"I call it 'Ritmo' -- like Gitmo, but it's in Raymondville," said Jodi Goodwin, an immigration lawyer from nearby Harlingen.

-- Washington Post, Feb. 2, 2007.

OK, first of all, the bad news. Dick Cheney is not going to jail, not any time soon, at least, and not because of the bizarre report that the vice president of the United States has been indicted in a small, obscure county deep in the heart of South Texas in a scandal over federal prison and detention abuses there. Aside from the obvious fact that a Willacy County, Texas, grand jury lacks authority over federal actions, the indictment of Cheney, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and other is not even signed by a judge, and the result of a wacky -- controversial wouldn't do the man justice -- renegade lame duck DA. It's almost not even worth noting that Cheney's alleged tie -- investing his millions in Vanguard mutual funds that are major owners of publicly traded federal prison contractors -- is weak beyond belief; by the grand jury's reasoning, one could surmise that others with Vanguard 401K plans (example: journalists at the Philadelphia Daily News and Inquirer!) could be charged as well.

That's a shame, because a) as noted here many times, Cheney's role in authorizing torture and other unlawful practices in the Bush administration deserves a real criminal probe and b) the strange false-alarm over this vice presidential indictment will probably obscure the fact that what has been taking place in Raymondville, Texas, during Bush and Cheney's time in office is a crime -- maybe statutory, maybe not, but definitely a moral one.

Willacy County, scene of today's indictments, is also home to the largest of a new generation of detention camps where thousands of undocumented immigrants -- the vast majority of whom have committed no crime other than seeking America's promise of a new life, without proper papers -- are now detained in conditions that could be described ironically as hot, flat, and crowded -- living in massive tents with poor food, non-existent health care and facing months if not years deprived of their basic liberty.

It wasn't always that way. For years, American policy was to catch and release undocumented immigrants, but that all changed with the GOP's politically charged crackdown on illegal immigration, which led in 2005 to a new policy of detaining undocumented non-Mexicans until they receive a deportation hearing and are usually booted from the country. The new policy meant doling out millions to politically connected prison firms and contractors (including the formerly Cheney-run Hallibuton) to hastily build these detention centers, including $65 million for the one in poverty-stricken Willacy County, some 260 miles south of Austin, that isn't even a structure but, as most simply call it, "Tent City."

Remember, these immigrants -- the majority at "Ritmo" hail from El Salvador, torn apart by years of civil strife -- have committed no crime beyond seeking to enter America without paperwork, and yet the Willacy County facility is in many ways quite simply a prison, like Gitmo, stark and surrounded by barbed wire. Here's how "Tent City" was described by the American Civil Liberties Union:

The Willacy County Detention Facility is the largest immigration detention facility in the country. The facility is made up of ten large tents, each of which is designed to house 200 people. The tents are windowless and lights are on around-the-clock, making it difficult to sleep. No partitions exist to separate the showers, toilets, sinks, and eating areas, and detainees report that they are occasionally forced to eat with their hands because no utensils are provided.

 The Washington Post article fills in more details:

Because lights are on around the clock, a visitor finds many occupants buried in their blankets throughout the day. The stillness and torpor of the pod's communal room, where 50 to 60 people dwell, are noticeable.

Goodwin described a group of women who huddled in a recreation yard on a recent 40-degree day with a 25-mph wind. "They had no blanket, no sweat shirt, no jacket," she said. "Officers were wearing earmuffs, and detainees were outside for an hour with short-sleeved polyester uniforms and shower shoes and not necessarily socks."

Perhaps more troubling, lawyers said, large numbers of immigrants have been transferred from Boston, New York, New Jersey and Florida, far from their families and lawyers. Because some immigration judges do not permit hearings by teleconference, detainees are essentially deprived of counsel.

There have been other problems inside "Tent City" -- mealworms were found inside some of the food there last year, for example, and another study found a stunning lack of available healthcare at Willacy -- but by now you probably get the idea. In many ways, this immigrant detention program is a metaphor for what we've seen time and time again during the Cheney-Bush years, a rushed and ill-conceived federal action (despite the harsh impact on those captured, the program's effect on solving the undocumented immigration problem is fairly minimal) that's meant big bucks for a few connected contractors, with little or no thought toward its degrading impact on real human beings, or on how America is perceived by the rest of the world.

