California tumbles into the sea; that'll be the day I go back to Arlington

I am ashamed this day to admit that I am a product of this Texas public school district, given the latest from the Associated Baptist Press:

ARLINGTON, Texas (ABP) -- A prominent black Southern Baptist pastor says a Texas school district should explain why it did not allow President Obama's Sept. 8 speech on education to be shown live in classrooms, but is planning later in the month to send selected fifth graders to a similar message by former President George W. Bush and his wife, Laura.

The Arlington Independent School District was one of several across the United States that opted out of the live broadcast of the president's speech challenging students to take personal responsibility for their own education ....

School officials in Arlington -- a large suburb located between Dallas and Fort Worth -- said students with appropriate parental notification could take a half-day excused absence to watch the president's address at an off-campus location like a home, church or community center.

One of those sites was Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington. The 4,500-member, predominantly African-American congregation invited students from both Arlington and the neighboring Mansfield Independent School District to watch the message at the church and offered free lunches to the first 100 students requesting them ....

Later McKissic learned the Arlington Independent School District had accepted an invitation to take 28 fifth grade classes to a Sept. 21 media event sponsored by a committee preparing for the 2011 Super Bowl to be played at Arlington's new $1.15 billion Dallas Cowboys football stadium.

Along with the former president and first lady, the program will feature "legendary Dallas Cowboys," along with business and community leaders from across North Texas. The event, being held to announce "the largest youth-education program in Super Bowl history," will give invited students free lunches and a T-shirt. Planners were also working to "secure a performance by a well-known recording artist to cap the festivities in high style."

McKissic responded with a second press release calling it a "blatant double standard" to not permit students to hear one message while busing them to hear the other.

Journalist Admits that In a "Perfect World" Journalists Would Investigate High Crimes

Political news directors suddenly become hardened realists when faced with the prospect that criminal investigations may also divulge that the news media was asleep at the wheel when they themselves should have been investigating:

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American Jurisprudence on the Skids

We aren't governed by the rule of law; we're governed by the rule of Phil:

Because Everyone Knows that There Are No Crooked Medical Doctors

The Bush Administration was willing to justify torture as long as a physician was present:

According to the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, which authored the memos, legal approval to use waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other abusive techniques pivoted on the existence of a “system of medical and psychological monitoring” of interrogations. Medical and psychological personnel were assigned to monitor interrogations and intervene to ensure that interrogators didn’t cause “serious or permanent harm” and thus violate the U.S. federal statute against torture.

The reasoning sounds almost circular. As one memo, from May 2005, put it: “The close monitoring of each detainee for any signs that he is at risk of experiencing severe physical pain reinforces the conclusion that the combined use of interrogation techniques is not intended to inflict such pain.”

In other words, as long as medically trained personnel were present and approved of the techniques being used, it was not torture.

And, after all, clinicians have never gone along with infamy before.

Obama "laying groundwork to look principled when he is doing an utterly unprincipled thing"

It's bad enough that a Bush appointee to the bench defended torture at the Justice Department, but is Barack Obama obstructing a war crime investigation of the Justice Department?

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Say it ain't so, "O."

Patently Ridiculous Spin at the WSJ

In the same article that states that bankers acknowledge that the Bush administration looked up to and admired Wall Street, the Wall Street Journal reports that the Obama is looking to tamp down populist resentment against callous bankers who keep credit markets closed in order to make friends with the financial industry (note: I'm not advocating that we return to the credit bubble days that got us in this mess, but freeing up sane credit for customers and infrastructure would be nice).

What's the problem with that you say? Banks were unwilling to open credit markets under a previous administration that venerated Wall Street. Banks are unwilling to open credit markets under an administration that initially tried to take a tougher stand. The problem is that it doesn't matter whether the banks have a kinder and gentler administration or not. They're only going to pass along the bailout largess from the government when they have first satiated their own desires, and then when they are good and darn well ready to do so (unless, of course, a bigger power calls their bluff).

Now that the media and the Obama administration are in reaction formation to the banks' hard line against popular resentment, both look like they're going to soften to the bluff rather than hold a line. The chance for real reform and regulation of our broken financial system looks as remote to me now as it did under Wall Street-friendly Dubya; and today's historic rise in the stock market counts neither as reform nor regulation.

