side note: Great read. Even though I was giving my gf a hard time last night about majoring in history…..it is extremely important to know what has happened in our past, so we don’t repeat the same mistakes as past generations. We need to make sure that the people in this country that stood up against the moron Palin, and that even bigger moron McCain (b/c he picked her), are aware of what’s going on. This is one of my biggest concerns….that people think they did their civic duty by showing up and casting their vote. That was just the beginning people….it’s important to stay aware and know what’s going on with your country.

by: Sara Robinson
The Campaign for America’s Future

Demonstrators in Santa Monica, California on tax day, April 15, 2009. The “Tea Party” movement has deep roots within the Republican party. (Photo: Getty Images)
There are dangerous currents running through America’s politics and the way we confront them is crucial.

All through the dark years of the Bush Administration, progressives watched in horror as Constitutional protections vanished, nativist rhetoric ratcheted up, hate speech turned into intimidation and violence, and the president of the United States seized for himself powers only demanded by history’s worst dictators. With each new outrage, the small handful of us who’d made ourselves experts on right-wing culture and politics would hear once again from worried readers: Is this it? Have we finally become a fascist state? Are we there yet?

And every time this question got asked, people like Chip Berlet and Dave Neiwert and Fred Clarkson and yours truly would look up from our maps like a parent on a long drive, and smile a wan smile of reassurance. “Wellll…we’re on a bad road, and if we don’t change course, we could end up there soon enough. But there’s also still plenty of time and opportunity to turn back. Watch, but don’t worry. As bad as this looks: no — we are not there yet.”

In tracking the mileage on this trip to perdition, many of us relied on the work of historian Robert Paxton, who is probably the world’s pre-eminent scholar on the subject of how countries turn fascist. In a 1998 paper published in The Journal of Modern History, Paxton argued that the best way to recognize emerging fascist movements isn’t by their rhetoric, their politics, or their aesthetics. Rather, he said, mature democracies turn fascist by a recognizable process, a set of five stages that may be the most important family resemblance that links all the whole motley collection of 20th Century fascisms together. According to our reading of Paxton’s stages, we weren’t there yet. There were certain signs — one in particular — we were keeping an eye out for, and we just weren’t seeing it. (more…)

In a decision announced this morning, the Supreme Court upheld the 1965 Voting Rights Act — a law that has done more to expand and strengthen our democracy than any other.

But the fight to protect voting rights doesn’t end there. Attacks on this critical law will not stop. And voter suppression tactics will continue to plague our elections.

In the wake of an historic election, it’s easy to reflect on how far we’ve come. But our democracy is still a work in progress.

Donna Brazile learned that first-hand as Al Gore’s campaign manager in 2000.

Watch Donna’s video on the fight to protect voting rights — then share it with your friends.

side note: One of my biggest disappointments with the Obama Administration. There have been quite a few instances now where he has marched in lockstep with Dubya and his illegal policies.

Glenn Greenwald
Salon.com
Arguments for suppressing torture photos are grounded in the worst aspects of the Bush/Cheney mindset.

(updated below – Update II)

Yesterday, there was a potentially temporary though still quite significant victory for those who believe in open government and transparency: as Jane Hamsher first reported, House leaders and the White House were forced to remove the Graham-Lieberman photo suppression amendment from the war supplemental spending bill, because widespread opposition to that amendment among progressive House Democrats was jeopardizing passage of the spending bill. Readers here and those of various blogs who bombarded House members with opposition calls on Friday obviously played an important role in forcing the withdrawal of this pernicious amendment. Successes of this sort are rare enough that — even if fleeting — they warrant some celebration.

Whether there is value in disclosing these specific torture photographs is a secondary issue here, at most [though in light of the ongoing debate in this country over torture and accountability, as well as the irreplaceable value of photographic evidence in documenting government abuses (see Abu Ghraib), the value of these sorts of photographs seems self-evident]. A much more critical issue here is whether the President should have the power to conceal evidence about the Government’s actions on the ground that what the Government did was so bad, so wrong, so inflammatory, so lawless, that to allow disclosure and transparency would reflect poorly on our country, thereby increase anti-American sentiment, and thus jeopardize The Troops. Once you accept that rationale — the more extreme the Government’s abuses are, the more compelling is the need for suppression — then open government, one of the central planks of the Obama campaign and the linchpin of a healthy democracy, becomes an illusion. (more…)

side note: The more and more we learn….the more we realize that for the 8 years the Bush Administration was in power…..the VP was actually running the daily operations. This is why Cheney is coming out and going on the offensive….they were his policies, not dubya’s. This is why we need a real investigation…..

by: Paul Kane and Joby Warrick
The Washington Post

Former vice president Richard B. Cheney personally oversaw at least four briefings with senior members of Congress about the controversial interrogation program, part of a secretive and forceful defense he mounted throughout 2005 in an effort to maintain support for the harsh techniques used on detainees.

