Vacation

I'm off on an extended vacation, probably will return the last week of July.

Have a great summer, and thanks for reading!!

Another One In the Tank On FISA Telecom Immunity

Olbermann joins Obama in the tank on FISA, and provides him with cover and image-enhancement at the expense of civil liberties at the same time. Read the whole disgusting thing. Greenwald finishes with gusto as he always does:

What's much more notable is Olbermann's full-scale reversal on how he talks about these measures now that Obama -- rather than George Bush -- supports them. On an almost nightly basis, Olbermann mocks Congressional Democrats as being weak and complicit for failing to stand up to Bush lawbreaking; now that Obama does it, it's proof that Obama won't "cower." Grave warning on Olbermann's show that telecom amnesty and FISA revisions were hallmarks of Bush Fascism instantaneously transformed into a celebration that Obama, by supporting the same things, was leading a courageous, centrist crusade in defense of our Constitution.

Is that really what anyone wants -- transferring blind devotion from George Bush to Barack Obama? Are we hoping for a Fox News for Obama, that glorifies everything he says and whitewashes everything he does? Compare what Russ Feingold said in an interview yesterday about the Democrats' support for the FISA bill to Olbermann's absurd effort to depict Obama as courageous for supporting it:

It's the latest chapter of running for cover when the Administration tries to intimidate Democrats on national security issues. It's the most embarrassing failure of the Democrats I've seen since 2006, other than the failure to vote to end the Iraq War. . . . It's letting George Bush and Dick Cheney have their way even though they're that unpopular and on their way out. It's really incredible.

It isn't that difficult to keep the following two thoughts in one's head at the same time -- though it seems to be for many people:

(1) What Barack Obama is doing on Issue X is wrong, indefensible and worthy of extreme criticism;

(2) I support Barack Obama for President because he's a better choice than John McCain.

Olbermann is smart and therefore knows exactly what he is doing here.

Everyone's Favorite Unelected Legislator Gets It Wrong

There's a reason we don't want guys like Scalia making public policy for us, and it's not just because he is an undisciplined pig and a legal fraud. He had no business invoking WOT talking points in an opinion about habeas corpus, but he did so anyway. Turns out he was wrong:

To bolster his argument that the Gitmo detainees should be denied the right to prove their innocence in federal courts, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in his dissent in Boumediene v. Bush: "At least 30 of those prisoners hitherto released from Guant?mo have returned to the battlefield." It turns out that statement is false.

According to a new report by Seton Hall Law Center for Policy and Research, "The statistic was endorsed by a Senate Minority Report issued June 26, 2007, which cites a media outlet, CNN. CNN, in turn, named the DoD as its source. The '30' number, however, was corrected in a DoD press release issued in July 2007, and a DoD document submitted to the House Foreign Relations Committee on May 20, 2008 abandons the claim entirely."

The largest possible number of detainees who could have "returned to the fight" is 12; however, the Department of Defense has no system for tracking the whereabouts of released detainees. The only one who has undisputedly taken up arms against the United States or its allies, "ISN 220," was released by political officers of the DoD against the recommendations of military officers.

Scalia bolstered his hysterical claim that the Boumediene decision "will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed" with stale information that was proven to be false one year ago. Professor Mark Denbeaux, director of the Seton Hall Center, said, Scalia "was relying uncritically on information that originated with a party in the case before him."

Shame on you.

New Todd Record Coming

Arena rock record due to drop next month:

The famous singer-pianist-guitarist-songwriter-producer is back with his 19th studio effort, “Arena,” which actually was partially conceived when Rundgren joined former Cars members Greg Hawkes and Elliot Easton in creating The New Cars. While that outfit called it quits when Easton broke his collarbone, Rundgren became fixated on simple guitar rock sounds.

“I found myself just going out and doing this sort of guerilla guitar quartet thing around the country and around Canada,” said Rundgren, during a phone call to his Kauai, Hawaii. home. “So when it came time to make a record, I thought maybe I’ll just continue in that vein and write something that is appropriate to the guitar, since the fans seems to be enjoying it so much.

“So when I decided to write a new album, I knew beforehand it was going to be this kind of old-school guitar-rock record.”

Among the notable tracks on “Arena,” which is due out next month, are the upbeat “Courage,” the AC/DC-meets-Queen-sounding “Strike” and the bombastic “Mountaintop.” It’s the latter song that finds Rundgren attempting to relive history.

