Many years ago in high school, when I was reading a lot of rock criticism, a common theme among the more politically-oriented writers was that corporate American was killing music. The idea was that corporate-types at the record companies and radio stations were too conservative and afraid to try anything new in the way of innovative music.

While these writers were correct, they overlooked another music-killer: the celebrity and rock and roll lifestyle. Many great rock and rollers are dead because of the lifestyle, either from drugs or wild living. The real cause of Michael Jackson's death may be debated for a long time, but I know that he was a victim of the lifestyle that only rock stars get to experience. He may not have used hard drugs, but you know that the freak show that his life had become could not have happened without the millions of dollars that Michael Jackson squandered.

Michael Jackson became a mega-star in the early 1980's, a decade that gave us other mega-stars, like Prince and Bruce Springsteen. At the time, it was fashionable for rock fans to dismiss Michael Jackson's music as crap. I remember hanging around during lunch hour in high school when one guy said that he liked the Jackson Five but that Michael Jackson had become some kind of a fag. Except that some rock fans had to admit that Beat It was a pretty good song, mostly because of Eddie Van Halen's guitar solo. But I also remember reading Creem or some other rock magazine and an anonymous heavy metal singer who played in a bar band published a letter to the editor. He admitted that he absolutely loved the Thriller album and that, unbeknownst to his heavy metal friends, he played the album all the time.

MJ sold millions and millions of albums, but for many of us he was a guilty pleasure. Nothing that he did after Thriller made any sense to me, and once he decided to become freak it was all over. But Thriller has its moments. The title track was not bad, though it sounded like a re-write of some of his better songs, like Don't Stop Till You Get Enough. Beat It wasn't bad, though it seemed like MJ was trying too hard to write a straightforward rock song.

But his greatest songs, for me, were Billie Jean and Wanna Be Startin' Something. Billie Jean had a haunting melody and genuinely good lyrics. Wanna Be Startin' Something is one of the great grooves of all time. For MJ, it was his Mount Everest, reaching heights which he would never see again. A friend of mine once said that all he wanted out of life was to write two great songs. These two, then, put Michael Jackson in rarified air. Dig 'em now, and don't be ashamed to admit it. These are great songs.

Let's face it. At least for some of you, your phone calls and emails are being reviewed by government officials who have significant leeway to spy on American citizens without any probable cause. Government spying on innocent Americans is an old story, as anyone familiar with the cold-war abuses can attest, but in the post-9/11 world, anything goes because ... it's a post 9/11 world.

The New York Times reported on June 17 that "The National Security Agency is facing renewed scrutiny over the extent of its domestic surveillance program, with critics in Congress saying its recent intercepts of the private telephone calls and e-mail messages of Americans are broader than previously acknowledged, current and former officials said."

These concerns over widespread government surveillance have prompted some members of Congress to investigate. They may want to look into a new revelation from an unnamed government employee, according to the Times, "a former N.S.A. analyst who, in a series of interviews, described being trained in 2005 for a program in which the agency routinely examined large volumes of Americans’ e-mail messages without court warrants. Two intelligence officials confirmed that the program was still in operation."

Well, that is interesting. How come we didn't know this sooner? The story adds:

The agency appears to have tolerated significant collection and examination of domestic e-mail messages without warrants, according to the former analyst, who spoke only on condition of anonymity.

He said he and other analysts were trained to use a secret database, code-named Pinwale, in 2005 that archived foreign and domestic e-mail messages. He said Pinwale allowed N.S.A. analysts to read large volumes of e-mail messages to and from Americans as long as they fell within certain limits — no more than 30 percent of any database search, he recalled being told — and Americans were not explicitly singled out in the searches.

The former analyst added that his instructors had warned against committing any abuses, telling his class that another analyst had been investigated because he had improperly accessed the personal e-mail of former President Bill Clinton.

Other intelligence officials confirmed the existence of the Pinwale e-mail database, but declined to provide further details.

All of this started under George W. Bush. But it's President Obama's problem now. Obama's adoption of some of George W's abhorrent policies confirms my theory that the office of the presidency corrupts the president, no matter who he is. Bureaucratic inerta and fear of the unknown will moderate even the most liberal presidents, who known damned well that the business of American is, literally, business, and that pure self-rule, public health and safety will always be subordinated to profits and military concerns. BIll Clinton probably knew that he was acting against his better judgment in furthering the policies of George H.W. Bush, and Obama is in the same boat.

This is no excuse, of course. We can clampdown civil liberties and privacy or we can honor civil liberties and privacy notwithstanding worst-case scenarios. There will always be people who say that some intrusions on privacy and freedom of speech are necessary to prevent a greater evil, but if I knew the government was reading my emails and listening to my phone calls, I'd be pretty pissed off. And you should be, too.

Many First Amendment cases that come before the Supreme Court involve the F word. "Fuck," to be exact. According to my research, the word "fuck" appears in exactly nine cases, including the famous dispute over George Carlin's "seven dirty words you can't say on television" and a case arising from Long Island in the early 1980's involving library censorship.

The most famous case arising from "fuck" is Cohen v. California, a Vietnam War era case where a guy walked through a local courthouse with a jacket that read "Fuck the Draft." Cohen was arrested for violating decency laws, but the Supreme Court declared the arrest unlawful because Cohen had a constitutional right to express himself this way. In Cohen v. California and other cases, the Supreme Court was not afraid to use the F-word when appropriate to outline the issues in the dispute. So in the library censorship case, Island Trees School District v. Pico, Justice Powell, a courtly southerner, appended to his dissenting opinion excerpts from the offending books. Justice Powell did not like the Court's result in the case (which held that local school boards cannot remove books from the shelves out of disagreement with the books' content), but he had no problem at all with broadcasting in a Supreme Court opinion the offending language.

This year, the Supreme Court heard another case involving "fuck," a dispute over the FCC's punishment against TV stations for the "fleeting expletive," where toilet-tounged celebrities slip in a few curse words in telling the world on live television how honored they are to win the Golden Globe Award. But that decision does not cite any of the curse words. And the lawyers arguing the case did not use that language either, even though that language was at the heart of the case. This was unusual. In the "fuck the draft" case back in 1971, Cohen's lawyer went out of his way to say "fuck" even though Chief Justice Burger (a stuffy Nixonite) made it clear that this language was not necessary; the attorney thought that self-censorship would hurt his argument that "fuck the draft" is free speech even at the courthouse. Cohen's lawyer won the case, and that story is now a well-known example of why lawyers should give it their all in court.

Now we know why the lawyers in the "fleeting expletives" case did not use the F-word. They were told watch their mouths. Last week, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg told a group of federal judges in New York that "the lawyers were alerted that some of the justices might find that unseemly, so only the letters 'f' and 's' were used in our court." I doubt that Ginsburg was behind this gag-rule; she used to work for the ACLU. One journalist thinks the order came from Chief Justice Roberts, a clean-cut fellow who voted with the majority which sided with the FCC in that case.

I guess we are afraid of F-word. Even I don't like typing the word "fuck" all that often. We should not be afraid of the F-word in court if the F-word is a major part of the case. Words like this are spoken in court all the time in sexual harassment and police cases, I can tell you that. I doubt the judges and juries even flinch after hearing that language over the course of a trial. But watch your mouth in the Supreme Court, the bastion of free speech.

When Barack Obama was elected President last November, the first thing I thought about was the Supreme Court, the one branch of government that has final say on the meaning of the U.S. Constitution and federal laws. It is the Supreme Court that breathes life into the First Amendment, religious freedoms, protection against police abuses. Without a Supreme Court that cares about these values, this would be a very different country.

I don't have any real expection that President Obama is going to stop the war in Iraq or maintain a foreign policy that respects democracy or human rights. None of the other presidents gave a damn about these things, and the system is too corrupt for an independent president to chart a different path. But I knew damned well that Obama would make a difference in his judicial appointments; any choices by Obama would be an improvement over George W. Bush's Supreme Court picks.

We forget that the Constitution and federal laws can be interpreted in different ways. Two highly intelligent judges can see things differently, and even men and women of good faith can find themselves on opposite ends of the most profound legal issues of the day. This is why many Supreme Court cases are decided by a 5-4 or 6-3 vote. Few decisions are unanimous. When you consider that every case that reaches the Supreme Court originated in the lower federal and state courts, the same issue may have been chewed over two or three times by different judges as the case made its way to the Supreme Court. The law is so malleable.

For the most part, Supreme Court rulings are final. While the Court can reverse itself on the same legal issue, that will not happen right away; it takes decades for the Court to reexamine one of its precedents. If the Court says that a particular practice violates the First Amendment, then that corner of the legal system is settled for a long time.

Obama must have thought about this In appointing Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court. Unlike the subliterate who occupied the Oval Office for eight years prior to Obama's election, Obama is an extremely intelligent man who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School. It was that work experience which made Obama such an attractive presidential candidate. Few presidents really understand what the Supreme Court does and its impact on American society. Having taught in this area, Obama knows exactly how the Supreme Court works.

I would have been devastated had a Republican president been able to replace David Souter on the Supreme Court. Souter was an unknown entity in 1990 when the first President Bush appointed him to replace the great Justice William Brennan, one of the greatest champions of individual liberties who ever sat on the Court. We all worried that Souter was a conservative who would help the other right-wingers on the Court roll back the clock on civil rights. Souter turned out to be one of the best Supreme Court justices we ever had, a truly independent mind who consistently questioned untrammelled presidential war powers and stood up for free speech and other constitutional rights over the course of nearly two decades on the Court. The possibility that Souter could have been replaced by his ideological opposite would have been too much for me to bear.

As a civil rights lawyer who practices in the federal courts in the Second Circuit, where Sonia Sotomayor serves as an appellate judge, I have argued five or six cases before her over the years. As a blogger who covers the civil rights decisions of the Second Circuit (www.secondcircuitcivilrights.blogspot.com), I am also one of the few lawyers who reads or at least scans most of the decisions coming out of that court. Obama could not have made a better choice. True, Judge Sotomayor has ruled against my clients in several cases involving First Amendment and other constitutional challenges. Those are the breaks, as much as I may have disagreed with her rulings. Any lawyer will tell you that you cannot win every case and that even fair judges can see things differently. The question is not whether she always rules for civil rights plaintiffs; the question is whether she will uphold the tradition of strong civil liberties in this country in the face of many, many forces in U.S. society that want to take us in the opposite direction. Having read her decisions on civil rights and liberties over the years, I can tell you that she will.

You will hear a lot about Judge Sotomayor over the next few weeks. Some of it true, some of it false. Some people will object to repeated references to her personal history. Sotomayor grew up in the Bronx and managed to attend Princeton University and Yale Law School despite every disadvantage a young woman in the housing project can be expected to endure. I'd like to see you go to Ivy League schools under these circumstances. This background is a plus. Too many federal judges wanted for nothing their entire lives and knew nothing about hardship.

Ugly anonymous comments about Sotomayor made their way around the Internet when her name first surfaced as a possible Supreme Court nominee. Some low-lives said that she did not have the required intelligence. As one who has actually read her opinions, I can assured you that's not the case. Even when she has ruled against my clients, she has done so with great intelligence and scholarship. While others correctly pointed out that Sotomayor is a tough judge on the bench -- and believe me, I've seen that side of her -- that's exactly what I want in a Supreme Court justice. Someone who asks tough questions and tries to get to the bottom of things.

Conservatives will object that Sotomayor's background is part of the nomination story. How can it not be part of the story? Growing up in the housing projects to a single mother is quite different from growing up in an upper middle class household in the suburbs. Interpreting the Constitution and federal laws is not a robotic exercise. Human beings make these decisions. Over the last few years, I have seen the conservative majority on the Supreme Court chip away at individual liberties and overturn precedents in order to advance the conservative, authoritarian cause. This reactionary rollback has got to stop. Thank God that Obama gets to appoint a real human being to the Supreme Court. The Court will be our's again someday. By herself, Sotomayor will not tilt the balance in our direction; she's replacing a liberal, not a conservative. But we are going to turn that ship around, and it's going to start right now.

There is a federal judge in Chicago who does more than decide cases. Richard Posner also writes on a variety of matters and fancies himself as a public intellectual. Judge Posner is conservative, but he's extremely smart. The problem for him is that he thinks that modern conservative thought leaves something to be desired, and that conservative thinking is in decline. He said this in an article a few weeks ago.

This point is most easily proven through the debate on torture and U.S. foreign policy. It's hard to believe that we are actually having this debate. Torture is against the law and totally immoral. Torture is what the barbarians do, and God help any country that tortures U.S. soldiers. But we are doing it, too, and the Bush administration denied it up and down but the evidence is there for all to see: the United States was torturing prisoners in the "war on terror" and trying to wiggle away from scrutiny by calling it "enhanced interrogations." In fact, there is evidence that the U.S. was torturing prisoners in order to prove that Iraq had something to do with 9/11. If that's the case, then in my view any U.S. official who authorized the use of torture for that purpose belongs in jail.

The modern conservative defends the use of torture because that's the only way to get information about the next terrorist attack. At least that's what the modern conservative tells us. Experts see it differently. They argue that evidence produced as a result of torture is unreliable because prisoners will say anything in order to stop the torture. There are better and more effective ways to gain this important information, though it takes time in order to get suspects to talk. But interrogators have come forward advising us that it can all be done legally.

Republicans threw in the intellectual towel a long time ago. We know this. The Republican Party had no message at all in the 2008 presidential election, and the one candidate who electrified the party last year was an anti-intellectual Republican governor from Alaska who could not answer the simplest questions and otherwise gave preposterous answers. She and others called Obama a terrorist out of desperation as the campaign died down, throwing the ultimate Hail Mary when it was clear the Republicans were going to lose.

Waterboarding is on the table now because the Republicans think that this technique produces reliable information and that terrorists need to be drowned in order to protect Americans from another terror attack. The disgusting Dick Cheney is a chief proponent of this theory, and the Republican diehards have fallen in line. But a right-wing talk radio host agreed to be waterboarded to see what it was like. He lasted only a few seconds. He was scared shitless as a result of the waterboarding exercise and declared that it was torture plain and simple.

This guy probably though he was a tough guy who could stand up to waterboarding and then be able to say that the terrorists in U.S. custody would outlast this practice. It was clear from the video, however, that he would have said anything to get out of waterboarding. I give him credit for putting his money where his mouth is, and I also give him credit for changing his mind after experiencing waterboarding. Here's the video:

Could you handle waterboarding? Probably not. In all likelihood, any "confession" as a result of this practice is useless. And the people who support waterboarding are nuts.

A renewed debate on torture in this country is a good thing. A new president does not mean the old crimes are washed away. The old crimes are still sharp and they are slicing and dicing us.

A week ago, President Obama exercised courage in releasing internal torture memos from the Bush administration. Although it violates U.S. and international law, including the Geneve Conventions, torture was the official policy of the United States government. No one cared. September 11 changed everything, they said, and it was gloves off.

Here is what we are learning about torture these days:

1. An army major suggests the torture was done in part to establish a link between Iraq and 9/11 at the time the Bush administration was trying to sell the war to the American public. Rich links to this psychiatrist's testimony so you can see it for yourself. A New York Times columnist, Frank Rich, highlights this in a piece over the weekend. The link to the testimony checks out. What makes this eye-popping is that this was happening at the same time that (then) secret documents circulating among the British government had confirmed that the Bush administration was stretching the facts to support the war policy at a time when the public was wavering on the war but the administration wanted it badly. Dating to summer 2002 (seven or eight months before the war began), these are known as the Downing Street Memos, a smoking gun which establishes that Bush wanted war in the worse possible way.

2. OK, but does torture work? The growing consensus is that it does not. An FBI agent suggests there were other ways to gain real intelligence from detainees beyond torture. He published an article on this topic in the New York Times last Thursday. This AP article also summarizes the view that torture is less effective than commonly believed, and that there are other ways of gaining useful intelligence. This article is not new, but it's new to me, so it's probably new to you.

3. This particular government interrogator does not believe torture works and that it resulted in the deaths of American soldiers. And this fellow who was affiliated with the navy thought the same thing. He told the Senate:

First, there are serving U.S. flag-rank officers who maintain that the first and second identifiable causes of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq – as judged by their effectiveness in recruiting insurgent fighters into combat – are, respectively the symbols of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. And there are other senior officers who are convinced that the proximate cause of Abu Ghraib was the legal advice authorizing abusive treatment of detainees that issued from the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel in 2002.

