Seeing the right wing defeat themselves has been enjoyable in many ways. It looks as if a leading light from Texas in the coming administration will be Chet Edwards. He is a Democrat who regained his seat after the dastardly redistricting imbroglio brought to you by the wingers in that 2003 purge.

Rep. Edwards isn’t just a senior member who will have influence in this administration, he is a reminder. If the wingers hadn’t purged out influential members of congress like Martin Frost, Texas would have much more representation in the government.

Now, with a relatively junior congressional delegation, two senators from the minority party and a White House brain trust likely to be devoid of Texans, the state of the Bushes and LBJ, Rayburn and Cactus Jack, Tom Clark and Tom DeLay faces a political future with “as little clout as in a century,” said Cal Jillson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University.

“The days when Texans ran the Congress are over,” Jillson said. “And we’re not going to have the presidency any time in the near future.”

Texas Democrats point the finger of blame at Bush, who is leaving office as the most unpopular president in modern American history, and former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Sugar Land, who inspired a redistricting plan that cost several senior Democrats their jobs.

“It comes into clear focus now the price Texans are paying because of the partisan folly of the Tom DeLay-driven, mid-decade redistricting,” said Rep. Chet Edwards, D-Waco, the most influential Texas Democrat in Washington. “Instead of Texans being in charge of the powerful Rules, Agriculture and Homeland Security committees, their jobs now belong to New York, Minnesota and Mississippi.”

For any of you who may have forgotten, an established practice of redistricting after census was ridden over by ambitious Republican party members who had visions of a permanent majority. They powered the mess through, and pitted Democrats in office against right wing electorates in the 2004 election. For a time, that gave them a majority, but it resulted to my glee in the election of a Democrat to replace Tom DeLay when his misdeeds got so out of hand his party wouldn’t stand for him any longer. Redistricting had gone forward in his district on the assumption that he would hold on forever, and a large segment of mixed income, mixed race voters were put into that area. They voted in Democrat …. So much for that power grab.

I am particularly pleased the former Sen. Daschle has been named to the post of Secretary of HHS. The right wing has spent eight years making the powers of government inimical to women. This is some one who has publicly stood for health choice for women, and has had to fight with the Catholic Church to keep his beliefs.

In 2003, Daschle lost his seat in the U.S. Senate after a public fight with his local bishop over a woman’s rights.

TOM DASCHLE may no longer call himself a Catholic. The Senate minority leader and the highest ranking Democrat in Washington has been sent a letter by his home diocese of Sioux Falls, sources in South Dakota have told The Weekly Standard, directing him to remove from his congressional biography and campaign documents all references to his standing as a member of the Catholic Church.

This isn’t exactly excommunication–which is unnecessary, in any case, since Daschle made himself ineligible for communion almost 20 years ago with his divorce and remarriage to a Washington lobbyist. The directive from Sioux Falls’ Bishop Robert Carlson is rather something less than excommunication–and, at the same time, something more: a declaration that Tom Daschle’s religious identification constitutes, in technical Catholic vocabulary, a grave public scandal. He was brought up as a Catholic, and he may still be in some sort of genuine mental and spiritual relation to the Church. Who besides his confessor could say? But Daschle’s consistent political opposition to Catholic teachings on moral issues–abortion, in particular–has made him such a problem for ordinary churchgoers that the Church must deny him the use of the word “Catholic.”

Much of the discussion about Daschle’s standing has gone on in private over the last few years, although Bishop Carlson and Senator Daschle had a very public spat about partial-birth abortion in 1997. During the run-up to a Senate vote on the issue, Daschle proposed what he called a “compromise,” banning the procedure while allowing exemptions for any woman who claimed

mental or physical health reasons for having such a late-term procedure. Pointing out the way the exemptions gutted the ban, Carlson called Daschle’s proposed compromise a “smokescreen” designed solely to “provide cover for pro-abortion senators and President Clinton, who wanted to avoid a veto confrontation.”

