Is there any hope at all that the larger players in the Bush-era criminal activities – Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, Perle, Feith and Wolfowitz most prominently – will be brought to justice when those two lesser lights (Yoo and Bybee) are allowed to return to a law school classroom and a seat on the federal bench?

Disgraceful as it is to say, don’t hold your breath.

Speaking of evidence, there is this: a bomb in Karbala exploded on Wednesday, killing and wounding dozens of Shiite pilgrims. Another bomb in Karbala was attached to a military vehicle and killed and wounded dozens on Wednesday. Another bomb killed and wounded several other pilgrims outside Baghdad on Wednesday. Gunmen shot and killed a police officer in Kirkuk on Wednesday. The day before, a suicide bomber killed 54 and wounded dozens more in the outskirts of Baghdad. As of Wednesday, almost 5,000 US soldiers had been killed in Iraq, and nearly 50,000 more have been wounded. More than a million Iraqi civilians have likewise been killed and wounded.

Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, Perle, Feith, Wolfowitz, Rice, and a dozen other members of the Bush administration, including Yoo and Bybee, are directly responsible for this carnage. They lied through their teeth and broke any number of laws to see it done. They are guilty of much more than the war crimes they committed in both Iraq and the United States. They are guilty of bankrupting this nation with two wars begun on false pretenses and perpetuated to enrich the few, while further cementing the stranglehold “defense spending” has on our growth as a civilized nation.

Thanks in no small part to the Iraq debacle, there is no political impetus to lay a finger on the wildly bloated “defense” budget, even as the fabric of our society shreds and shatters under the economic yoke placed upon our necks by the previous administration. Ours is a government staffed from stem to stern with political cowards who refuse to heal these wounds, and with those who are just as culpable as those members of the Bush administration (read: members of Congress who voted to support each and every criminal act that led us to this place).

Justice? When it comes to the Bush administration, the word has no meaning. They have escaped that justice, and we are all less free because of it.

via t r u t h o u t | Bush, Cheney and the Great Escape.

Frankly, I think the whole damned system has made itself irrelevant as far as the Rule of Law is concerned. Laws apparently only exist for those that are too poor to bribe or leverage their way out of trouble. Why should any person feel compelled to obey the law when we’ve got leaders and their underlings who just don’t and nothing happens to them? Pfffft.

Dear President Obama: Please listen to Jon Stewart when he tells you it’s Fucking Chow Time.

To a degree unimaginable as recently as 2004 — when Karl Rove and George W. Bush ran a national campaign exploiting fear of gay people — there is now little political advantage to spewing homophobia. Indeed, anti-gay animus is far more likely to repel voters than attract them. This equation was visibly eating at Orrin Hatch, the Republican senator from Utah, as he vamped nervously with Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC last week, trying to duck any discernible stand on Mullen’s testimony. On only one point was he crystal clear: “I just plain do not believe in prejudice of any kind.”

Now that explicit anti-gay animus is an albatross, those who oppose gay civil rights are driven to invent ever loopier rationales for denying those rights, whether in the military or in marriage. Hatch, for instance, limply suggested to Mitchell that a repeal of “don’t ask” would lead to gay demands for “special rights.” Such arguments, both preposterous and disingenuous, are mere fig leaves to disguise the phobia that can no longer dare speak its name. If gay Americans are to be granted full equality, the flimsy rhetorical camouflage must be stripped away to expose the prejudice that lies beneath.

The arguments for preserving “don’t ask” have long been blatantly groundless. McCain — who said in 2006 that he would favor repealing the law if military leaders ever did — didn’t even bother to offer a logical explanation for his mortifying flip-flop last week. He instead huffed that the 1993 “don’t ask” law should remain unchanged as long as any war is going on (which would be in perpetuity, given Afghanistan). Colin Powell strafed him just hours later, when he announced that changed “attitudes and circumstances” over the past 17 years have led him to agree with Mullen. McCain is even out of step with his own family’s values. Both his wife, Cindy, and his daughter Meghan have posed for the current California ad campaign explicitly labeling opposition to same-sex marriage as hate.

via Op-Ed Columnist – Smoke the Bigots Out of the Closet – NYTimes.com.

From the BLS:

The unemployment rate fell from 10.0 to 9.7 percent in January, and nonfarm payroll employment was essentially unchanged (-20,000), the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment fell in construction and in transportation and warehousing, while temporary help services and retail trade added jobs.

Percent Job Losses - Jan 2010 (click to enlarge)

Image via Calculated Risk

This graph shows the job losses from the start of the employment recession, in percentage terms (as opposed to the number of jobs lost).

Meanwhile, the President’s fireside chat today went something like this:

Legalize both Hemp and Marijuana, you’ll see small businesses “sprout” faster than you’ve ever dreamed possible.