Second, allied nations reportedly hesitated on occasion to participate in combat operations if there was the possibility that, as a result, individuals captured during the operation could be abused by U.S. or other forces.

Third, allied nations have refused on occasion to train with us in joint detainee capture and handling operations because of concerns about U.S. detainee policies.
And fourth, senior NATO officers in Afghanistan have been reported to have left the room when issues of detainee treatment have been raised by U.S. officials out of fear that they may become complicit in detainee abuse.

4. Some of this information is new, but some of the most important information is not. We have long known that many of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq (the scene of the photographs that came out a few years ago showing U.S. soldiers abusing prisoners) were innocent, guilty of nothing.

We have a choice. We can take all of this news seriously, or we can sweep it under the rug and look forward, not back. I prefer to look back. The people who condoned torture and made it U.S. policy should be severely punished. If Obama wants to be the man of change, this is the opportunity to show us what's made of. If he is afraid of looking weak on terror, he can highlight the fact that American soldiers died because of the torture policy. The Bush administration's desire for retribution killed our brothers and sisters.

The Supreme Court this week heard a case on students' rights under the Constitution. The Constitution is written in vague terms, and it says nothing about students, but courts have famously held that students do not shed their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse gate. After repeating that language, however, the Supreme Court often finds a way to restrict student rights.

The case this time around concerns whether school officials had the right to strip search a 13 year-old girl who was accused of carrying prescription drugs at school. Here's what happened:

In October 2003, one of the eighth graders was Savana Redding, who was 13 years old at the time. Based on a tip from another eighth grader, the middle school’s assistant principal, Kerry Wilson, focused on Savana in an investigation of students who carried prescription drugs to school and used them for non-medical reasons.

That investigation began after officials, suspecting substance abuse at a school dance earlier in the school year, grew wary of violations of a school rule against such uses. Acting on a tip naming Savana, for allegedly giving pain-killing ibuprofen to another student, principal Wilson first inspected Savana’s backpack, but found nothing. Two female aides then took Savana to the school nurse’s office, and conducted a strip search, requiring her to remove all of her outer clothing, and requiring her to expose her breasts and pelvic area by pulling her underclothes away from her body. Again, no pills were found.

So a 13-year-old is strip-searched because of an accusation that she was improperly carrying drugs comparable to Advil. This kind of search would never be legal on the street. But the rules are different in school. Like the military and prisons, students have some rights, but they are limited in light of the special concerns that govern the schoolhouse, at least according to the Supreme Court. Although the Fourth Amendment protects against "unreasonable searches and seizures," that standard has been relaxed in this institutional environments.

How far with the Supreme Court go in allowing officials to search students? Over the years, the Supreme Court has limited the First Amendment rights of student journalists. The Court has also more broadly limited the speech rights of students, most recently in the Bong Hits for Jesus case, where a smart-ass student who held up a nonsense banner during a school outing was disciplined. The Court has also given school officials leeway in searching student purses.

The common thread in many of these cases is drugs. The War on Drugs has restricted students' rights. The Supreme Court thinks that school officials have greater leeway to restrict "search and seizure" and other rights because of the fear of drug use. A real concern, to be sure, but how do we justify strip searching a student over ibuprofen? At least a few Supreme Court Justices may find that this search was legal. No Constitution of mine would uphold a search like this.

The wonders of the modern age include real-time commentary on the arguments before the Supreme Court. Bloggers who attend the oral arguments and read the same-day transcripts offer their analysis on what happened. The sense is that the Supreme Court remains concerned about drugs in school and the Justices will defer to the judgment of school officials in rooting out drug abuse by any means, including strip searches:

It was common for members of the Court — and, especially, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — to express discomfort with an Arizona prinicipal’s order for a close-to-naked search of a 13-year-old girl. But that sentiment did not appear to be as strong as the concern that drugs may be so destructive for teenagers that some surer means of detecting them had to be acceptable under the Constitution.

Isn't there a better way to make sure students are not bringing drugs into school? Are we going to allow strip searches over pills that have the same potency as two tablets of Advil? By the way, the search revealed no drugs at all. The lower federal court noted in rejecting the search that the student could have been detained in the principal's office until her parents arrived. They decided to make her disrobe instead. What the hell is going on here?

The torture files continue. In this morning's New York Times, we learn that the Bush administration was so eager to torture prisoners in the War on Terror that they agreed to adopt tactics that were actually used by Chinese communists many years ago during the Cold War. No one realized that waterboarding and other acts of torture approved by Bush's advisors were condemned by the United States many years ago.

The program began with Central Intelligence Agency leaders in the grip of an alluring idea: They could get tough in terrorist interrogations without risking legal trouble by adopting a set of methods used on Americans during military training. How could that be torture?

In a series of high-level meetings in 2002, without a single dissent from cabinet members or lawmakers, the United States for the first time officially embraced the brutal methods of interrogation it had always condemned.

This extraordinary consensus was possible, an examination by The New York Times shows, largely because no one involved — not the top two C.I.A. officials who were pushing the program, not the senior aides to President George W. Bush, not the leaders of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees — investigated the gruesome origins of the techniques they were approving with little debate.

According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven years ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans.

This is what it comes down to. September 11 shocked us all, but no one stopped to consider what it really means to torture. According to the Times, "'The process was 'a perfect storm of ignorance and enthusiasm,' a former C.I.A. official said. Today, asked how it happened, Bush administration officials are finger-pointing. Some blame the C.I.A., while some former agency officials blame the Justice Department or the White House."

What do we really know about this? Investigative reports can only learn so much. We did not have to learn about any of this at all. We really find out about torture and U.S. policy by accident. According to ThinkProgress.org, "In 2005, former State Department counselor Phillip Zelikow wrote a legal memo holding an 'opposing view' from the infamous OLC torture memos. But '[t]he White House attempted to collect and destroy all copies of my memo. I expect that one or two are still at least in the State Department's archives,' he writes. Zelikow discussed the matter on the Rachel Maddow Show last night." More here. All of this was against the law. This country was run by criminals for eight years.

In part I of this series, I outlined the problem. It is now confirmed that the United States was using torture on prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Prisons. Thanks to the Internet, these documents are readily available together with analysis parsing the legal contortions that Bush administration lawyers used in telling administration officials what they wanted to hear.

These memos could have been under wraps for all eternity. President Obama did not have to release them. He did so over the objections of some advisors. There is no way that John McCain would have released them had he won the election last November. McCain was old school: a veteran who defers to the military and thinks that "national security" is enough to justify anything. Obama is a former law professor who believes in brains over brawn.

That does not mean Omama deserves a gold medal. He does not want to prosecute Bush administration officials and intelligence workers who used torture against prisoners even though torture is illegal under U.S. and international law. Making matters worse, Obama used the mind of bullshit public relations language in justifying his decision. He said: "this is a time for reflection, not retribution."

But it's not about retribution. It's about upholding the rule of law. This country has long since taken the rule of law seriously. The last time it happened, it was 1998, when Congress impeached President Clinton for lying under oath about a consensual sexual relationship with an adult intern. Impeachment may have been a partisan affair intended to bring down a president that the Republicans hated, but at least the Republicans were able to do this on the basis that they were upholding the rule of law. When Republicans captured the White House in 2000, they set aside any concerns about the rule of law as President Bush routinely violated the law in a myriad of ways, from warrantless wiretaps in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to half-truths and lies in support of the Iraq war which violated the laws of war in that the war was not an act of self-defense but an aggressive attack.

The political class in this country does not know what to do about lawbreakers anymore, at least not the lawbreakers who wear silk suits and $200 neckties. There remains in this country a view that "disputes" foreign affairs are politcal, not legal, and that anything done in the name of self-defense or anti-terrorism is legitimate. That's how we can get away with hundreds of thousands of Iraqi casualties in a war that never should have started.

Fortunately, not everyone holds the view that we can only look forward, not back, in dealing with the crimes of yore. The New York Times ran a few letters the other day that perfectly summarized what Obama should be saying. Let's read them together:

April 18, 2009 Letters The Uproar Over the C.I.A. and Torture To the Editor:

Re “Memos Spell Out Brutal C.I.A. Mode of Interrogation” (front page, April 17) :

President Obama has decided that the C.I.A. employees involved in the torture of terrorism suspects will not be prosecuted and has justified his position by stating that “this is a time for reflection, not retribution.”

I find it hard to believe that a man as intelligent as Mr. Obama, who once taught constitutional law, would equate the pursuit of justice with retribution. It makes it appear as if his decision is one of political expediency.

If holding the C.I.A. operatives accountable for violating federal or international laws is retribution, then the prosecution of ordinary citizens for crimes is also retribution.

The president does not have the authority to be selective about who should or should not be charged with a crime, and he has made a grievous error by confusing the pursuit of justice with retribution or retaliation.

If the president reached his conclusion not to prosecute because the C.I.A. agents were merely following orders, I would remind him that that defense did not hold up at the Nuremberg trials. Those involved must be tried and held accountable regardless of the political consequences.

Seeking justice is moving forward, not backward. The whole world is watching.

Chase Webb
Gresham, Ore., April 17, 2009

•

To the Editor:

The overall idea put forth on Thursday by torture apologists that the C.I.A. and other government employees were only following Department of Justice legal opinions and essentially didn’t know that waterboarding and other tortures they committed were illegal and wrong is complete nonsense.

Why was torture only whispered about throughout government in hushed, embarrassed tones? Why did the F.B.I. open a “war crimes file”? Why did the news of Abu Ghraib immediately shame all Americans?

It’s true, and proved repeatedly in social psychology experiments, that otherwise good people will tend to conform to authority. It’s true that people, under such circumstances, often fail to listen to their consciences. But don’t conflate this obedience factor with not being able to appreciate the wrongfulness.

In choosing to appease powerful interests by trying to sweep this horrible wrongdoing under the rug, President Obama undoubtedly had to overcome the pangs of his own conscience.

Coleen Rowley
Apple Valley, Minn., April 17, 2009

The writer is the retired F.B.I. agent who exposed F.B.I. lapses that led to the 9/11 attacks.

•

To the Editor:

Expressing my personal views based solely on the public record, I believe that President Obama should not sanction impunity for high-ranking government officials who approved or facilitated the use of torture.

Although licensed legal or medical professionals who aided and abetted torture certainly should at the very least be disciplined for their role in war crimes and crimes against humanity, the principal focus of the needed criminal investigation should be on the policy-making officials and advisers at the highest levels of our government — the White House, the Departments of Justice and Defense, and the Central Intelligence Agency — who authorized or enabled such criminal conduct. This would also include many lawyers who provided legal cover for lawlessness.

Using torture is not merely an ethics violation. It is also a domestic and international crime, and Judge Baltasar Garzón in Spain should not be the only one investigating these reprehensible actions with an eye to criminal proceedings. The United States should finally put its own house in order.

John S. Koppel
New York, April 17, 2009

The writer is a career attorney (1981-present) on the appellate staff of the Justice Department’s Civil Division.

•

To the Editor:

Call me naïve, but I found the recent publication of the torture memorandums strangely hopeful.

This is not to make light of the unimaginable horrors endured by human beings in our custody. We as a nation looked the other way and allowed the Bush administration to act out our darkest desires for vengeance on the bodies of other human beings. All of this is devastatingly shameful.

Of course powerful nations have routinely exploited their power through all manner of coercion and torture. What seems new — and it is here that I root my hope — is the decision by the Obama administration to release this information and thereby affirm international standards that transcend any one nation’s claim to power. One such standard is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

(Rev.) Tom Martinez
Brooklyn, April 17, 2009

•

To the Editor:

The director of national intelligence, Dennis C. Blair, defends those under President Bush who justified torture, saying that what they wrote appears “graphic and disturbing” only because we are reading it “on a bright, sunny, safe day.”

The law does not care whether the sun is shining. Its very purpose is to be a constant yardstick by which we judge the actions of individuals — even in times of great anger, or great fear. Where individual moral compasses failed, the law stood firm: torture was, is and must always be illegal.

Given all the immediate problems at hand, perhaps the Obama administration is right not to burn its energy prosecuting torturers, but it certainly should not defend them.

Paul Cantrell
Minneapolis, April 17, 2009

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To the Editor:

Re “Report Outlines Involvement of Medical Workers in Abusive C.I.A. Interrogations” (news article, April 7):

The ethic of medicine is rooted in the basic idea that society can trust physicians to “do no harm.” If the Central Intelligence Agency’s use of health personnel in torture included physicians, this trust will have been threatened.

The A.M.A.’s Code of Medical Ethics clearly states that physicians must oppose and must not participate in torture for any reason, because participation in torture undermines the physician’s role as healer. For this reason, the A.M.A. opposes any direct physician participation in an interrogation.

In addition, physicians must help support victims of torture, strive to prevent torture, and report any instance of torture and coercive interrogation.

As the nation’s largest professional association of physicians, the A.M.A. stands ready to play a constructive role to ensure that our professional ethic is upheld and strengthened.

Rebecca J. Patchin
Chicago, April 10, 2009

The writer, a medical doctor, is chairwoman-elect of the board of trustees, American Medical Association.

Some distinguished people wrote these letters. That should encourage the rest of us to put aside our insecurities about prosecuting government officials would would certainly argue in court that they were only trying to keep the country safe or that they were only following orders.

We can read about the crimes of the Bush administration and then turn the page or we can do something about it. Ignoring the problem allows it to happen again. Dealing with the problem responsibly allows us to stand up for our ideals, at least the ideals that most Americans claim to stand for when they proudly argue that this is a nation of laws, not men. It is also a nation of laws, not emotion. We have a choice. As I wrote the other day, it's like moving into a house to discover a body in the basement. Do you call the police, or do you look the other way and decide to move on? We can go after the criminals. Or we can allow the corpse to rot in the closet.

So what do you do when you move into a house and discover evidence of a crime lodged in the basement, such as the bones of someone who died a few years ago, or documents hidden in the closet showing stock fraud or some other wrongdoing? Do you turn in the people who used to live there? Do you call the police? Your decision will say a lot about who you are.

The country is making that decision right now. We have long known that the Bush administration was using what it called "harsh interrogation techniques" on al Qaida prisoners and others in custody from the War on Terror. These practices are widely believed to be illegal, except for the lawyers who told the administration what it wanted to hear in clearing waterboarding and other brutal tactics. The scary part was that it was not just al Qaida terrorists who were held in U.S. captivity but innocent people who were taken in questionable sweeps and then let go after release from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons.

It's bad enough that the United States was holding some innocent people at the prison camps. But making things worse, the government has been using torture in attempting to extract confessions. No doubt that some of the prisoners are guilty of heinous crimes. But torture is against the law. It violates international law and American law. (There are also good arguments to the effect that torture does not work). There are three ways for the U.S. to get away with it: either get some government lawyer to assure you that the interrogation techniques are actually legal; do it in secret and hope that no one finds out; and hope that if anyone does find out, no one cares enough to go after the torturers.

Some excellent commentary is available online about the recent torture memos that Obama agreed to release this week. This commentary provides links to the actual documents. The ACLU's website provides easy to use access to these records (it was the ACLU which got the memos released). Prisoners are thrown against a wall, waterboarded (which simulates drowning), stripped naked in freezing temperatures and humiliated. Apologists argue that none of this is torture, but torture is not limited to electrocution or ripping out fingernails.

Here's why it all matters. As one commentator, Glenn Greenwald, points out, some of the legal documents justifying the use of torture note that nearly identical techniques are used by authoritarian countries and our own government condemns those very countries precisely for using those techniques. But one of the highest ranking government lawyers, Steven Bradbury, who ran the prestigious Office of Legal Counsel (which advises the president on legal issues) baldly stated that "we recognize that as a matter of diplomacy, the United States may for various reasons in various circumstances call another nation to account for practices that may in some respects resemble conduct in which the United States might in some circumstances engage, covertly or otherwise. Diplomatic relations with regard to foreign countries are not reliable evidence of United States executive practices and may be of only limited relevance here."

