Completely Unnecessary

Wow. I did not see that coming.

An internal report at the Justice Dept. concluded that aids to former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales violated federal law by using partisan criteria in the hiring of non-partisan positions.

Gonzales, of course, said he knew nothing about the conduct of his subordinates. Then again, he didn’t ever manage to remember anything about anything, despite frequent trips to the Hill for questioning.

Taking the brunt of the blame is Monica Goodling, one of Gonzales’ top aides. She denied people jobs for a host of reasons: having Democrat wives; rumors of possible lesbianism, Internet searches returning the words “abortion,” “homosexual,” “guns,” or “Florida re-count”.

Goodling last made news testifying in May 2007 on the firing of US Attorneys. She was granted immunity in that investigation in return for her testimony before the Judiciary Committee, but it appears she may be charged in this case. Today’s DOJ report cited her (and others’) activity as patently illegal. The man who would have to prosecute her, however, is Attorney General Michael Mukasey, also a Bush appointee.

Perhaps to encourage Mukasey, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers is considering perjury charges against Gonzales, Goodling and Kyle Sampson, Gonzales’ former chief of staff who fell on his sword for his boss during the US Attorney scandal.

Reflecting on this absurd level of corruption, I think it’s a good time to remember that there are less than 100 days til the election. Are you registered?

Vaguely Related

• Pat Fitzgerald - Undistinguished
• Stroger, the County Tax and the Fine

These stories are a couple of days old at this point, but I couldn’t stop gritting my teeth long enough to post about them.

Cook County Democrats - led by their torpid President Todd Stroger - struck down a bill to repeal the 1% tax that gives Chicago the highest sales tax in the US.

All the Republicans voted to repeal the tax, joined by - we can all do this together right? - Chicago Democrats Forrest Claypool and Mike Quigley.

Stroger and co. accused Tony Peracia (R), who proposed the repeal and was Stroger’s 2006 opponent, of political machinations to help his campaign for State’s Attorney in November.

And Stroger knows corruption when he sees it! His 2006 campaign just got fined $27,000 for incomplete and missing reports on contributions of more than $500.

But there are likely to be more fines since they didn’t follow the rules in other ways, as well. Here’s a quote that makes me laugh:

Stroger spokesman Eugene Mullins also said he was working to better reflect that a $441,000 certificate of deposit obtained by the 8th Ward Democratic Organization fund, of which Mullins is treasurer, was used as collateral for a $500,000 loan that Stroger’s campaign received shortly before the 2006 election.

One commenter on one of the stories noted that a $27,000 one-time tax would probably be requested some time soon. I say, one time! Better make it permanent. I mean, the 8th Ward only has so much money…

As much as I loathe and disagree with nearly every decision President Bush has made, at least his Administration went in with a plan. All Stroger plans to do is absorb taxpayers money and hand out jobs to cronies. Give me grand (horrible) plans any day over sponge-like, fatuous greed.

Links:
Cook County Board rejects sales tax increase repeal [Chicago Tribune]
Cook County does it again [Chicago Tribune]
Todd Stroger campaign hit with nearly $27,000 state fine [Chicago Tribune]

Vaguely Related

• The Stroger is Dead; Long Live the Stroger
• Stroger at the City Club of Chicago

Jesus. That’s about all one can say about this past Friday’s election in Zimbabwe.

With Tsvangirai gone and the UN bravely refusing to do anything (the august body was even unable to declare a run-off with one candidate ‘illegitimate’).

Mugabe has declared victory and proclaimed ‘record turnouts’, though it appear (unsurprisingly) that the Zimbabweans that voted did so out of fear. Despite the increasing violence and terror waged against those supporting the opposition, it seems as though numerous voters spoilt their ballots or voted for Tfo. Some even boycotted the poll, despite Mugabe’s thugs checking for the tell-tale ‘I voted’ red ink on people’s fingers.

But, worry not, Mugabe is going to be magnamouous in his ‘victory’ - I suppose he can afford to be, having terrorized his opponent and his people.

Bush is going to put in tougher sanctions, but whether this will work or not is debatable. One of Mugabe’s ploys in the past has been to claim that Western sanctions on his government is what has driven the insane inflation in the country. But at least he’s doing something.

