The Raven' s Blog, Web Log of Eric Ferguson: Second Half of February Archive

Article on transportation bill was predictive of GOP tantrum
February 29

That headline refers to this article from February 21 about the upcoming vote on overriding Governor Traffic Jam's veto of the transportation bill. Now that we know how the GOP caucus in the House punished it's members who voted for the bill and to override, we can look in this article and see it coming. I recall talking to a friend as I was reading it in that day's print edition, and telling him how interesting I found it that minority leader Marty Seifert was accusing the DFL (Democratic Farmer Labor Party) of putting pressure on legislators and calling it "despicable," yet further in the article a Republican admitting his own caucus was applying intense pressure. He asked my why I cared, and I did wonder for a moment if I was reading too much into it. No, I was right, it presaged a lot.

Now we know that the six GOP representatives (haven't heard what happened to the two senators) lost their leadership positions and have been told they won't get help in the election if they even win party endorsement. What told me something hypocritical was going on were these paragraphs in the linked story:

House Minority Leader Marty Seifert, R-Marshall, said the political pressure on Republicans -- and even some DFLers -- was "despicable." Tactics included threatening to find opponents to run against plan opponents, or to block bills or projects in their districts. The pressure, he said, was "ten times of what it's ever been in the past."
DFLers dismissed the charge and said that Republicans should produce proof. "If they know it, that should be brought up," said Rep. Bernie Lieder, DFL-Crookston, chief House author of the transportation bill (HF2800/SF2521). "I can't believe it's our Democratic legislators."

Seifert is clearly stating that only the DFL is bringing pressure, and just as clearly he's saying it's wrong. He appears to have been lying, judging by these paragraphs a little further along:

Rep. Neil Peterson, R-Bloomington, another of the targeted lawmakers, said Minnesota's transportation system is in such disrepair that the increased funding from the bill is needed, despite concerns about raising taxes.
"It's like what John Wayne said, 'You'll thank me in the morning,' when he slings the body over his saddle and rides away," he said. Pressure has been intense to follow the caucus line and vote against the measure, Peterson said.
Rep. Kathy Tingelstad, R-Andover, said she would likely vote for the bill. "They understand that a user fee is the best way to go," Tingelstad said of voters, but acknowledged many Republican lawmakers disagreed. "No one is talking to me today," she said.

Over one vote? Yes. They weren't kidding about the pressure. Peterson was assistant minority whip, which means he was Republican number three. Seifert fired him. The other six lost their positions as senior minority members of their committees. I suspected when I saw Seifert denouncing DFL pressure that he was actually doing just that himself. Something I've long observed about modern conservatives is that when they make a ridiculous accusation that seems to come from nowhere, they're often describing their own behavior. This is a classic example. Maybe it's why "fringe conservatives" should be considered a redundancy.

Now, understand that gubernatorial vetoes rarely get overridden: "A report by the Humphrey Institute at the University of Minnesota showed that, over the past 70 years, only two governors have made as many vetoes as Pawlenty's 37. And since 1939, only 14 of 447 gubernatorial vetoes have been overridden, with 12 overrides coming against Independence Party Gov. Jesse Ventura, who had almost no party members in the Legislature." Still, it was one vote, and the real problem was Pawlenty and Seifert were arrogant enough to assume they'd win against veto-proof majorities. That shouldn't be a surprise though. They've long shown they don't do compromise. Maybe part of the anger was the fear that this big loss for Pawlenty means the national party will decide he doesn't do vice-president either. The DFL won a veto-proof majority in the Senate in the last special election, and they're just a few seats from having one in the House too. Seifert might be their best friend in achieving that.

I don't know anything about the six who aren't being spoken to anymore except that they voted their heads instead of their party, and that they're in swing districts (given the current state of the GOP, few of their seats are safe). To them I say that if you get kicked out of your party, our party has a bigger tent, and your districts' DFL parties might be looking for candidates.

News on the biggest Bush scandal
February 27

I know that looks like hyperbole. Being the biggest Bush scandal is is tough with so much competition, but bear with me a moment. I'm referring to the missing e-mail scandal, which I've written about extensively before, but in brief there are two permutations: one is e-mail on the White House servers that is missing; the other is the use of RNC accounts by White House staff to get around archiving laws. The reason this not only matters but should be the biggest of all the scandals is that this is where the evidence is to found ---- for everything: lies about Iraq, politicization of the Justice Department, the Abramoff scandal, warrantless wiretapping, everything. They didn't merely fail in their responsibility to observe archiving laws, but appear to have done so as a massive cover up.