This is a remarkable statement by a prestigious lawyer, a man who held the same position that in years past was occupied by men who went on to become Supreme Court justices. What he is saying that the United States can hold other countries to standards that we do not have to follow. This is the last message you want to convey when you are trying to win the hearts and minds of the international community in your effort to protect this country from future terror attacks.

For years the gay marriage battle has been waged on the east and west coasts, in states like New York and Massachusetts and California. This was not a bad strategy. These states had a large gay population and favorable court rulings would not only help the greatest number of people but influence other states who might follow their lead.

But the gay marriage strategy failed in New York, where the Court of Appeals uphleld the restrictions against same-sex marriage on the theory that the government had a legitimate interest in promoting heterosexual unions, deemed to be more stable than same-sex unions. This was a horrible court ruling, with legal reasoning that a first-year law student would be ashamed of. A few years ago, when the New York Court of Appeals ruled against gay marriage, here is how it got around the question of whether the government could treat gay and straight couples equally:

The Legislature could rationally decide that, for the welfare of children, it is more important to promote stability, and to avoid instability, in opposite-sex than in same-sex relationships. Heterosexual intercourse has a natural tendency to lead to the birth of children; homosexual intercourse does not. Despite the advances of science, it remains true that the vast majority of children are born as a result of a sexual relationship between a man and a woman, and the Legislature could find that this will continue to be true. The Legislature could also find that such relationships are all too often casual or temporary. It could find that an important function of marriage is to create more stability and permanence in the relationships that cause children to be born. It thus could choose to offer an inducement -- in the form of marriage and its attendant benefits -- to opposite-sex couples who make a solemn, long-term commitment to each other.

The Legislature could find that this rationale for marriage does not apply with comparable force to same-sex couples. These couples can become parents by adoption, or by artificial insemination or other technological marvels, but they do not become parents as a result of accident or impulse. The Legislature could find that unstable relationships between people of the opposite sex present a greater danger that children will be born into or grow up in unstable homes than is the case with same-sex couples, and thus that promoting stability in opposite-sex relationships will help children more. This is one reason why the Legislature could rationally offer the benefits of marriage to opposite-sex couples only.

There is a second reason: The Legislature could rationally believe that it is better, other things being equal, for children to grow up with both a mother and a father. Intuition and experience suggest that a child benefits from having before his or her eyes, every day, living models of what both a man and a woman are like. It is obvious that there are exceptions to this general rule -- some children who never know their fathers, or their mothers, do far better than some who grow up with parents of both sexes -- but the Legislature could find that the general rule will usually hold.

I wrote then, and I still believe now, that this was horrible legal reasoning. As the Court of Appeals saw it, reckless sex between heterosexual couples can produce children. The State wants to prevent children from growing up without a mom and pop, so we induce the lovers to get married to save the children. The State can deny the same marriage right to gays and lesbians because although they can adopt children, they cannot naturally reproduce. The State Legislature can thus distinguish between same-sex marriage and heterosexual marriage. And, the Court ruled, the Legislature can rationally decide that children are better off with a mother and father rather than a father and father. This is what counts for legal reasoning in New York.

I receive a lot of reading material from the New York Bar Association and court system extolling New York's commitment to "our cherished values" under the Constitution. It sure sounds nice, but as I drop this stuff into the trash can, I think about the same-sex marriage decision in New York and how the 20-something Green Party mayor of my village (New Paltz) was the first small-town public official to sanction same-sex marriage, a gutsy move that got him arrested for breaking the law.

Iowa is not New York. So when the highest court in Iowa took up the issue of same-sex marriage, it probably looked at the New York decision and dropped it in the trash can. Iowa can think for itself.

Here's the general framework for courts to apply in deciding whether to strike down marriage restrictions. Under the Constitution, there are certain "fundamental" rights, like the right to travel, the right to privacy, the right to raise your children as you see fit and the right to marry. The language we usually see in these court rulings is that a fundamental right is something that is "deeply rooted in our tradition." In 1967, the Supreme Court held that it was illegal for the State of Virginia to prohibit interrracial marriage. A few years later, the Court said flat out that "the right to marry is of fundamental importance for all individuals." For this reason, even inmates can get married. Even serial killers can get married while in prison.

If a right is "fundamental" under the Constitution, it cannot be abridged or restricted without a "compelling" reason. In street language, the government needs a damned good reason to restrict a fundamental right. Hatred of an entire class of people is not good enough. "We always did it this way" is not good enough. "Just because" is not good enough. Prejudice is not good enough. Public opinion is not good enough. The rationale for this is that some rights are so fundamental that it does not matter what the majority thinks. Constitutional rights cannot be put up for a majority vote.

When the same-sex marriage controversy first wound up in the courts, I thought that an honest court would recognize that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to get married. After all, what compelling reason could justify the exclusion? The best parallel was the Supreme Court's ruling in 1967, Loving v. Virginia, which said that the government cannot restrict interracial marriages despite any arguments that it was always government policy to enforce these restrictions. As we know from the New York ruling, courts will find a way to sidestep the obvious.

Not Iowa. This is how the Iowa Supreme Court did it: It noted how the U.S. Supreme Court, in determining whether to grant certain social and racial groups heightened protections under the Equal Protection Clause, considers the following factors: "The Supreme Court has considered: (1) the history of invidious discrimination against the class burdened by the legislation; (2) whether the characteristics that distinguish the class indicate a typical class member’s ability to contribute to society; (3) whether the distinguishing characteristic is “immutable” or beyond the class members’ control; and (4) the political power of the subject class." Long ago, courts have applied this test in finding that discrimination on the basis of gender, race, national origin and religion is illegal under the Constitution. The dividing line is homosexuality.

Iowa's judges have found that gays and lesbians get heightened protection under the Iowa Constitution because gays and lesbians have historically been discriminated against. The Iowa court also held that they have minimal political clout and that the same-sex lifestyle is an immutable, or natural predisposition. Equally interesting, the court ruled that sexual orientation forms a part of the gay and lesbian identity. The Court also finds that gays and lesbians can contribute to society regardless of their sexual preference. Here is some good language from the judges:

We are convinced gay and lesbian people are not so politically powerful as to overcome the unfair and severe prejudice that history suggests produces discrimination based on sexual orientation. Gays and lesbians certainly possess no more political power than women enjoyed four decades ago when the Supreme Court began subjecting gender-based legislation to closer scrutiny. Additionally, gay and lesbian people are, as a class, currently no more powerful than women or members of some racial minorities.

In other words, the same reasoning that granted equal protection against racial and gender discrimination now applies to laws against same-sex marriage. In order for the State of Iowa to defend the restriction, it has to provide a good reason to overcome the presumption that laws against same-sex marriage violate the state Constitution. The state cannot provide those reasons, the Iowa Supreme Court says. It is not enough for the state to argue that it wants to preserve "traditional marriage," because that argument only advances discrimination for its own sake. While the state argues that male-female marriage is best for children, the Iowa court disagrees; not only do many opposite sex marriages produce no children, but there is nothing to prohibit gays and lesbians from raising children. In essence, the court shoots down all the justifications in support of the same-sex marriage ban.

You don't need to be a legal scholar to understand what the Iowa court did. The prohibitions against same-sex marriage are borne of prejudice against gays and lesbians along with religious objections and the sense that "we've never done it before." Same-sex couples can be as commited as opposite-sex couples, and I couldn't care less what religious objections someone wants to raise in opposition to these marriages. The framework that the courts have set up to determine that racial and gender discrimination violate the Constitution applies equally to the prohibition against same-sex marriage, especially when we remember that the courts have held out the right to marry as among the fundamental rights which cannot be abridged without an airtight reason.

What is the legacy of the Bush administration? I know, the Bush administration seems so last year. But its legacy will be with us for a long time, as with any former presidential administration which made decisions which cannot be undone. There is a growing consensus that, along with the bad economy, the botched war in Iraq and the administration's drive toward limitless executive power at the expense of other branches of government, the Bush administration's legacy will be ... Torture.

Mark Danner is a professor and writer who has been documenting authoritarian policies and practices for years. He got his hands on documents from Red Cross showing how U.S. forces engaged in the practice of torture in the "war on terror." Here is the opening paragraph to his recent piece in New York Review of Books:

We think time and elections will cleanse our fallen world but they will not. Since November, George W. Bush and his administration have seemed to be rushing away from us at accelerating speed, a dark comet hurtling toward the ends of the universe. The phrase "War on Terror"—the signal slogan of that administration, so cherished by the man who took pride in proclaiming that he was "a wartime president"—has acquired in its pronouncement a permanent pair of quotation marks, suggesting something questionable, something mildly embarrassing: something past. And yet the decisions that that president made, especially the monumental decisions taken after the attacks of September 11, 2001—decisions about rendition, surveillance, interrogation—lie strewn about us still, unclaimed and unburied, like corpses freshly dead.

The New York Times this morning ran one of its longest opinion pieces in recent years, a piece by Mark Danner that summarizes his findings. This is scary stuff to read, but you should read it. All of this was done in your name. If it's too long to read, then here is the conclusion:

What we can say with certainty, in the wake of the Red Cross report, is that the United States tortured prisoners and that the Bush administration, including the president himself, explicitly and aggressively denied that fact. We can also say that the decision to torture, in a political war with militant Islam, harmed American interests by destroying the democratic and Constitutional reputation of the United States, undermining its liberal sympathizers in the Muslim world and helping materially in the recruitment of young Muslims to the extremist cause. By deciding to torture, we freely chose to embrace the caricature they had made of us. The consequences of this choice, legal, political and moral, now confront us. Time and elections are not enough to make them go away.

Here is the article, in full:

Tales From Torture’s Dark World By MARK DANNER ON a bright sunny day two years ago, President George W. Bush strode into the East Room of the White House and informed the world that the United States had created a dark and secret universe to hold and interrogate captured terrorists.

“In addition to the terrorists held at Guantánamo,” the president said, “a small number of suspected terrorist leaders and operatives captured during the war have been held and questioned outside the United States, in a separate program operated by the Central Intelligence Agency.”

At these places, Mr. Bush said, “the C.I.A. used an alternative set of procedures.” He added: “These procedures were designed to be safe, to comply with our laws, our Constitution and our treaty obligations. The Department of Justice reviewed the authorized methods extensively and determined them to be lawful.” This speech will stand, I believe, as George W. Bush’s most important: perhaps the only historic speech he ever gave. In his fervent defense of his government’s “alternative set of procedures” and his equally fervent insistence that they were “lawful,” he set out before the country America’s dark moral epic of torture, in the coils of whose contradictions we find ourselves entangled still.

At the same time, perhaps unwittingly, Mr. Bush made it possible that day for those on whom the alternative set of procedures were performed eventually to speak. For he announced that he would send 14 “high-value detainees” from dark into twilight: they would be transferred from the overseas “black sites” to Guantánamo. There, while awaiting trial, the International Committee of the Red Cross would be “advised of their detention, and will have the opportunity to meet with them.”

A few weeks later, from Oct. 6 to 11 and then from Dec. 4 to 14, 2006, Red Cross officials — whose duty it is to monitor compliance with the Geneva Conventions and to supervise treatment of prisoners of war — traveled to Guantánamo and began interviewing the prisoners.

Their stated goal was to produce a report that would “provide a description of the treatment and material conditions of detention of the 14 during the period they were held in the C.I.A. detention program,” periods ranging “from 16 months to almost four and a half years.”

As the Red Cross interviewers informed the detainees, their report was not intended to be released to the public but, “to the extent that each detainee agreed for it to be transmitted to the authorities,” to be given in strictest secrecy to officials of the government agency that had been in charge of holding them — in this case the Central Intelligence Agency, to whose acting general counsel, John Rizzo, the report was sent on Feb. 14, 2007.

The result is a document — labeled “confidential” and clearly intended only for the eyes of those senior American officials — that tells a story of what happened to each of the 14 detainees inside the black sites.

A short time ago, this document came into my hands and I have set out the stories it tells in a longer article in The New York Review of Books. Because these stories were taken down confidentially in patient interviews by professionals from the International Committee of the Red Cross, and not intended for public consumption, they have an unusual claim to authenticity.

Indeed, since the detainees were kept strictly apart and isolated, both at the black sites and at Guantánamo, the striking similarity in their stories would seem to make fabrication extremely unlikely. As its authors state in their introduction, “The I.C.R.C. wishes to underscore that the consistency of the detailed allegations provided separately by each of the 14 adds particular weight to the information provided below.”

Beginning with the chapter headings on its contents page — “suffocation by water,” “prolonged stress standing,” “beatings by use of a collar,” “confinement in a box” — the document makes compelling and chilling reading. The stories recounted in its fewer than 50 pages lead inexorably to this unequivocal conclusion, which, given its source, has the power of a legal determination: “The allegations of ill treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill treatment to which they were subjected while held in the C.I.A. program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture. In addition, many other elements of the ill treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”

•

Perhaps one should start with the story of the first man to whom, according to news reports, the president’s “alternative set of procedures” were applied:

“I woke up, naked, strapped to a bed, in a very white room. The room measured approximately 4 meters by 4 meters. The room had three solid walls, with the fourth wall consisting of metal bars separating it from a larger room. I am not sure how long I remained in the bed. After some time, I think it was several days, but can’t remember exactly, I was transferred to a chair where I was kept, shackled by hands and feet for what I think was the next two to three weeks. During this time I developed blisters on the underside of my legs due to the constant sitting. I was only allowed to get up from the chair to go [to] the toilet, which consisted of a bucket.

“I was given no solid food during the first two or three weeks, while sitting on the chair. I was only given Ensure and water to drink. At first the Ensure made me vomit, but this became less with time.

“The cell and room were air-conditioned and were very cold. Very loud, shouting-type music was constantly playing. It kept repeating about every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day. Sometimes the music stopped and was replaced by a loud hissing or crackling noise.

“The guards were American, but wore masks to conceal their faces. My interrogators did not wear masks.”

So begins the story of Abu Zubaydah, a senior member of Al Qaeda, captured in a raid in Pakistan in March 2002. The arrest of an active terrorist with actionable information was a coup for the United States.

After being treated for his wounds — he had been shot in the stomach, leg and groin during his capture — Abu Zubaydah was brought to one of the black sites, probably in Thailand, and placed in that white room.

It is important to note that Abu Zubaydah was not alone with his interrogators, that everyone in that white room — guards, interrogators, doctor — was in fact linked directly, and almost constantly, to senior intelligence officials on the other side of the world. “It wasn’t up to individual interrogators to decide, ‘Well, I’m going to slap him. Or I’m going to shake him,’” said John Kiriakou, a C.I.A. officer who helped capture Abu Zubaydah, in an interview with ABC News.

Every one of the steps taken with regard to Abu Zubaydah “had to have the approval of the deputy director for operations. So before you laid a hand on him, you had to send in the cable saying, ‘He’s uncooperative. Request permission to do X.’”

He went on: “The cable traffic back and forth was extremely specific.... No one wanted to get in trouble by going overboard.”

Shortly after Abu Zubaydah was captured, C.I.A. officers briefed the National Security Council’s principals committee, including Vice President Dick Cheney, the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and Attorney General John Ashcroft, in detail on the interrogation plans for the prisoner. As the interrogations proceeded, so did the briefings, with George Tenet, the C.I.A. director, bringing to senior officials almost daily reports of the techniques applied.

At the time, the spring and summer of 2002, Justice Department officials, led by John Yoo, were working on a memorandum, now known informally as “the torture memo,” which claimed that for an “alternative procedure” to be considered torture, and thus illegal, it would have to cause pain of the sort “that would be associated with serious physical injury so severe that death, organ failure, or permanent damage resulting in a loss of significant body function will likely result.” The memo was approved in August 2002, thus serving as a legal “green light” for interrogators to apply the most aggressive techniques to Abu Zubaydah:

“I was taken out of my cell and one of the interrogators wrapped a towel around my neck; they then used it to swing me around and smash me repeatedly against the hard walls of the room.”

The prisoner was then put in a coffin-like black box, about 4 feet by 3 feet and 6 feet high, “for what I think was about one and a half to two hours.” He added: The box was totally black on the inside as well as the outside.... They put a cloth or cover over the outside of the box to cut out the light and restrict my air supply. It was difficult to breathe. When I was let out of the box I saw that one of the walls of the room had been covered with plywood sheeting. From now on it was against this wall that I was then smashed with the towel around my neck. I think that the plywood was put there to provide some absorption of the impact of my body. The interrogators realized that smashing me against the hard wall would probably quickly result in physical injury.”

