Hemophrenia

Romney's Class War

2012-01-20T03:16:00.001-07:00

Someone must be getting a little sleep deprived:

Lemme tell ya something. America is a great nation, because we’re a united nation and those who are trying to divide the nation as you’re trying to do here and as the president is doing are hurting this country, seriously. The right course for America is not to divide America, and try and divide us between one and another, it’s for us to come together as a nation. And if you’ve got a better model, if you think China is better, or Russia is better, or Cuba’s better, or North Korea’s better, I’m glad to hear all about it. But you know what? America’s right, and you’re wrong!

Romney said this in response to someone who had the audacity to ask what someone in the 1% would do for the 99%.

I'm not surprised a Republican presidential candidate would say this, but usually Romney does a better job of concealing his outright hostility to the unwashed masses. The issue of the class divide is a lot like racism in America: even if inequality exists, you are the problem if you dare to point it out.

The fact is that the US is already and has always been divided. Does anyone dispute the actual data? It's not just the growing gap between the rich and the poor, it's the growing barriers to economic mobility. People born to lower class parents are much less likely to be able to move upward than in other industrialized nations. A variety of policies systemically favor the rich in the United States and permit them to exploit labor and resources, avoid progressive taxation, utilize labor in nations with substandard labor, environmental, and human rights laws (such as China, the one that Romney thinks the questioner would prefer), and provide them with special access to the policy making process.

The policies Romney supports continue to "divide us between one and another." He just doesn't want anyone to point that out.

2011 in Music

2011-12-31T18:21:00.002-07:00

I obviously can't claim that the order is precise, but these 50 albums are roughly ranked in terms of how much I enjoyed them over the past year. I'm looking forward to seeing end of year lists from places like Silent Ballet, Boomkat, and Pitchfork to see what I missed. Definitely not enough hip hop or experimental music.

There are some albums that might take more time for me to get. Watch the Throne didn't click, but I'd like to give it more time (I've heard that it became better for people who actually saw the tour, but I didn't have near that much cash to spare). There are also albums by Bjork, Current, 93, Deerhoof, Ryan Adams, Atari Teenage Riot (blast from the '90s past), Shabazz Palaces, Ford & Lopatin, and others that I'd like to listen to a bit more before I decide how I feel about them.

M83 was the definite standout this year. My favorite thing by them since their debut.

1. M83 - Hurry Up, We're Dreaming
2. True Widow - As High As the Highest Heavens and from the Center to the Circumference of the Earth
3. Cults - Cults
4. WU LYF - Go Tell Fire to the Mountain
5. The Jezabels - Prisoner
6. Various Artists - Invasion of the Killer Mysteron Sounds in 3-D
7. ill.Gates - ill.Methodology
8. Fucked Up - David Comes to Life
9. Various Artists - For Nihon
10. Machinedrum - Room(s)
11. Wilco - The Whole Love
12. EMA - Past Life Martyred Saints
13. Arkasia - Evolution
14. Somatic Responses - Concrete Glider
15. Real Estate - Days
16. Rustie - Glass Swords
17. Shlohmo - Bad Vibes
18. Talkdemonic - Ruins
19. Black Tusk - Set the Dial
20. David Lynch - Crazy Clown Time
21. Blut aus Nord - 777 - Sect(s)
22. Kashiwa Daisuke - 88
23. Wormrot - Dirge
24. Los Campesinos! - Hello Sadness
25. Trash Talk - Awake EP
26. Dum Dum Girls - He Gets Me High EP
27. A Winged Victory For The Sullen - A Winged Victory For The Sullen
28. Grinning Death's Head - Black Sun Rising
29. Ygg - Ygg
30. The Caretaker - An Empty Bliss Beyond This World
31. Justice - Audio, Video, Disco
32. Vatican Shadow - Pakistan Military Academy
33. Girls - Father, Son, Holy Ghost
34. I Break Horses - Heart
35. Hauschka - Salon Des Amateurs
36. Marsen Jules - Nostalgia
37. Tank 86 - Rise
38. Wolves in the Throne Room - Celestial Lineage
39. Ghostfunk - Ghostfunk
40. Archnemesis - People's Radio
41. Beastie Boys - Hot Sauce Committee, Pt. 2
42. Atlas Sound - Parallax
43. Kill The Noise - Kill Kill Kill
44. New Look - New Look
45. Deaf Center - Owl Splinters
46. Bon Iver - Bon Iver
47. Necros Christos - Doom of the Occult
48. Adventure - Lesser Known
49. Sensual Harassment - Alpha Draconis
50. Wobbler - Rites at Dawn

Debt and Resistance

2011-12-19T13:53:00.001-07:00

Debt by David Graeber

Graeber offers an argument for why debt constitutes society.

He also cites an interesting situation in Madagascar in which people were able to participate in imperialism only to the extent necessary to survive, but remained effectively subtracted from colonial control by refusing to use their money to buy into the narcotic trip of consumer products culture. I'm used to seeing situations in which that kind of gesture makes control more effective by making it livable (for example, the fact that I can buy fair trade coffee allows me to cope with my participation in global capital by calming my liberal guilt, foreclosing any kind of more radical act that would actually threaten the status quo). I'm interested in reading this book to see how that strategy worked and what became of it in the long run.

Mouth pieces

2011-11-19T12:57:00.001-07:00

What Bill Cosby Means To The White Populist Mind - Ta-Nehisi Coates - Natio

This need to express right wing, borderline to full-on racist ideology through a fake minority seems pervasive. Just look at all of the conservative political cartoonists who use black characters to express their views.

The Suburbs (self-indulgence)

2011-08-06T17:24:00.006-06:00

The Arcade Fire's last album took a lot longer for me to get than their first two.

The first thing I heard by the Arcade Fire (didn't they used to have a "the" in their name?) was a poorly recorded live album. At the time, I was getting really bored of indie rock, but I could tell that something exciting was going on. Although I could barely make out the melodies behind the garbled sound, the music had an emotional intensity that I needed more of. When I finally tracked down Funeral and a CBC Radio EP, it was even better. Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels) told the story of lovers meeting in the freezing tunnels beneath their city and forgetting their families with music that reminded me of Angelo Badalamenti's Twin Peaks soundtrack. Neighborhood #2 (Laika) pulled me through my depression following one of the most horrible events in my life:

Come on, Alex,
You can do it.
Come on, Alex,
There's nothing to it.

I couldn't do much of anything back then. I spent my evenings drinking bottles of cheap bourbon, playing Super Mario Brothers 3, and listening to this. I was a withered blade of grass in my philosophy of science classes and while trying to regurgitate garbage about containing China in debate rounds.

But I lived through it. The followup, Neon Bible, came out at another opportune time. I was far from academia, living with my girlfriend, and doing data entry for a horrible health insurance company. The work was mindless and consisted of typing numbered codes all day long. The codes referred to human beings, many of whom were probably being denied things like chemotherapy due to preexisting conditions. Those people were alienated from me and all I had was the syntax. The codes had to work out according to the system's axioms, but what they actually represented didn't matter to me.

But at least I could do the work while listening to music. We didn't have TV or Internet back then, but I got a copy of Neon Bible off the wireless at Perkins or something. It seemed to encapsulate a lot of what I was going through then: growing further away from my friends and the worlds of philosophy and debate that had defined me.

Don't wanna work in a building downtown
No, I don't wanna see it when the planes hit the ground

The Bush administration was near the peak of its excesses despite the 2006 election and we were mired in an Iraqi quagmire:

No place to hide
You were fighting as a soldier on their side
You're still a soldier in your mind
Though nothing's on the line

You say it's money that we need
As if we're only mouths to feed
I know no matter what you say
There are some debts you'll never pay

Working for the Church while your family dies
You take what they give you and you keep it inside
Every spark of friendship and love will die without a home
Hear the solider groan, "We'll go at it alone"

And now I'm working my first real job and am afraid of losing myself and The Suburbs finally hits me:

You never trust a millionaire quoting the sermon on the mount
I used to think I was not like them but I'm beginning to have my doubts
My doubts about it

When you're hiding underground
The rain can't get you wet
But do you think your righteousness could pay the interest on your debt?
I have my doubts about it

I feel like I've been living in
A city with no children in it
A garden left for ruin by a billionaire inside of a private prison

I was one of those silly rubes who went to law school to change the world. But here I am, not freeing the innocent from prison or overseeing refugee flows in a foreign nation, but drafting trusts. A baby is on the way and, despite the multimillionaires and right wing ideologues I serve every day, I'm more broke than I've ever been. We can't get out from under all of this medical debt (and the credit card debt that paid for our food while the rest of my financial aid was going to creditors) and are resorting to what the American legal system considers the last resort for the financially destitute. Thank goodness debtors' prisons are illegal in this state.

During the day I rearrange symbols and documents to further the privilege of economic elites. But at night I'm still trying to listen to music and read things that I enjoy. I'm not gone yet.

Class War or Crisis?

2011-07-26T11:01:00.000-06:00

Statement: Robert Greenstein, President, on House Speaker Boehner’s New Budget Proposal — Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

The plan is, thus, tantamount to a form of “class warfare.” If enacted, it could well produce the greatest increase in poverty and hardship produced by any law in modern U.S. history.

I feel adrift right now and have no idea what the least horrible outcome is. Maybe our system makes this kind of crisis inevitable.

George Will's Misguided Silver Bullet Against the ACA

2011-07-09T10:57:00.004-06:00

More on this bad argument.

George Will thinks he has expanded the infamous broccoli argument into something more persuasive:

During a recent discussion, “Battle for the Constitution,” on ABCNews’s “This Week,” Will claimed that obesity impacts interstate commerce, and therefore does it not follow that Congress has the constitutional power to require overweight people to join Weight Watchers. Time’s Richard Stengel said he did not know, and Georgetown University professor Eric Dyson said the question is open.

Their responses didn’t satisfy Will, who kept demanding to know whether Congress can force heavy Americans into Weight Watchers. But Will’s spin on on the broccoli law argument did excite the right-wing blogosphere. (Breitbart.TV, “George Will Brilliantly Traps Liberal Panelists With Obamacare Constitutional Challenge.”) Will’s spin is not that new by the way – he has been asking the Weight-Watchers question for some time. See his columns here and here.

While many of us may have the intuition that it's unconstitutional to force American to lose weight, that gut feeling does not come from the reason that the ACA is being attacked as unconstitutional. Remember: the court challenges are primarily based on federalism and the Tenth Amendment of the US Constitution, which states that matters not specifically enumerated as being within Congress's powers are left to the states or the people. The individual mandate of the ACA doesn't fall afoul of the Tenth Amendment because it falls under Congress's power to regulate matters having a substantial effect on interstate commerce (the recent decision by the 5th Circuit was pretty compelling) and, arguably, Congress's power to levy taxes. Even if not purchasing insurance, itself, isn't interstate commerce (i) the Constitution makes no distinction between activity and inactivity and (ii), as Scalia put it in Raich, “where Congress has the authority to enact a regulation of interstate commerce, it possesses every power needed to make that regulation effective.”

Maybe Will thinks it's self-evident, but I don't see the problem. Sure, I'll fall right into his ingenious trap: Such a law probably doesn't violate the Tenth Amendment! Someone could probably make the argument that obesity has a substantial effect on interstate commerce and that the Weight Watchers mandate is necessary and proper to effectuate obesity regulations.

But you might still have an intuition that there is something constitutionally fishy about the weight watchers mandate. And you would be right. Your bad feeling is probably coming from the fact that the law might violate notions of substantive due process stemming from the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. The American Constitution Society post discusses this, but I want to point out that our intuition goes further than Will wants to take it.

Under Will's and Breitbert's reading, the Constitution invalidates only the federal Weight Watchers mandate. But what about states that force me to lose weight? Isn't that also a violation of my individual liberty to govern myself? You're going to need the Fourteenth Amendment to invalidate that law, not the Tenth. The gut feeling that leads them to think that this is a silver bullet argument comes from something more fundamental than the balance between federal and state power. It comes from our ideas about personal autonomy and decisionmaking. Sure, this same argument could be applied to the individual mandate, but that's not what they're doing. The real debate about the individual mandate has been about federalism, not substantive due process. That's why Romney is able to defend the Massachusetts health bill while attacking the ACA.

This brings me back to the bigger problem with the faux libertarianism of the modern Republican Party. They don't really care about individual liberty per se. The whole states' rights movement could care less if state or local governments infringe on your rights. Will cries these crocodile tears about people being forced into weight watchers and limiting government intrusion in our lives but throws up his hands when it comes to a state forcing the same thing upon unwilling citizens. This is supposed to be some kind of brilliant checkmate for the conservative cause, but it actually shows the limits of the modern GOP's notion of liberty.

Guess who is winning the class war?

2011-06-30T10:20:00.001-06:00

The Wageless, Profitable Recovery - NYTimes.com

All work and no pay - surplus value

2011-06-22T18:05:00.001-06:00

All Work and No Pay: The Great Speedup | Mother Jones

Habermas etc

2011-06-17T18:45:00.001-06:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/arts/people-argue-just-to-win-scholars-assert.html?src=me&ref=general

Blogger Droid

2011-06-12T15:18:00.001-06:00

I've occasionally used a mobile app to post from my phone. I didn't use it enough to justify buying the free version and didn't mind seeing ads while actually using it.

Lately I've been getting ads in my notification area. That's where I get information about phone updates, news, weather alerts, & messages from my wife and bosses. Blogger Droid uses something called Air Push to create these intrusive ads. I uninstalled the app and will not be purchasing the full version because I don't want to encourage this irritating practice. So now I'm using the official Blogger app.

There is also an app called Air Push Detector to eliminate apps that use this obnoxious software (especially since they design it to make it difficult to know which app is causing the ads). http://www.androidpit.com/en/android/market/apps/app/com.brosmike.airpushdetector/AirPush-Detector

Human League

2011-05-05T20:07:00.002-06:00

Don't You Want Me is a rare song where the verse is much catchier than the chorus.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.8

Castration Anxiety

2011-04-26T13:39:00.003-06:00

Allen West: Liberal Women Are ‘Neutering American Men’

West: We need strong women to raise American men!

WEST: We need you to come in and lock shields, and strengthen up the men who are going to the fight for you. To let these other women know on the other side—these planned Parenthood women, the Code Pink women, and all of these women that have been neutering American men and bringing us to the point of this incredible weakness—to let them know that we are not going to have our men become subservient. That’s what we need you to do. Because if you don’t, then the debt will continue to grow . . . deficits will continue to grow.

And . . .

As a close reading of Lacan's text instantly attests however, the opposition we are dealing with is not that of being versus having, but rather the opposition of to have/to appear: woman is not the phallus, she merely appears to be to be phallus, and this appearing (which of course is identical with femininity qua masquerade) points towards a logic of lure and deception. Phallus can perform its function only as veiled-the moment it is unveiled, it is no longer phallus; what the mask of femininity conceals is therefore not directly the phallus but rather the fact that there is nothing behind the mask. In a word, phallus is a pure semblance, a mystery which resides in the mask as such. On that account, Lacan can claim that a woman wants to be loved for what she is not, not for what she truly is: she offers herself to man not as herself, but in the guise of a mask. Or, to put it in Hegelian terms: phallus does not stand for an immediate Being but for a Being which is only insofar as it is "for the other", i.e., for a pure appearing. On that account, the Freudian primitive is not immediately the unconscious, he is merely unconscious for us, for our external gaze: the spectacle of his unconscious (primitive passions, exotic rituals) is his masquerade by means of which like the woman with her masquerade, he fascinates the other's (our) desire.

West doesn't have the phallus. Something is missing that he can't quite put his finger on. But that mysterious other person, the woman who supports Planned Parenthood, menstruates, and does all sorts of confounding "womanly" things appears to have it. She must have stolen West's wholeness, his mastery of the world around him. He must quickly snatch it back to retain the illusory fullness that was never there to begin with.

And don't even get me started on the before-the-fall myths that he's constructing out of movies like 300. If only we had never ceded so much to these . . . these females, things would be going perfectly. In Eden man was man and in control of reality. That damn Eve ate the apple, women got the vote and the morning after pill, and now everything's fucked. We can blame the women (or some different hated Other du jour) to rationalize our symbolic impotence and get to sleep at night.

Principled limits

2011-04-09T18:50:00.001-06:00

Inside the Mind of Justice Kennedy

"Third—and most importantly—to address Kennedy’s commitment to restraining federal powers, mandate defenders will have to formulate a plausible theory of congressional commerce authority that remains subject to meaningful, judicially enforceable limits. This is a line of argument that, to date, mandate defenders have been less successful in articulating. They cannot simply ridicule mandate opponents’ contention that the law would open the door to legislation requiring people to eat their broccoli: They must provide realistic examples to demonstrate that principled limits on federal power to regulate commerce among the several states remain meaningful and are not merely words on parchment. Were Kennedy to vote to strike the mandate, it will most likely be because its defenders could not present a principled, enforceable stopping point to federal power under the Commerce Clause."

This demand for a principled limit on the congress's commerce clause powers--one that would render the hypothetical statute mandating broccoli consumption unconstitutional--is ridiculed because the demand is ridiculous. It is also disingenuous.

Not every limit on congressional power comes from the constitution. Congress is well within its commerce clause powers to do any number of stupid things. Even if those things are not limited by the constitution, they should be limited by the inherent constraints of the legislative and democratic processes. I'm obviously taking some form of legal process theory for granted (one that many ACA opponents also take for granted when they're railing against judicial activism). If Congress tries to pass the Eat Your Veggies Act of 2011, you have a remedy: urge them to vote against it or vote against them next election cycle. This may be imperfect, but no remedy can be in any system of government that maintains any semblance of a commitment to democratic principles. Asking for a 10th amendment limit on mandatory broccoli consumption is just begging the question. Right wing legal theorists have such respect for rational legislative judgments until congress does something marginally progressive.

Then the demand for judicial second guessing begins.

Of course, my lack of sympathy for inherent limits on commerce clause power stems from my belief that individual liberty receives little inherent protection from a sharp federal/state divide than they get from other amendments. It usually seems like cover for regressive state and local policies (the major exception being medical marijuana, but federalist dualism didn't stop Scalia from joining a majority in upholding federal enforcement of such laws in Raich). The other amendments do a lot of heavy civil liberties lifting and do so in a way that isn't as bidirectional regarding civil liberties and civil rights as the 10th amendment.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

Seriousness

2011-04-05T19:47:00.005-06:00

The most serious of serious, not unserious plans to seriously crush the bottom non-serious 99%. Seriously.

"Seriousness" has gone past being the most over-used, meaningless abstraction to gloss over debates about the role of the welfare state and is now just a parody of itself. I can't tell if the David Brookses of the world are fucking with me or if they honestly think their favorite buzzword hasn't been drained of all substantive value.

Just look at this inanity:

His proposal will set the standard of seriousness for anybody who wants to play in this discussion. . . . The Ryan budget will put all future arguments in the proper context: The current welfare state is simply unsustainable and anybody who is serious, on left or right, has to have a new vision of the social contract.

And this isn't the first time that he's reached such orgasmic heights with his favorite adjective:

Wrong. This nation is still closely divided. The Republicans should not read a radical ideological mandate into the results tonight. But there is a trend here. The American people are fundamentally serious. They know that the most important problem facing the country right now is terrorism and security. They know that George W. Bush is basically right on how to approach this problem.

Apparently, he's gone from being enamored with how serious Bush's foreign policy was (that worked out well), to having a crush on the seriousness of the GOP's efforts to dismantle any fragile remnant of America's social safety net. One wonders when he'll ever ask his Tiger Beat idols when we'll get serious about how much we spend on an increasingly unsustainable overseas presence, self-perpetuating defense-industrial complex, and shaky extended deterrence umbrella.

But this isn't just about the way that the trite word grates on my ears. It also suggests some things we talked about when I was a comm undergrad.

David Brooks and Paul Ryan are just employing new versions of Lakoff's strict father morality, wherein the government is a metaphorical parent. In contrast to the loving welfare queen mother who spoils her kids rotten with medicare, food stamps, All Things Considered, and public infrastructure, the serious father has a budget to balance. The federal budget is nothing more than a larger version of a household budget. We have to tighten our belts and slash programs that just coddle and reward the downtrodden. David Brooks's serious father doesn't have time to worry about whether children will be able to get chemo or not. The strict father helps those who helps themselves, cutting taxes on the supposed producers of social wealth.

If you accept that metaphor, then it makes sense. Who am I to question the big man of the house for not spending dwindling paychecks on trips to the movies and school breakfasts for starving children?

It is odd, though, that no one ever wonders why Dad doesn't go back to that higher paying job that he had in the 90s. That's not very manly. Maybe metaphors only go so far.

No surprises

2011-04-02T19:28:00.001-06:00

http://www.vanityfair.com/society/features/2011/05/top-one-percent-201105?currentPage=all

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

An upside to draconian anti-labor moves?

2011-02-17T18:59:00.001-07:00

Organized labor has been stagnant for years. A lot of that problem can be attributed to the success of anti-labor ideology, restrictions on secondary activity, the ability of management to stretch out and taint the election process, and permanent replacements in non-unfair labor practice strikes. Admittedly, the proposed Wisconsin crackdown is on public sector unions, which I know less about and have been led to believe are more successful than their private counterparts.

However, the Wisconsin policy, with its proposal to break strikes by force and the outrage it has created, remind me of the unstable situation that brought on the legitimation of unions in the early 20th century.

Congress didn't pass the National Labor Relations Act to protect workers. It did it because labor unrest and business' myopic refusal to negotiate in good faith was generating a crisis. It was an unstable time with many possibilities, based on which faction was able to hegemonize the situation and direct it to its advantage. The blossoming labor movement could have flourished, bringing about more fundamental economic changes. Instead, we got watered down collective bargaining and an election process weighted in favor of management. Interstate commerce was saved and shop floor unrest was stabilized.