O'Dubya on Detainees

Still no good news on the Obama Administration's detainee policy. I frankly don't see a huge shift from the president has the inherent right to detain to the Congress gives the president the right to dictate detention:

Conceding that the Obama Administration has made “a partial retreat” from Bush Administration claims of power to detain indefinitely individuals rounded up in the “war on terrorism,” lawyers for a group of detainees argued on Friday that the new government is still asserting too much authority. The President, they contended, is engaging in “impermissible law-making” by the Executive Branch, intruding on Congress’s powers ....

The new leaders of the Justice Department contended that, while no longer asserting “inherent” presidential power to detain without charges, the President has authority under the resolution Congress enacted after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

But, the detainees’ counsel responded, that resolution (formally, the Authorization for Use of Military Force, or AUMF) does not go that far. “Congress did not intend the AUMF as a blank check to the President,” they argued.

Closing GITMO, But Otherwise Being Bush-Lite on Detainees

What is the current White House defense team up to (or down to) regarding their first response to a detainee lawsuit? According to SCOTUSblog, it looks like no fundamental change in the Bush Administration's siege on the human rights of Guantanamo Bay detainees.

This is not good:

The Obama Administration, taking its first position in a federal court on claims of torture of Guantanamo Bay detainees, urged the D.C. Circuit Court on Thursday to reject a lawsuit by four Britons formerly held there. In addition, the new filing argued that a recent appeals court ruling makes clear that “aliens held at Guantanamo do not have due process rights.”

Moreover, the document called for a sweeping ban on lawsuits against U.S. military officials, claiming constitutional violations by such officials. Allowing such lawsuits “for actions taken with respect to aliens during wartime,” it said, “would enmesh the courts in military, national security, and foreign affairs matters that are the exclusive province of the political branches.”

The brief was another indication that, at least so far, the new Administration is not moving to make a wide-ranging break with detention policies of the former Bush Administration. While President Obama has ordered the closing of Guantanamo by next January, lawyers for the government have taken positions in a variety of detainee court cases that do not propose fundamental change.

Obama is going to get beat up by the right wing for being soft on terrorists or insurgentsregardless of whether he continues the Bush policies are not. It's not going to help him to mimic Dubya on detainees. He just ought to do what's right, and let the other party scream, because they're going to regardless.

Was Cooper Spoiling Dems' Attempts to Mitigate the Bush Budget Blows?

Tennessee Blue Dog Jim Cooper was one of 20 Dems joining 178 House Republicans today to vote against post-Bush attempts reinfuse and reinvest in worthwhile domestic programs for:

• Transit
• Public housing
• Development Block Grants for neighborhoods
• Health care
• Education grants

Dallas Police Figure Guarding Bush Home Will Cost City $1 Million Per Year

A nation's old burden has become a city's new one.

Looks like our ex-President is returning to his business habit of relying on other people's money.

Be a long dark night before this thing is done

John Fogerty's driving protest songs against the fortunate-son Bush Administration are among some of the more memorable for me. The long dark night engendered by war, failed federal oversight, economic collapse, and social injustice of the last 8 years may not soon be over, but Bush's bad moon is setting tomorrow.

I would take the word of a Nobel Prize winning professor over that of a local journalist

PiTW's Matt Sullivan says that Herbert Hoover shouldn't be on a worst Presidents list because the Great Depression merely happened to him. Perhaps it is too much to ask to some people to remember that when it came to those left behind in economic downturn Hoover placed his faith first in relatively weak voluntary organizations rather than comprehensive government programs. Shanty towns called "Hoovervilles" didn't just emerge because of misdirected anger; they rose up because Hoover's effective responses to the Depression were late in coming and people suffered as a result of his lack of swiftness.

Professor Paul Krugman suggests that acting Hooveristically means "slashing spending in a time of recession, often at the expense both of their most vulnerable constituents and of the nation’s economic future." Each of these Hooverisms is consistent with George W. Bush's administration, which is widely acknowledged as one of the worst in history.  More Krugman on Hooverism in the GOP in the second half of this video:

Hoover may have been a victim of the Depression, but his response to it came too little, too late. He deserves to be listed among the worst Presidents ever. He earned the title.

