This Week in Tyranny
Sunday, October 5, 2008 at 05:11AM No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post
Jennifer Brunner had her attempt to throw out absentee ballots overturned by the Ohio Supreme Court. So she acted like a party hack, lost anyway and now has egg on her face. (Here in Ohio we seem to be developing a bipartisan tradition of messing with the will of the people.) Sounds like a decent outcome for someone trying to screw with the vote. If courts consistently reject suppression and disenfranchisement maybe the resulting bad press will act as a deterrent.
Via Andrew Appel:
A judge of the New Jersey Superior Court has prohibited the scheduled release of a report on the security and accuracy of the Sequoia AVC Advantage voting machine. Last June, Judge Linda Feinberg ordered Sequoia Voting Systems to turn over its source code to me (serving as an expert witness, assisted by a team of computer scientists) for a thorough examination. At that time she also ordered that we could publish our report 30 days after delivering it to the Court—which should have been today.A new form of corruption seems to be developing. Let’s call it Post Election News Dump. (PEND - perfect. The bad news is pending.) Whether this, or the This Time We Really Mean It investigation at Justice (see next item) or the results of Sarah Palin’s abuse of power probe, there seems to be a push to delay potentially embarrassing rulings, reports, and other data until after the voters have spoken. We should be demanding it now, and maybe talking about some kind of formal mechanism to move these things along since there seems to be such great incentive to slow them down.
The Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility released a report saying former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was a hack. (I would have gladly told them that for half the price.) Then - follow closely here - because the Justice Department investigation was resolutely obstructed by the White House, Gonzales’ replacement hack decided to launch a follow-up investigation by…the Justice Department. Results to come after the election but before the President leaves office and loses his ability to corrupt the process. Via lambert, the usually sensible Dan Froomkin writes:
Let’s be frank here: Not many people in Washington have ever suspected that notoriously weak-willed and suggestible former attorney general Alberto Gonzales came up with the idea of the firings on his own.Mr. Froomkin, those of us in the hinterlands require actual, verifiable reporting to learn of these things since we are not able to subscribe to the Beltway’s Open Secrets newsletter. If there is the appearance of impropriety and malfeasance in high places, isn’t it the job - hell, the raison d’être - of a news organization to assign resources to hunt high and low for a fire behind the smoke? It is infuriating that even those with the most skeptical stances in Washington feel totally at ease tossing off a line so casually dismissive of what the job of a journalist ought to be.
Side note: This article on the report struck me as very poorly written. I was going to use it instead of the LA Times article for my citation but when I tried to pick details out of it - the basic who, what, why, etc. - the basic facts seemed to be hard to find and pull out. I’ve cited lots of news articles and this is the first one I switched away from because it seemed garbled and unclear when I began to dig into it. Maybe I’m just slow or for some reason not well equipped to understand this particular article. I’d love to know what others think.
Damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead for the National Applications Office:
The Department of Homeland Security has been given the money it needs to begin turning international spy satellites within the country’s borders, despite lingering fears about the program’s lack of focus and the potential for it to infringe upon Americans’ civil liberties….Congress quietly authorized DHS to begin sharing data gathered by military satellites with civilian and law enforcement agencies. A $634 billion spending bill signed into law earlier this week provides funds for DHS to establish the satellite surveillance program, known as the National Applications Office, without addressing the myriad concerns about NAO privacy and civil liberties protections that had been delaying its implementation.My previous thoughts on the subject are here.
More on what caused the bailout, what I wish Wall Street had the honesty to say, and misery loves company.
UNPACKING JANE: Pp 220-1:
[Then-General Counsel of the United States Navy Alberto] Mora saw what he later described as “the package” - the collection of secret military documents that traced the origins of the coercive interrogation policy at Guantánamo….They were missing the initials indicating the approval of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers, among others. “This is not the way this should have come about,” Myers later said. He blamed what he called “intrigue” that was “probably occurring between Jim Haynes, White House general counsel, and Justice.” The document was also missing the “buck slip,” as it was called, showing that it had been read and signed off on by the required circle of officials.Literally lawless. The people who constructed America’s torture program simply disregarded the law. They just didn’t care. And I don’t know the etymology of “buck slip” but if it means an indication of a buck being passed that must eventually stop somewhere, then isn’t it an appropriate metaphor for the administration: The buck never stopped anywhere because it didn’t even exist. The No Buck White House.
Reader Comments (4)
I picked up part of an interview with Naomi Wolf yesterday in which she recited her ten reasons for believing we're on the road to fascism. I resist alarmist language but as she ticked off the steps already taken down the road, it was hard not to feel genuinely alarmed at every word. She may or may not have included some of the above horrors which, by themselves, are enough to make hairs stand up on back of neck...
I was a bit self conscious about using the term "This Week in Tyranny" at first, but I've started to think more and more that it's appropriate. It doesn't happen all at once, you know? The old "frog in a pot of water" analogy.
Brunner did not "attempt to throw out absentee ballots". Just read the linked story in the Columbus Dispatch. I'm afraid that is purely the desired GOP framing and it is false. The dispute centered on applications for absentee ballots, not actual absentee ballots.
I do agree that her efforts in this instance were very ham-handed and displayed a glaring lack of judgment in how this process should have been carried out. But this was definitely not a case of vote suppression. I think the GOP frame definitely won the news cycle on this story. "Democratic AG Attempts To Suppress Vote In Ohio" quickly became the conventional wisdom. And, in large part, many Democrats helped it along by parroting their talking points on this.
It might seem like nitpicking but allowing this false storyline to remain entrenched in the media does no one any favors.
Thanks for writing Mike. First, you are right that she was not attempting to throw out absentee ballots, but applications for them. I'm sorry for getting that wrong.
Having said that, I think she still was trying to gum up the works, make voting more difficult and generally acting in a way that would tend to discourage applicants from voting. So even though she wasn't actually throwing out cast ballots she was engaging in the kind of bad faith shenanigans that mess with the integrity of the vote. Suppression is a fair characterization of what she did, and as a liberal I think we should be especially hard on Democrats who engage in the kind of behavior. It's the only way to keep the high ground, and in 28 days the GOP will stage a spectacular demonstration of what happens when you lose that.