Sun don't shine above the ground

(Cross-posted at Hullabaloo)

Tomorrow, the Summer Solstice, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales will be delivering a speech on Civil Rights in Oxford, Mississippi. Won't that be special. I wonder if he'll use the phrase "I don't recall" much.

Oxford, of course, is home to the University of Mississippi, where, in the middle of a riot, James Meredith became the first African-American student. Meredith survived after being shot, nearly four years later, as he marched for voting rights.

I've heard that Meredith does not enjoy being considered an important figure in the Civil Rights movement. From the looks of the Voting Rights Section of the Department of Justice, it would seem Gonzales doesn't, either.

Via McClatchy on Monday:

WASHINGTON — A former Justice Department political appointee blocked career lawyers from filing at least three lawsuits charging local and county governments with violating the voting rights of African-Americans and other minorities, seven former senior department employees charged Monday.

Hans von Spakovsky also derailed at least two investigations into possible voter discrimination, the former employees of the Voting Rights Section said in interviews and in a letter to the Senate Rules and Administration Committee. They urged the panel to reject von Spakovsky's nomination to the Federal Election Commission.

[...]

In the letter to California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the panel's chairwoman, the former employees said that von Spakovsky acted as the "de facto voting section chief" from early 2003 until late 2005, spending virtually all of his time on voting matters and promoting "partisan political interests."

"We have never seen a political appointee exercise this level of control over the day-to-day operations of the voting section," they said.

It was the second letter in the last eight days in which former employees of the Voting Rights Section, including [Joseph] Rich and former deputy chief Robert Kengle, urged the Senate panel to reject the nomination. Feinstein told von Spakovsky during the hearing that the criticism from former department officials would make it difficult for him to win confirmation.

Monday's letter included the first allegations that von Spakovsky torpedoed suits and investigations over alleged state, county or local laws that diminish the voting strength of African-Americans, Native Americans or other minorities or prevent them from voting altogether.

I'm sure Gonzales' speech will be riveting.

McClatchy, by the way, has a new website with a new slogan, "Truth to Power." Josh Marshall sings the praises they deserve.

A reference point

(Cross-posted at Hullabaloo)

Today is Juneteenth. Happy Juneteenth!

It's a day to celebrate the abolition of slavery, but also to remember that there remains quite a bit of road ahead on the path to true equality under the law in America. The hard work left to do is especially glaring this year, in light of the fact that the Department of Justice seems hell-bent on making a U-turn.

Nancy Pelosi issued an eloquent statement today about the holiday:

"In his famous Gettysburg address, President Abraham Lincoln promised a new birth of freedom in our nation. And today we commemorate the day of new birth in which all people in America were made free: June 19, 1865.

"Known as Juneteenth, this is the day when Union Major General Gordon Granger landed in Galveston, Texas to issue the President's executive order, known to us as the Emancipation Proclamation. Although the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect on January 1, 1863, it took almost two and half years for the Proclamation to be enforced throughout all of the United States.

"Juneteenth has evolved into a national day of reflection and celebration for millions of Americans across the country. Juneteenth is America's reminder of a past of inequality, and a future of justice for all citizens. It is a reference point from which to appreciate the progress made in our society, toward the ideal of equality that is America's heritage and hope."

Paul Kiel at TPM Muckraker published a post last Friday detailing how clearly the DOJ Civil Rights division has been undermined by this administration. Every week, it becomes even more obvious.

I'm going to deviate a bit. It's not the true intention of the holiday, but I can't help thinking also about the way the world has advanced physically since 1865 and how news travels. Of course, part of the reason it took so long for word of the Emancipation to be delivered to the slaves in Texas was the fact that the Confederacy was in control and had no motivation for spreading that particular news item.

But news didn't travel so fast, anyway. Radio was still a generation away. And even sending a person somewhere wasn't that easy. There was no interstate highway system. When the 19th Century began, First Lady Abigail Adams got lost in the woods just trying to get from Baltimore to Washington D.C.