Blow Away, Blow Away, Blow Away

Wind blew in, cloud was dispersed
Rainbows appearing, the pressures were burst
Breezes a-singing, now feeling good
The moment had passed
Like I knew that it should.

- - George Harrison, Blow Away

River Spill Site Arsenic Levels 100 to 300 Times Acceptable Amount

EPA says they found 149 times the regulatory limit of arsenic at the Kingston coal ash spill site.

Environmentalist groups show Appalachian State report from water they collected on December 27 containing 300 times the allowable limits of arsenic. The professor who conducted the tests warned:

"The ecosystems around Kingston and Harriman are going to be in trouble, the aquatic ones for some time, until nature is able to bury these compounds in the environment," Tuberty said. "I don't how long that will take, maybe generations."

Tuberty also cautioned the ash might be harmful to people if it dries out and becomes airborne, a concern that's been acknowledged by TVA officials.

According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, what the Clinton and Bush EPA set for an "acceptable amount" of arsenic is still a carcinogenic amount.

UPDATE: Knoxnews reports that the EPA tests were from river water samples collected on December 23. The higher scoring environmentalist test collections were conducted on December 27. The concentration did not seem to dissipate over time, but doubled.

White House Cocktail Poison to Housing Market

George W. Bush paired faith in home ownership with the myth of an unregulated market to put us in the crisis we wake up to today. As a chaser, he hired a prep school friend to regulate the mortgage giants, but that regulator failed to wave a red flag as they were going down.

Vandy Prof Sends Letter to Condi Criticizing State Department "Demoralization" and "Crawl" of Historical Records

Historian Robert Thomas Schwartz maintains that future of historical record in foreign policy "in serious jeopardy." Sounds like the absence of intellectual rigor that will characterize the Bush Library is going through its paces early at the State Department.

Success in Stopping Immigrant Trafficking includes Multilingualism

The plan for stopping human trafficking of immigrants is not working in Las Vegas, even as the Bush Administration has given a million dollars in two years to the police and a faith-based non-profit to understand trafficking and to locate immigrant slaves. Despite the positive incentive of "T" visas to live in the US, only 1,300 such visas have been issued to immigrants nationwide.

Those close to the Vegas project maintain that federal money is poorly spent on a task force model instead of on the skills of people who speak the immigrants' languages and understand immigrant communities.

That laws are pursued to prohibit the speaking of any language other than English in government services in a time when victims of human trafficking are not being protected because of failure of local governments to mobilize federal resources toward immigrant languages is disturbing. In such a context, English Only laws are not only counterintuitive, but they have the potential for great harm and neglect.

The Bush Administration's hands-off approach (and perhaps its uncritical faith in faith-based organizations) hasn't helped insure the money was spent wisely.  And finally, I wonder how much recent ICE raids (including one that may have discouraged hurricane evacuation) might dampen immigrant slaves' willingness to risk applying for a protective visa lest it lead to an ICE sting.

When the President Does It, That Means That It's Not Illegal

The other day I mentioned an article that put traces the dominant Republican lineage back through Bush and Nixon to Joe McCarthy. Now that Bush is busy fabricating a positive legacy with spit and bailing wire, it behooves me to play a classic short of Nixon that drags Bush right back into that dubious lineage from which he is trying to extricate himself (with some help from the mainstream media):

As went Nixon on presidential privilege and abuse, so went Bush. That remains the starting point for judging any retrospective on George W. Bush.  But at least Nixon was a hardened realist about breaking the law.  Bush's abuses were more sinister in that they were cast in a veneer of idealistic sentiments, like "I'm trying to protect Americans and their families from evil."

Not Surprising

Finance industry lobbyists shouted down warnings of mortgage meltdown "horror stories" just before the Bush Administration relaxed lending regulations in 2006.

How Did I Miss This One?

"Goodbye Georgie Bush" celebration broke out on Chicago's Michigan Avenue the night Barack Obama was declared President Elect.