Democrats Call for Burris to Resign

Once again, the Democratic Party shows the kind of spirit I love.  Across the board, we're calling for the resignation or removal of Roland Burris.

David Orr:

It doesn't matter if there's some obscure explanations here and there. The credibility is shot. And we don't need this gamesmanship being played in our U.S senator. We need someone who has the reasonable credibility - Democrat or Republican - in this state who can go to work.

The Attorney General is getting in on it, as well as Sen. Boxer's Senate Ethics Committee:

llinois House Speaker Michael Madigan yesterday referred questions about Burris’s statements to Sangamon County prosecutor John Schmidt...

“The matter is under review by this office,” the prosecutor, Schmidt, said, confirming the House speaker’s referral. Springfield, the state capital, is located in Sangamon County.

Natalie Ravitz, a spokeswoman for U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat, confirmed the federal ethics inquiry.

“Whenever allegations of improper conduct are brought to the attention of the Senate Ethics Committee, we open a preliminary inquiry,” Ravitz said in an e-mail.

I'd love to see him refuse to resign, then get expelled by the Senate Democrats. Of course, the Republicans will try to block his expulsion, just like they helped bring him into the Senate in the first place. After all, there's nothing like having the taint of Blago stinking up the Democrat's side of the chamber.

Another Burris Lie: He DID Raise Money for Blago

Despite his assurances to the contrary, here's yet another confession from Burris:

U.S. Sen. Roland Burris has acknowledged he sought to raise campaign funds for then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich at the request of the governor's brother at the same time he was making a pitch to be appointed to the Senate seat previously held by President Barack Obama.

Burris' latest comments in Peoria Monday night were the first time he has publicly said he was actively trying to raise money for Blagojevich. Previously Burris has left the impression that he always balked at the issue of raising money for the governor because of his interest in the Senate appointment.

In comments to reporters after appearing at a Democratic dinner, the senator several times contradicted his latest under-oath affidavit that he quietly filed with the Illinois House impeachment panel earlier this month. That affidavit was itself an attempt to clean up his live, sworn testimony to the panel Jan. 8, when he omitted his contacts with several Blagojevich insiders.

Time to go, "Senator."  Luckily, the Illinois Legislature is already looking into charges of perjury, and the Attorney General is moving on the issue as well:

Illinois Atty. Gen. Lisa Madigan led a growing chorus of Democratic officials Monday calling for a deeper investigation of U.S. Sen. Roland Burris' explanation about how he was appointed by now-ousted Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

Burris has maintained there was nothing inconsistent between his testimony before state lawmakers and a recently filed affidavit outlining more extensive contact with Blagojevich insiders than he had previously disclosed. But Illinois Republicans pressed their call for a perjury investigation by the county prosecutor in Springfield and on Monday, Democrats expressed increasing discomfort over Burris' evolving explanation of efforts to get the seat.

"This is a particularly frustrating revelation," Madigan said of Burris' recent disclosure that he had contact with five Blagojevich insiders. "I encourage the Sangamon County state's attorney to take a closer look at this in the interest of truth, integrity and transparency."

Burris said political accusations were threatening to ruin his reputation and he would appear before state lawmakers or anyone else to preserve it.

Yeah, Roland.  It's other people's political attacks that are threatening to ruin your career, not your own lies on the matter.

Supremes to Hear Al Marri Case

So, the Supreme Court has finally agreed to hear the Al-Marri Case.  They're years late, but it's better late than never.

Al-Marri is one of the greatest travesties of Bush's misguided war on our civil liberties.  He must ultimately find Justice for the good of the nation, but this leads to a perverse situation.  If Obama moves to give him that Justice expeditiously, he could accidentally enshrine the powers seized by our recent Monarch, George W. Bush.  Without his continued indefinite incarceration, the Supreme Court will rule that the issue is moot, since the injustice has been righted.  They've done the same thing before in the Padilla case, where the Bush Administration transferred him to a civilian prison just before the Supremes were to hear the case.  The conservative court (with 7 of 9 Justices appointed by Republicans) refused to grant review in the Padilla case, thereby preserving Bush's justification for his indefinite detentions, and they will surely do so again if given the chance.