As with equal rights, it often seems that progress is "an arch wherethrough gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades for ever and for ever when I move," to be presumptuous enough to borrow from Tennyson. We just never seem to get there. You might be reading this post 10,000 miles from where it was written within minutes of its publishing. But a police officer still can't reliably tell a firefighter to get out of a collapsing building with an interoperable radio. The federal government couldn't even figure out help was desperately needed at the Superdome after Katrina. And the signal-to-noise ratio is so low these days that information doesn't penetrate even after it arrives, hence the Saddam was behind 9/11 poll results.

I think the good news is that we're close enough technologically that a simple change of leadership might be all it takes to get our nation communicating the way we ought to be. Just getting Ted Stevens away from a gavel was a good start. With enough pressure on the FCC, the Internet just might survive the threat of corporate control.

Equality under the law? Well, electing a president who will reverse some of the damage to the Justice Department will get us back on the road, at a bare minimum. I doubt there will ever be a Juneteenth when we can float out the Mission Accomplished banner. But as Pelosi said, today is a reference point and a chance to evaluate where we've been, where we are and where we are headed.

What a day

Scooter gets the sentence he deserves, Schlozman gets the grilling he deserves and Rudy gets interrupted by God while explaining why he's not Pontius Pilate.

Some days I have nothing to blog about. Today, too much to know where to start.

Natural Born Liars (redux)

Last week, DB was awed by the reflexive nature of Andrew Card's lying:

COMEY: I took the call. And Mr. Card was very upset and demanded that I come to the White House immediately.

I responded that, after the conduct I had just witnessed, I would not meet with him without a witness present.

He replied, "What conduct? We were just there to wish him well."

And I said again, "After what I just witnessed, I will not meet with you without a witness. And I intend that witness to be the solicitor general of the United States."

Marvelous. Imagine the audacity of delivering a complete lie to a former New York criminal prosecutor, at that moment Acting Attorney General... Imagine calling him in anger over an incident and then denying the incident even occurred... Imagine denying the incident even though Comey himself had personally witnessed it only moments earlier... Imagine handing him this bogus account of their encounter in response to Comey's insistence that an objective third party be present at a future meetings.

Think how naturally one must lie to even try to pull that one off.

Now we learn that it gets even worse. Digby catches this item in Newsweek about the morning after:

Comey didn't tell the Senate panel that the bad feelings were stoked even more the next morning when White House officials explained the hospital visit by saying Gonzales and Card were unaware that Comey was acting A.G. (and therefore the only person authorized to sign off on the surveillance program), according to a former senior DOJ official who requested anonymity talking about internal matters. Top DOJ officials were furious, the source said. Just days earlier, Justice's chief spokesman had publicly said Comey would serve as "head of the Justice Department" while Ashcroft was ill. Justice officials had also faxed over a document to the White House informing officials of this. When a Gonzales aide claimed the counsel's office could find no record of it, DOJ officials dug out a receipt showing the fax had been received. "People were disgusted as much as livid," said the DOJ official. "It was just the dishonesty of it." A Gonzales aide at the time (who asked not to be ID'd talking about internal matters) said there was a "miscommunication" and "genuine confusion" over who was in charge.

Fantastic. The administration is a cadre of congenital liars. They couldn't tell the truth if they tried. And they never do.

Whitehouse on FISA

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) has, so far, been the most pleasant surprise to DB since the November 2006 elections.

First, he had the most impressive moment of the day during the last hearing with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, when he pulled out some staggering charts to highlight the connections between the White House and the Department of Justice. (Dahlia Lithwick has the chart here.)

And again yesterday, at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, Sen. Whitehouse laid out the case against expanding Bush's intelligence gathering authority with total clarity. Here are his comments in total:

We'll talk more about this, obviously, in the closed session, but I wanted to make a couple of points. And before I do, Director, let me say that I'm going to be speaking rather generally. As between you and I, I believe you to be an honorable and trustworthy man. I think you are here with a view to be professional. That is your motivation. You are not an ideologue or a partisan and your desire is to repair the intelligence function of the United States and I applaud you for that.