After the fact, of course. God forbid we act when it might be truly effective - say, before or during the intimidating beatings, murders and incarcerations. Say, before Mugabe could claim victory in an election.

Perhaps if we meddled in the right place for once we wouldn’t have to call it ‘meddling’.

Vaguely Related

• Zimbabwe: Mugabe Retaliates in Plain Sight
• Zimbabwe: Mugabe in Plain Sight II

…for not posting.

I mean, it does. I know that more than one of you check this blog regularly for new and (ahem) insightful content.

But I can’t control your poor life choices.

So I’ve been tempted this week to blog about the lovely and soul-inspiring weddings of biddies - because obviously that’s awesome.

I think if you can’t be happy for 80+-year-old women getting married you don’t really understand what life is about. There’s fundamental level at which you don’t understand happiness.

[Ed. note - Um, Firefox 3, vaguely appealing though it is, does not seem to have incorporated spellcheck in a timely manner. This is absolutely disastrous for your editor, who can't spell her way out of a very small shoebox.] [Oh thank crap, it kicked back in; I had spelled disastrous wrong. I'm more of a big picture kind of girl.]

Anyway, I’ve been sick and also working/marking/watching Angel, so it’s really a grab bag of reasons why I’ve lacked the wherewithal to fulfill the blogging duties that - I will remind you - come with little to no financial reward.

I had something to say. I think it was this:

I know the Administration only has a short number of months (yay!) left in office, but this doesn’t mean that they should drive down their game.

It will potentially frighten several of you to learn that my father is a Republican. Not of the truly alarming variety - he just believes in lower taxes, etc, etc. (whereas I believe in stealing from the rich, etc., etc.).

Anyway, he sends me an article last week in which George Will (displaying the youngest picture GenXers have ever seen of George Will) is all about drilling in ANWAR and everywhere offshore because the Chinese are already doing it.

Eh, they’re not.

But, if the story gets repeated enough times, it looks like good enough impetus for Bush to advocate drilling off all our coastlines a few days later. The NYT, however, is not so impressed with that, considering it won’t lower gas prices until 2030.

But hey - talking points trotted out in the press ten days before they become ‘policy’ is just typical. Could these guys try anymore? I mean, where are those bold policy suggestions of yore? Isn’t there a country we should think about invading?

Oh, or is it just that we’ve gotten lazy, considering the oil contracts with one that we’ve already invaded?

Personally, I’m happier thinking about old ladies getting married.

Congrats to them and everyone taking the plunge (especially to Elissa and Keith, who I love with all my heart… even though they’re not gay. It’s not, like, a definite criteria for my support of your union).

Vaguely Related

• Justice Kennedy Back In Fine Form
• Zimbabwe Election Redux

I know I’m behind the times; on the upside, I know far more about Australian irrigation, catchment levels and the Murray-Darling scheme than I’d ever hoped to learn.

Anyway, onto Justice Kennedy, who reasserted himself as my favorite Supreme Court justice after a lengthly period on my shit list. Writing the Opinion (.pdf) in Boumediene v. Bush (the case that gave Gitmo detainees their rights back) he said:

Although the United States has maintained complete and uninterrupted control of Guantanamo for over 100 years, the Government’s view is that the Constitution has no effect there, at least as to noncitizens, because the United States disclaimed formal sovereignty in its 1903 lease with Cuba. The Nation’s basic charter cannot be contracted away like this. The Constitution grants Congress and the President the power to acquire, dispose of, and govern territory, not the power to decide when and where its terms apply. To hold that the political branches may switch the Constitution on or off at will would lead to a regime in which they, not this Court, say “what the law is.”

I feel that ‘Snap!’ doesn’t properly represent the the six years of illegality under which these detainees have been held.

Kennedy first won his way into my heart via his Opinion in 1993’s Church of the Lukumi Babalu-Aye v. City of Hialeah:

Our review confirms that the laws in question were enacted by officials who did not understand, failed to perceive, or chose to ignore the fact that their official actions violated the Nation’s essential commitment to religious freedom… No one suggests, and on this record it cannot be maintained, that city officials had in mind [as the target of their ordinances] a religion other than Santería.

