The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof, for six years…

There’s a push from right-wingers to repeal the 17th, along with some other amendments as well, not to mention some new amendments they want added. Curious, as the right wing has also been busy of late bashing Obama, Kagan, and Thurgood Marshall for saying that the Constitution, when written, was an “imperfect document.” Strange that they wish to tinker so with perfection.

In any case, I was curious as to why they 17th was a sore point with them. What’s wrong with the people electing senators directly? Well, according to the groups who want this, if the people elect senators directly, that means that the individual has less power. The only way to empower the individual is to take away their right to vote for a senator and put it into the hands of the state legislature. That makes sens–wait, huh? What?

Well, they do seem to have a point: they say that since public elections are driven by money, that means that senators don’t really listen to individuals from their state, and instead give their full time and attention to corporations who fund their elections. OK, fair enough, as far as it goes–but I don’t really see it as being that big a difference.

First, you have the illusion of a state legislator or a congressman paying more attention to you simply because they have smaller constituencies and they must be elected more often. But do they really pay any more attention to you than they do their financial backers, or does it just seem that way?

Second, the link between you and your senator through your legislator would still be removed. Your local legislators would have their own agendas, no doubt, and if they truly controlled the senators, they would be just as wont to abuse the power as anyone else. Not to mention that there would still be plenty of chances for others to get in the way. And that leads to the third objection to the change: money follows power. Instead of dealing out the money men, the money men would simply move to sway state legislators instead of senators directly, and you’d be back at square one.

No, there’s only one way to attack corruption of this kind, and that’s to directly address the issue of money and elections. Two things need to be changed–more descriptively, two obscenities must be erased from the law books. First, the concept that a corporation is an individual and has the same rights as one. The individual rights of a corporation rest in the rights of the people who make it up; the corporation itself is a legal fiction to serve an economic purpose. Giving corporations personhood creates super-powerful “individuals” whose psychological makeup is, by nature, that of a sociopath. The fact that they control large amounts of money and thus power in our government is at the heart of what is what is most wrong with us today.

The second obscenity is the concept that money equals free speech. No it doesn’t. If money equals free speech, then we live in a plutocracy. And that’s the current legal status. If money is free speech, then anyone who makes more money instantly has more power, which goes against the very idea of a republic which practices the principles of democracy:

Republic: a state in which supreme power is held by the people and their elected representatives, and which has an elected or nominated president rather than a monarch.

In theory, a republic could be consistent with a plutocracy, but that’s not what we were brought up to believe. Maybe democracy has always been a fiction to placate us, but if we’re even going to pretend, then we must hold that the idea of money being equal to speech is poison to what we believe in.

What we need to do is to change politics in two ways, and they have to be doozies. The first is to limit the way elections are funded. The only money that should be allowed in an election must come from individual citizens and nowhere else. And each citizen may contribute no more than $20 to any one election (including their own–no personal fortunes) or specific issue. Why $20? Because more than that and the money of one individual starts to outweigh the money of others who cannot afford it. Either that, or do away with contributions altogether and make elections funded completely by the federal government. Whichever the case, the idea is to prevent large donations from making their way to politicians and thus corrupting the system.

The second way is the real game changer: political advertisements. This is where “speech” really comes into it. And this may require an amendment to that holiest of amendments, the First Amendment itself. Like it or not, political advertising sways elections, and those advertisements are bought with money. It must be made so that public advertisements which impact elections, either on issues or candidates, must be regulated. Not forbidden, but limited to those funded by the people directly. Each advertisement can only be funded by individuals giving no more than $20 each. Remember above, I mentioned the $20 limit applying not just to candidates but to issues as well; this is what I was talking about.

What’s more, the ads can only be paid for by groups that specifically assemble for the purpose of representing such issues or candidates; you can’t have unions or organizations assembled for any other purpose doing it, else you have people who gave money for something else suddenly finding their money spent on something they disagree with.

Again, either this, or nothing–no ads at all, and we assert the right to use the public airwaves, allowing politicians to make speeches, give presentations, and have debates for specified blocks of time. This does not obliterate free speech–in fact, many countries do it. In Japan, where I live, that’s how it’s done–no campaign commercials. Other countries limit advertising as well. It may go against the grain of free and unfettered speech, but it is the only way to remove the worst of poisons from the system.

Is this a curtailing of free speech? In a way, yes–but in a very fundamental way, no. Because free speech is not supposed to be about rich people having more say or a louder say than anyone else–it is supposed to be about all people having the right to say whatever they want, whenever or wherever they want. But the central principle of that is that everyone is equal, and money playing a part destroys that essential equality. The system I describe above would not prevent anyone from speaking freely–it would only prevent a few from drowning out the rest simply because they have more money than others.

We’ll never get around money buying power. Rich people will still own and control newspapers and media networks, and there are other ways to use money to influence the people as well. But just because money will always have a say doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do our damnedest to limit what influence it does have.

Wow. Talk about slick. When Republicans slapped Barton’s wrist for saying aloud what they all felt, Boehner and the GOP leadership slipped in some pretty telling language. To quote a commenter from the previous post, “Behold”:

“The oil spill in the Gulf is this nation’s largest natural disaster and stopping the leak and cleaning up the region is our top priority,” said the leaders. “Congressman Barton’s statements this morning were wrong. BP itself has acknowledged that responsibility for the economic damages lies with them and has offered an initial pledge of $20 billion dollars for that purpose.”

First, note that BP is painted as a responsible business: they are taking “responsibility” and “offered” and “pledged” to pay for economic damages. Nothing about Obama making them do this–no, it’s as if BP always intended to pay this much, and would naturally have done it without any outside pressure at all.

But look closer, and you’ll see something slicker than snot: the oil spill was a “natural disaster.” Got that? BP is not responsible for the disaster; no, they “acknowledged that responsibility for the economic damages lies with them,” a significant difference in wording.