But that said, you are still asking for substantial changes in your authority. As an aside, I think the new technologies that have emerged do suggest some adjustment to FISA. It may be over- or under-inclusive in some areas, but as we look through the lens of the past, in terms of evaluating how much we can trust you with, institutionally. You know, these are tough times. As you said, we had FISA... the reason we have FISA in the first place is because of past abuses.

We've just found out about the litany of national security letter abuses within the Department of Justice.

The Attorney General has thoroughly and utterly lost my confidence. And at this stage, any element of the FISA legislation that depends on the Attorney General will need some other backstop in order to have my confidence.

We are coming out of this Article II regime the TSP program of warrantless wiretapping, and to this day, we have never been provided the presidential authorizations that cleared that program to go, or the Attorney General-Department of Justice opinions that declared it to be lawful.

Now, if this program is truly concluded, the TSP program, and if this is the new day, where everything is to be under FISA, I can't imagine for the life of me why those documents, that pertain to a past and closed program, should not be made available to the Committee and to us.

And so to me, it is very concerning, as we take these next steps, for you to be saying impliedly "Trust us. We need the authority. We'll use it well," when we're coming off the record of the national security letters. We're coming off terrible damage done to the Department of Justice by this Attorney General. We're coming off a continuing stonewall from the White House on documents that I cannot, for the life of me, imagine merit confidentiality at this stage.

And in the context of all of that... You've got some uphill sledding with me.

And I want to work with you and I want to do this, but it would be a big step in the right direction in terms of building the trust

Mr. Potenza, I heard you just talk about how important it was, to the extent we've been disclosed... these opinions... that there was that transparency... We've been talking a lot about transparency and all that kind of stuff.

Where's the transparency as to the presidential authorizations for this closed program. Where's the transparency as to the Attorney General's opinion as to this closed program? That's a pretty big "We're not going to tell you" in this new atmosphere of trust we're trying to build.

Gonzales has failed us all

DB didn't get a chance to do any blogging yesterday, but my two Gonzales Haiku submissions at FDL seem to have been pretty much spot on.

I don’t remember
I’m not prepared to answer
I cannot recall

That one pretty much speaks for itself. My other haiku requires maybe a little more background:

You covered his ass,
Spared him from jury duty
He’s not your “client”

When Gonzales' nomination was being considered by the Senate, he stated that he understood his job would be to represent the American people, and no longer would Bush be his client.

During his testimony in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee at their February 2006 hearing on the president's ability to wiretap without a warrant, Sen. Schumer asked Gonzales if the administration was preventing people like former Attorney General John Ashcroft from volunteering to testify:

SCHUMER: I'm asking you what the administration would think in terms of exercising any claim of privilege.

You're not going to have -- I'm sorry, here -- you're not going to have different rules for yourself, an administration advocate, then for these people who might be administration dissenters in one way or another, are you?

GONZALES: Sir, I don't know if you're asking what are they going to say...

SCHUMER: I'm not asking you that.

Would the rules be same? I think you answer that yes or no.

GONZALES: If they came to testify?

SCHUMER: Correct.

GONZALES: Well, sir, the client here is the president of the United States. I'm not sure it's in my place to offer...

SCHUMER: Or his chief...

GONZALES: ... up a position or my recommendation to you about what I might recommend to the president of the United States would not be appropriate here.

In November, as he failed to recall any mistakes he might have made, Gonzales referred to his "client" again. He still hadn't embraced the idea that he works for the American people.

And so it was easy to predict that Gonzales would again cover the president's sorry butt instead of helping the American people get to the bottom of what is an ugly, ugly mess at his department. Glenn Greenwald really hits this point home with eloquence:

[W]hat Alberto Gonzales did today -- and what he has done in this scandal since its inception -- is what he has been doing for the last six years, and particularly, during the last two years during his tenure as Attorney General. He has repeatedly lied to Congress, evaded their questions, concealed wrongdoing, expressed contempt for oversight and checks, particularly when it comes to the actions of the Leader, whom -- even as Attorney General -- he still plainly sees as his client and whose interests are his paramount, really his only, priority.