The Cheney-led briefings came at some of the most critical moments for the program, as congressional oversight committees were threatening to investigate or even terminate the techniques, according to lawmakers, congressional officials, and current and former intelligence officials.

Cheney’s role in helping handle intelligence issues in the Bush administration — particularly his advocacy for the use of aggressive methods and warrantless wiretapping against alleged terrorists — has been well documented. But his hands-on role in defending the interrogation program to lawmakers has not been previously publicized.

The CIA made no mention of his role in documents delivered to Capitol Hill last month that listed every lawmaker who had been briefed on “enhanced interrogation techniques” since 2002. For meetings that were overseen by Cheney, the agency told the intelligence committees that information about who oversaw those briefings was “not available.”

The revelations do not shed light on whether top Democrats, as Republicans contend, were aware that waterboarding, a technique that simulates drowning, was being used on terrorism suspects as early as the fall of 2002. That discussion has dominated Capitol Hill since last month, when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who was not present at any of the briefings that included Cheney, accused the agency of intentionally misleading her in a 2002 briefing about the use of waterboarding.

An official who witnessed one of Cheney’s briefing sessions with lawmakers said the vice president’s presence appeared calculated to give additional heft to the CIA’s case for maintaining the program. Cheney left it to the professional briefers to outline the interrogation practices, while he mounted an impassioned defense of the program. (more…)

side note: A very powerful part of last night’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann.

President Obama hit a home run with his nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court — and not just because she’s the “woman who saved baseball” by ending the strike in 1995, nor simply because she would be the first Latina ever to serve on the high court.

It was a home run because in her three-decade career as a prosecutor, judge, private litigator and law professor, she has time and again earned bipartisan praise as one of America’s finest legal minds. And it was the right choice because Judge Sotomayor — herself born and raised in a South Bronx housing project — has summed up the American dream in her own incredible story and never once forgotten how the law affects our daily lives.

Now her historic nomination goes to the Senate. I know that process well, and I can tell you that the debate of the coming weeks and months will be shaped by the public response in the next few hours and days. It’s critical that the Senate and the public clearly see where the American people stand.

Will you add your name to the growing list of Americans who are pledging to “Stand with Sotomayor” today? Your name and comments will become part of a public display of support at this crucial time.

I’ve followed Judge Sotomayor’s remarkable journey for years. I voted for her when President George H.W. Bush nominated her for the District Court in 1992, and I was proud to vote for her again when President Bill Clinton nominated her for the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in 1998.

Born to a Puerto Rican family, Sotomayor grew up in a public housing project in the South Bronx. She was an avid reader from an early age, and was first inspired to pursue a legal career by the Nancy Drew mystery novels. Driven by her mother’s belief in the power of education and her own relentless work ethic, she excelled in school. She won a scholarship to Princeton University, graduated summa cum laude, and then went on to attend Yale Law School where she served as an editor of the prestigious Yale Law Journal.

Like President Obama, Sotomayor passed up many more lucrative opportunities after law school to put her degree to work for the public good. She served as an Assistant District Attorney in New York, tackling some of the hardest cases facing the city, including robberies, assaults, murders, police brutality, and child pornography. Her growing reputation for fearlessness and legal brilliance prompted her first nomination to the federal bench, and she’s only continued to soar.

If confirmed, she would start with more federal judicial experience than any Justice in a century, more overall judicial experience than any Justice in 70 years, and replace David Souter as the only Justice with firsthand experience as a trial judge. She has participated in over 3,000 panel decisions and authored roughly 400 opinions, expertly handling difficult issues of constitutional law, complicated procedural matters, and lawsuits involving complex business organizations.
(more…)

side note: I’m glad these conservative pundits are having this done……they think it’s a joke going in, Mancow compares it to swimming or taking a bath. Then they get waterboarded, in a safe envionment, and they last for a just seconds, and they think it’s torture. How do you think a detainee, who has been confined for months or even years feels when they get it done to them….over and over and over. Hey Sean Hannity, you’re up!

side note: I am sometimes hard on our new President, but we have to be. It’s very easy for a new President to sit around and uphold old policies based on the old boy’s club…..nope, not dealing with this any longer. We need to keep harping on the bullshit that surrounds a lot of what the bushies did and to make sure we know exactly what happened.