“I have this song called ‘Bang the Drum,’ and it’s become a sports anthem,” Rundgren said. “I thought, ‘Why don’t I just try to write a sports anthem to start with and maybe it’ll be successful?’ Granted it’s not exactly about sports, it has that call-and-answer and chanting thing you hear at a sporting event.”

While fans attending his upcoming sold-out show can expect a few of his radio hits (“We Gotta Get You A Woman,” “Hello It’s Me,” and “Can We Still Be Friends”), Rundgren said they better arrive ready to hear “Arena” in its entirety. As for the new album’s title, that’s based around the notion of creating arena rock, which perhaps surprisingly is a relatively new style for this veteran artist.

“It’s something that I sort of lived through, but when arena rock was being defined and played, I was in Utopia,” Rundgren said. “While we would occasionally get to an arena, we’d consider ourselves more progressive rock. So there’s a difference. Progressive rock involves sometimes very long songs and convoluted arrangements, and the thing about so-called arena rock is it has a certain conciseness and accessibility.

“So in that sense, it’s not really a return to something I’ve done before because I’m not known for being concise and accessible, but on this particular instance, the music sort of demands it. So we’ll see whether it succeeds.”

Sweet Tuesday Morning

Yikes!! Badfinger appearing on Ralph Emery's Nashville Now:

Senator Dodd Rises In Opposition to FISA Telecom Immunity

An amazing speech, you can see and read it here.

We've Been Waiting So Long.....

From the Liars tour, 2004:

David Brooks Is A Big Fat Idiot

You already knew that, but his column today on the virtues of George W. is simply beyond the pale. Here he is today:

Let’s go back and consider how the world looked in the winter of 2006-2007. Iraq was in free fall, with horrific massacres and ethnic cleansing that sent a steady stream of bad news across the world media. The American public delivered a stunning electoral judgment against the Iraq war, the Republican Party and President Bush.

Expert and elite opinion swung behind the Baker-Hamilton report, which called for handing more of the problems off to the Iraqi military and wooing Iran and Syria. Republicans on Capitol Hill were quietly contemptuous of the president while Democrats were loudly so.

Democratic leaders like Senator Harry Reid considered the war lost. Barack Obama called for a U.S. withdrawal starting in the spring of 2007, while Senator Reid offered legislation calling for a complete U.S. pullback by March 2008.

The arguments floating around the op-ed pages and seminar rooms were overwhelmingly against the idea of a surge — a mere 20,000 additional troops would not make a difference. The U.S. presence provoked violence, rather than diminishing it. The more the U.S. did, the less the Iraqis would step up to do. Iraq was in the middle of a civil war, and it was insanity to put American troops in the middle of it.

Brooks' efforts to paint George and McCain as lone wolfs howling for a surge amid huge conventional wisdom against such a course during the winter of 06-07 is demonstrably false. Proof is found in Brooks' own columns from that period. Here he is on 1/7/07, in a column titled "Making the Surge Work," where Brooks endorsed the surge:

"It is now 2007, and President Bush has finally replaced Donald Rumsfeld, Casey and Abizaid. The question now is whether the policy that should have been implemented in 2003 can still be implemented four years on — after so many thousands have died.

Many in and out of the administration think so, hence all the talk about a surge — putting 20,000 more troops into Baghdad, finally occupying the dangerous neighborhoods, finally starting a jobs program, finally forcing national reconciliation."

There are others, but I can't find the strength to read any more of his reductionist, often painfully absurd columns.

Close Your Eyes

Carly and James.....

Politicizing the Justice Department

Ashcroft turned the DOJ into a frat house, and a lame one at that:

High-ranking political appointees at the Justice Department labored to stock a prestigious hiring program with young conservatives in a five-year-long attempt to reshape the department's ranks, according to an inspector general's report to be released today.

The report will trace the effort to 2002, early in the Bush administration, when key advisers to then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft moved to exert more control over the program to hire rookie lawyers and summer interns, according to two people familiar with the probe.

The honors program, which each year places about 150 law school graduates with top credentials in a rotation of Justice jobs, historically had operated under the control of senior career officials. Shifting control of the program to Ashcroft's advisers prompted charges of partisanship from law professors and former government lawyers who had worked under Democratic administrations.