That is what Alberto Gonzales is -- he is a supremely loyal servant of George Bush and he was installed as the nation's chief law enforcement officer precisely because of that attribute. There really is very little he would not do, if there is anything, in service to the White House. And that has been evident for quite some time.

Nor is there anything unique about Gonzales himself. His conduct is the conduct of this administration, and his mindset is its mindset. The U.S. Attorneys scandal is merely illustrative, not unique in any way -- except that Bush's weakened state and subpoena power in the hands of Democrats have combined to produce slightly more oversight and scrutiny than before.

For DB, the whole spectacle could really be summed up with this exchange. That clip doesn't show the question Gonzales was asked, but essentially, Sen. Cardin asked why the Department of Justice has investigated voter fraud issues, but they have not investigated voter intimidation cases. This, despite the fact that there are scant examples of actual voter fraud and the examples of disenfranchisement are legion.

Gonzales first claimed he can relate to poor minorities and then explained, falsely, that the department follows guidelines to prevent anybody from being intimidated from voting by the DOJ investigations into voter fraud, themselves. Nothing about why he doesn't take voter intimidation and suppression cases seriously enough to investigate.

That was the day in a nutshell... try to seem sympathetic, evade answering the question by talking about something else, and say whatever sounds like a legitimate reason for keeping the job. It was pathetic.

Finally, DB's two favorite summaries of the day. Dahlia Lithwick (of course) encapsulated the day quite well and even included a picture of Sen. Whitehouse's amazing chart (on Page 2). And this NY Times editorial is just perfect.

Department of Injustice

One of these days, the complete record of what the Bush administration has done to minorities will be revealed and the GOP will be broken. Of course, the racists among us will find another vehicle for their warped agenda. But the damage that has been done to the Department of Justice will take a long time to repair.

Here's one thing that the Bush political appointees insisted didn't raise any red flags. The sponsor of the bill, Georgia state Rep. Sue Burmeister told voting section staff that "if there are fewer black voters because of this bill, it will only be because there is less opportunity for fraud," and that "when black voters in her black precincts are not paid to vote, they do not go to the polls."

Once again, Josh Marshall and his staff are taking the lead on this issue. Please join DB in awarding him the honorary title Chief Justice of the Internet.

Gonzales Haiku

Here's DB's FDL Alberto Gonzales Haiku:

I don’t remember
I’m not prepared to answer
I cannot recall

Looks like he might as well send it to the Hill.

(corrected spelling in post title)

CHIEF JUSTICE JOSH MARSHALL

Before Jon Stewart earned DB's permanent respect for killing Crossfire, that show was on TV here all the time. One of the moments that made it watchable was this:

JAMES CARVILLE: I'll tell you what, that is the best money the government spent in all of 2002.

Trent Lott isn't the only Republican that wants to turn the clock back to the years of segregation. The embattled senator from Mississippi wants to take us back to 1948. Attorney General John Ashcroft, though, would rather return to 1848. Four years ago, Ashcroft gave an interview to "Southern Partisan Magazine," in which he described the importance of "defending southern patriots like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis."

(UNINTELLIGIBLE) to say not only segregation, but (UNINTELLIGIBLE). So tonight, I want to announce the formation of Liberals for Lott. Libs for Lott is dedicated to the American principle of equal justice for all. Leadership based on character and full accountability to those who seek to govern. Libs for Lott demands equality. If Senator Lott stays, so can Ashcroft. But if Lott goes, we insist that the Republican Party send Ashcroft with him.

(APPLAUSE)

Our group...

TUCKER CARLSON: Your group.

CARVILLE: Because I don't know what we're going to tell the children. Because when the little children come home and they say, mommy, why did Senator Lott lose his job? He was just for segregation.

CARLSON: But Senator Byrd...

