From TalkingPointMemo, this excerpt from AP:

President Bush, again defying Congress, says he has the power to edit the Homeland Security Department’s reports about whether it obeys privacy rules while handling background checks, ID cards and watchlists.

In the law Bush signed Wednesday, Congress stated no one but the privacy officer could alter, delay or prohibit the mandatory annual report on Homeland Security department activities that affect privacy, including complaints.

But Bush, in a signing statement attached to the agency’s 2007 spending bill, said he will interpret that section “in a manner consistent with the President’s constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch.”

Basically, this means he gets to decide whether to report on DHS’s law-abiding or -breaking behavior. Or so he asserts in his extraconstitutional signing statement. More via Yahoo.

Fox News tried to help their GOP masters yesterday by repeatedly identifying Foley as a Democrat.

They use children as human shields to prevent reporters from asking awkward Foley questions.

So, Woodward’s new book says Tenet warned Condi about scary intel from AQ in the summer of 2001.

Condi, predictably, insisted this was horseshit.

Too bad White House records make her a liar.

Is there anything these people won’t lie about?

Well done, Cliff Schecter. Some GOP talking head tried to spin the Foley situation as an isolated incident when compared to the Democrats’ corruption problems, which is just the wrong angle, and gets a serious smackdown for her trouble.

We can’t imagine what she was thinking. The whole trope of “the Dems are just as bad!” just won’t hunt when the GOP is losing seats to indictments and jail terms, with more likely to come as the Abramoff and Foley coverup investigations expand.

TPM reports that it turns out Bush has been learning the lessons of Vietnam. He’s just been learning them from Henry “Let’s Bomb Cambodia” Kissinger, a man who thinks the main problem with our Southeast Asian adventurism was that we didn’t stay long enough.

Sweet Lord.

It’s starting to look like the GOP leadership knew about his inappropriate contact with the page nearly a year ago — but did nothing.

By the way, if you want to read what Foley, the chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, said to his underage page in IM, well, go here.

From an editorial today:

Here’s what happens when this irresponsible Congress railroads a profoundly important bill to serve the mindless politics of a midterm election: The Bush administration uses Republicans’ fear of losing their majority to push through ghastly ideas about antiterrorism that will make American troops less safe and do lasting damage to our 217-year-old nation of laws — while actually doing nothing to protect the nation from terrorists. Democrats betray their principles to avoid last-minute attack ads. Our democracy is the big loser.

Republicans say Congress must act right now to create procedures for charging and trying terrorists — because the men accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks are available for trial. That’s pure propaganda. Those men could have been tried and convicted long ago, but President Bush chose not to. He held them in illegal detention, had them questioned in ways that will make real trials very hard, and invented a transparently illegal system of kangaroo courts to convict them.

[…]

Last week, the White House and three Republican senators announced a terrible deal on this legislation that gave Mr. Bush most of what he wanted, including a blanket waiver for crimes Americans may have committed in the service of his antiterrorism policies. Then Vice President Dick Cheney and his willing lawmakers rewrote the rest of the measure so that it would give Mr. Bush the power to jail pretty much anyone he wants for as long as he wants without charging them, to unilaterally reinterpret the Geneva Conventions, to authorize what normal people consider torture, and to deny justice to hundreds of men captured in error.

We are so fucking doomed.

Congressional Republicans are now pushing through a bill that would legitimize Bush’s extralegal wiretapping behavior, more or less gutting the already meager protections of FISA — which Bush ignored anyway, thereby making him a felon many times over.

As the Jackson office says, “Idiots have stolen my country. I have to go puke now. And move to Sweden.” Right there with you, buddy.

Go read. It’s worse than you think.

The Senate just killed an amendment to ensure federal courts could review the legitimacy of individual’s imprisonment on suspicion of involvement in terrorism.

Why do we need an amendment? Because the bill in question is that bad. Not that anyone noticed; it went down on party lines, with even “Maverick” McCain voting against it.

Kerry‘s had something to say about it, too:

We’ve got to tell the truth about what’s happening right now — right now — in our country. We must start treating our moral authority as a national treasure that doesn’t limit our power but magnifies our influence. That seems obvious, but this Administration still doesn’t get it. Still. Right now — today — they are trying to rush a bill through Congress that will fundamentally undermine our moral authority, put our troops at greater risk, and make our country less safe.

