born live love die

Is there some reason that the RICO Act isn’t being used against Karl Rove and the Republicans?

It is clear that several statutes were broken, e.g., the Hatch Act, Presidential Records Act, etc.  And it is clear that there was a conspiracy to break them.  Isn’t that all that is required to start an investigation under the RICO Act?

It seems to me that a vast criminal conspiracy has taken over the Republican Party.  This conspiracy is more dangerous to the Republic than the Mafia.  Shouldn’t RICO be used to fight it?

In our formulation of ethics, we have married rights and responsibilities.  One does not exist without the other.  This fact seems lost on Max Frankel, who rights a longish piece about the avenues of information that exist next to the corridors of power in our government, about leaks and the press.  The talks about the Valerie Plame case, and Scooter Libby and the trial.  He is most comfortable seeing it as a game:

For the vast majority of “secrets,” there has developed between the government and the press (and Congress) a rather simple rule of thumb: The government hides what it can, pleading necessity as long as it can, and the press pries out what it can, pleading a need and right to know. Each side in this “game” regularly “wins” and “loses” a round or two. Each fights with the weapons at its command. When the government loses a secret or two, it simply adjusts to a new reality. When the press loses a quest or two, it simply reports (or misreports) as best it can. Or so it has been, until this moment.

This is as short sighted and cynical a view as can be made and is comfortingly collegial as it allows those who are self-appointed power watchers to mix in social comfort with those who abuse that power.  What Frankel isn’t willing to cop to is the failure of the press to live up to its responsibility inherent in the rights given them in the Constitution.  He talks about Tim Russert and Russert’s testimony, and how Russert was a team member in spinning for the Administration.  At no point does he comment on the fact that Russert assumed that any call from an Administration official was assumed to be off the record.  At no point does he say anything about Russert’s responsibility to seek the truth.  What did Frankel learn?

Much as I enjoyed the human drama and revelations of the Libby case, I wound up regretting the rough ride of the law through the marketplace of information.

Frankel closes with a quote from Justice Potter Stewart:

So far as the Constitution goes … the press is free to do battle against secrecy and deception in government. But the press cannot expect from the Constitution any guarantee that it will succeed. … The Constitution itself is neither a Freedom of Information Act nor an Official Secrets Act. The Constitution, in other words, establishes the contest, not its resolution. … For the rest, we must rely, as so often in our system we must, on the tug and pull of the political forces in American society.

But it isn’t battle when the press and the government act like the sheep dog, Ralph, and the Coyote in a Warner Bros. cartoon.  Frankel again, on Stewart:

In loose translation: Prosecutors of the realm, let this back-alley market flourish. Attorneys general and others armed with subpoena power, please leave well enough alone. Back off. Butt out.

Yes, that should make every mother who has lost a child in Iraq feel better.

Dahlia Lithwick, writing in Slate, gets to the bones of the matter with the current dust up between the Congress and the White House.  As she explains, the White House is using the “lesser power within the greater power” argument.

At first it sounds like a defensible argument: The power to do something substantial includes the power to do something less so. If the president has the power to appoint ambassadors, for instance, he probably also has the power to invite them over for dinner. If I have the legal authority to control and care for my son, this probably includes the power to choose his T-shirts.

Lately we’re hearing an awful lot of this greater-power-includes-the-lesser-power analysis. As the president recently noted: “I have broad discretion to replace political appointees throughout the government, including U.S. attorneys. And in this case, I appointed these U.S. attorneys and they served four-year terms.” He claims that his power to appoint all 93 U.S. attorneys includes the power to fire them for any reason. Or, as his supporters routinely argue, since Bill Clinton fired all 93 U.S. attorneys when he took office and no one peeped, the power to fire all 93 when you take office must include the lesser power to fire only eight midterm.

John Yoo, purveyor of all things crackpotish, puts this little syllogism to work.

