It takes a lot for Bush's Justice Department to investigate one of its own.  But that's exactly what's happening in Washington, as the politicization of the Civil Rights Division is coming to a head, with Bradley J. Schlozman, perhaps the worst of the worst, right at the front as the target.

Glenn Greenwald beat me to today's update on the anthrax case, showing pretty conclusively that the FBI's case, which is being dribbled out slowly, just doesn't add up to much.  One thing I learned from Greenwald is that yesterday's revelation about Ivins' obsession with a sorority being the reason he mailed the letters near their house at Princeton, which already sounded ridiculous (they don't have sororities at the several dozen other campuses closer to his Frederick, MD home?), was also completely factually wrong.

There is a very coordinated push to leak details about the late Bruce Ivins to certify that he is the "lone nut" anthrax killer, details which don't entirely hold up upon scrutiny.  There's definitely a desire on the part of the government to make this an open and shut case seven years after the fact, but it doesn't completely hold together.  In fact, the media reports are almost all contradictory.

An exploration on the flip...

(cross posted at Calitics)

This report of a national conference call to fight Prop. 8 and marriage equality sounds more like a battle plan than a political strategy session.  All the leading figures of the religious right were there, and the language is undeniably militaristic.  I believe that the best way to counteract the theocratic right is to display them in all their radicalism, so the whole country understands the goals of their movement.  So here ya go:

The primary focus of the call was Proposition 8 in California, described by (Chuck) Colson as “the Armageddon of the culture war.” Many speakers invoked the language of warfare, raising up an army of believers, putting soldiers in the streets, being on the front lines of a battle. Lou Engle actually described a massive rally planned in Qualcomm stadium on November 1 as a “blitzkrieg moment.”

Today the Justice Department's Inspector General, Glenn Fine, appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee to discuss Monday's report showing serious violations of the law in the hiring of career Department employees.  What the IG revealed today was that the attitude of extreme partisanship inside the DoJ was pervasive.  Whether people were actively engaging in politicization or just tacitly accepting it, everyone was at least aware of what was happening... everyone except for Abu Gonzales, of course, who does not recall.

Actually the number is probably higher - 22,000 identified themselves explicitly as vets.  Over 55,000 called the special line set up through the VA in its first year of operation.  Some are friends and family of vets, which makes sense, as watching someone close struggle with PTSD or worse must be unbearable.  These statistics are gruesome.

Calls to the VA’s hotline more than doubled this calendar year going from a total of about 21,000 in January to more than 55,000 by the end of June, averaging about 250 calls a day.

over...

John McCain put out this dishonest ad over the weekend attacking Barack Obama for cancelling a visit with wounded troops because "the Pentagon wouldn't allow him to bring cameras."  The facts show the exact opposite picture, and indeed the footage shown while the announcer is intoning about Obama disrespecting the troops is a shot of Obama... playing basketball with the troops.  It's transparent, dirty and stupid.

And given all that, it's completely unsurprising that the ad has been scheduled to run only in that area with population that is the least credulous, most gullible, and most accepting of right-wing frames and half-truths - the Beltway.

In 2006 we had a crop of Congressional challengers that was poised to win in tough districts and take back the House and Sente.  It was a cautious list, at times a moderate list, and while there have been some excellent progressive lawmakers from that group (Steve Cohen, John Hall, Bernie Sanders and Sherrod Brown come to mind), overall it was a list full of more Democrats instead of better ones.  You never know what you're really going to get from a candidate until they're in office, but this year there are some promising signs that the class of 2008 is substantively better on several issues.

Jesse Taylor at Pandagon had a remarkably insightful piece today about the wingnut carping over the Barack Obama speech in Berlin, the media reaction, and his popularity generally.  I really think this is important to understand.  The right has always held a goal of minimizing political participation; normally this is done through voter suppression, onerous voter ID or ballot access laws, and generally disenfranchising those for whom it is hardest to engage in the process.  Now they've taken it a step further, basically planting the seed that ANY participation whatsoever, not just voting but showing up for a rally or working a phone bank or donating money, is toxic and inherently fascistic.  Because their deficit in this election year is enthusiasm, they're trying to make such support and excitement untenable.  Behold:

This is really good to see.

Alaska’s U.S. Senate race between Republican incumbent Ted Stevens and Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich has been a toss-up for several months now, but the Democratic challenger is now ahead 50% to 41%. When “leaners” are included, Begich leads 52% to 44%.

Begich began running his first television ads of the campaign on July 8 and the survey was conducted nine days later.

You may know that Bob Barr has arrived at Netroots Nation.  He bought a one-day pass and decided to mingle with the assembled conventioneers.  And he drew a crowd.  I first spied him when Kate Sheppard of Grist was interviewing him about his environmental policies (a lot of "we don't know if man is causing global warming, we need further study, etc).  All of us wanted to talk to him, but we didn't quite know what to ask.  But after a couple of minutes it hit me, and my good buddy clammyc lent me his voice recorder and I sidled up to Barr to ask my first question.

