Tripod has been the home of Left Hook! since it began nearly 8 years ago, but when I switched to a blog format, I learned that Tripod's blog setup just isn't very good. I've toughed it out for these last few months, but the time has finally come to move on. This site is going to remain in place, and I'll probably archive these posts on the main archive page here at Tripod, which will remain home base, but henceforth, the new work of Left Hook! will be carried out here. Come on over.

--classicliberal2

Posted by claslib2 at 6:08 PM EDT

Updated: Friday, 10 July 2009 6:40 PM EDT

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"Of the many responsibilities granted to a President by our Constitution, few are more serious or more consequential than selecting a Supreme Court Justice."

--The Obama, 26 May, 2009

And lo, the Obama didst nominate Sonia Sotomayor to fill the latest vacancy on the Supreme Court.

Offered for what it's worth, the Center For Individual Freedom, a right-wing think-tank (if such a thing can rightly be said to exist) offers the following assessment of Sotomayor's rulings in First Amendment cases:

While Sotomayor has been involved in hundreds of First Amendment cases since her appointment to the federal bench, a review by the Center for Individual Freedom found that she has personally authored only nineteen cases that bear directly on issues of free speech and association, freedom of religion, and freedom of the press.  Of those nineteen cases, Sotomayor sided with the individual (the First Amendment) only five times, or a mere 26.3 percent.

To be fair, the Center is a right-wing organization, and one of the cases on which they claim Sotomayor ruled against speech (Landell v. Sorrell) was in upholding Vermont's limitations on campaign donations, which is very questionable as a "speech" matter. A lot creepier is another cases cited by the Center (Doninger v. Niehoff), in which she ruled that "students could be subject to school sanctions for off-campus speech that 'would foreseeably create a risk of substantial disruption within the school environment,'" in that case, a student who had criticized school officials in a personal blog!

Meanwhile, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), the Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee held a press conference today to argue that Sotomayor was "moderate" on criminal cases. His evidence is that a review of Sotomayor's decisions in more than 800 criminal cases, prepared by the Democratic staff of the committee, showed that she ruled with her Republican-appointed colleagues 97% of the time.

Leahy cites this approvingly.

Sort of says something about what's considered "moderate" these days, eh?

--classicliberal

Posted by claslib2 at 1:01 PM EDT

Updated: Friday, 10 July 2009 5:30 PM EDT

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Only days after I raked former Republican VP wannabe Sarah Palin over the coals for her remarkably stupid public behavior, she comes out and trumps even my low estimation of her, announcing, in a rambling, incoherent mess of a speech (a mess even by her standards), that not only is she declining to seek re-election, she's actually resigning from the governorship entirely. Not even finishing her term.

Everyone has been speculating about why--her babbling dissertation certainly did absolutely nothing to clarify the matter. Her Republican fans among the punditry are actually portraying this as some sort of brilliant first step toward a presidential race! Palin has already been established as an erratic imbecile. Somehow, I can't see  this--quitting the only substantial government post she's ever held in the middle of the first term--adding much of a positive spin to her resume, even if we are talking about the Republican party.[*]

No, the much more likely scenario is that she's leaving office ahead of some looming scandal that would have driven her from it anyway. As if to bolster this speculation, Palin has now issued a public warning to those in the press who may report negative--or, as she calls it, "defamatory"--stories about her, theatening lawsuits. Good luck on that.

--classicliberal2

---

[*] A party whose unofficial voice (Rush Limbaugh) said, today, of the military coup in Honduras that just ousted the elected government, "If we had any good luck, Honduras would send some people here and help us get our government back."

Posted by claslib2 at 1:34 PM EDT

Updated: Friday, 10 July 2009 2:07 PM EDT

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I've been rather excited by what's happening in Iran in the wake of its rigged election. This is really the continuation of the process that was well underway before Bush attacked Iraq and interrupted it. Iranians had grown weary of rule by the mullahs and their sycophants for years, and various shades of "reformers" had swept the last several elections before the Iraq war. "Reformers" belongs in quotes, because the Supreme Leader still vets the candidates who are allowed to run. He'd been bowing to public pressure for a few years and allowing less reactionary candidates. Even the hardliners were adopting reformist slogans.

