March 06, 2009 08:00 AM
Mike's Blog Roundup
Legal Schnauzer: Rove deal is a raw deal for justice
David Sirota: If private insurance is so awesome, why would it lose a competition with government health care?
Liberal Values: The Obama response to conservative criticism
FiveThirtyEight: More childish chickensh*tery. This time they're blocking confirmation of two economic advisors. Who needs professional economic guidance, right?
The Rude Pundit wants a piece of John Yoo
A Tiny Revolution: The Palestinian housing crisis has been going on a lot longer than ours

doesn't seem to get ... legal is not the same as moral. John Yoo gave legal advice to the Bush administration, not moral advice. In fact, his advice was, to my mind, clearly immoral.
For that matter, I think Yoo's advice was illegal, too. However, lawyers are trained to give legal advice. It's up to their clients what they do with that advice.
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All of them should be.
side note to Mr. Mike B. Roundup: Thanks for linking those health care diaries together! All of us working on this issue are ecstatic about the shift this argument seems to be taking in the media, the Blogs... Hell! Everywhere it is shifting. The answer may not end up being as far towards the center-left as we would want (single payer) but ya never know?
Yoo was there to give legal advice and this is what he said:
When he says, "what you should do" he may be talking about how moral decisions are separate from legal opinions, and if he had just said that, he could be a reasonable person (a terrible lawyer because his opinion was so far off the mark, and kind of slimy because he enabled torture and now wants to say that he didn't mean Bush "should" have tortured, but still a person with rudimentary reasoning skills.)
But Yoo says "what's legal or illegal is not the same as what you can do..." He is saying that, yes, torture is illegal, but the President can do it anyway. What is his justification for this ridiculous statement? Well, he wants a big, strong "unitary executive" that will keep him safe and tuck him in at night and tell him he's special and keep all the scary people away.
It's bullshit. It's not legal advice. Best case scenario it's sucking up to your employer. Yoo should be disbarred immediately and then tried because he knows he was writing this for political and legal cover, i.e. he's a co-conspirator.
By the way, Chapman Law (at USC?) picked up this tub of goo after he left Berkeley (who should have never hired him). And this is what the Dean there said about hiring Yoo:
That is so freaking disingenuous to say that there are "serious constitutional scholars and historians" who "think he got it (torture memo legal opinions) right or at least made a fair stab at it."
Sure. Name one, you disassembling fuck.
He wouldn't have had to say "made a fair stab at it" if there were a single "serious" lawyer at all who thought Yoo was anything but a hack. Leave it to a dean to fall into a senseless, poorly constructed argument that would get an F in a freshman writing class.
By the way, it sure is nice to preface everything with "in the wake of 9/11" like that is somehow remotely relevant. You remember how they teach at law school the 9/11 defense: everything is legal if you're in a fucked up state of mind because you're overwhelmed by your job responsibilities and you really want to see if you can test some limits? I think they generally teach that right after the Chewbacca defense. Well, what about when the US invaded Iraq and started torturing Iraqis? (You think those military dogs and hoods were requisitioned, approved, invoiced, and brought in to Abu Ghraib by "a few bad apples"?) Was Yoo justified in allowing that torture because we were in the fucking wake of 9/11?
I'm with Rude Pundit, John Yoo is a piece of shit, and I would welcome the opportunity to express my utter revulsion with him in person.
Journalists out there...
Congressman Holt Introduces Anthrax Commission Legislation - Bill Would Create 9/11 Commission-Style Panel to Investigate Anthrax Attacks and Government Response
Let's keep the pressure on.
other than "Congressman, on advice of council, I respectfully refuse to answer on the ground that it might seem to incriminate me."
Rinse and repeat, endlessly.
The reason the Chimperor didn't pardon 'em is that without a pardon they can claim the Fifth which, if pardoned, they couldn't do.
Conyers could bestow immunity. We saw how that worked out back in the 80s with Ollie North, if you recall. Which is to say, it didn't.
aetna ronald williams said during a short interview on marketplace that: 'we must collaborate with physicians,with hospitals,with planned sponsors,with government and develop private and public
partnerships so we SLOW down the rate of inquires. if we don't we're looking at healthCare cost
DOUBLING between NOW and 2017'.
Nationalize the industry, top to bottom.
A society which permist private profit from sickness and death (and the incarceration) of its citizens is a society of barbarians and parasites, and deserves to die.
It's all well and good that Obama responds to conservative criticism, but when will he respond to liberal criticism?
Or is his intention to ignore liberals in a way that he doesn't ignore conservatives?
Just wondering....
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