Me: Rep. Barr, do you believe the impeachment of President Clinton was a good deterrent to the expansion of executive power and the establishment of the rule of law for the executive branch?

answer on the flip...

I have a ridiculously long post on torture and some of the revelations we've seen this week, in the Jane Mayer book, the Omar Khadr tape, etc.  Those who have been paying attention know what has been done in our name.  Much of the torture and abuse was subjected on people who had no intelligence value and were never credibly charged with any crime.  The methods were based on decades-old survival techniques produced by the Navy to resist torture, and a manual from the Chinese that used torture to elicit false confessions.  They used psychologists to develop a program of "learned helplessness", reverse-engineered from the SERE techniques.  In the end, not one terror suspect has been convicted of anything since 9/11.  The "intelligence" gained from the likes of Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was of the wild goose chase variety.  Evidence of torture inflamed the Islamic world and became a recruitment poster for Al Qaeda.  And on and on.

I wanted to reiterate some of it here, because it's indicative of the fundamental rot at the heart of the American system these days, and why we'll forever be diminished until we cut the rot away.

Judging from the last couple days on the site, and the endless stream of diaries about how to properly imagine  other people's opinions of cartoons, or how to properly eulogize a political opponent, I think it's more proper, actually, to recognize this editorial opinion from Elizabeth Edwards on the death of Tony Snow.  Edwards and Snow are linked by virtue of being diagnosed with recurrences of their cancer within days of one another in 2007, and the news of his death clearly came to her as chilling and sad.  In the article, Edwards reveals some universal, human truths, which often get lost in the clatter of political warfare, not limited to this site.  I want to excerpt a bit:

There have been a lot of incidents of appallingly bad journalism over the past eight years: those relentlessly focused on trivialities, stories inventing fake scandals out of whole cloth, the ones amplifying Bush lies and cheerleading for war.  Yet for some reason, this story by Dan Eggen and Paul Kane in Sunday's Washington Post strikes me as the most unbelievable, factually incorrect and just plain stupidest article of the Bush era.

Headline:

Recent Political Wins Smell of Compromise

Lately, President Employs a Little-Used Tool

I don't know if you're aware of it, but getting full immunity for lawbreaking, expanded unchecked surveillance powers, and no-strings funding for endless war in Iraq is the result of compromise!

There's obviously a lot of noise about Barack Obama's "shift to the center" inside the blogosphere, and today it bubbles up into the mainstream.  The LA Times thinks that most Democrats don't care (based on nothing but anecdotes from insiders), while the Washington Post thinks his ideology is problematic, saying that liberals are calling him a centrist and Republicans are calling him a liberal, so who knows???

I think these thumbsucker pieces offer little in the way of identifiable information.  Then again, so does the blogosphere, increasingly.  That herd mentality we've all noticed in the traditional media has definitely migrated over, and the narrative has definitely hardened.  There is perhaps no bigger critic of Obama's vote on the FISA bill than I.  At the same time, I can't believe that this wasn't a far bigger story, particularly in the blogosphere.

Now that Iraq's national security adviser has joined the Prime Minister in calling for the US-Iraq status of forces agreement to include a timetable for the withdrawal of US troops, it's time to place these remarks in context.

Nouri al-Maliki is trying to win an election.  He wants to outflank the Sadrists who have been resisting the US occupation for some time.  There have been massive demonstrations among the Shiite community to drive the occupiers out.  It's significant that the NSA, Mouwaffak al-Rubaie, made his comments in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, and after discussions with the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, no less.

But the actual withdrawal proposal put forth by Maliki and the Iraqi government is far less than it seems.

Conservative apologists are perplexed.  They can't seem to understand why Americans are so worried about their economic struggles.  After all, unemployment is down from historical highs, we haven't had a quarter of negative economic growth yet, the Dow is still high relative to prior downturns, so what's the problem?

Maybe if they actually listened to just one average American instead of figuring out ways to place the numbers in the right combination to make all look well, they'd get their answer.  Hint: it has nothing to do with what they hear on the nightly news.

Ann Shea, 47, an attorney who lives in Butte, said the nation faces hardships that trump patriotism.

"The issue is, we're paying almost five bucks a gallon in gas, we're in a war we shouldn't be in, and the current administration, which is the one McCain will carry on, is just lying to the American people to get what they want," she said. "Obama's not about that."

Chris Satullo, a writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer, made the suggestion in his column the other day that, instead of Fourth of July celebrations this year, we should sit in quiet contemplation of the plain fact that our country over the past seven years has engaged in torture, indefinite detention without charges, rendition, and other unspeakable acts.  It was a clear and provocative call to stand up for liberty in the face of fear, for honest criticism of our leaders as an act of patriotism.

We have betrayed the July 4 creed. We trample the vows we make, hand to heart.

Don't imagine that only the torturer's hand bears the guilt. The guilt reaches deep inside our Capitol, and beyond that - to us.

Our silence is complicit. In our name, innocents were jailed, humans tortured, our Constitution mangled. And we said so little.

Today, Satullo wrote a follow-up column, explaining the authoritarian response to his initial offering.