I believe in giving great access to the press for three reasons. First, I much prefer long back and forths, where reporters have multiple follow ups and I have an opportunity to explain my views in greater detail....
Second, I think reporters are better able to meet their first responsibility of ensuring an informed citizenry if they are allowed to press a candidate for more than a gotcha quote or a comment on whatever the cable driven news environment has decided is the process story of the day.
Last, and most importantly, the responsibility of an informed citizenry is as much my responsibility as it is yours. I don't believe in deceiving voters about my positions, my beliefs or how I would govern this country were I to have the extraordinary privilege of serving as President.
Bitter yet? New York Times ignores Bush's torture approval
04.14.08 - Posted by AsiansVote
The New York Times has run at least eleven articles since Friday about Obama's "bitter" comments.
But no matterwhatsearchtermsI use, I can find exactly zero articles from the New York Times about the April 11 ABC interview in which President Bush admitted that he approved of his top advisors' authorization of the "enhanced interrogation" or torture of al Qaeda suspects.
Just in case the New York Times is looking, here are its eleven missing links to the most important story of the weekend:
Ana Marie Cox wins Percy Sledge McCain McLovin Medallion
04.12.08 - Posted by AsiansVote
In her latest Time.com blog post, Ana Marie "Lovin' Eyes Can't Ever See" Cox defends her girlfriend John "She Can Do No Wrong" McCain from charges of hypocrisy with a heartfelt tribute to the "towering" standards McCain sets for himself. In fact, the things McCain says he believes are so rarefied and wonderful that if he betrays those beliefs, we should hardly fault him. Seriously. This is her argument:
To be sure, McCain's self-scrutiny is withering. (And the estimation of others can be wrong.) If McCain is not always his own worst critic, he is still a vicious and constant one. The level of achievement, honesty and duty to his country that he sets for himself is incredibly high -- higher than most people's, perhaps even "towering." And I am sympathetic to his aides' point that he shouldn't be punished every time his actions meet "normal" standards but fail his own.
Let's see how this works in practice...
John McCain's towering achievement, honesty, and duty to his country require him to speak out against torture. Which is surely far above the "normal" standards of a mere mortal like President George Bush.
John McCain, however, fails to meet the towering standards he set for himself. In fact, he changes his anti-torture legislation to allow President Bush to define what torture is. And he first supports, then votes against provisions that would require the CIA to abide by Army Field Manual regulations preventing torture.
But we shouldn't criticize John McCain. No, we should only praise him, for his anti-torture sentiments were so impossibly, gloriously high in the first place.
Ana Marie Cox, your love for your girlfriend is a beautiful thing. We proudly award you today's richly deserved Percy Sledge McCain McLovin Medallion.
I'm sorry. I'm... I'm all choked up. Can we listen to the song again? John Bolton version, please.
Click here for the origins of the Percy Sledge McCain McLovin Medallion.
President Bush just proudly affirmed that he personally approved his administration's torture policy. From ABC News:
President Bush says he knew his top national security advisers discussed and approved specific details about how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, according to an exclusive interview with ABC News Friday.
"Well, we started to connect the dots in order to protect the American people." Bush told ABC News White House correspondent Martha Raddatz. "And yes, I'm aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved."
...
These top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects -- whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding, sources told ABC news.
After this revelation, the next pundit who blathers about bowling scores, orange juice, or the word "bitter"...
He totally nails it at the end. And this is why I'm supporting this candidate. Because when the clowns who rule the airwaves think the most important issue of the day is whether a candidate orders coffee or orange juice, we need a leader like Barack Obama who has the ability to cut through the stupid chatter and make real points about real people and real problems.
Regardless of who the Democratic nominee is, the media and the Republicans will make every effort to drum up fake outrage at every opportunity. We need a candidate who can hit back with charm and power and common sense at the drop of a hat in a YouTube friendly way.
But Obama seizes the issue, turns it around, and rubs McCain's face in his failure to respond to the mortgage crisis.