The reason I bring this up now is both permutations made the news today, and these stories deserve far more attention than just liberal news sites and the inside pages of mainstream newspapers. The House Oversight Committee learned from the former senior official White House Chief Information Officer, Steven McDevitt, that the e-mail archiving system was "primitive." They inherited a functioning system from the Clinton administration but, perhaps applying the same "anything Clinton did must be wrong" attitude they applied to everything else, they replaced it with essentially nothing. It could be just stupidity if it wasn't for the use of RNC domains for official communications, which violates the archiving laws because the RNC servers aren't under government control, as was amply demonstrated today. The RNC gave the Oversight Committee a metaphorical up-yours when it said it won't even try to recover lost e-mail, even though it was attempting to restore mail from 2001-2003. My guess is that they thought they had wiped out everything, but didn't actually know how e-mail works. It's tough to wipe it from every PC, every mail server, every backup server, and every tape backup, especially when hosting companies go to great pains to backup everything even if an organization like the RNC is foolish enough not to make its own backups. Probably they promised to try to restore them assuming they couldn't and found, oops, they found the e-mail after all, with everything that's embarrassing, venal, and illegal.

Back when I wrote about a the Deborah Jeane Palfrey scandal which caught Randall Tobias and David Vitter, I used "capone" as a verb, referring to Al Capone, the gangster who got convicted only for tax evasion. It means getting someone very crooked on a relatively minor charge. I ask the Congress to capone the White House and RNC over the missing e-mail. Even if they can't get the evidence hidden in the e-mail, they can probably prove they intended to evade archiving laws and destroyed/hid evidence being sought in multiple investigations, and that's enough to impeach if not put some crooks in jail.

When it turned around
February 24

If there comes a time when we can refer to congressional Democrats as being a group that fights back against the Republicans and their fake president whole stole his way into office and out of the hearts of Americans, we can look at now as the point where that time started. I'm referring to the fight over the Protect America Act and legal immunity for the telecom companies. Since I wrote about this before, the Republicans have picked up the fearmongering nad obstruction, such as refusing to show up for meetings to reconcile House and Senate versions of the bill. The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) has put out a video copying promos for 24 where they actually take pride in walking out of the House chambers, but somehow they don't mention that Bush and the Republicans blocked an extension of this law they claim is so vital. At least lately, such as in the video, they've started admitting telecom immunity is really the issue here. Remember that when they say they don't want trial lawyers suing the telecom companies, they really mean they don't want you suing telecom companies. They don't mention that they can still get telecom companies to participate in surveillance just by presenting warrants. Of course, with warrants, there's a record of who was spied upon. Can't have that, or maybe we'll find out they were spying on political opponents, not just terrorist suspects. I don't know that of course, but I can't conceive of another reason to hide.

So far, House Democrats are standing stronger than they've stood before, and they put their Senate colleagues to shame. If they really don't back down, it's a political earthquake.

"You don't care about me."
16 year old Guantanamo detainee Omar Khadr, when he realized the Canadian agent he thought had come to take him out of Hell and home to Canada was just another interrogator.

"Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose, and you allow him to make war at his pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after having given him so much as you propose."
Abraham Lincoln in 1848, during the Mexican War, expressing why allowing a president sole discretion to decide when to invade another country is dangerous to the liberty of his own country.

"The OPR [the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility]also has been far behind in producing required annual public reports summarizing its activities. Last month, it released its report covering fiscal year 2005. That means many investigations undertaken during the tenure of former Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales remain under wraps."
LA Times reporter Richard B. Schmit, in an article written in July 2008, on how the OPR is hiding the results of investigations --- assuming they actually are investigating.

"Mr. Chairman, I think the number's actually higher than that now. Last time I checked it was 108, and the total number that were declared homicides by the military services, or by the CIA, or others doing investigations, CID, and so forth � was 25, 26, 27."
Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, on the number of detainees killed in Bush's prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan, and locations still secret.

"Democracy works, but sometimes churns slowly. Time is short. The 2008 election is critical for the planet. If Americans turn out to pasture the most brontosaurian congressmen, if Washington adapts to address climate change, our children and grandchildren can still hold great expectations."
James Hansen, on the 20th anniversary of his testimony before Congress where he informed them global warming was now certain, and how little time remains to prevent catastrophes.