It's supposed to be a program run by career staffers, not partisan hacks:

Critics in the department had argued that hundreds of high-quality applicants had been rejected because of their ties to left-leaning nonprofit groups or clerkships with Democratic judges and lawmakers, according to correspondence at the time. One Harvard Law School graduate said that when he applied for the honors program a few years ago he was warned by professors and fellow students to remove any liberal affiliations from his résumé.

Concerned Justice employees also raised alarms last year by sending a letter to lawmakers who had been examining whether political considerations led to the dismissal of nine U.S. attorneys.

In response, Justice officials last year said they had returned control over the honors and intern programs to career lawyers.

Oy. Here's an example of damage from this Administration seeping into the fabric of institutional order, wreaking havoc in sometimes big, sometimes small ways.

Eight Wimbledon Matches Fixed

As one of the world's greatest sporting events begins, it's important to note that the sport still needs to address the problem of match-fixing:

As a result of an inquiry, carried out by two former Scotland Yard detectives, extra security will be introduced at this year's competition.

This will include banning anyone apart from coaches from dressing rooms to prevent potential fixers having access to the sportsmen and women and to stop insider information such as details of injuries leaking out.

Eight Wimbledon matches from previous years have already been identified as suspicious. Four of them were from the men's singles last year, although none involved British players.

Last September, Belgian Gilles Elseneer came forward to say he had turned down a £70,000 offer to throw a game against Italy's Potito Starace at Wimbledon in 2005.

And British number one Andy Murray claimed: 'Everyone knows that match-fixing takes place.'

A tennis player might consider it worthwhile to throw a match if he expects to reach only the second or third round, where the prize money remains less than £30,000, but is offered several times that amount to lose in the first.

Football, horse racing, snooker and cricket have all been dogged by similar betting scandals in recent years.

Makes sense, huh?

That's $350 Million Well-Spent

Corporate welfare running in only one direction right now, but even by those gross standards this is pretty remarkable:

Since its inception, al-Hurra has been plagued by mediocre programming, congressional interference and a succession of executives who either had little experience in television or could not speak Arabic, according to interviews with former staffers, other Arab journalists and viewers in the Middle East.

It has also been embarrassed by journalistic blunders. One news anchor greeted the station's predominantly Muslim audience on Easter by declaring, "Jesus is risen today!" After al-Hurra covered a December 2006 Holocaust-denial conference in Iran and aired, unedited, an hour-long speech by the leader of Hezbollah, Congress convened hearings and threatened to cut the station's budget.

"Many people just didn't know how to do their job," said Yasser Thabet, a former senior editor at al-Hurra. "If some problem happened on the air, people would just joke with each other, saying, 'Well, nobody watches us anyway.' It was very self-defeating."

U.S taxpayers have spent over $350 million so far. To who?

Obama's FISA Capitulation

Once again we see the false power of personality over the very real institutional pressures and structures that tend to align facts in a certain way, consistently and repeatedly over time. Greenwald, on fire as usual, succinctly summarizes the dilemma:

People who spent the week railing against Steny Hoyer as an evil, craven enabler of the Bush administration -- or who spent the last several months identically railing against Jay Rockefeller -- suddenly changed their minds completely when Barack Obama announced that he would do the same thing as they did. What had been a vicious assault on our Constitution, and corrupt complicity to conceal Bush lawbreaking, magically and instantaneously transformed into a perfectly understandable position, even a shrewd and commendable decision, that we should not only accept, but be grateful for as undertaken by Obama for our Own Good.

Accompanying those claims are a whole array of factually false statements about the bill, deployed in service of defending Obama's indefensible -- and deeply unprincipled -- support for this "compromise." Numerous individuals stepped forward to assure us that there was only one small bad part of this bill -- the part which immunizes lawbreaking telecoms -- and since Obama says that he opposes that part, there is no basis for criticizing him for what he did. Besides, even if Obama decided to support an imperfect bill, it's our duty to refrain from voicing any criticism of him, because the Only Thing That Matters is that Barack Obama be put in the Oval Office, and we must do anything and everything -- including remain silent when he embraces a full-scale assault on the Fourth Amendment and the rule of law -- because every goal is now subordinate to electing Barack Obama our new Leader.

