6 posts tagged “alberto gonzales”
One of the lower profile parts of the US Attorneys scandal which was in the news awhile ago was the role of Pete Domenici, the republican Senator from New Mexico. We all know about how Alberto Gonzales worked as a loyal Bushie to politicize the Justice Department. We know how Karl Rove worked to install croneys there, and at all Federal government agencies, and use them to republican political advantage. What many people are not aware is that one of the incidents which started the whole ball rolling of getting this in the news was when Sen. Domenici directly called a US Attorney, and pressured him to begin a bogus investigation of Democratic politician in the middle of an election.
One would think that this is really, really, a criminal abuse of power. A sitting Senator, directly calls a US Attorney, and puts major pressure on him to use the courts to smear an opponent. No real question right? Well, in this topsy-turvey Bush black is white and white is black world, you'd be wrong...
Ooh, that must sting. For ringing up his state's U.S. attorney at bedtime to interrogate him about whether that high-profile corruption case against a prominent state Democrat will result in an indictment before the election, Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM) has been branded with the dreaded QA: that's right, qualified admonition.
The Senate ethics committee says it left no stone unturned in coming to this conclusion, including interviewing "current and former executive branch officials and attorneys," but that the "Committee finds no substantial evidence to determine that [Domenici] attempted to improperly influence an ongoing investigation." The key word there being "substantial."
The U.S. attorney, David Iglesias, who was of course fired a little more than a month after Domenici's call, testified that the call made him sick. And so the committee says that Domenici "should have known" better -- that such a call would create an "appearance of impropriety." But appearance of impropriety aside, maybe the good senator was just looking for an update. You know, just ringing up the local prosecutor at home to see how things are going.
If you haven't read the NYT report today on the collusion of the Alberto Gonzales Justice Department with the White House and Office of Vice President to legally sanction torture even after the famous Bybee torture memo had been withdrawn, then please take a look.
When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.
But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.
The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.
Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on “combined effects” over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion’s overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be “ashamed” when the world eventually learned of it.
Later that year, as Congress moved toward outlawing “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion, one most lawmakers did not know existed, current and former officials said. The Justice Department document declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard.
So in other words, if Congress tells the Bushies that they can't torture people, they just ignore that. They issue a secret memo that nobody else can see which states that although we can't torture people, whatever the Bushies do isn't "torture." See how that works? It isn't torture because they say it isn't. And by the way, they aren't going to tell you anything about it.
This is the really scary shit. Seriously. This is the stuff of totalitarian regimes. I'm not quick to start throwing around the fascist references, but this really is the kind of stuff that they do. Not good. We're starting to move on from Orwell to Kafka territory here...
P.S. This really brings me a lot of nostagia for the Clinton years, where the republicans were all in a tizzy about Clinton's supposed legalistic defenses against the political lynching they had instigated. "Depends what the definition of is is" was a big punch line. Boy, I wish we were all worrying about that kind of stuff now instead of legalistic defenses of torture and corruption.
What would you do with a guy who spent the main part of his career working to disenfranchise legitimate (Democratic) voters? Well, if you are the Bush administration, you'd put him in charge of the Department of Justice's Civil Rights voting rights section. While there, he would help transform the section's "historic mission to enforce the nation's civil rights laws without regard to politics, to pursuing an agenda which placed the highest priority on the partisan political goals of the political appointees who supervised the section." Do you think Alberto Gonzales was alone in wrecking the DOJ, and turning it into a partisan republican machine? This guy, Hans von Spakovsky (no, I'm not making that name up!), was one of the guys making the Karl Rove nightmare become reality. As this Slate story explains:
Among his numerous accomplishments at the Voting Section at DoJ, von Spakovsky can take credit for approving the Tom DeLay-sponsored midcensus redistricting in Texas—part of which was later deemed by the Supreme Court to have violated the Voting Rights Act. (To do so, von Spakovsky overrode a 73-page memo written by seven voting-rights experts finding that the DeLay scheme violated the Voting Rights Act by reducing minority voting strength in Texas.) Von Spakovsky similarly pushed for approval of Georgia's restrictive voter-ID law, again over the four-to-one objection of staff lawyers who (in a 51-page memo this time) felt the new law would disenfranchise black voters. State and federal courts later found that statute unconstitutional.