So, as awful as it is, I say let him rot in jail for another few months.  Then the Court will be forced to rule, and we will finally have a Supreme Court precedent saying what none of us ever thought would be necessary - that the President does not have the powers of a King in wartime, and cannot simply imprison Americans on American soil without charge or trial on his say-so alone.  That we need to establish this precedent via the Court rather than just relying on the plain reading of the Constitution is a sad, sad thing for the Republic.

DOJ Partisanship and Voting Fraud

Because Josh Marshall brought the US Attorney's Scandal to light, leading to Alberto Gonzales' humiliation and resignation, I'll just leave this all to him.  

It's time again to remember the backstory of the US Attorney Firing scandal. The firings were one thing. But the story behind the firings, what led to them, is key to understanding the current 'vote fraud' scam being played by the Republicans and the media outlets that are going along with the scam.

Remember, the US Attorneys in question were all either Republicans or Republican-leaning independents. In every case, they were appointed by George W. Bush. In most of the cases their firing was tied to 'vote fraud' claims stemming from the 2004 election.

The pattern was very consistent. During the final weeks of the 2004 campaign Republican partisans started pressing claims of widespread voter fraud. In many, though not all cases, the examples they pointed to were not even allegations of voter fraud, but allegations of voter registration fraud: examples of people being registered more than once, non-existent people being registered, etc.

The Republicans making these claims argued that these problems with registration cards were opening the coming election up to widespread vote fraud. Logically, this makes no sense. And, more importantly, all evidence shows this has never happened, certainly not in any widespread sense. Every person who claims otherwise is either ignorant or speaking in bad faith.

Nonetheless, CNN and other national news outlets and especially local media outlets, either out of ignorance or bad faith, ran hard with these stories -- just as CNN is doing now.

After the election, there was a lot of pressure from Republicans in states like Nevada, Washington, New Mexico, etc. (not surprisingly, all key swing states) to have local US Attorneys prosecute these cases. The word came down from Washington, DC, particularly the political office at the White House that this was a top priority. And the local US Attorneys launched into it.

But there was a problem. Most of these were ethical prosecutors. And when they looked into it there just wasn't anything there. Most of the stories weren't even true. And those that were, were obviously isolated and in most cases not done with malice. The number of people who could actually be prosecuted could be counted on one hand. Local Republicans got angry; Karl Rove got angry. And the US Attorneys got fired.

That's the real story of the US Attorney firing scandal. And what we're seeing today is textbook -- exactly the same as what we saw in 2004 and 2006. It's a scam. And the very recent history should be enough for news networks like CNN and others not to let themselves become complicit in this disgrace.

Well done, Josh.

Keating Economics

Very interesting entrant into the question of where our current financial crisis came from.

Latest Bush Admin Scandal - Sex and Drugs for Oil

There have been so many scandals during the Bush Administration that no one pays attention anymore. We just found out yesterday that the Bush Administration Department of the Interior has been engaged in widespread corruption. You'd think that trading sex and cocaine for oil leases would raise people's eyebrows.

I'm sure the rules will be the same under an Obama Administration.

Update: Yglesias ads that these are the same people who will be overseeing our new plan for energy independence, offshore drilling! Woooooo, offshore drilling! $0.08 discount in 20 years! Woooooo, energy independence!

"Hookers and Blow"

So much for "toning down" the convention in respect for the suffering of the Gulf Coast, eh? A truly hilarious 2:50. Hilariously sickening. McCain, of course, doesn't command the respect of his political troops because they know he's going to lose. "Might as well keep drinking! Life is short!"

When Obama, however, says that none of his people will mention the Palin's children, we march in lockstep. Even the diarists at DKos have remained basically silent, and when a diary is posted that uses the children, they get shouted down by commenters and rated into the dirt.

Of course, if I were a political operative, I'd have a stockpile of usernames with long (but extremely sparse) history to use in just such occasions. Amazingly, the original "Sarah isn't Trig's Mother" rumor was started by just such an account. Surprise!

AACS hacked irevokably

AACS, the new encryption system designed by the movie industry to replace CSS in the new generation of high resolution DVDs, has already had one of its secret keys broken, despite the fact that there are barely any AACS-protected products yet on the market. This encryption key allows the No-Intellectual-Property types to make perfect copies of the new generation of DVDs. My response, as a cryptography guy myself, is "what took them so long?"

