Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

Our vaunted Attorney General needs to go back to law school:

It’s been about two weeks since the Justice Department’s inspector general released a report on the unprecedented politicization of employment practices at the Justice Department. The IG report concluded that disgraced officials such as Monica Goodling and former chief of staff D. Kyle Sampson “routinely broke the law” by applying political litmus tests, even when hiring
prosecutors and immigration judges.

Since then, no one in the Bush administration has wanted to talk about the scandal. The good news is, Attorney General Michael Mukasey addressed the subject this morning in a speech to the American Bar Association. The bad news is, what he had to say was far from encouraging.

[snip]

First, the AG said he’s going to keep all of those who met the standards of “loyal Bushies” who are now part of the Justice Department’s staff.

“[C]ritics have suggested that we should summarily fire or reassign all those people who were hired through the flawed processes described in the joint reports. But there is a principle of equity that we all learned in the schoolyard, and that remains as true today as when we first heard it: two wrongs do not make a right. As the Inspector General himself recently told the Senate Judiciary Committee, the people hired in an improper way did not, themselves, do anything wrong. It therefore would be unfair - and quite possibly illegal given their civil service protections - to fire them or to reassign them without individual cause.”

Second, Mukasey said he will not prosecute the DoJ employees who repeatedly and flagrantly violated the law.

Attorney General Michael Mukasey said Tuesday that the Department of Justice would not pursue criminal charges against former employees implicated in an internal investigation on politicized hiring practices.

“Where there is evidence of criminal wrongdoing, we vigorously investigate it,” Mukasey said in a speech at the American Bar Association. “And where there is enough evidence to charge someone with a crime, we vigorously prosecute. But not every wrong, or even every violation of the law, is a crime.”

Wait, not every violation of the law is a crime? Isn’t that the definition of a “crime”?

Not in Republiconia, apparently. Laws don't matter. Defining things in a manner convenient to partisian political hacks is the order of the day. It's good to know - I'll be happy to cite Mukasey's definition if I'm ever facing a judge.

McCain once said he don't know much about economics. And he's right:

A cornerstone of Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) economic plan — Jobs for America — is cutting the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent, which McCain claims will turn America into a
“low-tax business environment.” But as it turns out, even with the rate at 35 percent, most corporations are not paying taxes.

Today, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report showing that between 1998 and 2005 “about two-thirds of corporations operating in the United States did not pay taxes.” Corporations have a “variety of reasons” for not paying, including “the cost of producing their goods, salary expenses and interest payments on their debt.”

McCain, meanwhile, has derided the U.S. corporate tax rate as the “second highest in the world.” While his statement is technically accurate for the purely nominal rate, U.S. tax revenue as a share of the economy is significantly lower (See graph below), and is below the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) average. The U.S. raises less revenue from corporations than Japan, the United Kingdom, and even Ireland, which the McCain campaign cites as a country with a competitive corporate rate.

Any doubts this man would be a hideous continuation of the Bush regime should end about here. The incompetence he demonstrates in every area is utterly breathtaking.

It's not just the economy, or energy, or any of a bajillion other things McCain's clueless on. Think about foreign policy for a moment. John Marshall would like us to understand just what an unmitigated disaster a McCain presidency would be:

I know I've made this point in various ways in several posts over the last day or so. But watching John McCain speak about the Georgian crisis in the video below should deeply worry anyone interested in a sane US foreign policy -- or the safety of their children. One arch joke from the earlier part of this decade was that the one good thing about the neocons
obsession with getting into a war with Iraq was that it distracted them from their much bigger obsessions -- ratcheting up Cold Wars with China and/or Russia.

The people that are pulling McCain's strings are the people who want to push us into a new Cold War with the Russians -- and ironically and a bit improbably with the Chinese too. But the Russians are probably more willing to oblige us since their power remains limited to oil
reserves and military power. In other words, they're people McCain's folks can understand and vice versa.

McCain is going out of his way to cast this as a replay of 1938 and 1939. Is it really in our interest to get into a renewed Cold War with Russia right now? Do we have the military resources for a proxy/advisor war in the Caucasus at the moment? Should we find ourselves in the situation where the Russians want to reassert their sway in Eastern Europe, we would have some very serious and consequential decisions to make. But this just is not that. The key is that McCain, both in terms of policy and temperament, wants to court that result.

There's more. If you know anyone naive enough to want to vote McCain this fall, now would be a good time to start gently breaking the news that their beloved, straight-talking maverick is a frothing insane, lying sack of shit chickenhawk who wants to make sure the world burns.

It's not like he's got anything to lose.