Abuse of power

White House press corps scandal

 Abuse of power, Bash the Messenger  No Responses »
May 122009
 

There has hardly been any comment on the recent scandal involving the White House press corps.

We can all assume that what Tom Lauria said is true. The Obama administration threatened Perella Weinberg, saying it would use “the full force of the White House press corps [to] destroy it’s reputation” if it resisted the government’s plan to abrogate their status as preferred creditors.

Robert Gibbs denied that the White House put that kind of pressure on Perella Weinberg, but nobody believes that. Obama’s defenders in the blogosphere are instead defending the right of Obama to bash corporations.

Some professional journalists are peddling the line that Perella Weinberg itself denied it. But there is no evidence of such a denial. Yes, there is a Reuters article with the headline, “Perella denies White House threat over Chrysler.” But if you read the article, you find out that what Perella Weinberg did was contradict the idea that it succumbed to White House pressure. At that point it says it realized its interests were better served by going along with the White House plan. That of course is not a denial that the threat was made exactly as Lauria described it.

Others are doing a good job of describing the many offenses against our legal system in what the Obama administration is doing here. I presume some of them will someday be featured in a bill of impeachment.

But the most chilling aspect of this has not been discussed. That is that the White House threatened to use the press corps as its agent of destruction.

And there hasn’t been a word of outcry from the nation’s press. Shouldn’t it be howling against Lauria, demanding that he retract his slander. Shouldn’t they try to protect their reputation, however tarnished?

About the best the news media have done, in some cases, is to omit the part of the accusation that involves them. For example, Neil King Jr. and Jeffrey McCracken of the Wall Street Journal simply say that Tom Lauria “accused the White House of threatening to destroy the reputation of Perella Weinberg.” They don’t mention the press’s alleged role in this.

Yes, it’s a vindication for those of us who have accused the nation’s press of losing its objectivity and being in the tank for Obama. But our country would be in a healthier state if the press still thought it desirable to deny it.

A larger customer base for Camp Guantanamo

 Abuse of power  No Responses »
Mar 252009
 

This is ominous news for The Reticulator, who predicts he’ll end up in one of Hillary’s internment camps but hopes he’s wrong.

George W. Bush asserted the right to put “enemy combatants” in detention camps without even charging them with a crime.

That was quite a power grab on his part, but now Barak Obama has gone him one step better. He asserts the right to put people in camps even if they aren’t enemy combatants. A lot more people will fit his definition of who can be locked up than fit GWB’s definition.

From the World Socialist Web Site:

Importantly, the filing asserts that the president has the right to continue to seize individuals it deems to be members or “substantial” supporters of Al-Qaeda or the Taliban. It does not define what is meant by “substantial,” but suggests that the executive branch alone will determine what constitutes membership in, or support of, these organizations. The New York Times called this definition “not significantly different from the one used by the Bush administration.”

The administration asserts its right to interpret ambiguously even its own vague description of those to be seized. According to the Justice Department, “the particular facts and circumstances justifying detention will vary from case to case.” US Attorney General Eric Holder indicated that the legal status of the inmates will remain in limbo, referring in a statement to “developing a new policy to govern detainees.”

Joe, the Regulated Plumber

 Abuse of power, Regulation  No Responses »
Nov 222008
 

We’re getting a good look at what “re-regulation” of our economy means. It means that government regulators can violate the privacy of individuals’ records for partisan political gain, and get by with a belated slap on the wrist.

Mind you, it doesn’t always work this way. When a couple of employees in the administration of Bush the Elder took a peek at Bill Clinton’s passport files during the 1992 campaign, they were fired immediately.

But that was a Republican administration. In Ohio, under Democrat Governor Ted Strickland, some employees took a look at Joe the Plumber’s records for information to use against him. They’re getting by with short-term suspensions. Nobody is getting fired over there, which serves to send the message to future privacy violators that if you do it for the right cause (i.e. the right side) it may very well be worth the risk.

When Linda Tripp’s records were illegally leaked for partisan political purposes, nothing substantial was done about it. Guess which party benefited from that one?

When health care workers violated the privacy of celebrities at UCLA’s medical center, at least one person was fired. But I suppose there was no overt partisan political cause to be served by that one.

Yes, government regulation is a wonderful thing to have. Keeps those nasty free marketers under control.

Another step to one-party government

 Abuse of power  No Responses »
Nov 032008
 

This sucks.

I was hoping to take half a day off of work tomorrow (Tuesday) to do some Spokesrider research at the state archives in Lansing. I voted by absentee ballot today so I could be gone all day tomorrow.

So tonight I sat down to plan my strategy for tomorrow, only to find that the entire Michigan Library and Historical Center is closed for election day.

Not only is that personally inconvenient to me, but it’s highly improper for a state agency to do something like that on election day. It’s basically a taxpayer-funded contribution to the Democrat campaign. The people who work for state agencies have a huge conflict of interest in getting involved in elections. Now we have not only taken away the Hatch Act protections for the occasional dissident who may work in the public sector, but we’re giving one political ideology free, tax-paid campaign contributions in the form of campaign-worker time. Those contributions are not available to the opposition.

Spitzer’s carefully crafted image

 Abuse of power, Bash the Messenger  No Responses »
Mar 122008
 

This latest Spitzer scandal had me wondering if the world had gone mad. I heard people on radio programs talk about how they were shocked that someone who was such a moral crusader could do such a thing. Even the Wall Street Journal’s lead article on Tuesday talked about a “jarring contrast to the governor’s carefully crafted image.”

Don’t these people remember the real scandal from just last year, the one that should have got him booted from office for abuse of power? The prostitution scandal is certainly worth noting. But even if he was using government money to pay for prostitutes (and I haven’t heard that he was) it’s not nearly as serious a violation of public trust as to what he was doing when he was using the power of his office to wage a personal vendetta against Joe Bruno.

But nobody was talking about that. The print edition of the above WSJ article has a timeline about the Rise and Fall of Elliot Spitzer which doesn’t even mention the 2007 scandal involving the state police and Joe Bruno. All it has for 2007 is “Inaugurated New York’s 54th governor.”

New York is not the center of my universe, so I was starting to wonder if I was mistaken and had the players and events all mixed up in my mind. But I see that at least John Fund at the WSJ hasn’t forgotten the real scandal:

As the political career of Eliot Spitzer melts down, many will lament that what the governor on Monday called his “progressive politics” fell victim to his personal foibles. If only he hadn’t made mistakes in his private life, they will moan, New York could have been redeemed from its squalid, special-interest dominated stagnation.

That’s nonsense. More is at issue here than a mere private mistake. The governor’s frequent use of a prostitution ring was of public concern — because, notes Henry Stern, head of the watchdog group New York Civic, “people could easily have blackmailed him, you can’t have that if you’re governor.”

True enough, New York’s dysfunctional and secretive state government desperately needs fumigation, with both political parties sharing in the blame. But Mr. Spitzer’s head-butting approach to redemption — involving the arbitrary use of power and bully-boy tactics — was no improvement. …

Mr. Spitzer seemed to excel only in the zeal with which he would go after perceived adversaries. Last summer, his staff infamously used the state police to track the movements of Joe Bruno, the Republican president of the state senate, in an effort to destroy his career. Mr. Spitzer then ferociously fought investigators who wanted to examine his office’s email traffic for evidence the governor himself may have been involved.

Carefully crafted image, indeed.

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