I wonder if the shortsighted overreach by anti-labor ideologues can show how much we've given up or lead us to fight for alternatives that could once not even be uttered.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

Kill the poor, the middle class

2011-02-14T20:16:00.001-07:00

Officials furious jobless funding refused - Wyoming Tribune Eagle Online

I've had it with self-professed followers of Jesus doing everything in their power to crush the unfortunate. Wealthy companies and derivatives speculators crashed the economy, leaving several unemployed people per job opening, but the working class has to suffer. Trillions in tax breaks and bailouts to save capitalism from itself and barely crumbs for the families victimized by structural inequality. What kind of cynical cruelty allows you to cry crocodile tears for family values on one day and them slap working families in the face on the next? Everything is rotten.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

Here is what they are afraid of

2011-01-30T11:28:00.001-07:00

Mobilizing the Jobless | The Nation

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.6

Decay

2011-01-15T11:36:00.004-07:00

Beautiful Decay

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.5

2010 Albums

2011-01-08T15:57:00.005-07:00

Favorite Albums of 2010

Swans – My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky
Grass Widow – Past Time
Nurse with Wound – Erroneous: A Selection of Errors
Bastard Noise – A Culture of Monsters
Sharon Jones – I Learned the Hard Way
Ganjasufi – A Sufi and a Killer
Late – Phantom Papers EP
Ital Tek – Midnight Colour
Alex B – Moments
Darkstar – North
The Budos Band – The Budos Band III
Sun City Girls – Funeral Mariachi
Misery Index – Pulling Out the Nails
Cold Cave & Prurient – Stars Explode
The Left – Gas Mask
Brian Eno – Small Craft on a Milk Sea
ASC – Nothing is Certain
Mark Van Hoen – Where Is the Trust
Liars – Sisterworld
Glenn Branca – The Ascension: The Sequel
Benoît Pioulard – Lasted
Women – Public Strain
Current 93 – Baalstrom, Sing Omega
Various Artists – Ninja Tune XX
Janelle Monáe – The ArchAndroid
Mike Patton – Mondo Cane
Big Boi – Sir Lucious Left Foot
The Roots – How I Got Over
Merzbow – Another Merzbow Records
Various Artists - Warp 20
Dungen – Skit I Allt
Various Artists – Missing Deadlines
Miami Horror – Illumination
Solar Bears – She Was Coloured In
ANBB – Mimikry
ASC – Nothing is Certain
Deerhunter – Halycon Digest
Autolux – Transit Transit
Balmorhea – Constellations
Joanna Newsom – Have One On Me
Andrew Cedermark – Moon Deluxe
The Tallest Man on Earth – The Wild Hunt
Kanye West – My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
The Arcade Fire – The Suburbs
Goldmund – Famous Places
Junip – Fields
Alcest – Ecailles de Lune
Das Racist – Shut Up, Dude
Ikonika – Edits EP
Gold Pnada – Lucky Shriner
Various Artists – Brazilian Guitar Fuzz Bananas
Badawi – El Topo
Onra – Long Distance
Kill the Client – Set for Extinction
Ulrich Schnauss – Epic
Early Graves – Goner
Various Artists – Work It Baby 10th Anniversary
RJD2 – The Colossus
Vampire Weekend – Contra
The National – High Violet
Cee Lo Green – The Lady Killer

ﬡ ﬡ ﬡ ﬡ

Favorite Rerelease of 2010

Rorschach – Remain Sedate/Protestant

ﬡ ﬡ ﬡ ﬡ

Albums I Want to Listen to that Others Have Been Talking About

Active Child – Curtis Lane

Actress – Splazsch
Ali Farka Touré & Toumani Diabaté – Ali & Toumani
Altar Eagle – Mechanical Gardens
Ankia - Anika
Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti – Before Today
Autechre – Move of Ten
Autre Ne Veut – Autre Ne Veut
Bardo Pond – Bardo Pond
Baths – Cerulean
Beach Fossils – Beach Fossils
Beach House – Teen Dream
Benni Hemm Hemm – Retaliate
Best Coast – Crazy for You
BJ Nilsen & Stilluppsteypa – Vikinga Brennivin
Black Breath – Heavy Breathing
Black Milk – Album of the Year
Blue Sky Black Death – Third Party
Boris – Variations
Brochenchord – The Bluestar EP
Burning Star Core – Papercuts Theater
Caribou – Swim
Celph Titled – Nineteen Ninety Now
Charlotte Gainsbourg – IRM
Conan – Horseback Battle Hammer
Cower – The Land Before Time
Crash City Saints – Glow in the Dark Music
Crystal Castles – Crystal Castles
Curren$y – Pilot Talk
D'Arcangelo – Cradle and Go!
Daníel Bjarnason – Processions
Darkthrone – Circle the Wagons
Data – Visualizations Vol. 1
Daughters – Daughters
Day of the Woman – Day of the Woman
Demdike Stare – Liberation through Hearing/Symbiosis
Dessa – A Badly Broken Code
DJ Nate – Da Trak Genious
Dolphins Into the Future - …on Sea-Faring Isolation
Duncan Powell – Came Into View EP
Eleh – Location Monument
El-P – Weareallgoingtoburninhellmegamixx3
Eluvium – Similes
Emeralds – Does It Look Like I'm Here?
Exit Calm – Exit Calm
Fang Island – Fang Island
Fenn O'Berg – In Stereo
Flying Lotus – Cosmogramma
Forest Swards – Dagger Paths
Four Tet – There is Love in You
Games – We Like to Play
Girl Talk – All Day
Gorillaz – Plastic Beach
Grave Miasma – Realm of Evoked Doom
Hidden Orchestra – Night Walks
Holy Fuck – Latin
Hovatron – Let's Get Wet
How to Dress Well – Love Remains
Hype Williams – Find Out What Happens When People Stop Being Polite, And Start Gettin' Reel
Inspired Flight – We All Want to Fly
Intronaut – Valley of Smoke
James Ferraro – Last American Hero
Julie Christmas – The Bad Wife
Kate Nash – My Best Friend is You
Kidz in the Hall – The Land of Make Believe
Kode 9 – DJ Kicks
LA Vampires & Zola Jesus – LA Vampires & Zola Jesus
La Verite – The Divine, Desolate City
Laura Veirs – July Flame
LCD Soundsystem –
Library Tapes – Like Green Grass Against A Blue Sky
Lone – Emerald Fantasy Tracks
LoneLady – Nerve Up
Los Campesinos! – Romance is Boring
Male Bonding – Nothing Hurts
Marnie Stern – Marnie Stern
Maserati – Pyramid of the Sun
Max Richter – Infra
Menomena – Mines
Mount Kimbie – Crooks & Lovers
Mouth of the Architect – The Violence Beneath EP
Nadja – Autopergamene
Nice Nice – Extra Wow
O. Children – O. Children
Ólafur Arnalds – ...And They Have Escaped The Weight Of Darkness
Oneohtrix Point Nevver – Returnal
Owen Pallett – A Swedish Love Story
Pangaea – Pangaea EP
Pariah – Safehouses EP
Potentz – Mission
Punch Brothers – Antifogmatic
Ramadanman – Ramadanman EP
Rangers – Suburban Tours
Rene Hell – Porcelain Opera
Robyn – Body Talk
Roll the Dice – Roll the Dice
RQTN – Decades and Decisions
Salem – King Night
School of Seven Bells – Disconnect from Desire
Secrets of the Third Planet – S3P
Shit Robot – From the Cradle to the Rave
Simian Mobile Disco – Cruel Intentions
Sleigh Bells – Treats
Space Dimension Controller
Starkey – Ear Drums and Black Holes
Sufjan Stevens – The Age of Adz
Surfer Blood – Astrocoast
Sweet Apple – Love & Desperation
Teengirl Fantasy – 7 AM
The Austerity Program – Backsliders and Apostates will Burn
The Books – The Way Out
The Dillinger Escape Plan – Option Paralysis
The Drums – The Drums
The Flashbulb – Arboreal
The Foreign Exchange – Authenticity
The Golden Filter – Voluspa
The Knife – Tomorrow, In a Year
The Library is on Fire – Magic Windows, Magic Nights
The New Pornographers – Together
The Sight Below – It All Falls Apart
The Thermals – Personal Life
Tindersticks – Falling Down a Mountain
Titus Andronicus – The Monitor
Tokimonsta – Midnight Menu
Toro Y Moi – Causers of This
Twin Shadow – Forget
Umberto – Prophecy Of The Black Widow
Various Artists – Don't Mind Control
Various Artists - Shangaan Electro: New Wave Dance Music From South Africa
VHS Head – Trademark Ribbons of Gold
Victoire – Cathedral City
Weapon – From the Devils Tomb
Weekend – Sports
Whirl – Distressor EP
Wild Nothing – Gemini
Yellow Swans – Going Places
Zoë Keating – Into the Trees
Zola Jesus – Stridulum II

The arc of history

2010-12-18T11:27:00.001-07:00

Honestly, I think McCain is most afraid of the fact that DADT will be repealed and nothing bad will happen.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.5

Capital Parts I & II: My Part in Perpetuating Finance and Industrial Capital

2010-10-10T20:10:00.006-06:00

For a while, I didn't get finance capital's place in the broader system of capital. I understood that it was a means of accumulating wealth and enabling business ventures and transactions, but it always seemed abstract and disconnected from the exploitation of laborers that operates on a daily basis. When an investment gets wrapped up in some kind of security and then resold on a secondary market with lots of other securities (as in the credit default swap pyramid scheme that helped bring down the global financial system in 2008), it gets difficult to follow the connection to labor. But this is exactly what Marx meant when he discussed the concept of fetishism. Real relations between people are obscured by seemingly abstract numbers and market fluctuations. It all seems fake, but we treat it as real. The finance capitalist says that it's all just numbers on a page, but continues to treat those numbers as if they were the most important thing in the world.

This made it easier for me to play my role in the financial system. After all, I wasn't out their crushing unions or helping to deny health care claims. I was just shuffling paperwork between different capitalists, helping some protect their assets from others with cutting edge trust instruments. But my paper pushing amounted to another form of fetishism. I knew very well that these instruments were imaginary abstractions, but I treated them like they were real and their legal status caused them to have a real effect on people.

Estate planning is fairly boring, but it plays an important role in modern capitalism. Over the years, liberal governments have created various tools to minimize the accumulation of multi-generational wealth. Even free market advocates saw this as beneficial to stop the concentration of wealth in a few hands―along with all of the social tension that that might cause―and retain some notion of desert to justify the system as a whole. It gets difficult to believe Horatio Alger parables about capitalism benefiting those who work hard when social mobility is low and your ability to become one of the haves or have-nots depends so much on your family's socioeconomic background.

The rich found ways to get around this, often transferring wealth to remote generations, avoiding imposition of the estate tax for quite some time. This was addressed with the Generation Skipping Transfer (GST) tax, that imposed a tax on transfers to so-called "skip" persons in remote generations. Now, however, there is a way of getting around both estate and gift taxes: the trust.

Modern trusts have their roots in English history. While they have existed in various forms for a very long time, they became important during the reign of Henry VIII. The basic idea of a trust is that the owner of property (the settlor) transfers property to a recipient (the trustee) for the benefit of another person (the beneficiary). The trustee holds legal title and the beneficiary has beneficial title. This can provide a number of benefits, allowing for privacy (unlike the probate process), efficiency, the avoidance of transfer taxes, control over assets, and protection from creditors (this is a lot of the work I had been doing).

The biggest obstacle to using trusts to maintain family wealth was the Rule Against Perpetuities (RAP). Anyone who has gone through law school probably shudders at the thought of RAP because of how difficult it is to learn and apply on law school exams.1 The basic rule goes something like this: Any property interest is invalid unless it must vest within 21 years of some life in being at the time of its creation.2 I'll leave aside the strange scenarios that you have to use to determine whether a trust is valid under this rule (imagine situations in which a property interest is created and then everyone who was alive on the planet dies). I'm probably not explaining it very well, which is why I got a terrible grade in Property 2; but the basic idea is that, at some point, a property interest has to vest in someone and the trust has to terminate. This prevented people from creating perpetual trusts that would avoid estate taxes forever.

However, states have been gradually doing away with RAP. Some have extended it to 1,000 years and others have abolished it outright. While this is nice for attorneys who can't grasp the rule's strange application, it's even better for someone who wants to concentrate family wealth. It gets even better when you realize that certain "grandfathered" trusts don't have to deal with the GST because they existed before Congress created the tax. The tricky thing is that a lot of those trusts were created while RAP existed, so they are set to terminate some time this century. That has led estate planners to craft some tricks to transfer the old trust assets into new perpetual trusts while maintaining their GST-exempt status. There is a small time frame in which to do this because GST and estate taxes have been abolished during 2010 because of the expiration of the Bush tax cuts. Right now, lots of estate planners and rich individuals are planning ways to create something called a "dynasty trust" before the year is out, shielding their wealth from public scrutiny and transfer taxes for a very, very long time. If you're in South Dakota, that's forever and if you're in Utah, it's a thousand years.

Wealth disparity is a real problem in this country. Slate had an interesting piece about it recently that looked at a number of reasons for it and why it's a bad thing from a liberal perspective called the Great Divergence. Noah chalks the gap up to a number of factors:

Race and gender are responsible for none of it, and single parenthood is responsible for virtually none of it.
Immigration is responsible for 5 percent.
The imagined uniqueness of computers as a transformative technology is responsible for none of it.
Tax policy is responsible for 5 percent.
The decline of labor is responsible for 20 percent.
Trade is responsible for 10 percent.
Wall Street and corporate boards' pampering of the Stinking Rich is responsible for 30 percent.
Various failures in our education system are responsible for 30 percent.3

While tax policy is not given a large share of the blame, it gets some. The role played by Wall Street also implicates trust law, since trusts have an investment function. A large part of the motivation for dynastic trusts isn't simply that they shield wealth, but that they also allow it to grow. This is largely done by investing trust assets.

But how is any of this possible? Where does dynastic trust wealth come from? It surely does not emerge ex nihilo from the aether. It turns out that my middle of the road estate planning was more directly tied to exploitation through the concept of finance capital than I had understood.

In Chapter Four of Capital, after several chapters explaining the development of the commodity form and the money commodity in often-excruciating detail, Marx explains a key historical shift that makes capital possible. Traditionally, someone produced a commodity, traded it for money, and then exchanged that money for a commodity that he or she wanted. I make a plate of muffins. They have both a use value and an exchange value. I don't like peach muffins, so they have little use value to me. However, they do have an exchange value in that others will exchange a certain quantity of other commodities for my muffins. So I sell them to someone who wants them for $5. I then exchange that $5 for a bag of potato chips. In the end, I am left with the same exchange value, except it is measured in a different commodity: $5 of chips instead of $5 of muffins. But the exchange makes sense because the chips have a use value to me that the muffins didn't. This is called C–M–C exchange (commodity -> money -> commodity). This exchange is intuitive and no one would question it.

But then we get an important historical shift. The capitalist exchanges money, for a commodity, for money (M–C–M exchange). But when this happens, the law of equivalence doesn't make sense anymore. Why would I give someone $5 for muffins and then exchange those muffins for $5? Getting back the same exchange value in money makes no sense. You might as well have just kept the $5 and not wasted your time. There has to be a reason to enter into the transaction: the prospect of generating a profit. This can accomplished either by charging interest (finance capital, which takes on the even stranger sequence of M–M where money is directly exchanged for more money) or by finding a way of extracting surplus value from the process (industrial capital). For this to happen, the capitalist needs to find a commodity that produces more value when it is consumed. That commodity is labor power. Capitalists and laborers meet in an open market where the laborer is free to sell the commodity of his or her labor power (usually as measured by time) to the capitalist. In the M–C–M sequence, money is advanced to the laborer for a certain amount of time worked, rather than spent outright, and received back (hopefully plus profit). David Harvey makes the point in his lecture on Capital that not all money is capital; rather, capital is a process whereby money is put into motion for this purpose.

In his discussion of fetishism, Marx makes a nicely worded point:

The independent form, i.e., the money-form, which the value of commodities assumes in the case of simple circulation, serves only one purpose, namely, their exchange, and vanishes in the final result of the movement. On the other hand, in the circulation M-C-M, both the money and the commodity represent only different modes of existence of value itself, the money its general mode, and the commodity its particular, or, so to say, disguised mode. It is constantly changing from one form to the other without thereby becoming lost, and thus assumes an automatically active character. If now we take in turn each of the two different forms which self-expanding value successively assumes in the course of its life, we then arrive at these two propositions: Capital is money: Capital is commodities. In truth, however, value is here the active factor in a process, in which, while constantly assuming the form in turn of money and commodities, it at the same time changes in magnitude, differentiates itself by throwing off surplus-value from itself; the original value, in other words, expands spontaneously. For the movement, in the course of which it adds surplus-value, is its own movement, its expansion, therefore, is automatic expansion. Because it is value, it has acquired the occult quality of being able to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.4

I was caught up in this mysticism. I believed that capital simply created value and that trusts could be protected from taxation and other creditors and continue to grow, abstracted from the brutal process of day-to-day exploitation. The increase in value of a dynastic trust doesn't come from nowhere, but from the M–C–M (or M–M) cycle. The notion of the dynastic trust spontaneously creating wealth is the kind of occult golden egg laying hen that Marx mocks. Part of the goal of Capital is to demystify this process. As wealthy families grow in size and inflation and income taxes eat away at the real value of dynastic trusts, new means of maximizing profit will have to be achieved.5 This will force ever downward pressure on wages as wealthy people attempt to receive the trust bounty to which they feel they are entitled.

I am an enabler of a violent system.

------------

fn1 Lucas v. Hamm, 364 P.2d 685 (Cal. 1961).

fn2 John Chipman Gray, The Rule Against Perpetuities 191 (4th ed. 1942)

fn3 Timothy Noah, The United States of Inequality, SLATE.COM, Sept. 15, 2010, http://www.slate.com/id/2266025/entry/2267384/.

fn4 1 KARL MARX, CAPITAL (S. Moore & E. Aveling trans., Frederick Engels ed., 1st Eng. ed. 1887) (1867), available at http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch04.htm.

fn5 William J. Turnier & Jeffrey L. Harrison, A Malthusian Analysis of the So-Called Dynasty Trust, 28 VA. TAX REV. 779, 787–88 (2009).

Karl Marx – Wage Labour and Capital

2010-08-16T22:05:00.007-06:00

Text available here.

This is going to be the first installment of my study of Marxism. I think it’s a good place to start because it seems to deal with some of the major issues in Capital (based on my understanding from secondary sources since I’ve only gotten through the first few chapters), which many readers never get to because they give up during the dull―but important―section on commodities.

I am using a text edited by Fredrick Engels. There is some argument that Engels’s views represent a specialized offshoot of Marxism and attempt to make it into a scientific version of political economy. Here, Engels’s goal is to turn the essay into a work that Marx would have written in 1891, rather than 1849. He notes that his chief alteration is to describe workers as selling their “labor power,” rather than their “labor” in exchange for wages. I don’t know of any reason to think that this affects the substance of the work.

Labor power is a commodity that workers sell to capitalists. Like any commodity, labor power has both a use value and an exchange value, which conflict with each other.1 From the perspective of capital, labor power is a use value and the capitalist purchases the right to put the worker to work for a certain period of time. That labor power produces goods or services that the capitalist can sell to replace expended materials, pay labor costs, and generate profits.

In contrast, labor power only has an exchange value to the worker. The worker does not receive a direct share of the product of his or her labor power, but receives the amount that the employer is willing to pay for that labor power. The exchange value of labor power consists of the wage. Workers are forced to sacrifice their labor time and power to those who own the means of production because the alternative is typically starvation (the capitalist system has imposed high costs on unemployment since the proletariat was forced off the land and into the cities and it became necessary to compel them to choose work rather than criminality or some other unproductive (from the standpoint of capital) means of living).

The value of labor power is affected in the same fashion as any other commodity: when demand outpaces supply, the exchange value (wages) go up and when demand decreases, prices go down. If Marx seems to be drifting a little close to classical microeconomics, his approach remains thoroughly non-orthodox.2 He goes beyond mere supply and demand and explains how armies of sellers and workers compete not only with each other, but with themselves. This relationship is dialectical, since the competition is also internal: different kinds of workers (e.g., undocumented immigrants and union labor) compete with each other, driving down wages. However, despite the flux of supply and demand, prices tend to balance out, more or less, meaning that a commodity’s exchange value is brought in accord with the cost of its production: in this case, the cost of materials and labor time.

Another key point is that commodities symbolize social relationships. Something only becomes capital by being transformed by the social relations of production. Not all commodities with exchange values are capital. They must be multiplied and produced via labor power: “It is only the dominion of past, accumulated, materialized labor over immediate living labor that stamps the accumulated labor with the character of capital.” (See Marx's discussion of fetishism in Capital).

Marx shows how the interests of capital and labor are mutually exclusive. Whenever profits grow, relative wages must shrink, widening the lines of stratification between the bourgeois and working classes and increasing social control over labor. A rise in actual wages may often be offset by other factors. One such factor is a rise in commodity prices (often necessities, on which the working class spend the bulk of their income). See Frederick Kaufman, The Food Bubble: How Wall Street Starved Millions and Got Away With It, Harper's, July 2010, at 27 (describing how grain speculation led to a dramatic rise in global wheat prices). This effectively reduces the real wages of workers because, even if they receive more income, they can do less with that income. Capital, on the other hand, experiences an increase in profits, since commodity prices go up faster than does the need to pay workers (this is especially true in a speculation situation in which prices go up without the need for more labor inputs).

Further, even if real wages go up, they will rise more slowly than profits. Money received by businesses while selling goods can be divided into three segments: (1) the cost necessary to replace and fortify the material implements of production, (2) wages, and (3) profits. Since the cost to cover materials merely replaces preexisting wealth, wages and profits must be divided up from the fruits of labor power. This alienates the proceeds of the worker’s labor power and allows capitalists to benefit themselves to a proportionally greater degree than laborers. The effect is that wages fall in a relational sense, since the socioeconomic gap between the worker and the capitalist grows.

This argument is persuasive in light of recent events. First, wages have not kept pace with increases in productivity. Second, moral hazard (the idea that insuring loss discourages loss avoidance) has been inscribed into the capitalist system. It was necessary for the federal government to bail out banks and investment firms when their speculation schemes fell through. The people who stand to profit from such risky activity are effectively shielded from that risk and only stand to gain in the form of short-term profits or a golden parachute. Those who bear the risk (workers, communities, environmental stakeholders, etc.) are simultaneously unable to receive the rewards of such risk-taking and must bear the brunt of it when the bubble bursts and the system collapses. It is difficult to imagine a form of capitalism that would do away with this kind of moral hazard. Simply letting the banks fail would have caused an even greater depression, wounding the working class. However, while large firms are now recovering from the recession and are seeing larger profits, those firms are sitting on their new revenues, rather than allowing them to "trickle down" to workers. See Tom Petruno, Big Companies are Awash in Cash as Economy Picks Up, L.A. Times, Mar. 24, 2010, http://articles.latimes.com/2010/mar/24/business/la-fi-rich-companies24-2010mar24. Meanwhile, the jobless rate continues to be abysmal. While recent numbers might show a slight decrease in unemployment, that may be because some of the jobless have simply given up hope of finding a job and are no longer counted on the unemployment roles. Andy Kroll, More Grim News on Jobs Front, Mother Jones, Aug. 6, 2010, http://motherjones.com/mojo/2010/08/more-grim-news-jobs-front. For a discussion of the moral risk argument as applied to capitalism, see Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce 12-13 (2009).

Marx isolates two means by which capitalism ensures that profits rise to the detriment of wages: (1) technological development and (2) the division of labor. The technological side of this was evident when I was paid to do data entry at Blue Cross–Blue Shield and the company moved from the inefficient process of having people directly type insurance claims into computers to a scanning system. While scanning might have been less unpleasant from my perspective, it required a lower degree of skill and didn’t take as many hours to complete. This meant slashing hours and pay. People who were on track to become full-time employees remained part-time, losing out on health benefits. While the technology allowed me to accomplish the same amount of work in less time, it became more difficult to qualify for productivity bonuses, so I found myself working more hours (informal full-time hours without accompanying benefits) to earn my old wage. Counterintuitively, the rise in productivity allowed by technology forced a drop in real wages, since I had to work longer and donate more of my time to my company without receiving the health insurance that would have once accompanied such an increase in working time.

Competition between capitalists drives this process on a global scale, something we have seen in the outsourcing of labor to nations with lower wages and less strict labor standards during recent decades. As available work and wages fall, workers must work more hours and do so under less pleasant circumstances. This increases the supply of labor and further depresses wages, allowing workers to hurt their own interests as a class for the sake of their individual well-being. Laborers not only compete with each other, but with themselves.

1 Marx writes:

The commodity itself appears as unity of two aspects. It is use value, i.e. object of the satisfaction of any system whatever of human needs. This is its material side, which the most disparate epochs of production may have in common, and whose examination therefore lies beyond political economy. Use value falls within the realm of political economy as soon as it becomes modified by the modern relations of production, or as it, in turn, intervenes to modify them. What it is customary to say about it in general terms, for the sake of good form, is confined to commonplaces which had a historic value in the first beginnings of the science, when the social forms of bourgeois production had still laboriously to be peeled out of the material, and, at great effort, to be established as independent objects of study. In fact, however, the use value of the commodity is a given presupposition -- the material basis in which a specific economic relation presents itself. It is only this specific relation which stamps the use value as a commodity. Wheat, e.g., possesses the same use value, whether cultivated by slaves, serfs or free labourers. It would not lose its use value if it fell from the sky like snow. Now how does use value become transformed into commodity? Vehicle of exchange value. Although directly united in the commodity, use value and exchange value just as directly split apart. Not only does the exchange value not appear as determined by the use value, but rather, furthermore, the commodity only becomes a commodity, only realizes itself as exchange value, in so far as its owner does not relate to it as use value. He appropriates use values only through their sale [Entäusserung], their exchange for other commodities. Appropriation through sale is the fundamental form of the social system of production, of which exchange value appears as the simplest, most abstract expression. The use value of the commodity is presupposed, not for its owner, but rather for the society generally.

Karl Marx, The Grundrisse 881 (M. Nicolaus trans. 1973).

2 See David Harvey, The Limits to Capital 8 (1982) (“Marx accepts the importance of supply and demand in equilibriating the market, but he vehemently denies that supply and demand can tell us anything whatsoever about what the equilibrium prices of commodities will be. ‘If supply and demand balance one another, they cease to explain anything, do not affect market-values, and therefore leave us so much more in the dark . . . .’” (quoting 3 Karl Marx, Capital 189 (F. Engels ed. 1967))).

Course of Study (updated)

2010-08-12T19:57:00.016-06:00

I think this is how my theoretical comments are going to go over the next year. It's fairly ambitious, not overly consistent (Kautsky to Lacan), and in no way complete. But I think it will provide me with some solace while coping with my daily life. Some of my writing might consist of more exegesis than original analysis on the subjects that I'm just trying to get a handle on (especially Capital . . . my grip of economics is very tenuous). Some of them are definitely out of order and others only list an author or movement until I figure out what specific works I want to comment on. This will be filled in as time goes by (I hope).

If you have a suggestion of something I should check out, feel free to contact me. I'm open to old and new things, regardless of whether I think I'll agree with them or not. I'm definitely missing out on some people who are influenced by Marx, but are not Marxists per se, and a lot of non-Marxist socialism, like the Utopians, Proudhon, anarchists, etc.

I can go back to being a good post-structuralist next year.

