Can We Prosecute NOW?!?!?!

From the United Nations Special Rapporteur on counter terrorism and human rights, Ben Emmerson:

The summary of the Feinstein report which was released this afternoon confirms what the international community has long believed - that there was a clear policy orchestrated at a high level within the Bush administration, which allowed to commit systematic crimes and gross violations of international human rights law.

The identities of the perpetrators, and many other details, have been redacted in the published summary report but are known to the Select Committee and to those who provided the Committee with information on the programme.

It is now time to take action. The individuals responsible for the criminal conspiracy revealed in today’s report must be brought to justice, and must face criminal penalties commensurate with the gravity of their crimes.

Yes, but they believed they had the authority, right?  I mean the OLC drafted a memo or two saying it was OK, right?  I mean even if subsequent officials in charge decided the memos were less than valuable, at the time they believed their now-criminal actions to be OK, right?

And the president even gave the order to waterboard, so it must've been OK, right?

Uh, no.  From Emmerson, again:

The fact that the policies revealed in this report were authorised at a high level within the US Government provides no excuse whatsoever. Indeed, it reinforces the need for criminal accountability.

International law prohibits the granting of immunities to public officials who have engaged in acts of torture. This applies not only to the actual perpetrators but also to those senior officials within the US Government who devised, planned and authorised these crimes.

As a matter of international law, the US is legally obliged to bring those responsible to justice. The UN Convention Against Torture and the UN Convention on Enforced Disappearances require States to prosecute acts of torture and enforced disappearance where there is sufficient evidence to provide a reasonable prospect of conviction. States are not free to maintain or permit impunity for these grave crimes.

Furthermore, The President says:

The United States participated actively and effectively in the negotiation of the Convention. It marks a significant step in the development during this century of international measures against torture and other inhuman treatment or punishment. Ratification of the Convention by the United States will clearly express United States opposition to torture, an abhorrent practice unfortunately still prevalent in the world today.

The core provisions of the Convention establish a regime for international cooperation in the criminal prosecution of torturers relying on so-called "universal jurisdiction." Each State Party is required either to prosecute torturers who are found in its territory or to extradite them to other countries for prosecution.

Wait. Obama said THAT?!?

Um, no.  That would be President Ronald Reagan, when he signed the law in 1988.

Torture occurred.  We've known that for a while.  Reagan signed the UN Convention against torture that requires the prosecution of the torturers (both the people who did it and the people who ordered it).

For the sake of our stained national honor, for any claim to be a nation of laws, for any claim to be a beacon for all those who must have freedom, President Obama:

Prosecute the torturers.

This is your legacy, now.

Jack Kelly Sunday

I have assumed that the standard operating procedure for right wing pundits is to simply assert something as true and trust that few readers in the audience would bother to check the facts.

This assumption is not at all challenged by these paragraphs found in today's Jack Kelly column in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

We must intervene in the civil war in Syria because "if a thug and a murderer like Bashar al-Assad can gas thousands of his own people with impunity," it would set a bad example for others, Secretary of State John Kerry told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Tuesday.

Secretary Kerry's moral outrage would have been more moving if Sen. Kerry -- who met with the Syrian dictator six times and urged "engagement" with his regime -- hadn't said so many kind things about Mr. Assad in the recent past.

And Secretary Kerry's assertion that the use of chemical weapons justifies U.S. military intervention would be more persuasive if Sen. Kerry hadn't taken the opposite stance. Many more were killed when Saddam Hussein gassed the Kurdish village of Halabja than in the sarin gas attack in a Damascus suburb Aug. 21, but Sen. Kerry didn't think that justified U.S. intervention in Iraq.

By the way, I am leaning against any sort of intervention into Syria, but I am conflicted.  On the one hand something has to be done to punish a regime that uses chemical weapons, on the other I can't see anything good coming out of it.  By hurting the Assad regime, we'd end up helping the rather nasty folks he's fighting.  Given the "law" of unintended consequences, I'm sure lotsa bad stuff would follow - all with our name on it.  But doing nothing seems wrong as well.

So you see my issue.

But let's get back to Jack.  He's contrasting Secretary of State Kerry's response to Syria's use of gas with the then Senator Kerry's "opposite stance" regarding Saddam Hussein's use of gas in Halabja in 1988.  In doing so, he leaves out a few things:

• As Senator Kerry cosponsored SR 408 - a condemnation of Iraq's use of chemical weapons.
• Iraq was an ally of ours at that time during the Iran-Iraq war.