So, given that, what would you do with this guy? Well, if you were any sane person, you'd prosecute him... but Bush has instead given him the Medal of Freedom nominated him to the Federal Election Commission. Oh yeah, by the way, he taped a big "Fuck You Democrats!" note on the nomination. Of course the Democrats control the Senate, and are aware of this joker, so you'd think that they would simply tank his nomination. Once again, you'd be wrong. One Democrat on the Senate Rules Committee, Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE), voted to allow this jackass out of committee. So now his nomination is going to go to a vote by the full Senate. Damnit, I'm going to be pretty pissed if this guy gets a six year job on the Federal Election Commission after all he has done to undermine voting rights in this country.
Footnote: If you're interested you can read about von Spakovsky's attempts to intimidate Justice Department employees, stifle their appeals, single-handedly disenfranchise thousands of Arizonans and then give false testimony (later modified in written answers) to the committee about it, you can read Dahlia Lithwick's take at Slate and ThinkProgress' rundown of von Spakovsky's past.
Reading this post, kind of got me thinking...
Of course, by now, we all know that under republican economic policies, the rich get much much richer, and the poor subsidize them. Tired of budget deficits which starve us of needed services? No money for schools, no money for infrastructure maintenance, no money for health care... these are not side-effects, these are primary goals of the republican party. The Bushies have just honed these principles to a fine art. They run a government with people who genuinely want to make the government grind to a halt. "Brownie", Gonzales, Chertoff... these people are not aberrations - incompetence is a goal, not an accident. You see, it is hard to extoll the virtues of privatization of inherently governmental functions when people are happy with how the government runs things. It is much better to fill the government with incompetent hacks, so that you can point to its incompetence when you propose to contract out all those functions to private contractors (who then donate handsomely to your re-election campaign).
Of course on other goal of these guys is to make life even easier for those who sit at the tippy top of the income ladder. Under Bush, marginal tax rates for the very top are the lowest they have been since the 1930's. Though those people are something like 5% of the population, they make up something like 30% of the national wealth. So lowering their taxes even a little bit, punches a huge hole in the budget because they make so much money. The big problem with whacking such a large portion of the Federal budget is that there really isn't anywhere to make up the money. Most of the budget outlays are set aside for the Pentagon war machine, and for paying interest on the national debt. Everything else is small.
Now, something else to consider. Bush tried to complete the dream of the conservatives a few years ago when he tried to shred social security. You see, the right has hated the whole concept of Social Security since it was instituted. It is really hard to understand why. Whether or not it makes any sense, we were faced with the prospect of the destruction of one of the country's most successful social programs. Bush failed spectacularly in his bid, but you often hear pundits and politicians on the right describe the "crisis" in Social Security and Medicare. Of course they pull a fast one when they put Social Security and Medicare together as being in crisis. Social Security is actually in fine shape, is self-financing through payroll taxes, and some very minor tinkering will keep it going essentially forever. Medicare on the other hand has some major costs, which is mainly due to the spiraling costs of medical care in general in this country. Medicare's troubles won't be solved until we get some sort of national healthcare system going.
The second chart shows projected growth in Social Security,* Medicare, and Medicaid spending as a percent of GDP between 2007 and 2017. The second bar shows the cost of Bush tax cuts and related revenue policies in 2017, not including associated interest costs. Growth in "entitlements" is said to be out of control, but the extent of projected growth to 2017 is dwarfed by revenue losses implied by Bush administration policy. Without significant adjustments elsewhere in the budget, benefit costs and revenue shortfalls will have to be reconciled somehow over the next 10 years.
Good riddance jackass... though he should have been led off in handcuffs. I'm just waiting for Bush to give him a medal.
I just got tipped to this by the always excellent Talking Points Memo. All of you political junkies should get a kick out of it!