Daschle, in turn, rose on the floor of the Senate in Washington to denounce his own bishop back in South Dakota for speaking in a way “more identified with the radical right than with thoughtful religious leadership.”
(snip)
…Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s office, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, issued in Rome a “Doctrinal Note” on Catholics in political life. “A well-formed Christian conscience,” the note declared, “does not permit one to vote for a political program or an individual law which contradicts the fundamental contents of faith and morals.”

The courage to take on the right wing is one characteristic I am very glad to see in the administration of health matters in this country. The administration is showing responsible care for the country’s health rather than blind ideology, a big change indeed. This is a good choice.

(This post also at http://cabdrollery.blogspot.com/ )

Wish it were the war criminals in the White House that had those warrants out, but this time it’s about Sudan’s al-Beshir. Having been the object of warrants for prosecution for his violations of international law and of Sudan’s laws, the president of that country is making no pretense of avoiding the results of his crimes.

Today, the arrest of journalists made another scar on the face of justice in Sudan. Violations of the rights of Sudan citizens is par for the course in al-Beshir’s career.

Sudan’s parliament on Monday approved an independent electoral commission in a crucial step towards free elections due next year that was immediately overshadowed by a mass arrest of journalists.

The line-up of the nine-member commission, appointed by the presidency and submitted to parliament for approval, was passed by 298 votes to 12 objections more than three months behind schedule, said an AFP reporter.

The names were drawn up by the three-man Sudanese presidency, head of state Omar al-Beshir, First Vice President and leader of the semi-autonomous south Salva Kiir, and Vice President Ali Osman Taha, after lengthy disagreement.

The 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), signed by north and south after a two-decade civil war, calls for elections no later than 2009 as part of a democratic transition, but myriad parts of the accord have hit major delays.

Just minutes after the parliamentary vote, police arrested more than 60 journalists protesting against the censorship which flouts the freedom of expression enshrined in Sudan’s interim constitution.
(snip)
Both north and south approve the new electoral commission chairman, Abel Alier, a former vice president of Sudan under Jaafar Nimeiri, who ruled the country from 1969 to 1985, and a lawyer from the dominant southern Dinka tribe.

His deputy, Abdallah Ahmed Abdallah, is a professor of agriculture from Khartoum University who was also a regional governor under Nimeiri.

The commission will be tasked with making all the provisions and setting a date for elections despite growing fears that polls will be delayed.

For the last eight years, the U.S. has done nothing to bring this criminal under the court’s jurisdiction, or to stop the atrocities his regime has committed.

The soft spot the U.S. war criminals have for their counterparts has not gone unnoticed. Immense improvement is foreseen for this country when the executive branch is cleansed of criminal elements that have ruled there during the right wing hold on our highest offices.

(This post also at http://cabdrollery.blogspot.com/ )

Watching the G20 mix it up over the worldwide economic crisis really made me wonder why the occupied White House wanted to make it so obvious that the world is waiting for them to crawl back into the hole they’ve dragged it into. Still more, why ask responsible world leaders in to plan, and announce before you got started that you will oppose the regulations you were supposed to enforce in the first place?

Once again, it looks from the performance being put on as if there’s some serious disability behind this country’s dysfunction in the highest office. It’s tempting to write off the disasters as incompetence. But that’s not enough to explain the bumbling wreck at the country’s helm.

Today I am glad to see an op-ed from Eliot Spitzer, who was such a star as prosecutor in the office of Attorney General, then Governor, of New York before he let personal weaknesses bring him down. He details the efforts he put forth to keep Wall Street from self-destruction, which would have been managed if the laws had been enforced. The opposition of the White House destroyed those attempts to use the laws, and brought this country into another disaster so large it has afflicted the economies of the world.

Those of us who raised red flags about this were scoffed at for failing to understand or even believe in “the market.” During my tenure as New York state attorney general, my colleagues and I sought to require investment banking analysts to provide their clients with unbiased recommendations, devoid of undisclosed and structural conflicts. But powerful voices with heavily vested interests accused us of meddling in the market.

