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.

"To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."
US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who successfully prosecuted Nazis at Nuremberg for the crime of aggressive war, thereby establishing the precedent that starting a war is, in and of itself, a war crime.

"A refusal to look back inevitably means moving forward in blindness."
Philip Alston, the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, on the resistance of the Obama administration to investigating human rights abuses by the Bush administration.

"Why is it that strong women are so often called bullies and ballbreakers, while strong, opinionated men are often called, simply, Justice Scalia."
Salon editor Joan Walsh, on the bigoted attacks on Sonia Sotomayor already on the day of her announcement.

"In Minnesota, Secretary of State Mark Ritchie has made military ballot protection a key priority of his Department. The result is that twice as many military ballots are actually cast, and half as many are rejected, as the national average in 2006."
The National Defense Committee, in an article on their web site praising Minnesota's efforts to encourage absentee voting by military personnel stationed overseas.

"We're seeing massive resistance to the cramdown proposal. That's a proposal to allow bankruptcy judges to reschedule a mortgage on a primary residence. They're fighting this thing tooth and nail. Now the fact is, the people fighting it are the last people who should get the ear of anyone. And it goes to show me they haven't really learned any lessons. A lot of these folks--large banks, Wall Street firms--they have the attitude that "Heads I win, tails you lose." No matter what happens, we always get ours."
Rep. Keith Ellison, on how the bailed out banks are fighting against bankruptcy reform.

''Scores of banks failed in the Great Depression as a result of unsound banking practices, and their failure only deepened the crisis,. Glass-Steagall was intended to protect our financial system by insulating commercial banking from other forms of risk. It was one of several stabilizers designed to keep a similar tragedy from recurring. Now Congress is about to repeal that economic stabilizer without putting any comparable safeguard in its place.''
The late --- and correct --- Paul Wellstone, expressing opposition to repealing the law that prevented financial corporations from entering other types of financial business, like preventing commercial banks from becoming investment banks. This repeal was a large part of making the (collapsing) conglomerates possible.

"The facts revealed reflect the way the U.S. government has consistently tried to cover up the truth of Binyam Mohamed's torture. He was being told he would never leave Guant�namo Bay unless he promised never to discuss his torture, and never sue either the Americans or the British to force disclosure of his mistreatment."
Reprieve Director Clive Stafford Smith, speaking about a British court's ruling that the Bush administration tried to get Mohamed to plead guilty to something, anything, and keep quiet about his treatment as a condition of release.

"We spend hours and hours and hours arguing over $10 million amendments on the floor of the Senate, but there has been no discussion about who has been receiving this $3 trillion."
Sen. Bernie Sanders. I-VT, on the mostly unreported spending by the Federal Reserve to prop up the big financial corporations.

"The AIG scandal is significant and has resonated so powerfully because it is a microscope that enables the public to see what and who has wreaked the destruction that threatens their security and future and, most important of all, to realize that these practices haven't ended and the perpetrators haven't been punished. The opposite is true: those who caused the crisis continue to exert control over what happens and continue to have huge amounts of public money transferred in order to enrich them."
Glenn Greenwald, explaining why the AIG bonus scandal is both symbolic and important.

"Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly."
Attorney General John Ashcroft, during a principals meeting about torture methods.

"There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age.

A review of the literature suggests that, to the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists' thinking about the most important forces shaping Earth's climate on human time scales." Thomas Peterson of the National Climatic Data Center, who surveyed scientific research from 1965-1979 and showed that contrary to what climate change deniers keep asserting, there was no consensus on global cooling. That means the point that climate scientists must be wrong now because they were wrong then is itself based on a false assumption.

"We do not know where George Will is getting his information, but our data shows that on February 15, 1979, global sea ice area was 16.79 million sq. km and on February 15, 2009, global sea ice area was 15.45 million sq. km. Therefore, global sea ice levels are 1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979. This decrease in sea ice area is roughly equal to the area of Texas, California, and Oklahoma combined.

It is disturbing that the Washington Post would publish such information without first checking the facts."
statement on the web site of University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, responding to an assertion by global warming denier George Will that they said sea ice area is the same as 1979.

"It has often and confidently been asserted, that man's origin can never be known. But ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science."
Charles Darwin, whose 200th birthday is coming up on February 12.

"The thing I like most is it says you can get these complex traits evolving by a combination of unlikely events. That's just what creationists say can't happen."
evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, commenting on an experiment that was able to observe a mutation that changed one species into another.

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