Insta-Rebuttal

Media Matters has filled a grave need in the progressive movement, bringing awareness to conservative lies and media malpractice for years. Now they're filling yet another niche with Email Checker, a simply superb idea.

You can send them that conservative email forward your friends or relatives send you, and they will write a full fact-based response that you can send back. It's countering viral emails with viral rebuttals. Spectacular. Here's one from their site:

The following email has been widely forwarded. Media Matters Action Network has written a response to the text below. Please feel free to copy and paste it and send to your friends.

[note - all mistakes below are original to text of email]

From: XXXXXX@aol.com
To: XXXXXX@hotmail.com
Date: Sat, 01 Aug 2009 16:01:57 -0400
Subject: AARP AGREE OR DISAGREE... a note to seniors.... but something to think about

About two years ago Winnie and I dropped our membershipin the AARP because of their leanings.This is even more so since they baacked Obama in the election and are now supporting his health reform bill. This bill with reduce benefits to Medicare by abour $500,000,000,000 to help pay the costs of his health reform. This means seniors will be denyed life saving care. AARP no longer represents seniors, but their high paid executives and their business partners. They contributed more to the Democrats than to Repbulicans in the elections. I suggest seniors should rebedl by dropping their memberships.

Herb Jones

RESPONSE

Hi there.

This email is interesting, but I have some questions.

The articles I've read say that the cuts they're talking about are going to be to the parts of Medicare that waste money and not benefits to actual seniors. And why shouldn't we be using the money to treat seniors instead of wasting it on needless paperwork and on the few doctors who manipulate the system so as to receive a higher repayment? Here is one of those articles: http://www.newsweek.com/id/214254

Plus, the House bill increases payments made to doctors so that they can afford to take in more seniors. I know I want my doctor to get paid more so they can continue to afford to treat me. I read that without an act of Congress, my doctor could get paid around 20% less for treating Medicare patients next year. I don't want to risk losing my regular doctor.

You, I'm sure, are entirely aware that prescriptions cost way too much. The New York Times says that this bill will decrease the amount seniors will have to pay for their medications. If the bill doesn't pass, the price of prescriptions will go up 20% in the next ten years. If you want to read that article, here is the link - http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/31/health/policy/31drug.html

And, frankly, I'm tired of people trying to tell me that the government is going to deny seniors life saving care. Congress would never write a law like that, mostly because they're good people but also because more seniors vote than any other group! Politicians are smart - they're not going to tell the largest group of voters they can't go to the doctor.

AARP and President Obama are working towards making health care affordable for all Americans - including seniors! Those efforts will mean changes, but isn't it worth it if everyone will be able to afford to go see a doctor? Imagine where you would be now if you hadn't been able to go see a doctor when you were younger.

Look - if nothing changes, Medicare will go broke. Something has to give, and I'm not willing to give up on this program.

Let's talk soon.

Fucking great. It's one thing if a media outlet writes "The Top 5 Lies About Obama's Health Care Reform". That's useful. But the majority of people predisposed to believe ridiculous email forwards don't trust traditional media sources. They get a letter from someone they know debunking the myths, and they'll be far more likely to believe it. And these are well written.

Loving this tool. Fills a gaping hole.

The Ether

As you know, conservatives are injecting mountains of B.S. into the societal ether around health care, stuff that's hard to debunk once it's "out there" no matter how full of lies it is. Here's a typical example.

AD TITLE: "Squeeze"

SPONSOR: Conservatives for Patients' Rights

SCRIPT: "Some of Congress' health care plans could squeeze you four ways. It could raise taxes by $600 billion—even taxing soda. It could add a trillion to the federal deficit. New rules could hike your health insurance premiums 95 percent. You still might end up on their government-run health plan. Tell Congress you've been squeezed enough. Say no to a government-run health plan." [...]

ACCURACY: Although CPR lists individual sources for each statement in the ad, the facts are largely taken out of context, come from biased industry groups or have been discredited. "There's absolutely nothing here that's right. It's unbelievable," says John Holahan, director of the Health Policy Research Center at the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.

I think at this point a lot of these ads get drowned out and turn into just background noise. What's far more insidious is that we're seeing the return of the notorious email forward.

This week I received a mass email that exhorted the recipients to pray for our country because of the disaster surely to befall on us if health care reform is passed. It is very important for all of us to understand what health reform is about because being able to respond to these distortions is important. So I went through every charge and answered it and sent it back to the huge email list to which it had been distributed. I wish I had seen the excellent rebuttal done by Politifact before I spent all this time, but it's encouraging to know we have multiple ways to toss this stuff back.

All the Politifact analyses in the world won't get decent information out to the millions if not tens of millions of people who received this email. In it, there are 45 charges made about specifics language in the bill, every one of them false. When you go out in the world and wonder how everyone has appeared to swallow these talking points, this is at least one way that message goes out.

At some point, you have to fight fire with fire. It makes me wonder why something like this column isn't sent virally to every inbox in the country.

So it's proper to remind ourselves what that American way entails. For if the insurers have proved anything over the last 15 years as the health crisis has gathered speed like an avalanche roaring downhill, it's that they're part of the problem, not the solution.

The firms take billions of dollars out of the U.S. healthcare wallet as profits, while imposing enormous administrative costs on doctors, hospitals, employers and patients. They've introduced complexity into the system at every level. Your doctor has to fight them to get approval for the treatment he or she thinks is best for you. Your hospital has to fight them for approval for every day you're laid up. Then they have to fight them to get their bills paid, and you do too.