Let me be clear about something-something that it seems few people are willing to say. This bill permits torture. It gives the President the discretion to interpret the meaning and application of the Geneva Conventions. No matter how much well-intended United States Senators would like to believe otherwise, it gives an Administration that lobbied for torture just what it wanted.

The only guarantee we have that these provisions really will prohibit torture is the word of the President. But we have seen in Iraq the consequences of simply accepting the word of this Administration. No, we cannot just accept the word of this Administration that they will not engage in torture given that everything they’ve already done and said on this most basic question has already put our troops at greater risk and undermined the very moral authority needed to win the war on terror.

Oh, and it gets worse. From the LA Times:

BURIED IN THE complex Senate compromise on detainee treatment is a real shocker, reaching far beyond the legal struggles about foreign terrorist suspects in the Guantanamo Bay fortress. The compromise legislation, which is racing toward the White House, authorizes the president to seize American citizens as enemy combatants, even if they have never left the United States. And once thrown into military prison, they cannot expect a trial by their peers or any other of the normal protections of the Bill of Rights.

This dangerous compromise not only authorizes the president to seize and hold terrorists who have fought against our troops “during an armed conflict,” it also allows him to seize anybody who has “purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States.” This grants the president enormous power over citizens and legal residents. They can be designated as enemy combatants if they have contributed money to a Middle Eastern charity, and they can be held indefinitely in a military prison.

Glenn Greenwald has more:

There is a profound and fundamental difference between an Executive engaging in shadowy acts of lawlessness and abuses of power on the one hand, and, on the other, having the American people, through their Congress, endorse, embrace and legalize that behavior out in the open, with barely a peep of real protest. Our laws reflect our values and beliefs. And our laws are about to explicitly codify one of the most dangerous and defining powers of tyranny — one of the very powers this country was founded in order to prevent.

[…]

Thomas Jefferson, in his letter to Thomas Paine, 1789. ME 7:408, Papers 15:269, said: “I consider [trial by jury] as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.” And Patrick Henry warned us well in advance about Government officials who would seek to claim the right to imprison people without a trial:

Is the relinquishment of the trial by jury and the liberty of the press necessary for your liberty? Will the abandonment of your most sacred rights tend to the security of your liberty? Liberty, the greatest of all earthly blessings–give us that precious jewel, and you may take everything else! …Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel.

Bush will sign this bill without a thought of what he’s doing, which is, in essence, undoing 800 years of legal tradition.

If you voted for any of these GOP weasels, well, fuck you. If you’re a senator opposed to this and didn’t try to mount a filibuster, fuck you, too. And if you don’t care about this law and its implications, well, fuck you twice. We are now officially a nation of shitheads. It’s Rob’s phrase, but we believe it.

Seriously. How long do you think it’ll be before someone politically inconvenient to the current regime is disappeared? An investigative journalist? A pro-choice activist? An environmentalist? It’ll be legal, under this law — Bush can declare someone an “enemy combatant” and keep them wherever he likes. It’s a complete end run around separation of powers, and that’s precisely what this imperial President wanted.

Tbogg explains who Bush has made us:

In America they torture people, including their own, in secret prisons.

The media, of course, missed the entire point of Clinton smacking Wallace around — that being that the historical record makes abundantly clear that his administration did far more in pursuit of Islamic terrorism than Bush would have you believe, or than Bush himself did. This is no surprise.

However, Jon Stewart was paying attention, as was our national treasure Keith Olbermann, who termed his comment “A Textbook Definition of Cowardice.” Crooks and Liars has an easier-to-view video; it’s well worth your time, even if you just read the transcript in the first link. His closure we’ll include here:

The “free pass” has been withdrawn, Mr. Bush.

You did not act to prevent 9/11.

We do not know what you have done to prevent another 9/11.

You have failed us — then leveraged that failure, to justify a purposeless war in Iraq which will have, all too soon, claimed more American lives than did 9/11.

You have failed us anew in Afghanistan.

And you have now tried to hide your failures, by blaming your predecessor.