In a few short sentences, Boehner managed to (1) distance himself from Barton’s gaffe, (2) make it seem like he is attacking BP by castigating a party member for apologizing to them, therefore gaining props from the public, (3) take credit for trying to stop the leak, saying it was “our” top priority, (4) remove all credit from Obama for getting BP to pay when clearly BP was doing all it could to avoid that, (5) make BP seem like a beneficent good guy, a responsible business which pledged and offered and took responsibility when in fact nothing of the sort is true, and (6) remove all feeling of actual responsibility from BP by qualifying the nature of their responsibility (economic, not actual; volunteered, not legal or actual) and painting the spill as an act of god, a “natural disaster,” as if BP wasn’t to blame and was instead somehow the victim of it all.

That’s pretty breathtaking.

So much for high-level Republicans “not taking BP’s side” in this.

Imagine this scenario: you work at a non-union company, doesn’t matter which one or what you do, except that you are low in the ranks. There is someone who manages the security department, who understands the technical aspects of security really well, whereas you don’t know much about it at all. This person is high-ranking, very well-off, and has the resources of his entire department at his disposal. Additionally, this person is in tight with upper management, and is even allowed to write company policy.

Now, it appears that some people who work for the company have been stealing this person’s lunch from a refrigerator at work. Because of certain laws concerning workplace surveillance, video cameras were not an option to catch the perpetrators. Instead, the security guy claims to have acquired forensic evidence from the refrigerator and the trash, and claims that it points to dozens of people at the company–including you–as having stolen his lunches.

In retaliation, he demands that you and every other offender he identified pay the equivalent of the cost of lunch for him at a nice restaurant every day for two months–quite a hefty sum–on the accusation that you may have taken his lunch one day. If you don’t, then he will file a formal complaint against you, using the forensic evidence he claims to have collected. If the claim is successful, you will be fined, fired from your job, and have a stain on your employment record that will follow you for some time.

You may defend yourself, but you will have to hire experts in security and other people to help you make your defense, without which you don’t stand a chance–but they will cost a great deal more than paying the demanded “settlement.” And even with the hired team, you still might lose the challenge and pay the penalties anyway, in addition to the cost of the defense.

Disregarding the unlikelihood of this scenario, what would your assessment be? Is the manager abusing his power and influence? As he is in fact being robbed, is he justified in his response? Or would you simply consider him to be a petty, arrogant ass?

I see this as being roughly the equivalent of what innocent defendants face in the P2P mass-extortion nuisance lawsuit business (in which lawyers for movie producers are suing thousands of John-Doe defendants for downloading their bad movies). Even the ones who are guilty are being abused in the form of apallingly excessive fines. You don’t threaten to fine someone $100,000 for allegedly littering, or even for catching them doing it red-handed. And when a person’s guilt is ambiguous at best, extorting money from them is completely inexcusable.

Take this case of a elderly couple, both 69 years of age, accused by studio lawyers of having illegally downloaded, via BitTorrent, a schlocky violent-action film based on a first-person-shooter video game:

“My wife and I are both 69 years of age and the only occupants of this location,” wrote Wright. “Charter personnel installed the high speed equipment for our internet connection and we have made no modifications to it. If it had any features that made it vulnerable to ‘hacking,’ we had no knowledge of that. The technology is way above our abilities to deal with.”

In short, the couple’s WiFi signal was likely hijacked by a neighbor who downloaded the movie, and the couple had no way of knowing about this or preventing it. Rather than realize that a near-septuagenarian couple would not know how to download movies illegally and would never watch their crap movie in the first place, and rather than figure that continuing to attempt to extort them would result in bad press and make them look like complete schmucks, they instead smugly used legal maneuvering to essentially call the elderly couple idiots and persisted in their attempt to extort $1500 from the folks. It seems that in an attempt to give the court detailed information in their request to squash the lawyers’ subpoena, the couple accidentally invalidated their own motion–something a lawyer would know how to avoid, but the old folks wouldn’t.

The analogy I laid out at the top of this post holds true. A powerful entity–the entertainment industry–has bought off the government with bribes and essentially written the law themselves, in which they allow themselves huge rewards for what are in relative terms piffling offenses. They then use these laws in addition to the legal machinery at their disposal to extort exorbitant amounts from tens of thousands of people who may or may not be guilty of the offense and who mostly cannot afford to take the chance to defend themselves. True, offenses were committed; the lunches were indeed stolen. But the manner and method of the response is outrageously out of proportion (even for those in fact guilty), and in its scattershot attempt to nab offenders who cannot definitively be identified, they know that they are demanding huge amounts from people who are innocent and cannot afford to pay.

Read the Ars Technica article which details several cases of people who are likely innocent but fell victim either to IP address misidentification or WiFi leeching by neighbors, and are now facing the prospect of (a) paying dearly for an offense they did not commit, (b) paying more dearly to defend themselves, or (c) paying obscene amounts if their defense is unsuccessful. Worse, these people, often people who can’t afford much at all, are being forced to defend themselves in a court all the way across the country. Frankly, I think the judge should lay down these rules: that (1) the plaintiffs must sue each person individually in their district, (2) they must prove that the person in fact downloaded it and did not have their WiFi hijacked, and (3) if they fail, they must pay for the defense of the defendant.

So the question might become, how does the entertainment industry deal with piracy reasonably? Ideally, they should come clean and admit that piracy is in fact not costing them nearly as much as they claim, and that turning so viciously against the public is gaining them no sympathy from anyone. If they can truly make a case that they are losing some money from this–not the ridiculously inflated claims they publicly release–then do what most industries do in response to common cases of widespread theft: catch and punish those you can prove without doubt, otherwise just hike your prices a modest amount to compensate (something the industry is probably already doing, come to think of it). If they must take legal action, then stop with the “settlement offers,” which are little more than legal extortion–or else make the offers much more reasonable, like demanding the offender pay for the full retail value of the item, low enough that people would pay without much more than grousing.

As for the laws making the accused liable for penalties in the amount of tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars for downloading a $10-$20 piece of crap, they are unspeakable obscenities that do not belong on the law books, and should be stricken–and would be, if the politicians who write our laws actually worked for the people, like they’re supposed to, instead of being bought off by corporations.