When my office, along with the Department of Justice, warned that some of American International Group’s reinsurance transactions were little more than efforts to create the false impression of extra capital on the company’s balance sheet, we were jeered at for attacking one of the nation’s great insurance companies, which surely knew how to balance risk and reward.

And when the attorneys general of all 50 states sought to investigate subprime lending, believing that some lending practices might be toxic, we were blocked by a coalition of the major banks and the Bush administration, which invoked a rarely used statute to preempt the states’ ability to probe. The administration claimed that it had the situation under control and that our inquiry was unnecessary.

Time and again, whether at the state level, in Congress or at the Securities and Exchange Commission under Bill Donaldson, those who tried to enforce the basic principles that would allow the market to survive were told that the “invisible hand” of the market and self-regulation could handle the task alone.

The reality is that unregulated competition drives corporate behavior and risk-taking to unacceptable levels.

The laws written to prevent another Great Depression from ever happening again were dubbed by the rowdies in the White House as quaint and outmoded, useless regulations that Wall Street could ignore without hurting anyone. Knowing that this behavior was irresponsible, and counter-indicated by experience over decades, the law enforcement powers in New York were brought into play, and lost. The device of pre-empting state efforts to enforce laws has been a favorite of the administration, and has been very destructive to efforts to prevent disasters. It has also been brought into play to prevent recovery of damages for injury from faulty products. The lawless in the White House won this round, while the country lost.

The trust this country has lost among world powers will have a chance to revive in the new administration. It would be easier if the administration’s representatives were eliminated entirely from any role in the hard efforts ahead for President Obama. They have shown they are not wise, and not trustworthy. We can’t ask economic leaders of other countries to accept discredited functionaries, and shouldn’t ask our own citizens to accept them, either.

(This post also at http://cabdrollery.blogspot.com/ )

Bill Ayers was the favorite accusation of the right wing during the campaign, and that now he is talking about it should provide answers to the huge lie that Obama associates with terrorists. An interview with Amy Goodman at DemocracyNow! is worth your time.

I began by asking Bill Ayers to respond to the controversy surrounding him in the presidential race.

BILL AYERS: We actually didn’t pay a lot of attention to it. We recognized that there was this cartoon character kind of thrust up on the screen, and I was an unwitting and unwilling part of his presidential campaign. We tried not to watch it, because, pretty much, it was distracting and kind of crazy-producing. On the other hand, as you played those, there’s so much that’s dishonest in it that it’s kind of impossible to kind of know where to enter it.

First of all, the idea that Bill O’Reilly says, you know, that I was in hiding. I wasn’t in hiding. I was teaching and speaking and writing and doing all the things I do. What I wasn’t doing was commenting on the presidential campaign to the media. And I decided not to do that. We decided not to do that when this all began, because we couldn’t figure out a way to interrupt what we took to be a profoundly dishonest narrative that, you know, had no—we had no purchase. We had no way into it.

And what’s dishonest about it, I mean, there are many things. One is, I was not a terrorist. I never was a terrorist. And the idea that the Weather Underground carried out terrorism is nonsense. We never killed or hurt a person. We never intended to. We existed from 1970 to 1976, the last years, the last half-decade of the war in Vietnam. And by contrast, the war in Vietnam really was a terrorist undertaking. The war in Vietnam was terror on a mass scale, with thousands of people every month being murdered, mostly from the air. And we were doing everything we could to stop it. So, again, it’s hard to know where to start to interrupt that narrative.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Bill, for a lot of younger listeners and viewers who may be not familiar with the Weather Underground—I remember back more than forty years ago I was in the Students for a Democratic Society with you and Bernadine—and could you talk a little bit about how the Weather Underground developed and what were its goals?

BILL AYERS: Sure. When I was first arrested opposing the war in Vietnam was the year that the United States built the war up, 1965. And at that time, I was arrested in the draft board with thirty-nine other students trying to disrupt the normal activity of the draft board. You know, one of the things to note about that arrest is, while thirty-nine of us were arrested and while hundreds of students supported us, thousands of students opposed us, because in 1965 the war was popular. Again, in retrospect, it’s hard to remember that.