It is absolutely false that the only unconstitutional and destructive provision of this "compromise" bill is the telecom amnesty part. It's true that most people working to defeat the Cheney/Rockefeller bill viewed opposition to telecom amnesty as the most politically potent way to defeat the bill, but the bill's expansion of warrantless eavesdropping powers vested in the President, and its evisceration of safeguards against abuses of those powers, is at least as long-lasting and destructive as the telecom amnesty provisions. The bill legalizes many of the warrantless eavesdropping activities George Bush secretly and illegally ordered in 2001. Those warrantless eavesdropping powers violate core Fourth Amendment protections. And Barack Obama now supports all of it, and will vote it into law. Those are just facts.

The ACLU specifically identifies the ways in which this bill destroys meaningful limits on the President's power to spy on our international calls and emails. Sen. Russ Feingold condemned the bill on the ground that it "fails to protect the privacy of law-abiding Americans at home" because "the government can still sweep up and keep the international communications of innocent Americans in the U.S. with no connection to suspected terrorists, with very few safeguards to protect against abuse of this power." Rep. Rush Holt -- who was actually denied time to speak by bill-supporter Silvestre Reyes only to be given time by bill-opponent John Conyers -- condemned the bill because it vests the power to decide who are the "bad guys" in the very people who do the spying.

This bill doesn't legalize every part of Bush's illegal warrantless eavesdropping program but it takes a large step beyond FISA towards what Bush did. There was absolutely no reason to destroy the FISA framework, which is already an extraordinarily pro-Executive instrument that vests vast eavesdropping powers in the President, in order to empower the President to spy on large parts of our international communications with no warrants at all. This was all done by invoking the scary spectre of Terrorism -- "you must give up your privacy and constitutional rights to us if you want us to keep you safe" -- and it is Obama's willingness to embrace that rancid framework, the defining mindset of the Bush years, that is most deserving of intense criticism here.

* * * * *

Last night, Greg Sargent wrote that the most infuriating aspect of what Obama did here "is that since the outset of the campaign he's seemed absolutely dead serious about changing the way foreign policy is discussed and argued about in this country"; that Obama's "candidacy has long seemed to embody a conviction that Democrats can win arguments with Republicans about national security -- that if Dems stick to a set of core principles, and forcefully argue for them without blinking, they can and will persuade people that, simply put, they are right and Republicans are wrong"; and that "this time, he abandoned that premise," even though:

if there were ever anything that would have tested his operating premise throughout this campaign -- that you can win arguments with Republicans about national security -- it was this legislation. If ever there were anything that deserved to test this premise, it was this legislation.

This superb piece from The Technology Liberation Front makes the same argument:

We are, in other words, right back to the narrative where being "strong" on national security means trashing the constitution. . . . . This is doubly disappointing because until now Obama has been a master at re-framing national security debates to get out of this box. Unlike John Kerry, he has refused to shy away from a confrontational posture on foreign policy issues. He's shown a willingness to say he has a better foreign policy vision, rather than simply insisting he can be just as tough on the terrorists as the Republicans are. He could and should have done the same with FISA, taking the opportunity to explain why warrantless surveillance isn't necessary to protect us from the terrorists. But it seems he, along with Steny Hoyer and Harry Reid, chickened out. So it's back to Republicans being tough on national security and Democrats defensively insisting that they, too, hate terrorists more than they love the constitution.

It's either that he "chickened out" or -- as Yale Law Professor Jack Balkin asserts and Digby wonders -- Obama believes he will be President and wants these extreme powers for himself, no doubt, he believes, because he'll exercise them magnanimously, for our Own Good. Whatever the motives -- and I don't know (or much care) what they are -- Obama has embraced a bill that is not only redolent of many of the excesses of Bush's executive power theories and surveillance state expansions, but worse, has done so by embracing the underlying rationale of "Be-scared-and-give-up-your-rights." Note that the very first line of Obama's statement warns us that we face what he calls "grave threats," and that therefore, we must accept that our Leader needs more unlimited power, and the best we can do is trust that he will use it for our Good.

In the first serious test of his general election campaign, Obama the person failed miserably. Those are just facts, largely the result of institutional and structural limitations that force individuals holding or seeking position of power to act consistent with a tightly proscribed institutional framework, reinforced and reaffirmed over decades, regardless of the particular person we may be talking about at any one moment in time.

When Surfers Attack (To Protect Matt M!)