After this beating, Abu Zubaydah was placed in a small box approximately three feet tall. “They placed a cloth or cover over the box to cut out all light and restrict my air supply. As it was not high enough even to sit upright, I had to crouch down. It was very difficult because of my wounds. The stress on my legs held in this position meant my wounds both in the leg and stomach became very painful. I think this occurred about three months after my last operation. It was always cold in the room, but when the cover was placed over the box it made it hot and sweaty inside. The wound on my leg began to open and started to bleed. I don’t know how long I remained in the small box; I think I may have slept or maybe fainted.

“I was then dragged from the small box, unable to walk properly, and put on what looked like a hospital bed, and strapped down very tightly with belts. A black cloth was then placed over my face and the interrogators used a mineral water bottle to pour water on the cloth so that I could not breathe. After a few minutes the cloth was removed and the bed was rotated into an upright position. The pressure of the straps on my wounds was very painful. I vomited.

“The bed was then again lowered to horizontal position and the same torture carried out again with the black cloth over my face and water poured on from a bottle. On this occasion my head was in a more backward, downwards position and the water was poured on for a longer time. I struggled against the straps, trying to breathe, but it was hopeless.”

After being placed again in the tall box, Abu Zubaydah “was then taken out and again a towel was wrapped around my neck and I was smashed into the wall with the plywood covering and repeatedly slapped in the face by the same two interrogators as before.

“I was then made to sit on the floor with a black hood over my head until the next session of torture began. The room was always kept very cold.

This went on for approximately one week.”

•

Walid bin Attash, a Saudi involved with planning the attacks on American embassies in Africa in 1998 and on the Navy destroyer Cole in 2000, was captured in Pakistan on April 29, 2003:

“On arrival at the place of detention in Afghanistan I was stripped naked. I remained naked for the next two weeks.... I was kept in a standing position, feet flat on the floor, but with my arms above my head and fixed with handcuffs and a chain to a metal bar running across the width of the cell. The cell was dark with no light, artificial or natural.”

This forced standing, with arms shackled above the head, seems to have become standard procedure. It proved especially painful for Mr. bin Attash, who had lost a leg fighting in Afghanistan:

“After some time being held in this position my stump began to hurt so I removed my artificial leg to relieve the pain. Of course my good leg then began to ache and soon started to give way so that I was left hanging with all my weight on my wrists.”

Cold water was used on Mr. bin Attash in combination with beatings and the use of a plastic collar, which seems to have been a refinement of the towel that had been looped around Abu Zubaydah’s neck:

“On a daily basis during the first two weeks a collar was looped around my neck and then used to slam me against the walls of the interrogation room. It was also placed around my neck when being taken out of my cell for interrogation and was used to lead me along the corridor. It was also used to slam me against the walls of the corridor during such movements.

“Also on a daily basis during the first two weeks I was made to lie on a plastic sheet placed on the floor which would then be lifted at the edges. Cold water was then poured onto my body with buckets.... I would be kept wrapped inside the sheet with the cold water for several minutes. I would then be taken for interrogation.”

•

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the key planner of the 9/11 attacks, was captured in Pakistan on March 1, 2003.

After three days in what he believes was a prison in Afghanistan, Mr. Mohammed was put in a tracksuit, blindfold, hood and headphones, and shackled and placed aboard a plane. He quickly fell asleep — “the first proper sleep in over five days” — and remains unsure of how long the journey took. On arrival, however, he realized he had come a long way:

“I could see at one point there was snow on the ground. Everybody was wearing black, with masks and army boots, like Planet X people. I think the country was Poland. I think this because on one occasion a water bottle was brought to me without the label removed. It had [an] e-mail address ending in ‘.pl.’”

He was stripped and put in a small cell. “I was kept for one month in the cell in a standing position with my hands cuffed and shackled above my head and my feet cuffed and shackled to a point in the floor,” he told the Red Cross.

“Of course during this month I fell asleep on some occasions while still being held in this position. This resulted in all my weight being applied to the handcuffs around my wrist, resulting in open and bleeding wounds. [Scars consistent with this allegation were visible on both wrists as well as on both ankles.] Both my feet became very swollen after one month of almost continual standing.”

For interrogation, Mr. Mohammed was taken to a different room. The sessions lasted for as long as eight hours and as short as four.

“If I was perceived not to be cooperating I would be put against a wall and punched and slapped in the body, head and face. A thick flexible plastic collar would also be placed around my neck so that it could then be held at the two ends by a guard who would use it to slam me repeatedly against the wall. The beatings were combined with the use of cold water, which was poured over me using a hose-pipe.”

As with Abu Zubaydah, the harshest sessions involved the “alternative set of procedures” used in sequence and in combination, one technique intensifying the effects of the others:

“The beatings became worse and I had cold water directed at me from a hose-pipe by guards while I was still in my cell. The worst day was when I was beaten for about half an hour by one of the interrogators. My head was banged against the wall so hard that it started to bleed. Cold water was poured over my head. This was then repeated with other interrogators. Finally I was taken for a session of water boarding. The torture on that day was finally stopped by the intervention of the doctor.”

Reading the Red Cross report, one becomes somewhat inured to the “alternative set of procedures” as they are described: the cold and repeated violence grow numbing. Against this background, the descriptions of daily life of the detainees in the black sites, in which interrogation seems merely a periodic heightening of consistently imposed brutality, become more striking.

Here again is Mr. Mohammed:

“After each session of torture I was put into a cell where I was allowed to lie on the floor and could sleep for a few minutes. However, due to shackles on my ankles and wrists I was never able to sleep very well.... The toilet consisted of a bucket in the cell, which I could use on request” — he was shackled standing, his hands affixed to the ceiling — “but I was not allowed to clean myself after toilet during the first month.... I wasn’t given any clothes for the first month. Artificial light was on 24 hours a day, but I never saw sunlight.”

•

Abu Zubaydah, Walid bin Attash, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed — these men almost certainly have blood on their hands. There is strong reason to believe that they had critical parts in planning and organizing terrorist operations that caused the deaths of thousands of people. So in all likelihood did the other “high-value detainees” whose treatment while secretly confined by the United States is described in the Red Cross report.

From everything we know, many or all of these men deserve to be tried and punished — to be “brought to justice,” as President Bush vowed they would be. The fact that judges, military or civilian, throw out cases of prisoners who have been tortured — and have already done so at Guantánamo — means it is highly unlikely that they will be brought to justice anytime soon.

For the men who have committed great crimes, this seems to mark perhaps the most important and consequential sense in which “torture doesn’t work.” The use of torture deprives the society whose laws have been so egregiously violated of the possibility of rendering justice. Torture destroys justice. Torture in effect relinquishes this sacred right in exchange for speculative benefits whose value is, at the least, much disputed.

As I write, it is impossible to know definitively what benefits — in intelligence, in national security, in disrupting Al Qaeda — the president’s approval of use of an “alternative set of procedures” might have brought to the United States. Only a thorough investigation, which we are now promised, much belatedly, by the Senate Intelligence Committee, can determine that.

What we can say with certainty, in the wake of the Red Cross report, is that the United States tortured prisoners and that the Bush administration, including the president himself, explicitly and aggressively denied that fact. We can also say that the decision to torture, in a political war with militant Islam, harmed American interests by destroying the democratic and Constitutional reputation of the United States, undermining its liberal sympathizers in the Muslim world and helping materially in the recruitment of young Muslims to the extremist cause. By deciding to torture, we freely chose to embrace the caricature they had made of us. The consequences of this choice, legal, political and moral, now confront us. Time and elections are not enough to make them go away.

The Obama administration this week released secret Bush administration memos that gave the president advice about possibly suspending provisions of the U.S. Constitution to fight the "war on terror" and war in general. These memos made news because they suggested that the Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures could be pushed aside so that "the president could use the nation’s military within the United States to combat terrorism suspects and to conduct raids without obtaining search warrants," according to the N.Y. Times.

Scary stuff, suspending the Fourth Amendment, the one protection against a police state and military dictatorship. But equally troubling was the suggestion in these legal memorandums that "“First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully.” Read that again. The Bush administration's lawyers were suggesting that the government can suspend the First Amendment in order to wage war. The memos are here. The First Amendment part is at page 24.

These suggestions were not put into place. Someone in the Bush administration probably realized these were untenable and that even a guy like Dick Cheney cannot go onto national television to tell the American people that the Constitution was being suspended.

These memos were written about six weeks after the September 11 attacks. Published reports have confirmed that the Bush administration was already thinking about war with Iraq in the wake of 9/11, and the president and his subordinates were beating the war drums for months on end before the war began in March 2003. The war is now considered a fraud by most rational people. Can you imagine suspending the First Amendment over the Iraq war, a lopsided invasion that was not undertaken to protected national security?

Suspending the Constitution during wartime is shocking, but not a new concept in our lifetime. In the mid-1980's, when another Republican President, Ronald Reagan, was pummeling a third world country (Nicaragua) for unlawful and unjustified reasons, one of his national security assistants, Oliver North, had the same idea. This story broke in the Miami Herald in July 1987.
Here's a summary:

National Security Council officer Colonel Oliver North heads the development of a secret contingency plan called REX 84. In the event of an emergency, the plan calls “for suspension of the Constitution, turning control of the United States over to FEMA [the Federal Emergency Management Agency], [and the] appointment of military commanders to run state and local governments.” The plan, initially revealed in the Miami Herald in 1987, also reportedly calls for the detention of upwards of 400,000 illegal aliens and an undisclosed number of American citizens in at least 10 military facilities maintained as potential holding camps. North operates the program from a secure White House site, allegedly using a software program known as PROMIS. PROMIS was designed to track individuals, such as prisoners, by pulling together information from disparate databases into a single record.”

As the attack against Nicaragua (through proxy armies like the contras rather than U.S. soldiers) was even less justified than war against Iraq, the 1987 story tells us that fascism is alive and well in this country and just bubbling under the surface. The Bush administration may have employed radical lawyers who had no regard for the First Amendment, but that's not news. The Reagan administration, beloved by modern conservatives from coast to coast, also danced on the fringes of authoritarianism.

As a constitutional lawyer, it never ceases to amaze me how often people bring defamation suits for offensive comments that no one gives a damn about. Defamation lawsuits only bring more attention to the offensive statement, and these cases are expensive to bring and often yield little in the way of monetary damages, if the case even survives a motion to dismiss on the basis that the statement was not a defamatory statement of fact ("Joe is a criminal") but an expression of opinion ("Joe is a jackass"), which is constitutionally protected.

The rules of defamation law are over 100 years old, created when newspapers and pamphlets were the only way to convey information. With the Internet age upon us, courts have to apply those rules to the modern era, when on-line statements live forever and wind up in Google's search field which anyone can access. This has not been easy for the courts. In the past, newspapers and authors were regarded as professionals who would stand behind their work. But in the Internet age, anonymous speech is all around us, and you can damned well say whatever you want.

Except that you can't always say what you want. The latest court decision on Internet defamation comes out of Maryland, where the court had to determine whether someone claiming defamation from an Internet message board can find out the identity of the anonymous writers. The court sided with free speech, noting first that the First Amendment has always protected the right of anonymous speech, with some limitations if the speech is defamatory.

Against this background, the Maryland court noted that "Courts and commentators alike have emphasized the importance of extending free speech protections to the Internet, recognizing the Internet as capable of 'democratizing' the very 'nature of public discourse,' by permitting anyone with a computer to “become a town crier with a voice that resonates farther than it could from any soapbox.'”

In this case, a businessman sued a newspaper and some "John Doe" defendants who allegedly defamated him on the paper's discussion board in stating on-line that his fast-food restaurant was filthy. The question was: how can the businessman find out the anonymous posters? Does the newspaper have to produce their names?

I know that most people reading this are not lawyers, so take my word for it when I say that the court created a legal standard for when newspapers have to produce the names of anonymous Internet posters that makes it difficult for defamation plaintiffs to get what they want. This is good news. There are too many anonymous comments and too many opportunities for these lawsuits such that defamation cases would flood the courts, a bad thing in light of the First Amendment's protections in favor of anonymous speech. The multi-part standard, below, is too time-consuming for most people to bother with, which is just as well because most defamatory comments on-line are either ignored or no one gives a damn, anyway.

Here's how the Washington Post describes the court ruling: "Operators of newspaper Web sites, blogs and chat rooms that allow readers to post anonymous comments using pseudonyms do not have to readily reveal the posters' identities in defamation suits, Maryland's highest court ruled yesterday, further shaping an emerging area of First Amendment law in the Internet age."

Here's the legal standard, in any event:

When a trial court is confronted with a defamation action in which anonymous speakers or pseudonyms are involved, it should, (1) require the plaintiff to undertake efforts to notify the anonymous posters that they are the subject of a subpoena or application for an order of disclosure, including posting a message of notification of the identity discovery request on the message board; (2) withhold action to afford the anonymous posters a reasonable opportunity to file and serve opposition to the application; (3) require the plaintiff to identify and set forth the exact statements purportedly made by each anonymous poster, alleged to constitute actionable speech; (4) determine whether the complaint has set forth a prima facie defamation per se or per quod action against the anonymous posters; and (5), if all else is satisfied, balance the anonymous poster’s First Amendment right of free speech against the strength of the prima facie case of defamation presented by the plaintiff and the necessity for disclosure of the anonymous defendant’s identity, prior to ordering disclosure.

A seismic shift is slowly taking place in American constitutional law. The modern Supreme Court, stacked with Republican appointees, is little by little doing away with a time-honored principle that was intended to keep the police honest: the exclusionary rule.

The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects against unreasonable searches and seizures, and it also requires that the police obtain a warrant before they can search your home or other private spaces. The question is how do we enforce the Fourth Amendment? Of course, you can train the police to respect the Fourth Amendment, but what if they get their hands of evidence that can be used against you in court, and the evidence was obtained without a warrant? Then what?

It was this scenario which gave rise to the exclusionary rule, which holds that evidence which the police had no right to obtain cannot be used against you in court. Even if the evidence would give the police a slam-dunk case in court. The exclusionary rule ensures that the police will get it right before evidence goes before a jury. If the evidence was obtained illegally, i.e., without a warrant, the judge throws it out before trial. That means there may not be a trial, without the evidence. For decades, the courts decided that it was better that guilty people go free rather than allow the police to get used to scheming to find evidence without probable cause, which is necessary to secure a warrant. The benefits of the exclusionary rule include the understanding that the police will not rummage through your stuff or invade your privacy without good reason. Ask anyone who had an unpleasant encounter with the police without doing anything wrong how important it is to ensure that the police have probable cause and a warrant before poking through your stuff.

The Court's Chief Justice is John Roberts, who as a young lawyer in the 1980's suggested doing away with the exclusionary rule. According to the New York Times, a recent Supreme Court case, Herring v. United States, is another step in the slow process of erasing the exclusionary rule. In that case, the Court said that evidence obtained as a result of the police's erroneous belief that someone had an outstanding warrant against them did not have to be thrown out pursuant to the exclusionary rule. The outdated warrant was still in a police computer. Someone screwed up. The Times reported a few weeks ago:

Taking aim at one of the towering legacies of the Warren Court, its landmark 1961 decision applying the exclusionary rule to the states, the chief justice’s majority opinion established for the first time that unlawful police conduct should not require the suppression of evidence if all that was involved was isolated carelessness. That was a significant step in itself. More important yet, it suggested that the exclusionary rule itself might be at risk.

The Supreme Court is moving in the direction that would allow the police to get away with obtaining evidence in violation of the rules so long as the police misconduct is not too serious. Minor errors -- such as computer screw-ups -- are not enough to invoke the exclusionary rule.

This issue first surfaced a few years ago, when the court signaled that it might erase the exclusionary rule, conservative Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that "much had changed since the Mapp decision in 1961 [which held that state and local police officers must adhere to the exclusionary rule]. People whose rights were violated may now sue police officers, and police departments are more professional. In light of these factors, he wrote, “resort to the massive remedy of suppressing evidence of guilt is unjustified.”