Preliminary Readings

Karl Marx - Wage Labor and Capital (this seems like a good prelude to Capital, since it lays out the argument that people often don't get to because of the dry and difficult early chapters)
Slavoj Žižek - First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (not chronological at all, but I just read it and it's giving me some ideas about the limits of industrial democracy, especially in relation to collective bargaining, unionization, and shareholder proxy voting)

Marx and Early Marxism

Karl Marx - Capital (this will be informed by Harry Cleaver's Reading Capital Politically & Study Guide to Capital and David Harvey's The Limits to Capital as well as his podcast lectures).
Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy (I suppose this should be in conjunction with Proudhon's Philosophy of Poverty)
Karl Marx - Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right
Karl Marx - Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy
Karl Marx - Critique of the Gotha Program
Karl Marx - The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
General Rules of the International Working Men's Association

Socialism and Statism

Mikhail Bakunin - Statism and Anarchy
Mikhail Bakunin - God and State
Karl Marx - Conspectus of Bakunin's God and State
Ann Robertson - The philosophical roots of the Marx-Bakunin conflict
Post-Fordism and Social Form: A Marxist Debate on the Post-Fordist State - Bonefeld/Holloway, Eds.
State and Capital: A Debate – Holloway/Picciotto, Eds.
The State Debate - Clarke, Ed.
Law and Marxism

German Social Democracy

Rosa Luxemburg - Reform or Revolution
Rosa Luxemburg - Organisational Questions of the Russian Revolution
Rosa Luxemburg - The Mass Strike
Rosa Luxemburg - Leninism or Marxism

Revisionist Social Democracy

Eduard Bernstein - Evolutionary Socialism

Orthodox Marxism

Karl Kautsky - The Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx
Karl Kautsky - Thomas More and His Utopia
Karl Kautsky - The Class Struggle

Lenin and Bolshevism

V.I. Lenin - What is to be Done
Alexandra Kollontai - The Worker's Opposition
G.V. Plekhanov - Materialist Conception of History
G.V. Plekhanov - Monist View of History
Evgeny Pashukanis - General Theory of Law and Marxism

Trotskyism

Leon Trotsky - Results and Prospects
Leon Trotsky - 1905
Leon Trotsky - Terrorism and Communism
Leon Trotsky - Platform of the Joint Opposition
Leon Trotsky - The Third International After Lenin
Leon Trotsky - The Permanent Revolution
Leon Trotsky - The Revolution Betrayed
Leon Trotsky - The Stalin School of Falsification
Tony Cliff - Trotskyism after Trotsky
Tony Cliff - The Nature of Stalinist Russia
Tony Cliff - Rosa Luxemburg
Ernest Mandel - The Marxist Case For Revolution Today
Ernest Mandel - Trotsky's Ideas and the Soviet Union Today
Ernest Mandel - Trotsky's Conception of Self-Organisation and the Vanguard
Ernest Mandel - How to Make No Sense of Marx
Ernest Mandel - Social Democracy and Social Movements
Ernest Germain - In Defence of Leninism
Ernest Mandel - Rosa Luxemburg and German Social Democracy
Ernest Mandel - World Revolution Today
Ernest Mandel - The Labor Theory of Value and Monopoly Capital
Ernest Mandel - An Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory
Ernest Germain - The Theory of State Capitalism
Tom Novack - Understanding History

Western Marxism

György Lukács - What Is Orthodox Marxism
György Lukács -History and Class Consciousness
István Mészáros - Marginal Utility and Neoclassical Economics
István Mészáros - Marx's Theory of Alienation
Etienne Balibar - The Philosophy of Marx
Etienne Balibar - Self-Criticism
Etienne Balibar - On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat

Council Communism

Anton Pannekoek - Workers Councils
Anton Pannekoek - Party and Working Class
Anton Pannekoek - General Remarks on the Question of Organisation
Paul Mattick - Economic Crisis and Crisis Theory
Paul Mattick - Bolshevism and Stalinism
Cajo Brendel - Proletarian Spin-off of the Russian Revolution
Cajo Brendel - Goodbye to the Unions! - A Controversy About Autonomous Class Struggle in Great Britiain
GIK - Fundamental principles of communist production and distribution
GIK - Origins of the Movement for Workers' Councils in Germany
Syliva Pankhurst - Communism and its Tactics
Sylvia Pankhurst - Communism vs. Reformers
Herman Gorter - The Lessons of the March Action
Herman Gorter - Why we need the Fourth Communist Workers' International
Herman Gorter - Open Letter to Comrade Lenin
Dave Graham - An Introduction to Left Communism
Otto Ruhle - The Fight Against Fascism Begins With the Fight Against Bolshevism
Otto Ruhle - The Revolution is not a Party Affair

Hegelian Marxism

Paresh Chattopadhyay - On Some Aspects of the Dialectic of Labor
Paresh Chattopadhyay -Value and Exploitation
Paresh Chattopadhyay - Marx on Capital's Globalization
Cyril Smith - Marx vs. Historical Materialism
Cyril Smith - Meszaros on Lenin
Cyril Smith - Marx's Critique of Political Philosophy
Cyril Smith - Karl Marx and Human Self-Creation
Karl Korsch - Marxism and Philosophy
Karl Korsch - The Present State of the Problem of Marxism and Philosophy
Karl Korsch - A Non-Dogmatic Approach to Marxism
Hiroshi Uchida - Marx's Grundrisse and Hegel's Logic

Autonomia and Associated Tendencies

Karl Marx - Grundrisse (all the way down here because it's so heavily associated with Negri and the Italian autonomists)
Antonio Negri - Marx Beyond Marx
Antonio Negri - Goodbye Mr. Socialism
Hardt & Negri - Empire
Nick Dyer-Witheford - Cybermarx
Nick Dyer-Witheford - Autonomist Marxism and the Information Society
Nick Dyer-Witheford - Cognitive Capital Contested
Selma James - The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community
Selma James - Sex, Race, and Class
Midnight Notes - Darkness at Midnight
Midnight Notes - Spatial Deconstruction in D.C.
Midnight Notes - Promissory Notes
Midnight Notes - Strange Victories
Raniero Panzien - The Capitalist Use of Machinery
Raniero Panzien - Surplus Value and Planning
Mariarosa Dalla Costa - The Door to the Garden
Sergio Bologna - Class Composition and the Theory of the Party at the Origins of the Workers' Council Movement
Sergio Bologna -Nazism and the Working Class
Mario Tronti - The Strategy of Refusal
Mario Tronti -Social Capital
Mario Tronti -Workers and Capital
Aufheben Magazine - Decadence
Harry Cleaver - Crisis Theory
Harry Cleaver - The Chiapas Uprising
Harry Cleaver - Kropotkin
Harry Cleaver - On Schoolwork
Paulo Virno - Between Disobedience and Exodus
Maurizio Lazzarato - Possibilities in the Public Sphere
Paulo Virno - Creating a New Public Sphere Without the State
Adelino Zanini - Multitude and Working Class
Adelino Zanini - Postfordist Lexicon
Matteo Pasquinelli - War Porn War Punk
Antonio Negri - Against Empire
Antonio Negri - Approximation
Antonio Negri - Empire and Multitude
Antonio Negri - Strategies of Resistance
Matteo Pasquinelli - Radical Machines Against Technoempire
Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri - Marx's Mole is Dead
Antonio Negri - Concept and Practice
Alessandro Pandolfi - Are We all Schmittians
Antonio Negri - Multitude and Metropolis
Maurizio Lazzarato - Biopolitics-Bioeconomics
Maurizio Lazzarato - Machines to Crystalize Time
Maurizio Lazzarato - A Deafening Noise
Paolo Virno - Republic of the Multitude
Antonio Negri - Grammar of the Multitude
Antonio Negri - Capitalist Domination and Working Class Sabotage

Johnson-Forest Tendency

CLR James - State Capitalism and World Revolution
CLR James - Notes on Dialectics
Raya Dunayevskaya - Socialism or Barbarism
Raya Dunayevskaya - Women's Liberation, Then and Now
Raya Dunayevskaya - The Uniqueness of Marxist Humanism
Raya Dunayevskaya - A restatement of some fundamentals of Marxism against 'pseudo-Marxism'
Paul Romano and Ria Stone - The American Worker
Radical America 1-1
Radical America 4-4

Socialism or Barbarism

Claude Lefort - What is Bureacracy
Cornelius Castoriadis - On the Content of Socialism
Cornelius Castoriadis - The Working Class and Organisation
Cornelius Castoriadis - Modern Capitalisma nd Revolution
Cornelius Castoriadis - From the Analysis of Bureacracy to Workers Management
Socialisme Ou Barbarie - The Role of Bolshevik Ideology in the Birth of the Bureacracy
Henri Simon - Some Thoughts on Organisation
Henri Simon - From the Suburbs Riots to the Student Movement
Henri Simon - The New Movement
Henri Simon - The Refusal of Work
Andy Anderson - Hungary '56
Solidarity - Third Worldism or Socialism
Solidarity - As We See It
Amadeo Bordiga - The Story of our Origins
Amadeo Bordiga - Is This the Time to Form Soviets
Amadeo Bordiga - Towards the establishment of workers councils in Italy
Amadeo Bordiga - Theses on the Role of the Communist Party in the Proletarian Revolution
Gilles Dauve - When Insurrections Die
Gilles Dauve - Eclipse and Re-emergence of the Communist Movement
Jacques Carnatte - About the Revolution
Jacques Carnatte - On Organization

Structuralism

Louis Althusser - On Marxism
Louis Althusser - How to Read Marx's Capital
Louis Althusser - Notes on Lenin and Philosophy
Louis Althusser - We Must Change in the Party

Gramsci

The Prison Notebooks

Frankfurt School

Max Horkheimer - Critique of Instrumental Reason
Max Horkheimer - Eclipse of Reason
Max Horkheimer - Traditional and Critical Theory
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno - Dialectic of Enlightenment
Theodor Adorno - Hegel: Three Studies
Theodor Adorno - Negaive Dialectics
Theodor Adorno - On Pop Music
Theodor Adorno - The Culture Industry
Theodor Adorno - Culture Industry Reconsidered
Jurgen Habermas - The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
Jurgen Habermas - Legitimation Crisis
Jurgen Habermas - The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity
Walter Benjamin - The Life of Students
Walter Benjamin - The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Walter Benjamin - Critique of Violence
Herbert Marcuse - Negations: Essays in Critical Theory
Herbert Marcuse - Counterrevolution and Revolt
Walter Benjamin - Illuminations
Ernst Bloch - Hitler's Force
Herbert Marcuse - One-Dimensional Man
Herbert Marcuse - The Foundation of Historical Materialism

Lettrist and Situationist Internationals

Raoul Vaneigem - The Book of Pleasures
Raoul Vaneigem - The Revolution of Everyday Life
Guy Debord - Theses on the Situationist International and Its Time
Guy Debord - Society of the Spectacle
Guy Debord - Preliminaries Toward Defining a Unitary Revolutionary Program
Guy Debord - Beneath the Idol, the Bureacrat
Guy Debord & Gil J. Wolman - Pourquoi le lettrisme
Guy Debord, Attila Kotanyi, & Raoul Vaneigem - Theses on the Paris Commune
Situationist International - May 1968 Documents
René Riesel - Preliminaries on Councils and Councilist Organization
Mike Rooke - Marxism is Dead! Long Live Marxism
Asger Jorn - Internationale Situationiste No. 1
Gilles Dauve - Critique of the Situationist International
Gilles Dauve - Intakes

Zerowork

Massimo De Angelis - Value Struggle or Classs Struggle
Massimo De Angelis - Marx's Theory of Primitive Accumulation
Massimo De Angelis - The Zapatista's Voice
Massimo De Angelis - Globalisation, Work, and Class
John Zerzan - Organized Labor versus the Revolt Against Work
William Cleaver - Wildcats in the Appalachian Coal Fields
The Zerowork Collective - Introduction to Zerowork 1
George Caffentzis - Throwing Away the Ladder
Paolo Carpignano - US Class Composition in the 60s

Open Marxism

Ferruccio Gambino - A Critique of Fordism and the Reformist School
Werner Bonefeld - The Permanence of Primitive Accumulation
Werner Bonefeld - The Politics of Debt
Werner Bonefeld - Labor, Capital, and Primitive Accumulation
Werner Bonefeld - The Politics of Globalisation
Werner Bonefeld - Social Constitution and the Form of the Capitalist State
John Holloway - Change the World Without Taking Power
John Holloway - Class Struggle is Assymetrical
John Holloway - The Concept of Power and the Zapatistas

American Socialism

Daniel Deleon - Reform or Revolution
Daniel Deleon - The Burning Question of Trade Unionism
Daniel Deleon - What Means This Strike
Hal Draper - Marx on Democratic Forms of Government
Hal Draper - The Myth of Lenin's Revolutionary Defeatism
Hal Draper - The Two Souls of Socialism
Hal Draper - Marxism and Trade Unions

Laclau and Mouffe

Hegemony and Socialist Strategy

Naomi Klein

The Shock Doctrine (I don't know where to put this, but I want to read it)

Psychoanalysis

Jacques Lacan - Écrits
Jacques Lacan - Various Seminars
Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari - Capitalism and Schizophrenia volumes
Slavoj Žižek - Revolution at the Gates
Slavoj Žižek - In Defense of Lost Causes
Slavoj Žižek - Violence

Alain Badiou

Alain Badiou - Being and Event
Alain Badiou - Metapolitics

So now what?

2010-08-12T01:33:00.002-06:00

Well, law school is over, I took the bar, and I don't have a job. Few people are hiring and most of those positions gets snapped up by people who didn't go to Tier III schools. Law Review and top 5% don't help that much in this economy if you're didn't go to a top 14 school.

In a sense, it's kind of liberating. I don't have to worry about being a respectable lawyer. I don't even have to be a lawyer. Extinction might have kept me in law school just like a hapless pledge who keeps pursuing frat membership just so the week of humiliation he has already received will not be in vain, but I don't need to let that control my life. Sure, I need a job to pay soaring medical bills, avoid homelessness, and eat, but the death cult of the law doesn't have to my way of doing that (especially if the law doesn't want me).

So I think I'm going to try to focus on two things that I've neglected: my interests in philosophy and creative writing. I think I can use this space to post some of my attempts at writing fiction about new religious movement eschatology and exploring the ins and outs of libertarian Marxism and psychoanalysis that I thought I didn't have time to think about over the past two years because I was neck-deep in the drivel that I tried to pass off as legal writing.

We'll see. A plan might be forthcoming.

50 Albums of 2009

2009-12-31T17:09:00.002-07:00

Edited late December 31, 2009 to add A Place to Bury Strangers. I'm disappointed I didn't know about this earlier. It is the second coming of the Jesus and Mary Chain

As usual, I didn't spend as much time listening to music as I would have liked in the past year. This is mostly just the soundtrack for frustrated editing and driving back and forth from work while wearing a wool suit in July.

Definitely not enough Hip Hop. Raekwon was better than I expected but still made me wish I were listening to the original.

Regina Spektor didn't get enough credit from anyone except my wife.

And I am clearly a C93 fanboy. I'll follow him through hell. While others in that crowd (Death in June) got stale and started doing the same thing over and over again, Tibet seems to still be branching out, even if Aleph seems like a direct extension of the guitar-heavy parts of Black Ships.

1. Current 93 - Aleph at Hallucinatory Mountain
2. Hyperdub - 5 Years of Hyperdub (Disc 1)
3. Antony and the Johnsons - The Crying Light
4. Regina Spektor - Far
5. Pretty Lights - Passing By Behind Your Eyes
6. Dan Deacon - Bromst
7. Telefon Tel Aviv - Immolate Yourself
8. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart - The Pains of Being Pure at Heart
9. A Place to Bury Strangers - Exploding Head
10. 93 Million Miles From The Sun - 93 Million Miles From The Sun
11. Two Fingers - Two Fingers
12. Vitalic - Flashmob
13. Mos Def - The Ecstatic
14. Tv Ghost - Cold Fish
15. HEALTH - Get Color
16. Fever Ray - Fever Ray
17. DatA - Skywriter
18. Moby - Wait For Me
19. Fleeting Joys - Occult Radiance
20. Sonic Youth - The Eternal
21. William Basinski - 92982
22. Raekwon - Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... II
23. Kid Cudi - Man On The Moon: The End Of Day
24. Converge - Axe to Fall
25. Bowerbirds - Upper Air
26. Depeche Mode - Sounds of the Universe
27. Doomriders - Darkness Comes Alive
28. Dirty Projectors - Bitte Orca
29. Bastard Noise - Rogue Astronaut
30. Little Black Dress - Snow In June
31. ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead - The Century of Self
32. Snowblood - Snowblood
33. The Fiery Furnaces - I'm Going Away
34. Lindstrøm & Prins Thomas - II
35. FM ATTACK - Dreamatic
36. Caspian - Tertia
37. Tim Hecker - An Imaginary Country
38. Clubroot - Clubroot
39. FaltyDL - Love is a Liability
40. Neko Case - Middle Cyclone
41. Alpinist - Minus.Mensch
42. Hudson Mohawke - Butter
43. Lazer Sword - Gucci Sweatshirt
44. Japandroids - Post-Nothing
45. Mantic Ritual - Executioner
46. Vladislav Delay - Tummaa
47. The Phantom Band - Checkmate Savage
48. The Thermals - Now We Can See
49. Phonat - Phonat
50. Altar of Plagues - White Tomb

Changing direction?

2009-07-11T16:26:00.002-06:00

I don't know why I post news stories here. No one checks this thing regularly and it's all obvious stuff that you can get from real news sites and feeds or the links that people post on facebook. And no one cares about my personal stuff.

I used to post bad poetry. Maybe I'll try writing a novel on here. It's a good way of organizing my thoughts and motivating myself to do something besides stress out over the dull vagaries of trust, federal tax, securities, and electronic privacy law.

Awesome Hip-Hop: Definite & B.L.I.N.G.

2009-05-01T12:09:00.006-06:00

Definite & B.L.I.N.G. - Flavourism

How have I not heard of this before?

Oh yeah, because they're from Aukland. I guess Flight of the Conchords isn't New Zealand's only export.

Nice if you want something upbeat for the coming spring and summer months.

Walt on "The Treason of Hawks"

2009-04-29T10:45:00.002-06:00

What is Benjamin Netanyahu Thinking? | Stephen M. Walt

I am substantially more sympathetic to international relations realists than I used to be, especially of the defensive variety. Contrary to the psychotic image of them encouraged by the likes of Henry Kissinger, nearly all of the them came out against the Iraq invasion, before it was politically expedient.

Walt has an interesting take on the pitfalls of single-minded hawkishness in the context of Netanhayu and the two-state solution:

After pointing out that "treason" is a word that carries especially harsh moral connotations, Ikle noted:

[T]he English language is without a word of equally strong opprobrium to designate acts that can lead to the destruction of one’s government and one’s country, not by giving aid and comfort to the enemy, but by making enemies, not by fighting too little, but by fighting too much and too long. 'Adventurism' -- much too weak a word -- is perhaps the best term to describe this 'treason of the hawks.' ... Treason can help our enemies destroy our country by making them stronger; adventurism can destroy our country by making our enemies more numerous."

I was reminded of Iklé’s insights when I read about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ideas for resuming the peace process with the Palestinians. Netanyahu clearly wants to avoid an open rift with the Obama administration, which has forcefully reiterated its commitment to negotiating a two-state solution. To do that, he has to pay lip service to the peace process. But because Netanyahu has long opposed the creation of a viable Palestinian state and instead wants to extend Israel's control of the West Bank, he has to lay out a set of demands that will endlessly delay the process and make it hard for Obama to put meaningful pressure on him.
According to Ha'aretz, Netanyahu will insist that the Palestinians go beyond their prior recognition of Israel's right to exist (as expressed in the 1993 Oslo Accord) and explicitly recognize Israel as a "Jewish state." Furthermore, he wants the United States to agree that a future Palestinian state be barred from possessing its own army and forbidden from making alliances with other countries, while Israel is permitted to monitor its borders, its airspace, and its use of the electromagnetic spectrum, presumably in perpetuity. In the meantime, the expansion of Israeli settlements will surely continue, and in ways that will soon preclude any possibility of a territorially contiguous state on the West Bank. Lastly, Netanyahu wants to link progress toward a two-state solution with an end to Iran's nuclear program. As I've noted before, this condition would allow Tehran -- purposely or inadvertently -- to derail a two-state solution by stonewalling on the nuclear issue. Ironically, this outcome might suit Iran and Netanyahu alike: Israel could keep expanding settlements and the Islamic Republic could continue to play the Palestine card against its Arab rivals.

My question is this: What is Netanyahu thinking? Doesn't he realize that time has nearly run out for the two-state solution, and that failure to achieve it is by far the most serious threat facing Israel? The prime minister and his allies keep harping about an "existential" threat from Iran, but this bogeyman is mostly nonsense. Iran has zero -- repeat, zero -- nuclear weapons today, and even if it were to acquire a few at some point in the future, it could not use them against nuclear-armed Israel without committing national suicide. Let me say that again: national suicide.

It is just refreshing to read someone who treat Iranians and Palestinians like actual people.

The New Depeche Mode is Good

2009-04-27T10:38:00.004-06:00

Some have said it's the best thing they have done since Violator. I'm still not sure if it's better than Playing the Angel, but it took me a little while to start liking that album.

If you like synthpop, get it.

AMG Review

Harold Koh and Conservative Misinformation

2009-04-20T09:10:00.002-06:00

Good post.

This whole uproar over citing international legal authority is mind-bogglingly stupid. It amounts to insisting that courts aren't allowed to be persuaded by international sources. That's utter bullshit. Persuasion depends on the validity and soundness of the reasoning and there's no reason that U.S. courts can't look to foreign jurisdictions to see what works any more than sovereign state courts can't look to other state courts to see what rules they have adopted. No one is suggesting that foreign law is binding on U.S. courts and the people who are defaming Koh probably know that.

Koh’s unremarkable position is that rulings by non-American courts should be considered, when applicable, as persuasive authority in deciding an issue before an American court. Unless required by treaty, American courts would have no obligation to follow the decisions of any foreign courts. They should merely consider how they addressed the same issue. Not only is this not controversial, it is also common sense.

For example, if Philadelphia’s City Council is considering the effect a smoking ban will have on local businesses, it would be foolish not to look at how similar bans affected business in New York or London. Similarly, if a court is considering whether mentally retarded defendants should be sentenced to death, it might want to see how other democracies with similar values have addressed the issue.

This is little different than a Pennsylvania court citing the opinion of a New Jersey court in support of its decision. To do otherwise would be to ignore the world around us and deprive courts of a valuable tool in understanding the consequences of their decisions. Unless you believe that judges should pay no attention to the results of their actions, Koh’s position should not alarm you.

US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites

2009-03-16T18:50:00.001-06:00

I love the New York Review of Books, even when it's depressing.

Texas Law Enforcement Using Civil Asset Forfeiture to Intimidate Black Drivers

2009-03-11T10:42:00.001-06:00

Not a real surprise. But I'm glad it's getting reported.

By Howard Witt

March 11, 2009

Reporting from Tenaha, Texas — You can drive into this dusty fleck of a town near the Texas-Louisiana state line if you're African American, but you might not be able to drive out of it -- at least not with your car, your cash, your jewelry or other valuables.

That's because the police here allegedly have found a way to strip motorists, many of them black, of their property without ever charging them with a crime. Instead they offer out-of-towners a grim choice: Sign over your belongings to the town, or face felony charges of money laundering or other serious crimes.

More than 140 people reluctantly accepted that deal from June 2006 to June 2008, according to court records. Among them were a black grandmother from Akron, Ohio, who surrendered $4,000 in cash after Tenaha police pulled her over, and an interracial couple from Houston, who gave up more than $6,000 after police threatened to seize their children and put them into foster care, the court documents show. Neither the grandmother nor the couple were charged with or convicted of any crime.

Officials in Tenaha, along a heavily traveled state highway connecting Houston with several popular gambling destinations in Louisiana, say they are engaged in a battle against drug trafficking, and they call the search-and-seizure practice a legitimate use of the state's asset-forfeiture law. That law permits local police agencies to keep drug money and other property used in the commission of a crime and add the proceeds to their budgets.

"We try to enforce the law here," said George Bowers, mayor of the town of about 1,100 residents, where boarded-up businesses outnumber open ones and City Hall sports a broken window. "We're not doing this to raise money. That's all I'm going to say at this point."

But civil rights lawyers call Tenaha's practice something else: highway robbery. The attorneys have filed a federal class-action lawsuit seeking unspecified damages and a halt to what they contend is an unconstitutional perversion of the law's intent, used primarily against African Americans who have done nothing wrong.

Tenaha officials "have developed an illegal 'stop and seize' practice of targeting, stopping, detaining, searching, and often seizing property from apparently nonwhite citizens and those traveling with nonwhite citizens," asserts the lawsuit, which was filed in U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Texas.

The property seizures are not happening just in Tenaha. In southern parts of Texas near the Mexican border, for example, Latinos allege that they are being singled out.

According to a prominent Texas state legislator, police agencies across the state are wielding the asset-forfeiture law more aggressively to supplement their shrinking operating budgets.

"If used properly, it's a good law-enforcement tool to see that crime doesn't pay," said Democratic state Sen. John Whitmire, chairman of the Senate's Criminal Justice Committee. "But in this instance, where people are being pulled over and their property is taken with no charges filed and no convictions, I think that's theft."

Money, minorities

David Guillory, an attorney in nearby Nacogdoches who filed the federal lawsuit, said he combed through Shelby County court records from 2006 to 2008 and discovered nearly 200 cases in which Tenaha police seized cash and property from motorists. In about 50 of the cases, suspects were charged with drug possession.

But in 147 others, Guillory said the court records showed, the police seized cash, jewelry, cellphones and sometimes even automobiles from motorists but never found any contraband or charged them with any crime. Of those, Guillory said he managed to contact 40 of the motorists directly -- and discovered that all but one of them were black.

"The whole thing is disproportionately targeted toward minorities, particularly African Americans," Guillory said. "Every one of these people is pulled over and told they did something, like, 'You drove too close to the white line.' That's not in the penal code, but it sounds plausible. None of these people have been charged with a crime; none were engaged in anything that looked criminal. The sole factor is that they had something that looked valuable."

In some cases, police used the fact that motorists were carrying large amounts of cash as evidence that they must have been involved in laundering drug money, even though Guillory said each of the drivers he contacted could account for where the money had come from and why they were carrying it -- such as for a gambling trip to Shreveport, La., or to purchase a used car from a private seller.