In ’65, 70 percent of Americans supported the war. By 1968, 70 percent opposed the war. A lot had happened in those years. Certainly, the activism of the student movement was part of it. Perhaps more important was strong elements of the black freedom movement coming out unequivocally against the war. And perhaps most decisive was Vietnam vets coming home and adding energy to the antiwar movement, starting their own antiwar organizations and denouncing the people who had sent them there, telling us, telling all the American people, that the war was immoral, that they were asked to do war crimes on a regular basis as a part of policy, not by accident. And that just, you know, kind of deflated the whole idea of this so-called noble enterprise.

So here was this illegal, immoral war. In 1968, the sitting president announced that he would leave office at the end of his term, rather than run for reelection, in order to end the war. We felt that we had run a great victory when he made that announcement in March of 1968. Four days after that announcement, King was dead. A couple of months later, Kennedy was dead. And a few months after that, it was clear that the war was going to escalate. And the question was, what do you do? It’s 1968, there’s no end point in sight, and thousands of people are being murdered every month. People did many things. Some joined the Democratic Party and tried to organize a peace wing. Some left the country. Others decided to organize in communities. Some built communes. And we decided that we would build an organization that could resist and create a more militant response to the American misdeeds in Vietnam.

While to most of us it was obvious that the lies were not to be credited, it is good that friends I have heard from - who actually fell into a vague feeling that Obama had a questionable background - will find out that it was always entirely wrong. The wingers will never believe the truth, because it doesn’t serve their purposes. But having the truth out will help.

(This post also at http://cabdrollery.blogspot.com )

The scandals that are still unwinding at the ‘Justice’ Department have made quite an impression on those who will be needing to govern the country. At the Holy Land Foundation trial, I have watched in horror as this government was represented by attorneys telling jurors to rely on their memories rather than evidence. The politicization of the department has obviously resulted in a personnel problem.

The incoming administration is wasting no time turning around the ruination that has been inflicted by lawbreakers on our justice system.

Political considerations affected every crevice of the department during the Bush years, from the summer intern hiring program to the dispensing of legal advice about detainee interrogations, according to reports by the inspector general and testimony from bipartisan former DOJ officials at congressional hearings.

Although retired federal judge Michael B. Mukasey, who took charge of the department in the winter, has drawn praise for limiting contacts between White House officials and prosecutors, and for firmly rejecting the role of politics in law enforcement, restoring public confidence in the department’s law enforcement actions will be central, lawmakers and former government officials say.
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“The infusion of politics into the Justice Department and an abdication of responsibility by its leaders have dealt a severe blow,” Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) and Sen. Arlen Specter (Pa.), the panel’s ranking Republican, wrote in an opinion piece last month. “Great damage has been done to the credibility and effectiveness of the Justice Department.”
(snip)
Another critical, early judgment must be made about how to allocate scarce resources without shortchanging national security. Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, more than 7 percent of the department’s budget shifted to terrorism, away from drug trafficking, organized crime and white-collar misdeeds, according to an analysis by the Government Accountability Office.

The terrorism trials which have all ended in defeat for the DoJ will soon come to a conclusion in Dallas, with a jury that has received easily the most mind-boggling prosecutorial admonition I have ever seen. Hopefully they are not the halfwits the government addressed itself toward. It would be a very good thing if the administration returns the Department to the work of ending crime instead of witchhunting.

The country will be better served by simple competence in staffing the DoJ. We hope that a fine mind like President Obama’s will serve the country well, and give us actual excellence in the positions in which public service is needed once again.

****************************************************************

Another piece of the article raises that specter of nonpartisan executive decision making the right wing is wishing for.

“It would not be beneficial to spend a lot of time calling people up to Congress or in front of grand juries,” Litt said. “It would really spend a lot of the bipartisan capital Obama managed to build up.”