Voltage Pictures, makers of The Hurt Locker, have officially filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia against “1 - 5000” John Doe defendants in “every jurisdiction in the United States” for illegally downloading and sharing their motion picture. In the suit (PDF), they allege “great and irreparable injury that cannot fully be compensated or measured in money.” Nevertheless, they are seeking to be compensated in money–specifically, pursuant to 17 U.S.C. § 504, at least between $750 and $30,000 per defendant, in addition to costs, attorney’s fees, and “other and further relief,” in addition to demanding that each defendant destroy all downloaded copies and never, ever even think of downloading any of their movies ever again.

In short, they have jumped on the RIAA bandwagon: file a massive, indistinct lawsuit against thousands of people in the hopes of (a) scaring file sharers into stopping their nefarious activities, and (b) raking in huge amounts of cash via what is essentially extortion writ large. It is expected that Voltage will offer “settlements” in the amount of $1500 per defendant, qualifying as extortion because, like any good nuisance lawsuit, the settlement will cost less than any defendant would pay in legal fees even if they successfully fight off the lawsuit. If all the defendants settled, Voltage would rake in $7.5 million. This assembly-line extortion is a new line of business for attorneys, just like class-action lawsuits as described in Grisham’s The King of Torts. They even go so far as to put the movies online themselves so they can more easily get the IP addresses of downloaders.

So, who are the defendants in the Hurt Locker case? Essentially, Voltage Pictures, makers of the film, have collected up to 5,000 external IP addresses, which identify only the general location of the people who downloaded the movie via BitTorrent, and have filed suit in hopes that this will allow them to legally obligate the ISPs serving those people to hand over the internal records which will provide enough information, they hope, to identify specific downloaders. ISPs who cooperate are not exactly innocent here–they make money off this as well, charging $32 to $60 for each IP address given to plaintiffs, citing costs for doing the search and notifying the address holder.

Voltage Pictures has the ability to carry out this kind of action this primarily because corporations were able to get laws passed which demand abusively large penalties for file sharing. The statute allows the plaintiff to “elect” (language used in the current suit) to take statutory damages between $750 and $30,000 per infringement, even if it cannot be proved that the defendant willfully committed the offense–meaning that if it were simply their liability, if it happened over their connection even without their knowledge, they could be still be forced to pay. I presume that this covers not having a protected WiFi network and a neighbor downloads the movie over stolen bandwidth.

If the file sharing is found to be willful, the penalty jumps to $150,000.

For file-sharing a single movie file. Yeah, that’s “justice.” The law allowing this is obscene and must be rewritten.

Let’s call this out for what it is: extortion. Legal or not, it’s is nothing less than extortion, a grab for cash by unethical means. Today, a film’s profits are measure in terms of domestic and international box office, as well as DVD rentals and sales. How long before proceeds from nuisance lawsuits are added as an element in determining the total earnings of a film?

In the fallout from the failed crotch-bomb plot over Detroit, many have pointed out the fact that right-wingers have been particularly dishonest and hypocritical. Conservatives have been putting outright blame on Obama for the failure to catch this beforehand, whereas they blamed Clinton for the 9/11 attacks, not Bush; where Obama is to blame for an intelligence agency ignoring the father’s warning, Bush was somehow not to blame for ignoring a plethora of warning signs, several of which were delivered directly to him. Where Bush was hailed as “keeping us safe” even while the Shoe Bomber, in almost identical a fashion to the Crotch Bomber, attempted to blow up a plane to the U.S., Obama is criticized for not keeping us safe. And while Republicans excoriate the Obama administration for the lack of security, they brazenly ignore the fact that they themselves voted down more funding for airport security. Not to mention the fact that criticizing Bush on terror or security was seen as near-treasonous, while criticizing the president today is apparently not at all a problem.

I look at these criticisms and reflect on why I don’t blog on politics quite as much now: it’s all trite. Of course they’re acting like that. Of course the facts don’t matter one bit. Of course Republicans are being hypocritical, lying bags of scum; hasn’t that been all too well established? Just like it’s been established that Democratic politicians are generally weak-kneed sissies afraid of their own shadows.

The pattern is pretty simple: anything a conservative does: good; anything a liberal does: bad–even if the two acts are identical. Just claim they’re different somehow, ignore logic and consistency, blame any evidence to the contrary as an artifact of the “Liberal Media,” and there you have it. The neoconservative narrative. Throw in some social religion for further control, a few more tax cuts for the rich, disregard a few more civil liberties (while always steering clear of the control-irrelevant gun ownership), deepen the dependence on corporations, and you’re getting close to seeing the overall sheep-herding architecture of the New Conservative Society. Within that twisted framework, even Sarah Palin makes perfect sense.

Frustrated that the FCC won’t respond to his threats, the Telecom-bought senator from Arizona introduced a bill that would make it so that the FCC could never “propose, promulgate, or issue any regulations regarding the Internet or IP-enabled services.” A bill introduced by a colleague in the House says the same thing. As is usual for politicians, they named the bills to sound like panacea: the Senate bill is the “Internet Freedom Act of 2009,” and the House’s is the “Real Stimulus Act of 2009” (snark!).

So, the best way to stimulate the economy is… deregulation! Because that has worked so well in the financial sector. In short, McCain wants to prevent the FCC from protecting consumers so that the Telecoms can charge anything they want, restrict anything they want, do anything they want, and create any cartels or monopolies they want, without any competition or accountability whatsoever.

Swell idea! The best part about the bill is that it is almost sure to die quickly.

Imagine if this guy were president.

Apparently, the scammers who seem to abound in Nigeria must be slowly catching on to the fact that their con involving Nigerian oil ministers and $10 million stuck in bank accounts which need your kind assistance is getting a bit stale. Maybe it’s because once nearly every person on the planet have received more than 100 variations of the same scam letter, it becomes a bit of a cliché.

So now the scammers have come up with a surprisingly clever step-up, where they scam people for much larger amounts–$700 a pop–in a much more believable scam than the Nigerian-prince-down-on-his-luck story.

The new scam: they list an apartment on Craigslist, one that looks like a great bargain, explaining that they had to move to West Africa for some reason (I would think that the missionary story would work to the best effect) and are trying to rent the place from there. Prospective buyers are allowed to drive by, they say, but they can’t trust anyone with the keys until they receive the deposit of $700. Of course, the house does not belong to them and anyone foolish enough to send the deposit will probably get nothing more than extra attempts to shake them down for more money until the well runs dry. While there are fishy elements to the story as presented–just the mention of Africa in regards to payment of funds before getting anything will raise flags with many–overall, the scam seems far more sellable than the prior scam.