This is one strange story:

A paparazzo trying to photograph Matthew McConaughey at the beach told police he was attacked by a mob of surfers who threw his camera in the ocean.

The 29-year-old photojournalist told sheriff's deputies that a large group of surfers near Paradise Cove in Malibu approached him and other paparazzi about 2 p.m. Saturday and demanded the group stop taking pictures and filming.

"There was apparently a fight, and the photographer gave a statement that he received injuries," Los Angeles County sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore said Sunday. Detectives are investigating, he said.

McConaughey was not involved in the attack, authorities said.

Didn't I see that happen in a movie? And it involved Johnny Utah, Bodhi, and a few of the Red Hot Chili Peppers?

George Carlin, RIP



This is a huge loss. His voice and wit will be missed, particularly as the elections draw near. RIP George.

Bad News -- Obama Caves on Telecom Immunity

How's that for a swift kick in the pants:

Barack Obama got around to issuing a statement and -- citing what he calls "the grave threats that we face" -- he just announced that he supports this warrantless eavesdropping and telecom amnesty bill:

Given the grave threats that we face, our national security agencies must have the capability to gather intelligence and track down terrorists before they strike, while respecting the rule of law and the privacy and civil liberties of the American people. . . .

After months of negotiation, the House today passed a compromise that, while far from perfect, is a marked improvement over last year's Protect America Act. . . .It is not all that I would want. But given the legitimate threats we face, providing effective intelligence collection tools with appropriate safeguards is too important to delay. So I support the compromise, but do so with a firm pledge that as President, I will carefully monitor the program, review the report by the Inspectors General, and work with the Congress to take any additional steps I deem necessary to protect the lives -– and the liberty –- of the American people.

Telling Americans that we have to give up basic constitutional rights -- and allow rampant lawbreaking -- if we want to save ourselves from "the grave threats we face" sounds awfully familiar. Obama has obviously calculated that sacrificing the rule of law and the Fourth Amendment is a worthwhile price to pay to bolster his standing a tiny bit in a couple of swing states. The full Obama statement is here.

I can't tell you how profoundly disappointing this is. This smacks of the same protective, calculating behavior that led so many Dems to support the invasion of Iraq in 2004, and the detestable "Patriot Act" -- fear of the GOP claiming that you are "weak on terrorism." That won't play anymore.

Cyd Charisse




I had to pleasure to meet Cyd Charisse back in the mid 70s. I was staying with my parents for several weeks during the summer at the old Thunderbird Resort in Las Vegas, I think it was maybe 1974 or 75. We mostly spent the days by the big pool out back. Most every day my parents chatted with two "stars" that I had no idea who they were -- Tony Martin and Cyd Charisse. My parents being my parents, they were very cozy with Tony and Cyd. I do remember Ms. Charisse playing with me in the pool (there were almost no kids in Vegas in those days) and I distinctly remember being thrown around in the pool by comic Freddie Roman, who also hung out at the pool and I assume opened for Tony and Cyd in the Thunderbird showroom.

It's a pity Charisse had the bad luck to pass away during the week-long deification of Tim Russert, she deserved better. RIP Ms. Charisse.

Dem Congress More Popular With Republicans

Now that's what I call leadership! And this was before the FISA tragedy:

Fox News just released a new poll (.pdf) today and look at what it found:


The Democratic Congress is more popular with Republicans than with Democrats. And that doesn't even include yesterday's events, so I'm sure the Democratic Congress will become even more popular among Republicans.

And can you blame Republicans? If I were a hard-core Bush follower -- such him or him, praising the "compromise" bill -- I would have a huge poster of Steny Hoyer or Rahm Emanuel on my wall. Unconditional, endless funding of the war. Warrantless eavesdropping. A stop to lawsuits examining Bush lawbreaking. Telecom immunity. What more could a Bush follower ask for? As Kit Bond put it: "the White House got a better deal than they even had hoped to get" -- a deal they tried but were unable to get when the Congress was controlled by Bill Frist and Denny Hastert.