Hmm...military intervention with an ally.  That's what Jack thinks Senator Kerry should have been calling for back in 1988 in order for Secretary Kerry to sound credible now.

But let's take a deeper look at Halabja in 1988.  First some background from Foreign Policy:

In 1988, during the waning days of Iraq's war with Iran, the United States learned through satellite imagery that Iran was about to gain a major strategic advantage by exploiting a hole in Iraqi defenses. U.S. intelligence officials conveyed the location of the Iranian troops to Iraq, fully aware that Hussein's military would attack with chemical weapons, including sarin, a lethal nerve agent.

The intelligence included imagery and maps about Iranian troop movements, as well as the locations of Iranian logistics facilities and details about Iranian air defenses. The Iraqis used mustard gas and sarin prior to four major offensives in early 1988 that relied on U.S. satellite imagery, maps, and other intelligence. These attacks helped to tilt the war in Iraq's favor and bring Iran to the negotiating table, and they ensured that the Reagan administration's long-standing policy of securing an Iraqi victory would succeed. But they were also the last in a series of chemical strikes stretching back several years that the Reagan administration knew about and didn't disclose.

And:

By 1988, U.S. intelligence was flowing freely to Hussein's military. That March, Iraq launched a nerve gas attack on the Kurdish village of Halabja in northern Iraq.

And:

According to recently declassified CIA documents and interviews with former intelligence officials like [Air Force Col. Rick] Francona, the U.S. had firm evidence of Iraqi chemical attacks beginning in 1983.

And yet at the same time:

President Reagan yesterday condemned the use of outlawed chemical weapons in the Persian Gulf war, especially against the Kurdish minority in Iraq, and called for new global ban on such warfare.

"We condemn it," Reagan told the 43rd General Assembly in his final speech to the world body as president. "The use of chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq war - beyond its tragic human toll - jeopardises the moral and legal strictures that have held these weapons in check since World War I."

Reagan indirectly criticized Iraq's use of poison gas against Iraqi Kurds and Iranians. He cited the Kurdish area of Halabja in Iraq and Maidan Shahr on the border as "terrible new names added to the roll call of human horror."

Something that's been known for more than a decade:

A covert American program during the Reagan administration provided Iraq with critical battle planning assistance at a time when American intelligence agencies knew that Iraqi commanders would employ chemical weapons in waging the decisive battles of the Iran-Iraq war, according to senior military officers with direct knowledge of the program.

So yea, Secretary of State Kerry's the one whose credibility should be questioned here.

By the way, Jack Kelly was an deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force during the Reagan Administration - starting in December 1983.  Considering that the Reagan Administration had firm evidence of Iraqi chemical attacks since, well, more or less exactly when Jack started working for it, did he know that the Reagan was lying through its teeth when his administration was both aiding Iraq's use of chemical weapons and yet condemning it all at the same time?

Party Of Reagan? Part II

Bill Maher disagrees with Bob Dole:


From Crooks and Liars (partial) transcript:

This has become a kind of conventional wisdom, that the Republican party has gone so far right, Reagan himself wouldn't fit in. But I'm here tonight to call bullshit on that.

Ronald Reagan was an anti-government, union busting, race baiting, anti-abortion and anti-gay, anti-intellectual, who cut rich people's taxes in half, had an incurable case of the military industrial complex, and said Medicare was socialism, that would destroy our freedom.

Sounds to me like he would fit in just fine.

And then at about 5 minutes in:

Worst of all, Reagan inspired a whole generation of people who hate government to get into government.

Both sides really should stop pretending he was something other than the man most responsible for our decline.

Just can't disagree with that last sentence.

The Party Of Reagan?

Senator Bob Dole doesn't think so.

Here he is being interviewed by Chris Wallace on Fox News this past Sunday:


Thanks to Think Progress for a transcript:

WALLACE: You describe the GOP of your generation as Eisenhower Republicans, moderate Republicans. Could people like you, even Ronald Reagan — could you make it in today’s Republican Party.

DOLE: I doubt it. Reagan couldn’t have made it. Certainly Nixon couldn’t have made it, 'cause he had ideas. We might have made it, but I doubt it.