One Wendell Potter reminded a Senate committee in June that health insurance executives had assured Congress in 1993 that they would work to secure universal medical coverage and end denials of coverage to people with pre-existing conditions. Then they moved heaven and earth to kill reform.

They've made the same promises now, Potter observed. But they're in an even better position to throttle reform. Mergers and acquisitions have turned the industry into a cartel of huge corporations.

"The industry is bigger, richer and stronger, and it has a much tighter grip on our healthcare system," he said. The last thing they want is a government program set up as their competition.

Actually, I'd make it simpler than that, as Kevin Drum did - why does health insurance exist? They are nothing more than middlemen who in theory smooth the payments for your health care over time so that you're not hit with a big bill when you need treatment. But that's not how it works in practice. So really what they have become is a middleman, taking a 30% profit off the top for the service of moving your money to your doctor.

But for some reason we're supposed to care about whether they continue to exist or not. Why? I care about the quality of my doctors, my nurses, the hospital I go to, and the drugs I take. I don't really care who takes on the administrative task of paying the bills — except that I wish they were handled a lot more efficiently and with a lot less hassle than private insurers typically do. Frankly, a world without private healthcare insurers sounds pretty good to me.

If that kind of sentiment pinged from computer to computer for a few weeks, with the intent of openly questioning why this large industry even exists or what purpose it serves, maybe there would be a choice in the level of dialogue "out there".

Now that insurance companies are no longer friends to Democrats, maybe someone should give it a try.

Make It Stop

I'm getting a little tired of seeing headlines with "sticks with the Bush position" in them.

The Obama administration on Friday told a federal judge it would not deviate from the Bush administration's position that detainees held at a U.S. air base in Afghanistan have no right to sue in U.S. courts.

In one of his first acts in office, President Barack Obama ordered the closure within one year of the Guantanamo Bay detention center, which has been widely criticized by rights groups and foreign governments. About 245 people are currently held at Guantanamo, according to the Pentagon.

However, Obama has not yet decided what to do about the makeshift prison at the U.S. military base in Bagram, where the U.S. government is holding more than 600 prisoners, or whether to continue work on a $60 million prison complex there.
In late January, Obama directed a task force to study the government's overall detainee policy and report back to him in six months.

But the new administration faced a February 20 deadline to tell U.S. District Court Judge John Bates whether it would "refine" the Bush administration's position on four men being held at Bagram who have filed suit against their detention.

In a brief filing with the court on Friday, the Justice Department said it would stick to the previous government's position, which argued the four men -- who have been detained at Bagram for over six years -- had no right to challenge their detention in a U.S. court.

There is little to recommend here. In a substantive sense, Bagram and Guantanamo are hardly different. Many of the detainees have been in both camps. There are just as many stories of human rights abuses at Bagram (including the homicide of Dilawar, the taxi driver whose experience is chronicled in last year's Oscar-winning documentary Taxi To The Dark Side). To separate the two at all is really dastardly. Just because Gitmo is more well-known doesn't make the sins of Bagram acceptable.

And here's another example of the Obama Administration adopting a Bush-era stance on an issue of executive power:

Two advocacy groups suing the Executive Office of the President say that large amounts of White House e-mail documenting Bush's eight years in office may still be missing, and that the government must undertake an extensive recovery effort. They expressed disappointment that Obama's Justice Department is continuing the Bush administration's bid to get the lawsuits dismissed.

Recently, the Bush White House said it had located 14 million e-mails that were misplaced and that the White House had restored hundreds of thousands of other e-mails from computer backup tapes.

"The new administration seems no more eager than the last" to deal with the issue, said Anne Weismann, chief counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the other group that sued the EOP.

The Executive Office of the President includes the president's immediate staff and many White House offices and agencies.

Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, noted that President Barack Obama on his first full day in office called for greater transparency in government.

The Justice Department "apparently never got the message" from Obama, Blanton said.

I'm sure that some of this is because the Administration doesn't want to get ahead of itself and make the determinations on these cases on their terms, and there are also zombie lawyers arguing these cases, holdovers from the Bush Administration, and we are very early in the new people getting to the job and asserting their will. But we have the previous regime committing very serious crimes and the new team not wanting to deal with them, frankly, so they're trying to dismiss lawsuits or keep practices in place to bury the evidence. It doesn't work that way, however. Eventually, the truth comes out, and by implicating themselves deeper into this mess, they cannot claim to be turning the page on anything or deserving of a new level of respect around the world or at home.

There's another opportunity on this coming Wednesday. A federal judge is setting that deadline for the Administration to weigh in on the subpoenas of Harriet Miers and Josh Bolten in the US Attorneys scandal. Will they back George Bush's claim of executive privilege covering these two aides and preventing them from testimony before Congress, or will they reject it? There are implications for Karl Rove's testimony as well. The new White House counsel is urging Rove's lawyers to work out a deal with Congress, probably so he doesn't have to weigh in himself. This could be good or bad, and since the White House's motion for continuance was denied, we'll know more by Wednesday. I'm tired of being disappointed on these issues.

Reincarnation Watch!

So there's apparently an Obama Death List that's been floating around via the emailz. You know, a list of all the people he's had killed because they came too close to finding out "the truth." Par for the course. They had a Clinton Body Count back in the 90s.

Turns out that "Gandy Baugh" (candy bar?), at the bottom of the Obama list, was actually on the Clinton body count as well, as a lawyer who died by falling out of a window. Just like on this new email forward.

From Clinton’s list:

#11: Gandy Baugh - attorney for Dan Lasater in a financial misconduct case. Supposedly jumped out the window of a tall building to commit suicide.

