alternative hippopotamus

(Author’s note: it’s very difficult not to type Sunstain, or to type it and make yourself correct it.)

The DemocracyNow debate between Glenn Greenwald and Samantha Power’s husband is illuminating for a number of reasons. For one thing, Greenwald makes a distinction that can’t be stated often enough. Those of us who support Obama still vehemently disagree with his support of the recent FISA bill, and insist vocally that the Bush administration must be held accountable.

The mechanism of the Executive branch makes it difficult to hold Bush accountable during his term. By that I mean that as long as the Attorney General refuses to enforce the law, we’ll have to wait for an Obama administration for an accountability moment. The netroots is uniformly clear that the Bushies must face legal consequences for their actions, however. There is no superior class that separates them from the masses.

Sunstein articulates the worst kind of tepidness on this, and Greenwald calls him on it:

GLENN GREENWALD: You know, I think this mentality that we’re hearing is really one of the principal reasons why our government has become so lawless and so distorted over the past thirty years. You know, if you go into any courtroom where there is a criminal on trial for any kind of a crime, they’ll have lawyers there who stand up and offer all sorts of legal and factual justifications or defenses for what they did. You know, going back all the way to the pardon of Nixon, you know, you have members of the political elite and law professors standing up and saying, “Oh, there’s good faith reasons not to impeach or to criminally prosecute.” And then you go to the Iran-Contra scandal, where the members of the Beltway class stood up and said the same things Professor Sunstein is saying: we need to look to the future, it’s important that we not criminalize policy debates. You know, you look at Lewis Libby being spared from prison.

I’ll add that it’s important that Greenwald makes the distinction between supporting the candidacy, and supporting Obama’s views on this policy, as he does in his introduction:

Well, you know, it’s one thing to defend Senator Obama and to support his candidacy, as I do. It’s another thing to just make factually false claims in order to justify or rationalize anything that he does.

This also serves to put a future Obama administration on notice that a Sunstein judicial appointment is not going to fly.

At some point, the anti-establishment gadflies (Lambert and BTD come to mind) somehow got it in their heads that to effect democratic change means to reject anything to do with the netroots and Democratic Party candidates, and identify with screaming banshees like rivermalkin. I take it they believe that by alienating Josh Marshall (WKJM to them), Kos, and Chris Bowers the world will be a better place.

Meanwhile, there are people like Jane Hamsher and Glenn Greenwald who use their visibility to annoy and afflict the Bushies and their enablers. This is an example of right relationship between the progressive blogosphere and progressive action.

Prof Turley is without doubt one of the most admired legal eagles in our fair city, the People’s Republic of DC. In this case, though, I’m hoping he has mischaracterized the relationship between Obama and Cass Sunstein, aka Mr. Samantha Powers. As far as I can tell, Sunstein is a creepy dude.

This quote from Sunstein has been going around lately. You may have seen it:

Prosecuting government officials risks a “cycle” of criminalizing public service, [Sunstein] argued, and Democrats should avoid replicating retributive efforts like the impeachment of President Clinton — or even the “slight appearance” of it.

It’s kind of ironic that Sunstein wrote a book called Republic.com 2.0. If he had read the slightly older Republic.com 1.0, he would have recognized that Justice is a fundamental attribute of the ideal city. Ideal, of course, in the Platonic sense. The idea that the Executive branch should not be accountable for crimes, high or low is so offensive to our notion of justice that I find it hard to believe that a Harvard Law professor would broach the subject. Well, Harvard, maybe. They can be kind of weird.

As one of Turley’s commenters asks:

Sunstein is a lawyer? Where’d he get his degree? Costco?

Look, Sunstein: there is public service, and there is crime. They are not the same thing. It’s apples and oranges. Public service simply cannot be “criminalized.” A person holding public office who uses that office to commit crimes is not in public service but in self service.

I’ll note that Sunstein doesn’t refer to himself as a “close advisor” to Obama, as Glenn Greenwald had put it: (Salon)

You’re sounding a bit like Barack Obama. He was your colleague for a while, right?

Yes, 10 years. And I’m an informal, occasional advisor to him.

I’ll tell you what I like about Obama, which is connected with the book. He really doesn’t like to surround himself only with like-minded others. He really is someone who has never lived and wouldn’t live in an echo chamber.

While I’d prefer “he thinks I’m an idiot” to “informal, occasional advisor” at least it’s something.

David Weigel on the Meowists, emphasis mine:

Is there any way of gauging how many PUMAs there are? Well, on June 14 Bower created a Facebook group for them. In a month and a week it’s grown to 456 members. Is it so small because Clinton’s salt-of-the-earth supporters don’t waste their time online? Well, no. The still-active Hillary Clinton for President group has more than 22,000 members, although it’s shedding dozens of them every day.

Are the PUMAs lying about their support, their numbers, or their fundraising just to get attention? We won’t know for sure until July’s fundraising numbers come out, as they can prove or disprove Bower’s Fox News claims. Bower, in another interview where he made the “$10 million” claim, said that PUMAs give in increments of $20.08 so “they know it’s from us.” Anyone want to bet that 50,000 Clinton donors materialized in a week in early July? A long holiday week, no less? If you do, I’ve got an account at IndyMac I want to sell you.