The Herring decision a few weeks ago which further eroded the exclusionary rule was decided 5-4, with the Court's reliable conservatives siding with the police. For at least the next four years, while Obama is president, no conservatives will be appointed to the court. But the Supreme Court does have a rock solid conservative majority. Five justices can do away with the exclusionary rule once and for all before Obama can start balancing out the court. That cannot happen unless people retire, and there is no way of knowing when that will happen, as Supreme Court justices like to hang around on the court for decades.

Most people are not constitutional scholars and would therefore not know what the exclusionary rule is. But they would also assume that the police have to follow the rules like everyone else. There is no perfect way to enforce the Fourth Amendment. What is bothersome is that no politician or judge will be taken to the woodshed for coming down harder against criminal defendants and advocating the end of the exclusionary rule. Conservatives call the exclusionary rule a "technicality" that allows the guilty to walk free. I prefer to call it constitutional dur process. We can go round and round on this. Imagine if we lived in a society where issues like this were debated all the time.

Now that the Bush administration is history, it's worth noting that the consequences of the Bush administration are still with us. The Iraq war will last for years. Some people predicted this would happen when the war began in 2003, but most Americans supported the war and actually thought Saddam Hussein played a role in the 9/11 attacks.

You don't just invade a country and then leave. In the case of the Iraq war, we invaded and destroyed the place and handed the Iraqi people a civil war. A philosopher might argue that we have a moral obligation to stick around to clean up the mess. A contrarian might say that the arsonist should not be allowed to put out the fire.

Where am I going with this? One consequence of the Bush administration is that some very good investigative journalists made a living writing excellent books about the inner workings of the administration and how the war was planned and executed. One of these writers, Thomas Ricks, wrote a book called "Fiasco." I read the book, and I do not recall that Ricks was a flaming liberal who wanted to embarass the administration. But the title of the book says it all.

Ricks has now written another book, a sequal to "Fiasco." He calls it "The Gamble." The review in the New York Times is quite sobering, reporting that Ricks believes the war is only half over. If that's the case, the hundreds of billions of dollars have yet to be spent on this folly. Here's an excerpt from the review:

Thomas E. Ricks’s devastating 2006 book, “Fiasco,” provided a lucid, tough-minded assessment of the Iraq war, brilliantly summing up the political and military mistakes that had brought the United States, after more than three years of occupation, to a terrible tipping point there. Drawing upon the author’s reporting on the ground in Iraq and his many sources within the uniformed military, “Fiasco” chronicled how the United States “went to war in Iraq with scant solid international support and on the basis of incorrect information,” and how flawed assumptions, drastic planning failures and plain old-fashioned hubris led to a “derelict occupation” that fueled a burgeoning insurgency.

In his equally powerful and illuminating new book, “The Gamble,” Mr. Ricks, who covered the military for The Washington Post from 2000 to 2008, takes up the story where he left off in “Fiasco.” This volume recounts how Iraq came close to unraveling in 2006, how the Bush administration finally conceded it was off course, and how a new set of commanders — headed by Gen. David H. Petraeus and Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno — began putting a radically different strategy in place.

. . .

While Mr. Ricks praises General Petraeus’s success in helping the military regain the strategic initiative in Iraq as an “extraordinary achievement” — reducing violence and reviving “American prospects in the war” — he also reminds us that the surge was meant to “create a breathing space that would then enable Iraqi politicians to find a way forward,” and that that outcome is still unclear. “The best grade” the surge campaign can be given, he says, “is a solid incomplete.”

. . .

Although Mr. Ricks writes that he is saddened by the war’s “obvious costs to Iraqis and Americans” and by “the incompetence and profligacy with which the Bush administration conducted much of it,” he adds that he has come to the conclusion that “we can’t leave.”

As Mr. Ricks sees it, the regional and global repercussions of failure in Iraq would be far more dire than those incurred by the United States’ withdrawal from Vietnam — ranging, in this case, from a full-blown civil war to “a spreading war in the Middle East,” from a stronger Iran presiding over a Finlandized Iraq to the rise of a brutal new Iraq led by “younger, tougher versions” of Saddam Hussein, who “by the time of the invasion was an aging, almost toothless tiger.”

Other assessments offered by Mr. Ricks in this volume are equally provocative. He writes that as a presidential candidate Senator John McCain “seemed most detached from reality, essentially not listening to Petraeus and instead laying out a concept for an ending that seemed unreachable,” describing Iraq “in terms that were eerily similar to how the Bush administration had described it on the eve of the invasion, as a country that the Americans would transform and turn into an engine of change for the entire region.” And Mr. Ricks predicts that with a smaller American presence in Iraq and more Iraqi elections scheduled for 2009, this year will most likely prove to be “a particularly difficult” one for President Obama and the Pentagon.

. . .

He adds that the Bush White House was so reluctant to acknowledge the worsening course of the war, suppressing dissent and “substituting loyalty for analysis,” that without the midterm elections of November 2006, which transferred control of Congress to the Democrats, the administration “might never have contemplated the major revisions in strategy and leadership that it would make in the following two months.” Until the election, he writes, “Bush seemed satisfied with blather. After it, he began to speak about the war seriously.”

. . .

This volume leaves the reader with an understanding of the hard-won military dynamics of the surge and the professionalism and competence of the generals who designed and executed it. But the dominant impression left by “The Gamble” and “Fiasco” is one of the devastating consequences of an ill-conceived and ill-planned war — an unnecessary war of choice, waged with too few troops and no overarching strategic plan, a war that was going badly but was allowed to continue along the same unfruitful path for three years by a White House “in denial” about its downward trend. It is a war, Mr. Ricks writes, that may well become “America’s longest war, passing the American Revolution and even the Vietnam War.”

“No matter how the U.S. war in Iraq ends,” he writes at the conclusion of this important and chilling book, “it appears that today we may be only halfway through it. That is, the quiet consensus emerging among many people who have served in Iraq is that we likely will have American soldiers engaged in combat in Iraq until at least 2015 — which would put us now at about the midpoint of the conflict.”

In other words, he adds, “the events for which the Iraq war will be remembered probably have not yet happened.”

In 1967, Bob Dylan and The Band holed up in a house near Woodstock, New York, to record some demos for the record company. Those demos were heavily bootlegged and the record company finally gave in by formally releasing some of the songs in 1975. The album is called the Basement Tapes. I think the songs really were recorded in the basement. Although this was taped in 1967, the songs are not psychedelic. They are more rustic and, for that reason, timeless. Dylan would never sound this way again. And I doubt that lyrics like this were ever written again. Scroll down after the YouTube link for the words. Read them out loud to the next person you meet.

Well, the comic book and me, just us, we caught the bus.
The poor little chauffeur, though, she was back in bed
On the very next day, with a nose full of pus.
Yea! Heavy and a bottle of bread
Yea! Heavy and a bottle of bread
Yea! Heavy and a bottle of bread

It's a one-track town, just brown, and a breeze, too,
Pack up the meat, sweet, we're headin' out
For Wichita in a pile of fruit.
Get the loot, don't be slow, we're gonna catch a trout
Get the loot, don't be slow, we're gonna catch a trout
Get the loot, don't be slow, we're gonna catch a trout

Now, pull that drummer out from behind that bottle.
Bring me my pipe, we're gonna shake it.
Slap that drummer with a pie that smells.
Take me down to California, baby
Take me down to California, baby
Take me down to California, baby

Yes, the comic book and me, just us, we caught the bus.
The poor little chauffeur, though, she was back in bed
On the very next day, with a nose full of pus.
Yea! Heavy and a bottle of bread
Yea! Heavy and a bottle of bread
Yea! Heavy and a bottle of bread

There are very few good Buffalo Springfield videos on You Tube, probably because the band is still relatively obscure except for a few songs that everyone knows. But when the little-noticed drummer from an underrated band dies, his obituary still makes the news because the 60's generation that now works in journalism knows a noteworthy death when it sees one.

Buffalo Springfield was a folk-rock band from Los Angeles which stayed together only a few years, long enough to release three albums and spawn the careers of Neil Young and Stephen Stills. They ended the 1960's playing with other people, but their great songs and ensemble cast made Buffalo Springfield the closest thing that America had to the Beatles. And I don't give damn what anyone ways about that comparison. I'm sticking to it. The drummer, Dewey Martin, who died this week at 68, was not well-known, but his death reminds us that his generation of rock stars is now dying off one by one. It's time to appreciate what Buffalo Springfield did.

The story of how Buffalo Springfield got together is like something out of a slapstick comedy. Neil Young and bass player Bruce Palmer went to Los Angeles to find Stephen Stills, who becam acquainted with Young a few years earlier. According to Wikipedia, "Roughly a week later, discouraged at having been unable to locate Stills and ready to depart for San Francisco, they were stuck in traffic on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles when Stills, Furay and Friedman, sitting in their white van, recognized Young’s black 1953 Pontiac hearse, which just happened to be passing by in the opposite direction. After an illegal u-turn by Furay, some shouting, hand-waving and much excitement, the four musicians realized that they were united in their determination to put together a band."

The Beatles' influence on 1960's rock is well-documented, but an under-appreciated result of their success is abandoning the bandleader model for an ensemble approach. Buffalo Springfield had several leaders, Stills and Young, and most of the band wrote and sang. That created a diverse sound which includes folk, country, psychedelia and rock. It also means the band did not have a distinct sound, so while some of their songs are well known, many fans do not realize they emanate from the same group. That's kind of a compliment, in my book.

A pleasant demo of "Flying on the Ground is Wrong." Dewey the drummer is nowhere to be found

Buffalo Springfield's most famous song is "For What It's Worth," featured in nearly every movie about the 1960's. Most of us know the song from its chorus ("stop, hey, what's that sound"). But don't overlook the others, like "Bluebird," "Mr. Soul" and "I Am a Child," which turned into a Neil Young staple. My fave, though, is the little-known, "Flying on the Ground is Wrong," which unfortunately has the worst edit in rock history, as some engineer or producter stitched together two parts of the song in the clumsiest way possible. That does not destroy the song, but a better, acoustic version appears on the Buffalo Springfield box set. Scroll back up to hear it, and ignore the boring visual.

Buffalo Springfield perform "Rock and Roll Woman" before an audience of squares

In the 1960's, rock musicians must have thought it would last forever. It didn't. Neil Young went on to 40 years of success, and Stephen Stills made it work with Crosby, Stills and Nash, but even CSN only had a few good albums. Dewey Martin, the recently deceased drummer, kept the Springfield going for a few years with other musicians, but Stills and Young got a court order to stop the exploitation. According to Wikipedia, Martin eventually quit music to become a car mechanic, returning to music from time to time. He probably thought he would find success as a drummer with someone else, but rock history is all about five-year careers, with the lucky few chugging along for decades.

Whether you can read this or not, this is a Buffalo Springfield concert poster from the late 1960's

Reseaching Dewey Martin was enlightening. I had never heard of him, and I have most of Buffalo Springfield's work. Not every drummer is as famous as Ringo. Dewey apparently was a good guy. Here's a first-person account from Rolling Stone's website about Martin's character:

Gene Herd | 2/6/2009, 4:49 pm EST

I saw plenty of bar brawls during my days as a club musician, but none was as satisfying as one night in 1968 that my friend Dewey Martin punched out two beer-soaked rednecks who were ragging on him for his long blond hair at the club where my band was playing in Portland Oregon. Dewey, who was wearing little rectangle tinted glasses at the time was a ringer for John Lennon. He had just dropped by to say hello to our band. It started in the men’s room when one of them said to Dewey, “You’re in the wrong bathroom aren’t you sweetie?” Dewey told him to “Fuck off,” and walked out. As he went through the door, the redneck hit him from behind. Dewey turned and floored him with one punch. When Bubba’s friend came all the way across the dance floor to help, Dewey punched him out too. In case you’ve forgotten, hippie-length hair was not a popular hairstyle among the moral majority in the 60s. Longhaired kids were a favorite target of straight-arrow necks because longhairs were usually too intimidated to fight back. Dewey was an exception to that rule. Wherever you are Dewey, I hope they let you sit in.

So, Dewey didn't put up with any shit. Other first-person accounts of Dewey Martin in Rolling Stone further speak to his kindness and decency, frankly a rare set of qualities in a rock star. I didn't know the guy, but I'll say this: drumming for one of the greatest American bands of the 1960's is good enough for me.

We are too hung up on abortion to allow for a straight pro-choice policy that transfers from one presidential administration to the next. So, every time the presidency changes hands from one political party to another, the President changes policy on international funding for abortion. It's one of the few direct ways that the President can directly affect abortion policy, and if he can only do so in the international arena, so be it.

As Reuters reported this week,

President Barack Obama on Friday lifted restrictions on U.S. government funding for groups that provide abortion services or counseling abroad, reversing a policy of his Republican predecessor George W. Bush.

The Democratic president's decision was a victory for advocates of abortion rights on an issue that in recent years has become a tit-for-tat policy change each time the White House shifts from one party to the other.

When the ban was in place, no U.S. government funding for family planning services could be given to clinics or groups that offered abortion services or counseling in other countries, even if the funds for those activities came from non-U.S. government sources.

This nonsense began under President Reagan, when he restricted international funding for abortion. It changed when Bill Clinton became President, and it changed over again when George W. Bush wandered into the White House. What makes these policy changes even more significant is that a new President takes the oath of office on January 20, only two days before the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, in which the Supreme Court in 1973 ruled that the Constitution protects the right to abortion.

If you don't like abortion, don't have one. That's what I always say. That's also what the bumper stickers say. But the abortion issue goes beyond mere choice. We can say for sure that the controversial Roe v. Wade decision is safe for the time being. The Supreme Court declined to overrule it in 1992, when Republican justices on the Court got tired of having conservative lawyers and government officials begging the Court every few years to overturn a relatively recent precedent. The more pressing issue, then, is the rights of poor people to have an abortion.

The right to abortion does not mean the government has to pay for one. In the 1970's, after the Supreme Court issued Roe v. Wade, right-wing politicians decided to chip away at abortion rights by retricting government funding for them. As the fault line in American politics separates rich and poor, the policy against government-funded abortions had the effect of overruling Roe v. Wade for indigent people who cannot otherwise afford them.

The Supreme Court upheld the government's right to take abortion away from poor people, in a decision that should be as notorious as Roe v. Wade is famous. The name of that decision is Harris v, McRae. Apart from deciding that this funding restriction was not a true restriction on the right to abortion, the reason the Supreme Court upheld the policy, despite the constitutional right to abortion, is that the Supreme Court has never ruled that it is illegal for the government to discriminate against poor people. Although the Court has been progressive on the issue of equal rights for blacks, women and other minorities, it has never extended that policy to the indigent, who continue to get the crap kicked out of them on a regular basis without any constitutional guarantees in their favor.

Few Supreme Court justices actually represented poor people when they were lawyers. One justice who did was Thurgood Marshall, who write in dissent from the Harris v. McRae decision that "If abortion is medically necessary and a funded abortion is unavailable, [poor citizens] must resort to back-alley butchers, attempt to induce an abortion themselves by crude and dangerous methods, or suffer the serious medical consequences of attempting to carry the fetus to term. Because legal abortion is not a realistic option for such women, the predictable result of the Hyde Amendment will be a significant increase in the number of poor women who will die or suffer significant health damage because of an inability to procure necessary medical services."

In many ways, the fight over abortion rights is a rich man's game. For the poor folk, the right was taken away a long time ago. If President Obama really wants to do something dramatic, he'd tell Congress to fund abortions for anyone who wants one. It's clear that we as a country are moving further and further away from racial discrimination. But discrimination against the poor remains with us to this day.

President Bush made many of us radicals. Normally staid and "responsible" people came to hate President Bush and use harsh language in criticizing his administration. My local newspaper, the Kingston Daily Freeman publishes in upstate New York, in a congressional district which includes one of the most liberal congressmen in the House of Representatives, Maurice Hinchey. Still, it came as a surprise to read the below editorial the other day in which the paper slammed Bush in terms normally reserved for liberal magazines like the Nation.

EDITORIAL: Bush's watch

Sunday, January 18, 2009 3:06 AM EST

IN TWO DAYS, the world will watch yet another peaceful and orderly transfer of United States executive power.