Obama did not win with bipartisan votes, and should not give over to the wishes of those who fought, very dirty, to keep eight years of disasters going in this country.

I agree with Avedon Carol, what the Republicans believe in is indefensible. It has ruined our justice system, and needs to be stopped right now.

(This post also at http://cabdrollery.blogspot.com/ )

Yesterday I spent many hours at the closing moments of the Holy Land Foundation trial in Dallas, an exercise in the occupied White House trying to convince twelve jurors from Dallas that Holy Land Foundation was supporting terrorism. specific charges were brought against Mufid Abdulqader, Abdulrahman Odeh and Mohammed El-Mezain. As posted previously, this is part of an ongoing effort by this government to prosecute charities for support of terrorism, and effort which has failed in previous cases filed.

I missed Monday, thankfully, a day in which the prosecution played about 3.5 hours of videotapes of undetermined date showing performances of dances and skits which protest against the Israeli occupation. Prosecutor Jonas made the statement, quoted by the Dallas Morning News report, that Holy Land Foundation was making widows and orphans rather than supporting them.

Throughout the trial, I have seen the prosecution equate terrorism - that America is supposed to fear, and use its resources to combat - with anti-Israel feelings. Defense witnesses have been brought in to elucidate the jury about the Middle East conflict and the prevalence of standard songs, dances and skits in festivals where nationalism is invoked for Palestine.

All of us are learning a great deal about the conditions in Palestine, where three quarters of the population live on less than $2 a day, and unemployment has reached 33%. In 1995 Hamas was designated a terrorist organization, and the Holy Land Foundation asked for guidance on how to support charitable activities in the Middle East without violating U.S. law. HLF made overtures to the Treasury and Department of State, and the Israeli government, to get solid guidelines. They got mixed messages, and little guidance.

We have also learned that in the predominantly Muslim Middle East, zakat committees carry out a lot of the charitable organization, representing the needy and delivering aid. The word zakat refers to one of the five pillars of Islam, and refers to the practice of giving 2.5% annually for the poor, which Muslims regard as basic religious observance.

That grassroots campaign that organized local units to spearhead the GoPerv drive to control of Congress under Newt Gingrich led to deep penetration at the town level by powers of the right wing. I see it here in the operation of our local government, as in the refusal to allow poll watchers to view our recent election returns. In Dallas, some prosecutions are being reviewed, government prosecutions that have focused largely on Democratic office holders and candidates.

The ongoing investigation of the House Judiciary Committee stated in its majority staff report back in April that an extraordinary degree of politicization within the Department of Justice had developed since 2001.

A study published in February 2007 by Professors Donald Shields and John Cragan found that federal prosecutors during the Bush administration have investigated Democratic officeholders far more frequently than their Republican counterparts. The study identified 375 investigations or indictments of candidates and elected officials brought by U.S. attorneys from January 2001 to December 2006. The study’s authors found that of the 375 cases they identified, 10 involved independents, 67 involved Republicans, and 298 involved Democrats.

The authors noted that the greatest disparity in investigations or indictments involved local politicians, where Democrats were seven times as likely as Republicans to be subject to criminal investigations. An updated report based on a sample of 820 reported cases and investigations determined that during the Bush administration, 80 percent of federal public corruption investigations have involved Democratic officeholders, and only 14 percent have involved Republican officeholders.

A review of the 375 cases reveals that one of the cases studied was the investigation of former Mayor Pro Tem Don Hill. The study concluded that there was a 1 in 10,000 chance that the over-representation of Democrats was by chance, thereby concluding that selective prosecution of local Democrats across the country had taken place. There has been very little, if any, reporting on this dynamic, national story in this newspaper.

The dirty tactics the right wing employs have been responsible for a huge overturn of our constitution, as well as of local functioning governments. The results have been catastrophic.

The Department of Justice has been particularly impacted by politicization at the expense of the Rule of Law. The purpose of the DOJ is to carry out the laws Congress passes. Instead of functioning as it should, the present DOJ - like much of the executive branch - is at loggerheads with its own purpose. The laws have been pushed aside while the executive branch pursues purely political purposes.