Once the motorists were detained, the police and the Shelby County district attorney quickly drew up legal papers presenting them with an option: Waive their rights to their cash and property or face felony charges for crimes such as money laundering -- and the prospect of having to hire a lawyer and return to Shelby County multiple times to contest the charges in court.

Apparently routine

The process apparently is so routine in Tenaha that Guillory discovered pre-signed and pre-notarized police affidavits with blank spaces left for an officer to fill in a description of the property being seized.

Jennifer Boatright, her husband and two young children -- a mixed-race family -- were traveling from Houston to visit relatives in East Texas in April 2007 when Tenaha police pulled them over, alleging that they were driving in a left-turn lane.

After searching the car, the officers discovered what Boatright said was a gift for her sister: a small, unused glass pipe made for smoking marijuana. Although they found no drugs or other contraband, the police seized $6,037 that Boatright said the family was carrying to purchase a used car -- and then threatened to turn their children, ages 10 and 1, over to Child Protective Services if the couple didn't agree to sign over their right to their cash.

"It was give them the money or they were taking our kids," Boatright said. "They suggested that we never bring it up again. We figured we better give them our cash and get the hell out of there."

Several months later, after Boatright and her husband contacted an attorney, Tenaha officials returned their money but offered no explanation or apology. The couple remain plaintiffs in the federal lawsuit.

Except for Tenaha's mayor, none of the defendants in the federal lawsuit, including Shelby County Dist. Atty. Lynda Russell and two Tenaha police officers, responded to requests for comment about their search-and-seizure practices. Lawyers for the defendants also declined to comment, as did several of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit.

But Whitmire says he doesn't need to await the suit's outcome to try to fix what he regards as a statewide problem. On Monday, he introduced a bill in the state Legislature that would require police to go before a judge before attempting to seize property under the asset-forfeiture law -- and ultimately Whitmire hopes to tighten the law further so that law-enforcement officials will be allowed to seize property only after a suspect is charged and convicted in a court.

"The law has gotten away from what was intended, which was to take the profits of a bad guy's crime spree and use it for additional crime fighting," Whitmire said. "Now it's largely being used to pay police salaries -- and it's being abused because you don't even have to be a bad guy to lose your property."

Telefon Tel Aviv - Immolate Yourself

2009-02-12T09:52:00.006-07:00

I heard a track on the Brainwashed podcast (which you should subscribe to if you enjoy experimental music, everything from shoegaze to IDM to Coil) and got the whole thing. It's beautiful electronic music with emotional synths and spare vocals, along the lines of m83. Melancholic feel.

Unfortunately, it's their last because Charles Cooper died in January. It makes for a sad listening experience, but enjoyable.

Sublime Frequencies: Group Bombino - Guitars from Agadez Vol. 2

2009-02-09T10:05:00.004-07:00

Good new music from a troubled region in Niger, but appears to be sold out from the source. It's better if you know the context.

Here

Group Bombino is the latest salvo from the Agadez music scene. Led by the guitar virtuoso Omara Mochtar (Bombino), the group’s debut LP-- Volume two in the Guitars from Agadez series, represents the latest chapter in the modern sound of the Tuareg revolution. As of 2008, the Tuareg rebellion is in full force again, and Bombino is in exile to parts unknown. Agadez has been cut off from the rest of Niger. The only road that connects this legendary city with the rest of the country is littered with land mines and the only escorts are the military. This music and its messages of hope, justice, and desire for validation of the Kel Tamachek way of life ring louder than ever. Group Bombino are gaining mythic status in and around the Tuareg community for their incendiary live performances. Coming from the same scene as Group Inerane and sharing some of the same musicians, Group Bombino showcase both sides of the Tuareg Guitar style. Side one features the “Dry Guitar” sound, an unplugged selection of songs sung among the dunes and stars of the Tenere desert. Side two showcases the electric fury of the full band, a melding of heavy, psychedelic guitar heroics with a raw garage sound, back beat percussion, all swirling in extended trance rock moves. Recorded live and unfiltered in Agadez and the surrounding desert in early 2007, with the band’s equipment powered by generators and an unflinching dedication to the rebellion, Group Bombino’s music transcends any influence and ignites the raw passion of its message to the outside world. This is a one-time pressing of 1,500 copies. Pressed on 180 gram vinyl and comes in a gatefold full color jacket stocked with great photos of the musicians and liner notes by Hisham Mayet.

Here

Not every African band has a revolutionary backstory, but this one does. In early 2007, Sublime Frequencies co-founder Hisham Mayet discovered Group Bombino in Agadez, a Niger city accessible only by traveling a landmine littered road with a military escort, according to the label. Mayet recorded the group—led by guitar genius Omara Mochtar— live in Agadez and the surrounding desert with generator-powered equipment, and pressed 1500 LPs of the music that was made.

The first half of the record features an almost mournful Mochtar playing acoustic or “dry” guitar, his rhythms punched out with handclaps, the songs sung out in layered voices. The second half is reserved for the thumpers, with Moctar plugged in persistently sustaining a groove, trilling notes over the thick bass. The LP joins two other recent Sublime Frequencies releases that focus on modern African guitar sounds and the Tuareg scene. Years from now, Tuareg may be viewed as this century’s new Delta or Mississippi Hill Country, with Mochtar in the role of RL Burnside and Mayat as its Alan Lomax. (Jason Cherkis)

A bit of what's going on in the region

BAMAKO (AFP) — A hardline Tuareg rebel leader is no longer on Malian territory, a military official said Friday, amid new signs of peace between Bamako and former rebel factions.
Ibrahim Ag Bahanga, whose forces reportedly have been routed by the Malian army, "is no longer on Malian territory. We control all his positions in northern Mali," Captain Alioune Diakite told AFP from the region.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, an Algerian official claimed to have "the same information."
On Thursday, members of another former Tuareg rebel group, the Alliance for Democracy and Change (ADC), reportedly accepted new government proposals to end the conflict in the north of Mali.
Ag Bahanga's group is the only one that has so far refused to join the peace process, but several members of his group have recently asked Algerian mediators to join.
The Tuaregs are a nomadic desert people who have roamed the southern Sahara for centuries. In recent years they have staged uprisings in both Mali and Niger, claiming autonomy for their traditional homeland.

So long, Rabbit

2009-01-28T22:35:00.000-07:00

And now John Updike is dead. That's two writers that really touched my life gone in less than a year.

Damn it

2009-01-23T14:06:00.003-07:00

Nadine Strossen is speaking to my red state law school and I have a makeup class during it. My grasp of hearsay is too tenuous to skip.

Three good developments today

2009-01-23T10:38:00.001-07:00

Green Light for US Stem Cell Work

Senate OKs Wage-Bias Law

Obama to End Mexico City Rule

Searching for news stories on family planning funding is irritating because all of the top stories on Google News are from the Christian Broadcasting Network or Catholic Culture.

Thank god

2009-01-22T17:12:00.003-07:00

Obama Issues Directives to Shut Down Guantanamo, Extraordinary Rendition, Torture, etc.

President Obama signed executive orders Thursday directing the Central Intelligence Agency to shut what remains of its network of secret prisons and ordering the closing of the Guantánamo detention camp within a year, government officials said.

The orders, which are the first steps in undoing detention policies of former President George W. Bush, rewrite American rules for the detention of terrorism suspects. They require an immediate review of the 245 detainees still held at the naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to determine if they should be transferred, released or prosecuted.

And the orders bring to an end a Central Intelligence Agency program that kept terrorism suspects in secret custody for months or years, a practice that has brought fierce criticism from foreign governments and human rights activists. They will also prohibit the C.I.A. from using coercive interrogation methods, requiring the agency to follow the same rules used by the military in interrogating terrorism suspects, government officials said.

Now about that Mexico City policy...

How appropriate

2009-01-21T10:15:00.002-07:00

It's somewhat fitting that one of Bush's final acts in office was to commute the sentences of two border control agents who shot a non-threatening person who was running away from them and then tried to cover up the evidence.

Takeover Rhetoric

2009-01-18T23:53:00.003-07:00

Researching the history of corporate takeovers is more interesting than I had imagined, at least for aesthetic reasons. I had no idea there were so many fun metaphors: Poison Pill, Suicide Pill, Gray Knights, Greenmail, Jonestown Defense, Pac-Man Defense, Lobster Trap, Shark Repellent, Killer Bees.

How the Bush administration screwed up the Civil Rights Division...

2009-01-16T10:03:00.004-07:00

...with the help of the Federalist Society.

I haven't found the report yet, but the summary on the NYT's editorial page is frightening (although we already knew how Bush and Gonzales politicized the DoJ). I guess I'm going to one of those attorneys that isn't a "Real American."

The report found that a former senior Justice Department official, Bradley Schlozman, set out to hire so-called “Right-Thinking Americans,” including members of the Federalist Society and other Republicans, for what were supposed to be apolitical career positions. He then gave them plum assignments on civil rights cases when he was helping to run the Civil Rights Division, beginning in 2003.
The report also concluded that Mr. Schlozman, who left the Justice Department in 2007 amid the uproar over the dismissal of at least eight United States attorneys, which led to Mr. Gonzales’s resignation, gave false statements to Congress when he repeatedly denied factoring politics and ideology into his hiring decisions.
The report’s case against Mr. Schlozman relies heavily on his words, from e-mail and phone messages to colleagues and underlings. His disdain for the traditional independence and mission of the Civil Rights Division is palpable. He spoke brazenly about reshaping the division by doing away with “pinko” and “crazy lib” lawyers and others he did not consider “real Americans.”
“As long as I’m here, adherents of Mao’s Little Red Book need not apply,” he wrote in one e-mail message. The report found that Mr. Schlozman transferred three lawyers out of the division because they were viewed as liberals who opposed his political agenda. The transfers, the report found, violated federal civil service law and “constituted misconduct.” All three lawyers brought federal discrimination claims and returned to the division after Mr. Schlozman’s departure.
While he was a senior official in the division, political appointees overruled career lawyers to approve a Texas redistricting law that clearly violated the 1965 Voting Rights Act, as well as a plainly unconstitutional voter identification law in Georgia that amounted to a modernized poll tax.

Over 20 Versions of the Exact Same, Terrible Right Wing Cartoon

2009-01-15T22:17:00.003-07:00

Good collection showing how editorial cartoonists distribute their trite talking points:

If Global Warming is Real, Then Why is it Cold?

People are really this stupid. They seriously think that the IPCC has no idea that the Northern Hemisphere tilts away from the Sun once a year.

Edit: Here are some hilariously awful McCoy cartoons. At least they're not making an identical joke.

Bush administration official admits that torture occurred

2009-01-15T10:39:00.001-07:00

Oh my.

The top Bush administration official in charge of deciding whether to bring Guantanamo Bay detainees to trial has concluded that the U.S. military tortured a Saudi national who allegedly planned to participate in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, interrogating him with techniques that included sustained isolation, sleep deprivation, nudity and prolonged exposure to cold, leaving him in a "life-threatening condition."

"We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani," said Susan J. Crawford, in her first interview since being named convening authority of military commissions by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in February 2007. "His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that's why I did not refer the case" for prosecution.

Queen II on vinyl

2009-01-03T13:38:00.005-07:00

I think this is the first version of this record that I've heard that hasn't been a shitty tape dub or CD-R in a long time. It's nice to hear a clean transition from "March of the Black Queen" to "Funny How Love Is."

Thanks, wife.

It makes me think of being in Junior High, dubbing it for my best friend from the county library's scratched up CD. Last I heard, he was in Iraq with the U.S. Army, which makes me nostalgic and nervous.

Top 50 Albums of 2008 +stuff I didn't get to

2008-12-30T01:52:00.002-07:00

1. Have a Nice Life - Deathconsciousness
2. Snowman - The Horse The Rat and the Swan
3. Zeigeist - The Jade Motel
4. Ital Tek - Cyclical
5. M83 - Saturdays = Youth
6. The Bridal Shop - From Seas
7. Ladytron - Velocifero
8. Sunset - The Glowing City
9. Bohren & Der Club of Gore - Dolores
10. Portishead - Third
11. Deerhunter - Microcastle
12. Made Out Of Babies - The Ruiner
13. Deerhoof - Offen Maggie
14. Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago
15. Benga - Diary of an Afro Warrior
16. Bun B - Ill Trill
17. Fight Like Apes - And the Mystery of the Golden Medallion
18. Kidz in the Hall - The In Crowd
19. Les Gars - La Physique
20. Islands - Arm's Way
21. Friendly Fires - Friendly Fires
22. Nomo - Ghost Rock
23. Onra - Chinoiseries
24. 2562 - Aerial
25. Ryoji Ikeda - Test Pattern
26. Coil - The New Backwards
27. Nine Inch Nails - Ghosts I-IV
28. Legowelt - The Rise & Fall of Manuel Noriega
29. Claro Intelecto - Metanarrative
30. Benoit Pioulard - Temper
31. Jasper TX - Black Sleep
32. Los Campesinos! - Hold On Now, Youngster...
33. Grails - Take Refuge In Clean Living
34. A Made Up Sound - Shortcuts
35. Elzhi - The Preface
36. Dusk + Blackdown - Margins Music
37. Porn & Merzbow - And the Devil Makes Three
38. 9th Wonder & Buckshot - The Formula
39. Fennesz - Black Sea
40. Women - Women
41. The Cure - 4:13 Dream
42. Religious Knives - The Door
43. Kuruucrew - BATTLEDISCO!!!
44. Human Highway - Moody Motorcycle
45. Hercules and Love Affair - Self Titled
46. Boris - Smile (US)
47. The Tallest Man on Earth - Shallow Grave
48. Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend
49. 5ive - Hesperus
50. Fucked Up - The Chemistry of Common Life

And here's what I didn't get to listen to enough to have an opinion:

Sigur Ros
Love is All
Vivian Girls
Fleet Foxes
Max Richter
Anoraak
Johann Johannson
Glasvegas
Peter Broderick
Matt Elliot
Cut Copy
Jarboe
Mr. Oizo
Sylvain Chauveau
Lucinda Williams
Like Honey
Silver Jews
Frightened Rabbit
Elliot Brood
No Age
The Endless Blockade
Underground Railroad
Okkervil River
Marnie Stern
Black Milk
David Byrne & Brian Eno
Max Tundra

Mp3 collections and Lacan

2008-12-05T02:00:00.005-07:00

It's the time when people start compiling their lists of the year's best music. I've cobbled together my own lists over the past few Decembers, in spite of the fact that I'm not a music professional and no one, not even my wife and cats, cares that much about whether I liked Boris's Smile better than some unrelated dubstep album. Looking back at them, it's interesting to see what was a top 10 list turn into a top 50, not including runner-up albums. It wasn't too long ago that I had a difficult time coming up with 10 new albums with which I was even familiar.

As the year ends, I find myself furiously listening to recommended albums that I missed during the past year. Part of me is horrified that I might have missed something good. And inevitably (as most things that confuse me do), it makes me think about Lacan and the superego injunction to "enjoy!" at all costs. What was once a simple pleasure has become an all consuming, unstoppable burden that I've placed on myself. For all of the time that I spend pouring over hornbooks and case law, I spend an equal amount of time organizing my digital music collection, making sure all of the genre and year tags are right, and getting the best possible album art. I spend more time doing this than actually listening to a good portion of the music itself. But thanks to cheap hard drive space, I have a way of hording all of this music without the burden of actually listening to and enjoying it. My Western Digital drive relieves me from that task.

I am reminded of a Zizek quote (yes, I know, roll your eyes):

In order to account for these paradoxes, Robert Pfaller recently coined the term "interpassivity." Today, it is a commonplace to emphasize how, with new electronic media, the passive consumption of a text or a work of art is over: I no longer merely stare at the screen, I increasingly interact with it, entering into a dialogic relationship with it (from choosing the programs, through participating in debates in a Virtual Community, to directly determining the outcome of the plot in so-called "interactive narratives"). Is, however, the other side of my interacting with the object instead of just passively following the show, not the situation in which the object itself takes from me, deprives me of, my own passive reaction of satisfaction (or mourning or laughter), so that is is the object itself which "enjoys the show" instead of me, relieving me of the superego duty to enjoy myself? Almost every VCR aficionado who compulsively records hundreds of movies (myself among them), is well aware that the immediate effect of owning a VCR, is that one effectively watches less films than in the good old days of a simple TV set without a VCR; one never has time for TV, so, instead of losing a precious evening, one simply tapes the film and stores it for a future viewing (for which, of course, there is almost never time).

One should therefore turn around one of the commonplaces of the conservative cultural criticism: in contrast to the notion that the new media turn us into passive consumers who just stare blindly at the screen, one should claim that the so-called threat of the new media resides in the fact that they deprive us of our passivity, of our authentic passive experience, and thus prepare us for the mindless frenetic activity.

But I should really be writing about computer fraud now.

I guess Obama is Nixon.

2008-12-02T16:37:00.006-07:00

It's strange watching talking heads who kept nodding their heads for the past eight years flipping out about Eric Holder's connections to the Clinton pardons. They're seriously using Nixon comparisons.

Where the hell have all of you been for the past eight years? I'm not saying Clinton should get a pass on pardoning Rich, but after Schiavo, Iraq, Katrina, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, extraordinary renditions, Plame, warrantless wiretapping, indefinitely holding citizens without charge, torture, and so on, it seems hard to get outraged about Clinton pardons. Bush pardoned someone who committed perjury to cover up the crimes of his own administration.

After all of that garbage, now we're getting the Nixon comparisons? Are you serious?

Awesome night, but...

2008-11-04T22:22:00.002-07:00

I am so happy about Obama's victory that it's surreal.

But part of me is terrified about proposition 8 in California. If gay marriage gets rolled back there... I just don't know.

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU

2008-11-04T21:06:00.003-07:00

Your scare politics don't work anymore. Resign yourself to being a regional party and die.

Oh dear lord

2008-09-27T02:49:00.004-06:00

Sarah Palin is either a complete idiot or a brilliant experimental poet influenced by dada and the cut-up techniques of William S. Burroughs.

First:

Katie Couric: You've cited Alaska's proximity to Russia as part of your foreign policy experience. What did you mean by that?

Sarah Palin: That Alaska has a very narrow maritime border between a foreign country, Russia, and, on our other side, the land-boundry that we have with Canada. It's funny that a comment like that was kinda made to … I don't know, you know … reporters.

Couric: Mocked?

Palin: Mocked, yeah I guess that's the word, mocked.

Couric: Well, explain to me why that enhances your foreign-policy credentials.

Palin: Well, it certainly does, because our, our next-door neighbors are foreign countries, there in the state that I am the executive of. And there…

Couric: Have you ever been involved in any negotiations, for example, with the Russians?

Palin: We have trade missions back and forth, we do. It's very important when you consider even national-security issues with Russia. As Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where do they go? It's Alaska. It's just right over the border. It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right next to, they are right next to our state.

Second:

That's why I say I, like every American I'm speaking with, were ill about this position that we have been put in. Where it is the taxpayers looking to bail out. But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy. Um, helping, oh, it's got to be about job creation, too. Shoring up our economy, and getting it back on the right track. So health care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions, and tax relief for Americans, and trade -- we have got to see trade as opportunity, not as, uh, competitive, um, scary thing, but one in five jobs created in the trade sector today. We've got to look at that as more opportunity. All of those things under the umbrella of job creation.

Third:

PALIN: Every American student needs to come through this area so that, especially this younger generation of Americans is, to be in a position of never forgetting what happened here and never repeating, never allowing a repeat of what happened here. I wish every American would come through here. I wish every world leader would come through here, and understand what it is that took place here and more importantly how America came together and united to commit to never allowing this to happen again. And just to hear and from and see these good New Yorkers who are rebuilding not just this are but helping to rebuild america has been very, very inspiring and encouraging. These are the good americans who are committed to peace and security and its been an absolute honor getting to meet these folks today.

CNN: On the topic of never letting this happen again, do you agree with the way the Bush administration has handled the war on terrorism, is there anything you would do differently?

A: I agree with the Bush administration that we take the fight to them. We never again let them come onto our soil and try to destroy not only our democracy, but communities like the community of New York. Never again. So yes, I do agree with taking the fight to the terrorists and stopping them over there.

Fourth:

Couric: You recently said three times that you would never, quote, "second guess" Israel if that country decided to attack Iran. Why not?

Palin: We shouldn't second guess Israel's security efforts because we cannot ever afford to send a message that we would allow a second Holocaust, for one. Israel has got to have the opportunity and the ability to protect itself. They are our closest ally in the Mideast. We need them. They need us. And we shouldn't second guess their efforts.

Couric: You don't think the United States is within its rights to express its position to Israel? And if that means second-guessing or discussing an option?

Palin: No, abso … we need to express our rights and our concerns and …

Couric: But you said never second guess them.

Palin: We don't have to second-guess what their efforts would be if they believe … that it is in their country and their allies, including us, all of our best interests to fight against a regime, especially Iran, who would seek to wipe them off the face of the earth. It is obvious to me who the good guys are in this one and who the bad guys are. The bad guys are the ones who say Israel is a stinking corpse and should be wiped off the face of the earth. That's not a good guy who is saying that. Now, one who would seek to protect the good guys in this, the leaders of Israel and her friends, her allies, including the United States, in my world, those are the good guys.

15000 words

2008-09-25T23:55:00.002-06:00

Jesus, I could be a quarter of the way through writing a novel by now. And that might have actually been entertaining.

David Foster Wallace dead

2008-09-14T13:47:00.002-06:00

Very, very sad. He was only in his forties.

I never finished Infinite Jest, but it comforted me during a really horrible point in my life.

In God We Trust

2008-09-12T10:33:00.003-06:00

McCain on The View (yeah, I know) just cited "in God we trust" as evidence that the founders established the U.S. on Christian principles.

How mortifying is it that someone running for President on a major ticket actually believes that?

The politics of stupidity

2008-09-10T19:21:00.003-06:00

There's a Newsweek piece that's spot on about the bullshit we've seen in the past two days.

I thought I'd seen it all during the Bush era. I thought that McCain was the best of a disgusting bunch and would at least be honest.

Wow, was I wrong.

And it looks like this shit is working. If we lose this cycle, I just give up. If the American public still falls for this garbage after eight years of Bush, I don't know what else we can do. These people have figured out how to game the public with demagogic tactics and no amount of truth on our part can do a thing about that.

I don't know if I have the energy anymore. It's just too fucking ridiculous for me to comprehend.

Years ago, I posted about how we had slid over the edge of the tragic into farce. Little did I know how much worse things could get.

2008-09-05T22:47:00.002-06:00

Apparently the forty page limit for law review notes includes footnotes.

Oops. Time to start pruning the chaff.

The Shield wins a Buffy

2008-09-05T22:42:00.003-06:00

Salon awarded "The Shield" a Buffy award for being the most underrated show on television.

When I first noticed the show, it was during the run up to the Iraq invasion and I assumed it was another 24-esque post-9/11 show about how awesome it is when cops violate people's civil liberties.

My judgment was clouded by the time that I was in and I was really, really wrong.

I thought the 9/11 tribute kitsch couldn't get worse

2008-09-02T13:14:00.003-06:00

Oh my god.

Now you can get non-circulating Liberian tender with the numbers 9 and 11 adding up to twenty d0llars with the image of the two towers on the front. It even comes with a display case.

If you watch the TV ad, they're practically celebrating the date. Sure, they say that it's a tragedy but the tone of voice suggests that they're selling Mother's Day cards.

lexis...

2008-08-27T23:58:00.002-06:00

Who the hell came up with the idea that dual column print is the best way to view court decisions in a word processor?

Game of Pricks

2008-08-23T03:17:00.003-06:00

Listening to Guided by Voices' greatest hits album makes me feel like it's the summer of 2002 again. I had just met my future wife, was under house arrest, worked at a bakery, drove a volkswagen, and had just discovered this thing called lo-fi indie rock. We didn't have cable or Internet, could barely afford Taco Bell, and I had to sneak out of the house at night, but it was a really good summer.

Ugh.

2008-08-22T02:41:00.002-06:00

I guess I should have known that writing a note for the law review would be difficult, but I didn't think I would struggle this much. I'm going to be half alive on the first day of class. Lord knows when I'll have time to write the memo I need to do for my internship or finish my pre-class reading.