Understandably, while this story's made its way onto much of the left leaning news sources (talkingpointsmemo, americablog, and so on), I was wondering if there was any (ANY) echo on any conservative blogs.

Well, my friends, take a look at this from the American Conservative.  After quoting Dole's interview with Wallace about how Reagan "couldn't have made it" in the contemporary GOP, W. James Antell III writes:

This has become a common refrain among a certain kind of Republican. Jeb Bush said much the same thing, throwing his father into the mix of party elders who would be out of step with today’s GOP.

Dole’s legislative accomplishments ranged from being part of the bipartisan majorities that passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to playing a key role in the passage of the Reagan economic program. The Republicans of his era were more temperamentally conservative, even if less ideologically so. They believed in balanced budgets and would have been horrified to hear a party leader say “deficits don’t matter.”

Newt Gingrich, who became Dole’s partner in crime during the GOP Congress of 1995-96, is a good example of the party’s evolved brand. He led Republicans to their first House majority in 40 years, displaying a creativity that past Republican leaders conspicuously lacked. But he was undone by his excesses, cultivating an image of partisanship, over-the-top statements, and a penchant for unpopular crusades.

Today’s GOP is as much Gingrich’s party as Reagan’s or Nixon’s. Chest-beating often replaces prudence, the party frequently makes use of both libertarian and traditionalist themes without taking either of them very seriously.

Um thanks, Newt?

But at least that's rational - check this out from breitbart.com.  Guess what?  Instead of countering Dole's argument (and positing some evidence that Reagan WOULD be welcome in the contemporary GOP, they just BASH DOLE INSTEAD:

Dole complained that he would not make it in today's Republican Party. However, Dole could not make it in 1976 on the bottom of the GOP presidential ticket against when the Party ran against Jimmy Carter or the top of the ticket 20 years later when he ran against Bill Clinton.

And that's hardly surprising considering the state of the contemporary GOP.

Recess Appointments - Trib Style

A few days ago the editorial board of Richard Mellon Scaife's Tribune-Review published an editorial.  They wrote:

A federal appellate court ruling that President Obama's January 2012 “recess” appointments of three National Labor Relations Board members were an unconstitutional end run around Congress is a victory for the Constitution.

The Framers intended recess appointments to fill vacancies only after Congress — then able to meet just a few months a year because traveling to Washington took so long — had finished a year's work and couldn't confirm nominees.

But particularly in the past 60 years or so, presidents have stretched that power to evade Senate unwillingness to confirm certain nominees, and lawmakers have gaveled in and out of brief “pro forma” sessions to evade adjourning for the year — as they were when those NLRB appointments were made.

They go on to call for Obama's impeachment if he knew he was making the appointments knowing it was an abuse of power.  This is how they put it:

And if supposed constitutional scholar Obama didn't know better than to misuse recess appointments, he's no constitutional scholar. If he did know better, he committed an abuse of power that rises to the level of an impeachable offense.

Interesting that the braintrust points out how "presidents have stretched that power" over the last 60 years or so.  I mean considering this report from the Congressional Research Service.

The CRS did some work and found out how many "recess appointments" would not have been allowed had the appellate court ruling been in place since, say, late January of 1981.

I'll give them an exposition:

On January 25, 2013, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (DC Circuit) issued its opinion in Noel Canning v. National Labor Relations Board (hereafter Noel Canning).  In its ruling, the court determined that the President can make recess appointments only during intersession recesses, and that such appointments can be made only to vacancies that have occurred during the recess in which the appointment is made. The court also appeared to support the position that the recess appointment power may not be used to fill newly established positions, although that question was not before the court. [Italics in original]

In a footnote, they define "intersession" and "intrasession" this way:

Intersession recess appointments are those made between annual sessions of the Senate. The court indicated in Noel Canning that intersession recesses are only entered into when Congress adjourns sine die to end the session of Congress. Intrasession recess appointments are those made during recesses within annual sessions of the Senate. {Italics in original.]

Guess what they found?

Of the total number of 652 intra- and intersession appointments made between 1/20/1981 to the present nearly 36% of them (72 intra-and 160 intersession appointments) came from one man: Ronald Wilson Reagan.

Another 26% (141 intra- and 30 intersession) came from George W. Bush.