The trick is making sure that folks are able to actually see and hear Obama's words. So feel free to spread this video around -- particularly to friends in Pennsylvania.
Dear Journalists: John McCain is not your girlfriend and you are not Percy Sledge
04.11.08 - Posted by AsiansVote
So enough with the "When a Man Loves a Woman" act.
If she's bad he can't see it
She can do no wrong
Two months ago, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof noted John McCain's flip flop on torture, but concluded that "Mr. McCain truly has principles that he bends or breaks out of desperation and with distaste. That’s preferable to politicians who are congenital invertebrates."
I'm just guessing here, but the people who have been killed due to the Bush Administration's torture policies probably wouldn't find anything "preferable" about John McCain's "desperation and distaste" with selling them out.
Today, Time Magazine's Michael Scherer dives deeper into the mighty river of denial by providing clear evidence that McCain flip flopped on torture -- while insisting that McCain never flipped on torture, no way, nuh huh.
Journalists apparently can't believe their own lying eyes.
Let's recap just a few items from the last few months:
John McCain says he's against torture. But he voted against putting real limits on the Bush Administration's torture policies.
John McCain agreed to take public financing and took out a loan on the basis of that agreement. But he's apparently broken the law by blowing past public financing spending limits.
John McCain claims he's all about straight talk. But he was ousted from the board of Project Vote Smart for failing to answer a questionnaire about where he stands on the issues.
The good news, Journalists of America, is that John McCain really isn't your girlfriend! So you can totally report on all of this stuff! Really! Go for it!
If she plays him for a fool
He's the last one to know
Lovin' eyes can't ever see
Ah, who am I kidding. You're in love, you crazy kids!
Alas, Time's Michael Scherer claims that a "review of the record shows that McCain has neither changed his position on torture nor taken sides with President Bush on the substance of the issue." Yet Scherer himself points out that McCain's tough talk against torture means nothing given his failure to challenge the Bush Administration's claim that only it can define what torture is:
"Cruel and inhuman treatment is defined as an act intended to inflict severe or serious physical pain or suffering," McCain explained on the Senate floor, during this second effort. "Such mental suffering need not be prolonged to be prohibited. The mental suffering need only be more than transitory." McCain has said he was assured by government officials that one of the most extreme techniques, waterboarding, was illegal under these laws.
The problem with all of these measures was that they continued to depend on interpretation by Bush Administration lawyers, who continue to be both secretive and evasive of congressional intent. As recently as February 6, the day after the Super Tuesday primary, a White House spokesman refused to rule out the future use of waterboarding as a technique for high-value detainees. The Attorney General has also declined to say that the technique, or other extreme techniques, are outlawed. On March 8, Bush vetoed the latest Congressional attempt to force the CIA to adhere to the Army Field Manual, a rule book that prescribes mostly psychological methods of interrogation, and clearly prohibits the use of forced nudity, waterboarding, hooding and the use of military dogs.
So McCain says he's against torture and waterboarding. But he supports the President's veto of legislation that would curb the Administration's ability to allow for torture and waterboarding? And Scherer insists that McCain hasn't flipped on the issue or sided with Bush?
Scherer seems to have flip flopping issues of his own.
UPDATE: Scherer claims that McCain's vote against requiring the CIA to adhere to the Army Field Manual "was not a flip-flop, but rather the continuation of a position he took in 2005 when he first championed a bill to restrict the Bush Administration's ability to mistreat detainees." Yet Scherer himself notes that the first draft of McCain's 2005 bill "specifically outlined a plan to make the Army Field Manual 'the basis for a uniform standard adhered to by all elements of the United States Government.'" In other words, McCain was for applying the Army Field Manual before he was against it. Scherer sweeps the contradiction away by quoting a McCain spokesman who assures us that that first drafts of bills don't mean anything. But McCain's willingness in 2005 to drop provisions that might actually prevent torture is consistent with the compromises he made in 2006 to allow the Bush Administration to define what torture is.
