Harper’s has a longish and well-documented piece on how the GOP reworked the Justice Department to pursue political gain, not, well, “justice.” It’s something the GOP has long accused other parties of, naturally, but the only group that reliably attempts to or does turn the DoJ into a political hit squad is the Republican Party. It is the GOP that repurposed the Civil Rights division into something cleverly designed to suppress voter turnout. It is the GOP that began purging USAs for not initiating political investigations into enough Democrats. It’s the GOP that’s got a hard-on for the Voter ID act, which will certainly further suppress minority and lower-income voting — and, in so doing, increases their share of the vote, since those folks don’t usually vote Republican.

And, let us not forget, it is the Bush DoJ that has pursued political cases with partisan rigor:

In 2007, Donald Shields and John Cragan, two retired professors, released the preliminary results of a long-term study of the Bush Justice Department’s investigations of public officials. They found that between 2001 and 2006 the Justice Department had initiated 375 investigations of public officials. They also found that 298 of those investigations targeted Democrats and 67 of them targeted Republicans. Shields and Cragan concluded that the odds of this imbalance occurring randomly were one in ten thousand.

One of those 298 Democratic targets was former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman. Arguably the most successful Democrat-ic politician in recent Alabama history, Siegelman had occupied almost every statewide elective office, frequently winning by large margins. He was elected governor in 1998 with a 57 percent majority. In 2002, however, Siegelman faced a strong challenge from Republican Bob Riley. The election was the closest in the state’s history, and was ultimately called for Riley following a late-night “computer glitch” that moved votes on just one line–that of the gubernatorial contest–enough to reverse the outcome of the race. A study the following year by Auburn University’s James Gundlach strongly suggested “systematic electronic manipulation.” But this electoral oddity remains unexamined by the Justice Department.

Later that year, however, as the Mobile Press-Register was publishing a poll that showed Siegelman trouncing Riley in a rematch, the Department of Justice finally took action. It launched an investigation of Siegelman. The case was based on allegations that Siegelman had appointed Richard Scrushy, the CEO of the Birmingham-based health-care firm HealthSouth, to an uncompensated hospital-oversight board as a quid pro quo for Scrushy’s having arranged a $500,000 contribution to a 1999 initiative to promote a state lottery bill favored by Siegelman. There were several problems with the case. First, the contribution itself was legal. There was no payment to Siegelman, or even to his campaign. Also, Scrushy didn’t support Siegelman in the election. He was a Republican and had backed Riley. In addition, Scrushy had been appointed to the same board by three prior governors. And finally, according to his own uncontradicted testimony, Scrushy didn’t even want the appointment.

It was a clear case of selective prosecution–and if the theory applied to the Siegelman prosecution were to be applied uniformly, many in the Bush Administration would now be in prison. George W. Bush singled out 146 individuals who gave or gathered $100,000 (to his actual political campaign) for appointment to far more desirable postings as ambassadors, cabinet officers, or members of his transition team. Not a single one of these appointments triggered a Justice Department investigation.

The piece concludes by noting the very real damage Bush has done here, and how it may become permanent:

It is improbable that any contender who prevails in the 2008 presidential election will renounce the Bush model of a redefined presidency. A newcomer will likely differentiate his (or her) policies on a number of points, pulling back somewhat from positions (such as the presidential right to torture or wage preemptive war) that have drawn sharp criticism. But these changes will be introduced as a matter of presidential policy, not because the president is bowing to law defined by Congress or to constitutional constraints.

Our Constitution provides a mechanism for countering transformational excess, but the people’s representatives thus far appear to have decided that the impolite process of impeachment is only for presidents who have affairs. Given this failure of will, we must be prepared to accept a changed system in which the will of the people is subsumed by good manners and fearful politics. As long as this new democracy prevails, little will matter beyond the will of the president.

Food for thought.

Doonesbury examines the myth of GOP fiscal responsibility. Hint: it’s a lie.

• Over half the national debt was incurred under a Bush presidency
• The proportion grows to 70% if you include Reagan
• Out of 19 budgets submitted by Bush I, II, and RWR, only 2 were balanced

The much-ballyhooed John Yoo torture memo has been declassified. Madcap hilarity does not ensue. Among the spectacular legal assertions Yoo manufactured: the Fourth Amendment doesn’t apply to terror cases, even on domestic soil — in other words, warrantless wiretapping is A-OK! (N.B. that the notion of whether or not the Bill of Rights and the Constitution apply to foreigners in the U.S. is well settled law; they do, so it doesn’t matter if the person being investigated is a citizen, alien, illegal alien, or whatever.)

Further, Yoo’s imperial doctrine asserts that the President has the authority to simply abrogate laws that are in his way, such as those prohibiting harsh treatment of detainees i.e. torture. In this way, Yoo is directly responsible for at least some portion of the abuses found at Gitmo, in Iraq, and at undisclosed black sites maintained by the CIA around the world. N.B. what Wikipedia has to say about Authoritarianism:

Rule of law is frequently opposed by authoritarian and totalitarian states. The explicit policy of such governments . . . is that the government possesses the inherent authority to act purely on its own volition and without being subject to any checks or limitations.