And now you exploit your failure, to rationalize brazen torture which doesn’t work anyway; which only condemns our soldiers to water-boarding; which only humiliates our country further in the world; and which no true American would ever condone, let alone advocate.

And there it is, Mr. Bush:

Are yours the actions of a true American?

In our suitcase, we found the midsummer New Yorker we’d misplaced on our last trip (July 10 & 17), which kind of makes up for the lightweight nature of the current issue.

Anyhow, there’s a long rumination about the future of liberal internationalism by George Packer in which he discusses the struggle with jihadism as compared (by others) to the Cold War against expanding communism. The final few paragraphs are well worth your time:

The critical view [of l.i.] is not confined to the pacifist and anti-imperialist left. It can count among its most thoughtful and influential adherents the writer David Rieff, who a decade ago in Bosnia was a leading liberal internationalist himself. The interventions of the past ten years, culminating with Iraq, have turned Rieff into a deep skeptic of power used in the name of human rights — a self-proclaimed realist. Writing recently in The Nation, and amplifying his latest book, “At the Point of a Gun,” he suggested that “when you posit the fundamental benevolence of the liberal universalist order and identify the United States as a guarantor of that order . . . you are stuck with the prospect of a virtually untrammeled use of American power.” In other words, there is a straight and not very long line from the Atlantic Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to Abu Ghraib and Haditha. Like Kurtz, those who begin as humanitarians have a way of ending as barbarians.

Rieff writes with the bitter scorn of an ex-interventionist, and he forces innocent believers to confront the most painful questions about the motives and consequences of their actions. He dislikes, above all, the moral vanity inherent in American exceptionalism — the idea, as the Bush Administration’s crucial 2002 position paper “National Security Strategy of the United States” put it, of “a distinctly American internationalism that reflects the union of our values and our national interests.” For Rieff, there is no union; America is just like any other empire, acting out of selfish concerns, and its moral fantasies make its power only more dangerous. Rieff is in love with disillusionment, and he was resolved the crisis in his own outlook by taking an impossibly pure position. . . For Rieff, the fact that NATO was partly designed to enhance American power means that a benign view of Truman’s foreign policy is childish. Having gazed into the dark heart of liberal internationalism and recoiled, he doesn’t allow the possibility that NATO is both a tool for America to assert its will and an arrangement that has benefitted large numbers of people, most of them non-Americans, for more than half a century.

American power, currently reviled around the world, is an inescapable fact, and when it allows itself to be harnessed to the wishes and interests of other nations, especially democratic ones, it can be a constructive force and win wider acceptance. As the German journalists Josef Joffe writes in his new book “Uberpower: The Imperial Temptation of America” (Norton; $24.95), “If the United States is an empire, it is a liberal one — a power that seeks not to grab but to co-opt.” This is not a narcissistic fantasy but an accurate description by a European who, unburdened by the torments of exceptionalism as few American writers of any persuasion are, can say matter-of-factly to his American friends, You have made your problems worse, you have acted recklessly and selfishly, but don’t overdo the self-criticism. Other countries naturally resent your power, but most still prefer it to the alternative. The world can’t afford these wild mood swings.

One of the greatest challenges of the new few years will be to rescue democracy, human rights, and national security from the company these words have recently kept. A clear-eyed understanding of our predicament begins with the recognition that American interests and values do not always rhyme; imagining that they do makes it more likely that in the end we’ll compromise both. [Emph. added] How can the U.S. fight jihadism without supporting dictatorships? Regime change by force has proved disastrous; elections have brought to power Islamists whose commitment to democracy is doubtful; ongoing blank checks written to Saudi princes, Pakistani generals, and a decaying dynasty in Cairo are bound to bankrupt sender and receiver alike. It’s ahrd to imagine a waning of the jihadist threat that doesn’t involve some kind of liberalization in the Muslim world, either because Islamism comes to be reformed from within or because it comes to be rejected by subject populations. (Iran, several decades ahead of the Arab countries, is where this struggle can be seen in sharpest relief.) A serious American policy towards Islamism will do well what the Bush Administration has done badly or not at all, and without triumphalist speeches: modest, informed, persistent support for reformers, without grand promises of regime change; concerted efforts at reconstruction and counter-insurgency that bring to bear the full range of government agencies as well as alliances and international institutions. Since these tasks will fall to the United States one way or another, we should learn to do them better rather than vow never to try again. large ideas drawn from historical analogies can help as guiding frameworks, but the glamorous certainties they seem to offer are illusions; we still have to think for ourselves.

