I may be the only person in this country outside of the Blagojevich family to say this, but I think the impeachment was a travesty.

I think he probably broke the law. I expect that he will either end up convicted of a federal offense either through a plea bargain or a conviction via a jury trial. I also think he was absolutely correct in saying that the rules under which the Illinois senate impeached him were patently unfair. This was a show trial where conviction and removal from office were the only possible outcomes.

I wouldn’t want to be tried for anything under those rules.

In a discussion thread that started with my last post, I was asked why I think the Bush people got away with all the criminality we’ve seen and the Nixon people didn’t. It’s a really complicated question. I may not have time to fully flesh out my thoughts on it in the near future, so let me just offer up some basics.

First, I’m not convinced they will get away with it. There are some serious people who have been involved with war crimes trials who believe that members of the Bush administration, if not Bush himself, may end up indicted I have real worries about how the Obama administration may react to that. Obviously, no US president is going to allow a former US president to go on trial for war crimes. It won’t happen. What do they do if a senior Bush administration official gets indicted, though? The American people, by and large, seem to think that we’re above being judged by other countries. We’re the good guy. Period. It would be wholly inconsistent for Obama not turn one of those guys over and it would be a nightmare politically if does. Anyway…

One suggestion for why the Bushies haven’t been caught is that they’ve learned from the mistakes that the Nixon and (to a lesser extent) Reagan administrations made. There’s something to that, for sure. Impeachment is a wholly political thing, though. So if you’re talking about Bush or Cheney, specifically, politics is your answer. For the first six years of his administration, Bush had a Republican House. He had a Republican House where the majority was created by guys like Newt Gingrich who thought that “bipartisan” was a dirty word and who saw themselves as revolutionaries. Party loyalty rules. I suspect that some of the high profile Republicans (especially some of the more libertarian ones) who “retired” from Congress during Bush’s presidency did so out of party loyalty. They couldn’t go along with what was happening, but they couldn’t criticize their party while they were office holders, either. On the Democratic side, the politics are different, but no less prevalent. The Democratic leadership is timid. They’ve largely been unable to successfully frame the issues and they’ve been scared to death of being labeled shrill liberals. They also learned exactly the wrong lessons from Clinton’s impeachment. Pelosi et al are afraid that impeachment would have made Bush more popular, themselves less so, and resulted in losing seats in the next election.

Nixon had a very different House. The Democrats had been in charge for a generation and weren’t too worried about losing that. The Republicans of that era would just about all be considered RINOs today. They were more northeastern, more liberal, and less partisan that what we’ve got today in the GOP. Nixon had a very different set of crimes, too. Burglary and cover up are easy for the average person to wrap their heads around. The target of that burglary–the other party– left little doubt that this was simply a crime with no defense. Bush’s crimes have been harder for the average person to wrap their heads around. They’ve also come with a lot of legal justifications from his own lawyers, often as or before they were committed. To see Bush’s crimes you have to be willing to honestly evaluate the US’s place in the world. You can’t just assume we’re the good guys. If your knee jerk inclination is to trust authority and admire the “stern leader” who does what he thinks is best for you, then you’re not likely to see those crimes. I believe there’s a huge chunk of the US population who will never, could never, see the actions of the Bush-Cheney administration as criminal.

In the commercials for Frost/Nixon, one of the moments that is clearly meant to draw a reaction from liberals shows an inflamed Nixon saying something like “I’m saying if the President does something, it isn’t illegal”. I bet there are enough Americans who have a knee jerk inclination toward believing that to allow Bush to sleep easily at night.

Edit: Let me add here that Nixon committed some far worse crimes in SE Asia than what he was impeached over. There’s been talk here and there over the years of indicting Kissinger over some of those, but nothing ever came of it that I’m aware. Bush’s crimes are much more like the things that Nixon got away with in SE Asia than what he got impeached over.

The media and, seemingly, much of the country has been having a good laugh at the Bush-Cheney legacy tour. At a certain level, it is laughable. Few people who have lived as conscious adults or adolescents through the last eight years, let along the better ones before them, would think this has been a good time in America or that Bush has been a good leader. Don’t count on that sentiment to hold over time. It might. The last eight years might turn out for many Americans to be an even worse time than we think it was and Bush may be widely vilified.

My favorite column from Paul Krugman starts out like this: “Historical narratives matter.That’s why conservatives are still writing books denouncing F.D.R. and the New Deal;they understand that the way Americans perceive bygone eras, even eras from the seemingly distant past, affects politics today.”

The Bush-Cheney legacy tour may be a ham-fisted start to the project of rehabilitating their legacies, but it won’t be the end of that project. Once the GOP has done whatever self examination it’s going to do, it will find ways to claim successes over the last few years. It will spin some of the things that we find most objectionable as being among those successes. You can be damn sure that they’re not going to give up on their “regulation is bad” philosophy even if they have to tone down the rhetoric for a while.