Scherer claims that McCain has never "taken sides with President Bush on the substance of the issue" (my emphasis). But when McCain's legislation concedes all power to the Bush Administration, what substance is left? Scherer ends with a plaintive McCain quote:
"It is unfortunate," he said on the Senate floor on February 13, of the Bush Administration's refusal to call waterboarding illegal. "It would be far better, I believe, for the Administration to state forthrightly what is clear in current law."
It would be far better, I believe, if John McCain hadn't given the Bush Administration the right to create its own definitions of torture in the first place.
Issues > Civil Rights & Liberties > This entry's link
Hall of Shame: Torture advocate John Yoo
04.11.08 - Posted by AsiansVote
Berkeley law professor John Yoo joins the Hall of Shame for destroying the rule of law and contributing to the deaths of dozens of people by providing legal cover for the Bush Administration's policy of torture at Guantanamo. Scott Horton has the lowdown on Yoo's reprehensible work at Harpers.org:
[Yoo's] memorandum authorized waterboarding, long-time standing, hypothermia, the administration of psychotropic drugs and sleep deprivation in excess of two days in addition to a number of other techniques. Each of these techniques is long established as torture as a matter of American and international law. The application and implementation of these techniques was and is a crime.
...
Following the implementation of these techniques, more than 108 detainees died in detention. In a large number of these cases, the deaths have been ruled a homicide and connected to torture. These homicides were a forseeable consequence of the advice that Haynes and Yoo gave.
Now the National Lawyers Guild is calling for Yoo's disbarment and prosecution for war crimes. Here's an excerpt from the press release:
In a memorandum written the same month George W. Bush invaded Iraq, Boalt Hall law professor John Yoo said the Department of Justice would construe US criminal laws not to apply to the President's detention and interrogation of enemy combatants. According to Yoo, the federal statutes against torture, assault, maiming and stalking do not apply to the military in the conduct of the war.
...
"John Yoo's complicity in establishing the policy that led to the torture of prisoners constitutes a war crime under the US War Crimes Act," said National Lawyers Guild President Marjorie Cohn.
Congress should repeal the provision of the Military Commissions Act that would give Yoo immunity from prosecution for torture committed from September 11, 2001 to December 30, 2005. John Yoo should be disbarred and he should not be retained as a professor of law at one of the country's premier law schools. John Yoo should be dismissed from Boalt Hall and tried as a war criminal.
Glenn Greenwald provides more justification for the war crimes argument -- along with an explanation of why John Yoo will never be brought to justice:
Since the Nuremberg Trials, "war criminals" include not only those who directly apply the criminal violence and other forms of brutality, but also government officials who authorized it and military officials who oversaw it. Ironically, the Bush administration itself argued in the 2006 case of Hamdan -- when they sought to prosecute as a "war criminal" a Guantanamo detainee whom they allege was a driver for Osama bin Laden -- that one is guilty of war crimes not merely by directly violating the laws of war, but also by participating in a conspiracy to do so.
...
The political reality is that high government officials in the U.S. are never going to be held accountable for war crimes. In practice, "international law" exists as a justifying instrument for powerful countries to impose their will on those which are less powerful, and war crimes tribunals are almost always a form of victor's justice. So neither John Yoo, David Addington nor Alberto Gonzales, and certainly not their bosses at whose behest they were working, are going to be sitting in a dock charged with war crimes any time soon -- regardless of whether they ought to be.
But at least House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers has called for Yoo to testify about the memo before Congress on May 6.
In the meantime, watch carefully for any politician or journalist who speaks warmly of John Yoo or provides him a venue to justify himself without challenge. Those are politicians and journalists you can safely write off as deeply unserious people who have no understanding of or respect for the rule of law or the principles upon which this country were founded.