Unfortunately, then came Bush, and all of that went away. Ahmadinejad was the candidate of the most reactionary elements inside Iran, an excrescence of the mullahs given power solely by Bush's decision to go play Army in the desert next door. The same dissatisfaction still existed, though, and it has been brewing there ever since.

The mullahs still vet the candidates. Mousavi is portrayed as a "reformer" in a lot of the press coverage here, and during the campaign, he adopted a lot of the reformist talk, as had other conservatives, pre-war, but before that, he has always been, himself, a conservative, and, except for his transformation during the campaign (which could just be political rhetoric, rather than a genuine change of heart), he's representative of the narrow perspective that has traditionally been allowed by the mullahs to take part in the democratic process. But for the rhetoric, it's like having a choice between Augusto Pinochet and Rick Warren.

What makes the Iranian situation really exciting is the stupid, clumsy response of the mullahs and their Revolutionary Guards. Fixing an election for their boy in such a transparently obvious way, then falling back on the old methods of repression to keep people in line in an age of technology that just goes around their efforts, an age that has totally passed them by, and made their reaction look, to all of Iran, to be as outrageous as it is. By their behavior, they've radically escalated the situation, and set into motion something that, before it ends, could be their undoing.

Predictably, John McCain, Sean Hannity, and a number of other righties in the U.S. are bitching about Barack Obama's very measured comments on these developments. Their criticism is, as is so often the case, deplorable. To state the obvious, if the President of the Great Satan was to come out with a strong condemnation of the election or the mullahs, or an endorsement of Mousavi's efforts, it would doom those efforts utterly and completely. The reactionaries in Iran have, from the beginning, put the blame for the "unrest" on agitation from the U.S. Any word Obama may breath in support of the reformers or against the current regime would be used a confirmation of that allegation inside Iran, and the reformers would be completely discredited. A Sean Hannity probably doesn't know that--he probably thinks Iran is run by some strongman, and couldn't find it on a map--but a John McCain does know these things, and, had he been elected president, would be behaving exactly as is Obama. His public performance amounts to a lie. He's playing to the base of his party, the people who think the cretinous Sarah Palin falls just after sliced bread in the realm of inventions.

If the hardliners in Iran decide they want to fight about it, we could be looking at another revolution. The youth of Iran, who have emerged in huge numbers and coalesced around Mousavi, seem ready to shrug off the old guard. Mousavi himself probably couldn't contain them now. It's a very exciting time.

--classicliberal2 

Posted by claslib2 at 5:11 PM EDT

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Yesterday, Glenn Greenwald was out with another example of why he's the best political blogger on the internet. "Obama and Transparency: Judge For Yourself." It matches up Obama's promises to end Bush-era abuses with regard to government secrecy vs. the reality, wherein Obama has largely continued those policies. An article well worth a look.

It does give due consideration to the good things Obama has done in this area:

Balanced against all of that, Obama complied with a court order directing the release of Bush-era OLC memos on torture; issued an Executive Order creating additional procedures before executive secrecy under FOIA could be asserted; and ordered his agency heads to interpret FOIA with a "presumption" in favor of disclosure.  It should also be noted that--as Think Progress documented yesterday--Obama's position in denying access to visitor logs is a direct violation of his statements about the Bush administration's practices in doing the same, and the same is true for his use of the Bush-era version of the state secrets theory.

The record is pretty bad, and, as Greenwald notes, this only deals with the matter of government transparency:

...it's worth emphasizing that the above excerpts pertain only to transparency issues.  None of this has anything to do with what The New York Times in May--referring to Obama's Bush-replicating policies on detention, rendition, denial of habeas rights, military commission and the like--described as "how he has backtracked, in substantial if often nuanced ways, from the approach to national security that he preached as a candidate, and even from his first days in the Oval Office."  No matter how you look at it, this is quite a record.

 As the song says, "Meet the new boss..."

