Category: Issues of the Day

Dungy: ‘I embrace’ same-sex marriage ban

CARMEL, Ind. — Colts coach Tony Dungy said he knows some people would prefer him to steer clear of the gay marriage debate, but he used a speech Tuesday night to clearly stake out his position.

Dungy told more than 700 people at the Indiana Family Institute’s banquet that he agrees with that organization’s position supporting a constitutional amendment that defines marriage as between one man and one woman.

“I appreciate the stance they’re taking, and I embrace that stance,” Dungy said.

IndyStar.com

Shut up Coach.

Four of a kind

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales faced the cameras for all of nine minutes yesterday, but he managed to contradict himself at least four times as he fought off calls to resign over the firing of U.S. attorneys.

“Mistakes were made,” he said in fluent scandalese, but “I think it was the right decision.”

“I am responsible for what happens at the Department of Justice,” he posited, but “I . . . was not involved in any discussions about what was going on.”

“Kyle Sampson” — Gonzales’s chief of staff — “has resigned,” he said, but “he is still at the department.”

And, finally, “I believe in the independence of our U.S. attorneys,” Gonzales maintained, but “all political appointees can be removed . . . for any reason.”

Dana Milbank, The Washington Post

The difference

I also asked her how this at all differed from the move in 1993 when he husband asked all 93 US Attorneys to resign.

“This is a great difference,” she said. “When a new president comes in, a new president gets to clean house. It is not done on case-by-case basis where you didn’t do something that some senator or member of Congress told you to do in terms of investigation into opponents. It is ‘Let’s start afresh.’ Every president has done that.

“This happening now with this administration is actually quite rare,” she went on. “There’s been some research done that concluded it’s hardly ever happens and it happened with so many people and it apparently was going to happen with more. We now are hearing stories that basially the White House wanted to change all the US Attorneys for political and personal reasons. I think this raises serious questions.”

Political Punch, ABC News

And, from The Washington Post:

Although Bush and President Bill Clinton each dismissed nearly all U.S. attorneys upon taking office, legal experts and former prosecutors say the firing of a large number of prosecutors in the middle of a term appears to be unprecedented and threatens the independence of prosecutors.

For Pete’s sake

In New Mexico, Domenici was regularly complaining about Iglesias. He made numerous calls to the White House and the Justice Department, and even phoned Iglesias to inquire about a seemingly stalled corruption investigation against Democrats in New Mexico.

Domenici has since said he regretted making the call to Iglesias, but that incident most enraged Democrats on Capitol Hill.

“Sen. Domenici called for the AG (Gonzales) because he wants to discuss the criminal ‘docket and caseload’ in New Mexico,” William Moschella, principal associate deputy attorney general, recounted in an e-mail to both White House and Justice officials. “Sen. Domenici offered to come here, talk on the phone, or we could stop in on the senator.”

Later, when Iglesias was one of those fired, Domenici moved quickly to recommend names to the White House for his replacement. “Not even waiting for Iglesias’ body to cool,” Sampson wryly commented in an e-mail to Goodling seven days after the firing.

Los Angeles Times

Too few good men

Those not familiar with fired New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias might be interested to know:

“In 1986, he was one of three JAGs who represented Marines accused of attempted murder for a hazing incident that their lawyers argued was encouraged by commanders at Guantanamo Bay. The successful defense helped the Marines avoid serious penalties, and the case inspired the hit Broadway play ‘A Few Good Men’ and the later film. Iglesias was not consulted during the production of the play or movie.”

From a profile in the Los Angeles Times.

Help me out here

NewMexiKen has the sense that if I ask my representative to request an ethics investigation of Heather Wilson it isn’t going to go very far. My Representative is Heather Wilson. (Capital R, because she sure as hell isn’t my representative.)

