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.

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.)

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.)

Save your confederate money, boys.

The South, I mean the Republican Party, shall rise again. The latest debate in the GOP is over whether the song, “Barack the Magic Negro” is an appropriate holiday gift to the party from a candidate for new party leader. Tough call. Decide for yourself.

We have too many well educated voters.

And it costs too much to educate them, says a conservative's op-ed in The NY Times. Having been stung by the results of this problem in the most recent election, conservatives are fighting back. Reset our national goals so that we channel most students wanting a post high school education into vocational schools and we solve two problems. Cut government spending, and ensure that there will be fewer voters in the future capable of dissecting big public policy issues. This should help candidates such as Sarah Palin climb right to the top down the road. As the op-ed points out, most people aren't really deep thinkers anyway, so why try to force them to study a range of subjects that will just frustrate them?

Obama's two short years in the US Senate.

One of the things that Republican speakers are now saying (incorrectly) is that Obama has only been in the US Senate for two years. It's four! That's a big difference in a position in which it takes a year just to get your bearings. The attempt, of course, is to bring Obama down to Palin's level. People should call Republicans on this lie everytime they say it - as TV interviewers are failing to do, except on the Daily Show.

McCain will win the election by saying Obama will lose the war.

Obama may lose the election because McCain has changed the conversation about the war. Obama’s huge strength as a candidate is that he had the courage to oppose the worst U.S. foreign policy mistake of the past fifty years, and possibly of all time. Yet, McCain paints Obama as naïve and inexperienced in foreign policy and military affairs. McCain keeps saying that Obama wants to let the U.S. lose the war in Iraq, but Obama is not really answering this charge, except to defend his patriotism and repeat that he will impose a timetable.

What Obama needs to repeat with all is oratory skill is that the war was never really designed to protect American interests. It was a blind spasm by a misguided President, a Wag-the-Dog diversion erected by his neo-con Vice-President who was determined to simultaneously subvert the constitution and destroy many of the noble values for which this country has stood. It has given a blank check to military contractors to whom the Republican Party is beholden, and to an unstable and dependent government in Iraq that will never step up and unless we are serious about stepping out. We financed the entire multi-trillion dollar war on credit and we can't fix our economy until we stop pouring money into this sinkhole. The only way to preserve American dignity, our stature in the world and our national treasury is to get on a timetable. Unlike Bush and McCain, Obama can show that as a leader, he has the discipline to get us out of the mess.

The public tolerated the war for a long time, even as facts mounted that the evidence for it was rigged, because people assumed the war was really about ensuring reliable and affordable fixes for our addiction to oil. Stratospheric gas prices exploded that myth.

Obama has already said these things, but in his quest to be seen as a uniter, he now seems afraid to offend any potential supporter. But unless he steps up, he risks losing the enthusiastic support of those who were passionate about his courage to lead, and worse, being unable to shake McCain’s tagging him as a weak leader. Today, he seems to have moved far away from his bold criticisms in 2002:

What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne. What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income, to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.