Yoo skates through.

The Obama administration has decided that this and future administrations that engage in human rights abuses and war crimes should not fear punishment. They implemented this decision by using a reliable Department of Justice career veteran, David Margolis, to quash the recommendation by the Office of Professional Responsibility that Bush administration lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee not face possible disbarment for approving the use of torture. (If we're all scared, it's okay, right?)

Now comes the news that many of Yoo's email messages while at DOJ have mysteriously gone missing. So much for restoring confidence in the integrity of the U.S. government at home and abroad.

Dear President Obama,

My assumptions about Washington have been more than borne out by the past year: The Republican leadership and nearly all Republican members of Congress only care about one thing: defeating and punishing Democrats. They don’t have an altruistic bone in their bodies and they have no interest in bipartisanship. Their game plan is like that of any other grueling sport where time is a factor. They want you to lose badly, for anything you accomplish to take as long as possible so that you will achieve as little as possible, and for controversies surrounding your unfinished agenda to get carried into the next federal elections.

I said a year ago that in your first months in the White House you should be very decisive and take advantage of your mandate to get a lot done. Any delay caused by bi-partisan efforts would simply be exploited by the Republicans to propagandize against your agenda, whip unsophisticated voters into a frenzy and scare them to death. This would slow down the process and prevent you from accomplishing much. Was I right?

The message the voters sent you in Massachusetts was not that they hate your health care plan, although Brown did exploit fears that the state was not getting a fair deal. The message was that they don’t want you and Congress to spend anymore time on this. They want you to fix the economy!

You should threaten to pour boiling oil on reluctant Democrats in the House, get them to pass the Senate health care bill, and sign it! If you don’t get substantial reform done, you will lose your base. Some tea partiers will get over their hysteria once they see that previously uninsurable people they care about can get insurance, but only if you get a bill signed in time for this take effect before elections in November.

You need to get health care off the table ASAP and move on so that 90% percent of your time and your messages to the voters are about fixing the economy. People want you to kick the banks hard. You have to stop the perception that you are in the pocket of Wall Street. Be swift and decisive with regulation to avoid dragging out stock market reactions. The sooner you get this done, the sooner the markets will recover. You don’t want to cause any major downturns less than six months before the mid-term elections.

Your message to the voters, passionately delivered several times a week, should be hope. Just like FDR. You know how to do that well. You should continually paint the Republicans as only interested in obstruction and protecting big business at the expense of the people. If you don’t do this you may lose Congress in the fall.

It’s not going to get any better for you with Congress. Your majorities in Congress will only get smaller. You may have just this year to get anything significant done in your time in the White House. Think of this as your last chance. Unlike the Republicans in Congress, I want you to succeed.

Blackwater's crusade.

According to a disturbing interview on the NPR program Fresh Air today, it seems that the U.S. now has the largest mercenary army in our history -- and in the world -- with its own intelligence service and air force. There are more U.S.military contractors in Afghanistan today than U.S. troops.

Blackwater, renamed Xe, is the largest contractor and is run by Erik Prince, who according to sworn affidavits of former employees, "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe," and that Prince's companies "encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life."

Blackwater is entirely funded by U.S. tax dollars, yet is accountable to no one. It's doubtful that its employees could be prosecuted for rape or murder since Dick Cheney and others made sure they were exempt from U.S. law, and the laws of the nations we invaded. According to the author of the articles cited above (and others who've reported on this) Blackwater employees are making some targeting decisions instead of U.S. troops.

But whether or not it's a good idea for the U.S. be on a crusade to wipe out Islam is immaterial at this point. We've made sure Erik Prince has a strong profit motive to get the job done.

A mere 16 years ago, our greatest national fear was about private domestic militias dedicated to bringing down our government. Perhaps in our paranoia about external terrorists, we've already forgotten our own recent history.

Coopting cooperation.

A recent NY Times article collects a wide range of interesting facts about cooperation, but having read many articles by journalist Nicholas Wade I am dismayed about the incorrect impressions it conveys. I have not read Michael Tomasello’s new book Why We Cooperate, cited throughout, but anyone who has read more than one of Frans de Waal’s books knows that cooperation is definitely not what distinguishes humans from animals. Some of the ways that we cooperate are more elaborate, but anyone who asserts that “shared intentionality” makes us different from chimps must be unaware of de Waal’s seminal study Chimpanzee Politics written more than 25 years ago.