Ars Technica has an article which explains how one of their staff members was caught up because the scammer used their house as the one being rented–they got drowned in potential renters coming up to their door asking for a walk-through (the Nigerians apparently were unable to find a house which was at the time unoccupied).

It’s sad that the entire country of Nigeria, perhaps a large portion of Africa in fact, are getting such a crappy reputation from these scammers. I would imagine that if I had to actually move to Nigeria for some reason and had to do transactions from there, I would have a lot of trouble doing so. I also have to wonder how this impacts legitimate businesses in that country, especially ones trying to market themselves electronically.

At his press conference today:

OBAMA: … As one of those options, for us to be able to say, here’s a public option that’s not profit-driven, that can keep down administrative costs, and that provides you good, quality care for a reasonable price as one of the options for you to choose, I think that makes sense.

QUESTION: Wouldn’t that drive private insurance out of business?

OBAMA: Why would it drive private insurance out of business? If — if private — if private insurers say that the marketplace provides the best quality health care; if they tell us that they’re offering a good deal, then why is it that the government, which they say can’t run anything, suddenly is going to drive them out of business? That’s not logical.

As people have said before, in answer to the criticism that a low-cost government plan will drive the private insurers out of business, one should say, “Good!” In this case, the anti-socialized-medicine crowd can’t win; they’ve painted themselves into a corner. If it’s an option to take the public insurance route, then if people don’t want it, they won’t take it. If government can’t run health care efficiently, then private health insurance should drive the public insurance out of business. And if the government can do health insurance better than private industry, then why shouldn’t it?

The right-wing criticism is that the government can’t run anything efficiently, but we’ve seen that proven false lots of times–until the Republicans get their hands on it and intentionally drive it into the ground, and then declare, “See!?”

Opponents of public health care ask snidely if people want politicians making your medical decisions for you. A stupid question, as politicians would meddle with your coverage far less than the insurance companies currently do; under a public plan, your doctor would have more control than now. And right now, lawyers working for the insurance companies are making your medical decisions based upon how much it profits them; how’s that working out?

The bottom line is this: health care should not be a lucrative, for-profit industry. We’ve seen close-up what happens when it is, when corporations can charge whatever the market can bear to save your life, and lie, cheat, and steal when it comes to living up to their end of the bargain. The whole reason there’s even a debate about this is because the private businesses have done such a horrific job. The insurance companies are running scared because they know that they can’t compete with a public health insurance option, not without cutting their profits to a reasonable margin, covering people the way they’re supposed to, and not denying them coverage at every possible excuse. They don’t want to lose all that.

In what was probably music to the RIAA’s ears, a jury found in its favor and awarded it $1.9 million in damages in a file sharing retrial in Minnesota.

The bad news for the RIAA, even if they don’t realize it or don’t care, is that this verdict makes them look far worse then they ever did previously, which is saying a lot.

First, the evildoer they have crushed is a single mother of four. So, not exactly the poster girl for evildoers. She is low-income, so she is not likely to be able to pay even a fraction of the fine. Then there is the idea that this penalizes her kids just as it does her, and considering the relatively pedestrian nature of the “crime,” it comes across as chopping off someone’s hand for stealing a piece of penny candy. No, for stealing the discarded wrapper of a piece of penny candy.

Second, the judgment was so outrageous that most people will recoil: $80,000 per song, or $1,920,000. For downloading 24 songs, and maybe a few people downloaded them from her. Actual damages to the RIAA, at most, were probably well under a hundred bucks. Hard to imagine how the jury didn’t gag on that verdict–one can only assume that they were simply following a set of rules and did not allow reason to interfere.

And third, the verdict is likely to cause a legal challenge more powerful than before, under the proposition that such an award is “grossly excessive.” You can be sure that we haven’t seen the last of this case yet. After all, this was a retrial–the first trial ended with a $220,000 award for the RIAA, but the case was thrown out because the judged ruled that award to be “wholly disproportionate,” “unprecedented and oppressive.” The new punitive damages are roughly a hundred thousand times the actual damages. Frankly, I find the minimum penalty of $750 per song to be excessive–no doubt carrying the force of law only because RIAA lobbyists bribed enough congressmen.

With luck, a challenge will rule the standing law to be unconstitutional–the Eighth Amendment says, “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.” How many people think that an $80,000 fine for downloading a single $1 song is not excessive? In fact, the law allows for $150,000 per song. Perfectly reasonable, right?

But one can be fairly confident that the folks over at the RIAA are smugly patting themselves on the back right now, because they don’t give a crap about any of the above. What they wanted was to scare the hell out of file sharers, making it easier to shake them down, and to scare people into buying the overpriced music they monopolize. That they took someone who was about as inoffensive as they get and derailing their life, crushing them for a petty offense, means nothing to them. This verdict is likely to frighten more people into caving to the RIAA’s extortion and coughing up thousands of dollars to avoid this kind of trial–despite there being no real evidence that they did anything wrong.

One can only suppose that the RIAA has given up on presenting any semblance of having any good will or image; they have likely decided that people need their music, even if they have to buy it from scum-sucking fascist fat cats.

In the whole torture debate, I see a parallel to the death penalty debate: we should eliminate or avoid such things simply because they are wrong and we should not do them. As I like to say, it is not who we are.

In an earlier blog post, I outlined my opinions about the death penalty, and the bottom line for me was that, as a society, we should not kill when it is not absolutely necessary. The clear exception is self-defense, although all too often this exception is used as a loophole to escape the moral standard; those who wish to kill indiscriminately or at will simply trump up imagined threats and say that we must do horrible things in self-defense. As we saw the Democrats in Congress fold like a cheap suit this week, such scare tactics–even when they are as insipid and hollow as the Republicans’ terrorists-released-on-our-streets meme–work all too well. 9/11 did a better job of scaring us all, and the war advocates milked that for all it was worth. As a result, war is far too often abused as a tool. In fact, it can be argued that since WWII, no war we have engaged in meets the true self-defense standard.