I ask this favor of anyone reading this. For the rest of your life, if you hear any mention of anything positive that came out of the Bush presidency and/or Republican control of congress during much of it, you jump on that. Be clear that these are lies. Point out just how bad the Bush presidency was for the world and for most Americans. The GOP already has a set of lying talking points that are meant to distort the achievements of FDR and keep us from ever going down the path of creating an even halfway equitable society. We’ve seen those trudged out during the current economic crisis. These guys play the long game. We need to, too. If not, you may live long enough to someday find yourself flying into George W. Bush airport in New York or celebrating George W. Bush’s birthday as holiday.

It’s weird to see a sports columnist for a national newspaper like the Washington Post who is completely out of touch with the sports she covers. An article today by Sally Jenkins demonstrates that this particular columnist has missed the entire evolution of employment at the top ranks of college sports over the last couple of DECADES. Boston College fired their head football coach because he interviewed for a job with the NFL’s NY Jets. This is complicated a bit by the fact that the Athletic Director who fired the coach is a longtime personal friend. The coach’s contract did not forbid him from interviewing for other jobs. It didn’t even state that other organizations would have to notify the school or seek permission to interview him. Boston College admits they fired the coach without cause. If the coach had accepted another job, he would have violated the contract and would have been forced to pay the university some money. If he had not taken the job, he would have continued to coach a program that has won two consecutive Atlantic Division titles under his watch.

College coaches interview or have informal discussions about other jobs all the time. Sometimes they take them, sometimes they don’t. Employment contracts at that level are financial arrangements. Period. There’s nothing ethical or moral about them. They just guarantee that if one party breaks the contract, the other gets compensation. On the other side of the coin, universities with big time sports programs fire coaches every year and have to pay out all or part of the remainder of their contract.

If this were the moral or ethical issue that BC’s athletic director of WaPo columnist Sally Jenkins were trying to make it out to be, BC wouldn’t be engaged in exactly the same behavior. Yeah, the AD who is all upset over this has done the same thing to, at least, one other university. The head coach of the women’s basketball team was the head coach at and under contract to Ohio University when he hired her away from that institution..

Here’s the video of that shooting. It comes about a minute and fifteen seconds in, but it’s worth watching the whole thing leading up to it. The video seemed clearer on TV than it does online. It’s cell phone video, so it’s going to be fuzzy anyway, but it seems clear enough as to what’s going on.

I just watched footage of a cop murdering a guy at a BART station the other day. It doesn’t appear to be on KTVU’s website yet. They have a bunch of other raw video on their website from the disturbance that led to the murder, though.

Friday morning, my wife and I watched a report about this “officer involved shooting”. Reports that the cops had confiscated pretty much every cell phone and camera they could get their hands on made us skeptical of claims that this was a justified shooting. If a cop has acted lawfully, they have nothing to fear from being seen on camera…as thousands of camera equipped patrol cars have demonstrated. As soon as I can find a link for this video on their website I’ll post it. This is clean cut murder, though.

The victim was subdued by a cop. He was on the ground, laying face down. He was struggling, but had two cops on him. One of the cops was on his back. That cop got up, un-holstered his weapon, pointed it at the victim and shot him. He shot an unarmed, subdued guy in the back while that guy was laying face down. This is exactly what witnesses told KTVU on Friday morning. It is exactly what BART and its cops denied having happened. That cop should sit in jail for the rest of his life. Every single cop who lied for him should lose their badge and do time.

A few days back, I read a really interesting article by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker about the difficulties of predicting who will be successful as a teacher. It’s an interesting article and it has shaken a little bit of my otherwise rock solid support for the current system of unions and tenure. Of course the problem with what Gladwell proposes is that in the real world of U.S. politics, we’d get the worst possible implementation of it. We’d lose tenure and job security without getting the more lucrative pay that, Gladwell correctly points out, is necessary to keep a realistic risk vs. reward structure in place.

I definitely think there’s something wrong with the state of education in this country when the block quote below is true. I’d say this is doubly wrong when, as we seem to know, that teacher training and credentialing as it exists does nothing to predict who will be good at being a teacher and who will not. The quote below is from TEACH California’s website. I find it ridiculous that our current system values someone with a bachelor’s degree in education over someone with a master’s degree in math or history.

Question: I have a master’s degree in the subject I wish to teach. Do I just need to pass the CBEST in order to teach in a k-12 classroom?

Answer: In order to teach, you must obtain a teaching credential; a master’s degree is not sufficient. Successfull completion of a teacher preparation program is required. You can easily locate teacher preparation programs by clicking on “Resources”, “Program Information”, and then “Find Credentialing or Graduate Programs”. Basic information about each program is provided. If you need more specific information, contact names and phone numbers are also included so that you can speak with the appropriate program staff.