--classicliberal2 

Posted by claslib2 at 2:20 PM EDT

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Groucho Marx once said he wouldn't belong to any club that would have him as a member. When I took part in such things on a more regular basis, I got thrown off a lot of message boards, discussion lists, forums. It isn't that I'm particulary mean or unfair. I just have a low tolerance for stupidity, and a poor track record of holding my tongue when confronted with it. I should probably know better, for example, than to go into a forum full of fellows who openly lust after Sarah Palin, to the point of posting LOTS of photoshopped images of the Alaskan governor's head transposed on to the nude bodies of porn stars for wanking purposes. I should know better. And I should definitely know better than to go there and post one of my modest, reasonable estimations of said governor's intellectual capabilities, in the wake of her public fight with yet another comedian. But I did it anyway. And--big surprise--it was deleted by the Palin fan who runs the joint, and who characterized it as inflammatory while  he replaced it with yet another of those much more respectable threads devoted to Sarah porn (to which no one could possibly object).

Such is life. I've sort of adopted an informal zero-tolerance policy toward this sort of thing, so I won't be back to that particular board, and I suppose I can add it to the list of clubs from which I have, in effect, been excluded. Here's the post that did the deed:

I know it must be difficult to be as cretinous an imbecile as Sarah Palin. She's forever trapped in a world she can't understand. The simplest things appear to her to be great, unsolvable mysteries. That isn't a bar to success in the Republican party, though, and she's made very clear she has ambitions. Can't she at least hire some handlers who, if incapable of explaining the facts of life to such a dullard, could at least tell her to stop when she's embarrassing herself so badly in public?

That's what she did during the election, and that's all she's done after. Her interview with Katie Couric last year became a nationwide story when, asked what news sources she read, Palin was incapable of naming a single one. As bad as that is, she's then spent the last year whining about it, lying about it (describing it as a "gotcha' question"), and trashing Couric. She dumped on Tina Fey for Fey's dead-on caricature of her on Saturday Night Live. She explained that she was a victim of these people, exploited by them. She's whined about her press coverage! A few weeks ago, she jumped into a public fracas with the father of her grandchild. Then, she became involved in a stupid public dustup over a Republican fundraiser in Washington. And now, she's back to whining about yet another comedian, this time being David Letterman.[*] Even after it was clear she was just embarrassing herself further, she kept right on, dragging the matter out for more than a week. In an attempt to diffuse the situation, Letterman has even apologized. Twice. In response, Palin issued a statement that sounds like some government press release from a Third World dictatorship, praising the brave American soldiers who defend the right of someone like Letterman to make jokes.

That last is interesting in another way, as Palin set forth her own, um... unique view of "free speech" during the campaign, when she said that press criticism of her amounted to an attack on her right to free speech.

It's one of the cardinal rules of politics that, when you want to pick a public fight, pick it with someone bigger than yourself. Palin has chosen a reporter, a teenager, and some comedians. Since she was picked by McCain in a vain, misguided effort to attract Hillary Clinton voters, Palin has been as incredibly popular with the Republican base as she has been an embarrassment to them, their party, and U.S. politics in general, and--make no mistake about it--she's the frontrunner for the Republican nomination in 2012. Is this really what the Republican party has come to? Is this what American politics have come to?

---

[*] And the joke wasn't even aimed, as she claimed, at Palin's family. It was aimed at Alex Rodriguez. Palin falsely asserted it was aimed at her 14-year-old daughter, who, in reality, hadn't even been mentioned, and went around telling the press Letterman was a dirty old man making jokes about the sexual exploitation of underage girls.

--classicliberal2 

Posted by claslib2 at 8:48 PM EDT

Updated: Friday, 19 June 2009 9:36 PM EDT

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"Of the many responsibilities granted to a President by our Constitution, few are more serious or more consequential than selecting a Supreme Court justice."

So sayeth the Obama this morning. The current Supreme Court is, at present, a plane with one wing--of 9 justices, there are 8 conservatives/reactionaries, 7 of them being Republicans. Their rule has been terrible indeed. So the Obama is not only right; what he said is particularly true in his case. And then he wheeled out his version of a quality U.S. Supreme Court nominee: A former corporate lawyer, appointed to the federal bench by George Bush the Senior, and who, in her long judicial career, votes with Republican court appointees 95% of the time. No kidding. From talking points issuing forth today from the administration itself:

"Known as a moderate on the court, Sotomayor often forges consensus and agreeing with her more conservative nominees far more frequently than she disagrees with them. In cases where Sotomayor and at least one judge appointed by a Republican president were on the three-judge panel, Sotomayor and the Republican appointee(s) agreed on the outcome 95% of the time."