The death penalty is easier to dismiss on this principle; there is no evidence whatsoever that the death penalty deters crime, we have secure enough prisons that escape and further crimes are not a true threat, and the cost of securing the death sentence is greater than that of incarceration. The only real value in the death penalty is vengeance, and I do not see that as a valid reason for society to kill. In short, the death penalty, like unnecessary war, should be banned simply because it is wrong, it is immoral–it is not who we are, or should be.

Torture just as easily falls under this principle. Torture is better suited for producing false statements, as the person being tortured will say anything to make it stop. (Something which now appears to be what Cheney was looking for–false evidence to prop up his war.) Non-torture interrogation is far more efficient as a means of producing reliable information. Therefore, torture is never appropriate for self-defense. Without that exception, torture is plainly wrong and should never be allowed.

In all three cases–torture, capital punishment, and war–our motivations are unhealthy. We do things things out of fear, anger, and vengeance. We drape these base drives with veils of false legitimacy, claiming self-defense, patriotism, and duty to those who have fallen. But the true reasons are clear to anyone who wishes to look.

In fact, it seems that as a nation, we have simply discarded the moral high ground we once treasured. With the coming of the Iraq War, so many–and not just on the pro-war side–quickly abandoned our long-held prohibition against pre-emptive strikes. We accepted the deaths of tens and even hundreds of thousands of foreign civilians with nothing more than a shrug, caring little even after it was clear that the actions in which they were killed were unnecessary and misled. We actually have debates where a fictional TV show is considered valid evidence of the facility of torture.

Where we once had pride, we now claim self-preservation. Where we once held principle and sacrifice over fear, we now hold fear over principle and sacrifice. In short, we no longer have values. Oh, go ahead and tell me otherwise, but as the saying goes, actions speak louder than words. Show me an action in the past decade that we as a nation have taken in any of these areas which demonstrates true adherence to the values we once held. Even if you can find one, I will be able to show you so enough actions that contradict those values to drown the few, if any, actions which adhere to what we once held sacrosanct.

When Nancy Pelosi accused the CIA of fibbing on what they said to her about waterboarding, Republicans reacted with outrage. The CIA, lie? Preposterous!

“I think her accusations against our terror-fighters are irresponsible and, according to the CIA’s record, Speaker Pelosi was briefed on what had been done,” said Sen. Kit Bond of Missouri, the senior Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee. “It’s outrageous that a member of Congress would call our terror-fighters liars.”

Of course, there is evidence that the CIA’s claims were less than accurate. For example, they also claimed to have briefed former Democratic Senator Bob Graham of Florida on three occasions; Graham, who takes careful notes and keeps his calendars and schedules, proved that he could not have attended briefings on those dates; the CIA relented and admitted the data was in error. Graham also insists that, according to his notes, he was also never briefed on waterboarding, despite the CIA claiming he was.

But what about Bond’s indignant protest that we not dare question the truthfulness of the CIA? Fact is, the CIA’s reputation has been pretty much torn down all on its own in the past years; the Bush administration pretty much decimated that. Sandy Goodman at HuffPo lists several prominent examples of the CIA misleading pretty much everyone–the U.N., the 9/11 Commission, reporters, Congress, you name it. And from a blog post I wrote exactly three years ago, here’s a quote from Harper’s on how the CIA presented information on Iraq:

A number of current and former intelligence officials have told me that the administration’s war on internal dissent has crippled the CIA’s ability to provide realistic assessments from Iraq. “The system of reporting is shut down,” said one person familiar with the situation. “You can’t write anything honest, only fairy tales.”

The New York Times and others have reported that in 2003, the CIA station chief in Baghdad authored several special field reports that offered extremely negative assessments of the situation on the ground in Iraq—assessments that later proved to be accurate. The field reports, known as “Aardwolfs,” were angrily rejected by the White House. Their author—who I’m told was a highly regarded agency veteran named Gerry Meyer—was soon pushed out of the CIA, in part because his reporting angered the See No Evil crowd within the Bush administration. “He was a good guy,” one recently retired CIA official said of Meyer, “well-wired in Baghdad, and he wrote a good report. But any time this administration gets bad news, they say the critics are assholes and defeatists, and off we go down the same path with more pressure on the accelerator.”

In 2004 Meyer was replaced with a new CIA station chief in Baghdad, who that year filed six Aardwolfs, which, sources told me, were collectively as pessimistic about the situation in Iraq as the ones sent by his predecessor. The station chief finished his assignment in December 2004; he was not fired, but according to one source is now “a pariah within the system.” Three other former intelligence officials gave me virtually identical accounts, with one saying the ex–station chief was “treated like shit” and “farmed out.” …

“The CIA’s ability to speak honestly is gone,” concluded the official, “which is extraordinarily dangerous to our country.”

So it is not exactly unreasonable to suggest that the CIA might be inaccurate.

Certainly it is no coincidence that the CIA released this information as Pelosi was calling for a truth commission that could potentially make the CIA look very bad–and that the Pelosi story has rocketed in the media despite its relative insignificance relative to other stories on the same topic. This is a chilling warning shot to those who would try to get the real truth out there: we will take you down with us.

When a thief, mugger, rapist, or murderer gets off on a technicality, right-wingers rail against the weak-kneed, pansy-ass liberal justice system that lets criminals back on the street just because police or prosecutors made mistakes. They loathe that particular adherence to principle, and cannot understand why it has to lead to the release of the criminal instead of just a slap on the wrist of the police or prosecutors, and they blame bleeding-heart liberals for allowing dangerous, hard-core criminals to roam free.

Except when the criminal is a Republican. In which case, the technicality, no matter how unrelated to the actual crime committed, completely and utterly clears them of even the barest hint of wrongdoing, and makes them into victims of what surely must have been a politically-motivated left-wing witch hunt. Just like Oliver North, or now Ted Stevens, who Republicans now claim is a victim. They even want Mark Begich, who beat Stevens in the election, to step down so Stevens can return.

I wonder, if prosecutors in the Blagojevich case turn out to have withheld any evidence, no matter how incriminating the whole case against him may be, will the GOP suddenly hail Blago as a patriotic victim and demand his return to office? Somehow I don’t think so.