As for the strength of the urge to cooperate, it does not correlate with a species’ intelligence, and is not a measure, as this article implies, to infer that one species is superior to another. To give just one example, the highest level of cooperation measured in one classic experimental design came from a species known for its murderous inclinations: the spotted hyena. Hyenas are the only mammals that are both matriarchal and regularly murder adults of their own kind. In cooperation, they blow chimpanzees off the chart. Does that make them a better example of our nature? (Some have speculated that this hyena study was suppressed for 15 years because it upended the notion that cooperation tracked with intelligence and evolutionary sophistication.)

Rooting out torture.

In considering whether to appoint a prosecutor to investigate torture, Obama is deciding whether to dip a toe into the cesspool that Bush administration created with its torture and detainment policies. Cleaning up this mess could is the most important legacy President Obama will leave. A generation or two or more later, if the US goes down such a dark path again, people will ask why Obama failed to reinstill a national ethos that humane treatment and due process are the bedrock on which out nation stands or falls. (See my previous post.)

Subprime mortgages rejected by Calfornia voters.

The day after their defeat in a California special election, it’s clear that most voters viewed Props 1A-E like a subprime mortgages. I’ve used this analogy in a previous post about Bush’s unsustainable tax cuts, and it fits equally well here. In trying to solve an unprecedented financial challenge, these propositions offered voters a quick fix based on completely unrealistic revenue projections.

If Props 1A-E passed, voters were smart enough to realize that in a few short years they would be just like homeowners with subprime mortgages: unable to pay the bills and wondering how they got bamboozled into creating debts they couldn’t repay.

Subprime “victims” were told they could refinance their homes when their debt payments ballooned or bought into a fantasy that the ballooning economy would trickle down higher salaries to them that would cover their debt. Voters in yesterday's election were told that when the state’s income needs would further balloon in a couple of years – in large part because of the elaborate borrowing against future revenues orchestrated by these propositions – that either a huge economic recovery or the “rainy day fund” created by Prop 1-A would cover the gap. (Never mind that it might take decades, if ever, for the fund to grow large enough to keep voters from getting soaked.)

Another sad truth has been reinforced by the election: if the private sector figures out a way to fleece unsophisticated consumers, after politicians denounce the hucksters for their immoral greed those same politicians sometimes have the gall to try to fleece voters in a similar way. The focus on today at the expense of planning for tomorrow that has famously plagued American industry since the 1980's also has deeply infected politics and public policy. In California, with term limits forcing every newly elected public official to immediately set his or her sights on the race for the next office, it’s a miracle the ship of state didn’t sink years before yesterday.

I’ve mentioned in previous posts some long standing issues that must be fixed as part of raising the wreck, such the requirement that any bill with fiscal impact pass by a two-thirds vote. Hopefully this will all play out like a disaster movie formula, and we’ll be rescued in time. My additional hope is that the Governator will make good on his promise to leave politics forever, and that future entertainers who assume that public office is just another venue that would draw on their existing skill set will study the careers of Arnold and Jesse and try stand up comedy instead.

Is that a gun in your pocket or do you just want to rape me?

I’m feeling violated by Obama’s signature on a bill demonstrating that no matter who sits in the Oval Office, the National Rifle Association packs the biggest pistol in Washington. One of the main reasons I’ve preferred to visit, camp, climb, backpack, and volunteer to work in National Parks is because I’m much less likely to run into visitors or “campers” with pistols. Sorry this decades old policy banning weapons in the parks is inconvenient for those too fearful to leave home without a gun at the ready, but getting away from some of the more insane aspects of our society for a weekend is fundamental to my wilderness experience.

Our National Park System (NPS) is perhaps the most important cultural and environmental contribution the United States has made to the world. Jazz is the only positive thing that even comes close. (Feel free to educate me with a comment, if you disagree.) Few Americans realize this, but the no other nation had a federalized park system before we created one well over a hundred years ago. The idea of preserving areas of great scenic beauty or ecological importance with a commitment that would endure as long as the nation that contained them was the most important catalyst of the modern environmental movement.

In his campaign for President, Mr. Obama brought hope to hundreds of millions around the world that the terrible vectors in our national policy that acquired so much traction after 9/11 would be drastically altered. Obama sought to reestablish the notion that the U.S. had earned its place as the leader of the free world through its values and its deeds. We’re more than just a posse of drunken cowboys presumptively in charge only because we have more rifles than anyone else. Perhaps no one outside the U.S. will care that we’ve just shot some holes in our greatest contribution to world culture. But I worry it’s symbolic that our efforts at self-rehabilitation – and the change many so fervently fought for – are one step closer to being scattered to the ill winds of political expediency.

(Other essays bring different perspectives to mixing guns and parks, including the fact that pepper spray protects people from large animals much better than guns.)