From Obama’s list:

GANDY BAUGH - Attorney for Obama friend Antonin Rezko died by falling out an eightieth story window of the Hancock Tower, January, 2003. His client was a convicted Chinese spy.

So the Obama forces are so dastardly that they RE-ANIMATED the lifeless corpse of Gandy Baugh, allowed him (her?) to practice law again, and seemingly provided working capital and access to clients, only to murder him (her?) when (s)he started working for Rezko.

That's cold-blooded, man...

Dog Ate My Homework

It is a novel excuse, I will say that.

The White House in December refused to accept the Environmental Protection Agency’s conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled, telling agency officials that an e-mail message containing the document would not be opened, senior E.P.A. officials said last week.

The document, which ended up in e-mail limbo, without official status, was the E.P.A.’s answer to a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that required it to determine whether greenhouse gases represent a danger to health or the environment, the officials said.

I would give you my opinion of this, but I refuse to read the article. I excerpted the first two paragraphs with my eyes closed. And if you try to comment I'm not going to read those either. La la la la I can't hear you!

(I was also considering "See No Email, Hear No Email" for the title. Which one do you prefer?)

American Pride

Where to begin? How about with the privatization of basic military functions and corporate muscle firing anyone who stands in their way?

The Army official who managed the Pentagon’s largest contract in Iraq says he was ousted from his job when he refused to approve paying more than $1 billion in questionable charges to KBR, the Houston-based company that has provided food, housing and other services to American troops.

The official, Charles M. Smith, was the senior civilian overseeing the multibillion-dollar contract with KBR during the first two years of the war. Speaking out for the first time, Mr. Smith said that he was forced from his job in 2004 after informing KBR officials that the Army would impose escalating financial penalties if they failed to improve their chaotic Iraqi operations.

Army auditors had determined that KBR lacked credible data or records for more than $1 billion in spending, so Mr. Smith refused to sign off on the payments to the company. “They had a gigantic amount of costs they couldn’t justify,” he said in an interview. “Ultimately, the money that was going to KBR was money being taken away from the troops, and I wasn’t going to do that.”

But he was suddenly replaced, he said, and his successors — after taking the unusual step of hiring an outside contractor to consider KBR’s claims — approved most of the payments he had tried to block.

This is a version of the "too big to fail" circumstance that "forced" the government to bail out Bear Stearns - we've given so much away to companies like Halliburton that their power is outsized compared to the ability to rein them in. KBR has threatened to stop providing food to the troops in the past if they didn't get their payments promptly. It reminds me of telecoms shutting off wiretaps due to late payments. These are the companies we're supposed to consider "patriotic." And in the case of KBR, they are a middleman performing job functions that the Army has traditionally done and ought to do again, lest we continue getting in situations where soldiers' well-being is essentially held for ransom.

Then we have the creeping official secrecy department.

The White House does not have to make public internal documents examining the potential disappearance of e-mails sent during some of the Bush administration's biggest controversies, a U.S. district judge ruled yesterday.

In a 39-page opinion, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said that the White House's Office of Administration is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), even though its top officials had complied with the public records law for more than two decades.

This is documentation showing the possible commission of a crime, the destruction of evidence in matters like the US Attorneys firing, the CIA Leak case, and the pre-war propaganda. The precedent has been set that future governments can seek to destroy incriminating emails right out in the open and fear no discovery.

And finally, we learned this today.

A Senate investigation has concluded that top Pentagon officials began assembling lists of harsh interrogation techniques in the summer of 2002 for use on detainees at Guantanamo Bay and that those officials later cited memos from field commanders to suggest that the proposals originated far down the chain of command, according to congressional sources briefed on the findings.

The sources said that memos and other evidence obtained during the inquiry show that officials in the office of then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld started to research the use of waterboarding, stress positions, sensory deprivation and other practices in July 2002, months before memos from commanders at the detention facility in Cuba requested permission to use those measures on suspected terrorists.

I think this was actually known; Philippe Sands' Torture Team discusses Administration bigwigs like David Addington going down to Gitmo to deliver lists of torture techniques. But the gambit was to always make it look like they bubbled up from underneath, at the staff level, and that the higher-level guys were shocked at the findings. Not true. Your government authorized and directed torture.

Aren't you happy with your country today?

Fighting Smears

Because the fundamentals are so impossible for Republicans to overcome this year, and because John McCain doesn't put a thrill in anybody's heart, the only hope for his campaign is to make the election relentlessly and unceasingly negative. He basically signaled as much today.

GOP presidential contender John McCain says he can't control every attack ad aimed at Democrat Barack Obama and fully expects he'll face a similar barrage, sounding the bell for a raucous general election brawl.

"I can't be a referee of every spot run on television," McCain told the Herald in an exclusive interview. "I admire Sen. Obama and his accomplishments, but we all know there are groups who want to attack me."

The Arizona senator's hands-off posture on attack ads by now-infamous tax-free and unaccountable political groups called 527s marks a softening of his view on the negative campaign tactic -- and opens the door to a no-holds-barred five-month scramble.

He's just throwing up his hands. There's nothing that the leader of the GOP can do, you see. It's just very saddening to him. Tsk-tsk-tsk.

Almost immediately, we've had another foray into the low road, with Fox News labeling Michelle Obama as "Obama's Baby Mama" (which is basically a ghetto term for unwed mother). By November, an attack like that is going to look like patty-cakes.

