January 2010 archive

There once was a time most would be embarrassed to do or say the ridiculous and offensive to or pointed at others, or it was the wrong place and time, no matter what they might have thought personally. Most would keep whatever to themselves if they didn’t they would readily get shown how wrong their actions or words were and how offensive to others and some would actually be personally embarrassed, learning a lesson because they wouldn’t want same pointed or done to them, NO MORE, it’s now common and celebrated to be offensive the more it seems the better!

This happened just recently, a quick change of Command in Theater Afghanistan, and is now being reported why.

Open Thread

Today is Friday, January 29, the year 2010.  Remember this full moon evening.  

According to Newsweek’s Declassified Blog, http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs…

two Department of Justice anonymous sources said that a Senior DOJ official who finalized an Office of Professional Responsibility report, changed the assessment of the torture memo’s creator’s  Jay Bybee and John Yoo’s behavior to “poor judgement.”

But the reviewer, career veteran David Margolis, downgraded that assessment to say they showed “poor judgment,” say the sources. (Under department rules, poor judgment does not constitute professional misconduct.)  The shift is significant: the original finding would have triggered a referral to state bar associations for potential disciplinary action-which, in Bybee’s case, could have led to an impeachment inquiry.  

/snip

Two of the most controversial sections of the 2002 memo-including one contending that the president, as commander in chief, can override a federal law banning torture-were not in the original draft of the memo, say the sources. But when Michael Chertoff, then-chief of Justice’s criminal division, refused the CIA’s request for a blanket pledge not to prosecute its officers for torture, Yoo met at the White House with David Addington, Dick Cheney’s chief counsel, and then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales. After that, Yoo inserted a section about the commander in chief’s wartime powers and another saying that agency officers accused of torturing Qaeda suspects could claim they were acting in “self-defense” to prevent future terror attacks, the sources say. Both legal claims have long since been rejected by Justice officials as overly broad and unsupported by legal precedent.

John Yoo, a graduate of Harvard and Yale law school, who clerked for SC Justice Clarence Thomas, and served as a torture enabler in the Bush administration at the Dept of Justice from 2001 to 2003, is currently a law professor at the University of CA at Berkeley. http://www.law.berkeley.edu/ph…

Jay Bybee, a graduate of Brigham Young University and BYU’s J Reuben Clark Law School, helped John Yoo write the torture rationalization memos for President Bush during his Dept of Justice Office of Legal Counsel tenure from 2001 to 2003.  Bybee currently serves on the US Court of Appeals of the Ninth Circuit. http://www.fjc.gov/servlet/tGe…

It is not known at the current time when they will be displaying “poor judgement” again, nor how many fatalities might result.

What digby said–

The most generous reading I can give is that he’s trying to derail any efforts to pass a public option or medicare buy-in through reconciliation and ensure that none of the deals he struck will be harmed in the process.

Which leads me to ask if they still don’t ask the right question: did Rahm ever want to pass real health care reform? And if he did, can there be any excuse for his having mangled the legislative strategy so badly?

From the absurd strategy to try to call health care reform “deficit reduction”, to backroom deals after the president ran explicitly on transparency, to allowing the hostage taking by the Gang of Six for months to a dozen other inexplicable tactics — it all makes the most sense if you already assume that he wasn’t fully committed to its passage.

Maybe not. I’m not one to mythologize single actors, and I do believe that the buck always stops with the president. But either Rahm is a brilliant legislative strategist, in which case he didn’t bother to use his great powers to pass health care reform for reasons we can only speculate about, given the stakes — or his reputation for brilliance is extremely overrated. But Rahm’s culpability, whether intentional or not, has long been obvious and there’s nothing surprising in these recent statements.