It is a spectacle that, even in mundane times, inspires a considerable sense of awe about the mechanisms of power — that “system that would run of itself” — established under the Constitution.

There is nothing mundane about the context of either this inauguration of Barack Obama or the leave-taking of George W. Bush. It promises to be riveting theater.

The incoming president has scored a historic victory, the first African-American to win election to the highest office in the land. The administration of the oath of office truly will mark a watershed moment in the nation’s tortured history of trying to realize its highest ideals.

The outgoing president leaves his nation in far, far worse shape than he found it eight tumultuous and divisive years ago.

Bush leaves the nation with two wars, one entirely of his making upon a false premise.

He presided over a disastrous government response to the dire needs of millions of its citizens in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

The economy is in crisis, likely the worst shape in 80 years and still declining.

THERE’S NO dodging the responsibility for any of this. It wasn’t just a bad break that it happened on his watch. The American people hire a president to foresee threats, react ably to complex situations, extend aid when it is needed, and otherwise pilot the ship of state through all manner of the unforeseen. When the president fails to do these things, regardless of the circumstances, he has failed to do his job.

There is plenty of evidence that, prior to Sept. 11, 2001, Bush did not take the threat of al-Qaida as seriously as did President Bill Clinton.

Transition briefers noted indifference on the part of many incoming officials and, in the case of Vice President Dick Cheney and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, a distracted obsession with Iraq that would lead to further trouble down the road.

Domestic counterterrorism was demoted within the White House.

The administration bungled even the bluntest warnings of evidence of terrorist planning in August 2001 — a memo headlined and concluding that “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” and even a direct, face-to-face CIA briefing in Crawford, Texas. To that special briefing, Bush allegedly responded, “All right. You’ve covered your ass, now.”

That was on Bush’s watch.

From an unsteady beginning on the morning and afternoon of Sept. 11, Bush literally found his voice with firefighters and a bullhorn at Ground Zero, rallying the nation to regain its footing. The Afghanistan War, managed by the Central Intelligence Agency, was an initial, smashing success.

BUT the administration botched its opportunity to trap Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants in the rugged White Mountains of eastern Afghanistan.

The Iraq War was the result of a long-running, ideological obsession on the part of a determined and influential coterie of neo-conservatives within the administration. The war was sold to Congress and the American people through a combination of misreading intelligence and willful dissembling. The woeful planning for the invasion and occupation of Iraq relied on a series of faulty assumptions, including that Iraqis would welcome Americans with open arms as liberators, rather than invaders. As Iraq teetered at the brink of anarchy, Bush engaged in a public relations stunt, landing on the deck of an aircraft carrier to be photographed against the background of a banner with the patently false assertion, “Mission Accomplished.”

Bush appointed Michael Brown, who lacked the requisite expertise, to head the Federal Emergency Management Agency. A videotape of Bush being briefed the day before the Hurricane Katrina disaster portrayed a passive chief executive who didn’t ask a single question, even though federal emergency officials had been warning for days that catastrophe was possible. The president was oblivious enough to casually assert in the fateful days immediately following the disaster that Brown was “doing a heck of a job,” while Americans were shocked at the images of their fellow citizens stranded helplessly on rooftops, pleading for help that was slow to arrive.

He institutionalized the use of torture by the United States, degrading the nation’s moral standing while quite possibly violating both federal and international law.

FINALLY, Bush was asleep at the switch as the nation’s economic well-being was gambled away on a housing bubble built on bad mortgages. The administration’s response since has been uncertain and ineffective, to say the least.

So it is that this Inauguration Day is anticipated with as much relief as anticipation. An exhausted nation is desperate to regroup under new leadership.

We don’t doubt the quality of Bush’s heart in his public service. But, really, don’t let the door bump you as you leave, Mr. President.

I have to be perfectly honest here. I have no idea what to expect when Barack Obama takes the oath of office on January 20, 2009. But I will say this: this country is about to experience an extraordinary event. An Obama presidency will be significant not for any of his policies or accomplishments, but because of who he is.

An Obama White House is significant because he is the first president of a new generation. No longer will we have any presidents who fought in World War II or Vietnam. Obama was born in 1961. He's a 1970's kid. He grew up watching the same crap on television that I watched, and he listened to the same music. Growing up in a different era makes you a different person. There is a 15 year difference between George W. Bush (born in 1946) and Barack Obama (born in 1961). The generation gap is going to be noticeable from the outset. for one thing, Obama grew up in a time when his generation did not worship war.

When Obama was a kid, he probably never imagined that he would someday become president. He probably never thought he would enter politics. That was not the life for a black kid. As Obama began his childhood in the 1960s, this country was still profoundly racist, so much so that when President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the 1964 Civil Rights Act, he told his assistants that he was signing away the south for good. What he meant was that this law, which gave equal rights to blacks across the board, would create such a backlash in the southern states that they would all vote Republican from that point forward. And that is what happened. The Democratic stronghold in the south turned over almost immediately. When Johnson sought re-election that year against Barry Goldwater, the southern states for the first time in eons voted Republican. Johnson won that election in a landslide, but Republican strategists realized the significance of the southern Republican sweep. The Southern Strategy was born, and the Republican Party built itself back to power on the white backlash, regaining the presidency in 1968.

It will be hard for people my age to appreciate the significance of an Obama presidency in this light, but for people who grew up in a time when blacks had no rights at all and were treated as second-class citizens, it will be a shock to see him take the oath of office on January 20, 2009. My generation grew up with diversity programs and equal rights. Older generations will always have as their frame of reference the white backlash against civil rights. Even if older Americans have overcome the racism of their generation, I have the sense that January 20 will be a special day for them.

For liberals and leftists of my generation, however, an Obama presidency will mean something else. An intelligent president, and someone who is not inherently corrupt or venal. The 1968 presidency went to Richard Nixon, who resigned six years later as the Watergate scandal revealed his administration for what it was: a criminal enterprise, where the president spent much of his time plotting against his enemies. Watergate ushered in presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, who were not corrupt in the general sense of the word in that they did not take bribes or lie this country into war. But 1980 brought us Ronald Reagan, a vile man who promoted an authoritarian and violent foreign policy and redistributed income towards the wealthy, a policy that remains with us to this day. Reagan should have been impeached after the Iran-contra scandal revealed that his administration was sending money to a terrorist army in Nicaragua in violation of American law. He was replaced in 1989 by George H.W. Bush, the father of the current president, a little man who extended the Reagan administration by another four years and rejoiced in promoting more violence around the world, particularly in Panama and Iraq as he held firm in the belief that a successful presidency is one that wins a few wars.

When I voted in 1992 for Bill Clinton, most people I knew felt good about it. Clinton was not a Republican and he was a baby-boomer who did not hate black people and came of age through the 1960's. But no one had any illusions about Clinton. He was a centrist, and he seemed to go out of his way to accommodate Republican ideas. That's how he got re-elected in 1996. Even Clinton's most ardent defenders, though, admit that he fudged the truth, which got him impeached in 1998. Clinton was not as bad as Reagan and Nixon, and his lies were about sex, not war and peace, but the backlash helped bring George W. Bush to the presidency in 2000.

Contrast George W. Bush with Barack Obama. George W. is an imbecile, an incurious man who has no capacity for self-reflection and carries with him the macho bullshit approach that refuses to admit mistakes and kills over 4,000 American soldiers who died fighting Bush's illegal war in Iraq which rages on in its sixth year as of March 2009. Here is what some of Bush's former associates say about him now in an oral history published recently by Vanity Fair magazine:

Lawrence Wilkerson, top aide and later chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell: We had this confluence of characters—and I use that term very carefully—that included people like Powell, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice, and so forth, which allowed one perception to be “the dream team.” It allowed everybody to believe that this Sarah Palin–like president—because, let’s face it, that’s what he was—was going to be protected by this national-security elite, tested in the cauldrons of fire. What in effect happened was that a very astute, probably the most astute, bureaucratic entrepreneur I’ve ever run into in my life became the vice president of the United States.

He became vice president well before George Bush picked him. And he began to manipulate things from that point on, knowing that he was going to be able to convince this guy to pick him, knowing that he was then going to be able to wade into the vacuums that existed around George Bush—personality vacuum, character vacuum, details vacuum, experience vacuum.

Richard Clarke, chief White House counterterrorism adviser: We had a couple of meetings with the president, and there were detailed discussions and briefings on cyber-security and often terrorism, and on a classified program. With the cyber-security meeting, he seemed—I was disturbed because he seemed to be trying to impress us, the people who were briefing him. It was as though he wanted these experts, these White House staff guys who had been around for a long time before he got there—didn’t want them buying the rumor that he wasn’t too bright. He was trying—sort of overly trying—to show that he could ask good questions, and kind of yukking it up with Cheney.

The contrast with having briefed his father and Clinton and Gore was so marked. And to be told, frankly, early in the administration, by Condi Rice and [her deputy] Steve Hadley, you know, Don’t give the president a lot of long memos, he’s not a big reader—well, shit. I mean, the president of the United States is not a big reader?

Richard Clarke: That night, on 9/11, Rumsfeld came over and the others, and the president finally got back, and we had a meeting. And Rumsfeld said, You know, we’ve got to do Iraq, and everyone looked at him—at least I looked at him and Powell looked at him—like, What the hell are you talking about? And he said—I’ll never forget this—There just aren’t enough targets in Afghanistan. We need to bomb something else to prove that we’re, you know, big and strong and not going to be pushed around by these kind of attacks.

And I made the point certainly that night, and I think Powell acknowledged it, that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. That didn’t seem to faze Rumsfeld in the least.

It shouldn’t have come as a surprise. It really didn’t, because from the first weeks of the administration they were talking about Iraq. I just found it a little disgusting that they were talking about it while the bodies were still burning in the Pentagon and at the World Trade Center.

This is a long oral history, with the usual nonsense from Bush admirers about his firm leadership. The excerpts above are from people far more substantial than some press spokesman, however. The consensus among people who are really paying attention is that Bush was in way over his head as president. Bush is an idiot. Don't believe that garbage that he is stupid like a fox. He is just stupid, and we will be paying the price for the Bush presidency for the rest of our lives.

What makes an Obama presidency significant is the stark contrast between Bush and Obama. Prior presidential transitions were much more seamless. Nixon led to Ford led to Carter, followed by Reagan, then Bush I then Clinton. These people had more in common than we think. Each was an establishment man who worked his way through the system in predictable ways. Obama seems different. A lot smarter than Bush, not corrupt as far as anyone can reasonably tell, and intent on picking up the pieces. That's good enough for me.

No one thinks that he's the terrorist. The terrorist is always someone else. That's what happening these days, with Dick Cheney giving his farewell tour on the television news shows. He is brazenly defending the actions of the Bush administration, specifically, its policies on war and torture. He's lucky no one is going to serve him with a criminal warrant on the day he leaves office.

We don't associate terrorism with American policy. For that reason, terrorism is the most loaded word in the English language. They do it, not us. But that's silly. If human nature is what it is, and if terrorism is defined as politically-motivated violence, then terrorism is rampant all around the world, and there are terrorists among us. Like in Washington, which consistently maintains a violent foreign policy in violation of international law.

Portrait of a terrorist

Dick Cheney has been a bad guy for many years. I make it a point to read every good non-fiction book that comes out, particularly books on recent American history. As you read about American history from the Nixon administration to the present, there is one name that pops up regularly: Dick Cheney. He worked for the Nixon regime, a criminal enterprise by any definition. He hung around when Gerald Ford became president upon Nixon's resignation in 1974. Cheney never liked how the presidency lost presige and power as a result of post-Watergate reforms, and when he became a Congressman in the 1980's he defended President Reagan's illegal foreign policy when it erupted in scandal, the Iran-contra affair. After Reagan was caught trading weapons to Iranian terrorists in order to release American hostages and using the profits to finance the terrorist contras in Nicaragua in violation of American law, Cheney defended the practice and said that Congress had taken on too much authority in regulating foreign affairs. Cheney then became George H.W. Bush's Secretary of Defense, presiding over the invasion of Panama and the first Gulf War, military actions which killed thousands and proceeded on the basis of very flimsy justifications.

When Cheney became vice president in the Bush administration, astute political observers knew that he would be calling the shots, since George W. Bush had no experience on the national stage and knew nothing about foreign affairs. It was Cheney who forcefully pushed for war in Iraq and promoted the use of waterboarding and other forms of torture against prisoners captured in the war on terror.

There is no way to comment on Cheney's recent comments defending the use of torture. His words say it all. Here is a summary from ThinkProgress.org:

In an interview earlier this week, Vice President Cheney admitted to personally approving the torture of high-profile detainees. In a new interview with the Washington Times, Cheney stridently defended the Bush administration’s torture policies, saying, “I feel very good about what we did. I think it was the right thing to do.” He added emphatically that he would “do exactly the same thing again.”

Most audaciously, Cheney specifically defended the morality of torture, suggesting that it would have been immoral for the United States to not torture:

“In my mind, the foremost obligation we had from a moral or an ethical standpoint was to the oath of office we took when we were sworn in, on January 20 of 2001, to protect and defend against all enemies foreign and domestic. And that’s what we’ve done,” he said. […]

“I think it would have been unethical or immoral for us not to do everything we could in order to protect the nation against further attacks like what happened on 9/11,” Mr. Cheney said.

Cheney insisted that the torture policies he helped craft were “directly responsible for the fact that we’ve been able to avoid or defeat further attacks against the homeland for 7 1/2 years.”

Torture has endangered, not protected, American lives. Military experts say that the U.S.’s torture policies have been the single greatest recruiting tool for al Qaeda. A former interrogator who worked in Iraq stated unequivocally, “The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001.”

Rather than keeping us safe, former FBI special agent Jack Cloonan warned that Cheney’s torture policies will lead directly to another domestic terrorist attack:

Based on my experience in talking to Al Qaida members, I am persuaded that revenge in the form of a catastrophic attack on the homeland is coming; that a new generation of jihadist martyrs, motivated in part by the images from Abu Ghraib, is, as we speak, planning to kill Americans; and that nothing gleaned from the use of coercive interrogation techniques will be of any significant use in forestalling this calamitous eventuality.

The piece at Think Progress has links the original sources and articles to back up the commentary. More here. Many of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo were found guilty of nothing and therefore sent back to their native lands with a new hatred for the United States. Torture probably reveals very little in the way of usable intelligence because people will say anything to stop the agony. Then investigators have to double-check what the prisoners say under duress and these leads often produce nothing useful while wasting the valuable time of American intelligence officials.

Historians will look back at the Bush administration with horror and scorn at an infantile president and his malicious vice president. Historians will correct the current lie now being pushed by Bush and his defenders: that the U.S. did not suffer any terrorist attacks during the Bush administration. September 11 happened on Bush's watch, and there are websites galore which document how the administration was grossly negligent in dealing with red alert threats. Just Google "August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing" to see what I mean. Invading a sovereign nation without any justification, killing thousands in the process, won't go over too well with future historians, especially as they and their kids will have to keep paying the bill, totalling hundreds of hundreds of billions of dollars.

There will be many celebrations when Bush leaves the White House on January 20, 2009. I will be among the celebrators. But don't forget the terrorist who will be taking out the garbage with Bush. May Dick Cheney live out the rest of his life coming to terms with the terror and violence that happened on his watch. May his sleepness nights and night-frights dwarf those of the victims of his heinous war policies.

One of the things I learned in college while taking a course about Latin American revolutions is that desperate people do things that no one else would otherwise do, such as take up arms and storm the halls of power. The other thing that I learned was that journalists have to be objective in reporting the news. So what does a desperate journalist do? He throws a shoe at the President of the United States.

For my money, the You Tube video of the year is the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at President Bush who came to Iraq one last time to proclaim that freedom is on the march. Iraq is anything but a success story. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died in "Operation Iraqi Freedom," and that country has been decimated after 5+ years of unjustified war. In Iraq, throwing a shoe is a sign of craven disrespect. The angry journalist not only threw one shoe: he threw both shoes. And his throwing arm is outstanding. Had President Bush not ducked, it would have been a direct hit.

