Florida Taliban Handed A Sleight Defeat For Now

  Rick Scott and his criminal cronies got slapped a little.

FL GOP Attempt to Dismantle Judiciary FAILS

by SemDem for DKos Florida    Wed May 04, 2011

It's truly a wingnut's wet dream here.  And just like a dictator who has fallen out of favor, the Fleabag lawmakers are pulling all stops to cling to power. 

There are only two main obstacles: an awakened, angry electorate... and the court system, our third branch of government.  The Fleabag lawmakers have already taken care of the electorate with a fast-tracked, blatant voter suppression bill that I covered in my last diary.  Rachael Maddow devoted her show to it last week.  So there's that.

So that just leaves us with the state judiciary, which has not been playing ball with the GOP as of late.

The Florida Supreme Court did the unforgivable last year.  Not only did they NOT throw out two grass-roots citizen-led initiatives (amendments 5 & 6) that would end gerrymandered districts to protect incumbents in our legislative and congressional elections, but they had the audacity to throw out the GOP legislature's ominous Amendment 7--which was an amendment the legislature tried to sneak in that would "clarify" 5 & 6 if they passed.  And by clarify, I mean overturn.  It was so misleading that Judge Shelfer said it took him three days to understand what was written; and he tossed it off the November ballot.

With nothing to confuse the voters, amendments 5 & 6 won handily.  The GOP could NOT let this stand.  Judges, like the electorate, had to know their place in the new order. 

So they attempted to work over Florida's judiciary:

1.  SB 1504, sponsored by GOP Sen. David Simmons, would revoke the Florida Supreme Court’s power to remove any proposed constitutional amendment from ballot just because it is "misleading to voters".

Think about that for a second.

2.  Attempted to disband the Judicial Nominating Commission, which currently chooses nominees for the Supreme Court and state courts.  Gov. Voldemort would have had the SOLE authority to nominate state and Supreme Court justices.

3.  Attempted to split the court into two...move all the Democratic-appointed judges to the new Criminal division, and then allow Gov. Voldemort to appoint three new right-wing justices... just in time to review the redistricting maps. 

4.  Attempted to give themselves the authority to nix judicial rules and procedures put in place by the Supreme Court.  No power grab there.

5.  Attempted to move the bar for judges to win re-election to 60%.

6.  Punish the courts by cutting their funding.  In the same breath the state legislature is saying they want to increase efficiency, their budget cuts the high court's staff more than 50 percent.  That'll learn 'em!  (Staff increased for the other two branches, by the by.)

Every bar association, independent legal scholar, major state paper and national papers, including USA Today, called this scheme for what it was:  a powergrab and payback.  Activists flooded their legislator's inbox and voiceball.

And as of yesterday, when the world was celebrating a terrorist's death, the powergrab of the Florida judiciary died as well.

A watered down version passed Monday would allow Senate confirmation of justices, give the House access to confidential judicial investigations, and, of course, #4--allow the legislature to repeal judicial procedural rules enacted by the court.  The good news is that this amendment requires voter approval by 60% next election. Ha!

The bad news is that the legislature still yanks and threatens to yank funding when they throw their temper tantrums.  This is where I need your help:

I am calling on activists to start a citizen-led initiative for an amendment of our own:  Automatically fund the state judiciary with 1 percent of the state's budget. 

Currently, the judiciary budget is under .07%, and the legislature vindictively cuts it when they feel like it.  The judiciary, which we depend on to stop some of the insanity, is so underfunded that the judiciary had to beg for a $14 million infusion just to keep operating to the end of April! 

The courts cannot count on the legislature to do the right thing, and neither can we.

Also republished by Class Warfare Newsletter: The Plutocracy VS the Working Class and Community Spotlight.