Now, a nation that famously asked for the world's tired, poor, hungry and sick is taking refugees from a war-torn and poverty stricken corner of our own continent, and making them more hungry and depriving them of sleep before sending then away. How sad. That's not just an indictment of Dick Cheney, though. That's an indictment for all of us who allowed a harsh tent city called "Ritmo" to rise on our watch.

UPDATE: Here's the predicted cold water! Still, stay tuned for a different take on this issue.

For real! (per the Associated Press).

That said, it may not be what you expected, either. Talk about your runaway grand jury!

McALLEN, Texas — A South Texas grand jury has indicted Vice President Dick Cheney and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on charges related to the alleged abuse of prisoners in Willacy County's federal detention centers.

The indictment criticizes Cheney's investment in the Vanguard Group, which holds interests in the private prison companies running the federal detention centers. It accuses Cheney of a conflict of interest and "at least misdemeanor assaults" on detainees by working through the prison companies.

Gonzales is accused of using his position while in office to stop an investigation into abuses at the federal detention centers.

There's not a chance in hell of this standing up -- but it does speak to something else important: How enormously unpopular Dick Cheney and the Bush administration are across this country, even in the president's home state of Texas. How else does something like this could even happen. Some days it seems like the Democrats in Congress are the only ones who don't get it.

Fascinating story -- I hope to have more later.

Arghhhh! If this keeps up, then Talk Like a Pirate Day won't nearly be as much fun in 2009.

How many times, and in how many ways, will this story and headline get written before it actually happens?

Andy Reid must go.

The Eagles' only hope to regain their stature in an evolving NFL is to bring in someone with an entirely different philosophy than the current coach/executive vice president of football operations.

After a decade, this program has run its course.

Once, Reid had the Eagles going as good as any NFL team. There was a 5-year span when they probably should have won at least one Super Bowl.

But that window of opportunity slammed shut after the Eagles lost to New England in Super Bowl XXXIX.

There's only one way to be a coach for life, and that's to own the team, like George Halas and the Bears or Connie Mack and his A's here in Philly. Maybe Lurie, Banner and Co. have a weird kind of comfort level with their coach, but the fans won't be comfortable until there's a new man calling the plays.

The people who believe Obama is the Antichrist are perhaps jumping to conclusions, but they're not nuts.

-- Newsweek (yes, THE Newsweek), Nov. 15, 2008, in a story simply headlined, "Is Obama the Antichrist?" 

Uh, actually, these people are kind of nuts -- and I don't think it would have been at all out of bounds for Newsweek to come out and, using more polite terminology, say so. Unlike some journalists, I don't have a problem with the media reporting on the existence of conspiracy theories -- they are part of the fabric of American life, for better or worse -- but the goal is to put them in some context. This one seems waaay too credulous -- am I missing something here?

We've discussed this many times here: Thank God America is a place where people are free to practice their beliefs -- no matter how bizarre -- and free to speak about them. That doesn't mean a major media org like Newsweek needs to hand over a megaphone to a fringe idea that, at its core, is pretty odious.

A couple of stories struck me today. One was the news that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is charging the flamboyant billionaire Mark Cuban with insider trading. Cuban is a character who is many things to many people -- owner of the NBA's Dallas Mavericks, hard-charging investor, movie producer and critic of the Bush administration, and even a veteran of "Dancing With the Stars." Ever since his 1990s dot-com boom venture paid off big time, he has been one of the richest men in America -- and yet there apparently is one thing that Cuban is not.

Above the law.

While some are prone to speculate that Cuban is a scapegoat because of his politics, the facts of the case -- as initially laid out by the government, and certain to be contested by Cuban and his lawyers -- read like a textbook example of insider trading. The government alleges that Cuban learned of an action that would lower the stock price of an Internet startup called Mamma.com in which he was a major investor, and he sold his stock to unwitting buyers before the news was made public, and at a higher price than it traded for after the move. Nevermind, that Cuban's transaction was more than four years ago, or that the money he saved by acting as he did, $750,000 or so, is a drop in the bucket compared to Cuban's net worth -- shades of the Martha Stewart case -- or to the market cap of the stock (at least at that time). It would have been remarkably easy for the feds to look the other way and to ignore what Cuban is accused of doing.

But if the Dallas billionaire did indeed behave as the SEC alleges, it appears that he acted illegally, and that should be punished -- in part as a powerful signal to others who may be tempted to carry out insider trading in the future. It says that no one is more potent than the law, not even a billionaire. It is one of those things that we like to think is special feature of America, something that makes us exceptional as a nation.