Happiness Stan

I'm so peeved over this telecom immunity that I had to go quickly find something to cheer me up:

The Dems Hand Bush More Unlimited And Unconstitutional Power

Thank you Steny Hoyer:

I've now just read a copy of the final "compromise" bill. It's even worse than expected. When you read it, it's actually hard to believe that the Congress is about to make this into our law. Then again, this is the same Congress that abolished habeas corpus with the Military Commissions Act, and legalized George Bush's warrantless eavesdropping program with the "Protect America Act," so it shouldn't be hard to believe at all. Seeing the words in print, though, adds a new dimension to appreciating just how corrupt and repugnant this is:

The provision granting amnesty to lawbreaking telecoms, Title VIII, has the exact Orwellian title it should have: "Protection of Persons Assisting the Government." Section 802(a) provides:

[A] civil action may not lie or be maintained in a Federal or State court against any person for providing assistance to an element of the intelligence community, and shall be properly dismissed, if the Attorney General certifies to the district court of the United States in which such action is pending that . . . (4) the assistance alleged to have been provided . . . was --

(A) in connection with intelligence activity involving communications that was (i) authorized by the President during the period beginning on September 11, 2001, and ending on January 17, 2007 and (ii) designed to prevent or detect a terrorist attack, or activities in preparation of a terrorist attack, against the United States" and

(B) the subject of a written request or directive . . . indicating that the activity was (i) authorized by the President; and (ii) determined to be lawful.

So all the Attorney General has to do is recite those magic words -- the President requested this eavesdropping and did it in order to save us from the Terrorists -- and the minute he utters those words, the courts are required to dismiss the lawsuits against the telecoms, no matter how illegal their behavior was.

That's the "compromise" Steny Hoyer negotiated and which he is now -- according to very credible reports -- pressuring every member of the Democratic caucus to support. It's full-scale, unconditional amnesty with no inquiry into whether anyone broke the law. In the U.S. now, thanks to the Democratic Congress, we'll have a new law based on the premise that the President has the power to order private actors to break the law, and when he issues such an order, the private actors will be protected from liability of any kind on the ground that the Leader told them to do it -- the very theory that the Nuremberg Trial rejected.

That's an important point. I have read much of the testimony of the German high command at Nuremberg, as well as arguments put forward by their lawyers in defense or mitigation of their conduct. There is no question in my mind that this Congress has now enshrined the "Nuremberg Defense" for a very select group -- the largest Telecoms who have purchased this immunity from our leaders at great cost to our integrity, and moral standing.

A necessary byproduct is the legal presumption, now embodied by an actual statutory provision -- that whatever the President says is legal is now legal. Orwellian indeed. This may be one of the worst acts to come out of Congress in our lifetime.

Please donate to ActBlue to defeat and end the careers of those who perpetrated this corrupt and dishonest assault on our liberty.

What The Heck Does That Guy Know Anyway?

He was only assigned to investigate and prepare a report on Abu Ghraib:

The Army general who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison accused the Bush administration Wednesday of committing "war crimes" and called for those responsible to be held to account.

The remarks by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who's now retired, came in a new report that found that U.S. personnel tortured and abused detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, using beatings, electrical shocks, sexual humiliation and other cruel practices.

"After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes," Taguba wrote. "The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."

Taguba, whose 2004 investigation documented chilling abuses at Abu Ghraib, is thought to be the most senior official to have accused the administration of war crimes. "The commander in chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture," he wrote.

A White House spokeswoman, Kate Starr, had no comment.

Taguba didn't respond to a request for further comment relayed via a spokesman.

The group Physicians for Human Rights, which compiled the new report, described it as the most in-depth medical and psychological examination of former detainees to date.

Doctors and mental health experts examined 11 detainees held for long periods in the prison system that President Bush established after the 9-11 terrorist attacks. All of them eventually were released without charges.

The doctors and experts determined that the men had been subject to cruelties that ranged from isolation, sleep deprivation and hooding to electric shocks, beating and, in one case, being forced to drink urine.

Bush has said repeatedly that the United States doesn't condone torture.

That's a pretty credible denial, huh? For shame, Mr. President and the torture-enablers who debased our nation.

Obama Drops the Ball on Telecom Immunity -- Big Time

From bringing on two old Clinton Secretaries of State to considering Sam Nunn -- Sam Nunn!! -- as a possible running mate, I fear Obama's handlers are steering him in the wrong direction. Proof of that in a very important and big way here, courtesy of Glennzilla:

Blue Dog Rep. John Barrow of Georgia has been one of the most enthusiastic enablers of the radical and lawless policies of the Bush administration. When running for re-election, he ran ads accusing his own party of wanting to "cut and run in Iraq," and was one of the 21 Blue Dogs to send a letter to Nancy Pelosi demanding that they be allowed to vote for the Rockefeller/Cheney Senate bill to give warrantless eavesdropping powers to the President and amnesty to lawbreaking telecoms.

