and by responsibly…that’s exactly what I mean."

The attorney general seems almost disinterested in the issue. He’s not arguing for Guantanamo. But he won’t even give lawmakers the satisfaction of saying it should be shut down or at least that some of the prisoners should be released. Maybe better questions from committee members this afternoon will lead to more revealing answers.

It's Settled: Vice President Is Part of the Executive Branch!

Matthew Blake — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 17:06:09 GMT

Michael Mukasey, the highest legal official in the land: "the Vice President is obviously one of the close advisers to the president and is within the executive branch."