Shoe throwing is not a pastime in the United States, probably because once you throw your shoe, you can't get it back, and you need your shoes to walk around in. The best place to throw your shoes is indoors, where the shoe can be retrieved. So far as I can tell, no one has made the connection between the Iraq shoe-thrower and any shoe-throwers in the United States, but there is in fact a real connection.

In 2004, filmmaker Michael Moore tried to derail Bush's re-election campaign with Fahrenheit 911, a provocative movie about Bush's lies and prevarications in Iraq and Afghanistan. The movie was all right, though it could have been updated every week. I am not sure if the movie covered waterboarding and other forms of torture, but it sure made Bush out to be an incompetent dolt. The final scene showed Bush mangling the cliche, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." Bush said, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice . . . uh, You can't get fooled agan." Bush couldn't even get his cliches right.

When the media covered the movie as a political event, it noted that moviegoers shouted at the screen. Where I saw the movie, at the Rosendale Theatre in upstate New York, we all walked out of the movie house as if we had just gone to a funeral. We quietly filed out of the building and went to our cars and drove home with somber facial expressions. No one said a word.

But at one movie house, I recall reading, an older moviegoer did as the Iraqi journalist did. After Bush mangled the cliche, he took off his shoe and threw it at the movie screen. And according to Michael Moore himself, "A man in San Francisco took his shoe off and threw it at the screen when Bush appeared at the end. "This was more common than I thought, though, because a Google search references shoe-throwing as an aside, as if it were happening all over the place:

It’s been suggested that F 9/11 is a triumph of form over content-but that’s being generous. In MM’s film, mood and emotion trump both form and content. Its flourishes of detail conspire to build fervour and indignation. It’s an indelicate film-brash, wide-hipped and blustering. Like Moore. That’s why people throw shoes at the screen, weep aloud, can’t lift themselves from their seats when the credits roll. Viewed from whatever side of the fence, F 9/11 denies audiences the luxury of indifference.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the Bush administration's efforts to pass new rules on its way out the door that would serve as gifts to American industry. These rules govern public health and safety, the kind of rules which truly affect all of us, as opposed to high profile matters like the death penalty, which have strong moral implications but which also affect relatively few people (unless you kill someone in a state that recognizes the death penalty).

There is a secret government which affects all of us. This secret government may very well determine who lives and who dies, and who stays healthy and who suffers for years to come. This is not the secret government of conspiracy theorists, but the real branch of government known as the administrative state. In many ways, the administrative agencies which regulate American industry affect our lives more closely than any other branch of government. And we know very little about it, not because it operates in secret, but because no one knows to pay attention.

Here's the story, on the front page of the New York Times over the weekend. It was news in the Times, but it will be pushed aside very quickly. It's not sexy enough.

The Labor Department is racing to complete a new rule, strenuously opposed by President-elect Barack Obama, that would make it much harder for the government to regulate toxic substances and hazardous chemicals to which workers are exposed on the job.

The rule, which has strong support from business groups, says that in assessing the risk from a particular substance, federal agencies should gather and analyze “industry-by-industry evidence” of employees’ exposure to it during their working lives. The proposal would, in many cases, add a step to the lengthy process of developing standards to protect workers’ health.

Public health officials and labor unions said the rule would delay needed protections for workers, resulting in additional deaths and illnesses.

. . .

The Labor Department proposal is one of about 20 highly contentious rules the Bush administration is planning to issue in its final weeks. The rules deal with issues as diverse as abortion, auto safety and the environment.

One rule would make it easier to build power plants near national parks and wilderness areas. Another would reduce the role of federal wildlife scientists in deciding whether dams, highways and other projects pose a threat to endangered species.

. . .

A new president can unilaterally reverse executive orders issued by his predecessors, as Mr. Bush and President Bill Clinton did in selected cases. But it is much more difficult for a new president to revoke or alter final regulations put in place by a predecessor. A new administration must solicit public comment and supply “a reasoned analysis” for such changes, as if it were issuing a new rule, the Supreme Court has said.

Here's how it all works. The Congress passes laws, and the President signs those bills into law. We all learned this in school. But who enforces the laws? The President does. But not him personally. The administration enforces the laws. The President is too busy giving speeches and focusing on two or three policy matters at a time. That's where the federal agencies come into play. They enforce the laws. There are many such agencies, like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Education. The laws they have to implement are often vague and open-ended, and the agencies therefore issue rules that allow the agency employees (bureaucrats) to actually do their work in enforcing the laws.

With me so far? The agencies issue rules that are supposed to be consistent with the laws they have to enforce. But the Supreme Court has given these agencies substantial leeway in drafting rules so long as they are not totally inconsistent with the plain language of the laws. This is because we assume that the people drafting the rules and regulations are experts and they know what they are doing.

None of this is done in secret. The agencies propose new rules by publishing them in something called the Federal Register, a booklet that the government issues regularly. Few of us care about the Federal Register, but lobbyists care. This includes the business lobby, the environmental lobby and other interest groups. They look forward to the next Federal Register the same way that everyone else looks forward to the morning paper. Once a proposed regulation is listed in the Federal Register, the government accepts public comment on the rule, but again, it's the lobbyists who provide that comment.

The agencies are not required to actually listen to the public comments. But in theory they could, and that is why the comments are solicited. Then the government can say that it took into consideration the views of the Sierra Club when it proceeds to build a power plan near a river with endangered species. After the public comment period closes, the agency can adopt the proposed rule and it goes into the Code of Federal Regulations. At that point, the regulations have the force of law.

In early 2007, the New York Times reported that, for the first time, a Presidential administration would have political appointees supervise the regulatory process in the federal agencies. This should have been big news. Politics should not have any place in neutral rule-making on health and safety issues. But the story came and went.

What this all means is that while we scream and yell about social issues like abortion and the Pledge of Allegience, regulations are being issued which govern clean air, clean water and workplace safety. The Bush administration knows that once regulations are enacted, they are difficult to overturn, because the next administration has to undergo a lengthy process to that end. It's a hell of a way to enact your policies, but it's Christmas shopping season and everyone's excited about the incoming Obama administration so, really, who gives a damn if the new regulations make it more difficult to ensure workplace safety?

It has happened. American society has collapsed. We know that the American econony demands a healthy Christmas shopping season in order for the economy to stay afloat. That's whey they call it Black Friday. Stores go into the financial black on the day after Thanksgiving, when the month-long shopping season begins in earnest. At lot of crap is sold during the month of December, and bargains galore bring out the shoppers at 5:00 a.m. when the doors open the day after Thanksgiving.

American society collapsed on Long Island a few days ago, when a Wal-Mart worker was killed after customers crashed through the front doors to get their hands on the very expensive television sets and other electronic goodies that the store sold at a great discount for Black Friday.

Let's go the source: Newsday, the daily paper on Long Island, which usually tries to stand above the fray as one of the more literate newspapers in the country:

A stampede of shoppers in a Valley Stream Wal-Mart on Friday morning left one worker dead and at least three patrons injured after an impatient crowd broke down the store doors and trampled the seasonal employee, Nassau police said.

Jdimytai Damour of Jamaica, Queens, was pushed to the ground by the 2,000-plus crowd just before 5 a.m. as management was preparing to open the store, which is located across from the main Green Acres Mall building. Hundreds stepped over, around and on the 34-year-old worker as they rushed into the store.

"This crowd was out of control," said Nassau Police Det. Lt. Michael Fleming, whose squad is investigating.

"Nobody was trying to help him," said shopper Nakea Augustine, who was in the line. "They were rushing in the store, rushing, rushing, rushing."

. . .

As part of its Black Friday promotion, Wal-Mart had advertised sales like a Polaroid 42-inch LCD HDTV for $598 and a DVD of "Rush Hour 2" for $2 - prices valid only from 5 a.m. to 11 a.m. on Friday morning

. . .

Amid the chaos in Valley Stream, shoppers were asked to leave by other store workers, some of them crying, said Cribbs. Others ignored the pleas that they stop shopping, move to the front of the store and exit, she said. "They kept shopping. It's not right," Cribbs said.

The incident began when people who had gathered well before 5 a.m. in the rear of the line began pushing, cascading the people in the front into the sliding supermarket-type doors, which were literally knocked off their hinges, Fleming said

. . .

Frightened employees initially used the doors as makeshift shields to defend against the onslaught of shoppers, she said.

What a way to die. This story really says it all. Shoppers rammed the doors down and trampled a worker, probably a guy working for minimum wage. Shoppers protested when the store tried to restore order, and with the body still warm they ran all over the store at 5:00 a.m. looking for bargains the way that rats invade the resturant kitchen at night.

There is not much in the way research into the Christmas shopping culture. It really defines us a nation. First, you have to buy Christmas presents for everyone around you, particularly family and close friends. If you don't, you are a pariah and a degenerate. There are many people to shop for, and the looks on the faces of people at the mall reflect terror and fear that there is not enough time or money to shop for everyone.

Second, the economy absolutely requires a healthy Christmas shopping season. Every single television commerical from Thanksgiving until December 24 is a Christmas commercial. This is American capitalism. If people are not buying these items during the year, then they probably don't need them. They are buying them during Chrismas shopping season because they are told to do so. If Christmas did not exist, we would have to invent a holiday like it.

In the early 1970's, the Supreme Court heard a case about an anti-war protester who walked through a courthouse wearing a jacket that said "Fuck the Draft." When the Supreme Court heard oral argument on whether the protester had the First Amendment right to do this, his lawyer was told not to use the word "fuck" in addressing the Supreme Court justices, who came from an older generation that did not throw around four-letter words in mixed company. But the lawyer thought he had no choice but to say "fuck" in the ornate courthouse that is the symbol of American justice. He figured that it would hurt the case if he was afraid to say it when it counted most. He made the stuffy Chief Justice angry, but the lawyer won the case, and today Cohen v. California is a landmark free-speech case, known for its logic that "one man's vulgarity is another's lyric."

The word Fuck is again before the Supreme Court, which heard argument a few weeks ago on whether the FCC can penalize TV stations when foul language makes it past the censors on live broadcasts. We are not talking about sitcom scripts or movie dialogue but programs like awards ceremonies when superstars who can't control themselves say Fuck or Shit on live TV. We call that the "fleeting expletive."

The Court heard the case on Election Day, an interesting coincidence. I have noted that this year's presidential election has enormous consequences for the Supreme Court because some of the justices are nearing retirement and President Obama may have a chance to appoint two or three replacements. Change is near, and not just in the potential changes on the Court. According to a website that tracks Supreme Court activity, in the fleeting expletives case, "The court stenographer’s report indicates that 'F-word' appears in the transcript 16 times; that 'F-bomb' appears once, and that 'S-word’ was spoken six times." What caused the Supreme Court to blush in 1971 barely raises an eyebrow today, except that you still can't say Fuck in court. Saying the "F-word" is enough.

I am not just being a smart-ass here. It's not 1971 anymore. Television was broadly regulated for decades because it was the only game in town, and there were few TV airwaves, so the government had some leeway to regulate content, particularly vulgarities. We have all heard of George Carlin's "Seven Dirty Words You Can't Say on Television." We celebrate Carlin's wit and wisdom. But when the Supreme Court heard whether the FCC could punish the radio station for running Carlin's vulgarities, the radio station lost the case even though the Court said that his words were not legally obscene. That's because radio airwaves are not the street corner. There are zillions of street corners, but very few radio airwaves, so the government can more easily regulate them, particularly when children are listening.

The "fleeting expletives" case stems from the following facts, courtesy of Supreme Court Wiki: at the 2002 Billboard Music Awards, "singer-actress Cher used 'the F-Word,'' and in 2003, "actress Nicole Richie used variations of that word and used the four-letter excrement word." At the Golden Globe Awards in 2003 on NBC, "rock singer Bono used a variation of 'the F-Word.'” As a result of these outrageous disgraces, the FCC announced that it can punish TV stations even a single four letter word on TV. The Supreme Court has to decide whether the rule against "fleeting expletives" is legal under the First Amendment, or whether, at a minimum, the FCC has to come up with a good reason for prohibiting these fleeting vulgarities.

Lets step back for a minute and take a look at what's going on. If network television is more carefully regulated than cable TV or satellite radio, the question is why? It's not the 1970's, anymore, when no one had cable and, if you did, you got about 15 cable channels. Now everyone has cable, hundreds of channels, and network TV and cable TV stations sit side-by-side. If the F-Word is thrown around on cable every three minutes, then what is the point in prohibiting it on network TV?

You don't need a foul mouth to appreciate my argument. The Constitution does not demand good taste. It demands common sense. The distinction between network TV and cable TV is non-existent. That normally is enough for the Supreme Court to say that regulating one entity is unfair if a comparable entity is not similarly regulated. I may be a dummy, but a quick Google search shows that a serious constitutional law professor agrees with me. Michael Dorf, Esq. writes: "The rationale for content-regulation of broadcast television and radio has long been the scarcity of electromagnetic spectrum: Government must divvy up the airwaves among broadcasters and so, the scarcity rationale goes, it can insist on their use in the public interest, which includes restrictions on profanity. The rationale was dubious when announced and has become laughable with the proliferation of cable, satellite, and internet alternatives to broadcast tv, all of which fall outside of the FCC's regulatory reach."

The Supreme Court will issue its ruling by June 2009.

What's it all mean? No one knows. People on my side of the political spectrum have never experienced this before. All we've known is failure and disappointment. I'm too young to remember Richard Nixon's resignation in 1974. That must have been euphoric: the fall of a White House criminal. It's been downhill ever since. Jimmy Carter generates no nostalgia, and Bill Clinton's election in 1992 was fine as far as it went, if only because he ousted the first President Bush, but Clinton was a moderate centrist who sold out his values each and every day.

The way we feel about the election of Barack Obama will stay with us for a long time. He is not a bullshitter like Bill Clinton. We know he sees the world the way that we do, but that through necessity he will have to make compromises to work within the system and to avoid over-reaching. But as I wrote a few weeks ago, we know this about Obama: he will not start any bullshit wars like Iraq, and even if he is merely adequate at appointing federal judges, any of his choices would be an improvement over George W. Bush, who remade the federal judiciary in his own image.

Much will be written about the meaning of Obama's victory. Let me talk about what it means to me. As a civil rights law and a student of American political history, there is nothing more important to me than the court system. It was the federal courts in the 1950s and 1960s which made this country free. It was the federal courts which breathed life into the Bill of Rights, expansively interpreting the First Amendment, the rules against unreasonable search and seizures, false arrest, racial justice and all the other values that truly separate this country from the despotic regime that Dick Cheney fantasizes about when he goes to sleep at night.

The president's most far-reaching legacy is the Supreme Court. His appointments will outlast his administration. These days, Supreme Court justices stay on the Court for at least 20 years, and advancements in physical health mean that some of them hang around will into their 80s. Richard Nixon may have fled the White House during the Watergate scandal in the mid-1970s, but he appointed four justices, including William Rehnquist, my all-time least favorite judge, who nearly always went the other way on civil and constitutional rights. Rehnquist's decisions will be with us long after we die, which means that the tentacles of Richard Nixon will always be strangling us and our grandchildren.

As it now stands, of the nine justices on the Supreme Court, only two were appointed by Democrats: Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, both Clinton appointees. They are not leftists, but intellectually honest center-liberals. Ginsburg is in her 70s, and I don't see her serving for another eight years. The two other liberals on the Court, John Paul Stevens and David Souter, are both Republican appointees who have a mind of their own and turned into wonderful judges who would sooner lay down in front of a John Deere tractor than allow for the erosion of civil liberties. That's more than I can say for Clarence Thomas, a terrible judge who has gone out of his way to offend liberals and advocates of constitutional freedoms. But John Paul Stevens is 88 years old. That's right, 88 years old. Souter reportedly doesn't like Washington and could retire at any time. Steven and Souter will leave before Clarence Thomas does.

John Paul Stevens. 88 year old liberal Justice who obviously cannot live forever.

Need a scorecard yet? We have four liberals on the Court. The other five are conservatives, and they are young enough to outlast two Obama terms in the White House. They were appointed by more ideological presidents who wanted right wingers on the Court for decades. They have succeeded. The conventional wisdom -- which I agree with -- is that we now have four liberals, four conservatives, and one center-right justice on the Court who usually sides with the conservatives but sometimes steps in when the conservatives go too far. I'm talking about Anthony Kennedy, who has cast the critical vote to uphold abortion rights, the rights of detainees at Guantanamo and same-sex sodomy. The conservatives on the Court have moved so far to the right that Kennedy now looks like a moderate.