Sadly, it is increasingly clear that there is one class of Americans who are now increasingly completely out of the reach of any law: The president of the United States, and the people who work for him. Over the last couple of generations, it has become increasingly apparent that while a sitting president (Nixon, Clinton) might provoke a congressional investigation under the right circumstances, the commander-in-chief will never be prosecuted when he (or someday she) leaves the Oval Office, and aides can now likely expect pardons or commutations, assuming that any investigations even last beyond the change in administrations.

Even when the potential crime is something far worse and more insidious to this nation than insider trading.

Something like torture:

Barack Obama's incoming administration is unlikely to bring criminal charges against government officials who authorized or engaged in harsh interrogations of suspected terrorists during the George W. Bush presidency. Obama, who has criticized the use of torture, is being urged by some constitutional scholars and human rights groups to investigate possible war crimes by the Bush administration.

Two Obama advisers said there's little — if any — chance that the incoming president's Justice Department will go after anyone involved in authorizing or carrying out interrogations that provoked worldwide outrage.

 Here's the case for what Obama is reportedly doing:

Robert Litt, a former top Clinton administration Justice Department prosecutor, said Obama should focus on moving forward with anti-torture policy instead of looking back.

"Both for policy and political reasons, it would not be beneficial to spend a lot of time hauling people up before Congress or before grand juries and going over what went on," Litt said at a Brookings Institution discussion about Obama's legal policy. "To as great of an extent we can say, the last eight years are over, now we can move forward — that would be beneficial both to the country and the president, politically."

Putting the past behind us, moving forward. That has always been the way, ever since that Sunday morning in 1974 when Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, an act that most of the punditocracy has since hailed as one that healed the nation (although, frankly, during the malaise of the Ford and Carter years it was hard to tell). But did letting Richard Nixon remain a free man truly save the republic, or did the pardon embolden the Reagan administration to defy Congress and carry out the Iran-Contra scheme, knowing that America didn't want a rehash of Watergate. And did the lack of impeachment and the subsequent pardon of key Iran-Contra figures like Casper Weinberger and Elliot Abrams (recycled in the Bush administration!) encouraging bolder moves, including fishy pardons by Bill Clinton that weren't investigated by the Bush Justice Department, with the ensuing lack of outcry convincing the president there was zero downside to commuting the sentence of Scooter Libby, and now today we have President-elect Obama determined to pull a Gerald Ford, even when the alleged crime is as abhorrent as torture.

So where does it all stop? The slippery slope that Ford started 34 years ago didn't so much heal the nation as start a long chain of escalating presidential power, misconduct, and in some cases lawbreaking. The main reason that a Mark Cuban faces civil penalties for his alleged unlawful act to deter others from doing the same thing. But can deter a future president -- whether it is President Obama or the leaders who come after him -- from breaking the law?

Nothing.

As a journalist, I'm always fascinated when -- and how -- the British press knows things about America before we do, as in this report in the Guardian that Hillary Clinton will indeed become Barack Obama's secretary of state. Not sure what to make of that; clearly she's qualified for the job -- even if her diplomacy "baptism under fire" wasn't quite what she made it out to be. And the fact that her biggest decision in the foreign policy arena was also her worst, voting to authorize the Iraq war in 2002, now seems like ancient history after the brutal and endless presidential campaign.

I still have a hard time getting around this, however. Earlier today, Bill Clinton said his wife would be an excellent choice for the job. No surprise there, but the issue isn't so much what he said but where he said it, in Kuwait City, where he was giving yet another big bucks speech, this time to the National Bank of Kuwait. Indeed, the husband of the woman who would be secretary of state has spent much of the last eight years spinning a web of foreign entanglements, from speaking and consulting fees to huge donations to his library and the Clinton Global Initiative and an array of other causes.

Notes a different British newspaper (sigh):

 Mr Clinton is not required to reveal the list of donors, and has consistently refused to do so. Known foreign benefactors include the King of Morocco, the governments of Kuwait and Qatar, the Saudi Royal Family and the son-in-law of Leonid Kuchma, Ukraine’s deposed President.

And...

 One of the most controversial issues involved Mr Clinton’s dealings with Frank Giustra, a Canadian mining executive. It has been alleged that the former President helped him to win a uranium-mining contract in Kazakhstan. Months afterwards a foundation run by Mr Giustra donated $31.3 million to the Clinton Foundation.