Looks to me, that's more than half of the appointments.

According to this report, had Canning been in place Jeanne Kirkpatrick could not have been appointed by Ronald Reagan as "Representative, U.N. General Assembly Session" on September 8, 1981, and William Bennett could not have been appointed as "Chair, National Endowment for the Humanities" by Ronald Reagan. Alan Greenspan could not have been appointed "Chair, Board of Governors, Federal Reserve System" by George H. W. Bush on August 10, 1991.

A question to my friends on Scaife's braintrust: tell me again how it rises to the level of impeachment?

Tracking Teh Crazie - 22nd Amendment

I've seen this pop up in a few places and so I am assuming you have, too.

Here's teh crazie from la maison de crazie, WND:

Before President Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected to his third and fourth terms in office, U.S. presidents had honored the limit established by George Washington that a president should serve no more than two.

And after, the 22nd Amendment formally restricted service in the Oval Office to two terms.

But now, U.S. Rep. Jose Serrano, D-N.Y., and a supporter of President Obama, has introduced House Joint Resolution 15 to repeal the 22nd Amendment and thus abolish presidential term limits.

The title of the piece, incidentally, is:

Democrat plan lets Obama run for 3rd term

So we all know it's a "Democrat" plot to "let" Obama rule for another 4 years - can't trust them lib'ruls, can you?  Can't trust 'em not to change the Constitution to suit their radical socialist agenda, can you?

Except this is not the first time Serrano has introduced this.  Nor is he the only one.  Indeed, there's a whole mess of details that WND left out.  Let's start with their very next paragraph:

Serrano has attempted this before, in 2003, 2009 and 2011 with little luck. H.J.R. 15 would require a two-thirds majority vote in favor in both the House and Senate and a majority of support from state legislatures.

Actually, according to snopes.com:

Rep. Serrano has introduced the very same proposal to Congress every two years since 1997 (a total of nine times), regardless of which party was currently occupying the White House...[Emphasis added.]

That's two resolutions for Clinton the philanderer, four for Bush the torturer, and now three for Obama, the guy who's letting Bush get away with the torture.

But I digress.

Here's the text of Serrano's resolution:

JOINT RESOLUTION
Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States to repeal the twenty-second article of amendment, thereby removing the limitation on the number of terms an individual may serve as President.

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled (two-thirds of each House concurring therein), That the following article is proposed as an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which shall be valid to all intents and purposes as part of the Constitution when ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States within seven years after the date of its submission for ratification:

‘Article--
   ‘The twenty-second article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed.’. [Italics and Bolding in original.]

Did you know the current leaders in the Senate (McConnell and Reid) co-sponsored a very similar bill in 1995?  Word for word similar.

Did you know who said this?

...in thinking about it more and more, I have come to the conclusion that the 22nd Amendment was a mistake.

This person was also quoted as wondering whether the 22nd Amendment interferes with "the democratic rights of the people" Adding:

They can elect a Senator for 40 years or a Congressman—something of this kind—for as long as they want to. Why don't they have the right to vote for whoever they want to vote for?

Do you know who said that? That would be the 40th President of these United States, Ronald Wilson Reagan. And do you know when he said that?  You'd think, considering the frame teh crazie wants you to use, that it was when the Gipper was a Democrat.

You could think that, but you'd be wrong.

He said both those things in 1986 - during his second administration.  The first in an interview with Barbara Walters and the second during an interview with the Washington Post.

So yea, Serrano's resolution is a Democrat Plan to let Obama rule some more.

Tracking Teh Crazie.

Three things to remember during the debate about the Fiscal Cliff Fiscal Curb

1) Ronald Reagan: "Social Security has nothing to do with the deficit."



2) A nonpartisan tax report which found no correlation between top tax rates and economic growth was withdrawn after G.O.P. protest.

3) Nobody actually cares about the deficit like they say they do:




(h/t to Digby for items 1 and 3)

Fun With Math

I happened upon this recently.  Can they really get away with this?  See if you can guess where I am going:

Authors Danforth Prince and Darwin Potter have spent years tracking down the scandalous details of the actress' romances and affairs and they have laid her love life bare in new tome Elizabeth Taylor: There is Nothing Like a Dame.