Scott Horton (via PA) reports that at least two US Attorneys (USAs), as part of the loyal Bushies’ “burrowing in” program, are planning not to leave their jobs quietly as all USAs in years past have done. No, they’re going for the grand slam: try to smear Obama, apologize for Bush, push a partisan agenda, and attack and even try to convict Democrats out of partisan political motives.

As you recall, Bush was rightly criticized for firing USAs because they refused to abuse their power to carry out political agendas. When it came out that Bush was committing a highly unethical and possibly illegal act in doing so, a lame but just-plausible-enough defense was crafted: presidents always fire USAs! Of course, this only happens when a new president takes office, and is done in the same manner in which the president appoints a new cabinet and staff. It does not happen in mid-term, or to a limited number of attorneys, or as a way of punishing them for not abusing power. But the defense sounds good enough and takes a lot longer to debunk, so they ran with it.

By refusing to leave quietly, these loyal-Bushie USAs hope to smear Obama–look, he’s firing us! That would both make Obama look bad, and would make it seem like what Bush did was not unusual or wrong. These effects are purely superficial and go contrary to reason and logic, but political smears are not based upon truth. As is the case with most Republican smears, they seem plausible enough for a lot of people to believe in them, while the explanation of why they are completely and utterly bogus takes long enough so that most people will not be interested in hearing it.

More than that, they hope to create the impression that the government is riddled with corrupt Democrats. That’s the reason they’re giving as to why they should be allowed to hold on to their jobs: they need to prosecute all those Democrats who are guilty! This, of course, despite Republicans being the ones who have been breaking the law willy-nilly over the past eight years, but that’s the whole idea of the loyal-Bushie US Attorney scam, that they let Republicans get away with everything and instead try to prosecute as many Democrats as they can. This is the modern mentality of the Republican Party and the right-wing: take no prisoners, grant no mercy, never admit guilt, error, or defeat, and never give an inch of ground.

Then there’s the added bonus of making it look like Obama is firing these USAs in order to protect criminal Democrats from prosecution–ironic, as that’s what these very USAs have been doing for criminal Republicans, and Obama, far from protecting Democrats, seem far too unwilling to prosecute major crimes clearly committed by officials of the Bush administration.

Yep, with these loyal Bushies, it’s nothing but “Country First”! Um, no, wait.

Welcome to the tone-setting for the next four to eight years. It worked so well under Clinton, the Republicans figure it’s worth a try with Obama: do nothing but smear, obstruct, and attack, again and again and again, relentlessly, never giving quarter. And screw the law, the Constitution, and well-being of the country. This is about power.

This from the WaPo (via Kevin Drum):

The financial world was fixated on Capitol Hill as Congress battled over the Bush administration’s request for a $700 billion bailout of the banking industry. In the midst of this late-September drama, the Treasury Department issued a five-sentence notice that attracted almost no public attention.

But corporate tax lawyers quickly realized the enormous implications of the document: Administration officials had just given American banks a windfall of as much as $140 billion.

The sweeping change to two decades of tax policy escaped the notice of lawmakers for several days, as they remained consumed with the controversial bailout bill. When they found out, some legislators were furious. Some congressional staff members have privately concluded that the notice was illegal. But they have worried that saying so publicly could unravel several recent bank mergers made possible by the change and send the economy into an even deeper tailspin.

“Did the Treasury Department have the authority to do this? I think almost every tax expert would agree that the answer is no,” said George K. Yin, the former chief of staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation, the nonpartisan congressional authority on taxes. “They basically repealed a 22-year-old law that Congress passed as a backdoor way of providing aid to banks.” …

The change to Section 382 of the tax code — a provision that limited a kind of tax shelter arising in corporate mergers — came after a two-decade effort by conservative economists and Republican administration officials to eliminate or overhaul the law, which is so little-known that even influential tax experts sometimes draw a blank at its mention. Until the financial meltdown, its opponents thought it would be nearly impossible to revamp the section because this would look like a corporate giveaway, according to lobbyists.

Is it just me, or did we get snookered? And I don’t just mean the sudden and probably illegal huge tax break outlined in the article above, but the general bailout situation itself?

Remember, the $700 billion number was more or less pulled out of Henry Paulson’s ass; it did not represent a quantification of any real need, but a number that sounded good enough to calm investors’ fears. And I’m beginning to wonder if all or part of this whole thing has been a scam.

Not that there hasn’t been a financial crisis, but rather that there has been an opportunistic grab for money like there was after 9/11, only this one was far more immediate. Did we really need to give away $700 billion? Just like we were held hostage to our fear after 9/11, so have we been now; instead of fearing the specter of terrorism, we’ve simply been presented with a new boogeyman, and have been told to fork over ridiculous sums of money. And we’d better not complain or talk about not doing it, or else the financial markets will blow our economic brains out.

And yes, I know that Obama was in favor of the bill. I never said he was perfect, nor that I’d agree with him all the time–though his support for it is one of the few things that makes me wonder if I’m just being paranoid.

But even if the bailout is needed, I still am under the impression that we’re getting cleaned out, if not by the primary giveaway, then by the billions that will fall through the cracks, or are simply stolen via corruption in the system.

Either way, it seems like this is little more than a last-minute looting of the treasury by corrupt institutions which have become aware that the gravy train is soon ending. The change in the tax law comes across as a sign of the gates to the treasury being opened for the fatcats to charge in and plunder.

McCain:

McCain also complained that the identities of people who contributed more than $200 million of Obama’s total take have not been reported, although that is allowable under federal law because the individual donations fall under the $200 reporting limit.

“I’m saying it’s laying a predicate for the future that can be very dangerous,” McCain said. “History shows us where unlimited amounts of money are in political campaigns, it leads to scandal.”

Ultimately, the only problem with raising such big amounts is that the politician will be beholden to the donors and will feel it necessary to repay them with access and special favors. You know, the kind that McCain is embroiled in up to his neck and higher, as evidenced that his campaign is riddled with lobbyists, his campaign manager being a major lobbyist for Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. McCain gets a great deal of support, monetary and otherwise, from these lobbyists and their big-player clients, and, totally by coincidence I am sure, his policies and Senate votes have fallen in line with these players’ interests. Being so close to the corruption, one can perhaps see why McCain is talking about the need for reform so much.