John Yoo is, therefore, a WAR CRIMINAL, and ought to be in jail. Instead, he’s on the faculty at Berkeley Law.

Gore Vidal wins.

That speech? Obama wrote it alone.

Their reaction to Obama’s speech is fucking priceless. (I’ve tinyurl’d the link because their URL contains much of the joke.)

He may be a raving nutbird fundie, but he’s a decent human being who actually listened to Obama’s speech, which seems to have annoyed Scarborough yesterday (quoted at Kos):

HUCKABEE: [Obama] made the point, and I think it’s a valid one, that you can’t hold the candidate responsible for everything that people around him may say or do. You just can’t. Whether it’s me, whether it’s Obama…anybody else. But he did distance himself from the very vitriolic statements.

Now, the second story. It’s interesting to me that there are some people on the left who are having to be very uncomfortable with what Louis Wright said, when they all were all over a Jerry Falwell, or anyone on the right who said things that they found very awkward and uncomfortable years ago. Many times those were statements lifted out of the context of a larger sermon. Sermons, after all, are rarely written word for word by pastors like Reverend Wright, who are delivering them extemporaneously, and caught up in the emotion of the moment. There are things that sometimes get said, that if you put them on paper and looked at them in print, you’d say “Well, I didn’t mean to say it quite like that.”

And later:

HUCKABEE: I don’t think we know. If this were October, I think it would have a dramatic impact. But it’s not October. It’s March. And I don’t believe that by the time we get to October, this is gonna be the defining issue of the campaign, and the reason that people vote.

And one other thing I think we’ve gotta remember. As easy as it is for those of us who are white, to look back and say “That’s a terrible statement!”…I grew up in a very segregated south. And I think that you have to cut some slack — and I’m gonna be probably the only Conservative in America who’s gonna say something like this, but I’m just tellin’ you — we’ve gotta cut some slack to people who grew up being called names, being told “you have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie. You have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant. And you can’t sit out there with everyone else. There’s a separate waiting room in the doctor’s office. Here’s where you sit on the bus…” And you know what? Sometimes people do have a chip on their shoulder and resentment. And you have to just say, I probably would too. I probably would too. In fact, I may have had more of a chip on my shoulder had it been me.

Go and at least read Obama’s speech, even if you don’t watch the video. It is a profound document, perhaps the most significant such text since the civil rights movement. Senator Obama speaks to not just the red herring of his pastor’s most obnoxious remarks, but the anger and resentment that continue to characterize far too much of the racial dialog in this country — a country, he also notes, that is the only place a story like his could even begin to happen.

In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand – that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina – or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

Later, he finished with the story of Ashley, a woman who organized for his campaign in South Carolina. As a child, Ashley’s mother’s illness plunged her family into poverty, and Ashley wanted to work to avoid that fate for other families:

Now Ashley might have made a different choice. Perhaps somebody told her along the way that the source of her mother’s problems were blacks who were on welfare and too lazy to work, or Hispanics who were coming into the country illegally. But she didn’t. She sought out allies in her fight against injustice.

Anyway, Ashley finishes her story and then goes around the room and asks everyone else why they’re supporting the campaign. They all have different stories and reasons. Many bring up a specific issue. And finally they come to this elderly black man who’s been sitting there quietly the entire time. And Ashley asks him why he’s there. And he does not bring up a specific issue. He does not say health care or the economy. He does not say education or the war. He does not say that he was there because of Barack Obama. He simply says to everyone in the room, “I am here because of Ashley.”

“I’m here because of Ashley.” By itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough. It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children.

But it is where we start. It is where our union grows stronger. And as so many generations have come to realize over the course of the two-hundred and twenty one years since a band of patriots signed that document in Philadelphia, that is where the perfection begins.

Yes. We. Can.

Andy Sullivan had this to say about it:

I do want to say that this searing, nuanced, gut-wrenching, loyal, and deeply, deeply Christian speech is the most honest speech on race in America in my adult lifetime. It is a speech we have all been waiting for for a generation. Its ability to embrace both the legitimate fears and resentments of whites and the understandable anger and dashed hopes of many blacks was, in my view, unique in recent American history.

And it was a reflection of faith – deep, hopeful, transcending faith in the promises of the Gospels. And it was about America – its unique promise, its historic purpose, and our duty to take up the burden to perfect this union – today, in our time, in our way.

I have never felt more convinced that this man’s candidacy – not this man, his candidacy – and what he can bring us to achieve – is an historic opportunity. This was a testing; and he did not merely pass it by uttering safe bromides. He addressed the intimate, painful love he has for an imperfect and sometimes embittered man. And how that love enables him to see that man’s faults and pain as well as his promise. This is what my faith is about. It is what the Gospels are about. This is a candidate who does not merely speak as a Christian. He acts like a Christian.

As Rob notes, however, it should surprise no one that Fox is boiling the speech down to Obama still considering Wright “like family.” They don’t like it when people insist on talking about issues and matters of substance over there.