Justice Anthony Kennedy. A Republican who sometimes does the right thing.

Do you see how fragile the current state of the Supreme Court is? Another Republican administration would have been the death knell for the advancement of civil rights. Most people do not pay attention to what the Court does, but Court-junkies know that the Supreme Court is the last bastion of civil rights and constitutional values in this country. That hangs in the balance as we speak.

The good news is that Obama and his Vice President, Joe Biden, will not allow for any Supreme Court shenanigans. I don't say this as a fawning fan. I say this because both Obama and Biden were constitutional law professors. They know how important the Supreme Court is, and I am certain they are already thinking about who they would appoint to the Court once a vacancy opens up. We call this intelligent governance, something that has not existed in this country for many years. Never before have constititutional law professors held the Presidency and Vice Presidency. Out society does not value intellectual thinking, but this is a momentous occasion, though it shouldn't surprise us. It's like having a civil engineer serve as highway superintendent in your hometown. Over the last eight years we had an arsonist serve as the fire chief.

People may not remember this, but in 1987 Joe Biden was the U.S. senator who spearheaded the rejection of Reagan nominee Robert Bork for the Supreme Court. Bork would have been a disaster: a right wing ideologue with neither the temperament nor the grace to serve on the Court. Biden deserves a medal for this victory. Now he's the Vice President. Some people wanted Hillary Clinton as Vice President. I wanted someone who scuttled the Bork nomination. Biden is a better choice than we think.

There are many things that give us hope as a result of this election. But hope is like potential: it hasn't reached fruition yet. I don't merely hope that Obama will save the Supreme Court. I know that he will do so. Allowing a constitutional law professor to pick Supreme Court justices is like allowing a baseball fanatic to select players for the Hall of Fame. They waited their whole life for that moment. Obama will not screw it up, I can assure you. It's the first thing that I thought about when the networks announced Obama's victory on Election night. It's the first thing I thought about when I woke up the morning after the election. It's an amazing feeling to know that everything is going to be all right. We have not felt this way for a very long time. And I, for one, will savor this moment.

The world will focus on the presidential race all weekend. It's an excellent time for the corrupt Bush administration to pull a last minute fast one on the American people. That is exactly what is happening. The administration can get away with this for two reasons. First, no one is paying attention. Second, no one really understands the process of administrative regulations.

There is a hidden government in American politics. Not hidden like the CIA or FBI, but hidden in that few of us even know about it or pay attention. It's the administrative process, where the federal agencies make rules and regulations that affect business, the environment, banking and other aspects of American society. While Congress passes laws which get much of the attention, rules and regulations that have the same force and effect as laws get enacted by the administrative bureaucracy. Congress does not pass these rules; the agencies in the Executive Branch of government does. That's the presidency.

I know this sounds boring as hell. But the rules and regulations that come out of the administrative bureaucracy make a difference in all of our lives. They are supposed to be crafted by experts who work in agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education and the Justice Department, to name a few of the more high-profile agencies. But there is always a political element to these rules, as they affect the very businesses which hire lobbyists to push their preferred rules and regulations along and sometimes even help write them. These rules are hard to overturn in the courts, which give the agencies the benefit of the doubt in crafting them.

Work done by the administrative agencies is where the government really rolls up its sleeves. It's where the action really is. Since it's done quietly and only policy wonks pay attention to these agencies, they basically can do what they want. Now that no one is paying attention, the Bush administration is taking advantage of the obscurity of this very important process and kicking out some important but dangerous new rules that affect the issues we care about: the environment in particular.

According to Friday's New York Times (quoting the Washington Post):

A rule put forward by the National Marine Fisheries Service and now under final review by the Office of Management and Budget would lift a requirement that environmental impact statements be prepared for certain fisheries-management decisions and would give review authority to regional councils dominated by commercial and recreational fishing interests.

…

Two other rules nearing completion would ease limits on pollution from power plants, a major energy industry goal for the past eight years that is strenuously opposed by Democratic lawmakers and environmental groups.

One rule, being pursued over some opposition within the Environmental Protection Agency, would allow current emissions at a power plant to match the highest levels produced by that plant, overturning a rule that more strictly limits such emission increases. According to the E.P.A.’s estimate, it would allow millions of tons of additional carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually, worsening global warming.

A related regulation would ease limits on emissions from coal-fired power plants near national parks.

A third rule would allow increased emissions from oil refineries, chemical factories and other industrial plants with complex manufacturing operations.

See how important this stuff is? But can you see how the media and popular culture doesn't pay attention? While the rest of us are complaining about bullshit like presidential gaffes and Sarah Palin's eyeglasses and respect for the American flag, the real business of government is taking place right under our noses. We call these last minute rules "Midnight Regulations." The title speaks for itself.

Now for the invective. God-damn the Bush administration for doing this. The Bush administration has done everything in its power to destroy this country, from the economy to national security to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to the lies and the torture and Hurricane Katrina and every other area that I can think of. On its way out the door, it drops a massive Christmas gift to its biggest constituency, big business and the anti-environmental interests which profit by destroying the environment for profit. I see very little commentary on this, but I did find the House of Representatives (run by Democrats) have objected. Dragging the country through the shit-pile one more time is only natural for the criminals who have tore apart this country brick by brick since the day they took office.

This country is on the verge of something extraordinary. There is a very good chance that Barack Obama will be elected President. Unknown only a few years ago, he is about to shatter the last true bastion of racism in the United States: the presidency. An Obama victory would be jarring to the extreme right wing which has gone to war on American values ever since Ronald Reagan became President in 1981. They will try to destroy him. But the focused campaign that took Obama this far will, I hope, repel the bullshit that the American right wing got away with in the 1990's, when its war against Bill Clinton resulted in his impeachment in 1998.

I have been obsessed with the public opinion polls for this election for about six weeks, ever since Obama began breaking away from McCain. Obama began pulling away in key states, and the projected electoral vote has favored Obama ever since. The excitement is not that Obama will change the world or reverse all of the disasterous consequences of the Bush presidency. But in certain areas, you can be sure that things will be different.

Before I talk about the good stuff that awaits if Obama takes the White House, let's review the last eight years. Many investigative journalists and writers have documented the absolute disgrace that has been the Bush administration. We will be picking up the pieces for years. The economy is in a shambles. We are fighting two wars without end. One war, Iraq, was a war of choice, comparable to a high school student breaking into a kindergarten to kick the shit out of five year olds and declaring victory. Except that the Iraq war goes beyond bullying. It is costing this country 10 billion dollars per month. That money has been flushd down the toilet at a time when we desparately need it. For this reason alone, Bush should be condemned in the harshest of terms. Elect a madman, and you get madness.

The war in Iraq is the tip of the iceberg. Torture of prisoners in the "war on terror" in violation of international law. Wiretaps without court warrants, in violation of U.S. law. Conservative judges who narrowly interpret civil rights, issuing precedents that will remain "good law" for decades. Obsessive secrecy managed by an autocratic vice president, Dick Cheney. Deregulation of American industry at the expense of health and safety. Accelerated gap between rich and poor. Irreversible damage to the environment through neglect and denial, including global warming which will leave our children and grandchildren a very different world. All of us have our own pet issues of importance which were manhandled by the Bush administration.

What a difference an Obama presidency would be. Bush is an anti-intellectual and religious zealot who governs from his gut and cannot admit to any mistakes. Obama was a constitutional law professor. That's night and day, like eating out of the dumpster compared with the finest resturant in Italy. Obama will not be able to pick up all the pieces if he takes office. But I can guarantee that his administration will accomplish the following:

1. He will save the U.S. Supreme Court from permanent right wing domination. Right now, the Court leans conservative, but it remains only one vote (out of nine) from radical conservativism, including narrow interpretations of our civil and constitutional rights, strong support for Presidential power in waging war and other policies and favoritism toward the most powerful elements in American society, including big business, the military and the war-makers. Obama can appoint merely average or competent judges to the Supreme Court and it will be an improvement over anyone that a Republican President would appoint. I can guarantee this. For many of us, the Federal courts will be the first thing we think about if we wake up the day after Election Day to hear about an Obama victory.

2. He will do something about global warming, the single most important issue that mankind will ever face, in my view. Rampant consumerism and corporatism in this country and autocratic governance around the world is destroying the only planet that gives us life. The Bush administration maintained a catastrophic approach to global warming. It ignored the problem, censoring government documents which outlined the problem and consistently citing the need for jobs and economic growth as an excuse to piss in the river. I seriously doubt Obama will continue with this approach.

3. There will be no more Iraq wars. This war is built on lies, deception and arrogance, leaving in its wake hundreds of billions of dollars in the toilet, four thousand American deaths and God knows how many hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths that land squarely at the feet of an anti-intellectual and macho Bush administration. All of the war makers from the administration should be immediately charged with war crimes on January 21, 2009. Obama probably feels this way. Normal people do not want to commit war crimes. Obama is one of them. No more Iraq wars.

4. An Obama victory may also mean that we are moving away from the thoughtless, anti-intellectual policies and approaches that have torn this country apart for the past 40 years, ever since the backlash against civil rights and anti-war activity grabbed hold over American politics and gave us the criminals in the Nixon administration, elected in 1968 on the strength of an electorate that did not want to think its way through any of our problems. John McCain is not idiot, but he ran his campaign like one, attempting to divert the attention of the American voter with bullshit about Obama's associations and a beauty queen running mate with the intelligence of a handball. Sarah Palin is a major drag on the McCain ticket, polls say, and that's a good thing. Maybe we can't afford that kind of distraction when the U.S. economy has reached the unthinkable and proverbial rock bottom.

I harbor no illusions that an Obama presidency would right all the wrongs. The office of the Presidency turns each President into a loathsome creature solely on the basis of the horrible corporate policies that each President must adhere to in order to remain in power. It may be that the current economic crisis will create a new paradigm that will force Obama and the Congress to move our economic and political policies in a different direction. This has happened once before, during the 1930s, when the Great Depression forced President Roosevelt to enact policies that would guarantee fair wages and other policies that brought this country out of the stone age. We have to hope for the best. Out of something horrendous can come something new and better. I'd much rather see Obama navigate us through those changes than McCain and his dingbat running mate.

The two weeks leading up to a presidential election are the longest two weeks in politics. This time around, it'll be no different. Although Barack Obama is leading in the polls and is carrying over 300 electoral votes (you need 270 to win), no one is breathing easy. In my view, this is because the Republican Party is capable of pulling anything, ANYTHING, to insure victory in November.

John McCain is a candidate without any real issues. Sure, he has some kind of economic plan and a health plan to speak of, but that's not his focus. His focus is attacking Obama in ways that take advantage of the ignorance of the American people and suggest that Obama is not like the rest of us.

First, as Josh Marshall points out at Talking Points Memo, "McCain himself and his top handful of advisers[] are banking on the residual racism in a changing America to get them over the finish line. The second is an aggressive use of innuendo to convince casual voters that Obama is in league with Islamic terrorists bent on killing Americans. How is McCain doing this? Marshall points something out that I could not put my finger on all this time that McCain has vigorously tried to associate Obama with a former Weather Underground radical who participated in violence against American institutions during the early 1970's but is today a respected college professor in Chicago. McCain is playing to our post 9/11 fears by using the Bill Ayers connection to associate Obama with terrorism.

Marshall writes:

Many people have asked whether enough Americans really care any more about the cultural convulsions of the 1960s. The answer? It doesn't matter. For the McCain campaign, Bill Ayers has nothing to do with 60s radicalism. Ayers is nothing more than a tool that permits McCain, Palin and all their surrogates to use the noun "terrorist" in polite company in the same sentence as "Obama," over and over and over again. It allows them to cobble together a 'respectable' version of those Obama smear emails they can push in commercials and robocalls and surrogate talking points every hour of every day.

Stripped down to its components McCain's message to voters is this: "Don't forget. He's definitely black. And he may be a terrorist." That's the message. The nuts and bolts is a concerted effort to keep Democrats from voting -- through intimidation, by striking new voters from the rolls, which is going to happen to lots of them, clogging polling stations to create delays that keep late day (predominantly) Obama voters from voting altogether. Smears in the air and voter suppression on the ground.

That hits the nail on the head. McCain said at last week's debate that he doesn't care about "some washed up terrorist" and that his real focus is why Obama hasn't told the truth about his (attenuated) relationship with Ayers. McCain's contradictory strategy makes perfect sense now. It's an excuse to link Barack Hussein Obama with terrorism, even if it's a different kind of terrorism that most of us think about, i.e., domestic terrorism that took place over 35 years ago.

There's another angle to the strident McCain effort to drag Obama through the mudpile. It's McCain's own associations. But no one knows or cares about them. Yet, they exist. I have written about McCain's reliance on Henry Kissinger's foreign policy advice during this campaign.
Kissinger was a terrorist by any definition. He was President Nixon's chief foreign policy advisor and as Secretary of State and National Security Advisor he orchestrated the Vietnam war and other international horrors that investigative journalists are still trying to untangle today. But who remembers Kissinger? Many Americans were not even alive when Kissinger last held public office. Kissinger is not an issue.

Thanks to David Letterman, however, this late night comic (of all people) brought up another comparable McCain association: G. Gordon Liddy. Liddy is a very dangerous man who actually carried out the crimes of the Nixon administration in the course of intimidating political opponents. Liddy went to jail for this. Letterman asked McCain about Liddy, and McCain gave a lame answer and was clearly unconfortable. McCain showed the face of a pathetic man who got caught in a major contradiction. There is no difference between Ayers and Liddy. Yet, McCain is getting away with the outrageous Ayers connection. Cheers to Letterman, who called out McCain on this issue in a manner that no investigative journalist that I am aware of has attempted.

The effect of McCain's attempt to link Obama with terrorism has produced some very ugly video footage from McCain campaign rallies. But here is some footage OUTSIDE a McCain campaign rally that is quite unsettling. It's hard to imagine that we all live the same country as the idiots and racists who openly spoke up on videotape. Take a look at the ass with the Obama monkey.

The outrageous disgrace that is the McCain campaign for the presidency is reaching new lows. Anyone who pays attention to the media these days knows that McCain campain rallies are turning into hate rallies, as the candidate is often formally introduced by a guy who refers to "Barack Hussein Obama," and the audience shouts out physical threats to Obama and calls him a terrorist. McCain had to calm down some supporters last week when someone in the audience called Obama an Arab and someone else said he was afraid to bring his unborn child into Obama's America.

In 2000, McCain ran against George W. Bush in the Republican primaries. Bush won the critical South Carolina primary after anonymous allegations surfaced that McCain had fathered a black child out of wedlock. In fact, McCain had adopted a girl from Africa. Many thought this racist campain tactic bore the fingerprints of Bush campain wizard Karl Rove. McCain was probably ready to strangle Bush for this nonsense, and the word on the street was that McCain had little use for Bush after the 2000 election and contemplated joining the Democratic Party.

That was the old McCain. The new McCain is a disgrace. To himself and to his country. He nominated an imbecile for his Vice President, a woman who knows very little about policy and is nothing more than a cheerleader on the campaign trail, thoughtlessly making outrageous claims about Obama hanging around terrorists and claiming that Obama basically hates our way of life. She does not know what she is doing. No matter. The Republican rank and file loves her. God help us if the 72 year old cancer survivor McCain dies in office, and a dimwit even dumber than George W. Bush is sitting in the Oval Office. The rank and file that supports McCain and screams out threats at McCain rallies does not see this.

It is this rank and file that must lose this election. McCain, too, but really the rank and file. The campain and its supporters. An Obama victory would bring us into a new era. Many people thought this over the summer, but we did not what kind of hate the Obama candidacy would unleash. Now we are looking at a different consequence flowing from an Obama victory. It would not only bury the Bush legacy by punishing the Republican Party and its heir to Bush's throne, McCain, but also the forces of unbridled hate and ignorance that characterize the McCain campaign, top to bottom. I hold no fantasies that Obama would change the world. But he would symbolize a giant step forward from the ignorant views of his opponents. And that is good enough for me.