That 71 days left looks awfully long, and dangerous to our country.

(This post also at http://cabdrollery.blogspot.com/ )

The figures that the maladministration is giving out for unemployment are bad enough, at around 6%, but that doesn’t take into account the many employed workers whose hours are being cut back. Last night, the discussion on Newshour shone a light on that figure, which is the underemployment so often encountered.

NARIMAN BEHRAVESH: … before the big sort of financial crisis hit in September, the recession could have been characterized as mild. Well, we can now banish that term from our vocabulary, because what the financial crisis did was it turned this recession into a much deeper one.

And so, indeed, we’re headed for a recession that’s probably at least as bad as the 1990-91 recession and possibly — although probably not — but possibly as bad as the worst recession in the postwar period, which occurred in 1982.

JEFFREY BROWN: Lisa Lynch, today’s report also had some numbers on average hourly wages. What did we learn there?

LISA LYNCH: So we saw some other things. Average hourly wages increased 2.9 percent on a weekly basis. Now, that’s running below inflation, which is rising right now at 4.9 percent.

So people that are fortunate enough to have a job are seeing their weekly wages not keeping pace with inflation. And part of that is a reflection of another dimension of the softening in the labor market that’s not captured by the unemployment rate, and that is a lot of people are in work but are working a lot fewer hours, either because they could only find part-time employment or their employers have reduced their hours.

So if we come up with a broader measure of unemployment that includes people that are out of work, people who’ve given up looking for work because they know there’s nothing around them, and people that are working part time for this sort of economic reason, the unemployment rate would be 11.8 percent.

So more than one in 10 workers out of work or severely stressed with respect to the softening in the economy. (Emphasis added.)

During conversation about this earlier this morning, trifecta mentioned that his own family had experienced this, and his own father had been cut back twice on the hours he works, and therefore the money he earns. His dad would still count as employed in official figures. The employment, however, doesn’t any longer give him the spending power he once had. Of course, for each worker losing his ability to support himself and family with diminished earnings, the economy suffers because consumption is diminished.

The failure of corporate interests to realize that by diminishing earning power they were cutting into profits has always astonished me. This morning I had to be somewhat amused to see that the originator of the mortgage-backed security, a major culprit in our present economic crisis, has become the victim of his own invention.

That headline is not as amazing as sitting in court yesterday with many who are associated with charities that include Palestinian needs and hearing our government telling former Consul General in Israel, Edward Abington, that big families are causing poverty in Palestine. “Four mouths are a lot easier to feed than eight,” instructed prosecutor Jim Jacks. To his great credit, Mr. Abington fired back that unemployment was the greatest cause of poverty there, and that having no job made it hard to feed any number of mouths.

The defense rested yesterday, after Mr. Abington wound up with testimony to the effect that the zakat committees that our government has demonized as just another form of the terrorists. He was yet another witness pointing out that the government’s case confuses members of charity operations of the Muslim religion with the radicals who do provide services they need to a desperately deprived region. Once again, the drastic interpretation of giving to the needy as supporting terrorism was discredited.

Defense attorneys representing five charity workers accused of using the formerly Richardson-based Holy Land Foundation to funnel millions of dollars to Hamas rested their case on a high note Thursday.

The defense finished its weeklong case Thursday with its fifth and most powerful witness, Edward Abington, the former United States consul general in Israel who also later served as the State Department’s No. 2 intelligence officer.

He told jurors that while serving as chief U.S. envoy to the Palestinian Authority from 1993 to 1997, he was never told in any of his daily government briefings that the terrorist group Hamas controlled a series of Palestinian charity groups.

The government contends those Palestinian charity groups, called zakat committees, were staffed by Hamas militants when Holy Land sent them more than $12 million after 1995, the year the U.S. designated Hamas as a terrorist organization.

The reporter for Dallas Morning News then went on to say that Mr. Abington had little or no knowledge of those serving on the zakat committees.