So if you have a moment today, please give your representative a call, whether Dem or Republican, and politely ask him or her to request an ethics investigation into Rep. Wilson’s conduct. Specifically, you want the ethics committee to look into whether Wilson “violated House rules by improperly contacting sitting U.S. Attorney David Iglesias of New Mexico, regarding pending litigation.” Of course, you don’t have to use that exact phrasing, but I think the part in quotes gets straight to the nut of the story.

Daily Kos

Email, god love it

Here for you on the internets, an Email from U.S. Attorney Bud Cummins Concerning Conversation with DoJ Official. It’s interesting enough for its own sake as part of the whole controversy over the firing of the U.S. attorneys, but what I love is the end of this two-week old message:

“I would appreciate maximum opsec regarding this email and ask that you not forward it or let others read it.”

And there it is on the internet.

Cummins himself made it available today.

(NewMexiKen has read some of his own emails out loud on the witness stand. Trust me, they never, ever go away.)

Well, they deserve it

[Senator Bernie] Sanders’s office came up with some interesting numbers here. If the Estate Tax were to be repealed completely, the estimated savings to just one family — the Walton family, the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune — would be about $32.7 billion dollars over the next ten years.

The proposed reductions to Medicaid over the same time frame? $28 billion.

Or how about this: if the Estate Tax goes, the heirs to the Mars candy corporation — some of the world’s evilest scumbags, incidentally, routinely ripped by human rights organizations for trafficking in child labor to work cocoa farms in places like Cote D’Ivoire — if the estate tax goes, those assholes will receive about $11.7 billion in tax breaks. That’s more than three times the amount Bush wants to cut from the VA budget ($3.4 billion) over the same time period.

Matt Taibbi at AlterNet

Deborah Jeane Palfrey Legal Defense Fund

Deborah J. (Jeane) Palfrey’s assets and entire life’s savings were seized by the Internal Revenue Service, on October 4, 2006, without notice. This was done via the civil asset forfeiture process and based upon the government’s allegations that Ms. Palfrey had operated a prostitution business, in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area, from 1993 through August of 2006, when she ceased operation and retired.

Ms. Palfrey adamantly disputes the government’s claims of illegal behavior. The business, Pamela Martin and Associates, functioned as a high-end adult fantasy firm which offered legal sexual and erotic services across the spectrum of adult sexual behavior and did so without incident during its 13 year tenure.

The unfairness of the civil asset forfeiture procedure as currently applied in the present day makes the intended target, as it has here with Ms. Palfrey, indigent and thus incapable of mounting a proper legal defense, either civilly or criminally. The strategy is to place an individual in a position whereby they are forced to accept whatever “deal” the government offers, as they are minus the necessary resources to fight back; a true David and Goliath scenario.
. . .

Additionally, consideration is being given to selling the entire 46 pounds of detailed and itemized phone records for the 13 year period, to raise the requisite defense funds. [emphasis added]

An example from a randomly selected 6 day period in August of 1996 is available for review now. [pdf file]

Deborah Jeane Palfrey Legal Defense Fund

See any phone numbers you recognize?

NIE on Iraq

NIE stands for National Intelligence Estimate1. NIEs are the unified assessment of the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies. An excerpt from today’s NIE on Iraq:

The Intelligence Community judges that the term “civil war” does not adequately capture the complexity of the conflict in Iraq, which includes extensive Shia-on-Shia violence, al-Qa’ida and Sunni insurgent attacks on Coalition forces, and widespread criminally motivated violence. Nonetheless, the term “civil war” accurately describes key elements of the Iraqi conflict, including the hardening of ethno-sectarian identities, a sea change in the character of the violence, ethno-sectarian mobilization, and population displacements.

Via TPMmuckraker, where one commenter says, “I believe the word they are seeking is ‘clusterf*ck.'”

1

National Intelligence Estimate (NIE)-These reports are the DCI’s most authoritative written judgments concerning national security issues. They deal with capabilities, vulnerabilities, and probable courses of action of foreign nations and key developments relevant to the vital interests of the United States. NIEs are produced at the national level by the NIC and are issued by the DCI with the approval of the NFIB. NIEs are designed to identify trends of significance to national security and, when relevant, differences of views among the principal intelligence officers of the US Government. Presidential Summaries of NIEs are prepared for the President, Vice President, and other key executive officers.