I’ve seen some pretty tin-foil hat stuff on the rivermalkin site, including a theory about how the DNC colluded with the Obama campaign to schedule the convention on the anniversary of MLK’s “I have a dream” speech. This, according to the sufferers of ODS, proves that Obama had been chosen before the primary season began, ostensibly to bring down the Clinton faction of the DNC.

Oi.

Here’s a much more straightforward conspiracy theory for you: that a small group of people took advantage of hard feelings on the part of Clinton supporters after the primary season to get attention. And, who knows, maybe a little cash.

That would explain something that’s always bothered me about the “divided government” folks among the PUMA’s. Even if they didn’t care about the Supreme Court make-up, or, say energy policy, environmental issues, or the de-Bushification of the Executive branch you’d think they’d care about accountability. To see investigations into wrong-doing by high-ups in the Bush 43 administration. Which will certainly not happen under a Republican. You’d think they’d want to see that as members of the Democratic party. Unless…

Is it just me, or do the new Metro buses look like Bank of America ATMs? Of course, it’s not like there’s an over-abundance of BoA ATMs, so maybe this isn’t a bad idea.

(from this WaPo story.)

As I was looking through the list of 600 Starbucks closings, I was expecting to at least see one of the 3 in Dupont Circle closed. Nope. Perhaps the one next to the Silver Spring Metro with the crappy hours? Nope. Maybe the one on Wisconsin Ave in Bethesda that always looks kinda lonely? No, sir.

It looks like exactly 1 DC Starbucks is closing: L St. and 21st. I didn’t even know there was a Starbucks on L and 21st.

The first time evah, I’d thought about becoming a monk:

Brother Cesare is the lead singer in a heavy metal band which has just released its second album.

A former missionary in the Ivory Coast, he lives in a small friary in the Milan hinterland.

The 62-year-old monk’s love affair with heavy metal began when he attended a Metallica concert some 15 years ago.

“I was overwhelmed and amazed by the sheer energy of it” he says.

My internet connection is very spastic today, but a link to his Monkish Metalness appears to be here.

On one hand, DC made the top 10 list of most walkable cities:

The top 10 neighborhoods in Washington D.C. are Walkers’ Paradises. 53% of Washington D.C. residents have a Walk Score of 70 or above. 79% have a Walk Score of at least 50—and 21% live in Car-Dependent neighborhoods.

On the other the chances are good that you’re being spied on:

Undercover Maryland State Police officers repeatedly spied on peace activists and anti-death penalty groups in recent years and entered the names of some in a law-enforcement database of people thought to be terrorists or drug traffickers, newly released documents show.

The files, made public yesterday by the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland, depict a pattern of infiltration of the activists’ organizations in 2005 and 2006. The activists contend that the authorities were trying to determine whether they posed a security threat to the United States. But none of the 43 pages of summaries and computer logs - some with agents’ names and whole paragraphs blacked out - mention criminal or even potentially criminal acts, the legal standard for initiating such surveillance.

State police officials said they did not curtail the protesters’ freedoms.

This WaPo vignette is one of the clearest illustrations of how a small group of individuals can game a system and destroy what was up to that point a charmingly quirky democratic republic. I like this quote for starters:

But two sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that Card called to reject the names shortly after the list arrived at the White House.

“The message was that there was only one candidate they wanted, and that was John Yoo,” one source said.

Yes, of course he was.

Yoo did not emerge from the head of Beelzebub post 9.11 of course. He was one of the gangsters in the Reagan justice department who came up with a series of remedies for Watergate. That is, how to prevent a future Republican presidential lawbreaker from being held accountable for a future Watergate.

Now, I know that RiverMalkin and the Meowists are satisfied that we’ll be just fine with divided government in the form of McCain and a Democratic Congress, no matter how light the Democratic seasoning of that Congress is. Having seen how Oz functions, I have little doubt that McCain will continue in the same vein. The Executive has been gamed, and it will take a generation of dedicated reformers to heal it. McCain is not that reformer. I dearly hope Obama is.

The Prince of Pudding ponders:

What I find interesting about the New Yorker cover is that it’s almost exactly the sort of cover you could expect to find on the front of National Review.

Consider that, for a moment, a work of art so PoMo that its meaning changes based on where it’s published.

In another world, it might be possible for a white guy to satirize the right-wing by dressing the first black nominee and his wife as Muslims and terrorists, and people would get the “joke.” In this world, the Jonah Goldberg’s, Fox Newsers, and Limbaugh’s will get the last laugh at the expense of the haughty intellectuals that run great bastions of progessivism like The New Yorker.

Fear not. You are not alone.

MacRumors.com notes that the itunes store is over bandwidthed. (Like my use of the noun as a verb?)

So you can’t buy the new iphone 2.0 software and use the stunning next generation mobile applications that you’ve been waiting all summer to try. There’s more to life than moblogging from a pub. At least I think there is.

On the other hand, maybe God really does hate you. That’s possible.