The Obama campaign is finally coming around to notice that this is a major problem, and not from the Fox Newses of the world, necessarily, but from the under-the-radar attacks that bubble up from blog comments and forwarded emails. They've inaugurated Fight The Smears, a website similar in tone to Hillary Clinton's "Fact Hub," which is designed to debunk false information that lurks throughout the Internet. The best part of it are the tools to allow users to forward the truth on to friends and neighbors through email or social media. We've already got one smear knocked down today, and I don't know if Obama's website contributed to this or not, but it makes a mockery of the whole "Obama's not a real American, show us the birth certificate!" trash that's been floating out there. Turns out he was born in Honolulu, and his name is indeed Barack Hussein Obama (why would any politician in this day and age change it to THAT), just as has been publicly known for his entire career.

This is going to be an effort for every progressive right on up to the election. It's going to be exhausting but those are the rules of the game.

Rolling Out The Smears

It's kind of comical to watch the right flailing about, trying to come up with some narrative that will stick to their opponent so they can carry the hulking corpse of John McCain across the finish line in November. On the one hand, you have the creator of the Willie Horton ads trying to paint Obama as soft on crime and responsible for gangland murders while in the State Senate in Illinois. On the other hand, you have a depiction of Hyde Park, home to the University of Chicago, as some sort of free-love, terrorist-supporting freak show in the middle of the Second City (Milton Friedman, take note). And on the third hand, you have the royalists over at the National Review demanding that Obama release his birth certificate to prove wrong rumors that, among other things, his real middle name is Muhammad (I don't know, I would've changed it to something other than "Hussein" if I thought it'd be a political liability).

All of this, of course, is about Obama being less than American, part of the Marxist left, both scary black man and Muslim jihadist, and it's the direct descendant of those pesky email forwards. Fortunately, Obama is seeking to counteract those.

Barack Obama is recruiting senior staff to a new unit which will combat virulent rumour campaigns on the internet that threaten to cost him votes in the presidential election against John McCain.

The unit is part of a huge expansion of Obama's campaign team as he shifts from the Democratic nomination race to the campaign for November's election.

As well as the rumour-mongering problem, units are being set up to deal with other perceived vulnerable points, including off-the-cuff remarks by his wife Michelle. McCain's wife, Cindy, questioned Michelle's patriotism in February after she said: "For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country."

Unfortunately, this is part of modern campaigning, but I'm glad to see Obama's team finally paying attention to it.

Office of Trash Compacting Services

If I were heading up the next Administration, I would retain whoever in this White House is responsible for disposing of the evidence.

Older White House computer hard drives have been destroyed, the White House disclosed to a federal court Friday in a controversy over millions of possibly missing e-mails from 2003 to 2005.

The White House revealed new information about how it handles its computers in an effort to persuade a federal magistrate it would be fruitless to undertake an e-mail recovery plan that the court proposed.

"When workstations are at the end of their lifecycle and retired ... the hard drives are generally sent offsite to another government entity for physical destruction," the White House said in a sworn declaration filed with U.S. Magistrate Judge John Facciola.

It does sound very tidy. This isn't incompetence, this is a series of regularly scheduled dustings.

As I've said before, recycling the email tapes and copying over old data is a very green way to remove anything incriminating from the files. It's all about the environmental advantages!

Congress is going to have to step in here and mandate methods for communciation retrieval and permanent storage. The Constitution doesn't say much about email, as I remember. As for these thieves, there isn't a jail big enough.

Conflicting Statements On FISA

There's considerable evidence that House and Senate negotiators are deadlocked on whether to give Bush everything he wants, including immunity for his lawbreaking, on FISA.

House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer said Wednesday the House will not take up an electronic surveillance measure this week, further delaying any decisions on the controversial measure.

Hoyer said in his weekly press conference that he hoped to wrap up work on an update to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act; “towards the end of this week or the beginning of next week.”

However, the majority leader acknowledged that there were “still disagreements” within the Democratic caucus over the issue of granting immunity to telecom companies who aided the government in the wiretapping program [...]

Although Democratic leaders insist they are working feverishly to iron out their differences, one House member—speaking on the condition of anonymity—suggested it could be a long time, if ever, before the bill was brought for a vote.

“A lot of people think the politics of doing nothing on this issue are very good for both sides of the political spectrum,” they said.

Behind the scenes, it appears that there are internal differences between Democrats over the immunity issue. However, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi pointed to exclusivity as the real issue.

In a conference call with bloggers today, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) made it clear that her highest priority for a surveillance bill was that it contain a so-called "exclusivity" provision -- a measure that would explicitly state that the bill would be the "exclusive means" by which the government would conduct surveillance, or in other words, the president does not have the power to ignore the law if he/she so pleases.

"Exclusivity is the issue," she said.

Of course, the original FISA bill had "exclusivity" in it. Bush broke the law. Making FISA the exclusive means for intelligence gathering and surveillance is nice, but it just says you can't break the law. Amnesty says that breaking the law doesn't matter.

I think what's causing this new-found concern against amnesty within the Democratic caucus are the stories about major privacy violations as a result of national security letters, which allowed the FBI to illegally obtain personal information of Americans, and this new question about emails, which puts the fight over FISA into an entirely new context:

The fight in Congress and the big push for expanded wiretapping powers has nothing to do with intercepting foreign-to-foreign phone calls inside the United States without a court order. In fact, it turns out that the nation's secret wiretapping court is fine with that.

That extraordinary admission came from Assistant Attorney General for National Security Kenneth Wainstein at a breakfast on Monday, according to the Washington Post.

"At the breakfast yesterday, Wainstein highlighted a different problem with the current FISA law than other administration officials have emphasized. Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, for example, has repeatedly said FISA should be changed so no warrant is needed to tap a communication that took place entirely outside the United States but happened to pass through the United States.

