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Ohio State Rep. To Bush: If You Want To ‘Coddle Criminals,’ Then Pardon Traficant

By Matt Corley on Jul 7, 2007 at 3:27 pm

As soon as President Bush commuted the prison sentence of his former aide, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, attorneys across the country immediately began arguing that their clients deserve “the Libby treatment.”

Yesterday, Ohio State Rep. Bob Hagan (D-Youngstown) sent a letter to President Bush, claiming that his standards for Libby should be applied to another criminally-challenged political figure: former U.S. Congressman James Traficant, who was convicted in 2002 on bribery and racketeering charges. Hagan says that Traficant deserves the same leniency that Libby received:

“If the President is going to coddle criminals in his Administration because he believes they have suffered enough, the least he can do is apply equal justice and release all of those whose crimes had far less impact on the public good than Libby’s,” Rep. Hagan said.[...]

“Libby lied to the FBI and a grand jury about the Valerie Plame cover-up, which undermined the nation’s intelligence operations,” Hagan argued. “Add to that his role as Vice President Cheney’s Chief of Staff in promoting false reasons for going to war in Iraq – and it all outweighs anything Mr. Traficant has done. [...]

“Libby is the first sitting White House official to be indicted in 130 years, and yet he walks away without paying his deserved debt to society.”

Hagan, who previously waged a primary challenge against Traficant, doesn’t actually want President Bush to commute Traficant’s sentence. “They both deserve to be in jail,” Hagan told the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

He has a history of making satirical statments to prove his points. In 2006, when conservatives introduced a bill to ban gay couples from adopting children, Hagan “asked fellow senators to co-sponsor a bill to ban households with one or more Republican voters from adopting children.” Similarly, this past year, when new regulations for strip clubs were debated, “Hagan drafted an amendment to ban lobbyists from touching lawmakers.”

President Bush has yet to respond to Hagan’s request for clemency for Traficant.

Media

The Impeachment Option

By ThinkProgress on Jul 7, 2007 at 2:48 pm

With sentiment on the question of impeaching Bush running at a pretty strong 39 percent for giving him the boot (with 49 percent opposed), I think this needs to enter the mainstream conversation. And, insofar as Bush appears determined to use his constitutionally granted authority to shield his subordinates from the consequences of breaking the law, I would say that removing him from the office which grants that authority is something that should be discussed.

The fact remains, however, that impeaching and convicting Bush means, in practice, only that Dick Cheney becomes President. In a weird way, it was the very trumped-up and trivial nature of the charges against Clinton that made impeachment plausible — replacing Bill Clinton with Al Gore really would have had a material impact on the quantity of tomcatting in the executive branch. Removing Bush doesn’t accomplish anything. I suppose you could impeach Cheney, and then impeach Bush before confirming a new vice president, and then Nancy Pelosi becomes president. And that, of course, is going to get 67 votes in the Senate sometime after they establish congressional representation for flying pigs.

UPDATE: I don’t think the “impeach Cheney” option makes much sense, though public support for it is quite strong. The problem is that the VP doesn’t have any independent legal authority from the President. If Bush delegates authority to Cheney, and Cheney uses that power in an illegal manner, then either Bush needs to hold Cheney accountable for that, or else congress and the public need to hold Bush accountable. Having the buck stop with Cheney creates a terrible set of forward-looking incentives.

The thing to do is to impeach Bush and Cheney on a dual docket and have Nancy Pelosi and Robert Byrd both say that they would decline the presidency in the event of a dual vacancy (they can even note that many scholars think putting members of congress in the line of succession is unconstitutional anyway), thus making Secretary of State Rice the heir apparent, in order to demonstrate a lack of partisan motivation.

You’re still left with the problem that this is only getting the requisite votes in fantasyland, but I think it’s a perfectly cogent political agenda.

Culture

Modeling in Circles

By ThinkProgress on Jul 7, 2007 at 1:38 pm

Strange phenomena in NBA player-performance modeling as the Wages of Wins Journal discusses Rashard Lewis:

Lewis is a comb0-forward, which means he has logged minutes at power forward and small forward in his career. WP48 is calculated by comparing a player relative to the average player at his position. Because power forwards tend to rebound at a higher rate than small forwards, power forwards tend to offer higher levels of productivity. So when Lewis is compared to players at the four spot, he tends not to look so good. Relative to small forwards, though, he can be very good.

To illustrate, consider last season. When Lewis played power forward his WP48 was only 0.096, which is close to average. At the three spot his WP48 was 0.209, which is above the “perfect” mark.

This is more than a little perverse. Good power forwards are hard to come by. That Rashard Lewis is capable of performing competently in that role is an asset he has as a player. But thanks to the WoW position-adjustment method, it registers as a problem for his game. If he was much, much worse at playing the 4, he’d never be asked to do it, and his WoW rating would look much better. But in the real world, he’d be a less valuable basketball player.

Culture

Nervous in Boston

By ThinkProgress on Jul 7, 2007 at 1:26 pm

I promise that my initial intention in setting out to do some research for this post was to cast a little doubt on the widespread-on-ESPN.com assumption that Ray Allen’s career is about to head off a cliff. That led me to Basketball-Reference.com which judges Allen’s career thus far to be substantially more similar to Mitch Richmond‘s than to anyone else.