In the unauthorised biography, which promises "all the gossip unfit to print from the glory days of Hollywood", Prince and Porter claim Reagan was 36 when he invited a teenage Taylor to dine with him at his home in the Hollywood Hills - and she seduced him.

According to the book, she told a close pal, "Reagan was treating me like a grown woman, and that thrilled me. We sat on his sofa and I could tell he wanted to get it on but he seemed reluctant to make the first move. I became the aggressor.

"After a heavy make-out session on the sofa, we went into the bedroom."

While they are more or less exact with The Gipper's age (36) Prince and Potter are less so with Taylor's (she's characterized as a "teenager" - which could be as old as 19).  So let's run the numbers.

According to Whitehouse.gov, Ronald Reagan was born Feburary 6, 1911.  Which means he was 36 from February 6, 1947 to February 5, 1948.

According to biography.com, Elizabeth Taylor was born on February 27, 1932. Which means that she was 14 from February 6, 1947 to her birthday in 1947, when she turned 15.

The Daily Mail in the UK says roughly the same thing:

A NEW US biography, Elizabeth Taylor: There is Nothing Like a Dame, by Danforth Prince and Darwin Porter, claims actor Ronald Reagan, then 36 – later America’s 40th president – dallied at his Hollywood home with Elizabeth Taylor, then 15...

Whah???

These are some very serious allegations.  If this story is true, The Gipper, at the very least, participated in a "heavy make-out session" with a girl of (let's give him benefit of the doubt) 15.

And this was when he was 36 and married to Jane Wyman.

The Real Reason Scott Walker Won

Zombie Reagan!
(Please note: The CDC officially denies any existence of an actual Zombie Apocalypse.)

How Different The GOP Is!

I wanted to follow-up on this post from a few days ago.

As you will no doubt recall, Ronald Reagan was on record as saying:

We establish no religion in this country, we command no worship, we mandate no belief, nor will we ever. Church and state are, and must remain, separate.

Owing to the date of that speech (October 24, 1984)  and to the fact that he takes a political swipe or two:

And there's something else. The ideals of our country leave no room whatsoever for intolerance, for anti-Semitism, or for bigotry of any kind—none. In Dallas, we acted on this conviction. We passed a resolution concerning anti-Semitism and disassociating the Republic[an] Party from all people and groups who practice bigotry in any form. But in San Francisco this year, the Democratic Party couldn't find the moral courage or leadership to pass a similar resolution. And, forgive me, but I think they owe you an explanation. [Applause] Thank you.

What has happened to them? Why, after the issue became so prominent during the primaries, did the Democratic leadership walk away from their convention without a resolution condemning this insidious cancer? Why didn't they turn their backs on special interests and stand shoulder to shoulder with us in support of tolerance and in unequivocal opposition to prejudice and bigotry?

We must never remain silent in the face of bigotry. We must condemn those who seek to divide us. In all quarters and at all times, we must teach tolerance and denounce racism, anti-Semitism, and all ethnic or religious bigotry wherever they exist as unacceptable evils. We have no place for haters in America—none, whatsoever.

We can assume this is speech is more of a campaign speech than a policy speech.  It was only a few weeks before the '84 elections.  For example, what did he mean by "In Dallas"?

That would be the GOP party platform from the Party Convention in Dallas:

The Republican Party reaffirms its support of the pluralism and freedom that have been part and parcel of this great country. In so doing, it repudiates and completely disassociates itself from people, organizations, publications, and entities which promulgate the practice of any form of bigotry, racism, anti-semitism, or religious intolerance.

It's interesting to ponder that, faced with an upcoming election, Reagan decided to campaign on the idea that the church and state are separate and that in matters of faith the government must remain neutral.

How does that stand up to the current GOP in the current election season?

Huh. Go Figure.

An interesting stream of words came to me this weekend via a facebook status update.  The text read:

We in the United States, above all, must remember that lesson, for we were founded as a nation of openness to people of all beliefs. And so we must remain. Our very unity has been strengthened by our pluralism. We establish no religion in this country, we command no worship, we mandate no belief, nor will we ever. Church and state are, and must remain, separate.

It's that last part that fumes our friends, the social/religious conservatives.  It's not in the Constitution, they say.  It's not what the founders or the framers intended, they say.  Our greatness as a culture depends on our reliance on our shared Judeo/Christian heritage, they say.  Erasing it will only undermine that greatness, they say.