I might not always agree with him, but the man does not mince words, which I respect more than most things. The Hialeah ruling is like series of uppercuts to the judge below him - awesome.

Vaguely Related

• Democrats for President: Exhibits
• Blogging Means Never Having To Say You’re Sorry

Turns out that last October’s comments by then-Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews about Africans not ’settling and adjusting’ were contrary to departmental advice.

He was told that socio-economic problems (unsurprisingly) played more of a role than ethnicity in criminal behaviour.

Yet after the beating death of Liep Gony, an Australian citizen of Sudanese birth, Andrews saw fit to say:

I have been concerned that some groups don’t seem to be settling and adjusting into the Australian way of life as quickly as we would hope and therefore it makes sense to put the extra money in to provide extra resources, but also to slow down the rate of intake from countries such as Sudan. (Age, 2 Oct.: 2)

Ironically, Andrew’s comments came on the same day that it ‘emerged that Mr Gony’s alleged attackers were not African’ - as the Age persists in phrasing it. His alleged murderers were, in fact, white and Australian-born.

In a paper I just wrote on the Gony affair, I argued that media framing set the stage for Andrews’ comments by portraying Gony’s death as part of a continuing ‘refugee crisis’ in Australia.

The reporting was strikingly similar to that of other ‘crises’, such as the Tampa and ‘Children Overboard‘. In 2001, the Howard Government used these incidents to encourage ethnic and immigration tensions for political purposes and was reelected.

In the paper, I said:

While this paper does not imply that Andrews had cynical motivations for his comments, if the Minister had been looking for a Tampa-esque moment, he could be excused for believing the time was ripe.

Now that we know that Andrews specifically acted against departmental advice, it seems less likely that his comments were innocent in nature.

Papers at the time noted that Andrews’ explanation above did not match with the rationale his department had previously given for cuts in the intake of African refugees, and this seems like the final nail in the coffin.

Here were are again, six months after an election, finding out damning information about another of these pre-election, race-baiting events.

Andrews was specifically told that ethnicity was not the problem, but he went ahead and made statements that whipped up ethnic tensions in Noble Park - to the tune of a beaten Sudanese refugee on the 10th and a bashed police officer on the 11th.

Thank god it wasn’t to the tune of another term in power.

Race row we didn’t have to have [The Age]

Vaguely Related

• Level of Interest
• Quentin Bryce: Gender-Tagging the New Governor-General

What a sad state of affairs when it’s preferable to be imprisoned in the jail of a desperate dictator than fall into the hands of the United States:

The legal interpretation, outlined in recent letters, sheds new light on the still-secret rules for interrogations by the Central Intelligence Agency. It shows that the administration is arguing that the boundaries for interrogations should be subject to some latitude, even under an executive order issued last summer that President Bush said meant that the C.I.A. would comply with international strictures against harsh treatment of detainees.

No word on whether ‘latitude’ means going back using the definition that ‘nothing short of the pain associated with organ failure constituted illegal torture.’

Ah, the halcyon days of 2002-2004.

Vaguely Related

• You there, quit it.
• The Cheney Impeachment Response

I’m not really an advocate of military intervention, but maybe we could be speaking up a bit more than letting one of our envoys do the heavy lifting…

Mugabe’s party/police raided opposition headquarters:

Armed police officers raided the headquarters of Zimbabwe’s main opposition party in Harare, the capital, on Friday, arresting hundreds of people, a spokesman for the party said.
…
“These armed police have taken hundreds of people that were now staying at the party headquarters running away from the different parts of Zimbabwe, where the regime has been unleashing brutal violence,” Mr. Mlilo said in a statement.

In a later statement, the MDC said the number arrested had risen to 300 people, including all staff members.

The police searched for documents used by the opposition to support its claim it won the presidential election, and had also taken away computers, Mr. Mlilo said.

Reuters has a newer article, but some of the info seems older.

Supposedly, we’ll have results this weekend, and the nine constituencies that have recounted have remained the same.