The idiot son of Mike Wallace tried to ambush former President Clinton on Fox, with predictable results. Transcript, Video.

Wallace asserted they’d asked the same leading questions of Bush Administration figures, but, well, turns out he’s a lying little bitch.

Clinton was by no means perfect — no matter what else he did, for example, he’ll always be remembered for Lewinsky and his poorly considered pardons — but it sure would be nice to have somebody in public life with the ability to fight back against right-wing, neocon bullshit like this.

Update: The Rude Pundit points out an excellent bit we missed:

But let’s not let one quote pass without notice. When Wallace, armless, desperately turning his head to wipe the blood off his mouth, asked Clinton about promoting democracy in the Muslim world, the former President said, “Democracy is about way more than majority rule. Democracy is about minority rights, individual rights, restraints on power.”

Now that’s an undercut to the gut of the Bush administration.

Word.

“Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terror Threat” (Local copy)

MediaMatters dismantles Bill O’Reilly’s newest opus, “Culture Warrior.” The summary? He’s a damned liar, a fool or both.

This is just a small sampling of O’Reilly’s falsehoods, distortions, and misrepresentations. Although he has a habit of accusing people of being “cowards” when they decline to appear on The O’Reilly Factor, he refuses to have most of “the S-Ps” on his show — where they might answer some of his charges — because “it is hard to imagine a more loathsome group.” This refusal extends to Media Matters: Despite the fact that he has attacked us on the air numerous times (and in the book calls us “vile”), not only does he refuse to allow a representative from our organization to appear on his show to respond, he has never been able to cite a single instance — not one — in which we have said something about him that wasn’t true.

Not that this is a surprise; the formerly principled Arizona republican — who is sitting in Barry Goldwater’s seat, no less — has his nose so far up GWB’s ass he can tell what he’s having for lunch. As a consequence, his supposed resistance to allowing the Bush administration to detain and torture suspects with no legal recourse or grounds has evaporated like, well, a kidnapped Canadian sent to Syria.

The “compromise” arrived at by the Senate and White House basically allows the executive branch to do as it pleases and disregard Geneva more or less at will. Habeas corpus won’t even enter into it because — you guessed it — Bush’s folks will still get to decide when that applies. We’re now the first nation on earth to legally authorize violations of the Geneva convention. Congratulations.

Coverage and analysis at Eschaton, Digby, This Modern World and American Prospect. In particular, from the latter:

There is nothing in this bill that President Thumbscrews can’t ignore. There is nothing in this bill that reins in his feckless and dangerous reinterpretation of the powers of his office. There is nothing in this bill that requires him to take it — or its congressional authors — seriously. Two weeks ago, John Yoo set down in The New York Times the precise philosophical basis on which the administration will sign this bill and then ignore it. The president will decide what a “lesser breach” of the Geneva Conventions is? How can anyone over the age of five give this president that power?

Also, from the Washington Post, quoted at Whisky Bar (go read his contrasting quote, too):

The bad news is that Mr. Bush, as he made clear yesterday, intends to continue using the CIA to secretly detain and abuse certain terrorist suspects. He will do so by issuing his own interpretation of the Geneva Conventions in an executive order and by relying on questionable Justice Department opinions that authorize such practices as exposing prisoners to hypothermia and prolonged sleep deprivation.

Under the compromise agreed to yesterday, Congress would recognize his authority to take these steps and prevent prisoners from appealing them to U.S. courts. The bill would also immunize CIA personnel from prosecution for all but the most serious abuses and protect those who in the past violated U.S. law against war crimes.

Cite

If you think this is a good idea, just imagine what would happen if you or someone you love ended up on the wrong side of these provisions. It does happen. That’s why we have due process, and why we have a real court system. Bush & co. seem content to dismantle all that in the name of Fightin’ Terra, but those who support him would do well to recall that governments rarely give back power once the people have ceded it. Even if you think this is a good idea now, we can guarantee we’ll see these provisions applied in ways you won’t be so happy about within a very few years.