Only a traitorous lib'rul could say what I read on facebook.  The thing is my loyal facebook friend asserted that it was Ronald Reagan who spewed forth such malicious ideas.

The Trib On The Debt Ceiling

Again, it's what they leave out that matters most.

From today's editorial page at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:

"Saving" the nation from an anticipated default caused by Washington's own fiscal disregard, the deal cobbled together Sunday in the 11th hour amounts to yet another excuse for even more egregious spending -- not a course correction.

No mention of the fact that most of that "egregious spending" happened while a Republican was in the White House.

And then there's this:

What the nation gets, instead, is a short-term "fix" that raises the arbitrary debt ceiling, which already has been jacked up 11 times in the past decade. This continues the same ineffectual thinking, the same partisan brinkmanship masquerading as a fool's definition of leadership.

Yes, that's all true. But not in the way the Braintrust wants you to think.

Jacked up 11 times in the last decade. So that's 4 under Obama and 7 under Bush. Think Progress has a chart:

Look at how many times the debt ceiling was raised under Dubya. Look at how much it was raised by. Look at how many GOP Senators voted for it.

The "partisan brinkmanship" the Trib derides is simply this. It's Ok If You Are A Republican.

Did you know that Republican Presidents have raised the debt ceiling much much more than their Democratic counterparts in the last 30 years? The debt ceiling was raised almost 200% under Ronald Reagan alone.Again, a chart:Betcha didn't know that.

Tell me again about the liberal media?

Happy Reagan Day (Part II)

As pointed out previously, this is President Ronald Reagan's 100th birthday.

Now while the wingnuts and the rest of the media regurgitate the usual myths of the Reagan years (Reagan ended the Cold War, Reagan was a tax-cutter, etc), I want to point out some truth.

First, from Think Progress. Did you know that Ronald Reagan raised taxes in seven of his eight years in office?

He did. From the transcript:

Former Senator ALAN SIMPSON (Republican, Wyoming): Ronald Reagan raised taxes 11 times in his administration. I was here. I was here. I knew him. Better than anybody in this room. He was a dear friend and a total realist as to politics.

SCOTT HORSLEY: Simpson's recollection is spot on, says historian Douglas Brinkley, the editor of Reagan's diaries.

Professor DOUGLAS BRINKLEY (Rice University): Ronald Reagan was never afraid to raise taxes. He knew that it was necessary at times. And so there's a false mythology out there about Reagan as this conservative president who came in and just cut taxes and trimmed federal spending in a dramatic way. It didn't happen that way. It's false.

They go on to describe how Reagan never really cut much domestic spending but when his early tax cuts kicked in, he was faced with a decision; cuts in entitlements or raising taxes. Guess what?

...Reagan faced a choice between raising taxes and an even bigger federal debt. He chose the tax hikes.

This is RONALD REAGAN we're talking here.

Did you know that federal spending ballooned during the Reagan Administration. And "ballooned" is not, in fact, my term. It's how Reagan's favorite DC newspaper, the Washington Times described it:

During Reagan’s eight years in office, inflation fell from its staggering late-1970s peak, relations with the Soviet Union thawed, the unemployment rate fell and incomes rose. But measured by other standards, income inequality grew and federal spending ballooned. [emphasis added]

And as Will Bunch, author of Tear Down This Myth points out at the Huffington Post, Ronald Reagan would not have approved of torture. In his letter accompanying his signature on the UN Convention Against Torture, Ronald Reagan wrote:

The United States participated actively and effectively in the negotiation of the Convention . It marks a significant step in the development during this century of international measures against torture and other inhuman treatment or punishment. Ratification of the Convention by the United States will clearly express United States opposition to torture, an abhorrent practice unfortunately still prevalent in the world today.

The core provisions of the Convention establish a regime for international cooperation in the criminal prosecution of torturers relying on so-called "universal jurisdiction." Each State Party is required either to prosecute torturers who are found in its territory or to extradite them to other countries for prosecution.

Happy Birthday, Ronnie! Ya soft-on-terror, tax-and-spend, big-guv'ment pragmatist!

Happy Reagan Day!

I noticed this in today's Tribune-Review.