The things we get in a tither about versus the things we ignore absolutely does my head in…

Links:
Opposition ‘Clear Victor’ in Zimbabwe, U.S. Says [NYT]
In Zimbabwe Raid, Hundreds in Opposition Party Detained [NYT]
Zimbabwe Riot Police Stage Raid [Reuters at NYT]

Vaguely Related

• Zimbabwe Election Redux
• Zimbabwe: Mugabe Retaliates in Plain Sight

This brings us to the article on politicians as TV comedians, which I think is actually the more depressing one:

None of the presidential candidates want to be seen as snooty or overeducated, which must be why on Monday all three provided taped greetings to wrestling fans watching “WWE Raw” on the USA network.

I’m going to leave the shamefulness of this statement. I’ll note only how pathetic it is that that around the world, education is seen as the thing that can lift people up, change their lives - and in the US its seen as effete and something to be hidden. As if there is somehow a thing as ‘too educated’ - call me elitist (though you might be racist if you do), but that is the single saddest comment anyone can make about the United States.

The article goes on to detail the alarmingly large number of TV appearances by the candidates. There is something disturbing about the embedded (and by this I actually mean ‘in bed’)-ness of the candidates, their wives and surrogates with the news media.

For instance, Laura Bush is serving as co-host on the ‘Today’ show. Hard news it’s not, but there’s still something alarming about the media serving as an uncritical platform (literally) for politicians. How will NBC Nightly News critique the husband of the woman who hosted their morning show? Oh wait, he’s already on Deal or No Deal.

Sure there is concern about politicians using the airwaves as cheap publicity stunts. The cheapening of our politics (and politicians), however, is only one aspect of this problem.

As this trend becomes more entrenched, the networks will be compelled to deliver these kind of political celebrity moments more and more. The problem becomes not if Bush wants to show off on Deal or No Deal, but if NBC needs to have Bush on the show. What kinds of efforts will the networks have to make to attract these guests?

Media theory around sources suggests (unsurprisingly) that one of the problems inherent in relying on government for media sourcing is that eventually the media becomes dependent on the government. They become unlikely to bite the hand that feeds them because they need access for their stories.

Control of access is incredibly powerful, which we saw this weekend in the NYT’s story about military analysts. These men admitted that they sometimes told military falsehoods to keep their Pentagon contacts happy.

If the media become dependent on government and politicians for both their news and entertainment sources, it further removes the media’s ability to be an independent watchdog.

Which brings me to a question: how do we feel about satire? The Daily Show and Colbert Report seem to be able to critique politicians in ways available to few other media outlets. The two shows have also been using politicians as guests for a number of years. A) Do you think their success is driving the trend in other media outlets? and B) Could the critical distance of these shows make them immune from the effects?

Please discuss in groups for about ten minutes, and then we’ll report back.

Vaguely Related

• Media Refuses to Do Its Job in Pennsylvania
• General Election Update: Casting Sleazy McCain Aspersions

What’s it’s going to take in Zimbabwe? South Africa (ANC) is finally calling for the release of election results, and Ban Ki-moon is ‘deeply concerned’ (which, by the way, NYT is calling ’strong talk’), but will any MDC (opposition) voters be around to see them?

A 15-year-old girl was abducted and beaten because Zanu-PF (Mugabe’s party) supporters suspected that her mother had voted for the MDC. When her mother went to look for her, she, too, was beaten.

[Attacked voters] are from diverse parts of rural Zimbabwe and they are a fraction of the many hundreds of people the opposition says have been assaulted as gangs of armed Zanu-PF supporters under military leadership move through the countryside, using polling station returns to identify villages where support for the opposition was strong.
…
“They said it was to teach us how to vote,” said Linus, 58. “They said: ‘It’s your own fault, voting for the opposition. That’s why we are doing all these things to you. When we have the run-off, you will know how to vote’.”

Plain sight. It really doesn’t get more audacious than this.

Few people have been killed in the beatings. It would appear that Zanu-PF has learned that deaths attract attention.

I doubt it’ll take long to move to larger-scale killings though - we’re not paying attention to terrible beatings, so why not?

Links:
Mugabe’s men take their revenge [the Age - from the Guardian]
Strong Talk About Zimbabwe at the U.N. [NYT]
South Africa Shifts on Zimbabwe, Calls For Result [Reuters]

Vaguely Related

• Zimbabwe Election Redux
• Mugabe Possibly Defeated in Zimbabwe Election