"Who will chair the commission investigating the secrets of warrantless spying, years from today? Will it be a young senator in this body today? Will it be someone not yet elected? What will that senator say when he or she comes to our actions, reads in the records how we let outrage after outrage after outrage slide, with nothing more than a promise to stop the next one? I imagine that senator will ask of us, 'Why didn't they do anything? Why didn't they fight back? In June 2008, when no one could doubt anymore what the administration was doing---why did they sit on their hands?'"
Sen. Chris Dodd, in his speech on the Senate floor opposing the FISA bill and retroactive immunity.

"We had the worst natural disaster in the history of this country Katrina, and there wasn't a drop of oil spilled."
Sen. Norm Coleman, proposing more offshore oil drilling. There was actually enough oil spilled to match the Exxon Valdez. Whether Coleman is lying, or ignorantly repeating Republican talking points, is unknown.

"I'll go back to square one on this: We squandered a lot of gifts. Human beings were given a lot of great gifts. We were given the ability to reason, this extra-large brain, walking erect, having binocular vision and the opposable thumb, and all of these things, and we had such promise, but we squandered it on goods and superstition. We gave ourselves over to the high priests and the traders, and they are the ones we allow to control us."
George Carlin, in an interview with Salon, on how he became a disappointed idealist.

"To date, seven long years after we scooped up our first detainees in Afghanistan, not a single one of them has faced evidence, his accusers, or anything remotely resembling a legal court hearing on his guilt or innocence."
Joseph Galloway, military correspondent for McClatchy, on how responsibility for war crimes goes right to the top, despite efforts to confine consequences to the bottom, in light of the recent McClatchy series on detainees.

"As I was leaving the UN food distribution center in Damascus, Layla Atiya, the widow with seven children, touched my arm. 'Can you tell me one thing?,' she pleaded. 'Why did America do this to us? What did we do to America to make her hate us so?'"
Medea Benjamin, cofounder of Code Pink, writing about her visit to Iraqi refugee camps.

"So we're sitting here and, for example, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who said that he wanted to be a martyr on 9/11, make no mistake about it --- he said that he just couldn't get a visa --- launched into a description of what kind of psychotropic drugs he's taking here at the prison camp, or being given here at the prison camp. And the media monitors hit the white noise button. We didn't get to hear what exactly he's being given and we didn't exactly hear his explanation about why he's on medication.

And one of the escorts here explained that this was HIPAA protection, the Health and Information Protection Act on a place where the Bush Administration says the Constitution doesn't apply."
Miami Herald reporter Carol Rosenberg, on the restrictions placed on the press and mistreatment of detainees.

"If the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court was really concerned about fairness, it could have simply asked the Florida Supreme Court to devise a universal standard, appoint a judge to enforce it, and then extend the state's meaningless 'safe harbor' deadline to make it possible to complete the recount. It did not do so because it was not interested in counting the votes. It wanted George W. Bush to win."
Gary Kamiya, Salon writer at large, in a review of the HBO's "Recount", on how the Supreme Court stole the election for Bush.

"Convicting and imprisoning Paul Minor on corruption charges could be a powerful way to curtail contributions to the local Democratic Party."
U.S. House Judiciary Committee report on political prosecutions by the Bush DOJ. Minor was a vital contributor to the Mississippi Democratic Party.

"Where does the madness end? Where do words lose their meaning? Al-Qa'ida is not being defeated. Hizbollah has just won a domestic war in Lebanon, as total as Hamas's war in Gaza. Afghanistan and Iraq and Lebanon and Gaza are hell disasters � I need no apology to quote Churchill's description of 1948 Palestine yet again � and this foolish, stupid, vicious man is lying to the world yet again."
Robert Fisk, columnist and resident of Lebanon, responding to remarks by Bush that show he hasn't the least understanding of the region he's mucking up.

"The short version: Republicans in Congress, McCain included, have slashed the United States budget for wind energy since Carter was president, which is why McCain has to speak at a Danish turbine manufacturer instead of an American one."
Mother Jones reporter/blogger Jonathan Stein, noting that McCain made his climate change speech in a Danish wind turbine factory after repeatedly cutting funding for wind development here.

"We get off on warfare."
Rev. Rod Parsley, McCain's spiritual advisor, who calls for mass murder, in a snippet of a sermon in a video by Mother Jones and Brave New Films. That line of Christian charity comes about 1:25 into the video.

Quotes Archives