DREGS VOL. VII # 17: HERE COME THE JUDGE

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Monday, August 11, 2008

posted by Cintra Wilson at 7:09 PM
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"Look, is it high school? Yeah. Are we playing high school with, you know, 5,000 nuclear warheads in our arsenal? Yeah, we are. We're playing, you know, who's the first guy to run off the highway with us and Iran."

-- Pulitzer Prize-winning New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh, quoted in Think Progress

A day of something like judgment is sort of upon them. It's not as satisfying as seeing them get strapped naked to lamp-posts in Dupont Circle to be eaten by crows, but it might turn into a little bit of crow-eating, if we're lucky.

U.S. District judge (and new congressional rock-star) John D. Bates upended the White House assertion that Harriet Miers, John Bolton (and nobody has explicitly said it yet but, uh, *cough,* KARL ROVE, *cough*) were "absolutely immune from compelled congressional process." Judge Bates, in a landmark fist-pumper of a 93-page opinion declared, in essence, immunity-schmimmunity.
Claims of 'executive privilege' are, at least in this case, malarkey.
Miers and Bolton don't get to ignore their congressional subpoenas in regard to the investigation of politically motivations for the U.S. attorney firings (which effectively turned the Department of Justice into the equivalent of a private judicial delicatessen serving up fresh, handmade laws however the White House felt like eating them that day).
Many are hoping that this opinion paves the road toward actual enforcement of contempt citations, and that this will compel Terrence W. Gainer, the 38th and current Sergeant at Arms of the U.S. Senate, to go over to Karl Rove's house and pistol-whip him into compliance.

The gold nuggets of Bates' opinion, as panned from the silt by constitutional law guru Marty Lederman on the Balkinization website:

"There are powerful reasons supporting the rejection of absolute immunity as asserted by the Executive here. If the Court held otherwise, the presumptive presidential privilege could be transformed into an absolute privilege and Congress's legitimate interest in inquiry could be easily thwarted. . . . [I]f the Executive's absolute immunity argument were to prevail, Congress could be left with no recourse to obtain information that is plainly not subject to any colorable claim of executive privilege....The Executive's proposed absolute immunity would thus deprive Congress of even non-privileged information. That is an unacceptable result."

So: now we know -- Congress does actually have a job to do, after all, besides raise campaign money for themselves and accept valuable prizes from lobbyists.

Meanwhile, back in the utterly meaningless world of Hollywood, mildewed zombie entertainment creatures from the blue lagoon are rising from their shallow narcissistic fishbowl-graves to spread fear and alarmist political rhetoric throughout the land:

"The Democratic Party, in its quest for power, has managed a propaganda campaign with subliminal messages, creating a God-like figure in a man who falls short in every way," screeched has-been actor Jon Voight, in an op-ed in the Washington Times. "If, God forbid, we live to see Mr. Obama president, we will live through a socialist era that America has not seen before, and our country will be weakened in every way."

Politico.com commenter Ernestine Bass responded to the actor, notable exclusively of late for his role as the estranged father of Angelina Jolie,

"YO!, 'Midnight Cowboy'...seen your grandkids lately?  Didn't think so."

Meanwhile, back over by Crawford Ranch, Exxon set a record quarterly profit -- a net income of $11.7 billion. A walloping 14% increase.

The Dregulator recalls a little news item from the San Francisco Chronicle by Carla Marinucci in May of 2001, concerning the name change of a certain 129,000 ton oil tanker, (four months before 9/11, even!) from the "Condoleezza Rice" -- a longtime Chevron board member -- to the more nebulous and Star Trek-sounding "Altair Voyager."

This was to ensure that critics wouldn't leap to conclusions about the Bush administration's enduring love for big oil companies.

"(T)he White House had faced questions over the appropriateness of the tanker's name -- particularly as California struggled with the effects of an energy crisis," wrote Marinucci, who probably wasn't aware at that point that the "crisis" was actually due to Enron's deliberately manipulating California's energy markets to deliberately create 400% energy cost increases for consumers.

Hmm....Gasoline at $4 a gallon. It was only a dollar-something eight years ago. Hmm.

"(The 'Condoleezza Rice' tanker) does underscore that there's never been an administration in power in this country that has been so close to a single industry -- in this instance, the oil-and-gas industry," said Chuck Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity in May, 2001.

And this was before the planet had begun to bleed black and wobble on its axis; when America was still a place to be proud of and its guardians hadn't yet sold it into prostitution to pay for its dirty little habits.

Sergeant at Arms: do your duty.

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