As a result of all of that, Barrow faces a serious primary challenge in July from State Senator Regina Thomas, who decided to run against Barrow due to -- as she told Howie Klein when she announced -- "Barrow's failure to support his constituents against the encroachments of powerful Big Business interests." As Klein noted yesterday, Thomas' positions on both foreign and domestic policy are firmly in line with Barack Obama's views and with the Democratic base in that district, while Barrow has continuously supported the most extremist Bush policies, as he himself proudly boasts.

In contrast to Barrow's demands for warrantless eavesdropping and telecom amnesty, here is the statement Regina Thomas issued yesterday (via email):

After reading the FISA bill -- Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act -- I thought "This can not be good for Americans. That the Bush Administration wants unlimited powers for spying on not only terrorists, but on any American citizen. This is against and violates the Constitutional Fourth Amendment [right of] privacy. This also allows warrant-less monitoring of any form of communication in the United States." I was disappointed and dismayed with my Congressman John Barrow supporting this Bush Republican initiative against Americans. Too often Congressman Barrow from the 12th district in Georgia has voted with Bush and the Republicans on key issues.

Despite all of this, The Atlanta Constitution-Journal reported yesterday that Barack Obama -- who has been claiming to be so emphatically opposed to warrantless eavesdropping and telecom amnesty, to say nothing of the Iraq War -- taped a radio endorsement this week for Rep. Barrow, with the specific intent to help him defeat Regina Thomas in the Democratic primary (h/t sysprog):

Obama cuts an ad to help John Barrow in his primary fight

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama has taped a radio commercial on behalf of U.S. Rep. John Barrow of Savannah, who faces a July 15 primary challenge.

It's the first case of Obama involving himself in a local race in Georgia. . . But the Obama campaign made clear to my colleague Aaron Sheinin that it sees Barrow, a two-term Democrat, as an important ally. . . .

"Senator Obama believes that Congressman Barrow has worked hard to bring change that families in his district deserve, and we'll work hard to help John Barrow win in November," Obama spokeswoman Amy Brundage said.

In the ad, Obama asks voters to join him in supporting Barrow. "We're going to need John Barrow back in Congress to help change Washington and get our country back on track," Obama says in the 60-second ad.

The article highlighted the reason Barrow was so eager to have Obama record an ad endorsing him and why it's so potentially important in helping Barrow win his primary:

Barrow beat a Republican incumbent in 2004 and had tough GOP opposition in 2006. But this April, Barrow picked up unexpected opposition from Regina Thomas, a well-known African-American state senator based in Savannah. Barrow is white, and in past primaries in the 12th District, black voters have cast nearly 70 percent of the ballots.

What makes this even more amazing is that, as the article notes, Barrow cynically waited until after Obama's sweeping primary victory in Georgia to endorse him. He did so only once he saw that Obama would likely be the nominee and obviously with the hope of having Obama encourage Barrow's sizable African-American constituency to support him. And now Obama turns around and intervenes in a Democratic primary on behalf of one of the worst Bush enablers in Congress -- not in order to help Barrow defeat an even-worse Republican, but to defeat a far better and plainly credible Democratic challenger.

For all of Obama's talk about the wicked ways of Washington, these incumbent protection schemes -- whereby Beltway power factions all help each other stay in power no matter their ideology or positions -- are among the most vital instruments for perpetuating how Washington works. Democratic leaders pretend that they are forced continuously to capitulate to the Bush administration due to their "conservative" members, yet continuously work to keep those same members in power, even when it comes to supporting them against far better Democratic primary challengers.

Obama has made himself a central part of that rancid scheme. Recall that in 2006, Obama -- who now touts his commitment to ending the war -- endorsed Joe Lieberman in his Connecticut primary race over war opponent Ned Lamont, appearing with Lieberman to say: "Joe Lieberman's a man with a good heart, with a keen intellect, who cares about the working families of America . . . . I am absolutely certain that Connecticut's going to have the good sense to send Joe Lieberman back to the United States Senate."

Oy veh -- telecom immunity must be stopped and the rule of law restored.