But in response to a question at the meeting by David Kris, a former federal prosecutor and a FISA expert, Wainstein said FISA's current strictures did not cover strictly foreign wire and radio communications, even if acquired in the United States. The real concern, he said, is primarily e-mail, because "essentially you don't know where the recipient is going to be" and so you would not know in advance whether the communication is entirely outside the United States."

That would make sense since email doesn't go directly to a device in most cases, it goes to a server that holds the email until the recipient(s) come to pick up the email -- which could be and often is from different parts of the world -- think of any business traveler.

DNI Michael McConnell, the serial exaggerator who claims to be a non-political straight shooter, himself kept saying the NSA lost 70 percent of its capabilities after the ruling.

If that's the case, that means that 70 percent of what the NSA does is collect emails inside United States telecom infrastructure and service providers.

Really? If that's what tens of billions of dollars are going to the NSA for annually, we don't need to give them more power to read emails, we need to get them to learn to do real intelligence collection.

I think that Democrats took a look at the loss of privacy on all these other fronts and decided that they want to actually know the breadth of it with regard to telecom surveillance. You cannot give cover to the executive to gather intelligence at his discretion without oversight or judicial review and expect there to be no abuses. This is all devastating evidence in favor of stopping any talk of immunity. DFA is fighting very hard against those who would give the President and his corporate buddies full carte blanche to break the law. We need to fight for justice on this one. No amnesty.

Obama's Bind

I guess that the "Obama is a Muslim" issue came up among voters in Southern Ohio in last night's 60 Minutes report. Now, I don't have much to say about Sen. Clinton's answer about this, which offered a little bit of wiggle room in print, but if you listen to it she pretty quickly dismisses it. What I want to hone in on is Obama's remarks:

"I have never been a Muslim, am not a Muslim. These emails are obviously not just offensive to me, as somebody who's a devout Christian, who's been going to the same church for the last 20 years, but it's also offensive to Muslims because it plays into a certain fearmongering there."

This is better than what he's said in the past, but Obama's of course in a real bind. I'm worried about these denunciations of anyone daring to suggest that someone is a Muslim, as if being a Muslim is the worst thing you can be. I recognize the political realities here, but it's troubling to buy into the demonization of a whole class of people based on religion and/or ethnicity. Obama at least acknowledged that to an extent, although I'd much rather see him say "I'm not a Muslim, but if I was that would not have any impact on my governing ability, and it's offensive for anyone to suggest otherwise. I know he can't actually say that, so this is about as close as we're going to get.

But it should be noted that there are plenty of Muslim American voters that might not be altogether happy with this constant distancing. In fact, a substantial amount of Muslims live in the swing state of Michigan. And they are speaking out about this, and you really can't blame them:

The Muslim faith group also finds itself politically isolated. Though candidates have been courting voters in this tight race, none of the three top contenders has met with major Muslim groups. Neither, they say, have major interfaith groups and politicians rallied around them to loudly condemn the anti-Islamic strategies.

"It would be good if the president and leaders of both parties would say: 'Enough. We're better than this,' " said Salam Al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council. "It's disconcerting to me they haven't."

In addition, the immediate denunciation of the photo of Obama in Somali garb that surfaced last week risks the potential for a backlash. Kenyans don't believe Obama did anything wrong, and indeed he didn't. The Obama campaign has to thread the needle between denouncing anyone who brings these things up and alienating Muslims or Africans who may understand that any association with them has become politically toxic.

I believe that Barack Obama is a committed civili libertarian (that Jeffrey Rosen article is a must-read) who has a strong belief in equality for everyone under the law. Indeed he would be a positive President for those who are subject to increased hate crimes, like Muslims. But he really has to walk a fine line here.

Obama Fights Back Against Muslim Slur

Glenn Greenwald is trying to say that this mailer from Barack Obama, where he calls himself a "committed Christian" who is "Called to Christ," "Called to Bring Change" and "Called to Serve" is similar to Mike Huckabee's use of his faith as a front and center appeal of his campaign.

It may be that the criticism of Huckabee just for using the phrase "Christian leader" was too harsh. But if I were the victim of an email forward smear for the better part of a year claiming that I was a secret Muslim, educated in Madrassahs, and that I was sworn into Congress with my hand on the Koran, I'd do what I could to set the record straight, too. Obama doesn't have a choice. It's despicable what's been said about him, and let me add that the military should be praised for shutting down the email forward among their soldiers, and these Jewish leaders in the Senate deserve admiration as well. Wingers with agendas and even a few Democrats (my sister, a Hillary supporter, absolutely knows the email is false and is forwarding it to everyone she knows anyway) have been trying to discredit Obama in the dirtiest, most under-the-radar way possible, and I think he's perfectly within his rights to contrast that with the true sense of his beliefs. We also should not, especially on a day dedicated to the memory of a Reverand, be so squishy about this kind of overtly religious appeal. The Christian left has done a lot of good in this country's history. It is not analogous to someone who wants to change the Constitution to make it more like the Ten Commandments.

Furthermore, if Obama can overcome this in the primary, he'll be better tested for the general election, where what the Clintons are throwing at them will seem like a tea party. I have to say I've gained a bit more respect for him in the last 48 hours. He addressed problems in the black community to their faces, which was extremely noble and courageous. Frankly I think his advisors suck and are giving him bad advice. And I still think he's fairly moderate at a time when a progressive is needed. So rather than staying above the fray and promoting this message of unity, he needs to hit back hard at tonight's debate and make a forthright economic, moral and ethical case for his being in the White House. We'll see if he does so.

