Black Box Report

As the votes are being counted in Texas' open primary and the delegates are, uh, delegated, voter turnout could be even higher than the record turnout expected, due to an unlikely last-minute endorsement for Clinton. It seems Rush Limbaugh told his Texas listeners to vote for Hillary:

I want Hillary to stay in this...We need Barack Obama bloodied up politically, and it's obvious that the Republicans are not going to do it and don't have the stomach for it...I want our party to win. I want the Democrats to lose. They're in the midst of tearing themselves apart right now. It is fascinating to watch, and it's all going to stop if Hillary loses.

Shades of Democrats for Mitt!, except for two small differences: 1) While Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas urged Democrats to prolong the GOP nomination by voting for Romney in the open Michigan primary, organizing Democrats to do anything on what amounts to a whim is like herding cats, and the lark had predictable results - Democrats and independents voted overwhelmingly for McCain; and 2) Romney never had a legitimate shot at actually winning the nomination. As such, the conservative blog Outside the Beltway doesn't think this is the greatest idea:

While I subscribe to the conventional wisdom that Clinton would be the weaker opponent in the fall, we really don't know that with any certainty. Far better, it seems to me, to let the process play out fair and square. Certainly, Republicans wouldn't want to have any complicity in electing Hillary Clinton president.

(On a side note, if this actually happened, if Clinton won Texas due to the efforts of the dittoheads, and that sparked a legitimate "comeback" which led to her running the table, all the way through November and a Clinton presidency could be attributed to Rush and his listeners...well...Can schadenfreude be fatal?)

But even with the help of Rush's dittoheads, a close look at the math suggests how difficult Hillary's task will be from here out:

For Clinton to pull ahead, she will need to win 57% of the remaining pledged delegates. To keep that number from rising even higher, they of course need to win 57% of the delegates on Tuesday, which would mean getting at least 213 delegates to Obama's 161 -- a 52 delegate advantage. If they net anything below 52 delegates, they fall even further behind. This is the key number to keep in mind when watching the election returns.

And, of course, even netting 52 delegates is hardly a big win. The Clinton campaign picked Texas and Ohio as its battleground because those states are particularly Clinton-friendly. The remaining primary states include several -- like Mississippi, Oregon, and North Carolina -- where Obama is likely to rack up major wins. That means that Clinton needs to gain well over 57% of the delegates in the states that are better for her. The only way she could possibly do this would be to utterly destroy Obama's reputation, make him a radioactive figure, like Al Sharpton.

And even then, Clinton would have to rely on Superdelegates to push her over the finish line, a divisive and controversial move in itself. For all of these reasons, blogger Matthew Yglesias thinks, when push comes to shove, Hillary won't go there:

If Wednesday morning the only shot Clinton has at winning the nomination involves getting the superdelegates to overrule a large Obama lead in pledged delegates and/or somehow getting the Michigan and Florida delegations seated, then Clinton's chances of winning the nomination will still be extremely low, and the prospects of either person winning the general election would get quite a bit lower. Basically, Clinton would be completely burning years worth of goodwill built up by her and her husband in the progressive community and ending her shot at playing a leadership role in the Senate in exchange for a very marginal increase in the odds of her becoming president in January 2009. A choice like that would be bad for the country, bad for the party, and bad for Hillary Clinton. It would be good, primarily, for her campaign's highest-paid operatives who would keep getting their checks, and it would be good for John McCain.

I've thought about it, and I don't think she'll do it. I don't think she and Bill are that out of touch with reality, and I don't think that most of her key supporters are either. If her results today are good enough to give her a realistic shot at winning the nomination through winning primaries, then of course she'll stay in. But if the delegate math isn't there, then I think she'll get out.

And even if she does - and that's still an "if" at this point - there's at least the consolation prize: annoying Rush Limbaugh.