But what McCain is objecting to here is that Obama raised less than $200 apiece from more than a million average Americans; he calls this “dangerous.”

Um, Senator McCain? I think you need to go back and look up what the word “reform” means.

The claim is that ACORN is a group with close ties to Barack Obama and is involved in a massive scam to register hordes of fake voters so as to throw the election for Barack Obama. McCain claimed in the debate last night that ACORN is “now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.”

The truth, of course, is significantly different.

ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) is a voter advocacy group that holds registration drives, focusing on increasing participation among lower- and middle-class citizens. While ACORN often finds itself aligned with Democrats on the issues, it is not affiliated with any political party, and McCain himself was the keynote speaker at an ACORN rally, where he praised ACORN and its workers, saying, “What makes America special is what’s in this room tonight.”

ACORN is not involved in any vote fraud. The focus of the recent storm is something which has always plagued all registration drives by all such organizations of any size: workers scamming their employers for a little extra cash. ACORN, and many organizations like it, hire people to register citizens to vote. You’ve probably seen this many times, where a card table is set up somewhere in public with forms, and a few people are approaching passers-by and urging them to register. The people who work these tables are hired just like with any organization or company. They are paid to register people. And whenever you hire lots of people, some will be dishonest. In this case, some decide that it’s easier to simply fake registrations instead of signing up real people, which is how you get registrations for Mickey Mouse and Tony Romo.

This is not directed by or encouraged by ACORN, Barack Obama, or John McCain, it is not the fault of anyone except a few dishonest people for hire. ACORN, the actual victims of fraud here, do their best to flag such fraudulent registrations, but are not allowed to throw out even the most egregious fakes–all must be submitted. But this does not mean that this will result in any fake votes. This is a few people trying to get a few extra bucks by submitting forms with fake names and information.

There is no evidence–zero, zilch, none, not a scrap–that this is anything but what I have described above. So why is it such a big story? The answer is an old one: because it is a helpful red herring for right-wing efforts to commit real election fraud.

There is a real and penetrating effort by conservative groups to suppress the poor and minority votes, primarily due to the fact that these groups vote strongly Democratic. There are several ways to do this. One is to introduce new laws which challenge and restrict registration and voting by these groups, such as Voter ID laws, which discourage poor voters by throwing more obstacles in their path. Another way is to fight against laws which make it easier for these people to register, such as Motor-Voter laws, which conservatives have always fought against. Another way is to disenfranchise large numbers through a variety of dodgy, dishonest, and often contemptible means, such as voter caging; the most recent iteration of this is to challenge the registration of voters whose homes have been foreclosed.

How are these efforts helped by false claims of fraud by groups like ACORN? In truth, there is very little actual voter fraud amongst these groups; in light of that truth, there is little justification for the conservative efforts to suppress the vote. But by claiming massive voter fraud where there is none, such efforts are given a false veneer of legitimacy. Without any voter fraud happening, Voter ID laws don’t make much sense; by claiming voter fraud is rampant, you gain support.

In McCain’s case, the reason is more immediate: to not only sully his opponent and energize the base, but also to begin construction of a false narrative as to why the election will go the way it will go.

This whole situation is made much worse by the recently leaked news that the FBI is now launching an official probe into ACORN. Coming just a day after McCain made his big ACORN smear campaign official, the news smacks of dirty tricks, giving just such false legitimacy to the claims of vote theft. The real question here is why ACORN is being investigated while blatant efforts of real election fraud go uninvestigated and unpunished, from Katherine Harris’ 2000 fraud where she knowingly disenfranchised tens of thousands of Democratic voters in Florida under an intentionally-botched purge of felons from voter lists, to more recent caging efforts that target college students who are required to leave their dormitories during summer break, or even soldiers who are serving overseas.

These efforts result in the actual loss of voting rights by tens of thousands of real American citizens at the polls, as compared to the claimed ACORN fraud, which has very little if any impact at all on actual votes cast in any election.

But those real and significant cases of election fraud benefit conservative politicians–draw your own conclusions as to why they go uninvestigated.

Story out of Michigan: a left-leaning web site reported that the Macomb County, Michigan Republican Party Chairman James Carabelli stated that he plans to use lists of families with foreclosed homes as a target for challenging their voter eligibility. In just the second quarter of this year, about 63,000 homes were foreclosed in Michigan alone, and reportedly more than half of the foreclosures in Michigan are on homes owned by African-Americans–likely Democratic voters, as are the others who lost their homes. As the saying goes, a Democrat is a Republican who lost his job, or in this case, his home.

While it is true that the report came from a left-leaning web site and that the source denies the story, it fits in very closely with Republican voter-suppression tactics of the past. In 2004, Michigan Republican state senator John Pappageorge said, “If we do not suppress the Detroit vote, we’re going to have a tough time in this election.” Publicly. Also in 2004, the GOP played a dirty trick by sending mass mailings to black college students during the summer break when they were inevitably not at their college addresses; when the letters, marked “do not forward,” were of course returned, they were used to challenge these strongly Democratic-leaning voters their right to vote in that election. So going after people, mostly black, who had their homes foreclosed–most likely strongly Democratic–fits in perfectly with documented past Republican efforts.

The Republicans who are denying this story claim that it can’t be true because “the lists don’t give them information on where a voter lives.” However, this is not a deterrent for the GOP voter caging program–in fact, it’s a perk for them. Remember, in the 2000 election, they successfully disenfranchised tens of thousands of African-American Florida voters, overwhelmingly Democratic, simply because they had names resembling those of convicted felons. Here again, they have a list which is mostly black and Democratic, and would likely use the same tactic of overreaching to try to disenfranchise everyone in the state with names matching those on the lists. As stated, it fits in with past documented Republican disenfranchisement efforts.

So, while there is a possibility that this story is not true, the Obama campaign is quite wise to file in court for an injunction to prevent Republicans from doing this. Because despite their current spate of denials, Republicans also have a past record of not only denying stuff they’re doing, but also of doing reprehensible acts and then defending it with thinly-veiled arguments to make it sound like it was somehow necessary, justified, or even patriotic. After all, the whole voter caging and disenfranchisement effort is based upon accusing hundreds of thousands, if not millions of honest American citizens of being vote-stealing criminals. Which also fits this story.