You Can't Say They Don't Care About The Environment

Reduce, reuse, recycle.

Yesterday’s midnight filing by the White House in CREW v. Executive Office of the President, a lawsuit challenging the failure of the White House to preserve and restore millions of missing emails, raises some very troubling questions that the White House clearly does not want to answer [...]

Even more troubling, the White House has now admitted that until October 2003, the White House recycled its back-up tapes, which contained the only copies of emails deleted prior to that date. What the White House has not explained is why it changed its policy of preserving all back-up tapes -- instituted in March of 2000 when the Clinton administration discovered that its system did not fully preserve all email from the Office of the Vice President -- at the same time it decided to dismantle the existing electronic record-keeping system, with no replacement at hand.

The deletion of millions of email beginning in March 2003 coupled with the White House’s destruction of back-up copies of those deleted email mean that there are no back-up copies of emails deleted during the period March 2003 through October 2003. The significance of this time-period cannot be overstated: the U.S. went to war with Iraq, top White House officials leaked the covert identity of Valerie Plame Wilson and the Justice Department opened a criminal investigation into their actions.

Look, if you want to criticize the White House for actually showing bold leadership in controlling our runaway back-up computer tape consumption in this country, fine. But don't turn around and claim that you want to stop global warming then. You know how much carbon is released into the air through the production of back-up computer tapes? Maybe you want to see Florida sink into the Atlantic Ocean, and if so, go ahead and keep using those computer tapes!

Federal Judge - Hey Bush, Hang On To Those Emails

The primaries are around the corner, but there's still a lot of loose threads with the criminal lawbreaking of the current Administration, and today, there was some movement on one front.

A federal judge Monday ordered the White House to preserve copies of all its e-mails, a move that Bush administration lawyers had argued strongly against.

U.S. District Judge Henry Kennedy directed the Executive Office of the President to safeguard the material in response to two lawsuits that seek to determine whether the White House has destroyed e-mails in violation of federal law.

This is key for a couple of reasons.

For one, we still haven't gotten to the bottom of what happened to 5 million magical disappearing emails, and ensuring oversight will prevent this and future Administrations from trying that trick again, as well as strengthening the fight to actually find those emails destroyed since 2003, by getting the courts on the record that this is a crime in violation of the Federal Records Act. The White House may now have to explain in a public setting what happened to those prior missing emails. We don't even know what those emails relate to, but it's likely they have at least something to do with the Valerie Plame case, as the dates line up with when then-White House Counsel Abu Gonzales was told to preserve all relevant documents and then didn't inform the staff officially until 12 hours later.

The second reason that this ruling has broad relevance is because of what happened about a month ago at an intelligence conference in San Antonio.

As Congress debates new rules for government eavesdropping, a top intelligence official says it is time that people in the United States changed their definition of privacy.

Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguard people's private communications and financial information.

This was one of those inadvertent moments of telling the truth that crop up from time to time in the Bush era (think: "it'd be a lot easier if this was a dictatorship, so long as I'm the dictator.") The goal of the Administration is to eliminate the Fourth Amendment and provide unchecked surveillance powers to the executive in the name of national security, though what those powers would actually be used for is anybody's guess. And the proof for how this debate is completely phony can be seen in today's ruling. The White House has no problem asking 300 million Americans to willingly give up any reasonable expectation of privacy, but zealously guards THEIR OWN, even though the consensus through hundreds of years is that their records must be preserved for history.

It's also completely ridiculous that the White House is claiming that they simply lost those 5 million emails when we know that they have the technology to do this:

The central witness in a California lawsuit against AT&T says the government is vacuuming up billions of e-mails and phone calls as they pass through an AT&T switching station in San Francisco.

Mark Klein, a retired AT&T technician, helped connect a device in 2003 that he says diverted and copied onto a government supercomputer every call, e-mail, and Internet site access on AT&T lines.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed the class-action suit, claims there are as many as 20 such sites in the U.S.

At the least, the White House emails are in this system.

This claim that we must give up some privacy for security is maybe the most pernicious of the Bush era, with far-reaching effects for the future of American civil liberties. They are floating this idea that, because we use our credit cards in e-commerce and our real names on Facebook, somehow government spying must be OK. Yet they fail to allow for the most secure possible oversight, through the National Archives, when it comes to their own communications.

"Those two generations younger than we are have a very different idea of what is essential privacy, what they would wish to protect about their lives and affairs. And so, it's not for us to inflict one size fits all," said Kerr, 68. "Protecting anonymity isn't a fight that can be won. Anyone that's typed in their name on Google understands that."

"Our job now is to engage in a productive debate, which focuses on privacy as a component of appropriate levels of security and public safety," Kerr said. "I think all of us have to really take stock of what we already are willing to give up, in terms of anonymity, but (also) what safeguards we want in place to be sure that giving that doesn't empty our bank account or do something equally bad elsewhere."

Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group that defends online free speech, privacy and intellectual property rights, said Kerr's argument ignores both privacy laws and American history.

"Anonymity has been important since the Federalist Papers were written under pseudonyms," Opsahl said. "The government has tremendous power: the police power, the ability to arrest, to detain, to take away rights. Tying together that someone has spoken out on an issue with their identity is a far more dangerous thing if it is the government that is trying to tie it together."

That's why we have to pay attention to what happens in the next 14 months, on all fronts, rather than just hope for better in the future with a new President . The precedents that are being set now will carry over for decades, and we must continue to completely reject these claims of unchecked surveillance coupled with official secrecy.