More Molly Ivins

From her final column:

We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war.

Raise hell. Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous. Make our troops know we’re for them and are trying to get them out of there. Hit the streets to protest Bush’s proposed surge.

If you can, go to the peace march in Washington on Jan. 27. We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, “Stop it, now.”

Thanks to Avelino for the idea.

Are Children Sounding the Global-Warming Alarm?

Freakonomics co-author Stephen Dubner wonders.

How did this happen? How has such a sweeping, complex, controversial issue become such a pressing concern — not overnight, certainly, but very rapidly as of late?

One theory came to mind the other day when I was looking over a list of the most profitable worldwide movie releases of 2006. No. 1 on the list was Ice Age 2: The Meltdown, an animated — and apocalyptic — kids’ movie, which took in just over $1 billion at the box office. And as you can see here, the animated kids’ movie Happy Feet has also been huge, with over $350 million worldwide, and counting. While Happy Feet isn’t quite about global warming, it is about mankind’s disastrous overreach into nature. (In order to appreciate the reach of these kids’ movies, consider that Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, a global warming jeremiad, has done $42 million worldwide, a huge figure for a documentary but a drop in the bucket compared to the animated blockbusters.)

We all know how influential kids can be. Newspaper editors and TV producers and even politicians have kids, and when those kids start obsessing about something, it’s amazing how fast the parents do, too. Just look at anti-smoking education in the U.S. My kids are so thoroughly indoctrinated against smoking that if they see someone in an old movie smoking a cigarette, they look at me, horrified, as if they’ve just seen someone slit a puppy’s throat. Similarly, I wonder if children may have been the ones who were scared straight about global warming — and have gone nipping at their parents’ heels.

Of course, then, it wouldn’t be children sounding the alarm but producers of animated films sounding it. Whatever, just so someone is.

Too bad this isn’t a democracy

A commanding majority of Americans oppose President Bush’s decision to send more troops to Iraq and just over half the country wants Congress to block the deployment, a Times/Bloomberg poll has found.

As he seeks to chart a new course in Iraq, Bush also faces pervasive resistance and skepticism toward the U.S. commitment — more than three-fifths of those surveyed said the war was not worth fighting and only one-third approved of his handling of the conflict.

And in a striking measure of Bush’s declining credibility, half said they believed he deliberately misled the U.S. in making his case for invading Iraq.

Los Angeles Times

Worst president ever.

All the news that fits

Not to shill for The New York Times, but . . .

First, a best line from David Carr writing about Monday night’s Golden Globes:

“The Queen” might not have taken home gold for best picture, but its star, Helen Mirren, had enough hardware at the end of the night that she looked as if she’d spent time at Home Depot.

An article on some beautiful pencil and paper drawings by Monet.

David Leonhardt on the cost of a mistake:

For starters, $1.2 trillion would pay for an unprecedented public health campaign — a doubling of cancer research funding, treatment for every American whose diabetes or heart disease is now going unmanaged and a global immunization campaign to save millions of children’s lives.

Combined, the cost of running those programs for a decade wouldn’t use up even half our money pot. So we could then turn to poverty and education, starting with universal preschool for every 3- and 4-year-old child across the country. The city of New Orleans could also receive a huge increase in reconstruction funds.

The final big chunk of the money could go to national security. The recommendations of the 9/11 Commission that have not been put in place — better baggage and cargo screening, stronger measures against nuclear proliferation — could be enacted. Financing for the war in Afghanistan could be increased to beat back the Taliban’s recent gains, and a peacekeeping force could put a stop to the genocide in Darfur.

All that would be one way to spend $1.2 trillion. Here would be another:

The war in Iraq.

And Selena Roberts has an interesting assessment of Michelle Wie, though this one is behind the Times Select wall.