McCain's Ace in the Hole is the Very Reason He's Unfit to President

2008-08-17T17:30:00.004-06:00

An article in the NYT demonstrates why foreign policy, supposedly McCain's biggest advantage, is the very reason he shouldn't be anywhere near the Oval Office:

Within hours [of the World Trade Center attacks], Mr. McCain, the Vietnam War hero and famed straight talker of the 2000 Republican primary, had taken on a new role: the leading advocate of taking the American retaliation against Al Qaeda far beyond Afghanistan. In a marathon of television and radio appearances, Mr. McCain recited a short list of other countries said to support terrorism, invariably including Iraq, Iran and Syria.
“There is a system out there or network, and that network is going to have to be attacked,” Mr. McCain said the next morning on ABC News. “It isn’t just Afghanistan,” he added, on MSNBC. “I don’t think if you got bin Laden tomorrow that the threat has disappeared,” he said on CBS, pointing toward other countries in the Middle East.
Within a month he made clear his priority. “Very obviously Iraq is the first country,” he declared on CNN. By Jan. 2, Mr. McCain was on the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt in the Arabian Sea, yelling to a crowd of sailors and airmen: “Next up, Baghdad!”
[...]
Whether through ideology or instinct, though, Mr. McCain began making his case for invading Iraq to the public more than six months before the White House began to do the same. He drew on principles he learned growing up in a military family and on conclusions he formed as a prisoner in North Vietnam. He also returned to a conviction about “the common identity” of dangerous autocracies as far-flung as Serbia and North Korea that he had developed consulting with hawkish foreign policy thinkers to help sharpen the themes of his 2000 presidential campaign.
While pushing to take on Saddam Hussein, Mr. McCain also made arguments and statements that he may no longer wish to recall. He lauded the war planners he would later criticize, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney. (Mr. McCain even volunteered that he would have given the same job to Mr. Cheney.) He urged support for the later-discredited Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi’s opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress, and echoed some of its suspect accusations in the national media. And he advanced misleading assertions not only about Mr. Hussein’s supposed weapons programs but also about his possible ties to international terrorists, Al Qaeda and the Sept. 11 attacks.

Maybe there is reason that McCain doesn't know the difference between Sunni and Shia groups. Whether it's Iraq, Iran, North Korea, or Al Qaeda, he has this simplistic worldview that calls for the same cookie cutter response to every problem.

But Obama is a celebrity (unlike that other Presidential candidate who has appeared on SNL and several other late night programs), so he couldn't possibly have a more sophisticated view of foregin affairs!

Buff1 - There's Only One

2008-08-17T12:36:00.003-06:00

This one might be on some end of year lists. Independent-minded, good flow, and isn't afraid of using a catchy hook. The production is top notch too.

Buff1 - There's Only One

I'm so sick of this "racism is irrelevant" bullshit

2008-08-03T12:33:00.006-06:00

We now live in bizarro world, where pointing out the obvious racial context of this election is racist, even though Republicans have been playing on racial fears for decades. Apparently, the most racist thing you can do in America these days is to point out that racism exists. If you think it's a coincidence that all of the faces on our money are white, you are lying to yourself. Obama faces serious challenges in running as the first black candidate of a major party and pretending that they don't exist is ridiculous.

Obama is facing a clear double-standard. The very fact that he's black means that he has to stay away from focusing on race, even when doing so is appropriate, for fear of being labeled "uppity" or a "dangerous black man." McCain, meanwhile, is free to spout off racial epithets like "gook" and no one cares. He can use imagery that is racially charged, as in his ad juxtaposing Obama with Britney and Paris, but if anyone point that out, they are decried for being the real racists. But if Obama even suggests that his race may be used against him, it sets of a storm of controversy.

McCain faced racist attacks, himself, in 2000, and he wasn't even black. Now he has hired people associated with Bush's political campaigns and he's surprised that people are preparing for racially charged attacks? If he were honest, he would acknowledge his party's legacy of racism and vow not to repeat it. But he won't, because acknowledging that it exists would reveal the elephant in the room and take away one of his best means of defaming Obama.

What was the devil's greatest trick, again?

Afrobeat!

2008-08-03T03:19:00.004-06:00

I don't know why I never got into Afrobeat before, but it's sick stuff. Really funky beats and fun improvisation. Good music for the Summer or for when you want to feel good in spite of all of the messed up stuff that's going on around us.

I've been listening to these albums and want to get more:

Fela Kuti & Afrika '70 - Zombie
Fela Kuti & Afrika '70 - Opposite People + Sorrow Tears and Blood
Fela Kuti - The '69 Los Angeles Sessions
Fela Kuti - Yellow Fever/Na Poi
Chicago Afrobeat Project - Self-titled (they have a newer album I haven't heard)
Geraldo Pino & the Heartbeats - Afro Soco Soul Live
G eraldo Pino - Let's Have a Party
Various Artists - Nigeria Disco Funk Special

McCain's desperation grows

2008-07-31T00:07:00.002-06:00

Now they've resorted to juxtaposing Obama with Paris Hilton and David Hasselhoff's name.

I kind of feel bad for them. Apparently a former strategist does too.

New McCain Ad Bashes Obama for Not Visiting Troops Using Footage of Obama Visiting Troops

2008-07-28T01:37:00.003-06:00

This is one of the worst things that I've seen on TV.

Here's the godawful video.

I'm not sure what's worse: the fact that they accuse him of not seeing the troops due to cameras being barred when no one has claimed that or the fact that they imply that he took a trip to the gym when he was playing basketball with soldiers in Kuwait.

I can't believe that I used to think that this hack had integrity. Anything to be President, I guess...

US Human Rights Credibility: Shot

2008-07-21T15:23:00.001-06:00

Well, we already knew that, but now the UK government agrees:

The UK can no longer rely on US assurances that it does not use torture, and we recommend that the government does not rely on such assurances in the future We also recommend that the government should immediately carry out an exhaustive analysis of current US interrogation techniques on the basis of such information as is publicly available or which can be supplied by the US.

Rove attempted to have Fitzgerald fired while under investigation

2008-07-18T02:40:00.003-06:00

This is downright Nixonian.

In a supplement to his responses to the House Judiciary Committee, Patrick Fitzgerald confirms what we've always suspected: Karl Rove was trying to have Patrick Fitzgerald fired while Fitzgerald was still investigating Rove for his role in leaking Valerie Wilson's identity--and the timing lines up perfectly with the Administration's efforts to fire a bunch of US Attorneys.

Remember back in June, when Fitzgerald publicly suggested he had more details to share with Congress about Rove's efforts to get him fired?

"If I owe a response [about the putsch to remove him from his job], I owe it to Congress, first," Fitzgerald said when asked about all this after the verdict.

Well, it turns out Fitzgerald did share those details with Congress. And those details make it clear that Fitzgerald learned Rove was trying to fire him while Fitzgerald was still actively investigating Rove's role in the leak of Valerie Wilson's identity.

In my answers submitted on May 2,2008, I noted in my response to Question Eleven that I omitted discussion of when I first learned that I might be asked to resign as United States Attorney. I declined to answer more fully due to the then pending trial of United States v. Antoin Rezko in the Northern District of Illinois. With that trial concluded, I can briefly elaborate further: I learned some time in or about early 2005 from agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation ("FBI") that a cooperating witness (who later testified at the Rezko trial, but not about this topic) had advised the FBI agents that he had earlier been told by one of Mr. Rezko's co-schemers that it was the responsibility of a third person in Illinois to have me replaced as United States Attorney. I should be clear that I did not understand that any putative effort to replace me as United States Attorney was related to my conduct as Special Counsel but understood instead that it was related to the investigative activities of federal agents and prosecutors conducting a corruption investigation in Illinois. [my emphasis]

As a reminder, here's the allegation with all the names handily added in (though I think Fitzgerald is referring to someone besides Ata, because Ata was not yet cooperating with the Rezko prosecutors):

In a hearing before court began, prosecutors said they hoped to call Ali Ata, the former Blagojevich administration official who pleaded guilty to corruption yesterday, to the stand.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Carrie Hamilton said she believed Ata would testify to conversations Ata had with his political patron, Rezko, about working to pull strings to kill the criminal investigation into Rezko and others when it was in its early stages in 2004.

"[Ata] had conversations with Mr. Rezko about the fact that Mr. Kjellander was working with Karl Rove to have Mr. Fitzgerald removed," Hamilton told U.S. District Judge Amy St. Eve.

Note, Fitzgerald emphasizes that Rove was trying to fire him to protect Republican donor Bob Kjellander, not to protect Rove and Libby and Cheney. But that doesn't change the fact that Rove was in discussions about firing Fitzgerald while he--Rove--was under active investigation.

Also note the timing: while the discussions between this cooperating witness and (presumably) Kjellander happened earlier, the timing lines up with the effort to fire all the US Attorneys--and then, when Kyle Sampson suggested his name, Fitzgerald specifically--at the beginning of 2005.

It would be nice if they got a contempt of Congress charge to stick this time. This bullshit has gone on long enough.

Here's Rep. Sánchez, chair of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law:

Why Karl Rove Should Go To Jail

Again last week, we saw the arrogance of former White House advisor Karl Rove when an empty chair sat for him in front of the House Judiciary subcommittee where he was required by subpoena to testify. Not only did he refuse to appear before the committee -- let alone testify -- but he defiantly left the country thereby blatantly ignoring his obligations under the congressional subpoena served on him. When he did return to the country, Rove found the time to gab with TV reporters on a summer press tour in Beverly Hills, but failed to stop by the Judiciary Committee in Washington.

After my ruling that Mr. Rove's claims of immunity are not legally valid, Congressman Conyers and I gave him one last chance to comply with the law. He ignored us. As he let yet another deadline slip by this week, Mr. Rove's disregard for Congress has become intolerable. Mr. Rove needs to understand that he is not above the law and should obey a subpoena just like any other American is required to do.

Mr. Rove should not be able to hide behind the president to avoid the American public. Americans are fed up with this administration flaunting the law. They expect Congress to hold people accountable and that is exactly what we intend to do. Letting Mr. Rove get away with this would set a dangerous precedent. I have recommended that we hold Mr. Rove in contempt of Congress. If we need to revive the inherent contempt procedure which gives Congress the authority to arrest those who defy Congressional subpoenas, then so be it.

The courts have made clear that no one, not even the president, is immune from compulsory process. Any person who scoffs at the law and who has committed an offense that is punishable by jail time should be put in jail. This includes Karl Rove.

The New Yorker

2008-07-17T14:01:00.011-06:00

In a strange way, I think the New Yorker cartoon might have actually been successful. Sure, people didn't take it for satire, but maybe that's not the point. People got a good distillation of the ridiculous garbage that has been hurled at the Obamas and were disgusted. We actually got to see the same media figures that trafficked in xenophobic rumors about Obama come out and attack the image. I suspect that the reason that they were so outraged with the cartoon is that it hit a little to close to their own rhetoric.

Isn't that the point of irony? It's not about getting someone to say, "Hey, I get it. That's clever." It's about getting people to come face-to-face with absurdity. It expresses the truth in the guise of a lie. The image is false and offensive, but in showing that, it has exposed a lot more about bigotry underlying attacks on the Obamas than a direct refutation may have. Lakoff writes about how simply denying a claim ("Obama is not a jihadist") can reinforce the idea that you're trying to attack.

Then again, irony can do the same thing (see the people who are cynically ironic and use their detachment to get away with offensive rhetoric, or to paraphrase Zizek, those who know that what they are doing is wrong and are doing it anyway). There is the risk that the image will be adopted by those who actually believe Obama is a secret Muslim. A number of conservative editorial cartoonists have attempted to do this, identifying Obama with those that protested the Danish Mohammed, even though his comments have been very reasonable:

"I know it was The New Yorker's attempt at satire. I don't think they
were entirely successful with it," Obama said. "But you know what?
It's a cartoon ... and that's why we've got the First Amendment."

You can see what passes for conservative humor: here, here, and here.

So some people have taken this as a chance to express horrible views under the guise of irony.

But the people who spilled the most bile over the cartoon were the same ones who propagated the lies that it depicts in the first place. It's telling that someone like Bill O'Reilly was offended by it. Sometimes the subversive move isn't to disidentify with an oppressive image, but to overidentify with it. The cartoon got too close to the racism underlying American politics and people recoiled in horror from it, in the same fashion that the Cathar heresy was offensive to the Catholic church because it came too close to Catholic ideology and demonstrated its inherent excess.

The whisper campaign against Obama has operated by staying under the radar. The GOP benefits from rumors that are spread via dispersed networks, such as e-mail, but can't directly propagate them for fear of being exposed for encouraging bigotry. The cartoon provokes anxiety because it threatens that distance.

Maybe it wasn't entirely successful, but I'm not sure that the case is as simple as people are making it out to be.

Edit: Let's watch idiot cartoonists run this shit into the ground!

Keep on hoping, keep on dreaming, one day maybe...

2008-07-10T03:42:00.003-06:00

...whilst in the real world you rot.

Obama: This Administration has put forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand. When I am president, there will be no more illegal wire-tapping of American citizens; no more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime; no more tracking citizens who do nothing more than protest a misguided war. Our Constitution works, and so does the FISA court.

Goddamnit, Obama

2008-07-09T17:14:00.001-06:00

The Wiretapping Bill: President Bush, and Fear, Lead the Senate Off a Cliff

And here's the icing:

Senator Christopher S. Bond, the Missouri Republican who is vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said there was nothing to fear in the bill “unless you have Al Qaeda on your speed dial.”

You have nothing to fear unless you're a counterrevolutionary...

What to do about Guantanamo?

2008-07-06T14:18:00.002-06:00

The Truth Commission

July 6, 2008

Op-Ed Columnist
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
When a distinguished American military commander accuses the United States of committing war crimes in its handling of detainees, you know that we need a new way forward.

“There is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes,” Antonio Taguba, the retired major general who investigated abuses in Iraq, declares in a powerful new report on American torture from Physicians for Human Rights. “The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”

The first step of accountability isn’t prosecutions. Rather, we need a national Truth Commission to lead a process of soul searching and national cleansing.

That was what South Africa did after apartheid, with its Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and it is what the United States did with the Kerner Commission on race and the 1980s commission that examined the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

Today, we need a similar Truth Commission, with subpoena power, to investigate the abuses in the aftermath of 9/11.

We already know that the United States government has kept Nelson Mandela on a terrorism watch list and that the U.S. military taught interrogation techniques borrowed verbatim from records of Chinese methods used to break American prisoners in the Korean War — even though we knew that these torture techniques produced false confessions.

It’s a national disgrace that more than 100 inmates have died in American custody in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo. After two Afghan inmates were beaten to death by American soldiers, the American military investigator found that one of the men’s legs had been “pulpified.”

Moreover, many of the people we tortured were innocent: the administration was as incompetent as it was immoral. The McClatchy newspaper group has just published a devastating series on torture and other abuses, and it quotes Thomas White, the former Army secretary, as saying that it was clear from the moment Guantánamo opened that one-third of the inmates didn’t belong there.

McClatchy says that one inmate, Mohammed Akhtiar, was known as pro-American to everybody but the American soldiers who battered him. Some of his militant fellow inmates spit on him, beat him and called him “infidel,” all because of his anti-Taliban record.

These abuses happened partly because, for several years after 9/11, many of our national institutions didn’t do their jobs. The Democratic Party rolled over rather than serving as loyal opposition. We in the press were often lap dogs rather than watchdogs, and we let the public down.

Yet there were heroes, including civil liberties groups and lawyers for detainees. Some judges bucked the mood, and a few conservatives inside the administration spoke out forcefully. The Times’s Eric Lichtblau writes in his terrific new book, “Bush’s Law,” that the Immigration and Naturalization Service commissioner, James Ziglar, pushed back against plans for door-to-door sweeps of Arab-American neighborhoods.

The book recounts that in one meeting, Mr. Ziglar bluntly declared, “We do have this thing called the Constitution,” adding that such sweeps would be illegal and “I’m not going to be part of it.”

Among those I admire most are the military lawyers who risked their careers, defied the Pentagon and antagonized their drinking buddies — all for the sake of Muslim terror suspects in circumstances where the evidence was often ambiguous. At a time when we as a nation took the expedient path, these military officers took the honorable one, and they deserve medals for their courage.

The Truth Commission investigating these issues ideally would be a non-partisan group heavily weighted with respected military and security officials, including generals, admirals and top intelligence figures. Such backgrounds would give their findings credibility across the political spectrum — and I don’t think they would pull punches. The military and intelligence officials I know are as appalled by our abuses as any other group, in part because they realize that if our people waterboard, then our people will also be waterboarded.

Both Barack Obama and John McCain should commit to impaneling a Truth Commission early in the next administration. This commission would issue a report to help us absorb the lessons of our failings, the better to avoid them during the next crisis.

As for what to do with Guantánamo itself, the best suggestion comes from an obscure medical journal, PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases. It suggests that the prison camp would be an ideal research facility for tropical diseases that afflict so many of the world’s people. An excellent suggestion: the U.S. should close the prison and turn it into a research base to fight the diseases of global poverty, and maybe then we could eventually say the word “Guantánamo” without pangs of shame.

More waterboarding

2008-07-03T12:31:00.002-06:00

From Christopher Hitchens, who has managed to not be completely insane when it comes to the war on terror: Believe Me, It's Torture

Also:

China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo

Japanese Soldiers Who Waterboarded Tried for War Crimes

US loses first post-Boumediene detainee hearing

2008-07-02T10:35:00.002-06:00

Good news. Maybe sanity is making a comeback.

Awesome quote from the decision:

First, the government suggests that several of the assertions in the intelligence documents are reliable because they are made in at least three different documents. We are not persuaded. Lewis Carroll notwithstanding, the fact that the government has “said it thrice” does not make an allegation true. See LEWIS CARROLL, THE HUNTING OF THE SNARK 3 (1876) (“I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.”). In fact, we have no basis for concluding that there are independent sources for the documents’ thrice-made assertions. To the contrary, as noted in Part III, many of those assertions are made in identical language, suggesting that later documents may merely be citing earlier ones, and hence that all may ultimately derive from a single source. And as we have also noted, Parhat has made a credible argument that -- at least for some of the assertions -- the common source is the Chinese government, which may be less than objective with respect to the Uighurs.

The new Prodigy is kickin

2008-06-27T14:12:00.004-06:00

It came out in the spring and I slept on it for a few months, but H.N.I.C. Part II is a good summer album.

Good beats, competent flow, and gangster posturing.

("Mobb Deep" Prodigy, not "Smack My Bitch Up" Prodigy)

The Grand New Party has a musty smell.

2008-06-27T08:45:00.004-06:00

David "Applebees Salad Bar" Brooks has another rich editorial in the New York Times:

There have been other outstanding books on how the G.O.P. can rediscover its soul (like “Comeback” by David Frum), but if I could put one book on the desk of every Republican officeholder, “Grand New Party” would be it. You can discount my praise because of my friendship with the authors, but this is the best single roadmap of where the party should and is likely to head.
Several years ago, Tim Pawlenty, the Minnesota governor, said the Republicans should be the party of Sam’s Club, not the country club. This line is the animating spirit of “Grand New Party.” Douthat and Salam argue that the Republicans rode to the majority because of support from the Reagan Democrats, and if the party has a future, it will be because it understands the dreams and tribulations of working-class Americans.

The fact is that the right has attempted to court the working class. However, they have done so in a manner that is superficial and offers practically nothing to actually help them in any meaningful way. See the GOP's new-found populism in an attempt to defame Obama (try not to spit your coffee out when you read about Karl Rove attacking Obama for being an elitist who drinks martinis and makes snarky comments at a country club).

The Reagan comparison is telling: lots of cheap blue collar imagery papering over an agenda that favors massive tax cuts to the rich combined with the gutting of social programs. The right can only win the votes of workers by getting them to vote against their class interest with things like the 2004 gay marriage initiatives. People focus on immigrants, blacks, Muslims, and gays as if they were a real threat to their well-being instead of the economic forces that conspire at the top to keep them in their place.

The right can go on and on about superficial things like the fact that Obama has heard of arugala (along with all of the rest of us in rural America who get the Food Network), but it has nothing to offer the working and middle classes when they're out of a job and medical bills force them to declare bankruptcy. It has nothing to offer them when they want to send their children to college and can't afford it on their meager salary. It has nothing to offer but more Horatio Alger and bootstrapping bullshit.

The only thing that the Republican part has to offer us is cheap labels (Who do you want to have a beer with? Do you want to vote for a guy who shops at Whole Foods or Sam's Club?) and fear of otherness. Brooks can go on and on about "hard work conservatism," whatever the hell that means, but it doesn't amount to meaningful policies in an economic environment where hard work isn't enough to keep your head above water.

Brooks' myopia can be summed up in the following paragraph:

In the 1950s, divorce rates were low and jobs were plentiful, but over the next few decades that broke down. The social revolutions of the 1960s and the economic revolution of the information age have emancipated the well-educated but left the Sam’s Club voters feeling insecure.

That's right: the sixties were about emancipating the "well-educated." Forget about that silly Civil Rights thing. Was that just another example of uppety "elitist" negroes like Obama that didn't know their place, unlike the hard working, white Americans that Brooks imagines go to Sam's Club and put Hunts ketchup on their iceberg lettuce? Jesus Christ.

I know it's time to stop researching for the night when...

2008-06-26T02:49:00.005-06:00

...I start laughing at the footnotes in a District Court opinion:

This Court first considered calling the motions a "phalanx" of motions. However, the phalanx was a tight group of Greek infantry with an impenetrable shell of soldiers' shields and a lethal extension of their lances capable of piercing the strongest of armies. Out of respect for the Greeks, this Court will not liken these motions to the Greek phalanx. So plethora, not phalanx.

Thurmond v. Compaq Computer Corp., 2000 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 21880

I'm clearly not in my right mind.

wordle cloud

2008-06-23T03:36:00.003-06:00

2008-06-20T03:19:00.003-06:00

As long as the Dems keep capitulating, they will never transform American politics. We're going to keep going down this road of selling out our principles that gave us losses in 2000, 2002, and 2004.

Deal Reached in Congress to Rewrite Rules on Wiretapping

By ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON — After months of wrangling, Democratic and Republican leaders in Congress struck a deal on Thursday to overhaul the rules on the government’s wiretapping powers and provide what amounts to legal immunity to the phone companies that took part in President Bush’s warrantless eavesdropping program after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The deal, expanding the government’s powers in some key respects, would allow intelligence officials to use broad warrants to eavesdrop on foreign targets and conduct emergency wiretaps without court orders on American targets for a week if it is determined important national security information would be lost otherwise. If approved, as appears likely, it would be the most significant revision of surveillance law in 30 years.

The agreement would settle one of the thorniest issues in dispute by providing immunity to the phone companies in the Sept. 11 program as long as a federal district court determines that they received legitimate requests from the government directing their participation in the warrantless wiretapping operation.

With some AT&T and other telecommunications companies now facing some 40 lawsuits over their reported participation in the wiretapping program, Republican leaders described this narrow court review on the immunity question as a mere “formality.”

“The lawsuits will be dismissed,” Representative Roy Blunt of Missouri, the No. 2 Republican in the House, predicted with confidence.

The proposal — particularly the immunity provision — represents a major victory for the White House after months of dispute. “I think the White House got a better deal than they even they had hoped to get,” said Senator Christopher Bond, the Missouri Republican who led the negotiations.

The White House immediately endorsed the proposal, which is likely to be voted on in the House on Friday and in the Senate next week.

While passage seems almost certain in Congress, the plan will nonetheless face opposition from lawmakers on both political wings, with some conservatives asserting that it includes too many checks on government surveillance powers and liberals asserting that it gives legal sanction to a wiretapping program that they contend was illegal in the first place.

Senator Russ Feingold, the Wisconsin Democrat who pushed unsuccessfully for more civil liberties safeguards in the plan, called the deal “a capitulation” by his fellow Democrats.

But Democratic leaders, who squared off against the White House for more than five months over the issue and allowed a temporary surveillance measure to expire in February, called the plan a hard-fought bargain that included needed checks on governmental abuse.

“It is the result of compromise, and like any compromise is not perfect, but I believe it strikes a sound balance,” said Representative Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the House Democratic leader who helped draft the plan.

Perhaps the most important concession that Democratic leaders claimed in the proposal was a reaffirmation that the intelligence protocols are the “exclusive” means for the executive branch to conduct wiretapping operations in terrorism and espionage cases. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had insisted on that element, and Democratic staff members asserted that the language would prevent Mr. Bush, or any future president, from circumventing the law. The proposal asserts that “that the law is the exclusive authority and not the whim of the president of the United States,” Ms. Pelosi said.

In the wiretapping program approved by Mr. Bush after the Sept. 11 attacks, the White House asserted that the president had the constitutional authority to act outside the courts in allowing the National Security Agency to target the international communications of Americans with suspected terrorist ties, and that Congress had implicitly authorized that power when it voted to use military force against Al Qaeda.

McCain's biggest Democratic supporters

2008-06-17T22:14:00.003-06:00

McCain has an awesome list of prominent Democrats who support his campaign.

There's Lieberman and then there's... this guy...

As I wrote on Sunday, John McCain is touting an unlikely name in his list of "prominent" Democratic supporters: Phillip "Icky" Frye of West Virginia.

Just who is Icky Frye? Well, he's a TV and VCR repairman who decided to run for governor of West Virginia after discovering that his wife was having an extramarital affair with then-Governor Bob Wise.

Icky said his campaign "was fueled by revenge" and that he "wanted to embarrass Wise," who he called a "little weasel-faced bastard" and a "typical Democrat."

During the campaign, Icky told a West Virginia TV station that he didn't have any qualifications to serve as governor but wanted "to be a sheer nuisance to Bob Wise."

Icky's campaign slogan ("He'll do his job...not his staff.") was a reference to the affair between his wife, a state employee, and the governor

Not suprisingly, Icky finished in 7th place of out 8, winning just 1% of the vote.

Despite all this, according to the McCain campaign, Icky is one of the nation's most "prominent" Democratic "leaders and activists", and is one of the most important members of John McCain's effort to win over Democratic voters.

And now, according to a front-page report in The Charleston Gazette, the McCain campaign is defending their claim that Icky is a "prominent" Democrat.

Hilarious!