E.J. Dionne, Jr.
The New Republic

UPDATED AFTER TODAY’S SPEECHES

WASHINGTON — President Obama’s lieutenants would love it if all the networks ran a crawl line at the bottom of the screen during news broadcasts that kept repeating: “The economy, health care, energy, education. The economy, health care…”

Then there’s reality. Over the past two weeks, the past has ensnared the present, deflecting attention from Obama’s domestic priorities and raising issues that divide his coalition. We’re talking about torture as much as health care, military commissions as much as green energy, and Nancy Pelosi as much as Barack Obama.

In principle, the president is philosophical about this, but he is also frustrated. “The balance he wants to strike,” senior adviser David Axelrod said in an interview before Obama’s big speech on terrorism on Thursday, “is to solve the mess we found in ways that don’t trigger endless, backward-looking partisan battles that inhibit our efforts to get other things done.”

This may be reasonable, but Obama is caught between two powerful forces and two conflicting ideas. Republicans want to change the subject from their own party’s failures and distract from the progress Obama and Democrats in Congress are making on health care and cap-and-trade legislation. Their slogan might be: Bring on the past!

Many Democrats, in the meantime, are eager to hold the Bush administration accountable for its policies on torture and all manner of other things. Large numbers in their ranks, including human rights activists who met with Obama on Wednesday, are deeply unhappy with a series of Obama decisions. These include accepting some Bush approaches, notably barring the release of photos of prisoner abuse and continuing to use military commissions to try certain terrorism suspects. The complementary slogan from these Democratic critics might be: You can’t escape the past!

Characteristically, Obama tried to cut through all this with his Thursday speech. He tried to position himself between the two camps and turn it from a no man’s land into common ground. He presented himself as a careful balancer making “tough calls involving competing concerns.”

The fact that Obama had to give the speech at all reflects the administration’s realization that its initial efforts to put these issues to bed have fallen short. Why? (more…)

side note: Another reminder of the abuse of power by the previous Administration. It’s now time for Congress to look at the Patriot Act, page by page, and determine what is necessary. Why have The Constitution if are basic rights as citizens are not protected?

side note: I know we’ve heard people say that Cheney doesn’t care about his legacy….but I think he does! And I think this media blitz he’s doing is just that, he sees a shift in this country and doesn’t want to go down in history as a war criminal. Sorry DICK….a little too late for that Mr. Dark Side. Your legacy is fucked!

Salon.com
Who can even begin to guess at what’s motivating former Vice President Dick Cheney to continue to go on all the Sunday shows in order to defend waterboarding and slam the Obama administration? By this point, he has to know he’s not exactly a popular man (he even joked about that on Sunday), and that Democrats get down on their knees and thank God every time he’s on television.

So what is it? Maybe he’s convinced that ultimately his argument is a political winner, no matter who’s making it. Maybe he’s just trying to defend his legacy — and former President Bush’s — at all costs. Maybe he doesn’t mind hurting his fellow Republicans, who certainly didn’t mind taking shots at the previous administration once its approval numbers went south. Or maybe, as he seemed to show in a Sunday interview with CBS’ Bob Schieffer, he’s just not all that great of a political mind.

In response to a question from Schieffer about how the Republican Party can broaden its appeal and get moderates back in the fold, Cheney said, “[T]he suggestion our Democratic friends always make is somehow, you know, if you Republicans were just more like Democrats, you’d win elections. Well, I don’t buy that. I think we win elections when we have good solid conservative principles to run upon and base our policies on those principles.”

Then, asked to choose between two men who’d fought recently over the direction of the GOP, radio host Rush Limbaugh and former Secretary of State Colin Powell, Cheney responded, “Well, if I had to choose in terms of being a Republican, I’d go with Rush Limbaugh, I think. I think my take on it was Colin had already left the party. I didn’t know he was still a Republican… I just noted he endorsed the Democratic candidate for president this time, Barack Obama. I assumed that that is some indication of his loyalty and his interest.” (more…)

The U.S. House has passed the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Precent Act, also known as the Matthew Shepard Act, today by a vote of 249-175.

This decision comes after an official statement from President Obama urging the House of Representatives to pass the legislation and shortly after Rep. Virgina Foxx referred to Matthew Shepard’s hate-motivated murder as “a hoax.”