A Man And His Moment

It must be noted that Chris Dodd in polling at under 1% in California and many other states, so viability is obviously an issue, but I think people have to take notice at a speech like this, if they ever manage to find it (certainly not on their local or even national news; they only show Congressional speeches when someone makes a "gaffe.").

Mr. President, for six years, this President has demonstrated time and time again that he doesn’t respect the role of Congress nor does he respect the rule of law.

Every six years as United States Senators we take the oath office to uphold the Constitution. Our colleagues on the House side take that oath every two years. That is important.

For six years this President has used scare tactics to prevent the Congress from reining in his abuse of authority. A case and point is the current direction this body appears to be headed as we prepare to reform and extend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act [...]

Each of these policies share two things in common.

First, they have weakened our ability to prosecute the global war on terrorism – if for no other reason than they have made it harder, if not impossible, to build the international support and cooperation we need to fight it.

And second, each has only been possible because Congress has not been able to stop this President’s unprecedented expansion of executive power, although some in this body have tried.

Whether or not these policies were explicitly authorized is beside the point. In every instance, Congress has been unable to hold this Administration to account for violating the rule of law and our Constitution. In each instance, Republicans in the Congress have prevented this body from telling this Administration that “a state of war is not a blank check.”

And those aren’t my words, Mr. President – those are the words of Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor who was nominated by Ronald Reagan.

And today, it appears that we are prepared to consider the proposed renewal of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act – a law that in whatever form it eventually takes will almost certainly permit the Bush Administration to broadly eavesdrop on American citizens.

Legislation, as currently drafted, that would grant retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that helped this Administration violate the civil liberties of Americans and the law of this country.

Mr. President while it may be true that the proposed legislation is an improvement on existing law, it remains fundamentally flawed because it fails to protect the privacy rights of Americans or hold the Executive or the private sector accountable if they choose to ignore the law.

That is why I will not stand on the floor of the United States Senate and be silent about the direction we are headed.

It is time to say “no more.”

No more trampling our Constitution.

No more excusing those who violate the rule of law.

These are our principles.

They have been around at least since the Magna Carta.

They are enduring.

What they are not is temporary. And what we do not do in a time where our country is at risk is abandon them.

It's a great speech and it really needs to be heard by every American, many of whom have a vague sense of this, but have not seen anyone in the Congress standing up for them and expressing their beliefs. Dodd is really rising to the importance of the moment, and I would hope that everyone marching in protests tomorrow, or grumbling around water coolers, or just disassociating from politics altogether can take the time to seek this out and recognize that there is a champion fighting for our interests in the Senate, and he needs your support.

It really just takes one man to say these things for the whole hollow shell of this Administration to come undone. But it has to be amplified. There's this great article in The Nation about the power of the right-wing email chains. These emails with baseless lies about Democrats get forwarded around to millions of fellow travelers, and there's no accountability on them, nor any idea where they even came from. There are a few similar kinds of email forwards on the left, but not nearly with the same reach. Let's send around Chris Dodd's speech. It has the benefit of being true.

The Case of the Missing Emails

The latest report is that the White House lost over 5 million emails in a two-year period, which isn't a heck of a lot when you think about your own email usage and then multiply it by an entire office of people who are manic obsessives, BUT... these are emails from the Executive Office of the President and it's actually the law that they are to be preserved, in accordance with the Presidential Reocrds Act. So not only are White House staffers going offline to do their secret dealings by using RNC email servers, they're purging the emails that are ONLINE.

Furthermore, the RNC instituted a "document retention" policy under which all emails were supposed to be preserved, particularly Karl Rove's, as Patrick Fitzgerald asked that this be done during the CIA Leak investigation. But even still Rove was deleting his emails up a storm.

Mr. Kelner's briefing raised particular concems about Karl Rove, who according to press reports used his RNC accountfor 95%o of his communications. According to Mr. Kelner, although the hold started in August 2004, the RNC does not have any e-mails prior to 2005 for Mr. Rove. Mr. Kelner did not give any explanation for the e-mails missing from Mr. Rove's account, but he did acknowledge that one possible explanation is that Mr. Rove personally deleted his e-mails from the RNC server.

Mr. Kelner also explained that starting in 2005, the RNC began to treat Mr. Rove's emails in a special fashion. At some point in 2005, the RNC commenced an automatic archive policy for Mr. Rove, but not for any other White House officials. According to Mr. Kelner, this archive policy removed Mr. Rove's ability to personally delete his e-mails from the RNC server. Mr. Kelner did not provide many details about why this special policy was adopted for Mr. Rove. But he did indicate that one factor was the presence of investigative or discovery requests or other legal concerns. It was unclear from Mr. Kelner's briefing whether the special archiving policy for Mr. Rove was consistently in effect after 2005.

And as if we had to guess, the New York Times is reporting that the missing emails may be related to the firing of the US Attorneys. Ya think? That was the whole point! The missing links in the paper trail are all emails to the White House about various prosecutors, meetings, et al. And now even the White House is acknowledging the "mistake," still sticking to the story that email can vanish when everyone knows it can't. And they're also sticking to the notion of executive privilege, even for email that comes out of the RNC (I guess that's party privilege):

It also exposed the dual electronic lives led by Mr. Rove and 21 other White House officials who maintain separate e-mail accounts for government business and work on political campaigns — and raised serious questions, in the eyes of Democrats, about whether political accounts were used to conduct official work without leaving a paper trail.

The clash also seemed to push the White House and Democrats closer to a serious confrontation over executive privilege, with the White House counsel, Fred F. Fielding, asserting that the administration has control over countless other e-mail messages that the Republican National Committee has archived. Democrats are insisting that they are entitled to get the e-mail messages directly from the national committee.