McCain doesn't even know what habeas corpus is

2008-06-13T17:49:00.002-06:00

For the love of god...

The United States Supreme Court yesterday rendered a decision which I think is one of the worst decisions in the history of this country. Sen. Graham and Sen. Lieberman and I had worked very hard to make sure that we didn't torture any prisoners, that we didn't mistreat them, that we abided by the Geneva Conventions, which applies to all prisoners. But we also made it perfectly clear, and I won't go through all the legislation we passed, and the prohibition against torture, but we made it very clear that these are enemy combatants, these are people who are not citizens, they do not and never have been given the rights that citizens of this country have. And my friends there are some bad people down there. There are some bad people. So now what are we going to do. We are now going to have the courts flooded with so-called, quote, Habeas Corpus suits against the government, whether it be about the diet, whether it be about the reading material. And we are going to be bollixed up in a way that is terribly unfortunate, because we need to go ahead and adjudicate these cases. By the way, 30 of the people who have already been released from Guantanamo Bay have already tried to attack America again, one of them just a couple weeks ago, a suicide bomber in Iraq. Our first obligation is the safety and security of this nation, and the men and women who defend it. This decision will harm our ability to do that.

After his continual inability to distinguish the Sunnis and the Shiites, I'm not sure if this guy is eve qualified to be President.

McCain is a bigger tool than we thought

2008-06-13T12:01:00.002-06:00

McCain slams habeas corpus ruling

"The United States Supreme Court yesterday rendered a decision which I think is one of the worst decisions in the history of this country," McCain said. He went on to quote from Justice Roberts dissent in the case, rail against "unaccountable judges," and say that the courts are about to be clogged with cases from detainees.

This, along with his reversal on warrantless NSA wiretapping, torture, and "agents of intolerance" has revealed him as the shill that he is. This slide to the right is a calculated move and, if anyone ever felt that he actually had integrity, he has destroyed that illusion.

Hell yes: SCOTUS holds Guantanamo prisoners can challenge their status in federal court

2008-06-12T20:25:00.003-06:00

This is a good day. I never thought this would happen, but it did.

In typical fashion, the conservative bloc resorts to right wing talking points in place of legal analysis.

“It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed,” [Scalia] said. “The nation will live to regret what the court has done today.” He said the decision was based not on principle, “but rather an inflated notion of judicial supremacy.”

The usual nutjobs are crying out against an "activist court" (whatever the fuck that means) and some are even calling for Bush to refuse to obey it (Constitutional crisis anyone):

On two separate occasions now, the United States Congress has duly enacted painstakingly specific laws to lawfully and Constitutionally strip the Supreme Court of jurisdiction to hear cases involving non-citizens currently detained outside of sovereign territory held by the United States. As Dan McLaughlin has noted, today the Supreme Court purports to ignore this clear limitation on its own authority to even hear the case before it (which by law has been confined to the CADC) and issue an opinion declaring the act which removed their jurisdiction unconstitutional. Savor the irony for a moment, if you will.

I don't think any manner of argument will convince these people that the U.S. has exclusive de facto jurisdiction over Guantanamo or that habeas rights extend to all people under U.S. jurisdiction. But that group is getting smaller and smaller and even Bush might realize that he has to abide by this decision. This group will become increasingly marginalized as the utter disaster of the past eight years continues to reveal itself for what it is.

Bush is finally getting reigned in over his insane executive overreach and we're looking at the real prospect of an Obama presidency. Maybe this shameful period in our history is almost over. I'm sure we'll see the best that the Republican slime machine has to offer (terrorist fist bumps, flag label pins, and jihadist Manchurian candidates), but I think I can see some light at the end of the tunnel.

Edit: Any Clinton supporters who are planning on voting for McCain have to be insane. Some of the justices on the court who made today's ruling possible are getting old. If McCain is President, he will appoint justices that will be around for life. The freedom to choose, civil rights, labor relations, and human dignity all hang in the balance and voting for McCain because you're sore about Clinton's loss is cutting off your nose to spite your face. I would say the same if Clinton had won the nomination.

nice

2008-06-12T01:31:00.000-06:00

3.755

Blow

McCain is into ABBA.

2008-06-07T12:31:00.002-06:00

I like ABBA, but jesus christ

It's real.

Senate report confirms deceptive nature of Bush's propaganda effort to sell the war

2008-06-06T09:44:00.002-06:00

http://intelligence.senate.gov/080605/phase2a.pdf

http://intelligence.senate.gov/080605/phase2b.pdf

I am shocked.

-Statements and implications by the President and Secretary of State suggesting that Iraq and al-Qa'ida had a partnership, or that Iraq had provided al-Qa'ida with weapons training, were not substantiated by the intelligence.

--Statements by the President and the Vice President indicating that Saddam Hussein was prepared to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups for attacks against the United States were contradicted by available intelligence information.

--Statements by President Bush and Vice President Cheney regarding the postwar situation in Iraq, in terms of the political, security, and economic, did not reflect the concerns and uncertainties expressed in the intelligence products.

--Statements by the President and Vice President prior to the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iraq's chemical weapons production capability and activities did not reflect the intelligence community's uncertainties as to whether such production was ongoing.

--The Secretary of Defense's statement that the Iraqi government operated underground WMD facilities that were not vulnerable to conventional airstrikes because they were underground and deeply buried was not substantiated by available intelligence information.

--The Intelligence Community did not confirm that Muhammad Atta met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in 2001 as the Vice President repeatedly claimed.

Oh fuck.

2008-06-05T01:51:00.000-06:00

White House ignored FBI torture concerns

2008-05-21T01:21:00.000-06:00

Sigh

W. House ignored FBI concerns on prisoner abuse -probe
Tue May 20, 2008 7:12pm EDT
(Adds reaction, Qahtani suicide attempt)

By Randall Mikkelsen

WASHINGTON, May 20 (Reut ers) - Top Bush administration security officials ignored FBI concerns over abusive treatment of terrorism suspects, which one agent called "borderline torture," a four-year Justice Department probe found.

The FBI clashed with the Pentagon and CIA over interrogation techniques including snarling dogs, sexual provocation and forced nudity, said the 370-page report, released on Tuesday by the Justice Department's inspector general.

Critics say such techniques inflicted on terrorism suspects captured after the Sept. 11 attacks amounted to torture. The report covers late 2001 to the end of 2004.

FBI agents joined in terrorism interrogations and still do, but bureau Director Robert Mueller directed agents in 2002 to not participate in coercive questioning, the report said.

The FBI and Justice Department officials raised concerns with the National Security Council, which comprises top security-agency officials, and with officials at the Guantanamo Bay detention center for terrorism suspects, the report said. They argued the abusive interrogations were counterproductive.

"Ultimately, neither the FBI nor the DoJ had a significant impact on the practices of the military with respect to the detainees," it said.

The National Security Council was headed then by President George W. Bush and included Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, now secretary of state.

"The White House, the Defense Department, and the CIA were ignoring advice that was coming from people who were charged with enforcement of the law," said Chris Anders, senior legislative council of the American Civil Liberties Union.

RICE ROLE

The report is the first to show a role by Rice in the prisoner-abuse issue, Anders said.

White House spokesman Tony Fratto said "abuse or inhumane treatment of prisoners is not, and never has been, US policy." Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman referred to the military's 2005 report into the charges, which "determined that there was no evidence of torture or inhumane treatment."

The Pentagon stopped authorizing some abusive techniques in 2003, and Congress in 2005 banned inhumane treatment of prisoners. The CIA says it has not used "waterboarding," a form of simulated drowning, in five years.

But Bush in March vetoed legislation that would ban the CIA from using waterboarding and other abusive techniques.

Democrats in Congress vowed to hold hearings on the report and faulted FBI and Justice Department leaders for not taking stronger action to halt abuses. "This remains a sorry chapter in our nation's history," said Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat.

The new report quotes an FBI agent as objecting that the CIA's interrogation of suspected senior al Qaeda commander Abu Zubaydah was "borderline torture," and said at one point an agent helped care for him in the hospital "even to the point of cleaning him up after bowel movements."

The CIA has acknowledged Zubaydah was one of three suspects subjected to waterboarding, but the report blacked out as classified information interrogation techniques used on him.

The report says techniques used in Guantanamo or Iraq included sleep disruption, prolonged "short shackling" of hands and feet or wrapping a detainee's head in duct tape. A female interrogator grabbed a detainee's genitals to inflict pain.

It also said a U.S. Marine captain questioning suspected Sept. 11 conspirator Mohammed al-Qahtani squatted over a Koran, provoking Qahtani to lunge at the Marine and the holy book.

SUICIDE ATTEMPT

Qahtani attempted suicide in April by cutting himself after learning he faced charges -- later thrown out -- that could carry the death penalty, his lawyer said on Monday.

In 2004 FBI agents were required to report abusive conduct. But agents told Justice Department investigators they often did not know what techniques the military authorized.

The FBI's continued involvement in interrogations of prisoners interviewed by the CIA, which has fewer restraints on techniques, may present problems for future legal cases, the report said.

CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said the CIAs interrogation methods had previously been found lawful by the Justice Department and were used only when traditional means of questioning, such as rapport-building, failed.

(Additional reporting by Andrew Gray and Jeremy Pelofksy in Washington, and Jane Sutton at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base, Cuba)

(Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

When McCain and Bush say that we should "support the troops..."

2008-05-06T16:45:00.002-06:00

...that apparently doesn't include giving them educational benefits.

By DAVID LERMAN

202-824-8224

6:04 PM EDT, May 6, 2008

WASHINGTON

Virginia Sen. Jim Webb's GI bill—giving full college tuition to military veterans -- could make headway in Congress for the first time later this week.

The effort to expand education benefits for troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan could be included in a war spending bill that may reach the House floor for a vote by week's end.

That move, if it comes, would mark the first substantive advancement of an initiative that Webb first introduced 16 months ago.

Expanding college benefits for military veterans was the legislative centerpiece of Webb's 2006 Senate campaign.

The issue lay dormant last year, but has gained new momentum as Congress reacts to growing public frustration with a war that has entered its sixth year.

House Democratic leaders told reporters Tuesday they are working on including veterans' education benefits as part of the Iraq war funding measure requested by President Bush.

If Webb's measure—or similar legislation—gets included in the war bill, it could win speedy passage because of the urgency of funding the war.

In another sign of progress, Webb's bill will get a hearing Wednesday before the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee. The chairman of that panel, Sen. Daniel Akaka, D- Hawaii, has endorsed the bill.

But prospects for the measure remained uncertain.

The Bush administration opposes Webb's bill, fearing it would entice troops to leave the military sooner than they otherwise might at a time of war.

And Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, signaled his opposition to Webb's bill by announcing plans for alternative legislation offering more modest education benefits.

Webb, a decorated Vietnam combat veteran, argues that today's veterans deserve the same educational opportunities as veterans of World War II received. Many veterans of the so-called Greatest Generation, including Virginia Sen. John Warner, received full college tuition as a result of the original GI bill signed by Franklin Roosevelt.

By contrast, current law, known as the Montgomery GI Bill, covers only about half the cost of a college education today, according to veterans groups.

Webb's bill would offer veterans up to 36 months of benefits, including tuition, books and fees—up to the cost of the most expensive in-state public school of a veteran's home state. The government would match, dollar for dollar, contributions of any private school willing to make up the difference between the in-state public rate and a private school's higher charge.

The measure also provides for a $1,000 monthly stipend and funds for tutorial assistance.

Lawmakers have estimated the cost of the bill at $2.5 billion to $4 billion a year—a price that Webb has said should be considered a "cost of war."

Copyright © 2008, Newport News, Va., Daily Press

Secrecy and inhumane treatment of immigrant prisoners

2008-05-06T16:32:00.002-06:00

May 5, 2008
Few Details on Immigrants Who Died in Custody
By NINA BERNSTEIN

Word spread quickly inside the windowless walls of the Elizabeth Detention Center, an immigration jail in New Jersey: A detainee had fallen, injured his head and become incoherent. Guards had put him in solitary confinement, and late that night, an ambulance had taken him away more dead than alive.

But outside, for five days, no official notified the family of the detainee, Boubacar Bah, a 52-year-old tailor from Guinea who had overstayed a tourist visa. When frantic relatives located him at University Hospital in Newark on Feb. 5, 2007, he was in a coma after emergency surgery for a skull fracture and multiple brain hemorrhages. He died there four months later without ever waking up, leaving family members on two continents trying to find out why.

Mr. Bah’s name is one of 66 on a government list of deaths that occurred in immigration custody from January 2004 to November 2007, when nearly a million people passed through.

The list, compiled by Immigration and Customs Enforcement after Congress demanded the information, and obtained by The New York Times under the Freedom of Information Act, is the fullest accounting to date of deaths in immigration detention, a patchwork of federal centers, county jails and privately run prisons that has become the nation’s fastest-growing form of incarceration.

The list has few details, and they are often unreliable, but it serves as a rough road map to previously unreported cases like Mr. Bah’s. And it reflects a reality that haunts grieving families like his: the difficulty of getting information about the fate of people taken into immigration custody, even when they die.

Mr. Bah’s relatives never saw the internal records labeled “proprietary information — not for distribution” by the Corrections Corporation of America, which runs the New Jersey detention center for the federal government. The documents detail how he was treated by guards and government employees: shackled and pinned to the floor of the medical unit as he moaned and vomited, then left in a disciplinary cell for more than 13 hours, despite repeated notations that he was unresponsive and intermittently foaming at the mouth.

Mr. Bah had lived in New York for a decade, surrounded by a large circle of friends and relatives. The extravagant gowns he sewed to support his wife and children in West Africa were on display in a Manhattan boutique.

But he died in a sequestered system where questions about what had happened to him, or even his whereabouts, were met with silence.

As the country debates stricter enforcement of immigration laws, thousands of people who are not American citizens are being locked up for days, months or years while the government decides whether to deport them. Some have no valid visa; some are legal residents, but have past criminal convictions; others are seeking asylum from persecution.

Death is a reality in any jail, and the medical neglect of inmates is a perennial issue. But far more than in the criminal justice system, immigration detainees and their families lack basic ways to get answers when things go wrong.

No government body is required to keep track of deaths and publicly report them. No independent inquiry is mandated. And often relatives who try to investigate the treatment of those who died say they are stymied by fear of immigration authorities, lack of access to lawyers, or sheer distance.

Federal officials say deaths are reviewed internally by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which reports them to its inspector general and decides which ones warrant investigation. Officials say they notify the detainee’s next of kin or consulate, and report the deaths to local medical authorities, who may conduct autopsies. In Mr. Bah’s case, a review before his death found no evidence of foul play, an immigration spokesman said, though after later inquiries from The Times, he said a full review of the death was under way.

But critics, including many in Congress, say this piecemeal process leaves too much to the agency’s discretion, allowing some deaths to be swept under the rug while potential witnesses are transferred or deported. They say it also obscures underlying complaints about medical care, abusive conditions or inadequate suicide prevention.

In January, the House passed a bill that would require states that receive certain federal money to report deaths in custody to their attorneys general. But the bill is stalled in the Senate, and it does not cover federal facilities.

The only tangible result of Congressional concern has been the list of 66 deaths, which names Mr. Bah and many other detainees for the first time, but raises as many questions as it answers.

For Mr. Bah’s survivors, the mystery of his death is hard to bear. In Guinea, his first wife, Dalanda, wept as she spoke about the contradictory accounts that had reached her and her two teenage sons through other detainees, including some who speculated that Mr. Bah had been beaten.

In New York, a cousin who is an American citizen, Khadidiatou Bah, 38, said she was unable to bring a lawsuit, in part because other relatives were afraid of antagonizing the authorities.

“They don’t want to push the case, or maybe they will be sent home,” she said. “This guy was killed, and we don’t know what happened.”

Lingering Questions

The list of deaths where Mr. Bah’s name surfaced is often cryptic. Along with 13 deaths cited as suicides and 14 as the result of cardiac ailments, it offers such causes as “undetermined” and “unwitnessed arrest, epilepsy.” No one’s nationality is given, some places of detention are omitted, and some names and birth dates seem garbled. As a result, many families could not be tracked down for this article.

But when they could be, they posed more disturbing questions.

In California, relatives of Walter Rodriguez-Castro, 28, said they were rebuffed when they tried to find out why his calls had stopped coming from the Kern County Jail in Bakersfield in April 2006. Then in June, his wife went to his scheduled hearing in San Francisco’s immigration court and learned that he had been dead for many weeks, his body unclaimed in the county morgue.

The coroner found that Mr. Rodriguez-Castro, a mover from El Salvador in the country illegally, had died of undiagnosed meningitis and H.I.V., after days complaining of fever, stiff neck and vomiting. The cause of death on the government’s list: “unresponsive.”

Immigration authorities said on Friday that the case was now under review, but would not answer questions about it or other deaths on the list. Sgt. Ed Komin, a spokesman for the jail, said the death had been promptly reported to immigration officials, who were responsible for notifying families.

Four sons in another family, in Sacramento, described trying for days to get medical care for their father, Maya Nand, a 56-year-old legal immigrant from Fiji, at a detention center run by the Corrections Corporation in Eloy, Ariz. Mr. Nand, an architectural draftsman, had been ailing when he was taken into custody on Jan. 13, 2005, apparently because his application for citizenship had been rejected, based on an earlier conviction for misdemeanor domestic violence. In collect calls, the sons said, he told them that despite his chest pains and breathing problems, doctors at the detention center did not take his condition seriously.

The Corrections Corporation said he had been seen and treated “multiple times.” But a letter to the family from an immigration official said his treatment was for a respiratory infection. The letter said that Mr. Nand was taken to an emergency room on Jan. 25, where congestive heart failure was diagnosed, and that he “suffered an apparent heart attack while at the hospital.” He died on Feb. 2, 2005, shackled to a hospital bed in Tucson.

Boubacar Bah had more going for him than many detainees. He had a lawyer and many friends and relatives in the United States, and his detention center in New Jersey was one of the few frequented by immigrant advocates.

But three days after he suffered a head injury in detention last year, no one in his New York circle knew that he was lying comatose in a Newark hospital, where he had already been identified as a possible organ donor.

“Thank you for the referral,” an organ-sharing network wrote on Feb. 3, 2007, according to hospital records. “This patient is a potential candidate for organ donation once brain death criteria is met.”

Four days after the fall, tipped off by a detainee who called Mr. Bah’s roommate in Brooklyn, relatives rushed to the detention center to ask Corrections Corporation employees where he was.

“They wouldn’t give us any information,” said Lamine Dieng, an American citizen who teaches physics at Bronx Community College and is married to Mr. Bah’s cousin Khadidiatou.

On the fifth day, they said, a detention official called them with the name of the hospital. There they found Mr. Bah on life support, still in custody, with a detention guard around the clock.

“There was one guard who knew Boubacar,” Ms. Bah said. “He told me on the down-low: ‘This guy, you have to fight for him. This guy was neglected.’ ”

Within the week, word of the case reached a reporter at The Times, through an immigration lawyer who had received separate calls from two detainees; they were upset about a badly injured man — named “something like Aboubakar” — left in an isolation cell and later found near death.

But advocacy groups said they were unaware of the case. And Michael Gilhooly, the spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said that without the man’s full name and eight-digit alien registration number, he could not check the information.

For those who knew Mr. Bah, it was hard to understand how such a man could lie dying without explanations.

“Everybody liked Boubacar,” said Sadio Diallo, 48, who has a tailor shop in Flatbush, Brooklyn, where he and Mr. Bah had shared an apartment with fellow immigrants since arriving in 1998. “He’s a very, very, very good man.”

For six years, Mr. Bah had worked for L’Impasse, a clothing store in the West Village, sewing dresses that sold for up to $2,000 with what a former manager, Abdul Sall, called his “magic hands.” Mr. Bah often spent Sundays at the Bronx townhouse his cousins had inherited from the family’s first American citizen, a seaman who arrived in 1943.

In Africa, Mr. Bah’s earnings not only supported his first wife, sons and ailing mother, but in Guinean tradition, allowed him to wed a second wife, long distance. It was his longing to see them all again after eight years that landed him in detention. When he returned from a three-month visit to Guinea in May 2006, immigration authorities at Kennedy Airport told him that his green card application had been denied while he was away, automatically revoking his permission to re-enter the United States. An immigration lawyer hired by his friends was unable to reopen the application while Mr. Bah waited for nine months in detention, records showed.

Mr. Bah died on May 30, 2007, after four months in a coma. His lawyer, Theodore Vialet, requested detention reports and hospital records under the Freedom of Information Act. But by the time the records arrived last autumn, the idea of a lawsuit had been dropped.

So Mr. Vialet just filed the records away — until a reporter’s call about a name on the list of dead detainees prompted him to dig them out.

After the Fall

There are 57 pages of documents, some neatly typed by medics, some scrawled by guards. Some quote detainees who said Mr. Bah was ailing for two days before his fall on Feb. 1, and asked in vain to see a doctor.

The records leave unclear exactly when or how Mr. Bah was injured in detention. But they leave no doubt that guards, supervisors, government medical employees and federal immigration officers played a role in leaving him untreated, hour after hour, as he lapsed into a stupor.

It began about 8 a.m., according to the earliest report. Guards called a medical emergency after a detainee saw Mr. Bah collapse near a toilet, hitting the back of his head on the floor.

When he regained consciousness, Mr. Bah was taken to the medical unit, which is run by the federal Public Health Service. He became incoherent and agitated, reports said, pulling away from the doctor and grabbing at the unit staff. Physicians consulted later by The Times called this a textbook symptom of intracranial bleeding, but apparently no one recognized that at the time.

He was handcuffed and placed in leg restraints on the floor with medical approval, “to prevent injury,” a guard reported. “While on the floor the detainee began to yell in a foreign language and turn from side to side,” the guard wrote, and the medical staff deemed that “the screaming and resisting is behavior problems.”

Mr. Bah was ordered to calm down. Instead, he kept crying out, then “began to regurgitate on the floor of medical,” the report said. So Mr. Bah was written up for disobeying orders. And with the approval of a physician assistant, Michael Chuley, who wrote that Mr. Bah’s fall was unwitnessed and “questionable,” the tailor was taken in shackles to a solitary confinement cell with instructions that he be monitored.

Under detention protocols, an officer videotaped Mr. Bah as he lay vomiting in the medical unit, but the camera’s battery failed, guards wrote, when they tried to tape his trip to cell No. 7.

Inside the cell, a supervisor removed Mr. Bah’s restraints. He was unresponsive to questions asked by the Public Health Service officer on duty, a report said, adding: “The detainee set up in his bed and moan and he fell to his left side and hit his head on the bed rail.”

About 9 a.m., with the approval of the health officer and a federal immigration agent, the cell was locked.

The watching began. As guards checked hourly, Mr. Bah appeared to be asleep on the concrete floor, snoring. But he could not be roused to eat lunch or dinner, and at 7:10 p.m., “he began to breathe heavily and started foaming slightly at the mouth,” a guard wrote. “I notified medical at this time.”

However, the nurse on duty rejected the guard’s request to come check, according to reports. And at 8 p.m., when the warden went to the medical unit to describe Mr. Bah’s condition, the nurse, Raymund Dela Pena, was not alarmed. “Detainee is likely exhibiting the same behavior as earlier in the day,” he wrote, adding that Mr. Bah would get a mental health exam in the morning.

About 10:30 p.m., more than 14 hours after Mr. Bah’s fall, the same nurse, on rounds, recognized the gravity of his condition: “unresponsive on the floor incontinent with foamy brown vomitus noted around mouth.” Smelling salts were tried. Mr. Bah was carried back to the medical unit on a stretcher.

Just before 11, someone at the jail called 911.

When an ambulance left Mr. Bah at the hospital, brain scans showed he had a fractured skull and hemorrhages at all sides of his swelling brain. He was rushed to surgery, and the detention center was informed of the findings.

But in a report to their supervisors the next day, immigration officials at the center described Mr. Bah’s ailment as “brain aneurysms” — a diagnosis they corrected a week later to “hemorrhages,” without mentioning the skull fracture. After Mr. Bah’s death, they wrote that his hospitalization was “subsequent to a fall in the shower.”

The nurse, Mr. Dela Pena, and the physician assistant, Mr. Chuley, said that only their superiors could discuss the case. The Public Health Service did not respond to questions, and the Corrections Corporation said medical decisions were the responsibility of the Public Health Service.

Mr. Bah’s cousins demanded an autopsy, but the Union County medical examiner’s confidential report was not completed until Dec. 6. It was sent to the county prosecutor’s office only as a matter of routine, because the matter had been classified as an “unattended accident resulting in death.”

Prosecutors said they did not investigate. “According to the report, Bah suffered a fall in the shower,” Eileen Walsh, a spokeswoman for the prosecutors, said in an e-mail message. “We are not privy to any other bits of information.”

In the home movies Mr. Bah made of his last journey home, he is only a fleeting presence: a slim man with a shy smile. But without his support, relatives in Africa say they have little money for food and none for his sons’ schooling.

His body went back to Guinea in a sealed coffin.

“I stayed here seven years, waiting for him,” his second wife, Mariama, said in French, recalling their long separation and the brief reunion that led to the birth of their son, now a toddler, while Mr. Bah was in detention.

“I wanted them to open the casket,” she added, “to know if it was him inside. Until today, I cry for him.”

Margot Williams contributed reporting.

Trent Reznor one-ups himself.