It's a chummy, feel good tale from the pen of Paul Kengor (Poli Sci professor at Grove City College and beneficiary of much Scaife funding), of President Ronald Reagan and how easily the Gipper connected with the common man, in this case an African-American limo driver named Joe Bullock. It begins thusly:

Today marks the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan's birth. In a telling development, Republicans around the country have been holding Reagan Day dinners as they've long done every February for Abraham Lincoln. This is yet another spontaneous display of affection for Reagan.

Having written so much on the man, I get lots of questions about Reagan this time of year, running the gamut from his domestic achievements to his historic foreign-policy triumph: peacefully ending the Cold War.

And then a few paragraphs down:

I'd like to take the opportunity presented by Reagan's time of year -- not to mention the month of Presidents Day -- to share an anecdote that was told to me by Bill Clark, Reagan's close friend and most significant adviser.

At the time this happened, Clark was serving as Reagan's national security adviser. He had previously been deputy secretary of State and would later be appointed secretary of the Interior. His driver all this time was a man named Joe Bullock, a Georgia native who had moved to Washington during the Great Depression. Joe was a victim of the cruel Jim Crow laws that afflicted the South. He went to Washington for a better life.

I wanted to look into this story a bit - it's a good story.

Know what I found?

This - National Review Online February 6, 2010 (one year ago):

Today marks the 99th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birth. In a telling development, Republicans around the country have begun holding Reagan Day dinners, as they’ve long traditionally done every February for Abraham Lincoln. This is yet another spontaneous display of affection for Reagan.

Having written so much on the man, I get lots of questions about Reagan this time of year, running the gamut from his domestic achievements to his historic foreign-policy triumph: peacefully ending the Cold War.

While this is NOT PLAGIARISM (as it was written by the same person) you'd think that for something as important to conservatives as Ronald Reagan's birthday, Professor Kengor could actually write something, you know, new.

Am I wrong about this? Talk about your spontaneous displays of affection.

Bestest Poll Ever?

Via The Washington Post:

The day after officials unveiled a redesign of the $100 bill, new polling suggests most Americans don't want to see changes made to the $50 note.

Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) last month proposed putting Ronald Reagan on the $50 bill instead of former president Ulysses S. Grant, arguing that the "last great president" of the 20th century deserved the honor.

But 79 percent of Americans oppose the idea, according to a Marist Poll released Thursday. Only 12 percent support McHenry's idea while 9 percent are unsure.

(h/t to Daily Kos)

The President's Speech To The Nations School Kids

Here's an excerpt uncovered by Tommy Tomlinson, columnist for the Charlotte Observer:

We've been working to take an economy that was in bad shape and get it moving and growing again; take our national defense and make it first-rate again after a long period of decline; and to restore reason, respect and reality to our foreign policy. And I think it's fair to say that we've made a good deal of progress.

Tomlinson comments:

Those of you who were worried about what he would say: You were right all along. It is nothing but politics.

And:

You were also right about him trying to indoctrinate the children of America into his cult of personality. Listen to this: “We want to make your future better, because tomorrow belongs to you. And since you're the leaders of tomorrow, I wanted to talk to all of you as a friend about the things you'll have to do to ensure a prosperous nation and a peaceful world.”

So in conclusion, it's clear that President Obama – wait a second. This isn't President Obama.

It was President Ronald Reagan, back in 1986.

You can read the whole speech here.

And two years later there's another speech - again to a group of Junior High School Students. It was right after the '88 election where Reagan praises the American Democratic system:

Now, last week the United States did something so exceptional that people around the world marveled at it. Last week the American people freely elected our government. Some ballots were cast by people who were rich and famous, and others were cast by most ordinary people, but each person had the same, one vote. These ballots were cast in secret, and they were counted in the open, not the other way around. And when the votes were totaled, those holding or seeking the highest positions in the land all surrendered to the will of the people. Soon, power will be peacefully transferred from those leaving office to those taking office. And, yes, we do this every election year, and that's what so much of the world marvels at. What we in America take for granted is something that's rare in history and all too remarkable on this globe, the Earth.

Which is all well and good until the Gipper cuts right:

From the beginning, the American vision was that our country would be the cradle of freedom for all mankind. Two hundred and thirteen years ago, in Philadelphia, James Allen wrote in this diary that: ``If we fail, liberty no longer continues an inhabitant of this globe.'' But our Founding Fathers didn't fail. And now it's our duty to bring the values of the American Revolution to all the peoples of the world, and this is happening. Today, to a degree never before seen in human history, one nation, the United States, has become the model to be followed and imitated by the rest of the world.