Unfortunately, between the 97-98 season (when he was 32) and the 98-99 season (when he was 33), Richmond experienced a sudden and dramatic decline in playing ability, transforming overnight from a star-quality player to a decided state of averageness.

Photo by Flickr user Skidrd used under a Creative Commons license

Climate Progress

Blue and Green Together Again

By Joe Romm on Jul 7, 2007 at 1:04 pm

blue.jpg12:30 Blue Man Group does a very funny bit, no big surprise. They point out that, unlike an airplane, the planet has no emergency exits. We’re stuck with this blue and green planet, and the planet is stuck with us!

shrek.jpg12:12 Shrek says Kermit was wrong: “It is easy being green!”

(Okay, I confess I find the music — which in general has very little to do with global warming or its solution — to be less interesting than the rest of the show.)

Politics

The New Virginia

By ThinkProgress on Jul 7, 2007 at 12:59 pm

The Washington Post takes a look at the collapsing Republican position in Virginia — Democratic governor, one Democratic Senator, and now 40 percent of Virginians say the next president should be a Democrat and just 33 percent want a Republican. Beyond the more obvious points, I like to think that this also does show something about the significance of governing.

When Mark Warner first ran for governor in Virginia, it was pretty clear that only a “different kind of Democrat” kind of Democrat could win in the state. But not only did Warner win, he governed in a popular manner. And while he continued to be a “different kind of Democrat,” he didn’t shy away from being a Democrat and playing a role in the national party. Tim Kaine and Jim Webb have very much continued in that tradition — neither are central casting Democrats, but both have actually represented the national party on national television in State of the Union responses. And as a result, their performance in office winds up not just keeping them afloat personally, but also serves to rehabilitate the party’s overall image.

Yglesias

Values and Foreign Policy

By ThinkProgress on Jul 7, 2007 at 12:33 pm

Hilzoy and Robert Farley offer up what I would consider to be the standard philosopher’s rejoinder to Ezra Klein’s fatwa against “values” as a center of US foreign policy, namely that policy choices irreducibly implicate value decisions and allegedly value-free concepts like “the national interest” are, in fact, both contestable and, in practice, contested.

I think this is right, but I also think it misses the true force of Ezra’s point. The point isn’t, literally, that the problem is that we have “too much values” in our foreign policy and need to somehow wring it out with a judicious focus on consequences and pragmatism. The point, rather, is that our political debate has become unhealthily deductive — with more time and column-inches being spent on the part of the argument that goes “does policy X flow logically from value Y” than on the part that asks “if we do Y, what’s going to happen?”

Basically, an enormous amount of intellectual energy has been expended since 9/11 on the proposition that we can effectively outline policies for coping with problems emerging from the Muslim world without availing ourselves of rigorous empirical knowledge of the countries or people in question. This makes sense because the broad American elite basically had no knowledge of these issues. Insofar as the most important people were knowledgeable about any foreign places, those places tended to be in Eastern Europe or the Balkans. Even worse, the community of regional specialists on the Middle East and Persian Gulf regions tend to hold politically unacceptable opinions about the US-Israel relationship and, indeed, the general thrust of US policy in the area. Under the circumstances, the idea that better policy requires better reasoning about values has a natural appeal, but relatively little actual utility.

On the other hand, I do think it’s important for progressives to develop more effective public articulations of what it is we’re trying to say about US foreign policy, and I do think that communicating these ideas to a mass public requires this kind of flight into the ether of values. In that sense, I think Anne-Marie Slaughter’s (the nominal subject of this conversation) ability to link up specific policy ideas to values-stuff is actually extremely valuable.

Climate Progress

Is That Captain Kirk I hear?

By Joe Romm on Jul 7, 2007 at 12:05 pm

captain.jpg

11:45 I wasn’t sure the first time I heard him, but sounds like William Shatner is doing Live Earth spots.

11:44 Plant shade trees — a great idea!

11:36 Kelly Clarkson, dressed down, explained she doesn’t know very much about saving the environment, but she really wanted to do this show and learn about what she and her fans could do.

11:32 Robert Patrick (of the X-Files and Terminator 2) pushes bamboo as an eco-friendly building material (which it is as long as it wasn’t transported over great distances).

11:05 Robert Redford is in the house. What eco-event would be complete without him?

Politics

Professor retracts Mr. Rogers smears.

By Faiz Shakir on Jul 7, 2007 at 12:00 pm

Yesterday, ThinkProgress noted that Fox News was participating in an effort to “blame Mr. Rogers” for the “sense of entitlement” among some children today. The criticism of Mr. Rogers stemmed from Don Chance, a finance professor at Louisiana State University. Chance later contacted Fox News to issue a statement retracting his attacks:

The reference to Mr. Rogers was just a metaphor. I have no professional qualifications to evaluate the real problems or propose solutions. Mr. Rogers was a great American. I watched him with my children and wouldn’t hesitate to do so again if I had young children.

Chance’s lack of “professional qualifications” didn’t prevent from the mainstream media from catapulting his propaganda. Watch it:

[flv http://video.thinkprogress.org/2007/07/rogersII.320.240.flv]

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