2008-05-05T15:58:00.004-06:00

Big ups to Trent Reznor for not only putting out his new album for free on the Internet but for also

1. Providing lossy copies of respectable quality (V0 Lame).

2. Providing lossless copies in FLAC, M4A, and WAV.

3. Using bittorrent for distribution. Huge improvement over the way that Ghosts I-IV and Niggy Tardust were distributed. Although those were really cool, server problems prevented a lot of people from downloading for a while and direct downloads are a lot more finnicky for people without the best connections.

First he outdid Radiohead, then he outdid himself. Regardless of whether you're still into Nine Inch Nails (or never were), you have to admit that this is pretty cool.

Get your copy here.

Tracklist:

1. 999,999
2. 1,000,000
3. letting you
4. discipline
5. echoplex
6. head down
7. lights in the sky
8. corona radiata
9. the four of us are dying
10. demon seed

length: 43:45

Slowly getting sucked into a legal apparatus

2008-05-03T00:29:00.001-06:00

Every day I listen to my classmates go on and on about how much they're looking forward to making six figures a year. The hard choices are about whether to be a transactional attorney that pretty much just pushes papers around or the in-house counsel at a health insurance compnay. The thing that makes them the angriest is that some of the income that they're dreaming of might get taxed some day (this coming from people who gladly use public roads and federal financial aid to attend a state school).

Day in and day out, I'm buried in mountains of studying. Whether it's screen after screen of notes that I don't even remember typing or rule after rule that I can't seem to fit into the broader picture of whatever subject I'm trying to catch up, it all feels endless. I'm not doing anything novel or beautiful.

I keep telling myself that I'm doing this for a reason. But that's what a lot of people say when they go to law school and pretty much all of them sell out when they realize that they're never going to be a world famous civil rights litigator or defender of the environment.

With stories like this, I don't know what to think about the future. Even if I get good grades, I'm at a tier 3 school and my options are severely limited. If I spend the rest of my life going over wills or trying to figure out how to help companies settle products liability cases while this kind of nauseating garbage is going on, I don't think I can make it.

I just have a really strong feeling that these three years are going to be wasted. None of this unpleasantness is going to do a thing to stop this. The people who are pissed about paying taxes are the one who will probably win. Either that or I'll turn into one of them.

May 3, 2008
After Hiatus, States Set Wave of Executions
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

HUNTSVILLE, Tex. — Here in the nation’s leading death-penalty state, and some of the 35 others with capital punishment, execution dockets are quickly filling up.

Less than three weeks after a United States Supreme Court ruling ended a seven-month moratorium on lethal injections, at least 14 execution dates have been set in six states between May 6 and October.

“The Supreme Court essentially blessed their way of doing things,” said Douglas A. Berman, a professor of law and a sentencing expert at Ohio State University. “So in some sense, they’re back from vacation and ready to go to work.”

Experts say the resumption of executions is likely to throw a strong new spotlight on the divisive national — and international — issue of capital punishment.

“When people confront a new wave of executions, they’ll be questioning not only how people are executed but whether people should be executed,” said James R. Acker, a historian of the death penalty and a criminal justice professor at the State University at Albany.

Texas leads the list with five people now set to die here in the Walls Unit, the state’s death house, between June 3 and Aug. 20. Virginia is next with four. Louisiana, Oklahoma and South Dakota have also set execution dates.

Some welcome the end of the moratorium.

“We’ll start playing a little bit of catch-up,” said William R. Hubbarth, a spokesman for Justice for All, a victims rights group based in Houston.

“It’s not like we have a cheering section for the death penalty.” Mr. Hubbarth said. But, he added: “The capital murderers set to be executed should be executed post-haste. It’s not about killing the inmate. It’s about imposing the penalty that 12 of his peers have assessed.”

More inmates whose appeals have expired are certain to be added to execution rosters soon, including, in all likelihood, Jack Harry Smith, who, at 70, is the oldest of the 360 men and 9 women on Texas’ death row (though hardly a row any more, but an entire compound). Mr. Smith has been under a death sentence for 30 years for a robbery killing at a grocery in the Houston area.

“If it’s my time to go, it’s my time to go,” said Mr. Smith, who maintains his innocence and was delivered by guards for a prison interview in a wheelchair.

So far, at least nine others elsewhere, including Antoinette Frank, a former police officer convicted of a murderous robbery rampage in New Orleans, have been given new execution dates, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, an anti-capital punishment research group that puts the latest death row census at 3,263. Dozens more are likely to get execution dates in coming months, but most under death sentences have not exhausted their appeals.

Yet public support for capital punishment may be dwindling. Death sentences have been on the decline, and a poll last year by death penalty opponents found Americans losing confidence in the death penalty.

“There will be more executions than people have the stomach for, at least in many parts of the country,” said Stephen B. Bright, president of the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, a leading anti-death-penalty litigation clinic.

Last year, Texas accounted for 26 of the 42 executions nationwide. That includes the last two people executed before the Supreme Court signaled a moratorium on executions while considering whether the chemical formula used for lethal injection in Kentucky inflicted pain amounting to unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment. The justices ruled 7 to 2 on April 16 that it did not, while allowing for possible future challenges.

But the scheduling of executions comes as prosecutors and juries have been turning away from the death penalty, often in favor of life sentences without parole, now an option in every death-penalty state but New Mexico.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center, death sentences nationwide rose from 137 in 1977, peaked at 326 in 1995 and fell steadily to 110 last year.

“We’re seeing a huge drop-off,” said Mr. Bright, attributing the decline to the time and trouble of imposing death sentences, and a recent wave of exonerations after DNA tests proved wrongful conviction.

Close to 35 people have been cleared in Texas alone, including, just days ago, James L. Woodard, who spent more than 27 years in prison for a 1980 murder he did not commit.

The first inmate now set for execution is William E. Lynd, 53, on Tuesday in Georgia. Mr. Lind was convicted of shooting his girlfriend, Ginger Moore, in the face during an argument in 1988, shooting her again as she clung to life, and a third time, fatally, as she struggled in the trunk of his car. After burying her, he attacked and killed another woman he had stopped on the road.

With two other executions pending but not yet scheduled in Georgia, the state seeks “clearance of the backlog,” said Russ Willard, a spokesman for Attorney General Thurbert E. Baker. “We will work our way though the system at a much more rapid pace than we would have.”

Virginia — which has executed 98 people since 1976, second only to Texas, with 405 — has the next scheduled execution: May 27, for Kevin Green, 30, for the 1998 slayings of Patricia and Lawrence Vaughn in their convenience store in Dolphin. Three other Virginia inmates also have been given dates in June and July.

Louisiana has set a July 15 execution date for two inmates, including the former police officer, Ms. Frank, 30. She was convicted of killing a fellow officer, Ronald Williams, and two Vietnamese workers, Ha Vu and her brother, Cuong Vong, at their family’s restaurant in New Orleans during a robbery in 1995.

But appeals may delay her execution and that of the second inmate Darrell Robinson, convicted of killing four people.

South Dakota, which has recorded only 15 executions since 1889, set a week’s window of Oct. 7-13 for the execution of Briley Piper, 25. He pleaded guilty to the torture murder of Chester Allan Pogue, 19, who was forced to drink hydrochloric acid and then stabbed and bludgeoned to death in 2000. One accomplice was executed last year and another is serving life without parole.

The first Texas inmate now re-scheduled for death, on June 3, is Derrick Sonnier, 40, convicted of stalking, stabbing and strangling a young mother, Melody Flowers, and her baby son in Humble, north of Houston, in 1991.

Mr. Sonnier, who turned down a request this week for an interview, had forbidden his trial lawyer from calling family members as mitigating witnesses, costing him a chance for life in prison without parole, said his appellate lawyer, Jani Maselli.

In another of the five latest scheduled Texas executions, a July 22 date was set for Lester Bower, 60, convicted of killing a former police officer and three other men near Sherman in 1983.

Mr. Smith, the oldest death row inmate, lost his Supreme Court appeal in February and said he was resigned to an execution date soon as well.

“I’d hate to go before my time,” he said, a gaunt figure seated in a wheelchair and speaking by phone behind glass in the Polunsky Unit in Livingston, Tex., where the condemned are housed until the day they are driven to Huntsville to die.

Asked if the prospect of an end to his confinement came as any relief, he said, “In a way it does.”

“Death is death,” Mr. Smith said. “If they stick a needle in your arm or shoot you in the head, it’s cruel and inhuman punishment, taking a human life.”

Yet, he said, “a life sentence is a whole lot worse — it’s torture.”

The Military-Analyst-Propaganda Complex

2008-04-21T12:12:00.002-06:00

Is it any wonder that the public has been so misguided on so many issues, especially regarding national security? This, combined for last week's farce of a Presidential debate, shows that American journalism is in need of a good defibrillator.

April 20, 2008
Message Machine
Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand
By DAVID BARSTOW

In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded “the gulag of our times” by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from United Nations human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure.

The administration’s communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo.

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized.

Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.

Analysts have been wooed in hundreds of private briefings with senior military leaders, including officials with significant influence over contracting and budget matters, records show. They have been taken on tours of Iraq and given access to classified intelligence. They have been briefed by officials from the White House, State Department and Justice Department, including Mr. Cheney, Alberto R. Gonzales and Stephen J. Hadley.

In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.

A few expressed regret for participating in what they regarded as an effort to dupe the American public with propaganda dressed as independent military analysis.

“It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you,’ ” Robert S. Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and former Fox News analyst, said.

Kenneth Allard, a former NBC military analyst who has taught information warfare at the National Defense University, said the campaign amounted to a sophisticated information operation. “This was a coherent, active policy,” he said.

As conditions in Iraq deteriorated, Mr. Allard recalled, he saw a yawning gap between what analysts were told in private briefings and what subsequent inquiries and books later revealed.

“Night and day,” Mr. Allard said, “I felt we’d been hosed.”

The Pentagon defended its relationship with military analysts, saying they had been given only factual information about the war. “The intent and purpose of this is nothing other than an earnest attempt to inform the American people,” Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said.

It was, Mr. Whitman added, “a bit incredible” to think retired military officers could be “wound up” and turned into “puppets of the Defense Department.”

Many analysts strongly denied that they had either been co-opted or had allowed outside business interests to affect their on-air comments, and some have used their platforms to criticize the conduct of the war. Several, like Jeffrey D. McCausland, a CBS military analyst and defense industry lobbyist, said they kept their networks informed of their outside work and recused themselves from coverage that touched on business interests.

“I’m not here representing the administration,” Dr. McCausland said.

Some network officials, meanwhile, acknowledged only a limited understanding of their analysts’ interactions with the administration. They said that while they were sensitive to potential conflicts of interest, they did not hold their analysts to the same ethical standards as their news employees regarding outside financial interests. The onus is on their analysts to disclose conflicts, they said. And whatever the contributions of military analysts, they also noted the many network journalists who have covered the war for years in all its complexity.

Five years into the Iraq war, most details of the architecture and execution of the Pentagon’s campaign have never been disclosed. But The Times successfully sued the Defense Department to gain access to 8,000 pages of e-mail messages, transcripts and records describing years of private briefings, trips to Iraq and Guantánamo and an extensive Pentagon talking points operation.

These records reveal a symbiotic relationship where the usual dividing lines between government and journalism have been obliterated.

Internal Pentagon documents repeatedly refer to the military analysts as “message force multipliers” or “surrogates” who could be counted on to deliver administration “themes and messages” to millions of Americans “in the form of their own opinions.”

Though many analysts are paid network consultants, making $500 to $1,000 per appearance, in Pentagon meetings they sometimes spoke as if they were operating behind enemy lines, interviews and transcripts show. Some offered the Pentagon tips on how to outmaneuver the networks, or as one analyst put it to Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, “the Chris Matthewses and the Wolf Blitzers of the world.” Some warned of planned stories or sent the Pentagon copies of their correspondence with network news executives. Many — although certainly not all — faithfully echoed talking points intended to counter critics.

“Good work,” Thomas G. McInerney, a retired Air Force general, consultant and Fox News analyst, wrote to the Pentagon after receiving fresh talking points in late 2006. “We will use it.”

Again and again, records show, the administration has enlisted analysts as a rapid reaction force to rebut what it viewed as critical news coverage, some of it by the networks’ own Pentagon correspondents. For example, when news articles revealed that troops in Iraq were dying because of inadequate body armor, a senior Pentagon official wrote to his colleagues: “I think our analysts — properly armed — can push back in that arena.”

The documents released by the Pentagon do not show any quid pro quo between commentary and contracts. But some analysts said they had used the special access as a marketing and networking opportunity or as a window into future business possibilities.

John C. Garrett is a retired Army colonel and unpaid analyst for Fox News TV and radio. He is also a lobbyist at Patton Boggs who helps firms win Pentagon contracts, including in Iraq. In promotional materials, he states that as a military analyst he “is privy to weekly access and briefings with the secretary of defense, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other high level policy makers in the administration.” One client told investors that Mr. Garrett’s special access and decades of experience helped him “to know in advance — and in detail — how best to meet the needs” of the Defense Department and other agencies.

In interviews Mr. Garrett said there was an inevitable overlap between his dual roles. He said he had gotten “information you just otherwise would not get,” from the briefings and three Pentagon-sponsored trips to Iraq. He also acknowledged using this access and information to identify opportunities for clients. “You can’t help but look for that,” he said, adding, “If you know a capability that would fill a niche or need, you try to fill it. “That’s good for everybody.”

At the same time, in e-mail messages to the Pentagon, Mr. Garrett displayed an eagerness to be supportive with his television and radio commentary. “Please let me know if you have any specific points you want covered or that you would prefer to downplay,” he wrote in January 2007, before President Bush went on TV to describe the surge strategy in Iraq.

Conversely, the administration has demonstrated that there is a price for sustained criticism, many analysts said. “You’ll lose all access,” Dr. McCausland said.

With a majority of Americans calling the war a mistake despite all administration attempts to sway public opinion, the Pentagon has focused in the last couple of years on cultivating in particular military analysts frequently seen and heard in conservative news outlets, records and interviews show.

Some of these analysts were on the mission to Cuba on June 24, 2005 — the first of six such Guantánamo trips — which was designed to mobilize analysts against the growing perception of Guantánamo as an international symbol of inhumane treatment. On the flight to Cuba, for much of the day at Guantánamo and on the flight home that night, Pentagon officials briefed the 10 or so analysts on their key messages — how much had been spent improving the facility, the abuse endured by guards, the extensive rights afforded detainees.

The results came quickly. The analysts went on TV and radio, decrying Amnesty International, criticizing calls to close the facility and asserting that all detainees were treated humanely.

“The impressions that you’re getting from the media and from the various pronouncements being made by people who have not been here in my opinion are totally false,” Donald W. Shepperd, a retired Air Force general, reported live on CNN by phone from Guantánamo that same afternoon.

The next morning, Montgomery Meigs, a retired Army general and NBC analyst, appeared on “Today.” “There’s been over $100 million of new construction,” he reported. “The place is very professionally run.”

Within days, transcripts of the analysts’ appearances were circulated to senior White House and Pentagon officials, cited as evidence of progress in the battle for hearts and minds at home.

Charting the Campaign

By early 2002, detailed planning for a possible Iraq invasion was under way, yet an obstacle loomed. Many Americans, polls showed, were uneasy about invading a country with no clear connection to the Sept. 11 attacks. Pentagon and White House officials believed the military analysts could play a crucial role in helping overcome this resistance.

Torie Clarke, the former public relations executive who oversaw the Pentagon’s dealings with the analysts as assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, had come to her job with distinct ideas about achieving what she called “information dominance.” In a spin-saturated news culture, she argued, opinion is swayed most by voices perceived as authoritative and utterly independent.

And so even before Sept. 11, she built a system within the Pentagon to recruit “key influentials” — movers and shakers from all walks who with the proper ministrations might be counted on to generate support for Mr. Rumsfeld’s priorities.

In the months after Sept. 11, as every network rushed to retain its own all-star squad of retired military officers, Ms. Clarke and her staff sensed a new opportunity. To Ms. Clarke’s team, the military analysts were the ultimate “key influential” — authoritative, most of them decorated war heroes, all reaching mass audiences.

The analysts, they noticed, often got more airtime than network reporters, and they were not merely explaining the capabilities of Apache helicopters. They were framing how viewers ought to interpret events. What is more, while the analysts were in the news media, they were not of the news media. They were military men, many of them ideologically in sync with the administration’s neoconservative brain trust, many of them important players in a military industry anticipating large budget increases to pay for an Iraq war.

Even analysts with no defense industry ties, and no fondness for the administration, were reluctant to be critical of military leaders, many of whom were friends. “It is very hard for me to criticize the United States Army,” said William L. Nash, a retired Army general and ABC analyst. “It is my life.”

Other administrations had made sporadic, small-scale attempts to build relationships with the occasional military analyst. But these were trifling compared with what Ms. Clarke’s team had in mind. Don Meyer, an aide to Ms. Clarke, said a strategic decision was made in 2002 to make the analysts the main focus of the public relations push to construct a case for war. Journalists were secondary. “We didn’t want to rely on them to be our primary vehicle to get information out,” Mr. Meyer said.

The Pentagon’s regular press office would be kept separate from the military analysts. The analysts would instead be catered to by a small group of political appointees, with the point person being Brent T. Krueger, another senior aide to Ms. Clarke. The decision recalled other administration tactics that subverted traditional journalism. Federal agencies, for example, have paid columnists to write favorably about the administration. They have distributed to local TV stations hundreds of fake news segments with fawning accounts of administration accomplishments. The Pentagon itself has made covert payments to Iraqi newspapers to publish coalition propaganda.

Rather than complain about the “media filter,” each of these techniques simply converted the filter into an amplifier. This time, Mr. Krueger said, the military analysts would in effect be “writing the op-ed” for the war.

Assembling the Team

From the start, interviews show, the White House took a keen interest in which analysts had been identified by the Pentagon, requesting lists of potential recruits, and suggesting names. Ms. Clarke’s team wrote summaries describing their backgrounds, business affiliations and where they stood on the war.

“Rumsfeld ultimately cleared off on all invitees,” said Mr. Krueger, who left the Pentagon in 2004. (Through a spokesman, Mr. Rumsfeld declined to comment for this article.)

Over time, the Pentagon recruited more than 75 retired officers, although some participated only briefly or sporadically. The largest contingent was affiliated with Fox News, followed by NBC and CNN, the other networks with 24-hour cable outlets. But analysts from CBS and ABC were included, too. Some recruits, though not on any network payroll, were influential in other ways — either because they were sought out by radio hosts, or because they often published op-ed articles or were quoted in magazines, Web sites and newspapers. At least nine of them have written op-ed articles for The Times.

The group was heavily represented by men involved in the business of helping companies win military contracts. Several held senior positions with contractors that gave them direct responsibility for winning new Pentagon business. James Marks, a retired Army general and analyst for CNN from 2004 to 2007, pursued military and intelligence contracts as a senior executive with McNeil Technologies. Still others held board positions with military firms that gave them responsibility for government business. General McInerney, the Fox analyst, for example, sits on the boards of several military contractors, including Nortel Government Solutions, a supplier of communication networks.

Several were defense industry lobbyists, such as Dr. McCausland, who works at Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney, a major lobbying firm where he is director of a national security team that represents several military contractors. “We offer clients access to key decision makers,” Dr. McCausland’s team promised on the firm’s Web site.

Dr. McCausland was not the only analyst making this pledge. Another was Joseph W. Ralston, a retired Air Force general. Soon after signing on with CBS, General Ralston was named vice chairman of the Cohen Group, a consulting firm headed by a former defense secretary, William Cohen, himself now a “world affairs” analyst for CNN. “The Cohen Group knows that getting to ‘yes’ in the aerospace and defense market — whether in the United States or abroad — requires that companies have a thorough, up-to-date understanding of the thinking of government decision makers,” the company tells prospective clients on its Web site.

There were also ideological ties.

Two of NBC’s most prominent analysts, Barry R. McCaffrey and the late Wayne A. Downing, were on the advisory board of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, an advocacy group created with White House encouragement in 2002 to help make the case for ousting Saddam Hussein. Both men also had their own consulting firms and sat on the boards of major military contractors.

Many also shared with Mr. Bush’s national security team a belief that pessimistic war coverage broke the nation’s will to win in Vietnam, and there was a mutual resolve not to let that happen with this war.

This was a major theme, for example, with Paul E. Vallely, a Fox News analyst from 2001 to 2007. A retired Army general who had specialized in psychological warfare, Mr. Vallely co-authored a paper in 1980 that accused American news organizations of failing to defend the nation from “enemy” propaganda during Vietnam.

“We lost the war — not because we were outfought, but because we were out Psyoped,” he wrote. He urged a radically new approach to psychological operations in future wars — taking aim at not just foreign adversaries but domestic audiences, too. He called his approach “MindWar” — using network TV and radio to “strengthen our national will to victory.”

The Selling of the War

From their earliest sessions with the military analysts, Mr. Rumsfeld and his aides spoke as if they were all part of the same team.

In interviews, participants described a powerfully seductive environment — the uniformed escorts to Mr. Rumsfeld’s private conference room, the best government china laid out, the embossed name cards, the blizzard of PowerPoints, the solicitations of advice and counsel, the appeals to duty and country, the warm thank you notes from the secretary himself.

“Oh, you have no idea,” Mr. Allard said, describing the effect. “You’re back. They listen to you. They listen to what you say on TV.” It was, he said, “psyops on steroids” — a nuanced exercise in influence through flattery and proximity. “It’s not like it’s, ‘We’ll pay you $500 to get our story out,’ ” he said. “It’s more subtle.”

The access came with a condition. Participants were instructed not to quote their briefers directly or otherwise describe their contacts with the Pentagon.

In the fall and winter leading up to the invasion, the Pentagon armed its analysts with talking points portraying Iraq as an urgent threat. The basic case became a familiar mantra: Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons, was developing nuclear weapons, and might one day slip some to Al Qaeda; an invasion would be a relatively quick and inexpensive “war of liberation.”

At the Pentagon, members of Ms. Clarke’s staff marveled at the way the analysts seamlessly incorporated material from talking points and briefings as if it was their own.

“You could see that they were messaging,” Mr. Krueger said. “You could see they were taking verbatim what the secretary was saying or what the technical specialists were saying. And they were saying it over and over and over.” Some days, he added, “We were able to click on every single station and every one of our folks were up there delivering our message. You’d look at them and say, ‘This is working.’ ”

On April 12, 2003, with major combat almost over, Mr. Rumsfeld drafted a memorandum to Ms. Clarke. “Let’s think about having some of the folks who did such a good job as talking heads in after this thing is over,” he wrote.

By summer, though, the first signs of the insurgency had emerged. Reports from journalists based in Baghdad were increasingly suffused with the imagery of mayhem.

The Pentagon did not have to search far for a counterweight.

It was time, an internal Pentagon strategy memorandum urged, to “re-energize surrogates and message-force multipliers,” starting with the military analysts.

The memorandum led to a proposal to take analysts on a tour of Iraq in September 2003, timed to help overcome the sticker shock from Mr. Bush’s request for $87 billion in emergency war financing.

The group included four analysts from Fox News, one each from CNN and ABC, and several research-group luminaries whose opinion articles appear regularly in the nation’s op-ed pages.

The trip invitation promised a look at “the real situation on the ground in Iraq.”

The situation, as described in scores of books, was deteriorating. L. Paul Bremer III, then the American viceroy in Iraq, wrote in his memoir, “My Year in Iraq,” that he had privately warned the White House that the United States had “about half the number of soldiers we needed here.”

“We’re up against a growing and sophisticated threat,” Mr. Bremer recalled telling the president during a private White House dinner.

That dinner took place on Sept. 24, while the analysts were touring Iraq.

Yet these harsh realities were elided, or flatly contradicted, during the official presentations for the analysts, records show. The itinerary, scripted to the minute, featured brief visits to a model school, a few refurbished government buildings, a center for women’s rights, a mass grave and even the gardens of Babylon.

Mostly the analysts attended briefings. These sessions, records show, spooled out an alternative narrative, depicting an Iraq bursting with political and economic energy, its security forces blossoming. On the crucial question of troop levels, the briefings echoed the White House line: No reinforcements were needed. The “growing and sophisticated threat” described by Mr. Bremer was instead depicted as degraded, isolated and on the run.

“We’re winning,” a briefing document proclaimed.

One trip participant, General Nash of ABC, said some briefings were so clearly “artificial” that he joked to another group member that they were on “the George Romney memorial trip to Iraq,” a reference to Mr. Romney’s infamous claim that American officials had “brainwashed” him into supporting the Vietnam War during a tour there in 1965, while he was governor of Michigan.

But if the trip pounded the message of progress, it also represented a business opportunity: direct access to the most senior civilian and military leaders in Iraq and Kuwait, including many with a say in how the president’s $87 billion would be spent. It also was a chance to gather inside information about the most pressing needs confronting the American mission: the acute shortages of “up-armored” Humvees; the billions to be spent building military bases; the urgent need for interpreters; and the ambitious plans to train Iraq’s security forces.

Information and access of this nature had undeniable value for trip participants like William V. Cowan and Carlton A. Sherwood.