Ugh. If it were Bill Clinton himself up for secretary of state, I think he's too far gone. In the case of Hillary Clinton, however, the bare minimum here is full disclosure of all of Bill's post-presidency business dealings, especially with foreign nationals, and a pledge to refrain from any such activities while his wife is at the State Department. When the dust settles, I'd love to see legislation that would bar ex-presidents from cashing in, in the manner that Bill Clinton (and other ex-POTUSes like Reagan) has done. I doubt that will happen, though. In fact, I think the Newspaper Economic Relief Act of 2009 has a better chance of becoming law.

OK, I wasn't meaning to imply a cause and effect, it's just the timing as those two unrelated events were reported out in your ever-dilligent Philadelphia media. As for the MVP award, for all those nay-sayers who insist you can't hit .251 and strike out 199 times and get the award, um, you were right. As for Howard's nocturnal doings in beautiful downtown Essington, let's hope he gets that raise he needs for '09, since $10 million apparently isn't enough to afford the joints on Delaware Avenue.

The overwhelmingly Democratic Congress and that new guy in the White House means that a bunch of stuff that didn't have a snowball's chance in hell of becoming law over the last 14 years has a decent chance of actually happening in 2009. I guess as a card-carrying liberal I should be fairly pleased, but there's one item that everybody's talking about that I simply don't get, even though as a union member, not to mention a left-leaning dude, I'm "supposed" to be a slam-dunk supporter.

It's called the Employee Free Choice Act (and who could oppose something with a name like that?), and it's a measure that supporters say could reinvigorate the labor movement in America. I don't have a problem with the end --not as much as some of you reading this probably do -- but what worries me is the means. There's no doubt the labor movement is at a low ebb in this country -- membership is about half what it was when Ronald Reagan fired the striking air-traffic controllers in 1981 -- and vital workplace protections have suffered as a result.

Indeed, when you read what the advocates say about the current proposal, it tends to focus on the outcome rather than the proposed change in the process, which makes it easier to certify a new union by would-be members simply signing a card, as opposed to the longstanding tradition of a secret ballot. Here's the AFL-CIO's position:

People call the current National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election system a secret ballot election—but in fact it's not like any democratic election held anywhere else in our society. It's really a management-controlled election process because corporations have all the power. They control the information workers can receive and routinely poison the process by intimidating, harassing, coercing and even firing people who try to organize unions. No employee has free choice after being browbeaten by a supervisor to oppose the union or being told they may lose their job and livelihood if workers vote for the union.

Much of that is no doubt true, but I believe that a democratic process should be the goal in any decision process like this, and the gold standard for democracy has always been the secret ballot. God knows that in our broader political system, there are all sorts of problems with American elections, from too much big-money influence to issues with voting machines, and the solution was always to try and make the election system better -- not to scrap it for something else. Without the secret ballot, everybody -- both the employer and the union organizers -- knows where employee stands, and strips them of basic right to privacy.

Of all people, George McGovern, who should be enjoying a well-deserved retirement these days, had to step up to the plate with the conscience of a liberal to explain why the Employee Free Choice Act is a bad idea:

 To my friends supporting EFCA I say this: We cannot be a party that strips working Americans of the right to a secret-ballot election. We are the party that has always defended the rights of the working class. To fail to ensure the right to vote free of intimidation and coercion from all sides would be a betrayal of what we have always championed.

Some of the most respected Democratic members of Congress -- including Reps. Marcy Kaptur of Ohio, George Miller and Pete Stark of California, and Barney Frank of Massachusetts -- have advised that workers in developing countries such as Mexico insist on the secret ballot when voting as to whether or not their workplaces should have a union. We should have no less for employees in our country.

I worry that there has been too little discussion about EFCA's true ramifications, and I think much of the congressional support is based on a desire to give our friends among union leaders what they want. But part of being a good steward of democracy means telling our friends "no" when they press for a course that in the long run may weaken labor and disrupt a tried and trusted method for conducting honest elections.

McGovern was right about Vietnam and the war in Iraq, and he's sold me on this, too. If union elections are unfairly rigged toward the employer -- and I agree that they most certainly are -- then let's come up with legislative solutions that will make the secret ballot process a more fair one. But the solution to a flawed democratic process should never be to make it less democratic.