Asian American minister speaks out about Obama's speech on race
03.30.08 - Posted by AsiansVote
From the
new">San Francisco Chronicle:
Listening to Wright on YouTube, "I was saying 'Amen,' " said Park, 32, a Korean American and a Baptist seminarian who leads Oakland Mosaic Project. "The struggle of what race you are is huge in America, especially in an urban environment. ... As an Asian American, I could totally resonate with that."
Park said his sermon today, inspired by Obama's speech, would be about the story of Jesus engaging with a Samaritan woman at a well - a parable affirming acceptance of different cultures.
The Austin American Statesman has interviewed former army chaplain James Yee about the mistreatment he witnessed at Guantanamo. Here's an excerpt:
Yee says he was horrified to see "religion used as a weapon" against Guantánamo detainees — as prisoners told him of detainees being forced to bow down in the middle of a satanic circle in an interrogation room and profess that Satan was their god, not Allah. Detainees were mocked during prayer and taunted or teased sexually by American women while chained. At first, Yee thought it an act of compassion that Guantánamo detainees were allowed to keep a Quran in their cells. But the detainees begged Yee to have them taken away, he says, for American MPs took such delight in mishandling the books or breaking their bindings during random searches.
Then feel free to vote against Senator John McCain in November.
McCain claims that he'll close Guantanamo and even earned Yee's praise for adding an amendment to a military spending bill in 2005 that prohibited "'cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment' in connection with terrorism suspects." But just as McCain spoke out against waterboarding before he voted for it, McCain undermined his vote against inhumane treatment of Guantanamo prisoners within a year. Robert Kuttner has the scoop on McCain's 2006 flip flop:
[A Supreme Court ruling in June] required legislation establishing due process for detainees. The administration responded with an over-the-top proposal that did not allow accused prisoners to see or challenge the evidence against them, suspended habeas corpus, and authorized what by any normal definition is torture disallowed by the Geneva Conventions.
At this last provision, McCain balked. He and his two Republican allies on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Lindsey Graham and John Warner, rose to defend the Geneva Conventions as protecting US prisoners and the American soul.
But then deep negotiations with the administration ensued. When the parties emerged, the compromise looked uncannily like the original administration bill. Nominally, we reaffirm the Geneva protections. But the bill explicitly authorizes the president to define what that means. A detainee's right to challenge his detention to an independent judge (habeas corpus) is still eliminated, as is the right of the accused to see evidence. And the CIA retains the ability to spirit people to third countries that don't even pretend to ban torture.
The bill passed the Senate Thursday on a mostly party-line vote. Supporting it were Senators Graham, Warner, and John McCain.
Hat tip to Blue Texan at Firedoglake for the Yee link.
Updated to include information about the 2005 amendment.
... but Hillary Clinton didn't "misspeak" about her trip to Bosnia. She told an elaborate story that was demonstrably false in multiple, critical ways.
Feel free to spread the word to your friends in Pennsylvania.
Tell your Pennsylvania buddies to register as Dems by March 24 to vote in primary
03.10.08 - Posted by AsiansVote
If you have friends or family in Pennsylvania, please let them know that if they want to vote in the April 22 Democratic primary, they need to be registered as Democrats. This means that if they're Independents or Republicans, they need to switch their party affiliation by March 24.
Legendary Asian American historian Ron Takaki has come out for Barack Obama. Here's an excerpt from his essay:
For me, regardless of what will happen in the primaries or the general election, Obama is already a winner. He has challenged the Master Narrative of American history. He has made his complexion an American one, and his name an American-sounding one. He has opened a new identity not only for African Americans, but also for Asian Americans and Latino Americans. As the son of a father from Kenya, he has remembered his immigrant roots; as the son of a Caucasian mother, he has represented mixed race complexity. Like Tiger Woods, Obama has inspired bi-racial and multi-racial Americans everywhere to embrace their ethnic multiplicity.
Moreover, as a historian of multicultural America, I welcome Obama’s affirmation of America as a nation peopled by the world. He personifies diversity as America’s “manifest destiny.” A leader of vision, Obama has reached for the ties that bind — Lincoln’s “mystic chords of memory,” seeking to unite us as a diverse people belonging to one nation. Crossing racial, economic, and political boundaries, Obama has already inspired millions of us, both young and old, to be audacious in our hopes for changing America and the world.