After a long public records fight, MSNBC finally got the goods on Todd Palin’s role in the Alaska state government when his wife was governor. About 3,000 pages of e-mails just released show that Todd was more than a sounding board. He regularly got deeply involved in state official business, participating in matters such as a judicial appointment and contract negotiations with state employees. Todd was so involved, in fact, that the state withheld 243 e-mails on the grounds that, according to MSNBC, “executive privilege extends to Todd Palin as an unpaid adviser to the government.” The e-mails reveal quite a bit about Sarah Palin as well, including how she wanted her staff to handle installation of a tanning bed in the governor’s mansion and how she could get the state to foot the bill for her family’s air travel.

Much of what’s contained within the e-mails is not completely new information, but the correspondence is still worth perusing if only to check out Sarah Palin the governor in her own often Blackberry-generated words.

Also, kudos to NBC and the other news organizations that kept fighting to get these e-mails released. These documents may serve mostly as juicy tidbits for Sarah Palin critics, while other successful public records request have had far more impact. (Here, for example.) But every time journalists or citizens get documents under the power of the Freedom of Information Act, there’s a tiny ripple effect that backs up the public’s right to know. Getting information this way is usually a long, arduous and incredibly frustrating experience. It’s very tempting to give up; public officials often give insane reasons why they can’t provide information. (In this case, the state of Alaska initially said it would cost $15 million to retrieve these e-mails, for instance.)

via E-mails Reveal Todd Palin’s Role as First Dude – Swampland – TIME.com.

There may be more Sarah stuff coming, such as the recent news about her vacation cabins that weren’t declared for property taxes.

Assassinating non-Americans is just as illegal as assassinating Americans. The leap here is not to victims of a different citizenship, but to the legalization of murder.

The director of U.S. national intelligence told the House Intelligence Committee the government has the right to kill Americans abroad.

Here are 10 problems with this:

• 1. Acts that are crimes under national and international law don’t cease to be crimes because you cross a border.
• 2. Acts that are crimes under national and international law don’t cease to be crimes because you engage in them frequently. Assassinating non-Americans is just as illegal as assassinating Americans. The leap here is not to victims of a different citizenship but to the legalization of murder.
• 3. Killing people has nothing whatsoever to do with gathering so-called intelligence.
• 4. Even in this age in which senators and house members petition and write public letters to the president imploring him to obey laws, rather than introducing legislation, issuing subpoenas, holding impeachment hearings, or defunding agencies, the fact remains that Congress, above all, IS the government, and it is just not the place of the director of national thuggery to come in and dictate what the law will or will not be.
• 5. Having made the globe a battlefield and sanctioned crimes including lawless imprisonment, torture, warrantless spying, indiscriminant bombings, and the use of white phosphorous, depleted uranium, and other sickening weapons, on the grounds that all is fair and legal in war, preventing Americans from becoming the innocent victims of the war is becoming harder and harder. If active military can be on duty here, if we can be spied on, kidnapped, and imprisoned here. If our most prominent foreign death camp can be relocated here, by what logic — and for how long — can government assassinations of Americans (without trial) be confined to elsewhere?
• 6. Typically when we assassinate people abroad, a lot of other innocent people are killed in the process. Those are all murders. That too will come home if there is not resistance soon, major resistance to this madness.
• 7. We are being asked to trust extrajudicial decisions on whether or not to murder, not just to allegedly wise judges who are in too big a hurry or find it logistically unfeasible to hold a trial, but to the very people who lied us into the wars that are motivating most of the international hostility toward our country and draining most of the resources Americans need at home.
• 8. No republic has ever survived putting this kind of power in the hands of a single ruler, with no independent legislature, no independent press, and no independent popular resistance. And we’re almost there.
• 9. These people usually only admit to believing they have the barbaric “right” to do things that they have already done.
• 10. What are the chances the Director of Intelligence will never consider a president a threat to national security?

via Top 10 Problems with America Killing Its Own Citizens | Civil Liberties | AlterNet.

Ten American missionaries arrested as they tried to take 33 Haitian children across the border to the Dominican Republic were charged last night with child abduction and criminal conspiracy.

The Baptists from Idaho, who claimed to be rescuing orphaned children from the chaos that followed the earthquake in Haiti, appeared at a hearing in Port-au-Prince where they were told that there was sufficient evidence to charge them and that their case was being sent to an investigative judge.

Jean Ferge Joseph, the Haitian Deputy Prosecutor, told them: “That judge can free you but he can also continue to hold you for further proceedings.” Edwin Coq, the lawyer representing the group, said afterwards that there would not be an open trial. He said that a judge would consider the evidence and could deliver a verdict in about three months.

via US Baptists charged with Haiti child abduction face 15 years in jail – Times Online.