Yoo, author of the infamous “torture memo” that came out of the Office of Legal Counsel in August of 2002 and became public in the summer of 2004, continues to defend the legality of the president’s right to torture suspects. (The OLC subsequently withdrew the memo.) Yoo’s argument rests largely on more of this same “greater-power-includes-the-lesser-power” analysis. As he explains to his interviewer, “Look, death is worse than torture, but everyone except pacifists thinks there are circumstances in which war is justified. War means killing people. If we are entitled to kill people, we must be entitled to injure them.” He goes on to say, “I don’t see how it can be reasonable to have an absolute prohibition on torture when you don’t have an absolute prohibition on killing.”

The law is a metaphysical shell game to Mr. Yoo where only he knows under which shell the truth lies.

This being a debater’s trick, as with all debater’s tricks, the argument is won or lost in the axioms.

The real trick, as Jack Balkin of Yale Law School points out, is convincing your listener that the same rules and norms that govern the “greater” category also govern the “lesser.” You need to convince them that if the state is allowed, for instance, to execute criminals, any laws regarding cruel and unusual treatment simply go away. In the case of the U.S. attorney firings, that would mean insisting that the same rules and norms that govern presidential authority over U.S. attorney appointments govern everything to do with the Justice Department’s oversight of individual (partisan, political) criminal investigations and prosecutions. You would similarly need to insist that the rules that govern the president’s power to kill someone during wartime also govern his authority to torture a suspect during an undeclared war on terror.

I like Ms. Lithwick and I really like her writing, but the stakes are higher than her close.

All of which explains, I imagine, some of the nuttiest legal positions taken by the president over the past years. If you assert absolutely vast “greater” powers, it’s cheap and easy to swallow up those pesky little “lesser” ones. I don’t know how much longer this trope will have currency for the Bush administration. But I would suggest that their greater power to offer this as a serious legal argument does not trump our lesser power to laugh at it.

There are probably now or will soon be about a half million dead in Iraq.  They aren’t laughing.

Tom DeLay is on Hardball and he just said that he met Jesus when he was a freshman congressman and he was drinking 12 martinis a night.

Given the path that Tom DeLay has walked for the last 20 years, I don’t think that was Jesus he met after those 12 martinis.

I think he just had a bad case of the D.T.s.

Voter fraud?

Bush wanted eight U.S. prosecutors removed because they didn’t vigorously investigate voter fraud?

As my mother would say, “That’s rich.”

The dismissals took place after President Bush told Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales that he had received complaints that some prosecutors had not energetically pursued voter-fraud investigations, according to White House spokeswoman Dana Perino.

Were any of them in Florida?

Newsweek has this headline:

Walter Reed’s New Victim

Surgeon General Kevin Kiley may not be the last to fall over the military health-care crisis. Wanted: A long-term fix.

Victim?

Not enough yet.

Vanity Fair has a great article about the generals who spoke out a year ago.  Long, but a very good read.

Newbold walks over to his computer, fiddles around with the mouse, and calls up a photograph for me. “Here’s one of the Marines we helped out,” he explains quietly. “He was unconscious when I saw him.” On the screen is a bewildered-looking young man being lifted out of a chair. He has lost his legs, and his head looks lopsided, like a clay pot on a wheel before it has been centered: part of his brain has also been blown away. Seeing these horribly maimed men and women, who for all their injuries want nothing more than to go and rejoin their buddies in Iraq, was very inspiring, says Newbold. But it was also infuriating, and as he speaks, even across a table, one can feel something welling up in him. It is indignation; the war to which they were all sent, the war that has marked them for life, is, to him, foolish and dishonest and unnecessary, and, worst of all, predictably so. “Any military leader dispatching young soldiers and Marines to something less noble than those soldiers and Marines themselves is committing a blasphemy,” he then says.

Ubuntu is a distribution of the Linux operating system that wants to be available for everyone. Linux is making a lot of inroads into government offices in other countries. These governments are balking at the high cost of Microsoft based products. The latest to switch is the French Parliament.
Ubuntu has a page that allows people to help do translations of application buttons and text. There are many languages, including Scots. Here’s an example:

English: If enabled, gnome-session will prompt the user before ending a session.

Scots: If enablt, gnome-session will prompt the uiser afore feenishin a session.

Scots has the nice ring of hillbilly in it. Dun’it?

The languages, Latin and Klingon, are also supported.