Matthew Shepard’s mother Judy Shepard responded to the decision saying, “No one should face violence simply because of who they are. This bill is a critical step to erasing the hate that has devastated far too many families.”

“Everyone in this country deserves a chance to pursue the American dream free from intimidation and persecution,” said U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette, who is Vice Chair of the LGBT Equality Caucus and cosponsor of the measure. “Every hate crime is an attack on the liberty and equality valued by every American. This legislation will provide state and local law enforcement agencies with resources they need to investigate and prosecute hate crimes, while also protecting the exercise of free speech and religious expression provided under our Constitution.”

Matt Kailey, editor of Out Front Colorado said, “The passage of the Matthew Shepard Act in the House today brings us one step closer to full equality for GLBT people by recognizing that our lives are just as valuable as anyone else’s. Adding sexual orientation and gender identity to the federal hate crimes statute does not create a special class of people or give GLBT people special recognition or special rights. What it does is recognize that preying on a GLBT person because of his or her GLBT status victimizes an entire community rather than just one person.

It also brings us closer to eliminating the ridiculous “trans panic” and “gay panic” defenses that have been used for too long as excuses to commit crimes of violence against GLBT people.”

see original

side note: I do have to give my brother credit for turning me on to Frank Rich in the Times…..what a great addition to a lazy Sunday morning. His writing style and the great research that goes into each of his editorials is hard to match…….

By FRANK RICH
The New York Times

WE don’t like our evil to be banal. Ten years after Columbine, it only now may be sinking in that the psychopathic killers were not jock-hating dorks from a “Trench Coat Mafia,” or, as ABC News maintained at the time, “part of a dark, underground national phenomenon known as the Gothic movement.” In the new best seller “Columbine,” the journalist Dave Cullen reaffirms that Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were instead ordinary American teenagers who worked at the local pizza joint, loved their parents and were popular among their classmates.

On Tuesday, it will be five years since Americans first confronted the photographs from Abu Ghraib on “60 Minutes II.” Here, too, we want to cling to myths that quarantine the evil. If our country committed torture, surely it did so to prevent Armageddon, in a patriotic ticking-time-bomb scenario out of “24.” If anyone deserves blame, it was only those identified by President Bush as “a few American troops who dishonored our country and disregarded our values”: promiscuous, sinister-looking lowlifes like Lynddie England, Charles Graner and the other grunts who were held accountable while the top command got a pass.

We’ve learned much, much more about America and torture in the past five years. But as Mark Danner recently wrote in The New York Review of Books, for all the revelations, one essential fact remains unchanged: “By no later than the summer of 2004, the American people had before them the basic narrative of how the elected and appointed officials of their government decided to torture prisoners and how they went about it.” When the Obama administration said it declassified four new torture memos 10 days ago in part because their contents were already largely public, it was right.

Yet we still shrink from the hardest truths and the bigger picture: that torture was a premeditated policy approved at our government’s highest levels; that it was carried out in scenarios that had no resemblance to “24”; that psychologists and physicians were enlisted as collaborators in inflicting pain; and that, in the assessment of reliable sources like the F.B.I. director Robert Mueller, it did not help disrupt any terrorist attacks.

The newly released Justice Department memos, like those before them, were not written by barely schooled misfits like England and Graner. John Yoo, Steven Bradbury and Jay Bybee graduated from the likes of Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Michigan and Brigham Young. They have passed through white-shoe law firms like Covington & Burling, and Sidley Austin. (more…)

side not: This is beyond the pale.

C.I.A. employed near-drowning technique against Al Qaeda prisoners

By Scott Shane
The New York Times

C.I.A. interrogators used waterboarding, the near-drowning technique that top Obama administration officials have described as illegal torture, 266 times on two key prisoners from Al Qaeda, far more than had been previously reported.

The C.I.A. officers used waterboarding at least 83 times in August 2002 against Abu Zubaydah, according to a 2005 Justice Department legal memorandum. Abu Zubaydah has been described as a Qaeda operative.

A former C.I.A. officer, John Kiriakou, told ABC News and other news media organizations in 2007 that Abu Zubaydah had undergone waterboarding for only 35 seconds before agreeing to tell everything he knew.

The 2005 memo also says that the C.I.A. used waterboarding 183 times in March 2003 against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The New York Times reported in 2007 that Mr. Mohammed had been barraged more than 100 times with harsh interrogation methods, causing C.I.A. officers to worry that they might have crossed legal limits and to halt his questioning. But the precise number and the exact nature of the interrogation method was not previously known.
(more…)