Mr. Cowan, a Fox analyst and retired Marine colonel, was the chief executive of a new military firm, the wvc3 Group. Mr. Sherwood was its executive vice president. At the time, the company was seeking contracts worth tens of millions to supply body armor and counterintelligence services in Iraq. In addition, wvc3 Group had a written agreement to use its influence and connections to help tribal leaders in Al Anbar Province win reconstruction contracts from the coalition.

“Those sheiks wanted access to the C.P.A.,” Mr. Cowan recalled in an interview, referring to the Coalition Provisional Authority.

Mr. Cowan said he pleaded their cause during the trip. “I tried to push hard with some of Bremer’s people to engage these people of Al Anbar,” he said.

Back in Washington, Pentagon officials kept a nervous eye on how the trip translated on the airwaves. Uncomfortable facts had bubbled up during the trip. One briefer, for example, mentioned that the Army was resorting to packing inadequately armored Humvees with sandbags and Kevlar blankets. Descriptions of the Iraqi security forces were withering. “They can’t shoot, but then again, they don’t,” one officer told them, according to one participant’s notes.

“I saw immediately in 2003 that things were going south,” General Vallely, one of the Fox analysts on the trip, recalled in an interview with The Times.

The Pentagon, though, need not have worried.

“You can’t believe the progress,” General Vallely told Alan Colmes of Fox News upon his return. He predicted the insurgency would be “down to a few numbers” within months.

“We could not be more excited, more pleased,” Mr. Cowan told Greta Van Susteren of Fox News. There was barely a word about armor shortages or corrupt Iraqi security forces. And on the key strategic question of the moment — whether to send more troops — the analysts were unanimous.

“I am so much against adding more troops,” General Shepperd said on CNN.

Access and Influence

Inside the Pentagon and at the White House, the trip was viewed as a masterpiece in the management of perceptions, not least because it gave fuel to complaints that “mainstream” journalists were ignoring the good news in Iraq.

“We’re hitting a home run on this trip,” a senior Pentagon official wrote in an e-mail message to Richard B. Myers and Peter Pace, then chairman and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Its success only intensified the Pentagon’s campaign. The pace of briefings accelerated. More trips were organized. Eventually the effort involved officials from Washington to Baghdad to Kabul to Guantánamo and back to Tampa, Fla., the headquarters of United States Central Command.

The scale reflected strong support from the top. When officials in Iraq were slow to organize another trip for analysts, a Pentagon official fired off an e-mail message warning that the trips “have the highest levels of visibility” at the White House and urging them to get moving before Lawrence Di Rita, one of Mr. Rumsfeld’s closest aides, “picks up the phone and starts calling the 4-stars.”

Mr. Di Rita, no longer at the Defense Department, said in an interview that a “conscious decision” was made to rely on the military analysts to counteract “the increasingly negative view of the war” coming from journalists in Iraq. The analysts, he said, generally had “a more supportive view” of the administration and the war, and the combination of their TV platforms and military cachet made them ideal for rebutting critical coverage of issues like troop morale, treatment of detainees, inadequate equipment or poorly trained Iraqi security forces. “On those issues, they were more likely to be seen as credible spokesmen,” he said.

For analysts with military industry ties, the attention brought access to a widening circle of influential officials beyond the contacts they had accumulated over the course of their careers.

Charles T. Nash, a Fox military analyst and retired Navy captain, is a consultant who helps small companies break into the military market. Suddenly, he had entree to a host of senior military leaders, many of whom he had never met. It was, he said, like being embedded with the Pentagon leadership. “You start to recognize what’s most important to them,” he said, adding, “There’s nothing like seeing stuff firsthand.”

Some Pentagon officials said they were well aware that some analysts viewed their special access as a business advantage. “Of course we realized that,” Mr. Krueger said. “We weren’t naïve about that.”

They also understood the financial relationship between the networks and their analysts. Many analysts were being paid by the “hit,” the number of times they appeared on TV. The more an analyst could boast of fresh inside information from high-level Pentagon “sources,” the more hits he could expect. The more hits, the greater his potential influence in the military marketplace, where several analysts prominently advertised their network roles.

“They have taken lobbying and the search for contracts to a far higher level,” Mr. Krueger said. “This has been highly honed.”

Mr. Di Rita, though, said it never occurred to him that analysts might use their access to curry favor. Nor, he said, did the Pentagon try to exploit this dynamic. “That’s not something that ever crossed my mind,” he said. In any event, he argued, the analysts and the networks were the ones responsible for any ethical complications. “We assume they know where the lines are,” he said.

The analysts met personally with Mr. Rumsfeld at least 18 times, records show, but that was just the beginning. They had dozens more sessions with the most senior members of his brain trust and access to officials responsible for managing the billions being spent in Iraq. Other groups of “key influentials” had meetings, but not nearly as often as the analysts.

An internal memorandum in 2005 helped explain why. The memorandum, written by a Pentagon official who had accompanied analysts to Iraq, said that based on her observations during the trip, the analysts “are having a greater impact” on network coverage of the military. “They have now become the go-to guys not only on breaking stories, but they influence the views on issues,” she wrote.

Other branches of the administration also began to make use of the analysts. Mr. Gonzales, then the attorney general, met with them soon after news leaked that the government was wiretapping terrorism suspects in the United States without warrants, Pentagon records show. When David H. Petraeus was appointed the commanding general in Iraq in January 2007, one of his early acts was to meet with the analysts.

“We knew we had extraordinary access,” said Timur J. Eads, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and Fox analyst who is vice president of government relations for Blackbird Technologies, a fast-growing military contractor.

Like several other analysts, Mr. Eads said he had at times held his tongue on television for fear that “some four-star could call up and say, ‘Kill that contract.’ ” For example, he believed Pentagon officials misled the analysts about the progress of Iraq’s security forces. “I know a snow job when I see one,” he said. He did not share this on TV.

“Human nature,” he explained, though he noted other instances when he was critical.

Some analysts said that even before the war started, they privately had questions about the justification for the invasion, but were careful not to express them on air.

Mr. Bevelacqua, then a Fox analyst, was among those invited to a briefing in early 2003 about Iraq’s purported stockpiles of illicit weapons. He recalled asking the briefer whether the United States had “smoking gun” proof.

“ ‘We don’t have any hard evidence,’ ” Mr. Bevelacqua recalled the briefer replying. He said he and other analysts were alarmed by this concession. “We are looking at ourselves saying, ‘What are we doing?’ ”

Another analyst, Robert L. Maginnis, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who works in the Pentagon for a military contractor, attended the same briefing and recalled feeling “very disappointed” after being shown satellite photographs purporting to show bunkers associated with a hidden weapons program. Mr. Maginnis said he concluded that the analysts were being “manipulated” to convey a false sense of certainty about the evidence of the weapons. Yet he and Mr. Bevelacqua and the other analysts who attended the briefing did not share any misgivings with the American public.

Mr. Bevelacqua and another Fox analyst, Mr. Cowan, had formed the wvc3 Group, and hoped to win military and national security contracts.

“There’s no way I was going to go down that road and get completely torn apart,” Mr. Bevelacqua said. “You’re talking about fighting a huge machine.”

Some e-mail messages between the Pentagon and the analysts reveal an implicit trade of privileged access for favorable coverage. Robert H. Scales Jr., a retired Army general and analyst for Fox News and National Public Radio whose consulting company advises several military firms on weapons and tactics used in Iraq, wanted the Pentagon to approve high-level briefings for him inside Iraq in 2006.

“Recall the stuff I did after my last visit,” he wrote. “I will do the same this time.”

Pentagon Keeps Tabs

As it happened, the analysts’ news media appearances were being closely monitored. The Pentagon paid a private contractor, Omnitec Solutions, hundreds of thousands of dollars to scour databases for any trace of the analysts, be it a segment on “The O’Reilly Factor” or an interview with The Daily Inter Lake in Montana, circulation 20,000.

Omnitec evaluated their appearances using the same tools as corporate branding experts. One report, assessing the impact of several trips to Iraq in 2005, offered example after example of analysts echoing Pentagon themes on all the networks.

“Commentary from all three Iraq trips was extremely positive over all,” the report concluded.

In interviews, several analysts reacted with dismay when told they were described as reliable “surrogates” in Pentagon documents. And some asserted that their Pentagon sessions were, as David L. Grange, a retired Army general and CNN analyst put it, “just upfront information,” while others pointed out, accurately, that they did not always agree with the administration or each other. “None of us drink the Kool-Aid,” General Scales said.

Likewise, several also denied using their special access for business gain. “Not related at all,” General Shepperd said, pointing out that many in the Pentagon held CNN “in the lowest esteem.”

Still, even the mildest of criticism could draw a challenge. Several analysts told of fielding telephone calls from displeased defense officials only minutes after being on the air.

On Aug. 3, 2005, 14 marines died in Iraq. That day, Mr. Cowan, who said he had grown increasingly uncomfortable with the “twisted version of reality” being pushed on analysts in briefings, called the Pentagon to give “a heads-up” that some of his comments on Fox “may not all be friendly,” Pentagon records show. Mr. Rumsfeld’s senior aides quickly arranged a private briefing for him, yet when he told Bill O’Reilly that the United States was “not on a good glide path right now” in Iraq, the repercussions were swift.

Mr. Cowan said he was “precipitously fired from the analysts group” for this appearance. The Pentagon, he wrote in an e-mail message, “simply didn’t like the fact that I wasn’t carrying their water.” The next day James T. Conway, then director of operations for the Joint Chiefs, presided over another conference call with analysts. He urged them, a transcript shows, not to let the marines’ deaths further erode support for the war.

“The strategic target remains our population,” General Conway said. “We can lose people day in and day out, but they’re never going to beat our military. What they can and will do if they can is strip away our support. And you guys can help us not let that happen.”

“General, I just made that point on the air,” an analyst replied.

“Let’s work it together, guys,” General Conway urged.

The Generals’ Revolt

The full dimensions of this mutual embrace were perhaps never clearer than in April 2006, after several of Mr. Rumsfeld’s former generals — none of them network military analysts — went public with devastating critiques of his wartime performance. Some called for his resignation.

On Friday, April 14, with what came to be called the “Generals’ Revolt” dominating headlines, Mr. Rumsfeld instructed aides to summon military analysts to a meeting with him early the next week, records show. When an aide urged a short delay to “give our big guys on the West Coast a little more time to buy a ticket and get here,” Mr. Rumsfeld’s office insisted that “the boss” wanted the meeting fast “for impact on the current story.”

That same day, Pentagon officials helped two Fox analysts, General McInerney and General Vallely, write an opinion article for The Wall Street Journal defending Mr. Rumsfeld.

“Starting to write it now,” General Vallely wrote to the Pentagon that afternoon. “Any input for the article,” he added a little later, “will be much appreciated.” Mr. Rumsfeld’s office quickly forwarded talking points and statistics to rebut the notion of a spreading revolt.

“Vallely is going to use the numbers,” a Pentagon official reported that afternoon.

The standard secrecy notwithstanding, plans for this session leaked, producing a front-page story in The Times that Sunday. In damage-control mode, Pentagon officials scrambled to present the meeting as routine and directed that communications with analysts be kept “very formal,” records show. “This is very, very sensitive now,” a Pentagon official warned subordinates.

On Tuesday, April 18, some 17 analysts assembled at the Pentagon with Mr. Rumsfeld and General Pace, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

A transcript of that session, never before disclosed, shows a shared determination to marginalize war critics and revive public support for the war.

“I’m an old intel guy,” said one analyst. (The transcript omits speakers’ names.) “And I can sum all of this up, unfortunately, with one word. That is Psyops. Now most people may hear that and they think, ‘Oh my God, they’re trying to brainwash.’ ”

“What are you, some kind of a nut?” Mr. Rumsfeld cut in, drawing laughter. “You don’t believe in the Constitution?”

There was little discussion about the actual criticism pouring forth from Mr. Rumsfeld’s former generals. Analysts argued that opposition to the war was rooted in perceptions fed by the news media, not reality. The administration’s overall war strategy, they counseled, was “brilliant” and “very successful.”

“Frankly,” one participant said, “from a military point of view, the penalty, 2,400 brave Americans whom we lost, 3,000 in an hour and 15 minutes, is relative.”

An analyst said at another point: “This is a wider war. And whether we have democracy in Iraq or not, it doesn’t mean a tinker’s damn if we end up with the result we want, which is a regime over there that’s not a threat to us.”

“Yeah,” Mr. Rumsfeld said, taking notes.

But winning or not, they bluntly warned, the administration was in grave political danger so long as most Americans viewed Iraq as a lost cause. “America hates a loser,” one analyst said.

Much of the session was devoted to ways that Mr. Rumsfeld could reverse the “political tide.” One analyst urged Mr. Rumsfeld to “just crush these people,” and assured him that “most of the gentlemen at the table” would enthusiastically support him if he did.

“You are the leader,” the analyst told Mr. Rumsfeld. “You are our guy.”

At another point, an analyst made a suggestion: “In one of your speeches you ought to say, ‘Everybody stop for a minute and imagine an Iraq ruled by Zarqawi.’ And then you just go down the list and say, ‘All right, we’ve got oil, money, sovereignty, access to the geographic center of gravity of the Middle East, blah, blah, blah.’ If you can just paint a mental picture for Joe America to say, ‘Oh my God, I can’t imagine a world like that.’ ”

Even as they assured Mr. Rumsfeld that they stood ready to help in this public relations offensive, the analysts sought guidance on what they should cite as the next “milestone” that would, as one analyst put it, “keep the American people focused on the idea that we’re moving forward to a positive end.” They placed particular emphasis on the growing confrontation with Iran.

“When you said ‘long war,’ you changed the psyche of the American people to expect this to be a generational event,” an analyst said. “And again, I’m not trying to tell you how to do your job...”

“Get in line,” Mr. Rumsfeld interjected.

The meeting ended and Mr. Rumsfeld, appearing pleased and relaxed, took the entire group into a small study and showed off treasured keepsakes from his life, several analysts recalled.

Soon after, analysts hit the airwaves. The Omnitec monitoring reports, circulated to more than 80 officials, confirmed that analysts repeated many of the Pentagon’s talking points: that Mr. Rumsfeld consulted “frequently and sufficiently” with his generals; that he was not “overly concerned” with the criticisms; that the meeting focused “on more important topics at hand,” including the next milestone in Iraq, the formation of a new government.

Days later, Mr. Rumsfeld wrote a memorandum distilling their collective guidance into bullet points. Two were underlined:

“Focus on the Global War on Terror — not simply Iraq. The wider war — the long war.”

“Link Iraq to Iran. Iran is the concern. If we fail in Iraq or Afghanistan, it will help Iran.”

But if Mr. Rumsfeld found the session instructive, at least one participant, General Nash, the ABC analyst, was repulsed.

“I walked away from that session having total disrespect for my fellow commentators, with perhaps one or two exceptions,” he said.

View From the Networks

Two weeks ago General Petraeus took time out from testifying before Congress about Iraq for a conference call with military analysts.

Mr. Garrett, the Fox analyst and Patton Boggs lobbyist, said he told General Petraeus during the call to “keep up the great work.”

“Hey,” Mr. Garrett said in an interview, “anything we can do to help.”

For the moment, though, because of heavy election coverage and general war fatigue, military analysts are not getting nearly as much TV time, and the networks have trimmed their rosters of analysts. The conference call with General Petraeus, for example, produced little in the way of immediate coverage.

Still, almost weekly the Pentagon continues to conduct briefings with selected military analysts. Many analysts said network officials were only dimly aware of these interactions. The networks, they said, have little grasp of how often they meet with senior officials, or what is discussed.

“I don’t think NBC was even aware we were participating,” said Rick Francona, a longtime military analyst for the network.

Some networks publish biographies on their Web sites that describe their analysts’ military backgrounds and, in some cases, give at least limited information about their business ties. But many analysts also said the networks asked few questions about their outside business interests, the nature of their work or the potential for that work to create conflicts of interest. “None of that ever happened,” said Mr. Allard, an NBC analyst until 2006.

“The worst conflict of interest was no interest.”

Mr. Allard and other analysts said their network handlers also raised no objections when the Defense Department began paying their commercial airfare for Pentagon-sponsored trips to Iraq — a clear ethical violation for most news organizations.

CBS News declined to comment on what it knew about its military analysts’ business affiliations or what steps it took to guard against potential conflicts.

NBC News also declined to discuss its procedures for hiring and monitoring military analysts. The network issued a short statement: “We have clear policies in place to assure that the people who appear on our air have been appropriately vetted and that nothing in their profile would lead to even a perception of a conflict of interest.”

Jeffrey W. Schneider, a spokesman for ABC, said that while the network’s military consultants were not held to the same ethical rules as its full-time journalists, they were expected to keep the network informed about any outside business entanglements. “We make it clear to them we expect them to keep us closely apprised,” he said.

A spokeswoman for Fox News said executives “refused to participate” in this article.

CNN requires its military analysts to disclose in writing all outside sources of income. But like the other networks, it does not provide its military analysts with the kind of written, specific ethical guidelines it gives its full-time employees for avoiding real or apparent conflicts of interest.

Yet even where controls exist, they have sometimes proven porous.

CNN, for example, said it was unaware for nearly three years that one of its main military analysts, General Marks, was deeply involved in the business of seeking government contracts, including contracts related to Iraq.

General Marks was hired by CNN in 2004, about the time he took a management position at McNeil Technologies, where his job was to pursue military and intelligence contracts. As required, General Marks disclosed that he received income from McNeil Technologies. But the disclosure form did not require him to describe what his job entailed, and CNN acknowledges it failed to do additional vetting.

“We did not ask Mr. Marks the follow-up questions we should have,” CNN said in a written statement.

In an interview, General Marks said it was no secret at CNN that his job at McNeil Technologies was about winning contracts. “I mean, that’s what McNeil does,” he said.

CNN, however, said it did not know the nature of McNeil’s military business or what General Marks did for the company. If he was bidding on Pentagon contracts, CNN said, that should have disqualified him from being a military analyst for the network. But in the summer and fall of 2006, even as he was regularly asked to comment on conditions in Iraq, General Marks was working intensively on bidding for a $4.6 billion contract to provide thousands of translators to United States forces in Iraq. In fact, General Marks was made president of the McNeil spin-off that won the huge contract in December 2006.

General Marks said his work on the contract did not affect his commentary on CNN. “I’ve got zero challenge separating myself from a business interest,” he said.

But CNN said it had no idea about his role in the contract until July 2007, when it reviewed his most recent disclosure form, submitted months earlier, and finally made inquiries about his new job.

“We saw the extent of his dealings and determined at that time we should end our relationship with him,” CNN said.

Torture, Waterboarding, and the Cambodian Genocide

2008-04-09T14:04:00.004-06:00

Survivor recalls horrors of Cambodia genocide

By Christiane Amanpour
CNN Chief International Correspondent

Editor's note: Christiane Amanpour is currently in production on a major CNN documentary that focuses on those people who stood up and said, "Listen! We must stop the killing. Stop the genocide."

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (CNN) -- A recently disclosed memo gave U.S. interrogators the ability to use harsh methods -- what many call "torture" -- to extract information from terrorist suspects after 9/11. Around the world, critics saw it as another blow to American prestige and moral authority.

The 2003 document also invokes wartime powers to protect interrogators who violate the Geneva Conventions, for example, by the use of waterboarding -- when a prisoner is made to think he is drowning.

Half a world away, the divisive debate over whether waterboarding constitutes torture comes into sharp relief at the infamous S-21, Tuol Sleng Prison in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

This is where the genocidal regime of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge imprisoned and brutalized its enemies from 1975 to 1979. I visited the once secret S-21, now a museum, with Van Nath, a former inmate. He remembers being brought here blindfolded and terrified:

"I thought that was the end of my life," he told me. "In my room people kept dying, one or two every day."

Van Nath was kept in a room packed with 50 other inmates, shackled together and forced to lie down.

"We could not sit. If we wanted to sit, we had to ask permission first. No talking, whispering or making noise," he told me.

Van Nath described how male prisoners were whipped raw, their fingernails were yanked out, they were hogtied to wooden bars. Prison guards mutilated women's genitals, ripped off their nipples with pliers. And worst of all, babies were ripped from their mothers' arms and slaughtered. Video Watch the former prisoner recount the brutality »

Van Nath was accused of being a CIA agent and given electric shock torture, but he survived when his jailers found out he was one of Cambodia's most prominent painters. And what did they make him paint?

"Pol Pot's picture. Big pictures," he told me. "I had to paint the same one again and again. If they didn't like my painting, that would have been the end of my life."

So when Pol Pot finally fell in 1979, Van Nath returned to paint what he had really seen and heard at S-21. He did it as a memorial to the 14,000 who had been tortured and executed in the prison. It's one of the few public reminders of the regime's crimes.

Take water torture, for instance. Van Nath remembers it as if it were yesterday. I gasped as I entered a room filled with his vivid depictions.

One of his paintings shows a prisoner blindfolded and hoisted onto a makeshift scaffold by two guards. He is then lowered head first into a massive barrel of water. Another shows a prisoner with cloth over his face, writhing as an interrogator pours water over his head.

Van Nath still remembers the accompanying screams: "It sounded like when we are really in pain, choking in water," he told me. "The sound was screaming, from the throat. I suppose they could not bear the torture.

"Whenever we heard the noises we were really shocked and scared. We thought one day they will do the same thing to us."

As he talked and showed me around, my mind raced to the debate in the United States over this same tactic used on its prisoners nearly 40 years later. I stared blankly at another of Van Nath's paintings. This time a prisoner is submerged in a life-size box full of water, handcuffed to the side so he cannot escape or raise his head to breathe. His interrogators, arrayed around him, are demanding information.

I asked Van Nath whether he had heard this was once used on America's terrorist suspects. He nodded his head. "It's not right," he said.

But I pressed him: Is it torture? "Yes," he said quietly, "it is severe torture. We could try it and see how we would react if we are choking under water for just two minutes. It is very serious."

Back then, Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge cadres recognized this for what it was and used it with brutal efficiency. The Cambodian genocide ultimately killed 2 million people.

Fourteen thousand of them had passed through the gates of hell at Tuol Sleng Prison.

Bush Administration: Fourth Amendment No Longer Applies

2008-04-03T12:44:00.002-06:00

I wish I were exaggerating.

Memo Linked to Warrantless Surveillance
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 4:38 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- For at least 16 months after the Sept. 11 terror attacks in 2001, the Bush administration believed that the Constitution's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures on U.S. soil didn't apply to its efforts to protect against terrorism.

That view was expressed in a Justice Department legal memo dated Oct. 23, 2001. The administration on Wednesday stressed that it now disavows that view.

The October 2001 memo was written at the request of the White House by John Yoo, then the deputy assistant attorney general, and addressed to Alberto Gonzales, the White House counsel at the time. The administration had asked the department for an opinion on the legality of potential responses to terrorist activity.

The 37-page memo has not been released. Its existence was disclosed Tuesday in a footnote of a separate secret memo, dated March 14, 2003, released by the Pentagon in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union.

''Our office recently concluded that the Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations,'' the footnote states, referring to a document titled ''Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activities Within the United States.''

Exactly what domestic military action was covered by the October memo is unclear. But federal documents indicate that the memo relates to the National Security Agency's Terrorist Surveillance Program, or TSP.

That program intercepted phone calls and e-mails on U.S. soil, bypassing the normal legal requirement that such eavesdropping be authorized by a secret federal court. The program began after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and continued until Jan. 17, 2007, when the White House resumed seeking surveillance warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

White House spokesman Tony Fratto said Wednesday that the Fourth Amendment finding in the October memo was not the legal underpinning for the Terrorist Surveillance Program.

''TSP relied on a separate set of legal memoranda,'' Fratto told The Associated Press. The Justice Department outlined that legal framework in a January 2006 white paper issued by the Justice Department a month after the TSP was revealed by The New York Times.

The October memo was written just days before Bush administration officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, briefed four House and Senate leaders on the NSA's secret wiretapping program for the first time.

The government itself related the October memo to the TSP program when it included it on a list of documents that were responsive to the ACLU's request for records from the program. It refused to hand them over.

Late Wednesday, Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said department officials believe the October 2001 memo was not about the eavesdropping program, but he did not explain why it was included on requests for documents linked to the TSP.

Earlier, Roehrkasse said the statement in the footnote does not reflect the current view of the department's Office of Legal Counsel.

''We disagree with the proposition that the Fourth Amendment has no application to domestic military operations,'' he said. ''Whether a particular search or seizure is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment requires consideration of the particular context and circumstances of the search.''

Roehrkasse would not say exactly when that legal opinion was overturned internally. But he pointed to the January 2006 white paper.

''The white paper does not suggest in any way that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to domestic military activities, and that is not the position of the Office of Legal Counsel,'' he said.

Suzanne Spaulding, a national security law expert and former assistant general counsel at the CIA, said she found the Fourth Amendment reference in the footnote troubling, but added: ''To know (the Justice Department) no longer thinks this is a legitimate statement is reassuring.''

''The recent disclosures underscore the Bush administration's extraordinarily sweeping conception of executive power,'' said Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU's National Security Project. ''The administration's lawyers believe the president should be permitted to violate statutory law, to violate international treaties and even to violate the Fourth Amendment inside the U.S. They believe that the president should be above the law.''

''Each time one of these memos comes out you have to come up with a more extreme way to characterize it,'' Jaffer said.

The ACLU is challenging in court the government's withholding of the October 2001 memo.