Technorati Tags: Rick Scott,Republicans,Florida Taliban,Florida Supreme Court,Florida,Law,Current Events,American Taliban

Bin Laden Death Irks Pakistan

  Let’s get this right, okay? We have given Pakistan somewhere in the neighborhood of $300 billion in aid and yet they have the gall to be angry at the United States for going after Osama without letting them know in advance? This crap from the country that has been hiding Bin Laden for the past few years in a $1 million compound near the countries top military academy. The nerve!

U.S. officials have suggested Pakistani officials may have known where bin Laden was living and members of Congress have seized on those suspicions to call for the U.S. to consider cutting billions of aid to Pakistan if it turns out to be true.

Western officials have long regarded Pakistani security forces with suspicion, especially when it comes to links with militants fighting in Afghanistan. Last year, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton publicly said she suspected that some members of Pakistan's government knew where bin Laden was hiding.

However, within Pakistan criticism has been focused on the U.S. breaching the country's sovereignty. The Obama administration has said it did not inform the Pakistanis in advance of the operation against bin Laden, for fear they would tip off the targets.  Yahoo News

   Pakistani officials are now trying to cover their asses, and they are feeling a little left out of the party.

In a statement, the Pakistani government said "this event of unauthorized unilateral action cannot be taken as a rule."

"The government of Pakistan further affirms that such an event shall not serve as a future precedent for any state, including the U.S.," it said, calling such actions a "threat to international peace and security."

Technorati Tags: Pakistan,Osama Bin Laden,United States,CIA,Current Events

Republicans say torture led U.S. to bin Laden. Facts say otherwise.

  Those darned Republicans still distorting the facts after Bin Laden is killed.

You could see this one coming a mile off. Here's Dick Cheney on Fox News: "I would assume the enhanced interrogation program we put in place produced some of the results that led to bin Laden's ultimate capture.... We need to keep in place those policies that made it possible for us to succeed in this case."

Here's an AP story reiterating the same.

Current and former U.S. officials say that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, provided the nom de guerre of one of bin Laden's most trusted aides. The CIA got similar information from Mohammed's successor, Abu Faraj al-Libi. Both were subjected to harsh interrogation tactics inside CIA prisons in Poland and Romania.

Or how about the Heritage Foundation screaming "Detainee Interrogations: Key to Killing Osama bin Laden": "This lead was developed during the Bush Administration, most likely from al-Qaeda associates picked up and transferred to Guantanamo and subject to interrogations that critics have repeatedly deemed to be pointless in terms of intelligence value. Whether these detainees remain at Guantanamo is an open question." See, if Bush and Cheney hadn't been man enough to torture people, we never would have found bin Laden. Nine years later.

There's plenty more where that came from:

• Rep. Steve King (R-IA) tweeted, "Wonder what President Obama thinks of water boarding now?"
• Karl Rove said on Fox & Friends this morning: "I think the tools that President Bush put into place—GITMO, rendition, enhanced interrogation, the vast effort to collect and collate this information — obviously served his successor quite well."
• Bush torture architect John Yoo says "Without the tough decisions taken by President Bush and his national security team, the United States could not have found and killed bin Laden. It is the continuity of policies in the war on terror that has brought success, not the misguided effort of the last two years to disavow them."

Let's revisit history, again, by going to the best source, Marcy Wheeler at emptywheel. The waterboarding of KSM, all 183 instances, occurred in March, 2003. The torture of al Libi happened in early 2002, after his November, 2001 capture.

As Marcy explained in an e-mail:

Assuming they got the courier's name in 2005 or 2006, per reports, it happened 2 years or more after KSM's waterboarding.

Which would say KSM withheld this information under waterboarding.

And given how much time it took to actually get from the courier to the compound (presumably about 4 years), both KSM and al-Libi didn't give all that much on the courier(s).

KSML was waterboarded 183 times, presumably without revealing the name of the courier. And, since it took 183 tries, the efficacy of the whole enterprise can only be questioned. [Update: The following applies to Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, not to Abu Faraj al-Libi, who is sourced in the AP story. The lesson about the effectiveness of torture remains unchanged, but the timeline for Abu Faraj al-Libi is slightly different. See emptywheel for more on that.] But what the torture of al Libi "revealed" is even more damning for the pro-torturers's case.