In a letter to Mr. Leahy and Representative John Conyers Jr., chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Mr. Fielding, the White House counsel, said the administration was prepared to produce e-mail from the national committee, but only as part of a “carefully and thoughtfully considered package of accommodations” — in other words, only as part of the offer for Mr. Rove and the others to appear in private.

Mr. Conyers, a Michigan Democrat, issued a tart reply: “The White House position seems to be that executive privilege not only applies in the Oval Office, but to the R.N.C. as well. There is absolutely no basis in law or fact for such a claim.”

Ben Smith at The Politico has more.

We are moving into uncharted territory here with this scandal, and the press has been spending the entire week talking about Imus getting fired. They need to get their eyes back on the ball. The White House is acknowledging that they broke the law, and is refusing to comply with a Congressional subpoena. Keep your eyes on the ball, people. There's a Constitutional crisis under your noses and you don't even know it.

More tomorrow.

Our Bad

The White House is now resorting to the excuse that didn't work for me in fourth grade, so good luck to them:

The White House said Wednesday that it may have lost what could amount to thousands of messages sent through a private e-mail system used by political guru Karl Rove and at least 50 other top officials, an admission that stirred anger and dismay among congressional investigators.

The e-mails were considered potentially crucial evidence in congressional inquiries launched by Democrats into the role partisan politics may have played in such policy decisions as the firing of eight U.S. attorneys.

The White House said an effort was underway to see whether the messages could be recovered from the computer system, which was operated and paid for by the Republican National Committee as part of an avowed effort to separate political communications from those dealing with official business.

"The White House has not done a good enough job overseeing staff using political e-mail accounts to assure compliance with the Presidential Records Act," White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said in an unusual late-afternoon teleconference with reporters.

I'm sure it's a herculean effort to find those emails. I also like how the spokesman is admitting to breaking the law here. He must be new.

There's no way to positively spin this. It's the equivalent of an 18-minute gap, with the added element that you can't really lose emails, and anyone who isn't technically illiterate knows that (and even those people will know that soon, because Democratic leaders are speaking up about it).

President Bush's aides are lying about White House e-mails sent on a Republican account that might have been lost, a powerful Senate chairman said Thursday, vowing to subpoena those documents if the administration fails to cough them up.

"They say they have not been preserved. I don't believe that!" Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy shouted from the Senate floor.

"You can't erase e-mails, not today. They've gone through too many servers," said Leahy, D-Vt. "Those e-mails are there, they just don't want to produce them. We'll subpoena them if necessary."

Of course, the rubber hits the road with the fact that only the US Attorney for the District of Columbia can prosecute a contempt of Congress charge, which is where the White House is headed with their stonewalling. So even while they're backed into a corner, there's still a way out for this Administration. Unless the Congress really wants to do something about it.

We again have an executive branch that believes the law does not apply to them. When this is all over, the most important thing that'll need to be done is to re-establish the rule of law so something like this can never, ever happen again.

You've Got RNC Mail

I've been following but not writing about this related scandal to the US Attorney purge, which concerns the fact that many White House communications are coming from RNC email servers instead of those from the White House, which is a violation of the Presidential Records Act.

Apparently this has become standard practice, and while it sounds like an inside baseball thing, it's just an extension of the secrecy under which this White House operates.

White House staff are using non-governmental e-mail addresses to avoid leaving a paper trail of their communications, a senior congressman charged Monday.

In a pair of letters Monday, House Oversight and Investigations Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman, D.-Calif., asked the Republican National Committee and the Bush-Cheney '04 Campaign to preserve e-mails sent and received by White House officials using domains controlled by the two groups [...]

"Such e-mails written in the conduct of White House business would appear to be governmental records subject to preservation and eventual public disclosure," Waxman wrote.

The use of e-mail addresses from domains like "gwb43.com" by White House aides surfaced in the news earlier this month when the Justice Department released hundreds of e-mails between political appointees discussing the firing of several U.S. attorneys. E-mails from Scott Jennings, a deputy to White House political adviser Karl Rove, came from an address featuring the gwb43.com domain.

But Waxman also pointed to e-mails his committee received last year in connection to convicted superlobbyist Jack Abramoff, which show White House aides sending and receiving work-related e-mails from domains like "georgewbush.com" and "rnchq.org".

It appears that the White House deliberately went off the grid because they knew internal emails could be subpoenaed. Rep. Waxman has made public emails that circumvent the White House communications system that he uncovered during the US Attorney probe, but also the Jack Abramoff investigation, and emails sent to the General Services Administration, which is a target for holding meetings on helping Republican candidates in 2008 with taxpayer dollars.

Apparently Karl Rove sends 95% of his email on RNC servers, yet the White House is paying him to do that. Rove's top aide, Susan Ralston, was walking around with an RNC Blackberry. This is a security issue as well, since the RNC servers are not as locked up as the ones in the White House, and could be subject to spying from foreign intelligence agencies. And in the end, this won't help White House staffers avoid scrutiny as easily as they thought:

But as we noted earlier with Karl Rove, this may have been too clever by half. If the president's aides were using RNC emails or emails from other Republican political committees, they can't have even the vaguest claim to shielding those communications behind executive privilege.

Now Rep. Waxman is asking for all RNC emails regarding the General Services Administration probe, and he'll get them. This was a stupid idea from an executive branch obsessed with secrecy, and it won't even achieve the stated purpose. And it's against the law, but that's almost expected at this point.