When Bob Schieffer hailed John McCain as a man of character because he was shot down over Vietnam, Wesley Clark (after having spent a few minutes praising McCain as a “hero”) said that that did not qualify McCain for president; that was without a doubt not swift-boating, no matter what the wingnuts want to claim.

The latest book by noted sleaze merchant James Corsi, however, is the epitome of swift-boating–not because it was by a former associate of Obama’s who claimed to know him. a usual key ingredient in the definition. It is swift-boating because the author of the book is the original swift-boater himself, and the book carries the signature quality of being jam-packed with errors, innuendo, and mostly bald-faced lies. This time, not even the media will give this book any credibility, but that won’t stop the Republicans from trying to float a “popular” campaign based on it.

The book will premier as #1 on the New York Times best-seller list (one can only assume the editors had to swallow hard when labeling it as “non-fiction”), but not because people are buying it–rather because right-wing organizations are buying it in bulk quantities likely for no better reason than to artificially put it on the “best-seller” list and so inflate the book’s cache with the mindlessly-inclined. McCain’s quip on the book: “You gotta keep your sense of humor.” Yeah, right–like he’d react better if a book of the same caliber on him came out. Maybe he’d like to comment on this YouTube commercial–slimy, even though factually accurate.

This is the essence of the conservative run for the presidency: don’t just lie, but lie about the lies. Yet another reason not to vote Republican–unless you would like this kind of thing to define your personal politics.

Seymour Hersh in an interview with Think Progress, about how Cheney and his staff were trying to think up ways to start a war with Iran:

There was a meeting. Among the items considered and rejected — which is why the New Yorker did not publish it, on grounds that it wasn’t accepted — one of the items was why not…

There was a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war. The one that interested me the most was why don’t we build — we in our shipyard — build four or five boats that look like Iranian PT boats. Put Navy seals on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Straits of Hormuz, start a shoot-up. Might cost some lives.

And it was rejected because you can’t have Americans killing Americans. That’s the kind of — that’s the level of stuff we’re talking about. Provocation. But that was rejected.

So, the New Yorker editors thought that it wasn’t news because during a meeting in which the Vice President was conspiring with administration officials to come up with a way to falsely manufacture a war with a foreign nation, a method that could easily be described as treasonous and at the most charitable, highly illegal, was rejected.

These are the standards we’ve fallen to. We become aware that the Vice President of the United States of America is trying to manufacture a false pretense for going to war, and it’s not considered news. When, of course, the fact that it was rejected is only partly exculpatory; the fact that the intent to commit illegal acts was there should have been a huge news story. But they passed on it as if it wasn’t anything extraordinary.

I have to admit, that was my personal reaction as well–that this just confirms something that I was pretty certain of for some time anyway. That’s the problem with assuming the worst of this gang in the White House: when you find that your assumption of their criminality and foulness is confirmed to be true, you can’t react with surprised outrage. It seems the media feels the same way: “Oh, the Vice President is conspiring to commit illegal acts? Well, we know he’s a scumwad who does stuff like this, so as long as he didn’t actually follow through, I guess we have nothing.”

I am so glad that Bush and Cheney brought honor and dignity back to the White House.

I had to stop listening to the podcast for Meet the Press just now. Yes, some time ago, Barack Obama said that he would “aggressively pursue” talks with McCain to work out a system that was free of big money; the worst you could say is that he didn’t pursue it as aggressively as he suggested. That’s the worst you can honestly say about what he did. But his campaign financing is cleaner than McCain’s. Obama’s campaign is not riddled with lobbyists like McCain’s is. Obama has shut down federal lobbyists, PACs, and 527’s not only for his campaign but for his party as well, in a way that John McCain refuses to do. While he may have violated the letter of his pledge, he has more than upheld its spirit, and he has done nothing even remotely illegal–not even remotely reminiscent of corrupt.

On the other hand, as a matter of legal fact, John McCain is in direct violation of campaign finance law, on two counts. He took out a loan with public financing as collateral and then unilaterally pulled out of the system–both illegal acts. He. Broke. The. LAW. And with every dollar he spends, he continues to break the law.

And yet these yapping heads continue to rave on about how Obama is disgracing himself, and are not uttering a word about McCain’s continuing violation of the law. Instead they whine about how Obama is breaking an otherwise great system. A system that allows for millions in corporate, lobbyist, and special interest money to be spent on behalf of a candidate who is then beholden to them, spent in a way that allows them to do it anonymously and without accountability.

You want corruption? How’s this: The FEC, which is supposed to police campaign finance, has been hobbled because Bush wanted to nominate to the commission an absurdly partisan member, and the Republican Party has filibustered any other nominations until this partisan spoiler was approved; as a result, the FEC, without enough members to act, has been powerless to do anything.

Regardless of this, David Mason, the Republican chairman of the FEC, spoke out earlier this year, challenging McCain about both of his illegal acts–in essence announcing that McCain may not unilaterally withdraw from public financing and that his using public financing as collateral must be reviewed by the FEC. Now, that actually speaks well of the public financing system–that a Republican FEC chair takes his own party’s candidate to task.

However, Mason will never get that chance: Bush has fired him.

Now tell me about how public financing is not corrupt.

Obama is the clean one here. McCain is not only corrupt, he is literally and demonstrably criminal. That is not a partisan rant, not a legal theory–it is fact. So naturally, Obama is eviscerated in the media on campaign financing, while McCain is lauded.

People, I make a lot of satirical references to the “Liberal Media™” in this blog, but I mean this for real: the media is so biased in favor of McCain this election season that it is not even close to being funny. That this can happen–again–and not make a public stir is only evidence of how conventional wisdom is still dependent upon what the media is willing to accept. If the media doesn’t pick up on a story, it dies, and no amount of blogging can give it power.

In the meantime, McCain is pushing for further media consolidation, allowing fewer and fewer people to own more and more of the media–single ownership of television, radio, and newspapers in multiple markets.

Gee, I wonder why.