But America's world leadership goes well beyond the tide toward democracy. We also find that more countries than ever before are following America's revolutionary economic message of free enterprise, low taxes, and open world trade. These days, whenever I see foreign leaders, they tell me about their plans for reducing taxes and other economic reforms that they're using, copying what we have done here in our country. I wonder if they realize that this vision of economic freedom -- the freedom to work, to create and produce, to own and use property without the interference of the state -- was central to the American Revolution when the American colonists rebelled against a whole web of economic restrictions, taxes, and barriers to free trade. The message at the Boston Tea Party -- have you studied yet in history about the Boston Tea Party, where, because of a tax, they went down and dumped the tea in the harbor? Well, that was America's original tax revolt. And it was the fruits of our labor -- belonged to us, and not to the state. And that truth is fundamental to both liberty and prosperity.

Of course he means his party's message of "free enterprise, low taxes and open world trade" Not America's. And of course he was, to paraphrase Jim Greer, head of God's Own Party in Florida, looking to indoctrinate "American's youngest children before they have a chance to decide for themselves."

Such political indoctrination unnoticed and unmentioned by the birther/tenther/"Obama, that untrustworthy Communist Negro, wants to kill your Grandma" crowd.

I wonder why.

What Krugman Says

While the day's news will swirl around the murder in Wichita, there's something else in the Times that should not go unnoticed.

Nobel prize winner in economics (so he's presumably an expert in these matters) had this to say about the roots of our current economic crisis:

For the more one looks into the origins of the current disaster, the clearer it becomes that the key wrong turn — the turn that made crisis inevitable — took place in the early 1980s, during the Reagan years.

Specifically, the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act signed into law by Reagan in 1982:

The immediate effect of Garn-St. Germain, as I said, was to turn the thrifts from a problem into a catastrophe. The S.& L. crisis has been written out of the Reagan hagiography, but the fact is that deregulation in effect gave the industry — whose deposits were federally insured — a license to gamble with taxpayers’ money, at best, or simply to loot it, at worst. By the time the government closed the books on the affair, taxpayers had lost $130 billion, back when that was a lot of money.

But there was also a longer-term effect. Reagan-era legislative changes essentially ended New Deal restrictions on mortgage lending — restrictions that, in particular, limited the ability of families to buy homes without putting a significant amount of money down.

These restrictions were put in place in the 1930s by political leaders who had just experienced a terrible financial crisis, and were trying to prevent another. But by 1980 the memory of the Depression had faded. Government, declared Reagan, is the problem, not the solution; the magic of the marketplace must be set free. And so the precautionary rules were scrapped.

And finally:

Now, the proximate causes of today’s economic crisis lie in events that took place long after Reagan left office — in the global savings glut created by surpluses in China and elsewhere, and in the giant housing bubble that savings glut helped inflate.

But it was the explosion of debt over the previous quarter-century that made the U.S. economy so vulnerable. Overstretched borrowers were bound to start defaulting in large numbers once the housing bubble burst and unemployment began to rise.

These defaults in turn wreaked havoc with a financial system that — also mainly thanks to Reagan-era deregulation — took on too much risk with too little capital.

There’s plenty of blame to go around these days. But the prime villains behind the mess we’re in were Reagan and his circle of advisers — men who forgot the lessons of America’s last great financial crisis, and condemned the rest of us to repeat it.

Thus Spake Krugman.

From A Recent Poll From Fox "News"

Ohmigodohmigodohmigod!

How will the wingnuts deal with this one?

In a recent poll for Fox "News", 900 registered voters nationwide were asked the following question:

What do you think the nation's economy needs more of right now -- the economic policies of Ronald Reagan or the economic policies of Barack Obama?

And how do you think the numbers stacked up?

40% Ronald Reagan
49% Barack Obama
11% Don't know

But didn't Ronald Wilson Reagan save us all (singlehandedly, no less) from the Communist Menace? But, more importantly, didn't Ronald Wilson Reagan save us from ourselves??

And yet, in this current FOX "NEWS" poll, more people think we need the economic policies of the new guy.

Huh. Go figure.