(CROSSTALK)

CARVILLE: ... Ashcroft, who spoke out nostalgically about slavery keeps his. I don't understand. We have to be willing to have the courage to teach the little cowboys and cowgirls out there in America the lesson that everybody is responsible for their actions, even the attorney general.

CARLSON: Well, good luck, James. And in the absence of any real ideas, that would probably make a good platform for you. And I hope you do a great job with it.

CARVILLE: Please join Libs for Lott, because we're standing with Trent. Because we say equal justice for all. If it's good for the majority leader, it's good for the attorney general.

CARLSON: If the idea that the attorney general is a racist or a supporter of slavery, someone...

CARVILLE: Well why keep giving interviews to "Southern Partisan Magazine," a magazine that regularly praises the assassination of Abraham Lincoln? Do you think that was a good idea that Lincoln was assassinated? Speak out against it.

CARLSON: This is so insane, that I can't continue this conversation.

(CROSSTALK)

CARVILLE: ... wrong to assassinate Abraham Lincoln.

CARLSON: We're going to have to take a commercial break. Insanity demands it.

Do you think that was a good idea that Lincoln was assassinated, Tucker? Comedy gold.

DB is writing this post today for several reasons. First, it is timely. President Lincoln was killed 142 years ago today (and I'm a sucker for anniversaries).

Today is also Jackie Robinson Day at stadiums across America. The same TV stations that have spent the last two weeks hosting debates about racist comments directed at some fantastic young athletes and scholars will spend the afternoon celebrating, quite rightly, an American hero who heard the same and worse when he broke the color barrier in baseball 60 years ago.

Robinson was named Rookie of the Year in September 1947, just five months before President Truman delivered his civil rights agenda to Congress, which led to the segregationist 1948 presidential candidacy of Strom Thurmond. The candidacy that Lott romanticized above.

We've come a long way in America, but obviously not far enough. Over at Josh Marshall's TPMmuckraker, we saw this report by Paul Kiel last week:

During the first five years of the Bush administration, the Justice Department's voting section only filed a single case alleging voting discrimination on behalf of African American voters. That's despite the fact that the section, part of the Civil Rights Division, was created mainly to protect African American voters from discrimination.

But during that same time period, the section managed to file the first ever "reverse" discrimination case under the Voting Rights Act.

[...]

A similar shift has occurred in the division's employment litigation section, which is tasked with preventing discrimination in employment. That section has managed to file two "reverse" discrimination cases alleging discrimination against whites under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, while filing only one alleging discrimination against African Americans in the past six years.

Shameless.

All of this is of course compounded by the examples of misconduct emerging from the U.S. Attorneys scandal, which is breaking open in large part because of the persistence of Marshall and TPM.

Which brings DB to the main point of this post and also to the reason this it begins with that ridiculous exchange on Crossfire.

While Marshall and TPM have been appropriately receiving accolades for their work in "PurgeGate," the truth is that Marshall has been an online hero for justice for a long time. Here's Ashcroft praising that racist southern magazine:

"Your magazine helps set the record straight," said Ashcroft. "You've got a heritage of doing that, of defending Southern patriots like [Robert E.] Lee, [Stonewall] Jackson and [Jefferson] Davis. Traditionalists must do more. I've got to do more. We've all got to stand up and speak in this respect or else we'll be taught that these people were giving their lives, subscribing their sacred fortunes and their honor to some perverted agenda."

Who do you think broke that story for Slate in 2000? That's right, Josh Marshall. And here's what he humbly wrote at TPM:

And finally, why hasn't more been said about Ashcroft's interview with the Southern Partisan magazine? I'd like to take heaps of credit for being the first to mention this story late on the evening of December 22nd. But, honestly, a few Nexis searches are all that's required to get all the details. But a quick search on the self-same Nexis reveals that only one article (that by Tom Edsall in the Washington Post) has even mentioned the Southern Partisan interview since Ashcroft's nomination (and even then only in passing).