We wish we could base our endorsement for president on who has the best plan for addressing global warming and fully funding Head Start and ending anti-immigrant rhetoric and dealing with the upcoming recession and giving us electric cars and marriage equality and universal health care and pretty, pretty ponies.
But the next president has a much more fundamental task -- restoring the rule of law and the Constitution of the United States of America.
We believe electing Barack Obama is our best chance of getting the job done.
Over the past eight years, the Bush Administration has brought us warrantless wiretaps, presidential signing statements that amount to an unconstitutional line item veto, suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, an attorney general who apparently fired US attorneys for partisan political reasons, a second attorney general who refuses to enforce congressional subpoenas, a war of aggression, and torture. These aren't just everyday choices between liberal and conservative policies; these are attacks on fundamental American principles and freedoms.
Last year, a group called the American Freedom Campaign pushed each of the presidential candidates to take the American Freedom Pledge, which reads:
We are Americans, and in our America we do not torture, we do not imprison people without charge or legal remedy, we do not tap people's phones and emails without a court order, and above all we do not give any President unchecked power. I pledge to fight to protect and defend the Constitution from attack by any President.
Barack Obama signed the pledge on October 2, 2007. Hillary Clinton, the last of the Democratic candidates to address the request, followed a few days later with a letter in which she affirmed the principles of the statement, touting her vote against "the President's wiretapping bill this past August."
Unfortunately, Senator Clinton skipped the vote on February 12 in which the Senate considered the FISA bill's grant of immunity for telecoms that participated in the Bush Administration's illegal warrantless wiretapping. The week before, she similarly failed to show up for a vote to sunset the FISA bill in four years rather than six. Obama was present for both votes -- and voted both to strip the immunity provisions and to sunset the FISA bill early.
Both of the amendments failed by wide enough margins that Senator Clinton's vote wouldn't have made a difference. But her failure to vote implies a less than total commitment to defending the rule of law. Senator Clinton has only reinforced the impression with her call to seat Florida and Michigan delegates against Democratic Party rules and her campaign's eleventh hour threats to sue over the Texas Democratic Party's delegate selection process.
In all fairness, Senator Obama has passed up plenty of opportunities to lead himself. He could have filibustered the torture bill. He could have joined Senator Christopher Dodd much earlier in fighting the FISA bill. He could have filibustered the confirmation of Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who just showed his true colors by rejecting contempt citations against Harriet Miers and John Bolton for ignoring congressional subpoenas (instead, both Obama and Clinton said they opposed Mukasey but skipped the actual vote). He could have publicly pressured Senator Harry Reid to take up the Judiciary Committee bill that didn't include immunity provisions for telecoms instead of the Intelligence Committee bill that did.
But as the Obama campaign has frequently noted, Obama did speak out when it mattered regarding the war in Iraq. While we haven't heard Obama use the words "war of aggression" or call Donald Rumsfeld a war criminal, in 2002, Illinois State Senator Barack Obama called the Iraq War: "A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics."
Furthermore, as George Washington University law professor Jeffrey Rosen notes in the New York Times, Senator Obama has made at least one proactive stand for the Constitution:
In the Senate, Mr. Obama distinguished himself by making civil liberties one of his legislative priorities. He co-sponsored a bipartisan reform bill that would have cured the worst excesses of the Patriot Act by meaningfully tightening the standards for warrantless surveillance. Once again, he helped encourage a coalition of civil-libertarian liberals and libertarian conservatives. The effort failed when Hillary Clinton joined 13 other Democrats in supporting a Republican motion to cut off debate on amendments to the Patriot Act.