Having slipped off the radar, the government clearly does not want his case revived, not only because it may have to explain what has happened to him, but also because, as a result of the application of "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques," al-Libi claimed that Saddam Hussein had offered to train two al-Qaeda operatives in the use of chemical and biological weapons.

Al-Libi's "confession" led to President Bush declaring, in October 2002, "Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and gases," and his claims were, notoriously, included in Colin Powell's speech to the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003. The claims were of course, groundless, and were recanted by al-Libi in January 2004, but it took Dan Cloonan, a veteran FBI interrogator, who was resolutely opposed to the use of torture, to explain why they should never have been believed in the first place. Cloonan told Jane Mayer, "It was ridiculous for interrogators to think Libi would have known anything about Iraq... The reason they got bad information is that they beat it out of him. You never get good information from someone that way."

What torture got us, in practical terms, was the Iraq debacle. And the complete and well-deserved debasement of our international standing. And a hell of a lot more anti-American terrorists.

Technorati Tags: Osama Bin Laden,Waterboarding,Republicans,Dick Cheney,FoxNews,Current Events

Right-Wingers Still Short On Facts

  It never ceases to amaze me at the lengths that the right-wing will to go in order to make themselves look like assholes.

DKos           by   Stand Strong

By now, you've probably seen this pathetic excuse of an attempt to deny the President any credit for the recent events that resulted in the death of Osama Bin Laden:

Let's be clear on this: OBAMA did NOT kill Bin Laden. An American soldier, who Obama just a few weeks ago was debating on whether or not to PAY, did. Obama just happened to be the one in office when our soldiers finally found OBL and took him out. This is NOT an Obama victory, but an AMERICAN victory!!!

This is one of the most ridiculous, disingenuous and steaming piles of dog mess I've seen in a while. It almost tops the chain-mail I got several years ago about how all Democrats hate the troops, want them to die, and support the terrorists. That one didn't end well either, thanks to "Reply All."

Yes, Obama did NOT personally kill Bin Laden but then again, George Bush didn't personally kill Saddam Hussein either but he got credit for it, didn't he? And surprisingly, there are some out there today giving Bush credit for this, and yet he happens to not be the guy in office anymore which pretty much nulls that first argument.

But to get to a more serious point, the truth of the matter is that this was a long-term project which involved numerous meetings between the President and his security advisers, as well as the diligence of those in the intelligence community and ultimately, those soldiers who actually carried out the mission.

However, HAD THIS MISSION FAILED and Osama Bin Laden gotten away and/or those SEALs who underwent the mission been injured or killed, are you telling me you're going to dish out a heaping cup of blame on the SEALs for fucking it up?

No, of course not. But I'll tell you what you WILL do. You're going to turn and you're going to look at the President and you're going to blame him.

Why?

HE was the one who had the meetings and reviewed the intelligence.
HE was the one who made the decision to launch the mission.
HE, as Commander in Chief of the United States, who is ultimately responsible for the well-being of those who serve this nation, sent a SEAL team on probably one of the most high profile, risky individual campaigns those people had ever gone on.

If things go to shit, THAT'S on the President. But if it succeeds...?

As for the other myths in this meme, the soldiers didn't just "finally found OBL" while doing a routine patrol. They were given intelligence, they trained, they planned. This was a mission, not some spider-hole they stumbled upon, popped the lid off of and said "Whoa! Hey! What do we have here?!" This was a mission reviewed and approved by the President.

And lastly, with regards to "cutting off pay," I assume this involves the recent threats of shutting down the government?

Yeah, that wasn't Obama either.

Technorati Tags: Barack Obama,Osama Bin Laden,American Taliban,Right Wing Radio,Current Events