When the assault on AACS began, the first victory was won by the hackers who successfully extracted a secret hexadecimal key used to decrypt the movies inside the players into a viewable form. This, in itself, is not devastating, although it is an extremely expensive problem to fix. The MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) could simply revoke that one key from the keyspace and their problem is solved. Of course, all the HD-DVD players out in the world that use that key for decryption would not be able to play any movies factory-pressed from the date of revocation forward, and that's where the cost occurs. Annoying, yes. Devastating, no.

It is the nature of the attack used to discover that first secret key that makes this devastating. By inserting a modified chip into their player, they can observe the device's handshaking with the message and the invocation of the cryptosystem to verify and decrypt the video. From this chip they can obtain Volume IDs, from which they can derive an unlimited number of valid secret keys. According to the hackers (a most trustworthy group), the infrastructure they have in place cannot be destroyed without tearing the entire AACS encryption scheme to the ground and starting back from scratch. In the words of Elzar: "movie industry, Bam."

The funny thing is that I wouldn't be surprised if they had this hack completed months ago, when the announcement of it would have forestalled the rollout of this new technology. Instead, just as with the original DVD protection, CSS, they wait until the standards are all finalized and millions of players have shipped. At that point, there's really nothing to be done.

Interestingly, tying this back to governance, this little AACS episode represents a stunning victory against the utterly vacuous DMCA. Mass civil disobedience against dumb laws strikes me as a good thing. People have produced songs, T-shits, animated gifs, and heavily obfuscated programs containing these codes. You cannot suppress this speech, and it's pointless to try.

An American Royalty

Reader DD chimes in via comments concerning the Anna Nicole Smith story:

Its long been pointed out that in America, celebrities have culturally filled the role of royalty.

This reminded me of an idea some friends and I were tossing around one night, years ago. DD is correct in saying that celebrity fills an analogous role to royalty in our society. Some people have a deep need for a source of authority they can idolize and fixate upon. Idolizing authority, weak-sauced as it is, is completely predictable - an inescapable part of the human condition.

My concern, of course, is politics, and it is therefore these idolaters' electoral influence that I am interested in examining. Idolatry is poisonous to democracy, for voters need to make choices based on fact and principle rather than on a cult of personality. Unfortunately, without a national royalty these authoritarians idolize political leaders, which helps lead to the vicious invective in our politics. The Idols grow isomorphic to the nation itself, so criticizing that leader becomes tantamount to treason. Sound familiar?

So, why not have an elected Prince? Not only would we diminish the influence of irrational idolatry in our elections, but we'd kill two birds with one stone by removing much of the ceremonial component from the President's shoulders. It could be a good idea.

Glenn Greenwald touched upon this with his essays on the lack of political ideology in the Bush movement:

It used to be the case that in order to be considered a "liberal" or someone "of the Left," one had to actually ascribe to liberal views on the important policy issues of the day - social spending, abortion, the death penalty, affirmative action, immigration, "judicial activism," hate speech laws, gay rights, utopian foreign policies, etc. etc. These days, to be a "liberal," such views are no longer necessary.

Now, in order to be considered a "liberal," only one thing is required - a failure to pledge blind loyalty to George W. Bush. The minute one criticizes him is the minute that one becomes a "liberal," regardless of the ground on which the criticism is based. And the more one criticizes him, by definition, the more "liberal" one is. Whether one is a "liberal" -- or, for that matter, a "conservative" -- is now no longer a function of one's actual political views, but is a function purely of one's personal loyalty to George Bush.

...

If it now places one "on the Left" to oppose unrestrained power and invasiveness asserted by the Federal Government along with lawlessness on the part of our highest government officials, so be it. The rage-based reverence for The President as Commander-in-Chief -- and the creepy, blind faith vested in his goodness -- is not a movement I recognize as being political, conservative or even American.

A movement which has as its shining lights a woman who advocates the death of her political opponents, another woman who is a proponent of concentration camps, a magazine which advocates the imprisonment of journalists who expose government actions of dubious legality, all topped off by a President who believes he has the power to secretly engage in activities which the American people, through their Congress, have made it a crime to engage in, is a movement motivated by lots of different things. Political ideology isn't one of them.

Greenwald calls this a cult-like mentality, but I'll continue referring to them as idolaters. If we had royalty, it would sink some of these idolaters out of the political process since they would have a more appropriate target for their fixation. The intense personal identification and nationalistic pride that is a pox on electoral democracy is a boon to monarchy.