Isn't this sort of a big deal? Is it really too much to ask that nominees for Attorney General not give interviews to crypto- (or not-so-crypto) racist publications like the Southern Partisan?

The media did, finally, begin to notice and Marshall kept the questions rolling:

More on point is the fact, reported in the AP story, that George Bush, Sr. appointed Ashcroft to his commission on race and minorities in America. And Ashcroft was one of only two of the forty commission members who refused to sign the final report. Ashcroft said the report's "generalizations about setbacks in progress are overly broad and counterproductive."

Hmmm.

Talking Points hasn't seen the report. But he imagines that since it was sponsored by President Bush it probably wasn't a particularly afro-centric document, if you know what I mean.

Anyway, the point isn't that Ashcroft's a racist. But then that's not the standard, is it? Given all the evidence, let's just say that civil rights enforcement just doesn't really seem like John Ashcroft's cup of tea.

And since the AG is the head civil rights enforcer. Maybe he just ain't the right guy for the job.

So here we are, seven years later, and the results are in. The Department of Justice has not just abandoned its Civil Rights responsibilities. It has deceptively and deliberately worked to undermine its own mission.

Josh Marshall saw it coming and rang the alarm bell. Too bad it's taken seven years for him to make it to prime time cable news shows and to get some notice in the "Paper of Record."

DB thinks America is a better country when people are paying attention to Josh Marshall and I'd like to keep him in the spotlight.

Therefore, I nominate JOSHUA MICAH MARSHALL, CHIEF JUSTICE OF THE INTERNET

Who's with me?

Lithwick

Dahlia Lithwick nails it again. DB has said it before... Lithwick and Fred Kaplan are the only reasons Slate is still bookmarked in my browser.

It's easy to be distracted, even slightly amused, by the banal office shenanigans that make up the day-to-day coverage of the scandal. Increasingly, the Justice Department is revealed in all its wacky Dunder Mifflin glory. Alberto Gonzales is unmasked as The Office's Michael Scott—in so far over his head that he has no idea what his youthful employees are up to. With our daily focus on who was e-mailing whom and who was spending what on their fancy investitures, it's tempting to dismiss senior Justice Department staff ranking U.S. attorneys for their "loyalty" to the president as sophomoric. The Duke case is a useful reminder that the little plastic game cards being shuffled around and swapped by Kyle Sampson and Monica Goodling were, in fact, loaded weapons.

Federal prosecutors, like state district attorneys, have tremendous power and almost limitless discretion to launch investigations, to subpoena, to file charges, to question witnesses, and to drop charges when the facts don't bear them out. And if the Duke case reminds us of anything, it's that the innocent targets of such investigations and indictments have only one power: to wait it all out and hope for the best.

While Tucker spent his time on the air today shouting "I was right!!!" about the Duke case like a five-year-old, Lithwick shows how a thoughtful person responds to a serious problem with our legal system.

Voter fraud

75,000 Voter Registration Cards Found in Trash Bin in Atlanta:

ATLANTA (AP) -- The Georgia Secretary of State's office has begun an investigation into who threw more than 75,000 Fulton County voter registration cards into a trash bin.

The cards contained a voter's full name, address and Social Security number. The office says a random sampling showed many of the cards were for active voters.

In a statement, Secretary of State Karen Handel said the finding "represents a significant and serious breach of the personal information of Fulton County voters and an outrageous violation of the trust and integrity of Fulton County's elections."

After getting a call from a resident, officials with Handel's office found more than 30 boxes of voter registration application cards, precinct cards and other documents Monday in a construction trash bin at Atlanta Technical College in southwest Atlanta.

Gee, I wonder what the student body at Atlanta Technical College looks like:

Student Body Size and Diversity

In Fall 2002, the school had 2,135 (full-time equivalent) students.

Minority enrollment included African-American (85)%, Hispanic (1)%, and Asian (3)%.

Atlanta Technical College is a Minority Serving Institution as defined by the Office of Civil Rights.

I'm sure Karl Rove's Department of Justice will be sprinting to the scene to find a remedy.