After the Nixon / Watergate scandals of the 70's, Americans learned the lesson of the dangers of an unchecked, out of control executive branch. It's where we got the FISA court, to prevent a president from spying on his political enemies. It's also where we got the Intelligence Oversight Board, created in 1976 in the wake of widespread abuses by U.S. intelligence agencies. And ever since, the ghost of Nixon's administration, in the corporeal form of Dick Cheney, has sought to undo any and all congressionally-imposed restrictions on executive power. Oversight? You know how this president feels about oversight:

Bush was successful for years in marginalizing the IOB, making it along with other internal review mechanisms "ineffective", in the words of Sen. Leahy. For the first two years of his presidency, Bush just left the Board vacant. Subsequently, he packed the IOB...with plenty of cronies and incompetents.
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It's possible, then, that last year (a) congressional report of IOB nonfeasance publicly humiliated the Board into starting to do its job again. That could cause problems for the Bush administration, especially if (as in 2007) the IOB planned during the spring of this year to forward a set of reports about legal violations, this time those dating from 2007. That might include any number of details related to warrantless wiretapping or potentially even the politicization of the Justice Department.

Whoa! Can't have that, now, can we? So Bush issued an Executive Order stripping the Board of most of its powers and duties, and giving the oversight responsibility to Bush's hand-picked Director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell:

Steven Aftergood, the director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, an advocacy group, said the move appears to dilute the independent board's investigatory powers in favor of a member of the president's administration.

"It makes the new board subordinate to the (national intelligence director) in a way that the old board was not subordinate to the director of central intelligence," he said.

The White House disagrees.

"The (board) retains its independent authority to review intelligence community activities," said White House spokesman Scott Stanzel. "It can, as appropriate, report matters to the president."

And thanks to Bush's EO, the procedure for doing so will be to...first report them to DNI McConnell. Who, obviously, is not independent, but a political appointee in an administration famous for being packed to the gills with yes-men, flunkies and sycophants.

So, quis custodiet ipsos custodes? No one. We're on the honor system now:

I can't wait to see how that's going to work. Bush's DNI and Bush's AG will check themselves for intelligence abuses, and then let Bush know if there are any problems.

What could possibly go wrong?

Oh, cooking up excuses to go to war, spying on Democrats, the possibilities are endless! And as a bonus, it's a ticking time bomb for the next president, provided they're a Democrat, of course:

To the extent that this is about his successor, my guess is that they figure that Congress will rediscover its interest in oversight and objections to presidential executive power overreach. The very powers Bush claimed will, for a Democratic president, be the foundation for impeachment. They aren't just masters of hypocrisy, they're masters of "distinctions without differences." That is, when President ClintonObama does it, it's somehow different when President BushMcCain does it.

It's OK for Republicans if Bush does it, but a Democrat? There will be blood.

And there's the rub. For years now, my biggest contention with those who advocated Bush's unchecked executive power has been this: If the shoe were on the other foot, would Republicans/conservatives/run-of-the-mill wingnuts be comfortable with President Hillary Clinton telling Congress to get stuffed on executive oversight? Spying on Americans? Politicizing the Justice Department? Really, anything the Bush administration has done over the last 7 years, imagine if President Hillary had done it. Would there be a hue and cry? Would there be a wailing and a gnashing of teeth and accusations of our president being mad with power and dangerously out of control?

Oh, heavens my, yes. Don't kid yourselves otherwise.

And yet, Republicans are only concerned with the here and now, while they hold power, the immediate political advantage. Nevermind that the ill-gotten powers are bad for the country as a whole. As long as there's a Republican in the White House, it's all good. Blogger Matthew Yglesias is on the same wavelength, but in this case, he thinks Bush is just being a generous guy:

Like everyone else, I sometimes wonder what conservatives are going to think about the Bush administration's headline executive power grabs when it's castrating harpy Hillary Clinton or Muslim black nationalist Barack Obama who's got the power to arbitrarily detain people, torture them, etc...

Bush waited pretty late into his lame duck period to pull this particular stunt, so it seems this is mostly a favor to his successor. He wants John McCain, Clinton, or Obama to be in a position to commit widespread abuses and not just hog all the glory for himself.

Awww, what a guy, but really Mr. President, you shouldn't have.