I let readers draw their own conclusion about what this says about the nominee, the appropriateness of her nomination, and about Obama, and offer only a prediction: Republicans will paint Sotomayor as some wild-eyed radical "judicial activist" anyway.

--classicliberal2 

Posted by claslib2 at 8:07 PM EDT

Updated: Friday, 19 June 2009 8:45 PM EDT

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The corporate press has been obsessed over the Nancy Pelosi non-story for two days, now; full-bore saturation coverage. Hour after hour of "What did Nancy Pelosi know about Bush administration torture, and when did she know it?"

The real question is "What difference does it make?" And the answer is "none at all." The entire matter is a meaningless sideshow being raised as a distraction from the real story, which is the behavior of the Bush administration, the fact that it tortured prisoners.

Meanwhile, on Wednesday, we got confirmation of something those of us who have followed these matters have long suspected--that Bush administration war-hawks were instituting their squalid torture regime in part to manufacture a case against Iraq. It was reported by former NBC News investigative producer Robert Windrem that, just after the Iraq invasion, when the fact that the administration had flat-out lied about WMDs was becoming painfully apparent, Dick Cheney's office suggested that captured Mukhabarat official Muhammed Khudayr al-Dulaymi be put on a waterboard in order to get him to "confess" to an Iraq-al Qaida partnership. Two intelligence officers in the know confirmed this, and Bush chief weapons inspector Charles Duelfer confirmed he was asked to oversee this and rejected the idea as "reprehensible." Duelfer called it a political move, and darkly notes that it was "ludicrous" to assume Dulaymi, given his position, would even have any knowledge of any such matter.

It's already a matter of public record that, in the lead-up to the Iraq war, Bush and his thugs were writing directly into their public pronouncements the nonsense being offered by those whom they were torturing. In the case of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, for example, Cheney ordered the prisoner tortured even after interrogators had reported that al-Libi was compliant and that such methods weren't necessary. When al-Libi started "confessing" to an Iraq-al Qaida partnership, the torture was discontinued, and even though his interrogators were reporting that he was probably just making it all up in order to get the torture to stop, his words on the subject were , within months, coming right out of the mouth of the "President" and his top thugs as a rationale for an attack on Iraq. Al-Libi later recanted this, the CIA circulated an IC-wide disavowal of everything he'd said on the subject, and al-Libi mysteriously died.

But the press has chosen to ignore this, and give us, instead, saturation coverage of the Nancy Pelosi matter, something that is of absolutely no consequence, except to conservative Republicans trying to derail the torture story and protect the vile Bush administration.

The ever-vigilant Media Matters gives us the dismal particulars:

Despite covering questions regarding what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) knew about the Bush administration's interrogation policies, none of the three major networks' evening news programs mentioned on May 14 that according to a May 13 report by former NBC News investigative producer Robert Windrem, "[t]wo U.S. intelligence officers confirm that Vice President Cheney's office suggested waterboarding an Iraqi prisoner ... who was suspected to have knowledge of a Saddam-al Qaeda connection." All May 14 CNN and Fox News Channel evening shows, as well as all daytime shows available on the Nexis database, also ignored Windrem's story.

Just another example of our "liberal" press at work.

--classicliberal2

UPDATE (05/19/09) --  Yesterday, Media Matters followed up with print media, looking at coverage in five major national newspapers (the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today). Unsurprisingly, while all had extensively covered the Pelosi non-story, there wasn't a single mention of the Windrem scoop, much less a full-blown article about it, in any of those papers.

At the same time, MM also looked into how those same papers had covered a May 15 McClatchy article about Dick Cheney's claims that prisoners tortured at Guantanamo had provided evidence of an Iraq-al Qaida partnership. They didn't. And the big papers buried that one, too.

Posted by claslib2 at 11:45 AM EDT

Updated: Friday, 19 June 2009 8:00 PM EDT

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One of the things for which I've gotten some static over the years is my characterization of Bush's view of his own powers as Stalinist.  It's seen as hyperbolic rhetoric, unnecessarily inflammatory, and, most of all, a charge that borders on crackpotism. To be fair, most of the time, charges like that are crackpotism, even when it comes to Bush. It isn't that such charges are unjustifiable when it comes to Bush; it's that those who make them can't justify them, and are using the charge as a substitute for an informed critique.