Either Clinton or Obama would be vastly preferable to Senator John McCain, who voted for torture and virtually every other Bush Administration policy. And we will gladly support Senator Clinton if she wins the Democratic nomination -- as Rosen notes, "she would be immeasurably better on civil liberties than George W. Bush." And we deeply respect the passion of supporters like Elena Ong, who have devoted months to Hillary Clinton for her commitment to universal health care and women's rights.
But for showing up to vote and for at least occasionally leading the fight against the Bush Administration's attacks on the Constitution and the rule of law, Senator Obama has has won our enthusiastic support and vote in the primaries.
"No representative of Paxson or Alcalde & Fay personally asked Senator McCain to send a letter to the FCC," the [McCain] campaign said in a statement emailed to reporters.
Alas:
"I was contacted by Mr. Paxson on this issue," McCain said in the September 25, 2002 deposition obtained by Newsweek. "He wanted their approval very bad for purposes of his business. I believe that Mr. Paxson had a legitimate complaint."
...
McCain agreed that his letters on behalf of Paxson, a campaign contributor, could "possibly be an appearance of corruption"-even though McCain denied doing anything improper.
Via ThinkProgress, we learn that last November, McCain said:
Everybody says that they’re against the special interests. I’m the only one the special interests don’t give any money to.
Alas:
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, McCain has taken nearly $1.2 million in campaign contributions from the telephone utility and telecom service industries, more than any other Senator.
National Review tests interracial marriage/communism smear, forgets to use the Google
02.21.08 - Posted by AsiansVote
dday at Hullabaloo tips us to a repulsive National Review post in which Lisa Schiffrin claims that "for a white woman to marry a black man in 1958, or 60, there was almost inevitably a connection to explicit Communist politics" and concludes, "Time for some investigative journalism about the Obama family's background." Schiffin elaborates:
Political correctness was invented precisely to prevent the mainstream liberal media from persuing [sic] the questions which might arise about how Senator Obama's mother, from Kansas, came to marry an African graduate student. Love? Sure, why not? But what else was going on around them that made it feasible? Before readers level cheap accusations of racism — let's recall that the very question of interracial marriage only became a big issue later in the 1960s.
Exactly "what else was going on around" the Obamas when they met at the University of Hawaii and their son was born in Honolulu is readily available to anyone with a passing familiarity with the Google. As the barest amount of research shows, in 1956-1957, just a few years before Barack Obama's birth, rates for interracial marriage in Hawaii ranged from 22.0 percent for professional workers to 43.5 percent for farm laborers. Even in the 1950s, interracial marriage was commonplace in Hawaii.
So now can we level cheap accusations of racism?
That's a joke, folks. But what's not so funny is the way Schiffin's piece, knowingly or not, echoes 1950s-era white supremacist paranoia with its conflation of interracial marriage and communism. HalfricanRevolution has more, including this relevant quote from "Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Post War America" by Renee Christine Romano:
The White Sentinel, a white supremacist newspaper published out of St. Louis, called mongrelization of the white race Communisms' "secret weapon," while Robert Shelton, Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1950s, declared that "amalgamation is ultimately the goal of the Communist element...because it would weaken the morals of the people."
The good news is that the National Review's chasing a losing hand -- according to the latest Gallup poll, 77 percent of Americans now approve of "marriages between blacks and whites." Something tells us that the 17 percent who disapprove weren't going to vote for Obama anyway.
Candidates & Leaders > 2008 Presidential Candidates > This entry's link
On September 22, 2006, Senator John McCain told Matt Lauer:
There will be so such thing as waterboarding. We outlined the breaches of conduct and you will never see that again and we stood up and said that will not be done. Most importantly we said we will not change the Geneva Conventions. We're very proud of what we did.
The Senate voted 51 to 45 on Wednesday afternoon to ban waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods used by the Central Intelligence Agency against high-level terrorism suspects.
...
Mr. McCain, a former prisoner of war, has consistently voiced opposition to waterboarding and other methods that critics say is a form torture. But the Republicans, confident of a White House veto, did not mount the challenge. Mr. McCain voted “no” on Wednesday afternoon.