Those who directed that static my way have long ago been corrected by history (if they paid it any attention), but now, we have something else to add to that rarely-examined pile we broadly call "the historical record." New documentation on Bush's assertions of anti-constitutional dictatorial powers. Not much new; it's just good to have in writing that administration's assertions that it had the power to freely do things like illegally spy on Americans, illegally kidnap people, send soldiers storming into private residences without warrant or any legal procedure, and crush free speech and press rights at will. They flatly assert, in short, that Bush could operate a military dictatorship within the U.S., entirely free of constitutional or legal restraint. These positions aren't theoretical, either--they were official Bush policy until only a few months before the administration left office.

Those in the corporate press have maintained a 10 year practice of smelling what they seem to consider the pleasant, rosy aroma of Bush's breath via the noses they've kept tightly jammed up his ass, and, it seems, nothing changed about this with the change of administrations--the "liberal media" have largely refused to report most of this. Par for the course.

--classicliberal2

UPDATE: 03/05/09

"We may not have realized it at the time, but in the period from late 2001-January 19, 2009, this country was a dictatorship."
--Harper's Scott Horton, on the newly-released "legal opinions"

"This is a theory of presidential dictatorship. These views are outrageous and inconsistent with basic principles of the Constitution as well as with two centuries of legal precedents. Yet they were the basic assumptions of key players in the Bush Administration in the days following 9/11."
--Yale law professor Jack Balkin

"Reading these memos, you've gotta almost conclude we had an unconstitutional dictator. It's pretty deadly and pretty serious, what's in these materials."
--Former White House counsel John Dean

Posted by claslib2 at 7:11 PM EST

Updated: Saturday, 25 July 2009 7:31 PM EDT

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Were I in a better humor of late, the mess that has become the "stimulus bill" would be something in which I'd find a great deal of amusement. Obama talked up admiration for Dr. King, but adopted Rodney King politics ("can't we all just get along?"). I've written much about the pernicious effects of this sort of thing. It's a subject that has probably made up most of this blog since I launched it.

Rodney King politics is the folly of fools in this day and age. That's something too many Democrats never seem to learn. Today's conservatives and Republicans are going to oppose anything of any substance a Democratic administration tries to do--even if they agree with the policy in question, they'll do this. If the Clinton years taught Democrats anything, it should have taught them this. Instead, Obama is the latest in a long string of "Democrats" who think that, if you give up half of what you want right up front, the other side will be equally accommodating.

They won't.

Did Obama genuinely think that if he appointed a gaggle of rightists to run his administration, then proposed a stimulus bill that was nearly half tax-cuts of the sort favored by Republicans, the Repubs would simply fall in line behind it? It certainly looks that way. At present, it seems he's being schooled on that point.

Whatever stimulus bill eventually passes will have to be rammed through on a party-line or mostly-party-line vote--why not just write a bill you'd like to see passed and think would be effective, instead of wasting time and political capital on a doomed effort to be accommodating? If the Repubs want to filibuster, let them. The economy is going to be in the dumper no matter what passes. Let them be the ones to stand in the way of any effort to alleviate the pain.

Government is always a circus. In the U.S., it's a particularly pathetic circus. The transition from Bush to Obama is like a transition from evil-intentioned not-so-bright children running the government to adults who just aren't showing signs of being terribly bright. A huge step up, so it's certainly progress, but when it promises so little, is it really enough to call it progressive? It just looks so much better because of what came before. And so, by the way, would just about anything--taking over from one of the worst presidents in the history of the Republic makes it easy to look good by comparison. That doesn't mean it will be good in and of itself.

Obama finds himself playing catch-up on the stimulus bill, now. Today, he held a town-hall meeting and a prime-time press conference, with more to come, but Republicans have already managed to effectively demonize the package. He didn't accomplish anything by larding up the bill with Repub-friendly tax-cuts (which every serious economist says is far less stimulative than the spending provisions), except to ensure that the final bill, which will pass without any substantial Republican support (if any at a all), is full of these sorts of expensive, less stimulative measures.

--classicliberal2

Posted by claslib2 at 1:15 AM EST

Updated: Tuesday, 10 February 2009 4:32 PM EST

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